This Sunday Message was originally delivered at Bristol United Methodist Church on September 1, 2024. Below the recorded-live video is the sermon text I preached from, if you would like to follow along. Biblical texts for reference: James 1. Read online with https://www.biblegateway.com – a fantastic resource.
In his “Table Talks”—basically his conversations with students—Martin Luther, the great reformer, author of Protestantism, is recorded as having said this, about the book of James—the book of the bible that we just read from:
“We should throw the epistle of James out of this school, for it doesn’t amount to much… I maintain that some Jew wrote it who probably heard about Christian people but never encountered any. Since he heard that Christians place great weight on faith in Christ, he thought, ‘Wait a moment! I’ll oppose them and urge works alone.’ This he did.” (“Luther’s Works,” Volume 54, page 424).
It’s pretty well established that Martin Luther wished the book of James was not in the bible, and it’s also pretty clear that it’s because James points out that “by grace alone,” one of the central tenants upon which the entire rebellion against the Roman Church was based—James, more than any other book of the bible, points out that “by grace alone” is an insufficient concept of salvation. James makes some pretty overt claims that living a good life and doing good things—that the quality of your character here on earth—is, in fact, vital to Christian existence.
I don’t know about you, but it was a good Protestant, I’ve had communicated to me, all my life, preached to me over and over again, this very Protestant idea that, We are saved by grace alone. Not by good works. We can do nothing to earn salvation. It is purely a free gift from God over which we have no control—except whether or not we accept it.
We are saved by grace alone.
And this idea originated as a counter argument to the “old wisdom”—and by old wisdom, I mean one of the most ancient ideas about good and evil in human existence. An Old Wisdom which still permeates all popular opinion on the subject of salvation—the idea that salvation is something to be earned, that there’s some cosmic scorecard out there, and that if you do earn enough points you’re in, and if you don’t earn enough points you’re not in…
There is this fantastic sitcom: I actually think it should be required viewing for all college philosophy majors, not because it’s perfect but because it raises a lot of really important questions about right and wrong and good and evil in like the best format possible to discuss those complicated things… while being just flat out hysterical at the same time… And that comedy itself is used to highlight some real problems—some actual, logical absurdities in some of the assumptions, the things that we have just taken for granted for centuries about the nature of right and wrong.
And yes, this is me, once again, making that argument that if you want to understand theology—or philosophy which for all intents and purposes is the same thing—read and watch, be a fan of, science fiction and fantasy. It will help you. Okay. Moving on.
It’s a sitcom called The Good Place, aired from 2016-2020, starring Kristel Bell and Ted Danson. It’s a modern day take on a very, very old story premise where these characters wake up in the afterlife to discover there is a good place and a bad place. And that all their lives, they have been “earning points” to determine where they will end up for eternity…
Sound familiar?
It’s a comedy, but it’s also the kind of mental exercise in good versus evil that human storytellers have been engaging in for more than 2000 years. The story in Luke 16, Jesus’s story about the rich man who doesn’t help people out in life and so ends up in what we might call “the bad place” after death is one of these popular afterlife morality tales that people, philosophers, thinkers were telling in Jesus’s own time. Jesus himself engages in this mental exercise with his disciples.
And in The Good Place, this silly little sitcom, which over the course of four years develops itself into a full-fledged and honest academic discussion of why we should live the best lives that we can here on earth—the story starts with the main character waking up in the afterlife and realizing she’s been put in the good place by mistake… that based on her actual life and the actual point score her lack of good deeds in life must have earned her, she should actually have been sent to the bad place… And the show evolves from there into this main character, terrified of being discovered and sent to the bad place, seeking help, seeking instruction, studying moral philosophy and ethics in an attempt to, after death, earn her way into the good place, so that, if she is ever discovered, she can stay—again it’s hysterical and the acting is superb and it’s intentionally ridiculous. Because three seasons later, what not only the human characters trying to avoid punishment and suffering in the afterlife, but what all of the “higher beings” in the show will also conclude, ultimately, is that the entire afterlife system, the point system that has for all of time weighed souls on a cosmic scale of good and evil is fundamentally flawed and unable to accurately judge the value, and more particularly the moral potential of a human life.
