Do Paul & James Disagree About "Works"?

A Spicy Group Chat on "Faith and Works"

Hi everyone,

Today’s New Testament reading was from James Chapter 2. First thing this morning, I sent a few thoughts via group chat to some friends who I knew were also reading the same passage (the beauty of a reading plan!).

DISCLAIMER: What follows is a brief discussion of a very controversial topic in Christian theology regarding the relationship between “faith” and “works.” I usually stay away from addressing such topics in this format, for two reasons: (1) they tend to foster division rather than unity among believers; and (2) they do not often bear the fruit of deeper love for Christ. Love, trust, and obedience to Christ are the main thing. Our various intellectual interpretations about him are secondary. Even so, biblical interpretation is obviously very important. Deeper understanding of Scripture certainly can lead to deeper love for God. Likewise, our collective misconceptions of certain passages and doctrines can be very costly to our faith over time. My hope is that we would become a community that can have these conversations and handle them well. With that said, here’s today’s reading from James 2:

¹⁴ What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? ¹⁵ If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, ¹⁶ and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? ¹⁷ So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.

¹⁸ But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. ¹⁹ You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder! ²⁰ Do you want to be shown, you foolish person, that faith apart from works is useless? ²¹ Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up his son Isaac on the altar? ²² You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by his works; ²³ and the Scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness”—and he was called a friend of God. ²⁴ You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. ²⁵ And in the same way was not also Rahab the prostitute justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out by another way? ²⁶ For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead.

So I began my text to the group somewhat boldly…

This morning’s reading from James is a word for our Christian cultural moment. We’ve spent too long saying obedience is merely the fruit of faith, as though faith were merely some internal intellectual exercise. No, faith is when, like Abraham, you obey.

Hunter Hanger responded with, “Next blog subject, Ross.” (Thanks man. Ask and you shall receive!)

Sam Kittrell then asked, “Would you say faith is the fruit of obedience?”

My answer:

I think faith appears to have two parts: inner trust or confidence in things unseen and outer trust or confidence in things unseen. These are two perspectives on the same growing event. Sometimes it is felt inwardly, sometimes it is acted outwardly. These appear as two separate realities but they are not. The reality of each is vindicated by the other. Sometimes inward trust bears the fruit of outward action. Sometimes outward action strengthens inner trust.

I went on (a little too boldy)…

The idea that “faith” (as Jesus and Paul mean it) is a mere inward reality given by God, utterly divorced from human agency and outward action, except that outward actions are “evidence” of inward faith—which is honestly the way almost all Protestant seminaries teach it today—suffers from the same Gnostic/Arian rejection of paradox that tempted the early church to disbelieve that Jesus could be both “fully God and fully man.”

Then added:

Thank the Lord for James who could not be more clear on this point.

(But, honestly, Paul and Jesus are clear too.)

The problem arises from a mistaken conception of what Paul means by “works.”

[At this point, PJ Terranova and Tathan Bennett added some great deep thoughts, which I will leave be for now.]

Nathan Pyle asked, “Ross, will you elaborate on the misconception of Paul’s ‘works’?”

After wrapping up some good old 1/2bh (area of a triangle) with my daughter Susu, I responded with one of those annoyingly long texts you get from your friends sometimes…so long that the iOS gave it a thumbnail view that you have to click to expand:

Sorry I was deep in that homeschool life. Good q. Here’s the point where Paul and James seem most directly to contradict one another.

Romans 3:28 - “For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.”

James 2:24 - “You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.”

This contradiction seems so clear that it caused many of our 19th and 20th Century scholars to say that James and Paul actually disagreed on this point and that the NT, far from laying out one unified doctrine of Christian faith, was actually just a historical document recording the disagreements of the earliest Christians. Most of these scholars were German Lutherans, and they “took Paul’s side” over James, as it were, since Luther himself called James’ letter “an epistle of straw” and moved to throw it out of the canon (though he eventually thought better of it). But the whole “disagreement” is a mistake, which in many ways stems from Luther (who was brilliant and faithful, I believe, but still mistaken on this point).

In short, Luther wants “works” to mean literally all human action toward God, and then to say, “No mere human action toward God can justify.” Of course, by his own logic, Luther is correct, because he takes “justify” to mean “merit God’s favor.” But this is not what “justify” means, because God is not working according to a merit system, which, ironically, is the whole thing Paul is trying to make clear! No human action *needs* to merit God’s love, because God has always loved us. “For God so loved the world…” etc. Luther and Calvin get especially stuck on the problem of “meriting God’s favor.” They say, rightly, that we cannot do this, and then conclude that the solution is that Jesus must do it for us. But this is *not* the solution, because the problem was never, “How can we merit God’s love?” The problem has always been: “God loves us, but tragically, we do not love him. How can we come to love him as he loves us?”

This is the problem Jesus came to solve.

