Faith and Works: A Biblical Language of Salvation
How do faith and works go together? This question implies another question, namely, how do grace and free will go together. And at the root of these two questions is the question of how man is justified before God — how is he saved? For almost five hundred years now this tangle of questions has been at the center of the divide between Catholics and Protestants. Luther supposedly said that his understanding of justification "by faith alone" was the article "by which the Church stood and fell." To him, it was this understanding that was "the Gospel." And so, for almost five hundred years Catholic Christians have been assailed by Protestant Christians with the claim that they do not believe the Gospel. Catholics have retorted in a number of ways to this claim. St. Francis De Sales, writing apologetic pamphlets less than a hundred years after the start of the Reformation, sounded somewhat exasperated as he observed that the notion that faith alone justified a man was a position of the ancient Trinitarian heretic Eunomius, condemned by St. Augustine long before. Further, he noted the problem that what this formulation means even to the Protestants is up for grabs: "Can you deny me that as regards Justification you are as much divided against each other as you are against us: . . ."1
Was repentance itself a work? Could an unrepentant sinner still be saved? Some Protestants seemed to say yes and some no. Luther, with his typical bombastic style, asked "how rich is the Christian, that is the baptized man, who even if he wishes is not able to lose his salvation by any sins whatever, unless he refuses to believe?"2 No works are necessary here, even, apparently, the desire to be saved. God's salvation is thus perceived as purely an extrinsic transaction, one best understood using Luther's famous image of the Christian as a dung heap covered by snow. God has not transformed the dung heap, but just covered it over. This has led to the doctrine that you may have heard before: the doctrine of "once-saved, always saved." In this understanding, justification, being set right with God, has been identified with an "experience of salvation," a moment of belief and trust, and completely separated from sanctification, the holiness which produces good works. Others have been less clear. Calvin's own use of justification by faith was often in the same vein as Luther's when he argued with Catholics, but he often ends up saying pretty much what Catholics say:
Why, then, are we justified by faith? Because by faith we grasp Christ's righteousness, by which alone we are reconciled to God. Yet you could not grasp this without at the same time grasping sanctification also. For he "is given unto us for righteousness, wisdom, sanctification, and redemption" [1 Cor. 1:30]. Therefore Christ justifies no one whom he does not at the same time sanctify.3
Faith, for Calvin, is a vessel by which we "grasp Christ's righteousness" and that righteousness is real — a being made holy. Compare the Council of Trent's decree on Justification which states that we are "said to be justified by faith, because faith is the beginning of human salvation, the foundation and root of all justification" and that in this justification we have also the "sanctification and renewal of the inward man."4
Do we who are "at the same time" sanctified and justified in our initial reception of faith not have to bear the fruit of good works — repentance at the very least — in order to be justified at the end? As we have seen, the mature Luther shied away from any implication that faith actually transformed the person in the here and now. Fr. Louis Bouyer, a former Lutheran, has written that as Luther's conflict with Rome advanced we begin to see him identifying the doctrine of sola gratia (grace alone) more and more closely with "extrinsic justification": "That is to say, he himself unites two statements so closely that they become inseparable — one an affirmation, grace alone saves us; the second a negation, it changes nothing in us by so doing."5 Calvin, as we have seen, is more careful to say that "we are justified not without works, yet not through works, since in our sharing in Christ, which justifies us, sanctification is just as much included as righteousness."6 Whether there is a difference between justification "not without works" is a good question. Calvin often discusses works as simply the prolongation of faith in life, thus echoing St. Paul's own notion of "the obedience of faith." In the end, of course, St. Francis was right: Protestants themselves differ as much among themselves as they do with us, even if they go back to the "original Reformers." Or, as Jacques Barzun noted in his From Dawn to Decadence, "The one tenet common to the Evangelicals was abhorrence of the Catholic church, the 'whore of Babylon'."7
A "traditional" reading: St. Paul misunderstood
What, however, is the problem with the "whore of Babylon" that makes Protestants so nervous about the Church, even when, as with Calvin, their teaching is so closely aligned as to make the differences almost purely a matter of semantics. The first problem is that, though Calvin's position on faith and works was much closer to the Catholic position, he maintained Luther's rhetoric of "faith alone." The result was that many Protestants, particularly Baptists and other Evangelical groups, even of a Calvinist sort, have frequently misunderstood what Calvin meant by it. They have taken, instead, Luther's reading of St. Paul about justification being by "faith alone" and his later claim that grace affects us in no way. (And here, I might add again, that not all Protestants have followed Luther, even all Lutherans. Particularly Wesley's followers, Methodists as well as Pentecostals, have often read St. Paul much more like Catholics. Wesley himself was often accused of being a crypto-Catholic.)
