In March 2007, Michael Horton interviewed Dr. Robert Sungenis, president of Catholic Apologetics International for the past fourteen years and author of several books on Roman Catholicism, including the best-selling Not By Faith Alone: A Biblical Study of the Catholic Doctrine of Justification (Queenship, 1997).
Michael Horton: Robert, can you give us some background on how you became Roman Catholic?
Robert Sungenis: I was raised in the Roman Catholic Church even before Vatican II, as a matter of fact, and so I know the Roman Catholic faith. At age 19, I decided to leave the Catholic church because I felt it was not teaching the Bible, it was steeped in ritual, you know, the whole nine yards that a lot of people that have left complained about. And for the next 18 years I was a full-fledged card-carrying Protestant. I was in and out of, I don't know, maybe three or four Protestant denominations at that time’Presbyterian, Baptist, Independent, Fundamentalist…so I got pretty good knowledge of Protestant theology. I'm a graduate of George Washington University and Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, so I learned from the best. Norman Shepherd created quite a stir at Westminster in 1980-1981 when I was a student there, and his emphasis was that works justify. I don't think they ironed it out quite the way they wanted to, even back then or even now what exactly he meant by that, so there was a lot of controversy. But it did stick in my mind. Then when I was 37, back in 1993, I came back to the Catholic church and have been back ever since.
Do Roman Catholics teach salvation by works? That's often one of the things we hear on the street, in evangelical circles at least. What do you say to that?
I would preface it by saying this: It's like the question, "Have you stopped beating your wife?" If you answer yes, you're going to convict yourself; if you answer no, you're going to convict yourself. So, it's a question you have to treat gingerly, especially in a theological arena where things can be misunderstood easily. On the one hand, I would say no, Catholic theology does not teach that one is justified by works if we understand by the word "works" that we are doing something outside the grace of God. We cannot give God our works and say, "God, you owe me salvation because of these works I have done." The Council of Trent condemned that idea in its very first canon. It said that anybody who thinks that they can work their way to God either by the law or any of your good works, whatever they are, that's anathema. On the other hand, the Catholic church does teach that works are salvific, that they do justify, but when they use "works" in that sense, they are talking about works that are done under the auspices of God's grace’that is, someone who has already entered into God's grace by faith, and God can now look at those works a lot differently than when the person was not under God's grace. When the person was not under God's grace, the Law, which God would use as a standard to judge those works would condemn him for any work that he did, because it would never meet up to the standards of God's righteousness. But once he's in the "system of grace," as I call it in my book, then God looks at him in a very different way and thus those works he does for God, God can look at those works, and bless those works, and give a reward for those works, which we call salvation. He in no way owes the man anything; he is not legally obligated to pay him anything for those works; God just does it out of his benevolence. And so in that sense, works do justify.
What is the classic formulation of the Roman Catholic doctrine of justification today?
If you say "classic," then that would be from the Tridentine doctrine, and that was the last dogmatic council we had on justification. Vatican II and its aftermath doesn't claim to have any dogmatic statement on justification. All it does is reiterate what the Council of Trent said, and you can tell that by the footnotes in the Catechism when you read it.
Could you summarize that understanding of justification for us?
There are 32 canons in the Council of Trent. On the one hand, as I said, the first canon says that by no works of the law or any work done by man in his moral disposition can he attain justification. Justification is given by the grace of God. Faith is the beginning of the justification, and that's in chapter eight of Trent. That is, that's the root of all justification. That's where it starts. In order to get into the grace of God, you have to have faith in God. Once you have the faith-and the Roman Catholic Church says that's a gift of the Holy Spirit as well-it's not something that you alone generate by yourself; it's you cooperating with God that allows you to have faith. That is, you have faith and works that are under God's grace, and both of those are looked at by God as things that he requires you to do, and he blesses those. As long as you remain in the faith and keep doing the works, then you remain in the justification. The Catholic church also believes that if you do not do the works, that is, you sin, then you can lose your justification. And you can regain your justification if you repent of your sin and come back into the grace of God.
So, would that hold for individual sins? If I committed a sin at one o'clock, would I be unjustified until I had opportunity to confess it to a priest?
