A Ramble About Faith Alone

It is a strange thing that, given my own journey of faith, I should come to this conclusion on my own and apart from the Evangelical Protestant training in which I was initially formed; that, ultimately, and according to several Fathers of the Church, faith alone in Jesus Christ is necessary for one's salvation.

This isn't to say faith without action, because faith is action and action is faith. To be judged by one's actions is the same thing as being judged by one's faith because action is the outward expression of what one truly believes and has faith in.

It is faith in Jesus Christ which makes the transforming Energies of God active within us and around us. It is faith in Jesus Christ which makes the Sacraments effective. It is faith in Jesus Christ and God's ability and willingness to save us through His death, burial, and resurrection which makes that Saving Grace active. Though, our outward actions must reflect our inward faith to this end. No one should delude himself on this account, if your actions do not reflect the faith you profess to have then your profession is a self-deception and you do not believe what you say you do. Grace will only become active in the presence of genuine faith in Jesus Christ. Just as Jesus said, you will know a tree by its fruit. A good tree will not produce rotten fruit, neither a rotten tree good fruit. The Energies of God respond in proportion to the presence of faith.

Thus we will also, at the resurrection, be judged by both our faith and our actions because our actions demonstrate what we truly believe, and we will be judged on whether we truly believed in Jesus Christ. So it can be said truly that we are saved by faith alone, and our actions bear witness to that faith. Do you believe in Jesus Christ? Do you refrain from judgment? Do you love you enemies? Do you forgive so you will be forgiven? Do you pick up your cross and crucify your self? Do you believe Him when He told us to do these things, or is it lip-service only?

We, as human beings, none of us can tell what another person truly believes except through his actions. Only God can truly know a person's inner heart and intentions. There are times when we don't know ourselves, but must step back and observe our thoughts and actions to determine where our faith truly lies.

We are transformed into the image of Christ by Grace through faith alone, because it is only by faith Grace is made active. A person not visibly undergoing this change, however slowly or however small or great the change may be, doesn't have faith in Jesus Christ at all. But the person whose faith is but small, this person's faith must be fanned and fed, stretched, exercised, and encouraged carefully so that it grows. Any amount of faith in Jesus Christ is or can be saving faith regardless of most false teachings around which it may be wrapped. We must be careful not to extinguish this faith as we ourselves may be the cause of rendering Grace inert within that person, and this is a terrifying prospect for us, because we must answer to our Lord for it; the One who said it was better for a large millstone to be tied around our necks and be thrown into the sea than for this to happen.

So, salvation is truly, ultimately, by Grace through faith alone. We can do nothing, no good works to earn it, and yet obedience to Jesus Christ is an absolute necessity as evidence of our faith in Him.

A Ramble About Doubt

On our journey to research for the Mission which we envision, I have often struggled with doubt. No matter how many times the Lord provides for us, and no matter how magnificent a way, doubts continuously creep back into my mind as I look at the ridiculous poverty of our circumstances and the magnitude of the task in front of us.

I had something of an insight the other day as I was spending time in prayer. We were staying the night parked in a church parking lot in Iowa and I had gone to use an outdoor electrical outlet to charge my laptop and tablet. While they were charging I spent some time in prayer.

My insight was this, when doubts creep into my mind, they're not doubts about what God can do, they're doubts about what I can do. How I can accomplish something. God can do anything He wants. Me? Not so much. But this is why doubt hampers faith, because it turns our faith away from God and what He can do and it turns it towards ourselves and what we can do. And when we see what we can, or in this case can't do, we then become afraid. Doubt hampers our faith in God, because it redirects that faith towards ourselves, positively or negatively.

The impact of this on prayer, and the transformation and powers of Grace can't be underestimated. For Grace to become active, it absolutely requires faith in Jesus Christ. For prayers to bear fruit, they absolutely require faith in Jesus Christ that He will do them. But doubt throws our faith back onto ourselves and off of Him thus rendering Grace inert proportionately.

