Comparing the faiths

Salvation: faith, works and mercy

How is a person saved? Christianity and Islam both speak of faith, good deeds and God’s mercy, but they put them together differently. This topic compares the two answers using the Bible and the Qur’an.

1The question

What does a person need to be saved, according to the Bible and the Qur’an?

2What Christians believe

Christians answer that salvation is God’s free gift, received by faith in Jesus. No one can earn it, because all have sinned. Good works do not save, but they follow from real faith as its fruit.

Christians read James 2:24, “by works a man is justified”, as describing the faith that shows itself in works, not as a second way to be saved. Jesus’s death pays for sin, so forgiveness rests on what he did, not on what we do.

3What the texts say

By grace through faith

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:
Ephesians 2:8 · KJVRead in context →
Not of works, lest any man should boast.
Ephesians 2:9 · KJVRead in context →
Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law.
Romans 3:28 · KJVRead in context →

Works and commandments

Ye see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only.
James 2:24 · KJVRead in context →
And he said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.
Matthew 19:17 · KJVRead in context →

Mercy for those who turn back

But if the wicked will turn from all his sins that he hath committed, and keep all my statutes, and do that which is lawful and right, he shall surely live, he shall not die.
Ezekiel 18:21 · KJVRead in context →
For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.
Hosea 6:6 · KJVRead in context →
I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.
Luke 15:7 · KJVRead in context →

4What scholars say

Martin Luther, who taught salvation by faith alone, called the letter of James “an epistle of straw” in his 1522 preface to the New Testament, because it seemed to him to stress works.

E. P. Sanders (Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 1977) showed that Judaism in Jesus’s day was not a religion of earning salvation: God’s mercy came first, and keeping the Law was the response. N. T. Wright and others have built on this to argue that Paul’s debate was about who belongs to God’s people, not about earning grace.

Scholars agree that the New Testament contains both emphases, faith in Paul and works in James and Matthew, and that Christians have long debated how to hold them together.

5The Islamic perspective

Islam teaches that salvation comes through faith in the one God, good deeds and, above all, God’s mercy. No sin is too great to be forgiven for one who turns back, and every deed, however small, is counted:

Say: O My slaves who have been prodigal to their own hurt! Despair not of the mercy of Allah, Who forgiveth all sins. Lo! He is the Forgiving, the Merciful.
Qur’an 39:53 · PickthallRead in context →
And whoso doeth good an atom's weight will see it then, And whoso doeth ill an atom's weight will see it then.
Qur’an 99:7–8 · PickthallRead in context →

The Prophet ﷺ taught that no one enters Paradise by his deeds alone, but only through God’s mercy, as reported in Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim. Muslims see this as the balance found in Ezekiel 18 and Hosea 6:6: God forgives the one who repents, without any sacrifice.

6Objections and responses

“No one can be good enough, so we need a perfect sacrifice.”

Response: Islam agrees that no one is perfect. That is why it rests salvation on God’s mercy, not on our perfection. In the parable of the lost son (Luke 15), the father forgives the son who comes home, with no payment made first.

“Ezekiel and Hosea describe the Old Covenant, before Jesus.”

Response: Jesus taught the same thing in his own words: there is joy in heaven “over one sinner that repenteth” (Luke 15:7), and when asked how to enter life he said “keep the commandments” (Matthew 19:17). Muslims see one consistent message from God across the prophets.

7Conclusion

Both faiths teach that salvation depends on God’s grace and that real faith shows itself in deeds. Christians hold that grace comes through Jesus’s death on the cross. Muslims hold that God forgives directly, out of his mercy, those who believe, repent and do good.

Read Ephesians 2:8–10 and James 2:14–26 together, then Qur’an 39:53–54.

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