Robert Shank on Unconditional Security: Do the Warning Passages of Scripture Serve as a Means of Infallibly Preserving Believers unto Final Salvation?

        [I]s the peril real? Are believers actually in peril of apostatizing? Some do not think so. Many apologists for the doctrine of unconditional security, in an attempt to reconcile the warning passages with their a priori doctrine, explain them as being only God’s means of ensuring that believers shall not fall away from the faith. The essence of the arguments of many is as follows: The mere fact that travelers are warned that there is a ditch alongside the road does not mean that they will fall into it. The warnings must not lead us to suppose that they will or can. God warns believers simply because, as rational beings, they are so constituted as to require motivation. He therefore appeals to their fears to keep them on the path. But the warnings do not prove that believers will fall; on the contrary, they are God's means of ensuring that they shall not fall.
        One will not read long from the advocates of the doctrine of unconditional security before encountering this “explanation” of the presence of so many urgent warnings against apostasy so obviously addressed to believers. The folly of their contention is in seen in the fact that, the moment a man becomes persuaded that their doctrine of unconditional security is correct, the warning passages immediately lose the very purpose and value which they claim for them. [A. H.] Strong quotes Dr. A. C. Kendrick on Hebrews 6:4-6: “The text describes a condition subjectively possible, and therefore needing to be held up in earnest warning to the believer, while objectively and in the absolute purpose of God, it never occurs.” But how can there be any “earnest warning” to the believer who is sufficiently “instructed” to understand that the “warning” is directed against an impossibility? How can something be subjectively possible for the person who knows it to be objectively impossible? The only possible circumstance under which the warning passages could serve the purpose and function which they claim for them would be the total rejection of the doctrine of unconditional security and inevitable perseverance.

 

Robert Shank, Life in the Son: A Study of the Doctrine of Perseverance, 2nd edn (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House, 1989), pp. 164–5, emphases in original

Copyright © Robert Lee Shank, 1960, 1961, 1989. All rights reserved.

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Addendum.  Robert Lee Shank (1918–2006)  died on Monday, 16 October 2006, aged eighty-eight.

• Legacy (obituary)

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