Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  Though God sent his Son in fleshly form to redeem mankind from its sin, not everyone will be saved. At 8:29–30, Paul sets out his views on predestination: God foreknows and predestines those whom he will justify. Those whom he predestined “he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified.” From these brief passages would spring all the bitter controversies that for centuries would rage over the doctrine of predestination.

  In another momentous passage (chapters 9–11), Paul describes the respective parts played by Jews and Christians in God’s plan for the world. Though God had made a covenant with the children of Israel through Abraham, they never attained righteousness, because their efforts were based on deeds rather than faith. Gentiles, who did not strive for righteousness, had attained it, through their faith in Christ. Because the Jews had stumbled, salvation would come to the Gentiles. But God had not completely rejected Israel. A remnant of it would be saved, but by grace rather than works. Those who “do not persist in unbelief” will be grafted in with those who will be saved. These passages would add to the Jews’ fury against Paul.

  In the last section of his letter, Paul turned from theological speculation to practical admonition: People should love one another, hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good. They should rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, extend hospitality to strangers. “Bless those who persecute you” and “weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are.” If your enemies are hungry, you should feed them; if they are thirsty, you should give them drink. “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.”

  As these passages show, Paul considered moral conduct essential; he just did not think it could lead to salvation. Good works were important but secondary; they were the product of justification, not the cause. Paul’s downgrading of works would extend into the political sphere as well. In chapter 13, he issued his famous injunction (which would be so critical to Luther) to “let every person be subject to the governing authorities,” for they have been “instituted by God.” Since faith was all, political resistance was irrelevant.

  Paul’s intense focus on faith would set him apart from not just the Jews but also the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem. Sometime after Paul wrote Romans, James the Just (or, more probably, a follower writing in his name) prepared a letter that reads like a direct rebuttal of it. Whoever keeps the whole law “but fails in one point,” he wrote, “has become accountable for all of it.” A person “is justified by works and not by faith alone.”

  What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “go in peace, keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

  Offering his own practical rules for piety, James urged his readers to act humbly, avoid gossip, shun selfish ambition, love one’s neighbor as oneself, and help the less fortunate. The rich who keep back the wages of their workers should tremble for the miseries that will befall them. “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”

  “Orphans and widows” has become a sort of shorthand for the type of ethics-based spirituality at the core of James’s teaching. For him, faith, while important, could not on its own lead to salvation; it had to be backed up by conduct.

  To a degree, the difference between the Pauline and Jamesian approaches was one of emphasis. For Paul, works performed without faith could degenerate into a grudging compliance with the law, undertaken out of fear of punishment or expectation of reward. For James, faith not backed by works could become mere lip service, an exercise in hypocrisy and sanctimony. Still, their theologies represented two distinct visions of piety—the one based in faith in the risen Christ, the other in the doing of Christlike works; the one stressing belief, the other conduct. Between them, they defined two strands within Christianity that would remain present and in competition over the ages and that would periodically erupt into open conflict—including in the early sixteenth century.

  Initially, the Pauline strand seemed destined to fade away, parallel to Paul’s own tragic end. Before leaving for Rome, he decided to travel to Jerusalem to deliver the contributions to the poor that he had collected on his missions. On his arrival, around 58, he clashed with both Jews and Jewish Christians. At the urging of some of the latter, he agreed to undergo a seven-day purification ritual in the Holy Temple. As it was nearing its end, he was recognized by some Jews from Asia Minor, who, angry over his rejection of the Jewish law, attacked him and dragged him from the Temple. Only the intervention of a group of Roman soldiers saved him from being beaten to death. After he was arrested and ordered flogged by a Roman tribune, Paul declared that he was a Roman citizen, and he was moved to a prison in Caesarea on the Mediterranean coast. After two years, an effort was finally made to bring him to trial, but Paul—asserting his rights as a citizen—requested a proceeding in Rome.

  His appeal granted, he was put on a ship bound for the coast of Asia Minor. There, he was transferred to an Alexandrian vessel heading for Italy. Encountering rough waters, the ship was driven out to sea off Crete, and those on board drifted for fourteen days without food. As it approached an island, the ship ran aground on a reef. At Paul’s urging, everyone jumped into the water; clinging to driftwood, all managed to make it ashore. The island turned out to be Malta. After three months there, Paul was put on another ship, which took him to Puteoli, near what is now Naples, and from there he walked to Rome. He had finally made it to the imperial capital, but as a prisoner rather than a proselytizer.

  Paul’s fate in Rome is unclear. According to Acts, he was kept under house arrest for two years but allowed to teach all who came to see him. According to Christian tradition, he and Peter were in Rome at the same time and both were swept up in the persecution of Christians ordered by Nero after the fire that engulfed Rome in the year 64. The two are said to have been executed on the same day in that year or a short time afterward—Peter crucified in the city and Paul beheaded on the Ostian Road, a short distance outside it.

