Can Christians Lose Their Salvation?

Question: Can you explain BFC's (and, perhaps, the Foursquare movement's) position on whether someone can lose their salvation? If so, what are the circumstances under which that might happen?

As far as I can tell, the Foursquare denomination does not have a written “position” on this issue. It is a question that has been hotly debated in the church for the last 500 years and before! Both sides of the issue are represented by sincere, intelligent, Christians. On one side you have those who believe in a “once saved always saved” position, also called “Eternal Security,” or the “Perseverance of the Saints.” Those who hold this position are called Calvinists, or “Reformed”. On the other side, you have the Arminian/Wesleyan/Holiness positions that while not denying the certainty of salvation for those who believe would also say that the possibility exists that by an extreme, conscious act of the will someone could renounce Christ. The Foursquare movement as a Pentecostal denomination is more closely related to the Arminian/Wesleyan roots from which it sprang than to Calvinism.

Years ago, I had a godly Bible teacher (actually a Quaker) who answered this very question by saying something like, “I don’t think that you could lose your salvation the way you might lose your pocket knife, or your homework paper, but I do believe that a person could publically renounce Christ and the Lord would sadly honor that request.”
Actually, like many issues, it is one that gets weirder the further you go to either extreme. On the one extreme, you have people saying that having once professed faith in Christ for salvation it doesn’t matter what you do (an ancient heresy called antinomianism and practiced widely on college campuses!). Not too many Calvinists would go that far. On the other hand, you could be so freaked out by the personal responsibility/holiness passages that you live in constant fear and think you’ve lost your salvation every time you fall short of perfection. Thankfully, there is a lot of real estate in the middle where most Christians live! The interesting thing is that the net result in both cases is sadly the same. Let’s say that a person “came to Christ” at some point in their life but then later renounced Christ and became an outspoken infidel attacking the things of God and then dies. In such a case the Arminian might say that the person had “lost their salvation”. The Calvinist would say that he was never saved in the first place…that he had only the appearance of being a Christian. We see that both sides agree on the tragic outcome, but use different reasoning to get there.

I know that this is part of a huge theological debate, and while I have strong opinions on this subject, I have no thought that I can solve it by writing this blog. When I read the Bible, I try to take the text for what the text says, rather than superimposing my frameworks on top of it (and squeezing doctrines out like so much Play-Doh). In my Bible, I see passages that look a lot like Calvinism and I see a lot of others that sound like Arminianism. Can it be that the Bible teaches both God’s sovereignty and man’s free will, the perseverance of the saints and personal responsibility? I’m just simple enough to believe it!

We can say that Beaverton Foursquare Church, as a congregation is:

• Biblically conservative (i.e., we believe the Bible is the Word of God), and
• Experientially moderate (e.g., no snakes, no Kool-aid, no chandeliers to swing from, no ranting screeds, but we do raise our hands!),
• Enthusiastically desiring to be spiritually passionate Christ-followers!

If we are wholeheartedly following Jesus, and have a desire to please him, then the possibility of losing our salvation is a moot point and the question nothing more than an irrelevant hypothetical. We choose faithfulness!

I would like to share a few Bible passages, a sampling, for you to wrestle with if you want to do the homework.

• Ephesians 2:8-10
• Romans 6:1-23
• Romans 8:31-39
• 1 John 1:9-10
• Hebrews 3:12-14
• 2 Timothy 2:8-13

Finally, one of my favorite statements on this subject was given by the late Dr. Guy P. Duffield in a sermon (he was in his 80s at the time) from Acts 1 entitled, “Mind Your Own Business!” He said,
“I feel as if I am standing in a great gabled house. I look out the window on my right and I see the rafters of Calvinism. Then I turn and look out the window on my left and I see the rafters of Arminianism . . . and where these two great rafters meet is . . . somewhere way over my head."