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

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

[AndrewSshi]

There are those who think that life has nothing left to chance,
A host of holy horrors to direct our aimless dance.

A planet of playthings,
We dance on the strings
Of powers we cannot perceive
“The stars aren’t aligned-
Or the gods are malign”
Blame is better to give than receive.
…
All preordained-
A prisoner in chains-
A victim of venomous fate.
Kicked in the face,
You can't pray for a place
In Heaven's unearthly estate.

You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill;
I will choose a path that's clear-
I will choose Free Will.

--Rush, “Freewill,” ©1980.

When Martin Luther defied a Pope and proclaimed salvation only through the ineffable grace of God, he had no idea that he was rending the body of the ancient church that had for so long known only unity. As his revolution spread, though, all Christendom watched as the Church began to fracture like one of the rose windows smashed by a maddened Swiss mob. Northern Germany, Scandinavia, and a large portion of the Swiss cantons turned away from the faith they had known for centuries, causing no small consternation in a civilization that valued timeless truths above novelty, and which viewed the past as the repository of truth and the present and future as decay. When the reformers were accused by men like Cardinal Sadoleto of pulling away from their faith for the sake of unprecedented novelties, both Luther and Calvin responded that it was their medieval forbears who had introduced devilish novelties into the Church, and that they were merely restoring Christianity to its ancient form (“Reply,” 56).

Such claims and counter claims were absolutely vital in the spirit of those times. For if Christ had indeed left His authority with a body of believers upon his ascension, then any faction claiming to possess the true meaning of His scriptures would logically have to be in agreement with that original body that carried on Christ’s truth after His return to His Father. It is outside of the purview of the discipline of history to ask questions about the existence and nature of God or the supernatural claims of any institution. We can, however, examine the claims of historical continuity by the various parties involved: Were Doctors Luther and Calvin reclaiming an ancient theology obscured by centuries of scholastic decadence, or were they, as their opponents claimed, introducing novelties never before seen under the sun? 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.

In examining the Reformation and its dogmas, we must first understand the key fulcrum upon which the reformation turned. This point, though, is often obscured when navigating through a list of secondary issues like use of images, liturgical style, church property, etc. We would do well to note that all of these issues pale besides that which drove the reformers to the lengths they went—“Therefore it is clear that, as the soul needs only the Word of God for its life and righteousness, so it is justified by faith alone and not any works; for if it could be justified by anything else, it would not need the Word, and consequently it would not need faith.” The reformation stands or falls on the basis of the assertion that man is justified before God only through His ineffable grace, by faith alone.

At the outset, this should not seem like too much of a problem. Even the most adamant pre-Vatican II Catholic will acknowledge the corrupt nature of man and inability to approach the righteousness of Christ without divine grace. Why then, did the reformers’ preaching of grace cause such a stir? If we delve below the surface, the problem with sola fide soon becomes apparent. If salvation comes by grace through faith alone, then no works of man can have anything do to with his salvation. If that is the case, then, as Luther tells us, this discounts any act of the will, for if one were to be able to will oneself to believe, faith would simply be a meritorious work (Luther, 135). Calvin reaches a similar conclusion in his Institutes (XXI, 1), and such thinking leaves us with the uncomfortable notion that, if one is to be saved by faith alone, then man, shorn of his free will, is reduced to the role of a puppet dancing on God’s strings. This of course opens up a host of other difficulties, and the perplexed believer is left asking if God in His love also responsible for evil. In the end, the Roman Catholic Church rejected reformed dogma in order to defend the doctrine of man’s freedom (Tracy, 101).

This rejection then left the reformers in the position of standing against the ancient Catholic Church and demanding that they, rather than the ancient church, possessed apostolic truth. Erasmus of Rotterdam had this to say about Luther’s claim to have re-discovered the truth:

Even though Christ’s spirit might permit His people to be in error in an unimportant question on which man’s salvation does not depend, no one would believe that this Spirit has deliberately overlooked error in His church for 1300 years, and that He did not deem one of all the pious and saintly Church Fathers worthy to be inspired, with what, they contend, is the very essence of all evangelical teaching (Erasmus, 19).

Erasmus lays a fairly serious charge at Luther’s feet. The answer, then to the question of whether or not the reformers held views in concord with the ancient church lies in ascertaining Erasmus’s assertion that the denial of free will is completely alien to the historical record of the Church’s teachings.

Since Erasmus felt it meet to bring the Church Fathers into the discussion, I shall begin my examination with patristic sources. I intend first to examine the works of Justin Martyr, a second century convert and one of the first Christian apologists. I intend to examine Justin’s work as a case study for several reasons, chief of which are that his first and second apologies were written both to answer objections to the Christian faith and outline its basic principles, and, if we are looking for a picture of early Christianity as handed down to the apostles, we could do no better than to examine the product of a Church removed from the death of the last apostle by less than a century.

