Monday, January 15th, 2007

Mortal and Venial Sins

Along with the Third Use of the Law discussions, a discussion on Mortal and Venial Sins has arisen. I actually think this issue runs much deeper. It would be possible to maintain a sense of assurance of salvation in the face of Third Use preaching. I often did so in my earlier days as an evangelical. For a while, I even thought such preaching was beneficial. After all, God had saved me, so what could be better than being told how to pursue life in his kingdom? I wanted practical teaching. And I didn't feel the worse for hearing it most of the time. There is the rub. Most of the time.

The trouble is, a period of this can really take on some new dimensions that you don't expect. I'd like to present some of this autobiographically. But I want the reader to keep something in mind as he or she reads. The question at issue is not whether or not there was a good theological answer that could have been helpful in these situations had I known it. The question is whether my ignorance, combined with a belief in mortal and venial sins, would have been deadly, and what that has to say to our lives in general.

One of my phases of spiritual growth occurred after a best friend had some kind of conversion experience at Calvary Chapel. This friend had believed in God in his youth. But he had a very emotional crisis over deciding to trust God instead of having someone take his SAT tests for him. I do not now regard this as a conversion, even if it was a major moment in his journey. In any case, we started going to church together. A lot. And the church had a youth group with a very intense youth pastor.

For a while this was very amazing. We spent a lot of time in worship. We read a lot of Scripture. We even did street witnessing. That in itself taught me a lot. I could see just how people's egotistical personalities would get in the way, as when we would run into nominal Christians and one of our group would go after them. Where they got the gospel right with non-Christians, when they ran into nominal Christians, they had a very legalistic message. Toe the line, or else.

In any case, after some time I started to hear of a teaching called Lordship Salvation. For Jesus to be your Savior, He also had to be the Lord of your life. Now in itself, this didn't seem so threatening. Much of my energy was devoted to seeing this happen. Only then I would hear preachers in another context talking about how if Christ was not Lord of all, he was not Lord at all. Huh? What did it mean for him to be Lord of all? Every area of your life? Every minute of your life? Every second of your life? This was something else altogether. I went from pursuing something out of sheer love to pursuing something out of fear. And the fear was not a helpful motivator. It made me try harder and harder to achieve less and less. Before I would have worshipped because I wanted to. Now I would sing and my heart wasn't in it. Who could worship the God who had become a judgmental tyrant?

I remember when the connection with Romans 13 hit. This was first introduced to me once when a friend said, "Technically speaking, speeding is a sin." That is, when we would speed, even on the way to church, we were disobeying the governing authorities. Well, Christ had to be Lord of my driving. Or he wasn't my Lord. And he wasn't my savior. Well, I tried. This was particularly hard on a stretch of road near the UCI campus. There was one lane. I remember once working hard to drive the speed limit. At the end of the one lane stretch, some Asian guy passed me and flipped me off on the way past. In his mind, I was just being a jerk. Later in the week at church, I was steamed. I had put all this effort into things and felt terrible. Other people weren't struggling with this and were happy. What had gone wrong?

At another point, I remember "failing" at something I thought I was supposed to do. My brother had gotten me into Pro Life activisim. The thought occurred to me that I should take something from our garage that was supposed to weld metal on contact and put it on the door hinges of the abortion clinic. After all, what was my own freedom compared to the lives that were being lost. On a gut level this seemed to be a bad idea. But on an intellectual level, I had not, at 18, been given the tools to think this through. So in my mind I was committing a sin of omission. Did this mean I was not saved?

As I warned earlier, it would be easy for any Christian adult to say, "Well, the fact of the matter is, God did not expect that of you, so the point is moot." No, it really is not moot. For as much as I am better informed on the issue now, I have to see that such situations can come up again. My conscience can be ill-informed on an intellectual level. But if the Mortal and Venial sin distinction is made tightly, then I am in a catch 22. Anything that has an argument for being right, I must do without hesitation. Not to do so would be to risk having an evil intention. For some, this idea sounds far-fetched. But I had too much experience trying to apply such teaching while I took it seriously to think it is. While it is often true that the spirit is willing and the flesh is weak, sometimes what we think is the spirit is stupid and the flesh too smart to listen.

I'll have much more to say on this subject, both searching the Scriptures and searching the Confessions. But I want to leave my readers with one thing here. The idea that an individual Christian should be able to draw a fine distinction between carnal security and Christian confidence is a fantasy. When someone enters into a conundrum like I did, there is no confidence. It has been killed. Worse yet, repentance looks futile. Why? Because such teaching tells the person that their faith, during their disobedience, was a sham faith. But it felt real. If a sham faith could feel real during the disobedience, then perhaps all I've ever had is a sham faith. And I'll never know how to identify a real one.

"Oh, that's easy. By its fruits!" Sorry reader, you aren't really following the argument if you can say that. What fruits? What is to produce them? You won't have confidence in the mercy of God, because that won't avail for you unless you have faith. And without faith, no actions are good. So you have to have those fruits in order to know you have true faith, but you have to have true faith in order to know those fruits are good. If you've never run into this problem, you're lucky. The only way out of it is to take faith out of the equation altogether. To trust Christ. And not to ask whether the trust is real or not.

Those who want to get all anxious about whether faith is real or not only know how to kill faith. They can't make it live. If they think they have found a dead faith, they think they can revive it by prescribing good works. If that were true, then the preaching of Moses would be all we really needed.

2:36 pm Pacific Standard Time

[ posted by Rick Ritchie | 42 comments | Permalink ]