Once saved, always saved. (Believe it or burn!)

Yipes

OSAS – ‘once saved, always saved’, or the idea that not even televangelists can lose their salvation - was a bedrock dogma of the evangelicalism I grew up with.   It wasn’t until I became an adult that I discovered just how many Christians reject it, and on perfectly biblical grounds.  I might have rejected it, too, if I’d had a choice.  If anyone wants to try to convince me to reject it, please feel free: I don’t doubt that you’ll wipe the theological floor with me.  But please know that if you succeed, I’ll be throwing away my extensive fish lapel pin collection and checking out Pure Land Buddhism.

When I was a teenager, I went through a long crisis about not knowing how to evangelise without making people want to become satanists.  So when, one day, I spotted a real live teenage evangelist in town, I lingered near him with an air of ‘Hi - I’m damned, but I’m open-minded,’ in the hope that I’d get a one-on-one lesson in how to approach people on the Lord’s behalf.

It worked.  He gave me a pamphlet and treated my claim to already be a Christian with scepticism.  He persuaded me to meet the leader of the regional branch of his church – a giant church whose denomination is well-known around the globe.  I agreed, and we went to the leader’s house later that week.

The leader asked me about my conversion experience, and I made the mistake of saying that I thought maybe God had set up all my ropy pre-conversion experiences with witchcraft and yoga to lead me to salvation.  The leader stopped me.  ‘If one thing is clear from the bible,’ he said, ‘it’s that when you are a sinner, God wants nothing to do with you.’

I almost pointed out what I’d learned from the bible so far: that sinners were the only people Jesus wanted anything to do with.  So if this church leader believed in the divinity of Christ, it followed that he was mistaken.  But I held my tongue.  The church leader took me on a tour of the bible, pointing out various lists of things that I should not do unless I wanted to lose my salvation and go to hell.  They were mainly to do with personal purity.  He was keen to tell me, in front of his teen acolyte and within earshot of his wife, that he had masturbated only twice in the last twenty years.  Perhaps thinking that my squirming was owing to guilt and not to intense social discomfort, he told me that I needed to be part of a church that supported my drive towards holiness, lest I end up writhing for eternity in the abyss.

                I whined feebly that I thought that the whole point of Christianity was that you get to go to heaven free of charge, and the leader slapped his forehead and sighed loudly and then showed me more bible verses indicating the opposite.  Half an hour later, he let me go, having obtained from me a promise to attend his church as soon as possible.  I left his house thinking that his gospel was completely pointless, and wondering whether he was right.

According to the gigantic New International Version Study Bible (with concordance) that I’d saved up for, the guy was right.  Apparently it was possible to lose your salvation.  More than that, it was amazingly easy to lose it.  If you continued sinning after your conversion, you were basically doomed, unless you kept confessing your sins to God and requesting forgiveness.

Well, fine, I thought.  I’ll just have to keep confessing and repenting and getting forgiven.  Daily, if not hourly.  The trouble was that I was sinning so much that I barely had time for all the repentance I required.  I constantly tried, of course, to curb my wickedness.  But when temptation to do wrong overtook me, I found that I suddenly did not care about my holiness; I only cared about it afterwards.  When, during Maths lessons, I lapsed into daydreams about girls beckoning me into hot-tubs, the thought of abandoning the fantasy and returning to trigonometry would strike me as literally insane.  And by the time I’d started to feel sullied and had decided to repent, I’d have to catch up on my maths by copying someone else’s work, which was also a sin.  Wickedness came naturally to me, but it was also surprisingly hard work.

For many weeks I grappled with the idea of abandoning my satanically liberal church and joining the other one.  As part of my grappling, I read my bible like never before.  And I developed three beliefs that caused me to stay put.

Actually, one of the beliefs was passed on to me by Andrew, an older mentor from church, in whom I’d confided my doubts about the durability of my salvation.  He said that if we think we need to meet some moral standard in order to keep our salvation, we are denying the whole basis of our faith, which is that salvation cannot be earned.  Such a denial would count as apostasy, which (according to the book of Hebrews) is akin to re-crucifying Christ.  Andrew said that gratitude for my salvation, as well as a God-implanted desire to be good for its own sake, should spur me on to seek goodness.  Fear and selfishness are not noble motives - 'your will be done on earth as it is in heaven' almost certainly doesn't mean 'your will be done on earth as it would be done in a boot camp'.  It may be that salvation can be lost – the question will always be a vexed one – but even if that is the case (Andrew argued), we surely do not forfeit our salvation by sinning against a God who supposedly came ‘to save the people from their sins’; we are more likely to forfeit it by ceasing to believe in our salvation.

