SS Paul and James on Faith and Works

Recently I responded to a social media post from an apologist for the Roman Church.  In the post, the Roman apologist made the oft-repeated claim that the only verse in the Bible in which the expression “faith alone” appears is the verse which rejects it, i.e., James 2:24.  Among other things, I pointed out that this simply is not true.  The expression also appears in Mark 5:36 where it is put in the imperative mood, that is, as a command, by none other than our Lord Jesus Christ Himself.

 

The Roman apologist responded by altering his original claim to include the qualification “in the Greek.”  This was an unwise move on his part.  The Greek text translated “only believe” in the Authorized Bible in Mark 5:36 is “μόνον πίστευε” (monon pisteue).  The Greek text translated “faith only” in James 2:24 is “πίστεως μόνον” (pisteos monon).  In the Greek, the word rendered “only” is identical and the relationship between the genitive noun in St. James’ epistle and the imperative verb in St. Mark’s Gospel is much more obvious than in English.  Both are built on the same stem πίστ (pist), whereas in English we use “believe”, a verb of Germanic descent to correspond to “faith” a noun of Latin etymology.

 

A better argument that he might have used would have been to say that the Lord was speaking to the situation in Mark 5:36 and so it was not a statement about the theology of salvation.  The problem with this reasoning is that the Lord’s statement was addressed to Jairus who had just received word that his daughter, for whom he was asking the Lord for healing and her very life, had died.  This verse is, in fact, typical of the response, when a verbal response is recorded, that the Lord would give to requests for healing.  Only two verses prior the Lord had said to the woman who had been healed while He was on His way to heal Jairus’ daughter “Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole.” Late He would use almost identical wording to blind Bartimaeus who requested his sight when the Lord was traveling through Jericho on His way to Jerusalem just prior to His Triumphal Entry “Go thy way.  Thy faith has made thee whole” (Mk. 10:52).   In St. Luke’s account of both these events, the word “saved” appears in place of “made…whole.”  This was a translation choice.  It is the word σέσωκέν (sesoken) in each instance.  This is the third person singular, perfect active indicative form of σῴζω (sozo), “I save”, from which our word soteriology – the doctrine of salvation – is derived. 

 

Now, it could be argued that the salvation in view in these passages is not spiritual salvation, that is, salvation from sin and its eternal consequences, but physical salvation from temporal conditions.  It would be unwise for a Roman apologist to make such an argument, however.  The entire theological basis for thinking that anointing by the Church’s elders (presbyters, priests) for healing is a Sacrament (a means through which God conveys grace) is that spiritual healing being so much more necessary than physical, God gives the former when He gives the latter, a principle that would seem to be supported from the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ healing the man sick of palsy (in St. Mark’s account 2:1-12).  More importantly, however, is that the pattern is consistent throughout the Gospels – if someone comes to the Lord, seeking healing of illnesses, of conditions such as blindness, deliverance from demonic possession, or any such thing, all that the Lord asks of that person is faith. The faith does not even have to measure up to a set standard.  Think of the man who requested that his son be delivered from possession immediately after the Transfiguration.  The Lord tells him “If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth” (Mk. 9:23) and the man responds “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief” (v. 24) and receives what he had requested (vv. 225-27).  All of these things – healing, sight, the ability to walk, exorcisms, what have you – were gifts that the Lord gave freely to whoever came to Him for them.  All that was needed to receive them was faith – and faith enough to ask, was sufficient.

 

This is very similar to what St. Paul has to say about faith in the fourth chapter of his epistle to the Roman Church.  This brings us to one of the other things that I had pointed out in my response to the Roman apologist.  Even if it were true that James 2:24 was the only verse to speak of “faith alone” and in the context of denying it, which I have just demonstrated is not the case, this leaves the matter of what St. James asserts that people are justified by in addition to faith.   The expression St. James uses is ἐξ ἔργων (ex ergon) – out of, or by, works.  This is precisely what St. Paul denies that justification or salvation is by.  These denials occur not just in a single verse but multiple times throughout the Pauline corpus.  The fourth chapter of Romans is of particular importance, however, because in this chapter the reason why justification is by faith and not by works is explained at length. 

 

Before looking at that explanation another detail about the fourth chapter of Romans deserves mention.  That is that the language used by St. Paul in this chapter is very similar to that used by St. James in the second chapter of his epistle.  “Justified”, “faith”, and “works” occur repeatedly in both passages.  It is not just a matter of similar terminology.  St. Paul references the example of Abraham in the Old Testament, quoting Genesis 15:6 in the third verse of the chapter.  St. James also references Abraham and quotes the same verse in the twenty-third verse of his second chapter.  That both writers use the same primary Old Testament reference and the same terminology to argue for what on the surface seem to be contradictory conclusions places an interpretive responsibility on both sides of the debate about faith and works.  If, as both the Roman Church which rejects “Sola Fide” and our Anglican Church which affirms it (Article XI) along with the Lutherans and Reformed confess, both the writings of St. Paul and the epistle of St. James are part of the inspired written Word of God then some way of explaining why both are true even though the one seems to be affirming A and the other non-A must be found. 

 

There is, in fact, an explanation which suggests itself in the very texts in question.  The similar terminology in the two passages has already been noted but there is one term that is prominent in the fourth chapter of Romans that does not appear at all in James 2:14-26.  That word is χάρις (charis) which means “grace”.  It occurs in the fourth chapter of Romans for the first time in the fourth verse, then again in the sixteenth verse.  While these are only two occurrences they are key verses because they contain St. Paul’s explanation of his doctrine.  In the first occurrence the Authorized Bible reads “Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt.” (Rom. 4:4).  Something that is received as a reward for works is something that is owed to the person who receives it.  This is not the case with God’s justification or salvation.  All people, Jews or Gentiles, are sinners.  We do not deserve salvation.  We can do nothing to earn it.  It is given to us as a free gift.  That is what it means for justification to be “by grace” in St. Paul’s writings.  The verse that immediately follows reads “But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness.”  “To him that worketh not” - Gk. τῷ δὲ μὴ ἐργαζομένῳ (to de me ergazomeno) – is a much stronger way of saying that it is not by works and it is only in the context of making his point here that the Apostle speaks in this way.  After quoting from King David who expressed the reverse side of counting of faith as righteousness (the non-imputation of sin) and arguing from Abraham’s having been justified by faith in his uncircumcised state that those who believe are justified regardless of whether they are circumcised or not, he provides this plain explanation “Therefore it is of faith, that it might be by grace; to the end the promise might be sure to all the seed: not to that only which is of the law, but to that also which is of the faith of Abraham; who is the father of us all.” (Rom. 4:16)  This verse says that justification is by faith that it might be by grace.  The earlier verse says that for it to be by grace it cannot be by works.  What this suggests with regards to the interpretation of St. James is that the justification that he is talking about, the justification that is “by works” and not by “faith only” cannot be justification by grace. 

 

To argue this from the absence of the word grace from the relevant passage of St. James alone would be a mere argument from silence, but when we join that absence to what St. Paul says about faith, works, and grace in Romans, the conclusion seems established.  Further support can be found in the second verse of the fourth chapter of Romans where St. Paul writes “For if Abraham were justified by works, he hath whereof to glory: but not before God.”  St. James had declared that Abraham was justified by works.  St. Paul here does not say that he wasn’t, but rather than such justification is cause for boasting but not before God.  In other words, it is not the kind of justification, justification by grace, that he is writing about.  In Ephesians 2:8-9 he wrote “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.”  The “boast” in this verse, is the verb form of the noun rendered “whereof to glory” in Rom. 4:2.  Romans 4:2, therefore, provides an explanation of James 2:14-26 that harmonizes the two passages.  James 2:14-26 provides no such explanation of Romans 4 – or Eph. 2:8-9, or all the other passages in which St. Paul asserts that salvation is by grace through faith and not by works. 

 

That an explanation of St. James can be found in St. Paul, while St. James contains no explanation of St. Paul, only makes sense.  St. Paul’s epistle to Romans was written towards the very end of his third missionary journey as he was about to travel to Jerusalem where he would be arrested.  St. James’ epistle was written much earlier, before the Council of Jerusalem which took place between St. Paul’s first and second missionary journeys.  This can be reasonably deduced from the fact that St. James’ epistle is written to a Jewish Church into which Gentiles have not yet been incorporated.  The author identifies himself as James and traditionally this has been thought to have been St. James the Just, who as bishop of the Church of Jerusalem presided over the Council (Acts 15), making it incredible to think that it could have been written after the Council.  If the St. James who wrote the epistle was the brother of St. John this would also mean that the epistle had to have been written before the Council of Jerusalem and, indeed, before St. Paul’s first missionary journey, because he was killed by Herod Agrippa at the beginning of the chapter of Acts prior to the one in which SS. Paul and Barnabas were sent out by the Church of Antioch.  St. Paul, then, by the time he wrote Romans, had plenty of time to have become acquainted with St. James’ epistle, but Romans would have been years in the future when St. James wrote his epistle.

