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.
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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 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
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.
This is exactly true! Thanks for all your insightful comments in this post. They're "right on"!!