Solus Christus
Solus Christus (“by Christ alone”). Christ alone, not the saints, the angels, the ministry and rites of the church, or our good works, acts as our Mediator, Redeemer, and Savior. “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5). We live by faith in the Son of God, who loved us and gave himself for us (Gal. 2:20). Only Jesus Christ as Mediator can be our Prophet to teach us, our Priest to reconcile us to friendship with the holy God, and our King to deliver us from our enemies and rule us by his Word and Spirit. Christ is not merely the door into the kingdom; he is also the way we must travel to glory. “And in Him you have been filled” (Col 2:10). Christ is “unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption” (1 Cor. 1:30).
Contemporary alternatives to evangelical Christianity deny Christ his rights as the only Mediator. Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962), himself a neoorthodox theologian and no evangelical, wrote that modernistic theological liberalism “established continuity between God and man by adjusting God to man,” resulting in a theology that proclaimed that “a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”1 Postmodernism sees truth as relativistic, a mere tool of power; it denies universal and absolute truth, and thus the absolute claims of Christ. However, if you are a true son or daughter of the Reformation, Christ in his uniqueness as the “God-man” and threefold office as Mediator will mean everything to you. Do you love Christ as the incarnate Word of God? Is he your beloved Prophet who gives you true wisdom, your faithful Priest who turns God’s curse upon your sins into God’s blessing, and your great King who rules and defends you? Do you know Christ personally and experientially as your Lord? Is Christ everything to you?
Footnotes
H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (1937; repr., New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 192–93. ↩︎