Saved by Faith Alone! *Terms and Conditions May Apply

Why is getting “saved by faith” so much work?

Photo by Mockup Graphics on Unsplash

In my last article, I walked through what I see as a fundamental paradox in some Christian and Christian-origin movements in the way they handle serious wrongdoings: why do some churches that hold members to ridiculously high, stringent standards of religious observance suddenly abandon an instinct for rules, reform, and punishment when faced with a member who has done something truly heinous? In the last article, I argued that the origins of this habit are in justification theory, as defined by Douglas Campbell and Jon DePue in their upcoming book Beyond Justification.

In the case of Protestant churches, though, there’s actually a second paradox. Most Protestant churches in the United States teach some variation of the idea that Christians are “saved by faith alone” (the level of detail will probably vary considerably, and also may look very different as it is expressed among people in the pews as opposed to theology textbooks). According to this idea, which is key to justification theory, Christians are not saved from the hell they deserve by doing good works. They are instead saved by putting their faith in Jesus, for which they receive absolution from God.

It’s odd, then, that Institute for Basic Life Principals (of recent Shiny Happy People fame) both affirms this:

We believe people are saved by grace through faith in the shed blood of the Lord Jesus Christ and without any additional human effort or works.

And yet also sells curricula of hundreds of minute rules that Christians ought to follow. My strong suspicion is that if you grew up in an evangelical church in the US, your church may have been more or less the same.

How does that happen? How does being saved by faith alone, apart from works, result in churches where people are doing so many works, and putting their faith in so many things besides Jesus?

I think the easy answer here would be to say that churches are simply not practicing what they preach. But I don’t think that’s quite it. I think the reality is that the cycle of multiplying beliefs and multiplying works that actually do “save” is baked into a contradiction at the heart of justification theory.

Review: What’s Justification Theory?

Let’s review the way justification theory works. Justification theory is a system of relating to God by exchanging a difficult, works-based way of earning God’s favor for an easier method. According to JT, humans know the will of God – either by their own consciences, or by the written will of God in the Torah. These standards are exacting, and humans do not meet them, which means they deserve to be tortured eternally in hell. However, humans are offered an alternative path – namely, that instead of trying to carry out the will of God, they can put their faith in Jesus Christ, who satisfied God’s wrath by allowing God to torture him in humanity’s place. 

Humans who wish to escape hell can thereby be saved by simply putting their faith in Jesus  instead of doing the arduous labor of following the will of God outlined in the Torah/Old Testament. Instead of trying to work your way to God, and never knowing if you’ve done enough, you can be assured you’re going to heaven right now, by simply putting your faith in Jesus as the Christ.

Pretty easy, right? 

Well, not really. Because, you see, there’s a problem. Your salvation and standing in front of God is now dependent on your faith, and if you don’t have faith, you’re going to hell. But how do you know if you have faith? How do you know that your faith is going to save you? 

Answer 1: Faith reveals itself in works!

One option, of course, is that the genuineness of your faith is simply shown through your works. If you do good things, you prove your faith is genuine, and this is the faith that can actually save you. “As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead” (James 2:26).

Depending on the norms of your community, though, the list of works that are required of genuine Christians to demonstrate their faith can be as long as the community says it is. It can include going to church services, going to weekday services, taking on private devotional practices, reading your Bible more, taking on certain charitable causes, giving your money to someone or some organization, voting or not voting for someone, going to this church and not a different church, listening to certain kinds of music, wearing certain kinds of clothes, changing your diet, having your kids attend a certain school (or no school at all), posting certain things on social media, meeting gendered standards of behavior, etc. At this point, the distinction between salvation by faith and salvation by works is really just semantics. If anything, you would be better off following the Old Testament down to the last letter than trying to keep up with the demands of American Christian culture. Torah is complete and bounded, but the list of works that churches require of genuine Christians just keeps getting longer and changes all the time.

Answer 2: That’s legalism, Patrick! All that is required is not exhaustive effort, but a sincere effort to do right motivated by faith and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit!

If the above example sounded like “legalism” to you, then this might be the tack with being “saved by faith” that you prefer. God doesn’t demand new and different works from the Christian. All God expects is a sincere, trusting effort to live as though you are a Christian, and trusting God to be at work in you for your sanctification.

