[Dominick]

And here's the Acid Test -- let's hold you to the Teachings of your own church.

Stipulating in advance that the ability to perform Good Works is granted by the grace of God, DO YOU AFFIRM, OR DENY, that "eternal life is the reward given by God for good works and merits"?
Deny this, and you deny the teachings of the Vatican itself. Affirm this, and you prove what I have said all along.

This isn't the teaching of the Church, and you are full of beans.

I hold to what the Church teaches, and this isn't what the Church teaches. You are again using a straw man, and misusing emphasis. The first is a fault of logic, the second is the fault of your education in netiquette.

Your church only anathematized everyone who wasn't Roman Catholic therein, and considered Trent so important she went 300 years without holding another Council thereafter.

You can't call anathema on someone outside the Church. You misunderstand the meaning of anathema. "Let him be anathema" means you are subject to being put outside the Church, if you are already outside the house, how can you be more outside?

Calling me a hack, a fraud, and misrepresenting the Church is all you seem to be able to do.

From the CCC:
2009 Filial adoption, in making us partakers by grace in the divine nature, can bestow true merit on us as a result of God's gratuitous justice. This is our right by grace, the full right of love, making us "co-heirs" with Christ and worthy of obtaining "the promised inheritance of eternal life." The merits of our good works are gifts of the divine goodness. "Grace has gone before us; now we are given what is due. . . . Our merits are God's gifts."
...
2020 Justification has been merited for us by the Passion of Christ. It is granted us through Baptism. It conforms us to the righteousness of God, who justifies us. It has for its goal the glory of God and of Christ, and the gift of eternal life. It is the most excellent work of God's mercy.
2021 Grace is the help God gives us to respond to our vocation of becoming his adopted sons. It introduces us into the intimacy of the Trinitarian life.
2022 The divine initiative in the work of grace precedes, prepares, and elicits the free response of man. Grace responds to the deepest yearnings of human freedom, calls freedom to cooperate with it, and perfects freedom.
2023 Sanctifying grace is the gratuitous gift of his life that God makes to us; it is infused by the Holy Spirit into the soul to heal it of sin and to sanctify it.
2024 Sanctifying grace makes us "pleasing to God." Charisms, special graces of the Holy Spirit, are oriented to sanctifying grace and are intended for the common good of the Church. God also acts through many actual graces, to be distinguished from habitual grace which is permanent in us.
2025 We can have merit in God's sight only because of God's free plan to associate man with the work of his grace. Merit is to be ascribed in the first place to the grace of God, and secondly to man's collaboration. Man's merit is due to God.


This is the authority of the Church's Doctrines, and they are not what you are proposing they are. Good works are the result of Grace from God, our Good works are because of inspiration.

Framing the discussion as you have been doing is a straw man argument, the positions you assign the Church are not the positions they hold.

[OrthodoxPresbyterian]

Stipulating in advance that the ability to perform Good Works is granted by the grace of God, DO YOU AFFIRM, OR DENY, that "eternal life is the reward given by God for good works and merits"? Deny this, and you deny the teachings of the Vatican itself. Affirm this, and you prove what I have said all along. ~~ This isn't the teaching of the Church, and you are full of beans.

Look, I'm gonna make this real simple.

From the Vatican:

The Catholic Church maintains, moreover, that the good works of the justified are always the fruit of grace. But at the same time, and without in any way diminishing the totally divine initiative, they are also the fruit of man, justified and interiorly transformed. We can therefore say that eternal life is, at one and the same time, grace and the reward given by God for good works and merits.

So here's my question for you:

Stipulating in advance that the ability to perform Good Works is granted by the grace of God, is it True in any sense that "eternal life is the reward given by God for good works and merits"?

Well? True, or False?