Certainty Of Faith Research Articles

The perseverance of the saints, persecution and mission, and its implications for Reformed churches

The confession of saints’ perseverance in the Canons of Dort gives much comfort to the Christian. This was one of the most important challenges the Synod of Dort had to address. It also has many implications for the mission of the church. Not only does it highlight the message that God, in his salvation, will always complete his act of redemption, but also that he will not reject the believer once he or she has become a true Christian. It also comforts many in times of persecution, because God, in his faithfulness, will be the One to empower the believer to remain steadfast and also to vow for those who doubt and even struggle to keep the faith. For Reformed churches, this means that, in the endeavour of mission, a message of great comfort can be proclaimed to all. In Jesus Christ there is certainty of eternal life not because of human power or godliness, but because of God’s faithfulness. Theologically it is, however, also important to challenge philosophical views where certainty of faith is rejected for a worldview of uncertainty. The truth of faith is, however, found in God, not in the human possibilities. In this regard, Dort is important for the church to be guided to the fullness of service to the triune God. Mission becomes a wonderful act of peace for the troubled soul in a troubled world.

The Infallibility of Canonizations: A Revisionist History of the Arguments

The Infallibility of Canonizations:A Revisionist History of the Arguments William Diem The Modern Consensus and the Prima Facie Problem Since the publication of De Servorum Dei Beatificatione et Beatorum Canonizatione by Prospero Lorenzo Lambertini (later Pope Benedict XIV), a general consensus has emerged that formal canonizations of the saints are infallible papal acts.1 Indeed it is so commonly held that the New Catholic Encyclopedia simply asserts, without any note of either controversy or explanation, that canonizations are infallible declarations.2 More precisely, it is commonly held that, in canonizations, the pope infallibly [End Page 653] teaches that the one canonized is now in heaven.3 Yet, this position faces a rather significant objection. As Avery Cardinal Dulles notes, "it is difficult to see how [formal canonizations and the approval of religious institutes] fit under the object of infallibility as defined in the two Vatican councils."4 What he means is this: the two Vatican councils connect the Church's infallibility directly to the guarding and expounding of the deposit of faith handed down from the apostles. Hence Vatican II in Lumen Gentium teaches, "this infallibility with which the Divine Redeemer willed His Church to be endowed in defining doctrine of faith and morals, extends as far as the deposit of Revelation extends, which must be religiously guarded and faithfully expounded."5 So [End Page 654] much is uncontroversial: the Church's infallibility is linked directly to her office as guardian and teacher of public revelation. Now, we should note another uncontroversial point: that this infallible teaching authority extends not only to what has been directly revealed in public revelation—the primary or direct objects of infallibility—but extends also to those things that are necessarily connected with revealed truth by either a logical or a historical necessity. Defenders of the infallibility of canonizations—well aware that Christ revealed nothing about the fate of particular post-apostolic individuals—thus place canonizations among these secondary or indirect objects of infallibility. Hence, for example, Ludwig Ott writes, "to the secondary objects of infallibility belong … the canonization of saints, that is the final judgment that a member of the Church has been assumed into eternal bliss and may be the object of general veneration."6 But what necessary connection is there between a particular historical individual's beatitude and the faith? As Dulles notes, "it is not easy to see how the fact that this or that saint possessed heroic virtue is either a necessary condition or a necessary consequence of Christian faith."7 Now to complete the difficulties, we can consider the two lines of data that are examined leading up to a formal canonization and on which the determination of sainthood is ultimately made. Since the beginning of the practice of formal canonizations by the popes,8 two lines of investigation [End Page 655] have been carried out to determine sanctity: The first is an examination of the person's life, and the second is an examination of miracles attributed to the person's intercession. To the first of these, we must note that, while a thorough investigation of a person's life may give very good reason to determine that a person was holy and is now in glory, it is ultimately inconclusive insofar as we cannot read another person's soul.9 What's more, not even the individual can know his own state of grace with absolute certainty—the sentiment is clear in Paul: "I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me" (1 Cor 4:4). Trent is explicit: "For as no pious person ought to doubt the mercy of God, the merit of Christ and the virtue and efficacy of the sacraments, so each one, when he considers himself and his own weakness and indisposition, may have fear and apprehension concerning his own grace, since no one can know with the certainty of faith, which cannot be subject to error, that he has obtained the grace of God."10 Note carefully the distinction, in Trent, between those things on the one hand that are matters of divine revelation—the mercy of God...

