When I read Hebrews 11, one pattern leaps off the page: every “by faith” is followed by a verb. By faith Abel offered. By faith Noah built. By faith Abraham went. Biblical faith is never a vague feeling or a private opinion; it is an inner conviction that necessarily spills over into concrete, often costly, action.
Yet in much of modern Christianity, “faith” has been collapsed into a narrow concern with personal salvation: “Am I going to heaven when I die?” Hebrews 11 is not blind to future hope—its heroes look for a better country, a city with foundations. But the emphasis is unmistakable: their faith is validated, clarified, and even taught to them through what they do in this life. Faith is not merely a ticket to a future world; it is a way of inhabiting this one under God’s rule.
Over the years, I’ve watched theology—and religion more broadly—turn this living dynamic into a tug‑of‑war: is it “faith” that matters, or “works”? Some traditions, especially those fixated on personal salvation as a status, seem to say, “Just believe; what you do is secondary.” Others, reacting against hypocrisy, insist that what really matters is what you do—your activism, your social engagement, your good deeds—while what you believe is treated as a private, almost optional layer.
Both moves, in different ways, tear apart what Hebrews 11 holds together.
In that chapter, faith is defined as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” But it doesn’t stop at definition. The author immediately walks us through a gallery of men and women whose inner trust in a transcendent Source leads them to take specific, risky steps in real history. They act not because their culture cheers them on, and not because they’ve designed the perfect social program, but because God has spoken and they trust Him enough to obey. And it is precisely in these costly acts that they—and we—learn what faith truly is.
This basic pattern is not unique to Christianity or Judaism. In virtually every religious tradition, we find some version of this tension:
- Devotional streams that emphasize inner piety, meditation, or belief, while social and moral life quietly conform to prevailing culture.
- Activist or ritualistic streams that emphasize doing—campaigning, serving, performing observances—while the vertical dimension of accountability to a holy, personal God fades into the background.
What Hebrews 11 does, and what I want this series to explore, is expose the false dichotomy between faith and works. Faith and works are not rival currencies competing for spiritual value. They are two sides of one reality: a relationship of trust with God that necessarily expresses itself in the way we live, spend, speak, give, build, refuse, and endure—here and now. When we treat faith as mainly an insurance policy for the afterlife, we lose sight of this formative, incarnational dimension: we are meant to practice faith in history so that we can understand, and be shaped by, the very thing that will carry us into eternity.
When we split faith and works, two distortions quickly appear.
First, faith without works. In this view, faith becomes a kind of “heavenly insurance policy” or a psychological comfort. You affirm certain propositions, you feel a certain way about God, and you’re told that’s what really matters. Ethics may still be encouraged, but there’s a subtle message that obedience, sacrifice, and concrete moral decisions are secondary. Faith gets reduced to an inner opinion, safely sealed off from your wallet, your sexuality, your politics, your business practices. Paradoxically, a doctrine intended to secure your eternal future ends up muting the very kind of present‑tense, Hebrews‑11 faith that prepares you for that future.
Second, works without faith. Here the pendulum swings the other way. People become rightly dissatisfied with empty belief and religious hypocrisy and conclude, “What counts is making the world a better place.” Justice, equality, and compassion become the watchwords. But detached from any robust, revealed moral framework, our “works” are left to be defined by the loudest voices, the latest theories, or the deepest resentments.
This is where modern social justice, as it is often practiced and preached, collides with the faith of Hebrews 11.
On the surface, social justice language borrows heavily from biblical themes: concern for the poor, outrage at oppression, a passion for liberation. Many people assume that supporting these movements is automatically aligned with the heart of God. But when we examine them through the lens of Hebrews 11 and the broader moral law—including commands like “you shall not covet”—a different picture emerges.
Coveting is not just wanting what someone else has; it is the inward posture that says, “What you possess, I deserve, and I am justified in resenting you—and, if necessary, coercing you—to get it.” When this spirit gets baptized as “justice,” we are no longer talking about works that flow from faith in God; we are talking about works that flow from envy, fear, and a loss of trust in divine provision and judgment.
Hebrews 11 describes people who acted in faith, often at great personal cost, without demanding guarantees from human systems. They trusted that God saw, God judged, and God rewarded—even when, in this life, they did not receive what was promised. Their present obedience was both an expression of their future hope and the crucible in which that hope was refined. That posture stands in sharp contrast to much modern activism, which insists on immediate, visible payoff enforced by ever‑expanding human power.
If the solutions we pursue for the betterment of the world are driven by covetousness, by the desire to redistribute not only resources but moral responsibility, by the assumption that human structures are our ultimate savior, then those solutions are not simply “imperfect expressions of faith.” They are, in a very real sense, competitors to the faith described in Hebrews 11. They hollow it out. They relocate our hope from God’s character and promises to the machinery of the state, the market, or the movement.
In this opening article, I want to lay the foundation for a claim I’ll develop through the whole series: the world’s problems cannot be solved by “works” that are cut loose from true faith. Nor can they be solved by a privatized “faith” preoccupied with personal salvation while largely indifferent to the shape of our obedience in this age. If our vision of justice contradicts the moral law of God—if it legitimizes coveting, erases personal responsibility, or excuses what God condemns—then no amount of zeal, sacrifice, or sincerity can transform those works into something righteous. They may be powerful, but they will not be redemptive.
Over the next eight articles, we’ll walk through specific examples from Hebrews 11—Abel, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and others—and contrast their faith‑driven works with modern patterns of thought and action. Along the way, I’ll invite readers from different religious and philosophical backgrounds to ask: What is my ultimate reference point for justice? For sacrifice? For hope? Is it the living God who speaks and commands—or is it the shifting consensus of my time?
My goal is not to dismiss every concern raised by social justice movements, nor to baptize any particular political approach. It is to recover a holistic vision in which faith and works are reunited under the authority of God’s word and the example of those who “obtained a good testimony” by trusting Him—and to insist that the way we practice faith now is itself preparation for the world to come.
As you think about your own life—your causes, your convictions, your sacrifices—would you say your “works” are mostly driven by inner trust in God’s revealed will, or by pressures and narratives you’ve absorbed from the culture around you?
