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Revisiting ‘the Nature of Protestantism’: Justification by Faith Five Hundred Years On
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
This article builds on contemporary debates about the doctrine of justification by faith alone to revisit the old question of the “nature of Protestantism”. Traditionally a core feature of Protestant theology, the doctrine of sola fide has been under assault for the past forty years, including within Protestant theology. This essay begins by showing that the major contemporary critique that sola fide bases salvation on a “legal fiction” misses the way that early Reformers like Luther and Melanchthon understood the doctrine very substantially in terms of its pastoral power to “console” consciences. Attending to the theme of “consolation” reveals a psychological and affective realism close to the heart of the doctrine of justification by faith alone as it was originally understood. This article then shows that traditional Protestant critiques of the reliability of external mechanisms and instruments in the mediation of grace were shaped by the same orientation to psychological and affective factors that are evident in the doctrine of justification. Together, these observations suggest that “the nature of Protestantism” may be usefully understood in terms of a foundational prioritization of psychological and affective considerations over metaphysical considerations in theology.
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- Copyright © 2017 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
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24 Apology of the Augsburg Confession (Ibid., p.130).
25 Apology of the Augsburg Confession (Ibid., p.131).
26 Melanchthon's argument here has interesting parallels with Karl Rahner's critique of neo‐scholastic theology as failing to represent grace as something that registers in the experience of the Christian, rather than just in the realm of “purely ontological reality”. See Karl Rahner, “Religious Enthusiasm and the Experience of Grace”, in Theological Investigations XVI, p.37.
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28 “Epitome of the Formula of Concord”, Article III (The Book of Concord, pp.495‐96).
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35 WA 28:554. Non est disputatio de substantia, sed usu et abusu rerum. Non praedicamus, was das wesen an yhm selber sey. Sed de verkereten misbrauch tui cordis. Non cupimus mutari res, sed tuum cor perversum.
36 For this theme in New Testament ethics, in addition to Romans 14 see especially the moral equation of anger and lust with murder and adultery in the Sermon on the Mount; Jesus’ discussions of “what defiles a person” (Matt. 15:11, 15‐20; Mark 7:15‐23) and of good and bad trees and their fruit (Matt. 7:18, etc.); and Paul's discussion of food offered to idols in 1 Cor. 10:23‐29.