Faith Alone and Grace Alone
**This message was originally presented to the Eastern University community by Dr. Philip Carey in February 2017 as part of the 2017 Faith Forum, titled “The Good News of the Protestant Reformation” **
We've had about 500 years of Protestantism, since 1517 when Martin Luther's famous 95 theses inaugurated the Protestant Reformation. Actually, I don't think Luther's theology was really Protestant until some time in 1518, and the Reformation didn't really get underway in earnest until 1521, I would say. But who's counting? 500 years is close enough, and lots of us are celebrating the Reformation this year.
What matters is what Martin Luther had to say when he really did start thinking like a Protestant—the first Protestant in history. What should we make of the fact that the first Protestant in history, close to 500 years ago, is not the first Christian in history? There were a lot of Christians before 1517, after all, and they weren't Protestants. I've spent most of my scholarly career writing about some of those Christians, especially Augustine, the bishop of Hippo in North Africa, who died more than a thousand years before Luther was born—saint Augustine, the Catholics call him. I can assure you, even if you're the kind of Protestant who doesn't exactly believe in saints, that Augustine really was a Christian, though he wasn't a Protestant.
So what do we need Protestantism for? If Protestantism is new—which is to say, only 500 years old, which is not nearly as old as Christianity—and if the basis of Christian faith is Scripture alone, as Protestant theology regularly insists, then what do we need a new form of Christianity for? To put the question in terms that have often made Protestants uncomfortable: what is the place of Protestantism in the Christian tradition? Or to narrow it down to the specific question of Protestant theology, we could ask: what contribution does Protestant theology have to make to the larger Christian tradition?
That's the overall question I'd like us to consider in our Faith Forum events this week. When you look at Protestant theology in the light of the whole Christian tradition, then it's not always obvious that it's actually needed. What's more, Protestant theology is in a very bad way nowadays, with the mainline Protestant denominations often abandoning essential teachings of the Christian faith, and no longer looking very Protestant and often not even very Christian. There is, I think, a pathway from liberal Protestantism to a post-Christian church, and some denominations are taking that path.
And then there's the evangelical churches, which are often rather distrustful of theology entirely, which means that they don't teach central Christian doctrines, as a result of which many students come to Eastern University not knowing some of the basics of the faith. I remember a student from a big nondenominational church in central Pennsylvania who came to Eastern not knowing the Lord's Prayer. He's the one who told me about Veggie Tales, something I didn't know about. At any rate, he's now Catholic. You can see why, I suppose. If your experience of growing up Protestant means not even knowing how to pray the prayer that our Lord Jesus gave us to pray, then it certainly makes more sense to want to raise your kids Catholic.
Nonetheless, I think there's something indispensable that Protestant theology offers the larger Christian tradition. And it's not some new teaching added to the Bible only 500 years ago. It's a new understanding of something that Christians have always done, which arose because Christians 500 years ago in the West were asking new questions and suffering from new anxieties. What Luther did, I think, was give biblical answers to questions that had not been asked in the Bible itself, questions that were powerfully on people's minds in the 16th century, back in 1517 and thereabouts. I think they are questions that remain with us in distinctively modern variations, some 500 years after Luther.
The most distinctive answers that Luther is famous for are summed up in the phrases “faith alone,” “grace alone,” and “Scripture alone.” That's what I'll be talking about today and tomorrow morning. They're often called “the Reformation solas,” because other Reformation Protestants like John Calvin and later John Wesley, adopted them after Luther, and they got put into Latin, the standard language of Western scholarship in Luther's day, and in Latin they are: sola fide, sola gratia, sola Scriptura (when you see “sola” think “sole,” as in “only,” and you'll get it). Behind all three of these sola's is a conviction that can be labelled “solus Christus,” Christ alone. And that actually explains why Protestant theology is not based on a new doctrine, but rather is a new understanding of the way Christians have always believed. Solus Christus means Christ alone is our savior, our hope, the one in whom we put our trust for redemption and salvation and blessing and eternal life. Whatever else Catholics and Eastern Orthodox churches may say about the saints, and Mary, and bishops and monks, if they look to them as a source of salvation apart from Christ, they have surely gone too far, and I do think Catholics and Orthodox have in fact needed Protestants to pull them up short some times, and remind them that Christ alone is their hope and their salvation. It's a reminder of what they already know. That's the kind of contribution Protestantism makes to the Christian tradition.