  Meanwhile, the Jews in Palestine were revolting against Rome. Their uprising (lasting from 66 to 70) was put down with singular brutality. The Holy Temple was destroyed, Jerusalem was devastated, and the Jews were forced to scatter. The Jerusalem church collapsed, but in the resulting vacuum the Gentile churches that Paul had helped organize in the Diaspora flourished. Paul’s gospel, with its promise of spiritual transformation and eternal life, took hold in the crowded cities and towns of the Mediterranean. The small colony of Christians in Rome to whom Paul had written from Corinth grew into a powerful force that would eventually challenge and displace the empire itself. By the year 200, Paul’s letters had been incorporated into the New Testament canon. Thanks in large part to the Apostle’s drive and vision, Christianity captured Europe, and the cross became its supreme symbol.

  But Paul’s faith-centered interpretation was only one current in the New Testament. Another was offered by the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, which contained the Sermon on the Mount and the parables and which highlighted Jesus’s works of kindness, compassion, and mercy. (The Gospel of John, with its stress on the crucifixion and resurrection, has more in common with Paul’s letters.) James’s epistle itself was eventually included in the New Testament, reflecting a desire by the Church Fathers to acknowledge the importance of works and the law. As the Church faced the practical task of encouraging ethical conduct among the laity, it inclined more and more in a Jamesian direction. That emphasis grew during the Middle Ages, with Scholastic theologians (influenced by Aristotle) asserting the importance of doing all that is within one.
By the late fifteenth century, good works had come to be seen as a crucial part of saving faith.

  Paul himself receded in importance. His letters seemed to deal with ancient disputes over arcane differences with little relevance to contemporary concerns. In the Sentences, Peter Lombard cited Augustine far more often than he did Paul. Few churches were named after him, and painters and sculptors neglected him as a subject.

  Yet as the movement ad fontes gained force, interest in Paul revived as well. As the earliest surviving Christian documents, his epistles provided a valuable resource to those hoping to recover the spirit of the early Church. At Oxford, John Colet drew large crowds with his lectures aimed at bringing Paul and his world to life. Erasmus in the Enchiridion urged readers to make themselves “completely familiar” with the Apostle and “keep him in your heart at all times.” And, in 1512, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples came out with a Latin translation of Paul’s epistles, with a commentary stating that man can be saved not by good works but by faith in God and the conferring of his grace.

  Luther had a copy of Lefèvre’s translation and commentary as he prepared for his lectures on Romans, in the weeks prior to Easter 1515. From his notes, it is clear that he had not advanced much beyond the understanding he had arrived at during his lectures on the Psalms. “The sum and substance of this letter,” his scholia begin, “is: to pull down, to pluck up, and to destroy all wisdom and righteousness of the flesh,” no matter “how heartily and sincerely they may be practiced.” He scoffs at those Jews and Gentiles who are inwardly pleased with themselves and “praise themselves in their hearts as righteous and good men.” As Luther makes his way through chapters 1 and 2, his discussion grows ever more dense and tangled. He ponders the four stages of perdition, the threefold way in which God is proved truthful, and the two ways in which the phrase “separated unto the gospel of God” can be understood.

  When he reaches 3:19–20, however, something remarkable happens. This is the point at which Paul begins his long and forceful discussion of the distinction between the law and faith. Perking up, Luther observes that Paul, in distinguishing between these two categories, also distinguishes between the works associated with them. By works of the law, Paul means those acts that the law compels through the fear of punishment or the promise of reward. By works of faith, Paul means those acts done in a spirit of liberty and love of God. The works of the law cannot contribute anything toward making a person righteous; on the contrary, they are a hindrance because they keep one from seeing oneself as unrighteous.

  Luther goes on to offer a parable: Suppose a layman outwardly performs all the functions of a priest. He celebrates Mass, pronounces absolution, and administers the sacraments. Outwardly, these acts seem like those of a real priest; the layman, in fact, may even perform them more skillfully than a priest would. But because the layman has not been ordained, he actually enacts nothing but “merely puts on a play and deceives himself and his friends.” So it is with works performed according to the law. A man cannot become justified by such deeds. Rather, he can become justified only “by something else, namely, by faith in Christ.”

  Faith in Christ: this phrase, which had appeared fleetingly in Luther’s commentary on the Psalms, suddenly grabs hold of him. There’s a quickening in his notes as he begins to explore the theological implications of Paul’s idea that only faith in Christ can justify a man before God. He who seeks to become righteous by the law may do finer and more splendid works than a man who is justified by faith, but he is not really justified and in fact may be even more hindered in becoming righteous in God’s eyes. He who does have faith, by contrast, can become just apart from performing such acts.

