I received a letter from someone who had visited my web site and had these questions:

Do you believe that grace alone saves us? If you do, you believe a deception. It is our faith that saves us by grace. Faith is basically what we believe, and the faith that saves us is what we believe about the Christ and him crucified. The bible (sic) states that faith without works is dead. But we first need to know what works "of faith" are. This the bible (sic) also tells us. The works of faith are our words. God wants us not only to have the three aspects of faith that you state on your web page, but also to put into words what are faith is, without the correct verbalization of who the christ (sic) is, we can't be saved.

I think this individual’s questions bring out several vital issues of the grace conflict among various Christians. This person cannot seem to accept the inability of humans to produce what is necessary for salvation. Already assumed in these questions and comments is the conclusion that we can contribute something to our salvation. In this case, that something is "faith." Notice that how this faith is defined in terms of works as he/she refers to "works ‘of faith’ and "the works of faith are our words." In my reply I said:

You say that our faith saves us. Then, you must believe that we save ourselves. Or, that we help Christ save us through believing what He did. I would say that Christ alone saves us, and the only hope we have is to believe that He alone is sufficient. I would never say that my faith saves me. That takes away from the sufficiency of Christ. Another important difference between what we believe is that you see faith as something that grows out of human nature, whereas I would see faith as what the Bible calls it, "the gift of God." "For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God;" (Ephesians 2:8 NAS) The word "that" of "and that not of yourselves" points to the word "faith," which precedes it. This points to faith as a gift or an act of God’s grace. If God inspires or creates faith in us through the work of the Spirit in hearing the Gospel, then faith is a gift from God to bring us to Him. Therefore, it is not faith that saves us, but it is God Himself. Either way we look at it, two things are true: 1) Christ alone died for our sins, we didn't. 2) God has gifted us with faith, we didn't create it. He alone is sufficient. He has done all that is necessary to save us. So, we are saved by the grace of God alone.

Here is a very significant truth to remember about the nature of grace. Many Christians, Catholic and Protestant, as well as cult groups, are willing to acknowledge that grace is somehow necessary in salvation. But, what distinguishes them, is that many don’t believe grace is sufficient. It is not enough to believe that it is necessary. We must also believe that grace is also sufficient. This is what the Bible teaches.

Many Christians believe in what could be called "peanut butter" grace. This is where God’s grace is "smeared" over our righteousness in order to cover or hide all of its short-comings and inadequacies. At the heart of this view of grace is that we are saved by a core of our own efforts, covered with a surface layer of God’s grace. Another type of grace is what I call "filler" grace. This is the understanding that God’s grace makes up for the gaps of what we can’t do. Like body putty fills in the holes in an automobile body, so the grace of God fills in the holes of our righteousness to make us appear righteous before God. It is remarkable that both of these ideas are found in a very large Christian cult:

For we labor diligently to write, to persuade our children, and also our brethren, to believe in Christ, and to be reconciled to God; for we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do. (The Book of Mormon, 2 Nephi 25:23, my italics)

Rather than reflect divine grace as taught in the Bible, this definition of grace reflects that form of Perfectionism that saturated the culture in which Joseph Smith was nurtured. This same Perfectionism has pervaded our time and led to a great misunderstanding of the grace of God. God’s grace is never a "filler" to be troweled into the holes of our imperfection. It is not peanut butter to be smeared over the thin places in our righteousness. All our righteousness is as an unclean thing. We need nothing but the pure, undefiled, and perfect righteousness of Christ our Savior to make us acceptable with God. Grace is sufficient, because Christ is sufficient. Accept no substitutes!

FOOTNOTES

1.  I acknowledge that the Latter Day Saints claim Nephi lived six centuries before Christ. He left Israel with his father Lehi to sail to the New World (America) and there he prophesied these words about the coming salvation through Christ. It could be said that this view of grace was before Christ came to do His work. But later in the Book of Mormon, in 3 Nephi 15, Jesus is said to appear and teach the people that the commandments they are to obey are those he gave them in the law of Moses (v. 10). This shows me that Joseph Smith never understand the proper relationship between Law and Gospel, and it led him to an unbiblical view of grace.