5. Salvation: By Grace Through Faith

The Preface stated that this review regards the official Orthodox teaching on how a sinner is made right with God as a departure from the gospel. That is a serious thing to say, and it ought not to be said lightly. This section gives the reasons. It begins, as fairness requires, with the places where Trenham is right.

Where Trenham Is Right

Trenham complains that Protestants have shrunk salvation down to a single idea. In Scripture, he says, salvation is a great deliverance from all of humanity’s enemies: sin, condemnation, the wrath of God, the devil, the world, and finally death itself.⁶⁷ He is right about Scripture, though he is wrong about Protestants, whose own teaching names every one of those enemies.⁶⁸ Baptists believe that Christ saves His people from the penalty of sin, from its power, and at last from its very presence. Forgiveness is the door of salvation, not the whole house.

Trenham is also right that the New Testament speaks of salvation in the past, present, and future.⁶⁹ Believers have been saved, are being saved, and will be saved. Baptists teach the same thing, usually in other words: a believer has been justified, is being made holy, and will one day be glorified.

But notice how Paul connects the three. Trenham quotes him: since we are now justified by Christ’s blood, “much more” shall we be saved from wrath through Him (Rom. 5:9–10).⁷⁰ The apostle reasons from the past to the future. Because God has already done the harder thing, reconciling His enemies, He will certainly do the easier thing, saving His friends. Paul does not make the past uncertain by pointing to the future. He makes the future certain by pointing to the past.

A man pulled from a stormy sea into a lifeboat can say three true things. He has been saved, for he is out of the water. He is being saved, for the boat is carrying him toward shore. And he will be saved, when at last he steps onto dry land. All three are true. But the second and third depend entirely on the first. He is being carried home only because he is already in the boat.

Where the Disagreement Lies

So the two sides do not disagree about whether salvation is large or whether it has a future. They disagree about something more basic. How does a sinner first come to stand right with God? And what part do his own works play in it?

Trenham answers plainly. The Orthodox, he writes, “categorically deny” that a person is saved by faith alone.⁷¹ Salvation is “a dynamic and synergistic work,” that is, a work in which God and man cooperate.⁷² The Confession of Dositheos, which Trenham reprints as an appendix to his book, is more precise still. It teaches that a man is justified “through faith and works.” It rejects as “far from all Orthodoxy” the idea that faith is like a hand that takes hold of Christ’s righteousness. And it describes good works as “in themselves meriting” a reward, through God’s promises.⁷³

It is only fair to add what the Orthodox do not mean. They do not teach that a man can earn heaven by his own unaided effort. They insist that grace comes first and that every good work is done with God’s help. The disagreement is not between grace and no grace. It is between two answers to a single question: is a sinner accepted by God because of what Christ has done, received by faith, or because of what Christ has done together with what grace enables the sinner to do?

What Paul Says

Paul answers that question more than once, and his answer is the same each time. His clearest statement uses a picture from ordinary working life: “Now, to the one who works, the reward is not considered as a grace but as something owed. But to one who does not work but believes in the one who justifies the ungodly, it is faith that is accounted for righteousness” (Rom. 4:4–5).

Everyone understands the difference. A man who works all week expects his pay on Friday, and he does not thank his employer for it as though it were a present. He earned it. A gift is something else altogether. The moment a man has to work for it, it stops being a gift and becomes a wage. Paul says the same thing in another place: “if [it is] by grace, then it is no longer of works; otherwise grace is no longer grace” (Rom. 11:6). The two cannot be mixed. A gift with a price attached is not a gift with a discount. It is simply a sale.

Notice, too, whom God justifies in Romans 4:5. It is not the godly, the man who has cooperated well. It is “the ungodly,” the man who has nothing to offer. That is why Paul can say that sinners are “justified by faith apart from the works of the law” (Rom. 3:28) and that “all are being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 3:24).

The same teaching runs through his other letters. “By grace you have been saved through faith, not by yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, so that no one would boast” (Eph. 2:8–9). God saved us “not by works of righteousness which we did ourselves, but according to his mercy” (Titus 3:5). Paul’s own hope was to “be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own (from the law), but through faith in Christ (the righteousness which is from God by faith)” (Phil. 3:9).

The Confession of Dositheos objects to the picture of faith as a hand. But the picture is exactly right, and that is why it matters. A hand that receives a gift adds nothing to the gift. A beggar who holds out his hand for bread does not share the credit with the baker. Faith is not a work that earns salvation. It is the empty hand that receives it, and that is why Paul sets faith and works on opposite sides.

