The Missing Evidence Against “Faith Alone”

You’re listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So today I want to do two things. One, I want to explore this big question, are we saved by faith alone or are we saved by faith and works? And to do that, I want to look at the biblical evidence, but I want to do this in two parts. First, kind of lay out the territory. Like why do Catholics and Protestants disagree on this and how much do we actually disagree and why are we disagreeing? And then in the second part of the video, I want to look at four simple questions that you can ask yourself or you can ask maybe your neighbor with whom you disagree on justification to try to get to more of a clear biblical depiction of what justification is all about and whether we’re saved by faith and works, by faith alone. But let’s do the first part first. Why do we disagree about justification and how much do we disagree about justification?

Because I’ve read and seen protestants who claim Catholics aren’t Christian and the primary reason they’re not Christian is they’re not trusting in Christ alone, but trusting in their own works. So this is a rejection of Jesus. They’re not accepting him as Lord. And on the flip side of that, you have other Protestants, most famously C.S. Lewis, who say, “This really isn’t that big of a deal.” Lewis in mere Christianity says, “Christians have often disputed as to whether what leads a Christian home is good actions or faith in Christ. I have no right really to speak on such a difficult question, but it does seem to me like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is most necessary.” And so as a Catholic we would say, “Absolutely. That’s exactly how we see this issue.” That trying to pit faith and works against one another isn’t a matter of putting all of your trust in Jesus.

It’s a matter of not understanding the right relationship of faith and works. I’m getting ahead of myself a little bit there, but I want to just point out, both Catholics and Protestants disagree. We also disagree about how much we disagree, which is very strange and what is going on here? I want to suggest that the reason we’re disagreeing over how much we’re disagreeing is because of three things. Number one, we misunderstand each other. If you ask a Catholic, “What does a Protestant think?” Or ask a Protestant, “What does a Catholic think on this question?” There’s a really good chance you’re going to get a distorted depiction of what the other side has to say. And then you might say, “Well why is that? Why is it unusually difficult to represent the other side well?” And I would suggest a second reason. That we are using the same theological language, words like justification, sanctification, works of the law, good works, et cetera.

And we often mean really different things by the same words, which can make for a very confusing conversation when we think we’re meaning the same thing and we’re meaning opposite things. So even the question of is justification this one time event or is this something that I’m constantly involved in and can lose my justification? We understand these things differently and that’s obviously going to impact how we answer the question. If we don’t know what we mean by justification, then asking whether it’s by faith or by faith and works is already getting way too ahead of ourselves. And third, you might say, “Well why are we confused about the biblical language terms like justification?” Well the answer is because the Bible itself is confusing. You will find people who say, “Oh, the Bible’s really clear on justification. It teaches X.” Then you’ll find someone else who says, “The Bible is really clear and justification teaches Y.”

And the truth is you can find strings within the New Testament that seem to point in those different directions and strings which seem to contradict each other. Now I want to be clear, I don’t think they do contradict each other, but I think it would be foolish and false to claim that this is all super easy and it’s just a matter of just reading these proof texts and then you’re off to the races. That is a bad way of doing theology in general. It’s a really bad way of doing theology here where proof texts can lead you in completely the wrong direction if you’re not reading these things carefully as part of a broader whole. So with that in mind, let’s unpack each of those three things more deeply. First, how is it that Catholics and Protestants are misunderstanding one another? Well on the Catholic side, I’ll start with what we get wrong.

I’ve talked to and heard from many Catholics who think that Protestants think that as long as you believe the right thing intellectually, you’re saved and so your actions don’t really matter. And you might find some Protestant out there who believes that, but that’s not a fair representation of Protestantism kind of broadly. Certainly that’s not what Protestants have historically taught. So for instance, John Calvin in antidote to the Council of Trent says that, “When we say a man is justified by faith alone, we do not fancy a faith devoid of charity, but we mean that faith alone is the cause of justification.” Now notice that he’s going to compare faith and charity and faith and regeneration as like heat and light, where from the sun you get both heat and light. We can distinguish the heat and the light. They’re not the same thing, but they’re always found together, coming from the sun.

So he says that, “Christian life works the same way.” So faith alone isn’t actually alone. Now that is a very confusing name to give your theology if you don’t mean that it’s actually alone, but this is really important. That faith alone means faith and charity. That faith is doing something in a unique way here, but it’s not actually by itself despite what the name sounds like. And that’s something, again, as I say, I think a lot of Catholics don’t get about the Protestant position and this is going to be an important kind of point. That it’s not just, “I prayed the sinner’s prayer so I’m going to go out and murder somebody and it doesn’t matter because I’m on the good list.” Again, you might find someone who has that distorted understanding. That’s not the historic thing Protestantism is taught. On the flip side, a lot of Protestants misunderstand Catholicism and I’ve heard Protestant preachers and apologists making the claim that as Catholics, we think we earn our way to heaven by our own good works apart from grace or that we somehow can earn the grace of justification.

Now here again, you might find some misinformed Catholic who thinks that, but that’s not at all what the Catholic Church teaches. In fact, the Catholic Church condemns that view. So I want to go to two places here. First Benedict the 16th, pretty fascinatingly in 2008 said that Luther’s phrase faith alone is true if it’s not opposed to faith in charity in love. So as you can see, the gap between what Calvin is saying and what Benedict is saying is much smaller than I think many Catholics and many Protestants realize. That neither one is saying, “Just have faith without love,” or, “You have to work your way to heaven without grace.” None of that is going on here. That if you understand what both sides are saying, it’s much smaller than it appears. Calvin’s kind of making that point, although he still is claiming that the gap is pretty big.

