2 The Grammar of Sola Fide Defined
ILLUSTRATIVELY RATHER THAN exhaustively, the 
Given the fact that we will utilize an interpretation of Paul’s theology as a paradigm throughout this book, we may ask: Why the narrow focus on Paul? What about the rest of the Scriptures? First, our particular interest in Paul lies in the observations we are about to make—namely, much of the language, many of the themes, and the strong antithetical pattern of negation and affirmation that permeates and fills the Book of Common Prayer suggest a strong and pervasive Pauline influence. Second, because Paul is both an interpreter and proclaimer of Jesus Christ and also a reader of Israel’s Scriptures, attending to Paul does not limit but rather opens up the scriptural witness.
THE CENTRALITY OF JUSTIFICATION IN PAUL: SOLA FIDE AS A GRAMMAR
The question of the centrality of justification in modern Pauline scholarship. We begin by recognizing that justification-as-center is a highly contested notion in modern theology and Pauline scholarship. If Luther’s justification-centric interpretation of Paul re-bequeathed to Christianity this theological hub, then subsequent generations of scholars have dismantled it. In an important essay, Jonathan Linebaugh traces this dismantling through the lineage of William Wrede, Albert Schweitzer, Krister Stendhal, and E. P. Sanders, whose collective work concludes that the centrality of justification had far more to do with Luther’s own personal soul-struggle (i.e., what Wrede calls, “die Seelenkämpfe Luthers”) and far less to do with Paul’s actual theology. Justification has been displaced, says modern scholarship, not necessarily because it is theologically unimportant to Paul, but for two central reasons. First, justification has a specific context and purpose in Paul centered on Jew-Gentile relationships and the way that Gentiles can be Christ-followers without having to become doers of the Jewish law. Second, justification is merely one of many Pauline images for salvation and should not be elevated above the other important themes such as reconciliation, participation, union, redemption, election, atonement, and adoption. Linebaugh effectively challenges this displacement in part by pointing out the unhelpful employment of the metaphor of justification as “center” and “middle.” For Paul, argues Linebaugh, it is not so much that justification is a middle hub out of which spread all other Pauline soteriological spokes. Rather, it is the gospel of Christ itself that stands at the center, with justification functioning as a kind of syntactical gatekeeper which norms the articulation of what is and what is not that gospel. Linebaugh concludes that a much more useful way of describing Pauline justification is to speak of it as a “grammar.”
The grammar of justification by faith alone. The notion of theology as a grammar has a rich lineage throughout Christian history and philosophy, traceable from Gregory Nazianzen to Wittgenstein. The idea is similar to how we learn the rules of speech in linguistic grammar simply by conversing. So it is with theological grammar that we first acquire knowledge of who God is not by formal and abstract study of him, but simply by being a Christian, relating to him, and responding to his revelation. In this understanding of theology as a grammar, we operate according to the rules of this knowledge whether or not we have spent time reflecting on those rules or are even cognizant that such rules exist. Even if we do study the rules, it is often the case, at least in good study, that the rules recede from our reflective consciousness, “for it is as if the rules have become embedded in the speech textures themselves.” To speak of justification as a grammar, then, is to simply focus the scope of theological grammar—relating to God through his gospel.
At this point, we need to distinguish between justification as a doctrine, and justification as a grammar in order to recognize, first, that the two construals are not mutually exclusive, and, second, for our purposes we are focusing on the latter. George Lindbeck defines doctrines as “communally authoritative teachings regarding beliefs and practices that are considered essential to the identity or welfare of the group in question.” Justification by faith alone certainly fits within this definition. Sola fide, in this regard, can be articulated propositionally: Through Christ, God justifies sinners by his free grace, completely apart from any works or merits of their own. At the same time, however, we are attempting to recognize what Lindbeck also points out about how doctrines are often “more easily accounted for if they are taken to resemble grammatical rules rather than propositions.” What we will observe is that Paul not only articulates justification propositionally but makes decisions between faithful and unfaithful doctrine and practice out of the kinds of rules that justification establishes. With this distinction clarified, let us unpack justification as a grammar.
