Tag Archives: salvation

Faith and Love

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Giotto, Christ Washing the Disciples' Feet

Christ Washing the Disciples’ Feet, by Giotto (c. 1305), Scrovegni Chapel, Padua.

For the past little while, since I’ve been engaging with hostile Protestants, I’ve been increasingly troubled. Because to my Protestant-steeped brain, their reading of the Apostle Paul sounds correct—the way I’ve been raised up to read him. I’ve struggled to read the Catholic idea of “justification through faith plus works” in his thought (even though I know this is a Protestant misrepresentation), and aside from the few verses I’ve explicated, it has been disturbingly difficult. What if we Catholics have Paul wrong? What if Luther was right? What if he really does mean sola fide, justification by faith alone?

At the same time, I’ve been more comfortable with our reading of Saint James and of Jesus Himself; and I’ve recalled the charge I’ve heard all my academic life, that Paul preached a different Gospel than Christ. I’ve never believed that. Both Catholics and Protestants find ways to read Scripture to make it appear internally consistent to themselves; it certainly is possible. But it is very clear that Paul was thinking along different lines than either Jesus or James; he was confronting different problems. Jesus never propounded anything resembling justification by faith alone. It is very clear that Protestants, particularly the Reformed variety, emphasize Paul and sola fide to the exclusion of all other interpretations; they force Jesus and James into their own framework of sola fide. They likewise accuse us of the same thing, of forcing Paul into our framework of “works’ righteousness.”

I’ve been writing recently and vehemently that the Catholic Church does not teach “works’ righteousness”—that it is through our works, done by the grace of God, that we are saved, not by our works, done in our own power (see Philippians 2:12-13). God working in us, through our works, justifies us and sanctifies us; but I haven’t really thought about what it is that is actually occurring in us as this happens. Last night I read a piece by Bryan Cross of Called to Communion that has profoundly affected me; provided me with this missing puzzle piece I didn’t even know I was lacking; shone light on the key to the Catholic understanding of salvation; given the glue that binds together what Jesus said and what James said and what John said and what Peter said and what Paul said, what God has said throughout the entire Bible:

… It’s love. Love is the key. Not faith alone. Not faith and works. Because even if I understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, but have not love, I have nothing; I am just a clanging cymbal (1 Corinthians 13:1-2). Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love (1 John 4:8). Faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead (James 2:14-26)—but what works? Works of love. Jesus said that the greatest commandments are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our mind, all soul, and all our strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves (Luke 10:27). And how do we love God? We keep his commandments (John 14:15). Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law (Romans 13:10).

This has been staring me in the face all along, and it hasn’t clicked. I’ve worn out the section on grace and justification in my copy of the Catechism (or at least I would have, if I were still carrying my paper copy)—and yet I haven’t seen it. The word “love” is used eleven times in that section alone; “charity” is used another eleven. Love—agape (ἀγάπη)—charity (caritas)—all three words refer to the same idea—is at the core of Catholic teaching; as it well should be, since it is at the core of Scripture.

Bryan brilliantly illustrated this to me clearly for the first time in his explication of the thought of St. Irenaeus (c. 125–c. 202) toward justification, and in his piece, which I hadn’t read before but read immediately following, on the soteriology of Pope St. Clement of Rome. Though our doctrine today is more fully developed, both early Fathers reflect these ideas. And if we read Paul with this understanding, then everything makes sense.

If we have faith, but have not love, then our faith is in vain. It is only having faith in love that accomplishes anything toward our justification. If we do good works, but don’t do them in love, then they are empty and meaningless. If we love God, we will obey His commandments. If we continue to disobey God, how can that be love? “If anyone says he loves God, but hates his brother, he is a liar. . . . God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 John 4:20, 16). “No one who abides in Him keeps on sinning; no one who keeps on sinning has either seen Him or known Him” (1 John 3:6).

The Reformers would have us believe that we are totally depraved; that even our good works are filthy rags before God; that the entire purpose of the Law was to prove that we couldn’t keep it, that we were morally bankrupt without salvation, and even with it, we are just and sinners at the same time (simul justus et peccator). And yet all throughout Scripture—in the Old Testament, and in the teachings of Jesus, Peter, Paul, James, and John, we are called to obedience and holiness (1 Peter 1:13-35). We are told again and again that we will be judged according to our deeds (Matthew 16.27, 1 Peter 1:17, Romans 2:6, Revelation 20:13)—and yet Protestants tell us that we are incapable of living by God’s Law; that our works do not matter as long as they are covered by Christ’s imputed righteousness. I have said before that I never felt much inclination as a Protestant to pursue holiness, feeling that my sin was “covered.” Now I see how starkly the Protestant view misses the main idea of Scripture: We are to obey God’s commandments, because we love Him, through the grace which He gives us by the Blood of Christ. It is through living in His grace, growing in His love, conforming ourselves to His image, that we are saved. Faith and works are both just active parts of that.

