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The Great ‘Good Works’ Misunderstanding
Examining the Evangelical Claim that ‘Good Works’ have Nothing to Do with Coming into Salvation
If there is one thing that deeply perplexes the more fair minded of evangelical Christians, it is those non-Christians they know who do live consistent genuinely good lives.
Through the power of television we are constantly being bombarded with examples of the extremes of good and evil. On one hand, we see numerous examples of the horrendous evil of which human beings are capable, yet on the other hand we are increasingly seeing the amazing commitment to generosity and goodness of many other people. And while some of these genuinely good people will be committed Christians, many are not. This is a great puzzle for evangelical Christians brought up, as they are, on teachings which constantly proclaim how increasingly evil the world is getting, while at the same time desperately trying to trivialise and minimise the goodnesses of non-Christians.
While in pastoral ministry I talked with a woman who was a member of a local evangelical congregation. She expressed the struggle she was having in believing that only Christians would go to heaven on death. In her work for an international aid agency she was relating daily with both Christian and non-Christian people involved in long term commitment to the world’s poor. The work was low paid and most of those working in this field could have easily earned much higher salaries in the business world. To survive more than a few months required strong commitment of the will, great self sacrifice and above all a loving compassionate heart. From firsthand experience she had to admit that many of the non-Christians she worked with were at least as loving, even under real pressure to be otherwise, as any of the Christians involved, herself included!
She related daily with people of every belief system. Some had absolutely no religious commitment at all, some even claimed to be agnostic or atheistic. Then there were those of other faiths. Among them, she knew, were Jehovah Witnesses, Mormons, several New Age types, Bahais, Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus. All of these people’s lives showed a very deep level of consistent costly self sacrifice, consistent compassion and the highest level of personal integrity and honesty.
Her question to me was this, "Bruce, when I see these sorts of loving character traits in Christians, I say ‘Oh, isn’t it wonderful. These are the fruits of the Holy Spirit, this is Jesus at work through them. But when I see these very same character traits at work in non-Christians I am supposed to dismiss them as merely ‘humanistic good works’. Because we say that ‘good works’ can’t ever save you, these supposedly count for nothing with God! This simply isn’t fair and it isn’t just. How am I supposed to answer this?"
At the time I was in the midst of an unwitting journey from being a convinced exclusivist to what could be called ‘an uneasy exclusivist’, and all I could think to say was, "Well, we don’t have all the answers on this difficult issue, but what we do know is that God will never treat anyone in a way that is unfair or unjust, so we can only leave these sorts of questions up to him."
Looking back I still think my answer was basically correct and certainly more generous than many an exclusivist would have given. But what it did not do was to face this major issue squarely and seek to answer some of its very disturbing implications.
Perhaps most disturbing is the fact that we evangelicals have come up with a belief system which forces us to have to regard the countless numbers of truly good, loving and generous non-Christians in a manner which is at best patronising and condescending and at worst appallingly arrogant and deeply unjust. What’s more, it causes fair-minded non-Christians to regard the Christian God as the source of such attitudes.
It is high time that we started to face up to this issue and the great injustices that our doctrines perpetrate against the vast numbers of truly good and decent non-Christian people.
Important: In order to fully grasp what this article is endeavouring to say and all the reasonings behind it, please first carefully read the main article in this Inclusive Christianity section entitled The Broadness of Salvation.
A Classic Example of the Typical Evangelical Mind-set
In a recent ‘Planet Guides’ TV documentary on the US state of New England, the interviewer talked to a group of Christian motor cycle enthusiasts. During the course of the brief discussion one of the Christian women came out with a classic evangelical claim. Reflecting on how a person becomes a Christian, she said with great conviction, "It’s got nothing to do with being good, you only have to ‘believe in Jesus’."
This woman’s comment illustrates clearly one of the biggest mistakes that evangelicals make in regard to the issue of ‘on what basis’ God accepts people into relationship with himself.