Perhaps coined by Luther himself, the idea of justification as a grammar means that it “governs the way words run when sentences speak the Pauline gospel,” functioning as an “evangelical criterion,” which “says ‘no’ to not-gospels while norming the saying of the gospel.” Justification is “an evangelical canon that makes possible the judgment: this is or this is not the gospel.” Linebaugh critically notes that “justification often does this theological work without the specific vocabulary of justification.” This means that justification is structurally present in every kind of soteriological construction, running like unseen rebar throughout the other edifices of Paul’s architecturally diverse salvation-theology. Agreeing with modern scholarship’s insistence that Paul’s development of justification is specific to his context, we recognize that justification arises in Galatians, for instance, out of the crisis that occasioned a conflict between what Paul perceives as “the gospel of Christ” and “a different gospel” (Gal 1:6-7). What we are pointing out, though, is that as Paul distinguishes between these two “gospels” for the Galatian church, justification is the way he determines the real gospel from its counterfeit. In this regard, though justification is functioning as a hermeneutic to parse the gospel in that specific context, its methodology becomes applicable to a limitless host of other situations. We observe this universal applicability beyond Jew-Gentile conflicts in passages like Romans 4, where Paul employs justification as a way of reading Scripture—particularly the story of Abraham and Sarah in Genesis. So justification is not merely for Paul something to apply to the sociological problem of first-century Jew-Gentile relationships, nor is it even merely a way of understanding the structure of his soteriology. It is a hermeneutic for how to read and interpret God’s work in all of Scripture with application to all of life. It is a way of speaking and understanding. It is, indeed, a grammar. Linebaugh offers a useful metaphor for what this grammar does: “The excluding and including grammar of justification functions as an evangelical gold-pan, separating and filtering out all human criteria such that all that remains as gospel is the pure gold of the grace of God in Jesus Christ.”
How the grammar of justification works. Concretizing the above, Paul’s grammar of justification sifts by making sharp distinctions of categorical exclusion. When Paul describes and defines grace, his characteristic emphasis is on what John Barclay calls grace’s “incongruity”—namely that grace excludes all human standards of worth and comes as an unconditioned gift. Linebaugh picks up on this exclusionary function of grace, observing what he calls the “Pauline pattern of antithesis.” This theology, especially preeminent in Galatians and Romans, presents antithetical, either/or binaries: salvation is either ἐξ ἔργων νόμου (“by works of the law”), or it is διὰ πίστεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ (“through faith in Jesus Christ”) (Gal 2:16; cf. Rom 3:21-22); it is either that “I live” or “Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20). This separation is radically disjunctive: no one is justified by works of the law (Rom 3:20); but all are justified by his grace as a gift (Rom 3:24). Again, “we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law” (Rom 3:28). And it is these antitheses, these categorically exclusive distinctions, which define what is the gospel and what is ἕτερον εὐαγγέλιον (“another gospel”), which is no gospel at all (Gal 1:6-7). Out of this Pauline way of speaking come various shorthand distinctions, coined by Paul and some repackaged by the Reformers: faith and works (Rom 3:20-26); spirit and letter (2 Cor 3); old and new creature/creation (2 Cor 5:17); death and life (Rom 5:12-17); flesh and spirit (Rom 7:4-6; Gal 5:16-26); first Adam and second Adam (1 Cor 15:20-23); nothingness and creation (Gal 6:14-15); law and grace (Rom 5:20-21); the “alien work of God” and the “proper work of God.”
