SOLA SCRIPTURA
Many churches commemorated Reformation Day on Sunday. One of the ‘Solas’ highlighted in the Reformation is ‘Sola Scriptura’ – Scripture alone.
The Reformers recognised, among other Solas, the authority of Scripture – they acknowledge that to accept the lordship of Christ means accepting the principle of biblical authority and this principle dictates Christians’ approach to the church’s life.
Because the church on earth consists of imperfectly sanctified sinners, there are always two defects in the lives of its members, both corporately and individually – these are ignorance and error, which cause omissions and mistakes in belief and behaviour. This was what happened in the sixteenth century when the church went so far wrong, preaching and practicing errors, including upholding church’s traditions which are in fact contrary to the teaching of Scripture. This was compounded by the fact that the Bible was not accessible to the laity – there was no translations which are understood by the lay people – everything depended on the communication of those in authority; hence there was no way for the ordinary believers to examine whether what was taught was in line with the teaching and revelation of Scripture.
The church has two constant needs – instruction in the truths by which it must live, and correction of the shortcomings by which its life is marred. (2 Tim. 3:16). The Reformation sought to correct the shortcomings and to reestablish the truths by which the church must live – and Sola Scriptura is one of such affirmations.
It is the church’s responsibility to use Scripture for its intended purpose – this it does by the exposition of Scripture and followed by reformation. To accept the authority of Scripture means in practice being willing first to believe what it teaches, and then to apply its teachings to ourselves for our correction and guidance. The words and lives of Christian men and women must be in continual process of reformation by the written Word of their God. This means that private theological speculations and church’s traditions may never be identified with the word which God speaks, but are to be classed among the words of men which the Word of God must reform.
Christians fall into mental error, partly through mistaking or overlooking what Scripture teaches, partly through having their minds prepossessed with unbiblical notions so that they cannot take scriptural statements seriously. All heresy begins so. Unscriptural ideas in our theology are like germs in our system which weaken and destroy life, and their effect is always damaging; we need to dispel them from our system by imbibing, and assimilating the Word of God in Scripture, and dislodging the germs and infection from taking hold in our lives.
We need to remember that many godly individuals have ‘fought’ to reform the church; many paid a high price for their efforts. Many bible translators also suffered the same fate – today, we have the Bible in so many translations which are available to many believers in their own language.
Unfortunately and sadly, many believers do not avail themselves to the reading, studying and meditating of Scripture, and to understand the progressive revelation of God for His people. We remain in ignorance. And there are also many who have a superficial understanding of the Word of God – they are not able to detect errors from preaching and teaching of the Bible from unscrupulous individuals who claim to be God’s servants – hence the precarious spiritual state of Christians individually and corporately. Today, although we observe Reformation Sunday, we, as individual Christians, and as a church, in most cases, have practically lost sight of what the Reformers fought for, and what God always desires for His people.
We can talk about Sola Scriptura; we can sing about Sola Scriptura, but in reality, this is not a reality in most of our lives. The Lord God is surely not pleased with what is happening among His people today!!
SOLA SCRIPTURA (B)
When we speak of ‘Sola Scripura’, we are referring to the whole Bible and Scripture as the progressive revelation of God; the authority of Scripture is therefore the authority of God who speaks and reveals Himself and His purpose and plan to, and, for humankind.
The Bible not only contains the evangelistic mandate of the New Testament, it also contains God’s call to the cultural task: a stream of obligation that courses throughout both Old Testament and New Testament. Whereas the New Testament focuses largely on the individual before God, the Old Testament stresses his corporate relationship (family, community and state). At Sinai, God gave his people a style of life that was both egalitarian and humane…in short, the Old Testament teaches a way of life in which the rights of man are safeguarded.
Biblical theology centers on God’s saving self-revelation as it takes the shape of certain events in which God calls to himself a people who will reflect his character and further his loving purposes. It is historical and progressive – it sees the development against the background of a world which God created as a vehicle of his purposes and values; it sees how God refuses to abandon his purposes despite the unfaithfulness of his own people and works even in their unbelief, to create a people more perfectly and completely his own.
