Category: The Five Solae

Have you ever had someone take credit for your work? Maybe you had a boss claim your team’s innovation as his own to gain a promotion. Maybe you remember that group project in school where that one group member did little of the work – only to take much of the credit when it was time to present.

As frustrating as these occasions are on their own, they’re made more frustrating by the fact that the people taking credit for others’ work sometimes won’t even realize they’re doing it. Sometimes, a person genuinely thinks he came up with the innovation, idea, or did the work when he clearly didn’t. Sometimes, we’re no exception to this blindness. As people, we have a tendency of making ourselves the heroes of our own stories.

And as Christians, we have a tendency of making ourselves the heroes of our own story. After the baptism of someone who’s professed faith, we are quick to say, “Congratulations!” We are slow to say, “Praise God!” How many of our contemporary worship songs focus more on our feelings or thoughts or imaginations than on what God has done? But this isn’t just a problem for the contemporary church. Go back one hundred years and count the number of songs about a heavenly mansion, receiving a crown, or streets of gold. Go way back and look at the way James and John asked to sit on thrones beside Jesus – only to be told that the “great among you must be your servant” (Mark 10:43).

If we know by scripture alone that we are saved by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, then it’s clear that glory belongs to God alone. God is the subject of our salvation. Any glory we have is participatory glory, glory that shares the divine glory of God. It’s not a glory we can manufacture. And it’s not a glory for which we can take credit.

Worship in the heavenly throne room in Revelation is very different from what many of us expect. Instead of glorying in the crowns they receive, the elders cast their crowns before the throne and say, “Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power.” God is worthy because God “created all things” (Revelation 4:11).

And God is worthy because in Jesus Christ, God descended from glory and became one of us for us. Jesus is glorified because he exemplified his own teaching that the great must become the servant. Jesus is glorified because by his blood he “ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation” (Revelation 5:9). Indeed, “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing” (Revelation 5:12)!

Glory to God alone, now and forever! Amen.

One of my wife’s “favorite” memories from growing up as a Christian youth in the ‘90s is the Audio Adrenaline song “DC-10”:

If a DC-10 ever fell on your head,

Laying in the ground all messy and dead…

Do you know where you’re gonna go?

Straight to Heaven? Or down the hole?

From this twenty-five-year-old song, to the revivals of two hundred years ago that started our denomination, to the “Hell Houses” of last month – many well-meaning (though sometimes questionable) evangelistic efforts have asked the question: “Do you know where you will go if you died tonight?” It’s so common, many of us probably think that personal assurance about where we will go after death is a basic mark of being “saved.”

Yet this question, if asked to even a faithful Christian in Europe in the early 16^th century, would not prompt assurance – it would provoke fear. Luther spent most of his monastic life dreading the righteous judgment of a holy God. The Church of Luther’s day certainly taught grace. You received grace at baptism, through the Eucharist, the other sacraments, prayers, good works, etc. But whether or not an individual had accumulated enough grace to attain salvation upon death was anyone’s guess! The Council of Trent, formed by the Roman Catholic Church as a response to the Reformation in 1547, put it this way:

If anyone says that man is absolved from his sins and justified because he firmly believes that he is absolved and justified, or that no one is truly justified except him who believes himself justified, and that by this faith alone absolution and justification are effected, let him be anathema.

When Luther looked at himself and asked if he had received enough grace to find salvation, he saw only wretchedness and the fear of eternal damnation. Yet in Scripture, he found the only way of receiving saving grace: “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” (Ephesians 2:8)

The unmerited grace of God is the only reason for salvation. And this unmerited grace is received through faith – through believing and trusting – that God has actually done what God has said he has done. Martin Luther found the way to peace and assurance with God through this faith: “The law says, ‘Do this,’ and it is never done. Grace says, ‘Believe in this,’ and everything is already done.” (Heidelberg Disputation, 1518)

For Cumberland Presbyterians, faith is neither a “good work” nor a way to “merit salvation,” but it is a “response to God, prompted by the Holy Spirit, wherein persons rely solely upon God’s grace in Jesus Christ for salvation.” (Confession of Faith, 4.08-09) Faith itself is a gift from God, not of ourselves. And it is through this gift of faith alone whereby we can have assurance that everything needed for our salvation by grace alone has already been accomplished in Christ Jesus alone. Glory to God alone, now and forever! Amen.

“What is truth?”

