Sola Fide: Our Only
Means
Hab.
2:4; Rom. 1:17; Gal. 3:11; Heb.
10:38
Behold, his soul
which is lifted up is not upright in him: but the just
shall live by his faith.
For therein is the
righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it
is written, The just shall live by faith.
But that no man is
justified by the law in the sight of God, it is evident:
for, The just shall live by faith.
Now the just shall
live by faith: but if any man draw back, my soul shall
have no pleasure in him.
The background of our first text,
Habakkuk 2:4, is the conceit and arrogance of the
Babylonians. The Hebrew behind lifted up (‘apal), which appears
only here in the Old Testament, literally means “to
swell.” They were, indeed, swollen, puffed up in their
pride and self-confidence. In stark contrast, God
declares that the righteous person will live by
faith. So pivotal
is this principle that it is quoted three times in the
New Testament. By quoting this text in Romans 1:17, Paul
says that salvation is by faith, in Galatians
3:11 he emphasizes that that salvation is not by
works, and in Hebrews 10:38 he adds that we now
live by faith in all
things.
From an early age,
Martin Luther received religious training. In 1502 he
received his B.A. and in 1505 he received his M.A. It
appeared that he was on his way to a career in law, but
turned instead toward the church and became an
Augustinian monk in the monastery in Erfurt in 1505.
Some historians explain that this sudden change was
possibly due to the deep impression made on him by the
death of his close friend Alexis and his own narrow
escape from lightning. While that might certainly be
true externally, another historian has a better
explanation of what was happening
internally:
But those who
believe in the Reformation will claim a deeper
explanation, and will say that Divine Providence sent
Luther through the legal, monastic regime of the
[monastery], that he might be more perfectly prepared to
serve as the evangelical reformer; that he needed the
Pauline experience of enslavement to law, in order to
become the herald of the Pauline doctrine of
grace.[i]
That last statement is
especially striking. God allowed Luther to go through
the bondage and despair of enslavement to law that he
found in Roman Catholic monasticism to prepare him for
the earth shattering doctrine of grace through faith
alone. Luther’s story is indeed an amazing
one.
Luther was
constantly aware of his need for salvation, and even as
early as 1506 he was becoming more and more dissatisfied
with the teaching of the Catholic Church and more and
more conscious of personal sin. He just could not rid
himself of feelings of guilt over his and was besieged
by the thought, How can a sinner ever become a
saint?
He then spent hours in
study and prayer. He observed the minutest details of
discipline. No one equaled Martin in prayer, fasting,
night vigils, or self-mortification. He would later
write, “If ever a monk could get to heaven by monkery, I
would have gotten there.” All his efforts, his only
concern, was to become a saint and earn a place in
heaven. But no matter what he did, nothing lifted him
from his despair and feelings of abject unworthiness. He
never felt that he was getting closer to his goal. So
deep set was Luther’s guilt that instead of weakly
confession, the normal practice of the other monks, he
confessed every day. On one occasion, he spent six hours
confessing only his sins from the previous day.
So deep was Luther’s
despair, that Johann von Staupitz, Doctor of Divinity
and Vicar-General over all the Augustinian monasteries
in Germany and Luther’s mentor in those days, tried to
help him. After explaining his struggles to Staupitz,
the vicar asked Luther if in all his reading had not
read of God’s love, mercy, and goodness? Luther
responded:
Oh, Father, is it
not
against all natural reason that God out of his mere whim
deserts men, hardens them, damns them, as if He
delighted in sins and in such torments of the wretched
for eternity, He Who is said to be of such mercy and
goodness? This appears iniquitous, cruel, and
intolerable in God, by which very many have been
offended in all ages. And who would not be? I have been
so driven to the very abyss of despair that I have
wished I had never been created. Love God? I hate
Him!
What despair! Sitting on
his bed one specific night, Luther contemplated his
state and decided on a course of action. I must mortify
the flesh even more, he thought. It is the body that
keeps me from knowing holiness. Looking at the whip that
lay beside him, he picked it up, stood, and swung his
arm in an arc in front of him and then over his shoulder
as hard as he could. The whip dug into his flesh,
raising welts immediately. He stifled a cry from the
pain, and then repeated the action again and then again.
