In my last
essay, I looked at how Hyper-Protestants, those who are not content merely with
opposing the errors distinctive to Rome that the Magisterial Reformers,
continental and English, rejected, but who also oppose at least in part the
Catholic tradition that belongs to all the ancient Churches and not just Rome, elevate
their position in disputes over doctrines that are at best tertiary, over both
the first rank of Christian truths – the Catholic tradition, especially the
essential core which is the faith confessed in the Creed – and the second rank,
the truths for the clarification of which, the Protestant Reformation was
fought. In this essay we shall look at
that second rank of Christian truths and see why, important as they are, they
should not be treated as on the same level or higher, than the truths of the
Creed.
It is
common among conservative evangelicals today to say that the Reformation was
fought over the Five Solae – Sola Scriptura, Solus Christus, Sola Gratia, Sola
Fide and Soli Deo Gloria. In English
these are respectively Scripture Alone, Christ Alone, Faith Alone, Grace Alone,
and To God Alone be the Glory. Note
that you will find these arranged in different orders and while Sola Scriptura
is more often than not the first and Soli Deo Gloria is usually the last, there
is no correct order. That doesn’t mean
that the order is irrelevant. The
reason Sola Scriptura usually appears first is because it identifies the
authority claimed for the others. The
reason Soli Deo Gloria usually appears last is because it is a conclusion that
inevitably follows from the others – if Christ is the only Saviour, and
salvation is by grace alone through faith alone, then God alone gets the glory
for it. The order of the three others
varies the most. I have placed them in
the order that I think makes the most sense as a sequence where each item
follows logically from that which preceded it.
That there is no “correct” order is because it is absurd to think of a
correct order to a formulation that was thought up in the twentieth century,
and imposed upon the theology of the sixteenth century.
That the
Five Solae are a twentieth century formulation imposed on the sixteenth century
is one reason why I do not think it is the best way of looking at the truths
the Reformers stood for. If this were
the only reason it would not be sufficient cause for looking for another
formulation since the same thing could be said of any alternative. There are, however, other reasons.
It was
Reformed theologians who came up with the Five Solae formulation. The Reformed tradition already has a five
point formulation. This formulation is
the canons of the Synod of the Reformed Church that met in Dort from 1618-1619
to respond to the challenge of Arminianism, a form of theology that had
developed within the Reformed Church as a reaction against the strong
Predestinarianism of the Reformed tradition.
The Arminians had issued a five-point challenge to the Predestinarian
position in their Articles of Remonstrance, published in 1610 shortly after the
death of their teacher Arminius the previous year, and in the Canons of Dort
the Reformed Church responded to these Articles point by point. The Canons are one of the Three Points of
Unity of the Reformed Church, are very strongly Predestinarian, and, slightly
rearranged, are familiar as the Five Points of Calvinism, the TULIP – Total
depravity (or inability), Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement (particular
redemption), Irresistible Grace (effectual calling), and the Perseverance of
the Saints. Of these, the doctrine of
Limited Atonement – that Jesus died only for those whom God had pre-selected
for final salvation and not for the whole world contradicts the plain teaching
of Scripture (1 John 2:2) and undermines the sixteenth century Reformation
understanding of the Gospel as the objective assurance of salvation to all who
believe it, an understanding retained in the Lutheran tradition, but in the
sixteenth century taught by the Reformed Reformers as well, including John
Calvin. It undermines this
understanding of the Gospel, because a message of “Good News’ that says “if you
are lucky enough to be one of those God pre-selected for salvation then Jesus
died for your sins” is considerably less assuring than “Jesus died for your
sins”. Indeed, it ultimately undermines the
Law-Gospel distinction so important to Dr. Luther and Calvin in that having
stripped the Gospel of its objective assurance, the believer must look
elsewhere for assurance that he is one of the elect, and the Dortians have
generally directed such seekers to look inward to the fruit of sanctification,
i.e., their own works. Since the Five
Solae is a formulation drawn up by theologians within the Dortian tradition, influenced
by their own Five Points of Dort, it looks like an attempt, consciously or
unconsciously, to the paint the entire sixteenth century Reformation with the
brush of the Dortian Reformed tradition.
The Reformed tradition is but one of the three major traditions to
emerge from the Magisterial Reformation, one that was already more radical in
the sixteenth century than either Lutheranism or Anglicanism, and which became
that much more so, at least in regard to Predestinarianism with the Synod of
Dort. It is a mistake, therefore, in my
opinion, to try and read the entire Reformation through a Dort-inspired lens.
