The Church Needs a Faith that Works

The relationship between faith and works is a difficult one for Protestants. Since the Protestant Reformation, Protestants have been careful to safeguard the doctrine of salvation by faith alone. We insist strongly that there is nothing that we do that can set us right before God. It is wholly the work of Christ by which we are saved.

But sometimes this obsession with faith alone can get us into dangerous waters. It did for Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformer famous for nailing his 95 theses onto the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church in Germany.

The Epistle of Straw

Luther famously called the book of James an “epistle of straw.” Many have pointed to this to argue that Luther wished for James to be removed from the New Testament canon. Luther is made out to be an arbitrary redactor, leaving in certain books and excluding others which did not fit his theology.

A Brief Remark on the Canon

This is certainly the case. Luther was at least partly responsible for why Protestants removed books like Tobit, Judith, the Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch (these books are part of the deuterocanonical books), and parts of Esther and Daniel. That is just to name a few! Some, like Dr. Stephen Nicols in his interview with Ligonier, claims that Catholics added these books to their canon in 1546.

In reality, the biblical canon, including the books that Luther left out, was settled within a few centuries of Church history. The last remark to make on this subject is that Protestants are a small minority with how few books we consider canonical. Orthodox churches read the deuterocanon. And the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible contains books completely unfamiliar to Protestant ears, like Josippon or the Didascalia.

Luther and the Book of James

Some claim that Luther called James an “epistle of straw” because he wanted it out of the Bible. Kathy Schiffer on the National Catholic Register, for example, writes of “Luther’s biblical meddling.” According to this narrative, Luther did not like James’s emphasis on works. This contradicted Luther’s obsession with salvation by faith alone.

However, there has been some pushback on this narrative. Martin Foord on Themelios argues that Luther did not want James out of the Bible. Rather, Luther saw it as less important as other books, like the Gospels. As Foord writes, Luther had a “two-level” understanding of Scripture. As Luther saw it, there were “the ‘chief books’ and those that were of less value.”

The “chief books” were ones that Luther thought had apostolic authorship, or were written by the apostles. The ones that were deemed less important were the books of Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation. This does not help Luther’s case, though. Luther imposed categories onto the New Testament, judging which ones were more or less important than others. We understand his attitude towards James better in his own words:

St. James’ epistle is really an epistle of straw, compared to these others, for it has nothing of the nature of the gospel about it (Luther, Word and Sacrament I).

This leads us to ask ourselves why Luther didn’t consider James to have nothing to do with the Gospel.

What is the Gospel, Anyways?

Luther’s attitude towards James has been inherited by ourselves today. We are so focused on faith alone. This focus on faith excludes the fruits of faith. And in excluding the fruits of faith, we separate ourselves from the Scriptures that tell us about the fruits of faith.

There is a tendency to reduce the Gospel to one singular event: Jesus died for your sins. But if we were to say that that is the Gospel, how much of Christ do we really have? What is sin? That cannot be understood without the book of Genesis, which teaches us about the Fall. Who is Jesus, and why did He die? Jesus’s death cannot be understood without Jesus’s life.

Following the Gospel Authors

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, according to tradition, wrote the four Gospels we know today. If we consult these writers, we can get a better understanding of what the Gospel really is. Mark, who is considered by some scholars to have written the very first Gospel in 70 CE, is a good example to follow.

Mark 1:1 reads, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” What does Mark write after this? You would think that Mark would get right to business. Shouldn’t he just write about Jesus’s crucifixion and be done with it? Or maybe he should write about Jesus’s birth and all his deeds.

But no. Mark begins with a prophecy in Isaiah, about how God would send a messenger to prepare the way for Christ. And then Mark writes about John the Baptizer. He doesn’t even start with Jesus. Yet he prefaces his book as “the beginning of the gospel.”

Compressing the Gospel

I think Mark highlights where we get it wrong. In a world of soundbites, short attention spans, and 15-second videos, we have compressed the Gospel. “Jesus died for you” is not enough to express the Gospel. It is too small of a box to contain the Gospel.

And when we start compressing the Gospel, we begin to compartmentalize our faith and understanding of God. Didn’t Luther do that? He began imposing categories of what he considered more and less important books onto the Bible. Don’t we do that? We focus on salvation by faith alone. But we focus so hard on faith alone that we make faith lonely. We focus so much on salvation that we forget that salvation is only one part of a larger mural that God is painting.

Faith isn’t meant to be lonely. The Church needs a faith that works.

Recovering Faith and Works

This article is really an invitation to immerse ourselves in what James has to say. James tells us to “be doers of the word, and not hearers only” (1:22, ESV). But James is not just saying that we have to add works to our faith. Faith and works are not just a combo. They make up a system, and one does not work without the other.

The metaphor that James employs is that of the body and the spirit. Does it make sense to say that I am alive if my spirit has departed from my body? Can my body say, “I have all the organs necessary for life. I am intact and can function like a normal human being”? Of course not. For without the spirit, the body is a corpse.

The same goes for faith. Just as the body is the vessel for the spirit, faith is the vessel for works. Faith cannot truly exist apart from works that follow it. As James writes, “faith apart from works is dead” (2:26). Or as I would say, faith without works is nothing more than a corpse.

Was Jesus About “Faith Alone”?

Like with all things, Jesus is our example for how this is lived out. If Jesus were just about faith, wouldn’t He be nothing more than a talking head? A mind that would exposit biblical and salvific truths to other minds that would process and assent to those truths?

Yet, that is not the story that we are given in Scripture. Jesus was not about “faith alone.” Jesus did much more than preach. He healed the sick, empowered the lame, cast out demons, raised the dead, prayed, worshipped, fasted, made wine, and feasted with outcasts. The underlying theme of all of what Jesus did? He did things different.

To have a faith that works, we must do things differently. Just as Jesus’s miracles violated the laws of nature, our works must violate the expectations and norms of society. While others will put profit before people, we must put people before profit. If it is normal to neglect the needy and the poor, those are the ones we must help the most. Since people wish to do good to feel good about themselves or earn recognition, we must do good in secret. So secretive that only God Himself knows we did it.

Let our lives be miracles. Let our lives be disruptive to the ways of this world. Oh God, let our faith work and not be lonely. Just as our body and spirit need each other, we must recognize that works and faith require each other.