Moral norms, often disparaged by Dietrich Bonhoeffer despite his own highly ethical upbringing and its clear impact on his virtuous life choices, are important for salvation because they orient us toward the good. Good works help develop within us habits that enable us to distinguish between good and evil.
Christian ecumenism can be a virtuous pursuit of mutual understanding. Sadly, it more often is a kind of flight from understanding in the name of good feelings. This is not to say that Christians, and Catholics in particular, should shy away from serious discussions with members of other denominations. But it is important, if only out of respect for our interlocutors, that we recognize and address the very real disagreements we have regarding fundamental issues related to life, both here and in relation to the hereafter.
These (hardly groundbreaking) thoughts were brought to my mind on perusing a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran opponent of the Nazis who was executed for his role in a plot to kill Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer was a great humanitarian and an important theologian. He had visited Rome as a young man and explicitly rejected the possibility of conversion. As he developed his theology it became clear why he would not be able to join the Church, for he fully embraced Lutheran ideas of salvation by grace alone. Indeed, he repeatedly and explicitly castigated the notion that we mere mortals might know God, let alone join Him in any meaningful sense through our own work.
At one level Catholics should have no trouble joining Bonhoeffer’s condemnation of the prideful claim that man can save himself through his own efforts. This is the Pelagian heresy against which the Church has inveighed for centuries. But the distinction between works and grace, recognized by most Christians, is one Bonhoeffer, in keeping with Lutheran doctrine, emphasizes beyond the breaking point. Works, on this view, become the product of grace, important only as expressions of divine will. Catholics, too, recognize how important signs of God’s grace truly are—for example in miracles, to which we can look as emanations of His love. But Bonhoeffer rejects the value of human works, and human knowledge, altogether as an element in salvation, or, indeed, of coming closer to God in any fashion.
One aspect of this vision is the war against the sin of pride, so often waged by men of good will working in the area of faith. For Bonhoeffer, even the words of a minister of the Gospel are not of worth in and of themselves. The best sermon imaginable by man may fall on deaf ears, and the worst be made an object of righteous inspiration, if God so wills it. One does not fulfill one’s vocation, or achieve one’s nature, through one’s own efforts, but only if and when one is grasped by God (for reasons a mere human cannot understand) and made an instrument of His will. To believe otherwise, Bonhoeffer claims, is to set oneself up in the place of God, as the creator of good works, when we cannot even know the good. Only God knows the good. Only God can do good, though He may choose to do it through man.
Stated thus baldly, no Catholic can subscribe to a Lutheran conception of grace, or of the God behind it. It is useful to hear it, however, as a means of examining our own understanding of the nature of God, His creation, and the importance of good works. The differences between Catholic and Protestant understandings in this realm cannot be eliminated, or even papered over in any meaningful way. Still, they are worth considering as a means of better self- and common-understanding.
The manner in which Bonhoeffer criticizes human works and his idea of being grasped by God involuntarily go to the heart of why I, at least, am Catholic. For it is not, I would argue, a matter of “earning” heaven, but of saying “yes” to God. The Protestant belief in predestination is of great importance, here, and brings with it deep theological issues having to do with the freedom of the will—both God’s and man’s. That said, it brought to my mind something smaller and more directly concerned with how each of us as persons can hope to act with meaning in this world and seek communion with God in the next. Clearly we cannot “deserve” God’s love. Born in sin and sinning throughout our lives, we are dependent on God’s grace, his free gift of love. But how will we know when this gift is offered to us? And how will we know to accept it, rather than reject a love and a mercy that may be severe, especially when contrasted by the corrupt pleasures so easily had in this life?
It is here that works, along with reason and recognition of the order of God’s created universe, become important. We cannot “earn” God’s love but, alas, too often we reject it. And it is up to us to use the gifts God has given to us—including our inherent rationality as well as the Church and the aids to faith and reason it provides—to orient ourselves to the good. Through hard work we can develop our character (habits of virtue or vice that go far toward determining who we are) such that we will recognize and say “yes” to God’s will. The saint does not achieve salvation through mere right conduct, but the saint’s conduct, both spiritual and physical, help him to surrender fully to God and do His will. In doing the right thing for the right reason we orient ourselves toward what is right and thereby recognize and accept God.