To properly comprehend the early Church’s positions on the freedom of the will, we must first examine the philosophical background of the classical world from which Christianity emerged. We quickly find that, as a general rule, the classical world was hostile to the notion of humanity possessing the free ability to choose. Democritus with his mechanistic view of the cosmos and the Eleatics with their monism both held that all events and choices were under the sway of a deterministic necessity (“Free Will”). Aristotle was a bit more optimistic, allowing for contingency, but then, with his cosmos brought into being by a primum mobile, it is hard to escape the notion that all subsequent causes must be dependent of the first cause (ibid). Nor did the stoics allow for free choice, which was precluded by their pantheistic picture of the universe (ibid). It was against such background that Christianity addressed the issue of man’s freedom.

In Chapters XLIII and XLIV of his Second Apology, Justin examines the question as to whether or not men are free. His conclusion is an unambiguous rejection of the classical world’s determinism. Martyr makes several arguments, one based on a usage of the term “devour” in Isaiah, and another on the dubious notion that Plato learned what he knew from the Hebrew prophets (Martyr, XLIV). We shall pass over these, though, in favor of the much more powerful argument of responsibility. He tells his reader “unless the human race have the power of avoiding evil and choosing good by free choice, they are not accountable for their actions” (Martyr, XLIII). Justin hammers this point home further in stating that God made man, “not like other things, as trees and quadrupeds, which cannot act by choice” (ibid). For Martyr, the sinner would not be worthy of punishment if his action were not of his own volition, but a result of the condition in which he was made (ibid). He then quotes Deuteronomy 30:15, 19: “Behold before thy face are good and evil: choose the good” (1.2.5).

Augustine in his answer affirmed that man does evil through the use of his free choice (Free Choice, 1.16.35), and that evil comes not from God, but rather from a negation of His goodness, that is, in a man turning from the good that which is God to follow his own desires (ibid, 2.20.54). In agreement with Justin Martyr, he asks rhetorically, “How could a man be punished justly, if he used his will for the very purpose for which it was given” (ibid, 2.1.3)? He goes on to state that to be justly punished, sin must be committed by a free act of the will (ibid).

In this context, when Augustine speaks of the decrees of God, he speaks of God’s predestination as coming through the foreknowledge of His omniscience. Indeed, he goes out of his way to state that foreknowledge is not the same as compulsion (Free Choice, 3.4.10), and states that, simply because God has foreseen an evil does not mean that He is responsible (ibid, 3.4.11). He draws the notion of foreknowledge to its logical conclusion, stating that because God foreknows everything, then events must happen as He has foreseen (ibid, 3.3.8). This appears to satisfactorily wrap up the issue of God’s decrees.

All of the above would seem to create the impression that God’s only action in working out His will is in foreseeing that which will occur and thus working out His will through man’s will. But we must carefully bear in mind that Augustine is speaking of the origins of evil. We have not yet examined what Augustine taught from scripture concerning, not man’s reprobation, but his salvation. When we look to this issue, the picture of Augustine becomes much murkier.

Augustine notes that the first man fell through his own completely free choice. Adam, in Augustine’s thinking, was completely free to choose either good or evil, and opted for evil (Free Choice, 3.24.73). From this point, humanity was enslaved to original sin. The original sin came through free will, but subsequently, though still free, the will was subject to corruption, and thus, unable to rise to salvation. This can be summed up in the statement, “But, though man fell through his own will, he cannot rise through his own will” (ibid, 2.20.54).

At this point in his career, Augustine might have been willing to acknowledge that man can freely look for the grace of God in order to assist him in doing good, stating that man, though subject to concupiscence, nonetheless has the knowledge of God, by whose grace he might rise to a higher state (ibid, 3.19.53). If we were to cease our examination of Augustine here, we would find a ready partisan of Rome, affirming man’s free choice, predestination through foreknowledge, and the ability of man to choose God. Alas, the picture is not that simple.

For at the turn of the fifth century, the notorious heretic Pelagius preached that man in and of himself had the ability to be perfect, and that the fall of Adam, rather than plunging the whole of the human race into sin, served merely as a bad example (Nature and Grace, 9.10). To the dismay of the good Doctor, Pelagius and his followers sought to bolster support for their beliefs with Augustine’s very own writings on free will (Retractions, 1.9.3). Augustine’s response to this heretic’s teachings generated his later writings on the will, predestination, and divine grace.

