Jimmy Akin dives deep into the Catholic understanding of sola fide (faith alone) challenging the common Protestant position. He argues that while faith is essential, it must be accompanied by love to achieve justification.
Transcript:
In your debate with James White, you talked about Sola Fide and Pope Benedict. You just talked more about that. Back in 2008, when Pope Benedict was given a series of audiences on St. Paul,
in one of the audiences, he talked about how Luther’s formula, justification by faith alone, is true, as long as you’re not excluded from that faith, the concept of love, or supernatural love charity.
As St. Paul himself says in Galatians 5, “In Christ neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything. What counts is faith working through love.”
For people who follow this issue closely, this is not a surprise. This has always been the Catholic understanding of things. Now, because of the Protestant Reformation and their extensive use of the formula by faith alone,
people divvied up into tribes and started treating that as a sine qua non of Protestantism. If you use that phrase, you must disagree with Catholic teaching. They frankly misrepresented what the church teaches. When you study the matter, and I have a whole book about this called “The Drama of Salvation” where I talk about this. I also have a 20 answers booklet called “20 Answers, Faith, and Works” where I talk about this. But the formula of faith alone is not alien to Catholic teaching. In fact, it has been used by Catholic thinkers down through the ages, including people like St. Thomas Aquinas, who’s a doctor of the church. And what the Council of Trent did was not reject the formula of faith alone. What it did was reject a misunderstanding of the formula of faith alone.
What it rejected infallibly was saying that man is justified by faith alone if you mean that all you need is intellectual faith.
If you mean all you need to do is just believe Christian teachings and you have a purely intellectual faith, that’ll justify you. Well, no, it won’t. So that’s the church’s position. But most Protestants don’t believe that either. They think you need a more robust faith than mere intellectual belief. So what else do you need? What needs to be part of it? Well, one view that you have in some Protestant circles is you need more than intellectual faith. You need what they call fiducial faith. Fiducia means trust. And so you need to, in addition to have intellectual belief in the gospel, you need to trust God for your salvation. And they’ll say that that’s what saves you. The problem is, St. Paul denies that in 1 Corinthians 13, where he’s talking about the virtue of love, and he says, look, even if I had faith strong enough to move mountains, and you really got to trust God pretty strongly. So this is clearly fiducial faith we’re talking about in order to move mountains. But if I didn’t have love, it wouldn’t benefit me at all. And so fiducial faith is not the right kind of faith either. The right kind of faith, as Paul makes clear in 1 Corinthians 13 and in Galatians 5, is faith that incorporates love, because he says love believes all things and hopes all things. So if you have supernatural love or charity, that incorporates faith and it incorporates trust or hope. And so you have all three theological virtues. And then that’s what he says counts in Christ in Galatians 5. So yeah, if you have faith working through love, you are in a state of grace. Now that doesn’t deny the role of the sacraments or anything like that, because if you have
supernatural love of God, you’re going to want to do what God says. And God says, go get baptized. So you’re going to go get baptized and he’ll give you his grace through the baptism. But if you have faith working through love, then you are in a state of grace. You are in a state of justification.