Canon XXIV: "If any one says that righteousness, after having been received, is not conserved nor augmented before God by good works, but that these works are merely the fruits or signs of the justification which one has obtained, and that they are not a reason why justification is increased,—let him be accursed."
It is a well-known characteristic of the decrees of the Council of Trent that truth and error appear skilfully interwoven in them. They are like a double motion that is offered in a deliberative body: they contain things which one must affirm, and other things which one must negative. They cannot be voted on—many of them—except after a division of the question. They contain "riders" like those in a bill that comes before a legislative body: in order to pass the bill at all, the "rider" must be passed along with the bill. But enough crops out in these decrees to show that the Catholic Church is not willing to let the merits of Christ be regarded as the only thing that justifies the sinner. He must cooperate with the Holy Spirit to the end of being justified. He must prepare and dispose himself for receiving justifying grace, and this grace is infused into him, and manifests itself in holy movements of the heart and by good works, in acts of love. The Roman Catholic Christian is taught to believe that he is justified partly by what Christ has done, partly by what he himself is doing. He cannot subscribe to Paul's statement: "By grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God; not of works, lest any man should boast." (Eph. 2, 8. 9.) Nor is his justification ever complete, because his love is never perfect. It must be increased even after his death. The Roman purgatory contains sinners whom God had justified as far as He could, the sinners remaining in arrears with their, part of the contract. Accordingly, the sinner can never have the assurance that he will enter heaven. It would be presumptuous for him to think so. He must live on and work on at his poor dying rate, and hope for the best.
This teaching of the Church of Rome subverts Christianity. It strikes at the root of the faith that saves. It is a relapse into paganism and an affront offered to the Savior. It borrows the language of Scripture to express the most hideous error. By this teaching Rome does not drive men into purgatory,—which does not exist,—but into hell. It is only by a miracle of divine grace that sinners are saved where such teaching prevails: they must forget what is told them about the necessity of their own works and cling only to the Redeemer, and must thus practically repudiate the teaching of their Church. Some do this, and escape the pernicious consequences of the error of their Church. All of them will rise up in the Judgment to accuse their teachers of a heresy the worst imaginable.
Rome has, indeed, assailed "the article with which the Church either stands or falls." All its other errors, crass, grotesque, and repulsive though they are, are mere child's play in comparison with this damning and destructive error of justification by works. Luther rightly estimated the virulence of this abysmal heresy when he said that those who attacked his teaching of justification by grace through faith alone were aiming at his throat. Rome's teaching on justification is an attempt to strike at the vitals of Christian faith and life. It sinks the dagger into the heart of Christianity.
16. The Fatalist Luther.
Catholic writers have discovered a fatalistic tendency in Luther's teaching of justification by faith without works. They declare that Luther's theory of the utter depravity of man by reason of inherited sin and his incapacity to perform any work that can be accounted good in the sight of God kills every ambition to virtuous living in man. They argue that when you tell a person that he is not capable to do good, he is apt to believe you and make no effort to perform a good deed. The situation becomes still worse when the divine predestination is introduced at this point, as has been done, they say, by Luther. If God has determined all things beforehand by a sovereign decree, if there really is no such thing as human choice, and all things occur according to a foreordained plan, man no longer has any responsibility. He is reduced to an automaton. Free will is denied him; he cannot elect by voluntary choice to engage in any God-pleasing action; for he is told that his natural reason is blinded by sin and his understanding darkened, rendering it impossible for him to discern good and evil, and leading him constantly into errors of judgment on what is right or wrong, while he is made to believe that his will is enslaved by evil lusts and passions, ever prone to wickedness and averse to godliness. As a consequence, it is claimed, man must necessarily become morally indifferent: he will not fight against sin nor follow after righteousness, because he has become convinced that it is useless for him to make any effort either in the one direction or in the other. The doctrine of man's natural depravity and the divine foreordination of all things, it is held, must drive man either to despair, insanity, and suicide, or land him hopelessly in fatalism: he will simply continue his physical life in a mechanical way, like a brute or a plant; he merely vegetates.
These fatal tendencies which are charged against Luther are refuted by no one more effectually than by Luther himself. As regards the doctrine of original sin and man's natural depravity, Luther preached that with apostolic force and precision. That doctrine is a Bible-doctrine. No person has read his Bible aright, no expounder of Scripture has begun to explain the divine plan of salvation for sinners, if he has failed to find this teaching in the Bible. This doctrine is, indeed, extremely humiliating to the pride of man; it opens up appalling views of the misery of the human race under sin. We can understand why men would want to get away from this doctrine. But no one confers any benefit on men by minimizing the importance of the Bible-teaching, or by weakening the statements of Scripture regarding this matter. Any teaching which admits the least good quality in man by which he can prepare or dispose himself so as to induce God to view him with favor is a contradiction of the passages of Scripture which were cited in a previous chapter, and works a delusion upon men that will prove just as fatal as when a physician withholds from his patient the full knowledge of his critical condition. Yea, it is worse; for a physician who is not frank and sincere to his patient may deprive the latter of his physical life, but the teacher of God's Word who instils in men false notions of their moral and spiritual power robs them of life eternal.
Luther avoided this error. He led men to a true estimate of themselves as they are by nature. But over and against the fell power of sin he magnified the greater power of divine grace. "Where sin abounded, grace hath much more abounded" (Rom. 5, 20),—along this line Luther found the solution for the awful difficulty which confronts every man when he studies the Bible-doctrine of original sin, and when he discovers, moreover, that this Bible-doctrine is borne out fully by his own experience. Just for this reason, because man can do nothing to restore himself to the divine favor, God by His grace proposes to do all, and has sent His Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to do all, and, last not least, publishes the fact that all has been done in the Gospel of the forgiveness of sin by grace through faith in Christ. Luther has taught men to confess: "I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ or come to Him," but he taught them also to follow up this true confession with the other: "The Holy Ghost has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with His gifts, sanctified and kept me in the true faith."
The Gospel is called in the Scriptures "the Word of Life," not only because it speaks of the life everlasting which God has prepared for His children, but also because it gives life. It approaches man, dead in trespasses and sins, and quickens him into new life. It removes from the mind of man its natural blindness and from the will of man its innate impotency. It regenerates all the dead powers of the soul, and makes man walk in newness of life. The difficulty which original sin has created is not greater than the means and instruments which God has provided for coping with it. "God hath concluded all in unbelief, that He might have mercy on all." (Rom. 11, 32.)
This is the only true salvation, every other is fictitious. It teaches man both to face the fearful odds against him because of his corruption, and to relish all the more the points in his favor by reason of God's redeeming and regenerating grace. It starts its work with crushing man's pride and self-confidence utterly, and hurling him into the abyss of despair, but it lifts him out of despair with a mighty power that breaks the power of evil in him. This change is brought about in such a gentle, tender way that the sinner has no sensation of being coerced into the new life by some farce which he cannot resist. It wins him over to God and his Christ in spite of his resistance, and makes out of his unwilling heart a willing one, which gladly coincides with the leadings of grace.