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Catholics believe in an initial justification that comes entirely by God\u2019s grace (apart from our doing anything<\/em>, at this<\/em> stage). It\u2019s given to those (above the age of reason) who accept the free grace of God in their free will (the acceptance itself being caused by God). It regenerates us (particularly, baptism does this, including even for infants), justifies us, and removes the worst effects of original sin. For more on this, see:<\/p>\n Trent Doesn\u2019t Utterly Exclude Imputation<\/a>\u00a0(Kenneth Howell) [July 1996]<\/p>\n Council of Trent: Canons on Justification<\/a>\u00a0(with a handy summary of Tridentine soteriology)<\/a>\u00a0[12-29-03]<\/p>\n Initial Justification & \u201cFaith Alone\u201d: Harmonious?<\/a>\u00a0[5-3-04]<\/p>\n Monergism in Initial Justification is Catholic Doctrine<\/a>\u00a0[1-7-10]<\/p>\n Catholics & Justification by Faith Alone<\/a>:\u00a0Is There a Sense in Which Catholics Can Accept \u201cFaith Alone\u201d and\/or Imputed Justification (with Proper Biblical Qualifications)?<\/a>\u00a0[9-28-10]<\/p>\n Salvation: By Grace Alone,\u00a0Not<\/em>\u00a0Faith Alone or Works<\/a>\u00a0[19 passages] [2013]<\/p>\n Baptismal Regeneration and Justification<\/a>\u00a0(vs. Jason Engwer)\u00a0[6-4-20]<\/p>\n 14 Bible Verses That Show We\u2019re Saved Through Baptism<\/a>\u00a0[National Catholic Register<\/em>, 11-30-21]<\/p>\n Bible on Faith \/ Belief, etc. \u201cAlone\u201d [?] for Salvation (Fifty Bible Passages Stress Faith or Belief, Regarding the Question of Salvation, Compared to a Hundred that Emphasize or Highlight Works: Flowing from God\u2019s Grace Through Our Faith. <\/a>\u00a0[10-11-24]<\/p>\n Biblical Infant Baptism<\/a> [9-19-25]<\/p>\n Justification by Faith: Ten Bible Proofs<\/a> [1-15-26]<\/p>\n Catholic and Protestant Views on Justification and Sanctification<\/a> (Tom Nash, Catholic Answers)<\/p>\n The best description of what we receive in baptism I\u2019ve ever seen was in the Modern Catholic Dictionary<\/em>\u00a0(Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co, Inc., 1980) by Servant of God Fr. John A. Hardon, S. J. (who received me into the Catholic Church in 1991):<\/p>\n Baptismal Graces<\/a><\/p>\n The supernatural effects of the sacrament of baptism. They are: 1. removal of all guilt of sin, original and personal; 2. removal of all punishment due to sin, temporal and eternal; 3. infusion of sanctifying grace along with the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit; 4. incorporation into Christ; and 5. entrance into the Mystical Body, which is the Catholic Church; 6. imprinting of the baptismal character, which enables a person to receive the other sacraments, to participate in the priesthood of Christ through the sacred liturgy, and to grow in the likeness of Christ through personal sanctification. Baptism does not remove two effects of original sin, namely concupiscence and bodily mortality. However, it does enable a Christian to be sanctified by his struggle with concupiscence and gives him the title to rising in a glorified body on the last day. (p. 53)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Catholics believe that Protestant baptisms (trinitarian formula) are valid, and thus that Protestants receive all of the above gifts and are ushered into the kingdom of God and the Church as our Christian brothers and sisters in Christ. Canon IV on baptism<\/a> from the Council of Trent (Session VII: March 3, 1547) held that Protestant baptism was valid:<\/p>\n If any one says that the baptism which is even given by heretics in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, with the intention of doing what the Church does, is not true baptism; let him be anathema.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So Protestants are our brethren in Christ on that basis. Vatican II, in its\u00a0Decree on Ecumenism<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>from 1964, is very clear:<\/p>\n Men who believe in Christ and have been properly baptized are put in some, though imperfect, communion with the Catholic Church. . . . All who have been justified by faith in baptism are incorporated into Christ; they therefore have a right to be called Christians, and with good reason are accepted as brothers by the children of the Catholic Church. . . . [Protestant] liturgical actions most certainly can truly engender a life of grace, and . . .\u00a0 give access to the communion of salvation. (3)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Council of Florence proclaimed in its Decree for the Armenians (Nov. 22, 1439), that by baptism \u201cwe are made members of Christ and belong to his body, the Church\u201d. That\u2019s from Heinrich Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum: A Compendium of Creeds, Definitions and Declarations of the Catholic Church<\/em><\/a>, #1314, p. 339 in the 2012 edition. This is the standard collection of and reference source for Catholic dogmas and doctrines. In the same work is a related statement from the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 (\u201cChapter 1. The Catholic Faith\u201d):<\/p>\n The sacrament of baptism (which is celebrated in water at the invocation of God and of the undivided Trinity, that is, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit) conduces to the salvation of children as well as of adults when duly conferred by anyone according to the Church\u2019s form. (#802, p. 267)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In sum, Protestants who analyze Catholic soteriology and our views of Protestantism, often are disagreeing with straw men, rather than our authentic doctrines. They often say that Catholics started regarding Protestants as \u201cseparated brethren\u201d only in the 1960s, but as we just demonstrated, the same view was already present in ecumenical councils in 1215 and 1439 and moreover, it goes back at least as far as St. Augustine, who contended that Donatist<\/a>\u00a0baptism was valid.