Contra Errores Protestantium — No. I
A graphic is making the rounds: white and red text on black, a headshot, and the name and handle of the man who posts it, Brandon Delgado. One sentence across the middle. Catholics got tricked into believing faith in Christ alone isn’t sufficient to be saved. Underneath, Ephesians 2:8–9 printed out in full, with “by grace,” “through faith” and “gift of God, not of works” picked out in red. Then the citation. The citation ends at verse 9.
We name him because he published it under his own name, and a reply that will not say whose claim it is answering is not much of a reply. What we will not do is judge him. What he knew when he made it, and why, is between him and God, and we will not guess at it. The sentence and the verses under it are public, and those we can take apart.
A word about the series title while we are at it. Protestantium is used here in the broad historical sense, for the family of claims that descend from the sixteenth-century break. It does not mean that every position answered in these pages is the teaching of the Reformation confessions, because often it is not. Where a Lutheran or a Reformed Christian would reject the claim as firmly as we do, we will say so, and in this first entry we are going to say so more than once.
Start with what it gets right
The graphic correctly reports Catholic teaching. The Church does deny that faith alone is sufficient for salvation, and she denies it under anathema.
Trent, canon 20: if anyone says that the justified man “is not bound to observe the commandments of God and of the Church, but only to believe; as if indeed the Gospel were a bare and absolute promise of eternal life, without the condition of observing the commandments,” let him be anathema. Canon 24 goes further: the justice received is preserved and increased before God “through good works,” and those works are not merely the fruits and signs of a justification already obtained. That is the Catholic position, stated by the Council in the sharpest form it has. We are not going to wriggle out of it, and an apologetics page that pretends the Church teaches something softer is wasting your time.
So the disagreement is real and it is old. What the graphic has to carry is the other word, tricked, and the proof text it puts underneath. Those are the two things we are going to look at, because that is where it comes apart. The verses do not establish the claim, and the history runs the opposite way from the accusation.
Verse 10
Here is what the graphic quotes, plus one more verse, in the same translation it used, so that nobody can say we changed Bibles halfway through the argument:
For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
Verse 10 is a new sentence, but it is not a new subject. It opens with gar, “for,” the particle Paul uses to give the ground of what he has just said. He is not changing topic after “lest anyone should boast.” He is explaining it: you have nothing to boast of because you are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works that He prepared in advance for you to walk in. The thought ends with works. (The Douay-Rheims renders the phrase “created in Christ Jesus in good works.” The Greek is epi with the dative, carrying both “for” and “in the sphere of.” Either way the works are what God prepared, and either way they are not optional.)
Now be careful about what that does and does not prove, because overclaiming here is how Catholic apologists lose this argument.
Verse 10 does not refute sola fide. A confessional Protestant reads it as the necessary fruit of saving faith, and the Westminster Confession quotes its very words to say so: good works are “the fruits and evidences of a true and lively faith,” by which believers glorify God, “whose workmanship they are, created in Christ Jesus thereunto.” Verse 10 is not merely compatible with the Reformed position. It is written into the Reformed confession.
What verse 10 does is take away the shortcut. A citation that stops at verse 9 presents the passage as self-contained, as though Paul had finished his thought and the reader could go home. He had not. The sentence he was building ends with the saved being created for good works, which means these two verses cannot by themselves settle whether works bear on salvation. They raise the question; they do not close it. To close it you have to go to Romans 4, Galatians 2 and Titus 3 on one side, and to Romans 2, Galatians 5 and Matthew 25 on the other. And once the argument moves there, it is an argument, not an exposé. Nobody has been tricked.
A witness the graphic did not expect
Around 395, St. John Chrysostom, then a preacher at Antioch, worked through Ephesians in a series of homilies. The fourth covers exactly these verses. We are going to quote him against ourselves first, because that is the only honest way to use him.
On “and that not of ourselves”: “Neither is faith, he means, of ourselves … So that the work of faith itself is not our own.” A few lines later, on “that no man should glory”: “But no one, he says, is justified by works, in order that the grace and loving-kindness of God may be shown. He did not reject us as having works, but as abandoned of works He has saved us by grace.” That is a Greek Father, with no Reformation to defend and no Trent to anticipate, saying that even the faith is a gift, that no one is justified by works, and that God saved us when we were destitute of them. A Calvinist can sign every word, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
But between those two comments, Chrysostom had already met the question the graphic raises, and his answer is worth having whole, including the clause that helps the other side:
Was faith then, you will say, enough to save us? No; but God, says he, has required this, lest He should save us, barren and without work at all. His expression is, that faith saves, but it is because God so wills, that faith saves. Since, how, tell me, does faith save, without works? This itself is the gift of God.
