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.)

ERASMUS ON THE PERSPICUITY OF SCRIPTURE AND CIRCULAR PROTESTANT REASONING

"But now comes the objection, ‘What need of an interpreter, when Scripture is perfectly clear?’ If it is so clear, why have such distinguished men throughout so many centuries been blind, precisely in a matter of such importance, as Luther and his adherents want us to see it? If there is nothing obscure in Scripture, what need was there for prophecy in the apostles’ time? [1 Cor 12:28]. . . But let us grant, as indeed we must, the possibility that the spirit may reveal to some humble, unlearned individual what he has not revealed to many learned men . . .

Yet if Paul, in his own age, when this gift of the spirit was flourishing, orders spirits to be tested whether they are of God [1 Cor 12:3; cf. 1 Jn 4:1], what ought we to do in this carnal age? And so, how shall we test the spirits? By learning? There are scholars on both sides. By behaviour? On both sides there are sinners . . . ‘What help in knowing the Spirit are a great many men?’ my opponents ask. ‘What help are a very few?’ I reply. . . . They ask, ‘In understanding the Scriptures, what use is an assembled synod, in which it may happen that no one has the Spirit?’ I reply, ‘What use are small private assemblies, where it is more probable that there is no one who has the Spirit?’ . . . People did not believe the apostles unless miracles had strengthened belief in their teaching. Nowadays anyone and everyone demands to be believed because he asserts that he has the evangelical spirit. . . .

If, in the event of some disagreement over the meaning of Scripture, we quote the interpretation of the ancient orthodox authorities, they immediately sing out, ‘But they were only men.’ If asked by what means we can know what the true interpretation of Scripture is, seing that there are ‘only men’ on both sides, they reply, ‘By a sign from the Spirit.’ If you ask why the Spirit should be absent from those men, some of whom have been world-famous for their miracles, rather than from themselves, they reply as though there had been no gospel in the world these thirteen hundred years. If you demand of them a life worthy of the Spirit, they reply that they are justified by faith, not works. If you ask for miracles, they say that miracles have long ceased, and that there is no need of them now that the Scriptures are so clear. And if you then say that Scripture is not clear on this point, on which so many eminent men have apparently been blind, the circle is complete.

(”Diatribe on Free Will” [1524], from: “Collected Works of Erasmus,” Vol. 76: “Controversies”, edited by Charles Trinkaus; translated by Peter Macardle and Clarence H. Miller; University of Toronto Press, 1999, pp. 17-19)

Good Point.

Revelation 3:1-5

New King James Version (NKJV)

Revelation 3

The Dead Church

1 “And to the angel of the church in Sardis write, ‘These things says He who has the seven Spirits of God and the seven stars: “I know your works, that you have a name that you are alive, but you are dead.

2 Be watchful, and strengthen the things which remain, that are ready to die, for I have not found your works perfect before God.[a]

3 Remember therefore how you have received and heard; hold fast and repent. Therefore if you will not watch, I will come upon you as a thief, and you will not know what hour I will come upon you.

4 You[b] have a few names even in Sardis who have not defiled their garments; and they shall walk with Me in white, for they are worthy.

5 He who overcomes shall be clothed in white garments, and I will not blot out his name from the Book of Life; but I will confess his name before My Father and before His angels.

I think that God deals with our depravity in different ways during different dispensations/economies. I totally agree that our "default setting" since the fall is towards evil.

I believe and am very convinced that God deals with each one of us exactly the same way in our depravity and salvation throughout history. The scriptures never says that Noah sought God, only that Noah found favor with God. Abel was the same way, that God regarded Abel sacrifice but not Cain. God called to Abraham, to Moses, to Samuel, to Samson, to David, to Paul, ...on and on. Jacob He loved, but Esau He hated.

An excellent example is the death of Jeroboam's son. Please consider the following passage of Jeroboam's infant son Abijah:

1Ki 14:11 Anyone belonging to Jeroboam who dies in the city the dogs shall eat, and anyone who dies in the open country the birds of the heavens shall eat, for the LORD has spoken it."'

1Ki 14:12 Arise therefore, go to your house. When your feet enter the city, the child shall die.

1Ki 14:13 And all Israel shall mourn for him and bury him, for he only of Jeroboam shall come to the grave, because in him there is found something pleasing to the LORD, the God of Israel, in the house of Jeroboam.

