On Salvation

Thoughts on Works and Salvation

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

June, 2015

A parishioner recently gave me a written piece with the premise that while works do not bring about “salvation,” works are required to keep one’s salvation once one has it. This piece claims to support this thesis with several quotes from the New Testament, all of them more or less taken in isolation from the context in which they appear. The piece raises, or perhaps better points to, profound issues about the meaning of Christianity and how the faith shapes our lives and our relationship to God. There are also foundational issues here that we must address before turning to the specifics of the matter.

The first issue we must address is the issue of methodology. It is so common for Christians to support some position by throwing Bible verses at it. Yet the simple truth is that we can “prove” almost anything with carefully selected Bible verses. We can cite Paul for the proposition that justification (whatever that means) comes as God’s free and unmerited grace that we access through faith, and we can cite James (as this piece does) for the proposition that works are necessary for our faith to mean anything. We can “prove” that Jesus was born in a house in Bethlehem where Mary and Joseph already lived by citing Matthew, and we can “prove” that he was born in a stable in Bethlehem where Mary and Joseph did not live by citing Luke. We can “prove” that God created the world in six days by quoting Genesis 1, and we can “prove” that God created the world in one day by quoting Genesis 2. We can “prove” that God wants strict adherence to Torah law by quoting Deuteronomy or Leviticus, and we can prove that God cares nothing about robotic obedience to the law but wants us to treat vulnerable people with justice and compassion by quoting the great eighth century BCE prophets like Isaiah, Micah, and Amos. The Bible says so many different things that we can find a text to support most any proposition. Trotting out a string of Bible quotes to prove some point only proves that the person doing it found some quotes he or she likes. It very probably doesn’t prove the point being argued at all.

So what are we to do? We need to step back from the specific verses we find in the Bible and discern just what the Bible is really about. It is of course about a lot of things, but mostly it consists of the accounts of their experience and understanding of God by many different people in different historical and cultural settings. Despite its great variety of views, the Bible does have certain big themes that course through its pages. These include the themes of God as the Creator of a good world, human beings as being made in the image and likeness of God to serve as stewards of God’s creation, God as love, God as a God of both law and grace, Jesus Christ as the Son of God come to proclaim a new understanding of God, and salvation (whatever that means) coming from God for us Christians through Jesus and for Judaism through the revelation of God’s law. These themes have spoken powerfully to a great many people in a great many historical-cultural-linguistic contexts, and they still do.

So in general terms the question of whether salvation requires works either to obtain it in the first place or to keep it once we’ve got it comes down to understanding how the question of salvation fits with the Bible’s great themes, not whether proof texts can be found to support any particular position. I am convinced that the question of salvation comes down to a question of grace, but before we can examine that contention in more detail there is another preliminary matter we need to deal with.

It is the matter of definition. Before we can have any meaningful discussion of anything we need to make sure that we’re all understanding the same things by the terms we use. The most basic definition issue this document raises is the meaning of the word “salvation.” The piece never defines that basic term. It seems to assume the common definition of salvation as being in right relationship with God so that your immortal soul goes to heaven after you die. The first thing we have to understand in this context is that your soul going to heaven when you die is mostly not what the New Testament means by salvation. There are to be sure passages that fit with that understanding. For example, the Gospel of John has Jesus say to his Disciples “In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you.” John 14:2 NIV The Gospel of Matthew has the famous judgment of the nations scene in chapter 25 in which a resurrected Christ separates the sheep from the goats. Christians usually understand this passage to be about judgment for salvation or damnation after death. Whether that is really the most important thing about that passage is another matter altogether, but we need not go into it here.

