You may have seen one of those Protestant tracts, web pages, or videos that asks: “What Must I Do to Be Saved?” The reference is from Acts of the Apostles 16:30-31, where it is related that Saint Paul and Silas were loosed from their prison confinement miraculously, which led the guard to want to kill himself with his sword: a suicide Saint Paul thankfully stopped by assuring the guard that they were all accounted for. At this dramatic point, the prison guard asked the holy inmates a question:

And bringing them out, he said: Masters, what must I do, that I may be saved? But they said: Believe in the Lord Jesus, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.

Now, before I dig into this meaty subject, there are a couple of necessary preludes to what follows — one, for clarity; the other, to anticipate an objection. First, I need to define what I mean by “salvation.” Next, I have to anticipate the inevitable objection that, compared to the facile, “one-verse-wonder” kind of plan of salvation so common to our separated brothers and sisters in Evangelical Christianity, the Catholic economy of salvation is very complicated.

Are You Saved, Brother?

So, first, let us define saved. Many Protestants — and I am speaking of the “once saved always saved” folks — believe that “salvation” is something you get in this life when you believe, and it cannot be lost. What we can receive in this life is justification — synonymous with righteousness, holiness, sanctifying grace, and habitual grace. This is God’s grace abiding in us as a stable quality of soul. True, salvation is given to us in this gift, but in seminal form. The seed can be crushed and the supernatural life of the soul extinguished, as we will show later. But “salvation” in its ultimate sense is going to Heaven after death. It is the everlasting possession of the Beatific Vision in Heaven, which can never be taken away. It is the heavenly glory enjoyed by all the saints who have been perfected in God’s love. That is what we Catholics mean by “saved” in the question “What must I do to be saved”: Living in Heaven forever after you die and are judged.

Too Complicated!

Next, onto the objection that the “Catholic system,” if you will, or the true “economy of salvation” is way too complicated. It is a very common objection, and it appeals to the lazy human desire for ease and simplicity. Now, there is nothing wrong with trying to reduce complexity to simplicity in order to grasp a thing intellectually, but we must avoid “missing the forest for the trees,” as they say. But, the intellectually honest man does not deny the complexity of the thing he wants to grasp in as simple a vision as possible. We can simplify the Catholic economy of salvation by saying that a man must be united to Jesus and stay united to Him till death in order to get to Heaven. That’s twenty words — which, by my garrulous standards, is very economic indeed. But that simplicity of design contains a lot of complexity under the hood.

So how do we answer the objection that the Catholic economy is so darned complicated? Let me begin simply by saying that if to “believe on the name of Jesus” were all that is necessary for salvation full stop (cf. 1 Jn. 3:23 in the KJV), then Holy Writ itself is way too long and complicated. But that rather obvious and true observation might be mistaken for snarkiness and irreverence. So, here is the longer response: The supernatural life of grace is frequently compared in Scripture to the natural life of the body. It is constantly called “life,” and its opposite, “death.” Hell is called the “second death,” for instance (cf., Apoc./Rev. 2:11, 20:6, 20:14, and 21:8). Now, life itself is simple inasmuch as it is “the power of immanent activity.” Inanimate things are passive and all apparent activity they have is called transient activity, meaning that they are acted upon from outside, like leaves blowing in the wind or water falling down Niagara Falls. Living things have their principle of activity in themselves — that is what “immanent” means — like birds flying against the wind or salmon swimming upriver. From that simple definition of life — “the power of immanent activity” — we can discuss the myriad things that contribute to life from the womb to the tomb: How did it originate? What fosters its flourishing by way of nutrition, health, environmental factors, and exercise? How is it healed of injuries or diseases? In the case of us men, how do our emotional experiences, good or bad — our ecstasies and our agonies, if you will — contribute to our mental health and psychological vigor? In each of these aspects, we can drill down to the most minute level of organs, proteins, cells, or mental stimuli, and we have barely gotten to the level of what is highest in our natural life — our intellect and will. We can explore the effects of our social influences on individual organisms of the species for good or for bad. As such, one man’s life — though it is simply speaking, the power of immanent activity — can become the subject of biology, anatomy, psychology, the medical sciences, history, sociology, pedagogical methodology, and any number of other sciences. Following the Biblical analogy that proportions our supernatural life to our natural life, we must admit that to receive, to foster, to remedy, and to preserve the supernatural life that we call the life of grace, when viewed at a granular level, has a complexity to it — not a chaotic or random complexity — but a sublime architecture whereby the minute parts all fit into an orderly whole that is being supernaturally alive in Christ. Yes, it is complicated, but that is life!

