20 Answers: Faith and Works (20 Answers Series from Catholic Answers Book 40) by Jimmy Akin

Author:Jimmy Akin [Akin, Jimmy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catholic Answers Press
Published: 2020-06-25T05:00:00+00:00

12. Can salvation be lost?

Once a person has entered a state of justification, can this be lost? If so, how would this happen? Protestants have proposed a variety of answers to these questions.

Luther, based on the idea of justification by faith alone, held that it is possible for Christians to lose their salvation, but only through a loss of faith. In other words, only the sin of apostasy—the rejection of the Christian faith—would do this. Any other sins, even great ones like murder or adultery, would not. This view remains standard in Lutheranism today.

However, some Protestants advocate an idea known as eternal security. According to this view, if a person ever enters a state of salvation, he will remain in it for all eternity. It thus is not possible to lose salvation. This view was unheard of in Church history prior to the Reformation. Prior Christians universally acknowledged that salvation was granted through baptism, but it also was clear that some of the baptized later committed sins that the New Testament says will exclude one from the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, the idea of eternal security was a theological novelty when it was proposed in the 1500s.

Eternal security is understood in more than one way among Protestants. Calvinists frequently use the phrase “perseverance of the saints” to describe their understanding of the teaching. According to this view, God will cause authentic Christians to persevere in faith and good works until they die, and this is the reason they are eternally secure: God will not allow them to do those things that would cause them to be lost. If a person does lose faith or fall into grievous sin, it means one of two things: either the person was never an authentic Christian to begin with, or he will return to an authentically Christian life before he dies. In either case, someone who is truly a Christian “can neither totally nor finally fall away from the state of grace; but shall certainly persevere therein to the end, and be eternally saved.”16

Another view of eternal security is sometimes expressed with the phrase “once saved, always saved.” This view is found among some non-Calvinist Protestants, and it holds that true Christians can and do fall away from the faith or fall permanently into grievous sin, yet they do not lose their salvation. A single moment of saving faith, at any point in one’s life, is sufficient to permanently cancel all of one’s sins, even those not yet committed. Therefore—at least in terms of salvation—it does not matter what one later does. This view is often associated with advocates of free grace theology.

Not all Protestants have views as extreme as these. Some are much closer to the traditional Christian view. Thus, members of the Methodist, Wesleyan, Holiness, and Pentecostal movements, as well as some others, acknowledge that it is possible for a believer to commit grievous sin and fall from grace. The precise conditions under which this would happen are not definitively worked out, and

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