It must be noted that Augustine’s later writings on original sin and predestination seems to show a markedly different posture from his earlier work on free will. While it has been argued that this hardened stance was due either to his reaction to the fall of Rome or the Pelagian heresy, it is more likely that his own views were gradually evolving under the influence of St. Paul, independent of external circumstances. I base my judgment on Augustine’s quotation of his Retractions in On the Predestination of the Saints:

I indeed labored in defense of the free choice of the human will, but the grace of God conquered, and only thus was I able to arrive at the point where I understood that the Apostle spoke with the clearest truth, “For who singles you out? Or what do you have that you have not received? And if you have received it, why do you glory as if you had not received it” (1 Corinthians 4:7, qtd. in Predestination, 4.8)?

The above taken into account, the later Augustine still believes that those who choose faith in Christ do so of their own free will, but with the important caveat that God has prepared the will of the elect to choose Him (Predestination, 6.11). Under these teachings of Augustine, free will alone is insufficient to believe in Christ, and indeed, if free will is enough for the believer to be saved, then “Christ has died in vain” (Nature and Grace, 40.47). The will of man is both corrupt and inadequate to seek salvation. The elect are not called because they believe, but so that they may believe (Predestination, 17.34). We see Augustine at his most Protestant when he further recounts his own changing views in stating “I said most truly: ‘For just as in those “whom God has chosen,” not works initiate merit, but faith…’ [Emphasis added.] But that merit of faith is also a gift of God…” (Predestination, 3.7) Here, then, the Catholic, to his dismay, sees what seems to be protestant doctrine issuing from the pen of the arch-Catholic.

We will be going too far, though, if we make Augustine a five point Calvinist. We must note that, for starters, when he issued a retraction concerning his first writings on the nature of evil, he stated that free will was inadequate for man to rise to God. He never, though, changed his statement that evil comes only from the free exercise of the will, and never denies that in choosing to do evil, Adam was under no compulsion. When he mentions predestination, he is quite clear that only by God’s predestination can man come to an efficacious and saving faith, but what is striking is that predestination is only mentioned regarding salvation. Those that are condemned do so merely because they follow their own corrupt will, and God justly punishes their evil deeds. Augustine takes his stand for grace and salvation through election, while at the same time avoiding the horror of double predestination.

For the next several centuries, the Church would follow this Augustinian path. The Church rejected the teachings of Pelagius, and a hundred years later at the Council of Orange, issued a series of canons affirming the Augustinian position on grace and predestination. Canon 4 states that if anyone contends that God’s cleansing of man from sin is contingent upon the will then he is in error; Canon 5 states that the beginning of faith itself comes from the grace of God rather than the will of man; Canon 6 states that grace does not depend on the cooperation of man (“Canons of Orange”). As the Church moved on through the centuries, she attempted to carry on in the steps of the African Doctor in straddling the fence between grace and free will. By the beginning of the High Middle Ages, though, the Church was pulling back towards a system that acknowledged the primacy of the human will. By the turn of the twelfth century, St. Anselm of Canterbury wrote in his De Concordia that free choice co-exists with divine grace and cooperates with it (Anselm, 453). With such pronouncements, The Church had arrived at a position specifically condemned by St. Augustine (cf. Letter 225). We shall now examine how well Luther and Calvin succeeded in their attempts to return to his teachings.

Luther would be in perfect concord with Augustine in his affirmation of salvation by grace through faith. In The Bondage of the Will, though, he arrives at Augustine, but then passes him completely, arriving in territory where none have trodden before. Augustine stated that man’s fall came through his choice, and the resulting corruption of human nature resulted in a will that commits sin of its own volition. Luther does the good doctor one better, though, and asserts that the wicked man sins “under the impulse of divine power” (Luther, 130). Luther even challenges Augustine in his definition of free will, stating that, if in a fallen state the will is unable to seek God, then it is not in fact free (ibid, 113), and that Augustine and others who have called such a will free are degrading the very word (ibid, 120). Luther goes to the extreme end of the spectrum, and then beyond the pale, but recognizes and embraces this: “Therefore, we must go to extremes, deny free will altogether, and ascribe everything to God” (ibid, 133)!

Indeed, his statement that a will unable to do good is in fact under compulsion makes fine logical sense, but the end result is a man with no freedom, and one whose evil must be the responsibility of divine omnipotence. Luther here returns to the Augustinian notion that in His omnipotence God allows but does not cause the workings of evil in order to further His divine plan (ibid, 130). It almost seems here that Luther is pulling back from the brink of a precipice to which he has been running headlong, staring into an abyss to which he dare not attempt to apply his own feeble reason. And indeed, though throughout this debate on free will with Erasmus Luther employs the techniques of reason and dialectic, in the end he felt that any attempt to use reason to fathom the mind of God was a fairly silly exercise (ibid, 129). As the reformation continued, though, another figure would arrive who would see no problem in attempting to apply human reason to the workings of the Eternal God, taking every statement on grace, sin, and God’s decrees to their horrifying ends, leaping joyfully into the abyss from which Luther held back. That man was Jean Calvin.