It is also
a red flag that the common word to all five is “sola” or “alone”. The reason this is a red flag is that
isolating a truth from other truths is the formula for generating a
heresy. A heresy is not a simple
error. A heresy is a truth that has
been set apart – alone – from other truths and so emphasized that other truths
end up denied. Unitarianism and
Sabellianism, for example, so separate and overemphasize the unity of God, that
they deny that God is Three in Person.
The opposite heresy of this is Tritheism, which emphasizes the unique
Personhood of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost to the point of denying the unity of
God and making the Three Persons into Three Gods. Nestorianism emphasizes the distinction
between Jesus’ two natures, His being fully God and fully Man, to the extent that
it denies the unity of His Person by rejecting the Communicatio Idiomatum and
asserting that something can be true of one of His natures that is not true of
Him as a Person. Monophysitism is the
opposite heresy that emphasizes the unity of the Person of Jesus Christ to the
point of denying the distinction between His natures and maintaining that His
humanity was swallowed up into His divinity.
This is the nature of heresy, getting one truth alone, so that others
are denied. This is also why the
opposite of one heresy is generally not the truth but another heresy. Someone, recognizing that one heresy has
denied an important truth, pushes back too far in asserting that truth, and in
doing so rejects and denies the truth the original heresy had overemphasized. A careful statement of truth, like the
statement of the Hypostatic Union in the Definition of Chalcedon, avoids the
heretical pitfalls of both extremes, in the case of Chalcedon the extremes of
Nestorianism and Monophysitism.
This does
not mean that the word “alone” always marks a truth that is in the process of
being isolated into a heresy. In the
case of the Five Solae, each, if properly explained – and some need more
explanation than others – is sound. It
does indicate, however, that a doctrinal statement in which each article is an
“alone” statement is not the product of the same type of careful, precise, and
contextual theological thought that went into the ancient Creeds and the
Definition of Chalcedon.
Of the Five
Solae, the one that requires the least by way of explanation is Solus
Christus. Jesus Christ is the only
Saviour. This is basically the same
thing as what St. Peter said when addressing the high priests and Sanhedrin in
Acts 4 he said “Neither is there
salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among
men, whereby we must be saved.” (vs 12)
Or for that matter what the Lord Jesus Christ Himself said when He told
the Apostles after the Last Supper “I am the way, the truth, and the
life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” (Jn. 14:6)
Sola Fide requires Sola Gratia. Sola Gratia is that salvation – the
spiritual salvation that Jesus Christ, as the only Saviour, accomplished – is
by the Grace, the freely given favour that is, of God alone. Alone in this case means as opposed to “with
the help of human works”. The principle
is spelled out in the fourth chapter of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans where
it is quite clearly, especially if the chapter is read in its own place in the
context of the linear argument the Apostle makes in this book. “Now to him that worketh is the reward not
reckoned of grace, but of debt. But to him that worketh not, but believeth on
him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness” (vv.
4-5) God’s saving favour is freely
given to those who don’t deserve it. It
is not a reward to be earned but a free gift.
This is stressed repeatedly in the Pauline epistles. It is only when this is first grasped that
Sola Fide makes sense. If God’s saving Grace is a gift freely given
in Jesus Christ to those who do not deserve it (none of us deserve it – Rom
3:23) then how do those who do not deserve it and cannot earn it receive
it? By faith is the answer. “Faith alone” means that faith is the sole
means appointed to the sinner to appropriate the freely given Grace of
God. It is not an ontological statement
about faith existing apart from repentance, Christian love, and the works
Christian love produces in the heart and life of the believer nor is it a
statement that faith is the “whole duty of man” or any such nonsense.
While Sola Fide requires Sola Gratia and follows from Sola
Gratia, and Sola Gratia follows from Solus Christus in that if Jesus, the
Saviour God has given us, is the only Saviour, then salvation is a free gift by
His Grace, Sola Fide then leads back to Solus Christus, for faith needs an
object and that object is Jesus Christ the only Saviour. Solus Christus in turn requires Sola Fide
for if Jesus is our only Saviour and if He does all the saving without our
assistance, the only thing left to us is to trust Him.
By contrast, Sola Scriptura requires the most by way of
explanation. If not carefully explained
it can become the source of all sorts of bad doctrine and practice. The Sola is the problem here. Does it mean that the Scriptures are the
only one of something like how Solus Christus means Jesus is the only Saviour? Or does it mean that something is to be done
by the Scriptures alone, like how Sola Fide means that the free gift of
salvation is to be received by faith alone?
If it means that the Scriptures are the only one of something then what
is that something? Does it mean that
the Scriptures are the only authority binding on Christians? If that is what it means it contradicts
those very same Scriptures. Does it
mean that the Scriptures as the written Word of God are the only earthly
authority vested with infallibility?
