dead works and what defines obedience

Hebrews 9:14

English Standard Version (ESV)

¹⁴ how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our^[a] conscience from dead works to serve the living God.

From an old sermon[ an online translation of Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa’s work from the 1400s which addresses the nature of Christ’s suffering in our stead.]:http://jasper-hopkins.info/SermonsCCLXXVI-CCXCIII.pdf

From this infection [the soul] works dead works, which are without the [presence of the] enlivening Holy Spirit, who is called Love.
Therefore, by the death of Christ the soul is freed from this union by
which a man’s spirit clings to the spirit-of-death, through which his
works are dead.

from comment 48 here: http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2012/11/how-the-church-won-an-interview-with-jason-stellman/#comment-39984
 But that aside, what we have here is a clash of paradigms with one of us not realizing it (you). Your entire operating assumption is that it is the Law that defines obedience, which is why you say, “even the holiest of men is disqualified from the perfection demanded by the Law.” Now if I were a Pharisee I would agree with you and the Reformed tradition that it is obedience to the letter of the Law that defines the obedience that God requires. But as long as I am a Catholic who doesn’t share your assumption on that point, you simply can’t expect to use it as a premise that doesn’t need defending.

So you’re either unaware of the basic Catholic position on this issue (that God’s will is fulfilled by Spirit-wrought love of God and neighbor and not by perfect obedience to the letter of the law), or you’re unwilling to fairly represent the position you’re trying to refute. But in either case, debating is pointless until you stop begging the question

quote below found here http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/07/st-augustine-on-law-and-grace/#freewill

St. Augustine continues:

And that you may know that he designated as theirs the righteousness which is of the law, and as God’s that which man receives from God, hear what he says in another passage, when speaking of Christ: “For whose sake I counted all things not only as loss, but I deemed them to be dung, that I might win Christ, and be found in Him — not having my own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, which is of God.” (Philippians 3:8-9) Now what does he mean by “not having my own righteousness, which is of the law,” when the law is really not his at all, but God’s, — except this, that he called it his own righteousness, although it was of the law, because he thought he could fulfil the law by his own will, without the aid of grace which is through faith in Christ? Wherefore, after saying, “Not having my own righteousness, which is of the law,” he immediately subjoined, “But that which is through the faith of Christ, which is of God.” This is what they were ignorant of, of whom he says, “Being ignorant of God’s righteousness,” — that is, the righteousness which is of God (for it is given not by the letter, which kills, but by the life-giving Spirit), “and wishing to establish their own righteousness,” which he expressly described as the righteousness of the law, when he said, “Not having my own righteousness, which is of the law;” they were not subject to the righteousness of God — in other words, they submitted not themselves to the grace of God. For they were under the law, not under grace, and therefore sin had dominion over them, from which a man is not freed by the law, but by grace. On which account he elsewhere says, “For sin shall not have dominion over you; because you are not under the law, but under grace.” (Rom 6:14) Not that the law is evil; but because they are under its power, whom it makes guilty by imposing commandments, not by aiding. It is by grace that any one is a doer of the law; and without this grace, he who is placed under the law will be only a hearer of the law. To such persons he addresses these words: “You who are justified by the law are fallen from grace.” (Gal 5:4) (chapter 24)

from comment 128 below---http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2012/11/how-the-church-won-an-interview-with-jason-stellman/#comment-40172   here

Joey wrote:

“Luke 1:6 They were both righteous in the sight of God, following all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blamelessly. –> I’ve heard you talk about this in your interview. Luke, often times, used the word “righteous” in a practical and relative sense describing the pattern of living shown by believers. This means that generally, they were in exemplary conformance with the Law in the way that they lived relative to other Israelites and the pagan nations. The passage never said that they were not sinners before God (Rom 3:23). It never said that they were justified before God, as sinners, on the ground that they were generally Law abiding. Paul explained in Romans 3:19-20 that “no one is declared righteous before him by the works of the Law, for through the Law comes the knowledge of sin”. What justifies is a work not done by the sinner but by Christ who propitiated sin in our behalf on the cross. In fact, just like John’s parents, Paul also walks blamelessly in the commandments and ordinances of God (Philippians 3:6). But, he never saw such righteousness as the righteousness that justified him before God. He sought that righteousness which is found in Christ; not his own inherent righteousness (3:9).”

The above is pure eisegesis… there was nothing ‘relative’ about the righteousness of Z&E, this is inserted this into the text to mitigate cognitive dissonance. Further, appealing to the word ‘righteous’ in other areas of Luke’s gospel does nothing to address the uniqueness of Luke 1:6, another basic exegetical misstep. Let’s review the verse again:

“6 They were both righteous in the sight of God , walking blamelessly in all the commandments and requirements of the Lord.”

Z&E b(and as we’ll see later, the Publican) are to this discussion what the black swan represented to David Hume. Not exactly of course, but there is a somewhat of a parallel between the classic problem of induction and the Reformed paradigm with regards to the meaning and intent of the Mosaic law.

Righteous in v 6 is actually dikaioi (just, from which we get the word justified), and it’s not just (pun intended) that they are called dikaioi, but much more than that, they are described dikaioi in the sight (in view) of God. There is simply no way around that. So the question then becomes: how could Luke 1:6 exist in a Reformed paradigm where the word ‘law’ automatically always and everywhere conveys the notion of legalistic, God indebting nomism? Well that’s precisely the problem and precisely the issue (albeit tangentially) that Jason Stellman is raising, an incredibly important one at that.

The problem for the reformed paradigm is this: Luke 1:6 is ironclad: they weren’t simply called ‘righteous’, but rather righteous in God’s sight! This is impossible under reformed theology because of the straitjacket into which the Mosaic law has been placed. Hence Jason believing that the catholic paradigm provides better explanatory power for such a verse. (I cannot blame him for doing so, even though I know he knows it is not the only other paradigm that does so.) So what is this other paradigm? Well for starters, it is one in which we begin to realize that the Mosaic law was given to the Jews not as a list to keep to earn salvation, but actually as a handmaiden/attendant to mature the Jews to the obedience of faith (see D.A Carson’s stunning admission at the end of Justification and Variegated Nomism). This obedience of faith was not one in which nomism put God in debt when one kept the commands (or attempted to, no one could in fact keep all 613 commands), this was in fact a twisting of the law by the Jews in the ultimate cosmic reversal borne out of pride: they were trying to reverse the roles, they as patron and God as client, and trying to put God into their debt (think Pharisee vs Publican here), hence Paul’s unique term ‘works of the law’ (which btw, does not only include ceremonial boundary markers contra NT Wright/Dunn/NPP, sizeable faux pas there). But, by contrast, the obedience of faith was obedience that found its genesis in humility and love for God. Remember, both Pharisee and Publican stood at the temple where sacrifices were made. They were both involved with the law, but one went home justified and the other not. The Publican approached the law and the sacrifical lamb/atonement provision at the temple with humility and faith. And that is precisely the paradigm that does the best job of explaining the existence of Luke 1:6 in the NT, i.e., one in which the Mosaic law was all along meant to be a law of faith (think Rom 8:1-4). Now, if you’re thinking well, who needs Christ then if the Mosaic law was so great? Well, think again, was Jesus in the picture in the story of the Pharisee and the Publican? No, He wasn’t. Did He say that the Publican was justified because of the extra nos imputation of the Messiah’s merits? No, He didn’t. Christ simply says that the Publican went home justified that day. The publican is a black swan of his own, in a land where we are told all swans are white (all law keeping is legalistic in nature). You’re only way out of this quagmire is DTS style dispensationalism, but that is jumping out of the frying pan into the fire, it is very easily dismissed.

