Assurance: Anchored in Jehovah

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

Believers should have confident assurance of their salvation, but on what grounds? I’ve explored several options and have commended a richly trinitarian understanding of salvation as the ultimate basis of assurance. Confidence in God and his salvation rests in intelligent belief in the Trinity.

The reason for this is that, to put it as concisely as possible, the Trinity is the gospel. Trinity and gospel are not just connected in some distant way, as two ideas which can be related to each other by a long train of reasoning. The connection is much more immediate than that. Seeing how closely these two go together depends on seeing both Trinity and gospel as clearly as possible, in a large enough perspective to discern their overall forms. When the outlines of both are clear, we should experience the shock of recognition: Trinity and gospel have the same shape! This is because the good news of salvation is ultimately that God opens his own trinitarian life to us. Every other blessing is either a preparation for that or a result of it, but the thing itself is God graciously taking us into the fellowship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to be our salvation.

Here for certain we have a truth which evangelicalism has always grasped firmly. It is the central idea of that beloved text John 3:16, that we can see the extent of the Father’s love for the world by attending to the greatness of the gift which he gave for our salvation: his Son. And it is at this point, where God’s self-giving is most conspicuous, that we are forced to break through to explicitly trinitarian confession if we want to go any further. For in the case of God, “himself” is not a word that points to an isolated individual existing alone with his aloneness. When God finally fulfills all his promises by giving himself to be our salvation and our shield, this takes place as the Father gives the Son.

The index of how much God loves us is how much he gave to accomplish our salvation. Paul drives this point home as the climax of his far-ranging argument in Romans 8, grounding Christian hope and assurance in the fact that since God has already given his own Son, it obviously follows that nothing is too great for God to give. Dwight L. Moody, sometimes called “Mr. Evangelical,” preached frequently on this theme, and one of his last sermons was on the text of Romans 8:

Now Paul puts some questions. ‘Who can be against us? He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also give us freely all things?’ (verse 32). When God the Father gave Christ, the Son of His bosom, He literally gave up all that heaven had. He gave the richest jewel that heaven possessed. And if He has given us His Son, is there anything too great for us to ask? If a man should give me a diamond worth one hundred thousand dollars, I think I would make bold to ask him for a little piece of brown paper to carry it away in. If the Lord has given me the Son of His bosom, I can ask for anything. How shall He not freely give us all things?

When we consider the gospel of salvation in Christ, we are not dealing with the outer fringes of God’s ways, but with the very core and center of who God is. God is not trifling with us in the gospel, but opening up in the most intimate way his very heart. Of course God remains incomprehensible, mysterious, and far above all created things in a way that is not at all diminished by the way he makes himself lavishly available to fallen humanity in the economy of salvation. But his infinite transcendence over all created things cannot be construed as any kind of reserve or standoffishness. The Father’s giving of the Son renders that interpretation impossible. Having sent servants already, God takes the ultimate step and reaches out to his people by sending an agent more dear and intimate to himself: “What shall I do? I will send my beloved son; perhaps they will respect him.”

The Puritan Thomas Goodwin brought all of these insights together tersely when he said that “the things of the gospel are depths –the things of the gospel…are the deep things of God.” Goodwin loved to ponder the many ways in which the gospel was a mystery. He noted that this gospel was the thing into which prophets “inquired and searched diligently,” and that angels “longed to look into” its content. But beyond this, Goodwin said, it was a mystery in the sense that God himself considered it uniquely precious, because it “lay (as I may so speak) at the bottom of his heart, the great secrets, which he esteemed such even from everlasting.” Goodwin is drawing language not from Ephesians but from First Corinthians when he speaks of “the deep things of God.” In the second chapter of this letter, Paul puts great emphasis on how profound, secret, and inaccessible to human understanding the blessings of the gospel are. What has been made known to us in the gospel is “what God has prepared for those who love him,” and far from being conformable to human wisdom, it is something which

no eye has seen,
nor ear heard,
nor the heart of man imagined,

words which most Christians probably associate with heaven, but which Paul clearly intends with reference to the present revelation of the gospel. If this divine wisdom has now been handed over to us in the gospel, it is by miracle, because these are things whose origins lie so deep within the heart of God that only God can know them. The mystery of the gospel is locked up inside of God, and can only be communicated by someone who is God. Paul underlines this three different ways:

We speak God’s wisdom, which God predestined before the ages to our glory

To us God has revealed them through the Spirit, for the Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. Who knows the mind of a man except the spirit of the man, which is in him? Even so the thoughts of God no one knows except the Spirit of God.

