Letters Along the Way E-Book

D. A. Carson

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

A Novel of Letters from a Theologian to a Young Christian When student Tim Journeyman first wrote to family friend Dr. Paul Woodson, he didn't know it would start a fifteen-year mentorship that would shape his life and Christian faith. Within their candid letters are words of real-world wisdom—from a "senior saint" to a "junior saint"—covering various areas of living, from the theological to the everyday.  Written as fictional correspondence between two men at different stages of life and faith, the novel Letters Along the Way provides important, biblical perspectives on topics such as apologetics, science and faith, inerrancy of the Bible, heart versus head faith, prayer, the changing face of evangelicalism, and trends emerging in American culture. Published in partnership with the Gospel Coalition. - Memorable and Engaging Style: Inspired by C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters - Tackles Moral, Biblical, and Cultural Issues: Topics include marriage, pastoral ministry, temptation, repentance, and more - Excellent for Seminary Students and New Believers: Includes a subject index outline to find topics quickly and easily

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“My wife and I read this book together during my first year as D. A. Carson’s teaching assistant and PhD student. We loved it. Reading these fictional letters is almost as personal as if you wrote a challenging theological or practical question to Carson and Woodbridge themselves and then received a thoughtful reply. Now I use this book as a resource for mentoring seminary students.”

Andy Naselli, Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and New Testament, Bethlehem College & Seminary; Elder, Bethlehem Baptist Church

“When I was a relatively young believer beginning to explore a calling to pastoral ministry, my pastor encouraged me to read this book. It has become one of the most formative books for me. I’ve read it and reread it more times than I can count, and am beyond thrilled to see it being relaunched so that a new generation can enjoy its wisdom and insight. In a time sadly lacking in character and statesmanship in the church, I am confident this book will become a huge blessing to many.”

Sam Allberry, Pastor; author, What God Has to Say about Our Bodies

“As a college student, I found this book on the library shelves. It was neither assigned nor recommended, but reading it changed my life. I have found it to be consistently insightful and encouraging throughout the years. Perhaps because it’s presented as a story, with realistic characters experiencing the vicissitudes of life, inevitably the issues of cultural and theological debate have changed even as letter-writing seems like an antiquarian pastime. But the thoughtful vision it presents of the Christian life remains remarkably fresh. Whether you are exploring theology as a college student, new to pastoral ministry, or wrestling with the cultural issues of our day, this book may change your life too.”

Ivan Mesa, Editorial Director, The Gospel Coalition; editor, Before You Lose Your Faith: Deconstructing Doubt in the Church

“I have long considered D. A. Carson and John Woodbridge among the finest evangelical scholars of our generation. Their areas of specialty, of course, differ—Carson has excelled as an expert in New Testament scholarship while Woodbridge has made his life’s work the exposition of church history and Christian thought down through the centuries. This small volume, cast in the form of letters from an older Christian to a younger believer, distills the wisdom of both men in these two vital areas of Christian scholarship, but also captures the essence of sapience that can be found only in what has been described as a ‘long obedience in the same direction.’ I am thrilled that it is being republished afresh for the spiritual and theological undergirding of a new generation of Christians, for the wisdom here is much needed in these troubling times.”

Michael A. G. Haykin, Chair and Professor of Church History, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

Other Gospel Coalition Books

Christ Has Set Us Free: Preaching and Teaching Galatians, edited by D. A. Carson and Jeff Robinson Sr.

Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion, by Rebecca McLaughlin

Everyday Faithfulness: The Beauty of Ordinary Perseverance in a Demanding World, by Glenna Marshall

Faithful Endurance: The Joy of Shepherding People for a Lifetime, edited by Collin Hansen and Jeff Robinson Sr.

15 Things Seminary Couldn’t Teach Me, edited by Collin Hansen and Jeff Robinson

Finding the Right Hills to Die On: The Case for Theological Triage, by Gavin Ortlund

Glory in the Ordinary: Why Your Work in the Home Matters to God, by Courtney Reissig

God’s Design for the Church: A Guide for African Pastors and Ministry Leaders, by Conrad Mbewe

Gospel-Centered Youth Ministry: A Practical Guide, edited by Cameron Cole and Jon Nielson

Growing Together: Taking Mentoring beyond Small Talk and Prayer Requests, by Melissa B. Kruger

Here Is Our God: God’s Revelation of Himself in Scripture, edited by Kathleen B. Nielson and D. A. Carson

His Mission: Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, edited by D. A. Carson and Kathleen B. Nielson

Joyfully Spreading the Word, edited by Kathleen Nielson and Gloria Furman

Mission Affirmed: Recovering the Missionary Motivation of Paul, by Elliot Clark

Missional Motherhood, by Gloria Furman

The New City Catechism: 52 Questions and Answers for Our Hearts and Minds

The New City Catechism Curriculum

The New City Catechism Devotional: God’s Truth for Our Hearts and Minds

The New City Catechism for Kids

The Plurality Principle: How to Build and Maintain a Thriving Church Leadership Team, by Dave Harvey

Praying Together: The Priority and Privilege of Prayer: In Our Homes, Communities, and Churches, by Megan Hill

Pursuing Health in an Anxious Age, by Bob Cutillo

Rediscover Church: Why the Body of Christ Is Essential, by Collin Hansen and Jonathan Leeman

Remember Death, by Matthew McCullough

Resurrection Life in a World of Suffering, edited by D. A. Carson and Kathleen Nielson

Seasons of Waiting: Walking by Faith When Dreams Are Delayed, by Betsy Childs Howard

Word-Filled Women’s Ministry: Loving and Serving the Church, edited by Gloria Furman and Kathleen B. Nielson

Letters Along the Way

From a Senior Saint to a Junior Saint

D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge

Foreword by Mark Dever

Letters Along the Way: From a Senior Saint to a Junior Saint

Copyright © 1993, 2022 by D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge

First published in 1993 as Letters Along the Way: A Novel of the Christian Life

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: Amanda Hudson

Cover image: Shutterstock, Getty Images

First printing 2022

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations marked NIV 1984 are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-7335-4 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-7339-2 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-7336-1 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-7338-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Carson, D. A., author. | Woodbridge, John, 1941– author.

