Faith alone

 October 28, 2021 (Thursday)

 

Sunday is Reformation Day. It’s when Protestants mark when Martin Luther nailed the 95 Thesis to the church door in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. However, there is a lot of history most of us have not tracked. For instance, nailing notices to church doors was like the public bulletin board. Luther’s objective was to purify the Roman church from its excesses and corruption. Meanwhile, the Pope was trying to raise money to build St. Peter’s Basilica.

 

The Reformation was born during the cultural shift called the “Enlightenment” when the general population was moving away from the superstition of the dark ages. In fact, the motto of the Reformation was “post tenebras lux” (after darkness light). The Reformation essentially was politically driven. Many of the Saxon (German) princes wanted to break away from the “Holy Roman Empire” and rule themselves. This gave rise to more than a century of off and on civil war. The main Saxon princes, who protected Luther (Fredrick the Wise and John the Constant) remained Catholic.

 

Not to be missed is the fact that Luther did not happen in a theological void. Before him were reformers such as Waldo, Wycliffe, and Huss. In fact, there were reformed church already in existence in Moravia and Bohemia (Czech). Concurrent (and independent) to Luther were Calvin and Zwingli. What sparked Luther, and Huss, into action was the sale of indulgences. Indulgences were means of buying forgiveness for your (or a loved ones) sin; effectively buying your way into heaven. Indulgences were basically fund-raisers for crusades and building things like St. Peter’s Basilica.

 

Eventually, Luther and those that followed formulated what has been called the five solas. They started with grace alone, faith alone, and Christ alone. Eventually Scripture alone and the glory of God alone were added. The presupposition of “sola” (alone) is the shift in theology between Roman Catholics and Protestants. The question is who are you going to trust? The infallible Word of God or the claimed infallible human organization called the church?

 

When Martin Luther was studying the book of Romans, he read, “For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.” [Romans 1:17 ESV] In the margin of the Bible he wrote, “sola.” Let’s see if we can understand the first (historically) of the sola’s.

 

The righteousness of God is referring to how God makes us righteous. The “gospel” (meaning “good news”) has the ability to save us. “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” [Romans 1:16 ESV] The gospel is that Jesus died to save sinners, the rose in victory from the grave, and will someday return in glory to set all wrongs right. Okay, you can tweak the language and details. The essence is death, resurrection, and return.

 

The way to acquire this salvation is through belief. This might be hard for us to understand but Jesus stated, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.” [John 3:36 ESV] There are two points in this verse. Belief means eternal life and disobedience means eternal wrath. If you think about it, that’s a very low standard.

 

Getting back to Romans 1:17, the Greek is clearer than the English. The idea is that we are saved through faith “from start to finish” (“from faith to faith”). In other words, we are saved when we believe and we continue in faith to be saved… from start to finish. NOTHING ELSE is possible (sola) or needed. If anything else were possible or needed to be added, it would negate the whole need, effectiveness, and sufficiency for faith.

 

What Luther noticed is that Paul never mentions anything else in respect to salvation. If something else were necessary then Paul would have stated it. Sounds simple enough to understand.