Many Christians take the Gospel of John in particular to be about the life of the soul after death. In support of that notion they often cite John 3:16, easily the most frequently cited verse in the entire Bible. There Jesus says (or perhaps it’s only John says, but we needn’t jump into that briar patch): “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not parish but have eternal life.” NIV Christians most frequently understand John’s term “eternal life” to mean unending life of the soul in heaven after death. The Gospel of John itself, however, makes it quite clear that that is not what the term eternal life means. John defines eternal life, only once to be sure, but he does define it. In chapter 17 of John Jesus is praying before his arrest and execution. He says to the figure he always calls Father in this Gospel “For you granted him [Jesus] authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” John 17:2-3 NIV Notice: He doesn’t say you get eternal life by knowing God and Jesus Christ. He says that knowing God and Jesus Christ is eternal life. Given this definition of eternal life we should understand John 3:16 as saying that God gave us Jesus so that we might have life in the knowledge of God and Jesus Christ. The life that is intended here is clearly life in this life on earth. The Gospel of John isn’t primarily about how you get to heaven at all. It’s about living in the knowledge of God in this life. That is the life that John calls eternal.

That being said, the New Testament has many different voices and many different views of what salvation is and how one gets it. Christianity (or at least western Christianity) most commonly sees Jesus as being about salvation of souls in the hereafter. Yet it is a simple fact that in the Gospels Jesus talks about this life a whole lot more than he talks about any next life. In the first three Gospels what Jesus mostly talks about is something he calls “the kingdom of God.” In Matthew he mostly calls it the kingdom of heaven, but that term means the same thing in Matthew as kingdom of God means in Mark and Luke. For Jesus the kingdom of God isn’t heaven. It is a vision for life here on earth. We know that because so much of what Jesus says is about how God wants us to live in this life. One powerful way in which the New Testament understands salvation is as liberation from the ways of the world so that we can live into the ways of God.

Nonetheless, over the centuries after New Testament times it has become much more common for Christians to think of salvation as being about our eternal fate with God, more specifically the fate of our souls after death. It is common for Christians grappling with the issue of salvation understood in this way to reduce the Bible’s many views of the matter down to two primary ones. The question usually gets reduced to the ancient and contentious issue of faith versus works. Faith versus works is the dominant issue in the authentic writings of St. Paul, the oldest Christian documents that we have. The background of the issue over whether salvation depends only on grace through faith or only on what is usually called works, is the Jewish law. In first century Judaism salvation was mostly understood as coming from strict adherence to the Torah law, those 613 laws (by the traditional count) contained in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. The first Christians were Jews. They grew up with Torah law, and they retained their Jewish training which said that to be right with God they had to obey the law, meaning the Torah law, also called the law of Moses. That belief was no particular problem as long as most Christians were Jews. It became a big problem when word of Jesus Christ began to spread through non-Jewish areas, mostly through the cities of the eastern half of the Roman Empire, where the people were Greek not Jewish. Greek people, especially Greek men, were not about to obey some of the Torah laws, especially the law of circumcision. Some leading Christians, particularly St. Paul, began to preach that justification, that is, right relationship with God, came not through obeying the Torah law but by God’s unmerited grace accessed through faith in Jesus Christ. Paul insisted that the works of the law were unnecessary and even harmful for people seeking to be in right relationship with God. Paul believed, correctly I think, that it isn’t even possible to obey all of the Torah laws. For him, the primary function of the law was to convict people of sin, that is, to show us that we are sinners in need of God’s grace. Paul is not always perfectly consistent on the matter, but the thrust of his writing is that right relationship with God comes through grace not through works.

Not all early Christian writers agreed. The piece that has prompted this essay includes several quotes from the Letter of James, the book that famously says that faith without works is dead. I think that there is a sense in which James is right about that, but I don’t think that works are necessary for salvation. The Protestant tradition of which I am a part has long held that right relationship with God comes by grace through faith, not by the works of the law. Martin Luther had that brilliant insight after studying Paul’s letter to the Romans. He called James a “book of straw” and would have thrown it out of the New Testament if he could have. He thought it misleads people into relying on their own works for salvation rather than on the grace of God. Grounding his theology in the writings of Paul, Luther taught that we are saved by grace through faith and not by any of our own good works. The basic Protestant teaching is that salvation is a free gift of God’s grace that we neither merit nor can earn. God offers salvation simply because that’s what God does, that’s who God is.

It follows that if a gracious and forgiving God extends salvation when we have neither deserved it nor earned it, that God isn’t going to take it away when we continue to demonstrate that we don’t deserve it. It’s not that God doesn’t make demands on us. God does; but if our being put in right relationship with God didn’t depend on our works, our goodness, in the first place, it only makes sense that any failure on our part isn’t going to cost us our salvation later on.