Depends on the seriousness of the sin. I like to use the example that Paul uses in Romans 4 where he talks about David. He says that David was a man who was justified by his faith without doing works, but if you look at the life of David, what we find is that David was a man of God long before he had committed the sin of adultery with Bathsheba and murder with Uriah the Hittite. So if David is saying that he repented of his sin, and thereby was justified at that point in time, that means he had been justified prior to that and lost his justification, and now because he's repented of his sins (murder and adultery), he has regained his justification. So, in your example, the sin at one o'clock would be David's sins of adultery and murder, and then as he repents, he gets his justification restored to him.
What is the state of the debate these days in Roman Catholic circles in interpreting justification in the Greek, dikaioo/dikaiosis, and the Latin, iustificare? I'm thinking here of Joseph Fitzmyer, who says that clearly this is a legal, forensic term in the Greek, and the Latin, iustificar-, "to make righteous" is actually a misunderstanding and mistranslation of the Greek "to declare righteous." Where is the debate now in biblical scholarship in Catholic circles?
We cover that in Appendix 2 of the book, starting on page 615. We deal with Fitzmyer's assertion. Basically, Fitzmyer doesn't speak for the Catholic Church because there's been no official statement from the Catholic Church despite opinions from what we would call liberal theologians in the Catholic Church, and Fitzmyer would be one of them. Raymond Brown would be another, and there is a whole cadre of these individuals.
Is it your view, then, that the word always means "to make upright" rather than "to declare upright"?
Yes, we can prove that. We do it by a proof of, say, James 2, when James is quoting Genesis 15:6 where it says that Abraham believed and God justified him. He's quoting the same passage that St. Paul is quoting in Romans 4:3, so that means that James and Paul have to have the same understanding of the Greek word dikaiosune, because they're quoting from the same passage, Genesis 15:6. And here's where the Protestants try to change the meaning of dikaiosune’or dikaioo in James 2’because they say it means "demonstrated to be righteous" as opposed to "declaring to be righteous." So they have a dichotomy in their own thinking on the definitions of these words. And we go through it meticulously in chapter two of the book to show that it is impossible to arrive at that position where you make a dichotomy between "demonstrated" righteousness and "declared" righteousness on the one hand, and we also show in the book that the preponderant use of dikaioo in the Greek is not a declared righteousness’and the same would be true for the Greek word logizomai which is used in the King James Bible, for example, when it translates as "imputation." We show that the Greek word logizomai preponderantly means in the Greek that there is a reality to the thing that someone is viewing; it's not a fiction. It's not something that we label, not a label that we put on something, even though we know that the label is not saying that this thing is a reality of the label. We show that the Greek word logizomai actually means in the Greek that the label means what it is signifying. We go through all the uses of logizomai in the New Testament to show that.
So dikaioo and that word group never means "to declare righteous"?
No, there's no passage we can point to that says definitively that the only meaning that can be applied here is "declared righteous." There's no passage we have found in the New Testament that teaches that.
So it's always a "making" righteous?
Always, yes.
As in Romans 3:4, when God is said to be "justified" when he speaks?
Well, when we're talking about a soteriological context, then we're talking about that. We're not talking about passages that apply the word dikaioo to God himself.
OK, so the word itself, then, is more elastic than "to make righteous."
Yes, but it's not elastic in its soteriological sense. That's what I would say.
That would be a dogmatic claim, though, not a linguistic claim, right?
No, that would be both.
[laughter]
What do Roman Catholics do with a verse such as Romans 4:4-5, "Now to the one who does not work, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due, and to the one who does not work but trusts him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness." What would be the typical response to that in your circles?
