Is the Lord here teaching, that a person’s name is entered into the Book of Life by grace through faith, but then can be blotted out by (lack of) works, by not enduring or remaining faithful to the end? Smarter people than I have debated that … (The Letters to the Seven Churches, pg. 13).
The theological terms for the doctrines of eternal and conditional salvation, are monergism, and synergism. Monergism “is the position in Christian theology that God, through the Holy Spirit, works to bring about the salvation of individuals through spiritual regeneration without cooperation from the individual.” Since the Holy Spirit is the agent of salvation and not the individual, salvation is not conditional, but eternal. Synergism is “the belief that God and individuals cooperate for salvation.” Since the individual cooperates in his salvation, his salvation can be conditional.
“Monergism,” Wikipedia.
“Pelagius and Augustine, in whom these opposite forms of monergism are embodied, are representative men, even more strictly than Arius and Athanathius before them, or Nestorius and Cyril after them. … They represented principles and tendencies, which, in various modifications, extend through the whole history of the church, and reappear in its successive epochs. The Gottschalk controversy in the ninth century, the Reformation, the synergistic controversy in the Lutheran church, the Arminian in the Reformed, and the Janenistic in the Roman Catholic, only reproduce the same great contest in new and specific aspects.”
Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Vol. 3, pp. 786-787.
Leave a Reply