Check out Trent’s talk on “sola fide” and the Catholic doctrine of justification he recently presented at the Houston Fullness of Truth conference!
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic answers.
We’re still digging ourselves out of this frozen wasteland. Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn, and while we dig ourselves out, I thought it’d be fun to share with you a talk I gave at the Fullness of Truth conference down in Houston. Fullness of Truth hosts Catholic conferences here in Texas. They’re really great. They rotate go, to all the different cities all throughout Texas. They even have COVID19 protocols. They’re still going, not as big as the conferences I used to go to in the past, but I hope that’ll change in the future. It’s always a treat to be able to speak at them. I’ll be speaking at another one here up in Keller, Texas, right up here in the DFW area, in June, along with Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers. Steve Ray might be there. Steve Ray was speaking with me actually, this time round.
I gave a talk on sola scriptura and sola fide, so I wanted to share that with you. It’s a general introduction to justification, justification by faith alone, sola fide, how to explain the Catholic position on these issues to our Protestant brothers and sisters, and that’s how I refer to those who are people who are Christian, but not in full communion with the Catholic faith. It’s always important, when I usually give talks to audiences, I try very hard to assume there is someone in the audience who does not share our Catholic faith. They could be Protestant, they could be Jewish, they could be an atheist, and I wish more speakers would do this.
Some speakers will get up in front of an audience and just be really condescending towards non-Catholics, and that’s not a good idea because you may have a non-Catholic in your audience. They might watch the talk on YouTube later. Everything we say should be something that we could give to a general audience. Now, of course if I had given this talk at a Protestant seminary, it probably would have been a little bit different.
This is an introduction to a Catholic audience on justification. If you’d like more on the subject, I would definitely recommend my friend, Jimmy Akin has a wonderful book, The Drama of Salvation, and also my book, The Case for Catholicism, has two chapters on justification, theories of justification, the doctrine of justification and Protestant arguments against the Catholic position on this issue. I’ll link to those in the show resources trenthornpodcast.com. If you go there consider becoming a premium subscriber. For just $5 a month at the bronze level tier, for $5 a month or $50 annually, five zero, $50 annually, you get access to the show resources, commenting, messaging me, voting on episodes, submitting questions for open mailbag episodes, and every Monday at 8:00 AM we release a 30 minute video for our catechism study series. You just go to Trent horn podcast.com, Monday at 8:00 AM, it pops right up there. You can watch it, a 30 minute video presentation on a section of the catechism and my goal probably by the end of the summer, we’ll have gone through the entire catechism and then I’ll probably release another study series after that.
Go and check it out at trenthornpodcast.com and your support makes the podcast possible, and consider leaving a review at iTunes, Google play. That’s always a big help. We are very close by the way to 1500 reviews on the iTunes podcast app, so if you could leave a review there, get us closer to 1500, that would be a big help. Now, without further ado, here is my talk on sola fide, a justification by faith alone for the Fullness of Truth conference.
Last night, I showed how we need to combat the Protestant reformation doctrine of sola scriptura, by scripture alone. I think that’s one of the biggest obstacles we have when it comes to sharing our faith with our Protestant brothers and sisters, because when we do share our faith, the number one retort, what is it that we usually hear? “Yeah, but where is that in the Bible? Where is purgatory in the Bible? Where are indulgences in the Bible? If you can show it to me in the Bible, I’ll believe it.” I showed you last night, how that standard, “Where is that in the Bible?” is actually not in the Bible, and so it refutes itself. That’s sola scriptura.
This morning, I want to talk to you about another sola from the Protestant reformation, and that would be the doctrine of sola fide, or by faith alone. I think the theme of this conference, and I’m glad I’m kind of playing a supplementary support to Steve Ray. Steve is giving you all of the great evidence for the mass, the sacrifice of the mass, and then later today, he’s going to talk about defending the Eucharist, and that’s great, and we need to have that, but I really do believe if you would try to share Steve’s material with someone, these assumptions are going to come up first. That’s what we have to be able to go after and engage before people will hear other evidence for our faith.
