Why Sola?
Sola is Latin for alone. That is the whole of it — one small word meaning by itself, with nothing added.
It is our name because it is the word of the Protestant Reformation — the fight, five hundred years ago, over what the gospel actually is. It appears five times:
- Sola Scriptura — Scripture alone
- Sola Gratia — grace alone
- Sola Fide — faith alone
- Solus Christus — Christ alone
- Soli Deo Gloria — glory to God alone
Five claims, and the same word doing the work in every one. (It shifts shape — sola, solus, soli — the way Latin words do. It means the same thing each time.)
Now take that word out, put in its place what the Roman Catholic Church had put there, and read them again. Scripture and tradition. Grace and merit. Faith and works. Christ and the church. Glory to God and to the saints who helped. Every one of those the Roman Catholic Church would have signed without blinking.
The fight was never about whether Scripture, grace, faith, and Christ mattered. Everyone agreed they mattered. Men were burned at the stake over the word alone.
What they actually claim
Scripture alone. The Bible is the final authority. Not the Bible plus the church's tradition. Not the Bible as interpreted by the pope. Councils have erred, popes have erred, and every teacher who ever lived stands under the Word rather than over it. Even an apostle's hearers were commended for “examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so” (Acts 17:11). Where Scripture speaks, the argument is finished.
Grace alone. A dead man does not cooperate with his own resurrection — and “dead in your trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1) is what every one of us was. Salvation is not God meeting us halfway, rewarding the sincere, or responding to something He foresaw in us worth rewarding. It is God's work from first to last on people who had nothing to bring and no power to come.
Faith alone. A sinner is justified — declared righteous, once, permanently — “by faith apart from works of the Law” (Romans 3:28). Not by faith and baptism. Not by faith and church rituals. Not by faith and a lifetime of obedience added up at the end. The righteousness that saves is Christ's, credited to the account of a man who never earned a penny of it.
Christ alone. “One mediator also between God and men” (1 Timothy 2:5) — the God-man Christ Jesus. Not Mary, not the saints, not a priest, not a church. One man who lived the obedience we owed and died the death we deserved — and “there is salvation in no one else” (Acts 4:12): no other name under heaven, no other door, no other blood.
The glory of God alone. All of it goes to Him. There is no corner of salvation left over for a man to boast in, because there is no corner of it he performed — “not of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:9).
Take those five together and you have the gospel. Take any one of them away and you do not have a weaker gospel, you have a false one.
Why we took the name
Five hundred years ago the Roman Catholic Church had corrupted the gospel. Men protested — hence Protestant — and set about reforming the church according to the Word of God — hence Reformed. A reformed church was simply a church that had been purified by bringing it back to Scripture — and what it was brought back to is what you just read: Scripture alone, grace alone, faith alone, Christ alone, to the glory of God alone. Those five claims are the gospel. They are the foundation of Protestantism, and every Protestant church on earth stands on them whether it remembers standing there or not. Take any one of them away and the gospel is false.
That is why we took the name. Sola. Alone. It is the gospel, pure and simple. Paul's command is that a believer marries “only in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 7:39) — and a marriage in the Lord starts with the gospel held in common. This whole place stands on it, the men who inspired us stood on it together, and everyone you meet here has affirmed it.