[AI translation] Dear brothers and sisters, the biblical passage that I have just read from the letter of the Apostle James was given this title when the Bible was translated and printed: true faith is manifested in deeds. This is what I would like to talk about now, that true faith is manifested in deeds. In fact, let me say that only true faith is manifested in deeds, in good deeds. And this idea is particularly topical today, because it is here that the whole problem of the relationship between Christianity and atheism comes to the fore. Here, then, in the question of faith and the works that flow from it.I have often thought, and I think you will probably agree with me, that we, as believing Christians, should somehow see and appreciate atheism in a completely different way. Somehow we should have a very different attitude to the one we usually have: we tend to be too negative about atheism as a whole. Somehow we think that it is a danger to faith, that it is harmful to the knowledge of God. We feel ourselves forced into a sort of alarmed fear, a defensive position against it. And yet, brothers and sisters, atheism not only has a negative significance for faith, it also has a very, very serious positive significance for the life of faith, for the knowledge of God. Just think, for example, of the extremely useful service that atheism performs by relentlessly combating all kinds of idolatry and superstition. And in this struggle, we believers must feel ourselves to be as close partners in arms as possible with atheists. For one of the greatest dangers to a sober faith in God, a true faith in God, is precisely superstition. And indeed, in two thousand years there have been just enough superstitious ideas attached to people's faith. So we can be grateful to atheism when it helps to weed out, even eradicate, these weeds. Let us also help to eradicate these weeds from our own faith. But, brothers and sisters, beyond that, atheism's criticism of the faith in God is not at all harmful or damaging, but a very salutary and useful warning that should force us believers to introspection. It should encourage us to give up our often very skewed ideas about our faith and our whole concept of God, because there is no harm in it, and to try to return to a deeper, truer, more real faith in God.
Let me put it this way, my brothers and sisters: we believers must take God Himself deadly seriously in the judgment that God pronounces on us, the Church, through the atheists.
Atheism is in fact the bankruptcy of the faith in God of believers. It is almost a natural and self-evident consequence of the fact that the faith of believers, spoken by their mouths, has not proved true and authentic in their lives and actions. Atheism is one of the church's unpaid bills in the world. And the Christian man would do very, very well to listen to the atheist and take his arguments seriously. We, as believers, should go much, much further in our willingness to meet our fellow atheist, to understand him and to meet him in an atmosphere of unconditional solidarity. Brothers and sisters, the field of solidarity and belonging between believers and non-believers is not a field of theory - because there we can only argue, let us leave that to others - but a field of practice, of behaviour lived in everyday life, of action. Let me put it this way: the living of true humanity. This is the field where we can meet. And if we believe - as we undoubtedly do - that the Gospel of Christ has something to say to the people of the world today, in 1965, then we must proclaim it and make it known to this world, first and foremost, by our actions. Because, brothers and sisters, whether one believes in God or not cannot really be deduced from one's principles, from one's dogmatic theory. Belief or unbelief in God is decided primarily not by our words but by our actions.
This is also the point of this passage that I have read. You heard it: the apostle James writes that if a believer can only say gracious words to a fellow human being in any kind of need, but does not give him what the body needs - the apostle James emphasises very strongly: not life, but the body - then the whole faith in God of such a believer is dead, dead in itself. And this, let me say, is worse than having no faith at all. For what is not, is not. But if a man has a dead faith, it is as if he had a decaying and infectious corpse in him all the time. Dead faith has a worse smell around it than total unbelief. This is what the apostle James says: "But faith, if it has no good works, is dead". It is dead. What this means is that, for example, someone who professes and believes that what Jesus teaches in, say, the Sermon on the Mount is true and right, but does not live by it, is dead. Or, for example, when someone reads the Bible, goes to church, listens to the sermon with pleasure, and perhaps even tells others what a good sermon he has heard; at the table of the Lord's Supper, says over and over again that he believes and confesses the merits of Jesus for the forgiveness of sins and the grace of God, and then, perhaps with the taste of communion wine still in his mouth, he tells the latest gossip about someone, or thinks of someone with anger or hatred, or looks at someone with a look of displeasure, or his heart and mouth are full of bitter complaints: he is dead.
