Response to Cary on Salvation

Dear friend,

I read and enjoyed the article you linked. Cary’s point about “reflective faith” is very important. It’s true that reflective faith is not saving faith. You don’t have to “have faith in your faith” in order to be saved. Faith is really nothing more than believing Christ’s promise to be true. You don’t have to work anything up in your own heart. And yet, this kind of belief is the hardest thing in the world precisely because it cannot be worked up. You cannot convince yourself of it. This is the glorious mystery of saving faith; it is a gift from God. No one is even capable of believing Christ’s promises unless that faith is placed in his or her heart. “If you want to build people up in faith, you have to direct their attention to the Word of God, not to their faith.” This is essential. My pastor calls it “preaching the Gospel to yourself.” It’s not giving yourself a pep talk. “I believe, yes, I really do, amen!” No, it sounds more like, “Jesus loved me when I was dead in my sins, and took the wrath of God upon Himself so that I can now live! Glory to God!” As Cary writes, it is “much easier to confess, ‘Christ is no liar’ than to profess ‘I believe.’” He says, “My faith is not good enough, but the one I have faith in is.”

Before I go any further, a quick note on Calvin. I don’t pretend to be a Calvin scholar, and my theology is more in the vein of the Anglican Puritans, Jonathan Edwards, and the Calvinistic Baptists. I’m not defending Calvin or his particular theology, but the Reformed doctrines as I understand them. So much for clarification.

On the surface, I must disagree with Cary’s statement, “We are justified and converted many, many times in life.” Whether or not it is an accurate summary of Luther’s doctrine or not, is not mine to say. But after Cary spent so much time extolling the glory of God’s unmerited and assured salvation, this is something of a let-down. Now, perhaps he’s using a different definition of “justification.” Either I missed it, or he assumes the meaning of this. The word “justification,” rightly understood, references the legal standing of the Christian before God. His guilt is covered and atoned for, and he stands as “righteous” before God. This does make him actually sinless, and it certainly does not mean that God becomes unaware of his actual sin. But at the same time that God is aware of everything true about his sin, what is equally true, is that he is nevertheless just before God because of Christ’s propitiation for his sins. This type of justification is not dependent upon the Christian’s state of actual sinlessness. It simply cannot be, because it is not his work at all, but God’s, and it is not conditional upon anything. In fact, the reason a Christian can and ought to be assured of his salvation, is because of the everlasting faithfulness of God. “Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful.” His faithful God will not revoke his salvation, and the Christian can not renounce it because it is not conditional upon him, but upon God’s work. The faithfulness of God is the impetus for our own faithfulness, not vice versa.

A key element to Cary’s argument seems to be the sacrament of baptism, and this mystifies me, because he is clearly not intending to preach a gospel of works. But for him, the act of baptism seems to impart some sort of justifying power. So I’ll grant for the moment that baptism is not a “work.” During the early part of the article, the idea of baptism goes back and forth between the physical sacrament and the idea of a spiritual baptism. As a “third-wave” charismatic, I’d term it the “baptism of the Holy Ghost,” which comes upon every believer at conversion, and never departs. It is simply the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in every believer. I’d also separate it from the physical sacrament of baptism, which, I believe, also imparts special grace to the believer, but not saving grace, because he already has received it. However I don’t wish to argue that point at this time. My contention is that belief in “baptism,” as connected significantly to salvation, should be seen as a belief in Christ’s saving work we are baptized into, not the power of the act of baptism itself. To treat baptism otherwise is to make it in itself the qualification for salvation, and not Christ’s saving work which it applies, which would bring us right back to what Cary criticizes as the Protestant “reflective” understanding of justification.

But it seems that Cary errs by affirming strict baptismal regeneration, of all things. “Have the authors of the Formula of Concord forgotten that everyone involved in this dispute have been baptized, nearly all as infants, and thus that none of them were, at any point in their adult lives, simply unregenerate?” Then, because they have all been “regenerated” through baptism, Cary argues, the argument of once-in-a-lifetime conversion falls flat. The reason he cannot accept the doctrine of perseverence, is because he thinks that the act of baptising a child, actually saves the child, but he cannot accept that it saves him permanently, at least, not necessarily. Salvation and baptism are equated in his mind, and so an argument against the permanence of one translates directly to the other.