 

St. Paul’s explanation of why the justification of which he wrote is by faith and not by works corresponds with what we have already noted about how the Lord healed and delivered people during His earthly ministry.  Again, the Lord bestowed these blessings freely, turning nobody away, and requiring nothing except faith enough to come to Him and ask.  St. Paul’s account of justification basically amounts to spiritual salvation being exactly the same as this.  The word χάρις, like its Latin and English counterparts,  can refer either to the attitude of favour on the part of someone who freely gives or to the attitude of thankfulness on the part of the recipient (hence, the designation of Holy Communion as The Eucharist, or Great Thanksgiving, “saying grace” and the very word gratitude for thankfulness).   When used of God it is always the grace of the Giver.  When used of God with regards to the salvation of man it can mean either His favour as actively expressed in the giving of His Son to be our Saviour (Rom. 3:24) or His favour as the state in which we stand because of Christ’s saving work. (Rom. 5:2) Either way, the primary idea of salvation by the grace of God is that everything which God does to make sinful people right with Him, He gives to them freely.  We must believe in Jesus Christ, but this is not a work we do to earn our salvation.  If it were, justification by grace could not be through faith any more than it is by works. As with the physical healing during His earthly ministry, we merely need faith sufficient to come to Him and ask (Rom. 10:13).  Faith’s role in salvation is to receive the gift.  It is to the free gift of justification (Rom 3:24, 5:14-18) and everlasting life (Rom. 6:23) what the hand of a recipient is to a material gift.  Since it is the only such hand that we have been given for receiving the gift of salvation – as means of grace, Sacraments correspond to the hand of the Giver not the hand of the recipient, the role of repentance is not to receive grace but to break down the barriers sin erects in the heart to the reception of grace (1), and the exclusion of works from this role is explicitly spelled out by St. Paul – it is indeed, “faith alone”, or better, “faith only” which receives the grace of salvation.  This is St. Paul’s teaching.  It is not what St. James denied in James 2:24.

 

That St. Paul writing later, explains St. James writing earlier and that the explanation is that Jacobean salvation/justification is not salvation/justification by grace before God, is the harmonization that most fits the sacred texts.  The explanations of St. Paul offered by those who reject this harmonization are less than satisfactory.  That when St. Paul wrote that justification was not by works he meant “works of the law” not “works of love” is true but does not support the conclusion for which those who so argue contend.  The difference between “works of the law” and “works of love” is that “works of the law” are works done in order to gain God’s acceptance and “works of love” are works done with no such motive in mind but out of love for God.  The whole idea of “works of love” rests upon the fact that we are free to love God, because He first loved us by giving us His Son to take away our sin.  If you say that “works of love” are necessary for salvation in any sense other than that they are the natural fruit of the love that God’s freely given forgiveness inspires then you have eliminated the distinction between “works of the law” and “works of love” and transformed “works of love” into “works of the law.”

 

Nor is it helpful to try and explain away St. Paul by saying that the works he excluded were works of “the Law” in the sense of the Old Covenant as opposed to works of “the Gospel” in the sense of the New Covenant.   Unless, of course, one has John 6:29 “Jesus answered and said unto them, This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent” in mind which is unlikely to be the case with someone trying to explain away St. Paul in this manner.  The moral standard the Lord Jesus set for His followers was higher than that set by Moses.  What was merely implicit in Moses, the Lord spelled out explicitly in the Sermon on the Mount – if we are to be righteous in God’s eyes by meeting His standard, then we must obey His commandments completely rather than merely in the most literal outward manner, we must obey them in our hearts, in our thoughts, words and deeds.  St. Paul, however, in the third chapter of Romans explained that the Law could not justify before God because all have sinner and so the Law can only condemn.  If this is the case with the Law as given by Moses, it is all the more the case with the higher standard of the Sermon on the Mount.  St. Paul’s argument for why justification by grace cannot be of works would make no sense if the works excluded were works under a lower standard but not works under a higher standard.

 

Finally, the argument that the works St. Paul had in mind were works of the “ceremonial Law” but not works of the “moral Law” is defeated by Titus 3:5 “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost.”   “Works of righteousness” is hardly an expression that would be used to refer to keeping the ceremonial Law rather than the moral Law.

 

Such explanations are obviously inferior to simply accepting that St. Paul, writing later, explained St. James rather than the other way around and that the explanation is that St. James was not talking about salvation/justification before God by grace.  Those who do not accept this and cling to one or more of the inferior explanations do so because they are unwilling to acknowledge that the words “Sola Fide” could express, depending upon how it is explained, a truth rather than a form of heresy. This is a dangerous unwillingness, however.

 

Someone unwilling to acknowledge that “Sola Fide” can be a truth as well as a heresy, deliberately blinds himself to the fact that heresies are not simple errors of the 2 + 2 = 5 type, but a distinct kind of error that involves exaggerating a truth to the point that it eclipses other truths that are just as important.  Sabellianism/Patripassionism/Modalism is the heresy that you get if you exaggerate the unity of God (a truth) to the point that it eclipses the distinct Personhood of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.  Tri-theism is the reverse heresy.  If you exaggerate the truth of the deity of Jesus Christ to the point that His humanity is eclipsed or denied then you open the door to a number of heresies including Docetism, Apollinarism, and Eutychianism.  Similarly, if you exaggerate His humanity to the point that His deity is downgraded you can get a number of different heresies including  Ebionism, Adoptionism, and Psilanthropism (Arianism, the main heresy of the fourth century against which the first two ecumenical councils contended, also downgraded the deity of Jesus Christ but in exaggeration of a different truth).  If there is a Sola Fide heresy then there must be a truth in Sola Fide that has been exaggerated.  Indeed, technical definition of heresy aside, holding SS James and Paul together requires this.  The Sola Fide denied by St. James must be a heresy.  The Sola Fide acknowledged and emphasized by St. Paul – the fact that he does not use the word “alone” is not relevant because it is “works” that the “alone” in “faith alone” excludes and St. Paul excludes works with much stronger language than the word “alone” – must be a truth.

 

The Pauline Sola Fide – the truth – is an auxiliary truth.  It supports and safeguards another, more important truth.  This truth is Sola Gratia, the truth that salvation is the free gift of God by grace and not something we earn.  Now Sola Gratia, while one of the Five Solae in the formula drawn up by twentieth-century Calvinists either to summarize the teachings of the sixteenth century Reformers or to try and make them all out to be Calvinists, is not a Reformation/Protestant distinctive.  It is not denied by those who have difficulty seeing in the words Sola Fide anything other than the Jacobean Sola Fide – the heresy.   Rather, it is affirmed by them, often quite strongly and with indignation against the suggestion that they teach salvation by works.  It is Catholic dogma in the truest sense of the word Catholic because it was defined as such against both the ultra-rigorism of the Novatian and Donatist schismatic sects and the heresy of Pelagius by the Catholic Church of the early centuries of the first millennium before such things as the cultural differences between Greek and Latin speakers, the political divisions between the Roman and Persian Empires and between the East and West within the Roman Empire, and ecclesiastical political squabbles of precisely the sort that the Lord forbade, introduced schisms of a different sort than that of someone getting mad that the Church would not go along with either his doctrinal hobby horse or his one strike and you’re out policy towards serious post-baptismal sin  and leaving to found his own sect. 

 

You contradict your affirmation of salvation by grace, however, if unlike the best Roman Patriarch of living memory, the late Benedict XVI, (2) you refuse to acknowledge that Sola Fide, properly explained, is a truth.  St. Paul clearly taught that for salvation to be a free gift of God’s grace it must be received by faith in which reception works can play no part.  That is all that Dr. Luther meant by Sola Fide, that is all that the eleventh of our Articles of Religion means by it and Archbishop Cranmer meant by it in the third sermon in the Edwardian Book of Homilies, and it is all that John Calvin meant by it in the third book of his Institutes of the Christian Religion.

 

Some acknowledge the Pauline truth of Sola Fide but say that it refers only to initial justification.  This is not the case, however.  A person does not need God’s grace only when he first becomes a believer, he is constantly in need of God’s grace.  Grace sufficient to meet his ongoing need is available for him.  It is available exactly where he obtained it from initially – in Jesus Christ.  St. Paul after having explained that Christ’s one Sacrifice accomplished what the many sacrifices of the Old Covenant never could, wrote “there remaineth no more sacrifice for sin” (Heb. 10:26).  This was part of a warning against apostasy from Christianity, one of several such dire warnings in an epistle written to Hebrew believers who were tempted to so apostatize, a general theme of which being that since the New Covenant is the substance of which the Old was a mere shadow, the judgement that would come upon those who abandoned the New Covenant would be more severe than that which came upon those who abandoned the Old.  Many in the early centuries, unfortunately, took the words of this warning as meaning that sin – or, at least, “serious sin” – after baptism, could not be forgiven, or could only be forgiven once, or one could only hope to receive forgiveness on one’s deathbed after a lifetime of non-communicant repentance.  Eventually, this sort of bad thinking was rejected by the Church when grace prevailed against the errors of Novatianism, Donatism, and Pelagianism as already mentioned.  That grace would prevail over this error was inevitable. St. John had clearly promised that Christians, confessing their sins, would be forgiven and cleansed and from his remarks about Jesus Christ being our Advocate with the Father and the propitiation for our sins it is also fairly clear that the forgiveness comes from the same source as our initial forgiveness, the one Sacrifice of Jesus Christ., (1 John 1-2:2).  This only makes sense.  In baptism, new life is conferred upon the believer, and St. Paul identifies the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ into which the believer is baptised as the source of that new life (Rom. 6:3-5).  In Holy Communion the new life of the believer is fed with His body and blood, that is to say, the same sacrifice.  In both Sacraments, the grace given comes from the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ, in both Sacraments what is given is received by faith (see John 6 for faith as the means of receiving the grace in Holy Communion).  From start to finish in the Christian life, the grace that comes from Christ’s death and resurrection through the myriad means of giving that God has provided, is received only by faith.

