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R.C. Sproul
Rome believes that justification is by faith, it's by grace, and it's by Christ. What Rome doesn't believe is that justification is by faith alone, or by grace alone, or by Christ alone.
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Renewing Your Mind Host
When it comes to the Gospel, one word can make all the difference between eternal life and eternal death. Hello and thank you for joining us for this Saturday edition of Renewing youg Mind. At the heart of the Gospel is the doctrine of justification. Throughout Church history, there have been disagreements as to how we define it, and one word really does make all the difference. To begin a series on the solas of the Reformation, here's R.C. sproul. On faith alone,
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R.C. Sproul
we're going to start our study of the solas by looking at the first one, sola fide. And I'd like to address that subject under the subtitle of what was the matter with the Protestant Reformation? Well, when I asked the question, what was the matter with the Protestant Reformation? I'm not using the word matter in the normal way. When we say, what's the matter with something? We mean what's wrong with it? Or what was the fault of it? But I mean something quite different when I say, what was the matter with the Protestant Reformation? What I mean by that is what was the essence, the substance, the stuff, or what we call in philosophy the material cause of the Protestant Reformation? What was the chief issue that provoked such massive consequences as this split that occurred in the 16th century? And when historians of theology and of Church history look back to the 16th century, they'll often use distinctions originally set forth by the philosopher Aristotle when he distinguished between different types of causes. And they will distinguish between what's called the formal cause and the material cause. And when the church historians distinguish between the formal and material causes of the 16th century Reformation, they will say the formal cause, the intellectual background to the issue was a dispute over the the seat of final authority that binds the Christian conscience. And we'll look at that separately under the title of sola scriptura. But what is called the material cause. Again, the substantive issue that was the core point of dispute was the doctrine of justification. And the Protestant view is expressed in the shorthand of. Of the Latin sola fide. And the phrase sola fide means by faith alone, without any mixture of good works or merit on our part. Now, to understand sola fide in its historical context, we have to understand something about the theological dispute based on the Roman Catholic understanding of justification. But first, a word about justification itself and its relevance to the 16th century, to the 1st century, and to the 21st century. At the heart of this dispute was not a tangential debate over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin or in a needless controversy over pedantic points of theology and of doctrine that professors disagreed about. But this issue touched the very heart of the Christian faith because the question of justification is is designed to answer the deeper question, how can an unjust person possibly survive the judgment of a just and holy God? Now, in our day, I find that people really don't care that much about the doctrine of justification. It has been reduced pretty much to a non issue, just as the differences among churches historically over the substance and the meaning of the Gospel itself, that those differences have now been minimized as being no significant matter. But if you're going to understand the upheaval that came about in the 16th century, you have to understand that the church in the 16th century believed in a Last Judgment. The church in the 16th century believed in the wrath of God. The church in the 16th century believed in the justice of God. And the church in the 16th century believed in Hell. That's why center stage was the question, how can I be saved now? At the time of the reformation in the 16th century, something may come as a surprise to many Protestants. The Roman Catholic Church then as now, believed that justification is by faith, by grace and by Christ. Three of the issues that are captured in the essence of Protestant thinking are, as I've already mentioned, sola fide by faith alone, sola gratia by grace alone, solus Christus through Christ alone. And because of that, many Protestants believe that the Roman Catholic Church did not believe in justification by faith or in justification by grace or in justification by Christ. That's simply not true. The Roman Catholic Church emphatically does not believe that people can be saved by their own righteousness without any help from God. Well, what did they teach in the 16th century and what do they continue to teach today? Well, they teach that faith is a prerequisite. Faith does three things for justification. Faith is what they call the initium, that is the initiation or the beginning of justification. They also say that faith is the fundamentum of or the foundation of justification. And they also say that faith is the radix, or the root of justification. So you see that faith is of critical importance according to the Roman Catholic Church in three ways. With respect to justification, it's important to start the process of justification. It's the initiation, it's the foundation upon which justification is established. And third, it's the very core or, or root of our Justification. So to say that the Roman Catholic Church doesn't believe that faith is necessary or that you can be justified apart from faith is simply to seriously slander and misrepresent the Roman Catholic Church. Secondly, the Roman Catholic Church has always taught that grace is necessary, a necessary prerequisite for justification. And without the grace of God that is infused into the soul sacramentally, which we'll look at more closely in a moment, without that grace, we'd be left back in the hopeless condition of Pelagianism, of having to try to earn our way into heaven simply on the ground and basis of our own righteousness and our own merit. And Rome rejects that. And of course, the Roman Catholic Church