ADVENTIST REVIEW ONLINE

C O V E R S T O R Y

BY CLIFFORD GOLDSTEIN

By Grace Alone!

The May 25 edition of the Adventist Review carried an important article about Seventh-day Adventist assessment of the Roman Catholic Papacy (see “The Antichrist: Is the Adventist Interpretation Still Viable?”). The following article is a companion piece that explores recent developments between Protestants and the Roman Catholic Church—Editors.

HEN, AFTER 30 YEARS OF DIALOGUE, Lutherans and Roman Catholics last year signed a common declaration on justification by faith, they did so on October 31—Reformation Day, which commemorates Martin Luther’s posting of his 95 theses on the church door in Wittenberg.

Yet October 31, 1999, was also Halloween, and no day in the calendar better symbolizes the nature of this document.

Endorsed by dignitaries from the Vatican and from the Lutheran World Federation (which represents 58 million of the world 61.5 million Lutherans) The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (JDDJ) states that, despite “remaining differences,”¹ Roman Catholics and Lutherans have the same fundamental understanding of justification by faith, the doctrine that spawned the Protestant Reformation.

For More Information

Ellen White: By Grace Alone!

A complete text of the joint declaration

Catechism of the Catholic Church

The Antichrist: Is the Adventist Interpretation still viable?

Jubilee 2000

“The present declaration has this intention,” declares the JDDJ document, “namely to show that on the basis of their dialogue the subscribing Lutheran churches and the Roman Catholic Church are now able to articulate a common understanding of justification by God’s grace through faith in Christ . . . and that the remaining differences in its explication are no longer the occasion for doctrinal condemnations.”²

Do Lutherans and Catholics really have a common view of “justification by God’s grace”; or is JDDJ the latest and most dramatic manifestation of the truth of these words: “And all the world wondered after the beast” (Rev. 13:3)? “It is not without reason that the claim has been put forth that Catholicism is now almost like Protestantism. There has been a change; but the change is in Protestants, not in Romanists.”³

The answer, after a comparison of their views, will be sadly obvious.

The View From Wittenberg
However divergent Catholic and Protestant (including Lutheran) theology is on numerous issues, the crucial split occurs along one sharp divide—justification by faith. What is justification, and what does it mean for the justified? On this issue hangs, if not the law and the prophets, then certainly the gospel and the church. (For Martin Luther, justification by faith was the doctrine upon which the church stood or fell.)⁴

Since the Reformation, Lutherans along with almost all Protestants have insisted that justification by faith is an act by which God declares us righteous. Using such verses as “Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law” (Rom. 3:28) and “Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight” (verse 20), the Reformers taught that justification was something that God does for us, not in us—a crucial distinction. By the Lord’s gracious act, we have the perfect righteousness of Jesus—the righteousness wrought by His sinless life and absolute obedience to God’s law—credited (or imputed) to us, as if that sinlessness and absolute obedience were now our own. Christ’s history, Christ’s obedience, Christ’s righteousness, become, legally, our history, our obedience, our righteousness, and these provide the only means by which we, as sinners, can be accepted by a holy and perfect God.

However good the news, it gets even better: this legal declaration of righteousness comes—by faith alone. It can’t come to us by works, because we’re already sinners, and thus no matter how obedient and law-abiding, we can never achieve the perfect righteousness that a perfect God demands. Nothing that happens in us gives us merit that can, in any way, justify us in God’s sight. We’re justified only by what Christ did for us, apart from us, outside of us.

“For what saith the scripture? Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness. Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt” (Rom. 4:3, 4). God counted Abraham as righteous, not because of Abraham’s works, but because of Christ’s righteousness, which Abraham—through faith—had credited to him. Otherwise the reward would have been reckoned not through grace, but because Abraham earned it. If salvation were earned through works, it would be owed, and what’s owed is what we deserve—and how can any of us deserve Christ’s perfect righteousness? We can’t deserve what only Christ can give us, and that’s why our salvation has to be by grace alone through faith alone.

“Every soul may say,” wrote Ellen White, that “‘by His [Christ’s] perfect obedience He has satisfied the claims of the law, and my only hope is found in looking to Him as my substitute and surety, who obeyed the law perfectly for me. By faith in His merits I am free from the condemnation of the law. He clothes me with His righteousness, which answers all the demands of the law. I am complete in Him who brings in everlasting righteousness. He presents me to God in the spotless garment of which no thread was woven by any human agent.’”⁵

The View From St. Peter’s
In Roman Catholic teaching, justification isn’t just an act, an extrinsic declaration of righteousness, but also includes an ongoing process that is continually making a Christian righteous. Justification isn’t just a change in stature but a change in human nature itself. What Protestants understand as sanctification—the fruit, the personal subjective experience of justification—Roman Catholics subsume under the name of justification, which includes not just what God does for us but what He also does in us. This difference isn’t mere semantics; on the contrary, it gets to the heart of the most crucial teaching in all Scripture: How are we saved?

