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.   

The Righteousness of God and Man

Who is a good person?

This used to be a fairly simple question. Our society had standards which defined certain behavior as right and certain behavior as wrong. A good person was a person who behaved in the right way and a bad person was a person who behaved in the wrong way.

The question has become complicated because there have been radical changes over the half of a century in how our society defines right and wrong. Behavior that was once defined as “wrong” such as sexual intercourse outside of wedlock is now considered, if not to be “right”, to at least be “none of your business”. Meanwhile behavior that nobody would have dreamed of considering to be “wrong” one hundred years ago has jumped to the top of the totem pole of sin. Much of this behavior consists not of outward actions but of inward thought patterns.

Consider, for example, the terms “racism”, “sexism”, and “homophobia”. All of these terms are very recent additions to the English language. Racism entered the English language in the 1930s, sexism and homophobia were first used in the 1960’s, with homophobia not gaining widespread usage until the 1980’s and ‘90’s. All of these terms describe ways of thinking more than they describe ways of acting. Is there any doubt that these are considered to be the greatest of evils in society today – at least by politicians, teachers, the media, and liberal clergy?

Was our society more right in what it deemed to be right and wrong behavior one hundred years ago or today? (1)

In spite of these changes there remains a general concept of a “good person” as someone who is kind, considerate and helpful to others, who obeys the law and pays his taxes, and doesn’t hurt other people. If you were to ask most people if they consider themselves to be a good person you would get answers like “I try to be”, or “I’m as good as the next person”, or if the person is particularly self-righteous “Well I’m better than a lot of other people”.

What these answers demonstrate is the human concept of righteousness. We judge ourselves to be good or bad by comparing ourselves with others. We look at people who commit major violent crimes like murder, robbery, and rape and consider them to be the “bad people”. We look at people in general and judge ourselves to be better than most. We look at someone like Mother Theresa and feel guilty.

We also feel guilty when we take a look at our own behavior and realize that we have not lived up to the moral standards we profess. We then try to justify ourselves by justifying our behavior. We make excuses for ourselves. We concoct nice logical arguments as to why our bad behavior is really right behavior. This is generally our first response if someone else points out our bad behavior to us.

Who does God consider to be a righteous person? Does He judge us in the same way other human beings do or does He have His own standards of righteousness by which He judges us?

The Scriptural answer to this question is, of course, that God holds us accountable to His own standards. He does take our standards into consideration, in judging us, Jesus said:

For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. (Matthew 7:2)

This is the reverse of the way in which we judge ourselves and others. We tend to be easier on ourselves than on other people, excusing and justifying in ourselves, behavior that we would condemn if committed by someone else. Jesus says, however, that God will hold us accountable if we don’t live up to the standards whereby we judge others.

Is there even one among us who has such perfect integrity as to endure such a judgment and be deemed righteous?

In the Sermon in which Jesus made the remark quoted above He tells us what the righteousness which God demands from man looks like.

He said:

For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:20)

The scribes were the teachers of the Law in Israel. The Pharisees were a Jewish sect that dated back to the Maccabean revolt in the 2nd century BC, who stressed purity and strict adherence to the law. When Jesus says that our righteousness must exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees He is setting the bar very high indeed. We should not try to get around this verse by thinking “well, the Pharisees weren’t really that righteous”. To do so would be to miss Jesus’ point altogether.

After saying the above, Jesus goes on to comment on six Old Testament commandments. Each time His remarks are to the effect that mere conformity to the letter of the commandment is insufficient to meet the requirements of righteousness God demands of people. We are required to be righteous in our hearts, which are only seen by God, and not just in our outward behavior seen by other people. He brings this section of His Sermon to a close by saying:

Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. (Matthew 5:48)

Jesus then went on to say that it is alms-giving, prayer, and fasting that is done in secret rather than in front of other people that God rewards (Matthew 6:1-18) and that we must make God’s kingdom and righteousness the chief ends of our lives, placing the pursuit of them ahead of concerns about basic human needs such as clothing, food and shelter, warning us that we cannot serve God and money at the same time (Matthew 6:19-34).

As Jesus brought this Sermon to an end, He described the way of righteousness He had been preaching as a straight gate, and a narrow way, leading to life, which few find, as opposed to the wide gate and broad way that leads to destruction. It is a straight and narrow way indeed. There is not a human being other than Himself who has ever walked it. None of the rest of us have come even remotely close. Friedrich Nietzsche was in this limited sense correct when he wrote:

The very word 'Christianity' is a misunderstanding--at bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. (2)

The Sermon on the Mount is recorded in the Gospel of St. Matthew. The word “Gospel”, from the Old English “godspel” means “glad tidings”, and translates the Greek “euangelion” – “good message” or “good news”. How can a Sermon proclaiming that God requires of us a righteousness which we do not come close to meeting, be considered “Good News”?

