By Faith Alone

Today on Renewing Your Mind… How would you define Christianity? More specifically, how would you answer the question, What must I do to be saved? Historically, Roman Catholics and Protestants have answered that question differently. On the surface, the difference may sound like a matter of nuance. It is not, and it boils down to one word.

Here's Dr. R.C. Sproul. We've been looking at the Reformation formula, justification by faith alone, and I'm going to look briefly now at the question of faith. What is meant in the formula, justification by faith alone, by the word faith? In the initial stages of the Reformation, the Roman Catholic communion heard Luther teaching a kind of licentious libertinism or antinomianism, the idea that you can just believe in Christ and then live however you want because works were not considered necessary for justification. And so Luther had the task of defining what saving faith really means. And historically, there's a difference among scholars as to how the Reformers expanded their understanding of the elements of saving faith. Tarrant, for example, in the seventeenth century included six or seven or eight subtle nuanced elements of saving faith. Gordon Clark in the twentieth century reduced those elements to two, but the usual customary understanding of the elements of saving faith in historic Reformed thought is that saving faith consists of three distinct elements, and those three distinct elements are called notitia, assensus, and fiducia.

Now, the first element, notitia, or sometimes called noti, refers simply to the information or the data. You've heard it said it doesn't matter what you believe just as long as you're sincere. Well, Christianity says eternal life matters concerning what you believe. There is a content to the Christian faith, and we don't have the authority to fill it up with whatever we want to fill it up with. And so to be justified by faith you had to have the basic information about Christ, about His person, about His work. You had to have the elements of the gospel that are understood, that there is this God-man Jesus who died on the cross for our sins and so on. Those amount to the notitia or the notae, the notes or the information that one has to believe in order to be justified. But in addition to being aware of that data or of that information, you have to assent to the truth of that information.

You have to believe that these ideas of Jesus and His person and His work are realities, not just myths or interesting imaginative ideas. And so saving faith requires an intellectual, cognitive assent to the truth of the data. Now so far the Reformers would say if we have the information, the notitia, and we assent to its truth, assentus, all that qualifies us to be is a demon because the devil knows the information, and he knows that the information is true. The devil could make a hundred on any theological exam you ever gave him.

He's not stupid. He knows the information. But in addition to having the intellectual awareness and the intellectual assent to the data, one must have fiducia, and fiducia has to do with trust. You must not only, again, know the information, believe that it's true, but trust in it personally for your redemption. I've always said that it's very simple intellectually to understand the content of the doctrine of justification by faith alone, but to get it in the bloodstream is a whole nother matter to really trust for eternity the work of Christ for your salvation and not mix with that trust in Christ a reliance on your own performance or on your own activity or your own works or your own merits or, and this is crucial, your own profession of faith. One of the great problems that we have in our day is distinguishing faith from the profession of faith. Anyone who has faith is called to profess that faith, but not everybody who professes faith has that faith. Jesus warns frequently that on the last day many will come to Him saying, Lord, Lord, didn't we do this in Your name? Did we do that in Your name?

And so on. And He will say to them, depart from Me, you workers of iniquity. I never knew you.

Please leave. These people had made a profession of faith, but they didn't possess what they professed. Elsewhere He said, these people honor Me with their lips, but their hearts are far from Me. And that's why this element of fiducia is so critical to the Reformation biblical doctrine of justification by faith that you have to have true trust and not a mere profession. This is the danger, for example, that we see practically speaking in methods of evangelism that we encounter through church history. There's that movement or that idea called decisional evangelism where we try to get people to make a decision to believe in Christ and to follow Him. When I was first converted to Christianity, the first year I was a Christian, the local church where I was going to college was having an evangelistic series of meetings, and they brought this evangelist from some other city to come and give this series of messages. And I met with him privately, and he said to me, give me any man alone for fifteen minutes and I will get a decision for Christ.

And I thought, after spending fifteen minutes with this guy who was so forbearing, I could understand that people would give a profession of anything just to get away from after fifteen minutes. But how arrogant it was to think that you can just manipulate people into the kingdom of God. Now at a philosophical level, there's a different matter. The British empirical philosopher David Hume, in analyzing the substance of belief, how and why people believe what they believe, he made it clear that you can make a decision to do lots of things. You can make a decision to go to the store this afternoon and go to the store.