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “justification includes the remission of sins, sanctification, and the renewal of the inner man.”⁶ Justification, in Rome’s opinion, is what happens inside a person as well as outside. Christ’s merits, the merits that He wrought out in His perfect life by His perfect obedience to the law, are not just credited to a person but are actually infused into the life of the believer through the sacraments administered by the Roman Catholic Church itself. Rome teaches that this saving merit doesn’t remain outside of us but becomes something that happens inside a person, a change that gives that person merit before God.

“The merits of man before God in the Christian life,” according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “arise from the fact that God has freely chosen to associate man with the work of his grace . . . so that the merit of good works is to be attributed in the first place to the grace of God, then to the faithful.”

The italics in that statement are Rome’s, and shouldn’t be overlooked. Rome’s teaching that God somehow associates man “with the work of his grace” leads it to an understanding of justification that Protestantism has rejected. Though Scripture does use the term “grace” in ways that include God working in us, Rome melds the grace that saves us with that grace that works in us until “the merit of good works” belongs not just to Christ but also “to the faithful”—whose good works do, then, grant them merit before God.

“Moved by the Holy Spirit,” says the Catechism, “we can merit for ourselves and for all others the graces needed to obtain eternal life.”7 Yet if we can “merit for ourselves . . . the graces needed to obtain eternal life,” then doesn’t justification become something different than when it’s based only on Christ’s merits credited to us by faith alone? Of course it does, which is why at the sixteenth-century Council of Trent (still viewed as authoritative by the Roman Church), Rome denounced justification by faith alone: “If anyone says that the sinner is justified by faith alone, meaning that nothing else is required to cooperate in order to obtain the grace of justification . . . let him be anathema”8—a denunciation that, after more than 450 years, the church has never repudiated.

Word Games
Protestants understand “the grace of justification” as purely a legal declaration; for Rome justification is a process of inner renewal, something that happens in us. Considering these fundamental contradictions, how can The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification show a “common understanding of justification by God’s grace through faith in Christ” between Catholics and Protestants?

The answer, of course, is that it can’t.

JDDJ is, instead, a twentieth-century linguistic philosopher’s dream, 44 paragraphs of crude proof that language can be so ambiguous, so fluid and slippery that two groups reading the same words can take away from those words meanings as diverse as the difference between Christ and antichrist.

For example, The Joint Declaration declares: “By grace alone, in faith in Christ’s saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God.”9 Sounds nice, but even the clerics at Trent who cursed the Reformers could have signed their names to that sentence. Rome has no problem accepting salvation by “grace alone.” For Rome it has always been God’s grace, and God’s grace alone, that saves us. It’s even God’s grace alone that gives to the faithful “merit for ourselves . . . to obtain eternal life.” Therefore, technically, because it is God’s grace working in us—it’s never, as the document says, “merit on our part.”

“Through Christ alone,” JDDJ declares, “are we justified, when we receive this salvation in faith.”10 Again, Rome has not denied that it’s through Christ alone that we are justified, or that salvation comes by faith (just not by “faith alone”). For example, Rome teaches that the church “bears in herself and administers the totality of the means of salvation”11 or that Mary in heaven “did not lay aside this saving office but by her manifold intercession continues to bring us the gifts of eternal salvation.”¹² Because everything the church or Mary does is derived only from Christ, Rome can still insist that all the church does toward saving souls, and all that Mary does in her “saving office,” come to the believer “through Christ alone.”

According to JDDJ, justification tells “us that as sinners our new life is solely due to the forgiving and renewing mercy that God imparts as a gift we receive in faith, and never can merit in any way.”¹³ Here too Rome can sign on the dotted line without conceding anything, even its age-old practice of granting indulgences, which bring to the sinner “the remission before God of the temporal punishment due for sins already forgiven as far as their guilt is concerned.”¹⁴

What does that mean? According to Roman Catholic belief, when sins are “forgiven” the sinner still faces a “temporal punishment” for those sins, which need to be expiated before or after death. Because the debt from the sin remains, “an indulgence,” says The Catholic Encyclopedia, “offers the penitent sinner the means of discharging this debt during his life on earth”—as opposed to “expiating [those] sins in purgatory.”¹⁵