 

If it be objected that this contradicts what the Scriptures teach about the Last Judgement, I answer that the contradiction is surface only.  At the Last Judgement we will give account for every thought we have ever thought, every word we have ever said, and every deed we have ever done.  Of this the Scriptures are clear and even if they were not that we will be judged for our works is inherent in the very concept of judgement itself.   The Scriptures are also clear that nobody will be justified at that Judgement by having his works meet the standard of judgement.  St. Paul says that explicitly in Romans 3:20, it is also the implication of what St. James says in James 2:10-11.  Nobody will be justified by his works because all have sinned.  The only exception, the only One Who could measure up before the Judgement, is the One Who will be sitting on the throne doing the judging.  Anybody else who is pronounced righteous at this Judgement will be so pronounced because he has been made to be righteous in the eyes of God by his sins having been forgiven and removed by Jesus Christ through His propitiatory, redemptive, Sacrifice by grace.  This is how one is justified when he is first united to Christ, this is how his justification is maintained, and this is how he will be justified in the end when he stands before Jesus Christ at the Last Judgement.

 

Let us consider the Judgement passage that is most often taken as contradicting this. The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats in the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 25 is the classic example.  The Sheep and Goats are both judged on the basis of what are traditionally called the Corporal Works of Mercy – feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, providing shelter and clothing to those who need it, visiting the sick and prisoners.  The Sheep are rewarded for having done these for the Judge, Who explains that He counts any such thing done for “the least of these my brethren” as done unto Him.  The Goats are sent away into everlasting punishment for having not done these for the Judge, Who counts any neglect of “the least of these my brethren” as neglect of Himself.

 

This parable is often read as if it was saying that at the Final Judgement, everyone will be judged in the same way and that on the basis of their performance they will be divided into those who will be rewarded and those who will be punished.  The parable does not say this, however.  While the same type of works are referenced with regards to both the Sheep and the Goats in the Judgement, the way in which the one group is judged according to these works is radically different from the way the other group is judged.  Note that the Sheep and Goats are separated from each other before the actual Judgement, before any mention is made of the works.  Jumping ahead to the Goats, these are punished for the slightest sin of omission, the slightest neglect of the Works of Mercy.  This is a strict, by-the-book, legal judgement.  Now consider the case of the Sheep.  Just as the Judge condemns the Goats for the slightest sin of omission, so He rewards the Sheep for the slightest Work of Mercy.  This, and not that they have deserved, earned, or merited their reward by consistent practice of the Works of Mercy, is the import of the Judge’s words.

 

So how is this not a gross injustice, the same Judge, judging two different groups of people according to the same kind of works, but in totally opposite ways, rewarding the one group for the smallest work done and punishing the other for the smallest work undone?

 

The only possible answer is that the Sheep have had that which would otherwise make them Goats removed – their sins.  What the Goats receive is what everyone deserves according to a strict, by-the-book, legal judgement.  The Goats receive this, because they did not avail themselves of the sin-removing mercy and grace of God made available to them through the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ.  With their sins unremoved, even the smallest sin of omission counts against them at the Final Judgement.   There is nothing to condemn those from whom Jesus Christ has removed their sins, however, so they can be rewarded for the slightest work.  Although called a reward, what they receive is not what their works have earned, merited or deserved.  It is not what is due them but a further expression of grace.

  

 (1)   The Parable of the Prodigal Son shows repentance’s role.  The son’s repentance was not responsible for the father’s willingness to forgive.  Those who call upon sinners to “soften God’s heart” with their tears commit blasphemy.  Even Christ’s Sacrifice shouldn’t be spoken of as if made God the Father, previously unwilling to forgive sinners, willing to forgive them (the forgiving love of God the Father initiated the work of salvation – “For God so loved the world that He gave His Only-Begotten Son”).  God, like the father who represents Him in the Parable, is already looking with a forgiving heart for the sinner to return to Him.  What the son’s repentance in the parable did was move him to so return.  This is the role of repentance.

(2)   “For this reason Luther's phrase: "faith alone" is true, if it is not opposed to faith in charity, in love.” – Pope Benedict XVI, 19 November, 2008, St. Peter’s Square.  “Faith must of course be sincere. It must be a faith that performs good works through love. If faith lacks love it is not true faith.” – Dr. Martin Luther, Commentary on Galatians, 1535.

The Theologians’ Cross

In this essay, written at the request of a colleague and former classmate, we shall be considering the subjects of election and predestination.   This is the first of three planned essays on these subjects.  This one will look at the difference between how the two main continental Protestant traditions have handled a theological dilemma that is at the heart of the predestination/free will debate and will conclude by briefly looking at how our Anglican tradition has handled the same dilemma in its Articles.  A second essay will consider divine foreknowledge and human responsibility from a broader perspective than how these apply in salvation and will look more at pre-Reformation thinking on the subject.  The third essay will be an exegetical consideration of certain relevant chapters of the New Testament.

 

The Scriptures speak of God’s people, under both Covenants, as having been chosen by Him which is the concept the word “election” denotes.  The verb προορίζω appears in various forms, six times in the New Testament.  This verb is a compound of a Greek preposition meaning “before” and a verb meaning “determine” or “ordain” and is translated by “predestinate” in the Authorized Bible in four out of the six occurrences. (1)  Election and predestination, therefore, are Scriptural concepts and so within the context of orthodox Christian theology, discussion and debate has not been over whether God’s people have been elected and predestined, (2) but over what the implications of these words are especially with regards to how they relate to the matters of divine Sovereignty and human moral responsibility or free will. 

 

“The theologians’ cross” is a translation of the Latin expression crux theologorum.  This expression is used, primarily by Lutheran theologians, to designate a problem that has plagued theologians of all Churches, denominations, and stripes.  The problem is cur alii, alii non, or “why some, not others?” that is, “why are some saved, not others?”  Within the Reformed tradition, that is, the branch of Protestantism that began in Zurich, Switzerland with Ulrich Zwingli at about the same time that the Lutheran tradition began in Wittenberg, Germany with Dr. Martin Luther, two opposite answers to this question have been given.  Calvinism, which takes its name from John Calvin whose became the leader of the Reformation at Geneva about half a decade after Zwingli’s death, says that the answer is the eternal decree of God.  God, before the creation of the world, decided that He would save such-and-such individuals and that He would leave others to suffer damnation, and in both cases His decision was based solely on its pleasing His will so to do and not on anything in either the elect or the reprobate themselves that distinguished the one group from the other.  Arminianism, on the other hand, which began in the generation after Calvin with Jacob Arminius, a student of Calvin’s successor Theodore Beza, says that the answer is to be found in the free will of man, that God did indeed elect and predestine some to salvation, but that this was based on His foreknowledge of who would out of their own free will believe the Gospel and who would not.  Today, an increasing number of theologians can be found willing to answer the question by denying the distinction, despite the sacrifice of orthodoxy involved in doing so. (3)

 

By contrast with both the Calvinist and Arminian sides of the Reformed tradition and the non-orthodox contemporary universalists, the Lutherans who named the problem have also taken the position that it has no answer, or at least no answer that can be known to us in this life.  The Lutherans insist that there are two truths that must be affirmed simultaneously, the universality of God’s saving grace and that salvation is by grace alone.  The crux theologorum arises because by natural human reasoning, these truths taken together ought to add up to universalism and yet they do not.  The Calvinist answer to the dilemma amounts to a denial of universal grace, the Arminian to a denial of grace alone. (4)   The Lutherans maintain, against both sides of the Reformed tradition, that universal grace and grace alone can be affirmed together, because God gives His grace through means, specifically the means of the Gospel in its three modes of Word, baptism, and Communion, and that when God works through means His will is resistible.  Therefore, salvation is entirely the work of God which He completed for the whole world in Jesus Christ and the grace (state of being in favour) thereby purchased He gives to all as a free gift along with the faith which is the appointed means whereby we receive it in the Gospel, but because of the intermediate nature of the communication of grace, we are capable of resisting it and it is our natural inclination in our fallen condition to do so.  God, in the grace He gives through the Gospel, is the sole cause of salvation in those who receive it by faith, man, resisting that grace out of the perverse inclination of his fallen will, is solely responsible for his own damnation in the case of those who are finally and incurably impenitent.  The saved, are not saved because of anything in themselves (even a lesser resistance) that makes them differ from the lost, nor are the damned, damned because God loves them less or has made lesser provision for their salvation, than the saved.  There is, therefore, no answer to the question of what makes the one differ from the other, and this should be treated as a mystery.

