03/14/2021 – Day 301 – James – 1 – 3// 3 of 3 – “Faith Without Works is Dead” – remembering family arguments.
I remember in the early 60s my father, a lifelong Catholic and my mother a lifelong Lutheran , argue back and forth on James Chapter 2 : Verses 14 – 26. As a youngster, I remember wondering, what are they arguing about? It turns out, it was a good question because they were arguing over differences in semantics, not a Christian faith tenet.
I am going to share with you an entire section of “Faith and Works” under Chapter 13 – “Salvation” from “The Pocket Handbook of Christian Apologetics” by Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli. If you put me on the spot and asked me what was my favorite Christian book, outside of the Bible, I think I would name this little power-packed Pocket guide of just a little over one-hundred pages.
Here is Kreeft and Tacelli’s discourse on this subject:
Faith and Works
“The issue of salvation sparked the Protestant Reformation and split the Church. It seemed to both sides at the time that Protestants and Catholics taught two radically different gospels, two religions, two answers to the most basic of all questions. What must I do to be saved? Catholics said you must both believe and practice good works to be saved. Luther, Calvin, Whcliffe and Knox insisted that faith alone saves youj. Unfortunately, both sides have been talking past each other for 450 years. But there is strong evidence that it was essentially a misunderstanding and that it is beginning to be cleared up.
Both sides used key terms, faith and salvation, but in different senses.
- Catholics used the term salvation to refer to the whole process, from its beginning in faith, through the whole Christian life of the works of love on earth., to its completion in heaven. When Luther spoke of salvation he meant the initial step – like getting into Noah’s ark.
- By faith Catholics meant only one of the three needed “theological virtues” (faith, hope and love), faith being intellectual belief. To Luther, faith meant accepting Christ with your whole heart and soul.
Thus, since Catholics were using salvation in a bigger sense, and faith in a smaller sense, and Luther was using salvation in the smaller sense and faith in the bigger sense. Catholics rightly denied and Luther rightly affirmed that we were saved by faith alone.
Catholics taught that salvation included more than faith, just as a plant includes more than its roots. It needs its stem (hope) and its fruit (love) as well as its root (faith). Luther taught that good works can’t buy salvation, that all you need to do and all you can do to be saved is to accept it, accept the Savior, by faith. Both were right.
Such real agreement in substance beneath apparent disagreement in words should not be surprising, for both Catholic and Protestants accept the same data, the New Testament. The New Testament teaches both points: that salvation is a free gift, not earned by works of obediance to the law; and that faith is only the beginning of the christian life of good works; that “justification” (being made right with God) must, if it is ; real, lead to “sanctification” (being made holy), saintly, good), that “faith without works is dead.”
To help support this position, on October 31, 1999, Catholics and Lutherans signed a Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (JD).