Sola Fide’s Absence in the Early Church

Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answer’s apologist, Trent Horn, and today, I’ll be examining the historical evidence, or lack thereof, for what is probably the central doctrine of Protestantism, sola fide, justification by faith alone, but one thing I cannot do alone is hosting this channel. It’s a team effort and you can help out our team by liking this video and hitting the subscribe button, and if you really want to put your faith in the channel into action, then please support us at trenthornpodcast.com to get access to our bonus content.

New Testament Catechism study series, all kinds of great stuff, trenthornpodcast.com. All right, so why is this such a big deal? Martin Luther once said that justification by faith alone is the doctrine by which the church stands or falls. It was even a recent defense of sola fide that uses this quote as the book’s title. So in a nutshell, sola fide means that a sinner is justified by faith alone and works are only an effect of justification, never its cause. Moreover, Christ’s righteousness is imputed or credited to the believer.

And his standing before God is based solely on that legal declaration that imputes this righteousness and not on anything that actually changes in the soul of the believer, what would be called infused righteousness of Christ. Some Protestants take this one step further and say that once a person is justified by faith alone, he can never lose his salvation, but did the early church, which received the faith from the apostles themselves, did they teach this? Did they teach that works have nothing to do with our justification or our standing before God?

Are works just the inevitable byproduct of a true faith? In today’s episode, I’m going to restrict my discussion to the earliest Apostolic Fathers, which are those who wrote in the first two centuries. If sola fide were apostolic and given its crucial importance to the gospel, the Christianity, at least from a Protestant perspective, we’d expect the church fathers to have made at least some mention of it. Now in response to that claim, some Protestants say that the church fathers at this time were busy focusing on heresies related to christology and the trinity.

So justification just was not an issue for them, but I find that hard to believe because salvation was definitely an issue for them. They were rebutting the Gnostics who believed you needed secret knowledge to be saved. They were answering the Judaizers who said that you had to be circumcised in order to be justified in God’s sight. It would’ve been very easy for these first Christians to just say, the only thing that justifies you before God is faith, faith alone, and true faith will on its own produce good works to accompany it, none of which have any effect on our salvation.

Jordan Cooper, who is a Lutheran scholar and who defends some forms of sola fide in the fathers, in these earliest fathers, he put it well in his book on the subject. He says, “It is untenable to suggest that the question, what must I do to be saved, was not a predominant question at this time in the early church.” So we see salvation was certainly an issue and it’s a natural context for sola fide to be brought up if that’s what the church taught. Now, a few caveats before I continue.First, many people misunderstand the Catholic view of justification in contrast to the Protestant view.

They summarize it this way. Protestants believe we are justified by faith alone and Catholics believe we are justified by faith and good works, but this summary makes it seem like Catholics believe our initial justification or how we go from being dead in sin to being alive in Christ is through a combination of faith and works. That’s not true. Paragraph 2010 of the Catechism says, “Since the initiative belongs to God in the order of grace, no one can merit the initial grace of forgiveness and justification at the beginning of conversion.”

And the 16th century counsel of Trent said this, “We are justified by faith because faith is the beginning of human salvation, the foundation, and the root of all justification, without which it is impossible to please God.” So the question is not does faith justify us? Did the early fathers teach that? Lots of early Christians say faith justifies us. We are justified by faith in Christ. We are not justified by the Mosaic Law, for example, but that is not the same as saying we are justified by faith alone because the fathers also talk about us being under the new law of Christ, for example.

This framework of faith and works can also make it seem like Catholics must perform an arbitrary number of good works in order to get to heaven, which is not true. The only good work a Catholic must do to get to heaven is to just not die in a state of mortal sin. Good works are not the automatic byproduct of faith, but they only come from faith, as Paul says in Galatians 5:6. “For in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any avail, but faith working through love.” That’s why Pope Benedict XVI once said the following in a general audience.

He said, “Being just simply means being with Christ and in Christ and this suffices. Further observances are no longer necessary,” Jewish observances. “For this reason, Luther’s phrase, faith alone, is true if it is not opposed to faith in charity, in love. Faith is looking at Christ, entrusting oneself to Christ, being united to Christ, conformed to Christ to his life.” Also, if we do gravely evil works, if we fail to keep God’s commandments in a way that destroys charity in the soul and thus destroys our friendship with God, then we must respond to the grace of God that always seeks our salvation and be reconciled to God.

