More Thoughts (Mine) on Ephesians 2:8-10

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2:8-10)


We need to be careful, with Ephesians 2:8-10, not to try to force it to bear too much theological baggage. As St. John Chrysostom points out (see my first post of today), it isn’t meant to deny the role of free will. It doesn’t mean God decides not to accept any of our works, in order to keep us humble, and decides to accept only faith instead. Rather, it means God accepts us on the basis of our faith precisely because we come to Him bereft of any worthy works. What we once supposed were our good deeds turn out, in the harsh light of reality, to be about as spotless as used menstrual pads. (Isaiah 64:6) They were all done in the service of the beast within.

This passage means nothing we can do ever earns salvation, because it isn’t earnable; it’s a pure gift; it’s free, from God’s own loving Heart. Moreover, we ourselves do not have the power to do the things saving us requires, such as the power to unite divine nature with human nature or to kill death by dying, or to ascend into heaven.

If we try to make more of these verses, if for instance we hang from this passage a theory that we humans cannot contribute one single thing, however slight, to our salvation, not even our free choice to accept the faith God offers us, then the difference between our being saved or not will rest, ultimately, with God. The paradox Lutherans and others offer us won’t hold. According to it, if we are saved, the glory is all God’s, and if we are lost, the fault is all our own. This is true, but (paradoxically!) only if we have free will. Because what fault is it of mine that I willed only evil, if I was born, indeed conceived, unable to will anything else? No, if my salvation depends exclusively upon God, and He has all the power to save, and chooses to save you but not me, then it is His doing that I am lost. And this is so even if God only passively chooses to damn me; that is, does not choose to save me. Either way, my fate is His choice alone. That’s another way of asserting that “Double Predestination” (God chooses to save some and chooses to damn others) and “Single Predestination” (God chooses to save some but not all) are practically and morally identical.

And in that case, you contradict the whole rest of the Christian message about Who God is, and contradict certain other biblical passages as well, such as I Timothy 2:4, which speaks of God our Savior, “Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth,” and Ezekiel 33:11, “Say unto them, [As] I live, says the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live: turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of Israel?” and 2 Peter 3:9, “The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” (See also Ezekiel 18:23 and 18:32)

Faith in Christ is something God makes possible for us, but we still either embrace or reject Him. To reject Christ makes it impossible for God to get any further with us. To embrace Christ (in faith) is a work, yes, face it, a work. It isn’t a work that makes us worthy of anything, but faith in Christ does make it possible for Grace to proceed with His transfiguring (saving) work in us. Faith isn't what saves us, Grace is. Faith is not why God saves us, His Love alone is. But faith in Christ is the instrument through which God is able to work in us. In that sense, salvation does indeed depend upon it.

And if you do not wish to affirm some capricious, monster god, there’s no way around this: you have to admit that to go with Christ or to reject Him is ultimately up to us; and that our own rejecting of Him when we could have chosen Him (rejecting Him, as distinct from merely not yet having acquired faith in Him) is what sinks us, and not God’s omitting to do anything whatsoever for the salvation of every single one of us.

Faith, Works, Love

The following is from Saint Diadochos of Photiki's work On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination: One Hundred Texts.

He who loves God both believes truly and performs the works of faith reverently. But he who only believes and does not love, lacks even the faith he thinks he has; for he believes merely with a certain superficiality of intellect and is not energized by the full force of love's glory. The chief part of virtue, then, is faith energized by love.

HT: Tony-Allen, where you can read the larger passage.

St. John Chrysostom on Faith Alone

Somebody sent me these passages from "the Golden Mouth", and sorry to say, I'm no longer sure who it was. If it was you, please say so, that I may thank you. (Christopher Orr, was it you?) Or did I perhaps copy these from someone else's blog? At any rate, they're always worth reading or reading again.

Though a man believe rightly on the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, yet if he lead not a right life, his faith will avail nothing towards his salvation. Therefore when He saith, “This is life eternal, that they may know Thee the only true God” ( John 17.3 ), let us not suppose that the (knowledge) spoken of is sufficient for our salvation; we need besides this a most exact life and conversation. Since though he has said here, “He that believeth on the Son hath eternal life,” and in the same place something even stronger, (for he weaves his discourse not of blessings only, but of their contraries also, speaking thus: “He that believeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him”;) yet not even from this do we assert that faith alone is sufficient to salvation. And the directions for living given in many places of the Gospels show this. Therefore he did not say, “This by itself is eternal life,” nor, “He that doth but believe on the Son hath eternal life,” but by both expressions he declared this, that the thing (fn. “i.e. believing”) doth contain life, yet that if a right conversation follow not, there will follow a heavy punishment. (Chrysostom, Homily XXXI on John (3: 35, 36). NPNF 1 vol.14. Page 106.)

