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JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH
EWTN ^ | Dr. William Marshner

Posted on 12/11/2011 5:59:43 PM PST by rzman21

Dr. William Marshner The Catholic Church holds that faith in Jesus Christ is not saving faith unless it bears fruit in good works. Vice-versa, the Church holds that such works are so intimately joined to faith, that, without them, it is impossible for the believer to grow or persevere in his faith.(1) In this way, good works are necessary for salvation. Most Protestants are uncomfortable with such a statement. Without denying the importance of good works, Protestants tend to see them as symptoms of the one thing necessary rather than as necessities in their own right. For Luther, good works were merely symptoms of confident faith; for Calvin, they were symptoms of irresistible grace. Few Protestants today are familiar with the details of Luther's or Calvin's personal thought; what they have inherited from these great forebearers is rather a general orientation, whose core is the conviction that according to St. Paul, we are justified (by faith alone) or (by grace alone), either formula being understood to exclude any essential role of good works.

Now, in order to see how this general orientation may clash with Catholicism, it is necessary to introduce two further points.

First, Catholic and Protestant views on the respective roles of grace, faith and works cannot be compared meaningfully, unless one specifies what stage of the justificational process one is talking about. In the preparatory stage, for instance, in which prevenient graces first stir a person towards an interest in religious truth, towards repentance, and towards faith, Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists are at one in saying "."(2) A second stage is the very transition from death to life, which is the first stage of justification proper. Here the parties are at one in saying "sola fide," though they seem to mean different things by it. Protestants tend to mean that, at this stage, by the grace of God, man's act of faith is the sole act required of him; Catholics mean that faith is the beginning, foundation and root of all justification, since only faith makes possible the acts of hope and charity (i.e. love-for-God) which are also required.(3) However, since most Protestants have a broad notion of the act of faith, whereby it includes elements of hope and love, it is often hard to tell how far the difference on this point is real and how far it is a matter of words. Finally, however, there comes a third stage, that of actual Christian life, with its problems of growth and perseverance. The man justified by faith is called to "walk" with God, to progress in holiness. It is at this stage that the parties sharply diverge. Catholics affirm, and Protestants strenuously deny, that the born-again Christian's good works merit for him the increase of grace and of the Christian virtues. As a result, Protestant piety has no obvious place for the self-sacrifices, fasts, and states of perfection which are prominent features of Catholic piety.

Now this divergence over works in the third stage is partially due to a Protestant allergy to the word 'merit', but only partially. The real reasons are much deeper, which brings me to my second point.

At each stage, neither the apparent agreements nor the apparent disagreements can be understood without looking at certain metaphysical quarrels, the chief of which is over the very existence of what Catholics call "grace."

In the natural order, a doctor ministers to a moribund patient and restores him to life; he does so by really changing the condition of the patient's body; he restores to it a quality called health. Can something analogous happen in the supernatural order? If so, what Catholics call "grace" exists. It is the quality thanks to which the soul is made alive and enabled to function as God intended it to function, just as health is such a quality to the body.

Of course, as is the case with all analogies, there are points at which this one breaks down. The human doctor is a finite physician; he can heal the sick but not the dead; God, on the other hand, restores spiritual health to those dead in trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:5), so that God's act is not so much a cure of the sick as it is a down-payment on the Resurrection (Ephesians 2:6). So the analogy limps. It fails to reflect the fact that grace is not only like health but also like brand-new life. Still, between life and health there is a deep connection, so that this limp is not fatal to the analogy. However, there is another problem with it.

Thanks to his instruments, chemical and surgical, the doctor is the principal cause of the patient's restored health; but it would seem odd to say that the man's health is wholly the doctor's gift, even if the doctor collected no fee. After all, it is the patient's own natural powers, his own natural capacity for health, which allows the doctor's work to be successful. So there is a cooperation here between the doctor's art and the patient's nature, thanks to which the restored health is not wholly the doctor's gift but partially also the patient's own achievement. Such things cannot be said of the initial, justifying grace. As Catholics understand it, this grace is a quality for which man has no natural capacity, to which he has no natural right, and towards which he has no natural inclination. It is a pure surprise, a pure gift, an elevation of our nature rather than a part of it; and this was true even before the Fall.(4) Now, to be sure, Catholics believe that once we have been elevated to grace, we become capable of cooperating with God's further graces, since He has now given us the capacity and the inclination for such things. But this does not cancel the original picture; it only means that our very capacity to cooperate is a gift to us, something not natively ours; as a result, every God-pleasing act of ours remains so rooted in God's initial gift that it is simply an actuation of that gift. So the analogy between health and grace limps in this second way: it fails to reflect the fact that grace is so totally a gift that it exceeds our natural capacities and hence never becomes simply "our property," even after it has been given.

Thanks to these difficulties, what Catholics call "sanctifying grace" or "habitual grace" turns out to be a deeply mysterious entity: a quality of man which is a property of God. In order to cope with such an entity, one needs a sophisticated metaphysics of participation. The Church Fathers and their successors, the Scholastic Doctors, took the trouble to work out such a metaphysics because the existence of grace as a real entity in man—ontic grace—was and is the foundation, without which the whole Catholic understanding of justification makes no sense.

The Protestant Reformers, however, impatient with metaphysics, preferred not to cope with such an entity and denied its existence.(5) To them it seemed simpler to say that grace is something wholly in God, namely, His favor towards us. But then, if grace is not something real in man, our "justification" can no longer be conceived as a real change in us; it will have to become a sheer declaration on God's part, e.g. a declaration that, thanks to the work of Christ, He will henceforth consider us as just, even though we remain inwardly the sinners we always were. Hence, the Protestant doctrine of "forensic" or "extrinsic" justification. Now watch what happens to our own act of faith: it ceases to be the foundational act of an interior renewal and becomes a mere requirement, devoid of any salvific power in its own right, which God arbitrarily sets as the condition on which He will declare us just. Whereupon, watch what happens to our good works: they cease to be the vital acts wherein an ontologically real "new life" consists and manifests itself; they become mere human responses to divine mercy—nice, but totally irrelevant to our justification—or else they become zombie-like motions produced in us by irresistible divine impulses, whereby God exhibits His glory in His elect.