“Faith saves,” he grants, and then: Was faith enough? No. Both halves, in one breath. And having reached verse 9 and said that no one is justified by works, he turns immediately to the danger of stopping there:
And then, lest when you hear that the whole work is accomplished not of works but by faith, you should become idle, observe how he continues — Ver. 10. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works …
“Observe how he continues.” Sixteen hundred years ago a preacher anticipated precisely the inference the graphic draws from verses 8 and 9, and headed it off by reading verse 10 aloud. Whatever else is in dispute, the Catholic habit of finishing the paragraph is not a late invention.
Fruit or ground: where the argument actually is
Here is the reply a well-catechised Protestant will make, and it is much better than the graphic:
Verse 10 is in my confession, word for word. Westminster XVI.2 quotes it; the Heidelberg Catechism asks at question 86 why we must still do good works and answers that Christ renews us by His Spirit. Good works are the necessary fruit of saving faith. We deny only that they are its ground or its instrument. You have refuted antinomianism and billed it as a refutation of sola fide. Now deal with the verses you skipped: Romans 4:4–5, “to him that worketh not, yet believeth … his faith is reputed to justice”; Romans 11:6; Galatians 2:16; Titus 3:5. And note that Ephesians 2:9 says ex ergon, works full stop, with no “of the law” attached.
Every word of that is fair, and the first thing to say is that we concede it. Verse 10 by itself does not separate us from a confessional Protestant. Romans 4:4–5 is in our Bible too, and it says what he says it says: to the man who works, the reward is reckoned as a debt, and God justifies the ungodly who does not work but believes. Trent says the same thing in its own voice. Nothing preceding justification, “whether faith or works,” merits it. On the beginning of the Christian life there is less daylight between us than either side’s memes suggest.
The dispute is about everything after the beginning, and it comes down to one question: is the charity that works in a justified man the evidence that he was justified, or is it part of what he will be judged by? Catholics say the second.
Paul, to the Romans, on the day of judgement: God “will render to every man according to his works” (2:6), and “not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified” (2:13). A Reformed reader has an answer ready, and it is a serious one: Romans 2 states the law’s standard in order to convict everybody under it, and Paul draws his own conclusion a chapter later at 3:20, “by the works of the law no flesh shall be justified before him.” We will not pretend that verse is not there. But that reading has to account for 2:7 and 2:10, where Paul does not state a standard and withdraw it; he promises glory and honour and peace to those who patiently do good. And at 2:16 he says this judgement is “according to my gospel,” which is an odd thing to say of a hypothesis he is about to abandon.
Paul to the Galatians: what avails is “faith that worketh by charity” (5:6), not faith accompanied by charity but faith operating through it. And Paul at his most pointed, to the Corinthians:
And if I should have prophecy and should know all mysteries, and all knowledge, and if I should have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.
The standard reply is that mountain-moving faith is a charism rather than saving faith, and that “I am nothing” is a statement about worth and not about justification. Grant both and the verse still does work: Paul is willing to say that a faith which charity has not formed leaves a man at nothing, which is not a sentence that sits comfortably beside the idea that charity is only the receipt. Add Our Lord’s own account of the judgement in Matthew 25, where the sheep and the goats are separated by what they did and failed to do for the least of His brethren. It can be read as evidence being produced at an assize. It can also be read the way it sounds.
That is the real argument. It is serious, it is five centuries deep, and good men are on both sides of it. What it is not is the argument on the graphic.
What the Church actually teaches about grace
One thing the graphic does not say, but its comment sections always do, is that Catholics think they earn salvation by being good. That is not a Catholic doctrine. It is a heresy the Church condemned fifteen hundred years ago.
In 418 the bishops at Carthage condemned the Pelagian teaching on nature and grace. It was not a tidy process, and we may as well say so: Pope Zosimus had declared Pelagius orthodox the previous year and had to reverse himself, under pressure from the African bishops and an imperial rescript, before condemning him in the Epistula tractoria. The doctrine still got settled, and it got settled against Pelagius.
A century later the Council of Orange condemned the softer version, the idea that the first move toward God might be ours and grace the reward for it. Its canon 18: “That grace is not preceded by merit. Recompense is due to good works if they are performed; but grace, to which we have no claim, precedes them, to enable them to be done.”
