Jesus told the Parable of the Sheep and Goats. This does not seem like a news flash until we turn away from observing the obvious and begin to talk about soteriology, a three-dollar word for that branch of Christian theology concerned with the question “What must we do to be saved?”
For early Christians the answer was brief: “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ!”—words compact with deeply incarnational meaning. If you believed in Jesus, it was taken for granted that you didn’t simply hold a theory about him; you were called to be his disciple and reorder your entire life in conformity with his will. So Paul habitually spoke of the “obedience of faith” (Romans 1:5), and James likewise said that “faith without works is dead” ( James 2:20, KJV).
This common-sense understanding of faith continued to reign for a millennium and a half. But enthusiasts in the sixteenth century came up with a definition of faith that lost contact with the Incarnation. This definition basically said that “faith alone” saved and that, consequently, it didn’t really matter what you did, just so long as you believed that Jesus would forgive you for doing it. Luther, for instance, famously said: “Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly for he is victorious over sin, death, and the world. As long as we are here in this world we have to sin. This life is not a dwelling place of righteousness.” He topped it with, “No sin will separate us from the Lamb, even though we commit fornication and murder a thousand times a day.”1
You can sort of see what he’s getting at. Yes, Jesus does say, “Forgive seven times seventy” (see Matthew 18:22) and binds himself implicitly to the promise that he will do as much if we are truly repentant. Yes, the sacraments of baptism and reconciliation can and have forgiven stupendous crimes. (Reflect on the fact that Hans Frank, Gauleiter of Poland and the murderer of roughly four million men, women, and children, sought the sacrament of reconciliation before he was hanged and was reconciled with Christ and the Church.) But that doesn’t mean “Murder four million more and you’ll still be all right.” Luther’s rhetorical flourish may have felt good, but “sin boldly” is counsel specifically rejected by Luther’s hero, Paul, who bluntly declared:
What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? (Romans 6:1–2)
It is not, however, counsel that was rejected by a great deal of Protestantism in Luther’s train.
To be sure, most Evangelical Protestants holding a “Once Saved, Always Saved” (OSAS) theology would not say, “Sin boldly!” Rather, they say that sin is a bad idea and that there will be unspecified bad consequences for the Christian as a result. But the pernicious notion that faith and good deeds have no essential connection remains. So, while Evangelical Christian culture warriors might be quite willing to say that non-Christians are facing damnation, they often tend to assume that Christians who sin gravely still have “assurance of salvation” since they “accepted Jesus into their heart as their personal Lord and Savior.” Fail to perform that verbal ritual, and (according to OSAS theory) no amount of “good works” means the slightest thing, since our righteous deeds are like filthy rags in God’s sight (see Isaiah 64:6). Perform that ritual and nothing can keep you out of Heaven (according to the theory).
Because of this theory, many Evangelical Protestants think Catholics are all about “salvation by works,” and many Catholics, to whom this talk about “accepting Jesus” is foreign lingo, often fan the flames of Evangelical fear by saying “But I go to Mass!” or “I help out at the soup kitchen” or some other variation on what Evangelicals tend to see as “works of righteousness.” So the conversation devolves into two monologues in two different Christian dialects as the Evangelical sits in judgment of the hell-bound Catholic and the Catholic becomes increasingly mystified by the Evangelical jargon. My approach to Evangelicals who ask, “If you died tonight, why would God let you into Heaven?” is a bit different. I don’t point to the good-works thing; I just tell them that I’d be happy to ask Jesus into my heart as my personal Lord and Savior (again). Then I tell my Evangelical friend I will go to Mass and say a word of thanks to Mary for this happy conversation.
Bam! Suddenly I’m told that it’s not “Once Saved, Always Saved” after all. Rather, I must do a good work pronto. Namely, I have to stop going to Mass, and I especially have to stop talking to and about Mary. In fact, I am often informed that, as a Catholic, I don’t really have faith at all because of my Bad Work of belonging to the wrong Church, and so on. So much for sinning boldly and believing more boldly still.
The beautiful irony of all this is that it shows that “salvation by faith alone” is not believed even by its adherents. Instead, it makes plain that if you really believe something, that belief must be expressed in actions or it’s just a fantasy or a theory. In this case, the good work I must do is “renounce the Catholic Church.” That particular course of proposed faith in action is, of course, all wet. But the idea of faith in action is itself sound as a bell.
Jesus was the first person in our tradition to point that out, which is why neither he nor his apostles ever talked about salvation through “faith alone”––except James, who condemned the idea as preposterous (see James 2:24). Instead Jesus spoke of salvation in precisely the way that his disciple John spoke of him: as Word made flesh. When Zacchaeus pledged to pay back fourfold all he had stolen, Jesus did not rebuke him for trying to buy salvation with his filthy works of righteousness. He commended him as a true son of Abraham and told him that salvation had come to his house (see Luke 19:1–10). And when Christ in Matthew 25 talked about the salvation of the nations, he didn’t theorize about faith alone but instead talked about what Catholic tradition would later call the corporal works of mercy:
Then the King will say to those at his right hand,“Come,O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.” (Matthew 25:34–36)
This is not amenable to neat Evangelical categories of “saved” and “lost.” The saved sheep had no idea it was Christ they were serving. They never so much as heard of Jesus, much less asked him into their hearts as their personal Lord and Savior. Nor (with all due respect to the theory of Feeneyite enthusiasts that only visible members of the Catholic Church are saved) did the saved sheep indicate the slightest familiarity with baptism or the sacraments. They were members of “the nations” (that is, Gentiles, goyim, outsiders). Their baffled reply was “Lord, when did we see you hungry, thirsty” and so on. They had no idea it was Jesus they were serving in the poor, dispossessed, naked, and wretched. They just thought they were doing the decent thing. And yet, to them, the King spoke neither a word of rebuke or reproach for their “works salvation” nor a syllable about their righteous works being like filthy rags, nor a peep about their failure to ask Jesus into their hearts as Savior. He said nothing about their lack of the sacraments. None of this was according to the standard Evangelical (or Feeneyite) playbook.
Likewise, the goats heard none of the words an Evangelical or Feeneyite would expect about failure to make a good profession of faith in the Trinity or the saving work of Christ on the cross. There was nothing about a personal decision for Jesus or any sacrament. In the parable, what was make-or-break for the goats as well as the sheep was how they treated the “least of these.”
Of which more on Monday.
(For more information, see my book THE WORK OF MERCY: BEING THE HANDS AND HEART OF CHRIST (available here, signed by me, or in Kindle format here, or as an audiobook here).
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Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An angel writing in a book of gold:—
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the presence in the room he said,
“What writest thou?”—The vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord,
Answered, “The names of those who love the Lord.”
“And is mine one?” said Abou. “Nay, not so,”
Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerly still; and said, “I pray thee, then,
Write me as one that loves his fellow men.”
The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the names whom love of God had blest,
And lo! Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest.
–Leigh Hunt (1834)