Now, again, few Protestants have thought these matters through. Most do not realize that the theology they have inherited derives historically from nominalistic assumptions, which led Luther and Calvin to deny the existence of sanctifying grace. Rather, they feel that they are simply reading St. Paul. "By grace are ye saved, through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast" (Ephesians 2:8f). They feel that an extrinsic, purely declaratory justification is the obvious meaning of such passages. Catholic apologetics, therefore, must show the opposite. It is no use arguing metaphysics until we break down that lively conviction by which the Protestant feels that St. Paul is his home turf. We must show that St. Paul's real position is far closer to that of Trent than to that of Luther.

Here, then is apologetics at work in a different way—the way of exact and objective exegesis.(6)

The place to begin is with the fact that St. Paul expounds and contrasts two economies of justification or two orders of righteousness. Thus, Philippians 3:9 says: "(I counted all things loss) that I might be found in Him, not having my own justice, which is from the Law, but the justice which is from the faith of Jesus Christ, the justice that comes from God through faith." Here the main contrast is between justice from the Law and justice , whereupon a second contrast emerges between justice and justice God.

This second contrast reappears in Romans 10:3, "(The Jews) not knowing the justice of God and seeking to establish their own justice, did not submit to God's justice."

We learn the result of this Jewish conduct in Romans 9:30-32, "What shall we say then? The gentiles, who were not pursuing justice, laid hold of justice, but the justice which is from faith. Israel, however, pursuing the law of justice, did not attain the law" (i.e. did not accomplish or fulfill it). The exact interpretation of this text has been debated,(7) but for our purposes it suffices to see that Paul was speaking of a justice pursued by way of works and that such justice was the great ambition of the Jews in connection with the Law of Moses.

The point that Mosaic legal justice was a matter of works reappears in Romans 10:5 ("Moses wrote of the justice which is from the law that the man who keeps it shall live by it," quoting from Leviticus 18:5) in contrast with the justice from faith. The same is said in Galatians 3:12 ("But the law is not from faith; rather the one who does those things will live in them") and in Romans 2:13 ("It is not the hearers of the Law who have been justified before God but the doers of the Law will be justified," i.e. will be declared just at the last judgment), and this is expounded at length in Romans 2: 23-27: "You who glory in the Law, you dishonor God by transgression of the Law....To be sure, circumcision is profitable if you observe the Law; but if you transgress the Law, you are returned to a state of uncircumcision. So, if the uncircumcised man keeps the just precepts of the Law, shouldn't he be regarded as circumcised? In fact, the man who remains in his natural state of uncircumcision and who has accomplished the Law will judge you, who with letter and circumcision have broken the Law."

So, over against the justice of God, which is the justice of faith, there is a self-justice which is of the Law and which is a justice of works. This latter would give men a basis for boasting (Romans 4:2, Ephesians 2:8-9), since works give one a strict right to be considered just: "To the man who has works, his salary is not counted as a favor but as something due," (Romans 4:4).

Now, as a matter of practical fact, does anyone really have this self-justice of Law and works? Over and over again Paul answers in the negative: "for from the works of the Law no flesh is justified before Him" (Romans 3:20); "Israel, pursuing a law of justice, did not attain to the Law; why? because Israel did not seek to attain it through faith but through works" (Romans 9:31-32); "For all who proceed by the works of the Law are under the curse; for it is written, 'Cursed be anyone who does not persevere in practicing all that is written in the Book of the Law'"(Galatians 3:10, quoting Deuteronomy 27: 26 and the context indicates that the curse has indeed gone into effect).

How does St. Paul back up this startling thesis? How does he explain the failure of anyone to be justified before God by the works of the Law? Here are the steps of his answer.

1. "For through the law comes knowledge of sin" (Romans 3:20). The law makes sin better known. What else?

2. "The law works (God's) wrath. For where there is no law, there is no transgression" (Romans 4:15), meaning, of course, no transgression of positive law.

3. Such transgression is deadly. "For while we were in the flesh, the passions of sins, which were through the law, worked in our members so as to bring forth death" (Romans 7:5). The passions or causes of sins were stirred up by the law. "While we were in the flesh" describes the situation of Christians before their baptism. So the law is clearly being given some part of the responsibility for the existence or activity of the passions which lead to various sins. What is this responsibility?

4. The answer is given in Romans 7:7-25, a text which falls into two parts, verses 7-12 and 13-25. Here is the first part. "What shall we say? Is the law sin? Far from it! But I would not have known sin except through the law. For indeed I would not have known covetousness, if the law had not said, 'Thou shalt not covet.' But sin, taking occasion of the commandment, produced in me all covetousness; for without law sin is dead. So long as there is no law, I was alive; but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died, and the commandment which was for the sake of life turned out to be for death. For sin, taking occasion of the commandment, seduced me and, through it, killed me. So then the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, just and good."

There is a human story here, but whose story is it? St. Paul's "me" is certainly not meant to refer exclusively to himself. Some interpreters have thought he meant the young Jew in general and then, perhaps, by analogy, any young person. For just as the young Jew gains awareness of sin through learning the revealed Law, so also the young Gentile learns sin through the emergence of his conscience at the age of reason. On this interpretation, the time when I was alive without the law was the time of my non-responsible childhood. Thus Origen and St. Jerome.(8) Other interpreters have thought that Paul's "me" is the subject of human history. Man knew sin before Moses but not with the same killing exactitude. It is one thing to have nature or conscience as one's accuser and quite another to have God Himself. Hence the time when I was alive without the Law was the time before Moses. Thus Chrysostom(9) and Aquinas(10). Still others have thought that Paul was speaking of universal human experience as prototyped in Adam. Our first parent "lived" until God gave him a commandment, of which sin was able to take advantage. Thus Theodore of Mopsuestia.(11)

It may be the case that St. Paul had something of each of these possibilities in mind. Only Adam and Eve were fully innocent before they learned God's positive law. But each of us is somewhat like Adam in this: whenever we become fully aware of a divine commandment, the experience marks a crucial transition both (a) from whatever vague sense of unease we may have felt beforehand to the conscious guilt we must feel afterward, and (b) from the lesser malice of just "doing as we please" to the infinitely greater malice of pleasing ourselves in defiance of God. And this experience of transition which each of us has (perhaps in one way upon reaching the age of reason, and in other ways later in life) in turn parallels the collective experience of our race in history, as the "age of ignorance" yielded to the epoch of Sinai.

