Audio only:
Joe Heschmeyer explores the role of works in salvation and Catholic teaching on the Treasury of Merit.
Transcription:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I want to talk about this idea of whether or not Roman Catholics believe in workspace salvation because this is a charge I’ve heard many times and there are aspects of Catholic theology that I understand sound alien and even heretical to Protestant ears. Particularly. I want to talk about this idea of a so-called treasury of merit. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this, but if you have and you’re a Protestant, you might have found it weird. And again, pian sounding or something, many Protestants understandably find the whole thing completely unbiblical.
CLIP:
You are not going to find the treasury of merit anywhere in the scriptures. It’s not hinted at, talked about explicitly or even implicitly. If you are a Roman Catholic watching this, you have probably heard of it, but you dunno what it means. If you’re a Protestant, you have likely never heard of
Joe:
This. I had never heard of it,
CLIP:
And once we describe it, it’s going to actually make sense of a whole bunch of other doctrines. We actually would call this the Spine of Roman Catholic doctrine because it’s a doctrine that holds up all of these other ideas. So let’s dig into this.
Joe:
So what is the Treasury of Merit and is it biblical? Look, I don’t agree with the Protestant past, you just heard from about it being the spine of Catholic teaching, but I do think he’s right about a couple things. Number one, many Christians, including many Catholics, are completely oblivious to what the Treasury of merit is. And number two, getting this question right is really helpful in making sense of a bunch of other areas. Catholics and Protestants disagree, most notably purgatory and indulgences. I’m not going to get into those topics today by the way, but this is much more at the root of that fight than I think many Catholics and Protestants realize. So let’s start with first a simple argument and then sort of a definition of terms. The simple argument I’m going to make throughout this video is that the Treasury of merit is thoroughly biblical, it’s perfectly biblical and it is found in the Bible often in pretty naked, explicit sort of ways that the only reason it sounds biblical to us then is because of the influence of Protestant theology that this doctrine is thoroughly biblical.
It’s not thoroughly Protestant, it is alien to Protestantism. It’s not alien to the Bible. So let’s then define the terms. If we’re going to figure out if that’s true or not, we should know what the treasury of Merit is. And this is defined in a couple places in the catechism of the Catholic church, namely paragraph 1476 and paragraph 1477 and in 1476 we’re told that we also call the spiritual goods of the communion of saints, the church’s treasury. And then it clarifies when we talk about the treasury here, we don’t mean a bunch of material goods. We instead mean the treasury of the church, the infinite value which can never be exhausted, which Christ’s merits have before God. They were offered so the whole of mankind could be free from sin and attain communion with the Father in Christ, the redeemer himself, the satisfaction and merits of his redemption exist and find their efficacy.
And I’m inclined to say so far so good. I think if the catechism stopped there and that’s all we meant by the treasury of merits, calyx and Protestants would be pretty comfortable. Christ clearly does merit for us salvation. We both use that kind of language. But the catechism then goes on to say the treasury of merit also includes the prayers and good works of the blessed Virgin Mary, which it describes as truly immense, unfathomable, and even pristine in their value before God. But then also it says in this treasury too are the prayers and good works of all the saints, all those who have followed in the footsteps of Christ, the Lord by his grace and have made their lives holy and carried out the mission the Father entrusted to them. In this way, they attained their own salvation and at the same time cooperated in saving their brothers in the unity of the mystical body.
So we went from a paragraph that I would describe as pretty uncontroversial, Christ merited salvation as infinite and it’s worth to a paragraph that is about as controversial as you’re going to get in any single paragraph. If you’re talking about all the fights between Catholics and Protestants one in the same time you have these references to Mary and the pristine value of these works that she’s doing and good works and you have the saints, you’ve got that weird line about the saints attaining their own salvation and then references to them interceding for us. That’s a lot of things we disagree on kind of rolled into one. And then you remember that all of this is adjacent to disagreements we have about purgatory and about indulgences, and hopefully you can see why I think this is an underappreciated disagreement like if Catholics are right about the treasury of merits, that’s going to have a lot of downstream implications for a lot of other things. If Catholics are wrong about the treasury of merits, likewise that’s going to impact a whole lot of the ways we view a whole lot of other doctrines. So what do we make of this? Does all of this just flatly go against the prior paragraph that talked about the infinite nature of the merits of Christ and his atoning death on the cross? The Protestant pastor I quoted before and suggests that it does and he explicitly claims that this idea of the treasury of merits turns Catholicism into a workspace religion.
CLIP:
So to summarize, the treasury of merit is all of the excess merit of Jesus, Mary and dead saints who all had more than enough merit currency to get into heaven already. If you are a Protestant, you’re sort of like what is happening? This is very, very foreign because for Protestants we will never have enough merit. We regularly communicate and preach the gospel, which is that anybody who goes into heaven, it’s not because of their own merit, it’s all the righteousness of Christ. And Christ alone has enough righteousness and his righteousness is applied to our account in our behalf.
Joe:
I get the kind of what is going on response to that and I want to stress that we actually agree that we cannot just earn our way to heaven. We’re going to get into that more. We actually believe in justification by faith, which many Protestants don’t realize. We don’t believe in justification by works. This is a misunderstanding of what we mean by the whole process of initial justification. There’s a lot that’s there, but let’s just unpack this a little bit at a time in case this sounds alien and confusing to you and just ask four questions. Now remember I’m making the argument that this may sound unbiblical to you if you’re coming from it from just ever hearing a Protestant interpretation of scripture. So I want you to just bear with me because it’s going to sound weird at first until you look at what the Bible actually says, and we’re going to do that in four ways.
