The Reformation Flashpoint, and a Handshake in 1999

Grace was the formal cause of the sixteenth-century split, and the atlas keeps the confessional positions side by side rather than adjudicating them. The Catholic teaching, defined at the Council of Trent, is that grace is genuinely infused into the person, really transforming them, and that the justified truly cooperate with it. The Lutheran confession insists grace is God's unmerited favour received by faith alone, apart from any human contribution that could be counted as merit. The Reformed tradition of Calvin and the Synod of Dort adds that saving grace, given to the elect, is effectual and not finally resisted. The Wesleyan position holds that a prevenient grace goes ahead of everyone, restoring enough freedom to respond, and that this grace can be resisted and lost.

The most striking recent development is the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification of 1999, in which the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church declared a "differentiated consensus", a shared core beneath differing emphases, and stated that the mutual condemnations of the sixteenth century no longer apply to the teaching of the partners as here presented. Methodist, Anglican and Reformed bodies later associated themselves with it. It did not dissolve the differences; it reclassified them.