RUN TO WIN THE PRIZE
Perseverance in the New Testament
By Tom Schreiner. Apollos. 132 pages. £9.99
ISBN 978-1-84474-369-8
Can a real Christian fall away and be lost? Don’t the warning passages of Scripture, like Hebrews 6 and 10, imply that those who have trusted Christ can forfeit eternal life? These are classic questions of enormous pastoral importance.
In this short book, Tom Schreiner, of Southern Baptist Seminary, Louisville, USA, carefully exegetes the relevant texts and explains why, though the Arminian position, that salvation can be lost, seems cogent, it does not ultimately hold up to scrutiny. The biblical evidence shows that just as God uses the gospel to call the elect to faith, so he uses the warning passages to keep the elect in the faith so that none of them is ever lost. This is underlined by the fact that Scripture says that those who do walk out on Christ were actually never Christians at all (1 John 2.19, Matthew 7.13,14, etc.).
The re-emergence of heavy shepherds
What would you think if you received a letter from your church leaders that read like this? ‘Are church members …