by Zack Hunt
Faith or faithfulness?
If you grew up a red-blooded American Protestant Christian like me, then this probably sounds like the dreaded works-based salvation we were taught to despise. We were told that Christianity was all about a personal relationship with Jesus, that all you had to do to be saved was believe, say the Sinner’s Prayer, confess your belief in Jesus, and you would go to heaven. But that understanding of salvation is a fairly recent development in the history of the Christian faith. How Christians understand salvation has evolved over time. How people think we are saved today hasn’t always been how people throughout history have thought we are saved.
Jesus himself changed the salvation paradigm from the sacrificial system that came before him. But that wasn’t the last time the people of God’s understanding of salvation changed. In fact, salvation in the Judeo-Christian tradition doesn’t actually start with the sacrificial system. After all, many people came before the sacrificial system was institutionalized in the law of Moses: people like Joseph, Sarah, and Abraham. The Christian faith considers them all to be “saved,” so to speak, but not because they made the correct atoning sacrifices. So how were they saved? The writer of Hebrews tells us it was their faithfulness to God’s calling, not their adherence to a list of rules or set of beliefs that didn’t yet exist, that “saved” them (see Hebrews 11). This emphasis on actions rather than ideas is important to keep in mind as we begin to rethink salvation in light of the apocalypse, because it reveals what biblical faith is all about. Biblical faith is not defined by rules, rituals, or ideas; it’s about faithfulness to a calling from God.
Of course, the law of Moses did eventually arrive, and with it a new path to salvation—or more accurately, atonement. The law of Moses laid out in detail what would keep the people of God in right standing with God. Some 613 commandments in the Torah told them what they would need to do or not do and what sacrifices they would need to make to get back in right standing—atone for their sins—when they screwed up. Curiously, heaven doesn’t really come into play here or really anywhere throughout the Old Testament. The people of Israel certainly believed in the existence of heaven, but going there wasn’t the goal. In fact, the Old Testament includes only a few mentions of people going to heaven, and they were taken there directly by God while they were still alive. Faithfulness for the sake of faithfulness, and the better life now that came from that faithfulness, was the “goal.” Going to some otherworldly paradise or avoiding eternal conscious torment? These simply don’t appear in the Old Testament.
When Jesus shows up on the scene, the history of salvation takes another dramatic turn. When he was crucified, the veil in the temple, symbolically separating the people from their God, was torn apart. Access to God was now open to all. The sacrifices once required for atonement are no longer required, according to the apostle Paul, because Jesus was the final atoning sacrifice. Through his sacrifice we are all forgiven and brought back into right relationship with God. Yet Paul describes how we are saved in a fascinating way. Salvation is, Paul writes, “not by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ” (Galatians 2:16). In this passage, Paul uses the Greek term pistis Christou, which has often been translated “faith in Jesus Christ.” Some biblical scholars suggest, however, that a better rendering of Paul’s words would be “faith of Jesus” rather than “faith in Jesus.”2 Better still would be to translate pistis Christou as “faithfulness of Jesus.” At first glance, this may seem like an insignificant detail, the kind of thing scholars like to dissect. But the implications for our understanding of salvation are enormous. It’s not our belief in right ideas that saves us, but rather Jesus’ faithfulness in following the will of his Father, even to the point of the cross. It’s the same sort of faithfulness the patriarchs exhibited before the law of Moses was even given.
For Paul, faithfulness doesn’t stop at the cross. As he says in Philippians, we are called to that same faithfulness, called to have the same mind in us that was in Christ Jesus that “though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:6-8). For Paul, having the same mind as Christ doesn’t mean believing the exact same ideas as everyone in the pew next to us. It means pursuing the same way of life, the same sort of faithfulness to God’s calling that Jesus embodied.
James builds on this understanding of faithfulness—answering God’s calling to a particular way of life—in his own epistle, in which he famously says that faith alone does not save us, for faith without works is dead (see James 2:14-26). When many of us hear the word works today in the context of salvation, we’ve been conditioned to think about actions intended to win God’s approval through moral perfection. But when James talks about works, he’s not talking about the sort of rituals, or works, of the law of Moses that were intended to make atonement with God and which Paul said Jesus replaced the need for when he writes in Romans that “a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law” (Romans 3:28). There’s another kind of works mentioned in the New Testament, and it’s the kind that James is talking about here. The works James describes are better understood in English as faithfulness, the kind of faithfulness that Jesus and the patriarchs embodied. Faithfulness is a work of faith defined not by adherence to religious rituals or by intellectual assent to a list of beliefs, but by a particular way of life that is faithful to God’s calling—especially God’s call to love God with all our heart, mind, and soul, and our neighbor as ourselves (Matthew 22:36-40). By being faithful to this calling to love our neighbor, we’re not trying to win God’s approval or love. We already have God’s love, by virtue of God’s loving nature. We love our neighbors not as a means to our own end of getting to heaven but as an end itself. To love them simply for the sake of trying to win God’s approval would be to objectify our neighbors by turning them into a means to an end. If we did that, we would still be doing the sort of ritualistic “works” of the law that Paul says won’t justify us with God anyway.
