A. 50 B. 30 C. 10 D. 1
THE
ANSWER IS….. D…. only once. Note that the phrase “not by” comes before it
(James 2:24: “Justification is by works and NOT by faith alone” ).
Guys, the
truth is… we Catholics don’t have a problem with the Protestant slogan
“salvation is by faith alone” as long as “faith alone” is defined as “faith
working in love” (Gal 5:6) or faith whose fruits are hope and charity, or
“living faith.”
Even evangelicals
will say the “faith” they refer to is intellectual assent PLUS trust. If you
would just include charity in that, we could agree completely. For Catholics,
acts of love or charity make the faith perfect….they go hand and hand and
cannot be separated.
Catholics feel that evangelicals separate things that cannot be separated: the Bible and the Church, faith and works, the Eucharist being both the true sacrifice of Christ AND a memorial sacrifice, a legal and an infused justification, etc. etc.
But back to salvation. I have seen it described this way: Evangelicals believe there is one thing you have to do for salvation: to believe (which is a gift from God), while Catholics believe there are two things you have to do: to believe and do works, (both being gifts from God and not of ourselves lest any man boast.) Again…We believe neither our faith nor works is attributable to man….it’s all God.
Catholics believe that any goods works we do are actually God’s works as His
grace flows through us after we receive initial justification, a free gift from
God.
On the other
hand, any bad works (or failure to do good works) are not from God, but are
from humans and their sin.
Once we
receive justification, we do not believe the Bible gives us a guarantee that no
matter what we do in the future we’ll have justifying grace until the day we
die (although certainly many Christians do continue in this grace until death)
Because God
wishes all men to be saved (I Tim 2:4), God offers grace to all. It’s up to us
to accept or reject. When we reject it, we sin. God allows us to sin thanks to
his gift of free will to reject or to not reject his gifts. When we accept
God’s grace, we aren’t actually doing anything from ourselves.
Some
Protestants argue that accepting grace involves something originating from our
meager old selves, but it’s not.
Picture it
this way: Pretend there is a funnel
over your head and it’s filled with vanilla pudding, which is really God’s
grace being poured out. If you stick your finger up to the mouth of the funnel
and block it, then you did something….you sinned….you blocked or rejected the
grace.
But if you do NOTHING, God continues pouring grace onto you and living through you. The grace acts on you, and now you can act on yourself thanks to the power of the grace. The grace acts on us like the spinach acts on Popeye. We, like Popeye, are able to act now (thanks to the foreign substance that has been infused in us.)
That’s the
Catholic stance. On the other hand, many Protestants say we have no free will
to reject or accept grace. We reject this notion. A loving Father wouldn’t want his children to love him just
because he made them into robots with no choice to reject.
Rev. William G. Most
does a good job of explaining grace in his book Catholic
Apologetics Today: Answer to Modern Critics.
As
convert-to-Catholicism Jimmy Akin puts it, the evangelical slogan declaring
that salvation is by “faith alone” is “intrinsically misleading and contrary to
the language of Scripture.”
One more note: No time to treat the whole issue of Protestant justification (a one-time event) versus Catholic justification (a lifelong process with a beginning, middle and end……which is also the view of the Early Church and which Akin systematically shows is also the Biblical teaching). But I do want to emphasize (again) that the Catholic Church teaches that no work of man could possibly bring us to initial justification. In other words, one minute you’re going to hell, and the next minute, God justifies you with his grace and you’re going to heaven. No work precedes the start of justification…..the grace is a free gift.
This gift of
salvation is an inheritance from our heavenly Father. Inheritances cannot be
earned. But you can lose this free gift. One well-known Catholic apologist
(need to check which one) explained it this way: When parents die, their
children may receive an inheritance. Nobody would ever claim this was earned by
the children….it was a free gift. But could one of the children behave so
wickedly and rebelliously that he gets cut out of the inheritance? Yup.
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