Justification and the Hierarchy of Truth

I have been working on a sequel to my essay “Catholic and Protestant.”   In that essay I argued that the Anglican Church, contrary to the types of Churchmen who eschew one or the other of these labels, should embrace both, defining Catholic as that which belongs to all the ancient Churches since the earliest Christian antiquity and Protestant by the two fundamental truths of the Reformation, the final authority of the Scriptures as the Word of God and the freeness of the gift of salvation in Jesus Christ which can only be received by faith.  The sequel, which I have given the title “Catholic not Roman” will concentrate more closely on how the errors of Rome rejected in the Reformation were distinct to Rome and late innovations rather than belonging to all the ancient Churches since the earliest times.  The death of California pastor, seminary president, and Bible teacher John F. MacArthur Jr. this week has prompted me to first address the objection that has been raised to a point I made in my first essay.  That point was that it is wrong to describe the recovery of the Pauline doctrine of justification in the Reformation as a recovery of the Gospel because the truths St. Paul himself identified as the Gospel he preached (that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, was buried, and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures and the testimony of the eyewitnesses he enumerated)[1] were never lost by the Church and are confessed to this day even by Rome in the ancient Creeds.

 

There was a point behind this point and that is that there is a hierarchy of importance to Christian truth.  The truths that are the most important are the Catholic truths.  These are the truths confessed in the ecumenical symbols of the faith – the Apostles’ and Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creeds, and the Quicumque Vult or Athanasian Symbol.  That these outrank justification by faith alone in terms of importance is acknowledged by the formularies of each of the three branches of the Magisterial Reformation.  Our Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles of 1571 acknowledge it by placing the Catholic truths in the first eight articles (Article VIII is the reception of the ecumenical symbols) and the Lutheran Book of Concord of 1580 places the three ecumenical symbols at the start before any of the distinctly Lutheran confessions.  

Indeed, I can hardly think of a better way of making the point than how the Heidelberg Catechism of 1563 makes it.  This is one of the Three Forms of Unity that the Reformed Church acknowledged as its basic formularies at the pan-Reformed Synod of Dort in 1618-1619.  Its twenty-second question asks “What, then, is necessary for a Christian to believe?” The answer is “All that is promised us in the Gospel, which the articles of our catholic, undoubted Christian faith teach us in summary.”  The next question asks what those articles are and the answer is simply the text of the Apostles’ Creed.  The twenty-fourth through fifty-eighth of the questions and answers probe deeper into the meaning of each of the simple assertions of the Creed.  It is only then in the fifty-ninth question which asks “What does it help you now, that you believe all this?”, that is, the faith confessed in the Apostles’ Creed, that justification by faith alone, the topic of questions fifty-nine through sixty-four is raised.  

It should not require an appeal to the Protestant confessional formularies, however, to make this point.  According to the doctrine of justification by faith alone it is faith in Jesus Christ that is the hand with which a sinner receives everlasting life and the righteousness of God freely given in Jesus Christ.   It is therefore, by the doctrine of justification by faith alone itself, more important to believe in Jesus Christ, to believe what is confessed about Him in the faith of the ancient symbols, than to believe in the doctrine of justification by faith alone itself.

Consider what the Scriptures themselves teach us about the content of saving faith.  The object of saving faith is, of course, Jesus Christ.  The object of faith is the answer to the question of Who is believed.  The content of faith is the answer to the question of what is believed.  St. John tells us at the end of the penultimate chapter of his Gospel “But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name”[2]  The predicate about Jesus in this verse contains two assertions placed in apposition to each other so as to identify them with each other.  The Christ is the Son of God, and the Son of God is the Christ.  Each term brings its own connotations to the overall concept.  Christ is the Greek word corresponding to the Hebrew Messiah.  It literally means Anointed One, and the anointing primarily referred to is that of the kingship of Israel.  Priests were also anointed in the Old Testament and Jesus as the Christ is the High Priest after the order of Melchizedek and in one instance a prophet was anointed in the Old Testament and Jesus is the Prophet that Moses predicted God would send.  First and foremost, however, the Christ or Messiah is the promised heir to David’s throne Who would establish the Kingdom forever.  That the Christ/Messiah would be the Saviour not just of Israel but of the whole world is indicated by the very first prophecy found of Him in the Old Testament in God’s judgement on the serpent in Genesis 3.  The Christ, therefore, is the Saviour Who God had promised He would send the world since the Fall of Man.  Jesus as the Christ is the fulfilment of those promises.