There’s sola scriptura, but then there’s sola fide, by faith alone. People will say, “Well, why do I have to go to mass? You’re telling me that in order to be saved, I have to go and receive the Eucharist? I have to at least go to mass every Sunday and I have to receive the Eucharist at least once a year, but that’s not what the Bible says. Doesn’t the Bible say that we’re saved by faith alone? We’re saved by faith, apart from works. We’re saved by grace, not because of works. That’s a work. If I walk up and receive the Eucharist, I’m doing a little bit of work. This is something that you receive by faith alone.”
As long as someone has that mindset, that all that is necessary for salvation is faith in Jesus Christ, then the act of receiving the Eucharist, the sacrament of the Eucharist and the sacrifice of the mass, it’s not going to fit in that person’s worldview, as long as that worldview is blocked by this sola fide right here, that says, “Well, no, that can’t fit because we’re saved by faith alone.”
Now, I’m going to give just kind of a general overview of the controversy, because there are very technical elements related to the doctrine of justification. There are words people will throw around, $6 words like imputed righteousness, infused righteousness and I’m not going to go down these technical trails. I want to just stay focused on the main issue, which is how are we justified? How are we made right with God? We know we’re wrong with God. We know that there’s something not right with us, and if we were to stand before God, before the judgment seat, before Christ on His throne, and if we were to try to argue our case to get into heaven, we would spectacularly fail, and that’s something, with our Protestant brothers and sisters, that we can agree with them on. We absolutely agree.
Have any of you ever read a Chick tract? Any of you ever heard of a guy named Jack Chick? Okay. Maybe a few of you have. Jack Chick is the most famous comic book artist in the world. Now, I love comic books. I like DC comics. I prefer Marvel movies, though. I like Stan Lee, Jack Kirby. I love comic books, but Jack Chick has sold billions of comics. His comics are these little tiny flip book comics. They’re about this big. They could fit right in the palm of your hand, and they’re very short. It takes you about five minutes to read one. The word I would use to describe them is macabre. It gives you a little bit of a chill when you read them. Look, reading them, it’s like a car accident. You can’t quite turn away from it.
What they are, the illustrations, usually they promote Jack Chick’s particular version of fundamentalist Christianity. Saved by faith in Jesus alone, and Catholics are definitely doomed unless they leave the Catholic faith. Usually the story is about a Catholic guy who goes to mass, but he’s mean to his family. He’s rude, inconsiderate. He treats religion as a ritual, and then he dies and he meets Jesus and heaven, and Jesus, in a Jack Chick tract, is absolutely terrifying. He’s a 50 foot tall, faceless judge who sits on a throne, because Jack Chick is a comic book artist, but he’s also a fundamentalist. He believes that Catholics break the second commandment when they create statues, graven images, so how does Jack Chick make an image of Jesus without breaking the second commandment? His loophole is he doesn’t put a face on Jesus, so it just looks like Jesus in a robe, but he’s a white figure with no face, and so it’s just kind of creepy.
The Catholic is standing before giant, judgy Jesus and says, “Lord, why can’t I go to heaven? I went to mass every Sunday.” He says, “Jonathan, did I tell you to go to mass? I told you to have faith in me alone. If you had just read the Bible, you would have known this.” Then our bad Catholic starts sweating bullets and then gets dragged off by a bunch of demons with their pitchforks, and it’s absolutely silly, but it does unnerve people, and it does make people question our faith.
We have to go after that central element, this idea that well, no, we’re saved by faith alone, and to do that, we need to go back 500 years to the Protestant Reformation to understand this idea, and this idea is really the brainchild of Martin Luther. Luther was an Augustinian monk, and Luther was a very scrupulous individual. One of his confessors, a person he would go to for confession, and he went to confession all the time. Went all the time. His confessor even told him, not to be crude, “Martin, you don’t have to go to confession every time you pass gas.” That’s the second time you talked about passing gas, what’s up with the guy? Said that last night too. When you have children, including a newborn in diapers, your home life is just very scatological. It’s just how it ends up being.