To make these kinds of distinctions, to completely filter and sift, is to do theology “justification-ly.” In other words, to properly define and proclaim the gospel, not-gospels must be exposed and separated out, and the means of doing this is by making the above distinctions and making them in such a way as to be mutually exclusive, radically disjunctive. And the opposite is true: to confuse and commingle these distinctions is not only to obscure the gospel. It is to lose it entirely. This is precisely why sola fide works as a descriptor of both justification and the gospel itself. It is in the radical distinguishing of faith apart from works that the grammar of justification is active, and when this is done, the gospel is clarified and preached, even felt, and seen in its truth over against that which is not the gospel.
An example of the methodology of the Pauline grammar. Here we want to entertain an example from Paul, both as a means of illustrating the way this grammar works biblically and of breaking into Cranmer’s own redactive method liturgically. In an insightful essay, David Lincicum contrasts how Paul, in Romans 10:6-8, reads Deuteronomy 30:12-14 with how a contemporaneous Jewish scholar, Philo of Alexandria, interpreted the same. The contrast brings Paul’s grammar of sola fide into stark relief. Philo’s interpretation takes a more straightforward approach to the passage. He argues that when Deuteronomy admonishes, “the word is very near you, in your mouth and in your heart and in your hands, so that you may do it” (LXX Deut 30:14), it is encouraging the attainability (and therefore pursuit) of a total and virtuous keeping of the law. Philo achieves this interpretation through a more conventional expansion, paraphrase, and explanation of the Deuteronomic text.
By contrast, Paul’s interpretation of Deuteronomy comes in the form of theological redaction of the actual passage. Lincicum observes Paul doing three things in his redaction: (1) He renounces self-reliance; (2) he erases the “doing”; and (3) he replaces the commandment with Christ. It is worth reproducing Lincicum’s side-by-side comparison here, both because of its explanatory clarity and because it will serve later as a template for observing Cranmer’s own work (see 
DEUTERONOMY 30:12-14 (LXX)
ROMANS 10:6-8
[The command] is not in heaven that one should say,
,
But the righteousness that is by faith says, “Do not say in your heart,
“Who will ascend for us into heaven and take it for us?
And
once we have heard, we will do it.”
‘Who will ascend into heaven ?’ (that is, to bring Christ down) or
Nor is it on the other side of the sea that one should say,
“Who will cross over to the other side of the sea for us and take it for us? And when he has caused us to hear it we will do it.”
‘Who will descend into the deep?’” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). But what does it say?
The word is very near you,
in your mouth and in your heart and in your hands, in order for you to do it.
“The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart” that is the message concerning faith that we proclaim.
Figure 2.1. Deuteronomy 30 and Romans 10
Lincicum makes us aware of three things. First, we see in Paul’s redaction of the first phrase a clear renunciation of self-reliance by negating (“Do not say in your heart”), rather than saying something positive about, one’s commitment to doing the law. Paul draws from language in Deuteronomy 8:17 and 9:4 where “do not say” precedes a stern warning not to base success on one’s own righteousness. Second, Paul “erases the doing” in the second, fourth, and fifth phrases by editing out all references to how the law will be kept (“we will do it”). Third, Paul replaces the commandment with Christ in the second and fourth phrases by making Christ, not the commandment, the object of action (“bring Christ down . . . bring Christ up”). Adding to Lincicum, we can also observe in the fifth phrase Paul transposing law into gospel: the “word” was the law to be kept (Deut 30:14); now the “word” is the “message concerning faith”—that is, the gospel (Rom 10:8). In sum, “Paul has erased any hint of ‘doing’ the commandments, instead placing emphasis on confessing and trusting Jesus as the Messiah.”
What we are observing is the Pauline grammar at work. Paul is not explaining justification. In fact, sola fide is absent, terminologically speaking, from Romans 10:6-8. Paul already made his theological claim a few verses back: “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes” (Rom 10:4). Having made that claim, the grammar simply goes to work in Paul’s editorial interpretation of Deuteronomy 30. And what does this redaction do? It separates. It distinguishes. It “erases the doing” so that faith and works avoid any commingling. This is what justification does when it functions as a grammar: it utterly separates, categorically distinguishes. It puts faith, Christ, and grace in as stark a relief as possible. To reiterate Linebaugh’s words, sola fide filters out “all human criteria” until the “pure gold of grace” is left—alone.