What is this general reading? They generally read St. Paul's polemics against salvation by "works [plural] of the law" in, for instance, Rom. 3:208 as a polemic against the notion that good works of any kind have anything to do with our final justification before God. The above verse reads, "For no human being will be justified in his sight by works of the law, since through the law comes knowledge of sin." Protestants, taking this verse at face value and without any context, will tell you that there it is, plain as day, what you do has nothing to do with justification before God. St. Paul even repeats it in Rom. 3:28 that "we hold that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the law." Similarly, in Gal. 2:15-16, Paul writes, recounting what he said to St. Peter who had shied away from table fellowship with Gentiles who had not been circumcised, "We ourselves, who are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners, yet who know that a man is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, in order to be justified by faith in Jesus Christ, and not by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ."
Two points to notice in these passages: 1) In all of the above quotations, as in all of St. Paul's writing, faith is not said to be "alone" but simply "apart from works of the law." The only place in the entire Bible where "faith alone" is mentioned is James 2:24: "You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone." 2) Faith is not apart from "good works" in general, but from "works of the law."
What are "works of the law"?9
Taking the second point first, what are works of the law? Rom. 3:28, denying justification by "works of the law," is immediately followed by a question: "Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not God of the Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also" (3:29). This question is a tip-off. What law would apply to Jews only but not Gentiles other than the law of Torah? When he refers to "the law" (nomos in Greek), St. Paul is not referring to any old law, particularly not the natural moral law that he said is "written on the hearts" in Rom. 2:15. No, "the law" means the Torah. Continuing in Rom. 3:30, St. Paul writes that God is the God of Gentiles also "since God is one; and he will justify the uncircumcised on the ground of their faith and the uncircumcised through their faith." So the point is that circumcision, the prime entrance into the life of the old covenant, stands for the Torah in its entirety. God does not justify or make just people who simply follow the commands of the old law. He justifies all, both Jew and Gentile, on the basis of faith.
That this is the case in Galatians is evident as well. The entire book is about the question of whether new Gentile Christians, that is members of the New Israel, had to follow the rules of the Old Israel. St. Paul is quite adamant that neither Jews nor Gentiles are required to follow all the rules of the Torah. That is why St. Paul's rebuke of St. Peter is so stinging — because Peter knows it too: "If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?" (Gal. 2:14). No, instead, St. Paul will say that in Christ "there is neither Jew nor Greek" for "you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:28). It is, again, faith that makes all the difference. But what does St. Paul mean when he says faith "justifies"? We noted earlier that St. Paul never says faith is "alone." Does it exclude works of any kind?
What is "justification"?
To see what justification is like, we can look to the end of Galatians. After St. Paul has summoned up a number of different arguments to show that Torah, the Mosaic Law, pointed to something beyond itself, namely the new covenant in the blood of Christ, he now tells the Galatians what really matters if they wish to be a part of this new covenant, how it is that they can be considered justified before God on the last day — how, that is, "through faith, by the Spirit, we wait for the hope of righteousness" (Gal. 5:5). That we are waiting for righteousness is important. It is Protestant scholars like E. P. Sanders and N. T. Wright who have for over twenty years been pointing out that St. Paul does not mean by the justification of human beings "how human beings come into a living and saving relationship with the living and saving God . . . ".10 St. Paul spoke from the standpoint of a first-century Jew to whom justification would mean the following, in the words of N. T. Wright:
When the age to come finally arrives, those who are the true covenant members will be vindicated; but if one already knows the signs and symbols which mark out those true covenant members, this vindication, this 'justification,' can be seen already in the present time. Covenant faithfulness in the present is the sign of covenantal vindication in the future; the badges of that present covenant faithfulness may vary from group to group, but those who wear the appropriate ones are assured that the true God will remain faithful to them and bring them safely into the new world that will soon be ushered in.11
Justification is not a matter of how one came into relationship with the living God, but a matter of "how you could tell who was in," not "so much about soteriology as about ecclesiology."12 It was about how you decide who belongs in the Church which waits for the hope of righteousness at the end times. So for St. Paul, how could you tell who was in relationship with the living God?
