As part of my testimony, I typically share that I was raised in a Roman Catholic family. But it was not through the Roman Catholic church that I learned of the Good News of Jesus Christ or received salvation. In the spring of 1991, I experienced salvation from my sins and was brought into fellowship with God through Jesus Christ for the first time at a Protestant church. At this church, my eyes were opened to the Gospel through the clear teaching of the Scriptures. Every week I learned more about how I was a sinner, separated from God and deserving of His wrath, but that Jesus came to pay the penalty for my sin and to save me by His grace into a personal relationship with God. In the spring of 1991, I professed faith in Jesus Christ and was saved by His grace.

What had I missed in the Roman Catholic church that kept me from this great salvation? At the time, I could not articulate the difference in the view of salvation between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, but I sensed there was a difference, a great one in fact. Later, as I understood the theology of the Gospel more deeply and studied church history, I came to understand the difference between the two views of salvation. The Reformers, like Luther, Calvin, Tyndale, and many others, saw with clarity that the view of salvation propagated by the Roman Catholic church was so harmful that it was worth splitting the church over. And even to this day we have a split between the Roman Catholic and Protestant church over their conflicting views of salvation.

At the heart of the issue of salvation is our understanding of justification. Justification is quite simply what makes us acceptable to God. God is a just God who cannot accept sin. To do so would require Him to deny his holiness, righteousness, and goodness, and this would require Him to no longer be God. God's wrath is God's just way of dealing with sin. Yet, we also read of God's forgiveness and ability to cleanse our sin (Psalm 32; 51; 1 John 1:9). How can a holy God who must punish sin also forgive our sins and make us objects of his love and compassion? Or, to say it another way, how can sinners, which we all are, be justified in His sight so that we can know God and have a final and lasting peace with Him (Rom 5:1)?

The Roman Catholic view of justification is a life long process where a person falls in and out of justification before God and must rely on the church given sacraments to stay in a state of justification. According to the Council of Trent, which is the upheld response of the Roman Catholic church to the tenants of the Reformation, justification of the sinner begins with the sacrament of baptism, where the sinner has justifying grace poured into him. He then continues in a state of justification until he commits a mortal sin, which then nullifies his justification before God. To get re-justified, the sinner must perform the sacrament of Confession or Penance, whereby he confesses his sin and is given priestly absolution (a declaration of forgiveness by the Priest), followed by assigned works of satisfaction, which are designed to make amends for the sin(s) committed. But, if the person dies with any impurity of soul, the person is deserving of hell and goes to Purgatory, the place of purging of impurity. In the Roman Catholic view, someone must have a personal, inherent or actual righteousness without any impurity in order to deserve heaven.

The Protestant view of justification has three primary differences with the Roman Catholic view. First, and what I believe to be the key difference, the Protestant view is that a person is never justified on the basis of personal, inherent righteousness because no one can ever be inherently righteous in this life (Rom 3:19-20, 23). Instead, a person is justified on the basis of a “credited” or “imputed” righteousness earned by Christ alone. Righteousness, which is alien to the sinner, is credited to him, and this righteousness is not his own but it is the righteousness of Christ, merited by Christ's perfect obedience and death on the cross. Therefore, the person who is justified has a “declared” righteousness that is not his own but given as a gift of God's grace (Rom 3:21-25).

Second, the Protestant view of justification is that it is given by faith alone. Belief or faith alone is the sufficient condition for receiving the gift of God's credited righteousness as stated so clearly in Romans 3:22, 25 and developed in Romans 4 in the example of Abraham (see Rom 4:3). The key word here is the word, “alone.” The Roman Catholic view states that faith is the necessary condition for justification, but that there must be an admixture of faith and works in order for someone to be justified, as clearly seen in the sacerdotal system of the sacraments administered in the Roman Catholic church. Saving faith in the Bible, however, cannot have any admixture of our own works. Salvation is by grace alone for God's glory alone (Rom 3:27; Eph 2:8-9). A justification that is on the basis of faith alone with no admixture of our works is what guarantees that it is by God's grace alone and for His glory alone.

The final area of major difference between the Roman Catholic and Protestant views of justification is seen in how justification plays out in the life of the believer. In the Roman Catholic view, justification is a process, whereby the one placing faith in Jesus needs to constantly be re-justified. The Protestant view sees the justification of a sinner as a declaration by God that is once and for all. The person having faith in Jesus Christ is declared righteous or justified in God's sight and will always be seen in this light because God sees the believer in light of the righteousness of Christ (Rom 3:24; Tit 3:7). Therefore, on the basis of this justification, the believer is accepted by God as His very own child, adopted into His family and never to be cast out (Rom 8:30, 33-34).

Martin Luther, the famous Reformer, was educated as a lawyer. Later in life, as a monk, he lived in a constant state of terror before a Holy God. As a former lawyer, he was keenly aware of all the sins he committed and how God was just in condemning him for his sins. He tried everything in the Roman Catholic system to assuage his guilt, but he could find no rest for his soul until he came to understand the great truth of justification. He understood that in the Gospel, the righteousness of God was revealed, a righteousness that was a gift of God to be received by faith in Jesus Christ (Rom 1:17; 3:21-26). And because of this once for all gift of righteousness, or justification, he finally had peace with God (Rom 5:1). I pray we would also.