Review Article: Justification By Faith Alone -- By: Gerald L. Priest

Journal: Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal
Volume: DBSJ 02:1 (Fall 1997)
Article: Review Article: Justification By Faith Alone
Author: Gerald L. Priest


Review Article:
Justification By Faith Alone

Gerald L. Priest*

* Dr. Priest is Professor of Historical Theology at Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary in Allen Park, MI.

Justification by Faith Alone: Affirming the Doctrine by Which the Church and the Individual Stands or Falls, by John MacArthur, Jr., et al., edited by Don Kistler. Soli Deo Gloria, 1995. 188 pp. $12.95.

Justification sola fide is the centerpiece of Pauline theology. This doctrine launched the Protestant Reformation, it inaugurated America’s Great Awakening, and it has been the special object of Satan’s attack against historic biblical Christianity. For some time liberal ecumenists have sacrificed this, along with other essential doctrines of orthodoxy, in order to produce a united church of Catholics and liberal Protestants. Evangelicals have traditionally and correctly viewed this attempted amalgamation as evidence of apostasy. But the incredible happened in September 1992. Professing evangelicals and Roman Catholics, most of whom are active in the pro-life movement and charismatic renewal,1 met together to seek “unity that is pleasing to God,…unity in the truth.”2 The product of that meeting was a joint affirmation in March 1994 that was anything but doctrinally true and God-pleasing. “Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium” (ECT) is a betrayal of the truth. It asserts that devout Catholics are Christian “brothers,” and that doctrinal points of difference are not serious enough to keep evangelicals and Catholics apart. But the differences amount to what is the true gospel versus what is false, such as “sacraments and ordinances [are] symbols of grace or means of grace,” and “Baptism as sacrament of regeneration or

testimony to regeneration.”3 There is a great gulf fixed between these differences which no amount of searching “for a better understanding”4 will ever resolve. Such an attempted resolution virtually jettisons the pure gospel of Christ and replaces it with another gospel having God’s curse on it (Gal 1:6–9).

Response to ECT was both swift and varied. Publishers churned out rebuttals and counter-replies. Among those mounting a well-reasoned scriptural attack on ECT were John Ankerberg and John Weldon in Protestants and Catholics: Do They Now Agree?5 and J...

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