October 27, 2024

Is Faith Enough?

Five hundred and seven years ago this Thursday, the Augustinian friar and professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg, Germany, Martin Luther, composed a list of ninety-five points of dispute with the Roman Catholic Church.  The historical tradition, although disputed by some, is that he posted his Ninety-five Theses on the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg as a means of sparking a debate on the issues.  Whether he actually did post them, or just mailed them to his bishop, they were eventually printed and circulated.  The common people were inspired, and Rome was not pleased.  In short order the Protestant Reformation, that would forever alter the landscape of Christianity, was underway.  Luther had a lot of gripes with the church (as I mentioned, he had ninety-five of them).  But chief among them was his insistence on something called “justification by faith”.  Luther was taken by the Apostle Paul’s words in Romans: “since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus . . .”¹ and in Ephesians: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God – not the result of works . . . .”²  So he took issue with the church’s doctrine that the only faith that justifies (or “saves”) a person is the faith demonstrated in good works and righteous living.  Luther wrote, “All have sinned and are justified freely, without their own works and merits, by His grace . . . . This cannot be otherwise acquired or grasped by any work, law or merit.  Therefore, it is clear and certain that this faith alone justifies us.”³  Luther referred to this as the “Chief Article” of his confessions.  He said, “Upon this article, everything we teach and practice depends.”⁴  Luther made it clear: faith is enough.

Now, I know this all sounds like a lot of “theological twaddle”, but it’s important stuff, for at least a couple of reasons.  First of all, I think it’s terribly important to consider what in the world it means to be “justified” or “saved”.  I know for some people this means winning a ticket through the pearly gates after death.  There’s nothing wrong with that belief, but I don’t happen to adhere to it.  I think it has to do with getting right with that Indefinable Unknowable that we often refer to as God.  For me, God is best thought of, metaphorically, as the Beating Heart of Love that pervades the Universe and resides at the Core of Being.  “Getting right” with that Heart of Love means, I think, being free to find and express love in all relationships and to live in the constant assurance of the immutable bond we have with Being itself.  In my book, that’s what it means to be saved – to be justified.

Which brings us to the question posed by my sermon: Is faith enough?  The Apostle Paul and Martin Luther both adamantly declare that it is by faith alone that we are saved.  Are they right?  Is faith itself sufficient to bring to one’s life this freedom and this assurance that I speak of?  Once again, that depends, I’m sure, on one’s definition of “faith”.  For many people, including, I daresay, Martin Luther, faith is about believing.  To have faith, by this account, means believing the right things.  For Luther faith was a free gift of God, but only given to those who believe that Jesus is Lord and savior – God’s Messiah.  This is at least one point at which I part company with Luther (by the way, there are others, including his extreme anti-Semitism in later life).  I don’t happen to think that faith has anything at all to do with believing things.  I suppose this makes me a fish swimming against the current of modern Christianity, but there it is.  I contend that people are born with faith.  It’s in our DNA.  We come into the world wide-eyed with wonder, reaching out to trust the first face we see, sometimes squawking about things not being the way we want them, but always ready to be touched by love.  It is only over time that we unlearn that faith.  We become disconnected from the center of our own Being – the very center that all other beings share – and we begin to think of ourselves as autonomous and become enslaved by our needs for power and security.

And, paradoxically enough, one’s beliefs, rather than being a source of faith, can easily become vehicles for working out those needs for power or security.  The most glaring case in point is, I suppose, the outfit that is calling itself the “Islamic State”.  They are so enslaved to their need for power that their beliefs simply become a major weapon used to exert that power.  Any group of people who don’t conform to their beliefs can quite simply be slaughtered.  And I heard a while ago about folks in India who were murdering people who were suspected of having beef in their home, or of having eaten beef.  Their belief in the sacredness of cattle makes them regard the life of a cow more highly than the life of a fellow human.  You may object that these extreme examples don’t reflect the lives of everyday Christians who hold dear such things as their belief in the inerrancy of scripture or in any of the other doctrines of their churches.  But I have to tell you that in my experience beliefs on a whole have tended to do more to separate people from one another than to bring them together; they have created more hostility and division than love and mutual understanding.

