The Roman Catholic View

R.O.M. distinguishes between mortal sin and venial sin. Mortal sin is called mortal sin because it kills the grace of justification that's in your soul. Calvin opposed that by saying that all sins are mortal in the sense that they deserve death, but no sin is mortal to the Christian that would destroy your salvation. But in the Roman view, if you commit a mortal sin, if you die in mortal sin, you go to hell.

If you, as a Christian, commit a mortal sin and die, you go to hell? That doesn't sound like good news, but that is part of the Roman Catholic view of salvation, and one of the matters that Protestants were protesting during the 16th century Reformation. This is the Wednesday edition of Renewing Your Mind.

I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham. When you examine the official teachings of the Roman Catholic Church compared to the teaching of Scripture, it really is a contrast between bad news and good news, and that's why the Reformers pursued Reform, a return to the clear teaching of the Word of God. In the series that you're hearing this week from R.C. Sproul, he unpacks further the history and theology of the Reformation, and you can own the series, study guide, and the hardcover edition of the Legacy of Luther when you give a gift of any amount in support of Renewing Your Mind at renewingyourmind.org. Well, to help us better understand the Roman Catholic view, here's Dr. Sproul. If you take the time to read Luther's Ninety-Five Theses, you'll see in there that there's very little about the doctrine of justification. But Luther's discussion that he wanted to have with the faculty over the theses had to do with the whole system of doctrine that was associated with indulgences.

And initially, Luther wasn't opposed to indulgences in itself, but the abuse of the selling of them that was being carried out by Tetzel. However, when he began writing up his Ninety-Five Theses, and if you read them, you will see that he raises questions about the whole system that's tied to indulgences and to the Roman Catholic understanding of justification and of the gospel. And for us to understand, as I've said, the Reformation concept, I think the best way to do it is against the backdrop of the Roman Catholic view. Now, the Roman Catholic doctrine of justification was not set forth in all of its complexity overnight by Augustine or later by Gregory the Great or anything like that, but rather the system of salvation within Rome took centuries and centuries to develop with a layer at a time upon another layer. And from a theological perspective, the Roman Catholic system of salvation is called sacerdotalism, meaning that salvation is wrought through the ministrations of the church and of the priesthood. And the doctrine of justification wasn't defined until after the beginning of the Reformation when we saw what was called the Counter-Reformation. The Roman Catholic Church responded to Protestantism with a three-pronged counter-move.

The first was with the beginning of the Spanish Inquisition in which people who embraced these heretical doctrines of the Protestants were subjected to severe forms of torture. And secondly, the founding of the Jesuit order, a special order of priests to deal with the intellectual issues of the day, the society of Jesus, founded by Ignatius Leola. Sometimes if you'll see writings by Jesuit scholars, you'll see their name and instead of after their name the initials PhD, you'll see instead SJ, society of Jesus, means they're Jesuits.

They're the creme de la creme of the academic priests in the Roman Catholic Church. But the major element of the Counter-Reformation was the calling of an international ecumenical council like Vatican II, Vatican I, Constantinople, Ephesus, Chalcedon, those great councils of church history. And in the middle of the sixteenth century, this council was called and began in Trento, Italy and is called the Council of Trent. Sometimes references to decisions of Trent are called tridentines.

So, if you hear that phrase from now and then, the tridentine view, means those views espoused and set down in concrete officially day, fee day, was at the Council of Trent. Now, that council went through several sessions over several years, but the most important one for our consideration of justification was the sixth session of the Council of Trent in which the sixth session does two things. In the first part of the session, it defines the Roman Catholic view of justification. The second part includes these twenty-some canons, which are pronouncements of judgment against heretical views or anathemas.

You know, if anyone says this, let him be anathema, let him be cursed, or let him be damned. And so, it's still a debate, which we can talk about a little later, among contemporaries as to how definitive Trent is. But I just mentioned in passing that the decrees of the Council of Trent were reaffirmed in toto in the Catholic catechism of the 1990s.

And so, officially within the Roman church, even though you'll find people in America and Canada and the western wing of the church who are loose on Trent, the curia of the Latin wing of the church and the papacy still affirms unequivocally the decrees and canons of Trent. So, that's what we're going to do to understand its view of justification. Now, before again I expound that so often in the discussion and debate between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, both sides set up straw of persons and attack things that aren't true.

They slander each other. You know, I hear it all the time, well, we believe in justification by faith, Rome believes in justification by works, as if faith wasn't significant. Or we believe in justification by grace, Rome believes in justification by merit, and that's a falsification and oversimplification. Or some say we believe in justification by Christ, they believe in justification by their own activities.

That's not true. So, let's ask the question, what does Rome teach on this question of justification? Well, in the sixth session, it starts off this way by saying that the first step in justification is the sacrament of baptism, which Rome defines as the instrumental cause of justification, the instrumental cause of justification. When we say justification by, we're using the instrumental data, we're talking about the means by which something takes place.

