Lesson video

Hi there.

My name is Ms. Marx.

And I'm going to be your religious education teacher today.

And today we're going to do a lesson called Reaching Heaven through Faith Alone.

And this is a really important Christian idea that's been around particularly the last 500 years since the Protestant Reformation.

And today we're going to explore the debate around this idea as well as see if it still has a great influence over Christianity today.

So when you're ready, let's go.

So by the end of today's lesson, you'll be able to explain how Martin Luther's teaching on reaching heaven by faith alone may influence Christians today.

Let's start with our keywords words, evangelical, an interpretation of Christianity that emphasises the authority of the Bible and the need for personal faith in Jesus Christ.

Faith, believing something strongly.

Grace, unearned love of God.

Sola Fide, faith alone, the principle that it is faith and not works that will help someone get to heaven.

Works, actions or deeds that God has commanded or sees as good.

In today's lesson we're going to have two sections.

We're going to first of all look at Martin Luther and Sola Fide and secondly, the influence of Martin Luther's ideas today.

So let's get started with our first section, Martin Luther and Sola Fide.

What do John Newton and Stormzy have to do with each other? So these are two different men here who are around a few hundred years apart from each other.

What could they have to do with each other? Have a think about your answer.

Talk to the person next to you or you could talk to me.

Well, they've both written powerful songs about the idea of God's grace, the unearned love of God.

So John Newton's song about grace, he talks about being rich and being broken and God sort of saving him.

And in Stormzy's song that he writes about grace.

He talks about being broken and unworthy and that God came and saved him.

So both of these men, even though they're writing hundreds of years apart from each other, have this idea of God sort of saving them even though they didn't really deserve it.

And that's really important for the idea of Sola Fide today.

So here we have Martin Luther and he's often seen as someone who sort of sparked the Protestant Reformation and many of the different Protestant denominations that we have around us today.

The idea of God's grace being unearned was very important to Christian thinker, Martin Luther.

So this idea of grace being something that we cannot get ourselves from our own efforts, something that was given to us by God through God's love is super important to Martin Luther, particularly with his idea around Sola Fide.

In Martin Luther's understanding Christianity, all humans were sinners and are not able to get to heaven by their own works.

So by their own efforts, by their own actions, humans cannot get to heaven because they're going to get it wrong and they're not gonna be able to do it properly so they'll never be able to get them through their own works.

They're only able to do this through God because they're not able to earn it themselves.

They would never be able to do enough good to be able to get to heaven.

One important part of the story of Martin Luther and his realisation about Sola Fide and this idea of grace being unearned from God is something called the Tower Experience.

In around the year 1518, Martin Luther was praying and reading the Bible.

So this is after he did a famous incident connected to the "Ninety-five Theses" that you might have heard about where he wrote down some statements about what was happening in the Roman Catholic Church.

This is after that he is still thinking about connecting to his religion and reading the Bible.

And at that point he was thinking about even though he tried to be a really good Christian, he was still a sinner.

So he was a monk.

He'd taken these promises to live a very poor life.

He was celibate, he wasn't spending lots of money on things, he was very obedient, but he felt that he was still a sinner and he could still never do enough to be good enough to get to heaven.

He thought he could never do enough good works to earn God's forgiveness.

Even though he was trying his best, he thought, "I'm never gonna be good enough." Now we dunno exactly the date that he has the Tower Experience due to the different historical sources that we have.

But most historians place the Tower Experience as when he was teaching university about "The book of Romans." Now "The book of Romans" is a letter that's part of the New Testament part of the Bible, which was a letter written by St.

Paul to the Christians in Rome.

And "The book of Romans" has a lot about Christian faith and ideas in there and the way that Paul understood them.

And so many historians believe that Martin Luther was reading this when he has the Tower Experience and it really shapes his thoughts around Christianity.

Romans is a book of the New Testament part of the Bible and was written by an early Christian called Paul, and we've got the image of him here.

Paul had converted from Judaism to Christianity.

This is right at the beginning of Christianity when people were following Jesus.

He converts from being Jewish to Christianity.

And Paul really emphasised the need for faith rather than works to be forgiven by God.

So lots of different things that Paul writes has this sort of focus on faith rather than actions to be forgiven by God.

So here's two passages written by Paul in the Bible which kind of emphasise this.

We've got here in Romans, "The righteous will live by faith" in Romans 1:17.

And then we've got in another letter by Paul called Ephesians.

"For it is by grace that you have been saved, through faith - and it's not from yourselves, it's the gift of God - not by works so that no one can boast." What does faith mean here? And why might Paul have linked faith to grace? Have a think about your answer, talk to the person next to you or you can talk to me.

