Why Sola Fide Won't Save Your Butt!!!
Posted: January 19th, 2010, 4:05 pm
Part I
You might have heard the term (Sola Fide), a Latin phrase which means 'by faith alone'. This slogan of the Protestant Reformation attempted to answer the question 'How do people get saved?'. The idea is that 'faith alone' saves people rather than 'works of the law' or things someone might do in order to earn their salvation. It is this framework of thought that leads to the perennial question "Are people saved by works or faith?". But this question reflects a confusion of categories at several levels. It is akin to asking what the color 9 smells like.
Here's why.
First, I need to stress the importance of reading the Bible using the proper method or 'hermeneutic'. Consider the example of someone who found an old letter from their grandfather to their grandmother written during WWII. Now imagine that the person reading the letter read it as though it was written to them rather than their grandmother. I call this an 'egocentric hermeneutic'. This simply refers to a self-centered method for reading text. For example, suppose the grandfather wrote "I can't wait to see you in your blue dress." Who, in their right mind, would read that statement as if the grandfather wanted to see them in a blue dress?
Now imagine that in that same letter the grandfather said he was 'gay'. In the 1940's, when he wrote the letter, the word 'gay' meant happy. But suppose the person reading it interpreted the word in light of their own cultural setting. Now they believed that their grandfather had been a homosexual writing a letter to them wanting to see them in their blue dress! You would agree that the person was pretty confused. But again, this is exactly how many of us read the Bible - from an egocentric viewpoint and without regard to its cultural context.
Projecting your own cultural meaning onto the text is called an 'anachronistic' reading. Now there's a big word for you. An anachronism simply refers to something that is out of place in a particular cultural setting. Imagine watching the scene of a gunfight in an old western movie. The good guys are holed up behind a big rock and running out of ammunition. All of a sudden one of the cowboys pulls out a cell phone to call Shooter's Supply. The cell phone is an anachronism. It is out of place in that particular historic setting. So an 'anachronistic' reading of the text would refer to reading it and projecting ones' own meaning onto it without respect to the cultural context in which it was originally written.
Believe it or not, the theological support for the Protestant Reformation resulted from reading the Bible in just this way. Martin Luther believed that Paul's letter to the Romans was about a timeless system of 'how someone gets saved' (an egocentric hermeneutic). He also projected his own meaning onto several key words and phrases used by Paul like 'justification', 'works of the law', and 'the righteousness of God' (an anachronistic reading). Needless to say, Martin Luther was pretty confused when it came to reading St. Paul's letter to the Romans!
Part II
In order to understand just how differently Martin Luther understood these phrases, we first need to understand what Paul meant when he used them in his letter to the Roman church. A brief summary of his train of thought goes something like this:
When Paul wrote his letter, the Jews were guilty of racial pride. They thought that their physical descent from Abraham gave them special favor with God. The fact that God had given them the law also came to serve as a source of pride. The law gave them certain customs like circumcision, the Sabbath, and food laws that served like a badge, making it easy to tell who was part of the covenant. Paul referred to these customs as ‘works of the law’.
In light of their arrogance, Paul opened his letter by painting a cosmic court room scene with God as the judge. For those who read it, it didn’t take long to realize that the boast of the Jews was empty. They were just as bad as the Gentiles if not worse! The irony is that the law they took so much pride in possessing, condemned them as 'guilty'! On top of that, physical descent from Abraham was meaningless when it came to figuring out who Abraham’s family really was.
Paul insisted that God really isn’t partial. He would judge the Jews and Gentiles by the same standard. Everyone who heard the gospel and responded with faith would be declared vindicated or ‘justified’ by God. Faith was the real sign that Abraham was someones father It marked them out as a member of the renewed covenant. In the renewed covenant, faith basically operates the same way that ‘works of the law’ operated in the original covenant. It let them (and us) know who the members are. I should note at this point that the Greek word pistis translated as 'faith' carries with it the idea of faithfulness, not simply faith as we use the word (mental ascent to a set of given facts).
