Sin, Salvation, Faith, and Works

This essay is the fifth in a series on my journey from Protestant to Catholic. If you’ve stumbled across this one first and want to read them in order, here are links to Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV:

Divine Signs

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November 23, 2025

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been writing about my religious journey from Evangelical Protestantism to Roman Catholicism. I’ve explained how my initial anti-Catholic biases were shed, my worries that real Christian unity—the sort of unity that the Bible seems to present as normative—

Here in Part V, I want to discuss the relationship between faith and works. If you are a Protestant reading this essay, you probably know exactly what I mean by this and why I am bringing it up. If you are a fairly normal contemporary American Catholic, there’s a good chance that you do not know why I am bringing it up, so let me begin by providing a bit of context.

One helpful way to illustrate different worldviews—religions, philosophies, and the like—is to begin with the questions What’s wrong with the world? and How can it be fixed? I won’t attempt to present any comprehensive list of the different answers one might give to these questions, but thinking about those answers can be a useful tool for understanding the fundamental issues at stake in many of our cultural divides. If you’d like to pause for a moment to try this exercise for yourself, go ahead. I’ll wait.

Are you back? Excellent.

For Christians of any stripe, our answer to the question What’s wrong? must ultimately make reference to sin, though that idea can be explicated in many different ways. Personally, I find the contrasting language of wholeness and integration to be helpful. (Sin is inherently parasitic, and we need some notion of what is good and right in order to understand that which is bad and wrong.) Deep in the Christian view of reality is the conviction that God made everything that exists, and that all of God’s creation is good. This is just the language of Genesis, of course: “God said Let there be… and there was… and God saw that it was good.” Everything that God made was made to function as a coherent, integrated whole. Protestant theologian Cornelius Plantinga notes that this vision of integrated wholeness is a way of understanding what the Hebrew prophets meant by shalom:

The webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight is what the Hebrew prophets call shalom. We call it peace, but it means far more than mere peace of mind or a cease-fire between enemies. In the Bible, shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight—a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, a state of affairs that inspires joyful wonder as its Creator and Savior opens doors and welcomes the creatures in whom he delights. Shalom, in other words, is the way things ought to be.1

Plantinga gives a number of examples of what shalom looks like, or would look like, in everyday human life, and concludes with the following:

Above all, in the visions of Christians and other theists, God would preside in the unspeakable beauty for which human beings long and in the mystery of holiness that draws human worship like a magnet. In turn, each human being would reflect and color the light of God’s presence out of the inimitable resources of his or her own character and essence. Human communities would present their ethnic and regional specialties to other communities in the name of God, in glad recognition that God, too, is a radiant and hospitable community, of three persons. In their own accents, communities would express praise, courtesies, and deferences that, when massed together, would keep building like waves of a passion that is never spent.

Again: shalom is the way things ought to be.

To return to the question with which I started, according to Christians what’s wrong with the world is that shalom has been violated. Things are not the way they are supposed to be. The world is undeniably broken. Where shalom involves integrated wholeness, we experience separation: separation from others, from the natural world, even from ourselves. Most fundamentally, of course, we experience separation from God, from the One for Whom we are made. We are literally disintegrated: that is, dis-integrated; rather than wholeness and unity, we experience division and separation, at every level of our being.

Worse, each of us participates in that disintegration. Each of us makes choices that exacerbate the brokenness of the world, that contribute to division and separation. We are selfish, we are wasteful, we use others instead of loving them, we make idols of our desires… in these and sundry other ways, we violate shalom. Our thoughts and actions are misaligned with the way things ought to be. And when we are blameworthy for doing so, that is when we sin. Sin, in Plantinga’s words, is “culpable shalom-breaking.”

The question then arises, what can be done about it? or, as I put it above, how can the world be made better? How can things be healed? How can that which is broken be fixed? How can we be forgiven of our sins?

Again, Christians of all stripes will answer with one voice: it is through the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ that the world will be restored. To use the technical theological term, it is through Christ that we can be justified before God. And this is where the Protestant-Catholic stuff comes in.

