=============================================
"With regard to God, there is no strict right to any merit on the part of man. Between God and us there is an immeasurable inequality, for we have received everything from him, our Creator."
-Catechism of the Catholic Church #2007
=============================================
"Do Catholics believe that they can merit eternal life?"
That depends on what you mean by "merit." No, absolutely and emphatically not, if you mean to ask whether we believe that can earn our salvation through good deeds. That idea is absolutely unbiblical, and un-Catholic, because the Church teaches that God gives salvation as a totally free gift.
Now, there is another way to use the term "merit," a way that expresses what the Bible says about the way we are saved; (I'll show some Scriptures about that in a moment;) and the Catechism picks up on this in paragraph 2010. There, the Catechism says that God moves within a sinner's heart to convert him, and then it says, "we can then merit for ourselves and for others the graces needed for our sanctification, for the increase of grace and charity, and for the attainment of eternal life." That passage gets a lot of resistance from Protestants, because most of them think that the phrase "meriting grace" equals the unbiblical idea of "earning grace," which is impossible because grace is a free gift. (Even after we come to believe, it remains impossible for us to earn eternal life. Some theologians have said that once God's Spirit begins to indwell us, He enables us to earn our salvation; but that is part of a heresy known as "semi-Pelagianism" which the Church officially condemns.) The Church proclaims -- rather emphatically -- that it is impossible to earn grace: "Grace is favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become children of God." (CCC 1996, emphasis in original) So we do not "earn" grace (CCC 1996), but we do "merit" it (CCC 2010); meriting and earning are not the same thing.
What does "merit" mean then? That is a really important question with a really great answer: "The term 'merit' refers in general to the recompense owed by a community or a society for the action of one of its members." (CCC 2006, emphasis in original) According to the Bible, God has given to Christians "the right to become God's children...the right to eat the fruit from the tree of life and to go through the gates [of heaven]." (John 1:12, Revelation 22:14) God gives us the right to eternal life, or in other words, He confers true merit upon us as a gift. "Merit," in Catholic theology, is the same thing as the "right" to eternal life. It is not something we earn; it is a totally free gift.
These are passages from the Bible that describe the Catholic idea of "merit"
=============================================
Meriting eternal life in Hebrews 10:32-35
Meriting eternal life in Romans 2:6-8
Meriting the grace of sanctity in Matthew 6:1-4
Meriting the grace of sanctity in Hebrews 12:10-11
Merit according to St. Augustine
=============================================
[ Homepage ] - [ Apologetics page ]
When we were dead in our trespasses, we had no right to heaven and God did not see us as having any merit before Him. But then He began to work in our lives, and gave us the grace to respond to His call, and then we did acquire merit, (i.e. the right to eternal life,) because He gave it to us; and we do obtain the further graces of sanctification and finally salvation by this "merit." Now, faith is a good example of true merit being conferred on us. For faith is a good thing, there is some merit in faith, but here's the key: when we first believed, we did not merit that faith -- we had no right to it, but it is a gift of God, as all true merits are. In other words, we do not have have a right to merits; they are freely given to us by God. But when God confers this merit, this right to eternal life, then He respects it -- not because it is ours, "for God is no respecter of persons" (Acts 10:34), but because it is His gift of Himself and He always respects His Son.
That is why the Catechism says that we cannot merit the grace of conversion, but we can merit other graces after that (CCC 2010): because we had no right to conversion, no right to anything, but when God converted us He gave us the right to salvation, (He conferred on us the merit of eternal life,) and everything else we can merit is so much less than that.
This is similar to another way we use the term "merit": when a general selects his soldiers for a certain mission, he selects them based on their merits. They have proven themselves better at the necessary tasks than the others, and their reward is the special mission that they alone are selected for. That is the way the Bible uses the term "merit": it is a reward. When I say that God confers on us the "merit" of eternal life, I am saying that God gives us the "reward" of eternal life. This has huge theological significance, because the word "merit" is equivalent to the Latin word "merces," which is the translation of the Greek word for "a reward." When the Bible says that God gives us a reward, it is the same as saying that God confers merit on us.
Back to top
=============================================
These are passages from the Bible that describe the Catholic idea of "merit"
=============================================
Hebrews 10:
32 [A]fter God's light had shone on you, you suffered many things, yet were not defeated by the struggle. ...
