For by grace you are saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, for it is the gift of God; Not of works, that no man may glory. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus in good works, which God hath prepared that we should walk in them. For which cause be mindful that you, being heretofore Gentiles in the flesh, who are called uncircumcision by that which is called circumcision in the flesh, made by hands; That you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the conversation of Israel, and strangers to the testament, having no hope of the promise, and without God in this world. But now in Christ Jesus, you, who some time were afar off, are made nigh by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and breaking down the middle wall of partition, the enmities in his flesh: Making void the law of commandments contained in decrees; that he might make the two in himself into one new man, making peace (Ephesians 2:8-14).

The first sentence of this passage is often quoted by Protestants of every sect as “proof” that man is saved “through faith alone.” This is done in spite of the fact that the word “alone” appears nowhere in this or any other verse pertaining to salvation through faith by grace. An interesting point of my own personal experience with his passage is that I have never heard the whole passage quoted to me by any of my Protestant friends—to say nothing of those who would prefer to be outright opponents—only the first verse is ever quoted. Perhaps this is because it is easy to assume that the “core” of the message is contained in this first verse, and that the rest are just the details.

Unfortunately, I think a lot is lost in skipping over those details. That St Paul was writing to the Gentiles concerning “Works of the Law”—e.g. keeping the commandments—is quickly forgotten. Saint Paul himself stresses that he is referring not to “works” in general, but specifically to “Works of the Law.” In his Letter to the Romans, he makes this abundantly clear.

But now the justice of God has been made manifest independently of the Law, being attested by the Law and the prophets; the justice of God through faith in Jesus Christ upon all who believe. For there is no distinction, as all have sinned and have need of the glory of God. They are justified freely by his grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God has set forth as a propitiation by His blood through faith, to manifest His justice, God in His patience remitting former sins; to manifest His justice at the present time, so He Himself is Just, and makes just who has faith in Jesus.”

“Where then is thy boasting? It is excluded. By what law? Of Works? No, but by the law of faith. For we reckon that a man is justified by faith independently of the works of the Law. Is God the God of the Jews only, and not of the Gentiles also? Indeed of the Gentiles also. For there is but one God Who will justify the circumcised by faith, and the uncircumcised by the same faith. Do we therefore through the faith destroy the Law? By no means! Rather we establish the law (Romans 3:21-31, Confraternity of Christian Doctrine Text).

This is another letter from which isolated verses are ripped and wielded as daggers against the Faith. They are all-too-often as daggers in the hands of those whose skill is with clubs. Saint Paul is stating that salvation comes through the New Law and not the Old Law. But the Old Law—the Commandments and such—was never really meant for salvation. It barely sufficed for purification, as the Psalmist noted in stating that God wants not so much burnt offerings as a contrite heart.

The Old Law was meant as the framework within which morality, worship, and so on could be built up. As Mr Mark Shea has noted, the Ten Commandments, indeed the whole of the Old Law, is a sort of “basic moral tenets,” that is, the absolute minimum which men are called to observe.

The problem is, all this sort of thinking is rubbish. For Jesus makes clear that the Ten Commandments, like all the prohibitions of the Law, are the floor, not the ceiling of the moral life. This comes as a shock to people used to political blather about the Ten Commandments as “the sacred teachings that enshrine our highest values” and so forth. The Ten Commandments do not enshrine our highest values. They enshrine our lowest values. For it is the bare minimum of decency and common sense to say, “At the very least, don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t commit adultery, have some respect for your parents, honor your Creator, etc.” These are not “the highest ideals of the human race.” They are the absolute bare minimum for a functioning human society.

Equally telling is that the more fundamentalist Protestants—and even some who are by no stretch fundamentalists—often avoid like the plague the second chapter of the epistle of St James. It seems that Martin Luther was not the only Protestant to brush it aside as “an epistle of straw.” The second part of said Epistles clarifies St Paul’s position by putting works and faith into the right context with each other:

What will it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith, but does not have works? Can the faith save him? And if a brother or sister be naked and in want of daily food, and one of you say to them, ‘Go in peace, and be warmed and filled,’ yet you do not give them what is necessary for the body, what does it profit? So faith, too, unless it has works, is dead in itself. But someone will say, ‘Thou hast faith, and I have works.’ Show me thy faith without works, and I from my works will show you my faith. Thou believest that there is one God. Thou dost well. The devils also believe, and tremble.

But dost thou want to know, O senseless man, that faith without works is useless? Was not Abraham our father justified with works, when he offered up Isaac his son upon the altar? Dost thou see that faith worked along with his works, and that by the works the faith was made perfect? And the Scripture was fulfilled which says, ‘Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as justice, and he was called a friend of God.’ You see that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only. In like manner, was not Rahab the harlot also justified by works, when she welcomed the messengers and sent them out another way? For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith also without works is dead (James 2:14-26, Confraternity of Christian Doctrine Text).

