In wrestling they call it “the reversal.” You score big points when you not only escape the clutches of your opponent, but suddenly have him in your clutches. Here is how the devil does this to us as it relates to how we have peace with God. At the time of the Reformation our fathers spent a great deal of time and energy trying to get a handle of this question of how we have peace with God. Out of this came the solas of the Reformation, nuggets of recovered wisdom that slowly grew into a great mass of doctrine. Rome fired back, and we returned that fire. Sundry compromises were suggested, and we haggled, rightly I would add, over why those wouldn’t work. We built our competing empires, and fussed at one another. Yet every generation brings its Rodney Kings who wonder why we can’t all just get along.
So the debate goes like this- Cranky Reformed folk man the barricades in defense of their learned tomes. We make our stand, as we ought, on imputation, on sola fide, on penal, substitutionary atonement. Happy ecumenists, on the other hand, want a more “simple” gospel. They want to leave behind the tired old sixteenth century arguments in favor of something plain and unadorned. Have you caught the reversal yet? Rome, and her kissing cousin, eastern Orthodoxy, created a ladder like system to get into heaven, complete with lists of sundry saints to help you along the way, liturgies to appease the wrath of the Father, penances to pay and refining fire beyond the grave, all designed to make us good enough for God. The Reformation, on the other hand, threw over these man-made, man-driven systems in defense of a simple gospel- repent and believe.
Our heritage isn’t complex, weighty, pharisaical burdens. Our patron saint is the tax collector who entered the temple, beat his breast and prayed, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” It is precisely the commitment we who are Reformed have to the simplicity of the gospel that requires us to draw lines in the sand against any system built upon self-righteousness, against any “gospel” that adds burdens to the good news. As one friend wisely put it, Jesus + Nothing= Everything. What we miss is this, Jesus + Anything= Nothing.
Recovering our heritage then requires two things. First, as we rightly defend sola fide, we must do so without destroying sola fide. If our explanations and defenses, no matter how zealous, do not lead us back to God, be merciful to me, a sinner, then we are on the deadly road to Rome, no matter how loudly we denounce Rome. And second, our commitment to the simplicity of the gospel must keep us from embracing the complexities of the anti-gospels. Our commitment to simplicity cannot allow an ecumenism that includes complex systems. Or to put it another way, we must repent and believe.