Does Dr. Craig Teach a Works-Based Salvation?

KEVIN HARRIS: Welcome to Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. It's Kevin Harris. Right now I'm in the deep woods of east Texas where wind storms are finally dying down. We've had wind gusts, many of which are up to 45 miles an hour, some as strong as 70 miles an hour, and it's knocked out my electricity. It's blowing tree limbs down. They're hitting power lines, and thousands and thousands of people are without power. Fortunately I have a charged battery in my laptop to record this. The strong winds are calming, but I have no idea when we'll get the power back on. But I digress. Two good topics on the podcast today, and a quick reminder that our annual matching grant is now in effect. Whatever you give to the work and ministry of Reasonable Faith will be doubled thanks to some very generous donors who have agreed to double every dollar you give up to $300,000. This is going on from now until the end of the year, so double your impact for the Kingdom of God through the work of Dr. Craig and Reasonable Faith. Give securely online at ReasonableFaith.org, and thank you so much. Now let's head to the studio and talk to Dr. Craig.

Bill, let's combine a couple of topics here based on your work that people have responded to in blogs. We'd like to get your response today. The first one is Ben Stanhope who just recently wrote “On William Lane Craig's (mis)interpretation of Othmar Keel and criticism of my Hebrew cosmology illustration.”^[1] What is the problem with this illustration that he's done of ancient Israelite cosmology?

DR. CRAIG: The problem is that it represents an insensitive and literalistic pastiche of different passages from the Bible often very poetic in nature that are then cobbled together to make this monstrosity of a worldview that I think no ancient Israelite would ever have recognized. For example, it will take expressions about the firmament or the mountains of the deep and things of this sort and interpret them all literally and then put these expressions from different sources together to make this sort of composite picture which I think is just a monstrosity frankly.

KEVIN HARRIS: I think part of the problem was that even in the event that you say, “Well, we can just take these descriptions of the cosmos in Genesis in a metaphorical way or in the way that an ancient Hebrew writer or a man on the street would,” you're saying that that's not even necessary because according to Keel they didn't even believe in that kind of a firmament.

DR. CRAIG: Right. Yes. Although I want to emphasize that contrary to what Ben Stanhope says, my argument is not based on authority. I do quote Keel and his co-author Silvia Schroer as confirming the conclusions I come to. But my conclusions are based upon an analysis of ancient Mesopotamian myths about the layers of heaven and ancient Egyptian myths about the nature of the sky and the heavens. It's based on primary sources. And what I argue is that when you read these primary sources there's absolutely no reason at all to think that the ancients interpreted these things literalistically and, in fact, I honestly think there is decisive grounds for saying that they did not take them literalistically. That comes from Babylonian astrology and astronomy. The ancient Babylonians understood the motion of the stars and of the planets and the sun and the moon. The planets would wander across the sky so that they would cross the path of the fixed stars as they slowly rotate across the sky. That sort of view is impossible to reconcile with the idea that the heavens are like a hard inverted bowl over the Earth resting on its surface at the horizon. There's no way that you can get planets moving across the paths of the stars if this is supposed to be some sort of a cosmology based upon a hard stellar surface. It was for that very reason that, remember, Greeks postulated a system of spheres around the Earth to try to explain the motion of the stars and the planets and the sun and so forth. But there's nothing like that in ancient Babylon. In fact, Francesca Rochberg in her work on ancient Babylonian science shows that Babylonian science was instrumentalist in character, not realist. They didn't try to provide any sort of physical cosmology! It was purely instrumentalist. All they cared about was making predictions of the positions of the stars and the planets at different times of the year. The fact that it was anti-realist in nature is made most clear by the fact that they used two different incompatible systems for making such predictions. Either of the systems would give you an accurate prediction of the location of the stars at different times of the year but they could not both be literally physically true because they were incompatible. What I want our listeners to understand is when you see these diagrams printed in these books purporting to show pictorially the worldview of the ancients and particularly of the Hebrews you need to understand that these are to be taken with a grain of salt because all the evidence, I think, is that these were not interpreted literalistically in the way that people like Stanhope think. I've noticed when you challenge people like Stanhope they simply appeal again to the pictures or to the myths and they don't address the question, “How do you know that ancient peoples interpreted these literalistically?” They never seem to address that crucial question.

KEVIN HARRIS: It seems his main complaint is that any of your attempts to refute his cosmology illustration, he says, “I literally based my illustration off of Keel’s”, and so there shouldn't be a problem there with his illustration of this ancient Israelite cosmology.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah, and yet Keel says the ancients wouldn't have believed in such a thing literally. In fact, it's so funny, because he quotes Keel as saying, “Modern representations of the ancient Near Eastern world view err in portraying the upper regions too concretely, as if they were as well understood by the men of that time as was the earthly environment.” Well, that undermines Stanhope's own diagram and own picture. What Keel is saying is that there's no reason to interpret these myths and pictures in such a concrete literalistic way. I thought it was really odd that Stanhope shoots himself in the foot by quoting Keel on how these modern representations are overly concrete in the way they represent the ancient worldview.