That’s the conclusion, by the way, that two thousand plus years of human philosophy has come to in the modern world—which is also, shocker, what Martin Luther the great reformer concluded when he started preaching “by grace alone” in the 1500s…
The old wisdom, the logic that we can or have to earn our way into heaven is fundamentally flawed for numerous reasons—first and foremost the problem of motivation. If we are only doing good things because we expect a reward, is there any actual moral value to the good that we do? Also the question of accidental circumstance: Some people end up doing more bad than other people simply because of the reality in which they exist, over which they have no control. How do we justly judge such things? And, of course, the basic question: Well, how good is good enough? Everyone does bad things. Where’s the scorecard that tells us which good deed erases which bad deed—and why controls that scorecard?
And the great thing about those questions—also the infuriating thing about those questions—is that they are not rhetorical questions. They are questions that need to be dealt with, and wrestled with, and pondered in this ongoing struggle we have as human beings with the concepts of good and evil and how to best live our lives.
Certain people in the Church in Luther’s day had turned heaven into a point system. There were actual point values assigned to activities in the Christian life—going to Mass, taking Eucharist/Communion, saying the Lord’s Prayer—all of these things had a point value, literal years off your time in Purgatory, or the ability to cancel out the negative value of certain sins. And then if all else failed, there was the greatest fundraising scheme of all time—and it literally was a church fundraiser—which allowed people to literally purchase years off their Purgatory sentence. The indulgence was literally a receipt, a piece of paper that stated: This person [incert name here] has purchased X number of years off Purgatory.
And the whole concept of Purgatory—this intermediary place between heaven and hell—at that time in history, Purgatory was just a continuation of the point system concept into the afterlife—if you didn’t earn enough points in life to get into heaven, well, you make that up in Purgatory.
And to be fair—because Protestants have not always been fair on this topic—the actual concept of Purgatory, and how it functions in the Christian theologies that accept it, is a lot more complicated than that, and there is, arguably, some biblical justification for the idea—I’m not saying it is biblical, just that, logically, there is an argument to be made from certain things the bible does say. But in Luther’s day, in popular opinion at least, that is what Purgatory had been reduced to, which is largely why we Protestants—for good or evil—just rejected the entire notion.
So with all this, with all the fundamental flaws in the afterlife point system concept of salvation, all the corruption happening in certain parts of the Catholic Church at the time, what became the Protestant Churches started preaching “by grace alone” for all the right reasons…
The problem, for us, five hundred years later, is that “by grace alone” has its own set of fundamental, logical flaws—flaws pointed out throughout the bible, but really highlighted in the book of James. The book of the bible that makes these really dramatic claims, like: “Faith without works is dead,” (James 2:26).
And of course, our reading for this morning: “be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves,” (James 1:22). And James goes on in our reading to define religion itself as living a good life: “Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world,” (James 1:27).
These aren’t statements that really leave a lot of room for interpretation when it comes down to it. I mean, people try—really hard. But the overt, biblical claim of the book of James is that if you are not living a good life, if you are not doing good things, then you are not really a Christian, you do not really have faith, and therefore, you are not saved…
Now, the main way people try to argue around this… The best example I can find is this quote from a blog post at ZondervanAcademic.com—Zondervan, if you don’t know, a major Christian publishing company of bibles and other academic resources. And one of their bloggers writes: “The reality is that James is not suggesting in any way that works lead to our salvation. It’s a result of it.” (Did Martin Luther Really Want James Taken Out of… | Zondervan Academic)
This is the typical Protestant rebuttal to James—and it’s a great example of how to deal with the problem without actually dealing with the problem.
“The reality is that James is not suggesting in any way that works lead to our salvation. It’s a result of it.” (Did Martin Luther Really Want James Taken Out of… | Zondervan Academic)
Just think about it for a second: In a practical, real-world sense, what is the point of that statement? What’s the point it makes of James? Why would James spend so much ink and energy on this argument that faith without good works is meaningless—that you are deceiving yourself if you think you can have faith and not be out there doing good things in the world—why would James even bother to make that argument if good works just automatically happen because you believe in Jesus?
I think we all know, right—just from actual, life experience—that’s just not how it works. Good works do not just happen. As a Christian, you’re not just always happy. As a Christian, you’re not just always selfless, or generous, or compassionate, or just, or honest… These are choices that we make every day.
