46. Brief Analysis

Surely every group of religious and reasonable people on the face of the earth knows and believes that there is one God; that doing good things is being with God; that doing evil things goes against God; that we must apply our own soul, heart, and powers to doing what is good and not doing what is evil, even though these faculties and abilities actually flow into us from God; and that the religious life consists in doing all the above. Surely everyone can see, then, that to confess three persons within the Divine and to declare that salvation has nothing to do with good works is to remove religious life from the church.

The Protestant assertion that salvation has nothing to do with good works is made in the following passages. Faith makes us just apart from good works; see §12 a, b. Good works are not necessary either for our salvation or for our faith, because salvation and faith are not preserved or maintained by our good works; see §12 g, h, l, m. Therefore there is no bond that unites faith and good works.

If we go back to the assertion that good works nevertheless spontaneously follow faith like fruit issuing forth from a tree — see §13 k, m — then we must ask this: Who does these good works? In fact, who would bother thinking about them or feel spontaneously moved to do them when they know and believe that these works contribute nothing to their salvation, and that none of us on our own can do any good for our own salvation, and so on?

If someone asserts that Protestants do nonetheless unite good works to their faith, I reply that if you deeply examine that union, you find that it is not actually a uniting but rather an appending of good works to faith. Good works are an appendage that is tacked on; they are not an integral part or even securely attached. They are like the shadows that are added to a painting to make it look more realistic. Religious practice, though, has to do with our lives; it consists in good works that we do in accordance with the truths taught by our faith. Clearly, then, religious practice is not in actuality an appendage; it is the thing itself.

To many people, though, living a religious life is like a horse’s tail; you can remove it if you want, because it serves no purpose. Who could come to any other reasonable conclusion from statements such as the following when taken at face value?

It is foolish to dream that the works enjoined by the second tablet of the Ten Commandments make us just before God; see §12 d.

Any who believe they will gain salvation because they do acts of goodwill are insulting Christ; see §12 e.

Good works must be completely excluded from any discussion of our justification and eternal life; see §12f.

There are many other such statements there as well.

When we go on to read that good works necessarily follow faith, and that if they do not follow faith, our faith is false and not true (see §13 o, p, v, and many other passages), who among us pays any attention to this? Or if we do pay attention to it, do we do good works consciously? Because good works that somehow flow out of us when we are unaware of them are surely as lifeless as if they had been done by a statue.

If we look more deeply into the cause of this teaching, we find that the leading reformers first assumed faith alone as their standard dogma in order to be differentiated from Roman Catholics, as I mentioned above (§§21, 22, 23). Later on they attached acts of goodwill so as not to go against Sacred Scripture and so that their denomination would be viewed as a religion and something wholesome.

103. Brief Analysis

The reason why there is no way to simultaneously hold the views of the new church and the views of the former church (that is, the modern-day church) regarding faith is that the two positions do not overlap by a third or even a tenth.

In Revelation 12 the faith of the former church is portrayed as a dragon (see §§87– 90 above) and the faith of the new church is portrayed as a woman clothed with the sun, who had a crown of twelve stars on her head. The dragon persecuted her and spewed water like a flood at her in an effort to carry her away by it. These two views cannot coexist in the same city, much less in the same household or the same mind. If they were to come together, the only possible outcome would be that the woman would be constantly exposed to rage and insanity from the dragon, and would constantly fear that the dragon would devour her son. After all, we read in Revelation 12 that the dragon stood before the woman, when she was about to give birth, in order to devour her child. After the woman gave birth, she fled into the wilderness (Revelation 12:1, 4, 6, 14– 17).

The faith held by the former church is a faith of the night; human reason has no experience of it at all. This is why we are told that we are to hold our intellect under obedience to faith. In fact, we do not even know whether it is within us or outside of us. The human will and human reason have nothing to do with it.

For that matter, goodwill, good works, repentance, the law of the Ten Commandments, and a number of other things that actually exist in the human mind have nothing to do with it (see §§79, 80, 96, 97, 98). The faith of the new church, however, forms a partnership and a marriage covenant with all the things just mentioned. As a result, this faith lives in the warmth of heaven; and because it does, it also lives in heaven’s light. It is a faith of the light.

A faith of the night and a faith of the light cannot live together any more than an owl and a dove can live together in one nest. The owl would lay its eggs there, and the dove would lay its eggs. After incubation, both sets of chicks would hatch, and then the owl would tear apart the dove’s chicks and feed them to its chicks. (Owls are voracious.)

The faith of the former church cannot live with the faith of the new church because the two are completely incompatible. The faith of the former church is descended from the idea that there are three gods (see §§30– 38 above); the faith of the new church, though, is descended from the idea that there is one God. And because the two are completely incompatible as a result, it is inevitable that if they lived together in us they would collide and cause so much conflict that everything related to the church would be destroyed in us. We would fall into such a state of spiritual madness or else spiritual unconsciousness that we would hardly know what the church was or whether such a thing even existed.

Consequently, people who are deeply committed to the faith of the old church are incapable of embracing the faith of the new church without endangering their own spiritual lives, unless they have first rejected the teachings of the former faith one by one and have uprooted that former faith along with all its live offspring and unhatched eggs (meaning tenets). What these tenets are like has been shown earlier in this work, especially in §§64– 69.