By Grace Alone Through Faith Alone
By Ralph C. Wood,
University Professor at Baylor University
Ephesians 2:8-10, NRSV
"For by grace have you been saved through faith, and this in 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" (Eph. 2:8-10).
You and I as Christians probably owe our lives in Jesus to these two verses from the letter to the Ephesians. This claim—that we are saved by faith alone—was, in fact, the watchword of the Protestant Reformation. It was never far from the minds and the lips of Martin Luther and John Calvin. Nor did our Baptist ancestors in England and early America ever forget it. For them, also, this was the gospel in its purest essence. In relation to this fundamental declaration, everything else stood or fell. This was the sine qua non, that without which everything else is nothing. Luther was referring to his unrelenting defense of precisely this definition of the gospel—as divine redemption through grace alone by faith alone—when he stood before his accusers and stubbornly declared: "Hier stehe ich; ich kann nicht anders"—"Here I stand; I can do no other."
I have come, as a pathetically lesser Luther, to call for a new reformation of the church. This means that I must first report the alarming news that we are again in danger of losing the gospel. As in the early sixteenth century, so in the late twentieth century, the problem lies not chiefly with the world but with the church. The most sinister sin is often committed by Christians rather than pagans—sinister, because we ought to know better and, indeed, because we have been shown our own evils so clearly. If we are faithful Christians, we will know that awareness of sin is what distinguishes us from our pagan counterparts. We need only to look into the mirror of Jesus Christ to see ourselves as we truly are. Our secular friends have no such mirror. They stare back only at themselves.
This is why the cosmetic and physical fitness industries flourish. Pagan America is desperate to find a prettier face, a better body, a finer physique. As Abraham Lincoln said, there comes a time when every man becomes responsible for his own face. We Christians know that, apart from the new face we have been given in Jesus, we are unbearably ugly.
When I call for a reformation of the church, please do not hear me as saying that there is nothing much wrong with the world. I am deeply alarmed about the state of society. Christians have cause to be concerned, as Charles Colson has recently been reminding us, about the state of our pagan culture. Colson has made the stunning claim that the day may soon come when we Christians will have to withdraw our support from the United States government. For it is a government that seems ever more insistently bent on making demands that many Christians regard not only as unacceptable but as outright damnable, especially concerning such matters as partial-birth abortions, euthanasia, sodomy laws and homosexual marriages
I share Colson`s concern but not his solution. I believe that we need a reformation of the church even more that a reordering of society and the state. Important as these other matters are, we know that even the best governments come and go. The kingdom of God, by contrast, will stand forever. Not even the gates of hell will be able to shut out its coming. It is in God`s kingdom that we have our true home, not only in the world to come, but also in the here and now. As I tell my students, the aim of the gospel is not to get us into heaven so much as to get heaven into us, and thus to get the hell out of us. We will not find out our true place there until we recognize that we are alienated from the kingdom. Though we are meant to be strangers and sojourners in the world, we have become falsely at home in the world and aliens to the kingdom. The reason for this is not hard to find. It is because our churches have largely abandoned the doctrine of salvation by grace alone through faith alone. On both the left and the right, among both liberals and conservatives, this is the doctrine that many Christians no longer believe. Hence my call for a latter-day reformation of the church: a recovery of the gospel according to Ephesians 2:8-10.
I.
On the left, our churches are being reduced to virtual social service agencies. In these liberal churches, the gospel is equated more or less with doing good, being moral, helping the poor, visiting the sick and lonely and imprisoned, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, sheltering the battered, teaching the illiterate. In this liberal understanding of gospel, being a faithful Christian becomes virtually equivalent to being a faithful Democrat. This is not a bad thing to be, of course, as some of my best friends attest! God knows, and so do we, that services to the needy must be provided, if not by the state, then surely by the church. A society is measured largely by its care for those who cannot care for themselves—for the poor and defenseless, for the widows and orphans, as the Bible calls them. A church or a nation who neglects such care has the wrath of God on its head. Yet such human caring is not the sum or even the essence of the gospel. The heart and soul of the gospel is salvation by grace alone through faith alone.
