Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!wuarchive!psuvax1!ukma!seismo!dimacs.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: louns@cs.washington.edu (Michael Lounsbery) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Once Saved, Always Saved? Message-ID: Date: 15 Jan 91 09:44:08 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: U of Washington, Computer Science, Seattle Lines: 82 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In response to a thoughtfully written article by Gene Gross (gross@dg-rtp.dg.com): > First of all, Michael, you set up a real paradox that maybe you did not > intend. If this Elmo really did recieve the faith unto salvation, he is > not going to fall away seeing as how salvation does not rest upon the > works of man but rather the finished work of Christ Jesus. If I set up a paradox, it seems to me that this argument comes close to a tautology. If anyone receives faith "unto salvation" I take it by the way you use the term that they are going to be saved. Though it is trivially true that anyone who is bound for salvation will be saved, that in itself is not a very useful statement. It looks to me like this just moves the problem of "who is saved" to "who REALLY repents unto salvation", without having actually provided any assurance of either. I don't deny that anyone who does/believes whatever it is that is sufficient for salvation through Christ can be saved. (How can I?) Instead, since you have indicated that someone can mistakenly think he is repentant, but is actually only remorseful, I do wonder about how well grounded anyone's perception of this assurance for himself can be. > Thus, if Elmo believes (pistis/pisteuo), then he is not making > a mere mental movement but a commitment of such proportions as to turn > his entire life around for eternity. My silly story of the rise and fall of Elmo was contrived, but here's a real one. I have known actua{ people who were, in their early 20's, very sincere, faithful, practicing Christians. Years later, they rejected their Christian faith, and lived a new life, apparently in contradiction to Christian values. I think you would argue (please correct me if I'm wrong), based on what I tell you of their later life, that their original Christian life wasn't genuine all those years. But having known these people fairly well, I really doubt it. If they weren't sincere at the time, they did an amazing job of fooling everyone, including themselves. From this I conclude that either they did indeed reject their salvation, or that they were falsely assured of something that turned out to be wrong. This is why I still think the theory of assured salvation doesn't work when applied to real people in real life, and I don't understand how anyone can really be assured of this assurance without knowledge of the future. > If salvation rested upon > anything other than this, then your point would be well taken, and we > should find ourselves hiding from the world trembling for fear of losing > that which we now know to be permanent. It is permanent not because of > man but because of the sovereign work of our Sovereign God. My interpretation of salvation does draw me to the conclusion that I can freely choose to throw it away through rejecting God, but I certainly do not intend to hide trembling in consequence. Quite to the contrary, I think that hiding and trembling would be a primary way that I could reject my salvation. Christ commands us rather to be active in the world, spreading his message by word and deed. Hiding and trembling would be like the unworthy servant who buried his talents, and is a great evil I want to avoid. I reject this as a logical consequence of my belief, as much as you would reject the idea that "Now that I'm assured of heaven, I can live it up and do whatever I want" as a consequence of yours. As with so many articles in this group, I see now that this issue is rooted once again in the question of how much our salvation comes from God alone, with no cooperation from man, or from our choice to allow God to work his grace through us. Since we each seem to be bound to end up re-hashing this problem once more, I don't think either of us is going to convince the other on this one side aspect of a much deeper problem. Thank you for your careful response earlier. Michael [Historically, this was one of the big problems that the later Calvinist tradition had to deal with. Given that those who were called are assured of salvation, how could you assure people that they were really called. A lot of effort went into identifying signs by which people could tell that they were called. And even that didn't always reassure them. Luther had been bothered that his repentance wasn't good enough, and took solace in the fact that salvation wasn't from himself, but depended only upon God. But as the Calvinists found out, this creates its own spiritual tension, because we cannot necessarily know what God's plans are for us. Interestingly enough, universalism seems to have grown out of this problem within Calvinism. It's certainly a way of solving the problem, in that it lets you give people a real assurance of salvation. However it's not a solution that most Christians have been willing to accept. I don't have a solution either. --clh]