In any case, we are now ready for the second part of this text (Romans 7:13-25), which clearly depicts the state of life under the Law of Moses. "Did what is good then become death for me? Far from it! But sin, in order to appear as sin, gave me death by means of a good thing, so that sin might be held the more guilty through the fact of the commandment. For we know that the law is spiritual; but I am corporeal [Paul's word here is not his usual which means dominated by the flesh, but which means made of the flesh.], sold into the service of sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I should like to do, I do not do; but what I hate, I do. So if I do what I don't want to, I recognize that the law is good. But then it is no longer I who do it but the sin which dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. In effect, the desire for good is within my power but not the practice of it....For in my inner self I take pleasure in the Law of God, but I perceive another law in my members, which struggles against the law of my reason, and which enslaves me to the law of sin which is in my members....Thus it is one and the same me who serve the Law of God through my reason but the law of sin through my flesh."

Here the "me" is no longer considered in its state of relative innocence. Sin has emerged, and an inner conflict is unfolding under the most unfavorable conditions. Sin is no longer an agent external to man, as in the case of innocent Adam, nor an interior but latent principle, as in the case of a small child. Sin has become a "law" of the flesh.(12) Given this new power of sin, there emerges a new "me," whom Paul says has fallen into the power of sin.

Nearly every ancient commentator, plus a virtual unanimity of modern exegetes, Catholic and Protestant alike, has understood this new "me" to be the Jew existing under the Mosaic Law. What makes this exegesis inevitable is the fact that Paul, in the verses which follow immediately, makes this sorry state of inner defeat, this impotency of one's better self, a foil for the totally different experience now available in Christ. Through Him we are able to behave "not as our corporeal nature dictates but as the spirit dictates" (Romans 8:4).

Such was also St. Augustine's exegesis, until, at the end of his life and in further reaction to Pelagianism, he changed his mind and extended the "me" of Romans 7 to the Christian.(13) (St. Augustine's example on this point was followed by St. Gregory the Great, Peter Lombard, and Thomas Aquinas.) Needless to say, Luther, Melanchthon, and the Calvinists were delighted to adopt such an idea. To this day, the sad doctrine that our justification must be something merely declaratory has one of its most powerful roots in this fateful mistake: what St. Paul considered the paradigm experience of the Jew under the Law is confused with the paradigm experience of the Christian under the power of grave! And it is interesting to note that the revivalist wing of Protestantism tends to escape this mistake. Encountering Christ in deep experiences of conversion, they taste the power of His victory over sin in their own lives; having tasted it, they have not a doubt in the world that they have been changed inwardly, that God has given them new hearts, and that the nightmare experience of Romans 7 is over for them. Of course, the Christian can fall back into that nightmare. This is the grain of truth in St. Augustine's later exegesis. The Christian can cease to live in the power of Christ; he can neglect prayer, grow cold, and find himself thrown back on his own resources; when he does so, inevitably, he will repeat within himself the experience of the Jew under the Law. For St. Paul's essential point is valid under either covenant: the moral information of the commandment, no matter how sublime, is powerless of itself to secure our practice of the good. Being nothing of itself but an external norm and not an active force, the Law boxes the unconverted or half-converted human heart into an unbearable situation, from which there is no escape but a new and totally different kind of law: "the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus" (Romans 8:2). To this latter St. Augustine also gave full weight elsewhere in his theology, and in that regard the Reformers did not follow him.

In summary, then, what was wrong with the Jewish project to achieve righteousness from the Law is this: the project prescinded from God's grace. Taken in abstraction from grace, the Law was powerless; destined to be disobeyed at least inwardly,(14) the Law served to provoke and deepen sin.

Though it may seem odd to summarize our discussion in that way, introducing suddenly the mention of grace, there is a reason for doing so. Romans 7, with its abstract dialectic of Law and sin, better self and concupiscence, has to be understood consistently with what St. Paul has already said in Romans 2. There he seems to treat the keeping of the commandments as a real possibility: "for when the gentiles, who do not have the Law, naturally do the things of the Law..."(Romans 2:14). In fact, he says, "God will render to each man according to his works: eternal life to those who, dedicating themselves with perseverance to good works, seek glory, honor and immortality...glory honor and peace to all who do good, to the Jew first and to the Greek" (Romans 2:7) and this in a context in which the revelation of Christ is not even under discussion yet.

These words certainly show that St. Paul did not regard good works as impossible, misguided, or pernicious, as some Protestant exegetes have tried to hold. Quite the contrary. But if St. Paul seems to admit justifying works in Romans 2 and to exclude them in Romans 7, the most plausible explanation is that he is speaking of the total human condition in chapter 2, where grace is at work among Jew and gentile alike, whereas in chapter 7 he is showing what happens when the Law is isolated from grace. Such isolation is exactly what is sought, when man seeks his own righteousness on the basis of law.

Moreover, what we have been saying squares with St. Paul's remarks on the function of the Law in God's overall plan of salvation. "The Law intervened so that sin might abound" (Romans 5:20), that is, so that men might become more convinced of their sins and learn humility from their moral failures. For such humility would dispose them toward the ultimate end of the Law: "for the end of the Law is Christ" (Romans 10:4). As Paul explains: "Before faith came, we were placed under the guardianship of the Law, sealed up in expectation of the faith which was to be revealed. Thus the Law was our teacher until Christ" (Galatians 3:23f).

