Is not ‘faith alone’ sufficient for a believer to be in right standing with God, apart from acts of love and good works?

Orthodox Christians hold that the Protestant slogan ‘faith alone’ (sola fide), when taken to mean a faith that saves without love and good works, is unacceptable, resting on a misreading of the blessed Apostle Paul, the very danger of which St Peter warns: “our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him… There are some things in his letters hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures. You, therefore, beloved, being forewarned, beware lest you be carried away with the error of the lawless and lose your own stability” (2Pe 3:15–17; see Q052).

As the Scriptures consistently teach, faith without love and good works is inactive and dead; such faith is not saving faith, and cannot lead to eternal life: “whoever does not love his brother or sister remains in death” (1Jo 3:14); “What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but has no works? Can such faith save him?… As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also” (Jas 2:14, 26).