As human beings we will always have faith in something; either ourselves, other people, idols, or Jesus Christ. But the uncreated Energies of God will only be made active in the presence of faith in Jesus Christ. He will only respond to faith in Himself, and not in anything else. When faith is redirected away from Himself and onto the abilities of something or someone else, He chooses not to respond so as not to add to our delusions. Just as a psychologist doesn't want to contribute to a patient's psychosis or insanity, but draw them out of it, so also God doesn't want to add to our self-deception by responding to faith in ourselves or in idols. That wouldn't be healthy for us or bring us any closer to union with Himself. But He does respond to faith in Him however small the faith might be, and as we see and experience His responses to our faith, then, ideally, our faith in Him begins to increase and our faith in other people or things begins to decrease.

To this end, there are some times when He has to forcibly separate us from our faith in other things or people in order to increase our faith in Him. And so we lose jobs, friends, family, ideas, philosophies, theological structures, and anything else we are trusting in besides Him. The disillusionment of these losses can be painful and severe, but it is always done therapeutically like a surgeon removing a gangrenous limb because He knows if it's not removed we will not become healthy, and will likely become worse. In the process of discipleship and learning to follow Jesus Christ by Grace through faith, we must unlearn all the ways we have previously studied as to how to live because He shows us that they are not only unreliable, but they are as tangible as smoke. He is the only permanent, trustworthy reality.

In the Scriptures, Jesus gave His disciples the authority to cast out demons when He sent them out to preach, and they reported back that demons did indeed obey them and leave. But there was this one that was causing epileptic fits in a boy that they couldn't cast out, and after Jesus did cast it out they asked Him why. He responded that it was because of their lack of faith. The disciples knew for a fact that Jesus had the authority to cast out demons, and when He told them He was giving them that authority they believed Him, having seen everything else that He did. This faith in Him is what activated the Grace around them to order the demons around. But when it came to this particular boy, his condition seemed so severe they began to doubt, and misdirect their faith onto their own abilities or lack thereof. This is why Jesus again calls them “oligopistoi,” or “little-faiths,” which seems to be the name He gives them every time they begin to doubt and are unable to do anything, like when Peter stepped out on the boat to walk to Jesus on the water and then began to doubt because he started looking at the storm and the water instead of Jesus. Jesus calls him, “oligopistos.”

Doubt, misdirected faith, cripples faith in Jesus Christ, and as a result it also cripples the activity of Grace, and it can cripple answers to prayer as well. Part of God's transforming work in our lives is to remove the sources and objects of that misdirected faith so that we will actually have faith in Him alone.

A Syllabus for Discipleship

Generally speaking, a syllabus is a list of books and course materials that are needed for a class. When we become disciples of Jesus Christ, we are to study what He taught and become His students. There are certain books and methods which I believe are more helpful for this goal than others. To this end, this also involves studying what His disciples taught, and what the great "Jedi Masters" of Christianity taught and practiced.

Many of these books are available in electronic format for free, although some aren't. All should be required reading in any course on discipleship as far as I'm concerned:

The Holy Bible

The letters and writings of Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp, Justin Martyr and other Early Church Fathers

The Philokalia

The Confessions of St. Augustine

The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis

The Cloud of Unknowing

The Didache

The Release of the Spirit, and other works by the late Coptic Pope Shenouda III

The Orthodox Way by Kallistos Ware

The Paradise of the Desert Fathers

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers

The Autobiography of St. Ignatius of Loyola

The Life and Legend of St. Francis of Assissi

Many of these works can be found in the first volume of the Ante-Nicene Fathers. The rest can be found through a careful search online or at gutenberg.org and archive.org. Some are available as Kindle books for free through Amazon.com.

Any serious discipleship must begin first with the study of what Jesus actually taught and committing this to memory and practice. To this end I recommend starting with the Gospel of Matthew, getting a spiral bound notebook and pen and begin copying down everything Jesus says in the text. This is easier to do with a red letter edition of the Scriptures, but any good translation will do. There are a number of reasons for writing down, but the main one is simply to take notes on what Jesus actually said and to think about it and incorporate it more carefully.

