The charge that Luther invented sola fide in the 16th century is refuted by the apostolic texts themselves. Paul's argument in Romans excludes works of the law from justification at the outset: "a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law." Augustine affirmed this while insisting that genuine justifying faith is dynamic — it works through love and is not inert belief — harmonizing Paul and James without surrendering faith's primacy. Hugh of St. Victor argued that the faith of all eras is "one and the same," with believers before and after Christ equally justified by faith in promised redemption, differing only in degree of explicit cognition. Calvin described the Reformation as recovery — clearing away medieval accretions of merit to restore the Pauline teaching that the law convicts and faith alone receives mercy. John Owen refined this further, defining justifying faith as the act that "closeth with Christ for righteousness and acceptation with God only," entirely exclusive of works.
"Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law. Is he the God of the Jews only? is he not also of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also: seeing it is one God, which shall justify the circumcision by faith, and uncircumcision through faith" — the apostolic foundation of justification by faith alone, applying equally to Jew and Gentile and excluding works of the law from the first.
"Yet that the faith of the preceding and the subsequent was one and the same... faith increased in all through the times so that it was greater but was not changed so as to be different" — Hugh's argument that the faith by which all the just from the beginning were justified is continuous across eras, positioning the Reformation's sola fide as recovery of an unchanging apostolic principle rather than a 16th-century novelty.
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