Martin Luther on Perseverance & eternal security
Yes — real apostasy is possible
It is, accordingly, necessary to know and to teach that when holy men... happen to fall into manifest sins, as David into adultery, murder, and blasphemy, that then faith and the Holy Ghost has departed from them.
THE POSITION
Luther explicitly names and rejects the position that a believer who falls into open sin must never have had faith. He says the opposite: when a holy man falls into manifest sin as David did, faith and the Holy Spirit have departed from him. Baptism remains and can be returned to — 'the ship never breaks... but it happens, indeed, that we slip and fall out of the ship' — but the falling is real, not merely apparent.
9 Anyone born of God refuses to practice sin, because God’s seed abides in him; he cannot go on sinning, because he has been born of God.
4 OTHERS HOLD THIS
ABOUT THIS FIGURE
Augustinian friar whose protest over indulgences opened the Reformation, and the theologian for whom justification by faith and the bondage of the will are the whole of the gospel. This entry rests on his own writings only — The Bondage of the Will (1525), the Smalcald Articles (1537), the Large and Small Catechisms (1529), Concerning Christian Liberty (1520), the Heidelberg Disputation (1518), the Church Postil and his biblical prefaces — and deliberately excludes the Augsburg Confession and the Formula of Concord, which are not his.
Cite this page
"Martin Luther on Perseverance & eternal security", Examined Doctrine, July 2026 edition, https://examineddoctrine.com/position/luther/perseverance (archived at https://examineddoctrine.com/editions/2026-07/position/luther/perseverance).