Can a believer fall away from grace?

This is one of the questions on which Christians are most divided, and the main traditions read these passages differently. But none of them has to treat the texts as contradicting each other, because the promises and the warnings do different work. The promises speak of God’s keeping power: no outside power, “nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature”, can tear Christ’s people from his hand or from God’s love (Romans 8:39), and the sheep in John 10 are described by what they do: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (10:27). The warnings are addressed to people who profess faith, and call them to go on in it. Galatians 5:4 is about trying to be justified by the law: those who do so have left grace as the ground of their standing with God. Hebrews 6 warns against open, deliberate apostasy, and then adds, “But, beloved, we are persuaded better things of you, and things that accompany salvation” (6:9).

Christians in the Calvinist or Reformed tradition hold that all who are truly born again will persevere, because God keeps them: “he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6). On this view those who finally fall away show that they never truly belonged, “They went out from us, but they were not of us” (1 John 2:19), and the warnings are one of the means by which God keeps his people. Christians in the Arminian and Wesleyan traditions, Lutherans, and the Catholic and Orthodox churches hold that a true believer can turn away and be lost, through unbelief or, in Catholic teaching, grave sin: no one can snatch the sheep from Christ’s hand, but a sheep can stop following. They point to warnings against “an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God” (Hebrews 3:12) and to promises made “If ye continue in the faith” (Colossians 1:23). Both views hold every one of these verses to be true.

A hypothetical warning

Some who hold eternal security, such as Got Questions, read Hebrews 6 as a hypothetical case: if a true believer could fall away, he could never be restored, which shows that it will not happen.

Loss of reward

Others hold that salvation cannot be lost, and that the warnings concern a believer’s loss of reward or fruitfulness, not of eternal life.

Whether a true believer can finally fall away is debated among Christians, above all between Calvinists and Arminians. The texts are consistent on either reading; the dispute is over how best to put them together.