The Faith, More or Less

 

Adolf von Harnack was a German Lutheran theological and ecclesiastical historian in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  In the last decades of the nineteenth century he wrote a multi-volume work the English title of which is The History of Dogma.  In this work he maintained, among other things, that the Church had gone wrong from pretty much the first generation, that Jesus had preached a simple Gospel of universal love under the universal Fatherhood of God but His followers had buried this under layers of foreign ideas taken from Greek philosophy and so created dogma – the authoritative teachings of the Church in the ancient Creeds, especially the Nicene – and that these layers needed to be stripped away and the simple Gospel recovered.  Harnack believed that in his liberal revisionism he was merely taking Dr. Luther’s Protestant Reformation principles to their logical conclusion.  Apologists for the Roman Catholic Church jumped to agree with him on this last point.

 

One of Harnack’s better known students – I would say his best known except that Dietrich Bonhoeffer also studied under him – the Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth later came to disagree with this idea that the Trinity and the other basic tenets – dogmas if you will – of Christian orthodoxy were foreign to the essence of the Christian message and rejecting the liberalism that he had been taught found his way back, for the most part, into Christian orthodoxy. 

 

In the meantime, orthodox Anglican scholars such as the Venerable A. E. Burn, Dean of Salisbury and the Right Reverend E. C. S. Gibson, Bishop of Gloucester, in their works on the history of the ancient Creeds, tore Harnack’s theory to shreds.  Two centuries earlier another orthodox Anglican scholar, the Right Reverend George Bull, Bishop of St. David’s in his Defensio Fidei Nicaenae (1685) had defended Nicene orthodoxy by showing that the truths affirmed in the Ecumenical Councils were consistent with those taught by the Ante-Nicene Fathers.  A rebuttal of Harnack had to go further than this, however, and Burn and Gibson persuasively demonstrated that what was defined, unfolded, and explained in the ancient Creeds was present in the teachings of the Apostles themselves.  While we in the West are accustomed to thinking of the Apostles’ Creed as the baptismal Creed and the Nicene Creed (the expanded version affirmed at Constantinople) as the Eucharistic Creed, both developed out of Western and Eastern baptismal Creeds.  The fourth section of the second chapter (on the Apostles’ Creed) of Gibson’s The Three Creeds (1908) directly addresses Harnack and shows that the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity is inescapably present in the baptismal formula of Matt. 28:19. (1)

 

As mentioned earlier, Roman Catholic apologists in the twentieth century regarded the liberal revisionism of Harnack, Freidrich Schleiermacher and Albrecht Ritschl as being the developed form of the doctrines of Dr. Luther and Calvin thus agreeing with Harnack’s own assessment.  See, for example, Joseph Wilhelm’s entry “Protestantism” in volume 12 of the 1911 The Catholic Encyclopedia.  This could be regarded as the reverse side of the coin to the idea articulated by John Henry Newman in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine that the late medieval Roman theology to which the Reformers objected on the grounds that it was not found in the Scriptures (or, the English Reformers at least would add, the writings of the Fathers of the early centuries) was the natural evolution of Scriptural and Patristic teachings.  Newman came to look at it this way just prior to his crossing the Tiber into the Roman Church. 

 

There is a sense in which Harnack was right in regarding revisionist liberalism as an extension of ideas that played out in the Reformation.  Not the doctrines for which Dr. Luther, Zwingli and Calvin became known, but the Renaissance humanist principles that informed them (as they did others who remained in communion with Rome such as Erasmus and More), in particular the principle of ad fontes, (back to the font or source).  The problem was that Harnack and company wanted to go back to a “source” that existed only in their imagination, a “simple” message that predates that of the ancient Creeds and the Scriptures that back them.