St. Paul's conviction that God intended the Law to be provisional has its roots in the earliest preaching of the Church. Stunned by the death and resurrection of Jesus, whom they had thought to be the Messiah, the first disciples were compelled to search the Scriptures for a clue to the meaning of these shattering events. By combining Psalm 18 (alluded to in Acts 2:23) with Psalms 16 and 110, Peter and the others were able to see that death and resurrection had been part of the script, so to speak, for the Messiah. God had all along intended that His Christ should suffer (Acts 2:23; 3:18) and that he should not receive his sovereignty on earth but in Heaven, after a resurrection (compare Acts 2:25-35 with the vision of the Son of Man in heaven in Daniel 7). These points had to be preached, because otherwise the Jews could not be persuaded that the facts about Jesus, however true, "filled the bill" of messianic prophecy. But merely to preach these points of correspondence was not enough. The question remained, why? Why should the Messiah have to go through all that! It made no sense, given Judaism's picture of what was wrong with the world. According to that picture, what was wrong was Israel's failure to enjoy the exaltation among the nations which was her due as God's people. What needed fixing was the geo-political situation. For once the Messiah had made Zion the visible center of divine and human power, the nations would flow up to her, forsaking their idols, and the blessing of the knowledge of the Law would flow out to all people. But if the Messiah was supposed to suffer and die, mankind's religious problem had to be quite different from what the Jewish picture contemplated. What was needed was a clue to a whole new picture. This clue was found in the Servant Songs of Isaiah (especially Isaiah 52:13 -53:12), where the suffering and death of the Servant are presented as a vicarious atonement for sin. "By his suffering shall my servant justify many, taking their faults upon himself" (Isaiah 53:11). If the servant and the Messiah were one and the same figure, that would explain everything, including certain dark sayings of Jesus (Mark 10:45; 14:24). But it would also explode the Jewish world-view. If the Messiah's central mission was to deal with sin, then the problem to which the Messiah was the answer went back beyond the Davidic Monarchy and even beyond Moses; it went clear back to Adam. And if mankind's central religious problem was not ignorance of the Law but bondage to sin, then faith in the Redeemer-from-sin would have to be the guiding thread of God's plan for man, from the beginning. Was it not written: "The just man shall live by faith" (Habakuk 2:4)?

This is the thought that led Paul to Abraham, the man whose faith was reckoned to him as righteousness (Genesis 15:6; Romans 4:1-11; Galatians 3:15ff). At the very origin of Israel, Paul found in Abraham's faith the thread resumed in Christ; whereupon the entire Mosaic sub-plot could be read as a parenthesis ordained to Christ.

The Jewish project to seek one's own justice from the Law, then, was not only psychologically impossible (Romans 7) but also contrary to the plan of the ages, in which the Law had no function but this: in leading us to Christ, to render itself obsolete. Now we can understand why Paul cried out in frustration at the obtuse Galatians: "If the Law can justify us, there is no point in the death of Christ" (Galatians 2:21).

And the time has come to examine that other kind of justice mentioned by Paul: the justice which comes from God through faith.

"For in it (the Gospel) the justice of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, 'The just shall live from faith"' (Romans 1:17). What is this justice "of God" (dikaiosune theou)? If the genitive is one of attribution, then what has been revealed is God's own attribute rather than something He gives to men. Thus Origen(15) and Pseudo-Ambrose.(16) But if the genitive is one of source, then what is revealed is a justice conferred on men by God. Thus Chrysostom,(17) Augustine,(18) and most modern exegetes.(19) What lends weight to the second interpretation is the fact that God's own justice gets revealed precisely in His conferring justice on men, as Paul himself suggests: "so that He Himself might be just and render just the man who has faith in Jesus Christ" (Romans 3:26). By contrast, Luther's notion that "the justice of God" here refers to His vindictive action against sinners is totally unsupported either by the Fathers or by the modern scholars.

The thought of Romans 1:17 is picked up again in Romans 3:21-22: "Now the justice of God, to which the Law and the prophets bear witness, has been manifested apart from the Law, the very justice which, through faith in Jesus Christ, comes to all those who believe, without distinction." Here there is no doubt that God's justice is something which comes to men, is communicated to men.

In this light, look again at a text we saw before: "(The Jews) not knowing the justice of God and seeking to establish their own justice, did not submit to God's justice" (Romans 10:3) We can now see that the contrast is not between God's attribute and man's achievement, but rather between something God communicates to man and something man tries to achieve on his own. Both pertain to man, and so, they are rivals, Now, we can begin to understand this "non-submission." It was not the attitude of the true heroes of the Old Testament. Besides the example of Abraham, we have a whole catalogue of Jews who lived "by faith" in Hebrews 11, a document which, if not by Paul himself, was certainly written by someone intimately concurrent with his thought. "There is not time for me to give an account of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, or of David, Samuel and the prophets. These men who through faith conquered kingdoms, did what is right and earned the promises." (Hebrews 11:32f) Now the key to these men, by virtue of which they are said to have lived "by faith", is not that they did not do any works of the Law! Obviously. Rather, the key is that they lived in total dependence upon God's promises, in total openness to what God would yet reveal. That is why there is no contradiction between their attitude and the surprising turn which revelation took in Jesus Christ. But the other and later Jews had so reduced faith to the keeping of the Law, that the Law could not be provisional; as a result, their whole attitude toward God was not one of expectant faith but one of satisfied accomplishment. So, when the justice that God had all along intended to confer upon man was revealed in Jesus the Servant-Messiah, they did not submit to it. Not so obtuse as Luther, they could see that this "justice of God" was meant for them and so was a rival to the justice they already thought they had. And not so obtuse as the Galatians, they could see that if the Messiah's death had a point to it, then the Law could not justify them.

Now, if what Paul means by is not something to remain in God but something meant to be conferred on us, then we must reckon with that mysterious possibility: a quality of man which is the property of God! Does St. Paul say anything to indicate a knowledge of this possibility? Indeed he does: "God has made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that we in him might become justice of God" (II Cor. 5:21). This verse is the pattern on which Athanasius would learn to say, "God became man, so that man might become divine." It is not a question of replacement but of participation, and the participation is real in both directions. First in Jesus: just as really as the Word took our humanity, just that really his humanity became God. And then in us: just as really as Christ-God took our sins (so really that even the Father forsook Him—Mark 15:34), just that really we receive God's justice. For if we dare to believe that in the Incarnation our nature, without ceasing to be a human nature, received God's subsistence, then we may easily believe that we, in Christ, receive God's justice as our quality. In fact, St. Paul even has a name for this quality. In the very next verse (II Cor. 6:1) he says: "As God's co-workers, we beg you once again not to have received God's grace in vain." What we should not "receive in vain" is exactly what Paul has just said we have "become" in Christ. God's justice is His grace, a gift to men. That is why the justice of God is identically "the justice which God through faith" (Philippians 3:9).

