I understand the scriptures from James and that sort of stuff about why
works are involved in salvation; I just don't understand how it works. I'm confused
about the Catholic understanding of how works play into salvation.
There's a lot of confusion in this area, and you hear a lot of things—from both sides of the aisle,
frankly, both from Protestants and Catholics—that doesn't accurately reflect Church teaching. And
you even hear some—you hear it from Protestant apologists, you even hear it's from some Catholic
apologists, because not everybody has done a close study of this issue. Fortunately, I have, and I've
written a number of resources about this that I'll mention, and one of them we have in print
at Catholic Answers, and we'll see about sending you a copy of that. It's a book called "The Drama
of Salvation," and I go into a lot of depth there. I also have a little shorter work
that's available as an e-book on Amazon called "Justification by Faith and Works:
What Does the Catholic Church Really Teach?" So if you go to Amazon and you type in "Jimmy Akin
faith and works," it'll come up. But to sketch the answer for you right now,
the term "works" is used in different senses. It's used in different senses in different
passages of the Bible. A lot of the time when St. Paul uses it, he's not referring to good works,
which is how the term is commonly taken in the history of Protestant theology, and to some extent
in the history of Catholic theology as well—"good works" being works of a morally good nature.
Very frequently when Paul is using the term works he means works of the Mosaic law, or things you do
because you believe you need to fulfill the Mosaic law in order to be saved. And that's
why he talks so much about circumcision in Romans and Galatians, because the point he's making there
is you don't need to be a Jew in order to be a Christian and be saved. And so when he's talking
about works, much of the time St. Paul means works of the Mosaic law. Now suppose, though, that we
use the historical definition that has been contentious between Protestants and Catholics,
which is "morally good works." Well, there's sort of two kinds of morally good works. There are
good works that are done by human nature, and then there are good works that are done by God's grace.
Prior to the point of justification, it is not possible for us to do
supernaturally good works, or works done by God's grace, because God's grace isn't yet acting in our
souls. We haven't yet been justified, we haven't yet received his grace, and so it is impossible
for us to do supernaturally good works prior to the point in our lives where we convert
and we're justified. And as a result of that, nothing that we do prior to justification merits
the grace of justification. So the first thing that happens—I mean, we come to God, we believe,
we repent, we get baptized—that's the point at which, in the ordinary course of affairs,
he justifies us and gives us his grace. Then, over the course of the Christian life,
we grow in his grace. And because we have his grace working in our souls now,
it's now possible for us to do supernaturally good works. And we have many exhortations in scripture
to do those, as part of the Christian life. St. Paul says we were "created in Christ...for good
works," so they're a part of the Christian life, and we grow in our righteousness, or grow in our
justification, over the course of the Christian life by doing good works in cooperation with
God's grace. And this is the kind of justification that James is talking about. In James chapter 2,
James is not talking about the beginning of the Christian life. The example he cites is Abraham
and his willingness to do whatever God wanted, and that's something that—Abraham had already
been justified for years by this point. So James is not talking about how to get into a state
of justification, he's talking about growing in Christlike-ness in that state of justification.
And then at the end, when we stand before God, we'll also be justified there. So there are these
different aspects to justification; there's past justification at the beginning of the
Christian life, there's ongoing justification during the course of the Christian life,
and then there's final justification when we stand before God. And when we stand before God,
he will pronounce us righteous on the basis of Christ and what he did in our lives,
and he will reward the good works that we have done. This is something St. Paul stresses both
in Romans and in Galatians. He says "God will reward every man according to his works," and
among the rewards that Paul says God will give, in both places, is eternal life. This is in Romans 2
and it's also in Galatians 6. And so there is a sense in which eternal life is a reward
for the perseverance and good works that we've done, but it is not earned by that. It's simply
a reward that God has freely chosen to give us as a result of his grace. So that's kind of a sketch:
we don't do good works to get into a state of justification; good works flow from the state
of justification, and ultimately God rewards us for having done those in the next life.