Protestantism’s Most Unhistorical Doctrine

Welcome to the Council of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

Some Protestants say they’re recovering the doctrine of the early church. But there’s one doctrine many of them believe in that makes me doubt they really want the faith of the early church. Welcome to the Council of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist Trent Horn. And today, I want to talk about the most unhistorical Protestant doctrine. But before I reveal which doctrine that is, I hope you will universally embrace liking this video, subscribing to this channel, and supporting us at trenthornpodcast.com. Our goal is to reach 100,000 subscribers by the end of the year, so if you could click the subscribe button to help us out, I would greatly appreciate that.

All right. So as I said, the motivation for today’s episode are claims from Protestant apologists who say that they aren’t introducing novel teachings into the church. They claim they’re recovering the truth faith of the church fathers. For example, Kenneth Collins and Jerry Walls write in their book Roman But Not Catholic, “If no significant theological changes had been made after the Council of Chalcedon in 451, some of which affected how the good news of the gospel was understood by both clergy and laity alike, then the Protestant theological traditions would never have likely emerged. The Reformation would not have happened simply because there would have been little to reform.” And Gavin Ortlund recently put out a video that makes this claim.

Protestantism has a more realistic and compelling relation to church history. Cardinal Newman famously said, “To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.” And to be sure, many contemporary Protestants do have a shallow historical consciousness. But Protestantism as such was nothing other than an effort of historical retrieval. The magisterial reformers appealed to the church fathers just as much, and sometimes more, than they appealed to Scripture to oppose what they saw as the novel accretions and innovations of the medieval West.

John Calvin wrote the following in a 1539 letter to Cardinal Sadoleto. “You know, Sadoleto, not only that our agreement with antiquity is far closer than yours, but that all we have attempted has been to renew the ancient form of the church.” If this is true, then we’d expect one popular doctrine among Protestants to be found among the church fathers. Or really, any prominent Christian before the Reformation in the 16th century. And that’s the doctrine of eternal security, also known as perseverance of the saints or assurance. Basically, it’s the view that a true Christian cannot lose his salvation. The Synod of Dort said that, “True believers, those who’ve been regenerated by the Holy Spirit, will still sin. But God preserves them in the incorruptible seed of regeneration from perishing, or being totally lost.”

Edwin Palmer summarizes the doctrine this way. “The person who sincerely puts his trust in Christ as his savior is safe in the arms of Jesus. He is secure. No one can hurt him. He will go to Heaven. And this is for eternity. He is secure for all time, not just for a little while. He is eternally secure.” Now the Council of Trent in the 16th century spoke of that great gift of perseverance given to those who are destined to spend eternity with God. Catholics and Protestants agree that anyone who goes to Heaven does so because they’ve cooperated with God’s grace, and that grace has preserved them from being lost. That’s why the catechism says, “The saints have always had a lively awareness that their merits were pure grace.”

So while it’s true, indeed trivially so, that all Christians who are predestined to Heaven will go to Heaven, it is not true that every Christian is predestined to eternal life with God in Heaven. That’s because God may, through His grace, lead some people to initial salvation where they become regenerate, they become true Christians, but God then allows them to fall away and remain unrepentant until death, which would result in damnation. Now disclaimer alert … Not all Protestants believe in eternal security. Lutherans, for example, follow Martin Luther’s view that salvation by faith alone can be lost if a person abandons the faith. Methodists and other Protestants likewise reject eternal security. But many other Protestants accept this doctrine.

If it was possible to disqualify myself from salvation, I would get disqualified. I can’t save myself, and I can’t keep myself saved.

To suggest that you can lose your salvation would be to deny that the word eternal means permanent.

I’m a Christian, and I’m saved and I’m on my way to Heaven when I die. Now there’s a possibility that I could mess this thing up, but I haven’t. You probably just did.

As big of a doofus as I can be, even when I sin in bad ways, Jesus still has you. You have eternal life.