What emerges from these texts, then, is the existence in man of a justice conferred by God. But this justice is tied into faith, whether before Christ's coming, as in the case of Abraham, or afterwards, as in our case. What we must explore next is the nature of this tie-in between justice and faith.

St. Paul's most important text on faith is Romans 10:13-17: "Whoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. But how shall they call upon one in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how shall they hear if no one preaches? And how shall anyone preach unless he has been sent...But not everyone has obeyed () the Gospel. As Isaiah said, 'Lord, who has believed our report?' So faith depends upon preaching and preaching upon the word of Christ" We have here an order of necessary conditions, which inverts to yield the following order of precedence: (1) The word or teaching of Christ, i.e. the Gospel; (2) the mission to preach given to the Apostles; (3) their preaching; (4) our hearing, and finally (5) an act which may be described equally well as () and as obedience ().(20)

The point that faith is based on hearing is made also in Galatians 3:2 and 5: "Did you receive the spirit on the basis of the works of the Law or on the basis of the hearing of faith?" And the point that faith is receiving the words of the Apostles in a spirit of obedience to God is found again in I Thessalonians 2:13 "We thank God for the fact that, as soon as you received through us the word of God which you heard from our mouth, you heard it as God's word." This is why Paul twice speaks of "the obedience of faith" (Romans 1:5 and 16:26, the genitive being appositional) and also why II Cor. 10:5 says that every thought (or every intellect) is to be brought into a captivity which is "obedience of Christ."

These texts indicate that what St. Paul called "faith" certainly included the scholastic sense of the term (assent or submission of the intellect to the truths taught by Christ to His Apostles, and by them to us, on the authority of God) but also included more. The reader should remember that the scholastic definition of 'faith' was designed to do a technical job, namely, to designate the common content of 'living faith' () and 'dead faith' (). It does this job very well; the common content is intellectual assent to the revealed message. But St. Paul's term 'faith' was used by him to designate man's rightful response to Christ's message. Now, where this message consists of truths of fact (e.g. "Before Abraham was, I am"; "I and the Father are one," etc.) intellectual assent is all there is to the rightful response; but where the message contains imperatives ("Repent and be baptized"), consolations ("Fear not, I have overcome the world"), promises ("But I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice"), examples ("When you pray, pray like this: Our Father...") etc., there the rightful response is to do as one is commanded, take the consolation, trust the promise, heed the example and so forth. Indeed, to believe in a command intellectually and then not do it, to accept a consolation intellectually and then not feel it, to acknowledge a promise and then not trust it—these are even unnatural responses. "Dead faith" is an ugly thing—not just "unformed" but deformed by sin and shot-through with the self-contradiction which lies at the heart of every sin.

So, a rightful response to Christ's total message must not only include faith in the narrow sense but must be what St. Paul calls "obedience of faith," which is just what Catholic theology calls the acts of faith, hope and love.(21)

We are now in a position to see the tie-in between faith and justice. Observe first of all how St. Paul expresses the connection in prepositions. He speaks of God's "justice which is () faith" (Romans 9:30; 10:6); he says we are "justified faith" (Gal. 2:16; 3:24). So justice is distinct from faith; it proceeds from it. Justice has its source and point of departure in faith. However, lest we should get the idea that justice is a direct "output" of faith, or a natural derivative, it is vital to see that a divine action intervenes between faith and justice: "God justifies the Gentiles from faith" (Gal. 3:8,30; cf. Romans 3:24). This divine action is highlighted by Paul's other favorite preposition, the instrumental , through. "God's justice is through faith" (Romans 3:22; Phil. 3:9) "he justifies the gentiles through faith" (Romans 3:30). So man gets justified, but God does the justifying, and He does it by means of faith, using faith as an instrument. Elsewhere we have it (Phil. 3:10) that "the justice from God is on the basis of faith ()" and (Hebrews 11:7) "according to faith ()

These prepositions instruct us on how to take Paul's meaning when he dispenses with prepositions in favor of a simple instrumental dative: "For we think that man is justified by faith" (Romans 3:28); "through Him (Christ) we have access by faith" (Romans 5:1). The meaning is the same as before. Faith remains God's instrument in justifying, and not (as Luther supposed) man's instrument in getting justified.

But how does God use this instrument? We have an indication from Romans 4:3f. "Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him () for justice." In the Hebrew of Genesis 15:6, the verb is active: "God counted it as justice." So the mystery is being described as an accounting procedure. God credits to Abraham's account as having the value of Now the question is what kind of accounting this is. Luther supposed that God took a thing of no real value (our faith) and made it stand for something of value. God doctored the Book of Life! Such an idea has no foundation in the text. The key verb here () is used throughout the Septuagint (Psalm 106:31; Isa. 40:17), and even in Koine Greek, and in the New Testament (Acts 19:17), and even in St. Paul's epistle to the Romans (2:26; 9:8), to mean an honest reckoning, based on a real equivalence of value between the two things. Nowhere does the crediting presuppose a disproportion between the thing furnished (e.g. faith) and the value put on it (e.g. justice). No, indeed; what Abraham's faith is said to count for in Gen. 15:6 is the very thing which the keeping of the Law is said to count for in Deuteronomy 6:25 and 24:13. Living faith is worth righteousness. Yes, but not in the way that works are worth it. Hear how Paul continues the passage which he started about Abraham (Romans 4:4f): "To the one who works, his wages are not credited to him according to grace but according to what is owed. But to the one who does not work but believes in Him who justifies the wicked, his faith is credited to him for righteousness. " So, if faith is really worth righteousness, it is not worth it in the way that works are. The latter have their value in the order of strict justice, whereas faith has its value in the order of grace ().