Sometimes he would change his swing so he could strike
the back of his thighs. The pain was so intense there
that he had to bite a piece of leather to suppress a
scream. He continued in this manner until his back bled,
but still he did not feel right with God. He inflicted
thirty more lashes to no avail, and then thirty more. By
this time he was on knees and was beyond agony, but he
would not stop until he could feel his guilt lift. After
still another thirty lashes, he passed out and lay on
the floor all night.
Luther was ordained a
priest in 1507, called to teach for a semester at the
newly founded University of Wittenburg in 1508, and back
to Erfurt to teach there in 1509. As we noted in an
earlier study, he was thrilled in 1510 when he was sent
to Rome on business. He hoped he would find peace for
his troubled heart. On approaching the city, he fell on
his knees and cried, “Hail, holy Rome!” But what he
found was far from holy. He saw a worldly, warlike pope
(Julius II) who lived in luxury, and terribly corrupt
priests who even mocked the ritual of the church and
rushed through the mass. He returned to Wittenberg in
1511 more disillusioned than ever. The corruption he had
witnessed left a sour taste in his mouth and a dark
cloud over his soul that he could not escape. He simply
could not comprehend how supposed “men of God” could
live as they did in Rome. In a letter home, Luther
wrote, “It is incredible what sins and atrocities are
committed in Rome. They must be seen and heard to be
believed; so that it is usual to say, ‘If there be a
hell, Rome is built above it; it is an abyss from whence
all sins proceed.’”
Inevitably, this began to
cast doubt in Luther’s mind of the Church itself, and it
was that doubt that deepened his fear for his own soul.
If salvation is not in relics, he thought, not in
self-denial, not in shrines, not in good works, not even
in Rome, where is it? For the second time he found
himself thinking, sometimes I hate God. There was no way
Luther could have known, of course, but what he had seen
in Rome and his increasing self-doubt were preparing him
for the turning point of his life that was just
ahead.
In spite of his doubts,
Luther was not dissuaded from his duties. By October of
1512, he had completed all the requirements for his
Doctor of Theology degree. It was Johann von Staupitz
himself who placed the Doctor’s cap on Luther’s head
during the colorful ceremony, and it was Staupitz whom
Luther would now succeed as Professor of Theology at the
University of Wittenberg, the position he would hold for
the remaining thirty-four years of his
life.
In spite of his struggles,
Luther launched into the study of the Scriptures like
never before because of his new responsibilities of
teaching. Having always been strong on the mastery of
the Biblical languages, he once insisted: “Languages are
the sheath in which hides the Sword of the Spirit—so
although the faith of the Gospel may be proclaimed by a
preacher without the knowledge of the languages, the
preaching will be feeble and ineffective. But where the
languages are studied, the proclamation will be fresh
and powerful, the Scripture will be searched, and a
faith will be constantly rediscovered through ever new
words and deeds.”
This attitude now drove all
Luther’s study, as he prepared lectures that he then
delivered twice a week. From 1513-1515, he lectured on
the Psalms and from 1515-1517 on Romans and Galatians.
It was somewhere during this time—no one knows exactly
when, for even Luther recorded no specific date—that
this man, who had struggled for so long, who had lived
in despair for so many years, who had hidden his
uncertainties from his students, finally found the
answer he had sought for so long. While seated at his
desk on the second floor of a tower in the Black
Monastery, he meditated on the words of the Apostle Paul
in Romans 1:16-17:
“For I am not ashamed of
the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto
salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first,
and also to the Greek. For therein is the righteousness
of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written,
The just shall live by faith.”
