It is important for us to consider recent events in our town and around the country in the light of God’s Word. The Lord has been very kind to us thus far, but part of our responsibility is to understand His kindness, and not just to receive it. The Lord has given us the great privilege of holding a contested part of a field of battle, but part of our duty lies in understanding what has just recently transpired, and understanding it in all wisdom.
“Would to God ye could bear with me a little in my folly: and indeed bear with me. For I am jealous over you with godly jealousy: for I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ. But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if ye receive another spirit, which ye have not received, or another gospel, which ye have not accepted, ye might well bear with him” (2 Cor. 11:1-4).
And they continued stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers . . . And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart, Praising God, and having favour with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved (Acts 2: 42, 46-47).
The gospel is not over-engineered. Consider what we learn in these passages. Paul sarcastically notes that adultery and treachery are complicated, but fidelity and loyalty are 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 complicated. Rationalizations are always tangled, and sin breeds rationalization. But true simplicity does what the early Christians did. They accept what the apostles taught, period, they fellowship with one another, period, they take the Lord’s Supper together, period, and they pray together, period. This brings the glorious result—gladness and simplicity of heart, praise to God and favor from outsiders. And God uses this to bring salvation to those who are being saved.
So what is at issue? 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 the last few 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, in the meantime, the slogans of a previous period of simplicity have often been transformed (in the hands of trained professionals) into something that only a scribe could love.
We need to get beyond the five solas. Initially some might worry that this entails an abandonment of the glorious revival that came in what we call the Reformation, but nothing could be further from the truth. But it is an abandonment of much of jargon that has grown up around the solas. Loving the original ship does not mean loving the barnacles. Over against the errors of so many false religionists, we still affirm what the solas originally meant. Salvation is by Christ alone (solus Christus), not by Christ and some kind of creaturely help. Salvation is by grace alone (sola gratia) and not some mixture of grace and merit, grace and works, grace and ungrace, or grace and brownie points. 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 words of men. And all this comes together to glorify God alone for all that He has done (soli Deo gloria). All of this is most important, and most cool.
But all glorious confessions of faith can be attacked in two ways. One is the assault from without (persecution), but 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 bad macaronic pun, and not a serious attempt at matching gender, number, and case. No letters from the Latinists, please.
The need of the hour is to restore the five solas, and get them up out of the narrow crevice some follks have pushed them into. We need the five totas. Our answer to such things must be simple, and not complicated. 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 or portion of reality, and this makes the rest of reality incomprehensible -— and obviously complicated, with great “subtlety” required of those who seek to understand the godless part of the universe. But there is no godless part of the universe, and so to all this we reply with totus Christus (all Christ and all His people), tota gratia (to be a creature is grace, to be saved 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), and toti Deo gloria (all the glory for all things goes to God). God save us from all partialism.