Rome believes that justification is by faith, it's by grace, and it's by Christ.

What Rome doesn't believe is that justification is by faith alone, or by grace alone,

or by Christ alone.

When it comes to the gospel, one word can make all the difference between eternal life and eternal death.

Hello and thank you for joining us for this Saturday edition of Renewing Your Mind.

At the heart of the gospel is the doctrine of justification. Throughout church history, there

have been disagreements as to how we define it, and one word really does make all the difference.

To begin a series on the Solas of the Reformation, here's R.C. Sprole on Faith Alone.

We're going to start our study of the Solas by looking at the first one, Solafide.

And I'd like to address that subject under the subtitle of what was the matter with the Protestant Reformation? Well, when I asked the question,

what was the matter with the Protestant Reformation,

I'm not using the word matter in the normal way

when we say, what's the matter with something,

we mean what's wrong with it, or what was the fault of it.

But I mean something quite different when I say what was the matter with the Protestant Reformation.

What I mean by that is what was the essence, the substance, the stuff, or what we call in philosophy, the material cause of the Protestant

Reformation. What was the chief issue that provoked such massive consequences as this split

that occurred in the 16th century. And when historians of theology

and of church history look back to the 16th century, they'll often use distinctions originally

set forth by the philosopher Aristotle when he distinguished between different types of causes, and they will distinguish

between what's called the formal cause and the material cause.

And when the church historians distinguish between the formal and material causes of the 16th century

...