Joint Declaration on Justification

1. What the Joint Declaration Is

The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification is a formal statement signed on 31 October 1999 in Augsburg, Germany, by the Lutheran World Federation and by the Catholic Church acting through the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. Its central claim, set out in paragraph 40, is that a consensus in basic truths of the doctrine of justification exists between Lutherans and Catholics. Its practical effect, set out in the Official Common Statement signed alongside it, is that the sixteenth-century condemnations on this doctrine do not strike the teaching the other communion presents in the Declaration.

Three documents were signed together and they should always be read together. The Declaration itself runs to forty-four numbered paragraphs. The Official Common Statement is the short instrument by which the two parties commit themselves to the Declaration's conclusions. The Annex to the Official Common Statement clarifies four points that Rome had flagged as insufficiently clear the previous year. Anyone quoting the Declaration without the Annex is quoting a text that the Catholic side considered incomplete in 1998.

The Signatories

Cardinal Edward Idris Cassidy, then President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, and Bishop Walter Kasper, then its Secretary, signed for the Catholic Church. Bishop Christian Krause, then President of the Lutheran World Federation, and Ishmael Noko, its General Secretary, signed for the Federation. The Lutheran World Federation is the communion to which the large majority of Lutheran church bodies belong, and its member churches had voted on the text individually before the Federation could act.

Signatory names and offices are as recorded in the Official Common Statement of 31 October 1999, published by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and by the Lutheran World Federation. The description of the Lutheran World Federation's membership follows the Federation's own account of itself.

Why Augsburg, and Why 31 October

Both the place and the date were chosen to speak. Augsburg is the city where the Lutheran princes presented the Augsburg Confession to Charles V in 1530, and where the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 conceded that the empire would hold two confessions. The thirty-first of October is Reformation Day, the date Lutherans keep as the anniversary of Luther's ninety-five theses in 1517. Signing an agreement on justification in that city on that day was a deliberate act of symbolism, and symbolism is not doctrine. What the Declaration does and does not accomplish has to be read out of its paragraphs.

2. Why Justification Divided the West

Justification is the act by which God makes a sinner right with himself. The sixteenth-century quarrel was about how that happens, what part the sinner plays, and whether the change is a verdict spoken over him, a transformation worked in him, or both. Everything else in the Reformation controversy, indulgences, penance, the Mass, the authority of the papacy, ran back to this question, which is why Lutherans came to call it the article by which the Church stands or falls.

The Lutheran Position in Lutheran Terms

Lutherans teach that a human being can do nothing to move God to accept him. Article IV of the Augsburg Confession (1530) states that men cannot be justified before God by their own powers, merits or works, and that they are justified freely for Christ's sake through faith, when they believe that they are received into favour and that their sins are forgiven for Christ's sake. Christ's righteousness is reckoned to the believer, and the believer's assurance rests on that reckoning rather than on any quality found in himself. Faith here is trust, fiducia, the confidence that the promise is true and is true for me. The Apology of the Augsburg Confession develops this at length, and the Formula of Concord (1577) restates it against later disputes.

Two consequences follow that Lutherans hold firmly. First, the believer remains at the same time righteous and a sinner, simul iustus et peccator: righteous by God's reckoning, a sinner in the resistance that remains in him until death. Second, good works follow justification as fruit and are necessary, and they contribute nothing to the ground on which God accepts him.

The Catholic Position in Catholic Terms

The Council of Trent answered in its sixth session on 13 January 1547, with sixteen chapters and thirty-three canons. Trent teaches that justification is the passage from the state of a child of Adam to the state of grace and adoption, worked by God, prepared for by grace that goes before any human movement. Chapter 8 calls faith the beginning of human salvation, the foundation and root of all justification. Chapter 7 identifies the formal cause as the justice of God, not that by which he himself is just, but that by which he makes us just, so that we are truly renewed within.