Having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience.” He shows that not faith only, but a virtuous life also is required, and the consciousness to ourselves of nothing evil. Since the holy of holies does not receive “with full assurance” those who are not thus disposed. For they are holy, and the holy of holies; but here no profane person enters. They were sprinkled as to the body, we as to the conscience, so that we may even now be sprinkled over with virtue itself. (Chrysostom, Homily XIX on Hebrews, NPNF 1 vol.14. Page 445.)

But wherefore hath He chosen us? “That we should be holy and without a blemish before Him.” That you may not then, when you hear that “He hath chosen us,” imagine that faith alone is sufficient, he proceeds to add life and conduct. To this end, saith he, hath He chosen us, and on this condition, “that we should be holy and without blemish.” (Chrysostom, NPNF 1 vol.13. Page 50.3.)

After this, that we may not be confident in the gospel merely preached, nor think that faith only suffices us for salvation, He utters also another, an awful parable. Which then is this? That of the net.“For the kingdom of Heaven is like unto a net, that was cast into the sea, and gathered of every kind; which, when it was full, they drew to shore, and sat down, and gathered the good into vessels, but cast the bad away.”And wherein doth this differ from the parable of the tares? For there too the one are saved, the other perish; but there, for choosing of wicked doctrines; and those before this again, for not giving heed to His sayings, but these for wickedness of life; who are the most wretched of all, having attained to His knowledge, and being caught, but not even so capable of being saved. Chrysostom, Homily XLVIII on Matthew, NPNF 1 vol.10. Page 295.)

"Then in order that not even these should put confidence in their faith alone, He discourses unto them also concerning the judgment to be passed upon wicked actions; to them that have not yet believed, of coming unto Him by faith, and to them that have believed, of care with respect to their life. For the garment is life and practice. And yet the calling was of grace; wherefore then doth He take a strict account? Because although to be called and to be cleansed was of grace, yet, when called and clothed in clean garments, to continue keeping them so, this is of the diligence of them that are called. (Chrysostom, Homily LXIX on Matthew, NPNF 1 vol.10. Page 423.)

Faith v. Certainty (Part 3 of a series)

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The Holy Scriptures everywhere assure us that we cannot be saved apart from faith in Christ and (based upon that faith) love for Him.

Do I have faith? How do I know? St. James says, “Show me your faith without your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.” (James 2:18)

Do I love God? How do I know? St. John, in his First Epistle, says repeatedly it’s by doing His commandments. St. Paul tells us without love we are nothing, no matter how much faith we have (I Corinthians 13:1-3) and even goes so far as to anathematize those who do not love Christ. (I Corinthians 16:22)

By those measures, by any practical, objective measure, my faith is laughable and my love pitiable. Perhaps some may dare to suppose with certainty they could pass these scriptural tests, but not I. And it’s much worse than merely that I have done this or failed to do that. Those are but the symptoms of underlying attitudes, and those attitudes, in turn, are reflections of my heart, of who I am. That is the problem: not even what I do or don’t do, not even the attitudes that produce those misdeeds and omissions -- but who I am!

Here then, are the paradoxes: We Orthodox see in ourselves no faith through which Grace might work to save us; yet, we know the communion of the Holy Spirit, unmistakably present, the pledge and token of our salvation. (2 Corinthians 1;22, Ephesians 1:14) Christ tells us if we had faith the size of a mustard seed, we could move mountains; (Matthew 17:20) and we (most of us) move no mountains. Yet, we, like those first disciples, already have the joy of walking with Him. We are like the man who cried, “I believe, Lord; help Thou my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24) Yet, we observe that this man’s petition was granted; his son was healed. Like St. Paul, we do not dare to judge ourselves (as saved); (I Corinthians 4:13) yet, though our hearts condemn us, Christ is greater than our hearts. (I John 3:20)

Moreover, we look at the holy ones in our midst, the people who already are who we want to be, namely, “Christ with skin on” – and from them we hear that their perception of themselves and of their faith and love is the same as our perception of ourselves and our faith and love! So we see that even the objective criteria by which faith and love, in Scripture, are to be measured, are seen by our hearts only subjectively. We do not know how God sees our hearts. We do know Christ is greater than our hearts.

