My Big Question for Defenders of “Sola Fide”

Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

Hey everyone. Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answers Apologist and Speaker Trent Horn. And today I want to talk about the doctrine of justification by faith alone or in Latin, sola fide in particular, I want to talk about my big question that I have for defenders of sola fide. And I feel like their inability to answer that question that to me is what really showed that justification by faith alone is a problematic unworkable doctrine and why the Catholic view on justification is just a better assimilation of all of the evidence that we have. So before I talk about that though, I just want to let you know that this podcast, this YouTube channel, cannot function by faith alone. You have to put your faith in the podcast into action by clicking that subscribe button. It helps us to grow and to reach more people, and I would definitely appreciate that.

So before I talk about the question that I have, I need to specifically talk about what I mean by justification by faith alone or sola fide because there are some forms of this doctrine that are consistent, but they’re still wrong in spite of their consistency. For example, consider free grace theology the free grace movement. This branch of modern Protestantism says that good works have no role whatsoever in our salvation, absolutely none. We are saved by faith alone, period. Good works have nothing to do with our salvation. What this means is that as long as you had true faith at one point in your life, you will go to heaven even if you never have any good works after that point, even if you abandoned the Christian faith, you’ll still go to heaven.

Robert Wilkin, one of the current defenders of this view, put it this way, “There is no time requirement on saving faith. Even if a person believes only for a while, he still has eternal life.” But it seems that most Protestant apologists don’t take this view on the role of good works and are salvation. Instead, they say “Good works are an essential part of the true faith that does save us works. Do not save or justify us, but good works will always be present in the faith that does justify us.” Martin Luther said, “If faith justifies without works, let us work nothing.” He says of that attitude, “It is to despise the grace of God. Idle faith is not justifying faith.” John Calvin said “It is therefore faith alone which justifies and yet the faith which justifies is not alone, just it is the heat alone of the sun which warms the earth and yet in the sun it is not alone because it is constantly conjoined with light.”

However, the 17th century Puritan theologian, John Owen probably coined the phrase in the way that’s most memorably known today, “We are justified by faith alone but not by a faith that is alone.” Here’s how he put it. “We are justified by faith alone, but we are not justified by that faith which can be alone.” He goes on to say, “Alone respects its influence into our justification, not its nature and existence. And we absolutely deny that we can be justified by that faith which can be alone. That is without a principle of spiritual life and universal obedience, operative in of it as duty does require.” So under this view, true saving faith will always be accompanied by good works. Here are some contemporary Protestants expressing this idea

As those who believe in justification by faith. I believe the answer really is very simple, that true faith will always produce accompanying works. That we’re not justified by the works. The works are the proof of our faith.

That your faith alone in Jesus, that is what saves and then a life that has been saved, a sanctified, regenerated heart produces fruit, the fruit of good works. And so a person’s been saved because of their fruit, but the fruit is not the reason they’re saved.

If a church doesn’t have a statement that says that true faith is always accompanied by works, then that faith doesn’t understand the gospel.

To borrow Calvin’s imagery just says the light of the sun naturally produces heat and it doesn’t have to choose to make heat, a Christian will naturally produce good works as a sign of the true faith that he has. A saved person does not have to choose to do good works in order to remain saved because that would make his salvation dependent on him making the right choices in life instead of it being dependent on faith alone. The Protestant website gotquestions.org puts it this way, “Faith in Christ always results in good works. The person who claims to be a Christian but lives in willful disobedience to Christ has a false or dead faith and is not saved.” All right, now here’s my big question for defenders of sola fide. What exactly are the good works that accompany true faith? Please be specific in your answer. What particular actions make up the good works we’ll see in someone who has true faith, and to what degree will we see them in a person who has true faith versus somebody who has a false faith?

Another way to put it in relation to the GotQuestions article would be to ask this exactly how much disobedience to Christ shows a person has false faith. If you disobey Christ at all, do you have a false faith 10% of the time, 51% of the time. How much? If you’re going to say good works are a sign of true faith and the absence of good works is a sign of a false faith, then you need to have some criteria in order to define the term good works. Otherwise, a person is always going to worry about whether he has enough good works in his life to show he has true faith. What’s ironic is that Protestants often criticized Catholics for allegedly being in a position where they have to worry if they’re doing enough good works in order to earn their salvation. But vaguely saying, “Good works will always be the fruit of true faith.”