At first, those
verses terrified him afresh. If God is righteous and
just, he thought then I must be damned. How can I expect
God to forgive me? As he compared this with other
Scriptures that deal with “penance,” however, the light
began to dawn. He saw that the Latin in Second Peter 3:9
and many others verses read poenitentia, which
means “penance”—and unknown to Luther would be so
translated in every future Roman Catholic Bible in
English even to this day. He then discovered, however,
that the original Greek in such verses is
metanoia, which means “repentance, a change of
mind from evil to good.” This showed him that salvation
came not by penance, that is, by fasting,
pilgrimages, prayers to the saints, and so forth, but by
repentance, a change of mind about sin, a turning
from sin. The curtain opened on his mind and he saw for
the first time that salvation is not by outward
effort but by inward attitude. He saw that
through the merits of the finished and sufficient work
of Christ, a righteous and just God declared men
righteous through faith. Luther would later write in his
work, Justification By Faith:
I greatly longed to
understand Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and nothing
stood in the way but one expression, “the justice of
God,” because I took it to mean that justice whereby God
is just and deals justly in punishing the unjust. My
situation was that, although an impeccable monk, I stood
before God as a sinner troubled in conscience, and I had
no confidence that my merit would assuage him. Therefore
I did not love a just and angry God, but rather hated
and murmured against him. Yet I clung to the dear Paul
and had a great yearning to know what he
meant.
Night and day I pondered
until I saw the connection between the justice of God
and the statement that “the just shall live by faith.”
Then I grasped that the justice of God is that
righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy God
justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to
be reborn and to have gone through open doors into
paradise. The whole of Scripture took on a new meaning,
and whereas before the ‘justice of God’ had filled me
with hate, now it became to me inexpressibly sweet in
great love. This passage of Paul became to me a gate to
heaven.
If you have a true faith
that Christ is your Saviour, then at once you have a
gracious God, for faith leads you in and opens up God’s
heart and will, that you should see pure grace and
overflowing love. This it is to behold God in faith that
you should look upon his fatherly, friendly heart, in
which there is no anger nor ungraciousness. He who sees
God as angry does not see him rightly but looks only on
a curtain as if a dark cloud had been drawn across his
face.
Martin Luther’s true
conversion to Christianity would not only have
long-range affects on history—influences that Luther
could never have fathomed—its immediate result was the
transformation of his preaching and teaching. While he
did not break with Rome immediately—he would, in fact,
remain in sympathy with its teachings and only criticize
its excesses—what he now believed and taught would
transform his preaching in such a way that it would
quickly cross the lines of Church teaching and force him
to forsake the Roman Church. He would now begin
preaching the Truth, which always tends to bring
controversy.
During the next four
years, Luther’s understanding of sola
fide, the biblical doctrine of
justification “by faith alone,” molded his thought into
a solid Theology, a Theology which powered all his
teaching and preaching. He was appointed preacher of the
monastery, and by 1516 a great number came to hear him
and desired that he preach every day. Students came from
all over Germany to hear him lecture.
Sola fide
became what has been called the “material principle” of
the Reformation. While a “formal principle”—which was
sola scriptura—speaks of the authority that forms
and shapes an entire movement or system, a “material
principle” is the central teaching of a movement
or system. When properly defined and understood, a
material principle provides indispensable help in
understanding all other teachings of the system. In
other words, an entire doctrinal system can be explained
in relationship to its material principle. As we saw in
our previous study, sola scriptura is the
model (form and pattern) of salvation; we now see
that sola fide is the only
means (way, channel, agency)
of salvation.
No other principle
of Christianity, therefore, more encapsulates its entire
system of doctrine than does sola fide. Salvation
does not come by works, which is the material
principle of Catholicism and all religion;
rather salvation comes through faith. What was
the Reformation about? The Reformation was about a
repudiation of the whole idea of human effort through
his own works as a way to commend the sinner toward God
and the recovery of the Gospel of faith in Christ
alone. That alone, in fact, is the Gospel,
the good news, as declared in Galatians 2:16; 1:1:8-9;
Romans 3:21-22 and 30, and many other verses. Salvation
comes not by ceremony, but by the cross.
It is not by the ritual of the Church, but
the righteousness of Christ. It is not by
the bondage of the Law but by blood
of our Lord. It is not by our continuous
works but by His completed work. In short,
the righteousness of God is not granted by
works, but is a gift of
faith.
