Today begins the season of Lent. It is a season of deeds, penetential in nature. Some of these deeds are acts of self-mortification to focus our minds on God and our relationship with him. But our deeds cannot end there, me and Jesus. He wants our faith to be lived in lives of service to others, especially the poor and the least with whom He most identifies.
James 2
Faith and Deeds
12Speak and act as those who are going to be judged by the law that gives freedom, 13because judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy triumphs over judgment!
14What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? 15Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. 16If one of you says to him, “Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? 17In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.
18But someone will say, “You have faith; I have deeds.”
Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do.
19You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.
20You foolish man, do you want evidence that faith without deeds is useless[d]? 21Was not our ancestor Abraham considered righteous for what he did when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? 22You see that his faith and his actions were working together, and his faith was made complete by what he did. 23And the scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness,”[e] and he was called God’s friend. 24You see that a person is justified by what he does and not by faith alone.
25In the same way, was not even Rahab the prostitute considered righteous for what she did when she gave lodging to the spies and sent them off in a different direction? 26As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead.
Coming Home 
Or, as Rev. Dr.Martin Luther King, Jr. said, religion that does not act on behalf of justice is dry as dust. I have always found this passage of James an interesting counter-point to the Lutheran insistence that we are saved “by grace alone.” Certainly nobody can EARN salvation by good works, and of course I fully appreciate the evil of selling indulgences, but anytime someone lifts one principal out of the Bible, and says this is THE requirement, they leave so much else behind that is equally set forth by God. Truly, if we could stop fighting over doctrine, and recognize that each person who has tried to follow Christ has had some insights others missed, and made some mistakes others would do well to learn from, that the true nature of God is greater than any or all of us can comprehend, we might indeed be one body again. One thing Jewish teaching got right: they don’t pretend to know the nature of God. They just know that he exists, and that he has communicated certain intentions to humanity.
“Or, as Rev. Dr.Martin Luther King, Jr. said, religion that does not act on behalf of justice is dry as dust.”
which of course is why the Catholic Church is so right about abortion and contraception.
Abortion is NOT just. At any stage in pregnancy. (Not even for Trisomy 21)
Abortion is not justice.
The Catholic church recognizes the injustice that is perpetrated on the helpless, innocent, unborn baby and speaks out against abortion under any circumstance, even rape and incest.
No other religion does this.
And also the Jewish religion does know quite alot about the “nature” of God. It’s all through the old testament. 😉
BTW, way to go with the nice shot at the CC and indulgences. 😛
You should at least TRY to hide your anti-Catholic bigotry on a Catholic blog – or maybe go elsewhere if it you find it troublesome…..
SJ,
Martin Luther ADDED the word “alone” to Paul’s statement in Galatians that we are justified by grace. It does not appear there.
It does appear in James.
Thus, while Paul says that we are justified by grace, James claims as much but insists that it is NOT by grace ALONE, but also by the works as taught by the Father to Isaiah in ch. 58, spoken by the Son in Matthew 25, and inspired by the spirit in James 2.
The consistency of scripture.
Ah yes, I try to acknowledge that understanding God is complex, and you try to simplify things into a neat little package tied with a bow, perfectly matching whatever viewpoint you happened to be raised with of course. I don’t claim that I have a perfect understanding, but I’m quite certain there is only one who does.
I recently began reading Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, in which he points out, as an aside, “Galileo was not shown the instruments of torture in an abstract debate about lunar motion. He had threatened the Church’s conventional argument for social and doctrinal stability: the static world order with plaents circling about a central earth, priests subordinate to the Prope and serfs to their lord. But the Church soon made its peace with Galileo’s cosmology. They had no choice; the earth really does revolve about the sun.”
Ever since the Church realized this simple truth, theologians in traditions which insisted that Scripture said the planets revolved around the earth have spilt oceans of ink trying to prove that the Bible does NOT say any such thing. In spite of some quibbling over Joshua telling the sun to stand still, I agree, it doesn’t. But, for centuries the church accepted Aristotle as Gospel, after several earlier centuries during which Aristotle was banned. Luther and Melancthon, incidentally, were more dogmatic than the Curia, probably because they had already taken on as many fights as they could handle, and had anchored themsleves to “sola Scriptura.” But all were wrong.
Its not consistency of Scripture that is a problem. It is consistency in human understanding of what any given book or chapter is there for, and what exactly its enduring message might be. May we all come reasonably close. There are lengthy essays of diverse origins trying to show how consistent Paul and James are. The fact that so much effort is expended strongly suggests that a good deal of human reasoning is at work.
well, SJ, then please don’t make these little digs ok?
and you know quite well, that bringing in the supposed selling of indulgences was just that.
