Theopedia

Sola Fide

“For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.”

— Romans 3:28 (ESV)

Definition

Sola Fide (Latin for “faith alone”) is the doctrine that a sinner is justified, declared righteous before God, through faith alone, apart from any works of his own, because that faith receives the righteousness Christ himself accomplished.1 The formula excludes not gross merit alone but any contribution whatsoever to justification, since faith itself justifies only as the empty hand that receives a gift already complete, not as a virtue God rewards.2

Confessional Witness

The doctrine is the settled teaching of the Reformation’s confessions, not a single tradition’s distinctive. The Westminster Shorter Catechism defines justification as “an act of God’s free grace, wherein he pardoneth all our sins, and accepteth us as righteous in his sight, only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, and received by faith alone.”3 The Second Helvetic Confession (1566) states the same doctrine under its own heading, “We are justified by faith alone”:

“We therefore teach and believe with the apostle that sinful man is justified by faith alone in Christ, not by the law or any works… we attribute it wholly to the grace of God in Christ through faith.”1

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states the same exclusivity: those God effectually calls, he freely justifies, “not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous,” imputing to them “Christ’s active obedience unto the whole law, and passive obedience in his death for their whole and sole righteousness by faith, which faith they have not of themselves; it is the gift of God.”4

Biblical Basis

The Old Testament pattern

Paul grounds justification by faith alone in Abraham’s own justification: “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness” (Gen. 15:6), a declaration made, Paul stresses, before Abraham was circumcised and so before any work of his own could have earned it (Rom. 4:9-11). Habakkuk states the same principle as the mark of the righteous generally: “the righteous shall live by his faith” (Hab. 2:4). Paul cites this text directly against a rival principle from the law itself, “the one who does them shall live by them” (Lev. 18:5), to argue that no one is justified by the law: “Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law, for ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’ But the law is not of faith, rather ‘The one who does them shall live by them’” (Gal. 3:11-12). Micah McCormick observes that Paul is not merely proof-texting but setting two Old Testament principles, faith and law-doing, in deliberate antithesis to make the same point Habakkuk himself made: righteousness before God comes by faith, not by doing.5

Paul’s forensic exposition

Paul states the doctrine as a settled conclusion rather than an inference: “we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law” (Rom. 3:28), and he grounds it again in Abraham, “to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness” (Rom. 4:5). Galatians states the same exclusivity against a rival gospel of law-keeping: “a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ… because by works of the law no one will be justified” (Gal. 2:16). Ephesians ties faith itself to grace rather than human effort, “by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Eph. 2:8-9). Paul states his own testimony in the same terms, renouncing “a righteousness of my own that comes from the law” in favor of “the righteousness from God that depends on faith” (Phil. 3:9).

Doctrinal Significance

Sola fide grounds a believer’s assurance in Christ’s own finished work rather than in his own performance. Bavinck writes that justification “frees believers from all dread and fear” and “grants the assurance that they are adopted children and heirs,” the hope of righteousness still to come, since if God himself justifies, no one is left to condemn.6 Because Christ’s own righteousness, not the believer’s, is the ground of acceptance, all boasting is excluded: “the elect are justified by God so that they would glory in him and in nothing else.”7

Doctrinal Implications

Because justification is God’s forensic declaration rather than an infusion of righteousness into the sinner, it must be really distinct from sanctification even though the two are never separated in a believer’s life. Bavinck states the connection plainly: “Christ does not justify anyone whom he does not also at the same time sanctify. We, accordingly, are not justified by works, but neither are we justified without works.”8 This distinction between justification’s ground and its fruit is what Rome’s own doctrine collapses by making the sinner’s own inward renewal part of the ground of justification itself.

