Karl Keating on OSAS

[Thy Geekdom Come]

I received this in Karl Keating's newsletter a short time ago...found it interesting.

[quote]KARL KEATING'S E-LETTER

November 16, 2004

TOPIC:

CHRISTIANS HAVE NO GUARANTEE OF HEAVEN

Dear Friend of Catholic Answers:

After a parish seminar I spoke with a young man, a Fundamentalist,
who insisted that one can have an absolute assurance of salvation.

"All you need to do is to accept Christ as your personal Lord
and Savior," he said. That acceptance will make you a
"born-again Christian," with heaven guaranteed. Nothing you
later might do, no sin you might commit, would exclude you from
heaven.

I proposed to him a hypothetical situation.

"Let's say your pastor became a born-again Christian at age
fifteen. He now is 75 and for sixty years has lived an exemplary
Christian life. So far as anyone knows, and so far as he himself
knows, he never, in those sixty years, has committed a serious sin.

"Today, while being in full possession of his faculties, he
changes completely. He commits adultery, murders a stranger, robs a
bank, deliberately runs over a cat with his car, shouts obscenities
at passersby, and then commits suicide, cursing God as he dies
unrepentant.

"My question to you," I said to the young man, "is
this: Does your minister go to heaven or hell?"

"To hell, of course."

"How can that be, since he is a born-again Christian?"

"No, he isn't."

"Yes, he is, as I told you at the start."

"No, he can't be born-again."

"Hey, this is my hypothetical! I told you he was a born-again
Christian."

"No born-again Christian would do those things."

"So you mean that he fooled everyone, including himself, for
sixty years? You mean he was mistaken?"

"Of course. There's no other answer."

Then I had a small revelation.

"What you're saying is that you can't tell whether a man really
is a born-again Christian until he's safely dead. It means you can't
tell if you yourself are a real Christian. You might be fooling
yourself, as the minister fooled himself. The conclusion is that you
can't have the absolute assurance you'd like to have.

"In practice, if not in theory, you are perilously close to the
Catholic understanding of salvation.

"The Catholic Church teaches that we can have a moral assurance
of salvation but not an absolute assurance. We can be assured that we
will go to heaven--if we remain in the state of grace. But we can
have no assurance that we will persevere in such a state, much as we
might want to at the moment.

"The Church teaches that since 'God wills the salvation of all
men,' he gives each of us enough grace to be saved. Grace is a gift,
and a gift is not forced upon the recipient. A gift can be accepted
or rejected, and it can be rejected after once being accepted.

"The minister in my hypothetical once accepted grace and, on the
last day of his life, rejected it, losing his salvation. He died
grace-less and therefore disqualified for heaven."

Our discussion went on for a while. I brought up several verses that
I have found useful when talking about the idea of an absolute
assurance of salvation. I particularly like to use a trio of verses
from Paul. (I give them here in the Revised Standard Version Catholic
Edition translation.)

In Romans 5:2 Paul writes that "we rejoice in our hope of
sharing the glory of God"--that is, we rejoice in our hope of
going to heaven. This means salvation is something we hope for.

In Romans 8:24 he says, "For in this hope we are saved. Now hope
that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees?" Hope
concerns things that are possible but not certain, which is why the
saints in heaven no longer have the virtue of hope. They don't need
it. Having God, they already have everything, and there is nothing
left for them to hope for.

In 1 Corinthians 9:27 Paul says, "I pommel my body and subdue
it, lest after preaching to others I myself should be
disqualified." Even the apostle battled earthly temptations lest
he succumb to them and lose heaven.

"Taken together," I said to the young man, "these
verses show that Paul did not teach an absolute assurance of
salvation. Quite the opposite. Who was more a born-again Christian
than he? Which Christians of your acquaintance have been knocked off
their feet while on the road to Damascus?

"If Paul didn't believe in an absolute assurance of salvation,
why should we?"

Until next time,

Karl [/quote]

[daugher-of-Mary]

Nice!

[phatcatholic]

if only refuting OSAS were that easy........

[Lil Red]

yeah, i get the newsletter too...i thought it was pretty cool.