Doctrines
Sola Fide
Also Known As Justification by Faith Alone The English form used in most Protestant confessional writing.
Salvation and Liberation
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Article IV of the Augsburg Confession, presented to the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, states that people cannot be justified before God by their own powers, merits or works, but are justified freely for Christ's sake through faith. Melanchthon's formulation is forensic: righteousness is imputed, reckoned to the believer rather than infused as a quality, and the works that follow are the fruit of justification and never its cause. The doctrine reorganised everything downstream of it, penance, indulgences, the treasury of merit, the mass understood as a sacrifice, and it is the first of the Reformation's solas in order of controversy if not of logic, since the appeal to scripture alone was the ground on which it was argued. The Council of Trent answered it directly in its sixth session in 1547, affirming that grace is genuinely received and that a justified person can grow in righteousness, and anathematizing the proposition that the sinner is justified by faith alone. The two positions were re-examined at length in the twentieth century, and the 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification signed by the Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church found a shared understanding sufficient to lift the sixteenth century condemnations as they applied to the partner church, without either side abandoning its own confessional language.
Facts
Position Profile
Key TextArticle IV of the Augsburg Confession, that people cannot be justified before God by their own powers, merits or works, but are justified freely for Christ's sake through faith. 2 Principal ProponentMartin Luther drew the principle from his reading of the letter of Paul to the Romans, making it a central plank of the Protestant Reformation. 5 Opposing PositionSourced to the subject's own accountThe Council of Trent, in its sixth session, affirmed that grace is genuinely received and that a justified person can grow in righteousness, and anathematised the proposition that the sinner is justified by faith alone. 3 Status
Status Within the TraditionDefined and binding within this tradition 2Tradition: Lutheranism Status Within the TraditionSourced to the subject's own accountRejected, or not held, within this tradition 3Tradition: Roman Catholicism Doctrinal CategorySin, Grace and the Human Condition 1 Current StatusSourced to the subject's own accountThe 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, signed by the Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church, found a shared understanding sufficient to lift the sixteenth-century condemnations as they applied to the partner church, without either side abandoning its own confessional language. 4 Origins
Held ByThe Lutheran and Reformed confessional traditions, and the Protestant bodies descended from them. 1 Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceMelanchthon's formulation is forensic: righteousness is imputed, reckoned to the believer, rather than infused as a quality, and the works that follow are the fruit of justification and never its cause. 2 The Claim
The ClaimSola Fide holds that a person is justified before God through faith alone, not through good works, which are understood as the fruit of justification rather than its cause. 5 Learn More
Luther, Romans and the Augsburg Article
Luther's own account placed the turn in his reading of Romans 1:17, where the righteousness of God ceased to be the standard by which he would be judged and became the righteousness God gives. From that reading followed a distinction he treated as the hinge of everything: the law shows a person what is owed and cannot supply it, while the gospel announces what has been supplied. Justification is therefore not a process a believer completes but a verdict already pronounced, received by the empty hand of faith.
Melanchthon gave the position its confessional form in 1530. Article IV of the Augsburg Confession is four sentences long and states that people cannot be justified before God by their own powers, merits or works, but are justified freely for Christ's sake through faith, when they believe that they are received into favour and that their sins are forgiven on his account. The vocabulary is deliberately forensic, drawn from the law courts rather than from medicine: righteousness is imputed, reckoned to the believer's account, not infused into them as a quality that grows.
The Reformers were careful about the objection they knew was coming, that a verdict without change licenses whatever the believer pleases. Their answer was that faith is never alone even though it justifies alone, since the faith that receives Christ receives him whole and cannot receive him without being remade. Good works are the fruit that follows and the evidence that faith is real; they are simply not the ground of the verdict.
Trent's Answer and a Twentieth Century Reopening
The Council of Trent addressed justification in its sixth session in January 1547, and the decree is longer and more careful than Reformation polemic usually allowed. It affirms that nobody merits the grace of conversion, that grace is a free gift, and that no one can be justified without it. Where it parts company is on what happens next: Trent holds that grace genuinely makes a person righteous rather than merely declaring them so, that the righteousness received can increase, and that a justified person cooperates with grace in works that are truly meritorious because grace makes them so.
