Every once in a while I see someone post a historic writing about justification by faith alone and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness that makes me feel like I am being commanded to crawl up a long stone flight of stairs on my knees to kiss a relic when I have reached the top. What is the point of glorying in justification by faith when faith is then defined as requiring extraordinary piety and assurance of salvation is made doubtful? I’m reminded of a conference I attended where a speaker criticized this tendency:

But what kind of faith is sola fide faith? There is a certain quality to this saving faith, and there is the spurious faith and there is the pretentious faith. Then the pulpits want us to begin examining our faith. Then we have to “bring up” our faith. Before you know it, everybody thinks that he or she is not saved. “How can I really and truly be saved?” To find out, come back next week and the preacher will make you feel guilty, by golly. Week after week the people are berated, bullied, and tortured in their consciences on the presupposition that God is as niggardly as the preacher believes Him to be. God only saves with the greatest possible reluctance. When somebody manages to squeak into the kingdom, He snaps His fingers and says, “Shucks! Another one made it. I was hoping that he would be deceived into thinking that he had saving faith when he really didn’t have it.” The whole notion of God is distorted, as if Paul preached a Gospel so full of qualifiers that faith becomes a new work–and outdoes what the most wicked, abominable, self-righteous Pharisee (as our own Reformed fathers viewed the Pharisees) ever taught about works that had to be performed to enter the kingdom of God.

Another speaker:

When you read some books, even some reformed books about assurance, they will say something like this, that anyone can have assurance provided he continues in godliness for a certain space of time. How long? Five minutes good? Does it have to be ten? Does it have to be a year or two of godliness before you can have any assurance? And I began to wonder what do you do with somebody who has struggled against sin, who falls into sin, terrible sin, wants to flee from them, finds himself terribly attracted to them, can a person like that have assurance of salvation or does that wait until much later on after he has already conquered his terrible sins that he is struggling against? But then how do you conquer sin when you have no assurance? How do you battle against sin when you are not sure that God loves you? When you are not really sure that Christ died for you? And when you’re not really sure that you are one of his people, how could you ever fight against sin? What power would you have to fight with if you are not really sure that he has given you his Holy Spirit?

And again:

I’ve be in situations where many times I’ve had occasion to speak to Christian young people, covenant young people who have grown up in evangelical homes, good church kids, well established, well taught and there are a hand full of topics that can get a room full of young kids to go deathly quiet, deathly quiet. And one of them, one of the two, is assurance of salvation. Becau (se we have 350 years of our tradition requiring people to twist in the wind for an appropriate period to time before they can go through a crisis, convulsive experience and say, “I’m saved.” This model has been developed. We take a snippet from the Bible: The Apostle Paul was converted that way. He has a convulsive, Damascus road experience and it is wonderful when that happens. But we have made the Damascus road, convulsive, conversion experience the norm. And all over America you will have somebody come in to a special Sunday evening service, the former Hell’s Angel who has $300 a day crack cocaine, killed three people, scrambled his brains with a little egg whisk, he was on death row and the governor pardoned him and then led him to the Lord and now he is traveling around the country telling people about Jesus. And he is a mess. All right? He is a forgiven mess but he [is a mess]. And all these covenant kids are thinking “Ah man why can’t I have that?”Because your parents were obedient! Your parents brought you up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Your testimony is supposed to be boring. It is! Glory to God for boring testimonies.

In short, if you are a believer, you are supposed to be confident God loves you and to follow him as trustworthy (which includes: faithful to continue to forgive all your sins all the rest of your life until you are perfected in the next one). You are not supposed to be told that you might have the imputed righteousness of Christ if you study enough or flagellate yourself enough or do any other works (!).

I get so far away from this I forget that it really happens. But then I see a quote from a Puritan or Pietist (not that there weren’t good Puritans and Pietists who did better than this) and legalism as grace has been a real problem in the Church.

It can even distort an Evangelist’s message.