 

What it means for Jesus to be the Son of God is established in the first verse of the same Gospel.  The Word was in the beginning, the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  This Person St. John identifies as the Word (Greek Logos), is eternal since He was there in the beginning with God and is Himself God.  St. John’s use of the word Logos/Word here, like the phrase “In the beginning” points back to Genesis, since in the second verse he says that is through the Word that everything that was made was made.  In Genesis 1 God speaks (“Let there be light” for example) all of Creation into existence.  The Word is identified as Jesus in the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel after which the relationship between the Word Who is God and the God Whom the Word is with is spoken of as that of Father and Son.  In a few places St. John modifies “Son” with the Greek word rendered “only-begotten” in the Authorized Bible.  This expression indicates that Jesus is God’s Son in a way no one else is.  All humans and angels are sometimes spoken of as God’s sons by right of creation.  Christians are God’s children by adoption.  Jesus, however, is the only natural Son of God, the kind of Son Who shares the nature of His Father.  That this does not mean there are two Gods is the significance of Jesus’ saying “I and my Father are one”[3] and St. John’s Gospel also identifies the Third Person Who shares in the unity of the Godhead with the Father and Son, the Holy Spirit or Comforter.

 

The words with which St. John identifies the content of saving faith are familiar from elsewhere in the Gospel records.  They are identical with the confession St. Peter made at Caesarea Philippi in response to the question addressed to Jesus’ disciples “but whom say ye that I am?”[4]  Jesus’ immediate response to St. Peter’s confession was to say that St. Peter was blessed, that this revelation had not come to him from “flesh and blood” but from the Father, to declare that He would build His Church which the gates of hell would not overthrow on this rock, and to give St. Peter the keys.[5]  This marked the point where Jesus began teaching His disciples that He would suffer and be crucified and rise again the third day.[6]  These are, of course, the events that make up the content of the Gospel as preached by St. Paul.  That Jesus revealed them in advance to His disciples upon St. Peter’s confession that Jesus is the “Christ, the Son of the Living God” establishes a connection between the two.  For Jesus to be the “Christ, the Son of the Living God” means to be He Who was crucified for us and rose again the third day.  The end or purpose of St. Paul’s proclamation of the Gospel that Jesus died for our sins and was buried and rose again the third day was that those who heard would believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.  This was also the end or purpose of the Gospel Jesus Himself preached, the content of which was that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.[7]  This content pointed to faith in Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God because what the Kingdom of Heaven being at hand meant was that the promises of it had been fulfilled because it was present in His Own Person, the promised Christ.  Jesus preached this Gospel to the Jews who were anticipating the coming of the Christ and the Kingdom of God.  St. Paul preached the Gospel of the death and resurrection of Christ to both Jews and Gentiles because it revealed what it really meant for Jesus to be the Saviour, to be the Saviour of everybody from the bondage of sin which has afflicted the whole world since the Fall rather than a political deliverer of a single nation.

 

There is one other prominent confession of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God and that occurs earlier in St. John’s Gospel in the account of the raising of Lazarus in the eleventh chapter.  It is the confession of St. Martha of Bethany in response to Jesus’ words “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. Believest thou this?”[8]  St. Martha’s confession was the only possible response for someone who believed these words.  Only the Christ, the Son of God could truthfully say He could guarantee resurrection and everlasting life to all who believe in Him.

