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    Understanding Assurance and Salvation
    Understanding Assurance and Salvation
    Understanding Assurance and Salvation
    Ebook67 pages58 minutes

    Understanding Assurance and Salvation

    By R Picirilli

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    About this ebook

    Dr. Picirilli gives a basic overview of the teachings of Joseph Arminius and discusses the biblical explanation of the possibility of apostasy. This booklet presents the Reformed Arminian position of assurance and salvation in easy-to-understand terms that prove beneficial to both scholar and layperson. This is an ideal book for ministers and church leaders to have in the office library. This quick read is ideas for anyone interested in doctrine and theology.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandall House
    Release dateJul 1, 2003
    ISBN9781614840442
    Understanding Assurance and Salvation
    Author

    R Picirilli

    Dr. Robert E. Picirilli is former academic dean and professor of Greek and the New Testament studies at Free Will Baptist Bible College in Nashville, Tennessee. Since 1983, he as served as the General Editor of "The Randall House Bible Commentary" and contributed to several volumes within the series. His other published works include "Teacher, Leader, Shepherd"; "Grace, Faith, Free Will"; "Paul, the Apostle"'; and numerous other books and articles in denominational publications and theological journals.

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      Book preview

      Understanding Assurance and Salvation - R Picirilli

      Preface

      Calvinism is the name of the theology of salvation traced to John Calvin (1509-64), the leading theologian of the early Protestant Reformation, a magisterial reformer of almost as much importance as Martin Luther himself. Arminianism represents the thinking of Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609), a Dutch thinker who resisted some of the forms of Calvinism.

      Since the Calvinistic-dominated Synod of Dort in 1618-19, it has become customary to summarize the differences between the two schools of thought using the acrostic TULIP.

      T is for Total Depravity. Calvin insisted that humans are so depraved, following original sin, that they are permanently disabled from responding to God until He first regenerates them. Arminius did not disagree about the depravity, but he understood the Bible to teach that God’s pre-regenerating grace enables the depraved person—still possessing freedom of the will as part of his constitutional makeup—to respond positively or negatively to the offer of salvation in Christ.

      U is for Unconditional Election. Calvin believed that God by predestination chose some to be saved and the rest to be lost, eternally, and unconditionally. Arminius agreed that it is biblical to speak of the election as eternal, but he held that it is likewise biblical to speak of election as based on the saving faith of the individuals, exercised in time.

      L is for Limited Atonement. Calvin taught that Christ died only for those whom God had unconditionally elected. Arminius cited a wealth of biblical evidence that Christ died for the entire human race and thus provided salvation for all—applied, however, only to those who respond in faith to the gospel.

      I is for Irresistible Grace. Calvin’s view was that elected persons are regenerated by the gracious work of the Holy Spirit without their awareness or cooperation; only after this new birth can they receive faith as a gift from God. Arminius understood the Bible to teach, instead, that the individual, enabled by the Spirit but not yet regenerated, must willingly believe in Christ in order to be saved.

      P is for Perseverance. Calvin said that all who are elected will necessarily persevere in salvation. Arminius, though he did not develop this doctrine as fully as the others, referred to biblical teachings that ought to make one cautious, passages that fall short of guaranteeing that all who are born again will certainly persevere to the end.

      This little book treats the views of Arminius, and of more recent followers of his thinking—including this writer—on this fifth subject.

      CHAPTER ONE

      Arminianism and Conditional Perseverance

      As I have said in the preface, Arminius himself and his first followers¹ avoided a clear conclusion on the subject of perseverance. But they raised the question, and the natural implications of their non-predestinarian view of salvation, even at that early stage, tended to question whether Calvinism’s assumption of necessary perseverance was truly biblical.

      Arminius’ opinion on the subject can be captured in this relatively brief statement on the subject:

      My sentiments respecting the perseverance of the Saints are, that those persons who have been grafted into Christ by true faith, and have thus been made partakers of his life-giving Spirit, possess sufficient powers [or strength] to … gain the victory over those enemies—yet not without the assistance of the grace of the same Holy Spirit…. So that it is not possible for them, by any of the cunning craftiness or power of Satan, to be either seduced or dragged out of the hands of Christ. But I think it is useful and will be quite necessary in our first convention, to institute a diligent enquiry from the Scriptures, whether it is not possible for some individuals through negligence to desert the commencement of their existence in Christ, to cleave again to the present evil world, to decline from the sound doctrine which was once delivered to them, to lose a good conscience, and to cause Divine grace to be ineffectual.

      Though I here openly and ingenuously affirm, I never taught that a true believer can either totally or finally fall away from the faith, and perish; yet I will not conceal, that there are passages of Scripture which seem to me to wear this aspect; and those answers to them which I have been permitted to see, are not of such a kind as to approve themselves on all points to my understanding.²

      From a historical perspective, Arminius insisted that the denial of such a possibility "was never, from the very times of the apostles down to the present day, accounted by the church as a catholic

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