Who has known the mind of the Lord, that he should instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.

The predestining Father determined this mystery; and the depth-searching Spirit has access to these depths because he is as intimate with God as my spirit is with me. But that same Spirit has revealed them to us, and we therefore have come into harmony with the mind of Christ, the one who knows the mind of the Lord. Note that the Spirit and Christ have brought out into the open a mystery which has its natural home at the center of God’s heart, at the depth of his life. This opened secret is the gospel. It has such a profound and divine character that even to make it known, God must give himself over for its revelation. That revelatory self-giving is perfectly in line with the content of the thing revealed, which is that God gives himself to us to be our salvation. He does not dispense blessings, but himself.

Trinitarian soteriology, then, grounds the assurance of salvation. I give the last word to nineteenth century American theologian Benjamin Morgan Palmer, whose excellent little book The Threefold Fellowship and the Threefold Assurance draws these connections in a powerful way.

The relation of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit to man corresponds to a relationship in God between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; and the love which is poured out to save us is the expression of that love which has dwelt eternally in the bosom of God. The gospel scheme of salvation not only has its origin in the infinite grace and mercy of God, but also finds its method and its execution in his threefold personality ….

What amazing security does this view give to the whole system of grace, seeing that it cannot fail in a single point except through a schism in the Godhead itself. The hand trembles that writes the daring suggestion; which is only saved from blasphemy by the assurance that he who searches the heart knows it is written only to give the most intense emphasis to the truth which it declares.

Well may the Psalmist of old sweep with his fingers the strings of the Hebrew lyre to the tune of the sixty-second Psalm (vs. 6,7): “He only is my rock and my salvation: he is my defence; I shall not be greatly moved. In God is my salvation and my glory; the rock of my strength and my refuge is in God.”

Making Men A Bit Less Devilish

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

President Obama has a unique chance to win the war against terrorism by the judicious use of force combined the right ideas sold through his awesome rhetorical skills. He has a clean slate and the attention of much of the world. Picking the right ideas to argue is essential to victory.

If your neighbor has bad ideas, then he is likely to do bad things. Laws and might may force him to behave, but the neighborhood will remain in danger. If your neighbor can be converted to better ideas, then force will not be necessary and peace will cost nothing.

In the same way, terrorists motivated by false religious beliefs must not just lose on the battlefield, but intellectually. We must fight, but the battle should contain intellectual and moral components as well as military force.

Millions of humans are open to lies, because they view the alternatives as worse. This does nothing to justify terrorism or extremism, but does suggest what will have to be done to make terrorism and the extreme ideologies that support it unpalatable to the millions of people who would otherwise be likely to accept it.

There will always be extremists in any large group of people, but normally their ideas will have little appeal to most fellow citizens. Extremists are attractive to many, in part, because they think the alternatives are cultural decay, libertine values, and greed.

President Elect Obama is smart enough to recognize that the problem with terrorists’ beliefs is not that they are religious, but that they are false and wicked. Terrorists must be opposed intellectually and morally, but Obama must pick the right arguments.

Secularism will not be useful intellectually or culturally. It is the wrong message to send.

Much of the world’s population associates secularism with features of American culture they understandably reject, such as our consumerism and broken families. Second, right or not the vast majority of the world views Western secularism as intellectually wrong and personally unappealing. They rightly reject the indefensible idea that they should compartmentalize their religious beliefs from the rest of their lives.

What are the right arguments for President Obama to make?

First, terrorism demeans religious faith. It is the product of fear and not love. It is the strategy of the fearful and not those secure in the righteousness of their cause. Terrorism concedes the intellectual battle is lost and so insults the religion it purports to defend.