 

My point, once again, is that what St. John identifies as the content of saving faith – that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and what St. Paul identifies as the Gospel – that Christ died for our sins, was buried, and rose again from the dead the third day – are all confessed in the three ancient ecumenical symbols of the faith.  It is therefore a gross exaggeration of the important of the doctrine of justification by faith alone to say that its formulation in the Reformation was a recovery of a lost Gospel.  The Roman Church, as corrupt and in serious error as she had become by the sixteenth century, still confessed as she confesses to this day, these ancient symbols.

 

This does not mean that justification by faith alone is not important.  It is a truth taught in the Scriptures.  The claim of the Roman apologists that it is only mentioned when St. James denies it[9] is most kindly described as simplistic.  One could just as simplistically respond that the claim is not true because Jesus said (to the ruler of the synagogue seeking healing for his daughter) “Be not afraid, only believe”[10] and that since this appears twice and comes from the mouth of Jesus Himself it negates the verse in St. James’ epistle.   A more serious answer would be to point out that since the Roman Church has re-iterated her official belief in the inerrancy of the Bible at least on matters of doctrine and morals in the second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and her 1992 Catechism she is not free to choose St. James over St. Paul but must find a way to affirm both.  It is insufficient to point out that St. Paul does not use the word “alone” or “only” as it is more accurately rendered in the Authorized Bible[11] because St. James specifies “by works” thus including the very thing excluded by name in St. Paul.  The question, therefore, is which of the two writers explains the other.  The answer is quite clear.  There is nothing in the Jacobean epistle which could be understood as saying “St. Paul said this in Romans and Galatians, but what he meant is this, which does not contradict what I am saying here.”  St. Paul, however, includes just such an explanation of St. James at the beginning of his argument for justification by faith without works in the fourth chapter of Romans.[12]  His explanation is that justification by works, such as is affirmed by St. James, is “not before God.”  St. James, therefore, by the authority of St. Paul, was not talking about the righteousness of God which is given in Jesus Christ to all who believe in Him apart from works.[13]  This is also evident by taking note of what is missing from James 2:14-26.  Such words as “justified”, “faith”, and “works” are common to both this passage and Romans 4, as are the Old Testament references.  The word “grace”, therefore, is conspicuous by its absence from the passage in St. James.

 

Grace is the key concept here.  St. Paul doesn’t just assert that justification is by faith and not works he gives an explanation as to why this is the case.  He writes “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”[14] and later “Therefore it is of faith, that it might be by grace; to the end the promise might be sure to all the seed; not to that only which is of the law, but to that also which is of the faith of Abraham; who is the father of us all.”[15]  Grace has a number of connotations, including the love of God revealed in His blessing His creatures, the act of God blessing His creatures, the blessings themselves, and even the thanks offered back to God for His blessings.[16]  When St. Paul says that justification – or salvation in all of its aspects for that matter – is by grace, he is saying that it is a free gift.  That is why it is by faith and not by works.  If it were by works it would not be a gift but a reward, payment, or wage.  Faith, by contrast, is not something offered in exchange or something that merits reward, but merely receives what is given.

 

This is a very important truth and I have not the slightest desire to diminish its importance.  It is possible, however, with any truth to exaggerate it and when this is done that truth becomes distorted.  That is the very nature of heresy – the exaggeration of a truth in such a way that other truths are denied and the exaggerated truth is distorted into error.  

