Perseverance and Assurance

By now you know the shape of this module's problem. Put out both sets of texts before you decide anything, and be suspicious of any teacher who only needs one of them.

The keeping texts are strong and numerous. John 10:28-29: 'I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one can snatch them out of My hand. My Father who has given them to Me is greater than all. No one can snatch them out of My Father's hand.' Romans 8:38-39 says nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Philippians 1:6: 'He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.' 1 Peter 1:5 says believers 'through faith are shielded by God's power for the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time'. Jude 24 addresses him who is able to keep you from stumbling. And Romans 8:29-30, worked in the first lesson of this module, runs its chain from predestination to glorification without losing anybody.

The warning texts are equally strong and equally numerous, and they are not confined to one writer. 1 Corinthians 10:12: 'So the one who thinks he is standing firm should be careful not to fall.' Colossians 1:23 makes the presentation holy and blameless conditional, 'if indeed you continue in your faith, established and firm'. Hebrews 3:12 warns brothers against 'a wicked heart of unbelief that turns away from the living God', and 3:14 says, 'We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly to the end the assurance we had at first.' Galatians 5:4 tells those trying to be justified by the law that they 'have been severed from Christ' and 'have fallen away from grace'. John 15:6 says, 'If anyone does not remain in Me, he is like a branch that is thrown away and withers. Such branches are gathered up, thrown into the fire, and burned.' 2 Peter 2:20-22 describes people who have escaped the corruption of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ only to be entangled and overcome by it again, and says their final condition is worse than it was at first. And then Hebrews 6 and 10, which get a section of their own.

Here is the thing to notice about the warnings, because it is the first move every serious treatment makes. The warnings are not addressed to people who are obviously outside. They are addressed to congregations, in the second person plural, by writers who address the same people as brothers and beloved in the next breath. Hebrews 6:9 does it three verses after the hardest warning in the New Testament ends. That is why the easy solution, that the warnings are aimed at hypocrites who were never in, has to be argued rather than assumed, and it is also why the opposite easy solution, that the warnings prove salvation is precarious, has to reckon with the fact that the same letters also say believers are guarded by God's power.

One more piece of ground clearing. The question of this lesson is not whether a professing Christian can walk away; everybody has seen that happen and nobody disputes it. The question is what happened. Did a saved person become lost, or was a person who appeared saved never saved, or is it possible to be genuinely in and genuinely leave? Those are three different claims about the same visible event, and the arguments are about which of them the texts require.

Take the passage whole. Hebrews 6:4-6 says it is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age - and then have fallen away - to be restored to repentance, because they themselves are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting Him to open shame. Five descriptions, then a falling away, then an impossibility. One word of the BSB's English is itself a choice: it prints 'because they themselves are crucifying', reading the Greek participle as the reason for the impossibility. The same participle can be read as 'while' they crucify, which makes the impossibility last only as long as the rejection does and so leaves room for a return, whereas the causal reading gives the impossibility more weight. Neither reading is forced by the grammar, and which one a reader prefers usually follows which of the four readings below they already hold. Then verse 7 and verse 8 supply the agricultural image of land that drinks the rain and bears either a useful crop or thorns and thistles. Then verse 9: 'Even though we speak like this, beloved, we are convinced of better things in your case - things that accompany salvation.' Then verse 11: 'We want each of you to show this same diligence to the very end, in order to make your hope sure.'

Hebrews 10 says it again in harder words. 'If we deliberately go on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no further sacrifice for sins remains, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume all adversaries.' Then 10:29 asks how much more severely one deserves to be punished 'who has trampled on the Son of God, profaned the blood of the covenant that sanctified him, and insulted the Spirit of grace'. Note the pronoun problem in that clause: on the natural reading the person sanctified by the blood is the apostate, which is a considerable difficulty for any position that says he was never in. Some readings take the sanctified one to be Christ, which is grammatically possible and is a minority view. The BSB prints 'him' in lower case there, where it capitalises pronouns for Christ elsewhere, so its text takes the natural reading; because the Greek has no capitals, the defenders of the minority reading are reading the same words and not a different text. And then 10:39 closes the passage: 'But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls.'