That distinction of that distinction of instrumental causality goes back to Aristotle's study of causes, and some of you may be familiar with that, where he distinguished among the efficient cause, the formal cause, the final cause, the material cause, the instrumental cause, and so on, all these different subtle distinctions about causality. Well, Rome believes that the instrument by which a person is justified initially is the sacrament of baptism. What happens in that sacrament is the infusion or pouring into the soul of the person baptized the righteousness of Christ, or what is also sometimes called justifying grace. Now, there's a debate there of subtleties with Roman theologians about their whole understanding of grace. The language that they use describes grace as some kind of substance or thing that is poured into the soul, that has a habitus, it inhabits the soul. We speak of grace as being an activity of God, a generous treatment of us that we don't deserve, but we don't think in terms of grace in substantive language. But again, to understand the Roman view, you have this grace infused or poured into the soul, and that it affects what it intends to affect ex opera operate. That means through the working of the works.

They don't like to use the language automatic, but really it is automatic. If you are baptized, you do receive this infusion of grace and are at that state in a state of justification. Now, to continue in that state of justification, you have to cooperate with that infused grace.

The language that they use, the Trent, is the language cooperare et assentare, to cooperate with and assent to this grace that has been infused into you. So that when you cooperate with this grace and assent to this grace, then the righteousness that has been infused is now inherens. That is, it's inherent in you so that you are righteous in the sight of God.

And the reason why you're righteous in the sight of God is because you really are righteous. You've cooperated and ascended to this infused grace, and so you're in a state of justification until or unless you commit a mortal sin. Now, at that point, Rome distinguishes between mortal sin and venial sin. Venial sin is real sin and needs to be confessed and forgiven and all of that, but it doesn't destroy your saving grace that inheres in your soul. Mortal sin, however, is called mortal sin because it kills the grace of justification that's in your soul. Calvin, you know, opposed that by saying that all sin are mortal in the sense that they deserve death, but no sin is mortal to the Christian that would destroy your salvation. But in the Roman view, if you commit a mortal sin, if you die in mortal sin, you go to hell. Now, the first thing you have to know here is that you can have real faith, faith that is necessary for salvation, and have saving faith and still commit mortal sin.

So, let me explain that for just a second. We distinguish between a necessary condition and a sufficient condition. If I want to build a fire out in the woods, I need a certain amount of oxygen to have a fire occur. Oxygen is a necessary condition under normal circumstances for fire to occur, but it's not a sufficient condition. If it were a sufficient condition, it would mean all you need to have a fire is the presence of oxygen.

If that were the case, then what? The whole world would be on fire right now because wherever there's oxygen, there would be fire. So, you couldn't have oxygen without having fire.

Now, the idea is you can't have fire without having oxygen, but you can have oxygen without having fire. Now, using that illustration between necessary and sufficient condition, the Roman view of faith is that faith is a necessary condition for justification, but not a sufficient one. You can have true faith and not be justified. Whereas, in the Protestant view, faith is not just a necessary condition for justification, it's a sufficient condition for justification. If you have true faith, you have justification. You can't have true faith and not have justification, and you can't have justification without having true faith.

Am I going too fast? All right. Now, expanding on this mortal sin idea and on faith, in the sixth session of Trent, Rome defines faith as having this function. It has a three-fold function with respect to justification. Rome calls faith the initium, the fundamentum, and the rodex of justification. Now, to translate that into English, faith is the initiation, the first step of our justification.

So, when people say, Rome believes in justification without faith or just by works, no, no, no. You have to have faith as the initiating element for your justification. It's also the fundamentum, the foundation upon which justification is established. And thirdly, it's the rodex, the root or the core of justification. So, justification is not some loose-fitting option that you can have or not have in the Roman Catholic thing. It's a necessary condition for justification. It's the initiation, the foundation, and the root of justification. But if you have that faith, you can still commit mortal sin.

And here's where the problem comes in. If you commit mortal sin, you lose your justification. And if you lose your justification, you need what Rome calls, Trent, the second plank of justification for those who make shipwreck of their souls. Now, the idea of walking the plank or having a plank on a ship or a different plank of like the Republican program, they have planks or they have positions that they take.

Well, here Rome is using the naval idea. You lose your salvation and your justification by mortal sin. Now, the question is, how can you get re-justified? Well, you would think that the answer to that question would be, well, you just get baptized again. But they say, no, you don't get baptized again. There's an indelible mark that's given to you when your original baptism you never lose, no matter.

Even if you go to hell, you'll have that indelible mark. And so you don't have to get re-baptized, but you need another sacrament instead of the sacrament of baptism in order to be re-justified. And that's the sacrament of penance. And that's at the core and center of the controversy here in the sixteenth century.

