This is from Kevin Keane. The early church seemed to have a lot to say about people who sinned after baptism and reception of the Holy Spirit. What would you say about someone who had fallen away? Has their baptism as the Catholics teach made it so that if they have apostasized, they cannot be saved. And he says where he read that from. OK. I would have to look and to my knowledge, that is not the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. I would have to look at that whole quote.
I mean, I've read their, you know, new catechism and that. I don't think that's what they teach. You may be misreading reading it. But anyway, the question is equally valid. Well, if you've fallen away, you can come back. I mean, the early Christians never put a bar of somebody coming back if they repented. Now, sometimes they might make you wait a number of years before they would accept you into communion again.
They did view it very seriously to like deny Christ in persecution or commit adultery or something like that. But if you repented, they always accepted you back. There's no instance of their not doing that. Now, there is the unforgivable sin, and the people who've committed that don't repent. They don't come back. You know, they're gone. And I think that happens to a lot of people. And they are eternally lost because they never will repent, you know?
But if someone repents, then it's evidence they have not committed the unforgivable sin. And yeah, I mean, they should at some point be admitted back into communion. And again, if I'm wrong on the Catholic Church there, my apologies there, I'd just like to say, if that's their teaching, that is a surprise to me. Yeah, that would be a surprise to me as well.
Even when they got into burning heretics at the stake, from my understanding, and I could be wrong on this, is that it wasn't even if someone was deemed a heretic, and then they repented, and then they committed heresy again and repented, oftentimes they would accept the repentance, but still burn them like as a purifying effect. It's bad practice. I don't recommend it. But even in that context, they had some form of hope for the one who repents. But like I said, they did. I'm not sure where that comes from.
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