Let me explain why I think beliefs can be a snare.  As I have often said, if that which we refer to as God is truly all that is said and believed about him (or her), then that God must be beyond words, images, or any other kind of description or understanding.  Any concept of Divinity that can be visualized or comprehended by one tiny human brain is way too small to be all that we claim.  Consequently any beliefs we hold in our heads about Divine will, intentions, or strictures must, by definition, be wholly inadequate.  And to hold such beliefs with an iron grip that claims divine authority is, in my view, nothing less than idolatry – placing one’s own tiny little brain, or the tiny little brains of some church “fathers,” on the throne: a throne that can only be occupied by that great Indefinable Unknowable that we often refer to as God.  This is why in all religion we speak in metaphors.  We speak of that Indefinable Unknowable, as scripture does, as a Father, as a Mother, as an Eagle, or a Bear.  We speak of Jesus as “Son of God” and “Son of Man”, or, as the author of the letter to the Hebrews wrote, a “High Priest”.  All our religious language is metaphorical because we are intended to keep reminding ourselves that what we speak of is beyond words and beyond knowing.

So I hold my beliefs very lightly; they are not critically important.  But that does not mean they are insignificant.  Those metaphors of belief can lightly comfort us when we rest in the hands of abiding faith.  C. S. Lewis does a wonderful job of suggesting how our metaphors of belief can nurture us if we are not too desperately chained to them.  In one of the Chronicles of Narnia books, The Silver Chair, the queen of the underworld wants Puddleglum the Marshwiggle to believe that Narnia only exists in his imagination.  Puddleglum says, “Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself.  Suppose we have.  Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones.  I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan.”⁵  Well, I’m on C. S. Lewis’ side.

Faith is not about believing things; it is an attitude of Being that one recaptures and brings up from the depths of the soul to offer to life.  It is an unshakeable sense of connectedness to that Beating Heart of Love at the center of everything.

So, how is it that this kind of faith “saves” us, or “justifies” us?  It does so by keeping us on the path of love, by keeping us grounded and centered in that which truly matters in life – which brings peace, wholeness, harmony, and grace.  Faith heals.  It heals hearts and it heals communities.  It is a power we barely understand.  Jesus told the blind beggar, “Go; your faith has made you well.”  And this healing, this power, this grace is not simply an individual affair.  That groundedness, that centeredness, that reveals itself in trusting love, involves a participation in a Unity of Being, and we are all part of that Unity.  That is why we speak of this body of folks here as a “community of faith”.  We are held together by this mysterious thing we call faith, and each one of us is held lovingly in the hands of that faith.

Roger Alling writes about a dear friend who died at the age of 56.  Alling says his friend had been “. . . priest and rector of a fine parish for many years.  As Bob lay dying, a parishioner spread out a quilt on the parish-hall floor and, with indelible markers, she traced around the hands of all who patiently stood in long lines for the privilege of being part of this loving pattern.  Families put their hands one on top the other.  Gnarled old hands of matriarchs and patriarchs were drawn, and tiny hands of sleeping babies, a pattern made of all the hands of the whole community of faith.  And then the quilt was taken to Bob’s bed and gently laid upon him.  As he died he received the laying on of hands of all the faithful ones to whom he was so incarnately connected in our Lord Christ.”⁶

So I come to the title of my sermon, and raise the question posed at the top: Were Martin Luther and the Apostle Paul right?  Are we justified/saved by faith alone?  Is faith enough?  My answer: faith is not simply enough; faith is everything.

¹ Romans 3:23-25.

² Ephesians 2:8-9.

³ Martin Luther, “The Smalcald Articles”, in Concordia: The Lutheran Confessions, Concordia Publishing, 2007, Part two, Article 1, p. 263.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (The Chronicles of Narnia #4), Harper Collins, 2002, p. 190.

⁶ Roger Alling, David J. Schlafer, ed., Preaching as Image Story and Idea: Sermons that Work VII, Morehouse Publishing, 1998.