Z&E were righteous in God’s sight in the same way in which the Publican was. They approached the law with the obedience of faith. Were they one of the very few who did so? Most likely very much so, much like Joshua and Caleb were the ‘very few’ who made it into the promised land, by faith. So how is all this reconciled with Romans 3:23? Well, no one is denying that Z&E sinned, this is a red herring/straw man. The law made provision for sin, and when this provision was made with a heart full of faith as opposed to a heart full of pride, it was accepted by God (think about the Publican again). What about Romans 3:19-20 then? That’s the better objection:

Romans 3:19-20 is dealing with the ‘works of the law’, i.e., the mindset that the Mosaic law was a law of works. But here’s the point again: it wasn’t meant to be a law of works! It was meant to be a law of faith, where every attempt to keep the law was clothed in humility and in faith that it was God who justified, and not one’s attempt to put Him in our debt. But of course, the Jews (as we would have done), turned that on its head and infused a spirit of legalism into the ordinances and commandments of God. Instead of thinking, “how can law #34 draw me closer to loving God”, they thought “how can I make sure to keep law #34 to have something to present God with and demand repayment at the judgment”. Cue in Phil 3:6, that’s exactly where the artist formerly known as Saul was!

So there is absolutely no contradiction between Luke 1:6 and Rom 3:19-20 or Rom 3:23! You are dealing with apples and oranges. But the problem, as Jason has astutely raised, is that we are dealing with two different paradigms, one of which is fatally flawed. I adduce Romans 9:30-32 here:

“30 What shall we say then? That Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, have attained to righteousness, even the righteousness of faith; 31 but Israel, pursuing the law of righteousness, has not attained to the law of righteousness. 32 Why? Because they did not seek it by faith, but as it were, by the works of the law.

There, straight from the horse’s mouth. Now that Christ has atoned for the sins of the world, there is an infinitely better way to the obedience of faith. But let’s not lose sight of what the existence of Z&E in the NT has to teach us: the proper paradigm for our covenantal relationship with God is not one which posits that God desires that we keep a list of laws perfectly. The proper paradigm is that God desires for us to mature to the obedience of faith. And this is the GOOD NEWS:

“There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. 2 For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death. 3 For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: He condemned sin in the flesh, 4 that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.”

Peace to All,

SS.

from comment 48     here http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2013/01/holy-church-finding-jesus-as-a-reverted-catholic-a-testimonial-response-to-chris-castaldo/#comment-46784

Second, you claim that the Catechism’s claim (CCC 2027) about the possibility of meriting grace contradicts Romans 11:6 and Romans 4:4-5. In these verses in Romans St. Paul is speaking of dead works, i.e. works done apart from grace. In this particular context he is teaching that no one is justified merely by following the Jewish law, without grace. God has not rejected the Jews. But merely carrying out the Jewish law is not sufficient for salvation; the remnant are (as always) those who have been given grace. Likewise, in Romans 4:4-5 St. Paul is speaking of works-done-apart-from-faith. But when the Catechism speaks of the possibility of meriting grace, it is referring only to works done in a state of grace, by those having living faith. So there is no contradiction between what the Catechism says, and what St. Paul is teaching in these verses. I’ve written a post on the subject of merit titled “The Doctrine of Merit: Feingold, Calvin, and the Church Fathers,” which addresses this objection in much more detail.

Imitation Gospel

Interesting article on Imitations and the Gospel by Bryan Cross found here  :[http://principiumunitatis.blogspot.com/2008/11/on-imitations-and-gospel.html

following are a few excerpts

-This is Satan's mode of operation. He deceived Eve by offering her an apparent good that in its description seemed to be just what God had offered them as the fruit of obedience. Satan offered them a shortcut to what seemed to be that very same good, i.e. being like God (Gen 3:5), and being immortal ("you shall not die") [Gen 3:4]. Similarly, Satan offered to Jesus what seemed to be His goal, attaining all the kingdoms of the world. But it was by way of a false shortcut, bending the knee to Satan instead of persevering through the cross.

I couldn't help but wonder whether the gospel has an imitation, something that seems to provide everything the true gospel provides, but in fact does not provide the actual good that the true gospel provides. What must this imitation look like?........

This conception of salvation as something extrinsic to us is entailed by Martin Luther's notion of simul iustus et peccator which I discussed here. Salvation, for Matzat, is (or is primarily) an accounting procedure, not the transformation of an evil heart into a heart filled with the supernatural virtue of charity. As an accounting procedure, salvation is external to us, as if the external problem [i.e. the debt we owe to God on account of our sinfulness] is the fundamental problem, and the internal problem is either secondary or a resultant of the external problem. But the debt of our sin before God has been caused by our sinful hearts. Our sinful hearts are the fundamental problem, and salvation therefore has to be primarily a transformation of the heart from its perversion of curved-inwardness to the rightful order of loving God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and, subordinate to that, loving our neighbor as our self.
....................

 the Catholic teachingthat we are saved not primarily by knowledge of what Christ has done for us, but by becoming a participant in the very life of Christ, in His death and His resurrection, joined to Him through baptism, having His very life within us, even within our hearts. This is how babies are saved through baptism from their original sin, even before they know anything at all.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,
Matzat's position has difficulty explaining how it is that saved people with evil hearts who discover that Christ died for them are thereby able to enter heaven, especially if they remain filthy rags merely hidden by a covering. According to his position we remain hidden from God, not open, free and transparent before Him. Matzat's position has difficulty explaining why gaining this bit of knowledge about Christ dying for them makes them suitable to enter heaven. These difficulties arise because this concept of salvation is an imitation of the real thing, for salvation according to this conception does not deal with the primary problem of man's evil heart; it offers a shortcut (i.e. an accounting procedure) by which antinomianism becomes the default, and "sin boldly" becomes even conceivable to utter. No more taking up one's cross. No more "Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter." (Matt 7:21) No more "Depart from me, you who practice lawlessness" (Matt 7:23). No more "We know that no one who is born of God sins" (1 John 5:18).

