Joe Heschmeyer explores the role of works in salvation and Catholic teaching on the Treasury of Merit.

Transcription:

Joe:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I want to talk about this idea of whether or not Roman Catholics believe in workspace salvation because this is a charge I’ve heard many times and there are aspects of Catholic theology that I understand sound alien and even heretical to Protestant ears. Particularly. I want to talk about this idea of a so-called treasury of merit. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this, but if you have and you’re a Protestant, you might have found it weird. And again, pian sounding or something, many Protestants understandably find the whole thing completely unbiblical.

CLIP:

You are not going to find the treasury of merit anywhere in the scriptures. It’s not hinted at, talked about explicitly or even implicitly. If you are a Roman Catholic watching this, you have probably heard of it, but you dunno what it means. If you’re a Protestant, you have likely never heard of

Joe:

This. I had never heard of it,

CLIP:

And once we describe it, it’s going to actually make sense of a whole bunch of other doctrines. We actually would call this the Spine of Roman Catholic doctrine because it’s a doctrine that holds up all of these other ideas. So let’s dig into this.

Joe:

So what is the Treasury of Merit and is it biblical? Look, I don’t agree with the Protestant past, you just heard from about it being the spine of Catholic teaching, but I do think he’s right about a couple things. Number one, many Christians, including many Catholics, are completely oblivious to what the Treasury of merit is. And number two, getting this question right is really helpful in making sense of a bunch of other areas. Catholics and Protestants disagree, most notably purgatory and indulgences. I’m not going to get into those topics today by the way, but this is much more at the root of that fight than I think many Catholics and Protestants realize. So let’s start with first a simple argument and then sort of a definition of terms. The simple argument I’m going to make throughout this video is that the Treasury of merit is thoroughly biblical, it’s perfectly biblical and it is found in the Bible often in pretty naked, explicit sort of ways that the only reason it sounds biblical to us then is because of the influence of Protestant theology that this doctrine is thoroughly biblical.

It’s not thoroughly Protestant, it is alien to Protestantism. It’s not alien to the Bible. So let’s then define the terms. If we’re going to figure out if that’s true or not, we should know what the treasury of Merit is. And this is defined in a couple places in the catechism of the Catholic church, namely paragraph 1476 and paragraph 1477 and in 1476 we’re told that we also call the spiritual goods of the communion of saints, the church’s treasury. And then it clarifies when we talk about the treasury here, we don’t mean a bunch of material goods. We instead mean the treasury of the church, the infinite value which can never be exhausted, which Christ’s merits have before God. They were offered so the whole of mankind could be free from sin and attain communion with the Father in Christ, the redeemer himself, the satisfaction and merits of his redemption exist and find their efficacy.

And I’m inclined to say so far so good. I think if the catechism stopped there and that’s all we meant by the treasury of merits, calyx and Protestants would be pretty comfortable. Christ clearly does merit for us salvation. We both use that kind of language. But the catechism then goes on to say the treasury of merit also includes the prayers and good works of the blessed Virgin Mary, which it describes as truly immense, unfathomable, and even pristine in their value before God. But then also it says in this treasury too are the prayers and good works of all the saints, all those who have followed in the footsteps of Christ, the Lord by his grace and have made their lives holy and carried out the mission the Father entrusted to them. In this way, they attained their own salvation and at the same time cooperated in saving their brothers in the unity of the mystical body.

So we went from a paragraph that I would describe as pretty uncontroversial, Christ merited salvation as infinite and it’s worth to a paragraph that is about as controversial as you’re going to get in any single paragraph. If you’re talking about all the fights between Catholics and Protestants one in the same time you have these references to Mary and the pristine value of these works that she’s doing and good works and you have the saints, you’ve got that weird line about the saints attaining their own salvation and then references to them interceding for us. That’s a lot of things we disagree on kind of rolled into one. And then you remember that all of this is adjacent to disagreements we have about purgatory and about indulgences, and hopefully you can see why I think this is an underappreciated disagreement like if Catholics are right about the treasury of merits, that’s going to have a lot of downstream implications for a lot of other things. If Catholics are wrong about the treasury of merits, likewise that’s going to impact a whole lot of the ways we view a whole lot of other doctrines. So what do we make of this? Does all of this just flatly go against the prior paragraph that talked about the infinite nature of the merits of Christ and his atoning death on the cross? The Protestant pastor I quoted before and suggests that it does and he explicitly claims that this idea of the treasury of merits turns Catholicism into a workspace religion.