Number one is the idea of heavenly treasure, biblical. The answer is going to be yes. Number two, if so, does this treasure include eternal life? Yes. Number three, can our heavenly treasure lead other people to salvation? Yes. Again. And then finally is all of this works righteousness? And there the answer is going to be no. But let’s look at each of those questions in turn and you can correct me if you think that I’m wrong. This by the way, I just make a quick plug right here. This question was sparked by someone asking over on my patreon, shameless joe.com. And a lot of the content I’m getting these days comes from questions real life people are asking. And if you want to join that conversation, you can sign up for as cheap as $5 a month and get a live like weekly q and a.
And it’s a good community and I really enjoy the questions and I’ve benefited from it I think other people have as well. So I should just at least make mention of that as we launch into this. So with that said, number one is this idea of heavenly treasure, biblical. You might think of, oh, the treasury of merits and the whole thing sounds positively medieval like something a Medici banker or a borja pope had come up with. But no, it’s coming from the itinerant preacher of Nazareth, Jesus Christ. He says in Matthew six verses 19 to 20 that we should lay up for ourselves treasures not on earth where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but instead lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. And the question that we should be asking is, okay, I know it looks like to accumulate worldly possessions.
What is it that Jesus means when he talks about us accumulating heavenly possessions, laying up treasures in heaven? This clearly means something obviously in one sense you just say, oh, he’s saying focus on heaven, but he doesn’t just say focus on heaven does. He says to lay up treasure in heaven. What does it mean to lay up treasure in heaven? And it turns out as soon as you clue into this and you start looking for other times, this kind of language is used. It’s all over the place. I focused for purposes of this video on the word reward and all the ways Jesus speaks about heavenly reward, but it’s clearly tied to this idea of treasure in heaven, reward in heaven, treasure in heaven seem to carry same or similar meanings. And we find this also in Matthew six. So when Jesus talks about treasure in heaven, it’s coming from this broader passage.
Matthew six begins with Jesus saying, beware of practicing your piety before men. Notice the context we’re talking about good works here, practicing your piety before men in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your father who is in heaven. So what’s being rewarded here? Well, the acts of piety, the practice of your piety, good works. In other words, and he’s going to be more specific throughout this. He’s going to contrast good work’s done for the wrong reason, which won’t be rewarded compared to good works done for the right reason, which will be rewarded. So for instance, he talks about in verses three to four, when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing so that your alms may be in secret and your father who sees in secret will reward you.
One of the things people are just flabbergasted by is, oh, look, in the 16th century people were giving donations and expecting heavenly rewards for that. That looks really transactional and totally honestly, it can become transactional with the wrong kind of spirit if you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. But notice here in Matthew six, Jesus clearly talks about alms giving as one of those things that lays up heavenly reward. One of those things that when done for the right reason, when done in secret not to acclaim the other people’s kind of prestige, your father who sees in secret will reward you. So when you give alms, you will get something for it in heaven. That is Jesus’s promise in Matthew six verse three to four, unless you’ve already gotten your reward here on earth by doing it in a kind of ostentatious manner, and it’s not just alms giving, that’s the first example he gives, but it’s not the only one.
He similarly talks about with prayer. When we go to do it secretly in our room, our father who sees in secret will reward you same language. And then a few verses later, well several verses later in verses 17 to 18, he says the same thing about fasting. When you fast anoint your head and wash your face that your fasting may not be seen by men, but by your father who’s in secret and your father who sees in secret will reward you. This repetition of this phrase for prayer, fasting, oms giving, we talk about this in several different contexts. These are things that are not optional. Not if you pray, if you fast, if you give alms, but but nevertheless, even though it’s this kind of mandatory part of the faith when you’re doing that well, there is a promise of heavenly reward attached to it.
And it’s not just those things as well. In the prior chapter, the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account, rejoice and be glad for your reward is great in heaven. Now, what does it mean for our reward to be great in heaven? Are all of the heavenly rewards the exact same size? Jesus doesn’t say so several Protestant theologians do. He speaks of great reward in heaven. He speaks of laying up reward in heaven or to accumulate heavenly reward. But for many Protestant theologians, there’s no space for that because they have this idea that the one and only reward is just justification, which means salvation and all the saved have the exact same reward and that’s it. So there’s no accumulation. Are you going to get double E saved?
Doesn’t make sense. And so something is clearly missing with the way many Protestants treat these passages. Now I’ve been looking here at the words of Jesus in the gospel of Matthew, but there’s much more to it. I’m going to give another passage from Matthew, then turn to Luke, then turn to St. Paul because there’s a lot on this. For instance, a little later in the gospel of Matthew, Matthew 10, there’s a section that in my Bible’s actually just labeled rewards a little like paragraph headers and it talks about other ways that we merit heavenly reward. Jesus says, he who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives him who sent me. He who receives a prophet because he’s a prophet, shall receive a prophet’s reward and he who receives a righteous man because a righteous man shall receive a righteous man’s reward and whoever gives to one of these little ones even a cup of cold water because he’s a disciple, truly I say to you, he shall not lose his reward.
