⭐ The Catholic Church's formal answer to the Reformation. ⚠ Please note how to read this entry: the decision field gives the decree in its own words, set apart from the thirty-three canons that Protestants read in it — the two differ greatly in tone, and that difference is itself historical evidence.
The issue
Is justification God declaring a person righteous (imputation), or God making a person righteous (infusion)? And does the human will have any part in it?
Claim
The Protestant side (Luther): justification is an alien, imputed righteousness — at the same time righteous and a sinner. Nothing is necessary for salvation except the historical cross, the gospel preached, and faith in the sinner's heart. Luther's own words, as Olson gives them, draw this line very clearly: the righteousness received in justification is Christ's, an alien and imputed righteousness — through faith in Christ, Christ's righteousness becomes our righteousness, and all that he has becomes ours, because he himself has become ours. ⚠ This righteousness never becomes a person's own possession, and it never turns the one who receives it into someone wholly righteous: the person who has received Christ's righteousness, as Olson puts it, is still a sinner through and through, and the normal state of his whole life is to be at the same time righteous and a sinner (simul justus et peccator). As Olson gives Luther's words: a Christian is at once righteous and a sinner, holy and profane, an enemy of God and a child of God.
Two inferences follow from this, and they are exactly where Luther collides head-on with Trent. First, as Olson puts it, nothing is necessary for salvation except the historical cross, the gospel preached, and faith in the sinner's heart. Second, in Olson's words, no work of penance can add to any aspect of salvation; the merit of Christ that God imputes to the sinner cannot be added to. ⭐ The second point runs straight against Trent's Canon 32 — which anathematizes precisely the denial that good works are also the merits of the justified person himself. The two sides were not talking past each other; they met head-on at one and the same point.
Counterclaim
⚠ What Protestants read from this council was mainly the thirty-three canons that came with the decree, and two of them were the hardest to accept. Canon 9: “If any one saith, that by faith alone the impious is justified, in such wise as to mean, that nothing else is required to cooperate in order to the obtaining the grace of Justification, and that it is not in any way necessary, that he be prepared and disposed by the movement of his own will: let him be anathema.” Canon 32: “If any one saith, that the good works of one that is justified are in such manner the gifts of God, that they are not also the good merits of him that is justified … let him be anathema.” For Protestants, Olson notes, Canon 32 seemed to be ironclad proof that Roman Catholicism taught justification by works.
⚠ But this reading itself has to be discounted, and it is a Protestant historian who discounts it. Olson writes that Protestants interpreted the decree to mean that Christians can be justified only once they are already sanctified, and that sanctification is the result of cooperating with God's grace, so that justification must be the result of human work — and then he immediately adds that the Council of Trent never said anything so blatant from beginning to end. ⭐ We leave this sentence here because it is exactly what the first rule of this module requires: first let one side speak for itself, then set other people's reading of it apart from what it actually said.
The ruling
What the decree itself says (Chapter 5): “in adults, the beginning of the said Justification is to be derived from the prevenient grace of God … without any merits existing on their parts, they are called; that so they, who by sins were alienated from God, may be disposed through his quickening and assisting grace, to convert themselves to their own justification, by freely assenting to and co-operating with that said grace: in such sort that, while God touches the heart of man by the illumination of the Holy Ghost, neither is man himself utterly inactive while he receives that inspiration, forasmuch as he is also able to reject it; yet is he not able, by his own free will, without the grace of God, to move himself unto justice in his sight.” ⚠ Two more points must be recorded with it: justification “is not remission of sins merely, but also the sanctification and renewal of the inward man, through the voluntary reception of the grace, and of the gifts”; and Chapter 12 says that, except by rare special revelation, we cannot know our own predestination — and, in González's rendering, therefore we should not place our hopes in predestination.
