One of my friends recently listened to a lecture in a Western Civ course about John Calvin. The professor stated that Calvin did not believe Christians could be assured of their salvation. My friend was sceptical and asked me if I knew about this. I replied I was reasonably certain that Calvin did teach assurance, but I’d look it up for him. (After looking it up I now should have been very certain he taught assurance.)
In The Institutes, Calvin mainly addresses assurance in 3.2. Here are some quotes from that chapter. Brackets are mine except the Scripture references which are Calvin’s editor, John T. McNeill.
3.2.16:
3.2.24: Calvin teaches the basis of our assurance is union with Christ.
3.2.40:
These passages definitely teach assurance, not only that it is possible but a vital part of faith! Perhaps this professor needs some of Calvin’s famous spectacles.
No man is a believer, I say, except him who, leaning upon the assurance of his salvation, confidently triumphs over the devil and death; as we are taught from that masterly summation of Paul: I have confessed that “neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come … [Calvin’s ellipsis] can separate us from the love of God which embraces us in Christ Jesus” [Rom. 8:38–39 p.]. Thus, in the same manner, the apostle does not consider the eyes of our minds well illumined, except as we discern what the hope of the eternal inheritance is to which we have been called [Eph 1:18]. And everywhere he so teaches as to intimate that we cannot otherwise well comprehend the goodness of God unless we gather from it the fruit of great assurance.
3.2.24: Calvin teaches the basis of our assurance is union with Christ.
For because they [the half-papists] cannot defend that rude doubt which has been handed down in the schools [mediaeval scholasticism], they take refuge in another fiction: that they may make an assurance mingled with unbelief. When ever we look upon Christ, they confess that we find full occasion for good hope in him. But because we are always un-worthy of all those benefits which are offered to us in Christ, they would have us waver and hesitate at the sight of our unworthiness. IN brief, they so set conscience between hope and fear that it alternates from one to the other intermittently and by turns….But what kind of confidence will that be, which now and again yields to despair? If, they say, you contemplate Christ, there is sure salvation: if you turn back to yourself, there is sure damnation. Therefore unbelief and good hope must alternately reign in your mind. As if we ought to think of Christ, standing afar off and not dwelling in us! For we await salvation from him not because he appears afar off, but because he makes us, ingrafted into his body, participants not only in all his benefits but also in himself. So I turn this argument of theirs against them: if you contemplate yourself there is sure damnation. But since Christ has been so imparted to you with all his benefits that all this things are made yours, that you are made a member of him, indeed one with him, his righteousness overwhelms your sins; his salvation wipes out your condemnation; with his worthiness he intercedes that your unworthiness may not come before God’s sight. Surely this is so: We ought not to separate Christ from ourselves or ourselves from him. Rather we ought to hold fast bravely with both hands to that fellowship by which he has bound himself to us.
3.2.40:
Not content with trying to undermine firmness of faith in one way alone, they [the Schoolmen] assail it from another quarter. Thus, they say that even though according to our present state of righteousness we can judge concerning our possession of the grace of God, the knowledge of final perseverance remains in suspense. A fine confidence of salvation is left to us, if by moral conjecture we judge that at the present moment we are in grace, but we know not what will become of us tomorrow!
These passages definitely teach assurance, not only that it is possible but a vital part of faith! Perhaps this professor needs some of Calvin’s famous spectacles.