Certainty is an intellectual conclusion based upon irrefutable evidence. An Orthodox Christian simply cannot, in honesty, arrive at absolute certainty (and he marvels that anybody else can speak so certainly!) regarding his ultimate destiny, because in all honesty, very realistically, he finds that the iron-clad, deductive evidence is simply not there that he has any faith in Christ or any love for Him -- or that if he has faith, he will keep it unto the end and not fall away.

Faith, by contrast, is not an intellectualization, but the lived experience of reality, such that the beginning and the end of reality are Christ, and so is everything in between. Faith is the hypostasis (here and now existence) of things otherwise only hoped for, and the actual scrutiny of things invisible: we do have communion in the Holy Spirit, we do walk in and with Christ, we have been made to sit in the heavenly places, we do receive healing. These things we do not deduce but encounter.

Faith (the lived reality) makes certainty of salvation (the intellectual conclusion) unnecessary. Faith bypasses that certainty.

Certainty about salvation also bypasses real faith, resting content with itself. (That's the whole idea behind the craving for certainty, to be able to rest content.) I'll have to ponder it some more, but I'm thinking certainty may also be incompatible with real faith.

Trusting Christ, not Faith, Part 2

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I've just discovered mamajuliana's blog, Abide and Endeavor (see blogroll on left) and there found this wonderful prayer from St. Ephraim the Syrian. This prayer, by acknowledging how crummy my faith is (as measured by my deeds) and by then turning to Christ, puts into practice what I was trying to say in my previous post about having faith in Christ, and not in our faith.

…Bad habits entangle me like snares, and I rejoice at being thus bound. I sink to the very depths of evil, and this delights me. Daily the enemy gives me new shackles, for he sees how the variety of bonds pleases me.

…Although I know how dreadful these shackles are, I hide them behind a noble appearance from all who might see. I appear to be robed in the beautiful clothes of reverence, but my soul is entangled with shameful thoughts. Before all who might see, I am reverent, but inside I am filled with all manner of indecency.

How pitiful I am; and how pitiful is my daily repentance, for it has no firm foundation. Every day I lay a foundation for the building, and again with my own hands I demolish it.

My repentance has not even made a good beginning as yet; yet there is no end to my wicked negligence…

…I hope in Thy mercies, O Lord; I fall at Thy feet and beseech Thee: Grant me the spirit of repentance and lead my soul out of the dungeon of iniquity! May a ray of light shine in my mind before I go to the terrible judgement which awaits me, where there is no opportunity to repent of one’s wicked deeds.

Mamajuliana concludes, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Have mercy upon me, a sinner!"

Amen!

Having Faith in Faith (Not!)

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Orthodox spirituality does not allow our love of Christ to remain unexamined or unchallenged. In some other bodies of which I have been a member in the past, this is not so; a person is free to entertain a highly exaggerated notion of his faith and of his love for Christ. But when one becomes Orthodox, suddenly, he is called upon to put that faith and love into practice.

Okay, so you love Christ; can you fast with the Church, for His sake? Okay, so you can, you say, but you didn’t. You try again, with the same result, or at least a result very little better.

Okay, so you love Christ; can you control your temper, for His sake? Okay, so you think you can, but is that true? You try again, with the same result, or at least a result very little better.

Okay, so you love Christ; can you pray 30 seconds without distraction, sacrifice your money for the poor, make time in your busy schedule to visit the sick? You love Christ, so how come you sat in that traffic jam cussing for half an hour when you could have taken the opportunity to say the Jesus Prayer? You love Christ, so why are you judging your brother every day when Christ commanded you not to?

And so forth. The Orthodox Christian, after a (usually short!) while, begins to wonder whether he ever loved Christ at all, much less with the great and ardent love he had formerly imagined he harbored. He begins to wonder what became of the faith that in his fantasy was so firm, so strong, precious, so devoutly held. And if it really is anything like what he had imagined it to be, how come it keeps flunking out when put to the test, almost any test?