Well, I think I already explained this at the top of the show, which was when Paul is talking about works in this context, he's talking about works that we do outside of the grace of God, and you can tell that by the word "debt" that he uses in Romans 4:4. He said if we try to work, then we're putting God in debt. And what he means by that is, it's like you working at a job and you say, "God, I put in my forty hours, so even though I don't like you or care for you, I did work for you, so you owe me something." Paul says you can't come to God on that basis. You can't come to God saying, "You owe me. Here's my list of works; you have to pay me for what I did." Paul says in order to be saved, in order to be justified, you have to have a relationship with God. And faith is that relationship. Faith is the one thing that God can see within us where we know that we really want to know God for who he is, not for what he's going to give us. And that's why Paul is faulting the Jews here, because they got into a system where they were just working and said that God owed them salvation. And God says, "I don't owe you anything. I want you to believe in me. I want you to believe in who I am." And that's why he uses the example of Abraham, because in verses 18-22 of that chapter he goes through what Abraham went through, an excruciating ordeal with God. God pulled every ounce of faith out of him because God wanted him to believe in God for who he was, and so, again, Catholicism really is not any different from what I think you believe here. Most Protestant commentators understand Paul's works here as trying to obligate God to pay them with salvation for the work that they do. Catholicism, as I said, in canon one of the Council of Trent condemned that idea as well.
But there is the expectation that God will reward our works, right? There's still the idea of merit in Catholic faith and practice?
Well, you have to be careful with the word "merit" here, because if we're talking about merit in a legal sense, we would say no, there is no merit in the legal sense. If we want to use it in the gracious sense, we would say yes, of course, and in that sense we merit something with God, same as Hebrews 6:10 I think, which says, "God is not unjust when he looks at your works. He will faithfully reward you for your works." And it's interesting that Paul-and I think Paul wrote Hebrews, so I'll say Paul-is using the word "unjust" there. He is saying God is not unjust. He will reward you. So in that sense, there is merit, but it is a gracious merit.
I recall our interchange on the question of justification as a "legal fiction" from within a Protestant framework. Do you still see justification as it is interpreted by Reformation theology as a "legal fiction"?
Well, it depends on who you read on this topic. I've got a list of probably a dozen Protestant scholars in my book that I go through in chapter five, dealing with this idea of forensic justification. What does it mean? I'm not really quite sure they do know what it means, because on the one hand, you'll have a guy like Sproul saying, "Yeah, well, it's not a legal fiction because it's a real fiction," and I even get confused reading some of this stuff. They try to put a reality on the fiction. And somebody else will say, "No, no, it's not a reality. It is a legal fiction." So you get quite a variance on this topic here. I would say this, though: To make a demarcation between the Catholic and Protestant view-and this goes back to my treatment of the word logizomai. It's very important, this word, because a lot of Protestants are under the impression that this word only means something that you have a mental picture of in your mind but in reality does not exist outside your mind, and that's not the way the New Testament uses the word.
Nor the way the Reformers used it.
I don't know, I wouldn't be too sure about that.
I am pretty sure about that.
OK, let me ask you a question, then. Are you saying you don't believe in legal fiction?
No, it's not a legal fiction because the righteousness that God demands in the Law is fully present in Jesus Christ. He has fully satisfied all of the conditions of the covenant of law, so…
OK, I see what you're saying. Where we would differ is this: We would go to Romans 4 again, and I would point out this same passage in Romans 4:18-25, and there it says, "Abraham was fully persuaded that God was able to do this," and it says in verse 22, "Therefore he was justified, because of that." In other words, it's something that God saw in Abraham. He saw the faith in Abraham, and it's that reason that Abraham was justified. He wasn't justified based on some alien righteousness. It doesn't say that in the passage; it says that God justified Abraham based on Abraham's faith, and that's a real faith. It's not a legal fiction. And that's the difference, I think, between the Catholic and the Protestant view.
But then the faith in Roman Catholic understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, faith is not justifying until it is formed by love, so what you're saying is that acceptance or justification of Abraham was based on what God saw in him, not only in terms of faith, but also in terms of charity and good works.
Well yes, you have to treat the whole ball of wax. When we're talking about baptism, and I think that's probably the better angle to cover this thing, the Council of Trent says that at baptism, hope, faith, and love are infused into the sinner, and at that point in time, he has all three of those virtues. So it's not by faith alone that he's justified; it's by hope, faith, and love-at the moment of baptism. When you get to a case like Abraham, where you don't have baptism involved, you have to look at different phases of his life and then you have to join them all together and make a conclusion as to what the Scripture is teaching in the soteriological sense.
