Sermon Tone Analysis

What are the Five Solae?

Today we start our new series on the Five Solae!

This is part of our way of remembering and celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Reformation.

It’s easy look back with sadness at the division and upset of the Reformation, and to feel like it was pointless when you look around at some of the stupidity and chaos in the Church today.

So why is the Reformation worth celebrating?

Was the debating, divison, and often bloodshed, worth the gains of the Reformation?

Well, I hope that this 5 part series will answer that question with a resounding “Yes!”

You see, the Five Solae, or “Solas”, is a summary of what was fought for and regained by the Protestant Church.

As we look at each Sola over the next few weeks we will see another key element of our faith explored, and you will walk away saying, “yes, the reformation was needed, because we need the Solae”

These five distictives are the hallmarks of Evangelical Christianity.

They are summaries of what the Bible explicitly or implicitly teaches.

These key teachings, or doctrines, are not essential to salvation, but we tend to think they are very important.

Important enough to stir up trouble and get kicked out of churches because of them.

So to begin our look at the Solae, we’re going to start with Sola Scriptura - Scripture Alone for us who don’t speak Latin.

And to do that, we need to start with a story!

Reformation

Back in the day there was only one institutional church.

You didn’t go down the street and see a Baptist Church, then a Pressie Church then a Roman Catholic Church.

There was one denomination, one church for every area and when there was religious disagreement all the big wigs in church got together and sorted it out at a special meeting, such as the Council of Nicea where they nailed down some teaching on the Trinity.

Anyways, after a thousand years or so the Greek speaking (or eastern) side of the Church said to the Latin speaking West; “We’re not really vibing with the direction you guys are heading.

We still want to be friends, but we don’t think the Bishop of Rome (also known as the Pope) should be our Boss (amongst other things).

So east and west part of the Church parted ways.

It was like they used to be housemates, and then one of them had to move out, but only down the street; so they bump into each other and have chats, but they’re not best mates anymore.

So the east and west split up.

We now know them now as the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church.

Each are doing their own thing.

And they take different directions, and their theology went different ways.

And different practices were introduced.

So 500 years after the East & West split, there was a fellow called Martin.

He lived in Germany, which was in the domain of the Roman Catholic Church.

He was training to be a lawyer, but to his Father’s disgust he quit Law school and chuffed off to Bible School.

There he tried to be a super spiritual Christian, and learned as much as he could and eventually became a Uni lecturer on Theology.

As Dr. Martin was doing his thing, teaching and studying Theology he noticed some practices of the Romon Catholic Chruch of the day that seemed a bit out of place with Scripture and History.

Specifically, he was not real happy with the practice of selling Indulgences where you could do a good work (like giving money to the church) to receive time off punishment in Purgatory.

In Martin’s day, the system was being abused to raise money for the church.

So Martin did a bit of digging around and discoved not only was the sytem being abused, but that the sytem itself was problematic.

So he prepared a document called the 95 Theses where he laid out some propositions mainly in relation to the indulgences.

He wanted to have a good old fashined academic argument and get the issues sorted out.

What Martin didn’t expect, was that he would stir up so much trouble!

As Dr. Martin got more and more into the issues he was facing he became more and more aware of other problem areas in what the Chruch beleived and practiced!

As he studied his Bible more and more he saw that alot of the church’s teaching was not only absent from scripture, but in some cases opposite to what the Bible said!

Martin had inadvertantly started the Reformation.

He started the process by which people like himself would seek out the scriptures and history in the hope of reforming the Church into what God said it should be.

Eventually Dr. Martin Luther ruffled enough feathers to be called to the Diet of Worms, where he was intesley interviewed infront of a bunch of powerful people.

They basically thought he was off his rocker and tried to get him to recant.

They asked him essentially, “Give us a straight answer; will you recant your teachings or not?”

