Redeemed by Faith

"Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ" (Romans 5:1).

The doctrine of justification by faith alone, over which the Protestant Reformation was fought, means that justification is by Christ alone. There is nothing we can do to merit our salvation. Rather, redemption from slavery to sin is freely given to all who trust in God.

Theologians representing the papacy argued against the Reformers that James 2:24 says, “You see that a person is justified by what he does and not by faith alone.” They argued that human works contribute to meriting salvation, though the primary work was done by Christ alone.

The Reformers replied from Romans 4:2–3, “If, in fact, Abraham was justified by works, he had something to boast about—but not before God. What does the Scripture say? ‘Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.’ ” Obviously, they said, it is belief, not meritorious works, that makes us just in God’s sight.

How can we reconcile James and Paul? We have to remember the theme of James 2. James is arguing against those who profess faith but have no good works to prove it. Consider this question: Is justification by faith or by profession of faith? Clearly, justification is only by true, humble faith, which always and inevitably issues in faithful works. Thus, James asks, “What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save Him?” (James 2:14).

Like Paul, James illustrates his principle from the life of Abraham who, he says, was justified by his deeds. When? When he offered up Isaac in obedience to God (James 2:20–24; Genesis 22). Was this at the beginning or toward the end of Abraham’s life? Obviously, the latter. Paul, however, uses Abraham as an example of justification by faith alone because Abraham believed God before he did the works of the law (Romans 4; Genesis 15).

Thus, Paul is speaking of legal justification before the eyes of God, while James is speaking of visible justification before the eyes of men.

If you were on trial as a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you? True submissive faith always produces faithful works of obedience. Ask God to help you manifest your faith through good works.

History and Faith

"He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him"

(John 1:10).

Nineteenth-century liberal thought was highly anti-supernatural, and the liberal theologians of that era sought to strip away all the miracles and wonders of the story of Jesus as we find it in the New Testament. They wanted to present Jesus as some kind of great moral teacher, not as someone who claimed to be the incarnate Son of God. They held that the way to understand what Jesus was all about is to study what he had to say about the kingdom of God. In their understanding, the kingdom is here and now, working itself out in history. It is an evolutionary kingdom, not a supernatural one, in which men are getting better under the moral influences of Jesus’ teachings.

In the early days of the twentieth century, Albert Schweitzer published a devastating critique of this viewpoint. Schweitzer pointed out that the New Testament clearly presents the kingdom of God as a supernatural and catastrophic event that breaks into history from eternity. This is what Jesus announced, said Schweitzer, not some moral rearmament programme. Schweitzer went on to say that Jesus was disappointed when the kingdom did not come and that He died in despair on the cross. Schweitzer himself turned to pantheism.

C. H. Dodd replied to this that Schweitzer was right about the kingdom’s being a supernatural event, but wrong in thinking that it did not arrive. Dodd said that the kingdom fully came in Jesus’ day. He pointed to the miracles of casting out demons, the Resurrection, Ascension, sending of the Spirit, and destruction of Jerusalem. On the cross Jesus cried, “It is accomplished!” Dodd’s view is called “realized eschatology,” and it means that the kingdom came completely in the first century.

Orthodox Christianity teaches there is an “already” and a “not yet” aspect of God’s kingdom. It is supernatural, it is present, and it will yet be fully realized. Only when Christ returns will the kingdom be inaugurated in its fullness.

The same tension between the already and not yet is true of our salvation and sanctification. God has begun a good work and will complete it. Until He does, ask Him for personal diligence, hope, and much growth in Christian grace.

Our Reasonable Faith

Allan Bloom begins his book The Closing of the American Mind with the assertion that the vast majority of students enter American universities with a prior commitment to philosophical relativism. This relativity eschews any form of fixed objective values or truth. Its simplistic creed is that “there are no absolutes.”

While Christians bemoan this cultural slide into moral anarchy, we meet the crisis by throwing gasoline on the fire. I doubt if there is any sector of modern culture that fuels the spirit of relativism more than the evangelical church.