Now let’s go back and read that section in Romans 3 and see where Luther goes astray. Notice the phrase Paul uses: “For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from *works of the law*.” He does not merely say “works,” but “works of the law.” Elsewhere, Paul will use the shorthand “works,” but for Paul it pretty much always means “works of the law,” meaning of the OT written code. Notice, the very next verse reads, “Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also…” This verse would make no sense in this context if Paul were talking about human works generally. He is talking about the specific works of the Jewish law. And he is saying, these outward works are not—and have never been!—the means of salvation. As if outward circumcision could save. No. As Paul and the OT prophets attest, it must be circumcision of the heart.

Finally, when James uses the word “works,” he *is* using it in a more generalized sense. Obviously Abraham’s obedience with his son Isaac is not obedience to some particular OT code or commandment. Abraham is obeying God directly, by faith. So James is further clarifying Paul’s point, that though justification comes through faith, not by mere outward adherence to the Torah, faith is also not *mere* inward belief—even the demons believe in that way!—but embodied faithfulness. This is the faith we see in Abraham putting his son on the altar. This is also the faith we see in the life of Jesus. But not only in his life. Also in his teaching: “Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock” (Matthew 7).

One thing more recent scholarship has shown, which seems to have been a blindspot during the Reformation (though not in the early church), is that the word that is translated “faith” in these texts (Gk. pistis) can actually mean both “faith” and “faithfulness.” I find it helpful to hold onto both meanings at once.

Finally, finally, I am not meaning to lead everyone away from the great work (and faith!) of the Protestant Reformers. That is our tradition. They were greater than I. And my faith has been so shaped by them that I could never cut them off, even if I tried, without cutting off the branch I’m sitting on. You will not find me converting anytime soon. But it is also worth realizing that much of our Protestant adherence to so-called “justification by faith,” “faith alone,” “grace alone,” “Scripture alone” *is* actually (and quite ironically) an adherence to our Protestant TRADITION, not to the words of Scripture themselves.

Then added:

This is why, btw, Jesus says the whole law can be summed up in love. And why Paul says, “love is the fulfillment of the law.” Not because love is somehow “a work” that merits God’s favor. Ugh. But because the whole point from the very beginning was *not* adherence, but sharing mutually in the love of the Father, Son, and Spirit. To love God and others is to be saved. Or as Father Zosima says in the Brothers K, “What is hell? I maintain it is the suffering of being unable to love.”

[At this point, Nathan Pyle had some great thoughts.]

Then my friend Thomas Dixon, the resident New Testament scholar on the group chat, asked: “Ross, in this vein, how do you read Rom 4:1-8, where Paul contrasts justifying faith with work that merits a reward? E.g. “To the one who works, the wage is counted not according to gift/grace but according to what is owed, but to one not working but believing in the one who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness.”

My response:

My take, humbly, is that the beginning of Romans 4 is consistent with what I’ve been saying here. Paul wants to do away with the merit economy that the law seems to have engendered in its (false) adherents. That was never the purpose of the law, and *that* economy is not what Christ fulfills. I don’t believe Jesus needs to *merit* our salvation for us, because I believe our salvation is in our loving union to God in Christ, and such a thing need not be merited at all. Christ is our salvation in a different sense that is only confused by the language of merit. Marrying God requires our love/trust, not our performance. But love/trust is not merely inward. As James says, it is embodied in what we do.

So Paul and James are making two different points about Abraham, but in the end they are two sides of the same coin. Abraham is both the example of someone *not* justified through meritorious works of the Torah but through faith in God (Paul), and also the example of someone who’s justifying faith is not merely inward but embodied in his obedience to God at the altar of Isaac (James).

Would love to know your thoughts on this, as an actual Pauline scholar!

At this point Carter Fleck recommended the book Justification by N. T. Wright, which indeed deals with this problem directly. And Parker York asked a very poignant question about the “New Perspective on Paul,” a contemporary scholarly movement most famously represented by none other than…N. T. Wright. Parker and Carter are spot on. N.T. Wright and the NPP deal with exactly the sort of questions this post attempts to address. And though I’m tempted to open up a whole new can of worms regarding NPP, I think I will leave this where it lies for now, if only to say: I have deep respect for Wright (perhaps the greatest NT scholar of our time?), though I’m not sure I fully resonate with his solution to the “justification” problem. I think Thomas would say the same, but I’ll have to leave it to him to correct me (and Wright) as he sees fit. Perhaps, Thomas, we should do our first joint podcast on this?

That’s all for today. If you’d like to join our monthly Bible Reading Plan, here are two ways: (1) Analog: You can access the reading plan here and print it out or bookmark it on your phone or computer. (2) Dwell App: We also have a personalized plan on Dwell (free for you!), which automatically loads each new day’s Scriptures in audio and visual form. Lots of people have been having trouble getting the app to work, but this new link (thank you Sarah Schultz) should clear it all up.

— Ross

P.S. My good friend Zach Kuenzli was not on this text thread, but he is a faithful Lutheran and one of the deepest theological thinkers I know. I trust, from our past conversations on this topic, that he may also bring some nuance and/or correction to my blunt force here. Zach, bring the Formula of Concord or something, and let’s have a chat.