Council of Trent

The Council of Trent was the Roman Catholic Church’s own council, meeting at Trent between 1545 and 1563, called to define Catholic doctrine against the Protestant Reformation.¹ Its decrees fixed Rome’s position that Scripture and unwritten apostolic tradition carry equal authority, defined justification to include the “sanctification and renewal of the inward man” rather than pardon alone, and set the number of sacraments at seven.²³ The council’s own summary of its work, the 1564 Profession of Faith of Pope Pius IV, bound Catholic clergy and converts from Protestantism to these decrees by oath.⁴

Historical Development

Trent’s fifth session, held June 17, 1546,⁵ issued a decree on original sin condemning anyone who denied that Adam’s fall “injured himself alone and not his posterity” or reduced its effects to death and physical evil “and not also sin which is the disease of the soul.”⁶ The same decree carried a canon condemning, by name, Martin Luther’s own teaching that sin remains in a baptized child as itself sin.⁷

A later session took up justification and, with it, the standing of the human will after the Fall. The council affirmed that the Fall left “free will… by no means extinct, although it is weakened as to its strength and biassed,” and anathematized anyone who said free will “has been lost and extinguished in consequence of the sin of Adam.”⁶ Even so, Trent did not settle the dispute within Rome itself: Jansenist Augustinians and Semipelagian Jesuits both read the council’s own canons on grace as satisfying their opposing positions, a tension the papacy finally resolved against the Jansenists only in 1713, with the bull Unigenitus.⁸

Trent also closed a question the church had left open since the Council of Hippo in AD 393: the extent of the Old Testament canon. Trent included the Apocrypha in that canon, “pronouncing an anathema on all who should hold a contrary opinion,” where Protestant churches instead kept the Hebrew canon and read the Apocrypha only for edification, not as authoritative for doctrine.⁹ And it confirmed the number of sacraments at seven, a count that had itself only hardened into doctrine gradually, from Peter Lombard’s Sentences through the Council of Florence in 1439.³ The council’s own decrees were explained for parish use in the Roman Catechism, prepared at Pius IV’s order and promulgated by Pope Pius V in 1566.⁴

Confessional Definition

The Second London Baptist Confession answers Trent’s decree on free will directly, without naming the council: fallen man “is not able by his own strength to convert himself, or to prepare himself thereunto.”¹⁰ Where Trent anathematized the claim that Adam’s sin left the will “lost and extinguished,” the confession states exactly that claim as its own doctrine.

On the sacraments, the confession recognizes two rather than Trent’s seven:

Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are ordinances of positive and sovereign institution, appointed by the Lord Jesus, the only lawgiver, to be continued in his church to the end of the world.¹¹

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t Trent’s own condemnation of those who say free will was “lost and extinguished” by the Fall put the council closer to the Reformed doctrine of total depravity than to Semipelagianism? Trent’s canon rules out only the claim that the will was destroyed outright; it still leaves the will able to cooperate with grace once offered, which is the same “cooperation” language the Council of Orange had used centuries earlier for the Christian’s life after baptism, not for how grace is first given. Rome’s theology after Trent extended that cooperation backward into the very beginning of salvation, teaching that grace “confers the capacity to believe but not the act of believing itself,” which Bavinck describes as smuggling semi-Pelagianism back in under a different name, a move Orange’s own settled points do not require and that Trent never formally repudiated.¹² The confession’s own doctrine of effectual calling denies not just the loss but the sufficiency of any unaided human contribution at the point where faith begins.¹⁰

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.” ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 20, “Justification, Sanctification, and Perseverance.” ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 22, “The Spirit’s Means of Grace.” ↩ ↩²
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 7, “Creeds and Confessions.” ↩ ↩²
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 19, “Original Sin,” quoting Council of Trent, Sess. V, Can. 2, and Sess. VI, Cap. 1 and Can. 5. ↩ ↩²
Jared Heath Moore, A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), chap. 3, “On Concupiscence, the Roman Catholics Rejected Augustine and the Reformed Tradition Followed Augustine.” ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 28, “Effectual Calling.” ↩
Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), chap. 23. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 9, “Of Free Will,” para. 3. ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 28, “Of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.” ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 17, “The Order of Salvation.” ↩