What's new about Protestantism is the conviction that because Christ alone is our savior, faith alone is the way we are saved. That means, of course, Christian faith, faith in Jesus Christ. Now of course, other forms of Christianity have a central place for faith in Christ, but they don't add that little word “alone.” So if you want a two-word summary of what is distinctively Protestant, “faith alone” will do it. “Grace alone” really follows from “faith alone.” And again, other Christian traditions also put a huge emphasis on the grace of God. But they don't add that word “alone.” So let's start with “faith alone.” Luther's key doctrine, which I am suggesting is the key contribution of Protestant theology to the rest of the Christian tradition, is the doctrine of justification by faith alone. “Justification” means: this is how we become just or right or righteous in God's sight. This is how we come before the judgment throne of God as those who are worthy in God's sight to receive blessing and life, not condemnation and wrath.
Notice, the original phrase was justification by faith alone. As you can kind of see just by looking at the word, “justification” is about justice. Unfortunately, for those who are just beginning to study this, the word for justice that is used by Luther and other theologians of the time has often been translated “righteousness.” And justice and righteousness seem like very different concepts nowadays. If you talk about a just man, you're talking about a person with the virtue of justice in his soul. But if you call someone “righteous,” as in “you think you're so righteous, you righteous hypocrite!” well, you're actually calling them self-righteous. Whenever my mother calls someone righteous, for instance, she's insulting them. So when you read English translations of Luther and other theologians of the time, you have to adjust, every time you see the word “righteous” and “righteousness,” that you're looking at the word for justice. It's justitia in Latin, or Gerechtigkeit in German. The point is that Latin has only one word for this, whereas English has two, and the same goes for German: only one word where English has two, and in English those two words have drifted apart over the centuries so that they no longer mean the same thing, as they used to do. And by the way, the same thing is true of New Testament Greek, which has only one word, dikaiosyne, which is often translated “righteousness” but is in fact the word for justice. You know, as in “faith, reason and justice.”
But it's important to realize, “justice” does not just mean a just society. For the ancient world in the days of the Bible, and for most of the Christian tradition, “justice” is a virtue. That is to say, it is a quality of the soul, a habit of the heart, a way our hearts and minds are formed in justice. You find justice not only in just societies but in just people. And the old way of saying that in English is to say such people are righteous—and that was not an insult. It is what makes a person just or good on the inside, someone whose heart God can look at and approve of.
Now when we ask about the meaning of justification by faith alone we have to ask what that word “alone” excludes. “Faith alone” means only faith and not something else. Only faith and not—what? Here's where things may start to get pretty familiar. Luther insists that people are justified before God by faith alone, apart from the works of the law. Faith, not works. We become good and just people in God's sight not by what we do but by what we believe—that is, by believing in Christ alone. Or, to switch from the language of justification to the language of salvation: there's nothing we can do to save ourselves, because Christ alone saves us, and we accept Christ simply by believing him. It is by faith alone that we accept Christ into our lives. All this is very familiar, I hope. But what may be unfamiliar is how far Luther will go when he insists on what is excluded by that word “alone.” One of the most important things it excludes, for example, is love. For the good works that don't save us are works of love, the works of love that are commanded by our Lord Jesus when he tells us to love God and our neighbors. And Luther's point is that neither the works nor the love are what make us good, just or righteous people. The love in our hearts is not how we are justified in God's sight, for we are justified by faith alone. Luther insists on that, and it's the Catholics who insist that a certain amount of love is required here.
^Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms, 1521
Do you begin to see why this might be an issue? Do you begin to see why what Protestant theology teaches is not obvious? After all, don't we become better people by practicing love? To that, Luther says a resounding No. That's the foolishness of that pagan philosopher Aristotle, who thinks you become just by doing just deeds. He says that, right there in the Nicomachean Ethics, as some of you know. Luther says: that's fine if you're talking about how you become a good citizen, but it's nonsense if you try applying it to how you stand before the judgment of God. We are all sinners, Luther insists, every one of us born in Adam, and every single one of our deeds is sin. This is one of the things that really got the Pope mad at him. They had a big fight about this one.
Luther insisted that the best works or things done by pious Christians are always, in their essence, sins. And it's not just that they're a little imperfect. They are, in Catholic terms, mortal sins, which means they make us worthy of nothing but eternal damnation. That's what our good deeds earn us, if God were to judge us in strict justice. Even our love, such as it is, earns us nothing but damnation. For our love, like everything good in us, is never good enough to face up to the judgment of God. Hiding behind all our love is a perverse selfishness that we never get rid of in this life. All our love is secretly turned in on ourselves, so that everything we do is really about me, me, me—even my works of love, which I'm doing out of fear of punishment or desire for reward, and not because I really love God or my neighbor from the depths of my heart. We've got this sin problem in the depths of our heart, and the goodness in our hearts is not strong enough to overcome it. Only Christ is—Christ alone.