This is something that most Protestants would say is incompatible with justification by faith alone, but this idea that evil works can have a negative effect on our justification before God, that is something we do find in the fathers of the first two centuries. They see salvation contingent on avoiding evil works and they do not say this behavior will just be a byproduct of a saving faith instead of a dead faith, for example. Finally, before I review some of these early fathers, I want to point out that many Protestant scholars and apologists bite the bullet on this one.

They admit sola fide was fairly or even entirely unknown in the early church. So Thomas Torrance’s 1948 dissertation, The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers, which is considered a classic work on the subject, declares that, “The Church of the Apostolic Fathers has but a very feeble understanding of the great truths of the gospel.” So this is a Protestant lamenting that the earliest fathers do not teach sola fide. The Dutch reform theologian, Louis Berkhof, writes, “The writings of the early church fathers contain very little respecting the doctrine of sanctification.

A strain of moralism is quite apparent in that man was taught to depend for salvation on faith and good works,” or consider Alister McGrath’s magnum opus, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification. This is one of the most comprehensive books on justification. It’s over 500 pages long, but it spends less than 10 pages on how justification was understood before St. Augustine. In the third edition of the book, McGrath said, “For the first 350 years of the history of the church, her teaching on justification was inchoate and ill-defined.”

That line does not appear in the book’s newest edition, but McGrath still admits that, “Early Christian writers did not choose to express their soteriological convictions primarily in terms of the concept of justification.” Among Protestant apologists, Geisler and MacKenzie say that, “Between the time of the Apostle Paul and the Reformation, scarcely anyone taught imputed righteousness or forensic justification,” and the Protestant apologist James White says that only a few valid contextual citations can be mustered in reference to justification by grace through faith alone in the writings of the early church.

However, there are scholars who believe that this view of the fathers is overly pessimistic and at least the precursors of sola fide can be found in these early sources. People like Nathan Busenitz in Long Before Luther, Nick Needham’s article on Justification in the Early Church Fathers, and Jordan Cooper’s book, The Righteousness of One: An Evaluation of Early Patristic Soteriology in Light of the New Perspective on Paul. Another source that’s often used is Brian Arnold. He has a book based on his dissertation that discusses justification in the second century church fathers.

And a lot of this is also summarized in Thomas Schreiner’s book, Faith Alone, The Doctrine of Justification: What the Reformers Taught and Why it Still Matters. It’s interesting that these authors who try to find early testimony of the sola fide and the fathers, they’ll talk about doctrine developing and it’s just unclear during this time when the same authors often chide Catholics for explaining a lack of explicit teaching in the fathers as an example of doctrinal development, but in the works we’re going to look at, we don’t get unclear descriptions of faith alone becoming more clear over time.

We instead get clear descriptions of how things other than faith affect our justification before God, and even these scholars that I just cited, they admit that is the case in at least some of these early Apostolic Fathers. For example, Needham says that the author of The Shepherd of Hermas believed that serious post-baptismal sin could be forgiven only once, and Busenitz says that the work, Shepherd of Hermas, makes salvation contingent on good works. DH Williams in his book Evangelicals in Tradition says that the Didache represents very unpoline thought, especially in its injunction to work to ransom one’s sins.

The primary source that these different authors rely on to try to show that sola fide existed in some form in the first century tends to be the letter of Clement, First Clement in particular, and the letter says this in part. “And we too being called by his will in Christ Jesus are not justified by ourselves nor by our own wisdom or understanding or godliness or works which we have wrought in holiness of heart, but by that faith through which from the beginning almighty God has justified all men. To whom be glory forever and ever, amen.”

Now this sounds very Protestant until we read other parts of First Clement like section 30 where Clement exhorts his audience to resist sins like adultery and drunkenness. He says that they should instead clothe ourselves with concord and humility, ever exercising self-control, standing far off from all whispering and evil speaking, being justified by our works and not our words. Now, this may mean that we are justified in the sense of being vindicated, proven right rather than made righteous.

