History | #TheSolae

Hey there!

A big thank you for making it here, and, hopefully, as excited as I am for this new journey. I feel like I’ve used the woulrd journey a lot, but anyway, it is what we all are on; the road that leads to knowledge and wisdom.

I posted an alert on Sunday about this new series we’re doing, and today we get this ball rolling. Now I can get deep without the fear of revealing spoilers (sigh of relief). As I teased, the solas/solae are the principles that surround the doctrine of salvation in Lutheran and Reformed Christianity. Let’s lay down a few definitions and refreshers before we can dive right in.

Sola is Latin for alone, and there are five of these tenets we shall explore as we progress on in the series. Now that we have that fancy word made familiar…

We looked at what salvation is based upon in the 4th installment of Know More, Overwhelming Sacrifice; the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. The question that would naturally come to mind is, why then must principles exist to explain this? Is there really a need to have guiding lights to help us understand what salvation is? The next logical question in the chain is then, what formed the basis of these principles? This is what we will attempt to answer in this article.

After the formation of the first church (body of believers, not a physical building), the Gospel was spread to various parts of the world through the efforts of the early apostles. As we all have experienced, the Gospel can be very offensive, because it shows us how flawed we are and how in need of a relationship with God we are. So, as time went by, several people and groups of people decided to place the Gospel (God’s truth for mankind that leads to salvation) on the back burner, and instead attempt to use their limited human knowledge to try and box the vastness of this truth.

One of these was what we currently know as the Roman Catholic movement. This in and of itself is a very broad, very deep topic which, if we explore in depth, may cause a digression from the intent of this series. However, a lot of things present today in Roman Catholicism were present in the early days of Christianity, and the solae are one of the ideologies expounded by the founders of what we now know as Protestantism, which were used in (obviously) protest against the superpower that was the Roman Catholic Church.

In the European Middle Ages, only the elite (royalty, nobility, and the clerics) were able to read and write. A vast majority of the population were peasants, and even those who managed to escape the life of peasantry still had social classes that didn’t place emphasis on literacy. Hence, a lot of people would have the Bible spoken to them on set days of the week, then go about their business as usual. The church at the time took note of this, and used the people’s weakness as a weapon against them.

Whatever was spoken by a priest was final (hmm, interesting that this still seems to go on till today). The church then organised itself into a superpower of sorts, using divine threats as a means of conquering and gaining power. At the head of this was the aptly titled ‘Vicar of Christ’, the Pope, who claimed infallibility and the power of God’s spokesperson on earth.

Basically, it was a mess. A big, big mess. So much so, it caught the attention of one man called John Wycliffe. He showed, after careful and thoughtful analysis of Scripture, that there existed no biblical justification for the papacy, and emphasised on the basis of the Bible alone being the only source of matters pertaining to life, not the Pope or any spiritual head. He was fervent in his attempts, and had a group of his followers preach these truths in the common language (English) to make sure as many people as possible heard them.

His works influenced a Bohemian priest called Jan Hus about a century later. He too made known the glorious truth of Scripture alone being sufficient to give knowledge of salvation, as well as bringing to light the fact that salvation was by grace alone through faith alone, not through added works or human merit as was widely preached to the masses. The church silenced him by charging him with heresy (a very high crime) and duly burnt him at the stake.

Eventually, for a while, it seemed things cooled down and went back to the norm; the clergy abusing their power and using it to enrich themselves. Within no time, the priests and the papacy were among the wealthiest members of society, and wielded so much authority that even kings would submit to them. A Dutch humanist, Erasmus, noticed this, and blatantly called out the Catholic Church for the systemic rot; the wealth and ease with which their leaders lived in, non-scriptural practices such as veneration of saints and worship of Mary, as well as some grave errors in the Latin translation of the Bible.

It didn’t take long for his protests to gain traction. A German priest, Martin Luther, also had began to notice how extravagant the current Pope, Leo X, was. Upon the disrepair of a great cathedral, St. Peter’s Basilica, Leo began to give indulgences those who would give alms to go towards the repair of the building. Indulgences were tokens given to the church essentially as a way of buying one’s salvation as well as for those who had died; hence, the more alms given, the less your chances of suffering for your sins.

Martin questioned why the Pope, who was one of the wealthiest men of the time, could not give part of his wealth towards the repair of the church, but rather asked for money from some of the poorest people, threatening them and their loved ones of eternal torment if they failed to do so. This, and many other issues he had seen, prompted him to write the now-famous 95 Theses, which he nailed to the door of his church on October 31st, 1517. He posed his thoughts as a means of garnering debate, not knowing the wave that would follow it soon after. From that simple act, a great division occured from the Catholic Church at the time, and the ‘dissidents’ were ridiculed as Protestants for their protests calling for reform in the church.

That, dear readers, is a highly summarised version of the history of the Protestant Reformation. This would have been one very long article that I had to shorten and emphasise key points through.

What exactly were they protesting over? The answer is, the perversion of salvation and grace by the Catholic Church. The church had set the word of the pope as the final authority on matters of salvation; it was countered with God’s word (the Bible) as final authority. Salvation, they preached, was by faith and good works; the reformers, basing their conclusion on Scripture, said it was by faith alone. Your good works merit your salvation, the chuch said; nope, said the reformers, again using Scripture to show it was only by the undeserved favour of God (grace) that we are saved. Mary and the saints can save you, the church proclaimed; the Bible says its Christ alone, the reformers said. Salvation is to be attributed to all these things and people, the church hollered; actually, no, said the reformers, it’s all to God, and for His glory alone.

Scripture alone. Grace alone. Faith alone. Christ alone. All for the glory of God alone. These five pillars, built on the foundational doctrine of salvation, are what we shall be exploring in this series. Next Friday, we begin with the sola that started it all; sola Scriptura (Scripture alone).

See you there!