Now maybe you think reward just means salvation. That would be a strange interpretation here because it would seem to suggest you have to give people a cup of water if you’re going to be saved. That seems to works much more squarely into the process of being saved. It doesn’t seem to fit with Protestant theology in that sense. So seemingly something else is going on that even the saved are able to accumulate more heavenly reward in some sense. And when we’re talking about a treasury, that’s very much what Jesus is giving us in Matthew six as kind of a motif or an image to use to make sense of this accumulation of heavenly reward. We’re laying up treasures, not just getting one treasure but laying up treasure.
In Luke six, I promised I’d turn to Luke. Now the gospel of Luke spends less time explicitly focusing on reward, but you can certainly find these passages as well. So for instance, Jesus says that we should love our enemies and do good and lend expecting nothing in return and your reward will be great and you’ll be sons of the most high for he is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish. That’s Luke 6 35. What do we make of those passages? That’s what I want to unpack as we go, but for now, I hope it suffices to say the idea of heavenly treasure is thoroughly and repeatedly found in the Bible. The idea that this is something you won’t find in the Bible as a Catholic, yes, you will if you’re not blinded to the fact that it could be there. And this is true not just in the words of Jesus, but as I alluded to before, this is also true in the writings of St.
Paul. St. Paul in one Corinthians chapter three has this passage that gives Protestants a lot of trouble. Oftentimes it begins in verse 10, St. Paul says, according to the commission of God, given to me like a skilled master builder, I laid a foundation and another man is building upon it. Let each man take care how he builds upon it for no other foundation. Can anyone lay then that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Pause here. Notice Paul’s going to be distinguishing two things. One is the foundation. This is Christ. But then there’s how we build on the foundation. Building on the foundation is everything else. This is what other people are doing in sanctifying you. This is also your own good work. So you’ll notice here, St. Paul first talks about another man building upon it, meaning other people are helping to build you up in the faith, but then you are also going to build on your own foundation.
And so in verse 12, he says, now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble, each man’s work, notice what is being built work, right? It makes it very clear we’re talking about good works here on top of salvation or on top of the foundation of Christ. Each man’s work will become manifest for the day. That means judgment day for the day. We’ll disclose it because it will be revealed with fire and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work which any man has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. As I say, for many Protestant theologians and apologists, this passage can be something of a stumbling block because well several reasons. Not only is this part of one of the go-to passages for purgatory, for reasons we’ll get into in the very next verse, you’ll see in a moment, but also because it seems very clear that God is talking about some additional rewards beyond salvation and rewards tied not because of the foundation, Jesus Christ alone, but of the good works by which we’ve built upon that foundation that shows just as Matthew six shows that good works in some way are tied to this aspect of heavenly reward.
And many Protestants are uncomfortable with that because it seems to suggest that just as there are different degrees of punishment in hell, some people in the biblical evidence certainly seem to be punished more harshly than others. Jesus is explicit about that. You also, these passages seem to suggest that some people will be rewarded more than others, but bear in mind, many Protestants have been taught over and over and over again for years that all sins are equally bad and they’re all a death sentence and they’re all punished the same and that everyone in heaven is treated the same way. None of this is biblical, none of that is biblical. There is a degree to the severity of sin. There’s even a distinction between sin which is deadly and which isn’t explicitly in one John, but you also have this seeming set of degrees in heaven.
Now, how do we make sense of that? That’s one of the questions that a Protestant professor and theologian by the name of Dr. Steven Wellum posed or was posed in a video that his seminary, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary put out where he tries to grapple with these texts like one Corinthians chapter three. And I want you to listen to how he doesn’t seem, I mean this is, he wasn’t just ambushed on the street. He’s making a prerecorded video on this topic and seems to not know what to do with this idea of different degrees of glory and reward in heaven.
CLIP:
Well, if we first take the reward side of the equation, most of the passages that are referred to one Corinthians three is really dealing with leadership in the church. When you read a Hebrews 11, the reward that’s mentioned really is Christ, the salvation that we receive, the inheritance that are ours. All of those rewards, for the most part are dealing with receiving the great grace of God and salvation in Christ Jesus. It’s not so much saying there’s a higher or lesser reward. Salvation is the reward. Eternal life is the reward. Eternal covenant relationship with the triune God is the reward. Yet there is still this sense of some sitting near Christ versus others. How are we to think of that? Scripture doesn’t really say much other than our great reward is Christ himself. Salvation is our great reward. All believers receive their salvation in Christ, our justified. There’s not some that are more justified than others. We have to be very, very careful of this when we think of reward.
Joe:
So you can see how uneasy he is. I think we were just talking about how careful we need to be against thinking that there might be some greater rewards in heaven even though scripture repeatedly speaks of that because his theology hasn’t committed to you can’t increase in justification. And so how could one person be more transformed into Christ than another? And we would say, of course you could be. The fact that every soul is completely filled by Christ doesn’t mean every soul has been completely opened up by charity. The point of charity is to stretch your soul and the more you allow that to happen, the more you can be filled with the infinite love of God. Not that somebody is in heaven with a cup half full, but do you have a thimble or do you have a swimming pool? Do you have an ocean of charity that is being filled with the love of God?
That right there points to an obvious difference of degree. Not that some people aren’t enjoying heaven, they’re enjoying it to the greatest capacity they can, but some of the saints have increased their capacity by the way that they said yes to the love of God throughout this life. And so you can make perfect sense of all of this language about heavenly reward and the like by recognizing that none of that contradicts God himself being the ultimate reward of heaven. All of that makes perfect sense of it. Now what about this part that one Corinthians three is really just about church leadership and not about heavenly reward? Well, that’s contradicted by just reading one Corinthians three. I’m going to go back to verse 14 where we left off and then continue to read the next verse. One 14 says, if the work which any man has built on the foundation, remember the foundation is Christ.
