Christ is your Good Shepherd, and he has given to you eternal life; no one can snatch you from his hand; your salvation is secure and unlost.
One of the questions I frequently hear as a pastor often comes up right when I’ve finished teaching about the doctrine of divine election, or predestination. Having established with Scripture that it is God who calls and elects (Rom. 8:29-30; Eph. 1:4-5) sinners who cannot come to God on their own (1 Cor. 2:14), usually someone raises a very important question: can salvation be lost?
There’s no lack of sincerity in sensing a degree of conflict between Scriptural promises about the security and assurance of salvation in Christ and the very real evidence of our experience that people occasionally walk away from faith. Baptism grants death and resurrection with Christ (Rom. 6:3-7), but most of us know people who have treated their baptism with contempt or indifference. And most of us also know people have simply walked away from faith in Christ altogether.
Especially when such people are your relatives or friends, this is a uniquely vexing problem. Can someone lose their salvation? Can you rightly expect someone who renounces faith in Christ to be welcomed into eternal life?
Some bad answers have been delivered to this question, even by inheritors of the Reformation.
I’ll start with members of my own Lutheran tradition. It is well-known that the Lutheran Confessions retain some sort of doctrine of mortal and venial sin, meaning sins that “lead to death” and those that don’t (1 John 5:16-17). Melanchthon’s Apology puts the matter clearly and simply by asserting that “those who are accounted righteous before God do not live in mortal sin” (Ap IV.48; Tappert, 114). For the Christian, all sins are forgiven; for those without faith, all sins lead to death.
Later Lutherans, reflecting on the distinction of different sins, speculated about the causes of sin. It was common in post-Reformation scholastic theology to distinguish various different causes according to a framework inherited from the philosophy of Aristotle. When applying a framework of causes to the human will after salvation, some of these later Lutherans opened up the possibility that human freedom might have some power to turn aside from God’s grace and embrace sin to the extent that salvation can be lost––if you try hard enough.
The problem with doing this is that it puts Christians in the position of inspecting their own choices and inclinations to define the level of “willingness” they have applied to their own sins. Should you prove too willing, then you might have reason to suspect that the Holy Spirit has departed, and that you’ve been cut off from salvation.
One post-Reformation Lutheran puts it this way: “A mortal sin is that by which the regenerate, having been overcome by the flesh, and thus not remaining in a regenerate state, transgress the divine Law by a deliberate purpose of the will, contrary to the dictates of conscience, and thereby lose saving faith, reject the gracious influence of the Holy Spirit, and cast themselves into a state of wrath, death, and condemnation” (Schmid, 254).
The main problem here is the danger of self-examination as the route to assurance: if you can simply know yourself well enough, then you can be assured that you haven’t committed such a sin with death-dealing willingness. But if you remain uncertain about yourself, you also remain uncertain whether you stand under the law or under God’s grace.
Both Lutheran and Reformed theology, at least after the Reformation, attempted to solve the problem of apostasy by theorizing either that salvation can be lost or that it cannot.
A similar problem attends the Reformed tradition and its answer to the question of whether salvation can be lost. I’ll steelman their answer as best I can: because election is unconditional and predestination is an eternal decision of God, those whom he justifies in time can look to the fruit of faith as evidence of salvation. Good works then serve to authenticate your election––as even the New Testament might imply (see 2 Pet 1:10), although I would argue this is a more accurate way to look at such passages.
When someone walks away from the faith, either through indifference or renunciation of Christ, the logical conclusion to draw is that such a person was never justified to begin with. He or she only had the appearance of faith and its fruits. This further undermines confidence for struggling Christians, because you’re then cast upon your struggle against sin.
You might rightly suspect you have false faith and will one day fall away if you fail to fight hard enough. As one Reformed writer once put, “Be killing sin, or sin will be killing you.” But how can I know I’m killing sin enough? Surely, the Christian faith is a battle of righteousness against unrighteousness in the bodies of Christians. But if you’re wholly responsible for the conduct of battle, there’s no certainty you’ll win––and plenty of reasons to think you’ll lose.
The problem with both alternatives (though there are worse ones), is that they resort to theory and contemplation. Both Lutheran and Reformed theology, at least after the Reformation, attempted to solve the problem of apostasy by theorizing either that salvation can be lost or that it cannot. Both then offer the same solution to struggling Christians. In the case of some Lutherans, self-reflection can vindicate your salvation by revealing that you were sufficiently unwilling when you happened to sin. For the Reformed, the fruits of faith in good works vindicate your salvation since these fruits are only evident in the elect.
For both schemes, the theory puts you in the position of having to take a general truth and apply it to yourself. But sinners being what they are, you can never be quite sure.
A much better, and more biblical, way of dealing with whether salvation can be lost is to turn to the one who cannot be doubted. Scripture teaches that God cannot lie (Num. 23:19; Titus 1:2; Heb. 6:18). So when God speaks his word of promise, truth, and faithfulness to you, it cannot be doubted, but only believed. Such truth isn’t something to think about, ruminate over, or reflect on. It’s an object of faith that trusts God alone.
With Christ’s sure word of promise, any doubt about salvation is dispelled, being replaced by faith––which is what Christ’s word gives.
Much better, then, to deal with the issue of lost faith in the way Jesus does. When disputing with the Jews in the temple, Jesus speaks of himself as the Good Shepherd. There, he attacks the faithlessness of his opponents. But when speaking of his sheep, those he has called, he speaks differently: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand” (John 10:27-28).
It's in this way you speak to those who fear their salvation has been lost: Christ is your Good Shepherd, and he has given to you eternal life; no one can snatch you from his hand; your salvation is secure and unlost; nothing you have done or could do will remove you from Christ, since you belong to him.
Now you can dispense with the theorizing, reflection, and fruit checking. With Christ’s sure word of promise, any doubt about salvation is dispelled, being replaced by faith––which is what Christ’s word gives. Should you find unfaith, lost faith, forgotten faith, or indifferent faith, the remedy is the same: give the gospel, the power of God for salvation, and leave the rest to the Holy Spirit.