Does it follow, then, that the order of grace is arbitrary, unreal, an order in which the worthless is accorded fictitious worth? Not at all! We have seen what living faith really is. It is that rightful response to the Gospel, whereby man assents to the truths, heeds the commands, feels the consolations, trusts the promises—in short, it is that total attitude toward God which (as from a source) or through which (as by a means) God can draw forth every good work with the further help of His actual graces. Between such faith as a basis and the "measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ" as an apex, there is a real continuity and proportion. is why God can use faith to justify us, and why He can, without dishonesty, credit that faith to our account as the root and foundation of all justice.

For as St. Paul himself says, in a verse which ought to have stopped the mouth of Luther forever, "We are God's handiwork, having been created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them" (Ephesians 2:10). Our new creaturehood in Christ Jesus is our reception, through grace, of the "obedience of faith." Through that faith, as through an instrument, God has refashioned us, making us now prompt to obey. Our new estate is thus ordered to good works as to its intrinsic and God-intended finality. With what joy, therefore, do we walk in them, we who believe! And woe to us if we do not walk in them, for then we betray our faith and frustrate God's handiwork.

So we have, and are intended to have, works. Does it follow that we may boast? Not at all! For our works, unlike the works attempted by the Jew under the Law, are not us but God. Rooted in God's gift, brought forth by living faith, God's instrument in us, these works are grace-works. They are our justice faith, and therefore they are justice in the order of grace (), not in the order of self-achievement where boasting arises.

Living faith: our quality but God's instrument; good works: out deeds but God's handiwork; our deeds as men living in Christ, not the motions of "graced" zombies still dead in sin—these are the possibilities overlooked by Luther and Calvin but preached by Paul and defined by Trent.

Notes

1 Council of Trent, Canons on Justification, especially canon 24; Denzinger-Schoenmetzer # 1574. The Church considers herself bound to this position by James 2:14-26.

2 The teaching of the Second Council of Orange is given in Denzinger ## 374ff. and that of Trent in #1553. To say that, prior to a person's conversion (or baptism), his or her "good deeds" may merit God's grace is Pelagianism or worse; even to say that man has the initiative in this preparatory stage, or that his first response of faith is his own free motion, his own step the grace of God and not already an effect of the grace of God, is a heresy (Semi-Pelagianism).

3 Trent, Decree on Justification, chapter 8 (Denz. # 1532), and canon 9 (Denz. 1559).

4 See the Church's condemnation of Michael Baius, Denz. ## 1901ff.

5 See the magnificent discussion in Louis Bouyer, (Westminster: Newman Press) 1956.

6 In what follows, I borrow substantially from the classic exposition by Lemonnyer in the , vol VIII/2, col. 2050ff.

7 Compare the view of St. John Chrysostom, (hereafter=PG) 60, col. 563, with that of Aquinas, In epistolam ad Romanos>, c. 9, lect 5

8 Origen, pg 14, col. 1082; St. Jerome, (hereafter PL) 22, col. 1025.

9 St. John Chrysostom, 60, col 501.

10 Aquinas, c. 7, lect. 2.

11 66, col 811

12 When discussing this passage with a Protestant, most especially a Protestant male, one must keep in mind that one is talking to a person who went through the travails of adolescence without the help of the Sacraments. To such a person, it seems the most obvious thing in the world (too obvious, indeed, to be mentioned that what St. Paul is talking about is erection, sexual lust, and other aspects of arousal. This idea is abetted by the King James Version, which uses 'lust' and 'concupiscence' throughout this passage, where I have used 'covetousness'—words which had a broader meaning in the 17th Century, of course, than they have today. The fact of the matter is that Paul is not speaking exclusively nor even primarily of sexual matter. By the "law in our members" he means the whole phenomenon of over-inclination towards visible, tangible, worldly goods and values—an overinclination to which man's bodily nature () makes him naturally liable, and to which Adam's fall has made man not only liable but actually subject (). Thus man's sinfulness, for Paul is a broad-based as man's very secularity. In light, it is intelligible why even the very first and most basic commandment of the Law, the commandment to have God alone as one's ultimate concern, should prove to be so difficult, cross-grained, and frustrating to us.

Catholic children, thanks to the early and regular practice of Confession, tend to grow up with a better grasp of this broad character of "sin." But in Protestant countries, few factors have been more ruinous to Christianity than the tendency to almost identify sin with sex and thereby to shift the center of "sin" away from deliberate acts and towards the uncontrollable motions of the "id" or the genitals.

13 II, 1, 32, col. 629.

14 I say "at least inwardly" because, as far as public and merely external observations are concerned, Paul concedes that he himself was blameless: Philippians 3:6. See Aquinas's comment, c. 3, lect. 2.

15 14, col, 861.

16 17, col, 56.

17 60, col, 409.

18 44, col 211.

19. Cf. Sanday-Headlam, (IGC) p. 25.

20 For the same indifference between 'faith' and 'obedience', compare Rom. 10:16 with II Thess. 3:2.

21 See how the acts called hope and love are founded on intellectual assent (otherwise I wouldn't even acknowledge the command or the promise, etc.) but add to it in such a way that the assent the loving assent of the whole man. This is why Trent, using 'faith' in the narrow sense, was right to say that faith is the root and foundation of all justification that faith is made living by hope and love.

(Appendix 4 from "Reasons for Hope" published by Christendom Press, 2101 Shenandoah Shores Road, Front Royal, VA 22630, (800) 877-5456.)


TOPICS: Catholic; Evangelical Christian; Orthodox Christian; Theology
KEYWORDS: catholic; catholicism; protestantism; theology
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To: rzman21
Ping to you since I mentioned you. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/2819100/posts?page=177#177
181 posted on 12/13/2011 9:57:05 PM PST by boatbums (Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us. Titus 3:5)
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To: johngrace
Whoa. I didn't say that to set you off and certainly not to compare one act with another or even suggest they were in any way comparable. My point was simply that you cannot judge a faith tradition by the acts of one who may profess that faith. This is something we get reminded of every time there is a thread that speaks about abuse or any other problem within the Catholic Church. The person you know is flat out wrong for acting that way and we see the exact reason why is because it brings shame upon the name of Christ - just like Paul was so upset with the Corinthians about. So, please, I am not overreacting nor did I say what I did to rile anyone. It was a simple point that I thought would make sense. That's all. So thanks for the concerns about my mental health. I'm okay fine.