The terrorist is arrogant in his individualism. He refuses the virtue of prudence and patience. He refuses to submit to God’s will and tries to wrest history into his own control.

Terrorism, therefore, is doomed to failure.

Second, terrorism is inconsistent with the moral teachings of the great monotheistic faiths. Terrorism, which intentionally targets noncombatants, lacks the virtues of the warrior: courage and the defense of a just society using just means.

Third, terrorist groups are intellectually unserious. They have no plan for victory or a plausible alternative society. Where extremists have gained power, such as in Iran, they have proven incapable of ruling well and have done nothing to provide a plausible alternative to Western secularism.

Finally, political liberty is not the same as libertine morality. A free market is not a justification for greed and exploitation. Law is necessary because men and women are imperfect, but the ideal is liberty. If the state makes me be good, much of the value of the act is lost. The chance to freely choose virtue, instead of having charity coerced by the state, is a chance for real virtue.

Personal liberty and economic freedom are opportunities for holy living. The fact that some Western people misuse their freedom should surprise nobody, but they do not represent our best ideals or ambitions as a people.

Because we make an action legal does not mean we like it.

President Elect Obama is religious like most of the world. He has shown global appeal and might be able to persuade many to take another look at the United States and our values.

This is not an idle hope.

People are created in God’s image and each heart contains memories of that nature. We are broken enough that intellectual and passionate appeals to better oneself do not always work. That is why war will be with us this side of paradise. Persuasive words from a President can never fundamentally fix our problems . . . that is not government’s job.

As Lincoln and Reagan demonstrated, however, the right arguments can make a difference. People do not have to be perfect to make tolerable neighbors. As Theodore Roosevelt pointed out, a strong American fleet and the magnificent pulpit of the White House can help.

President Obama cannot make men angels, but he might persuade more of us not to be devils.

America Needs Its Frontier Spirit

By Daniel Henninger
The Wall Street Journal

The greatest danger in the current economic crisis is that the United States will lose its historic appetite for risk. The mood now is that risk-taking got us into this mess. Risk, though, is the quintessential American trait that built the nation -- from the Battle of Bunker Hill to the rise of the microchip. If we let risk give way to a new ethos of commercial reserve and regulatory restriction, the upward arc of the U.S. ascendancy will flatten. Maybe it already has.

Corbis

Daniel Boone: Founding Risk-Taker

By "we" I mean the policy makers in Washington who will write the new rules of finance, our stunned bankers and businessmen, and the average Joes of Main Street who with reason have lost confidence. If all lose faith at once in the American idea of risk, refinding it when the recession ends may prove difficult.

This is the moment for Americans to rediscover the "frontier thesis" of Frederick Jackson Turner. In a seminal paper delivered in 1893 to the American Historical Association, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," Turner argued that the U.S. found its identity as it pushed away from the Eastern seaboard and crossed a series of frontier "fall lines": the Allegheny Mountains, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the plains, the Rocky Mountains and California.

Every American absorbs the frontier experience from reading biographies of great Americans or from movies. Frederick Turner, however, made it clear that with this effort to transform the wilderness the Americans broke decisively with what he called, believe it or not, "old Europe." "Here is a new product," Turner wrote, "that is American."

"From the conditions of frontier life," Turner believed, "came [American] intellectual traits of profound importance . . . coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy, that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil." These, he said, are "the traits of the frontier."

Turner's ideas on the frontier lie at the center of many political fights today over domestic and foreign policy. It is hard to overstate how abhorrent Turner's frontier thesis became to the American left, especially its new historians. His paper has been called "notorious and troubling" and a "myth." Their problem with Turner's view of the Americans' tendency to "incessant expansion" needs no elaboration. His critics have called him a racist.

This is unfair. Turner himself later described the political tensions in the new 20th century between Morgan's banks, Harriman's railroads -- "wealth beyond their power to enjoy" -- and the new forces of reform.