This, I think, is much closer to the thinking of the Reformers, but let
us consider the other possible interpretation of Sola. If it means that something is to be done by
the Scriptures alone, what is that something?
The answer that jumps to mind is prove and establish true doctrine but
this raises yet another question. Who
is to prove and establish true doctrine by the Scriptures alone? The Church or the private individual. For Dr. Luther and the other sixteenth century
Magisterial Reformers, the answer to this would have been the Church as the
community of faith. For the more radical
Reformers – the continental Anabaptists, the English Puritans, the separatists
and sectarians of various shades – the answer was the private individual.
If we take the idea that the Scriptures as the written Word
of God are the only earthly authority that is infallible and the idea that the
Church, not the private individual, is to prove and establish true doctrine by
the Scriptures alone, these ideas together are a good picture of what the
Reformers thought with regards to the Scriptures and what they were fighting
for. Personally, I don’t think the
language of “Sola” or “Alone” is necessary to convey these ideas and that
speaking of Scriptural Primacy or Supremacy accomplishes the job much better
and without lending itself to the private interpretation view that gives birth
to heresies, schisms, and enthusiasm of all sorts.
Someone might object to this characterization of the Reformation
position by claiming that Dr. Luther taught private interpretation. This is not accurate. Not entirely, at any rate. Dr. Luther certainly did not practice
private interpretation. He did not
ignore what previous generations of Christians going back to the Church Fathers
had to say when interpreting the Bible.
Nor did he throw out the teaching authority of the Church and discard
the Ecumenical Councils. The Lutheran
confessions contained in the Book of
Concord are evidence of that. What
Dr. Luther did not admit to Church tradition, the Church Fathers, and the
magisterium (the teaching authority of the Church) was a) infallibility and b)
an authority over the Scriptures to impose a meaning upon them other than what
is there in the text. He did not admit
either of these things to the individual Christian either. He was fighting the false teachings of a
Patriarch of Rome that had usurped jurisdictional authority over the entire
Church, magisterial authority over the Scriptures themselves, and was already
heading in the direction of Vatican I in which he would claim
infallibility. He knew that granting
this same usurped authority to each individual Christian, thus in effect making
each Christian his own pope, would multiply the problem not rectify it. .Now, some apologists for the Roman Church
might jump in here and say “Ha, gotcha, Luther said exactly that. He said ‘In
these matters of faith, to be sure, each Christian is for himself pope and
church’”. This is a quote that
regularly pops up among Roman apologists when addressing Sola Scriptura but
that was not what Dr. Luther was talking about. These words originally appeared in the
context of an extended discussion “Concerning Faith and Works” that appears in
his Commentary on the Psalms, under Psalm XIV verse 1, in which Dr. Luther was
talking about faith in Christ as opposed to faith in external ceremonies
(formalism) and urging those who trusted in the outward works of ceremonies to
cast such misplaced faith off. In this
context, these words do not mean that each Christian is “pope and church” when
it comes to deciding what the Scriptures mean, but that when it comes to
placing faith in Christ rather than externals, he, the Christian, should not
wait approval from the Church hierarchy.
In other places Dr. Luther
sometimes appears to affirm something like private interpretation when talking
about the universal priesthood of all believers. In the Western Church by the sixteenth
century, an unhealthy gap between the clergy and the laity had developed. It was widely thought, although not
necessarily officially taught, that the priesthood and the laity were
ontologically different classes within the Church, that the priesthood was
assigned the active role of interpreting the Scriptures and sanctifying the
people, especially through offering the Eucharistic sacrifice, and that the
laity were assigned the passive role of believing whatever the priests told
them and being sanctified by the Eucharistic sacrifice whether they partook of
it Sacramentally or not. Dr. Luther,
rightly opposed this sort of thing, but in doing so, he incorrectly inferred
from the universal priesthood of all members of the Church taught in the New
Testament that Christ had not appointed a specific priesthood to lead His
Church. The inference is illogical – in
the Old Covenant, all members of national Israel were said to be priests, but
God also gave the nation the Levitical priesthood under the Aaronic high
priesthood. That the same was not true
of the Church under the New Covenant, Dr. Luther and the other Reformers –
except the English Reformers, and the Scandinavian Lutherans who departed from
Dr. Luther in retaining the priesthood – argued on the basis of Christ having
offered once and for all the one true Sacrifice, leaving the Church with only
Christ’s High Priesthood and the universal priesthood. This contradicts what the Apostle Paul said
of his own ministry in Rom. 15:16. The
word translated “ministering” in this verse means “doing the work of a
sacrificing priest”. While the truth in
the Reformation position was that Jesus by dying on the Cross for our sins and
offering His blood in the Holy of Holies of the Heavenly Tabernacle once and
for all accomplished the true Sacrifice to which the Old Testament slaying of
animals on the altar and sprinkling their blood in the Holy of Holies pointed and
any claim that a Christian priesthood is doing these things or anything
analogous to them would indeed be blasphemous, the Reformers pressed the point
way too far, because Jesus Christ’s One Sacrifice is clearly depicted in the
New Testament as the food that sustains the everlasting spiritual life of the
believer, and the Apostolic ministry as commissioned to make that Sacrifice
available to believers through the means of the Sacrament. The Apostolic ministry of the Church is,
therefore, very much a “Christian priesthood”.
