Is Once Saved, Always Saved Biblical? Christians Disagree

Christians disagree, and both sides build on Scripture. The words “once saved, always saved” are not in the Bible. Reformed churches and the Southern Baptist Convention teach that everyone God has truly saved will persevere to the end. Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist, Pentecostal and Free Will Baptist churches teach that a believer can fall away and be lost.

The little letter of Jude holds both halves of the argument within four verses. “Keep yourselves in the love of God,” Jude tells his readers (Jude 21), and then he gives glory to the one who keeps them: “Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy” (Jude 24). We are told to keep ourselves, and we are told that God keeps us. Every church in this debate believes both sentences. They part over how the two fit together, and whether God’s keeping can ever fail because ours does.

The phrase is a popular shorthand. The teaching behind it has an older and more careful name, the perseverance of the saints, and the Reformed churches defined it in the early seventeenth century. After the death of Jacob Arminius, a professor at Leiden, his followers presented five articles in the Remonstrance of 1610, and they came to teach, among other things, “the possibility of a fall from salvation.” The Synod of Dort, meeting in 1618–19 with delegates from eight countries besides the Netherlands, rejected their views. Its Canons answer the question with a sentence that is both humble and bold:

So it is not by their own merits or strength but by God’s undeserved mercy that they neither forfeit faith and grace totally nor remain in their downfalls to the end and are lost. With respect to themselves this not only easily could happen, but also undoubtedly would happen; but with respect to God it cannot possibly happen.

Canons of Dort, Fifth Main Point, Article 8

The Westminster Confession (1646) says the same: those whom God has called and sanctified “can neither totally nor finally fall away from the state of grace, but shall certainly persevere therein to the end, and be eternally saved.” The weight rests on God. Our own hold, Dort admits, would certainly slip. His does not.

Not in the confessions that teach it. Dort says believers can fall into “serious and outrageous” sins, as David and Peter did, and that by such sins they “grieve the Holy Spirit” and “severely wound the conscience” until God renews them to repentance. The Westminster Confession speaks of believers who “fall into grievous sins; and, for a time, continue therein” and bring “temporal judgments upon themselves.” On this teaching, the proof that God keeps a person is that he brings them back. Someone who leaves the faith for good is taken never to have belonged, as John wrote of those who left the church in his day: “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us” (1 John 2:19).

A second version of “once saved, always saved” goes further. Some evangelical teachers hold that a person who has once believed in Jesus has eternal life whatever follows. The Grace Evangelical Society, one voice for this view, teaches that obedience is “the essential responsibility of each Christian,” but that “the Bible does not teach that this obedience will be manifested in all believers,” and that a believer’s final destiny is “already set.” The Reformed confessions do not say this. They expect a true believer to go on believing. When people argue about “once saved, always saved,” it helps to ask which of the two they mean.

The strongest comes from Jesus himself. “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand” (John 10:27–29). He says the same in another place: “him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out,” and it is the Father’s will “that of all which he hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day” (John 6:37, 39).

Paul is “persuaded” that nothing in all creation “shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38–39). He is “confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6). Believers are “sealed with that holy Spirit of promise, which is the earnest of our inheritance” (Ephesians 1:13–14). Peter calls them people “who are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation” (1 Peter 1:5). And John wrote his first letter “that ye may know that ye have eternal life” (1 John 5:13).

The warnings are just as plain. The Letter to the Hebrews says that “it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost … If they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance” (Hebrews 6:4–6). It warns “brethren” against “an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God,” and adds, “we are made partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence stedfast unto the end” (Hebrews 3:12, 14).

Paul tells the Colossians that Christ will present them holy “If ye continue in the faith grounded and settled” (Colossians 1:22–23), and warns the Romans of God’s severity toward those who fell: “toward thee, goodness, if thou continue in his goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off” (Romans 11:22). Of the Galatians who sought to be justified by the law, he says, “ye are fallen from grace” (Galatians 5:4). He even disciplines himself “lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway” (1 Corinthians 9:27). Jesus says, “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered” (John 15:6), and “he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved” (Matthew 24:13).