As Christians, watching what we say, keeping our anger in check—both “good works” mentioned in the reading from James today—Just having faith does not make these choices to control ourselves easy, or even natural.
I remember getting so annoyed, as a teenager, reading this Christian book series—it was a good series overall. But there was this point in the first book—the main character was protecting her friend who had run away from home because of an abusive parent. And in the course of that, she comes to this point where she has to decide to disclose her friend’s whereabouts or lie. And what annoyed me was not the moral problem there. What annoyed me was that the book was written, worded intentionally, to make it seem like as a Christian, this teenager’s natural inclination was to not lie, no matter the circumstances, because Christians just naturally don’t want to do bad things… And it annoyed me because, as a Christian teenager at the time, I could have told you back then, and will tell you now, that is just not reality.
But worse than just not being realistic, this presentation of Christians as people who are, through faith and as a result of faith, just naturally disinclined to do wrong, undermines and devalues the real struggle, the real strength of will and character that is required to do right. A strength of will and character that has to be developed, forged over time, and reinforced again and again with every choice that we make.
Having faith does not just rewrite or override natural human inclinations. That is why not just James but the entire bible, actually, spends so much time and energy and ink arguing that as people who claim to follow God, we have a responsibility to fight, to actively deny, a lot of our natural human impulses, and instincts, and desires. That we have to strive as Christians to be better and to do good in this world rather than evil.
James is not some treatise on how having faith makes Christians awesome people—which is what the typical Protestant argument does imply. James is issuing a warning to all Christians everywhere and through all of time, that if you would claim the name Christian—literally meaning “one who belongs to Christ”—then you must be of the high moral character that does reflect God in this world, and to have that kind of character, you have to spend a lifetime developing it, that every word you choose to say or not say, every time you do or do not give into your anger, every single choice is a choice to build that character or detract from it.
The logical flaw in the notion of “by grace alone,” is that taken literally to its literal conclusion, it means one of two equally absurd things: either that doing good is easy and natural if you just believe. Or, that nothing we do actually matters at all. Tell that mean girl at school exactly what you think of her in the cruelest way possible, lie to your boss about why you were late, gossip about the next door neighbors, shoplift those sunglasses that just look so good on you, murder someone… Either Christians are just never tempted to do those things, or it’s all good. God forgives you. Say a prayer and all is well…
The irony is, taken to its literal conclusion, “by grace alone” becomes the very type of salvation formula that Luther was trying to break free from. And I mean formula literally. In certain church programs as a kid I was handed an actual formula, printed on an actual piece of paper—You may know it as the “Come to Jesus” prayer… Step 1: Pray this prayer—which is itself a two-step, acknowledge your sins/ask Jesus to come live in your heart formula. Step 2: Sincerely mean it—which is the escape clause, right? If someone later abandons their faith, there’s the built in explanation: oh, well, they didn’t really mean it to begin with… Step 3: Be saved and enjoy eternal salvation, by grace alone…
It’s exactly the type of thinking that “by grace alone” was meant to break us out of. And it is, as James says, useless, like looking in a mirror and immediately forgetting what you look like, a deception, and dead.
So what can we conclude here, in this eternal struggle between “saved by grace” and “saved by works?” Which is right? In which path do we put out hope?
Again, we’re going to be in James for the next few weeks, so I suspect this topic will continue. The debate will continue.
For today, the takeaway, the conclusion, is first, just to recognize that both sides, salvation by grace alone, and salvation by some cosmic point system of good deeds—both sides, taken to their logical conclusions, end in absurdity.
Which means, when you think it through, neither side can be right—not by itself.
And so that is the conclusion for today—that in this debate, grace or works, it is, I think, the debate itself that matters most. Because the debate itself provides balance for the absurd extremes on both sides. Are we saved by doing good? Yes. Are we saved by grace alone? Also, yes. The debate keeps us honest, keeps us thinking, keeps us working on ourselves and our communities, and keeps us humble. It’s when we stop debating, stop questioning, think we have figured out all the answers and resolved all the contradictions—that’s when we fall into the absurdities, the formulas, the indulgences and scripted prayers that we can say with certainty do not bring salvation.
As long as we are debating, we are working toward better, deeper understandings of ourselves and our faith.
