Goldsworthy: "The Reformation recovered the historical Christ-event as the basis of our salvation"

“Sola Scriptura (Scripture Alone) was a rallying-cry of the Reformation. The right of interpretation was restored to every believer, but this did not mean that the principles of interpretation found within the bible could be overlooked and every Christian follow his own whim. The allegorical method became far less popular, because the historical meaning of the Old Testament was found to be significant on its own, within the unity of the Bible.

“...The reformers maintained that salvation is a matter of grace alone, by Christ alone, through faith alone. ‘Grace alone’ meant that salvation is God’s work alone unconditioned by anything that man is or does. ‘Christ alone’ meant that the sinner is accepted by God on the basis of what Christ alone has done. ‘Faith alone’ meant that the only way for the sinner to receive salvation is by faith whereby the righteousness of Christ is imputed (credited) to the believer.

“What had this got to do with the Old Testament? It meant that the reformers were establishing a method of biblical interpretation in which the natural historical sense of the Old Testament has significance for Christians because of its organic relationship to Christ. God’s grace seen in his dealings with Israel is part of a living process which comes to its climax in his work of grace, the gospel, that is in the historical events of the Christ who is Jesus of Nazareth. Just as it is important to assert that this Old Testament ‘sacred history’ or ‘salvation history’ must be interpreted by the Word, Jesus Christ, it is also important to recognize that the gospel is God acting in history more specifically, through the history of Jesus Christ.

“Medieval theology had internalized and subjectivized the gospel to such an extent that the basis of acceptance with God, of justification, was no longer what God did once for all in Christ, but what God was continuing to do in the life of the Christian. This de-historicizing of what God had done once for all in the gospel went hand-in-hand with the allegorizing of the history of the Old Testament. The Reformation recovered the historical Christ-event (the gospel) as the basis of our salvation and, in turn, the objective importance of Old Testament history.

“This is, of course, a very different thing from the modern approach of seeing the Old Testament as part of the historical development of man’s religious ideas, or as merely a background history to the New Testament age. Basically, the Old Testament is not the history of man’s developing thoughts about God, but the whole Bible presents itself as the unfolding process of God’s dealings with man and of his own self-disclosure to man. – Graeme Goldsworthy, Gospel and Kingdom, pp. 17-18.