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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   3169 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 8, 2024

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Some points of clarification: I would agree that works are necessary. I would perhaps even be willing to agree that the merits of our works are imputed to us (not certain, though, because of the one parable). What I am not willing to assent to is that our works are the basis of our justification; that is, that we can be accepted before God because of the works that we have done. Those are always mixed with sin and lacking the spotlessness needed for conformity to God's law.

So yes, to your both-and, both are necessary.

I will point out one difference from your comparison. Unlike the example you give about love and commitment, Paul specifically contrasts faith against works in justification. This makes what you are presenting not as readily applicable. You have no mention of "love apart from commitment" or other such contrasts, which, I would think, would heavily affect how you would read such a thing. (With the caveat that I mostly conceded to the other interlocutors that "faith apart from works" is insufficient to prove the protestant point; you need to understand Romans or the other books more thoroughly to do that, because that in itself does not tell you what faith or works mean in this context).

I think I also think it not unlikely that James is replying to misinterpretations of Paul; I just disagree as to what those are.

I think what Peter is referring to, by the context that follows, "take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability," is speaking of antinomianism, that is, saying that we don't need to concern ourselves with doing good and a reformed life whatsoever, that being free from the law we can do anything. Perhaps 1 Corinthians is relevant.

Protestantism founds its theory of justification entirely -- not partially, not mostly, not a little bit, but entirely -- on reading the entire New Testament and patristic tradition in light of Paul's letters

Justification by faith can be found elsewhere, most prominently in John.

John 3:14-15: "And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life."

3:18: "whoever believes is not condemened…"

5:24: "Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life."

6:40: "For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day."

6:47: "Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life."

11:25-26: "Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?”"

20:31: "but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name."

So at the very least, believing (or however you'd prefer to translate pisteuo) is closely connected to salvation. Does this have the explicit "and it's not by works" here? Not except by implication by omission.

I do not think Peter's warning means that we should ignore Paul, it just means we should read him carefully, and watch out for misinterpretations leading to spiritual danger, like antinomianism.

I hold that we don't need Paul to interpret Jesus for us, nor ought we to read the master's words in light of the servant's.

While Jesus is of course of more importance than Paul, they should both be read in light of the other. It would be foolish not to attempt to use the words of his followers, who are speaking by the same Holy Spirit, to aid in understanding him, when needed.

It seems also you may have missed where the gospels describe Jesus as hard to understand, and—unlike Paul—deliberately so.

But instead we should refer to what Jesus says about his promises and their requirements, and literally every time he talks about his judgment he talks about what people have done, not just what they believe.

And it makes sense to bring up works. Those who are condemned are condemned for their works. I'd contest the claim that this is everywhere, though. I cited John 5:24 above, for example, and that seems like it may be a counterexample. I'm sure there are more.

And when he talks about faith? He uses metaphors that describe it as something small, even insignificant, though containing within itself the germ of something greater that must be allowed to grow. Seeds falling on soil, trees bearing fruit, vines growing -- he talks a lot about growth, gardening. And God is the vinegrower, while we are co-workers with God, tending the Garden in the cool of the day.

I do not think this is relevant; of course our faith is something that grows, and yes, Jesus says that it can be small. When Jesus speaks of faith like a mustard seed, this is not to denigrate faith, rather he extols its power.

I think a lot of differences between Protestantism and Catholicism (and even, to an extent, eastern Christianity) come down to Protestantism trying to drill down to what the "bare minimum" is, and aiming for that.

While this is how it may appear, I do not think this is a good encapsulation of the concerns of the Reformers; they cared seriously about the Christian life. You see them as promoters of lightness and not taking things seriously, when really it was quite the opposite. They preferred a strict imposition of the law, not the medieval minimalistic one, where it was not actually all that hard to follow the commandments and avoid sin (which is not to say we do), and only the monks follow the evangelical counsels and perfections and truly seek a perfect, rather than passable life—no, they preferred one with a rigid law, where we are commanded to love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength (and our neighbor as ourselves) and the slightest deviation from that will not be tolerated, is utterly damning, a law where our every action, even the best, is stained with sin and so utterly damnable. We are hopeless before the law, even regenerate.

It is in this framework that you see the radiance of justification by faith—in this darkness, this hopelessness of our sin and failure and gloom, we have been saved by Christ, who gave himself for us, and we can do nothing but trust in him. We cannot have our standing before God consist in our works, because we are yet imperfect, and so our works cannot be trusted; they remain sinful, except for the acceptance of them by God in Jesus Christ and the non-imputation of the sin we commit in the midst of performing them.

So you have it precisely backwards. It whs the protestants who had their eyes wholly on the goal: perfection. Who sought it eagerly, failed, and despaired. And who were comforted by the grace in Jesus Christ and the forgiveness found within, and our own acceptance based on his own righteousness who achieved that goal—worthy is he, and he alone. While it was the papists, the keepers of the old tradition, who promoted laxity and a lesser extent of the law, who thought that we could serve God well enough to pay for some penalty with satisfactions and purgatory, and who would make our justification, our standing before God, dependent, in some measure, upon our own idiot hopeless selves.

Justification by faith is not the driving force behind protestant soteriology. It is rather the resolution to the actual core concern: our inadequacy before God's law. It is Isaiah 6 that is its heart.

Now to actually address what you were saying.

I'm not quite convinced that your list of requirements perfectly matches the Protestant ones—I would think it's closer to just trust in Christ, and desire for a changed life, etc. are not things upon which our salvation is, strictly speaking, depending, though they will always accompany it in all Christians. (Also, side note: if you're talking about bare minimum, perfect contrition isn't quite the bare minimum for you, as, after looking it up, it looks like imperfect contrition+confession would do? Or does that produce perfect contrition?)

Catholicism doesn't actually claim that "to get to heaven" everyone has to become a heroic saint. It does claim that there's something about the heroic saints that merits recognition, and I think that's a more fruitful area of disagreement than pure justification.

And Protestantism's point is that those saints are still deeply indebted to God, even if we look only at them post-conversion, only at their best actions, and so even their best cannot be depended upon. Of course, protestants do respect the good wrought in pious Christians, but it is ultimately too incomplete in this life to stand before God's judgment.

Protestants were not quite claiming that Catholics were teaching that everyone would have to be teaching that everyone would have to be a heroic saint. It was rather that with the teaching of justification and our standing before God consisting on inherent or imparted rather than imputed righteousness, Catholics should be (even if they are not) teaching that we should have to be a heroic saint, more of a heroic saint than any yet seen.

I also think that the distinctive position of Roman Catholicism is actually the importance of confession, which, while significant, is not given the same encompassing weight in other Christian traditions that have it. In that sense I would hold that the justification debate in the West, when brought to brass tacks, might actually not be "justification by faith" vs "justification by works" but "salvation outside the confessional" vs "salvation through the confessional."

Lutherans kept private confession, I believe, though they did not ascribe to it the same powers, preferring to vest in them instead in faith and baptism.

For me, in addition to these hermeneutical positions, the most compelling argument against pure justification-by-faith is that none of the Christian traditions that pre-date Protestantism (or Hussism, perhaps) endorse it as part of their tradition. There's unity between the Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox, the Oriental Orthodox, and the Church of the East on that point. So, to argue for justification-by-faith, you have to hold that the Church failed to teach the Gospel for some unspecified period of time, not just in one place but in all places. That's Great Apostasy theory.

My answer is just that justification by faith is not of such great importance that the deeply lacking and imperfect understandings of justification found throughout history would constitute apostasy, and that some understanding of the gospel can be had without it, even if not the fulness.

Edit: saw after I posted, you deleted. Why?

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