It is important to realise that this discussion is all about the actual entry point into salvation. Evangelicals will rightly stress the fact that good works are a sign that a person actually has been saved, and will look on them as ‘the fruit of salvation’. But they strongly deny that goodness on its own, no matter how amazing, plays any role whatsoever in bringing any person into a relationship with God. They call this ‘salvation by works’ and totally reject any such possibility.
They teach, as the Christian biker woman was to say, that to receive ‘salvation’ you must first ‘believe in Jesus.’ By this they mean that a person must be able to agree with and believe the teaching that Jesus is God and that he died on the cross to forgive our sins. In the light of this the individual must commit to Christ and ask him to take control of their life. Evangelicals assert that the Bible teaches that since the death of Christ on the Cross this is the only way a person comes into a valid saving relationship with God. It does not matter how genuinely loving and compassionate a person may have been during their life. If they fail to ‘believe in Jesus’ (in the way described above) they will be judged by Christ and end up spending eternity in hell.
‘No Salvation by Good Works’
The evangelical catch-cry ‘there is no salvation by good works’ completely misses the point and confuses the issue. What evangelicals should be emphasising is that doing ‘good works’ with self-serving loveless motives can’t ‘save you’.
“If I give all I have to the poor and surrender my body to the flames but have not love, I gain nothing.” (1 Corinthians 13.1-3)
But ….. if I do such things (in other words keep the ‘Golden Rule’) and do them with love, then I gain life, both in this world and the next.
When evangelicals claim that ‘good works’ are never able to ‘save you’, they exhibit a consistent and serious confusion. When their arguments are examined, it becomes clear that what they are actually (and quite correctly, in my opinion) objecting to are those seriously inadequate heart attitudes which, when present in a person, close the door to Divine relationship. If they could only realise it, their real objection is that ‘good deeds’ done from thoroughly self-serving loveless motives are never acts of genuine goodness in the first place. And, quite clearly, anyone producing such counterfeit good deeds betrays the true spirit of the command to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’.
However, most evangelicals miss this point completely and fixate on the poorly thought through slogan ‘salvation has got nothing to do with being good’. They are so indoctrinated by this slogan that they completely miss the fact that Jesus clearly taught in many places in the synoptic gospels that keeping the ‘Golden Rule’ with a pure heart (that is, with ‘acts of genuine goodness’) has got a whole lot to do with opening the door into what he termed ‘eternal life’.
We will now examine more closely the evangelical objections on this issue.
No Salvation by Way of ‘Building up Merit Points’
Evangelicals reject the view that Divine relationship can be achieved by building up merit points through the giving of alms or charity and/or the performing of prescribed religious sacrifices or rituals. They disagree with the view that says that ‘as long as your merit points outweigh your demerit points then you are in good standing with God and heading for heaven in the next life’. In doing so they rightly point out that relationship with God cannot be based on some arbitrary arithmetical formula which declares – ‘51% merit points and you are in, less than 50% and you are out’. Divine relationship simply does not work this way.
Using this rationale, evangelicals will rightly declare that a ‘merit based’ model is invalid and as such cannot save. But in saying this they usually miss the main issue. Let me restate it simply.
While their rejection of the mechanical/arithmetical version is valid they fail to see that the real thing keeping the door of Divine relationship closed is good works and/or sacrificial acts performed from largely self-serving and loveless heart attitudes and motivations! Such attitudes may be found anywhere. All religions have their own versions of them, Christianity included.
It is a huge mistake to imagine that a person can manipulate and even fool God by doing all the ‘right things’, like giving to the poor, doing good deeds, making the right sacrifices and performing the right rituals in the right way. If, through it all, their heart is hard or begrudging and their actions do not arise out of genuine ‘goodness of heart’ then Christianity is right, ‘good works’ cannot save them. If a person imagines that they can heartlessly build up just enough merit points in this life to keep God satisfied (and hopefully at arms length so that he doesn’t interfere too much with what they really want to do with their life) so that they gain heaven in the next, then such merit is false and useless. Likewise, if someone’s motivation for doing good things is based on some type of ‘prosperity doctrine’ and the hope that they will invoke some ‘divine principle’ to get God to ‘bless and prosper them’ with material goods, then they are fooling themself.