CLIP:

So to summarize, the treasury of merit is all of the excess merit of Jesus, Mary and dead saints who all had more than enough merit currency to get into heaven already. If you are a Protestant, you’re sort of like what is happening? This is very, very foreign because for Protestants we will never have enough merit. We regularly communicate and preach the gospel, which is that anybody who goes into heaven, it’s not because of their own merit, it’s all the righteousness of Christ. And Christ alone has enough righteousness and his righteousness is applied to our account in our behalf.

Joe:

I get the kind of what is going on response to that and I want to stress that we actually agree that we cannot just earn our way to heaven. We’re going to get into that more. We actually believe in justification by faith, which many Protestants don’t realize. We don’t believe in justification by works. This is a misunderstanding of what we mean by the whole process of initial justification. There’s a lot that’s there, but let’s just unpack this a little bit at a time in case this sounds alien and confusing to you and just ask four questions. Now remember I’m making the argument that this may sound unbiblical to you if you’re coming from it from just ever hearing a Protestant interpretation of scripture. So I want you to just bear with me because it’s going to sound weird at first until you look at what the Bible actually says, and we’re going to do that in four ways.

Number one is the idea of heavenly treasure, biblical. The answer is going to be yes. Number two, if so, does this treasure include eternal life? Yes. Number three, can our heavenly treasure lead other people to salvation? Yes. Again. And then finally is all of this works righteousness? And there the answer is going to be no. But let’s look at each of those questions in turn and you can correct me if you think that I’m wrong. This by the way, I just make a quick plug right here. This question was sparked by someone asking over on my patreon, shameless joe.com. And a lot of the content I’m getting these days comes from questions real life people are asking. And if you want to join that conversation, you can sign up for as cheap as $5 a month and get a live like weekly q and a.

And it’s a good community and I really enjoy the questions and I’ve benefited from it I think other people have as well. So I should just at least make mention of that as we launch into this. So with that said, number one is this idea of heavenly treasure, biblical. You might think of, oh, the treasury of merits and the whole thing sounds positively medieval like something a Medici banker or a borja pope had come up with. But no, it’s coming from the itinerant preacher of Nazareth, Jesus Christ. He says in Matthew six verses 19 to 20 that we should lay up for ourselves treasures not on earth where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but instead lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. And the question that we should be asking is, okay, I know it looks like to accumulate worldly possessions.

What is it that Jesus means when he talks about us accumulating heavenly possessions, laying up treasures in heaven? This clearly means something obviously in one sense you just say, oh, he’s saying focus on heaven, but he doesn’t just say focus on heaven does. He says to lay up treasure in heaven. What does it mean to lay up treasure in heaven? And it turns out as soon as you clue into this and you start looking for other times, this kind of language is used. It’s all over the place. I focused for purposes of this video on the word reward and all the ways Jesus speaks about heavenly reward, but it’s clearly tied to this idea of treasure in heaven, reward in heaven, treasure in heaven seem to carry same or similar meanings. And we find this also in Matthew six. So when Jesus talks about treasure in heaven, it’s coming from this broader passage.

Matthew six begins with Jesus saying, beware of practicing your piety before men. Notice the context we’re talking about good works here, practicing your piety before men in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your father who is in heaven. So what’s being rewarded here? Well, the acts of piety, the practice of your piety, good works. In other words, and he’s going to be more specific throughout this. He’s going to contrast good work’s done for the wrong reason, which won’t be rewarded compared to good works done for the right reason, which will be rewarded. So for instance, he talks about in verses three to four, when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing so that your alms may be in secret and your father who sees in secret will reward you.

One of the things people are just flabbergasted by is, oh, look, in the 16th century people were giving donations and expecting heavenly rewards for that. That looks really transactional and totally honestly, it can become transactional with the wrong kind of spirit if you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. But notice here in Matthew six, Jesus clearly talks about alms giving as one of those things that lays up heavenly reward. One of those things that when done for the right reason, when done in secret not to acclaim the other people’s kind of prestige, your father who sees in secret will reward you. So when you give alms, you will get something for it in heaven. That is Jesus’s promise in Matthew six verse three to four, unless you’ve already gotten your reward here on earth by doing it in a kind of ostentatious manner, and it’s not just alms giving, that’s the first example he gives, but it’s not the only one.