 

Harnack and the other liberal revisionists, in other words, sought to streamline the Christian faith by removing from it that which belonged to it from the very beginning but which conflicted with nineteenth and twentieth century Modern rationalist thought.  This was not, after all, as Barth (and later and more completely, Methodist theologian Thomas Oden) was to discover, a more thorough application of the Renaissance/Reformation ad fontes principle.  Rather than returning to the source for clarity, it involved recreating from no evidence whatsoever a “source” that matched the liberals’ idea of what a source, a primitive original version of the Christian faith, should look like.  While it is understandable that Roman apologists would try to argue that Dr. Luther and the other Reformers were doing something similar, in reality liberal revisionism was a form of extreme reductionism.  A more legitimate charge against the Reformers – one which could also be levelled against the Roman Church – would be that of doing the opposite of this.

 

Harnack and company thought that the original faith as delivered to the Apostles by Christ must have been something much simpler than the faith as confessed in the ancient Creeds.  In reality, however, the ancient Creeds are about as simple as the Christian faith can get.  Jesus, at the end of St. Matthew’s Gospel, which according to the consensus of ancient writers was the first Gospel written, instructed His disciples to make other disciples of all the nations by baptizing them.  In doing so, He borrowed a rite that the rabbis of late second Temple Judaism had introduced for Gentile converts and adapted it as the rite of entrance into His Church by instructing that the baptism was to be in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.  This was not just a prescription of the words to be said over the person baptized but the content of the faith into which that person was being baptized.  The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost – the Three Persons manifested in His own baptism – as the content of that faith, are divine Persons. The fact that Christianity is a continuation and fulfilment of the Old Testament faith “Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God is one Lord” along with the fact that Jesus spoke of a singular name of the Three Persons tells us that the Three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, are but One God.  This is the Trinity, God as confessed in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds.  The first part of the Athanasian Symbol unfolds this truth so as to protect it against pretty much any conceivable error, while the second half like the Definition of Chalcedon (2) does the same for doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ that of necessity belongs to the Trinitarian faith, i.e., that the Eternal Son in the Incarnation, without ceasing to be God, took a full and perfect human nature formed from that of His Virgin Mother and united it with His Eternal Person so that from the moment of the Incarnation, He, remaining the same Person in the Trinity that He always had been, had two complete natures, being fully God and fully Man. Apart from these truths the ancient Symbols contain a brief narrative account of Gospel, the historical events of Christ’s earthly life and ministry from His Incarnation to His Ascension, especially His death for us on the cross and Resurrection, and the most basic of the truths auxiliary to those of the Trinity and the Person of Jesus Christ such as the Second Coming, the Church, and the promise of forgiveness of sins and everlasting life.

 

The history of how these ancient Symbols of the faith came to be in the form in which we have received them is the history of how the basic truths of the faith as entrusted to the Apostles by Christ were defined and unfolded in response to the numerous heresies that arose as Jesus and the Apostles had warned they would.  The process involved the development of precise theological meanings for certain terms.  The Greek words hypostasis and ousia, for example, virtually identical in meaning in the first century had to be differentiated so that hypostasis (person) could indicate what the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are as distinct from each other whereas ousia (essence, substance, being) indicates how they are One.  This enabled the word homoousios (of one being, essence, or substance) which had been used with heretical intent by Paul of Samosata whose teachings blended a Trinitarian heresy similar to that of Sabellianism (modalism) and an Adoptionist heresy regarding the Person of Christ, to become the safeguard of Christ’s true deity against the Arian heresy in the Nicene Creed in the fourth century.  Nothing ended up in these Symbols which did not belong to the “faith once delivered unto the saints” as believed in the Church “everywhere, always, and by all”.

 

The error of the liberal revisionists was to subtract from the deposit of faith.  In the sixteenth century those on both sides of the Reformation controversy had little interest in subtraction.  The Apostles and Nicene Creeds both consist of the same twelve articles, usually worded more elaborately and precisely in the Nicene version.  The Lutheran Augsburg Confession of 1530 contains twenty-eight articles and the Reformed Belgic Confession of Faith of 1561 contains thirty-seven and it is not a matter of their having both merely added the difference between these numbers to the twelve of the Creeds.  The truths of the Creeds are affirmed but summarized in these Confessions and take up considerably less than twelve of each of their sets of articles.  Our own English Articles of Religion, in their final Elizabethan form of 1571 are thirty-nine in number, down from the Edwardian forty-two. (3) The eighth article affirms the ancient Creeds, many of the truths of which were also restated in the articles preceding, but everything after the eighth pertains to other matters either not covered in the ancient Symbols or merely briefly mentioned. 

