Salvation a la mode, and a cup of tea

"Blessed assurance," goes the old song, "Jesus is mine." But what does "assurance" mean, really? Can we know - and I mean really know - that we are "saved?" I think that the word "know" gets us confused. Like many words in English, it means many things, and its meanings have shifted over the years.

Disclaimer:

This is my own take, and while I believe it to be consonant with and supportive of the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church (RCC), and will gladly be corrected if it is not, it is not to be construed as official Roman Catholic doctrine.

I think we have to recognize that there is a spectrum of what we "can" believe concerning salvation. ("Can" here means "it is possible for us to believe," not "what is consonant with sound Christian doctrine.") Leaving aside a whole nother dimension that allows such strange possibilities as "we don't need saving" and "we are unsalvageable," the basic spectrum runs along a single linear dimension, which I might grade on a scale of 0 to 4:

        0          1          2          3          4
   "Insalvism"                                   Universalism

As you might guess, I have a sort of agenda for choosing a scale with exactly five numbers in it. (Don't forget to count the zero, kids!) I have a position in mind for each of the numbers, and I shall now proceed to describe them.

At 0, we have what I've labeled insalvism, but might better be called despair. It is the position that states, in essence, "Salvation is impossible." In its a-theistic form, it is the darker form of existentialism, the view best expressed in the work of (admittedly brilliant) writers like Samuel Beckett and William S. Burroughs, seeing us as essentially corrupt bags of rotting flesh with no hope to become anything better. In its theistic - or, more precisely, quasi-Christian - form, it is the only rational approach to Satanism: the belief that, since we can't be saved anyway, the best thing for us is to worship the Evil One who promises us power in this life in return for the soul It is bound to claim in the end anyway.

At 5, I have placed universalism, which is an exact theological term for the belief that everyone will be saved. The most obvious consequence of this belief is an abrogation of all obligations to God, our neighbor, and ourselves - after all, if we're going to be saved anyway, it doesn't matter what we do, right?

(Incidentally, the conclusion I draw from this is that most people who call themselves Universalists actually aren't, since not only their actions but even their words make it clear that they do believe that the "morality" of our acts, words, and thoughts have real consequences. Actually, most people who call themselves Universalists seem actually to believe that the only thing that matters is our motivations for an action - you can do pretty much as you like, as long as it's for "good motives." This is probably best summed up in the creed of Aleister Crowley [who called himself "the Beast 666"]: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the Law, Love under Will.")

Real Universalists tend to be a-theistic, generally people who put their faith in Progress and Science and the Goodness and Perfectibility of Humankind. H.G. Wells, in his more cheerful mode, is an excellent example. So are many of the prophets of the newage movement. In the realm of religion, Hinduism is a kind of depressed Universalism - it teaches that, yes, we'll all be saved, but we're going to go through Hell on Earth first, because all life is suffering.

Those are the extremes. Let s move toward the center. (If you haven't yet guessed, I plan to suggest that the center is the correct position.)

At 1 we have a position I might call narrowness. This is the attitude that says, in essence, "my way or the highway," insisting that whatever sect or denomination or cult you belong to is the only path to salvation and all others are damned without hope. I have known too many Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, who seem to believe this. I haven t known any Orthodox who believe this, but then I have not known as many Orthodox as I'd like to.) I've never met a serious Moslem who didn't believe this.

At 3 we have a position theologically known as indifferentism. Roughly, this is the belief that all religions (even a-theism and a-gnosticism) are equally valid, and as long as you do your best to live a "good life" you'll be saved. This is the quintessential liberal viewpoint. Its fundamental flaw, from a Christian point of view, is that it would mean that Christ died for nothing.

And so we come to what, I hope, will be our "happy medium," at 2. I don't have a name for this position except, I think, "the right one." <g> It isn't very easy to describe, which is why I've gone into such detail in describing the other regions of the spectrum - by saying what is wrong, we can perhaps gain an understanding of what is right. As Sherlock Holmes famously observed, "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever is left, however absurd it seems, must be true." Or as Michelangelo probably didn't say, the way to sculpt an elephant is to start with a block of marble and cut away everything that doesn't look like an elephant.

