"Works Righteousness."

When I was in seminary, I remember a conversation about something a rabbi was quoted as saying: "If you want to be a good Jew, then act like one!"  One of my friends was quick to dismiss this as "works righteousness," a big no-no for Protestants.  I sort of had to agree, but I remember not being comfortable about it.

The "heresy" of "works righteousness" is based supposedly on Martin Luther's original critique of Medieval Roman Catholicism's habit of dispensing God's grace as a reward for giving money to the church or fulfilling pious rituals.  Protestants came to understand that we are saved by God's grace alone, and not by anything we do.  At the same time, we also know that "faith without works is dead," which means that real faith is not fruitless, it necessarily results in good actions.  There is therefore no such thing as either faith that is not expressed in good actions (or, I would add, good action that is not rooted in faith).

I had read Dietrich Bonhoeffer's critique of what he called "cheap grace," which was grace doled out by the church without getting reflected in good works.  Bonhoeffer said that only someone who is obedient to Jesus really believes in him, and only one who obeys him actually believes in him.  The idea that faith does not require or inspire us to do anything is not what the New Testament teaches.  Jesus is always talking about what we need to do, as are Paul and other writers of the New Testament.  No, we are not saved because we do these good things, that would indeed be works righteousness.  But we do good things because we are saved.  In no case are good works disconnected from God's grace.

But this is what some Protestants actually do.  The worst ramification of the allergy to "works righteousness" is the view that what we do doesn't matter at all.  That we are saved is enough, and now we may go about our business as we see fit.  This attitude is what led to the despicable spectacle of baptized Christians driving trains to Auschwitz while imagining they were still saved.  This is where we have Army chaplains in WWII reassuring American bomber crews that the firebombing of Japanese cities, slaughtering thousands of civilians, would not affect their standing with God.  It is a convenient way to make faith utterly irrelevant to your life, and give yourself license to commit all kinds of atrocities with impunity.  

Indeed, here we see the whole point to such a pernicious doctrine: the State can demand all kinds of bad behavior from a person, and still reassure them that they will get into heaven.  After all, connecting good actions to faith would be the heresy of works righteousness.

Personally, I would much rather serve a church full of people trying to live the gospel and follow Jesus in their good deeds, and take the risk of being charged with works righteousness, than serve in one where most members blithely drift in a complacent reverie about how saved they are because of their faith, while flagrantly living lives of depravity, injustice, cruelty, fear, and violence.  

For in the end that rabbi was right.  Doing good works itself reveals a trust in God (faith) that the person may not yet be able to articulate.  Paul himself says that people can keep the law and not realize it is God's law they are keeping.  This is what Bonhoeffer means when he says that someone who obeys Jesus in their actions thereby reveals their own faith.

Finally, in real life we learn by doing.  We do not try to gin up some mental state or cognitive opinions called "faith," and only then obey Jesus' teachings.  That is a form of procrastination designed to let you off the hook of discipleship.  No, we do what he commands us, and in so doing we discover the faith we have always had within us, which is the faith of Jesus Christ.

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