A Clunky Christianity

There’s a saying I’ve heard in Lutheran circles: “We do good works not in order to be saved, but because we’ve been saved already.” As far as it goes, this saying is true: salvation is the free gift of God in Christ, and good works are the result of this gift. (Ephesians 2:8-10) However, the way this saying gets used can be nasty stuff. There are a number of reasons why this is so, but I’ll limit myself to three.

First, often this saying is nothing more than a passive-aggressive way of getting someone to do something against his will. It’s said with the intention not of assuring someone of the goodness of God, but of forcing him into action by (secretly) questioning his salvation. This gets even worse when the “good works” being urged aren’t even commanded by God’s Word.

Second, this saying gets used with the underlying assumption that salvation is achieved by way of an attitude change: “If you do this for the right reason – that is, if you do this while keeping in mind that you’re already saved – then you’ll indeed be saved.” It seems to me that this is a new, increasingly subtle promotion of works-righteousness. Contrariwise, we must insist that choosing the right reason to do something is not the new good work that wrests salvation out of God’s hands.

These two problems are rooted in a third: we’ve made no clear connection between the gift of salvation and the good works that follow. Thus, our saying betrays a clunky Christianity that takes God’s gift of salvation and then clumsily tries to attach good works to it. The result is a combination of a dead, ineffective faith with an unnatural appendage called “good works”.

If we’re going to avoid these problems and use our saying rightly, then we ought to draw the connection between God’s gift of salvation (which is the gift of Christ and his Spirit) and the virtue issuing out of those who have received that gift. The connection is quite simple: it is the same God who (1) commands a life of virtue/love, and (2) freely saves from sin and death. The second proposition does not abolish the first, but rather makes its fulfillment possible. We could even say that for those who have faith in the second proposition, obedience to the first is the necessary form that their faith freely takes.

Thus, faith gives rise to love as naturally as a good tree produces good fruit. (Matthew 12:33) Said differently, faith works through love. (Galatians 5:6) It’s a logical connection: those who trust in the love of God will delight in fulfilling that same God’s commandments. True, to the eyes of the flesh, God’s commandments look like nothing more than a call to self-denial and death. But to the eyes of faith, from such self-denial and death comes new life. To the eyes of faith, the crucified Christ is the risen Christ, and dying with him in humility means rising with him in glory.

To go back to our saying – “We do good works not in order to be saved, but because we’ve been saved already” – I hope that its proper use is clear. As a passive-aggressive way of coaxing love out of unwilling hearts, it will succeed only in producing new Pharisees. Any “love” produced by such hearts will be restrained by a deep-seated fear of self-denial and death. (Hebrews 2:15) However, if we use our saying to simultaneously assure one another of the goodness of God and instruct one another in his commandments, then the result will be not hard-hearted Pharisees, but Christians who love freely and joyfully.

Used in this way, and met with the obedience of faith, our saying will be true: We do good works not in order to be saved, but because we’ve been saved already.