©2023 Victor R. Claveau, MJ
The process of changing us from sinners into saints is called justification; it makes us just: good, holy. The majority of Christians are agreed that Jesus Christ is the one responsible for our justification; He made it possible by his death on the cross. He redeemed us, paid back to God the debt we had incurred by our sins, liberated us from our slavery to the devil, opened the gate of heaven for us, and made possible our adoption as sons and daughters of God.
The argument starts, however, when we try to figure out the means Jesus uses to share the benefits of His Redemption with each one of us individually. How are your, and my, sins forgiven? The fact of the Redemption does not mean that you and I share in it automatically. Our share is there ready for us; but how do we get it? On the Cross, Jesus acquired the means of making all people Saints. But all people are actually Saints. What method does Jesus use to make living Saints out of you and me?
The basic answer is that some kind of effective spiritual contact must be established between Jesus Christ and ourselves. His human soul, now in heaven, is simply overflowing with the graces He obtained by His death on the cross. If our sin-shredded souls are united with His grace-filled soul, the overflow will come to us; and we will share His justice, His sanctity, and His union with the Divinity. We will be prepared for heaven.
There is no great discovery of theologians involved in this; Jesus made it clear by His own words: “I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing. Anyone who does not remain in me will be thrown out like a branch and wither; people will gather them and throw them into a fire and they will be burned” (John 15:5-6).
Thus far, most of us are still together: Lutherans, Calvinists, Catholics. But the next question separates us: By what means is this effective contact with Jesus Christ established? Yet even here the separation is not readily apparent because we all agree that faith is the fundamental means of contact. We could hardly doubt it since Jesus Himself taught it (Mark 16:15), and St. Paul insists upon it all through his writings, especially in the Epistle to the Romans.
However, when we say “faith,” we do not all mean exactly the same thing. For the Catholic it is a firm acceptance of the teachings of Christ, the Son of God. For most Protestants faith has much of the fiduciary in it; it is less an intellectual assent than a confidential assurance. It is a firm conviction of the fact and effectiveness of personal justification through the merits of Jesus Christ.
Our real differences, however, center around the adequacy of faith alone to establish a thoroughly effective contact between ourselves and Christ so that His justice will come to our souls. And there are differences, too, in our various appraisals of the results of this justification in our souls.
Catholics hold faith to be the basic requirement, first in time and importance; but we believe that it must be a practical faith, animated by charity and productive of the works of love. Protestants, generally, following Luther, maintain that faith is enough. They say that we Catholics take the credit for salvation away from Jesus and try to hoist ourselves to heaven by tugging at our own bootstraps, with only a grateful nod to the Savior for a helpful boost. Some hold that we consider this boost to be mechanical; He lifts us to heaven on a sacramental crane, and once we are there our good works gain us entrance. I will answer that charge later.
The Protestant conception of justification stems almost entirely from a tremendous subjective discovery made by Martin Luther in 1512 while he was in the tower of his monastery, meditating on the seventeenth verse of the first chapter of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: “For in it [i.e., the Gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” From that discovery Luther evolved his own ideas of justification by faith; later Calvin followed him, but added emphasis on God’s predestining choice of those whom He will justify.
Luther was a good theologian, but he was also a monk with a conscience; and that conscience troubled him. He was deeply aware of sin, without confidence of forgiveness. He longed for the interior peace, which would come from a definite assurance of his personal salvation. His anxiety of conscience had been stimulated by a frightening concept of God’s justice; he had always understood it as the rigid justice of a stern judge who demands that we measure up, even though He must surely know that we can never do it. Then that day in the tower it suddenly dawned on him that the justice of God is not a demanding thing, but a giving thing. It does not simply require us to be just; it makes us just.
This soul-shaking discovery should not have startled a Catholic theologian. It represented the traditional Catholic teaching; but for Luther it was delightfully new. Apparently, his ideas on the subject had come from the Nominalists, especially Ockham, who had distorted the Catholic notion of justification into a kind of Pelagianism, the notion that we work out our own sanctification. In any case, in the light of this new understanding, Luther went on to meditate on other words of St. Paul, like Rom. 3:28: “For we hold that a man is justified by faith apart from works of law.” And from such words, interpreted in the light of his personal needs for comfort and security, he evolved his doctrine that our justification comes entirely from the merits of Christ through our faith in Him, and without our personal efforts having any effective part in the process.
