Catholic Tract 2
The Catholic Church has always affirmed
that salvation is a free gift that God freely offers to mankind. God “desires all men to be saved and to
come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4). God is the Saviour of all men,
especially of those who believe.”(1 Tim 3:10). Human beings cannot save
themselves. Nor does mankind deserve eternal life, any more than we “deserved”
to be created in the first place. Nothing that a person has ever done or ever
could do on his own can merit or earn eternal life; God must offer it or confer
it.
The Catholic Church does not teach and has
never taught that a person can be saved by anyone else other than Jesus Christ.
No one is saved by Buddha, Mohamed or the leaders or gods of any other
religions. Nor do Catholics believe that anyone is saved by the Pope, the
Virgin Mary, the saints or any other member of the Church. Jesus alone is the
Saviour of man: “…. There is salvation in no one else for there is no name
under heaven given among men by which we can be saved” (Acts 4:12).
Many Evangelicals will say they believe
Christians are saved by faith, and that Catholics believe they are saved by
works. Both statements are fundamentally inaccurate. Both Protestant and
Catholic Christians accept the official starting tenet of soteriology that we
are all saved by grace. This is not a point of disagreement between Protestants
and Catholics. This is one of our glorious agreements!
The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts
it this way: “Since the initiative belongs to God in the order of grace, no one
can merit the initial grace of forgiveness and justification” (CCC 2010).
Evangelicals and others however define
justification as an act of God whereby he declares the Christian righteous. It
happens at one moment in time and is made possible by the Christian’s faith
alone (sola fide: justification by faith alone - Latin).
Catholic Christians believe that
justification starts at a moment in time but continues throughout a person’s
life. Justification, for Catholics, is made possible by faith working in love
(Gal 5:6). It is an error to think that Catholics do not have a place for faith
in justification,
The unscriptural belief of justification
by faith alone only arose with Martin Luther in the 15th century. In
order to substantiate this man-made claim, Luther deliberately added the word “alone”
to his German translation of Rom 3:28. In reality, the only time “alone”
appears with the word “faith” in the original Greek text is in James 2:24 where
it says we are not saved by faith alone.
Some Evangelicals have likened Catholic
justification to Evangelical justification and sanctification rolled up into
one A Catholic would respond that justification is not complete without
complete sanctification: “Justification entails the sanctification of (man’s)
whole being) (CCC 1995).
Scripture clearly teaches that “graced”
works are involved in the “by” of justification. James 2:26 is the most obvious
passage: “…. You see that a person is justified by what he does and not by
faith alone.”
Is it any wonder that some of the
Reformers attempted to put James into an “appendix” to the Bible rather than in
its historically accepted place?
Most important: this is also the gospel of
Jesus. His ideal was that of a life of (graced) good works flowing from a
vibrant inner faith. See Mt 7:24-27, the two sons (Mt 21:28-32), the Good
Samaritan (Lk 10:25-37), the talents (Mt 25:14-30), the sheep and the goats (Mt
25:31-46) and other texts to teach a
unity of faith and works for salvation. How much more explicit could Jesus have
been in the following: “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord’, will enter
the kingdom of heaven, but only he who “does the will of my Father in heaven”
(Mt 7:21)..
It is important to keep in mind that Paul
uses the word “works” in a very different way from either James or the Catholic
Church. Paul is usually referring to Jewish obligational “works of the law”, as
opposed to “graced works”. Look at Rom 3:28: “For we maintain that a man is
justified by faith apart from observing the law (the Torah). Paul uses the word
as a verb rather than a noun, probably due to his continued struggles with the
“party” of the circumcision. In Phil 2:12 he exhorts his converts to “work out
your salvation with fear and trembling”. Why work, why fear, why trembling, if
faith is all that is necessary?
In Eph 2:8-10 “For it is by grace that you
have been saved …. Not by works” Paul is not pitting faith against works. He is
pitting works of the law (the Torah) against grace (through faith in Jesus
Christ WORKING IN LOVE – Gal 5:6).
An Evangelical apologist once said that
all the cults started by tampering with
the words of Scripture to make it say what they want.
Catholics unashamedly start with the
gospel and base their soteriology on Jesus’ teachings. The rest of the New
Testament is looked at as an expansion on Jesus (which it is) and must be
understood in the light of his teachings. Evangelicals start their study of
soteriology with the Pauline epistles. All the rest of the Bible is a
“footnote” to Paul, including the teaching of Jesus. A check of evangelical
literature will bear this out.
This approach to Scripture bears an
uncanny resemblance to the heresy of Marcion, the 2nd century
Gnostic, who relegated all of the Old Testament and most of the New Testament
to second place under the Pauline epistles. He taught that the Old Testament
was lived under an entirely different economy to the New (that will sound
familiar to most Evangelicals, particularly “dispensationalists”). Because
Marcion led the first major split in the Church of Jesus Christ, Polycarp, a
disciple of St John, referred to him as “the first-born of Satan”. There are
some Evangelicals who teach that “people of Jesus’ time lived under the law; we
live under grace, therefore very few of Jesus’ sayings apply to us”(sic).
Catholics speak of heaven as our “hope”.
Evangelicals speak of knowing (being “assured”) that one is saved. Although
Scripture uses both terminologies, Catholics are actually using the more common
biblical language, for faith, hope and charity are the three virtues of 1 Cor
13:13. Our hope is in Christ, and his
promise of heaven. Hope that is seen (assurance) is not hope at all; it
actually nullifies faith (See Rom 8:25-35).
Catholics pray for the “grace of perseverance” in their faith, of which it is
written, he that “shall persevere to the end, shall be saved” (Mt 10:22,
24:13).
Evangelicals will sometimes ask a
Catholic: “Have you been saved?”. A Catholic’s answer would be threefold:
The Reformers saw justification, then, as
a mere legal act by which God declares the sinner to be meriting heaven even
though he remains, in fact, unjust and sinful. It is not a real eradication of
sin, but a covering of non-imputation. One’s sins are covered, as it were, by a
blanket, the “dungheap” of sin remaining underneath. It is not an inner renewal
and a real sanctification, only an external application of God’s justice.
The Catholic Church understands
justification as a true eradication of sin and a true sanctification and
renewal. The soul becomes objectively pleasing to God and so merits heaven.
Scripture conceives of the forgiveness of sin as a real and complete renewal of
man. The words used are “blot out” (Ps 50:3), clears away (Ps 102:12), “takes
away” (Jn 1:29). The few times the Bible mentions “covering” sins, it refers
not to the forgiveness of sins by God, but to the forgiveness of one man’s sins
by another. Since only God really forgives, the best we can do is overlook, or
“cover” them. Fundamentalism’s notion that God “covers” our sins, but does not
actually remove them is an unfortunate misreading of the Bible that found its
origin in Martin Luther.
“Are you saved?” asks the fundamentalist.
“I am redeemed”, answers the Catholic,. “and like the apostle Paul I am working
out my salvation in fear and trembling”(Phil 2:12) – with a firm hope but not
with a false assurance – and I do all this as the Church has taught, unchanged
, from the time of Christ”.
introductory
page Selected Catholic tracts available in this
series