The problem of Good Deeds and Faith

The problem of Good Deeds and Faith

This one is for Darrell, who asked a question a couple days ago, based on something I wrote on The Lord's Prayer - "Lead us not into temptation ...".  Darrell - I hope you see this.  

It's also for anyone else who has question similar to his -

It's also for anyone who, like me, was Catholic and later learned about salvation by Grace alone.  

There's an article in Christianity Today - the August edition that just came out in electronic version today - titled 500 Years After Reformation, Many Protestants Closer to Catholics than Martin Luther.

It's about a survey that was done.
The results were shocking and disappointing.
The conclusion - well, it was only about what people said - what people believed to be true.  While I couldn't really expect them to reach a conclusion as to whether or not the results were good or not (although I believe they weren't good) - I was hoping they'd at least say something about why Luther believed in the concepts he put forth.  Not the whole thing - even a short statement.

They didn't.  
And that leaves readers to look it up for themselves.
Unless, of course, they assume the people surveyed actually got it right.  
Well - let me rephrase that - unless they assume the people surveyed that have the same beliefs as them were right.

So - let's look at the issues - of which there were two.

In 1517, Martin Luther staked his soul on two revolutionary ideas: sola fide, that justification is dependent on faith alone; and sola scriptura, that Scripture is the only ultimate authority for Christian belief and practice and does not need oversight from church leaders or tradition to be read and understood.

The 95 theses Luther nailed to the door at Wittenberg served as the catalyst for one of the world’s largest religious splits, as thousands broke off from the Roman Catholic Church. His legacy, 500 years later, is 560 million Protestants across the globe, making up more than a third of the world’s Christians.

But many of them don’t actually agree with him.

The first issue is "sola fide" - which means "faith alone" - so the question is whether or not we are saved by faith alone.

The second issue is "sola scriptura" - which means "scripture alone" - so the question is whether or not Scripture alone is authoritative for the faith and practice of the Christian.

Let's start with the second one - scripture alone.

Scripture Alone

I'd like to start with this one, because it's important in deciding whether or not "faith alone" can even be legitimate.

There are really two parts to this scripture alone question.

1. The first part of scripture alone is one of whether scripture is authoritative.  I bring this up, because some, including too many Christians, are willing to say that the Bible has many errors.  The problem then, becomes one of how any document that has a lot of errors can be authoritative.  At that point, does the authority not become the person or persons who decide which parts of the document are in error and which are not?  In fact - how can one even have faith in anything when we believe it has errors?  For more on that, I invite you to read something I wrote earlier - the problem of inerrancy.  I believe that most, if not all the things people consider errors aren't errors at all, but misinterpretations, different points of view of the authors that viewed the events, improper translations, Etc.  I can't say that I've investigated every single thing that's claimed to be in error - so I also cannot say that my previous list is complete.  However - I did reach the following conclusion in the article, with time and experience only serving to make that belief even stronger.

And yet – I have to believe that what He said is True. Having been through the statistical and science side of things – the odds for life to be what it is are so astronomically small – it’s harder to be an atheist than it is to believe in God. An atheist has to have an unbelievable amount of faith in randomness and chaos to believe that God doesn’t exist. They just refuse to admit it.

The real issue – if we choose to admit it – is something I’ve written about and talked about before. And it comes down to the difference between believing in God – and believing God.