Peter Marshall was a popular Protestant evangelist when I was in high school. I never heard him speak, but I read his books. One of his sermons I remember even today: “God Has No Grandchildren.” By that he meant that each of us must choose to accept and live God’s gift of faith and eternal life. We cannot inherit the faith of our parents. This image of “God Has No Grandchildren” is at the core of today’s first reading from Romans. It is also at the heart of something Protestants and Catholics fought vehemently about for over a hundred years. Theologians call this issue “justification by faith.”
Martin Luther and the 95 Theses
An ethics course my senior year in college turned the corner for me from Protestant to Catholic. But that intellectual journey began two years earlier when I read the Erasmus-Luther debates in a humanities class. I remember being fascinated by the issue of justification by faith then. 2017 commemorates the 500th anniversary of when Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses on the church door in Wittenberg in 1517 to begin the Reformations. At the core of Luther’s struggle and those theses were issues that came from Romans. How does God save us? How much depends on us and how much depends on God?
Or, put differently, does God have grandchildren?
Do not be afraid that I’m going to attempt to resolve the controversies of 500 years in today’s reflection. I am not. The issues are complex, even as they are explained in the Catholic-Lutheran statement of accord signed by both churches in 1999 after years of dialogue. The text of that accord can be found here.
The Accord says, in very general terms, that while Protestants and Catholics literally killed each other more than 6 million times over justification by faith during the Reformation-Counter Reformation years, that, really, both churches meant the same thing: God is the leader and instrument of our salvation through Christ. He makes the first move. We respond. While even our ability to respond comes as a gift of God through grace, we have freedom to respond and responsibility to respond. A simple yes to God is not response enough. Once the yes is said, God continues to act through grace to transform us into his likeness, as we say yes again and again and again. We must choose to be God’s children. God has no grandchildren.
Today, Who Cares?
While once upon a time people of faith fought to the death over what justification by faith means, today a growing number of our youth simply say “I don’t believe that” and reject God, the Church, faith, and the need for justification.
We worry about this, write books and articles, and have Catholics Come Home programs in our parishes. We blame culture, schools, and our children. How can our children reject seeing themselves as God’s children?
Perhaps too many of us parents have rejected justification by faith in subtle ways. We take salvation for granted, as if God owed it to us. We are baptized, confirmed, and receive communion. Don’t those sacraments assure us a place in heaven?
No.
We see ourselves justified as God’s grandchildren–people who absorb faith from family. The faith of our fathers feeds us.
Paul says today, “God Has No Grandchildren!”
God has children, children who claim the “righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.”
Through freely chosen, freely accepted, joyfully lived faith.
What is this faith? It isn’t just reciting the creed, saying a rosary, and going to church. To be justified by faith, our faith must be active and vibrant. Whether it is an Evangelical’s “profession of faith and baptism” or our having received all our sacraments, THAT DOES NOT MEAN WE ARE SAVED. God saves us, but we must accept in both mind and will.
I found this in the catechism. The catechism begins by talking about God’s action—the revelation of God the Father. Then it talks about what a response of faith looks like:
- By this revelation, “the invisible God, from the fullness of his love, addresses men as his friends, and moves among them, in order to invite and receive them into his own company.” The adequate response to this invitation is faith.
143 By faith, man completely submits his intellect and his will to God. With his whole being man gives his assent to God the revealer. Sacred Scripture calls this human response to God, the author of revelation, “the obedience of faith.”
144 To obey (from the Latin ob-audire, to “hear or listen to”) is to submit freely to the word that has been heard, because its truth is guaranteed by God, which is Truth itself.
The catechism says, faith “completely and freely submits intellect and will.”
Justification by Faith Means We Give Ourselves Up to God
In faith we give over mind. Give over will to obedience to what God has revealed to us—through Christ, through Scripture, through the Church, through the actions of Providence in our lives.
Give over. Submit.
That is not cultural Catholicism or Christianity.
That is radical change of life—“Selling out to Jesus.” “Becoming an intentional disciple.” “Accepting we are called to be sons and daughters of God.”
This is the faith response that saves us, because it opens us up EVERY DAY to God for God to continue to speak to us and work in us.
Those who completely doubt the faith can be won back—but they won’t be won back by nominal Christianity, cultural Catholicism, by people who take faith for granted–by God’s grandchildren.
We have to let God work through faith in us. We cannot save ourselves. St. Paul goes on today,, “What occasion is there then for boasting? It is ruled out. On what principle, that of works? No, rather on the principle of faith. For we consider that a person is justified by faith apart from works of the law . Does God belong to the Jews alone? Does he not belong to Gentiles, too? Yes, also to Gentiles, for God is one and will justify the circumcised on the basis of faith and the uncircumcised through faith.”
We are justified by faith that is real, tangible—that has works others can see.
But it isn’t what we do that counts, but rather who we are—saved babies, sons and daughters of God.
So where and how are you with that today?
Expressing Faith
Recently I spent time with a couple whose marriage and family are in serious trouble. Somehow the topic of how they live their faith came up. They realized how they live their faith is internal personal conviction and external religious practices. What is missing is conversation about personal conviction that can tie it to the religious practices so the faith flows through them. That’s what Jesus is talking about in the Gospel today.
The couple realized what they are doing by not talking about their faith is making their children into God’s grandchildren.
I work with octogenarians whose greatest distress is that their children no longer go to church. Yet when I asked them recently if I could invite their children to come be part of their reception of the Sacrament of the Sick with them they said, “No, my children wouldn’t be interested.”
Exploration of that shows they haven’t had faith conversations with their children and they can’t imagine having them now.
They didn’t mean to, but in our modern world, that makes their children into God’s grandchildren.
Grandchildren can’t be justified by faith. Faith is a gift, but each one of us must accept and live that gift
Prayer:
Lord, today help me be aware that faith is precious, freely given by God. Yet I must claim and live it. I can’t just talk the talk. I must also walk the walk that Jesus walked. Then the great justification accomplished by Jesus when he came, lived, died, and arose from the dead will be mine. I will be justified as God’s child.
