I know this thread is somewhat older, but if anyone’s interested, this non-Catholic might be able to help you sort out the infusion doctrine. It has a Protestant counterpart, but frankly both sides in the debate present the argument somewhat haphazardly. It’s one of the better key debates over Scripture between the two sides, and deserves more attention.
Greek verb dikaiow, used pan-Bible, means to VINDICATE, to MAKE RIGHTEOUS, and that’s what’s used in the LXX of Isaiah 53:11. Hebrew clause is b’dato yatsdiq, and literally means By His Thinking Truth Knowledge He Makes Righteous. So that’s the mechanic. How He paid for sins is how He makes us Righteous. He paid by THINKING, not by dying physically, ibid. His Physical Death signified He succeeded in paying for sins, when He died quoting Psalm 31:5.
So salvation begins with a juridical, positional declaration of VINDICATION, Genesis 15:6, John 3:16, Romans 5:1. That’s JUSTIFICATION, another meaning of dikaiow. His Righteousness really is imputed to us, Isaiah 53:11, Hebrews 10:10-14. Hence ‘sanctification forever’, ibid.
However, the person saved still is ‘dirty’ in his own soul; now I’m switching to the Catholic side of the debate. So has to undergo a change in his soul. Catholicism prescribes the sacraments, etc. as a system to GET CLEAN and GROW UP in Christ.
Now we switch to the Prottie terms. EXPERIENTIAL SANCTIFICATION is the idea of GROWING UP in Christ while you’re still alive down here, post-juridical salvation. That process is attested in a number of Bible verses, ‘founded’ on Ephesians 2:10, which is anarthrous. God’s Works in you, not your works in yourself.
So now we switch back to the Catholic explanation. For this to happen, God must INFUSE you with the power to ‘work out’ your salvation’. In Bible, this means spiritual maturation. You are saved, thus you now have spiritual assets in ORDER to mature; maturation goal is Ephesians 3:15-19, Colossians 1:25-27, Ephesians 4:12-13, ‘reaching the destination of life’ (Greek katantaw), the maturation level of Christ.
This is accomplished by learning and living Bible under your right teacher, Ephesians 4:16. Obviously, you can’t do that on your own, and only God can do it to you. It is the SPIRIT who causes the Ephesians 4:3-6 ‘henotes’ (mistranslated ‘unity’, means really harmony with God, Plato defined the term in the Philebus).
So the argument between the Catholic and Prottie sides is, HOW does the Spirit do this experiential sanctifying? Catholics have one prescription, Protties offer another. Basically, they differ over papal authority, rituals, etc.
Catholics differ in one other respect. As I understand it, the RCC position is that you can’t go to heaven until you experientially reach the maturation level of Christ, so that’s why the purgatory doctrine is taught. Shorthand idea is that your ‘salvation’ must be experientially completed, before you go to heaven.
So per RCC, yeah you’re saved, but you are not spiritually mature. So you go to purgatory to finish that maturation process, and only THEN do you go to heaven. For to the RCC, no one is fit for heaven, until experientially ‘perfect’.
Protties (me included), can’t find any justification for the purgatory doctrine, and Bible refutes it, 'absent from the body, face to face with the Lord (Greek preposition pros means face-to-face with), 2 Cor 5:6-8. Which would mean, you indeed go to heaven immediately after death, no matter whether you personally matured, or not. Which then means, you are STUCK WITH whatever status of spiritual growth you were in when you died.
Think of it like savings. You retire on a certain amount of savings. That ‘bank’ will still grow, but the amount it grows, is determined by the amount it was worth, when you retired.
So too, with spiritual maturation. If you die as a spiritual baby, then your ‘spiritual capital’ is very small, and your eternal status then will be happy, but also small. Paul stresses this in Philippians 3:18-19, 1Cor3, other passages. So heaven is a bunch of UNEQUALLY DEVELOPED spiritual beings, from the most-mature ‘kings’, down to the lowest levels of heavenly society, tying to Jeremiah 31:31-34, as explained in Hebrews 8:8-10:17.
So the argument of ‘justification’ and ‘sanctification’, which is bifurcated in the Bible between absolute salvation and relative spiritual maturity (as just described above para), is muddled by both Catholic and Prottie sides in the debate; for they argue over the question as if it were only about salvation. It’s not. There are TWO stages: juridical, and forensic. The Protties focus on the first, the Catholics on the second, but the Bible uses both.
So per Bible, you immediately go to heaven, but as what? Spiritual baby, teenager, adult, mature? That’s what 1John addresses.
What I’m trying to say here is that both sides in the debate validly acknowledge real Bible issues, but they don’t JOIN the two types of sanctification (really three, body’s sanctified at death, 1Cor15) – to get the Bible’s own picture.
It’s a scary thing, to be saved yet have a soul still ‘dirty’, needing a complete ‘epistemological rehabilitation’ in the Word, so to mature like Christ. We are all royal family of God, a royal priesthood in aggregate, 1Pet2:5,9. We have teachers, which the RCC calls ‘priests’ (etc); the teachers are our husbandmen (Greek term haphe) in Ephesians 4:16. We grow up only so much as they do, ibid.
So it behooves both sides to refine their doctrines. We need that, to grow up better, and reach the Eph 4:13 destination.
