JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH

Dr. William Marshner The Catholic Church holds that faith in Jesus Christ is not saving faith unless it bears fruit in good works. Vice-versa, the Church holds that such works are so intimately joined to faith, that, without them, it is impossible for the believer to grow or persevere in his faith.(1) In this way, good works are necessary for salvation. Most Protestants are uncomfortable with such a statement. Without denying the importance of good works, Protestants tend to see them as symptoms of the one thing necessary rather than as necessities in their own right. For Luther, good works were merely symptoms of confident faith; for Calvin, they were symptoms of irresistible grace. Few Protestants today are familiar with the details of Luther's or Calvin's personal thought; what they have inherited from these great forebearers is rather a general orientation, whose core is the conviction that according to St. Paul, we are justified (by faith alone) or (by grace alone), either formula being understood to exclude any essential role of good works.

Now, in order to see how this general orientation may clash with Catholicism, it is necessary to introduce two further points.

First, Catholic and Protestant views on the respective roles of grace, faith and works cannot be compared meaningfully, unless one specifies what stage of the justificational process one is talking about. In the preparatory stage, for instance, in which prevenient graces first stir a person towards an interest in religious truth, towards repentance, and towards faith, Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists are at one in saying "."(2) A second stage is the very transition from death to life, which is the first stage of justification proper. Here the parties are at one in saying "sola fide," though they seem to mean different things by it. Protestants tend to mean that, at this stage, by the grace of God, man's act of faith is the sole act required of him; Catholics mean that faith is the beginning, foundation and root of all justification, since only faith makes possible the acts of hope and charity (i.e. love-for-God) which are also required.(3) However, since most Protestants have a broad notion of the act of faith, whereby it includes elements of hope and love, it is often hard to tell how far the difference on this point is real and how far it is a matter of words. Finally, however, there comes a third stage, that of actual Christian life, with its problems of growth and perseverance. The man justified by faith is called to "walk" with God, to progress in holiness. It is at this stage that the parties sharply diverge. Catholics affirm, and Protestants strenuously deny, that the born-again Christian's good works merit for him the increase of grace and of the Christian virtues. As a result, Protestant piety has no obvious place for the self-sacrifices, fasts, and states of perfection which are prominent features of Catholic piety.

Now this divergence over works in the third stage is partially due to a Protestant allergy to the word 'merit', but only partially. The real reasons are much deeper, which brings me to my second point.

At each stage, neither the apparent agreements nor the apparent disagreements can be understood without looking at certain metaphysical quarrels, the chief of which is over the very existence of what Catholics call "grace."

In the natural order, a doctor ministers to a moribund patient and restores him to life; he does so by really changing the condition of the patient's body; he restores to it a quality called health. Can something analogous happen in the supernatural order? If so, what Catholics call "grace" exists. It is the quality thanks to which the soul is made alive and enabled to function as God intended it to function, just as health is such a quality to the body.

Of course, as is the case with all analogies, there are points at which this one breaks down. The human doctor is a finite physician; he can heal the sick but not the dead; God, on the other hand, restores spiritual health to those dead in trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:5), so that God's act is not so much a cure of the sick as it is a down-payment on the Resurrection (Ephesians 2:6). So the analogy limps. It fails to reflect the fact that grace is not only like health but also like brand-new life. Still, between life and health there is a deep connection, so that this limp is not fatal to the analogy. However, there is another problem with it.

Thanks to his instruments, chemical and surgical, the doctor is the principal cause of the patient's restored health; but it would seem odd to say that the man's health is wholly the doctor's gift, even if the doctor collected no fee. After all, it is the patient's own natural powers, his own natural capacity for health, which allows the doctor's work to be successful. So there is a cooperation here between the doctor's art and the patient's nature, thanks to which the restored health is not wholly the doctor's gift but partially also the patient's own achievement. Such things cannot be said of the initial, justifying grace. As Catholics understand it, this grace is a quality for which man has no natural capacity, to which he has no natural right, and towards which he has no natural inclination. It is a pure surprise, a pure gift, an elevation of our nature rather than a part of it; and this was true even before the Fall.(4) Now, to be sure, Catholics believe that once we have been elevated to grace, we become capable of cooperating with God's further graces, since He has now given us the capacity and the inclination for such things. But this does not cancel the original picture; it only means that our very capacity to cooperate is a gift to us, something not natively ours; as a result, every God-pleasing act of ours remains so rooted in God's initial gift that it is simply an actuation of that gift. So the analogy between health and grace limps in this second way: it fails to reflect the fact that grace is so totally a gift that it exceeds our natural capacities and hence never becomes simply "our property," even after it has been given.

Thanks to these difficulties, what Catholics call "sanctifying grace" or "habitual grace" turns out to be a deeply mysterious entity: a quality of man which is a property of God. In order to cope with such an entity, one needs a sophisticated metaphysics of participation. The Church Fathers and their successors, the Scholastic Doctors, took the trouble to work out such a metaphysics because the existence of grace as a real entity in man—ontic grace—was and is the foundation, without which the whole Catholic understanding of justification makes no sense.

The Protestant Reformers, however, impatient with metaphysics, preferred not to cope with such an entity and denied its existence.(5) To them it seemed simpler to say that grace is something wholly in God, namely, His favor towards us. But then, if grace is not something real in man, our "justification" can no longer be conceived as a real change in us; it will have to become a sheer declaration on God's part, e.g. a declaration that, thanks to the work of Christ, He will henceforth consider us as just, even though we remain inwardly the sinners we always were. Hence, the Protestant doctrine of "forensic" or "extrinsic" justification. Now watch what happens to our own act of faith: it ceases to be the foundational act of an interior renewal and becomes a mere requirement, devoid of any salvific power in its own right, which God arbitrarily sets as the condition on which He will declare us just. Whereupon, watch what happens to our good works: they cease to be the vital acts wherein an ontologically real "new life" consists and manifests itself; they become mere human responses to divine mercy—nice, but totally irrelevant to our justification—or else they become zombie-like motions produced in us by irresistible divine impulses, whereby God exhibits His glory in His elect.

Now, again, few Protestants have thought these matters through. Most do not realize that the theology they have inherited derives historically from nominalistic assumptions, which led Luther and Calvin to deny the existence of sanctifying grace. Rather, they feel that they are simply reading St. Paul. "By grace are ye saved, through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast" (Ephesians 2:8f). They feel that an extrinsic, purely declaratory justification is the obvious meaning of such passages. Catholic apologetics, therefore, must show the opposite. It is no use arguing metaphysics until we break down that lively conviction by which the Protestant feels that St. Paul is his home turf. We must show that St. Paul's real position is far closer to that of Trent than to that of Luther.