 

Meanwhile on the other side, in 1564 after the Council of Trent (1545-1563) Roman Patriarch Pius IV published a Creed which, while technically consisting of twelve articles like the earlier Creeds, includes the entire Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed as its first article, then goes on to add eleven others which include such fun and exciting things as “that there are truly and properly Seven Sacraments of the New Law, instituted by Jesus Christ our Lord, and necessary for the salvation of mankind, though not all for every one”, “that in the Mass there is offered to God a true, proper, and propitiatory sacrifice for the living and the dead”, “that there is made a conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the Body, and of the whole substance of the wine into the Blood, which conversion the Catholic Church calls Transubstantiation”, “that there is a Purgatory, and that the souls therein detained are helped by the suffrages of the faithful”, “that the saints, reigning together with Christ, are to be honored and invoked, and that they offer prayers to God for us, and that their relics are to be venerated”, “that the images of Christ, of the Mother of God, ever virgin, and also of other Saints, ought to be had and retained, and that due honor and veneration is to be given them”, “that the power of indulgences was left by Christ in the Church, and that the use of them is most wholesome to Christian people” and “the Holy Catholic Apostolic Roman Church as the mother and mistress of all churches”.    

 

By including these items in a new Creed, the making of which was forbidden by the Council of Ephesus, the third of the general Councils that the same Creed claims to “receive and profess”, Rome declared them to be de fide, that is to say, to be of the essence of the faith and so required to be believed for salvation.   Now, the question of whether any or all of these things are de fide is different to that of whether they are true.   For a doctrine to be de fide it must also true, but a doctrine does not have to be de fide to be true.   To go through each of the additional articles of the Profession of Pius IV and examine them as to their truth value would be a too lengthy diversion here.  One of them is clearly false from a historical point of view – the Church from which all other churches after the persecution following the martyrdom of St. Stephen are descended, was situated in Jerusalem not Rome, so if any Church deserves the honour of being called the Mother of all Churches it is the Church of Jerusalem.  We do not need to show that the others are similarly false to show that none of them are de fide.  At least two of them, Purgatory and Indulgences, fail the Vincentian test of Catholicity (believed “everywhere, always, and by all”) and have never been confessed by any of the other ancient Churches whose communion with Rome was broken prior to the second millennium and while the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist does pass the test of Catholicity, the account of the Real Presence to which the term Transubstantiation refers does not, owing far more to the Medieval rediscovery of Aristotle than to the Scriptures and the Fathers of the first millennium.   At an even more fundamental level, none of these things can be shown to have belonged to the original deposit of the “faith once delivered unto the saints” either explicitly or implicitly in the same way as the Eternal Generation of the Son or the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son.  That Rome was willing to declare these things to be de fide, as in later Councils she would declare such other things as the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary and the infallibility of the Roman Patriarch, lends much weight to the accusation that the authority she claims for herself goes way beyond the Catholic truth that the Church has authority to define the faith by explaining the original deposit in such a way as to protect it against heresy and that she believes she has the power to just add to the deposit of faith by her own fiat.

 

Neither the Lutherans nor the Reformed officially made such claims for the extra-Creedal doctrines in their Confessions, although sometimes in practice certain of their theologians and preachers have acted like they did.  Calvinist preachers of various denominational stripes have been known to say that the “doctrines of grace”, by which they mean the doctrines of the Synod of Dort (1618-1619) – total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints -, are the Gospel, as if a rigid predestinarianism in which God has arbitrarily picked out a handful of people to receive His mercy and nobody else ever has any real opportunity to escape condemnation could possibly be accurately described as “Good News.”  The Lutheran claim that “justification by faith alone is the article upon which the Church stands or falls”, while more defensible than the Calvinist equation of predestinarianism with the Gospel, (4) makes a doctrine about Christian faith more important that the truths that are the essential content of Christian faith.