So faith means a belief in something.

So a belief in what God has done, a belief in what Jesus has done by dying on the cross and rising again.

So for Paul, this idea of faith is linked to grace because it's through believing in it that someone is able to kind of access that grace and that forgiveness by God.

So for Paul, it seems to be linked to the belief rather than any works that somebody can do.

These passages show that Paul believed humans could reach heaven through their faith and the grace of God.

So we really have this focus here on the idea of what people are believing in, in what kind of God has done for those people.

And these passages influence Martin Luther to believe it's through faith alone that people can get to heaven.

So we have this phrase here, "Not by work so no one can boast." So it's not through me and my efforts, it's through something that God has done for me.

We can see how this could influence Martin Luther and this idea of faith alone.

Martin Luther uses the phrase Sola Fide, which comes from Latin.

So Latin was the language that was happening in the church at the time of Martin Luther.

And the Bible was written in Latin and it was a very important language for people within the church within Christianity.

And so we have lots of phrases in religious education that come from Latin today and one of these is Sola Fide and it means these things.

Sola meaning alone, you might have played solitaire one day or you might be a solitary person in a room sometimes.

So Sola means alone and Fide means faith.

If you can think of the words fidelity, that would come from Fide as well.

So we can see that Sola Fide means faith alone.

For Martin Luther Sola Fide meant that a person could not get to heaven by their own works, but through faith and a belief in what God had done for humans through the death of Jesus on the cross.

So the forgiveness isn't earned by humans, it's by Jesus dying on the cross, meaning that humans can be forgiven and therefore righteous.

Let's do a quick check.

What does the phrase Sola Fide mean? Faith alone, scripture alone or Jesus alone.

Pause the video and have a think.

Well done.

Yes, it means faith alone.

'Cause Fide means faith.

Fantastic.

A bit tricky that one.

'Cause they all had alone in them, didn't they? There are other parts of the Bible which show that works are important for showing this faith is genuine though.

So for example, in the book of James, now that's a letter in the New Testament written by James, one of the followers of Jesus too.

And in the book of James it says, "What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Faith by itself, if not accompanied by action, is dead." So here we've got the word deeds used, which is sometimes used for works.

So that's following kind of the actions that God has commanded.

And for James, this seems to be showing that faith is important, but without actions and without deeds, how can we know if that faith is genuine? Does this mean that works are also important for reaching heaven in Christianity? What do you think? Pause the video.

Talk to the person next to you or talk to me.

Let's meet Asher and Danielle now.

Asher is an evangelical Protestant Christian and Danielle is a Roman Catholic Christian.

And they're going to tell us about their views on whether you can reach heaven through faith alone or whether it works are needed too.

Asher says, "I could never be good enough to get to heaven by my own works, it's only through faith in God and Jesus' actions that I'm saved." And Danielle says, "I do not earn my way to heaven through my works, but works are important to show that my faith is real." So here we have Asher suggesting that it's only through his faith and not through his works that he can be saved 'cause he says he just wouldn't ever be good enough to do it through his own works.

Danielle here is saying that it's not that works earn her way to heaven, but they show that her faith is real.

So she needs the faith in order to get to heaven.

And the works are the thing that sort of show that it's genuine and real.

So in a sense she needs the works to show that the faith is genuine.

What could have influenced each of them to hold these views? Have a think about that and talk to the person next to you or talk to me.

Well, we could say that their different denominations may have shaped the way they think about this, the different teachings they might have within their different understandings of Christianity.

We've got Asher here who's a Protestant Christian.

So we know that he might be influenced by the ideas of say Martin Luther for example.

And here we've got Danielle who's part of the Roman Catholic Church and so she may be influenced by different teachings within the Roman Catholic tradition, but also perhaps the Bible verses that we looked at earlier might have influenced them.

Can you see here that Asher's statement seems to link with some of those ideas from Paul? About it not being through our own works and we can't boast of our own efforts helping us get to heaven? And then with Danielle, could we say that she's influenced by that idea from James? That faith without actions is dead and it needs to be accompanied to sort of show that that faith is real.

So here we can see that within Christianity there can be different on this idea of reaching heaven through faith alone.

Let's do another check.

Is this true or false? All Christians believe that humans can reach heaven by faith alone.

Is that true or false? Pause the video and have a think.

That's false.

All Christians do not believe that humans can reach heaven by faith alone.

But why? Because there's a variety of views on this in Christianity.

Martin Luther's view that humans can reach heaven by faith alone is held by many Christians.

But other Christians believe that works are needed to show that this faith is real.

So we can't say that all Christians believe that it might be something that some Christians do, but not all of them.

