The Apostle Paul once viewed salvation as God’s work plus his own work, but after coming face to face with the living God he realized that those things of his didn’t add to the sum total, they subtracted from it. Whatever he thought was credit he found to be debit. We can’t be saved by faith plus works because works is a negative quantity, and whenever you add it to faith the result is something less than faith.

Sometimes blogging is idyllic, like drifting down a river on a raft, and sometimes it’s consuming, like the burden to prophecy that the Old Testament saints were faced with (Amos 3:8), and woe to me, Piper’s latest comments about the necessity of good works in salvation has taken me out of the former state of mind and put me into the latter. Fortunately there’s already been a great deal said about the topic, (much of it here at H&M), but seeing as there still seems to be something missing, I intend to supply the deficiency in this post.

In saying that however I want to make it clear that I have no interest echoing what some others have said when they’ve gone on record with, “Piper isn’t saying things which aren’t Reformed!” because Piper isn’tReformed. He holds to no confession and therefore it shouldn’t surprise us when he says something Roman Catholic. So I won’t say anything like that. Instead, my point comes from the alarmingly stout defense I’ve been seeing the Reformed Baptists putting up on behalf of the following statement:

But what about being saved by faith alone? You’re not. You’re justified through faith alone. Final salvation comes through justification and salvation – both initiated and sustained by God’s grace.

When I asked my Reformed Baptist friends what final salvation meant they told me that because union with Christ brings with it every saving blessing, including final perseverance, there’s a difference between salvation which is begun by monergistic regeneration and a salvation involving personal effort. Hence the distinction between initial and final salvation.

Now I may not have the sharpest intellect, out there but that hasn’t stopped me from figuring out over the course of my life that certain follow-on words can, by their proximity to the initial words, cancel out their meaning entirely. If you apologize to your spouse and use the word but then the apology no longer counts—everything before the but gets erased. “I’m sorry, but this is your fault” is equivalent to “this is your fault” not “I’m sorry.” The Scriptures even use this principle to glorious effect when they say things like “With man it is impossible to be saved” or “you were dead in your sins and trespasses,” and then turn around and negate the whole thing with a “but God.”

Salvation operates on that same cancellation principle. If you believe you’re saved by the work of Christ alone plus anything else then you’re no longer saved by Christ alone. If you believe in worshiping Jesus plus Baal then eventually Elijah is going to show up on Mt. Carmel and rebuke you for not worshiping Jesus at all. The Apostle Paul once viewed salvation as God’s work plus his own work, but after coming face to face with the living God he realized that those things of his didn’t add to the sum total, they subtracted from it. Whatever he thought was credit he found to be debit. We can’t be saved by faith plus works because works is a negative quantity, and whenever you add it to faith the result is something less than faith. The only way to make the equation balance is to reduce the human works to zero. Mix chocolate ice cream with dog poop and you get something less than chocolate ice cream. Grace plus works is simply works sans grace.

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