The distinction between justification by faith and justification by works was central to the Protestant Reformation, and a standard Protestant complaint against the medieval church was its (perceived) promotion of ‘works-righteousness’. ‘The Reformation accusation is often that Catholic theology teaches some form of salvation by one's own work’.Footnote 1
How St Paul understood the distinction between justification by faith and by works (e.g. in Rom 3:28 or Gal 2:16) is a hotly debated question. Proponents of the so-called New Perspective on Paul claim that ‘the works of the law’ which Paul contrasts with ‘faith in Christ’Footnote 2 are the boundary markers which served to separate the Jews from other nations, for example, circumcision and purity laws.Footnote 3 Interpretations of the New Perspective-type ascribe, accordingly, a narrow meaning to the phrase ‘works of the law’. This goes against the tendency of much modern Protestant theology, which interprets ‘works’ in a very inclusive sense, for example, as moral achievement in general, or as ‘man's self-powered striving to undergird his own existence in forgetfulness of his creaturely existence’.Footnote 4
The purpose of this article is not to discuss Pauline interpretation. It is, instead, to examine what I will call ‘Protestant conceptions’ of the relationship between the notions of ‘faith’ and ‘works’, as they figure in the context of the doctrine of justification. I will use the term ‘Protestant conceptions’ (with scare quotes to indicate that it is a term of art) to refer to ways of conceiving the relationship between faith and works which satisfy the following two conditions.
(1) In order for a conception of the faith/works relationship to qualify as ‘Protestant’, it must have an understanding of ‘works’ which is sufficiently wide so as to include something that the Council of Trent as well as mainstream medieval theology regarded – controversially in relation to the Protestant Reformation – as an all-important factor in justification, namely the believer's possession of the supernatural virtue of love.Footnote 5 The virtue or habit of love is, according to Trent, a constitutive element of the justified believer's inherent sanctity or righteousness.Footnote 6 According to standard Protestant polemics, however, this amounts to a form of works-righteousness. ‘Love’, as Philip Melanchton says, ‘is the fulfillment of the law’, its highest work.Footnote 7 Views which do not imply this verdict – that is, which do not associate love with works of the law and thereby exclude love from being an integral part of justification – are not ‘Protestant’.Footnote 8
(2) ‘Protestant conceptions’ of the faith/works distinction portray ‘faith’ and ‘works’ as mutually exclusive categories. Faith is not a certain kind of work. It is true that the early Luther (1520) can describe faith as the ‘first and highest good work, the noblest of them all’.Footnote 9 In later writings, however, he recognises that this is an inappropriate way of speaking.Footnote 10 The concern to keep faith and works as exclusive categories is shared by many modern theologians. Karl Barth writes: ‘“Justification by faith” cannot mean that instead of his customary evil works and in place of all kinds of supposed good works man chooses and accomplishes the work of faith.’Footnote 11 Bruce McCormack: ‘Paul's concern is to contrast justification by faith with justification by works. It would be strange if, given this intention, he were to turn around and treat faith as a “work” – that is, as a human possibility.’Footnote 12
My definition of ‘Protestant conceptions’ of the faith/works relationship is not meant to imply that (e.g.) Reformed or Lutheran doctrines of justification must necessarily be interpreted in accordance with the two conditions above. My interest in this article, however, is limited to views which fit the definition. These are common within Protestantism but, as we will see, prima facie problematic. The main problem which they face is occasioned by certain features which they have in common, and which my two criteria are intended to capture. This is why I have chosen to define and study the general type rather than particular exemplifications of it. The polemical edge that the relevant type of views direct against the Tridentine doctrine of justification justifies my choice of the label ‘Protestant’.Footnote 13
The Protestant emphasis on the solus Christus and the alien nature of Christian righteousness has often expressed itself in a critique of the Catholic idea of inherent righteousness. ‘To conceive of the new righteousness in Aristotelian terms as a qualitative property (qualitas) inhering in a substantial self is to give support, even if unwittingly, to the constant human temptation to rely on something within the self, something other than God.’Footnote 14 The latter is the essence of works-righteousness, according to Protestant polemics. The fact that the sanctifying grace of Tridentine doctrine is not an act but an internal state does not, accordingly, save it from being classified as a work. ‘Works-righteousness’ – as it figures in much Protestant theology – is a very inclusive concept which may apply to any attempt to base justification on some inherent property of the justified subject.