One can only conclude that Abijah was saved by the Lord, even unto death. (Yes, death is not the end.) There was no confession. No walk down the aisle. No reciting the Four Spiritual Laws and praying a prayer for the infant son Abijah. The Lord just "found something pleasing" about him. Why this is I have no idea except to say that everyone who is saved, God found something pleasing to His pleasure in us. But we must be careful to note that there isn't anything in us that would please Him. A subtle but very important difference.

Abijah wasn't saved because the Lord thought that He was "good". Abijah was saved because the Lord thought that Abijah should be saved for some unknown reason. Salvation is a gift from God, less any man may boast.

They were sinless..they did not need to have their eyes opened ..they were open until the fall..and the bondage of the will what was the serpents lie? You shall be as god.. that is an appeal that targets mans pride.. remember that is what also caused the fall of Lucifer

PROVERBS 16:18-19 NKJ
18 Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.
19 Better to be of a humble spirit with the lowly, than to divide the spoil with the proud.

Calvin notes this

“Augustine, indeed, is not far from the mark, when he says (in Psalm 19), that pride was the beginning of all evil, because, had not man’s ambition carried him higher than he was permitted, he might have continued in his first estate.”

http://www.calvin500.com/what-caused-the-fall-of-adam/

I believe and am very convinced that God deals with each one of us exactly the same way in our depravity and salvation throughout history.

I don't think so. From our perspective is the essential factor Faith Alone in God? Yes! However, I think God interacts with us differently at different times.

Gen. 6:3 And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man,...

Gen. 6:8 But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.

Heb. 11:7 By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear prepared an ark...and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith.

During the time of Noah the Holy Spirit did not indwell man. It did convict man of it's sin, but it was not acting as a counselor to guide God's elect. However we do see after the Cross the Holy Spirit indwells the elect and guides us. So I look at the time of Noah and see how our total depravity affects us and what we do when given absolute free will. However after the Cross God intervenes for us and guides us. So we have to different periods where Faith Alone is critical, but God deals with us differently.

I would submit that part of the reason my Reformed Brothers and Sisters struggle with eschatology is because they are trying to take how God interacts with us in one period and impose it in another.

I don't think so. From our perspective is the essential factor Faith Alone in God? Yes! However, I think God interacts with us differently at different times.

"I am the God that changes not" (mal 3:6),Hbr 13:8 Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.

I agree with Harley I think :)

Read that vs of Genesis again.. Noah FOUND grace in the eyes of God.. This is the first time that the word grace is found in the scriptures.. grace is Gods unmerited favor Wm.. Noah, like me, had done nothing to merit that favor of God.. no works.. what does eph tell us? While we were yet sinners (like Noah ) .... ... Gods grace precedes repentance and regeneration..

All of the Ot was about Gods long suffering Gods righteousness and Gods mercy and grace

I think God saved Noah exactly the same way He saved me.. by His grace and mercy ...

They were sinless..they did not need to have their eyes opened ..they were open until the fall

> I know I'm out on a heretical limb on this one. There is not one shred of fatherly history to support me. I would argue that their eyes were not opened to the truth and I would point to Eve's confusion as evidence to this fact. Eve's was deceived into sinning. Adam sinned willfully but it wasn't pride that led him to sin. There was failure to seek out God for a remedy for Eve's disobedience.

Pro 11:2 When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with the humble is wisdom.

This is an odd way of putting it (who am I to critique God's writing) but pride comes from lacking wisdom.

Now you can take this for what it's worth, an opinion. There something that troubles me to think that I have a different view on this then every single brilliant church theologian. :O)

"I am the God that changes not" (mal 3:6),Hbr 13:8 Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.

Bear with me, I may not be expressing this thought as well as others might. I'm not saying that God changes. I don't believe that.

I'm with you 1,000%! We are saved by God's gift of Grace to us through Faith Alone. The idea of works in any way affecting our justification is a heresy of institutional orthodoxy. I've kind of veered over to something else. I see since the fall we are sinful (depraved) and left on our own we rebel. What I'm looking at is are there different periods where God intervenes and draws us to Him and are there other periods where God gives us absolute Free Will to be what we are. I think the time of Noah is one example of man having absolute Free Will. Another period would be the Tribulation. However, after the Cross God intervenes for us and sends us the Holy Spirit to indwell us and guide us. So while justification is always the same, by Faith Alone, and salvation is always the same, by Grace Alone, God does interact with us differently during different periods.

