Is Sola Fide True?

Justified by works and not by faith alone

“You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone.”

James 2:24

A note on this page and its companion. Like the page on sola scriptura, this one examines a Protestant doctrine rather than a Watchtower one, and its left panel is headed Protestant View accordingly. Sola fide — justification by faith alone — was the material principle of the Reformation, and Luther called it the article by which the Church stands or falls.

On this question Jehovah’s Witnesses are not on the Protestant side. They reject faith alone as firmly as any Catholic, and teach that obedience is necessary for salvation. But they arrive there by a different road and end somewhere else: where the Catholic Church says that grace transforms a person so that his works are genuinely his and genuinely God’s, the Watchtower makes salvation depend in practice on loyalty to an organization and a record of activity that can be counted. The middle ground between faith alone and works-earning is narrow, and it is worth marking out carefully.

The epigraph above is the only place in Scripture where the phrase “faith alone” occurs. That is not, by itself, an argument — a doctrine can be true without its slogan appearing — but it is a fact worth noticing at the outset, since the one appearance is a denial.

Let’s take the doctrine as its defenders state it, and ask …

  • When Paul says a man is justified apart from “works of the law,” which works did he have in mind, and were they good deeds or the badges of the Mosaic covenant?
  • And if justification is a verdict declared over an unchanged sinner, what has actually happened to him?

I invite your engagement with me on these questions. You may leave comments below, but please be sure to read our policy on commenting before doing so.

Protestant View

Protestants hold that a sinner is justified before God by faith alone — that is, that God declares him righteous on account of the righteousness of Christ received by faith, and not on account of anything he has done or will do. Good works follow necessarily from living faith, and a faith producing none is dead; but they are the fruit of justification and never its cause. Luther called this the article by which the Church stands or falls.1

What They Affirm

Paul says it in as many words. “For we hold that a man is justified by faith apart from works of law” (Rom. 3:28). And again: “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God — not because of works, lest any man should boast” (Eph. 2:8–9). The exclusion of boasting is the whole point: if any part of the verdict rested on the sinner, he would have grounds for it.2

Abraham is the test case, and Paul chose him. “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness” (Rom. 4:3, quoting Gen. 15:6). Reckoned — an accounting word. Paul adds that to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift but as his due, while to one who does not work but trusts God, his faith is reckoned as righteousness (Rom. 4:4–5). Righteousness is credited, not earned.

Justification is a declaration, not a process. It is a legal verdict pronounced once, on the basis of Christ’s righteousness imputed to the believer, and it does not wait on his improvement. Sanctification — the actual making-holy — follows, and takes a lifetime, and is never complete in this world. Confusing the two turns assurance into anxiety, since a man who must wait to see whether he has been made good enough can never know where he stands.3

How They Argue It

James is addressing a different question. When James says a man is justified by works and not by faith alone (Jas. 2:24), he is not contradicting Paul but correcting a misuse of him. Paul asks how a sinner is set right with God; James asks how a professed faith is shown to be real. His examples make it plain: the faith he condemns is the kind the demons have, who believe and shudder (Jas. 2:19) and are not saved by it. A faith that produces nothing was never saving faith to begin with.

And the alternative undoes the gospel. If works contribute to the verdict, then Christ’s work was not sufficient, and grace is no longer grace but a wage part-paid (Rom. 11:6). Paul’s letter to the Galatians treats any addition to faith as another gospel and pronounces it accursed (Gal. 1:8–9). The Reformers were not splitting hairs; they judged that a Church teaching justification by faith and works had lost the gospel itself.4

Endnotes
  1. The phrase articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae is associated with Luther and became standard in Lutheran orthodoxy. For a modern statement of the doctrine see R. C. Sproul, Faith Alone: The Evangelical Doctrine of Justification (Baker, 1995). ↩
  2. Romans 3:28 and Ephesians 2:8–9 are the principal texts. Luther’s German rendering of Romans 3:28 added the word allein, “alone,” which he defended as required by the sense of the passage. ↩
  3. On the distinction between justification and sanctification, and on imputed rather than infused righteousness, see the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), XI, and Sproul, Faith Alone, chs. 5–6. ↩
  4. The charge that the Catholic doctrine of justification amounts to another gospel is pressed in the Reformation confessions and restated in modern evangelical treatments; see Sproul, Faith Alone, on the 1994 statement Evangelicals and Catholics Together and why he judged it a concession too far. ↩

Catholic View

The Catholic Church teaches that salvation is by grace alone, that nothing a sinner does can earn his initial justification, and that anyone who thinks he can put God in his debt has misunderstood the gospel. What she denies is the word alone attached to faith — not because works are added to grace, but because justification is not merely a verdict pronounced over a man who stays as he was. It is a real change worked in him by grace, and it can be lost, and it shows.

