On Grace and Faith and Works

There seems to be a great deal of interest and controversy parsing the exact position and proportion and progression of the roles of grace and faith and works in accomplishing and maintaining and completing our salvation. So what is the role of human effort in solving the human plight? Does salvation come entirely from God, or is human belief or action necessary to complete God's work of salvation? The Christian Scriptures offer perspectives such as the following:

Ephesians 2.8-10 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life. 

1 Corinthians 15.10 By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. 

Philippians 2.12-13 Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure. 

Within almost every spiritual path, there is a debate over how much humans must work to solve their problem, and how much we must rely on Divine power beyond ourselves to save us. Different spiritual paths use different terms for this debate, but in Christianity this is often spoken of as the relationship between grace, faith, and works. "Grace" is the free, undeserved gift of God to heal us and set us free. In Christianity, grace is often spoken of with the acronym: God's Riches At Christ's Expense. "Faith" refers to our acceptance of God's grace by trusting in God and relying on God's power. And "Works" are our actions to cooperate with Divine grace, and live into the full potential that God has implanted within us. 

Some Christians insist that God's grace does everything to save us. We can do nothing at all, and God will save us anyway. Other Christians say that God's grace is not effective unless we put our faith in Christ. We must pray to receive Jesus as our Lord and Savior, or else we cannot be saved. But, once we have faith, we do not have to do anything else to stay saved. Our faith has purchased a certified "ticket to heaven". Still other Christians disagree with both of these views. Yes, God gives us grace. And yes, we must have faith. But we must prove our faith by doing good works to show we are really saved. As it says in the Biblical book of James: "Faith without works is dead". Without continual good works and constant effort, we will fall away from salvation, and find ourselves captive to Sin once again.

Yet, this is not just a Christian debate. In Pure Land Buddhism, they look to the Buddha of Infinite Light as a Savior figure who will lead followers to enlightenment after death. This Buddha has such a storehouse of good karma that he has created his own "Pure Land", which is a kind of afterlife paradise. If people trust in this Buddha, he will take them into this Pure Land, so they can learn how to be freed from reincarnation. Some Pure Land Buddhists say that this trust is developed by chanting the name of Buddha every day, as a meditative practice, to prepare themselves for the Pure Land. Other Buddhists disagree. They claim that all we need to do is recite Buddha's name once in life, and really mean it, and he will save us. No works required. The original Buddha seems to disagree with both of these views. His final message to his disciples before leaving Earth was this: "Work out your own salvation with diligence".

There are numerous other examples of this debate working itself our in different spiritual paths. Hindus practice various forms of yoga, which require immense amounts of effort and discipline to master. Yet, in the Bhagavad Gita, God speaks through Krishna and insists that whatever we do for God, we should consider that God is working through us to accomplish it. We should not worry about the results of our yoga, but leave it up to God, since God is the real actor working through all of us. Thus, the great paradox of yoga is this: While it looks like we are earning our own salvation, it is really God's grace working through us to do these good works. As the Hindu teacher Eknath Easwaran puts it: He was only able to do what he did "by the grace of his guru".

The debate starts to be resolved when we realize that grace is what initiates and empowers our spiritual life, and our works are the natural result of that grace flowing through us. Just as the natural result of plugging in a lamp is that it shines, so also the natural result of being plugged into Ultimate Reality is that we shine with Divine Love. Thus we find Saint Paul writing this to the Christian community in ancient Philippi: "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure." And so we find that across the great spiritual paths of the world, our central human problem is solved when we encounter the grace of love and compassion and forgiveness which is greater than ourselves. Once we find this grace, we put our trust in it. And as we trust grace, we begin to co-operate with grace to do works of love and compassion and forgiveness for others. Perhaps this love is the ultimate solution to our deepest problems. 

