1.21 blog

If you grew up in a broadly evangelical or fundamentalist church, you should find this funny (or maybe offensive…if it offends you, lighten up). For those of you who may wonder, this is not the catechism I’ve been recommending to people. Also, it’ll probably be a bit easier to appreciate it if you take a few moments to look a the Westminster Shorter Catechism. I’m not sure who wrote it, but it does a great job skewering some of the sub-biblical thinking in many “evangelical” circles.

1. Q: What is the chief end of each individual Christian?
A: Each individual Christian’s chief end is to get saved. This is the first and great commandment.

2. Q: And what is the second great commandment?
A: The second, which is like unto it, is to get as many others saved as he can.

3. Q: What one work is required of thee for thy salvation?
A: It is required of me for my salvation that I make a Decision for Christ, which meaneth to accept Him into my heart to be my personal lord and saviour

4. Q: At what time must thou perform this work?
A: I must perform this work at such time as I have reached the Age of Accountability.

5. Q: At what time wilt thou have reached this Age?
A: That is a trick question. In order to determine this time, my mind must needs be sharper than any two-edged sword, able to pierce even to the division of bone and marrow; for, alas, the Age of Accountability is different for each individual, and is thus unknowable.

6. Q: By what means is a Decision for Christ made?
A: A Decision for Christ is made, not according to His own purpose and grace which was given to me in Christ Jesus before the world began, but according to the exercise of my own Free Will in saying the Sinner’s Prayer in my own words.

7. Q: If it be true then that man is responsible for this Decision, how then can God be sovereign?
A: He cannot be. God sovereignly chose not to be sovereign, and is therefore dependent upon me to come to Him for salvation. He standeth outside the door of my heart, forlornly knocking, until such time as I Decide to let Him in.

8. Q: How then can we make such a Decision, seeing that the Scripture saith, we are dead in our trespasses and sins?
A: By this the Scripture meaneth, not that we are dead, but only that we are sick or injured in them.

9. Q: What is the assurance of thy salvation?
A: The assurance of thy salvation is, that I know the date on which I prayed the Sinner’s Prayer, and have duly written this date on an official Decision card.

10. Q: What is thy story? What is thy song?
A: Praising my Savior all the day long.

11. Q: You ask me how I know he lives?
A: He lives within my heart.

12. Q: And what else hast thou got in thine heart?
A: I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart.

13. Q: Where??
A: Down in my heart!

14. Q: Where???
A: Down in my heart!!

15. Q: What witness aid hath been given us as a technique by which we may win souls?
A: The tract known commonly as the Four Spiritual Laws, is the chief aid whereby we may win souls.

16. Q: What doth this tract principally teach?
A: The Four Spiritual Laws principally teach, that God’s entire plan for history and the universe centereth on me, and that I am powerful enough to thwart His divine purpose if I refuse to let Him pursue His Wonderful Plan for my life.

17. Q: What supplementary technique is given by which we may win souls?
A: The technique of giving our own Personal Testimony, in the which we must always be ready to give an answer concerning the years we spent in vanity and pride, and the wretched vices in which we wallowed all our lives until the day we got saved.

18. Q: I’m so happy, what’s the reason why?
A: Jesus took my burden all away!

19. Q: What are the means given whereby we may large crowds of souls in a spectacular manner?
A: Such a spectacle is accomplished by means of well-publicized Crusades and Revivals which (in order that none may be loath to attend) are best conducted anywhere else but in a Church.

20. Q: Am I a soldier of the Cross?
A: I am a soldier of the Cross if I join Campus Crusade, Boys’ Brigade, the Salvation Army, or the Wheaton Crusaders; of if I put on the helmet of Dispensationalism, the breastplate of Pietism, the shield of Tribulationism, and the sword of Zionism, having my feet shod with the gospel of Arminianism.

21. Q: Who is your boss?
A: My boss is a Jewish carpenter.

22. Q: Hath God predestined vessels of wrath to Hell?
A: God hath never performed such an omnipotent act, for any such thing would not reflect His primary attribute, which is Niceness.

23. Q: What is sanctification?
A: Sanctification is the work of my free Will, whereby I am renewed by having my Daily Quiet Time.

