I’ve never been the type to throw the baby out with the bath water. I can find the good in a bully, I can see the merits of other religions and glean truths from them, and I can watch a sleazy televangelist and see where he might be right about some things – all three of those were necessary to get through four years of ORU under Richard Roberts without losing my faith and without losing my sanity. 

Richard Roberts is the son of the late healing evangelist Oral Roberts (founder of Oral Roberts University). Whatever anyone thinks about Oral’s dramatic exclamations, or his poor money management skills, I remain thoroughly convinced of the man’s love for Jesus and his God-given gift for supernatural healing. I never saw Oral on t.v., only in person, but I did see his son Richard’s t.v. program once or twice while waiting for Lukus in the fishbowl (our nickname for the all-glass lobby). Like his father, Richard spoke on his program about a “point of contact”, and if you needed healing, all you had to do was believe and place your hands on the television screen where Richard’s hands were, and you could be healed. He compared it to the woman with the issue of blood who reached out to touch the hem of Jesus’ garment and was healed, and spoke often of the need to exercise your faith in order to release your miracle. Now I’m not sure how many people were healed when they touched their t.v. screen, but what stands out to me is the fact that this evangelical preacher insisted on this “point of contact”, this need to exercise your faith and take a practical step toward releasing your miracle.

I also recall my Assemblies of God youth pastor questioning if certain individuals were “really saved” because their lifestyle hadn’t changed since that time they’d said the Sinner’s Prayer. My own mom, who adamantly despised a “works-based religion” often told me, “You know a tree by its fruit. If the fruit is bad, then that individual’s faith isn’t genuine.” And when my grandfather was dying, my mom tried to share the gospel with him because he’d clearly never cared for God, the Bible, or church, and there was no evidence that he was a believer of any kind. He told her, “I said the prayer years ago. God and I are good.” Yet she could tell by his tone that he just wanted her to shut up and she didn’t at all believe that he and God “were good.”

So after all these experiences growing up in evangelical communities, when I became Catholic I had to bite my tongue any time someone mentioned that they couldn’t understand why I would join a “works-based religion.” This is the point at which I think Protestants just aren’t being honest with themselves unless they’re the type like my grandfather who believe they can live doing whatever they want and still claim to be saved, in which case, they aren’t really Christians at all. Catholics and Protestants are surprisingly on the same page when it comes to faith and works, so let’s get down to brass tacks.

Let me start with a transparent analogy: You have a car. It’s a good car, runs well, fairly new. You can go anywhere on land. You know this because you know your car and you trust its reliability. But tell me, what is the point of your car if you never get inside it, turn the ignition, and drive somewhere? Can your car get you anywhere if you don’t drive it? Nope. You can believe in that car all you want, but just believing won’t get you to the grocery store or to Arches National Park. Would I take a car all the way from Spokane to Arches if I didn’t believe in the reliability of the car? No. So to really get where I want to go, I need to trust my car, and then I need to actually drive the darn thing or I get nowhere. 

So it is with works and faith. Super simple. And yet Protestants think they believe that simply having a car and believing in it is enough to get somewhere, which in their practical Christian lives isn’t really the case. They then look at Catholics and think we’re trying to carry our car across the country on our own backs, which also isn’t true. 

Catholics believe that God initiated salvation through the death and resurrection of Jesus, and without Jesus, no amount of good deeds makes us righteous. Works do not grant us access to God. There is some grace, of course, for those who have legitimately never heard the gospel message and, like Romans 1 says, will be judged by their conscience. But I grew up believing that even in evangelical circles. For those who have heard the gospel, strictly doctrinally speaking, salvation comes by grace through faith in Jesus. But we’d also argue that, like Richard Roberts used to say, faith needs a “point of contact”. Faith itself IS work. Hebrews 11:1 says that “Faith is the SUBSTANCE of things hoped for, the EVIDENCE of things not seen.” Faith, if it is not EVIDENT, if it has no SUBSTANCE is merely hope. No honest Christian would claim that wishin’ and hopin’ is sufficient for salvation. Faith is the key ingredient, and yet, faith is a compound chemical made of hope mixed with action. We could all easily agree that “faith alone” is sufficient stuff for salvation if we could also agree that the very nature of faith includes works. 

