Sola Fide: All You Need to Know

There is a longstanding dispute among Christians about whether salvation comes from good deeds or from faith in Jesus, and the inerrant word of God is characteristically incoherent and self-contradictory on the question.

It is quite the little irony that the notion of sola fide, salvation by faith alone, should have received its fullest articulation in Germany by Martin Luther, since Germany also furnishes the ultimate "smell test" case for this doctrine: if sola fide is true, then every Nazi (up to and including Hitler himself) who died with faith in Jesus is now in heaven, while each of the six million or so Jews whom the Nazis killed, and who still had his/her doubts about Jesus at the moment of death, is now in hell.

I am not asserting that Hitler died with faith in Jesus; I have no idea what supernatural twaddle was rolling around in his head at the moment of his death. But if the sola fide faction of Christianity is true, then it is entirely possible that Hitler is now in heaven, because under these assumptions, his deeds count for nothing and the state of his beliefs about Jesus counts for everything. I will add that it beggars credulity to suppose that sola fide does not entail millions of Holocaust victims now burning in hell, since Jews are rather famous for their doubts about Jesus; and just as much it entails that at least some Nazis, surely even some high-ranking ones, are now resting happily in heaven since they died with the right thoughts about Jesus.

This is, of course, a monstrous doctrine, one that is so alien to morality that I have a hard time believing that people actually take it seriously. But it is one of the central distinctions between Catholicism and Protestantism, and millions fought and died over it and similar theological disputes. It continues to be a bedrock belief of many Christians, which is, to me, more than enough justification for dismissing Christianity as a dangerously immoral body of beliefs.