With those preludes out of the way, we now forge ahead to answer to the question: What Must I Do to Be Saved?

The Three Theological Virtues

In an argument between the Catholic and the type of Protestant we are considering here, there will be little controversy over the necessity of faith for salvation. Both parties agree that faith is necessary, though we do not agree on the particulars of what that means. In general, Evangelicals follow Luther and Calvin in making Faith not an assent of the intellect to revealed truth but a conviction in the will that, for Christ’s sake, God will not impute our sins to us. This is called “fiduciary faith.” For us Catholics, faith is a theological virtue infused in the soul by God whereby we believe in our minds all the truths that God has revealed. This is dogmatic faith.

Faith is the initium salutis, “the beginning of human salvation” — not the middle, not the end. This quote comes to us from the Council of Trent, which cites Saint Fulgentius of Ruspe (468-533) as its source. Among the three theological virtues — and, indeed, within the supernatural life as a whole — faith is “first,” not chronologically or in any other respect “mathematically,” but first in that ontological sense in which all else that comes after is dependent upon it; without it, there simply is no supernatural life. Aside from the text from Acts 16 we quoted at the beginning of this piece, here are four additional verses that show its necessity. (For a couple of reasons, I have elected to use the RSV-2CE translation rather than our accustomed Douay-Rheims version, not because I like it better, but because it is both more accommodated to modern ears and closer to modern Protestant translations.)

1. Mark 16:15–16: “And he said to them, Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned.”
2. Heb. 11:6: “And without faith it is impossible to please him [God].”
3. John. 3:18: “He who believes in him is not condemned; he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of God.”

Hope is the second of the theological virtues. It, too, is necessary for salvation:

1. Rom. 8:24–25: “For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” Note that both the DRV and the KJV translate v. 24 as “For we are saved by hope.”
2. 1 Cor. 13:13: “So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”
3. Heb. 10:23: “Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering.”

Love — or Charity — is the third and the greatest of the theological virtues. Without it, we cannot be saved:

1. Luke 10:25–28: “And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, ‘Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ He said to him, ‘What is written in the law? What do you read there?’ And he answered, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.’ And he said to him, ‘You have answered right; do this, and you will live.'”
2. 1 Cor. 13:1–3: “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.”
3. 1 Cor. 13:13: “So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”
4. 1 John 4:7–8: “Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is love.”
5. 1 John 3:14–15: “We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren. He who does not love remains in death. Any one who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.”
6. In Matt. 22:37–40, we learn that the two greatest commandments are love of God and neighbor. Because we must keep the commandments to be saved — as we will see later on — love or charity is, therefore, necessary for salvation.
7. In Matt. 25:31–46, the final judgment scene, we see that people are judged by acts of love.
8. John 14:15: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”
9. John 15:9–10: “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.”
10. John 15:12: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”

For the sola fides Protestant, one question that comes to mind is this: Do you really think that you can go to Heaven if you do not love God? There is no escape from this question. Clearly, faith is not the same as love or charity, for Saint Paul himself (1 Cor. 13:13) says that faith, hope, and charity, are “three” (not “one”), and “the greatest of these is charity.” Further, Saint John says (1 John 4:8) that those who do not love do not even know God, while the Good Shepherd Himself tells us, “I know mine and mine know me” (John 10:4), all of which leads us to conclude with certainty that he who does not love cannot be saved.

This is the first of a series, so: to be continued… .