What Faith Knows

"Faith knows that of itself it does not produce salvation and abiding in Christ. So in the call to faith there is no room for a command to make a personal contribution to salvation and perseverance; there is simply a call to complete reliance on Christ." (G. C. Berkouwer)

Perseverance And Doxology

"Only if we remember the profundity of God's faithfulness can we see our life, not as only a series of indepedent moments, but as a life that is preserved in spite of everything. Therefore the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints will always be a doxology to God's preservation, which again and again places the weak and threatened life in the unextinguishable light of His grace." (G. C. Berkouwer)

From Death To Life

"In the change from death to life, God's grace is mirrored. Therefore, we cannot speak of faith and unbelief, standing and falling, apart from the grace of God. The Church is warned against apostasy precisely because of the riches which in true faith are appropriated and preserved. Only because of the unbreakable connection between our faith and God's grace, between our love and God's love, is it understandable that there is such a serious admonition here. Anyone who busies himself with these connections in a logicistic fashion plunges himself into the abyss of pride or of frivolity. But faith and love turn their ear to the Scriptural admonition. It does not suggest a falling away from true faith, nor (which is the same) a falling away from the love of God; but is accents the relatedness in faith of the entire life to the grace of God." (G. C. Berkouwer)

What's Up With Hebrews?

"For this reason the Epistle to the Hebrews is full of admonition and consolation, because it is in this way that the preservation of the Church is accomplished...These admonitions have as their end the preservation of the Church, which precisely in this way is established in that single direction, which is and which must remain irreversible--the direction from death to life!" (G. C. Berkouwer)

The Necessity Of Obedience

"We, whom God has favored with the light of the Gospel, ought to acknowledge that we have been called in order that we may advance more and more in our obedience to God, and strive constantly to draw nearer to him. This is the real preservation of the soul, for by doing so we shall escape eternal perdition." (John Calvin, Commentary on Hebrews)

Faith and Perseverance

"...anyone who sees a contradiction between the doctrine of perseverance and the numberless admonitions of the Holy Scriptures has abstracted perseverance from faith. Faith itself can do nothing else than listen to those admonitions and so travel the road of abiding in Him. For admonition distinguishes the true confidence, which looks for everything from grace, and the other 'possibility,' which is rejected on the basis of Christ and the Church. So admonition is at the same time both a remembrance and a calling. It points out the way of error to those who travel the way of salvation, and it exhorts them to keep going only in the true way." (G. C. Berkouwer)

Another Old, Dead Reformed Guy

"It is therefore quite mistaken to infer from the admonitions of the Scripture the possibility of the total loss of grace. The certainty of the outcome does not make the means superfluous, but in God's order it is unbreakably tied up with them." (Herman Bavinck)

Work Out Your Own Salvation With Fear And Trembling, FOR It Is God Who Works In You, Both To Will And To Work For His Good Pleasure

"We will never be able to understand these words if we see the divine preservation and our preservation of ourselves as mutually exclusive or as in a synthetic cooperation. Preserving ourselves is not an independent thing that is added paradoxically to the divine preservation. God's preservation and our self-preservation do not stand in mere coordination, but in a marvelous way they are in correlation. One can formulate it best in this way: our preservation of ourselves is entirely oriented to God's preservation of us...There is therefore no reason to see a tension between God's preservation and our preservation of ourselves if we do not view the latter as something complementing the divine preservation. In such a case the divine keeping would be only the starting point for perseverance and perseverance would be realized by an independent preservation of ourselves. This, however, is a train of thought that is foreign to the entire Scriptures...Preserving ourselves does not imply that we contribute our part and that God contributes His. Our preserving is oriented to His, and it is included in it. Faith can never say, and will never say, 'This is our part.' It is the mystery of faith that it cannot speak in this way. It understands the connection of promise and demand, of grace and admonition. The mystery of this connection is the profound content of the doctrine of perseverance. Apart from faith this doctrine petrifies into a meaningless train of argument; but in faith the correct view of God's sovereign grace and His loving mercy is maintained. Amidst all weakness and instability, faith confesses this mercy as the alpha and omega of life." (G. C. Berkouwer)

It Really Is That Simple!