 

The Lutheran position on this has much to commend it.  Some questions don’t need answering and given the problems with any answer that has been put forward to this one, leaving it as a mystery is the best option.  A sedes doctrinae can be found for this position in Deuteronomy 29:29 which reads “The secret things belong unto the Lord our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.”  The precise doctrine that sparked the Calvinist-Arminian controversy within the Reformed tradition is the classic example of what can happen if theologians ignore this verse and pry into the secret things that God reserves for Himself.

 

John Calvin’s career as a Reformer spanned about three decades from the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536 until his death in 1564.  While predestination was not as important in his own theology as it would become in the theology of those who call their view by his name, he did teach a strong double predestination, in which the reprobation of the lost is as much a positive decree based entirely on the pleasure of God’s will as the election of the saved. (5) Jacob Arminius, who was born in 1560 a few years before Calvin’s death, was a protégé of Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor as chief pastor of Geneva.  Beza’s principal theological contribution to the development of Calvinist theology was the doctrine of supralapsarianism.  Supralapsarianism is a doctrine about the order of God’s decrees.  It asserts that God’s decree to save some and damn others, logically but not temporally (because these decrees are from eternity which is outside of time) precedes His decree to create mankind and allow him to fall into sin.  If anything warrants being described as a secret thing belonging unto the Lord our God and hence not to us, it is the order of God’s eternal decrees.  The effect, however, of the doctrine of supralapsarianism is to say that God created people and allowed them to fall into sin in order that He might damn them and have grounds  on which so to do. 

 

Arminius, shortly after being made pastor in Amsterdam in 1587, was tasked by that city’s Ecclesiastical Court with rebutting the anti-Calvinist arguments of one Dirck Coornhert.  Later, after he had become a professor at his alma mater Leiden University in 1603, he became embroiled in a controversy with a senior member of the faculty of theology Franciscus Gomarus that would last the rest of his life.  In both cases, supralapsarianism was at the heart of the controversy.  Arminius had been asked to defend this doctrine against both Coornhert’s attacks and the proposed alternative of infralapsarianism (in which the decree to save and damn, presupposes the fall of man).  Arminius had concluded, however, that the doctrine he was asked to defend was indefensible, and by the time of his falling out with Gomarus at Leiden, he had come to see infralapsarianism as afflicted with many of the same problems as supralapsarianism.  As a consequence, he adopted a modified doctrine of predestination in which election is based on foresight of a positive response to the Gospel. 

 

In 1610, the year after Arminius’ death, his students submitted a protest against the strict predestinarianism of the Dutch Reformed Church.  The protest was entitled the Remonstrance, and consisted of five articles which have since been collectively called Arminianism although not all of them were spelled out in Arminius’ own teachings.  These are conditional election, unlimited atonement, total depravity (that fallen man is lost and sin from which he cannot extract himself but is utterly dependent on the grace of God – Arminians are no Pelagians), prevenient grace (like the Lutheran view of grace but unlike Calvin’s, Arminian prevenient grace is resistible, but unlike the Lutheran view it works by restoring the will’s ability to choose God so that the believer cooperates, although only after grace, in his own conversion), and a questioning of the guarantee of perseverance that soon hardened into the positive affirmation of the possibility of the believer’s apostasy that in wider evangelical circles today is the first if not the only thing the word “Arminian” summons to mind.  The Dutch government sat on the Remonstrance for a surprisingly long time, and in 1618 summoned representatives of the Reformed Churches to meet at Dordrecht to address the matter in what was intended to be the Reformed equivalent of a General Council.   The Synod of Dort met from late 1618 until spring of 1619 and published five canons in response to the Remonstrance.   These are what have ever since been known as the Five Points of Calvinism, for which the acronym TULIP was early coined – Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, Perseverance of the Saints. (6)   

 

This intra-Reformed schism, therefore, and its polarized theological positions, are a direct result of the Reformed tradition’s unwillingness to leave the crux theologorum unanswered and to leave to God the “secret things” that are His. This is a specific example of a general reluctance in practice to acknowledge mysteries that are beyond the explanatory capacity of human reasoning that also manifests itself with regards to other facets of the predestination-free will debate.  This reluctance helps explain the rise of Modern rationalism but is itself somewhat of a mystery in that one would expect a tradition that places such an emphasis on the gap between Sovereign Creator and fallen creature to be more willing than others to acknowledge mysteries beyond its understanding rather than less.  A partial explanation is the influence of Renaissance humanism on the Reformed tradition.  While Renaissance humanism in general, and that of Erasmus in particular, influenced both Dr. Luther and the Reformed tradition, the influence was greater in the Reformed tradition.   Note, however, that this does not mean that the strong predestinarianism of the Reformed tradition came from Erasmus.  Dr. Luther and Erasmus had a famous falling out in 1524-1525 precisely over this matter.  In 1524, Erasmus had published his treatise On the Freedom of the Will which argued for the capacity of the human will to respond positively to grace, and in the following year Dr. Luther had responded with his On the Bondage of the Will which, as the title would suggest, argued that the human will since the Fall has been bound in chains by sin and cannot respond positively to grace until freed to do so by grace itself.  It was more humanism’s general influence that led to the proto-rationalism of the Reformed tradition.   This should not be taken as entirely a negative thing.  In the Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin wrote the single most important contribution to systematic theology since St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica and this too can be largely attributed to the same influence.

 

Where the humanist influence on the Reformed tradition can be most seen to impact its approach to the crux theologorum has to do with the means of grace, especially the Sacraments.  In the broader Christian tradition, the expression “means of grace” refers to channels through which God distributes grace to people.   Protestantism takes a narrower view of this concept than other Christian traditions, limiting the grace distributed through the means to saving grace.  This is part of the reason why Protestants generally limit the Sacraments to two (baptism and the Lord’s Supper) or three (if absolution is included), although, as I recently discussed at length, (7) our Anglican Church has the best position on the matter by affirming baptism and the Lord’s Supper as Gospel Sacraments through which saving grace is distributed, without dogmatically rejecting the others affirmed by the broader Christian tradition as being Sacraments in a more general sense.   The Lutherans, helpfully distinguish between two kinds of means of grace, the organa dotika (means of giving, Word and Sacraments) and the organon leptikon (means of receiving, faith).  While the Reformed tradition uses the expression “means of grace” for Word and Sacrament (the Westminster Confession of Faith also names prayer), in their theology only the Word is a means of grace in the sense of an instrument God uses to give saving grace and faith. 

 

In the Heidelberg Catechism, Question 65 is “It is through faith alone that we share in Christ and all his benefits: where then does that faith come from?”  The answer is “The Holy Spirit produces it in our hearts by the preaching of the holy gospel, and confirms it by the use of the holy sacraments.” (8)  Note the distinction.  “Confirm” here is used in its original sense of “strengthen” rather than “verify” but since faith’s reception of grace is in no way dependent on its strength this position nullifies the concept of the Sacraments as an effectual means of grace in Reformed theology.  Orthodox Lutherans argue that Reformed theology by its doctrine of immediate grace nullifies even the Word as an effectual means of grace. (9)  This is because in Reformed theology, conversion is produced by irresistible grace or the effectual call, which is distinguished from the outward call of the Gospel, and which is regarded as a work of the Holy Spirit that is entirely internal to the person on whom it has the effect.  It is the Holy Spirit in the elect, in other words, rather than the Holy Spirit in the Word, who makes the elect believe the Word by the direct exercise of His power within the elect, rather than through the instrument of the Word.

 

The idea in Reformed theology, that the Holy Spirit operates directly on the human spirit, and that the external means of grace are inappropriate tools for Him to use to accomplish His work but are at most external signs testifying to it points to something in Reformed theology that manifests itself elsewhere in Reformed theology, and that is a tendency towards a moderate neo-Gnosticism.  The original heresies to which the term Gnosticism is applied, saw the physical world and the matter of which it is composed, as irredeemably corrupt and the spirit as incorruptible and pristine.   Their idea of salvation was the liberation of the human spirit from what they regarded as its material prison.  The Gnostics derived their ideas from secular philosophy, and in particular from Plato who saw everything in the physical world as an imperfect reflection of a perfect original in the unseen world.  While Plato also clearly influenced the thinking of St. Paul, the Apostle like the orthodox Church Fathers who contended against the Gnostics, recognized both the material and the spiritual as the creation of the One God, the same God of both Covenants, Who was manifest in the flesh in the “mystery of godliness” (1 Tim. 3:16).  While the Reformed tradition’s affirmation of the Nicene Creed and the Definition of Chalcedon prevents it from being outright Gnostic, its rejection of Nicaea II, the theological argument of which, whatever one might think of the practices that the Roman and Eastern Church justify with it, are the reasonable consequences of the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation as articulated and defended in the earlier ecumenical councils, demonstrates an uncomfortableness with regarding the material as the vehicle of the spiritual that approaches Gnosticism without quite crossing the boundary between it and Christianity.  This entered the Reformed tradition through the influence of humanistic philosophy on, especially, Zwingli, and is the reason that tradition, while retaining the language of means of grace with reference to Word and Sacrament, falls short of seeing them as the actual instruments God uses to give His grace.  This in turn is the reason why the Reformed tradition is unwilling to leave the crux theologorum as an unsolvable mystery.

