XIII. Of Works Before Justification

Note: The entry below is a good example of a misreading of an Article. The comments are corrective and instructive, so make sure to read them.

Works done before the grace of Christ, and the Inspiration of his Spirit, are not pleasant to God, forasmuch as they spring not of faith in Jesus Christ...

One of the great quests of the Enlightenment was for a scientific system of morals. This was not to be a revolution in morals, since most of the philosophes were quite content with the bourgeois or benign aristocratic morals of their class or the class of their patrons. But above all else, they sought to divorce morals from the "superstitions" of inspired religion.

To some extent, this was a laudable goal insofar as they sought to eliminate the need for the religious wars of the previous two centuries that had wrecked much of Christendom and produced untold human misery. Theologies that stressed endurance in beatings, chains, untold tortures, and even unspeakable death were popular prior to the philosophes, but they were merely the necessary counterweight to theologies of the sword. Notable among the courageous and the prophetic of these times were the members of the Religious Society of Friends, who disavowed not only wars of religion but also all forms of outward violence, taking these principles not from some new revelation from heaven but as a core teaching of the New Testament.

The Articulators, however, likely were often theologians of the sword or silent partners to such theology. It is one thing to say that they strived for compromise between Calvinist and Roman Catholic views (and perhaps ended up lukewarm and schizophrenic Lutherans), but it is another thing to pose them as tolerant men. They sought civil peace through ecclesiastical order. One justification for such compromise would be that if they had things right enough in their attempt to renovate the catholic faith, divine favor would shine on the English kingdom. Thus, civil and ecclesiastical polity closely shared their discourses. A Jesuit did not merely spread the errors of Popery but were agents of the foreign powers of the papal court, the Emperor, the King of France, and the King of Spain. Roman Catholicism was not a threat to the health of souls, it often seems, it was a threat to the cherished liberties of Englishmen. To a lesser extent, tensions with the Dutch took on a religious character as well as a civil one. But Roman Catholicism was the greater enemy. The laity of the Church of Rome in England were treacherous puppets and her clergy were the puppeteers. The courts Christian did not condemn such for heresy and transfer them to the civil arm for burning. At times, these were too clogged with "overzealous" Protestants. Instead, it was the prerogative courts and the common law courts that tortured and condemned Catholics for treason and consigned them to a traitor's death.

As Americans, we still bear the prejudices of our English ancestors. We sympathize with the victims of the auto da fe but have less consciousness of the weight of the late Tudor and Stuart persecutions of the Catholics. They both were bloody. But the blood ran too in Germany, France, and Spain and thence we have the concerns of the philosophes.

I give such voluminous and apparently irrelevant background to the first clause of Article XIII, because the first objections we have to it come from our interiorization of the quest of the philosophes for the objective classification of action in the moral sphere. From the Christian perspective and for reasons we have discussed, I believe such a program fails on two grounds.

1. An objective and scientific system of morals will tend toward quantification of what it considers. I am not the most ardent opponent of consequentialism, but I usually fear most types of moral calculus because almost all forms of quantification, especially in the social sphere, become involved in quantitative discourses related to the means of exchange and production. Economists now can analyze the worth of human lives in terms of fixed dollar amounts. This is useful for a variety of purposes, but it becomes positively immoral when moral boundaries are crossed for the sake of profit, whether individual or communal. Even when quantitative arguments are divorced from the economic they can become troublesome. "Do we drop the bomb on the city and kill 50,000 of them to save 1,000,000 of ours?" The easy answer is that 950,000 lives are saved, so let's drop the bomb. What does it matter as long as we save lives? One possible analogy that argues against this would be a man with $100 who spends $5000 to gain $20,000 worth of goods is still out $4900, unless he can resell the goods. But you cannot resell lives, relationships, or reputations. Treating moral questions quantitatively invokes the thinking of economics implicitly. And to some extent, this thinking can be refuted by showing where the analogy breaks down. Yet it would best to avoid such thinking altogether and simply uphold the entirety of the Moral Law whenever possible.

2. An objective system of ethics only can work if there exists either an absolute frame of reference accessible to human thought or a system by which a moral action can be transformed from one frame of reference to another. In the latter case, the method almost certainly would be quantitative and potentially subjective. In the former case, Christians believe that this absolute frame of reference exists in "light inaccessible hid from our eyes." The absolute frame of reference in morals is God. God alone can see the effects of all our works. Thus morals are inevitably bound to "superstition," properly interpreted.