Please forgive a brief excursus on the idea of “conversion.” Must a person have a “conversion experience?” This concept became one of the odd theological quirks of the New England Puritans. One reads the stories of men such as Jonathan Edwards, who seems to have exhibited the outward fruits of Christianity from a young age, wrestling in his soul because he had no special experience to justify his claim to be a Christian. The “Half-Way Covenant” required those who wished to be communicants to give evidence of conversion. It would seem that this was taken to mean a recounting of a spiritual experience, rather than a profession of faith and the presence of the accompanying spiritual fruits characteristic of true Christians. As such, it was very much “reflective.” Many of us have found ourselves having grown up believing the Gospel. We cannot remember “the hour I first believed.” Others remember how they once lived under the power of sin, but have no particular spiritual or emotional experience of conversion at a specific time. This is true in my case, but I know, nevertheless, that “I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see.” Cary mentions the case of Lutheran children who grew up being taught that they were baptized (I’m reading this for now, as, “in Christ”). They grew up under the Gospel, under the instruction of their parents in grace. Just as they did not remember their physical baptism, they did not remember the time they were baptized in their hearts and indwelt by the Holy Ghost. That’s my take on Christian children.

Cary takes pains to asserts that this conversion is not eternal, but must be repeated many times within the course of one’s life. But he also defines “conversion” differently than most Protestants do. “Theologically, conversion simply means repentence, which should happen daily, though occasionally it needs to take the form of a dramatic psychological turning point…” This understanding of conversion is fully compatible with the doctrine of perseverence. “We are never free from the need for renewed conversion, which is to say for daily return to the promise of the Gospel of Christ spoken to us in our baptism.” The Christian life is one of daily “conversion.” I’d prefer not to put it in those terms though, because of the misunderstandings it could cause. When you and me hear the word “conversion,” we usually think of the event in which a hell-bound sinner becomes a heaven-bound saint. So perhaps our difference with the Lutherans, here at least, is semantic?

I understand that Luther didn’t have a doctrine of sanctification as I do. Most reformational Christians agree with me that progressive sanctification–growth in devotion and Christlikeness–is an important aspect of the Christian life. What is this sanctification? It is not periodic instances of “justification, repentence, and conversion,” but something that is a living reality in the Christian from the hour of justification until the day of glorification. But if Luther says that the Christian life is continuing instances of justification, repentence, and salvation, what then? We need not say that the Christian becomes unsaved and must return to the gospel. “Returning” to justification, repentence, and salvation may also indicate the Christian’s ongoing efforts in what most Protestants would call sanctification; remembering the truth that Christ has justified him–for it has not become untrue by his sin; repenting from his known sins; and beseeching God to reign in righteousness over his regenerate, but still too often sinful heart. The act of salvation is once and for all, the application of it to the Christian life is not only repeated, it is continual. There is not one moment when we are sufficient in ourselves; there is not one moment that we stand firm outside of grace; there is no moment when we are perfectly sinless. But the continual application of salvation is not done by the Christian himself. It is done by Christ, who pleads continually for us before the throne of God. It is an eternal state, because Jesus’ mediatorship is eternal.

So after all this, I still disagree with Cary’s statement that “we are justified and converted many, many times in life,” because I believe that we are both eternally justified and converted, and continually being justified and converted. I find it unnecessary to claim that because justification and conversion are continual, that they are also unsure in the future. Because they are acts of God’s grace, and not man’s will, there need be no fear for the future, because God promises to complete the work in glorification.

Cary writes, “No one knows their own future that well. For no decision you make now can determine that in five or ten years or even tomorrow, you won’t apostatize, abandon the faith of Christ, and go the way of eternal death.” Suddenly salvation is not something that God does that we believe in; it is something we “make a decision” about, that is conditional upon our good behavior. We’re back to the old revivalist “make a decision for Christ” nonsense. Suddenly my eternal destiny is in my hands again. I better not apostatize, because God’s hand isn’t there to catch me. But what is apostasy? Rejecting the faith? Committing sins? The more I see the magnitude of my own sin, the more I realize that I am never in a state of holiness. I am always believing some lie or other about God, and God must continually be bringing me back–which He faithfully does. The Christian life is a struggle to live in the salvation you have been granted, and the only way to accomplish it is to get your focus off your own sinfulness and on Christ’s all-sufficient righteousness, which has been applied to us through salvation. To say, then, that at any time one might apostatize and go the way of eternal death, is not to be unsure of man (which would be appropriate), but to be unsure of God Himself, and of his promise to redeem.

I am not so confident of my holiness to trust in such a weakened gospel, but I am far too jealous for God’s honor to accept such a weakened gospel. Galatians 1:6-9.