As
Alister E. McGrath writes at the end of his magisterial study Iustitia Dei, these challenges to the
doctrine of justification sola fide have
led to it having a reduced place in the contemporary church.[i]
A significant ecumenical statement produced in 1982, the ARCIC report, declared
that:
We are agreed that this is not an
area where any remaining differences of theological interpretation or
ecclesiological emphasis, either within or between our Communions, can justify
our continuing separation.
The
document itself does not show evidence of addressing the issues of controversy
so much as of sidelining them. The impression given is not so much of a
resolution accomplished in the name of reconciliation, but an unwillingness to
see the disagreement as having an ongoing significance. It could be argued that
the doctrine of justification has for too long meant a divisive doctrinal
quibbling between churches. Furthermore, in the post-Christendom era, in which
the justice of God is no longer a presupposition of human life, isn’t it simply
the Lordship of Christ that should be the content of Anglican preaching? Is
there then an ongoing place for the insistence that justification is sola fide today? The last section of
this paper seeks to address that pressing question.
We
opened our discussion of sola fide by
hearing from Queen Katherine Parr, whose account of her own conversion
contained such a clear description of the Reformation teaching on
justification. She bore witness not simply to an intellectual change of mind,
but to a wholesale personal and spiritual transformation. This came through an
understanding not simply of the rule of Jesus Christ, but of the manner of his
salvation of her. ‘By faith alone’ was a description of her spirituality. It had three clear aspects
for her, each of which had existential significance: first, it taught of her
desperate plight as a sinner without hope before the final judge; second, it
spoke of the unparalleled mercy to be found in the blood of Jesus, the crucified
and risen Lord; and third, it awakened in her a lively faith, the instrument by
which she received the divine blessings of mercy and forgiveness, and the
assurance that attends them – indeed, the only
way by which could receive them.
These
three truths remain as relevant as they ever were – to a modern day citizen of
a democracy as to a sixteenth century queen. We do not inhabit the honour/shame
culture of Renaissance Europe, with its strict social ordering and its pattern
of manners. However, to be someone in a contemporary industrial economy is
increasingly a matter of (apparent) merit, earned through hard work and study.
Social status and wealth still today bring the illusion of having attained a
higher moral standing. Alongside this performance-based ‘justification’ there
remains the status that comes from having the right origins. Likewise,
condemnation swiftly falls on those who do not perform, or on those who are
outsiders. In my own country, Australia, we are known for our intolerance of the
unemployed as lazy (our expression is ‘dole bludgers’) and for our xenophobia,
which finds an outlet in our treatment of refugees.
The
transferal of these states of mind to the state of a person before the creator
is crude, but common – and unfortunately perpetuated by the behaviour and
sometimes teaching of many Christian churches. The twin engines of
performance-based identity and status-based identity drive the human social
world and make it hard to imagine that the divine being is of any different
mind. The ‘natural’ order of things would seem to bolster a perception of God
as the one who rewards performance and honours status; and thus, the achiever
and the insider are held to be the truly blessed.
The
gospel of Jesus Christ exposes this natural theology of performance and
inclusion for the idolatrous and banal sham that it is. In the first place, human
beings are recalcitrant sinners whose plight is desperate. In this judgment,
God does show favourites on the basis of ethnicity (Rom 2) – a challenge to the
persistence presence of racial and ethnic exceptionalism in our world. The
great hopes that education would prove a path to human improvement in the
nineteenth century by men like Matthew Arnold, were exploded by the devastating
events of the twentieth. Author Francis Spufford has written recently:
Peace is not the norm; peace is rare,
and where we do manage to institutionalize it in a human society, it’s usually
because we’ve been intelligently pessimistic about human proclivities, and
found a way to work with the grain of them in a system of intense mutual
suspicion like the US Constitution, a document which assumes that absolutely
everybody will be corrupt and power-hungry given half a chance.[ii]
It
may not be polite to say so, but he’s right. He’s exposed on a social scale the
illusion that Queen Katherine discovered she’d been living with: that a decent
and moderate exterior is evidence of and even the grounds for an assurance that
one is at peace with the Creator.
