MUCH CONFUSION exists about the relationship of works to salvation. And the distinction of time must be kept. There are absolutely no works in justification. Neither are works needed to supplement faith. The individual who has responded to God's initiative with faith and love is a saved person. He needs to do nothing more to become saved. He is already. But he will manifest his faith in love to God and his fellow men. And love is practical and concrete. It enfleshens itself in "joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control" (Gal. 5:22, 23, R.S.V.). These are the works—or, better, the fruits—of the Spirit. These are not works done to earn salvation, but done in order to become like Christ. As E. Stanley Jones so beautifully puts it, "The Christian now does not live up to a code, but to a character." This kind of living cannot be accused of legalism.
Some time ago Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in his Cost of Discipleship a scathing rebuke to all those who think that being a Christian is simply a verbal as sent to Christian faith, a mere oral confession that one is a Christian. "Cheap grace," he says, "means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. Grace alone does everything, they say, and so everything can remain as it was before. . . . Instead of following Christ, let the Christian enjoy the consolations of his grace! That is what we mean by cheap grace, the grace which amounts to the justification of sin without the justification of the repentant sinner who departs from sin and from whom sin departs."—Pages 46, 47. He goes on to say that "cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate." —Ibid., p. 47.
The Christian's life involves discipleship, following the Master in His path of suffering and service. The Christian does this because he is saved, not in order to be saved. Too many would rather wear a cross than carry one. Some have become so frightened of "works" that in their Christian life they use the bad connotation of works as a good excuse for doing nothing.
The works of faith, or fruits of the Spirit, are an integral part of the Christian life. They are inseparable from it. He who does not bear the fruit of the Spirit cannot call himself a Christian. Ultimately in the judgment he will be judged on the basis of what he has done. "For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive good or evil, according to what he has done in the body" (2 Cor. 5:10, R.S.V.). This sentiment is ex pressed also in Matthew 16:27; Romans 2:6; 1 Corinthians 3:8; and Revelation 22:12. It must be considered as basic Christian doctrine. This does not mean that we can earn our way into the kingdom, but it does mean that the way we live our Christian life is important. The final judgment is, not to determine whether men have accumulated enough credit through their good works, but to ascertain the genuineness of men's faith. Faith that does not issue forth in good works is not true faith. Therefore the man who does not produce the fruit age of faith is condemned, but the man who produces the fruitage of faith is justified. His genuine faith passes the test.
We can rightly question the person who claims to be a Christian but does not live a life of obedience. In fact, Christ says, "Every branch of mine that bears no fruit, he takes away" (John 15:2, R.S.V.). As Bonhoeffer has written, "The only man who has the right to say that he is justified by grace alone is the man who has left all to follow Christ."—Ibid., p. 43.
Obedience is not a question of working our way into the kingdom; it is a question of the sincerity of our faith. If we truly have faith in Jesus Christ, then our life has been united with His. We will begin to walk with Him in His light. "If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not live according to the truth; but if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one an other, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin" (1 John 1:6, 7, R.S.V.). Our abiding in Him inevitably leads to our bearing of fruit. "He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit" (John 15:5, R.S.V.).
The test of our love is obedience. What is obedience but the doing of God's will, and what is doing God's will but becoming like God and fulfilling in our lives the best that God and we would desire for ourselves? This is in the ultimate sense the meaning of salvation or redemption. It is not merely the forgiving of our sins; it is, through the grace of God, the restoring in our broken lives of the image of God. Our response of love to God is motivated by God's great love in redeeming us from sin. If this is our motivation, then we want to leave be hind the life of sin and begin a new life in righteousness. Therefore, if we do not live a life of obedience we do not truly love God. How can we say we love God, because He redeems us from a life of sin if we, in fact, want to continue in that life of sin? No wonder Jesus says, " 'He who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me; and he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him' " (John 14:21, R.S.V.). And again, " 'If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. He who does not love me does not keep my words' " (verses 23, 24).
