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In this episode Trent breaks down the most common verse Protestants present as an objection to the Catholic view of salvation.
Transcription:
When Catholics discuss the Eucharist, or confession, or baptism, or practically anything related to salvation, there is one verse that Protestants almost always bring up in response. Ephesians 2:8-9, “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God— not because of works, lest any man should boast.”
But Catholics fully agree with what aul is teaching here and so when Protestants bring up this verse they end up misusing it and divorcing it from its original context. For example, the Protestant apologist Ron Rhodes says, “The Roman Catholic position seems to assume that human beings actually do things that make them acceptable to God, but such an idea goes against the entire grain of Scripture. . . . God’s grace—God’s unmerited favor—is our only chance for salvation (Eph. 2:8–9).”
But Ephesians 2 does not conflict in any way with the idea that we “do things” in order to be saved. So let’s take a look at the context as well as what Catholicism teaches about salvation.
Paul begins Ephesians by discussing how God predestined Christians: In him, according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to the counsel of his will, 12 we who first hoped in Christ have been destined and appointed to live for the praise of his glory.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church agrees that God has a plan for every single person because, “To God, all moments of time are present in their immediacy. When therefore he establishes his eternal plan of “predestination”, he includes in it each person’s free response to his grace” (CCC 600)
None of us can choose to love God through our own human ability because, without grace, we are dead in sin. Paul makes this point in Ephesians 2:4-5, “But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved)”.
God’s grace empowers us to be able to say “yes” to his offer of salvation if that’s what we choose. But we are also still free to say “no”, God’s grace isn’t irresistible. In Matthew 23:37 Jesus says, ““O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!” Or consider what St. Stephen told his persecutors before his martyrdom, “You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit.”
We can refuse to cooperate with God’s grace but we can also consent to cooperate with it. Reformed people like to call this heretical synergism but 1 Corinthians 3:9 says “we are God’s fellow workers” and fellow workers comes from the Greek word synergois.
Now let’s go to Ephesians 2:8-9, “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God— not because of works, lest any man should boast.”
Many Protestants think this verse refutes Catholic views on salvation because they only think about our initial salvation, the moment we go from being a child of wrath to being a child of God. This verse definitely applies to that moment in our lives. The Catechism says in paragraph 2010: Since the initiative belongs to God in the order of grace, no one can merit the initial grace of forgiveness and justification, at the beginning of conversion.
In fact, infant baptism, which many Protestants also agree with, is a sign of this gracious gift. A baby can’t work or merit anything, they are saved purely by God’s grace through baptism. And Martin Luther said baptism is an instrument of God’s grace and not a human work. He writes: “Yes, our works, indeed, avail nothing for salvation; Baptism, however, is not our work, but God’s”
Ephesians 2 is misused when it is applied to the rest of our lives to make it seem like there is nothing we must do to remain saved and enter into final salvation. But that is not what the Bible teaches. There is nothing we do to earn final salvation, as if it were a wage, but we can choose to reject it by being disobedient to God. John 3:36 says, “He who believes in the Son has eternal life; he who does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God rests upon him.”
In 1 Corinthians 15:2 Paul speaks of the gospel “by which you are saved, if you hold it fast—unless you believed in vain”. The word “saved” (in Greek, sozesthe) can be translated “you are being saved” because it is in the present tense. Just because we have been saved in the past, as Ephesians 2:8–9 says, that does not mean our salvation was settled once and for all in the past.
In Philippians 2:12 Paul implores his audience to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” In Romans 13:11 Paul says, “Salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.” The Protestant biblical scholar Brenda Colijin notes that: salvation, for Paul, is predominantly future. As we have seen, even his uses of salvation in past and present tense have a forward-looking aspect
In response to this argument, some Protestants say Paul (like James) is only talking about works that automatically flow from an authentic faith. They might cite Philippians 2:13, which says, “For God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” Geisler and MacKenzie conclude, “We do not work in order to get salvation; rather, we work because we have already gotten it. God works salvation in us by justification, and by God’s grace we work it out in sanctification (Phil 2:12–13).”
The point must be repeated because it is so crucial—Catholics do not work in order to receive initial justification, or we don’t work to “get salvation”. Against the view that good works simply “flow” from the fact that we are saved, James Dunn asks:
Can the first half of Philippians 2:12–13 (v. 12: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling”) be totally absorbed into the second half (v. 13: “for it is God who works in you both to will and to work for his good pleasure”)? Paul’s talk of “walking by the Spirit” or “being led by the spirit elsewhere” [Rom 8:4, Gal 5:16–18] clearly puts responsibility on the believer to so walk, to be so led.
