Theology for Today

IS BELIEF IN ETERNAL SECURITY NECESSARY FOR JUSTIFICATION?

 by: David R. Anderson, PhD

Introduction

“Has anyone ever taken a Bible and shown you how you can know for sure that if you died today you would go to heaven?” This is one of the opening questions utilized by EvanTell Ministries to present the gospel. I believe it is an excellent question. In fact, at the outset of this discussion let me clearly state that I believe the best way to present the gospel is with a statement concerning one’s assurance of salvation. I have been training people that way for decades, and our church has been a poster church for utilizing EvanTell materials in our evangelistic training. So I believe opening a gospel presentation with the issue of assurance and ending the presentation with the same is the very best way to evangelize. For me, that is not the question. The question is whether that is the only way. Must the issue of assurance be addressed in order to lead someone to Christ? And a corollary question might be, must one believe in eternal security to be justified?

Someone will say, “Wait a minute, you just changed the discussion midstream. Assurance of salvation and eternal security are not necessarily the same.” And I would agree. But in recent months the discussions on justification I have overheard have morphed from “assurance is of the essence of faith” to “belief in eternal security is a sine qua non of justification.”[1] At a recent conference I attended a question was asked after a statement. The statement was, “I trusted Christ as my Savior and asked forgiveness for all my sins four years before I came to believe in eternal security.” The follow-up question was, “When was I justified?” The answer? “When you believed in eternal security.”

So in this paper I wish to address the issue of eternal security in its relationship to justification head on; then, I think a distinction needs to be made between giving someone assurance of his salvation and leading him to believe in eternal security. First of all, the teaching that one must believe in eternal security to be justified will be addressed. I am suggesting that this teaching is based on Insufficient Historical Theology, Insufficient Biblical Theology, and, therefore, Insufficient Systematic Theology (since Biblical Theology + Historical Theology = Systematic Theology).

Insufficient Historical Theology

The real issue in eternal security is what happens to our sins after we have trusted in Christ as Savior. It seems the post-apostolic church saw water baptism as the laver of regeneration which covered all sins leading up to water baptism. Post-baptismal sins were another question. They were to be handled by confession, contrition, and penance. Improper dealing with post-baptismal sins led to loss of salvation.

Thomas F. Torrance did a dissertation for Basel entitled “The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers.” It was his claim that the doctrine of grace was lost after the apostles, not to be reclaimed until the Reformation. Although he tends to lump all the apostolic fathers together and makes too many generalizations, a case could be made that none of the fathers addressed the issue of eternal security or assurance of salvation. Au contraire, most of them taught against these doctrines.

2 Clement, for example, tells us that if we don’t keep our baptism pure and undefiled, we will not enter the kingdom of God (6.9), and salvation “in the end” comes only to those who practice righteousness (19.3). The Epistle to Barnabas certainly did not teach any kind of assurance. This writer tells us that we are “hoping to be saved” (1.3). No one can take the attitude that he was “already justified” (4.10). If faith makes one a new creature, works keep him in the kingdom:

Each person will receive according to what he has done: if he is good, his righteousness will precede him; if he is evil, the wages of doing evil will go before him. Let us never fall asleep in our sins, as if being “called” was an excuse to rest, lest the evil ruler gain power over us and thrust us out of the kingdom of the Lord (4.12, 13).

As we work our way through the church fathers to Augustine nothing changes with regard to their view of post-baptismal sins, and Augustine did nothing to clear the murky waters. Of course, he never taught assurance of one’s salvation in this life or eternal security, and his justification was not viewed as a change of one’s standing before God (forensic), but a progressive change of one’s condition on earth. The elect would not be identified until physical death. Augustine became the summa pater of Western Christianity. His teachings, after some initial resistance, won the day in the West and were not contradicted until the Reformation. It was the Reformers who introduced the concept of all sins (past, present, and future) being dealt with at the cross, meaning at the time of initial faith in Christ. And even this forensic understanding of justification did not come all at once in a news flash. Luther first understood the righteousness of Christ as something external to the believer which God puts around the new believer like a cloak in 1516. It was not until ten or more years later that Melanchthon developed the forensic view of a declaration of righteousness pronounced in the courtroom of heaven. As Alister McGrath points out:

In his earlier phase, around the years 1515–19, Luther tended to understand justification as a process of becoming, in which the sinner was gradually conformed to the likeness of Jesus Christ through a process of internal renewal. In his later writings, however, dating from the mid-1530s and beyond, perhaps under the influence of Melanchthon’s more forensic approach to justification, Luther tended to treat justification as a matter of being declared to be righteous, rather than a process of becoming righteous. Increasingly, he came to see justification as an event, which was complemented by the distinct process of regeneration and interior renewal through the action of the Holy Spirit. Justification alters the outer status of the sinner in the sight of God (coram Deo), while regeneration alters the sinner’s inner nature.[2]

These men, the Reformers, were the pioneers (post Paul) in this concept of forgiveness of future sins, an absolute necessity if one is to believe in eternal security. And it dawned on them rather slowly. But here is the point. If God is building His church and the gates of hell cannot prevail against it, then there had to be a witness from AD 100 to AD 1500. In other words, there had to be genuine, born-again people living through-out this era. But we have no written record (help me if I am wrong) of anyone teaching forgiveness of post-baptismal sins once and for all at a point of faith in Christ. Hence, none of them taught eternal security or assurance of salvation.  If either of these doctrines or even both of them was/were required for justification, then we could say that none of the writers during these centuries between the Apostles and the Reformation was justified. One might claim that born-again people existed during these centuries, but they came in under the written radar. This is an argument from silence. Yet God continued to build His church, and that organism is comprised of only people baptized by the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 12:13), that is, born-again people. But did any of them believe in eternal security or assurance of salvation? Perhaps so, but there is no written record of which I am aware. To say that the people born-again during this era had assurance at the moment of regenerating faith but lost it later due to bad teaching is another argument from silence. So, unless Christ built His church on an organization of unbelievers, I would conclude that the teaching that belief in eternal security as a requirement for justification is based on insufficient historical theology. The Church flourished. Yet there is no record of anyone who believed in eternal security or had assurance of his salvation. Are we really ready to say that all the people of whom we have a written record between the Apostles and the Reformers went to hell? The Historical Theology which would claim such is both inconsistent and insufficient. But more than just the Historical Theology behind this position is insufficient; so is the Biblical Theology…

[1] Now, March 22, 2007, the terms have changed twice again: 1) Jesus is the guarantor of eternal life = eternal security; and 2) Justification is irrevocable = eternal security. It’s hard to hit a moving target. The first nuance just stated shifts the discussion to what one understands about the word “guarantor” or “guarantees.” The second statement is merely a substitution of terms. Anyone who believes in eternal security believes that justification is irrevocable. But now the question is whether one must believe that justification is irrevocable to be justified. This study will stick with that which is in print, ie, an unregenerate person must believe in eternal security to be justified.

[2] Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), 444.

Serving Him with you until He comes for us,
Fred Chay, PhD
Managing Editor, Grace Theology Press