<\/p>\n Related to this are issues discussed in this lengthy article of mine: Anathemas of Trent & Excommunication: An Explanation<\/a> [5-20-03, incorporating portions from 1996 and 1998; abridged on 7-30-18]. It explains, among many other things, that at least some of the anathemas of Trent \u2014 some of the ones most objected to by Protestant \u2014 no longer apply to Protestants today.\u00a0 This is explained at length in an excellent 1996 article by Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin, cited at length in the above article: \u201cJustification by Faith Alone.\u201d<\/a> In this article, Akin refers to<\/p>\n a document written a few years ago under the auspices of the (Catholic) German Conference of Bishops and the bishops of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany (the Lutheran church). The purpose of the document, titled The Condemnations of the Reformation Era: Do They Still Divide?<\/i>, was to determine which of the sixteenth-century Catholic and Protestant condemnations are still applicable to the other party. Thus the joint committee which drafted the document went over the condemnations from Trent and assessed which of them no longer applied to Lutherans and the condemnations of the Augsburg Confession and the Smalcald Articles, etc., and assesses which of them are not applicable to Catholics.<\/p>\n When it came to the issue of justification by faith alone, the document concluded:<\/p>\n Today the difference about our interpretation of faith is no longer a reason for mutual condemnation . . . even though in the Reformation period it was seen as a profound antithesis of ultimate and decisive force. By this we mean the confrontation between the formulas \u2018by faith alone,\u2019 on the one hand, and \u2018faith, hope, and love,\u2019 on the other.<\/p>\n We may follow Cardinal Willebrand and say: \u2018In Luther\u2019s sense the word \u2018faith\u2019 by no means intends to exclude either works or love or even hope. We may quite justly say that Luther\u2019s concept of faith, if we take it in its fullest sense, surely means nothing other than what we in the Catholic Church term love\u2019 (1970, at the General Assembly of the World Lutheran Federation in Evian).<\/p>\n If we take all this to heart, we may say the following: If we translate from one language to another, then Protestant talk about justification through faith corresponds to Catholic talk about justification through grace; and on the other hand, Protestant doctrine understands substantially under the one word \u2018faith\u2019 what Catholic doctrine (following 1 Cor. 13:13) sums up in the triad of \u2018faith, hope, and love.\u2019 But in this case the mutual rejections in this question can be viewed as no longer applicable today<\/p>\n According to [Lutheran] Protestant interpretation, the faith that clings unconditionally to God\u2019s promise in Word and Sacrament is sufficient for righteousness before God, so that the renewal of the human being, without which there can be no faith, does not in itself make any contribution to justification. Catholic doctrine knows itself to be at one with the Protestant concern in emphasizing that the renewal of the human being does not \u2018contribute\u2019 to justification, and is certainly not a contribution to which he could make any appeal before God. Nevertheless it feels compelled to stress the renewal of the human being through justifying grace, for the sake of acknowledging God\u2019s newly creating power; although this renewal in faith, hope, and love is certainly nothing but a response to God\u2019s unfathomable grace. Only if we observe this distinction can we say<\/p>\n In addition to concluding that canons 9 and 12 of the Decree on Justification did not apply to modern Protestants, the document also concluded that canons 1-13, 16, 24, and 32 do not apply to modern Protestants (or at least modern Lutherans).<\/p>\n During the drafting of this document, the Protestant participants asked what kind of authority it would have in the Catholic Church, and the response given by Cardinal Ratzinger (who was the Catholic corresponding head of the joint commission) [the future Pope Benedict XVI] was that it would have considerable authority. . . .