Historical Theology - Sola Scriptura, Sola Fidei: Luther and the Reformation

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Lecture audio: Sola Scriptura, Sola Fidei

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Question: How do we find favor with God?

This has been the driving question of all human religions. Many ancient religions said that we must provide sacrifices to the gods to find their favor, or follow certain rules. By the time of the Protestant Reformation (16th century AD), most Christians in Europe would have given a whole list of answers to that question: “In order to find favor with God, you must be baptized into the church, receive the sacraments, confess any mortal sins to your priest, pay money for spiritual ‘indulgences,’ and then after death proceed through purgatory until you are finally free from sin.” All of these answers came from layers of Christian tradition that had developed over the centuries. Martin Luther, however, began with another question: “What is our ultimate source of authority?” And if the ultimate authority is not layers upon layers of human traditions, then maybe the answers we’ve been giving to the question of how to find God’s favor have been wrong.

The Problem of Christian Authority in the Late Middle Ages

The rule of Christianity, from the very beginning, has been simple: “Jesus is Lord.” It is Christ alone who is the center of our faith, and the Bible is honored because it stands as the first and only authoritative witness to Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. However, the early church never set any clear boundaries on the relationship between later Christian traditions and the Bible, and as the centuries wore on, and fewer and fewer people in Europe were able to read the Bible for themselves, the slowly-developing traditions of the Catholic church became the main authority for Christian faith. This led to a number of problems, not the least of which was the sale of “indulgences”—the teaching (sanctioned by the pope) that if you donated to certain worthy causes, the pope could grant you (or a deceased family member) a free pass through purgatory. The famous catchphrase was, “When a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs.” However, by the 1400s and 1500s, a new generation of scholars were learning Greek and Hebrew, were reading the Bible for themselves, and were finding that many of these Catholic traditions seemed to run against the spirit of the Scriptures themselves. So which one should be given pre-eminence?—the Bible, even though its interpreters now faced the challenge of applying a text that was a millennium-and-a-half old to the contemporary world?—or the traditions of the church, which were assumed to be directed by the active ministry of the Holy Spirit?

Martin Luther

Luther was a Roman Catholic monk who was deeply afflicted with a sense of his own sinfulness. After transitioning into the role of a professor, he began learning Greek and Hebrew and taught courses in the books of Psalms, Galatians, and Romans. He began to be deeply impressed by the power of the Scriptural message, as well as convicted of the ways that it didn’t seem to match up with current Catholic practice. As a way to spark academic debate about these issues, he posted his “95 Theses” on the church door at Wittenburg, Germany—many of his theses attacked the practice of selling indulgences and insisted that the grace of God was an unmerited favor that could only be received as a gift, not earned.

Sola Scriptura (“Scripture Alone”)

Luther looked at the evidence for the two sources of authority: Scripture and tradition; and found that tradition was not matching up to the spirit of the New Testament church as revealed in the Bible. That being the case, tradition could not be considered “inspired” by the Holy Spirit or authoritative in the same way that Scripture was—the Bible had to take precedence. He called this theological rule “Sola Scriptura,” and proceeded to write a complete translation of the Bible into German, so that ordinary Christians around him would finally have access to the Scriptures.

Sola Fidei (“Faith Alone”)

Once the question of authority was settled, Luther went back to the Bible with fresh eyes, to see what the New Testament itself, unencumbered by later interpretations, said about the biggest question of all: how to find favor with God. What Luther found was that the popular-level Catholicism of the Middle Ages seemed to be pointing in the wrong direction. There was nothing in the Bible that made the performance of certain actions on our part the prerequisite of God’s grace. We were expected to be baptized, take communion, and give generously, but these things were not the things that saved us, because it wasn’t anything on our part that could save us. It was God’s grace alone that opened the way for us to receive his favor; and the one and only thing we had to do to receive that gift was to say Yes to it with our whole beings: this is the response of faith. So Luther made this his second rule of faith—“Sola Fidei”—it is faith in Jesus Christ that saves us, and nothing else. Other good actions on our parts are an indicator of whether we actually have that saving faith in Christ, but it is not the acts themselves that grant us favor with God. Jesus has already won that favor for us, completely apart from our actions.

Application

In our Baptist practice, we know that it is not baptism that saves us, or taking communion, or anything like that. However, we still sometimes fall back into the habits of trying to earn favor with God. We sometimes conceive of God as perpetually disappointed or frustrated in us because of our continued struggles with sin; we might picture him as a disapproving father or a meticulous judge keeping careful track of all our transgressions. We need to remind ourselves, day in and day out, that when God looks at us, he sees the righteousness of his own Son; we need to remind ourselves that there is nothing we could possibly do to make him love us more, because he already loves us to an infinite degree.