Today to a person asked, “If faithfulness is required to inherit the kingdom [Col. 1:22-23; Gal. 5:19-21; 2 Pet. 1:10-11], doesn’t that violate saved by grace?”

I wrote (you get the edited version):

I’ve wrestled with these passages since 1986. I could not put them together until about 1992, a couple years after I started reading the church fathers. 1992 was 34 years ago. I have stewed in the uncertainty since 1986, slowly learning how these verses fit together. I do not expect others to “get it” in one Facebook post.

What surprised me, after I began reading the church fathers, was that none of them seemed to share our modern dilemma. They never ask, “How do we reconcile Paul and James?” They simply quote both.

So here’s my explanation:

Grace and Works

I strongly, strongly prefer “favor” over “grace,” so I’ll use “favor” through the rest of the post.

Favor is how we remain faithful and avoid gratifying the flesh. The favor of God brings salvation and trains us to live righteously and godly in this present age (Tit. 2:11-12). Mercy is God forgiving our sins; favor is God empowering us to overcome them (Rom. 6:14).

Consider Romans 6:22-23. Everyone knows verse 23 but most don’t know verse 22 even exists. Romans 6:22 says eternal life is the result of holiness (cf. Heb. 12:14) and holiness is the result of becoming a servant of God. Then, immediately, Paul says eternal life is the gift of God in the next verse.

John Chrysostom explained, more than 1600 years ago, that eternal life cannot be said to be the wages of righteousness, like death is the wages of sin, because our righteousness [both our behavior and our innocence before God, 1 Jn. 3:7] is a gift. We are servants of God because by favor and through faith we became God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works. Why should we receive wages for God’s work? No, we can’t say that eternal life is wages. Instead, eternal life is the gift of God because the service and good that we did to reap eternal life (Rom. 2:5-8; Gal. 6:7-9) were the gift of God as well.

It is hard to take Romans 11:6 and join it to Ephesians 5:5-7 or 2 Peter 1:10-11 or Galatians 5:19-21 and 6:7-9, but we have to. So many modern Christians pick whether they prefer Ephesians 2:8-9 or 2 Peter 2:20-21.

We don’t get to pick. They are both true. No early Christian ever wrote about struggling to reconcile faith and works. No early Christian ever asked, “What do we do with James 2:24 and Romans 3:28.” There is something they understood which we have lost.

The best example is one of the earliest and most well-known church fathers, Polycarp. He wrote the way Paul wrote, assuming his readers knew something we have forgotten. He starts his letter to the Philippians by echoing both Paul and Peter, saying we are saved by favor (Eph. 2:8-9) and therefore rejoice with unspeakable joy (1 Pet. 1:8). Yet only a few sentences later he says God will raise us up in Christ IF we keep his commandments, don’t return evil for evil or insult for insult. He spends most of the second chapter listing things we have to do to be raised up with Christ.

We have to make the effort to find out what Paul, Polycarp, and the early churches understood. If the Christians closest to the apostles saw no contradiction, then perhaps the contradiction is not in Scripture but in the assumptions we bring to it.