24. Q: What rule hath God for our direction in prayer?
A: The rule that we must bow our hands, close our heads, and fold our eyes.

25. Q: What doth the Lord’s Prayer teach us?
A: The Lord’s Prayer teacheth us that we must never memorize a prayer, or use one that hath been written down.

26. Q: What’s the book for thee?
A: The B-I-B-L-E.

27. Q: Which are among the first books which a Christian should read to his soul’s health?
A: Among the first books which a Christian should read are the books of Daniel and Revelation, and The Late Great Planet Earth.

28. Q: Who is on the Lord’s side?
A: He who doth support whatsoever is done by the nation of Israel, and who doth renounce the world, the flesh, and the Catholic Church.

29. Q: What are the seven deadly sins?
A: The seven deadly sins are smoking, drinking, dancing, card-playing, movie-going, baptizing babies, and having any creed but Christ.

30. Q: What is a sacrament?
A: A sacrament is an insidious invention devised by the Catholic Church whereby men are drawn into idolatry.

31. Q: What is the Lord’s Supper?
A: The Lord’s Supper is a dispensing of saltines and grape juice, in the which we remember Christ’s command to pretend that they are His body and
blood.

32. Q: What is baptism?
A: Baptism is the act whereby, by the performance of something that seems quite silly in front of everyone, I prove that I really, really mean it.

33. Q: What is the Church?
A: The Church is the tiny minority of individuals living at this time who have Jesus in their hearts, and who come together once a week for a sermon, fellowship and donuts.

34. Q: What is the office of the keys?
A: The office of the keys is that office held by the custodian.

35. Q: What meaneth “The Priesthood Of All Believers”?
A: The Priesthood Of All Believers meaneth that there exists no authority in the Church, as that falsely thought to be held by elders, presbyters, deacons, and bishops, but that each individual Christian acts as his own authority in all matters pertaining to the faith.

36. Q: Who is the Holy Spirit?
A: The Holy Spirit is a gentleman Who would never barge in.

37. Q: How long hath the Holy Spirit been at work?
A: The Holy Spirit hath been at work for more than a century: expressly, since the nineteenth-century Revitalization brought about by traveling Evangelists carrying tents across America.

38. Q: When will be the “Last Days” of which the Bible speaketh?
A: The “Last Days” are these days in which we are now living, in which the Antichrist, the Beast, and the Thief in the Night shall most certainly appear.

39. Q: What is the name of the event by which Christians will escape these dreadful entities?
A: The event commonly known as the Rapture, in the which it is our Blessed Hope that all cars driven by Christians will suddenly have no drivers.

40. Q: When is Jesus coming again?
A: Maybe morning, maybe noon, maybe evening, and maybe soon.

41. Q: When the roll, roll, roll, is called up yonder, where will you be?
A: There.

42. Q: Hallelu, hallelu, hallelu, hallelujah!
A: Praise ye the Lord!

43. Q: Praise ye the Lord!
A: Hallelujah!

44. Q: Where will we meet again?
A: Here, there, or in the air.

45. Q: What can a pastor say while all heads are bowed?
A. Yes, I see that hand.

46. Q. How is a person saved?
A. If you walk this aisle…”

47. Q. And what requirement is there if you should fall into sin?
A. You just need to rededicate your life to God.

48. Q: Can I hear an Ay-men?
A: Ay-men.

Posted By: Gene Schlesinger

Yesterday, I preached from Acts 8.9-25 about the life of Simon Magus, who professed Christ, was baptized, joined the church, and then turned out to be a false-convert and a heretic. While we shouldn’t assume that anyone who isn’t involved in the life of a church belongs to Jesus, Simon proves to us that not everyone who talks about Jesus and belongs to a church knows him either. And this should make us stop and think. We need to ask where our hope and our trust are. This is especially important here in the South, the Bible belt, because everyone goes to church here. And there’s a lot of bad teaching about salvation in the churches many people go to.

