Beyond the Five Solas

As we try to make good sense of what is happening here in Moscow, not to mention some other parts of the country, we need to do this in the light of God’s Word. The Lord has been very kind to us thus far, but part of our responsibility in the aftermath means we need to understand His kindness. Any number of times, He has given us the great privilege of holding firm on a contested field of battle, but part of our duty lies in all the necessary after-action reports. Our duty lies in understanding why this keeps happening and seeking to understand it in all wisdom.

And as the flight attendant has frequently reminded all of us, the exit may be behind you.

Consider what we see in these passages. The gospel is not over-engineered. Paul sarcastically notes that adultery and treachery are complicated, but that fidelity is simple. The serpent came to Eve in all subtlety, and this is contrasted with the “simplicity that is in Christ.” Other Christs, other gospels, other spirits are easy enough to put up with (in this fallen world), but they are always complicated. Oh, what tangled webs we weave . . .

Rationalizations are always tangled, and sin breeds rationalization. But true simplicity does what the early Christians did. They simply accepted what the apostles taught, period, they had fellowship with one another, period, they took the Lord’s Supper together, period, and they prayed together, period. All of it period, flat out. This brought in the glorious result—gladness and simplicity of heart, praise to God and favor from outsiders. And God then used this to bring salvation to those who were in the process of being saved. Read your Bibles, worship God, love one another. But because the lords of complication feel threatened by all this, controversy ensues.

One of the obvious concerns that we should have before us is whether all the controversies that the Lord has brought to us over the course of many years have anything in common. And the answer is yes, they do. In fact, at bottom they are all really the same controversy.

Whenever the Spirit moves in the history of the church, He does so in a way that sweeps away all our carnal complications and restores that primitive and apostolic sense of gladness and simplicity of heart. But often the slogans of a previous period of such simplicity have been transformed over time (in the hands of trained professionals) into something that only a scribe could love.

So in that spirit, you may have taken notice of the title—Beyond the Five Solas. Is that too provocative?

Initially some might worry that any talk of “beyond” is an exercise in abandonment. Does this signal a watering down of the glorious truths recovered in the revival that we call the Reformation? No, not at all. But it does mean this. The ship of the Reformation was not a magic ship that could not collect any barnacles. And scraping off barnacles is not an assault on the ship.

But it is an abandonment of much of jargon that has grown up around the solas. The doctrine is the ship; the jargon would be the barnacles. Over against the errors of so many truncated religionists, we still do exuberantly affirm what the solas originally meant. Watch this. Salvation is by Christ alone (solus Christus), not by Christ and some other creature helping. Salvation is by grace alone (sola gratia) and not some admixture of grace and merit. Salvation is received through faith alone (sola fide) and not some mixture of faith and works. We understand all this through ultimate reliance on Scripture alone (sola Scriptura) and not through some combination of the Word of God and the supplementary wisdom of man. And all this comes together to glorify God alone for all that He has done (soli Deo gloria).

Now any sound Reformed guy is going to acknowledge that all this is orthodox enough. But he then might ask, since the barnacles are now gone, why is there any talk of going “beyond?” The idea is to express the same truths in a way that will be harder for the complicating ones to get at the next time.

All glorious confessions of faith can be attacked in two ways. One is the assault from without (persecution), and the other is corruption from within. In the grip of Enlightenment individualism, pietism, sentimentalism, and so forth, in our day the meaning of the solas has been turned aside from their earlier and more glorious meaning. Now they are solo Christus (just me and Jesus), solo gratia (narrow, sectarian grace), solo fide (when I “prayed the prayer”), solo Scriptura (just me and my Bible), and solo Deo gloria (God gets all the glory for saving me, and maybe somebody else).

Now please realize that the word solo here constitutes a rudimentary macaronic pun, and not any serious attempt at matching gender, number, and case.

So I need to practice what I preach here. I want to conclude with a straightforward and very simple point. That one point can be made by asserting that Christ is Lord, and do so by referencing the Five Totas. Our answer to all such challenges must be simple, and not complicated. The summary meaning of the Five Totas is simply to say that Christ is Lord of all. Everything. Nothing left out.

The claims of Jesus Christ, Lord of heaven and earth, are necessarily and always total, never partial. The solo tendency always tends to restrict the work of God to just a part of reality, and this always makes the rest of reality incomprehensible—and obviously complicated, with great “subtlety” required in order to untangle it for the layman.

To this we reply with totus Christus (all Christ and all His people), tota gratia (to be a creature is grace, to be saved from our sins is more grace), tota fide (we are saved by faith from first to last), tota Scriptura (we do not pit the Old Testament against the New, or law against grace, or red letters against black), and toti Deo gloria (all the glory for all things goes to God). Or, in sum, as we say, all of Christ for all of life.

God save us from every form of partialism. God save us from every form of dualism. Dualism, in its very essence, is very bad juju. It is never the case that Christ gets this part and the devil gets that part. It is not possible for Christ to take His share and Aristotle to walk off with his share. Now someone might object that Aristotle made some fine discoveries, which is certainly true. Take, for example, the laws of thought. But all those discoveries are actually Christ’s possession because Aristotle himself is Christ’s possession. The great Kuyperian vaunt—”not one square inch”—expresses this wonderfully.

How does the word tota help protect the true meaning of the word sola? When sola is simply asserted, all by itself, some will distort it to mean that the sola is an umbrella under which true doctrine sits, and outside that umbrella we may resort to other authorities—psychology, or geology, or natural law, or reason, or something else. But no. Jesus is Lord. He is Lord of heaven and earth. He is Lord of all.

But it is not dualism to make distinctions. Of course not. Genesis begins all of our stories with distinctions. Sun and moon. Evening and morning. Sea and dry land. Male and female. We glory in distinctions. We just refuse to separate them, and we refuse to relegate anything whatever to an outside realm where Christ is not the undisputed Lord.