When we focus back in on the Christian formulation of this problem, we find that the grace of God working within us is not "without effect" as Saint Paul says in 1Corinthians 15.10. The grace of God empowers us not only to have faith in Christ, but also to live the Christ life of love toward others. Just as Paul says to the Galatians: "It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me" (Galatians 2.20). So, it is a failed hypothesis to even try to separate out grace and faith and works as if they could be neatly distinguished. Rather, they are intertwined much as the members of the Trinity are intertwined. Grace is the cause of life within us, and faith and works are the effect. Furthermore, faith is the inner, subjective effect of grace working within us, while works are the outer, objective effect of grace working within us. Faith is the motive, and works of love are the action resulting from that motive. But they do not occur and cannot apart from each other. They imply and entail one another, which is why James 2 tells us that faith without works is dead. They form an organic whole, and we know from dealing with biological organisms that when an organism ceases to be reactive to stimuli, it is dead. So also, when a life does not respond in love to God and God's children, it is dead.

A helpful analogy would be a marriage. A good marriage is bound by love, constituted by trust between spouses, and issues forth in a whole host of activities that embody that love. It would be ludicrous to analyze a marriage and debate when exactly trust must be applied to love in order to "count" as a marriage, and what are the minimal amount of works necessary to stay married. It is not as if someone proposes marriage by saying "I want to be married to you, but I want to know what is the minimum I must feel about you, and do for you, in order to stay married". No, marriage is an organic whole of intertwined love and trust and activity. And at each stage-- dating, proposing, marrying, parenting, burying-- love and trust and activity are present as the divine source, the inner motive, and the outward consequence of that sacramental relationship. So too with our relationship with God.

So why then does Paul say in many places that salvation is NOT the result of works, while at other times Paul insists works ARE a necessary aspect of the life of salvation. For instance, this claim is made within the same paragraph in Ephesians 2.8-10: "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life."

Paul seems to use works in two different senses throughout his writings, as was common in the Judaism of his day. On one hand, there were moral or ethical deeds of justice and compassion that were expected of all people. Indeed, Jews declared that there could even be "righteous gentiles" if they lived a life of ethical goodness according to the Covenant given to Noah and the entire human race (cf. Genesis 9; Acts 15.28–29). This sense of doing ethical deeds of compassion and justice is precisely what is rewarded by Christ in the parable of the sheep and goats in Matthew 25.31-46. And it is this sense of "good works" of ethical duty which Paul talks about in Romans 2:6–11: 

[6] God “will repay everyone according to what they have done.” [7] To those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honor and immortality, he will give eternal life. [8] But for those who are self–seeking and who reject the truth and follow evil, there will be wrath and anger. [9] There will be trouble and distress for every human being who does evil: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile; [10] but glory, honor and peace for everyone who does good: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. [11] For God does not show favoritism. 

But there is also another form of works common in the Judaism of Paul's day, and that is ritual works which form a badge of ethnic or cultural or religious identity. These works are not motivated by compassion or justice to meet the needs of other humans, but motivated to distinguish one group of humans from other groups of humans. These ritual deeds include various marks of membership (such as circumcision), ritual observances, dietary practices, and holy days and festivals. Often these ritual works were used as an "entry ticket" into the "chosen people" to justify oneself as better than another group or culture or race, and to distinguish one's group as specially chosen by God. It is precisely these ritual works that Paul rejects as having any role in salvation. To wit:

Romans 3.20 For “no human being will be justified in [God's] sight” by deeds prescribed by the law...

Romans 3.28 For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law... 

Galatians 2.16 We know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. And we have come to believe in Christ Jesus, so that we might be justified by faith in Christ, and not by doing the works of the law, because no one will be justified by the works of the law. 

Colossians 2.16–17 Therefore do not let anyone condemn you in matters of food and drink or of observing festivals, new moons, or sabbaths. These are only a shadow of what is to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. 

Now that we can see the distinction between Paul's use of ethical works versus ritual works, we can come to see why ethical works are intrinsic to the life of salvation in Christ on one hand, while ritual works are excluded as a basis or cause of salvation on the other hand. Thus, it makes sense why the Pauline letter of Ephesians would insist that we have NOT been saved "as result of [ritual] works", while the very next sentence insists we have been created "for good [ethical] works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life".

