Calling and Believing: John Chrysostom, Diodore of Tarsus, and the Question of Faith Alone

A widely repeated claim holds that John Chrysostom denied justification by faith alone. The evidence usually offered is a single sentence from his thirty-first homily on the Gospel of John: that not even from the promise of eternal life to the one who believes do we assert that faith alone is sufficient to salvation. Read in isolation, the sentence looks decisive. Read against the rest of Chrysostom's homiletic corpus, and against the theology of the teacher he revered above all others, it looks like something else entirely: a warning against treating bare intellectual assent as sufficient, not a denial that faith and the confession that flows from it are what first obtain salvation. This article argues that Chrysostom, properly read, held that salvation is received through believing and calling upon Christ, and that it can subsequently be forfeited by a life inconsistent with that faith. On the specific question of how salvation is received and how it is kept, this places him closer to the conditional security later articulated by John Wesley than to either a Reformed doctrine of imputed and unconditionally preserved faith or an Orthodox and Catholic model in which salvation is itself constituted by an accumulating, meritorious process.

A principle for reading the fathers

Catholic apologist Joseph Heschmeyer has offered a useful diagnostic for patristic interpretation. When a reading of a church father requires him to contradict himself, or to contradict a source he explicitly and repeatedly praised, the reading itself is probably at fault rather than the father. That principle governs the argument that follows. Chrysostom cannot simultaneously teach, in dozens of homilies, that sinners obtain salvation by believing and calling on Christ's name, and mean, in one homily on John, that this is false. The two claims must be reconciled, and the reconciliation has to come from Chrysostom's own words rather than from an interpreter's preference.

The disputed text reconsidered

The passage in question, from Homily 31 on the Gospel of John, reads in full: though a man believe rightly on the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, yet if he lead not a right life, his faith will avail him nothing toward his salvation. Chrysostom then clarifies his own meaning. The Evangelist did not say that believing on the Son constitutes eternal life on its own terms, nor that mere belief has eternal life, but rather that belief contains life within it, such that if a right manner of living does not follow, a heavy punishment will follow instead. The distinction being drawn is not between faith and works as alternative instruments of acquiring salvation. It is between the reception of salvation, which faith accomplishes, and its continuation, which requires a life consistent with that faith. This is precisely the distinction Wesley would later formalize as conditional security: salvation freely given upon faith, forfeitable through a subsequent life inconsistent with it.

Diodore of Tarsus and his influence

Chrysostom's regard for his teacher Diodore of Tarsus was not casual. When Diodore visited Antioch after Chrysostom's ordination, he was compared in a sermon to John the Baptist, the voice of the church, the rod of Moses. Chrysostom took the pulpit the next day and redirected the praise onto Diodore himself, likening him to the Baptist and, in a separate homily, to the martyrs, describing his mortified limbs and the expression of an angel on a human face. A student's theology is never a perfect mirror of his teacher's, but the resemblance between Diodore's soteriology and Chrysostom's is close enough to be instructive.

Commenting on Romans 10:11 through 13, Diodore writes that God does not extend grace without discernment, even to those unwilling to offer the Benefactor so much as a request and a prayer, and that God removed even the excuse of ignorance by sending evangelists to invite sinners to ask for the gift. Salvation, on this reading, is obtained by asking. Chrysostom says the same thing in his own homilies on the same chapter.

Chrysostom on Romans 10

In Homily 17 on Romans, commenting on verse 9, Chrysostom states that there is no long journey to make, no sea to cross, no mountain to pass in order to be saved, since the word of salvation is already in one's mouth and heart. A person may be saved while seated at home, because it is there, in mouth and heart, that the source of salvation lies. Commenting on verses 11 through 13 in the same homily, he observes that Paul produces two witnesses, one to faith and one to its confession: the phrase everyone who believes points to faith, and the phrase whosoever shall call upon the Lord's name points to confession, and both apply equally to Jew and Gentile.

In Homily 18, commenting on verse 14, Chrysostom traces a single chain of causation: being saved comes from calling upon Christ, calling comes from believing, believing comes from hearing, hearing comes from preaching, and preaching comes from being sent. Since the apostles were sent, did preach, and were pointed out by the prophets in advance, unbelief can be attributed to nothing but the unbeliever's own fault.

In Homily 16, commenting on Isaiah's prophecy that the Lord would make a short word upon the earth, Chrysostom explains that this short word is the confession described in Romans 10:9, and that faith holds salvation within a few short words, requiring no circuitous performance of the law. That same short word, he adds, carries with it not salvation only but righteousness as well.

Calling upon God in the Homilies on Acts

In his tenth homily on the Acts of the Apostles, Chrysostom exhorts his hearers to call upon God directly, not merely for the benefit of an enemy but for the salvation of their own souls, since God is present and delighted by such prayer rather than provoked to anger by neglect of it. He offers three models: Stephen, who prayed that his killers not be charged with his death; the wife of Elkanah, who prayed with tears, sobs, and supplication for a son; and Moses, who interceded even for those who had driven him into exile. In each case salvation, or the answer sought, comes through direct address to God rather than through an accumulated record of works.