So Arnold harmonizes sections 30 and 32 by saying that Clement is arguing that authentic saving faith will be evidenced by someone performing good works, but this doesn’t account for other passages that connect good works with salvation. In chapter 34, Clement compares believers to good and bad employees. He then quotes St. Paul as saying that God will render to every man according to his work. He also says the following in chapter 35, “Let us therefore earnestly strive to be found in the number of those that wait for him in order that we may share in his promised gifts.

But how beloved shall this be done if our understanding be fixed by faith towards God, if we earnestly seek the things which are pleasing and acceptable to him, if we do the things which are in harmony with his blameless will, and if we follow the way of truth casting away from us all unrighteousness and iniquity, along with all covetousness, strife, evil practices, deceit, whispering, and evil speaking, all hatred of God, pride and haughtiness, vain glory and ambition.” This does not sound like Clement is saying we are justified by faith alone, but true faith will yield all these things.

Clement seems to be exhorting believers to do these things because they may very well, in being true believers, choose not to do them, which would jeopardize their justification. So the most plausible reading of First Clement that I’ve found is actually in one of the critics that Arnold cites in his dissertation, but he doesn’t actually rebut. That would be scholar Carey Newman’s approach to Clement. So Arnold summarizes Newman’s view of Clement this way. It is also clear that Clement understood good works as the means to maintain salvation. That’s what Newman says.

Arnold summarizes, “Newman claims that in First Clement, one gets in by faith, but one stays in through works.” This view also makes sense given what Clement says in chapter 50 of First Clement. He writes, “Blessed are we beloved if we keep the commandments of God in the harmony of love, that so through love, our sins may be forgiven us,” and the warning that Clement gives in chapter 42, which is directed at Christians, it says “Those therefore who do anything beyond that which is agreeable to his, god’s, will are punished with death.

You see, brethren, that the greater the knowledge that has been vouched safe to us, the greater also is the danger to which we are exposed.” That does not sound like one is justified by faith alone. In fact, Dr. Matthew Thomas has a forthcoming book on First Clement and he says that “Wright’s contention, that final justification in Paul, is in accordance with the life the believer has then lived fits seamlessly here as well as Clement makes clear that the outworking of this faith in God in one’s life, pursuing what pleases God, fulfilling the things befitting his will.

Following the way of truth and casting away sins against God and neighbor provides the basis for ultimately being found in the number of those who will share in his promised gifts, and for the eschatological judgment of God who will pay each one according to his work. Such an understanding of justification whereby present justification is received as a gift by faith apart from our own works or piety and final justification is in accordance with the believer’s subsequent works reconciles the apparent contradictions in this section and allows it to be read as a unified whole.”

So Clement of Rome could say we’re justified by faith alone in our initial salvation and Catholics can say that still today, but the remainder of our life of faith is not by faith alone. Our justification also involves our works to remain in Christ. So Clement of Rome simply does not fit as a defender of sola fide in the first century, but let’s move on then to the early second century. Ignatius of Antioch tells his listeners, “Obey the bishop and the presbytery with an undivided mind, breaking one and the same bread, which is the medicine of immortality in the antidote to prevent us from dying.

But which causes that we should live forever in Jesus Christ.” So once again, that doesn’t sound like we live forever in Christ by faith alone. It sounds like we have to do works like receive Christ in the sacrament of the Eucharist, for example. That is the antidote that gives us immortality. That’s probably why the Protestant scholar Thomas Torrance, who I mentioned earlier as having written a classic treatment of this subject, he says this of Ignatius of Antioch. “We are thus far from a New Testament doctrine of grace.

We are in fact well on the way to the Roman Catholic view. Rather than works being a mere sign of saving faith, Ignatius sees works done in faith as having a value on their own that is worthy of recompense, payment. Ignatius echoes St. Paul’s armor of God language and he says, let none of you be found a deserter. Let your baptism endure as your arms. Your faith is your helmet, your love is your spear, your patience as a complete panoply. Let your works be the charge assigned to you that you may receive a worthy recompense.” Literally says that our works are deposited with holdings.

