Letter to the American Church by Eric Metaxas

Author:Eric Metaxas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Salem Books
Published: 2022-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight The Church Paralyzed

You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.

—JAMES 2:24

In this final section about the error that comes from misunderstanding what true faith is, we come to that verse in which James wrote that we are “justified by our works, and not by faith only.” To Luther, surely this had to be the most nettlesome of all in James’s whole unpleasant epistle. Not because Luther didn’t understand what James was getting at, but because it could easily be misunderstood as meaning precisely the opposite of what Luther with his whole being was trying to say. Luther had so hammered upon the idea of “faith alone” that it had become the battle cry of the Reformation, Sola Fide! But this unfortunately created the atmosphere against which Bonhoeffer was preaching that Reformation Day in 1932. For even this good idea can be twisted away from God’s purposes and can become an idol.

The phrase “faith alone” had made the Christian faith so simple—and ultimately so thin and one-dimensional—that over time it was easily and blithely assented to by nearly everyone in the German nation, so that Bonhoeffer wrote about it in The Cost of Discipleship. Faith was meant to be expressed by loving God with our whole being, and must not be reduced to an Enlightenment rationalist proposition. As James in his epistle tells us, even the demons “believe” and tremble. So in many ways, it is words that create the problem. We use words like faith and belief, and over time they come to mean something far less vital than they did in the beginning. So we have to revisit these ideas, and restore the Christian faith to its fullness in the minds of the Church.

Living out our Christian faith is less an issue of what we believe than an issue of in whom we trust. After all, the devil and demons “believe” in God and despise Him. So the question is whether our belief in God brings us to trust in Him with our whole being. That’s what it really means to believe in God.

Another way of looking at the question of what we “believe” comes to us from the author Os Guinness, who in his book The Great Quest tells the story of an African Christian discussing the concept of faith in hunting terms. The European idea of “belief” has devolved into an intellectual exercise that may be expressed in the image of a hunter raising his rifle to shoot at a stag from a great distance. But the African way of thinking about faith—which is of course the biblical way of thinking about it—presents us with the much more visceral image of a lion pouncing upon a stag. The lion’s whole being is required in the action; its sinews and muscles and bones are all vitally central to the task. But of course, the hunter from a distance only needs to aim and then move his index finger half an inch.

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