So when one confesses Christ, but his motives and actions are not Christlike actions: this is dead faith. And because of many, many such dead beliefs, there is atheism in this world. And do you know, brothers and sisters, what is the most terrible thing? It is that not only is it that one professes Christ, but his works are not Christlike, but the reverse is also true. It is that one does not confess Christ, perhaps denies God, but his works are Christian, Christian works - because there is such a thing. I have very often seen, with shame, atheists, people who deny God, or people who absolutely do not care for God, manifest in their service to their fellow man and to the world so much true humanity, so much deep, earnest sense of responsibility, that almost the light of Christian love shone forth in them. Let us therefore be very careful when we want to draw a rigid line between believer and non-believer, between Christian and atheist. For this line of demarcation, brothers and sisters, let us remember, is not between two groups of people. Certainly not somewhere on the border between East and West, but do you know where this borderline is? In the very centre of the heart of each one of us. Let's not imagine that love, humanity, goodness can only be found in the lives of people who believe in God. Let me tell you, there is a great deal of bitter experience to show that there is almost nowhere else where one finds so much contempt, so much self-righteous arrogance, so much flippant criticism, so much concrete unlovingness, as among people who profess to believe. On the contrary, one finds shameful goodness, true humanity and cordiality in the lives of people who do not want to know anything about God.
One of today's most modern French writers, Camus, who is generally considered to be the most prominent exponent of atheistic humanity, writes in one of his novels about an unbelieving doctor who literally sacrifices himself to fight the plague. He does everything for his patients. He walks around day and night, injecting his patients, tired to death, not caring that at any moment he himself might fall victim to the dreadful plague, fighting desperately against death to save people. Here, one could say, he is describing the figure of an atheist saint, because there are such people in the world, brothers and sisters! And now let me say, even if it may offend some of us, that a doctor, for example, who denies God but loves his patients and fights for their lives, sparing no effort, is closer to Christ than perhaps a learned theologian who despises his colleague and harms him where he can. Yet the one mocks the things of faith, the other may write volumes about it. Or, for example, the young soldiers who lost their lives in recent weeks fighting the floods in Transdanubia: however intellectual and principled they were, they were closer to Jesus than the believer who, while bending his door, was praying in secret, when he could perhaps have helped.
What does Jesus say? "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends". To lay down one's life for another person, especially for strangers - that, brothers and sisters, is pure Christianity. And Jesus once said - remember him - "Whoever loses his life for me will find it". You know what this "for my sake" means, don't you: practically it means for the sake of another person. Because Jesus says that what we have done or failed to do for a fellow human being, we have done or failed to do for him. Word for word, Jesus says: "If you have done it to one of the least of my brethren, you have done it to me". So brethren, let us not look down on unbelievers, let us not look down on them. And for the world's sake let us not think, let us not imagine that because we believe rightly or wrongly in one way or another, that we are in any way superior to them. Oh, we are not above them! We are not above them at all. In fact, let us be carried down from all sorts of imaginary heights by these very, very harsh words of the Apostle Paul: 'Though I have all faith, so much so that I can move mountains out of places, yet have I not love, I am nothing'. So the greatest, the most conscious and the most devout faith is nothing without love. Nothing at all.