Sure, but if this is how you’re thinking about works – not in number or perfection but in sincerity of commitment and effort, then how do we know your faith is actually sincere enough to count? Wouldn’t a really sincere desire to good produce some kind of results? How do you behave in such a way that you know you’re sincere? If your sincerity is expressed in effort, how do you know your effort is significant enough? Isn’t this lapping right back around to the legalism we already discussed?

Answer 3: Forget works. If you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

The other option is that we define faith as adherence to Christian teaching – namely, faith in Jesus as the Messiah, which makes you a Christian. The measure of faith is no longer in sincerity of feeling or in evidence of effort, but in the content of that faith. If you believe Jesus is the Messiah, then you are saved. 

But now we have all new problems. One problem is that if we’ve now decided that behavior has nothing to do with who goes to hell and who doesn’t, we’re in a morally uncomfortable place where any Christian child abuser is in heaven, but Anne Frank is in hell. To the former example, you might say that a Christian child abuser is not actually a Christian – in which case, you have simply returned back to the works/sincerity problem. If you agree that the Christian abuser is a Christian and spared the torments of hell, you have conceded that God actually doesn’t hold Christians accountable for their behavior – which might raise the question of why God so stringently holds non-Christians accountable for theirs, even if it’s considerably better.

The second problem is that commitment to this content-based faith (“if you believe Jesus is the Messiah, then you are saved, and only then are you saved”) might not be as clear cut as you think it is. You might say you believe that faith in Jesus as the Christ is saving faith, but on a case-by-case basis, you might realize you actually don’t believe this – and even if you do, go ahead and bring it up in church if you want to get a massive argument going.

For example: What if you believe Jesus is Lord, and God raised Jesus from the dead, and also:

•  you also pray to Mary and several saints?

• you believe the Book of Mormon is Scripture?

• you also follow the teachings of the Buddha and honor the Buddha at a shrine?

• you think most of the Bible is false?

• you call God “She?”

• you think some races are superior to others?

• you’re a Marxist?

• you are a man who is married to another man?

• you use they/them pronouns?

• you deny that the crucifixion atoned for sin?

• you’re a Christian Nationalist?

See what I mean? At least one of the beliefs above is repugnant to you. But, if you’re a person who believes in salvation by faith, you probably think one of the people on the above list isn’t “actually a Christian,” even though they believe Jesus is the Christ. So what else do they need to do? Or what else do they need to actually believe?

Answer 4: It’s not just faith in Christ that saves, it’s faith in Christ, rightly understood. You have to adhere to orthodox beliefs on all the salvation issues.

Ah, there we are.

Ever heard that one?

What’s a “salvation issue?”

A “salvation issue” is a phrase you can find among a range of evangelical pastors and laypeople that is used to describe a belief that is so central to Christian teaching that it must be believed in order for a person to qualify as having “saving faith.” You’re probably not going to find this phrase in a theology textbook, but you may have heard it in church or in a parachurch ministry setting. The phrase is used to distinguish between a belief that is central and therefore must be believed in order to be saved, and one that isn’t central and therefore does not impact whether you’re saved or not.

So to quote Pastor Peter Holtvluwer:

What people seem to mean by it is to distinguish between those biblical teachings which must be believed for a person to be saved from everlasting damnation, and those teachings which do not. Certain things that God reveals in Scripture must be believed for salvation but other things must not. Teachings that fall into the latter category, then, however beneficial they might be, become essentially optional for the Christian. The reasoning goes like this: whether you are convinced of six day creation or not has no effect on your salvation. The same is true for infant baptism, women in office, the true church, and a host of other biblical teachings. So in the end it matters very little what you believe on these points. You’ll still end up in heaven. They are simply not salvation issues.

But to also quote Peter, who denies that. this is a useful category:

I can find nowhere in Scripture that any of its teachings are optional. And that makes sense when you consider that the Bible is not a human production but a divine one.

Yeah, so here’s the problem.

Let’s say you’re a Christian who goes in for the idea of “salvation issues.” You think ideological unity is only required on major, foundational issues, and beyond that, we can have acceptable disagreements. You probably have a list of “big ones” ideas, that must be believed to qualify as a Christian, and likely one of them is about the authority of the Bible.