The first reading is that the people described are genuine believers who genuinely apostatise and are genuinely lost. Its defenders include I. Howard Marshall, whose Kept by the Power of God appeared in 1969, and Scot McKnight, whose formal analysis of the warning passages appeared in the Trinity Journal in 1992 and argued that the five descriptions in 6:4-5 are the writer's own vocabulary for Christians elsewhere in the letter. The case is the plain force of the five descriptions, the sanctified apostate of 10:29, the second person plural address, and the observation that a warning against an impossible outcome is not a warning. What it has to answer is John 10:28-29 and Romans 8:38-39, and the fact that Hebrews 6:9 expresses confidence about these very readers immediately after saying restoration would be impossible.

The second reading is that the people described were never regenerate, and that the five descriptions name real but non-saving participation in the life of a Christian community. John Owen argued this at length in his commentary on Hebrews, and among modern writers Wayne Grudem made the case in a detailed essay on this passage, arguing that each of the five phrases falls short of what the New Testament says of the saved, and that the agricultural image in verses 7 and 8 distinguishes two kinds of land from the start rather than describing land that changes. The case also leans on 1 John 2:19, 'They went out from us, but they did not belong to us', which is the New Testament's own comment on apostasy. What it has to answer is 10:29 with its sanctified apostate, the use of enlightened in 10:32 for the readers themselves (the BSB text there reads 'in the light', with a footnote giving 'Or Remember when you were first enlightened'), and the impression that if the five descriptions can be true of an unsaved person, a believer has no way of telling which side of the line he is on, which is a pastoral cost the position's own defenders acknowledge.

The third reading is that what is lost is reward rather than salvation. It belongs chiefly to the Free Grace school, argued by Zane Hodges and developed by Joseph Dillow, and it reads the fire of 10:27 and the burning of 6:8 as the loss of a believer's work in the manner of 1 Corinthians 3:15, and the inheritance language of Hebrews as an inheritance of rulership rather than of eternal life. The case is that it takes the readers to be Christians throughout, as the letter says they are, without making their salvation precarious. What it has to answer is the vocabulary of 10:27 and 10:39, which speaks of a raging fire that will consume all adversaries and of people who are destroyed, and it should be said plainly that this reading is a minority position with few defenders outside its own circle, though it is a real one held by real interpreters and belongs in an honest list.

The fourth reading is that the warnings are real warnings about a real danger which function as the God-appointed means by which the elect are in fact kept. Thomas Schreiner and Ardel Caneday set this out in The Race Set Before Us in 2001. On this account the question of what would happen if a believer fell away is the wrong question, because the warnings are not predictions but instruments: God preserves his people through their heeding them, as a doctor's warning is a means of a patient's recovery rather than a forecast of his death. The case is that it takes the warnings at full strength without weakening the keeping texts, and that it fits Hebrews 6:9-12 exactly, where warning and confidence and exhortation stand together. What it has to answer is whether it has really answered the question or relocated it, since a reader may still ask what the warning describes, and critics on both sides say that it does not so much resolve the tension as decline to.

A fifth, older reading should be mentioned so you recognise it: that the case in 6:4-6 is hypothetical, a scenario posed for the sake of the argument, so that the writer is saying what would be true if it happened while holding that it cannot. It has been held by various commentators in the Reformed tradition and it is often the popular-level version of the second reading. Its weakness is the one the first reading presses: the warning is delivered to a real congregation for a real purpose, and a purely hypothetical danger is an odd thing to frighten people with.

Now the honest statement. Each of these readings is held by competent people who know the Greek, and each accounts well for part of the passage and strains at another part. This lesson is not going to hand you a verdict on Hebrews 6, because the argument has been running since the third century, when whether the lapsed could be restored was a practical crisis, and by the fourth century Ambrose was answering the Novatians' use of this very passage: he quotes Hebrews 6:4-6 in full at De paenitentia II.2, written around 384, and sets about refuting the rigorist reading of it. What you should be able to do at the end of this section is state all four readings in a form each set of defenders would recognise, and say what each one costs.

