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Part 4
In 1 Corinthians, Paul tells us that the Gospel, though foolishness to those who are perishing, is the wisdom and power of God. For Christ has been made 'our righteousness, holiness, and redemption.' Here, Paul is simply picking up a recurring Old Testament Gospel announcement. For instance, we read in Is.61:10: 'I delight greatly in the LORD; my soul rejoices in my God. For he has clothed me with garments of salvation and arrayed me in a robe of righteousness.' Jeremiah prophesied of Christ, 'In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. This is the name by which he will be called: The LORD Our Righteousness.' Christ does not merely infuse me with righteousness; he is my righteousness. This is the meaning of the animal skins with which God clothes Adam and Eve and the robe that the father places over the prodigal son. And yet, this is precisely what Rome denies: God cannot, we are told, judge me to be righteous while I am unrighteous simply by transferring Christ's righteousness to me. But this is precisely what Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Paul are arguing.
But it is in Paul's letter to the Galatians where one finds the apostle's magisterial defense of the Gospel in the crucible of controversy. It is especially relevant in view of the fact that the church fathers themselves offered contradictory views on the way of salvation. In his epistle to the Corinthians, Clement, Bishop of Rome just a few decades after Paul's letters to the same church, wrote, 'So we too who by his will have been called in Christ Jesus are justified not of ourselves nor through our own wisdom or understanding or piety, nor yet through anything that we have done in purity of heart, but through that faith through which almighty God has justified all men from the beginning, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.' Justin Martyr, John Chrysostom, and other Fathers concur. The Fathers said some good things and some bad things, but always sent us directly and finally back to Scripture.
If a prominent church founded by the Apostle Paul could fall so quickly into a false gospel of works-righteousness, we should not be surprised at the confusion of the early church. 'I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel--which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even is we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned! As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned!'
Paul describes his public controversy with Peter, which would have been a rather remarkable thing had Peter been the first infallible pope. But Peter did, in the end, come around and in his own letters acknowledged Paul's writings as Scripture. If Peter could be corrected by Scripture, one would have hoped that those who claimed to be his successors might have imitated him. In fact, Peter himself declared that there is a heavenly inheritance reserved in heaven for those 'who through faith are shielded by God's power' and assures his readers, 'you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls' (1 Pet. 1:5). Peter opens his second epistle with the greeting, 'To those who through the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ have received a faith as precious as ours.' In Galatians, Paul declares that 'by observing the Law no one will be justified...for if righteousness could be gained through the Law, Christ died for nothing.' The apostle could not have been more aggravated: 'You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you?...All who rely on observing the Law are under a curse...Clearly no one is justified before God by the Law, because 'The righteous will live by faith.' The Law is not based on faith; on the contrary.' In Rome, one is justified by faith and obedience, but for Paul, justification by faith is contrary to justification by obedience. For the next several chapters, Paul labors this contradiction. 'So that Law was put in charge to lead us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith,' he declares in 3:24. After having been freed from the bondage of legalism, 'How is it that you are turning back to those weak and miserable principles?' he wonders in astonishment. 'You who are trying to be justified by law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen from grace.'
The famous passage in Ephesians 2:8, 9 could not be clearer: 'For by grace you have been saved, through faith, and none of this is of yourselves; it is all the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.' It is by grace through faith, not of works! This parallels Paul's statement in Romans 11: 'For if it is by grace, it is not of works, otherwise grace is no longer grace.'
To Timothy, the Apostle writes, 'God has saved us and called us to a holy life--not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace' (2 Tim.1:9). God has called us to a holy life, to be sure, but this is the goal, not the cause, of our justification. Our opponents will say that whenever Paul refers to 'works' or 'law' as contrary to faith, he is referring to the ceremonial law of the Old Testament, but here we have one of many obvious examples that Paul intends to exclude all works by saying that it is 'not because of anything we have done.' Surely that includes all works, ceremonial or moral. It is by faith alone.
In the Scriptures and throughout church history, proponents of this view have been charged with opening the door to loose-living. It was the Apostle Paul himself who realized the full impact of this Gospel when, after announcing that 'where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more,' he anticipated his readers' shock: 'What shall we say, then? Shall we continue in sin so that grace may abound?' His answer, and ours, is 'Heaven forbid! How shall we who have died to sin live any longer in it.' We do not deny regeneration and sanctification, we simply do not regard this as the basis for our acceptance before a holy God. While the Apostle Paul knew that the Gospel he preached would raise the objection that this would lead to loose-living, Rome has never had to worry about this accusation concerning the gospel she proclaims.
Why would we 'hunger and thirst after righteousness' if it is already imputed?, one may ask. It is precisely because it is already imputed that we hunger and thirst after obedience to God in gratitude for our redemption. It is similar to asking why a foster child would want to obey if he is already adopted. We are sons, not slaves; we serve God out of gratitude, not fear of judgment or hope of rewards. Tell me that I have to sufficiently love God and my neighbor before I can enjoy God's favor and the last thing I will want to do is love God. What I must hear if I am to end my war against God is that he forgives the wicked. He makes sons out of his enemies. He declares those to be righteous who in themselves cannot love God and their neighbor. Then I will lay down my weapons and accept the truce.
In Protestant theology, 'salvation' is a broad word, encompassing not only justification, but election, atonement, regeneration, sanctification, adoption, and final glorification. In these debates, a recurring error on the Roman Catholic side is to assume a false antithesis: Either the Bible teaches that justification and sanctification are identical or the Bible teaches that there is no such thing as sanctification. This debate, therefore, is not over the question of whether God renews us and initiates a process of gradual growth in holiness throughout the course of our lives. 'We are justified by faith alone, but not by a faith that is alone,' Luther stated, and this recurring affirmation of the new birth and sanctification as necessarily linked to justification leads one to wonder how the caricatures continue to be perpetuated without foundation. For instance, in the magazine published by Catholic Answers, This Rock, Leslie Rumble (April, 1993) makes the astounding claim concerning Luther that the German Reformer denied that a change takes place in the person who is justified. 'He remains exactly as he was before' and the believer is never transformed. This demonstrates a remarkable lack of familiarity with the Protestant position. We affirm conversion and the life-long process of growing in sanctifying grace.
This is why we do not find a problem with James, although Roman Catholics find great problems with the rest of Scripture on this subject. For Paul, speaking to new converts who have been steeped in legalism and paganism, the content of the Gospel is uppermost. For James, addressing believers who gloried in what they called 'faith,' but did not seem to think that works were a necessary consequence of saving faith, justification was a matter of making your claim to being justified stand up in a court of law. For Paul, the court of law is God's and it is heavenly; for James, it is man's and it is earthly. For Paul, the fact of justification is in view; for James, the proof of justification is the concern. Therefore, when James declares that faith is dead if it is alone, how could one object? Luther himself said that we were justified by faith alone, but not by a faith that is alone. This is James' point: Anything that you call faith that does not love or serve is not really justifying faith, but is 'dead.' Of course, this faith-- 'dead' faith, cannot save anybody. Only living, active, working faith is the genuine article. However, it is not the fruit of faith that justifies. It does not justify in acting, working, loving, or serving, but in believing and receiving Christ's gift of righteousness. The faith that Paul described is not the faith the James sees in those antinomians who thought that faith was nothing more than an assent to certain facts.
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