This may be part of the reason other communions encourage their members not to look at themselves, to “keep your eyes on Jesus.” It is frightening to behold the disease and disfigurement within ourselves, and the extent to which we are slaves to our own bodies. Yet if you don’t look, you never know yourself. You have no way of knowing whether your faith or your love is authentic. You have no way of testing your faith. “Faith” is easy to have if you blind yourself to the reality within, but when you see the dragons there, then what?

Worse, if you don’t look, you never find Christ there, within you, as He promised to be. You will remain a stranger to the Holy Spirit, who dwells within the Christian.

There never comes a time when the Orthodox Christian, if he is really following the spirituality taught by the Church, ever says to himself, “Alright, I seem to be in good shape now. I can rest secure.” Such self-satisfaction is not on the Orthodox menu! Seeing that one has made some small progress in this or that can never be grounds for pride, because advancement in Orthodox Christian spirituality clarifies a person’s vision, thereby causing him to see how small is the healing so far, compared with the disgusting enormity of the remaining disease. What one might say to himself is something like, “God seems to have granted me to fast a little better, yet I have been grumpier than before and have been mistreating everybody!”

Even St. Paul wrote,

Not that I have already attained, or am already perfected; but I press on, that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me. Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Therefore let us, as many as are mature, have this mind; and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal even this to you. Nevertheless, to the degree that we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule, let us be of the same mind. (Philippians 3:12-16)

It doesn’t mean if St. Paul had dropped dead midway through writing that passage, he would not have made it to heaven. It means the object is to love God with all our heart and all our mind and all our strength. Therefore, the question, “How much faith (or love, or obedience) do I need to be saved?” is wrong-headed and self-centered, not loving at all, and not relying upon Christ at all, either.

Instead, we seek perfect conformity to His image, Whose perfections are infinite. Christ Himself is our heaven, and the more one is conformed to Him, the more one already lives in heaven. And the Orthodox know two things. One is that we are already living and moving and breathing in that heaven. The other is, we are doing it very imperfectly; like St. Paul, we haven’t made it, yet. We live in hope, we walk by faith. But our faith is not in our faith. It is in Christ.

Justified by Faith -- with or without Works?

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But to him who does not work but believes on Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness, (Romans 4:5)

You see then that a man is justified by works, and not by faith only. (James 2:24)

If a person believes that these two passages of Scripture contradict one another, then one has to decide which one to accept and which one to reject. If, however, you are a sola scripturist, and even if you are not, rejecting either passage is unacceptable, since both are inspired by the Holy Spirit, who does not contradict Himself.

If we are not Orthodox, what often happens in such cases is, we acknowledge that these Scriptural sayings cannot really be contradictory. Yet only one or the other passage really makes sense to us and we are unable to explain how they fit together – or perhaps we have an explanation, but not a very satisfactory one. One or the other of these verses will not fit very well with our theology. We will work with the passage that does and will largely ignore the other. That is a de facto rejection of the virtually ignored Scripture.

In this case, though, the answer to the apparent dilemma is very easy: St. Paul is not making a contrast between faith and works in general, but specifically between faith and lawkeeping. St. Paul, after all, is the Apostle to the Gentiles! He spends chapter after chapter telling them, contra the Judaizers, that they do not have to be Jews to be Christians, they do not have to be circumcised, they need not and must not rely upon the Law of Moses for salvation. St. Paul emphasizes this point all the more because the idea scandalizes his Jewish-Christian readers – and frightens them, since this is the Law God Himself has ordained. They must have felt approximately the way a Catholic might if you tried to persuade him there is salvation apart from the pope. Salvation apart from the Law of Moses was very difficult for them even to imagine.

Salvation, says St. Paul, is by grace through faith, apart from the Law of Moses. You do not have to enter into the Old Covenant, do not have to keep kosher, do not have to offer sacrifice in the Temple, indeed must not offer it (and a good thing, too, as within a couple of decades the Temple and the nation of Israel were destroyed, and with them, the ability to keep huge portions of the Law of Moses).