 

Predestination and Election are addressed in Article XVII of our Anglican Articles of Religion.  Although it is a fairly long Article I will quote it in its entirety:

 

Predestination to Life is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby (before the foundations of the world were laid) he hath constantly decreed by his counsel secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom he hath chosen in Christ out of mankind, and to bring them by Christ to everlasting salvation, as vessels made to honour. Wherefore, they which be endued with so excellent a benefit of God be called according to God’s purpose by his Spirit working in due season: they through Grace obey the calling: they be justified freely: they be made sons of God by adoption: they be made like the image of his only-begotten Son Jesus Christ: they walk religiously in good works, and at length, by God’s mercy, they attain to everlasting felicity.

 

As the godly consideration of Predestination, and our Election in Christ, is full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort to godly persons, and such as feel in themselves the working of the Spirit of Christ, mortifying the works of the flesh, and their earthly members, and drawing up their mind to high and heavenly things, as well because it doth greatly establish and confirm their faith of eternal Salvation to be enjoyed through Christ, as because it doth fervently kindle their love towards God: So, for curious and carnal persons, lacking the Spirit of Christ, to have continually before their eyes the sentence of God’s Predestination, is a most dangerous downfall, whereby the Devil doth thrust them either into desperation, or into wretchlessness of most unclean living, no less perilous than desperation.

 

Furthermore, we must receive God’ s promises in such wise, as they be generally set forth to us in holy Scripture: and, in our doings, that Will of God is to be followed, which we have expressly declared unto us in the Word of God.

 

Just as Article XXV on the Sacraments affirms the Protestant view of baptism and the Lord’s Supper as being unique as Sacraments of the Gospel without dogmatically rejecting the other five others affirmed by all the ancient Churches (with a partial exception of the Assyrian Church) as being Sacraments, so this Article affirms only the bare basics that all Christians should be able to affirm about predestination.  There is no mention of reprobation or even of preterition or any other predestination other than predestination to life.  It speaks of those so predestined as “chosen in Christ out of mankind” without commenting on whether that election is based on foresight or unconditional.   Although this Article was written before Jacob Arminius was born – it is a slightly shorter, but substantially the same version of what Archbishop Cranmer had written in the Forty-Two Articles of 1553 – there is nothing in this that Arminians cannot affirm. (10)  Nor is there anything in it that Calvinists cannot affirm, although their attempt in the late Elizabethan period to have the more explicitly Calvinist Lambeth Articles passed demonstrates that this Article did not impose their interpretation to the extent they would have liked (11).  It is more Lutheran than either Calvinist or Arminian, however, belonging to the section of the Articles immediately following the first section (Articles I-VIII) which affirms the most important Christian truths, the Catholic truths.  This section (Articles IX to XVIII) could be described as the “Augustinian” section of the Articles, and in it Archbishop Cranmer clearly drew his inspiration from the Lutherans as can be seen by comparing Articles IX, X, XI and XII/XIII to Articles II, XVII, IV and XX of the Augsburg Confession (and its Apology) respectively.  (12)  In the later section on Sacraments, Archbishop Cranmer was more influenced by the Reformed tradition than the Lutheran when it comes to the presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper (his Article XXIX was much toned down in this regards in its revision into the current Article XXVIII in the reign of Elizabeth I) but his language in the last paragraph of his Article XXVI, which became the first paragraph of the current Article XXV, would seem to rule out the idea that Sacraments are merely external witnesses rather than actual instruments of communicating grace. 

 

Therefore, while the Articles do not require that Churchmen take the Lutheran position on the crux theologorum, it is the position they most direct us towards.  Many serious historical and present-day theological conflicts could have been avoided in our Church, if Churchmen had agreed to that position.

 

 

 

 

 

 (1)    When used as verbs, there is no difference in meaning between “predestinate” and “predestine”, “predestinate” being the older form of the verb which more closely corresponds to the cognate noun predestination.  Unlike “predestine”, “predestinate” is also used as an adjective, indicating that the noun it modifies has been predestined.

(2)   The question of whether God’s people are elected as individuals, i.e., Joe was elected qua Joe to be part of God’s covenant people or as a collective, i.e., the entire Church is collectively chosen to be in covenant relationship with God, is a question that arises within the boundaries of orthodoxy because it is a question about the nature of election rather than the fact of election.  Similarly, the difference between the Arminian (conditional election) and Calvinist (unconditional election) views is a difference about the grounds of election among those who hold to individual election.  The recent calling into question to varying degrees of God’s foreknowledge of the outcome of the Final Judgement by “open theists” (Richard Rice, John E. Sanders, Greg Boyd, Clark Pinnock, et al.) does not fall within the bounds of orthodoxy because it rejects the fact of election as well as classical theism and Augustinianism in the general sense in which it was accepted as orthodox against the Pelagian heresy in the early Church.

(3)   In 1987, Swiss Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, best known for his work on theological aesthetics, raised a few eyebrows with his book Dare We Hope? “That All Men Be Saved”? although the book merely raised the hypothetical possibility that all would be saved ultimately without affirming that this must be so.  More recently, David Bentley Hart, a lay Eastern Orthodox theologian who is the brother of two Anglican priests (one of whom crossed the Tiber in both directions) and a doppelganger of the late David Ogden Stiers (if you only know the actor from M*A*S*H or the revived Perry Mason movies you won’t see it, look up an image of him from Doc Hollywood or later in the period when he wore a beard), published That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell and Universal Salvation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).  Note the similarity between Hart’s title and von Balthasar’s and the big difference – Hart’s is an assertion, Balthasar’s was a question.  In his book, Hart declares that everyone will ultimately be saved and that to say otherwise is to make the eternal suffering of the damned the price paid for the everlasting bliss of the saved and to teach a God Who is unworthy of our faith and love.  It would be far beyond the scope of this essay to rebut his thesis which I have brought up only as an illustration of answering the crux theologorum by denying the dilemma.  For a book length rebuttal of universalism (and annihilationism) see The Other Side of the Good News: Confronting the Contemporary Challenge’s to Jesus’ Teaching on Hell (Wheaton: Victor Books, 1992) by Dr. Larry E. Dixon, who was my Greek and theology professor and faculty advisor in the 1990s.  Or, if you are looking for something more recent, try Michael J. McClymond’s two-volume The Devil’s Redemption: A New History and Interpretation of Christian Universalism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018).

(4)   Neither Calvinists nor Arminians necessarily accept this assessment of their views.  The Lutheran assessment of the Arminian position is based on the Arminian view of prevenient grace as enabling the will to choose to respond positively to the Gospel.  The Lutherans argue, correctly, that a positive effect on the will is the result of grace being received through faith produced by grace rather than an intervening secondary cause in producing faith.  They point out, again correctly, that faith, even in other contexts, is not a product of the will.  We say “I trust so-and-so” and “I believe such-and-such” but this is not because we choose to do so, but because so-and-so has persuaded us of his trustworthiness and such-and-such has impressed us with its truth.  With regards to the Gospel, of course, ordinary persuasion is insufficient because man in his fallen condition is disinclined to believe God, but the Holy Spirit is always present in the Gospel working to overcome this. Much of the second volume of Charles Hodge’s Systematic Theology is devoted to arguing that Calvinism does not deny the universal aspect of God’s grace.  To give but one example of how his arguments fail to persuade, however, Hodge, in his defence of the Calvinist view of the design of the Atonement – he conspicuously avoids the expression “Limited Atonement” – directs his argument against the claim that the Atonement must apply equally to everyone and in no way have a special reference to the elect.  In reality, of course, what everyone other than Calvinists find objectionable in the Calvinist doctrine, is the denial that there is provision for the salvation of those who will ultimately reject it in the Atonement.

(5)   See John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.23.

(6)   The order of the canons required adjustment to produce the acronym.  In the order published, it would be ULTIP.

(7)   https://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2025/10/sacraments-and-gospel-sacraments.html

(8)   Richard Hooker in the fifth volume of his Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie had to contend with the absurd contention on the part of Elizabethan era Puritans that the Word was powerless to convert unless “preached” in the sense of exposited in a pulpit address.  Some of these objected to the reading of the Lessons (actual passages from the Scriptures) in the Church on this basis.   Ursinus and the other framers of the Heidelberg Catechism did not intend “by the preaching of the holy gospel” to be understood in this grossly ignorant manner.