...............Satan's greatest deception is convincing people that they do not need to be saved. His most effective way of doing this is to convince them that they are already entirely saved when in fact they are not. And his most effective way of doing this is to convince them that salvation is something external to them, something already entirely accomplished for them outside of them, and not requiring love and righteousness in their heart or obedience in their lives. In this way, they think they do not need salvation, because they think they are already saved, as saved as they can possibly be this side of heaven. What they have, however, is an imitation of the gospel, and this inoculates them to the true gospel. The imitation gospel allows them to ignore their sinful heart, and even celebrate it by recharacterizing it as 'freedom' from the law. They have been deceived by accepting a cheap knockoff conception of heaven as merely a nice place, and not as an everlasting loving and obedient union of our hearts with the heart of God. If they understood heaven to be most fundamentally a union of hearts (ours with God), they would understand that the gospel must be a purification of our heart, for light can have no fellowship with darkness. (2 Corinthians 6:14)
.
The true gospel "cleanses our hearts by faith" (Acts 15:9). The true gospel gives us a pure heart (1 Timothy 1:5; Romans 2:29). Otherwise St. Paul could not have written, "Now flee from youthful lusts and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart." (2 Timothy 2:22) He could not have written that because there would have been no one with a pure heart with whom to call on the Lord. But they had, by the grace of Christ, purified their hearts, as St. James commands that we do. (St. James 4:8) Their hearts had been filled with the love of God, as St. Paul writes, saying, that the "love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us". (Romans 5:5) When Jesus said that the good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth what is good (St. Luke 6:45), He wasn't speaking about a merely hypothetical, someone not to exist this side of heaven. He was talking about what His own followers are to be now, through His grace. His command to be perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect, was not a mere hypothetical (St. Matthew 5:48). This is what He truly wants His followers to be, now, and He has provided the means for us to attain this goal through the grace that comes to us through the sacraments.

also from comment  from Jason here http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2013/12/jason-stellmans-interview-on-the-journey-home/#comment-68171

The gospel-on-a-dime I arrived at from the NT (which, since it's abbreviated, admittedly doesn't say everything about everything, goes something like this:

"Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and ascension inaugurated the New Covenant through which the Holy Spirit was given to God’s people, thereby enabling us to exhibit the love of God and neighbor that fulfills the law and graciously results in our eternal inheritance in the age to come."

More could be said, but I believe that is the basic paradigm from which all the NT writers, including Jesus, were working. It makes the most sense out of the most data.

Semi-Pelagianism and Pelagianism

Catholic view as stated here: from comment 49 http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2009/10/a-reply-from-a-romery-person/

Semi-Pelagianism claims that we (without grace) make the first move, then God gives grace in response. Pelagianism denies that God needs to give grace at all, in order for us to be saved. Pelagianism denies the necessity of grace for salvation. Semi-Pelagianism denies the necessary of prevenient grace (i.e. operative actual grace, where God acts upon us, without us), but does not deny the need for grace for salvation.

Forensic justification/ rc and Protestant

http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2009/10/a-reply-from-a-romery-person/  quote below from this link:

I should point out that Catholics do not reject forensic justification. In Catholic soteriology, God declares because He effects it. It is not a legal fiction, but a legal truth, because our hearts have been given agape at that very instant. The Protestant position (if I can speak of it as one position), is simul iustus et peccator, without a distinction between mortal and venial sin, i.e. without a distinction between those sins that destroy/remove agape from the soul, and those that do not.

found in comments here:http://www.creedcodecult.com/did-the-rich-young-ruler-hear-the-gospel/ =
By virtue of the love of God poured into our hearts we possess the very righteousness that God wants, one that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees.

also in comment 17 here http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2014/05/trent-and-the-gospel-a-reply-to-tim-challies/#comment-88169

I think one fundamental problem is that a wrong understanding of Justification is imputed on to the text (pun intended). The Reformed tradition understands “justify” to mean something along the lines of “declared to have kept the law perfectly and thus legally entitled to enter Heaven,” but that’s not how the term is ever used in Scripture. The term is often used in a forensic sense, but forensic in the sense of declaring either guilty or not guilty (or even pardoned) – this lawcourt theme does not include the notion of declaring that someone has kept the law perfectly.

What Paul’s main theme is when speaking of getting justified and getting saved is that of having our sins forgiven, given a new heart, given the Holy Spirit, and thus reconciled to God. Now as one of God’s adopted children, we must grow and mature to adulthood to receive our promised inheritance. The Reformed view has mistakenly conflated conversion/reconciliation with the persevering in good works (i.e. finishing the race) to be worthy of Heaven. The two events are distinct.

So any time a Protestant says they want to stand with full confidence before God by faith alone, the problem is that ‘full confidence’ here is only speaking of reconciled back into God’s family, and is not speaking of the final judgement based on our works. Tim and other Reformed first need to properly define “justify,” and it’s not enough for them to say things like “justify is a forensic term” and “justify does not mean to infuse righteousness into someone,” because even if there’s truth to those statements, it’s still a bait and switch of sorts because the fact is “justify” does not ever mean “declare to have perfectly kept the law,” but something more along the lines of vindicate.

Here are some questions and answers concerning the reformed view found in 152 ::http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/06/reformed-imputation-and-the-lords-prayer/#comment-50566 :

You wrote:

I guess I had conceived of imputation as transfer of sins, guilt, and punishment, such that one’s ‘account’ of sins was erased because of the transfer of them off of one’s account onto Christ. But really you’re saying that the sins are still on one’s account, just covered by Christ’s righteousness, and the guilt for those sins is gone, giving one a status as innocent and acquitted due to the transfer of the passive obedience. Correct?

As soon as you use the term ‘account,’ you are already speaking sf something relational, and extrinsic. And thus (according to Reformed theology) you’re already speaking of guilt/punishment, and not the sin proper, which is in one’s heart. The “account” and one’s heart are not the same thing (in Reformed theology). When Horton says “even on a good day, the average Christian is wicked,” he is speaking of the heart. But, for Horton (and Reformed theology), even on a bad day, every regenerate person’saccount is not only perfectly free of sin (as if the person had never sinned), because of the imputation of all the [guilt/debt of punishment] of one’s past, present and future sin to Christ’s account, but is also perfectly righteous, as if one had perfectly fulfilled the law, because of the imputation of Christ’s perfect obedience to one’s account.

I have another related question; why would one need Christ’s passive obedience transferred to one’s account to give one an innocent status, if one’s guilt had already been transferred away?