Here, then is apologetics at work in a different way—the way of exact and objective exegesis.(6)

The place to begin is with the fact that St. Paul expounds and contrasts two economies of justification or two orders of righteousness. Thus, Philippians 3:9 says: "(I counted all things loss) that I might be found in Him, not having my own justice, which is from the Law, but the justice which is from the faith of Jesus Christ, the justice that comes from God through faith." Here the main contrast is between justice from the Law and justice , whereupon a second contrast emerges between justice and justice God.

This second contrast reappears in Romans 10:3, "(The Jews) not knowing the justice of God and seeking to establish their own justice, did not submit to God's justice."

We learn the result of this Jewish conduct in Romans 9:30-32, "What shall we say then? The gentiles, who were not pursuing justice, laid hold of justice, but the justice which is from faith. Israel, however, pursuing the law of justice, did not attain the law" (i.e. did not accomplish or fulfill it). The exact interpretation of this text has been debated,(7) but for our purposes it suffices to see that Paul was speaking of a justice pursued by way of works and that such justice was the great ambition of the Jews in connection with the Law of Moses.

The point that Mosaic legal justice was a matter of works reappears in Romans 10:5 ("Moses wrote of the justice which is from the law that the man who keeps it shall live by it," quoting from Leviticus 18:5) in contrast with the justice from faith. The same is said in Galatians 3:12 ("But the law is not from faith; rather the one who does those things will live in them") and in Romans 2:13 ("It is not the hearers of the Law who have been justified before God but the doers of the Law will be justified," i.e. will be declared just at the last judgment), and this is expounded at length in Romans 2: 23-27: "You who glory in the Law, you dishonor God by transgression of the Law....To be sure, circumcision is profitable if you observe the Law; but if you transgress the Law, you are returned to a state of uncircumcision. So, if the uncircumcised man keeps the just precepts of the Law, shouldn't he be regarded as circumcised? In fact, the man who remains in his natural state of uncircumcision and who has accomplished the Law will judge you, who with letter and circumcision have broken the Law."

So, over against the justice of God, which is the justice of faith, there is a self-justice which is of the Law and which is a justice of works. This latter would give men a basis for boasting (Romans 4:2, Ephesians 2:8-9), since works give one a strict right to be considered just: "To the man who has works, his salary is not counted as a favor but as something due," (Romans 4:4).

Now, as a matter of practical fact, does anyone really have this self-justice of Law and works? Over and over again Paul answers in the negative: "for from the works of the Law no flesh is justified before Him" (Romans 3:20); "Israel, pursuing a law of justice, did not attain to the Law; why? because Israel did not seek to attain it through faith but through works" (Romans 9:31-32); "For all who proceed by the works of the Law are under the curse; for it is written, 'Cursed be anyone who does not persevere in practicing all that is written in the Book of the Law'"(Galatians 3:10, quoting Deuteronomy 27: 26 and the context indicates that the curse has indeed gone into effect).

How does St. Paul back up this startling thesis? How does he explain the failure of anyone to be justified before God by the works of the Law? Here are the steps of his answer.

1. "For through the law comes knowledge of sin" (Romans 3:20). The law makes sin better known. What else?

2. "The law works (God's) wrath. For where there is no law, there is no transgression" (Romans 4:15), meaning, of course, no transgression of positive law.

3. Such transgression is deadly. "For while we were in the flesh, the passions of sins, which were through the law, worked in our members so as to bring forth death" (Romans 7:5). The passions or causes of sins were stirred up by the law. "While we were in the flesh" describes the situation of Christians before their baptism. So the law is clearly being given some part of the responsibility for the existence or activity of the passions which lead to various sins. What is this responsibility?

4. The answer is given in Romans 7:7-25, a text which falls into two parts, verses 7-12 and 13-25. Here is the first part. "What shall we say? Is the law sin? Far from it! But I would not have known sin except through the law. For indeed I would not have known covetousness, if the law had not said, 'Thou shalt not covet.' But sin, taking occasion of the commandment, produced in me all covetousness; for without law sin is dead. So long as there is no law, I was alive; but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died, and the commandment which was for the sake of life turned out to be for death. For sin, taking occasion of the commandment, seduced me and, through it, killed me. So then the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, just and good."

There is a human story here, but whose story is it? St. Paul's "me" is certainly not meant to refer exclusively to himself. Some interpreters have thought he meant the young Jew in general and then, perhaps, by analogy, any young person. For just as the young Jew gains awareness of sin through learning the revealed Law, so also the young Gentile learns sin through the emergence of his conscience at the age of reason. On this interpretation, the time when I was alive without the law was the time of my non-responsible childhood. Thus Origen and St. Jerome.(8) Other interpreters have thought that Paul's "me" is the subject of human history. Man knew sin before Moses but not with the same killing exactitude. It is one thing to have nature or conscience as one's accuser and quite another to have God Himself. Hence the time when I was alive without the Law was the time before Moses. Thus Chrysostom(9) and Aquinas(10). Still others have thought that Paul was speaking of universal human experience as prototyped in Adam. Our first parent "lived" until God gave him a commandment, of which sin was able to take advantage. Thus Theodore of Mopsuestia.(11)

It may be the case that St. Paul had something of each of these possibilities in mind. Only Adam and Eve were fully innocent before they learned God's positive law. But each of us is somewhat like Adam in this: whenever we become fully aware of a divine commandment, the experience marks a crucial transition both (a) from whatever vague sense of unease we may have felt beforehand to the conscious guilt we must feel afterward, and (b) from the lesser malice of just "doing as we please" to the infinitely greater malice of pleasing ourselves in defiance of God. And this experience of transition which each of us has (perhaps in one way upon reaching the age of reason, and in other ways later in life) in turn parallels the collective experience of our race in history, as the "age of ignorance" yielded to the epoch of Sinai.

In any case, we are now ready for the second part of this text (Romans 7:13-25), which clearly depicts the state of life under the Law of Moses. "Did what is good then become death for me? Far from it! But sin, in order to appear as sin, gave me death by means of a good thing, so that sin might be held the more guilty through the fact of the commandment. For we know that the law is spiritual; but I am corporeal [Paul's word here is not his usual which means dominated by the flesh, but which means made of the flesh.], sold into the service of sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I should like to do, I do not do; but what I hate, I do. So if I do what I don't want to, I recognize that the law is good. But then it is no longer I who do it but the sin which dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. In effect, the desire for good is within my power but not the practice of it....For in my inner self I take pleasure in the Law of God, but I perceive another law in my members, which struggles against the law of my reason, and which enslaves me to the law of sin which is in my members....Thus it is one and the same me who serve the Law of God through my reason but the law of sin through my flesh."

