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Grace and the Christian Life

Truth in Love 124

The Reformation recovered the doctrine of grace it remains vitally important today for Christian living.

Oct 23, 2017

Heath Lambert: I am thrilled to be joined this week on the podcast by Dr. Ligon Duncan, the chancellor and chief executive officer of the Reformed Theological Seminary. We are glad you are with us Dr. Duncan.  Here at the ACBC annual conference on the Protestant Reformation, everybody is looking forward to your talk on Sola Gratia, so we are really glad you’re here and to talk to you about this topic this week on the podcast. We have a couple of questions for you about this topic. First of all, explain the doctrine of Sola Gratia; what is that? 

Ligon Duncan: Well, what we’re trying to emphasize is that salvation is something that, not only does God initiate, but He accomplishes; that means that we don’t look to ourselves for salvation as Christians, we don’t believe in self-salvation. We don’t look to our worthiness, we don’t look to our efforts, we don’t look to our works, we don’t even look to our faith as the basis or the ground of our salvation. Our faith is the way we receive salvation, but we view salvation as a gift, it is a grant of God’s love, and goodness, and grace to his people in Christ Jesus. So, salvation, from beginning to end, is the provision of God and it’s all of grace; it’s a gift. 

Heath Lambert: Now when we use the phrase Sola Gratia, that is of course a Latin term which harkens back to a certain historical context, give us some background on the historical context of this term and why it was such an important doctrine, particularly at the time of the Reformation.

Ligon Duncan: Well in the Reformation time, there was a prominent stream of theology in the Roman Catholic Church that was emphasizing that there was a syncretism in salvation, there was a contribution on the part of God and then there was a contribution on the part of the person, and there were various formulations of it.  There were semi-pelagians and semi-augustinians. Pelagius was a teacher in the early days of the church, in the fifth century, who argued that man had to reach out to God first in order to be saved, and though his teaching was officially rejected by the Roman Catholic Church in the in the 5th and 6th centuries, there were aspects of that teaching that got into the bloodstream of mediaeval Roman Catholicism. 

So, you have a kind of a semi-pelagianism that argues, that there’s this prevenient grace given to everyone and then everyone has the power to respond to that particular grace, and then the whole Christian life is a motion of activity in which we participate in our own salvation. Over against all of those kinds of teachings that were proliferating in the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, all of the reformers, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Bullinger, Cranmer, Knocks, all of the reformers everywhere, all over Europe said, “absolutely not. We do not contribute one drop right to our salvation, and if we do, we’re all undone. If it’s not all of Grace, we’re really in trouble”. That was a that was a stunning slap on the face to what was the predominant theology of the of the Medieval Era, and you can imagine how that would have spread like fire across Europe and the kind of assurance of Salvation that that would have created in people. 

It’s very interesting, in the next century, Robert Bellarmine, who was one of the major Roman Catholic controversialists against Protestantism, he said that the fundamental error of Protestantism, and you’re expecting him to say, “well, it must be justification by faith, but he says it’s assurance. The reason he says that Protestantism makes the mistake of assurance is because it teaches salvation is all of Grace. Of course, he’s exactly right except that it’s not the fundamental error, but he’s really fast on something, that if you believe that salvation is all of Grace, you can have assurance, but if you don’t, you can’t. Because if we could lose our salvation, we would. If we could mess it up, we would. If we have contributed something to it, then there’s clay that has been mixed in with a gold and the solid foundation of Grace. So, the Reformers helpfully clarified the Bible’s teaching to that generation who had been confused by Roman Catholic magisterial teaching for a thousand years on this subject. 

Heath Lambert: Praise the Lord. So even on assurance there, that’s a beautiful reality that you’re talking about. I want to be sure that people who are listening to this know that this has everything to do with their life right now today. So, we have thousands of people that will listen to this in 50 countries, there might be a French Pastor, a British housewife, anyone listening to this, and they might wonder, “okay, now, that doctrine of grace, how does that matter to me right now, today”? What would you say to that person? 

Ligon Duncan: Well, there are several ways that it matters to us, one is what God begins, He completes. If God has to save us by Grace from the beginning, He saves us by grace to the end. In the Christian Life, all of us get to places where we realize that if it depends on us, we’re not going to make it; just knowing and having confidence that God began by Grace, He saved us through his own gift, it was through his own initiation and his own accomplishment, and he continues that, He won’t let us go. He will hold me fast. Matt Merker has this song and that is a message of the ongoing grace of the Christian life. ” For my savior loves me, so he will hold me fast”. That’s really important for us to know because there are times when we know I can’t hang on to God right now and the Lord hangs on to us by grace.