The Protestant critique of the idea of inherent righteousness has, however, always provoked counter-questions about the status of faith. Is faith a human condition for justification (that is, something inherent in humans which is necessary for justification), and what distinguishes it, in that case, from a work, in the wide sense? Why does love – understood as a divinely infused quality of the human soul – belong in the general context of works, but not faith? In this study, I am primarily interested in exploring the logical options which are available for reconciling a wide understanding of works (condition 1) with the claim that faith is not a work (condition 2). I will do this by examining six suggested explanations of why faith is not a work, selected on the ground that they represent what I see as the spectrum of logically available approaches to the problem.
The conclusion that the present study will arrive at is somewhat surprising. I will argue that there are two coherent ways of combining a wide conception of ‘works’ with the claim that faith is not a work. Only one of them, however, is plausible. It requires, furthermore, the rejection of something that many Protestants view as important for Protestant identity, namely an exclusively forensic understanding of justification.
Faith is not in the Decalogue
The Lutheran tradition is careful to distinguish between law and gospel (or law and ‘promise’). Luther says that ‘there are two teachings, law and promise; and law and work are correlatives, just as promise and faith are’.Footnote 15
If we take ‘law’ as referring to the Decalogue,Footnote 16 then we have a possible answer to why faith is not a work. Faith, it could be argued, is not an act which is prescribed by the Decalogue. Faith is only related to the promise. Love, however, is prescribed by the Decalogue and is therefore a work.
The problem with this solution is that it presupposes a narrow and literalistic interpretation of the Decalogue. The Reformers did not interpret it that way. Luther, for instance, finds faith and trust in God to be implied by the first commandment: ‘The intention of this commandment, therefore, is to require true faith and confidence of the heart, which fly straight to the one true God and cling to him alone.’Footnote 17
The commandments have, of course, different implications for people living in different phases of salvation history. If faith and trust in God is implicit in the first commandment,Footnote 18 as Luther claims, then faith and trust in Christ and the gospel is what obeying this commandment means for those who (through the Holy Spirit) have knowledge of Christ's divinity.Footnote 19 To disbelieve God is not consistent with trusting him, and to reject the gospel is to disbelieve God. ‘True faith’, accordingly, ‘is to be found within the scope of the first commandment’.Footnote 20 If the Decalogue is narrowly and literalistically interpreted, on the other hand, we will not find any commandment about love there either (contrary to what Jesus says, Matt 22:37). So to distinguish faith from works by reference to the contents of the Decalogue does not seem to be a very promising idea.Footnote 21
Faith is a gift of God
A knee-jerk response to the question of why faith is not a work is that faith is ‘a gift of God’.Footnote 22 This response is obviously inadequate, if the agenda is to distinguish the Protestant doctrine(s) of justification by faith from any medieval doctrine of justification. The created habit of grace which, according to the medieval schools, is the formal cause of justification is certainly a gift from God. So is St Thomas Aquinas’ iustitia infusa, the infused property which makes humans intrinsically righteous.Footnote 23 The good deeds which the justified sinner performs are, according to St Augustine, gifts from God (‘When God crowns our merits, he crowns nothing but his own gifts’Footnote 24). The universally acknowledged fact that ‘believing is not something we can muster up on our own steam’Footnote 25 therefore does not distinguish believing (faith) from a lot of other states, conditions or actions which the Reformers were eager to keep out of the doctrine of justification, most prominently Christian love.
Faith is non-voluntary
A possible way to salvage the ‘gift of God’ response is to construe faith as a property which God unilaterally confers on humans without any cooperation with their free will. God gives me, according to this suggestion, faith in a similar sense of ‘give’ as when we say that God has given me two arms and two legs. I did not voluntarily affirm or accept God's giving of arms and legs, and the transaction took part without any cooperation between God and my free will. If God's giving of faith is like that, then this may be a basis for distinguishing between faith and works.