Man's response to God's love is faith, but "faith" is "active in love" (Gal. 5:6, N.E.B.).* Love is faith in action. Love makes faith concrete and visible. With out love, faith remains invisible, re mains simply a claim, a profession. The life of love, of obedience, is faith made visible. So James says, "What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him? If a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, 'Go in peace, be warmed and filled,' without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead" (James 2:14-17, R.S.V.). James goes on to say that "a man is justified by works and not by faith alone" (verse 24). He says this because men were professing faith which was not active in love. According to Paul this would not be faith at all. James himself describes it as a dead faith. Paul and James do not contradict each other, since the sense in which James uses the phrase "by faith alone" differs from the sense in which Paul uses it in Romans 3:28. By using the expression "by faith alone" James refers to dead faith, whereas in Paul it is a dynamic, living faith which is active in love. "Works" in James means faith-obedience not—"works of the law" as in Paul. Further more, Paul is talking about justification, our initial approach to God, while James is talking about our life after we have accepted Christ. James is opposing those who would live according to Bonhoeffer's "cheap grace."
What Is Faith?
Some have wondered about the role of faith in justification. What is faith? Is it a kind of work to perform, in order to achieve salvation? First let us recognize that no amount of faith can save us were it not for the fact that Christ has died for our sins. It is not our faith that saves us; rather it is Christ's death for us. But faith is the means by which we receive this sacrifice for ourselves. Faith, then, is not a return to works. It is relying completely on what Christ has done.
Faith shows different facets. Furnish regards it as the obverse of man's love. Dodd describes it as "the attitude of pure receptivity in which the soul appropriates what God has done" (The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, p. 56). Some interpret faith in Paul's writings as primarily obedience. The act of faith is an act of obedience. This is shown by two verses that are parallel to one another in Romans 1:8 and 16:19 (R.S.V.). In the former Paul says "because your faith is proclaimed in all the world" while in the latter he says "for . . . your obedience is known to all."
Faith is not a new kind of work; it is not an achievement, but only the hand that takes hold of what Christ has done. The "work" is what Christ did on the cross. Faith is the means by which man appropriates through grace what Christ has done for him.
Fritz Guy defines faith as trust, and places it in opposition to belief. "The distinction here between belief and trust is important: Belief is what you hold to be true, what you think is the case; trust is a response of self-commitment that makes your well-being dependent on the integrity of another. . . .
"While trust is largely volitional—a result of choice, a decision to give oneself to another in this kind of relationship—belief is largely non-volitional: We do not in fact choose to believe something or other is the case. Belief—as we are thinking of the word here—is often a result of a rational consideration ... of evidence. Belief differs from knowledge here only in that the question of validity remains open... . Yet the fact remains that belief is essentially a rational process rather than a volitional one." —"Contemporary Adventism and the Crisis of Belief," Spectrum, No. 4 (Winter, 1972), p. 20.
It is important, according to the last definition, not to confuse faith with be lief. According to Paul, faith is more than belief; it is trust, commitment. A man may say he believes parachutes are reliable and that they always work. So someone says to him, "All right. Then take it and use it. Put it on your back and jump off a plane." If he's afraid, uncertain, unwilling to jump, then he believes but does not have faith. Only when he takes that chute and jumps off a plane thousands of feet above the ground does he have faith. Even so, it is not enough to believe in Christ; belief must move on to trust.
To summarize, we say first that faith is our response to God's initiative in opening up the way of salvation. The fact is that God cannot save us against our will. He has provided the way of escape in Jesus Christ, but He cannot force us to accept it. In fact, many will not accept it. While our faith is awakened through God's great love and His Spirit operates on our heart, yet the act of faith is ours. But the act of faith is not a work; it is the acceptance of what God has done. It is the admission that there is nothing we can do toward our salvation. It is a complete renunciation of the possibility of attaining righteousness through our own efforts and a complete trust in God's having accomplished it for us in Jesus Christ. In the words of Jeremias, "Faith is not an achievement in itself, rather it is the hand that grasps the work of Christ and holds it out to God." —The Central Message of the New Testament, p. 56.
Salvation involves more than what Christ did in the past. It is true that there can be no salvation without that, but it also involves its appropriation by the victorious faithful daily life of the believer today. Not only must there be a death of Christ on the cross, there must also be daily crucifying of ourselves on the cross now.
While faith is entirely passive to attain salvation, it is not passive, as we have seen above, in the life of the Christian. It is commitment in action, it is obedience active in love. The man of faith will say with Paul: "I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me" (Gal. 2:20, R.S.V.).