The answer lies in the rest of the story. In the very next chapter a leper comes and worships Jesus and says “Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean”, an expression of faith. Jesus heals him. Then a centurion comes and tells Jesus that he has a servant at home suffering from palsy. Jesus says that He will come and heal him and the centurion says that he is not worthy to have Jesus enter his home but that if Jesus just speaks the word his servant would be healed. Jesus commends him for his faith, saying that He had not found such faith in Israel, and grants his request saying “Go thy way; and as thou hast believed, so be it done unto thee”. Later in that same chapter, Jesus and His disciples enter a ship and a tempest arises while Jesus is asleep in the boat. The disciples, in terror awake Him. He rebukes them for their lack of faith – then calms the sea.

Throughout this chapter we see that Jesus rewards faith. In the chapter following Jesus will tell the Pharisees that He is not come to call the righteous but “sinners unto repentance”.

In the New Testament, the righteousness of God is both something God demands of people (as we saw in the Sermon on the Mount) and something God gives to people who trust Him. The righteousness that God demands of us is a righteousness we cannot achieve. When Jesus told the Pharisees that it is the sick that need a physician, not the well, and that He is come to call sinners unto repentance, He was not telling them that they didn’t need Him. He had already given the Sermon which demanded a righteousness higher than their own. They, therefore, were sinners just like the publicans and sinners whom they objected to Jesus eating with.

Earlier, when I described our tendency to make excuses for our bad behavior, I used the word “justify”. The word “justify” means to “declare to be righteous”. When we, having been caught doing something wrong, try to justify ourselves, we try to come up with arguments to convince others and ourselves that we were actually right in doing what is wrong.

God does not engage in that kind of justification in Scripture. He does not call bad actions good. He does not call wrong behavior right.

He does, however, justify sinners. Throughout the Bible, God calls those who trust in Him, righteous. These are not people who meet the standards of righteousness Jesus preached in the Sermon on the Mount. In Genesis 15, God speaks to Abraham, who is old and childless, and tells him that he will have a son and from his son descendants as numberless as the stars in the sky will be born. Abraham believed Him, and according to verse 6, “He counted it to him for righteousness”.

In the Psalms, King David frequently distinguished between the righteous and the wicked and calls upon God to rescue the former and to punish the latter. Yet, in the Psalms King David also expresses a deep sense of his own sinfulness. Psalm 51, for example was written after Nathan the prophet had come to David and exposed his sin in the affair with Bathsheba. David had slept with another man’s wife, gotten her pregnant, then in his attempt to cover up his sin had had her husband killed. Psalm 51 expresses his sorrow and repentance, and calls upon God to have mercy upon him, and to cleanse him from his sin and to create a clean heart within him. In repenting David expresses His faith that God can cleanse him of his sins and make him righteous. The theme of trust in God is a dominant one in the Davidic Psalms. Psalm 16 for example, opens by saying:

Preserve me, O God: for in thee do I put my trust.

Jesus, throughout the Gospels, rebuked unbelief more frequently than He rebuked sin and rewarded faith. St. Luke records a parable in which He compared a Pharisee and a tax collector, who both went to the Temple to pray. The Pharisee prayed this way:

God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess. (Luke 18:11-12)

The tax collector, on the other hand, smote his breast and said:

God be merciful to me a sinner. (v. 13)

It is the tax collector who went home justified, Jesus said, and not the Pharisee.

It is St. Paul in his Epistle to the Church of Rome who provides us with the most detailed account of the righteousness God gives to those who trust in Him through Christ. In the first chapter St. Paul writes that the Gospel of Christ:

[I]s the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith. (vv. 16-17)

The Gospel of Christ, the good news that Jesus died for our sins, was buried, and rose again from the dead, brings salvation to everyone who believes it, Jew or Greek it is for everybody. The “righteousness of God” revealed in the Gospel, is both God’s personal righteousness, and the righteousness He gives to those who believe.

St. Paul expands upon this by first writing about the wrath of God, God’s anger against man’s unrighteousness, describing the general condition of men as having rejected the revelation of God in His creation, and turned away to worship idols, and commit all sorts of sin (1:18-32) He then goes on to argue in the next two chapters that both Jews and Gentiles are alike condemned, for the Law only justifies those who obey it, that it will condemn those who possess it and do not obey it, and will justify those who obey it even if they have never heard it, but that no one will be justified by the works of the law “for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God”.

