From hedrick@pilot.njin.net (Charles Hedrick) Sun Jul 28 20:36:48 1991 Path: aramis.rutgers.edu!dimacs.rutgers.edu!mips!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!psinntp!dorm.rutgers.edu!pilot.njin.net!hedrick From: hedrick@pilot.njin.net (Charles Hedrick) Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc Subject: Re: Religion in the age of easy virtue Message-ID: Date: 29 Jul 91 00:36:48 GMT References: <1991Jul27.213514.13782@ncsu.edu> <1991Jul27.231230.27543@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 66 [You will note that I have omitted talk.abortion.] >You're behind the times, Mr. Rasmussen. About 2000 years behind, in >fact. Christianity has always insisted that doing virtuous deeds >earns you no salvation, but only faith - in other words, virtuous >attitudes. Not quite. The issue is what is meant by saving faith. (I'm using Protestant terms here, because the view you attack is primarily a Protestant one. And of course, I'm a Protestant. I realize that David is a Catholic, but I think what I have to say will probably be acceptable to him, modulo differences in terminoloy.) Faith isn't quite an attitude -- it's a commitment. The life of faith involves continuing self-examination and prayer. The commitment made when someone "accepts Christ" is to continue in relationship with Christ. This means that Christians are expected to regularly look at what they have done (and not done), and to repent. What repentance means is more than just being sorry. It means to prayerfully consider what led to the failures, and with God's help make the necessary changes. This process is not always easy or immediate. But if someone does not engage in prayer and repentance, they are not being a Christian. There are (at least) two ways that this process can fail. (Detailed analysis will differ between Protestants and Catholics, at least in terminology.) In the correct situation, we have both trust in God and Christian actions. These are tied together by the ongoing process of prayer and repentance. It is this process that allows spiritual growth to issue in improved actions, and failure in action to drive spiritual growth. All three things are needed: the trust in God, the Christian actions, and the prayer and repentance that ties them together. However in practice I claim that the most common failure -- which leads to the others -- is a failure in prayer and repentance. If this fails, the link between faith and action is lost. Trust in God turns into religious feelings that lack the element of commitment. Similarly, Christian actions lose their grounding in the relationship with God, which is necessary in order to allow for change and growth. Protestant terminology came out of a time when the Reformers believed that Christian action had lost its grounding in prayer and repentance. I don't want to argue whether their view of the 16th Catholic Church was right or not. But the polemic against "salvation by works" is against a system in which they believed good works were done simply to build up credits, and did not follow from a genuine commitment to God. While such works may benefit others anyway, they are not associated with any real change in the person. Failure did not lead to repentance, and genuine growth, but to being assigned formal penances, which can be carried out mechanically (though that certainly was not the intention). Thus the Reformers emphasized that it is not works *in themselves* that save. However they did not intend to go to the opposite extreme and suggest that the Christian life is based on religious feelings alone. Faith, as used by the Reformers, includes commitment to Christ and submitting one's life to him on a continuing basis. This is the reason that the Reformers emphasized the need for repentance. The term repentance for them described the entire process I talked about above, of reviewing what you have done in prayer with God, and accepting correction. It is the link between faith and action. It is a process of mutual feedback, where growth in understanding of and reliance on God and growth in bringing our lives into conformance with Christ's standards reinforce each other. Thus the good works are necessary, but they are necessary *results*. However religious feelings are not enough. A faith that does not include the element of commitment, and thus does not establish the basis for a continuing life of repentance, is not saving faith. From hedrick@pilot.njin.net (Charles Hedrick) Mon Jul 29 03:09:29 1991 Path: aramis.rutgers.edu!dimacs.rutgers.edu!seismo!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!psinntp!dorm.rutgers.edu!pilot.njin.net!hedrick From: hedrick@pilot.njin.net (Charles Hedrick) Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc Subject: Re: Religion in the age of easy virtue Message-ID: Date: 29 Jul 91 07:09:29 GMT References: <1991Jul27.213514.13782@ncsu.edu> <1991Jul27.231230.27543@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu> <1991Jul29.025342.4547@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 44 >He denies he's Catholic; he declares he's an atheist. Sorry, I hadn't seen that. The fact that there's been an ongoing discussion about djr's religion was just brought to my attention, but I still haven't read the relevant articles. I was not intending to take sides in that discussion, but just to warn people that there might be some differences in terminology between us because of background. >But the works >themselves are supposedly only the workings of God's grace within you. >Good works done *without* faith earn you nothing. ... >Now: where does the notion of faith as an ongoing commitment fit in >with the doctrine of salvation as a free gift? Self-examination, >and prayer, and repentance, are a lot of work. So salvation *isn't* a >free gift. It's something to be earned, with enormous effort and >difficulty. (Only it isn't earned with virtuous *deeds*.) You're right that being a Christian is a lot of work. But I wouldn't say that this work earns salvation. You say that "good works done without faith earn you nothing." If you're implying that good works done with faith, or faith itself, earn something, then I'd disagree. I'd say that the Christian life, including faith, repentance, and good works, is the *result* of God's grace, not its cause. Grace is both free and costly. When talking about it as a "free gift", we have to be very careful what we mean by free. It's free in the sense that the price has already been paid. No matter how bad we are, we can still accept it. But it's costly in the sense that it will ultimately cost us our whole lives. If people are