This leads to the point about grace alone, because what the word “alone” excludes in the phrase “grace alone,” is merit, which is to say, any kind of deserving or earning a reward from God. By all our good deeds and works of love, we earn nothing but damnation. We deserve nothing but God's eternal wrath. That's all the merit we have. And therefore we have no hope for salvation except grace alone, which is to say the grace and mercy of God in Jesus Christ, received by faith alone.
Now in the Catholic view, grace and merit are not mutually exclusive. If you go back to Augustine, that great Catholic theologian I study, you find him teaching that we do merit salvation and eternal life from God, but we do so by grace. The grace of God, Augustine teaches, is more than just God forgiving our sins. It's how God inwardly changes us, when love for God is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit (Rom. 5:5). So grace is the Holy Spirit working in our hearts so that we grow in love for God and neighbor, and this love, which grows out of the grace of God in us, actually does merit God's approval, according to Augustine and Catholic teaching. As we grow in love, we become better Christians, and this is the process of justification.
^Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. Where Luther posted the 95 Theses.
That's the view Luther rejected. Again, I want you to see how radical his teaching is. Luther agreed with Augustine, emphatically, that Christian love grows out of the grace of God given to us in Christ, through the work of the Holy Spirit in us. He agrees, just as emphatically, that faith in Christ always results, by the grace of God, in love for God and neighbor. And he thinks this love earns us nothing, has no merit in God's sight, because all our works of love are really, at heart, mortal sins, meriting nothing but damnation. We do have Christian love, but it's not good enough to save us, not sincere and real enough to justify us in God's sight.
Luther thinks it's very important for us to recognize this, because it drives us to Christ. When we see that even our works of love are sin, if God were to judge them in strict justice, then we are deprived of all hope for salvation except faith in Christ alone. And then we're really ready to hear the Gospel, to hear that Christ alone is our saviour and redeemer. And that is good news indeed. It's also how we find the grace of God and take hold of it and make it ours—by faith alone, simply by believing that the Gospel about Jesus is true.
Think of it like this. Have you ever really messed up in your Christian life—so badly that you wondered whether you were really a Christian at all? (That's the Protestant version of mortal sin). Has your conscience ever nagged at you because you realized you're not such a loving Christian as you thought, that your self-image as a Christian is really a sham, that your Christian life is just faking it? Have you ever wondered what you can do to reassure yourself that the life you're living isn't really that bad after all, that maybe you can slide by with a sort of second-rate Christian life? But then you think: maybe when you meet God face to face, at the last judgment, when it's time for God himself to render a verdict on your life, that your life is just not acceptable, and he won't accept it. Have you ever suffered from what I'll call Christian performance anxiety, wondering whether what you're doing in your Christian life is good enough?
Well, Luther's got news for you: it's not. Nothing you do, not even the love in your heart, such as it is, is good enough to justify you in God's sight and save you. If you want to face God and see anything but condemnation, you have no hope at all unless Jesus Christ died for you. But now I've really got good news for you: it was for you that Christ died, for you that he shed his blood, and it was for your justification that he rose from the dead, and it is for you, along with everyone else who calls upon his name, that Jesus Christ intercedes with his Father in heaven, as he sits at the right hand of God. That's the good news, the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And that's the truth. And what justifies you in God's sight is simply believing that God is telling you the truth when he gives his own Son for you and tells you about it in the Gospel.
By “Gospel,” what Luther (and Protestant theology) means, is not just the four documents called “Gospels” in the Bible. The Gospel is God's good word, his kind and gracious word about Jesus Christ, wherever it is found. You can find it in the Old Testament, when the prophets speak of Christ to come, like when Isaiah promises us: “For unto us a child is born, to us a son is given.” And likewise, you can find it in the letters of the New Testament, which also teach and announce the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And you can hear it today, whenever the word of God is preached as good news that gives us Christ as our savior and redeemer and Lord. (That's what I tried to illustrate preaching the Gospel yesterday). We are justified by faith alone because it is through the Gospel alone that Christ is given to us, and we receive the Gospel simply by believing it is true, and that this is a truth that includes us: for unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and that “us” includes you and me. That's the Gospel giving us Christ, to be received by faith alone.
