Appendix 2: The Reformation’s “Five Solas” and Catholicism

This appendix serves a double purpose. 

Protestants will find it addresses the following concerns: Don’t Catholics believe in salvation by faith plus works? Isn’t the sacrament of reconciliation (commonly called “confession”) in contradiction with grace as a free gift? Don’t Catholics worship Mary and the saints? Don’t Catholics elevate the pope to the level of Christ? Don’t Catholics elevate human-made tradition to the level of Scripture? 

Catholics will find it addresses worries about how Catholic I truly intend to become; is not my attachment to my Protestant heritage too strong? Am I trying to Trojan horse the Princeton Catholic community? 

Sola Fide: Catholics do NOT believe in works-based salvation

Here is something all Christians believe: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9). Let us define a few terms. “Saved” means being rescued by God from the eternal consequence of our sin: separation from Him. Upon being saved, the Holy Spirit takes up residence in our hearts and begins to help us live like Christ. The ultimate goal is for us to “glorify God and enjoy Him forever,” in the beautiful words of the Westminster Catechism. “Grace” is the free, unmerited salvation God offers to us in the Son, Jesus Christ. “Faith” is the trust by which we accept this gift. Like grace, faith is totally unmerited—we do nothing to deserve it, and we add nothing to it. All we can do with this pure gift is accept or reject it. There is no question of our contributing to it. 

Sola Fide is just an emphatic affirmation that although we might do good works, none of them contribute to a sum total that, when combined with God’s gifts, equals our salvation. Protestants frequently are taught that Catholics reject this teaching, but they are mistaken. The worst part of this misconception is that even lay Catholics have frequently bought Protestant caricatures of Catholicism, despite the fact that it is propaganda against them. The proper doctrine, shared by both Protestants and Catholics, can be formulated this way: We are saved by grace through faith for works. If Protestants are uncomfortable with this last bit, I invite them to read Ephesians 2:10: “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” 

Here is a helpful image: Faith is the root, works are the fruit. Healthy roots always produce good fruit; genuine faith always produces works. Likewise, bad fruit always indicates a problem in the roots.¹ This is basic Christian formation that everyone should have. But we can take the analogy one step further. When a tree produces good fruits, those fruits may fall to the ground and enrich the soul, which will in turn nourish the roots and lead to more bountiful, sweeter fruit. We are saved through faith, but works follow—and when they do, they strengthen our faith. We love because Christ first loved us. When we love others, our heart is enlarged and our capacity to love Christ increases. This builds our ability to love others, and so on. It is quite literally a virtuous cycle. But notice: just as you don’t get an apple until you have a tree with roots, so you do not get genuine works until you have faith in Christ. It is through faith alone that we enter right relationship with God. 

For those worried that my reading of Catholic doctrine here is colored by wishful thinking, I refer you to the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (linked in Appendix F). In it, the Lutheran and Catholic churches officially recognize that, despite preferring different language, they share the same account of justification. Originally created in 1999, it has since been adopted by the global council of Methodists and the world communion of Reformed churches. 

Sola Gratia: Confession does NOT compete with grace

We are saved through faith, but by grace. It might seem that requiring confession adds some condition to God’s forgiveness. But this is already mistaken on several points. First I must repeat something I argued in the main text: the sacraments bind us, yet they do not bind God. God is absolutely free to forgive under any circumstances. But He has graciously offered us ordinary, tangible ways to be reconciled to Him that do not leave us constantly wondering if we felt sufficiently and truly sorry, or whether we’d really been forgiven. Here we must correct another error. Reconciliation with God begins the moment a sinner turns from his sin back to God. The Prodigal Son’s reunion with his family is completed with the robe and ring, but it begins when he decides to come home. Thomas Aquinas says that the smallest amount of contrition, or sorrow at our sin and decision to return to God, is sufficient to wipe out everything between us and God. God does not wait for us to drive to confession, have our turn, complete our penance, and only then forgive us. His forgiveness is ready to break in upon us like water bursting a dam at the smallest bit of openness to His endless love.