I think in some of these periods we have absolute Free Will and in other Periods we have predestination. I believe the Church Age is a time of predestination and the Tribulation is a period of Free Will. The absence of the indwelling Holy Spirit may be the critical factor.

I know we got way off track, but isn't everyone tired of going over the same old ground? ;-)

During the time of Noah the Holy Spirit did not indwell man. It did convict man of it's sin, but it was not acting as a counselor to guide God's elect.

Hmmmm...So the nature, purpose and character of God's Spirit changed?

I would say that the Holy Spirit roll prior to the cross was just the same as after the cross. He was acting as a counselor to guide God's elect and there are a "number" of instances of this.

In Numbers for example we see this in effect where God puts his Spirit on the people:

Num 11:24 So Moses went out and told the people the words of the LORD. And he gathered seventy men of the elders of the people and placed them around the tent.

Num 11:25 Then the LORD came down in the cloud and spoke to him, and took some of the Spirit that was on him and put it on the seventy elders. And as soon as the Spirit rested on them, they prophesied. But they did not continue doing it.

Num 11:26 Now two men remained in the camp, one named Eldad, and the other named Medad, and the Spirit rested on them. They were among those registered, but they had not gone out to the tent, and so they prophesied in the camp.

Num 11:27 And a young man ran and told Moses, "Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp."

Num 11:28 And Joshua the son of Nun, the assistant of Moses from his youth, said, "My lord Moses, stop them."

Num 11:29 But Moses said to him, "Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the LORD's people were prophets, that the LORD would put his Spirit on them!"

We also see this in Judges when it states over and over, "The Spirit of the Lord was upon (fill in the blank)".

But no greater example exist than Saul's conversion at the hands of Samuel:

1Sa 10:6 Then the Spirit of the LORD will rush upon you, and you will prophesy with them and be turned into another man.

1Sa 10:7 Now when these signs meet you, do what your hand finds to do, for God is with you.

1Sa 10:8 Then go down before me to Gilgal. And behold, I am coming to you to offer burnt offerings and to sacrifice peace offerings. Seven days you shall wait, until I come to you and show you what you shall do."

1Sa 10:9 When he turned his back to leave Samuel, God gave him another heart. And all these signs came to pass that day.

Yes, Saul turned out to be a big disappointment but he showed the people exactly what Samuel prophesied about what a king would be like.

But I would agree that starting with Pentecost, God put His Spirit in EVERY believer rather then just a few. So hope of Moses was fulfilled, where God put His Spirit on all His people.

I would submit that part of the reason my Reformed Brothers and Sisters struggle with eschatology is because they are trying to take how God interacts with us in one period and impose it in another.

I find few people except me seem to struggle with eschatology. And the reason I struggle with it is because I believe the scriptures are unclear on this unless one has an absolute grasp upon a great deal of ancient history in order to justly do a comparative analysis of the views. People want to poo-poo the first 1800 years of the church historical view in favor of a post-modern view of eschatology because it is simple and easy. Consequently it warps the doctrine of grace.

A simple illustration of this is what I tell just about everyone on this board and in which they end up taking offense; "God does not extend His special blessing to those who do not believe in His Son but His wrath rest upon them." This includes the Jews as well. People goes nutzo when I make this statement but it is a BIBLICALLY SOUND FACT. Their eschatology colors their logic of biblical stated truth.

But there is no such thing as "free" will. You have God's will and you have man's will. Man's will NEVER do God's will simply because it is completely opposite to God's will. God has to change that in order for man to do His will. The only two people that truly had "free will" was Adam and Christ.

I'm going to have to respond in bits and pieces so please bear with me.

Hmmmm...So the nature, purpose and character of God's Spirit changed?

I thought I was pretty clear on this point, but I'll try to go over it again. I'm suggesting that God interacts with his creation in different ways at different times. God does not change.

I would say that the Holy Spirit roll prior to the cross was just the same as after the cross. He was acting as a counselor to guide God's elect and there are a "number" of instances of this.

I disagree.

The passages you noted tell us the Holy Spirit was "upon" them. I don't believe you are going to find in the OT period the Holy Spirit permanently indwelling all believers.

Roms. 8:11 But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.

Also, this role of the Holy Spirit only began after the crucifixion.

John 16:7 Nevertheless I tell you the truth. It is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I depart, I will send Him to you.

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