Does Salvation Require Faith?

 

Does Salvation Require Faith?

September 9, 2022

 

We’ve all heard it, or at least all we Protestants have heard it. We aren’t saved by doing good deeds, we’re saved by “grace through faith.” That’s the technically correct to state this proposition, but often it gets reduced to just we’re saved “by faith” or perhaps “through faith.” These sayings come from the genuine letters of Paul, though he’s frightfully inconsistent about the dynamics of salvation. Yet conventional Protestantism isn’t inconsistent at all about what is required for salvation. Conventional Protestantism insists that faith in Jesus is what saves us. Perhaps the most common belief of the people who call themselves Christians is that to be saved you have to believe in Jesus. This contention is often expresses as, “You must take Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior.” Many Christians, especially conservative Protestant ones, insist that doing so is the only way to avoid your soul spending eternity in the torments of hell after you die. Believe in Jesus and you’re saved, don’t believe in Jesus an you’re not. It’s not hard to find scriptural support for this contention, especially in the Gospel of John (which is probably a big part of why conservative Christians love John so much). John 3:18, for example, reads, “Those who believe in [Jesus] are not condemned, but those who do not believe are condemned already because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” NRSV. So there you have it. Believe in Jesus, and you’re good with God. Don’t believe in Jesus, and your soul is in a world of trouble. That’s what Christianity is, right?

Well, no. Yes, that certainly is what Christianity has become for a great many people. There’s no denying that. Yet for many of us it is impossible to hold a faith that makes no sense, and the notion that you aren’t saved unless you believe in Jesus makes no sense at all. There are several reasons why it makes no sense, but there is one of those reasons that I want to discuss here. It makes no sense to say you must believe in Jesus to be saved because that way of looking at the matter makes salvation our doing not God’s doing. Let me explain.

In theory at least, if there is anything about Protestant Christianity that distinguishes it from other varieties of Christianity, it is that we do not earn salvation through good works. Back in 1517 an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther reached that conclusion after studying the authentic letters of Paul, especially Romans. Though Paul is inconsistent on the matter, the thrust of his theology is that salvation does not come through our doing the works of the law. Paul meant the Torah law of Judaism. Christians today usually express Paul’s idea by saying that we are not saved by any good works whether they be of the Torah or not.

So how does salvation come to us? Protestants often reduce Paul’s “by grace through faith” to “by faith.” I have always found the phrase “through faith” confusing. What does it mean? I don’t really know; but I do know what most Protestant Christians, especially conservative Protestant Christians, take it to mean. They take it to mean that we must believe in Jesus Christ if we are to be saved. They take it to mean that salvation may be through God’s grace in some abstract sense, but the only way we can actually receive God’s grace is by believing in Jesus. In this way of thinking, faith in Jesus becomes more important than God’s grace in the dynamics of salvation.

I have to ask: What’s really going on when a person says she is saved by her faith in Jesus? In this way of thinking, who is actually effecting salvation? The answer seems to clear to me. We see it in something I once read a very conservative Christian pastor say. He said that he had been saved ever since he put his trust in Jesus to get him to heaven. Shockingly, he said had done that at the ripe old age of five. Now, notice who is the primary or initial actor in this way of understanding salvation. It's not God. The individual person is the one who effects salvation. It is that act of believing that saves us, that is, we save ourselves through the work of belief. To this way of thinking, believing in Jesus becomes a work through which we are saved and without which we simply aren’t saved at all. In this way of understanding salvation, God doesn’t save us, or at least God is not the active party in the only step salvation requires. It isn’t God who decides whether a person is saved or not, it is the person himself who makes that decision. In other words, we save ourselves through our good work of faith.

I’m sorry, but though it is an understanding held by millions upon millions of Christians, that way of understanding salvation doesn’t make a lick of sense. We humans are the ones who need salvation. If we were able to save ourselves, all of us would. If we were able to save ourselves, Jesus would have nothing to do with it. But turning faith into the work necessary for salvation is a cop out. It says that the way we deal with the existential dilemma of sin and salvation is to have the right thoughts in our heads. As Marcus Borg says somewhere, it is hard to believe that God cares that much about the thoughts in our heads. Being saved through the thoughts in our heads cheapens grace. It is so easy to say we believe one thing or another. To save ourselves that way we don’t have to rely on God’s free and unmerited gift of grace, a grace that is beyond our understanding. We just have to rely on ourselves to believe the right things. We don’t have to understand God as transcendent over all human ways of doing things, we just have to project our human ways of merit and reward onto God. In this understanding, salvation is not God’s free and unmerited gift. Rather, we earn the reward of salvation through our work of proper belief. God saves us only as a reward for what we have done to earn salvation, namely believe the right things and not believe the wrong things. Faith becomes a work. The grace part of salvation by grace through faith takes a distant backseat to faith.

Yet I know that I cannot possibly earn God’s grace through any kind of faith I may have. All of us humans are finite, fallible creatures. I don’t accept the details of the hoary Christian doctrine of original sin, but I know that I am not capable of moral perfection. No one is, whether without faith or even with it. Yet we read that Jesus said, “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Matthew 5:28 NRSV. The perfection of which Jesus speaks is a noble goal for us to strive to reach, but we’ll never reach it. We simply cannot earn salvation, not through any work, not even through the work of faith. We don’t save ourselves. God’s grace saves us, our faith just doesn’t.

So does faith play no role in the dynamic of salvation? Well, no, faith does have a role in that dynamic; but that role is not to save us. God’s grace saves us. God’s grace saves everyone. It always has, and it always will. Our Christian faith isn’t our salvation, it is how we Christians know that we are saved. It is how we live into a salvation that is already there through God’s infinite grace. Our faith doesn’t create that salvation, and a lack of faith doesn’t mean we aren’t saved. Christian faith is how we Christians live under God’s grace. Other people live under God’s grace through other faith traditions or even under no faith tradition at all. None of those ways of living under God’s grace creates God’s grace. God does that simply because that’s who God is. None of those ways is a prerequisite for salvation. There is no prerequisite for salvation. God gives us all salvation just because God is a God of grace not a God of works and reward. Our question isn’t are we saved. We are. Our question isn’t how do we save ourselves. We don’t. God saves us. So does salvation require faith? No, it doesn’t. Perhaps if Christianity as a whole would finally figure that out, it could continue to be the rich, vital faith tradition that is has been for nearly two thousand years. May it be so.