So any work you’ve built on the foundation of Christ survives, he will receive a reward. Now, clearly that reward is not just the foundation Christ, how do we know that? Because look at the very next verse. If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved but only as through fire. Now you can see why this is one of the go-to passages in talking about purgatory because Paul is talking about two categories of saved Christians. One category is acting in a great way, building well on the foundation of Christ, and they are promised reward on judgment day. The other category of Christians are still told they will be saved, but they salvation will be only as through fire. You can see why this is a go-to for purgatory because it says there will be a suffering of loss.
It says there’ll be salvation as through fire. It sounds very purgatorial, but notice both of those guys are still getting saved both categories of these saved Christians living on the foundation of Christ. He is their rock, he is their cornerstone. How in the world are we going to say then that the first group’s reward is just the same thing the second group got? It doesn’t any sense of comparing verse 14 and 15. Paul clearly means to show a contrast between the fate of the two groups. So if you talk about the verse 15 Christians as the kind of purgatorial Christians, you have these particularly holy Christians described in verse 14 that are being promised heavenly reward, whatever that means. It can’t just be salvation. So however you understand it, I hope we can at least say at this point there is clearly a biblical basis for the notion of heavenly treasure, a treasury of what we might call merit heavenly reward, things that are in response to our good works done with the right intention.
That then leads to a second question, well, do these heavenly treasures include eternal life? Now obviously in first Corinthians three, St. Paul is thinking about other treasures other than salvation and Christ. We just saw that, right? That’s the difference between first Corinthians three 14 and 15. But elsewhere in scripture you find these passages that seem to talk about salvation itself as a reward. Now we will pause on this and say, I realize many Protestant ears are perked up and maybe burning right now because that sounds so flagrantly unbiblical because St. Paul says things that seem to preclude any sense of that being true. I mean to take just one really obvious example in Titus three, verse five to seven, Paul says that God has saved us not because of deeds done by us and righteousness, but in virtue of his own mercy by the Washington of regeneration and renewal and the Holy Spirit, which we would say is baptism.
They would say something else which he poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ, our savior, so that we might be justified by his grace and become heirs in hope of eternal life. So you hear a passage like that and it’s easy to say, okay, so clearly good works. The deeds done in righteousness have nothing to do with whether we’re ultimately saved or not. And if those are all the verses that you ever read or those are all the verses your pastor points you to, it’s easy to come away with that impression and everything St. Paul is saying there is true. Let’s be totally clear about that. But you misunderstand it if you don’t read other things said throughout scripture including by St. Paul himself. So for instance, let’s say you turn from Titus three over to Romans chapter two, and you read the same author St.
Paul saying that God will render to every man according to his works, and you say, oh, hold on. What could that possibly mean? Didn’t you just say God’s rendering is on faith alone and not works? That’s how many Protestants read three and other places like the rest of Romans. And so what is this strange thing about God rendering to every man according to his works? And so there’s a popular Protestant interpretation that says, oh, well, when you hear that language like in one Corinthians three, that only refers to some kind of glory, some kind of heavenly reward apart from salvation. And again, if you look at one Corinthians three, that makes total sense of the passage. It doesn’t make total sense of the passage in Romans two, but many Protestants will insist that it does. So for instance, RC Spro in his commentary on Romans tries to make this passage in Romans two fit a Protestant framework.
He says, our justification is by faith alone, but our rewards in heaven will be distributed according to our works. That is why our Lord told his followers, those who are justified by faith alone to treasure up things in heaven. Okay, so it sounds like justification is by faith alone works, don’t enter into anything in terms of our salvation, but just in terms of heavenly glory, then we can kind of add to it with good works that already by the way, I think complicates the picture many Protestants have of the role of good works. So bravo for at least acknowledging that much to sprawl. But the problem is it still doesn’t make sense of Romans two because Romans two isn’t just about other heavenly rewards to those who are already saved. Let’s read Romans two in its context. This is verse six to eight. For he God will render to every man according to his works, to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life.
So Paul justification by faith, Paul is also really clear that the gift of eternal life will be given as a reward based on works that complicates how we understand this whole picture, right? That makes it a pretty different picture than what we may have been familiar with. And it’s not just in Romans two, by the way, in Galatians six, there’s a law of the harvest. St. Paul talking about our work says, do not be deceived. God is not mocked for whatever a man sows that he will also reap for he who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but he who sows to the spirit will from the spirit reap eternal life. Notice Paul’s description of this is you are the actor. You are like the farmer sowing seeds based on your actions, your good actions, you’re sowing seeds to reap eternal life.
Your bad actions, you’re sowing seeds to reap corruption and death. Your actions are leading you to one of those two places. He doesn’t say anything there about faith alone. He’s specifically looking at your actions and how they’re guiding you towards or away from eternal life. So I don’t know a way to harmonize the idea of sofie like justification by faith alone understood in the way separated from good work, separated from charity, separated from all that stuff. I don’t know how to harmonize that with Galatians six saying that the one who sows to the spirit will from the spirit reap eternal life. That certainly looks like one of the things we are laying up in heaven by our actions in some mysterious sense is salvation is eternal life. Now we’re going to unpack that in a few minutes to see how do we harmonize that with the things Paul does say about justification by faith.