When Jesus gave the command to disciple the nations, He explicitly said to teach them everything whatever He had commanded. Not to teach them things about Him, but what He Himself taught. So this needs to be the first and most important foundation laid down in our discipleship; what Jesus Himself taught.

From there, go to Mark, Luke, and John, and do the same thing. After you have a good grounding in understanding and practice of what Jesus taught you should be ready to go to what His Apostles said about what He taught in their letters, making up the bulk of the rest of the New Testament.

At the same time as you are copying down what Jesus said, I recommend beginning to read through The Cloud of Unknowing. This little book was originally written in Middle English, so find a good Modern English translation, but it remains one of the best books on prayer you can find.

When you are done with letters of the Apostles, go on to the letters of the Early Church Fathers. I recommend beginning with Clement of Rome, and then going on to Ignatius of Antioch, following the order of the Ante-Nicene fathers. This should give you a good grounding in how the second and third generations of the Church understood the teaching which was passed to them from the Apostles, who themselves were taught by Christ.

When you are done with The Cloud of Unknowing, start on the Philokalia. This is a long collection of spiritual writings compiled over a period of about a thousand years. Your best bet is to start at the beginning. They are largely written by Orthodox monks who lived as either solitaries or in small communities, so you may not be able to relate to them right away, but their writings contain a lot of practical wisdom on practice, prayer, and ultimately internal spiritual warfare. These men were grounded and experienced combatants in the spiritual realities which every follower of Jesus Christ must face, and about which the unbelieving world has no clue. St. Peter of Damaskos' writings in volume three in particular are a good condensation of all the learning before him and I refer back often to him.

When you are finished with Justin Martyrs writings go on to the Didache, then the Confessions of St. Augustine. From there continue on through the works listed in no particular order. It will take you a while. Where The Orthodox Way is concerned, use this as a guide if you are not already familiar with Christian doctrine and dogma of any faith tradition.

As you begin this course of discipleship, maintain regular prayer times each day following what you learn in the course textbooks. Don't neglect this. The process of salvation is by grace through faith. You must stay connected to and focused on Jesus Christ. There is no other way. Discipleship is about learning to do, not just filling your head with information. If you just want to be full of knowledge stop right now. None of this will help you and is possibly harmful to you.

No one can make you follow Jesus Christ. No one can make you become a disciple. It is a choice you must make on your own, and it is a choice you must keep making by faith. This little list of books and set of instructions isn't the only way to go about it, but it is one way and, in my opinion, a good way especially if you don't have a good spiritual guide or pastor to whom you can turn. It would be best to find a church or parish with mature Christians who can guide you, but this is not always possible in this day and age. So I offer this Syllabus to help all those who for whatever reason must begin this journey without a community to support them.

A Ramble About "Irresistible Grace"

Contrary to John Calvin, the uncreated energies of God are not irresistible. They surround us and fill us constantly because all life depends on His existence, but they are not irresistible. If His energies were irresistible, there should be no one in danger of being forever lost to eternal suffering. His energies must be cooperated with in the same way that a patient must cooperate with his course of treatment if he wants to get well. If a patient refuses to do what the physician prescribes, it isn't the physician's fault if the patient gets worse and worse. The first rule a physician follows is that if you can do any good for the patient, at least do no harm. Forcing a patient to submit to treatment is dangerous and can have the exact opposite effect you are looking for. It can cause harm to the patient. God knows this better than any human physician. And few if any physicians would treat a patient against their own wishes regardless.

It is said that we cannot respond or cooperate with God unless God first initiates it. We cannot have faith unless God first initiates this as well. And if God first initiates this, is this not irresistible Grace? And yet I would counter that it is perfectly possible for a person to spurn God's advances towards him or her. Even those who are joined to Him through baptism into Jesus Christ do this on a daily basis, to our shame. God doesn't play games with those He doesn't wish to be destroyed, and He doesn't wish any of us to be destroyed with our own eternal suffering. Grace requires cooperation on our part.