What Luther learned, by hard experience, is that when you're faced with Christian performance anxiety, and you discover how serious your sins really are, and you wonder whether anything you're doing is good enough, the only thing good enough to free you from your anxiety, and convince you that all is well is God himself tells you so. That's what the Gospel does. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is God himself telling you that his Son is given to you, together with his life and death and resurrection and eternal life at the right hand of God. For unto us a son is given. The Gospel, thank God, does not tell you what to do to get saved. It tells you what Christ has done to save you.
Think of the difference: what Christ has done is good enough to save you, worth trusting with all your heart. Whereas what you do to save yourself—anything you do to answer the question, what do I do to get saved?—is something that raises the question of performance anxiety: if this is what I do to get saved, am I doing it well enough? And Luther thinks the only honest answer to that question is always, No. I'm not doing anything well enough to justify and save myself. I really don't have any hope at all unless Christ died for me. Everything depends on whether that's really true.
The point to get here, is that the Gospel does not tell you what to do to get saved. It tells you what Christ has done to save you. Isn't that wonderful? I mean, let sink in a minute. Christ died for you, to make atonement for your sins. And he was raised from the dead, to give you eternal life. That's the truth, and that's what matters. In the face of your anxieties, that the only thing that matters. So every time you're worried whether you're doing a good enough job at the Christian life, whether you're really surrendered fully to God, whether you really love God in your heart as Jesus commanded, you are free to turn away from those worries, simply because the truth is that Christ died for you and was raised from the dead for you, and sits at God's right hand praying for you. That's the Gospel truth. And if you find sin and resentment and ugliness in your heart where love ought to be, then you are free to confess your sins, to admit to yourself and to God that you haven't lived up to the Christian life. Instead of trying to convince yourself that your Christian life is doing OK when it's not, you are free instead to repent and believe the Gospel. For no matter what your sins are, the truth of the Gospel remains: Christ died for you, and he was raised from the dead for your justification. God keeps repeating this point, over and over again, over the years and the centuries as the Gospel is preached. It is not some new teaching. But it keeps coming to us sinners as good news.
So now take a step further with me, and imagine the kind of performance anxiety that people in Luther's day suffered from, when they worried whether their hearts were really in a state of mortal sin rather than a state of grace: when they looked at their own hearts, maybe as they're trying to confess all their sins to a priest, and they don't know, really, if they have confessed all their mortal sins, the damnable sins that could earn them eternal wrath. The name Luther gave to this kind of performance anxiety was “the terrified conscience.” For if you had a conscience that was nagging at you in those days, reminding you of your sins, the feeling that resulted was not much like what we now call guilt feelings. The feeling was terror: that I'm going to come before the judgment throne of God and hear a word of condemnation, like God saying “depart from me, you worker of iniquity, I never knew you.” Imagine that word of God being the truth about you forever. That's what Luther was afraid of. You almost never hear in Luther about hellfire and brimstone and vivid tortures like that. What you hear about is the word of God. What Luther's terrified conscience was terrified of was not hellfire or devils with pitchforks. Luther was afraid of GOD. Above all, he was afraid of what he would hear from God. And imagine his comfort when he realized that the word of God that he needed to believe was not a word of accusation and condemnation but a kind and gracious word, tidings of comfort and joy: the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the truth that Christ died for him.
So when Luther talks about justification by faith alone, it really matters that it's faith in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which means it's faith in God's word, trusting that God will be true and keep his word. The doctrine of justification by faith alone makes absolutely no sense without the Gospel of Christ. So when Protestant theology talks about walking by faith alone, it's not talking about just trusting God that everything will work out. It's not even talking about believing that God will answer our prayers. “Faith alone” means faith in the Gospel of Christ, the Word of God, the Biblical story that tells us who Christ is, including the biblical promises by which Christ our Lord gives himself to us, as a Bridegroom gives himself to his Bride in his wedding vows. God gives himself to us in his word, by giving us his own Son to be our Bridegroom, our Beloved. And we receive this Bridegroom, this Beloved, not by loving him enough—our love is never worthy of receiving him—but simply by believing that his promises are true. Let God be true and every man a liar, as the apostle says. And that includes my own lying, dishonest heart. I can't trust what's in my heart. I can't trust that my prayers are sincere and heartfelt enough to deserve an answer. I have nothing to trust for my salvation and justification but the word of God, the Gospel that gives me Christ. When you've come to realize that, you've come to see the point of the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone.