These wrongly motivated so called ‘good works’ can never form the basis of a relationship with God, and in pointing this out evangelicals are correct. But the vital point they usually fail to see is this. If these same goodnesses are performed from a heart that is, in most part*, free from the above smelly motives and impulsed by genuine love, then Jesus teaches quite clearly that such good works (which are, in effect, "doing unto others what you would have them do unto you") do usher an individual into ‘life’. (See Matthew 7.12-14.)
• (I say ‘in most part’ as I doubt if anyone is capable of having one hundred percent pure motivations in this area.)
No Salvation by Way of ‘I’m as Good as the Next Fellow’
Evangelicals also rightly reject the sort of attitudes often shown by those people who really want no part in any relationship with God, or with anyone else for that matter, that might require from them a life of costly self-sacrifice.
Such people often hide behind a justification that goes, "Hey, what do you mean I’m a sinner! Okay, maybe I’m not perfect, but I’m at least as good as the next fellow. My good points outweigh my bad points so I don’t need to ‘come to Jesus’, I don’t need any God dying for my sins, thank you very much. In fact, I’m good enough on my own. I can earn my own way into God’s good books, if indeed there is a God, so push off and stop bothering me."
This is just another version of ‘salvation by merit points’ or, as it is sometimes called, the ‘debits and credits’ or ‘brownie points’ view. It says, in effect, that if my good points outweigh my bad points then I’m okay and God will have to accept me. If he doesn’t, I’ll have a thing or two to say to him! This type of statement shines a searchlight on very smelly core heart attitudes. It shows up the fact that such a person, while being quite partial to the thought of ‘going to heaven’ after death, is not at all interested in doing God’s will in this life, nor anything else that will involve too much self-sacrifice. Instead, they will appeal to their largely illusory good deeds, and perhaps lack of commonly accepted evil, and demand that God let them into heaven. They seem quite unaware that their great sin is what C.S. Lewis described as the sin of “above all things, not wanting to be interfered with,” (1) least of all by any God demanding the crucifixion of self-firstness and self-rule.
Quite clearly, evangelicals are correct in rejecting ‘good works’ like these, which are held up pridefully to excuse basic selfishness and spiritual apathy. Such deeply entrenched heart attitudes make it impossible for a person to live in any sort of a meaningful relationship with God or their fellow humans.
But note, this is again all about smelly heart attitudes. It has nothing to do with the question of what, if any, part genuine heart motivated goodness plays in causing a person to be welcomed by God. Therefore, to claim as evangelicals are apt to do that this is an example of how ‘good works’ cannot save a person completely misses the point and demonstrates just how they have confused the whole issue.
Recently, while we were lunching with a refreshingly enlightened evangelical Christian couple the woman commented that the world was full of many genuinely good Muslims. Her husband responded, "Yes, the world is full of many genuinely good people, and some of them are Christians." The emphasis was his.
THE FRIGHTENING ATTITUDE OF THE EVANGELICAL CHURCH TOWARDS GENUINELY GOOD NON-CHRISTIANS
The world is full of genuinely good people who would not call themselves Christians or ‘religious’. Yet what they do have in common with genuine Christians is that they also live a similar life-style of costly self sacrifice and loving service to human kind (and/or the environment) and their lives are characterised by consistent ‘good fruit’. In fact such people show exactly the same ‘fruit’ that good Christians display. Some, indeed, may show a lot more fruit a lot more consistently than some Christians ever do!
Yet tragically, when confronted with people like this (and remember, this world is full of them), the official evangelical position is that the genuinely good things done by non-Christians, even when they are identical to those done by Christians, can never ever be seen as the sort of ‘good fruit’ that Jesus speaks about in Matthew 7. On this logic they refuse to class such people as the ‘good trees’ whom Jesus obviously regarded as true disciples. In fact evangelicals will claim that such goodnesses cut absolutely no ice whatsoever with God, are at best mere humanistic good works, and can therefore never be that which establishes a ‘saving’ relationship with God.
