I think it is inevitable. Any great movement eventually gets reduced to a slogan. And for a while the slogan works, and then the movement gets institutionalized. And institutions can’t work on slogans. And people forget what the slogan meant. And people try to add to the slogan. And it becomes trite.
The slogan of the Reformation is or was “The Solas”. As late as the 20th Century people were still trying to add solas to the list. The Reformation really boiled down to two: Grace Alone and Faith Alone. Somewhere along the way Word Alone was added. Three points always rolls easier. Leave it to the Reformed to try and push 3 to 5. I think they wanted a Reformation parallel to TULIP, the Calvinist summary. But the two they added in the 20th century just address later arguments that aren’t really the beating heart of the Reformation. So I stick with three: Grace Alone, Faith Alone, Word Alone.
Grace Alone. Nobody really disagrees with this. The problem that Christianity addresses is sin. You might ask what is sin? At least I think moderns do. And there are different answers. You can lean into the legalistic, breaking a commandment. You can be more general, missing the mark. That is the allusion buried in the Hebrew word translated sin. I appreciate the definition the Novelist Francis Spufford used in his work of apologetics and confession: The Human Propensity to *Mess* Things Up. Although he didn’t use *Mess*. We can’t seem to avoid it. We mess things up. Even when we don’t want to, we do. As Paul would cry from the heart, “who will save me from this body of death?” Other religions don’t all have sin as their fundamental problem, but they usually will offer some type of solution. And that solution always comes in some type of law like the Buddhist 8 fold path or the Islamic 5 Pillars or the Mormon Doctrine and Covenants. Christ says something completely different. It is by grace alone. You can’t fix it. God has. And everything worthy of the name of Christ agrees that it is by grace alone.
The first dividing point is the 2nd Sola: Faith Alone. As Mumford and Sons once sang, “How does this grace thing work?” One answer is that it works like medicine. God grants grace. If we respond to the medicine with good works, He supplies more grace. And so there is a cycle of grace and works. And boy did Luther try the works. It was later reformation Roman polemic that would smear Luther, but all the early accounts of everyone who knew Luther would have described him as Super-Monk. He lived it. It didn’t work. How does this grace thing work? Absolute trust in God: Father, Son and Spirit. Faith Alone. The grace of God given to us freely creates faith. Non-Reformed Christianity will still talk about the process as medicinal, a steady infusion of grace to the extent that works are done. The Reformation proclaims faith alone that God’s grace is enough to cover even me.
Eventually everyone asks the question “How do you know?” One answer would be authority. The Pope or Prince says so. Another answer would be tradition. This is how it has always been, or this is how we do it. The Reformation added its third Sola for this question. How do you know? Word Alone. This often gets taken as Scripture Alone. Which is not terrible, because the Scriptures are the Word of God for Christians of all times and places. The Scriptures are the Norming Norm of our life together. But Word Alone was always bigger. The simplification to the Scriptures I think is what caused so much of the late 19th and 20th century angst. As critical movements and the enlightenment attacked the Scriptures themselves, for many it felt like everything was lost. But the Reformation slogan is deeper. Word Alone. The Word of the Lord Endures Forever is something of another Reformation slogan – VDMA. When you’ve heard the Word of God, you know. It is self-revealing. It does not return empty. It is not without power. How do you know? Word Alone.
Reformation Day is a banner waving day, but also a good day to understand what those banners are about beyond hooray for my side. They are about Grace. They are about how Faith holds onto that Grace. They are about How we know. The Word of God has come to us today.