Angry Birds, Twisted Culture
Sponsored
Catholic365 is sponsored by
Road to Purity
I must confess to being constantly baffled by the ethic of salvation launched by Martin Luther at the time of the Protestant Rebellion. To begin with, I call it a “rebellion” because it amounted to a forceful rejection of virtually everything that had constituted Christianity and Christian culture for 1500 years prior to that.
And just as every rebellion needs a slogan, in fact a rallying cry, to get others on board, this salvation ethic turned out to be the rallying cry of the rebellion: “Ye are saved by faith alone!” cried Saint Martin and his cronies ad nauseam.
But it was an empty slogan because it severed faith from the Church—specifically, the Catholic Church—and made it strictly a privatized act, which is exactly what it is not.
As a background note, very few presentations I’ve read of the so-called Protestant Reformation are honest about the motives for it. It takes a Catholic with a comprehensive sense of history like Hilaire Belloc to tease out the main motive behind the rebellion, which dwarfs the motivating power of its slogan. Belloc got to the root cause of the damage.
In his masterful work, How The Reformation Happened, he lays out the claim that the myriad German duchies and principalities that backed Martin Luther in the 16th century did so primarily for economic motives, not religious ones. That is, the civil leaders of the day saw a chance to steal Catholic Church property, and they did so on such a grand scale that they could not only enrich themselves but also finance the rebellion for decades.
Money may not have been how the movement got started, but it is certainly how the Protestant rebellion endured as a sustained force of destruction for centuries. And if you need proof of that, just look at what Henry VIII did in England, which is a mirror image of what Luther’s potentates did in Germany.
Not only did making himself Head of the Church in England in 1534 gave Henry VIII de facto control over all church property (at that time the Catholic Church owned about a third of all land in England), but the subsequent parliamentary act in 1536, called the “Dissolution of the Monasteries”, literally licensed the crown and the English gentry to steal every piece of church property in the realm, from the great medieval cathedrals down to the lowliest vicarage.
It was the greatest single theft in human history. And you never hear anything about it. Most Anglicans don’t know about it either and generally, when it is presented to them as a historical fact, don’t want to talk about it. I’ve also heard amazing replies like, “Well, the Catholic Church stole everything from the Druids” and “The Catholic Church has done irreparable damage so we’re not giving them back,” etc. Proof offered for claims like this? Nah.
For that reason, I’m not impressed with any attempts to lionize Luther, Henry VIII, John Calvin, or any of the other rebels from that period. They were all the “marauders” that Jesus warned us about in the passage about the Good Shepherd (Jn 10:1), and they benefited enormously from the massive steal that utterly crippled Christianity in its wake.
Which leads me back to the salvation ethic and its slogan, which was used (along with the “Bible alone” slogan) as the primary justification and rallying cry for the rebellion.
In one fell swoop, they got rid of that one pesky pope in Rome and replaced him with…let’s see, a million individual popes who interpreted the Bible according to their own infallible authority and set the terms of their own salvation accordingly. After all, faith was now personalized to the point of not needing a church at all.
The problem with the “Faith Alone” slogan is that it’s so skewed. Let’s try to envision it using a non-polemical image that takes it out of the realm of religion.
Imagine a new curator for the British Museum walking into the massive institution and laying his eyes on the famous Rosetta Stone. In the new curator’s mind, that marvelous piece of history is the key display in the Museum and, so he believes, the very reason why people come to the Museum. In his mind, nothing else matters. So, in his first act as the new curator, he closes off the rest of the Museum and only lets people see the Rosetta Stone. Nothing else in the Museum is important.
In this analogy, the New Testament is the Museum, the “Faith Alone” doctrine is the Rosetta Stone, and Martin Luther is the new curator (who appointed himself for the job, by the way.)
Granted, there are certain verses in the New Testament which state that we are “justified by faith”, but there’s a twist. Here are the verses: Romans 3:28; Galatians 2:16; Ephesians 2:8; Philippians 3:9
Now the twist: When you read these verses, you find that the word “alone” is not there. Martin Luther in fact added it to Rom 3:28 in his German translation in order to give the slogan extra authority.
The implications of that bit of dishonest translating would be like telling people that the Rosetta Stone contains four languages (the fourth, added one, being the most important) when in fact it only contains three. Those inscriptions are important, no doubt, but the curator doesn’t get to add an extra section to something that is literally “written in stone,” as the text of the Bible is.
The great irony about it is that the only place where “faith alone” appears in the New Testament is in James 2:24 where it means exactly the opposite of what Martin Luther wanted it to say: “See how a person is justified by works and not by faith alone” (Ja 2:24).
It turns out that St. Paul and other New Testament writers had a lot to say about salvation, thankfully. In one of his key passages about salvation St. Paul tells his readers to “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12). Hmmm. Not “faith alone”? You mean we actually have to work humbly for salvation?
Also, certain key passages in the New Testament say we are saved by other things that are not faith and certainly not faith alone. (We all know that spiritual gifts cannot be divided up and parceled out like material things—they all derive from the One Holy Spirit of God—but for the sake of argument, we’ll treat these other things as distinct entities from faith.)
Translations may vary, but elsewhere in Paul’s writings, he says that “in hope you were saved” (Romans 8:24) and also that “You have been saved by grace” (Ephesians 2:5.8, repeated in 2 Thes 2:15).
Then, in his letter to Titus, he says “[God] has saved us by the baptism of new birth and renewal by the Holy Spirit” (Titus 3). Echoing that same sentiment, St. Peter weighs in and says that “You are saved by a baptismal bath” (1 Peter 3:21).
There’s even a passage in the Book of Wisdom (a Catholic book of the Old Testament, one of the books Martin Luther removed) that says we are “saved by wisdom” (Wis 9:18). Interesting! Not saved by “faith alone.” Apparently, in Titus, we are not even saved by Jesus Christ but by the Holy Spirit’s renewal!
As mentioned above, the Book of James admonishes believers to avoid any idea that faith can be detached from works of charity. Did you know that Martin Luther wanted to eliminate the Book of James from the New Testament as well?
In essence, even within the New Testament itself, there is no inkling of the idea that we are saved by “faith alone.” The Protestant contortions needed to explain the Book of James in an attempt to make it consistent with the “faith alone” salvation ethic are truly painful to hear.
So if someone were to tell you that all you need to be saved is “faith alone,” tell them that what they believe is actually a non-biblical tradition of men and then give them a copy of Belloc’s book. That should be sufficient witness to the need for a Church—specifically, the Catholic Church.
Peter Darcy is a writer and editor who spent thirty years in the non-profit sector and various business enterprises. His great passion is educating others about the power of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness. In 2020 he launched the Sacred Windows website for this purpose.
He has written or ghostwritten a dozen books, of which Natures of Fire: God’s Magnificent Angels (2021) is his latest. In 2020, he published The Seven Leadership Virtues of Joan of Arc and No-Nonsense Non-Profit.
Visit Sacred Windows at www.sacredwindows.com and his author’s website at www.peterdarcywriting.com.
