What does it mean that faith is Gods work rather than human achievement? In this thought-provoking episode, father-daughter duo Lutheran theologians Paul Hinlicky and Sarah Hinlicky Wilson tackle a listener's question about the nature of faith and Gods work in our spiritual lives. They explore how Gods work manifests in gifting us faith while still crediting Abraham's faith as righteousness, addressing the seeming paradox between divine initiative and human response.

The conversation delves deep into Lutheran theology's understanding of how Gods work operates through grace, breaking down barriers in our hearts while respecting human dignity. From Augustine's journey to modern faith crises, the hosts demonstrate how Gods work encompasses both the gift of faith and our authentic human response, showing that doubt itself can be part of Gods work in deepening our trust and understanding.

Welcome to the Enter the Bible podcast where you can get answers or at least reflections on everything you wanted to know about the Bible but were afraid to ask. I'm Kathryn Schifferdecker.

I'm Katie Langston and today on the podcast we are delighted to welcome back two of our very favorite, well, not just theologians, but humans, if I could go so far as to say that.

Yes, indeed.

And

we're so excited to have them together. have Paul Hinlicky and Sarah Hinlicky Wilson right here. They're in the same room even. Sarah has just returned from, gosh, how many years of missionary service in Japan? Sarah? Six and a half years of missionary service in Japan where she served as the pastor of Tokyo Lutheran Church, the English speaking congregation. And she is also a

half years.

author, theologian, publisher, and podcaster extraordinaire. In fact, both of our guests have a podcast together called Queen of the Sciences, which as soon as it comes into my feed is like my first listen all the time. And joining as well is Paul Hinlicky. He is a retired professor of theology at Roanoke College and Lutheran theologian and all around cool guy who likes farming, right? Is that right?

And Sarah's father. There you go.

Sarah's dad.

name

didn't give it away. Right.

Name of

So we have a really interesting question today and we kind of thought of both of you immediately for this question that comes from a listener and of course, you dear listener, if you would like to submit a question, you may do so at enterthebible.org. We try to get to as many of these as we can. And it says, I listen to a Lutheran podcast regularly and they state faith is a gift of God. Like he faiths us and even repents us. For those of you on YouTube, I'm using kind of...

quotes there. But my focus here is on faith. Now, if faith is a gift, how could faith have been credited to Abraham as righteousness? If faith is based on human decision to seek him, find him, and follow him, how is it that they attribute all that to God? They often say in the podcast that he does all the verbs. How so? And I thought that was a really good question. Yeah. Both theologically and biblically. And you both are so good in both areas, both Bible and theology. Tell us.

You know, how does that work? Does it work that way? What are those other Lutherans barking up the wrong tree? You know, do we object? What would you say? What say you?

Well, I would begin with the observation that goes back to St. Augustine that faith slash belief is a universal human phenomenon. And so the questioner is absolutely right that faith is a phenomena of human existence. Anyone listening to this podcast has implicit faith that it's going to deliver a quality product. And if that faith is violated, they cancel the subscription to the podcast, right? Right.

So true.

Okay.

You know, and whenever you take something out on credit to buy something, your good faith and credit is at stake, and the bill collector will come if you don't collect. Now, that's a human understanding of faith. But Christian faith, including in retrospect the faith of Abraham, it follows the paradigm of Paul's statement in Galatians 2.20, is, longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.

and the life I now live in the flesh I live by the pistis, the faith or faithfulness of Jesus Christ who loved me and gave Himself for me." So Christian faith is not…it has a family resemblance to ordinary human faith, but it's a term that has been baptized as it were retooled by the gospel, right, to talk about a new relationship to God. And I would even be as bold to say this.

that when we believe, it is Jesus Christ who believes in us as He believed for us. I'll leave it there.

Well, to build on that idea, even Abraham, it's interesting though, the listener seems concerned that Abraham got signed some kind of credit, right? He believed God credited to him as righteousness. So it's interesting, this is always a good sort of way to needle at religious inquiries is like, are we trying to make sure we get the credit we're due?

So, maybe a larger ecumenical question could we ask is Lutheranism or Luther's theology the ultimate works righteousness? Because instead of works, it's actually our faith. And that is the work that achieves for us our righteousness before God. And you could read that sentence from Genesis that Paul picks up, not this Paul, you know, the holy Paul, not the other Paul.

that he picks up on as saying, like, make sure credit is given where it belongs with Abraham or Abram. But the case is even with Abraham, what happened before he had anything to believe in? God had to come to him and to speak to him and utter a promise to him. And we know from Abraham's own story,

This was a mighty struggle. It's not like Abraham got it instantly, like, sure, I'll leave Erv the Chaldeans. I hate this backwater anyway. Lots of stuff goes wrong along the way. And if you look at Jesus' life and Jesus' faithfulness to his heavenly father, that was tested pretty hard, but it was done in response to the direct relationship that Jesus had to his heavenly father. So even to talk about

I think we're ⁓ trying to parse out is a legitimate and an illegitimate way to inquire after our part in our faith. In one sense, obviously, it's my faith. I'm believing or not believing. On the other hand, what are even the circumstances that could create the possibility for Christian faith in me? And so, it kind of depends on what we're after or what we're trying to protect against how we address a question like this.