The Word “Alone”

Trenham points out that the word “alone” does not appear in the Greek text of Romans 3:28, and that Luther added it in his German translation.⁷⁴ That is true, and it should be granted at once. But it proves less than it seems to. Paul says that a person is justified by faith “apart from the works of the law.” If a thing is received apart from works, then it is received by faith alone. The word “alone” adds nothing that the sentence does not already say. Luther was not changing Paul’s meaning. He was underlining it.

What James Says

The strongest text on the other side is in the letter of James, and it must be faced directly. “You see, then, that one is justified by works, and not only by faith” (James 2:24). Trenham cites this chapter as plain proof that salvation is not by faith alone.⁷⁵ On the surface, James seems to say exactly the opposite of Paul.

But look at the question James is answering. “What good is it, my brethren, if someone claims to have faith but has no works? Can faith save such a person?” (James 2:14). The man in view only claims to have faith. James is not asking whether true faith needs works added to it. He is asking whether a faith that produces nothing is real at all, and he answers that it is “dead in itself” (2:17). Then comes the challenge: “Show me your faith without works, and by my works, I will show you my faith” (2:18). Works do not create faith. They show it.

James’s own example makes this clear. Abraham, he says, was “justified by works, by offering up his son Isaac on the altar” (2:21). Yet in the same breath he adds that this fulfilled the Scripture that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him as righteousness” (2:23). That Scripture comes from Genesis 15. The offering of Isaac comes in Genesis 22, many years later. Abraham was counted righteous by faith long before he ever climbed the mountain with his son. When he did climb it, his obedience did not make him righteous. It proved that his faith had been real all along.

An apple tree is not made an apple tree by its apples. It is an apple tree first, and the apples show what it is. But a tree that bears no fruit, year after year, may fairly be suspected of being dead. Paul tells how a sinner is made right with God: by faith, apart from works. James tells how a sinner’s faith is shown to be genuine: by the works it produces. The two apostles are not contradicting each other. They are answering different questions. Paul himself puts the two together in a single sentence: we are saved by grace through faith, “not of works,” and we are “created in Christ Jesus for good works” (Eph. 2:8–10).

Faith and Baptism

Trenham ties the moment of salvation to baptism. “We associate the definitive moment of salvation with holy Baptism,” he writes; it is there that a person is forgiven, united to Christ, and indwelt by the Spirit.⁷⁶ This claim is important enough to deserve its own section, and Section 7 will examine it. Here it is enough to notice that every passage quoted above names faith, not baptism, as the means by which a sinner is justified. Baptism has its proper place, as the following sections will show. But it is not set beside faith as a second condition of acceptance with God.

Union with Christ

Trenham’s deepest complaint is that Protestants neglect salvation as union with Christ, which Orthodox theology calls theosis, or deification.⁷⁷ He is right that union with Christ lies at the heart of the New Testament, and Protestant teachers have said so for centuries.⁷⁸ Baptists affirm it gladly. Paul could say, “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). Peter speaks of believers becoming “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4). And John, in a verse Trenham himself quotes, says that when Christ appears, “we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is” (1 John 3:2).⁷⁹

The difference, once again, is not in the destination but in the way. Union with Christ is not a summit that the believer slowly climbs toward, hoping at last to reach it. It is a gift given at the start. Paul prays that “Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith” (Eph. 3:17). The believer is joined to Christ when he believes, and the whole of his Christian life is the working out of a union that is already his. Baptists do not deny that a Christian grows. They deny that his growth is the ground of his acceptance.

The Early Witnesses

This understanding of grace is not a Protestant invention. Clement of Rome, writing to the church at Corinth near the end of the first century, said that Christians “are not justified by ourselves, nor by our own wisdom, or understanding, or godliness, or works which we have wrought in holiness of heart; but by that faith through which, from the beginning, Almighty God has justified all men.”⁸⁰ An unknown Christian writer of the second century, in the work known as the Epistle to Diognetus, marveled at what God had done in Christ: “O sweet exchange!… That the wickedness of many should be hid in a single righteous One, and that the righteousness of One should justify many transgressors!”⁸¹ These writers did not hold every Baptist conviction. But on this point their words could stand in any Baptist pulpit.

Why This Matters

It might seem that all this is a quarrel over words. It is not. If a sinner is accepted by God partly because of what grace enables him to do, then his acceptance depends in part on how well he has done it. And no honest man can be sure that he has done it well enough. He may hope, but he cannot know.

The gospel is good news precisely because it does not rest on the sinner. It rests on Christ, who has done everything required. “Being therefore justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 5:1). Peace is not the condition of a man who is still waiting to learn whether he has done enough. It is the condition of a man who has been told, on the word of God, that the matter is settled.

That brings the argument to its next question. Can a believer truly know that he is saved? And having been saved, can he ever be lost? Trenham’s answers to both questions differ sharply from the Baptist answers. The next section examines them.