Paul went on to explain that God was operating through the faithfulness of Jesus to keep his promise to Abraham to make him the father of ‘many nations’ not just the single Jewish nation. When someone responded to the message of the gospel with faith, they were 'saved'. Paul called this determination by God to keep his promise ‘the righteousness of God’. What was important to Paul when he wrote to the Romans was not to explain how someone got saved (that is subsumed under his overarching argument) but how God had been faithful to the covenant.
Now let’s take a look at how Martin Luther understood the same words and phrases nearly fifteen hundred years later in a culture very different from Paul’s. Unfamiliar with Paul’s culture, Luther interpreted the phrase ‘the righteousness of God’ as his determination to punish every little sin. “Works of the Law”, he thought, referred to ones attempts to ‘earn’ salvation and ‘Justification’ was a step in the process of salvation. It’s pretty obvious that the way he understood scripture had gotten way off course.
And things were about to get worse...a lot worse!
Part III
Suffering from a troubled conscience and angry with God, Luther struggled to understand how he could get enough ‘righteousness’ to be saved. While pondering the phrase “the righteousness of God” in Romans 1:17, Luther suddenly came to believe that ‘the righteousness of God’ referred to something that God’ took out of himself and put into or imputed to a person at the moment of faith to make them acceptable to God. This event would later become known as his ‘Tower Experience’. Keep in mind that the phrase really refers to God’s determination to fulfill the covenant with Abraham.
Using this reasoning, he believed that the obedience of Jesus is credited to each person who has faith making ‘works’ irrelevant. This, he thought, freed people to sin to their hearts content - seriously. This quote of Martin Luther taken from a letter to Melanchthon will give you some idea of how distorted his theology actually was:
“Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong, but let your faith in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world. We will commit sins while we are here, for this life is not a place where righteousness can exist….No sin can separate us from Him, even if we were to kill or commit adultery a thousand times each day”
Luther thus developed the slogan ‘sola fide’ implying that a person is ‘saved’ by faith alone or Sola Fide and not by ‘works’, which he equated with Paul’s term ‘works of the law’. This created the illusion that faith and works are opposing principles. In this way he pit faith against works and Paul against James. This, my friends, is a totally twisted, confused, and delusional reading of both men. St. Paul actually taught that the future judgment will be according to works. Listen to to what Paul writes:
Romans 2:6 He will reward each one according to his works: 2:7 eternal life to those who by perseverance in good works seek glory and honor and immortality, 2:8 but wrath and anger to those who live in selfish ambition and do not obey the truth but follow unrighteousness.
Unable to reconcile the teaching of James with Paul, Martin Luther had this to say about James.
“St. James' epistle is really an epistle of straw…for it has nothing of the nature of the gospel about it" (Luther, M. Preface to the New Testament, 1546).
Early in the history of the Church, James was actually fighting against the kind of heretical teaching espoused by Martin Luther. James plainly stated that it exactly this kind of faith – sola fide - or 'faith alone' that could not save a man. I hope you see the irony. Good works (not to be confused with Paul’s phrase “works of the law”) are evidence that one has the kind of faith that causes God to declare them as 'vindicated' or part of the renewed covenant. This is in full accordance with Paul’s teaching that faith (remember that the Greek word pistis carried the nuance of faithfulness) served to identify those who would be declared vindicated or ‘justified’ in the present - in anticipation of the final day when Jesus returns to judge the world.
Concluding Remarks
It would be difficult to overestimate the effect Martin Luther’s distorted theology has had on the church. It has crippled the ability of millions of Christians to understand the bible. This study is not an attempt to smear Martin Luther (his words speak for themselves) nor is it an indictment of the Protestant Reformation. So if that’s your beef, please, hold your fire.
What this study attempts to do (Lord please bless my faltering efforts) is to clarify how our theology has gotten off track and try to get it back on track. By reading Romans and other epistles in their cultural context, we will be more able to understand the implications for our own lives. Maybe we will be more equipped to be the place where heaven meets earth for other people. And maybe, just maybe, we can do good works without having any fear that we are somehow trying to ‘earn’ favor with God or earn our salvation.
After all, you aren’t declared to be ‘justified’ or part of God's family by understanding how somebody gets saved or even by understanding Romans. You are declared to be part of the family by placing your faith in and confessing that Jesus the Messiah is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords!
