The human soul, which in its best part always thirsts for true life and salvation, can only be satisfied with the described teaching through misunderstanding, it will certainly feel its falsity. This feeling of a living soul was expressed, albeit unsuccessfully, in innumerable sects, in many attempts to correct Catholicism, such as we see throughout the entire course of Western Church history, and finally broke out in that terrible upheaval which is called the Reformation, and which still stands before Catholicism as a living denunciation of its untruth.

Protest of the Reformation

The Reformation came out with a merciless denunciation of all Catholic imitations in life and teaching, the soulless formalism that reigned in it, and demanded life and truth for man. Protestants both wrote and said that the source of Catholic wisdom is not the Gospel, not the teaching of Christ, but the considerations of reason, which stands on its own point of view and judges these things exclusively in a human way [2]. Without penetrating into the inner work of those who are being saved, reason stops at the external side and bases its conclusions on this alone. It is not surprising if in this way he arrives at propositions that are absurd from the point of view of spiritual experience and before the judgment of human conscience [3]; and then, feeling falsehood and at the same time seeing no other way than the existing one, he is forced against his will to resort to various artificial constructions in order to somehow drown out the tormenting voice of his conscience. "In this way, people, under the pressure of great danger, have invented various deeds, various liturgical rites, in order only to somehow calm their troubled conscience" [4]. In order to avoid this sad and terrible fate, it is necessary to break off all connection with the philosophical views that have been accepted, but are not reconciled to the truth of Christ, to turn to the truth of Christ itself, to investigate it, listening to the inner voice of one's conscience, trying to grasp what the Word of God and the Church's tradition are saying not only to the mind, but to the whole soul [5], and to be concerned not only with faithfulness to logic, but about fidelity to the truth, which is essentially living and active, and not formal.

Apparently, the time has come for a radical renewal in Western Christianity. Indeed, Protestantism began to refute with fury the main dogma of the legal view - the doctrine of deeds as merits before God. This teaching is untenable for the very reason that it fundamentally contradicts the very foundation of the Christian faith – salvation by the one Jesus Christ. "Whoever confesses that he has deserved grace by works, despises the merit of Christ and grace, and seeks the way to God besides Christ, by human powers" [6]. And even if there were no such contradiction, the deeds of man, taken in themselves, by their very essence cannot be merit before God: man does good deeds only with the help of the grace of God [7], yet everything he does himself inevitably bears the stamp of sin [8]. Wherefore all who boast of the merits of their works, or hope for works which are superfluous, boast of vanity, and hope for idolatry, which is to be condemned, we read in the Scottish Confession. - Thus resolutely and mercilessly were exposed all those conclusions which necessarily followed from Catholic teaching: purgatory, indulgences, etc.

Why Protestantism Could Not Restore the True Doctrine of Salvation

But... Protestantism was a child of its time and school. The first reformers learned to speak and think in the same Aristotle and Cicero as their Catholic opponents. Therefore, indignant at the blatant distortion of Christ's truth which they saw in Catholicism, they thought to explain it only by accidental causes: the wickedness of the hierarchy, etc., and did not suspect that instead of these conclusions there would necessarily appear others, equally false, because the falsehood is not in the conclusions, but in the very basis, in the very point of view on the subject. Instead of rejecting this basic lie, the Protestants were able to reject only some of its offspring, and thus only replaced some distortions with others.

For this reason, the Reformation, in the sense of the restoration of Christ's truth, ended in complete failure.

Juridism in Protestantism

Protestants, as we have seen, turned to life itself and tried to test their conclusions with it, but they looked at Life from a legal point of view. They wanted to bring peace of conscience with their teaching, but they understood this peace quite legally, in the sense of a sense of security, impunity for the sins committed. Man is afraid of punishment, and so the death of Jesus Christ is pointed out to him as such a great, excessive satisfaction with God's truth, that this truth can no longer demand anything else from man, any other satisfactions. A person, since he believes in the Gospel, must calm down about himself. If Christ paid for our sins even more than they were worth, why else think that we need to work for this satisfaction ourselves? Human efforts, not to mention their imperfection before God, etc., are directly superfluous and even dangerous: they belittle the significance of Christ's merit. What is salvation after this? It is nothing more than the absolution of sins or deliverance from punishment for sins [10], justification [11], followed by acceptance into the favor of God, etc. Justification is understood "not in the physical sense, but in the external and judicial" [12]. It does not mean "to make righteous of the wicked," but in the judicial sense (sensu forensi) to proclaim righteous [13], to consider righteous, to declare (jus-turn aestimare, declarare) [14], and this for the merit of Jesus Christ [15], i.e. for the sake of an extraneous event, which has no connection with my inner being. Justification, therefore, is a completely external act, "an act that acts not in man, but outside and around man" [16]. Therefore, the consequence of this act can only be a change in the relationship between God and man, while man himself does not change. "We are still sinners, but God treats us, by virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, as if we had not sinned, but, on the contrary, fulfilled the law, or as if the merit of Christ were ours" [17]. In other words, instead of the former Pelagian legal point of view, which had been rejected and condemned, Protestantism put forward the same principle of law, only taking the other side of it: rejecting human merit as insufficient to propitiate an angry God, or, to put it bluntly, to oblige God to grant me eternal life, Protestants nevertheless looked upon eternal life as an agreed payment which God "must" give to man; only the obliging "third" for Protestants is not the merit of man, but the merit of Christ [18]. In Catholicism we have seen the forgetfulness of Christ in the matter of our salvation; here the work of man himself is forgotten, "our righteousness" has been reduced to the imputation of someone else's righteousness (imputatio alienae justitiae). Such an idea is common to Protestants of all times, and if in the latest dogmatic systems of Protestants we encounter attempts to give vitality and reality to an external judicial event, to transform dogmatic propositions into psychological phenomena, then these attempts either clearly do not reconcile themselves to the basic Protestant principle, according to the consciousness of the Protestants themselves [19], representing only inevitable concessions of Protestantism to religious experience, or they change only names. without changing the essence of the matter.

