Justified by Works

The doctrine of justification by faith alone lay at the heart of the Reformation. But as we celebrate the Reformation this year we need to remember that in a sense we are justified by works.

The central question raised by the doctrine of justification is how God can himself be just and also the justifies How is it possible for God to retain his own integrity, keep his law, and at the same time forgive the sinner? This dilemma is based upon a prior fact: God has ordained that the soul that sins shall die. Sin has consequences; penalties are exacted against those who despise God’s law and do violence to his holiness.

Everywhere Scripture bears testimony to the truth that man cannot make himself right in the eyes of God by what he does. His works, no matter how good, are insufficient. Both in quality and in quantity they are inadequate, because they are intermingled with the reality of sin.

God’s solution was to send Jesus as the one who would make it possible for God to remain just and at the same time to justify sinful man. By his active and his passive obedience, Jesus became our mediator. He lived sinlessly and died in our place. Jesus kept the law of God perfectly. He also submitted himself voluntarily to death on the cross in order to satisfy the full demands of the law. As a result, sinful man, by accepting Jesus as his substitute, can be forgiven and made righteous before God—justified. This is the glory of Scripture, the testimony of the early Church, and the truth recovered by the Reformation.

But it was works that made the justification of man possible—the works of Jesus. And the justification of man makes good works not only possible but mandatory. They are the necessary fruit of justification; their absence is proof positive that there has been no justification. Paul says that no one can be justified by works, that justification comes through faith alone. James complementing rather than contradicting what Paul says, asserts that the absence of good works in the life of one who professes to be justified is an impossibility. Works are outward evidences of justification, just as the signs and wonders that Jesus did were proofs of his messiahship. Jesus said that the tree that did not produce fruit was to be cut down.

The doctrine of justification by faith has been diluted if not emptied of its biblical meaning by those who press for universalism, the view that all human beings are already in Christ whether they know it or not, and that all will at last be saved. Years ago the Anglican archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, said this in his book Nature, Man and God (Gifford Lectures): “The atheist who is moved by love is moved by the spirit of God; an atheist who lives by love is saved by his faith in the God whose existence (under that name) he denies” (p. 416). Christ died for all people, but this does not mean that everybody is therefore justified. Nor does it mean that every person is already in Christ whether or not he knows it. It means no more than that the invitation is open to all persons. A hungry man who is invited to sit and eat at a banquet table will remain hungry if he stands beside the table but does not eat.

William Temple was wrong on two counts. First of all, no atheist or agnostic or follower of any ethnic religion or cult ever has or ever will “live by love.” The only one who ever lived entirely “by love” was Jesus. Temple was talking about an impossibility unless he was willing to water down the biblical meaning of love. Secondly, he was wrong in speaking of the atheist’s faith—“faith in the God whose existence … he denies.” This is impossible; it is a contradiction in terms. No amount of word-juggling can produce an atheist who “is saved” and has “faith in God” and yet remains an atheist.

Those who spurn God’s gracious invitation must experience his wrath. On Reformation Sunday we need to remember that there can be no greater works, no greater fruit of justification, than telling sinners the good news that Christ died for them.

Fiscal Legerdemain

The financial plight of America’s largest city continues to plague Mayor Beame, Governor Carey, and the federal government in Washington. The great lesson we all need to learn from New York’s experience is that fiscal irresponsibility cannot go on forever. No city or state can extend more and more benefits to its citizens unless at the same time it increases the taxes upon those citizens. Borrowing money means the government spends today what it hopes to collect in taxes tomorrow. If this is done long enough, the borrower is bound to go broke.

While New York flounders, the fiscal situation of the nation has in it the seeds of a crisis of much greater proportions. The House Ways and Means Committee has voted to increase America’s national debt ceiling by $20 billion, to a $597 billion top through March 31, 1976. At that time the ceiling will doubtless have to be lifted again.

In 1966 the national debt was $320 billion, which worked out to $1,600 per citizen. By 1976 it will undoubtedly be double that. The government has only one source of funds: the people. And one way or another, every American will have to pay more than $3,000 to amortize the national debt. When the interest is included, the sum total to be paid by the citizenry will reach horrendous proportions. Just how irresponsible can America get?

The United States was built on a foundation of the Judeo-Christian tradition, a tradition that teaches we are to owe no man anything. Economic soundness is intrinsic to the Christian faith. No person or nation can violate this law of nature and of revelation without sooner or later suffering the consequences. Other nations have gone broke. It may be that the United States will be next.

The greatest danger to America comes not from outside but from inside: its foolish unwillingness to put its economic house in order. When pay day comes, as it surely will if America does not change its ways, democracy will yield to some form of totalitarianism, be it to the left or to the right.

Time To Step Down

Every organization and business is likely to face the problem of employees who because of illness or age should resign but won’t. We all have known of ministers who continue to serve in their dotage. Biological age is no final criterion; many able people can do very creditable work at seventy or seventy-five. But there are many others who should retire at sixty-five.

A glaring case in American life is that of Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas. We suggest that his situation spur churches and Christian organizations to consider similar problems of their own.

Justice Douglas is seventy-seven. He has served longer than any other justice in history, and his record is impressive, though we and a lot of others have disagreed with him on a number of major decisions. But now Douglas is obviously a sick man. He cannot perform his duties with dispatch or with the competence our times demand. However, the only constitutional reason for removing a Supreme Court justice is departure from the standards of “good conduct.”

Perhaps the best approach is for his colleagues on the court to get together and make it plain to Justice Douglas that the time has come for him to step down. If he refuses to do so, then they should tell the nation what they have done and force the issue. The Congress could then vote to remove him, and the Court itself could rule that “good conduct” includes the capacity to perform adequately the duties of the office. Considering some of the Court’s twisting and turning over the years, this ought not to be too difficult an assignment. And it should be followed up by a constitutional provision similar to that in force for the presidency that will allow for the replacement of a justice when it is obvious he can no longer do his job adequately.