If indeed the Democrats' intellectuals want to disown Turner, the conservative movement could profit from adapting what he admired on the frontier. Everyone's ancestors made the frontier, but if it's just a Republican thing now, so be it.

Turner's purpose wasn't to idealize America but to try to understand the wellsprings of its remarkable and self-evident success. He found it, persuasively, in the lessons learned settling a continent.

For our purposes, amid economic meltdown and fiasco, the telling phrase in his list of shaping frontier traits is "that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil."

Individualism working for good is the story of America's entrepreneurs, the wonder of the world the past 100 years. This week Congress is producing the tragic final turn of three of the most famous -- Ford, Chrysler and General Motors.

Most people would view the economic rubble before them as the result of individualism working for ill and evil -- Angelo Mozilo's mindless mortgage originators at Countrywide, Robert Rubin's bonus-addicted risk managers at Citigroup, the politically connected million-dollar managers who opened the vaults at Fannie and Freddie.

The great danger now is that a depressed and angry people will allow the risk-taking American baby to be thrown out with the toxic-securities bathwater. The line of waiting washerwomen is long.

France's Nicolas Sarkozy ("Laissez-faire capitalism is over") and our European friends propose a global regulatory body to monitor financial risk, which of course means it would corral America's cowboy capitalists. Barney Frank wants a "systemic-risk regulator."

Some rethinking of the financial regulatory regime is inevitable. The abrupt September transformation of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley into bank holding companies, most notably with their capital ratios regulated (intensely) by the Federal Reserve is a beginning, and arguably not much more is needed.

What's worrisome is that Congress and an array of piling-on regulatory bodies -- the Fed, Tim Geithner's Treasury, the SEC, the CFTC, a new derivatives regulator -- will create too many designated drivers for American finance and business, producing a status quo of caution.

The current crisis is the result of a world gone madly long on real estate. Daniel Boone, the famed American frontiersman, went belly-up speculating on Kentucky land. He moved on in 1788 and paid his debts. So should we, without losing sight of the American frontier, where we discovered the rewards of risk.

Trinitarian Soteriology and Assurance

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

To have a proper confidence in salvation, believers don’t need to muster up greater and great conviction. Instead, we need deeper insight into what salvation is. When we understand our salvation thoroughly enough, conviction and assurance take care of themselves. An adequate doctrine of salvation –a soteriology– needs to be located first of all in something outside of us, needs to be specific in giving content to salvation, and needs to be expansive enough to survey the full range of salvation.

My recommendation for a suitable location for the doctrine of assurance is in a soteriology that is elaborately and explicitly Trinitarian.

There is a lot that could be said about a trinitarian soteriology. Since my purpose here is only to show what it contributes to the proper placing of the doctrine of assurance, I will describe trinitarian soteriology as concisely as possible: God has brought about salvation by sending the eternal Son into our history as the incarnate Son, and the Father and Son together pour out the eternal Spirit as the Holy Spirit of Pentecost on the basis of Christ’s finished work. The missions of the Son and Spirit, which together constitute the history of salvation, are prolongations or temporal enactments of the eternal processions which constitute the triune being of God.

While a well-ordered soteriology will affirm that God is free by insisting that the temporal missions are not strictly necessary to God, it will also rejoice in tracing the way those missions are temporal expressions of God’s eternal being. God saves humans by being for them in time what he is in himself: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The gospel is anchored in the Trinity, and believers can sing “Anchored in Jehovah, I shall not be moved.” Assurance of salvation has its ultimate and most comprehensive doctrinal foundation in this Trinitarian soteriology, and only subsequently in the doctrinal locations usually urged in isolation.

Let us admit that, considered abstractly, God could have saved us many ways: by fiat, by annihilating and reconstituting us, by destroying evil, or by a thousand ways his omniscience could have devised. But the way of salvation that he chose involved sending the eternal son into human history, making the one who was always begotten of the Father into the one who was sent on a mission by the Father. Likewise, the Holy Spirit who always proceeds from the Father (and the Son) has come into our history on a mission to apply and perfect the work of the Son. We experience reconciliation when God as the Father puts the Spirit of the Son in our hearts.