Consider the basic heresies the Church contended against in the early centuries.  Sabellianism[17] exaggerated the unity of God to the point of denying the Threeness of the Persons of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Arianism, the heresy that the first two Ecumenical Councils addressed,[18] was a pendulum swing in the opposite direction that stressed the distinction between the Persons to the point of denying the fundamental unity in being of the Father and the Son and so posited that the Son was a lesser, created, god.[19]  The orthodox response stressed the unity of being between the Father and Son and so the full deity of Jesus Christ but even this could be exaggerated as it was in the teachings of Apollinaris of Laodicea who taught that the Divine Logos took the place of the human nous (mind or reason) in Jesus thus denying that Jesus' humanity was complete.  The Cappadocian Father St. Gregory Nazianzus expressed the orthodox response “That which is not assumed is not redeemed” and the second Ecumenical Council condemned Apollinarism.  Nestorius of Constantinople stressed the distinction between the deity and humanity of Jesus Christ in a way that compromised the unity of His Person.  Nestorius’ orthodox opponent was St. Cyril of Alexandria whose orthodox response was itself exaggerated by Eutyches of Constantinople in a way that erased the distinction between the natures and fused them into one.[20]  In the fourth ecumenical council, the Council of Chalcedon, a supplement to the Nicene Creed was produced that defined the orthodox doctrine of the Hypostatic Union of Jesus Christ – that the Son, Who is eternally God of one nature with the Father and Holy Spirit, in taking to Himself true humanity in the Incarnation, remained the One Person He eternally was and is but with two natures that remained distinct being neither confused, divided, changed or separated.  The monk Pelagius stressed human moral responsibility to the point that he denied the hereditary taint of Original Sin and the need for God’s grace.  The heresies of monothelitism and monoenergism condemned at the sixth ecumenical council[21] were variations of the error of Apollinarism.[22]

 

If the unity of God could be exaggerated into a heresy (Sabellianism) and the deity of Jesus Christ could be exaggerated into a heresy (Apollinarism) then by all means justification by faith alone can be exaggerated into a heresy and those who elevate it above the Catholic truths of the ancient symbols of the faith by saying that its re-formulation in the Reformation was a recovery of the Gospel are at least in danger of doing just that.

 

There is a particular school of evangelicalism that clearly does this.  Note that in this context by “evangelicalism” I mean what was called “the new evangelicalism” in the 1950s when it began as a kind of softer fundamentalism although the “new” or “neo” was eventually dropped by everyone except those who continued to claim the label “fundamentalist” for themselves.  By softer fundamentalism I mean less militant and separatist.  The leaders of this new evangelicalism also claimed that they were more academically and intellectually respectable than the old fundamentalists although I have seen no evidence that would convince me that they were more so than the contributors to The Fundamentals[23] and certain books that were published about the time I was doing my undergraduate work in theology rather laid waste to the idea.[24]  By the 1970s it was evident that the doctrinal drift the old fundamentalists warned would happen in the new evangelicalism was indeed taking place.[25]  In response to the doctrinal, moral and intellectual shallowness of the broader evangelicalism a school of conservative evangelicalism arose around the 1980s and 1990s that called for a renewed commitment to standards.  This school tended to draw its inspiration primarily from the Reformation and the second-generation Calvinism of the English Puritans.

The way these evangelical leaders treated the doctrine of justification by faith alone was very interesting.  They ran it up the flag pole and demanded that everyone salute it.  If someone did not loudly and publicly affirm it his evangelicalism and even his Christianity would be suspect.  No similar allegiance was required for all of the tenets of the ancient symbols and no wonder.  These leaders were almost to the man Nestorians.  This was most evident in their rejection of the honourific Mother of God for the Blessed Virgin[26] although in the case of the late R. C. Sproul it was also expressed in an ill-conceived diatribe against Charles Wesley’s wonderful lyric “Amazing love, how can it be, that Thou my God shouldst die for me.”  Some of them including the late John F. MacArthur Jr. taught Incarnational Sonship, the heresy that Jesus was not the Son of God prior to the Incarnation but became the Son of God in the Incarnation, although MacArthur did recant this early in the new millennium after teaching it for over twenty years, something that cannot be said of “cults” expert Walter Martin who taught the same heresy.[27]  They demanded allegiance to justification by faith alone while themselves teaching serious heresies concerning more important Christological and Trinitarian truths.  Allegiance was all they demanded for justification by faith alone, however, not comprehension or understanding.  When John F. MacArthur Jr’s The Gospel According to Jesus was published[28], it came with glowing endorsements from John Piper, James Montgomery Boice, R. C. Sproul, et al., and even an introduction from J. I. Packer.  Perhaps these Calvinists were too busy cheering MacArthur’s blistering attack on the Dallas Seminary crowd to notice that he still essentially subscribed to Dallas theology himself with regards to the worst elements of that theology and that he had gutted justification by faith alone of all meaning by redefining it so that "faith" is unrecognizable as what is meant by the rather simple concepts of “belief” and “trust” and so as to include in faith the very thing that the Reformation doctrine excludes.  One Calvinist who did notice this was John W. Robbins[29] whose scathing review of this awful book is a must read.[30]

