What Is Reformed Theology? with R. C. Sproul, Faith Alone Part 1, 4

Sola Fide and the Reformation Controversy

As we continue our study on the basic themes of Reformed theology, you'll recall that in our last session we looked at the formal principle of the Protestant Reformation, the doctrine of sola scriptura.

And today we're going to look at what the historians call the material cause of the Reformation, the central controversy over which the whole debate raged, which was the doctrine of sola fide. And the term sola fide contains this sola again, which means alone, and fide is the word for faith coming from fidelis.

We remember the Marine Corps motto, Semper Fi or Semper Fidelis, or the hymn Adeste Fidelis, or Come All Ye Faithful. Sola fide means faith alone, and this was the central assertion of Martin Luther that provoked the serious controversy of the 16th century.

And he was speaking to the question, how is a person justified in the sight of God? Now before we give a brief exposition of the doctrine of justification by faith alone, I want to take a few moments to recap for you the urgency that the magisterial reformers felt about this issue.

They did not think that the debate over justification was an argument over some fine point of theology whereby theologians get together and nitpick over secondary issues and so on, but they were convinced of not only the truth of justification by faith alone, but also believed that it was of critical importance.

Luther said that justification by faith alone is the article upon which the church stands or falls. Now we could view that from the vantage point of the 20th century perhaps as an exaggeration or as an overstatement, but I'm just mentioning at this point that it was clearly Luther's conviction that this doctrine was so important because it touched the very heart and soul of the Gospel itself.

And again, it is Luther's contention that justification is the article upon which the church stands or falls, and it's the article upon which we stand or fall because it is the article that we understand that reveals to us how we are redeemed.

Calvin took a similar view of the importance of the doctrine. He used a different metaphor. He said that justification by faith alone is the hinge upon which everything in the Christian life turns. In our own day, J .I. Packer in his preface to Buchanan's 19th century work on justification used another striking metaphor where he likened the doctrine of justification by faith alone to the mythological figure of Atlas whose task it was to bear the world on his shoulders.

And what Dr. Packer was saying with this analogy was just as Atlas is required to hold up the world, so the doctrine of justification by faith alone is that which holds everything else up. Well, the controversy as we know flared and ended in perhaps the most, not perhaps, but certainly the most serious fragmentation of Christendom in the history of the church and became the most volatile controversy of all time.

Luther on the Centrality of Justification

Now again before I get into an exposition of it, I'd like to read a comment that Martin Luther, a couple of comments from Luther. First of all, an expanded comment of his view of the importance of it, and then second, a comment that referred in later years of Luther's life to his profound concern that the recovery of the biblical doctrine of justification by faith alone would be short-lived.

First his expanded comment on the importance of it. He says,. This doctrine is the head and the cornerstone. It alone begets, nourishes, builds, preserves, and defends the church of God, and without it the church of God cannot exist for one hour.

And again he said, The article of justification is the master and prince, the lord, the ruler, and the judge over all kinds of doctrines. It preserves and governs all church doctrine and raises up our conscience before God.

Without this article the world is utter death and darkness. No error is so mean, so clumsy, and so outworn as not to be supremely pleasing to human reason and to seduce us if we are without the knowledge and the contemplation of this article.

And then, as I said in his later life, he made this observation. There are few who know and understand this article, and I treat it again and again because I greatly fear that after we have laid our head to rest it will soon be forgotten and will again disappear.

And indeed we cannot grasp or exhaust Christ, the eternal righteousness, with one sermon or thought, for to learn to appreciate Him is an everlasting lesson which we shall not be able to finish either in this or in yonder life.

Why Justification by Faith Alone Matters So Deeply

Now if I can add my own personal observation to those of Luther, Calvin, and Packer it would be this, that I think that the doctrine of justification by faith alone of all of the doctrines of systematic theology is relatively easy to grasp with the mind.

It's not that complicated or so arcane or obtuse that only specialized experts in the field of theology can grasp. But to get the doctrine from our heads into our bloodstreams is another matter altogether because it is one thing to understand a doctrine.

It is another thing to have it be the controlling aspect of the faith by which we live before God. And another thing I want to say before we proceed to an exposition is that we are not saved by a doctrine.

It's not faith in the doctrine of justification by faith alone that is what redeems a person. It is the content to which the doctrine points that is so central and crucial to our salvation. Well again we ask why.

The fundamental question that the doctrine of justification is trying to answer and succeeds in that attempt is the question, how can an unjust person ever survive the final judgment of a just and holy God?

And as soon as we ask that question we see instantly why it is a matter of great importance, not just a question of dotting I's and crossing T's in passing an exam in systematic theology, but it is the question of how are we to stand before God?

We remember David's anguish and pathos and poignancy in his question, O Lord, if Thou should mark iniquities, who would stand? And it was a rhetorical question because David understood the answer to that question.

He was experiencing something that we all should experience the moment our conscience alarms us to the presence of sin in our lives. He said, O God, if you keep a record, if you keep track, and if you bring this into the judgment, who can stand?

And the answer is obviously what? No one can stand. I just had a conversation yesterday with a friend of mine who is Jewish, and he was asking me questions about Christianity and wanted to know what's the basic difference between the Christian faith and his own religious background.

And I said to him, What do you do with your guilt? And he began to fumble around and he said, Well, I guess I just have to keep trying harder to obey the laws, to keep kosher, and to repent when I do wrong, and so on.

And then I went on beyond that and I said, Okay, how is God going to forgive you if no atonement has been made for you other than the sacrifices of bulls and goats? And that led us into a lengthy discussion of what the Gospel proclaims at its heart because the good news is that God, according to the Apostle Paul, is both just and justifier of sinful people.