Why? Well, the elements of penance are these. There's first of all confession. If you've committed mortal sin, you've got to go to confession. You've got to confess that sin to the priest. And that confession has to be genuine.

It can't merely be attrition. Attrition is repenting out of a fear of punishment. You know, like the little kid when you catch him in his hand in the cookie jar and you said, please don't spank me, please don't spank me. He's all very sorry because he's going to get punished, not because he's done something wrong. But true contrition is like you would find in David's Psalm 51, where his heart is broken before God. And he has this broken and contrite heart because he realizes he's sinned against a holy and righteous God. So you come to confess and you say, you know, Father, I've done this, and I'm confessing I'm repenting not only out of a fear of God's punishment but because I have offended Thee and so on in the prayer of confession. The second part of the sacrament is priestly absolution, te absolvo, the priest says.

Now Protestants get all exercised about that. They say, I don't have to go to confession by sin. I don't need to go to a priest.

I go directly to God. You know, at the same time, we say that you are supposed to confess your sins. There's nothing wrong with confessing your sins to another person or to your pastor. There's nothing wrong with the pastor giving the assurance of pardon as we do regularly in our liturgy. We're saying if you confess your sins, God is faithful and just to forgive you your sins and to cleanse you of all unrighteousness. When the priest says, te absolvo, I absolve you, he's not saying that I have the inherent power to forgive sins.

Only God has that power. But he is exercising a delegated right. He is exercising a power endowed with him when he goes to the sacrament of holy orders, and he becomes consecrated as a priest. Now part of being a priest is he has the authority to pronounce the forgiveness of God upon a penitent person.

So far, no harm, no foul. It's the third part of the sacrament of penance that created all the stir. And that's this. In the third part, after you have priestly absolution to be fully restored to justification, you must do works of satisfaction in order to be justified. Here's where the works come in. Works of satisfaction such as saying so many Hail Marys, so many Our Fathers, giving alms, doing some other good deed. These are works that are required in order to be justified. The Reformed view is justification is by faith alone in the Roman Catholic view.

It's faith plus works in order to be justified. Now these works are called works that bring with them congruous merit. Meritum De Congruo is the language of Rome. Congruous merit, which is distinguished from Meritum De Condigno, or condign merit. Condign merit is merit that is so meritorious, so righteous, that it requires a blessing or a reward from God. God would be unjust not to re-justify a person if that person had condign merit. But Rome is saying, no, the sacrament doesn't bestow condign merit. It bestows congruous merit, which means that it's not which means that if a person does these works of satisfaction, it is now fitting or suitable or congruous that God reward them by restoring that person to justification. In other words, God would be acting incongruously if He didn't restore this person to salvation. You get it.

So you have those things. Now the person is back justified, and he stays justified until or unless he commits another mortal sin. If he commits a mortal sin, he can die and go to hell, or he can go back to that sacrament of penance and be restored again and again and again and again.

And again. Now if the person dies with any impurity on his or her soul, then the person goes to purgatory. Purgatory is so-called because it is the place of purging.

It is that place that purges you from any impurity that you die with. You may spend two weeks in purgatory. You may spend two million years in purgatory, depending how much you had to get cleaned up in order to get into heaven. But you will not get into heaven until or unless you are inherently righteous. Now that, in a nutshell, is Rome's version of the gospel. And you can see the radical contrast between that and the Reformation view, where in the Reformation view, the moment I have faith, I have heaven. There's no purgatory.

I have eternal life. I'm adopted into the kingdom of God, and my sins are forgiven once and for all. And so the contrast between these two views is the contrast between good news and bad news, two different, radically different understandings of the gospel. Now there's still more that I need to talk about briefly about the Roman Catholic view with respect to the indulgences and the power of the keys and the treasury of merits.

That's all part of the system that Rome employed and continues to employ in their understanding of salvation. Two radically different understandings of the gospel, one good news and the other bad news. As we approach October 31st, the anniversary of Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany, we're considering the history and theology surrounding these events so that we are each reminded of the beauty of the gospel and why we must take a bold stand in our day, like Luther did, not to compromise, but to boldly and compassionately proclaim the whole counsel of God. To better help you do that, you can work through the complete 10-part study, Justified by Faith Alone. Walk through the study guide and read the book, The Legacy of Luther, when you give a gift of any amount at renewingyourmind.org, or when you call us at 800 435 4343. You'll have lifetime digital access to the series and study guide, and we'll get a hardcover copy of the Legacy of Luther book to you in the mail. Be quick and use the link in the podcast show notes or at renewingyourmind.org. As Protestants, we believe in justification by faith alone. But what do each of those words mean? RC Sproul will define our terms tomorrow, here on Renewing Your Mind.