The Reformers and Church Fathers on Nature, Grace, and Choice

Vanity, vanity, everything is vanity | December 29, 2001 | Andrew Reeves (me)

[Romulus]

Will God allow something that is contrary to His plan?

If you worship something that deals in force and compulsion, the being you worship is something other than God.

[RnMomof7]

Will God allow something that is contrary to His plan?

If you worship something that deals in force and compulsion, the being you worship is something other than God.

You didn't tell me what you believe about Gods sovereignity?

All of us that pray believe that God can and does answer prayer. That means that He can and does cause things to happen. Will God allow something that is not part of His plan?

[Romulus]

Mom, think of the father in the parable of the prodigal son. He allows the son to make foolish and self-destructive choices, does he not?

Please consider the implications of belief in a god that compels all things. In what sence can a god be called a god of love, if it denies a generous measure of freedom to his children? Are we not informed that we are not slaves but heirs to the Kingdom? Have you considered what it means to live under a dispensation of grace that dispenses with that of Law?

Finally, I urge you to reconsider my point about bondage: compulsion is a form of bondage. Bondage ends ultimately in sin, and in death -- the ultimate bondage. It is not God's way thus to deal with us. The true God, whose Son is -- literally -- the Truth, promises to set us free in that truth. This is an experience of the Resurrected world, in which death has no dominion. It is impossible to reconcile the idea of a Resurrected, freedom-giving Savior, with that of a controlling, manipulative god that saves or damns according to arbitrary will, without respect to any human gesture of cooperation or rejection.

Any god that deals in compulsion is a god of death.

[RnMomof7]

We are very boring Rom...New Years eve and here we are considering the things of God:>) I am going to bed now ..I will read your post throughly in the morning...

God bless you and Happy New Year!

[Romulus]

See you next year.

[Fred]

Thank you Mother Angelica.. and praying for your healing...

Sola Fide
Question from Don on 10-10-2001:

Father Eckert,

I have read in a number of different sources that Martin Luther translated a passage in Romans (maybe, Romans 3:27-29), to read, "For we hold that a man is justified by faith 'alone' apart from works of law" -- inserting the word "alone" where it is no where to be found in the original text. (I read that he later "dropped" that word from his translation of the Bible.) I have also heard that a Greek word for "alone" did exist which Saint Paul, if he was really teaching the doctrine of sola fide, could have naturally used in the original text, but did not. Since he did not use that word for "alone" in any of his passages on "justified by faith", it stands to reason that he did not believe in sola fide.

What do you think of this? I performed a quick search in an online version of the RSV and found that Romans 4:23, Romans 11:3, Galatians 6:4, 1 Thessalonians 3:1, 1 Timothy 5:5, 1 Timothy 6:16, and 2 Timothy 4:11 all have the word "alone". Could Paul have used the equivalent Greek word for "alone" to say in Romans "a man is justified by faith alone..."? Since he did not use the word "alone" where he had used it in other places, it stands to reason that he did not believe in "faith alone" for salvation. Do you agree, or am I missing something, as I do not know any Greek?

Thanks.

Don

Answer by Fr. John Echert on 10-10-2001:

Don:

The very expression "faith alone" does appear in the New Testament in a manner which directly contradicted Martin Luther. It was for this reason that he insisted that St. James was not an apostle and therefore did not have authority in this matter--how convenient! Read on:

Protestants who argue that faith alone is what saves a person draw principally upon texts from Romans and also from Galatians. For instance, Paul wrote to the Christians at Rome:

3:20 For no human being will be justified in his sight by works of the law, since through the law comes knowledge of sin. 3:21 But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it, 3:22 the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction; 3:23 since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 3:24 they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, 3:25 whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins; 3:26 it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies him who has faith in Jesus. 3:27 Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. On what principle? On the principle of works? No, but on the principle of faith. 3:28 For we hold that a man is justified by faith apart from works of law.

First of all, Paul did not write that faith ALONE is what saves, but that faith apart from works of the law. So Paul does not set faith alone as the means of salvation, which would effectively remove grace as the means of salvation, if it were faith alone that saves. Specifically, Paul was insisting that it was no longer Mosaic Law that one could regard as the means of being righteous before God, which never could make one truly righteous even in OT times. His point is that it is only in Jesus Christ that we are saved. Since the time of the Reformation, many Protestants have become fixated on a slogan which is out of context, namely, that we are saved by faith alone. This is not only taking Paul out of context but is contradicted by other parts of Sacred Scripture, especially as found in the letter of James:

2:14 What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him? 2:15 If a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food, 2:16 and one of you says to them, "Go in peace, be warmed and filled," without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit? 2:17 So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. 2:18 But some one will say, "You have faith and I have works." Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith. 2:19 You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe -- and shudder. 2:20 Do you want to be shown, you shallow man, that faith apart from works is barren? 2:21 Was not Abraham our father justified by works, when he offered his son Isaac upon the altar? 2:22 You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by works, 2:23 and the scripture was fulfilled which says, "Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness"; and he was called the friend of God. 2:24 You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone.