In other words, God saves by being himself for us: turning the eternal processions outward into temporal missions, and bringing us into the power of those relationships. The gospel is God opening his triune life to us. This is a kind of soteriological maximalism: there is no higher blessing conceivable than this incorporative adoption into the life of God.

The presuppositions of this Trinitarian soteriology can be stated more precisely, in the following form: The temporal sending of the Son is the economic form of his eternal procession from the Father. Similarly, the temporal sending of the Spirit is the economic form –free, gracious, unexacted, but directly in line with and revelatory of—his eternal procession from the Father and the Son. The eternal processions are correlated to the temporal missions. These presuppositions were worked out helpfully by Augustine, but their most precise articulation comes in the work of Thomas Aquinas:

‘Mission’ denotes not just coming forth from an origin, but the terminus in time as well. A mission, therefore, takes place only in time. In other words, mission includes an eternal procession, but also adds something else, namely an effect in time; for the relationship of the divine person to an origin is eternal. We speak, therefore, of a twofold procession –the one during eternity, the other during time– in view of the doubling, not of relation to principle, but of the terminations –one in eternity, the other in time.

This Trinitarian soteriology builds on a clear distinction between and coordination of the immanent and economic Trinity, emphasizing the direct, personal, special, proper presence of the Son and Spirit as themselves among us as they are in eternity. The Son of God is the Son of God on earth as he is in heaven, opening up to us adoptive sonship on earth that is founded on the eternal sonship in heaven.

Here are some of the benefits of locating assurance within this explicitly Trinitarian context:

1. It ensures a greater objectivity than any other option. Back behind the economic sending of the Son and the Spirit, though in line with them, is the eternal immanent Trinity. The way this soteriology directs our attention to God’s absolute aseity, independence, and blessedness is unprecedented. And it does so without some of the distorting consequences of appealing first to God’s inscrutable sovereignty in election. It gets behind even that eternal counsel to the only thing which is behind the eternal counsel, the very bedrock of the being of God: his being as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

2. It takes the encounter between the believer and Jesus and puts it in the broader context of the Father, Son, and Spirit acting concertedly for each other’s glory, and then as a subordinate end, for our salvation. While a confession of the encounter between Jesus and me is integral to evangelical faith, it must happen against the horizon of Jesus and his Father. Trinitarian soteriology is intensely personal, but allows us to construe the word “personal” as an indication of the infinite depth of the divine life rather than as a pointer to my own richly developed inwardness in its religious manifestation. It enables believers to respond with proper gratitude to God’s action on our behalf, without degenerating into the “many-tongued but monotonous pro me, pro me, and similar possessive expressions” of an inwardly-focused piety.

3. This Trinitarian soteriology is routed through the economy of salvation, and mvoes from God to salvation history before contacting me and my own experience of salvation. This requires me to see my Christian experience as serving God’s larger ends, employing me as a witness to God’s spreading glory. The economic presences of the Son and the Spirit are, after all, missions, a word which was first of all a technical term in Trinitarian theology before it was a description of cross-cultural world evangelism. Our participation in the twofold mission of the Son and Spirit is not only our salvation but our employment in the mission of God. This keeps the quest for assurance from becoming selfish.

How Assurance of Salvation Works

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

The doctrine of assurance can be slippery. Even among those Protestant evangelical traditions that have recognized the necessity of formulating a doctrine of assurance that answers to the biblical witness about faith’s confidence, there has long been a candid acknowledgement that the doctrine must simultaneously face two opposite directions. It must assure me that I, even I, am saved; but it must do this by pointing away from me to an objective ground.

To state the doctrine too objectively is to leave the believer as an onlooker to a redemptive spectacle which assures him with absolute confidence that somebody is saved, but leaves open, disturbingly open, the question whether he is that somebody. To state the doctrine too subjectively, however, directs the believer’s attention to phenomena of his own biography, experience, and consciousness, where the ground of salvation cannot be seen. A well-ordered doctrine of assurance must underwrite the confident confession that even though I am condemned if considered in myself, I am not in fact in myself but in Christ, where I, truly I, am saved.

