The Roman Catholic View
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Rome distinguishes between mortal sin and venial sin. Mortal sin is called mortal sin because it kills the grace of justification that's in your soul. Calvin opposed that by saying that all sins are mortal. in the sense that they deserve death, but no sin is mortal to the Christian that would destroy your salvation. But in the Roman view, if you commit a mortal sin, if you die in mortal sin, you go to hell.
If you, as a Christian, commit a mortal sin and die, you go to hell? That doesn't sound like good news, but that is part of the Roman Catholic view of salvation and one of the matters that Protestants were protesting during the 16th century Reformation. This is the Wednesday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham. When you examine the official teachings of the Roman Catholic Church compared to the teaching of Scripture, it really is a contrast between bad news and good news. And that's why the Reformers pursued Reform, a return to the clear teaching of the Word of God. In the series that you're hearing this week from R.C. Sproul, he unpacks further the history and theology of the Reformation.
You can own the series, study guide, and the hardcover edition of The Legacy of Luther when you give a gift of any amount in support of Renewing Your Mind at renewingyourmind.org. Well, to help us better understand the Roman Catholic view, here's Dr. Sproul.
If you take the time to read Luther's 95 Theses, you'll see in there that there's very little about the doctrine of justification. But Luther's discussion that he wanted to have with the faculty over the theses had to do with the whole system of doctrine that was associated with indulgences. And initially, Luther wasn't opposed to indulgences in itself, but the abuse of the selling of them that was being carried out by Tetzel. However, when he began writing up his 95 Theses, and if you read them, you will see that he raises questions about the whole system that's tied to indulgences and to the Roman Catholic understanding of justification and of the gospel. And for us to understand, as I've said, the Reformation concept, I think the best way to do it is against the backdrop of the Roman Catholic view. Now, the Roman Catholic doctrine of justification was not set forth in all of its complexity overnight by Augustine or later by Gregory the Great or anything like that, but rather the system of
of salvation within Rome took centuries and centuries to develop with a layer at a time upon another layer. And from a theological perspective, the Roman Catholic system of salvation is called sacerdotalism, meaning that salvation is wrought through the ministrations of the church and of the priesthood. And the doctrine of justification wasn't defined until after the beginning of the Reformation when we saw what was called the Counter-Reformation. The Roman Catholic Church responded to Protestantism with a three-pronged counter move. The first was with the beginning of the Spanish Inquisition. in which people who embraced these heretical doctrines of the Protestants were subjected to severe forms of torture. And secondly, the founding of the Jesuit order, a special order of priests to deal with the intellectual issues of the day, the Society of Jesus, founded by Ignatius Leola. Sometimes, if you'll see writings by Jesuit scholars,
You'll see their name, and instead of after their name, the initials PhD, you'll see instead SJ, Society of Jesus, means they're Jesuits. They're the creme de la creme of the academic priests in the Roman Catholic Church. But the major... element of the counter-reformation was the calling of an international ecumenical council like Vatican II, Vatican I, Constantinople, Ephesus, Chalcedon, those great councils of church history. And in the middle of the 16th century, this council was called and began in Trento, Italy, and is called the Council of Trent. Sometimes references to decisions of Trent are called tridentines. So if you hear that phrase from now and then, the tridentine view means those views espoused and set down in concrete, officially, de fide, was at the Council of Trent. Now, that Council went through several sessions over several years, but the most important one for our consideration of justification was the sixth session of the Council of Trent, in which the sixth session does two things.
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