We Catholics believe that Luther simplified the process of justification too much. He had attained his understanding of spiritual freedom by a long, hard struggle within his own conscience; so that it was very deep and personal with him. The force of his inner conviction made the idea dynamic: other tortured souls, struggling with guilt and anxiety, must know the comfort of this discovery.
Luther’s ideas of justification were determined also by his notion of original sin. He believed that man had quite ruined his nature by sin, to the point that he is incapable of doing anything good. Since our whole nature has become sinful, our every act exudes from sin, no matter how good our intentions or how strong our efforts. Furthermore, original sin destroyed our free-will, so that we are determined to sin in spite of ourselves.
How then was it possible for this sinful nature to be justified? Can sin be made holy? Obviously not. But when sin is covered up by the merits of Christ, God can overlook it, and not impute it to us. We must recognize our sinfulness in true humility, repent sincerely, and then when we believe in Christ with firm confidence, He so thoroughly hides our sins beneath His that He justifies us in spite of them. We remain sinners underneath, but He tucks us under His own cloak and takes us through the gate of heaven with Him.
It would seem that if followed with thorough logic, this idea of justification would overthrow the practical basis of sound morality. Our will is not free and we are incapable of good, and no matter what we do we contribute nothing to our salvation. Jesus sanctifies us in spite of our sins. Where is the incentive to goodness? Apparently, in Lutheran practice, such logic is short-circuited. Lutheran morality has always been rigid; and whether you have free-will or not, most Protestants will hold you to personal accounting. None of them believes, in a practical way, that it doesn’t matter what you do. They simply insist that Jesus saves us, no matter what we do, if we have real faith in Him. And if we have the faith we will be inspired to live by it.
There are two good aspects to Luther’s doctrine: (1) It gives due importance to the justice of God and the merits of Jesus; by de-emphasizing the human factor it emphasizes the supernatural nature of our justification. (2) Psychologically, it should liberate us from our scruples and worries. It leaves the work of justification entirely up to someone else; except for our trusting faith we remain passive in the process, with no need for fear of failure.
So much for Luther; now back to the Catholics! What do we Catholics believe about the process of uniting sinful man to holy God? How do we participate in the merits of Christ’s death?
The Catholic idea of justification is not based upon any single text of Scripture. We give full attention to Romans 3:28, but we give equal consideration to many other statements of St. Paul, to various words of Jesus Himself, and even to the Epistle of St. James. We fit them all together into a complete doctrine. It is not a simple doctrine, but it gives due weight to all the truths which enter into it: to God’s goodness, power, and love, and to Man’s free-will; to the evil of sin and the effectiveness of grace; to the essential role of faith and the requirement of love; to man’s complete dependence on grace and the necessity of his co-operation with it.
Obviously, space does not permit me to quote many texts; here are only a few typical ones. Jesus sent His Apostles into the whole world to make disciples of all nations, and He told them: “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation. 16 He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned: (Mk 16:15-16). The point is that in addition to believing, we must be baptized.
A lawyer inquired of Jesus: “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read?” And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And Jesus told him: And he said to him, “You have answered right; do this, and you will live” (Lk 10:25-18). “This” is in addition to faith.
A certain ruler asked him, “Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” (Luke 18:18). And Jesus reminded him that he should keep the Commandments and was advised to practice poverty and charity, and then to follow Christ.
The words of St. James have always entered sharply into the controversy. He tells us that we must “be doers of the word and not hearers only” (James 1:22), and his challenge is direct: What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him? (James 2:14).
The most rewarding source of study oh justification is St. Paul, not n an isolated passage or two, but in all fourteen Epistles and particularly in those shorter letters of love and union: Ephesians, Phillipians, and Colossians. He tells us how we are buried with Christ in Baptism and rise again with Him that we may be dead to sin but alive to God, in Christ Jesus. He reminds us that we must strip off the old man with his evil deeds and put on the new, with his heart of virtue and forgiveness, and above all, charity, which is the bond of perfection.
In eloquent repetition St. Paul shows his delight in the effects of grace in our souls: it transforms, elevates, and unites. It permits us to do all things in Him who strengthens us; it permits us to walk worthy of God and please Him in all things, bearing fruit in every good work; and it permits us to grow in union with Christ by every work of truth we perform in love.
Looking at the whole picture of justification, in all its love and beauty, we might sum it up this way:
Our justification comes entirely from Christ. The basis of our effective union with Him is faith; but this faith is supernatural, and we cannot acquire it by our own efforts. It is a gift of God. We believe in response to his grace.
