[HarleyD]

I would say your list is a tad unfair to Luther:

1) That only a subset of the Christian written tradition is determinative in Christian life;

The Catholic Church does not accept all the writings of the early church fathers or for that matter all the writings of fathers throughout the ages. Only a small subset of Christian writing ever makes it into Catholic doctrines picked and chosen by a few select people. Luther espounded nothing more than typical practice.

2) That man is capable of understanding that subset outside of the Tradition as a whole, which subsists in the Church;

The Church has erred. Selling indulgences was a "tradition" outside the Church yet the Church for a while accepted the practice.

3) That man's faith is a binary condition that once obtained does not grow or wane

You'd be hard press to find Calvin (and I suspect Luther) making this claim. This is not in any confession that I know of. Calvin and Luther simply believed that man's faith could not wane to a point of falling away completely from Christ. This is consistent with 1 John 5:18.

4) That grace cannot transform man.

Again nonsense. Calvin and Luther believed as this article states that it is God's grace alone that transforms man. The Roman Catholics, as argued by Erasmus and many of the Catholic here, believe that man must "cooperate" with God by freely accepting God's gift. This is Greek thought and anthropocentric in nature.

It is ONLY God grace that transforms man. It is ONLY God birthing us into a new spirit that saves us. We are born again because of God's grace-not because of anything we've done including cooperating. God doesn't ask us if we want to be born. God doesn't ask us if we want to be born again.

The cardinal error actually rest with the Cardinals.

[annalex]

1) The subset of Christian written tradition is Luther's reduced Old Testament canon. Moreover, even when formally accepting the New Testament canon, Luther ridiculed the Letter of James and argued against retaining some others, I forget which. This engendered selective reading of even the New Testament. The protestants rarely if ever rely on James for their instruction, ignore or spin away Christ's teaching on charity, offer fantastic interpretations of the parables, or the clear teaching on judgement based on works in the Apocalypse. 90% of Protestant argumentation from scripture revolves around isolated verses from Paul taken out of their historical, and often literal context.

The only Church Father studied with any consistency is St. Augustine, and he is taken in isolation from the other patristic literature, and his own clarifications regarding the free will are ignored. This is not the patristic approach. Contrary to Luther, the Church teaches that individual fathers erred here and there, and this is why they are not in the canon. Yet, the consensus of the Church Fathers is the sacred written tradition.

2) Sola scriptura is Luther's doctrine, at it means exatly what I say: that man is capable of understanding Luther's reduced canon outside of the entire Tradition, written and unwritten, that lives in the Church. While he was correct in criticizing indulgencies, they were not a part of the Sacred Tradition. Sola scriptura and the sale of indulgences does not justify sola scriptura.

3) Let me correct my formulation: the third error is that man's faith is a binary condition that once obtained does not alter the final salvation of the soul.

4) The distinction I draw is between grace that substantially and often gradually transforms man onto holiness, and Luther's "grace" that covers up depravity without actually removing it. The latter is an error. The former is consistent with the Tradition, written and unwritten.