When Ephesians 2:8 is taken alone and juxtaposed with this passage from St James, the appearance of a contradiction is given. Luther, in rebelling (and rightly so!) against certain abuses of the clergy of his day—particularly the selling of indulgences, but also against tinges of Pelagianism which had crept back into Christendom—knew from the start that his revolution against the Church could only succeed if the salvation became contingent upon something which could be attained or achieved apart from the Church. This meant, among other things, that he would need to abolish the sacramental graces: those seeming rituals which had lied at the heart of Christian worship for a millennium and a half.

In the end, this could only be accomplished by abolishing works from the economy of salvation. Salvation would be individual only, and any communal life existed solely to help the individual achieve his salvation, and to act together in worshipping God. Faith alone could save a man, and that faith needs nothing else save God’s grace.

On this last point, at least, Catholics and Protestants actually agreed in principal. The main differences were in how this was expressed. The Church had long taught that man did not “earn” heaven through his good works, but rather that these good works were the natural way in which man lived in faith. On this point, at least, Catholics and most Protestant agree (at least to some extent); thus, for example, was the historic signing by Catholics and Lutherans of the Joint Declaration of Salvation during the last century.

Where Catholics differ from some Protestants on this is in the view of what works do. We believe that God created us as a dynamic union of mind, soul, and body—and thus that what we do with our bodies matters. We believe that God created out bodies because He intended for us to use them as yet another channel of His grace; if the body does not matter, then what is the use of proclaiming its resurrection? What is the use in Christ’s Own death and resurrection, of His whole sorrowful passion? For all of these things happened not in the soul—which lives forever, which cannot be killed by men—but in the body. Saint Augustine, favorite Church father of the Protestant theologians, once called Christ’s death and resurrection God’s single greatest work.

Works matter, not because we earn our salvation through these, but because they are the exercise of our faith. They are what gives life to faith, and what makes it manifest. They also become yet another channel for grace, both for ourselves and for others: a grace which strengthens our faith. This is not by any means to our own credit: our good works are the response which faith, hope, and love require of us to be effective. These latter three virtues are granted to us by God—as are any graces. He has willed that salvation must be a cooperative venture: it is a gift to us, but one with which we must cooperate. It is by our works that we engage in this cooperation with Divine grace; God calls us, and we must respond, which we do through our works. Just as sin can be in the body or the spirit, so too must salvation be participated in by both body and spirit.

A complaint which I have heard aired, both by some of the friendly Protestant exegetes and by nearly all of the anti-Catholics bigots is that this requirement of a response to faith cheapens God’s glory. As a certain of these latter anti-Catholic Fundamentalists, Mr Thomas Wright, pontificates:

You can not cheapen Christ blood by trying to earn your way in…You do good things because you are [acceptable] before God. You can not cheapen [Christ’s] sacrifice by saying that he needs more of you into the mix, rather than his blood.

This is, of course, an attack against a strawman argument. The Catholic position does not say that Christ needs our cooperation to effect our salvation. Rather, we state that He wants our cooperation. We state that He allows us each to choose whether we will accept His offer of grace.

Moreover, to state that man can choose to accept this offer by exercising his free will does not cheapen God’s grace in the matter. As my friend Mr Stephen Cheney has noted before, we did not create our own free wills. God created that, so even our will comes as a gift from God, a grace from God. Thus, in responding to Christ’s sorrowful death and glorious resurrection, we are not cheapening the sacrifice or the victory, but rather enriching it by giving back to God what is His. We are able to do this not because we have power over God in this respect, but because God has given us a share of His riches with which to do whatever we would like, and has only asked that we should choose to return these riches to Him.

Every new soul which is won for heaven enriches heaven, not because we enrich God of our own worth, but rather because He values us and so makes us to be His riches. We hardly cheapen Christ’s sacrifice by noting that He desires our response, that He wants “more of [us] in the mix.” If we are valued by God—He Who Is all-powerful, and Who has infinite treasures without us—if God Himself values us this much, then adding ourselves to Christ’s sacrifice can hardly cheapen it. What does cheapen the sacrifice is to reduce it as a sort of “get out of hell free” card by insisting that we have no duty to respond to this sacrifice by our works. Salvation came to use through the obedience of Christ’s Spirit, but also through the submission of His Body unto death: a work not only of His Spirit, but of His Body also. We are similarly called to participate in salvation both through the virtues of our spirit—faith, hope, and love—but through the works of our body.