Are the Five Solas Still Important for the Church Today?

Gabriel Fluhrer The five solas (Latin for “alone”) of the Reformation—Scripture alone, grace alone, faith alone, Christ alone, to the glory of God alone—are indispensable for the church in any era. They will always be relevant because they summarize the biblical gospel, which is the church’s lifeblood in every age. They are particularly significant today because even professing evangelicals, to say nothing of the culture around us, are being tempted to abandon the gospel. Therefore, the church must recognize the dire need of not only defending the five solas but also celebrating them. The five solas are important for us today for at least three reasons. First, they set apart the true gospel from every other religion, worldview, or philosophy. Every day, the world calls out its siren song of spiritual compromise. Satan loves to negotiate the nonnegotiables of biblical truth. He whispers the lie that we don’t need to have strong convictions about the Bible as our only standard of truth or hold firm to

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God Is the Prize of the Gospel – Explaining a Sixth Sola

John Piper: For five hundred years, Christians in the lineage of the Reformation — that is, Protestant Christians who love the Bible and are bent on seeing the gospel for all that it is — have described the gospel in terms of five solas, which is the Latin word for only or alone — like the English word solo. What I want to do is just put those five together in a gospel definition and add one, which is implicit in the other five. You can decide if it’s eccentric or not: As revealed with final authority in Scripture alone, the gospel is the good news that by faith alone, through grace alone, on the basis of Christ alone, for the glory of God alone, sinners are granted to enjoy God alone forever. Enjoying God alone is my own addition, but Calvin, Luther, Zwingli, the Puritans, Jonathan Edwards, Spurgeon — all this long line of Reformation lovers of the gospel would hear me say that and respond, Amen. Let me show you how

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Does God Really Save Us by Faith Alone?

John Piper: The first great Reformers like Martin Luther, John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli never summed up their teaching with the tidy set of five phrases we now know as the five solas. The solas developed over time as a way of capturing the essence of what the Reformation was mainly about in its dispute with the Roman Catholic Church. Sola is Latin for “alone” or “only.” The five solas are sola gratia (by grace alone), solo Christo (on the basis of Christ alone), sola fide (through the means of faith alone), soli Deo gloria (to the ultimate glory of God alone), sola Scriptura (as taught with the final and decisive authority of Scripture alone). Justification Alone I think these five solas can be preciously illuminating, both for the crux of the Reformation and for the essence of the Christian gospel itself, which of course was central to the dispute. I say they can be helpful because five prepositional phrases hanging in the air with no clause to modify are not helpful in making clear what the great

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The Solas

Randy Alcorn provides a nice summary of Protestant distinctives … 1. Sola Scriptura – “The Bible alone.” Scripture alone speaks authoritatively, and it speaks to all believers, independently of church leaders and councils, human interpreters and so-called spokesmen for God. 2. Sola Gratia – “Grace alone.” It is only by the unmerited favor of God that Christ went to the cross and paid the price for man’s salvation. Man is by nature depraved—he has no virtue that commends him to God. Therefore God’s grace to him is truly undeserved and amazing, and God’s grace alone has the power to draw people to himself. 3. Sola Fide – “Faith alone.” Only total righteousness is acceptable to God, and that is found in Christ, not us. Man can only accept Christ’s work by placing his trust in him. Man is justified by faith alone in the finished work of Christ, not by any works of his own. 4. Sola Christus – “Christ alone.”

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Perseverance – “God cannot fail”

“I’ve heard it said that the most arrogant person on earth is the person who believes that salvation can be lost, but still believes himself to be saved. If you ask an Arminian “who deserves the blame if he loses his salvation?”, he will say that he himself does. If you ask him “who should get the credit if he perseveres to the end?”, he is therefore required to answer the same. To say otherwise is logically inconsistent. If God truly deserves ALL the glory for our perseverance, we will never ultimately or finally fall away because God CANNOT fail. To be an Arminian, you either have to believe that God does not have the ability to hold onto us (at least not in every instance), or else that we must contribute in some sense to our own salvation (since we might lose it if we don’t). As I see it, a denial of the doctrine of perseverance requires one

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