St. James is teaching us that works will proceed from authentic faith, not that works themselves are the means of salvation. And so we see that the writings of St. Paul and St. James are not only compatible but complementary: faith precedes justification with God and works proceed from one who has such faith. For one who lives radically contrary to the requirements of faith, such as a life of mortal sin, we should not expect that such a one is in a state of grace. And while Father Martin Luther and others in the Reformation wanted to throw out this letter from the NT, because it contradicted their misinterpretation of Paul, they were unsuccessful. Instead, it is either overlooked or misinterpreted. Sadly, millions upon millions of Protestants since then have been misled about this Biblical truth about salvation. Faith is the beginning step which makes us open to grace but it alone is not what is established as the normative means of salvation. The Gospel of John and much of the rest of the NT vigorously assert that baptism is the formal way by which one is incorporated into the life of Christ and is given saving grace.

Finally, while we cannot agree with the statement that we are saved by faith alone, we can agree that we are saved by grace alone. For our salvation is unmerited in every way and cannot be earned by faith or works. On the other hand, for those who are in a state of grace, their works do have merit for the present and the future, as our Lord teaches in several instances as recorded in the Gospels. ©

Father Echert

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[RnMomof7]

Morning Rom !

Any god that deals in compulsion is a god of death.

I think it depend what "compulsion" means. "Life " compels me to do things all the time, I must eat and sleep and toilet myself..Failure to do any of those things means physical death.

Is God's grace compelling? Yes it is ! But not in the negative way that you worded it.It is a sweet compulsion ,that embraces and draws you that makes you will to be His.It is irresistible

Remember when you fell in love with your wife? That sweet expectancy ,the desire to be together forever,the desire to touch and hold.That was compulsion ....but a sweet one. Why would anyone WANT to say no to such a moment of Grace?

The son in the parable was already the Fathers.It was never a question of his position in the family. He and the father were tied together by blood. The question was of inheritance.

But all this begs the question of how we deal with the tension that exists in scripture between Gods sovereignty and "free will".

If we believe that God can and does intervene in the affairs of men ,then He must have the ability to do so. So in the end it is always His will that gets done not ours.That is why Jesus told us to pray "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven". We are always to be praying for His will not our own!

In the parable it was not the son that was in control of the situation it was always the Father Rom ,it was always his decision. The son could have come to His door and the father had the right to turn him away. The only will that counted here was the Fathers will...never the wayward child!

[american colleen]

Thank you Fred! I labor all the time to figure out why anyone would think faith alone without good works is possible. From true loving faith, good works always spring. I do not believe "true faith" alone is possible without the natural flowing or fruition of good works. Like Mother Theresa.

[Romulus]

Remember when you fell in love with your wife? That sweet expectancy ,the desire to be together forever,the desire to touch and hold.That was compulsion ....but a sweet one. Why would anyone WANT to say no to such a moment of Grace?

Beats me.

[AndrewSshi]

How can a being described as being "dead in trespasses and sin" Ephesians 2:1 - with hearts described as "deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked" Jeremiah 17:9 - be able, much less "free" to choose anything but evil?

The worship of the great god, free will, is one of the errors most deadly to man's soul.

Well, the reason I wrote the article is that I began looking to try and find out a historical church position on the whole question, since, like Erasmus said, one think that Christ would not let His entire Church fall into error for 1300 years. What I found, though, was that, prior to Calvin, the most pre-destinarian voice in the Church was Augustine, but even he stopped short of double predestination and God being the effective agency in evil. My conclusion, though, is that we are probably in error if we attempt to apply our own human reason to the mind of the Infinite Pantocrator. When we try to force a scenario in which either men are free or utterly under divine control, we are painting an incomplete picture. I suspect the reason that the Church Historical has wrestled for an answer to this issue is that it is one that has no pat and easy solution, and we would be better off instead trusting to the mercy of Christ.

[RnMomof7]

Beats me.

LOL me too Rom..

For a long time I would look around and see people that didn't seem to see or hear God. They hasd no interest in spiritual things (I suspect you have noted the same thing,because you have a deep interest yourself)

I kept asking myself how can that be? How can a man ignore the God of the Universe ? How can a man not fall on his knees in Gods presence?