What is "faith"?
His answer is, of course, "faith," but his phrase is not just "faith," never mind "faith alone." Instead, he tells them "in Jesus Christ neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any avail but faith working through love" (Gal. 5:6). Faith doing work. There it is, faith and work right there together. The faith which is belief in the living God must produce something in life. St. Paul calls it "the obedience of faith" (Rom. 16:26). I mentioned that Calvin spoke of good works as the prolongation of faith through life and here we see what he had in mind. Catholics don't disagree with Calvin in this regard. Remember that even the Council of Trent said that we say that justification is by faith because faith in the sense of believing is the root of all justification. In his delightful little book In the Fullness of Faith: On the Centrality of the Distinctively Catholic, the great theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar reflected on faith as both root of justification and, in one sense, the whole of justification, the whole of Christian life:
Faith is a movement of the entire person away from himself, through the gift of grace; thereby he lays hold of the mercy of God given to him in Christ — in the form of the forgiveness of sins, justification and sanctification. In this movement away from himself man has done all that he, through grace, can do; he has done all that God requires of him. Since his intention is to leave himself, without reservation, and hand himself over entirely, this movement implicitly contains all the "works" he will eventually do. They are not some second entity beside faith; if they are performed in a Christian spirit, they are only forms in which faith expresses itself.13
Faith and works of love for St. Paul, as for Balthasar here, are not two things, but one — faith working through love. And so for shorthand St. Paul often just says "faith" is our justification, meaning a faith that produces a holy life — not wholly holy, mind you, since "even a righteous man falls seven times a day" and, we might add, "rises again" (Prov. 24:16). But the "obedience of faith" is not just belief, but a belief that produces action. Catholics usually say we are justified by "faith, hope, and charity" because Catholics usually mean by faith simply "belief" or "intellectual assent." Catholics and Protestants alike might be surprised that in the Joint Declaration on Justification that the Catholic Church signed with the Lutheran World Federation, the Holy See did not insist on eliminating all uses of the phrase "faith alone" from the Lutheran side of the text. James Akin notes that since the Lutheran signers gave the phrase "faith alone" an "understanding that made its content equivalent to 'faith, hope, and charity,' the formula did not become a point of conflict."14 Of course, to say this is not to say that Catholics should start using the formula "faith alone." As Akin points out, the formula is "intrinsically misleading" since Protestants always have to explain that they don't simply mean "dead faith" or simply intellectual assent.15 (This is often confused by Evangelicals themselves. A Catholic friend of mine recently went on a date with an Evangelical man who assured her that sleeping together had nothing to do with whether he was "saved" or not.)
A misunderstanding from the beginning
Whatever St. Paul meant by faith as a badge of covenant membership, it seems that he was misunderstood by some of his readers from the very beginning since the Epistle of James deals with this very problem of people who assume that faith alone, in the sense of intellectual assent, is enough to be seen as a true member of the covenant community. "You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe — and shudder. Do you want to be shown, you foolish fellow, that faith apart from works is barren? Was not Abraham our father justified by works, when he offered his son Isaac upon the altar?" (James 2:19-21). Apparently some readers, or in the ancient world, more likely, hearers of St. Paul assumed from such passages as Rom. 4 that because it is said that Abraham "believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness" (Rom. 4:3), that Abraham simply assented to God's promise of children and that that was all there was to it. But, again, looking at Romans 4 as a whole, we see that St. Paul is continuing the conversation from Rom. 3. The question is again about the Torah and whether Abraham was justified before or after circumcision (Rom. 4:10). If after circumcision, then the true sign of Abraham's covenant would be circumcision, the touchstone of fidelity to Torah. If not, then the sign would be something else. St. Paul affirms that Abraham was justified before and apart from circumcision (4:11) and that this makes him "the father of all who believe without being circumcised who are not merely circumcised but also follow the example of the faith which our father Abraham had before he was circumcised." The question for St. Paul again is whether we now have to be circumcised or whether we have to simply follow the "example of faith" of our father Abraham.
