Sola Fide: Unearthing the Roots of the Protestant Reformation

Discover the radical convictions of John Huss that ignited a revolution in Christian thought and set ablaze the trail for the Protestant Reformation. Join Taylor Windham and step back into a time where 'sola fide'—faith alone—became the battle cry that challenged centuries of Catholic doctrine. We'll honor Huss's legacy, not only examining his courageous stance against the church's practices and his consequential martyrdom but also how his teachings inspired Martin Luther and reshaped the Christian faith. As we unfold this historical tapestry, you'll gain a deeper appreciation of the crucial distinctions between Protestant and Catholic beliefs that continue to shape our understanding of salvation.

Prepare to challenge your preconceptions as we explore the multifaceted concept of grace through a Protestant lens, contrasting it sharply with Catholic perspectives. We'll dive into the heart of theological debate, scrutinizing the Catholic portrayal of grace as an infused presence requiring sacramental nurturing against the Protestant view of grace as an imputed, unearned gift from God. This episode is not just a historical recount; it's a journey to the core of what it means to embrace 'sola gratia'—grace alone—and its transformative impact on the doctrine of salvation. Tune in for a thought-provoking discussion that promises to enlighten your spiritual path and bring clarity to the profound questions at the heart of Christian doctrine.

If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe, follow, share the episode, like, or check us out in YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtvAv52Ldvfjf4CgYhYTZig

As always, thank you for watching Gospel Grit, where we seek to apply the Word of God, to the people of God, to the glory of God.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:08

This episode is in honor of my grandfather, bill Wyndham. The year is 1415. The day is July 6th, a Thursday, and you are a peasant in the church of an up-and-coming and seemingly radical preacher named John Huss in Prague, czechoslovakia. You are working in the field just outside of town like you do every day, for little wages. You get word that Pastor Huss has been arrested by the Catholic Church. You're in a panic, you leave your post and you run to protest and stop it, if you can. You've been attending this church that has been causing some issues for some time now, but nothing this serious. This has caught you totally off guard.

Speaker 1: 0:57

Pastor Huss is ordained by the Roman Catholic Church but has been preaching reform for some time now, almost from the very beginning of his ministry. In particular, he has been preaching reform for some time now, almost from the very beginning of his ministry. In particular, he has been preaching against indulgences, moral failures in the clergy and the Pope, the simony of money extortion, along with teaching and preaching that the Bible be read and taught in the language of the people. You watch as they imprison him and put a chain around his neck on the charges of teaching the doctrines of John Wycliffe, another reformer of his day. He's imprisoned for 73 days total. He is told to recant and, of course, he refuses no surprise to you. He maintains that if he can be shown from the Bible he will change his mind, but only from the Bible. It is announced that he has been condemned by the assembled Council of Constance, which was assembled in Constance, germany, the trial of Hus being in June of 1415, and he was sentenced to be executed by the feckless and kangaroo court. He was dragged out into the square, chained and set alight. He fell on his face, prayed for his persecutors, turned to his murderers and uttered the now famous words Today you will cook this goose, which is where we get the term. His goose is cooked as well, as his name meant goose in the common vernacular. But in 100 years, there will arise a swan which you will prove unable to boil or roast. Then this proto-reformer went to be with the Lord. Then this proto-reformer went to be with the Lord. The swan he referred to, 100 years later, in the same country of Germany, was none other than Martin Luther, the swan that God used to bring the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages to its knees, who is, in fact, never boiled or roasted.

Speaker 1: 3:04

Welcome to Gospel Grit. As always, this is the channel where we seek to apply the Word of God to the people of God, for the glory of God. I'm your host, taylor Windham, very glad, as always, to be with you guys. As you can tell from the title thumbnail and all the goodies, this is going to be a bit of a different series. It's going to be a series. It is going to be a bit of a different series and it's going to be a series and it's going to be five parts. I'm going to try to keep these about 15 minutes. I know I say that all the time, but I'm going to keep these about 15 minutes. We are actually going to be tackling the solos. You'll see this. It's called you'll see this, hopefully very clearly for the title of the series.

Speaker 1: 3:44

It's basically Roman Catholicism and I really want to focus on what makes us different as Protestants, evangelicals, as people who believe the Bible call us a fundamentalist or whatever you'd like to say, but what makes us fundamentally different. I'm really going to tackle the solas and what those mean, what's different about them and why they're so important. So we're really going to focus on salvation. We're not going to talk about extraneous issues. The question I get asked and what sort of prompted this is something like this, taylor is what do you think what is the big deal with Roman Catholics? Are they Christians that are just in a different denomination? That's what I've been told. What do you think? And without any equivocation, let me say that is 100% wrong and I hope at least by the end of the series maybe even this video here you come to understand that. So let me try to explain.

