Can faith alone ever be sufficient?

[Jim__]

45. Yes it does.

The April 18th issue of The New York Review of Books has a review of Michael Massing's Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind. The review - which is behind a paywall - speaks a bit about this issue. One example:

This doctrine of justification by faith was in fact a commonplace of medieval theology, but it was obscured in practice by the medieval church’s emphasis on the strenuous pursuit of holiness. Luther radicalized it by making salvation an entirely passive process, in which human will and the practice of good works played no part. When in 1522 Luther translated the New Testament into German, he rendered Saint Paul’s assertion in Romans 3 that “man is justified by faith, without the works of the law” as “man is justified by faith ALONE, without the works of the law,” an apparently minor adjustment that in fact opened up a fundamental breach between Catholic and Protestant doctrines of salvation.