⭐The other chapters of the decree — the half you cannot do without when reading it alongside the Formula of Concord. The Decree on Justification has sixteen chapters, followed by thirty-three canons. Besides Chapter 5 quoted above, the following chapters directly fixed the distance between Catholics and Protestants on this thread for the next four hundred years (as translated in González's third volume):
Chapter 6 · How one is prepared. Adults receive faith by hearing; “understanding themselves to be sinners,” they “are raised unto hope, confiding that God will be propitious to them for Christ's sake”, and so they trust and love God and hate sin — this hatred is called penitence, and for adults it must take place before baptism.
Chapter 7 · What justification is. Justification “is not remission of sins merely, but also the sanctification and renewal of the inward man” (quoted above).
Chapter 8 · What Paul's saying means. In González's rendering: when Paul speaks of justification by faith, what he actually means is that the beginning of justification comes by faith, not by merit. ⚠ Please notice: the decree does not deny by faith; it limits by faith to the beginning.
Chapter 9 · ⭐⭐ No one can know for certain that he is justified. In González's rendering: it is not necessary to know that one is justified; justification can be a real thing in a person without his knowing it, since, in the decree's words, “no one can know with a certainty of faith, which can not be subject to error, that he has obtained the grace of God.” ⭐ This is the sharpest collision on this thread; be sure to read it alongside Luther — what Luther, tormented day and night in the monastery, finally solved when he rediscovered the gospel was exactly this uncertainty; and Trent confirmed this uncertainty as doctrine. ⚠ We do not judge who is right: one side holds that assurance is the heart of the gospel, the other that claiming assurance is presumption. But why the two sides could not agree, this chapter shows more clearly than any canon.
Chapter 10 · Justification can increase. In González's rendering: justification is an objective reality in the believer, and its degree can be increased by good works.
Chapter 11 · The good works of the righteous are not sins. In González's rendering: the notion that the justified sin even in their good works must also be rejected, because the justified have in them an objective righteousness, and can and must do good works, even if they now and then fall into venial sins. ⚠ This directly rejects Luther's simul justus et peccator.
Chapter 12 · Do not place your hopes in predestination. In González's rendering: except by rare special revelation we cannot know our own predestination, and therefore we should not place our hopes in predestination. ⭐ Read this alongside thread 3: the same document both rejected imputed righteousness and warned people not to take comfort in predestination — it closed both doors.
What was at stake for salvation
Each side believed the other's teaching would destroy salvation. Protestants held that to merge justification with sanctification makes salvation depend on what a person has become; Catholics held that to declare without changing lets a person be saved and still go on doing evil. ⚠ Olson has a very fair sentence on their mutual rejection: Protestants, he says, were frightened out of their wits by the Catholic idea of earning merit and kept well away from it — exactly as Catholics kept well away from the Protestant forensic righteousness, which looked to them like a legal fiction.
Aftermath
⭐ A structural fact: the position of Chapter 5 — grace goes first, and a person can refuse it — has the same shape as the ruling of the Council of Orange in 529. In that thousand years the Catholic Church did not change its stance. ⚠ And there is a point of chronology Olson reminds us of, which we must record as it stands: long before the Council of Trent anathematized the Protestants, he writes, the leading Protestant reformers and many of their followers had grown used to calling the pope the Antichrist and consigning his whole following to hell — the condemnation did not run in one direction only. After this, each side produced its own confessions: the Lutheran Formula of Concord (1577), the Dutch Reformed Belgic Confession (1561), and the Heidelberg Catechism (1563) of the German Palatinate.
⚠It also condemned a plan for reconciliation. To bring about reconciliation between Catholics and Protestants, some proposed a double justification: in González's words, one justification inherent in the righteous person, and another, the imputed righteousness of Christ — that is, accepting that each kind of righteousness holds in its own right, since the two were never talking about the same thing. The plan is usually tied to Article 5 of the Regensburg Book at the Colloquy of Regensburg in 1541 (drafted by Gropper and Bucer, finalized by Contarini); the Catholic theologian Albert Pighius, an adviser at the earlier Colloquy of Worms (November 1540 to January 1541), also held a form of double justification. This proposal, González notes, did not satisfy the parties to the dispute, and was later condemned by the Council of Trent. ⭐ That is: this council closed off not only the Protestant view but also a road in between.