Faith can be understood both as a virtue (or some other kind of state) or as an act. Applied to faith as a virtue, the suggested solution would mean that God gives me the virtue of faith without in any way considering my response. ‘Works’ can then be distinguished from faith on the ground that they, as opposed to faith, involve my free will in some way.
Applied to faith conceived as an act, the same solution would mean that faith is construed as non-voluntary – as an ‘act’ which is not even partially a result of a free decision or choice on the part of the subject. It is God who unilaterally makes me perform it. It would then, in some sense, be correct to say that I have performed the act of faith (since the act involves my mental faculties) but it would nevertheless also be correct to say that I was totally passive (since my mental faculties did not freely or voluntarily perform the act, but were forced to do so). The idea, hence, is that faith's character of non-voluntary act, wholly and exclusively controlled by God, is what distinguishes faith from works – the latter being understood as voluntary acts.
It is important to see that this solution requires that there is no cooperation whatsoever between God or God's grace and human freedom in the act of faith. If the act of faith is, in any sense, voluntary on the side of the human subject (if God, for instance, causes humans to freely perform it, as for example Aquinas thinks), then nothing relevant distinguishes this act from other grace-assisted human acts, such as the good deeds which Trent views as meritorious. Both Catholics and many Protestants assume that the justified sinner's good deeds are cooperative enterprises, in which God's grace and human free will are both involved. Protestants normally insist, however, that those acts belong on the ‘works’ side of the faith/works dichotomy, and that they therefore cannot play any role in relation to salvation.Footnote 26 If faith is partly a voluntary human act, even though it presupposes grace, then the question of what distinguishes faith from a grace-assisted work remains unanswered.
Luther famously denied the existence of free will after the fall, at least with respect to salvation and spiritual things.Footnote 27 For Luther, the act of faith does not seem to depend on free will in any sense.Footnote 28 The Formula of Concord, however, says that God has ‘one way of accomplishing his will in a human being as a rational creature, and another way of accomplishing his will in other, irrational creatures, or in a stone or block of wood’. Furthermore, all who have been baptised ‘have now arbitrium liberatum [a freed will or freed choice] . . . For this reason they not only hear the Word but are also able to assent to it and accept it – although in great weakness.’Footnote 29
Oswald Bayer interprets this to mean that ‘human faith is no mechanical echo, but God alone creates faith entirely as a free response’.Footnote 30 For those who accept this view of faith, it is not possible to follow the suggestion above and distinguish faith from works on the ground that faith, as opposed to works, is a non-voluntary act. In Bayer's interpretation of the Formula, faith is voluntary, even though the contribution of the will is dependent on grace.
We have seen that the suggestion that faith is a totally non-voluntary act may provide a basis for distinguishing faith from works (defined as voluntary acts).The price for this solution, however, is high. If God does not care about receiving a voluntary human response to his offer of communion, then why did he create free will in the first place,Footnote 31 considering the amount of evil which it has unleashed? It is of course possible that free will has a very great value in itself, even though it is of little or no importance in our relationship to God. The possibility in question, however, seems very unlikely from a Christian perspective. How can free will be valuable if it has nothing to do with the purpose for which the world was created – our communion with God? If faith, as Protestant theology emphasises, is the primary and all-important way by which we relate to God, and if faith is non-voluntary, then our communion with God is also non-voluntary. This leaves free will hanging in the air as a more or less superfluous but extremely dangerous appendix.
Even more pressingly, if free will has nothing to do with salvation, why did God choose to save us through an elaborate salvation history? God's historical election of and dealings with Israel and the church, by which he gradually educates the human consciousness and raises its awareness of his love, seems to make sense only if God respects human freedom and wants us voluntarily to choose communion with him. If God does not see any value in a voluntary conversion on our part, however, then there seems to be no point for God to use such indirect, messy and costly means. God could instead have converted our hearts smoothly and directly by internal force.
