BOB W: Welcome to Grace in Focus. I’m here with Pastor Bob Vacendak. Welcome, Bob. 

BOB V: Good to be here, Bob. 

BOB W: Bob recently received his PhD from Liberty University and you wrote your doctoral dissertation on an important topic. What was that? 

BOB V. Yeah, the title of the dissertation was, “Is Assurance of the Essence of Saving Faith in the Gospel of John?” And of course, what I mean by “of the essence,” if that sounds a little strange to some of the listeners, essentially, I define that as, is assurance a “necessary part” of saving faith? Does a person have to have assurance of their salvation to be able to say, I am a believer in Jesus? 

BOB W: Or how about this? Does a person have to have assurance of salvation to have salvation. And so we’re going to be talking about that over the next several shows. We’re going to go through several of your chapters. We won’t go through the whole thing, because what is that, about 400 pages or something? So we won’t be hitting everything, but we will be hitting some of the issues. And I think in this first one, we’re going to talk about the history of assurance of salvation as it’s seen throughout church history. Is that right? 

BOB V: That’s correct. 

BOB W: All right. So why don’t you get us rolling? Where would you want to start in terms of church history and assurance? 

BOB V: Well, what I did in that chapter, and it was an early chapter, it was the second chapter right after I gave an introduction, where I went back to roughly 1970 to see what contemporary writers and academics were saying about assurance of salvation. I wrote about, first of all, what Calvinists had written in commentaries and in books. And then I focused on what Arminians had written, and then looked at also what had been written by Free Grace theologians. 

BOB W: Okay. So as we go through talking about the history of assurance, we’re going to look at those three basic areas: Calvinists,  Arminians and Free Grace. And by Free Grace, we mean focused Free Grace, because the flexible Free Grace people often have a view of assurance that’s significantly different than the focused Free Grace. And we’re going to do that also when we talk about the definition of assurance in the next show. So in terms of assurance of salvation, did you begin in the church fathers or did you start in the early Catholic church or what? 

BOB V: Yes, what I did is I went back to 500 AD.

BOB W: Which is around the start of the Catholic church, what we would call the Catholic church, right? 

BOB V: Correct. Yeah, there were already popes in existence at that time that they were considered, for instance, I write about Pope Gregory, his life was from 540 to 604 AD. And he argued that people should repeatedly do penance for their sins. And here’s what he wrote. “They should repeatedly do penance for their sins in the hope that we may escape hell, but we can never be sure of success. Constantly anxiety is the only safe attitude until life is over and temptation passed. Assurance of salvation and the feeling of safety engendered by it are dangerous for anybody, it would not be desirable even if possible.” 

BOB W: Wow, so we’re supposed to have constant anxiety according to Pope Gregory, is that who this was? And he says assurance is bad if you could have it.

BOB V: Yes, well, and the idea behind that would be the danger involved with having assurance is that you’ll just go out and live like the devil essentially. 

BOB W: And then according to his theology, that would send you to the lake of fire. All right. So how did this progress in church history? 

BOB V: Well, you’ve got this for a thousand years essentially. later on, 

BOB W: Up until the Reformation. 

BOB V: Yes, and you have Thomas Aquinas putting his two cents in about it, but it’s essentially the same thing that Gregory was saying. He did not believe that a person could be sure. And so that’s what you have for a thousand years there. Assurance of everlasting life, even if it were desirable, is not possible. 

BOB W: Yeah, now I should point out, and I’m sure you would agree that what we’re talking about here is what has come down to us in the literature that has survived. We don’t know what everybody believed during that time period because what either they didn’t write or they wrote, in the Catholic or the Orthodox churches destroyed their publications or just didn’t preserve them. But clearly in every generation, there would have been a remnant of people who knew that they had everlasting life by faith in Christ apart from works, right? 

BOB V: Absolutely. 

BOB W: But we don’t have quotes, in other words, as you look, you can’t find quotes from those people in that thousand years, right? 

BOB V: That’s pretty much true. 

BOB W: So when we get to the Reformation, did Luther and Calvin have a different view of assurance? 