Even worse, many will say that God actually despises the good things non-Christians do! To support this shocking view, they will, totally out of context, quote Isaiah 64.4, saying that God regards unbelievers’ good deeds as nothing but ‘polluted used menstrual rags’. Note, it is only the ‘unbelievers’ whose good deeds are despised. Christians, if they do identical good things, are said to be displaying a wonderful example of the love of Christ!
Lest it be thought that I am exaggerating this issue I share the following conversation. In a recent discussion on precisely this issue, an otherwise very caring and likeable evangelical man in his late twenties came out with these exact words to try and counter what I was saying about the often profound self-effacing goodnesses of non-Christian people. “Oh, sorry,” he exclaimed, “these people aren’t the ‘good trees’ that Jesus spoke about, and they can’t be producing ‘good fruit’. Their good works are just ‘humanistic good works’.”
How did this tragic understanding arise?
The short answer is that it came about through inadequate evangelical biblical scholarship. (For another most important slant on the reasons behind this understanding, read carefully the article on The Broadness of Salvation.)
This evangelical view is based largely on:
1. A mistaken interpretation of Paul’s words in Ephesians 2.8-9.
2. A mistaken understanding of the fundamental purpose and nature of Christ’s work on the cross, and therefore
3. A mistaken understanding of the ‘new covenant’.
1. Misunderstanding Paul’s words in Ephesians
Paul writes in Ephesians 2.9-10, “For it is by grace that you are saved through faith, this is not of yourself but is the gift of God. Not by works, least any man should boast. For we are God’s workmanship recreated in Christ that we may do good works which God had prepared in advance for us to do.”
Over the centuries evangelicals have interpreted these ‘works’ that can’t save us as ‘good works’, that is acts of love, generosity and compassion, despite the fact that in 2.9 Paul does not insert the word ‘good’ in front of ‘works’ at all.
Throughout Paul’s letters, on virtually every occasion when he wants to refer to works of compassion and goodness, he uses the term ‘good works’. This precise point is emphasised even more by Paul’s very next words when, in 2.10, and referring directly to acts of loving compassion, he uses his usual term ‘good works’. To interpret ‘works’ in 2.9, as evangelicals do, to mean ‘any form of human goodness’ is seriously flawed, especially when the meaning of what Paul is trying to say is painfully obvious.
What were these ‘works’ that cannot save you? It is clear that when, in this context, Paul uses the word ‘works’ he is referring to the ‘works’ of the Jewish purity law, not to ‘good works’, an error perpetuated for hundreds of years from evangelical pulpits. Even the conservative evangelical Bible translation, the Amplified Bible, supports this view when it translates the first part of 2.9 as, “Not because of works [not the fulfilment of the law’s demands]…..”
This is made even more obvious when we consider the following:
a) Paul’s great obsession and contribution to Christian doctrine, and the subject that dominated most of his letters, was precisely the futility of the Jewish sacrificial and purity laws to forgive sin and bring about a real relationship with God.
b) The church at Ephesus, like most of the churches of this area, was made up in part of Jewish converts to Christianity.
Paul had spent three months arguing in the synagogue at Ephesus. When he was finally kicked out he would, undoubtedly, have taken his many Jewish converts with him. He was to spend another two years in Ephesus. During that time he would make many more converts from among the sizable Jewish population. They would become part of the Ephesian church. (See Acts 19.) In Ephesus, as in all of the churches with Jewish converts, the whole issue of what, if any, place Jewish purity laws had in the Christian scheme of salvation was a hot topic and an ongoing issue of debate and controversy. In the light of this, to imagine that Paul would have used such an obvious Jewish ‘code’ word as ‘works’ and not meant by it ‘the works of the law’ is inconceivable. Therefore, to claim as evangelicals try to do that the word ‘works’ in this passage refers to ‘works of goodness’ is, at best, bad scholarship, at worst, quite unbelievable.
