Introducing a Reformed doctrine
The Calvinist doctrine of “perseverance of the saints” (to accentuate the anthropological side) or “preservation of the saints” (to accentuate the theological side) was a theological novelty rooted in Protestantism’s second generation. Colloquially, it has become known as “once saved, always saved.” It emerged as a doctrine with a pastoral aim. It was about assuring individual Christians of their good standing with God as part of the true church, consoling those with the gift of “faith” about their ultimate salvation. More than a version of predestination, it belongs to a theory of double predestination: for every individual, God has predestined either the goodness of salvation or the evil of damnation, such that via sovereign willing, God efficiently and irresistibly causes both, down to the movements of individual human wills among elect and reprobate classes alike (e.g., John Calvin, Institutes, I.18.1–2). Through divine foreordination, the individuals comprising these two, fixed human groups will certainly either suffer damnation or persevere unto salvation. Calvin himself called it God’s “secret plan” where God “freely chooses whom he pleases, rejecting others,” after which Calvin affirms that it has to do with individuals, whose election or reprobation God’s will determines with a “certainty of its effect” (Institutes, III.21.7). The pairing of fixity and certainty is key.
Pastorally, the point was to supply 16th century Reformed parishioners with a feeling of certainty (i.e., “assurance”) about personal salvation. The stimulus was a mode of introspection that had occupied Martin Luther a generation earlier. Fixity can undergird certainty, and a fixity allegedly rooted in God’s own mind is what Calvin’s theology suggested. This was a point of contact between Calvin and Luther’s theologies of assurance: according to Luther, a sense of being “absolutely certain” (certitudo; Sicherheit) is necessary. He had written that “…the Christian must be certain, absolutely certain, that Christ appears before God as a priest for him” (Luther, WA 57.215, emphasis added). As the Wittenberg reformer saw it, the fruit of real faith is an individually tailored assurance or sense of certainty in the here and now.
Contextualizing the Reformed doctrine of “perseverance” as part of a revised ecclesiology
But earlier Protestants like Luther did not hold Calvin’s position on perseverance, nor did pre-modern Christians, nor for that matter do large swaths of contemporary Protestants (if you wish, you can see here a defender of the idea acknowledge its being peculiar to Calvinists; he fudges a distinction between Jesus “saving perfectly” and Jesus as a “perfect savior,” but that’s another matter). Prior to Calvin, the nearest analogy is a conception of double predestination declared heretical at the Council of Orange in 529 C.E. (e.g., see the anathema in the concluding section). However, Calvin and his followers do have something important in common with the first generation of Protestant leaders, namely, a definition of the “true church” as being intrinsically invisible. In a discussion entitled “The True Church with Which as Mother of All the Godly we Must Keep Unity,” Calvin states: “We must thus consider both God’s secret election and his inner call. For he alone ‘knows who are his’ [2 Tim 2:19], and, as Paul says, encloses them under his seal [Eph 1:13], except that they bear his insignia by which they may be distinguished from the reprobate. But because a small and contemptible number are hidden in a huge multitude and a few grains of wheat are covered by a pile of chaff, we must leave to God alone the knowledge of his church, whose foundation is his secret election.” (Calvin, Institutes, IV.1.2; similarly, see the later Westminster Confession of 1646, XXV.1: “The catholic or universal church which is invisible, consists of the whole number of the elect…”).
This ecclesiology stressing invisibility was a largely novel idea of Luther’s, aside from some rough precedent in John Wycliffe (1330–1384), who does not seem to have been an inspiration here for Luther (there is no evidence in Luther’s early writings that he was aware of Wycliffe’s ecclesiology, and Wycliffe’s Tractatus de Ecclesia does not, at any rate, derive the church’s invisibility from an idea of predestination). What is more, the New Testament itself neither defines the term ekklesia in terms of the elect nor does it associate ekklesia with invisibility. The New Testament’s usage maps onto standard Jewish (e.g., in the Septuagint) and wider Hellenistic usage of ekklesia as a tangible, and even officially structured, community. What changed? In the 16th century, the idea that the true church must be an invisible collective of the elect was a way to portray the Catholic Church—and ultimately, any visible ecclesiological institution—as dispensable.
Contrary to the occasional suggestion that Augustine of Hippo thought the church was invisible, Augustine does not propose any essential differentiation between individuals with “interior” grace, on the one hand, and the institutional church, on the other. Nor does his anti-Donatist description of the church as a “mixed body” (corpus mixtum) have to do with a contrast between true Christians and apparent Christians, but rather between Christians with greater and lesser degrees of sin (see Pablo Irizar and Anthony Dupont’s article in the International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 82 [2021]). For Augustine, the one, holy, Catholic, apostolic church is the visible community par excellence that enables the true culmination of individuality through sacramental union with Christ’s visible body. Furthermore, the historian Richard Rex in The Making of Martin Luther demonstrates that Luther, as an Augustinian friar, developed the idea of the invisible church precisely as a warrant for dismissing Augustine’s ecclesiology. Protestant notions of a “true, invisible” church constituted a new, revolutionary ecclesiology.