Here the "me" is no longer considered in its state of relative innocence. Sin has emerged, and an inner conflict is unfolding under the most unfavorable conditions. Sin is no longer an agent external to man, as in the case of innocent Adam, nor an interior but latent principle, as in the case of a small child. Sin has become a "law" of the flesh.(12) Given this new power of sin, there emerges a new "me," whom Paul says has fallen into the power of sin.

Nearly every ancient commentator, plus a virtual unanimity of modern exegetes, Catholic and Protestant alike, has understood this new "me" to be the Jew existing under the Mosaic Law. What makes this exegesis inevitable is the fact that Paul, in the verses which follow immediately, makes this sorry state of inner defeat, this impotency of one's better self, a foil for the totally different experience now available in Christ. Through Him we are able to behave "not as our corporeal nature dictates but as the spirit dictates" (Romans 8:4).

Such was also St. Augustine's exegesis, until, at the end of his life and in further reaction to Pelagianism, he changed his mind and extended the "me" of Romans 7 to the Christian.(13) (St. Augustine's example on this point was followed by St. Gregory the Great, Peter Lombard, and Thomas Aquinas.) Needless to say, Luther, Melanchthon, and the Calvinists were delighted to adopt such an idea. To this day, the sad doctrine that our justification must be something merely declaratory has one of its most powerful roots in this fateful mistake: what St. Paul considered the paradigm experience of the Jew under the Law is confused with the paradigm experience of the Christian under the power of grave! And it is interesting to note that the revivalist wing of Protestantism tends to escape this mistake. Encountering Christ in deep experiences of conversion, they taste the power of His victory over sin in their own lives; having tasted it, they have not a doubt in the world that they have been changed inwardly, that God has given them new hearts, and that the nightmare experience of Romans 7 is over for them. Of course, the Christian can fall back into that nightmare. This is the grain of truth in St. Augustine's later exegesis. The Christian can cease to live in the power of Christ; he can neglect prayer, grow cold, and find himself thrown back on his own resources; when he does so, inevitably, he will repeat within himself the experience of the Jew under the Law. For St. Paul's essential point is valid under either covenant: the moral information of the commandment, no matter how sublime, is powerless of itself to secure our practice of the good. Being nothing of itself but an external norm and not an active force, the Law boxes the unconverted or half-converted human heart into an unbearable situation, from which there is no escape but a new and totally different kind of law: "the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus" (Romans 8:2). To this latter St. Augustine also gave full weight elsewhere in his theology, and in that regard the Reformers did not follow him.

In summary, then, what was wrong with the Jewish project to achieve righteousness from the Law is this: the project prescinded from God's grace. Taken in abstraction from grace, the Law was powerless; destined to be disobeyed at least inwardly,(14) the Law served to provoke and deepen sin.

Though it may seem odd to summarize our discussion in that way, introducing suddenly the mention of grace, there is a reason for doing so. Romans 7, with its abstract dialectic of Law and sin, better self and concupiscence, has to be understood consistently with what St. Paul has already said in Romans 2. There he seems to treat the keeping of the commandments as a real possibility: "for when the gentiles, who do not have the Law, naturally do the things of the Law..."(Romans 2:14). In fact, he says, "God will render to each man according to his works: eternal life to those who, dedicating themselves with perseverance to good works, seek glory, honor and immortality...glory honor and peace to all who do good, to the Jew first and to the Greek" (Romans 2:7) and this in a context in which the revelation of Christ is not even under discussion yet.

These words certainly show that St. Paul did not regard good works as impossible, misguided, or pernicious, as some Protestant exegetes have tried to hold. Quite the contrary. But if St. Paul seems to admit justifying works in Romans 2 and to exclude them in Romans 7, the most plausible explanation is that he is speaking of the total human condition in chapter 2, where grace is at work among Jew and gentile alike, whereas in chapter 7 he is showing what happens when the Law is isolated from grace. Such isolation is exactly what is sought, when man seeks his own righteousness on the basis of law.

Moreover, what we have been saying squares with St. Paul's remarks on the function of the Law in God's overall plan of salvation. "The Law intervened so that sin might abound" (Romans 5:20), that is, so that men might become more convinced of their sins and learn humility from their moral failures. For such humility would dispose them toward the ultimate end of the Law: "for the end of the Law is Christ" (Romans 10:4). As Paul explains: "Before faith came, we were placed under the guardianship of the Law, sealed up in expectation of the faith which was to be revealed. Thus the Law was our teacher until Christ" (Galatians 3:23f).

St. Paul's conviction that God intended the Law to be provisional has its roots in the earliest preaching of the Church. Stunned by the death and resurrection of Jesus, whom they had thought to be the Messiah, the first disciples were compelled to search the Scriptures for a clue to the meaning of these shattering events. By combining Psalm 18 (alluded to in Acts 2:23) with Psalms 16 and 110, Peter and the others were able to see that death and resurrection had been part of the script, so to speak, for the Messiah. God had all along intended that His Christ should suffer (Acts 2:23; 3:18) and that he should not receive his sovereignty on earth but in Heaven, after a resurrection (compare Acts 2:25-35 with the vision of the Son of Man in heaven in Daniel 7). These points had to be preached, because otherwise the Jews could not be persuaded that the facts about Jesus, however true, "filled the bill" of messianic prophecy. But merely to preach these points of correspondence was not enough. The question remained, why? Why should the Messiah have to go through all that! It made no sense, given Judaism's picture of what was wrong with the world. According to that picture, what was wrong was Israel's failure to enjoy the exaltation among the nations which was her due as God's people. What needed fixing was the geo-political situation. For once the Messiah had made Zion the visible center of divine and human power, the nations would flow up to her, forsaking their idols, and the blessing of the knowledge of the Law would flow out to all people. But if the Messiah was supposed to suffer and die, mankind's religious problem had to be quite different from what the Jewish picture contemplated. What was needed was a clue to a whole new picture. This clue was found in the Servant Songs of Isaiah (especially Isaiah 52:13 -53:12), where the suffering and death of the Servant are presented as a vicarious atonement for sin. "By his suffering shall my servant justify many, taking their faults upon himself" (Isaiah 53:11). If the servant and the Messiah were one and the same figure, that would explain everything, including certain dark sayings of Jesus (Mark 10:45; 14:24). But it would also explode the Jewish world-view. If the Messiah's central mission was to deal with sin, then the problem to which the Messiah was the answer went back beyond the Davidic Monarchy and even beyond Moses; it went clear back to Adam. And if mankind's central religious problem was not ignorance of the Law but bondage to sin, then faith in the Redeemer-from-sin would have to be the guiding thread of God's plan for man, from the beginning. Was it not written: "The just man shall live by faith" (Habakuk 2:4)?