"So what is Jesus saying [in Matthew 10:22 and Mark 13:13]? He is saying that perseverance to the end is God's means by which anyone will be saved. At the same time his words assure all who persevere and remind us that there is no other way to face persecution, even unto death, if we want to be saved in the final day. It is really that simple! But you ask, 'What if I should fail to persevere to the end?' The answer from the context is simply that you will not be saved, if you fail to persevere to the end. Again you may ask, 'So, are you telling me that Jesus' words mean that is is possible for me to lose my salvation?' No, that is an unwarranted conclusion to draw either from the text or from our explanation of the text. Jesus' words say nothing about the possibility of losing one's salvation; that is not the function of his conditional promise. Rather, his words function to assure you that you will be saved, if you persevere. You must persevere if you want to be saved. You ask once more, 'So are you saying that if I do not persevere to the end, that will prove that I was never truly saved in the beginning?' Though the theological answer is 'Yes,' it inverts Jesus' words. Here, Jesus does not give us a test of perseverance by which we may know whether or not we are saved. Notice his orientation. He is prospective, not retrospective." (Schreiner and Caneday, TRSBU, p. 152)

Warnings As "Means of Salvation"

"...their proper primary effect evidently being just to bring out, in the most impressive way, the great principle of the invariableness of the connection which God has established between perseverance, as opposed to apostasy, as a means, and salvation as an end; and thus to operate as a means of effecting the end which God has determined to accomplish--of enabling believers to persevere, or preserving them from apostasy; and to effect this in entire accordance with the principles of their moral constitution, by producing constant humility, watchfulness, and diligence." (William Cunningham)

Don't Play Off The Biblical Writers Against Each Other

"So in the Holy Scriptures we continually find passages with forceful admonitions, earnest appeals, and warnings against apostasy. We also meet passages full of consolation about the unchangeablenss of God's grace, of God's loving, all-determining grace. One might think for a moment that we are confronted here with two incompatible trains of thought, which one could label the 'apostasy of the saints" and the 'perseverance of the saints'...If we examine the witness of Scripture carefully, we observe immediately that it is not correct to say that one Biblical writer is dynamic in his description of the life of faith, while another works with purely static data, data of stability and immutability. If that were so, one could postulate differing Biblical-theological teachings, with one writer thinking in terms of election and another in terms of human responsibility. It is clear, however, that with such a method of division we do not really get at the problem of perseverance and apostasy. For what is striking about the Scriptures is that the passages concerning the steadfastness of God's faithfulness and the passages with admonitions are inseparable. We do not encounter a single passage that would allow anyone to take the immutability of the grace of God in Christ for granted...Only if we have some understanding of the depth of the correlation between God's grace and faith will we be able to go ahead correctly here...For the Scriptures, then, there is apparently no unbearable tension or opposition between the gracious faithfulness of God and the dynamic of life, because it is in the thick of the dynamic of the actual struggle of life that Scripture speaks of perseverance in grace." (G. C. Berkouwer)

Are Unconditional Promises Actually...Conditional?

"The opponents of the doctrine of perseverance knew these passages, of course; but they always stress that the 'if,' the conditional, must always be understood in the text, even though it is not found there in so many words. Further, such 'unconditional' texts, they said, had to be understood within the entire conditional context of the Scriptures." (G. C. Berkouwer)

Do Warnings Imply That Believers Can Perish?

"Indeed, because the Scriptures continually warn against falling away, many think that the perseverance question is already basically settled. They believe that such warnings, if they are in earnest, have meaning only if the danger of falling is not imaginary but is a very real threat with which one must constantly reckon." (G. C. Berkouwer)

YOU DO NOT NEED TO DOUBT GOD'S PROMISES IN ORDER TO BELIEVE HIS WARNINGS

YOU DO NOT NEED TO DOUBT GOD'S WARNINGS IN ORDER TO BELIEVE HIS PROMISES

Loss of Salvation: Robert Shank

“…a person cannot be motivated by the ‘alarming admonitions’ until he abandons his confidence in the ‘consolation’ passages—the (supposed) promises of God that perseverance is inevitable and apostasy is impossible.” (Robert Shank)

Test of Genuineness: Wayne Grudem

"The purpose is always to warn those who are thinking of falling away or have fallen away that if they do this it is a strong indication that they were never saved in the first place." (Wayne Grudem)

Jonathan Edwards: Soft Hearts and Hard Warnings

"False affections, however persons may seem to be melted by them while they are new, have a tendency in the end to harden the heart. With the delusion that attends them, they finally tend to stupefy the mind, and shut it up against those affections wherein tenderness of heart consists: and the effect of them at last is that persons become less affected with their present and past sins, and less conscientious with respect to future sins, less moved with the warnings and cautions of God's word or God's chastisements in His providence, more careless of the frame of their hearts and the manner and tendency of their behavior, less quick-sighted to discern what is sinful, less afraid of the appearance of evil, than they were while they were under legal awakenings and fears of hell...