Unfortunately, this sort of nuanced balance between belief and putting that belief into practice was lost over time, and the church found itself back in a place where religious rituals, or “works,” were once again taught to be required for salvation. Selling indulgences is one example. This is the sort of thing Martin Luther railed against and why he was so emphatic about salvation by faith alone. That zealousness was not without problems, though, for Luther decried James as a “gospel of straw” and wanted it cut out of the Bible for its emphasis on works. The legacy of Luther’s distaste for James has turned the book’s testimony about the critical importance of works into an awkward part of the New Testament for Protestants rather than an important reminder to live out our beliefs.
Luther’s legacy, Protestantism, centered on the doctrine of salvation by faith alone, an idea that continues to be not only embraced but celebrated by countless Christians today. But the history of salvation didn’t end with Luther. If anything, Luther’s ideas laid the foundation for yet another development in the history of salvation. Centuries later, as the Western world found itself in the throes of the Industrial Revolution, salvation by faith alone came to its logical, literal conclusion. The revivalism of nineteenth-century America transformed salvation once more. The Industrial Revolution transformed the way we think about life, particularly in regards to time. Journeys that once took weeks on horseback could now be completed in days on a train. Manufactured goods that once required several days to make by hand could be created in a single afternoon thanks to the advent of the assembly line. But industrialization didn’t just transform transportation and manufacturing. It transformed society as well. It transformed us into an on-demand people who expected to get places quickly and have what we want immediately. The church was not immune from this transformation. The church’s
approach to salvation soon began to mirror the same sort of assembly line logic, demand for immediacy, and focus on the bottom line of the Industrial Revolution. By taking salvation by faith alone at its literal word—that is to say all that is required for salvation is belief—salvation became an industrial process as the way of Jesus was streamlined and ultimately replaced with an easy-to-follow and incredibly efficient system guaranteed to produce salvation every time.
Folks like the evangelist Charles Finney created salvation factories, of sorts, with their own assembly lines. Meeting at first in the theaters of New York City and then spreading out to revivals in towns across the country, Finney would bring a sinner up to the stage, where the sinner would sit in a chair, known as the mourner’s bench, and confess his or her sins. Confession made, salvation was had, and it was on to the next sinner, who would come on stage and take a seat in the chair. Replace the stage with a sanctuary, and the chair with an altar to kneel at, and you have a typical Sunday morning at any evangelical church in America today.
In the holiness tradition in which I was raised, Phoebe Palmer took things a step further and declared that “the altar sanctifies the gift,” meaning a visit to the altar was enough to be instantly and entirely cleansed of sin, or as Nazarenes like me call it, entirely sanctified. Palmer and Finney were far from the only ones promoting a streamlined version of salvation focused on the bottom line of getting to heaven. Countless other evangelists and preachers contributed to this sort of reductionist version of salvation. Regardless of where we trace its origins, the result of the various incarnations of American Christianity was that salvation by faith alone became Christianity by right belief alone. Christianity was individualized, internalized, and spiritualized. Discipleship was replaced by a moment of decision. The way of Jesus was replaced with the Sinner’s Prayer. Salvation became a zero-sum game in which all that mattered was avoiding hell, and doing that became as simple as saying a few magic words at an altar. A particular way of life no longer really mattered, because it was no longer ultimately necessary for salvation. Sure, we’ll say we need to act like Christians and we’re quick to condemn people for not conforming to whatever our particular version of cultural Christianity dictates—like no smoking, drinking, or getting tattoos. But the rest of our life belies the truth that faith excuses a multitude of sins.
This is how 81 percent of white American evangelical voters can support someone like Donald Trump whose words, actions, and policies are so radically antithetical to the way of Jesus. The disconnect between faith and faithfulness means self-professed Christians can support all sorts of unchristian things without feeling hypocritical because their Christian faith (and personal salvation) is ultimately determined by what they believe, not by how they live. None of the doing of Christianity matters when the only concern is getting to heaven.
Dispensationalism grows in the fertile soil of a faith whose focus is on the afterlife and having all the right answers. The “ends justify the means” ethics of end-times theology is a natural outgrowth of an individualized, internalized, and spiritualized version of salvation. So end-times theology isn’t the disease that needs to be eradicated in order for Christianity to rediscover what it truly means to follow Jesus. It’s just a symptom of a much deeper problem—namely, the disconnect between the Christian faith and the Christian life. For in its pursuit of escape from the earth, end-times theology reveals a problem that runs throughout Protestantism in general and American Christianity in particular: a self-centered Christianity exhausted by simply agreeing that a certain list of doctrines are true.