(9)    “Because saving grace is particular, according to the teaching of the Calvinists, there are no means of grace for that part of mankind to which the grace of God and the merit of Christ do not extend…But neither do the Calvinists have means of grace for the elect.  Believers are expressly directed by Calvin not to ascertain their predestination from the external Word, that is, from the universal call (universalis vocation) which occurs through the outward Word (per externam praedicationem), but from the special call (specialis vocation), which consists in an inner illumination by the Holy Spirit…But according to the teaching of Calvinism this “inner illumination” is not brought about through the means of grace; it is worked immediately by the Holy Ghost.” Francis Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, Volume III (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1953), 118-122.  Pieper is, of course, a hostile witness to Calvinism, but when he goes on to quote Charles Hodge to prove this point he does not misrepresent him.  Indeed, if anything he understates his case because he elides from his quotation the following “When Christ said to the leper, ‘I will: be thou clean’, nothing intervened between his volition and the effect.  And when he put clay on the eyes of the blind man, and bade him wash in the pool of Siloam, there was nothing in the properties of the clay or of the water that cooperated in the restoration of his sight.” (This is on page 684 of the 1872 edition published by Thomas Nelson in London and Edinburgh, and in New York by Charles Scribner.  Pieper cites it as 634f.  Either he was looking at a different edition or, more likely, he or his English translator wrote a 3 for an 8).  This is sloppy thinking, and worse exegesis on Hodge’s part.  Obviously, Christ’s words expressing His will for the cleansing of the leper, intervened between His volition and the effect to bring about the latter.  In the case of the blind man, while it is true that nothing in the properties of the clay or water contributed to the restoration of his sight, this is entirely beside the point.  While Christ could have just spoken and healed the blind man like He did the leper, in this case He chose the means of mud and the pool of Siloam, and the mud and water were effective means not because of their intrinsic properties, but because He so chose to use them.

(10)                       Despite this, John Wesley removed it from his Twenty-Five Articles for Methodism.  In the century before Wesley, Bishop Andrewes, Archbishop Laud, and other Orthodox Churchman of the Jacobean and Caroline reigns were accused of “Arminianism” by the Hyper-Calvinist Puritans.  A case can be made that this accusation was no more substantial than the ridiculous accusation of popery made by the same people because the Laudians insisted that the Church follow the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer to the letter (if you don’t see why that accusation is ridiculous you are hopeless and I will not waste my time explaining it).  See, however, Samuel D. Fornecker, Bisschop’s Bench, Contours of Arminian Conformity in the Church of England, c. 1674-1742 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022) for an account of Arminian Churchmanship of a slightly later period (Bisschop is the Dutch name of the man more commonly known as Simon Episcopius, who was the leader of the Remonstrants, Arminius’ first generation followers).  Whether their Arminianism was real or merely in the minds of their opponents, these Churchmen subscribed to the Articles of Religion.

(11)                       See my discussion of this here: https://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/ 2023/08/1595-anglicanism-at-crossroads.html

(12)                       Note also the wording of Article XVI.  It suggests the Lutheran rather than the Calvinist view of perseverance, although not strongly enough so that a Calvinist could not affirm the Article.

Dr. Luther’s Trick and Treat

 Or

Sola Fide as Catholic Truth

 

We are in Allhallowtide, the period long ago set aside by the Church for the remembrance of those who have passed on before us.   It begins on the 31 October, All Hallows’ Eve, so called because on sacred calendars days are counted from evening to evening, not from midnight to midnight as in secular calendars, and 1 November is All Saints Day.   All Hallows’ Eve is also the anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation for it is on that day in 1517 that Dr. Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg.   This was a great trick on the corrupt Roman Patriarch and those who accepted his usurped supreme jurisdiction over the Church because the Ninety-Five Theses were a devastating critique of corrupt practices, like the sale of indulgences, that the Roman Patriarch – at the time it was Leo X – was using to raise funds.   Soon thereafter, Dr. Luther would provide a wonderful treat for Christian souls by hosing down the doctrine of justification, as taught by St. Paul in the New Testament, and washing away all the mud that had accumulated to obscure it so that it could be viewed in all its peace-and-assurance bringing clarity.

 

Dr.  Luther is often quoted as having said that justification is the article on which the Church stands or falls.   If you go looking through the corpus of Dr. Luther’s works for the exact phrase you will not find it, although you will find the idea stated in different words in multiple places, and the earliest attribution of the saying to him is close enough to his own time that there is no good reason to question its authenticity.   Justification, in the quotation, means the doctrine of justification by faith alone.

 

The Roman Church took a rather different view of the doctrine.   In the Council of Trent, which met from 1545 to 1563 to address the Reformation, the Roman Church pronounced an anathema upon justification by faith alone in the fourteenth canon of the Council’s sixth session in 1547, although the doctrine condemned in the canon is worded in such a way as to be unrecognizable as that which Dr. Luther and the other Reformers taught.       Here are the words of the canon:

 

If any one saith, that man is truly absolved from his sins and justified, because that he assuredly believed himself absolved and justified; or, that no one is truly justified but he who believes himself justified; and that, by this faith alone, absolution and justification are effected; let him be anathema.

 

In the doctrine condemned by this canon, the only content identified for this faith is that one is absolved and justified.   If this were the only content of one’s faith, the Roman Church would indeed be right in condemning the idea that such faith by itself absolved and justified one, for that idea would amount to the claim that one can make something be true by believing it.   You find that sort of idea in a lot of fuzzy, pop, New Age, thinking today, but you will look in vain to find it in the writings of Dr. Luther or Zwingle or Calvin or Archbishop Cranmer.  

 

The Reformation article is quite otherwise than the caricature that is condemned in the Roman canon.   In the Reformation article, the Gospel is the content of saving faith.   The Gospel is the Good News about everything God has done for us in Jesus Christ.  We needed a Saviour because of our sins and God gave us a Saviour, the Saviour He had promised from the Fall.   This Saviour is God’s Only-Begotten Son, that is to say, the Son Who is eternally begotten of God the Father, shares the Father’s nature, and so, like the Father and the Holy Ghost, is the One True God.   God gave Him to us in the Incarnation, in which the Son of God came down to Earth from Heaven, and took on our nature through a miracle wrought by the Holy Ghost in which He was conceived and born to the Virgin Mary and so became fully Man while remaining fully God.   Through this miracle, His human nature was not tainted with sin like ours and so He lived out the righteousness God requires of us all but which we are unable to produce because of our sin.   Then, rejected by the leadership of the people into which He had been born, He was condemned in a mock trial, and crucified at the order of a Roman governor who knew Him to be innocent but wished to appease the mob.   He submitted to this meekly in order that He Who had committed no sin, much less a crime, might die the death of a criminal.   Dying that death, He did what only One Who was both God and sinless Man could do, which was take the burden of all the guilt of the sins of the entire world upon Himself and pay for them once and for all.   Having so expiated the sins of the world and remaining sinless in Himself Death had no claim on Him. He entered Death’s Kingdom as Conqueror and rose triumphantly from the Grave before Ascending back to the right hand of the Father.   By doing all of this Jesus effected the salvation of the world on our behalf and the benefits of that salvation are promised in the Gospel to whosoever believes in Him.

 

Note how I worded that last sentence.  If you compare that with what the Roman canon condemns another way in which the canon misrepresents the Reformation doctrine should become clear.   Faith’s role is not to effect our absolution and justification.   That is what Jesus did in the events of the Gospel.   Our faith’s role is to receive absolution, justification, and indeed, all of the salvation that has been given to us freely in our Saviour Jesus.

 

This is where the stress needs to be when talking about faith in respect to salvation – that its role is that of the hand that receives the free gift which God has given us in Jesus Christ.   Unless we are clear that the role of faith in God’s plan of salvation is instrumental, and instrumental on our part – how we receive the gift God has given – as opposed to instrumental on God’s part – how He brings, confers, and bestows the gift of Jesus Christ and His salvation upon us – justification by faith alone does not make sense.  Sola fide is in the ablative case.   It does not mean just “faith alone” but “by faith alone” and what this expression means is that it is by faith alone that we receive the gift of salvation.   It does not mean that faith, by itself, so pleases God that on the intrinsic merits of faith He accepts us despite our plentiful bad works and deficiency in good ones.   It does not mean that the only thing Christianity asks of people is faith or, to put it another way, that Christianity consists only of believing.   It means that the task of faith in the order of salvation – the receiving, on our part, of the free gift of salvation in Jesus Christ – belongs to faith alone, and that nothing else can either substitute for faith or add to faith in the reception of salvation.