The Apostle does not specify each and every time that works of the Law of Moses are what he is contrasting to faith, but he does specify it enough times to let his readers know that this is what he means, e.g., Romans 3:28, 9:32, Galatians 2:16, 3:2, 5, 10. Even the verses such as the one under consideration here (Romans 4:5), in which St. Paul does not add “of the Law”, are set within the context of discussion of the Mosaic Law’s place in the scheme of things. Read all of Romans 3 and 4 to see what I mean.

You do not need to keep the Law of Moses to be saved. In fact, if you rely upon that instead of upon Christ, you have negated the Christian faith. That is what St. Paul is saying. He is contrasting faith with the works of the Law, and by extension, with with any kind of “dead works,” that is, works outside of faith -- but not at all with faith's own works!

Faith’s works, prompted not by Moses but by the Holy Spirit, not by obligation but by love, done not by us but by Christ through our flesh and our effort, faith's works are the very soul of faith, says St. James; they are what animates faith and makes it to be faith. “For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.” (James 2:26)

Even the repentant thief crucified beside Jesus, the moment of his repentance, began to live and die according to faith, that is, unto God, instead of according to whatever had been his impetus before. Faith instantly made good works of his thoughts and words, of his breathing and sweating, of his living and suffering, and even of his dying.

This is how, in the thief, in Abraham, in all the saints, “faith collaborated with works, and by works faith was made perfect.” (James 2:22)

And the works of faith, making it faith, are those to which St. James refers when he says we are justified (made righeous) by them, and not by “faith” alone.

What "Faith Alone" Looks Like

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Here's another Escher drawing of impossible objects.



Below, two more, not his but inspired by him.



These are what "faith alone" looks like. I mean faith considered apart from works. You can't consider it apart from its works, because, as all Christians acknowledge (so far as I know), it doesn't exist that way, except on paper, or in the human imagination. As it doesn't exist, God doesn't do anything with it, because of it, or about it. Except eventually to expose the illusion for what it is.

And here, with multiple impossibilities, is what a theology ends up like if it contains too many absurdities. (You have to look very closely, as also at some theologies, to see the impossibilities, but the most obvious ones here are 4. I'm told there are several more; have fun.)

Faith as Righteousness

But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2:4-10)

In Christianity, righteousness is not a matter of fulfilling the Law (of Moses) and never was. It is true that, if you could fulfill the Law, you would be righteous. Yet you would not be righteous because you had fulfilled the Law, but the other way around: you would have fulfilled it, as Christ did, because you were already righteous.

The corollary to this is that faith is not some temporarily acceptable substitute for true righteousness. It is not as if God said, “Okay, so since true righteousness is impossible for you, I’ll tell you what. I’ll graciously settle for faith and count you as righteous if only you have faith.” On the contrary, faith always was the true righteousness. The Law of Moses, which St. Paul says was “added because of transgressions” until Christ should come, was to show faithless men who did not love God roughly what faith and love would look like. The Law was our “custodian” to keep us in line until then, and to be a preliminary revelation of God’s will. The Law, then, was the temporary arrangement, but it was no substitute for faith. In fact, fulfilling it was impossible without faith, and attempts to carry it out even to the minutest letter were unacceptable without love of God, and such love is impossible without faith.

Faith, then, is and always was the true righteousness.

What, then, is faith? Almost all Christians know it is not mere belief. Some say it is belief plus trust, but faith in the Christian sense is much more even than that. It is trust such as becomes the premise, the foundation, the working principle, of our lives. If we were computers, faith would be our operating system. Now a working principle that does no work is what? An absurdity. A logical contradiction, nothing real at all, except on paper, like an Escher drawing.


That is why the greatest chapter in the Bible on faith, Hebrews 11, is also the greatest catalog of heroic deeds.

To acquire true, Christian faith means — by definition! — that the foundation of your life shifts. It shifts, specifically, from whatever it was (“self-fulfillment” usually, or self-preservation) to Christ. Note carefully: not from self-fulfillment via secular means to self-fulfillment through Christ! but to Christ in His own right, for His own sake. Christian faith, then, is a new identity. It means you have faith in Christ such that He becomes the new principle of your existence.

Now to seek self-fulfillment, or self-preservation, ironically, is ultimately self-destructive. (Matthew 16:235, Mark 8:35, Luke 9:24, Luke 17:33) This is because it is a selfish enterprise, and accomplished at the expense of others. It is the opposite of love and the opposite of true personhood, for which the human being was created. Faith means giving that up in favor of Christ, in the confidence that He, Who is the meaning of your life, will do with it whatever is best. Faith means donating your life to Him.