Trent's canons condemned specific propositions. Canon 9 anathematises the claim that the sinner is justified by faith alone in the sense that nothing else is required to cooperate. Canon 11 anathematises the claim that men are justified solely by the imputation of Christ's righteousness with grace and charity not poured into their hearts. Canon 12 anathematises the definition of justifying faith as nothing else than confidence in divine mercy remitting sins for Christ's sake. Canon 24 anathematises the claim that the justice received is not preserved and increased by good works. Canon 32 anathematises the claim that the good works of a justified man do not truly merit an increase of grace and eternal life.

Where the Two Descriptions Actually Clash

Both bodies say that grace is prior, that no one merits the first grace, and that faith is indispensable. The clash lies in whether justification is only God's verdict or also God's renovation of the person, whether the concupiscence remaining in the baptised is truly sin, whether a believer may be certain of his own state of grace, and whether the works of a justified man can be called meritorious. Those are the four hard points, and each one has its own subsection in the 1999 Declaration. For the underlying scriptural argument about faith and works considered on its own terms, see our guide to faith and works in Catholic teaching, which handles Romans and James directly and does not deal with the 1999 text.

3. The Road to 1999

The Joint Declaration is the end of a process that ran for more than thirty years, and no part of it was sudden. Official Catholic and Lutheran dialogue began after the Second Vatican Council, and by the early 1970s the international commission was producing agreed reports. The habit of the dialogue was to describe each side's position in that side's own vocabulary first, then ask whether the two descriptions actually contradicted each other or contradicted a caricature.

The Documents That Fed Into It

• The Malta Report (1972), the first report of the international Lutheran and Catholic study commission, which registered a far-reaching consensus on justification and named what was still open.
• Justification by Faith (1983), the seventh round of the United States Lutheran and Roman Catholic dialogue, a long and technical study that produced a common statement and separate reflections. Its analysis of imputation and interior renewal shaped the international text.
• The Condemnations of the Reformation Era: Do They Still Divide? (1986), a German study directed by Karl Lehmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg, which took the sixteenth-century anathemas one by one and asked whether each still applied to the other side's teaching as now held.
• Church and Justification (1994), the international commission's report placing the doctrine inside a doctrine of the Church.

Drafting, Voting, Signing

A draft Joint Declaration was completed in 1997 and sent to the Lutheran World Federation's member churches for response and to Rome for evaluation. The Federation reported in June 1998 that its member churches had reached the necessary consensus. Rome's evaluation, published the same month, accepted a high degree of agreement and raised difficulties serious enough that the signing could not proceed as planned. The difficulties were addressed in the Annex agreed in 1999, and the signing followed on 31 October of that year. That sequence matters: the Declaration as signed is the 1997 text plus the corrections Rome asked for.

4. What the Declaration Actually Says

The Declaration has five parts. Part 1 sets out the biblical message of justification. Part 2 explains why the doctrine became a church-dividing problem. Part 3 gives the common confession. Part 4 works through seven disputed points, each with a joint statement followed by a separate Lutheran paragraph and a separate Catholic paragraph. Part 5 states the significance and the limits of what was achieved.

The Sentence Everything Rests On

Paragraph 15 carries the agreement itself, introduced by the words "Together we confess":

Read that sentence slowly, because every clause is load-bearing. "By grace alone" is the Lutheran sola gratia, and Catholics have never denied it. "Not because of any merit on our part" excludes merit from the ground of acceptance, which is what Trent itself taught about the first grace. "Renews our hearts" states an interior transformation, which is what Trent's chapter 7 insisted on and what a purely forensic account of justification would leave out. "Equipping and calling us to good works" gives works their place after justification and outside its ground.

The Claim About the Condemnations

Paragraph 5 states the Declaration's purpose: to show that on the basis of the dialogue the subscribing churches are now able to articulate a common understanding of justification, and that in the light of this consensus the sixteenth-century doctrinal condemnations do not apply to today's partner. The Declaration guards that claim in its preamble: the churches neither take those condemnations lightly nor disavow their own past. Paragraph 41 draws the conclusion in the two directions that the Official Common Statement then formalises.