St. James has no doubt that circumcision was not the example of faith we are to follow, but instead obedience to God. And the example of a work he gives is striking in its consonance with St. Paul. Abraham's justification by works is his obedient readiness to kill his son Isaac on the altar; child sacrifice was not a part of Torah; in fact it was strictly forbidden by it! There is no disagreement between James and Paul at all. One can almost imagine a frustrated St. James listening to some enthusiastic member of his flock telling him "Paul says we don't have to do any work." St. James's response to the "foolish fellow" is a calculated way of saying, "Of course Paul says you don't have to do any 'works of the law' but you do have to do whatever work God gives you; you might have to do 'works' that are forbidden by the law."
It's difficult to know what it refers to, but there's another passage, 2 Peter 3:15-16, where St. Peter refers to St. Paul and his writings, full of "the wisdom given to him": "There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures." Are we dealing with the same "faith alone" problem that the Epistle of James addresses? It's quite possible that this is the case since the letter has mostly been dealing with "what sort of persons ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness waiting for and hastening the coming day of God . . ." (2 Pt. 3:11-12). What sort of person you are and not just what you believe is key to what the day of God will reveal about your covenant membership.
A different, Catholic, scriptural language
We have noted that the language of "faith" alone and even "faith alone," properly understood, can be used to signify what grounds our justification both now and at the last day. Protestants are not necessarily wrong in so doing. But, we noted, that language can be misleading, and in the case of "faith alone," it can be literally "unbiblical." What is so ironic about the use of "faith" as a shorthand for a life of faith working through love is that it is not the only New Testament phrase used, even by St. Paul. Since, as we have seen from St. James, "faith" seems to have been a dangerous usage from the very beginning, making so many believe that only intellectual assent is necessary to be justified, it's important for Catholics to remember and explain that their own emphasis on "works" of charity as the final "badge" of justification is just as biblical.
Catholics are usually more comfortable with the Gospels since they are generally the text preached upon at Mass and they bear a special place in Catholic liturgy. What does Jesus say about being right with God? Let's start with the story often described as the "rich young ruler" in tradition. Luke 18:18-23 reads:
And a ruler asked him, "Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" And Jesus said to him, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: 'Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honor your father and your mother.'" And he said, "All these I have observed from my youth." And when Jesus heard it, he said to him, "One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me." But when he heard this he became sad, for he was very rich.
Here is the question: what must I do to inherit eternal life? What does Jesus then ask him about? Theology? What he believes? No, what Jesus asks of the man is whether he follows the commandments, and when he lists them he mentions all of them except the ones relating to God specifically, the ones sometimes called the "first tablet." Jesus asks how he treats his neighbor — do you commit adultery, kill, steal, lie, or dishonor your parents? When the man affirms that he has kept all these commandments, does Jesus then ask him about idol worship — perhaps a secret attachment to some mystery cult he'd come across — or doubts about the oneness of God? Does Jesus ask what he believes? Does he ask how the ruler's prayer life is going? Perhaps the man expected that and was ready to be commended for it. What Jesus instead tells him he lacks is yet another good "work" — selling his possessions to give to others. And then, says Jesus, follow me. What does Jesus look for in the man except for good works?
How about Jesus' own account of what the last judgment will be like? In Matthew 25, to what does he attribute the negative judgment against the "goats," those who are to go away into "eternal punishment"? It was their lack of charity to "the least of these." They had not fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the prisoner and the sick (Matt. 25:42-46). And so Christ says, you have not fed, clothed, or visited me. Nothing about faith in the sense of belief. That was a moot point. As St. James said, "Show me your faith apart from your works and I will show you my faith by my works" (Jas. 2:18). And the same with those "sheep" who are welcomed to inherit the kingdom of heaven. They are commended for feeding, clothing, and visiting Christ himself. And what's more, they did not even know they were doing it; they are astonished at inheriting the kingdom as the goats are at entering eternal punishment. As a good friend of mine says, you can tell they're all Catholics since none of them know where they're going or why.
