The Protestant Reformation is based upon the themes of scripture alone and faith alone, as promulgated by Martin Luther and John Calvin. Faith alone is derived predominantly from passages in St Pauls letters, such as Rom 3:28, 4:2, Gal 2:16, and Eph 2:8. The Reformers contended that they had discovered St Paul's gospel of faith alone in each of the above passages, as an imputed righteousness of Christ granted by God to the believer. And yet the history of interpretation of those and other New Testament passages shows the passages were never understood to teach justification by faith alone.
And because the Reformers also taught the believer is guided by the Holy Spirit to understand the scriptures, either -
1) The Holy Spirit must have remained silent for over 1,500 years until a small group of men came to the gospel. Such a possibility is mitigated by the claim of the Holy Spirit always acting within the church to bring believers to the truth of the gospel.
2) The Holy Spirit must have acted in church history for the first 1,500 years, but there is no evidence for faith alone theology within the church fathers, or church councils. Consequently, the Reformed version of the Holy Spirit requires that He has seen fit to preserve the Reformed gospel as a silent (and evidence free) oral tradition that was once known to the early church, but then lost, and then regained through careful exegesis of several texts of St Paul's letters.
The Reformed version of the faith alone gospel requires the Reformed believer to embrace the notion that the all wise God who acts as the person of the Holy Spirit, saw fit to provide no evidence for the gospel for 1,500 years, and then suddenly reveal the faith alone gospel to a select number of men in Europe, who then promulgated the gospel in opposition to the Roman Catholic church. Those same men, who have no historical precedent for the faith alone gospel, must also ignore the vast amount of historical evidence for the Roman Catholic gospel as the sacramental economy, along with the creeds from the church and the Christian ethos.
For the Reformed gospel to be true, there must be the following silent oral traditions which existed throughout church history up until the Reformation of the 16th century.
1) The silent oral tradition of faith alone.
2) The silent oral tradition of scripture alone.
3) The silent oral tradition of the human authority of an autonomous conscience as the rule of faith. The exercise of the autonomous conscience may be exercised at any time, as is the case of Martin Luther and John Calvin, to promote the gospel without any reference to the claims of authority of the historical church and in opposition to many practices and beliefs of Christians found within the church fathers and church councils.
4) The silent oral tradition of private interpretation of the scriptures by a believer.
If a Reformed believer is required to buy into the above four silent traditions not found in church history as the true gospel, what else then may also exist in the gospel that is contained in church history as a silent oral tradition? We may propose several other additions to the gospel of faith alone as we see with the Presbyterian gospel -
1) Christ alone is the cause of justification.
2) Justification and salvation is for God's glory alone.
3) Justification by grace alone.
Not one of the above has any foundation in history. So we may also add the following to the gospel and also claim silent oral traditions used as the centerpiece of the newly Reformed gospel -
4) Justification by the Holy Spirit alone.
5) Justification by God the Father alone.
6) Justification by patience alone.
7) Justification by hope alone.
8) Justification by love alone.
9) Justification by autonomous conscience alone.
10) Justification by the church council alone.
11) Justification by keeping the law of Christ alone.
12) Justification by the meaning of St Paul's letters alone.
13) Justification by Mary alone.
14) Justification by the New Exodus alone.
15) Justification by the New Creation alone.
The fact that the above 15 solas are all mutually exclusive statements that make the newly Reformed gospel a bundle of contradictions need to worry us at all. For we can claim that God is transcendent and can act in a mysterious way beyond reason, even if the gospel is contradictory.
Conclusion - If the Reformed gospel is true, there must by multiple silent oral traditions in church history which are in fact the gospel. If so, there may be many other silent oral traditions we can posit as the fulness of the gospel.
Alternatively, the Reformed gospel is false and the gospel of Christ is well attested within church history as the Roman Catholic gospel.
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