Paradox

“What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” [James 2: 14-17]

Verses such as these in the Epistle of James (the Epistle for Sunday) nearly kept James from making the canon of Scripture in the early days of Christianity.  During the Reformation, Martin Luther called James “a right strawy epistle,” that is, a nearly useless book, and wanted to ban it from the canon. Luther believed it taught what is called “works righteousness,” that is, that one can “work” oneself into God’s grace or heaven. He rejected that idea, but not initially.

Luther said of himself, “I was a good monk, and I kept the rule of my order so strictly that I may say that if ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery it was I. All my brothers in the monastery who knew me will bear me out. If I had kept on any longer, I should have killed myself with vigils, prayers, reading and other work.” 

His religious ethic was driven by his awareness of his own imperfections in being the pure person he thought God required and the need to continuously work on that. He was known to rise from receiving absolution after confessing his sins, and immediately return to the confessional to begin again, so profound was his sense of sinfulness and unworthiness. He hoped if he kept each “jot and tiddle” he could find salvation and a sense of peace. But not until his study of other work, such as Paul’s letter to the Galatians introduced him to the idea of salvation by grace alone, did he realize he had been on the wrong path. He read there, “But no man is justified by the law in the sight of God, it is evident: for, the just shall live by faith.” Consequently, Luther became opposed to anything he interrupted as teaching that the doing the proper works could produce salvation.

Luther struggled with the paradox he found between verses such as those in James and Romans which says, “For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from works of the Law.” Even today, it is difficult to explain these apparently very different ideas. As a pastor, I encountered any number of parishioners who would state emphatically they believed in salvation by grace. But almost in the next breath, they would be telling me they didn’t take Communion because they didn’t feel worthy, that is, “not good enough.” Sorry, Charlie, that idea is clearly one that yells “works righteousness.” Such thinking is a good example of the disconnect between what is sometimes described as the “theology of the pulpit” and the “theology of the pew,” where the first is well developed and orthodox (generally speaking!) and the second is sometimes something of a mishmash of ideas garnered here and there.

The usual “final solution” for works/grace paradox is that grace through faith saves us, but being saved, we would naturally act rightly. “By their fruits you will know them,” in other words. It’s workable, but it is also a little too facile. We might do better to just admit that everything religious, spiritual and/or Christian is not as clear as we might wish it to be.

Peace, Jerry