Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – John 14–17

Evangelical Questions: Grace and Works by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC If ye love me, keep my commandments. (John 14:15) Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about Grace and Works. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand. Before we get started I want to remind you about the FAIR Conference and tell you about another one of the talks that will be happening. Stephen Smoot is a young scholar who was at Book of Mormon Central for a while and is now working at the BH Roberts Foundation, and his area of specialty is the Book of Abraham. Recently BYU Studies put out a 300-page guide to the Book of Abraham and I think Smoot co-authors every chapter in that publication, or just about. There simply are no serious conversations going on these days about the Book of Abraham that Stephen is not somehow involved in. He’s spoken at FAIR several times and is just incredibly insightful and well-studied. You can come and join us in person in Provo, Utah August 2-4, or you can stream online for free – we just ask that you go to the website and register for access for planning purposes. Stephen is speaking on Wednesday, I am speaking on Friday. The schedule is up on the FAIR website if you want to see who else is speaking. Today we will (finally) get into one of the topics that has come up probably more than any other in the last 50 years of conversation between Evangelicals and Latter-day Saints: Grace vs. Works. Maybe the only thing that comes up more is, “You worship a different Jesus.” But Grace v. Works is right up there. We touched on this a tiny bit back in Episode 6 when we talked about, “What must I do to be saved?’ but today we go in a bit deeper. The traditional argument goes something like this: Evangelicals say Latter-day Saints are trying to earn salvation through good works – and Latter-day Saints say Evangelicals are practicing a cheap grace where all they do is pray a prayer and never have to become like Jesus. I think, as we go through this, you’re going to see that the questions aren’t even really formed in a helpful way and there’s probably a better way to look at it. Both the Latter-day Saint listeners and the Evangelical listeners to this episode will probably be surprised to know that one of the most hotly anticipated books coming out this year in the Evangelical press is called, “The Doctrine of Good Works: Reclaiming a Neglected Protestant Teaching.” Baker Academic is putting it out and its 3 authors are all Phd’s with impeccable Evangelical credentials. They are serious scholars who write about serious topics. Unfortunately, the book isn’t out until the end of July. I was able to read about 30 pages of it online and was fascinated by the beginning. “To say that Christianity has a crisis of credibility is an understatement…..people are hardly interested in the truth claims of Christianity unless and until they see that it matters….They will not be inclined to give serious consideration to the truth claims of Christianity until there is something about it that makes them hope that it might be true.” They point out that g