As a Catholic, I have had many discussions with my Protestant friends who adhere to the dogma Sola Fide (Faith Alone), which states that once saved you cannot fall from grace with God. Catholics believe that faith without works is hollow:
So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead — James 2:17
I’ve recently rediscovered the writings of Bishop Fulton Sheen. Currently I’m reading Peace of Soul, a book written at the dawn of the Cold War in 1949. Sheen looks at things from another direction I had not considered: works without faith. As I read I realized he was describing perfectly how the modern Liberal approaches religion:
We are willing to be saved from poverty, from war, from ignorance, from disease, from economic insecurity; such types of salvation leave our individual whims and passions and concupiscences untouched. That is one of the reasons why social Christianity is so very popular, why there are many who contend that the business of Christianity is to do nothing but to help in slum clearance or the development of international amity.
After the 2004 election the Democrats realized that the group of people to push the Republicans to victory was the faithful. So what did they do? They got that old time religion. But they only embraced the “works” part. To be sure, that is an important part of knowing God. But works without faith is also hollow:
This kind of religion is, indeed, very comfortable, for it leaves the individual conscience alone. It is even possible that some persons are prompted to courageous reforms of social injustices by the very inquietude and uneasiness of their individual consciences: Knowing that something is wrong on the inside, they attempt to compensate for it by righting the wrong on the outside. This is also the mechanism of those persons, who, having accumulated great fortunes, try to ease their consciences by subsidizing revolutionary movements.
This is the “religion” of environmentalists, of Palestinian rights organizations, of anti-war groups like Code Pink, of the entire leadership of the Democrat Party. Even people like Bill Gates and George Soros call this religion home. But Sheen points out the dangers of this “works only” religion:
The first temptation of Satan on the Mount was to try to induce Our Lord to give up the salvation of souls and to concentrate upon social salvation by turning stones into bread – on the false assumption that it was hungry stomachs and not corrupted hearts that made an unhappy civilization. … Sensing a broader need for religion, others are willing to join a Christian sect so long as it concentrates on social “uplift” or the elimination of pain but leaves untouched the individual need of atoning for sin. At the average dinner table people do not object to the subject of religion being introduced into a conversation – provided that religion has nothing to do with the purging of sin and guilt.
Wow! That is so obvious, yet so profound. Left-leaning social justice groups have no problem tackling the noble cause of caring for AIDS patients but recoil at the thought of atonement for sins. In my own Church such “liberation theology” groups will open shelters for illegal immigrants but refuse to acknowledge that that they are leading those same people (and themselves) into a criminal existence, causing them to live in a shadow world.
Faith and works are intertwined. I think a real relationship with God requires both.