When you have done that, you have become righteous. And God recognizes this new relationship with Him as righteousness. This is what He really wants from you, has always wanted, not because He is power-hungry, not because to be believed in flatters Him in any way, nor yet because, like some human lover, He yearns for his love to be gratified by being returned. Rather He wants faith and love from you because it is the only way of saving you from yourself. If He is said to guard His prerogatives jealously, it is never in a self-seeking sense, for love never seeks her own. It is all for us.

When you have donated your life to God in Christ, you have become righteous, and God recognizes you as righteous. Yet, things aren’t that simple. There’s much more to the story than that, because this is only an incipient faith and an incipient righteousness. "He who does righteousness is righteous," as St. Peter tells us. When you first acquire the righteousness of faith, it is like a tiny mustard seed, “which indeed is the least of all the seeds; but when it is grown it is greater than the herbs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches." (Matthew 13:31-32) The large tree is the goal, mature faith, perfect righteousness.

How does faith/righteousness grow? The same way a child does. By living, acting, practicing, learning, struggling; see previous post. As St. James puts it, faith is made perfect by [its] works. (James 2:22) The more you love (actively! not just in your imagination), the more you enlarge your capacity to love. The more you act on faith, the greater it grows. Obedience in small things makes possible (and easier!) obedience in larger things, until one day, you reach the goal (Romans 8:28) of being made like Christ and perfectly one with Him.

Are not the perfections of Christ infinite? How can you attain to all of His infinite perfection in one short lifetime? You cannot. Whoever told you that was necessary before God would accept you misunderstood. The truth is, if you are a person of faith (and love, without which we are nothing at all), you have already entered Paradise, have been made to sit with the saints in the heavenly places, and death will not disrupt that. Death will merely let you see it more clearly, no longer dimly, as in a clouded mirror, but now unveiled to you in all its glory. Or rather, in all His glory, for Christ Himself is our Paradise.

Righteousness -- How?

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No declaration by God can make a person righteous. It’s like saying headache can be made to stop hurting by applying a bandage to your elbow, or it’s like thinking to give penicillin for osteoporosis, or building a dam by sucking a lollipop. The two just don’t have anything in common. The one is unable to have any effect upon the other. Declarations and righteousness simply belong to completely different categories, different spheres of operation.

It would seem, at first, more logical to argue that a declaration by God means God now regards a person as righteous. But that would be to assert that God, Who sees us keep on sinning, denies the truth, Who is Truth. So that doesn’t work any better. It’s not as though (as I read in some other blog yesterday) He shoots a perfect round of golf and then hands me His scorecard and lets me, a terrible golfer, falsify it by signing my name to it. There is no trickery with God, no sleight of hand, no falsity, no gamesmanship. He doesn't scam Himself. He does not pretend Christ's righteousness is mine or that my sins are Christ's. He knows better.

Righteousness doesn’t come to us sacramentally, either. Healing does, healing of our wounded, sick, sinful human nature. That is why we receive the sacraments frequently. They give us strength. They are concrete forms of God’s grace. Christ washes us, takes us with Him through death to life, anoints us, allows Himself to be ingested by us, enters into our bones and sinews, gradually sanctifying and deifying us. Yet we continue to sin daily, hourly. We continue unrighteous.

And God, Who is no fool, knows it.

Moreover, we want Him to know it, which is why we go to confession, because unless He is aware of our sins and burdens, how shall He help us with them? How shall He forgive them or heal us or give us the strength or wisdom to do better next time?

No, righteousness comes from trying hard, in communion with Christ, to do righteousness. That's what nobody much wants to do, try hard. A declaration would be sweeter, or so at least we imagine. “Be not deceived,” writes St. Peter, “he who does righteousness is righteous.” Righteousness comes from struggling for it.

At every point, the struggle is God’s work. We get no credit for it at all. (And even if we did get any credit, we could not exchange it for anything; it would be worthless as Monopoly money. This is because God cannot be bought or bribed with anything whatsoever.)

Yet that does not mean He does it all for us while we sit on our fat bottoms doing nothing. All the work is God’s, yes; and all the effort is ours. We call it synergy, and it is what St. Paul perfectly describes when he urges us to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God in us, both willing and working. All the work is God’s, all the effort is our own. And much effort is required.

