Trent Horn answers the question most often debated by Protestants and Catholics: Can Christians lose their salvation? Although the belief that Christians can lose their salvation was held for the first 1500 years of the Church’s history, many non-Catholics challenge this idea. Trent Horn explains the difference between losing salvation and never being saved in God’s eyes.
Transcript:
The mainstream belief in Christianity for 1500 years was that it is possible for someone to come into communion with Christ in his church, to be saved, to be spiritually regenerate, and then to forsake his salvation. And that’s something that many Protestants have believed even after the Reformation. Martin Luther believed it. It’s something more that you find among Calvinists and reformed circles, this idea of eternal security.
And so a problem that arises for someone who defends eternal security, who says that a true Christian will never lose his salvation is what do you do when you have someone who appears to be a true Christian, who appears to be saved, who then leaves the Christian faith, becomes an apostate and dies and is unrepentant? How do you explain that?
It seems like a true Christian lost their faith. And the explanation I usually hear is, “Oh, well, they were never really saved to begin with.” I think the essence of the question is saying, is there really a difference between a person losing their salvation and never having been saved in the first place? Well, in one sense there isn’t a difference because someone who was never saved and someone who has forsaken their salvation will end up in the same place they will be apart from God for all eternity.
Though there may be differences about them, for example, there can be people in hell who have indelible spiritual marks on their souls. The marks left by baptism or the marks left by holy orders, for example, if they chose to reject God’s gift to salvation even after receiving it. So in one sense, like when you think about from God’s perspective, right, God has a timeless perspective.
God sees every moment at once. He has the perfect simultaneous possession of unending life. That’s what God’s eternity is. So in one sense, he sees both of these kinds of people; they will end up with the same eternal fate. But on the other hand, there’s certainly a difference from God’s perspective, because God in his omniscience knows that some of these people were given grace and rejected it, and others did not.
This goes back to the parable – remember the parable that Jesus tells about the sower and the seeds, right? You have someone who scatters seeds abundantly throughout the field. Some of them will land on hard ground and be picked up. Others will land in shallow soil, and they’ll sprout up. But then they’ll wilt under the sun. So you have some people who will never accept the gift of salvation.
You have others who will accept it, they’ll grow in their faith, but they’ll have a shallow foundation and they’ll. They’ll wilt in the sun. Or the other part of the parable says they’ll be choked by the weeds, by the temptations of this life. So on the one hand, there isn’t as much of a difference. Those two individuals will have the same eternal fate.
But the other God certainly knows that some of them were that his adopted sons and daughters, and that they tragically made shipwrecks of their faith, as St Paul’s says in 1 Timothy 1:19, I believe. He talks about how there are those who have made a shipwreck of their faith. And so that’s something we must always be concerned about.