Faith justifies the Protestant outwardly, by virtue of the merits of Christ

It is true that the Protestants, with all their desire to be faithful to their teaching, could not but recognize the necessity of certain conditions on the part of man. But such a condition was recognized, as the last possible minimum, faith in Christ without works. Yielding to the demands of life and conscience, Protestants make an attempt to give this faith as much vitality and efficacy as possible. They say that only living faith justifies, i.e., active faith, which is necessarily accompanied by works and is in no case conceivable in a man who is given over to sin, and that, consequently, justification will necessarily be accompanied by the moral regeneration of man. "It cannot be that this holy faith remains idle in man" [24]. But how does this rebirth take place, and in what sense can faith be called "the root of good works"? Not at all in the sense that it serves as an inducement, an inspiring principle, in a word, not at all in the sense of some kind of moral work on the part of the person being saved. This work with justifying faith has nothing to do with [26] and therefore does not belong to justification.

Faith is the root of good works in the sense that by it we "perceive Christ, Who promised us not only liberation from death and reconciliation with God, but also the grace of the Holy Spirit, by which we are reborn in the renewal of life" [27]. But this is no longer an excuse, but a consequence of it. Christ can be accepted only by those who have already been justified, i.e. proclaimed righteous, reconciled to God. Does this vital aspect of salvation, therefore, have any essential significance in justification, the significance of an active condition? No. To be justifying, faith must remain "exclusively receptive, must rely solely on a sacrifice independent of our person (Subjectivitat), but wholly satisfying God" [28]. Faith "justifies not by the fact that it is our work" (which would imply moral tension), but for the sake of Christ our truth, Whom it perceives [29], and this is understood in such a way that it perceives the promised mercy [30]. Faith thus saves outwardly, for the sake of the truth and holiness of Christ, which it assimilates to man [31], for the sake of the merit of Christ, which is imputed to man [32]. In other words, faith serves as the basis only for an external-judicial, and not a moral phenomenon.

It requires love, works, and in general the active participation of man in his salvation

What, then, is the significance of man's deeds in justification, i.e., his moral work and development in good? It is impossible not to see that good works, if they are assumed at all, are exclusively as a co-existing or consequent phenomenon, and not as a producing, not participating in the actual work of salvation. This idea is expressed with complete clarity in symbolic books. For example, the Augsburg Confession, while acknowledging that "faith (justifying) must bring forth good fruits," hastens to stipulate that "the remission of sins is assimilated by faith" [33]. Or in the Apology: "To receive forgiveness of sins is to be justified... By faith in Christ alone, not through love, nor for love or works, we receive remission of sins, although love follows faith. Thus, by faith alone we are justified, understanding the word "justify" in the sense of "to make or revive from what is wrong" [34]. In this way, faith justifies in contrast to good works, which are understood not in the sense of external actions, but even in the sense of the whole disposition or mood of the soul. This disposition does not participate in justification, does not contribute to it, even more: it cannot be in a person before he is justified. "It should not be thought," we read in the Apology, "that on the pledge of this love, or for the sake of this love, we receive remission of sins and reconciliation; nor do we receive remission of sins for the sake of other subsequent deeds; but by faith alone in the proper sense the remission of sins is obtained, since the promise cannot be assimilated except by faith. And faith in the proper sense is that which agrees with the promise [35]. In this way, faith justifies man, even if it is a rich possibility of works, then in any case at the time of justification it is still only abstract, intellectual, and justifies precisely by its intellectual side, as the means and instrument by which we assimilate to ourselves the satisfaction of Jesus Christ. There is no place for human participation in the Protestant justification.