Dionysus on a Bike

Galatians 5:2-6 – 6/25/2026

There is a caricature of Paul, especially among Lutherans and other Protestants, that in emphasizing faith alone as justifying and necessary for salvation, he leaves no room for the importance of works in the Christian life. While Paul is adamant that performing the works of the Law of Moses cannot bring about justification, he does not therefore reject the importance of doing good as an essential part of the life of faith.

Here in today’s reading Paul makes just such a shift from discussing works of the Law (in this case circumcision, the initiation rite for male children into the Jewish community) to pointing toward the works that are implied by faith in Jesus. Circumcision and the other ritual commandments of Torah do not matter for one’s relationship to God and the church; instead what matters is “faith working through love.” The word translated “working” is from the Greek root energeia meaning active, effective power in action. While it is true that Paul does speak of “faith alone” in a way that gets picked up by Luther and other Protestant theologians, this faith is not belief or trust alone. Faith, for Paul, as well as the ancient Church Fathers, is always an active faith, directed toward and by love, love for God and love for other people.

This connection between active faith and works of love helps us connect Jesus’s teachings about loving with Paul’s teachings about the primacy of trusting the grace of God. I emphasize again and again in these reflections that Jesus identifies loving as the greatest commandment, loving God and loving one’s neighbor. Loving others is the primary activity of a good life, a life that is pleasing to God. Paul, in emphasizing love’s connection to the faith of Christ, shows that our capacity to love, our actually being in the world loving others in concrete activity, is a gift from God.

Whatever salvation in Christ is, it is salvation of the whole person. The caricature of Protestant theology’s emphasis on faith holds that once one has the right belief and trust in Jesus, one’s actions don’t matter. Our actions were mired in our sinful nature, and since we can do nothing to free ourselves, all that matters is that we are right in God’s eyes through faith in the gift of God’s gracious favor. This misses Paul’s key teaching in today’s reading; faith “works” (is effective) when it is a faith that loves, a faith that follows the greatest commandment that Jesus made, the command to love.

Lutheran theology makes a key distinction between Law and Gospel, Command and Promise. The commands of the law convince of us our need and lack while showing us a picture of what a good and blessed life could look like. The promise of the gospel tells us of God’s gift to us when we could not earn or attain blessedness for ourselves. These two sides to the message are conceptually distinct and useful when presenting the basic message of the church, but in the actually lived Christian life, the distance between law and gospel breaks down. The promises of God are a free gift, but that free gift, accepted in faith, is an effective, active faith that enables the one who follows Jesus to love in keeping with Jesus’s greatest commandments. In other words, the distinction between faith and works is useful in reminding us that what we have, we have as a pure gift we did not earn, but the pure gift is itself a changed life, a life lived empowered, enabled, and directed by love.

Reflections of a Dionysian Lutheran, comments on the daily readings of the Revised Common Lectionary by Justin Marquis