Title: Letters along the way : from a senior saint to a junior saint / D. A. Carson and John Woodbridge ; foreword by Mark Dever.

Description: Second edition. | Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021042584 (print) | LCCN 2021042585 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433573354 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781433573361 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433573385 (mobi) | ISBN 9781433573392 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Evangelicalism. | Christian life. | Imaginary letters.

Classification: LCC BR1640 .C37 2022 (print) | LCC BR1640 (ebook) | DDC 270.8/2—dc23/eng/20211116

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021042584

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021042585

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2022-02-16 09:41:23 AM

This book

is gratefully dedicated to

Kenneth S. Kantzer

“I admit that I worship the God of our fathers, as a follower of the Way.”

the apostle Paul,As quoted in Acts 24:14

Foreword

In 1993, Don Carson gave me a gift. We were in Cambridge at the same time for the space of almost a year, going to the same church, both working (him a lot, me some) at Tyndale House. He was a professor on sabbatical. I was a student working on my doctoral dissertation. Don was generous in giving his time to me.

Tyndale House is near Leckhampton, the graduate housing for Corpus Christi College (my college). As a member of the college, I had spent my first few months in Cambridge in the spring of 1988 living at Leckhampton. My wife and daughter and I lived in the gardener’s cottage, while the college looked for an assistant gardener and my wife and I looked for other accommodations. It was breathtakingly beautiful in the college gardens there that spring. There was a long, winding, Narnia-like path around the edges of the garden, and the playing fields of the college bordered it, where there was more walking to be had.

Cambridge doesn’t flaunt its beauties. None of this would be visible from driving or cycling or walking past. Just high walls, narrow lanes, thick shrubs. But it was there in those gardens, and walking around that playing field, that Don, working at nearby Tyndale House, first told me about this project with his good friend John Woodbridge.

I had met John a couple of times, and had appreciated his work as a historian—a theologically inclined one at that. His Christian character and love for his students at Trinity shone through his interaction with others. So when Don laid out this idea for a book that he and John had, it made perfect sense. And it made perfect sense that these two would have come up with it.

It has to be said that some seminary professors seem more academic than spiritual. I know that’s not a great dichotomy to make, but you know what I mean. Don and John both had good academic chops, so to speak, but were also transparently interested in gospel ministry. They cared pastorally for their students, understood the Bible as God’s word, and viewed their own careers in the academy as gospel missionaries. This book was an extension of that ministry.

Don gave me my copy in July of 1993, and I remember reading it quickly. (Had I already read it in manuscript? I can’t remember.) But I do remember that when I read it, I liked it. I could hear Don in the elder character, the “senior saint” Paul Woodson. And, by deduction, I thought I could tell when it was John Woodbridge. Nevertheless, the hybrid saint of Paul Woodson came across believably, and wisely. Tim Journeyman, the younger student, was a hungry disciple. He sat at Woodson’s feet through means of correspondence.

Before email, letters were perhaps more slowly and therefore more thoughtfully composed. They certainly took more time and money to create and then to reach their intended recipient. Card or paper selected. Envelope found. Letter written in sufficiently good penmanship to be legible. Stamp acquired. Address verified and written down. Journey to the mailbox or post office. Deed is done. Should be received in a few days or a couple of weeks.

This slower pace encouraged more reflection in writing and responding to letters. There was also a kind of intimacy that exceeds all but the most exceptional emails. Someone had taken time on this physical object, to craft it uniquely for me, and then had gone to some trouble to get it to me. Anyway, Don and John had chosen a natural medium for instruction—the letter.

In the letters, a span of a decade and a half is covered, and instruction is given in almost every area of Christian living and ministry. So much careful instruction! About how you phrase the gospel invitation. About the history of Protestant witness in France (thanks, John!). About a young Christian’s confusion about how doctrine is important—and how it isn’t.

Through these letters we get to follow a young student becoming a Christian in the second half of college. We follow him through an early career in New York City, then deciding to go into ministry, training for it, and beginning it. Along the way, comment is given on theologians, both historical and contemporary, and the books they produce. Speaking of books, the senior saint even dispenses wisdom on building a personal library.

You can tell Don Carson and John Woodbridge had a fun time thinking up and planning this book. They may have even enjoyed writing it. They certainly succeed in giving us teaching in an easily digestible form. If you’ve wondered how to grow as a young Christian, how to consider whether you should go into pastoral ministry, how you should navigate work and faith issues, how you should navigate formal theological studies, or how you should begin your pastoral ministry, this book is for you. In reading it, you will begin to feel like Paul Woodson is real, and really is your old friend. When you leave him—or he leaves you—at the end of the story, you may well feel it.

Paul Woodson is much more real than the word fiction suggests. The wisdom of two senior saints is here summarized for us all.

I was benefited by reading this book. Though it was error-correcting like medicine, it tasted much better, more like a full, even enticing meal. I both pray and guess that this will be your experience reading it as well.

Take up and read. And profit.

