Justification, and Mortal and Venial Sin - Conversations as a Protestant

The selections below are mostly quotations from a conversation I had on the Called to Communion Catholic website back when I was a Protestant, just about a month to a month-and-a-half before I began converting to Catholicism.  I find them interesting because they reveal the state of my thinking at that time regarding the nature of justification as well as the distinction between venial and mortal sin.  The conversation took place in the comments section of this article.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, when I was a Protestant, I was never an opponent of Catholic salvation theology to the degree many Reformed people are and have been.  I was always sympathetic to the Augustinian way of expressing the doctrine of justification, and so I never had the substantial problems with the Catholic doctrine of justification that many Reformed people have had.  You can see my pre-Catholic views here and here.

With regard to the distinction between mortal and venial sin, this was not something I had done a lot of research on before becoming Catholic, so I didn't have any really strong views on the subject, as you can see from the quotations below.  In general, I was not a very "anti-Catholic" Protestant, mostly because Catholicism simply wasn't all that much on my radar screen until not long before I became Catholic.  I didn't define my theology in opposition to Catholicism.  This is not to say I didn't disagree with some aspects of Catholicism, but simply that I had not focused on it in depth before I began to consider it more in 2012.

The first selection below is actually from a few years earlier than the Called to Communion conversation.  It is from notes I wrote up when I was doing a short study on Catholicism as an elder at Christ Presbyterian Church, in response to some of our members becoming Catholic.  There is also one other selection that is from another conversation going on at the same time as the Called to Communion conversation.

June 24, 2011, 11:34 AM (These were notes I wrote to myself, preparing for a study I was going to lead at church.  It can be seen here that I did not have a problem with the substance of the Catholic doctrine of justification, and I was much more sanguine on other topics as well than many conservative Reformed people tend to be.)

Problems with Roman Catholicism with regard to salvation:

1. Infusion vs. imputation – In itself, I find this not to be too problematic, honestly. In both the Augustinian and the Reformed views, we deserve nothing but hell, and our righteousness is entirely Christ's. God elects us, grants us Christ's righteousness, and then that righteousness is worked out in us through the Holy Spirit. Since we are saved entirely by the righteousness of Christ granted entirely through grace, I think this captures the heart of the gospel of salvation by grace through the righteousness of Christ. Read Calvin on Augustine's expressions.
2. Covenant theology – Read about this in the Confession. The Romanists have the core of this at least, because they recognize that we can merit nothing in strict merit. God freely chooses to associate us with the work of his grace. We lost the chance to have our own righteousness, and now we can only be saved through Christ's. I think this is the core substance of covenant theology in this sense.
3. Baptismal regeneration and the Mass, including transubstantiation. Faith alone. - With regard to baptism, the Roman Church teaches that baptism is not absolutely necessary for salvation, and that baptism, to be true baptism, requires faith. So is their position really all that different from the “faith alone” position of the Reformed here? The same with the Lord's Supper. It does not communicate Christ in a saving manner without faith, and it is not necessary for salvation. Read Confession on these points. Transubstantiation is indeed a real problem. Talk about the sacrifice of the Mass, maybe.
4. Free will and cooperation with grace – This, to me, is the heart of the matter, as Luther thought also.
5. Merit – We will be rewarded according to our works. But it is Christ's merit, not ours. To me, the issue of free will is central here. Christ's work in us is indeed worthy of God's favor, but our works, as from us, are not.
6. Active and passive obedience – Show me active obedience in the Bible. The Bible speaks along of propitiation as the means of atonement, but included in this is the positive righteousness of Christ. Catholics believe we receive the positive merit and righteousness of Christ as well.
7. Losing justification through mortal sin and using the sacrament of confession/penance to be restored to it. Perseverance of the saints. - Two ways of looking at this. In an Augustinian sense, it is wrong, but not a denial of salvation by grace, per se. It is, however, a denial of assurance. In a free will sense, it is of course as bad as Arminianism.

January 24, 2015, 1:35 AM (I talk about how the good works of believers are good, but they don't give us personal merit, and how my views are not necessarily in substance different from St. Augustine's views, which Catholics also hold):

Hi _____,

I would distinguish between the idea of “believers gaining personal merit due to good works” and the idea of “good works having merit.” I think the Turretin quotation I’ve mentioned a couple of times above is illuminating in this respect when he says, “For wherever God beholds his own likeness, he deservedly loves and holds it in honor” (emphasis added). Good works are, in their intrinsic nature, fit to receive God’s favor and thus eternal life. In this sense, I would not forbear to say that good works “merit” eternal life, for what is “merit” other than a fitness of one thing to receive another? It is true that Protestants don’t typically use the word “merit” in this context, and no doubt that is because of a reaction against the use of the word in Roman Catholic theology, but there is nothing inherently inappropriate about the word used in this way.

So, because our good works are truly good, as produced from the Holy Spirit, they can be said to warrant or merit God’s favor and the reward of eternal life that implies. At the same time, however, we must say that believers do not themselves gain personal merit by means of their good works. What I mean by that is that believers cannot say that they themselves personally deserve eternal life on the basis of their good works, and this is because those works, and the moral character that produces them, is an unmerited gift of God superadded to their native human nature and indeed contrasts with their fallen human nature (which merits eternal death). The difference I am getting at here is like the difference between a person who contributes his own efforts towards earning $20 and then goes and buys something with that money, vs. a person who is given a free gift of $20 and then goes and buys something with it. In both cases, the $20 merits the purchase, but in the latter case the purchase can be said to be an extension of the gift rather than something personally earned by the buyer. As Augustine said (paraphrasing), “When God crowns our works he is crowning not our merits but his own gifts.”