The typical approach to salvation here in the South is that you must “ask Jesus into your heart,” or “give your heart/life to Jesus,” or “enter into a personal relationship with Jesus,” or “make Jesus your personal Lord and Savior” (pronounced pursnullordnsavyur). There are a few problems with this mindset. The first is that none of these phrases are to be found in the Bible. Scripture casts salvation in terms of repentance and faith. We trust in Christ and his work on behalf of sinners. Jesus makes us right before God (justification). At their best, these expressions are trying to get at this. But often they degenerate into something harmful.

For example, Pastor Stephen was “saved” and got baptized around seven times during his childhood. He asked Jesus into his heart a lot. And at no point was his faith put in Christ. I’ve personally said the “sinner’s prayer” countless times. And it never worked. And the problem is that by expressing the matter in these terms, we turn the focus onto ourselves and on what we’re doing, rather than on Christ and what he has done. Our confidence is shifted to our act of prayer, or confession, or acceptance, or walking the aisle, or whatever other accoutrements may attend the “conversion experience.” And when that happens, there’s a very real possibility that we are trusting in ourselves and our own works rather than Jesus.

Often times, people are pointed back to their conversion experience for assurance of salvation. But again, this is a misguided idea. Our assurance can’t come from something we’ve done. Maybe I “believed” in Jesus back then, but what about now? Only faith in the present tense is the instrument of receiving Christ and his benefits. And what if I “did it wrong?” What if I didn’t repent or believe enough or the right way? Instead, biblical assurance of salvation comes from the Holy Spirit leading us to recognize the promises of God to all who believe, and that we ourselves are included in these promises. Biblical assurance pushes us back to the cross and resurrection of Jesus and away from ourselves.

I’m not saying that all people who “ask Jesus into their hearts,” or “get saved,” or say the sinner’s prayer haven’t been truly converted. But I am saying that many are not because they are trusting themselves rather than Christ. And I am saying that when we explain salvation this way, we confuse people about the nature of hope, and risk leading them to miss out on salvation even as they are “getting saved.”

Posted by: Gene Schlesinger

Sadly, one of the things Christians are best known for is conflict. Sometimes we disagree with and get angry with each other. Frequently there’s disagreement with and anger towards the surrounding culture. Sometimes (rarely) we disagree and get angry with ourselves. Disagreement is an inevitable part of human existence, it’s ok and even good. Diversity adds beauty to the world. The Apostle Paul explains how to handle disagreements in Romans 14. When there is not a clear biblical directive, we allow freedom, even if we don’t agree with someone. We are forbidden to condemn or despise each other for holding different opinions or taking different courses of action than what we might prefer. Conflict is good as well. Sometimes there needs to be confrontation over an issue. If someone is in danger (e.g., from their sin), then the loving thing to do is to confront them and seek to help them. So there’s a place for loving conflict (where loving is an adjective). The problem is that so many of us are loving conflict (where loving is a verb).

Derek Webb’s song, Cobra Con, gets at the heart of the issue.

You wanna rock with the cops on the front line
You wanna kick it with the people in the back
You strike a match and you throw back a cocktail
There’s got to be a better way

(Chorus)
It is harder to stay
It is harder to wait
To out-love, to out-suffer them

I wanna dream up a world I wanna live in
I wanna spray it on a building downtown
I wanna protest with patience and a paycheck
‘Cause there’s got to be a better way

(Chorus)

Don’t wanna wait
No drugs or sleep
I wanna hold your hand grenade

God bless these bombs
Baptize this rope
Lie with us in the bed we’ve made

So often we approach conflict in terms of a war, throwing bombs, pulling others down (or up) with ropes, and invoking God to bless our cause and agenda (which we should never assume is identical to his). But our call is to outlove and out-suffer the people with whom we disagree. When you’re attacked, and you will be, remember this call. God shows himself to us not as a conquering power, but as a man who suffered abuse and was unjustly killed. He didn’t defend himself. And because he didn’t, we are reconciled to God. We don’t have to attack others and assert our superiority, because we’re saved by Jesus, not ourselves. We HAVE NO superiority. And we don’t have to defend ourselves when we are attacked. God will defend us if we need defended. And even if injustice is done to us in this life, Jesus’ cross and resurrection assure that all wrongs will one day be set right.

So as we face inevitable disagreements and conflicts, let’s look to the one who settled our greatest conflict (the one we had with God), and who calls us to bear with and love those with whom we disagree.