In a flourishing Christian life, this confident repose on God shows itself as an effortless and unselfconscious equipoise: Gazing on the savior and glancing at the self, the believer is saved and assured of being saved in one simple motion. Let the redeemed of the Lord say so! The theologian should not seek to problematize this assurance, but rather to account for it doctrinally by locating it in relation to the larger doctrinal complexes of Christian theology. Succeeding at this descriptive task will have benefits of various kinds, but the project takes on a certain urgency when one notices how much disorder and perplexity can result from this doctrine’s mislocation or dislocation, to say nothing of its outright denial.
Properly locating the doctrine of assurance within the landscape or ecosystem of Christian doctrine is an important task.

To many theologians it has seemed that assurance of salvation is best described as assurance of faith, and therefore should be included in the description of faith itself, since to have assurance is just to know that one believes the promise of someone worth believing in. On this analysis, assurance is faith roused to self-consciousness, or faith knowing itself as faith. This answer is surely correct, so long as it can be consistently distinguished from a confidence in the exercise of faith, or the felt experience of having faith. When assurance is considered as a kind of intensification of faith, or a subjective reflex of the act of faith, it is too easily assimilated to the risings and fallings of religious experience, and subject to all the temperamental vicissitudes of that experience. The summons to assurance then becomes an exhortation to grasp the promise of salvation with a passionate inwardness that is the measure of faith.

In reaction to this, some theologians bundle assurance and faith together and then link them to an external source of authority. One obvious external source is the authority of the church, and especially its competence to deliver truthful doctrines and valid sacraments. Faith and its assurance then quickly become reduced to implicit faith in the ecclesial authority. Much medieval theology, however correct in substance it may have been, was vitiated by an over-reliance on a perfectly content-less implicit faith, which Calvin rightly ridiculed as “ignorance blended with humility,” a mixture unworthy of the name of faith.

Another widespread solution is the appeal to biblical authority to ground assurance. Insofar as scripture is the repository and channel of God’s promise, it is certainly right to appeal to it in this way. But in a way that is structurally similar to the appeal to church authority, the appeal to the authority of scripture is only as successful as the soteriological content it specifies. Unless and until that content is made explicit, the appeal to the divine authority of scripture is a mere placeholder marking out where the argument should go.

These three attempts are variations on the theme of grounding assurance in an intensification of faith: first in the intensified experience of faith, second in the authority of the church which proposes what to believe, and third in the scriptures as the authoritative record of God’s promises which are to be believed. We might label these three solutions in their pure forms as the pietist, the Catholic, and the fundamentalist solutions. None of them is entirely mistaken, but they have in common a tendency to leave the content of the promise unstated. On their own they end by collapsing into either the objective or subjective ranges of the spectrum.

A theology that describes assurance of salvation the right way will have to solve this problem by leading with more content, and that means being clear about what salvation itself is. You could state the rule of thumb this way: To get a functional doctrine of assurance, invest in a robust doctrine of salvation.

(This is the beginning of a paper I read at ETS in Rhode Island in late November. I’ll post some more of it later.)

Assurance of Election and Justification

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

You can’t get assurance of salvation just by insisting ever more loudly that you are assured, or that the church or the Bible or God’s promise or God’s character assure you. All those appeals to authorities as objective grounds of assurance fail to establish a point of contact with the person doing the asking about assurance. The path to assurance of salvation lies through a deeper understanding of salvation.

Calvinists get this. A heroic effort to ground assurance in God’s eternal predestinating election is characteristic of the Reformed theological tradition. This effort has many merits to recommend it. First, it marks a definite advance by naming the content of salvation: God’s gracious election. Second, it recognizes the requirement for a truly objective starting-point for assurance: you don’t get much more objective than mongergistic predestination!

