The Doctrine That Didn’t Exist: Early Christians v. Sola Fide

You’re listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.

Welcome back to Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So, I’ve been on a kick of exploring what the early Christians had to say on a lot of doctrines that Catholics and Protestants debate about. I wanted to get to one of, if not the biggest doctrines, which is this doctrine of justification by faith alone, which is often known by the Latin name sola fide, which just means faith alone. And so, when we talk about what are the biggest issues separating Catholics and Protestants, as a Catholic, I’m inclined to say something like the Eucharist or the Papacy, but I’m aware that many Protestants read it differently. And for many Protestants, the biggest issue separating them from Catholics is this chasm, or perceived chasm, on the doctrine of justification.

So, I’ll give you an example. In their book, Salvation, Morgan and Shreiner say … Well, they’re actually quoting Francis Pieper’s Christian Dogmatics, that in Lutheran theology, the article of justification is the central chief article by which the Christian doctrine and the Christian church stands and falls. It is the apex of all Christian teaching. This is the most important Christian teaching from this Lutheran perspective. And Morgan and Schreiner point out that in these words, Luther’s tradition remains faithful to its founder. This is a Lutheran describing this.

And then Luther himself wrote, considering justification, “If this article,” that is the article of justification, “Stands, the church stands. If this article collapses, the church collapses.” So, that is about as much weight as you can give to a doctrine as is imaginable. Or perhaps you could go further and call it like the first in chief doctrine. Well, he does that too. In the Smalcald Articles, 1537, he describes it as the first in chief article, and is clear what he means by the doctrine of justification is not just that we are justified by faith, but specifically that faith alone justifies us.

Catholics are totally fine with the formulation that we’re justified by faith, the question becomes faith alone and what we mean by faith alone. We’ll get into some of those distinctions as we go. And Martin Luther, who is quoted in Franz Pieper’s Church Dogmatics, which we heard from before, Luther says that this article, that is the article of justification, is the head and cornerstone of the church. That is, he’s describing it in terms we usually describe Jesus. That justification by faith alone is the head and cornerstone of the church, which alone begets, nourishes, builds, preserves and protects the church. That to say this sounds idolatrous almost I don’t think is an exaggeration. If I said this person, who isn’t Jesus, or this idea that isn’t Jesus is the head and cornerstone of the church, and this person or this idea alone begets, nourishes, builds, preserves and protects the church, I think a lot of Protestants would be deeply uneasy with that kind of language and say, “It sounds like you’re putting them into place only Christ can be.”

But Luther does that with sola fide, this doctrine that as we’re going to see, he kind of invents. We’ll get into that. I know it’s a controversial claim at this point. But then he says without it, without sola fide, the church of God cannot subsist one hour. Now, we’ll see if that’s true. And then elsewhere, he says, “Neither can anyone teach correctly in the church, or successfully resist any adversary if he does not maintain this article.” So the church, this is the make or break issue for Christianity according to Martin Luther. And obviously not all Protestants agree on basically anything, including this, but this is one of those issues that comes close to having something like unanimity, or at least something like unanimity on the surface. Anthony Lane, he goes by Tony Lane, but I don’t know him. And so, it feels weird to call him Tony, although I go by Joe.

And so, I guess we’ll call him Tony Lane. And Tony Lane says that he teaches at a college that has a basis of faith, that’s like a statement of faith, that is unequivocally evangelical, but at the same time the basis deliberately does not side with Baptists or Pedobaptist, that’s people who baptize babies, with Lutherans or reformed, with Calvinists or Armenians, with Premillennialists or Amillennialists. In other words, like many Protestant colleges, it affirms the statement of faith that Protestants of a wide variety of backgrounds would be comfortable signing, and tries not to take a position on issues that might be divisive among Protestants. “But,” he says, “In contrast, the doctrine of justification by faith, however, would be seen by most, if not all evangelicals as one of the central doctrines of the faith.”

In other words, there’s a lot of this stuff, is Calvinism true? That Protestants often feel comfortable saying, “Agree to disagree. You can be a good Christian without being a Calvinist, or you can be a good Christian and be a Calvinist.” And there’s a lot of issues that are in that category. But justification by faith alone for many Protestants is not in that category. If you reject this, you’re not just rejecting one optional or secondary part of Christianity, it’s something much bigger. And he says, “To suggest that the differences between Evangelicals and Roman Catholics over justification might fall within the category of acceptable differences, will to many evangelicals at first seem a preposterous suggestion.”

So, those are the stakes. This is not an optional issue for many Protestants. This is, as Luther says, the make or break issue. This is the chief and cornerstone, this is the head, this is the doctrine that judges other doctrines, this is as big as it gets. And according to Luther, the church wouldn’t last an hour without this doctrine. The whole point of this episode is to find out if that’s actually true, or if in fact the church lasted 1,500 years just fine without that doctrine. Now, before we go on, three quick things. One, as often happens when I’m getting close to you finishing up an episode, I discovered Trent Hornet had gotten there first.

And so, I urge you to check out his video, Sola Fide’s Absence in the Early Church. It’s obviously covering a lot of the same ground, but he goes in some different angles. So, I think you can watch both of them without being hopefully too bored. Second, if you’re someone who likes this channel and wants to support it, I just put out a thing on the YouTube community section, if you know where to find that, asking people about Patreon and tiers, and what they’d be interested in if we end up launching a Patreon in a few weeks here.