The canons attached to the decree then condemn the alternatives one by one, including the proposition that the sinner is justified by faith alone, understood as excluding the necessity of preparation and cooperation. Each side read the other's position through its own vocabulary, and the words merit, faith and righteousness did not mean the same things across the divide, which is part of why the argument lasted four centuries with so little movement. It moved in the twentieth. Sustained bilateral study of the actual sixteenth century texts led to the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, signed in Augsburg in 1999 by the Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church, which set out a common understanding of justification by grace through faith and concluded that the mutual condemnations of the Reformation era no longer apply to the partner as now understood. Neither church surrendered its confessional language, and other Protestant bodies were not party to it, but the flashpoint of the Reformation is no longer where it was.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
Article XI states that we are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of Christ by faith, and not for our own works or deservings, and calls this a most wholesome doctrine.
The Baptist confessions follow the Reformed pattern here, holding that faith receives and rests on Christ's righteousness and is not itself the ground of acceptance.
Chapter XI of the Westminster Confession holds that God justifies not for anything wrought in the justified but for Christ's sake alone, and that faith is the alone instrument of justification.
A doctrine held within Christianity.
Article XI states that we are justified by faith only, and calls it a most wholesome doctrine and very full of comfort. Article XII places good works after justification as its fruits, which cannot put away sins but do please God and follow of necessity from a true faith.
The Belgic Confession holds that faith is the instrument that keeps us in communion with Christ and in all his benefits, and that it does not justify by any worth of its own but because Christ is our righteousness. Works follow as fruits and add nothing to the ground.
The same article of the Augsburg Confession makes faith the sole instrument, and the confession's article on the new obedience insists that good works must follow while denying them any part in earning the remission of sins.
Article IV states that people cannot be justified before God by their own powers, merits or works, but are justified freely for Christ's sake through faith. This is the article on which this tradition was founded.
Wesley kept the article on justification by faith only from the Thirty-Nine Articles when he abridged them for the American Methodists in 1784, and his own preaching of 1738 onward turned on it.
Classical Pentecostal statements of faith set justification by faith as the first work of grace, before the sanctification and Spirit baptism that follow it.
Chapter XI of the Westminster Confession holds that faith is the alone instrument of justification, receiving and resting on Christ and his righteousness.
Article IV of the Augsburg Confession fixed the Protestant position that a sinner is accounted righteous through faith in Christ alone, and the Reformed and later Protestant confessions restate it in their own terms.
This body teaches that the believer is accepted on Christ's account and not on their own, and reads its own emphasis on the law as following justification rather than earning it.
Rejected Here
The third and fourth Articles of Faith set out faith, repentance, baptism by immersion and the laying on of hands as the first principles and ordinances. Justification by faith alone is not the pattern taught.
Trent's sixth session, in 1547, affirmed that grace makes a person genuinely righteous and that a justified person cooperates in meritorious works, and anathematized the proposition that the sinner is justified by faith alone.
Sources
1. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition
F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.), Oxford University Press, 2005View the Source 2. The Augsburg Confession
Philipp Melanchthon, 1530Article IV, Of Justification, the Augsburg Confession, 1530View the Source 3. Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent
Council of Trent, 1563Session VI, the decree and canons on justification, 1547the holders' own accountView the Source 4. Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification
Lutheran World Federation and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, 1999the holders' own accountView the Source 5. The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine
The Pearl of Great Price
Joseph Smith, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1851The Pearl of Great Price, Articles of Faith 3 and 4View the Source The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion
Church of England, 1571The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, Article XI, Of the Justification of Manthe holders' own accountView the Source Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490-1700
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Allen Lane, 2003on the justification controversy and its confessional settlementView the Source The Westminster Confession of Faith
Westminster Assembly, 1646The Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter XI, Of Justificationthe holders' own accountView the Source The Belgic Confession
The New Hampshire Confession of Faith
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