Some parts of the Lutheran tradition tend to address problems like this by reference to mystery and to the unfruitfulness of speculating about the mind of the Deus absconditus. In the context of a theological discourse where God's existence is unproblematically taken for granted, this may be fine. As a response to a question concerning the coherence of Christian faith raised in the context of modern scepticism about the existence of God, it is much less adequate. In that context, we may find that the (perceived) theological gains of Luther's position on free will come at the price of a considerable loss in Christian philosophical credibility.Footnote 32
Faith is a not a condition for justification
Another approach to explaining why faith is not a work argues that faith is not a condition for justification. To make justification dependent on faith is to misconstrue the doctrine of justification precisely by turning faith into a work. Robert Preus represents this approach: ‘The fifth assault against the evangelical doctrine of justification by faith is to make faith a condition for justification’. ‘Historic Roman and Arminian theology made faith as a work and virtue of man a condition for fellowship with God and for salvation’.Footnote 33 Bruce McCormack sees tendencies in this direction even in Luther's theology:
The residual problem created by Luther's analysis (and one he bequeathed to later generations of Protestant theologians) lies in the fact that the priority of the giving of faith over the act of divine imputation would seem clearly to require a certain logical priority of regeneration (a work of God ‘in us’) over justification. And to the extent that that were so, the ‘break’ with Catholic understandings of justification . . . would be less than complete.Footnote 34
McCormack's point is that, if faith is understood as a condition for justification, then justification is made dependent on regeneration (the work of God ‘in us’, in this case the giving of faith). If so, the essential difference between the Reformation doctrine of justification and the Catholic view is lost. The ground of God's forgiveness of sins is again conceived as (partly) located in us (namely, our faith), and not exclusively in Christ's righteousness. In order to avoid this relapse into pre-Reformation doctrine, we must conceive of faith as a consequence rather than a condition of the divine imputation of righteousness to sinners.
As an interpretation of Paul, McCormack's view is strained. If it is correct to say that we are justified ‘by’ or ‘through’ faith even though faith is a consequence (and not a precondition) of justification, then why would it not be equally correct to say that we are justified by good deeds? Good deeds are a consequence of justification, and a necessary one. The Reformers (and Paul), however, would certainly have been very surprised if someone had attempted to express this by saying that we are justified ‘by’ (or ‘through’) good deeds.Footnote 35
McCormack believes, as we have seen, that it is detrimental to sound doctrine to understand faith as a condition of justification. Faith would then be equivalent to ‘a “work” – that is, a human possibility . . . a condition which we humans must first provide before divine imputation can occur’.Footnote 36 This reasoning depends on a tacit premise, namely that any condition which we humans must first satisfy before divine imputation can occur is a ‘work’. If this premise is true, then it follows that justification must be unconditional, or else we are faced with the spectre of works-righteousness.
If the tacit premise is true, however, then it is impossible to avoid works-righteousness. Most people would agree that God only imputes the righteousness of Christ to beings who are (or have been) alive. God does not impute Christ's righteousness to, for example, rocks or ping-pong balls. This means that there is something that the recipient of justification must ‘provide before divine imputation can occur’ – she must live (or have lived). It is also very probable, as far as we know, that God only justifies humans, which means that being human is a condition of justification.
This indicates that the attempt to deny that faith is a condition of justification is wrongheaded. Such a denial does not solve any problem. Even if faith is not a condition of justification, other human properties clearly are. So justification is not unconditional, and if conditional justification is equivalent to works-righteousness, then works-righteousness is the only kind of righteousness there is. This shows that it is a bad idea to define ‘works’ in the super-inclusive way suggested by McCormack.