Things that in an ancient Roman army, for example, would guarantee your back pay. Now that doesn’t sound like sola fide, right, does it? It sounds like that our works allow us to be recompensed or be rewarded for them. They’re not just the byproduct of faith. They have an effect on our justification. They make us more righteous, they make us worthy of reward. Now, some protestants quote Ignatius saying the following to the Magnesians saying no, he couldn’t have believed that. He said, “If he, God, were to reward us according to our works, we would cease to be.”

But in this context, Ignatius is not talking about works done in Christ. He’s talking about Christians who return to Judaism and try to be saved by works of the law and Judaism. Before this quote, Ignatius said, “We have obtained faith and therefore endure that we may be found the disciples of Jesus Christ, our only master. How should we be able to live apart from him?” So we see from Ignatius that faith is something we have to endure like how Jesus says in Matthew 10:22, only those who endure to the end will be saved. The works we do, they’re not the automatic byproduct of faith.

They’re things that in and of themselves deserve recompense or reward from God. This is not compatible with sola fide. So next up then, we have St. Polycarp of Smyrna and he cites in his letter to the Philippians, Ephesians 2:8-9, which is a verse Protestants often cite in defense of sola fide. So this is what Polycarp says. “Knowing that by grace you are saved not of works, but by the will of God through Jesus Christ,” but once again, this does not equal sola fide. Catholics agree no good work rescues us from original sin or causes God to choose us to bestow his grace upon us.

So works have no role in our initial justification from God, but works do have a role in our justification or how we are saved after baptism. That’s why Polycarp later says in the letter, “But he who raised him up from the dead will raise us up also if we do his will and walk in his commandments and love what he loved, keeping ourselves from all unrighteousness.” Polycarp also cites the Deuterocanonical book of Tobit which says, when you can do good, defer it not because alms delivers from death.

It’s no wonder the Princeton theologian Michael Holmes says, “Polycarp works with a synergistic understanding of salvation. Salvation, especially with reference to resurrection, is for Polycarp both a gift and an achievement,” which once again is not what you would find in someone who defends sola fide or justification by faith alone, which has no room for salvation being in any way an achievement or something involved in a work. So by the middle of the second century, we have Justin Martyr, who according to Nick Needham, teaches a “bold doctrine of imputed righteousness.”

Schreiner claims that Justin taught that the law doesn’t save, but the death of Jesus accomplishes salvation instead. Right, but that’s not the same as saying faith in Jesus alone is what saves us. For example, Justin tells Rabbi Trypho that each person shall be saved by his own righteousness and that if indeed you repent of your sins and recognize him to be Christ and observe his commandments, then remission of sins shall be yours. In his apology of the Roman emperor, Justin only mentions faith a handful of times, never in a context of salvation by faith alone.

Instead, Justin says, “that each man goes to everlasting punishment or salvation according to the value of his actions.” Cooper notes that while Justin’s soteriology is closer to Luther than to adherence of the new perspective on Paul, like people like N.T. Wright, Justin Martyr is still “far from teaching justification by alien imputed righteousness.” Cooper even says, “there is clear evidence in Justin’s writings that he does not hold to sola fide.”

The last major figure from the second century would be St. Irenaeus who said “the Lord did not abrogate the natural precepts of the law by which man is justified, which also those who were justified by faith and who pleased God did observe previous to the giving of the law, but that he extended and fulfilled them.” Irenaeus also said “God exhorts and advises them to those things by which man is justified and draws near to god.” Irenaeus then says that God rejected holocausts and sacrifices because these do not justify. What does justify? Faith and obedience and righteousness because of their salvation.

Notice that Irenaeus says man is justified by the moral law. That is incompatible with sola fide, but Irenaeus does not think a man is justified by the law alone. Our justification comes from a faith that empowers us through agape, love of God to do the works that justify us, and the spiritual regeneration that begins this process, according to Irenaeus, it comes in baptism. He writes of Christ, “giving to the disciples the power of regeneration into God and that power comes from,” well, he says, he quotes Matthew 28:19. “He said to them, go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.”

After baptism, our conduct has a direct connection to our standing before God, or as Irenaeus says, “Those then are the perfect who have had the spirit of God remaining in them and have preserved their souls and bodies blameless, holding fast the faith of God, that is that faith which is directed towards God and maintaining righteous dealings with respect to their neighbors.” The strongest argument protestants make for sola fide in the Apostolic Fathers is a passage from the epistle of Diagnetus to Mathetase. It’s an anonymous author from the late second century. A similar lesser known work called the Odes of Solomon, it’s an ancient Jewish and Christian hymn book.