Such grace and good works must be given their proper order. We Christians are indeed called by God to help the helpless in gratitude for his saving us from our own helplessness. Such acts of charity and gratitude are the glad and necessary consequences of the gospel. But they are not its burdensome and necessary condition. We do not seek to do good in order to earn God`s favor. We do good works in sheer gratitude for the favor we could not possibly earn. This is why Paul says that we are God`s workmanship rather than our own. Jesus has redeemed us for the good works that will serve as signs of his salvation. This explains why Jesus says that we are to offer a cup of water to the thirsty in his name. Unless that cup of water is a sign of the water that quenches our ultimate thirst, it can be a great deceit. As the Baptist curmudgeon-prophet Warren Carr likes to say, many of our liberal churches are busy building houses for the homeless without ever bothering to tell them where their real home is.
Martin Luther believed that such false good works serve as a roadblock on the path of salvation. "Works righteousness" is what Luther called this false notion that we can merit the mercy of God by our own good deeds. It is indeed a deadly doctrine. If we think God owes us anything, then we do not know the God of the gospel. We are not saved by boastful works, says Paul, but by utterly unboastful grace. Only in Christ do we boast, the apostle declares elsewhere, by pointing away from ourselves to the Savior who hangs from the cross.
The German religious painter Mathias Grunewald`s masterpiece Isenheim Altarpiece gets the order of things right when it shows John the Baptist standing beneath the cross and pointing with his long index finger away from himself to the Man who has been nailed on the cross for our sins. From the mouth of the Baptizer issues these words: "May he increase that I decrease." Without the gospel of salvation by grace alone through faith alone, we get the order backwards—Christ decreased in order that we may increase.
Permit me two examples of liberal works-righteousness. The first comes from an eminent Baptist religionist who like to say that the word Christian should serve as an adjective more that a noun. He means by this claim that the ethical and spiritual quality of our lives is what makes us Christians—how well or how ill we imitate the moral example that Jesus gives us in the Gospels, especially the commands set forth in the Sermon on the Mount. We should not be surprised to hear that this same religionist has little use for Paul. In this man`s understanding of the gospel, Jesus is not the one name "under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved" (Acts 4:12, KJV). He is more or less like every other great moral hero, from Buddha and Mohammed to Gandhi and Martin Luther King. What this liberal religionist fails to see is that God first makes Christians into nouns in order that we might become adjectives. Jesus makes us substantives capable of modifying the world in his name. The word substantive means literally "to stand under." It is not our good deeds that give us the substantial status of being Christian. Jesus has made us substantives by standing in our place on the cross and thus giving us a place to stand before God and man—as forgiven and transformed sinners saved by grace alone through faith alone.
An example of liberal works-righteousness comes from a liberal Baptist minister friend. He reported only last week how he had sought to answer a fellow preacher who felt that his own church had existed for fifty years without making any discernible difference to the city where it is located. "Why, of course you have made a difference," my liberal friend sought to console his downcast fellow preacher. "Look at the soup kitchen you built, the homeless shelter you erected, the school lunch program you instituted, the counseling hotline you set up."
My friend is partially right. Any church should be rightly proud of such accomplishments. Yet my friend was listing such social services as the chief purpose of this Christian church, the proof that it had "made a difference" in its city. Not once did this Baptist preacher mention that for fifty years this church had taught people to live the life of prayer, that it had enabled blacks and whites to be reconciled to each other because they are brothers and sisters in Christ, that it had liberated women not by feminist equality but by gospel equality. Nor did he declare that it had proclaimed forgiveness of sins and newness of life and therefore that its members had been reconciled not only to each other but to the God who had wrought their salvation in Jesus Christ by grace alone through faith alone.
II.
