Justification/Salvation: event or process? (Protestant vs. Catholic view)

Saturday, November 22, 2008, 4:28 AM

I think it is necessary to clarify a deep, gross misconception that many Protestants entertain about the fundamental divide between the Catholic and the Protestant Doctrine of Justification/Salvation.

It can be trivialized (wrongly) by opposing Faith (Protestant) vs. Works (Catholic), whereas the real divide is Process (Catholic) vs. Event (or sequence of events - Protestant).

Let me explain why it is so and what it means.

i. Catholics do NOT believe that "good works" are their "merit" any more than Protestants do: Catholics know very well (have always known) that supposed "good works" are nothing, are mere exteriority unless they stem from God's grace, unless they are, most of all, rooted in Love that only God, the source of Love, can plant in our hearts.

ii. Catholics, though, believe that Salvation is NOT a "once and for all" event (or a series of events), the so called "Ordo Salutis" (lit. "sequence of salvation") the finicky definition of which they are quite happy to leave for the "debate over ordo salutis, most keenly evident between the Reformed and Arminian systems." (see at Theopedia). Catholics believe that Salvation is a process, undoubtedly initiated by God's Grace, which can be, though, acquired and lost more than once.

iii. Justification (Greek dikaiosyne), although God's Holy Spirit is invoked, is viewed by Protestants essentially as a forensic event, a "once for all" decree resulting in a change of relationship; this event takes place at the moment of saving faith. It is not in any way a process, nor does it result in a fundamental change in a person's nature.

The idea expressed by dikaioo ["to justify"] is "to declare righteous," not "to make righteous." ... [T]he root idea in justification is the declaration of God, the righteous judge, that the man who believes in Christ, sinful though he may be, is righteous -- is viewed as being righteous, because in Christ he has come into arighteous relationship with God. (G. E. Ladd, A Theology of the New Testament, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974, p. 478)

iv. Protestants (in particular Lutherans) believe that man remains his fundamental, irrecuperable sinful self, and that God's justification only covers man with the merits of Christ, like a cloak over a sick body or, to use Luther's even more colorful image, "like white snow over a dung hill". As Luther says elsewhere:

"through his justification, man is intrinsically sinful yet extrinsically righteous." (Alister McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, the Beginnings to the Reformation. 2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 1:182; italics his)

The trouble with the Protestant doctrine of Justification/Salvation is that it is a novelty, a novum, compared with the doctrine that the Church had always entertained for 15 centuries, and (which is even more serious), a departure from tradition that is totally unsupported by the biblical sources, a personal reading adopted by the founders of Protestantism essentially for personal psychological reasons: to free themselves, once and for all, from an unbereable sense of personal guilt.