Can I Lose My Salvation? (Crucial Questions)

by R.C. Sproul

This gets at the issue of the doctrine of eternal security, also known as the perseverance of the saints, which is the P in the famous Calvinist acronym TULIP.

During the sixteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church disputed with the Reformers because the Reformers said that a person can be justified by faith alone, and upon their justification, they can have an assurance of their present state of salvation.

But the Reformers made a distinction between assurance of salvation—that is, certainty that one is currently saved, with no comment on whether one will remain saved—and perseverance of the saints—certainty that one will continue to be saved into the eternal future.

In the Bible itself, there are many passages that strongly suggest that people can indeed lose their salvation (e.g., Heb. 6:4–6; 2 Peter 2:20–22).

And yet, on the other side, there are also many passages that seem to be promises that God will preserve His people to the end.

What we’re describing here theologically is called apostasy, a term based on a Greek word meaning “to stand away from.” To fall into apostasy means to reach a position but then to abandon it.

when we talk about those who have become apostate or who have committed apostasy, we’re talking about those who have fallen from the faith or at least have fallen from their first profession of faith.

It is perfectly clear from the text of 1 Timothy 1, as well as narrative examples that we find in the Scriptures— for example, the well-known leaders King David and the Apostle Peter—that it is certainly possible for people who profess faith in Jesus Christ to fall in some sense of the word.

The Italian Reformed scholar Girolamo Zanchi once made the distinction between a serious fall and a total fall.

He argued that the Bible is replete with examples of true believers who truly fall away, who fall into gross sin and, on some occasions, protracted periods of impenitence. This is a serious fall.

So, the question is not “Do people fall?” They do fall. Each and every Christian is subject to the possibility of a serious fall.

But is someone who commits a serious fall eternally lost—making it a total fall—or is the fall a temporary condition that will be remedied by his restoration?

While some will return after a serious fall, some will not, because they never actually had faith. They made a false profession of faith; they did not possess what they professed.

When the heat comes, such a person will flee from his original profession, resulting in a total fall. In cases like this, the conversion was not genuine in the first place. This is illustrated in Jesus’ parable of the sower (Matt. 13:1–9).

“They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us” (1 John 2:19).

So, when we call it the “unforgivable sin,” we mean by that that it is a sin that will in fact not be forgiven by God, not because God can’t do it but God won’t do it.

Jesus is responding to the Pharisees, who have been engaged in consistently fierce opposition to Him. They were the ones who were most knowledgeable in the things of God, in the law of God, in the theology of the Old Testament.

If any group of people should have been the first ones to recognize the identity of Christ as the Son of Man and as the promised Messiah, it was the Pharisees. But, instead, they were the ones who most fiercely opposed Him.

Jesus’ response appears to be a warning to the Pharisees that they are coming perilously close to a line past which there will be no hope for them.

Before that line is crossed, Jesus can pray for their forgiveness on the basis of their ignorance, but past that point, there is no forgiveness.

Thus, someone commits the unforgivable sin when he knows for certain through the illumination of the Spirit that Christ is the Son of God, but he comes to the conclusion and makes the statement verbally that Christ was demonic.

For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins. . .. How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace? (Heb. 10:26, 29)

So, one possibility is that this passage is speaking of those who fall away from the visible church in the face of persecution but then want to associate with the visible church again in a time of tranquility.

However, this language doesn’t necessarily have to be referring to one who is authentically converted. It could refer to people who have been closely involved in the life of the church but were never converted in the first place.

As was Old Testament Israel, the New Testament church is what Augustine called a corpus permixtum, a mixed body, containing within it what Jesus described as the wheat and the tares (Matt. 13:24–30)—believers and unbelievers. The tares are those who never were converted, even though they are members of the covenant community.

Returning to the overall meaning of this passage, some understand it as referring to people inside the church who are truly converted but who apostatize and repudiate the gospel under persecution; these people, then, cannot be restored.

Others see it as referring to the Judaizing heresy. An interpretation that understands the passage as referring to the Judaizing heresy is more likely, because there are a couple of problems with the first view.

The first problem is that Peter repudiated the gospel in one sense when he sided with the Judaizers—in that his behavior denied the sufficiency of the work of Christ for...

He also denied Christ but was restored by Jesus Himself. So, Peter is an example of one who was restored after repudiating the gospel. This seems to illustrat...

It must be that the author is referring to true repentance, and he is saying that it is impossible for a truly regenerate person, one who has truly repented, to be restored again to repentance if he falls away, because in his falling away he crucifies again the Son of God and holds Him up to contempt.

The argument here is a form of argumentation found throughout the New Testament epistles called the argumentum ad absurdum.

This means that you take the premises of your opponent and show how, if they are true, they eventually lead to a conclusion that is absurd.

When it comes to the Judaizing heresy, the issue turns on the keeping of the law. If the Christian who has embraced the gospel of justification by faith alone now turns back to trying to justify himself through the works of the law—circumcision, keeping the festivals, observing the food laws, etc.—that person cannot be saved, because he has crucified Christ anew.

But what does it mean to crucify Christ anew? Christ obviously has only been crucified once. When He was crucified, Christ took upon Himself the curse of the old covenant. When a person turns back to keeping the law as the primary mode of relating to God, he rejects the work of Christ, who took on the curse on behalf of others. Having repudiated the work of Christ as a vicarious sacrifice, he in fact condemns Christ as having been justifiably killed on the cross and makes himself complicit in the death of Christ. Such a person takes the curse upon himself again and cannot be saved.

Thus, we see how the author of Hebrews uses the argumentum ad absurdum to demonstrate the folly of his opponents’ position. Since the Judaizers’ argument that the law should still be observed leads to the repudiation of Christ’s work...

The author is likely using this argument hypothetically, to show what would happen. But this could never actually happen in the case of...

The author says in v. 9, “Though we speak in this way, yet in your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things—things that belong to salvation.” When he says, “we speak in this way,” he is saying that he’s writing i...

He’s showing how his opponents’ teachings would lead to someone’s having no grounds for salvation. But, in the case of true believers, he is certain that they will stand fast: “we feel sure...

Augustine taught that the only way anyone ever perseveres to the end after beginning the Christian life is by virtue of the grace of God. Since that time, perseverance has been understood as a gift of divine grace.

If I look to myself, I can have no confidence in my ability to continue on to glory once I begin my Christian walk because, as we have noted, the Christian life is a struggle.

But that life, as Paul said, is marked by an ongoing battle between the new man and the old man, between the spiritual self and the sinful flesh that still retains power in our lives (7:13–25). But now we have something added as a gift, namely, the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.

That is, Reformed theologians maintain that the Christian life begins at regeneration, which is the work of the Holy Spirit in quickening us and raising us from a state spiritual death to make us alive in Christ.

Reformed theologians thus use the word monergism or monergistic to describe the process of regeneration. As a result, many people who hear this tend to think that a Reformed perspective teaches that the whole Christian life is monergistic.