Luther was very scrupulous. He was worried that he was never good enough for God. Then, in reading Paul’s letter to the Romans, he had an epiphany saying that it’s not him who needs to be good enough, that we need to rely on Christ. I would say, once again, I agree with our Protestant brothers and sisters. If I stood before judgy Jesus, or regular Jesus, and tried to just argue my case to get into heaven, I would fail. It’s like when we talk to our non-religious friends, or our minimally Christian friends, they’ll say, “Oh, do you want to go to mass? You’ve been to confession.” Oh, well, “God doesn’t care. As long as you’re a good person, you’ll get into heaven.” Have your heard that one? As long as you’re a good person.
Here’s the question you should ask. What’s a good person? Help me understand, how good do you have to be to get into heaven? Please define a good person. What ends up happening is the person who says you just have to be a good person to go to heaven, the standard is simply them or anyone better. Because I could ask, well, is a murderer a good person? No, of course not? Is an adulterer? No, of course not. Unless you talk to someone who committed adultery once, “Well, sometimes people make mistakes.” How about people who drink and drive or let’s turn up the dial a little bit. In order to be a good person, do you have to give 10% of your income to charity? Well, no, you don’t have to give that much. Well, how do you know? It sounds like you’re going to set the bar at whatever you think you are, because you assume you’re a good person, but the fact of the matter is, imagine if I was standing before Jesus, it’s me and Mother Teresa, and I said, “Well, good people go to heaven.” And Jesus says, “Yeah, Mother Theresa is a good person. Are you a Mother Teresa?”
Even Mother Teresa would say that she is not good enough because what we do of our own human nature is never good enough to please God on its own. Luther was right about that, but he was wrong about how God cleanses us of our sins, of how God makes us righteous. Luther believed that in being saved by faith alone, God merely covered our sins. He covers them. He hides them under the righteousness of Christ. That by having faith in Christ, the righteousness of Christ is draped over our sins like a white cloak, and so it hides our sins. If you have the cloak, you go to heaven. You don’t have the cloak, well, get ready for the thermostat to go up.
The analogy that Luther used to understand this is on the German countryside, there would be these dung heaps. Farmers would put out these heaps of dung from the cows and other animals. He said think about it in winter when the snow falls and these ugly, putrid, dung heaps are covered in pure white snow. That is what the righteousness of Christ does to us. It is the pure white snow that covers us. It doesn’t change us though. We go into heaven, we are still the dung heaps. That when we are saved, God just kind of overlooks our sin. He hides it, but He doesn’t change it.
Another analogy to understand, I think for many of our Protestant brothers and sisters, and when I look at tracts, Jack Chick or other evangelism tracts from Protestants, they usually view salvation as a moment that occurs in a courtroom. Salvation is a moment, because people will ask you. Has anyone ever asked you, “Have you been saved? When did you get saved?” The question presupposes that there is a moment when we get saved and that salvation occurs within this single moment, and in that moment, God, who is the judge, says “Guilty, not guilty,” and nothing changes about us. It’s just a verdict that’s read aloud. Salvation and justification are viewed as a courtroom phenomena. It happens in an instant and we’re declared guilty or not guilty, but that is not the Catholic view of salvation and is not the biblical view of salvation. Because salvation and justification are not a moment, and it’s not about whether we’re guilty or not guilty per se, but it’s about whether we’re alive or dead. Are you spiritually alive or spiritually dead?