BOB V: Well, of course, Luther and Calvin grew up in the Catholic church. So they were well-schooled in Catholic doctrine and obviously didn’t have assurance of their own salvation. But supernaturally and miraculously, God works in their lives and they come to saving faith in Christ and both of them are, at least at some point in their life, adamant about assurance being of the essence of saving faith, both of them. 

BOB W: And by the way, two things about what you said there. Number one, at various points in their life, they did seem to change their theology over time, so we can’t say every minute of their lives, they were holding to this. But secondly, you point out, they use the expression “assurance.” In fact, Calvin coined that expression, didn’t he? Or was it somebody before Calvin? 

BOB V: I do think it was Calvin that coined the phrase “assurance is of the essence.” Because of course, by the time you get about a hundred years later or so, you have the Westminster Confession in 1647 saying the exact opposite. 

BOB W: Yes. It says assurance is possible, but assurance is a quest. You’re on this lifelong quest for it. 

BOB V: And the conditions that they give for obtaining it, in which we were going to talk about later, are just so unbiblical, and it’s very, very sad. But nonetheless, it was obvious that the Westminster Divines, 

BOB W: Which were the leaders of the Westminster Confession or the Puritan branch of Calvinism.

BOB V: They had all of these Christian leaders come together, and they were fed up with any idea along the lines of that a person can have absolute assurance. 

BOB W: Right. In fact, they had three legs of assurance, right? And we’ll talk about that in a subsequent show. But they departed, wouldn’t we say then, from Luther and Calvin? 

BOB V: Yeah, and what I was leading up to earlier was that, by the time you get a hundred years after Calvin and Luther, and the Westminster Confession is being penned and published, you have them coming out and saying that “assurance of salvation doth not belong to the essence of saving faith.” 

BOB W: Which is exactly the opposite of what Calvin said. 

BOB V: Yes, and both Calvin and Luther, there are just amazing quotations of theirs, where they just say, listen, assurance of eternal life is when I know, when I am assured and am 100% certain that I’ll be with God forever. 

BOB W: Right. It’s not, they would say that assurance of salvation is not saying that the elect are eternally secure. It’s not saying that whoever believes in Jesus is eternally secure, but I don’t know if I believe in Jesus. It’s actually saying, I believe in Jesus, and I know I have this life that can never be lost, right? 

BOB V: That’s correct. 

BOB W: Yeah. So did you go beyond the Westminster Confession when you’re looking at assurance throughout church history? 

BOB V: Yes, then what we do after we look at what the reformers had believed and had written about, copiously, or I should say, there’s just a lot of data there, a lot of material. Well, then we get to this third time period regarding the post-reformation, this we’ve already just talked about this with Westminster Confession, but they just come out and say, assurance is not of the essence of saving faith, and that has to do with Westminster, and so that occurred in 1647, and so what has happened is now Pandora’s box has been opened to just, it was already open for a thousand years before Luther. But Luther and Calvin begin to get people reoriented to Scripture. They begin to focus on what Jesus says and what the apostles said instead of looking at what a pope that supposedly is speaking ex-cathedra in the place of God, and that whatever he says is the God honest truth. 

BOB W: Right, and of course, you mentioned earlier, they both grew up Catholic, and it’s interesting, they didn’t completely abandon all the tenets of Catholicism. For example, they both still believed in infant baptism. They both still believe you should only be baptized once. They were adamant against the Anabaptist, people who baptized adult believers even if they’d already been baptized as a child. In fact, they put them to death. They would burn them at the stake or kill them, and so Luther and Calvin weren’t exactly like your Sunday school teacher today. They were part of a community that actually would kill people who were baptizing adult believers. 

BOB V: That is true. However, I would say this, I would say that they did an amazing thing for the people that needed to hear the truth. All over this earth, they set, a mark in history where people could look back to, their things got published and, and it changed everything. 

BOB W: Right, and now it allowed people to go to the Scriptures rather than church councils. Rather than decrees of popes. And so it was a remarkable change. 

Thank you, Bob, and thanks to each of you for listening in, and remember, keep grace in focus. 

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On the next episode: we continue, what is the definition of the assurance of salvation? Please join us, and until then, let’s keep grace in focus.