Mark Dever

Capitol Hill Baptist Church

Washington, DC

April 6, 2020

Preface to the Second Edition

At the beginning of the 1990s, the two of us—Don Carson and John Woodbridge—were chatting away about books that had shaped us, or that we had at least admired. Inevitably the discussion turned to C. S. Lewis, and soon enough one of us mentioned The Screwtape Letters. Ostensibly they were letters from a senior devil by the name of Screwtape, to a junior devil called Wormwood. Readers cannot help but admire Lewis’s creative verve, his sketching in of what the biblical world looks like from the devil’s perspective, the satirical attacks on Christian hypocrisy, the insight into Christ seen through the eyes of “our Father Below,” and the depiction of God as “the Enemy.” And for those with eyes to see, the book is a treasure trove of insight into the nature of temptation and sin, and how to fight them. As we chatted together, one of us remarked how much fun it would have been to write a book like that. The other one (and neither of us can remember which it was) replied rather lightly, “We should write a book of letters purporting to be from a senior saint to a junior saint.” Chuckling away, we readily acknowledged that we would not be as creative or as humorous as Lewis, let alone as insightful, but at least we could claim, formally speaking, to be on God’s side, not the devil’s.

And so the idea was born. We started meeting every Tuesday morning at six o’clock for breakfast. Over the course of much of a year, we fleshed out the characters of the two characters, and enough of their personal histories to make them plausible. Not surprisingly, we named the senior Christian Paul, and the junior Christian Timothy. Shamelessly, Timothy became Tim Journeyman, and Paul became Paul Woodson. (Of course, he might have become Paul Carbridge, but we liked Woodson better.) Then we sketched in the topics we wanted to cover, and slowly filled in the focus of each of almost fifty letters, making sure we correlated their substance with current events that ran from the date of the first letter, May 8, 1978, to the date of the last one, Feb 10, 1992. We divided up the letters, each of us agreeing to draft about half of them. Over the next year, each of us wrote on his own. At the end of that time each of us read the other’s work, and suggested improvements. One of us took on the responsibility of imposing a certain editorial uniformity.

And so Letters Along the Way was born. We then made two decisions whose wisdom we still debate today. First, we wrote the original preface as if it were part of the fictive structure. In other words, we presented ourselves as editors of the original correspondence between Tim and Paul, tidying up their missives and preparing them for publication. The “preface” became part of the story. That led to our second decision. Not wanting to give the impression that our Paul and Tim were real people, we decided to come clean in our subtitle: Letters Along the Way was complemented by A Novel of the Christian Life. With its customary courtesy and professionalism, Crossway published the book in 1993, with a quietly evocative cover.

In this new release, available in print, ebook, and audio, the main text is unchanged. You can still read the old “preface,” which sets the stage for the letters, but this new preface enables the authors to escape from the narrative world and confess our guilt as authors. That also accounts for the new subtitle. Now that the genre of the book—it is, after all, a novel—is made clear by this new preface, we have dropped A Novel of the Christian Life in favor of From a Senior Saint to a Junior Saint, with obvious allusion to the influence of C. S. Lewis.

We hope the book will appeal to three kinds of readers. The first will enjoy it because it is a story, a spiritual “coming of age” book chronicling a young Christian as he works through challenges of various kinds and grows to stable maturity, all under the tutelage of a wise mentor. The second may enjoy it because it opens up some windows into the recent past, the well-nigh decade and a half, 1978–92. To today’s readers, who live in the age of Facebook, Instagram, Zoom conferencing, and Trump, it takes conscious effort to understand a world without any of them—a world in which, nevertheless, many of the challenges its inhabitants faced are perennial and therefore just like ours. In other words, this story, located a mere thirty or forty years ago, may be fiction to be enjoyed, but it is located in a setting we should not forget, for, as has often been said, those who forget their history are destined to repeat its mistakes. And finally, some readers may latch on to some of the pastoral and theological lessons that Tim is learning, wanting to learn them, too.

As always, it is a pleasure to work with the professionals at Crossway.

Soli Deo gloria.

D. A. Carson

John D. Woodbridge

Preface to the First Edition

In mid-1991 a former student of ours at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Timothy Journeyman, approached one of us to solicit advice about the wisdom of publishing a rather remarkable series of letters. These had been written to him over the past thirteen or fourteen years, covering the span from Timothy’s conversion when he was a junior at Princeton, through further study and employment, to seminary training and the first years of pastoral ministry. As a pastor, Timothy could see that these letters contained not only a great deal of distilled wisdom that had helped him mature in his Christian faith, but also a fair bit of useful comment on the changing face of evangelicalism.

The writer of these letters is Dr. Paul Woodson, then Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology here at Trinity. Naturally enough, Timothy approached Prof. Woodson about publishing them. Prof. Woodson did not think they were worth it, and in any case was loath to release time at his age from his more serious research, a multivolume treatment of Calvin’s doctrine of God. Still, he had no objection to Timothy seeing the letters through the press, with or without collaboration. That was why Timothy approached one of us for counsel. Since we have worked together on projects before, we decided to collaborate once again, edit the letters here and there, check facts, and generally prepare them for the press. We asked Timothy to reconstruct, as well as he could, the situation or correspondence that called forth each letter. Timothy’s notes we have greatly reduced, leaving only enough material to enhance the reader’s ability to appreciate the letters themselves. When we told him what we were doing, Dr. Woodson himself, we might add, seemed to be amused, but not displeased.