The catechism says this in paragraph 1989, “Moved by grace man turns toward God and away from sin, thus accepting forgiveness and righteousness from on high. Justification is not only the remission of sins, but also the sanctification and renewal of the interior man.” Instead of the analogy of the courtroom, a better analogy for salvation would be the prodigal son. The parable of the prodigal son that we find in the gospel of Luke. This is about our salvation, that the father is waiting. You have the son, and he goes to a far off land, and he essentially is dead, is spiritually dead to the father. Because, remember, when the prodigal son returns, he comes back to the father saying, “I’m going to starve to death in this foreign country. I spent all my money. I’m going to starve to death here. If I went back to my father’s house, if he treated me like a slave, at least I could get something to eat.”
He wants to go back, even just as a slave, to his father, but then when he returns, his father sees him coming at a distance. I love that detail in the parable of the prodigal son, because it shows that the father was waiting every morning, looking to see if the son would return. He was waiting for him. This is a process of the son, and when he returns, the father says to the son, actually, I think he says this in front of the older brother, “You who are once were dead, are now alive. Your brother was once dead, and is now alive.”
Our salvation and our justification goes from being spiritually dead, apart from God, without the grace of God, to being spiritually alive again, to be filled with the grace of God. When we have this grace, when we become part of this family, it’s not just from death to life, but from becoming a stranger to God, to belong in God’s family. It’s not just a courtroom. It’s not just guilty, not guilty. It’s being incorporated within the family of God, and that’s all throughout St. Paul’s letters. Paul says that we now cry out to God, “Abba Father.” We have a spirit of adoption. Jesus is God’s son by nature. We are God’s children by adoption through the sacrament of baptism.
We agree with our Protestant brothers and sisters. Paragraph 2010 of the catechism says, “No one can merit the initial grace of forgiveness and justification at the beginning of conversion.” Paragraph 2010, “No one can merit the initial grace of justification.” This is helpful because some Protestants will share with us Ephesians chapter two verses eight through nine. They’ll say, “Well, I don’t need the Eucharist. It says right here, ‘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.'” I would say that’s absolutely right. The first moment that we were saved was not of our own doing. It was through faith and cooperating with the Holy Spirit.
For example, I got my little onesie down there for John Paul. When John Paul was saved, he was saved about five months ago, when he was baptized, four months ago. Did John Paul do anything to earn his salvation? No. As Catholics, we firmly agree, the moment we were saved for the vast majority of us, we did nothing. For the vast majority of Catholics, they were infants. It was through the faith of their parents, cooperating with the Holy Spirit that they had been saved. That as an infant, wriggling around, they did nothing to be saved.
Now I was an adult. Well, 16, but close enough to being an adult, but even there, I didn’t earn grace through the sacrament of baptism. The Holy Spirit convicted my heart to be baptized, and I said yes to it. I cooperated with God’s grace. We can firmly agree, 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.” That’s the first moment of our salvation, but our salvation is a process.
In Romans 13:11, Paul says that salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed. Not that we have always been saved, and that never changes. In first Corinthians 15:2, Paul talks about the faith. He says you are being saved, if you hold fast to the faith. In Philippians chapter two, Paul says, “We should work out our salvation in fear and trembling.”
To go back to Luther, then, what do we make then of passages in scripture that talk about being saved by faith rather than works? Where do works fit into this, because people will say, “Well, we’re not saved by works.” That’s right. We do not earn our salvation. The first moment of salvation does not occur through works. In fact, after you are saved, after we are baptized, there is only one work we must do to be saved. Do you know what that is? There is only one work we must do in order to be saved after we have been baptized. Don’t commit a mortal sin. That’s it. Then if you do commit a mortal sin, be reconciled to God.
Now, what is entailed with what is a mortal sin? What is a rejection of God? Even many of our Protestant brothers and sisters would agree, most of them would say that if a Christian goes off to become an atheistic serial killer, he’s not saved. They’ll say he wasn’t saved in the first place. You ever heard that one before? Oh, well, he was just never saved in the first place. Well, my question is, then how could anybody know they’re saved in the first place? Because nobody has infallible knowledge of the future, to know whether they will or won’t go off the rails. To be saved, there’s no works we do to be saved. Rather, we are obedient to God’s commandments that He’s given us as part of this new covenant.