Then after faith we are normally joined to Christ in Baptism, the instrument He gave us to affect our union with Him. Love, which is grounded in faith, is the effective bond of this union; and from it we share in His divine life, which permits us to live with Him for eternity, and enough of His divine nature to permit us to share, by adoption, in the paternal love of the Father.
By way of exception, the essential effects of justification may come into the soul before actual Baptism. The strong faith, which God gives us may produce an active love of God, which is also His gift; and thus, we are brought into sanctifying union with Him by the ardor of our desire. With a child the process is reversed: Baptism gives him the faith, hope, and love which make him fit for heaven, even though he is not able to make present use of them.
When this sanctifying life of grace has come into our souls we are so thoroughly incorporated into Christ and so elevated and transformed by His presence in us that we live and act on a supernatural level, on the plane of heaven. Everything we do has value for heaven as long as it is a work of truth, done in love. We grow in union with God by living and acting with Him. Our natural acts could have no value for heaven, but they are given value by the grace of Christ. They share so thoroughly in His merits that they please God, and He attributes merit to them.
In all of this we recognize the devastating effects of original sin and the intrinsic evil of our own personal sins. But we do not believe that original sin destroyed our free-will; it only weakened it badly. It did not make out nature essentially sinful; it only immersed us in sin. The grace of Christ, in our justification, pulls us out of the mire of sin and cleanses us by immersion in God’s love and goodness.
We believe that the process of justification has its effects deep within the soul. Sins are not covered up; they are removed, as regards their guilt. The essence of sin was separation from God; justification unites us to Him. But the taking away of sin is hardly more than a preliminary feature of justification; it gives us the life of heaven, the faculties for knowing and loving God in heaven, and for loving and serving Him meritoriously here on earth .
The Catholic doctrine cannot give the ironclad internal assurance of salvation which comes from a conviction of predestination or an experience of a trusting faith, but it does teach a loving confidence in the mercy and goodness of God, in His effective desire for the salvation of all men, and in the abundant opportunity He provides for each of us. Understanding of the Catholic doctrine should not only bring tranquillity of conscience in the certainty of forgiveness, but also that peace and happiness which comes from awareness of God’s love for us and His presence with us. Furthermore, it offers that ardent incentive for good works and self-denial, which can come only from awareness of love and confidence in our ability to return love in a manner acceptable to the One loved.
Catholic View of Justification
©2023 Victor R. Claveau, MJ
The process of changing us from sinners into saints is called justification; it makes us just: good, holy. The majority of Christians are agreed that Jesus Christ is the one responsible for our justification; He made it possible by his death on the cross. He redeemed us, paid back to God the debt we had incurred by our sins, liberated us from our slavery to the devil, opened the gate of heaven for us, and made possible our adoption as sons and daughters of God.
The argument starts, however, when we try to figure out the means Jesus uses to share the benefits of His Redemption with each one of us individually. How are your, and my, sins forgiven? The fact of the Redemption does not mean that you and I share in it automatically. Our share is there ready for us; but how do we get it? On the Cross, Jesus acquired the means of making all people Saints. But all people are actually Saints. What method does Jesus use to make living Saints out of you and me?
The basic answer is that some kind of effective spiritual contact must be established between Jesus Christ and ourselves. His human soul, now in heaven, is simply overflowing with the graces He obtained by His death on the cross. If our sin-shredded souls are united with His grace-filled soul, the overflow will come to us; and we will share His justice, His sanctity, and His union with the Divinity. We will be prepared for heaven.
There is no great discovery of theologians involved in this; Jesus made it clear by His own words: “I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing. Anyone who does not remain in me will be thrown out like a branch and wither; people will gather them and throw them into a fire and they will be burned” (John 15:5-6).
Thus far, most of us are still together: Lutherans, Calvinists, Catholics. But the next question separates us: By what means is this effective contact with Jesus Christ established? Yet even here the separation is not readily apparent because we all agree that faith is the fundamental means of contact. We could hardly doubt it since Jesus Himself taught it (Mark 16:15), and St. Paul insists upon it all through his writings, especially in the Epistle to the Romans.
However, when we say “faith,” we do not all mean exactly the same thing. For the Catholic it is a firm acceptance of the teachings of Christ, the Son of God. For most Protestants faith has much of the fiduciary in it; it is less an intellectual assent than a confidential assurance. It is a firm conviction of the fact and effectiveness of personal justification through the merits of Jesus Christ.
Our real differences, however, center around the adequacy of faith alone to establish a thoroughly effective contact between ourselves and Christ so that His justice will come to our souls. And there are differences, too, in our various appraisals of the results of this justification in our souls.