He similarly talks about with prayer. When we go to do it secretly in our room, our father who sees in secret will reward you same language. And then a few verses later, well several verses later in verses 17 to 18, he says the same thing about fasting. When you fast anoint your head and wash your face that your fasting may not be seen by men, but by your father who’s in secret and your father who sees in secret will reward you. This repetition of this phrase for prayer, fasting, oms giving, we talk about this in several different contexts. These are things that are not optional. Not if you pray, if you fast, if you give alms, but but nevertheless, even though it’s this kind of mandatory part of the faith when you’re doing that well, there is a promise of heavenly reward attached to it.

And it’s not just those things as well. In the prior chapter, the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account, rejoice and be glad for your reward is great in heaven. Now, what does it mean for our reward to be great in heaven? Are all of the heavenly rewards the exact same size? Jesus doesn’t say so several Protestant theologians do. He speaks of great reward in heaven. He speaks of laying up reward in heaven or to accumulate heavenly reward. But for many Protestant theologians, there’s no space for that because they have this idea that the one and only reward is just justification, which means salvation and all the saved have the exact same reward and that’s it. So there’s no accumulation. Are you going to get double E saved?

Doesn’t make sense. And so something is clearly missing with the way many Protestants treat these passages. Now I’ve been looking here at the words of Jesus in the gospel of Matthew, but there’s much more to it. I’m going to give another passage from Matthew, then turn to Luke, then turn to St. Paul because there’s a lot on this. For instance, a little later in the gospel of Matthew, Matthew 10, there’s a section that in my Bible’s actually just labeled rewards a little like paragraph headers and it talks about other ways that we merit heavenly reward. Jesus says, he who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives him who sent me. He who receives a prophet because he’s a prophet, shall receive a prophet’s reward and he who receives a righteous man because a righteous man shall receive a righteous man’s reward and whoever gives to one of these little ones even a cup of cold water because he’s a disciple, truly I say to you, he shall not lose his reward.

Now maybe you think reward just means salvation. That would be a strange interpretation here because it would seem to suggest you have to give people a cup of water if you’re going to be saved. That seems to works much more squarely into the process of being saved. It doesn’t seem to fit with Protestant theology in that sense. So seemingly something else is going on that even the saved are able to accumulate more heavenly reward in some sense. And when we’re talking about a treasury, that’s very much what Jesus is giving us in Matthew six as kind of a motif or an image to use to make sense of this accumulation of heavenly reward. We’re laying up treasures, not just getting one treasure but laying up treasure.

In Luke six, I promised I’d turn to Luke. Now the gospel of Luke spends less time explicitly focusing on reward, but you can certainly find these passages as well. So for instance, Jesus says that we should love our enemies and do good and lend expecting nothing in return and your reward will be great and you’ll be sons of the most high for he is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish. That’s Luke 6 35. What do we make of those passages? That’s what I want to unpack as we go, but for now, I hope it suffices to say the idea of heavenly treasure is thoroughly and repeatedly found in the Bible. The idea that this is something you won’t find in the Bible as a Catholic, yes, you will if you’re not blinded to the fact that it could be there. And this is true not just in the words of Jesus, but as I alluded to before, this is also true in the writings of St.

Paul. St. Paul in one Corinthians chapter three has this passage that gives Protestants a lot of trouble. Oftentimes it begins in verse 10, St. Paul says, according to the commission of God, given to me like a skilled master builder, I laid a foundation and another man is building upon it. Let each man take care how he builds upon it for no other foundation. Can anyone lay then that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Pause here. Notice Paul’s going to be distinguishing two things. One is the foundation. This is Christ. But then there’s how we build on the foundation. Building on the foundation is everything else. This is what other people are doing in sanctifying you. This is also your own good work. So you’ll notice here, St. Paul first talks about another man building upon it, meaning other people are helping to build you up in the faith, but then you are also going to build on your own foundation.

And so in verse 12, he says, now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble, each man’s work, notice what is being built work, right? It makes it very clear we’re talking about good works here on top of salvation or on top of the foundation of Christ. Each man’s work will become manifest for the day. That means judgment day for the day. We’ll disclose it because it will be revealed with fire and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work which any man has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. As I say, for many Protestant theologians and apologists, this passage can be something of a stumbling block because well several reasons. Not only is this part of one of the go-to passages for purgatory, for reasons we’ll get into in the very next verse, you’ll see in a moment, but also because it seems very clear that God is talking about some additional rewards beyond salvation and rewards tied not because of the foundation, Jesus Christ alone, but of the good works by which we’ve built upon that foundation that shows just as Matthew six shows that good works in some way are tied to this aspect of heavenly reward.