The Explicit Limits

Paragraph 40 says a consensus in basic truths exists and that the remaining differences of language, theological elaboration and emphasis are acceptable. Paragraph 42 says nothing in the Declaration takes anything away from the seriousness of the condemnations related to the doctrine of justification, and that some were not simply pointless. Paragraph 43 lists what remains to be worked on and introduces the list with the words "among other topics": the relationship between the word of God and church doctrine, ecclesiology, ecclesial authority, church unity, ministry, the sacraments, and the relation between justification and social ethics. The document names its own incompleteness in its own text.

5. The Seven Disputed Points, One by One

Part 4 of the Declaration takes seven contested topics and handles each in three paragraphs: what both confess together, how Lutherans put it, how Catholics put it. The structure is the argument. Agreement is stated first, then each side is allowed to keep its own idiom without the other treating that idiom as heresy.

4.1 Human Powerlessness and Sin (19 to 21)

Both confess that human beings are wholly dependent on God's saving grace and cannot turn to God to seek deliverance by their own powers. Lutherans state that a person is incapable of cooperating in his own salvation and that he is passive in the strict sense at the moment God works faith in him. Catholics state that a person cooperates in preparing for and accepting justification by consenting to God's justifying action, and paragraph 20 makes the decisive qualification: that consent is itself an effect of grace and not an action arising from innate human powers. Read with that qualification, the Catholic word "cooperation" no longer names what the Lutheran Confessions condemned.

4.2 Justification as Forgiveness of Sins and Making Righteous (22 to 24)

Both confess that God forgives sin and at the same time frees the human being from sin's enslaving power and imparts new life in Christ. This is the paragraph where Lutherans conceded most. The Declaration states plainly that when persons come by faith to share in Christ, God no longer imputes their sin and works active love in them through the Holy Spirit, so justification is understood as forgiveness and as making righteous together. Lutherans keep the distinction between the two so that the free gift is not confused with human renewal, and Catholics keep the emphasis on the renewal because it is God's own work in the person.

4.3 Justification by Faith and Through Grace (25 to 27)

Both confess that sinners are justified by faith in God's saving action in Christ, and that whatever in the justified precedes or follows the free gift of faith is neither the basis of justification nor merits it. Lutherans describe justifying faith as trust in the promise, which by its nature includes hope and love. Catholics describe faith as fundamental and note that a person is justified in the fullest sense when faith is living through love, since love is poured into the heart by the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5). This is where the word alone is handled. The joint confession leaves the formula "faith alone" out. Each side keeps its own formula, and the Declaration identifies the substance both formulas were meant to protect.

4.4 The Justified as Sinner (28 to 30)

Both confess that in baptism the Holy Spirit unites the believer with Christ, justifies him and truly renews him, and that he remains subject to the power of sin and to a lifelong struggle against the opposition to God in his own selfish desires. Lutherans call the believer at once righteous and a sinner. Catholics hold that the concupiscence remaining in the baptised is an inclination coming from sin and pressing toward sin, and that it is not sin in the proper sense, since it does not separate the justified from God. The Council of Trent stated this in its fifth session, on original sin. This point was the hardest of the seven and it was the one Rome pressed hardest on in 1998.

4.5 Law and Gospel (31 to 33)

Both confess that Christ has fulfilled the law and by his death and resurrection has overcome it as a way to salvation. Lutherans distinguish sharply between law and gospel, with the law accusing the conscience and the gospel giving the free promise. Catholics hold that the commandments remain binding on the justified and that Christ is the lawgiver whom the justified are bound to obey. Both agree that the law's demands are not a means by which anyone earns God's acceptance.

4.6 Assurance of Salvation (34 to 36)

Both confess that the faithful can rely on the mercy and promises of God, and that even in their own weakness they can be sure of that mercy in view of the word of promise and of baptism. Lutherans place the whole weight on Christ's promise and hold that looking away from oneself to that promise is what assurance means. Catholics hold that no one may build assurance on the inspection of his own strength or works, and Trent condemned the further claim that anyone can know with the certainty of faith, apart from a special revelation, that he is among the elect. The two positions differ on what the word certainty attaches to.

