PART 1 - ONCE SAVED, ALWAYS SAVED?

What Did the Earliest Christians Actually Believe?

There is a phrase millions of Christians have heard:

“Once saved, always saved.”

For some, it is one of Christianity's greatest assurances.

For others, it raises a difficult question:

What happens when someone who genuinely believed in Christ later walks away?

Was that person never saved?

Was the earlier faith never real?

Can a Christian abandon Christ?

And perhaps the most important question of all:

Did the earliest Christians even believe in the doctrine we now call “once saved, always saved”?

Before we answer that question, we need to do something unusual.

We're going to leave Calvin, Arminius, Baptists, Catholics, and modern evangelicalism out of the discussion—for now.

We're going back.

Before Augustine.

Before Calvin.

Before the Reformation.

We're going back as close to the apostolic church as the surviving historical evidence allows.

And we're going to let the evidence speak.

FIRST, WHAT ARE WE LOOKING FOR?

There is an important distinction we need to make.

The early Christians obviously taught believers to persevere.

The New Testament repeatedly tells Christians to remain faithful.

But that isn't quite the same question as:

“Can a genuinely saved person finally fall away?”

And it is different again from:

“If someone does fall away, does that prove they were never genuinely saved?”

Those are three different propositions.

Our job is to determine when—and how—the third proposition entered Christian theology.

THE EARLIEST CHRISTIAN WRITINGS

We begin with writings that came from the generations immediately following the apostles.

And what we find is not a simple, neatly organized doctrine of eternal security.

Instead, we find something much more pastoral:

Persevere.

Repent.

Don't fall away.

Don't return to your former life.

Remain faithful.

And when Christians actually did fall, early Christian writers wrestled with what that meant.

That is important.

Because if the Church's settled understanding had simply been:

“A true Christian cannot fall away, so anyone who does was never truly Christian,”

we would expect that framework to dominate the earliest discussions.

It doesn't.

THE DIDACHE: TWO WAYS

One of the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament is the Didache.

It opens its moral teaching with what it calls “the Way of Life” and “the Way of Death.”

The emphasis is unmistakably on the path a Christian walks.

The Didache is not a systematic theological treatise explaining eternal security. So we should not force it to answer a question it never directly addresses.

But it gives us an important glimpse into the moral framework of early Christianity:

Christianity was understood as a way of life that had to be walked.

The language is not:

“You made a decision once; therefore your subsequent direction is irrelevant.”

The emphasis is perseverance in the Way.

That doesn't settle our question.

But it gets our investigation started.

THE SHEPHERD OF HERMAS

Now things become much more interesting.

The Shepherd of Hermas, generally dated to the second century, became one of the most widely read Christian writings of the early Church. It was even included alongside New Testament writings in some ancient manuscripts, although it was ultimately not received as canonical Scripture. 

And Hermas is deeply concerned with something that modern Christians sometimes discuss abstractly:

What happens when Christians sin after baptism?

Hermas describes a situation in which believers have fallen into sin and then asks what can be done.

The answer involves repentance.

In one section, Hermas specifically discusses those who have received remission of their former sins through baptism and then asks about repentance afterward. 

The work eventually presents what it calls a “second repentance.”

Modern scholars describe the Shepherd as centrally concerned with the problem of believers who sinned after baptism and with the possibility of repentance before the final judgment. 

Now, we need to be careful.

The Shepherd of Hermas does not give us the later Reformed doctrine of salvation.

It has its own developing theology, and in some respects it differs considerably from the New Testament.

But historically it tells us something important:

Early Christians were not simply assuming that post-baptismal failure was impossible.

They were asking what happens when people who had entered the Christian community fall.

And they were talking about repentance and restoration.

That's our first major piece of evidence.

JUSTIN MARTYR

Now we reach Justin Martyr, writing around the middle of the second century.

And here we need to slow down.

In Dialogue with Trypho 47, Justin is discussing Jewish believers in Christ and their relationship to the Mosaic institutions.

Trypho asks whether someone who believes Christ but continues observing those institutions can be saved.

Justin gives a nuanced answer.

He says that such a person may be saved if they don't impose those practices on Gentile believers. 

But then Justin introduces another category.

He speaks of people who:

confessed and knew Christ,

then:

went back to the legal dispensation,

and:

denied that Christ was the Christ.

Justin says that if they do not repent before death, they will not be saved. 

Now let's be extremely careful.

Justin is not writing a treatise on “once saved, always saved.”

His discussion is specifically about Christ-believing Jews, the Mosaic law, and the question of what happens when someone turns away from their confession of Christ.

But historically, the statement is still remarkable.

Justin can describe people who had:

confessed Christ,

known Christ,

and then:

turned back and denied Him.

And he treats their final refusal to repent as spiritually decisive.

That is difficult to reduce to:

“If they walked away, that proves they never genuinely believed.”

At minimum, Justin's language shows that early Christian theology had a category for people who had confessed and known Christ and then turned away.

That's important.

IRENAEUS: PERSEVERE IN HIS LOVE

Then we come to Irenaeus.

And again, perseverance is central.

Irenaeus describes the righteous in terms of those who “have persevered in his love.”

He also repeatedly speaks about repentance, persistence in righteousness, and the consequences of refusing to turn back. 

Again, this isn't a systematic answer to our modern debate.

But notice the vocabulary emerging from these early sources:

perseverance

repentance

falling

turning back

remaining

continuing

Those aren't incidental concepts.