In the Gospel of John this message is even stronger. Believing is important, but the only way to know if you really believe is by what you do. And Jesus has an even higher standard for those who follow him after the Passion than before, saying baffling things like this decree in John 14:12: "Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I go to the Father." Greater works than healing the sick, the blind, and the lame, feeding the five thousand, raising the dead? Maybe John Paul II and Mother Teresa, but me? Startling, but the message accords with the teaching in the Sermon on the Mount: "For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 5:20). Admittedly, exceeding the scribes and the Pharisees in good works seems easier than exceeding Jesus himself, given Jesus' own negative comments about the former, but when Jesus then immediately gives examples, what he does is make the stakes higher than ever: Do not kill is amended by Jesus to include anger and insults, even minor ones like "you fool" (Matt. 5:21-22). The same with all the other commandments. Jesus doesn't even mention belief — only action, action, and in the case of sins, inaction.
Of course Jesus is very clear that we do not do these great works or avoid sins on our own, but only as we abide in him (John 15:4). But the only way to know we abide in him is if we keep his commandments. Not just the Gospels, but the other Epistles state it the same way. Take 1 John 2:4-6: "He who says 'I know him' but disobeys his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him; but whoever keeps his word, in him truly love for God is perfected. By this may we be sure that we are in him: he who says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way he walked." The only justification for us at the last judgment seems to be what we did (works of love) and didn't do (sins) if we are to believe what the New Testament writes almost constantly. Just as faith can stand for the entire response of the person to God in Christ in St. Paul, so everywhere else in the New Testament can works stand for the entire response of the person to the Living God.
And what's more, even St. Paul uses that language. If we go back to Romans, the same letter in which St. Paul repeats so many times that justification before God is based solely on "faith apart from works of the law," we find that he can also use the same "works" language when he talks about the "day of wrath" or, as we would call it, the "last judgment":
For he will render to every man according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are factious and do not obey the truth, but obey wickedness, there will be wrath and fury. There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, but glory and honor and peace for every one who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek. For God shows no partiality. (Rom. 2:6-11)
St. Paul has here in chapter two the same polemic against thinking that adherence to the entire Torah is the way to be justified in God's eyes. The Jew may be judged first and the Greek (or Gentile) second, but the criterion is the same: "works," "obey the truth," and doing — "well-doing" or evil-doing. St. Paul has no problem saying either that our final justification before God is due to faith alone or to works alone. That the works are the outgrowth of faith does not need to be said, nor does it need to be said that faith is only the root of work.
Similarly in Galatians we find that St. Paul can use other phrases than "faith working through love." He can urge the Galatians in the same chapter to "not grow weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall reap, if we do not lose heart" (6:10). Losing heart seems to mean the same thing as ceasing "well-doing." And although Luther said that the baptized Christian cannot lose his salvation by any act "unless he refuses to believe," St. Paul, like all the other New Testament writers does not mention "belief" or even "faith" when he warns the Galatians:
Now the works of the flesh are plain: immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.
Of course, Paul could have said that if you do these things you will probably lose your belief eventually. We all see people like this, perhaps even ourselves, who begin by doing wrong things, fail to correct them, and then "change their mind" about what they really do believe, usually ending up in some sort of vague belief far from Christianity, even if they still call it that. But he didn't. St. Paul understood that what we believe affects what we do and what we do affects what we believe. So like Jesus to the rich young ruler, he can tell his congregation to do good things and not evil or he can tell them not to "lose heart." In the end, it means the same thing since we are embodied souls.
Why the fuss?
As I pointed out, in the end, Calvin and many Protestants seem to hold essentially the same position that Catholics do — faith without works is dead and doesn't mean anything for salvation — but he refuses to say our justification in the end can be "through" works. His hard and fast distinction between justification and sanctification, between faith and works, is, as we have seen, not tenable if we look at Scripture, even St. Paul. And yet, many Protestants refuse to admit Catholics are real Christians because they won't use "faith alone" or because they will explain that salvation, though only through the merits of Christ, depends on and comes through works. If the language is good enough for Jesus, Peter, Paul, and James, why can't they accept it?
