Theopedia

Roman Catholicism

The Roman Catholic Church is a major communion of Christianity, governed by the Pope, the Bishop of Rome, held to be Peter’s successor and Christ’s vicar on earth. It affirms the Trinity, Christ’s deity, and his bodily resurrection, and is a disputed-but-orthodox tradition: its members are fellow Christians, though Reformed confessional theology disagrees with it over the rule of faith, justification, and the sacraments. It traces its separation from Eastern Christianity to the Great Schism of 1054 and its definitive break with Protestantism to the 16th-century Reformation, which the Council of Trent’s decrees answered.

Historical Origin

Rome’s leadership claim rests on its self-understanding as the church Peter and Paul founded and on an unbroken line of bishops succeeding Peter in the city. Herman Bavinck traces the claim’s actual historical growth rather than treating it as given from the start: “It was in Rome, in the middle of the second century, that the first list of bishops was drawn up; it was there that the idea of episcopal succession and the bishops’ apostolic dignity was raised. In the early period, however, this primacy of the church at Rome had only a moral-religious character; Rome was first among equals with the other Christian churches.”1 John Calvin likewise granted that the early church gave Rome real honor, but for reasons short of a Christ-instituted, perpetual headship: the belief that Peter’s ministry founded the church there, Rome’s prominence as the seat of empire, and the comparative doctrinal stability of the Western churches during disputes that unsettled the East.2 The decisive step from honor to dogma came later: Bavinck credits Pope Leo I (440-461) with first developing Rome’s primacy “with all deliberateness in several letters” and elevating it “to the rank and value of a religious dogma,” grounded in Matthew 16:18, over the objection of the Eastern churches, whose own canons instead ranked Constantinople’s bishop second only to Rome’s “because the same is the new Rome.”3 (See Great Schism for the 1054 division this rivalry eventually produced.)

Roman Catholicism’s distinguishing doctrines took their classic, formal shape centuries later, in direct response to the Reformation. Martin Luther’s protest against the church’s penitential system, especially the sale of indulgences, provoked the Council of Trent (1545-1563), whose 1547 decree on justification, “one of the results of its sixth session,” was “promulgated as a counter to the Protestant threat, offering an official ecclesiastical definition and exposition of the doctrine of justification.”4 The decree, sixteen chapters and thirty-three canons, rejected both the Pelagian denial of grace’s necessity and the Reformers’ doctrine of justification by an alien, imputed righteousness.4 (See Council of Trent and Catholic Reformation for this period in full.)

The papacy’s authority received its fullest formal definition in the modern era. Pope Pius IX restored the Jesuit order (1814), proclaimed Mary’s immaculate conception a dogma (1854), and issued the Syllabus of Errors condemning modern liberalism (1864), before the First Vatican Council (1869-1870) defined papal infallibility itself.5 A century later, the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) issued Gaudium et Spes, its “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World” (1965), which changed the church’s public posture toward it.6

Core Tenets

The papacy and apostolic succession. Roman Catholicism holds that Christ gave Peter a unique primacy among the apostles, transmitted by lawful succession to each subsequent bishop of Rome. Bavinck states Rome’s own reasoning: it claims the church’s mark of apostolicity “because it was founded by the apostles and agrees in its doctrine, organization, and ministry with those of the apostles, but especially because its office-bearers are the successors, in an unbroken line, of the apostles and received their power and authority from those who themselves in turn received it in lawful succession from the apostles.”7 The First Vatican Council (1870) carried this claim to its fullest extent, declaring the pope’s power “immediate, conferred by Christ, as well as full and supreme, absolute and subject to no laity, bishop, or council, but only to God,” with every bishop and believer owing him “absolute obedience… not only in matters of faith and morals, but also in matters of the discipline and government of the church,” and declaring that when the pope speaks ex cathedra he is, “by virtue of divine assistance, infallible.”8 The church’s own Tridentine Profession of Faith has each member swear obedience “to the Roman bishop, the successor of St. Peter, prince of the apostles, and vicar of Jesus Christ,” a formula to which an 1877 decree appended Vatican I’s language on “the primacy and infallible rule of the Roman Pontiff.”9 (See Papacy for the office in full.)

Scripture, tradition, and the Magisterium. Rome does not locate final doctrinal authority in Scripture alone. Michael Kruger describes its position as a “trifold authority structure that includes Scripture, tradition, and the Magisterium (the church’s teaching authority),” in which the Magisterium, chiefly the pope and his bishops, “alone has the right to interpret Scripture and tradition” and “the sole authority to define what writings constitute Scripture and tradition in the first place.”10 Bavinck makes the same point from the Reformation side: where Protestant theology grounds its articles of faith on Scripture alone, Roman Catholic theology grounds them “from the magisterium of the church.”11

Justification. Trent defined justification as more than the forgiveness of sins: it is, in the council’s own words, “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.”12 Bavinck summarizes the resulting Roman Catholic doctrine: justification “is therefore that act of God by which he forgives the guilt of sin and absolves persons from eternal punishment and internally regenerates and renews them; the latter results in the former,” with “habitual grace” as “the formal cause both of the remission of sins and of sanctification.”13 Rome affirms that Christ’s righteousness is not withheld from believers, but holds that it comes to them by an ethical infusion rather than by imputation alone, so that justification and sanctification, kept formally distinct, are not clearly separated in practice.13 (See Justification for the Reformed doctrine this denies.)

