1.21 blog

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