Pauline shorthand for the grammar of justification: “Not I, but Christ.” In another essay, Linebaugh argues that a specific Pauline passage serves as a touchstone for the grammar of sola fide—Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” Following justification’s work as a grammar whose rules include antithetical distinction, this passage radically distinguishes the “I” in me from the “Christ” in me. The “I” is dead. Christ now lives. While this separation brings up questions regarding the continuity and discontinuity of the “me” associated with the dead “I,” versus the “me” associated with the living Christ, this passage from Galatians offers a helpful hook on which to hang the identification of the grammar at work, tying together the example from Paul in the previous section above. The grammar of sola fide is at work when the “I” is completely removed from the equation of righteousness (“not I”) and when, at the same time, Christ and his righteousness is featured, totally and exclusively (“but Christ”). In the language of audio production, for sola fide to be at work, it is not merely that Christ sits on top of the mix; it is that he is soloed—all other tracks are not just softer but muted entirely. In the language of theater, it is not merely that Christ is foregrounded against other actors in salvation; he is the only one on the stage.
We see this pervasive “not . . . but” structure of Paul’s theology clearly, for instance, in Romans 9, where the apostle explicates one of his great soteriological themes—election—according to justification’s grammar. Paul does so by employing three “οὐκ . . . άλλὰ” constructions to show that God’s election lacks any preexisting condition outside his own grace. Whereas contemporaneous Old Testament interpreters (such as Philo) read God’s election of Abraham and his offspring as conditioned by virtue, worth, or status intrinsic to those people, in an unprecedented move Paul surprisingly asserts that God’s election occurs apart from those things. God’s election of Isaac is “not” based on Abrahamic genealogy, “but” God’s promise (9:8). God’s election of Jacob is “not” based on Jacob’s moral worth, “but” God’s calling (9:11-12). It is “not” based on Jacob and Esau’s social status (primogeniture), “but” on God’s mercy (9:12, 16). Again, quite apart from the language of sola fide, here we see a clear example of the structure of justification by faith alone norming how Paul articulates the gospel as he explores the theme of the unfailing word (9:6) that calls and sustains Israel from generation to generation. And Paul’s way of going about this is through the repeated “not . . . but” categorical contrast.
The “not I, but Christ” of Galatians 2:20, therefore, serves not only as one of the many disjunctive antitheses in the Pauline corpus. It also serves as a tidy shorthand uniquely suited for the work of identifying how justification works in theological redaction of texts (as with Paul in Rom 10) and liturgies (as we will observe with Cranmer in the Book of Common Prayer). “Not I, but Christ” neatly illustrates the kind of subtraction and addition taking place when texts are edited according to sola fide. In Paul’s theology, the human remains in the story of salvation as God’s beloved creature—the finite, fallen person under sin that God loves, redeems, adopts, and calls righteous. When Paul says, “not I,” therefore, he is not urging a negation of human personhood or dignity. Rather, “not I” is an exclusion of the person as an actor of righteousness, as an agent in their justification before God. To negate and exclude this “I” is a way to display the depths of God’s love, according to the grammar of justification—God loves even that “I,” that one who has nothing to offer. It is for this reason, for the sake of displaying and magnifying the love of God in Christ, that one is led to excise any reference to “I,” except where the “I” is confessing inadequacy, need, inability, offense, sin, transgression, and so on. And where righteousness and law-keeping before God are concerned, Christ and only Christ is mentioned. The “I” is either negated or excised; Christ is showcased and exalted. And the former and the latter are never confused or commingled. Given the unique suitability of “not I, but Christ” as a way into observing the operation of sola fide particularly in texts, it will serve as a primary paradigm in the next chapters to observe the gospel as it is clarified and distinguished by Cranmer in the Book of Common Prayer. But before we get there, we might first briefly trace the “pedagogical lineage” of the grammar’s transmission from Paul to Cranmer.