Does that make sense? I expect it does to a great degree, because Augustine’s theology of grace, which in substance I and other Reformed would agree with (at least in this area, though we dispute his terminology, particularly his conflation of what we call “justification” and “sanctification”) is also a major part of the Roman Catholic theology of grace. In fact, I would argue that the Reformed view and the Roman Catholic view in this area are actually closer than many people tend to realize or acknowledge, though there are also crucial differences (one of the major ones being the issue of how we “cooperate” with grace and the role that plays in the way we can be said to “merit” an increase of grace and eternal life).

So, to apply this more directly to your question: Do we merit eternal life by means of our works? As you point out, the Bible speaks frequently of eternal life as a reward of our works. It also speaks frequently of our inability to merit God’s favor and that “the free gift of God is eternal life” (Romans 6:23). The solution, I would say, is that our sanctified moral character and good works do merit eternal life (that is, they are fit to receive that reward), and at the same time, considered as to what we have personally earned rather than what is an unmerited gift to us, we do not deserve eternal life but rather receive it as a free gift of grace. This is the Reformed view, although I’m phrasing it in language that is more “Augustinian” than we typically use in order to help build a bridge of understanding.

By the way, here is a comment from Calvin on Augustine’s way of talking about justification (from the Institutes, and taken from here):

Even the sentiment of Augustine, or at least his mode of expressing it, cannot be entirely approved of. For although he is admirable in stripping man of all merit of righteousness, and transferring the whole praise of it to God, he classes the grace by which we are regenerated to newness of life under the head of sanctification. Scripture, when it treats of justification by faith, leads us in a very different direction.

Note that Calvin does not oppose the substance of Augustine’s views, but his “mode of expressing it.” There is a fear that Augustine’s conflation of the crediting of righteousness to us with righteousness being infused into us (this is like the distinction between having the deed of a house transferred to our ownership and then subsequently living in the house) tends to lead to a blurring of the clear biblical idea of grace and the creeping in of a concept of personal merit condemned in the Bible.

Anyway, I’ve said a lot more than I thought I was going to when I started, so I’ll stop there. :-)

January 30, 2015, 6:24 PM (Here I wrestle with the meaning of Catholic language regarding "mortal" and "venial" sin - the Catholics are trying to explain this distinction to me from Aquinas, etc.  I also discuss my concern here with the Catholic idea that we "cooperate" with grace - I misunderstand that idea to mean that we contribute something from ourselves to salvation that is not a gift of grace.  I eventually got my confusion regarding the Jesuit/Molinist view cleared up, as you can read about here.)

_____ and ______, thanks for your thoughts.

I’m trying to wrap my mind around the distinction that Aquinas is making in those quotations. I can conceive of the distinction between a more deliberate sin, such as when one consciously makes a choice to cheat on a test or the rob a bank, etc., vs. a more “instinctual” sin, such as when one snaps angrily and inordinately at a friend without having consciously planned to do this (and then is immediately sorry afterwards and apologizes). Do think that this is the kind of distinction Aquinas is getting at? In the first sort of sin, the person has deliberately put aside his commitment to love God supremely and to follow his law (at least until he repents). In the second, however, there is no deliberate choice to put aside obedience to God, but there is an instance of a lapse of a charitable attitude, and once the conscious mind is aware of it, the person deliberately fights against it and tries to make reparation for it.

If this is the sort of distinction Aquinas is getting at, I grant that it is a real distinction, though in some cases the dividing line can be a bit blurry, and in many cases of each kind there is probably a bit of a mix of the other kind in it. When a person commits a more deliberate sin, this may involve a bit of self-deception which causes him to rationalize that he is not truly being disobedient to God, and to some degree he may actually come to believe that. When a person commits a more “instinctual” sin, there may still be traces of conscious choice, though less easy to detect or to distinguish out from the more instinctual reaction. Human psychology can be very complex!

Also, both kinds of sins, it seems to me, are incompatible with charity (I’ll follow the direction our language seems to be following in this conversation now and use this word as a synonym for agape as we’ve been using that word), because they both exhibit an attitude that fails to truly love our neighbors as ourselves or God as God (or both). Thus, I would say that both deserve damnation in themselves and can be described, to use some previous language, as “loving something else as God, and not loving God as God.” Certainly, one sort of sin is, in certain ways, less heinous, less dominating, less dangerous, than the other, for a number of obvious reasons, but it still partakes in its essence of the nature of sin.

I think we must also distinguish between both of these kinds of sins on the one hand and mistakes or failings that are not actually sins at all (that is, not truly moral failings, or failings of love to God or neighbor) on the other. If someone startles me, I might yell in response in a way that sounds similar to an uncharitable outburst but which might actually simply be a natural “fright and fight” mechanism. My response might not have involved even any real recognition of there being a human person involved, or it might have been the response of a fight instinct that is functioning properly and is designed to protect us against enemies attacking, which is not a sinful thing to do even when fighting against human beings–that is, it is not uncharitable per se to defend oneself against enemies.

I think that the main place where I might “stick” at what some of you are saying is where there might be any suggestion that there is such a thing as a true sin (a true moral act) which is not in its essence an act of “loving something else as God, and not loving God as God” (or one’s neighbor as oneself, which is inseparable from love to God). Again, if this is a distinction that you want to uphold, I find it problematic. But, again, I wonder if some of the apparent difference might be semantic, in that some of you are including what I would call a “non-moral mistake or failing” into the category labeled “sin,” in which case it is possible we might not actually be differing in substance.

