Answering the “Once Saved, Always Saved” Argument

In my last article for Catholic Stand, I wrote about an important difference between the way we Catholics and many (but not all) Protestants understand salvation. In a nutshell, Catholics believe that our salvation isn’t assured until we die and get to heaven, but many of our Protestant brothers and sisters say that our salvation is guaranteed once we believe and are justified, even if we persist in serious sin or fall away from the faith entirely.

In that article, I presented some arguments for the Catholic view, and this time, I’d like to look at the other side of the debate. I want to examine some passages that are often used to show that we cannot lose our salvation. When we read them carefully, however, we are going to see that there is more to these texts than meets the eye.

The Gospel of John

Let’s start with a few verses from the Gospel of John:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears my word and believes him who sent me, has eternal life; he does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.” (John 5:24)

“Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst.’” (John 6:35)

The argument here is that, in these passages, Jesus simply presents a one-time act of belief as the requirement for salvation. In the first verse, for example, He tells us that once someone believes in God, they already have “eternal life,” and they will “not come into judgment.” He doesn’t say that they will escape judgment only if they continue believing or if they avoid serious sin. No, He says that once someone believes, they have escaped judgment and have “passed from death to life.”

Similarly, in the second verse, Jesus says that once someone goes to Him and believes in Him, they will “never” hunger or thirst. Again, the implication is that all we need to do is believe in Jesus once, and we will never lack eternal life.

The Original Greek

And on the surface, that is what Jesus seems to be saying. However, as usual, the surface is not good enough. The problem is that we are reading these verses in English, but the original Greek tells a different story.

In these verses (and others like them), the Greek text contains some nuances that we simply can’t replicate in English without turning Jesus’ words into a tortuous and convoluted mess. Translators do their best to make the passages simple and easy to read, but that unfortunately obscures their full meaning. So to really understand what Jesus is saying here, we have to take a little lesson in ancient Greek grammar.

The key phrases in these verses are “he who hears…and believes” and “he who comes….and he who believes.” In English, those could very well refer to one-time events. They could mean that whoever “hears” and “believes” and “comes” just once will be assured salvation, but that is not what the Greek says.

Without getting too technical, suffice it to say that in Greek, these verbs are all in the present tense, and unlike the English present tense, this tense in Greek refers to a continuous action, not something you do just once. If Jesus wanted to refer to a one-time act, He would have used a different tense, called the Aorist tense.

Once we understand the linguistic background, the true meaning of Jesus’ teaching here becomes clear. He is not saying that all we need to do is believe once and then we are good for the rest of eternity. Rather, He is telling us that we have to continue believing in order to be saved. We have to persevere in our faith, and if we do not, we will not receive the eternal life He promises us.

Faith and Obedience

But what about serious sin? Even if we have to persevere in faith, these verses still seem to be saying that all we need to do is believe, so our moral (or immoral) acts are irrelevant. But is that really what Jesus is saying here? Not at all. Take a look at this striking verse:

“He who believes in the Son has eternal life; he who does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God rests upon him.” (John 3:36)

Here, the Gospel of John does something unexpected. Instead of contrasting belief with unbelief, it contrasts belief with disobedience, and that tells us that the book’s concept of belief must go beyond mere intellectual assent. For John, it includes obedience as well.

Consequently, when Jesus says in this Gospel that we have to “believe,” He does not just mean that we have to intellectually accept the facts of His death, resurrection, and lordship over our lives. We also have to act like it by performing the good works He commands. In other words, bare intellectual assent is not enough to get us to heaven.

The Teaching of St. Paul

That was admittedly a bit complicated, so let’s turn now to another Protestant argument, one that will not take us beyond the typical English translations most of us use. It is based on a moving passage from St. Paul:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written,

“For your sake we are being killed all the day long;
we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:35-39)

The Protestant argument here is pretty simple. Paul says that nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord,” so we can never be separated from Him and lose our salvation. Cased closed, right?

What St. Paul Really Said

Not quite. While that explanation may sound convincing at first, it has one fatal flaw: it is not what Paul actually says. If you look at his list of things that can’t separate us from God, they are all external forces. His point is that no matter what we endure or suffer, none of that can separate us from God.

But notice what he does not include: ourselves. He does not say that we can’t separate ourselves from God by our own sins, and that is significant because in another one of his letters, he says in no uncertain terms that we can:

“You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace.” (Galatians 5:4)

In this verse, St. Paul is telling his readers that they have cut themselves off from God by their own sins, so the truth of the matter is clear. When Paul says that nothing can separate us from God, he is only talking about external forces. He is saying that no third party can sever our relationship with God, but that does not mean we cannot do it ourselves.

On the contrary, we are very capable of cutting ourselves off from God through our own sinful acts. Once again, being justified in this life doesn’t guarantee that we will go to heaven when we die.