By Faith Alone
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You've heard it said, doesn't matter what you believe just as long as you're sincere. Well, Christianity says eternal life matters concerning what you believe. There is a content to the Christian faith.
Eternal life does hang in the balance, which is why we must be so clear in our proclamation of the gospel and vigilant in our defense of it. Welcome to the Friday edition of Renewing Your Mind, as we conclude a week of R.C. Sproul unpacking for us the theology of the Protestant Reformation and presenting a clear explanation of the biblical gospel. This week's series is called Justified by Faith Alone. And today is the final day that you can request lifetime digital access to this series and study guide, along with a hardcover edition of The Legacy of Luther, edited by R.C. Sproul and Stephen Nichols, when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. So request these resources today before this offer ends at midnight.
We are justified by faith alone, but what is true saving faith? Here's Dr. Sproul.
We've been looking at the Reformation formula justification by faith alone. And I'm going to look briefly now at the question of faith. What is meant in the formula justification by faith alone by the word faith? In the initial stages of the Reformation, the Roman Catholic Communion heard Luther teaching a kind of licentious libertinism or antinomianism, the idea that you can just believe in Christ and then live however you want because works were not considered necessary for justification. And so Luther had the task of defining what saving faith really means. And historically, there's a difference among scholars as to how the Reformers expanded their understanding of the elements of saving faith. Teryton, for example, in the 17th century, included six or seven or eight subtle, nuanced elements of saving faith.
Gordon Clark in the 20th century reduced those elements to two, but the usual customary understanding of the elements of saving faith in historic Reformed thought is that saving faith consists of three distinct elements, and those three distinct elements are called notitia, ascensus, and fiducia. Now, the first element, notitia, or sometimes called noti, refers simply to the information or the data. You've heard it said, doesn't matter what you believe just as long as you're sincere. Well, Christianity says eternal life matters concerning what you believe. There is a content to the Christian faith, and we don't have the authority to fill it up with whatever we want to fill it up with. And so to be justified by faith, you had to have the basic information. about christ about his person about his work he had they have the elements of the gospel that are understood that there is this god man jesus who died on the cross for our sins and so on those amount to the notitia or the note the notes or the information that one has to believe in order to be justified
But in addition to being aware of that data or of that information, you have to assent to the truth of that information. You have to believe that these ideas of Jesus and his person and his work are are realities, not just myths or interesting imaginative ideas. And so saving faith requires an intellectual, cognitive assent to the truth of the data. Now, so far, the reformers would say, if we have the information, the notitia, and we assent to its truth, a sensus, all that qualifies us to be is a demon because the devil knows the information and he knows that the information is true. The devil can make a hundred on any theological exam you ever gave him. He's not stupid. He knows the information.
But in addition to having the intellectual awareness and the intellectual assent to the data, one must have fiducia. And fiducia has to do with trust. You must not only trust Again, know the information, believe that it's true, but trust in it personally for your redemption. I've always said that it's very simple intellectually to understand the content of the doctrine of justification by faith alone, but to get it in the bloodstream.
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