With regard to the cooperation of the will: The language you have quoted from the RC Catechism, _____, is for the most part agreeable to me. It is, of course, quite Augustinian. This line from Trent, however, concerns me: “When God touches man’s heart through the illumination of the Holy Spirit, man himself is not inactive while receiving that inspiration, since he could reject it; and yet, without God’s grace, he cannot by his own free will move himself toward justice in God’s sight.” I am concerned that this statement is intended to suggest that grace does not effectually or efficiently produce the good will, but that the very same grace which results in a good will for some might not do so for others, because there is an element independent of the grace involved, coming from the human will, which either cooperates with or rejects the grace. In this case, it could not be said that the cooperation of the will is entirely a work of God’s grace, because there is also required a cooperation of the will of some sort that grace itself does not produce of itself.

Of course, I’m aware that this is a controversial topic within the Roman Church, such as between the Thomists and the Jesuits, for example. The Augustinian or the Thomist view, as I understand them, I find acceptable in that they truly do ascribe the cooperation of the will entirely to grace because they make grace effectual, but the Jesuit view I find to be heretical because it does not. The Jesuit view, in my opinion, brings in the sort of “merit” that I object to, because since the cooperation of the will is not itself produced by grace, the implication is that it is produced by the will and not grace, and this leads to a Pelagian sort of merit and the sort that the Protestant view holds to be unbiblical. I know the Jesuits and those who hold a similar view don’t see it the same way, but I think they are wrong in that regard.

February 3, 2015, 2:32 PM (Here I try to explain the Reformed view of justification in a way that I thought palatable to Catholics, and I also acknowledge that some Catholics, such as the Augustinians and the Thomists, may be basically sound with regard to the doctrine of merit.)

____ (re #513):

As I’ve explained above, in order for there to be a difference between them, God must have two moral standards; otherwise nothing but ad hoc stipulation would make the good works that merit different from the good works that don’t merit.

I have explained in my article (posted in #496) why good works don’t give us personal merit in a way that avoids your claim here. God has only one moral standard, and nothing I have said is opposed to this. Good works are truly good, and so they truly deserve God’s favor. I entirely agree with this. They don’t give us “personal merit” not because they aren’t really good, or because they don’t meet the standards of God’s law to be worthy of reward, but because they aren’t ours originally but are a free gift. Because they are a free gift, we cannot claim that they have come from us originally, and so we cannot claim final credit for them. In subsequent comments (#502, #504. #507), I’ve elaborated on this further.

If I were saying that good works are good enough to be called good by God, but not good enough to deserve God’s favor, I would agree with you that this would imply two moral standards, or perhaps rather a divided moral standard, separating what cannot truly be separated. An approbation of moral goodness cannot be separated from a desert of favor and reward. This is what Turretin says in that quote I keep quoting: “For wherever God beholds his own likeness, he deservedly loves and holds it in honor.” So we (Turretin and I) agree with you here. But we have other reasons (elaborated in the article and in earlier comments) for distinguishing between the merit of good works per se and us gaining “personal merit” by means of them.

I should note here that I have not and am not attempting to make any accusations against RC theology on this point. That is, it is not my primary intention to do so. My primary intention has been to vindicate the Reformed view from the charge that our theology makes good works not truly good. My intention has not been to make an argument that RC theology is defective on this point. In fact, I think there are subtleties in RC theology, and that it is not monolithic. Turretin would agree; he often comments on these nuances and differences in his Institutes. The Augustinians and Thomists may be basically sound on this point (though other issues must be looked at as well, such as purgatory and indulgences, the merits of saints, etc., which I won’t get into right now), while I think the Jesuits and some others do indeed imply “personal merit” in the bad sense because of their commitment to how the will and grace cooperate. These issues are worth discussing, but their discussion has not been my primary intent in this particular conversation. I’m just clarifying here what I’m aiming at in making the arguments I’ve been making.

I don’t know where you got the notion that this is something I was putting forward. I did not state such a position, nor does it follow from anything I said, nor do I hold it.

I wasn’t saying that you were putting this “chemical solution” view of works forward as your view. I was saying that this seems to be your view of my view. You seem to think of the Reformed view as being that God looks at our lives, sees the “good” and the bad, has a law that says that only good without any bad around it is truly good, and so we don’t have any truly good works–as if the goodness of good works is dissolved by the bad so that there is no true good. I have been saying that this is not in fact the Reformed view, but that we rather hold what I’ve been calling an “oil and water” view of works, where there is true good and true bad, and neither is made anything other than what it truly is simply by being accompanied by the other. We agree with you that true love for God is true goodness, and so the works of believers are truly good and deserve God’s favor.

I can see, ____, why you think that the “chemical solution” view is the Reformed view. Some of the things the Reformed confessions sometimes say can sound like that. In my article, I mention that I wish Reformed people would speak more clearly on this point, and that I myself used to misunderstand the Reformed position along the same lines that you do (and that Jason Stellman and Beth Turner do). But I do think it is a misunderstanding. One way this can be seen is by noting that the Reformed have always insisted that good works are truly good, and are fundamentally different from the not-strictly-speaking “good works” of the unregenerate. My quotations from Turretin illustrate this. This also shows up, for another example, in the Westminster Confession. The Confession distinguishes between the good works of believers and the “good works” of the unregenerate, saying the latter, unlike the former, do not truly “please God.” The Confession says that as good works are good, they proceed from the Holy Spirit. They are “sincere,” and so God is pleased to reward them. (Turretin comments on how the true goodness of good works makes them fit for reward, whereas evil works would not be so fit–see my article for the fuller passage.) The natural end of the good works of believers is “eternal life,” which cannot be said of the “good works” of the unregenerate. Etc. The Reformed tradition has always held and affirmed strongly that the good works of believers are truly good. Your account of the Reformed view washes this away, and therefore is contrary to how the Reformed themselves look at their own view. We do not agree with you that we say that good works of believers are not truly good.

