"Nobody Believes That"

Frank Turek and a Catholic guy were speaking of justification, and Frank Turek said "Trent condemns salvation from grace alone through faith alone".

The Catholic guy said, "if by faith you mean a purely intellectual assent".

I think it was Frank Turek who said (sound off, I just read subtitles, and here both men were shown and shown too small for me to see who moved the lips), "nobody believes that."

Now, the thing about Trent is, it condemned LOADS of things no Christian faction was believing at this point.

It did condemn what it saw as errors of Protestantism.

Saying that a man who in goodwill and trusting God reads the Bible without having the guidance of the Church can find salvation is NOT among the condemned errors. What is condemned is persisting in an interpretation when you know it contradicts that of the Church's magisterium "through the ages" (paraphrasing in an SSPX sense) or "the sense that the Church" (meaning its magisterium) "hath held and now holds" (meaning, there is no condemnation of those who reject a modern position of the magisterium, known to be modern, if someone tells a Catholic "oh, you're fine if you believe the creation days were long ages" that's not even what the magisterial document said, in 1909 it said "theologians are free to discuss" ... basically whether to allow that or not ... a discussion that didn't take place), and there is an addition about contradiction "or also of the unanimous sense of the fathers".

But trying the Bible on your own, especially as a new Christian who has no experience of the Catholic Church is not condemned.

Now, in this case, there were actually Protestants, most notably Luther, who had come very close to saying things like "if I read the Bible, I can conclude that all Church Fathers and a Council dealing with this question, even an Ecumenical one, was in error" ... that is condemned in Session IV.

But when it comes to the great themes, and justification is one of them, the Council opted for condemning things that even Luther, Zwingli and Calvin would promptly condemn, and putting the condemnations against these in that context. Not just a list of pre-existing bad Protestant statements, but a map of errors in the direction of Protestantism.

General Council of Trent: Fifth Session
https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/trent/fifth-session.htm

General Council of Trent: Sixth Session
https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/trent/sixth-session.htm

These map out the whole doctrine, so to speak, of Original Sin (Session V) or of Justification (Session VI). They map it out by condemning things that no Catholic is allowed to say about these subjects.

CANON XX.-If any one saith, that the man who is justified and how perfect soever, is not bound to observe the commandments of God and of the Church, but only to believe; as if indeed the Gospel were a bare and absolute promise of eternal life, without the condition of observing the commandments ; let him be anathema.

In other words, Trent's condemning Free Grace. And unlike Evangelicals, the mainline historic Protestant Churches do have a historic penchant from their Reformers to Free Grace.

But there were indeed things condemned which no Protestant sect at the time believed, at least none of the bigger ones.

CANON I.-If any one saith, that man may be justified before God by his own works, whether done through the teaching of human nature, or that of the law, without the grace of God through Jesus Christ; let him be anathema.

Why exactly this take?

Why not be content as the Church had been in the days of Bishop Tempier and of Pope Pius IX to issue a list of actually extant errors?

Well, it was an Ecumenical Council, such are costly and may wreak some havoc in making people refuse them.

In Nicaea, one was content to condemn the error of Arius. Came Constantinople I, Ephesus I, Chalcedon, Constantinople II and III, six councils, by the way usually accepted by Lutherans and Calvinists, unlike Nicaea II, because the first of them was content to condemn errors already existing.

The Council Fathers at Trent kind of could see this coming, since Protestantism, among other things, hankered back to the heresiarchs condemned in Constance, namely Wyclif (absent, already dead) and Hus.

So, they basically settled for a deep dive, "let's get everything right!" in order to avoid centuries of disputes about what the original condemnations were really supposed to condemn or not condemn, allow or even enjoin.
/Hans Georg Lundahl