Ian Maclaren’s Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers (1896) is set in Scotland and includes many conversations — or debates — between Presbyterian, mainly Free Kirk, clergymen. So the more Bible and covenant theology you know, the better you can follow along. Two of the ministers are John Carmichael, the novel’s main protagonist, and “Rabbi” Saunderson, nicknamed for his studious habits and vast knowledge and respected also for his intense piety. In the build-up to a major crisis in the story
Carmichael remembered a vivid incident in the Presbytery of Muirtown, when an English evangelist had addressed that reverend and austere court with exhilarating confidence — explaining the extreme simplicity of the Christian faith, and showing how a minister ought to preach. Various good men were delighted, and asked many questions of the evangelist — who had kept a baby-linen shop for twenty years, and was unspoiled by the slightest trace of theology—but the Rabbi arose and demolished his “teaching,” convicting him of heresy at every turn, till there was not left one stone upon another.
I interrupt for a moment to say that I need no encouragement toward intellectual snobbery, particularly directed against some preachers, so at this point the account seems to be leading me onto dangerous ground. But read on.
“But surely fear belongs to the Old Testament dispensation,” said the unabashed little man to the Rabbi afterwards. “’Rejoice,’ you know, my friend, ‘and again I say rejoice.’”
“If it be the will of God that such a man as I should ever stand on the sea of glass mingled with fire, then this tongue will be lifted with the best, but so long as my feet are still in the fearful pit it becometh me to bow my head.”
“Then you don’t believe in assurance?” but already the evangelist was quailing before the Rabbi.
“Verily there is no man that hath not heard of that precious gift, and none who does not covet it greatly, but there be two degrees of assurance” — here the Rabbi looked sternly at the happy, rotund little figure — “and it is with the first you must begin, and what you need to get is assurance of your damnation.”
One of the boys read an account of this incident—thinly veiled—in a reported address of the evangelist, in which the Rabbi — being, as it was inferred, beaten in scriptural argument—was very penitent and begged his teacher’s pardon with streaming tears. What really happened was different, and so absolutely conclusive that Doctor Dowbiggin gave it as his opinion “that a valuable lesson had been read to unauthorised teachers of religion.”
I’m reminded of two other things by this account, beyond how stupid I sometimes think some preachers are. The first is a formal debate between a couple seminary professors I witnessed about forty years ago. It’s not important to say who they were and what it was about, but, albeit with the modifications of a more genteel place and age than mid-nineteenth-century Scotland, both the explicit theological and the underlying social issues were quite similar to the one between the “Rabbi” and the evangelist.
The second is my favorite way of answering questions about who’s gonna be saved. (1) Whom God chose before all time? That’s the “Rabbi’s” answer, though it comes out more clearly in other parts of the novel. (2) Whoever chooses to believe in Jesus? That’s the answer conveyed by most evangelists and believed by most evangelicals today. (3) Everybody? That’s universalism, or in the terms of Kate and Those Ministers, “the Linlathen heresy.” Because some universalists’ favorite Bible passages are surrounded by vast thunder clouds of contrary testimony, my facetious answer is (4) Nobody. Yep, we’re all going to hell. It’s certainly just as easy to prove scripturally, perhaps easier. And, without the smirk, it sounds like what the “Rabbi” said to the evangelist, but in his piety rather than his theology.
So “the happy, rotund little figure,” the evangelist who believes in “assurance” (of salvation), represents presumption, and the “Rabbi” represents, for a moment, despair. And, whatever the authorial voice thinks about who should have won the debate, I’m rooting for neither. Presumption and despair are the Scylla and Charybdis of a Christian’s thinking about one’s own eternal future, about, that is, heaven and hell. I don’t want to slam into either rock.
But if today’s evangelicals represent presumption (and we, or they, do) and some others are following the logical course of universalism to denial of the appropriateness of the question, then who is left to represent despair? Is there anyone left who can read, for instance, Psalm 1:1 or Isaiah 6:5 without retreating into something like the evangelist’s “surely fear belongs to the Old Testament dispensation”?
And is there a name for the middle ground? In the traditional quartet the blessed opposites of presumption and despair are hope and humility. I’m occasionally able to say something about hope. For humility see my “Avoiding Heroics” series (numbers 1, 2, and 3/4). Since I don’t think I said it there, I’ll mention here what has become a key part of humility in my experience. It is recognizing that the question about whether I personally am going to hell or heaven for eternity is not all that important. That goes against most of what we have taught ourselves, perhaps not so much now as a generation or two ago, as enshrined in the consoling but self-centered doctrine of “assurance.” Whether God is glorified, and he will be, is more important, and that is the answer to that heaven or hell question that the “Rabbi” works toward.
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Ian MacLaren was a Free Kirk minister who published novels under that name and sermons under the name he was born with, John Watson.
The One Story 