Grace Alone---Salvation as a Gift of God

Carl R. Trueman, Matthew Barrett

• Verlag: Zondervan Academic
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780310515777
• Thema: Theology & Religion
• Thema: Christian Theology

Grace is the heart of the Christian gospel. It's a doctrine that touches the very depths of human existence and makes Christianity such an essential alternative to the dissolution and nihilism of modern culture. Grace Alone guides you into a better doctrinal understanding of the issue and gives you a more glorious vision of an active and saving God.

The language of grace fills the Bible so much that to say "grace alone" may not evoke much reflection. Unlike "faith alone, " there's no theological controversy among expressions of Christianity. Reviving one of the five great declarations of the Reformation (and one of the more overlooked) —sola Gratia — professor and church historian Carl Trueman:

• Provides a thorough definition of grace as it's found in the Bible and an overview of biblical references to, and teaching on, grace.
• Tracks the doctrine of grace as it's been articulated throughout church history, with discussions of Augustine, Pelagius, Thomas Aquinas, and ending with the Reformation and theologies of Luther and Calvin.
• Looks at the relationship between the means of grace and the modern church, defining the practical implications of the Reformation's understanding of grace.

Explanations throughout on the relationship of grace to sin, salvation and glorification, God's sovereignty, the sacraments, and the controversies regarding freewill and predestination. Grace Alone is a beautiful and much-needed revival of this foundational doctrine and the assurance of salvation.

—THE FIVE SOLAS—

Historians and theologians have long recognized that at the heart of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation were five declarations, often referred to as the "solas." These five statements summarize much of what the Reformation was about, and they distinguish Protestantism from other expressions of the Christian faith: that they place ultimate and final authority in the Scriptures, acknowledge the work of Christ alone as sufficient for redemption, recognize that salvation is by grace alone through faith alone, and seek to do all things for God's glory.

The Five Solas Series is more than a simple rehashing of these statements, but instead expounds upon the biblical reasoning behind them, leading to a more profound theological vision of our lives and callings as Christians and churches.

PART 1

Sola Gratia in Scripture and History

CHAPTER 1
Grace in the Bible

For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people.

Titus 2:11

I am by calling a professor of church history and the pastor of a local church. Thus, the bulk of this book will play to what are, if not my strengths, at least the areas in which I am probably most competent: history and ecclesiology. Yet even as the subject of the book, grace alone, points us inevitably to matters of history and practice, above all it points us to the Scriptures. And that is appropriate. I write as a Protestant, an heir of the Reformation, and thus as one committed not simply to the principle of grace alone but also to Scripture alone.¹ All theology must therefore be normed or regulated by the teaching of Scripture. Thus, while the historical heroes of the tale I tell are Augustine, Aquinas, and the Reformers, they were motivated by the desire to understand and to proclaim what God had taught about grace in the inspired words of his Scriptures. For this reason, it is important to start our study by addressing the issue of the Bible’s own teaching about grace.

A search for the word “grace” and its cognates in the English Standard Version yields over 150 occurrences throughout the Old and New Testaments, with the vast majority in the latter. Indeed, “grace” as a specific term is a relatively rare occurrence in the Old Testament. And yet we should not allow ourselves to be misled by such a crude approach into concluding that the concept of grace does not pervade the whole of the Bible from beginning to end. A search for the term “Trinity” reveals no occurrence of the word at all, yet no orthodox Christian would deny that the concept is a vital part of the Bible’s teaching. Thus it is with grace: grace permeates Scripture as one of the most important teachings about God and his relationship to his creation.

In fact, as we start to look at Scripture’s teaching on grace, we might characterize it at the start by saying that it has a twofold theological significance in the Bible. First, it most typically means the unmerited favor of God. Perhaps we might, with all due reverence, say that in this way grace speaks of God’s attitude toward his creation and toward his people. When thinking of grace in this sense, Reformed theologians have made a further distinction between common grace, referring to God’s unmerited but nonsalvific favor toward the fallen creation that restrains evil and allows human beings to flourish in this earthly realm, and special grace, referring to God’s unmerited salvific favor exhibited in and through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Second, grace can mean the active outworking of God’s unmerited favor in the life of the church and of the believer. Here the language of grace refers to the work of God in those to whom he has an attitude of saving favor. He does not just save us from our sins, but he also matures us in the faith and uses us to bring glory to his name even while here on earth. Yet this too is ultimately the gracious work of God. Thus, these two meanings are intimately connected: it is because we are saved by grace that grace then works in our lives to accomplish God’s purposes for us. The Christian life originates in God’s grace and is lived by God’s grace. And this is true of both Old and New Testaments.²

