One of the historians of the Council of Trent, of great repute [Pallavicini], tells us that the assembled fathers were much exercised in attempting to explain the apostle’s statement, “We conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law” (Rom_3:28). We cannot wonder at their perplexity when we remember the scholastic training which they had received, particularly as regards the theory of an infused justifying righteousness. In what sense were they to understand the faith which St. Paul apparently makes the instrument, or condition, of justification? How reconcile his words with the prevalent teaching of the Church? It is obvious that faith, for some reason and in some sense, occupies a very prominent position in his reasoning on justification; it cannot be overlooked; it must be explained, or explained away. The difficulty was obvious, and was met as best it might. “With few exceptions,” says Pallavicini, “they all agreed that when a man is said to be justified by faith, faith must be taken, not as the whole and the immediate cause of justification, but as the first preparation, and the first necessary root, to the actions whereby the gift is obtained; or if we may, in some sense, assign it the function of an immediate cause, yet it must not then be thought of as alone, but in conjunction with penitence and baptism.”
This description of justifying faith was adopted by the Council and appears in its decree. “Whereas,” it says, “the Apostle declares that we are justified by faith, and gratuitously, he must be understood in the sense which the Catholic Church has always assigned to his words, namely, that faith is the commencement, the root, and the foundation, of all justification; since without it it is impossible to please God. And as to the gratuitous nature of justification, it means that none of those things which precede justification, whether faith or works, deserve the grace of justification itself. Faith is thus classed with the preparatory antecedents to justification, such as conviction of sin, alarms of conscience, and a general hope of God’s mercy. In itself it is assent to the truths of revelation, especially as interpreted by the Church; as such it places the sinner on the road to justification, but it is not the direct instrument, still less the only one, of receiving that gift, or of retaining it when received.”
This amounts merely to saying that a man must be a professed believer in Christianity before we can enter into the question of his justification; which, however true, does not throw much light upon the matter. The only office of faith, then, is to lead up to the sacrament of baptism, in which the special grace of justification is infused, and in which faith itself is transformed from acquiescence in the truth of revelation into a faith informed by love (fides formata). In this state it may be allowed to take its place among other graces as a means of justification; and so St. Paul is to be understood. The Council, however, does not explain why, of all graces, faith should be singled out so remarkably by the apostle for the office of justifying.
1. “We are justified by faith.” If a man believes, he is saved. Why so? Not as some people sometimes seem to fancy—not as if in faith itself there were any merit. There is a very strange and subtle resurrection of the whole doctrine of works in reference to this matter; and we often hear belief in the gospel of Christ spoken about as if it, the work of the man believing, was, in a certain way and to some extent, that which God rewarded by giving him salvation. What is that but the whole doctrine of works come up again in a new form? What difference is there between what a man does with his hands and what a man feels in his heart? If the one merits salvation, or if the other merits salvation, equally we are shut up to this: Men get heaven by what they do; and it does not matter a bit what they do it with, whether it be body or soul. When we say we are saved by faith, we mean, accurately, through faith. It is God that saves. It is Christ’s life, Christ’s blood, Christ’s sacrifice, Christ’s intercession, that saves. Faith is simply the channel through which there flows over into my emptiness the Divine fulness; or, to use the good old illustration, it is the hand which is held up to receive the benefit which Christ lays in it. A living trust in Jesus has power unto salvation only because it is the means by which the power of God unto salvation may come into my heart. On that side is the great ocean, Christ’s love, Christ’s abundance, Christ’s merits, Christ’s righteousness; or, rather, that which includes them all, there is the great ocean, Christ Himself; and on this is the empty vessel of my soul, and the little narrow pipe that has nothing to do but to bring across the refreshing water—that is the act of faith in Him. There is no merit in the dead lead, no virtue in the mere emotion. It is not faith that saves us; it is Christ that saves us, and saves us through faith.
Faith is nothing in itself. It is its object which is everything. It is just the opening of the soul which lets in God. [Note: R. W. Barbour, Thoughts, 77.]
2. It may be said without irreverence that the reason why, in God’s method of salvation, faith is selected as the channel of God’s grace is not because there is any special virtue in it, or because it is the greatest of all Christian graces, for charity is greater (1Co_13:2; 1Co_13:13), but because faith is peculiarly fit for this particular office, since there is in it that element of self-surrender, of trust, confidence, and reliance on another, which necessarily excludes all reliance on self and our own merits. Had we been justified by something else, as love, there would have been the possibility of reliance on self, and the notion of earning salvation would not have been in the same way shut out. Further, it is faith that enables us to realize the unseen. It is “the assurance of things hoped for, the proving of things not seen” (Heb_11:1); and thus it makes things distant become near, and admits them to close embrace.