4.7 The Good Works of the Justified (37 to 39)

Both confess that good works follow justification and are its fruits, and that the justified are called to bring them forth. Lutherans hold that grace is preserved and faith and grace grow, and they resist the language of merit because it can suggest a claim on God. Catholics affirm that good works, made possible by grace and the working of the Holy Spirit, contribute to growth in grace and are said to merit an increase of grace and eternal life, in the sense that the merit itself is God's gift. The Declaration and the Annex both stress that Catholic teaching does not make any part of justification a human achievement.

Paragraph numbers refer to the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (1999) as published by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the Lutheran World Federation. The table compresses each subsection and is no substitute for the text, which runs to three paragraphs per point.

6. What Each Side Conceded

A joint declaration is a negotiated text, and reading it well means seeing which sentences cost which side something. Neither party surrendered a dogma. Both accepted descriptions of the other that their sixteenth-century predecessors would have rejected, and both allowed a vocabulary they do not use to count as a legitimate carrier of the shared faith.

What Lutherans Conceded

The largest Lutheran concession is in 4.2. Justification is confessed as forgiveness of sins and as making righteous, which rules out a purely forensic reading in which God declares the sinner righteous while leaving him internally untouched. The Annex sharpens this further by affirming that the justified are truly and inwardly renewed by the action of the Holy Spirit. A second concession sits in 4.7, where good works are given a necessary place and Catholic merit language is accepted as compatible with grace once its meaning is stated. A third runs through the whole text: the Catholic teaching described here is agreed not to be the works-righteousness the Lutheran Confessions condemned, which means the Confessions' condemnations of "the papists" do not land on the Catholic Church as it teaches today.

What Catholics Conceded

The largest Catholic concession is the judgment that the Lutheran teaching presented in the Declaration does not fall under Trent's canons. That is a considerable statement, and it is the one Catholic critics object to. A second concession is in paragraph 20, where the human consent that Trent defended is described as itself an effect of grace, a formulation that gives the Lutheran anxiety about cooperation everything it needed. A third is in 4.6, where the Declaration affirms that believers may be sure of God's mercy on the ground of the promise and of baptism, without requiring an inspection of one's own works.

What Neither Side Conceded

Lutherans did not abandon simul iustus et peccator and did not accept that concupiscence in the baptised is merely an inclination. Catholics did not withdraw a single canon of Trent, did not accept the formula "faith alone" as the joint confession, and did not accept the Lutheran claim that justification is the criterion by which every other doctrine must be measured. Paragraph 18 records that difference honestly: Lutherans treat the doctrine of justification as the indispensable criterion for the whole life and teaching of the Church, while Catholics see themselves bound by several criteria and read justification within the wider rule of faith.

Both communions quote that passage. The Declaration's achievement is to have found a way of saying both of its halves at once without either side hearing the other as a denial.

7. Differentiated Consensus: The Method That Made It Possible

The Joint Declaration works by a method called differentiated consensus, developed in German ecumenical theology in the decades before 1999. A differentiated consensus states a shared confession at the level of substance, then states the remaining differences, then argues that those differences do not contradict the shared confession and therefore do not divide churches. Every subsection of Part 4 is built that way.

Why the Method Was Necessary

The alternative methods had both failed. Demanding that one side adopt the other's formulas produces surrender rather than agreement, and no church can surrender what it holds to be revealed. Producing a new formula acceptable to both risks a text so vague that each side reads its own doctrine into it, which settles nothing and misleads the faithful. Differentiated consensus keeps both vocabularies visible on the page and asks the narrower question that the sixteenth century never asked cleanly: does this specific condemnation strike what that body actually teaches now?

The Standard Objection to the Method

Critics on both sides raise the same objection in different accents. If the differences remain, they say, the consensus is verbal, and a shared sentence that each party glosses differently is a shared sentence rather than a shared faith. Lutheran critics argue that "renewal" in paragraph 22 means one thing in Wittenberg and another in Rome. Catholic critics argue that the Declaration lets a Lutheran keep the very propositions Trent's canons named, provided he describes them in warmer language.