This organic unity of grace, faith, and ethical works does not even touch on the ambiguity of what "faith" means across the pages of the New Testament. The Greek words pistis (as a noun) and pisteuo (as a verb) are translated as faith or belief or faithful(ness) across the New Testament. Some parts of the New Testament seem to insist that pistis/euo is something like cognitive belief, such as Hebrews 11.6: "Without faith [pistis] it is impossible to please God, for whoever would approach him must believe [pisteuo] that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him". Other parts of the New Testament seem to use the same word to indicate a heartfelt personal trust in Christ, such as John 14.11: "Trust me [pisteuo] that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then trust me [pisteuo] because of the works themselves." Yet other Scriptures apply the same word to both the faithfulness of God to us, and our faithfulness to God, such as Romans 3.3 "What if some were unfaithful? Will their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness [pistis] of God?" And also Galatians 5.22-23: "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness [pistis], gentleness, and self-control".

To compound this, various translations of the New Testament systematically interpret the faithful actions of Christ as if they are faith or faithfulness that came from us. For instance, the passage above from Galatians 2.16 usually is translated similar to this: "A person is justified... by faith [pistis] in Jesus Christ... We have come to believe [pisteuo] in Christ Jesus, so that we might be justified by faith [pistis] in Christ." Yet, in Greek it reads much more naturally as: "A person is justified... by the faithfulness [pistis] OF Jesus Christ... We have come to believe [pisteuo] in Christ Jesus, so that we might be justified by the faithfulness [pistis] OF Christ." A similar phenomena occurs in Romans 3.22. Many translations say "God's righteousness comes through faith [pistis] in Jesus Christ for all who believe [pisteuo]". Yet, the more natural Greek reading is "God’s righteousness comes through the faithfulness OF Jesus Christ for all who are faithful".

So which is it? Faith in Christ or the faithfulness of Christ that saves us? Does Christ want us to have faith IN him, or be faithful TO him? The New Testament can be read in all these ways. This short essay is no place to unravel the thorny questions raised by Paul's use of pistis/pisteuo, and whether that describes primarily Christ's actions toward us, or our attitude toward Christ. Nor can we adequately parse all the occasions it refers more to cognitive belief, or heartfelt trust, or lifestyle faithfulness. If you want pursue these issues at depth, then check out the two volume set of "Paul and the Faithfulness of God" by scholar NT Wright, (and be sure to also read some of the authors he disagrees with in those volumes). 

Yet, most of us do not have time to read all of this literature and trace down all of many ways the Scriptures use "faith/fulness". So what should we do? Perhaps this complexity and ambiguity is a sign from God that this is a multi-variable organic unity of grace, faith, and works that cannot be unravelled into a nice sequential model, and reduced to a neat formula. There are many Christian catechisms and confessions and doctrinal statements which have tried to do just this. But perhaps it cannot be done (and never has been done successfully). Perhaps we do not possess enough data to come to a precise set of propositions that fully define the mystery of what it means to find ourselves in Christ.

Perhaps the best we can say is that when the grace of God, embodied in Jesus Christ, grasps us, then we begin to be transformed. And that transformation will remake our inner self image and experience of the cosmos. Progressively we will change our cognitive beliefs about God, and experience heartfelt trust in Christ, and grow in faithfulness to the pattern of Christ's life. And intertwined with this inner transformation, our outer lives will be objectively changed as we grow in ethical works of love and compassion and justice for others. And this process of inner transformation in Christ and outer conformation to Christ will continue to grow forever, as we progressively partake in the Divine Life through Christ (2Peter 1.3-4), and are transformed into Christ's image from one degree of glory to another (2Corinthians 3.18). This is a messy description of how grace, faith, and works co-operate to transform us in Christ. But that's the point. God's grace is messy and magnificent.