Capitalism: ‘Basically Unjust’?

“A ‘basic contradiction’ exists between the capitalist system and biblical justice, mercy, stewardship, service, community and self-giving love,” decided the delegates to “An Ecumenical Consultation on Domestic Hunger” convened last month by the National Council of Churches.

We were blinded to these basic contradictions between the values inherent in our faith heritage and the operative social reality.… Now, however, the contradictions are too apparent, and we are forced to confess, our complicity—whether through ignorance, apathy, fear or deliberate venality—with a system that is basically unjust.

The delegates went on to say that Christians are called upon to make a difficult decision:

We must choose either to serve God and our neighbor or to perpetuate the prevailing values and systemic arrangement. There is no other choice. To end hunger, then, means to work for radical change in the economic, political and religious values and institutions in this society.

If they were saying that the capitalistic system operative in the United States today has evils that need to be corrected, we would certainly agree. But they are going much further. They are saying that capitalism is inherently evil and must be abolished. This we must certainly reject.

The question we must ask this NCC panel is, What other system do you advocate? Where is there evidence of a better system, one more consonant with “justice, mercy.… and self-giving love”? Certainly not in the state capitalism of Russia and China, one that makes possible the worst examples of the dehumanization of man. Certainly not in a system that denies to its citizens such basic human freedoms as freedom of speech, religion, and movement. Certainly not in a theory that makes fairy-tale promises of the disappearance of the state and of a future communal society in which all people will work for the common good without coercion from anyone.

The alternative to capitalism is socialism. But the socialism of China and Russia has shown itself incapable of producing enough food to feed the people. For the foreseeable future, both of those nations will have to depend on the achievements of what the hunger consultation called a “basically unjust” system to keep them going (while they work to kill the goose that lays this golden egg).

The time has come for Christians who believe in capitalism, which they admit can be abused and is indeed in need of correction, to make themselves heard. The best way for them to get their message through to the NCC is to cut off their churches’ financial support of that body. Money talks; so does its absence. If the NCC wants to promote the destruction of capitalism, it should do so with money contributed by persons who favor that goal. Much of its constituency does not.

Washington Cathedral: No Taste For The Tawdry

The group of twentieth-century thinkers known as the “Oxford Christians” remind us again and again that human beings need to create because they were made in the Creator’s image. The Washington National Cathedral stretches above the capital city as a symbol of what Tolkien, and Lewis, and Sayers meant.

Begun in 1907 by congressional charter, the cathedral is not yet completed, though sections of it have been open to worshipers and tourists since 1910. Blocks of marble and carved stone line its driveway, some lightly covered with plastic, others exposed to rain and sun and snow, all awaiting final placement—an image of the Christian’s earthly life. The warm limestone and cool marble inside the cathedral compose and awe one in appropriate preparation for worship. And the magnificent arches and brilliantly colored windows draw one’s thoughts to God, who gives the gifts of beauty and creativity to his people.

For the first time this month the whole of the towering, vaulted nave was open to visitors and worshipers. Workmen tore down a temporary wall that had blocked the western end since 1935. Although brown paper still protects the windows and the red, green, and beige marble floor is only partly installed, the opening of the nave marks a major step in the history of the cathedral. A rose window symbolizing creation, twenty-seven feet in diameter and made of 10,000 pieces of stained glass, will soon be installed. The 234-foot towers at the western end of the nave are now expected to be finished by 1980.

On opening day, about 10,000 people viewed the nave, and cathedral officials say it will remain open to visitors during construction off-hours. Christians who visit Washington should put a trip to the Washington National Cathedral at the top of their lists. It is more than a national monument. It answers the complaint made by Dorothy Sayers in Creed or Chaos:

Yet in her own buildings, in her own ecclesiastical art and music, in her hymns and prayers, in her sermons and in her little books of devotion, the Church will tolerate, or permit a pious intention to excuse, work so ugly, so pretentious, so tawdry and twaddling, so insincere and insipid, so bad as to shock and horrify any decent craftsman. And why? Simply because she has lost all sense of the fact that living and eternal truth is expressed in work only so far as that work is true in itself, to itself, to the standards of its own technique. She has forgotten that the secular vocation is sacred. Forgotten that a building must be good architecture before it can be a good church, … that work must be good work before it can call itself God’s work. [pp. 56, 57].

The builders of the National Cathedral have remembered.

Appraising Values

“The only values are the values you create,” testified a college professor in the Air Force hearing for an admitted homosexual fighting discharge at Langley Air Force Base.

“The books in question are sold to many libraries and accepted,” a dealer wrote to a Christian librarian who had objected to profanity in a series recommended for third to sixth graders. (He added the reassuring word that this “honor series” was selected by a hard-working jury of librarians.)

The world does have its values and standards, of course. The United States government establishes grades for meat. The Pulitzer prizes in journalism set standards for excellence in that field. Winners of Nobel prizes are looked upon as tops in their areas of activity. Films that are awarded Oscars are promoted as the best. Nearly all trade and professional associations have ranking systems.

These man-made standards are, of course, just that. They may completely ignore standards established in God’s World. Notwithstanding what the professor said at the Air Force hearing, God has established eternal values. When people ignore them, they do so to their own hurt.

One of the most memorable passages in the J. B. Phillips translation of the New Testament is in Romans 12, where verse two reads, “Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mold, but let God remake you so that your whole attitude of mind is changed.” This is an admonition that Christians should recall when they feel pressured to accept—e.g., a book or idea or film or philosophy—that has won high acclaim in some circles but weighs in poorly on the scale of biblical values.

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