Sola nonsense...

I wrote this a few weeks ago and didn't get around to posting it, with no apologies:

Faith Alone?

I’ve been in the throes of illness on and off for months now, but it has really been worth it. I’m grateful for the trial, as it is waking me up more and more to what my life is for, what I am meant to do, not in some “God’s will” kind of way, but generally, toward truth, toward salvation, toward more abundant life.

I became Orthodox 5 and a half years ago, knowing only that the Church had the Truth, not knowing how I knew, but finding it extremely straightforward to stop rationalizing about my faith, and just believe. I’d been in Protestant Evangelical colleges for over two years, and it was becoming clear that faith was not something I was going to arrive at through reason. But since that was the clear goal of the faith-based education I was in (or, as it was put to me, “discern your own truth”, which if you believe there is an absolute and knowable Truth, should raise a large, bright-red flag!!), I was in despair of ever knowing the right way to go. There was no consensus in Western Christianity, only division, to the degree that each person was his own arbiter of truth for himself!

So I fled all of that and become Orthodox. I didn’t understand what the Orthodox faith said I had to do to be saved, but I did know that it wasn’t a single prayer at an altar call, and that was really enough for me. I did have many of the ingredients figured out: baptism, chrismation, participation in the sacraments, faith (of course)... but my catechism was quite incomplete. Maybe it was because the parish where I began was made up entirely of converts, most of whom were still nervous about the leap they had taken, or collectively nervous, but I never heard anyone come right out and say, “Good works are necessary for your salvation”... until I re-read the second chapter of the epistle of James yesterday, and saw that one verse in particular says: “You see then that man is justified by works and not by faith only” (v. 24, NKJV). What irony is this! One of the only things a large number of Protestant Christians can agree on is the “doctrine” of sola fides: salvation by “faith only”. Too bad, as I just showed, this notion is directly contradicted in the epistle of James, not to mention many places in the gospels, in the words of Christ himself (Matt 25 comes to mind, as well as the Parables of the Talents, the Wise Virgins and the Rich Man and Lazarus). I have never felt so stable in my Orthodoxy, nor so sure of myself as a sinner and Christian. I fail constantly, so I must repent constantly, and persist in doing good, not merely avoiding bad.

This brings up another thing I came to realize as I was pondering salvation: repentance. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but the Greek word for repentance is metanoia which has something to do with turning around and going the other direction (I don’t have the literal root in front of me). An analogy would be helpful here: If I am on a journey, traveling West and realize I should have been going East all that time, is it enough to just stop where I am? Is that going to get me to my intended destination? No. I must turn around and travel toward the East. Same goes for sin. If find that I am going the wrong way, sinning, I must reverse my heading and do the exact opposite of my former action: good works. This is not the source of my salvation, but the proof of my change. Without works, faith is dead.