And another clarification. The point of the sacrament of reconciliation is not merely to put us back on the right side of a revolving door.  It is not as though you are going on your merry Christian way until you indulge a lustful thought, at which point the Holy Ghost flees you like a a rat from sinking ship and you’re drop-kicked out of God’s family till you say sorry. This misconception was one of the most difficult for me to sort out, and indeed was my last major objection to Catholicism. It can be best addressed by introducing the Catholic distinction between mortal and venial sin.² Consider this passage from 1 John 5: “If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he should ask God, who will give life to those who commit this kind of sin. There is a sin that leads to death; I am not saying he should ask regarding that sin. All unrighteousness is sin, yet there is sin that does not lead to death.” That phrase, “leads to death” in Greek is “pros thanatou” or “unto death.” The impression that Catholics think of salvation as just one mortal sin away from being lost confuses “sin, [which,] when it is full-grown, gives birth to death” (James 1:15) with instant death. To use another botany example, there might be weeds that are annoying but don’t really threaten your crops, like dandelions.³ There might also be weeds that will totally destroy whatever you’re trying to grow, if you don’t deal with them promptly. In the Pacific Northwest, we have an invasive species of blackberries that have massive thorns, grow quickly, are resilient, and choke most everything out once they’re in an area. Venial sin is dandelions, mortal sin is blackberries. When you go to confession you’re pruning, uprooting, and spraying RoundUp anywhere necessary in the garden of your soul. Mortal sins (and they’re harder to commit than you probably think) do not necessarily mean you’ve abandoned your life in Christ, but they are cause for serious concern and should be dealt with swiftly, decisively, and in community with fellow Christians to whatever extent is appropriate. 

There are therefore no hoops to jump through for God’s forgiveness. Even when we are moving through the steps of reconciliation, we do so because He first loved us, and because He is loving us back into full friendship with Himself. All of this is pure grace. 

Soli Deo Gloria: Catholics do NOT Worship Mary or the Saints

Catholics, going back to the ancient Church, distinguish between hyperdulia, or veneration, and latria, or worship. Hyperdulia is the kind of honor we give to our heroes, both famous and those closer to home. As Americans, it is debatably the respect we show to the flag, ensuring that it never touches the ground, that it is lit at night, and that it is folded and disposed of properly. For me, the easiest way to understand this was to think about my own relationship with C.S. Lewis. I love the man. I admire him as a Christian, as a writer, and as an academic. I take him as one of my spiritual guiding lights. But my love for him is not in any way competitive with my love for Christ. In fact, I love Lewis precisely because he is for me a window offering a view into the heart of Jesus that I otherwise would never have had. This is what the saints are for: they are windows. The Protestant fear about Catholics worshipping saints sounds for all the world to Catholics like someone who has never heard of windows asking why everyone is staring at glass. They’re not looking at glass. They’re looking through glass at the landscape beyond. I’ll be the first to admit that there are some Catholic practices that are opaque to me—I’m not sure how others see through them to Jesus. But they do seem to, and I am not in a position to say from the outside whether that is the case or not. 

Latria is the service we render to God alone. It is worship, the kind of intimate love that can only ever obtain between a creature and her Creator. Because Protestants don’t apply the concept of hyperdulia to our spiritual lives, we think of everything as latria, and there is a kind of beauty to it. Love for God pulses through our Christianity like blood in veins. It reaches everything from prayer, to singing, to serving the needy, to enjoying our hobbies. Everything, properly understood, should be latria, and as such it can only be offered to God. This, actually, is exactly right. The only thing to see is that our hyperdulia to the saints can itself be latria to God. Because the saints are supposed to be windows looking on to God, even when we engage in hyperdulia, that too should be offered up as service and love of God.

Prayer and singing (which we tellingly just call “worship”) deserve to be treated specially. Protestants think of these activities as inherently latria. For prayer, this can be addressed by understanding the history of that word. Perhaps you have read Shakespeare or other Elizabethan English, and come across “prythee” or “I pray thee, lord” before. Originally, this word just referred to requesting aid from a superior among the nobility. Of course, God is the only true King, so this word is very fitting for worship. But historically you could “pray” to living human beings in front of you. So the word itself does not strictly require that God be the only object. Even so, praying to the dead might seem like a kind of idolatry.⁴ On this point I was instantly converted upon reading a line in Joseph Ratzinger’s Eschatology that ran something like this: “If the real distinction is not those who are alive and those who are dead but those who are in Christ and those who are not in Christ, then why should death sever our communion?” 

Okay, fair enough, but why bother praying to a saint when you could just pray to God? Let’s be clear: you don’t pray to the saints to do things in the world, as if they were little semi-autonomous pagan deities. Rather, you ask for their intercession. You ask them to pray for you just as you would ask a member of the Church on Earth. But why do even that? Well, I think there are a lot of reasons, one of which is that it binds the Church together across great tracts of time and space. But most importantly, it is because God delights to work through secondary causes. God wants to get as many of His people involved in His work as possible. He sends an angel to speak to the prophet who speaks to the nation, sends Gabriel to announce the birth of Christ, and invites each of us into the work of sharing the Gospel. God could do everything directly Himself, but He simply is too much of a giver.⁵ He wants us for partners in pouring out His love upon the world.