affirms the necessity of the atonement of Christ and of the work of Christ to help us in our justification. And so, just in brief recapitulation, Rome believes that justification is by faith, it's by grace, and it's by Christ. What Rome doesn't believe is that justification is by faith alone, or by grace alone, or by Christ alone. But rather it combines other elements. For example, in the Roman Catholic view, it is faith plus works that gives us justification. It is grace plus merit that gives us justification. It is Christ plus me and my inherent righteousness that gives me justification. That's the formula in a nutshell. The Reformers objected strenuously to this and said, no, we have no merit of our own of any kind that we bring before God. As the hymn writer Augustus Toplady wrote in Rock of Ages, it's nothing in my hand I bring simply to the cross, I cling. So this is crossed out by the Reformers, this is crossed out by the Reformers. And my inherent righteousness is crossed out so that you have faith alone, grace alone, Christ alone. Well, briefly, for the Roman Catholic Church, justification begins with baptism. And baptism is called by Rome the instrumental cause of justification. Now, what that means, very simply, is this. Back in Aristotle's day, when Aristotle divided different types of causes, he used an illustration of building a statue. And the material cause of the statue is the stone out of which the statue is made. The efficient cause is the sculptor who uses his instruments to bring about the shaping of the statue. But the instrumental cause would be the chisel and the hammer, the instrument he used to bring about the effect. And so, according to the Roman Catholic Church, the instrument that God uses to bring justification to the needy person is, in the first instance, the instrument of baptism. In baptism, the person who is baptized receives an inpouring or an infusion of. Of what is called justifying grace, or what is called the grace of the righteousness of Christ. That is, when the person is baptized, something happens inwardly, the soul is infused with divine grace. And if that person cooperates with that infused or poured in grace in baptism and not only cooperates with it, but assents to it. The Latin is co operare et asentare. If you cooperate with that infused grace and assent to that grace, then you are in a state of justification wherein you remain until or unless you commit mortal sin. And if you commit a mortal sin, the reason why mortal sin is called mortal sin is because it can kills the inhabiting grace that is poured into your soul at baptism. So you have this infusion of grace and that's good until you commit a mortal sin. When you commit a mortal sin, that grace is killed, it's destroyed. And so you are now no longer in a state of justification and you have to be re justified. Well, that doesn't mean you go back to baptism, but there's a second sacrament that's crucial to this process in the Roman Catholic system, and that's the Sacrament of penance. And the sacrament of penance is defined by the Roman Catholic Church as the second plank of justification for those who've made shipwreck of their souls. And I think most of you are aware of the historical circumstances of luther posting his 95 theses on the church door at Wittenberg. And what provoked Luther to ask for a disputation among the faculty members of the university was something that he considered an abuse of one of the Church's practices. And that had to do with the granting of indulgences. And what the sacrament of penance required is that the sinner come to the priest and enter into the confessional and confess his sins. And with that confession, then came a prayer of contrition and priestly absolution. Then in the sacrament of penance came the imposition of what's called works of satisfaction. And these works of satisfaction are the performing of the practice of penance. You notice historically then, when Protestants speak about repentance, they say be repentant or simply repent. Whereas the normal language of Roman Catholicism historically is that the sinner is called to do penance. Penance is not something you feel or express, but rather it is something that you do. It is an activity. It is a kind of work that is required. And so the works of penance may be very small. They may mean that all that you have to do is to say so many Hail Marys, so many our Fathers or whatever, or in severe cases, more strenuous labors may be required of the penitent to show the fruits of their genuine contrition. And what the effect of these works of penance, doing of penances is to provide works of satisfaction. Now, how does the Church define that these are works performed to satisfy the demands of God and of his law, which works of satisfaction earn for the penitent? Merit. So in this case, not only is grace required, but in addition to grace, merit is required. Not only is faith required, but in addition to faith, works are required, and these works must be done by before a person can be justified. Now, one of the works of satisfaction that the Church defined was the giving of alms. If a person, out of a spirit of genuine heartfelt contrition for their sin, in an attempt to be restored to the state of grace, goes through the sacrament of penance, if they are sincere and they give alms to the poor or gifts to the working of the Church out of sincere repentance, then those alms would count towards completing the works of satisfaction and could lead the Church graciously to count these alms as the basis for the granting of indulgences. But when the Church for the building of St Peter's granted indulgences in the 16th century, the church at least tried to make it clear to its people that these indulgences would only actually take place if the giving of alms was done out of a sincere heart. However, if you die in mortal sin, you go to hell. That's why the last sacrament, the sacrament of extreme unction, is so important. You've all seen the scene of somebody dying in an accident scene, calling for the priests, rushing the priest there to give them the last rites, which began as a healing ministry, but now is given as sort of an extension of the sacrament of penance, to make sure they don't die with mortal sin on their soul, lest they go to hell. Now, the vast majority of