Are You Saved?

The “Are you saved?” question is, more often than not, a loaded question.

By Deacon Frederick Bartels
12 February 2025

A few times in my life—whether in an elevator, during a pro-life march, or in a friendly gathering—a Protestant Christian suddenly and unexpectantly asked me: “Are you saved?” Granted, it’s meant to start a discussion with the aim of giving witness to Christ, which is a good thing. And I appreciate every opportunity to discuss the Christian faith. But I have to admit, in my experience, it’s often a loaded question that betrays a mistaken view of salvation.

Why do I say that? Because the underlying premises are often these:

1. If Jesus is accepted as my personal Savior, I am brought into a personal relationship with him.
2. If I am in a personal relationship with Jesus, I am saved.
3. Once I am saved, salvation is secure—it can’t be lost.

We might sum up such an idea as “once saved, always saved” (OSAS) or “eternal security.” It’s the notion that once a person is saved in Christ, he remains saved, with no possibility of turning away and losing salvation. A personal relationship with Christ, then, guarantees entrance into the kingdom of heaven. Period.

But this kind of thinking is foreign to Catholic ears. Why? It’s not part of the apostolic tradition of the Church—it never has been—which means it’s contra Church teaching. Also, it ultimately denies the power of human free will and, at the same time, overemphasizes the effects of God’s grace in the extreme. In other words, grace does not erase free will with its associated power to choose this or that, to remain in Christ and cooperate with the grace of the Holy Spirit, or, on the other hand, to reject Christ and the grace of the Holy Spirit.

St. Augustine summarized it with this statement: God created us without our consent, but he does not save us without our consent.

When did OSAS arise?

The first point in history where the doctrine of “eternal security” arises is with the advent of the Protestant reformer John Calvin—something which Protestant scholars readily concede. Nowhere do we find it among the Christians who came before him. It was not even held by Martin Luther, the man credited with igniting the spark of the Protestant revolution in the 16^th century. More importantly, it’s conspicuously absent among the Church Fathers.

Is OSAS biblical?

Granted, there are NT bible verses which seem to support this view—at least on the surface. On the other hand, there are verses which oppose it (which is why the magisterium of the Catholic Church is so important as a corrective!).

Let’s look at a couple of verses often used to support OSAS. One common example is Romans 10:9:

“[I]f you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Although this verse is often used to support OSAS, notice it does not say “you are saved” but “you will be saved,” which seems to imply you will be saved at a future time, as opposed to “you are saved now,” and there’s a lot of stuff that can happen between confessing faith in Christ and the end point of our life. Given that consideration, it seems reasonable to conclude that there is still more to do in the future to attain final salvation. In other words, it speaks to salvation in the future tense (something discussed more below).

Another often quoted verse is Ephesians 2:8: “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God.”

Notice that Ephesians 2 speaks about salvation as acquired in the past tense. Through justifying grace, we “have been saved.” When justifying grace is received, we indeed have salvation at that moment because we have been justified or “made righteous” before God by virtue of his free gift of grace. But what about on into the future? In other words, is justifying grace an “irresistible grace” which positively prevents us from ever choosing to turn away from Christ and thus reject God? Does it erase free will? Does it prevent a person from ever committing apostasy in repudiation of the Christian faith? Does the reception of justifying grace guarantee that a person is saved absolutely from that day forward unto death?

Here we come to a crossroad. Given the evidence, most of us are familiar with people who once claimed to have faith in Christ and lived an admirable Christian life for a time, but then sometime later rejected Christ. For example, it’s not uncommon to find atheists who adamantly claim to be former Christians.

The OSAS answer to this apparent paradox is to say these people never truly had real faith in Christ. Their faith was merely intellectual and empty, in contrast to a real heartfelt faith in and self-entrustment to Christ. The idea is that they were never justified but only pretended to be (or were deceived).

That indeed could be the case. People can certainly fake things. Further, a merely intellectual belief in Christ is not what we consider a saving faith. On the other hand, it may be that they indeed really had faith in Jesus but later turned away, as it happens when a young person who, years or months earlier, displayed all the traits of truly having faith in Jesus but then, after attending an anti-Christian-faith propaganda machine called “college,” fell away.

For example, when we speak to apostate Christians, they often insist that they really did believe in Christ at one point. “I went to church,” they say. “I prayed. I read the Bible. I believed. But then I found out it was all a lie.”

There are nearly endless “reasons” offered to justify their loss of faith. But they all boil down to this: I was Christian until (fill in the blank).

It’s simply a plain fact of human experience that people can say, “I believe” one moment and “I don’t believe” the next. It happens.

But let’s assume a person has received the free gift of justifying grace through faith in Christ. At that moment he is saved. Here’s what the Catechism says about it:

Justification detaches man from sin which contradicts the love of God, and purifies his heart of sin. Justification follows upon God’s merciful initiative of offering forgiveness. It reconciles man with God. It frees from the enslavement to sin, and it heals. (CCC 1990)

Once a man is justified, does it mean he is saved on into the future, with no possibility of losing salvation?

