Purify Your Bride

I just read a piece describing the differences between Luther and Calvin on Sola Fide. Dr Cary makes a very good argument why basing you assurance of salvation of the external sacramental declaration of God’s grace to you is much better pastorally than basing it on an internal profession of faith. I don’t want to repeat his entire paper but he essentially says that basing salvation on ‘giving your heart to Jesus’ leaves open the question of have I really done that fully enough and sincerely enough to be saved? To make that worse there are people who look like saved people for a few months or even a few years and then they leave the faith. In a ‘once saved always saved’ world you have to say they were never saved. That is scary because often these folks were holier than you in many ways. So how do you know your commitment to Jesus was better than theirs? It is ironic that a doctrine of eternal security ends up making people less secure about their salvation. It is also ironic that a theology that emphasizes grace so much ends up looking for that security by making their faith commitment good enough. That is they end up in works righteousness. They need to know they are saved people struggling with sin rather than unsaved people just playing games with God. They can look and feel very similar so people try and do good works to convince themselves and convince God that they are true Christians.

Luther has two main differences in his ideas. One is that he focuses on the sacramental declaration at you baptism that you have new life in Christ. That is important because it focuses the matter of salvation not on your statement of ‘I believe’ but on the promise of Jesus. This is the grace of God and you know it applies to you because the sacrament is personal. It is amazing how the doctrine of baptismal regeneration makes the assurance issue go away. Of course, you don’t have eternal security. You can fall away. That is just a fact so it is hardly a fault of a theology to state this fact.

Dr Cary, as an Anglican, can’t take this one step further. He can’t say that we need sacramental assurance even of our reconversion after we have fallen away. How do I know I have reformed myself enough? If you have gone to a priest and received absolution the question goes away. If you just have your one time baptism and have been in and out of a state of sin many times how do you avoid the same problem of basing the reform on a personal trust in God that has to be sufficient? As humans even our repentance is imperfect. Still an encounter with Jesus can bring us back into the fold. Not the image of Jesus inside our minds but the true Jesus revealed to us in the church. That is what we need to encounter. The church is the only place we are guaranteed to find him.