He is denying that he’s holding the position many Catholics seem to think he was holding. And meanwhile, Benedict is denying the position many Protestants think that he’s holding. And it’s not that this is some new thing in 2008 where suddenly the Catholic Church realized, “Well, yeah. There are formulations of faith alone that are acceptable.” The Council of Trent acknowledged that and the Council of Trent talks about how faith is the beginning of human salvation. It is the foundation and the root of all justification. That it is fine to say we’re justified by faith, understood in that sense. And then it goes on to condemn anyone who says that a man may be justified by God by his own works. Whether done through the teaching of human nature or that of the law, without the grace of God through Jesus Christ. That if you’re talking about good works as some ungraced human effort, no. That doesn’t get you anything.

It doesn’t get you justification, doesn’t get you to salvation. Then a little bit later, it condemns the proposition that without the prevenient inspiration of the Holy Ghost, and that is help, man can believe, hope, love, or be penitent as he ought. So as that the grace of justification may be bestowed upon him. In other words, not only can your own human effort not get you to heaven, not get you justified, but neither can you buy your human effort believe, hope, love, or be penitent in the relevant ways. That it’s not just like your good deeds out there, but even like your faith is a grace. So we are saved by faith through grace. This is what the Council of Trent’s affirming and that is not what I think a lot of Protestants think the Catholic Church believes based on things I’ve read. So that’s the first problem.

The second problem, as I said, is we mean different things by justification. Now if you watched my video last week, you know I talked about this a little bit already. Alister McGrath in his book Lustitia Dei talks about this, how the reformers kind of redefine justification in three ways. First, they introduced the idea of what’s called forensics justification. Second, they distinguish it from regeneration. We already saw Calvin doing that, distinguishing it like the heat and the light are distinct in the sun. And third, they talk about the imputed righteousness of Christ. Rather than Christ imparting His righteousness to us, it’s imputed to us, it’s a sign to us or given to us, but we’re declared holy rather than becoming holy. And one of the things McGrath, who is a Protestant, points out is none of these things are found before the reformation. That you won’t find Christians in the first 1500 years who believed any of those three things about justification.

So that’s really big. That when we’re reading the biblical evidence, we’re either going to read it through the eyes of early Christians, in which case we’re going to take the Catholic view, or we’re going to read it through the eyes of late medieval Protestant reformers, in which case we’re going to take the Protestant view. But so often you’ve got people in the 21st century who don’t realize that when they’re reading the word justification on the page, Paul doesn’t have a little glossary at the bottom where he defines what he means by the term and they’re instead going with the thing they were taught justification means based on a glossary maybe they got in a modern book that goes back only 500 years. That is a redefinition of the word in some pretty important ways. And if you don’t believe me on that, that was last week’s video I get into all of that, that nobody in the early church believes in sola fide, nobody taught that.

And Protestants trying to show people taught that are just taking partial sentences out of context because they’re, again, using this language very differently than Protestants would later use it. So I want to talk specifically about the first of those three things that I mentioned, the forensic justification. What is forensic justification? Nathan Busenitz, and long before Luther, does a pretty good job of explaining it from a Protestant perspective. He says, “When we consider the writings of the leading reformers, we see that they understood justification to be the forensic declaration of God in which he as the supreme judge pardons sinners by forgiving their sin and declaring them to be righteous.” That word declaring is really important because the assertion that to be justified means to be declared righteous stood in sharp contrast to the prevailing Roman Catholic teaching of the 16th century and as McGrath and others show, not just the 16th century, but the prior 15th centuries before that. “Most Roman Catholics,” Busenitz said, “View justification as a formative process that involves sinners being made righteous over the course of their entire lives.”

So this is the difference. When the reformers read justification, they’re reading to be declared righteous. It’s a very legal kind of concept of justification. John Calvin not coincidentally is a lawyer. And so it’s a very legalistic kind of framework, that justification means you’ve been declared righteous. Whereas before that justification didn’t just mean you were declared righteous, but that you were actually made righteous. There’s a declarative aspect. We don’t want to draw this to too great of an extreme, but it’s not simply being declared, it’s being made righteous. We’ll get into more of that as we go, but that’s an important distinction to understand. Alister McGrath, whose work I already referenced, says, “This distinction is actually the most reliable historical characterization of Protestant doctrines of justification.” That what makes Protestant visions of justification distinct from Catholics ones isn’t really faith alone verse faith plus works.

It really is justification, forensic or not. And another way to say that is is it extrinsic? Is it something applied from outside like the declaration of a judge or is it something that happens within like the Holy Spirit transforming us to be made just? And so the extrinsic vision of justification is the Protestant one. The intrinsic one, the infused righteousness of God actually making us holy, that’s the Catholic one, that you really do become a saint. You’re not just a sinner who’s got the label saint written above him. That’s obviously a 20,000-foot view. There’s a lot more that could be said, but that’s an important distinction to get right.

Okay. Now after last week’s video, my friend Keith Little over at Cordial Catholic, which you should definitely check out if you want more good Catholic content, asked me why in the world I hadn’t worked with the work of Matthew J. Thomas and turned out it was like hadn’t been familiar with his work, which has been delightful since then because Matthew J. Thomas, like Alister McGrath and like Anthony Lane who I mentioned last week, all three of them have their doctorates from Oxford. So they’re doing something right over there.