This is the thought that led Paul to Abraham, the man whose faith was reckoned to him as righteousness (Genesis 15:6; Romans 4:1-11; Galatians 3:15ff). At the very origin of Israel, Paul found in Abraham's faith the thread resumed in Christ; whereupon the entire Mosaic sub-plot could be read as a parenthesis ordained to Christ.

The Jewish project to seek one's own justice from the Law, then, was not only psychologically impossible (Romans 7) but also contrary to the plan of the ages, in which the Law had no function but this: in leading us to Christ, to render itself obsolete. Now we can understand why Paul cried out in frustration at the obtuse Galatians: "If the Law can justify us, there is no point in the death of Christ" (Galatians 2:21).

And the time has come to examine that other kind of justice mentioned by Paul: the justice which comes from God through faith.

"For in it (the Gospel) the justice of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, 'The just shall live from faith"' (Romans 1:17). What is this justice "of God" (dikaiosune theou)? If the genitive is one of attribution, then what has been revealed is God's own attribute rather than something He gives to men. Thus Origen(15) and Pseudo-Ambrose.(16) But if the genitive is one of source, then what is revealed is a justice conferred on men by God. Thus Chrysostom,(17) Augustine,(18) and most modern exegetes.(19) What lends weight to the second interpretation is the fact that God's own justice gets revealed precisely in His conferring justice on men, as Paul himself suggests: "so that He Himself might be just and render just the man who has faith in Jesus Christ" (Romans 3:26). By contrast, Luther's notion that "the justice of God" here refers to His vindictive action against sinners is totally unsupported either by the Fathers or by the modern scholars.

The thought of Romans 1:17 is picked up again in Romans 3:21-22: "Now the justice of God, to which the Law and the prophets bear witness, has been manifested apart from the Law, the very justice which, through faith in Jesus Christ, comes to all those who believe, without distinction." Here there is no doubt that God's justice is something which comes to men, is communicated to men.

In this light, look again at a text we saw before: "(The Jews) not knowing the justice of God and seeking to establish their own justice, did not submit to God's justice" (Romans 10:3) We can now see that the contrast is not between God's attribute and man's achievement, but rather between something God communicates to man and something man tries to achieve on his own. Both pertain to man, and so, they are rivals, Now, we can begin to understand this "non-submission." It was not the attitude of the true heroes of the Old Testament. Besides the example of Abraham, we have a whole catalogue of Jews who lived "by faith" in Hebrews 11, a document which, if not by Paul himself, was certainly written by someone intimately concurrent with his thought. "There is not time for me to give an account of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, or of David, Samuel and the prophets. These men who through faith conquered kingdoms, did what is right and earned the promises." (Hebrews 11:32f) Now the key to these men, by virtue of which they are said to have lived "by faith", is not that they did not do any works of the Law! Obviously. Rather, the key is that they lived in total dependence upon God's promises, in total openness to what God would yet reveal. That is why there is no contradiction between their attitude and the surprising turn which revelation took in Jesus Christ. But the other and later Jews had so reduced faith to the keeping of the Law, that the Law could not be provisional; as a result, their whole attitude toward God was not one of expectant faith but one of satisfied accomplishment. So, when the justice that God had all along intended to confer upon man was revealed in Jesus the Servant-Messiah, they did not submit to it. Not so obtuse as Luther, they could see that this "justice of God" was meant for them and so was a rival to the justice they already thought they had. And not so obtuse as the Galatians, they could see that if the Messiah's death had a point to it, then the Law could not justify them.

Now, if what Paul means by is not something to remain in God but something meant to be conferred on us, then we must reckon with that mysterious possibility: a quality of man which is the property of God! Does St. Paul say anything to indicate a knowledge of this possibility? Indeed he does: "God has made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that we in him might become justice of God" (II Cor. 5:21). This verse is the pattern on which Athanasius would learn to say, "God became man, so that man might become divine." It is not a question of replacement but of participation, and the participation is real in both directions. First in Jesus: just as really as the Word took our humanity, just that really his humanity became God. And then in us: just as really as Christ-God took our sins (so really that even the Father forsook Him—Mark 15:34), just that really we receive God's justice. For if we dare to believe that in the Incarnation our nature, without ceasing to be a human nature, received God's subsistence, then we may easily believe that we, in Christ, receive God's justice as our quality. In fact, St. Paul even has a name for this quality. In the very next verse (II Cor. 6:1) he says: "As God's co-workers, we beg you once again not to have received God's grace in vain." What we should not "receive in vain" is exactly what Paul has just said we have "become" in Christ. God's justice is His grace, a gift to men. That is why the justice of God is identically "the justice which God through faith" (Philippians 3:9).

What emerges from these texts, then, is the existence in man of a justice conferred by God. But this justice is tied into faith, whether before Christ's coming, as in the case of Abraham, or afterwards, as in our case. What we must explore next is the nature of this tie-in between justice and faith.

St. Paul's most important text on faith is Romans 10:13-17: "Whoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. But how shall they call upon one in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how shall they hear if no one preaches? And how shall anyone preach unless he has been sent...But not everyone has obeyed () the Gospel. As Isaiah said, 'Lord, who has believed our report?' So faith depends upon preaching and preaching upon the word of Christ" We have here an order of necessary conditions, which inverts to yield the following order of precedence: (1) The word or teaching of Christ, i.e. the Gospel; (2) the mission to preach given to the Apostles; (3) their preaching; (4) our hearing, and finally (5) an act which may be described equally well as () and as obedience ().(20)

The point that faith is based on hearing is made also in Galatians 3:2 and 5: "Did you receive the spirit on the basis of the works of the Law or on the basis of the hearing of faith?" And the point that faith is receiving the words of the Apostles in a spirit of obedience to God is found again in I Thessalonians 2:13 "We thank God for the fact that, as soon as you received through us the word of God which you heard from our mouth, you heard it as God's word." This is why Paul twice speaks of "the obedience of faith" (Romans 1:5 and 16:26, the genitive being appositional) and also why II Cor. 10:5 says that every thought (or every intellect) is to be brought into a captivity which is "obedience of Christ."