And when Orange summed up what must therefore be preached and believed, it quoted Scripture, and one of the verses it quoted was this: “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and it is not your own doing, it is the gift of God.” Ephesians 2:8. The council that settled the question cites the verse the graphic thinks Catholics have been hiding from.
Trent said it again in 1547, in chapter 8: we are justified freely, “because none of those things which precede justification, whether faith or works, merit the grace itself of justification.” Canon 1 puts the anathema on the opposite view. The Catechism states it flatly at §2010: “no one can merit the initial grace of forgiveness and justification, at the beginning of conversion.”
What then about canons 20 and 24, quoted above, and canon 32, which says the justified truly merit eternal life? Read canon 32 to its end and it answers itself: the justified man merits “by the good works which he performs through the grace of God and the merit of Jesus Christ, whose living member he is.” Trent’s chapter on merit grounds the whole thing in a God “whose bounty towards all men is so great, that He will have the things which are His own gifts be their merits.” The Catechism says it in St. Augustine’s words at §2009: “Grace has gone before us; now we are given what is due…. Our merits are God’s gifts.”
You may reject that as an answer. You cannot call it a doctrine of earning. And if you want to hear what it sounds like in the mouth of a saint rather than a canon lawyer, the Catechism ends its own section on merit by quoting St. Thérèse of Lisieux, a Doctor of the Church:
In the evening of this life, I shall appear before you with empty hands, for I do not ask you, Lord, to count my works.
That is the Catholic who was supposedly tricked. She is holding nothing.
The one place Scripture says “faith alone”
James 2:24: “Do you see that by works a man is justified; and not by faith only?” The Greek is ouk ek pisteos monon.
Two honest complications before anybody builds a slogan on it. First, monon is adverbial. It is not the adjectival mones that would attach it directly to “faith,” so the sentence can be read “a man is not justified only by faith” rather than “by faith alone.” Second, and separately, a well-read Protestant holds that James uses “justified” in a demonstrative sense: shown righteous, vindicated before men by the evidence of deeds, pointing to 2:18, “show me thy faith without works.” Those are two independent arguments and neither depends on the other.
Much of what James says is common ground, and pretending otherwise wastes everyone’s time. He is describing a man who claims faith and has nothing: “if a man say he hath faith, but hath not works?” (2:14). His verdict on that faith is that it is dead, “dead in itself” (2:17), dead as a body without the spirit (2:26). The demons have assent and it does them no good (2:19). No Protestant disputes any of that, and a Catholic who thinks he has scored a point by establishing that a dead faith saves nobody has not been listening.
The difference is narrower and sharper. James does not say Abraham was shown to have been justified; he says he “was justified by works, offering up Isaac his son upon the altar” (2:21), and then denies justification “by faith only” (2:24). Catholics take those as statements about justification itself. At 2:23 he says the Genesis text, Abraham believed God, and it was reputed to him unto justice, was “fulfilled” in the offering of Isaac decades later; the word can be read as “confirmed, shown true,” and a Protestant reads it that way. But the verse before gives James’s own gloss, and it is not the language of evidence: “by works faith was made perfect” (2:22). Something was completed, not merely displayed.
Paul and James are not in conflict, and the Church has never read them as if they were. Paul denies that anybody puts God in his debt. James denies that an inert belief producing nothing is the faith Paul meant. The live question is whether the charity that completes faith is part of what justifies or only proof that justification happened, and that question is not settled by a graphic.
What “works” means in Ephesians 2
Read on past verse 10 and Paul tells you what sort of works are on his mind. Verses 11 to 22 are about Gentiles and Jews: “you, being heretofore Gentiles in the flesh, who are called uncircumcision by that which is called circumcision”; strangers to the covenants; the middle wall of partition broken down; “the law of commandments contained in decrees” made void in Christ’s flesh. The second half of the chapter is about the collapse of a barrier between two peoples, and the boast excluded in verse 9 is, in that context, the boast of the insider over the outsider.
We want to be careful here, because this is where Catholic apologetics tends to overclaim. It is not true that scholarship has settled this in our favour. The reading that Paul’s polemic against “works” targets Jewish covenant boundary markers belongs chiefly to James Dunn and N. T. Wright, developing E. P. Sanders’s account of Second Temple Judaism as covenantal nomism; none of the three is Catholic. It has been among the most influential currents in New Testament studies since the late 1970s, and it has also been contested at book length by able Protestant scholars. It is a major school, not a consensus, and it should not be reported as one. It is also weakest exactly here: Ephesians 2:9 says ex ergon, works, with no “of the law” attached, which is why even sympathetic readers hesitate to import the boundary-marker sense into this verse.
