Oh, and by the way, faith is what saves, not works, so unless you wanted me to argue with you for the sake of arguing......
No,
both faith and works save. Works completes the faith. Faith is only the first step.
Faith Alone is solely the product, the "fruit" [using the word loosely] of Luther's imagination, and probably, his troubled psyche. With his doctrine of "justification by faith alone," Luther brought in a new kind of Christianity unlike anything that had gone before. Faith for an apostolic christian is an intellectual virtue based on belief in truth revealed by God and safeguarded by the teaching authority of the Church. For Luther it was instead an emotional virtue, a sentiment of confidence in God's favor. The result has been that
religious enthusiasm or feelings supplant doctrinal orthodoxy.
Emotional experiences to run riot at the expense of reason.
The new teaching of Faith Alone postulates that alll that man can do is to trust in the mercy of God and believe with firm confidence that God has received him into his favor. As the Augsburg Confession, puts it, "Men are freely justified for Christ's sake through faith, when they believe that they are received into favor and that their sins are forgiven for Christ's sake." This doctrine of justification by faith was the keystone of the whole Lutheran system. It became the battle cry of the Protestant Reformation.
Consequences of this new doctrine have been most unfortunate. An almost entirely self-centered individualism resulted. Personal conversion based on individual piety, guaranteed by feelings of assurance, became the focus of its work. Popular Protestantism urges the individual "to believe on Christ and be saved."
The sense of community and of corporate religion thereby declined. No intermediaries were needed, priests, sacraments, or saints. The individual was supreme to the very Church itself, which had to be defined in a totally different way, no longer as a visible institution founded by our Lord, but as a vague, invisible aggregate of the "saved," known only to God.
The Apostolic Christian has the gospel by his Church; he accepts the truth guaranteed for him by the guidance of the Holy Spirit operating within the Church; he repents of his sins; from the Church, the mystical body of Christ, he receives the very grace and life of Christ, a life he must make his own in accordance with Paul's words: "I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me" (Gal. 2:20). In Apostolic teaching neither the individual nor the Church can be ignored, but Protestant theology, with its doctrine of justification by faith only, changes this equation.
Equally disastrous was the effect upon worship. The Bible, interpreted by each reader for himself, became the one supreme rule of faith. Based on a doctrine of the "inner light," it produced chaos in religious belief and practice about which the Protestants of today are becoming more and more acutely conscious and nervous. In worship, the pulpit supplanted the altar, and the Eucharist became little more than a social meal. The ministry of the Word rendered the ministry of the sacraments almost meaningless.
In this new interpretation of Christianity the sacraments could not be a means of grace; at most they could be "ordinances" to symbolize a favor already conferred. So they came to be regarded as more or less superfluous and to be neglected. Indeed, the logical end of the road was reached in the complete abandonment of liturgical worship and sacramentalism by such bodies as the Quakers and the Salvation Army. The theory of justification by faith alone could not maintain Christian standards of spirituality.
Luther had failed to find peace of soul in ascetic self-discipline and efforts at "good works." He never declared a good life unnecessary. He intended that however great a sinner one may be, granted repentance, he can be justified solely by faith. But to be zealous for good works, thinking them to be a means to salvation, was to manifest a lack of faith in God's power to save.
The popular results of this teaching are disastrous. Men declared that good works prescribed in order to please God were utterly meaningless. It was an easy step from that to conclude that the observance of the moral law itself was not really necessary, still less any ascetical self-discipline for the sake of an imaginary and impossible "spiritual progress."
If there is but an exterior imputation of the righteousness of Christ, there can be no truly interior sanctification of the soul. The one supreme task for a protestant is to reinforce one's feelings of assurance in one's own personal salvation. And such feelings have no necessary connection with obedience to the laws of God or with duties in regard to one's fellow men. Logically such a creed leads to the undermining of Christian standards of conduct and still more of all efforts to attain to higher degrees of holiness in one's personal spiritual life.
The idea of "full, free, and present salvation" for those "justified by faith," as if Christ had done all and the Christian had to do nothing toward his own salvation,
led to the dreadful doctrine that it is belief and not behavior that matters - a doctrine which is the very basis of hypocrisy. Christ warned his hearers against imitating the Pharisees, of whom he declared, "They preach but they do not practice"
(Matt. 23:3). Quite evidently he thought that not only what we believe matters, but also how we behave. In other words,
he insisted on the necessity of both faith and good works for salvation, as does the Apostolic Church. Against this it is urged that Scripture forbids men to rely upon their own righteousness and insists that all must acknowledge that they are sinners needing redemption by Christ.
It is true that we, when we come to Christ, must admit that we are sinners and that he alone can redeem us. Those who turn to Christ must acknowledge his authority as God and as our supreme judge and that we are under condemnation for the sins we have committed and for which wecannot forgive ourselves. Nothing of our own previous righteousnessis matters.
Yet after we have repented of our sins and have obtained forgiveness, righteousness is expected of us. God is not indifferent as to how we live. We must show our antagonism toward evil by trying to live a holy life, and the will to do this is necessary for salvation. We cannot rely upon our salvation unless we fulfill that condition.
If that be so, what are we to make of Paul's words, "For by grace you are saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, for it is the gift of God; not of works, that no man may boast?"
(Eph. 2:8-9). Paul is there referring to the fact that before one's conversion and attaining to the grace of Christ no "good works" can possibly deserve that grace and also to the fact that, even after one's conversion, it is the grace of Christ which gives value to good works done under its inspiration and with its assistance. But Paul does not deny the value of good works performed under the influence of grace after one's conversion as a means to eternal salvation.
Christ himself certainly went out of his way to stress the necessity of good works for our salvation.
He warned us, "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that does the will of my Father who is in heaven" (Matt. 7:21). Praising good works, he said,
"Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is very great in heaven" (Matt. 5:12). He declared that such good works, or the absence of them, will be a deciding factor in the Last Judgment. Then he will say, "Come, you blessed . . . for I was hungry and you fed me," or "Depart you cursed, for I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat"
(Matt. 25:34, 41). How can it be said that salvation is "wholly without works" if, for lack of good works, it can be forfeited?
Paul wrote, "I have fought the good fight . . . and there is laid up for me a crown of justice" (2 Tim. 4:8). That implies that good works done by those in a state of grace provide one with a just claim in Christ to eternal salvation. In the same sense
Peter says, "Wherefore, labor the more, that by good works you make sure your calling and election" (2 Pet. 1:10). If we believe in the Bible, we must believe in all of it, not concentrating on a few isolated texts and forgetting all else.
Here allusion can well be made to the case so often cited, that of the good thief to whom Christ said on Calvary, "This day you shall be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:43). Since that thief had done no good works, how can we explain his salvation, if faith alone is not sufficient? To say that the good thief did no good works is to take far too narrow a view of what good works mean. We must not think only of being good to the poor or of other forms of humanitarianism. After all, the good thief publicly proclaimed the innocence of Christ and equally, with deep humility, acknowledged his own guilt. These were already good works.
In any case, that the good thief did not have time to do further good works after his conversion could not affect the principle that good works are necessary, good works which the good thief would certainly have the will to do, had he had the opportunity. Paul wrote to the Galatians, "In doing good let us not fail. For in due time we shall reap, not failing. Therefore while we have time let us work good to all men, but especially to those who are of the household of the faith" (Gal. 6:9-10).
It rests with God how much time each of us will have. But while we have it God expects us to do good, and our salvation depends upon our doing it. If we do it, Paul tells us that we shall reap our reward. And our Lord himself tells us, as we have seen, that our not doing it can result in the loss of our souls.
and even if I were to totally agree with your analysis of James that would change that fact.
