Faith Alone

The Evangelical Doctrine of Justification

R. C. Sproul

• Publisher: Baker Books
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN: 9780801019494
• eBook ISBN: 9781441236869
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

A leading theologian explains the biblical doctrine of justification by faith alone and urges fellow evangelicals to embrace this classic Protestant teaching.

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1

Light in the Darkness

In the old city of Geneva, Switzerland, there is a lovely park adjacent to the University of Geneva, close to the church where John Calvin preached and taught daily. The park contains a lasting memorial to the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. The central feature is a magnificent wall adorned with statues of John Calvin, John Knox, Huldrych Zwingli, Theodore Beza, and others. Chiseled into the stone are the Latin words Post tenebras lux (After darkness, light).

These words capture the driving force of the Reformation. The darkness referred to is the eclipse of the gospel that occurred in the late Middle Ages. A gradual darkening of the gospel reached its nadir, and the light of the New Testament doctrine of justification by faith alone was all but extinguished.

The firestorm of the Reformation was fueled by the most volatile issue ever debated in church history. The church had faced severe crises in the past, especially in the fourth and fifth centuries when the nature of Christ was at stake. The Arian heresy of the fourth century culminated in the Council of Nicea and the subsequent confession, the Nicene Creed. The fifth century witnessed the church’s struggle against the monophysite and Nestorian heresies that resulted in the Council of Chalcedon and its clear declaration of the humanity and deity of Christ. Since Nicea and Chalcedon the ecumenical decisions of these councils have served as bench marks for historic Christian orthodoxy. The doctrines of the Trinity and the union of Christ’s divine and human natures have since been regarded, almost universally, as essential tenets of the Christian faith.

Every generation throughout church history has seen doctrinal struggles and debates. Heresies of every conceivable sort have plagued the church and provoked fierce argument, even schism at times.

But no doctrinal dispute has ever been contested more fiercely or with such long-term consequences as the one over justification. There were other ancillary issues debated in the sixteenth century, but none so central or so heated as justification.

Historians often describe justification as the material cause of the Reformation. That is, it was the substantive and core issue of the debate. It was this doctrine that led to the worst rupture Christendom ever experienced and the fragmentation of the church into thousands of individual denominations.

How could a dispute over one doctrine cause so many splinters and provoke so much hostility? Was it simply a case of conflict between contentious, obstreperous, bellicose theologians, inclined to wage war over trivial matters? Was it a case of repeated misunderstandings leading to a tempest in a teapot, much ado about nothing?

We know how Martin Luther felt about the controversy. Luther called justification by faith alone “the article upon which the church stands or falls” (articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae). This strong assertion of the central importance of justification was linked to Luther’s identification of justification by faith alone (sola fide) with the gospel. The “good news” of the New Testament includes not only an announcement of the person of Christ and his work in our behalf, but a declaration of how the benefits of Christ’s work are appropriated by, in, and for the believer.

The issue of how justification and salvation are received became the paramount point of debate. Luther’s insistence on sola fide was based on the conviction that the “how” of justification is integral and essential to the gospel itself. He viewed justification by faith alone as necessary and essential to the gospel and to salvation.

Since the gospel stands at the heart of Christian faith, Luther and other Reformers regarded the debate concerning justification as one involving an essential truth of Christianity, a doctrine no less essential than the Trinity or the dual natures of Christ. Without the gospel the church falls. Without the gospel the church is no longer the church.

The logic followed by the Reformers is this:

1. Justification by faith alone is essential to the gospel.
2. The gospel is essential to Christianity and to salvation.
3. The gospel is essential to a church’s being a true church.
4. To reject justification by faith alone is to reject the gospel and to fall as a church.

The Reformers concluded that when Rome rejected and condemned sola fide, it condemned itself, in effect, and ceased to be a true church. This precipitated the creation of new communions or denominations seeking to continue biblical Christianity and to be true churches with a true gospel. They sought to rescue the gospel from the impending danger of total eclipse.

The eclipse metaphor is helpful. An eclipse of the sun does not destroy the sun. An eclipse obscures the light of the sun. It brings darkness where there was light. The Reformation sought to remove the eclipse so that the light of the gospel could once again shine in its full brilliance, being perceived with clarity.

That the gospel shined brilliantly in the sixteenth century is not much disputed among people who identify themselves as Evangelicals. The life of the Protestant church in the sixteenth century was not perfect, but the revival of godliness in that era is a matter of record that attests to the power of the gospel when viewed in full light.

Evangelical Distinctives

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Evangelicals are called Evangelicals for a reason. That reason may change as words undergo a fluid evolution through variations of usage over time and in various cultural settings. Language changes. Words undergo sometimes radical, sometimes subtle changes in nuance and meaning. The science of lexicography is cognizant of such change. Lexicographers pay attention chiefly to two factors in the process of defining words. The first is etymology or derivation. We search for the original roots of words and their historic meanings to gain insight into present usage. Since words and their meanings can and often do change, however, it is not enough merely to examine a word’s root to discover its current meaning. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, chief architect of Linguistic Analysis, argued that words must be understood in terms of their contemporary or “customary” usage.

Words are a part of the customs of a people. Words change their meanings as the people change. Take, for example, the word scan. If I tell my students to scan the textbook, what would they understand their assignment to be? Most would understand that they need only skim lightly over the material.