And then what? What happens next? Then, as the apostle says, faith works by love. Then we get back to work, loving God and neighbor, just as Jesus commanded. Notice the different roles our Lord Jesus has: first he is the Beloved, the Bridegroom, God's gift to us. Then he is the lawgiver, the one who commands us, reiterating the Old Testament, that we must love God with our whole heart, mind and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves. Luther insists: don't be confused about who Christ is. Don't confuse him with Moses, who is a lawgiver. For Jesus our Lord is God's gift to us before he is a lawgiver, and the law he gives us is already found in Moses, in the Old Testament, for it's the law of love that God has been teaching us from the beginning, and which we have been breaking from the beginning, and which therefore cannot save us.
The law of love, in other words, does not tell us what to do to get saved. It tells us what to do to please God and be of service to our neighbor. None of our works of love is good enough to save us, but that's not their purpose. Why, after all, does God command you to love your neighbor? It's not so that you can save yourself, but so that you can serve your neighbor. It's not about you. Christ's love, in the Gospel—that's about you. For it was out of love for you that Christ died, and it was for your vindication that he was raised from the dead, and it is for the sake of eternal life for you that he now lives forever in his Father's sight. The Gospel is Christ's story, not yours, and yet it includes you, because it is for you that he did all these things.
But the Law is different. That law of God tells you what to do, but not what to do to save yourself, because that's Christ's doing. It tells you that you must serve your neighbor in love. In other words, after the Gospel gives you Christ, the Law gives you to your neighbor. In this way, faith in the Gospel—faith alone—frees love to be love. It frees love to be about the people you love, about God and your neighbor, rather than about yourself. Because if the Law had to save you—if you needed to save yourself by how much love filled your life and what a good Christian you were—then the whole Christian life would be about yourself. You would be trying to love your neighbor in order—to save yourself. And you would be trying to love God—in order to save yourself. Luther noticed this. He noticed that our works-righteousness, as he called it, was all turned in on itself, it was all about ME, ME, ME, rather than my neighbor. It twisted the love of God and neighbor back to myself, to ME, because everything was about trying to become a good, loving Christian, which meant it was all about me. It's deeply perverse and twisted: loving your neighbor in order to save yourself. Or trying to serve your neighbor or the poor in order to show what a nice, loving Christian you are. This is the kind of thing that gives charity a bad name. It's incredibly condescending and self-centered: let me serve you in order to show what a nice, loving Christian I am. It makes it all about me.
So one of the wonderful things that the doctrine of faith alone does, is that it frees love to be love—so that love of neighbor can really be about my neighbor rather than myself. Since I can't do anything to save myself, there is nothing for my Christian life to do except love God and my neighbor. I don't have to ask myself whether my Christian life is good enough. Or rather, when I should ask that question from time to time and answer: no, it's not good enough. Thank God Christ is good enough. Meanwhile, I can get back to the work of love, which leads me to ask a different question. Instead of “Is my work good enough?” I can ask: “Is this work I'm doing genuinely good for my neighbor?” That, after all, is the question that love asks. Love does not ask: Am I loving enough Christian? Is the love in my heart sincere and real enough? That's the question of performance anxiety, not love. What love asks is: What is good for my neighbor? What really helps and serves my neighbor? Is what I'm doing actually helping and serving my neighbor, or should I do something differently? That's the kind of question love asks, because love is not all about me and what kind of nice, loving Christian I am. It's about my neighbor. It's about the person I love.
So the doctrine of justification by faith alone frees love to be love. It does this by directing our attention to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the word of God which gives us Christ as a gift rather than a lawgiver. For it is precisely when we are given Christ as a gift that we are freed to obey the law and to really love. Here we can come back to that point that Augustine makes about grace, the inward gift of the Spirit that changes our hearts and gives us the gift of love. Augustine was the one who explained why preaching the law and telling people what to do can't possibly save them. The law doesn't give us the power to obey the law, Augustine points out, because what the law demands is an inward obedience of the hear, a love that comes from the very depths of our soul. And that means that what the law is really good at is making us anxious. By demanding so much of us—an inward obedience of love, put into practice consistently—it mainly shows us what we are not doing, what we are incapable of doing.
The Law can't give us the power to obey the law, to love God and neighbor. Only grace can do that. This is the great lesson of Augustine's theology of grace. We need God's help in order to obey God's law, and that help is an inner gift of the Holy Spirit. So the great question is: how do we receive this gift? Where do we go to find the grace of God? Here, Augustine gives an answer that Luther finds inadequate. He agrees emphatically with Augustine: the law cannot give us the love that it demands of us. It cannot save us, because the law cannot give us the power to obey the law. So what do we do? We flee to the grace of God. How? By praying. We pray for God to give us the gift of grace through the Holy Spirit. This is that answer Luther finds inadequate.