You might try reading the following book for further enlightenment:
Galileo goes to jail.
Among the myths of science that are debunked (by atheists no less):
That Copernicanism demoted humans from the center of the cosmos
That Galileo was imprisoned and tortured for advocating copernicanism
That Isaac Newton’s mechanistic cosmology eliminated the need for God
Very good reading.
SJ,
When I need scriptural exegesis or Church history, Gould is the last person to whom I turn. Even among evolutionary biologists, it’s acknowledged that he became rather puffed up and wordy in the second half of his career.
As for neat packages and bows, I have spent decades reading all of the Catholic and Protestant exegetes. Most ascribe to the Historical Critical methods which begin with a hermeneutic of doubt, which is beyond sad. It’s pathetic.
As a scientist, I consider the infinity of the cosmos and the worlds within worlds, universes within universes. Then begin to contemplate the God who made it all and that He chose to reveal something of His infinite majesty to us. Most especially, He chose to reveal to us our share in His divinity and what is required of us to maintain that covenantal reality.
Then you show up and snark about whether it’s possible to believe that the corpus of His revelation to humanity is lacking in internal coherence. I say it is. You suggest that the God of the universe is impotent, unable to successfully transmit something of Himself to humanity in a way that is clear, consistent, and durable.
That was the purpose of this series.
Throw in with the crowd given to the hermeneutic of doubt if you must. But mind yourself on this blog that you don’t ridicule anyone’s faith. It won’t be tolerated.
“Most ascribe to the Historical Critical methods which begin with a hermeneutic of doubt, which is beyond sad. It’s pathetic.”
Bultmann- what a bum!
Oh, we’re not so far apart as you seem to envision.
To really shock everyone, I’m going to agree with Mary Catherine. Newton in no way dispensed with God. Apart from the fact that Newton himself was something of a mystic, Newton openly said that while he had developed equations which measured pretty well HOW gravity worked, he could not for the life of him explain WHY it was so. Materially, it shouldn’t have been so.
Galileo wasn’t actually tortured, because he recanted after being shown the instruments of torture as a warning. What he was imprisoned for was considerably more complicated than advocating copernicanism. It is significant that Copernicus himself was never even excommunicated, much less imprisoned. I picked up a book some years ago called Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, which contains a good deal of correspondence with church officers, including Cardinal Bellarmino, who is reputed to have said that the purpose of Scripture is “to tell us how to go to heaven, not how heaven goes.” I don’t think there is much doubt that the church officers erred in their response to Galileo, which Pope Leo XIII acknowledged implicitly, and John Paul II had the grace to acknowledge explicitly.
I read a review recently which suggests that Copernicanism rescued humanity from conceptually being in the cess-pit of the universe — ancient views of earth as the center were not exactly an exaltation of humanity at all, but morosely consigned us to the lowest level — that being more from Plato and Aristotle than from the saints. It is also worthy of note that Copernicus’s perfect circular orbits were less able to predict the course of the planets than Ptolemy’s complex crystal cycles and sub-cycles — Newton figured out that the orbits were elliptical. There really are no geniuses — just people stumbling along turning up a bit of truth that doesn’t really make sense until someone else finds out a bit that was missed.
But I mentioned indulgences, not as a dig, but because it was a historical event which an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther properly criticized, while going overboard in his search for Scriptural guidance. I don’t think any of us would disagree that it was erroneous to raise funds by announcing that you could buy your grandmother out of purgatory. I don’t think anyone doubts that there were several layers of politics contributing to that episode; it wasn’t a full-blown plan exactly as ordered from Rome. Luther leaped from “this is a corrupt practice” to “good works have nothing to do with salvation.” Judges encounter this every day in more mundane circumstances, particularly in appellate courts. There may be many ways to reason out a decision which has a just outcome for the plaintiff or defendant, but judges always have to keep an eye on the many ways their words will be applied a precdent in markedly different factual situations. Again, things are much more complex than historians, each with their own biases, are likely to acknowledge.
Gerard, I had actually anticipated markedly different ways you might respond to my reference to Gould, particularly The Mismeasure of Man, which I expect you would find a lot of good in. I don’t doubt God — I doubt that any of us has a firm grasp on EXACTLY what God expects of us, and particularly of what God expects from our neighbors. The entire Bible is a history of everyone God vouchsafes a revelation to getting it wrong, within hours, or within a generation or two. How many times did Jesus essentially tell his disciples “Don’t you guys understand anything I’ve been saying to you?” It is worthwhile to work at trying to understand — and the appearance of contradiction should not become an excuse for despair. But anyone who wishes to speak with authority — including those inclined to Historical Critical methods or epistemologies of doubt — should do so only with a strong dose of humility.