Faith Alone---The Doctrine of Justification

Thomas R. Schreiner, Matthew Barrett

• Verlag: Zondervan Academic
• Jahr: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780310515791
• Thema: Theology & Religion
• Thema: History of Christianity

Renowned biblical scholar Thomas Schreiner looks at the historical and biblical roots of the doctrine of justification and offers an updated defense of this pillar of Reformed theology.

Reinvigorating one of the five great declarations of the Reformation— sola fide —Schreiner:

• Summarizes the history of the doctrine, looking at the early church and the writings of several of the Reformers.
• Walks readers through an examination of the key biblical texts in the Old and New Testament that support the Reformed understanding of justification.
• Discusses whether justification is transformative or forensic and introduces readers to some of the contemporary challenges to the Reformation teaching of sola fide, with particular attention to the new perspective on Paul.

Five hundred years after the Reformation, the doctrine of justification by faith alone still needs to be understood and proclaimed. In Faith Alone you will learn how the rallying cry of "sola fide" is rooted in the Scriptures and how to understand this doctrine in a fresh way.

—THE FIVE SOLAS—

Historians and theologians have long recognized that at the heart of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation were five declarations, often referred to as the "solas." These five statements summarize much of what the Reformation was about, and they distinguish Protestantism from other expressions of the Christian faith: that they place ultimate and final authority in the Scriptures, acknowledge the work of Christ alone as sufficient for redemption, recognize that salvation is by grace alone through faith alone, and seek to do all things for God's glory.

The Five Solas Series is more than a simple rehashing of these statements, but instead expounds upon the biblical reasoning behind them, leading to a more profound theological vision of our lives and callings as Christians and churches.

PART 1

A Historical Tour of Sola Fide

CHAPTER 1

Sola Fide in the Early Church

“O the sweet exchange, O the incomprehensible work of God, O the unexpected blessings, that the sinfulness of many should be hidden in one righteous man, while the righteousness of one should justify many sinners!”

— ​The Epistle to Diognetus 9.5

We begin our historical tour of the doctrine of justification by looking at the apostolic fathers and the patristic era. In doing so, we must acknowledge that our point of view affects how we read. At the outset we should say that the writings of the earliest Christians should be read with gratefulness and appreciation. When we read them, we recognize and affirm that they confessed the same faith we cherish. We resonate with their belief that Jesus is the Christ and that he fulfilled Old Testament prophecy, for they confessed that Christ is the center of their faith. Evangelical Protestants recognize that God guided the early church as it wrestled with the christological dimensions of the faith revealed to them. Protestants influenced by Reformation traditions affirm that the Nicean and Chalcedonian creeds capture the message of the NT. Nor do we limit our appreciation to christological matters, for we rejoice in their affirmation of the created world, their rejection of Gnosticism, and their concern for ethics proclaimed by Jesus Christ and the apostles.

The oft-repeated saying that we stand on the shoulders of those who precede us applies to the earliest theologians in the history of the church and indeed to all the saints and scholars before us. Protestants who ignore or despise the contributions of the earliest era of the church show their folly and arrogance, for we stand in debt to the church throughout the ages. By affirming sola fide, we are not saying that we believe the true church only arose in the sixteenth century, nor are we saying that the church was deeply flawed until the time of the Reformation. On the contrary, we stand in the deepest appreciation of believers who followed the Lord before us, gratefully acknowledging their faith, wisdom, courage, and devotion. Luther himself acknowledged that there was much good in the church in the 1,500 years preceding him.¹ An observation like this doesn’t mean that there weren’t weaknesses in the church, nor should we assume that the church and its doctrines have always been biblical and healthy. The Reformation happened for a reason! Still, the danger for many Protestants is to assume that the church had little to no understanding of the Pauline gospel for its first 1,500 years. Such a judgment is a gross exaggeration.

