I was enticed to read this book on account of its title, or even more so, its subtitle. Before I acquired the book I pondered the subtitle and how I might respond. I imagined Wetterling's focus would be on law verses like "No thief shall enter the kingdom of heaven." Does Scripture mean this when it says it? Yes. But Jesus can still say to a thief, "Today you will be with me in Paradise." The warning was a real one. But the proposed punishment fell upon Christ rather than the thief. When God says it, God means it. But sometimes he finds a way to follow what he said with something new.
Yet when I received the book, I found that Wetterling had chosen a different set of verses on which to focus. He does not come across as the Pharisee closing the legal loophole on the dejected sinner. He comes across as the pastoral heart not wanting postmodern confusion to allow people to meander off a cliff because somebody before him had tried to obscure the warning signs. In fact, despite the firmness of Wetterling's writing, I happily find the tone of the title, at least the tone in which I first read it, a bit misleading. This is a confident book that could be given out to an unbeliever.
Wetterling examines six verses from John that he calls "Unshakeable Certainties." They are John 3:3, 6:44, 14:6, 10:18, 10:27-28, and 16:22b. The tone of the book can be conveyed through looking at a couple of these.
The first to look at is John 14:6: "No one comes to the Father except through me." This verse was one of the first I was given to memorize, for which I am forever thankful. I was visiting the Sunday school of another church, and this verse was the verse of the week. It inoculated me against the idea that there was a way other than Jesus to get to God. So many well-meaning and generous people would like to find another way. Wetterling explains why this is dangerous, and does so not as one who is happy to see any ill befall people outside his little community. His breadth of life experience as, among other things, a Vietnam fighter pilot, convinces the reader that this insistence on "only one way" is not rooted in a narrow-minded bigotry against people who are different from himself.
The second is John 16:22b: "No one will take away your joy." Not all "No one" verses are threats. This one is a promise. Next time you read Wetterling's title, imagine this promising verse. "No one will take away your joy." When Jesus says it, he means it. I have no complaint.
As a Lutheran note, Wetterling presents a Calvinist view of eternal security with John 10:27-28. He presents this winningly. If there were never any apostates in the Bible or from church history or among my friends, I would see no reason to disagree with Calvinists on this. But when you equate true Christians with the elect, then the apostates make it harder to identify true Christians, since no apostate ever was one. The problem of the "missing ingredient" looms as large for these groups as the problem of the "non-elect true Christian" does for others. That is, if you have known convincing apostates, you must conclude that there was a missing ingredient that kept them from being true Christians. "But that's an easy one. Faith!" Yes. But they appeared to believe. I cannot believe it was a mere act in every case. If they were deceiving me, they were deceiving themselves, too. So how do you or I know we are not deceiving ourselves? One way or another, there is a problem for assurance. You cannot draw a straight line from coming to faith to final glory with no anxiety in between.
But this is not enough of a defect in Wetterling's book for me to fault it in a major way. Everybody has some trouble in this area. And I do think John 10:27-28 does present comfort, which Wetterling's pastoral focus drives home in a mostly good way. He doesn't draw the erroneous practical conclusions that some writers draw from his doctrine. He doesn't write such that sorrowing Christians would be driven to despair, or such that impenitent sinners would be strengthened in their malice. Most of his treatment does the good task of giving "sorrowing and tempted people the permanently abiding comfort of knowing that their salvation does not rest in their own hands" (Formula of Concord, SD XI 90).