The Declaration's own defence is in its structure. It does not say the differences are unimportant. It says, in paragraph 40, that the remaining differences of language, theological elaboration and emphasis are acceptable, which is a claim about a particular set of differences and is open to being tested one by one. Anyone who wants to argue against the Declaration has to argue at that level, taking a specific difference and showing that it does contradict the joint confession. Several critics have done exactly that, and the argument is a real one.

8. Why the Council of Trent Still Stands

The sixth session of the Council of Trent remains Catholic dogma, unamended and unrepealed, and no signature in 1999 could have changed that. A general council's definitions on faith bind permanently, and the Catholic Church has no mechanism for withdrawing a dogmatic canon. The Joint Declaration never proposes to withdraw one. Understanding this is the difference between reading the document and repeating a headline about it.

The Distinction That Does the Work

A conciliar anathema condemns a proposition. It does not condemn a person or a community in perpetuity regardless of what that community later means by its words. Trent's canon 11 condemns the claim that men are justified solely by the imputation of Christ's righteousness, to the exclusion of grace and charity poured into their hearts. If the Lutheran teaching presented in 1999 confesses that the Holy Spirit truly renews the heart, then that teaching is not the proposition canon 11 condemned. The canon still stands. The teaching in front of us is judged not to be its target.

The Official Common Statement puts this in two symmetrical sentences: the teaching of the Lutheran churches presented in the Declaration does not fall under the condemnations from the Council of Trent, and the condemnations in the Lutheran Confessions do not apply to the teaching of the Catholic Church presented in the Declaration. Both halves are limited by the same phrase, "presented in this Declaration". The judgment is about these described positions and not about every position ever held by anyone under either name.

What a Catholic Is Still Bound To

A Catholic is bound to hold that justification is conferred through the sacrament of baptism (Trent, session six, chapter 7), that it involves a real interior renewal in the person and a change in God's reckoning, that mortal sin destroys the grace received and that it is restored through the sacrament of penance, that the justified truly merit an increase of grace by works done in grace, and that no one may claim an infallible certainty of his own final perseverance apart from a special revelation. The Catechism of the Catholic Church sets out the doctrine of justification at paragraphs 1987 to 1995 and the doctrine of merit at 2006 to 2011, where paragraph 2010 states that no one can merit the initial grace of conversion and forgiveness.

9. The 1998 Roman Response and the 1999 Annex

In June 1998 the Holy See published a Response of the Catholic Church to the Joint Declaration, prepared with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It welcomed a high degree of agreement and stated that the level of consensus reached did not yet allow the affirmation that all the differences on justification were resolved. The Response was blunt about where the text was thin, and its publication was widely read at the time as a sign that the signing had collapsed.

The Difficulties Rome Named

• Simul iustus et peccator. The Response held that the Lutheran formula as stated in the draft was not reconcilable with the Catholic doctrine that baptism removes all that is truly and properly sin, leaving concupiscence which is from sin and inclines to sin.
• The status of the Lutheran Confessions. The Response asked which Lutheran teaching, exactly, was being declared exempt from Trent's canons, given that the Confessions themselves were not being revised.
• Justification as sole criterion. The Response objected to treating justification as the one measure by which all doctrine is tested.
• The place of good works and merit. The Response asked for a clearer statement that the good works of the justified truly contribute to growth in grace.

What the Annex Added

The Annex to the Official Common Statement, agreed in 1999, answers those points inside the framework the Declaration had already built. It affirms that the justified are truly and inwardly renewed by the action of the Holy Spirit and that in baptism all that is sin in the proper sense is forgiven, while an inclination coming from sin remains and stands under the lifelong struggle against sin. It reaffirms that good works are the fruits and signs of justification and that eternal life is at one and the same time a grace and a reward given by God for good works. It restates the assurance of the believer in terms of the promise and of baptism. It confirms that the doctrine of justification measures Christian faith without displacing the rest of the rule of faith, which is the compromise wording on the criterion question.

