Apostasy

Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God.

Definition

Apostasy is the decisive abandonment of a professed Christian faith, by open denial of Christ or by a final falling away from truth once outwardly held. Scripture treats it as a real danger, warning believers against drifting from the living God (Heb. 3:12) and describing those who commit it in the sternest terms (Heb. 6:4-6; 2 Pet. 2:20-22). Yet the same Scripture holds that a person truly regenerated by the Spirit cannot finally or totally fall away: apostasy, when it happens, unmasks a faith that was never saving rather than destroying one that was (1 John 2:19).

Confessional Definition

The 1689 London Baptist Confession has no chapter titled “apostasy,” but chapter 17, “Of the Perseverance of the Saints,” answers the question apostasy raises: can someone truly united to Christ finally lose that standing? Those whom God has “effectually called and Sanctified by his Spirit… can neither totally nor finally fall from the state of grace… but shall certainly persevere therein to the end and be eternally saved.”¹ The confession grounds this not in the believer’s own strength but in the “immutability of the decree of Election… the efficacy of the merit and intercession of Jesus Christ… the oath of God, the abiding of his Spirit, and the seed of God within them.”²

This does not mean the confession treats professed believers as immune to serious spiritual decline. It allows that they may, “through the temptation of Satan and of the world, the prevalency of corruption remaining in them,” fall into “grievous sins, and for a time continue therein,” incurring God’s displeasure and wounding their own consciences, yet “they shall renew their repentance and be preserved through faith in Christ Jesus to the end.”³ The confession’s own vocabulary therefore separates two things a reader might otherwise run together: the true believer’s temporary, grievous, but ultimately repented fall, and an apostasy that is total and final. It denies the second is possible for anyone truly regenerate, which places the burden of explaining apparent apostasy elsewhere: on the nature of the apostate’s original profession, not on the security of genuine grace.

Biblical Basis

The apostle John states the governing principle directly: “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us” (1 John 2:19). On this reading, a departure that is genuinely final is itself the evidence that the departed one was never truly regenerate, rather than evidence that regeneration itself can be lost.

Two passages in Hebrews supply the sharpest warnings against apostasy in the New Testament. Hebrews 6:4-6 describes those “who have once been enlightened, have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away,” for whom “it is impossible… to restore them again to repentance.” Hebrews 10:26-29 warns that “if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins,” naming a person who has “spurned the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant… and has outraged the Spirit of grace.” Gill reads both passages as describing an experience real as far as it goes, but short of saving faith: the knowledge in view is “notional and speculative,” the kind Scripture elsewhere allows even to those without grace, “for the apostle says, men may have ‘all knowledge’… and ‘all faith’… and yet be without grace” (1 Cor. 13:2).⁴ Judas himself was among those who worked miracles by a share in the Spirit’s gifts, “and yet devoid of true grace,” on the same principle Christ names in Matthew 7:22-23.⁴

Second Peter uses a different image for the same phenomenon. Those who have “escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” and are then “again entangled in them and overcome,” Peter writes, are “like a dog returning to its own vomit, and a sow, after washing herself, returning to wallow in the mire” (2 Pet. 2:20-22). Gill takes the proverb at face value: a dog and a sow have not changed their nature by a temporary cleaning, “and therefore when they apostatized, it was only a returning to their former state,” not the loss of a nature actually renewed.⁵ Paul’s own case of Demas, who “loved this present world” and deserted him (2 Tim. 4:10), belongs to the same category of a departure Scripture records without treating it as the loss of a salvation Demas once had.

Historical Development

The church faced a version of this question early and concretely, in the aftermath of Roman persecution. Calvin’s Institutes names the controversy directly: “The Novatians, in ancient times, agitated the Churches with this dogma,” teaching that a Christian who sinned gravely, or lapsed under persecution, after baptism could never again be restored to the church’s fellowship, since Scripture allows for only one regeneration and therefore only one forgiveness.⁶ Calvin traces the same error into his own century: “not unlike the Novatians are some of the Anabaptists, who have fallen into the same delirious dreams,” holding that the baptized are raised to “a pure and angelical life” such that a post-baptismal sinner is left with nothing but “the inexorable judgment of God.”⁶