So we will not lean on it, and we do not need to. Grant the broadest possible reading of “works,” every good deed a human being can perform, with no restriction to the Mosaic law. Trent grants exactly that, in so many words. The sentence still ends at verse 10, and verse 10 still says the saved were created for good works.
“Tricked”
Which leaves the load-bearing word. A trick requires someone deceived and a moment when it happened, and the chronology runs the wrong way.
Ephesians was written, copied, read aloud in the liturgy and preached on by a Church that baptised infants, offered the Eucharist as a sacrifice, prayed for its dead, and taught that faith must be completed by charity. Chrysostom, quoted above, is one of its preachers. Augustine, the hammer of the Pelagians, the man who taught the West that grace precedes everything, wrote a whole treatise, On Faith and Works, against lay correspondents who held that faith without a good life suffices. These are the men who handed the letter down. On the graphic’s account they are the first victims of the trick, and they are also the reason anyone has Ephesians to quote.
A word of precision about what is and is not new. The objection is not that somebody coined a phrase. Words like “faith alone” can be found in Christian writers long before the Reformation, in senses a Catholic can accept. What appears in the 1520s is a particular account of justification: faith as the sole instrument, and a righteousness imputed from outside rather than poured into the soul. That is the thing Trent took up, and that is the thing with a date.
About one piece of that period we can be exact, because the man responsible wrote it down. In 1530 Luther published an open letter defending his German New Testament, in which Romans 3:28 had acquired a word the apostle did not write: allein, “alone,” faith alone. His answer to the critics:
I also know that in Rom. 3, the word “solum” is not present in either Greek or Latin text — the papists did not have to teach me that — it is fact! The letters s-o-l-a are not there.
He argues from there that German idiom requires the word to carry Paul’s sense, which is an argument a translator is entitled to make and to lose. But the fact is not in dispute, because he states it himself.
The same period produced the famous judgement on James, and since this is an article about cropping quotations we will give it whole, including the clause that helps him:
Therefore St. James’ epistle is really an epistle of straw, compared to these others, for it has nothing of the nature of the gospel about it.
“Compared to these others” matters, and leaving it out would be the same offence this article exists to answer. Luther is ranking James below John, Romans and 1 Peter, not throwing it out of the Bible. He never removed it, and his preface to James grants that it is a good book. In his German New Testament he placed James, Hebrews, Jude and Revelation outside the numbered books, on the stated ground that the ancients had disputed them, which is the ground Eusebius and Erasmus had used before him. The “straw” sentence is reported as absent from editions after 1537. A reader can weigh that arrangement without weighing the man.
So the sequence is this. The Church reads Ephesians 2 one way for fifteen centuries, with the chapter’s greatest ancient expositor insisting that grace does everything and then reading verse 10 aloud to forestall exactly the inference the graphic draws. In the 1520s a new account of justification appears, requiring an added word in one verse and the rearrangement of four books. Five centuries after that, a social-media graphic informs Catholics that the fifteen-century reading was the trick.
Whatever else that is, it is not a deception worked on Catholics. It is a disagreement, and it has a date.
Meme theology
None of this material is hard to reach. Verse 10 is one line further down the page. James 2 surfaces in any concordance. Trent’s decree on justification is online and free, about six thousand words. Chrysostom’s homily on the passage is shorter than that and also free. Calvin on Ephesians 2:10 is free. None of it is behind a paywall or locked in a language nobody reads.
What the format offers instead is a feeling: that Catholics are dupes, that the reader is not, and that two red-highlighted verses settle sixteen centuries of theology. It flatters the reader for the length of a scroll and asks nothing further of him. That is the genre working as designed. A citation that stops where the apostle’s thought does not is not a reading of Scripture; it is a quotation with the ending removed.
If you want to argue about justification, argue about it, and we will meet you gladly. Bring Romans 4 and we will bring Romans 2. Bring Romans 3:20 and we will bring Romans 2:16. Bring Galatians 2:16 and we will bring Galatians 5:6. Bring Titus 3:5 and we will bring 1 Corinthians 13:2, and then let us talk about what charity has to do with faith, which is the actual question. There is a real conversation here, and Catholics have been having it, in writing, since before the New Testament had a table of contents.
But if the case is going to rest on Ephesians 2, read one more verse first.