Speaker 1: 4:42

The goal of this issue is to address the core concern or consideration that we are not separated siblings, so to say. We're not two sides of the same Christian coin as Protestants and Catholics, and whatever we fought about in that great Reformation thing 500 years ago is totally irrelevant today. I think most Christians believe that they don't know what they believe and they certainly don't know what Roman Catholics believe. So let's try to clear some things. Up Tonight we're going to focus on maybe the most famous, the principal cause of the Reformation, of the five solas. You've heard it before I have a tattoo of all these on my arm. That's how important I think these are, and it is sola fide.

Speaker 1: 5:23

Sola fide, which is a Latin term meaning faith alone. Okay, so again, we're not going to be focusing in this series on worshiping Mary, the worship of saints, purgatory, the mass, any egregious errors in the Roman Catholic Church, all of the seven sacraments rather than two. We're not doing any of that repository of merit. I mean, on and on it goes. We could go on and on forever about the true differences and what you might call secondary issues, but I want to focus on salvation. So the place to start with this is faith alone, or faith plus something.

Speaker 1: 6:07

So, without going into too much history for the sake of time, we as Protestants, as evangelicals, those who focus on the gospel, need to remember and stay focused on the fact that we believe in sola fide, or at least we ought to. We believe in that gospel that Paul talks about in Galatians 1, when he's rebuking the Galatians for so quickly leaving and abandoning the gospel and turning to another gospel. And so I want to point out something that may be fairly obvious, and that is that when they turn to another gospel, the thing that they really turn to, if you read Galatians 1, and I encourage you to read that chapter, heck, read the whole book. If you read Galatians 1, you see emphatically that they're not turning to another Christology or they're not turning to another view of eschatology, or on and on and on. What they're really turning to is that they are mixing works. The Judaizers are coming into the church and they're talking about circumcision and Paul writes those famous critiques and scathing words there.

Speaker 1: 7:09

But really the issue becomes it always has been is it faith alone that we are saved by, or is it faith plus something else? So sola fide means faith alone, right, and it's not, and I want to be clear. It's not that, as Roman Catholics groups of people who ascribe to that theology or that system of thinking and there are about 1 billion Catholics on this planet. So this is important, critically important, that we understand the difference. It's not that they don't believe in faith for salvation. Roman Catholics believe faith is absolutely necessary for salvation. It's just that faith alone was what they got hung up on 500 years ago in the Reformation and it is what they're hung up on now. That fundamentally hasn't changed the idea that grace and we'll get to this a little bit later the idea that grace is infused into the soul and it needs to be cooperated with, and the fact that there needs to be evidence sacerdotally, through the sacraments and things like that.

Speaker 1: 8:12

We're positing as Protestants, as evangelicals, as Christians, that the gospel is emphatically Romans 4.3,. Abraham believed God and it was credited, accounted to, reckoned to his account as righteousness, and we'll jump into all of that. But please understand that I am not saying that Roman Catholics don't believe in salvation by faith. I am saying, without a doubt, that they do believe in salvation by faith. I am saying, without a doubt, that they do believe in salvation by faith, but not faith alone In their case. They mix in works. They mix in into the admixture of salvation. The formula which we'll get to is truly faith plus works equals justification, and we'll dig into that. So there are really four main views I wrote down here and I don't think these should be too shocking. But, as always, rewind it, pause it. Whatever you need to do to think on this and comment below. If you got a question for me or you've got a comment, we'd love to hear from you guys, because this is a pertinent issue to our time.

Speaker 1: 9:15

We see so much ecumenicism and everything becomes ecumenical, everything becomes inclusive. We are so focused on trying to put our arms around as many people as humanly possible. The evangelical view of salvation is not just sola fide, faith alone, but it's faith equals works plus justification. So on one side of the equation it's faith. So faith produces works and faith also produces justification. So when we say sola fide, we're really just saying that we are saved by Christ alone, faith in Christ alone, right. So ultimately we're saying things like we are saved by faith alone, through grace alone, all the five solas together, through Christ alone, according to Scripture, alone to the glory of God alone. So the Protestant view is that our faith produces works Ephesians 2.10, and our faith is the means by which justification, being put back in right standing with God, is appropriated to us.

Speaker 1: 10:25

So the second view is the Roman Catholic view. It has been, it still is. It's faith plus works equals justification. Right, I know this is an oversimplification, but faith plus works equals justification. So in the Roman Catholic view of sola, like merit and penance and purgatory if necessary, of pilgrimages, penance, penitence, indulgences that was a big controversy 500 years ago, of course, with Luther and Johann Tetzel All of those things would be works and they mix faith plus works to bring about the result of justification.

Speaker 1: 11:15

The third one is antinomianism. That's a term we use in evangelical circles, of course, but it's the anti-law view. It's faith minus works equals justification. Your works have nothing to do with it at all, in fact. Justification. So your works have nothing to do with it at all. In fact, it's just fideism on steroids and I won't spend any time on that. But that is a whole different issue. And if you study the Reformation you know the libertines caused as much trouble for the reformers really as the Roman Catholic Church did and the Anabaptists and people like that. But we'll move on. So the religious view, which is every other religion outside of Christendom or the loose definition of Christianity, the religious view, is just works equals salvation. So faith doesn't necessarily have anything to do with it. Works equals salvation. And that's how the four camps break it up. Obviously, we're focusing in this video on Protestant view faith equals works plus justification.

