Reflections of a former Evangelical on “the instant” of salvation.

My mother asked me, “¿Would you like fifty cents?” to which I immediately replied, “I would love to.” What a naive question for an eight-year-old boy. Of course I would like to get fifty cents. Fifty cents meant a lot of money when I was little. My mother continued, “Here is a Bible verse I want you to memorize, and when you can recite it perfectly, I will give you the money.” And that is how, for the first time, I learned and memorized some of the best-known passages of the Bible. I memorized the whole of Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd…” I learned Psalm 119:105, “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path,” which was a constant reminder of the Bible’s place of supremacy in my life, the only rule of faith and practice.

Of course, the most important verse for an Evangelical Protestant child to memorize is John 3:16. It is a verse that encapsulates the Gospel of Christ in an elegant and meaningful statement, a statement that reaches the heart of God and explains the essence of the history of salvation in twenty-five words. The key words of these stand out with clear rigidity: loved, gave, believed, perished, and has. We can possess (have) something thanks to God’s act of love and to man’s response. God’s act of love opened, and on other occasions closed, a bolted door, granting man escape from eternal condemnation and an offer of eternal life.

No one accepts the Bible or any other information, for that matter, with complete objectivity, without a tradition and a mind predisposed through which the information is filtered. Last year, before embracing the Catholic religion, my wife and I, as well as our Evangelical friends, clung to the fundamentalist traditions of belief in Christ alone and justification by faith alone.

Recently I was approached by a fundamentalist who said that “Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him for righteousness (Gen. 15:6), and since the word believed is in the past tense, it meant that Abraham was saved at the instant he believed God”. Supposedly Abraham was saved and had eternal security from that point in time, from his one-point-in-time assent of faith. Then this fundamentalist friend moved on to John 3:16 and tied Abraham’s belief to our belief in Christ.

There is an interesting shift with this verse that seems to have eluded my fundamentalist friend. I asked him if he had ever looked carefully at the tense of the action verbs in John 3:16. He had not, and because his tradition tells him that belief-at-a-point-in-time is the basis of salvation, he automatically assumed that John taught that by a momentary mental assent to Christ, one could secure eternal life and guarantee himself a place in Heaven. I broke the verse apart to give him the information he had omitted, which I myself had omitted all my life before entering the Catholic Church.

First, a note about the action words. In Greek, the language of the New Testament, there are various tenses for the verbs. We will discuss two: aorist and present (see the notes at the end of this article). The aorist tense describes a point in time. It is as simple as that. The present is the current, the present current action. It too is as simple as that. The aorist is represented by a point (.). The present is represented by a continuous line (—–). Now, with this simple understanding, let us look at John 3:16:

John 3:16 “For God so loved (aorist, a point in past time) the world, that he gave (aorist, a point in past time) his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth (present, progressive action) in him should not perish (aorist, a point in time), but have (present, current, progressive action) everlasting life.” (KJV)

Interesting, eh? The present tense “whosoever believeth is believing in Him” casts a different light on the verse. One might expect the word believe to be in the aorist, to teach its “once-and-for-all” act, a “one-point-in-time” event. I used to say, “I believed in Christ on such and such a date, so now I know that I am saved.” But now I say, “I believed in Christ, I believe in Christ, and I am being saved”. One might ask why the evangelist changed to the present tense, a verse full of indefinites. The present tense implies believing continually, a process of belief and not the past mental assent I once thought of.

Notice that “has eternal life” is also in the present tense. It does not say he will have eternal life in the past or in the future, but that he will regularly be attaining eternal life. A Greek grammarian explains the present tense this way, he says, “The present tense is fundamentally linear or durative, going into its kind of action. The durative notion can be expressed graphically by an unbroken line (_), since the action is merely continuous. This is known as the progressive present. Refinements of this general rule will be found; however, the fundamental distinction will not be denied.” He who is currently, habitually, and continually believing… will be (currently and at present) having eternal life. We need to be careful with the interpretation of the Bible, because what one believes and understands has eternal consequences.

Does the word believe mean a mere state of mental assent? The biblical term believe cannot be reduced simply to a mental acceptance. If we study the sacred books together, throughout the long history of Israel, we will see that the word believe also intends to convey the concepts of obedience and trust. Kittel says “pisteuo means ‘to trust’ (also ‘to obey’)…” Vines says, “… trust in, not mere acceptance…”

This is confirmed by John the Baptist’s statement in John 3:36 “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life; and he that believeth not (apeitheo) the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him.” (KJV). The word apeitheo is understood, by all good translators and commentators, as disobedience. The opposite (antonym) of believing is disobeying. The verse in the RSV reads “He who believes (“is believing”, present tense) in the Son… he who does not obey (“is disobeying” present tense) the Son...” The NASB translates the verse as follows: “He who believes in the Son has eternal life; but he who does not obey the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him”. Kittel clearly defines apeitheo as “to be disobedient.” The word belief has the element of obedience wrapped in its arms, and the opposite of biblical belief is disobedience. Those who teach salvation by mental assent without a consequent present and without continual obedience cannot be considered “evangelicals.”

My fundamentalist friend has never responded to the explanation of these verses. I hope that one day he may see beyond the walls of his fundamentalist traditions and behold the great beauty of the church and its past. It is very difficult to take a glance over the wall, but many of us have done so, by the grace of God. Many of us not only took a glance over the wall that surrounded us, but actually climbed it and leaped over it, finding on the other side the glory of the Catholic Church.

Notes on the Greek aorist and present tenses

– Aorist Tense: The aorist tense is characterized by punctiliar action; that is, the concept of the verb is considered without relation to past or present or future time. The events described by the aorist tense can be grouped into several categories according to the grammarians, but the most common sense is always the idea of an action that was begun at a certain point (“ingressive aorist”), or that was completed at a certain point (“cumulative aorist”), or simply that existed at a certain point (“punctiliar aorist”). The categorization of other cases can be found in the Greek grammars.

– Present Tense: According to Dana and Mantey in their book A Manual Grammar of the Greek New Testament, “The fundamental meaning of the present tense is the idea of progress. It is the linear tense… the progressive force of the present tense should always be considered as primary, especially with reference to the potential moods, which in the nature of the case do not need any ‘punctiliar present’ tense… There are three varieties of the present tense in which its fundamental idea of progress is especially patent.” And when he speaks of the progressive present he explains: “This use approaches the main idea of the tense. It signifies action in progress, or a state of persistence…” In short, the present tense expresses an action in progress in present time.

– New Testament Greek (James Hewitt, B.A., B.D., M.A., Ph.D.; Hedrickson Publishers; 1986, page 13)
– Theological Dictionary of the New Testament by Gerhard Kittel, a renowned Protestant theological dictionary of ten volumes. Eerdmans, 1968
– An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words by W. E. Vines (TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1984)

Author: Steve Ray

Source: From the Catholic Convert site.

Translator: Lic. Guillermo García Almaguer