I'd like to suggest that there is a surface answer that reveals a deeper reason behind this reluctance. The surface answer is a sort of humility that is based again on a misreading of St. Paul. Another theme of Romans besides justification of human beings is "boasting." It is not necessary to explore this theme in depth here, but I would recommend to you James Akin's fine book, The Salvation Controversy, particularly chapter four, "Faith, Works, and Boasting."16 In this chapter, Akin discusses our theme in greater detail and addresses also the claim that if we say that good works are accounted as part of our final justification before God, then we are claiming a self-righteousness apart from God and are thus not abiding in him. This is based on a number of passages such as Rom. 4:2, which says, "if Abraham is justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God." This use of boasting, a word that can also be translated as "exulting" or "rejoicing" is not referring to boasting about self-righteousness, but again to boasting about "works of the Law," namely Torah. Their boasting was not in their own righteousness per se, but in their favored status with God through Torah. Akin explains that their position was that keeping Torah, "works of the law," is necessary and sufficient for a right relationship with God. St. Paul's point is that: "It is not necessary, so Gentiles do not need to become Jews. And it is not sufficient, for as the letter to the Hebrews points out, the sacrifices and rituals authorized for dealing with sin are fundamentally incapable of dealing with sin's eternal consequences (Heb. 10:4)."17 The kind of boasting criticized in Romans 3 and 4 is again a question of Torah, not of pridefulness.
In fact, one's boasting or exulting can be about oneself without being self-righteous. St. Paul even recommends boasting, carefully, and not comparatively, in Gal. 6:4-5: "But let each one test his own work, and then his reason to boast will be in himself alone and not in his neighbor. For each man will bear his own load." "Not in his neighbor" refers to the practice of looking at someone else's sins and then comparing yourself to them, rather than in comparing oneself to what God has called one to do. We have no right to look at the rich young ruler and scoff that he went away sad unless we can identify ourselves as people who have done all God has called us to do. And even then, it's dangerous. Elsewhere, St. Paul says, "I do not even judge myself. I am not aware of anything against myself but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me" (1 Cor. 4:3-4). When St. Paul is advocating boasting he is not advocating pride in oneself apart from God. After all, he notes that all of our works are themselves "fruits of the Spirit" (Gal. 5:22).
But if the fuss is based on a misreading, the misreading is based on what I think is a deeper mistake that lies at the heart of the Protestant Reformation. That mistake is summarized by Louis Bouyer as the doctrine that "it is impossible to affirm and uphold the sovereignty of God without a corresponding annihilation of the creature, especially man."18 If justification is based on grace, the reasoning goes, then it cannot be based on the human being or his works, even if our works themselves are dependent on grace. This makes Protestants blind to the language of Scripture that can affirm the goodness of redeemed and free human beings, a goodness that can be said to perform good actions, pleasing to God and therefore worthy of final justification before God: ". . . [I]t would be a lapse into idolatry to suppose that man, even when regenerated and recreated, in St. Paul's words, in holiness and justice, could possess any value and still worse to attribute to him the power to 'merit' anything in any sense of the word."19
This attitude is still present. St. Paul refers to salvation as a "prize" in 1 Cor. 9:27. When I referred to this passage in an email to a Protestant friend she wrote to me, "I don't think the 'prize' likely refers to salvation, for that is a gift given by a merciful God rather than something to be earned by us." What was so ironic was that immediately before this sentence she had quoted for me 2 John 1:8: "Look to yourselves, that you may not lose what you have worked for, but may win a full reward." Work and reward. And yet my friend never noticed this.
