EKLI - Life, together

Ways Christians See It

Can you know you are saved?

1 John 5:13, 2 Peter 1:10, Philippians 2:12-13, Matthew 7:21-23

John says he wrote so that you may know you have eternal life. Peter tells his readers to be diligent to make their calling and election sure, which implies it is not yet. Paul tells the Philippians to work out their salvation with fear and trembling. And Jesus says that on the last day many will say Lord, Lord, and be told he never knew them.

So the New Testament promises and unsettles it in the same breath. That is not a contradiction to be resolved quickly. It is the reason this question has produced so much pastoral damage in both directions: people crushed by doubt who should be at peace, and people entirely at ease who have no business being so.

Where everyone agrees

Everyone here agrees that salvation is God's work and not a human achievement, that a person can be genuinely mistaken about their own standing, and that assurance is not the same thing as being saved. Someone can be saved without feeling sure. Someone can feel sure and be wrong. The disagreement is about what grounds a well-founded confidence.

Look outward, at the promise

Assurance rests on Christ and the promise attached to him, never on the quality of your faith or your progress.

What it claims

The moment you make assurance depend on evidence in yourself, you have made it depend on you. And you are exactly the variable that fluctuates. Faith is not a quality you inspect; it is a hand that holds something. The promise is objective and outside you. God said it, attached it to Christ, and sealed it in your baptism. On bad days you cannot find your faith at all, and the promise does not move. This is why Luther told despairing people to stop examining themselves and to say instead that they are baptised.

Who holds it

Lutheran theology above all, and much Reformed preaching. Luther's own counsel was to look away from yourself entirely, and to remember your baptism.

The texts it stands on

  • Romans 8:38-39 Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ, a list of external threats with nothing about the strength of our grip
  • John 10:28-29 No one will snatch them out of my hand
  • Titus 3:5 Not because of works done by us, but according to his mercy
  • Hebrews 6:17-19 God guaranteed it with an oath, so that we might have strong encouragement

Strongest case

It is the only position that offers real comfort to someone in the dark. Every other view sends a struggling person back to inspect the very faculty that is currently failing. It also matches how the New Testament actually consoles people, which is by pointing at Christ rather than at their track record.

Hardest question

Jesus warns about people who say Lord, Lord and are turned away, and they clearly believed the promise applied to them. James says faith without works is dead. If assurance never involves looking at your life, what stops a person living any way at all while resting on a promise that was never theirs?

How it answers that

The warning in Matthew 7 is aimed at people trusting their own works, not the promise. Read it again: their defence is that they prophesied and cast out demons. They are pointing at their résumé. This view says that is exactly the wrong place to look, so the warning lands on the opposite error. And a promise genuinely trusted changes a person. Luther expected fruit; he simply refused to make fruit the ground of comfort, because the ground has to hold on the days when the fruit is not visible.

Holding the map

Notice how differently these fail. The promise view fails toward presumption. The evidence view fails toward morbid introspection. The Spirit view fails toward chasing experiences. The sacramental view fails toward outsourcing your conscience. Most of the pastoral harm in this area comes from a view being pushed past its own limits rather than from the view itself.

One practical note, because this question is almost never asked in the abstract. Someone who is terrified they are not saved and someone who is entirely comfortable while living however they like need opposite words, and the same sermon cannot serve both. Nearly every disagreement here is between people who have different congregations in mind.

EKLI serves Christians across traditions. On questions where churches differ we explain how each one sees it and leave the deciding to you.

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