Do you know, brothers and sisters, what is true atheism? What is true godlessness? Well, inhumanity. Again, let me refer to the words of Jesus, who said, "If you have not done it to one of the least of my brethren, for example, to feed a hungry man, or to help him in any affliction, you have not done it to me. This is true atheism! So, it is not true atheism when one denies the existence of God, but when one denies one's fellow human being the love, the goodness, the help that he needs. Real atheism is when one treats another human being inhumanely. It is real atheism to let your fellow human being suffer, whoever he is, even though you could help him with a kind gesture. Or when you look down on the other person, the non-believer, because they don't believe as you do. Or when you don't notice the tear in your colleague's eye. When you only care about yourself and not others, that is true atheism. No matter how fervently one sings the psalm in church, and no matter how many Bible quotes one has in one's head, what good is it! If a man says he has faith - so says the apostle - but his good works do not show his faith, can faith keep him? Does faith then make any difference at all? The apostle says this, brethren, not I. Moreover, it is the word of God that says it, not the apostle! So it is the atheism in us that is the dangerous one, not the one in the world. It is when a man who believes in God treats another man inhumanely. For the outward atheism in the world, brothers and sisters, let us give thanks to God. For it presents us with a mirror in which we can see beyond a shadow of a doubt whether our faith is alive or dead.
This unbelieving doctor of Camus's thinks that if he believed in the existence of an omnipotent God, he would not trouble himself with curing the sick, but would entrust the whole matter to God. But God is silent, and so he must face death himself. Why does the atheist think that God is silent, or that God is dead? It is because they are silent, and dead in faith, who ought to proclaim - and proclaim by their deeds - what God says. And what does God say? What Jesus lived: Jesus, who sacrificed all his physical and spiritual strength, very often even his nightly rest, to relieve the worries, troubles, bitterness, sorrows, burdens of his fellow human beings, and even afterwards sacrificed his life completely for us. This Jesus, the pro-selfish Jesus, is the model of the pro-selfish man, the model of the man who exists for others. This Jesus said to us, "I have given you an example, that as I have done to you, so you may do to others and to one another".
Fear not, God is not mocked by the atheism in the world. Those who confess God with their mouths but not with their works are mocked, and they shall be mocked. But God will do what He wills without those who believe in Him, and even by those who do not believe in Him, and even by those who deny Him. Jesus once said, "If ye hold your peace, the stones will cry out". Well brethren, the stones are already crying out. Listen to how loudly atheist scientists, for example, are crying out to the conscience of the world. The whole globe echoes their cry, when each in his own orchestration says: Beware people, the world is in danger! The whole of humanity is in danger! Do not kill, but negotiate. The world is going down the drain, and it's all sinking into nothingness. Sartre, the very famous French atheist philosopher who is alive today, once put it in these terms: 'Each man must be held responsible for the war as if he himself had declared it. Do you not realize, brothers and sisters, that even if non-believing politicians, atheist scholars and writers say it, they are saying it as a warning from God! The stones will cry out if you listen.
"Show your faith by your works" says the apostle. Understand that it is not dogmatic principles that matter today, but concrete actions. They matter. And the greatest faith, the most devout and the most conscientious faith, if it has no good works, is dead in itself. To truly believe, to believe in Jesus in a living way, is to have the wonderful energy of Jesus' death and resurrection flowing into the believer in Him. It pours out in his members and in his consciousness and in his unconscious world, and moves him to action. It becomes manifest and justified in the deeds of Christ. Faith is, in fact, an adherence to Christ, a growing into Christ, as when a branch is adhered to the branch and is sustained by its vitality. And whether the graft has taken hold of it depends on whether life has begun in it, and whether it is growing, and whether it bears flowers and fruit? Brethren, we shall all very soon know of our faith whether it be living or dead. For our works will tell us. Just as a thermometer tells the temperature. The thermometer does not make the temperature, the thermometer does not adjust the weather: it is not by our works that we earn our salvation, our works only indicate whether our whole life is already involved in the energy of Christ's death and resurrection. So whether we truly believe in Christ.
Well, do we? God calls us to self-examination through the words of the apostle James: 'Show me your faith by your works'. Let us not deceive ourselves, brothers and sisters! Let us read the "thermometer"!
Amen.
Date: 9 May 1965.