The Differences between Catholics and Protestants PART III Section 1

Catholics and Protestants Irreconcilable Differences

PART III How Salvation Works: The Irreconcilable Differences between Catholicism (and Orthodoxy) and Protestantism

In Commemoration of the 500th Anniversary of Protestantism

Section I

This third installment of Catholics and Protestants focuses on How Salvation Works. It involves Justification, how God “justifies” us, or “makes us right” with Him so that we can enter Heaven. Go here for a Part I of this series, the Introduction, for Part II, the Protestant issue with Church Authority (section 1; section 2 is here.)

• The essential question involved is: are our natures changed? Can we enter Heaven and be sinners? How’s it work?

Two Options
The Historical Church Option

• Catholicism and Orthodoxy (what I say for the Catholic position covers both) insists that one must be changed in one’s nature to enter Heaven. Sin cannot co-exist with God. So that’s why God became man and took on our Fallen Nature: He did so in order to transform it into a sinless perfect nature. N.B. Theosis the traditional term for this in Greek, and in Latin Divinization.
• For evidence of this in the New Testament, one simple option is to see the many New Testament refs to “a new creation in Christ”, such as 2 Cor 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” 2 Peter 1:4 might well puts it best – but Protestants essentially only read St. Paul. So, see Romans, 6:4, 7:6, 12:2; Galatians 3:27; Ephesians 4:22-24; Colossians 3:8-12. (Also John 1:12 “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; 13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.”

The Protestant Option

• Conversely, Luther answered no, Romans 3:28 shows that we’re all sinners and all of us “fall short of the glory of God. St. Paul then lists six Old Testament refs in Romans 3:10-18 to emphais this point. These are very important to look up in a minute, but they are: Psalms 14:3, 5:9, 140:3, 10:7, Isaiah 59:7-8 (the only non-Psalm) and 36:1. Therefore, Luther argued,  one is NOT changed in one’s nature. One can’t. The effects of Original Sin are irreversible. This is the “T” in the Dutch Calvinist “T.U.L.I.P”; i.e., “Total depravity.”
• Instead, Luther said, one enters Heaven like a manure pile covered with snow; i.e., God’s grace covering our wretched, sinful, fallen nature, which we are united to for eternity. Luther’s Latin tag for this was “Simul justus et peccator”, “simultaneously justified and a sinner”. (This slogan would have been incomprehensible to theologians before Luther, as it goes against the entire idea os Theosis, our necessary divinization, which was the reason God became man, to elevate human nature in himself to make Theosis possible.)
• Therefore, the Battle Cry of the Reformation was “Salvation by Faith Alone!” or “Sola Fide”.  Both meaning that only by having faith in God are we “saved” or “justified”. It’s a legal action God takes with us. God imputes or assigns righteousness to us because of His Son’s death on the Cross, rather causing a metaphysical change in our natures.
• The “verse that launched the Reformation” was Romans 3:28 “Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law.” (KJV, and for the “New Living Translation: “So we are made right with God through faith and not by obeying the law.” The Douay-Rheims Bible: “For we account a man to be justified by faith, without the works of the law.”

That’s it. One might say, “Hey, wait a minute! THAT’S it? Tens of thousands killed and maimed and the faith of millions wracked, if not destroyed, and Western culture and civilization torn to shreds (and if nothing else, an incalculable loss for art and our very idea of art) for this?

Yep.

A lot of blood has been spilt over it, and lot of loved ones forever estranged from each other over it. It’s one of the great tragedies of the human race that so much disaster should come from the misunderstandings of a few hot-shot, up-and-coming intellectuals about a few Biblical passages. For a misunderstanding it was, caused in part by something innocuous: the numbering of chapters and verses in the Bible and how that development resulted in a change in how the Bible was read. (Which I’ll explain in more detail in Section II.)

But the effect on the Christian Church seems to have been permanent.

Now, even today, this difference in how Catholics and Protestants see how Salvation works is elemental, foundational, and it takes up all the air in the room, all the inches in the column. If you’ve ever watched a debate between Catholics and Protestants, this is the true bone of contention, with endless quotes from St. Paul to bolster the Protestant position. (Martin Luther said of him that “St. Paul's voice is the voice of the divine majesty.” Yeah, and Christ’s wasn’t? No, because of Matthew 25:31-46.) However, it is not the most important difference between the two sides of Christianity, and once one understands where St. Paul is actually coming from, this most contentious of arguments evaporates into nothing.

It truly does.

That’s hard to believe, I know.

But let's see why this is so in Section 2.

An Préachán