 

That this is what Dr. Luther’s article of justification by faith alone means cannot be emphasized enough.   For while the Church of Rome, in whose eyes Dr. Luther had been poking his fingers, was the only ancient Church to pronounce a formal condemnation of the article, none of the other ancient Churches, except our English Church which joined the Reformation, embraced it.   They regarded it as a novelty because the Fathers, doctors, and theologians of the ancient Churches had not been in the habit of using the word “alone” in conjunction with “faith”.   Neither did St. Paul in the Bible.   What was meant by Sola Fide, however, that faith is the only hand we have with which to receive the gift of salvation, was clearly taught in other words by St. Paul.   We shall have more to say about that shortly.   First I wish to observe that just as the Roman Church’s formal condemnation of Sola Fide at the Council of Trent did not condemn Sola Fide as Dr. Luther taught it, that faith is the sole means by which we appropriate to ourselves the gift of salvation, but a weird caricature of it in which belief creates its own reality, so none of the reasons that the other ancient Churches gave for not affirming it speak to what the article actually says.

 

Consider the objection based upon the role of baptism.   At the end of St. Peter’s sermon on the first Whitsunday (the Christian Pentecost) in the second chapter of Acts, the crowd, under heavy conviction of sin, asked the Apostles “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” and received the answer from St. Peter “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.”   Other passages can be pointed to that stress the role of baptism (1 Peter 3:21, Rom. 6:3-6, Mk. 16:16).   These verses, however, do not say that the role of baptism is the same as that of faith, that of a hand receiving a gift.   Nor is that the Catholic – held by all Christians, everywhere, at all times – understanding of the role of baptism.   Baptism is linked by the Scriptures to three distinct aspects of salvation – regeneration or the new birth, our sins being washed away, and our being joined in union with Jesus Christ.   Baptism is not how we receive these salvific blessings, however, but the ordinary means by which God bestows them upon us.    

 

I will try to make the distinction clearer.   God has given us salvation in our Saviour Jesus Christ.    This took place in the events of the Gospel, from the Incarnation to the Ascension, two millennia ago.   For that salvation to be ours, however, two things must happen.  1.  God must bring the salvation He has given us in Jesus to us.  2.   We must appropriate it to ourselves.    Both of these things involve the use of means or instruments.   God uses means to bring the salvation He has given us to us.   We use means to receive it to ourselves.   The means God uses to bring Jesus Christ and His salvation to us are the Church and her ministries of Word and Sacrament.   The means we use to appropriate Jesus Christ and His salvation to us is faith.

 

Baptism is the Sacrament that God ordinarily uses as His means, along with the Ministry of the Word, in bringing the salvation of Jesus Christ to us for the first time.   This is why it is connected specifically to regeneration, cleansing from sin, and union with Christ.  These are the aspects of salvation that are most prominent as the beginning of the Christian life.    Faith is the means by which we appropriate this salvation to ourselves and make it truly ours.   Baptism is the means God ordinarily uses to confer, faith is the means we always use to receive.  

 

A few words are in order here about what is meant by “ordinarily” and “always”.   It should not be surprising that we speak of the means God uses as ordinary but the means we use as absolute.   This merely means that God does not limit Himself to His appointed means, the way He limits us to ours.   What this means in practice with regards to baptism is that someone who hears the Gospel and believes in Jesus Christ will not be damned for lack of baptism.   This is why Jesus in Mark 16:16 promises salvation to those who believe and are baptized, but pronounces damnation only on those who do not believe.   It also means, however, that those who think this an excuse for neglecting baptism, ought to consider the account of Naaman in 2 Kings 5, and particularly verses 10-13.  

 

It is also important to note that while God always brings salvation, and more specifically regeneration, cleansing from sin, and union with Christ, to us in baptism, they are not ours unless we receive them by faith in Jesus Christ.   In the early Church controversies arose about the efficacy of baptism administered by those who had failed to be faithful witnesses in periods of persecution.   The orthodox Fathers, in answering the Novatians and later the Donatists, maintained soundly that the efficacy of the sacrament does not depend on the worthiness of the minister who administers it.  By the time of the Reformation, many in the Roman Church had twisted these arguments into arguments for the mechanical efficacy of the sacrament, that the salvation conferred through it is ours regardless of faith on our part.  The Reformers, rightly, upheld the original intent of the arguments of St. Augustine et al., that the efficacy of the Sacraments as channels of Grace was not overthrown by the sin of the minister, but, also rightly, rejected the mechanical view, and emphasized that Grace conferred is not received, except by faith.   The only benefit that one receives mechanically upon baptism is external, formal, membership in the Church.   To truly be united to her and her Saviour internally and spiritually requires that the Grace conferred in the Sacrament be received by faith in Jesus Christ.

 

Everything just said about baptism also applies to the other Gospel Sacrament, the Lord’s Supper.   Baptism is the Sacrament through which God bestows on us the initial Grace of regeneration, washing of sin, and union with Jesus Christ, the Lord’s Supper is the Sacrament through which God confers the Grace that sustains the new life in Jesus Christ, by feeding the believer with the spiritual food of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ as broken and shed for us on the Cross in His One True Sacrifice.   As with baptism, so with the Lord’s Supper, God uses the Sacrament as a channel to bestow Grace apart from the worthiness of the minister, but we only receive it by faith in Jesus Christ.

 

The orthodox understanding of the Sacraments as the ordinary means of Grace along with the ministry of the Word, therefore, does not conflict with Sola Fide.    The Sacraments and faith are both instrumental means by which the gift of salvation given to us in Jesus Christ becomes ours, but the Sacraments, or more properly the Church in both of her ministries, is the means God has appointed for Himself to bestow the gift upon us, and faith is the means, the only means, God has appointed for us to receive it.

 

Another objection to Sola Fide is on the grounds of the necessity of repentance.   While some answer this objection by pointing out that in the New Testament, at least, the word translated by repent literally means to change your mind, something that must necessarily occur whenever someone believes for the first time, this does not, I think, do justice to the Scriptural teaching on repentance.   Repentance is not just any change of mind but the kind illustrated by the Prodigal Son’s coming to himself and returning to his father.    The right answer to the objection is to say that while the necessity of repentance is certainly taught and emphasized in the Bible this does not mean that repentance does the same thing as faith, that it shares faith’s place in the Order of Salvation.  Note that in the preaching of John the Baptist, as well as St. Peter’s response to the crowd under conviction in Acts 2, repentance is linked with baptism, whereas in the passages that talk about the beginning of Jesus’ preaching ministry repentance is linked with faith.   Just as repentance does not perform the same function as baptism, neither does it perform the same role as faith.   It is linked to both because it performs the essential auxiliary function of breaking down the pride and self-righteousness which otherwise keep sinful human beings from recognizing their need for the salvation given in Christ, conferred in baptism, and received by faith.    Repentance, therefore, is not another hand with which to receive Grace alongside faith.   It can be likened to the act of emptying the hand that it might receive the gift.

 

This brings us back to the most common objection to Sola Fide, the claim that it was novel, invented in the sixteenth century by Dr. Luther.   This is, on the surface, the most plausible of these objections.   Those who make it appeal to both Scripture and tradition.   The appeal to Scripture consists of the argument that the expression “faith alone” appears only once in the Holy Scriptures and that one occurrence is St. James’ denial in the twenty-fourth verse of the second chapter of his Epistle.   The appeal to tradition is basically that the Church Fathers and those who succeeded them down to the sixteenth century did not speak of “faith alone”.   The first point I wish to make in response to this objection is that the important matter is not whether the Scriptures and Church tradition used the expression “faith alone” but whether or not the idea behind those words is contained in the Scriptures and tradition.    Once again, the idea behind Sola Fide, is that salvation is a gift that we have been given in our Saviour Jesus Christ, and that it is only by believing in Him that we receive this gift.    It does not deny to anything else its place in the Order of Salvation, it merely insists that the place assigned to faith is not shared by anything else, and especially not by human works.    When it is clearly understood that this is what the expression means, this seemingly plausible objection becomes nonsense, for this is clearly taught in the Scriptures, and is implicit in the doctrine that salvation is a gift that God has freely given us in Jesus Christ that is very much a part of the tradition of the Church.   Nobody thinks Sola Gratia was a novelty invented in the sixteenth century.

 

That salvation is a gift means that it cannot be by works and works are what Sola Fide explicitly excludes.   This is common sense.   Something that you get by working for it is not a gift.   It is a wage, a payment, a reward.   You are owed it not given it.   Not only is it common sense, it is Scripture.   St. Paul spelled it out for us explicitly in the fourth chapter of his epistle to the Romans:

 

Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt. But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness. (Rom. 4:4-5)

 

These words make nonsense out of the claim that the only time the Scriptures mention “faith alone” is the denial in James 2;24.   Indeed, since the “alone” in “faith alone” means “and not by works”, Sola Fide is affirmed throughout the New Testament.   Here are a few examples:

 

Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified. (Gal. 2:16)

 

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.  (Eph. 2:8-9)

 

Who hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began.  (2 Tim. 1:9)

 

Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost; (Tit. 3:5)

 

Consider that last example.   Some try to explain St. Paul away by claiming that when he denied that we are saved by works he was talking only about ceremonial works and not moral works.    In 2 Timothy 1:9, however, it is clearly “works of righteousness” that St. Paul says we are not saved by.   His entire reasoning in Romans 4 that it cannot be by works because otherwise it would be of debt rather than Grace would collapse if it were only ceremonial and rather than moral works that were in view.

