Faith and Works; Catholics and Protestants

The issue of salvation sparked the Protestant Reformation and split the church. It seemed to both sides at the time that Protestants and Catholics taught two radically different gospels, two religions, two answers to the most basic of all questions: What must I do to be saved? Catholics said you must both believe and practice good works to be saved. Luther, Calvin, Wycliffe and Know insisted that faith alone saves you. Unfortunately, both sides have been talking past each other for 450 years. But there is strong evidence that it was essentially a misunderstanding and that it is beginning to be cleared up. 

Both sides used key terms, faith and salvation, but in different senses. 

1. Catholics used the term salvation to refer to the whole process, from its beginning in faith, through the whole Christian life of the works of love on earth, to its completion in heaven. When Luther spoke of salvation he meant the initial step-- like getting into Noah's Ark of salvation-- not the whole journey. 

2. By faith Catholics meant only one of the three needed "theological virtues" (faith, hope and love), faith being intellectual belief. To Luther, faith meant accepting Christ with your whole heart and soul. 

Thus, since Catholics were using salvation in a bigger sense and faith in a smaller sense, and Luther was using salvation in a smaller sense and faith in a bigger sense, Catholics rightly denied and Luther rightly affirmed that we were saved by faith alone. 

The official teaching of Catholicism ( as distinct from popular misconception) is that salvation is a totally free gift that we can do nothing to "buy" or produce. The Council of Trent's "Decree of Justification" is as insistent on the gratuitous nature of grace as Luther or Calvin. So is Aquinas in the Treatise of Grace in the Summa Theologiae, the bottom line of which is that we can do nothing without God's grace-- not be saved, not deserve grace, and even ask for grace. 

Scripture clearly says both that salvation is a free gift to be accepted by faith (Romans and Galatians) and that  "faith without works is dead" (James). "Work" means "love", and "love" means "the works of love," for Christian love (agape) is not a feeling, like worldly love (eros, storge, philia): if it were, it could not be commanded.

( Excerpt from HANDBOOK of CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS  BY Peter Kreeft & Ronald K. Tacelli : IVP, 1994) 

# Peter Kreeft is a professor of Philosophy at Boston College, and a convert of Catholicism while in college. Ronal Tacelli is a Jesuit Father and an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston College.