The misunderstanding arises because of a confusion between the issue of the goodness of good works per se vs. the question of personal merit. It is in the context of the latter question, not the former, that the Reformed statements about the inadequacy of good works come into play. The WCF gets at the distinction here when it distinguishes between good works as being “from the Holy Spirit” vs. being “from us.” The good works of believers cannot gain us personal merit, because they do not erase the fact that our bad works are from us originally and therefore will always reflect what we deserve of ourselves apart from grace (for apart from grace, they would characterize us to all eternity). Our good works, on the other hand, are not from us originally and therefore cannot be attributed to us originally, and therefore we cannot accrue personal merit from them. Also, while the good works are themselves good, if they are looked at as coming from us (considering what we are only in ourselves, apart from grace), the offering up of them is not a great honor to God attaining for us personal merit, while if they are looked at as coming from the Holy Spirit, or as coming from us (conceived of not as we are in ourselves but as what we are made by grace–the holy children of God), the offering of them is a great honor and fit for favor and reward.

You quote the Belgic Confession above. Here is a fuller quote of that section in its fuller context:

We believe that this true faith, being wrought in man by the hearing of the Word of God and the operation of the Holy Ghost, doth regenerate and make him a new man, causing him to live a new life, and freeing him from the bondage of sin. Therefore it is so far from being true that this justifying faith makes men remiss in a pious and holy life, that, on the contrary, without it they would never do anything out of love to God, but only out of self-love or fear of damnation. Therefore it is impossible that this holy faith can be unfruitful in man; for we do not speak of a vain faith, but of such a faith which is called in Scripture a faith that worketh by love, which excites man to the practice of those works which God has commanded in His Word.

These works, as they proceed from the good root of faith, are good and acceptable in the sight of God, forasmuch as they are all sanctified by His grace; howbeit they are of no account towards our justification. For it is by faith in Christ that we are justified, even before we do good works; otherwise they could not be good works, any more than the fruit of a tree can be good before the tree itself is good.

Therefore we do good works, but not to merit by them (for what can we merit?), nay, we are beholden to God for the good works we do, and not He to us, since it is He that worketh in us both to will and to do of His good pleasure. Let us therefore attend to what is written: When ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, we are unprofitable servants; we have done that which was our duty to do. In the meantime, we do not deny that God rewards our good works, but it is through His grace that He crowns His gifts.

Moreover, though we do good works, we do not found our salvation upon them; for we do no work but what is polluted by our flesh, and also punishable; and although we could perform such works, still the remembrance of one sin is sufficient to make God reject them. Thus, then, we would always be in doubt, tossed to and fro without any certainty, and our poor consciences continually vexed, if they relied not on the merits of the suffering and death of our Savior.

You can see that the Confession affirms the true goodness of works, and its discussion of the inadequacy of works is not in relation to its true goodness, but to its ability to bring us personal merit, to make us not personally deserving of hell (considered in ourselves, apart from grace). Good works do not justify us, because they are not ours intrinsically nor do they erase what we are intrinsically (considered as to our own nature without grace). We are justified by Christ’s satisfaction and merit being imputed to us, and then after that the good works are given to us and made ours so that we can become fit for eternal life. I like to think of it this way: Justification is like having a house deeded to you. Sanctification is like living in the house. Living in the house will not make the house yours. Rather, the house must become yours and then you can live in it. That is what the Reformed confessions are getting at.

This is why someone like Turretin can say on the one hand that good works cannot gain us justification or personal merit, and at the same time, without contradiction, affirm that the good works of believers are deservedly loved and held in honor by God. In your “chemical solution” portrayal of the Reformed view, you are making it out that the very goodness of the good works is dissolved into the overall moral mix of our lives, so that there is nothing there that truly deserves God’s favor, and that is why good works cannot justify. But the real Reformed view is that good works are truly good, that they don’t lose their goodness by being accompanied by badness in our lives, and that good works cannot justify us not because they are not good but because they are not ours originally but our a part of the gift of salvation. So we do not hold the “perfect goodness” paradigm that you attribute to us (at least if we are faithful to Reformed thought in its fullness). (We might use the terminology of “perfect goodness,” but we don’t mean by it the paradigm you have described.) Our view is not that far off from your agape view, actually.