You might have heard the term (Sola Fide), a Latin phrase which means 'by faith alone'. This slogan of the Protestant Reformation attempted to answer the question 'How do people get saved?'. The idea is that 'faith alone' saves people rather than 'works of the law' or things someone might do in order to earn their salvation. It is this framework of thought that leads to the perennial question "Are people saved by works or faith?". But this question reflects a confusion of categories at several levels. It is akin to asking what the color 9 smells like.
Here's why.
First, I need to stress the importance of reading the Bible using the proper method or 'hermeneutic'. Consider the example of someone who found an old letter from their grandfather to their grandmother written during WWII. Now imagine that the person reading the letter read it as though it was written to them rather than their grandmother. I call this an 'egocentric hermeneutic'. This simply refers to a self-centered method for reading text. For example, suppose the grandfather wrote "I can't wait to see you in your blue dress." Who, in their right mind, would read that statement as if the grandfather wanted to see them in a blue dress?
Now imagine that in that same letter the grandfather said he was 'gay'. In the 1940's, when he wrote the letter, the word 'gay' meant happy. But suppose the person reading it interpreted the word in light of their own cultural setting. Now they believed that their grandfather had been a homosexual writing a letter to them wanting to see them in their blue dress! You would agree that the person was pretty confused. But again, this is exactly how many of us read the Bible - from an egocentric viewpoint and without regard to its cultural context.
Projecting your own cultural meaning onto the text is called an 'anachronistic' reading. Now there's a big word for you. An anachronism simply refers to something that is out of place in a particular cultural setting. Imagine watching the scene of a gunfight in an old western movie. The good guys are holed up behind a big rock and running out of ammunition. All of a sudden one of the cowboys pulls out a cell phone to call Shooter's Supply. The cell phone is an anachronism. It is out of place in that particular historic setting. So an 'anachronistic' reading of the text would refer to reading it and projecting ones' own meaning onto it without respect to the cultural context in which it was originally written.
Believe it or not, the theological support for the Protestant Reformation resulted from reading the Bible in just this way. Martin Luther believed that Paul's letter to the Romans was about a timeless system of 'how someone gets saved' (an egocentric hermeneutic). He also projected his own meaning onto several key words and phrases used by Paul like 'justification', 'works of the law', and 'the righteousness of God' (an anachronistic reading). Needless to say, Martin Luther was pretty confused when it came to reading St. Paul's letter to the Romans!
Part II
In order to understand just how differently Martin Luther understood these phrases, we first need to understand what Paul meant when he used them in his letter to the Roman church. A brief summary of his train of thought goes something like this:
When Paul wrote his letter, the Jews were guilty of racial pride. They thought that their physical descent from Abraham gave them special favor with God. The fact that God had given them the law also came to serve as a source of pride. The law gave them certain customs like circumcision, the Sabbath, and food laws that served like a badge, making it easy to tell who was part of the covenant. Paul referred to these customs as ‘works of the law’.
In light of their arrogance, Paul opened his letter by painting a cosmic court room scene with God as the judge. For those who read it, it didn’t take long to realize that the boast of the Jews was empty. They were just as bad as the Gentiles if not worse! The irony is that the law they took so much pride in possessing, condemned them as 'guilty'! On top of that, physical descent from Abraham was meaningless when it came to figuring out who Abraham’s family really was.
Paul insisted that God really isn’t partial. He would judge the Jews and Gentiles by the same standard. Everyone who heard the gospel and responded with faith would be declared vindicated or ‘justified’ by God. Faith was the real sign that Abraham was someones father It marked them out as a member of the renewed covenant. In the renewed covenant, faith basically operates the same way that ‘works of the law’ operated in the original covenant. It let them (and us) know who the members are. I should note at this point that the Greek word pistis translated as 'faith' carries with it the idea of faithfulness, not simply faith as we use the word (mental ascent to a set of given facts).