Lest you think that all evils lie on the left, let me make clear that our conservative churches are in no less need of reformation. They are no less guilty of abandoning the gospel of salvation by grace alone through faith alone. But here, instead of ethical works serving as the substitute, a sentimental personal piety is often made to replace the hard social realism of our redemption. I can make my case by citing a sign I saw in the offices of two evangelical ministers. It read: "Christianity is a relationship." What this sign means, so far as I can tell, is that we are Christians by virtue of our having made a personal decision to enter a private intimacy with someone whom we call Jesus. It`s a metaphor that implies two separate and autonomous creatures—Jesus and the solitary self—entering into a cozy and cuddly relationship, a warm and fuzzy affair that more appropriately belongs to the old TV show The Dating Game.
Certainly the gospel is relational through and through. It rightly relates us to God and to other humans and the world. But its relationality is not essentially private. The gospel is socially embodied in the people called the church. We, its members, are incorporated and engrafted into the body of Christ by our baptism, by our receiving the Lord`s Supper, by our hearing and doing of his word—not by a chatty and sentimental private relationship with our divine Buddy.
The first casualty of such reduction of the gospel to sentimental piety is the bedrock Reformation doctrine of election. Whereas the Christ of the gospel makes all the decisions that matter, choosing us to be included in this work called the kingdom, the new conservative gospel leaves the essential decision to us. No longer is it God who elects us, but we who elect God. Instead of God choosing us from the foundation of the world, as Paul says in Ephesians (1:4), it is we who choose him. I heard one Christian preacher put the matter in this grossly heretical manner: "God has cast his vote for you. The devil has cast his vote against you. And now you must break the tie." Our Baptist forebears would have hooted in contempt at this decisionistic idea of Christian faith.
Such an I-and-me centered gospel is also reflected in the bumper sticker that reads: "I found it." What would Abraham or Isaac or Jacob, Amos or Jeremiah or Ezekiel, Peter or Stephen or Paul have made of such a slogan? They didn`t find the God of the Bible. God, the Hound of Heaven, chased them down. Abraham was tending sheep, Jeremiah was lying in his mother`s womb, and Paul was persecuting Christians when God called them. The motto of Christians ought therefore to be something akin to this: "God in Christ has found me." God finds us, not by our personal religious decision and our private religious relationship, but by his grace alone.
This Jesus of the religious right is a sentimental savior because he makes no serious demands on us. He is not the Jesus of the Gospels who bids his little flock take up their cross and come die with him. This false Christ is a success-oriented savior who calls Christians to be rich and good-looking and numerous. On the right, therefore, our churches are proclaiming a salvation not of ethical good works but of religious good works. The more we pray and read the Bible and attend church, so this false gospel proclaims, the happier and more prosperous we are guaranteed to become. This explains why the TV evangelists always have their phone number flashing across the bottom of the screen. Send us money and God will send you money. Theirs is indeed a prosperity gospel.
It follows that, just as many liberal Christians turn out to be Democrats, so most conservative Christians turn out to be Republicans. No one has the courage to say that Jesus Christ is neither right nor left, neither Democrat nor Republican, but the radical critic and drastic transformer of every political or economic scheme. As the late Louisiana writer Walker Percy used to say, there isn`t a dime`s worth of difference between most conservatives and liberal. Yet Percy did spot one distinction between them. In his hilarious novel, Love in the Ruins, he wrote that you could tell Christian liberals from Christian conservatives only because the liberals require their black maids to ride in the front seat when they are taking them home.
Among conservatives, one`s faith is measured by the size of one`s smile—the more blinding, the better. The Scriptures never record Jesus as having worn a plastered and permanent smile, though they surely record him as having wept over Jerusalem.
The false god of the false gospel of religious good works turns out to be someone rather like Santa Claus. Santa Claus supposedly gives his followers whatever they want, if they make their requests known in a sweetly pious way. I have conservative Christian students who tell me that they pray for God to find them a parking place, and that this God of theirs always comes through. Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane prayed that God would lift the bitter cup of absolute suffering and divine abandonment from his lips, but God said no.
I am not ridiculing petitionary prayer. I do indeed believe that God answers prayer. I believe that God gives three answers to our prayers: Yes, No, and Later. A pious conservative Christian in England, who believes that God always answers "yes and now," once told me that people who don`t believe in Jesus are always unhappy and that they always come to "a sticky end." I replied that our Lord himself came to a sticky end.