In fact the work of scholars like James Dunn, EP Sanders, and NT wright on what is called The New Perspective on Paul, reveals how many Protestants misunderstand Paul’s writings, including what he’s talking about in Ephesians 2:8-9: “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God— not because of works, lest any man should boast.” But we also need to add the next verse: For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
Notice that Paul says we were not saved because of “works” but we were created for “good works”. This implies that the works in verse 9 Paul is speaking of are inferior to the good works God wants us to do in verse 10. The key to understanding Paul’s message is to see that the object of his criticism are not people who try to earn their salvation through good works.
Paul was not, as Protestants often allege, a man wracked with guilt over a law he could not keep who rejoiced in being set free from it by faith in Christ alone. That was how Luther saw Paul because Luther was projecting his own struggles onto the apostle he studied. According to one historian, Luther suffered from “attacks of doubt that made him utterly despair of God’s love…. At such moments even the rustling of dried leaves in a forest sounded like the legions of hell coming to seize his soul” (one confessor even scolded the scrupulous Luther to “stop calling every fart a sin”).
But James Dunn points out that “in passages where Paul speaks explicitly about his pre-conversion experience there is no hint whatsoever of any such agony of conscience.” Rather, Paul boasted of how he was advanced in Judaism beyond many his own age (in Gal 1:13), and as to righteousness under the law, he was “blameless” (as he says in Phil 3:6).11
Paul was saying to his audience that salvation “is the gift of God” for every single human being. It was not just a gift to the Jewish people. The Jews did not believe you could work your way to heaven. Salvation was by God’s grace that caused you to be born a Jew. If salvation required works of torah, then no gentile could be saved, because through those works any convert would become a jew and then a Christian. Indeed, Acts 15:1 describes how “some men came down from Judea and were teaching the brethren, ‘Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.’”
Paul was not concerned about people trying to do good works to please God, but people who claimed that in order to belong to the New Covenant you had to first belong to the old covenant. Salvation is for everyone, not just the Jews.
That this is Paul’s meaning is evident in the dozen verses after Ephesians 2:8-9 that speak of uniting estranged Gentile believers to God through faith in Christ rather than observance of the Torah. Paul writes:
Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands— remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.
The Torah, the Jewish law meant to keep Israel unique and holy in comparison to its neighbors, had gone from being a wall to protect the Chosen people to being a wall that kept other people God chose from experiencing his love. Paul says this separation has been taken away by the blood of Christ in verse 13, and in its place God has given us peace because he “has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law of commandments and ordinances” (v. 14–15).
The law is the Torah, and Paul identifies it with the “dividing wall”, which some have taken as an allusion to the wall that separated the court of the Gentiles from that of the Jews in the Jerusalem Temple. Now that this boundary marker of the Old Covenant has been abolished, all people can enter God’s covenant by faith in Christ.
According to Pope Benedict the sixteenth, after Paul’s encounter with Christ, he saw that the “wall” formed by the Law “is no longer necessary; our common identity within the diversity of cultures is Christ, and it is he who makes us just. Being just simply means being with Christ and in Christ. And this suffices. Further [ Jewish] observances are no longer necessary.”
You can see this in other passages that Protestants cite which do not teach that salvation comes by faith alone or that works have no role in our salvation. These passages are just saying that we enter the new covenant by grace through faith and you don’t have to become a Jew before you can become a Christian. Once again, this is talking about how works are not needed to enter the new covenant, it’s not saying anything about the role of works after initial salvation.
For example, Romans 3:28 says, “For we hold that a man is justified by faith apart from works of law.” But the next verses say, “Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since God is one; and he will justify the circumcised on the ground of their faith and the uncircumcised through their faith.
Or Romans 10:9: if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” but three verses later Paul says: or there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and bestows his riches upon all who call upon him. 13 For, “every one who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.”
Finally, Paul says in Galatians 5:6, “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any avail, but faith working through love.”
Once again, we enter by grace through faith in Christ, and we can freely choose remain in God’s new covenant by being obedient to him, “ie faith working through love” or we can reject that covenant as some did to which Paul said, “you are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace.”
So while we don’t follow works in order to be saved, God has prepared good works for us to do after being saved as seen in Ephesians 2:10. These works in themselves don’t save us but if we are disobedient to God and fail to do these works, then we forsake our salvation. Even many Protestants would say a person who says they are Christian but fails to ever do the good work of going to church wasn’t really saved in the first place.