They also cite that for sola fide, but that work, it’s really only cited in Arnold’s dissertation and he doesn’t address passages in it that conflict with his view, such as when the Otis says the most high circumcised me by his Holy Spirit. Then he uncovered my inward being toward him and filled me with his love and his circumcising became my salvation and I ran in the way in his peace in the way of truth. This points to a transformative justification, especially in baptism, which Paul says in Colossians is our new circumcision.

Not some kind of forensic justification or imputed righteousness. He doesn’t also address when the Otis implores listeners to “keep my mystery, you who are kept by it, keep my faith and you who are kept by it as being a necessary instruction to remain saved,” but let’s go back to Diagnetus because that is the much more commonly cited work from this time period by Protestant apologists who want to find early testimony of sola fide. It says in part “for what other thing was capable of covering our sins than his righteousness.

By what other one was it possible that we, the wicked and ungodly, could be justified then by the only son of God? O sweet exchange. O unsearchable operation. O benefits surpassing all expectation that the wickedness of many should be hid in a single righteous one and that the righteousness of one should justify many transgressors.” I think a lot of Protestants are impressed with this passage because it talks about our sins and Christ’s exchange. In Protestant theology, the imputation of Christ’s righteousness is often described as the great exchange.

We receive Christ’s righteousness and are judged solely on that righteousness receive through faith and Christ receives our sins and he is judged and then punished on the cross for those sins. However, the Catechism says in paragraph 603, “Jesus did not experience reprobation as if he himself had sinned, but in the redeeming love that always united him to the Father he assumed us in the state of our waywardness of sin.” I’m not going to get into the biblical arguments for this view, but Catholics can speak about Jesus dying in our place on the cross without endorsing imputed righteousness of the great exchange.

We can talk about how Christ offered himself as a sacrifice to the Father in our place since his sacrifice was the only one sufficient to atone for sins. Christ was not literally punished on the cross for sin, but he underwent a punishment sinners deserve so they would not have to endure it. In this sense, it’s like a person who pays someone else’s fine for a crime. They are not charged with a crime or punished, but they make a painful sacrifice that frees the criminal from his debts. They make a payment in his place, so to speak.

Now that we have that framework, even if we did grant that this passage taught imputed righteousness and it taught justification by faith alone, it wouldn’t be a notable part of the Christian tradition. The work is never quoted again by any church father, even early medieval writers. May just represent an extreme minority of heterodoxy amidst the sea of orthodoxy, similar to how Augustine talks about unnamed Christians in his time believing in what we now call the doctrine of eternal security, even though eternal security was something that was universally rejected in the early church.

See my episode on that, but there is good reason to believe that this text, the Epistle of Diagnetus, does not teach sola fide. First, notice there’s an inference being made here, that it teaches sola fide because it allegedly describes justification by imputed righteousness, the great exchange, and that is then assumed that this exchange naturally leads to justification by faith alone because this exchange is the only means by which we are justified, but the passage, it never talks about righteousness produced by faith.

Faith, it’s only mentioned in the epistle about four or five times, none of them talk about salvation as occurring through faith in Christ. This all it seems to be resting on this idea that the exchange is just about imputed righteousness or a forensic declaration. That may not be what the author is talking about when he means exchange. Brandon Crowe has done an excellent analysis on this epistle. This sweet exchange points to the entirety of the life of the Son given in exchange for unrighteous sinners who are themselves unable to attain eternal life.

It is the Son’s righteousness that enables humanity to attain God’s kingdom, life and justification. In short, in Diagnetus, “The sweet exchange is best viewed as the entirety of the work of the Son in the incarnation, both extending to a positive accomplishment of righteousness and serving as a sacrificial ransom in his death.” In other words, Christ exchanged places with us so he would die and we would not have to. This can be seen before the passage when the author of the epistle says, “In ourselves, we were unable to enter into the kingdom of God. We might through the power of God be made able.