Calvin’s own answer draws on two lines of evidence. The Lord’s Prayer itself, prayed daily by the saints, has Christ commanding his people to ask forgiveness (“Forgive us our debts,” Matt. 6:12) as a continuing need, not a one-time transaction closed at baptism.⁶ And the Old Testament supplies a chain of examples in which grave, covenant-breaking sin by God’s own people was met with restoration rather than final rejection: the patriarchs’ plot against Joseph, Simeon and Levi’s massacre at Shechem, Reuben’s incest, Judah’s sin with Tamar, and David’s adultery and murder, none of which “expunged” its perpetrator “from the chosen people.”⁶

Opposing Views

The Arminian and Wesleyan tradition holds that a genuinely regenerate believer can, by finally resisting grace, lose salvation. Hodge summarizes the logic of the scheme itself: on this view, God gives “such a measure of grace and light to all and every man as to enable all to attain eternal life,” but “those who duly improve that grace, and persevere to the end, are ordained to be saved.”⁷ The determining factor is the creature’s own continued cooperation with grace rather than an unconditional decree, which makes final, irrecoverable apostasy of a truly regenerate person a live possibility on this scheme rather than a contradiction in terms.

Objections and Responses

Hebrews 6:4-6 sounds like a description of a true believer who irrecoverably falls away, not an unregenerate professor. Gill’s answer turns on what each phrase in the passage actually requires. Being “enlightened” and having “tasted” the heavenly gift describe a real but external encounter, the kind natural men can have “a superficial knowledge of,” rather than the saving taste that “is proper to true believers, who feed upon [Christ] and are nourished by him.”⁴ Being “made partakers of the Holy Ghost” need mean only a share in his gifts, not his indwelling grace, “both of which Judas was made a partaker, and yet devoid of true grace.”⁴ On this reading, the passage’s own severity, that such a person cannot be renewed again to repentance, is consistent with the person described never having had saving faith to begin with.

Hebrews 10:26-29 and 2 Peter 2:20-22 describe people “sanctified by the blood of the covenant” and who had “escaped the pollutions of the world,” which sounds like real, converted Christians. Gill argues the sins these passages name could never be committed by anyone truly regenerate: to “tread underfoot the Son of God” and count his blood “an unholy thing” is a different act than Peter’s own denial of Christ, which “did not deny him to be his Saviour” or the value of his blood.⁸ Being “sanctified by the blood of the covenant” describes an outward, professed sanctification, submission to baptism and the Lord’s Supper, rather than the actual expiation of sin, “for such are most certainly saved from wrath to come.”⁸ And Hebrews 10:38-39 itself, in the very next verse, refuses to identify the two groups it names: “we are not of them that draw back unto perdition; but of them that believe to the saving of the soul,” treating the just who live by faith and those who draw back as two different kinds of people, not one person before and after a fall.⁹

If a truly regenerate person cannot finally fall away, why does Scripture keep warning believers against apostasy at all? Gill treats this as no more superfluous than any warning against sin generally. A believer told to “take heed lest he fall” (1 Cor. 10:12) or to guard against “an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God” (Heb. 3:12) is not being warned about final perdition, from which he is in no danger, but about a real, partial departure that can still dishonor God, grieve the Spirit, embolden the wicked, and “wound his own soul,” even though it cannot end in his eternal loss.¹⁰ The warning’s seriousness and the doctrine’s assurance are not in tension, because they answer two different questions: whether sin matters for a true believer, and whether that sin can undo what God has done in him.

Related Doctrines

• Perseverance of the saints
• Assurance of salvation
• Regeneration
• Total depravity
• Election

References

1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 17, “Of the Perseverance of the Saints,” para. 1, text as reproduced by The 1689 Confession. ↩

2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 17, para. 2, text as reproduced by The 1689 Confession. ↩

3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 17, para. 3, text as reproduced by The 1689 Confession. ↩

4. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book 6, chap. 15. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, book 6, chap. 15. ↩

6. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-46), book 4, chap. 1, secs. 23-24. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

7. Charles Hodge, “Chapter I. The Plan of Salvation.,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 311-352. ↩

8. Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, book 6, chap. 15. ↩ ↩²

9. Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, book 6, chap. 15. ↩

10. Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, book 6, chap. 15. ↩