Personally, I think the rapture, which I have a whole video on if you want to check it out, is even more unhistorical than eternal security. But because eternal security has to do with salvation, it’s a more central doctrine. So it’s fair to focus on it and call it a Protestant doctrine because many Protestants accept it, even though it’s completely unhistorical. But in order to show it’s unhistorical, we need to distinguish between two kinds of eternal security. The first has been called Once Saved Always Saved, or Free Grace Theology. Defenders of Free Grace Theology say the only thing necessary for salvation is faith. Good works are not necessary, even as proof of faith. Once you’re saved, no sin, not even permanent apostacy, can cause you to lose salvation.

The other view is called Perseverance of the Saints. It’s also associated with lordship salvation. It says if a Christian permanently abandons the faith, that would only prove he was never saved in the first place. In order to have assurance, a Christian must submit to Christ as Lord. The good works that follow don’t cause you to be saved, but the works are proof that you are saved and that you cannot lose your salvation. But both of these views are virtually absent from church history before the reformation, and each side admits this. Let’s start with Free Grace advocate, Wilkin, who says the following: “There is no time requirement on saving faith. Even if a person believes only for a while, he still has eternal life.”

In response to the claim that faith without works is dead, as James chapter 2 says, Zane Hodges claims that, “This does prove that the person’s faith is now dead. But if it’s dead now, it was once alive at some point. And you can’t lose salvation as long as you had a living faith at one point.” He writes, “There is absolutely nothing to suggest that James believed that if a man’s faith is pronounced dead, it must therefore always have been dead.” In a debate with Wilkin in 2005 on Free Grace theology, James White, who defends Perseverance of the Saints over Free Grace theology, was not having any of this kind of interpretation of James 2.

Even so faith, if it has not works, is dead. And there is actually some people who’ve said, “Yeah. Well, if it’s dead, it must have been alive once.” Really? That’s what James’ point is here. That’s what James is trying to exhort people to.

10 years later in a 2015 video, White reflected on their debate and said that the Free Grace view of James 2 and eternal security was never held before the modern period.

Our foundation, the bedrock is it’s not some surface-level, get your ticket punched, go off, do whatever you want. That is so far removed from anything in the New Testament that … Until the modern period, I can’t think of anyone who ever believed it. I can’t think of anybody who ever believed it.

The Protestant scholar, D.A. Carson, reaches a similar conclusion and said of the Free Grace interpretation of James 2, “Not one significant interpreter of Scripture in the entire history of the church has held the Hodges interpretation of the passage he treats. That does not mean that Hodges is wrong, but it certainly means he is probably wrong. Even those who defend Free Grace theology admit it was unknown in the early church. Wilkin writes, “The first generation after the apostles distorted the good news which the apostles had entrusted to their care. The reformers looked back to Christ and the apostles rather than the church fathers for their view of salvific repentance and the gospel.”

Kenneth Yates is another Free Grace theologian who admits that his view was unknown in church history. But he says this is also a problem for eternal security advocates like James White, who say if you just live the right way, this proves you have a faith that can never be lost. Because he says this view was also unknown in church history. Yates calls is lordship salvation and says the following: “The gospel as understood by lordship salvation proponents is not found in the extent writings of the early church. The same charge they direct towards free grace teachers can be charged to them. If the view argued above that a free grace understanding of the gospel existed in the church is an argument from silence, then the same is true of a lordship understanding. In fact, the same could be said about any gospel that claims justification is by faith alone and Christ alone or that teaches salvation cannot be lost.”

On his Alpha and Omega blog, James White quotes the Dutch reformed theologian, Louis Berkhof, who says, “There are comparatively few Christians today who really glory in the assurance of salvation.” Burkhof sees the issue was a very important one to Christian life and practice, one we should be glorying more. But he also admits the doctrine was not believed in the early church. He writes, “It would be unreasonable to look for a common, definite, well-integrated, and fully developed view of the application of the work of redemption in the earliest church fathers. Their representations are naturally rather indefinite, imperfect, and incomplete, and sometimes even erroneous and self-contradictory.”