If any saint’s veneration is likely raise the hackles of Protestant Christians, it is almost certainly going to be Mary. I only have two thoughts to add here beyond what I’ve already said. The first is that Protestants should be willing to admit that we pay rather less attention to Mary than we probably should, and the only real reason we are allergic is overcorrection for what we see in Catholicism. The early Church had an entire council about whether it was appropriate to call Mary the Theotokos (theo-toke-oss), the God-Bearer. Indeed, the famous heretic Nestorius was condemned for insisting that we should technically call Mary the Mother of Christ rather than the Mother of God. Mary herself says in the Magnificat, one of the most beautiful prayers in the Bible, that “all generations will call me Blessed.” We have permission from Scripture and Creed to say “Blessed Mary, Mother of God.” How many young Evangelical women (and men) and been wrongfully denied this surpassing role model? In my experience, Phoebe and Debora often come up as biblical female role models before Mary and Elizabeth, which I take to be a straightforwardly lamentable failure. 

By the same token, Catholics should be willing to admit that the quantity of veneration paid to Mary, and the intensity of the prayers offered to her, do lend themselves to looking like latria at first glance. I myself struggle with some of these prayers, and I take it as a given that Reformation Catholics will love Mary but not gravitate towards Marian devotion the way most Catholics do. All I can say in defense of some of these prayers is that, as Marcus pointed out to me, we often say things that are true poetically but not scientifically. So when one prayer refers to Mary as “Our life, our sweetness, and our hope,” we should not interpret it too strongly. We would not accuse a sociologist of lying if he said to his wife, “You are the most beautiful woman in the world,” but did not rank her first in a global scientific study of attractiveness. Likewise there is a truth to “He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved” (Psalm 104:5) that does not conflict with heliocentrism. When it comes to latria, to worship, all Christians agree with Isaiah:

“I am the Lord; that is my name!

    I will not yield my glory to another

    or my praise to idols.”

Solus Christus: Christ Alone Saves Us and is the Head of His Church

From what I have said on the other solas, it is clear why Christ alone is Savior. He alone, as God Incarnate, is able to do the redemptive work required to restore us to God. No one comes to the Father except through Him, and no one comes to Him unless she is called by the Father in the Holy Spirit. This is Christian doctrine, this is Catholic doctrine. But Protestants might be worried about the pope, the so-called Vicar of Christ. By its roots, “vicar” means someone who operates in the place of, or on behalf of, someone else. The pope’s role is to shepherd the Church on Earth. This is not an attempt to usurp the rule of Christ. Rather, it is a recognition that while we all want to come under the reign of King Jesus, He has not seen fit to directly and bodily govern His Church. Rather, He gave the keys of the kingdom to Peter, and through him to the rest of the Apostles. If Jesus wanted to rule temporally, no doubt He could. But He has withdrawn from this kind of obvious presence until His return, and in the meantime we have to carry on. As I argued extensively above, we simply must be able to settle doctrinal disputes if we hope to remain anything like united. In His wisdom, God provided an office that He promised would not err in matters of faith and morals. Protestant friends have frequently expressed to me, “I just can’t trust a merely human institution,” to which I reply, “Me neither.” 

There are probably very few people impressed with the moral purity of the papacy. There have been popes with their own personal harems. It is no accident that for several hundred years almost no popes were recognized as saints. Dante, a devout Catholic, even describes a special area of Hell in his Inferno where wicked popes are stuffed upside down into a hole, and the top pope has his feet burned until another arrives. The shocking thing is that in light of this bone-deep corruption, the institution has survived. It’s almost, dare I say, miraculous? Even more amazing is that, if my experience is worth anything, it is actually very difficult to find a clear-cut case of a pope teaching heresy. You would think after two thousand years, surely some degenerate pope somewhere along the line would have carelessly published false teaching. But my conclusion from listening to hours of Catholic v. Protestant debates on the topic is that you have to get deep into the weeds to find even potential candidates. Recall what I said about the Northern and Southern Kingdoms: the promise is that the kingship will not pass from Judah. The promise is decidedly not that every Judaic king will be righteous. Catholics do not trust in the papacy per se. They trust the Holy Spirit to lead us into all truth, and Christ’s promise that the gates of Hell will not prevail against His Church. The pope is Christ’s steward, endowed with certain executive powers in his Master’s stead, but is never to be confused with the true Head of the house. 