 

This school of evangelicalism both exaggerated the doctrine of justification by faith alone by treating it as more important than such basic truths as the Eternal Sonship of Jesus Christ and the Unity of the Person of Christ and distorted the doctrine beyond recognition by redefining faith to mean something other than “belief” and “trust.”  On both counts it is guilty of heresy.[31] 

 

 

 

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[1] 1 Cor. 15:3ff.

[2] Jn. 20:31. Authorized Bible.

[3] Jn. 10:30.

[4] Matt. 16:15.  St. Peter’s confession is in verse 16.

[5] Matt. 16:17-19.  After the Resurrection the keys were given to the Apostles’ collectively Jn. 20:23.

[6] Matt. 16:21.

[7] Matt. 4:17, Mk. 1:14-15.

[8] Jn. 11:25-26.  St. Martha’s confession is in verse 27.

[9] Jas. 2:24.

[10] Mk. 5:36, Lk. 8:50.

[11] The underlying Greek word is an adverb not an adjective.

[12] Rom. 4:1-2.

[13] That St. Paul explains St. James rather than vice versa only makes sense considering the apparent timing of the writings.  Although Galatians is relatively early in St. Paul’s corpus, Romans indicates the time of its writing as during the journey to Jerusalem that culminated in St. Paul’s arrest.  In the book of Acts this is the time period of the 20-21 chapters.  This is approximately 57 AD.  The Epistle of St. James, however, was most likely written before the Council of Jerusalem in 50 AD.  The reason most New Testament scholars think this is that the epistle, written by the man who presided at the Council of Jerusalem, is addressed to a Church that does not seem to have incorporated the Gentiles as of the time of its writing and takes no account of the various issues that the Church had to deal with as a consequence of the incorporation of the Gentiles.

[14] Rom. 4:4-5.

[15] Rom. 4:16.

[16] This is why thanking God before a meal is called “saying grace.”  This double usage of the same word for God giving and man returning thanks indicates the range of meaning of the words used in the original Scriptural Hebrew and Greek, as well as the Latin word from which the English “grace” is derived (the Latin expression that is the equivalent of our “Thank you” is “Gratias tibi ago”).  The Greek word for grace is charis.  Note how this is the main part of the compound word that is the traditional name for the Sacrament of the Lord’s Table, Eucharist.  Eucharist means “Thanksgiving.”

[17] Also known as Patripassionism in the early centuries, today it is more commonly called modalism.  It has been revived in Oneness Pentecostalism.  The feminist theology that replaces Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer” in order to get rid of gender-specific terminology for God is also a move towards Sabellianism because these terms are not the names of Persons but denote functions or roles.

[18] First Council of Nicaea (325 AD), First Council of Constantinople (381 AD), these are the Councils that gave us the Niceno-Constaninopolitan Creed, more commonly called the Nicene Creed.

[19] This heresy has been revised in the teachings of Charles Taze Russell and Judge Rutherford, whose followers are the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, better known as the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

[20] The heresy known as Eutychianism or Monophysitism.  Whether those who were accused of teaching this heresy were guilty or just misunderstood is a matter that historians debate as is the case with Nestorius.  The ideas that are called Nestorianism and Eutychianism, however, depart from the orthodox truth of the Hypostatic Union in opposite directions in a manner rightly condemned, regardless of whether or not the condemnation of those whose names they bear was  historically justified.  Nestorianism and Eutychianism were the subjects addressed by the third and fourth ecumenical councils, the Council of Ephesus (431 AD) and the Council of Chalcedon (451 AD) respectively.