This is already implied in what I’ve said, but just to address it briefly explicitly: The idea of God looking on our good works “in his Son” does not mean that our good works are actually offensive to him and not truly pleasing, but that he pretends they are because he stops himself from seeing them by putting something else in front of them. I agree with you that that would be unbiblical and irrational. The idea, rather, is that though good works are truly good and pleasing to him, yet they do not become ours and their goodness attributable to us until we are in Christ. In other words, if we are outside of Christ, any good works that exist would not be attributable to us and so would not hide the guilt of our native sinfulness and sins or make God view us favorably; but once we are in Christ, God views us as his children and attributes the good works to us as such, and so the pleasingness of the works passes over into God’s being pleased with us. Go back to the house analogy I mentioned earlier. If we move into a house that has not been legally granted to us, people will not consider the house to be ours no matter how much we make ourselves at home in it. They will not associate the house with our property. Once we have the legal deed, though, now the house will be considered ours. So good works flow from justification. First, we are made children of God legally (so to speak), and then we are associated with Christ’s righteousness (since we are “in the Son”), and as a result of this the righteousness of Christ is infused into us (just as we go to live in the house only after we own it, if we do things legitimately) and good works come from us which are attributed to us and count towards us (not because they come from our own natural powers and will without grace, but because they have been made ours as part of the gift of salvation and as a fruit of being united with Christ). In short, God is pleased to give us a reward for our works when he looks on us in his Son–that is, when we are in his Son the goodness of our works (from the Holy Spirit) is counted to us and we receive the favor and reward of them. We are never rewarded for them in terms of “personal merit” but always as a gift of grace, in the Son. “When God crowns our works, he is crowning not our merits but his own gifts.

February 5, 2015, 12:01 PM (I explain that I don't yet fully understand the mortal vs. venial sin distinction.)

"I assume you have studied the Catholic and, I would certainly say Biblical, distinction between mortal and venial sin but find it lacking. How so?"

Well, I'm not sure I fully understand what it means. We are discussing this currently over at C2C, in the comments to the article I linked to in my second "UPDATE". If "venial sin" is defined as "a morally evil action which does not deserve hell and is not an act of not loving God supremely," then I don't believe there is any such thing, because those things are the essence of sin.

February 19, 2015, 6:24 PM (Here I begin to understand better the Catholic position on mortal vs. venial sins, and I recognize the validity of it, so long as certain truths are safeguarded.  If you want to see my view on this today, by the way, there is a section on it in my recent book.)

Hello all,

I always get myself involved in these conversations, and then they get too large for me to keep up with! At any rate, I appreciate all the good questions and comments!

I’m still not sure I fully understand the RC view of venial vs. mortal sins, but I think that I resonate with at least some of what it seems to be getting at. I would acknowledge a distinction between more deliberate and less deliberate sins, as I’ve mentioned earlier. There is indeed an important difference between falling against one’s overall will into a momentary lapse of proper attitude and choosing premeditatively and consciously to do something wrong or to turn the direction of one’s life towards wrong deliberately. I would simply be concerned to affirm that insofar as one’s will is involved and there is not absolute invincible ignorance, even the “lesser” sins are still sins–that is, they are still instances of a will turning away from how it ought to be–and thus deserve damnation.

I see the life of a regenerate person in this way: In ourselves, in our natural fallen condition without grace, our lives are devoted to sin and we are oriented away from God. In regeneration, we are given a new will which is oriented towards God and which rejects sin. The experience of a regenerate person in this life is one in which the overall, ordinary will is oriented towards God, but God does not wipe out entirely the presence or influence of our fallen sinful will, and it continues to worm its way into our lives to varying degrees. That “worming” does not change the overall trajectory of our life. It can manifest itself sometimes as a temporary premeditated turning away from God. It can also manifest itself as a momentary, less deliberate lapse in moral attitude. Either way, our overall will–the regenerate will that characterizes the overall trajectory of our life–fights against it and brings eventual repentance. The Westminster Confession puts it this way:

2. This sanctification is throughout, in the whole man; yet imperfect in this life, there abiding still some remnants of corruption in every part: whence ariseth a continual and irreconcilable war; the flesh lusting against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh.

3. In which war, although the remaining corruption, for a time, may much prevail; yet through the continual supply of strength from the sanctifying Spirit of Christ, the regenerate part doth overcome; and so, the saints grow in grace, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.

The regenerate will is fully good, completely pleasing to God. The sinful will is fully evil, completely displeasing to God. The badness of the evil will does not cancel out the goodness of the regenerate will, nor vice versa. And thus the works of the regenerate are truly good works, which was the point I was originally trying to make. Even if the good and bad will are both involved in what, in a loose sense, could be called a “single action,” the badness of the action does not cancel out or erase or absorb its goodness. That is, it is not that God looks at a work, sees good and bad in it, declares it not perfect, and so determines that it fails to meet the standard of his law to be a truly good and pleasing work. That’s the idea of the Reformed view I’m trying to oppose. Rather, it is that God looks at our works, sees a mix of good and bad, and is pleased with the good as being truly good according to his law and displeased with the bad as being truly bad according to his law. The goodness we have does not give us personal merit, but this is not because it is not really goodness, but because it is not ours intrinsically but has been given to us as a free gift.

In addition to sins–whether more or less deliberate and premeditated, etc.–we can sometimes make non-moral mistakes (that is, non-moral in reference to the state of our will). We might do something wrong in invincible ignorance. We might attempt to accomplish something good and fail for reasons external to our intention and attitude. We might respond irrationally and instinctively to something (someone comes up behind us and says “Boo!”) in an inordinate way, but without there being any wrong attitude or intention involved. Etc. These actions do not merit for us damnation, because only moral wickedness can deserve damnation. But even “lesser” sins do deserve damnation, because even if they are only momentary expressions of a will that does not characterize our overall lives, that will that they are an expression of is still an evil will–that is, a will that does not love God supremely, etc.–and an evil will inherently deserves God’s disfavor.