Catholics hold faith to be the basic requirement, first in time and importance; but we believe that it must be a practical faith, animated by charity and productive of the works of love. Protestants, generally, following Luther, maintain that faith is enough. They say that we Catholics take the credit for salvation away from Jesus and try to hoist ourselves to heaven by tugging at our own bootstraps, with only a grateful nod to the Savior for a helpful boost. Some hold that we consider this boost to be mechanical; He lifts us to heaven on a sacramental crane, and once we are there our good works gain us entrance. I will answer that charge later.
The Protestant conception of justification stems almost entirely from a tremendous subjective discovery made by Martin Luther in 1512 while he was in the tower of his monastery, meditating on the seventeenth verse of the first chapter of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: “For in it [i.e., the Gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” From that discovery Luther evolved his own ideas of justification by faith; later Calvin followed him, but added emphasis on God’s predestining choice of those whom He will justify.
Luther was a good theologian, but he was also a monk with a conscience; and that conscience troubled him. He was deeply aware of sin, without confidence of forgiveness. He longed for the interior peace, which would come from a definite assurance of his personal salvation. His anxiety of conscience had been stimulated by a frightening concept of God’s justice; he had always understood it as the rigid justice of a stern judge who demands that we measure up, even though He must surely know that we can never do it. Then that day in the tower it suddenly dawned on him that the justice of God is not a demanding thing, but a giving thing. It does not simply require us to be just; it makes us just.
This soul-shaking discovery should not have startled a Catholic theologian. It represented the traditional Catholic teaching; but for Luther it was delightfully new. Apparently, his ideas on the subject had come from the Nominalists, especially Ockham, who had distorted the Catholic notion of justification into a kind of Pelagianism, the notion that we work out our own sanctification. In any case, in the light of this new understanding, Luther went on to meditate on other words of St. Paul, like Rom. 3:28: “For we hold that a man is justified by faith apart from works of law.” And from such words, interpreted in the light of his personal needs for comfort and security, he evolved his doctrine that our justification comes entirely from the merits of Christ through our faith in Him, and without our personal efforts having any effective part in the process.
We Catholics believe that Luther simplified the process of justification too much. He had attained his understanding of spiritual freedom by a long, hard struggle within his own conscience; so that it was very deep and personal with him. The force of his inner conviction made the idea dynamic: other tortured souls, struggling with guilt and anxiety, must know the comfort of this discovery.
Luther’s ideas of justification were determined also by his notion of original sin. He believed that man had quite ruined his nature by sin, to the point that he is incapable of doing anything good. Since our whole nature has become sinful, our every act exudes from sin, no matter how good our intentions or how strong our efforts. Furthermore, original sin destroyed our free-will, so that we are determined to sin in spite of ourselves.
How then was it possible for this sinful nature to be justified? Can sin be made holy? Obviously not. But when sin is covered up by the merits of Christ, God can overlook it, and not impute it to us. We must recognize our sinfulness in true humility, repent sincerely, and then when we believe in Christ with firm confidence, He so thoroughly hides our sins beneath His that He justifies us in spite of them. We remain sinners underneath, but He tucks us under His own cloak and takes us through the gate of heaven with Him.
It would seem that if followed with thorough logic, this idea of justification would overthrow the practical basis of sound morality. Our will is not free and we are incapable of good, and no matter what we do we contribute nothing to our salvation. Jesus sanctifies us in spite of our sins. Where is the incentive to goodness? Apparently, in Lutheran practice, such logic is short-circuited. Lutheran morality has always been rigid; and whether you have free-will or not, most Protestants will hold you to personal accounting. None of them believes, in a practical way, that it doesn’t matter what you do. They simply insist that Jesus saves us, no matter what we do, if we have real faith in Him. And if we have the faith we will be inspired to live by it.
There are two good aspects to Luther’s doctrine: (1) It gives due importance to the justice of God and the merits of Jesus; by de-emphasizing the human factor it emphasizes the supernatural nature of our justification. (2) Psychologically, it should liberate us from our scruples and worries. It leaves the work of justification entirely up to someone else; except for our trusting faith we remain passive in the process, with no need for fear of failure.
So much for Luther; now back to the Catholics! What do we Catholics believe about the process of uniting sinful man to holy God? How do we participate in the merits of Christ’s death?