Similarly, a Presbyterian pastor friend once wrote to me that he could never be a Catholic because the Catholic position was a sort of "synergistic" understanding. Synergy comes from the Greek words, meaning "work together" or "work with." He seemed to assume that salvation was a sort of potluck supper where God brings some grace, I bring some freedom, and then I sit down and have some salvation. Of course this is not true, as the Council of Trent said in chapter eight of its decree that "none of those things that precede justification, whether faith or works, merit the grace of justification." But what is odd is that his use of the term "synergy" is yet another biblical, indeed Pauline phrase for our relationship to God. James Akin notes that salvation is spoken of quite often throughout the New Testament in terms of synergy, for example in 2 Cor. 6:1 where St. Paul urges the Corinthian Church, "Working together with him, then, we entreat you not to accept the grace of God in vain." Akin says that this means "it is either possible to accept the grace of salvation at one time and then have it be vain, or it means that it is possible to accept the grace of the offer of salvation and have it be vain because you fail to cooperate with the offer — either of which means that Grace is not irresistible."20 If grace is not irresistible, said my Calvinist friend, then God is not in charge, not sovereign. We see here what Fr. Bouyer meant when he said that upholding God's sovereignty means the annihilation of the creature. I asked another Calvinist friend if he agreed that it is possible to resist Grace — is it possible that we have the freedom to reject God once grace has been given to us. He wrote to me, "I agree existentially speaking." In other words, we feel like we can resist grace, but it's not possible. There are no truly human acts, even of responding by God's grace to the love he offers. The failure here is to understand that "all is grace in our salvation, but, at the same time, grace is not opposed to human acts and endeavor in order to attain salvation but arouses and exacts their performance."21
The Catholic way
Perhaps what is so annoying to Protestants, Calvinist or otherwise, is that Catholics actually take the more biblical line in their thinking. There is not a Catholic "system" of "Soteriology," or theology of salvation, in the same way as there is in Protestantism. Romano Guardini, in his delightful little book on the Our Father perfectly described the "problem" with grace:
One cannot reduce it to a system. It is not a doctrinal structure of "ifs" and "therefores" but a dialogue between the child of God and his Father — a prayer of love. Whenever anyone has tried to reduce it to a system, the result has been wretched, and the Church has had to condemn it. One cannot know these truths in the abstract; one must realize them in prayer and in love.22
Are we saved by faith or works? Yes. Are we saved by grace or through our own free will? Yes. "Why?" the Catholic is asked. If the Catholic is being ornery, he will just laugh and say, "Because the Bible tells me so."23
End Notes
1. Francis de Sales, The Catholic Controversy, trans. H. B. Mackey (Tunbridge Wells, England: Burns and Oates, 1886; Repr. Rockford, Ill.: Tan, 1989), 78, 173.
2. Ibid., citing Luther's Babylonian Captivity, i.
3. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Ed. John T. McNeill, Trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), Vol. 1: III, XVI, 1.
4. The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, trans. H. J. Schroeder (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1941), Sixth session, chaps. VIII and VII.
5. Louis Bouyer, The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism, trans. A. V. Littledale (Princeton, N.J.: Scepter, 2001 [1956]), 168.
6. See note 3.
7. Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 29.
8. All quotations taken from the Revised Standard Version (Catholic Edition), unless otherwise indicated.
9. I am indebted in my reading of the New Testament in this section in various ways to various works of N. T. Wright, E. P. Sanders, and James Akin, as well as to various undergraduates to whom I have taught in introductory sections of theology.
10. N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1997), 116.
11. N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 336.
12. N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said, 119.
13. Hans Urs von Balthasar, In the Fullness of Faith: On the Centrality of the Distinctively Catholic, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988 [1975]), 74.
14. James Akin, "Consensus on Justification: How Far and How Much Farther?", Catholic Dossier 7:5 (Sept.-Oct. 2001): 14-21, at 18.
15. Ibid.
16. James Akin, The Salvation Controversy (San Diego: Catholic Answers, 2001).
17. Ibid., 109.
18. Bouyer, Spirit and Forms of Protestantism, 176.
19. Ibid.
20. Akin, Salvation Controversy, 92.
21. Bouyer, Spirit and Forms of Protestantism, 173.
22. Romano Guardini, The Lord's Prayer, trans. Isabel McHugh (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1958), 103.
23. This is a revised version of a lecture given at the Church of St. Helena in Minneapolis, Minnesota on May 13, 2004. I thank John Sondag for inviting me to speak.
Mr. David Paul Deavel is a doctoral candidate in historical theology at Fordham University, writing a dissertation on Cardinal Newman. He also serves as an associate editor for Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture and is a contributing editor to Gilbert Magazine. His writing has appeared in such journals as Pro Ecclesia, Faith & Reason, The Journal of Markets and Morality, Logos, and other periodicals. He lives in St. Paul, Minn. With his wife and two sons. This is his first article in HPR.
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