I don`t believe that God much cares whether we are happy, but I believe that he cares enormously whether we are faithful and therefore joyful. Happiness is largely a matter of outward circumstance. We must possess certain things to be happy: health, money, security, success, and power. None of these things is required for joy. True joy lies in knowing that we are saved by God. It is by grace alone through his gift of faith alone. This knowledge brings the peace that surpasses all mere human happiness. We can have this joy and peace no matter how grim our circumstances—even amidst poverty and ill health, despite failure and weakness, and no matter how sinful we are.
III.
Permit me a single illustration of what I understand this true gospel of salvation by grace alone through faith alone to be and what a work of true and godly righteousness looks like. It is a story so dramatic that I fear it might not seem relevant to us. I hope we will see that it could also be your story or mine. It concerns a Vietnam veteran who suffers the worst effects of what we call postwar syndrome.
This man lives alone. He spends much of his time drinking alcohol in an attempt to drown his memories of what he saw and what he did during the war in Vietnam. He has horrible day-visions and terrible nightmares about the children he killed there, wasting their lives with napalm and gunfire. He is convinced that he is going to hell; indeed that he already occupies hell. He is haunted by the verse of Scripture which declares, "You shall reap what you sow."
This past Christmas Eve, the worst night of the year for him, he went to a bar and got himself thoroughly drunk. In the early hours of Christmas morning he came to his host`s home not only drunk but also violent. His brother-in-law, a Methodist minister whom I know, sought quietly to talk him down from his drunken fury. At first, he wouldn`t listen. In fact, he grabbed his brother-in-law by the throat and told him that he would kill him, that killing is the only thing he knows how to do well, and that the power to kill is what gives him real power over people.
My friend was not afraid of this violent and drunken maniac. He did not cringe and beg for the killer to spare his life. He kept calm, not because he is a supremely brave man—though he is surely one of the bravest men I know—but because he is a faithful man. He knows that he is saved by grace alone through faith alone, because God is getting the hell out of him and getting heaven into him. With this killer`s hands clutching his throat, he quietly made his witness:
"I am not afraid of you. I am not afraid because I love you. I love you because I know that God loves you. I know that God loves you for the same reason he loves me, because through Jesus Christ he has taken our sins on himself. You will never find peace by trying to find some way of justifying your actions in Vietnam, not by calling it an act of war, not by excusing yours deeds as mere obedience to the orders of your superiors. Nor will you ever be able to make up for what you did there. But Jesus has already made up for it. If you go to hell, therefore, it will be for the same reason that I will go to hell, because you and I will have kicked and slapped away the outstretched arms of the man who has laid hold of us at Calvary. For on his cross he has reaped what you and I have sown. He has saved those children whom you killed, and he can also save you by grace through faith alone."
I cannot report a sudden and complete conversion in this man. Nor can I promise that all will turn out well for him. If he experiences salvation at all, it will be through the long and rocky road that winds down from Golgotha. It is a path that will lead him straight past all liberal do-good religion and past all conservative feel-good religion. Like all of us, this man will experience salvation by being baptized in the slow, red river of Jesus` blood. Just as for each of us, this salvation will be God`s work within him from first to last. Like every one of us, he will be called to make his witness to the world among the people of God in the body of Christ called the church. There he will perform works of true righteousness, such as my preacher friend performed when he spoke the word of hope that no psychiatrist and no social worker can speak. There he will find his forgiveness and redemption by grace alone through faith alone.
This, as I understand it, is the reformation that is needed in both our liberal and our conservative churches if they are not to become citadels of unbelief that crucify Christ afresh. This is the gospel according to Jesus Christ as it is summarized in Ephesians 2:8-10. This is the call of the cross to you and to me: "Sinners, come home. Receive God`s salvation by grace alone through faith alone."
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The sermon was originally published in The Library of Distinctive Sermons, Volume Seven, Gary W. Klingsporn, editor. Multnomah Publishers, Sisters, Oregon, 1997, who granted permission for its publication, along with Hendrickson Publishing Company.