Says the Lutheran theologian Karl [inaudible 00:10:24], “It stands as an assured fact, a fact knowing no exceptions, and acknowledged by all well-versed in the matter that all of the pre-Augustinian fathers taught that in the appropriation of salvation, there is a coworking of freedom and grace.” Berkhof continues, “In spite of all their emphasis on the grace of God and on faith as the appropriating organ of salvation, the early fathers reveal a moralism that is not in harmony with the Pauline doctrine of salvation.” Other defenders of the kind of eternal security that James white defends are equally candid about its absence in church history. The 20th century Calvinist author Loraine Boettner says of the church fathers that, “They, of course, taught that salvation was through Christ. Yet they assumed that man had full power to accept or reject the gospel.”

Peter Lillback, the president of the Protestant Westminster Seminary, says, “The evidence is clear. Eternal security was not a doctrine that was carefully considered by the uninspired founding fathers of our Christian tradition. It is hard to believe, but in over 5000 pages of the Anti-Nicene writings, John 3:16 is only cited twice. There are elements of the church fathers that can be viewed as moving away from grace toward what N.T. Wright has termed an early Catholicism.” In a debate with James White on predestination, Jimmy Akin said the following that relates to the doctrine of eternal security.

It was Calvin who first denied the historic Christian teaching that a true Christian can fall. Check that out for yourself. I did. I searched multiple books and called half a dozen Calvinist seminaries talking to their systematic theology and church history professors, and no one could name anyone before Calvin who taught this thesis. This is a problem even for those who claim to take their teachings exclusively from Scripture, for how could a doctrine this important, if true, remain completely undiscovered for the first 1500 years of Christian history? Other important doctrines have always been known through Christian history. Christians always knew, even when heretics denied it, that Jesus Christ was God.

So it turns out that when Christians never knew that a true Christian can fall away and then suddenly, a millennium and a half later, someone starts claiming it, one has to ask, “Who’s passing on the teachings of the apostles, and who is teaching the novel heresy?” To put it bluntly, how on earth could God in Heaven fail to let the true Christians of three-quarters of church history know that they could never all away? How could He let them believe that they could fall away and be damned if it wasn’t true? This is an unambiguously black mark, a big black mark against the hypothesis.

White did not rebut Akin’s claim by trying to show someone in church history held his view. In my debate with White on the same subject, I made the same point Jimmy did. And white did, in this case, offer one example of someone who allegedly held his view, sort of.

Unknown for 1500 years … Well, I really don’t want to take the time to read all of this, but maybe at a later point in the debate, I will take the time. But I would like to direct you not only to some of the earliest writings of someone like the disciple who wrote to Diognetus and his acceptance of the concept of the imputation of the righteousness of Christ and stuff. But I’ll just right now refer you to the writings of Fulgentius, the bishop of Ruspe between 467 and 532, for a number of statements. He was a very Augustinian theologian who very clearly enunciated the very same things that I would read to you. And maybe, as I said, later on in the debate, I’ll have time to be able to read those things to you.

We’ll get to Fulgentius later, but this brings me to the next reason to doubt that eternal security was part of the faith of the early church. Not only is it absent from the church fathers, you have many church fathers teaching the opposite view or warning of the real possibility of believers being able to lose their salvation through grave sin. Here is a few examples. “As many [inaudible 00:14:37] in the exercise of repentance return into the unity of the church, these, too, shall belong to God that they may live according to Jesus Christ. Do not err, my brethren. If any many follows him that makes a schism in the church, he shall not inherit the kingdom of God.” Saint Ignatius of Antioch.