Here’s how I and a lot of other people understand the matter of salvation today. Our salvation, either for new life here on earth or for eternity hereafter, is grounded in God’s grace. God’s grace, that is, God’s love in action, is free and universal. God offers it without condition to every creature. God never takes it away from anyone. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection reconciled God and creation. See 2 Corinthians 5:16-19 That work of reconciliation was God’s work through Jesus. Since it was not the work of any mere human its effect applies either to all people or to no people. Since that work is meaningless if it applies to no one, it must apply to all. God has given us salvation through grace. God’s not going to take it away.

God’s not going to take it away, but that doesn’t mean that we humans have no role in the drama of salvation. God extends unconditional grace, but we are free to acknowledge and live in that grace or to ignore it, deny it, or reject it. God calls us to respond to God’s free offer of grace with lives of faith and service to God’s people and God’s earth. When we acknowledge that God has saved us through God’s grace, the abundant life that Jesus came to bring us, John 10:10, opens before us. We find peace, inspiration, and hope. Many people who are ignorant of God’s grace live decent lives, but those of us who have felt God’s grace know that what John calls eternal life, that is, life in the knowledge of God and Jesus Christ, is far fuller and far deeper than mere earthly life. We live more abundantly now, and we have good hope for the life to come.

I’m guessing that perhaps the attempt that was recently shared with me to work both grace and works into the economy of salvation is grounded in a belief that every verse in the Bible is true and must be taken into account in our understanding of the faith. I’m afraid I must say that that just isn’t correct. See the brief examples of biblical contradictions above. It is undeniable that the Bible includes many different points of view, and it simply is not possible to reconcile all of them. Bible verses don’t always mean what they appear to mean at first blush, and it is important to understand a verse deeply and in its original context before accepting or rejecting it. Sometimes, even after we’ve done the work to understand a passage deeply, we simply must conclude that it does not express the will and nature of God for us. A good example from the Old Testament is the command God supposedly gave King Saul to kill every living thing among a foreign people called the Amalekites. See 1 Samuel 15:1-3 The God I know, love, and seek to serve never gave any such order to anyone. God is a God of life not death. God is the God of all people, even the Amalekites, not only of the Hebrews. The claim that God told Saul to kill every living thing among the Amalekites is simply false. An example of the same dynamic from the New Testament is the directive in 1 Corinthians that women must be silent in church. See 1 Corinthians 14:34 That directive, which almost certainly is a later insertion into this letter and is not actually from Paul, is quite simply patriarchal nonsense. It’s in the Bible, but it isn’t from God. It’s just plain false. I make no effort to reconcile it with divine truth, for it is a satanic lie that made it into the New Testament as cultural sexism reasserted itself in the early Christian community against early Christianity’s radical acceptance and inclusion of women. So it simply isn’t necessary to reconcile everything in the Bible with everything else in the Bible. It isn’t necessary because it isn’t possible.

So yes, the Letter of James is in the Bible, and it seems to say that works are more important than faith in the dynamic of salvation. I’m not so sure it really says that, but I’ll assume for now that it does. I find that contention to be false, and I have no need to reconcile it with anything. It contradicts my experience of God. It contradicts other passages in the New Testament. It contradicts the dominant teaching of the Protestant tradition of which I am a part. I am convinced that salvation comes only from God and not from anything we do or don’t do or anything we believe or don’t believe. That is the only way grace is grace, for if salvation depends on something we do or believe then salvation is a reward, a payment, and not a free gift of God.

So, to my parishioner who gave me the piece that prompted this essay, I say that I believe that salvation is God’s free and unmerited gift. I do not believe that we need to or even can do anything to earn it, and I don’t believe that God ever takes it away. There probably are Bible verses that say something different. It doesn’t matter. We must always do our own discernment in dialogue with the Bible and the Christian tradition and figure out what in the Bible rings true for us and what doesn’t. It does not ring true to me that we must do good works to keep our salvation. If it does to you, OK. We can talk about that. For me, salvation is God’s free gift that never gets taken away. Thanks be to God!