This brings us to NT verses which speak about salvation in either the present or future tense. For example, speaking in the present tense, Paul urges Christians to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12). In terms of looking forward to the future, Paul tells us that our “salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed” (Rom 13:11). According to Paul’s teaching, salvation is something we must hold on to in the present and look forward to receiving in the future. These statements seem to imply both that salvation can be lost, and that it is not finally secured until some future date.

In First Corinthians Paul writes about salvation in both the present and future tenses. Here he speaks of the gospel “by which you are saved, if you hold it fast—unless you believed in vain” (1 Cor 15:2). It seems Paul is saying that we receive salvation initially (present tense) through accepting the saving gospel (faith in Christ), but if one fails to hold fast to it (in the future), one’s previous faith in Christ will ultimately be proved to have been worthless. Said another way, if we’re going to have faith in Christ but then toss it away, it’s ultimately pointless to ever have bothered with it at all. All of that suggests it’s possible to lose one’s faith.

Paul also speaks about a final judgment that will determine salvation: “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive good or evil, according to what he has done in the body” (2 Cor 5:10). Again, future tense. This also implies that a person cannot have absolute certainty of salvation. We may think we are saved but cannot be absolutely certain of it until judgment in Christ takes place.

One of the most powerful strikes against OSAS is found in the Letter to the Hebrews:

For if we sin deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful prospect of judgment, and a fury of fire which will consume the adversaries. A man who has violated the law of Moses dies without mercy at the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by the man who has spurned the Son of God, and profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and outraged the Spirit of grace? For we know him who said, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay.’ And again, ‘The Lord will judge his people.’ It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. (Heb 10:26-31)

Now, since it’s true to say that salvation can be lost, how can it be lost?

The moment we are justified by the free gift of grace through faith in Christ, we are saved. However, ongoing salvation is dependent upon remaining in a state of justifying (sanctifying) grace. If that grace is lost, salvation, too, is lost. How can this occur?

Through mortal sin (1 John 5:16-17). In a nutshell, mortal sin entails a rejection of God. Here’s what the Catechism says about it:

Mortal sin is a radical possibility of human freedom, as is love itself. It results in the loss of charity and the privation of sanctifying grace, that is, of the state of grace. If it is not redeemed by repentance and God’s forgiveness, it causes exclusion from Christ’s kingdom and the eternal death of hell, for our freedom has the power to make choices for ever, with no turning back. However, although we can judge that an act is in itself a grave offense, we must entrust judgment of persons to the justice and mercy of God. (CCC 1861)

What qualifies as mortal sin?

For a sin to be mortal, three conditions must together be met: Mortal sin is sin whose object is grave [serious] matter and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent. (CCC 1857)

If grave sin is committed, knowing it is a serious offense against God, and it is freely chosen, then sanctifying grace is lost. At that moment, our relationship with God is severed. The good news is that God’s mercy and forgiveness is available through repentance and the sacrament of Penance (something for a future post).

Finally, as I said earlier, the doctrine of “eternal security” is not found in historical Christianity before Calvin. For 1500 years, then, OSAS was absent from Christian teaching. With that in mind, what examples do we find in the early Church that counter that idea?

In the Didache, a 1^st century document known as the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, we find: “Watch for your life’s sake. Let not your lamps be quenched, nor your loins unloosed; but be ready, for you know not the hour in which our Lord comes. But you shall assemble together often, seeking the things which are befitting to your souls: for the whole time of your faith will not profit you, if you be not made complete in the last time” (Didache 16).

St. Irenaeus, writing in the 2^nd century, tells us:

To Christ Jesus, our Lord, and God, and Savior, and King, according to the will of the invisible Father, ‘every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth, and that every tongue should confess’ [Phil. 2:10–11] to him, and that he should execute just judgment towards all…. The ungodly and unrighteous and wicked and profane among men [shall go] into everlasting fire; but [he] may, in the exercise of his grace, confer immortality on the righteous, and holy, and those who have kept his commandments, and have persevered in his love, some from the beginning [of their Christian course], and others from [the date of] their penance, and may surround them with everlasting glory.” (Against Heresies 1:10:1 [A.D. 189])

To sum up:

OSAS is not part of the apostolic tradition of the Church, nor is it supported by the full context of Scripture. When Catholics encounter the “Are you saved?” question, a good way to discuss the underlying presuppositions is by addressing past, present, and future tenses vis-à-vis salvation. Final salvation is dependent upon maintaining unity with Christ in cooperation with God’s grace unto death (cf. Matt 7:21).

It is therefore not possible to have absolute assurance (though we can have moral certainty) of salvation because there remains the danger of committing mortal sin and dying in a state of final impenitence. Mortal sin aways remains a possibility because God’s grace does not subdue man’s free will.

On the other hand, as long as there is still breath within us, it is possible to repent of sin, receive justifying grace once again (if previously lost through mortal sin), and be restored to a state of salvation.

All of this points to the essential importance of the apostolic tradition of the Church and the teaching of the magisterium. For it is through the Church that we receive the words of truth, allowing the fog of confusion and mistaken ideas to be burned away.