Five Solas-Intro
The weeks leading up to October 31 evoke within our American experience all manner of feelings, imagery, and traditions. For most, autumn is in the air as preparations are made for Halloween and celebrations of the harvest. In one way or another, these traditions leave their mark on our homes, neighborhoods, and storefronts as decorations change to match the season. While these things may mark the broader cultural landscape, there is another “harvest” whose memory also attends this season, one that often gets overlooked, even among many churches that are beneficiaries of its blessings.
On October 31, 1517, German professor and monk Martin Luther famously presented ninety-five points for debate at the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. Luther was motivated by an increasing personal opposition to what he had become convinced were a series of unbiblical doctrines, practices, and abuses within the Roman Catholic Church, ones that he believed undermined the very essence of the gospel itself. While perhaps in less dramatic fashion than many retellings of the event portray, popular history remembers Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses as the spark that ignited the Protestant Reformation. The movement would be marked by an explosion of “Reformation-minded” churches that, in breaking away from Rome, sought to recover the gospel and preach the essential doctrines of the Christian faith. These convictions came to be summarized in what are commonly called the Five Solas of the Reformation: Sola Scriptura (Scripture Alone), Sola Fide (Faith Alone), Sola Gratia (Grace Alone), Solus Christus (Christ Alone), and Soli Deo Gloria (Glory to God Alone).
Prominent Protestant theologians and reformers, such as Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, John Calvin, John Knox, and their followers, rallied around these central convictions. Broadly speaking, their theological descendants would most directly include Lutherans, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Puritans, Congregationalists, and, ultimately, the variety of denominational traditions downstream from these. Yet, despite the myriad modern non-Roman Catholic denominations that look to the Protestant Reformation as their starting point, we return to the theological soil in which the Reformation’s Five Solas and their harvest in the gospel emerge in order to identify what it means to be a true product of the Reformation, or “Reformation-minded” (a label around which we here at the Gospel Forum happily unite).
That said, while the harvest that came with the recovery of the true gospel cannot be overstated—that is, salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, as revealed in Scripture alone, to the glory of God alone—it is important at this point to remember that the movement was just that, a harvest. Though Luther is often dramatically presented as the spark that ignited the Reformation, his convictions did not emerge out of nowhere. He and the other Reformers were beneficiaries of centuries of arduous tilling, sowing, and watering by faithful saints who had gone before, often making the ultimate sacrifice.
As early as the late 1100s, the wealthy merchant Peter Waldo of Lyon, France, having embraced the gospel, was determined to see the Scriptures translated into the vernacular so that ordinary people could read them for themselves and test Rome’s teachings against them. Having commissioned translations of portions of the Gospels and several epistles, he distributed them freely and gave his life to preaching the Scriptures. As his work bore fruit and gained a following in Lyon, it put him at odds with the authorities in Rome. In 1182, Waldo and his followers were ultimately expelled from Lyon and fled to the French Alps. There they, the Waldensians, lived and built a community around their commitment to the ultimate authority of the Scriptures. Fascinatingly, centuries later, when missionaries of the Reformation made their way to the Alps, they reportedly found the Waldensians already committed to many of the same theological convictions.
Later, in the fourteenth century, having borne witness to corruption within the Papacy, the established sale of indulgences and church offices, and the fraught relationship between the Church and the fractured remnants of the Holy Roman Empire, English theologian John Wycliffe became convinced that if a doctrine or practice was not taught in the Scriptures, the people had a right to question it. As a result, the work and movement he initiated led to a collaboration with his scholarly associates to bring about the first complete translation of the Bible from Latin into common English. As his followers and ordinary people gained access to the Scriptures, they committed them to memory and eventually drafted doctrinal summaries such as the Twelve Conclusions (1395). These demonstrate convictions similar to those later held by the Reformers. Though Wycliffe died of natural causes, he was later condemned as a heretic by the Council of Constance, and his body was even later exhumed and burned.
Finally, one beneficiary of Wycliffe’s work and writings emerged in the Bohemian city of Prague around 1400. His name was Jan Hus. His commitment to Scripture as the supreme authority led him to embrace doctrines, preaching, and practices that closely aligned with many of the fundamental commitments later associated with the Five Solas. His teaching on the supremacy of Christ in salvation and over his Church naturally also put him in opposition to Rome. He openly preached against the pope’s claim to headship over the Church, as well as many of the same doctrinal errors and abuses that Wycliffe had opposed before him. Then, at the same council at which Wycliffe was posthumously condemned, Hus was given an opportunity to recant his teachings. He, too, was condemned and executed after refusing to recant anything unless he could be shown from Scripture that he was wrong. Later, during his own defense at Leipzig Debate, Martin Luther would acknowledge his own significant doctrinal alignment with the already-condemned Hus.
While we could recount many more of these tillers, sowers, and waterers of the Kingdom in the centuries leading up to that famed day on October 31, 1517, hopefully this has been sufficient to stir our thanksgiving for those who have gone before us as we count our blessings in the gospel during this autumn harvest season. We would do well this week, as we consider the Five Solas of the Reformation, to remember that it was less a spark and bang and more the fulfillment of Jesus’s promises in the Gospels. Where the seed of God’s Word is faithfully sown, it will find good soil. While Rome might prefer to think of the Protestant Reformation as the product of bad soil, producing a harvest doomed to wither for lack of roots, we can take confidence that our roots are in Christ through His Word, that we are not alone in the history of His Church, and that in the gospel championed by the Five Solas we can look forward to an ultimate harvest unto salvation that, in God’s sovereignty, produces 30-, 60-, and 100-fold.