So, I’m not going to do a heavy-handed push for that, but if that’s something that sounds interesting to you, you can go over there and read about the proposals for different tiers, and perks, and all that stuff. And third quick thing, what this episode isn’t, a lot of times when we talk about sola fide, the Catholic side and the Protestant side say, “Here’s how I read the Bible, here’s how I read the Bible.” That’s good. I think that’s really important. In fact, I’m probably going to do an episode next week, unless Trent gets there first, doing just that, saying look at the biblical basis for why we don’t believe in sola fide. But I’m not trying to do that here. So, if you watch this episode and say, “You didn’t prove sola fide was false,” well, not exactly what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to do something different.

I’m trying to just ask the question, is sola fide what the early Christians believed in? Did they believe the same thing the Protestants believe about justification? Now, when we talk about what the Protestants believe about justification, I know this again, kind of a catchall, but we can speak of a few distinctive things that the reformers add to the doctrine of justification. Three things that separate them from what Catholics, and we’ll see 1,500 years of Christians, had believed about justification before the reformation. So, let’s go there. What did the reformers mean by justification?

Because so often when we jump into this, we talk about how justification works, is justification by faith alone, is justification by faith and works? But we don’t often get into the question of, well, what is justification? So, justice and righteousness are the same word. And so, how do you become just, how do you become righteous? And there’s three things that mark the Reformation reading. Now, these are both names we’re going to hear more of soon, Nathan Busenitz, he quotes Alister McGrath or really summarizes Alister McGrath, and McGrath identifies three primary characteristics of the Reformation doctrine of justification.

So, when we talk about what makes the Protestant vision of justification distinct from the Catholic one, we’re looking at three things. Number one, what’s called forensic justification. The reformers taught that justification was forensic rather than formative. In other words, it’s a divine declaration of righteousness, that God declares you righteous rather than actually forming you as righteous. Rather than making you righteous, he just declares you holy, he declares you righteous, he declares you just. So, it’s all about a declaration, and that’s usually a one-time event rather than this process of being made actually holy. Second, this distinguishes justification from regeneration in what’s called the order of salvation.

And so, the reformers distinguish regeneration and progressive sanctification. So, in justification, God declares sinners to be positionally righteous. You get moved from the unsaved, unholy category over to the saved, holy category. And not because of anything you did, but because you’ve been clothed in the righteousness of Christ. That is in the beginning of your journey. And then in regeneration, you are renewed so that you can begin to grow in practical holiness. Now, you will find debates among Protestants about the order of some things within that kind of schema, but the important thing is that there’s been a break there, that regeneration and justification are no longer being treated as the same event.

Third, there’s the imputed righteousness of Christ. Now, you might be saying, “Well, of course righteousness is coming from Christ.” That’s not the question. Imputed righteousness is that we’ve been clothed with Christ in such a way that we remain as rotten as we were before. It’s sometimes falsely ascribed to Luther or Calvin, but it seems to have been a later Calvinist author who declared this to be like snow covering a pile of dung, like you remain disgusting but now you’re declared holy. So again, it’s about this declaration, this imputation. Whereas, the Catholic view is that there’s an actual infusion of the righteousness of Christ through the indwelling of the Holy Trinity, through taking on Christ you’re able to live in this Christ-like way.

That you’re not just declared righteous before God, but in this you’re really being transformed into being God-like. So, those are these three distinctive elements. And as we’re going to see, McGrath says these things didn’t exist prior to the Reformation. Those three things we just heard, he’s going to say all of those are novelties. So, let’s just ask the question. Did the early Christians profess this supposedly cornerstone doctrine?

Did they believe in the Protestant version of justification? Did they profess sola fide? Is that a historically plausible sort of argument? Now, I want to caveat at the beginning, I’m Catholic, and reasonably people have said in the comments, “How do we know that you’re not just giving us the evidence that looks like the most Catholic?” Basically, without being mean, I think they’re asking a very reasonable question. “How do we know you’re not just saying here is the most favorable Catholic evidence?” That is a perfectly valid question, because it’s easy as a Catholic to read history through a Catholic lens, and to read the things that are most exciting and most favorable rather than the things that might be the most difficult.

I think everybody has an inclination to do that. I’m no different. And so, I want to point you to three Protestant scholars who are all three imminent scholars in their fields, who focus specifically on this area and who’ve all come to the conclusion that the Protestant reformation, that this vision of sola fide simply did not exist prior to the 16th century.

The first one we’ve already heard a little bit from, Tony Lane. And so, who is he? Well, he’s a professor of historical doctrine at the London School of Theology. You heard him reference where he worked before, that’s where he works. He has his doctorate from the University of Oxford, he’s the author of a lot of things. And as the Baker Publishing Group points out, he’s a world-class Calvin Scholar who abridged the institutes to a popular student edition, and edited the translation of Calvin’s Bondage and Liberation of the Will.