In rejecting works Bonhoeffer also rejects religion, terming it a dead thing that gets in the way of the person’s relationship to God. But Catholics understand that religion is that which binds us, not merely to one another, but to God. Through liturgy, through the sacraments, and through the teachings of the Church, we are granted the ability to become better, to conform our lives to the order of creation in a manner that keeps us open to God’s grace and enables us to recognize His will. As, for example, the sacrament of reconciliation is effective only if the penitent truly is penitent, with all that implies, we can only receive God’s forgiveness by being open to it.
Moral norms, often disparaged by Bonhoeffer despite his own highly ethical upbringing and its clear impact on his virtuous life choices, are important for salvation because they orient us toward the good. Good works help develop within us habits that enable us to distinguish between good and evil; good works make it more likely that we will choose the good, even when it brings with it pain and death. This, I submit, is not some prideful claim to earning one’s own salvation, but rather a recognition of both the dignity and the weakness of the human person. We have within us an impulse toward the good, which we too often ignore. We have written on our hearts a knowledge of God’s will, which we also too often ignore. By both thinking and doing right we can embrace the good, opening ourselves to the grace offered by God—who is beyond our full knowledge but who has created within us a soul capable of recognizing His will.
I would not expect this understanding of the role of good works in a good life (here and hereafter) to be convincing to Bonhoeffer, or any Lutheran. But it is, I think, quite distinct from the Pelagian heresy. And the role of the Church, her sacraments, and her teachings in leading us, in part through our works, to acceptance of God is something without which I would not live.
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Excellent essay and excellent points all.
The proble with the Lutheran view (insofar as I understand it here) is that it actually transplants the notion that God has chosen a temporal and universal institution of which we are a part (the Church) into the notion that God has chosen special little old me for reasons only the Divine mind can fathom thereby elevating me to eternal relevance unlike the irrelevant damned.
To my mind, Grace so concieved flies in the face of Christ’s explicit teaching . He did not come to save some, but all.
That said , the more I learn about Orthodoxy the more I think the whole work vs. faith debate is a natural result of the Catholic insistence on a rational component to religion taken to an unhealthy extreme.
“He did not come to save some, but all.” I think you may be confusing Martin Luther with John Calvin? Luther taught that God’s grace extends to all, and therefore anyone can attain salvation through faith. Predestination, the salvation of only a chosen few, was a core doctrine of Calvinism.
It is very difficult for me to begin to reply. I was raised in a Finnish Lutheran Church, learning the Small Catachism until the age of Comfermation, all through Lay Ministers and teachers. All my childhood friends in my small world in the 1950’s were all from a different denomination of Protestanism or Roman Catholic. I went to all their churches as a guest. This made me want to learn who was what, how and why. I became a student, self read through many laborious hours of reading and rereading The Book of Concord, in which the following is contained:
Preface to the Christion Book of Concord (1580)
The Three Universal or Ecumenical Creeds
The Augsburg Confession (1530)
Understanding Indulgences
The Apology of the Augsburg Confession (1531)
The Divine Service
The Smalcald Articles (1537)
Temporal and Spiritual Leadership in the Holy Roman Empire
(The Two Kingdoms)
The Power and Primacy of the Pope(1537)
The Small Catechism (1529)
The Large Catechism (1529)
The Formula of Concord, Epitome (1577)
Controversies and the Formula of Concord
The Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration(1577)
I am not boasting. I am near 70 years old and still am a student of this book.
I now attend a confessional Evangelical Lutheran Church of The Missouri Synod. Not all Lutherans adhere to the ” spirit” of the Reformation. And Lutherans are not Protestants. The history of that is very rich.