Thomas is the theology department chair at Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology at Berkeley and has done a lot of work on this particular interest. Unlike Alister McGrath and Anthony Lane, Thomas is a Catholic, the other two are Protestants, but they’re singing from the same hymnal. They’re seeing the same scholarly stuff. And Thomas had the privilege of writing the entry on justification for the St. Andrew encyclopedia of theology. And so he does a good job of explaining, unpacking in pretty clear terms, the counterpoint to the forensic model. That when you look at the alternative, well just here’s what he says. He says, “For readers who argue for both forensic and effective,” that’s the Catholic view, aspects to justification, “One model for understanding the relationship between them is God’s act of creation in Genesis one.” Right. So what happens in Genesis one? God says, “Let there be light.”

That’s the declaration aspect. And there was light. That God’s declaration actually is effective. So the problem with the reformers is that they’re taking the forensic notion, the justification by declaration kind of notion, but they’ve separated it from the fact that God doesn’t just declare something, he actually causes things through his word. His word doesn’t go out and come back to him fruitless. And the fruit it bears is that when he declares you just, it’s because he’s actually making you just. Not because you’re a pile of dung covered in snow as one of the early reformed visions of forensic justification puts it. If you get a stain on your shirt, one answer would be to just say, “I’m going to declare this a white shirt,” or, “I’m going to put a white shirt over it to cover up the stain.” That’s being clothed with the merits of Christ and being declared clean.

But the Catholic vision is, “No, no. He does more than that. He actually cleanses you. He actually removes the stain. He actually makes you radiantly white because you have been transformed.” Not because Christ’s merits have been applied to you so when he sees you, he doesn’t see you, he sees Christ. No, because then you are still as rotten and stinking and worthless as ever. He actually transforms you. That’s at the heart of where we actually disagree on this question. Okay. So hopefully that’s clear. The other image that Thomas points to that I think is very helpful is in the parable in Matthew 18 when there’s a king who is calling in some debts. And beginning in verse 24, he calls in the debt of someone who owes him 10,000 talents. This is an unbelievably large debt that the man’s never going to be able to pay. And he says, he’s going to call in the debt, the man’s going to be sold, his wife and his children, all that he had, and payment has to be made.

And the man falls to his knees, this servant, and he says, “Lord, have patience with me for I’ll pay you everything.” And out of pity for him, the Lord of that servant released him and forgave him the debt. So notice, this is what you might call the initial moment of forgiveness and it’s unconditional. He doesn’t say, “I’m going to get a payment plan. I’m going to do X, Y, Z.” There’s nothing like that. It’s unconditional. It is simply because the man cried out, forgiveness is granted to him. On this point, I think Catholics and Protestants are going to say, “Yes. There’s nothing the man’s done to merit this. It’s unmerited, it’s unconditional,” et cetera, or unconditioned I should say because it’s not actually unconditional. There’s a difference between unconditioned, it’s a free gift, and unconditional, that you’re going to get that gift no matter what.

Why does that matter? Because what happens next in the parable. The servant then finds somebody who owes him a much smaller debt and he grabs him by the throat and says, “Pay what you owe.” And this other servant says to him, “Have patience with me and I’ll pay you.” So he’s actually offering to do more, but this forgiven servant is totally ruthless. He refuses and instead he goes and puts him in prison until he should pay the debt. Okay. What’s the story? Well what’s going to happen next? The other servants find out about this, they go and tell their Lord about it, and he summons him and says to him, “You wicked servant. I forgave you all that debt because you besot me and should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant as I had mercy on you.” And in his anger, his Lord delivered him to the jailers until he should pay all his debt.

So what happened? In Matthew 18:32 to 34, a man who had previously been forgiven, through no merit of his own, then becomes unforgiven because he fails to act charitably. He is forgiven and doesn’t act in a forgiving way and so he loses his status as forgiven. That’s pretty clearly what we’re arguing on the Catholic side. That yes, you must receive the grace of justification throughout anything you’ve done to merit or earn it, but then you can actually lose it if you don’t live the right way. And that’s where works come in. Both to help you grow in holiness, but also to maintain your status of justification. And Jesus makes this point very clearly. Verse 35 says, “So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.” If you missed the fact that this applied to us, Jesus says it outright in Matthew 18 verse 35.

He also says it in Matthew six verses 14 to 15 after introducing the our Father. He says, “If you forgive men that trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your father forgive your trespasses.” Now he’s speaking here to people who can go to God as father. He is not speaking to people who are unregenerate, unsaved, not members of the Christian community, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. He’s talking to people who are members of the family, who are children of God, who can go to God as father and warning them that they can still lose salvation because they can still act in an unforgiving way and no longer be forgiven by God.

So there is a conditionality here moving forward that your works actually matter. Now last week I gave an analogy, I’m going to give it again here for those who’ve maybe just tuned into this episode for the first time. If you think about your life, you did nothing to merit being conceived, nothing to merit being born, but once you receive that initial gift of life, there’s all sorts of things you have to do to maintain it. Eating, drinking, breathing, fill in the blank. That doesn’t earn you the gift of life, but the gift has to be maintained. And if you don’t maintain it, it’s not just that you won’t grow up big and strong like sanctification, you grow, it’s also that you can simply cease to exist, you can die.

And this is remarkably the way the Bible talks about the relationship of faith and works. Faith without works is dead. Not that it never existed, but that it dies. So that’s the biblical model that we’re talking about here. Okay. I want to turn back now to Matthew Thomas because he’s actually got an entire book on this subject called Paul’s Works of the Law in the Perspective of Second-Century Reception where he just wants to know, between the time of the apostles and about the year 200, when people read phrases like works of the law or when they used those phrases, what did they think that meant?