We should perhaps explain two or three of our editorial decisions. Not all the letters that Dr. Woodson wrote to Timothy Journeyman during this period have been included, but only those that deal with spiritual, moral, biblical, or theological issues, or those that comment on the changing scene. Most pleasantries have been edited out. Where such deletions have affected the flow of the letter, we have noted them. In 1978 the letters were written by hand, with a fountain pen, and emphasis was achieved by underlining. Six years later, Dr. Woodson’s letters were run off a computer printer, complete with italics. In 1978 Dr. Woodson used the male pronoun and adjective generically; gradually he changed his style to “gender-neutral” expressions or to complex expressions such as “he or she.” Such distinctions we have tried to preserve in our editing because they provide a subtle feel for the changes the last decade or so has witnessed.

The Rev. Timothy Journeyman joins us in wishing that these letters will prove enlightening, informative, and challenging to a wide circle of readers never envisaged when Woodson, hearing that Journeyman’s father had died and that Journeyman himself had become a Christian in the wake of that tragedy, first picked up his fountain pen to write them.

The Editors

1

How did this lengthy correspondence with Dr. Paul Woodson begin in the first place? I must confess that I dashed off my first letter to Dr. Woodson not really knowing much about him. I was simply paying a courtesy to one of my dad’s friends from college days. It happened something like this.

In April of 1978, my junior year at Princeton was rushing madly to a frenzied conclusion. And what an eventful year it had been. My father had passed away in the fall. I did not even have a chance to say good-bye to him because I was in Princeton when he suffered his fatal heart attack at work in New York City. I loved him dearly and wished he had not driven himself so hard. But he was determined to provide a “good life” for his family. I would have preferred that he had spent more time with us even if that had meant a lower standard of living.

My mother did not soon get over the trauma of Dad’s passing. And neither did any of us children. Sometimes when I dreamed, I found myself talking to my dad. I wished these dreams would never end. They always did.

Then again, Sarah, also a junior at Princeton who I had thought was the “love of my life,” told me that she just wanted to be my friend. I knew immediately what she was really saying. It turned out that she was quite taken by a fellow on the basketball team. I played intramurals but was certainly not in this guy’s league. I tried to say to myself, “So be it. This is Sarah’s loss.” But my bold attempt at self-deception did not actually assuage my heartache.

At least my grades held up through these traumas. I greatly enjoyed my history program at Princeton. The history of science was my personal forte. I wanted to write my senior paper on the reception of Darwinism at Princeton. Other people must have thought I was doing at least fairly well because the history department did not take my scholarship away from me.

The best thing that happened to me occurred in the early spring. One of my friends from the Princeton Evangelical Fellowship invited me to hear a speaker address the group about why Christianity is “true.” As a kid I had gone to Sunday school, but by high school days, religion didn’t mean much to me. I was working on my studies and preparing for the SATs so I could get into an Ivy League school. On weekends I partied with my friends, and I was not really interested in going to this meeting.

After trying to figure out an excuse, I finally yielded to my friend’s polite insistence. The speaker was actually quite intelligent and very humorous. It was amazing. I heard the “gospel” (as some of the students in the group called it). That evening my friend asked me if I wanted to trust Christ as my Savior and Lord. Without fully understanding what this was all about, I did do that. Somehow I understood that Jesus had died on the cross for my sins; it did not take much to convince me that I was a “sinner.” I sensed that I had done things that really were not ethical and good; even my “pagan” conscience had not been entirely seared. Without trying to be melodramatic, I must say that I had a sense of joy that evening after I committed my way to Christ.

One day early in May I decided to write a letter to Dr. Paul Woodson. He and my dad had been close friends at Princeton in those antediluvian years which, I am told, existed before I was born. My dad had told me that he had always admired Paul but thought he was a little too “religious.” Paul had tried to tell Dad about Christ. Dad indicated to me that in college days he really did not want to hear anything about “religion.” Be that as it may, I do remember that when I was a kid, our family visited the Woodson home. Apparently Dr. Woodson’s faith in Christ had not created a barrier between the two men. My memories of Dr. Woodson were really vague, however, when I wrote to him.

He was teaching at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois, when I dashed off a note to inform him of my father’s death. I also mentioned that I had become a believer in Christ. To my amazement Dr. Woodson, in what was probably return mail, sent me the following letter.

Dear Tim,

Thank you for your good letter. Yes, I do remember you, but I must confess that the way your letter reads makes me believe that you have matured greatly since the last time we met. Then you were a small boy with a twinkle of mischief in your eyes. When you visited us with your parents, you scampered around our home quite full of yourself. Your mom and dad were so proud of you, and rightly so. I remember as if it were yesterday your dad saying to me that he hoped you would go to college, meet a young woman as wonderful as your mom, and then advance up the corporate ladder as he did. He wanted the very best for you.

And now the little boy has become a young man. How time flies! Your dad would be very proud knowing that you are a junior at old Nassau—and on a scholarship to boot. It pains me greatly that he is gone. But my personal loss obviously does not match that of yourself and your family.

I am very pleased that you took it upon yourself to write me even though we have not seen each other for years. I counted your dad one of my best friends when we were together at Princeton. Although we did not keep in touch as closely as we should have after college, I always cared for him. That his son would write to me is a genuine personal delight.

It is especially heartwarming to read that you have recently come to faith in Christ. Your dad, for one reason or another, never made such a commitment. He was very upright, one of the most honest men I have ever known. But he just could not see his way clear to become a Christian. He used to kid me about being too “religious,” but he did so in a playful way, not in any malicious sense. That he told you I was a believer and that you might want to contact me sometime may mean that he was more open to the gospel in later life than we might surmise. Perhaps you could fill me in about any discussions you had with him about Christ. Did he seem to understand the gospel? I would love to know about this. He meant so much to me.