We trust in something. We have faith in something even if it is not in Jesus Christ. Many people put their faith in their own abilities, or in the abilities of others. More often then not we have faith in our delusions of material security. Faith itself, the ability to believe something as true and act on it, is not a product of Grace, but is something we do by nature one way or the other. We have to do this in order to remain sane. We instinctively have faith that when we go to bed, we will wake up the next day. We instinctively have faith that the sun will set tonight, and rise tomorrow. We instinctively have faith that when we sit in a chair, it will hold our weight, even if we have never seen that chair before. We base this faith on previous experiences with these phenomena from the time we are born. This goes down to the foundations of our psyche where we must have faith that certain things are true in order for the psyche to function properly and make sense and order of the world. Otherwise, it goes insane if there is nothing it can have faith in as being true as opposed to false.

We must direct this faith towards Jesus Christ in order for His energies to become active within us. This doesn't preclude Him arranging circumstances outside of us to induce faith in Him within us in order to activate Grace. It doesn't take much faith in Him to activate Grace, it only takes faith itself. As Jesus said, even faith the size of a mustard seed can rip a mountain from its foundations and throw it into the sea. Once Grace has been made active, it then moves within to induce more faith to continue the cycle of cooperation to initiate the salvific transformation. As long as Grace is active within the person in any way, it will continue to draw the person towards deification, union with God in His energies (though not His essence). But if the person refuses to cooperate with that Grace, it will result in his shifting the focus of his faith towards something else other than Jesus Christ. This will render Grace more and more inert proportionately drawing the person away from deification and towards eternal suffering.

I say again though, that we must direct this faith towards Jesus Christ Himself, and not towards a particular teaching, or system of theology, or any other person, but Jesus Christ Himself. There are a great many people that put their faith heavily in their denomination's system of theology or dogmatic teachings, and there are also a great many people that put their faith heavily in their church leaders. They do this, and yet Grace often seems stunted among them. Why? Because they trust more in these things than they actually do in Jesus Christ. Perhaps this has been the problem with the Church for centuries. It isn't that the truth, the Gospel, hasn't been there, it's that the people within the churches have put their trust in their leaders, theological systems, and dogmatic teachings, and not in Jesus Himself. Deifying Grace is only made active when we put our faith in Jesus Christ, and it is made active in proportion to this faith.

No, Grace isn't irresistible. If it were, we should all be mature, complete Saints with transfigured bodies right now. That we are not is testimony to this fact.

A Ramble About Faith in Prayer

I wrote down several passages today that caught my attention. I've been reading through different books of the New Testament over the last few months in the Greek text. (As to why I've been doing this, the truth is that it's been long in coming. I started learning Greek when I was fifteen, and now, twenty three years later, I'm at a point where English translations begin to really bug me and I find myself crossing out the words in italics in my English Bible which I know really shouldn't be there. I then asked myself “the” question, “why, if I know the original well enough am I still bothering with a middleman's work, however scholarly and well done?” So, I quit making excuses and just took the plunge. Besides this, it makes my reading slow down enough to where I can actually take the time to think and meditate on what I read devotionally.) The latest book I've been reading through has been Matthew, although the truth is that I cheated a little. I started in Matthew five, rather than Matthew one, because I really wanted to jump to the meat of what Jesus taught.

The thing that caught my eye this time, and that I've been pondering now for some time is Jesus' insistence that if we have even the smallest size of faith we can order mountains, trees, and shrubbery to do the most unnatural things, and they will obey. The reason why it struck me this time is that I realized today that Matthew records Jesus as saying it more than once in his gospel. For some reason, I kept thinking the only repetitions of this were in between Gospels, and were of the same event. They are not. I have thought, more and more over the years, that anything the Gospel writers took pains to record more than once was an important enough part of His teaching that He said it regularly. In Matthew, the two occurrences which stuck out to me are:

He said to them, “Because of your unbelief. For most certainly I tell you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will tell this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.” (Matthew 17:20, WEB)