How do the faithful obtain indulgences? Though the practice has varied over the years, John Paul II, in the “Bull of Indiction of the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000,” announced special indulgences for the penitent during the Jubilee. According to Rome, the faithful can “make a pious pilgrimage to one of the Patriarchal Basilicas . . . and there take part devoutly in Holy Mass . . . or if they visit, as a group or individually, one of the four Patriarchal Basilicas and there spend some time in Eucharistic adoration and pious meditations, ending with ‘Our Father’ . . . or abstaining for at least one whole day from unnecessary consumption . . . and donating a proportionate sum of money to the poor; supporting by a significant contribution works of a religious or social nature.”¹⁶ (See sidebar, p.10.)

Doesn’t the practice of indulgences contradict what JDDJ says about forgiveness being “a gift we receive in faith, and never can merit in any way”? Not if one understands the terms as Rome does. For Rome, no matter how many indulgences the penitent obtains, either from pilgrimages or paying money, it’s still never a person’s own merit that pays the debt. Instead Rome teaches that the church possesses a treasury of the “merits of Christ and the saints,” which includes the “prayers and good works of the Blessed Virgin Mary,” and it’s from this treasury that the penitent “obtain from the Father of Mercies the remission of the temporal punishments due for their sins.”¹⁷ In other words, even though the people make pilgrimages, or pay money to “works of a religious or social nature,” forgiveness comes only from the merit of Christ and the saints. Forgiveness, therefore, is something the sinner can never “merit in any way”; and because we can never merit it—it’s a “gift we receive in faith.”

JDDJ also said: “We confess together that sinners are justified by faith in the saving action of God in Christ.”¹⁸ No problem, even if (for Rome) that saving action is manifested through the sacraments, which are “efficacious signs of grace, instituted by Christ and entrusted to the church, by which the divine life is dispensed to us.”¹⁹ These signs of grace, which come “by the action of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit,”²⁰ must be administered for salvation. “The church affirms that for believers the sacraments of the New Covenant are necessary for salvation,”²¹ and they include “Baptism, Confir-mation or Chrismation, Eucharist, Penance, Anointing of the Sick, Holy Orders, and Matrimony.”²²

Again, nothing here contradicts The Joint Declaration. Everything that happens to the believer through the sacramental system happens only through “the saving action of God in Christ”—even if it’s all mediated to the believer through the church itself, which is “the sacrament of Christ’s action at work in her through the mission of the Holy Spirit.”²³

In Place of Christ
Because salvation is always by “grace alone,” received “in faith” (and “never any merit on our part”), and because salvation happens only through “the saving action of God in Christ”—Rome could sign the document without changing any practices that, at their core, deny the essence of justification by faith alone. No wonder many Protestants have protested JDDJ, including 200 German theologians who expressed their “weighty objections” because, they said, the document brings the “Lutheran Doctrine of Justification by faith into question [and] presupposes an ecumenical notion of purpose which is irreconcilable with Reformation criteria.”²⁴

Perhaps the most interesting, and revealing, statement came from Jesuit scholar Avery Dulles. Writing in a publication that supported JDDJ, Dulles noted that on the issue of justification by faith alone, “it is very difficult to make out a consensus since the Lutheran position is based on the assumption that faith is the means whereby we are clothed with the merits of Christ, in whom we believe. Lutherans reject justification as interior renewal because in their view such renewal is always imperfect and presupposes justification. Here again, no agreement has been reached.”²⁵

No agreement has been reached! One would think that the whole point of a document titled The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification would be to reach an agreement on the doctrine of justification. Yet, according to this Jesuit, there was no agreement. And he was right; in fact—there can’t be one. Rome will never accept justification by faith alone because to do so would, in effect, undo its whole purpose for its existence.

The Roman Catholic system is based on the crucial notion that all that Christ has done or does for a person comes mediated through the church itself. In other words—salvation, through all God’s grace, and always through Christ alone—is dispensed to the faithful only through the church and its sacraments and priesthood. Rome sees itself as the sole dispenser of grace. The Roman system, therefore, at its core, at its very essence, has usurped the ministry, sacrifice, and high priesthood of Christ. “Antichrist” does not mean just “against Christ” but also “in the place of Christ.”

