Once saved always saved?

The girl whom I talked to after the evangelical meeting in my China trip asked me repeatedly, "Am I going to heaven if I believe in Jesus?" As I have said in the previous post, it seemed to me that the only reason she wanted to believe is to get the ticket to heaven. Another thing that bugs me is how we should respond to her. Of course, I know the "official" evangelical answer, but is that the best way to deal with this? Then I read this from the internetmonk today.

(It's quite long, I'm sure many of my friends won't read something this long in English, so I have tried to summarise this and highlighted some points in red in case you don't want to read the excerpt.)

...In a recent podcast contrasting evangelical (Shea is a convert to the RCC) and Roman Catholic views on spiritual security and assurance, Shea made a unique comment about a common area of disagreement... “I became more secure in my relationship with God once I was no longer certain I was going to heaven.”

Shea is skewering the common conception that evangelicals believe in easy salvation with instant assurance, but produce millions of believers who get “saved and resaved” with regularity or care so little about the possibility of hell that they never consider actually following Christ. It’s a bit of a caricature, but it’s also based in some truth. Many conservative evangelicals make it difficult to discuss the topic reasonably because they prefer to run to extremes that aren’t helpful to anyone except people wanting to make stupendous numerical claims for their evangelism.

Let’s talk about the evangelical doctrine of assurance for a moment. It’s one of my favorite topics- having spent many hours wrestling with the Bible and Methodist friends over the question- and it is one of the most misunderstood, distorted and pastorally damaging of evangelical teachings.

First of all, what are we talking about? Most usually, we seem to be discussing “Can I know for certain now that I am going to heaven?” Some call the subject “assurance of salvation,” but that gets into the area of what a person feels at a given point and not into God’s work of salvation itself. Most Protestants call this subject “perseverance,” and by that they mean that quality of faith that continues through life to heaven.

On that question of “Can you know that you know that you know?” I’ve heard at least a thousand Baptist preachers shout “Yes!” based on what we grew up calling “once saved always saved.” “Real Baptists” tend to like OSAS, while more reformation influenced Baptists prefer perseverance, but all of them agree that the elect, the people of God individually, those who belong to Jesus, persevere to the end, do not finally fall away and cannot lose this salvation.

Of course, many Protestants, following, but going far beyond, John Wesley, believe that Christians may, at any moment, move into a state of unbelief, and therefore into a loss of salvation which must be recovered. Depending on the group one is dealing with, this may take the form of only losing salvation through actual, explicit rejection of the faith- apostasy- or go all the way to the views of some Holiness groups that there isn’t enough security in the Gospel to last out the morning worship service. “Born again….and again….and again….and…” is not a joke.

The strength of the doctrine of eternal security is that struggling, failing Christians hear the good news that God is on their side and has not abandoned them. Pastorally, it is a powerful doctrine, and when you work with young Christians, it is important. They are frequently overwhelmed with guilt and failure, and without a strong, Biblical promise that those stumblings and departures from obedience have not disqualified them from God’s gift of salvation. Christians that haunt young disciples with the threat of a God who will abandon or give up on them do little good, despite good intentions. Fear of hell produces something entirely different from transforming grace.

In terms of language, eternal security and perseverance are preferable to the deceptive and misleading “once saved, always saved,” a phrase explicitly tied to certain evangelical evangelistic practices, like the “praying the sinners pray.” OSAS is not the view of any mainstream, historic Baptist doctrinal statement. For example, here’s part of the Baptist Faith and Message Statement 2000 on God’s Purpose In Grace.

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. Believers may fall into sin through neglect and temptation, whereby they grieve the Spirit, impair their graces and comforts, and bring reproach on the cause of Christ and temporal judgments on themselves; yet they shall be kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation.

Many who reject eternal security ridicule the idea that those persons who lived as Christians in some respect, but don’t finally go to heaven, were, in fact, not ever “true” or “real” believers...

The language of the Baptist Faith and Message says that being a Christian and beginning to be a Christian are not the same thing. That’s the problem with “once saved always saved.” Christians are marked by perseverance, not just beginnings. Perseverance in what? Not in sinlessness, but perseverance in imperfect faith in Christ and imperfect obedience to Christ. We can say that “those with true faith” persevere to the end, despite certain failures in faith along the way...

What this means is that we have to have a way to talk about assurance in the present, and in the future. In both cases, we need to talk about the faith and the promises of God. In both cases, we need to retain Biblical realism about the importance of perseverance. (The Bible is never as anxious to pronounce an individual beyond apostasy and certain for heaven as some evangelicals are.)

...In their 2001 book The Race Set Before Us: A Biblical Theology of Preserverance and Assurance, Thomas R. Schreiner and Ardel B. Canneday, both Baptist Biblical scholars, suggest that there are other choices. Their book presents a full view that salvation is always past, present and future, the many warnings and commands of scripture work exactly as their were meant to work, providing the path of past, present and future faith a disciple travels to a completed salvation.

In other words, “once saved, always saved” isn’t the confessional Baptist view, and doesn’t need to be the view against which other Christians react. At the same time, Baptists and other evangelicals could do much to end the abuses of invitationalism, stop the pragmatic pronouncements of automatic salvation to anyone who makes a profession and stress things like Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, church membership with integrity, public worship, growth in grace, etc. that mark the life of the true believer. Defending the salvation of those who have no part in the people of God or desire to walk in the way of discipleship isn’t ever wise. We don’t undermine anyone’s assurance by saying “This is the road we’re walking.” We increase assurance and make the discussion and supposed appeal of “losing” salvation less likely.