You asked me if I could recommend any books on growing in the Christian life. Christians in North America have remarkable access to an abundance of valuable materials about Christian spirituality. But realizing that you are a very busy student, I suggest only three books for you. The first is C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, a classic in its genre. A second is John Stott’s Basic Christianity. A third is F. F. Bruce’s The New Testament Documents—Are They Reliable? Should you read these books, might you be so kind as to give me your impressions of them? I would be interested in your reflections.

I should tell you that I am a bibliophile valiantly striving not to inundate you with titles. Because you and I have had no contact with each other since you have become an adult, I do not know what your interest level might be. Thus the shortness of the list.

In any case, whether you read these books or not, do write again. I am so pleased that you took the initiative to reestablish contact with a family friend. A few lines in your letter remind me of what your dad would say. Let’s continue to keep in contact.

Again, thank you for your kind letter.

Cordially,

Paul Woodson

2

Although the reading list Dr. Woodson gave me proved very helpful (its brevity was a boon), my comments on each book were unremarkable. So, too, were Dr. Woodson’s letters back to me.

In my last year at Princeton, however, I found myself in what I thought then to be the most surprising quandary. Here I was, several months old as a Christian, but instead of feeling holier, I was beginning to feel more sinful. The more I learned of the Christian way, the more I discovered I could not live it. Far from easing my guilt, my fledgling faith was increasing it—and I didn’t like it one bit.

Before long I wondered if I was really a Christian at all. How could a true Christian be so burdened with lust, envy, malice—sins I hadn’t thought much about before? I wrote to Dr. Woodson just after Thanksgiving and frankly told him what I was going through. His letter was a wonderful Christmas present.

At the same time, his response marked a transition in his communication with me. In some ways, Prof. Woodson belongs to the nineteenth century, when letters were not only personal but long and reflective. I doubt if many Christian leaders at the end of the twentieth century would take the time to answer a young Christian’s questions so fully.

December 15, 1978

Dear Tim,

It is almost inexcusable that I have delayed three weeks in replying to your letter. It caught me near the end of term, when papers and examinations completely fill the horizon of seminary professors. I thought of dashing off a quick note, but the candor with which you described your anguish forbade me from writing with glib brevity.

Unfortunately, by delaying until I could write with more balance and thought, I have undoubtedly contributed to your sense of dislocation. I apologize and will try to do better next time.

Before I set out some biblical truths that bear on what you are going through, I must say that your experience is by no means unique. It is very common for new converts to Christ to pass through a stage of shame and guilt. Intuitively, we can see why this is so. Before you began to think seriously about Jesus Christ and his claims, not to mention his death and his resurrection, you probably lived your life with only those minimal ideas of right and wrong you had absorbed from your family and friends.

On becoming a Christian, all of that changed. Prayerlessness would not have made you feel guilty before; now it does. Resentment at some slight, real or imagined, never troubled you before; indeed, you may have nurtured it to safeguard your sense of moral superiority! Now you are appalled that such self-serving behavior is so deeply rooted in your personality. Doubtless you were already mature enough that you would never have wanted (at least in times of sober reflection!) to hurt a woman, but prolonged pandering to secret lust never struck you as evil—nor did barracks-room jokes or overt flirtation. Now you find you are far more chained to lust than you could have imagined. Worst of all, you are finding how impossibly difficult it is for poor sinners, like you and me, to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

But in one sense, this feeling that you are awash in guilt is a good sign. It means that you are taking sin seriously, and that is one of the marks of a true believer. I believe it was the Puritan theologian John Owen who wrote, “He that hath slight thoughts of sin never had great thoughts of God.”1 Of course, if your consciousness of sin does not lead to a deeper awareness of the grace and power and love of God, it achieves little but a kind of repression that may keep you from some public offenses while churning you up inside. But rightly understood and handled, what you are facing can become a stepping stone to a deeper knowledge of God.

What is at issue is how you should apply to your own life what Christians have called the doctrine of assurance. Since you are studying history, perhaps the best introduction to this doctrine would be a survey of some historical turning points.

At the time of the Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church, at least at the popular level, taught that it was a mortal sin for a person to claim he was sure he was saved. After all, the church argued, he will sin again; he might even sin seriously. That is why he has to keep going to confession and to Mass; the sacrament of the Mass was widely understood to be a further sacrifice of Jesus, a bloodless sacrifice, that could be applied to the lives of those who had confessed their sins. Put crudely, to the problem of continuing sin the church had a ready answer—a repeated sacrifice that atoned for the guilt that had accumulated since the Christian’s previous attendance at Mass. But suppose you died after committing some heinous sin, but before you had the opportunity of dealing with it in the confessional and at Mass? Suppose the sin was not merely “venial”—something that could be paid off in the fires of purgatory—but “mortal”— something that threatened the soul with eternal ruin. From this perspective, to claim assurance of salvation sounded desperately presumptuous.

But with the insistence of Martin Luther and others that we are “justified”—that is, acquitted before the bar of God’s justice, declared not guilty and received by God as entirely just—by God’s grace, grace that is appropriated by faith in Jesus Christ and his unique sacrifice on our behalf, the place of assurance changed. Having died once, Christ dies no more (Heb. 10:10–14). The Reformers could not accept the Catholic view of the Mass. If a Christian sins, the sin is dealt with, they said, not by looking to a new sacrifice, but by confessing our sins to God and seeking his pardon on the basis of the atonement Jesus has already made for us. “If we confess our sins, [God] is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). (Incidentally, Tim, I am quoting from the NIV, the New International Version, just published. I read through the NIV New Testament when it came out a few years ago and resolved then that I would switch to the NIV when the whole Bible became available. It still feels very strange to me, but I am convinced we must use twentieth-century language to win twentieth-century people. I do not know what Bible you are using, but I do urge you to buy a modern translation.)