Of course, feeding the flock with the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ’s
One Sacrifice is not something that can be done by the priests for the people
without the people participating in the Sacrament and under the New Covenant,
the substance of which the Old Covenant was the shadow, the Apostolic
priesthood is not there to do everything for the people, but to lead the people
in being the “royal priesthood” that they are in Christ. In the teaching ministry of the priesthood,
which the Reformers rightly thought had come to be neglected in the period
leading up to the Reformation, the priests teach the Word to the flock, so that
the flock can in turn teach the Word to others. It is in this sense, of the flock passing on
what they have learned and teaching others, that Dr. Luther sometimes uses
language similar to that of private interpretation. That he did not mean that each individual
Christian can and should decide for himself what the Bible means, disregarding
what the Christian community, the Church, in all previous generations have
thought it means, is evident in his vehement rejection of those who thought
just that in his own day – the Anabaptists.
Again, “Scriptura Suprema” or
“Prima Scriptura” better express the Reformers’ position than Sola
Scriptura. The Reformers’ point was not
to deny any authority to tradition or the Church but that these authorities are
not higher than that of the Scriptures.
The Scriptures’ authority must necessarily be the highest due to the
difference in kind between Scriptural authority and the authority of tradition
and the Church. The Scriptures are the
inspired, written, Word of God, which never changes. Tradition, by contrast, is always changing, growing,
and adapting. This does not mean the
inflexible Scriptures and flexible tradition are opposed to each other. Each has the qualities best suited to its
own kind of authority. Being “written
in stone” – literally in the case of the Ten Commandments – is the quality
needed in an infallible, highest authority that has the final say over lower
authorities. It is not so desirable a
quality in other types of authority.
This is illustrated in the Scriptures themselves. The inflexibility of the Law of the Medes
and Persians proved to be a roadblock to stopping the plot of Haman when it was
uncovered in the book of Esther, although, thanks to the ingenuity of Mordecai,
it was not an insurmountable roadblock.
Michael Oakeshott, speaking of the “Rationalist”, the person who has
rejected all knowledge as knowledge except technical knowledge and replaced
tradition with ideology, writes “And by some strange self-deception, he
attributes to tradition (which, of course, is pre-eminently fluid) the rigidity
and fixity of character which in fact belongs to ideological politics” (the
title essay of Rationalism in Politics
and Other Essays, 1962). Oakeshott,
of course, was talking about political tradition rather than religious
tradition, but fluidity is the nature of both types of tradition – I remember
seeing a placard in the narthex of a Church in Toronto once that read
“tradition is a moving target” – and this is tradition’s strength. Tradition is an ongoing conversation between
man who changes in his ever changing circumstances on the one hand and God Who
never changes on the other hand, if it is religious tradition, the permanent
things that reflect His character in the order of Creation – Goodness, Beauty,
Truth – if is cultural or political tradition.
Tradition, therefore, needs to be fluid for the conversation not to
become stagnant – reducing tradition to a rigid ideology is a bad thing – but
it also needs an anchor to hold it to that which is immutable and good, and in
the case of the Christian religious tradition this is the supreme authority of
the infallible, written Word of God.
Soli Deo Gloria – to God
alone be the glory – is in itself, a pretty straightforward and unobjectionable
concept but it can be and has been taken to some strange extremes. In the context of the Five Solae it clearly
means that God deserves all the credit for salvation. As is evident from the arguments of those
whose Nestorian claims I answered in my last two essays, some seem to take it
to mean that nobody else should get any honour of any type for anything
whatsoever, with one person thinking that the appropriate way to avoid giving
Mary the kind of honour and glory due only to God, is to heap mud on her. This, of course, is antiscriptural. God will not share the honour and glory due
to Him alone with anyone else, but is constantly bestowing other types of
honour and glory on people.