<\/p>\n Before the joint commission met, Cardinal Ratzinger and Lutheran Bishop Eduard Lohse (head of the Lutheran church in Germany) issued a letter expressing the purpose of the document, stating:<\/p>\n Our common witness is counteracted by judgments passed by one church on the other during the sixteenth century, judgments which found their way into the Confession of the Lutheran and Reformed churches and into the doctrinal decisions of the Council of Trent. According to the general conviction, these so-called condemnations no longer apply to our partner today. But this must not remain a merely private persuasion. It must be established in binding form<\/b><\/i>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I say this as a preface to noting that the commission concluded that canon 9 of Trent\u2019s\u00a0Decree on Justification\u00a0is not applicable\u00a0<\/b><\/i>to modern Protestants (or at least those who say saving faith is Galatians 5 faith). This is important because canon 9 is the one dealing with the \u201cfaith alone\u201d formula (and the one R.C. Sproul is continually hopping up and down about). It states:<\/p>\n If anyone says that the sinner is justified by faith alone, so as to understand that nothing else is required to cooperate in the attainment of the grace of justification . . . let him be anathema.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The reason this is not applicable to modern Protestants is that Protestants (at least the good ones) do not hold the view being condemned in this canon.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Jimmy Akin wrote another superb article entitled \u201cAnathema\u201d<\/a> (This Rock<\/em>, 4-1-00), which offers basically \u201ceverything you ever wanted to know about anathemas and excommunication.\u201d Among many other helpful things, he noted:<\/p>\n Vatican II did not use the term\u00a0anathema<\/em> in any of its documents.\u00a0 . . .<\/p>\n The 1917 Code of Canon Law<\/em>, . . . provided that, \u201cExcommunication . . . is called anathema especially when it is imposed with the solemnities that are described in the Roman Pontifical\u201d (CIC [1917] 2257 \u00a7\u00a7 1\u20132).<\/p>\n Yet the penalty was used so seldom that it was removed from the 1983\u00a0Code of Canon Law<\/em>. This means that today the penalty of anathema does not exist in Church law.\u00a0 . . .<\/p>\n 1.\u00a0An anathema sentenced a person to hell<\/em>. This is not the case. Sentencing someone to hell is a power that is God\u2019s alone, and the Church cannot exercise it.<\/p>\n 2.\u00a0An anathema was a sure sign that a person would go to hell<\/em>. Again, not true. Anathemas were only warranted by very grave sins, but there was no reason why the offender could not repent, and those who repent aren\u2019t damned.<\/p>\n 3.\u00a0An anathema was a sure sign that a person was not in a state of grace<\/em>. This is not true for two reasons: (a) The person may have repented since the time the anathema was issued, and (b) the person may not have been in a state of mortal sin at the time the anathema was issued. . . .<\/p>\n 6.\u00a0Anathemas applied to all Protestants<\/em>. The absurdity of this charge is obvious from the fact that anathemas did not take effect automatically. The limited number of hours in the day by itself would guarantee that only a handful of Protestants ever could have been anathematized. In practice the penalty tended to be applied only to notorious Catholic offenders who made a pretense of staying within the Catholic community.<\/p>\n 7.\u00a0Anathemas are still in place today<\/em>. This is the single most common falsehood one encounters regarding anathemas in the writings of anti-Catholics. They aren\u2019t in place today. The penalty was employed so infrequently over the course of history that it is doubtful that anyone under an anathema was alive when the new\u00a0Code of Canon Law<\/em>\u00a0came out in 1983, when even the penalty itself was abolished.<\/p>\n 8.\u00a0The Church cannot retract its anathemas<\/em>. Anti-Catholics love to repeat this falsehood for rhetorical flourish. But again, it isn\u2019t true. The Church is free to abolish any penalty of ecclesiastical law it wants to, and it did abolish this one. . . .<\/p>\n Unfortunately, there is little likelihood that passionate anti-Catholics such as [Mike] Gendron, [James] White, and numerous others will get the facts straight, openly admit their error, and actively work to counteract the damage they have done by spreading so much misinformation on this subject. But one day it will all get straightened out\u2014by God.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n See another related article by Jimmy Akin, \u201cAre YOU \u2018Anathema\u2019? How about Your Protestant Friend?\u201d<\/a> (6-8-11).<\/p>\n Protestants often object to the Catholic teaching of \u201coutside the Catholic Church is no salvation.\u201d Both Luther and Calvin taught the same thing, about the Christian Church as they conceived it:<\/p>\n He who would find Christ must first find the Church. . . . For outside of the Christian church there is no truth, no Christ, no salvation. (Martin Luther, Sermon: The Gospel for the Early Christmas Service<\/em>, 25 December 1521, in\u00a0Luther\u2019s Works<\/em>, vol. 52, pp. 39-40)<\/p>\n There is no other means of entering into life . . .\u00a0 beyond the pale of the Church no forgiveness of sins, no salvation, can be hoped for,) . . . the abandonment of the Church is always fatal. (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion<\/em>, 1559, Book IV, 1:4) . . .