Trent on Justification

Dear N.,

I have just finished reading the the Decrees and Canons of the Council of Trent on justification, which thing is very lengthy and somewhat tiresome! The area with which Anglicans have the sharpest disagreement with Trent concerning justification is over the matter of condign merit and the doctrine of temporal retributive punishment due for sins whether in this life or in purgatory. We would label the doctrines that regenerated man inherently, even though it is by virtue of his inseparable unity with Christ, merits more justification or grace of justification through his own good works, and that man is required to suffer temporal punishment due for sins not remitted by grace, as 'erroneous and strange doctrines contrary to God's word.' We would say that in those areas the Church of Rome departs, not from protestantism, but from the universal consensus of the Undivided Catholic Church of the First Millennium and the Canon of Saint Vincent of Lerins. Trent directly contradicts aspects of Articles XIII, XIV, and XXII - although I believe a strong argument could be made that Articles XI and XII are not wholly incompatible with Tridentine theology as they affirm particular truths regarding faith and works reasserted by Trent. On the matter of justification itself, apart from further considerations of how justification advances and grows or how sanctification relates to justification, we are in very close agreement.

One great difficulty for us in grappling with the complicated categories of Trent lies in that Anglicanism, like Eastern Orthodoxy, has no dogmatic or systematic theology part from the living Tradition of the Church contained in the liturgy, creeds, sacraments, councils and fathers, and therefore we have never developed the compartmentalised and overcategorised statements such as those dogmatised at Trent. Justification and sanctification are a mystery of God's love collaborating with man's freedom, and thus we have never attempted to scholasticise the wonder of God's redeeming and justifying power in the Tridentine manner. But clearly certain claims of Trent contradict New Testament and conciliar teaching on the nature of good works and their relationship to divinisation, although we assuredly believe that good works are essential to sanctification and to the process of becoming God-like, for good works are 'God Himself crowing His own achievements in His own children', they are the Christian virtues, theological and cardinal, in action, and they are indispensable. We agree that the Christian must be holy and good and obedient and must keep the Commandments. Where we disagree with Rome is in the precise relationship of necessary good works to claims of intrinsic merit and supererogation.