would. You say you receive it through hearing the Word, but how can the
Word do any work on you if all you do is hear it? How can the Word do
any work on a log or a stone? Perhaps you were brought to life but you
were totally unaware that it happened! What is that liveliness except your
ability to say, ‘Faith alone justifies us and saves us’? But you don’t even
know what faith is or which type of faith saves us!”
[ 3 ] Then someone whom the angel with me called a syncretist stood
up. He took off his head-covering and put it on the table, but then
quickly put it back on his head because he was bald. “Listen to me,” he
said. “You are all wrong. It is true that faith is spiritual and goodwill is
moral, but still they are connected. The Word connects them; then they
are connected by the Holy Spirit; and finally they are connected by their
effect, which could indeed be called obedience, but it is an obedience in
which we have no part, because when faith enters us we are as unaware of
it as a statue would be. I have thought long and hard about this. What I
have finally come to is that we can receive faith (which is spiritual) from
God, but God cannot put us in a state of spiritual goodwill any more
than he could put a log in a state of spiritual goodwill.”
[ 4 ] The people who believed in faith alone applauded these state-
ments, but the people who believed in goodwill booed them. The pro-
ponents of goodwill said indignantly, “Listen, friend, you don’t seem to
know that there is such a thing as a moral life that is spiritual, as
opposed to a moral life that is merely earthly. People who do good
things that have their origin in God and yet do them as if they were act-
ing on their own live a spiritual moral life. People who do good things
that have their origin in hell and yet do them as if they were acting on
their own live a merely earthly moral life.”
[ 5 ] I mentioned before that their fighting sounded like teeth grind-
ing together and like hammering with whistling mixed in. The argu-
ments from the people who made faith the sole and essential thing in
the church sounded like teeth grinding together. The arguments from
the people who made goodwill the sole and essential thing in the
church sounded like hammering. The whistling that was mixed in came
from the syncretist. These people sounded like this at a distance because
they had all spent their time in the world arguing but had not abstained
from any evil; therefore none of them had done any good thing that
had a spiritual origin. They were also completely unaware that truth is
the essence of faith and goodness is the essence of goodwill; that truth
§460 goodwill & good actions 551