The Scott Hahn Conversion Story- an excerpt on Sola Fide

The Scott Hahn Conversion Story:


But the more I studied, the more I came to see that for the
ancient Hebrews, and in Sacred Scripture, a covenant differs from a
contract about as much as marriage differs from prostitution. In a
contract you exchange property, whereas in a covenant you exchange
persons. In a contract you say, "This is yours and that is mine," but
Scripture shows how in a covenant you say, "I am yours and you are
mine." Even when God makes a covenant with us, He says, "I will be your
God and you will be my people." After studying Hebrew, I discovered that
'Am, the Hebrew word for people, literally means, kinsman, family. I
will be your God and father; you will be my family, my sons and my
daughters, my household. So covenants form kinship bonds which makes
family with God.

I read Shepherd's articles, and he was saying much of the same
thing: our covenant with God means sonship. I thought, "Well, yeah, this
is good." I wondered what heresy is involved in that. Then somebody told
me, "Shepherd is calling into question sola fide." What! No way. I mean,
that is the Gospel. That is the simple truth of Jesus Christ. He died
for sins; I believe in him. He saves me, pure and simple; it's a done
deal. Sola fide? He's questioning that? No way.

I called him on the phone. I said, "I've read your stuff on
covenant; it makes lots of sense. I've come to pretty much the same
conclusions. But why is this leading you to call into question Luther's
doctrine of sola fide?" He went on to show in this discussion that
Luther's conception of justification was very restricted and limited. It
had lots of truth, but it also missed lots of truths.

When I hung up the phone, I pursued this a little further and I
discovered that for Luther and for practically all of Bible Christianity
and Protestantism, God is a judge, and the covenant is a courtroom scene
whereby all of us are guilty criminals. But since Christ took our
punishment, we get his righteousness, and he gets our sins, so we get
off scot-free; we're justified. For Luther, in other words, salvation is
a legal exchange, but for Paul in Romans, for Paul in Galatians,
salvation is that, but it's much more than that. It isn't just a legal
exchange because the covenant doesn't point to a Roman courtroom so much
as to a Hebrew family room. God is not just simply a judge; God is a
father, and his judgments are fatherly. Christ is not just somebody who
represents an innocent victim who takes our rap, our penalty; He is the
firstborn among many brethren. He is our oldest brother in the family,
and he sees us as runaways, as prodigals, as rebels who are cut off from
the life of God's family. And by the new covenant Christ doesn't just
exchange in a legal sense; Christ gives us His own sonship so that we
really become children of God.

When I shared this with my friends, they were like, "Yeah,
that's Paul." But when I went into the writings of Luther and Calvin, I
didn't find it any longer. They had trained me to study Scripture, but
in the process, in a sense, I discovered that there were some very
significant gaps in their teaching. So I came to the conclusion that
sola fide is wrong. First, because the Bible never says it anywhere.
Second, because Luther inserted the word "alone" in his German
translation, there in Romans 3, although he knew perfectly well that the
word "alone" was not in the Greek. Nowhere did the Holy Spirit ever
inspire the writers of Scripture to say we're saved by faith alone. Paul
teaches we're saved by faith, but in Galatians he says we're saved by
faith working in love. And that's the way it is in a family isn't it? A
father doesn't say to his kids, "Hey, kids, since you're in my family
and all the other kids who are your friends aren't, you don't have to
work, you don't have to obey, you don't have to sacrifice because, hey,
you're saved. You're going to get the inheritance no matter what you
do." That's not the way it works.

So I changed my mind and I grew very concerned. One of my most
brilliant professors, a man named Dr. John Gerstner, had once said that
if we're wrong on sola fide, I'd be on my knees outside the Vatican in
Rome tomorrow morning doing penance. Now we laughed, what rhetoric, you
know. But he got the point across; this is the article from which all of
the other doctrines flow. And if we're wrong there, we're going to have
some homework to get done to figure out where else we might have gone
wrong. I was concerned, but I wasn't overly concerned. At the time I was
planning to go to Scotland to study at Aberdeen University the doctrine
of the covenant, because in Scotland, covenant theology was born and
developed. And I was eager to go over and study there. So I wasn't
particularly concerned about resolving this issue because, after all,
that could be the focus of my doctoral study.