The difference is, I think, the crucial difference between Catholic and Protestant theology. Augustine seeks grace by praying for it. Luther finds grace by believing the Gospel. What Augustine has is a human word, a word of prayer addressed to God. What Luther has is the Word of God, giving us the grace we seek by giving us Christ. So it's the difference between seeking grace through a human word, and finding it in God's word.
Now let me hasten to point out: of course Augustine knew the Bible. He had God's word too, just like Luther. But this is what I mean by saying Luther gives us a new understanding of what Christians have always believed. Of course Augustine believed the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But he didn't think that was what saved him. For he didn't understand the Gospel as the word of God that gives us grace in Jesus Christ, a grace sufficient to save us. He didn't believe we are saved by grace alone, because he didn't believe we are saved by faith alone, because he didn't understand that the Gospel didn't just tell us what to do—it wasn't a kind of new and better law—but rather it was God giving his own Son to us in his word.
I've written a lot in my books about the difference between Augustine and Luther on exactly this point, so I'll skip over a lot of details here, in order to focus on the one thing necessary. What the Gospel gives us is Christ, whom we receive by faith alone, simply by believing the Gospel is true. To receive Christ through faith in the Gospel means that Christ dwells in our hearts by faith. That's the inner gift of grace that Augustine seeks by prayer, and that Luther finds in the Gospel. Luther finds the inner grace of God not by looking inside his heart, but by taking hold of an external word, the Gospel.
Once again, just as we saw when it came to loving our neighbor, faith means looking away from ourselves, at something external, outside us. That's how love works, and it's also how faith works. Christ dwells in our hearts because we're not paying attention to our hearts but to the Gospel word. It's like music: if you want the music to move you in the depths of your heart, then you have to stop paying attention to your heart and pay attention to the music, which is out there in the room and in the air, and it only gets into your heart through your ears. It is by paying attention to what is outside you that the depth of your heart is moved and changed and transformed. For it is faith alone that makes the inner difference in our hearts, precisely because faith takes hold of Christ in the Gospel, which is an external word that only gets into our hearts through our ears.
So as we will discuss tonight, everything depends on how we direct our attention. If we're looking for Christ in our hearts, we won't find him. If we look for Christ in the Gospel, there he is. That's how he comes to us: in the preaching and teaching and singing of the Gospel. (The Gospel really wants to be set to music, so that we can sing it in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, as the apostle says). And this preaching and teaching and singing is how Christians have always come to salvation—that includes Augustine and all those Catholics, long before Luther. It's how Catholics and Orthodox and Protestants are saved and transformed to this day: by faith in Christ alone. And from this faith come works of love, because through this faith we have union with Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts.
So—in conclusion—why do we need this new understanding of what Christians have always believed? It begins with the terrified conscience of the 16th century, which ramps up a performance anxiety which gets out of hand in the reflective consciousness of the modern world. The Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone is needed wherever Christians are plagued by performance anxiety, trying to make sure their Christian lives are good enough, and thus in need of the good news that they're not, and that Christ alone is good enough, received not by our love or good works but by faith alone.
But I will say there's this irony. The Gospel is nowadays likely to be heard most clearly in non-Protestant churches, because that's where you'll find the old liturgies that are not attempting to be relevant and are therefore not all about ME, ME, ME. The old liturgies are all about God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and what God has done in the world to redeem the world, rather than about ourselves and our Christian lives and the various performance anxieties that we have about our Christian life. The old liturgies don't tell us how to get saved; they just give us Christ our savior, and by doing that they save us. For the liturgies of the ancient church are just full of the Gospel, through and through. They keep telling us about Christ, resolutely, repeatedly, unashamedly. They are unembarrassed about being “impractical,” not telling us what to do but telling us about Jesus Christ, and God our Father, and the gift of the Holy Spirit. And so one of the key phenomena of our day, which is quite visible here at EU, is that Protestants become Catholic or Orthodox because they are bitten by the liturgy bug. It's an irony that stems, I think, from the attempt of American evangelicalism to be relevant and practical, which means their preaching is all about telling us what to do rather than giving us Christ. But there's more about that tonight, when we'll talk more about good news for anxious Christians, and all the practical ideas that you don't have to apply to your life.
by: Dr. Philip Carey, Professor of Philosophy at Eastern University