So if faith is a gift, does God, I don't know if this listener is interested in this question, but I hear, ⁓ I've heard others ask this, if faith is a gift, not a work or not something that we do, then why doesn't God give faith to every person?

Well, Kathryn, if you knew the answer to that question, you would be God.

That is true. And I am not. I am not.

Okay, and none of us are. And we have the testimony of Scripture that the Holy Spirit blows like the wind wherever it will, and we are not in control. One of the things about faith as a gift is that it's receiving the precious good news of Jesus Christ only and exclusively as gift. It's not ever in our control. It's something that… The point of saying it's a gift is that it's not in your control.

yet it concerns you ultimately and personally, but not in your control. And the minute you think faith is in your control, you get to thinking like Sarah was suggesting, here I've got something to boast about. Unlike these others, I believe in Jesus. Unlike those others, I honor God. You know, and then you turn yourself into a Christian Pharisee.

Yeah, so I think it's legitimate to be concerned. Like if you take seriously that faith only exists as a gift of God, and you start to follow out the implications, and let's just remember these are our implications, then one conclusion you could come to is, well, I got faith, so I'm special, God loves me more, and God loves them less. But there's the same problem if you make faith your own work, then you're saying, well, I'm the good person,

who generates faith that God approves of, and those slobs over there haven't done the work, haven't tried hard enough. So you're going to have a problem either way you slice it in that respect. I think what the New Testament answer is to people who do not have faith is not that you get to conclude how much God loves them, because after all, God so loved the world, CF everybody's favorite Bible verse, or that you're better. The answer is go share the good news with them.

Like stop, you don't get the right to make ultimate inquiries into their eternal status or God's game plan for their life. The answer is you offer the word and then let the spirit take over and then back off, Jack. Right. That'd be my missionary approach. Back off.

I

would just add one more thing to that in terms of your own personal relationship to God in Christian faith. You must… We never overcome the scandal of the object of our faith, which to the eyes of this world is a man strung up on a Roman stake, dying, afflicted, and abandoned. True, we believe him to be there the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, but what we see with our earthly eyes is nothing but

and offense, something that is ugly and repulsive and sends us away. And Jesus Christ always remains that, no matter how far we progress forward in Christian faith. He always remains a stumbling block to us. And therefore, in the trial of faith, when faith is really tried, this is what you always have to discover at the bottom of all trials. This is the root that once again I'm taking offense.

at God whose compassion for the world left God and the person of his Son to face Golgotha in my place.

I think we could also just ask even more basically, what is faith? Or what do we mean when we say a word? And this is another kind of a classic discussion. is faith second-rate knowledge? Because you don't know for sure. That's one way of construing it. Is faith ascending to a set of facts about God? know, that's sometimes called intellectual faith, right? Is faith, you know,

passionate but ignorant loyalty to Jesus and his tribe? You know, is faith putting your body on the line when your affiliation with Jesus is contested by someone who's not happy about it? I mean, these are all, I think actually all of these are components in faith. But again, it makes some difference what you're talking about for this kind of question about how can it be ours or how can it be a gift of God or how can it be, I think the answer is ultimately it's both at the same time.

but in a very structured way. First as a gift of God, but it really does affect us and who we are, how we think, how we feel, how we live, but always in that order, not ever in a way that, as like St. Paul loves to say, who are you to boast? What do you have that you were not given? And I think that's the framework for thinking about what our own faith, even our, you know, beautiful or strong or, you know, something that really

makes God pleased with us. It still comes in that structured place from his own reaching out to us.

So how would you answer that question then? Sarah, how would you ask the question, know, so what is it? How do you begin to reflect on what it is?

Do you want to do some New Testament Greek there, Dad?

No, I don't at the moment.

Ahahaha!

Okay. All right, so here, well, let's workshop. This is one way I've been trying to think about it, especially because of my experience being in Tokyo and trying to really like start from ground zero with people who even come to me and have faith, but they don't even know how to talk about it. So this is my working definition on the human side, is it something like, faith is the success of God's gospel breaking through all my barriers and finally making contact with me. And then my

my actually experiencing that and responding to it. That is something like faith. So it's still the initiative of God. It still acknowledges that there is a problem with believing. Like, it's not instantaneous, it's not natural, and it's not easy. But at the same time, the credit goes to God because He finally broke through my barriers. But if my barriers have been broken through, that actually alters who I am and how I relate to the person who has torn these walls down and let the light into my darkness.