That’s the real thing for someone to worry about. They may not be worried about doing enough good works to earn salvation, but now they’re worried about whether they do enough good works to show whether they were saved in the first place. Do those good works you must have in order to prove you’re a real Christian? Well, what do they include? Do you have to tithe 10% of your income? 5%, 1%. Does it include doing missionary work, feeding the homeless in your community? Is going to church a necessary good work that shows you have a true faith?

I knew a Protestant who didn’t feel the need to go to church because he said the Bible never commands believers to go to a church to worship. After all, if you don’t have the fruit of good works in your life, whatever that means, then does that mean you have to rededicate your life to Christ all over again? Maybe when you gave your life to Christ at vacation Bible school in the fourth grade, you weren’t serious enough to make that decision and so your salvation didn’t really stick. Here’s the Protestant YouTuber, Allen Parr describing How many Protestants struggle with this worry?

Normally the story looks something like this. At some point in their past, they accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior. Maybe they went down to the front of the church, maybe they recited a sinner’s prayer and they knew they were saved. But then over time they began to wrestle with their desires. They struggle with sin, they may backslide, and then they begin to question, am I truly a Christian? If I were to die right now, can I be certain that I am going to go to heaven? And so because of that doubt, then what happens is maybe the next time the gospel is offered to them, they go back down in front of the church and they get saved “again and again and again” and the cycle repeats itself.

This is why I love the sacraments that God gave us. If you are validly baptized, then you are a part of the body of Christ. Catholics believe there is no specific amount of good works you have to do to be saved. The trueness of your faith does not depend on people being able to see you perform good works. It just depends on you being in a state of grace and you and I, if we’re in that state, we will go to heaven as long as we do not die in a state of mortal sin. That is it. And the church has sufficient teachings to help us know which sins are serious enough violations of God’s law to show we have fully turned away from Him. And so now we have to be reconciled to God and restored to communion with Him through the sacrament of reconciliation. Which is another point where we can know we are saved and we don’t have to rely on a mere subjective feeling that we have God’s spirit or something like that.

So while Protestants might say Catholics over complicate things with something like the sacrament of reconciliation, they still have to be able to delineate the difference between things like major and minor sins. And as we’ll see under sola fide, they really can’t do that. Here’s another way to look at this problem facing justification by faith alone, a lot of pastors, especially youth pastors, they like to ask this question, “If you were arrested for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?” It has to be evidence, not circumstantial evidence like someone saw you at church or mere testimonial evidence like you saying you’re a Christian. Would a jury looking at your behavior convict you for the crime of being a Christian? The goal here is to motivate people to put their faith into action. Here is a typical youth ministry approach to the question that I found online,.

But there is evidence. I’m a Christian.

Then where is it? If there was evidence supporting your claim, we would have it.

Here’s what we have instead. January 15th of this year, you skipped church because you said you had a headache. Instead, according to our reports, you stayed home to play Fortnite with your friends. March 22nd, you decided a youth event wasn’t as important as the new episode of the Bachelorette.

You couldn’t be the only one at school who hadn’t seen it. I understand I would’ve done the same thing.

But just being able to tell us isn’t good enough. You have to be able to show us something. Otherwise it’s just words.

An apple tree produces apples. That’s how you know it’s an apple tree. If you claim to be a Christian, we should be able to tell that by what you produce at all times. But

I’m guilty. I promise I’m guilty.

I know that you think that. But the evidence says otherwise.

By the way, I love youth ministry skits like this and it makes me nostalgic for when I used to do this kind of work 15 years ago. So maybe in the future I’ll show you some Trent Horn Youth Ministry skits from back in the day. Another sermon from a Protestant church puts it this way. “If you can’t prove to a jury that you are a Christian, you definitely won’t be able to prove it to Christ. If you were arrested for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?” But what does this mean? Does this mean that in order to be a real Christian to have real true faith, you have to do a certain amount of witnessing or you have to do a certain amount of charity in order to prove you have true faith rather than false faith? If so, well, how much do you have to do?

Do you see how someone could obsessively worry about whether they have enough fruit of good works in their life to prove they have true faith rather than a counterfeit faith? Now, a Protestant might respond to this by saying, “Well, the good works we do, it’s not so much about doing a certain number of good deeds, it’s more about rejecting sin.” That’s more workable but since Protestants generally reject the distinction between mortal and venial sin, this is still going to be a cause of concern for many of them. The letter of James says that we all stumble in many small ways, Christian sin. But clearly some sinful lifestyles are compatible with being a Christian like minor sins that are occasional or even somewhat frequent, but are minor and other sinful lifestyles are not compatible with Christianity like being a habitual adulterer or an abortionist. But what standard do you use to determine to draw the line that says that these bad fruits prove you have a false faith, but these other bad fruits?