  From the Psalms, Luther had concluded that one could not become just in God’s eyes by doing good works. Now, in reading Paul, he can finally see how one could become just: through faith. Here, in his notes on the last section of the third chapter of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, Luther begins to formulate the idea that would become the heart of his new gospel: man is justified by faith alone.

  Seizing on this revelation, Luther excitedly explores its implications. Faith, he declares, cannot be selective—it is either a “whole faith” or “no faith at all.” A man who denies Christ in one aspect denies him in all aspects. That is the way of heretics. Invoking this or that feature of Christ, they insist that their own understanding surpasses that of all believers. Similarly, the Jews believe in much that the Church does, but because they deny Christ, “they perish in their faithlessness.” There are others who, recognizing their unrighteousness, think that they can become righteous through prayer, suffering, and confession, without faith in Christ. But this is impossible, for righteousness is given only through such faith. “So it has been determined, so it pleases God, and so it will be.”

  As for those who do believe, Luther explains, they will always retain some inclination toward evil. Because of our nature, we will always be prone to lust, boastfulness, and pride. Those who realize this are “the new people, the believing people, the spiritual people.” With a sigh of the heart and the toil of the body, they seek and pray to be made just in God’s eyes, “ever and ever again until the hour of death.”

  As Luther relates this, it is clear that he considers himself one of these new people. His comments seem to flow from someone who, feeling the lifting of a great burden, experiences a swelling of the heart—who feels born anew. Luther’s very language lightens. He describes the “thousand tricks” by which the Devil pursues us. Some he leads astray by tempting them into obvious sins. Others, who consider themselves righteous, he causes to become complacent, so that they give up longing for betterment. Still others he seduces into “fanaticism and ascetic sectarianism,” so that they seek to do good works “with a feverish zeal” that fills them with pride and drives them to despise others.

  Finally—and here Luther seems to be speaking of himself—there are those whom the Devil urges on “to the foolish enterprise of trying to become pure and sinless saints.” He keeps them in terror before God’s judgment and exhausts their conscience “almost to the point of despair.” Because these people strive so fervently to be righteous, it is not easy to tempt them into straying. Instead, the Devil initially helps them in their effort to become righteous, and so they prematurely conclude that they have rid themselves of all selfish striving. Then, when they discover that they cannot accomplish this, “he makes them sad, dejected, despondent, desperate, and utterly upset in their conscience.” For this group, there is nothing left but for them to set their hope on the mercy of God and pray fervently that they may be freed from their sins.

  Man, Luther observed, “is like a convalescent: if he is in too much of a hurry to get well, he runs the chance of suffering a serious relapse; therefore, he must let himself be cured little by little and must bear it for a while that he is feeble. It is enough that our sin displeases us, even though it does not entirely disappear. Christ bears all sins, if only they displease us, for then they are no longer our sins but his, and his righteousness is ours in turn.”

  After all the years of fumbling in the darkness of the monastery, Luther in the third chapter of Romans had finally found the idea that would set him free from its oppressive demands. Paul’s denunciation of the law, issued in the heat of battle over whether Gentiles had to uphold the Mosaic code, seemed to Luther to apply to the rules of his order and, more generally, to the many regulations and prohibitions stipulated by the medieval Church. With the Apostle’s guidance, Luther was now finding his own pathway to Christ. The gate to paradise was swinging open.

  Buoyed by his new awareness of the importance of faith over works, Luther—moving into the fourth chapter of Romans—angrily turns on those who he can now see had led him astray: the Scholastic theologians. Outrageously, they had taught that original sin, like actual sin, can be entirely removed through good works, “as if sins were something that could be moved in the flick of an eyelash, as darkness is by light.” But the tinder of sin—co
ncupiscence—always remains, and no one can escape it. “Fool that I was,” Luther cries, “I could not understand, in light of this, in what way I should regard myself as a sinner like others,” inasmuch as “I had contritely made confession of my sins” and thus thought that those sins had been removed. It was “sheer madness to say that a man can love God above everything by his own powers.” “O you fools, you pig-theologians!” he erupted, breaking into German. “Hui! Go to work, please! Be men! Try with all your powers to eliminate these covetings that are in you! Give proof of what you say,” that it is possible to love God with all one’s strength and “without grace!”

  As he proceeds, Luther offers a weary lament: “I have been in the grind of these studies for, lo, these many years and am worn out by it, and, on the basis of long experience, I have come to be persuaded that it is a vain study doomed to perdition.” His language sharpening, he calls the subtle doctors foolish perverters whose teachings are full of “utter stupidity.” His favorite term for them is iustitiarii, which literally means “justifiers” but which for Luther connotes something like “works-mongers”—those who seek to accumulate merits in the ledger books of salvation. (Remarkably, the Jews, whom Luther had so violently assailed in his scholia on the Psalms, are largely absent from his notes on Romans. Now that he has identified the Scholastics as the main source of his misery, the Jews no longer need serve as scapegoats. The medieval theologians were the true Judaizers!)