Moreover, becoming sinless is impossible, whereas keeping one’s faith is possible – so take your pick.  Personally, I thought that if we need to maintain sinlessness to maintain salvation, then we must view Jesus’s admonition ‘Take my yoke upon you, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light’ as a rather nasty joke.

             Andrew said that if you truly believe in your salvation and in free grace, it is impossible for you to respond by using your liberty to launch into a life of wanton wickedness.  Of course, history is full of groups of people who use (or invent) ideas and theologies that legitimise debauchery.  Those people who exploit Christian ideas of freedom and salvation to launch into lives of wanton wickedness can safely be said not to truly believe in salvation, or they would not (Andrew said) be so ungrateful to Jesus, who was crucified to procure it for them.

These latter people, who believe and accept the liberating message of the gospel but use it as a licence to throw crazy orgies, seem to be the ones Paul talks about when he says that flagrant sinners will not inherit the kingdom of God.  To those who genuinely want to be rid of their sins, who ‘set their minds on the things of the Spirit’, Paul promises: ‘There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.’

Second, my reading of the bible made it clear that God’s standards were never less than infinitely high.  His requirements went way beyond not masturbating more than once a decade.  ‘Whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it,’ writes James in his epistle.  These standards included loving one’s neighbour as oneself, and loving God with one’s whole being.  This being the case, it was doubtful that I could keep my name in the Book of Life by means of good behaviour; and I don’t believe that the church leader I’d spoken to was managing it either, despite his laudable record with regards to self-abuse.  Grace and mercy really were my only hope.

Finally, it occurred to me that within the matrix of Jesus’s teachings, moral terms don’t apply only to actions.  A sin is never just an act: it is a point of convergence, where a certain outward act meets a certain inward intention.  Jesus himself is emphatic on this point; he describes his self-righteous opponents as ‘whitewashed tombs’ – respectable-looking on the outside, but dead on the inside.  Their whole problem is that they see immorality as skin deep.  But it is deeper than that; we might say it is sin deep.  And that was precisely the problem with the teachings of that church leader I met.

The wanton sinners who deliberately use their gospel liberty to get drunk and hold orgies have a different kind of sinfulness from those who live with a feeling of shame for their misdeeds, sometimes struggling against them, other times feeling wholly at their mercy, and who find themselves going miserably but compulsively to the orgies when they’ve told their spouse that they are just popping out to buy cat-food.  The actions are the same but the motives are antipodal.  The second kind of sinner is precisely the kind of hopeless case that Jesus came to save.  The first kind, conversely, doesn’t really want salvation; s/he wants carte blanche.  Again, Paul believes that people of the first kind will not inherit the kingdom of heaven.  And why should they?  They never wanted it in the first place.

I decided to throw in my lot with those people who feel crushed by selfishness and pettiness and destructive urges, yet who despise these parts of their characters and want to be more loving and pure-hearted.  I knew that I wasn’t using my religion as an excuse to be bad; I wanted desperately to be good.  I decided that folks like me must always cling to our salvation.  My alternative was to believe that, having been saved from hell, to which I had been condemned for not keeping the whole law of God, I now had to keep the whole of the law of God in order to keep myself from going to hell.  Even if I managed it, which I manifestly wouldn’t, my motive (a sweaty desperation to avoid going to hell) would be selfish, and so by Jesus’s own standards my good deeds would count for nothing.  When I thought about it, I didn’t really have a choice.

I never did learn to evangelise well.  But I did decide that whatever my gospel I ended up propagating, it would be a gospel of pure grace, scandalously free, the kind of gospel that was consistent with Jesus’s command not to worry about the morrow.  It would not ask anyone to buy their way into the kingdom of God, or to pay moral rent to stay there.  And it’s the hardest gospel to accept; or it would be, if accepting the other gospels weren’t impossible.