So, this is a guy who is a devout Protestant, who is an imminent scholar, who has really impressive bonafides that I think this is not some crazy French guy. And he points out in his book, Justification by Faith, in Catholic Protestant dialogue, that in the past some Protestants boldly claimed the supportive tradition. And he points out James Buchanan in 1867 said, “The Protestant doctrine was held and taught by some of the greatest writers in every successive age.”

So, Buchanan’s claim was not just that you could find sola fide, this Protestant vision of justification before the reformation, but there was an unbroken line where every generation you could find it. And Lane says, “No historically qualified writer would make any such claim today.” And I think we’re going to see that’s just absolutely true, that the people who do make that claim are not qualified to make that claim, and they aren’t doing real history. And then Lane says, “By contrast, Alister McGrath,” we’ve already heard a little bit from, “Has argued that there are no precursors of the Reformation doctrine of justification. That is, it’s not just that it’s not found in every generation prior to the Reformation, it’s found in no generation prior to the Reformation.”

That’s a pretty big claim. So, let’s turn to that second author, Alister McGrath. Who is he? Well, Nathan Busenitz, who as we’re going to see disagrees sharply with him and with Lane, admits Alister McGrath is one of broader evangelicalism’s foremost thinkers. Having taught historical theology at Oxford, McGrath is certainly qualified to trace the history of doctrinal discussions through the centuries. So, notice he’s doing historical theology, meaning he’s not just a theologian, but his area of interest and what he teaches at Oxford is about looking at the history of doctrinal development, and doctrinal fights, and everything else.

In other words, exactly what we’re talking about here. What did people believe in the past on certain doctrines? Busenitz then goes on to say that McGrath’s book on the history of justification, entitled Iustitia Dei, which means the righteousness of God, is widely regarded as one of the most comprehensive treatments of the subject. Great. So again, this is not a fringe thing, this is about as good a sources you’re going to find. And what does Alister McGrath in Iustitia Dei say? Well, he puts the challenge this way. Again, he’s also a Protestant.

He says, “If the catholicity of Protestant understandings of the nature of justification is to be defended, it is therefore necessary to investigate the possible existence of forerunners of the Reformation doctrine of justification.” You’ll see why earlier when I had Busenitz paraphrase McGrath, this is why, he’s scholarly and sometimes that is hard to follow. So, let me put that in plain English. He’s saying if, as a Protestant, you’re going to say this is really the Catholic meaning, like the universal position, we’re not inventing some new thing, we’re returning to the historic belief on justification, then you should be able to point to people before the reformation who are saying these things. And he acknowledges these would be things like writers from the later medieval period, who in conscious opposition to what they deemed to be the corrupt teaching of the contemporary church, foreshadowed the teachings of the reformers on the point at issue.

And he says you can do that in areas of sacramental theology. You can look for people like John Huss and John Wycliffe, who were making many of the same arguments the later Reformers make. They’re sometimes called the morning stars of the reformation. But he says, “This approach fails in relation to the specific question of the nature of justification and justifying righteousness.” That is, you can find forerunners to the reformation in some areas but not on justification. And then a bit later, in stronger words, he says, “A fundamental discontinuity was introduced into the Western theological tradition where none had ever existed or ever been contemplated before.”

“This is not a continuity, this is not a return, this is a radical rupture,” he says. The reformation understanding of the nature of justification, that is, what it means to be justified as opposed to its mode, must therefore be regarded as a genuine theological novum. That is, a novelty. Now, you may remember Busenitz had summarized accurately McGrath is saying the reformers make three distinctive claims. One justification is forensic, two, it’s distinguished from regeneration, and three, it’s the imputed, not the infused righteousness of Christ. But as Busenitz points out, McGrath, looking at 15 centuries of church history, can find no theologian or writer who taught any of these three distinctives. On that basis, he concludes that no one either in the Patristic age, that is the heir of the church fathers, or the medieval age anticipated the reformer’s understanding of justification.

That seems to be a pretty damning indictment of the claim that this is somehow a continuity or a restoration. It doesn’t appear to be that at all to these two imminent Oxford educated, one Oxford teaching, theologians and historians. But this is not a new insight. So, we can go to Philip Schaff, the 19th century imminent church historian. If you’ve read the Nicene, Post-Nicene Fathers series, he’s the general editor of that. And Elizabeth Clark, in Founding the Fathers, points out that he was 19th century America’s most famous church historian and public theologian, and he was … I’ll just give you a quick sense of all this.

I knew he’d done the Nicene, Post-Nicene Fathers series, I didn’t realize he was also the founder of the American Society of Church History, the founding member of the Society of Biblical Literature, the editor of the NPNF series that I mentioned before, the head of the American Committee for the Authorized Revision of the Bible, the leader of the American branch of the Evangelical Alliance, and Union Theological Seminary’s most distinguished 19th century professor of church history.

So, Schaff is massively influential. The sheer volume of stuff that he puts out in terms of translations, and his own theology and everything else is jaw dropping. And what does Schaff have to say? Well, in volume two of his eight volume History of the Christian Church, he writes looking at the period 100 to 311, “If anyone expects to find in this period or in any of the church fathers, Augustine himself not accepted the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone as the article by which the church stands and falls, he will be greatly disappointed.” So in other words, if you think Luther’s telling the truth, this is like the make or break issue, the church wouldn’t have survived an hour without it, you’ll quickly find in reading the early church, it’s not there anywhere, including in Augustine.

