184. You can clearly tell that a trinity of gods dwells in the minds of Christians - although out of shame they would never say so - by the way many of them ingeniously demonstrate that three are one and one is three. They use various phenomena in plane geometry, solid geometry, arithmetic, and physics, as well as folding pieces of clothing and pieces of paper. Like a bunch of clowns, they horse around with the divine Trinity.

Their clowning is like people's eyesight when they have a fever: they see one object, be it a person, a table, or a candle, as three objects, or three objects as one. It is like the trick people play by softening wax in their fingers and pressing it into different shapes. First they make a three-sided shape to show the trinity; then they make a ball to show the unity, and they say, "Isn't the substance one and the same?"

Truly, though, the divine Trinity is like the pearl of great price [Matthew 13:46]. Dividing the Trinity into persons is like cutting a pearl into three parts: it completely destroys the pearl.

640. The Merit and Justice of Christ Cannot Be Assigned to Anyone Else

To recognize that the merit and justice of Jesus Christ cannot be assigned to anyone else, it is necessary to know what his merit and his justice are. The merit of our Lord and Savior is redemption. For the nature of redemption, see the material in the relevant chapter above, 114-133. There you will see that redemption was a matter of gaining control of the hells and restructuring the heavens, and afterward establishing a church. Therefore redemption was something only the Divine could bring about. That material also shows that through his acts of redemption the Lord took on the power to regenerate and save people who believe in him and who do what he commands. Without this redemption no flesh could have been saved [Matthew 24:22].

Since redemption was something only the Divine could bring about and was the work of the Lord alone, and since that redemption is his merit, it follows that that merit is no more applicable or attributable or assignable to anyone else than the functions of creating and preserving the universe. Redemption was in fact a kind of re-creation of the angelic heaven and also of the church.

[2] The church of today, however, attributes that merit of the Lord the Redeemer to people who acquire faith by grace, as is clear from its teachings. This idea is central. The leaders of that church and also their followers, both in the Roman Catholic church and in the Protestant churches, say that through the assignment of Christ's merit, people who acquire faith are not only considered to be just and holy but actually are just and holy. Their sins are not sins before God, because those sins have been forgiven and they themselves have been justified, meaning reconciled, made new, regenerated, sanctified, and assigned to heaven.

From the Council of Trent, the Augsburg Confession, and the commentaries on them that have been widely accepted, it is abundantly clear that the entire Christian church today teaches this doctrine.

[3] The claim that all these benefits are transferred into that faith leads directly to the notion that possessing that faith is the same as having the Lord's own merit and justice. Therefore one who possesses that faith is Christ in an alternate form. After all, they say Christ himself is justice, and that faith is justice, and the assigning of merit, by which they mean its attribution or application, causes us not merely to be considered just and holy but actually to be just and holy. To this assigning, attributing, and applying of merit, just add an actual transfer of it and you too will be a pope, a vicar of Christ!