23. The Council of Trent has the following to say in regard to the faith that makes us just: The perpetual consent of the Catholic Church has been that 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; see §5 a above. The same document also says that faith comes from hearing the Word of God; see §§4 d, [8].

As you can fully see from statements given above in §§4, 5, 7, and 8, that Roman Catholic council united faith and goodwill or faith and good works. The Protestant churches, named for the founders mentioned above, separated faith and goodwill or good works, however, and declared that the ingredient that actually saves us is faith and not goodwill or good works; they separated the two so as to differentiate themselves from Roman Catholics with regard to goodwill and faith, since these two are the essential characteristics of the church. I have heard this assertion a number of times from the founders of the Protestant churches themselves.

I have also heard from them that they reinforced this separation [of faith and goodwill] with arguments such as the following: On our own, none of us can do the type of good things that contribute to our salvation; we cannot fulfill the law either. They also separated faith and goodwill to prevent our own sense of merit (which arises from doing good works) from becoming part of our faith.

From the statements presented from the Formula of Concord in §12 above it is clear that the points just made were the origins and purposes behind the Protestant denial that good actions and goodwill play any role in our acquisition of faith and therefore of salvation. The following are among the statements presented there: Faith actually does not make us just if it has been formed through acts of goodwill, although Catholics say it does; see §12 b. For many reasons we must reject the proposition that good works are necessary for our salvation. One reason is that Papists adopted these views in support of a bad cause; see §12 h. People ought to reject the decree of the Council of Trent [and whatever else is used to support the opinion] that our good works preserve and maintain our salvation and faith; see §12 m. Not to mention many other such statements in the Formula of Concord.

In the following sections [§§24– 27] you will see that Protestants do in fact unite faith and goodwill and attribute to them a shared power to save; the only difference between the Protestant and the Roman Catholic views concerns how our good works come into existence.

18. Brief Analysis

The churches that separated from Roman Catholicism during the Reformation consist of those who call themselves Evangelicals and those who call themselves the Reformed and also Protestants, and who are named Lutherans or Calvinists after the founders of their churches. The Anglican Church holds middle ground between them. (I am not referring here to the Orthodox churches, which separated from Roman Catholicism a long time ago.)

Many people are aware that the Protestant churches have theological disagreements with each other in a number of areas — especially concerning the Holy Supper, baptism, the person of Christ, and the process whereby people become “the chosen.”

It is not widely recognized, however, that there are four points on which all these churches agree: there is a trinity of persons in the Divine; there is such a thing as original sin; Christ’s merit is assigned to us; and we are justified by faith alone. The reason this is not widely recognized is that few people conduct research on the dogmatic differences between the churches, and therefore few realize the points the churches have in common. Members of the clergy limit themselves to an investigation of the tenets of their own church; and lay people rarely examine those tenets deeply enough to see the differences and similarities.

Nevertheless, on these four points, Protestants do agree, both generally and in most of the details, as you will find if you consult their books and listen to their sermons. (This point is established first for the sake of the points that are about to follow.)