The Annex is short and it is decisive. It is why the Catholic side could sign four months later, and it is why quoting the 1997 draft against the Catholic Church misses the target. On this site's account of Catholic teaching about grace and interior renewal, see our guide to salvation in Catholic teaching and our guide to baptism, which covers the sacrament through which Trent says justification is conferred.

10. The Lutherans Who Did Not Sign

A significant body of Lutherans rejected the Joint Declaration and still rejects it, and any honest account has to say so. The Declaration was signed by the Lutheran World Federation on behalf of the member churches that had approved it. Confessional Lutheran bodies outside that Federation were never party to it, and several of them published detailed refusals.

The German Theologians' Protest

Before the signing, a large group of professors of Protestant theology at German universities published a public objection to the Declaration, arguing that it obscured the forensic character of justification and that the consensus claimed did not exist. Eberhard Juengel, one of the most respected Lutheran dogmaticians of the period, was among the critics and published a sustained theological argument against the text. Their complaint was about the Lutheran side of the text. They held that Lutheran doctrine had been softened to make the agreement possible.

The International Lutheran Council and the Missouri Synod

The International Lutheran Council is an association of confessional Lutheran church bodies that stand outside the Lutheran World Federation, and its largest member is the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod. Those bodies did not sign the Declaration and do not regard themselves as bound by it. The Missouri Synod's Commission on Theology and Church Relations published a critical evaluation holding that the Declaration failed to state justification as God's forensic verdict on account of Christ alone, that its treatment of merit and of good works reintroduced what the Reformation had excluded, and that a consensus reached by allowing each side to keep its own doctrine is not a consensus at all.

The Independent Evangelical Lutheran Church in Germany, a confessional body in the same family, likewise declined the Declaration. Their objection deserves to be stated in its own terms: for these Lutherans, the doctrine of justification is the article by which the Church stands or falls, and a text that leaves both parties holding their sixteenth-century confessions while announcing that the condemnations no longer apply has, in their judgment, treated the article as negotiable.

Catholic Critics

Catholic criticism ran the other way. Some theologians argued that the Declaration's language on faith and on the certainty of salvation conceded ground that Trent had defended, and that ordinary readers would draw the conclusion, which the text does not state, that Trent had been set aside. The best answer to that worry is the one the Official Common Statement gives in writing: the canons of Trent stand, and the judgment made in 1999 is that the Lutheran teaching described in the Declaration is not their object. For the wider Catholic framework for engaging other Christians, see our guide to Catholic ecumenism.

Positions in this section are attributed to the bodies and authors that published them. The characterisations of the International Lutheran Council and of the Independent Evangelical Lutheran Church describe their published refusals of the Declaration and do not imply any statement about individual members.

11. Methodists, Reformed and Anglicans

The Joint Declaration began as a bilateral text and has since been joined by other Christian world communions. Each association is an act by which a third body states that the consensus described in the Declaration is in accord with its own teaching, and none of them makes the joining body a signatory of the original 1999 instrument.

The World Methodist Council, 2006

On 23 July 2006, at its conference in Seoul, the World Methodist Council adopted a Methodist Statement of Association with the Joint Declaration, affirming that the Council's member churches share the consensus in basic truths that the Declaration sets out. The act was signed with representatives of the Catholic Church and of the Lutheran World Federation present, and it was accompanied by a Methodist statement explaining how Wesleyan teaching on grace, faith and holiness stands in relation to the text. Methodism came into this discussion with its own vocabulary of prevenient grace, justifying grace and sanctifying grace, and John Wesley's insistence that faith working by love issues in holiness of heart and life made the association a natural one. For Methodist teaching in its own terms, see our guide to Methodism.