The penitent thief

Chrysostom returns to the penitent thief in two independent textual traditions and draws the same conclusion in both. In the Catena Aurea on Luke 23:40-41, he notes that the thief performs the office of judge though himself condemned, and that in his case confession is made to salvation rather than to punishment, since he is innocent of nothing but the crime for which he suffers alongside the truly innocent Christ. Commenting on verses 42 and 43, Chrysostom writes that the devil cast Adam out of Paradise, while Christ brought the thief into it before the whole world and the apostles, by a mere word and by faith alone, so that no sinner afterward might despair of entrance; he calls this a rapid change from the cross to heaven, from condemnation to Paradise, accomplished by the Lord's mercy rather than by the thief's own disposition.

A fuller version of the same episode appears in Chrysostom's homily on Genesis, preserved in Migne's Patrologia Graeca, volume 54, pages 612-613. There Chrysostom contrasts Adam, cast out for a single act of disobedience, with the thief, brought into Paradise while bearing what Chrysostom calls ten thousand burdens of sin. He asks directly whether the thief displayed labors, righteous deeds, or good fruits, and answers that one cannot even say this: on the strength of a bare word, by faith alone, the thief entered Paradise before the apostles themselves, proof that it was not his own merit but Christ's love for mankind that accomplished the whole work.

Confession as a recurring thread

The same vocabulary of confession recurs in Chrysostom's comments on two further parables, preserved in the Catena Aurea. On the prodigal son, he observes that the father does not wait to hear the son's prepared words of confession before running to meet him, showing that God anticipates the sinner's plea rather than withholding mercy until it is fully spoken; even so, the son's mouth is kissed as the source from which his confession proceeded. On the rich man and Lazarus, commenting on the rich man's request that his tongue be cooled, Chrysostom cites Proverbs on the power of the tongue and Romans 10:10 on confession made to salvation, noting that this was precisely what the rich man, out of pride, had failed to do in life. In both cases confession functions exactly as it does in the reading of Romans 10 given above: the acknowledgment through which grace already extended is received, not a work that earns it independently.

Free will and the offer of grace

Two further passages from the Catena Aurea round out the picture. Commenting on the Lord's Prayer, Chrysostom notes that to call God Father is, in that single title, to confess the forgiveness of sins, adoption, heirship, and the gift of the Spirit, benefits available only to one who calls on that name. Commenting on the parable of the sower, he addresses the hardened hearers of Matthew 13 directly: their blindness is not natural but voluntary, since they saw the demons cast out and called it sorcery, and heard Christ draw all people to God and called him godless. Yet even here Chrysostom insists the door remains open, framing God's own disposition as: if he would ask me, I would immediately forgive him. Culpability lies in the refusal to ask, not in any withholding of grace from those who do.

Diodore on grace and its aftermath

Diodore's remaining fragments on Romans confirm the same structure from the teacher's side. Commenting on Romans 8:17-18, he observes that suffering with Christ might seem to make glorification a wage earned by labor rather than a gift of grace, and corrects this by noting that God's goodness, unlike his justice, gives more to those who do right than their labor alone would earn. Commenting on Romans 13:11, he describes a believer's salvation as nearer, and easier to attain, after conversion than before, since accurate knowledge of what must be done was not available prior to instruction in the faith. Both comments describe salvation as a gift disproportionate to effort, requiring nonetheless an ongoing, effortful response once granted, which is the same shape Chrysostom gives the doctrine in his own homilies.

The Wesleyan parallel

John Wesley's Serious Thoughts Upon the Perseverance of the Saints states the position toward which Chrysostom and Diodore both point, even though Wesley wrote more than thirteen centuries later. Those who are righteous in God's own judgment, indued with a heart-purifying faith, grafted into the true vine, partakers of the Holy Spirit, and sanctified by the blood of the covenant may nevertheless so fall from God as to perish everlastingly; therefore let the one who stands take heed lest he fall. Wesley's own comment on Romans 10:10 draws exactly the distinction Chrysostom draws in Homily 31 on John: believing with the heart is the root of all inward religion, sufficient to obtain justification, while confessing with the mouth is the whole of outward religion, required to obtain final salvation. Neither element replaces the other, and neither is optional.

Conclusion

Read alone, Homily 31 on the Gospel of John looks like a flat denial that faith alone saves. Read against Chrysostom's homilies on Romans 10, his exhortation to call upon God in the Acts homilies, his double treatment of the penitent thief, his comments on the prodigal son and the rich man, and the closely aligned theology of his teacher Diodore of Tarsus, the passage instead denies that bare intellectual assent, unaccompanied by a corresponding life, is sufficient to keep what faith alone first obtained. That is not a denial of faith alone. It is an assertion that faith alone receives salvation and that a life consistent with that faith is required to retain it, a structure that anticipates, without simply repeating, the conditional security John Wesley would later set out as a formal doctrine.

Principal sources

John Chrysostom, Homily 31 on the Gospel of John

John Chrysostom, Homily 17 on Romans (on Romans 10:9, 10:11-13)

John Chrysostom, Homily 18 on Romans (on Romans 10:14-15)

John Chrysostom, Homily 16 on Romans (on Romans 10:22-23, referencing Isaiah 10:22-23)

John Chrysostom, Homily 10 on the Acts of the Apostles

John Chrysostom, Catena Aurea on Luke 23:40-43, Luke 15:17-24, Luke 16:22-24, Matthew 6:9, and Matthew 13:10-16

John Chrysostom, Homily on Genesis, in Patrologia Graeca, vol. 54, pages 612-613

Diodore of Tarsus, commentary fragments on Romans 8:17-18, 10:11-13, and 13:11

John Wesley, Serious Thoughts Upon the Perseverance of the Saints

John Wesley, notes on Romans 10:10