Faith and Works

“Faith without works is dead” (James 2:26); “by works a man is justified, and not by faith only” (James 2:24). These words of St. James, set against St. Paul’s “a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law” (Romans 3:28), stand at the heart of the longest-running controversy in Western Christian soteriology. This file lays out the two great readings — the Orthodox reading of salvation as the synergy of grace and human freedom, and the Lutheran reading of justification by faith alone — both fairly and from their own sources, and affirms the synergy reading as this collection’s tradition without polemic.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

What James Says

The decisive passage is James 2:14–26. James opens with the question that frames the whole: “What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? can faith save him?” (James 2:14). He gives the example of the brother left naked and destitute, sent away with a blessing but no bread: “even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone” (James 2:17). He presses the point with a famous barb: “Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble” (James 2:19). Bare assent to a true proposition is the faith of demons; it does not save.

He then turns to Scripture for two witnesses. Abraham was “justified by works, when he had offered Isaac his son upon the altar” — so that “faith wrought with his works, and by works was faith made perfect [eteleiōthē]” (James 2:21–22), and the word of Genesis, “Abraham believed God, and it was imputed unto him for righteousness” (Genesis 15:6), was fulfilled in the offering. From this comes the verse that gives the chapter its sting: “Ye see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only” (James 2:24). His second witness is Rahab the harlot, “justified by works, when she had received the messengers, and had sent them out another way” (James 2:25). And he closes with the refrain: “For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also” (James 2:26).

What Paul Says

Set beside this is the language of St. Paul, which sounds, on its surface, like its opposite. “Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law” (Romans 3:28). “Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ… for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified” (Galatians 2:16). And most starkly: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9). Where James says “not by faith only,” Paul says “without the deeds of the law”; where James makes Abraham’s justification rest in the offering of Isaac, Paul makes it rest in his believing (Romans 4:1–5). The verbal collision is real, and every serious reader of the New Testament has had to reckon with it (see St. Apostle Paul).

The Orthodox Reading: Synergy

The Orthodox tradition does not resolve the tension by subordinating one apostle to the other but by reading both within a single doctrine of salvation as synergeia — the cooperation of divine grace and human freedom (see Soteriology). Salvation is wholly the gift and work of God’s grace, which goes before and enables every good; but grace does not save a passive object. It calls forth, and works together with, the free assent and effort of the person, so that man is a fellow-worker (synergos) with God (cf. 1 Corinthians 3:9). On this reading faith and works are not rivals for the credit of justification; they are two moments of one living thing. Faith is the root, works the fruit that proves the root alive — which is exactly James’s own image: faith is “made perfect” by works (James 2:22), and apart from them is a corpse (James 2:26).

The apparent contradiction with Paul dissolves once the two apostles are seen to be answering different questions against different errors. Paul opposes the “works of the law” — circumcision and the ceremonial observances of the Mosaic covenant urged on Gentile converts (the very crisis of The Council of Jerusalem) — and dead legalism that would make a man his own savior and leave room to boast. He never opposes the works of love that flow from faith; the same Paul insists on “faith which worketh by love” (Galatians 5:6). James, for his part, is not opposing Paul at all but a counterfeit that abuses Paul’s language: a barren, merely intellectual faith — the faith of the demons (James 2:19) — that claims to be saved while doing nothing. Each apostle defends a different flank of the one gospel.

The Fathers read the two side by side in just this way, refusing any opposition between them. The catena tradition on James (Oecumenius and the Greek catenists) insists that James condemns not faith but faith that is idle, and that the works he requires are the living expression of faith, not a substitute for grace (Bray, ed., Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: James, 2000). The same conviction runs through St. John Chrysostom’s reading of Paul: in his homilies on Romans, Chrysostom takes the faith that justifies to be a faith that necessarily issues in a transformed life, never a bare assent that leaves the man unchanged, so that Paul’s “faith” and James’s “works” name one reality from two sides (Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans 7–8, on Romans 3–4; NPNF I/11; see St. John Chrysostom). For the Orthodox, justification is neither earned by works nor received by a faith that stays alone; it is the gift of grace appropriated by a faith that lives and works (on the broader contrast of soteriologies, see Orthodoxy and Protestantism).