Jesus answered them, “Most certainly I tell you, if you have faith, and don’t doubt, you will not only do what was done to the fig tree, but even if you told this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ it would be done. All things, whatever you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive.” (Matthew 21-21-22, WEB)

I then started looking up other similar passages in John's writings, and also in James, that had stuck out to me:

“You didn’t choose me, but I chose you, and appointed you, that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain; that whatever you will ask of the Father in my name, he may give it to you.” (John 15:16, WEB)

“Most certainly I tell you, whatever you may ask of the Father in my name, he will give it to you.” (John 16:23b, WEB)

“But if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach; and it will be given to him. But let him ask in faith, without any doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven by the wind and tossed. For let that man not think that he will receive anything from the Lord He is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.” (James 1:5-8, WEB)

“This is the boldness which we have toward him, that, if we ask anything according to his will, he listens to us. And if we know that he listens to us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions which we have asked of him.” (1 John 5:14-15, WEB)

I have been trying to understand these passages more, especially in reference to my own prayers and my own faith, or lack thereof. Jesus and His immediate disciples were insistent on this point and so it should not be taken lightly, and neither should the power it represents be. At the same time, I and many others know from experience that God does not always give us what we ask for when we ask for it. I believe that there are many reasons for this. More often than not, it's because what we ask for isn't in our best interests as He sees it. The closer we draw to Him, the better able we are to sense this in our requests through Grace and the Holy Spirit. But because of this, there always exists the element of doubt, even if it is just, “I am asking for this, but what if God doesn't think it's the best thing for me?”

In my previous Ramble I explored the nature of Sacrament and the relationship of God's uncreated energies to faith in Jesus Christ. In the same way, according to these passages, our requests in prayer, according to Jesus, are directly related to our faith in Him and belief that He will do as we ask. According to the Apostle John, there is the added stipulation that it be asked according to His will. And according to James the Elder, there can be no doubting that God will grant what is asked, otherwise the person asking shouldn't expect anything to happen because he really doesn't expect anything to happen to begin with.

So, as I have been meditating on this, it comes back to what I was saying previously. The transforming, uncreated energies of God are made active in direct proportion to our faith in Christ, as is also the movement of God for which we ask through prayer. To round this out, I will add that the charismata are likely made active and empowered in direct proportion to our faith in Christ as well.

So then, how do we approach this? Faith isn't faith unless it produces action. As I have said many times, you will always act on what you truly believe. Whether or not that's what you say you believe remains to be seen by what you do. So we must approach prayer in the same way we must approach every other aspect of our transforming relationship with God through Jesus Christ, by Grace through this kind of genuine faith. The faith which precedes the actions of faith.

This is why St. Peter began to sink beneath the waves when he took his eyes off of Jesus. He started believing something else besides the fact that through Jesus he could walk on the stormy water. I think this is also the problem in my own life. I began to look at the storms raging around me, and began to believe more that they would sink me, rather than believing that Jesus would hold me up regardless of the storms. Like St. Peter, I cried out “Lord, save me!” And like St. Peter, Jesus gently rebuked me, grabbing my hand and calling me, “little-faith.” While at the same time letting me know that He was still there and wasn't going to let me sink. We still haven't made it back to the boat yet, to carry the analogy further, but we're on the way.

In the ancient church, there are records of healings, exorcisms, and astounding miracles for centuries after Jesus ascended. Many of them were performed through the clergy, but many of them were also demonstrated through the laity as well and were commonplace among the church for centuries, because of their faith. At one time, exorcisms were the routine office of the laity, not the priests or bishops, and could be performed on the fly without preparation. This was the level of faith and discipleship which the church maintained at one time. It is striking that they ceased to be commonplace in proportion to the enculturation of the Christian faith among the people. When it became trendy and popular to be “Christian”, the true signs of a disciple were relegated to those “special Saints.”

I am reminded of a key line from the movie Prince of Egypt, “Believe, and you will see God's wonders.” The main reason why we don't see them so commonplace among us now, I think should be obvious. Jesus pretty much spelled it out.