I hope you and yours have a very merry Christmas and a happy and healthy new year.

182 posted on 12/13/2011 10:06:32 PM PST by boatbums (Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us. Titus 3:5)
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To: boatbums; wmfights; metmom; Iscool; Quix; RnMomof7; HossB86
>>Boy, does it ever get old! I've been on Free Republic for over five years now and I remember the same exact arguments on the RF back then.<<

Galatians 6:9 And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.

2 Corinthians 4:1 Therefore seeing we have this ministry, as we have received mercy, we faint not; 2 But have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully; but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God. 3 But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost: 4 In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them. 5 For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus' sake. 6 For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. 7 But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us. 8 We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; 9 Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed; 10 Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body.

Isaiah 55:11 So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.

183 posted on 12/14/2011 5:42:14 AM PST by CynicalBear
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To: boatbums
Tell me, rnmomof7, as a Mom and a former Catholic, did you see a lot of evidence of the sacraments helping young Catholics - especially boys - from the "travails of adolescence without the help of the Sacraments"? Or "Catholic children, thanks to the early and regular practice of Confession, tend to grow up with a better grasp of this broad character of 'sin.'"? I left the Catholic religion in my late teens, but I sure don't recall all that much difference nor that Catholics had it over Protestants in the understanding of the source of sin in their lives. How about you?

LOL that is hysterical .... The Girls private HS near my former home was known as the maternity ward of Buffalo ...Seeing that Catholics rank right up there as patients of abortion clinics seem to indicate otherwise..

184 posted on 12/14/2011 7:57:13 AM PST by RnMomof7
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To: boatbums

Just thought..we could find out if there is any substance by asking the Catholic men here how many were virgins when they married ...


185 posted on 12/14/2011 8:00:37 AM PST by RnMomof7
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To: boatbums; RnMomof7
Tell me, rnmomof7, as a Mom and a former Catholic, did you see a lot of evidence of the sacraments helping young Catholics - especially boys - from the "travails of adolescence without the help of the Sacraments"?

BWAHAHAHA!!!!!

Or "Catholic children, thanks to the early and regular practice of Confession, tend to grow up with a better grasp of this broad character of 'sin.'"? I left the Catholic religion in my late teens, but I sure don't recall all that much difference nor that Catholics had it over Protestants in the understanding of the source of sin in their lives. How about you?

Not me either.

186 posted on 12/14/2011 8:33:06 AM PST by metmom (For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore & do not submit again to a yoke of slavery)
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To: Salvation
The Sacraments are all instituted by Christ. Here is biblical background on them.

There was baptism and marriage long before Christ.. He did not "institute them ... he never ordained anyone ..he never gave "last rites" .. The only sacrament he instituted was the Lords supper.. and even that had previously been the passover meal..now done to remember the cross not the passover of the jews..

187 posted on 12/14/2011 8:42:06 AM PST by RnMomof7
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To: boatbums; CynicalBear; metmom; Iscool; Quix; RnMomof7; HossB86; HarleyD; Gamecock
Boy, does it ever get old! I've been on Free Republic for over five years now and I remember the same exact arguments on the RF back then. It's almost as if some people think they can sneak it past others and nobody will pop up and disagree.

Amen Sister! I use to wonder why some very knowledgeable Christians would just stop posting on the RF, but now after several years it makes sense. They get tired of being stuck at the elementary school level and want to move on to tougher questions such as reconciling predestination and free will, or where does faith come from.

I've pretty much seen just about all the sides that can be thought up on this most critical subject of Justification by Faith. But it is either grace or works, Scripture says, not both. If it's grace then it can't be by works because grace would stop being grace. But if it is by works, then you can't bring in grace because then work would not be work. I think Paul - through the Holy Spirit - could not have made it any clearer.

Praise the Lord!

I think the most liberating thing for a Christian is to start from the premise "What does the Bible tell me about this" when looking into any question. The answers are there!

So, now we have a newbie who comes in like gangbusters thinking he's gonna show all us ignorant "Fundies" how an "intellectual" shares the Gospel.

IMHO, here is the problem. They don't believe The Gospel given to us in the Scriptures. The same Gospel we are supposed to take to the entire world. They can't believe The Gospel or the power of their church to be the determinate of their salvation collapses.

They hold to a different gospel in which grace is infused into the believer by their sacramental system and their works.

The Gospel is NOT a difficult thing to understand - even a child grasps its truth. But so many people refuse to accept its simple but powerful truth - that Jesus Christ died to redeem us from our sin and the consequence of eternal death.

AMEN, AMEN, AMEN a thousand times AMEN!

Rom. 10:9 that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead you will be saved.

We are justified by Faith Alone, no works, no sacramentalism, no legalism, no sola ecclessia, only Faith in Jesus Christ.

188 posted on 12/14/2011 9:03:54 AM PST by wmfights (PERRY 2012)
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To: CynicalBear; boatbums; wmfights; metmom; Iscool; Quix; RnMomof7; HossB86

Great verses, thank you.


189 posted on 12/14/2011 9:10:09 AM PST by wmfights (PERRY 2012)
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To: wmfights; 1000 silverlings; Alex Murphy; bkaycee; blue-duncan; boatbums; caww; count-your-change; ..
Proverbs 30:5-6 Every word of God is pure; He is a shield to those who put their trust in Him. Do not add to His words, Lest He rebuke you, and you be found a liar.
190 posted on 12/14/2011 9:33:14 AM PST by metmom (For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore & do not submit again to a yoke of slavery)
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To: wmfights

ABSOLUTELY INDEED.

Which word of

“used Ktx”

do folks not understand?

