St. Paul on Faith and Works: What's in your Trophy Case?

Walk into almost any home where a child has played sports, and somewhere you’ll find a shelf of trophies. Some are earned through genuine achievement, the kind that required hours of practice and the bruises to prove it. Others, increasingly common in our culture, are participation trophies, given simply for showing up. Either way, the trophies tell a story about us. They say something about who we are, what we’ve done, what we want others to know about us when they walk into our space.

Now imagine a different kind of trophy case. Imagine one where every trophy on the shelf has someone else’s name engraved on it, but you’re the one displaying them. You didn’t earn them. You couldn’t have. Maybe you grabbed them at a thrift store and put them on your own shelf. And yet there they are, gleaming in your living room, and visitors keep complimenting you on them.

This is something close to the situation Paul describes when he writes his letter to the Romans.

And it’s precisely here, in chapters 2 and 3, that we tend to get tangled up.

Paul seems, on a surface reading, to contradict himself.

He insists that “the doers of the law who will be justified” (Romans 2:13, NRSV), and just a chapter later he declares that “a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law” (Romans 3:28).

For centuries, readers have wrestled with this apparent tension, and much of the wrestling has been shaped by debates that emerged long after Paul put down his pen.

But what if we’re holding the wrong lens to the text? What if Paul isn’t pitting faith against works in the way later generations would? What if his real concern is something deeper, something more searching, more uncomfortable?

What if Paul is asking about our trophy case?

 

The Question Beneath the Question

Read carefully and you’ll notice something. In the very middle of Paul’s argument, almost as a hinge between his two chapters, he asks: “Then what becomes of boasting? It is excluded. By what law? By that of works? No, but by the law of faith” (Romans 3:27).

Boasting.

That’s the word that should stop us. Paul is not primarily worried about whether good actions are good. Of course they’re good. He’s worried about something prior to that, something more diagnostic.

He’s worried about the human heart’s stubborn need to claim credit, to engrave its own name on trophies that belong to God.

The Greek word for "boasting" here is kauchēsis, and it carries with it the sense of glorying, of taking pride in, of finding your identity and standing in something.

It’s not merely the obnoxious athlete who won’t stop talking about his last victory. It’s the deeper, quieter, more spiritually dangerous habit of looking at our lives and saying, “Look what I’ve made of myself. Look what I’ve accomplished. Look at my righteousness.”

This is the issue Paul is circling. He's going after the Pharisee (he used to be one, so he'd know) who in Jesus' parable boasted in his own merits, who thanked God that he wasn't like other men, and thus received nothing before God (Luke 18:9-14).

Paul is not challenging whether we should do good. We absolutely should. His focus is on where the credit lies. Whose name is on the trophy.

Absolutely, the Pharisee's "works" judged alone were probably far greater than those of the Tax Collector in Jesus' parable who'd recognized himself as a sinner. The difference is, any "good work" we've boasted in, any trophy we've put our own name on, is ultimately a lie. It becomes worthless before God precisely in our boasting.

Because all we can offer to God is not our merit, but what He's already given us. He loved us. All we can do is return His embrace with the tightest loving squeeze we can manage. He provided for us all good things. All we can do is offer back to Him what was never ours, what had always been His, that by joining our love to His, we might share such love and welcome others into the embrace as they receive good things from God, too.

"But," you might protest, "I've worked hard! I actually earned these trophies! Look at the certificate on my wall, at the letters after my name! I did that!"

But did you do it alone? Could you have done any of that if you didn't have breath in your lungs, health in your limbs, a mind in your skull? Who gave you the mind, the body, the very breath you just took? Is not everything we boast of merely the application and stewardship of gifts that were already given us apart from any merit of our own? The illumination comes in the Spiritual life when we realize that all our work, all our effort, has been enveloped in love all along, that it's been a gracious invitation into the heart of God who gives to us generously, and in that view, all labor, all effort, all work takes new meaning.

It ceases to be about accumulating accomplishments out of self-love. It because a stewardship of a gift, given us in love, that we might re-purpose in the love of others. This is what Paul is concerned about in Romans. It's not about a "theology of justification," or about how you can know absolutely about whether you're going to heaven after you die. It's about recognizing the source of all we have, resting in gratitude, receiving all things in faith, and in such faith, allowing ourselves to fade away as we're graciously invited to participate in the ongoing gift of the great Giver who works in and through us to love the world.

In this way, as Paul later says, we become "living sacrifices" (Romans 12:1-2). We are sacrifices because we share in, and participate in, the love through which God's love overflowed into the world that He gave His only Son (John 3:16). We become sacrifices, and our good works begin to matter on a cosmic scale, precisely because we do them in faith, we become the vessels of God's love that's working in and through us, because all we ever received came from Him, and all we do is done in Him.

 

The Gift That Cannot Be Boasted About

Elsewhere, Paul writes plainly: “For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life” (Ephesians 2:10). And earlier in that same passage, the famous lines: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8).

Notice the careful logic. We are created for good works. The works themselves are part of God’s preparation. They are, in a real sense, God’s works performed through us. So when we do them, when love moves through our hands and feet into the world, the very capacity to act in this way is itself a gift.

This means there are two ways to relate to a good deed. We can do it and then place it in our trophy case, polishing the engraving with our own name. Or we can do it and recognize that the deed was God’s grace flowing through us, and we are merely the channel through which it passed. In the first case, the deed becomes an occasion for self-congratulation. In the second, it becomes an occasion for gratitude.