So for Luther and most of the other Reformers (Calvin did not go quite so far), assurance of salvation could never be based on whether or not you have just been to Mass, but it is an essential part of living faith in Jesus Christ. In other words, if you really do trust Jesus, if you really do believe in him, your assurance is already bound up with such faith. If you lack assurance that God has really saved you, it is because your faith in Jesus the Son of God is itself deficient. Only Christ, Christ crucified and risen and ascended to heaven, can save you; you receive his salvation by faith, and thus your assurance is as strong as your faith.

So I suppose that if the Reformers were alive today, they would say to you, Tim, that if you doubt you really are a Christian, you must check the foundations again. Do you really trust in Jesus? Does he not promise eternal life to all who hear his word and believe in the one who sent him (John 5:24)? When you first trusted Christ, was it not clear to you that the ground of God’s acceptance of you was Jesus’s death on your behalf? Wasn’t the assurance you then enjoyed based on what God had done in Christ Jesus on your behalf, and not on how holy or morally fit you felt at the time? So why should it be any different now? You began to walk your Christian life by faith; continue to walk by faith. No matter how guilty you may feel, your acceptance with God turns not on how you feel or how good you’ve been today, but on Jesus Christ and his powerful “cross-work” (as some early English Protestants called it) for you.

But by the time the Reformation reached the shores of England, this view of assurance, mediated through William Perkins, was significantly modified. Perkins and others noted with alarm how on the Continent the Reformation sometimes swept through entire regions without transforming people morally. Whole cantons could switch sides. People called themselves Lutherans, or said they now belonged to the “Reformed” church, and professed to espouse justification through faith without it making the slightest difference to their behavior. Of course, there were many wonderful conversions that thoroughly changed people. Even so, the more disappointing results were so common that many Christian thinkers were disturbed. This undeniable reality, combined with his reading of 1 John, convinced Perkins that Christian assurance should not be so tightly tied to profession of saving faith. After all, the apostle John, writing to Christians, says, “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life” (1 John 5:13). John, then, clearly thinks it possible for Christians (those “who believe in the name of the Son of God”) to need some grounds of assurance spelled out for them. Their assurance is not simply a component of their faith, or John would not have needed to write “these things.”

And what are they? The “these things” John mentioned can be enumerated. We know we have eternal life, John says, if we obey God’s word (1 John 2:5–6, 29), if we love the Christian brothers (3:14, 19–20), if we confess certain truths about Jesus (2:22–23; 4:1–6)—if, in short, we have an “anointing” from the Holy Spirit (2:20, 26–27). I write “these things,” John says, so that you Christians may know that you have eternal life.

Such assurance, then, is based on observable changes in our behavior; it is not simply an entailment of our faith. But how can these two strands of assurance be reconciled?

The answer, of course, is that just as the causes of doubt are varied, so are the biblical antidotes. If someone who professes faith in Jesus is having doubts because he cannot quite believe he is good enough for salvation or because he is not certain that Christ’s sufferings on the cross can atone for a pattern of life still painfully stained with sin, then Luther’s approach is essential. We can never win God’s favor ourselves. Apart from the Lord’s mercies we shall all be consumed. And “if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:1–2).

That is the only ground you will ever have for access into God’s presence. If you lose sight of this truth, it is your faith that is weakening; and as your faith weakens, your assurance evaporates. Your faith, in this instance, is weakening because you are losing sight of that on which it rests, that which it trusts. A Christian’s faith is powerful, not because it is intrinsically strong, but because its object is reliable—Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ crucified. So we may call Jesus and all he has done for us the objective ground of Christian assurance.

I guess, Tim, I am making three points. First, your experience is a common one for new Christians. Second, your wrestling with sin is not all bad—it is much, much better than not wrestling with it. The fact that you are concerned to fight is part of the subjective grounds that God himself is working in you by his Spirit. And third, what you must do, what all Christians must do is return again and again to the cross of Christ. That is the only objective ground for forgiveness that will remove our real guilt and therefore ease the pain of our guilt feelings. That is what we poor sinners need, and not least Christian sinners who discover with gratitude and relief that “if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just [not sentimental and wishy-washy, but faithful and just—because he keeps his promises to his own children whom he bought at the cost of his Son!] and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

If I write any more, you’ll wish I had taken up my pen while I was still in the rush of term papers.

Warmly yours in Christ Jesus,

Paul Woodson

1The Works of John Owen, vol. 14, ed. Thomas Russell (London, 1826), 88.

3

Although my immediate response to Dr. Woodson’s letter was immense relief, it did not last long. For a while my struggles seemed to get worse. I wondered what I would feel like in five years or in ten years. I had already met some people who assured me that I was simply going through a religious stage, a “born-again” phase. I’d get over it, they said; after all, one told me, he was an ex-Christian himself.

Probably none of this would have bothered me so much if I had not been wrestling with guilt at the same time. I could not see far into the future, but I could see far enough to be troubled. I did not think I was any stronger than my fellow student who had abandoned the faith. If God was keeping me, why was I struggling? If I was responsible to keep myself, how could my prospects be other than bleak?

In the first week of January I confided some of my troubled thoughts in a letter to Dr. Woodson. Strangely enough, although his reply was prompt, I had escaped that somber phase I was going through somewhat, and I doubt if I really grasped the wisdom of what he said. It was years later when I was reading through his letters again that the sane balance in his words struck me most forcefully. But I record them here, for this is when he wrote them to me.