The Reformed doctrine of perseverance. Those whom God has effectually called and sanctified can neither totally nor finally fall away from the state of grace, but shall certainly persevere to the end and be eternally saved. The Fifth Head of the Canons of Dort and the seventeenth chapter of the Westminster Confession are the standard statements, and the doctrine is grounded on the unchangeableness of God's decree, the merit and intercession of Christ, the abiding of the Spirit, and the nature of the covenant. Be careful about what it does not say, because the popular version is a caricature of the confessional one. It does not say a believer cannot fall grievously. Dort's Fifth Head says in its fourth article that the converted are not always so moved by God that they cannot in particular actions depart from the leading of grace, and it names David and Peter as the standing examples; the doctrine holds that such falls are real, incur God's displeasure, wound the conscience and forfeit for a time the sense of God's favour, and that God does not permit them to end in final ruin. Its eighth article grounds this not in the believer's strength but in God's undeserved mercy. It does not say that a person who professes faith and abandons it was necessarily saved and is now safe, which is the folk doctrine of once saved always saved that Reformed pastors spend their lives correcting; the confessional doctrine says the elect persevere, not that professors are guaranteed. Its named weakness is that it can only interpret an actual apostasy retrospectively, by concluding that the person was never regenerate, which means the doctrine is unfalsifiable in practice and offers no assurance until the end.

The Arminian position on conditional security. Salvation is kept by continuing faith, and a person who is genuinely united to Christ by faith may cease to believe and be finally lost. The Remonstrants left this open in the fifth of their Five Articles in 1610, saying the question needed further study; by their statement of 1618 and their Confession of 1621 they had concluded that scripture teaches true believers can fall away and perish. John Wesley argued the case in Serious Thoughts upon the Perseverance of the Saints in 1751 and preached A Call to Backsliders on the assumption that a believer may fall and may also be restored. The modern defence is I. Howard Marshall's Kept by the Power of God, whose title is itself an argument: Marshall's thesis is that God's keeping is real and is exercised through faith, which is what 1 Peter 1:5 says, and that the warnings are the means of that keeping rather than decorations on it. On the keeping texts, the Arminian answers that John 10:28 promises that no one will snatch the sheep out of Christ's hand, which is a promise about external powers and says nothing about a sheep that walks away; and that Romans 8:38-39 lists things in creation that cannot separate us, and a person's own apostasy is not among them. Its named weakness is that a salvation which can be lost by unbelief raises the question of how much unbelief is enough, and the tradition has never produced an agreed answer. Many Arminians hold that only deliberate, settled apostasy severs the union, and some, following one reading of Hebrews 6, hold that such apostasy is irreversible, which means that a believer worried about having committed it almost certainly has not.

The Lutheran account, which fits neither box. Lutherans teach that a person can fall from faith and be lost, and Article XII of the Augsburg Confession assumes it in its treatment of repentance. Lutherans also teach that election is unconditional and that the elect cannot perish, which is what the Formula of Concord's eleventh article says. Those two are held together without being harmonised, and the Formula's own advice is not to reason the matter out but to stop where scripture stops. The practical consequence is the distinctive Lutheran move: because neither your election nor your perseverance is something you can inspect, you are directed away from yourself entirely, to the promise attached to the word, to your baptism, to absolution and to the Supper. Luther's counsel to himself in the dark was not to search his heart for evidence but to say that he had been baptised. Its named weakness is the obvious one, that the position holds two claims that look contradictory and openly declines to reconcile them, and the Lutheran answer is that the alternative is to soften one of them and that a doctrine of God's hiddenness is the more honest price. Two consequences of that refusal are worth noticing, because they are where the doctrine actually bites. A Lutheran pastor will not let a person reason backwards from a fall to a verdict about their own election, since the Formula expressly forbids treating election as a fact to be inferred about oneself; and a Lutheran congregation receives someone who has fallen away by absolution rather than by treating them as a fresh convert, because the baptism that was given to them was not undone by their leaving. Both follow directly from locating the whole business outside the believer's own history.