Paul’s concern is that the moment we treat our works as if they were our own achievements, we have fundamentally distorted what they are. We have stolen something. We have taken credit for what we did not produce.

 

Faith as a Pointing Finger

This is why Paul exalts faith. Not because faith is some bare mental assent that allows us to dispense with action. That would be a grotesque misreading. Rather, faith, by its very nature, points away from itself. Faith is, as it were, a finger pointing to God. The whole posture of faith is one of reception, of openness, of acknowledging that what we have, we have received.

When Saint Paul says that we are justified by faith, he is saying that we are made right with God by this self-emptying posture, this hand held open rather than clenched in self-assertion. And when faith is genuinely alive, when it is, in the language of the tradition, formed by love, then it cannot help but issue forth in deeds. A heart truly opened to God cannot remain closed to neighbor. The branch truly grafted to the vine cannot help but bear fruit.

But the boasting, the kauchēsis, remains rooted in God. Because faith, by its very grammar, refuses to take credit. To boast in faith is to boast in the Giver, not the gift.

There is a beautiful symmetry here. Works without this faith become trophies in our case, occasions for self-congratulation. Faith without works becomes empty rhetoric, a tongue that says “Lord, Lord” but does not love. Yet faith formed by love, faith alive and active, performs the good deeds while never claiming them, because it knows that the very capacity to perform them came from elsewhere.

Much of the post-Reformation argument over faith and works has been an exercise in talking past one another. One side hears “works” and pictures a system of earning, a transactional spirituality where we accumulate righteousness like points. The other side hears “faith alone” and pictures a passive Christianity, all interior conviction with no demand on the body, no transformation of life.

I think much of the confusion is because since the time of the Reformation we've been asking the wrong questions of the text. Paul doesn't primarily have "how you get to heaven" in mind in these passages. His primary concern here is the disposition of the heart here and now, which has eternal implications.

Paul, I think, would recognize neither caricature in "faith vs. works." He'd take issue with the very "vs" put between those words. He's not concerned with the concerns that informed the debates of justification in the sixteenth century. He’s not playing on that field.

His field is more ancient, more searching. He’s looking at the human heart and asking: where does your boasting come from?

When you stand before God, what do you bring? Do you come with empty hands, ready to receive, or do you come with a list, expecting to be paid?

The prophet Jeremiah had already framed this issue centuries earlier: “Let not the wise boast in their wisdom, do not let the mighty boast in their might, do not let the wealthy boast in their wealth; but let those who boast boast in this, that they understand and know me, that I am the Lord” (Jeremiah 9:23-24).

Paul is standing squarely in this prophetic tradition. The whole question is the proper object of our boasting. And only one object will do.

 

The Quiet Examination

If this is what Paul is really after, then the question for us is not the abstract theological question that divided sixteenth-century Europe. The question is intimate, immediate, devastating in its simplicity.

What is in your trophy case?

Not literally, obviously. Spiritually.

When you think of your life, what do you point to with pride? 

When you mentally introduce yourself to God, what do you bring to the introduction? Your achievements? Your moral progress? Your service to the church? Your years of prayer? Your charitable giving?

None of these are bad things. In fact, they may be very good things, things genuinely produced by God’s grace at work in you. But the question Paul presses is whether you receive them with open hands, recognizing them as gifts, or whether you have quietly engraved your own name on them.

This is hard. The human heart is, as the prophet says, devious above all else (cf. Jeremiah 17:9). Our capacity for self-congratulation is virtually limitless. '

We can even take pride in our humility. We can boast about our refusal to boast. \

The serpent of self-regard slips into every crack we leave open.

 

How, then, shall we live?

How then do we live? A few simple practices, born of long Christian tradition, can help.

First, practice gratitude as a daily posture. At the end of each day, look back not at what you accomplished but at what you received. The good thing you did, the kind word you offered, the difficult moment you handled with grace, name them not as your achievements but as gifts that flowed through you. Try ending the day with the simple sentence: “Thank you for working through me today, in spite of me.”

Second, let your prayer include a specific act of returning credit. When you notice yourself feeling proud of some spiritual progress or good deed, pause and say, in whatever words come naturally, “This was your work, Lord. I receive it as a gift, and I return the credit to you.” This sounds simple, but the discipline of it slowly retrains the heart.

Third, resist the urge to display. Much of our boasting happens in subtle social currency, the little ways we let others know what we’ve done, how much we’ve sacrificed, how spiritual we are. Jesus was unsparing about this in the Sermon on the Mount: “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven” (Matthew 6:1). Pick one good deed this week and do it in such a way that no one will ever know. Let it remain a secret between you and God.

Fourth, be suspicious of comparison. The moment you find yourself measuring your spiritual life against someone else’s, whether favorably or unfavorably, you have stepped onto the trophy case ground. The only useful comparison is between who you are and who God is calling you to become.

Finally, rest in the Giver, not in the gift. The deepest cure for boasting is contemplative prayer, the simple practice of resting in God’s presence without producing anything, without proving anything, without earning anything. In that stillness, the heart is slowly reordered. We learn, by long practice, that we are loved before we have done anything, and that everything good in us is the overflow of that love.

The trophy case, in the end, should be empty. Or rather, it should hold one thing only, polished and gleaming, with a single name engraved on it. Not yours. Not mine. The name above every name, given to us as the only thing worth boasting about.

“Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 1:31).