The evangelical world is marked more and more by an anti-rational spirit. Reason itself is viewed as the ogre that brought about secularism in the first place. Therefore, reason is to be abandoned to make room for faith. Yet an unreasoned faith, or an irrational faith, is but one more form of relativism.

Some years ago in a debate at a major evangelical seminary, one debator, a New Testament professor, remarked that people can come to contradictory interpretations of the Bible, concluding, “That’s all right.” He declared that the Bible cannot be limited by logic or reason and that God’s truth may be revealed through contradictions.

Somehow it has become a mark of piety to believe that God’s Word is cloaked in contradictions. No matter that a heresy couldn’t even be identified as a heresy without the rudimentary use of reason to distinguish error from truth.

Reason, as a function of the mind, is an impartial judge. It carries no brief for paganism nor any case for Christianity. Reason itself has no content. It is merely a means to judge the consistency and coherency of propositions.

Again and again Christianity has been attacked in the name of reason. Those who reject revelation have wanted to substitute “natural reason” as the ultimate source of knowledge. Here the mind is closed to content that comes from God via revelation.

As Christians we insist that we have knowledge from special, supernatural revelation that goes far beyond what can be learned by the marked speculation of reason. But, that revelation is not irrational. Christianity is indeed more than reason. It is not less than reason.

Reason is the ally, not the enemy of the Christian. We assert this because God himself is rational. God is consistent and coherent. The truth he perceives and reveals is objective. It admits of no contradictions.

God’s Word is intelligible. It is given to us for our understanding. The faith or trust we live by is not sub-rational or irrational. It is an eminently reasonable faith. We trust with our hearts what we understand with our minds to be true.

Faithful Quotes

“The true, living faith, which the Holy Spirit instills into the heart, simply cannot be idle.”
—Martin Luther

“The first conscious exercise of the renewed soul is faith; as the first conscious act of a man born blind whose eyes have been opened, is seeing.”
—Charles Hodge

“God does not expect us to submit our faith to him without reason, but the very limits of our reason make faith a necessity.”
—Augustine

“It is not a very robust faith which in order to survive must distort or ignore the facts.”
—Elisabeth Elliot

“The more we know of God, the more unreservedly we will trust him; the greater our progress in theology, the simpler and more childlike will be our faith.”
—J. Gresham Machen

“What saves is faith alone, but the faith that saves is never alone.”
—J. I. Packer

“True faith is suffused with penitence.”
—John Murray

“Faith is not a distant view, but a warm embrace of Christ.”
—John Calvin

“Faith does not operate in the realm of the possible. There is no glory for God in that which is humanly possible. Faith begins where man’s power ends.”
—George Müller

“Good works do not make a good man, but a good man makes the works to be good.”
—Martin Luther

“The Bible recognizes no faith that does not lead to obedience, nor does it recognize any obedience that does not spring from faith. The two are opposite sides of the same coin.”
—A.W. Tozer

“Faith is to believe what we do not see, and the reward of this faith is to see what we believe.”
—Augustine

“Live in faith and hope, though it be in darkness, for in this darkness God protects the soul. Cast your care upon God for you are His and He will not forget you. Do not think that He is leaving you alone, for that would be to wrong Him.”
—John of the Cross

Biblical Faith and Fruits of Conversion

Faith is central to Christianity. The New Testament repeatedly calls people to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. There is a definite body of content to be believed, which is part and parcel of our religious activity. But what exactly is saving faith? It is a faith that inevitably, necessarily, and immediately yields the fruit of righteousness. A faith without any yield of righteousness is not true faith.

ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF SAVING FAITH

What are the constituent elements of saving faith? Biblical faith has three essential aspects: notitia, assensus, and fiducia.

Notitia refers to the content of faith, the things we believe. There are certain things we are required to believe about Christ, namely, that He is the Son of God, that He is our Savior, that He has provided an atonement, and so on.