The epistemological consequences of “invisibility” for visible human beings
What was revolutionary about it? According to Luther and eventually Calvin, the “true church” exists in the mind of God: a transcendent, intangible domain which no given person can or should claim to know. Defining the “true church” as invisible and rejecting the institutional Catholic Church were two sides of the same coin. Luther had come to associate the Catholic Church with demonic forces and the “antichrist” (itself redefined as an institution, rather than a person who denies the Son’s incarnation per 2 John 7). This invisible ecclesiology of the 16th century was a theological and sociological necessity for Protestants, who initially were uncomfortable hearing accusations that they were advancing theological novelties (e.g. sola fide, sola scriptura) and evincing hostility toward historical Christianity. They wished to clarify that, really, the true church is nothing to see, touch, feel, hear, or smell. The real body of Christ is “spiritual,” consisting of the elect known only to God. Since human beings are visible, tangible, finite, social creatures, the true church is, during this life, an unidentifiable mystery.
What does this have to do with perseverance and agnosticism? Calvin would certainly agree with the idea that faith is a gift from God (which on its own is traditional Christian theology). But he would also say that faith, if it is true faith, will of necessity persevere. Why is Calvin committed to this idea of necessity? While accepting Luther’s idea of sola fide, Calvin departed from Luther by advocating a more thoroughly monergistic model of divine agency in soteriology (Lutherans to this day reject “perseverance of the saints”). Calvin espoused a brand of determinism. He was aware that some people do, or at minimum seem, to fall away from faith. And faith is something he took to be inseparable from an elect minority whom God unilaterally identifies and controls. Given Calvin’s philosophical influences, it is unthinkable for him that someone could really have faith and still fall away (i.e., people thus only seem to fall away). Accordingly, about those who fall away, a Calvinist will often insist that such a person’s faith never was real. Instead, it had been a semblance of faith (or perhaps a faith that was real but which God sovereignly retracted?). Why might some have a semblance of faith? Those who fall away may serve as pedagogical warnings to others about divine sovereignty in distributing grace selectively, or about the import of ongoing good works that exhibit real faith’s fruit.
The issue is not predestination versus no predestination, nor is it divine sovereignty versus non-sovereignty. The issue is predestination understood through a strictly monergistic filter (i.e., a particular philosophical conception of agency), which is then applied doubly to those who are “saved” and those who are “reprobate.” Double predestination is a form of determinism: if x happens, it is because God positively willed x, and the involved creatures could not have done otherwise. The two categories of “saved” and “reprobate” were fixed in place in advance (e.g., Canons of Dort, 01.6, 11, which speak of election vs. reprobation). And again, this two-part distinction between elect and reprobate is part of a decree in the mind of God himself, rendering the true church intrinsically invisible to finite creatures.
Two logically consistent paths forward
What does consistent thinking look like in this case? Given Calvin’s monergistic soteriology in combination with the true church’s hiddenness, the issue is that, notwithstanding someone’s status today, individuals cannot possibly know whether their works, whether their faith, will in fact persevere tomorrow, next month, next year, and so forth. In other words, they cannot know whether they are indeed among the elect. In this life, there is no way really to know whether one’s works are truly good or whether one’s faith is truly saving faith as opposed to a semblance of good works or a semblance of faith. The invisibility of criteria for identifying genuine faith corresponds to the invisibility of the true church. On Calvinist terms, one can only really know the answers to such questions postmortem, since this or that individual could always, in the last minute of this life, “fall away.” One’s foreordained task as part of the reprobate might be to supply sobriety to others about the depths of human depravity and God’s absolute, monergistic agency in having elected some and damned others from time immemorial (or if someone is a postlapsarian, then this double determinism occurs after the fall). Just as the true church is invisible, so too are the criteria for definitively identifying true faith in this life. Consistent “five-point” Calvinism requires ecclesiological agnosticism.
The Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968) ostensibly solved the problem of Calvinist agnosticism with a Calvinist universalism, understood not in the pop culture sense of “anything goes,” but rather in the sense that God, specifically through Christ’s atonement, could sovereignly restore all. Barth is uncomfortable with the idea, but writes that theological consistency may push in that direction (Church Dogmatics, IV.3.2). Universalism resolves the issue of how Calvinist teaching on perseverance works against the grain of one’s own capacity to know whether one in fact belongs to the elect. From a Barthian perspective, everyone could ultimately be among the elect through God’s monergistic sovereignty. If one is going to read John 6:44 (“…unless the Father draws [ἕλκω] him”) in line with Calvinist soteriology, what prevents such a reader from doing the same with John 12:32? Here, Jesus himself speaks of his crucifixion, which I trust we can acknowledge is pertinent to salvation in John’s Gospel. And Jesus uses the same term from his earlier teaching in John 6 for “drawing” people: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw [ἕλκω] all men to myself” (12:32; to keep a Johannine focus, consider also 1 John 2:1–2). Or if one turns to Ephesians 1, why restrict Paul’s focus to “us” (i.e., Paul and the Ephesians) as the salvific goal of predestination (Eph 1:5)? After all, in the very same text, Paul writes that part of “the mystery of his [i.e. God’s] will” is “a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in Christ (τα παντα εν τω χριστω), things in heaven and things on earth” (τα επι τοις ουρανοις και τα επι της γης; see Eph 1:9–10).
If one does not take Barth’s universalist route, a consistent “five-point” Calvinist will need to be agnostic not only about the identity of the true church, but also about his or her own status in it. These are the internally coherent options available.
Does the need for either universalism or ecclesiological agnosticism undermine Calvinist theology? Strictly speaking, no, not as a logical consideration. But it is a real conceptual issue to acknowledge. And it illustrates how deeply the intentions of 16th century reformers can diverge from the inherent logic of the new theologies they constructed. Despite “perseverance of the saints” being a pastoral effort by Calvin to supply assurance to believers, a logically consistent, non-universalist application of it precludes assurance.
