Well lets not over-realize the eschaton. Nonetheless, I thought this excellent comment from reader Matt should be highlighted as its own post.
Matt writes:
“This is a great conversation. I have always hoped to be able to have a conversation about justification with interlocutors who were aware of the diversity of views within Catholicism on soteriological matters. At any rate, I would suggest that, depending on what we mean exactly by justification, some Thomists (of the even more radically Augustinian variety like Banez and Zumel) said that justification was the root of our righteousness (even if they didn’t use that terminology). In Banez’s writings, “the justified” is one of his basic categories for different “states” of human beings. We have fallen man, the blessed, man in pure nature, man with original justice, etc., and man as justified. After the Fall, it is only someone in this state who can do anything righteous. Without being justified, one is incapable of doing anything even remotely pleasing to God.
When it comes to imputation v. infusion, he also has a very interesting perspective. He is concerned–as, if I may offer an interpretation of Banez here, many Reformed theologians are–that the infusion of grace is letting semi-Pelagianism in through the back door. We have received this grace in the past which now allows us to earn our salvation. He will not accept this view and disputes with some Thomists who may have. His argument is that the redeemed human being still depends at every moment upon the grace of God and the activity of the Holy Spirit in the soul. If this were not true, he says, why would the redeemed have to pray, “Lead us not into temptation and deliver us from evil?”
Furthermore, he is much more concerned about the Protestant view (as he interpreted it, probably badly given, well, a whole set of reasons!) of the non-imputation of sins than the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. He thinks the former takes away from the proclamation of John the Baptist that Jesus “takes away the sins of the world,” the words of the Psalmist that God has removed our transgressions as far as the east is from the west, etc. I’ve rarely seen this distinction between non-imputation and imputation discussed between Protestants and Catholics, though I certainly may have missed it.
Thomas Aquinas and all of his followers say that justification happens instantaneously, which at least complicates the standard view that Protestants see justification as an event and Catholics see it as a process.
Finally (just so this doesn’t become *too* unwieldy), Cajetan interprets James 2 in a very interesting fashion (after giving a very straightforward interpretations of Romans 3). James says that, as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead. This has often been interpreted by Catholics in such a way that the works are like the spirit which makes the body alive. Cajetan rejects this view. He argues that the spirit must be like breath, which isn’t (he argues) the source of life but simply the sign or evidence that the body is alive. This was said long after his encounter with Luther, so he is well aware of the implications.
At any rate, I’m sorry if all of this has been covered in the previous threads. But I’m very happy to see what’s going on here. I hope at least some of these thoughts are remotely helpful!
Pax.”
I hope that it is not strange or anything to comment on “one’s own” post. But this week I found a few things to confirm that there is greater complexity in these Catholic-Protestant soteriological debates than we tend to think. The lines back then were drawn differently back than they are today. (And, in general, they spent a lot more time thinking about theology than most of us do, no?)
Even if scholars of the Synod of Dordt and the debate between Arminians and Calvinists would not say the following, I have often heard my Reformed friends talk about Arminianism as a half-way house to Rome. By rejecting the Calvinist view of the efficacy of grace, they have opened the floodgates for the semi-Pelagian heresies of Roman Catholic soteriology, even if they have not gone all the way down that terrible path… Does this sound familiar?–even if put a bit stridently…
At any rate, the way that Calvinists could draw upon sixteenth-century Thomists like Banez and others regarding predestination and free will showed me that this was not the case. Many leading seventeenth-century Calvinists, instead, saw themselves as part of the great catholic tradition on grace in harmony with St. Paul (of course), St. Augustine, St. Prosper, Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, and even contemporary post-Tridentine Dominicans. It was the Arminians, in common with the Molinist Jesuits, that had abandoned this broad consensus. I’m sure that not all seventeenth-century Calvinists thought this way, but some certainly did.
Anyway, I am rambling. The thing that I wondered is the following: how would Thomists, then, think of the debates on grace taking place at Dordt and the decades that followed? Among the Spaniards, I haven’t found much commentary. But Thomists elsewhere acted exactly as this framework might “predict” that they would: they believed that the aspects of Calvinists predestinarianism that they *did* disagree with had scandalized some of their co-religionists (the Arminians) into the terrible heresy of denying the efficacy of grace and truly embracing semi-Pelagianism. They did not see the Arminians as taking a step towards Tridentine orthodoxy on salvation. Instead, they thought that the Arminians had jumped from what they believed to be the Manichean-tainted heresy of the Calvinists, over the orthodox Thomist position, and into the very semi-Pelagianism that the Reformers had protested against so stridently.
I am certainly not saying that the Thomist story was true. But it is quite surprising and might suggest certain ways that we could re-draw the lines of soteriological debate today, taking our cue from the theologians living in the century or so following the Reformation.
Sorry for another long comment on an old post! I just couldn’t resist.
I had an extra “back” in that first paragraph… Sorry about that.