Luther and Lutherans on Confession, “the Forgotten Sacrament”

Luther and the Lutheran reformers regarded confession and absolution with sacramental status. Although it should not be coerced, it should be retained in corporate and individual form. Unfortunately, this has not always been taken to heart in the Lutheran church, something that Luther was also partly responsible for. Whether confession, the “forgotten sacrament,” can be restored, is hard to say. It has fallen too much to the wayside. Nevertheless, the forgiveness of sins is the important matter. It is justification as experienced by the sinner. God himself makes the sinner righteous. God’s word alone creates the certainty of faith; in absolution the person who confesses experiences God’s absolving word and can trust it. Without confession and forgiveness, justification dissolves into—as Peter Zimmerling has rightly said—“a protestant ideology.” Do people no longer require confession and forgiveness? Talk shows suggest that they do. We can only pray that the mandate of Jesus Christ would be received and fulfilled.

Life, Love and Hope: God and Human Experience by Jan-Olav Henriksen

Reviewed by: Life, Love and Hope: God and Human Experience by Jan-Olav Henriksen Mary Gaebler Life, Love and Hope: God and Human Experience. By Jan-Olav Henriksen. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014. 372 pp. Henriksen’s book offers a lucid and welcome proposal for a Trinitarian theology that incorporates evolutionary theory into a synthesis designed to challenge dialectical theology on the one hand (79) and scientific reductionism on the other. “Revelation is about more [than the Word of God],” writes Henriksen, “It is about experiences” (57). The Reformation emphasis on “the sinfulness of human nature” (96), Henriksen suggests, has led to an unfortunate distrust of nature (97). Yet each side needs to pay attention to the other; science “needs to relate to the wisdom of theology, just as much as theology needs to be informed by the knowledge of science” (107). While science has had obvious successes, it has failed, he insists, to address “the realms of the world that matter most to our everyday life” (39). Theology at its best, insists Henriksen, “offer[s] experientially based wisdom … [which] seeks to understand what the conditions and contents of a good life are” (100). Identifying his theological project with Bultmann, Pannenberg, and Tillich (among others), Henriksen’s book takes up the “positive challenge for theology, [which is] … to find God in the present” (87). Henriksen’s double perichoresis (drawn initially from the work of Jürgen Moltmann) is the fulcrum upon which his proposal rests. While the work of God in three persons operates first, according to the traditional internal perichoresis, the Trinity reaches out to the world in love, creating a second (asymetrical) perichoresis, as God the Spirit calls human beings into relationship. And it is this second perichoresis that provides the critical construct for explaining how [End Page 223] it is that God’s love and hope for the world come to be known and made manifest through human experience. God’s panentheistic presence, or “deep incarnation,” reveals a God who answers the human yearning for love and recognition. Evolution has gifted human beings “with capabilities to live in realms of life that are made accessible through symbolic means” (57). Thus, Henriksen argues, we come to experience ourselves as participants in natural, cultural/social, psychological, and spiritual realms (48)—all of which function interdependently to reveal surprising glimpses of future possibilities not visible in the present or the past (202). These glimpses Henriksen refers to as “hermeneutic experiences”; and insofar as they free us from a view of reality bound to the past, God’s hopes become human hopes, and we are drawn toward a life that seeks to make God’s kingdom manifest. So far the project appears to reflect faithfully an effectively updated version of Luther’s famous insistence that incarnation implies a finite world which bears the infinite in ways that exclude nothing from God’s active and grace-filled presence. Indeed, the call to find God’s loving activity in, with, and under every kind of experience (even the experience of Anfechtungen, where this is faithfully interpreted) reveals a decidedly Lutheran approach. As Henriksen arrives at the matter of agency, however, his correlation of human responsibility with God’s promised kingdom appears problematic, particularly from a Lutheran perspective. Whereas Luther’s faith rested on God’s reliability, Henriksen introduces a God whose hopes for the future are vulnerable to human failure. Offering the traditional argument that love of God requires a real choice, he couples this with a kingdom that is wholly temporal (and apparently dependent upon human action to make it manifest). Where the kingdom rests on the free choice and action of human beings (inclined by sin to say “no”), the certainty of faith and God’s power to motivate through the promise appear to be deeply undermined. Nevertheless, this is an important and provocative book—a book that is both interesting and well-argued. Henriksen brings to his task a profound erudition, and his list of interlocutors is impressive. While this is not a book I would recommend to anyone unfamiliar [End Page 224] with theological concepts, it is a book that deserves to be read—and one I recommend without reservation...