The Roman Catholic framework. Justification, on the Catholic account given in lesson 3, is a real condition of the person which mortal sin destroys, so a Christian in a state of grace can lose it, and the ordinary restoration is the sacrament of penance, which Trent's fourteenth chapter calls a second plank after shipwreck. Final perseverance is treated as a distinct gift, the donum perseverantiae, a term that goes back to Augustine's On the Gift of Perseverance, written around 428 to 429: it is not owed to the justified, it cannot be merited with the certainty proper to other graces, and it is to be prayed for. Trent accordingly teaches in its thirteenth chapter that all should place a most firm hope in God's help while not presuming a certainty about their own end, and its sixteenth canon condemns anyone who claims an absolute and infallible certainty of final perseverance apart from special revelation. Its named weakness is that a system in which grace is losable and final perseverance is not guaranteed gives a serious Catholic something real to be afraid of, and Catholic pastoral writing has had to handle scrupulosity as a recurring problem for exactly this reason. Be exact about what mortal sin is before using the doctrine as a caricature, because the caricature is common in Protestant preaching. The Catechism of the Catholic Church sets three conditions together: the matter must be grave, and the person must act with full knowledge of its gravity and with deliberate consent. Sins that fail any of those three are venial and do not destroy the charity that was infused, and the tradition's judgment is that grave matter combined with genuinely full knowledge and fully deliberate consent is rarer than the phrase suggests to an outsider. So the Catholic account is not that any serious sin puts a believer outside grace until the next confession.

The Eastern Orthodox framework. There is no doctrine of perseverance in the Western sense here, because there is no doctrine of the decree for it to follow from, and the question as Dort and the Remonstrants posed it does not arise. Salvation is described as a path rather than a status, and a person on a path can leave it; the possibility of apostasy is simply assumed, and the church's canonical tradition on receiving back the lapsed, which goes back to the persecutions of the third century, exists because the thing happens. What the tradition emphasises against fear is that repentance is always open while life lasts, that the sacrament of confession exists for precisely this, and that the fathers repeatedly warn against both presumption and despair as twin temptations. Its named weakness, pressed by Protestants, is that it offers the believer no settled ground of confidence about the outcome and seems to make salvation depend on ending well; Orthodox writers reply that this is not a weakness but a refusal to answer a question they think should not be asked, and that hope directed to a person is a firmer thing than certainty derived from a syllogism. Two features of the Eastern account will be unfamiliar to a Western reader and both matter here. There is no division of sins into mortal and venial in the Latin sense, with a defined threshold at which grace is lost and a defined remedy for crossing it; sin is treated throughout as a sickness of the whole person admitting of degrees, and confession is medicine rather than the repair of a legal status. And the church's ancient canons on receiving back those who denied Christ under persecution, which set out long periods of penance before restoration to communion, are evidence that the East took apostasy with complete seriousness and never doubted that the lapsed could return.

Notice first that the two questions come apart. Whether the saved can be lost is a question about what is objectively the case; whether I can know I am saved is a question about grounds of knowledge. You can hold that no believer will ever be lost and still hold that a particular person cannot be sure they are a believer, which is precisely the Reformed position and is why it produced a larger literature on assurance than any other tradition. You can hold that a believer may fall and still teach that a Christian may have a settled present assurance, which is Wesley's position. The alliances of this section are not the alliances of the last one.

The Reformed account. The Westminster Confession's eighteenth chapter is the fullest confessional treatment anyone produced. Its second paragraph says that an infallible assurance is possible in this life, founded on three things: the divine truth of the promises of salvation, the inward evidence of the graces to which those promises are made, and the testimony of the Spirit of adoption witnessing with our spirits that we are children of God. Its third paragraph then says something a modern reader should sit with, that this assurance does not belong to the essence of faith, so that a true believer may wait long and conflict with many difficulties before attaining it. The tradition worked this out in a pattern of reasoning later called the practical syllogism: whoever believes in Christ is saved; the fruits of the Spirit in my life evidence that I believe; therefore I am saved. A variant, the mystical syllogism, reasons from the inward experience of the Spirit's work rather than from outward fruit. Its named weakness is the one its critics have always pressed, that it sends a doubting believer to inspect the very evidence his doubt has made him unable to read, which produces a spiral. It is worth knowing that there is a live scholarly argument about the history here: R. T. Kendall argued in 1979 that Calvin's successors turned assurance into an introspective project Calvin never intended. The direct reply came from Paul Helm in Calvin and the Calvinists in 1982, arguing that Kendall had misread both Calvin and the later divines. Richard Muller has pressed a wider and more damaging objection, which is not chiefly that Kendall misread Calvin but that the question is malformed: Calvin was one of several second-generation codifiers rather than the tradition's single source, so measuring later Reformed theology against him is a methodological error before it is an exegetical one. That dispute is not settled either.