Robert, how do you comfort someone in your parish who says, "I feel God's displeasure. I keep committing the same old sins…I go to Mass regularly, I confess my sins, but I continue to struggle with lust, pride, hate, sloth…" How do you comfort someone like that, or if not comfort, what do you say?
Well, first of all, we would take him back to the theological basis for his complaint, and it's the same one that Paul had in Romans 7: "I love Jesus, but I find myself lusting." Saint Jerome said the same thing. He's there translating the Bible in his cave and he says, "I can't stop thinking of dancing women."
I often have the same problem when I'm writing.
[laughter]
I just keep pictures of my wife right in front of me so I don't have that problem sitting in front of my computer. I've got four pictures of her staring at me. That's how I would comfort him.
[laughter]
How about the question of assurance? How about if someone came to you and said, "I am confident that I am not only now in a state of grace, but I am God's elect child, I have all of my sins completely forgiven’past, present, and future’and the righteousness of Christ is imputed to me, therefore I know that I will be saved hereafter. I know I am one of God's elect and I am completely forgiven." What would you say to that person?
I would say you can be as sure as David was before he committed adultery and murder. David had to come to a point of repentance. He was a great man of God’he slew Goliath, he became the king, he passed up the seven brothers, he was a little shepherd boy out there but Samuel chose him, because God said, "I look into the heart of man, and he's the only one of all these brothers that I'm pleased with." So if there's anyone who thought he was a man of God, it was David. And yet he sinned’terribly. And he had to be justified again. So that's what I would tell him. That's the example I would give him from Scripture.
So as long as I am making use of, as you called it, the system of grace, I don't know what will be true of me tomorrow necessarily, but I can be reasonably sure that I am right now in a state of grace.If I walk out of the confessional and I've confessed my sins and I go the next day and receive the eucharist, well, there's no sin in my life that I can look at and say, "This is condemnable. I'm going to hell." Yes, I can say I'm a saved Christian. I'm born again and I'm on my way to heaven’that day.
How do you know, and how would an average layperson know that he or she hasn't committed a damnable sin? What would be a non-damnable sin? Well, again, two answers to that. One is to go back to David again. David committed murder and adultery. Scripture itself teaches us that that was a sin whereby he lost his justification and needed to repent to gain his justification. So there's an indication right there. If there's any doubt as to what a mortal sin is’and that's what David did’it was a mortal sin, "mortal" being death, in other words, that he was going to suffer the second death as it were for those sins, unless he repented. If there's any doubt about what a mortal sin is, then the person goes to the church and learns from the church, because the church is the one who has answers to these questions. He doesn't have to reinvent the wheel himself every day of his life and say, "Gee, I wonder if I committed a mortal sin here…" The church teaches him because the church has been there, and that's why God gave us the church’to give us answers to those questions.
Where did the church get those answers?
From the apostles. And from the apostles, it was passed down through the Scripture and the tradition, and it was transmitted through the fathers until we have our knowledge today.
So eating meat on Fridays was a mortal sin?
Well, no more than not eating meat that was offered to idols was in Acts 15, when the church said that the Christian should not do that. If anyone transgressed that law that the church laid down, they would be in sin, and they would be condemned for it. The same as Ananias and Sapphira were condemned for not giving money to the church when they said they were. They dropped dead and were judged right there on the spot. So, you know, these things the church did judge at that time, and it continues to do so.
Robert, do you believe with Trent that Protestants who do believe in justification by grace alone through faith alone because of Christ alone should be considered anathema?
The Council of Trent says, "Anyone who says, anyone who says"’and you have to look at the verbiage it uses’"anyone who says this, let him be anathema." But what the Council of Trent means by this is that someone who deliberately says that I know the truth but I am going to go against the truth because I believe what I want to believe, that person is anathema. So the Catholic church has a lot of leeway for anybody outside the Catholic church, because the Catholic church knows through two thousand years of experience that people believe certain things because they've been taught that as a child, or because they're ignorant, or because of many other reasons. There are a lot of other contingencies why someone would believe something different from the Catholic church. So if that answers your question…what I mean to say is, I think there is a lot of leeway as to who would be condemned and who would not be condemned.
Well, Robert, thank you for taking the time to be with us and explain some of these motifs and doctrines for us.
My pleasure.
