As I wrote in my last post, I’ve been enjoying a foray into Lutheran theology lately. As a Pentecostal pastor and theological mutt, I consider it a privilege (and responsibility?) to pillage the Christian traditions for insight. And this most recent (and ongoing!) exploration of Lutheran thought has been rich.
One of the most encouraging principles I have been reminded of by this journey has been the Reformation principle of sola fide, “faith alone.” Martin Luther called justification by faith alone the doctrine by which the church stands or falls. I resonate with this, and have found the reminder of this doctrine to be something like a drink of cold water on a hot day.
My own church tradition, Pentecostalism, has its roots in the Wesleyan movement. John Wesley famously made the doctrine of sanctification, or “Christian perfection,” the center of his movement.1 He was working against Christian nominalism, against “almost Christians” as he saw them, and he believed this emphasis on perfection was the reason God had raised up the Methodist movement.
Wesley was converted to living faith at a public reading of Luther’s Preface to Paul’s letter to the Romans. Within a few years, however, he became disillusioned with the lack of commitment to holiness in the writings of Martin Luther and the preaching of the Lutheran pietists who had first led him to the doctrine of justification by faith. Justification by faith, in the preaching of Wesley, became “becoming righteous by faith” over against Luther’s (and Calvin’s) “being declared righteous by faith.” Wesley’s understanding of the call for holiness was a self-conscious shift back toward medieval and patristic Christianity–something for which today’s Wesleyans praise him, but which has historically caused other Protestant Christians (particularly Calvinists and Lutherans) to look at him askance.
Between the two, as I have written elsewhere, I side with Luther. The call to love, obedience, and holy living is crucial. Indeed, to borrow from John Calvin, though we are justified by faith alone, “faith that justifies is never alone.” But we human beings are, by nature, legalists. We are always grading on a curve, looking to ourselves, and defining our own goodness or badness over against the perceived goodness or badness of others. Wesley’s doctrine, though thoroughly Protestant, leaves the door open to putting the cart before the horse. “Saving faith leads to holy living” can quickly become “I know I’m saved based on how I’m living.”2 This can lead to pride in some, despair in others. I, personally, can tend toward the second. The original Reformation principle that we are justified by an “alien righteousness,” that “the entire gospel is outside of us,” is a healing balm for the obsessive-compulsive and the chronically self-critical. The Reformers would also argue that it puts a nail in the coffin of our pride.
But the notion that justification by faith alone is the doctrine by which the church stands or falls reads, to me, like the statement that “there is no salvation outside the church.” Historically, this is what both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches have taught. And there was a time when they really meant it. But if you ask a Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox believer today if you have to be a member of their communion to be saved, they will reply with something along the lines of, “My church is the true church. Ideally, you should be a part of my church. But is salvation possible outside my church? Can Christians in other communions be saved? Certainly. But I know my church is where you can find saving grace.”
I think something similar about the doctrine of justification by faith alone.
Karl Barth, in his wrestling with the notion of “no salvation outside the church,” flipped the idea on its head. “No salvation outside the church” became “wherever you find salvation through Jesus, there you have also found the church.” Salvation and church are two angles on the same thing. The circles overlap. It’s a decidedly Protestant, if also radical, take on the classical Christian idea.
Similarly, in Barth’s lectures on the Scots Confession, he makes a somewhat offhand comment that our Roman Catholic siblings are saved “in spite of, not because of” their church’s doctrine. The early Presbyterians, whose Confession Barth was expounding at the time, of course held a very different view of the “papists” than Barth was expressing. Barth, for his part, agreed with the Scots’ Reformation theology, but disagreed with where they placed the boundary line of salvation in Jesus. The boundary, for the Scots Presbyterians, was wherever belief in the doctrine of justification by faith alone came to an end. But Barth, because of his belief in justification by faith alone, believed the boundary of salvation spread to wherever faith in Jesus as Savior and Son of God could be found. Naturally, this included even those Christians who believe (or fear!) their salvation depends, in some sense at least, on their works or church membership.
Barth based the boundary line of salvation around Jesus rather than around a principle or a doctrine, as important as that principle or doctrine might be. Because grace is grace, and we are all fools. There is no salvation outside the church, because wherever God is saving people through Jesus those people themselves are the church. And justification by faith alone is the doctrine on which the church stands or falls, because however well or poorly the church understands Jesus, the Jesus she believes in is saving her for no other reason than because she believes him. She is not saved because of her works. She is not saved because of her doctrine. She is saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.
Because, in the end, the center of our faith is not a principle but a Person. We are saved solus Christus, by Christ alone.
Mikael Ivaska 