And he talks here about how the patristic understanding, again, this is the 100s, could be well illustrated using Jesus’ parable of the unmerciful servant as an analogy, the one we just saw. While the servant is granted an inconceivable gift simply by his petition without being able to give anything, this gift is meant to be transformative in the servant’s life. When the servant is judged according to his deeds, which have manifestly not been transformed by the king’s mercy, all that remains for the servant is severe judgment. So think about just this parable. You could imagine three different people making claims about it. The first one says, “Forgiveness is by petition alone.” And look, if they only read the first part of the parable, you’d say, “Oh yeah. I see where you’re getting that from Scripture.” Another could say, “Petition is by deeds.” And you’d say, “Well, that first servant didn’t really do anything to earn his forgiveness.”

“So that view’s not really right.” The better view is it’s by petition at the initial stage and then has to be lived out, which includes works, which includes forgiving other people. That’s the model that the early Christians have, that’s the model Catholics have today, and that’s the model that I’m going to argue does the best job of harmonizing the biblical evidence. Now having said that, we should turn here to the fact that biblical evidence is in fact confusing. Not just that I think it’s confusing, but that simply reading it without a lot of theological priors or doing a lot of legwork, you can see apparent contradictions and confusing sort of passages. Let’s just take two examples. One Rahab and the other Abraham. Now I assume you know enough about Abraham. He’s the father of the Jewish people. Rahab is in Joshua chapter two. There are some spies that go into the promised land and then they’re going to kick out the Canaanites and Rahab shelters them.

And she is not a Jewish believer, she’s not an Israelite, Outside of the covenant people, this is going to be really important. She is not part of the mosaic kind of covenant, but she says to the spies, “I know the Lord has given you the land, but the fear of you has fallen upon us. That all the inhabitants of the land melt away before you.” And so then she says, “Swear to me by the Lord that as I have dealt kindly with you,” ’cause she sheltered them, “You also will deal kindly with my father’s house.” And so she asked to be saved, and for her family to be saved, from death. That she’s done them this good turn of sheltering them and now she makes a petition in faith basically, “Don’t let me get killed when you guys come in and invade.” And they reply, “Our life for yours.”

“If you do not tell this business of ours, then we will deal kindly and faithfully with you when the Lord gives us the land.” On the other hand they say. “But if you tell this business of ours, then we shall be guiltless with respect to your oath, which you have made us swear.” So the question is, “Okay, well was Rahab’s life spared by faith or by works?” In the New Testament evidence I’m just going to give it to you and you can see what to make of it. On the one hand, Hebrews 11 verse 31 says that, “By faith Rahab the harlot did not perish with those who were disobedient,” because she’d given friendly welcome to the spies. So this talks about her being saved by faith. On the other hand, James chapter two says that, “You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone.” And in the same way was not also Rahab the harlot justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out another way?

Now if you read the story, you can see where both sides are coming from. On the one hand, she’s making this petition. She believes that the message of the Lord is true and she acts on that belief and just says basically, “Look, I’m helpless. Save me.” That is a great act of faith. On the other hand she’s also doing something. You could believe all of that stuff to be true, like apparently her family did, and not do anything about it. And so she’s actually doing something about it. And so in that sense, there’s clearly works. She even makes this kind of promise with them and they’re very clear, “If you live up to your end, you’ll be saved. And if you don’t live up to your end, you won’t be saved.”

So whether you talk about that as salvation by faith or salvation by faith in works or by works, you can see how all of those interpretations make sense of the biblical evidence. Okay. So much for Rahab. Let’s turn next to Abraham. Romans chapter four famously says, “What then shall we say about Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh, for if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. For what does the scripture say? Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. Now to one who works, his wages are not reckoned as a gift, but as his due. And to one who does not work, but trusts him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is reckoned as righteousness.” So that seems pretty clear. Abraham believes God and so even though he doesn’t deserve it, he is declared righteous.

And then that gets into the whole question of declared and made righteous, but we’ll leave all of that aside for a second. There’s clearly this something is happening by faith and not by works, but then go and read James two again. Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered his son Isaac upon the altar? You see that faith was active along with his works and faith was completed by works and the scripture was fulfilled which says, “Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness and he was called the friend of God.” You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone. Now there’s one thing to notice here, which is that James two is talking about the completion of faith and the completion of justification. The faith is completed by works. And then the scripture about Abraham believing God and it being reckoned to him as righteousness is fulfilled. That something has begun in faith that then has to be carried out in works.

That’s what James is saying. That faith needs to be completed. It’s not enough by itself. And so he says, “You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone.” But now, take me out of the equation. Take Catholic and Protestant and any other exegesis out of the equation and I want to just present you two verses side by side to make the point that I’m making, which is that the biblical data points here are confusing. Romans 4:2, which you already heard, “For if Abraham was justified by works, he had something to boast about but not before God,” compared to James 2:21, “Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered his son Isaac upon the altar?” So that looks like a contradiction and in fact many non-Christians have seized upon it as a contradiction. And so what do we do with those? When we look at that biblical data, how do we make sense of what St. Paul is saying and what St. James is saying?