Speaker 1: 12:13

The Catholic view is faith plus works equals justification. So number two this is the second main point I really want to hit what is justification? What does it mean? So when we're talking about salvation by faith or salvation by faith alone, and how that is viewed, we have theologically what's called in the Catholic view of justification or faith, that God looks at a sinner and views him as righteous, he or her as righteous when they behave that way. So on the basis of your behavior, because of your faith in the Roman Catholic system, you are considered or reckoned righteous. In other words, god sees what is analytically and he says that person is righteous because their faith is making them act and behave and be predisposed to righteousness. They meet the threshold, they meet the requirement and so their faith is producing righteousness, producing works. Faith plus works equals righteousness. It's called analytical righteousness and it is the Roman Catholic view. Again, in a video this short, just trying to give you the high points, give you something to hang your hat on and kind of understand sola fide and why we argue.

Speaker 1: 13:28

The Protestant view, the view that I hold to, and probably most of you do, would be sort of forensic righteousness. It's that the 2 Corinthians 5.21, that God made Him, christ, who knew no sin, to become sin on our behalf so that we could become the righteousness of God in Him. So the idea there is that we have been given the positive righteousness of Christ. We take his place, we get his righteousness. He got our sin, he atoned for our sin. He took our place so we could take his place. So we are not practically righteous all the time in all of our behaviors, but we are positionally righteous. This is the difference between the Catholic analytical righteous view versus the Protestant and forensic righteous view that they believe.

Speaker 1: 14:15

God considers you righteous when you act and behave righteous and if you stop acting and behaving righteous because you've killed the grace in your soul that is infused and we'll get to that next in baptism then you lose your salvation and we go through penance and the whole system of sacraments, right? So the last thing is last question I want to address before we come to a close is how is salvation granted in these two systems? This is very important. Number one it's imparted, in the Roman Catholic view, or infused. So I referenced this a second ago. It just basically means that faith is necessary, as I said in the Roman Catholic view, but that it's slowly infused, it's trickled, it's like an IV drip into your soul and grace is infused at baptism typically infant baptism and you can kill it through mortal sins. You can squelch it or cut it off temporarily by venial sins.

Speaker 1: 15:12

Mortal sins are sins that kill the grace in your soul and cause you to go down that sacramental trail of penance. It used to be indulgences and that's not so big of a thing anymore, of course. But imparted grace or infused grace is something that is given to you in your soul. It's something that resides there and you have to tend to it right. You're cooperating with the grace given you by the Holy Spirit, but as long as you cooperate with it and you, you feed it and you uh, tend to it and you grow it right, and so you're doing positive things, you're believing positive things, you're staying on the right track, you're going to confession, and on and on and on it goes. As long as you're doing those things, then ultimately you're cooperating with that grace right.

Speaker 1: 15:59

And the last thing would be the Protestant view is that grace is imputed, not imparted. It's imputed, not infused, meaning that it is reckoned to us, it is given to us. It's not inherent in the soul. We don't speak of grace as Protestants in the way that Roman Catholics do, and that'll lead into sola gratia next week grace alone, perfectly. But we don't speak about grace the way that they do.

Speaker 1: 16:26

Grace is something that's in the soul, that is foreign to it. Think of it as an object, or think of it as a force, or some kind of vegetable or fruit that you're growing and you can do things to kill it. You can do things to help it grow. We view grace as something that stands outside of the center, that's done for the center by God. Right, so grace is undeserved merit. We use that Protestant view, but I think many of you most likely don't understand how radically different the two views are. They don't view grace as something God does. They view grace as something God gives you for you to tend and work, whereas we view grace in the imputed view that he gives it to us. It's a unilateral work done by God on behalf of us. So theirs would be synergistic, right. Theirs is a view that God has granted them something and they need to work together with it. The Protestant evangelical view, the biblical view, is that it's not tended to, it's imparted, rather it's imputed, it's reckoned to somebody and it's a unilateral, monergistic way of viewing that. Grace is given and done to you, not just in you.

Speaker 1: 17:45

We'll bring it to a close. We're about 17 minutes here. We'll bring it to a close. Com. About 17 minutes here. We'll bring it to a close. Uh, comments. I know this video is short. It felt like it just went by like that, but I need to get short videos to you guys and we've got four more parts so we can try to clean up whatever we may have missed. Please like, comment and subscribe. If you've got a question, drop it in the comments. You've got a comment? Drop it in the comments. I always love to hear from you guys. Please share this video. I hope this small, quick bit of theology when it comes to salvation by grace, faith, christ, scripture, glory of God alone, but specifically sola fide, the doctrine upon which the church stands or falls has been clear to you today. I love you guys and, as always, I hope we have achieved our goal of applying the word of God to the people of God for the glory of God. I love you guys and I will see y'all on part two of this.