HIGHLIGHTING THE GRAMMAR FROM PAUL THROUGH THE REFORMATION
Part of the reason it is important to trace key figures in the transmission of the Pauline grammar is that Cranmer’s own employment of the grammar takes on the characteristics of those predecessors. And the more we understand how those forerunners articulated theology through the grammar of sola fide (albeit with more or less clarity depending on the person), the more we will see how thoroughly Cranmer’s filter was operating. What we want to argue is that these key historical figures, who interpreted Paul similarly to what we have outlined above, collectively employed a theological way of speaking worth identifying. We make this identification not so much that we might marshal a kind of genealogical argument regarding Cranmer’s uses of similar terms and constructs (i.e., we do not want to go so far as to say that Cranmer’s use of certain terms was copied from these other thinkers or that his usage of those terms proves some sort of direct theological ancestry), but that we might more modestly and cautiously observe a correspondence and overlap in language in order to support a cumulative case for Cranmer’s commitment to sola fide. In other words, for these Reformation predecessors (including Augustine), we do not want to give the impression that we are summarizing their complete soteriology or even their entire understanding of justification, much less that their conceptions of the latter aligned with Cranmer and the Reformers on all points (for they did not). We are simply trying to observe some language that exposes the grammar of sola fide that Reformers like Cranmer appear to have picked up on and utilized in their more distinctive reading of Paul. With those disclaimers, let us trace the lineage and note a few terms and concepts that emerge when the Pauline grammar is at work.
Ambrose. Early in the church’s history, we find peppered through the teaching of key leaders the interpretation of Paul according to the lines drawn above. Ambrose, archbishop of Milan (c. 340–397), may very well have plowed certain ground that would become the initial pathways for more thorough paving by Augustine only a few years later. In Ambrose, we hear these distinctions: “the law was able to close the mouth of all, but it was not able to change their mind”; and “the law condemns the action; it does not take away its malice.” Ambrose here explains the sifting work of the Word of God. Elsewhere we find Ambrose setting forth the worthlessness of our works “in Adam” in order to utterly set apart justification: “I fell in Adam, in Adam was I expelled from Paradise, in Adam I died; and [God] does not recall me unless He has found me in Adam,—so as that, as I am obnoxious to the guilt of sin in him, and subject to death, I may be also justified in Christ.” And even more pointedly: “This is the ordinance of God, that he which believeth in Christ should be saved without works, by faith only, freely receiving remission of his sins.” In Ambrose’s understanding of Paul here, when a person comes to faith, justification categorically excludes our works.
John Chrysostom. This same line of interpretation of Scripture is present in one of Christianity’s first great expository preachers, John Chrysostom (c. 349–407). In effect, Chrysostom would articulate a very Pauline way of looking at all of Scripture, and it is noteworthy that Cranmer himself would pull out this particular jewel from the golden-mouthed preacher’s works: “He that is hard-hearted and an obstinate sinner shall there [in the Scriptures] find eternal torments, prepared of God’s justice to make him afraid and mollify him. He that is oppressed with misery in this world shall there find relief in the promises of eternal life, to his great consolation and comfort.” Note here in Chrysostom’s writing a sharp distinction between two experiences of God’s Word: “torment” and “fear” for the hard-hearted; “consolation” and “comfort” in God’s “promises” for those in misery. One can observe even from these two sentences that Chrysostom read Scripture through the Pauline lens outlined above. One might even read in these lines a proto-Reformation distinction between law and gospel.