Now before giving kind of a bigger issue where we look at John and how we can make sense of all of this using a different kind of way into the problem, I want to just turn back to Matthew Thomas’ work ’cause he does a good job of highlighting four different ways of harmonizing these things that different Christians have settled on. One or more could be right, but as you’re going to see, not all four can be right. So the first proposal is that it’s a matter of timing. Paul is speaking about initial justification or the initial reception of justifying grace apart from works while James is talking about the verdict of final justification on the last day for which works as evidence of faith are essential. And you can see that. I already kind of teed that up. That the works complete the faith.

So there may be a time difference between what Paul is talking about. He means the initial moment of justification and what James is talking about in moving forward. Second, that it’s a difference in how they mean the word works. That Paul is talking about the Torah’s observances as a requirement for justification, but it’s not as clear that Paul would say the same thing about the kind of good works that James is talking about. Now here it matters that we’re talking about Abraham and Rahab because neither of them are under the mosaic law and this is actually why those two were seized upon as important figures because, without getting way too deep in the rabbit hole, there were a lot of Jewish believers at the time who thought they were saved by observance of the mosaic law as part of the mosaic covenant, but they basically had a deal with God and as long as they lived up to their end of the deal, they were saved.

And that this meant that those who weren’t part of the mosaic covenant like the Gentiles had no hope. And that’s what Paul is actually writing against. And so Paul is going to be able to point to people like Rahab who’s outside of the covenant people and say, “Well obviously you believe she’s saved and yet she is not part of the mosaic covenant and more obviously Abraham, our father in faith, the father of the Jewish people is before Moses and he’s not part of the mosaic covenant. So if the mosaic covenant is how we’re going to be saved, that’s leaving out a lot of people we think are saved.” That is how he’s able to say this by faith and not by works of the law. That of the law matters because he’s not talking here about good works. He’s talking about things like circumcision. And so he says in places like Romans 3:28, “For we hold that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the law or is God the God of the Jews only? Is he not the God of the Gentiles also?”

Now that line of argumentation makes no sense at all if St. Paul means works to mean good works. And as I mentioned already, Matthew J. Thomas has a book that I’ve only begun to kind of delve into called Paul’s Works of the Law and the Perspective of Second-Century Reception in which he looks at all of this said, “Works of the law were understood by the earliest Christians not to mean good works, but were meant to mean like Torah observance.” And that makes sense because gentiles can do good works. They can’t do works of the law ’cause they’re not part of the mosaic covenant, but they can do good works and Paul even acknowledges this in Romans chapter two. He says that, “God will render to every man according to his works. To those who by patience and well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life.”

Now Paul right there in Romans two, the book that appears to be saying works have nothing to add to the whole story of salvation, says right there in a passage that too few Protestants focus on, “That God will render according to your works and to those who by patience and while doing seek for glory and honor, immortality, he will give eternal life.” Now in context, he’s talking about the Gentiles here and he’s acknowledging that these gentiles can be saved and that their good works here matter. So Paul seems to have a very clear distinction between good works and works of the law. Good works, which he praises is important for salvation in Romans two, works of the law, which he views as unimportant for salvation in Romans three and throughout Romans. And this distinction between good works and works of the law has been lost by many Protestant commentators and explains why Abraham looks like it’s kind of a contradictory thing.

Well of course he isn’t saved by works of the law. There’s no law for him to be saved by works of it yet. So that’s the second kind of way of harmonizing the two. The third is that this focuses on what we mean by the word faith and that it might be more notional in James because James makes the point that even demons can believe and they tremble. And so if by faith we just mean belief, well then belief alone clearly isn’t enough or the devil would be saved. The devil knows better than you do that Jesus is Lord. While Paul’s use of the term faith seems to more relational and entails fidelity as well. He uses phrases like, “The obedience of faith,” in Romans one and in Romans 16, which we’ll get back to. So if by faith you mean something different between James and Paul, then there’s no contradiction. Just like if by works you mean something different, there’s no contradiction.

So those three ways, I think all three of them make sense together and independently. I think you can say James and Paul are looking at different moments in the story of salvation. How do we become justified verse how do we live as justified? Second, they mean different things by works. And third, they mean different things by faith. The fourth way though is to just say, “Nope. James is simply contradicting Paul,” or vice versa. And Matthew Thomas points out that the biblical canon seems to suggest a [inaudible 00:34:42]. Meaning, the early Christians, they put James right after all of the writings of Paul, which means they didn’t seem to think that there was a contradiction between them and they presumably read the books. So they would presumably not gather together as scripture books that they thought just contradicted each other, but nevertheless, that is a possible way that you could interpret the relationship of James and Paul.

So pretty famously Martin Luther says in his preface to the epistles of St. James and St. Jude in 1522 that the book of James is flatly against St. Paul and all the rest of scripture in ascribing justification to works. And then he says, “This fault proves that this epistle is not the work of any apostle.” And he goes beyond this. He says, “In a word,” he, James, “Wanted to guard against those who relied on faith of that works.” But Luther says that James was unequal to the task in spirit, thought, and words. He mangles the scripture and thereby opposes Paul and all scripture. That’s Luther’s view. He just thinks James is a bad book in terms of teaching heretical doctrine. That’s really a striking kind of thing for the founder of Protestantism to claim because what he’s showing is that his vision of justification did not match up with St. James’s vision of justification.

