Proponents of the 16th century doctrine of eternal security, when faced with the massive amount of historical data that proves the lateness of their doctrine, play the same game with the Early Church Fathers that they play with the Gospel of John in which they take passages out of context and make them to appear to teach what they do not teach. Those of them who are fluent in the Greek language, and few of them are, know very well that in EVERY instance where John writes of believers in Christ having eternal life he uses either the Greek present tense or the Greek present participle in which the continuance of the action is stressed. That is, John writes that those persons who are continuing to believe in Christ and continuing to be obedient to Him have eternal life. They also know very well that when John writes of the faithfulness of God, he uses the indicative mood indicating an established fact and that when he writes of the faithfulness of men he uses the subjunctive mood indicating a supposition of what MIGHT prove to be. Perhaps worst of all, they take the words eternal life and separate them from their theological context and argue that if ones life is eternal he cannot die, when in fact the New Testament teaches that eternal life is had only in Christ in our sharing of His life with Him. It is His life that is eternal, and we possess that eternal life in Him. Those Christians who depart from Christ become severed from Him and that life. The Early Church Fathers knew this and the concept was very precious to them. Indeed, Christ was very precious to them and those Christians who chose to actively or passively depart from the Christian life were viewed by them with the utmost disdain and contempt.
Proponents of the 16th century doctrine of eternal security, when reading the Early Church Fathers, read them with the same 16th century misconception that a Christian cannot lose his salvation and they read into the passages that they are reading their own personal theologya theology that was totally absent from the Church till the 16th Century. The only writing from before the 16th century that teach anything remotely like eternal security are found in the writings of Saint Augustine and these writings were responsible for Calvins erroneous beliefs regarding the sovereignty of God and the theology that these erroneous beliefs gave birth to, including the perseverance of the saints. These writings of Augustine were written late in his life when he himself began to lose faith in the power of the atonement of Christ and found himself increasingly in bondage to sin. Therefore these particular writing, known today as the Retractions of Saint Augustine, are not found in any of the bound collections of his writings. Their only value is that they help to establish that Augustine was indeed the author of some writings the authorship of which has been questioned.
And, of course, proponents of the 16th century doctrine of eternal security never quote the Early Church Fathers in the passages where they clearly and expressly write of Christians falling from grace and losing their salvation.
If you want to know what the Early Church Fathers really believed, read their works in the original language without any commentary, paying very close attention to the Greek moods and tenses that they used when writing about salvation, believing in and being obedient to Christ, and eternal life.
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