Augustine. Certainly, it is in Augustine’s writings against Pelagius where we find the sharpest distinctions regarding salvation being made, and it would be the rereading of these treatises by the sixteenth-century Reformers which would spark a rediscovery of the gospel. One example: against Pelagius, Augustine interpreted the very words of Jesus (in Jn 15:5) in a way that employs Paul’s grammar of exclusivity: “The Lord did not say, ‘Without me you can with difficulty do something,’ but said, Without me you can do nothing. And in order to answer these people in advance, in that same gospel statement he did not say, ‘Without me you can complete nothing,’ but Without me you can do nothing.” In Augustine’s view, justification does not merely demote works; it excludes them. We note well here that for Augustine as with Ambrose, this categorical exclusion of works pertains to initial justification, and that for these Fathers works indeed factor into cooperation with grace on the other side of one’s first confession of faith. The Reformers, including Cranmer, would differ here. Nevertheless, it is through these insights of Augustine that the Reformers arrived at their understanding of what Paul was saying, and so we turn to some terminology of the Bishop of Hippo that Cranmer would pick up and employ.
“Assisting grace” in Augustine. Augustine repeatedly uses the language of assisting grace. To the modern ear, assistance implies coming alongside the agency of something else to, as it were, give it a boost. Based on Augustine’s employment of the term, however, the exact opposite is implied, especially as it pertains to the initial justification of the believer. For instance, in On the Spirit and the Letter, in which we find some of the bishop’s strongest distinctions drawn between faith and works, he says, “For whatever did even what the law commanded, without the assistance of the Spirit of grace, acted through fear of punishment, not from love of righteousness.” In other words, works done apart from faith (the only pathway for the love of righteousness) are not even partially meritorious or acceptable to God. After another long section sifting faith from works, Augustine summarizes the life of faith as the life which is “assisted by the grace of God.” For Augustine, then, assistance is not to be understood as God coming alongside a decently righteous person to elevate their merited or partially-merited efforts to an acceptable plane. Assisting grace is Augustine’s shorthand, rather, for the kind of work God does in the absence of meritorious good works: “Our very will without which we cannot do any good thing, is assisted and elevated by the importation of the Spirit of grace, without which help mere teaching is ‘the letter that kills.’”
In another work, Augustine discusses how the human condition is such that it becomes “difficult to be obedient unto righteousness; and unless this defect were overcome by assisting grace, no one would turn to holiness; nor unless it were healed by efficient grace would anyone enjoy the peace of righteousness.” That Augustine’s theology of assisting grace precludes any notion of a partnership with the inherent righteousness of the believer is abundantly clear in the fact that he uses the phrase to contrast his soteriology with that of Pelagius: “Perhaps, however, [Pelagius] thinks the name of Christ to be necessary on this account, that by his gospel we may learn how we ought to live; but not that we may also be assisted by his grace, in order withal to lead good lives.” Even in his latest writings, Augustine was found affirming the distinction between law and grace with this understanding of God’s assistance: “A man is assisted by grace, in order that [God’s] will may not be uselessly commanded.” Augustine’s understanding is that the law does not provide what it commands. Only grace can do that. Without grace, the law’s command is “useless.”
Yet elsewhere, Augustine describes this assisting grace as the very grace that resurrects the one who is dead in their trespasses and sins (Eph 2:1). Far from being a grace that comes alongside a decent person to help them become better, God’s assistance is a “grace [that] by coming to his assistance makes him alive.” In distinguishing between righteousness that comes by the law and righteousness that comes by grace through faith, Augustine uses God’s assistance to explain how the latter is distinct from the former.
Assisting grace is not only something that converts; it also sustains the believer, propelling the believer toward good works. After conversion, “we then have his assistance to lead good lives.” Every good work is “always assisted by God’s grace.” This kind of assistance is equated with the power and presence of the Holy Spirit to prevent future sin, helping us to resist evil. Nevertheless, Augustine is clear that the believer will not know sinless perfection until the final day:
They, however, are in a great majority, who, while not doubting that to the last day of their life it will be needful to them to resort to the prayer which they can so truthfully utter, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us,” still trust that in Christ and his promises they possess a true, certain, and unfailing hope. There is, however, no method whereby any persons arrive at absolute perfection, or whereby any man makes the slightest progress to true and godly righteousness, but the assisting grace of our crucified Saviour Christ, and the gift of His Spirit; and whosoever shall deny this cannot rightly, I almost think, be reckoned in the number of any kind of Christians at all.