In Reformed theology Christ’s passive obedience is the obedience by which one’s guilt is transferred away, as you put it. But in Reformed theology (or at least a dominant strand of it) that in itself would leave one merely innocent, not righteous. Righteous and innocent are not the same. Innocence is merely not having broken the law. Righteousness is having perfectly fulfilled the law. So in Reformed theology the imputation of the active obedience of Christ is necessary for making us *righteous,* and not just innocent. Watch the five minute Sproul video in comment #219 of the “Imputation and Paradigms” post. He presents that distinction quite clearly there.

Interesting article here  http://pontifications.wordpress.com/justification/  HERE ARE A BUNCH OF DIFFERENT QUOTES< BUT THE LONG ARTICLE IS MORE DETAILED AND WORTH THE READ:

 Anglican/Catholic agreement on justification:

Justification and sanctification are two aspects of the same divine act (1 Cor 6:11). This does not mean that justification is a reward for faith or works: rather, when God promises the removal of our condemnation and gives us a new standing before him, this justification is indissolubly linked with his sanctifying recreation of us in grace. This transformation is being worked out in the course of our pilgrimage, despite the imperfections and ambiguities of our lives. God’s grace effects what he declares: his creative word imparts what it imputes. By pronouncing us righteous, God also makes us righteous. He imparts a righteousness which is his and becomes ours.

also from this link:

 , Alister McGrath (Reformation Thought):

Whereas Augustine taught that the sinner is made righteous in justification, Melanchthon taught that he is counted as righteous or pronounced to be righteous. For Augustine, ‘justifying righteousness’ is imparted; for Melanchthon, it is imputed in the sense of being declared or pronounced to be righteous. Melanchthon drew a sharp distinction between the event of being declared righteous and the process of being made righteous, designating the former ‘justification’ and the latter ‘sanctification’ or ‘regeneration.’ For Augustine, these were simply different aspects of the same thing . . .

The importance of this development lies in the fact that it marks a complete break with the teaching of the church up to that point. From the time of Augustine onwards, justification had always been understood to refer to both the event of being declared righteous and the process of being made righteous. Melanchthon’s concept of forensic justification diverged radically from this. As it was taken up by virtually all the major reformers subsequently, it came to represent a standard difference between Protestant and Roman Catholic from then on.

and 

Thus we read in the Lutheran/Catholic Common Statement (1985):

The proclamation of God’s grace in word and sacrament is itself the saving event in that it announces the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. God’s word does what it proclaims or, in modern terminology, the gospel message is performative; it effects the reality of which it speaks. The preaching of the gospel has the force of decreeing the forgiveness of sins for Christ’s sake. Like a will or testament, it makes human beings heirs of the promise quite apart from what they deserve. God’s word accomplishes what it says in the very act of being proclaimed.

In this hermeneutical perspective even the faith which receives the promise is not a condition for justification. It is not a human achievement, but it is rather a free gift created and bestowed in the power of the Holy Spirit by the justifying word to which it clings. Justification is unconditional in the sense that the justifying word effects its own reception. (Justification by Faith: Lutherans and Catholics in Dialogue VII, p. 47).

and
"Protestants believe that justification is by imputation. Catholics believe that justification is by infusion. Protestants believe that we are justified by God forensically declaring us just. Catholics believe that we are justified by God making us just. Theologians and apologists tell us that these two models–the imputational and the transformational–are fundamentally incompatible and that the difference is rightly church-dividing.

Of course, things are murkier nowadays, because Catholicism seems willing to embrace within herself some of the Reformation distinctives. As a result official ecumenical agreements on justification have been worked out between Catholics and Anglicans and between Catholics and Lutherans. An informal agreement reached between Catholics and evangelicals, The Gift of Salvation, has also been published. But with a few exceptions, the Reformed and evangelical communities are not buying it! The imputational model of justification is pure Bible truth. To compromise on this is to abandon the gospel. In 1998 theAlliance of Confessing Evangelicals declared Gift of Salvation to be a dangerous, ambiguous, and seriously flawed document and reiterated the dogma of imputation as the primary and irreplaceable expression of the gospel:..............................

and

I would not be the Pontificator if I did not raise once again the question of authority. Are the confessional statements infallible? If not, then by what authority are these confessions, and in particular their imputational construal of justification, imposed upon the Church catholic? There is only one proper Protestant answer: “Justification by imputation is true! Just read the Bible (in Greek).” But this answer is insufficient. No matter how convinced confessional Protestants may be that their specific reading of the New Testament is the right one—and let’s remember, there are also lots of Protestants who do not agree with the Reformed and Lutheran churches on justification (just ask John Wesley and Charles Finney)—the fact remains that the imputational model of justification was a “genuine theological novum” (Alister McGrath). Melanchthon’s and Calvin’s theory of imputation was a real, honest to God novelty. (See my post Was the Reformation a Blunder?) Up until the 16th century, everybody, both East and West, held and taught a transformationist model of salvation. Readers of my blog know that the Pontificator holds a deep sympathy for the Reformation in its hermeneutical call to rightly divide law and gospel; however, the Church catholic has not dogmatically defined justification by imputation. The Council of Trent reaffirmed the transformationist model of justification; and though the Vatican is now willing to acknowledge that the Reformation formulations, properly understood, are not heretical, it sure ain’t going to repudiate the transformational understanding that has been dominant, virtually exclusively so, in the Church for two thousand years—nor should it. For her own part Eastern Orthodoxy has made it clear that she has no intention of altering its teaching oftheosis in order to accomodate the salvational theories of the Protestant reformers. Yet confessional Protestants have the hutzpah to insist to the point of ecclesial separation that their theological novum is the gospel and thus defines the identity of the Christian Church. Well, there’s a name for this—sectarianism!

and

In other words, what is important is not that the Church teach a theory of imputational justification but that the Church should do salvation to sinners through the preaching of the Word. The language of the courtroom can be employed very powerfully in this regard. There is a difference between saying “Faithful Christians will be acquitted at the final judgment” and “You are innocent!” The first statement is a true description; but it does not change the hearer. The second statement changes the hearer and establishes him in the eschatological life of the Spirit.

Can you think of ways where the Church speaks unconditional promise to sinners? Three items immediately come to my mind: “I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”; “I absolve you from all your sins”; “The body of Christ,” “The blood of Christ.