Let's do a practise task to see what we've learned.

Izzy here is explaining Martin Luther's idea of Sola Fide.

Izzy's used our own wording instead of the keywords, find where the keywords fit in and replace Izzy's wording with them.

So I'll read it to us.

Izzy says, "Martin Luther believed that humans could not do enough actions or deeds to be able to reach heaven because humans always sin.

Humans need God's unearned love to be able to reach heaven.

Humans can reach this by belief alone, which Martin Luther called faith alone.

Not all Christians agree with the idea of faith alone that Martin Luther emphasised because they have different interpretations of the Bible." So where can we put in our keywords from what Izzy has written? So pause the video, have a go and I'll see what you've written in a moment.

Well done some really good thinking there.

So I asked you to look at Izzy's writing and put in the keywords where she's written her own words and your response might look something like this.

Martin Luther believed that humans could not do enough works or deeds to be able to reach heaven because humans always sin.

Humans need God's grace to be able to reach heaven.

Humans can reach this by faith alone, which Martin Luther called Sola Fide.

Not all Christians agree with the idea of Sola Fide that Martin Luther emphasised because they have different interpretations of the Bible.

Well done.

So onto our second section then, the influence of Martin Luther's ideas today.

One way to investigate the influence of Martin Luther's ideas today is to use the tools of social science.

One of the tools of social science is to look at quantitative data.

This is information found in number form.

Quantitative data can help us see patterns and trends and analyse information across large amounts of people, places and times.

It's a really useful tool for us to see whether these ideas from 500 years ago from Martin Luther are still influencing Christians today.

The Pew Research Centre, which is a really influential think tank in the United States of America, who surveyed many, many people about lots of different issues.

They gathered some quantitative data about the influence of Martin Luther's ideas today.

They did this in 2017 as part of a project of 500 years after Martin Luther sort of sparked the Protestant Reformation.

They wanted to see whether Christians in the United States still were influenced by some of the key ideas of Martin Luther.

So they asked over 5,000 Christians in the USA about their beliefs.

What could they have asked Christians to find out if Martin Luther's ideas still had an influence today? what do you think they could have asked? Have a think about that.

Talk to the person next to you.

You could maybe even jot down your ideas or you could talk to me.

Well what they did is they asked different Christians which statement they agreed with more.

Now they've used the words deeds in their questions.

We've been using the word works and deeds throughout this lesson.

So where they have deeds, it means works or kind of actions that God has commanded.

Things that are what God would want people to do.

So they've said these two statements and wanted to see whether people agreed with them or not.

Faith in God alone is needed to get to heaven.

Or secondly, both good deeds and faith in God are needed to get to heaven.

So one statement is the idea of Sola Fide only needing faith in order to get to heaven.

The other one is this, the idea that faith may need to be accompanied by good deeds or actions or works in order to get to heaven.

And the different Christians said whether they agreed with this or not.

And perhaps you can spot that the faith in God alone is needed to get to heaven is the one that is more associated with Martin Luther's idea of Sola Fide.

And from the 5,000 answers that they got from different Christians, the Pew Research Centre grouped them into answers from Protestants and answers from Catholic Christians.

And we can see which group may have been more influenced today by this idea of Martin Luther about faith alone being needed to get to heaven.

So here are the results from what people said.

And we can see from both of our pie charts here that actually a majority of people in both Protestant and Catholic answers do not agree that faith alone is needed to get into heaven.

Can you see here that only 48% of the Protestants said that faith in God alone was needed? 17% of the Catholic Christians said faith in God alone was needed.

So whilst more Protestants agree with the idea from Martin Luther, we can see that still it is just about a minority, isn't it? It's very close, but it's just tipped there with 52% saying that faith and deeds are needed.

In the Catholic responses here we've got 81% saying that both deeds and faith are needed.

So whilst that teaching from Martin Luther about Sola Fide or reaching heaven by faith alone was is really important part of the Protestant Reformation, we can see that within the Protestant Christians who were surveyed here, still a majority just about would say that faith and deeds are needed.

So let's do a quick check.

Is this true or false? The Pew Research survey showed that a belief in Sola Fide, faith alone, is not held by the majority of Protestant Christians in the USA today.

Is that true or false? That is true, yeah.

Even though it was quite close, the majority of Protestant Christians in the USA today according to Pew Research survey, still believed that faith and deeds were needed in order to get to heaven.

A belief in reaching heaven by faith alone influences some Christians today to want to share their faith and belief with others.

So those who do have this belief in faith alone may be influenced to want to share that faith with others in order for them to be able to have faith to get to heaven as well.

