Putting it in my own descriptive, non-logician style, big B believers are walking along an arête with warnings which say “don’t go near the edge, you’ll fall off” (the thing warned of is real). And as we stumble and trip along we should not ask “am I about to disappear into the abyss?” but rather “God will you save me?” At every point of the journey we turn to him and see that he is holding the other end of our climbing rope and has promised never to let go and so we keep inching, stumbling along aware of the thing warned of but trusting in Christ to see us to the summit.

His point was to focus on the function of the warnings as to serve big B faith as a means of grace, rather than as an explanation of what happens to those who fall away, which is a subject he didn’t address. I think this point was helpful.

Yet, his definition of covenant = elect exposed an elephant in the room; what happens to the baptised who fall away? He’s also antipaedobaptist and so presumably can’t baptise anyone, as David Field pointed out on his blog on Tuesday.

His answer, I think, is that the warnings are real, not hypothetical, and that the only way of knowing who is a real believer is by whether or not the warnings keep turning us to Christ.

We need to distinguish carefully. There is a difference between saying that “the warning is real” and “the thing warned of is real”. In other words, the way I put it above is that you could have a real warning that nevertheless warns of something that will never happen.

Once you say that a real believer will never fall away, you need to say either:

(a) this warning is addressed to real (big B) believers, and so warns of a hypothetical reality, or

(b) this warning is addressed to a wider group, and so warns of something that will happen to some within that group.

The reason why I resist (b) is that the promises are addressed to believers, as the NT texts you refer to Schreiner citing show.

That leaves us at (a). Unless: What the NT means by “belief” in those warning passages is something other than capital B, real, effecting faith-union with Christ BELIEF. In other words, may forced choice of (a) versus (b) above should force us to say “distinguish please – what do you mean by believer”.

Which is where I think he misrepresents the FV case (from how you’ve reported his argument)

His answer, I think, is that the warnings are real, not hypothetical, and that the only way of knowing who is a real believer is by whether or not the warnings keep turning us to Christ.

The issue then is assurance. Might I fall away someday? Again, the warnings function to turn us to Christ and God’s promises such as Romans 8:33ff and Phil 1:6 and we find assurance in the promises.

Does that answer your question?

I didn’t agree with everything Tom said, especially his anti-FV stuff on the covenant; all true believers are members of the new covenant by the work of the Spirit which cannot be undone (Jer 31). There’s lots of stuff I want to think through, starting with Grudem in Still Sovereign, which Schreiner disagrees with.