The Catholic idea of justification is not based upon any single text of Scripture. We give full attention to Romans 3:28, but we give equal consideration to many other statements of St. Paul, to various words of Jesus Himself, and even to the Epistle of St. James. We fit them all together into a complete doctrine. It is not a simple doctrine, but it gives due weight to all the truths which enter into it: to God’s goodness, power, and love, and to Man’s free-will; to the evil of sin and the effectiveness of grace; to the essential role of faith and the requirement of love; to man’s complete dependence on grace and the necessity of his co-operation with it.
Obviously, space does not permit me to quote many texts; here are only a few typical ones. Jesus sent His Apostles into the whole world to make disciples of all nations, and He told them: “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation. 16 He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned: (Mk 16:15-16). The point is that in addition to believing, we must be baptized.
A lawyer inquired of Jesus: “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read?” And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And Jesus told him: And he said to him, “You have answered right; do this, and you will live” (Lk 10:25-18). “This” is in addition to faith.
A certain ruler asked him, “Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” (Luke 18:18). And Jesus reminded him that he should keep the Commandments and was advised to practice poverty and charity, and then to follow Christ.
The words of St. James have always entered sharply into the controversy. He tells us that we must “be doers of the word and not hearers only” (James 1:22), and his challenge is direct: What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him? (James 2:14).
The most rewarding source of study oh justification is St. Paul, not n an isolated passage or two, but in all fourteen Epistles and particularly in those shorter letters of love and union: Ephesians, Phillipians, and Colossians. He tells us how we are buried with Christ in Baptism and rise again with Him that we may be dead to sin but alive to God, in Christ Jesus. He reminds us that we must strip off the old man with his evil deeds and put on the new, with his heart of virtue and forgiveness, and above all, charity, which is the bond of perfection.
In eloquent repetition St. Paul shows his delight in the effects of grace in our souls: it transforms, elevates, and unites. It permits us to do all things in Him who strengthens us; it permits us to walk worthy of God and please Him in all things, bearing fruit in every good work; and it permits us to grow in union with Christ by every work of truth we perform in love.
Looking at the whole picture of justification, in all its love and beauty, we might sum it up this way:
Our justification comes entirely from Christ. The basis of our effective union with Him is faith; but this faith is supernatural, and we cannot acquire it by our own efforts. It is a gift of God. We believe in response to his grace.
Then after faith we are normally joined to Christ in Baptism, the instrument He gave us to affect our union with Him. Love, which is grounded in faith, is the effective bond of this union; and from it we share in His divine life, which permits us to live with Him for eternity, and enough of His divine nature to permit us to share, by adoption, in the paternal love of the Father.
By way of exception, the essential effects of justification may come into the soul before actual Baptism. The strong faith, which God gives us may produce an active love of God, which is also His gift; and thus, we are brought into sanctifying union with Him by the ardor of our desire. With a child the process is reversed: Baptism gives him the faith, hope, and love which make him fit for heaven, even though he is not able to make present use of them.
When this sanctifying life of grace has come into our souls we are so thoroughly incorporated into Christ and so elevated and transformed by His presence in us that we live and act on a supernatural level, on the plane of heaven. Everything we do has value for heaven as long as it is a work of truth, done in love. We grow in union with God by living and acting with Him. Our natural acts could have no value for heaven, but they are given value by the grace of Christ. They share so thoroughly in His merits that they please God, and He attributes merit to them.
In all of this we recognize the devastating effects of original sin and the intrinsic evil of our own personal sins. But we do not believe that original sin destroyed our free-will; it only weakened it badly. It did not make out nature essentially sinful; it only immersed us in sin. The grace of Christ, in our justification, pulls us out of the mire of sin and cleanses us by immersion in God’s love and goodness.
We believe that the process of justification has its effects deep within the soul. Sins are not covered up; they are removed, as regards their guilt. The essence of sin was separation from God; justification unites us to Him. But the taking away of sin is hardly more than a preliminary feature of justification; it gives us the life of heaven, the faculties for knowing and loving God in heaven, and for loving and serving Him meritoriously here on earth .
The Catholic doctrine cannot give the ironclad internal assurance of salvation which comes from a conviction of predestination or an experience of a trusting faith, but it does teach a loving confidence in the mercy and goodness of God, in His effective desire for the salvation of all men, and in the abundant opportunity He provides for each of us. Understanding of the Catholic doctrine should not only bring tranquillity of conscience in the certainty of forgiveness, but also that peace and happiness which comes from awareness of God’s love for us and His presence with us. Furthermore, it offers that ardent incentive for good works and self-denial, which can come only from awareness of love and confidence in our ability to return love in a manner acceptable to the One loved.
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