Another way in which Soli Deo
Gloria is taken to an absurd extreme is in the reasoning behind Dortian Predestinarianism. Remember what we have already said with
regards to Solus Christus, Sola Gratia, and Sola Fide, the trio of mutually
interdependent affirmations regarding the freeness of the gift of
salvation. Jesus Christ is the only
Saviour, He saves on the basis of freely given Grace and not on the basis of
reward for works, and the only means whereby we receive this freely given Grace
is faith. Faith, as the means of
receiving Grace, is distinguished from the means by which God brings the Grace
that Christ obtained for us to us to be received. The means by which God communicates Grace
are two – the Word and the Sacraments – although both Word and Sacrament are
forms of the Gospel, the message of the Good News of God’s gift to us in Jesus
Christ. God is the one Who communicates
Grace to us through these means. Faith,
as the means by which we receive that Grace, is like a hand receiving a
physical gift. Under normal
circumstances, nobody would think that someone’s stretching out his hand to
receive a gift means that he deserves a share in the credit given to the giver
for giving him the gift. Indeed, under
normal circumstances one would suspect anyone who suggested such a thing of
being an idiot. With regards to the
gift of salvation, however, some think it appropriate to say that if the gift
were given to all, with us left responsible to receive it by our faith, then
this would mean that we get a share of God’s glory and credit and that this is
unacceptable. Well, let us humour such
people, shall we, and consider the nature of the hand that receives the gift of
salvation. It is faith – believing
something, trusting Someone. With
physical gifts and literal hands, the recipient makes a conscious act to
stretch out the hand and take the gift.
It is an act of the will. This
is not the case with faith. Nobody
decides to believe anything, nobody decides to trust anyone. I believe that Sir John A. Macdonald was the
first Prime Minister of Canada. This is
not because I chose to believe this when I could have just as easily decided to
believe that Timothy Eaton was the first Prime Minister of Canada. I believe it because it was communicated to
me by credible – literally “believable” from Latin credo, credere “to believe”
– sources. I trust the mechanic who
changes the oil in my car. I don’t do
this because I choose to trust my mechanic when I could just as easily have
trusted Ronald McDonald to do the job.
I do this because my mechanic has proven himself to be trustworthy. That is how faith works. Although the person with the faith is the
one who does the believing or trusting in the active voice, faith is more
fundamentally the passive result of the demonstrable credibility of the
proposition believed, the person trusted.
What must be worded in the active voice when expressing the faith of a
believer as a verb, is the passive of the act of “persuading” or “convincing”
on the part of the object of faith. So
then, salvation is a gift, those who are saved don’t contribute to it but
receive it, and the means by which they receive it is faith which even in other
contexts doesn’t come from the person believing/trusting but from the
persuading/convincing of the one believed/trusted. Even this is not enough to secure Soli Deo
Gloria for some people. To these,
unless you also say that the Gospel that God has given to all the world
contains insufficient power in itself to bring anyone to faith but that God
must also add to the Gospel a special work of irresistible grace that He gives
only to a select few that He has chosen arbitrarily from eternity past, you
have not sufficiently guarded the glory of God from being shared with the
creature.
This sort of theology is the
result, not only of taking the truth of Soli Deo Gloria to an unhealthy
extreme, but of taking the Sovereignty of God to an unhealthy extreme as
well. Indeed, it often seems as if they
think that the Sovereignty of God cannot be taken too far, but it most
certainly can. Consider what it is that
is diminished or denied when the Sovereignty of God is taught in this way. God as conceived in the theology of Dort may
be bigger than how He is conceived in other theologies in terms of His
Sovereignty. He seems a lot smaller,
however, in this theology by contrast with other theologies, in terms of His
Love. Which, His Love or His
Sovereignty, does God so stress in the New Testament that He self-identifies
with it? This is not a hard
question. The answer can be found twice in
the fourth chapter of 1 John, in the eighth and the sixteenth verse. The answer is, of course, His Love. Dortian theologians go to great lengths to
twist the Scriptures so as to make God’s Love less extensive than a plain
reading of the text would suggest. St.
John, after declaring “God is love” in the first of the just-mentioned verses,
writes:
In this was manifested
the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the
world, that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God,
but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
(vv. 9-10)
The Dortian points to the words “toward us” and “that we
might live” and “he loved us” and “propitiation for our sins” to limit the
object of God’s love to us, believers, God’s elect. Earlier in the epistle St. John had written:
And he is the
propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the
whole world. (1 Jn. 2:2)
Even here the Dortians try to avoid the obvious, that God’s
Love extends not just to us, His Church, but to the whole world, that God
provided a propitiatory Sacrifice in Christ for everybody.
To so stress God’s Sovereignty that you diminish His Love in
this way does make your God bigger than other peoples’ God, or to put it more
accurately, does not make God in your conception of Him bigger than in other
people’s conceptions of Him. It makes
your conception of God smaller, much, much, smaller.
What is the term again for when someone stresses one truth
to the point of denying another that is equally or in this case more important? It starts with the letter h, I believe.