This is not to say, though the Article is not as clear on this point as it should be (and possibly teaches error as we will say later), that all of the outward acts of non-Christians are automatically depraved because they are not pleasant to God. The Article is clear that the righteousness of God is located in our interior relationship with God. Thus, it is clearly possible for non-Christians to practice civil righteousness as Christians do and to have customs of neutral or positive moral content that differ from those of Christians. And as has happened again and again in Christian history, it is possible for the civil righteousness of non-Christians and their customs to be sanctified by the Gospel. For in the account of the Apostle in Romans, it is clear that civil righteousness is possible according either to reason or the Law, but we all fail in civil righteousness and are subject to condemnation. But yet the Law is clearly a source of principles of civil righteousness. And yet Christ said that He did not come to destroy the Law but to fulfill the Law, not only in the sense that He fulfilled its mystical promises of Himself but also in the sense that He made it possible for a righteousness greater than the Law but not entirely dissonant with it.

...neither do they make men meet to receive grace or (as the School-authors say) deserve grace of congruity

I do not know of whom the Articulators were thinking, but Aquinas seems to consider this idea in II.114.3 of the Summa Theologica. The core of the idea is in the leading answer to the objections,

"Man's meritorious work may be considered in two ways: first, as it proceeds from free-will; secondly, as it proceeds from the grace of the Holy Ghost. If it is considered as regards the substance of the work, and inasmuch as it springs from the free-will, there can be no condignity because of the very great inequality. But there is congruity, on account of an equality of proportion: for it would seem congruous that, if a man does what he can, God should reward him according to the excellence of his power.

"If, however, we speak of a meritorious work, inasmuch as it proceeds from the grace of the Holy Ghost moving us to life everlasting, it is meritorious of life everlasting condignly. For thus the value of its merit depends upon the power of the Holy Ghost moving us to life everlasting according to Jn. 4:14: 'Shall become in him a fount of water springing up into life everlasting.' And the worth of the work depends on the dignity of grace, whereby a man, being made a partaker of the Divine Nature, is adopted as a son of God, to whom the inheritance is due by right of adoption, according to Rm. 8:17: 'If sons, heirs also.'

In other words, Aquinas and likely most of his contemporaries seem to have believed not that man was incapable of meritorious action but that the salvificity of meritorious human action consisted of participation in the Divine Nature and the consequent will. To simplify: when we permit the Spirit to move within us, our meritorious actions spring from the acts of God, thus our participation in Him is deeper than if we were to do meritorious acts by our own free will, since at most, we merely participate in God to the extent we participate in what is good and thus piddlingly. The salvificity of this participation by the extension of our will from God's is apparently called grace of congruity, since our actions and the will to do them are in harmony with those of God. However, I doubt that the opinion of the Schoolmen on the potential but piddling merit of actions proceeding from our own free will is truly consonant with the first part of the Article discussed.

...yea, rather, for that they are not done as God hath willed and commanded them to be done, we doubt not but they have the nature of sin.

I find the truth of this conclusion highly dubious. First, it assumes the exercise of free will is inherently sinful. To say it is not sufficiently meritorious or effectual with regard to justification seems proper. But it is quite a leap to say free will is inherently sinful. Free will seems to be the property of rational creatures. Therefore, we would have to believe that God created us to be in a state of sin and rebellion against Him from the beginning. I see nothing to justify that Adam and Eve lacked free will from the beginning. And yet they were primally innocent.

But on the contrary, one could argue that the commands of God were few and simple, thus they surely could be done as God intended them, for they concerned foods that are permissible and one type of food that was not permissible. Thus, the exercise of the unfallen will was not sinful as long as choice was exercised with regard to the permissible foods. For instance, choosing to eat a pomegranate rather than grapes was not sinful. But after one exercise of free will in violation of the divine command, the will became depraved and thus incapable of doing anything without sinning.

Or as Galatians 5:16-18 puts it, "What I mean is this: be guided by the Spirit and you will not gratify the desires of your unspiritual nature. That nature sets its desires against the Spirit, while the Spirit fights against it. They are in conflict with one another so that you cannot do what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to law."