In this case I'm attempting to sculpt an elephant named Truth. What doesn't look like the truth is universalism, despair, indifferentism, and narrowness. What's left is, alas, a sort of gray area.

Which is kind of my point. Wandering around the "who can be saved" question - and, I hope, skirting the "who is and who isn't a Christian" bogeyman- I've approached, however cautiously and circumlocuitously, the question of whether or not we can know we are saved.

Can we know that anyone (I mean anyone in particular) is not saved? Well, we certainly can't know that they aren't saved because they aren't a member of our Church. In fact, we can't even know that they aren't saved because they weren't Christians at all. Nor can we know that they are not-saved because of their sins. The famous concept of a deathbed conversion for a Hitler or a Charlie Manson (or, for that matter, a Torquemada) may be extreme, but can't be dismissed out of hand. Their sins may be quantitatively huge, but all sin is infinite by nature.

Indeed, we can know that some who are not Christians at all can be saved (and are, in Catholic terms, therefore in some meaningful sense united with the Church).

On the one hand, we have the plentiful examples of Old Testament folks whom God approved - not only his special friends like David and Abraham, Job and Noah, but those like Enoch and Elijah whom He took bodily into Heaven to be with Him. If that isn't being saved, I'd like to know what is!

On the other hand, we have Christ's rather gnomic sayings that he has other flocks to tend, and that His Father's house has "many mansions." I don't pretend to know what these sayings mean. I choose to believe, because it gives me greater hope in the goodness of God, that He meant that He had something in mind for saving those who, for one reason or another, had no way of knowing Him in this life. And 1 Peter, which tells of the Gospel being preached to the dead, also encourages us to think so.

And, on the third hand, as if to make matters even more confusing, we can't even know for certain that someone who has (in some sense) heard the Gospel and (in some sense) rejected it cannot be saved. Remember what St. Paul says about non-Christian spouses being saved through the faith of their Christian spouses. And there are those (so the RCC teaches, at any rate) who, through no deliberate fault of their own, are incapable of responding to the Gospel as such in this life - not to rehash an exhausted topic, but those hurt as children by preachers might be a good example of this.

Well, then, let's reverse the question. Can we know that we are saved because we are Christians? Well, Jesus (in St. Matthew, Chapter 25) seems to say no, that there will be plenty of us who think we're His friends and are in for a rude awakening.

Can we know that we are saved because we are Christians and live Christian lives? That's a bit harder to say, but I think we can't. I think the best approach is to say we have confidence, but not knowledge. "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling," Paul writes, and while I do the quotation violence by cutting it off there, it's the fear and trembling I want to emphasize in this mini-essay. We can only know the fear and trembling.

Well, no. That's not entirely true. We can also know the joy and peace, the love and happiness, that come from faith in Christ. But faith is not what we generally mean in modern English when we use the word "knowledge." We feel certain, but if we were asked to demonstrate the truth of our certainty, we couldn't, because it isn't based on observable facts: it's based on the "hope that is in us." And that's hope, not knowledge: Paul repeatedly emphasizes that word, hope, as if he wanted to make clear that he did not mean what we, today, think of as "knowledge."

We know with our senses and by our reason - call it "rational knowledge."

But there is another kind of knowing, by faith and hope. The secular world tends to ignore or dismiss this kind of knowledge. On the other hand, because we use the same word for the two, we Christians tend to think that knowing-by-faith is the same kind of thing as rational knowledge. They are not the same thing at all.

In the end, knowledge by faith is the surest kind (indeed, it is ultimately by an act of faith that we trust our senses and reason). But this kind of "knowing" is hard to discern. Unless we are very advanced in faith indeed - and I'll be the first to admit that I am not - it is best not to call it "knowing" but "believing," lest hope get the better part of the matter and fool us.

So we must live in hope and faith, and together they are quite as powerful as knowledge - and they form a kind of knowledge - but they are not what we normally think of as knowledge. It may even be quite reasonable for you or I to say "I know that I am saved." But we must always retain that speck of doubt, that awareness that we have not by any means earned salvation, that it's a proffered gift that may be snatched from us as in Mt.25, leaving us with no just grounds for complaint. We must always recall that what we have is hope in things unseen, that we do not know with our own knowledge that we are saved. We must always recall that we deserve damnation.

Penitence is always in order.