Hopefully this addresses the gist of what everyone has been saying to me on this topic, if not every individual detail. Feel free to repeat something specific or point me to something previously said if I’ve failed to respond to it and you would like me to do so. Another topic started to develop on the nature of the cooperation of the will, but as this is somewhat separate I haven’t tried to address it further here (but I can address it further if anyone wants to).

Thanks!

Published on Tuesday of Holy Week

ADDENDUM 1/18/22:  I just came across a couple of conversations over Facebook and email that I had back in 2011 and 2012 with a friend who had converted from Presbyterianism to Catholicism and was hoping to help bring me to Catholicism.  In fact, he and his wife ended up being very helpful and instrumental towards that end, especially through the literature they sent us (like St. Francis de Sales's The Catholic Controversy).  They raised the issue of Catholicism in my mind at a time when I was in a position to gain a lot from considering that point of view.  Anyway, these conversations contain a treaure-trove of information about how I viewed the doctrine of justification and the relationship between the Catholic Augustinian view and the Reformed view during this time period (when I was a member and ruling elder in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church).  (FYI, in this piece I outline a history of my thinking on justification over the years.)

So below are some pieces from these conversations, labeled by date.

5/18/2011:

1. First of all, do Protestants say that good works are necessary for salvation? Yes, they do say that (at least classic Reformed Protestants). For example, in Turretin's Institutes, he asks the question, "Are good works necessary for salvation?" and he answers, "We affirm." Good works are necessary because God's justice would not allow an unholy person to be rewarded with eternal life. This would be contrary to his law and his character. The reason there is confusion on this point in terms of understanding the Protestant position I think stems from confusion over the meanings of the terms "justification" and "sanctification."

2. One of the big differences between Protestant and Roman Catholic views of salvation has to do with the terminology of justification and sanctification. In my opinion, there are terminology issues here that cause confusion, and we ought to try to clear them up. Both Roman Catholics and Reformed Protestants agree that humans are lost in sin, that we deserve hell for our sins, and that we cannot be saved by any righteousness that we can produce. They both agree that we need a righteousness from outside of ourselves--Christ's righteousness--to be given to us in order to make us righteous and therefore acceptable to God, and therefore we are ultimately justified by Christ's righteousness and not our own (in the sense of a righteousness we produced on our own). But at this point a difference arises. The Reformed divide the concept of God giving us Christ's righteousness into two distinct parts: justification and sanctification. "Justification" refers to the legal aspect of the gift of righteousness. We do not do anything to buy or earn Christ's righteousness to be given to us; rather, it is declared to be ours as a gift of grace. Justification is God declaring Christ's righteousness to be ours, much as one might deed over a house to someone else. "Sanctification," on the other hand, refers to the implications of the act of justification. Having declared Christ's righteousness ours, God then infuses this righteousness into us, making us inwardly holy and producing good works in and through us. If justification is like having a house deeded over to you, sanctification might be compared to actually moving into the house. It is the tangible fruit of the legal declaration. So this is the classic Reformed terminology, and I think it is biblical. It derives especially from Paul's discussion of salvation in Romans, where he deals first with the idea of forgiveness and being counted righteous through the propitiation of Christ, and then goes on to talk about the fruit of that in our dying to sin and living to God, producing good works. In this language, our good works cannot be said to contribute towards our justification in any sense, because the declaration of our justification logically precedes our good works and is the cause of them rather than the other way around.

The Roman Catholic Church, on the other hand, follows the terminology established by Augustine. Augustine tended to use the term "justification" to refer to the whole nexus of the gift of righteousness, including both justification and sanctification as the Reformed define them. So in Augustine's language, we are justified when we are made righteous when the righteousness of Christ, unmerited by anything we could do, is graciously granted to us (this corresponds to the Pauline and Protestant idea of imputation) and infused into us by the Holy Spirit, making us inwardly righteous and producing good works that warrant God's favor. Augustine's terminology of "merit" is different than the Reformed terminology as well. Augustine would talk of the good works which flow from the infusion of Christ's righteousness as meriting justification, or in other words meriting God's acceptance and being worthy of the reward of eternal life. Augustine did not mean that we ourselves deserve the real credit ultimately for these good works--after all, they are simply fruits of a righteousness granted us by grace. When God crowns our works, he famously said, he is crowning his own gifts. So he gets all the glory and credit ultimately. But Augustine did use the term "merit" to describe the character of these good works, meaning by that that the works are pleasing to God and such that he finds fit to reward. The Reformed have shied away from using the term "merit" to refer to works, because they have been afraid of suggesting that we ourselves can deserve God's favor in a way that would make God our debtor. But they do not deny that the good works produced by God's grace in us are truly good and fit to please God and be rewarded by him, which is all that Augustine meant by calling them "meritorious." Personally, I think that the Reformed have overreacted a bit to the Augustinian language here, and this has caused difficulties in dialoguing with Roman Catholics whose terminology is very Augustinian. The Roman Catholic Church has always denied that we can have any strict merit to earn God's favor and that any merit our works have is ultimately a gift of grace and that God therefore gets the ultimate credit. I do not find the Augustinian terminology to be in substance unbiblical. I think that Augustine and the Reformed have expressed the same biblical doctrine of salvation simply in two different ways. So I don't think this needs to be a stumbling block nearly as much as many have taken it to be, on both sides.

