Wednesday, May 18, 2022

The "Ineffectual Calling" (Vocatio Inefficax) and Lack of Assurance of One's Election and Salvation in Reformed Theology

The following is that of Theodore Beza’s Tabula (1555) which depicts his understanding of predestination:


Latin:




(source)

English translation:




Source: 

Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2004), 63


One will notice "Ineffectual calling" (Latin: Vocatio Inefficax) in the diagram. Commenting on this, and how it leads to a lack of assurance of salvation in Reformed theology, Hoersma wrote that


 

The uncertainty and fear of being on the wrong side of the chart were reinforced by the notion of an “ineffectual calling,” which Beza connected with temporary faith. Reprobates might have many signs that would appear to indicate God had called them, too. Yet in realty this calling was not a true calling. Their love of God’s Word, their desire for Christian fellowship, and their zeal to do good works might all seem to indicate the presence of God’s special grace and effectual calling that did not lead to true conversion and true faith. In due time, this would become evident, when people with an ineffectual calling would harden their hearts and thereby show that they had never been inwardly called by the Spirit of God. Their call had merely been an external one. Those who were truly and inwardly called would always and necessarily persevere in their faith. This horribly difficult question now became “how to distinguish a weak but true faith from a strong but temporary one” (Peter White, Predestination, Policy, and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992], 21). As a result of this Bezan approach, a nagging doubt began to creep among the Reformed communities. (Ibid., 62, 64)