Wesley's account. From his own experience at Aldersgate in May 1738, Wesley taught what he called the witness of the Spirit, and he preached two sermons on it, in 1746 and again in 1767, both working from Romans 8:16: 'The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children'. His distinctive claim is that there are two witnesses and that neither is sufficient alone. The direct witness is the Spirit's own immediate testimony to the believer's heart that he is a child of God, which Wesley insisted is a real perception and not an inference. The indirect witness is our own spirit's conclusion from the fruit of the Spirit visible in the life. Wesley pressed hard against resting on the first alone, which he thought produced enthusiasm and delusion, and against resting on the second alone, which he thought produced a religion of works measured by the self. In his early years he held that no one could be a child of God without this assurance; by the 1760s he had moderated that, allowing that some are saved who do not have it, which is an honest change of mind by a man who had built a movement on the stronger claim. Its named weakness is that a doctrine resting partly on an immediate perception has no external check, and Wesley's own worry about enthusiasm is the standing criticism of it. His way of making room for the person who has no such witness is worth knowing, because it is where the mature Wesley ended up: he distinguished the faith of a servant from the faith of a son, holding that a man who fears God and works righteousness is accepted even while he lacks the assurance that belongs to sonship, and should be told to keep using the means of grace rather than to manufacture a feeling.

The Lutheran account. Lutherans object to both of the above on the same ground: each of them, in different proportions, makes the believer look at himself. The Lutheran answer is that assurance is not a conclusion about your spiritual condition but the reception of a promise addressed to you from outside you. The word preached says Christ died for you. Absolution says your sins are forgiven you. Baptism happened to you and you did not do it. The Supper is given to you, in your mouth, whatever you feel. Luther's own struggles, the Anfechtungen, are part of the tradition's furniture rather than an embarrassment in it, and his standing counsel was not to examine the heart but to flee to the promise and the sacrament. Its named weakness, pressed by the Reformed, is that a doctrine of assurance with no place for self-examination has trouble with the New Testament's own calls to examine yourself, and with 2 Peter 1:10, which tells believers to 'strive to make your calling and election sure'. The Lutheran answer to that verse is that the making sure is done by living in the means of grace rather than by auditing oneself, which is why private confession and absolution survived in Lutheranism when much else did not: the point of it is to hear the forgiveness of your own particular sin spoken aloud by another human voice, because a promise you hear addressed to you is harder to argue with than a conclusion you reached about yourself.

The Catholic position. Trent addressed this directly and its treatment is often misreported, so read it precisely. Chapter 9, headed against the vain confidence of heretics, denies that anyone must believe with the certainty of faith that his own sins are forgiven; canon 13 condemns the claim that such belief is necessary for forgiveness; canon 15 condemns the claim that a justified person is bound to believe he is certainly among the predestined; canon 16 condemns a claimed absolute certainty of final perseverance. What Trent is refusing is a particular thing: the elevation of a judgment about oneself into an article of faith. What it positively teaches is that everyone should place a most firm hope in God's help, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church treats hope as a theological virtue rather than a lesser form of confidence, holding that the signs of conversion in a life give real grounds while denying that any believer may treat his feelings or his works as a verdict. Two further things belong here, because the negative canons are usually quoted without them. The same chapter 9 that forbids the certainty of faith about one's own forgiveness also forbids doubting God's mercy, Christ's merit, or the efficacy of the sacraments, so the person is being redirected rather than left with nothing. And the Catholic tradition has a substantial literature for the believer whose consolation has gone, of which John of the Cross on the dark night is the best known: it reads the loss of felt assurance as a purification God is conducting rather than as a verdict he has passed. Its named weakness, pressed by Protestants for five centuries, is that a person who may not be certain is a person who may be afraid, and that the New Testament writers appear to expect a settled confidence that Trent's formulation makes difficult to have.

