Martin Luther: "Justification is the Article by which the Church Stands and Falls"
Embryo Parson Posted on Friday, September 22, 2023 at 02:46PM N.T. Wright on Martin Luther Not Being All That Right
"The point here being that whenever anyone says 'Luther was wrong,' it doesn’t matter what he says next. As soon as you grant Luther’s error, you raise serious questions as to the legitimacy of the Protestant Reformation."
And that, my friends, is the nub of it. Sanders, Dunn, Wright, et al. have arguably taken the legs out from under the entire Protestant Experiment.
What's left? How about the Catholic Church, East and West, that *stood*, without solafidianism, for 1,000 years before the Great Schism and 1,500 years before Reformation, and which still stands 500 years after it? When one carefully and honestly observes the sweep of Protestant history and where it has brought Protestants today, he must ask himself which church truly no longer stands.
See here for McGrath's account of how later Caroline divines began chafing at Luther's error, a version of which unfortunately made its way into certain Anglican formularies.
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Reader Comments (2)
It's certainly a very common and arguably defensible point of view that solafidianism was the central point of the Reformation, but I've long thought otherwise. If one truly believes it is, and that the experiment is shown to be a failure by the wrongness (or at least excesses) of that idea, I don't see how there can be any justification to remaining outside the Roman Catholic Church -- even in the most Catholic of Anglo-Catholic quarters.
I think, rather, that the issue was centuries of growing abuses by the RCC and the papacy, which exploded in a noisesome mess and produced some unfortunate effects, such as solafidianism. But the critique (which long preceded Luther -- Wycliffe, Hus, Erasmus, etc.) of the RCC was correct, and remains the justification for remaining outside Rome. (I also think Rome over-corrected the other way with Trent, but that's another story.)
(Also of relevance: Wright's reply to Marshall that is mentioned in Marshall's post: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax/n-t-wright-on-protestant-catholic-relations/ )