Babies who die before baptism according to RC

As regards children who have died without Baptism, the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God, as she does in her funeral rites for them. Indeed, the great mercy of God who desires that all men should be saved, and Jesus’ tenderness toward children which caused him to say: “Let the children come to me, do not hinder them,” allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without Baptism. All the more urgent is the Church’s call not to prevent little children coming to Christ through the gift of holy Baptism. (CCC, 1261)

see also: http://nannykim-catholicconsiderations.blogspot.com/2013/04/unbaptized-babies-who-die.html

1037 God predestines no one to go to hell; for this, a willful turning away from God (a mortal sin) is necessary, and persistence in it until the end. In the Eucharistic liturgy and in the daily prayers of her faithful, the Church implores the mercy of God, who does not want "any to perish, but all to come to repentance":

and this http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20070419_un-baptised-infants_en.html  Here is just a part of the intro:

INTERNATIONAL THEOLOGICAL COMMISSION

THE HOPE OF SALVATION FOR INFANTS
WHO DIE WITHOUT BEING BAPTISED*

The International Theological Commission has studied the question of the fate of un-baptised infants, bearing in mind the principle of the “hierarchy of truths” and the other theological principles of the universal salvific will of God, the unicity and insuperability of the mediation of Christ, the sacramentality of the Church in the order of salvation, and the reality of Original Sin. In the contemporary context of cultural relativism and religious pluralism the number of non-baptized infants has grown considerably, and therefore the reflection on the possibility of salvation for these infants has become urgent. The Church is conscious that this salvation is attainable only in Christ through the Spirit. But the Church, as mother and teacher, cannot fail to reflect upon the fate of all men, created in the image of God, and in a more particular way on the fate of the weakest members of the human family and those who are not yet able to use their reason and freedom.
It is clear that the traditional teaching on this topic has concentrated on the theory of limbo, understood as a state which includes the souls of infants who die subject to original sin and without baptism, and who, therefore, neither merit the beatific vision, nor yet are subjected to any punishment, because they are not guilty of any personal sin. This theory, elaborated by theologians beginning in the Middle Ages, never entered into the dogmatic definitions of the Magisterium, even if that same Magisterium did at times mention the theory in its ordinary teaching up until the Second Vatican Council. It remains therefore a possible theological hypothesis. However, in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992), the theory of limbo is not mentioned. Rather, the Catechism teaches that infants who die without baptism are entrusted by the Church to the mercy of God, as is shown in the specific funeral rite for such children. The principle that God desires the salvation of all people gives rise to the hope that there is a path to salvation for infants who die without baptism (cf.CCC, 1261), and therefore also to the theological desire to find a coherent and logical connection between the diverse affirmations of the Catholic faith: the universal salvific will of God; the unicity of the mediation of Christ; the necessity of baptism for salvation; the universal action of grace in relation to the sacraments; the link between original sin and the deprivation of the beatific vision; the creation of man “in Christ”.

The conclusion of this study is that there are theological and liturgical reasons to hope that infants who die without baptism may be saved and brought into eternal happiness, even if there is not an explicit teaching on this question found in Revelation. However, none of the considerations proposed in this text to motivate a new approach to the question may be used to negate the necessity of baptism, nor to delay the conferral of the sacrament. Rather, there are reasons to hope that God will save these infants precisely because it was not possible to do for them that what would have been most desirable— to baptize them in the faith of the Church and incorporate them visibly into the Body of Christ.

Finally, an observation on the methodology of the text is necessary. The treatment of this theme must be placed within the historical development of the faith. According to Dei Verbum 8, the factors that contribute to this development are the reflection and the study of the faithful, the experience of spiritual things, and the teaching of the Magisterium. When the question of infants who die without baptism was first taken up in the history of Christian thought, it is possible that the doctrinal nature of the question or its implications were not fully understood. Only when seen in light of the historical development of theology over the course of time until Vatican II does this specific question find its proper context within Catholic doctrine. Only in this way - and observing the principle of the hierarchy of truths mentioned in the Decree of the Second Vatican Council Unitatis redintegratio (#11) – the topic can be reconsidered explicitly under the global horizon of the faith of the Church. This Document, from the point of view of speculative theology as well as from the practical and pastoral perspective, constitutes for a useful and timely mean for deepening our understanding this problem, which is not only a matter of doctrine, but also of pastoral priority in the modern era.

rewards concerning works of the Christian

from comment 5 found here http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2009/10/a-reply-from-a-romery-person/

God has prepared good works for us, and when we do these works in agape, they are truly efficacious for eternity. That is, they truly contribute to what will be for the rest of eternity. God has given us the gift of letting us participate in His divine activity. Everything we do in agape, even giving a cup of cold water to the least of these, in His Name, will not go unrewarded. I’ve written more about that in a post titled “The Gospel and the Meaning of Life.” Our actions done in agape change us, by meriting further grace. If we are faithful with little, we are given more. He who has, more will be given to him. Also, our actions done in agape contribute to our eternal reward. This reward is not something extrinsic; it is our degree of participation in God Himself, our greater union with God Himself. There is no greater reward than God Himself.

glory to God not robbed

It does not rob God of glory when he gives others glory. It is from Him so it brings him glory.

That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish. " Eph 5--Glory to Him ......and John 17:22 .The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one.

^{2 cor 3:18} And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord,^[a] are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.

2 cor 4:17:  For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison,

I Peter 5:5 So I exhort the elders among you, as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed:

below on this found here http://principiumunitatis.blogspot.com/2008/11/on-imitations-and-gospel.html

How does this imitation sell itself? By claiming to give God all the glory, and turning that into a theological methodology. This methodology leads to monocausalism, also called monergism. Since Christ should get all the glory, according to this methodology, therefore our salvation cannot at all involve our own will or activity of our will. That same intention to maximize God's glory drove the occasionalists in the Middle Ages to deny actual causal powers to created things, mistakenly thinking that they could ascribe more glory to God by ascribing every effect directly to God as its cause. The occasionlists thereby ended up with a position that runs contrary to the doctrine of creation. In the same way, the methodology of a philosophical theology that seeks to "maximize the glory given to God" presumes dangerously to know what it is, precisely, that maximizes the glory given to God. "We know what will maximize the glory given to God", it reasons; "God must do everything". But this presumptuous and rationalistic approach ends up blinding itself to what salvation actually is, and accepting a cheap substitute, one that doesn't actually save us (and thus, paradoxically, detracts from God's glory).

and
“To give an illustration, the Reformed person—because of his zero-sum notion of divine action—should criticize Jesus for commanding and enabling the cripple to pick up his mat and go home. But the whole point of the Catholic gospel is seen in this action: Jesus doesn’t just heal the man and then carry him around for the rest of his life. Instead, he heals him and then enables him to live. And when that ex-cripple walks to the store the next day, he’s not threatening Jesus or robbing God of glory. Likewise, the Catholic understanding of Spirit-wrought obedience glorifies God rather than infringing on his turf.”