Sola Scriptura: Catholics Do NOT Subordinate Scripture to Tradition, They Did NOT Add Extra Books to the Bible

Of all the solas, this is the only one that might potentially conflict with Catholic teaching. I don’t think it does, but to my knowledge it is not a settled question within the Church. We can still make substantial progress towards a version of it that everyone will be happy with, even if we can’t settle it with finality. 

First, we should dismiss a rather naive version of sola Scriptura. The phrase might be interpreted to mean that we never need anything else to arrive at truth but a plain reading of the Bible. Immediately, we’d have to qualify that we don’t mean all truth, but only that which pertains to faith. This itself is not derived from Scripture, but we’ll let that pass. More to the point, there is no “plain reading.” If there were, we would not be in the situation we are presently in. We all come to the Bible with our assumptions, prejudices, biases, ignorance, and fears. It takes real work to learn to read it for ourselves, to be able to properly evaluate the relevant context, to connect a passage to the larger narrative of Scripture. I remember watching a Bible Project video on Genesis and seeing a comment that said something like, “I read this for myself and I didn’t see anything at all about Adam and Eve rejecting God’s definition of goodness.” Of course you didn’t, you probably aren’t ready to read modern literature with depth, let alone a Jewish text thousands of years old! As it turns out, none of us employ this version of sola Scriptura, no matter how attractive it sounds. 

My own mentors at Whitworth advocated for prima Scriptura. John Wesley famously taught what has become known as the “Wesleyan Quadrilateral.” It advocates for authority resting in Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and Experience, in that order. The teaching of Scripture comes first, but how we read it may be enriched by what we learn from other, lesser authorities. The five solas are an important part of Protestant tradition, so I think it best to keep sola Scriptura, although we do effectively mean prima Scriptura. This opens the door to synthesis with Catholicism. Catholicism insists that there is not only Sacred Scripture, but also Sacred Tradition, which can be understood as the faithful interpretation and unpacking of what is contained in Scripture. I say “can” be understood because there is another school of thought within Catholicism that sees Scripture and Tradition as two streams of revelation, each authoritative and neither exhaustive on its own. It is promising that at least one live option is compatible with Protestant thought on this point, and that may be all my Protestant readers wish to know. But I want to briefly make a case for why Catholics should opt for the first view, in which Tradition’s role is to faithfully exposit Scripture. 

It is true that the Church predates Scripture—who wrote it, after all? But in order to hold that Tradition (literally “handing down”) contains authoritative doctrine beyond what Scripture teaches, the further argument must made that these doctrines have Apostolic authority. That is to say, they come from the original Apostles but were not written down in Scripture. This involves the rather dubious genetic claim that a given doctrine, say, the bodily assumption of Mary into Heaven, can be traced back to Thomas, or Thaddeus, or Bartholomew. The Church simply does not make doctrinal decisions by examining the historical pedigree of a given idea. More importantly, though, if Scripture is supposed in some sense to come from the Word, the Second Person of the Trinity, it would be both surprising and unfitting if it turned out to be insufficient. Jesus is supposed to be all-sufficient, and the idea that some important material was just left out of the Bible would not seem to reflect the character of Christ. 

The challenge for this view is the hard fact that it is rather difficult to see the Immaculate Conception (the doctrine that Mary was preserved by God from sin) and the bodily assumption of Mary clearly in Scripture. Yet the Church maintains that a proper reading of the Bible does imply these teachings. I am reminded of something I once heard from Protestant apologist William Lane Craig. If Jesus is God, then whether you see the Messiah in the prophecies He quotes about Himself or not, you have to defer to His interpretive authority. Likewise, I argue that if the Church is appointed by God to steward His Word, then you have to defer to her interpretive authority. 

What about the Apocrypha? I confess I do not know its contents well. What I can say, though, is that it was treated as authoritative by a large number of the Church Fathers (including Augustine), and by most all medieval theologians (including Aquinas). It was Luther who removed the books of the Apocrypha, and he did so because they were not part of the Hebrew Bible. He almost removed James as well! I will leave my argument there: all I wish to show is that it was not Catholics who added these books to the canon of Scripture, but the Reformers who took them out.

1.  I know this isn’t good botany, but I have already shown I am willing to stretch things for an illustration. 

2.  Actually, all traditions that believe it is possible to forfeit salvation have this concept to some extent.

3.  Again, I don’t actually know anything about botany, but this seems plausible.

4.  Note that this word is just a combination idol+latria, ie., the worship and service of idols. 

5.  I am drawing on CS Lewis, Letters to Malcolm here.