But precisely in this success, it leaves open too much space between the objective and subjective poles of assurance. The question of assurance –How can I know that I am saved– is not so much resolved as re-stated in the famous form: How can I know that I am among the elect? It was in this form that the anti-Protestant council of Trent met with Protestant claims to assurance, and it rejected them by anathematizing anyone who claimed certainty about their elect status (though it allowed that saints might receive special revelation about their eternal destiny). The Reformed, on the other hand, did not think that Trent scored any points against their view. Instead, the Calvinist tradition decided it was on the right track, and got busy generating numerous insightful and pastorally sensitive approaches to the doctrine of assurance. The development of Puritan theology in particular gave rise to distinctions between intuitive versus discursive apprehensions of assurance, and within the discursive chains of reasoning there arose distinctions between a practical syllogism which takes into account marks of election in a faithful life, and a mystical syllogism which emphasized the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. (See Joel Beeke’s The Quest for Full Assurance for an introduction to this literature)

These Puritan Reformed maneuvers do not have to be judged unsuccessful in order for us nevertheless to continue seeking better,or more direct, answers in the quest for the best possible home for the doctrine of assurance. Indeed, that this Reformed tradition is fundamentally right in its basic orientation is suggested by the fact that Trent could only oppose the Reformed position by restricting its own negative appraisal of assurance to a handful of soteriological ideas while studiously avoiding a broader range of biblical motifs such as adoption and the indwelling of the Spirit. The most accomplished Reformed thinkers, in contrast, have always kept their explorations of election within that wider framework of adoption, indwelling, and an effectual call worked out in the course of history, along with a full enjoyment of the manifold benefits of union with Christ. Reformed soteriology has proven its capacity for a great inclusiveness of multiple biblical themes. This expansiveness is one of the correlates of a properly functioning doctrine of assurance.

The decisive soteriological conflict at Trent, however, was not on the front of election but of justification, and justification is a very promising locus to consider as a possible home for assurance of salvation. Again, it is a common suggestion: I should be assured of my salvation because God has unilaterally, forensically justified me in pronouncing me righteous on the grounds of Christ’s redeeming work. As a proposed doctrinal home for assurance, justification is eminently hospitable: it is biblically well attested, it is highly objective, and it is specific in its soteriological content. In its specificity it is sharply focused, and served as a perfect point of conflict with the Tridentine theology that denied assurance of salvation. The Reformers rightly identified justification as the right place to draw the soteriological line, and assurance followed in its train.

However, this great virtue of the Reformation account of justification carries a particular disadvantage when it comes to its application to the doctrine of assurance: it is a focusing maneuver, specifying in the most precise and pointed way the element of salvation on which everything turns. That is appropriate for a dispute over the nature of God’s mighty act of justifying the ungodly, and the surgical work of excising the metastasizing claims of human merit within salvation. But it is less helpful for the doctrine of assurance, because the movement of thought required for describing assurance is not the movement of focusing, but the expansive and inclusive sweep of reciting the many blessings of salvation.

So we should add this last criterion, expansiveness, to the other criteria or biblical attestation, objectivity, and specficity. A good doctrine of assurance will have all four.

(This is an excerpt from a paper I read at ETS in Rhode Island last month. The first part was posted yesterday. More to come.)

A Fight to the Death with His Own Conscience: Nietzsche

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

“I can write in letters which make even the blind see,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), the influential German philosopher who interpreted modern life as the murder of God. Nietzsche worried that the very people who had spent the nineteenth century driving God out of their worldviews were failing to draw the necessary conclusions. “If God is dead, anything is possible,” mused Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor in 1880, and it was Friedrich Nietzsche who set himself to the task of showing what that meant for morals. In 1887 he wrote his Genealogy of Morals, which is the best and clearest introduction to Nietzsche’s project. His project was to kill his conscience or die trying.

“He wanted to be the moralist of the new post-God society, so he was setting himself a task that he couldn’t possibly fulfill,” said playwright Ronald Hayman in the 1999 BBC documentary on Nietzsche’s life and thought. “No one could fulfill that task. And without suggesting crudely or simplistically that he copped out by retreating into madness, I do think that some such escape was inevitable.”