God as Both Just and Justifier

Now let's look at those concepts as they are put together, that God is both just and justifier. Now both of these concepts have to be clear in our mind if we're going to understand the Gospel of the New Testament.

The Gospel does not say that God simply unilaterally declares forgiveness to everybody in the world. Certainly the doctrine of justification includes the doctrine of divine mercy and of the remission of sins.

That's very important to us, and it sets forth before our eyes a God who is a forgiving God. But I remember when I was a student in the Netherlands that I had great difficulty trying to learn a foreign language in which to do my doctoral studies, and one of the biggest problems I had with the language is the same kind of problem we all have when we learn other languages, and it's the problem of learning the peculiar idioms of a nation or of a particular language.

Somebody was talking to me the other day, and he said, Well, I don't make any bones about that. And one of the people who was standing nearby was a guest in this country. He had learned English, and he was just completely befuddled by that expression, make no bones about it.

He said, What in the world does that mean? And we had to explain the nuances of that strange idiom. Well, one of the idioms that threw me when I was in Holland was an idiom that was used by one of my professors when he was talking about how God responds to the sin of human beings, and he said, God does not look at sin through His fingers.

And that stopped me in my tracks. I said, I have no idea what he's talking about. God doesn't look at our sin through His fingers. And it wasn't until much later when I was trying to practice learning vocabulary by reading Perry Mason novels in Dutch that I read a little episode in a Perry Mason case where a policeman was talking to a man who was illegally parked, but there was an urgent reason for it, and the policeman was talking to the man about another matter and wanted the man to accompany him somewhere.

And the man said, Well, I can't keep my car here. You're going to give me a ticket for parking this way. And the policeman said, Oh, don't worry about it. I'll look at it through my fingers. Ah. So we use the expression to wink at it.

And the point is is that when God in His mercy offers forgiveness to those of us who are guilty before Him, the whole process of divine forgiveness does not mean that God simply winks at our sin and therefore and thereby compromises His own righteous character or His justice.

His way of justifying guilty people is worked out from all eternity in such a manner that God Himself remains just. But again that brings us back to the original question. If God is just and I am not just and I have to face His just judgment, how can I possibly stand?

What I am in need of most desperately for all eternity is to be justified. Now what the Bible says is that God is both just and the justifier. So that however He works out His justification, He does it without compromising His own justice.

And the second point here that is so crucial is that it is God who does the justifying. Now that's not difficult to understand, but the implications are clear aren't they? If it is God who is the one who justifies, what does that say about my ability to justify myself?

I can't do anything to justify myself, nor can anyone else justify me in this world, nor can the church justify me. It is God and God alone who can pronounce the final verdict of my justification or my lack of it.

So in the first instance the reformers of the sixteenth century insisted that justification is forensic. And so they were teaching what is called forensic justification. Now this term is a term that is not commonly used in the church.

The most frequent place where we hear references to forensics is in criminal trials on Perry Mason or the O .J. Simpson trial or something where we hear about forensic pathology or forensic evidence or we have state forensics that involve competition in debate and public speaking and so on.

Because the term forensic here has to do with some kind of announcement or pronouncement in the arena of law. So when we talk about justifications being forensic we mean by that that in the final analysis God justifies us when He declares, pronounces that in His sight we are considered, deemed, or regarded as just.

So forensic justification involves God's declaration of a person's being just in His sight. And as I say it is a legal declaration by which God declares a person just. Now I used a string of words a moment ago that I want to elaborate on.

I said He judges us, declares us, or deems us, or reckons us, or counts us as just. Now to get a hold of that we have to do a little foray now into some simple Latin that we've explained in other courses, but we'll take the time to do it again.

It is Luther's summation of the sum and substance of the doctrine of justification by faith alone in his famous slogan simul justus et peccator. Simul is the word from which we get the English simultaneous.

Justus is the word for just. Et is the word for and. Peccator we get the word from the word impeccable or peccadillo and so on is the word for sinner. So what Luther is saying is that in the doctrine of justification by faith alone what is happening here is that those who are justified are at the same time just and sinner.

Now Luther's not engaging in contradiction here. He doesn't mean that we're just and sinner at the same time and in the same relationship. In other words it's a different sense that we are just from the sense in which we are sinner.

Now the good news of the Gospel according to Luther is precisely at this point that what Luther is saying is that the glory of the Gospel is that God pronounces people just while they are still sinners, that He declares a person to be righteous in His sight and before His law when under analysis they are still sinners.

Now it is that judgment of declaring somebody just who in and of themselves is not just that creates so much of the controversy over the doctrine and has led some critics of the Reformation to say that the Reformers postulated a legal fiction that has God guilty of lying, saying that somebody is righteous when in fact they are not.

Abraham Counted Righteous and Christ as the Ground of Justification

But the biblical concept of justification rests upon God's reckoning or counting people to be something that in and of themselves they are not. It reaches all the way back to the book of Genesis, to the fifteenth chapter of Genesis when God made certain promises to the patriarch Abraham.

And the author of Genesis tells us that Abraham believed God and it was counted to him for righteousness. And what Paul speaks of in the New Testament is this same concept by which God accounts or reckons people who put their trust in Christ as being just not because their faith atones for all of their sins or because their faith is such a supreme form of righteousness that it covers all of our unrighteousness, but rather the reason why God counts us righteous is because of the work of Christ in our behalf.

And so I conclude this introduction to the doctrine of justification, which we'll continue in our next session, by saying that really the expression justification by faith alone is theological shorthand for justification by Christ alone because the fundamental issue is this.

On the basis of whose righteousness does God declare anyone just? And the Reformation answered that clearly, that the only grounds by which God will ever view me as being righteous is the grounds of somebody else's righteousness, the righteousness of Christ.