On the standard (Protestant) telling of the story, the sixteenth-century Reformation was, in its essence, an attempt to recover authentic Christianity from the influence of a corrupt institutional Church that was misleading people about the nature of justification. The Church, whose authoritative Magisterium taught (and teaches) that faith and works are both necessary for salvation, was thereby teaching the heresy of Pelagianism: the idea that we can earn God’s favor by doing good works. But to make this claim is to make an error of the very worst sort; it is to tell a literally damnable lie. We cannot, the Reformers insisted, do anything to merit God’s favor. We do nothing to earn our salvation. This is something the Apostle Paul emphasized repeatedly in his writings. Consider his words in Ephesians 2, Romans 3, and Galatians 2:

[B]y grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast.

[A] person is justified by faith apart from works.

[A] person is justified not by … works … but through faith in Jesus Christ.

Justification is the free gift of God, obtained by faith alone, period. End of story.

With these verses and this understanding of salvation in mind, it’s not difficult to see why the Reformers were so passionately opposed to the Church. Nor is it difficult to see why many contemporary Protestants see Catholics not merely as mistaken, but as egregiously so: perhaps to such a degree that Catholics should not even properly be described as Christians. To teach that we earn our salvation—that we are justified before God on the basis of our own works—is to betray the heart of the good news that Christians call the gospel.

For me, personally, this was the biggest theological issue I had to address before I could seriously entertain the possibility of becoming Catholic.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but some of what I had learned in my scripture and theology classes at Biola University—the Evangelical college where I earned my master’s degree—had softened me to the Catholic understanding of salvation. I’d become at least loosely acquainted with “the new perspective on Paul,” an approach to the New Testament that emphasizes the deeply Jewish influences on the thought of the Apostle Paul and which questions whether Paul himself would have made the sharp distinction between faith and works that has become so central to much Protestant theology. I’d been reading a lot of Dallas Willard, who disparagingly refers to the gospel message I’d been taught as “bar code Christianity.” And I’d been very struck by a comment made by my New Testament professor at Biola, who once said that while he preferred to sidestep the “lordship salvation” debate, he thought it worth noting that if you were to propose to the Apostle Matthew a distinction between believing in Christ as Savior and following Christ as Lord, Matthew would have no idea what you were talking about.

And speaking of having no idea what someone is talking about, I suspect that many readers will have no idea what the phrases “bar code Christianity” and “lordship salvation” refer to. So let me take a moment to explain.

On the traditional Protestant understanding of salvation, a distinction is made between justification and sanctification. To be justified is to be forgiven of one’s sins and declared righteous in the sight of God. When a person places his or her faith in Christ as Savior, Christ’s own righteousness is imputed to him or her. To have placed one’s faith in Christ is, in the familiar language of Evangelicalism, to have been “saved.” And if you are saved, you are in Christ and you can be assured of going to heaven when you die—which is really the main point of the whole thing. Sanctification, in contrast, is the process of growing in holiness, of becoming more and more like Christ. A faithful Christian ought to grow in this way, but one’s own personal sanctity does not contribute in any way to one’s salvation.

The distinction between justification and sanctification is what generates the lordship salvation controversy. One of the areas of disagreement within Protestant thought concerns the question Is it possible to trust Christ as your Savior without making a commitment to follow Christ as your Lord? Some Protestants say “yes” and others say “no.” We don’t need to get into the arguments for and against these positions; suffice it to say that this is what my professor was alluding to in his comments on the Gospel of Matthew. I had been formed primarily in the “free grace” tradition, myself, which answered this question with an emphatic “yes”: it is possible to trust Christ as Savior without intending to follow him as Lord. To hear my New Testament professor, whom I respected enormously, subtly challenge this position was significant.

