KARL KEATING’S E-LETTER
November 16, 2004
TOPIC:
CHRISTIANS HAVE NO GUARANTEE OF HEAVEN
Dear Friend of Catholic Answers:
After a parish seminar I spoke with a young man, a Fundamentalist, who insisted that one can have an absolute assurance of salvation.
“All you need to do is to accept Christ as your personal Lord and Savior,” he said. That acceptance will make you a “born-again Christian,” with heaven guaranteed. Nothing you later might do, no sin you might commit, would exclude you from heaven.
I proposed to him a hypothetical situation.
"Let’s say your pastor became a born-again Christian at age fifteen. He now is 75 and for sixty years has lived an exemplary Christian life. So far as anyone knows, and so far as he himself knows, he never, in those sixty years, has committed a serious sin.
"Today, while being in full possession of his faculties, he changes completely. He commits adultery, murders a stranger, robs a bank, deliberately runs over a cat with his car, shouts obscenities at passersby, and then commits suicide, cursing God as he dies unrepentant.
“My question to you,” I said to the young man, “is this: Does your minister go to heaven or hell?”
“To hell, of course.”
“How can that be, since he is a born-again Christian?”
“No, he isn’t.”
“Yes, he is, as I told you at the start.”
“No, he can’t be born-again.”
“Hey, this is my hypothetical! I told you he was a born-again Christian.”
“No born-again Christian would do those things.”
“So you mean that he fooled everyone, including himself, for sixty years? You mean he was mistaken?”
“Of course. There’s no other answer.”
Then I had a small revelation.
"What you’re saying is that you can’t tell whether a man really is a born-again Christian until he’s safely dead. It means you can’t tell if you yourself are a real Christian. You might be fooling yourself, as the minister fooled himself. The conclusion is that you can’t have the absolute assurance you’d like to have.
"In practice, if not in theory, you are perilously close to the Catholic understanding of salvation.
"The Catholic Church teaches that we can have a moral assurance of salvation but not an absolute assurance. We can be assured that we will go to heaven–if we remain in the state of grace. But we can have no assurance that we will persevere in such a state, much as we might want to at the moment.
"The Church teaches that since ‘God wills the salvation of all men,’ he gives each of us enough grace to be saved. Grace is a gift, and a gift is not forced upon the recipient. A gift can be accepted or rejected, and it can be rejected after once being accepted.
“The minister in my hypothetical once accepted grace and, on the last day of his life, rejected it, losing his salvation. He died grace-less and therefore disqualified for heaven.”
Our discussion went on for a while. I brought up several verses that I have found useful when talking about the idea of an absolute assurance of salvation. I particularly like to use a trio of verses from Paul. (I give them here in the Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition translation.)
In Romans 5:2 Paul writes that “we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God”–that is, we rejoice in our hope of going to heaven. This means salvation is something we hope for.
More to follow-