What Is Granted

More than most Protestants expect. Justification is unmerited: the Council of Trent taught explicitly that none of the things preceding it, whether faith or works, merits the grace of justification, and condemned the idea that a man can be justified by his own works without grace. Pelagianism is a heresy in Catholic teaching, not a tendency. Boasting is excluded absolutely. And a Catholic who imagines he is buying heaven by good behavior has been badly catechized — a failure the Church has had to answer for, since the abuses that provoked Luther were real abuses.1

It is worth saying plainly, because the caricature is stubborn: the Catholic Church does not teach salvation by works.

The One Place the Phrase Occurs

“Faith alone” appears once in the New Testament, and it is negated: “You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone” (Jas. 2:24). That is not decisive on its own, since a true doctrine need not have its slogan in the text. But the burden it places on the other side is real, and the usual reply — that James means something different by justification — has to be shown rather than asserted.

James is not describing a bystander’s inference. He takes the same man Paul takes, Abraham, and the same verse, Genesis 15:6, and says the Scripture was fulfilled when Abraham offered Isaac — an act of obedience decades later (Jas. 2:21–23). Both apostles are talking about how Abraham stood with God, and one of them says works were involved in it.

Which Works Paul Excludes

The question that decides this is what Paul means by “works of the law.” Read as good deeds in general, Romans and Galatians teach faith alone. Read as the works of the Mosaic law — circumcision, the food laws, the calendar — they teach that a Gentile need not become a Jew to be saved.

The context favors the second reading throughout. The crisis in Galatia was not that converts were being told to be kind; it was that they were being told to be circumcised, and circumcision is what the letter argues about from beginning to end. In Romans the question is put in exactly those terms: is God the God of Jews only, or of Gentiles also (Rom. 3:29)? Paul’s answer that a man is justified apart from works of law lands, in the next breath, on the inclusion of the Gentiles — which is the difficulty he was actually addressing.

And the same Paul is emphatic that what a man does bears on his standing. God “will render to every man according to his works”, giving eternal life to those who by patience in well-doing seek glory and honor (Rom. 2:6–7). Neither the immoral nor the greedy will inherit the kingdom (1 Cor. 6:9–10). What counts is “faith working through love” (Gal. 5:6) — not faith alone, and not works alone, but the one operating by the other.

Imputed or Infused

Here is the real disagreement, and it is not about whether works help. It is about what justification is.

On the Reformation account it is forensic: God declares the sinner righteous on the basis of Christ’s righteousness credited to him, while he remains in himself what he was — Luther’s simul iustus et peccator, at once righteous and a sinner. On the Catholic account God does not pronounce a man righteous without making him so. Grace is poured into the heart (Rom. 5:5); he becomes a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17), a partaker of the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4), a son rather than a pardoned defendant.

The difference is not academic. If righteousness is only credited, then God's verdict describes something that is not the case, and the sinner is declared to be what he is not. The Catholic claim is that God's word does what it says: when He calls a man righteous, the man is made righteous, by a grace that is entirely God’s gift and entirely effective.

And Christ’s Own Account of the Judgment

When Jesus describes the last judgment at length, the criterion is not what was believed. The nations are separated on what was done and left undone — fed, clothed, visited, or not (Matt. 25:31–46). The rich young man asks what he must do to inherit eternal life and is told to keep the commandments, and then to sell what he has (Mark 10:17–21). None of this makes salvation a wage. But a doctrine which holds that works have no bearing on the verdict must explain why the only extended account of the verdict that Christ gives us is about works.