...Yea, the most confident and assured hope, that is truly gracious, has this tendency. The higher a holy hope is raised, the more there is of this Christian tenderness. The banishing of a servile fear by a holy assurance is attended with a proportionable increase of a reverential fear. The diminishing of the fear of the fruits of God's displeasure in future punishment is attended with a proportionable increase of fear of His displeasure itself; the diminishing of the fear of hell, with an increase of the fear of sin. The vanishing of jealousies concerning the person's state is attended with a proportionable increase of jealousy of heart, in a distrust of its strength, wisdom, stability, faithfulness, etc. The less apt he is to be afraid of natural evil (having his heart fixed, trusting in God, and so not afraid of evil tidings), the more apt he is to be alarmed with the appearance of moral evil, or the evil of sin. As he has more holy boldness, so he has less of self-confidence, and more modesty. As he is more sure than others of deliverance from hell, so he has more of a sense of the desert [i.e. deserving] of it. He is less apt than others to be shaken in faith; but more apt than others to be moved with solemn warnings, and with God's frowns, and with the calamities of others. He has the firmest comfort, but the softest heart. Richer than others, he is the poorest of all in spirit: the tallest and strongest saint, but the least and tenderest child among them." (Religious Affections, pp. 285, 291-92)

Jonathan Edwards on Fear and Love

"...men are doubtless to blame for being in a dead, carnal frame: but when they are in such a frame, and have no sensible experience of the exercises of grace, but on the contrary, are much under the prevalence of their lusts and an unchristian spirit, they are not to blame for doubting of their state. It is as impossible, in the nature of things, that a holy and Christian hope should be kept alive in its clearness and strength in such circumstances, as it is to keep the light in the room when the candle is put out; or to maintain the bright sunshine in the air when the sun is gone down. Distant experiences, when darkened by present prevailing lust and corruption, will never keep alive a gracious confidence and assurance, but one that sickens and decays upon it, as necessarily as a little child by repeated blows on the head with a hammer. Nor is it at all to be lamented that persons doubt of their state in such circumstances: on the contrary, it is desirable and every way best that they should. It is agreeable to that wise and merciful constitution of things, which God hath established, that it should be so. For so hath God contrived and constituted things, in His dispensations towards His own people, that when their love decays, and the exercises of it fail or become weak, fear should arise; for then they need it to restrain them from sin, and to excite them to care for the good of their souls, and so to stir them up to watchfulness and diligence in religion. But God hath so ordered, that when love rises and is in vigorous exercise, then fear should vanish and be driven away; for then they need it not, having a higher and more excellent principle in exercise, to restrain them from sin and stir them up to their duty. There are no other principles which human nature is under the influence of, that will ever make men conscientious, but one of these two, fear or love; and therefore, if one of these should not prevail as the other decays, God's people, when fallen into dead and carnal frames, when love is asleep, would be lamentably exposed indeed: and therefore God has wisely ordained, that these two opposite principles of love and fear should rise and fall, like the two opposite scales of a balance; when one rises the other sinks." (Religious Affections, pp. 107-08)

Berkouwer Quote

"The doctrine of the perseverance of the saints can never become an a priori guarantee in the life of believers which would enable them to get along without admonitions and warnings. Because of the nature of the relation between faith and perseverance, the whole gospel must abound with admonitions. It has to speak thus, because perseverance is not something merely handed down to us, but it is something that comes to realization only in the path of faith. Therefore the most earnest and alarming admonitions cannot in themselves be taken as evidence against the doctrine of perseverance." (G. C. Berkouwer)

Spurgeon Quote

"If God has put it in, he has put it in for wise reasons and for excellent purposes. Let me show you why. First, O Christian, it is put in to keep thee from falling away. God preserves his children from falling away; but he keeps them by the use of means…There is a deep precipice: what is the best way to keep any one from going down there? Why, to tell him that if he did he would inevitably be dashed to pieces. In some old castle there is a deep cellar, where there is a vast amount of fixed air and gas, which would kill anybody who went down. What does the guide say? ‘If you go down you will never come up alive.’ Who thinks of going down? The very fact of the guide telling us what the consequences would be, keeps us from it. Our friend puts away from us a cup of arsenic; he does not want us to drink it, but he says, ‘If you drink it, it will kill you.’ Does he suppose for a moment that we should drink it. No; he tells us the consequences, and he is sure we will not do it. So God says, ‘My child, if you fall over this precipice you will be dashed to pieces.’ What does the child do. He says, ‘Father, keep me; hold thou me up, and I shall be safe.’ It leads the believer to a greater dependence on God, to a holy fear and caution, because he knows that if he were to fall away he could not be renewed, and he stands far away from that great gulf, because he knows that if he were to fall into it there would be no salvation for him." (Charles Spurgeon)

Thoughts on Class discussion: 6/26/07

Please post any thoughts or questions about the classroom discussion regarding Chapter 3: The Race to Be Won.