Sometimes you’ll hear Christians promote the idea: “Once saved always saved”. It’s a reassuring claim – though not one that I subscribe to, in part because of passages such as Colossians 1:22-23. Andrew David Naselli, a prominent Calvinist scholar and pastor in the US, says the concept is “misleading“.
What does Colossians 1:22-23 say?
Paul uses Colossians 1:22-23 to urge Christians to persevere with their faith. He starts by carrying on his theme of reconciliation established through Jesus’s death:
Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behaviour. But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation – if you continue in your faith, established and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel.
What does the passage mean?
As The Biblical Theology Study Bible, edited by D.A. Carson, puts it, Christians have a “responsibility to guard their future home (‘if’, v. 23). All creation still awaits the consummation when it will be drawn into complete harmony with the Father. If believers are to be presented as holy, blameless, and above reproach, they must continue to be stable and steadfast in the faith.”
That need to continue could be interpreted in more than one way. F.F. Bruce has a rather eloquent way of making it fit across the Arminian-Calvinist theological divide. He says:
If the gospel teaches the final perseverance of the saints, it teaches at the same time that the saints are those who finally persevere – in Christ. Continuance is the test of reality. The language used may suggest that readers’ first enthusiasm was being dimmed, that they were in danger of shifting from the fixed ground of Christian hope.
We could interpret perseverance, then, as simply being a sign that someone was really saved. What the Bible certainly does not teach is that it is possible to turn up to a church, declare your faith, and then spend the next 60 years not engaging with Christianity at all and expect to be presented as holy in God’s sight.
To my mind, that places way too much emphasis on the idea that Christianity is only about “getting saved” rather than about having a relationship with God or being a disciple.
My take is that it is both possible to fall away from salvation if that’s what a person wants to do. Or, as Ben Witherington III put it: “one is not eternally secure until one is securely in eternity.”
This on account not just of this passage but also warning passages about falling away in Hebrews. At the same time, we have very reassuring passages that say that external forces cannot prize people away from salvation.
Jesus himself said: “I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand.” Paul said in some vivid, reassuring words said that he was convinced that there wasn’t “anything else in all creation” that would be able to separate Christians from God.