Now, the works we do, do make us holier. They increase this righteousness that God has given us. They make the light of Christ given to us in baptism to shine brighter. How does that work though? I thought God wasn’t impressed by our works. Go back to that family analogy for a second. The family analogy. Sometimes, I like to ask my children to help. I’ve listened to other parents, and there’s kind of a paradox. When your children are at the age they want to help, they’re not really the most effective helpers. Then, when they get to the age where they can be an effective helper, like a teenager, suddenly they’re not excited and they don’t want to help anymore. Any of you who have raised children to the age of 18 probably have recognized that paradox. When they’re four years old, they want to help. When a child is four years old and you hear the words, “I’m helping,” you start to fear what is happening right now. Then, when they’re 16, you never ended up hearing those words, “I’m helping” unless you drag it out of them. When my four-year-old is helping me, his help is appreciated. Is it the most effective help? Not always.
Let’s say, helping me with a task around the house. If I paid someone, and they provided that same level of help as my three-year-old or my five-year-old, I would tell them, “I’m not paying you. You didn’t earn this money. You didn’t do everything that needs to be done. I’m not going to pay. You haven’t earned anything.” We do not earn grace. It’s a gift, but we can receive it by being grateful children. Why is it then I’m not going to pay a worker who does the same amount of work as my three-year-old. I’m not going to pay him, but I might reward my three-year-old. I might pay him by giving him a special treat or something like that, and praise him and affirm him. Why? It’s the same work being offered. I react differently to my three-year-old because he’s not trying to earn anything from me. He’s just being my child who obeys me, and I love him because he is my child, and so what he does is pleasing to me because of our familial status.
That is how we as Catholics look at works of mercy at works. Works cannot earn salvation, but when we are children of God and we obey God, that pleases God. He doesn’t pay us, but He does reward us. In fact, St. Paul says in Romans 2:13, he says, “For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified.” Not the hearers, but the doers. Then, what about when Paul is saying, “We’re saved by faith and not by works of the law.” Of course, Luther is the one who added alone in Romans 3:28. A man is saved by faith alone, apart from works of the law, and that is not what Paul is speaking to here. That’s not what Paul is speaking to at all.
Rather, to go back to Luther, Luther was, remember, scrupulous. He always thought that he was committing a sin and he never thought he was good enough, and then he thought, “Oh, if I’m saved by faith, I’m free,” and so when Luther read Paul, he read Paul and saw in St. Paul, someone like him. Somebody who never thought he was good enough to satisfy God’s law. Never thought that he was good enough, and so in faith, the reason Paul said we’re saved by faith and rather than works of the law, was because Paul thought that the Jews of his time were trying to earn salvation, and Paul is saying, “I’m never going to be good enough to earn salvation. It’s just through faith in Jesus that I’ll be saved.”
That’s what Luther thought Paul believed, and Luther was wrong. In fact, many modern Protestant scholars have come to see this, as well. This, in biblical studies, is called the distinction between the old perspective on Paul and the new perspective on Paul. You have authors like N.T. Wright, James Dunn, E.P. Sanders, these are Protestant scholars who said the way that Protestants looked at Paul for hundreds of years is incorrect. Because when you go back to Paul’s letters, when you look at the letter to the Philippians, when he talks about his former life in Judaism, Paul doesn’t say he was racked with guilt and that he didn’t know if he could please God. In Philippians, Paul says he was blameless under the law, a Pharisee of Pharisees.
