NRO has an essay attacking Senator Kerry (D-Fallujah) for his ham-handed use of the Book of James. The Protestant writer, Quin Hillyer, assails the Cafeteria Catholic senator for equating “good works” with spending Federal money. In this, I agree with Hillyer (although I am uncomfortable with his view that almsgiving is per se an individual and not a corporate endeavor. The Old Testament prophets, to name one example, collectively excoriated the Chosen People for not taking care of widows and orphans.)
However, I think he misunderstands James, for the formulation “faith without works is dead” isn’t a comment on a person’s quality of faith — rather, it says that a faith which produces nothing is no faith at all, that it does not exist.
Mr. Hillyer says, “St. Paul’s repeated assertion that men are ‘justified,’ or saved, through faith alone.” Show me once in the Bible where it says that. It’s true that a famous Christian said that we are saved “by grace, through faith, apart from works of man,” but that Christian was Martin Luther, as I learned in my Lutheran confirmation class. Nobody thought that before he did.
Now, Hillyer is certainly free to accept Luther’s formulation, but he also wants to drag the Catholic view of salvation into his argument. He’s better off sticking to the meat of his critique, which is that wealth-transfer programs are a secular project that are unlikely to produce any spiritual benefits for the recipients.
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Glad you are posting again, Jackson
Well, Paul does seem in various places to distinguish faith from “works,” but one needs to engage in some analysis of what he means. Often, he means “works” like circumcision, rather than like basic morality.
By the way, I commented briefly on the article: http://www.exceptionalmarriages.com/weblog/BlogDetail.asp?ID=18982
Kerry could be indicted very harshly by the entirety of the Epistle of St. James. The first chapter deals with double-mindedness. James worries about speaking curses and blessings out of the same mouth. He warns those who think themselves teachers over the flock, for they shall be held to a higher standard (though Kerry isn’t a teacher of the Gospel, he is a teacher of the people in a public capacity by framing moral questions in political issues in deceptive ways— stem cells, abortion, etc), and of course, finally, he fails to live out his faith by his deeds. He says he believes life begins with conception, yet doesn’t act to preserve the sanctity of that life.
St. James would not be very pleased with the senator from Massachusetts.
I read the article this morning and had similar misgivings. I am glad to see that my misgivings were shared.
I agree that Hillyer’s piece does not do justice to the depth of the theological issues involved in the justification debate(s). However, your assertion that justification by faith alone was Luther’s innovation is untrue. As one counterexample, please see chapter 32 of Clement’s first epistle to Corinth (via CCEL):
This is all, of course, entirely tangential to Sen. Kerry’s deplorable faith-baiting.
I actually think – to expand briefly on my comment above – that the argument about whether Paul said or meant “faith” or “faith alone” is largely a red herring. The more interesting question is what he meant by both “faith” and “works.” Did he mean what, e.g., Luther thought he meant? I would say, probably not (“probably” because while I think I understand Paul, I’m not a Luther scholar, and don’t want to put words in Luther’s mouth). But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a sense in which he does hold for justification by “faith alone” – a sense which doesn’t contradict, but rather complements, what James means by “faith without works is dead.”