Analogies for the Catholic view of grace and salvation

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I posted these in a comment to somebody, and thought they might be worth sharing:

The best analogy I can think of to the Catholic understanding of salvation — and this has made all the difference in my life and in my Christian walk — is that we are trapped in our sins at the bottom of a pit, and entirely unable to do anything on our own to get out of it. Then God lowers us a rope (grace), and by that rope He can pull us out. But first we have to take the rope.

Dad helping baby walk

This was a much cuter photo than the ones of the old people and rehab patients.

Another one is this: we are little children taking our first steps — or alternately, we are old and decrepit, or in rehab — in any case, we can’t walk on our own. We can’t even take the first step under our own power. But Christ takes hold of us (by His grace), and as long as we hold on to Him, He holds us up. If we let go even for an instant, or try to do anything without Him, we go tumbling. But as long as we let Him hold us and help us, we are able to take steps forward. He is the one doing all the heavy lifting — we are just moving our feet, inching slowly toward our sanctification. (The old and decrepit person may work better, because unlike the child, we’ll never have the strength to walk on our own. The only good thing about the child metaphor is the paternal aspect.)

Sin and Punishment

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Tonight I’m struggling with Purgatory.

I guess I haven’t really thought much about it before. Like Mary did, it came upon me rather suddenly. Father Joe mentioned Purgatory briefly at RCIA on Sunday. I’ve been thinking lately about the nature of salvation, and the differences between the Catholic and evangelical Protestant conceptions of it. I’ve been reading Karl Keating’s Catholicism and Fundamentalism, and today read the chapters on salvation and Purgatory. It’s been a helpful book. It has drawn my attention to Catholic doctrines with which I still have questions and issues, and has helped me through grasping several of them.

The trouble with Keating is that sometimes I’m not sure he understands the fundamentalist position (or evangelical — his “fundamentalists” sound like every Southern evangelical I’ve ever known) any better than fundamentalists understand the Catholic one. For that matter, I’m not sure I understand the evangelical position very well either. I come from a theologically impoverished background; I have my own “feelings” about things, that aren’t always very rational or consistent. I have been saying for years, and still maintain, that theology is only man’s feeble attempt to grasp the mysteries of God that are ultimately beyond his comprehension. Grace and salvation may themselves be mysteries we will never fully understand. Scholasticism (at least, my prejudiced conception of it) deeply bothered me for a long time; I felt that it tried to regiment and reason away even the mysteries of faith. But the further I delve into Catholicism, the more I admire its consistency. The more I study, the more I find that many Protestant doctrines aren’t baked all the way through.

This is an awfully big bear to wrestle with in one post — I know I will be making many — so let me limit myself to the topic at hand: sin and punishment. This, if I’m not careful, multiplies into redemption, justification, salvation, and lots of other things. But what I really want to talk about is Purgatory.

I bought a worship CD a year or two ago, from a band I’d never heard of before called Branch. I bought it specifically because I was looking for a cover of the Gospel hymn “Nothing But the Blood,” and liked theirs. I was struggling with sin and those beautiful, powerful words kept echoing in my head:

O precious is the flow
that makes me white as snow;
no other fount I know;
nothing but the blood of Jesus.

I liked the CD. They had some really moving, impassioned songs about redemption and forgiveness. But one day I was listening to one of them, and it struck me in a way I hadn’t anticipated:

This is redemption written in his blood
This is forgiveness, the guilty go free
This is redemption, sinners get heaven 
This is a love song for those who believe

The guilty go free? Unexpectedly, these words troubled me deeply. Is that really what my religion espouses? Murderers, rapists, thieves, liars, and con men, getting off scot-free? Is that right? Is that just? Is that really what Christ’s redemption equates to? Criminals walking out of a courtroom unpunished?

Last night, Isaiah 53 came up in my Bible reading, entirely by random coincidence (though the older I get, the less I believe there’s any such thing). This is one of my dearest, most cherished passages of Scripture in the Bible. He was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities. Jesus suffered and died so our sins could be forgiven. I’ve always believed as a Protestant that one drop of His blood was enough to atone for a lifetime of my sins; that no matter what I did, His blood had purchased my forgiveness.

Covering. Keating writes of Luther’s conception of grace as a cloak:

[In the fundamentalist view,] accepting Christ accomplishes one thing and one thing only. It makes God cover one’s sinfulness. It makes him turn a blind eye to it. It is as though he hides the soul under a cloak. Any soul under this cloak is admitted to heaven, no matter how putrescent the reality beneath; no one without the cloak, no matter how pristine, can enter the pearly gates (Catholicism and Fundamentalism, 167).

Is this really what I believed? No, I don’t think it is. I have never accepted that I was “putrescent” or “totally depraved.” I have acknowledged that the sinful nature of my flesh was hopelessly sinful and flawed, that I could never be holy through my own power; but I maintained that there was a lot of good in me, by God’s grace. I never believed that I would go to Heaven as a rotting, putrid mass of sin; I had faith that Christ had cleansed me by His blood. There is power in the blood to wash away sins.

There is power, power, wonder working power
In the blood of the Lamb;
There is power, power, wonder working power
In the precious blood of the Lamb.