But for now, I’m just bringing out these parts of the scripture that many people are unaware of. Particularly many Protestants have maybe never heard these things or considered does this fit with my theology or not? Let’s turn to the third question. Can our spiritual treasures help to save others? It’s already probably controversial enough to say our spiritual treasures are building up treasure in heaven can help in our own salvation. But surely you can imagine the number of people who are reacting like that Protestant pastor we heard from earlier like dead saints. How could they do anything? Fair enough. You’ve got that controversial line that I quoted from earlier about the saints saying in this way they attained their own salvation and at the same time cooperated and saving their brothers in the unity of the mystical body. And if you’re coming from a certain theological background, you probably think that’s wildly heretical and unbiblical.
But the reality is you can find plenty of passages in scripture that say really similar things. So for instance, St. Paul in one Timothy chapter four reminds him, take heed to yourself and your teaching hold to that for by doing so you will save both yourself and your heroes. So the idea that you can save yourself and others is totally biblical. It has to be understood in the right way, both when the catechism says it and when St. Paul says it. But it’s a completely biblical mode of expression. And if you’re uncomfortable with it, that might reveal more about theological blinders than about it being unbiblical because it’s not. It’s perfectly biblical. So again, we’ll square all that with justification by faith in a few moments. But for now, I’m just trying to highlight these passages and I want to give a few others because there’s really plenty of these throughout scripture just to give you a handful of my favorites that I probably overuse on this channel.
But in Genesis 19, when Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed lot and his family are saved and explicitly, they’re not saved because of their own righteousness. They are according to verse 29, saved because God remembered Abraham, that Abraham’s righteousness, which goes over a lot is a good man. He’s a righteous man. Abraham is more righteous. He goes above and beyond. He’s laid up more heavenly treasure. God looking at that doesn’t just save Abraham who is not in danger. He saves a lot in his family. So the overflowing abundance of Abraham’s righteousness redo downs to the goodness of lot in his family. That’s Genesis 1929. You can read it for yourself and see if you can make sense of it on the basis of your own theology. Likewise, in the end of the book of Job, God punishes job’s foolish friends and tells them that he won’t listen to their prayers until job intercedes for them, which he does.
And so Job brings about their reconciliation with God through his intercession job is righteous in a way his friends are not, even though the friends are trying to follow God. And so he plays this important intercessory role to make them right with God. Now, someone listening to this is probably saying that those are both Old Testament examples. Do we have any New Testament examples of people being faved through the intercession of others, through their going over and above and quite literally, yes, we do. So Mark chapter two looks at the healing of the paralytic In Capernaum, this man is brought by his four friends to Jesus, but when they get there, they can’t even get inside the house because it’s packed full of people listening to Jesus speak. And so the friends go over and above, I mean quite literally, they go over the house above where Jesus is speaking, they then open up the roof and they lower their friend down so that he can have an audience with Jesus.
And here’s the kicker, in Mark chapter two, verse five, we’re told that Jesus saw their faith, not the man’s faith. He saw the friend’s faith. Jesus saw their faith and then said to the man, the paralytic, my son, your sins are forgiven. So why was the paralyzed man’s sin forgiven? Was it because if anything he had done, no, he was immobile, he couldn’t do anything. It was because his friends looked upon him and had mercy on him and brought him to Jesus going over and above. And when Jesus saw the intensity of their faith, he rewarded that by saving their friend, by forgiving his sins. And it seems like that has to be how we harmonize that, right? This man’s sins are being forgiven and they weren’t forgiven before or else it meant nothing. For Jesus to say that an actual reconciliation with Christ happened in Mark two verse five, on the basis of the intercession of the man’s faithful friends.
So can our heavenly reward read down to the good of our loved ones? You bet it can. In fact, St. Paul’s pretty darn clear about that in one Corinthians seven where he, in talking about divorce twice, has these kind of interjections reminding us of this spiritual principle. He says, for the unbelieving husband is consecrated through his wife, what he’s consecrated through his wife, he’s an unbeliever, and yet he’s being made holy. That’s what consecrated means. He’s being made holy through his wife because she’s faithful. That’s quite striking. That doesn’t fit neatly with our individualistic notions of how salvation works, where it’s all about your and my individual faith and it’s just my personal relationship with Christ. That is not St. Paul’s understanding of how relationship with Christ works. Pretty interesting. So one Corinthians seven 14, the unbelieving husband is consecrated through his wife and the unbelieving wife is consecrated through her husband.
And then almost as an aside, he just throws out otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they’re holy. And I think about lines like that a lot because if you refer to another human being as holy, there’s a certain category of Protestant who will jump on you and say, no one is good but God alone. But scripture talks about people being made holy in Christ, and in this case it’s his child of a believer and an unbeliever. It’s a pretty remarkable kind of passage. And then two verses later, he asked kind of rhetorically wife, how do you know whether you’ll save your husband? Husband? How do you know whether you’ll save your wife? And I can’t help but think that if the Corinthians were a certain type of Protestant, they would say, well, of course we can’t save our unbelieving spouses. We can’t consecrate them.
That’s Pianism. Salvation is this purely individual thing that’s received by faith alone, and that’s just not at all the framework that we’re given in one Corinthians seven by St. Paul, the guy who gets blamed for the doctrine of sofie. So let’s round that out by the fourth. And final question is what I’ve just laid out here, workspace, salvation. Now there’s two ways you could ask that question. Does the Catholic Church teach workspace salvation or on the basis of what we’ve just seen, does the Bible teach workspace salvation? And either way, I think the answer to that should be a resounding no. And I want to be very clear here. I have intentionally sought out the parts of the Bible that I think many Protestants overlook because they don’t neatly fit into their theology of justification by faith alone and into their theology of merit where all merit is Christ’s merit.
