Faith without works
With the beginning of the Catholic/Protestant war of the 16th
century, faith—from the Protestant perspective—finally became little
more than a mental confession that a person could not save him/herself.
Faith was left bloodless and “ethic-less”. By the time the battle lines
were fully drawn and the war against “a Catholic works salvation” was
well under way, faith as presented in the entire biblical witness was
not in sight.
"Faith"
was now used to prove that Catholicism was wrong. It became a doctrinal
war cry and into it was poured this and only this—“You can’t save
yourself!” In that climate everything about faith was dismissed (not
denied!) and orthodoxy became defined by one’s doctrinal
correctness—“Faith means you can’t save yourself.”
You
don’t find this lop-sided view of faith in the Bible. Faith is
certainly trust (the psalms are saturated with that truth) but not trust
in isolation. What the worst face of the Reformation wanted was a
“workless” salvation and the word “faith” came to stand for “a workless
inner understanding”; faith became nothing more than a theological way
of believing things. It wasn’t allowed to be a moral reality for
that would only allow Catholicism a foot in the door. All moral nature
and content had to be removed from “faith” and it became “a trust
without moral content.”
But
in the NT’s Hebrews 11, faith builds arks, leaves home, defies
genocidal governments, marches around city walls, goes to war, refuses
to live peaceably with paganism and dies before betraying the faith, and
so forth.
In
times of great crisis (in awful war or horrifying calamity or personal
devastation) to believe is moral heroism. To live in squalor and
deprivation and continue to believe defies despair and prophesies the
downfall of corruption and greed. Without the element of trust in faith
that God will right all wrongs nothing of full faith exists or makes
sense; but to water faith down to nothing but a denominational war cry,
“I can’t save myself from sin,” is injurious and false to the biblical
witness.
Faith insists that salvation is of God alone but the full story is not about what humans can’t
do, it’s about what they do! They scorn all appearances, all pain, all
failure and profound loss and in the name of God they put their foot on
the neck of despair and say a permanent, No!