Can someone explain to me what this means?
Note that the statement is twofold. Let’s unpack both parts:
“Freedom from the bondage of sin.” That assumes that sin is a kind of slavery. What happens when you are freed from it? You don’t
have to sin. One of the flaws I see in Catholic criticism of evangelical ecclesiology is the implied assumption that one is naturally going to sin as much as one can. I presume that the Catholics who make these kinds of arguments don’t really mean it the way it sounds, but to an evangelical that’s how it sounds. From an evangelical point of view, if you have Jesus in your heart you won’t
want to sin. So the first part of the good news is that you don’t
have to sin–at least, not constantly and habitually. You are free to love God and neighbor as you were created to do.
But, evangelicals (following Augustine) would say, in fact we will sometimes sin. We slip up. This is fairly uncontroversial–the main difference from Catholicism is that Catholics distinguish between venial and mortal sin. Catholics do believe, as I understand it, that everyone falls into venial sins from time to time.
So freedom from the
consequences of sin, for evangelical Protestants, means that you don’t have to worry about God punishing you when you do slip up. This only makes sense if you understand the previous assumptions: the fully orthodox assumption sin is a kind of “slavery” (not, as Catholic criticisms sometimes seem to imply, the behavior in which any rational person will engage if not prevented by punishment), and the further assumption that a “true believer” won’t
want to sin.
I think that the point Catholics need to think about is the evangelical assumption about what a “true believer” is. For many evangelicals, this involves “eternal security,” but not all. All evangelicals, though, assume that as long as you are a believer you have the basic desire to love God. This raises several questions:
- Can you have the faith that is a gift of God and not also have the gift of charity? Protestants (including Luther, who is much misunderstood by Catholics) have traditionally said no. You don’t need charity to perfect faith (this is the claim by Luther that leads to misunderstanding), but true faith will always come with charity. Catholics say yes. So for Catholics you can have faith (belief in everything God has revealed to be true), which is a supernatural gift of God, and yet not have love and thus not be saved. Evangelical Protestants understand by a “believer” someone who places their whole trust in Jesus for salvation, and traditionally teach that such a person will of course love God and neighbor. It comes with the territory, because the love of God is shed abroad in the hearts of all who believe. I think this is the key difference between Protestant and Catholic soteriology, and I find it a very difficult issue myself. Intuitively, I remain strongly attached to the Protestant position, and I have a lot of problems with what I see as the evangelistic consequences of the Catholic position. Catholics seem to have a lot of trouble using New Testament language about faith in Jesus–they seem to have an overly intellectualized understanding of what “faith” means from my point of view. And yet, when it comes to the technical definition of faith, Catholics can make a good Biblical case. I don’t think James is the real deal-breaker for Protestants (I find the focus on James a bit baffling, since I think traditional Protestantism has fairly good explanations of James). For me the real problem is 1 Cor. 13. Paul seems to speak of faith as something that one can have without charity, and which is totally useless in that condition. That’s precisely the traditional Catholic language about faith, coming from the very Apostle who elsewhere supposedly provides the grounding for the Protestant view. I remain hopeful that there’s a way to combine the strengths of both positions.
- Can you know whether you are a true believer (in the evangelical sense, i.e., in a state of grace) or not? Evangelicals say absolutely with regard to your present state, and eternal-security-believing evangelicals would say that this applies to your future state as well; Catholics traditionally say that you can have reasonable but not absolute certainty of your present state, and can never be sure that you will not fall away in the future. I think Catholics are right on this one, but this post isn’t primarily about what I believe.
- What then do we say about people who claim to have faith and don’t show its fruit? Typically, Protestants would say that such people don’t have faith. But this raises problems for the doctrine of assurance (discussed in point 2). I don’t think Protestants have ever had a good answer to this–it’s one of the places where I think Protestant soteriology breaks down hopelessly, both from an intellectual and a practical point of view. It is clearly possible to think one has faith in the Protestant sense and not have it, if one maintains with the Reformers and traditional Protestantism that faith always bear fruit in works.
Some modern evangelicals, faced with this conflict between their doctrine of assurance and the traditional understanding of works as the inevitable fruit of faith,
have fallen into genuine antinomianism. They will claim that anyone who thinks they believe (or at least, anyone who still thinks they believe after an evangelical has “correctly” explained what believing is) really does believe. That requires them to say that lots of people are “weak Christians,” otherwise known as people who don’t live like Christians at all yet are still “saved.” Many evangelicals haven’t thought the matter through very carefully and live with the tension between the two principles.
Edwin