And then he says, “The incarnation of the logos, his true divinity and true humanity, stand almost unmistakably in the foreground as the fundamental truths.” That makes sense. Like the head and chief cornerstone doctrine should be Jesus Christ, not justification by faith alone. But Schaff says, “Paul’s doctrine of justification, except perhaps in Clement of Rome, who joins it with the doctrine of James, is left very much out of view and awaits the age of the Reformation to be more thoroughly established and understood.” Now, notice here Schaff is a Protestant. He thinks the reformers got it right.

He thinks everyone in the early church just missed it, and that the only one who came anywhere close was Clement of Rome. But that Clement got it wrong by trying to read Paul as harmonious with James. Now, we accept the authority of both Paul and James, so we’d say, “Well, it’s good that he reads these two as both being divinely inspired authors,” because they were, but nevertheless that’s Schaff’s argument. So again, he’s reading it from a Protestant perspective, but he’s saying this doctrine isn’t anywhere.

There’s almost a mention in Clement, but it turns out if you read the rest of Clement it doesn’t really support that. And that’s it, that’s all you’re going to get in the early church. But it’s not just that. In other words, you could read that and just think, “Well, maybe they just never thought about justification, they never thought about salvation.” That’d be a weird thing for just nobody in the early church to think about, but maybe that was what was going on. “Well no,” Schaff says, “Rather the fathers lay,” Schaff stressed, “On sanctification and good works, and show the already existing germs of the Roman Catholic doctrine of the meritoriousness and even the super interrogatory meritoriousness of Christian virtue.”

So, they do speak about salvation, when they talk about it they emphasize the necessity of good works in that process, which is the worst case scenario for someone saying that they all believed in sola fide. So, what’s Schaff saying? Let’s take five things away. Number one, you do not find the Protestant doctrine of justification amongst early Christians. Number two, you don’t even really find it in the centuries after. In this section, remember he was just looking to 311, but he acknowledges it’s not even found after 311. Then he explicitly says, three, “It’s not found in Saint Augustine.”

Four, it’s not really in Saint Clement, although some are going to claim that it is. And five, the early Christians instead believe in meritorious good works, which doesn’t fit within the reformation doctrine of justification. Now, that’s from three well-respected Protestant theologians who are also church historians. In contrast to that, when we as Catholics make this point, we’re accused of lying. So, here’s Jeff Durbin responding to my friend and colleague, Tim Staples, and what he claims are false Catholic claims. So, you’re going to hear Tim and then you’re going to hear Jeff Durbin responding to him.

This is where Protestantism came from. Martin Luther taught a doctrine, justification by faith alone, that was never taught by a single Christian for 1,500 years.

Clement of Rome says, “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.” John Chrysostom, “Abraham himself, before receiving circumcision, had been declared righteous on the score of faith alone.” And this is John on his Homilies on the Epistle of Paul. What is the law of faith? It is being saved by grace. Here he shows God’s power in that he has not … This is extreme-

This is where Protestants came from. Martin Luther taught a doctrine, justification by faith alone, that was never taught by a single Christian for 1,500 years.

Clement of Rome says, “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.” John Chrysostom. “Abraham himself, before receiving circumcision, had been declared righteous on the score of faith alone.” And this is John on his Homilies on the Epistle of Paul. What is the law of faith? It is being saved by grace. Here he shows God’s power in that he has not only saved, but has even justified and led them to boasting, and this too without needing works, but looking for faith only.

So, that’s the claim, that we are lying about this and apparently all those Protestant historians are just making false claims because there are these lines, like from Clement and Saint John Chrysostom, that taken out of any context sound like they’re endorsing sola fide. I mean, they use the phrase faith alone. Why would anyone use faith alone if they didn’t believe in sola fide? So, I want to look at three people, Clement and Saint John Chrysostom, but also for reasons that we’ll see soon, origin, because I want to respond both to Jeff Durbin, but also to more scholarly sources like Nathan Busenitz. Busenitz, who I’ve been quoting from, has a book called Long Before Luther, and the whole point of the book is to claim all of these well-respected historical theologians are wrong, and that actually the Protestant distinctives were found long before Luther. And Busenitz, like Durbin, looks first to Saint Clement.

Busenitz says this, he says, “To what degree do the church fathers believe that sinners are justified by grace through faith apart from works? A brief survey of early Christian writers produces a chorus of affirming voices.” That should be the first red flag. Like, wow, you found a bunch of people who agreed with you and none of these historians found anybody? Okay, let’s see what you got. “For example, Clement of Rome, who died about 100, explains that Christians, like the Old Testament patriarchs before them, are justified through faith apart from works.” He then quotes 1 Clement chapter 32, which is the same place that Durbin goes, and it does on the surface.

I will happily admit it does sound like he’s saying sola fide, because in one sense he is. He talks about the Jewish patriarchs and the tribes of Judah, and he talks about how all of these were highly honored and made great, not for their own sake or for their own works, or for the righteousness which they wrought, but through the operation of his will, God’s will. And then he says, “And we too, being called by his will in Christ Jesus, are not justified by ourselves, nor by our wisdom, or understanding, or godliness or works, which we have wrought in holiness of heart.” This is a quote you just heard from Durbin.