Historical Development

The Apostolic Fathers

T. F. Torrance’s The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers argues that the generation of Christian writers immediately after the apostles forsook Paul’s doctrine of grace, and with it justification.9 Brian Arnold’s study of the same writers reaches the opposite conclusion. 1 Clement, addressed from the church at Rome to the church at Corinth around AD 96, gives what Arnold calls “the earliest non-biblical discussion of justification,” placed deliberately between two sections urging good works so that Clement’s moral exhortations elsewhere in the letter cannot be mistaken for a works-based soteriology:10

“We too, having been called through his will in Christ Jesus, are not justified through ourselves nor through our own wisdom or through our understanding or through our piety or through our works which we did in holiness of heart, but through faith, through which the Almighty God justified all who existed from the earliest times.”11

A century or so later, the Epistle to Diognetus states the same exchange in explicitly substitutionary and forensic terms: Christ gave himself “a ransom on our behalf, the holy for the lawless, the innocent for the wicked, the righteous for the unrighteous,” so that “the lawlessness of many might be hidden in one righteous man, while the righteousness of one might justify many lawless men.”12 Arnold reads this as among the clearest statements of justification and the atonement to survive from the ante-Nicene church, offered as evidence that Paul’s own doctrine, not a later works-righteousness drift, is what the earliest post-apostolic generations actually taught.13

Augustine and the medieval synthesis

The doctrine of justification Luther inherited was, in Alister McGrath’s judgment, essentially an outworking of Augustine’s own teaching: “to justify is to make someone just,” a moral transformation worked by grace rather than a forensic declaration.14 Peter Lombard’s Sentences (compiled c. 1150s), the standard theological textbook of the medieval schools and built substantially on quotations from Augustine, systematized this doctrine of grace: God’s operative grace first moves a sinner out of sin into a state of justification, understood in the Augustinian sense of being made righteous rather than merely declared so; cooperative grace then enables the justified sinner to merit eternal life through the virtuous character that grace has produced in him.15 This synthesis, in which justification includes the sinner’s own moral transformation and grace-enabled merit rather than excluding them, is what Luther’s reading of Romans overturned.

Luther’s breakthrough

Trained in the via moderna, the young Martin Luther had been taught that a sinner must first do “what lies within him” to move God to grant grace, an approach Waldron judges Pelagian in its practical effect.16 Sometime between his first lectures on the Psalms and his 1515 lectures on Romans, Luther came to a different understanding of the “righteousness of God” in Romans 1:17, recorded in his own retrospective account written in 1545:

“Then and there, I began to understand the justice of God as that by which a righteous man lives by the gift of God, namely, by faith, and this sentence ‘The justice of God is revealed in the gospel’ to be that passive justice with which the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written: ‘The just shall live by faith.’ This straightway made me feel as though reborn and as though I had entered through open gates into Paradise itself.”17

Two insights combined in this breakthrough: an Augustinian understanding of sin and grace recovered from Augustine’s own anti-Pelagian writings, and the further, specifically Reformation insight that the righteousness by which God justifies is not a righteousness sinners achieve but one they passively receive.18

Calvin’s systematic formulation

Waldron judges that Calvin, in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, gave “a balanced, consistent, and systematic articulation of Luther’s views of justification by faith alone.”19 Against Roman Catholic opponents who argued that justifying faith could not be separated from the evangelical obedience it produces, Calvin held both without confusing them: faith is evangelical obedience and inseparably produces it, but faith does not justify in its character as obedience. Justifying faith and evangelical obedience, on Calvin’s own careful distinction, are “neither separated nor identified.”20 Calvin states the positive side of the same distinction as a “double grace” received together, through union with Christ, yet really distinct: “by partaking of him, we principally receive a double grace: namely, that being reconciled to God through Christ’s blamelessness, we may have in heaven instead of a Judge a gracious Father; and secondly, that sanctified by Christ’s spirit we may cultivate blamelessness and purity of life.”21

Rome’s response and the confessional codification

The Reformation controversy turned on whether faith alone could justify without love or good works accompanying it as a further cause. Rome’s answer came at the Council of Trent (1547), which allowed that “we are said to be justified by faith, because faith is the beginning of human salvation, the foundation and the root of all justification,” while denying that faith alone, apart from the works that follow it, is sufficient.22 J. I. Packer describes what stood behind the Reformers’ insistence on the stricter formula: their concern was not justification by faith alone in isolation but “the sinner’s entire salvation… by free and sovereign grace only,” of which faith alone in justification was one expression, “important to them because it safeguarded the principle of sovereign grace.”23 Herman Bavinck states plainly why the Reformed tradition treated the doctrine as decisive rather than one topic among many: “Justification is the doctrine on which the church stands or falls.”2