It beats me too

[Hank Kerchief]

a Protestant Bible and thus are including what Luther added to Romans 3:28

Is this something you learned in Catholic School? There is not, to my knowledge, any Bible that adds the word "alone" to Romans 3:28. Would you please indicate the one you are familiar with that does?

I believe Martin Luther penned this word into his own, as a note.

Hank

[the_doc]

Echert doesn't understand what the Protestants are/were complaining about. While he is quibbling with a word used by Luther, he is completely ignoring the fact that Luther's position was beautifully defended by Calvin.

To help you see what I mean, change the word in the Protestant slogan to ONLY instead of ALONE.

Calvin and Luther both taught that justification is ONLY by faith. This is another way of saying that justification is by faith considered as a STAND-ALONE thing, i.e., APART FROM WORKS.

In a famous explanation of justification, Calvin went on to point out that a faith which does not produce good works is not real faith anyway. This was the point of the Apostle James. And Calvin's comment shows that the statements by James are necessarily and harmoniously subordinated to the statement by Paul.

In other words, justification is by faith ALONE, but a professed faith which is strictly alone is NOT JUSTIFYING FAITH IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Echert's artful comments are therefore moot.

Unfortunately, the Romanists are so busy complaining against the Protestants--and ferreting out language points in the New Testament to make their complaints seem spiritually plausible--that they don't notice that Calvin is correct.

Calvin was somewhat clearer than Luther was, partly because he came on the scene a little later in the Reformation. This is why the anti-Protestants ordinarily don't make their complaints against Calvin. The fact is, Calvin crushes the Romanists' objections to the Protestant position. (Luther got the Reformation started in several monumentally important ways, but it was Calvin's work which finally broke the back of Rome's domination in professing Christianity.)

Some anti-Protestants do complain against Calvin, of course. But they typically do this by lying about what Calvin actually said. They say that Calvin said that a man can be saved by faith alone, but they leave out the rest of Calvin's famous statement--which is that "the faith which saves is never alone."

Why would they want to do this? It's because they hate the correct Protestant position. That, in turn, is because they can't stand the Scriptural position.

Someone might say at this point "But wait a minute! Wasn't Calvin actually conceding the point the Romanists were making?"

No, he was conceding nothing whatsoever to Rome. To see what I mean, go back to what I said about the relationship between Paul's statement and James's statement. As Calvin pointed out, James's statement is necessarily subordinated to that of Paul. The overarching verse in the controversy is Romans 3:28. And the Romanists don't see that.

What I mean is that the RCs will not consistently and clearly uphold the idea that justification is ONLY by faith. Paul is clearly, emphatically telling them that justification is NOT by faith-plus-works. In the Epistle to the Galatians, Paul is even more emphatic in saying that we cannot simplistically add faith and works together in our doctrine of salvation.

But this is precisely what the RCs do. They don't fit the passages together. They just try to sum the passages.

This is disastrous. The disastrous nature of this error is the very reason why Paul went to the trouble of writing Romans 3:28 and the Epistle to the Galatians.

Why is Rome's error disastrous? Aren’t the RCs just using the writings of James to block the error of antinomianism? No. James was blocking the error of antinomianism and doing so in precisely the way Calvin pointed out. But the Protestant complains, with good reason, that the RCs are trying to use James's statements to undermine Paul's statements. Paul says that justification is NOT by faith-plus-works--but the stubborn Romanists say that justification IS by faith-plus-works.

But why is that error disastrous? Why did Paul go to such lengths to attack this error?

It's because fallen sinners are by nature gnostic fools. This is an artifact of the Fall. It's the idea presented in Romans 1:18-32.

The gnostic approach tries to substitute assensus for faith. (This was one of the more serious complaints which the Reformers made against Roman Catholicism.) Sometimes unregenerate religionists sneak into the visible church by antinomian counterfeiting of saving faith (which is why James wrote his Epistle), but an even more common kind of gnostic counterfeiting is legalism.

The legalist is the Adamic religionist (i.e., self-righteous fool) who does NOT have saving faith. At some level of his deceitiful soul, he will sense that what he has is not the faith of the justified sinner--since he will realize that he doesn't KNOW THE LORD in the way a born-again believer really does. So, the self-righteous fool will install works in his life and call it faith!

This is precisely what the Apostle Paul is telling the lost sinner that he must not do. But he won't really listen to Paul. He can read the Word of God, but he can't get it straight--precisely because he is unregenerate. Apart from electing grace, he is doomed as a self-righteous fool--justly so.

***

It is not correct to conclude from the above discussion that I am just a Catholic basher. I am merely a consistent Protestant, a Protestant who knows why the doctrine of justification is important. I am concerned about my Roman Catholic friends. And I have a lot of them.

