B. Common Concerns: Works Righteousness
B. Common Concerns: Works Righteousness
Newman and Vermigli both opposed the notion of works righteousness. From Newman’s perspective, Roman Catholic soteriology was vulnerable to this critique. Citing the reason for this vulnerability, Newman opines: “they do not discern, they do not believe in, anything else [besides ‘obedience’] in which [justification] can consist.”854 This led Newman to criticize the Roman Catholic position for reducing the ground of justification to a “habit” of obedience.855 Such an approach, he argues, easily makes the mistake of replacing a properly Christ-centered vision with unhealthy introspection (incurvatus in se).856
In a similar vein, Newman regarded the doctrine of gratia inhaerens as unwittingly reducing justification to a matter of meritorious works, a move that he considered detrimental to the development of personal faith.857 Concern for the practical liabilities of meritorious works vis-à-vis unhealthy introspection, it turns out, was shared by Peter Martyr:
Certainly no one understands except those who have experienced how difficult it is for a bruised heart, dejected and weary with the burden of sins to find comfort. . . . If we, like the Sophists, commanded a person to have regard for his own works, then he would never find comfort, would always be tormented, always in doubt of his salvation and finally, be swallowed up with desperation.858
In addition to cautioning against the danger of falling in “desperation” beneath the righteousness requirement of God, Vermigli and Newman also identified the tendency toward impersonal worship in the Catholic tradition. For instance, Newman viewed much of popular Romanism as promoting a sort of religious transaction, an exchange of “the [mere] influence of grace, not as the operations of a living God, but as something to bargain about, and buy, and traffic.”859 Peter Martyr also addressed what he regarded as the impersonal nature of the Roman Catholic system when he contrasts the ritualistic function of the Petrine “keys” with the preaching of the word, appropriated by personal faith.860 When Christ was at dinner with the Pharisees, Vermigli argues, “he exhorted them to first purify the heart, which is inward. This is something done by faith, for it is written in Acts, ‘by faith cleansing their hearts.’”861
Regarding the “grace of eternal life,” Peter Martyr asserts, “what is given freely, excludes merit completely.”862 In contradiction to his doctrine is the “Pelagian” view of the Roman Church (as he saw it), which he understood to effectively undermine divine grace by including human merit in the ground of justification.863 Newman does not employ the specific language of “Pelagianism” to describe the problem of works righteousness, but he shares Vermigli’s fundamental concern with grounding justification in human merit.864 However, by the time Newman wrote the third edition of his Lectures—twenty-nine years after converting to Catholicism—he had retreated from this concern:
This school is elsewhere called in these Lectures ultra-Roman or extreme Romanist. Such Catholic divines as Caietan, Vasquez, and Bellarmine were intended by this title, who, by making justification consist in the habit of charity or again in good works, not in sanctifying grace as an initial and distinct gift from above, seemed to the writer to fix the mind, equally with Anglican Arminians, not on a Divine inward Presence vouchsafed to it, but on something of its own, as a ground to rest upon and take satisfaction in. Of course, such a judgment seems to him now unreal and arbitrary.865
Newman and Vermigli may describe the problem of meritorious works with different language and identify its tendencies in different parts of the church, but they stand together in opposing human merit as a fundamental ground of justification.