As his thinking and teaching evolved after publishing the 95 Theses, Luther eventually established three basic doctrines: one concerned the way in which Christians approach life with God, the second concerned authority in the Church, and the third concerned the way in which God shares his life with us. These are called the three solas (the Latin word for “alone”): “Faith Alone” (sola fide), “Scripture Alone” (sola scriptura), and “Grace Alone” (sola gratia). The three solas have come to form a common doctrinal foundation for Protestants — a common statement of faith for almost all Protestant Christians to this day. While individual Protestants may have varied views, what we present here are the common, traditional views.
What Protestants mean by faith alone is that faith in Christ as Lord and Savior was all that was necessary for a Christian to be, well, a Christian. This notion of faith alone goes to the heart of the Protestant belief about “justification.” Justification is the gift of becoming good, upright and acceptable before God. It can never be earned; no works, not even heroic works, could ever bring about this condition within a human being. Certainly, the Catholic Church believes this, as well. But Luther’s concept of this was informed by his belief that man has absolutely no good in him whatsoever, that humans are completely spiritually dead because of the “Original Sin” committed by our first parents, Adam and Eve.
In Luther’s mind, this fall of the human race darkened our human nature so completely that free will no longer exists. He affirmed the total depravity of human beings. Because of its fallen nature, the entire human race, except for Jesus Christ, was incapable of doing good and, in fact, had no goodness in himself. But God, by his gift of grace, through faith, “imputes” or, “loans” the righteousness of Jesus to the believer. Through the free gift of faith, a totally good, perfect and righteous God declares a totally depraved and darkened human being to be just.
This takes us to a very important distinction between Protestant and Catholic understandings of the work of grace in the individual. For Catholics, sinful humanity is saved by grace through faith and works; but only by works which flow from faith, works by which we persevere in faith — in the words of Saint Paul in Galatians chapter 5, “the only thing that counts is faith working through love.” But the distinction Luther really wanted to make was, “sinful humanity is saved by faith alone, without works.” He uses the passage from Galatians 2:15-16 (NIV), “We who are Jews by birth and not sinful Gentiles know that a person is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law, because by the works of the law no one will be justified.”
In this passage, St. Paul was drawing a distinction between observing the Law of Moses, and the freely given and unearned grace of Christ. The latter brings us salvation, and the former does not. But Luther extended this to mean that all works, even “good works” moved by grace, contribute nothing for salvation. Remember, in Luther’s understanding, man by his nature is incapable of good — even after receiving the justifying grace of Christ. The grace that comes through faith “covers” the still-depraved human being. This creates a false opposition between faith and works.
In the Catholic understanding, although a man’s works can be heroic by human understanding (such as saving someone from a burning building), without grace and faith they have no “merit” towards salvation, because they are not done out of love for God. But with grace and faith, good works can be done for God’s sake, and these can contribute to our salvation. Then we are truly fulfilling the law, even if imperfectly. The key distinction for Catholics comes from the way we understand how grace and faith work within us. They are bestowed by baptism, and are developed as we come to know and love God and live according to his teachings.
Good works are not simply the “evidence” of our faith, as most Protestants hold, but they come when we freely and willingly cooperate with grace. Our holy words, deeds, thoughts and even avoidance of evil is grounded in saving faith, and so they, too, contribute to our salvation. It is, in effect, a cooperative effort, in which our response in faith, through charity or love, is actually a source of merit. But we must remember what St. Paul was trying to teach us in Galatians: that “the Law” of Moses and its prescriptions in and of itself (and even all “works,” by extension”) can avail us nothing without the empowering, saving, free and unearned gift of faith, given us in baptism. In recent years, some Catholic and Lutheran joint theological work has been done on the relationship between “faith and works,” but it remains to be worked out in its details.
“Scripture alone,” or Sola Scriptura, is perhaps the chief foundation of Protestant life and practice. Because of the abuses going on in the Church in Luther’s time, and sadly long before it, he came to the conclusion that the only true, unfailing benchmark of authority — one which seemed to “transcend” human sinfulness and corruption — was the Bible. Perhaps this was understandable, since there was only one Church in the West (although here and there some pockets of “sects” existed, especially in northern Europe) and the Church had until then done an insufficient job of preventing and correcting abuses. The Bible, then, seemed to be the only institutional expression of the Faith and rule of the Christian life that was trustworthy—after all, it had survived for centuries through plague, wars and persecution, and seemed to present an unchanging standard.
Arguably, this is what led Luther and the other Reformation leaders to the belief that Scripture contained everything we need to know, so that whatever can’t be read in it, or proved by it, is not required to be believed and is not needed for salvation. But what was the result of this doctrine? If only the Bible is infallible, then its interpretation is, ultimately, up to the individual Christian. This idea is known as the “private interpretation of Scripture.”