As Hayman suggests, it’s always tempting to explain Nietzsche’s philosophy in light of his biography: Raised as a Christian, he embraced the faith at first, but then rejected it about as thoroughly as anybody ever did. He began by writing love poems to Jesus and ended by calling for the coming of the Antichrist. He lived abstemiously but identified himself with the ancient god of drunken revelry, Dionysus. His life ended with a descent into madness and over a decade of vegetative stupor, and everybody from Hitler to Leopold and Loeb claimed they got their big ideas from his bombastic writings. This is strong stuff! And the shelves are filled with half-baked, impressionistic accounts of Nietzsche’s thought that use his biography or psychology to explain him away or squeeze a clear moral caution from him.

But you don’t have to know anything about his life, or guess into his personal sins, to know that Nietzsche had a plan for how to deal with conscience. Follow the logic of a string of his published statements on the subject. First, he knows that conscience bites, and that it shouldn’t:

“The bite of conscience, like the bite of a dog into a stone, is a stupidity.” (1880’s The Wanderer and His Shadow, epigram 38.)

“Not to perpetrate cowardice against one’s own acts! Not to leave them in the lurch afterward! The bite of conscience is indecent.” (Twilight of the Idols, epigram 10.)

Second, he knows that when you’re ashamed of something, part of you wants to deny it, and that’s the part of you most likely to win the battle: “‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually –memory yields.” (Beyond Good and Evil, epigram 68.)

Notice that you don’t have to do any guessing about what deeds Nietzsche regrets, or what his conscience wants to chew on him about. Whatever those details from his own life might be, they are irrelevant to the plan he sketches out for dealing with the conscience. He’s doing philosophy about the whole experience of having a conscience, and it’s in his book Beyond Good and Evil that he really begins to show what he has learned, and what he wants to teach:

“To be ashamed of one’s immorality– that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one’s morality.” (epigram 95) Feeling the bite of conscience is only the starting point, to alert you to the presence of the moral sense itself. Once you’re aware of it, you can handle it objectively. You can bully it, dominate it, and transform it into something you are proud of. Listen to him:

“Once the decision has been made, close your ear even to the best counterargument: sign of a strong character. Thus an occasional will to stupidity.” (107)

“A criminal is frequently not equal to his deed: he makes it smaller and slanders it.” (109)

“The lawyers defending a criminal are rarely artists enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of his deed to his advantage.” (110)

“The great epochs in our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us.” (116)

“To our strongest drive, the tyrant in us, not only our reason bows but also our conscience.” (158)

By the time he is re-christening his evil as what is best in him, Nietzsche has pretty much reached that raving-German-philosopher point where few will follow his lead. But did you notice how smooth the transition was from the first motions of taking arms against conscience, to that final position of irrevocable obstinacy?

We all feel the bite of conscience. Never mind the biographical details or the particular psychological histories, however importantly those may loom in your life. The big question is how you handle the bite, especially if you happen to feel it sharply. One of you has to give in, either you or your conscience. You might work out a sophisticated way of living with the bite, and you probably won’t end up dressed in black, shouting “God is Dead!” and shaping the future of philosophy. Most people don’t. Most people who set their wills against their consciences are content to just compartmentalize their lives, or become hard-hearted. Nietzsche may be the philosopher who thought the whole project through with relentless consistency, the theoretician of what we all do whenever we suppress the truth about ourselves.

In one of his last books, mockingly entitled Ecce Homo, Nietzsche boasted, “Really religious difficulties, for example, I don’t know from experience. It has escaped me altogether in what way I was supposed to be ’sinful.’ Likewise, I lack any reliable criterion for recognizing the bite of conscience: according to what one hears about it, the bite of conscience does not seem respectable to me. I do not want to leave an action in the lurch afterward.”

We don’t have to pry into the question of what particular sins Nietzsche had on his conscience in order to follow his train of thought on the subject. But we also don’t have to believe him when he tries to persuade us that he only knew about this whole conscience thing at second hand: “From what I hear, this conscience thing sounds bad.”

Nietzsche knew that conscience was a mighty force, and that he couldn’t live with it gnawing at him. One of them had to go. Nietzsche took his heart in his own hands and hardened it. He didn’t out-live his conscience by very long, but he did succeed in killing it.