A few weeks ago, I did a couple of posts about the classic Protestant distinction between law (everything God commands and requires of us) and gospel (everything God promises and does for us). The time has come to revisit that theme. God has created us for him to obey his will as expressed through the law. And despite our failure to obey the law, he has sent his Son, Jesus Christ to take our place, bear our penalty, and reconcile us to him. This is the gospel. However, once we’ve been reconciled to God by Jesus through faith, how are we to live? This is one of the questions I get most often as a pastor. It often comes in the form of, “What does it look like?” Given what I’ve said about law and gospel in the previous posts, the answer might be surprising, but here it is. It looks like the law.

Here’s what I mean. God didn’t just give us the law as an arbitrary standard. He gives it to us because it reflects his moral character. It reflects the sort of life he likes to see from humanity. Now because of sin, we can never keep the law well enough to have it be the basis of our standing with God. We will always need the gospel. But the gospel doesn’t change the fact that the sort of human life that is pleasing to God is described by the law. Now that we don’t have to keep the law in order to make ourselves acceptable to God, we are able to turn to the law in gratitude so that we can live lives that reflect what he wants for us. This is what Protestants have historically called the third use of the law.

Because God has perfectly pleased himself in Jesus, for our sakes, we are now free to imperfectly obey him. We are free because the law is no longer the basis of our relationship. But it’s still an accurate descriptor of what it looks like to live a life pleasing to God. Whenever we ask “what it looks like,” we’re asking for a law (this is the point of the law-gospel distinction, anything we do is law). And that’s okay, because we do indeed do things. We do indeed need a standard, a guide. The problem is that so often in looking for this law, we miss or ignore the one God has already given us..

The law is summed up in the 10 Commandments (Exodus 20), and from there even further in the command to love God wholeheartedly and love our neighbor as ourselves (see Matthew 22.34-40). Jesus’ point in that passage is that we should be loving to God and neighbor. And further, that rather than leaving it up to us to define what constitutes loving behavior, the 10 Commandments tell us what it looks like. They not only tell us what to avoid, but also what to pursue. For a classic account of the role of the 10 Commandments in the life of a Christian, see questions 92-115 in the Heidelberg Catechism. Boiling it down to these standards might seem a bit “shallow,” for those who want to go “deep.” But I assure you, there’s plenty to work on there. You won’t need anything deeper (at least not until you’re perfectly obeying these).

We should note, this doesn’t reduce our relationship with God to rules. The rules are never the basis of our relationship. That is founded on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus (gospel). But the law does show us what a gospel centered life looks like. Through the gospel, the Holy Spirit enables us to obey the law with gratitude and joy, not trying to earn anything from God or pay him back or to prove we’re good, but just because we’re thankful and we love him. Our obedience to the law will never be perfect, and when we see that we are falling short (and we always will be), we allow the law to once more lead us back to Christ, where all our security, hope, and comfort are found.

Posted by: Gene Schlesinger

Over the last several posts, we’ve been looking at the “Five Solas” of the Reformation, and seen how they safeguard the church’s confession that Jesus Christ is Lord, and the Savior of sinners. Denying these principles will lead us away from this bedrock truth. The capstone of these ideals is summed up in the three words, “Soli Deo Gloria” (glory to God alone).

Our salvation is accomplished entirely by God (sola gratia, sola fide, solus Christus), and can be learned about only from God (sola Scriptura). As a result, all credit must be given to God. We cannot pat ourselves on the back, or look down upon others. Instead, we should be moved to awe by the greatness of God’s mercy, and respond with adoration to him. As the second question of the Heidelberg Catechism puts it, there are three things we must know in order to live and die happily in the comfort of Jesus Christ. First, the greatness of our sin and misery. Second, how we are redeemed from all our sins and misery. And third, how we are to be thankful to God for such redemption. The Christian life is one of grateful response to what God has already done through Christ.