He said that he was blameless. He was the Jew that was the model to other Jews, when it come to living out the law, and we would say persecuting, preconversion Paul would say prosecuting, those fellow Jews who had engaged in heresies, like following Jesus of Nazareth. Paul didn’t have this kind of guilt. Then what was Paul concerned about? Why was Paul worried about faith and works? Because here’s the thing, the Jews in Paul’s time, they did not believe you could earn salvation. They would say, “Of course you can’t earn salvation.” The Jews in Paul’s time would never thought that salvation was just about doing enough good works to outweigh your bad works. They did not believe that. They would tell you that salvation comes about by grace. That salvation is a gift from God and it was a gift given to the Jewish people, and so thank goodness, I was born into a Jewish family and I was circumcised. My salvation is a gift from God. It was received by grace.
Then, now we see the problem here. Paul is saying that we are saved by faith and not by works. This is in reference to works of the law. When you read Paul, when you read when he talks about faith and works, just remember this in your mind to understand what he’s saying. Paul is saying in order to be a good Christian, you don’t have to be a good Jew first. That is Paul’s message. Just take that away from this talk. When you’re reading the letters of Paul and he’s talking about faith and works, this is what he’s telling people of his time. You don’t have to be a good Jew to be a good Christian, because that was the heresy in the early church the Judaizers were pushing. The idea was, well, we have to obey God, so we’re circumcised and we follow the kosher law, and then now we believe in Jesus.
The first Christians were Jews, they were Jewish Christians, but as the faith was growing beyond Judea and other gentiles, people like the Centurion Cornelius in Acts Chapter 10, when you have other gentiles coming to the faith, there were Jewish Christians saying that’s not fair. You have to go through Judaism first. Then you can be Christian. You have to go through the same process we all did. You can’t cut in front of the line. You have to be circumcised, go through the old covenant rituals. Then you can belong to the new covenant.
Of course, this was going to inhibit many gentiles from coming into the new religion. I mean, face masks are an uncomfortable thing, but adult circumcision might be a tad more uncomfortable, right? Think about, there’s some places you won’t go, some places, people, they won’t go because face masks are required, or there’s other COVID protocols. Some people don’t want to deal with the protocols. It’s uncomfortable. Well, imagine a protocol of adult circumcision for people. That might dissuade a lot of individuals from becoming Christian, and Paul did not want circumcision, which was meant to be a sign of the old covenant for God’s people, to suddenly become a wall or a barrier that would keep people out. In fact, when we go back to Ephesians 2:8 through nine, when Paul says, “By grace, you’ve been saved through faith, this is not of your own doing it is the gift of God, not because of works lest any man should boast,” in verse 10, Paul goes on to say, “For, we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.”
It’s clear in Ephesians 2, Paul is making a distinction between works and good works. One of my favorite citations on this, to understand what Paul means, is Bart Ehrman. Bart used to be a conservative evangelical scholar. Now he is an agnostic, but he’s one of the world’s leading Bible scholars, though he’s an agnostic. He’s not Christian, but in reading the text, he says, 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, the only place in the Bible that says faith alone, is in James, James two, a man is justified not by faith alone. 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. This is what James Dunn, another Protestant scholar, says about that. This is the new perspective on Paul, talking about Paul’s concerns. This is what Dunn writes. “What Paul is concerned to exclude is the racial, not the ritual expression of faith. It is nationalism, which he denies, not activism, or living out one’s faith. Whatever their basis in the scriptures, these works of the law, like circumcision or the kosher laws, had become identified as indices of Jewishness, as badges, betokening race and nation. What Jesus had done by his death and resurrection in Paul’s understanding, is to free the grace of God and justifying from its nationalistically restrictive clamps, beyond the circumcised Jew, and to a fuller expression.”