These texts indicate that what St. Paul called "faith" certainly included the scholastic sense of the term (assent or submission of the intellect to the truths taught by Christ to His Apostles, and by them to us, on the authority of God) but also included more. The reader should remember that the scholastic definition of 'faith' was designed to do a technical job, namely, to designate the common content of 'living faith' () and 'dead faith' (). It does this job very well; the common content is intellectual assent to the revealed message. But St. Paul's term 'faith' was used by him to designate man's rightful response to Christ's message. Now, where this message consists of truths of fact (e.g. "Before Abraham was, I am"; "I and the Father are one," etc.) intellectual assent is all there is to the rightful response; but where the message contains imperatives ("Repent and be baptized"), consolations ("Fear not, I have overcome the world"), promises ("But I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice"), examples ("When you pray, pray like this: Our Father...") etc., there the rightful response is to do as one is commanded, take the consolation, trust the promise, heed the example and so forth. Indeed, to believe in a command intellectually and then not do it, to accept a consolation intellectually and then not feel it, to acknowledge a promise and then not trust it—these are even unnatural responses. "Dead faith" is an ugly thing—not just "unformed" but deformed by sin and shot-through with the self-contradiction which lies at the heart of every sin.

So, a rightful response to Christ's total message must not only include faith in the narrow sense but must be what St. Paul calls "obedience of faith," which is just what Catholic theology calls the acts of faith, hope and love.(21)

We are now in a position to see the tie-in between faith and justice. Observe first of all how St. Paul expresses the connection in prepositions. He speaks of God's "justice which is () faith" (Romans 9:30; 10:6); he says we are "justified faith" (Gal. 2:16; 3:24). So justice is distinct from faith; it proceeds from it. Justice has its source and point of departure in faith. However, lest we should get the idea that justice is a direct "output" of faith, or a natural derivative, it is vital to see that a divine action intervenes between faith and justice: "God justifies the Gentiles from faith" (Gal. 3:8,30; cf. Romans 3:24). This divine action is highlighted by Paul's other favorite preposition, the instrumental , through. "God's justice is through faith" (Romans 3:22; Phil. 3:9) "he justifies the gentiles through faith" (Romans 3:30). So man gets justified, but God does the justifying, and He does it by means of faith, using faith as an instrument. Elsewhere we have it (Phil. 3:10) that "the justice from God is on the basis of faith ()" and (Hebrews 11:7) "according to faith ()

These prepositions instruct us on how to take Paul's meaning when he dispenses with prepositions in favor of a simple instrumental dative: "For we think that man is justified by faith" (Romans 3:28); "through Him (Christ) we have access by faith" (Romans 5:1). The meaning is the same as before. Faith remains God's instrument in justifying, and not (as Luther supposed) man's instrument in getting justified.

But how does God use this instrument? We have an indication from Romans 4:3f. "Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him () for justice." In the Hebrew of Genesis 15:6, the verb is active: "God counted it as justice." So the mystery is being described as an accounting procedure. God credits to Abraham's account as having the value of Now the question is what kind of accounting this is. Luther supposed that God took a thing of no real value (our faith) and made it stand for something of value. God doctored the Book of Life! Such an idea has no foundation in the text. The key verb here () is used throughout the Septuagint (Psalm 106:31; Isa. 40:17), and even in Koine Greek, and in the New Testament (Acts 19:17), and even in St. Paul's epistle to the Romans (2:26; 9:8), to mean an honest reckoning, based on a real equivalence of value between the two things. Nowhere does the crediting presuppose a disproportion between the thing furnished (e.g. faith) and the value put on it (e.g. justice). No, indeed; what Abraham's faith is said to count for in Gen. 15:6 is the very thing which the keeping of the Law is said to count for in Deuteronomy 6:25 and 24:13. Living faith is worth righteousness. Yes, but not in the way that works are worth it. Hear how Paul continues the passage which he started about Abraham (Romans 4:4f): "To the one who works, his wages are not credited to him according to grace but according to what is owed. But to the one who does not work but believes in Him who justifies the wicked, his faith is credited to him for righteousness. " So, if faith is really worth righteousness, it is not worth it in the way that works are. The latter have their value in the order of strict justice, whereas faith has its value in the order of grace ().

Does it follow, then, that the order of grace is arbitrary, unreal, an order in which the worthless is accorded fictitious worth? Not at all! We have seen what living faith really is. It is that rightful response to the Gospel, whereby man assents to the truths, heeds the commands, feels the consolations, trusts the promises—in short, it is that total attitude toward God which (as from a source) or through which (as by a means) God can draw forth every good work with the further help of His actual graces. Between such faith as a basis and the "measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ" as an apex, there is a real continuity and proportion. is why God can use faith to justify us, and why He can, without dishonesty, credit that faith to our account as the root and foundation of all justice.

For as St. Paul himself says, in a verse which ought to have stopped the mouth of Luther forever, "We are God's handiwork, having been created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them" (Ephesians 2:10). Our new creaturehood in Christ Jesus is our reception, through grace, of the "obedience of faith." Through that faith, as through an instrument, God has refashioned us, making us now prompt to obey. Our new estate is thus ordered to good works as to its intrinsic and God-intended finality. With what joy, therefore, do we walk in them, we who believe! And woe to us if we do not walk in them, for then we betray our faith and frustrate God's handiwork.

So we have, and are intended to have, works. Does it follow that we may boast? Not at all! For our works, unlike the works attempted by the Jew under the Law, are not us but God. Rooted in God's gift, brought forth by living faith, God's instrument in us, these works are grace-works. They are our justice faith, and therefore they are justice in the order of grace (), not in the order of self-achievement where boasting arises.

Living faith: our quality but God's instrument; good works: out deeds but God's handiwork; our deeds as men living in Christ, not the motions of "graced" zombies still dead in sin—these are the possibilities overlooked by Luther and Calvin but preached by Paul and defined by Trent.

1 Council of Trent, Canons on Justification, especially canon 24; Denzinger-Schoenmetzer # 1574. The Church considers herself bound to this position by James 2:14-26.

2 The teaching of the Second Council of Orange is given in Denzinger ## 374ff. and that of Trent in #1553. To say that, prior to a person's conversion (or baptism), his or her "good deeds" may merit God's grace is Pelagianism or worse; even to say that man has the initiative in this preparatory stage, or that his first response of faith is his own free motion, his own step the grace of God and not already an effect of the grace of God, is a heresy (Semi-Pelagianism).