Although our English Articles of Religion are, in terms of article count, longer than either the Lutheran Augsburg or Reformed Belgic Confessions, there is no extra-Creedal doctrine that defines Anglicanism the way TULIP defines Dortian Calvinism or Sola Fide defines Lutheranism (not in the sense that it is distinct to Lutheranism – the Reformed and Anglican Churches also affirm it – but it is more associated with Lutheranism, in the theology of which it is more central).  In part this is because the Articles of Religion – in their final, Elizabethan form at least, if the same cannot exactly be said about such predecessors as the Henrician Ten Articles or the Edwardian Forty-Two – were formulated with the end in mind of achieving the peace and unity in the English Church that Queen Elizabeth and Archbishop Parker sought rather than in the polemical spirit that drove the Continental Protestant Confessions (and, for that matter, the Creed of Pius IV and the Council of Trent).  In part it is because the English Reformers, much more so than their Continental counterparts, were determined to preserve the Catholicity of the English Church, to remove only the blatant late Medieval abuses in their reforms, and, while affirming the supremacy of the Scriptures as the Word of God above ecclesiastical authority and tradition like other Protestants, to look to the Fathers of the early centuries and Councils for the orthodox interpretation of the Scriptures.  This is reflected in all the formularies to come out of the English Reformation of which the Articles are but one.  These define the Anglican faith as the Catholic faith of the ancient Creeds. (5)  The (interrogative) Apostles’ Creed is the faith into which one is baptized in the service of the Book of Common Prayer.  The Apostles’ Creed is also the faith confessed in the daily offices of prayer (except on those to which the Athanasian Symbol is assigned), the Nicene Creed is the faith confessed in the service of Holy Communion.  To avoid any confusion on this matter, the Articles are entitled Articles of Religion and not Confession of Faith.

 

The English Reformers had it right, I believe.  The twelve articles which comprise the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, developed in the same early centuries in the West and East respectively out of the baptismal Creeds of Rome and probably Jerusalem, arguably themselves variants of a proto-Creed perhaps dating back to the Apostles, certainly ultimately derived from the formula with which Jesus Himself commissioned His Church to baptize the nations, are the Christian faith.  The Definition of Chalcedon provided further clarity on the Person and Two Natures of Jesus Christ to guard against latter heresies, the Athanasian Symbol provides the fullest exposition of the Trinity, but everything in the Definition of Chalcedon and the Athanasian Symbol is either explicit or implicit in the Creeds, just as everything in the twelve articles of the Creeds is either explicit or implicit in the original deposit of the “faith once delivered unto the saints” as recorded in the Scriptures.  To subtract from this faith the way liberal revisionists like Harnack did is to create a new religion that is less than Christianity.  To add to it by declaring other things, true or false, that are neither explicit nor implicit in the ancient Creeds to be of the essence of the faith in the way Pius IV and the Council of Trent did is to arrogantly claim authority far in excess of that given to the Church.  Nothing else resembles this error of the papacy so much as the attitude of those who treat the doctrines of the Reformation, or worse of five-point Calvinism, as if they were on par with the truths of the ancient Symbols. 

 

 (1)   Gibson’s book is part of the Oxford Library of Practical Theology edited by W. C. E. Newbolt and Darwell Stone.  Burn contributed separate volumes on each of the Creeds to the same series.  The material in these naturally overlaps that in his earlier An Introduction to The Creeds and the Te Deum (1899).

(2)   Although the Athanasian Symbol and the Definition of Chalcedon are both sometimes called Creeds, neither begins with “I/We believe” and so these are not Creeds in the proper sense.  Symbol is the Anglicization of the Greek word that was first used for these sort of faith formulations.  The Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds are, like the Athanasian Symbol and Definition of Chalcedon, Symbols, but the Athanasian Symbol and Definition of Chalcedon are not properly Creeds.