You can make a decision to read a book tonight and you read the book. You can make a decision to study the things of Jesus and study the things of Jesus. But what you cannot do as an act of the will is to believe something intellectually that you don't really believe. I can't decide to believe that Jesus is the Lord and Savior of my life. I have to be persuaded that I really have to have that assensus, not as a matter of decision, but as a matter of persuasion that I have been convinced of the truth claims of Christ before I can put my trust in it. So again, we get a lot of problems with the language that we use with respect to faith. Now the fourth word in the formula is alone. Justification is by faith alone.

And what does that mean? It means that there's no admixture of works in our faith that are in any way the foundation or the basis for God's declaring us to be just. If I had a blackboard here and could write on it some little formulae like your math formulas two plus two equal four, I would write three of them on the board for you. The first one would be the Roman Catholic view of justification. Faith plus works equals justification.

I could write the antinomian view, the carnal Christian view that's so popular in our day. Faith equals justification minus works, so that you can be a Christian and converted, be carnal. Christ is not the Lord of your life and so you believe Him as Savior but not as Lord. And so this idea of antinomianism is that you can be a true believer and never have any works. Luther said on the other hand a different formula. Faith equals justification plus works.

What does he mean? He means that if you have true faith, you will manifest that true faith by works of obedience after you're justified. Now those works that you manifest after you are justified contribute nothing of merit to your justification.

But if they're not there, it proves that you don't have what? Faith, because true faith will always manifest itself in works. So Luther said it this way, justification is by faith alone but not by a faith that is alone. Saving faith will always accompany itself with works of obedience. But again, when he talks about alone, it means that those works contribute nothing to your justification. That another way of saying this is that we are justified by the righteousness of Christ alone.

I can't add anything to the merit of Christ, nor can I ever subtract anything to the merit of Christ. It's by His merit or His works that we're justified. Another way of turning this upside down is to say we believe in justification by works alone. Well, that would seem to be the exact opposite, diametrically opposed to the idea of justification by faith alone. But what I'm getting at is this. We are justified by works, but they're not our works.

They're His works. And it's because Jesus fulfilled the law perfectly in His perfect act of obedience that we are able to be justified before God because He earned the blessing, which is then transferred to us. So do you see how we can turn that around and say we're justified by works alone? As long as you understand, it's by the works of Christ alone.

There's nothing that I can add. We will see when we look at Paul's statements in Romans, and Paul says, by the works of the law shall no man be justified. But nevertheless, we're justified by faith in the One who did keep the works of the law. Now, I've been saying throughout this discussion the importance of the idea of imputation, and I want to just spend a couple of minutes more on that.

When we distinguish between the Roman Catholic view of justification and the Reformed view of justification, we make this distinction that the Roman Catholic view is analytical, and the Reformation view is synthetic. Right? You've heard that a thousand times. You've probably never heard that, have you?

Well, what are we talking about? Well, when we look at propositions, statements, we can distinguish between analytical statements and synthetic statements. An analytical statement is literally a tautology. There is nothing new in the predicate that's not already found in the subject. If we put a mathematical formula on the board that was a copula, we would say two plus two equals four. Now, there's nothing new on the other side of the equal sign from what was already present in the first part, because two plus two are four, and four equals two plus two, so there's no new information added after the equal sign.

You get that? An analytical statement is a statement that is true by definition. Let me give you another one. A bachelor is an unmarried man. Now, what have you learned after the verb to be about the fellow? A bachelor by definition is an unmarried man. A bachelor can't be anything else but an unmarried man.

Now, you don't turn it around and say the unmarried man is a bachelor because he could be a widower and so on, but we know by analysis that a bachelor is an unmarried man. So it's true by analysis. And so an analytical view of justification, according to Rome, God declares a person to be just only if and when that person under analysis is just.

Right? God analyzes the person. He sees that that person possesses inherent righteousness.

He knows that that inherent righteousness came through the aid of grace and faith and Christ and all of that, but in the final analysis, God will not make the declaration that He is just unless under analysis He is just. A synthetic statement is a statement where there is something added in the information in the predicate that's not found in the subject. If I told you that the bachelor is a wealthy man, I would be predicating of the subject of the bachelor something that's not inherent in the term bachelor, namely the possession of wealth.

Okay? So now a synthetic statement is something that adds something that's not automatically found in the subject. Now why is the Protestant view called synthetic? It's because I am declared to be righteous by God, not because He looks at me and finds righteousness, but something has been added to me, that foreign righteousness, that righteousness that is extra nos, that righteousness that is not my own has been added to me. So when He looks at me, He sees me covered by the righteousness of Christ and declares me to be just. Now when we talk about God's declaring people to be just who are not just, we frequently use the term forensic justification because justification is a legal judgment whereby God declares someone to be just. And you understand what forensic medicine is and forensic psychology, you watch enough trials to know forensic evidence has to do with evidence that is applicable to a legal consideration or to a trial. And so when we say that justification is forensic, we mean that God judicially declares us to be just.

