I say this as a preface to noting that the commission concluded that canon 9 of Trent’s Decree on Justification is
not applicable to modern Protestants (or at least those who say saving faith is Galatians 5 faith). This is important because canon 9 is the one dealing with the faith alone formula (and the one R.C. Sproul is continually hopping up and down about). It states:
If anyone says that the sinner is justified by faith alone, so as to understand that nothing else is required to cooperate in the attainment of the grace of justification . . . let him be anathema.
The reason this is not applicable to modern Protestants is that Protestants (at least the good ones)
do not hold the view being condemned in this canon.
Like all Catholic documents of the period, it uses the term faith in the sense of intellectual belief in whatever God says. Thus the position being condemned is the idea that we are justified by intellectual assent alone (as per James 2). We might rephrase the canon:
If anyone says that the sinner is justified by intellectual assent alone, so as to understand that nothing besides intellectual assent is required to cooperate in the attainment of the grace of justification . . . let him be anathema.
And every non-antinomian Protestant would agree with this, since in addition to intellectual assent one must also repent, trust, etc.6
So Trent does not condemn the (good) Protestant understanding of faith alone. In fact, the canon allows the formula to be used so long as it is not used so as to understand that nothing besides intellectual assent is required. The canon only condemns sola fide if it is used so as to understand that nothing else [besides intellectual assent] is required to attain justification.
Thus Trent is only condemning one interpretation of the sola fides formula and not the formula itself.
I should mention at this point that I think Trent was absolutely right in what it did and that it phrased the canon in the perfect manner to be understood by the Catholic faithful of the time. The term faith had long been established as referring to intellectual assent, as per Romans 14:22-23, James 2:14-26, 1 Corinthians 13:13, etc., and thus everyday usage of the formula faith alone had to be squashed in the Catholic community because it would be understood to mean intellectual assent alone the very view being condemned in James 2 and would thus send millions of souls to hell (as the antinomian branch of Evangelicalism is doing today).
The Church could no more allow people to run around indiscriminately using the faith alone formula knowing how it would be interpreted by the faithful after centuries of one usage than the Church today could allow people to run around saying Jesus is not God (using God as a proper name for the Father). The confusion (and damnation) it would wreak would be massive. Even though the formula can indeed have a perfectly orthodox meaning, that is not how it will be understood by the masses. There must be continuity in the language of the faithful or massive confusion will result.
In fact, one can argue that the problem of antinomianism in Protestantism is a product of the attempt by the Reformers to change the established usage of the term faith to include more than intellectual assent. The English verb believe (derived from Old High German) and the English noun faith (derived from French and before that Latin) were both formed under the historic Christian usage of the term faith and thus they connote intellectual assent.
This is a deeply rooted aspect of the English language, which is why Protestant evangelists have to labor so hard at explaining to the unchurched why faith alone does not mean intellectual assent alone. They have to work so hard at this because they are bucking the existing use of the language; the Reformers effort to change the meanings of the terms believe and faith have not borne significant fruit outside of the Protestant community.
This is also the reason Evangelical preaching often tragically slips into antinomianism. The historic meaning of the terms believe and faith, which are still the established meanings outside the Protestant community, tend to reassert themselves in the Protestant community when people aren’t paying attention, and antinomianism results.
This reflects one of the tragedies of the Reformation. If the Reformers had not tried to overturn the existing usage of the term faith and had only specified it further to formed faith, if they had only adopted the slogan iustificatio sola fide formata instead of iustificatio sola fide,
then all of this could have been avoided. The Church would have embraced the formula, the split in Christendom might possibly have been avoided, and we would not have a problem with antinomianism today.
So I agree a hundred percent with what Trent did. The existing usage of the term faith in connection with justification could not be overturned any more than the existing usage of the term God in connection with Jesus identity could be overturned.
What both communities need to do today, now that a different usage has been established in them, is learn to translate between each others languages. Protestants need to be taught that the Catholic formula salvation by faith, hope, and charity is equivalent to what they mean by faith alone. And Catholics need to be taught that (at least for the non-antinomians) the Protestant formula faith alone is equivalent to what they mean by faith, hope, and charity.
It would be nice if the two groups could reconverge on a single formula, but that would take centuries to develop, and only as a consequence of the two groups learning to translate each others theological vocabularies first. Before a reconvergence of language could take place, the knowledge that the two formulas mean the same thing would first need to be as common as the knowledge that English people drive on the left-hand side of the road instead of on the right-hand side as Americans do.
That is not going to happen any time soon, but for now we must do what we can in helping others to understand what the two sides are saying.
(Needless to say, this whole issue of translating theological vocabularies is very important to me since I have been both a committed Evangelical and a committed Catholic and thus have had to learn to translate the two vocabularies through arduous effort in reading theological dictionaries, encyclopedias, systematic theologies, and Church documents.
So I feel like banging my head against a wall whenever I hear R.C. Sproul and others representing canon 9 as a manifest and blatant condemnation of Protestant doctrine, or even all Protestants, on this point.)
The fact faith is normally used by Catholics to refer to intellectual assent (as in Romans 14:22-23, 1 Corinthians 13:13, and James 2:14-26) is one reason Catholics do not commonly use the faith alone formula even though they agree with what (good) Protestants mean by it.
The formula runs counter to the historic meaning of the term faith.
The other reason is that, frankly, the formula itself (though not what it is used to express)
is flatly unbiblical. The phrase faith alone (Greek, pisteos monon), occurs exactly once in the Bible, and there it is rejected:
You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone. (James. 2:24)
Without going into the subject of what kind of justification is being discussed here (which is misunderstood by most Evangelical commentators on Catholicism, the phrase faith alone is itself rejected.
Even though Protestants can give the phrase orthodox theological content, the phrase itself is unbiblical. If we wish to conform our theological language to the language of the Bible, we need to conform our usage of the phrase faith alone to the use of that phrase in the Bible.
Thus, if we are to conform our language to the language of the Bible, we need to reject usage of the formula faith alone while at the same time preaching that man is justified by faith and not by works of the Law (which Catholics can and should and must and do preach, as Protestants would know if they read Catholic literature). James 2:24 requires rejection of the first formula while Romans 3:28 requires the use of the second.
Thus while Catholics have good reason for not using the formula faith alone, they do not deny what non-antinomian Protestants mean when they use this phrase.
This brings me back (after a long, but I hope fruitful journey) to the subject I began with. When callers ask, Why aren’t Catholics under the anathema of God since they reject the faith alone formula? one can simply say that in addition to believing in justification by grace alone and justification by Christ alone, Catholics also have no problem with justification by faith alone, so long as the kind of faith is understood properly as formed faith/fides formata/faith working by charity. Catholics don’t normally use the phrase faith alone for the two reasons indicated above,
but they have no problem at all saying we are justified by faith alone if the faith is understood to be Galatians 5 faith.
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