Yeah, then you could say with Paul Tillich, faith is a state of being grasped, taken hold of, seized, know, grasped. Now, Tillich said by ultimate concern, but we would say a little bit more concretely, being grasped by Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. And then so, I live in faith in a state of being grasped by Christ, and being grasped by Christ, I hold on to Christ, you know? And that's the kind of…

the dynamic between the passive reception of the activity of grace in my life and the new creature who then holds on for dear life to that being grasped.

That's a lovely way of putting it, being grasped. can people reject that gift of faith? Let's look at each other like-

Christian

and human and…in all Christian pastoral and personal experience, yes, beginning with me.

Dad came up with this nice phrase lately. He said, may not have free will, but we sure have free won't.

I like that. That's really cool.

And

again, to refer back to the wonderful St. Augustine, his whole book of confessions is his list of free won'ts until he finally got to his will being captive to the love of God that was poured abroad in his heart. But not because he was a very willing participant most every step of the way.

Kicking and screaming the whole way.

Yeah, yeah. I think about C.S. Lewis's testimony too. He talks about being hunted, in fact, by God.

And a pretty depressed and defeated believer when he finally came around to it.

Right.

Yeah. I ask that question because I have been in conversations where the other person tends towards universalism, like love wins, right? That whole kind of love wins. You know, Christ died for all, so all are saved and you don't even necessarily, you know, faith is a gift. you don't even, you may not even realize you have it. And I tend, I don't know if this is because of my Old Testament background or whatever, but

I tend to think that we have enough free will to reject and that God kind of honors that choice. Now, don't, you know, I do, I guess just in, you know, looking at history, looking at so many examples of people who seem to have been possessed by evil, right? That seems like there are instances where people can choose against God, can choose to defy God, you know.

I think of the baptismal thing, right? All the forces that defy God.

I'm

very happy you're raising that question because I think there is too much too easy universalism. The background of this is that in Calvinism at the time of the Reformation, you had a strong doctrine of the omni-causality of God. And so, beginning with Zwingli, these theologians boldly says that if someone does not believe it's God's own decision, it's reprobation.

Right? You can't battle that. God arbitrarily chooses to save some and just as arbitrarily, from our perspective, to damn others. In response to that, and of course then that meant Christ's atonement is limited to the elect. The Lutheran theologians, in my view, very rightly said, no, no, no, no, the atonement is universal. God so loved the world. God was in Christ reconciling the world, etc., etc., etc.

they were right to maintain that, and they called this objective justification. Because of Christ, God's love has reconciled the sinful world to Himself, and that is the premise and the starting point of all Christian proclamation. But of course, then they allowed that objective justification is not yet subjective justification. It's not what you're getting at here. And this has to do, I think you're exactly right, with God respecting

a certain human dignity. And that's when Sarah made this joke about my new definition of denying free will but accepting free won't. Which is basically very familiar in our culture is the whole discussion about consent in matters sexual. You know, anybody who thinks seriously about this realizes that sexual desire is not simply a matter of free will. It happens kind of spontaneously.

thank God for that, right? ⁓ But then when that is taking place, one always has to respect the person who says, stop, I'm not ready for this, I don't want to go there, you don't have my consent. So I may not have free will, I might be drawn into a desire to possess an object or something, but I do have free won't. And I think if you try to say,

that God saves all as a matter of principle, you end up with another form of Calvinism, that God is omni-causal and causes everything, and so everybody will be saved, whether you like it or not.

not yet right ⁓

And it just, think it offends me because of justice issues, right? Yeah. That someone who obviously rejects God and works against God their whole life somehow is going to be saved. And maybe that's true, but yeah, I like how you put it, Paul. Yeah, that there is some respecter of human dignity there.

think always with doctrine questions, we have to ask not only the content, but like I suggested earlier, why we need an answer to this. And one really important thing I learned from Luther is that there are some places, there's just a stop sign and you can't go further than that. And one of the places he said is questions of ultimate salvation. So Luther was specifically opposing the Calvinist kind of like arbitrary decree of who is condemned, who is saved. And he said, just don't go near predestination.

But I think that applies as much to a universalist predestination as to an arbitrary partition predestination. Because finally, why do you need to know everybody is saved? Is it to prove that you're even more tolerant than the people around you or more loving than the people or the other religions or more loving than God? Or to let yourself off the hook for your unwillingness to speak up about your faith? again, this is going to sound maybe a little hard, but...

Most of the people I hear assert universal salvation as simply a finished fact, not as a hope or prayer. think as a hope and a prayer, that's fine. I think we can pray for the conversion of the evil to come around. But to simply assert it as a fact is not really making a statement about God. It's positioning ourselves in the world and how we want to be seen as loving, tolerant people. And I think that's exactly, Catherine, where your justice concerns come in.

that you should not be loving and tolerant of evil. You should not ask God to be loving and tolerant of evil either. That's not part of the shalom salvation that He promises to us.