This doctrine is
hated and repudiated by Catholicism because, as one
great writer puts it, half of its errors stem from the
rejection of sola fide. That
wonderful champion of evangelicalism, J. C. Ryle
(1816-1900), wrote this scathing
summary:
. . . the absence [in
Catholicism] of the doctrine of justification by faith
alone in Christ’s work alone accounts for half the
errors of the Roman Catholic Church. The beginning of
half the unscriptural doctrines of Popery may be traced
up to rejection of justification by faith. No Romish
teacher, if he is faithful to his church, can say to the
anxious sinner, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and
thou shalt be saved." He cannot do it without additions
and explanations, which completely destroy the good
news. He dare not give the Gospel medicine without
adding something which destroys its efficacy and
neutralizes its power. Purgatory, penance, priestly
absolution, the intercession of saints, the worship of
the Virgin, and many other man-made services of Popery,
all spring from this source. They are all rotten props
to support weary consciences. But they are rendered
necessary by [Rome's] denial of justification by
faith.
Romanism
in perfection is a gigantic system of
church-
worship,
sacrament-worship, Mary-worship, saint-worship,
image-worship, relic-worship, and priest-worship. . . .
it is, in one word, a huge organized
idolatry.[ii]
Where are the men today who
will stand up and tell the truth, as did Ryle?
Rome, therefore,
fought the Reformation tooth and nail, its biggest guns
coming out at the Council of Trent, which began in 1545
and continuing for almost twenty years. High on Trent’s
hit list was sola fide. One of its “canons”
(principle tenets), for example, which has remained
unchanged through Vatican I and II, was: “If anyone says
that by faith alone the sinner is justified, so
as to mean that nothing else is required to cooperate in
order to obtain the grace of justification . . . let him
be anathema” (session 6, canon 9). Trent went on to
declare that the instrumental cause of
justification (i.e., the means by which it is obtained)
is not faith, but “the sacrament of baptism” (session 6,
chapter 7) and that justification is forfeited whenever
the believer commits a mortal sin (session 6, chapter
15). This without question makes justification dependent
on human works in the Roman system. But such religion is
precisely what Paul referred
to in Galatians 1:8-9, where he declares that any other
Gospel than that of faith alone (and as we will examine
in our next study, grace alone) is itself cursed of
God.
Is this issue really
all that important? Is it worth fighting for? Most
certainly! To deny sola fide is to deny the
finished work of Christ. To deny sola
fide is to align ourselves with
a pagan system that repudiates the true Gospel of Jesus
Christ.
Finally, if we are
going to understand sola fide, we must also
understood the doctrine of
justification. Luther
thundered that justification is “the chief article from
which all other doctrines have flowed,” and that it is
“the master and prince, the lord, the ruler, and the
judge over all kinds of doctrines.”[iii] Calvin likewise called
justification “the main hinge on which religion
turns.”
[iv] That great puritan Thomas
Watson echoed Calvin when he wrote:
Justification is the very
hinge and pillar of Christianity. An error about
justification is dangerous, like a defect in a
foundation. Justification by Christ is a spring of the
water of life. To have the poison of corrupt doctrine
cast into this spring is damnable . . . In these latter
times, the Arminians and Socinians
[v] have cast a dead fly into
this box of precious ointment.
[vi]
Those words make
clear that what we believe about justification
will dictate what we believe about salvation. It
is for this very reason that Roman Catholicism and
Biblical Christianity are polar opposites. We must be
clear on this point. There is no unity or agreement
between these two warring system. Catholicism teaches a
totally different gospel, namely, a gospel by which we
are justified by faith plus works, not by grace through
faith alone.
To repeat a question
from an earlier study, does all this mean we hate
Catholics? Certainly not! Roman Catholics are a
mission field. While the common
attitude among much of Evangelicalism today is that we
should embrace our “Catholic brethren,” nothing could be
further from the truth. Those who hold to that system
are blind and need the true Gospel of Jesus
Christ.
In its bare essence,
“justification” is a legal (or forensic) term. It means
“to declare or pronounce righteous and just, not
symbolically but actually.” Justification does not imply
that there is no guilt. On the contrary, we are worthy
of death. We who were once under condemnation are now
declared to be righteous because of Christ.