“But by that faith through which from the beginning Almighty God has justified all men.” Now, Busenitz then says, “Noting the parallels between Clement and Martin Luther, Jordan Cooper,” I believe is a Lutheran theologian, “Concludes for both Clement and Luther the Pauline polemic against works does not refer only to Jewish boundary markers, but to good works in general. If Clement were asked what works a man must perform to achieve justification, he would likely respond as Luther did, nothing at all.” Okay, what’s that missing in the analysis of Clement of Rome? Well, it’s a partial quotation, meaning it’s true. They’re quoting there from 1 Clement 32.

But just a few paragraphs earlier, Clement says, “Let us 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.” So, you have in 1 Clement 30 him claiming that we’re justified by our works, and then in 1 Clement 32 saying we’re justified by faith and not works. So, how do we harmonize this apparent contradiction? This is why it matters that the early Christians describe justification in very different ways. They mean something different by justification than later Protestants do, because they don’t think of justification just as a one-time event. Justification is about being alive in Christ. And so, we can distinguish between initial justification or achieving justification, and then remaining justified or sustaining justification. So, this might sound weird and technical, and it doesn’t need to be at all.

One of the biblical images of justification is being alive, you’re made alive in Christ. Now, in terms of bodily life how are you made alive? Well, not through anything you did. It was just the gift of God through conception to your birth. Your birth was not something you had any control over. Your conception, not something you had any control over, just a gratuitous gift. There was nothing you could have possibly done to earn it. But once you receive that gift, it’s not just, “Well, I became alive and therefore now I just grow.” But you also have to remain alive. So, if sanctification is like growth, justification is like being alive. Hopefully that’s clear, it’s being righteous. And so, even if you think of it in terms of saved, unsaved, you have to maintain your life. You have to do things like eat, and drink water, and sleep, and do all of those things to constantly maintain being alive.

You can’t just say, “I can’t do any works, this was a gift.” That would be an insane position to have about your life. Yes, it’s a gift, and yes, you have to work to maintain that gift. That’s how a lot of gifts work. If someone gives you a car, you don’t say, “I can’t put gas in it. That would be reducing the gratuity of the gift.” No, it’s still an unmerited gift and you need to maintain it. That’s how your life is, that’s how every gift you’ve ever gotten is. Look, my kids have destroyed a sizeable number of their Christmas gifts. I understand the need to maintain a gift once given, that’s how justification works as well. It is a gratuitous gift from God. And so, in that sense, when we’re talking about initial justification, how do you go from being unsaved to saved?

Right, you are not doing anything to earn, you couldn’t do anything to earn that. But once you are made righteous before God, once that initial justification has happened, then you cooperate with it and you have to do something to maintain it. And so, Saint Augustine, who earlier we heard Philip Schaff mentioned is someone who doesn’t believe in sola fide, makes this point using a very similar set of images. This is Augustine sermon 169. He says, “First of all, look, it’s better to be just than it is to be human. And God made you human.” So, if you think that it’s you who make you just, you’re claiming that you’re doing something better for yourself than God did. That you made something better, a holy person, where God made something less good. He said, “No, God made you without you. You didn’t give any consent to God making you”

How would you consent if you didn’t yet exist? I just made the same point. I mean, I got it from him, so don’t be impressed. But he says, “So, while he made you without you, he doesn’t justify you without you.” Now, it’s true he does the initial justification without you, which is why we can make sense of 1 Clement 32, that justification apart from works, but that process of maintaining justification he will not do without you. That’s the continuing being alive. That’s 1 Clement 30. That’s how we can talk about being justified by works, it’s how James 2 can talk about the fact that no one is justified by faith alone, but by works.

So, Augustine says, “He may do without your knowing it, he justifies you with your willing consent to it.” That’s just bracingly clear. He says, “Yet it’s he that does the justifying. In case you think it’s your justice and go back to the dead losses of wastage in the muck, for you to be found in him not having your own justice, which is from the law, but the justice through the faith of Christ, which is from God. Justice from faith to know him and the power of his resurrection, and the share of his sufferings, and that will be your power, your strength, a share in Christ’s suffering will be your strength.” That you can see is clearly not Pelagianism, the idea I have to earn initial justification, I have to merit getting saved.

But nor is it sola fide. It’s clearly not the Protestant position that we’ve just seen articulated that allegedly existed long before Luther. And so, I mentioned Saint Augustine just to give a clear sense that there’s a way of distinguishing these two senses of justification, because if you lose that, if you’re imagining that the early Christians mean by justification what the reformers mean by justification, then it’s not just that sometimes they’re going to sound Protestant, it’s that sometimes they’re going to sound self-contradictory. Because when they’re talking about initial justification, they’ll say that’s without works. And then when they talk about justification later, they’ll talk about it being by works. And you say, “How can that be true?” In the same way that if you said becoming alive, you don’t have to do anything for it, staying alive, you have to do a whole lot of stuff for it.