Assensus is the conviction that the content of our faith is true. One can know about the Christian faith and yet believe that it is not true. We might have a doubt or two mixed with our faith, but there has to be a certain level of intellectual affirmation and conviction if we are to be saved. Before anyone can really trust in Jesus Christ, he has to believe that Christ indeed is the Savior, that He is who He claimed to be. Genuine faith says that the content, the notitia, is true.

Fiducia refers to personal trust and reliance. Knowing and believing the content of the Christian faith is not enough, for even demons can do that (James 2:19). Faith is effectual only if one personally trusts in Christ alone for salvation. It is one thing to give an intellectual assent to a proposition but quite another to place personal trust in it. There is another element to fiducia besides trust, and that is affection. An unregenerate person will never come to Jesus, because he does not want Jesus. In his mind and heart, he is fundamentally at enmity with the things of God. As long as someone is hostile to Christ, he has no affection for Him. Satan is a case in point. Satan knows the truth, but he hates the truth. He is utterly disinclined to worship God because he has no love for God. We are like that by nature. We are dead in our sin. We walk according to the powers of this world and indulge the lusts of the flesh. Until the Holy Spirit changes us, we have hearts of stone. An unregenerate heart is without affection for Christ; it is both lifeless and loveless. The Holy Spirit changes the disposition of our hearts so that we see the sweetness of Christ and embrace Him. None of us loves Christ perfectly, but we cannot love Him at all unless the Holy Spirit changes the heart of stone and makes it a heart of flesh.

SO WHAT ARE THE FRUITS OF CONVERSION?

Theologians have traditionally recognized several elements that accompany or follow saving faith. These are called “fruits of conversion.” We will look at a few of them here...

Repentance

When someone is brought to faith by the Holy Spirit, he undergoes a conversion. His life turns around. This turning around is called “repentance,” and it is an immediate fruit of genuine faith. Some include repentance as part of genuine faith. However, the Bible distinguishes between repentance and belief. We cannot have affection for Christ until we recognize and acknowledge that we are sinners and that we desperately need His work on our behalf. Repentance includes a hatred for our sin, which comes with the new affection we are given for God. Repentance is a turning away, having a different view of sin. The Greek word for “repentance,” metanoia, literally means “a change of mind.” Previously, we rationalized our sin, but now we realize that sin is an evil thing; we have a different mind-set about it.

Adoption

When God declares us just in Jesus Christ, He adopts us into His household. His only true son is Christ, but Christ becomes our elder brother by way of adoption. No one is born into the family of God. By nature, we are children of wrath, not children of God; therefore, God is not our Father by nature. We can have God as our Father only if He adopts us, and He will adopt us only through the work of His Son. But when we put our faith and trust in Christ, God not only declares us just, He also declares us His sons and daughters by way of adoption.

Peace

Paul writes to the Romans, “Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (5:1). The first fruit of justification is peace with God. We were enemies, but the war is over. God declares a peace treaty with all those who put their faith in Christ. When He does this, we do not enter an unstable truce, such that the first time we do something wrong, God starts rattling the sword. This peace is an unbreakable, eternal peace because it has been won by the perfect righteousness of Christ.

Access to God

Paul also writes, “Through [Christ] we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God” (Rom. 5:2). Another fruit is access to God. God does not allow His enemies into an intimate relationship with Him, but once we have been reconciled to God through Christ, we have access into His presence, and we have joy in the glory of who He is.

Terminology/Theology Tuesday: Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi

Historically, it has been possible to consider “the well-known and time-honored principle” lex orandi, lex credendi (literally: "law of praying, law of believing") as the fuller legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi: “let the law of prayer establish the law of belief” (Wainwright 1980, 224). But in a convenient sense which has roots in the Latin ambiguity of the phrase, “it is equally possible to reverse subject and predicate,” thus subjecting the liturgy (or ‘prayer’) to the teaching authority of the church: lex credendi legem statuat supplicandi, or “the law of our faith must establish the law of our prayer” (Wainwright 1980, 224). These two understandings have accordingly attended lex orandi, lex credendi from the early days of the church when the principle was derived as an axiom from the capitula Coelistini, a work attributed to pope Celestine I, though the phrase is now commonly credited to Prosper of Aquitaine (Wainwright 1980, 225). As history will demonstrate, this principle has become vital in pursuit of the task of theology.

