In his chapter “Question 6: What is the Great Apostasy,” Kyle Beshears wrote the following:
Traditional Christians are right
to ask, did the Great Apostasy occur? While we can agree that apostasy occurs,
it does not—and cannot—rise to a level at which the gospel, with its full power
and authority to save, was or ever will be muted. (Kyle Beshears, 40
Questions About Mormonism [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel Academic, 2026], 60)
The problem for Beshears is that he is a Reformed Baptist.
In spite of proof-texting (such
as the abuse of a passage in 1 Clement), there is no meaningful evidence
for the historic Protestant understanding of justification until the second millennium
(let alone the development of nominalism that was necessary for Luther’s
understanding of justification).
While some may appeal to positive uses of “sola fide” in the
patristics, such would represent a word-concept fallacy. Pelagius himself used sola
fide positively, and no one would ever argue that Pelagius held to the
later Protestant understanding of justification (e.g., his
commentary on Romans). Furthermore, Ambrosiaster et al., held to
transformative justification, baptismal
regeneration, rejected eternal security, and so forth. The same applies to Marius
Victorinus in his commentary on Galatians, another popular “proof-text” by
some online apologists.
That the Protestant understanding of justification is a
theological novelty is admitted by both their scholars and apologists. Scholar
Alister McGrath, himself a Protestant, wrote that:
The fundamental theological
question which is thus raised is the following: can the teachings of the
churches of the Reformation be regarded as truly catholic? In view of the
centrality of the doctrine of justification to both the initium theologiae
Lutheri and the initium Reformationis, this question becomes acutely
pressing concerning the doctrine of justification itself. If it can be shown
that the central teaching of the Lutheran Reformation, the fulcrum about which
the early Reformation turned, the articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae,
constituted a theological novelty, unknown within the previous fifteen
centuries of catholic thought, the Reformers’ claim to catholicity would be
seriously prejudiced, if not totally discredited. (Alister McGrath, Iustitia
Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification [3d ed.;
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005], 211)
In an interview on Hank Hanegraaff's conversion to Eastern
Orthodoxy, Rob Bowman discussed whether one holding to EO (and RC) soteriology
instead of the classical Protestant formulation means one is not a true
Christian, Bowman said the following:
First of all, it leads to what I
think ought to be for most of us [Protestants] a rather unsettling conclusion,
which is that there were no Christians prior to the Protestant Reformation.
Because, you will not be able to find, except perhaps a statement here or there
out of context, you will not be able to find any Christian theologians,
teachers, writers, in the first 14/15 centuries of Christianity clearly
articulating what we would call "justification by faith alone," or as
some people would like to call it, "forensic justification." The idea
that justification is, at its core, is a legal act in which God pardons sinners
of all their sins, past, present, and future, solely on the basis of Christ's
atoning work, created simply by faith . . .(44:32 mark, "Episode 46:
Hank Hanegraaff Converts to Eastern Orthodoxy")
Of course, it is not just the patristics and later medieval
authors, but I would also argue that many doctrines that Beshears rejects
(e.g., baptismal regeneration) can be demonstrated using the
historical-grammatical method of exegesis, while some of the doctrines
underlying his soteriology (e.g., imputed righteousness) are not based on
meaningful exegesis. See, for e.g.:
Refuting
Jeff McCullough ("Hello Saints") on Baptismal Regeneration
Response
to a Recent Attempt to Defend Imputed Righteousness
