Faith, Works, Paul, and James

I came across an interesting non-existent conflict today, where it appears that Paul claims justification is through faith, and James claims justification is through works. Someone had quoted from James saying that "some religionists today advocate that man is saved by faith only", and I thought "well, yeah, that's right -- and good works come from that -- you're not saved because you do a bunch of good stuff to earn your way into heaven -- if that were true, Christ died for nothing".

As such, I felt compelled to look up the part from James he was talking about. The quoted part is only 2:24 -- "you see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone". Well, that by itself didn't sound right. Taken in context its pretty clear that in James 2, good works do come through faith, and James' point appears to be that if you're just claiming "yeah, I have faith"...well, you really are probably just saying that and not backing up your statement with your actions.

2:17-18 sums it up nicely I think -- "So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. But someone will say, 'You have faith and I have works.' Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works."

I still decided to take a further look and came across this link that discusses the (non-)controversy:

http://www.biblicaltheology.com/Research/CarterJ01.html

Worth a read if after reading James you still think there is disagreement.