Shestov's Quest for Certainty of Faith

This article reconstructs Lev Shestov’s views on the Christian faith and, more specifically, his exploration of religious philosophy. Shestov was raised in the Jewish tradition, and as a mature man he was baptized in the Orthodox Church. The article shows the twists and turns of his intellectual quest, which took him from Marxism, via criticism of 19th century intellectualism, to religious philosophy.

The Security of Hope

The Living Rosary Association, a renewed form of the rosary confraternity, was principally an association of the peasantry and lower social strata in Hungary. The paper presents and interprets the confraternity practice of a settlement (Kunszentmárton, Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok County on the Hungarian Great Plain), through confraternity minutes (1851-1940), the fraternity's religious literature and journal, interviews and comparison with other fraternities. The rosary was principally a form of female devotion. However, up to the 1940s the leaders were men. The high degree of feminisation can be interpreted in the frame of the process of secularisation. In the course of the processes of economic, social and cultural modernisation, the tasks of the private sphere within the family (running the household, raising children) fell to women. Within this frame they also provided for the family's sacral world. Until the 1940s the rosary confraternity preserved its character as a women's mass movement. At the turn of the 19th-20th century the prayer groups were organised on a family and neighbourhood basis. The confraternity also established its own funeral society, linking the living and the dead in prayer. Among the reasons for the popularity of the rosary were its democratic nature and the clear religious goals: it provided the faithful with an institutional frame for their charitable activity; it set readily understandable and easily performed tasks for its members; it required the acceptable co-ordination of individual and communal forms of religious practice. The prayer had a flexible spatial and temporal structure, that is, the prayers could be said at any time and anywhere, even during work. This ensured for devotions a required intimacy but at the same time also a communal character. We have a tendency in research to regard the religious confraternities only as a sociological and cultural phenomenon, forgetting the transcendental aspects they have for members. Besides the few characteristics mentioned so far, membership of the rosary confraternity offered and still offers its members the possibility of salvation through the certainty of faith. This gives the members the security of hope for the future.

Shestov's Quest for Certainty of Faith

Shestov's Quest for Certainty of Faith

Paradoxie in Werner Elerts Grundbestimmung der Dogmatik

The article tries to understand the category of paradox in the work of Elert not only in opposition to the rational but also in relation to it and thus seeks to analyze the rational function of paradox in Elert's conception of the foundation of dogmatics. The paradox in question here is not the so-called christological paradox. It is first the paradox of the deus absconditus which characterizes in a certain respect the natural relation of humans to God (I). This paradox allows no immanent solution at all in accordance with all natural conceptions of a rational understanding of the world. As such it characterizes in several respects the understanding of the gospel as its only transcendent solution (II). In so far as the gospel in a certain way presupposes an acknowledgment of that paradox it must be considered as paradoxical itself, thus being a paradox solution of the former paradox. Its paradox character is essentialy due to a genuine Lutheran understanding of justification emphazising the dependence of certainty of faith on the iustitia aliena; the paradox character of the gospel can finally be considered as the paradoxality determining the relation of law and gospel (III). This paradoxality related to the gospel thus has a basic systematic function by determining the condition under which the testimony of Christ is perceived as word of God himself -this word strictly being separated from the - paradox - experience of natural existence under the abscondity of God. Elert indeed does not relate the gospel to natural existence in a way of rational correlation nor does he simply replace correlation by mere confrontation. He rather establishes the correlation between the kerygma of Christ and natural existence in a way of paradoxical connexion (Anknupfung) as confrontation with the paradoxality of natural existence itself (IV).

