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Animadversions

Did I believe in security of salvation?

(Text as at 18/09/2007 23:48:29)

(For earlier versions of this Note, see the table at the end)

Did you believe in security of salvation?

This strikes me as rather an odd question. It’s true that I did accept this doctrine, and still think it’s a correct deduction from the New Testament teaching (assuming that the New Testament is univocal on the matter). However, what relevance has this to the case in hand? It’s not as though I was thinking whether I could get away with falling away in the moral sense and living a life of Riley on the premise that everything would be all right “up there”. I rather think that the NT teaching is that those who know the truth but don’t act on it are in for a good thrashing (in some spiritual sense; see Luke 12:47). No doubt there’s some dispensational way of weaselling out of this implication.

However, you can’t decide not to believe because you believe you have security of salvation; or at least not logically. Maybe if one believed in eternal conscious torment as punishment for reprobation, one might be frightened into not admitting your doubts, but this fear can’t stop you entertaining them.

However, you may have a point because I have admitted to an affinity with Aher¹, and that “the Lord knows those that are his”, so ultimately I do have a conditional belief that if Christianity is true, then I’ll probably be all right, if I ever was all right. But I’ve always rejected Pascal’s Wager² which assumes beliefs can be adopted or dropped at will, or should prudentially be adopted or rejected according to the consequences.