Grace in the Old Testament

In English translations of the Old Testament, while the noun “grace” is rare, the adjective “gracious” is more common.³ This is because God’s grace is not an attribute of God’s nature in the way that, say, omnipotence or omniscience are such. Grace is intimately connected to the fact that human beings are fallen and thus deserve the wrath and judgment of God. Grace, we might say, is a response, an application of God’s character and attributes, to human rebellion. Grace is that aspect of divine action by which God blesses his rebellious creatures, whether through preservation (common grace) or salvation (special grace). It characterizes the manner in which he deals with those who through their rejection of him as their Creator and sovereign deserve nothing from him and yet whom he still chooses to bless. In salvation in particular the character of grace is manifest. A loving God, faced with the rebellion of his creatures, desires to bring them back into communion with himself. Yet his holiness cannot simply allow their sin to pass without response, for if God allows our unholy rejection of him to stand, he is contradicting his own holy nature. The answer is grace: action on God’s part, motivated by love and shaped by holiness, which takes account of the seriousness of sin yet brings sinners back into communion with him.

In short, if the world did not exist and had never fallen, God could not be said to be gracious. An older generation of theologians would have referred to this as a relational attribute of God, one that only exists in relation to something other than God. It describes an active disposition toward that other thing.

When the Lord passes before Moses at Sinai in Exodus 34:6–7, he proclaims himself to be gracious:

The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and the fourth generation.

Here the Lord describes himself as gracious and merciful, two ways of saying essentially the same thing. But notice the reason he declares this. In the face of human sin and rebellion, the Lord has chosen not to exact justice, as he is entitled to do. He has chosen instead to be gracious and merciful. In other words, he has decided to show unmerited favor toward those who do not deserve it, and in his words to Moses he reminds his people of that very fact. The gracious disposition of God lies at the heart of the many biblical benedictions that have been pronounced over God’s people throughout the years.⁴

God’s merciful grace to his people pervades the Old Testament narrative, from the moment he allows Adam and Eve to live after they have sinned, through his loving preservation of his people Israel in the face of their frequent grumblings and rebellions, up to the coming of the Christ. Grace also provides the background to one of the most famous examples of prophetic petulance. When Jonah goes reluctantly to Nineveh to call the Ninevites to repentance and the Lord consequently spares the city and its inhabitants, Jonah is furious. The ground of his complaint is ironic: he claims that he knew that the Lord would do this because he understood, echoing Exodus 34:6, that God was a gracious God (Jonah 4:2). It’s ironic because it was only the fact of God’s graciousness that meant Jonah himself could enjoy the relationship with the Lord that he did. What Jonah took for granted he begrudged to others.

The story of Jonah is a very human one. As the great cynic Gore Vidal once said, every time he heard of the success of a friend, a little piece of him died. Vidal touches on something very true: there is a part of us as sinful human beings that hates the success of others; and to see the grace of God so gloriously displayed in the lives of the Ninevites was more than Jonah could bear. Yet Jonah’s reaction is only so ugly because God’s grace is so beautiful. An entire city of sleazy, corrupt, vile human beings is yet delivered from judgment and brought into joyful communion with God. The story is not so much about Jonah’s bitterness of soul as it is about God’s glorious grace.

Grace and Covenant

At the heart of the Old Testament teaching on God’s grace is God’s covenant with his people. The covenant provides the historical revelation, thread, and structure to God’s gracious dealings. The Abrahamic covenant ceremony described in Genesis 15 is both conventional and highly unusual. On the one hand, it was typical for ancient Near Eastern covenants to be ratified by the cutting in two of sacrificial animals, between which the covenanting parties would pass as a way of saying, “If we break the terms of the covenant, may we be torn in two as these creatures have been!” Yet in Genesis 15, Abram does not pass between the carcasses; only the Lord does this. In taking this action, the Lord unconditionally and unilaterally pledges himself to Abram and his descendants. As we see in the New Testament, this action prefigures the work of God in Christ on the cross at Calvary, where he takes up the penalty for our sins in the fulfillment of the covenant.

