This is what Scripture actually teaches about justification.
End of thread.
Or the very beginning of the thread. Linkwarz doesn't suffice as a logical case for Catholicism being right about both faith and works as a justification. My counter to that would be along the lines that Roman Catholics have confused repentance for penance, and hence have involved good works (penance) in justification.
Let us worship with music as we spend time thinking about the Lord:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfMAbgNr3cI
Repentance, or
metanoeo in the Greek, is a compound word indicating both "mind" and "change towards". So what we have is not a behavioral change, but an internal change. There are just a couple of places that show explicit Greek in the NT and call for both repentance and faith as the condition of salvation. In several other areas they are separately given as the condition of salvation. This makes it a hermeneutic necessity to consider the two as simultaneous parts of the same event, that
metanoeo (which we must note on a linguistic level as a
directional word) is occurring towards the
pistis/faith of Jesus.
But before we can assess any of this, we need to discuss the meaning of sin and the atonement. First I'd like to lay out on a basic level what my perspective looks like, in order to have a frame of reference as we get into more detailed hermeneutic discussion.
It is a bit lengthy so I've divided it into two parts:
Part 1
The issue of sin-
In the story of Adam and Eve, an emotional detail is often taken for granted that is key for understanding what exactly sin is and what sin feels like on God's end, found in the very start of the Bible. When they, His first great creations, succumb to the erroneous idea that they themselves can become something more, something like God, they do something as simple as eating fruit.
It has nothing to do with what they've physically done, though, nothing like the basic emotional repulsion of our stereotype as Christians, that sins like engaging in sexual immorality or hurting someone is "icky" or "ugly"; what it has everything to do with is that something in their mental nature has changed, and the action was little more than a symbol, a side effect of something I find much more emotionally disturbing. It is something that grieves me personally quite a bit more than "icky", "ugly", or "I hate that person, either that or I hate what they're doing" (btw, I'm not trying to describe you guys at all with this bit, just woolgathering about some prevailing attitudes).
What I despise is what has internally happened to humanity and what they were deprived of; of course that isn't nearly as important as how much I despise the emotional consequences on God's end.
Upon God's return He asks: "Where are you?" It is imperative to dwell on this moment because at this point God is having His first experience of separation.
We have to ask ourselves what exactly He is being separated from. What is God getting out of all of this in the first place? This is His special creation that is capable of asking questions, of having a theory of mind and dominating his/her immediate environment to the point of possessing responsibility, of being able to practice jurisprudence. While such jurisprudence may have fallen into a sad state at this point, at first it was marvelous. But what's more this thing adores what it sees, it wants to name things and learn about them. So the most lovely, most interesting thing in all of existence, the One that conceived of existence in the first place is finally able to have a sounding board for His thoughts.
And now something has happened, some action that disagrees with this thing's God gifted nature and it has hidden itself. Of course, compared to God it is naive and He knows exactly where it is hiding, but there is a break in the communication with that special God gifted part within them, an intellectual and emotional connection has been severed. In a manner of speaking God already feels hidden from them, and they Him.
Adam and Eve have arrived at the thought that they are not exactly alike to God (correct), but they should be (obviously incorrect), and for reasons they can't explain they are ashamed of what has happened. Maybe they now realize to some extent at this point that there is an essential likeness they have to Him, but by their very nature as it compares to His they can't think or do things on the same scale, so in doing what they've done they have driven a wedge of confusion into the issue; now all of a sudden they feel even less alike to Him. The accessibility is severed.
So, now that God has asked the first of His two most anguishing rhetorical questions, we proceed to contemplate the importance of the second question.
The issue of the atonement-
There is now an inconceivable avalanche of this sensation for God as He only knows how long the story takes, and because He knows of no time boundaries on Himself (time being something conceived of within His mind), there is torrential anguish to be had as He is painstakingly aware of all of the sin that happened, is happening, and will happen. But God was aware of this in an inscrutable period, if it can be understood as a "period" at all, called eternity past. He has predetermined the atonement that will solve this problem to His satisfaction.
What is the atonement? Yes, a typical answer would be the crucifixion, but what is it really? God has
assumed responsibility for something He isn't even personally responsible for, and has decided that He will experience the entire punishment, a reasonable punishment in light of the kind of pain incurred, all Himself in order that He can be satisfied coming into a relationship with as much of His beloved creations as He can. Even contemplating at all, on the feeble level of which I am capable what this atonement involved for Him, gives me some idea of how much pleasure He takes in the spiritual results on the other end. He considered it worth it after all.
There is something in His nature that cries out this sentiment: "Someone must
fully reckon and then experience all of the fallout anguish involved with this, in order for Me to be satisfied." It goes without saying that only He would be capable of doing that in the first place, so He was the sole qualified volunteer.
For our special benefit, He arranged that His own experience with death would be by crucifixion. It must be emphasized that an experience as meager as physical suffering, however bothersome it may be to us, is truly a triviality for a being like God during the atonement. The emotional, as opposed to physical, pain cannot remotely be mutually reckoned.
So why this particular type of execution? Crucifixion under the Roman empire was actually a public shaming ritual, where those whom the people deemed "low lives" were often marred beyond recognition, eventually covered in their own excrement as involuntary bodily functions occur during the process, and generally dehumanized in a number of unseemly ways. What more appropriate ritual for the benefit of our comprehension then, as the very thing that separated us from God was a dehumanizing of self?
Probably a great majority of Christians tend to think about the physical and sheer emotional pain involved here, but the primary end here was experiencing emotional pain and it would not be a simple kind of emotional pain at all. As the Scriptures record, He laid the sins of the world on Himself through His human form (the incredible quagmire that is Trinitarian theology and other concepts of the Godhead, has no topical space to be addressed here), so what we are examining right now is the point when God experienced every agonizing consequence of all of the sins combined, in the space of a few hours.
So far as I can meagerly comprehend, He dealt with the alienating, self loathing, manic depression that comes with the essential human crisis, which is at it's core the sensation of feeling separated, feeling insecure and little more than an animal, examining the consequences brought upon others- including God of course- in retrospect and feeling shame, and so on.
At this particular point He asks the most terrible rhetorical question, one that is emotionally difficult for me to read when I come across it: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" He experienced the incomprehensibly horrible sensation of complete separation, Himself.