The Orthodox position. The East frames assurance as hope in a person rather than certainty about a status, and is more suspicious than any of the others of the question itself. The prayers said before receiving communion in the Orthodox liturgy have the communicant confess himself the first of sinners, in the words of 1 Timothy 1:15 (the BSB has 'of whom I am the worst'; the Greek word is protos, first), and that is not a formality but the posture the tradition thinks appropriate all the way through. Salvation is spoken of in three tenses at once, as something that has happened, is happening and will happen, and a demand for present certainty about the third is treated as a category error. Against despair the tradition sets not a syllogism but the sacraments, the prayers of the church, and the repeated patristic warning that despair is a temptation rather than a form of humility. The tradition's compressed counsel on exactly this point comes from the life of Silouan of Mount Athos, who died in 1938 and left almost nothing in writing: his disciple Sophrony recorded it in the book he wrote about him, and it is given there not as Silouan's own aphorism but as the words he received in answer to his prayer, keep your mind in hell and do not despair. A Western reader hears a contradiction; an Orthodox reader hears an instruction to hold a true estimate of yourself and a true estimate of God's mercy at the same time, and to let neither one cancel the other. Its named weakness is the same as in the previous section and it is real: a believer who wants to know where he stands is told, in effect, that he is asking the wrong question, and that answer is cold comfort at two in the morning.

Which brings us to the pastoral question this whole lesson exists for. What do you say to someone who has sought assurance for twenty years and has never had it? Four things can be said honestly and across the traditions. First, that the lack of assurance is not the same as the lack of salvation, which is not a kindly evasion but the explicit teaching of Westminster 18.3, of Wesley's later position, and of Catholic and Orthodox pastoral practice. Second, that the direction of looking matters: every tradition here has a version of the counsel to look at Christ rather than at your looking, and the Lutheran version of it is the bluntest and often the most useful. Third, that the desire itself is evidence of a kind, since nobody agonises over whether they love a God they do not care about, and this is the one argument that reaches people whom nothing else reaches. Fourth, and this needs saying because the church has too often not said it, that persistent joylessness, self-accusation and the inability to receive good news are symptoms of depression at least as often as they are theological conditions, and a pastor who treats a melancholic's flat affect as a spiritual verdict on her soul is doing damage that doctrine will not repair. Get her a doctor as well as a Bible. Both traditions of care are real and neither substitutes for the other.

This module is finished, so take stock of it honestly. You began it able to read a passage in context and to say what a genre is. You can now do something different, which is to say what the whole Bible teaches on five of the hardest topics in Christian doctrine and to show your working from the texts.

Specifically. You can state the Calvinist and Arminian accounts of election from the passages their own defenders use, and you can add the Lutheran, Catholic and Orthodox accounts so that nobody in the room thinks it is a two-party question. You can explain what middle knowledge is, why the Dominicans opposed it, and why a pope closed the argument in 1607 without deciding it. You can show why union with Christ is the New Testament's own frame rather than a chapter in the middle of the book, work Romans 6 as a whole argument, explain what an ordo salutis is for, and give the Eastern doctrine of deification in its own terms from 2 Peter 1:4 and the fathers rather than as somebody's exotic alternative. You can state the forensic account of justification and Trent's account, each from its own documents, and you can tell a Catholic what his own council actually condemned, which is a courtesy that will surprise him. You can distinguish Sanders from Dunn from Wright, name the main criticisms and the replies, and say what the 1999 Declaration claimed and what it left standing. You can give four readings of Romans 7 and four of Hebrews 6 with their defenders, and say what each costs. You can state five accounts of sanctification and five of perseverance without caricaturing any of them.

Now the part that matters more. You have learned to state these positions, not to settle them. On every question in this module the church remains divided, and this course has deliberately refused to tell you which side wins, because a teacher who manufactures a consensus that does not exist is lying to his students in a way they will discover later, usually at the worst possible moment. You will form convictions, and you should; a person who holds no position on election has not understood the question. But hold them knowing what they cost, knowing what the other side's best argument is, and knowing which of your own tradition's arguments its own scholars have quietly dropped.

There is a test for whether this module has worked, and you can apply it yourself. Take the position you disagree with most in this module and write a page defending it, using its own texts and its own reasoning, and show that page to someone who holds it. If they recognise it, you have the skill this course exists to give. If they wince, you have more reading to do, and you now know exactly where to do it.

One last thing to carry out of the module, and it belongs with the woman at two in the morning from the previous section. Doctrine of this kind is not an indoor sport. Every question in these five lessons arrived in the church because somebody needed an answer: a congregation under persecution wondering whether they could come back, a monk who could not find a gracious God, a mother at a graveside. The reason to argue about it carefully, and to represent your opponents accurately, is that the people who will hear your answer are in that condition, and they deserve better than a summary of the other side written by its enemies. That standard is the whole of what this course has been trying to teach.