“And I hold further that such as have confessed and known this man to be Christ, yet who have gone back from some cause to the legal dispensation and have denied that this man is Christ and have repented not before death, shall by no means be saved.” Saint Justin Martyr. “Those who do not obey him, being disinherited by him, have ceased to be his sons. Wherefore, they cannot receive his inheritance.” Saint Irenaeus. “For do not many afterward fall out of grace? Is not this gift taken away from many?” Tertullian. “Yet to whom that is born and dies, is there not a necessity at some time to leave his country and to suffer the loss of his estate? But let not Christ be forsaken so that the loss of salvation and of an eternal home should be feared.” Saint Cyprian.

“He who sins after his baptism, unless he repent and forsake his sins, shall be condemned to hellfire.” [inaudible 00:15:50]. Finally, what about Saint Augustine? Some defenders of eternal security try to say that the doctor of grace believed true Christians could never lose their salvation. But Augustine recognizes there are true Christians who do not persevere. He says of them that, “If, being already regenerate and justified, a believer relapses of his own will into an evil life, assuredly, he cannot say, ‘I have not received.’ Because of his own free choice to evil, he has lost the grace of God that he had received.” According to the Calvinist Biblical scholar John Jefferson Davis, Augustine believed that one’s justification and baptismal regeneration could be rejected and lost through sin and unbelief.

As I noted earlier, God can predestine someone for final salvation with Him in Heaven or just for initial salvation where they become Christian and then later fall away. This corresponds to the parable of the sower where Jesus says some seeds fell on rocky ground where they had not much soil. And immediately, they sprang up since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched, and since they had no root, they withered away. So when Fulgentius says, “God also knows in advance the number of the elect. No one of that full number may lose his eternal grace, nor many any outside that total obtain the gift of eternal salvation,” that’s true. All those who are predestined to Heaven, to Heaven they will go. But not everyone is predestined to final salvation since God allows some people to receive the gift of faith, but not the gift of perseverance.

Rebecca Harden writes in her book Divine Grace and Human Agency: A Study of the Semi-Pelagian Controversy, “In this insistence on the unfailing character of the operation of grace, Fulgentius does not appear to have taken into account the case of those who are called to faith and then allowed to fall away.” Now we should be careful on how we phrase the existence of eternal security throughout church history. My claim is that no prominent Christian held this view. You could also say it was virtually unknown in church history. That’s because there may have been some Christians who believe this. Saint Augustine seems to be referring to people like this in the following passage.

He writes, “There are others who promise this deliverance from eternal punishment not indeed to all men, but only to those who have been washed in Christian baptism and have become partakers of the body of Christ, no matter how they have lived or what heresy or impiety they have fallen into. Though they have afterwards lapsed into some heresy or even into heathenism and idolatry, yet by virtue of this one thing, that they have received the baptism of Christ and eaten the body of Christ and the body of Christ, that is to say in the Catholic church, they shall not die eternally, but at one time or other, obtain eternal life. And all that wickedness of theirs shall not avail to make their punishment eternal, but only proportionately long and severe.” This view is also attributed to fourth century former monk named Jovinian, who also denied other doctrines like Mary’s perpetual virginity, and had mistaken views about baptism and the nature of the church.

But we don’t have many of his writings, so it’s hard to tell. So we should just be careful to not say this was completely unknown in the church prior to Calvin. And I may have mistakenly summarized it that way in the past. But I do think we can say no prominent Christian held this view, though a few examples have put forward. Some Protestant apologists quote the following from the Protestant church historian and scholar J.N.D. Kelly. He writes, “We find Ambrosiaster teaching that while the really wicked will be tormented with everlasting punishment, the chastisement of Christian sinners will be of a temporary duration.” Jerome develops the same distinction, stating that, “While the devil and the impious who have denied God will be tortured without remission, those who have trusted in Christ, even if they have sinned and fallen away, will eventually be saved. Much the same teaching appears in Ambrose, developed in greater detail.”