It
is the second feature of the theology and spirituality of the Anglican formularies
that speaks powerfully to the first. If there is something in us from which we
can take any skerrick of spiritual pride, then the obedient life, terrible
death and glorious resurrection of Jesus Christ do not have the meaning ascribed
for them in the New Testament. But this is the heart of the Reformation
Anglican theology: God, who is rich in mercy, sent his Son, in whose faithful
obedience to death on a cross is found the righteousness so sorely lacking in
human beings. By raising him from the dead, God reveals him to be vindicated,
overturning the verdict of the cross and declaring him ‘with power to be the Son
of God’.
Jesus,
who once was dead but is alive, is Lord. All other powers will bow to him, the
royal Son of God. But the testimony ‘Jesus is Lord’ is unique: it has no
earthly analogy amongst human kings and rulers. To proclaim Jesus Lord is not
at all the same as proclaiming the same of any other individual or force. It is
on this account that the doctrine of justification sola fide remains of vital importance to the contemporary church.
The gospel declaration is not that we are justified by grace through faith
alone. But the Lordship of Jesus Christ in whom is victory can only be
understood rightly in that way – since in his kingdom, membership is not on the
basis of status, ethnicity or performance.
This,
then, is the identity of the people of God that he gathers to himself. They are
not gathered in any other way or on any other basis than by the word about
Jesus Christ, which exposes performance and status as hollow and instead
introduces the divine mercy as the basis for inclusion. A church that loses
sight of the cross of Christ as its very constitution, loses its identity and
becomes something else entirely. A church that forgets that the living Jesus
himself bought it at the price of his own life and now has authority to rule it,
denies its very being. Is this not a terrible judgment on large tracts of
Anglican history, in which the church stood for ethnic superiority, social
inclusion and exclusion by status and a suburban morality? Is not this message
a magnificent call to preach the gospel in all the world, since the gospel of
Jesus Christ is for all without exception?
And
so, we come to matter of faith itself. For the evangelical Reformers, faith was
in one sense everything, though it was nothing. To say that a person is
justified by faith alone is chiefly a statement about the profundity of sin and
the greater profundity of the divine mercy. But it is also a declaration about
the kind of response that this gospel of its nature demands. It has to be
believed. It cannot be received in any other way, or it would not be itself!
But this fact does not make faith in and of itself a different species of ‘work’,
a virtue that one can attain through being more spiritual. That is the
contemporary popular understanding of ‘faith’ across the western world, bolstered
by popular religion; and that is why it seems so alien to many people, since it
is suggestive of a sort of spiritual elitism. Katherine’s biography reminds us
of a truth we still need: that faith is not an attainment.
Lastly,
the message of sola fide needs recovery
today because it is the true basis for the extraordinary good works that ought
to accompany the gospel of Jesus Christ as its most natural fruit. The people
of God are no longer constrained by the pressures of a performance-based
system; nor are they disempowered by a message of ethnic, tribal or social
exclusiveness. The extraordinary liberty of the gospel of Jesus Christ is
boundless in its possibilities for righteous action in the world. The
individual released from the deadening weight of a guilty conscience, and in possession
of all the comforts and assurances of God’s love in Jesus Christ, can turn with
joyful abandon to the call to do what God would have done in the world – as a
sign that the faith in which the believer stands is, as Cranmer would have put
it, a ‘lively faith’.
2 comments:
I'm going to wade in beyond my depth here, because this is a bit of a thing for me.
"Sola fide" is your tag phrase for this series, but I'm convinced that this shorthand phrase tends to lead us down the wrong path.
The phrase "Salvation by grace alone (not merit)" captures a fabulous, biblical, God-honouring, life-changing, obedience-producing truth, which you've explored.
But in my opinion, the phrase "Salvation by faith alone (not works)" causes two problems.
Firstly, it puts too much pressure on "faith" by making it sound like it's causing salvation. This makes us anxiously scurry down the "empty faith" avenue.
Secondly, it paints such a dark picture of obedience (works) that we struggle to figure out why obedience matters at all. (At least I did, for years, when I was first converted).
I think this series has been a good discussion of "salvation by grace alone". But the shorthand phrase is the problem!
Trouble is - I have been commissioned to write about 'sola fide' as part of a series on the solas!
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