But if we define faith as only “belief”, herein lies the rub. You could quote Ephesians 2:8 to me, “For by grace you have been saved through faith – and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not by works, lest anyone should boast,” and exclaim that faith alone is enough. And even if we used faith to only mean “belief” I would agree with you if it also meant that “saved” referred to the initial act of being made right with God. But I would tell you to keep reading, “For we are His workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.” Works is right there paired with faith, and that’s because salvation is not a one and done deal. We have been saved, we are being saved, and we shall be saved. It is in the “we are being saved” that we Catholics believe in works. If you ask a Catholic if they’re “saved”, they’ll likely look at you funny because few Catholics will point to a singular moment in their lives and tell you “I got saved when…”. That’s because we believe that salvation is ongoing until the day we die, and that means a lifetime of “working out our faith with fear and trembling (Phil. 2:12).” I think that’s something we actually all agree on because ALL Christians believe that upon conversion, our lives ought to reflect a real change. We ought to bear good fruit.

James 2 makes it all very clear that faith without works is dead, but I’ve heard so many Protestants just come right out and say they don’t like James. One Bible study leader I had said he wished Martin Luther had just taken James out of the Bible when he had the chance! So despite the glaring inconsistency of sola scriptura folks wanting to completely ignore an entire book of the Bible, I’ll go ahead and ignore James since so many people don’t like it and use the more revered words of Paul instead. He wrote in Romans 10:9-10 “If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus Christ and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.” So even at the very moment of conception of the rebirth of one’s spirit, it requires both belief AND a work: the act of confession. In John 15, Jesus says that every branch that does not bear fruit, He cuts off. What is the point of planting a grapevine if it doesn’t bear grapes? What is the point of Jesus dying to make us righteous if we do not then do righteous deeds? 

It’s also important to state that we do not believe these good works are done in our own power or by human effort. Catholics understand that it is only by the grace given to us by the Holy Spirit that we are equipped to carry out any kind of good. Nothing done by our own effort will make an ounce of difference; we must align ourselves to His suffering, His power, His heart, and His will. 

One particular work that Protestants have difficulty with is Penance. They understand repentance, and yet penance is right there inside the word repentance. The issue seems to be that Protestants mistakenly think that penance is either a form of punishment, or a good deed that curries favor with God so He’ll forget about your sins. Neither is true. First of all, doing the right thing should never be considered a punishment. If you’ve sinned and confessed to a priest and he tells you to go pray an “Our Father”, how could praying ever be considered a punishment? Or if your penance is, say, to return the blouse you stole from your sister, that’s not a punishment, it’s simply righting a wrong. Second of all, penance isn’t about getting your sins forgiven. If you’ve confessed your sins, the forgiveness happens right then and there. Penance comes after the forgiveness takes place. It helps to look at penance as coming from the word repentance, which means “to turn around and go the other direction.” So if you’ve been walking in the direction of sin, confession and forgiveness is the moment when you stop, are pointed in the right direction, and turn in that direction. Penance is simply taking that first step in the right direction. It can be hard to talk to God when you still feel ashamed of a sin. It can be hard to do the next right thing when you’ve been doing all the wrong things. So penance is a little nudge, an easy, gracious step toward getting back on the right path. It’s not some legalistic work that saves you, it is a response in faith to the mercy of God. 

So I hope that clears up another misnomer about the Catholic faith. Like many misunderstandings, it often comes down to defining the terms. A Catholic might say, “We are saved by faith and good works,” and if someone believes “works” to mean an attempt to reach God through human righteousness, there’s going to be a problem. But if they believe that “works” means a faith-response to God’s grace, the empowerment by His Spirit to carry out His will, and being conformed to the image of Jesus, well then we’re getting somewhere. Richard Roberts turned out to be right about one thing at least: that “point of contact” is essential.