I would so dearly love to join in these debates. Over the many years, it became more difficult because the definition of terms and language of doctrine has been surrendered to the feelings of opinion as opposed to serious research. Are we not fortunate to give all glory to God that our salvation has been won through the merits of Jesus Christ!! I can now go and serve my neighbor, good works, in the freedom in the forgiveness of my sins. Amen
Amen! You have put your finger on the key point here, which is that the idea of predestination, of there being an “elect,” is not Lutheran but Calvinistic, i.e. Reformed. I am Episcopalian, which in its high church form is essentially Catholicism without a Pope. To the best of my ability, having worshipped in four different parishes and studied intensely like you for 70-ish years, I understand the soteriology of the Church as being that Christ died to save all, that this salvation is accessed through baptism in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and that baptized Christians will naturally seek to do the will of God in gratitude for our Creation, Redemption and sustaining. The Church is our guide, along with Scripture and Reason, to what the will of God is in any given situation. For Episcopalians every service of the Eucharist includes the Confession of sin and the absolution by the priest of all those sincerely praying the Confession. The Episcopal Church is in full communion with the ELCA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
This essay is at odds with so much of what I know of Bonhoeffer and Lutheranism. Bonhoeffer’s experience in Rome impressed him deeply in terms of understanding the universality of the Church, and he maintained great affection for Catholicism. To criticize Bonhoeffer for not converting to Catholicism seems to miss the point that his semester in Rome inspired him to actively work toward a greater ecumenism and to fight against the corruption of the Church (broadly writ) by the Nazi regime.
You also seem in these sentences to misunderstand Luther: “But Catholics understand that religion is that which binds us, not merely to one another, but to God. Through liturgy, through the sacraments, and through the teachings of the Church, we are granted the ability to become better, to conform our lives to the order of creation in a manner that keeps us open to God’s grace and enables us to recognize His will.”
Luther makes clear in the catechism that the sacraments are God’s works, not the works of man. “God’s works, however, are saving and necessary for salvation, and do not exclude, but demand, faith; for without faith they could not be apprehended.” We receive the sacraments “That I may learn to believe that Christ, out of great love, died for my sin, and also learn from Him to love God and my neighbor.” Just as you describe the Catholic view in this essay, so too do Lutherans value liturgy, scripture and the sacraments.
Usually the first thing a Lutheran pator will tell you about the faith is: “Martin Luther never intended to break from the Catholic Church, he only wanted to reform it.” For those who are interested in furthering the spirit of Christian understanding, I might suggest the remarkable statements of agreement between Lutheranism and Catholicism, as understood by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/ecumenical-and-interreligious/ecumenical/lutheran/upload/Declaration_on_the_Way-for-Website.pdf
Kat: you are right that the definition of terms and language of doctrine have been surrendered to feelings and opinions – all the more reason why it is incredible that Christians should persist in division . The Roman Catholic Church, insofar as I can tell, attempts to contain all serious intellectual and spiritual disagreements within one communion. We can all disagree and debate while partaking in one communion .
As to Mr hsamuelking: No sir, I am not Orthodox , merely seduced by the allure of Orthodoxy , but I am Catholic . I am very happy that the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches are growing closer. I have been to a Russian Orthodox service one time and was quite taken (my protestant friends found it perhaps too pious, long and despairing). However I cannot boast any knowledge of Orthodox theology , and all of my exposure to it has been through Slavophile writers who, though Orthodox are not formally representative of Church doctrine.
But in an age when Christianity is in decline or succumbing to sectarianism , we all need each other and we need the pastoral care of long established Christian institutionalism.
Mr. Rieth, I have been wondering about your whereabouts, havn’t seen any sights of you on this blog. This evening, I was going through flagged emails and found this posting by Professor Frohnen that I identified for future consideration. I did not even remember doing this!! Senior moment, or this foggy memory of an actual reality that I stumbled upon.
I hope all is well with you. Reading this essay and the replys, two years later, is like entering a different world. Even though our world standing and realities may change, like language and opions, God’s Word, the Logos, coming in the flesh, remains as unchanged and trustworthy as it was in the beginning and will be to the end. That is the essence of Faith; the Holy Spirits work, through the Law and Gospel, to turn our rebellious spirit to a belief and trust that God’s Logos is true and victorious!
Grace can come. Good works per se do not bring grace necessarily, nor are they anathema to it.
That seems to be a sticking point between Catholics and Protestants—particularly Lutherans.
A thing may change a person in the doing of it. Or it may leave a person barren as when they began. It’s impossible to know.
Lutherans do not decry Good Works, but they understand that there’s no bargaining with God. Good works may be the result of Grace. They may be the fruit of an overactive ego. They may, in the doing, bring someone TO Grace.
Again, we can’t know. Generally, in the Protestant realm, the idea is to let ourselves manifest Grace in our life. To the extent that we’re capable, that would include Good Works no less than anything else.