by Frank Chan
We celebrate this year the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther posting his 95 Theses, which is commonly accepted as the start of the Protestant Reformation.The principles of the Reformation are no less significant because centuries have passed. They capture the heart of the gospel Alliance messengers proclaim around the world.
We celebrate this year the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther posting his 95 Theses (1517), which rejected the papacy’s practice of selling indulgences in exchange for the forgiveness of sins—commonly accepted as the start of the Protestant Reformation. After lecturing on Romans for the two years prior at the University of Wittenburg, Luther concluded that a person’s justification before God is not by his or her own human works but by his or her faith alone in the accomplished work of Christ (or sola fide).
In other words, Luther taught that no human good work, like the offering of money, could contribute to one’s righteousness before God. All Protestants to this day believe that one’s righteousness can only come from some place other than oneself.
This doctrine was important 500 years ago when the church was busy reforming itself. But sola fide is still a vital doctrine today in the evangelical world. There are two situations in which sola fide needs to continue to be part of the evangelical vocabulary: the problem of legalism and the problem of restrictive church membership.
The Problem of Legalism
Although no one really calls for Christians to lay down money to secure their righteousness standing before God (not even health-and-wealth televangelists go this far), many Christians today live under the burden of a “works-righteousness” mentality.
Although they don’t say this aloud, in their hearts they believe “I must earn God’s favor by doing all the right things expected of me.” Or, alternatively, they despairingly believe in their hearts, “Because I did this horrible thing, I cannot be a real Christian.” They have learned from their legalistic church upbringings devoid of grace that “real Christians” must behave a certain, prescribed way. The term for this in my ministry-training community, Nyack College, is “bounded-set” thinking.
I am the dissertation coordinator for the doctor of ministry program at Alliance Theological Seminary (Nyack, New York). We ask that each doctoral student’s dissertation address a pressing ministry problem in today’s church. I am surprised that so many doctoral students’ topics touch in some way upon legalism. Three come to my mind:
(1) Pastor Joshua Rodriquez chose to study pastors’ kids from Latino Pentecostal churches who had left the Christian faith. He showed one factor that made a difference in whether the prodigal PKs stayed away or returned to the church was the legalism of the churches they left. The more stress they perceived from legalism (among other things), the less likely they would return.
(2) Pastor Ezra Sohn chose to study Chinese-American and Korean-American Christians who had left their bilingual immigrant churches to attend popular majority-Caucasian churches. He isolated the three strongest reasons these second-generation Asians consistently cited for their transfer. One of them was the legalism of the Asian churches they left. Asian culture can be very performance-oriented, even in living as Christians.
(3) Pastor Brent Haggerty pastors a majority-Caucasian church in suburban New Jersey. He devised a questionnaire that measures how legalistic a congregant is in his or her thinking. After a year’s worth of preaching on God’s grace (“It’s OK to not be OK”) and structuring Holy Spirit experiences where congregants could sense the unconditional love of their Heavenly Father and experience intimacy with Him, Brent showed a reduction in the legalistic thinking of his church and was successful, in part, in establishing sola fide as a part of his church’s ethos.
In contexts as diverse as majority-Caucasian, Latino-American, and Asian-American churches, the doctrine of sola fide is a forgotten but desperately needed message.
The Problem of Restrictive Church Membership
As American society becomes increasingly secularized, more and more converts to Christianity will come from non-church backgrounds. Evangelical churches will have to get used to having applicants for church membership who are cohabiting couples, gay-lesbian couples, transgendered, smokers, drug addicts, sex addicts, gambling addicts, child abusers, spousal abusers, and many other behaviors that traditional church culture has rejected. Should these people be granted church membership?
I believe the conditions for membership in a church should not be that much more than the conditions for membership in the Kingdom of God.
I am an elder at my church, and I frequently screen people who seek to join it. When I interview them, I ask them almost exclusively about how they heard about and came to put their faith in Jesus Christ. Once I am convinced they have done this and ensure they are in agreement with the core values of the church leadership (and life change is one of our core values), I typically shake their hands and welcome them into membership. I never ask about their habits or whom they choose as friends.
Now, of course, I affirm that part of the Christian life is putting aside sinful ways. But the doctrine of sola fide means no one should have to do this to become a Christian or to be received by churches as a Christian. The power to change one’s character and behavior can come only after one has met Christ. No newcomer to Christianity should be led to think, I have to quit stealing to be loved by God. Rather, he or she should think, Because I am loved by God, I want to quit stealing. Sola fide rightly puts life-change after church membership, not before.
The Protestant Reformation is worth celebrating. The doctrine of sola fide and its good effects on the lives of evangelicals today is a reminder of why.
Frank Chan is a professor of Bible at Nyack (N.Y.) College.