There is no need for this sort of thinking to defend the
glory of God. Monergism, that God is
the sole Actor in salvation, does not require double predestination, a limited
Atonement, or irresistible Grace.
Lutheranism is monergistic without any of these things. In Lutheran theology, God is the sole Actor
in salvation, and faith like the salvation it receives is a gift God gives man,
but God gives saving faith to man through the resistible intermediate means of
the Gospel. Therefore, the Grace that
produces the saving faith that receives Grace, is given to everybody in the
Gospel, but it can be resisted and rejected, and man in his fallen estate is
inclined by Original Sin to resist and reject.
If someone comes to saving faith it is because this universal,
resistible, Grace has prevailed, and it is entirely God’s work. If someone ultimately fails to come to saving
faith, it is entirely on him, it is not due to any insufficiency in the Grace
given by God. You can trace God’s work
in those who believe back to eternity past and call it Election and
Predestination. You cannot do the same
for those who do not believe. Again,
their failure to believe is entirely on them.
This is a sound way of looking at monergism and predestination. It is the Lutheran way of understanding
these matters but it is consistent with our Anglican Articles of Religion as
well and, for what it is worth, it is my own understanding of how this works. Indeed, it is the only form of monergism
consistent with the distinction between Law and Gospel, and the Reformation
doctrine of the Gospel as objective assurance of salvation. The Law describes for us the righteousness
that God requires of us as His creatures and subjects and in so doing convicts
us of our sin. It is because of our sin
that we need saving. The Gospel tells
us that God has given us the salvation we need freely in Jesus Christ and
promises us that it is certain in Christ to all who believe. The Gospel meets the need of those convicted
of sin by the Law, whether unbelievers needing to receive salvation, or
believers needing to be assured of their salvation in Christ. It directs both to look outside themselves
and find what they need in Jesus Christ.
That Dortian predestinarian theology compromises that is evident in how
quickly the Calvinist tradition departed from Calvin and began directing
Christians looking for assurance of salvation to the fruit of sanctification in
their own lives, blurring the Law/Gospel distinction.
So then, having sifted the grain of Reformation truth from
the chaff of post-Reformation Reformed theology that often obscures it, the
question remains as to whether this grain – the Scriptures as the supreme,
final, infallible authority that keeps tradition and the Church accountable, salvation
as the free gift which God has given us in His Son, Our only Saviour, Jesus Christ,
which we receive by the means of faith, and the Gospel, in both its forms, Word
and Sacrament, as the message that brings that salvation to us and assures us
of it, as distinct from the Law – is on the same level of Christian truth as
the Articles of the Creed.
Here is the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed adapted by the universal,
undivided, Church in the first two Ecumenical Councils, as translated by Thomas
Cranmer for the Book of Common Prayer,
with the spelling updated:
I believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible, and invisible:
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the
only begotten Son of God, Begotten of his Father before all Worlds, <God of
God>, Light of Light, Very God of very God, Begotten not made, Being of one
substance with the Father, By whom all things were made: Who for us men, and
for our Salvation came down from heaven, And was incarnate by the holy Ghost of
the Virgin Mary, And was made man, And was crucified also for us under Pontius
Pilate. He suffered and was buried, And the third day he rose again according
to the Scriptures, And ascended into heaven, And sitteth on the right hand of
the Father. And he shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the
dead: Whose kingdom shall have no end.
And I believe in the Holy Ghost, The
Lord and giver of life, who proceedeth from the Father (and the Son), who with
the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spake by the
prophets. And I believe one [Holy] Catholic and Apostolic Church. I
acknowledge one Baptism for the remission of Sins, And I look for the
Resurrection of the dead, And the life of the world to come. Amen.
(1)
Those who would place the
Reformation truths on the same level as those of this Creed, or even set them
higher so as to write out of Christianity altogether the Church of Rome which
confesses this Creed – and the Definition of Chalcedon and the Athanasian
Symbol – and to assign it a place among the pagans or, more absurdly, identify
it with the antichrist of eschatology (2),
are in effect saying is that it is less important to believe the truths
of the Creed and trust the Saviour confessed in the Creed than it is to have a
correct understanding of how the truths of the Creed fit into the order of
salvation, the nature of their salvific benefits, and the mechanics of how one
comes to believe. I trust that you can
see how ridiculous that is.
It is even more ludicrous
when the broader historical perspective is taken into consideration. Reformation soteriology depends upon an
understanding of Christ’s saving work on the Cross that emphasizes the penal
substitution aspect of the Atonement.