There’s no contradiction there. Only if someone imagined being alive with just a one-time event, just like a light switch, and once you had it you could never lose it. If that’s not true, if you have to maintain it and you maintain it in part by works, there’s no contradiction at all. I say this to say, the people who claim that there were, long before Luther, early Christians making the Protestant doctrine have to ignore a ton of the evidence, not just from other early Christian writers, but from the Christian writers they’re looking at. So for instance, Nathan Busenitz quotes 1 Clement 32 and doesn’t even tell you about 1 Clement 30, neither does Jeff Durbin. They just give you half of the picture, which leads to this grossly inaccurate picture. It makes you think they’re saying we’re justified by faith alone, there’s no role for works.

A few paragraphs after they explicitly say we’re justified by works. Rather than trying to explain how those two ideas could both be true, they just hide half of that evidence from you and say, “Oh yeah, they agreed with faith alone. Why does everybody say they didn’t?” Because it’s not true. It’s dishonest, it’s inaccurate at least. I’m not going to say that they’re being intentionally dishonest, it’s at least very shoddy scholarship to just proof text the lines that sound like they agree with you, and cut them out of all context and ignore all the evidence that doesn’t appear to agree with you. So, so much for Clement.

What about Origin? Now, Durbin doesn’t mention Origin, but Busenitz, right after mentioning Clement, then turns to Origin. And he says, “Origin subsequently finds an example of justification apart from works by looking to the thief on the cross.” And then he gives an example from Origin. It says, “In light of such statements, Thomas P. Scheck observes that Origin recognizes that sometimes scripture says that human beings are justified by faith alone.” Now again, this should be setting off some red flags. Origin believes in sola fide sometimes? What does that even mean?

How could someone believe in justification by faith alone sometimes? Is that what Protestants believe? Do they believe they were sometimes justified by faith alone? No. But this is part of the chorus of affirming voices? So, you turn then to Scheck’s book. Now Scheck, for the record, is a former Protestant minister who started reading the church fathers and became a Catholic. So, he doesn’t believe the thing Busenitz is applying to him, or the way he’s being misused. Scheck does point out that yeah, Origin talks about the good thief, but he says this, “The good thief was justified apart from any antecedent merit or works,” meaning he could bring nothing to the table in becoming justified.

That’s what we already saw, you don’t bring yourself to conception or birth. His confession of faith in Jesus alone was adequate for him to begin his journey to paradise as a justified traveling companion with Jesus. That’s just standard Catholic theology, Protestant theology, everybody agrees on that part. Origin seems to understand this to be an exceptional scenario however, in that the man had no opportunity to be justified by his subsequent good works. Look at that. So, you’ve got Busenitz citing Scheck to claim that sometimes human beings are justified by faith alone, and just glossing over and not telling you about the fact that Origin finds this to be a weird circumstance because it’s impossible for the good thief to do any good works?

This is an exceptional scenario in that the man has no opportunity to be justified by his subsequent good works? And then on the same page that Busenitz quotes from, Scheck says, “On the other hand, one of the central themes of Origin’s theology is the necessity of human cooperation and salvation, a cooperation that extends to all that pertains to salvation, election, justification, interior transformation, and perseverance.”

Now, look again, my point in this video is not to prove to you that Origin is right and Luther is wrong, my point is to point out that when Protestants pretend that Origin and Luther believe the same thing, that is not an honest assessment of the evidence. So, so much for Clement, so much for Origin. What about Saint John Chrysostom? Now, you heard lines that sounded like he believes in justification by faith alone, but then you find his commentaries on John, you read them a little closer. He looks, for instance, at John chapter 12, verse 42 to 43.

Now, this is by itself a remarkable passage to try to explain away on the ground of sola fide, because John says, “Many, even of the authorities believed in him,” in Jesus, “But for fear of the Pharisees, they did not confess it, lest they should be put out of the synagogue. For they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God.”

So, here are people who believe in Jesus, but they’re timid about it. They don’t want to confess their belief in Jesus. What happens to them? Is John Chrysostom going to say, “That’s fine. They’re saved by this faith alone. Even if they’re too afraid to express the faith, they still have the faith, so later works like professing it, you don’t really need that”? No. Saint John Chrysostom, in Homily 3 in the Gospel of John says, “And so, they gave up their salvation to others, for it cannot be that he who is so zealous a slave to the glory of this present world can obtain the glory which is from God.” So, he’s quite clear, he thinks they lose their salvation because they won’t do the work of proclaiming their faith. Or take a passage like John 3 verse 36, that a Protestant could easily read as affirming sola fide.

“He who believes in the Son has eternal life. He who does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God rests upon him.” Okay, it sounds like belief is all you need. Now, that would put John 3 in tension with John 12, where belief is clearly not enough, but you can at least see how someone would read that and say maybe sola fide is true. What does Saint John Chrysostom say? I mean, if Jeff Durbin’s right, he’s basically a Protestant, he believes in sola fide. “Is it then enough, says one, to believe in the son, that one may have eternal life?” John answers.” By no means.” And then he quotes Jesus. “Not everyone says unto me, ‘Lord, Lord’ shall enter into the kingdom of heaven.” You have to do the will of God. It’s not enough to say, “Lord, Lord,” you don’t just have to believe the right things, you have to do the right things.