So we’ve got nothing to do with the whole thing. And I’ve purposely highlighted all the passages that contradict all of that, the things that get overlooked or watered down, neglected, ignored, distorted. But it’s dangerous to do that. And the danger is you can create an equal and opposite kind of error, right? There’s a danger in focusing just on those other parts, but there’s a danger of omitting them completely. So I want to make sure that we harmonize everything that I’ve said so far with two things. Number one, what St. Paul writes about justification by faith, you’ll notice I don’t say faith alone because he doesn’t. And number two, we need to harmonize this with what the Bible says about merit, particularly what St. Paul says about merit. And in doing this, I want to be clear that the Catholic church agrees with Paul on both of these points in ways that many Protestants are actually surprised by.
So for instance, the Council of Trent allegedly ized the gospel. You’ll hear some Protestants say because it denies justification by faith alone. But the Council of Trent explicitly affirms justification by faith. And it says for instance, that we are justified by faith because faith is the beginning of human salvation, the foundation and the root of all justification without which it is impossible to please God and to come under the fellowship of his sons. So let’s make sure you got that because I kind of stumbled over it. We are justified by faith. We’re not justified by works. When we receive justification, we’re getting that by faith. Why? Because this is the root of all justification. Faith is it’s where it all begins. And without faith, it’s impossible to please God. Notice that it means there is no such thing as a good work. And the biblical sense of that apart from faith because a good work is presumably one pleasing to God who alone is good.
And without faith, none of our works are pleasing to God. So that’s the first thing. We are justified by faith, but we can go even beyond that and say we are justified by faith gratuitously freely by grace, not because of anything we do. And so the Council of Trent is very clear that nothing which goes before justification, either faith or works, merits the grace itself of justification. Notice this, we are justified by faith and it’s a grace. We don’t earn it by our good works. We can’t remember. They’re not good yet and we don’t even earn it by our faith. It is by grace and explicitly the Council of Trent then points us to Romans 11, six. But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works otherwise grace would no longer be grace. So whatever you think the Catholic church’s position on justification is, the council of Trent says it’s this.
Romans 11, six justification is by grace and thus not on the basis of works otherwise grace would no longer be grace. So that’s true of how we become justified. We cannot earn it through anything we do. We cannot earn it even through our faith. How do we make sense of that? Because we want to affirm all of that strongly and at the same time recognize somehow my good works do have some kind of important role to play in the whole picture. When Jesus talks about separating the sheep and the goats, he’s looking at works. He doesn’t even mention faith. How do we make sense of those two seemingly opposite things? Let me suggest a way to square that. How do we preserve that justification is a free unmerited gift and we still have to do something. And the answer I would suggest is to think about babies. And I mention this because this is a biblical way of understanding the spiritual life. Jesus compares in John three verse five, to this act of being born, we have to be born of water in the spirit. And the Greek in John three talks about being born anew or born from above. This is where being born again comes from.
When you’re born, when you are conceived, you’ve done literally nothing to merit it. You’ve done nothing to earn it. You’ve done nothing to create the conditions of your existence. You couldn’t have, you were not there to do it. You were no more able to do that than the paralyzed man was able to push through the crowd and get to Jesus. You were incapable. But once you’re alive, you have to do any number of things to maintain your being alive. So your life, your biological life is a gratuitous gift from God, which you’ve done zero to earn, but you still have to do things every day. You need to drink water. Don’t forget to drink water today. You need to eat, you need to breathe, your heart needs to beat, you got to exercise, you got to sleep, you got to do all those things. It can be sometimes unpleasant.
All of that is wrapped up in your continued existence. But no one ever says, oh, how dare you eat and drink and sleep and exercise. Life is a gift. No. All of those works that you do to maintain your life and to increase your life, to grow in biological life, those are all ways you’re building upon the gift of biological life and responding to the gift. It doesn’t change the fact that it’s a gift, but for some reason when we’re talking about the spiritual life, people are very confused. How can we say the spiritual life is a gift and we have to do things to maintain it and then increase it? It’s the same principle in both cases, we are simply treating the spiritual life in light of a wealth of biblical data akin to biological life. A comparison made first by Jesus himself. So that’s what I would suggest. If you want to make sense of justification, you can just look at those passages. You don’t earn it in any way. You do have to do things to maintain it and increase it.
The next thing I want to consider then is merit. Because there’s a line in the catechisms discussion on merit that I think is actually a really helpful starting place. It’s a place many Protestants are like, oh, we actually agree more than we thought we did because you can hear everything I said so far about merit and make it sound like, oh, he’s making it sound like God owes us something. And we should be very clear that God doesn’t owe us anything strictly. I’ll get into important ways we can understand merit, but we need to start with what the catechism talks about in terms of God didn’t owe us. Remember, life is a total gift. So of course he doesn’t owe us anything. He didn’t owe his life to begin with. And along in preparing for this, I found the work of a channel called Trent Dialogues.