Even the extreme bombast of Luther’s Bondage of the Will does not take the horrific final step in the picture it paints of God’s omnipotence. Like Augustine, Luther admits that since the fall, man has been a slave to sin, but Calvin finally dares to examine from whence came the fall. His conclusion, unlike Augustine’s, is that God actively caused the fall of Adam and the whole human race into sin and damnation as part of His “wonderful plan” (Institutes, XXIII, 7). The ruthless Frenchman then goes on to state that God is nonetheless just in punishing the reprobate (ibid, XXIII, 4). Though this horribly contradicts both Augustine and Justin Martyr’s writings of responsibility, Calvin barely hesitates when he states that he is leaving behind the bulk of the Church’s traditions in favor of his alleged ruthless adherence to scripture (ibid, XXII, 1). Calvin has no problem in that asserting that, since salvation is not by works, then neither is damnation (ibid, XXII, 11), and that the reason for the eternal torment of the vast majority of the human race lies, not in their guilt, but in the arbitrary choice of God.

This horror, then, is the end result of the reformation: God has arbitrarily predestined some to eternal life, and has likewise predestined others to eternal damnation. Calvin then states that certain people might object to this, stating that it makes God a cruel tyrant, to which he responds that since God is both omnipotent and the creator of everything, then all that He decrees, ipso facto, is righteous, good, and just (Institutes, XXIII, 2). He then has the chutzpah to go on and tell the reader that his dogma is not one of absolute might, since God is “free from fault,” and the quintessence of Law and Right (ibid).

Jean Calvin then, has started from Augustine, who among the Church Fathers was most friendly to predestination, and taken the teachings of predestination to their logical extreme, crafting a dogma that would have caused St. Augustine to blanch in horror. Did St. Augustine believe in divine election and predestination of believers? Most assuredly. It was up to Jean Calvin, though, to add double predestination and eliminate Augustine’s free will theodicy in favor of a God who has decreed evil and suffering for his own amusement.

I submit, though, that such questions concerning free will and predestination would inevitably have come to the fore and been the cause of controversy even without Luther and Calvin. The reason for this is that Augustine loomed large over the western Church down through the centuries, and at times there seem to be two Augustines. Why is this the case? The reason that there seem to be two St. Augustines lies in the Bible itself, since there seem to be two St. Pauls*. We have the Paul who tells the believer in Romans Chapter 9 that God prepares some men for eternal life and some for damnation, answering the obvious objection to this with a “Who are you, O man, to talk back to God” (Romans 9:20)? On the other hand, we are also told that there is a loving God who “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of truth” (1 Timothy 2:4). Such contradictions in the Christian faith, then, were present at its inception.

Indeed, such difficulties are inevitable in any faith that attempts to posit a God who is all-powerful, all knowing, and all good. Paul, who likely never intended to be considered a basis for systematic theology, is all over the map when it comes to how to resolve such questions. As such, there is no pat resolution to these seeming contradictions. Perhaps the error of the church was to seek one; Luther is at his best not when he is glorying in the slavery of man, but when he is proclaiming the mercy of Christ.

Works Cited

Anselm of Canterbury, Saint. The Major Works. Eds. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Augustine of Hippo, Saint. Four Anti-Pelagian Writings: On Nature and Grace, On the Proceedings of Pelagius, On the Predestination of the Saints, On the Gift of Perseverance. Trans. John A. Mourant and William J. Collinge. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1992.

---. The Problem of Free Choice. Trans. Dom Mark Pontifex. New York: Newman Press, 1955.

The Problem of Free Choice. Appendix. Excerpt from Retractions.

Calvin, Jean. Excerpts from Institutes of the Christian Religion. The Protestant Reformation. Ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1968. 178-221.

---. “Reply to Sadoleto.” A Reformation Debate. Ed. John C. Olin. New York, Fordham University Press, 2000. 43-88.

"The Canons of the Council of Orange.” 529 A.D. Center for Reformed Theology and Apologetics.

“Free Will.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Michael Maher. 1909. Transcribed 1999.

Martyr, Justin, Saint. “The Second Apology.” The Ante-Nicene Fathers. Eds. Alexander Roberts, D.D., and James Donaldson, LL.D. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899. 188-194.

Erasmus of Rotterdam. Excerpts from The Free Will. Winter 3-94.

Luther, Martin. Excerpts from The Bondage of the Will. Winter 98-138.

[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.