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chances are you were taught that Protestants believe that salvation is through faith alone while Catholics believe that comes through a combination of faith and works leading Catholics naturally to accuse proud a sense of thinking they can do whatever they want as long as they believe and leading Protestants to accuse Catholics of thinking that they can earn their salvation through good works fortunately neither of these statements are actually true but are rather misinterpretations that come when we try to oversimplify a highly technical theological question there's certainly some truth in this often repeated distinction of faith and works but only in a general short-handed and sort of lazy sense that doesn't do justice to either sides position and overlooks the joint declaration Lutheran's and Catholics made in 1999 so what do we actually believe about justification this is Catholicism and focus [Music] the Council of Trent defines justification and Protestants would agree as a translation from that state wherein man is born a child of the first atom to the state of grace and of the adoption of the sons of gods through the second Adam Jesus Christ our Savior in the simplest of terms what we're essentially dealing with here is a question of how we go from being separated from God deserving of hell to being with God worthy of heaven now how does it work and when does it take place for both Catholics and Protestants like Martin Luther the starting point is the same we both accept that humanity has fallen from grace and there is nothing that we can do in ourselves to merit it back unlike Pelagius who argued that we possess within ourselves the mean to merit our own salvation both Catholics and Protestants recognize that our sin has left our wills damaged and that we require the grace of God to choose the good nothing not good works not prayer not even faith can cause our salvation from our human nature alone we are wholly and entirely doomed of course we are not entirely on our own as God reaches out to each and every one of us offering us the grace to remove our sins and offer us eternal life God seeks to make us righteous and so through God's initiative not ours we can be saved so far we're all in the same page the Roman Catholic Church Martin Luther and many other Protestant groups are all still friends for now what we can all agree that justification is an act of being forgiven and made righteous in the eyes of God there is sharp disagreement on what actually happens to us when we are justified and how we are to respond to it for Luther God declares us righteous and treats us differently as a result but nothing categorically changes about who we are we remain sinners but God in a sense now chooses to overlook that and let us into communion Lutheran's understand this condition of the Christian as a being at the same time righteous and sinner believers are totally righteous in that God forgives their sins through word and sacrament and grants the righteousness of Christ which they appropriate in faith in Christ they are made just before God looking at themselves through the law however they recognize that they remain also totally sinners in layman's terms and you just can't make this stuff up Luther is famously attributed to have said that this date of justification is like being poop covered in snow you're still the same sinful refuse that you were before but now with Christ you are covered with beautiful white snow acceptable in the eyes of God charming right naturally this has a tremendous effect on what is expected of the Christian following their justification since in Luther's eyes there is no hope of ever becoming anything other than a sinner and because the Christian is as justified by Christ at the moment of their initial justification as they ever will be there is no essential need for further conversion or purification because really who can top what Christ has already done no further works can increase this nor can they take it away all that matters both in receiving justification or potentially losing it is our complete trust in Christ this does not mean as Catholics might criticize that Protestants believe that they can do anything they want as long as they have faith while it's true that no good work no matter how good can merit anything more than we have already received and so works for a Protestant don't have an essential effect on salvation works still matter Jesus says that you will know a tree by its fruit good works necessarily flow from a true faith that has been justified and so Christians are expected to do good things not because they cause our justification but because they are a natural effect of in this way rather than saying that Lutheran's believe that salvation is the result of faith alone implying a disconnect from works it might be more appropriate to say that they believe that they are justified by faith which issues forth in works good works are not an option for Protestants and in many ways this ultimate formula isn't too far off from what Catholics actually profess but how we get there is quite different for starters Catholics have a far more positive view of the human person while we accept with Luther that our nature has been corrupted by the weight of sin we believe that our nature is essentially good not evil and that God's justifying grace can return us to our former state of goodness thus when Catholics say that someone is justified they do not mean that God has simply overlooked our sinfulness but rather that our very beings are changed the council of trent speaking of these effects proclaims that justification is not remission of sins merely but also the sanctification and renew of the inward man through the voluntary reception of the grace and of the gift swear by man of unjust becomes just and of an enemy a friend that so he may be an heir according to hope of life everlasting in other words through justification we are not simply poop covered in snow but people who have gone through internal purification crisis not just cover us up but lives in us and transforms us into something good in ourselves once again this perspective has a tremendous effect on what is expected of the Christian following their justification since in the Catholic Church's eyes there's not only hope but a profound expectation that our very beings be transformed and since this obviously does not happen the moment we emerge from the waters of baptism the act of justification cannot be spoken of as just a single moment instead one is justified that is included into the community of God but also must continue through a process of sanctification cooperating with the grace of God to allow God to flourish in us it is not enough to passively allow grace to declare us justified we must actively take up the task of growing in righteousness and we accomplish this by doing good works right interesting enough neither the Council of Trent nor the Catechism used the word works once to describe this process instead when the church speaks of cooperating with the grace of God what it refers to is one's participation and growth in the theological virtues Faith Hope and love for Catholics actions matter not because they achieve our salvation separate from God or simply because they reveal a Salvation already received but because they integrate form and grow with God instills in us namely God's very self thus in accepting and cooperating with these gifts we're not simply engage in pointless do-goodery but participate in the life of God making us more like God ourselves in this way rather than saying that Catholics believe that salvation comes from faith and works as if they were two separate criteria disconnected from God's initiative it might be more appropriate to say that we believe that we are initially justified by faith in God but that justification is an ongoing process of sanctification that requires us to respond with love which doesn't have the greatest ring to it and you can see why we like to over simplify these things but it also shows where our true differences lie and more importantly how we have been able in recent years to agree on common statements on the subject in 1999 more than 400 years after the issue of justification tore the church apart Lutheran's and Catholics were able to come together around a common resolution the present joint declaration has this intention 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 our justification by God's grace through faith in Christ it does not cover all that either Church teaches about justification it does encompass a consensus on basic truths of the doctrine of justification and shows that the remaining differences in this explication are no longer the occasion for doctrinal Kandam nations are there still some differences of course but through prayerful dialogue Lutheran's no longer consider Catholics Pelagians and Catholics no longer consider Lutheran's lazy hypocrites so that seems like a step in the right direction and I think there's a really important lesson in this here we have a topic that by all accounts caused the Reformation for centuries it kept the Western Church apart in a largely bitter rivalry and yet when we actually sit down and listen to the other explain what they believe agreeing on common language to express our theology what we find is that the vast oversimplifications we have used to attack one another are quite different from what we actually believe one can only imagine how different our church would look today if we had taken this approach in the 16th century and how much better our church and world will look in 400 years if we continue with this approach [Music] you