Faith is union with Christ
Another proposed way of avoiding portraying faith as a human work is to construe it as a ‘divine entity’.Footnote 37 The background to this proposal is the so-called Finnish school of Luther interpretation, which argues that Luther thought of justification in terms of the believer's union with Christ, understood in an ontologically realistic manner. The believer participates in Christ through faith, which means that Christ himself becomes the sinner's righteousness. Tuomo Mannerma writes:
Luther does not separate the person of Christ from his work. Rather, Christ himself, both his person and his work, is the ground of Christian righteousness. Christ is, in this unity of person and work, really present in the faith of the Christian (in ipsa fide Christus adest).Footnote 38
The critical edge of this interpretation is directed against the one-sidedly forensic understanding of the doctrine of justification which has dominated the later Lutheran tradition. The Formula of Concord, for example, seems to distinguish justification as forgiveness of sins from the divine indwelling, and conceives the latter as a separate phenomenon belonging to the doctrine of sanctification. Mannermaa argues that this separation represents a departure from Luther's own theology.Footnote 39 In Luther's thought, justification and the real presence of God are ‘completely united in the person of Christ’.Footnote 40 Christ is both God's favor (God's changed attitude to the sinner, his forgiveness of sins) and donum (God's gift of himself to the believer). Forgiveness of sins and the life-renewing indwelling of Christ in the believer are two sides of the same event, namely justification.Footnote 41
This means that justification is not exclusively forensic – it is also effective and transformational. By participating in Christ, the believer is ontologically transformed by receiving a share in the divine properties and the divine life. ‘The faith that saves is a new divine reality in the human being: Christ, who takes over the intellect and other faculties of the soul.’Footnote 42
Olli-Pekka Vainio believes that this view of faith can solve the problem addressed in the present study – how to avoid picturing faith as a work:
The Lutheran doctrine of justification strenuously denies the meritorious nature of human deeds and love. This stance can be maintained only if the new life given to the sinner is construed as participation in divine Life in Christ . . . Only when Christ is the form of faith do human deeds lose their justifying significance. The Lutheran doctrine of justification stands or falls on this Christological basis.Footnote 43
In this quotation, Vainio describes the union with Christ in terms of the Aristotelian philosophy which Luther himself uses. Form, according to Aristotle, is that which makes a thing what it is. Form is distinguished from matter, which is the potentiality that ‘receives’ form (or is ‘informed’). That Christ is ‘the form of faith’ (forma fidei) means that Christ ‘informs’ the matter that is the human soul. ‘Christ, as the form of faith, gives human faculties of soul a new essence.’Footnote 44
The key sentence in the longer quotation from Vainio above is the following: ‘Only when Christ is the form of faith do human deeds lose their justifying significance.’Footnote 45 Faith, as we normally conceive it, is a ‘human deed’. However, if faith as a human deed is a condition of justification, then it seems that a human deed has ‘justifying significance’. This is a problem, because the Lutheran tradition denies the justifying significance or ‘meritorious nature’ of human deeds. There is, however, a solution to the problem, according to Vainio, namely to picture Christ as the form of faith.
Why does this help? I can see two possible interpretations of Vainio's argument.
(1) If Christ is the form of faith, then faith is a ‘divine entity’ and not a human deed. This is why human deeds lose their justifying significance.
(2) That Christ is the form of faith does not exclude that faith is also a human deed. However, it is Christ's presence in faith that is justifying (meritorious), not the human aspect of faith (the ‘matter’). This is why human deeds lose their justifying significance.
It could be argued (in support of 1) that since the believer's faculties of soul have changed essence by being informed by Christ, they are no longer her faculties. ‘A believer lives no longer as himself but Christ lives in him.’Footnote 46 So faith (as informed by Christ) is not a ‘human deed’.
This argument actualises a dilemma, however. If the human faculties of soul which are ‘informed’ by Christ can no longer be said to be part of or belong to the believer, then Christ is no longer present to (united with) the believer and therefore no longer effective with respect to her salvation. If, on the other hand, the human faculties of soul which are informed by Christ can still be said to belong to the believer (as one of her properties) then faith is a ‘human deed’ (or other kind of human property), and human deeds have not lost their justifying significance.
In other words: if faith remains (in part) a human property after being informed by Christ, then human properties have justifying significance. If faith is a purely divine property, then faith does not connect humans to Christ.