The Eastern Orthodox Church, which continues to place its emphasis where
the Fathers of the first millennium did, on Christ as Victor (over Satan, sin,
death, and Hell) in the Atonement, would point out how the emphasis on penal
substitution in the Reformation understanding of the Atonement came about through
theological development within the Roman Church after the Schism (St. Anselm of
Canterbury in the eleventh century, St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth, the
Reformation in the sixteenth).
Protestant soteriology, from the Eastern perspective, is dependent upon
the Roman Catholic understanding of the Atonement.
I will conclude by showing
just how narrow the disagreement between Roman and Protestant soteriology
actually is. Let us leave aside popular
folk theology. Confessional Protestants
would not want their soteriology defined by those who think that one goes to
heaven by saying the sinner’s prayer once, neither should Roman soteriology be
defined by those who think that outward adherence to the Church will mechanically
convey salvation upon them even if they have to suffer thousands of years in
Purgatory first. Consider the following
soteriological statements:
Salvation is a gift of God.
Jesus Christ is the Saviour
Who accomplished salvation by dying for us on the Cross.
Salvation includes both
justification, which makes us righteous, and sanctification, which makes us
holy.
Both justification and
sanctification have positional and practical aspects. Positional justification and sanctification
are God’s regarding us as righteous and set apart for Himself (holy). Practical justification and sanctification
are God’s making us righteous and holy in a way that is visible to others in
our works. (3)
Justification and
sanctification, in both their positional and practical aspects, are effected
through our union with Jesus Christ.
Christians are united to Jesus Christ in His body the Church of which He
is the Head. Through this union, His
death is our death, cancelling our sin debt as fully paid, and His
righteousness is our righteousness, making us righteous and holy in Him in God’s eyes, and through this
same union, His resurrection life is our new life, and He indwells us through
the Holy Ghost to make His righteousness and holiness a lived reality in our
lives.
Are these statements of Roman or Protestant soteriology?
They are statements that both sides affirm. Where they differ is that Roman Church makes
ongoing and final positional justification dependent upon the outworking of
practical justification. Both assert
that practical justification occurs in all who receive positional
justification. Rome sees practical
justification as contributing to positional justification after initial
justification. We see this as an error
because practical justification is never completed in this life, the fruits of
practical justification are therefore never perfect, and neither is therefore
worthy of contributing to our standing before God, which is perfect from the
moment we are joined to Christ, because it is our standing in Him.
Is this difference sufficient to justify writing a Church
that confesses Jesus Christ in the faith confessed in the Nicene Creed out of
Christianity?
Those who would say yes would maintain that the Roman Church
has fallen into the error of Galatianism upon which St. Paul pronounced
anathema in the Bible. Galatianism was
the error of the false teachers that had come to the Church in Galatia and told
this primarily Gentile Church that they needed to become Jews – specifically to
be circumcised and keep the ceremonial parts of the Mosaic Law – in order to be
(ultimately) saved. While Rome’s error bears
some similarity to this – and Rome’s foolish decision to anathematize the
Protestant position in the Council of Trent invites this retaliatory accusation
– there are also huge differences. The
works, as the outcome of practical justification, that they see as contributing
to ongoing and final justification, are not the ceremonial works of the Mosaic
Law, but moral works of benevolence to others produced by the Christian love
that the Holy Ghost works in the Christian’s heart through faith. Think of the sort of works brought up in the
Parable of the Sheep and Goats in the Olivet Discourse in St. Matthew’s
Gospel. I think that Rome is wrong to
say that these contribute to the positional righteousness that is already perfect
in Christ. I don’t think that they are
so wrong as to fall under St. Paul’s anathema in Galatians, however.
That neither side should have been so quick to issue the
kind of condemnations each leveled against the other seems the only reasonable
conclusion from the fact that the New Testament contains both the epistle of
Romans and the epistle of James. That
the two epistles don’t contradict each other, all orthodox Christians must
accept. The question is one of how we
understand them to relate to each other.
The Roman position is what you get when you say that St. James
interprets St. Paul. The Protestant
position is what you get when you say that St. Paul interprets St. James.
Although one of our great orthodox Churchman, George Bull,
the seventeenth century Bishop of St. David’s, argued the opposite in his Harmonia
Apostolica, I think that St. Paul as
the interpreter of St. James is the obviously correct position. The Jacobean epistle is widely thought to
have been the first book of the New Testament to have been written – Bishop Bull
disagreed with this - and to have been composed very early. Romans, although it appears first in the
Pauline corpus in the usual order of publication in the New Testament, was the
last of St. Paul’s epistles other than the Prison and Pastoral Epistles to be
written. It was composed while St. Paul
was about to set out on the journey to Jerusalem that led to his arrest. This would be in the late ‘50s. While many of the same words – save,
justify, faith, works – are found in both Romans 4 and James 2, one prominent
word from Romans 4 is conspicuously missing in James 2. That word is Grace. That would suggest that St. James is not
talking about justification by Grace, a conclusion that is supported by the
fact that the word translated “only” in our Authorized Bible in the twenty
fourth verse of James 2 is an adverb not an adjective, modifying “justified”
not “faith”, and so the verse is talking about two justifications, one by faith
and another by works, and not a single justification by both faith and works. Finally, St. Paul includes a verse in Romans
4, the second verse of the chapter, that can be read as an affirmation and
explanation of James. No verse
similarly explaining Romans can be found in St. James’ epistle. If Romans 4:2 is St. Paul explaining St.