—	y Jason Stellmanhttp://www.creedcodecult.com/oddly-enough-paul-echoed-jesus/

Catholics Come Home

AND  ALSO   from comment 47 found  //www.calledtocommunion.com/2012/05/two-questions-about-marriage-and-the-civil-law/#comment-39660

on evangelizing Catholics:

The question is part of a broader question: how do we help others to attain the mind of Christ? The first step is in-house. Many Catholics do not know their faith, and are not spiritually and intellectually formed by the Catholic philosophical tradition, the Catholic moral tradition, the Catholic social tradition or the Catholic theological tradition. Rather, though they believe and recite the Creed, their philosophical/moral outlook is largely shaped by the values of the secular culture. The mind of Christ is something revealed to the world not primarily in individuals as individuals, but in the Church as a community, as a people. Right now in many places the quality of Catholic catechesis is appalling and shameful. As a result, the mind of Christ is virtually invisible to the world around us, because we are not being the salt of the world. Poorly catechized Catholics think very much like the world, and do not even know that in many ways their thought is contrary to natural law, to the mind of Christ and to the teaching of the Church. They acquire their values not from Scripture and Tradition, but from Hollywood and pop culture. This is a problem that has to be addressed both by the bishops and by the Catholic faithful who do know the teaching of the Church. As a people we cannot give what we do not have; on the other hand, those who have the mind of Christ never need to be compelled to evangelize, because evangelism is at the center of Christ’s heart. The key to evangelism is not techniques or technology, but union with Christ, acquiring His heart and mind. Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks. It is true, of course, that we are to be in the world and not of the world. But in order not to be of the world, there are certain respects in which we cannot be in the world. Otherwise, we end up like Lot and his family, unaware of how much we have come to have the mind of the world rather than the mind of Christ. And the sort of separation and “come out from among them” required is greater, the more evil a culture becomes. The communal life of Catholics informed by Scripture and Tradition is a *very* different way of life from that of the world, because its values are very different. That communal life, informed by Catholic values, needs to be recovered. The government (in the US) has begun to treat the Catholic faith as something that is expressed only on Sundays and only within a church building because that’s how many Catholics express their faith, as if they were not members of two communities (see the quotation from Cardinal Burke in the article above), but only one, with one shared way of life and a common set of values. But that has to change, and is slowly changing, as the values of our culture diverge more widely from those of Christ and His Church. Catholics in every parish, under the leadership of their bishops, need to rediscover the communal dimension of the way of life informed by the mind of Christ, distinct from the city of man. Only through the communal expression and embodiment of the mind of Christ is the Catholic faith successfully handed down to future generations, and made a light to the world.

the holy see a non-member observer of the UN

http://www.population-security.org/crlp-94-07.htm

crucifixtion and suffering of Jesus

Cardinal Newman explains: http://www.newmanreader.org/works/discourses/discourse16.html

Feingold also talks about this in comment 4 there is an audio---start listening around minute 29:  http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/the-harrowing-of-hell/#comment-7760  A few notes from this audio:   He refers to Christ making all of humankind's sin present to himself.

The greatest of all the pains of Christ would be this weight of human sin seen in all its disorder, malice, and cruelty in its offense to God. We don't know what sin is (that is why we do it) -if we knew what it was we wouldn't do it. But we don't know what it is. Now Jesus is the only one who perfectly knows what sin is because He knows the Father. If sin is an offense to the love of God, to the mercy of God, well, if you don't know God and the extent of His love, sin seems like little, but if you perfectly know God , then you know what sin is.  So really Jesus is the only one who could properly do contrition for sin.  We don't grasp what sin is because we don't know God and so it would have been precisely Jesus who could do ,as it were, an act of contrition for all of our sins.[around minute 38-9]

Contrition is the sorrow for sin that we should feel. We feel contrition in proportion to our charity. The more charity the more we feel contrition, the more we are sorry that we have offended God. Christ is the only one who could love God as God deserves to be loved, and thus the only one who could properly atone.

Now he made himself victim of our sins and he took them upon himself as if He were the culpable party and thus prostrated himself spiritually before God in solidarity with us because He is our head. He became man precisely to be the head of the human race and that means putting himself in solidarity with all human sin.(around 42 minutes into the lecture). So this would be the heart of the passion--the secret heart in which He makes himself, as it were, [he is not responsible-Christ can't lie to himself] but because of the solidarity of love He took our sins as His so as to atone for them since we don't . So he would make the act of contrition that we should , but don't. So it would be a kind of rending the heart for offending God . So Christ in Gethsemane had more sorry than any man could have---more sorrow then all of mankind combined, I think is the right way to understand this. Because he is experiencing sorrow for all.humans.........for every human being....So that is the meaning of what Isaiah said, Surely he has born our infirmities and carried our sorrows [alright, interiorly].

[he quotes someone here around 43.30--a preacher from the 17th century Botsway or something] Truly the grief alone of this would have killed him if he had not held back his soul in order that he might still [because it was not his time to die the night before at Gethsemane.he had to be crucified, ..but it could have killed him if he had let it] but he would not, he did not will to die on the Mount of Olives but he shed his blood, the blood he shed in the sweat of his agony, in order to show us that sin alone without the help of an executioner was sufficient to strike his death blow..............

This shows the principle cause of his death isn't Caiaphas, isn't Pilate ,....the principle cause is us.-of all sin of all human history. .....But he chose to have an executioner to add to his suffering.--all the dimensions of suffering. ...physical as well as interior.

Now we see the full extent of this in his words , 'My God my God, why have you abandoned me.' These are puzzling words to exegetes, to theologians. What could he mean by that? .......The text he is citing Psalm 22, which is a messianic psalm precisely about Christ's death...................So the first thing is doing is showing that psalm is being realized in his person [so that is one sense].  The psalm ends with his triumph--with the conversion of the Gentiles as the fruit of his suffering............But how should we take it.......abandoned in the sense that the hypostatic union was broken? No, that is totally impossible. alright what God took on He never relinquishes. So when the Son of God took the humanity of Jesus to be His that remains for eternity even in the tomb. Even in the tomb Jesus' body was the body of God  and Jesus' soul separated was the soul of the son of God. --the human soul of the Son of God [46.39 on the video]. So it is not that the hypostatic union was broken or something so that Christ was in interior reality abandoned by God, certainly not!  So it doesn't mean that .

 So what does it mean? Does it mean he was abandoned by not being loved by God, obviously not. No, in fact, this would be when he is most lovable. He is always lovable , but here he is more lovable than ever and that is preciously why he wanted to suffer all of this so that we would love him. Was he abandoned in the sense of suffering the pains of Hell? Some theologians hold this. What should we think about that? What are the pains of Hell in essence? Desperation --could Christ suffer desperation? No. Hatred of God for putting you there--could Christ suffer that?---of course not. The pains of Hell are pains that Christ could not suffer because they are the most opposite of Him that can be conceived. So he suffered, but not that--he suffered contrition which is very different than......... the remorse of an unrepentant person that is not contrition [48.07]-[which ]-is in a sense hatred of God's justice --that's the pains of Hell. Christ did not suffer that. Was he abandoned by loosing the beatific vision? Some theologians think this.I think it is a mistake.Because it was precisely the vision of God that enabled Him, we said, to fully suffer for every human sin, because it enabled him to see as it were every human sin. So it wouldn't be in that way either that he was abandoned.

