j9house:
I am currently in an apologetics discussion with a protestant (Christian Reformed). We seem to be arguing the same point about sola fide.When I give my case for faith and works, she agrees with me, but says that the works will come out of faith. She does not think works are a conscious act, but happen when someone has true faith. Is this typical Calvinist theology, and do we actually agree on sola fide, but are using different terminology?
I’m a bit puzzled about the comment, “she doesn’t think works are a conscious act” . . . I presume she does not believe that salvation by grace through faith leaves one in a perpetual stupor, in which one spends one days doing good works as if while sleepwalking?
Arminians and Calvinists believe that God takes the initiative in salvation and that salvation is ultimately the gracious gift of God to an undeserving sinner. Arminians believe that God enables all sinners, universally, to accept Christ and to serve Him, but that only some actually do so. To the Calvinist this appears to negate the point that Scripture makes that faith is not of ourselves but is a gift of God–and that no one would have grounds to boast. If I have been saved because I chose God where someone else was equally ‘enabled’ to choose God but chose Him not–there must have been something of myself, something of which I could boast, which caused me to choose God.
Calvinists say that the will and the intellect are utterly corrupt and that of ourselves NO ONE CAN CHOOSE GOD. God must not only enable us to choose but cause us to choose–because by nature we are at utter enmity with Him and will ever and always reject Him. Since God is utterly sovereign and owes his creatures absolutely nothing–He is in no sense under any obligation to save all. He is absolutely free to choose and one cannot even invoke moral principles in order to say that He ought not to choose only some and not others. Also: no implication is being made that God is choosing some ‘for no reason at all’. He does have His reasons–those reasons simply do not inhere to anything virtuous, desirable, or needful inherent within the individual mortal whom He elects.
Having elected a human, God also is the One who sanctifies and preserves the person. It is the sanctification and preservation which we normally think of as good works. The right beliefs of a person, as well as the ordinarily-virtuous character of his or her life, are evidences of their salvation but not proofs of it. The person who wishes to be saved must first know that he or she has thrown themselves utterly upon the mercy of God through faith in Christ and then walk in good works to the best of their ability, not trusting in those works to save but in the mercy of Christ–but ever mindful that one who would abandon virtue for vice bears forth bad fruit as evidence that they were not ever one of the Elect. Yet, even a good tree can sometimes bear bad fruit: therefore one can never be fully certain of one’s standing before God. One can only continue to put one’s trust in God.
If this is the general direction of your friend’s argumentation, she is a Calvinist and her views on this topic would be dramatically different from those espoused by Catholics since Tom Aquinas. Augustine, of course, was Calvin’s schoolmaster in the topic of predestination but relatively few Catholic theologians embrace Augustinianism these days. See also “No Place For Sovereignity” by Lloyd McGregor Wright for a fuller discussion of Calvinism and it’s historic roots.
