The solas don’t imply each other

Protestant defenses of the traditional solas of the magisterial Reformation tend, in my experience, to prove too much. The chief example of this overreach is the claim that the solas mutually and/or logically imply one another. Sola gratia entails sola fide entails sola scriptura, and so on.

But none of these follows from the others. Any of them might be true—all of them might be true—but irrespective of that question, each principle requires independent demonstration; the solas are not necessarily a package deal. Protestant apologetics would therefore be much stronger, not to mention more honest, if it did not suggest or assert that each sola implies or requires the others.

Take grace and faith. It is perfectly coherent to imagine a world, whether or not it is our own, in which God wills to save by grace alone but not by faith alone. I don’t mean not-by-faith; I mean that, in such a world, God wills to save sinful human beings (just like us) using the instrumentality of faith but not solely the instrumentality of faith. (It’s also possible to imagine a world in which God saves by grace but not by faith, but that’s too far afield from the present point.) In this case, then, God might save by faith through baptism, and both would be necessary for salvation, and both would remain utterly gratuitous means of grace, because neither would constitute a human work. Each would instead be a gift passively received, and on this schema, both would function together as God’s ordained means of saving grace.

Note that I’m not arguing that this is the case; I’m arguing that it could be, because there is nothing intrinsic to divine grace that logically entails the status of faith as sole instrumental means of receiving that grace. Perhaps in fact faith is the sole instrumental cause of sinners’ salvation by grace alone—but that need not be the case, just in order to be grace.

Now consider either sola fide or sola gratia (or, for that matter, solus Christus) in connection to sola scriptura. Imagine a world, exactly like ours, in which God wills to save by grace alone (possibly even by faith alone, though not necessarily) but simultaneously wills for his church to be led by successors to the apostles who, as a collective over time, are deputized by the Spirit of Christ to rule definitively (i.e., infallibly) on crucial questions of faith and morals, as and when conflicts arise over the interpretation of Scripture. In a word, in such a world God wills that his church be authorized to issue dogma.

Plainly, there is no contradiction here. God could do this. God is God, after all; it is within his omnipotent power. God thus might have done it—in this world or any other.

The question, then, is not whether it is possible: It is possible, and it is absurd to doubt it. The question, rather, is a matter of fact: Has God, in this world, just as it is, vested the church with dogmatic authority? And with respect to the answer to this question, on what basis (a) would we know it and (b) should we decide it?

Note well that the hypothetical world I have proposed is one in which God saves sinners through Christ alone, by grace alone, (even possibly) by faith alone. Each of these things might be true together with an infallible magisterium deputed by Christ’s Spirit to guard the deposit of faith entrusted to the apostle’s successors as they lead the church over time in the faithful interpretation of the authoritative word of God in Scripture. Were God to will this arrangement, Scripture would be the one word of God, which gives the church the gospel; the magisterium would interpret that word with definitiveness for the lay faithful; the latter would be bound to submit to the former; and in so doing the gospel of multiple solas (Christ, grace, faith) would not in any way entail a fourth (scriptura).

Hence, the dispute between Protestants and Catholics (as well as the Orthodox) is not an abstract one; it is not about logical possibility. Nobody is proposing a contradiction. The dispute is about actuality. Each of the solas must stand on its own two feet. Perhaps, if it were the case that all of the solas were true, then believers would be right to see organic connections or relations of fittingness between them. But such a discovery would be aesthetic rather than logical, and certainly not necessary. Moreover, it would be a retrospective judgment, nor a priori. The fact that all of them turned out to be true would be a function entirely of God’s good pleasure. It would not be analytic to the very notion of each sola, properly understood.