But when our wickedness had reached its height and it had been clearly shown that its reward, punishment and death, was impending over us, and when the time had come, which God had before appointed for manifesting his own kindness and power, how the one love of God through exceeding regard for men did not regard us with hatred nor thrust us away, nor remember our iniquity against us, but show great long-suffering and bore with us. He himself took on him the burden of our iniquities. He gave his own son as a ransom for us.”

Notice also the emphasis is on how one enters the kingdom of God, which cannot be merited in any way, once again, something Catholics and Protestants agree about, and more so it talks about believers being made able to enter, which sounds more like a transformative righteousness than a purely forensic one, and remember, in order to get sola fide from this passage, it has to be purely forensic, that sins are just imputed to Christ and then righteousness is imputed to us. That’s never explicitly said here. It’s assumed that that’s what exchange means here.

But when scholars like Brandon Crowe look at this, they say no, what is being exchanged is rather our place as being sinners who undergo death, for example, something like that, and he’s not the only scholar to question this is a purely forensic account. Michael Byrd, who is a Protestant, and Kirsten Macarus recognize there are some forensic aspects to the language used in this epistle, but they also write the following in their commentary on the Epistle of Diagnetus that is published in the Cambridge collection of the Apostolic Fathers.

They write, “There is no deployment of Pauline language for counting, reckoning, legisemi of righteousness, no reference to union with Christ, and no mention of Christ’s representative obedience. Imputed righteousness at best is a possible corollary of the text, not part of its content. Justification, decailleu, has its conceptual analog in Be Made worthy in 9:1 where the author contrasts human deeds which render a person as unworthy of life with God’s goodness and power, which render a person as worthy to enter the kingdom of God.

While justification necessitates a forensic change in status from lawless to righteous, so too is a change implied in moral state from godlessness to being worthy of life and from corruption to a fitness to receive immortality.” Dr. Matthew Thomas also has a great interview where he responds to critics of his book, Paul’s Works of the Law and the Perspective of Second-Century Reception. In that book, Thomas says, “the second-century church fathers saw that works of the law in Paul, i.e. what we are not justified by, they’re primarily works of the Mosaic law, not good works in general.” That’s how the second-century fathers saw them.

A critic from Credo magazine said that Thomas should have engaged the passage I quoted earlier from Diagnetus as evidence for a faith-alone perspective among the fathers on salvation. Thomas replies that he didn’t because Diagnetus never mentions works of the law, but he compares the section of Diagnetus to Jesus’ teaching on the unforgiving servant and says a transformative exchange perfectly fits the context. He says what he wrote in the book’s preface fits that passage in Diagnetus perfectly. These two sides of this patristic framework can be well illustrated using Jesus’ parable of the unmerciful servant as an analogy.

While the servant is granted an inconceivable gift simply by his petition without being able to give anything, this gift is meant to be transformative in the servant’s life. When the servant is judged according to his deeds, which have manifestly not been transformed by the king’s mercy, all that remains for the servant is severe judgment. So remember in that case, the servant was forgiven a debt. This was by grace alone, but he’s supposed to be transformed by that forgiveness to be merciful. The servant then encounters another servant who owed him a much smaller debt and he refuses to forgive him.

So even though he was given the opportunity to be transformed by this gracious gift, he was not and so then he suffers the consequences because his works did not follow what he graciously received by faith in the king. Thomas then says this in the interview about the Epistle of Diagnetus and how it relates to this. “This is an incredible passage and a really great example of the inconceivable gift and the transformation it brings, that while humanity apart from Christ is unable to enter God’s kingdom, it is now possible by the sweet exchange of grace that Christ gives to those now empowered by him.” All right. Well, that was a whirlwind tour.

I’m definitely more excited to dive into this topic, maybe to talk about fathers in the third, fourth, and fifth centuries. As you see, it’s a very deep topic, so I wanted to restrict it just to those earlier fathers, at least for now. In any case, if you want to learn more about the Catholic view on justification, I have some links about that in the description. Thank you guys so much. I hope you have a very blessed day. Hey, thanks for watching this video. If you want to help us produce more great content like this, be sure to click subscribe and go to trendhornpodcast.com to become a premium subscriber. You’ll help us create more videos like this and get access to bonus content and sneak peeks of our upcoming projects.