Old Journal Entries: Perseverance of the Saints Debunked

We’re getting back into my painful past here so before we go any farther, I present a cat and a human with a healthy relationship and good boundaries:

This video by Viced Rhino came out yesterday:

Presuppositionalism

It looks to me like the video that this video refutes is a pretty clear example of presuppositionalism, which is a type of Christian apologetics. And it’s about as pretentious as it sounds. When I was in college, I had figured out that there were different ways people learned about the world, such as reason, emotion, intuition, and direct observation/the five senses. But it bothered me that we couldn’t prove that reason worked with reason until we had proven that reason worked, and we couldn’t use anything else to prove that reason worked until we had proven that it worked, which would require reason. Finally, and you’re going to read all about it in the second journal entry below, the pastor and his wife sat down and talked to me and explained that I had stumbled upon epistemology and there were books for that. Specifically, they recommended The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God by John Frame.

In the book, Frame laid out exactly the same ways people learn about the world that I had already figured out, and explained how intertwined they are. So everything was going great until he explained that the solution was presuppositionalism. That means that we presuppose that the bible is God’s inerrant word, and since it apparently describes people using all of the aforementioned strategies such as reason, we know that they must work because they are in the bible, but they are all secondary to the bible. Frame argued that everyone uses presuppositions, so it was inescapable and the bible was just as good as anybody else’s presupposition (Frame, 1987).

To me, this presented the obvious problem that if we’re just going to start with a presupposition because everybody does it, then a great number of people’s presuppositions must be wrong. Desperate to be convinced, I actually found Frame’s email address because he was a professor somewhere at the time and asked him to clarify. I don’t remember what he said, I just remember that I figured it must be over my head since it made no sense. And the rest is history.

Back to the Video

I liked 20:51 of Viced Rhino’s video where he explains that people evolved to find agency in random events (he said it better than that) because it was a clearer way of saying the same thing that the BBC Future article said, and which I referenced in a recent entry. But I really linked to this video because at about the fifteen-minute mark, Viced Rhino describes exactly what I went through, and what until very recently I thought I was alone in. People who are “souled out for Christ” as I was do not often take leaving the faith lightly. It’s not an easy thing. And it’s especially hard when our families and a lot of our friends believe that if we have left the faith, we must not have really been saved or we couldn’t have fallen away, a principle known in my circles as “Perseverance of the Saints.” Then, I get Christians constantly trying to save me, assuming that I haven’t actually had a true spiritual experience and I haven’t considered Christianity from their perspective or known the “true Christianity.” (For those wondering, every single born-again Christian believes that whatever they believe is “true Christianity.” I’m told that this is also how it works in Islam, with every Muslim claiming to know the true Islam.) I’m trying to go through my old journal in chronological order, so when I saw what the next entries were, I thought it would be a good time to talk about Perseverance of the Saints because I think my experience pretty clearly refutes it.

Journal Entries Written by Me in November, 2010

Leave it to a bible professor to answer a student’s doubt with a good ‘ol straw man. What pains me now is not that I was unconvinced; it’s the amount of internalized oppression I was giving myself. I was a college student referring to critical thinking as “my situation.” I really thought it was a bad thing.

In the next entry,

• K was a friend who went to the same college as me and also was a member of my church
• D was another woman who went to my church and was usually my ride
• J was the pastor’s wife, AKA the go-between between me and the pastor because, as I’ve mentioned in the past, all women were considered potential harlots and a woman being alone in a room with a man who wasn’t her husband would have been so scandalous that it was unheard of. Unfortunately, while the pastor had at least gone to seminary, his wife’s only education was that she “felt like she had a seminary education because she had supported her husband through all his training.” 🙄
• A was a sweet roommate who let me borrow her car sometimes since I didn’t have one

Again, we have a lot of pathologizing of critical thought. We also have a clear illustration of exactly how inferior I was considered to be compared to the pastor, since I was shocked that he was willing to listen to me. Looking back, I’m not sure what the 🤬 I thought his actual job was, but I do know that he was making 100k/year in a very inexpensive area in the Deep South in 2010, and that money was coming from us tithe-payers’ contributions. I still worry constantly that I’m imposing, but I think I’ve made progress since college, when I obviously thought that I was not good enough to deserve anybody’s time ever.

And then we get a very young woman (me) on an intense spiritual high induced by basic apologetics and a touch of concern from others. I think that the sentence “no striving on my part could ever bring me any closer to him” is a good window into the life of a Calvinist. We believed that not only could we not save ourselves through our works, but the act of accepting Jesus as our Lord and Savior was a work, so even that was our response to having been saved by God. In other words, God had to save us and our accepting him was evidence that he had already done so. All good works that humans ever did were actually God using us to do good works because we, if left to our natures, would only do evil all the time. I say all this not because it’s what I believed the whole time I was a Christian. I was a Christian for years after this and definitely abandoned Calvinism for a while. But in the church I grew up in (not the church I was a member of in 2010), if someone appeared to fall away, it was always thought to mean that they were never really saved. My dad would say of people who left the faith that they “used to understand [xyz theological concept].” To him, it was inconceivable that someone could mentally grasp his doctrine and not agree with it. I feel like this must have to do with the idea that the “unsaved” are spiritually blind, so in order to understand we would have to be saved, and if we were saved then we could never lose our salvation.

Either way, there is a ton of invalidation facing apostates. From claims that we’ve never really experienced being high on Jesus to claims that we were never able to really understand the belief system to arguments that we didn’t really consider Christianity as an option hard enough, we have people from all sides saying that now that we’re “out,” we must have never been “in.” What this feels like to me as an apostate is people saying that I was either too stupid to know that I wasn’t really saved, or (more likely) I was lying through my teeth for most of my life.

It hurts not to be believed. Not being believed is a massive part of my life’s story thus far, not just in regard to religion, but also regarding trauma. At least in regard to Christianity, I understand why the disbelief is so prevalent. They don’t want to believe that I was really “saved” according to their concept of salvation because they don’t want to believe that falling away is something that could happen to them.

References

Frame, J. M. (1987). The doctrine of the knowledge of God. Phillipsburg, N.J: Presbyterian and Reformed Pub. Co.

Loosh. (2015, October 2). Cat politely declines being removed from blanket pile [YouTube video]. Retrieved August 24, 2021 from https://youtu.be/Oyx3xkdi4uw

Viced Rhino. (2021, August 23). Why Bible? Because Bible! [YouTube video]. Retrieved August 24, 2021 from https://youtu.be/ZbTgdgj3cVU