Sola Fide & Merit: The Catholic Perspective on Paul & the Dialectic of Salvation

by T. D. Barrett

Reviewed by Eileen Quinn Knight, Ph.D. Profiles in Catholicism

I met T.D. Barrett when the couple renewed their marriage vows at St. Clement in Chicago. He is a scholar who devotes his energy to searching for the God who created and sustains him. He was not always Christian. For the majority of the first 20 years of his life he was an atheist. His experience meeting the Lord, when I did meet Him, it was one of profound grace. He had lived a life of selfishness and self-destructive behavior, taking for granted and taking advantage of those who loved him. Then, one day, the Lord infused into him a desire for Himself and, in the darkness of his situation God revealed Himself. Within the course of a few short weeks, his entire pattern of life changed. He became interested in theology and found listening to debates about the relationship between faith and works in our salvation. He found himself regularly debating about faith and works in our salvation. What Catholics didn’t understand, he thought, was that a transformed life and the good works that flow from it are the product of being born-again and saved and not the cause of it. He developed a passion for ministry and entered seminary. His studies showed that he could understand Paul in terms of sola fide while being faithful to the Catholic tradition. One day after a class on the Pauline literature that he mentioned in passing that the question of salvation seemed to him to consist in a “dialectic” between grace and works. The moment he heard the professor say that word “dialectic” a light turned on in his head and he has ever since believed that the concept of dialectic is key to understanding the varied biblical teachings on this subject. So, T.D. thanked God for the professor’s help and many of his other Dominican professors.

At the beginning of this book, he briefly sketched out the history of the Lutheran Reformation ah the New Perspective on Paul as this provides the background for the dive into the history of Catholic exegesis that follows. He proceeds to the dialectic of salvation: sola fide and merit: salvation is both “by faith alone” and also by works and merit. He agrees that sola fide should be given pride of place over the other biblical descriptions of salvation (like works/merit) as long as we do not reject the orthodoxy of the other descriptions. The final chapter, a second excursion on the Protestant doctrine of Imputation, could only have been procured due to many conversations over the years with Lutherans.

The book is a product of a decade of his wrestling, studying in seminaries in both Catholic and Protestant settings and devouring everything he could find. He attempts to make it accessible to lay people and to the uninformed, but he has also tried to make it engaging for the learned, such that scholars on all sides of the aisle, even those whose expertise lay in this field, will find arguments challenging their presuppositions . Due to the availability of free texts online many of the quotes shared in this book are identified merely by reference to where they have been found rather than with a precise footnote citation.

While new Perspective exegesis and specific aspects of Protestant theology are critiqued, popular Catholic preaching is also. Undoubtedly, it is an internal critique: and the book is diving at correction, demanding we recognize and affirm valid tensions where they exist. There is a time and place for systematizing and smoothing, but systematics are not possible until the tensions of exegesis are laid out plainly. So plainly, we lay them. It is good to be intrinsically familiar with Romans and Acts of the Apostles before beginning this scholarly and thorough text. T.D. is finishing up his doctorate as he wrote this.