Historically the word scan meant to examine closely with fixed attention to detail. The word still carries that idea with respect to the task of air-traffic controllers. The radar scan is not a loose skimming of planes in the air. A brain scan done by a physician is likewise not a casual, “once over” viewing.

The word scan sounds enough like the word skim for people to begin confusing the two. In this confusion the term scan began to be used to refer to a process that means the very opposite of the word’s original meaning. So what is the correct “meaning” of scan? Most modern lexicographers, because of the confusion in the term’s contemporary usage, would probably cite both meanings.

I labor the point of language because the meaning of the word evangelical is not immune from such fluid development, change, and confusion. The etymology of evangelical is simple. It comes from the Greek word euangelion, or “evangel,” which is the New Testament word for gospel. Historically the term evangelical meant literally “gospeler.” It was a term used by Protestants who identified with the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone.

If the Reformation had two chief causes, a formal and a material cause, historic Evangelicalism has the same two causes. The formal cause of the Reformation was declared in the formula sola Scriptura, meaning that the only source of special written revelation that has the authority to bind the conscience absolutely is the Bible. The material cause was declared by the formula sola fide, meaning that justification is by faith alone.

Fig. 1.1
Doctrinal Causes of the Reformation

		Formal Cause	Material Cause
	Latin Name	Sola Scriptura	Sola fide
	Translation	Scripture alone	Faith alone
	Explanation	Scripture is the sole authority in doctrinal matters.	Justification is by grace along through faith alone.

Over the centuries Evangelicalism became manifest in a wide variety of forms. Manifold denominations emerged with individual doctrinal distinctives. Protestants were divided over a host of theological points, including the sacraments, church government, and worship. We have seen divergent views of soteriology and eschatology—Arminianism, Calvinism, Lutheranism, dispensationalism, and many other “isms”—all flying under the generic banner of Evangelicalism.

The term evangelical served as a unifying genus to capture under one heading a wide assortment of species. The two prominent doctrines that served as the cohesive forces of evangelical unity were the authority of the Bible and justification by faith alone. Though Protestants historically were divided over many issues, they were united on these two points as well as in their affirmation of the main tenets found in such ecumenical creeds as the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the formulas of Chalcedon.

Protestant Liberalism

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The unity of Evangelicalism came under attack and began to disintegrate in the nineteenth century. The use of post-Enlightenment modernism reached a crescendo with the advent of nineteenth-century liberal theology. Nineteenth-century liberalism refers not merely to open-mindedness or anything so vague. It refers to a specific school of thought that departed systematically from historic Christianity. The writings of David Strauss, Wilhelm Wrede, Adolf Harnack, Albrecht Ritschl, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and others belong to this movement. Christianity was desupernaturalized, the Bible as divinely inspired revelation was rejected, and the gospel was reduced to a matter of values, ethics, or social concern. The so-called Social Gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch and others shifted attention away from personal reconciliation to God via redemption from personal guilt and punishment, and toward social and cultural renewal.

The fundamentalist-modernist controversy early in the twentieth century was marked by a fierce struggle concerning the faith and mission of the church.

During this century the term evangelical began to be used not so much as a synonym for Protestant but to distinguish between liberal and conservative Protestants, between modernist and fundamentalist Protestants. The two doctrines of biblical authority and justification by faith alone were tenaciously maintained as vital elements of twentieth-century Evangelicalism.

With the increasing spread of liberalism, however, particularly through the so-called mainline denominations, the term evangelical began to assume an added nuance. An Evangelical was now someone who believes in personal salvation via personal faith, as distinguished from a salvation that is understood chiefly in social or cultural terms. Personal evangelism became a point of emphasis for Evangelicals. For many the word evangelical now began to serve as a synonym for evangelistic.

For several decades Evangelicals seemed suspicious about the church’s involvement in social, cultural, and political matters, stressing instead the church’s evangelistic mission. An unnatural split occurred between personal and social concerns in the mission of the church. Social action was now the “liberal” agenda and “personal evangelism” the conservative agenda.

The descriptive phrase “born-again Christian” came into vogue. Though historic Christianity had uniformly confessed the need of fallen sinners to be regenerated by the Holy Spirit as requisite for conversion to Christianity, some professing Christians now distinguished themselves by the term “born-again Christian.”

This phrase highlights the confusion provoked by nineteenth-century liberalism with respect to the nature of Christianity and with respect to what it means to be a Christian.

Historically the phrase “born-again Christian” sounds like a kind of stuttering. It is redundant. Classical theology would argue that because regeneration is necessary to one’s being a Christian, there is no such thing as an unregenerate (non-born-again) Christian. Likewise, because the rebirth in view refers to the Holy Spirit’s changing a person from a sinner to a believer, there is no such thing a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Foreword
• 1. Light in the Darkness
• 2. Evangelicals and Catholics: Together or in Dialogue?
• 3. Watershed at Worms
• 4. Justification and Faith
• 5. Imputed Righteousness: The Evangelical Doctrine
• 6. Infused Righteousness: The Catholic Doctrine
• 7. Merit and Grace
• 8. Faith and Works
• 9. No Other Gospel
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Latin Glossary
• General Index
• Index of Persons
• Index of Scripture
• About the Author
• Other Books by Author
• Back Cover