Protestant scholar EP Sanders writes “Paul was entirely in favor of good works. The works he had in mind, against which he was polemicizing in Galatians and Romans, were those works that make you Jewish and distinguished you from Gentiles.” Even non-Christian New Testament scholars agree, such as Bart Ehrman, who said that
when Paul speaks of “works” he is explicitly referring to “works of the law,” that is, observance of Jewish rules governing circumcision, the Sabbath, kosher foods, and the like. When James speaks of works, he means something like “good deeds.” Paul himself would not argue that a person could have faith without doing good deeds.
The New Perspective on Paul shows that when Paul talks about salvation by faith, he has a deeper concept of faith that would be better rendered faithfulness. So while the KJV renders Romans 1:17’s quotation of Habakkuk as “The just shall live by faith” the RSV, Catholic and non-Catholic editions, has a better translation, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” According to New Testament scholar Don Garlington,
Righteousness is, by definition, conformity to the covenant relation- ship; it consists of [emphasis in original] a faithful obedience to the Lord whose will is enshrined in the covenant. Yet the beginning of “faithfulness” is “faith.” In keeping with the Hebrew term ‘emunah, the Greek noun translated faith, pisti is two-sided: faith and faithful- ness.
Paul did not believe righteousness came from intellectual assent or trust alone, but from a faith that was lived out in righteous deeds that were faithful to the new covenant God was establishing for everyone, Jew and Gentile. This is evident in Paul’s Letter to the Romans where he reminds his audience that God “will render to every man according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing [in Greek, ergou agathou, literally “good work”] seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life” (2:6–7).
Protestants often say this passage is just talking about an impossible hypothetical. Doers of the law will be justified, but no one can perfectly do or obey the law, so the law will justify no one. But Romans 2:6–13 can’t consist only of impossible hypotheticals, because verses 8 and 9 promise that evildoers will be punished for their sins
Paul’s Jewish audience knew God would not give someone eternal life just because he did good works. According to James Dunn in his commentary on Romans, “The thought that no one could stand before God on his own terms, in his own strength, or could hope for acquittal on the merit of his own deeds, was thoroughly Jewish.” A better explanation of these passages is that Paul is talking about the increase of righteousness that takes place after one enters into God’s covenant on God’s terms rather than trying to stand before God on one’s own terms.
That’s why Dunn says Romans 2:13 stands “against the view that Paul sees justification simply as an act which marks the beginning of a believer’s life, as a believer” and N.T. Wright says, “Paul, in company with mainstream second-Temple Judaism, affirms that God’s final judgment will be in accordance with the entirety of a life led—in accordance, in other words, with works.”
So to summarize, “Catholics fully agree with Ephesians 2:8-9.” God wants to save everyone, Jew and Gentile, which is why there is no work we must do to enter into God’s new covenant. Anyone can enter it through faith in Christ, including tiny babies whose parents faithfully baptize them. And, after we are saved by grace alone, there is no work we must do to earn our salvation. All we have to do is not reject it.
The way we would do that would be to disobey what Paul calls “the law of Christ”. If we gravely disobey that law we choose to reject the new covenant community God to which God has called us. This covenantal view of salvation is a common theme in Catholic theology and one Protestant defender of the New Perspective on Paul admits, “[New Perspective on Paul] versions of salvation seem closer to the Roman Catholic view than to Luther’s.”
As I’ve said before on the channel, many Protestants believe this but use different language to describe it. They say that once you are saved the Holy Spirit will convict a true Christian to give up perpetual sinful behavior and carry out new Christian obligations like attending church or receiving the Lord’s super. But instead of quibbling over words I hope Protestants and Catholics can recognize that we agree we go from spiritual death to spiritual life by grace alone and Christians will act differently after they are saved. Our main disagreement is really on verse 10, what are the good works God prepared for us?
Does it only include works of mercy? Or does it include liturgy, the work of the people, that allows us to partake of Christ’s work on the cross where we receive in the sacrament of the Eucharist, the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ. Is this a good work God prepared for us, especially since Jesus said, “Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood you have no life within you?”
For more on this subject I’d recommend Paul, a New Covenant Jew: Rethinking Pauline Theology by Catholic authors Pitre, Kincaid and Barber as well as my book The Case for Catholicism which goes more in depth into what I discussed in this episode.
Thank you all so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.