Settled Certainty

by Phil Johnson



f our postmodern friends are correct and all certainty is arrogance, wouldn't personal assurance of one's own salvation be just about the ultimate conceit?

Many post-evangelicals avoid that uncomfortable question by backing into some form of universalism—because, you know, the only way it doesn't seem arrogant to be certain I'm saved is if I'm pretty sure everyone is ultimately going to be saved.

Others avoid the issue altogether because, after all, that's a doctrinal conundrum and post-evangelicals aren't really into doctrine.

Of course, the correct answer to the question is succinctly distilled a familiar statement the apostle Paul made in a context where he was encouraging Timothy not to be timid. "I am not ashamed," Paul wrote; "for I know whom I have believed and I am convinced that He is able to guard what I have entrusted to Him until that day" (2 Timothy 1:12).

I love that statement. It is an absolute manifesto of settled certainty—with a note of holy triumph that, frankly, I find contagious. And I hope you do, too.

Certitude. It probably wasn't popular in Paul's time, either. But frankly it's never been more out of vogue than it is today. The fashionable thing today is to question everything. The visible church is overrun with bad preachers and weak-willed people who are convinced that the very epitome of humility is never to state anything with too much conviction.

Everything nowadays is supposed to be carefully qualified with lots of ambiguous expressions and weasel-words like "perhaps," or "possibly," or "It seems to me . . . " or "maybe." Everything (including the gospel itself) gets prefaced with, "I could be wrong, but to the best of my knowledge this seems reasonable—although I know other people see it differently, so I don't want to be dogmatic."

Doubt has been canonized as a virtue and renamed "epistemological humility"—as if doubting what God says could be excused by labeling it "humility."

Personal assurance is an inevitable casualty of that value system.

Paul's statement of assurance is deliberately of the opposite style: "I know," he says, and then he strengthens it even more by a second expression of firm conviction: "I am convinced." He emphatically eliminates every hint of doubt or uncertainty.

Notice: Paul is not the least bit concerned about how that might sound to someone who holds a different opinion. He doesn't preface it with any apology for his "tone." He doesn't soften it in case someone who is more timid or less certain than Paul might think he sounds arrogant. He doesn't qualify it with a lot of self-effacing disclaimers about how he might be wrong because he is, after all, merely human and therefore incapable of fully comprehending everything perfectly. There's nothing like that anywhere in Paul's epistles. Why?

Because Paul really was that certain. And he wanted Timothy to have a the same kind of settled assurance—absolute conviction; a bold heart that refused to waver from the truth.

The further implication is that you and I are supposed to have the same kind of assurance. Certainty is not something to be ashamed of—no matter how loudly the voices of postmodern skepticism squeal.

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