people, according to the Church, in the Church, die not in mortal sin if they've been going to the sacraments of confession and so on. But if they die with any impurity on their souls, they go to purgatory, which is so called because it is the place of purging, which where the dross is removed and a person is purified, because you can't get into heaven until you are perfected, until you're purified. Now, when in the course of Church history, there have been extraordinary exceptions, there have been those few saints who lived righteously enough, that they didn't have to go to Purgatory, but when they died, they went directly to heaven because they had enough merit to go to heaven. And some of them not only had enough merit to go to heaven, but they had excess merit. Now that gets me to the absolute ultimate issue of the Reformation, which had to do with the grounds of justification. The question was this. On what basis will God, or does God ever declare a person to be just? On what grounds? Roman Catholic Church says the only way God will ever declare a person just is on the basis of inherent righteousness. We call this analytical justification. That is, when God puts His eye upon you and examines your soul and submits you to his divine analysis. If he sees inherent righteousness there, then he will declare you righteous. But not until or unless you are actually righteous will God declare you righteous. Now, again, you can't be righteous without the help of Christ, without the help of faith and without the help of grace. But given those helps, you still have to reach this level, because the only grounds by which God will declare you to be righteous is, is if righteousness inheres in you. And this is accomplished through infused righteousness. That is, that's what helps you become inherently righteous. Righteousness that comes in the sacrament that is poured into your soul, Christ poured into you, you cooperate and assent to that righteousness to such an extent that that righteousness then becomes your own. You understand that? Now, the Reformation view was that the only grounds by which God ever declares anyone just is the imputation of the righteousness of Christ. And the New Testament speaks about Christ as being our righteousness. The idea here is that the ground of our justification is not simply the atonement of Christ, by which he bears the burden of our guilt by taking the punishment of God for our sin, but also by the life of Christ by which he lives a life of perfect obedience to every mandate of the Divine law. And he is perfect and sinless. And Christ alone merits salvation in front of a just and holy God, because He's the only one who is sinless. He's the only one who is perfectly righteous and perfectly just. And I am an unjust person. And if I look at my own attempts, I am an unprofitable servant. I'm not only imperfect, but once I'm imperfect, there's nothing I can ever do to get rid of an imperfect life. You sin once, you'll never be perfect because you have that imperfection against your name. Now, the basis of justification according to the New Testament and according to Luther, is By the works of the law shall no flesh be justified. But we are justified by faith alone. In this sense, that faith is the instrument by which we embrace Christ. We put our trust in him and in him alone as the grounds for our salvation. And when we put our faith and trust in Christ, the moment we trust in Christ, God in a legal action transfers or imputes or counts or reckons the righteousness of Jesus to our account. So that at the end of my life I stand before the judgment seat of God and I am clothed not in my own inherent righteousness, but. But I am covered by the righteousness of Christ and God declares me just in the Beloved, in Christ by the imputation of his righteousness, which Luther insisted was a righteousness that is an alien righteousness. That is a righteousness not performed by me, but it's a righteousness performed by somebody else. It's not performed by me with the help of somebody else, but it's a righteousness that is performed by somebody else apart from me. It is a righteousness that Luther insisted was extra nos apart from us, outside of us. It's Jesus performance that is transferred to my account when I receive him by faith. That's why Paul labors the point that our justification is given to us freely as a gift of the Father. That God calls me just before he makes me, just where in the Roman Catholic scheme he won't call me, just until I've been first made. Just. That's the difference. And the one word over which the whole controversy is involved is this word imputation. You take away the concept of imputation from Protestant doctrine of justification, or you take away sola fide, you take away sola fide, you take away the Gospel. That's why with this doctrine of the imputation of the righteousness of Christ to the helpless believer is at the very heart and soul of the gospel itself. You reject that. You're rejecting the gospel. That's why the debate was so fierce, because nothing less than the Gospel of Christ was at stake. And it's still at stake today.
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Renewing Your Mind Host
Such a crucial reminder there from RC Sproul. Thank you for joining us for this Saturday edition of Renewing youg Mind. You know, as Christians, not only do we want to believe the gospel, we want to be able to share it with others. And this series was designed to help you understand the depth of the gospel and respond to those who would distort it. We'd like to send you the entire series on DVD and unlock the messages and study guide in the free Ligonier app. When you give a donation in support of our daily proclamation of the biblical gospel@renewingyourmind.org we'll also send you a Renewing your Mind notebook. So give your gift while there's still time@renewingyourmind.org or by using the link in the podcast Show Notes and in advance. Let me thank you for your generous donation. You know, we often sing Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound. But do we really need God's grace to be saved? Next Saturday, RC Sproul will answer that very important question here on Renewing youg Mind.
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R.C. Sproul
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