Isaiah 64:6

Douay-Rheims Bible
And we are all become as one unclean, and all our justices as the rag of a menstruous woman: and we have all fallen as a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.

New International Version (©1984)
All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away.
New Living Translation (©2007)
We are all infected and impure with sin. When we display our righteous deeds, they are nothing but filthy rags. Like autumn leaves, we wither and fall, and our sins sweep us away like the wind.

English Standard Version (©2001)
We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.

New American Standard Bible (©1995)
For all of us have become like one who is unclean, And all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment; And all of us wither like a leaf, And our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.

King James Bible (Cambridge Ed.)
But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.

GOD’S WORD® Translation (©1995)
We’ve all become unclean, and all our righteous acts are like permanently stained rags. All of us shrivel like leaves, and our sins carry us away like the wind.

King James 2000 Bible (©2003)
But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.

American King James Version
But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.

American Standard Version
For we are all become as one that is unclean, and all our righteousnesses are as a polluted garment: and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.

Darby Bible Translation
And we are all become as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all fade as a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, have carried us away;

English Revised Version
For we are all become as one that is unclean, and all our righteousnesses are as a polluted garment: and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.

Webster’s Bible Translation
But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.

World English Bible
For we have all become as one who is unclean, and all our righteousness is as a polluted garment: and we all fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.

Young’s Literal Translation
And we are as unclean — all of us, And as a garment passing away, all our righteous acts; And we fade as a leaf — all of us. And our iniquities as wind do take us away.


Ain’t it great when translators sanitize Scripture! /sarc


191 posted on 12/14/2011 9:40:26 AM PST by Quix (Times are a changin' INSURE you have believed in your heart & confessed Jesus as Lord Come NtheFlesh)
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To: metmom
AMEN!! And one more time!

Proverbs 30:5-6
Every word of God is pure; He is a shield to those who put their trust in Him. Do not add to His words, Lest He rebuke you, and you be found a liar.


Trust in HIM/HIS WORD. That scripture alone should make one want to leave a man-made teaching church.
192 posted on 12/14/2011 10:22:53 AM PST by presently no screen name (If it's not in God's Word, don't pass it off as truth! That's satan's job.)
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To: wmfights
IMHO, here is the problem. They don't believe The Gospel given to us in the Scriptures. The same Gospel we are supposed to take to the entire world. They can't believe The Gospel or the power of their church to be the determinate of their salvation collapses........ They hold to a different gospel in which grace is infused into the believer by their sacramental system and their works.

That's right...good post.

193 posted on 12/14/2011 10:39:48 AM PST by caww
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To: boatbums
Boy, does it ever get old! I've been on Free Republic for over five years now and I remember the same exact arguments on the RF back then.

Exactly the same...and with the same arguements and attitudes. Nothings changed. It would appear FR religious threads are stuck in the mud and there's no getting beyond into the deeper things of God......and this in view of the audiance.

Question is how can we take it further to that which might be instructive and draw us all nearer to Christ? To learn more about Him and what He desires of us ...souls are also at stake....and is the bottom line.

194 posted on 12/14/2011 10:46:32 AM PST by caww
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To: caww; boatbums
I know I'm late stepping into this, and I haven't even reviewed the discussion, but I caught the comment about 'works'. I am currently engaged in an exchange with someone on another forum regarding the topic 'once saved, always saved'. The other person is of this opinion. I am not. I look at salvation as the starting line. He looks at it as the finish line.

Have y'all seen any such thread here on FR?

(And for the record, works are the result of an active relationship with God through Christ. Eph 2:10) -Thanks.

195 posted on 12/14/2011 10:55:26 AM PST by Hoodat (Because they do not change, Therefore they do not fear God. -Psalm 55:19-)
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To: Hoodat
'once saved, always saved'. The other person is of this opinion. I am not.

I do...the 'sanctity of the believer' comes to mind. An individuals salvation belongs to Christ....He knows who are His and vice versa....Either they are "sealed" in Him or not...there is no middle ground....those who are KNOW they are His....it's really that simple. Scripture was written that we may KNOW we are His....not second guess His words.

Certainly "works" follow, they cannot help to be so as the individual is a "changed" man. But works are not a 'requirement' which affects ones salvation.... as the thief on the cross had no time or opportunity but to acknowlege Christ's sinlessness and admit his own sin...Jesus took Him with Him that very day.

But in the catholic faith it is my understanding it's a sin to acknowedge you KNOW your salvation is assured. ..and that flys in the face of what otherwise is clearly stated.

196 posted on 12/14/2011 11:17:53 AM PST by caww
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To: caww

OK, I will get back to you on that when I have more time. There are four scriptures I want to ask you about. One is when Jesus said to one who had healed the sick and cast out demons in His name, “I do not know you”. Another has to do with Paul finishing the race. Essentially, why do we need to develop a relationship with Christ if eternal life with God is already assured?


197 posted on 12/14/2011 11:27:20 AM PST by Hoodat (Because they do not change, Therefore they do not fear God. -Psalm 55:19-)
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To: Hoodat
Essentially, why do we need to develop a relationship with Christ if eternal life with God is already assured?

Simple..He asks that we do.

Our 'salvation' does not depend on the degree in which we have a relationship with Him but on His "finished work" on Calvary.

He offers salvation freely given to those who accept it. The old nature does not become inactive in us...rather His nature now makes it possible to love and serve Him as He asks, where before we could not please Him by any effort of our own...nor can we now...it is Christ living His life thru us as we yield those areas He determines need to be.

We can and do all get hung up on our own righteousness when in fact we have none apart from the works He does thru us. It is His works from start to finish...not ours..not ever.

198 posted on 12/14/2011 11:36:10 AM PST by caww
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To: boatbums
Grace is grace after all.

Perhaps the conversation should center on what Grace really is?

199 posted on 12/14/2011 11:41:47 AM PST by caww
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To: aimhigh

How do u know the thief didn’t do the work before the cross?

It is evident he knew something of Jesus and His kingdom. He sure didn’t learn about Christ’s kingdom while hanging on the cross.

Just curious.....!


200 posted on 12/14/2011 11:49:02 AM PST by swampfox101 (I)
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