At issue is whether a person who has been justified and saved by grace can, at some later point, “fall from grace” through willful sin and rebellion.
Biblically speaking, the case seems clear. Of course people can fall from grace. Concern over falling away and turning back, failing to endure and persevere, sits behind the whole narrative of Scripture, Old Testament and New. From Israel wanting to return to Egypt after the Exodus, to the exhortation in Revelation to return to your first love or have your lampstand removed from the presence of the Lord, the theme is pervasive. The book of Hebrews makes it all quite plain:
For it is impossible, in the case of those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, to restore them again to repentance, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding him up to contempt. (Hebrews 6:4–6)
Set aside, for a moment, the “impossibility” of restoration described here. (I am with Jesus on this one. With humans it is impossible, but with God all things are possible.) The situation clearly presumes a person falling from grace. And it is precisely this possibility that drives the pastoral urgency of Hebrews: “Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees.” I could pile on many other examples here.
But Calvinists have their own pastoral concerns. Specifically, if faith can be “lost,” then the security of grace has become fragile and provisional. What should be rest and peace has now become anxious and effortful. We must strain in order to “keep” our salvation. And beyond the anxiety and effort, there is the Calvinist concern about centering human work and will. Grace threatens to collapse into works.
While I am not a Calvinist, I do sympathize with this concern. Growing up in an Arminian tradition, which came pretty close to being outright Pelagian, I experienced firsthand the fragility the Calvinists worry about. So I understand their pastoral anxiety. Growing up in my tradition, you could lose your salvation multiple times a day. You were saved until you sinned. That put you back over the line with the lost. You had to quickly confess and repent to get yourself back over the saved line. And hovering over all this anxious shuttling back and forth--saved, lost, saved, lost, saved, lost--was the constant worry that some calamity would befall you while you tarried on the lost side of the line. Lord help you if a bus ran you over while you were in a state of unconfessed sin.
So yes, the Calvinists have a point here.
Thankfully, my tradition has done a lot of work over the last two generations. We are much more grace focused now. So much so that some of the older generations are starting to worry that we have lost our pastoral concern over sin and holiness. Grace, it is feared, has become divine affirmation. God loves you no matter what you do. Add to this the rise of cosmic and creational Christologies--where everyone already is in Christ--and more hopeful eschatologies--where no one will be lost--and there is a sense that the New Testament urgency about God’s apocalyptic judgment has been wholly lost. Practically speaking, what this amounts to is that “grace” becomes a baptized vision of “I’m okay, and you’re okay.” This is the Christian sacralization of liberal humanism that has devastated the mainline traditions.
But while Calvinists love to bang on about this, they have problems of their own. In some Reformed circles the doctrine of grace is so robust that one can get away with any sort of wickedness. I recall the evangelical worry over whether Trump really had a “salvation experience.” It turned out, in the eyes of those who inquired, in a classic case of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, that he had. And so Trump was a “Christian” no matter what he had done or continued to do.
Here is my point. There are many ways to go soft on sin. Progressive Christians have their ways. And evangelical Christians have theirs.
So those are some of the fault lines in this tired old debate. In the next post I'd like to articulate a balanced vision.
