Here’s what I mean.
Our Baptist friends have a teaching called Once Saved, Always Saved. Our Reformed & Presbyterian friends believe the same thing and call it Eternal Security.
(If the fact that Baptists call it Once Saved, Always Saved and Presbyterians call it Eternal Security doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about the difference in style between Baptists and Presbyterians, nothing will.)
So what is this one doctrine with two names? The teaching that once a person accepts salvation by grace through faith in Christ, he or she cannot lose it. That person is always saved, continually protected by God’s sovereign grace, and eternally secure.
A person can neither lose nor deny what was given by grace.
If a person who gives verbal testimony of salvation at some point later rescinds that same testimony (denies the faith), our Baptist and Reformed friends generally offer one of two explanations: 1) the original conversion & confession was not genuine; or 2) the person will be ultimately be “saved” and go to heaven after death, all based on that one time (much earlier) confession of faith.
A number of Scriptures support Once Saved, Always Saved, including Romans 8:38-39, John 10:28-29, and I Corinthians 3:10-15.
Charles Stanley has written one of the most influential books on the subject. You can check it out here.
Finally, proponents of this view use the analogy of childbirth & family: once a child is born into a family, they cannot be unborn out of it. In the same way, the thinking goes, once a person is born again into the family of God, they cannot be unborn out of it.
So Eternal Security has an impressive list of adherents, a cross-section of Scriptures to buttress it, and a powerful analogy most of us can relate to.
But then . . . the book of Hebrews steps in.
Time after time after time, it seems, the book challenges the thinking behind eternal security — that a genuinely saved person can never fall out of that saving relationship.
First, there’s Hebrews 2:1: We must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away. A warning against drifting away.
Then Hebrews 3:12: See to it, brothers, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. A stronger warning aginst turning away.
Next, Hebrews 6:4-8: 4 It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, 5 who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age, 6 if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance, because[a] to their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace. Everything in vv. 4-5 — enlightened, tasting the heavenly gift, sharing in the Holy Spriti, tasted the goodness of the word & the powers of the coming age — cries out, “Christian!” So why would the Christian of vv. 4-5 receive such a stern warning against “falling away” in v. 6 if it were not possible for them to do so? Now: the rest of v. 6 brings about a slew of interpretive issues . . . but that’s another blog for another time.
Finally, Hebrews 10:26-27, the place I stepped yesterday in my sermon: If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, 27 but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God. The “we” of verse 26 is the key . . . it is a sermon to insiders, a message of warning to believers, and it is consistent with Hebrews’ dire admonitions against falling away.
And how does this drifting away, turning away, falling away happen, according to Hebrews? Does it come with a single moment of denying faith in Christ — what most people refer to as apostasy? Or does it come as a result of gradual yet escalating sinful rebellion against the God who saved your soul?
On that question — perhaps the question in this dilemma — Hebrews offers baffling silence. Could the answer be “yes” to both?
So if I as a preacher cannot hold at the same time a belief in Eternal Security and a trust in the authority of the book of Hebrews, what am I to do?
Thank God for Methodism.
One of the signature teachings of historic Methodism is the doctrine of assurance. I call it the first cousin of Eternal Security.
Assurance teaches that you can know for sure that you are saved. That through a combination of objective evidence — public confession of Christ — and subjective experience — the loving touch of the Holy Spirit — a believer can know for sure that he or she is a child of God.
Does that mean it is impossible for that same person at some point to deny the faith? No. The same free will we had before conversion remains with us afterwards.
But, as Maxie Dunnam says, the question is not whether we can or can’t deny the faith, the question is whether we will or won’t.
By God’s grace, we won’t.
I claim and live I John 5:13 as testimony to the assurance of salvation: I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know you have eternal life. “Know” is the critical word there — not “hope” or “wish” or “believe.” Know with certainty.
Since that’s the gift that’s offered, that’s the gift I’ll take.
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A passage I think is very pertinent to this debate is the entirety of Romans 6. Paul seems, in my opinion, to be saying that living in sin is actually proof that a person doesn’t have faith to begin with. “Surely you know that when you surrender yourselves as slaves to obey someone, you are in fact the slaves of the master you obey – either of sin, which results in death, or of obedience, which results in being put right with God.” (Romans 8:16) It looks to me that the chapter says rather than sin excluding a person from the saved, the person leaves the saved and returns to sin as an effect of that loss of faith.
Great insights, David.
The entire book of James is much the same . . . lack of obedience suggests lack of faith.
You must be smart at bible AND math.
Wow, very true! James is almost relentless. He is so clear in 2:22 “Can’t you see? His faith and his actions worked together; his faith was made perfect through his actions.”