As Michael Horton points out:

Many historians look back to the Reformation and wonder at its far-reaching influences in transforming culture. The work ethic, public education, civic and economic betterment, a revival of music, the arts, and a sense of all life being related somehow to God and his glory: These effects cause historians to observe with a sense of irony how a theology of sin and grace, the sovereignty of God over the helplessness of human beings, and an emphasis on salvation by grace apart from works, could be the catalyst for such energetic moral transformation. The reformers did not set out to launch a political or moral campaign, but they proved that when we put the Gospel first and give voice to the Word, the effects inevitably follow.

How can we expect the world to take God and his glory seriously if the church does not? The Reformation slogan Soli Deo Gloria was carved into the organ at Bach’s church in Leipzig and the composer signed his works with its initials. It’s inscribed over taverns and music halls in old sections of Heidelberg and Amsterdam, a lasting tribute to a time when the fragrance of God’s goodness seemed to fill the air. It was not a golden age, but it was an amazing recovery of God-centered faith and practice. Columbia University professor Eugene Rice offers a fitting conclusion:

All the more, the Reformation’s views of God and humanity measure the gulf between the secular imagination of the twentieth century and the sixteenth century’s intoxication with the majesty of God. We can exercise only historical sympathy to try to understand how it was that the most brilliant intelligences of an entire epoch found a total, a supreme liberty in abandoning human weakness to the omnipotence of God.

It is not about us. It has never been about us. And until we recognize that we are not the center of the universe, we are doomed to futility and frustration. Whether because things aren’t going our way (the wrong politicians got elected, traffic is getting in the way of my agenda, the people around me just don’t understand), or because we aren’t becoming the people we think we should. But when God, by grace, opens our eyes to see reality, we are freed from these and all other burdens, even as we are transformed in the wake.

Posted by: Gene Schlesinger

We’ve been examining the Five Solas of the Reformation, which served as slogans and summaries of the Protestant church’s distinctives. And while they’re all important (Sola Scriptura defines where we’ll look for answers, (Sola Gratia and Sola Fide define how we’re made right with God), the idea of Solus Christus (Christ Alone) perhaps encapsulates them all. They all find their reference point and efficacy here in the Person and Work of Jesus Christ.

Scripture teaches that there is “one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus ” (1 Timothy 2.5). In Christ God has become man (John 1.1-14). As man, he lived a life of perfect obedience to the Father (this is called his active obedience).  As man he died in place of sinful people (this is called his passive obedience). As God, his death carries infinite value so that all who by grace believe in him will be reconciled to God. All who are united to him by faith are forgiven all their sins on the basis of his death. But we also receive something much better and much more than forgiveness. We are also credited with his life of righteousness. We are justified. Forgiveness puts us back at square one and gives us a second chance. Justification makes it to where we don’t need a second chance, we are completely restored and completely secured solely by the work of Jesus Christ. God doesn’t just demand that we not sin. He demands that we be perfectly righteousness. And in Christ he gives what he demands.

This means that all of our hope is located outside of us. There is nothing in me upon which I can rely or base any hope. Pietists rightly note that God looks upon and is primarily concerned with the condition of the heart. However, as Rod Rosenbladt has noted, “When I look into my heart, all I find is blood and sin.” A concern for personal holiness is good and biblical (see Hebrews 12.14). However, to the extent that our hope, or our focus is on these things (heart and/or holiness), we are missing the point. God demands utter perfection. None of us live up to this. We’ll always have mixed motives, and our best works will always be tainted with sin. So we don’t dare rely on anything in ourselves. If I’m to have any hope, I need God to look upon the perfect heart of Jesus, rather than my own.

A key verse for the Reformation understanding of Christian life and piety is 1 Corinthians 1.30, “[God] is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, whom God has made our wisdom, and our righteousness, and our holiness, and redemption.” My righteousness and holiness (and wisdom!) lived on the earth about two thousand years ago and is seated at the right hand of God. Biblical growth and sanctification is always a call up and out of ourselves. It is a call for us to look away from ourselves and look to Jesus Christ, who is our hope.

Incidentally, this frees us to love and serve our neighbor. Because God has all the good works he needs in Jesus, I am free to give my good works to my neighbor, who does need them. They are too tainted with sin to be of any use in helping me be right with God (and Jesus has done that anyway). But even sin-tainted works can help my neighbor. Upward and outward.

