What was the primary battle cry of the sixteenth-century Reformation?
What was the primary battle cry of the sixteenth-century Reformation? It is the unifying point of classic, historic evangelicalism: justification by faith alone, sola fide. Anyone who calls himself an evangelical, historically speaking, is saying by that title, “I believe in the doctrine of justification by faith alone.” Justification has to do with repairing the damage that sin creates in our relationship with God. It describes how we are declared just in the sight of God because God is holy and requires righteousness from His people. Since we fail to meet that requirement, we either stand under God’s judgment or we are justified in His sight. We are justified through the imputation of the merits of Christ so that the basis of our justification is the righteousness of Jesus alone. I want to call our attention to what I think is a great distortion of justification by faith alone. Incidentally, this is the very thing the Roman Catholic Church feared from the teaching of Martin Luther. T...