(1) A man may believe all that the Church teaches and yet be lost for want of good works or because he has not the love of God; consequently, faith alone does not justify or insure eternal salvation. Our Divine Saviour Himself declares: “Not every one that saith to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father who is in [pg 287] heaven, he shall enter into the kingdom of heaven.”[816] St. James says: “Do you not see that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only?”[817] And St. Paul: “If I should have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.”[818]
(2) Besides faith, justification requires certain other preparatory or dispositive acts. There is, for example, the fear of divine justice. Cfr. Ecclus. I, 28: “He that is without fear cannot be justified.”[819] Also, hope in God's mercy. Cfr. Rom. VIII, 24: “For we are saved by hope.”[820] Again, charity. Cfr. Luke VII, 47: “Many sins are forgiven her because she hath loved much.”[821] Furthermore, contrition or penitence. Cfr. Luke XIII, 3: “Unless you shall do penance, you shall all likewise perish.”[822] Finally, good works in general. Cfr. St. James II, 17: “So faith also, if it have not works, is dead in itself.”[823] No one who ponders these and similar [pg 288] texts can maintain, as Calvin and Melanchthon did, that the good works mentioned merely accompany justification, for they are unmistakably described as causes which dispose and prepare the sinner for it.
(3) It is not faith alone that justifies, but faith informed and actuated by charity. Cfr. Gal. V, 6: “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision: but faith that worketh by charity.”[824] The Greek text shows that the word operatur in the Vulgate must be taken passively, so that a more correct translation would be: “... but faith effected or formed by charity.” But even if ἐνεργουμένη were used as a deponent (ἐνεργεῖσθαι=agere, operari) the meaning would be substantially the same, i.e. a dead faith, without charity, avails nothing. Cfr. St. James II, 26: “For even as the body without the spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead.”[825]
In Rom. III, 28: “For we account a man to be justified by faith, without the works of the law,”[826] Luther deliberately inserted the word “alone.” The context shows that this is a falsification. The Apostle contrasts justifying faith, not with those preparatory acts of salvation which spring from it, but with the sterile “works of [pg 289] the law” (i.e. the Old Testament), which, as such, possessed no more power to justify than the good works of the heathen. Keeping this contrast in mind, it would not be incorrect to say, and St. Paul might well have said, that “supernatural faith alone (i.e. only) justifies, while the works of the law do not.” But if faith be taken in contradistinction to the other acts operative in the process of justification, such as fear, hope, contrition, love,—and this is the sense in which Luther takes it,—then it is false and contrary to the mind of St. Paul to say: “Faith alone justifies, nothing else is required.” For in this sense faith is merely the beginning, the foundation, the root of justification and cannot justify the sinner until it has absorbed the other preparatory acts required by Holy Scripture and transformed them into perfect love. This fact was already pointed out by St. Augustine. “Unintelligent persons,” he says, “with regard to the Apostle's statement: ‘We conclude that a man is justified by faith without the works of the law,’ have thought him to mean that faith is sufficient for a man, even if he leads a bad life and has no good deeds to allege. It is impossible that such a character should be deemed ‘a vessel of election’ by the Apostle, who, after declaring that ‘in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything nor uncircumcision,’ adds the important remark: ‘but faith that worketh by charity.’ It is such faith which separates the faithful children of God from unclean devils,—for even these ‘believe and tremble,’ as the Apostle James says, but they do no good works. Therefore they possess not the faith by which the just man lives,—the faith which operates through love in such wise that God recompenses it according to its works with eternal life.”[827]
There is another sense in which faith alone may be said to justify, viz.: if the term be taken to include all those things which God has ordained for our salvation, that is to say, the sum-total of “revelation” or “the true religion” as opposed to “heresy.” The term πίστις (fides) is sometimes employed in this sense by the Fathers, but never in Sacred Scripture.[828]
b) There is a unanimous and unbroken tradition in favor of the Catholic doctrine. St. Polycarp writes in his Epistle to the Philippians: “... the faith (πίστις) given you, which is the mother of us all when hope (ἐλπίς) follows and love (ἀγάπη) goes before.”[829] St. Augustine teaches that while faith is per se separable from hope and love, it is ineffective without them. “Man begins with faith, but the demons, too, believe and tremble; to faith, therefore, must be added hope, and to hope, love.”[830] And again: “Without love, faith can indeed exist, but it availeth nothing.”[831] St. Gregory the Great, paraphrasing St. James, says: “Perhaps some one will say to himself: I have believed, I shall be saved. He speaks truly if he sustains faith by works. For that is true faith which does not contradict by deeds what it asserts in words.”[832]
c) This teaching is in perfect conformity with reason.
α) No supernatural enlightenment is needed to perceive the intrinsic propriety of a moral preparation for justification. Not only must the sinner learn to know God as His supernatural end and the source of all righteousness, but he must also be persuaded that it is his duty, with the help of sufficient grace, to direct his will towards this final end.
Every tendency or movement presupposes a terminus a quo, from which it starts, and a terminus ad quem, to which it tends. The movement of the will in the process of justification, besides faith, demands a voluntary withdrawal from sin (contrition, good resolutions) and an approach to righteousness (hope, love, desire).[833]
This argument would have made no impression on Luther, since he bluntly denied free-will in the moral order and regarded human nature as so radically depraved by original sin as to be incapable of coöperating with divine grace. In fact he compared man to a “log, stick or stone.” This view was shared by Amsdorf, Flacius, [pg 292] and others, whereas Osiander and Butzer admitted that “inherent righteousness” is at least a partial factor in justification. Melanchthon, in an endeavor to reconcile the contradictions of this discordant system, unwittingly gave rise to the so-called Synergist dispute. When Pfeffinger[834] undertook the defence of free-will, many Lutheran theologians, especially of the University of Jena, boldly attacked the log-stick-and-stone theory[835] and tried to force their adversaries to admit that man is able to coöperate with grace. The “Half-Melanchthonians,” as they were called, succeeded in smuggling Synergism into the “Book of Torgau;”[836] but before the “Formulary of Concord” was finally printed in the monastery of Bergen, near Magdeburg (A. D. 1577), the strict Lutherans had eliminated that article as heterodox and substituted for it the log-stick-and-stone theory as it appears in the official symbols of the Lutheran Church. In the Syncretist dispute, and through the efforts of the Pietists, this harsh teaching was afterwards moderated. But what probably contributed most to the crumbling of the system was the rapid growth of Socinianism and Rationalism among the Lutherans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To-day, with the exception of a small band of “orthodox” Lutherans in Saxony and the United States, Protestants no longer hold the log-stick-and-stone theory. The school of Luther proclaimed it as the distinguishing tenet of Protestantism, as “the criterion of a standing or falling church,”[837]—and by this criterion the Lutheran Church has indeed fallen. Common sense has led modern Protestants to admit that [pg 293] contrition and penance are quite as necessary for justification as faith, an opinion which, in the words of Dorner,[838] “comes dangerously near the Catholic system.” In Scandinavia, according to Dr. Krogh-Tonning,[839] the Lutheran Church has experienced a “quiet reformation” and now unconsciously defends the Catholic doctrine of justification.[840]