Do you believe those words? I do! I believe with all my heart
I do believe those words! But I also know that the characteristic of all heretical doctrines - from which comes the name, in Greek
haireomai, “to choose” - is that their developers pick passages from Scripture, come up with their own private interpretation based on their private judgment, and ignore the rest, even though their doctrines contradict other parts of Scripture and above all else contradict the teachings of the apostolic Church.
If you learn Scripture as a whole and in unison with Tradition, you will understand that the heresies of
sola fide and
sola scriptura developed in the XVI century by a rebellious Catholic religious are self-defeating and anti-scriptural. If you read the Church Fathers, you will learn that your act of
fiduciary faith on your side is entirely pointless towards your salvation.
According to Luther (and Calvin), the faith that justifies is not, as the Catholic Church teaches, a firm belief in God’s revealed truths and promises, but is the infallible conviction (fiduciary faith) that God for the sake of Christ will no longer impute to us our sins, but will consider and treat us, as if we were really just and holy, although in our inner selves we remain the same sinners as before. This is a basic tenet of protestantism as expressed in the Solid Declaration of the Formula of Concord.
This “fiduciary faith” is not a religious-moral preparation of the soul for sanctifying grace, nor a free act of cooperation on the part of the sinner; it is merely a means or spiritual instrument granted by God to assist the sinner in laying hold of the righteousness of God, thereby to cover his sins in a purely external manner as with a mantle. For this reason the Lutheran formularies of belief lay great stress on the doctrine that our entire righteousness does not intrinsically belong to us, but is something altogether exterior.
In the Protestant system remission of sin is no real forgiveness, no blotting out of guilt. Sin is merely cloaked and concealed by the imputed merits of Christ; God no longer imputes it, whilst in reality it continues under cover its miserable existence till the hour of death. Thus there exist in man side by side two hostile brothers as it were — the one just and the other unjust; the one a saint, the other a sinner; the one a child of God, the other a slave of Satan — and this without any prospect of a conciliation between the two. But in a man who is at once sinful and just, half holy and half unholy, we cannot possibly recognize a masterpiece of God’s omnipotence, but only a wretched caricature, the deformity of which is exaggerated all the more by the violent introduction of the justice of Christ.
According to the teaching of the Catholic Church the righteousness and sanctity which justification confers, although given to us by God as efficient cause and merited by Christ as meritorious cause, become an interior sanctifying quality or formal cause in the soul itself, which it makes truly just and holy in the sight of God.
According to the teaching of the Catholic Church in active justification an
actual and real forgiveness of sins takes place so that
the sin is really removed from the soul. This view is entirely consonant with the teaching of Holy Scripture, for the Biblical expressions: “blotting out” as applied to sin (Psalm 1:3; Isaiah 43:25; 44:22; Acts 3:19), “exhausting” (Hebrews 9:28), “taking away” [2 Samuel 12:13; 1 Chronicles 21:8; Mich., vii, 18; Psalm 10:15 and 102:12], cannot be reconciled with the idea of a mere covering up of sin which is supposed to continue its existence in a covert manner. Other Biblical expressions are just as irreconcilable with this protestant idea, for instance, the expression of “cleansing” and “washing away” the mire of sin (Psalm 1:4, 9; Isaiah 1:18; Ezekiel 36:25; 1 Corinthians 6:11; Revelation 1:5), that of coming “from death to life” (Col. ii., 13; 1 John 3:14); the removal from darkness to light (Ephesians 5:9).
Justification as understood by Protestants, presents the following qualities: its absolute certainty, its equality in all, and finally the impossibility of ever losing it. According to the teaching of the Church, sanctifying grace has the *opposite *characteristics: uncertainty, inequality, and admissibility.
- Uncertainty for, since Scripture declares that we must work out our salvation “with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12), it is impossible to regard our individual salvation as something fixed and certain. Why did St. Paul (1 Corinthians 9:27) chastise his body if not afraid lest, having preached to others, he might himself “become a castaway”? He says expressly (1 Corinthians 4:4): “For I am not conscious to myself of any thing, yet am I not hereby justified; but he that judgeth me, is the Lord.”
- Inequality: first, because according to the generosity of God or the receptive condition of the soul an unequal amount of grace is infused; then, also, because the grace originally received can be increased by the performance of good works (Proverbs 4:18; Sirach 18:22; 2 Corinthians 9:10; Ephesians 4:7; 2 Peter 3:18; Revelation 22:11).
- Admissibility, because mortal sin involves the loss of divine grace according to Scripture. Even in the Old Testament the prophet Ezechiel (Ezekiel 18:24) says: “All his justices which he hath done, shall not be remembered: in the prevarication, by which he hath prevaricated, and in his sin, which he hath committed, in them he shall die.” Not in vain does St. Paul (1 Corinthians 10:12) warn the just: “Wherefore he that thinketh himself to stand, let him take heed lest he fall”; and state uncompromisingly (1 Corinthians 6:9 sq.) that it is not by infidelity alone that the Kingdom of Heaven will be lost.
