Start by Understanding Salvation
'Being saved' and 'doing good works' sounds like a low-grade version of the classic Reformation stand-off between Luther and the other reformers on the one hand and the Roman Catholicism of the late mediaeval period on the other -- and, of course, Luther and his followers saw this stand-off as the re-run of the battles Paul had with his opponents, particularly the so-called 'Judaizers' in Galatians.
This important set of arguments has become fairly thoroughly confused in the last hundred or two hundred years because it's got muddled up with various others, including (a) the Romantic notion that genuine religion is all about inwardness rather than externals ('How I feel deep down' vs 'What I do outwardly') and (b) the existentialist notion that 'authenticity' consists in being true to what one finds within oneself rather than conforming to outward regulations etc. Unfortunately, these four things (Paul's battles, Luther's battles, Romanticism and existentialism) are simply not the same as one another, though it would take a long article, perhaps a book, to spell all this out (I have tried elsewhere: see e.g. my commentary on Romans in the New Interpreters Bible (Abingdon Press) vol. 10).
Read the whole column.
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