saying that grace is free in the sense that it commits us to nothing, then I strongly disagree. "Send for your free sample. No obligation. No salesman will call." Sorry about that. There is most certainly obligation, and a salesman will call. Accepting Christ means accepting him as Lord and Savior. Note the "Lord". God is patient. He doesn't issue ultimata of the form "you must do X by date Y, or you're no longer saved", nor do the early stages of our life as a Christian necessarily require us to realize all of its implications. Thus we don't necessarily make an initial commitment to all of the specific things we'll eventually be called on to do. It may take God time to get us to unclench our fingers and let him change certain areas of our lives. But in accepting him as Lord, we've given him permission to do this, and promised that we'll give him the opportunity through prayer and repentance to work on us. Command: followup Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc To: akbloom@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu Subject: Re: Religion in the age of easy virtue Distribution: References: <1991Jul29.025342.4547@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu> <1991Jul30.025833.17780@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu> >You can say this isn't "earning" it, but then I'd say you're using a >non-standard definition of "earning" here. At least from the Protestant perspective, the human role in salvation is seen as entirely one of response. Depending upon the approach you take, the human role may vanish into almost complete passivity. (The Calvinist view you referred to, though a similar view was also held by Luther. I should warn you that I am in some slightly loose sense a Calvinist.) Faith and repentance are certainly essential to salvation, but they are seen as responses that are created by the Holy Spirit acting inside us. If you consider faith that we have been given as something that can be used to earn God's favor, then fine, at least we understand what you mean by "earn". But it's going to cause great confusion if you use that meaning in discussions with Christians. Christians typically don't use the term "earn" in this context, because it has historically been associated with the idea that people had to do (or believe) something independent of God before he would reward them with grace. (It's not clear that anyone ever actually held that view, mind you, but it's the implication the term typically has in a discussion like this.) I believe the correct view is that grace comes first, and both faith and works result from it. >Charitable works can build a feeling of charity, and so on. Why should >work not be the cause of grace in the sense that it can build faith, >and therefore create the conditions for receiving grace? That's a view >which appears to be largely absent from Christianity. I absolutely agree that charitable works can build a feeling of charity. That's why I described the mutual relation of faith, repentance and action as I did. I said that faith and action reinforce each other, and repentance (interpreted broadly) is what ties them together. The problem is your assumption that faith is a precondition for grace. It's not, at least not in the tradition of the Reformers. Grace precedes all three: faith, repentance, and action. It creates them. However to leave it at that would be a bit unfair to you, because it would imply that you've simply misunderstood Christians, and have postulated a primacy to faith that isn't really there. In fact there are things said that could easily give rise to your impression. As you point out, it is clear that (at least in the Protestant tradition) works without faith cannot save, but we shout "sola fide" at the top of our lungs. This naturally gives the impression that faith without works *can* save. Maybe there's something to that, but I'd like to point out two things. First, for those who invented "sola fide", faith wasn't really the basis for our salvation, but the way we receive it. The basis for salvation was God's grace (another of the three sola's: "sola gratia"). Grace always comes first. Second, faith always included with it repentance. Faith without repentance is a contradiction in terms. It's not real faith, but a religious enthusiasm. While repentance is not itself an action, it is the process that ties faith to action. So requiring repentance is a guarantee that we can't really have faith without works. Even so, it is possible that there was an overemphasis on the beliefs or feelings. Part of this was a reaction to what the Reformers saw as a system that based salvation on works, almost a system of counting "brownie points" to get into salvation. (I'm not interested in discussing to extent to which their perceptions of 16th Cent. Catholicism were correct. Right or wrong, that's what they thought they saw, and understanding that is important to understanding what they meant.) Now in later centuries we've seen that there's an equivalent danger in faith. One can have a system that regards our faith as something meritorious in itself, and come to rely on our faith rather than on God's grace. But that's not what they meant. "Sola fide" to them was a way of focusing on God's grace. Faith in this context really means trust in God. It is an injunction to trust God, not ourselves, whether our faith or our works. Another problem is a terminological one. Faith is by definition a response to God. Works are not necessarily. Atheists can do good works. This creates an asymmetry in the terms, because one can have works within religious significance, but faith is by definition centered on God. In fact there's more symmetry in reality than the terminology would indicate. Just as one can have works that look Christian but aren't, one can have things that look like faith and aren't: religious enthusiasm or belief without commitment. However because of the assymetry in terminology one can speak of good works that are not religious. But the equivalent in the areas of feelings and beliefs are not faith. They are something that only looks like faith. I think if we had a term that meant "good-works-done-out-of- gratitude-to-God-for-saving-us" the Reformers would have been more inclined to use it as an equally important parallel to faith. At any rate, I claim there is an essential parallelism: Just as faith is the attitude and belief with which we receive salvation, Christian action is the way we live our salvation. And repentance is what ties them together. But the salvation itself is not a result of any of these. It is a result of grace, which comes first.