Paul went on to explain that God was operating through the faithfulness of Jesus to keep his promise to Abraham to make him the father of ‘many nations’ not just the single Jewish nation. When someone responded to the message of the gospel with faith, they were 'saved'. Paul called this determination by God to keep his promise ‘the righteousness of God’. What was important to Paul when he wrote to the Romans was not to explain how someone got saved (that is subsumed under his overarching argument) but how God had been faithful to the covenant.
Now let’s take a look at how Martin Luther understood the same words and phrases nearly fifteen hundred years later in a culture very different from Paul’s. Unfamiliar with Paul’s culture, Luther interpreted the phrase ‘the righteousness of God’ as his determination to punish every little sin. “Works of the Law”, he thought, referred to ones attempts to ‘earn’ salvation and ‘Justification’ was a step in the process of salvation. It’s pretty obvious that the way he understood scripture had gotten way off course.
And things were about to get worse...a lot worse!
Part III
Suffering from a troubled conscience and angry with God, Luther struggled to understand how he could get enough ‘righteousness’ to be saved. While pondering the phrase “the righteousness of God” in Romans 1:17, Luther suddenly came to believe that ‘the righteousness of God’ referred to something that God’ took out of himself and put into or imputed to a person at the moment of faith to make them acceptable to God. This event would later become known as his ‘Tower Experience’. Keep in mind that the phrase really refers to God’s determination to fulfill the covenant with Abraham.
Using this reasoning, he believed that the obedience of Jesus is credited to each person who has faith making ‘works’ irrelevant. This, he thought, freed people to sin to their hearts content - seriously. This quote of Martin Luther taken from a letter to Melanchthon will give you some idea of how distorted his theology actually was:
“Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong, but let your faith in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world. We will commit sins while we are here, for this life is not a place where righteousness can exist….No sin can separate us from Him, even if we were to kill or commit adultery a thousand times each day”
Luther thus developed the slogan ‘sola fide’ implying that a person is ‘saved’ by faith alone or Sola Fide and not by ‘works’, which he equated with Paul’s term ‘works of the law’. This created the illusion that faith and works are opposing principles. In this way he pit faith against works and Paul against James. This, my friends, is a totally twisted, confused, and delusional reading of both men. St. Paul actually taught that the future judgment will be according to works. Listen to to what Paul writes:
Romans 2:6 He will reward each one according to his works: 2:7 eternal life to those who by perseverance in good works seek glory and honor and immortality, 2:8 but wrath and anger to those who live in selfish ambition and do not obey the truth but follow unrighteousness.
Unable to reconcile the teaching of James with Paul, Martin Luther had this to say about James.
“St. James' epistle is really an epistle of straw…for it has nothing of the nature of the gospel about it" (Luther, M. Preface to the New Testament, 1546).
Early in the history of the Church, James was actually fighting against the kind of heretical teaching espoused by Martin Luther. James plainly stated that it exactly this kind of faith – sola fide - or 'faith alone' that could not save a man. I hope you see the irony. Good works (not to be confused with Paul’s phrase “works of the law”) are evidence that one has the kind of faith that causes God to declare them as 'vindicated' or part of the renewed covenant. This is in full accordance with Paul’s teaching that faith (remember that the Greek word pistis carried the nuance of faithfulness) served to identify those who would be declared vindicated or ‘justified’ in the present - in anticipation of the final day when Jesus returns to judge the world.
Concluding Remarks
It would be difficult to overestimate the effect Martin Luther’s distorted theology has had on the church. It has crippled the ability of millions of Christians to understand the bible. This study is not an attempt to smear Martin Luther (his words speak for themselves) nor is it an indictment of the Protestant Reformation. So if that’s your beef, please, hold your fire.
What this study attempts to do (Lord please bless my faltering efforts) is to clarify how our theology has gotten off track and try to get it back on track. By reading Romans and other epistles in their cultural context, we will be more able to understand the implications for our own lives. Maybe we will be more equipped to be the place where heaven meets earth for other people. And maybe, just maybe, we can do good works without having any fear that we are somehow trying to ‘earn’ favor with God or earn our salvation.
After all, you aren’t declared to be ‘justified’ or part of God's family by understanding how somebody gets saved or even by understanding Romans. You are declared to be part of the family by placing your faith in and confessing that Jesus the Messiah is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords!