[21] The Third Council of Constantinople (680-681 AD).  The fifth ecumenical council had been the Second Council of Constantinople (553 AD) which was more about reaffirming and clarifying the decisions of the previous councils than anything else.  It did condemn the writings of older theologians, primarily Theodore of Mopsuestia (who died shortly before the Council of Ephesus) although the errors were for the most part one’s that had already been dealt with.  The seventh ecumenical council, the Second Council of Nicaea (787) was the last council received as ecumenical before the Great Schism – and thus the last true ecumenical council.  It condemned iconoclasm, which has more to do with practice than doctrine, although there was a doctrinal element.  In this case the error was less an exaggeration of a truth than a failure to see one, namely, that Incarnation meant that what God stressed to Israel in Deuteronomy, that at Sinai they had heard the voice of God but not seen His similitude, could no longer be said under the New Covenant because God had become visible by assuming humanity as expressed by the Lord Himself in the words He addressed to St. Philip in John 14:9 “he who has seen me has seen the Father.”

[22] Monothelitism denied that Jesus had a human will.  Monoenergism was the idea that everything that Jesus did in both of His natures was done through the same divine energy.

[23] A. C. Dixon, Louis Meyer, R. A. Torrey eds. The Fundamentals: A Testimony To The Truth, 12 volumes (Chicago: Testimony Publishing Company, 1910-1915), since 1917 published as 4 volumes. 

[24]David F. Wells, No Place for Truth, or, Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology (Grand Rapids: William B Eerdmans, 1993) and  Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994).

[25] See the criticism of such in Harold Lindsell The Battle for the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1976) and Francis Schaeffer The Great Evangelical Disaster (Wheaton: Crossway, 1984).

[26] The denial that Mary is the Mother of God is a denial that Jesus is God.  Attempts to evade this, by saying for example, that she was the mother of His human nature, reduce to nonsense.  The mother-son relationship is a relationship of persons not natures.  While it is obvious that Mary gave birth to Jesus in His humanity and that He did not get His deity from her (Anabaptist heresiarch Menno Simons denied that His humanity came from her), Her Son is God, making her the Mother of God, which is essentially the meaning of the phrase St. Elizabeth uses of her, “mother of my Lord” in Luke 1:43.  The sixteenth century Reformers, who all had a High Mariology, would be appalled at the direction evangelicalism has taken since their day. 

[27] That so many evangelicals who did not teach Incarnational Sonship themselves nevertheless defended MacArthur from the charge of heresy when he taught it reveals just how poor a grasp of orthodox Trinitarian doctrine they had.  The Holy Spirit is identified in the Gospels of SS Matthew and Luke as the Agent of Jesus’ conception.  If Jesus Sonship is derived from the Incarnation this would make the Holy Spirit His Father.  This confuses the Persons of the Father and the Holy Spirit ala Sabellianism.  Furthermore, if Jesus was not the Son prior to His Incarnation, the Father was not the Father prior to the Incarnation, because for Him to be the Father requires that He have a Son.  Since the Father is eternally the Father, the Son is eternally the Son, precisely as is confessed in the Nicene Creed and the Athanasian Symbol.

[28] John F. MacArthur Jr. The Gospel According to Jesus (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988).

[29] John W. Robbins was to Gordon H. Clark what Greg Bahsen was to Cornelius Van Til.

[30] https://www.trinityfoundation.org/ journal.php?id=193 

[31] It also tended to view justification by faith alone as being opposed to the sacraments as means of grace.  The sacraments as means of grace is Catholic and not merely Roman, being the doctrine of all the ancient Churches.  That this truth is not in conflict with justification by faith alone can be illustrated by the fact that in the giving of a gift there are two hands involved, the hand of the giver and the hand of the receiver.  The sacraments are the hand of the Giver (God working through His Church), faith is the hand of the receiver.

 

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.