The covenant becomes the key to the administration of God’s grace at several important moments in Israel’s history. In 2 Kings 13, we read of how Hazael, king of Syria (whom the Lord had raised up to discipline his own people, 1 Kgs 19:15–17), had been oppressing the kingdom of Israel. We are told that the Lord decided to be gracious toward his people and to preserve them “because of his covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” (v. 23). In other words, the basis for God’s gracious dealings with his people in the midst of their continual sin and rebellion was the covenant promises he had made to the patriarchs. Righteous kings such as Hezekiah realized this, and in 2 Chronicles 30 we see him citing God’s gracious covenant when he called the nation to repentance. The Jews were conscious of their covenant history with God and deeply aware that these promises formed the basis of their gracious standing before him.

Given the importance of the covenant in God’s gracious dealings with his people, the narrative of God’s grace toward them was vital to Israel’s identity. It shaped what we might call the liturgical life of the nation, both in the stories that it told about itself in the home and in the great declarations that it made in public before the nation and before the world. In Exodus 12 Moses points the people toward a time when their descendants will have no firsthand memory of the events of the exodus and no immediate understanding of the meaning of the Passover meal. In this context, he instructs them to recite and retell the story of God’s great rescue of his people from Egypt. When a new generation asks, “Who are we?” the answer is clear: “We are God’s special people whom he graciously rescued from slavery in Egypt.” God’s grace forms the foundation of their national identity. They are a people formed by grace and sustained by grace.

Grace, Confession, and Benediction

We also see this when we look at the foundational Jewish confession of faith in the Old Testament, the Shema of Deuteronomy 6. In reciting the words of the Shema, the people declare that God is one, followed by the command to love him and a warning not to forget the great and gracious acts of deliverance that the Lord had performed for his people. The identity of God’s people is established by their history, and their history is one of God’s gracious, unmerited, unilateral saving action toward them. They are, to put it simply, the people of God’s grace. Grace is essential to their identity. When they recall who God is, they must necessarily remember what he has done for them. Their identity starts not in their own activities, but in the prior action of God toward them.

Israel is who she is because she is the object of divine grace, and this truth is central to the great blessing that is to be given to the people, the Aaronic benediction of Numbers 6:24–26:

The LORD bless you

and keep you;

the LORD make his face shine on you

and be gracious to you;

the LORD turn his face toward you

and give you peace.

Even today, these words are frequently spoken at the close of worship services in Protestant churches, precisely because they remind the people of who they are—sinners who have received the free favor of God and have been made his people. The benediction points people to the grace of God, by which they approach him. When fallen, sinful creatures come before God, they need to be reminded that God is gracious toward them, that he chooses to bless them not for any merit they possess in themselves but simply because he, the Lord, has chosen to be merciful to them. God does not treat them as their sin and rebellion deserve. God is a God of grace, and his grace defines what it means for them to be the people of God.

The blessing of Numbers 6 was originally given to the Aaronic priesthood, and this ties it closely to the entire sacrificial system of the Old Testament. We should note this because we have a tendency today to reduce grace to a kind of divine sentiment. This reduction of grace cheapens forgiveness. We wrongly believe that apologizing will be sufficient to cover the evil of our sin. But grace is far more than a sentimental notion. Grace is connected to God’s being and God’s action, especially God’s action in Christ. It is therefore costly and not to be treated in a light fashion as if it were something cheap.⁵

Grace and Sacrifice

In contrast to cheap sentimentalism, God’s grace in the Old Testament is more than a whim or a spineless capitulation to human rebellion. God does not ignore the problem of sin and pretend it does not exist. He feels a holy anger and wrath toward sin and cannot simply pardon the rejection of his rule as if it had never happened. So there is need for atoning action to deal with the transgressions of his mandates. Thus, God establishes a sacrificial system under Moses, the supreme manifestation of which is the Day of Atonement, detailed in Leviticus 16, whereby sin might be addressed. God himself creates the sacrificial system, he regulates it via his word and elect priesthood, and ultimately, it is God who chooses to accept the sacrifices presented to him.

This fact—that God is the one who establishes and regulates the sacrificial system—should not be ignored. It’s significant because it teaches us that the Old Testament sacrifices were not an attempt by human beings to find something that would placate or cajole an angry God. We wrongly imagine that God was angry with his people and they somehow discovered ways to twist his arm and earn his favor despite their sin. The Scriptures teach us that it was God who took the initiative, revealing how sinful humans could relate to him. He established the content, the terms, and the results of the sacrifi...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• A Note from the Series Editor
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1: Sola Gratia In Scripture and History
• Part 2: Sola Gratia In the Church
• Conclusion
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index