Each side has a reading of the other’s verses. The Canons of Dort teach that God keeps his people by means of the gospel’s “exhortations, threats, and promises,” so the warnings of Hebrews are part of how he holds them fast. The Orthodox Church in America reads Hebrews 6 as speaking of “those who rejected Christ and His saving power after their Baptism.” And the promise of John 10 itself is spoken of sheep who “hear my voice … and they follow me.” For a fuller account of the churches that teach a believer can be lost, see can you lose your salvation?

Many do, though not all. The Southern Baptist Convention’s statement of faith, the Baptist Faith and Message (2000), says: “All true believers endure to the end. Those whom God has accepted in Christ, and sanctified by His Spirit, will never fall away from the state of grace, but shall persevere to the end.” It adds that believers may fall into sin and “grieve the Spirit,” “yet they shall be kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation,” the words of 1 Peter 1:5.

Free Will Baptists read the same Bible differently. Their Treatise, adopted in 1935, says there are “strong grounds to hope that the truly regenerate will persevere unto the end, and be saved,” but that “their future obedience and final salvation are neither determined nor certain,” so believers “ought, therefore, to watch and pray lest they make shipwreck of their faith and be lost.” The two kinds of Baptist differ over the same question that divides Calvinists and Arminians, which Calvinism and Arminianism side by side sets out point by point.

The Catholic Church rejected the teaching outright. The Council of Trent, in January 1547, condemned anyone who says “that a man once justified can sin no more, nor lose grace, and that therefore he that falls and sins was never truly justified” (Session 6, Canon 23). The Catechism teaches that mortal sin “results in the loss of charity and the privation of sanctifying grace” (paragraph 1861), and that the sacrament of Penance offers those who have fallen “a new possibility to convert and to recover the grace of justification,” which the Church Fathers called “the second plank [of salvation] after the shipwreck which is the loss of grace” (paragraph 1446).

The Orthodox Church does not speak of being saved at one moment for good. An answer from the Orthodox Church in America says, “For Orthodox Christians, salvation is a process, not a once-and-done event,” and that we are “being saved.” The same answer notes that the Church “since ancient times” has received back those who fell away, “after a period of repentance.”

The Lutheran, Anglican and Methodist churches say the same, and each says in the same breath that the fallen can be restored. The Lutheran Augsburg Confession (1530) condemns those “who deny that those once justified can lose the Holy Ghost,” and in the next lines condemns those who would not absolve the fallen who return to repentance. The Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles say, “After we have received the Holy Ghost, we may depart from grace given, and fall into sin, and by the grace of God we may arise again, and amend our lives” (Article 16). The Methodist Articles of Religion repeat those words almost exactly (Article 12).

The Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal church, holds the same view. Its position paper on assurance says that believers “can be lost if they repeatedly disregard the teachings of Scripture, continue to resist the conviction of the Holy Spirit, and finally reach the point where they have turned away from their Savior,” and the denomination “disapproves of the unconditional security position which holds that it is impossible for a person once saved to be lost.”

Some of us come to this question with a sin we cannot forget, or a season when faith went cold, and the warnings in Hebrews feel like a door closing. Whatever church you belong to, hear this above all: every one of these traditions calls the frightened believer back to Christ. None tells you to stay away.

The Canons of Dort know that believers “under severe temptation” do not always feel sure, and teach that God “by the Holy Spirit revives in them the assurance of their perseverance.” The Methodist Articles speak of those who fall and “by the grace of God, rise again.” The Catholic Church offers the sacrament of Penance as that “second plank.” The Orthodox answer quoted above tells a worried believer that “regardless of how sinful we become, even after being born again through water and the Spirit, we always have the possibility to repent.” Scripture’s promise is the same for all of them: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). The son in Jesus’ parable had wasted everything, and “when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him” (Luke 15:20). To be afraid of having fallen is already to be looking toward home. More verses for that road are gathered in Bible verses about assurance of salvation.

Jude, who told his readers to keep themselves, ended his letter by lifting their eyes to the one who keeps: “Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy, To the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen” (Jude 24–25).

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