The World Communion of Reformed Churches, 2017

On 5 July 2017, in Wittenberg, the World Communion of Reformed Churches associated itself with the Joint Declaration during the year of the five hundredth anniversary of the Reformation. The Reformed tradition had its own history with the doctrine, since Calvin's account of justification is distinct from Luther's in emphasis while agreeing on the exclusion of merit from the ground of acceptance. The Reformed association was accompanied by a statement setting out the Reformed contribution, particularly on the connection between justification and justice. For the Reformed position, see our guide to Calvinism.

The Anglican Communion, 2016

The Anglican Consultative Council, meeting in Lusaka in 2016, welcomed and affirmed the substance of the Joint Declaration on behalf of the Anglican Communion. Anglicans came to it by a different route, through Article XI of the Thirty-Nine Articles on justification by faith and through the Anglican and Catholic agreed statement Salvation and the Church (1987), produced by the second Anglican and Roman Catholic International Commission. For Anglican teaching, see our guide to Anglicanism.

Dates and wording of the three associations follow the statements published by the World Methodist Council (2006), the World Communion of Reformed Churches (2017) and the Anglican Consultative Council (Resolution of ACC-16, Lusaka, 2016), together with the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity's own record of them.

12. What the Declaration Did Not Do

Overclaiming is the standard error with this text, and it comes from both directions. Enthusiasts report that the Reformation is over. Opponents report that Rome capitulated. Here is the list of things the Joint Declaration leaves exactly where it found them.

• It did not establish communion. Catholics and Lutherans are not in eucharistic communion, and the Declaration does not propose that they should be on the strength of this agreement.
• It did not resolve the question of ministry. The Catholic Church does not recognise Lutheran ordinations as conferring the priesthood in apostolic succession, and the Declaration does not touch the question. See our guide to the Catholic priesthood.
• It did not settle the Eucharist. The Real Presence, the sacrificial character of the Mass and the number of the sacraments are untouched by it. See our guide to the Eucharist.
• It did not settle authority. Paragraph 43 names ecclesial authority and church unity as questions still needing clarification, which leaves the teaching office of the Church and the office of the Bishop of Rome exactly where the sixteenth century left them. See our guides to Sacred Tradition and to the papacy.
• It did not repeal any dogma. Trent's canons and the Lutheran Confessions are both still in force for their respective communions.
• It did not bind every Lutheran. Church bodies outside the Lutheran World Federation are not party to it, as section 10 sets out.
• It did not settle purgatory, indulgences or the invocation of saints. Those follow from the doctrine of justification in Catholic teaching and were not on the table. See our guides to purgatory and to the saints.

A short comparison may help fix the shape of the thing.

13. Did Catholics and Lutherans Agree? A Direct Answer

Yes, on the central point, and within limits both sides stated in writing. Catholics and Lutherans confessed together in 1999 that sinners are accepted by God through grace alone, in faith in Christ's saving work, apart from any merit of their own, and that the Holy Spirit renews the heart of the one accepted and calls him to good works. Both then declared that the condemnations their sixteenth-century documents pronounced on this doctrine do not strike the other side's teaching as presented in the Declaration. That is a genuine agreement and it took thirty years of work to reach.

The limits are equally real. Differences in language, in theological framework and in emphasis remain on all seven of the disputed points. The two communions are not in communion. Trent stands and the Book of Concord stands. A substantial body of confessional Lutherans rejects the whole result. The best short description of what happened in Augsburg is that two communions stopped condemning each other over one doctrine, having satisfied themselves that they were no longer condemning what the other actually holds.

What This Means for an Ordinary Catholic

Three things follow for practice. Speak accurately about Lutherans, which means learning the Augsburg Confession from Lutherans before answering it. Recognise that a Lutheran neighbour who says he is saved by grace through faith is saying something the Catholic Church confesses with him, in a joint text its own dicastery signed. Hold the Catholic doctrine whole, including baptism, the sacrament of penance, the reality of merit under grace and the interior renewal that Trent defined, because the Declaration presupposes all of it. For the Catholic and Protestant comparison at large, see our guide to Catholic and Protestant differences, and for the history that produced the split, our guide to the Reformation and to Lutheranism.

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