Letters Along the Way (eBook)

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Although the reading list Dr. Woodson gave me proved very helpful (its brevity was a boon), my comments on each book were unremarkable. So, too, were Dr. Woodson’s letters back to me.

In my last year at Princeton, however, I found myself in what I thought then to be the most surprising quandary. Here I was, several months old as a Christian, but instead of feeling holier, I was beginning to feel more sinful. The more I learned of the Christian way, the more I discovered I could not live it. Far from easing my guilt, my fledgling faith was increasing it—and I didn’t like it one bit.

Before long I wondered if I was really a Christian at all. How could a true Christian be so burdened with lust, envy, malice—sins I hadn’t thought much about before? I wrote to Dr. Woodson just after Thanksgiving and frankly told him what I was going through. His letter was a wonderful Christmas present.

At the same time, his response marked a transition in his communication with me. In some ways, Prof. Woodson belongs to the nineteenth century, when letters were not only personal but long and reflective. I doubt if many Christian leaders at the end of the twentieth century would take the time to answer a young Christian’s questions so fully.

December 15, 1978

Dear Tim,

It is almost inexcusable that I have delayed three weeks in replying to your letter. It caught me near the end of term, when papers and examinations completely fill the horizon of seminary professors. I thought of dashing off a quick note, but the candor with which you described your anguish forbade me from writing with glib brevity.

Unfortunately, by delaying until I could write with more balance and thought, I have undoubtedly contributed to your sense of dislocation. I apologize and will try to do better next time.

Before I set out some biblical truths that bear on what you are going through, I must say that your experience is by no means unique. It is very common for new converts to Christ to pass through a stage of shame and guilt. Intuitively, we can see why this is so. Before you began to think seriously about Jesus Christ and his claims, not to mention his death and his resurrection, you probably lived your life with only those minimal ideas of right and wrong you had absorbed from your family and friends.

On becoming a Christian, all of that changed. Prayerlessness would not have made you feel guilty before; now it does. Resentment at some slight, real or imagined, never troubled you before; indeed, you may have nurtured it to safeguard your sense of moral superiority! Now you are appalled that such self-serving behavior is so deeply rooted in your personality. Doubtless you were already mature enough that you would never have wanted (at least in times of sober reflection!) to hurt a woman, but prolonged pandering to secret lust never struck you as evil—nor did barracks-room jokes or overt flirtation. Now you find you are far more chained to lust than you could have imagined. Worst of all, you are finding how impossibly difficult it is for poor sinners, like you and me, to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

But in one sense, this feeling that you are awash in guilt is a good sign. It means that you are taking sin seriously, and that is one of the marks of a true believer. I believe it was the Puritan theologian John Owen who wrote, “He that hath slight thoughts of sin never had great thoughts of God.”1 Of course, if your consciousness of sin does not lead to a deeper awareness of the grace and power and love of God, it achieves little but a kind of repression that may keep you from some public offenses while churning you up inside. But rightly understood and handled, what you are facing can become a stepping stone to a deeper knowledge of God.

What is at issue is how you should apply to your own life what Christians have called the doctrine of assurance. Since you are studying history, perhaps the best introduction to this doctrine would be a survey of some historical turning points.

At the time of the Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church, at least at the popular level, taught that it was a mortal sin for a person to claim he was sure he was saved. After all, the church argued, he will sin again; he might even sin seriously. That is why he has to keep going to confession and to Mass; the sacrament of the Mass was widely understood to be a further sacrifice of Jesus, a bloodless sacrifice, that could be applied to the lives of those who had confessed their sins. Put crudely, to the problem of continuing sin the church had a ready answer—a repeated sacrifice that atoned for the guilt that had accumulated since the Christian’s previous attendance at Mass. But suppose you died after committing some heinous sin, but before you had the opportunity of dealing with it in the confessional and at Mass? Suppose the sin was not merely “venial”—something that could be paid off in the fires of purgatory—but “mortal”— something that threatened the soul with eternal ruin. From this perspective, to claim assurance of salvation sounded desperately presumptuous.

But with the insistence of Martin Luther and others that we are “justified”—that is, acquitted before the bar of God’s justice, declared not guilty and received by God as entirely just—by God’s grace, grace that is appropriated by faith in Jesus Christ and his unique sacrifice on our behalf, the place of assurance changed. Having died once, Christ dies no more (Heb. 10:10–14). The Reformers could not accept the Catholic view of the Mass. If a Christian sins, the sin is dealt with, they said, not by looking to a new sacrifice, but by confessing our sins to God and seeking his pardon on the basis of the atonement Jesus has already made for us. “If we confess our sins, [God] is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). (Incidentally, Tim, I am quoting from the NIV, the New International Version, just published. I read through the NIV New Testament when it came out a few years ago and resolved then that I would switch to the NIV when the whole Bible became available. It still feels very strange to me, but I am convinced we must use twentieth-century language to win twentieth-century people. I do not know what Bible you are using, but I do urge you to buy a modern translation.)

So for Luther and most of the other Reformers (Calvin did not go quite so far), assurance of salvation could never be based on whether or not you have just been to Mass, but it is an essential part of living faith in Jesus Christ. In other words, if you really do trust Jesus, if you really do believe in him, your assurance is already bound up with such faith. If you lack assurance that God has really saved you, it is because your faith in Jesus the Son of God is itself deficient. Only Christ, Christ crucified and risen and ascended to heaven, can save you; you receive his salvation by faith, and thus your assurance is as strong as your faith.

So I suppose that if the Reformers were alive today, they would say to you, Tim, that if you doubt you really are a Christian, you must check the foundations again. Do you really trust in Jesus? Does he not promise eternal life to all who hear his word and believe in the one who sent him (John 5:24)? When you first trusted Christ, was it not clear to you that the ground of God’s acceptance of you was Jesus’s death on your behalf? Wasn’t the assurance you then enjoyed based on what God had done in Christ Jesus on your behalf, and not on how holy or morally fit you felt at the time? So why should it be any different now? You began to walk your Christian life by faith; continue to walk by faith. No matter how guilty you may feel, your acceptance with God turns not on how you feel or how good you’ve been today, but on Jesus Christ and his powerful “cross-work” (as some early English Protestants called it) for you.

But by the time the Reformation reached the shores of England, this view of assurance, mediated through William Perkins, was significantly modified. Perkins and others noted with alarm how on the Continent the Reformation sometimes swept through entire regions without transforming people morally. Whole cantons could switch sides. People called themselves Lutherans, or said they now belonged to the “Reformed” church, and professed to espouse justification through faith without it making the slightest difference to their behavior. Of course, there were many wonderful conversions that thoroughly changed people. Even so, the more disappointing results were so common that many Christian thinkers were disturbed. This undeniable reality, combined with his reading of 1 John, convinced Perkins that Christian assurance should not be so tightly tied to profession of saving faith. After all, the apostle John, writing to Christians, says, “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life” (1 John 5:13). John, then, clearly thinks it possible for Christians (those “who believe in the name of the Son of God”) to need some grounds of assurance spelled out for them. Their assurance is not simply a component of their faith, or John would not have needed to write “these things.”

And what are they? The...