The distinction between justification and sanctification is also what leads to “bar code Christianity.” Again, the phrase is Dallas Willard’s; he introduces it in his book The Divine Conspiracy. He laments that, for many Protestants, justification alone is the point of Christianity. The only thing that matters is having Christ’s righteousness imputed to one’s account so that one will go to heaven one dies: like groceries at a register, we will be “scanned” after death and the machine will either beep or it won’t. If it does, we’re in. If not, well, sorry. The gist of Willard’s book is that the message of the gospel is far richer than this; it is an invitation to live in Christ’s kingdom here and now, not merely after death.

Perhaps the single most surprising thing I learned about Catholic theology on my journey into the Church was that, in Catholic thought, the distinction between justification and sanctification simply doesn’t exist.2 This difference, combined with the fact that Catholic theologians do use the term “justification” in discussions of salvation, is the source of much confusion. I suspect that it explains why many Protestants recoil at—and misunderstand—Catholic teaching. For the Protestant, there are only two possible answers to the question Are you saved?: it’s a simple “yes” or “no.” The faithful Catholic’s answer to the question is “I have been saved, I am being saved, and I hope to be saved.” Let me explain.

Willard’s understanding of the gospel as an invitation to life in Christ’s kingdom is not a bad way to express the Catholic understanding of salvation. Whereas Protestants believe that Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us, Catholics believe that Christ’s righteousness is infused in us. God’s grace is not merely a legal declaration; it is supernatural aid extended to us (primarily) through the sacraments, enabling us to live more and more fully as his children. God does not coerce us into the divine kind of life, however. We are free to resist him, or to cooperate with him. As we cooperate, we become more and more like Christ, more and more the kinds of creatures who can truly be at home with God in heaven, more and more meriting our ultimate salvation.

That last phrase will—and should—cause Protestants to pause. Catholics believe that we can merit salvation? Surely this gives the game away. This takes us right back to where we started, to the heart of the Reformation. We cannot earn our salvation. The essence of the Christian message involves the good news of God’s superabundant grace, his unmerited favor. If embracing Catholicism means abandoning that, then Catholicism should not only be disbelieved; it should be fiercely opposed.

I agree.

To say that someone “merits” salvation, in Catholic thought, is not to say that he or she has earned it or is in any way entitled to it. It is rather to say that he or she has become the kind of person for whom eternal life with Christ is fitting, a natural and suitable outcome of a life lived in and through and for him. This is what Catholics mean when they speak of meriting salvation, and there is nothing about it that should make a Protestant uncomfortable. To the contrary, Protestants should be very pleased to learn that the Catholic Church is utterly insistent that we cannot earn God’s favor or the gift of eternal life. Here are a number of quotes from The Catechism of the Catholic Church that make this clear (all italics are in the original):

Justification is…the acceptance of God’s righteousness through faith in Jesus Christ. Righteousness (or “justice”) here means the rectitude of divine love. With justification, faith, hope, and charity are poured into our hearts, and obedience to the divine will is granted us.

Justification has been merited for us by the Passion of Christ who offered himself on the cross as a living victim, holy and pleasing to God, and whose blood has become the instrument of atonement for the sins of all men.

Our justification comes from the grace of God. Grace is favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become children of God, adoptive sons, partakers of the divine nature and of eternal life.

This vocation to eternal life is supernatural. It depends entirely on God’s gratuitous initiative, for he alone can reveal and give himself.

The grace of Christ is the gratuitous gift that God makes to us of his own life, infused by the Holy Spirit into our soul to heal it of sin and to sanctify it. It is the sanctifying or deifying grace received in Baptism. It is in us the source of the work of sanctification.

The preparation of man for the reception of grace is already a work of grace.

Grace is first and foremost the gift of the Spirit who justifies and sanctifies us. But grace also includes the gifts that the Spirit grants us to associate with his work, to enable us to collaborate in the salvation of others and in the growth of the Body of Christ, the Church.

With regard to God, there is no strict right to any merit on the part of man.

The merit of man before God in the Christian life arises from the fact that God has freely chosen to associate man with the work of his grace. The fatherly action of God is first on his own initiative, and then follows man’s free acting through his collaboration, so that the merit of good works is to be attributed in the first place to the grace of God, then to the faithful. Man’s merit, moreover, itself is due to God, for his good actions proceed in Christ, from the predispositions and assistance given by the Holy Spirit.

