Confessions of a Self-Justified Sinner

I enjoyed reading a copy of James Hogg’s 1824 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: Written by Himself: With a Detail of Curious Traditionary Facts and other Evidence by the Editor, this spring.

Although some of the dialogue was written in a Scots vernacular and demanded a degree of patience to read, it was fascinating tale, set over a century before its publication. Wringhim, sometime Laird of Dalcastle, is a staunch Calvinist, with the uncanny ability of recognising which of his relatives and acquaintances are also God’s elect, and which most certainly are not. According to his carefully thought theology, God’s elect can do no wrong.

A strange character who is never named, but whom Wringhim calls Gil-Martin and weirdly suspects is Peter the Great, the Tsar of Russia on one of his ventures abroad, incognito, becomes attached to him. In possession of supernatural powers, he encourages him to murder those like his own brother and a local minister, on the grounds that he is doing God’s work, and that, in any event, the elect can do no wrong. Towards the end, he urges Wringhim to end his own life.

Hogg may well have been criticising the strict Calvinism which characterised so much of Scotland’s churches and early-modern religious history. Wringhim’s extreme Calvinism was utterly unknown to John Calvin himself who taught that good deeds, not evil, were evidence of God’s election. Antinomianism, the belief that the true Christian is subject to no law and may therefore do as he pleases, rears its ugly head in a number of theological climates, not just some forms of hyper-Calvinism. The truth that we are saved by grace, not works of the law, is twisted and bastardised into permitting any action, including adultery, pride and, in Wringhim’s extreme though fictional case, murder itself.

Being assured of one’s salvation and being certain thereof can be a tricky business, the quest for which Satan (or may we call him Gil-Martin?) enjoys meddling and thwarting. We base it upon a knowledge and application of Christ’s finished work and a trust in His promises for all who come to Him believing. Its evidence will be found in our good deeds, not our bad, though the feelings of repugnance and increasing levels of disgust towards our sin are also signs of real, saving faith.

What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein? Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection: Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. Romans 6:1-6, AV