(3)   The very Calvinistic Irish Articles of Religion of 1615, drawn up primarily by Archbishop Ussher (at the time Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College, Dublin and not yet a bishop), number 104.  This is the longest in terms of article number of which I am aware. Longest in terms of article number does not translate into longest in in terms of total content.  The Presbyterian Westminster Confession of Faith, which is not organized into articles, is longer. In 1523 Zwingli put out “The Sixty-Seven Articles”.  This however, was not the same sort of thing as either the English or Irish Articles or the Lutheran and Reformed Confessions but a personal statement, drawn up as part of his defence before the Zurich city council after he had been charged with heresy and many of the sixty-seven are short sentences joined together in larger divisions which in other Confessions would constitute a single article.  The last of the sixty-seven is an invitation to ask him questions about various topics.

(4)   The best defence of the statement would be to examine how St. John uses St. Peter’s Confession in his Gospel.  St. Peter’s Confession was that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the Living God” in His response to which Jesus said “thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” (Matt. 16:16, 18)  That the confession and not St. Peter personally, is this foundation rock, is evident in the Greek of rock which is feminine whereas St. Peter’s name is masculine.  In St. John’s Gospel, this very Confession is identified by the Evangelist as what one must believe to have everlasting life (Jn. 20:31).  Earlier in his narrative, Martha makes the same confession in response to Jesus’ asking her if she believed His statement “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” (Jn. 11:25-26, Martha’s answer in 27).  What Dr. Luther called “justification by faith alone” is the truth explained by St. Paul in the fourth chapter of Romans that being right with God is not something that we earn by works, but is a gift given by grace in Jesus Christ and received by us by faith.  St. Paul did not use the word “alone” in expressing this and many objected to Dr. Luther’s use of it on the grounds that St. James did use it  (Jas. 2:24) and negated it, although these failed to note that in doing so St. James asserted that justification was by precisely the thing St. Paul said it was not by and that the only reasonable way of harmonizing the two is to recognize that St. James was not talking about justification by grace (a word conspicuous by its absence from his second chapter which incorporates all of the other main terms of the fourth chapter of Romans) which is more or less what St. Paul himself said in the second verse of Romans 4 (frequently those who point to James 2:24 in this way claim that it is the only occurrence of “faith alone” in the Scriptures, ignoring or ignorant of Mark 5:36 in which it is stated by Jesus Himself positively in the imperative mood as a command).  All that the doctrine means is that for salvation to be a free gift of grace – which all Churches, even the Roman, acknowledge it to be – then faith must perform its role as the hand which receives that gift with no assistance from works.   The best Roman Patriarch of living memory, Benedict XVI, acknowledged that Dr. Luther was right about this.  At any rate, outside of St. Paul’s epistles, this is most emphasized in the Johannine writings, especially the fourth Gospel in which Jesus Himself and the Evangelist repeatedly promise everlasting life to everyone who believes in Jesus.  The exchange in the eleventh chapter between Martha and Jesus, associates Jesus’ being able to make this promise with His being Whom St. Peter confessed Him to be, which brings us back to that confession being the rock upon which Christ would build His Church and upon which it stands.

(5)   To be fair to the Reformed, one of their Forms of Unity (formularies), their Heidelberg Catechism of 1563, primarily the work of Zacharias Ursinus also clearly identifies the Gospel and the Christian faith with the faith of the Apostles’ Creed in Q and A 22 and 23.

Tiers of Truth: The Creed and the Reformation

 

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.

 

(1)   The words in <> were part of the Greek of the original Nicene Creed but were left out of the Greek of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan, the words in () translate the Latin filioque that is not in the Greek original and which is not accepted by the Eastern Church, and the word in [] was left out of the English for some reason, although it appears in both the Greek and Latin versions.   In the form published by the Councils, the confession was plural “we believe” but in liturgical use has been singular “I believe” even in the Greek , until in our own day liturgical revisionists decided to pluralize it again.

(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.