All too often, Christians spend most of their study time in the New Testament, only occasionally making forays into the Psalms and Proverbs, or now and then into the Prophets. The result is that many Christians fail to understand the whole scope of God’s revelation of himself – they have an incomplete picture of God’s purposes. The Old Testament is set in the home and marketplace and communicates God’s love and mercy in concrete terms. The truth is that the New Testament cannot stand by itself.
The relationship between the OT and NT:
God’s purposes are seen with a greater clarity in the NT. The covenant is sealed once and for all with Christ’s death rather than many times as in the OT sacrifices. The OT deals primarily with the nation of Israel while the NT displays a greater concern for the whole world. But the similarities between the two testaments are more important than their differences. The two testaments together record the one history of God’s progressive dealings with humankind. The work of Christ is a culmination rather than a denial of OT truth. Though the NT presents something new, it is not altogether new. There is an important continuity that links the two testaments together, both in the manner and substance of God’s revelation and in the way people respond to that revelation. What the NT gives us then does not leave the OT behind so much as bring out its deepest reality. One has the feeling that in going ever more deeply into the reality of the OT one comes to the truth of the NT. The NT and OT call for each other for their full self-expression.
When we study the Gospels, we cannot tell the story of Jesus without bringing in theology – and especially eschatology – into it. And the key to most of the theology is in the Old Testament, especially in the Servant Songs of Isaiah and the seventh chapter of Daniel.
Our studies of the Gospels have made two things clear:
a) Jesus believed the Kingdom of God (the rule of God) to be present in himself and his Ministry – dynamically present.
b) He saw his Messianic Ministry, from Jordaan to Golgotha, as a fulfilling of the prophecies of the Servant of the Lord. In simple terms the ‘career’ of Jesus as the Servant Messiah, from Jordan to Calvary, is the Kingdom of God, God acting in his royal power, God visiting and redeeming his people. For the Kingdom of God is no earthly empire to be set up by a political coup d’etat. It is a Kingdom in which God rules redeemingly through the Ministry of Jesus: not something added to the Ministry, but the MInistry itself. The suffering and sacrifice of Jesus, the Servant Son of man, so far from being only a prelude to the triumph, are the triumph itself, a triumph which the Resurrection will clarify and reveal.
So ‘Sola Scrptura’ implies that God’s people must anchor their beliefs and behaviour upon the whole Scripture, the OT and the NT, the whole progressive revelation of God and Church’s traditions and personal speculations must be reformed and tested by the Scripture.
SOLA GRATIA; SOLA FIDE
Following the commemoration of Reformation Sunday, we have noted the five “Solas” which focus on the emphasis of the Reformation – principally that the church has to recognise that its outworking and God’s plan of salvation are centred on “Sola Christi (or Christus)”, Sola Scriptura, Sola Gratia, Sola Fide, and Sola Gloria (GLORY TO GOD ALONE).
We spent some time considering Sola Scriptura in some detail, and acknowledging that church’s traditions and personal theological study and convictions cannot be tantamount to what “God speaks and reveals”; instead they have to be evaluated and reformed by Scripture (both OT and NT), the latter being the final authority (Sola Scriptura).
At this juncture, we will not be considering “Sola Christi” or “Sola Gloria”, as both have been covered extensively in previous sharings, particularly in the sharings gleaned from the study of the Gospels, and from the focus on God’s Salvation Plan for fallen humankind.
What we will be considering today is on “Sola Gratia” and “Sola Fide”; both ‘Grace’ and ‘Faith’ are so central in Christianity, and yet both have been misunderstood, sometimes rather ‘grossly’, and at times noted and acknowledged with some ‘distortions’ – nonetheless serious enough to cause much problems in outworking in Christian lives (from conversion to sanctification and glorification).
We begin by considering the following relevant verses in Ephesians 2:
“But because of HIs great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions – it is by grace you have been saved” (vv. 4-5).
“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God -not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (vv 8-10).
One of the most profound issues of the Reformation in the sixteenth century was the relationship between grace and merit. Grace is something we receive; it is not because we earn it but because out of God’s mercy and benevolence, he gives it to us as a gift. Merit, on the other hand, is a reward that is owed to someone for doing some work. Notice that in verses 8-9, it is by grace we have been saved through faith (note the connection between grace and faith). This is definitely not by works but it is a gift from God. There is no merit involved and therefore there is no room for boasting.
