Are “Good Works” A Good Thing Or A Bad Thing?

I’ve encountered quite a lot of confusion about the role of “good works” in relation to Christian faith. Perhaps this is more clumsiness than anything else, but it’s not uncommon to hear phrases like, “Nothing we do can affect our salvation. We can’t qualify for it based on anything we do, and we can’t lose it based on anything we do—it’s ‘once saved, always saved’. Jesus has done it all. We don’t need to do anything—we’re saved through faith alone by grace alone. We simply need to believe in Jesus.”

But commonplace within evangelicalism as these ideas might be, are they really true?

There’s a “devotional version” of them which clusters around a twee Christian catchphrase (you may have gathered that I loathe twee Christian catchphrases, even though they proliferate on social media): “God made us to be human beings, not human doings,” which is usually followed by something like, “We just need to bask in the Father’s love and enjoy our relationship with him.”

Sidebar: That last phrase is sometimes said without the definite article: “We just need to bask in Father’s love”—which always sounds as if the speaker is trying to sound posh. I’m surprised they don’t go the whole hog and say “Pater” (which out of interest does derive from the NT Greek word, patēr). I’ve also heard some speak of and to God as “Daddy,” which is more insolent than intimate. Those concerned need to look at the meaning of the Aramaic word abba—which is where they think they’re getting it from—which is NOT “Daddy.”   

Back to the main article. As is often the case, flawed though those phrases are, there is some truth in them. For example, we are indeed invited through Jesus into an intimate relationship with God, understanding him through the metaphor of heavenly Father. The problem is that there’s some heresy in them, too. Not to a level sufficient to jeopardise someone’s salvation—especially if they’ve heard them from people who should know better and simply assumed them to be right—but wrong thinking that unhelpfully distorts our understanding of God’s nature and character and what he wants from us.       

Modern-day heresies are generally of a different order to heresies in the early Church, where there was much debate before key theological concepts had been fully worked out: for example, the humanity and divinity of Jesus (as fully God and fully man), the triune Godhead (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), and the relationship of the God of the Old Testament to Jesus. Modern-day heresies (again I’m generalising) tend to be the overstatement of a truth at one end of a spectrum while failing to give due weight to the truth at the opposite end. A good example would be the so-called ‘health-and-wealth’ prosperity gospel.

Failing to recognise the tensions and paradoxes of “both/and” in relation to aspects of truth—insisting instead on a “right versus wrong,” “either/or” approach, whether that’s deliberate or inadvertent—is not just an intellectual failing but also one that fosters bad theology and, in the prosperity gospel example, at least, corrupt, harmful practices.             

Another example, closer to home in relation to this article, would be the spectrum of “faith” and “works.” James made it abundantly clear how that particular “both/and” tension is to be resolved. An extended quote from James 2 is in order:    

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill’, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

But someone will say, ‘You have faith and I have works.’ Show me your faith without works, and I by my works will show you my faith. You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder. Do you want to be shown, you senseless person, that faith without works is barren? Was not our ancestor Abraham justified by works when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was brought to completion by the works. Thus the scripture was fulfilled that says, ‘Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness’, and he was called the friend of God. You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. Likewise, was not Rahab the prostitute also justified by works when she welcomed the messengers and sent them out by another road? For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is also dead.

So what’s the good in those phrases we began with? Reformed evangelicals will be the first to rightly point out that “good works” do not get us to heaven. We are unable to qualify to save ourselves based on having lived a meritorious life (or at least one in which we’ve done more good than harm—which most people believe that they have). This idea is called “works-righteousness” and many from a Reformed background will be very sensitive to it being perceived to be in any way challenged. The problem is the exaggeration of that otherwise correct doctrine—it’s the overstatement, reflected in those phrases we began with, that gives rise to the error.

Though it’s certainly possible to read Paul as coming against “works,” that is generally down to misreading the context and meaning of “works” and “law” in his writings—by assuming that he’s talking about universal salvation truths rather than engaging in conversations about the extent to which Torah applies in relation to gentile Jesus followers. But think about this: It’s only because what we do matters that there was any discussion to be had in the first place about how the good works prescribed by God through Torah should apply to gentiles! If what people do or don’t do never mattered to God—or at least, if it doesn’t matter anymore, thanks to Jesus—then there would have been nothing to discuss. If what we do mattered only for Jewish believers, and even then, only until Jesus came along, then it’s surprising that the New Testament doesn’t make that clear. That is certainly not something that Paul was ever saying.            

Since Paul gets most of the “blame” for the Reformed aversion to anything that smacks of “works-righteousness” (is obsession too strong a word?), it’s salutary to note some other things said in the Pauline corpus. For example, Ephesians 2:10: “We are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works.” Titus 3:1: “Remind the believers to always [be] . . . ready to do what is good” and verse 8, “All who trust in God will devote themselves to doing good.” Just to show that Paul is perfectly clear on the “both/and” thing, in between those two verses he makes clear that God “saved us, not because of the righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy.”

So if Paul has been frequently misunderstood in relation to “good works”, what of Jesus? Email or message me if you disagree on this, but I don’t think Jesus ever said anything that can be read as negative towards good works and generally doing what’s good and right. I would go further and say he oftentimes directly linked what we do in this life to our experience in the life to come. And when I say, “what we do in this life,” I do not mean simply whether or not we prayed The Sinner’s Prayer (something that we never see Jesus asking of anyone). Take, for example, the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man. Or the Parable of the Faithful versus Wicked Servant. Or the Parable of the Talents. Or Jesus’ encounter with the rich young ruler. The Sermon on the Mount is all about doing the right things.

“Righteousness” is not just something that Jesus “gives us”—sharing with us “some of his,” to “make us” righteous before God when we’re otherwise not. Or at least, that doesn’t appear to be how Jesus saw it. For example, in Matthew 5:20, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Now, the general disdain towards first-century Judaism (as a religion of hypocrisy, works-righteousness, etc.) that evangelicals have (wrongfully) inherited from the Reformers means that this probably sounds like a pretty low barrier to entry. But that’s not how Jesus and those to whom he was speaking would have seen it; rather, the very opposite—setting the bar very high.

Righteousness is not some ethereal essence Jesus bequeathed to us. It’s not about a technical status granted by Jesus to deliver eternal life. At a minimum, it’s not just those things. Righteousness is fundamentally about what we do, and it’s important. It’s doing the right thing, doing right towards others, even when it’s costly.

Righteousness is also relational: it’s being concerned for our relationships to be right in every aspect of life—right with God, right with ourselves, right with others, and right with creation.    

Good works are not saying, “Please save me,” they’re saying, “Thank you for saving me.” Good works are not the means to righteousness, they’re the fruit of righteousness.

Most importantly, good works—doing what’s good, doing what’s right, “doing the right thing” in all circumstances and situations—are the fruit of really and truly understanding God’s nature and character, and what’s important to him. They are what the theory (or, the belief) of “loving God and loving people” looks like when it’s put into practice.