Justified by Grace, But What is Grace and What Does it Do? | Prof. Michael Root

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 22 November 2024

⏱️ 37 minutes

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Summary

Professor Michael Root delves into the theological debate surrounding justification by grace, a pivotal issue during the Protestant Reformation, emphasizing the differing interpretations between Protestant reformers like Martin Luther and Catholic theologians. After examining the historical perspectives and highlighting the differences he also discusses efforts to reconcile these views such as the 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification signed by Lutherans and Catholics.

This lecture was given on February 3rd, 2024, at The Dominican House of Studies.

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About the Speaker:

Michael Root is Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology at the Catholic University of America, Washington, DC. Earlier in life, he was a Lutheran, teaching at various Lutheran seminaries and serving ten years as a Research Professor at the Institute for Ecumenical Research in Strasbourg, France. He was received into the Catholic Church in 2010. His particular theological interests lie in grace and justification, eschatology (death, heaven, hell, etc.), and Protestant-Catholic relations.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Thomistic Institute podcast.
0:06.8	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:13.1	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.1	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us
0:22.2	at to mystic institute.org. I'm going to launch into this because it is a very difficult topic.
0:28.9	For me, this is the most difficult topic of the ones we are discussing. On the one hand, it is important.
0:34.8	It's a shibboleth of the Reformation that this is the article upon which everything
0:40.3	turns. You must get justification right. The Catholics didn't quite think that, but they spent
0:46.2	a lot of time at the Council of Trent coming up with a Catholic response. They broke with
0:51.7	precedent. Instead of just listing the wrong things they condemned,
0:55.5	they decided they needed to give a summary account of Catholic teaching, unusual for a council,
1:00.8	which they did. So it is important, but there have been false stereotypes throughout the tradition.
1:08.1	The things I have heard Catholics say about Protestant understandings of justification or Protestants say about Catholic understandings of
1:14.9	justification are often howlingly wrong, just incredibly wrong. But each issue is complicated.
1:23.8	I think a lot of the discussion on this issue have been ships passing in the night.
1:28.3	There are places where the ships do, in fact, I believe, run into each other,
1:32.3	but in other places it's hard to get the concepts to match.
1:37.3	One side says X, the other seems to say not X, but the words mean different things.
1:43.3	So they don't quite mesh. Let me note one point.
1:47.6	This entire retreat, we're talking about the Reformation. We're not talking about necessarily
1:54.9	contemporary Protestantism. At the very least, there are Protestant movements that arose
2:00.8	after the Reformation, who may very well not agree with what I'm going to say about justification.
	...

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