The Reformation insists that salvation is by faith alone; there is no merit or works involved. Before the Reformation, the teaching of the church was that justification is accomplished through a mixture of faith plus works (which consists of a variety of works that include penance, confession and the like).
Because “by grace we have been saved through faith” is a gift of God, the conclusion must be that faith itself is a gift of God. It is not an expression of human achievement, of human effort, or of human ability. We should be ever so grateful that every believer has received as a gift not only the salvation that comes through faith, but the gift of faith itself.
Faith is not the Christian’s righteousness, but it is the instrument of his justification. Christ, with what he has done and suffered, is the meritorious cause of our justification. Faith does not earn anything from God by its own worthiness, but simply receives the gift of what Christ accomplished.
To suggest that human beings born after the fall are in a state of moral and spiritual neutrality so that they do not need to be regenerated (made alive by God) but only to be properly trained and to be surrounded by good examples would result in the teaching of Pelagius. Pelagius, in the fourth century, taught the complete freedom of the individual, who is thus responsible for every action taken. Every sin is a result of individual choice and “We have within us a free will which is so strong and steadfast to resist sin”. Pelagius’ teaching was opposed by Augustine in particular and was rejected by the leaders of the early Church; his teaching was even branded as heretical.
More clearly than anyone else, the apostle Paul described what God did for humanity in Jesus Christ by relating it to grace and faith. For Paul a person “is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ”(Gal. 2:16). This justification is by “the grace of God” through faith and not through the law (Gal. 2:21;Rom.3:22,24). Faith in Christ is a gift of God (Eph.2:8-9); it arises from hearing the gospel proclaimed (Gal.3:2; Rom.10:17) and leads to a new life of obedience (Rom.1:5, cf.16:26). Faith expresses itself through love (Gal.5:6). Paul speaks also of God’s judgment of human works (2 Cor. 5:10′ cf. Rom. 2:6-8). Justification, however, is accomplished through Christ “once for all” and involves not only a past but also a present and future tense. It is based on what Christ has done in the past (Rom. 5:6ff.), which brings a new relationship with God through Christ in the present (Rom. 5:1), while being also a “hope of righteousness” for the future (Gal. 5:5). The action of God in salvation leads to a personal responsibility to live obediently in the new life. Thus Paul urges Christians to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” while also recognising that “God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:12-13). Any good works done by believers and presented to God in the future (1 Thess. 1:3; cf. Rom. 2:7) are done by the power of God in the Christian’s life.
Also teaching that human nature after the Fall is only partially depraved, not dead in sin but only sick, and therefore able to take the first step of regeneration, implies a Semi-Pelagian theology of salvation. Likewise, teaching that people may lose their salvation after they have genuinely received it is Semi-Peligian heresy. According to Semi-Pelagianism, the grace of God is necessary for salvation as medicine is to heal a dying man. But a type of co-operation must take place between the patient and the doctor for the healing medicine to have its effect. What happens is that God brings the medicine to the dying man, but the dying man must cooperate by opening his mouth to receive ity. This is the analogy often used. The teaching in Ephesians, and also the Reformed view, would be that man is not only critically ill, he is dead. The man does not even have the power to open his mouth to receive the healing medicine. Rather, the medicine has to be injected into him by the doctor.
The problem is that even though we have the power to choose in human matters, we are dead to the things of God, and as a result have no desire for the things of God. Rather, we follow a different course. We follow it willfully. We follow it freely, in the sense of doing what we want to do. But with respect to spiritual things, we are dead.
On the basis of the above explanation, we can realise how important it is to uphold “Sola Gratia” and “Sola Fide” – saved by grace through faith. Salvation is a gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast. Regeneration and being born again is received by faith and accomplished by the Holy Spirit – it is not by our achievement by keeping the law – it is by God’s election, not by man’s own effort and response, for a spiritually dead man would choose to ignore God and spiritual things – he would not, and cannot (on his own merit) choose to be saved.