De Irenische Perkins-Vertaling Van De Arminiaan Everard Booth (1577-1610) 1

AbstractBooth's Translation of an Irenical Perkins-Book In 1604 the Utrecht minister Everard Booth (1577-1610) published a translation of William Perkins' 'A Reformed Catholike'. Because of this translation, biographical dictionaries and other literature say that he must have agreed more or less with the predestinarian views of Franciscus Gomarus. In the conflict between Franciscus Gomarus and Jacobus Arminius, Perkins played an important part. He owes this to Arminius, who wrote a book against him and utterly disliked his ideas on predestination, the certainty of faith and final perseverance. The problem is that Booth attended the Conventus Praeparatorius (1607), a meeting meant for the preparation of a national synod. Here he agreed with Arminius on the question of whether the Belgic confession ought to be revised or not. In 1610, the year of his death, Booth's position raises even less doubt. He proved himself to be an Arminian. So his translation of Perkins might point to a change in his outlook or to a moderate stand. However, there is a better solution to the riddle of how a potential Arminian could like Perkins. Perkins' 'A Reformed Catholike' (1597) is an item in the syllabus of irenical writings, released by the French diplomat Jean Hotman in 1607 and extended later on. Utrecht was a former cathedral city which still had a high percentage of Roman Catholic inhabitants. Presumably Booth's attention was drawn to 'A Reformed Catholike' because of its irenical character. He may have considered the book as a means to bring his Catholic fellow citizens to other thoughts. In the same year, 1604, a second Dutchman, Vincent Meusevoet, translated 'A Reformed Catholike' too. He published it together with a translation of a highly polemical book written by Perkins, 'A Warning against the Idolatrie of the Last Times'. Booth did not do things in this way. Incidentally, he took a Latin edition of Perkins' book as his source, not the original English work, as Meusevoet did. 'A Reformed Catholike' is, indeed an irenical treatise. Perkins started his chapters with a discourse on the issues agreed on among Catholics and Protestants. Especially illustrative is the sixteenth chapter dealing with the faith. In the first part of this chapter, devoted to the common elements, he discussed his favourite theme for bruised consciences, namely that a small portion of faith, a faith as a grain of mustard seed, is sufficient in the eyes of God for salvation. So Roman Catholics who desired to believe could assume that they would be children of God, according to Perkins. As a matter of course, nobody was entitled to be satisfied with a small sparkle of faith: man had to aim at an increasing faith. Yet the 'infolded faith' really had a great importance according to Perkins. He showed himself open to the Roman Catholics on a central point in his theological thinking. Booth must have felt attracted to thoughts like those mentioned in 'A Reformed Catholike'. He was an irenical theologian. In the Dutch predestinarian conflict, the irenicists often turned out to be Arminians later on. Notwithstanding his English example Booth's irenical feelings placed him alongside the Arminians with their less unquestioning ideas. One indication of Booth's gifts as an irenicist is what became of the Utrecht Reformed community after his arrival (1602). For many years it had been in a state of turmoil. There were many people who steadfastly refused to go to church in Utrecht. They blamed the Consistory because it danced to the piping of the magistrate. After his arrival the situation improved. During his ministry (1602-1610) the Utrecht church enjoyed a period of peace. This may be mainly due to his influence. Booth was a pupil of the Leiden professor Franciscus Junius, the author of the 'Eirenicum de Pace Ecclesiae Catholicae'. Junius tried to mediate between the religious parties in Utrecht from 1593 onwards. Everard Booth followed in his footsteps.

Die sekerheid van die geloof by Calvyn en sommige van sy navolgers

The thoughts of Calvin and some of his followers on the certainty of faith In this paper Calvin's thoughts on the certainty of faith are traced as he expresses this in the Institutes. It is also shown that the Heidelberg Catechism faithfully follows Calvin's line of thought as the priority of faith over repentance and rebirth, which are seen as fruits of faith, is stressed. It is shown from the Institutes that for Calvin the certainty of faith lies in adhering in faith to the objectively given surety of the Word of God and His promises. In the second part of the article it is shown how in Beza's work, in Calvinistic scholastic orthodoxy and in the Nadere Reformatie of the 17th and 18th century in the Netherlands there is a gradual shift of emphasis in this matter. The implications of this shift in accent is briefly discussed.

'I Know That My Redeemer Liveth': (Job XIX, 25) From St Gregory's Commentary on Job, Bk XIV

By saying redeemer, not creator, he is clearly announcing one who appeared amongst us in the flesh, long after he had created all things, in order to redeem us from captivity, one who delivered us by his sufferings from never-ending death. And notice with what strong faith in the power of Christ's godhead he pulls himself together; just as St Paul says: ‘Even though he was crucified through weakness, yet he lives through the power of God’ (2 Cor. xiii, 4), so Job says here: ‘I know that my redeemer lives', as much as to say, more openly, ‘Any unbeliever can know about his being scourged, laughed at, knocked about, crowned with a crown of thorns, smeared with spittle, crucified, and dead; but I believe with the certainty of faith and I freely and openly declare that he lives after death. For my redeemer lives, whom the hands of wicked men slew.’

Grundtvig som tænker. Henning Højrup: Grundtvigs syn paa tro og erkendelse

Grundtvig som tænker. Henning Højrup: Grundtvigs syn paa tro og erkendelse