It turns out that we Protestants don't agree with RCs on very much. I honestly wish we did. But knowing the Lord Jesus personally is everything. Nothing must be allowed to get in the way of knowing God for real--not the professional "priesthood" which Rome has illegally dragged into the visible Church from Judaism; not the unscriptural mediators which Rome has invented to make things "easier" than true Christ-alone faith; not the hocus-pocus rituals which Rome has added in lieu of real faith.

At the bottom line, I am suggesting that true faith always involves repentance--and that this repentance unto life necessarily entails the sinner facing the fact that he doesn't know the Lord--at all. (The unregenerate sinner may think he knows the Lord, but according to Romans 1:18-32, he just knows about Him. That's completely different.)

I wish I could say that all RCs manifestly know the Lord Jesus. But the typical Roman Catholic's experience of the grace of God seems to be nothing like mine. The RCs seem to stake everything on refusing to admit that they don't really know the Lord. They don't seem to know what repentance IS. I think that this is why we don't agree on monumentally important points of doctrine.

***

By the way, there are numerous errors in the original article at the top of this thread. Augustine really is on the Protestant's side in regard to God's absolute predestination. (The Catholic Encyclopedia won't tell you that, of course!)

[Justice]

Mother Theresa is a paragon. Many christians who are born into faith, however, are extremely screwed in the area of virtue.

Good works may take years to form as backslide follows backslide. All those years of screwing up, however do not negate the fact that the individual has been a true christian all along.

[AndrewSshi]

Is this something you learned in Catholic School? There is not, to my knowledge, any Bible that adds the word "alone" to Romans 3:28. Would you please indicate the one you are familiar with that does?

I believe Martin Luther penned this word into his own, as a note.

From Martin Luther's German Bible, Romans 3:28:

"So halten wir nun dafür, dass der Mensch gerecht werde ohne des Gesesses Werke, allein durch den Glauben."

So yes, he did add "alone." The emphasis is mine.

[Hank Kerchief]

I intend, through an examination of patristic sources in comparison to Luther and Calvin, to demonstrate that the reformers reclaimed certain Augustinian principles, but in carrying them to their logical extremes, went to lengths that were utterly without precedent.

From the original article, and

By the way, there are numerous errors in the original article at the top of this thread. Augustine really is on the Protestant's side in regard to God's absolute predestination. (The Catholic Encyclopedia won't tell you that, of course!)

From you

...are enough to demonstrate that most, if not all, of organized Christianity, of every denomination, today is essentially laboring under the same load of false doctrine thrust into Christian dogma by Augustine's synchrotistic amalgam of Biblical teaching, Greek philosophy, and the teachings of the Manichees.

The whole sinful nature, predestination, salvation without being saved from sin, heresy began with him, and has been swallowed by almost everyone since. How it is, that a man who believed salamandas could live in fire and that there are people in the world without mouths who get all ther nourishment from the air could have pulled of such a theological swindle is really amazing. I suspect few have actually read Augustine, or Calvin, for that matter.

Hank

[AndrewSshi]

By the way, there are numerous errors in the original article at the top of this thread. Augustine really is on the Protestant's side in regard to God's absolute predestination. (The Catholic Encyclopedia won't tell you that, of course!)

As the author of the article, I take great exception to that. For starters, Augustine of Hippo never changed his stance regarding the origin of evil. From start to finish, he believed that evil came from the excercise of a corrupt will. Even in his later, more "Calvinist" state, he did not retract his statement that the fall of man came about from Adam's free will. Never did he ascribe this to God. In On the Predestination of the Saints, he is quite clear that predestination is necessary for faith. He does not, though, ascribe predestination to the sinner refusing to believe, save that in leaving the sinner unelected, it follows that he is predestined to Hell.

[AndrewSshi]

The whole sinful nature, predestination, salvation without being saved from sin, heresy began with him, and has been swallowed by almost everyone since. How it is, that a man who believed salamandas could live in fire and that there are people in the world without mouths who get all ther nourishment from the air could have pulled of such a theological swindle is really amazing. I suspect few have actually read Augustine, or Calvin, for that matter.

Augustine lived in a time in which the natural sciences were nowhere near as advanced as they are today, but this does not discount his brilliance in other areas. Indeed, in Civitatis Dei, he quite clearly states, after speaking of salamanders, antipodes, and the like, that before speaking more definitively on such creatures, it might be a good idea to ascertain whether or not they even exist. Such feelings are not the product of a gullible credulity.

[George W. Bush]

A superb historical and theological brief treatment of the subject, some of which is often overlooked in most discussions of the subject. I thought some others would really enjoy your post since you are, in this instance, too modest to flag the rest so I took the liberty of flagging them to it. I don't think they would want to miss it.

An excellent argument.