3 Trent, Decree on Justification, chapter 8 (Denz. # 1532), and canon 9 (Denz. 1559).

5 See the magnificent discussion in Louis Bouyer, (Westminster: Newman Press) 1956.

6 In what follows, I borrow substantially from the classic exposition by Lemonnyer in the , vol VIII/2, col. 2050ff.

7 Compare the view of St. John Chrysostom, (hereafter=PG) 60, col. 563, with that of Aquinas, In epistolam ad Romanos>, c. 9, lect 5

12 When discussing this passage with a Protestant, most especially a Protestant male, one must keep in mind that one is talking to a person who went through the travails of adolescence without the help of the Sacraments. To such a person, it seems the most obvious thing in the world (too obvious, indeed, to be mentioned that what St. Paul is talking about is erection, sexual lust, and other aspects of arousal. This idea is abetted by the King James Version, which uses 'lust' and 'concupiscence' throughout this passage, where I have used 'covetousness'—words which had a broader meaning in the 17th Century, of course, than they have today. The fact of the matter is that Paul is not speaking exclusively nor even primarily of sexual matter. By the "law in our members" he means the whole phenomenon of over-inclination towards visible, tangible, worldly goods and values—an overinclination to which man's bodily nature () makes him naturally liable, and to which Adam's fall has made man not only liable but actually subject (). Thus man's sinfulness, for Paul is a broad-based as man's very secularity. In light, it is intelligible why even the very first and most basic commandment of the Law, the commandment to have God alone as one's ultimate concern, should prove to be so difficult, cross-grained, and frustrating to us.

Catholic children, thanks to the early and regular practice of Confession, tend to grow up with a better grasp of this broad character of "sin." But in Protestant countries, few factors have been more ruinous to Christianity than the tendency to almost identify sin with sex and thereby to shift the center of "sin" away from deliberate acts and towards the uncontrollable motions of the "id" or the genitals.

14 I say "at least inwardly" because, as far as public and merely external observations are concerned, Paul concedes that he himself was blameless: Philippians 3:6. See Aquinas's comment, c. 3, lect. 2.

20 For the same indifference between 'faith' and 'obedience', compare Rom. 10:16 with II Thess. 3:2.

21 See how the acts called hope and love are founded on intellectual assent (otherwise I wouldn't even acknowledge the command or the promise, etc.) but add to it in such a way that the assent the loving assent of the whole man. This is why Trent, using 'faith' in the narrow sense, was right to say that faith is the root and foundation of all justification that faith is made living by hope and love.

(Appendix 4 from "Reasons for Hope" published by Christendom Press, 2101 Shenandoah Shores Road, Front Royal, VA 22630, (800) 877-5456.)

I reject any tinge of Calvinism because it turns God into a puppetmaster rather than a father.

Calvinism says that God saves us then He also keeps us, because we had no part in our salvation. If it was all in God’s power then I would agree however, God gave us a free-will and we can reject God if we choose. The Bible is very clear that it is possible to lose one’s salvation. However, this author believes it is so unlikely that none ever need be overly concerned about it.

Heb 10:26 - 31 For if we sin willfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins, But a certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation, which shall devour the adversaries. He that despised Moses’ law died without mercy under two or three witnesses: Of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace? For we know him that hath said, Vengeance belongeth unto me, I will recompense, saith the Lord. And again, The Lord shall judge his people. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
http://www.thomastaylorministries.org/article_calvinism_perserverance_of_the_saints.htm

I’m citing from an Arminian source that like yourself believes in Sola Fide and Sola Scriptura.

Just as I could never save myself..I could never keep myself..he keeps me by His grace ..That is why Christ called it ‘ETERNAL life”
>>I have news for you. Catholics, nor Orthodox Christians, believe we can save ourselves, but we can lose our justification. Eternal life comes AFTER you die.

Monergism is un-Biblical.

First here’s a Protestant response to the verse you cited relying on Sola Scriptura:
The truth is, Scripture repeatedly warns believers against falling away because it is possible for genuine believers to fall away. For the same reason, Scripture also repeatedly admonishes believers to continue in the faith. All of such scriptures stand in direct contradiction to the Calvinistic doctrine of Perseverance of the Saints.

Piper then quotes from Jesus’ words in John 10:26-30 to prove that the elect cannot be lost. This passage of Scripture is the favorite of just about all who believe in eternal security, whether they are Calvinists or not:

But you do not believe, because you are not of My sheep. My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me; and I give eternal life to them, and they shall never perish; and no one shall snatch them out of My hand. My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.

This passage of scripture, of course, is not the only passage of scripture in the Bible. It highlights the faithfulness of Christ, but notice that it also mentions some characteristics of those to whom Christ is faithful: Jesus’ sheep hear His voice and follow Him. They are the ones who shall never perish or be snatched out of His hand. This fits perfectly with the testimony of the rest of Scripture. As long as we continue in faith, as evidenced by our following Jesus, we need not fear that we will perish or be snatched out of our Father’s hand. If we stop following Jesus, we are no longer His sheep.
http://www.heavensfamily.org/ss/calvinism/calvinism-perseverance-of-the-saints

Let’s look at the patristic consensus on the meaning of the verse you chose from John 10 from the Catena Aurea:
22. And it was at Jerusalem the feast of the dedication, and it was winter.

23. And Jesus walked in the temple in Solomon’s porch.

24. Then came the Jews round about him, and said to him, How long do you make us to doubt? If you be the Christ, tell us plainly.

25. Jesus answered them, “I told you, and you believed not: the works that I do in my Father’s name, they bear witness of me.

26. But you believe not, because you are not of my sheep, as I said to you.

27. My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.

28. And I give to them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.

29. My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand.

30. I and my Father are one.”

AUG. And it was at Jerusalem the feast of the dedication. Encænia is the feast of the dedication of the temple; from the Greek word signifying new. The dedication of any thing new was called encænia.

CHRYS. It was the feast of the dedication of the temple, after the return from the Babylonish captivity.

ALCUIN. Or, it was in memory of the dedication under Judas Maccabeus. The first dedication was that of Solomon in the autumn; the second that of Zorobabel, and the priest Jesus in the spring. This was in winter time.

BEDE. Judas Maccabeus instituted an annual commemoration of this dedication.

THEOPHYL. The Evangelist mentions the time of winter, to show that it was near His passion. He suffered in the following spring; for which reason He took up His abode at Jerusalem.

GREG. Or because the season of cold was in keeping with the cold malicious hearts of the Jews.

CHRYS. Christ was present with much zeal at this feast, and thenceforth stayed in Judea; His passion being now at hand. And Jesus walked in the temple in Solomon’s porch.