That is Paul’s main point. He’s saying you don’t have to be a good Jew to become a good Christian, and so when you read, when these verses come up, like Romans 3:28, or Ephesians 2:8 through nine, notice that they are immediately followed by the concern that God loves Jews and gentiles. Not about earning salvation by doing enough good works. That is not what Paul is concerned about. Paul wants to make salvation universal, not merely a Jewish ritual. In Romans 3:28, Paul says, “A man is justified by faith, apart from works of the law.” That’s right. We don’t have to follow the works of the law, as in the mosaic law, to be saved, but faith. As Paul writes in Galatians 5:6, we’re saved by faith working through love, but right after Romans 3:28, a man is justified by faith, apart from works of the law, Paul writes, “Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded.” On what principle? On the principle of works? No, but on principle of faith.
Oh, sorry. A man is justified by faith, apart from works of law. Then in Romans 3:29, the next verse, it says, “Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of gentiles also? Yes. Of Gentiles also.” Here, it’s not about you’re doing good works or bad works. It’s about is salvation for everyone, or is it only a Jewish phenomena and ritual? Same in Ephesians 2:8 through nine. When Paul says we are saved by grace saved through faith, by grace, you have been saved through faith. He goes on then to say about we’ve been prepared to do good works, therefore, remember that at one time you gentiles in the flesh called the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision.
Remember that you were at that time, separated from Christ. He goes down to say about Christ, that He is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility. Many scholars believe the dividing wall that Paul is talking about is the wall at the temple in Jerusalem that separated where the Jews worshiped from where the Gentiles worshiped. Once again, yes, as Catholics people say, have you been saved? Have you been saved? Do you believe you’re saved by faith alone? My answer to that question is amen, I am saved by faith alone, but a faith working through love. A faith that is not merely an intellectual recognition of who Jesus is, but a faith that is a trust. A trust in Jesus that is willing to act on that trust and obey him. Faith is more than just believing something.
If you go skydiving, I have evidence. Oh, faith also, for atheists, they’ll say faith is just belief without evidence. They’ll say, faith is belief without evidence. That’s not true. You still need faith, even if you have evidence. Has anyone here ever gone skydiving? Okay, we’ve got some people here. I haven’t, yet. We’ll see, but if I went skydiving, imagine this. If you went skydiving, would you be nervous? Would you probably be nervous skydiving? I would, but I know statistically speaking, 99.99% of skydivers survive their jumps, and if I saw someone pack my parachute, I would know, and I’ve got the instructor I’m clamped to. I’ve got all the evidence I’m going to be okay, but as the door to the plane opens, I still need to have faith. I have to trust that evidence, and I have to be willing to act on my trust or nothing will happen.
I could have faith. Like, yeah, I’ll survive. Yeah, I believe all these propositions about skydiving, but if I don’t jump out of the plane, I’m not skydiving, am I? Even if I believe all these things about it. The same with the Christian life. Even if I believe all these truths about Jesus, if I don’t act on them, if I don’t obey God’s commands for how I am to live. When we read in Matthew 25 and the goats and the sheep are separated at the final judgment, Jesus doesn’t separate people at the final judgment based on who believed and who didn’t. He does it based on who obeyed him and who disobeyed him. That’s why in Matthew 10:22, Jesus says that you will be persecuted, but he who endures to the end shall be saved.
When we have that, we understand that faith, and then when people ask me, well, have you been saved? My answer is yes, I was saved at baptism. I became a child of God, and now I am being saved as Philippians chapter two says, I’m working out my salvation. I am obedient to the commands that God has given me, so I have been saved. I am being saved by faithfully obeying God, and I hopefully wait for my future salvation. That salvation is complete once I reach those pearly Gates. When we understand salvation is a process and it’s a familial element, it helps us to see then why the Eucharist and the master is so important. Salvation is a process, so we need food for the journey. Salvation is a familial context incorporated into the family of God. It’s not just my relationship with God. It’s my relationship with the body of Christ, and the fullness of that is when I’m united to the body of Christ at the table of the Lord to receive Christ Himself, to be nourished with His grace, so that I can endure to the end. I hope that more from this conference will give you more food for thought, as we look forward to sharing the food for our souls that God has given us in the sacrament. Thank you all so much, and I hope you have a wonderful day.
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