No, this struggle for righteousness does not earn us any merit or any brownie points, does not in the least put God in our debt or oblige Him to save us if we succeed. Righteousness does not entitle us to salvation -- or to anything else.

Instead, righteousness IS salvation. After all, to the extent you have become righteous, you have been saved from committing any more sins. That is what you wanted, isn’t it? Not really? It should have been. But oh, well, then, hold on, there’s more. To the extent you have become righteous, you have become Christlike! Still not terribly motivating? You love Him less than you thought, then, but never mind, because here’s the best part of all. To the extent you have become righteous, you are letting Christ live His own Life in and through your flesh, and there is no greater intimacy with another person than that. THAT is what union with Him means in its deepest sense. He is living His righteous life in you. That is how you acquire His righteousness. And remember that He, in turn, is one with the Father and the Holy Spirit, so through Him, you have this ultimate intimacy of a shared life with the Holy Trinity, Whose life is immortal, too.

Can you achieve perfect union with Christ in this life? No. But if, by faith, you honestly struggle for it, God, in His mercy, will make up the difference in the end and perfect you. In and by your death, He will separate you from your remaining sins.

Or if you don’t struggle to do the right, to stop sinning, to become like Christ, to live in perfect union with Him -- in short, if you don't do the works of faith -- then you don’t actually have faith, which of course makes the whole issue moot.

Another Snippet on Faith

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(I’m trying to organize my thoughts to write the section of my book on faith, works, righteousness, and grace.)

Everybody has some kind of faith. Faith is whatever you base your life upon, and everybody bases his life upon something. Even one who believes life is meaningless lives according to that faith.

To acquire Christian faith is to shift your life off of whatever had been its foundation (usually I, me, myself, and mine) onto a new foundation, Christ. Christian faith, then, is more than belief, more than belief plus trust, more even than belief plus trust plus good works. It involves all of those, but Christian faith, most profoundly, is a new identity out of which you operate.

And it isn’t good for anything unless it really is your “operating system.” An operating system that does not operate is – what? It’s nothing at all. Or it’s at best an hypothesis, a mental construct, an abstraction, something imaginary.

On Faith and Works (Another Stray Thought)

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He also spoke this parable: "A certain man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard, and he came seeking fruit on it and found none. Then he said to the keeper of his vineyard, 'Look, for three years I have come seeking fruit on this fig tree and find none. Cut it down; why does it use up the ground?' But he answered and said to him, 'Sir, let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and fertilize it. And if it bears fruit, well. But if not, after that you can cut it down.'" (Luke 13:6-9)

Good works are not the “fruit of faith”! Fasting, vigils, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting of the sick and imprisoned, etc., are the works of faith. They are the digging and fertilizing – and pruning and aerating and cultivating.

The Fruit is Christ. That is why St. Paul wrote to the Galatians (who misunderstood and were trying to earn their way to heaven) that he was like a mother in labor with them all over again “until Christ be formed in you.” (Galatians 4:19)

And you have to do that digging and fertilizing and cultivating of your soul so the seed of the Word planted there (Matthew 13) may sprout and mature and bring forth the fruit, Christ. This does not happen magically! You must work at it, just as you must at marriage (even a good marriage). Or, to switch metaphors, you have to invest the money (the grace, the Holy Spirit) you’ve been given. (Matthew 25:14-30) If not, the Word in you will remain barren; that is, your soul will not be Christ-bearing. If you are afraid to do these things (for fear, perhaps, that this is “works salvation”), you will end up like the servant in the parable who was afraid to invest the money entrusted to him and was called slothful; “even what he has shall be taken away.”

Saint Symeon the New Theologian says that it is not what man does which counts in eternal life but what he is, whether he is like Jesus Christ our Lord, or whether he is different and unlike Him. He says, "In the future life the Christian is not examined if he has renounced the whole world for Christ's love, or if he has distributed his riches to the poor or if he fasted or kept vigil or prayed, or if he wept and lamented for his sins, or if he has done any other good in this life, but he is examined attentively if he has any similitude with Christ, as a son does with his father."

(I took that from Ch. XV of The River of Fire. The author, Dr. Alexandre Kalomiros, gives no citation for this quote.)