These statements, drawn directly from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, reveal Rome’s usurpation of prerogatives that belong only to Christ. “Indeed bishops and priests, by virtue of the sacrament of Holy Orders, have the power to forgive all sins ‘in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.’”²⁶ “The Church, who through the bishop and his priests, forgives sins . . .”²⁷ “Basing itself on Scripture and tradition, the council teaches that the church, a pilgrim now on earth, is necessary for salvation.”²⁸ “Were there no forgiveness of sins in the church, there would be no hope of life to come or eternal liberation.”²⁹ “Through the liturgy, Christ, our redeemer and high priest, continues the work of redemption in, with, and through the church.”³⁰ “The Church is catholic: she proclaims the fullness of faith. She bears in herself and administers the totality of the means of salvation.”³¹

No wonder Rome fears justification by faith alone. Any system that claims to bear in itself “the totality of the means of salvation” must, of necessity, reject a doctrine that claims that the totality of salvation exists only in Christ Himself, and that this salvation comes to the believer by faith alone—not mediated by any institution, liturgy, or priesthood. If Catholics were to embrace biblical justification, Rome’s present structure—as the vehicle through which grace and salvation are dispensed—would crumble under the weight of its own false redundancy. For this reason Rome has, for almost 500 years, been an avowed enemy of justification by faith alone. She has to oppose it because no biblical teaching threatens her more.

The Prophetic Element
If, then, no agreement exists on justification, why this much-ballyhooed document claiming that one does? Though the answer is complicated, a few crucial factors seem to have helped prepare the soil for JDDJ.

First, due to the inroads of futurism, Rome is no longer seen by many Protestants as the antichrist (a helpful development in fostering ecumenical dialogue with it). Second, the philosophical climate of the past 40 years has made the notion of “truth” less absolute, more subjective, opening the way for the kind of semantic fog that JDDJ and other documents purporting doctrinal unity with Rome must have. Third, many Protestants simply don’t understand justification by faith alone and Rome’s utter usurpation of it; if they did, documents like JDDJ wouldn’t get past the first line.

Whatever the immediate causes, this document represents one of the most stunning prophetic signs that Adventists have witnessed in the past 50 years. It’s almost as if these two religious groups, having read the The Great Controversy, decided to perform it onstage. And though, in this particular scene, the actors weren’t wearing masks and costumes, they didn’t need to, because the words and phrases uttered in their lines and dialogue wore the masks and costumes instead.

Which is why—again—the signatories of The Joint Declaration couldn’t have picked a better day than October 31, Halloween, to play their parts.

¹Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (JDDJ), N.5
²Ibid.
³Ellen White, The Spirit of Prophecy (Oakland, Calif.: Pacific Press, 1884), vol. 4, p. 388.
⁴What Martin Luther Says: An Anthology, ed. Ewald Plass, 3 vols. (St. Louis: Concordia, 1959), vol. 2, p. 704, W. 5.
⁵Ellen White, Selected Messages, book 1, p. 396.
⁶Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) (New York: Doubleday, 1995), n. 2019. (Italics supplied.)
⁷CCC, n. 2027.
⁸Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, Rev. H. J. Schroeder, O.P. (Rockford, Ill.: Tan Books), canon 9, p. 43.
⁹JDDJ, n. 15.
¹⁰Ibid., n. 16.
¹¹CCC, n. 868.
¹²Ibid., n. 969.
¹³JDDJ, n. 17.
¹⁴Enchiridion of Indulgences, Authorized English Version, William T. Barry, C.SS.R., n. 1.
¹⁵CCC, n. 1475.
¹⁶Conditions for Gaining the Jubilee Indulgence. William Wakefield Card. Baum, Major Penitentiary. Given at Rome, at the Apostolic Penitentiary, Nov. 29, 1998.
¹⁷CCC, n. 1478.
¹⁸JDDJ, n. 25
¹⁹CCC, n. 1131.
²⁰Ibid., n. 1084.
²¹Ibid., n. 1129.
²²Ibid., n. 1113.
²³Ibid., n. 1118.
²⁴Position Statement of the Theological Instructors in Higher Education to the Planned Signing of the Official Common Statement to the Doctrine of Justification, quoted in Christian News, Nov. 15, 1999, p. 10.
²⁵Avery Dulles, “Two Languages of Salvation: The Lutheran-Catholic Joint Declaration,” First Things, Dec. 1999, p. 28. (Italics supplied.)
²⁶CCC, n. 1461.
²⁷Ibid., n. 1448.
²⁸Ibid., n. 846.
²⁹Ibid., n. 983.
³⁰Ibid., n. 1069.
³¹Ibid., n. 868. (Italics supplied.)
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Clifford Goldstein is the author of 13 books about Bible prophecy, interpretation, and current issues. He also edits the Adult Sabbath School Study Guide.