Well, that’s just an unavoidable part of the Christian life because we’re all sinners. To get around this dilemma, John Owen said, the following, “Your state,” i.e or whether you’re saved or not, “your state is not at all to be measured by the opposition that sin makes to you, but by the opposition you make to it. In other words, what matters is just that you don’t like sinning, not the particular kinds of sins you commit.” In Allen Parr’s video How to Know For Sure That You are Saved GUARANTEED!. He gives this advice to know if you’re still saved, even if you commit habitual sins.

Essentially, do you sense that the Holy Spirit is leading you in the decisions that you have to make? Do you sense the Holy Spirit producing fruit in your life, love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, kindness, meekness, self-control, all of these things that can only be produced by the power of the Holy Spirit. You see, these are experiences that are unique to the Christian. The very fact that you have this desire and that you’re wrestling with this and that you’re wrestling with your sin and that you desire so badly to want to please God with your life, and it bothers you so much that when you disobey God, this is proof that God is still working in you and that you truly are saved.

Honestly, this just makes it worse. A lot of times we feel like we don’t have the gifts of the Holy Spirit. We don’t feel particularly kind. We don’t feel particularly gentle. But does that mean on the days we don’t feel like the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit is actually not dwelling within us? And are we saved as long as we just feel bad about the sins that we commit? So could a Christian be an adult film star as long as he or she feels bad about it? Well, no. Par would probably say a true Christian is just going to stop performing in adult films. By the way, I hate the euphemism adult films, but YouTube really doesn’t like you saying the P word, so that’s why. But I’m sure Par would say you don’t have to stop every sin in your life to prove you’re a true Christian.

But okay, once again, we’re back to that question. Where do we draw the line? So it’s not so much what good works prove that we are Christians, but the absence of which bad works prove that we have a true justifying faith. And I don’t see how Protestants can really answer that question under the schema of sola fide. Ultimately the Protestant view of faith and works, it just seems to overly complicate everything. Under this view true faith will always produce good works, but nobody can tell you exactly what those specific good works are that you’re going to see in a true faith versus a counterfeit faith. Or avoiding habitual grave sin has no effect on your relationship with God because we’re justified by faith alone, not by our works. But if you have true faith, then you will by necessity not engage in habitual grave sins that are incompatible with being a Christian.

But if you do fall into those grave sins, whatever they are, we can’t define them, you will eventually stop and then ask God for forgiveness for what you did, even though God doesn’t have to forgive you again because forgiveness happened once in the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to you. Because justification by faith alone as a one-time act. Like I said, this just seems overly complicated when the Catholic view is just a more straightforward explanation of all the data we have from revelation and human experience. We are initially saved by the grace of baptism, which is received through faith either on our behalf or our parents. Initial salvation has nothing to do with works, but throughout our post baptismal life, good works increase our justification, they strengthen our relationship with God and bad works weaken that relationship. Committing mortal sin, freely chosen, fully known, and gravely evil acts completely turns us away from God.

And so in order to be restored to our friendship with God, we must respond to God’s grace in the sacrament of reconciliation. The sacraments give us an assurance that mere feelings cannot, and notice this description corresponds to what a person naturally feels like is happening in their relationship with God. In both cases, typical Catholic or typical Protestant, we really are describing the same behavior, having faith, doing good works, committing sin and seeking reconciliation. But the Catholic view seems to just describe reality as it is, whereas the Protestant view of sola fide has to add a bunch of ad hoc qualifications in order to preserve that doctrine. You aren’t really choosing to do good works that please God. That’s just an inevitable fruit of true faith. You aren’t really refraining from sins that reject God, that’s your faith working through you. God isn’t really forgiving you when you commit a grave sin as a Christian because he already did forgive you, et cetera, et cetera.

So for me, in my original discernment of all of this 20 years ago when I was converting to Catholicism, I followed the principle of parsimony and I went with the simpler explanation, which overall tends to be the correct one, or I don’t multiply explanations unnecessarily. Now, I know Protestants have different views of justification and the role of faith in works so there may be different answers to my big question what specific good works accompany true faith? So what might be nice moving this discussion forward would be having a dialogue or maybe a round table with different Protestants on how they would answer that question, and also how do we know that their answer to the question is the correct one, which brings us back to my other big problem with Protestantism, sola scriptura. So with all that being said, if you want to learn more about Catholic teaching on justification, I’ll put some links to books on the subject and the description below. But thank you all so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.

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