Catholic Reformation

The Catholic Reformation, also called the Counter Reformation, was the Roman Catholic Church’s sixteenth- and seventeenth-century reassertion of its doctrine and institutional structure, centered on the Council of Trent (1545-1563), in reaction to the Protestant Reformation.¹ Trent formally defined Catholic teaching on the relationship between Scripture and unwritten tradition and on justification, both points the Reformers had contested, condemning the Protestant positions on each.²³ A revived Jesuit and Dominican theology then carried that Tridentine doctrine forward into the centuries that followed.¹

Historical Development

Calls to reform the Western church predate the Reformation. The conciliar movement of the fifteenth century, especially the Council of Constance in 1414, was “motivated by concern for reform,” but Bavinck notes that “little reform was achieved.”¹ Rome met that failure with the same resistance a century later, when the Council of Trent met, from 1545 to 1563, against the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation.¹

The post-Tridentine church rebuilt its theology around Thomas Aquinas, marked throughout by polemic against the Reformation.¹ A neoscholastic revival took shape first among Spanish Dominicans such as Francisco de Vitoria, Melchior Canus, and Peter de Soto, but its principal carriers were the Jesuits, Bellarmine, Peter Canisius, and Suárez chief among them.¹ The Society of Jesus itself, founded by Ignatius Loyola in 1541, “has always been identified with Semipelagian Theology,” in A. A. Hodge’s judgment.⁴ Bavinck reaches a similar verdict on this Jesuit theology, finding that it diverged from Aquinas himself on sin, free will, and grace, in a direction he calls “Pelagian.”¹

The Jesuit line did not go unopposed within Rome itself. Dominican Augustinians, including Baius of Louvain and later Cornelius Jansen, bishop of Ypres, pressed a more Augustinian theology of grace against it, one Rome finally condemned by the bull Unigenitus in 1713.¹ Bavinck summarizes the outcome: “Pelagianism triumphed in dogmatics, probabilism in ethics, and papal curialism in the church.”¹ The Jesuit order was itself suppressed by Pope Clement XIV in 1773 and restored in 1814; papal doctrinal authority was pressed further in the century that followed, through the 1854 definition of the immaculate conception of Mary, the 1864 Syllabus of Errors, and the First Vatican Council’s 1870 definition of papal infallibility.¹

Confessional Definition

Trent addressed two questions the Reformation had put to Rome directly: the source of doctrinal authority, and the nature of justification.

Scripture and tradition. Trent’s own decrees, as Hodge summarizes them, teach “that Christ and his Apostles taught many things which were not committed to writing, i.e., not recorded in the Sacred Scriptures,” that these unwritten instructions “have been faithfully transmitted, and preserved in the Church,” and that they “constitute a part of the rule of faith for all believers.”² “The authority due to tradition,” Hodge writes, “is the same as that which belongs to the Scriptures.”² The Second London Baptist Confession states the opposite: “The Holy Scripture is the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience.”⁵

Justification. Trent defined justification as “not only the remission of sins but also the sanctification and renewal of the inward man through the voluntary reception of grace and the gifts.”³ On Bavinck’s reading, Rome does not clearly distinguish justification from sanctification: habitual grace, infused into the soul, is treated as the formal cause of both, so that God is said to forgive sinners because he has first made them inwardly holy.³ Rome does not deny that Christ’s righteousness is imputed to believers, but insists that justification also includes an ethical infusion of that righteousness into them, and because faith there means assent to revealed truth rather than the sole instrument of justification, Rome allows no assurance, by faith alone, of belonging to Christ.³ The confession states the reverse: God justifies the elect “not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous … not by imputing faith itself, the act of believing, or any other evangelical obedience to them, as their righteousness; but by imputing Christ’s active obedience unto the whole law, and passive obedience in his death for their whole and sole righteousness by faith.”⁶

The Creed of Pope Pius IV, promulgated in 1564 to bind Catholic clergy, teachers, and converts from Protestantism to Trent’s decrees, joined the Nicene Creed to a profession of “the apostolic and ecclesiastical traditions,” an acceptance of Scripture “according to the sense which the holy mother Church has held and does hold,” and a confession of seven sacraments “instituted by Jesus Christ our Lord.”⁷ A. A. Hodge judged the resulting system, “though studiously ambiguous,” to be “evidently though not consistently Semipelagian.”⁷

Related Doctrines

References

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 2, “The History and Literature of Dogmatic Theology.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰
Charles Hodge, “Chapter V. Roman Catholic Doctrine Concerning the Rule of Faith,” in Systematic Theology, Volume I (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 104-151. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 20, “Justification, Sanctification, and Perseverance.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 6, “Comparison of Systems.” ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 1. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 11, “Of Justification,” para. 1. ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 7, “Creeds and Confessions.” ↩ ↩²