The blood, I believed, had washed me white as snow. Sometimes, after repenting and asking for God’s forgiveness, I would truly feel in a state of grace. But then I would turn right around and sin again. Was I “white as snow”? What part of me had been washed clean?

The guilty go free. On this earth, it’s a great travesty of justice for the guilty to go free. No matter how contrite the person is; no matter if they ask, and are forgiven, by the people they have wronged; crime demands punishment. I’ve never been a great proponent of the death penalty, but it always bothered me when death row convicts would argue that they deserved to be spared because they had found grace through Christ and changed their lives. Perhaps so; but nonetheless, they committed a crime; Christ may have paid their eternal debt, but they still owed one on this earth.

“Having one’s sins forgiven is not the same thing as having the punishment for them wiped out,” writes Keating (195). Certainly in my case above this holds true. It is not just for the guilty to go free. God is a just God; it was for our guilt that Christ had to suffer. But that wasn’t enough? “It is not contrary to the Redemption to say we must suffer for our sins; it is a matter of justice” (194).

I have believed, as do Catholics, and as do the (Protestant) composers of the hymns above, that Christ washes away our sins; that he washes us clean. Maybe it’s not as instantaneous a process as I thought. But nonetheless, I will be washed clean. Perhaps Christ’s Redemption is analogous to him taking my death penalty for me: he died for my sins so I wouldn’t have to die spiritually; so I wouldn’t have to suffer eternal torment; instead, I only have to go to his prison, where daily I’ll bathe in his cathartic blood, until I really am white as snow.

Bridging the Gap

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I realized what it is I’ve been trying to do, through my constant, ecumenical assertions that “all who call on Christ’s name are Christians.” I truly believe — I have to believe — that Jesus saves those on both sides of this divide, if they faithfully follow Him and serve Him. I do not believe that He would abandon those who have fallen away from the Church and its sacraments, just as He didn’t abandon the Samaritans (John 4). I have no doubt whatsoever that my grandparents are among the saints, along with many other dearly beloved kin and ancestors. And I don’t want to abandon my heritage, the milieu I’ve been steeped in and that has shaped me. My homeland, my people, are so closely and so inextricably tied to Protestantism — and I don’t want to let go of that. I’ve been trying to bridge the gap between the two, between Catholicism and Protestantism; that by denying any difference between the two, by affirming their sameness, I can somehow remain both.

And I’m not sure I can do it. This recent, hostile conflict has caused me to reconsider some things. I think I am always going to maintain an ecumenical perspective and hope — a belief that in His infinite mercy, Christ saves all who call on His name, even those sheep who have wandered away with misguided shepherds — but I cannot insist that all churches are exactly the same. The faults in my own logic became glaringly clear as I wrote that last entry, and more and more so the more times I read it. My argument wore the thinnest, I think, in my suggestion that Protestant ministers, just by their virtue of having read the Bible, are just as much the successors of the Apostles as the Catholic bishops, whom the Apostles willfully and thoughtfully appointed.

Pope Benedict XVI has commented that Protestant churches are “not true churches” — a widely-quoted statement that deeply bothered me, and in fact turned me off from Catholicism for several years. But I hadn’t actually (and I guess, still haven’t, since this is only a news brief) read the full context of the statement until tonight:

Noting that churches and ecclesial communities not yet fully in communion with the Catholic Church “suffer from defects,” the doctrinal congregation acknowledged that “elements of sanctification and truth” may be present in them.

“It follows that these separated churches and communities … are deprived neither of significance nor importance in the mystery of salvation,” the congregation said. “In fact, the spirit of Christ has not refrained from using them as instruments of salvation, whose value from that fullness of grace and of truth which has been entrusted to the Catholic Church.”

…

Yet, Christian communities “born out of the Reformation” do not share that union as they “do not enjoy apostolic succession in the sacrament of orders,” the Vatican congregation said.

“These ecclesial communities which, specifically because of the absence of the sacramental priesthood, have not preserved the genuine and integral substance of the Eucharistic mystery cannot, according to Catholic doctrine, be called churches in the proper sense,” it said.

I agree with these comments, and find them much more caring than I believed them to have been — though I think the “not proper churches” phrase was a bit careless and probably ill-advised. (The moral of the story: read more than Wikipedia when you’re examining something of such import.)

It’s history, as much as anything, that has brought me to this point. And even if my American ancestors and the people I study were by and large Protestants, in rejecting that faith for myself, I in no way want to reject theirs, or reject them. There are, without a doubt, many strands and elements of Protestant Christianity, in fact some that I’ve grown up with, that I do not hesitate to distance and dissociate myself from. I can’t, and don’t want to, hold on to everything.

It’s the core message of the Gospel, the love of God, that is universal; it’s the divine mercy of God that saves, not anything that any of us do by our own power. Even if I let go of Protestantism, I will maintain that Protestants are Christians and that many are held by God’s saving grace. I will continue to strive to bridge the gap: not by being on both sides of it, but by teaching my Protestant brethren about the Catholic faith, dispelling their misconceptions, and encouraging acceptance and reconciliation in whatever way I can.