And this is not Trent Horn, he’s Catholic. This is not the Council of Trent, also Catholic. This is a Protestant guy named Trent, I assume, who does what seemed to me from a cursory look at his channel to be a very fair job of trying to understand Catholicism. He disagrees at points of course, otherwise he’d be Catholic. But he does his best to make sense of, well, why do you Catholics say this and is there a way we could make sense of it? And I really enjoyed the way he shares that a priest had sent him this paragraph of the catechism and he was really struck by it. He really liked it. So I’ll let him kind of introduce it to us. It’s paragraph 2007,
CLIP:
Section 2007. With regard to God, there is no strict right to any merit on the part of man between God and us. There is an immeasurable inequality for we have received everything from Him, our creator. Amen to that. I love section 2007. If this whole section was just only 2007, I think we’d be done video over.
Joe:
So yeah, that’s an important backdrop. When we talk about merit, we don’t mean that God strictly owes us anything by nature, he owes us nothing. So how can the catechism talk about merit at all? This same guy, Trent, comes pretty close to honestly just guessing the right answer later on in the video.
CLIP:
I’ve really racked my brain to try to come up with, is there some way that recompense owed could be interpreted in a way that would be acceptable? And the best that I can possibly come up with is this idea. If somebody receives a promise of a benefit from God and they accept that promise and they rely on that promise, could we think of God owing something until that benefit that’s been promised has been delivered. But even in that situation, it doesn’t mean that God owes us anything. Relying on a promise is fundamentally different than something being owed. It’s tapping into God’s faithfulness, not God’s indebtedness.
Joe:
So yeah, I mean, like I said, he kind of stumbles into what I think is basically the right answer when we talk about merit in relation to God, we mean that in one of two ways. Number one, God keeping his promises to us, he owes us nothing by nature, but if he makes promises to us, he then has to be faithful to his own promises, part of his nature to be faithful. So you can create a kind of indebtedness. I’ll give you an example. I’m a parent and occasionally I do the bad parenting move of bribing my children to be good in church by promising them if they’re well-behaved, they can have a treat after church like a donut. Now, do they deserve injustice? They have a donut for doing what they were supposed to do in the first place? They do not. Absolutely not.
But once I have made the promise to them, if I deprive them of let’s say they are perfect in church, this is not going to happen. Let’s say they are, then if I said, you know what, I changed my mind. I’m not going to give you the thing I said I was going to give you. Now I’ve actually done them an injustice. If you make a promise to somebody, if you say, Hey, give me your lunch and I’ll give you a thousand dollars, I’m totally serious. And they give you their lunch and you’re like, actually, this lunch was not worth a thousand dollars. You’ve done an injustice and strict justice right now. Notice prior to you making a promise you didn’t know them anything, you created a sense of indebtedness by saying, if you do X in this case, give me your lunch, then I promise to deliver on Y in this case, give you a thousand dollars.
That creates an indebtedness. God can create an indebtedness to us if he says, do these things and your father in heaven will reward you for instance, as Jesus does, he’s created a kind of indebtedness. Now, to be totally clear, in none of these situations are we actually that lunch is not worth a thousand dollars and more than that, my kids being well behaved, they’re not giving me anything I didn’t already have. I mean maybe peace of mind, but they’re not adding. And so likewise, when God says, pray fast, give alms and I’ll reward that. It isn’t because God was lacking prayer or lacking alms or no, no, no, everything belongs to God. But he’s creating a meritorious situation by promising to deliver on a promise. But there’s another way we can also talk about merit, and I’m getting a little in the weeds here, so I’m just going to throw it out just to highlight it.
Theologians will distinguish between merit and two senses. One is strict merit. Someone’s called conine merit. It’s merit what’s owed injustice. And God can only owe us anything injustice if he makes promises and then he really owes it to himself to the justice of his nature. But there’s this other kind of thing where God can reward things even if he hasn’t made a promise and it’s kind of merit, but it’s kind of merit loosely. So it’s sometimes called congruent merit. You might call it merit ish. Here’s what I mean by it. Think about a job. Your wages are owed to you in strict justice if you work and then you don’t get paid, you’ve been robbed. On the other hand, let’s say your company does employee of the month and you really do a good job and let’s say the employer decides to give it to somebody else, you might feel robbed, but you have not been robbed in any legal sense of the term.
So it’s not strict merit in that sense. You’re not owed employee of the month, you’re not owed the medal of honor even if you’ve done something brave for your country. But nevertheless, those things are tied to the nature of your works. So obviously the employee of the month, if it’s any kind of meaningful system, is someone who’s done a really good job. Obviously the Medal of Honor recipient is someone who’s done something really above and beyond and heroic. So one of the other ways when we’re talking about merit in heaven, in terms of the treasury of merit, it’s not just those things God has promised to deliver on. It’s also God recognizing good things in us and rewarding them somewhat gratuitously, but gratuitously still based on something found in us. Hopefully that’s a clear distinction. If you bestow the medal of honor, is that gratuitous?
Yes. Is that rooted in the behavior of the soldier also? Yes. There’s no contradiction between those things. So when we talk about merit, those are the things we mean. So we’re not saying God was lacking something like he’s a creature and he’s on our level and he owed us. In that sense, we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about this other way when we’re dealing with merit, which makes it complicated, I acknowledge, but it’s also biblical language. So I think it’s fine to use that kind of language of rewards being given for certain behavior. Finally, I want to close by turning to the writings of St. Augustine who in turn is analyzing St. Paul because Augustine notices this thing that St. Paul talks about justification and the gratuitous nature of it, but still sees an important role for works. And Augustine is someone who is beloved by many Protestants, and St.