ALCUIN. It is called Solomon’s porch, because Solomon went to pray there. The porches of a temple are usually named after the temple. If the Son of God walked in a temple where the flesh of brute animals was offered up, how much more will He delight to visit our house of prayer, in which His own flesh and blood are consecrated;

THEOPHYL. Be you also careful, in the winter time, i.e. while yet in this stormy wicked world, to celebrate the dedication of your spiritual temple, by ever renewing yourself, ever rising upward in heart. Then will Jesus be present with you in Solomon’s porch, and give you safety under His covering. But in another life no man will be able to dedicate Himself.

AUG. The Jews cold in love, burning in their malevolence, approached Him not to honor, but persecute. Then came the Jews round about Him, and said to Him, How long do you make us to doubt? If You be the Christ, tell us plainly. They did not want to know the truth, but only to find ground of accusation.

CHRYS. Being able to find no fault with His works, they tried to catch Him in His words. And mark their perversity. When He instructs by His discourse, they say, What sign show You? When He demonstrates by His works, they say, If you be the Christ, tell us plainly. Either way they are determined to oppose Him.

There is great malice in that speech, Tell us plainly. He had spoken plainly, when up at the feasts, and had hid nothing. They preface however with flattery: How long do you make us to doubt? as if they were anxious to know the truth, but really only meaning to provoke Him to say something that they might lay hold of.

ALCUIN. They accuse Him of keeping their minds in suspense and uncertainty, who had come to save their souls.

AUG. They wanted our Lord to say, I am the Christ. Perhaps, as they had human notions of the Messiah, having failed to discern His divinity in the Prophets they wanted Christ to confess Himself the Messiah, of the seed of David; that they might accuse Him of aspiring to the regal power.

ALCUIN. And thus they intended to give Him into the hands of the Proconsul for punishment, as an usurper against the emperor. Our Lord so managed His reply as to stop the mouths of His calumniators, open those of the believers; and to those who inquired of Him as a man, reveal the mysteries of His divinity: Jesus answered them, I told you, and you believed not: the works that I do in My Father’s name, they bear witness of Me.

CHRYS. He reproves their malice, for pretending that a single word would convince them, whom so many words had not. If you do not believe My works, He says, how will you believe My words? And He adds why they do not believe: But you believe not, because you are not of My sheep.

AUG. He saw that they were persons predestinated to eternal death, and not those for whom He had bought eternal life, at the price of His blood. The sheep believe, and follow the Shepherd.

THEOPHYL. After He had said, You are not of My sheep, He exhorts them to become such: My sheep hear My voice.

ALCUIN. i.e. Obey My precepts from the heart. And I know them, and they follow Me, here by walking in gentleness and innocence, hereafter by entering the joys of eternal life.

And I give to them eternal life.

AUG. This is the pasture of which He spoke before And shall find pasture. Eternal life is called a goodly pasture: the grass thereof wither not, all is spread with verdure. But these cavilers thought only of this present life. And they shall not perish eternally; as if to say, you shall perish eternally, because you are not of My sheep.

THEOPHYL. But how then did Judas perish? Because he did not continue to the end. Christ speaks of them who persevere. If any sheep is separated from the flock, and wanders from the Shepherd, it incurs danger immediately.

AUG. And He adds why they do not perish: Neither shall any man pluck them out of My hand. Of those sheep of which it is said, The Lord knows them that are His, the wolf robs none, the thief takes none, the robber kills none. Christ is confident of their safety; and He knows what He gave up for them.

HILARY. This is the speech of conscious power. Yet to show, that though of the Divine nature He has His nativity from God, He adds, My Father which gave Me them is greater than all. He does not conceal His birth from the Father, but proclaims it. For that which He received from the Father, He received in that He was born from Him. He received it in the birth itself, not after it; though He was born when He received it.

AUG. The Son, born from everlasting of the Father, God from God, has not equality with the Father by growth, but by birth. This is that greater than all which the Father gave Him b; viz. to be His Word, to be His Only-Begotten Son, to be the brightness of His light.

Wherefore no man takes His sheep out of His hand, any more than from His Father’s hand: And no man is able to pluck them out of My Father’s hand. If by hand we understand power, the power of the Father and the Son is one, even as Their divinity is one. If we understand the Son, the Son is the hand of the Father, not in a bodily sense, as if God the Father had limbs, but as being He by Whom all things were made.

Men often call other men hands, when they make use of them for any purpose. And sometimes a man’s work is itself called his hand, because made by his hand; as when a man is said to know his own hand, when be recognizes his own handwriting. In this place, however, hand signifies power. If we take it for Son, we shall be in danger of imagining that if the Father has a hand, and that hand is His Son, the Son must have a Son too.

HILARY. The hand of the Son is spoken of as the hand of the Father, to let you see, by a bodily representation, that both have the same nature, that the nature and virtue of the Father is in the Son also.

CHRYS. Then that you may not suppose that the Father’s power protects the sheep, while He is Himself too weak to do so, He adds, I and My Father are one.

AUG. Mark both those words, one and are, and you will be delivered from Scylla and Charybdis. In that He says, one the Arian, in we are the Sabellian, is answered. There are both Father and Son. And if one, then there is no difference of persons between them.

AUG. We are one. What He is, that am I, in respect of essence, not of relation.

HILARY. The heretics, since they cannot gainsay these words, endeavor by an impious lie to explain them away. They maintain that this unity is unanimity only; a unity of will, not of nature, i.e. that the two are one, not in that they are the same, but in that they will the same. But they are one, not by any economy merely, but by the nativity of the Son’s nature, since there is no falling off of the Father’s divinity in begetting Him.

They are one whilst the sheep that are not plucked out of the Son’s hand, are not plucked out of the Father’s hand: whilst in Him working, the Father works; whilst He is in the Father, and the Father in Him. This unity, not creation but nativity, not will but power, not unanimity but nature accomplishes.

But we deny not therefore the unanimity of the Father and Son; for the heretics, because we refuse to admit concord in the place of unity, accuse us of making a disagreement between the Father and Son. We deny not unanimity, but we place it on the ground of unity. The Father and Son are one in respect of nature, honor, and virtue: and the same nature cannot will different things.

31. Then the Jews took up stones again to stone him,

32. Jesus answered them, “Many good works have I showed you from my Father; for which of those works do you stone me?”

33. The Jews answered him, saying, “For a good work we stone you not; but for blasphemy; and because that you, being a man, make yourself God.”

34. Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, you are gods?’

35. If he called them gods, to whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken;

36. Say you of him, whom the Father has sanctified, and sent into the world, you blaspheme; because I said, I am the Son of God?

37. If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not.

38. But if I do, though you believe not me, believe the works: that you may know, and believe, that the Father is in me, and I in him.”