In light of all this, it is clear that “assisting grace” is a pervasive phrase in Augustine with a distinct theological meaning. It is, indeed, a phrase which speaks according to the grammar of sola fide.
Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon. Though contemporaries of Cranmer, Luther and Melanchthon serve as key figures in the reception of Paul and his grammar of sola fide. These German Reformers were in fact the most prolific expositors of this particular aspect of Pauline theology. Without question, their reception of Paul (particularly through Augustine) was a key critical influence on Cranmer’s conversion to Protestantism in general and on his understanding of the Pauline grammar of the gospel in particular. Luther and Melanchthon would take the Augustinian distinctions—faith and works, law and grace, spirit and letter—and codify them in such a way as to bring the Pauline grammar into intense focus. The German Reformers landed particularly on a singular dialectic of the grammar of sola fide—the distinction between law and gospel—which would be a prominent pairing among all the Reformers of the sixteenth century and beyond.
The distinction appears in Luther’s early writing and is tantamount to his “Protestant breakthrough.” For instance, in his 1517 Disputation Against Scholastic Theology, we read, “What the law wants, the will never wants, unless it pretends to want it out of fear or love.” And again, a few lines down, “Every deed of the law without the grace of God appears good outwardly, but inwardly it is sin.” We observe the Pauline grammar of justification at work in the totality of the claims. The will “never” wants what the law wants, and “every” deed done apart from God’s grace “is sin.” A year later, in his Heidelberg Disputation, the lines are drawn even more clearly. “The law of God . . . cannot advance persons on their way to righteousness, but rather hinders them.” “The law brings the wrath of God, kills, reviles, accuses, judges, and condemns everything that is not in Christ.” Again, we observe the categorical nature of the grammar at play: righteousness is something which the law “cannot” provide; “everything” not in Christ is utterly condemned, accused, judged, and ultimately killed by the law. We arrive at Luther’s famous phrase: “The law says, ‘Do this,’ and it is never done. Grace says, ‘Believe in this,’ and everything is already done.”
Three years later, Melanchthon would take this distinguishing language and process it through Augustine’s theology of the affections for a more existential rendering of the law-gospel distinction. Throughout his 1521 Loci Communes and later in his 1531 Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Melanchthon returns to the experiential language of the law, whose job it is to “terrify” and “confound,” and the gospel, whose job it is to “comfort” and “console.” That Melanchthon sees this distinction as grammatical is manifested in how he explains the hermeneutical payoff of the distinction for interpreting the Bible:
There are two parts of Scripture: Law and Gospel. The Law displays sin, the Gospel grace. The Law shows the disease, the Gospel the cure. To use the words of Paul, the Law is the minister of death, the Gospel the minister of life and peace (2 Cor 3:7-10). “The power of sin is the law” (1 Cor 15:56), whereas, “The Gospel is the power of salvation for everyone who believes” (Rom 1:16). But Scripture has not handed down Law and Gospel in such a way that you should think that the Gospel is only what Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote, or that the books of Moses are nothing but Law. Rather, the message of the Gospel is spread throughout all the books of the Old and New Testament.
In the interpretation of Paul by Luther and Melanchthon, the distinction between law and gospel becomes the key to separating the gospel from not-gospels. Returning to the language used above, the law’s job is to “erase the doing,” utterly crucifying “all human criteria” that would seek to let a righteous deed stand on its own two feet. The law calls a supposedly righteous deed what it actually is—unrighteous, not worthy. It pushes works completely out of the realm of what pleases the Lord, leaving only faith. Faith, then, is freed to lay hold of that other word—the word of pure grace, the gospel.