Now we’ve already seen, the first three ways I laid out, you’ll find Protestants who take one of those ways, but it’s striking that Martin Luther thought, “Nope. There’s no way to harmonize what I’m believing with what James taught,” because James is, in Luther’s view, simply not apostolic. And just not written by an apostle, but actually contrary to justification by faith alone. So all that’s to say, you can harmonize the biblical evidence or you can just decide not to harmonize the biblical evidence and throw out the books you don’t like, which is the approach that Martin Luther goes with. He moves James to an appendix and denies his [inaudible 00:36:40] authorship as we saw and doesn’t treat it as having any kind of doctrinal authority. So that’s sort of the lay of the land. I want to move here to four simple biblical questions to ask ’cause at this point you might be saying, “Yeah, this is hard to kind of muddle through.”

“People mean different things by justification. They mean different things by works. They mean different things even by faith. How do we do anything with this and how can we come to any kind of greater Christian consensus on a doctrine is important, but as complicated as justification?” And I want to suggest that one of those solutions is going to be to move away from just Paul and James and bring St. John into the equation. And another part of the solution is going to be to ask simple questions that don’t rely on jargony words like justification. Now justification is a fine word if you know what’s meant by it, but if you don’t and if we’re using it in different ways, let’s find a way to break this down in just pretty plain English. I want to suggest, as I said, four simple biblical questions and they are the following.

Number one, can you go to heaven without loving God and your neighbor? Number two, can you love God without keeping his commandments? Number three, can you keep God’s commandments without doing good works? And number four, do those good works happen automatically or is there an actual effort of the will? So we’ll go through each of those and I’m going to suggest the answer to all four of those is no and that this gives us a clearer vision, both of the biblical data on justification and on salvation and that it also gives us a clearer vision in terms of how close or how far away we are. That this is a good roadmap that Catholics and Protestants can both take and say, “Well where do I actually disagree here?” So let’s go to the first question. Can you go to heaven without loving God and neighbor?

And the answer as I say is no and that John is pretty key here. In first John three he writes, “We know that we’ve passed out of death into life because we love the brethren. He who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.” So loving your neighbor is not some optional part of Christianity. If you don’t love, you’re not in the state of salvation. You are dead. So you don’t have eternal life abiding in you. A chapter earlier John says that, “He who says he’s in the light and hates his brother is in the darkness still.” This is bold, but this is something we have to make sense of in terms of the biblical data. “He who loves his brother abides in the light and in it there’s no cause for stumbling, but he who hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness and does not know where he is going because the darkness has blinded his eyes.”

So those are the two categories. It’s not, have you said the sinner’s prayer? It’s not, have you built an orphanage? It’s do you love your neighbor or not? If you do, that’s a really good sign that you’re walking in the light. If you don’t, you’re in the darkness still. That’s the first question. Can you go to heaven without loving God and loving neighbor? And I’m looking here for obvious reasons, particularly the loving neighbor aspect, partly because the Bible talks a lot about the need to love your neighbor. The second question, can you love God without keeping his commandments? And again, pretty clearly the answer to that is no. Jesus in John 14 says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” And then a few verses later in verse 23, “If a man loves me, he will keep my word and my father will love him and we will come to him and make our home with him.”

“He who does not love me does not keep my word and the word which you hear is not mine, but the fathers who sent me.” Right? So there you go. If you love God and if you love Jesus, you will keep his command. If you don’t keep his command, that’s a good sign that you don’t love him. Then in the next chapter in John 15, Jesus says, “As the father has loved me, so I have loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love just as I have kept my father’s commandments and abide in his love.” So if you want to stay in the love of God, if you want to stay abiding in the love of God, what do you need to do? You need to keep the commandments. Now we’ll ask, what are those commandments and we’ll get into that, but I just want to establish that first point and then go to John in first John chapter five.

He says, “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is the child of God and everyone who loves the parent loves the child. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For this is the love of God that we keep His commandments and his commandments are not burdensome.” So the keeping the commandments of God, again, are not optional. In second John chapter one, writing to the church he says, “Now I beg you lady, not as though I were writing you a new commandment, but the one we’ve had from the beginning that we love one another. And this is love. That we follow his commandments. This is a commandment as you’ve heard from the beginning that you follow love.” So there’s this inseparable relationship. Loving is keeping the commandment and the commandment is loving. And this isn’t some new thing and John is quite clear, “This is not some new commandment, this is the commandment from the beginning.”

Now in one sense it is a new commandment. A new commandment I give you, love one another. And in another sense this is what the law and the prophets were always teaching. Jesus says as much in Matthew 22. A scribe or a lawyer comes up to him and says, “Teacher, what is a great commandment in the law?” And what does Jesus say in response? “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. This is a great and first commandment. And a second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” And then he says, “On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.” So if you get what the Torah was trying to teach you was those two things. Love God, love neighbor. And those are non-negotiable parts of going to heaven.

That’s the second answer to the question. So the third question, can you keep God’s commandments then without doing good works? Is it possible, in other words, to love God and love neighbor without doing anything for God or doing anything for my neighbor? And the answer of course is no. Absolutely not. But if you need more than that, first John chapter three, John says, “By this we know love that he laid down his life for us. Notice that. That Jesus doesn’t just love us in an abstract way, but he loves us through deeds and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or speech, but in deed and in truth.”

So the love we’re talking about isn’t, “Oh, that’s great. I feel so bad for you. I feel so good for you.” It’s not just saying the right thing, it’s doing the right thing. It’s loving in deed and loving in truth. It’s pretty easy to say the right thing. It’s much harder to do the right thing, but that’s what we’re called to do. And this is not like a one-off sort of point. Jesus says in Matthew five, the sermon on the mount, “Let your light so shine before men they may see your good works and give glory to your father who is in heaven.” So the necessity of good works is right there. You can call it whatever you want. If you want to call it loving in deed and in truth rather than using the phrase good works, fine, but it means the same thing.

