Word to the Wise
Thursday, October 13, 2011 - Thursday in the 28th Week in Ordinary Time
[Rom 3:21-30 and Luke 11:47-54,]Now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, though testified to by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.
The Letter to the Romans now addresses one of the central issues of Christian theology - an issue that became a defining line in the Protestant Reformation, but in a way that St. Paul probably never envisioned! This is the issue commonly referred to as "faith versus works." The context is important because the issue in St. Paul's time shares some characteristics with the issue in Reformation times and the issue as understood in our own day. I can only give some broad strokes here because scholars write big books about it.
St. Paul was a highly educated Jewish man who had studied the "Law" and Hebrew scriptural tradition at the feet of a famous rabbi, Gamaliel. He became a zealous anti-Christian and was in the process of hunting down Christians for arrest when he was dramatically converted. His conversion was one of the most important historical and theological events in the history of Christianity because his ideas and interpretation of the meaning of God's "intervention" in human history through Jesus Christ are dominant. He saw this intervention as something that transcended or replaced the Mosaic Law as the means whereby a person could be found "righteous" before God and "meriting" eternal life. (The words, "righteous" and "meriting" are theological "buzzwords" but we'll have to use them for our own purposes this morning.). Thus, for St. Paul, a whole way of life, the Jewish world of understanding what it meant to be on good terms with God through the Mosaic covenant as described in the Pentateuch and the prophetic writings, is now replaced with faith in a new covenant, that of Jesus Christ. Therefore, one became "justified" by faith and not simply following the precepts of the law. One could continue to do the latter, but if one did it in the belief that these actions alone were sufficient, one would be mistaken. No "human action" could "earn" justification. Only God's mercy and love, extended to the person of faith, could justify.
To the reformers in the 16th century, especially to Martin Luther, the issue of the Mosaic Law was replaced by the distorted behavior of the Renaissance church in regard to indulgences which amounted to claiming that all a person had to do would be to perform certain pious actions (devotions, pilgrimages) or acquire an "indulgence" - usually by paying money - and they would be forgiven their sins, no matter how they lived their lives otherwise. This way of seeing salvation is represented in the history of theology as "Pelagianism" which basically holds that a human can earn justification by his or her own efforts. So, a certain distorted way of understanding human religious actions led to a terrible division which we live with everyday now, even though the Catholic Church, the Orthodox and mainline Protestant traditions essentially agree on the matter. No one can earn salvation or justification. One must start with faith in Christ and then live according to that faith. How this "works" in regard to non-Christian faiths is a subject for another homily! Suffice it to say that St. Paul's teaching in the Letter to the Romans was and remains the spark that kindles the fire in this fundamental theological truth. AMEN
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