Promise in Luther and Melanchthon. As hinted at in the
How can it be that faith alone can make one righteous and can provide such superabundant riches apart from all works, when it is obvious that so many laws, commands, works, estates, and instructions are prescribed for us in Scripture? One ought to note here with diligence and to consider with all seriousness that faith alone, apart from all works, makes one righteous, free, and joyful, . . . and one must know that the entire Holy Scripture is to be divided into two words: the commandments or the law of God and the assurances or the promises. . . . When the human being learns about and has discovered his own powerlessness on the basis of the commandments, that there will be only fear about how he is to do enough of what is asked in the commandment. . . . Following upon this comes the other Word, the divine assurance and promise, which says: If you want to fulfill all the commandments, if you want to be free of your evil desires and sins, as the commandments pressure and demand, look here, believe in Christ, through whom I promise you all grace, righteousness, peace, and freedom. . . . This is what the promises of God provide, what the commandments demand.
Central to the Reformation reading of Paul is pure, divine promise—unprompted, unconditioned. Indeed, this is the mutual exclusivity of the grammar of sola fide at work. The promise is God’s eschatologically-loaded forgiving word, and faith hangs on that promise. For Luther, the idea of promise by definition excludes any notion that the recipient of the promise has prompted or motivated the gift. Melanchthon would go on to say the same thing, as well, equating the promises with the gospel itself (and justification). In the Reformation, then, promise is another terminological shorthand for the grammar of justification sola fide.
Comfort in Luther and Melanchthon. Another important word in the vocabulary of the Reformation was comfort. And while this word does not so much do the work of the Pauline grammar of justification, it appears as the fruit and necessary byproduct of the grammar’s distinction-making work. In other words, when the grammar is operating, the effect is comfort. The idea of faith as a means of comfort is certainly not merely the property of Reformation Christianity. And yet, comfort as a chief emphasis is undoubtedly a Reformation priority largely previously unknown. According to Eamon Duffy, “Horror and fear are the emotions most commonly associated with late medieval perceptions of death and the life everlasting, and preachers, dramatists, and moralists did not hesitate to employ terror—of death, of judgment, of the pains of hell or purgatory—to stir their audiences to penitence and good works.” The Reformation emphasis on the gospel as a means of comfort and assurance about death and the life to come could not be more opposite. It makes sense, therefore, that we find comfort a central theme in Luther. In fact, one of Luther’s earliest Protestant disputations carries this title: Disputation for Seeking the Truth and Comforting the Fearful Conscience (1518). Likewise, we find comfort all over the works of Melanchthon. And as we noted above, it is only when the grammar is at work—when non-gospels (such as the law) can be distinguished from the gospel—that true comfort can result. Law not distinguished from gospel, or works not separated from faith, by necessity carries with it the hook, “you could always do more; you could always try harder.” And there is no comfort in such a word. Law mixed with gospel collapses into pure law—which loses the gospel entirely. Faith mixed with works collapses into works-righteousness—which by definition loses faith entirely. One only finds comfort in the separation. In other words, the experience of comfort is a definite sign of the grammar of sola fide at work. When we observe comfort in Cranmer, therefore, we should see it as a telltale sign of the operation of justification by faith alone.
From the first century to the Reformation, we have attempted to trace a kind of theological pattern of speech whose commonality is less observable by shared vocabulary (though we’ve noted some terminological overlap) and more observable by a theological syntax we are calling a gospel-grammar. This commonality of thought emerges from the fact that all the above theologians were readers of Paul and shared at least a basic understanding that justification by faith alone was a key concept for Paul when it came to the gospel of Jesus Christ and its proclamation. Justification sola fide is what helps distinguish the gospel from non-gospels and therefore is the gospel’s great grammatical key. It is now time to turn to Cranmer to observe how all these same concepts are at play.