Waldron’s survey of the major Lutheran and Reformed confessions and catechisms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, drawn from Philip Schaff’s standard collection, finds Luther and Calvin’s same three commitments (faith’s passive definition, its distinction from evangelical obedience, and the law/gospel dichotomy) still intact generations later. Even the Canons of the Synod of Dort (1619), an international Reformed gathering convened to answer the Arminian Remonstrance rather than to restate sola fide directly, carries the doctrine forward without diminishing it: in Waldron’s own words, across the confessions he surveys “the testimony to justification by faith alone is becoming fuller and clearer” rather than eroding with time.24 That same confessional line runs on into the Westminster Assembly’s documents and, through the Savoy Declaration (1658), into the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession.

Opposing Views

Rome: infused righteousness

Roman Catholic theology holds that justification includes, not merely follows, the sinner’s own inward renewal. The Council of Trent’s canons anathematize anyone who says “that righteousness received is not preserved and also increased before God through good works,” treating those works as more than the fruit of a completed justification, and anyone who denies that “the justified man, by the good works which he performs through the grace of God and the merit of Jesus Christ… truly merit[s] increase of grace, eternal life.”25 On this framework, faith begins the process of justification, but the grace- enabled good works that follow are themselves a further, genuine ground of a person’s standing before God, not simply its evidence.

Contemporary evangelical departures

Samuel Waldron’s study of sola fide in the Reformation tradition identifies three commitments the doctrine holds together: faith is defined as passive, a receiving rather than a contributing; justifying faith is distinguished from the obedience that accompanies it; and a righteousness belonging to the law (a person’s own obedience) is set against a righteousness belonging to the gospel (Christ’s own obedience, imputed), with only the latter justifying.26 He argues that several contemporary evangelical theologians affirm sola fide in name while departing from one or more of these commitments.

Norman Shepherd, Waldron argues, embeds faith within the process of sanctification itself in a way that erases “any distinction between faith and moral renewal,” tending toward a view that “identifies faith indistinguishably with repentance and obedience as the ‘way’ or means of justification.”27 Shepherd holds that faith and repentance are “inseparable twins” and defines repentance as including “a turning from sin with a purpose and endeavor to walk with the Lord in all the ways of his commandments,” so that justification depends on a broader penitent, obedient disposition rather than on faith alone, narrowly defined.27

Don Garlington, a scholar Waldron calls “one of the major conduits of ‘the new perspective on Paul’ into Reformed and evangelical circles,”28 reads Paul’s phrase “the obedience of faith” (Rom. 1:5) through E. P. Sanders’s “covenantal nomism,” pursuing what he himself calls “the Sanders-Dunn trajectory.”29 Garlington affirms “imputation as a concept” but denies “a strict doctrine of imputation,” arguing instead that “exegesis will steer us away from imputation to union with Christ.”30 Waldron reads this as a denial that Christ’s own righteousness, imputed, is the ground of justification, replacing it with God’s declaration that believers are, in themselves, “faithful covenant-keepers”: “though Garlington frequently affirms sola fide, he does not mean by it what it was defined to mean in its classic articulation in the Reformation.”31

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t excluding works from justification contradict James, who says a person “is justified by works and not by faith alone” (James 2:24)? Reformed theology answers that James and Paul are not disputing the same question. Paul addresses how a sinner is declared righteous before God; James addresses how a professed faith is shown to be genuine before other people, arguing that a faith producing no works at all is not living faith but a dead one (James 2:17, 26). The works James requires are the fruit that authenticates justifying faith, not an additional ground of justification alongside it.