Thus, non-Christians are enslaved to their unspiritual natures, which make everything they do sinful. Well, OK. Maybe, I just don't know anything. Maybe, I don't have the proper Biblical pessimism about the utter depravity of our natures. So I guess I really shouldn't care about the good works of non-Christians and find anything praiseworthy in them. Non-Christians are never to be an example for me. Indeed, if they live in my polity, I should persecute them, since all they do is sin quietly in their own houses, sin grievously when they feed the starving beggar at their door, sin wickedly when I burn their house down and drive them from their land rather than resisting me, and cause unspeakable pollution of the ground when they pray to God on my behalf.

Yes, I'm being sarcastic. But surely we can imagine the same essential act performed by a person led by their spiritual nature and by a person of an unspiritual nature? In a particular case, we can imagine that God views the first as pardonable and the second as damnable. In another case, we can imagine the first act as congruent and salvifically worthy but the second act as incongruent and salvifically unworthy. The fallacy I see in this talk about utter depravity of the will is that it seems to intuit some sort of salvation by works anyway by arguing that non-Christians cannot do anything good. But Christians somehow can do good things. Maybe I'm imagining this fallacy. But let me repeat this: our sanctification and justification (or whatnot) is founded not on what we do but the alignment of our will and ultimately our being with God. Thus, having discussed grace of congruity and salvation by faith rather than works, can the Articulators call all non-Christian acts objectively iniquitous without my skepticism. We all sin. But we all do good.

In the Old Testament, the clear problem of the conscientiously righteous man, e.g. Job, is this: What use is piety if I am going to die anyway? What use is my righteousness before God (which is confirmed in the Scriptures) if I shall make my bed the grave and hand over my flesh to the corruptibility of the primal chaos beasts? If nothing I can do merits eternal life, what hope do I have? This hope we believe is Jesus the Christ. And I suspect the problem of Job is the problem of most non-Christians in this world. It is not that everything they do is evil (though like all of us, much of it surely is), it is that what they do good is of no use in the reference frame of eternity. Their souls are meant for eternity and yet they have no hope for eternal life.

A friend of mine once asked me, "Do you think being Christian makes you a better person?" I answered, "No, I think I am a Christian because I am worse than everyone else." My unspiritual nature needs to be kept in line. As Paul says to close Galatians 5,

"Anyone can see the behaviour that belongs to the unspiritual nature: fornication, indecency, and debauchery; idolatry and sorcery; quarrels, a contentious temper, envy, fits of rage, selfish ambitions, dissensions, party intrigues, and jealousies; drinking bouts, orgies, and the like. I warn you as I warned you before, that no one who behaves like that will ever inherit the kingdom of God.

But the harvest of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the old nature with its passions and desires. If the Spirit is source of our life, let the Spirit also direct its course."

Now I have seen the mere appearance of mere appearance of all these things within the circles of the worlds. Virtue and violence are our common inheritance. And I may read of Him who brought the form of the things of the second class into the worlds and said, "Peace is my last gift to you, my own peace I leave with you, peace which the worlds cannot give, I give to you." As for the forms of the first class, I do not know where they reside, but I do not want any part of them nor ever come near to them. But I long for the forms of the second class. Now how could I have recognized for what I yearn if I did not recognize how the fruits of the Spirit shared some qualities with those things that I see as mere appearance of mere appearance, but through the Spirit I knew the fruits were better? How can I say that this is what humans call love, but this love I sense is greater?

Well, that's a bit of Platonism, but the idea is very simple. The names of the fruits of the Spirit existed before Christ came into the world, though their fullness was unknown as Christ was unknown and unrecognized. Would anyone say that love is sinful? Would anyone say that patience is sinful? Would anyone say that self-control is sinful? Paul tells us that there is no law against these things. Yet the concept of all these things surely was prior to Christ. Thus, people loved, were patient, and were continent before Christ, though in mere appearances and without knowledge through the Spirit. And yet the Article would have us believe that love (insofar as it was love) was sin, patience (as far as it was patience) was sin, and self-control (as long as it was self-control) was sin? As if these things were not sin, how are they sin? Who has bewitched you, O Articulators?

As always, this is a work in progress. Feel free to show me where I've gone wrong or where you think the Articulators went wrong.

Until next time, the Holy Brothers pray that you may crucify your unspiritual nature as Christ was crucified in the flesh, so that you will not glory merely in the things that shall pass away just as the waning light of the Sun brings all the shadow but will rise with Christ into those things that are real and alight even in the darkness.