This is a somewhat deceptive principle though. Think of it this way: individual Christians interpret Scripture. Then they get together with others and propagate their interpretation, which then becomes a body of teaching that is considered authoritative. This principle of private interpretation, then, is partially why we see today thousands of Protestant denominations!
Luther was right that the bible is a very direct and reliable, even infallible, source of what God has revealed about his plan to redeem and save us. Where Luther went wrong, however, was to separate it from Sacred Tradition, which is also part of revealed teaching. We can say then, that the bible is the premier source of our knowledge of salvation, but it cannot be the only authority. Otherwise, it replaces the living voice of the Church’s chief shepherds and teachers, the bishops, leading to private interpretation and greater division of Christians.
Let’s move on to the last of the three solas, “grace alone.” Sola gratia.
We should start by asking what IS grace? We know that the bible teaches on it. It has been described by the Lutheran theologian Dr. Steve Paulson, as an attribute or “quality” of God, as the favor of God and the power of God working within believers. Catholics would really have no problem with this as one of a number of ways of understanding “grace.” The word itself is derived from a Latin word for something free, a gift, something that cannot be bought. In the original Greek of the New Testament, it is related to our English words “charisma” and “charitable” and is actually used in the New Testament about 125 times.
Grace is freely given to human beings, created with intellect, free will, and immortality. These three qualities are what distinguish us from all other living creatures, aside from the angels. It was an abuse of free will by our first parents that caused “original sin,” which in our modern understanding we might compare to an inherited or “genetic defect.” Adam and Eve’s desire to rebel against God’s will for their lives, and actively disobeying him, brought about a “new normal” for human beings.
What was this “new normal”? Original Sin created a guilt or burden affecting every single human being ever born — except for the Virgin Mary, who was redeemed by her Son by being preserved from the “stain” of Original Sin. For the rest of us, Original Sin destroyed a “natural right” we had to be one with God, to be at peace with him and to attain heaven; instead, it brought death and a clouding or severe weakening of our will, our intellect, and our emotions. This means that we often confuse right and wrong and choose what is evil and sinful — in seemingly inconsequential things, as well as important ones. Yet, in the end, we are still free to choose good or evil.
How did God respond to Original Sin? The Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World. Jesus became a man with all of our human limitations — except sin. He was full of God’s divine life and His human will was always perfectly aligned with God’s will. Being in perfect union with God, then, Jesus was always pleasing to Him. So, because Jesus was both God and man, He was able to correct the sin of our first parents, allowing us to be adopted as the Father’s true sons and daughters by grace.
Let’s take a more in-depth look at what Luther and the Reformation Founders meant by “grace alone.”
First of all, “grace alone” for what? Like faith alone, grace alone is about salvation: Salvation by grace alone. What do Protestants mean by this? As we’ve already said, from the Protestant perspective, righteousness is “imputed” or “loaned” to us; it does not become ours personally by our accepting it, because man is incapable of doing so, due to his alleged “depravity.” Luther understood this in his own expression, “At the same time, just and sinner,” which he took very literally. Here, man is “justified” or “redeemed,” but also remains unchanged in being—we remain, in Luther’s view, depraved at the core.
Saving grace, then, is actually not truly and radically personal — an inner transformation — it remains only a “protection” or a “covering”. This is reflected in the Reformation proposition that baptism does not make one truly justified or sanctified from within, as the Catholic Church believes, but is simply an outward “declaration” of God’s goodness to us. However, we know that baptism is necessary for this justifying power of grace, not as a mere “declaration” of grace that is “loaned” to us, not as something that merely “covers” us, but as that which makes us very literal and personal partakers in the life of God. Grace, as the Catechism explains it, “is the gratuitous gift that God makes to us of his own life, infused by the Holy Spirit into our soul to heal it of sin and to sanctify it.”
None of this is meant to imply that Protestants don’t believe that grace can and does transform us from within, making us more holy — but they don’t think that this “contributes” or adds to our salvation in any way. In this sense, they separate “justification” (being declared holy) from “sanctification” (becoming holy), whereas Catholics would argue that these movements of grace work as one within the believer, for his salvation.
The effects of the three solas of the Protestant Reformation influenced subsequent movements and ideas that have had a varying impact on Western Civilization for 500 years, not only in matters of religion, but of politics, economics and many other sectors of culture we take for granted today. For our purposes, these solas are considered according to their classical understanding, as concepts of faith. When interacting with a Protestant, awareness of these three foundational beliefs of the Reformation can be essential for a fruitful discussion about their general Christian beliefs.