Faith and Works

 

In my very first talk on the series on New Testament Grace earlier this year I had stated the Catholic belief that all of us obtain salvation through the grace of God and no person can earn salvation. If this were indeed the case, how does it reconcile with the belief that we are saved by faith and works?

The Church has believed, since the time of Christ, that we are saved by faith and works. This was a truth accepted unanimously by all Christians for about 1500 hundred years until the Protestant Reformation took place, when Luther advanced the theory that we are saved by faith alone (Sola Fide).

 

While I was doing a little study on the protestant view of Sola Fide, however, I was astonished at how unanimous most denominations were in their opinion that faith and works (though they don’t call it that) are inseparable in any properly constituted Christian life, and I couldn’t help but wonder what we keep disagreeing about.