January 12, 1979

Dear Tim,

You have no idea how much I appreciate the candor with which you write. At the risk of sounding like a man no longer young, I think I should tell you that I do not find many young men and women these days who actually wrestle and struggle with these kinds of questions. I am always encouraged to find serious Christians, those who want to think and read and understand, Christians who want to be holy and grow in the knowledge of God and of the marvelous redemption he has provided.

When I wrote my last letter to you, I thought it had grown a little long. With your reply in hand, I now wonder if it was long enough! Because what I am now writing will build on what I said then, you might remind yourself of the distinction I made between subjective grounds of assurance before God and objective grounds of assurance. Above all, meditate on the Scriptures I cited.

If I understand you correctly, your present wrestling prompts you to wonder if you can really hang on to your Christian faith. Let’s make this personal. Suppose you claim to be a Christian, walk with Christ and with Christians for a few years, and then gradually drift off into religious indifference. Let’s say you have an affair or start cheating on your income tax. Then, vaguely troubled, you come to me and say, “Paul, I have to confess I have lost the assurance of my salvation.” What should I say to you at that point?

Assuming I have been following you and know how you are living, I would still want to say that the only basis for being accepted by God is the person and work of Jesus Christ; the objective basis does not change. But at the same time I would tell you that you do not have the right to assurance before God if you habitually live in ways he condemns. Then I would take you through the sorts of verses in 1 John that I have already quoted: Believers have the right to assurance if they see that their lives are being transformed, but not otherwise. We may call such transformation the subjective ground of Christian assurance.

Indeed, there are still other approaches to assurance in the Bible, but these two will do for the moment. Which applies to you?

You need to be very careful at this point, and so does any Christian counselor or advisor (myself included!) who dares to tell you what to do. Just as a faulty diagnosis in medicine can issue in a catastrophically wrong prescription, so can a faulty diagnosis in the spiritual arena. For example, in the second scenario I gave, if the person increasingly playing around in sin were simply told to trust Christ and his cross-work, he would be confirmed in his sin; sin would have no bearing on whether he ought to enjoy assurance before God. On the other hand, toward the end of the Puritan period there were lots of rather sad examples of people who applied the lessons of 1 John to themselves so stringently and repeatedly that they could not bring themselves to believe that they had actually truly believed. Perhaps, they told themselves, their faith was spurious since so many sins still seemed to cling to them. They thus appealed to the subjective ground of assurance so ruthlessly that they lost any joy in their salvation; they lost sight of the objective ground of salvation.

So what are you telling me? If I read you rightly, you are far from saying that you do not care for God and his word and his way. Rather you are saying that, since becoming a Christian, you have become more and more aware of the sin in your life, and you are discouraged by it. But what discourages you, I see as a sign of life—not the sin itself, but the fact that you are discouraged by it. If you professed faith in Christ and it did not make any difference to your values, personal ethics, and goals, I would begin to wonder if your profession of faith was spurious (there are certainly instances of spurious faith in the Bible—for instance, John 2:23–25; 8:31ff.).

But if you have come to trust Christ, then growth in him is always attended by deepening realization that you are not as good as you once thought you were, that the human heart is frighteningly deceptive and capable of astonishing depths of selfishness and evil. As you discover these things about yourself, the objective ground of your assurance must always remain unfalteringly the same: “If anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One” (1 John 2:1). Let your confidence rest fully in that simple and profound truth.

What you will discover with time is that although you are not as holy as you would like to be or as blameless as you should be, by God’s grace you are not what you were. You look back and regret things you have said and thought and done as a Christian; you are embarrassed perhaps by the things you failed to think and say and do. But you also look back and testify with gratitude that because of the grace of God in your life, you are not what you were. And thus, unobtrusively, the subjective grounds of assurance also lend their quiet support.

I must say something about another facet to this question of assurance. “Once saved, always saved”—if you have not yet heard the slogan, doubtless you will someday. It shares the fate of most slogans—it articulates truth and is in danger of distorting it. Christians have long been divided over it. But if I understand the Bible on this topic, there is an important truth in the slogan that must be preserved. Read, for instance, the unbroken chain in Paul’s reasoning in Romans 8:29–30. Carefully think your way through John 6:37–40. There Jesus says that his God-given task is to preserve all those whom the Father gives to him. The Father’s will, he says, is that he should lose none of those the Father gives him, but that he should raise them up on the last day. In other words, if Jesus were to lose one of those the Father had given him, it would be because he is either unable or unwilling to perform the will of his Father, and that is unthinkable (see John 8:29). Jesus’s “sheep” hear his voice, and they follow him. He gives them eternal life, and they shall never perish; neither can anyone take them out of his hand (John 10:27–28). “Once saved, always saved”—not because we are so reliable, but because Jesus is so faithful.

But that does not mean that everyone who professes to be a believer truly is one. It does not mean that everyone who, let us say, makes a profession of faith at an evangelistic rally has necessarily become a Christian. Jesus himself could distinguish between genuine and spurious belief (John 2:23–25). It is quite possible for someone to believe in Jesus (at least in some sense), join the church, and rise to positions of influence and prominence, without ever having truly trusted in Jesus. I do not know what else to make of another passage in John’s first letter. Writing of some former church members who had now publicly gone over to the side of heresy, he says, “They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us” (1 John 2:19).

