The logical necessity of salvation by faith alone

Christianity is unique among world religions in that it does not require its adherents to earn their own salvation.  Judaism and Islam, the other two Abrahamic religions, each demand strict compliance to law and ritual; Hinduism requires self-purification to rid one’s life of evil; Buddhism mandates renunciation of self; Confucianism dictates a perpetual search for harmony; and so on.  Christianity, on the other hand, requires only faith in the gospel message that we are reconciled to God through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ, nothing more.  For many Christians, that message of salvation-through-faith-alone is a tremendous comfort. For others, and for many agnostics and skeptics searching for answers, it is a serious stumbling block to faith.

For them it doesn’t sound comforting. It sounds, at best, counter intuitive and at worst, cruel.  How can faith alone be enough to earn salvation? Everything about our human experience tells us that actions matter. How we behave and how we treat each other counts for something. Salvation through faith alone upends that notion. The idea that a murderer can confess Christ and be saved while a morally upright non-believer is lost to hell for all eternity roils our sense of fair play. The concept of a supposedly good and just God sanctioning such a patently unfair outcome undercuts the very notion that such a god exists.  It is a fair criticism, and it deserves an answer.

Let’s begin by acknowledging that the criticism is valid only if there is a God, and he is who he says he is. If there is no God, the critique is pointless. Absent God there is no transcendental standard of morality against which we can measure proper behavior, nor is there likely a heaven or hell for us to worry about anyway.  But if the God of the Bible does exist, it is precisely those characteristics he is purported to possess that cause us to recoil at the idea of him condemning a “good person” to hell for a mere lack of faith. Nevertheless, scripture is clear on the nature and character of God.  He is fully just, fully loving, fully holy and fully merciful. So how can such a God rationalize sending a good person to hell? 

Why Merit Doesn’t Matter

We intuitively believe merit should count for something in the quest for salvation, but is that true?  If a person has lived a good life, tried to do the right thing and never killed anybody, should they get into heaven? Or, conversely, should murderers be kept out? Perhaps so.  But if that is the case, it begs the question of what the precise behavioral standard for entry should be.  Where should God set the benchmark? If behavior counts towards admission, what would be a fair standard for deciding if someone has been good enough to get into heaven?  Consider some options.

God could use the Ten Commandments as the benchmark. It would be a good choice. They are, after all, one of the oldest codes of human behavior on record. And for the ancient Jews, they actually were the standard for entry into heaven.  They were hand delivered by God to Moses on Mount Sinai for the express purpose of instructing God’s people how to behave in order to be saved. How well would it work if they were still the standard today?  Could anybody live their entire life without breaking a commandment and thus make it into heaven on merit? It’s a tough standard to meet. Forget about the big ones like don’t lie, kill or cheat. Even if we could manage those, there are several “minor” sins to consider.  If you have ever put anything in your life (money, career, love life, material desire) above God, been disrespectful or disobedient to your parents, or been jealous of someone else’s possessions, you have violated the commandments.  A violation, even a small one, means you failed to meet the standard and therefore cannot be granted meritorious entry into heaven. 

Perhaps the Ten Commandments are too rigorous. Maybe in his perfect mercy God could lower the bar to give us a fighting chance. Ten, after all, is a big number to try and get right.  A single standard would be much easier. Perhaps God could use something more basic like the Golden Rule, “treat others the way you want to be treated.” Simple, neat, easy. Could any of us reach heaven on merit if all we had to do was abide by the Golden Rule?  Sadly, probably not.  Most of us wouldn’t make it a single day.  We are, after all, selfish creatures.  Try as we might to put others first, we inevitably pursue our own self-interest at their expense. We certainly don’t always treat them how we would want them to treat us. We are so proficient at being selfish we often don’t even recognize we’re doing it. We even go so far as to actively delude ourselves into thinking our selfishness is some sort of modern virtue.  We celebrate it with vacuous platitudes like, “I’m living my truth,” “the heart wants what the heart wants,” and “I have to live my best life.” In the end we’re doing nothing more than pursuing our own selfish interests at the expense of others, and that’s one big Golden Rule no-no. It seems that standard is too high a hurdle as well.

What if God lowered the standard even further for us, could we make it on merit then?  If the standard dropped all the way down to a bumper sticker slogan like “be kind,” would that work?  If eternity hung in the balance could you be kind to everybody, all the time?  Could you do it when someone steals your parking spot, cuts you off in traffic or spreads a nasty rumor about you? Could you do it on those days when everything goes wrong, everybody gets on your nerves and you just want to be left alone? No, of course not. No one can. On days like that, we get mean. It’s part of the human experience thanks to our selfish nature and this broken world. Nothing works the way it should, we feel slighted and then we lash out.  Therein lies the problem. Because of our broken and selfish nature, we can’t get to heaven on our own even when the standard for admittance is as low as simply “be kind.”  We are inherently incapable of behaving well enough to earn heaven on merit.

What is God to Do?

Faced with the reality that humans cannot meet a behavioral standard for admittance, what is God to do? How can he resolve the conundrum and allow imperfect people into his perfect presence?

One possibility is to dispense with standards altogether and let everybody in. There is brand of theology that preaches precisely that, Universalism.  The logical problem with it is it does nothing to resolve the original critique.  Why should the immoral, murderous degenerate be granted the same access to heaven as someone who has lived a life of virtue and sacrifice for others?  They shouldn’t. The other problem with Universalism is it is wholly inconsistent with God’s character. Even if he wanted to let everybody in, a holy, loving, just and righteous God cannot endorse that which is inherently unholy, unjust, unloving and unrighteous. Letting them into heaven is a de facto endorsement that, absent some recompense, cannot be allowed.

What, then, is left for God to do? How does a perfectly just, perfectly holy, perfectly loving and perfectly righteous God allow people into heaven when, no matter how low he makes the standard, they perpetually fail to meet it? The only option, really, is for God to meet the standard for us. It turns out that is precisely what he does. That is the gospel message. In the midst of our failure to reach God, he reaches us. Because there is no standard we can meet on our own, God sent Jesus to meet the standard for us, and then to take the punishment that should have been ours for not meeting it.  That’s what Christians mean by justification through substitutionary atonement, and it can’t be any other way. There is no standard we can meet and no works we can do to earn our way into heaven.  All we can do is accept the truth of God’s message and bask in his perfect mercy.  And doing that takes faith alone.