 

Once again we need to remember that Sola Fide means that faith does not share its place in the Order of Salvation, the place of the hand that receives the gift, with anything else.   It does not deny to anything else its proper place.   This is true of works as well.   St. Paul identifies for us what the proper place of works is in regards to salvation in the verse that follows immediately after those in the above verses from Ephesians:

 

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.

 

The place of works in the Order of Salvation, is not prior to salvation as a cause, but after salvation as an effect.  I recently watched a video in which a clergyman claimed that Sola Fide was the weakest of the Reformation doctrines.   I won’t embarrass him by naming him since he is usually much sounder than this but he spent some time criticizing the idea that works are the evidence of faith, which he seemed to think to be the only role available for works in the Protestant scheme.   Evidence for whom, he asked?   For us?  For God?   Neither is very satisfactory.   Evidence of faith, however, is not the role assigned to works, but fruit of salvation.   As has been pointed out many times in the past it is a matter of getting things in their proper order, identifying the cause and effect.   We do not do good works in order to be saved.   We are saved in order that we might do good works. (1)

 

Aristotle in the third chapter of the second book of his Physics identified four different types of “causes”.   He explained the difference between them with the illustration of a statue.   Its material cause is that from which it is made, bronze, stone, whatever.   Its efficient cause is the sculptor who makes the statue from the material.   Its formal cause is the idea of the statue in the sculptor’s head to which he makes the material conform.   Its final cause is the purpose for which the sculptor makes the statue.   John Calvin in section 17 of Chapter XIV of the third book of his Institutes of Christian Religion borrows these terms and applies them to salvation saying that the efficient cause is “the mercy and free love of the heavenly Father towards us”, that the material cause is “Christ, with the obedience by which he purchased righteousness for us”, and the formal cause as “faith”.   Calvin erred slightly on this last point because he identified the formal cause with the instrumental cause.   Aristotle did not identify the instrumental cause in his Physics but if he had it would have been the hammer and chisel employed by the sculptor in his illustration.   As we have seen, since salvation is a gift, there are two kinds of instrumental causes, the instrument God uses to put the gift of salvation into our hands, the Church and her ministries, and the hand which receives it and is therefore instrumental on the part of the receiver, which is our faith.    What actually corresponds to Aristotle’s formal cause with regards to salvation is God’s eternal design.   It is rather amusing that John Calvin of all people got that wrong.  

Where do works fit into this?

 

Works share the same final cause as salvation.   Of the final cause of salvation, John Calvin says “The Apostle, moreover, declares that the final cause is the demonstration of the divine righteousness and the praise of his goodness.”  A simpler way of putting that would be “the glory of God”.   Numerous verses could be cited in support of the glory of God being the final cause, the end or telos, of salvation, but since this is not really a controversial point, I will reference only 1 Tim. 1:15-17.   Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:16) and St. Peter in his first epistle (chapter 2, verse 12) instruct their hearers/readers to do good works that thereby men would glorify God.   This tells us that the good works of the believer have the same telos as our salvation.   Works are not any kind of cause of our salvation, but our salvation is the material cause of our good works, the final cause of both being the glory of God.

 

St. James does not contradict this.   Earlier in the epistle, long before the controversial passage, he asserts that salvation is a gift:

 

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures. (Jas. 1:17-18)

 

It is significant that he does not say this of the salvation and justification of which he writes in the controversial passage in his second chapter.   Nor does the word Grace appear in that passage, unlike the other key terms shared by the passage and the fourth chapter of Romans.   This, and the argument of St. Paul in Romans 4:4-5, indicates that whatever the salvation and justification St. James was talking about is it is not salvation/justification by Grace, justification/salvation as a gift of God.   St. James points further to that conclusion in the very verse that has caused so much difficulty:

 

Ye see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only.

 

The word “only” there is an adverb in Greek, modifying “justified”, not an adjective modifying “faith.”   St. James is saying there are two justifications, one by faith, one by works, not that faith and works are two causes of the same justification.   St. Paul himself seals that interpretation as the correct one when he writes:

 

For if Abraham were justified by works, he hath whereof to glory; but not before God. (Rom. 4:2)

 

That is St. Paul interpreting St. James.   Whatever St. James was talking about when he said Abraham was justified by works it was not justification before God which is a gift by Grace and therefore cannot be of works.

 

The only novelty in Dr. Luther’s article of justification by faith alone, was the wording.   That salvation is a gift that God gives us in Jesus Christ and not something we earn by our works is the plain teaching of the New Testament and it is the teaching of Catholic – belonging to the entire Church everywhere, at all times – tradition as well.   Sola Fide, that we receive this gift to ourselves only by the hand of faith in Jesus Christ, while not usually expressed in Dr. Luther’s wording prior the sixteenth century, is implicit in this Catholic doctrine of Sola Fide.   It is also required by the Catholic concept of good works as the fruit of a faith that works by love.   If the works of love are necessary, it is not the necessity of an imposed condition – do these or salvation is invalidated – because that kind of necessity would eliminate the distinction between the works of love and the works of the law.  Works of love are works of love, because the one who does them does them not in order to obtain God’s favour or out of the fear that he will lose God’s favour if he does not, but because he loves God.   Love cannot be produced by the compulsion of the Law.   That is the entire point of the Law.   Jesus summed up the Law in the commandments to love God and love our neighbour.   That should be regarded as the most sobering and terrifying words that Jesus ever spoke.  They were not words of comfort.   If love of God and love of our neighbour is what the Law demands, and these loves come with qualifications –we are to love God with all that we are, and to love our neighbour as ourselves – then we are in constant violation of the two greatest commandments.   Not one of us has lived up to either of these for a second of our lives.   The works of love that are the fruit of salvation are the fruit of a love that God works in our hearts by His Grace, through the means of the Gospel, which assures us that God in His love has met the demands of the Law for us, both its demands for perfect righteousness and its demands for just punishment of our sin, in Jesus Christ, freeing us to love God, not because the Law demands it, but because he first loved us (1 Jn. 4:19).   Ironically, that which the Roman Council of Trent feared most in Dr. Luther’s doctrine, which, as is obvious from their straw man caricature, was its assuring nature, is precisely what makes Sola Fide so essential to this Catholic truth of faith working by love.   It is only when one is assured through faith that he is secure in the freely given Grace of God in Jesus Christ that one is free to love God because God is so worthy of our love rather than to try and love God under the compulsion of the threats of the Law. 

 

All of this was clearly lost on the Church of Rome at the Council of Tent.    A recent Roman Patriarch, the late Benedict XVI, wrote:

 

For this reason Luther's phrase: "faith alone" is true, if it is not opposed to faith in charity, in love. Faith is looking at Christ, entrusting oneself to Christ, being united to Christ, conformed to Christ, to his life. And the form, the life of Christ, is love; hence to believe is to conform to Christ and to enter into his love. So it is that in the Letter to the Galatians in which he primarily developed his teaching on justification St Paul speaks of faith that works through love (cf. Gal 5: 14).

 

This displayed far more understanding than his predecessors in the sixteenth century.   Such a pity that he was forced from St. Peter’s throne and replaced with the Clown Pretender that currently occupies it.

 

Happy All Hallowtide

(1) It is sometimes said in response to this that salvation is a process not just an event.   More elaborately put, there are three tenses to salvation.  There is salvation past, our being brought into God’s family, united with Jesus Christ, cleansed of past sins, justified, regenerated.   There is salvation present, in which we are progressively conformed into the image of Christ by the sanctifying work of God and in which we are cleansed and forgiven of our ongoing sins.   There is salvation future, in which we are perfected, and brought into the presence of God.   Sometimes this is put more simply as salvation from the guilt of sin (past), power of sin (present), and presence of sin (future).   Or they are just called justification, sanctification, and glorification.   The more simpler the version the more precision is sacrificed.  Justification and sanctification, at least, have past, present, and future aspects to each of them, just as they have both positional and practical aspects, corresponding to the two aspects of our union with Christ (positional = us in Christ, practical = Christ in us).   All of this is valid, but what we have stressed in the main body of this essay, is true of all of it.   Salvation in all of its tenses and aspects, is the gift of God.   All of it was accomplished for us by Jesus Christ in the events of the Gospel.   It is all given to us on the basis of Grace.   The means God has appointed to bring all of it to us is His Church and her ministries of Word and Sacrament.   Faith is always the hand by which we receive it.   None of this changes from salvation past, to salvation present, to salvation future, although the specific Sacramental ministry God uses to bring it to us changes from the not-to-be-repeated baptism of salvation past to the perpetual Lord’s Supper of salvation present.   Those things that have auxiliary roles, like repentance, may vary over the course of the progress of salvation present (the specifics of what repentance calls for depend on the situation).   The basics – salvation is a gift, it was accomplished by Jesus Christ in the events of the Gospel, it is brought to us through the ministry of the Church, we receive it by faith – never change, nor does the fact that our good works are always the fruit of salvation – in all of its aspects and tenses – and never the cause of it in any of its aspects or tenses.