References
- Ephesians 2:8–10 quoted from the New King James Version, the translation on the graphic. The Douay-Rheims renders verse 10 “created in Christ Jesus in good works, which God hath prepared that we should walk in them”; the Greek is epi with the dative. Ephesians 2:11–16 from the same.
- St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Ephesians, Homily IV (on Ephesians 2:1–10). Oxford translation revised by Gross Alexander, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st series, vol. 13, ed. Philip Schaff; quoted here in the modernised text at New Advent. Every Chrysostom quotation in this article, including “no one … is justified by works” and “faith saves, but it is because God so wills, that faith saves,” is from that one homily. The NPNF editors assign the series to Antioch, where Chrysostom was then a presbyter; a minority view places it at Constantinople.
- Council of Trent, Session VI (13 January 1547), Decree on Justification: chapter 8, chapter 16, and canons 1, 20, 24 and 32. Canon 9’s anathema also falls on “faith alone,” but in a specified sense worth stating in full, since it is narrower than it is usually quoted: “in such wise as to mean, that nothing else is required to co-operate in order to the obtaining the grace of Justification, and that it is not in any way necessary, that he be prepared and disposed by the movement of his own will.” That canon is about the preparation of the will for initial justification. Canons 20 and 24, quoted in the body, carry the point at issue here.
- Council of Orange (529), canons and conclusion, Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University; canon 18 and the Conclusion, which quotes Ephesians 2:8. A regional synod of Gaul, its canons confirmed by Pope Boniface II on 25 January 531.
- Council of Carthage (1 May 418), canons against the Pelagian teaching on nature and grace. On Zosimus: he had accepted Caelestius’s profession and judged Pelagius orthodox in 417, then reversed himself in 418 under pressure from the African bishops and following the imperial rescript of 30 April. His Epistula tractoria condemning Pelagius and Caelestius survives only in fragments, and its exact relation to the Carthaginian canons is disputed.
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§2007–2011: §2009 quoting St. Augustine (“Our merits are God’s gifts”), §2010 on the initial grace, and §2011 closing with St. Thérèse of Lisieux, “Act of Offering,” Story of a Soul.
- James 2:14–26; Romans 2:6, 2:13, 2:16, 3:20, 4:4–5; Galatians 5:6; 1 Corinthians 13:2; all Douay-Rheims. At James 2:24 the Greek is ouk ek pisteos monon, with monon adverbial rather than the adjectival mones; the Douay-Rheims and King James render it “not by faith only,” the RSV, ESV and NIV “not by faith alone.”
- For the Protestant position as its own confessions state it: Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter XVI.2, “Of Good Works,” which calls good works “the fruits and evidences of a true and lively faith” and describes believers as those “whose workmanship they are, created in Christ Jesus thereunto”; Heidelberg Catechism, question 86; John Calvin, Commentary on Ephesians at 2:10. The Heidelberg answer is paraphrased, not quoted.
- Martin Luther, An Open Letter on Translating (1530), Project Gutenberg.
- Martin Luther, Preface to the New Testament (1522), Luther’s Works, American edition, vol. 35, p. 362, for the “epistle of straw” sentence, quoted here in full. That the sentence is absent from editions of his German New Testament after 1537 is reported by Martin Foord in Themelios 45.2; we have not checked a 1538 printing, and at least one other account gives a different date.
- St. Augustine, On Faith and Works (De fide et operibus), written c. 413 against correspondents who held that faith without a good life suffices for salvation; Augustine places it in the Retractationes immediately after De spiritu et littera. English: Gregory J. Lombardo, trans., Ancient Christian Writers 48; Latin in CSEL 41.
- On the “works of the law” question: E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977), for covenantal nomism; James D. G. Dunn, “The New Perspective on Paul” (Manson Memorial Lecture, 1982; published 1983); N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said (1997). For the sustained critique, D. A. Carson, Peter T. O’Brien and Mark A. Seifrid, eds., Justification and Variegated Nomism (2001–2004), and John Piper, The Future of Justification (2007).
- Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, Catholic Church and Lutheran World Federation, Augsburg, 31 October 1999. Its claim is narrow and worth stating exactly: §41 says that “the teaching of the Lutheran churches presented in this Declaration does not fall under the condemnations from the Council of Trent,” and that the Lutheran Confessions’ condemnations “do not apply to the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church presented in this Declaration.” Both halves are about the formulations in that document. §42 adds that nothing is thereby taken from the seriousness of the condemnations, which “remain for us ‘salutary warnings’.” It took the 1998 Catholic Response and a 1999 Annex to reach even that, and it does not dissolve the disagreement described in this article.