And Saint John Chrysostom says, “The blasphemy against the Spirit is enough of itself to cast a man into hell. It’s possible to believe in Jesus and could blasphemy against the Spirit, so clearly belief alone isn’t enough. He says, “But why speak of a portion of a doctrine? Though a man believe rightly on the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, yet if he lead not a right life, his faith will avail nothing toward his salvation.” Now, that’s as clear as it gets. You simply cannot be saved by having true beliefs about the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And if you read James 2, you’ll realize that’s true, otherwise the devil would be saved because the devil knows more theology than you do. So, if having that belief is enough to be saved, well the devil would be saved.

And instead we see faith alone avails nothing towards your salvation. Therefore, when he says, “This is life eternal, they may know you, the only true God,” he says, “Let us not suppose that the knowledge spoken of is sufficient for our salvation. We need besides this a most exact life and conversation, that your words and deeds also have to be in right accord. It’s not enough that your beliefs be right.” So you need, in simple terms, faith and works. And then Saint John Chrysostom points out, yeah, there are these passages like what we just heard. He that believes in the Son has eternal life. But he says, “Yet, not even from this do we assert that faith alone is sufficient to salvation.” This is the guy that Jeff Durbin is quoting, claiming that he teaches faith alone is necessary for salvation, and his exact words are, “Not even from this do we assert that faith alone is sufficient to salvation.”

He explicitly denies sola fide, he explicitly denies that faith alone is enough to save you. And so, this is true not just of these guys, this is true across the board when you find these Protestant proof texts claiming, oh yeah, lots of early Christians believed in sola fide. So, we’ve got two final things to talk about. First, there’s two types of scholarship we see here. On the one side, you’ve got those Protestants, we saw Philip Schaff, we saw Tony Lane, we saw Alister McGrath, those Protestants who admit that no one taught sola fide before the reformation.

And I want to point out three characteristics of at least the ones I mentioned. First, they’re all imminent, well-respected scholars. Second, they’re all admitting something against their own interest. And third, they’re all carefully considering both what the early Christians said, and what those words meant to them. Because it’s possible for two people to use the same words and mean different things by them. It’s not enough when a Muslim apologist says, “Look, Jesus says, ‘The Father is greater than I,'” and ignores all the context and just says, “That looks like it denies the Trinity.” Sure it does.

But if you read the context, if you understand deeper theology, get what Jesus is saying, doesn’t really deny the trinity. Likewise, you can find these things that sound like sola fide if you don’t understand context, if you don’t read the context, if you assume they mean by words that you mean by words. But these scholars, Schaff, Lane, McGrath are all doing the hard work of figuring out how did these guys that we’re studying understand things like justification? How do they think it works? I mean, it’s significant McGrath identifies three major ways the reformers understand the word justification, and the process or event of justification differently than anyone before them.

They’re doing the hard work. Now, I mentioned a second ago that they’re speaking against their own interest. In the federal rules of evidence, look, I used to be a lawyer, in the federal rules of evidence, a lot of out of court statements aren’t permitted because they’re hearsay, they’re unsworn statements. And so, there’s all kinds of reasons you can’t bring those into court, because if somebody tells you they’re innocent, they’re not available for cross-examination, you can’t just go and tell a jury, “Oh yeah, Mr. Smith said he was innocent.” That’s not fair, because then the normal way that someone evaluates the credibility doesn’t work because maybe the person was lying, or it’d just be good to have them on cross-examination. Let a jury evaluate, let the attorneys really do cross-examination, and probe them and all of this. But on the other hand, if someone says out of court, “I did it,” you can bring that into court because it’s a statement against their own self-interest.

Why would you lie to tell on yourself? Why would you lie to make your own life worse in other words? And so, typically, and there’s exceptions to all of this so I’m not giving you legal advice here, typically you can bring in statements against one’s own interest. Well, so it is here. The reason I’m citing to these Protestants isn’t just because they’re great scholars, they are great scholars, I have a great respect for all three of them. But because they’re saying something that’s a really inconvenient thing to admit, which makes it more likely that it’s true. So, that’s one group of scholars. The other group of Protestants, maybe scholars isn’t the right term for it, or just those kind of the popular level apologists and such that claim that these doctrines existed long before Luther. Now, some of them, like Busenitz, I mean, he teaches, he’s I think a dean at Masters Seminary or something.

So, I think it’s fair to put them in the scholarly category, but I don’t know that Durbin even claims to be a scholar. I’m not knocking that, by the way, I’m just saying. One thing we see is that they’re proof texting quotations. They’re just saying, “Aha, look, I just read you this line. I didn’t explain anything about it, I read you this line that sounds like sola fide.” Again, like the Muslim apologist saying, “The father is greater than I, Jesus Christ.” They’re quoting a line to you without any context, and expecting you to draw a certain conclusion based on them quoting the line. Second, they’re making no attempt to explain why these same people that they’re quoting also say things that are really inconvenient to the Protestant position. They’re not even trying to harmonize the evidence or make sense of it, they’re just quoting selectively the evidence that’s most favorable to their side.

That’s not a good way to do scholarship or an honest way to proceed. If you only quote the things that sound amenable and ignore all the evidence that goes against your position when you haven’t really built up a solid case. Third, there’s no consideration of what the early Christians meant by terms like justification. We just assume early Christians must have meant the same thing later Reformers or modern Protestants mean by justification. And as we know from McGrath, that’s not true. And fourth, the result of this kind of shoddy approach is that the early Christians are read in a way that renders them incoherent and self-contradictory. Now, you’re going to see this over, I gave you just a couple examples from Busenitz’s book. You can find plenty of examples in that. And not just his book, I don’t want to pick on him. A lot of Protestants do this kind of thing.