So how then, was he abandoned? Well, St.Thomas Aquinous, [speaks of it in two senses] exteriorly and interiorly, in the emotional level. Exteriorly it is easy to see, that is obvious. We say that when parents abandon a child they don't protect it, right? They let it suffer, whatever comes its way when you abandon a child. Well, certainly Jesus was abandoned in that way.......now it is his hour, the hour in which , as it were, abandoned, turned over to all the powers of darkness, turned over to all his adversaries and above all, the principle adversary which isn't Caiaphas, but Satan. So he was abandoned in that sense of not being protected, of being allowed to be buffeted by Satan in every way that Satan wanted. And of course Christ wanted it because He wanted that precisely to redeem us. So that is, I think, the more obvious sense in which He was abandoned. Right, and that doesn't cause any particular difficulty [around minute 49].But I believe there is a more profound sense as well that St. Thomas Aquinas... [and others bring out] .  That he would have been abandoned in the sense of emotional desolation. And this is something the great saints are given the privilege of sharing, as it were and we call that the dark night of the spirit. ....There are 2 dark nights according to the mystical writers. One dark night that purchased?? [maybe purged?(not sure I got this right) the soul of attachments to sensible consolations--that wouldn't be this. But there is another dark night in which the saint is purged, as it were, even from any consolation that is purely spiritual--the consolation of having a sense, say of heaven ,of the presence of God, a sense of a reality of the goodness of God...............[he mentions mother Theresa of Calcutta--50 years having this--this is not the doubting of faith/ no, on the contrary it is the extreme strength of faith that God allows these trials in the saints so that faith can be strengthened because it gets no support from feeling. It is the lose of any feeling of God's presence so that the saint has to go by faith alone. St John of the Cross is the one who brilliantly analyses this. But this is just a hint/ Christ does not allow his saints to suffer more than he does. He gives them a tiny taste of what He drinks to the full. But that is how we should try to approach it. That he would have experienced all emotional desolation that is possible to experience. And that make sense because when you are thinking about sin and its hideousness, its deformity, ...what it causes...the love that it extinguishes, the love of God it tramples, when you think about that of course those reflections create desolation, they don't create consolation.

And so we can not penetrate Christ's emotional life. But the great theologian, Thomas Aquinas , has this principle, which I think is very wise,/ because of original sin our emotional life has a life of its own . We can't dominate it; that is one of the effects [concupiscence]  of original sin that we are not able to rationally control our passions.We can, to the extent that we acquire virtue to a certain extent.. , but we can't simply  feel what we will to feel. But Christ could because he was immune to original sin. He was an unfallen, perfect man and he would have had a perfect dominion over his emotional states so he would have willed his emotional state to do what he wanted it to do which is to atone. In other words to experience every desolation which is the worse kind of suffering--the suffering of the most extreme depression and desolation.

Now how could he have suffered this [54.57minutes into audio]-St Ignatius explains this in His spiritual exercises--the experience of desolation. Darkening of the soul, troubling of the mind, movement to base and earthly things, restlessness,feeling apathetic, tepid,...separated from one's creator and Lord. Well, clearly that is what Jesus willed to feel, emotionally even though he is the most closely united to God. [hypostatic union--he is God]. But he willed to feel separation emotionally which we call desolation. He could do this because he had control of His emotional states, but it is a kind of miracle because normally what happens in the spiritual life is that the saints are normally the most joyful people because they have the most lively awareness of the goodness of God. Even the saints who are going through the dark night of the soul, we don't see it, we look at Mother Theresa and we thought she was joyful. But normally there is a certain overflow from the higher part of the soul to the lower part of the soul . The higher part would be that that lives by faith, hope, and charity. The lower part would be our feelings Jesus wanted to experience this dark night to the fullest.
That is the way we should understand those words, My God my God why have you abandoned me. Exteriorly yes, but also interiorly to atone.

[he mentions that John Paul II in the year 2000 (number 27 of some doc) spoke of this in one of his documents--the saints give us insights into some of these theological realities of faith and the gifts of wisdom, understanding and knowledge.] HE speaks of the paradoxical blending of bliss and pain. We can experience two different things at once if they have different causes. We can experience one type of emotional experience that has one cause and we can experience another one which has a different object. Because of the unity of the soul, normally it doesn't completely happen. Normally an overflow from one to another, but in Jesus he willed to do away with that overflow, we said. So there could be one and the same time a certain bliss or peace and at the same time the most excruciating pain. [joy and suffering can be present together in holy souls--can be both blissful and afflicted.]  The bliss is seeing the glory of God, but the affliction is seeing precisely the glory of God offended by all human sin and they go together. It is precisely the knowing God that enables the knowledge of sin to be so afflicting.[he talks of some saints that felt this ]  Even in the depths of Christ ' pain , he died imploring forgiveness of his executioners and expressing to the Father his ultimate filial abandonment.'Father into your hands I comment my spirit.' And we should see in that line something of peace. The peace of having done what He was born to do.....now he has drunk his chalice to the bottom. So there is the joy have having redeemed mankind.

 So both things are happening at once and we to can be involved in both things.Our sins were the cause of his pain.......but we can console him through our fidelity, because that to he saw.

NOTE:  refutations  of Balthasar’s claim that Christ did not have the beatific vision, is Unam Sanctum Catholicam‘s “Balthasar, Christ and the Beatific Vision.”

This above is a great link---just wanted to put a tiny bit of quotes from it: 

 O marvelous condescension of divine love for us! O inestimable dispensation of boundless charity! In the crib, on the Cross, in the unending glory of the Father, Christ has all the members of the Church present before Him and united to Him in a much clearer and more loving manner than that of a mother who clasps her child to her breast, or than that with which a man knows and loves himself" (Pius XII, Mystici Corporis, 48, 75).

and

If Christ possesses the Beatific Vision, as Pius XII clearly teaches, then He cannot experience faith. The Beatific Vision is simply the consummation of sanctifying grace, which ends in a participation in the very life of God. It is the end to which Faith tends. Therefore, if Christ in His human soul is already at that terminus, He cannot possess Faith, a virtue which is proper only to those who do not yet see God. But Christ does see God. For this reason, too, He does not have hope. "For we are saved by hope. But hope that is seen, is not hope. For what a man seeth, why doth he hope for?" (Rom. 8:24

andDoes the Beatific Vision render the suffering of the cross "innocuous", as Balthasar asserts?

