43. 8 This faith is faith in God the Savior Jesus Christ. In a simple form it is this:

1. There is one God, the divine trinity exists within him, and he is the Lord Jesus Christ.

2. Believing in him is a faith that saves.

3. We must abstain from doing things that are evil — they belong to the Devil and come from the Devil.

4. We must do things that are good — they belong to God and come from God.

5. We must do these things as if we ourselves were doing them, but we must believe that they come from the Lord working with us and through us.

29. The points just presented illustrate the truths stated in §§19 and 21, that Roman Catholics were the source the leading reformers drew on for their own teachings on the trinity of persons in the Divine, original sin, the assigning of Christ’s merit to us, and our being justified by faith alone.

The purpose of these points has been to show the origin of these key Protestant teachings, especially how the separation of faith from good works and the teaching concerning faith alone came about. Protestants arrived at this for the sole purpose of differentiating themselves from Roman Catholics. Yet this disagreement was more a matter of semantics than of real substance.

The quotations given at the beginning of the book [§§9– 15] clearly reveal the foundation on which the faith of the Protestant churches was built and what inspired the development of that faith.