Faith is indeed the only conceivable channel through which the sanctifying, ennobling, and joy-giving riches of God’s goodness can be conveyed into man’s nature. Paul everywhere regards God’s grace as the primal source of all blessings, but points out that God can give effect to His spontaneous liberality only through human faith. Giving and receiving are correlative and cannot be disjoined. Without a receiver there can be no transmission of a gift, nor can the giver enjoy the highest blessedness which love can know. The love I do not trust is as no love to me. The spiritual gifts and inspiring truths which, being imbibed, would come to the soul as rain and dew and sunshine to the earth, are as non-existent to the unbeliever. Forgiveness may be ready; God may be waiting to be gracious; He may be stretching forth His hands for days and years, but only faith can take His favour as a little child receives a gift.
It is a popular fallacy that faith is an arbitrary condition of salvation imposed by God, but which might be dispensed with or exchanged for something else. There is no substitute for faith. Without faith no social intercourse is possible, and personal beings stand apart, isolated, hostile, suspicious, and all commerce of the affections is arrested. Not because God would impose a needless condition of salvation, but because He desires to make no condition, to withhold no good thing, because to Him it is more blessed to give than to receive, or to retain, He freely offers all that man can need. Because He wills to give liberally, and without upbraiding, He seeks to awaken our receptive trust. It is therefore “of faith that it may be according to grace.” [Note: T. V. Tymms, The Christian Idea of Atonement, 379.]
3. Faith is our response to the grace of God in Christ. The glory of the gospel of Jesus Christ is that it has revealed the generous, undeserved love of God to us. The essence of it is that He does not treat us as we have dealt with Him. His love has survived our rebellion and evil ways. “He hath not dealt with us after our sins; nor rewarded us according to our iniquities.” However ill men treat Him, He treats them kindly and well; causing His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sending rain on the just and the unjust; and more than this, sounding the call of pardon and reconciliation to the whole world in spite of its long-continued iniquities and bitter alienation. This is the essence of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And it seems to suggest that God in His relation to us acts with a benevolence and grace which work irrespective of our attitude towards Him.
This is all divinely true. None the less is the issue of the gospel, its power to bless and enrich us, dependent on our response to it. The offer is free, Eph_2:8, “we are saved by grace.” But it is “through faith,” and faith on man’s side corresponds to grace on God’s side—it is the response of the soul to the appeal of love. According to our faith, so shall it be unto us. If we have no faith, there is no grace available for us, however freely and gladly it may be offered; if we have little faith, we shall have little grace; if we have great faith, we shall have large and royal grace to help, to bless and save us. If we do much for Christ, He can do much for us; if we give ourselves freely and fully to Him, He can give Himself freely and fully to us.
The virtue of Faith lies in the virtue of its Object. That Object, in this matter of Justification, so the Scriptures assure us abundantly and with the utmost clearness, is our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, who died for us and rose again. Here the simplest reliance, so it be sincere, is our point of contact with infinite resources. When the vast dam of the Nile was completed, with all its giant sluices, there needed but the touch of a finger on an electric button to swing majestically open the gates of the barrier and so to let through the Nile in all its mass and might. There was the simplest possible contact. But it was contact with forces and appliances adequate to control or liberate at pleasure the great river. So Faith, in reliance of the soul, the soul perhaps of the child, perhaps of the peasant, perhaps of the outcast, is only a reliant look, a reliant touch. But it sets up contact with JESUS CHRIST, in all His greatness, in His grace, merit, saving power, eternal love. [Note: H. C. G. Moule, in The Fundamentals, ii. 115.]
We must not be blind to the depth and richness of Paul’s conception of faith. It is not the mere recognition that a certain set of historical facts is true, that Jesus of Nazareth died on the Cross and rose again from the dead. Nor is it the acceptance of a theological interpretation of these facts, that they released energies for the salvation of mankind. This coldly intellectual way of regarding them is alien altogether from the evangelical idea of faith. There is intended by it rather a temper and attitude of the soul. It implies as its necessary condition the sinner’s consciousness of his condition, of his guilt and moral helplessness, and the impossibility of releasing himself from either one or the other. In this state of condemnation and impotence, finding in himself and in the world about him no relief for his condition, he is prepared to respond to the message of salvation in Christ. Casting away all thought of his own merit as commending him to God, for he feels himself to be a sinner in God’s sight, renouncing all efforts at self-reformation as superficial and ineffective, his whole being turns with a glad sense of confidence to Him that is mighty to save, with the deep gratitude of one who has been saved from despair. Cutting himself loose from all the supports on which he has hitherto rested, he takes the supreme risk of faith and launches himself into the void, but he makes his venture in the confidence that he will not be left to his fate, but be caught and held fast by the everlasting arms. And this faith, in which self-surrender, love, gratitude, and implicit trust are mingled, effects the mystical union between the soul and its Saviour. The intellectual element is presupposed in it, the believer must recognize the existence of God, his own sin, and God’s reaction against it, his inability to attain the moral ideal which God demands from him, the truth of the great redemptive facts proclaimed in the Gospel. This is the indispensable foundation of faith. But faith is something which embraces also the emotions and the will, it is the movement of the whole personality, the soul’s flight for refuge to Christ. Its inmost mystery, indeed, baffles analysis; how it effects the mystical union is God’s secret and not ours. But its mystical effect must be closely allied to its emotional element. [Note: A. S. Peake, Christianity: Its Nature and Its Truth, 292.]