Posted by: Gene Schlesinger

As we noted in the last post, Sola Scriptura was one of the fountainhead principles of the Protestant Reformation. But it was not the only principle. Simple recourse to the Bible does not make someone a Protestant (there are plenty of Christians who seek to base their beliefs on the Bible alone, but who cannot be described as Protestant in any significant sense). However, it’s my conviction that when the Bible is properly understood, it will lead to the other conclusions reached by the Reformers, many of which are summarized in the other solas. Of these, the two most significant are sola gratia (grace alone) and sola fide (faith alone).

It’s conventional wisdom that the good people will get to heaven and the bad people will go to hell. The only problem is that according to the Bible, we’re all the bad people (Romans 1-3). God does not help those who help themselves, because there’s no one who helps himself! In the medieval church, people believed that God saved them by grace, but that they had to cooperate with that grace in order for it to be effective. They were looking for God to help them. He would do their part, but they certainly needed to do our part. Sadly, that mentality is still around today in much of the “evangelical” church. In reality, though, we are saved by grace alone. We so often fail to cooperate with God’s grace, and don’t do our “part.” If our salvation in any way depended upon us, no one would be saved. And when we cast things in terms of doing our part, or cooperating we both fail to take the law as seriously as we ought, and seriously misunderestimate our own sin and depravity.

And the instrument by which we receive the grace of God that saves us is faith. No one would deny that faith is necessary. But the Reformers (rightly) taught that we are justified (made right with God) by grace alone through faith alone. This is implicit in the nature of faith. True faith is a trust and reliance upon Jesus Christ and what he has done. If anything is added to it, then it is debased, because we are relying upon something other than Christ’s work. Faith is what happens when we stop trying to make ourselves right with God and allow Jesus to do it for us (Romans 4-5). This happens through Jesus’ life of perfect obedience being imputed to us. We are counted as righteous, even though we ourselves are not righteous.

Martin Luther described justification by grace alone through faith alone as the “article on which the church stands or falls.” And yet in contemporary Christianity it’s often ignored, if not debased and contradicted. As long as we neglect this truth. As long as we include our good works in the equation with God (or make them part of “faith”). As long as we look to ourselves and our obedience rather than to Christ and his, we cannot expect that the church will stand. We cannot even expect to call the church the church. As the church declines in influence, it has only itself to blame (and, frankly, so long as the church is neglecting/denying justification by grace alone through faith alone, I’d rather it not have much influence).

Posted by: Gene Schlesinger

There were many dividing lines in the turmoil of the Protestant Reformation. But the principle of Sola Scriptura is perhaps the most well known and one of the most significant. It’s one of the most significant because it’s the wellspring from which all the other issues flow. This is so because it settles the issue of authority and standards. If you and I have a disagreement, we can only settle it if we have a common standard or authority. It might be reason (i.e., whoever is most logically persuasive wins). It might be observation (whoever can bring the most evidence wins). It might be emotional (whoever’s viewpoint feels best wins). But no matter what, we have to refer to some sort of standard in order to settle things. The Protestant Reformers determined to base their views upon and settle their disputes by reference to the Bible.

This means that creeds, traditions, perceptions, experiences, cultural expectations and so on are all subjected to the Bible. All these things are good. Indeed, they all have their place (our church holds to a confessional document, draws from historical traditions, seeks spiritual experiences, and tries to engage and be conversant with culture). But as Protestants, we test them by the Bible. The Bible gets the first word in the conversation. It gets the last word in the conversation. And it guides the conversation as it takes place.

Sometimes Sola Scriptura is misunderstood, as if to imply that truth is only found in the Bible. That’s not the case. That’s not what the Reformers were getting at. It also doesn’t mean that we can safely ignore other sources of knowledge (e.g., the sciences). All truth is God’s truth.

But finding truth is not always so simple a matter as we think it is. In postmodernity, we come to realize that “truth” isn’t just lying around out there for us to find. So much of our view of the world and what we consider true is inescapably conditioned by our cultural situatedness, our limitations, our expectations, and so on. In the sciences, certainty is no longer the name of the game. And because that’s the case, we need the Bible. Truth does exist, and it can be known and discovered. The problem is we’re often mistaken about the truth we discover. But God guarantees that the Bible is true. Scripture offers us a standard outside of ourselves. Because of this, it’s able to correct us.