Both liturgy/worship (‘prayer’) and doctrine/belief (‘faith’) have exercised alternating authority in their interactions with each other at different periods in church history. Champions of the primacy of the ‘law of prayer’ point to a time before confession or creed codified the faith, when Christ taught the earliest disciples how one should pray—and in effect—believe (Pelikan 2005, 158; c.f. Luke 11:1). As Pelikan notes: “therefore not the confession of faith, but prayer, is to be the continuous activity of Christian believers” (Pelikan 2005, 159).  Likewise, the ‘rule of prayer’ has helped settle some of the great doctrinal disputes in church history. Ancient examples include the decades-long formulation of the Trinitarian doctrine. Between the Creed of Nicaea of 325 and The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381, the refining influence of the Gloria Patria ("Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit") helped assure an equality of worship and an equality of glory to the Holy Spirit (Pelikan 2005, 168). This, in effect, became possible under the influence of Basil of Caesarea’s several versions of the Gloria Patria that were in circulation before the council in Constantinople in 381 and which advocate, through liturgy, a position of equality for the Spirit (Pelikan 2005, 168). Later examples of the rule of prayer over the rule of faith include the wars over iconography waged between iconoclasts (those who believed venerating icons was idolatry) and iconodules (those who revered icons and incorporated them into liturgical practice) in the Byzantine Christian Church in the eighth and ninth centuries:

When the reading of the rule of faith put forth by the iconoclasts came into collision with the reading of the rule of prayer represented by the iconodules, the victory in the early battles belonged to the iconoclasts, and the icons were condemned and banished. But the victory in the war eventually went to the icons and their defenders. In the same city in which the dogma of the Trinity had achieved it initial conciliar acceptance and creedal formulation by the First Council of Nicaea in 325, the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 in its confession vindicated the use of icons on the grounds that ‘it provides confirmation that the becoming man of the Word of God was real and not just imaginary,’ thereby finally bringing the rule of faith into conformity with the rule of prayer (Pelikan 2005, 173).

Other examples of the effect of liturgical practice upon doctrinal formation include its influence on the development of sacramental theology.

Can one ask what happens when the rule of prayer begins to detract from the rule of faith? Certainly a central, yet not exclusive, task of theology is to know Christ better (Col. 1:28). Is there a sense in which the current liturgical drama encountered in churches can pull one away from this vital task? The acerbic and enlightening sarcasm of Stanley Hauerwas helps answer this question: 

One reason why we Christians argue so much about which hymn to sing, which liturgy to follow, which way to worship, is that the commandments teach us to believe that bad liturgy eventually leads to bad ethics. You begin by singing some sappy, sentimental hymn, then you pray some pointless prayer, and the next thing you know you have murdered your best friend. (Hauerwas 1999, 89).

Hauerwas’ prescience is important in revealing the hazard of poor or anemic worship toward God, and in this case, its undue influence upon the ethical production of the church. Often the actualized profession of prayer by the communicant in liturgy differs from the professed ideological faith of the creeds and confessions. There is a danger here, because what we do is oftentimes a far more accurate description of what we believe than the credo. In this case, the rule of prayer may exercise undo influence upon the rule of faith, and it falls to the theologian in concert with lex orandi, lex credendi to sound the prophetic voice: lex credendi legem statuat supplicandi, or “the law of our faith must establish the law of our prayer.” This principle and reflection is especially important in the increasingly superficial worship culture of the Protestant, Free Church traditions in North America.

References:

• Hauerwas, Stanley, and William H. Willimon. 1999. The Truth About God: The Ten Commandments in the Christian Life. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press.
• Saliers, Don. 1994. Worship as Theology: Foretaste of Glory Divine. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press.
• Pelikan, Jaroslov. 2005. Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press
• Wainwright, Geoffrey. 1980. Doxology. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.