But now you’re just back where Peter was. If you say that believing the Bible is inerrant is a salvation issue, then what about the Bible’s contents? Or the interpretation of the Bible? If you think that the Bible clearly teaches the earth is 6,000 years old, is anyone who worships Jesus but doesn’t believe the earth is 6,000 years old going to hell? Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis says no, but also cautions that they are extremely close to being at risk of hell. Seems like the age of the earth is a salvation issue after all.

Or, as Lisa Weaver Swartz notes in her ethnography of Southern Seminary, students and teachers at Southern recount to her that in their interpretation of scripture, male dominance and female submission can actually be found in the entire Bible and is woven into the Gospel story. If this is how you read the Bible, then surely someone who doesn’t subscribe to male dominance doesn’t actually believe the Bible. Are they saved?

Even if you want to keep the list very short, the list is still a problem. Let’s say you want to say that only people who believe that the Bible is inerrant really believe Jesus is the Christ, and are therefore saved. When did this rule go into effect? How did Paul get saved before there was a Bible? Or did this rule only go into effect after the Bible was finalized? Do you have to have a vernacular Bible that you have read and fully affirm before you are saved? Isn’t that a work? What about people who lived before vernacular translations — that is, Christians through most of human history?

Where do you stop? At what point is a belief not a salvation issue? Is it enough to not believe an idea you think that is not in the Bible, or do you have to positively believe the thing that you do think is in the Bible? If you’ve never thought about how old the earth is, are you going to hell after all? Or is that only for people who believe it’s older than 6,000 years? How much older than 6,000 years do you have to believe the earth is before God sends you to hell? Before Darwin, if you supposed the world was much older than 6,000 years, did you still go to hell, or is this a post-Darwin rule?

At some point, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that God has really sold us a lemon with this whole “salvation by faith” thing. Faith saves, but most faith doesn’t save. Most faith doesn’t actually do what you need it to do — get you out of hell. It actually is a long list of things you have to do, and things you have to believe, and without them, you’re not saved at all.

The incredible irony of all this is that Jews have been following Torah for thousands of years and have an understanding of atonement for mitzvahs that aren’t kept. If all this is to keep us from the “trap” of working our way to God through the laws of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, we might have been better off with the Torah in the first place.

What’s the answer to all this? It seems to me that we need another account of salvation. And as luck would have it, Paul provided us with one! (Short free explanation here). But we’ll get to that at another time.

Two Possible Objections:

I wrote this thinking about what my friends and family who subscribe to JT would think about this, and this was the primary one I could come up with from that end:

“I don’t think about it this much or try to find all these loopholes! All I do is go to church, believe my Bible, say my prayers, and trust God - and that’s good enough for me! I’ll let God worry about the rest.”

Sure, but — the stakes are awfully high, aren’t they? If you believe your relationship with God is contractual, and he is going to save you because you put your faith in him — are you sure you want to trust him alone with the terms of the contract? You know what he does to the people who don’t follow the contract, right? Don’t you want to look into this a little more? If God was willing to make a way for our salvation by torturing Jesus on the cross, but is also willing to not apply that salvation to people unless they specifically ask for that salvation, then we are not dealing with a God who is afraid to disqualify people on a technicality. If this was the deal I had cut with God, I would want to be absolutely sure God and I were on the same page about the obligations and benefits.

The other thing I would say to you is — just because you don’t think about it doesn’t mean no one else does. All the questions I raised above were questions I had for a lot of my life as an evangelical, and questions that other people had that I knew. I eventually found answers I could live with. Others just left the church. It seems like this actually does matter quite a bit

The other objection I’m hearing to this is: “Laura owned Christianity with Facts and Logic. We can now see Christianity is dumb and makes no sense.”

Yeah, that would be true if what I described above was the length and breadth of all Christian teaching. As I’ve said, though, I don’t think it is.

At some point in the future we will go through a reading of Paul’s theology that, I think, makes more sense and solves these issues. But for now, I just want to key up what I am seeing as the problems. If this is what salvation by faith is, is it actually salvation by faith? What kind of faith? Are there works?

Can you think of a solution to those problems?

Because I sure can’t.