And because of this, in the church we settle things by the use of Scripture. The Bible is the church’s book, which means that the church is ruled according to the Bible (in other words, the larger culture is not). In the Bible, God reveals to us everything we need to know in order to be reconciled to him (gospel) and live lives that please him (law), but this doesn’t mean that he’s revealed absolutely everything (2 Timothy 3.15-17; Deuteronomy 29.29).

So, how does this play out? We do our best to study the Bible, to understand what God is saying in it. Then we believe and do what it says. We refuse to allow what the Bible forbids. And we refuse to forbid what the Bible allows. Only the Bible is binding upon the conscience of Christians because only the Bible has the full authority of God. The church, particularly the elders of the church have divinely granted authority. But that authority is limited, delegated, ministerial authority. Only God in Scripture has unlimited, absolute, magisterial authority.

Sola Scriptura ensures that God is able to speak into and rule his church, rather than letting us with our preferences and biases to “determine” reality.

Posted by: Gene Schlesinger

Saturday marked the 492nd anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. In the post I wrote on that day, I noted that the truths recovered during the Reformation are under attack today, not just from the culture, but in the churches, and in our own hearts. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once noted that American Christianity was very much a “Protestantism without the Reformation.” I’m not going to go into a tirade here, so I’ll leave it at that. But I will say that we lose sight of and/or ignore the truths and emphases of the Reformation to the church’s own harm. In the next few posts, we’ll be examining (maybe for the first time) some of the fruits of Reformation theology.

During the Protestant Reformation, five “solas” (Latin for alone)emerged, which served as slogans, rallying points, and symbols of the difference between the Protestant Churches and the Roman Catholic Church. The Cambridge Declaration is a helpful contemporary restatement of these articles and their importance. And I’d recommend reading it in its entirety. But for now, here are some excerpts explaining the solas

1. Sola Scriptura (Scripture Alone): “We reaffirm the inerrant Scripture to be the sole source of written divine revelation,which alone can bind the conscience. The Bible alone teaches all that is necessary for our salvation from sin and is the standard by which all Christian behavior must be measured.We deny that any creed, council or individual may bind a Christian’s conscience, that the Holy Spirit speaks independently of or contrary to what is set forth in the Bible, or that personal spiritual experience can ever be a vehicle of revelation.”
2. Solus Christus (Christ Alone): “We reaffirm that our salvation is accomplished by the mediatorial work of the historical Christ alone. His sinless life and substitutionary atonement alone are sufficient for our justification and reconciliation to the Father.We deny that the gospel is preached if Christ’s substitutionary work is not declared and faith in Christ and his work is not solicited.”
3. Sola Gratia (Grace Alone): “We reaffirm that in salvation we are rescued from God’s wrath by his grace alone. It is the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit that brings us to Christ by releasing us from our bondage to sin and raising us from spiritual death to spiritual life.We deny that salvation is in any sense a human work. Human methods, techniques or strategies by themselves cannot accomplish this transformation. Faith is not produced by our unregenerated human nature.”
4. Sola Fide (Faith Alone): “We reaffirm that justification is by grace alone through faith alone because of Christ alone. In justification Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us as the only possible satisfaction of God’s perfect justice.We deny that justification rests on any merit to be found in us, or upon the grounds of an infusion of Christ’s righteousness in us, or that an institution claiming to be a church that denies or condemns sola fide can be recognized as a legitimate church.”
5. Soli Deo Gloria (Glory to God Alone): “We reaffirm that because salvation is of God and has been accomplished by God, it is for God’s glory and that we must glorify him always. We must live our entire lives before the face of God, under the authority of God and for his glory alone.We deny that we can properly glorify God if our worship is confused with entertainment, if we neglect either Law or Gospel in our preaching, or if self-improvement, self-esteem or self-fulfillment are allowed to become alternatives to the gospel.”

In upcoming posts, we’ll take some time to unpack these statements, and see how they can inform our Christian lives today.

Posted by: Gene Schlesinger