Trent's Anathemas, and the Consensus of 1999

The sixteenth-century bodies drew the lines sharply. Calvin, in the Institutes, set out justification as God's free acceptance grounded in an imputed, not an infused, righteousness. The Council of Trent, in its Decree on Justification of 1547, taught justification as a true interior renewal through infused grace, involving faith, hope and charity and capable of increase, and attached canons anathematizing the doctrine of justification by faith alone as the Reformers meant it. For four centuries this stood as a defining and mutually condemning difference.

The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, signed in 1999 by the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church, proposed a "differentiated consensus": a common confession that sinners are justified by grace through faith in Christ, within which the language of imputation and of transformation could be read as complementary rather than contradictory. Critics on both sides have questioned whether the deep difference was resolved or only bracketed. The atlas records the imputed-versus-infused distinction as a genuine and still-argued divide, and the 1999 agreement as the most serious attempt to state what the two sides share.