The dilemma which interpretation 1 leads to suggests that interpretation 2 is a more promising way to argue for the insignificance of human deeds in justification. Vainio sometimes steers the argument in this direction:
The factuality of change must be maintained, but its meritoriousness denied. This is the problem that Luther's idea of Christ presence in faith is particularly positioned to solve. Renewal has to take place, and it truly changes the spiritual faculties of a sinner, but it is not the change or the faith that is reckoned as righteousness, but Christ himself. Footnote 47
In this passage, it seems that faith is not a purely divine entity. ‘The change or the faith’ is distinguished, in the quote, from ‘Christ’. There is no denial that faith is (partly) a human property. There is only a denial that the human aspect of faith, the ‘change’, is meritorious.
The claim that faith, as a human property, is not meritorious but simply a means by which Christ's righteousness is transferred to the believer is a classical Protestant idea.Footnote 48 This idea is logically distinct from the Finnish claim that Christ is ontologically present in faith, and the two ideas can therefore be divorced. Nothing in principle prevents faith from being a non-meritorious ‘pipe-line’ for the transference of Christ's righteousness to the believer even though Christ and the believer are not ontologically united.
I have argued that the Finnish understanding of faith as union with Christ does not make it possible to deny, without incoherence, that faith is a human deed (or some other human property). Faith must be conceived as having a human aspect, or else it is irrelevant for human salvation. What can be denied is that the human aspect is meritorious. This is what Vainio's view seems to boil down to. It may therefore be classified as a particular version of the classical, Protestant view that faith (or the human aspect of faith) is an ‘instrument’ of justification. This classical view is examined in its own right in the next section.
It might seem, then, that the Finnish paradigm – the conception of faith as ontological union with Christ – does not help us to explain why faith is not a work. This, however, would be a premature conclusion, because the Finnish paradigm allows us to conceive of faith as a human and divine entity. Human ‘faculties of soul’ is the matter which is ‘informed’ by Christ himself. This two-nature or two-aspects character of faith (human-divine) can function as an interesting and important distinguishing mark which separates faith from works, if the latter are conceived as non-divine (even though divinely caused) realities, such as good deeds, supernatural virtues and habits, or the ‘created grace’ that the Council of Trent and mainstream medieval theology conceived as the formal cause of justification. To be precise, faith should, if we want to follow this route, be defined as a human-Christic reality (a union with Christ) to distinguish it from the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the justified. We will return to discussing the implications of this solution in the concluding section.
Faith does not merit justification
The basic idea behind the classical Protestant view is that, even though faith is a subjective, human condition of justification (such as a human act or virtue), it does not merit justification. ‘Faith does not justify or save because it is a worthy work in and of itself, but only because it receives the promised mercy.’Footnote 49
This view provides a basis for distinguishing faith from works. Faith, it could be argued, can be distinguished from ‘works of the law’ if the latter are understood as potentially meritorious conditions for justification – deeds or inherent qualities which actually merit (or are believed to merit) justification.Footnote 50 ‘Scripture’, T. F. Torrance says, ‘opposes faith to works, to prevent it from being classified among merits.’ There is, on this view, no need to deny that faith is a human property and a necessary condition of justification in order to avoid confusing it with ‘works’. We need only deny that faith is a meritorious human property.