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n For\u00a0much<\/em>\u00a0more on this, see an excellent article by my friend, Rod Bennett, hosted on my blog:\u00a0Baptismal Ecumenism: A New Evangelistic Paradigm\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0[8-11-17]; also my very in-depth article,\u00a0Catholicism & Non-Catholic Salvation (Vs. Gavin Ortlund) + How Early Protestants Widely Damned Other Protestants Who Held Different Theological Views<\/a>\u00a0[2-9-24]<\/p>\n Referring to the period of time after this initial phase of regeneration and justification, the Bible speaks of\u00a0being vigilant and standing fast<\/a>, etc. I\u2019ve collected\u00a075 passages about\u00a0salvation as a process<\/a>\u00a0and 150 about\u00a0the possibility of apostasy<\/a>. Protestants\u00a0believe that good works inevitably flow from a genuine faith. We agree, but we also add that these post-regenerative\u00a0works are\u00a0organically connected to grace and faith<\/i> and hence are said to be part of the overall equation of justification and salvation (and this gets to my articles that collect Bible verses against faith alone). We don\u2019t separate sanctification from justification and regard it as non-salvific. Faith contains good works within itself, by definition. James is the most explicit about this, but there is plenty in Paul, too.<\/p>\n Baptist apologist Norman Geisler has stated that this was the view of the Christian Church from the time of Paul and up until Luther, and Anglican historian of justification Alister McGrath states that it was the\u00a0view of St. Augustine up till Luther and Calvin. See my article,\u00a0Sola Fide (Faith Alone) Nonexistent Before the Protestant Revolt in 1517<\/a>\u00a0(Geisler & McGrath) [Catholic365<\/i>, 10-31-23]<\/p>\n We believe that Christians and disciples of Jesus can fall out of the grace of God and that it can happen through committing objectively mortal [serious, grave] sin <\/a>and<\/b><\/i>\u00a0being subjectively aware with full knowledge and full consent of the will. It\u2019s rectified through an\u00a0examination of conscience<\/a>, repentance,\u00a0formal confession, and absolution<\/a>. Apart from this, we have a\u00a0moral assurance of salvation<\/a>, that I argue is as \u201cassured\u201d as any Protestant view. I certainly feel as assured of my ultimate salvation as I ever did as a Protestant.<\/p>\n Grace-enabled, post-regeneration good works are the outward expression of infused justification<\/a>\u00a0and God\u00a0transforming our lives through the Holy Spirit and His grace and power<\/a>, but of course it\u2019s also an internal thing,\u00a0of the heart: being more and more holy and righteous. Good works are also meritorious, and are rewarded by God. I have\u00a050 passages about that, too<\/a>. St. Augustine wrote that merit was \u201cGod crowning His own gifts.\u201d \u00a0Works play a role in salvation, caused by grace\u00a0<\/a>and through\u00a0faith<\/a>. All three\u00a0must be together<\/a>, otherwise, it becomes heretical antinomianism (no works at all are necessary either in the Christian life, or to be saved) or Pelagianism (works can save without God\u2019s grace).<\/p>\n We don\u2019t apply \u201csaved\u201d (let alone \u201cre-saved\u201d) so much to the current life. We stress what Protestants call \u201ceschatological salvation\u201d: being saved in the end, found to be in the elect, and heaven-bound. But we do talk about a \u201cmoral assurance<\/a> of [final] salvation\u201d. Losing that status comes through direct rebellion against God or other mortal sins, serious enough to exclude on from heaven, as the Bible refers to several times (1 Cor 6:9-10; Gal 5:19-21; Eph 5:5; Heb 12:14; Rev 21:27; 22:15).<\/p>\n Ideally, if we follow God wholeheartedly, we will become increasingly\u00a0sanctified as time goes on, though not perfect. Our belief here is similar to that of John Wesley and the early Methodists and the various \u201choliness\u201d movements that\u00a0derived from that. Baptism is the normative way that we receive regeneration<\/a>\u00a0and also the Holy Spirit,\u00a0so we speak of it as being salvific: not unlike the view of Lutherans and traditional\u00a0Anglicans.\u00a0 We argue that Jesus also spoke of\u00a0receiving Him in the Holy Eucharist is directly tied to salvation<\/a>. Two sacraments, in other words.<\/p>\n . . . With Many Links for Further Study, and Clarification That Catholic Anathemas Against Fellow Christian Protestants Are No Longer in Force \u00a0 Catholics believe in an initial justification that comes entirely by God\u2019s grace (apart from our doing anything, at this stage). It\u2019s given to those (above the age of reason) who accept […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2331,"featured_media":97018,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51,50],"tags":[19555,1482,1213,1471,1120,1207],"class_list":["post-97015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ecumenism-christian-unity","category-salvation-justification","tag-catholic-salvation","tag-catholic-soteriology","tag-faith-works","tag-grace-alone","tag-infused-justification","tag-synergy"],"yoast_head":"\n\n
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