By Faith Alone
Fall 2022
When Martin Luther finally understood the meaning of Romans 1:17 that, “The just shall live by faith,” he testified that the gates of Paradise opened before him. He felt that he was reborn. From that time forward, his life was a testimony to the doctrine of the gospel that became synonymous with him—justification by faith alone.
Luther’s passion for that truth underscored much of the content of the 95 Theses, published on October 31, 1517. In retrospect, it became the launching of the Protestant Reformation. His experience as a Roman Catholic monk taught him the frustrating futility of trying to follow church teaching by accumulating merits through which to secure God’s favor.
He received a vivid lesson in that futility during a 1511 visit he and another monk made to Rome regarding business for their monastic order. Luther expected that he would find the visit to Rome a boost to his spirituality and piety. Instead, he encountered the crassest corruption. Everything was for sale in Rome, including decrees of indulgences. As he stood at the top of the Scala Santa, the so-called sacred stairs, after climbing them on his knees with the repetition of appropriate prayers at each step, he looked back and wondered whether the promised pardon for his relatives was valid. He wondered whether anything in Rome was valid.
With the truth of justification by faith gripping his soul just a few years later, the principal German Reformer began a war against the heretical idea that not only could Christians contribute their acts of obedience as additions to Christ’s merit but that they must do so. He pointed out the absurdity of the church teaching that not even the most virtuous life could escape the requirement for millions of years in the fictitious place Purgatory.
According to that heresy, no one could be certain of having done enough good works to make justification final. But the church taught, despite that uncertainty, that the people still had to do good works as a supplement to the grace of justification. Luther, however, laid the groundwork for the statements of Protestant confessions in the ensuing generations that underscored the truth that justification is entirely the act of God’s free grace, and that believers receive justification solely through faith.
On the bedrock of that gospel truth, the proclaimers of Reformation theology have taken their stand for centuries. False religion, however, never sleeps. During the 20th century and into the 21st century, professing Protestants in some quarters have suggested that Luther and the other Reformers erred in their definition of justification. Some have begun to insist that good works are a necessary complement to God’s decree of pardon for sin.
The Protestant Reformers understood that the gracious act of God in declaring His people righteous in His sight did not provide those people the license to behave as reprobates. Reformation leaders urged those under their charge to follow the Scriptures. Such urgings, however, did not amount to the repudiation of gospel truth. The Reformers were clear. The good works of believers in Christ were not the cause of their justification; they were the result of it. Their position was far from the efforts in more recent times to undermine the gospel message with the goal of returning Christianity to the religion of merit.
The Council of Trent (1545-1563) was Roman Catholicism’s response to the Protestant Reformation. That council was part of the movement that historians have designated the Counter-Reformation. The declarations of the Council of Trent codified Roman Catholic teachings on the subjects that the Protestant Reformers highlighted. Several statements in particular targeted Martin Luther who died the year after the Council of Trent began its sporadic meetings. The first statement on justification, Canon 9, set the ground for other statements that followed. “If any one saith, that by faith alone the impious is justified; in such wise as to mean, that nothing else is required to co-operate in order to the obtaining the grace of justification and that it is not in any way necessary, that he be prepared and disposed by the movement of his own will; let him be anathema.”
Additional statements expanded the Council’s position and extended the reach of the anathemas. Roman Catholicism maintained those statements through the centuries that followed, even in the so-called ecumenical council that the world knows as Vatican II (1962-1965). The division between the Protestant Reformers with the confessions that expounded their work and the steadfast adherence to the traditional Roman Catholic position could not be any clearer.
The persistent Roman Catholic efforts to undermine the doctrine of justification by faith alone began to produce fruit during the 19th century and gained growing impetus during the 20th and 21st centuries. Paul M. Elliott, the director of Teaching the Word Ministries in Manchester, MD defends the biblical gospel of justification by faith alone. He publishes printed materials along with audio and video, including a radio and Internet ministry. In his book Christianity and Neo-Liberalism, he described what he called, “the neo-liberal pseudo-gospel of justification by faith-plus-works.” “It teaches that justification is not a once-for-all judicial act of God, but unfinished business whose outcome depends on the believer’s obedience. It teaches that justification is not brought about solely by the unilateral action of God. In this false gospel, the sinner does not come to God empty-handed, either at conversion or at the Judgment, because faith is not mere belief. Faith, according to this pseudo-gospel, is really faithfulness.”1
Elliott continued, “This false gospel teaches that God’s ‘not guilty’ verdict remains an open question until the Day of Judgment. On that day, say the neo-liberals, the Lord Jesus Christ does not at the outset openly acknowledge those who were declared not guilty at their conversion, by placing them at His right hand and giving them the inheritance of a kingdom that is rightfully theirs in Him. No, in the neo-liberal teaching Jesus evaluates men’s works on the Last Day for the purpose of making the final decision as to their eternal destiny.”2
A companion effort to revise the doctrine of justification by faith alone is what some call a New Perspective on Paul. There are differences between the main versions of this teaching. However, there is in any case the attempt to redefine the terms of justification away from faith alone in Christ to a substitute emphasis on union with Christ through the application of water baptism. Such efforts reflect the drift back to the experience of the early centuries of church history. The apostles warned against the efforts that they knew would arise to dilute and even replace the gospel of justification by faith alone.
While those whom the apostles trained directly were active, there was a restraint against the incursions of heretical views. When the so-called Apostolic Fathers were off the scene, however, some who succeeded them became more interested in what it meant to be Christian instead of what it meant to be a Christian. There was a shift away from Christian theology and the doctrine of salvation to the ethical concerns of doing good works and the way in which those good works gained favor with God.
The fear that the apostolic doctrine of justification by faith alone would encourage laxity in Christian behavior produced increasing emphasis on the necessity to do good works, not as evidence of faith but as productive of it. The apostles of Christ inveighed against such false gospels. Paul argued in Galatians 2:16, “Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.”
Against the departures from the true gospel that Paul expounded in that text, he, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, leveled anathemas that extended so far as to any departure that even Paul or any of his colleagues would make from the truth. Nevertheless, the ensuing centuries yielded the deepening spiritual darkness into which Martin Luther was born and in which he sought the way of acceptance with God.
When the light of gospel truth dawned in his soul, he resolved to challenge the false gospel so that others could live in the liberty of justification by faith alone. Such was the stirring effect that the truth of the gospel had on his enlightened mind that he took his pen to add a personal note in the margin next to his copy of Romans 1:17—Sola Fide! Faith Alone! Let this Reformation remembrance, 505 years after Luther posted his 95 Theses, encourage Christ’s people to renew their commitment to the truth that justification is by faith alone.
Rev. David Mook | Retired minister