8. Faith comes to us through hearing, when we believe that the teachings divinely revealed to us are true and when we trust in God’s promises. Faith is the beginning of human salvation, and the foundation and root of all justification. Without faith, it is impossible to please God and to come into the company of his children. Our justification takes place through faith, hope, and goodwill. Unless hope and goodwill are added to faith, it is dead rather than living and does not unite us to Christ.

We need to cooperate in this process. We have the power to move either closer to or farther away from [Christ]; if we did not, nothing could be granted to us, because we would be like a lifeless body.

Our openness to being justified renews us; this renewal takes place as Christ’s merit is applied to us, as the result of our own cooperation. Therefore we get credit for the works that we do; yet because they are done as a result of grace and through the Holy Spirit, and because Christ alone has earned merit, the rewards God gives us are his own gifts within us. Therefore none of us can attribute anything of merit to ourselves.

20. Brief Analysis

Although scarcely anyone has realized it, on these four points Protestants agree with Roman Catholics so closely that there is hardly any meaningful difference between them, except that Catholics unite faith to goodwill but Protestants separate the two. In fact, the agreement between them is so little known that even theology professors are going to be astounded by this statement.

The reason why this is unknown is that Roman Catholics rarely turn to God our Savior; they turn instead to the pope as Christ’s vicar, and also to the saints. Therefore they have let their tenets regarding the assigning of Christ’s merit and our being justified by faith lie dormant. Nevertheless, the points above in §§3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 taken from the Council of Trent (which were ratified by Pope Pius IV, as shown in §2) make it abundantly clear that these are among the tenets that are received and acknowledged by Catholics. Compare these with the tenets from the Augsburg Confession and the Formula of Concord in §§9, 10, 11, and 12, and you can see that the distinctions between them are not substantial; they are merely verbal. By reading and carefully comparing the quotations earlier in this work, the church’s theology professors will indeed be able to see (although not fully) the agreement between the Protestant and the Catholic views on these points. Some further illustrations of the agreement will be given in the following sections, so that theology professors, and also less highly educated clergy and lay people, will be able to see it.