The merits of our good works are gifts of the divine goodness.

Since the initiative belongs to God in the order of grace, no one can merit the initial grace of forgiveness and justification, at the beginning of conversion.

And on it goes. If you, dear reader, are a Protestant whose theological formation was similar to mine, these statements will be at least a little bit surprising, if not downright shocking. As I mentioned back in Part I of this series, the gap between the Protestant and Catholic understandings of salvation simply isn’t as wide as I’d been taught.

For years, I’d been influenced by preachers and teachers who were confident that the Catholic Church proclaimed a gospel contrary to St. Paul’s, a gospel of works rather than grace. The above quotations from the Catechism demonstrate how mistaken they were.

Before concluding this essay, I should make a brief comment about the biblical perspective on faith and works. As was illustrated earlier with the lines taken from Romans 3, Galatians 2, and Ephesians 2, there are New Testament passages that seem to teach the independence of faith from works of any kind. Well-informed Protestants are likely to know many of them by heart. What does the Catholic Church say about those?

You may be relieved to know that I have no intention of exhaustively discussing the salient biblical texts. If such a discussion is what you want, I’m afraid you’ll have to go elsewhere to find it. I’ll make just three observations:

• First: at the risk of belaboring a point I already belabored back in Part II of this series, the correct interpretation of the many New Testament passages relevant to the relationship between faith and works is not something that simply leaps off the page. The New Perspective on Paul and the lordship salvation controversy within Evangelicalism illustrate that faithful, informed Christians come to different conclusions on the basis of the biblical texts. What does it mean to “have faith in Christ”? Can salvation ever be lost? Do good works necessarily flow from authentic faith? What is the point of baptism, and who is eligible for it? And so on. It’s disingenuous to cherry-pick verses, take them out of context, and treat them as an exhaustive biblical theology of salvation.

• Second: even if we do isolate the passages that most clearly seem to support the Protestant insistence on separating faith from works, reading those with fresh eyes can be extraordinarily illuminating. What I mean is, it’s worthwhile to try to read those passages without importing our own assumptions and categories into them. In the book of Galatians, is Paul condemning works or works of the Law? Was he thinking like a sixteenth-century Christian or like a first-century Jewish convert? In Romans, what is meant by “the obedience of faith,” a phrase that bookends the whole epistle? Etc., etc., etc.

• Third: a satisfactory account of the biblical teaching on salvation must incorporate the whole of the New Testament witness. Just as it is possible to select a handful of passages that seem to unequivocally support the traditional Protestant view, there are equally many that seem to unequivocally support the Catholic view: consider the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25, the basis of the gift of eternal life in Romans 2, “faith working through love” in Galatians 5, the justice of God in Hebrews 6, and, of course, James’s emphatic statement about justification by works in chapter 2 of his epistle. Catholics as well as Protestants can play the cherry-picking game.

For my own part, I am persuaded that the Catholic integration of faith and works is not merely compatible with the New Testament, but is actually a better synthesis of the biblical data. For present purposes, however, there is no reason to pursue the matter further. A crucial milestone in my journey to Catholicism was becoming persuaded that the Church’s teaching on faith and works is not at all what St. Paul condemns in his writings. Hopefully the preceding has clarified why.

The good news of the gospel includes an invitation into the life of God. In Christ, we are called to join the divine project of healing the world, of restoring shalom. We cooperate with God’s grace, and we seek to be more closely conformed to the image of his Son. But all of it is a gift. I’ll give the closing words here to Pope Benedict XVI, who wrote the following when he was still Joseph Ratzinger:

a Christian is someone who knows that in any case he lives first and foremost as the beneficiary of a bounty and that, consequently, all righteousness can only consist in being himself a donor, like the beggar who is grateful for what he receives and generously passes part of it on to others.3

Not a bad summary of the Catholic view, I think, and one that should merit a hearty “Amen!” from any Protestant.

Next time: Popes, saints, and the development of doctrine

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