This leads us to the question we first wish to consider: Is sola fide taught in the earliest period of church history? We know that the formula itself — ​“faith alone” — ​was confessionally adopted during the Reformation after the church had existed for nearly 1,500 years. This leads us to wonder: If the earliest Christians didn’t espouse faith alone, should we do so today? Today, many evangelicals are returning to and recovering the voice of the early church fathers.² We recognize our debt to the early fathers, and there is now a fresh explosion of interest in their exegesis and theology.³ We now recognize that the early fathers were careful interpreters of Scripture, and hence our interest in whether they confessed that salvation is by faith alone is piqued. Did Protestants during the time of the Reformation and subsequently perhaps overreact to Roman Catholics? Could there be a more balanced and biblical stance found in the earliest fathers, in those who lived and wrote before the controversies of the 1500s began?

I haven’t said anything yet about the soteriology of the earliest Christians, for there is significant controversy in scholarship over whether they were, in fact, faithful to Paul’s theology of grace. I can scarcely resolve the matter here, given the extensive debate on the topic. Still, I hope to provide a perspective for our study, and it will become apparent where I lean in the dispute over whether the earliest fathers were faithful to Paul. Some have argued, perhaps most famously Thomas Torrance, that those in the patristic era misunderstood the Pauline gospel and actually contradicted it.⁴ Others claim that Torrance’s conclusion isn’t warranted, that a sympathetic examination of the theology of the earliest era shows that they affirmed Paul’s gospel.⁵ I incline more to the latter viewpoint, but before making that case, I should say another word about the matter of doctrinal clarity and precision.

To put it simply, we cannot expect the earliest Christians to have the same clarity on the issue of sola fide as the Reformers.⁶ The emphasis we find among them on topics like good works and merit lacks the clarity of the later discussions, but a sympathetic reading doesn’t posit a contradiction between them and the Reformers. True faith results in good works, and the term “merit” in the early fathers may designate the reward given instead of being interpreted to say that one earns salvation.⁷ We must remember that the early believers were rightly concerned about antinomianism,⁸ a misreading of Paul’s theology of grace that supported a sinful lifestyle. The earliest fathers rightly opposed what Dietrich Bonhoeffer would later call “cheap grace,” an abuse of the freedom of the gospel leading one to excuse sinful behavior.

The Reformers, unlike the church fathers, had the benefit of 1,500 years of Christian reflection in assessing justification and stood in debt to those who preceded them, especially to Augustine. The earliest church didn’t encounter significant theological controversy over soteriology and the role of faith and works. They gladly affirmed that salvation was of the Lord. They also, in line with the Pauline witness, confessed that salvation was by faith instead of by works. At the same time they concluded that good works were necessary for final salvation. These affirmations need not be seen as contradictory. They accord with what the NT itself teaches, and thus they represent a faithful appropriation of the NT witness, even if some of the terms and expressions of the early fathers lacked the clarity and precision of later formulations. A faithful reception of the NT message shouldn’t be equated with a full understanding of soteriology or with the precision that we find with the Reformers and their followers. But the vagueness of the early fathers isn’t surprising, for controversy (as is evident with the early debates on the Trinity and Christology) is the furnace in which clearer theology is forged.

What we do not find in the patristic era, at least until Augustine, is a full discussion of the relationship between faith and works. That matter came to the forefront in Augustine’s dispute with Pelagius. Before that time the church fathers were content with simply saying what we find in the NT: salvation is by faith and due to the grace of God, and those who experience God’s grace should live a new life, for those who are not transformed will not receive an eternal reward. In that respect, the fathers faithfully captured the message of the NT. But we should not expect those in the patristic era to speak directly to issues that arose later in church history.

Some, lamenting the divisions between Roman Catholics and Protestants in the last five hundred years, may pine for the unity on soteriology we find in the early church and might wish that we could go back to that period. Such feelings represent nostalgia, a nostalgia that doesn’t accord with historical realities. The truth is that every period of church history has been marked by doctrinal strife and dispute. Indeed, once the matter of faith and works came to the table in the dispute between Augustine and Pelagius, the matter was sharply controverted. Pastors were alerted in a fresh way to the issues at stake.

It is also nostalgic and sentimental to wish that we could discuss the matter of sola fide apart from the Reformation and the Counter Reformation, not to mention the four hundred plus years since. The controversy during the Reformation sharpened the debate and posed the issues with a clarity we don’t find in the ancient church. Again, to say this is no criticism of the early fathers. We should not expect them to weigh in on issues that weren’t debated in their time. We must be careful of an anachronistic criticis...