Unfortunately, this conception of the relationship between faith and works violates condition 1 of the definition above. Condition 1 says that a ‘Protestant conception’ of works must be sufficiently wide so as to include something that the Council of Trent regarded as an all-important factor in justification, namely the believer's possession of the supernatural virtue of love. The definition of ‘works’ contained in the suggested conception is not that wide. The virtue of love is not counted as meritorious in relation to justification by Trent. It is, in fact, not counted as meritorious in relation to anything. To think that possession of the virtue of love is in any sense meritorious would be to make a category mistake. The justified believer's inherent sanctity, which includes love, is not what merits her status as justified. It is what constitutes that status, according to Trent and the mainstream Catholic tradition. ‘But when anyone has grace, the grace already possessed cannot come under merit, since reward is the term of the work, but grace is the principle of all our good works.’Footnote 51 Justification is not a reward for having sanctifying grace and certain virtues – justification consists in receiving sanctifying grace and virtues from God by infusion. Certain acts, on the other hand, performed by the already justified believer, count as meritorious in relation to eternal life and can contribute to an increase of grace. Such meritorious acts flow from and presuppose the virtue of love, which is ‘the principle of all merit’.Footnote 52 ‘Jesus Christ himself continuously infuses strength into the justified . . . this strength [virtus] always precedes, accompanies, and follows their good works, which, without it, could in no way be pleasing to God and meritorious.’Footnote 53 Christian love, as the principle of merit, is itself freely given and not meritorious.
This means that love (inherent sanctity) does not fall under the category of ‘works’, if we follow the definition we are considering (‘acts or virtues that are meritorious in relation to justification’). The suggested definition of ‘works’ is therefore too narrow, and violates condition 1.Footnote 54
So a theologian who subscribes to the understanding of ‘works’ discussed in this section cannot consistently claim that the Tridentine view of love as an all-important factor in justification is a doctrine of works-righteousness. It is irrelevant, in this context, that the Tridentine doctrine of justification pictures justification as based on something ‘in’ the believer. The Protestant view we are considering admits that faith is ‘in’ the believer, and that faith is a condition for justification. What distinguishes faith from ‘works’ is just that faith is not meritorious with respect to justification. But the same is true of the virtue of love, according to Trent.
Conclusion
I have found two consistent ways of avoiding (without violating condition 1 and thereby abandoning the ‘Protestant’ position) the conclusion that faith is a work. If we define a work as a voluntary act (or a virtue/habit voluntarily acquired/received), then we can avoid classifying faith as a work so long as we conceive of faith as a non-voluntary act (or a virtue/habit non-voluntarily received).
I have already pointed out that a denial of free will with respect to salvation and spiritual things is a position which has very problematic consequences, for example, with respect to the meaningfulness of a salvation history (why was all that necessary?). If the only way of rendering a ‘Protestant conception’ of faith and works consistent is to deny free will in salvation, then it should appear more reasonable to abandon the ‘Protestant conception’.Footnote 55
There is, however, another consistent way of distinguishing faith from works within the limits set by my two conditions. If faith – following the Finnish school of Luther interpretation – is defined as a human-divine property, then faith can be distinguished from ‘works’ if works are defined as non-divine properties. Infused love or sanctifying grace are, according to mainstream medieval theology and the Council of Trent, created realities, which means that they are non-divine.Footnote 56 Infused love will therefore be classified together with ‘works’ by the suggested definition, while faith (as being partly divine) will not. This means that condition 1 is satisfied. The definition of ‘works’ is sufficiently wide.
The Finnish model provides, in my eyes, an elegant way of defending the consistency of a ‘Protestant conception’ of the faith/works relationship. The Finnish way seems, in fact, to be the only satisfactory way.Footnote 57 This conclusion is somewhat unexpected. The Finnish Luther interpretation is often described as ‘ecumenically fruitful’.Footnote 58 It has been said that it ‘could become a major influence on the future of the Christian ecumenical movement’.Footnote 59 This is mainly because the ‘Finnish Luther’ seems to be much closer to the transformation-orientated Catholic and Orthodox traditions than mainstream Lutheranism with its emphasis on forensic justification. If the argument of the present study is sound, however, it seems that the resources provided by the ‘Finnish Luther’ are also, surprisingly, more or less necessary for rendering coherent a distinctively Protestant perspective on the faith/works relationship. Only if faith is conceived in terms of Christ's real presence in the believer – which means that justification by faith is conceived as an effective and transformational event – is it possible to claim that the (Tridentine) virtue of love belongs in the context of ‘works’, while simultaneously insisting that faith does not.Footnote 60 This conclusion might be rather unwelcome for Protestants who believe that an exclusively forensic understanding of justification is essential for Protestantism.