Now there's a little hitch here. Forensic justification historically has been used as shorthand for the Protestant view. But if you look at the Roman Catholic view, you will see that justification takes place in the Roman view when God declares a person just. So even in Rome, justification is a forensic judgment made by God.

It's a legal statement about our status before Him. But the difference is, of course, in the Catholic view it's analytical forensics, and in the Reformed view it's synthetic forensics. I can remember when the first document of evangelicals and Catholics together was put out and created a firestorm, and then the second document came out much more detailed, trying to show that there's been great rapprochement accomplished between Rome and evangelicals. And I had a very distinguished historian, Catholic historian who signed that document call me on the phone, and he was so excited. He said, R.C., in this document, this is the first time that the Roman Catholic Church has declared that justification is forensic. And I said, I hate to burst your bubble, but they've always taught that it was forensic in the sense that God is the one who makes the legal declaration of those who are to be justified. Also in that particular document they said we've been able to come together on so many issues regarding justification, and they think that they have a substantive agreement between evangelicals and Roman Catholics. And then it ends up by saying, of course, imputation is still on the table. And they had said earlier in the document that all the elements of justification have been handled there, except for imputation. Mike Horton made the point. He says, you can take flour, and you can take sugar, and you can bake cookies, and you can have all the elements of chocolate chip cookies, but if you don't have the chocolate chips in there, you don't have chocolate chip cookies. You've got cookies, but you don't have chocolate chip cookies. And so as again, this issue of imputation remains the sticking point, and it is an either-or. We either are justified by our righteousness or by somebody else's righteousness. There's no tertium quid here.

There's no way that you can slice and dice that to get rid of the word alone. That's why Luther kept coming back to that all line alone idea that you can't mix it with anything else because it's only Jesus and His righteousness that justifies us. We are justified by faith and by faith alone. Thanks for listening to Renewing Your Mind on this Wednesday. I'm Lee Webb. We have been pleased to feature portions of Dr.

R.C. 's Sproul series, Justified by Faith Alone. This doctrine is at the center of Reformation theology, and it remains critical for believers today.

And while some may have grown weary of the debate, it's important for us to remember that there is no gospel without the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Would you like to continue your study on this topic? Dr. Sproul's series includes 10 23-minute lessons on two DVDs. We'll send you the full series for a donation of any amount to Ligetier Ministries plus a digital copy of the study guide, which has questions for group discussion and will point you to other resources.

We're also including Dr. Sproul's classic book, Faith Alone. So contact us today with a donation of any amount. You can reach us by phone at 800-435-4343. And let me give you our web address. It's renewingyourmind.org. If you prefer, you can make your request there.

Perhaps you're trying to explain this doctrine to a Roman Catholic friend or a family member, and you want to make sure that you have it straight. That's one of the reasons we're providing such a substantial bundle of resources today. We want you to have a deep working knowledge of justification by faith alone. So again, with your donation of any amount, we will send you the two-DVD set with 10 lessons, the digital study guide, and Dr. Sproul's classic book, Faith Alone.

Our number again is 800-435-4343, and our web address is renewingyourmind.org. You know, it would be wrong to assume that Dr. Sproul taught this series to, in effect, set Roman Catholics straight on the doctrine of justification. We talked about that once, and here's what R.C.

had to say. I'm not trying to set the Roman Catholics straight. I'm trying to send the Protestants straight because Protestants mess it up as much as Roman Catholics do. We think oftentimes that all you have to do to be saved is to profess faith in Christ. And you profess faith in Christ, that doesn't save anybody. You have to possess saving faith. And there are millions of people in Protestant churches who believe you can get to heaven by living a good life and by doing the right thing.

The gospel is distorted everywhere you turn. There are millions of people within the Roman Catholic Church that don't understand the church's doctrine, and unfortunately, they're not trusting in the Roman Catholic doctrine of justification. They're trusting in Christ. And I believe that anybody who trusts in Christ is a Christian and will go to heaven. But they do it in spite of the Catholic Church's teaching, not because of it. Well, tomorrow we are going to dive even further into this doctrine of justification by faith alone, and we hope you'll join us for the Thursday edition of Renewing Your Mind.