In thinking of “fake news” over the past year, many of us have probably asked that ancient question – especially since we cannot agree on what even constitutes “fake news.” But when Pilate said these words to Jesus (John 18:38), he did not realize that he was staring at the Truth himself (14:6) – the Word of God made flesh (1:1-14) – the answer to his question. By his education, he had been trained to ask this question, a deeply human question, and to uncover the answer by dialogue and reason. He missed that the man he was about to hand over to be executed was God’s own demonstration for him of the Truth.

For Christians, Jesus Christ is the Truth of God in the flesh. But there was some disagreement at the time of the Reformation in how we approach or understand this Truth. Four years after Martin Luther mailed his Ninety-Five Theses to his archbishop, he was on trial. The pope himself had pronounced that there were errors in his writings, and several of them had been banned. At the Diet of Worms in 1721, Luther’s works were laid out on a table in front of him, and he was asked to recant. His famous reply:

Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. Here I stand, I can do no other. God help me. Amen.

For Luther, the only completely trustworthy way of knowing what’s true about the Truth – Jesus Christ – was through the Bible. This was the “formal” cause of the Reformation, the reason Luther thought that his teachings were justified. The ancient councils were important for understanding the Truth. The church was essential for coming to know the Truth. But the teachings of councils and the church must be measured against the teachings of Scripture.

Three hundred years after Luther, the founders of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church used Scripture as their justification for breaking away from the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.: “All church-power however exercised, is ministerial and declarative only; that is, the Holy Scriptures are the only infallible rule of faith and practice.” (Introduction to 1883 Confession) This is carried on in our current Confession when we say that the Bible is “the authoritative guide for Christian living” because “the authority of the scriptures is founded on the truth contained in them and the voice of God speaking through them.” (1.05-06) We do not interpret Scripture alone – we need the help of the church, other Christians, the ancient councils, and especially the illumination of the Holy Spirit – but when justified by the teaching of Scripture, we hold that even one person can help correct the whole church.

When I teach classes about the history of Presbyterianism in America, I like to use a chart that outlines the different denominations and when they were formed: the schisms, the occasional unifications, the schisms-within-schisms. It’s complex.

Someday, I’ll lay this chart out for Will, but I’ll have to wait for him to get over his fear of spider webs. There’s a great cartoon of a similar chart on a chalkboard in a classroom with the teacher saying: “So this is where our movement came along and finally got the Bible right.”

“Jesus is so lucky to have us.”

Almost five hundred years and somewhere around 30,000 new denominations later, we are still talking about what Martin Luther did on “All Hallows’ Eve” (the day before All Saints’ Day) in 1517. On the door of All Saints’ chapel at the University of Wittenburg, Luther posted a protest of the Church: “Disputation on the Power of Indulgences” or the “Ninety-Five Theses.”

The background to this event was complex, and the Reformation of the Church that swept Europe over the next 130 years was even more complex. But the predominant issue on Luther’s mind on that date was the sale of “indulgences.” The understanding of grace by the Church at the time was an incremental one. You received grace for your original sin and all of your other sins at baptism. Sins after baptism needed more grace, and you received this grace within the church through the seven sacraments – especially the regular sacraments of communion and confession. The Church taught that if you died with minor (or “venial”) sins, your soul had to be purified in Purgatory to make you holy enough to enter Heaven. But there was another way to “spring” your soul – or the soul of a loved one – out of Purgatory. You could buy an “indulgence,” and the Church would absolve the sin.

Luther objected to this as something not found in Holy Scripture. In 1521, he was excommunicated, but the shockwaves were already spreading throughout Europe. Indeed, they reverberate to Cumberland Presbyterians today. Luther’s protest within the Church became the Protestant Reformation.

It is certainly right to mourn the schism of the last half-millennium, and we should, like Christ, desire the unity of the whole Church. Yet, it is also right for us to lovingly pursue the truth of the gospel as revealed in Holy Scripture. In trying to understand how we got here, Derek and I will be looking at the five summary statements, the “Five Solae,” for why Protestants broke away from the Roman Church. We will look at the “formal cause” – sola scriptura, Scripture alone – which was how Luther justified himself in protesting the teachings of the Church at all. And we will look at the content of his protest itself, that we are saved sola fide, sola gratia, solus Christus, soli Deo gloria –  through faith alone, by grace alone, in Christ alone, to the glory of God alone. May Christ bless his Church and help us to better understand his gospel. Amen.