Bye.

do think that a piece of this comes from probably an overemphasis on evangelism as fire insurance, right? there is on the one side sort of this, yeah, well, we want to be seen as tolerant and even if we're tolerating evil things, right? That exists for sure.

But I also think it's a reaction against, again, especially that sort of Calvinistic idea of limited atonement and God arbitrarily decides who will and won't be saved and or this definite, well, you're going to be damned if you don't say the magic Jesus prayer, right? So again, like above our pay grade, above our pay grade, the eternal state of someone else's soul, that's not something that is up to us to

Yeah.

have an opinion about, right? And instead, what's up to us is to love people and to invite them into faith and to be caring and compassionate and to share the gospel.

And that, that means also sharing the pain of a person's undue. Yes, right. And I think every pastor has had the experience. I'll tell an anecdote. In the congregation I served, some folks asked me to visit a Vietnam vet who was living almost like a hermit. And so he let me come visit him, and we spent a time talking. And I finally invited him, you know, to start attending church and renew his faith. he's…

looked at me and he said, Pastor, I have been born again so many times and it never did take. So please just leave me alone.

That's sad.

I mean, and I think pastors who are honest with their own pastoral experience will acknowledge something like that happening in the ministry all the time. part of being a good pastor, I think, is to have a theology that allows you to experience the pain of unbelief in yourself and in others and to bear with it. I think in many ways our Christian faith is a vicarious faith. We believe on behalf of others.

not just our lonesome selves, you know? And that includes even people who, perhaps because of the trauma of life of being a Vietnam vet, have been psychologically barred from coming to faith.

There's also a difference between lacking faith because you hate everything about Jesus or lacking faith because you would love it to be true, you just can't believe that everything isn't just random. Yeah. mean, there's different, also different kinds of unbelief and there's different kinds of struggling with faith. And there's unbelief based on, you know, personal trauma. There's unbelief based on having met really horrible representatives of the Christian faith. There's belief from

Good to be.

never living in a time and place where you ever could have heard of it. know, so we also have to ask, you know, meaningful questions about those. But if we're trying to get what we within the Christian faith, who are in some measure responding to God breaking through our barriers, then we can see it really does truly involve us, but it never would have involved us unless God had been the one reaching out and breaking the barriers down in the first place.

And you could add to that that doubt is really a part of faith. Doubt is not the opposite of faith. Doubt occurs to people who are passionately concerned for the object of faith and then have these critical reflections back on their own capacity or the world around them or something. And so, I would say to anybody who encounters an episode of doubt in their lives, hang on.

because you are being pushed by the Spirit into a more mature and a broader understanding of your belief and a deeper trust in the one who has called you to faith.

Yeah,

that's beautiful. And ⁓ an important word to say that doubt is not the opposite of faith, that we all go through seasons of doubt or even dark nights of the soul, and that ⁓ doesn't obscure the faith. think about, you mentioned the anecdote about the Vietnam Vet. I think about a story from here at Luther Seminary where a professor who taught here for many years and was actually came from

Europe after World War II as a refugee. He had a strong faith he'd gone through a lot of terrible things, but then his wife died, as of course happens. And he went to the president of Luther seminary and said, I don't believe anymore, so I need to resign. And the president very wisely and compassionately said, you don't believe now, I'm not going to accept your resignation because we're going to believe for you until you can believe again.

So I think that's just so wise and so compassionate. And it shows, I think what you were saying earlier, Sarah, it's not just about me and my personal faith, but about the community of faith and being part of that and bearing one another's burdens, including those times of doubt or those times of the dark nights of the soul.

So yeah, faith is not a one and done kind of thing. It's not a magic trick, but it's something that we are given it as a gift, but we also grow in and we grow together as community.

If there's any one and done, it's baptism, which is God's work on us. that whatever fluctuating state of faith we have, our baptism is firm. And we can say, well, you can even say, I don't feel any faith right now echoing in my big empty echoey soul, but God baptized me, so he's hanging on to me even when I'm not hanging on to him.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, beautiful. Well, I know we could talk a lot more about faith and the implications of faith and what faith is and the interplay between God's work giving us faith and then our pardon as well. But we've touched on a lot and I just want to thank you, Paul and Sarah, for your great insights and anecdotes about the role of faith and how God works faith in us. So thank you so much.

for answering this important question.

So glad to be here with you two again.

And thank you to our listener who submitted this great question. It's such an important topic. If you listener, other listeners, want to learn more about this topic and lots of other topics about the Bible, go to enterthebible.org, submit your own questions, and check out the courses and commentaries, the other resources, the videos, the other podcasts and blog posts.

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