106. Brief Analysis

When the leaders and priests of the Roman church are ordained into the ministry, they swear to uphold the decrees of the Council of Trent. This is clear from the papal bull issued by the Roman pope Pius IV, on November 13, 1564, which presents the formula to be followed when declaring a sworn profession of faith:

I with a firm faith believe and profess all and every one of the things contained in that creed which the holy Roman Church makes use of. I likewise undoubtingly receive all other things delivered and declared by the sacred Canons and ecumenical Councils, and particularly by the holy Council of Trent — so help me God.

In that same oath they constrain themselves to believe and profess the specific teachings sanctioned by the Council of Trent regarding the assigning of Christ’s merit to us and our justification by faith in that, as is clear from the following words in that same papal bull:

I embrace and receive all and every one of the things which have been defined and declared in the holy Council of Trent concerning original sin and justification.

The contents of those teachings can be reviewed in the material collected from the Council of Trent in §§3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 above.

These principles established in the Council of Trent lead to the following conclusions.

Roman Catholics before the Reformation had exactly the same teachings as Protestants did after it regarding the assigning of Christ’s merit to us and our being justified by faith in that; the only difference was that Catholics united this faith to goodwill or good works (see §§19, 20 above).

The leading reformers — Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin — retained the Roman Catholic dogmas regarding the assigning of Christ’s merit to us and our being justified by faith. They kept those views as they had been, and still were at the time, among Roman Catholics. The reformers separated goodwill or good works from that faith, however, and declared that faith alone saves, for the purpose of clearly differentiating themselves from Roman Catholics with regard to the essentials of the church, which are faith and goodwill (see §§21, 22, 23 above).

The leaders of the Protestant Reformation do indeed describe good works as an appendage to faith and even an integral part of faith, but they say we are passive in the doing of them, whereas Roman Catholics say we are active in the doing of them. There is actually strong agreement between Protestants and Catholics on the subjects of faith, works, and our rewards (see §§24– 29 above). Clearly, then, these beliefs used to be as important to Roman Catholics as they are now to Protestants.

40. Brief Analysis

The teachings of today’s Christian theology are based on an idea of three gods, an idea that resulted from taking the teaching that there is a trinity of persons at face value. We see the wrongness of those teachings only after we have accepted in their place the idea that there is one God and that the divine trinity exists within him, because seeing how wrong those teachings are is not possible before making that switch.

Before that, we are like people at night who are looking at various objects in the light of only a few stars; we see statues and mistake them for living human beings. Or we are like people lying in bed in the twilight before dawn, seeing something like ghosts in the air above them and thinking the apparitions are angels. Or we are like people who see any number of things in the dim, deceptive light of their own imagination and believe them to be real. It is well known that the true nature of things like that is not detected and does not become apparent until we come into the light of day — that is, the light of intellectual wakefulness. When genuine truths come forth to be seen in their own light, which is the light of heaven, the same thing happens to teachings of the church that have been mistakenly or falsely understood and reinforced.

Surely everyone is capable of understanding that all teachings based on the idea of three gods are inwardly wrong and false. I say “inwardly” because the idea of God is central to everything having to do with the church, religious practice, and worship. Theological concepts dwell at a higher level in the human mind than all other concepts, and the highest theological concept is the idea of God. Therefore if our idea of God is false, everything else that follows from it derives a falseness from or becomes falsified by the source from which it originates. Whatever is highest (which is also what is inmost) acts as the essence of the things that result from it lower down. That essence, like a soul, forms those lower things into a kind of body that is an image of itself. If that essence is false, and it descends and encounters truths lower down, it taints them with its own blight and error.

Our having the idea of three gods in our theological concepts can be compared to patients’ having a disease that persists in their hearts or lungs, but the patients consider themselves healthy because their doctor, unaware of their underlying condition, has convinced them they are well. A doctor who knows about their disease, however, and still convinces them they are well deserves to be and should be charged with causing immeasurable harm.