Ambrosiaster was a fourth century writer who was often confused for Saint Ambrose. Kelly may be referring to a passage where he writes, “Those who appear to believe, yet do not persevere in the faith, are not chosen by God because whoever God chooses will persevere.” But this could just mean they weren’t chosen for final salvation. God could still choose people or allow them to come to initial salvation and fall away. He writes in his commentary on Romans, “Those who seek eternal life are not merely those who believe correctly, but those who live correctly, as well, which shows that our actions have a role in our salvation and a lack of action can lead to a lack of salvation.” Saint Jerome said, “He who with all his spirit has placed his faith in Christ, even if he die in sin, shall by his faith live forever.”

There are other passages in the fathers that describe how Christians will not perish, but they will be purified after death. And this is basically Purgatory. But the fact that sinful Christians would be saved did not mean there were not sins that could cause people to lose their communion with Christ entirely and no longer be a Christian, like a sin like apostacy. Jerome even said, “Do not fancy your faith in Christ to be a reason for parting from her. For God hath called us in peace. Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but the keeping of the commandments of God. Neither celibacy nor wedlock is of the slightest use without works, since even faith, the distinguishing mark of Christians, if it hath not works, is said to be dead.” Likewise, Saint Ambrose rebuked the Novation heretics, who said some sins like apostacy were so grave, the church could not offer forgiveness to sinners.

Ambrose said this contradicted God’s mercy and the church’s power. He writes, “The office of the priest is a gift of the Holy Spirit. And his right it is specially to forgive and to retain sins. How then can they claim His gift who distrusts His power and His right? Why do you baptize if sins cannot be remitted by man? If baptism is certainly the remission of all sins, what difference does it make whether a priest claim that this power is given to them in penance or at the baptismal fount? In each, the mystery is one. But you say that the grace of the mysteries works in the baptismal fount. What works then in penance? Does not the name of God do the work?”

In other words, if Christians can’t lose their salvation, why are their priests ready to forgive their sin and readmit them to the church? Why is there even a way to have sins remitted after baptism or faith if salvation can’t be lost? Instead, Saint Ambrose says, “He calls each blessed, both him whose sins are remitted by the baptismal fount and him whose sin is covered by good works.” So what does all this show? First, it shows that for many Protestants, sola scriptura is really just solo scriptura. What I mean is that Protestants often say sola scriptura does not mean the Bible is the only rule of faith. They say the Bible is the only infallible rule of faith. But other rules, like tradition and church history, have their place, except when the historical evidence is overwhelmingly against a doctrine they’re convinced is in Scripture. Then they say history doesn’t matter. All that matters is what the Bible says. Solo scriptura.

One popular defense of eternal security even says this. “Just because false teachers can show a long chain of their doctrine throughout church history, don’t let their claims of ancient tradition or citing of church fathers move you in the least. You stand secure on the solid ground of holy Scripture.” Second, this doctrine cuts against the claim the Bible is perspicuous, or clear in the essential things it teaches. Even many Protestants, like major figures including Martin Luther and John Wesley, denied this doctrine. How could the Bible clearly teach a doctrine like eternal security when major Protestant traditions reject it? So what’s more likely? The apostles taught eternal security and the church immediately lost this truth and taught the opposite of it for centuries until the truth was rediscovered 1500 years later? Or that the apostles never taught it at all and it only exists in church history in the errant opinions of a handful of relatively unknown heretics?

I won’t make you work. The latter is more likely, not the former. Ultimately, Protestants can’t say they want to both restore the doctrines of the early church and teach that salvation can’t be lost. Because even Protestant scholars admit this doctrine was not a part of the early church. In fact, the opposite belief was affirmed among the early church fathers. Of course, as I said, not all Protestants hold to this doctrine. But I intend to do a similar comparison of the historic testimony for sola fide, or justification by faith alone, in a future episode. Until then, thank you all so much for watching, and I hope you have a very blessed day.

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