# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1855_S141
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

James’s Doctrine of Justifying Faith. 141

1. first, clearly, what is feared. In Romans 3:28 Paul declares the Christian doctrine that a person is justified by faith apart from works of the Law. This justifying verdict is based on faith, not because faith is in itself a righteous act, but only insofar as it grasps the righteousness offered in the Gospel, the righteousness that avails before God—that is, the righteousness of Christ—and makes it the believer’s own. It credits to him this righteousness of Christ, the fruits of His obedience, forgiveness of sins, etc., because he receives them. A person needs nothing more than to receive these things in faith in order to have the righteousness that avails before God pronounced his own; in particular, he must not imagine that, in order to obtain it, he must bring before God, in addition to faith, his own works of obedience to the Law and thereby make himself, as it were, worthy of it. The statement in Romans 3:28 would therefore be overturned

a. by the assertion that a person is not justified by faith at all;

b. by the doctrine that faith alone, or mere faith, in the righteousness of Christ is not sufficient to obtain the righteousness that avails before God, but that the believers’ own works must be added to it.

It is believed that the false doctrine presented in the two points cited above must be discerned in the words “and not by faith alone.” Let us therefore place

2. clearly before our eyes what James expresses in the words in question by considering them

A. by themselves. With all the necessary additions from what precedes, they read as follows: “and that a person is not justified by faith alone.” Of these words, the one that certainly strikes us most is “alone”; its position especially tempts us to relate it solely to the immediately preceding word “faith,” and therefore to suspect in this part of the sentence the false doctrine that a person is not justified by faith alone, or mere faith, and thus not without works of the Law. Yet “alone” belongs first of all with the preceding little word “not,” together with it forming the first part of that form of expression which is completed by a subsequent “but also.” Now, although no clause with “but also” follows in our passage, it is present in the earlier statement “that a person is justified by works”; it has merely been placed first there because it was the immediate result of the preceding discussion, and we may supply it after “and not by faith alone.” If we make this addition, we obtain the complete declaration that is evidently contained in verse 24: that a person is justified not by faith alone, but also by works. Thus “alone,” together with the “not” to which it belongs, does not merely qualify the word “faith,”