Recently Dallas-based Trinity Baptist Church fired Pastor Steve Lawson because of what they called an inappropriate relationship with a woman

Lawson was fairly well known in Calvinist circles and served as one of the deans at John MacArthur's the master's seminary.

In today's episode, I'm not going to dunk on a Protestant pastor for being caught up in a scandal.

As a Catholic, I'm depressingly familiar with having to hear about scandal. Instead, I want to focus on how scandals

like these undermine the popular Protestant doctrine of eternal security, the

belief that you can't lose your salvation. While not all Protestants hold this view, it is common

among Calvinists, but even many non-Calvinists accept it. The late Protestant apologist Norm Geisler

called himself a moderate Calvinist, but he wrote an anti-Calvinist book called Cho's called all creation that can separate a believer from Christ. On their website, Trinity Baptist

Church says under the heading Security, we believe that all the redeemed once saved

are kept by God's power and are thus secure in Christ forever.

But in their statement about the Lawson scandal, the church said,

Let us always be mindful of the words of 1st Corinthians 1012.

Therefore, let him who thinks he stands take he that he does not

fall. What kind of fall are we talking about? Is this a metaphorical fall from

grace or a literal fall from Grace like the one that St Paul talks about regarding the

Judaism in Galatians 5. 4. You are severed from Christ. You have fallen away from grace. You'll see that even defenders of

eternal security still act like Catholics and other Christians who believe we can

forsake our salvation through grave sin.

But before I talk about that, I want to point out

that we aren't entirely sure what Lawson did.

A lot of people assume he committed an act of adultery,

but that might not have been the case. Two years ago

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