Works Righteousness

I have never believed in works righteousness. But it is only through the process of studying for my qualifying exams that I have come to truly hate it, and to sympathize with Luther’s vehement loathing of anything that smacked of it.

Allow me to explain.

At my university, we do qualifying exams as part of our Ph.D. program, like everybody else. My division has four written exams over set bibliographies and an oral examination where you retract defend your written essays. It is a fairly infrequent occurrence for someone to fail. Only students who’ve been around for some time can remember anyone by name, and most of my contemporaries know of only one story. Still, if you do fail, there’s no second chance. Your enrollment in the program is terminated. So you can imagine that even though one’s odds of failing are very slight, it’s hard not to be pretty nervous. And by nervous, I mean terrified.

For much of the last six months or so, as I’ve been preparing, I’ve had occasion to reflect on what the prospect of failure (however unlikely) means for me. Most of that has been on what it means for me as a person, how the possibility has to be embraced in order to ever do anything, how one’s sense of worth can’t be contingent on one’s success in one’s various endeavors, etc. And I’m pretty good on that count. But the other night, I woke up and it suddenly occurred to me that however okay I was with it psychologically, it would mean suddenly finding myself unemployed in the Great Economic Downturn of 2008-200920102011. My livelihood at the moment is my stipend from my school, and if my enrollment in the school came to an abrupt end, so would my income.

Like I said, it’s highly improbable that I would fail. But even after praying myself down off that very figurative ledge, I was quite resolved to do absolutely everything in my power to be sufficiently prepared. So I’ve gone back and re-checked out couple books that I’d just skimmed, figured out when I’ll read a few that I was planning to just skim, realized that there aren’t enough hours in the day or days left in the week (that’s a literal week; the exams start a week from tomorrow) to read and process everything I’d like. So I find myself asking how much is enough. I want to have mastered as many of these texts as possible. I don’t want to do the bare minimum. But when push comes to shove, and with my present livelihood on the line (not to mention my career in this field), how much is enough to not get kicked out?

So if you know Luther or any other strain of Protestant theology, you can probably see where this is going. I am reminded of Luther’s anxieties over his salvation prior to his eureka moment with Romans 1:17. He believed, like any good late medieval Catholic, that one must be holy to see the Lord (that much is scriptural, see Heb. 12:14). And for him, that meant not only being in a state of grace through baptism and penance, but dying in a state of grace, and then being purged of one’s sins in purgatory. So how do you get into and stay in a state of grace? How much penance did you have to do? How many works of piety and mercy were required to make God disposed to give you the gift of perseverance, so you could get into at least purgatory when you died?

Luther’s breakthrough came when he realized that there was no humanly possible way to bridge the gap between God and humanity. One can do nothing to merit grace. It’s called grace because it’s entirely unmerited. God has done absolutely everything involved in salvation. God imputes Christ’s righteousness to the sinner based on faith, and even this faith is a gift of God. Humans always want to be able to contribute something, to think they had something to do with it. But it the scandal of it is that there is nothing about salvation that is not a gift (this has a slightly different nuance in Wesleyan theology. We’ll talk about that some other time. I’m pretty Lutheran today).

I fear (at certain moments) rejection by my school, which is also my community, and being deprived of a paycheck and a certain career. Luther feared being rejected by God and being deprived of eternal blessedness (and subjected to eternal torment). As I agonize over how much is enough to prove my merit as a scholar (a cruel irony that I study the grace of God, but have to prove my merit), I am thankful that I do not have to live my life wondering if I’ve done enough not to be rejected by God. My admission to candidacy and continuance in this program depends on me showing that I am good enough. My salvation does not.

And given how agonizing this test is, even though I will almost certainly pass it, I find that I don’t just think that any theology is wrong that makes my salvation almost but not entirely certain (and therefore dependent in some some small measure on my ability to prove my worth). I find it utterly abhorrent, and censure it not as an unfortunate misunderstanding, but a damnable error, a snare of the devil. But thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”