LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW - Brock University

84 LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW XV
its opening proposition: “Faith alone justifies”. 31 Those three words fairly
spell out the position he defended in this work. Further propositions also
offer support for the necessity of justification by faith alone. These include,
for example, his insistence that “The law of God cannot be kept by our
ability” and that “By its own strength free will can only sin”. Or, in other
words, since man is powerless to effect his own justification through the
keeping of the Law, salvation must be a matter of grace alone, received by
faith alone. The same is echoed in his next publication, his 1531
Supplication unto Henry VIII, where the first thesis he defends is that
“Alonlye faith iustifyeth before god”. 32 And once again this is supported by
the further thesis that free will after the fall of Adam can do nothing but sin.
If things are clear to this point, it is here that they may get muddled. In
1534 Barnes republished his Supplication, but with some drastic changes.
Several theses were omitted, a new one added, and another entirely
rewritten. Though the article on free will remained unchanged, that on
justification did see some minor modifications. William Clebsch has argued
that these changes distance Barnes from a Lutheran stance on justification by
faith alone and move him toward legalism. 33 His claim is based largely on
the fact that in 1531 Barnes, like Luther, felt that the book of James, with its
emphasis on good works, was not truly biblical. But he goes on to note that
by 1534 Barnes was willing to allow James a place in the canon of Scripture,
and then assumes that this indicates a corresponding emphasis on good
works rather than on faith alone.
Carl Trueman has done an excellent job of refuting this argument, 34 but
some additional points might also be raised. The first, ignored by both
Clebsch and Trueman, is simply that by the mid-1530s Luther himself
appeared willing to regard James as canonical; 35 so any change in Barnes’s
view is not necessarily a step away from Luther, but may be read as a step
31 Sentenciae ex doctoribus collectae, quas papistae valde impudenter hodie damnant
(Wittenberg, 1530), was written under Barnes’s continental pseudonym, Antonius Anglus.
The propositions quoted in this paragraph are found in its table of contents as the titles to
articles 1, 3, and 4. For an entire list of the articles addressed in the Sentences see N. S.
Tjernagel, The Reformation Essays of Dr. Robert Barnes (London, 1963), 95.
32 Barnes, A Supplicatyon (1531), fo. 1v.
33 Clebsch, 59-60, 66, 168.
34 Carl R. Trueman, Luther’s Legacy: Salvation and English Reformers, 1525-1556 (Oxford
1994), 156-97.
35 Changes are evident both in his general New Testament preface and the preface to James
itself. The well-known reference to James as “an epistle of straw”, which had appeared in
each edition of his New Testament since 1522, is first excised in the 1534 edition of the whole
Bible. See AE 35:362 and 358 n. 5. The strong language of the 1522 preface to James—e.g.
“he mangles the Scriptures and thereby opposes Paul and all Scripture”, and, “I will not have
him in my Bible to be numbered among the true chief books”—disappears in all editions after
1530. See AE 35:397 nn. 54, 55.