James Akin in http://www.ewtn.com/library/ANSWERS/AKINSTOR.htm
I began to have problems with the two fundamental doctrines of Protestantism: sola fide, the claim that we are saved by faith alone, and sola scriptura, the claim that Christians are to use only the Bible in matters of doctrine and practice.
The first began to be problematic for me because I started noticing certain passages in Scripture which contradicted the doctrine. In Romans 2:7, for example, the Apostle Paul tells his readers that God will give the reward of eternal life to those who "seek after glory, honor, and immortality by perseverance in working good."
In Galatians 6:6-10, Paul tells his readers that those who "sow to the Spirit" by "doing good to all" will from the Spirit reap a harvest of eternal life. It was especially noteworthy that I was finding these verses in Romans and Galatians, the very epistles on which Protestants claim to base the doctrine of justification by faith alone.
These verses don't mean we earn our salvation by good works, a doctrine many Protestants mistakenly attribute to the Catholic Church, but they do mean that the "faith alone" formula is not an accurate description of what the Bible teaches about salvation. These passages reveal that, as a result of God's grace, we are capable of doing acts of love which please God and which he freely chooses to reward. One of the rewards, in fact the primary reward, is the gift of eternal life (cf. Romans 2:6-7).
There was still the matter of how to explain passages such as Romans 3:28, where Paul says that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law, but this did not trouble me much since I had recognized from my earliest days of Bible reading that Paul was talking about the Mosaic Law in Romans and Galatians, which is why he spent so much time hammering home the fact that it is not necessary to be circumcised to be saved-circumcision being one of the key rituals of the Mosaic Law. What Paul is saying is absolutely true: We are justified by faith apart from works of the Mosaic Law.
This would be more obvious to English-speaking readers if translators used the Hebrew word for law, Torah, which is also the name of the first five books of the Bible; they contain the law of Moses. Paul said, "We hold that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Torah" (Rom. 3:28). We can prove this by looking at the very next verse: "Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also" (Rom. 3:29).
If Paul did not mean "works of the Torah," then this question and its answer would be meaningless. By the phrase "works of the Law" Paul refers to something Jews have but Gentiles don't: work of the Mosaic Law. He makes this point in the next verse: "Since God is one; and he will justify the circumcised [Jews] on the ground of their faith and the uncircumcised [Gentiles] through their faith" (Rom. 3:30). So the "works of the Law" Paul talks about in verse 28 are those works which characterize Jews, not Gentiles, the chief work being circumcision (cf. 3:29-30).
This means that the Jewish laws of circumcision, ritual purity, kosher dietary prescriptions, and the Jewish festal calendar are, now that we are under the New Covenant in Christ, entirely irrelevant to our salvation. Keeping the ceremonial Law of Moses is not necessary for Christians. What is important is keeping "the law of Christ" (Gal. 6:2) which is summarized as "faith working through love" (also translated as "faith made effective through love" [Gal. 5:6]).
One passage that highlighted the sacramental manner in which God gives us his grace was 1 Peter 3:20-21, where we're told that "God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. In it only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water, and this water symbolizes baptism that now saves you also; not the removal of dirt from the body but the pledge of a good conscience toward God. It saves you by the resurrection of Jesus Christ."
The meaning of Peter's statement, "baptism now saves you," is clear from the context of the passage. He's referring to the sacrament of water baptism, because he says eight people were "saved through water." Baptism does not save us by removing dirt from our bodies. The merely physical effects of pouring water in baptism are unimportant.
What counts is the action of the Holy Spirit though baptism, for in it we "pledge . . . a good conscience toward God," (that is, we make a baptismal pledge of repentance) and are saved "by the resurrection of Jesus Christ."
I began to discover this sacramental principle throughout the Bible. In both the Old and the New Testament there are incidents where God uses physical means to convey grace. One striking example is the case of the woman with a hemorrhage:
"When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, 'If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.' Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering. At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, 'Who touched my clothes?' 'You see the people crowding against you,' his disciples answered, 'and yet you can ask, "Who touched me?"' But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, 'Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering'" (Mark 5:27-34, NIV).
This passage contains all the elements of the sacramental principle:
the woman's faith, the physical means (touching Jesus' clothes), and the supernatural power that went out from Jesus. When the woman came up to him and, with faith, touched his garment, the power of God was sent forth, and she was healed. This is how the sacraments work; God uses physical signs (water, oil, bread, wine, the laying on of hands) as vehicles for his grace, which we receive in faith.
Thomas Aquinas pointed out that since we are not simply spiritual beings, but physical creatures also, it is fitting for God to give us his spiritual gift of grace through physical means. I later discovered that even Martin Luther recognized this. In his Short Catechism he stated that baptism "works the forgiveness of sins, delivers from death and the devil, and grants eternal salvation to all who believe." Sadly, he ignored the Biblical evidence for five of the seven sacraments (retaining only baptism and the Lord's Supper), and most Protestants lost even Luther's view of the sacraments as means of grace, departing from the Biblical teaching that "baptism now saves you."
God sometimes gives saving grace apart from baptism (cf. Acts 10:4448), but he ordained baptism to be the normative means through which we first come to him and become members of his Church. Peter told the crowd on the day of Pentecost, "Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit" (Acts 2:38). Paul was told at his baptism, "And now what are you waiting for? Get up, be baptized and wash your sins away, calling on his name" (Acts 22:16).
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