63. How did it come about that theologians attributed merely human qualities to God? The underlying cause is that all spiritual perception and enlightenment come from the Lord alone. The Lord is the Word, or divine truth. He is the true light that enlightens everyone (John 1:1, 9). He says, “I have come into the world as a light so that anyone who believes in me will not remain in darkness” (John 12:46). This light and the awareness that is gained from it flow only into people who acknowledge the Lord as the God of heaven and earth and who turn to him alone. This light and awareness do not flow into people who think in terms of three gods, as has been happening since the early establishment of the Christian church. Because the idea of three gods is an earthly notion, the only light it receives is earthly. It is incapable of opening up to receive any inflow of spiritual light. This is why the only qualities people have seen in God have been earthly in nature.

For another thing, if theologians had realized the vast incongruity between their ideas and the true divine essence, and had removed these ideas from the teachings on justification, this would obviously have amounted to a complete abandonment of a Christianity that had always been centered on the worship of three gods. [No alternative was available] before the predetermined time for the new church, when fullness and restoration would come.

7. The teachings of the Roman Catholics on justification, as gathered from the decrees of the Council of Trent, can be linked together and summed up as follows:

The sin of Adam was transfused into the entire human race. As a result, the state of the human race and of every individual within it was ruined and alienated from God. People became enemies [of God] and children of wrath. Therefore God the Father as an act of grace sent his Son to reconcile, ritually purge, appease, make satisfaction, and thereby redeem; and to do so by becoming justice.

Christ carried out and fulfilled this task by offering himself to God the Father as a sacrifice on the wood of the cross, that is, through his own suffering and his own blood. Christ alone earned merit. God the Father through the agency of the Holy Spirit assigns, attributes, applies, and transfers this merit of Christ’s to receptive individuals as an act of grace. In this way the sin of Adam is removed from them, although cravings do nonetheless remain and entice them to sin.

Justification is the forgiving of sins, which leads to a renewal of the inner self, by which we turn from an enemy [of God] into a friend and from a child of wrath into a child of grace. This brings us into a union with Christ. We are reborn as a living part of his body.