He responded with the famous quote;

Unless I am convicted of error by the testimony of Scripture or (since I put no trust in the unsupported authority of Pope or councils, since it is plain that they have often erred and often contradicted themselves) by manifest reasoning, I stand convicted by the Scriptures to which I have appealed, and my conscience is taken captive by God's word, I cannot and will not recant anything, for to act against our conscience is neither safe for us, nor open to us.

On this I take my stand.

I can do no other.

God help me.

This quote is often acredited with being the first appearance of Scripture Alone during the Reformation.

Here we clearly see Dr Luther response, in the face of the most powerful men in his country, and with his fate hanging in the balance, he said the Scripture was his guide.

He didn’t care what Pope or Councils said; he sought what the Scriptures plainly said.

That would be the marker between true and false teaching.

Now at this point, the Aussie in us says “yeah, stick it to the entitled self-righteous religious folk”.

But that’s not what Luther was doing.

He wasn’t trying to express independance or take down a religious heirarchy or follow his heart or start anything new.

Luther simply wanted the Church to turn to the Scriptures!

And he was willing to take the fight to the top dogs.

Unfortunatley, the Roman Catholic church was unwilling to be Reformed from within, so they kicked out Luther.

Over the years that followed, many folks would be kicked out, or willingly leave the Roman Catholic Church to pursue Biblical Christianity.

Some of their names are remembered to this day because of their contribution to the Reformation.

Names such as Ulrich Zwingli, John Calvin, John Knox and Thomas Cranmer might ring a bell because of the role they played in their region to Protest the Roman Catholic ways and Reform the Church.

Amogst other things, these fellows all have one thing in common.

They all saw the Scripture alone as their rule of faith and practice.

They didn’t go to the Pope, or history, or tradition, or anything else to as their final authority.

Instead they turned to God, and God speaks through His word, and that Word is Scripture.

What does “Scripture Alone” mean?

From this little story we start to see the historical context out of which the teaching “Scripture Alone” comes.

This is where the Five Solae start to take shape.

But like all the Solae, it is a summary of a Reformation idea, but it’s not new.

Each Sola is the summary of Biblical principles of old.

They are biblical teaching that had been misplaced or twisted throughout the years before the Reformation.

It’s kinda like when you mispronounce a word wrong for ages, and you end up telling others the wrong way to say it.

I thought a word for coffee was “expresso” for ages!

I thought people were mispronouncing and mispelling the word as “espresso”.

I would correct people, thinking I was doing them a service, when in fact I was leading them astray in my own misunderstanding.

Eventually I learned that it was indeed pronounced “espresso” and coffee lovers everwhere rejoiced!

Now, I can help others learn like me, how to correctly pronounce “espresso”.

The thing is, the phenomena works with Christianity too.

One person misapproriates something, then they teach somone else, then before you know it, something is widley accepted before it has ever been tested.

How many times have you seen something go viral on social media before some smart cookie looks into it it and discovers it was fake to begin with?

When it comes to matters of faith, we need something to test ourselves by.

We need something, or somone that is reliable, trustworthy and authoritative to guide us.

We need somwhere we can go to ask the big questions “How can I have eternal life?” “What must I do to be saved?”

“Who will save me from this body of death?”

We know that the person to ask about these things is God!

He is our trustworthy, reliable and authoritative place to go for these answers.

But the problem is, I can’t just waltz into the throne room of God and ask him a bunch of questions.

Instead God in his kindness and sovreignty has prepared and preserved for us an earthly source of His answers to our greatest questions.

Scripture is the Word of God

To understand what “Scripture alone” means, we must first comprehend what the scriptures are.

Now for any Christian in the room, we don’t need to be told what the scriptures are, we take it for granted!

We know that we’re talking about the Bible; those 66 books of the Old and New Testaments.

But, bear with me a minute, I want to talk about the idea of scripture.

Why is it we value these writings as Scripture?

It’s because it is the word of God!

You see, our God is a speaking God.

From the begining God has been speaking!