KEVIN HARRIS: Stanhope says that he has emailed Keel on this whole thing to see if he could straighten some of it out but hasn't heard back yet and so we will just have to wait on that response. Here's a different topic but it's another response that is being passed around on some of the apologetics Facebook pages. It's an article based on you that your theology and your belief is a “works salvation” – a works-based salvation.^[2] A lot of us are kind of scratching our heads and going, “What?” He begins in a typical way, Bill, by complimenting you on your work as a philosopher, an apologist, and theologian, but then takes issue with your view of faith. He mentions the traditional threefold Protestant definition of faith: notitia, assensus, and fiducia. He says, “And regular readers of this blog will immediately suspect the problem, i.e., the word trust or fiducia.” In Reasonable Faith (the book) you talk about this threefold Protestant view of faith. So what’s the problem with it according to him?

DR. CRAIG: If I believe in work-salvation then by the same token so did Martin Luther since this three-fold analogy of faith is his! The idea here is that saving faith involves, first of all, understanding the claims of the Gospel. Secondly, it involves giving affirmative assent to the truths of the Gospel. But then what it points out is that it's not just enough to give intellectual assent to these truths; you need to trust in Christ as your Savior and Lord. And that third element is fiducia, and that's absolutely crucial to saving faith. Otherwise you reduce faith to mere intellectual assent, and I think we all know that a person can give intellectual assent to propositions without having a genuine saving faith in God.

KEVIN HARRIS: I don't know. I had a hard time unpacking just exactly where this gentleman is coming from –  Shawn Lazar – in that he's of a particular group that is so insistent that there can be no works whatsoever, that they just consider even being a follower of Christ as disciple as a work, and you can't even do that. I found myself a little confused by it. It's almost extremist in something that we would otherwise agree on – that, no, you can't work for your salvation. You can't earn your salvation. But he thinks that a lot of what you say and evangelicals say can still be categorized as works.

DR. CRAIG: It’s bizarre because you notice in the New Testament Paul never thinks of faith as a work. Paul always opposes faith and works. The very nature of faith is that it's not a meritorious work that you perform. The evidence of Paul and the evidence of the Reformers, I think, clearly support the view that saving faith or trust (belief in God) is not a meritorious work by which you win your own salvation.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK. This is what he says,

According to Craig, trust means making a “commitment to follow Christ as his disciple.” Following Christ means doing works. That’s what “following” means. Regularly readers will immediately see the problem. If trust means doing good works, and trust is a part of faith, then Craig has redefined faith to include doing good works, which makes those works part of the condition of salvation.

DR. CRAIG: That's just sloppy reasoning. If trust means “making a commitment to follow Christ,” that doesn't mean that making a commitment is doing works. It's a commitment to do works, but the commitment isn’t itself a work. A person could trust in Christ at a Billy Graham crusade and then be killed in an automobile accident on the way home. He's made a commitment to follow Christ as his disciple but he is unable to carry through by his premature death. So making a commitment to follow Christ is not doing works. He's correct that following Christ means doing works, and good works are a result of genuine saving faith. They are the necessary outflow of saving faith. But trusting in Christ as your Savior and Lord is not itself doing a meritorious work.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK. One more thing here. This is more of the same but he says,

For Craig, fiducia (trust) also includes falling in love with God. You can assent to something, and yet not reach the level of saving faith because you lack love. The problem is love is a work.

So you can't even say that you need to fall in love with God or to love God because that's a work.

DR. CRAIG: You know the falsehood of Shawn’s point of view I think can be clearly seen in that for the Calvinist, or the Reformed, or the Lutheran theologian as well, this saving faith and trust in God is solely the product of God's grace. It is God who produces in you saving faith. For the Calvinist and the Lutheran there's nothing that I can do of my own to generate fiducia or trust in God or love of God. This is the outworking of God's grace. So if you take the strong Calvinist or Lutheran line on these subjects, it's just very clear that there's no incompatibility with saying that salvation comes through faith and yet salvation is wholly of God.

KEVIN HARRIS: In conclusion then, just set the record straight and in a nutshell and I think that people can read your works and listen to Defenders on the doctrine of soteriology and go through that series and get more information on what it is that you teach, but go ahead and just spell it out then. Do you teach a works-based salvation?

DR. CRAIG: No more than did Martin Luther and John Calvin. Of course not. What I claim is that with the apostle Paul faith is the opposite of works and that when we by God's grace place our faith in Christ we are simply receiving gratefully his unmerited favor and therefore salvation is totally by grace through faith.^[3]