Two different forms of a search for universal truth.
Don’t you think that it is a problem that there is no evidence in the Early Christian Church of the belief that “once saved, always saved”? In fact, quite the opposite. There are plenty of early Christian pastors and theologians in the first three to four centuries AD who warn Christians not to be complacent in their faith and live a life of willful sin…lest they perish to eternal damnation.
I grew up evangelical. I witnessed many persons pray the Sinner’s Prayer or go forward during an Altar Call and make what seemed to be very genuine professions of faith. These people then went on to witness to others about salvation through faith in Christ, attend Church and prayer meetings, etc. for a number of years.
They NOW never darken a church door or read a Bible. One person has converted to be a Muslim to marry her Arab husband, completely abandoning the Christian faith. I know of others who became murderers and child molesters and are unrepentant. I know others who are now living lives of sexual immorality and believe that there is nothing wrong with their behavior.
Do you really believe that if one of these former believers dies…he or she will go to heaven???
I know one Lutheran mother who’s daughter became an evangelical and had a “born again” experience. A short time later the daughter started living with her boyfriend. Her mother warned her that what she was doing is sin, and that ongoing willful sin against God places her salvation in jeopardy. The daughter replied, “Don’t worry, Mom. I’m covered. I was born again, and if you are born again there is no way you can lose your salvation no matter what you do. Lutherans are wrong.”
Neither infant baptism nor an adult “born again” experience is a “Get-into-heaven-free” card! Salvation only occurs by the grace of God, received through faith. No faith, no salvation.
The Christian whose faith and trust is in the Lord need never worry about his eternal security/his salvation. Our salvation is not dependent on how many good works we do. But, the believer who takes his salvation for granted, turns his back on God and lives a life of sin is endangering his soul and very well may wake up one day in hell!
The doctrine of Eternal Security is an invention of the Calvinists, codified at the Synod of Dort. It is false teaching. It did not exist in the Early Church. It is a license to sin! The Doctrine of Eternal Security is not scriptural!
I encourage evangelicals to read this Lutheran statement on this issue:
http://www.hopelcms.org/default.aspx?pg=87ac4963-1ad2-499c-8a26-0304068bf63c
Many Christians have said the following to themselves during a very difficult period in their life: “Am I really saved?” Here are the thought processes on this issue for an Evangelical and a Lutheran:
The Evangelical’s Assurance of Salvation:
1. At age ___ I accepted Christ as my Lord and Savior. At that moment I asked Jesus to come into my heart to be my Lord and Savior and to forgive me of my sins.
2. But since I am currently questioning my salvation, maybe I didn’t “do it” correctly. Maybe I didn’t fully understand what I was doing. Maybe I didn’t fully repent. Maybe I didn’t really have complete faith. Maybe I did it just because my friends were doing it. Maybe…
3. I don’t know…maybe I should “do it” again, just to be 100% sure.
The Lutheran’s Assurance of Salvation:
1. Have I been baptized into the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, thereby receiving God’s promise of the forgiveness of my sins, salvation of my soul, faith, and eternal life?
Answer: Yes.
2. Have I outright rejected Christ as my Lord and Savior?
Answer: No.
3. Am I living a life of ongoing sin in willful disobedience and defiance of my Lord?
Answer: No.
Therefore, I KNOW I am saved!
When your assurance of salvation is based on what GOD did and not what you did, it makes all the difference in the world!
http://www.lutherwasnotbornagain.com/2013/10/salvation-is-much-simpler-than.html
I thank you for a carefully worded, fine representation of Baptist belief in Eternal Security (I also title it Assurance of Salvation, good friend!)
Hebrews 6 and 10 have always been thrown in my face (yours was a very gentle throw! 🙂 as representative of a lack of Eternal Security in Scripture. The one thing I haven’t able to get past in these passages is that both begin with the word “if.” I believe Paul is deliberately setting up a HYPOTHETICAL situation, in chapter 6 (sorry to all my saved-lost-saved friends), to prove that “if” we could lose it we could never re-gain it, for the shame we were causing the Risen Christ, the only provision for salvation.
The chapter in 10 ends in saying “but we are not those who draw back to perdition, but those who believe to the saving of the soul.” What does this mean. To me, it is that our churches, surely members less often, but attenders certainly, are religiously inclined perhaps, but not trusting Christ for their salvation. These warnings then, become less threats to personal security, than to dangers to the fellowship of ‘grievous wolves’ that Paul warned of in Acts 20.
These verses therefore are not threats to the security of the believer, but the purity of the fellowship. Prescriptions, not obstructions. Forgive the length of this, and I appreciate brother David’s insights as well.
I’d love to discuss these issues by e-mail, too!