Ahoy there, CAF posters. I have recently been called out on my frequently-voiced assumption that OSAS (or, more directly, perseverance of the saints) was a product of the event commonly referred to as the Reformation. Can anyone demonstrate this belief’s existence prior to the 16th century? If you do so, you will dramatically realign my apologetics philosophy and win a brand new car!!*
The only precedents one can find for this are in Catharism and other heretical groups. The orthodox Augustinian tradition held that one could receive regenerating grace without receiving the gift of perseverance. Luther believed the same thing. The first references to the perseverance of all the regenerate that I’ve been able to find are in the writings of Zwingli and Oecolampadius in the early 1520s. Since they state the idea as if it were well established and not something they had just thought up, the case remains rather puzzling. But I think it simply followed logically from Zwingli’s prioritizing of election over faith. (Zwingli believed that the elect would be saved even if they never heard the Gospel, and hence never had faith. The elect would inevitably both do good works *and *believe the Gospel when they heard it, but election was the spring that drove the whole process.)
Bucer (in his writings of the 1530s–earlier he was closer to Zwingli) and Calvin moved Reformed theology closer to Wittenberg (I know less about Bullinger). Calvin in particular managed to synthesize the Reformed theology of election and perseverance with the Lutheran theology of sola fide, creating what we now think of as Reformed/Calvinist theology. But
originally it seems to me that perseverance was distinct from sola fide and almost in conflict with it.
Another interesting figure is Martin Borrhaus, or Cellarius–one of those wandering theologians common in the early 16th century who had trouble fitting in with anyone (though he eventually settled down as a respectable OT scholar at Basel). He was kicked out of his native Silesia by the Catholics; he went to Wittenberg and quarreled with Luther and Melancthon; he went to Zurich and quarreled with Zwingli; he went to Strasbourg and got along with Capito for a while, but eventually Bucer got fed up with him and he was kicked out of there too. While in Strasbourg he wrote a book called
De operibus Dei (On the Works of God), published in 1527. Shortly after his point, Bucer turned on Cellarius. But Bucer’s 1527 commentary on the Gospels has a number of interesting points of agreement with Cellarius. Cellarius believes that the elect have “sparks” of grace within them from birth, which causes them to live relatively righteous lives even before they are regenerated. Bucer uses that language in 1527 as well, but it’s not at all in keeping with the Augustinian tradition or with Luther’s teaching. You find a weaker version of it in Calvin’s
Institutes.
I mention Cellarius because his teaching does sound almost Gnostic or Manichean/Cathar. This is a part of the background of the doctrine of perseverance which the Reformed either deny or play down. Jurgen Moltmann’s history of the doctrine of perseverance, for instance, basically starts with Calvin, mentioning briefly and dismissively that Bucer’s doctrine of perseverance was “spiritualist” and had ties to Cellarius.
If you are interested, I can send you the rough draft of a paper I wrote on Cellarius and the origins of the doctrine of perseverance. It needs a lot of work–I prepared it for oral presentation and have never revised it for written publication.
Edwin