3. Now, this does not mean that I think the Roman Catholic doctrine of salvation is unproblematic. But I think the biggest real problem with the doctrine of salvation as expressed by many Roman Catholics is not in itself the terminology of justification and sanctification, but rather it is precisely what Martin Luther said it was: the doctrine of the freedom of the will. Your comments seemed to express a popular view within the Roman Catholic Church, and one that I and other Reformed Protestants find very problematic: the idea that the grace given to humans through the sacrifice of Christ is not efficacious or effectual, but rather is resistible by free will. It is this concept that, in my view, renders the Roman Catholic idea of justification by the infusion of grace a perversion of the gospel rather than simply the terminology of infusion itself. Augustine held that God's grace is effectual. It works like this: God chooses out of the world a number to whom to grant salvation. The elect are not chosen because of any positive thing in them that warrants God's favor, but only because of God's good purposes. To the elect, God applies his saving grace, purchased through the sacrifice of Christ, which has the effect of enlightening the minds, altering the affections, and renewing the wills of those to whom it is given. Before they receive this grace, the elect are rebels against God, refusing to submit their wills to him. God's saving grace changes their minds and hearts, causing them to see God and his law no longer as evil and odious, but as good and desirable, and so causes their wills to voluntarily turn from their rebellion and freely embrace God and his grace and commands. Because the change from unrighteousness to righteousness is produced entirely through the power of God's grace--which is Christ's righteousness infused into the sinner, having been purchased by the sacrifice of Christ--ultimately all the credit for the sinner's new righteousness and all its fruit in his good works is due to the Triune God, and he gets all the glory. The new righteousness we possess and the good works that are its fruit are meritorious, in that they are truly pleasing to God and warrant a reward from God, and yet strictly and ultimately speaking we do not merit anything from God by them because they are gifts of grace rather than produced by us out of the stores of our own nature and ability; all we were able to produce out our own stores was the sin we needed to be rescued from, and which caused us to deserve God's wrath. This was Augustine's view, and it is in line essentially with the Reformed view, although, as I said, the Reformed tend to describe this using different terminology. There have been many in the Roman Catholic Church down through the ages who have held this Augustinian view. In fact, it has often been dominant, to a significant degree at least. Thomas Aquinas held this view, as did the traditional Dominican order in general, among many others.

However, others in the Roman Catholic Church have held a different view. The different view goes like this: Man is enslaved to sin, but he still possesses a potential to respond favorably to God in some circumstances. When God gives his grace to humans, purchased by the sacrifice of Christ, it is not efficacious. It enters in and revives the will and strongly encourages it to choose God, but in the end the will can resist this grace and make it to no effect. God's grace cannot actually alter the will, it can only encourage it. Ultimately, the human will is not determined by sin or by grace. It retains a native power, when confronted with God's grace and the gospel, to either choose to remain in sin or to abandon sin and turn to God. If the will rejects grace, then the sinner remains unregenerated and outside of salvation. If the will cooperates with grace by accepting it, grace and the will working together produce righteousness in the soul and the good works that flow from it, making the sinner righteous and pleasing and meritorious before God. The problem Augustinians have always had with this view is that, in the end, it makes the human will rather than grace the true source of human righteousness. Grace encourages the will, and even strengthens it perhaps to give it the ability to choose, but grace cannot cause the will to choose aright. It cannot make the will good. Only the will itself, out of itself, can produce the choice of the good and thereby make itself a righteous will. Therefore in this view, ultimately all the righteousness we possess internally and through the good works that flow from the internal righteousness and which makes us meritorious before God is our righteousness. We get the ultimate credit for it, for although God helped us with his grace, the righteousness was ultimately produced by the will using its own resources. Therefore this doctrine leads in effect to the bad, unbiblical sort of idea of merit, where we are seen as truly deserving, through our own righteousness produced from ourselves, God's favor and eternal life. Therefore Augustinians have always regarded this doctrine as a fundamental perversion of the gospel, one which makes it ultimately a false gospel. This doctrine has been taught in the Roman Catholic Church by the Jesuits historically, and by others (although the Roman Church as a whole has always denied its implications, and affirmed that we have no strict merit and that all our merit is really ultimately God crowning his own gifts, as Augustine said). It is taught in the Protestant world typically under the name of Arminianism, though the Arminians have developed the idea in the context of Protestant terminology rather than Augustinian terminology. This seems to be the view taught by the Council of Trent when it says, in Chapter V of the Sixth Session (on the subject of justification), "Justification is to be derived from the prevenient grace of God, through Jesus Christ, that is to say, from His vocation, whereby, without any merits existing on their parts, they are called; that so they, who by sins were alienated from God, may be disposed through His quickening and assisting grace, to convert themselves to their own justification, by freely assenting to and co-operating with that said grace: in such sort that, while God touches the heart of man by the illumination of the Holy Ghost, neither is man himself utterly without doing anything while he receives that inspiration, forasmuch as he is also able to reject it; yet is he not able, by his own free will, without the grace of God, to move himself unto justice in His sight." However, although the council seems to be siding with the Jesuits here, there have always been those (like the historic Dominicans and the Jansenists) who have interpreted the council's phrases in a way that makes them consistent with an Augustinian viewpoint.

So I would be interested to know from you which of these two views of salvation you hold to. Would you side with the historic Augustinian, Thomistic and Dominican viewpoint or with the Jesuits? I hope that you would side with the Augustinians, because I think their doctrine of salvation is fundamentally orthodox (at least in terms of the points we've been discussing--there are other points regarding salvation that are very important as well that we haven't looked at, like the idea that some of the regenerate can lose their state of regeneration, baptismal regeneration, etc.). I think that on these points it accords with the Bible and with reason, whereas the Jesuit view is a perversion of the gospel and is out of accord with Scripture and reason.

