Saving Faith

[Contra_Mundum]

I fixed the messed up quote box... no good deed goes unpunished

mea culpa, mea culpa, please don' trow me in der brai' patch (whoops, wrong rabbit)

 

[Semper Fidelis]

Oh, I get it now. I hadn't even looked at who the quote was attributed to.

 

[sotzo]

Hey Rich...would love to get your final thoughts on my question in post 43 above.

 

[Semper Fidelis]

Now, after what I wrote and what you read from the Confession I am baffled that you would say that the WCF "...does not leave much room for my own wavering to trust Christ alone..." when you follow with the clause that "..."This faith is different in degrees, weak or strong...." That is exactly what we've been saying is that your faith does not have to be perfect or strong in order to lay hold of Christ for salvation. The clause is not intended to be inclusive of other expressions of what faith signifies but is meant to answer your own concerns about how your faith seems to wax and wane.

A faith that lays truly lays hold of Christ, weak or strong, is a saving faith.

Yeah, I admit to not being clear in how I explained myself in the previous post.

I understand the WCF is teaching (as you, Dr. Clark and others have well-marshalled and greatly helped me here) that faith is binary and, whether weak or strong, is saving faith because its object is Christ. My questioning is now shifting to perhaps a more ecumenical line of thinking...that is to say, if laying hold of Christ in faith is the conditio sine qua non of justification, then can we rest in the fact that divergent views on the way in which the sacraments benefit us or imputation vs. infusion does not separate us from the body of Christ at large? In other words,, that we can say a theology outside of our circles (for example in the RC church) may be heterodox, but that people in those in such heterodoxy can still lay hold of Christ "salvifically"?

What I am trying to reckon with is the idea that in the simple "laying hold of Christ" (as you've put it) we can rest knowing the eternal "weightiness" of justification does not hang in the balance of sorting out how the sacraments work, etc. Not that these matters are not of great importance, but that they are, in a true sense, ancillary to the GREAT matter of how one is made right with God.

Thanks for reminding me of this, I almost forgot about it.

I don't know Joel. I don't like to go around guessing how people are really apprehending things. I think the favorite past time of many Evangelicals these days is to note that there are probably saved Mormons or saved Roman Catholics or saved "X" out there no matter what the Church teaches. I kind of understand the reason because there might be a tendency (that has been manifested on this board) to have an overweening pride in our comprehension of the truth and consign everyone else to outer darkness.

How one views a lot of things says a great deal about how they view the faith that rests in Christ alone. One of the podcasts that I really look forward too every Sunday is the White Horse Inn because those guys really drive home the nature of the Gospel. If you don't subscribe to it then please do so. Go back and listen to the whole year. You'll be greatly edified by it.

In fact, whenever I teach about Saving Faith I always contrast it with the Roman Catholic view that sees justification as a measure of one's sanctification. You don't even have to listen back very far (just a few weeks back) when Mike interviews Robert Sungenis (an RC) about Justification to get a good idea.

I should be a lot more patient on this stuff because I've been reforming for about 10 years now and it's just over the past couple of years that many different ideas have really come into focus for me.

People can say they are saved by Christ's righteousness but then their lives reflect that they really don't believe that. Maybe that's the kind of doubt that the father of the epileptic had but, I fear, for many of them it's really double-minded unbelief. The problem is that this kind of double-mindedness is institutionalized in the Roman Catholic system as a matter of faith and practice and it is extremely common in "Evangelical" circles.

In fact, as Mike Horton and others have pointed out, many Evangelicals are actually more Pelagian these days than Roman Catholics are.

I was in a Church over the holidays that saddened me. The "Gospel" was basically this: God wants to help us raise G-rated kids in an X-rated world, Sin is not realizing our potential so we need to have God around to help us get back on track. The idea that God is there to kind of add just a little bit extra octane boost to our already put-together lives is extremely common.

We don't need "additional Grace" to help us get to the level of acceptance, we either drink the living Water or we perish. We don't need extra cash to fill up our accounts, we're DESTITUTE BEGGARS with nothing in our hands crying out to the Master to pay our incalculable debt!

The Sacraments then either reinforce that idea or they reveal that we don't really believe the Gospel. If we're walking down the aisle during the Mass to have Christ sacrificed anew to infuse us with more Grace to overcome the grace we lost when we didn't do our part then we've just demonstrated that we don't believe the Gospel. If we're going to the Priest to have the second plank of justification held out because our mortal sins have just killed the saving grace within then we don't believe the Gospel. If we think that there are some sins that only wound the grace within us and others that kill it then we don't believe the Gospel. Finally, if we are walking an aisle on Sunday to re-dedicate our lives to Christ because "...this time I'm really serious about being sold out to Christ..." then, with tears in my eyes, I have to say that such people have not yet believed the Gospel!

This faith thing isn't hard but, in the flesh, it's the hardest thing in the world to really believe. It's why we need a clear Gospel message constantly and we need Sacraments that reinforce the same object. Otherwise, we just goon it all up.

 

[VirginiaHuguenot]

The following may help to clarify some of the discussion on assurance. It is from the Works of Thomas Boston, Vol. 2.

Does anyone know if this is available online somewhere?

Ken -- See this this thread:

http://www.puritanboard.com/f29/works-thomas-boston-online-28411/