The
Five Solas of the Reformation
Part
3 of 6
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 (‘āpal), 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.[1]
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.[2]
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.”[3] Calvin likewise called justification “the main hinge on which religion turns.”[4] 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[5] have cast a dead fly into this box of precious ointment.[6]
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[7] and sanctification.[8] 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.