A man is justified by faith apart from works of the law. Justified by works and not by faith alone. Oh, you of little faith. If you had faith the size of a mustard seed. Faith without works is dead. Go, your faith has saved you. I have not found such great faith, no, not in Israel. Jesus saw their faith,…
The word faith appears 489 times in the Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition of the Bible. Two hundred eighty-eight of those come in the New Testament despite it only being less than a third the size of the Old Testament. Faith is a very important word when it comes to following God. It is so important that sometimes we simply boil down our entire religious beliefs into something like, “we share the faith,” or “keep the faith.”
Clearly faith is a critical word to understand when discussing our relationship with The Almighty. However, in that opening collection of Bible usages, we see paradoxical statements. “Your faith has saved you,” and “faith without works is dead,” seem like easy fodder for a skeptic to point to the Bible contradicting itself. This understanding of faith is a central aspect of the Catholic and Protestant divide as well. A key mantra of the Protestant Revolution was sola fide, or faith alone. Protestants insisted that salvation came through Christ by faith as a gift from God. As Catholics, we have no disagreement with this belief. Salvation does come through Christ by faith as a gift. Yay, agreement! However, the language used during the revolution was intended to isolate salvation from any attachment to the sacraments. Now, my disclaimer here is that not all Protestants had the same understanding of what was included under that term faith. For example, Martin Luther and Lutherans today maintained that baptism was necessary for salvation and did not act as some work but rather an act of faith. Therefore, they could simultaneously say sola fide, and baptism is necessary. Other revolutionaries rejected the sacraments as a means of grace in any way resulting in a strictly symbolic view of baptism.
But let’s get back to faith, and its meaning. In James 2:18-26, we see James speaking of faith as intellectual assent or verbal profession, “You believe that God is one - you do well.” The interlocutor James is engaging has the proper knowledge, in this case of God’s nature, but it is decisively shown this is not enough because the enemies of God are equal to the interlocutor in this sense, “Even the demons believe - and shudder.” These are harsh words for those who tout a sola fide banner. If James were writing in the 21st century, we could translate his message as this, “Congrats, you have faith. You have now on equal footing with Satan.” Admittedly, this is only half of the biblical story.
What about Paul and his statements often used to promote the Protestant teaching of sola fide? In Romans 3:21-31, Paul describes how righteousness is acquired through faith as a gift and not through “works of the law.” Paul is teaching the Romans that salvation is now distinctly through the individual of Jesus. Following the 613 laws of the Old Testament can still be a good thing, but that is no longer the measuring stick because Christ has come to fulfill the Law in himself. With the Incarnation, the people of God will receive additional revelation. They will learn there is only one way to The Father. Any person who wants to be saved from the Fall of Adam will need to have faith in Jesus as Messiah. To put it succinctly, it is all about the god-man Jesus. Paul elaborates on this repeated in many of his letters, but it isn’t until the end of his letter to the Galatians where we get a clearer understand of how Paul is using the term faith. In Galatians 5:6, Paul is talking about the usefulness of the initiation into the Abrahamic covenant (and the Mosiac Law by extension) via circumcision and says, “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any avail, but faith working through love.”
Paul’s verse in Galatians is key to resolving our paradox. There are two key points I want to highlight from Galatians 5:6. First is that the lack of circumcision is just as useless as the act of being circumcised. He is reinforcing that things after Jesus have been streamlined. In other words, he is saying, “Don’t figure out if you are following 613 requirements to the letter, instead ask if you are following the way of Jesus,” which is my second point. The second half of the verse tells us what Paul is saying what we are required to do. For if we are to be in Christ Jesus, our faith must be working through love. Now my insertions of “if we are to be” and “must be”, may be contended by Protestants as the wrong interpretive words for this verse. Instead, you may want to insert something like “when we are” and “will be”, so the verse means for when we are in Christ Jesus, our faith will be working through love. In this conversation, I am willing to concede this as a fine interpretation of the verse, but a key change to the Protestant position has been revealed. Faith is no longer alone. Faith is now with love.
With this new key to the problem given to us by Paul, we can now unlock James’s passage as well as Paul’s famous words from Corinthians to see what is required for salvation as taught by the Catholic Church. Faith in combination with love is the exact topic of James’s teaching. Read James 2:14 and on again.
14 What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him? 15 If a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food, 16 and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit? 17 So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.
18 But some one will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith. 19 You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder. 20 Do you want to be shown, you foolish fellow, that faith apart from works is barren? 21 Was not Abraham our father justified by works, when he offered his son Isaac upon the altar? 22 You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by works, 23 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. 24 You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone. 25 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? 26 For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so faith apart from works is dead.
In the first four verses we see James calling into question the usefulness of faith of the interlocutor because he fails to do works of love for his hungry and poorly clothed neighbor. In the second section, he gives examples of Old Testament figures who perform works of obedience which I would argue are works of love for God. Faith is not alone. It is accompanied by love, and this increases the justification of Abraham and Rahab. As for Paul’s verse in 1 Corinthians 13, “…if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.” Faith alone doesn’t save. Faith alone is useless.
Now I am at the length of one of my typical article’s and have not even mentioned Peter despite putting him in my subtitle. I was inspired to write this article when watching the season finale of Season 3 of The Chosen (Season 4 episode reviews will be coming soon). The bible story of walking on water is very well known, and the setup The Chosen gave us added so much weight to the moment. We know the next step. Jesus calls Peter onto the water. And Peter does it!!! The strength or type of Peter’s faith is only inferred from his willingness to attempt to walk to The Lord on the water in scripture. In the show, they make it much more explicit. Jesus even explicitly asks Peter if he still has faith after he is on the water. Peter shouts back that faith has not been his problem. He has been believing in Him the whole time. Peter has struggled to support his wife after the tragic loss of their child and is angered by Jesus’s seeming indifference to his plight. I think it is clear that Peter has proven he has faith beyond intellectual assent. All the while, Peter is doing the impossible. Peter is “with God” because all things are possible with God.
In another article, I wrote about Peter’s “child-like” trust he demonstrates in Jesus at this moment. Click here, if you want to read about that. But Peter’s walking on water is also an act of obedience. However, we all know the story doesn’t end with a long walk to the beach. The waves rise up and both the scriptures and tv show give us another command by Jesus, “keep your eyes on me.” I know this is a counter-factual, but I would hope every Christian believes that if Peter had continued to walk with Jesus, he would have been capable of surfing a tsunami. Nonetheless, this is not what plays out. Peter fails to obey this follow-up command. He ceases to obey, and he begins to drown.
At this point, I ask that you humor me in a spiritual interpretation of this story. I hope no one would argue that Peter loses his intellectual assent to Jesus being the Messiah when he turns to the wave. Peter maintains that faith. Peter is still on par with the demons. What Peter has lost is his faith working through love, and it is going to cost him his life. I encourage you to rewatch this scene from the episode and see if you believe Peter could have survived. I believe, just like Peter, if our faith is reduced to intellectual ascent, we will surely die as well. Our faith must be accompanied by love and obedience. We must walk with the Lord. And when we fail, we must ask for the Lord to save us, as Peter does. And when we are retrieved from the clutches of death, we must ask for the Lord to never let us go, as Peter does. Only then will our faith and love of God with the gift of His mercy save us.
May God bless and keep you,
Mitchell Godfrey