In Ephesians chapter two, St. Paul has this striking line where the first two verses get quoted and the third one sometimes gets kind of alighted over. The first two verses he says, well this is verses eight and nine, I should find a better way of saying that, in Ephesians 2:8 and nine, “For by grace you’ve been saved through faith and this is not your own doing. It is a gift of God, not because of works lest any man should boast for we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.”

So we are saved by grace through faith. We’re not saved, we’re not brought into this relationship because of anything we’ve done, but having been brought into this, we have been created by God to do good works. And so the person who decides not to do good works is not living up this thing that they’ve been created to do. Hopefully that’s clear enough. As I mentioned before, St. Paul uses this phrase in Romans one and in Romans 16, “The obedience of faith to talk about this.” So if you want to call it deeds of love, if you want to call it good work, if you want to call it the obedience of faith, these seem to be different ways of saying the same thing, that you love God and love neighbor and you act upon that love. And then in Galatians five verse 16, we get even one more formulation, which is I think a lot of people’s personal favorite.

St. Paul says that, “In Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any avail, but faith working through love.” Notice what he’s done there. He’s saying, “The works of the law, like circumcision, don’t matter. What does matter? Faith working through love.” So it’s faith, but it’s not just a belief kind of faith and it’s not faith apart from love. It’s faith that is united by love, but not just united by love, but working through love. So if you’re trying to do good deeds on your own apart from faith and apart from love, that’s not it. If you’re having faith alone without works and without love, that’s not it. It’s faith working through love. That expression really encapsulates seemingly the entire biblical data. And I think if you hold up that is the lens through which you read Paul and James and John, you’ll see that it harmonizes really nicely.

Now in saying these three things, I’m not saying all Protestants are going to say yes or no to any of these questions. I think every individual Protestant can look at these and say, “Well do I actually concretely disagree with any of these things?” Because if you don’t, if you agree with me the answer to the first three questions is no, no, no, then it seems like whatever disagreement we have on justification is pretty small because in both of our schemes, justification begins by faith alone through grace. And in both of these schemes, that faith needs to be working through love and producing good works or it’s not going to get you to heaven. And so if we believe those things, then we’re kind of quibbling probably about most of the rest of things. I mentioned there’s a fourth question. I had originally just written those three, but as I’ve gone through the years, I’ve found a fourth question to be helpful here because many Protestants will go through those three and say, “Sure, I agree with all of those, but the works aren’t actually doing anything.”

“They’re not causal in any kind of way. They’re just a symptom. That it’s the faith alone that matters.” And so the fourth question is, do good works happen automatically? And because strangely enough, you’ll find many Protestants who make the claim that they do and I’m going to of course say no, they don’t happen automatically. So John Calvin in the antidote to the Council of Trent, I already quoted the first part of this that, “As often as we mention faith alone, we’re not thinking of a dead faith, which work is not by love, but holding faith to be the only cause of justification.” But then he said, “It is therefore faith alone which justifies and yet the faith which justifies is not alone.” It’s confusing, but follow what he’s saying here. “Just as it is the heat alone of the sun, which warms the earth and yet in the sun it is not alone because it is constantly joined with light.”

So notice this. So faith and works are like the heat and light, but only the heat is what actually brings the warmth. And so likewise, only the faith is what brings the justification. The light’s kind of along for the ride. It’s always there, but it’s not doing anything causally. That’s one kind of formulation. Another is given in the NKJV study Bible. It says, “The reality is that if you have faith, works will naturally be a product. You cannot get rid of works because they do not save you. You cannot sever the effect from the cause, just as an apple tree will bear apples. So faith will produce good works.” That’s a popular kind of formulation and sometimes there’s a distinction that saving faith will produce good works. Now if by saving faith you mean faith working through love, then by saving faith you just mean the same thing we mean by faith and works or what Paul means by faith working through love, fine. Then it’s just a terminological difference.

But if the claim is that faith like true faith will automatically produce works as this seems to say, that’s not actually true. I’m going to give one more source. This is from a book called Thinking Christianity by a Mennonite author. He says, “The true meaning of James’ message, however, is that faith produces works the same way a tree produces fruit. When the focus of the believer is on faith, works are automatically produced. When works are the focus, true faith is neglected and soon dies.” So you’ll find lots of different formulations like that and I will leave it up to Protestant viewers as to whether they find those formulations to be accurate. I tried to give three sort of different takes that seem to be saying similar, but maybe not identical things. And I want to suggest that there’s something fundamentally wrong about just viewing works or worse viewing love as just kind of an effect of faith.

Now faith precedes it. So I get it in that sense. But read first Corinthians 13. St. Paul says, “If I have all faith so as to remove mountains but have not love, I am nothing.” But if you have faith and no love, you’ve got nothing. Just like James can say, “Faith without works is dead.” That your faith needs to be completed by this distinct thing which is love. Now significantly, Calvin and his commentary in this says, “Faith doesn’t mean faith there. That faith instead means miracles.” And he said, “The term faith is used in a variety of senses. It is a part of the prudent reader to observe in what signification it is taken. Paul, however, as I’ve stated already, is his own interpreter by restricting faith here to miracles.” Now of course when he’s talking about faith to move mountains, he’s referring to what Jesus said.