They are part of the early Christian understanding of what it meant to live the Christian life.

THEN SOMETHING HAPPENED THAT MADE THE QUESTION UNAVOIDABLE

The Church didn't have to debate apostasy merely as a theoretical possibility.

Persecution came.

And Christians actually denied Christ.

Some sacrificed to pagan gods.

Some obtained certificates claiming they had sacrificed.

Others abandoned the faith under pressure.

And suddenly the Church had a massive pastoral crisis.

They became known as:

THE LAPSED

Now the question was no longer theoretical.

It was:

What do we do with Christians who have fallen?

Can they repent?

Can they return?

Can they be restored?

Or is their apostasy proof that they were never genuinely Christians?

That controversy becomes particularly visible in the writings of Tertullian and Cyprian.

TERTULLIAN: “AFTER BAPTISM”

Tertullian wrote an entire section of On Repentance entitled:

“Of Repentance, in the Case of Such as Have Lapsed After Baptism.”

Think about the significance of that title.

He is not discussing someone who was never baptized.

He is not discussing someone who never entered the Christian community.

He is explicitly discussing those who lapsed after baptism. 

Tertullian takes repentance extraordinarily seriously. He does not want Christians to treat God's mercy as permission to keep sinning.

But he nevertheless discusses a second repentance for those who have fallen after baptism. 

Whatever we think about Tertullian's theology—and there are things in it we will need to examine critically—the historical point is undeniable:

Post-baptismal apostasy was a real category in early Christian thought.

The question wasn't simply:

“Were they ever really saved?”

The question was:

“They have fallen. What now?”

CYPRIAN AND THE LAPSЕD

By the third century, the issue became even more intense.

Cyprian's writings reveal a Church struggling over how to deal with Christians who had denied the faith during persecution.

And the debate became fierce.

Some Christians believed the lapsed should be restored relatively easily.

Others believed the Church should impose severe requirements.

Some believed certain forms of apostasy could not be forgiven.

The controversy eventually produced one of the major schisms of the early Church.

And here we discover something historically significant:

The early Church was arguing over how to restore fallen Christians—not simply whether fallen Christians had ever been Christians.

That doesn't mean the early Church had a single, uniform theology.

It didn't.

It means the historical evidence does not look like a mature version of:

“A truly saved person cannot fall away, therefore anyone who falls away was never truly saved.”

The categories are more complicated.

SO WHAT HAVE WE ACTUALLY ESTABLISHED?

Let's stop here and be honest.

We have not proven that every early Christian believed salvation could be lost.

We have not proven that the early Church possessed a fully developed doctrine of conditional security.

And we certainly haven't demonstrated that every early Christian understood salvation exactly as we do today.

But we have established something significant.

From the earliest Christian centuries, we find repeated evidence of Christians discussing:

falling away

apostasy

denial of Christ

repentance after baptism

restoration

perseverance

and the danger of failing to remain faithful.

And that means we cannot simply assume that the modern doctrine was the universal starting point of Christianity.

We have to trace its development.

BUT THEN WE COME TO AUGUSTINE

And this is where the story changes.

Because Augustine takes the question of perseverance and places it inside a much larger theological framework involving:

grace

predestination

election

regeneration

and ultimately:

the gift of perseverance.

Augustine's On the Gift of Perseverance is one of the earliest major Christian treatments devoted specifically to the question of perseverance unto the end. 

And now our question becomes much more precise:

What happens when perseverance stops being understood primarily as the believer's call to continue in Christ and becomes a gift that God gives to the elect, guaranteeing that they will persevere to the end?

Because once that happens, another question follows:

What do you do with the person who doesn't persevere?

And eventually, centuries later, Calvin will give a very specific answer.

But before we get there, we need to understand Augustine.

Because Augustine is the bridge.

THE QUESTION WE'RE CARRYING INTO PART 2

If the earliest Christian writers repeatedly warned believers about falling, repentance, apostasy, and perseverance…

and Augustine develops a doctrine of divinely given final perseverance…

When did the question change from:

“Will this believer persevere?”

to:

“If this person didn't persevere, were they ever truly one of the saved?”

That is where our investigation gets very interesting.

Because the answer will take us from:

Augustine

to the medieval Church,

to the Reformation,

to John Calvin,

and eventually to the doctrine formally known as:

THE PERSEVERANCE OF THE SAINTS

And that is where Part 2 begins.

Sources:

The Didache — The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0714.htm

The Shepherd of Hermas — Book I: Visions https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/02011.htm

The Shepherd of Hermas — Book II: Commandments https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/02012.htm

The Shepherd of Hermas — Book III: Similitudes https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/02013.htm

Justin Martyr — Dialogue with Trypho https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0128.htm

Justin Martyr — Dialogue with Trypho, Chapters 31–47https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/01283.htm

Irenaeus — Against Heresies https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103.htm

Tertullian — On Repentance https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0320.htm

Tertullian — On Repentance, Chapter 7: Of Repentance in the Case of Such as Have Lapsed After Baptism https://www.tertullian.org/anf/anf03/anf03-47.htm

Cyprian of Carthage — On the Lapsed https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/050703.htm

Cyprian of Carthage — Letters concerning the Lapsed and Restoration https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0506.htm

Historical Context

Catholic Encyclopedia — St. Cyprian of Carthage: The Lapsed https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04583a.htm