We don’t separate them. Faith and works aren’t two different things competing for your salvation, they’re two sides of the same coin. True faith produces works. Works flow from faith. You can’t have one without the other, and trying to split them apart creates a false problem that the Church has never really had.
If you grew up Baptist or at one of the big non-denominational churches around Beaumont, you probably heard a lot about “faith alone.” You got saved by believing in Jesus, and that was that. Works came later, maybe, as evidence or gratitude, but they weren’t part of the salvation equation. The Orthodox Church doesn’t teach that. We also don’t teach that you earn your way to heaven by racking up good deeds like spiritual frequent flyer miles. Both of those miss what’s actually happening when God saves us.
What we actually believe
Salvation is God’s work from start to finish. It’s grace all the way down. But grace isn’t a magic wand that zaps you into heaven while you sit there passively. Grace is God’s actual life and energy coming into you, healing you, transforming you, making you more like Christ. The technical word is theosis, becoming by grace what God is by nature. And that process requires your cooperation.
St. Paul told the Philippians to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work.” That’s the key. God works. You work. Not separately, but together. The fancy theological term is synergy, cooperation. God doesn’t override your will and He doesn’t leave you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. He offers His grace and you respond. You pray. You fast. You confess. You commune. You give to the poor. You forgive your enemies. You show up to Liturgy even when your shift at the plant had you up all night.
Those aren’t things you do to earn salvation. They’re how you participate in the salvation God is already giving you.
The whole faith-versus-works argument
Here’s the thing: Orthodox Christians read both Paul and James, and we don’t think they contradict each other. Paul says we’re justified by faith apart from works of the Law. James says faith without works is dead. Protestants have spent five hundred years trying to reconcile those two statements. We just take them both at face value.
When Paul talks about “works of the Law,” he means the ritual requirements of the Old Covenant, circumcision, dietary laws, Sabbath observance. He’s telling Jews and Gentiles that you don’t become a Christian by keeping kosher. You come to Christ by faith. Fine. We agree. But James is talking about something else entirely. He’s talking about the kind of faith that actually changes how you live. If you say you believe in Jesus but you let your brother starve, your faith is worthless. It’s not real faith at all.
The Orthodox Church has never seen a conflict there. Faith is the root. Works are the fruit. You don’t get an apple tree by stapling apples to a stick. But if your apple tree never produces apples, something’s wrong with the tree.
What this isn’t
This isn’t legalism. We’re not saying you have to pray a certain number of hours or fast a certain number of days to unlock heaven. The prayer rule your priest gives you isn’t a legal requirement, it’s a prescription for healing. You’re sick with sin and the medicine is prayer, fasting, almsgiving, the sacraments. You take the medicine because you want to get well, not because you’re afraid of getting in trouble.
And this isn’t Pelagianism, the heresy that says humans can save themselves by trying hard enough. You can’t. Left to yourself, you’re dead in your sins. Christ raises you to life. The Holy Spirit empowers everything good you do. But once you’re alive, you have to learn to walk. God doesn’t walk for you. He holds your hand while you take each step.
How this plays out
When you’re baptized at St. Michael’s, something real happens. You die with Christ and rise with Him. You’re united to His Body. The Holy Spirit comes to dwell in you. That’s all grace, all gift. But then you have to live into that baptism every day for the rest of your life. You have to keep dying to yourself and rising with Christ. You do that through repentance, through the Eucharist, through reading Scripture and the lives of the saints, through loving your difficult coworker and your ex-spouse and the guy who cut you off in traffic on I-10.
St. Silouan of Mount Athos said, “My brother is my life.” That’s not just a nice sentiment. It’s theology. How you treat other people reveals whether Christ is actually alive in you. Your faith becomes visible in your works. Not to earn anything, but because that’s what faith does when it’s real.
So when someone asks whether Orthodoxy teaches salvation by faith or by works, the answer is yes. Both. Or neither, if you’re thinking of them as separate things. We’re saved by grace, received through faith, expressed in works, all of it happening together in the life of the Church as God transforms us into His likeness. It’s not complicated. It’s just not the either-or question most of us were taught to ask.