It is here that he introduces the concept of justification by grace through faith:

Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus. (3:24-26)

It is because of the death of Jesus Christ, that God can be righteous Himself, and at the same time declare those who believe in the Savior He has given us, to be righteous as well. Christ’s death satisfies God’s just wrath against sin (this is what propitiation means) so that He can declare those who trust Him to be righteous without compromising His own righteousness. The mechanics of how Christ’s death accomplishes this is not fully explained in Scripture, and is probably beyond human comprehension, but St. Paul and St. Peter do explain that it involves substitution. St. Paul wrote that God “made Him to be sin for us Who knew no sin that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Cor. 5:21). St. Peter writes that Christ “Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth… his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.” (1 Peter 2:22, 24). In His death, Jesus took our sins upon Himself, and suffered for us, paying the penalty we owed to God’s justice and satisfying God’s wrath.

St. Paul goes on to explain that our works do not contribute to the righteousness that God gives us through faith. If righteousness in the eyes of God is something we must strive for through our own actions, we would be able to boast if we achieved it. The righteousness of God, however, is a gift freely given to us.

Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? of works? Nay: but by the law of faith. Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law. (Rom 3:27-28)

Note that St. Paul writes “without the deeds of the law”. A few verses later he writes:

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. (4:4-5)

This is the doctrine of “justification by faith alone”, which was not invented by Martin Luther in the 16th Century, but was clearly taught by St. Paul in the first. It is false to say that St. Paul did not teach sola fide because the word “alone” does not appear modifying the word “faith” in this epistle. The “alone” in “faith alone” means “without works” not “without grace, without Christ, without the Atonement” or anything of the sort, and St. Paul clearly says “without the deeds of the law” and “to him that worketh not”.

What this means is that being righteous in the eyes of God, is not something God dangles before us, like a carrot before a horse, as an end for which we are to strive, in order to keep us on a perpetual treadmill of good works. It is something God has already freely given us in Jesus Christ and we are to simply trust Him (take Him at His word) about it. This righteousness is not something of which we are to boast, but is rather something that should humble us. It is also the only proper foundation for a life of good works. Remember that St. Paul said, quoting the Prophet Habakkuk “the just shall live by faith”?

This means that trusting Jesus Christ as Savior is not a one time act (3) but the ongoing foundation upon which the Christian life of good works is to be lived. We are to live for God based upon the conviction (another word for faith) that Christ has died for us, redeemed us to God, and risen from the dead, and that through this God forgives us of our sins and gives us His righteousness and everlasting life in accordance with His promise in the Gospel to all who believe.

It is only by trusting God in this way that we can come to love Him and it is only through loving Him that we can do works that are pleasing in His sight. Jesus said the first and great commandment is the commandment to love God with all our hearts. St. John says that this is only possible because of His love for us:

We love him, because he first loved us. (1 John 4:9)

We know of this love, because it is revealed to us in Christ, in the Gospel, which we receive through faith.

If our righteousness in the eyes of God, if our acceptance by God, depended upon our fulfilling the Great Commandment we would never be accepted by God. God deserves and demands that we love Him wholeheartedly. This we never do in this life and we cannot love Him at all if we strive to love Him in order to be accepted by Him. Love is not something that can be produced upon command. If, however, we trust in Christ, if we believe that God out of the love, kindness, mercy, and grace of His heart, has made us completely acceptable to Him in Christ already, through our faith God will work love for Himself in us. And out of that love will flow works that are pleasing in His sight. It is not those works that make the believe righteous in God’s eyes, however, but the work of Christ.

The traditional Christian distinction between “works of the law” and “works of love” is the fundamental distinction between the works acceptable to God and works that are not – but the distinction is lost if we make “works of love” the basis of our personal acceptance with God. If they are something we must do in order to be accepted by God then they are “works of the law” not “works of love”.



(1) A lengthy answer to this question would sidetrack this essay but my answer is that we have moved away, as a society, from a more right view of right and wrong towards a more wrong view of right and wrong.

(2) Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by H. L. Mencken, The Anti-Christ (Middlesex: The Echo Library, 2006), p. 39.

(3) The evangelical practice of talking about one’s conversion as one’s salvation has pitfalls here. Faith is supposed to look away from the believer, away from his works, and away even from itself, to Christ. The Gospel is that Christ saved those who trust Him through His death on the Cross – not that we are to save ourselves by trusting in Christ. Thus, the familiar evangelical question of “do you know when you were saved” should be answered, by the believer, with “Yes – I was saved when Jesus died on the Cross” not by giving the date of the believer’s conversion. Likewise, the best answer to the evangelical question of “If you were to die tonight, and God were to say to you ‘Why should I let you into Heaven’?” is perhaps not what many evangelicals think it is. The answer is “Because You gave Your Only-Begotten Son to die on the cross for my sins, raised Him from the dead, and promised everlasting life to whoever believes in Him”.