And this is an idea that's really influenced one particular type of Christianity called evangelical Christianity.

And Asher who we met earlier belongs to an evangelical type of church.

And here he says, "I belong to an evangelical type of church and spreading the good news of Jesus to others is really important to us.

I like to share with people how faith alone in Jesus can help us to reach heaven." So for Asher, he does believe that faith alone is what he needs to get to heaven.

Because remember he said that his works would never be good enough.

And then part of that means he wants to spread that to other people and for them to also reach heaven through having this faith.

The word evangelical comes from Greek.

So lots of words in religious education also come from Greek as well as Latin we had earlier with Sola Fide.

And it has the stem evangelical.

Now this comes from eu meaning good.

So you might have heard the phrase euthanasia.

And so sometimes that gets contracted to ev instead of eu.

And angelos meaning message.

So if you think of an angel being someone bringing a message.

So evangelical is to do with good news or a good message.

So the word evangelism you might have heard before is the idea of spreading good news, spreading the good message of Christianity to others.

And evangelical Christianity has an emphasis on spreading the understanding of good news of Jesus and a hope for reaching heaven.

So it's this idea of wanting to spread that good news with others and sort of tell other people in the hope that they will get the same faith and be able to reach heaven as well.

So we could look at a case study of evangelism to understand this a little bit more.

So here I've got a church which is called Holy Trinity Brompton, which is found in London.

And an example of how this church community evangelises is through something called the Alpha Course.

It started in 1979 from an evangelical church in London, which I've got the picture of here.

And it spread to over 166 countries and had over 2.

5 million people take part.

And sometimes you'll know if a church is doing this programme because they'll have a poster or you know a flyer showing people about it.

And it tends to have a question as part of this because the idea is people can come and bring their questions and ask questions and find out more about Christianity.

And the idea is that that faith in Jesus and that faith in God is something that can be shared and spread and people may then choose to take on the religion for themselves.

And this is an example of a church in America.

And so it's spread across the whole world.

Many, many, many different people have become Christians through this programme or at least learnt and heard about the idea of Christianity.

One of the things they teach is that people can get to heaven through their faith and through becoming Christian in the faith of what Jesus did on the cross for them.

Let's do a quick check.

Which two statements are correct about evangelical Christianity? Evangelical Christianity emphasises the need for faith alone to reach heaven.

Evangelical Christianity emphasises the need to do good works to reach heaven.

Evangelical Christianity emphasises the sharing of the good news of Jesus to others.

Which two are correct? Pause the video and have a think.

That's right.

A and C are correct.

Because evangelical Christianity doesn't emphasise the need to do good works to get to heaven.

It's through faith in Jesus that those Christians believe that they are able to get to heaven.

So let's do another task to see what we've learned today.

So the table below has three points related to the influence of Martin Luther's ideas today.

For each point, give a piece of evidence or an explanation.

So the three points are: the majority of Christians surveyed do not believe in Sola Fide.

The idea of Sola Fide still influences some Christians today and how some evangelical Christians have spread the good news of Sola Fide.

For each one, you're going to either give a piece of evidence or write an explanation.

So pause the video and have a go and we'll see what you've done in a moment.

Well done.

That was some really good work there.

Let's see what you've written.

I asked you for each point on the table to give a piece of evidence or an explanation and your ideas might look something like this.

The majority of Christians surveyed do not believe in Sola Fide.

And the evidence you could have is that in the Pew Research, 52% of the Protestant and 81% of the Catholic Christians believe faith and works were needed to get to heaven.

Secondly, the idea of Sola Fide still influences some Christians today.

Well, many Christians today, especially evangelical Christians, do believe in Sola Fide and evangelise to share this good news.

And finally, how some evangelical Christians have spread the good news of Sola Fide and the evidence you could give is that the Alpha Course is one example of how some evangelical Christians have spread the good news of Sola Fide to others.

Well that was some fantastic work today and I wonder where you sit on the debate of whether people can get to heaven through faith alone or whether some works and deeds are needed in order to show that that faith is genuine.

Let's summarise what we've learned so far today.

Reaching heaven by faith alone.

Martin Luther was an important figure in the Protestant Reformation who believed that humans could only reach heaven through faith and the grace of God, not works.

Sola Fide is the principle that it is faith alone, not faith with works that will help a Christian get to heaven.

Martin Luther used parts of the Bible to support this.

There are other parts of the Bible that suggests faith with works is important.

And the idea of Sola Fide is not believed by the majority of Christians surveyed, but it continues to be an influential idea, especially for evangelical Christians today.

So well done for your hard work today and I'll see you again soon.

Bye-bye.