Faith Without Deeds

Faith without deeds

I honestly don’t know how to sit down and write a feel-good blog post for well-meaning Christian women to read right now. 

As I look around the world and at our nation at the moment, very little feels good. Immigrants with legal status are being kidnapped off the streets. Tax-paying, productive members of our communities are being swept into vans and absconded with. Children are being hauled out of their homes in the middle of the night - handcuffed, naked, in the middle of the street. American troops are being deployed to our own cities; huge swaths of American citizens are deemed “the enemy within” simply because they hold different values and disagree with the party in charge. School children and political figures are being murdered weekly. Children are going hungry and without medical care, much of which will only get worse over the coming months. 

Today, Christians across the spectrum disagree on myriad issues such as LGBTQ rights, immigration, abortion access, environmental stewardship, and much more. However, this is not a phenomenon unique to this moment in time. Historically, Christians have found themselves diametrically opposed on a number of issues. Christians both fought for the end of chattel slavery and defended the practice of owning other humans as property. In fact, the Southern Baptist Convention was formed in 1845 when a group of Baptist enslavers broke off from Northern Baptists over the issue of owning slaves, claiming that slavery was a Biblically supported institution. In Europe, many Christians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer decried and even actively fought the Nazis, while many others bought into their ideology wholeheartedly.

But how can we make sense of this incongruence amongst Christians? I recently listened to a sermon out of Restore Austin that addresses the very discordance I’m struggling with. 

In this sermon, pastor Zach Lambert begins with a short history lesson - bear with me, it really does tie in. A loose summary goes:

For the first 300 years after Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension, it was illegal to identify as a follower of Christ. Despite extreme persecution to the point of state-sanctioned execution, the way of Jesus flourished and continued to attract more and more followers. In its earliest and arguably purest iteration, the Christian faith existed in direct opposition to empire. Where Rome valued strength, victory, and self-adulation, the way of Jesus valued humility, mutual submission, and selflessness. Where Rome pursued wealth and military victory, the followers of Jesus used their resources to care for those most in need and laid down their weapons in favor of unity. 

Then, in 312 AD, Roman Emperor Constantine had a vision of Christ leading the way to victory and converted. Following his conversion, Constantine legalized the religion of Christianity and ended the state-sponsored persecution of Christians. 

In 325, Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea to formalize exactly what someone must believe to be considered a Christian by the government. Not only did the Roman government begin to allow for Christianity to exist, but it began to mandate what it meant to be Christian - to the extent that religious leaders holding minority or fringe beliefs were labeled heretics and, in many cases, executed. 

By 380 AD, Nicene Christianity was the official and required religion of the Roman Empire. 

During a 70-year period, Christianity went from a fringe offshoot of Judaism, available to anyone,, to an institutionalized set of beliefs prescripted by a limited and powerful group of men - a shift that has reverberated through history and still permeates Christianity today. 

Whereas Christianity first meant a way of life marked by devotion to Christ and a commitment to emulating his way of being (Christian literally means “little Christ”), it has become a thing we think, not a thing we do - sometimes, completely divorced from the way we live. But I don’t think that is ever what Christ would have wanted. As Zach points out in this sermon, 

“Jesus did not say, here is the truth, come believe it. He said I am the truth, come follow me.”

In the book of James, we get a blueprint for what it means to follow Christ. James 2:14-17 says, 

“What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food.  If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it?  In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.”

He continues in this vein for the rest of the chapter. James is unequivocable in his thesis statement that “faith without works is dead,” repeating it throughout this section of scripture.

When James uses the term faith here, he is talking about an intellectual assent to the idea of Christ and what his life and death represent. He reminds us in verse 19 that “even the demons believe that – and shudder.” He wants us to see that intellectual adherence to a set of beliefs is not sufficient. Jesus didn’t intend for us to merely check the box of right beliefs. But he’s not suggesting that completing a checklist of good works will do the trick either. James is reminding us that a life-changing dependence on Christ will animate our lives. The deeds James talks about are not an optional component of faith, they are the natural, tangible evidence of the Spirit at work inside of us. 

New Testament scholar Martha Moore-Keish says, “Until we practice what we proclaim, our supposed faith is no better than a corpse.”

Jesus saw the same problem at work in the lives of the religious elite of his time. In Matthew 23:27-28, Jesus rebukes the Pharisees - claiming that they are merely white washed tombs - appearing the right way and saying the right things but living in a way that carried death. And again a few chapters later, in Matthew 25, Jesus tells the parable of the sheep and the goats. In this parable, Jesus divides the people not based on who believed rightly, but based on who recognized the image of God in the “least of these” and treated them accordingly. 

Much like the Pharisees before us, Christians who proclaim the name of Jesus without following the way of Jesus are literally repellent to those around us. All we have to do is look at the reputation that Christians have in the outside world to see the evidence of this. Christians are not being persecuted for following Christ. We are being ridiculed and scoffed at for looking nothing like the Jesus we see in the Gospels; nothing like the earliest Christians who were described by Aristedes in 125 AD the following way: “Falsehood is not found among them; and they love one another, and from widows they do not turn away their esteem; and they deliver the orphan from him who treats him harshly. And he, who has, gives to him who has not, without boasting. And when they see a stranger, they take him in to their homes and rejoice over him as a very brother…”

When I look at the world today, I don’t see a sad broken world, full of sinners who need to intellectually assent to a statement of faith. I see a sad, broken world, full of image bearers, desperately in need of those who know Jesus to be his hands and feet in that world. To value everyone. To bind up the broken. To proclaim freedom to the captive. To welcome the immigrant. To dine with the tax collector. To love freely and without reservation. Now that would be good news for everyone.

“How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, “Your God reigns!” Isaiah 52:7