In the section above, I talk about efficacious grace and free will.  For more on my current understanding of Catholic doctrine on these points and how they relate to Calvinism, see here and here.  My view of the Jesuit (Molinist) view has been significantly revised since I wrote this--see here for more on that.  And I also mention Arminianism above, and you can see my current views on Arminius and Arminianism here. 

5/19/2011:

I think my views are solidly Reformed. I did express them, however, in ways that borrow from more Augustinian terminology because one point I am trying to make is that a good deal of the dialogue between Roman Catholics and Reformed Protestants tends to be very confused because of a lack of precision, clarity and flexibility in terminology. I am trying to bridge that gap somewhat. You are right that some of my expressions of my views to you might sound strange and even problematic to some people in Reformed circles, but if they were reading carefully, I think they would see that my views are fully Reformed. I want to help Reformed people communicate more clearly on some of these points. We can understand the possibility of a degree of flexibility in the terminology of justification, for example. Justification is indeed a one-time event, in the sense that when we come to faith God declares us pardoned of all sin, right with the law, and Christ's righteousness is completely, 100%, counted ours at that moment. It is not only, say, 20% or 50% of Christ's righteousness that is counted ours. However, this does not make it improper to note that there are other senses in which the work of salvation is an ongoing process. When we sin, we do indeed need to confess our new sins and ask for new forgiveness, and in that sense can be said to be justified afresh with regard to those new sins. Christ's righteousness is entirely ours, implying full forgiveness of all our sins, from the moment of our first faith; but the implications of this full justification are applied to us from time to time as new situations arise which call for it. Reformed people don't often express things in that way, but there is no contradiction with the substance of Reformed doctrine here.

Likewise, we Reformed need to recognize that Roman Catholics use Augustinian terminology, which defines justification in a broader sense than we tend to do, to include the whole of salvation. When we are talking to Roman Catholics, we need to be able to recognize the different terminology and adjust accordingly to communicate clearly. I don't think Augustine's theology is unbiblical here, even though his terminology is different from the route taken by typical Reformed semantics.

In my view, as I said, when we clear up the terminology issues and try to find some common ground in terminology, we can get down to the real heart of the differences--probably the most central issue here being the question of how free will relates to grace. Luther saw that as the heart of his dispute with the Roman Catholic Church, and I tend to agree with him. Putting it this way also allows us to find more common ground with more Augustinian-leaning Roman Catholics than we typically do.

I could show you places in classic Reformed writings where people have done what I am doing, using terminology more flexibly, using terms and phrases like "infusion," "works being necessary for salvation (I showed you this in Turretin already)," how justification can be used in a broader sense, even a term like "merit." I am simply reviving an older tradition of being more careful with words and phrases (and being more careful to understand people accurately and non-simplistically) in this sort of dialogue.

10/12/2012:

I get your point about the Reformed position seeming to be illogical because there is a continual asking for forgiveness from God for new sins while justification is supposed to be complete at the beginning.  I won't try to get into this in great detail here, as we may have a larger discussion about it sometime later, but in short I would say that I think the Reformed position is more nuanced than this.  (However, I think the Reformed haven't always done as good a job as they should articulating some of these things.  I think there needs to be a greater attempt to relate the Reformed teaching to Augustinian terminology such as Rome uses.)  Briefly, I look at it this way:  Justification is the imputation of the righteousness of Christ, which means that it is the act of God declaring Christ's righteousness mine.  This does happen at conversion.  Sanctification is the outworking in our actual experience of justification.  I like to use the analogy of buying vs. installing a piece of software.  Justification would correspond to buying, say, Microsoft Windows.  Sanctification would correspond to installing it and using it on one's computer.  So for me right now, Christ's righteousness is entirely mine, but my experience of that is incomplete in this life, and it even wavers to greater or lesser degrees depending on my current spiritual state.  At any given time, I am more or less experiencing a right relationship with God.  But I know that God will bring me to perfection in the end because he has granted me all of that from the beginning when he imputed Christ's righteousness to me.  Perhaps I can put it another way:  Justification refers to the right to have a right relationship with God, while sanctification refers to the actual experience of that relationship.

I would even grant that the Augustinian terminology is not so bad as many Reformed people think it is.  I think the Reformed terminology is biblical, but I don't think it needs to be inherently erroneous if one wishes to use the term "justification" comprehensively to refer to the whole process of being made righteous, including both justification and sanctification as the Reformed tend to use the terms.  Perhaps a case can even be made that the Epistle of James uses justification in just such an expanded way (while Paul seems to use it mostly in the Reformed way).  So I think there can be more rapprochement here between the two positions than is perhaps often thought.

As I mentioned before, I think a far more substantial point of difference is the concept of free will.  It is really the Augustinian language combined with free will which causes the real theological problem, in my view.

10/18/2012:

"To be more precise why confess sin if justification is already unequivocally imputed?"

Because justification implies sanctification and cannot be fully actualized without it.  When I sin against God, I must confess and repent to restore that relationship.  If I do not, the relationship will not be restored.  Unrepentant sin will lead to damnation.  To go back to my analogy, no matter that I have bought Microsoft Windows, if I do not install it, or fix the bugs in it, it will do me no good.  In justification at the beginning of conversion, I am granted the entirely of Christ's righteousness and satisfaction for sin.  But this will do me no good unless I come into the experience of that in my life, and that is sanctification.  The fruit of justification is my choosing Christ, repenting when I sin, etc., and without that fruit justification would be worthless and not attain its goal.