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"SOLI DEO HONOR ET GLORIA"
of Rev. Paolo de Petris

Dear Friends,

in the 16th century the Protestant Reformation tried to draw the attention of the church to the fact that faith in the living God implied a strong rejection of every contrary reality. The Scottish Confession of Faith of 1560 emphasized this element in its first chapter, stating: We confess and acknowledge one God alone, to Whom alone we must cleave, Whom alone we must serve, Whom only we must worship and in Whom alone we put our trust. The emphasis on the principles of TO GOD ALONE BE THE HONOR AND GLORY, CHRIST ALONE, SCRIPTURE ALONE, GRACE ALONE, FAITH ALONE had as a consequence a complete and radical reorientation of the faith of the church.

Today it is undeniable that the churches stemming from the Protestant Reformation are in a period of crisis. As the American theologian John Leith points out in his The Reformed Imperative, many factors have contributed to the malaise of the church. The general secularism of our culture, in which life is increasingly lived as if there were no God, is a factor. Of equal significance is the new social situation in which there is little support for the church within the general structures of society.

However, he adds, the plight of the church cannot be explained away in terms of the social environment. In fact, the primary source of the malaise of the church is the loss of a distinctive Christian message. Sometimes there is little difference between what the church says and what we hear from therapists, from political advocates and from the various political parties.

In substantial agreement with John Leith, Vittorio Subilia, my late mentor and professor at the Waldensian Faculty of Theology, pointed out, just before he died, a few years ago, that any biblical reference has faded away. As churches, we have lost the centre of the Christian message, and we are interested only in a false and levelling Ecumenism, in problems of ecology and in social issues. Since the 17th century there has not been a parallel situation of such gravity.

It seems that today, four centuries after the Protestant Reformation, what the Reformer Martin Luther prophetically anticipated, is about to be fulfilled. He said: In the future what we have built will be demolished and what we have demolished will be rebuilt.

In such a difficult context we are left wondering whether the survival of our congregations does not depend on a rediscovery of the basic Landmarks of the Protestant Reformations that have been lost.

As far as I’m concerned, I firmly intend to move in the aforementioned direction by trying to divulge the basic principles by which the Christian Church "stands or falls", that is to say:

Soli Deo Honor et Gloria, Sola Gratia ,Sola Fide, Solus Christus, Sola Scriptura.

27.09.2004