The Lutheran Reading: Sola Fide

The Reformation gave a different answer, and it is presented here from its own documents, fairly and without polemic. At its center stands justification by faith alone — sola fide — understood as the article on which, for the Reformers, the Church stands or falls. The classic Lutheran statement is the Augsburg Confession of 1530, Article IV, “Of Justification”: men “cannot be justified before God by their own strength, merits, or works, but are freely justified for Christ’s sake, through faith, when they believe that they are received into favor, and that their sins are forgiven for Christ’s sake, who, by His death, has made satisfaction for our sins. This faith God imputes for righteousness in His sight” (Augsburg Confession, 1530, Art. IV). Justification, on this reading, is forensic and imputed: God reckons to the believer the righteousness of Christ, received by faith as a sheer gift, apart from any human work as its ground.

On this account good works are not denied — they are required as the necessary fruit of a living faith, not its ground. The companion Article VI (“Of New Obedience”) insists that “this faith should bring forth good fruits, and that it is necessary to do good works commanded by God” — yet “not that we may trust in these works to merit justification before God” (Augsburg Confession, 1530, Art. VI). The Reformers therefore read James not as teaching a different ground of justification but as describing how a living faith shows itself: James’s “justify,” in this reading, means to demonstrate or vindicate faith before men by its evident fruits, so that “by works a man is justified” (James 2:24) speaks of the proof, not the cause, of righteousness. Luther himself, less willing to harmonize, doubted the epistle’s authority on this very point (Luther, Preface to the Epistles of James and Jude, 1522; Luther’s Works 35:396; see The Epistle of James) — though the confessional tradition that followed him preferred the harmonizing reading to the relegation.

Holding the Two Together

Read fairly, the two traditions are not as far apart as the slogans suggest: both confess that saving faith is never alone, both deny that a barren faith saves, and both affirm the primacy of grace. They divide over whether justification is best described as God’s forensic imputation of an alien righteousness, received by faith and bearing works as fruit, or as the transforming union of grace and freedom in which faith working through love is itself the form of righteousness. This collection holds, with the Orthodox Church and the Fathers, to the synergy reading: that St. James and St. Paul teach one gospel, that grace and human cooperation are not competitors, and that “faith without works is dead” (James 2:26) is not an embarrassment to be explained away but the plain truth of the Christian life. It states the Lutheran position not to refute it but because honesty about the great division of Western soteriology is part of telling the truth about this epistle without polemic.

See Also

References

  • The Holy Bible. James 2:14–26; Genesis 15:6; Romans 3:28; 4:1–5; Galatians 2:16; 5:6; Ephesians 2:8–9; 1 Corinthians 3:9; 13:2. (Quotations follow the Authorized Version; Greek consulted for eteleiōthē at James 2:22 and synergos.)
  • The Augsburg Confession (1530), Articles IV (“Of Justification”) and VI (“Of New Obedience”). In The Book of Concord, ed. and trans. Theodore G. Tappert. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1959.
  • Luther, Martin. Preface to the Epistles of James and Jude (1522). In Luther’s Works, Vol. 35: Word and Sacrament I, ed. E. Theodore Bachmann. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg/Fortress, 1960, pp. 395–397. (James “flatly against St. Paul… in ascribing justification to works.”)
  • John Chrysostom. Homilies on the Epistle to the Romans 7–8 (on Romans 3–4). Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vol. 11. (Faith that justifies as a faith that transforms the life.)
  • Bray, Gerald, ed. James, 1–2 Peter, 1–3 John, Jude. Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, New Testament XI. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2000. (The Greek catena on James 2 — Oecumenius and the catenists — on idle versus living faith.)
  • Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Way. Rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995. (Salvation as synergeia, the cooperation of grace and freedom.)