I learned early on that if people are different colors, I did not have the preferred color. When my mother and longtime friends would get together and the subject of skin color came up, my mother was sure to say with a tone of disgust, “We are all pale and bleached out. Everything shows. Every […]

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Last in the BA’s 2017 sola series commemorating the five-hundredth year of the Reformation is the sola to which all the other solas point. The Reformers were convinced that Christ and Scripture alone, and faith and grace alone, are only valid when understood and lived for soli Deo gloria — for the glory of God […]

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Upon first glance, a reader of this issue in our Reformation series might exclaim, “Church alone! Doesn’t the Bible Advocate staff know that this phrase was not a tenet of the Reformers? Don’t they know it represented the position of the Counter-Reformation? The Reformers taught against it. The Roman church emphasized it. Why is church […]

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Here are three popular definitions for grace:   God’s unmerited favor. God giving us what we do not deserve. God’s riches at Christ’s expense.   These all show that the source of grace is God, not us. God’s most significant gift of grace is His Son, Jesus Christ (John 3:16). Jesus must remain exclusively central […]

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In English class we learned that a phrase like faith alone is a conceptual unit but not a complete sentence. It lacks a verb and fails to answer the standard questions who, what, where, when, why, and how. But in the 1500s faith alone stood for the complete sentence “Justification is by God’s grace alone, […]

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The exclusivity of Christ alone was the Reformers’ answer to the question “How can I be saved?” Christ alone is the foundation upon which everything in our Christian life is built. The emphasis on Scripture alone as the only valid standard for determining a Christian’s faith and practice, answers the question “How am I, as […]

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The phrase Christ alone is at the center of the well-known declaration of the sixteenth century Reformers. They based their teachings on God’s justification of those who come to Him by His sovereign grace alone, through faith alone, grounded in Christ alone, for His glory alone.1 Another phrase the Reformers emphasized was Scripture alone. They […]

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