Is "salvation by grace through faith" a LUTHERAN idea?

A good student of mine recently said that, for him, being Lutheran has always and will always mean being "saved by grace through faith." Protestant students, and especially good Lutherans, typically assume that the doctrine of "justification by faith" is the distinctive cornerstone of the Protestant Reformation. Luther, after all, declared it to be the doctrine "by which the Church stands or falls." Does this mean that Catholics don't accept this doctrine? Not exactly. But the reason a simple "yes" or "no" can't be given is that the Bible requires careful interpretation. After all, Luther thought James 2:24 couldn't be reconciled with Romans 3:28 and therefore excluded the Epistle of James from those books listed as canonical Scripture in his translatin of the Bible. We need to examine the Bible closely, if we wish to avoid the same kind of error.

The idea of "justification by faith," of course, requires some unpacking. Depending on what one means by "faith," a Catholic could easily affirm this too, as the Catholic-Lutheran Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification of 1997 concluded. Even in the NT, "faith" means different things. For example, in 1 Cor. 13, St. Paul distinguishes "faith" from "hope" and "love," noting that having "faith as to move mountains" is "nothing" without love, which suggests that "faith" is perfected by hope, and, ultimately, by love. This is what St. Thomas Aquinas called "formed faith"-- faith that is perfected by love. But "faith" ALONE, in the sense here where Paul distinguishes it from "hope" and "love" isn't what St. Paul means in Romans where he speaks of our being justified through "faith" "apart from works of the law," where he seems to be using "faith" in a much richer sense. To highlight this, contrast what St. James says about "faith" in chapter 2 of his Epistle, where he says that even "demons" have faith in the sense of "believing in God," but then they "shudder" or "tremble." Obviously their "faith" doesn't save them. James 2:24 is the only place where the NT actually uses the words "faith alone," but then it says that that ISN'T what saves us, because we are saved by "works and not by faith alone." So what does St. Paul mean in Romans 3? Clearly he doesn't mean "faith" in this impoverished sense that even demons have, "faith" APART from "hope" and "love." So I take Paul to be using "faith" in a sense that is informed by the full trust and confidence of the disciple, who casts his life upon the Lord's grace in "hope" (of salvation) and "love" (of His gift of salvation). What does it mean, then, to say that the Christian is saved "apart from the works of the law (Torah)," as St. Paul suggests in Romans 3? If you read on, he immediately discusses circumcision and the works stipulated by the Torah under Moses, contrasting the Jew and the Greek, etc. It seems clear to me that St. Paul ISN'T saying that we're saved apart from a life of commitment and discipleship, but rather that Greeks (non-Jews) can be saved by "faith" apart from fulfilling the stipulations of the Old Covenant (circumcision, Sabbath observance, etc.). This is why, I think, St. Paul speaks frequently about the "obedience of faith" (as he does in Romans) or of "faith working through love" (as he does in Galatians). Could Bonhoeffer (one of my favorite Lutherans) have been more on target in writing a book entitled The Cost of Discipleship, and condemning what he called "cheap grace"? Surely, the grace of God is "free," but that hardly means that God asks nothing of us: He wants not just a piece of our lives and wills-- He wants EVERYTHING. And what else would the LOVER OF ALL LOVERS want from His beloved?!

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