A Word Against Overreach on Both Sides

Two things should temper this page. The first is that in 1999 the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation signed a Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, finding a consensus on basic truths sufficient that the mutual condemnations of the sixteenth century no longer apply to the teaching as each side now states it. Real differences remain, and the Declaration says so. But anyone arguing this question as though nothing had happened since 1547 is arguing with a ghost.2

The second is that much of the heat here comes from each side attacking a position the other does not hold. Protestants do not teach that a man may believe and then live as he pleases; the confessions are emphatic that saving faith is never barren. Catholics do not teach that a man earns heaven. A great deal of what passes for this debate is two caricatures fighting.

The Reply in Brief

Salvation is by grace, unmerited, and boasting is excluded — all of that is Catholic teaching and Trent said so. What is denied is the alone. The phrase occurs once in Scripture and is there rejected; the works Paul excludes are the works of the Mosaic law, which is the dispute his letters are actually conducting; the same Paul says God renders to each according to his works and that what avails is faith working through love; and the only extended account Christ gives of the judgment turns on what was done.

Underneath the exegesis lies the question of what justification is. If it is a verdict credited to a man who stays as he was, then God declares to be true what is not yet true. If it is grace poured into the heart, making a sinner actually a son, then the works that follow are not a wage he earns but the life he has been given, already at work in him. That is the Catholic claim — and it makes his good deeds neither the cause of his salvation nor irrelevant to it, but its evidence and its exercise.

The full essay works through Romans and Galatians on the works of the law, takes up James 2 and the standard harmonizations, sets out Trent Session 6 alongside the 1999 Joint Declaration to show what is and is not still in dispute, examines imputation and infusion at the level of what each account says happens to a person, and answers the strongest evangelical replies — Sproul’s in particular.

Endnotes
  1. Council of Trent, Session 6 (1547), Decree on Justification, ch. 8 and canons 1–3: none of the things which precede justification, whether faith or works, merits the grace of justification; and anathema on anyone saying a man can be justified by his own works without divine grace. ↩
  2. Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church, Augsburg, 31 October 1999), §§5, 13, 40–41. Later affirmed also by the Methodist, Anglican and Reformed communions. ↩

Summary

Sola fide holds that God declares a sinner righteous on account of Christ’s righteousness received by faith, and that works follow as fruit but never bear on the verdict. The Catholic objection is not that works earn salvation — they do not — but that the word alone misdescribes what justification is.

Start with what is agreed, because it is most of it. Trent taught that nothing preceding justification, faith or works, merits the grace of justification, and anathematized the idea that a man can be justified by his own works without grace. Pelagianism is a heresy in Catholic teaching. Boasting is excluded. The Church does not teach salvation by works, and the caricature should be retired.

The phrase appears once, and is denied. “You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone” (Jas. 2:24). Nor is James discussing a different subject: he takes Paul’s own example, Abraham, and Paul’s own proof-text, Genesis 15:6, and says it was fulfilled when Abraham offered Isaac decades later.

Which works Paul excludes decides the case. Read as good deeds generally, Romans and Galatians teach faith alone; read as the works of the Mosaic law, they teach that a Gentile need not become a Jew. The context favors the second throughout — the crisis in Galatia was circumcision, and in Romans the conclusion drawn from “apart from works of law” is that God is the God of Gentiles also (Rom. 3:28–29).

And the same Paul makes works bear on the outcome. God “will render to every man according to his works” (Rom. 2:6–7); the immoral will not inherit the kingdom (1 Cor. 6:9–10); what avails is “faith working through love” (Gal. 5:6). Christ’s one extended account of the judgment separates the nations on what was done and left undone (Matt. 25:31–46).

The real dispute is imputed against infused. On the Reformation account justification is forensic — declared over a man who remains what he was, Luther’s simul iustus et peccator. On the Catholic account God does not pronounce a man righteous without making him so: grace is poured into the heart (Rom. 5:5) and he becomes a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17). If righteousness is only credited, the verdict describes what is not the case.

And the sixteenth century is not where this stands. In 1999 the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation signed a Joint Declaration finding consensus on the basic truths sufficient that the mutual condemnations no longer apply to the teaching as each side now states it. Differences remain and the document says so — but arguing as though nothing had happened since 1547 is arguing with a ghost.

In short: not faith alone, and not works earning a wage, but grace that actually changes a man. On that account his good deeds are neither the cause of his salvation nor irrelevant to it — they are the life he has been given, already at work in him.

For a more complete essay on this topic, download Is Sola Fide Scriptural? (.docx)