Paul is someone beloved by hopefully all Protestants. And so it might be helpful to kind of close by saying, here’s this other way of understanding. Paul is regularly marshaled by Protestants as if he were a Protestant. When you listen to Augustine describe his own views on justification, it’s very clear that’s not his view. And I think this sermon called Sermon 3 33 does a good job of giving an accurate understanding of the Catholic and I would say the biblical view of the relationship of justification and good works and merit and the treasury of merit in all of this. So sermon 3 33, Augustine says, so now let us listen to what the apostle Paul has to say when he was drawing near to his passion, confident about the crown prepared for him. So notice we’re talking about the language of heavenly reward this time the crown. And then Augustine is going to quote two Timothy chapter four.
I’m going to look at verse seven and eight. He looks at verse eight, but I want to give a little context. St. Paul says, I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Notice he’s doing a lot of what I have done. Then he says, henceforth, there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge will award to me on that day, and not only to me, but also to all who have loved his appearing. Okay? So that’s his claim. Augustine notices the Lord, he says, will award me a crown being a just judge, right? So something in God’s justice is leading to the bestowing of a reward upon Paul. This is tied to merit. Then if we’re dealing with the giving of a reward injustice, that’s what we mean by merit.
So he owes what he will award. So the just judge will award having inspected the work. After all, he can’t deny the reward. And then Augustine asked, well then what work does he inspect? And he notices what Paul says, I have fought the good fight is a work I have completed. The course is a work I have kept. The faith is a work. And then he concludes, there remains for me a crown of justice. There’s a reward. So there’s works that are being rewarded, injustice by God. That’s what Paul says himself. And Augustine points this out. But then he says, but with the reward, you do nothing with the work. You don’t act alone. It’s an important caveat when we’re talking about good works that God is rewarding. These are not the things we are doing for God apart from grace. No, these are the workings of God’s grace through our cooperation, a cooperation he makes entirely possible. The crown simply comes to you from him. The work on the other hand comes from you, but only with his helping.
Augustine’s then going to draw an important contrast that before Paul had merited something quite different, he says, while the apostle Paul previously assault was the C in most monstrous of persecutor, he wasn’t deserving anything good at all. On the contrary, he was deserving the greatest possible evil he was deserving. That is to be damned not chosen. And lo and behold, suddenly while he was committing evils and deserving evil, he’s laid low by a single utterance from heaven. The persecutor is hurled down. The preacher raised up, listen to him confessing this very thing. And then Augustine quotes one Timothy chapter one where St. Paul says, I thank him who has given me strength for this Christ, Jesus our Lord, because he judged me faithful by appointing me to his service. Though I formerly blasphemed and persecuted and insulted him, but I received mercy because I’d acted ignorantly in unbelief.
So you have in the span of those two verses, Paul, going from the language of justice being judged, faithful to this language of mercy, receiving mercy. And Augustine notices this. He says, he didn’t say there, did he? The just judge will award it to me, I obtained is what he said, mercy, I deserved evil. I received good. He has not dealt with us according to our sins. That’s a quotation from Psalm 1 0 3. I obtained mercy. What was owing to me was not paid back. I mean, if what was owing had been paid back, a grievous punishment would’ve been awarded me. I did not. He says, receive what was owing, but I obtained mercy. And then Augustine closes again by quoting Psalm 1 0 3. He has not dealt with us according to our sins. So we have to keep all of these things in view that in St.
Paul’s words. I’m going to turn now to Paul Galatians five, six. What matters is what he calls faith, working through love. What we don’t want is a kind of pianism that just says, okay, here are all my good works. Here are all my bad works, because you’ve done things that have set you at enmity with God and you have merited hell. So if you were treated strictly unmerited apart from grace, you would not be saved. Catholics and Protestants actually agree on this, but nevertheless, even though faith is this unmerited gift part of the working of faith is this idea of faith working through love that now you have the ability to respond to what God is doing within you that you can, as Paul puts it, work out your salvation with fear and trembling because it’s God at work in you. That kind of idea is built in and not only is that built into this proper understanding of grace and what it is to be a child of God, but it also makes total sense why God would then promise the person who does that faithfully will be rewarded.
And so you can have something where God as just judge, not just as merciful, but also as just rewards you with a crown of righteousness. Paul attested that in his own life and he speaks about others who are going to live that kind of life. In one Corinthians three, that’s our promise. That’s what we’re invited into. So don’t be the kind of Christian where you’re saved, but through fire. Be the kind of Christian where you’re building up the treasury of merit through your own holiness and going above and beyond the bare minimum of what you’re required to do in faith. And God will ritually reward that. Now, if you understood this doctrine, if you understand this idea of treasury, of merit and the way that it builds up other people, I’ve focused more on build this up so you can help bring others to salvation and you can help improve other people spiritually and help get them right with God.
But the inverse of that is true as well, and this is where you get things like the doctrine of indulgences is this promise that we trust the great merits of Jesus, which are infinite, combined with these additional merits that he’s chosen to create, and the merits of the saints, including the Virgin Mary, that all of that is not for Naugh and that we can call upon that in our own moments of weakness. There are times you might be Abraham helping out lot. There might be times where you’re lot calling upon Abraham, right? Those two things go together, so hopefully this makes sense to you. I’m eager to know in the comments below if I’ve missed an important aspect of this or if you’re still confused by this, but I think if you get this idea of treasury of Merit, while it may sound alien and it’s alien to some forms of Protestant theology, it is in fact thoroughly biblical and drawing upon the imagery Jesus himself gives us in places like Matthew six for Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer, God bless you.