AUG. At this speech, I and My Father are one, the Jews could not restrain their rage, but ran to take up stones, after their hardhearted way: Then the Jews took up stones again to stone Him.

HILARY. The heretics now, as unbelieving and rebellious against our Lord in heaven, show their impious hatred by the stones, i.e. the words they cast at Him; as if they would drag Him down again from His throne to the cross.

THEOPHYL. Our Lord remonstrates with them; Many good works have I showed you from My Father, strewing that they had no just reason for their anger.

ALCUIN. Healing of the sick, teaching, miracles. He showed them of the Father, because He sought His Father’s glory in all of them. For which of these works do you stone Me? They confess, though reluctantly, the benefit they have received from Him, but charge Him at the same time with blasphemy, for asserting His equality with the Father;

For a good work we stone you not, but for blasphemy; and because that You, being a man, make Yourself God.

AUG. This is their answer to the speech, I and My Father are one. Lo, the Jews understood what the Arians understand not. For they are angry, for this very reason, that they could not conceive but that by saying, I and My Father are one, He meant the equality of the Father and the Son.

HILARY. The Jew said, You being a man, the Arian, you being a creature: but both say, You make yourself God. The Arian supposes a God of a new and different substance a God of another kind, or not a God at all. He said, You are not Son by birth, you art not God of truth; you art a superior creature.

CHRYS. Our Lord did not correct the Jews, as if they misunderstood His speech, but confirmed and defended it, in the very sense in which they had taken it. Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law,

AUG. i.e. the Law given to you, I have said, you are gods? God saith this by the Prophet in the Psalm. Our Lord calls all those Scriptures the Law generally, though elsewhere He spiritually distinguishes the Law from the Prophets. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.

In another place He makes a threefold division of the Scriptures; All things must he fulfilled which were written in the Law of Moses, and in the Prophets, and in the Psalms concerning Me. Now He calls the Psalms the Law, and thus argues from them; If he called them gods to whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken, say you of Him whom the Father has sanctified, and sent into the world, you blaspheme, because I said, I am the Son of God?

HILARY. Before proving that He and His Father are one, He answers the absurd and foolish charge brought against Him, that He being man made Himself God. When the Law applied this title to holy men, and the indelible word of God sanctioned this use of the incommunicable name, it could not be a crime in Him, even though He were man, to make Himself God.

The Law called those who were mere men, gods; and if any man could bear the name religiously, and without arrogance, surely that man could, who was sanctified by the Father, in a sense in which none else is sanctified to the Sonship; as the blessed Paul said, Declared to be the Son, of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness. For or all this reply refers to Himself as man; the Son of God being also the Son of man.

AUG. Or sanctified, i.e. in begetting, gave Him holiness, begat Him holy. If men to whom the word of God came were called gods, much more the Word of God Himself is God. If men by partaking of the word of God were made gods, much more is the Word of which they partake, God.

THEOPHYL. Or, sanctified, i.e. set apart to be sacrificed for the world: a proof that He was God in a higher sense than the rest. To save the world is a divine work, not that of a man made divine by grace.

CHRYS. Or, we must consider this a speech of humility, made to conciliate men. After it he leads them to higher things; If I do not the works of My Father, believe Me not; which is as much as to say, that He is not inferior to the Father. As they could not see His substance, He directs them to His works, as being like and equal to the Father’s. For the equality of their works, proved tile equality of their power.

HILARY. What place has adoption, or the mere conception of a name then, that we should not believe Him to be the Son of God by nature, when He tells us to believe Him to be the Son of God, because the Father’s nature showed itself in Him by His works?

A creature is not equal and like to God: no other nature has power comparable to the divine. He declares that He is carrying on not His own work, but the Father’s, lest in the greatness of the works, the nativity of His nature be forgotten.

And as under the sacrament of the assumption of a human body in is the womb of Mary, the Son of God was not discerned, this must be gathered from His work; But if I do, though you believe not Me, believe the works.

Why does the sacrament of a human birth hinder the understanding of the divine, when the divine birth accomplishes all its work by aid of the human? Then He tells them what they should gather from His works; That you may know and believe that the Father is in Me, and I in Him. The same declaration again, I am the Son of God: I and the Father are one.

AUG. The Son does not say, The Father is in Me, and I in Him, in the sense in which men who think and act aright may say the like; meaning that they partake of God’s grace, and are enlightened by His Spirit. The Only-begotten Son of God is in the Father, and the Father in Him, as an equal in an equal.

39. Therefore they sought again to take him: but he escaped out of their hand,

40. And went away again beyond Jordan into the place where John at first baptized; and there he abode.

41. And many resorted to him, and said, John did no miracle: but all things that John spoke of this man were true.

42. And many believed in him there.

BEDE. The Jews still persist in their madness; Therefore they sought again to take Him.

AUG. To lay hold of Him, not by faith and the understanding, but with blood thirsty violence. Do you so lay hold of Him, that you may have sure hold; they would fain have laid hold on Him, but they could not: for it follows, But He escaped out of their hand. They did lay hold of Him with the hand of faith. It was no great matter for the Word to rescue His flesh from the hands of flesh.

CHRYS. Christ, after discoursing on some high truth, commonly retires immediately, to give time to the fury of people to abate, during His absence. Thus He did now: He went away again beyond Jordan, into the place where John at first baptized. He went there that He might recall to people’s minds, what had gone on there; John’s preaching and testimony to Himself.

BEDE. He was followed there by many: And many resorted to Him, and said, John did no miracle.

AUG. Did not cast out devils, did not give sight to the blind, did not raise the dead.

CHRYS. Mark their reasoning, John did no miracle, but this Man did; wherefore He is the superior. But lest the absence of miracles should lessen the weight of John’s testimony, they add, But all things that John spoke of this Man were true.

Though he did no miracle, yet every thing he said of Christ was true, whence they conclude, if John was to be believed, much more this Man, who has the evidence of miracles. Thus it follows, And many believed in Him.

AUG. These laid hold of Him while abiding, not, like the Jews, when departing. Let us approach by the candle to the day. John is the candle, and gave testimony to the day.

THEOPHYL. We may observe that our Lord often brings out the people into solitary places, thus ridding them of the society of the unbelieving, for their furtherance in the faith: just as He led the people into the wilderness, when He gave them the old Law.

Mystically, Christ departs from Jerusalem, i.e. from the Jewish people; and goes to a place where are springs of water, i.e. to the Gentile Church, that has the waters of baptism. And many resort to Him, passing over the Jordan, i.e. through baptism.

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