5 Solas: Christ Alone
Christ Alone is one of the foundational principles of the Reformation in the recovery of the proclamation of the Gospel. But it is not just a reformation principle: it is at the core of the Bible’s message. Here are 3 verses which highlight this:
John 14:6 - “Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me.””
Acts 4:12 - The Apostles Peter proclaimed: “Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”
1 Timothy 2:5 - The Apostle Paul wrote: “For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.”
Jesus Christ is the only saviour of sinners. He is the only one who can make us right with God, because he alone could fulfil the work that was required to rescue us.
Because of our sin, we deserve eternal death. We are justly under God’s condemnation. How are we to be rescued from this? We need a saviour who can represent us, bear God’s wrath on our behalf and fulfil the righteousness God requires.
No mere human being can do that, because we are all sin infected. Not only that, we are finite and cannot adequately bear the just wrath of an infinite God.
We need someone who comes from outside the fallen human race, who becomes one with us to pay the debt we owe, and yet who can adequately bear the wrath of God. Only Jesus Christ can do this. He is the eternal Son of God who became man and died in our place. More than that he fulfilled the law on our behalf so that in him, we are justified.
Why did the reformers need to emphasise the exclusivity of Christ during the reformation?
Though Rome formally held to the uniqueness of Christ’s person as the God-man, they thoroughly undermined the sufficiency of his work. How?
What they did in effect was replace Christ, and through that the Holy Spirit, with the church. Roman Catholicism sees the church as the continuation of the incarnation of Christ. In effect, the church became a second Christ and replaces the Holy Spirit.
How? Largely through its sacramental theology. In order to benefit from Christ, you had to be baptised (or desire it). That baptism, by its very own working, led to the forgiveness of your past sins and regenerated you.
The mass was a re-offering of the body and blood of Christ, which strengthened you against venial and mortal sins. If you fell from a state of grace through a mortal sin, you had to confess to an earthly priest, receive priestly absolution and then fulfil an act of penance – service to a neighbour, voluntary self-denial or some other work. This brought you back to a state of grace.
For any sins not dealt with, there was purgatory which completed unfinished satisfaction. Help in the Christian life was found in praying to worthy saints, particularly Mary. You could buy indulgences to release relatives from purgatory. You could do extra works (works of supererogation) to add to the treasury of merit which people could apply to help them.
This structure replaces Christ, so that it is not salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, but salvation by grace plus our cooperation, by faith plus love, by Christ plus the church. What actually happens is that it becomes salvation by the church alone which abandons Christ. Through its elevation of tradition it attacks Christ as prophet; by its sacramental theology it attacks Christ as priest; by its view of the Pope it attacks Christ as King.
The reformers recovered the glory of Christ alone. Through simple, self-abandoning faith in him produced by the Spirit, all his benefits become ours. Everything we need is found in Christ.
What are the challenges to Christ alone today?
Outside the church the challenge is obvious. We live in an idolatrous world that rejects Christ. In the western world we live in an atheistic society that rejects the Bible and so the Christ of the Bible. We live in a world of religious pluralism. We are taught that all religions are equally valid. Your truth is your truth, my truth is my truth. Objective truth is denied. We are scared to offend lest we be prosecuted. The Bible calls us to unashamedly hold to the exclusivity of Christ.
Inside the visible church, we also face challenges. There is the obvious challenge of the liberal wing of the church which denies anything of the miraculous. This is not Christianity at all. But there are subtler errors. It is easy for us to drift away from Christ. The NT letters highlight this as an ever-present danger (Galatians and Colossians are supreme examples). Is Christ the substance of what we are preaching? Is he merely an add on? An insurance policy? Have we drifted into moralism or self-helpism? Have resorted to techniques rather than the fulness we have in Christ?
Do we have a proper understanding of the church’s union with Christ? If Rome’s error was to replace the risen Christ and the Spirit with the church, our rampant individualism can lead to us dispensing with the church.
We need to recover the corporate nature of our faith. Jesus Christ died for the church. When we are united to Christ by faith, we are also united to our brothers and sisters in Christ. Not only that, the church is the primary means by which Christ nurtures us. The church does not replace Christ; rather, Christ nourishes us through the church (Ephesians 4:16).