The sacraments and the Mass. Trent “expressly declared… that all seven sacraments were instituted by Jesus Christ our Lord himself… immediately,” a claim Bavinck judges an obligation “theology could not fulfill,” since Scripture attests Christ’s own direct institution only of baptism and the Lord’s Supper.14 Rome also holds the Mass to be a true, propitiatory sacrifice, not merely a commemoration. Trent’s own canons anathematize anyone who says the Mass “is only a sacrifice of praise and of thanksgiving; or, that it is a bare commemoration of the sacrifice consummated on the cross, but not a propitiatory sacrifice,” and teach that in the Mass “that same Christ is contained and immolated in an unbloody manner” and rightly “offered… not only for the sins, punishments, satisfactions, and other necessities of the faithful who are living, but also for those who are departed in Christ, and who are not as yet fully purified.”15 (See Mass, Transubstantiation, and Purgatory for these doctrines in full.)

Mary. Roman Catholicism holds Mary to have been conceived without original sin and assumed bodily into heaven. Pope Pius IX’s 1854 bull Ineffabilis Deus declared “that the most Blessed Virgin Mary was preserved from all stain of original sin in the first instant of her Conception, by a singular grace and privilege of Almighty God.”16 Bavinck judges the scriptural support offered for this and for Mary’s bodily assumption unconvincing, resting on typology rather than direct textual warrant.16 (See Mariology for the doctrine in full.)

Comparison with the Reformed Confessions

Scripture’s sufficiency. Against Rome’s trifold authority, the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states that “the Holy Scripture is the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience.”17 Where Rome holds the Magisterium alone competent to interpret Scripture and to settle the canon, Reformed confessional theology holds Scripture to be self-authenticating and sufficient without an infallible church to certify it. (See Sola Scriptura.)

Justification. The confession states that God “freely justifieth” those he calls, “not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous; not for anything wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ’s sake alone,” through “imputing Christ’s active obedience unto the whole law, and passive obedience in his death for their whole and sole righteousness by faith.”18 Where Trent makes justification a process of infused, increasing righteousness bound up with sanctification, Reformed theology keeps justification a single forensic verdict, grounded in Christ’s imputed righteousness and received by faith alone, distinct from the believer’s ongoing growth in holiness.

The sacraments and the Mass. The confession recognizes only two ordinances of Christ’s own institution, “appointed by the Lord Jesus, the only lawgiver, to be continued in his church to the end of the world”: baptism and the Lord’s Supper.19 Reformed theology also rejects the Mass as a repeated propitiatory sacrifice, holding instead that Christ’s one sacrifice on the cross was full and final and that the Supper commemorates and spiritually feeds on it rather than re-presenting it. (See Communion and Sacerdotalism.)

Church government. Reformed Baptist ecclesiology holds no post-apostolic bishop or council to carry binding doctrinal authority over the whole church in the way Rome grants the papacy; each local church governs itself under Christ, its only head, through its own elders rather than answering to a single earthly vicar.

Mary and the saints. Reformed confessional theology honors Mary as the blessed mother of the incarnate Son but rejects her immaculate conception, bodily assumption, and any mediatorial role in salvation as without scriptural warrant, along with the broader Roman Catholic practice of invoking the saints in prayer.

Related Doctrines

Papacy, Council of Trent, and Great Schism treat the office, the council, and the 1054 division central to this article’s Historical Origin and Core Tenets in full. Transubstantiation, Mass, Purgatory, and Mariology treat the specific doctrines summarized here at greater length. Justification and Sola Scriptura state the Reformed confessional position directly against Rome’s own. Eastern Orthodox Church is the other major communion tracing continuous descent from the ancient church that Rome is most often compared and contrasted with.

References

  1. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩

  2. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-46), book 4, chap. 6, “Of the Primacy of the Romish See,” 353-364. ↩

  3. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, chap. 21. ↩

  4. Aaron Thomas O’Kelley, “Grace and Merit in Late Medieval Theology,” in “A Historical-Theological Critique of the New Perspective on Paul” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 26-68. ↩ ↩2

  5. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, chap. 2, “The History and Literature of Dogmatic Theology.” ↩

  6. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, chap. 2, editorial note. ↩

  7. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, chap. 21. ↩

  8. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, chap. 21. ↩

  9. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 7, “Creeds and Confessions,” 112-128. ↩

  10. Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 1, “The Church’s Book.” ↩

  11. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 1, “Dogmatic Theology as a Science.” ↩

  12. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, chap. 20, “Justification, Sanctification, and Perseverance.” ↩

  13. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, chap. 20. ↩ ↩2

  14. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, chap. 22, “The Spirit’s Means of Grace.” ↩

  15. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 43, “The Lord’s Supper,” 631-650. ↩

  16. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, chap. 12, “The Fallen World.” ↩ ↩2

  17. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 1. ↩

  18. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 11, “Of Justification,” para. 1. ↩

  19. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 28, “Of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper,” para. 1. ↩