The assumption John makes, then, is that the genuine believers will persevere in the Christian way. That is the same assumption other New Testament writers make. For instance, the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews insists, “We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly till the end the confidence we had at first” (Heb. 3:14). Jesus warned that only those who stand firm to the end will be saved (Matt. 24:12–13). He told the people of his day, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples” (John 8:31)—just as John writes in his second letter, “Anyone who runs ahead and does not continue in the teaching of Christ does not have God; whoever continues in the teaching has both the Father and the Son” (2 John 9).

Now if I try to put together these sorts of passages with those that promise Jesus will never let go of those the Father gives him, I am left with a picture something like this: Jesus never lets go of his own, and, from the purely human side, the evidence that this is so is found in Christians who persevere to the end. That does not mean that such Christians never falter, never succumb to appalling acts of rebellion. Both Scripture and experience reveal how fickle all of us can be. It does mean that in the long haul the genuineness of my faith, the preserving power of Jesus, and my own perseverance in the Christian way stand or fall together.

But if I simply drift off into total disinterest, year in, year out, my perseverance is called into question. Since Jesus’s keeping power over all those the Father gives him cannot (for the believer) be called into question, then the genuineness of my initial profession of faith must be. But if I do persevere, it is not my perseverance that is keeping me. If I have to rely on my reliability, I am in big trouble! As responsible as I am to persevere, I soon have to recognize, with Paul, that my perseverance is nothing less than God working in me both to will and to do his good pleasure. Indeed, from Paul’s perspective the assurance that God continues to work in his own people becomes an incentive to our own perseverance (Phil. 2:12–13).

The relevance of this to what I have said about assurance should now be clear. As long as you are trusting Christ, however falteringly, I have few fears for you. Your trust will work out in terms of growing understanding and obedience and perseverance, however challenging the way may be at times. Your faith must rest in Christ. He is the one who keeps you, as he is the one who saved you when you first trusted in him. Your assurance should be as firm as the objective finality of Christ’s work on your behalf, as steady as the promises of God to his own people, his own “new covenant” people (see 1 Cor.11:23–26). But if you drift from or rebel against Christ and his way, not in some painful lapse or temporary rage but in sustained defiance, then sooner or later you call into question the genuineness of the trust you claim to place in Christ.

Meditate on 1 Thessalonians 5:8–11, 23, 24; Jude 24, 25, if you would.

Warmly yours in Christ Jesus,

Paul Woodson

4

In February of 1979, during my senior year at Princeton University, I wrote Dr. Paul Woodson a letter that brought a rather quick response. Looking back, I realize that I did not fully understand what he was saying, and I replied to him with a degree of self-righteousness I now find embarrassingly insufferable. Again he responded very quickly and presented a worldview so profoundly Christian it has shaped much of my thinking since then. I did think, however, that his letters were a touch preachy.

But I am getting ahead of myself. My conversion the year before took place in the context of the Princeton Evangelical Fellowship. This disciplined and conservative group provided me with all the early Christian nurture I received; doubtless I was also living off the early Sunday school lessons I had heard but had later rejected.

Then for the first time I met some Christians who strongly insisted that accepting Jesus as Savior was one thing, but accepting him as Lord was another. Real discipleship and growth began with the latter; the former provided a kind of escape from judgment, but could leave me as a “carnal” Christian, a worldly Christian. I was told to study 1 Corinthians 3, where I would learn of worldly Christians who were saved in the end, “but only as one escaping through the flames,” without reward and with no fruit. I wrote asking Dr. Woodson what he thought of this view.

February 8, 1979

Dear Tim,

Thank you so much for your thoughtful letter. I wish I could tell you that almost all Christians agree on almost everything, but that is simply not the case. Christians who read and think are invariably called upon to hear and evaluate strong competing views—including mutually exclusive interpretations of the Bible. Part of your spiritual growth (only a part, but an important part) depends on developing the ability, with God’s help, of distinguishing a good argument from a bad argument, of approving and holding fast to what is good, and questioning and rejecting what is false and slippery.

Let me plunge right into 1 Corinthians 3. In fact, I had better begin with the word carnal that crops up in older versions in the first few verses of 1 Corinthians 3. The word carnal derives from the Latin carne, “flesh” (or, for that matter, “meat”). But Paul often uses “flesh” (in Greek, sarx and its derivatives) to refer to fallen man, sinful nature—not simply to flesh in the physical sense. Among an older generation of Christians, carnal still has this sense. However, outside the holy huddle of aging Christians, carnal in English usage has come to have a much more restrictive meaning. It has to do exclusively with sexual sin. “Carnal desire” is sexual lust; “carnal sins” refer to sexual sins. Quite clearly that is not what Paul means in the opening verses of 1 Corinthians 3. That is why the NIV renders the two Greek words found here as “worldly.”

Using this terminology, then, the view to which you have been exposed holds that there are three kinds of men—the “natural man,” those who have never been regenerate, who are alienated from God and still under his wrath; the “spiritual man,” those who have not only become Christians but who characteristically follow Jesus with prompt obedience and observable godliness; and, between the two, the “carnal” or “worldly man,” those who have become Christians by faith in Jesus but who still largely live like “the world, the flesh and the devil.” This tripartite distinction is based almost exclusively on this chapter from Paul’s letters. It is then frequently tied with the view that it is possible to accept Jesus as Savior without accepting him as Lord. The natural man has not received Jesus at all; the worldly (or carnal) man has trusted Jesus as Savior; the spiritual man has received him as Lord.

For you to follow what I shall now say, you will need to have your Bible open to 1 Corinthians 3. I am convinced that the construction I have just outlined distorts the text rather badly and is easily corrected by following Paul’s line of thought more closely.