“If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you can tell the mountain to be uprooted and throw itself into the sea.” Calvin is reducing Paul’s vision of faith to just miracles. But if you keep reading first Corinthians 13, you realize that Paul means something more than that because he says in verse 13, “So faith, hope, love, abide these three. But the greatest of these is love.” Okay. Why does this matter? Because here, faith clearly doesn’t mean miracles, hope, and love. He’s referring to the three theological gifts of faith, hope, and love or the three theological virtues and the greatest of them is love. Why does this matter? Because the effect can’t be greater than the cause. That using the sunlight and heat from the sun kind of analogy. The heat on earth is never going to be warmer than the heat coming from the sun. It’s cause.

The cause is always greater than the effect. If you have a five gallon bucket of water and you’ve got some cups, you’re not going to pour six gallons of water. There has to be something coming in from outside. This is just a basic rule of logic. And so if good works and love are just a natural result of faith alone, then you’ve got a result, charity, and the good works produced by charity, that’s greater than the cause. So hopefully you can see. The problem that you need not just faith, you also need love. Now here again, the whole question is how do we understand that relationship? Because in Paul, charity is a greater gift or love is a greater gift than faith. Faith, hope, and love are the abiding gifts. Whereas the prophetic gifts, those pass away. Those are for this life only.

Faith, hope, and love endure. And the greatest one is love. So that’s kind of the key here. Do you have love or not? Do you have love of God? Do you have love of neighbor? And what are you doing with that love? Because it means nothing to say you have love of God and neighbor while you sit indifferently by in their moment of need. So that’s what we’re talking about. When we’re talking about good works we don’t mean, again, your unaided human effort. We mean are you living by love or are you trying to have faith alone without love? Because Paul will tell you as much as James will, that’s nothing. Paul will say that it’s nothing. James will say it is dead. And it means the same thing. If you have faith without love, that’s nothing. Now again, there are plenty of Protestants who say faith alone and probably mean faith with the good works produced by love.

But so often the way it’s framed is as if faith by itself will produce good works and that’s not true. Faith informed by charity, faith informed by love, will produce good works, which is why Benedict very keenly keys in on that point. By faith alone, are you separating faith from love or not? ‘Cause if you are, that’s no good. But if you mean faith and love, it’s not really a faith alone, but we’re fine with that formulation if that’s what you mean. But significantly here, I want to just double down on this point because anyone who’s ever tried to do a good thing knows it’s completely fictitious to say, “It’ll just naturally happen.” It’s just automatically you’re going to do the right thing. No, of course not. It’s a tremendous human effort. You’re giving the ability through faith, hope, and love to respond to the call of God.

But it’s often still hard to do and it’s not helpful or true to tell people, “It’ll just happen automatically if you’re one of the saved.” So I think there’s real spiritual damage being done by acting as if you’ll just naturally do the good works because you won’t. And when you don’t, that’s either going to be taken as a sign you didn’t need to do them, or worse, it’s as a sign you weren’t one of the elect. That’s just false teaching. So I think we need to call that out, but notice here, this is a much smaller issue than the way justification always gets talked about or often gets talked about. So hopefully it’s clear that faith, hope, and love enable you to do good works, but they don’t force you to do them. You can still resist them, you can still fail to do them, and you’re going to be accountable for how you live based on that.

Okay. Final thoughts. Your faith and your love can grow. And this is very clear from scripture. So just to give you a few examples, in Luke 17, the Apostles cry out to Jesus, “Increase our faith.” In second Corinthians 10, St. Paul says, “We do not both be unlimited in other men’s labors, but our hope is that as your faith increases, our field among you may be greatly enlarged.” In first Thessalonians three, he prays, “May the Lord make you increase and abound in love to one another and to all men.” In Philippians one, he says, “It is my prayer that your love may abound more and more.” So notice there’s a constant kind of theme that the faith you have can grow. The love you have can grow. It’s not a simple matter of an on off switch. That if you have it, you’ve got everything and if you don’t have it, you’ve got nothing.

No. What you have can grow, just as you can be more alive. Now that sounds very strange, but think about it. You can find someone who’s on death’s doorstep where they’re barely alive and you can find someone else who’s in the fullness of health. Well likewise, your faith, your hope, and your love work like that. And how do you help it to grow? Well one way is through prayer as we just saw through those four examples. Another way is by actually acting in faith and acting in love. Peter walking on water is a great way of exercising his faith and seeing where it needs help and seeing where he needs to call for the Lord for help. Likewise with love, when you actually do the hard work of doing good works, that’s how you grow your love and that’s going to be how it is that you have faith working in love.

So it’s spiritual malpractice I think to say, “Don’t focus on good works,” because we already saw, St. Paul actually says, “Focus on love,” and love means loving God and loving my neighbor. So you should be looking for how can I do good to those around me? How can I serve those around me? That’s the actual biblical model and it’s a mistake. It’s really dangerous if you avoid the acts of love because you’re afraid that means you’re not trusting God enough. No. Trusting God enough means you trust him to give you the gift of faith, hope, and love and you trust him to build that faith, hope, and love as you use it in the world by acting in a faithful, hopeful, and loving way, both to him and to your neighbor.

So I hope that’s clear in terms of where Catholics agree and disagree on the issue of justification with various groups of Protestants. I’m very interested in what you’d have to say below. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. Next week’s episode, I think we’re going to be looking at predestination and whether the Calvinist idea of predestination is found among the early Christians or whether that’s an invention as well. So if you’re interested in that topic, I hope you’ll tune in and then I think in two weeks we’ll get into some more lent and kind of stuff. All right. For Shameless Popery, Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.

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