A Response to “Cletus Van Damme” on Justification

The Sacramental Treadmill Begins

AFTER Roman Catholic “Justification”

I’m following up on a comment from another thread:

Part of restoration includes the desire to go to confession in the first place, so no it's not a semi-pelagian process as you imply. Works of mercy are not optional - one can commit mortal sin via omission as well as commission.

My interlocutor goes by the handle Cletus Van Damme. I want everyone to see how this individual’s method of argumentation works. It is not to provide clear and direct responses, but as is customary for Roman Catholics who are doing apologetics, his method is rather deflection and obfuscation (starting with his own pen name).

Keep in mind that you started off by saying that Roman Catholicism agrees with this statement: “if you rely on works of the law you are under a curse, because they have to be perfect.”

Where is perfection found in Roman Catholicism? Maybe at the moment of baptism. But again, Here you are now, with a bait-and-switch, making a case for “the second plank [of salvation] after the shipwreck which is the loss of grace.” (from CCC 1446). This terminology comes from the point in time after baptism, and Roman Catholics MUST, ARE REQUIRED TO, submit to a particular set of “works of the law”. The real name for this in real Roman Catholic Doctrine is called “The Precepts of the Church” (define: “precept”: “A precept (from the Latin: præcipere, to teach) is a commandment, instruction, or order intended as an authoritative rule of action”) – this is the very thing that I said constituted a “bait and switch”.

A Roman Catholic View of Nature and Grace Part 3

How the Roman Catholic view of nature and grace intersects with a variety of Roman Catholic doctrines and practices.

See also:

A Roman Catholic View of Nature and Grace Part 1.

A Roman Catholic View of Nature and Grace Part 2.

Aquinas was the problem; the Reformation was the solution.

I’m continuing to work through Gregg Allison’s work, “Roman Catholic Theology and Practice: An Evangelical Assessment”.

A proper evangelical assessment of Catholicism will treat Catholic theology as a coherent, all-encompassing system with one of its two key tenets being the nature-grace continuum that underscores the less-than-devastating impact of sin on nature, which, as a consequence, retains some capacity to receive, transmit, and cooperate with grace.

Specific theological doctrines and practices in which the outworking of this understanding of the nature-grace continuum can be seen are:

Sacrament of Penance: Public? Private? Once? Repeatable?

The Sacramental World in the Sentence of Peter Lombard

The human predicament ... was that, no matter what, people sin again: private penance, not public penance, is a remedy for those fresh outbreaks. Even Gratian, down in Bologna, argued for repeatability: charity rules that the ancient tradition of public penance should not be enforced, even though its rules should remain on the books. Why? Although Augustine, in other contexts, argued for unrepeatability, Gratian cited the anti-Donatist Augustine, who defined penance as the way of dealing with postbaptismal sin, yet argued that Donatists thought that rebaptism was the only means to reconciliation.

Peter argued for repeatability by citing what seem to be self-contradictory opinions of the authorities. In the first distinction on penance (distinction 14), for instance, he cited Ambrose, Augustine, and Origen that penance is a once-in-a-lifetime event. He then cites Augustine, Ambrose, and John Chrysostom that penance can be repeated as often as sins arise.

The infallible Council of Trent ruled that it was repeatable, private, to a priest, and it always had been, from the moment Christ instituted the sacrament.

The Church Prior to the Reformation: The Mass

Medieval conception of Purgatory

As Protestants, we all seem to know that the Roman Church was very bad during the middle ages, but in what ways? What, precisely, was being protested?

In his work “The Reformation: A History”, Diarmiad MacCulloch gives a brief overview of the Roman Church prior to the Reformation. He introduces that overview with this passage:

Nicholas Ridley, one of the talented scholarly clergy who rebelled in England against the old [Roman] Church, wrote about this to one of his fellow rebels John Bradford in 1554, while they both lay in prisons waiting for the old Church to burn them for heresy. As Bishop Ridley reflected on the strength of their deadly enemy, which now he saw as the power of the devil himself, he said that Satan’s old world of false religion stood on two ‘most massy posts and mighty pillars … these two, sir, are they in my judgement: the one his false doctrine and idolatrical use of the Lord’s supper; and the other, the wicked and abominable usurpation of the primacy of the see of Rome … the whole system of the medieval western Church was built on the Mass and on the central role of the Pope. Without the Mass, indeed, the Pope in Rome and the clergy of the Western Church would have had no power for the Protestant reformers to challenge, for the Mass was the centerpiece around which all the complex devotional life of the Church revolved (Diarmiad MacCulloch, “The Reformation: A History” (New York, NY: Penguin Books, ©2004, pg 10).

These are the things that the Reformation was all about: the “Mass” and the Papacy. These were the two real bulwarks of Roman strength. But in what way did they exercise power in the 16th century? In what ways did they hold captive the entire continent of Europe?

Genuine “Good Works” vs “The Precepts of ‘The Church’”

To help illustrate a sermon on the text of Ephesians 2:1-10 (in light of Romans 12:1-2), my pastor created this illustration to show how “good works” fit into the lives of believers.

Bryan Cross Uncharitably Caricatures "the Sacramental Treadmill"

Bryan Cross has uncharitably caricatured the easy-to-understand portrayal of the Roman Catholic system of works, which we know as the sacramental treadmill. He has called it a "performance treadmill picture in which one never knows whether one has one enough merit to be justified, is an utter caricature of the Catholic doctrine".

Bryan's portrayal suggests that the sacramental treadmill is merely not knowing whether one has enough merit to be justified. But that's not the true picture of all that the sacramental treadmill represents. Rather, simply put, the true sacramental treadmill represents virtually all the "stuff you gotta do for the rest of your life" as a Roman Catholic. Over and over again. Of course, if you look at the chart, it does correctly identify, in algorithm form, all the things one must "do" as a Roman Catholic -- the "precepts of the church", etc, -- in addition to mere "good works performed out of love".