James, then St. James is not talking about justification by Grace before God
when he says that there is a justification by works as well as a justification
by faith.
The Protestant view of
justification – actually of salvation, for all of salvation, justification,
sanctification, glorification, is a gift, given to us in Jesus Christ, brought
to us in the Gospel, Word and Sacrament, and received by us by faith, with
works coming out of salvation as its fruit, not contributing to it – is then
the Scriptural and correct one. This is
not grounds to exclude ancient Churches that confess Jesus Christ in the
articles of the Nicene Creed from Christianity. As the Irish Anglican, Edmund Burke, put it
in his Reflections on the Revolution in
France:
Violently condemning
neither the Greek nor the Armenian, nor, since heats are subsided, the Roman
system of religion, we prefer the Protestant: not because we think it has less
of the Christian religion in it, but because, in our judgment, it has more. We
are Protestants, not from indifference, but from zeal.
The disagreement between
Protestantism and Rome is a disagreement about the relationship between faith
and works, the Creed is the faith. The
truths in the Creed, remain the core of the first tier of Christian truth. The Reformation truths are important, but
secondary. Making them out to be as
important as the truths of the Creed is the first step down the dangerous path
of Hyper-Protestantism.
The best answer to Rome on
the matter of salvation and justification was given by Archbishop Laud in his A Relation of the Conference Between William
Laud, Late Lord Archbishop of Canterbury and Mr. Fisher the Jesuit, By the
Command of King James. The Anglican
primate of the reign of Charles I quoted Roman apologist Cardinal Bellarmine as
having written “that in regard of the uncertainty of our own righteousness, and
of the danger of vainglory, tutissimum est, it is safest to repose our whole trust in the
mercy and goodness of God” and commenting on these words said:
And surely, if there be one safer way than another, as
he confesses there is, he is no wise man, that in a matter of so great moment
will not betake himself to the safest way. And therefore even you yourselves in
the point of condignity of merit, though you write it and preach it
boisterously to the people, yet you are content to die, renouncing the
condignity of all your own merits, and trust to Christ’s. Now surely, if you
will not venture to die as you live, live and believe in time as you mean to
die.
(2) St. John writes “Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son.” (1 Jn. 2:22). Again he writes “And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.” (1 Jn. 4:3). You cannot deny that Jesus is the Christ or that Jesus Christ is come of the flesh and confess the Nicene Creed, the Apostles’ Creed, the Definition of Chalcedon, and the Athanasian Symbol. St. Paul writes “Wherefore I give you to understand, that no man speaking by the Spirit of God calleth Jesus accursed: and that no man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost.” (1 Cor. 12:3) Nobody, therefore, who claims to accept the Bible as the sole, infallible, authority, has any business to accuse the Roman Church or her Patriarch, of being “the antichrist”. It does not matter that the Protestant Reformers used this language. They were wrong. As Protestants we have not replaced the error of papal infallibility with the error of the infallibility of the Reformers. The Roman Church is a Christian Church that has erred, and the Roman Patriarch is a usurper of universal jurisdiction, which is a serious enough offense without bringing in accusations that are clearly unscriptural. No, the Roman Patriarch’s usurpation does not make him “the man of sin” that St. Paul talks about II Thessalonians 2:3-10. The Roman Patriarch has not declared himself to be God – not even when he falsely declared himself infallible in Vatican I. Nor, if John 5:43 is as it is widely understood to be, a reference to the Man of Sin, has he been received as Messiah by those who reject Jesus Christ as Messiah. Indeed, it is ludicrous to suggest that someone who confesses Jesus as Christ, and who leads a Church that confesses Jesus as Christ, would himself be accepted as Christ by those who reject Jesus as Christ. Note that those who reject Jesus as their Messiah are not usually very fond of the Patriarch of Rome.
(3) Theologians, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, often use justification to mean the positional standing of the Christian and sanctification to mean the ongoing practical work of transformation in the Christian life. My wording in the text of this essay, is more precisely accurate. Righteousness and holiness are not the same thing. There are positional and practical aspects to both justification and sanctification.
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