And many Protestants are uncomfortable with that because it seems to suggest that just as there are different degrees of punishment in hell, some people in the biblical evidence certainly seem to be punished more harshly than others. Jesus is explicit about that. You also, these passages seem to suggest that some people will be rewarded more than others, but bear in mind, many Protestants have been taught over and over and over again for years that all sins are equally bad and they’re all a death sentence and they’re all punished the same and that everyone in heaven is treated the same way. None of this is biblical, none of that is biblical. There is a degree to the severity of sin. There’s even a distinction between sin which is deadly and which isn’t explicitly in one John, but you also have this seeming set of degrees in heaven.

Now, how do we make sense of that? That’s one of the questions that a Protestant professor and theologian by the name of Dr. Steven Wellum posed or was posed in a video that his seminary, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary put out where he tries to grapple with these texts like one Corinthians chapter three. And I want you to listen to how he doesn’t seem, I mean this is, he wasn’t just ambushed on the street. He’s making a prerecorded video on this topic and seems to not know what to do with this idea of different degrees of glory and reward in heaven.

CLIP:

Well, if we first take the reward side of the equation, most of the passages that are referred to one Corinthians three is really dealing with leadership in the church. When you read a Hebrews 11, the reward that’s mentioned really is Christ, the salvation that we receive, the inheritance that are ours. All of those rewards, for the most part are dealing with receiving the great grace of God and salvation in Christ Jesus. It’s not so much saying there’s a higher or lesser reward. Salvation is the reward. Eternal life is the reward. Eternal covenant relationship with the triune God is the reward. Yet there is still this sense of some sitting near Christ versus others. How are we to think of that? Scripture doesn’t really say much other than our great reward is Christ himself. Salvation is our great reward. All believers receive their salvation in Christ, our justified. There’s not some that are more justified than others. We have to be very, very careful of this when we think of reward.

Joe:

So you can see how uneasy he is. I think we were just talking about how careful we need to be against thinking that there might be some greater rewards in heaven even though scripture repeatedly speaks of that because his theology hasn’t committed to you can’t increase in justification. And so how could one person be more transformed into Christ than another? And we would say, of course you could be. The fact that every soul is completely filled by Christ doesn’t mean every soul has been completely opened up by charity. The point of charity is to stretch your soul and the more you allow that to happen, the more you can be filled with the infinite love of God. Not that somebody is in heaven with a cup half full, but do you have a thimble or do you have a swimming pool? Do you have an ocean of charity that is being filled with the love of God?

That right there points to an obvious difference of degree. Not that some people aren’t enjoying heaven, they’re enjoying it to the greatest capacity they can, but some of the saints have increased their capacity by the way that they said yes to the love of God throughout this life. And so you can make perfect sense of all of this language about heavenly reward and the like by recognizing that none of that contradicts God himself being the ultimate reward of heaven. All of that makes perfect sense of it. Now what about this part that one Corinthians three is really just about church leadership and not about heavenly reward? Well, that’s contradicted by just reading one Corinthians three. I’m going to go back to verse 14 where we left off and then continue to read the next verse. One 14 says, if the work which any man has built on the foundation, remember the foundation is Christ.

So any work you’ve built on the foundation of Christ survives, he will receive a reward. Now, clearly that reward is not just the foundation Christ, how do we know that? Because look at the very next verse. If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved but only as through fire. Now you can see why this is one of the go-to passages in talking about purgatory because Paul is talking about two categories of saved Christians. One category is acting in a great way, building well on the foundation of Christ, and they are promised reward on judgment day. The other category of Christians are still told they will be saved, but they salvation will be only as through fire. You can see why this is a go-to for purgatory because it says there will be a suffering of loss.

It says there’ll be salvation as through fire. It sounds very purgatorial, but notice both of those guys are still getting saved both categories of these saved Christians living on the foundation of Christ. He is their rock, he is their cornerstone. How in the world are we going to say then that the first group’s reward is just the same thing the second group got? It doesn’t any sense of comparing verse 14 and 15. Paul clearly means to show a contrast between the fate of the two groups. So if you talk about the verse 15 Christians as the kind of purgatorial Christians, you have these particularly holy Christians described in verse 14 that are being promised heavenl... Read more on Catholic.com