The irony is that, properly understood, end-times theology can rescue the church from an individualized and overspiritualized understanding of salvation. For what we see in John’s apocalypse is the apocalyptic truth of Matthew 25 unveiled. Now, Revelation does not directly quote Matthew 25, as it does some of the Old Testament prophets, but the call of Matthew 25, and the consequences for not heeding that call, shape the first several chapters of Revelation. There are echoes of Matthew 25 at the end of John’s apocalypse as well, when Jesus declares, “My reward is with me, and I will give to each person according to what they have done” (Revelation 22:12 NIV).
The first chapters of Revelation don’t get as much attention as the rest of Revelation, at least not in dispensational circles. But if we take another look at the letters contained within them and let those letters become the framework for understanding the rest of Revelation, as John intended them to be, the curtain begins to be pulled back on the message of Revelation in general and salvation in particular. They emphasize the importance of “works” when it comes to the last judgment while also setting the time frame for the message of Revelation as the present, rather than the distant future. Everything that John warns is to come is directly connected to and dependent upon what happens “now.”
In six of the seven letters found in the opening chapters of Revelation, Jesus, speaking through John, says, “I know your works,” and in the letter to Thyatira he specifically says, “I will give to each of you as your works deserve” (Revelation 2:23). It’s a theme that’s repeated throughout the book of Revelation: the idea that punishment and rewards would be doled out not on the basis of affirmation of faith but according to how faithful the early church was to God’s calling not just to preach but to live out the good news of the gospel. In other words, as anathema as it might sound to Protestant ears, according to Revelation, salvation is fundamentally connected to what we do in this life, not just what we believe.
This didn’t create as much tension for John’s original audience as it does for Protestant audiences today. For one, “works”-based salvation had a strong foundation in Jewish theology, as we can see in both the sacrificial system and the various rites and rituals that were required of the people of Israel. Paul certainly emphasized the role of faith in salvation, but the role of works in living out that faith wouldn’t be as contradictory as we’ve been conditioned to believe. The work Paul rejected as necessary for salvation was not the working out of our faith by loving and serving our neighbor, but rather the “works prescribed by the law.”3 It’s this subtle but important distinction that is the key to resolving any tension between works and faith as they pertain to salvation. When we talk about “works” pejoratively, we usually mean the kinds of rites and rituals required by the law of Moses, the law that Paul says we are no longer under because of God’s grace. But as Jesus lays out in Matthew 25, work or effort is very much involved in salvation, just a different kind of work: the work of loving and serving the least of these.
The tension, then, between Paul’s teaching on faith alone and James’s declaration that faith without works is dead, can be resolved if we substitute the word love for works. After all, love is what all the works required by the law and the prophets hang on, according to Jesus (Matthew 22:40). Incarnated love is what the prophets called the people of God to embody; the incarnated love of God in the form of Jesus is what saves us; and the absence or presence of incarnated love is what the churches of Revelation are either chastised or praised for. Or to put it another way, it’s the love of the Father that creates us, the love of the Son that saves us, and the love of the Spirit that compels us to love one another. This doesn’t negate the role of faith, because biblical faith doesn’t reside only in the mind; it is lived out in the form of faithfulness or acts of faith—specifically, acts of love. In that way, “faith alone” does still save us. This approach also explains why Paul’s teaching that faith is the mechanism of salvation became a matter of such heated debate in the early church. It wasn’t just that he was ministering to Gentiles and welcoming them into the people of God because of what they believed. The uproar Paul encountered in his ministry came about because he was redefining what was required to be or live as the people of God. He wasn’t dismissing the role of works so much as redefining them—just as Jesus did with the greatest commandment and his description of the last judgment.
It’s this re
imagining that John echoes in Revelation. Works are critical in the book of Revelation, not just because they are how our eternal fate is determined in the last judgment, but because these new works usher in or have ushered in or should have ushered in (depending on which church is being addressed) a new way of life. This is why Jesus continually says, “I know your works” to the seven churches. The people in these communities of faith have been called to live a particular way in the last days, and are not to simply sit around and wait for Jesus to return and make everything better.
The reason most of us reject works when we talk about salvation is not just because of a few verses in Paul’s epistle, but because we’ve been taught that salvation requires perfection, and because we could never be perfect in our actions. No matter how many good works we do, we need Jesus’ perfection to save us. But salvation in the Bible was never about moral perfection. It couldn’t be. Only God is perfect. Salvation in the Bible is always about right relationship between us and God lived out through right relationship with our neighbors.
Which is why the sort of works-based salvation that Revelation teaches and Jesus describes in his Little Apocalypse of Matthew 25 describe our relationships with others, not how perfect we are. The same is true throughout the New Testament whenever the subject of works comes up as they relate to salvation. The works that James and Jesus and John and even Paul had in mind weren’t about moral perfection; they were about love. We don’t have to be perfect to love one another. Rather, it’s that love that perfects us. As we love one another as God first loved us, we fulfill Jesus’ command to “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48) because the heavenly Father is perfect love.