If faith alone justifies apart from works, what stops the doctrine from encouraging moral indifference? Paul raises and rejects exactly this inference: “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means!” (Rom. 6:1-2). The Reformed answer distinguishes the ground of justification from its fruit: faith alone justifies, but the faith that justifies is never alone, since the same union with Christ that secures a sinner’s righteous standing also secures his ongoing sanctification.2

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Second Helvetic Confession (1566), chap. 15, “Of the True Justification of the Faithful”: “We therefore teach and believe with the apostle that sinful man is justified by faith alone in Christ, not by the law or any works… Therefore, we do not share in the benefit of justification partly because of the grace of God or Christ, and partly because of ourselves, our love, works or merit, but we attribute it wholly to the grace of God in Christ through faith.” ↩ ↩2

  2. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 20, “Justification, Sanctification, and Perseverance”: “Justification is the doctrine on which the church stands or falls.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. Charles Hodge, “Chapter XVII. Justification,” in Systematic Theology, Volume III (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 113, quoting the Westminster Shorter Catechism. ↩

  4. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 11, “Of Justification,” paras. 1, 3. ↩

  5. Micah John McCormick, “Humanity’s Obedience for Eternal Life After the Fall,” in “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 158-159. ↩

  6. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 20, “Justification, Sanctification, and Perseverance”: “Justification frees believers from all dread and fear; and grants the assurance that they are adopted children and heirs (Rom. 8:15-17, 23; Gal. 4:5-7), the hope of righteousness (Gal. 5:5). After all, if God justifies, who is to condemn?” ↩

  7. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 20: “The elect are justified by God so that they would glory in him and in nothing else.” ↩

  8. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 20: “Christ does not justify anyone whom he does not also at the same time sanctify. We, accordingly, are not justified by works, but neither are we justified without works.” ↩

  9. Brian John Arnold, Justification One Hundred Years After Paul (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2013), conclusion, summarizing T. F. Torrance, The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers (London: Oliver and Boyd, 1948): “T. F. Torrance thought the Apostolic Fathers forsook Paul’s doctrine of grace, and thereby justification.” ↩

  10. Arnold, Justification One Hundred Years After Paul, 33-42. ↩

  11. 1 Clement 32.3-4, quoted in Arnold, Justification One Hundred Years After Paul, 42. ↩

  12. Epistle to Diognetus 9, quoted in Arnold, Justification One Hundred Years After Paul, 124-125. ↩

  13. Arnold, Justification One Hundred Years After Paul, 104-105. ↩

  14. Aaron Thomas O’Kelley, “Grace and Merit in Late Medieval Theology,” in “A Historical-Theological Critique of the New Perspective on Paul” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 28-29, citing Alister McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification. ↩

  15. O’Kelley, “Grace and Merit in Late Medieval Theology,” 30-31. ↩

  16. Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification, 33. ↩

  17. Martin Luther, preface to the Wittenberg edition of his Latin works (1545), quoted in Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification, 33-34. ↩

  18. Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification, 32. ↩

  19. Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification, 48. ↩

  20. Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification, 49-50. ↩

  21. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.11.1, quoted in Carol Man Fen Chen, “John Calvin’s Doctrine of Twofold Grace of God in Covenant Theology,” in A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants: Unconditionality and Conditionality in Relation to Justification and Sanctification (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 57-58. ↩

  22. Council of Trent, Sixth Session (1547), “Decree on Justification,” chap. 8, quoted in Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 513. ↩

  23. J. I. Packer, quoted in Matthew Michael Barrett, “Monergism in the Calvinist Tradition,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 58-59. ↩

  24. Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification, 84. ↩

  25. Council of Trent, Sixth Session (1547), “Canons Concerning Justification,” canons 24 and 32, quoted in A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 513. ↩

  26. Samuel Eldon Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification: Current Evangelical Departures from Sola Fide (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2005), 6-8. ↩

  27. Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification, 179-180. ↩ ↩2

  28. Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification, 195. ↩

  29. Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification, 195-196. ↩

  30. Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification, 232. ↩

  31. Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification, 232-233. ↩