Justification is the declarative act of God, as the
Judge, whereby He declares that the demands of justice
have been satisfied so that the sinner is no longer
condemned. Think of a criminal before the judge; he has
been convicted beyond a reasonable doubt and is justly
condemned to die, but the judge says, “You
are guilty and deserve to
die, but I by my mercy and grace declare you righteous.
You are no less guilty, but you are no longer
condemned.”
In the strict sense
of the word, however, justification does not make us
righteous, nor does it change our behavior, for these
are accomplished by regeneration[vii] and sanctification.[viii] While all three of
these work together, they are still distinct. Further,
justification is more than just pardoning the sinner, as
we just described in the analogy above. Again,
justification is a declaration, not of innocence, but
of satisfaction. In
our analogy, then, true justification would demand the
judge say, “While I am declaring you righteous,
someone else will have to die for your crime.”
That is
justification.
To understand justification
fully, we need only contrast it with forgiveness. While
justification includes forgiveness, it goes beyond it.
Justification means that the righteousness of Christ has
been “imputed” to use, that is, charged to our account
(Rom. 4:3-25; 5:17-19; Eph. 1:6-7; II Cor. 5:21). He is
the satisfaction; He went to the gallows for us. We
stand justified, that is, no longer condemned, not
because of our own righteousness, but because of
Christ’s righteousness. This demonstrates that there is
a change in our relationship to God and there is now no
guilt. In contrast, however, if our sins were merely
“forgiven,” there is no change in our relationship to
God and no guilt is removed. Why? Because the next time
we sinned, we would have to be forgiven again, and this
process would have to be repeated over and over again,
which is what occurred in the old Mosaic sacrificial
system.
The important thing
to notice here is that it is God who has justified us in
the past. It is not our faith that
justifies, rather it is God who justifies (Rom. 8:33), totally apart from
works. Put another way, faith is not the ground of
justification, rather the righteousness of Christ is the
ground of justification.
What part, then,
does faith play? After all, Romans 4:5 (“But to him who
does not work but believes on Him who justifies the
ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness”)
makes it plain that faith is involved, so how does it
relate? We can state the relationship this way: while
the righteousness of Christ is the cause of
justification, faith is the channel by which
it is applied. To put it another way: while God instigates
justification by the righteousness of Christ in the
past, He implements it in
us through faith in the present.
We close again with
this statement on sola fide,
as stated in The Cambridge Declaration of the Alliance
of Confessing Evangelicals on April 20,
1996:
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.
What
is the object of our faith? The righteousness of
Christ. Because “all our righteousnesses are as
“filthy rags,” that is, a menstrual cloth (Isa. 64:6),
we therefore have no righteousness. No matter how
many works we might perform, no matter how many
sacraments we might practice, it will not be enough. If
anyone could ever have gotten to heaven by works, it
would have been old Martin, but that’s not enough. It is
faith and trust in the righteousness of Christ alone
that saves us. Indeed, sola fide is the only
means of
salvation.
[i] Henry Sheldon,
History of the Christian Church, Vol. III, p.47 (emphasis
added).
[ii] J. C. Ryle,
Warnings to the Churches,
Banner of Truth, 1992, 158 (emphasis in the
original).
[iii] Martin Luther, What Luther Says: An
Anthology, Edwald M. Plass,
Editor (St. Louis: Concordia, 1959), Vol. 2, pp. 702,
715.
[iv] Institutes, III.11.1.
[v] Adherents of a
16th-century Italian sect holding Unitarian views,
including the denial of the divinity of Christ and the
Trinity.
[vi] Thomas Watson, A Body of
Divinity (Carlisle: The Banner
of Truth Trust, 1992 reprint), p.
226.
[vii] Regeneration is the “new
birth” (Jn. 3:3-7; Jas. 1:13; I Pet. 1:23), the act of
the Holy Spirit whereby He imparts new life (Jn. 5:21,
25; Eph. 2:1) and a new nature (II Pet.
1:4).
[viii] While regeneration is
birth, sanctification is growth, the continuous work of
the Holy Spirit whereby He makes us holy and more
Christ-like (Rom. 8:29) in attitude, action, and
affection (Rom. 12:1-2; I Cor. 6:9-11, 19, 20; Eph.
4:22-32; I Thes. 5:23; II Thes.
2:13).