35 Do not lose your courage, then, because it brings with it a great reward.
=============================================
Argument:
Calvinist theology demands that the reward of eternal life is granted only through faith, at the moment of conversion; but this passage teaches that merit is acquired not only when God first shines the light of grace upon us, but also after that, by our Christian conduct. So God gives us merit, as a grace, not only when we are first converted and when His Spirit first indwells us, but after that in every time we conquer in the struggles of this life. That is part of the reason why Catholics say that salvation does not come by faith alone: because the reward of salvation is conferred on us not only when we first believe, but more and more throughout Christian life; i.e. merit is given to us by God not only in the first moment of justification, but also through the process of sanctification.
Back to top
=============================================
These are passages from the Bible that describe the Catholic idea of "merit"
=============================================
Romans 2:
6 For God will reward every person according to what each has done.
7 Some people keep on doing good, and seek glory, honour, and immortal life; to them God will give eternal life.
8 Other people are selfish and reject what is right, in order to follow what is wrong; on them God will pour out his anger and fury.
=============================================
Argument:
This teaches explicitly, not that God confers merit on us by faith alone, but that it comes also through good deeds; and also that there is punishment reserved for the evil works of the un-saved. This teaches about merit, or a reward, in the eschatological sense, (i.e. in the context of Judgment Day,) which Protestants are usually slightly more comfortable with. The problem for Protestants, however, is that this passage connects this merit to our good deeds, whereas they believe that the reward of eternal life is only attained through faith.
Back to top
=============================================
These are passages from the Bible that describe the Catholic idea of "merit"
=============================================
Matthew 6:
1 Make certain you do not perform your religious duties in public so that people will see what you do.
2 If you do these things publicly, you will not have any reward from your Father in heaven.
3 So when you give something to a needy person, do not make a big show of it...
4 [a]nd your Father, who sees what you do in private, will reward you.
=============================================
Argument:
The phrase "religious duties" is readable enough, but a more literal translation would read somewhat awkwardly as "make certain that you do not do your righteousness in public." Now, righteousness is obviously a gift of God that comes by unmerited faith; but here Jesus teaches that by putting this righteousness into action we do merit a reward, and God will continue to reward us -- to confer merit on us -- whenever we do acts of righteousness. This corresponds perfectly with the Catholic doctrine that we can merit an increase of grace, because according to this passage we merit (or are rewarded with) an increase of righteousness.
Back to top
=============================================
These are passages from the Bible that describe the Catholic idea of "merit"
=============================================
Hebrews 12:
10 Our human fathers punished us for a short time, as it seemed right to them; but God does it for our own good, so that we may share his holiness.
11 When we are punished, it seems to us at the time something to make us sad, not glad. Later, however, those who have been disciplined by such punishment reap the peaceful reward of a righteous life.
=============================================
Argument:
This passage connects the reward of righteousness to sanctification, the lifelong process by which we are made holy in God's sight. "We may share in his holiness...[and] reap the peaceful reward of a righteous life." So by becoming increasingly holy, when we learn from our mistakes by the punishments we receive for sinning, we obtain a reward, a merit; God confers merit at the same time as He produces holiness inside us. Just as the Catholic Church teaches, and it is the same as saying that we merit an increase of righteousness and holiness, and ultimately eternal life.
Back to top
=============================================
To sum all this up I want to quote from St. Augustine, because he states the Catholic teaching about meriting eternal life (but not earning it) most succinctly and in an undeniably biblical way:
What merits of his own has the saved to boast of when, if he were dealt with according to his merits, he would be nothing if not damned? Have the just then no merits at all? Of course they do, for they are the just. But they had no merits by which they were made just.
Certainly they can say that forgiveness of sins is a grace which is given with no antecedent merits. For what good merits can sinners have? Yet even the very remission of sins is not without some merit, if faith asks and obtains it. For there is some merit even if faith, the faith by which that man said: "Lord, be mericiful to me a sinner"; and he went down justified by the merit of humble faith. ...since whatever good merits there are begin in faith, which we acknowledge as a gratuitous gift of God.
What merit, then, does a man have before grace, by which he might receive grace, when our every good merit is produced in us only by grace, and, when God, crowning our merits, crowns nothing else but His own gifts to us?
-St. Augustine
Back to top
=============================================
Back to top
=============================================