And one of the hallmarks that they’re using a bad method is this. If you’re reading the church fathers in such a way that either A, they’re disagreeing with themselves, or B, they’re disagreeing with people they think they’re agreeing with, that is a big red flag that you’re probably reading them wrong. To be sure, it’s possible for someone just to be internally incoherent, it’s possible for someone to change their mind. But the idea that Clement changes his mind between chapter 30, and then three or four paragraphs later in chapter 32 is ridiculous. That that’s just not a plausible interpretation of the evidence. And so, you’ve got that problem with Clement, you’ve got that problem with Saint John Chrysostom where in the same work he says, “Justification isn’t by faith alone,” how do you make sense of that evidence? You can’t just ignore half of it if you’re going to try to do good work here.

And you can’t just say, “Ah, he must be internally incoherent,” because if you’re saying that about everybody, you probably just aren’t understanding them correctly. And that’s true of everything. I’m not saying any special status for the church fathers here. If I read a bunch of economists, I’m like, “That guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He doesn’t make any sense, he’s contradicting himself.” And then I read another economist and I say the same thing, and another one, and I say the same thing, it’s not going to take long for you to be like, “Maybe you don’t understand economics,” which is true. And so, if that’s how you’re reading the church fathers is oh, they’re just contradicting themselves all over the place, you probably don’t understand the church fathers. Sometimes they disagree with each other, sometimes they might even be self-contradictory. But if you’re seeing that a lot, something is going wrong.

So, that’s what I mean by the two types of scholarship, because I know many of you aren’t wanting to do a deep dive into the theology of Clement, or Origin, or John Chrysostom, or Augustine, or any of the people that were mentioned here. And so, you’re just saying, “Well, who do I trust?” My point is, well, one group of these scholars seem very credible, both by their degrees, by their university affiliations, by their area of interest that they do historical theology full-time. Busenitz admits in the beginning of his book that this arose out of a series of internet comments that he was fighting back and forth with a Catholic he doesn’t even know the full name of, and he turned it into a book. That is two very different levels of scholarship, but then you get into the method and you’re like, “Yeah, there’s two very different levels of scholarship there.”

So, all that’s to say when you see both Catholics and Protestants telling you no one before the Reformation believed in sola fide, it’s because that’s actually the truth. No one before the reformation believed in sola fide, including the ones who might at a superficial level sound like they did.

Okay, very last thought here. There are three claims that cannot all be true together. So, at least one of the following must be false. Number one, justification by faith alone is the gospel. It is the doctrine on which the church stands are false. Number two, the early Christians didn’t believe in this doctrine. Number three, the early Christians were still Christians. We don’t even have to say amazing Christians, just still Christians. If Luther is right about number one, then either the Protestant scholars we just saw have to be wrong about number two, there must have been some Protestants all that time that we just don’t know about, or we have to say they weren’t Christians.

You can’t simultaneously coherently believe both the Protestant claims about justification by faith alone made by people like Luther, and believe, as the best Protestant scholarship shows, that the early Christians didn’t believe in this doctrine. In fact, nobody before the 16th century believed in this doctrine, and still hold that there were Christians prior to the 16th century. If you’re going to hold number one and number two, you have to logically conclude, yeah, Christianity went away from the time of Christ until the time of Luther. And that position is on its face ridiculous, for a few reasons. Number one, you’re then open to the Mormon claim. If you believe in a great apostacy like that, how is a German monk going to be able to restore the church that Jesus unsuccessfully founded?

Wouldn’t you need at least a prophet like Joseph Smith? Number two, if you claim the church doesn’t last in our sola fide, excuse me, without sola fide, and therefore the church fell into apostasy apparently within an hour. Okay, then where do you get the canon of scripture ? How do you know the right books were preserved? How do you know things like the Trinity are true, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera if those things were all sorted out by these false Christians? So, that doesn’t really work. And we’ve seen that the attempts by Protestant apologists to attack number two and say, “You know what? Actually the early Christians did believe in sola fide, and nobody knows that,” that’s shoddy scholarship that doesn’t stand up to any real scrutiny.

And so, if number two is clearly true, number three is clearly true, the early Christians were Christians, then that means it must be false. The sola fide is the gospel, and it must be false, the sola fide is the doctrine on which the church stands or falls because this is a novelty. And remember, Alison McGrath turns it’s a theological novum, it’s a novelty, it’s an invention of the 16th century, it’s not the gospel. It’s an invention of the 16th century the church did just fine without for 1,500 years, and would do just fine if it went away tomorrow.

So again, that’s the historical case, and I’m not even getting into the back and forth on the scriptural arguments. I’ll do that again probably next week, or at least in an upcoming episode. But I’m curious, especially for those of you who may be inclined to believe in sola fide, or maybe thought that sola fide was taught by somebody before Luther, how you square that in light of today’s episode? I look forward to reading your comments and hearing from you. For Shameless Popery I’m Joe Heschmeyer, God bless you.

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