2. The Evangelical Counter-argument Reveals their Core Error
Evangelicals will try and counter this by rightly pointing out that in Ephesians 2.9 Paul does say “For it is by grace you are saved through faith, this is not of yourselves but is the gift of God.” They interpret this in the following way:
a) Grace means ‘God’s free and unmerited favour towards humankind’. Therefore through Christ’s death on the cross the price for sin was paid, divine justice was met and forgiveness of sin was now possible. The result was entry into the ‘Age of Grace’ or the ‘new covenant/agreement’ between God and man.
(In differentiating the time since the Cross as the ‘Age of Grace’, evangelicals forget that grace has always been an essential element in relationship. If every human relationship demands the grace which accepts individuals ‘warts and all’, how much more profound has always been the grace expressed by God in his relationship with humans. It is grace which, throughout the whole of human history, has formed the bridge between Divinity and often very imperfect individuals.)
b) They conclude that this means that all the ways that God accepted people into relationship with himself in the period of time before the Cross are now finished with and no longer apply, therefore………
c) They say that from the time of the Cross forward there is only one way of entering into Divine relationship that is acceptable to God. A person must knowingly ‘turn towards’ Christ, seek his forgiveness for their sins, then give themself to Christ in life-long service. This alone brings a person into salvation.
d) If they are to be consistent with their official teaching, evangelicals must therefore deny any chance of true Divine relationship in this life or the next to even the most exceptionally consistently loving, compassionate people. This, despite the fact that (as has been noted elsewhere) in the synoptic gospels Jesus Christ did not teach such an understanding. The fruit of their lives is the same fruit that Jesus said could only grow in the lives of those ‘good trees’ who were the real followers of God the Father and himself!
Let me recap on a much misunderstood part of Jesus teaching as to just what it is that determines whether a person is living in true relationship with himself and with God.
3. “By their fruits you will know them.”
In Matthew 7.16-20 Jesus said that “A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Thus, by their fruit you will recognise them.” Here Christ’s logic is verging on brutal. What he is saying is, if you find a person, any person, whose life produces ‘good fruit’ then they must, of necessity, be one of those he calls a ‘good tree’. As such they are counted by Jesus to be walking on, what he calls in 7.13. ‘the narrow way’!
What did he mean by ‘good fruit’?
Good fruit is nothing other than what we call ‘The Golden Rule’, that is “Do to others what you would have them do to you.”
What he is saying is this. If a person makes this great command the bedrock and goal of their life they will be a ‘good tree’ and therefore produce ‘good fruit’. This is clearly shown by the fact that a few sentences earlier in 7.12 Jesus spells out the most important of all the commandments, “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” He then immediately launches into his famous and much misinterpreted passage about the ‘narrow way that leads to life’ and the few that travel that way.
So, what did he mean by "the narrow way"?
It is vital to note that the ‘narrow way’ is not ‘Jesus Christ’. This is another common evangelical misunderstanding preached in thousands of evangelistic sermons over the centuries, some of my own included! The only possible interpretation of this passage is that this ‘narrow way’ can only be the same Golden Rule - that costly commitment of a person’s life to always seek the highest good for others.
To claim, as evangelicals do, that the love, goodness, compassion and integrity as exemplified in ‘The Golden Rule’ count for nothing and cannot cause a person to be accepted by God as having salvation, is totally at odds with what Jesus Christ teaches in this Matthew 7 passage, and with several other key teachings in the synoptic gospels.
If I were to once again encounter the evangelical woman referred to at the beginning of this article I would no longer be caught on the back foot, struggling to adequately answer her heartfelt sense of injustice. This time I could confidently affirm with her that anyone whose life is committed to costly, self-sacrificial and loving service to the world, anyone whose actions arise out of a genuinely ‘good heart’ is in a saving relationship with God. Their consistent ‘good fruit’ makes them ‘good trees’ and therefore disciples, regardless of traditional evangelical teaching.
References
1. Lewis, CS Surprised By Joy Collins Fontana London 1969 (1955) p182
Note: For a fuller discussion of these and other passages see the articles The Broadness of Salvation and What about the Heathen?
By Bruce Puddle
www.ists-spiritualschool.org
From section: Inclusive Christianity
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