Works of the Law - Ceremonial Laws or the Whole Law - On Romans 328

Few phrases in St. Paul are more misunderstood than "works of the law," and few matter more, since how you read it shapes your whole understanding of justification. It stands at the heart of passages like Romans 3:28: "For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law." Robert Sungenis fields questions on it constantly, from readers who meet his account of the historic Catholic teaching and then hear another Catholic apologist say something different.

Many apologists today explain "works of the law" as the ceremonial law of Israel alone, the ritual practices such as circumcision, kosher diet, priestly sacrifices, and seventh-day sabbath observance, set over against the rest of the law. It makes an easy polemical tool: where the Protestant says Paul excludes all works from justification, the Catholic replies that Paul means only the ceremonial works, so that the moral law of the Commandments still justifies. That answer, Sungenis argues, is at best a half-truth and at worst a distortion of the Catholic doctrine of justification. In this study he reiterates, more forcefully than in his 1997 book Not By Faith Alone, what the phrase really means, and why the common reading, though partly right, gives the wrong answer to a crucial question.