Trent's Answer and a Twentieth Century Reopening

The Council of Trent addressed justification in its sixth session in January 1547, and the decree is longer and more careful than Reformation polemic usually allowed. It affirms that nobody merits the grace of conversion, that grace is a free gift, and that no one can be justified without it. Where it parts company is on what happens next: Trent holds that grace genuinely makes a person righteous rather than merely declaring them so, that the righteousness received can increase, and that a justified person cooperates with grace in works that are truly meritorious because grace makes them so.

The canons attached to the decree then condemn the alternatives one by one, including the proposition that the sinner is justified by faith alone, understood as excluding the necessity of preparation and cooperation. Each side read the other's position through its own vocabulary, and the words merit, faith and righteousness did not mean the same things across the divide, which is part of why the argument lasted four centuries with so little movement. It moved in the twentieth. Sustained bilateral study of the actual sixteenth century texts led to the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, signed in Augsburg in 1999 by the Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church, which set out a common understanding of justification by grace through faith and concluded that the mutual condemnations of the Reformation era no longer apply to the partner as now understood. Neither church surrendered its confessional language, and other Protestant bodies were not party to it, but the flashpoint of the Reformation is no longer where it was.