St. Thomas easily explains how the bodily suffering of Christ can be reconciled with the Beatific Vision, since bodily pain is felt with the lower powers of the soul and the joy Christ experiences through the Beatific Vision is limited to His spiritual soul. Thomas says:

"As was said above, by the power of the Godhead of Christ thebeatitude was economically kept in the soul, so as not to overflow into the body, lest His passibility and mortality should be taken away; and for the same reason the delight of contemplation was so kept in the mind as not to overflow into the sensitive powers, lest sensible pain should thereby be prevented' (III, Q. 15, art. 5). 

This follows from the nature of the Incarnation, in which Christ, because of His union to the eternal Word, should experience the Beatific Vision, but as true man should still suffer the conditions natural to man (sensible pain, hunger, etc). 

A larger problem is how Christ could experience the spiritual joy of the visio beatifica and at the same time experience the interior, spiritual sorrow necessitated by the Passion. There have been various theories on this, but St. Thomas teaches, in the words of Dr. Ott, "that he bliss proceeding from the immediate vision of God did not overflow from the ratio superior (=the higher spiritual knowledge and will directed to the bonum increatum) to the ratio inferior (=human knowledge and will directed at the bonum creatum) nor from the soul to the body." Thus, Christ experiences sorrow and sadness in His soul insofar as His truly human soul is directed towards things of earth; but insofar as Christ's soul, reason and will are fixed on God, He experiences joy. This joy of the higher reason (ratio superior) does not overflow into Christ's ratio inferior (STh III, Q. 46, art. 8).

cocernting it is finished

in comment    12 here http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2011/01/indulgences-the-treasury-of-merit-and-the-communion-of-saints/#comment-48459

 Hart implies that the Catholic doctrine of the communion of the saints conflicts with Christ’s statement “It is finished.” But that is not true. The “It is finished” refers to Christ’s Passion. It does not refer to the participation in, and extension of Christ’s redemptive work by the members of the Body of which He is the Head. Jesus wasn’t saying that St. Paul’s sufferings were already completed, the sufferings that filled up what was lacking in Christ’s afflictions (Colossians 1:24). If Hart asserts otherwise, he is simply begging the question against the Catholic doctrine

from comment 397 http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/catholic-and-reformed-conceptions-of-the-atonement/

St. Thomas discusses it in ST III, 50, Article 2.

Such forsaking is not to be referred to the dissolving of the personal union, but to this, that God the Father gave Him up to the Passion: hence there “to forsake” means simply not to protect from persecutors. or else He says there that He is forsaken, with reference to the prayer He had made: “Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass away from Me,” as Augustine explains it (De Gratia Novi Test.).

Also I found this interesting comment made on Amazon here 

.. regarding the "no king but Caesar" mention: It was not the crowd who called this, but the chief priests (Jn 19:15). And that was a play at Pilate's Achilles heel: he was automatically suspect by Caesar because of how Pilate got his job. 

Pilate might have been trying all along to shift the blame for Jesus's execution from himself onto the Jewish leadership. It was Passover week, remember, when passions ran high. Jesus still had thousands of devotees who were unaware that he had been arrested overnight. Might they riot in protest? It was a real danger,as Matthew explicitly records the chief priests realized; it was the reason they decided not to snatch Jesus during the daytime. If a riot there might be, Pilate might have thought, best to preemptively divert its rage away from the Romans and onto Caiaphas and company. Pilate would not be able to sit it out, but reporting to Rome that the people were rebelling against their own religious authorities, not Caesar, was infinitely better than the other way round.

But while Pilate was trying to play Caiaphas, the high priest, knowing well Jesus's popularity among the masses (as well as his allies among some members of the Sanhedrin, Nicodemus, for example) may well have been trying to set up Pilate to take the heat for him, also. Both men may have wanted to put the monkey on the other's back. This would help explain why Caiaphas gave Jesus such a cursory hearing before trundling him over to Pilate and the resistance to executing Jesus that Pilate gave right back to Caiaphas.

Caiaphas finally played his trump card. The Roman emperor was Tiberius, who had pretty much checked out of affairs of state in 26 c.e., moving to isle of Capri and living la dolce vita. He had left state affairs to Praetorian Prefects Lucius Aelius Sejanus and Quintus Naevius Sutorius Macro, neither of whom were loyal to Tiberius. By the time of Jesus' trial, Tiberius had taken power again after learning that Sejanus was actively plotting actual sedition and usurpation against him. He had Sejanus executed and began executing Sejanus' partners and political appointees by the dozens. Pilate owed his office to Sejanus but escaped the purge probably because his appointment was made in the very earliest days of Sejanus' rule, well before Sejanus began plotting against Tiberius.

Even so, Pilate must have known that his own political, and probably physical, survival depended on demonstrated devotion to Tiberius. This was Pilate's political Achilles' Heel and it was there that Caiaphas aimed a nearly-explicit threat: if you free Jesus we will report to Rome that you failed to defend Caesar against an insurrectionist, a pretender to the throne of Antipas, a Roman vassal, whom we do not recognize as legitimate in the first place, but matters not, for, "We have no king but Caesar," Pilate. How about you?

So Pilate felt compelled to act.

Evangelization of catholics and others

http://www.catholic.org/homily/yearoffaith/story.php?id=48346#

and from http://www.readability.com/read?url=http%3A//pontifications.wordpress.com/purgatory/

To put it simply, every human being begins his life heading away from God, with Satan and the world conspiring to keep it that way. Every person thus needs to be regenerated by a sovereign act of grace and incorporated into the divine life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Against the reality of original sin is the commitment of the Holy Trinity to restore mankind to himself through Jesus Christ. God desires the salvation of every human being and provides sufficient grace for each person to find him and turn to him. Catholic Christians confess that God’s saving grace is communicated through the preaching of the gospel and the sacraments of the Church. The Church is the ordinary means of salvation, and on this basis she commits herself to the vigorous evangelization of all peoples; but we also believe that God does not restrict his grace to the ministry of the visible Church. In the words of Vatican II:

This missionary activity derives its reason from the will of God, “who wishes all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, Himself a man, Jesus Christ, who gave Himself as a ransom for all” (1 Tim. 2:45), “neither is there salvation in any other” (Acts 4:12). Therefore, all must be converted to Him, made known by the Church’s preaching, and all must be incorporated into Him by baptism and into the Church which is His body. … Therefore though God in ways known to Himself can lead those inculpably ignorant of the Gospel to find that faith without which it is impossible to please Him (Heb. 11:6), yet a necessity lies upon the Church (1 Cor. 9:16), and at the same time a sacred duty, to preach the Gospel. (Ad gentes 7)

Just on Evangelization:  http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20071203_nota-evangelizzazione_en.html#_ftn49