They that have done good … this is the catholic faith

The Text

The creed ends where it began: with salvation at stake and the catholic faith named as its condition. Verse 42 delivers the universal judgment in its starkest form — those who have done good to eternal life, those who have done evil to eternal fire. Verse 43 closes the ring: this is the catholic faith, which unless one believe faithfully and firmly, he cannot be saved. The phrase Haec est fides catholica deliberately rings the Fides autem catholica haec est of verse 3, and salvus esse non poterit answers the absque dubio in aeternum peribit of verse 2. The whole document is a ring: warning, Trinity, hinge, Incarnation, narrative, warning. It hands the reader back to its own first word, now understood.

Two hard things converge in these two verses, and an honest annotation must take both. First: a creed whose tradition confesses justification by faith ends on those who have done good — the works-judgment language at its sharpest, and (to Reformation ears) its most alarming. Second: the perdition formula, mild or absent through the creed’s whole interior, returns here with full force — eternal fire, cannot be saved — exactly as it stood at verse 2. This is the clause, with the opening one, for which John Wesley struck the entire creed from American Methodism. So this last entry must do three things at once: resolve the faith-and-works tension the previous clause deliberately deferred; read the final perdition clause in the light of the whole creed’s structure; and bring the long arc of this commentary full circle — back to [[athanasian-creed/whoever-wishes-to-be-saved]], where it began.

Translation Notes

qui bona egerunt … qui vero mala — “those who have done good … but those [who have done] evil.” This is not the creed’s own formulation; it is Scripture, nearly verbatim. Matthew 25:46 in the Vulgate: ibunt hi in supplicium aeternum, iusti autem in vitam aeternam; John 5:29: qui bona fecerunt, in resurrectionem vitae; qui vero mala egerunt, in resurrectionem iudicii. The creed is quoting the dominical judgment-saying. Whatever one makes of “judgment according to works,” the words are Christ’s before they are the creed’s; the perfect tense egerunt points to the life as actually lived, the deeds done in the body.

ignem aeternum — “eternal fire.” Matthew 25:41. The perdition image, restored. Through the creed’s interior the warnings were gentle — let him be thus minded (verse 28), it is necessary … believe faithfully (verse 29), neither with a perdition clause. Here it returns: fire.

Haec est fides catholica — “this is the catholic faith.” The closing inclusio. Verse 3 had opened the body of the creed with Fides autem catholica haec est. Verse 43 closes it with the same words inverted. The creed names itself at its start and its end; everything between is the content, and the form is a deliberate ring. The document does not trail off into a list; it closes a circle and sets the reader back at the beginning, now equipped to re-read it.

quam nisi quisque fideliter firmiterque crediderit, salvus esse non poterit — “which unless each one shall have believed faithfully and firmly, he cannot be saved.” The doubled adverb is not filler: fideliter (with fidelity, trustfully) firmiterque (steadfastly, with constancy). The faith required is both trust and endurance. And salvus esse non poterit — “cannot be saved” — is the perdition formula returned to answer verse 2’s absque dubio in aeternum peribit. The frame is now closed on both sides by the gravest language; the interior was mild. The creed’s severity is its frame, not its substance evenly distributed — a structural fact that bears directly on how the clause should be read (see Interpretation, Pastoral Use, and [[athanasian-creed/whoever-wishes-to-be-saved]]).

Historical Context

The dominical source. The deepest historical point about verse 42 is that it is not the creed editorializing; it is Matthew 25:31–46 and John 5:28–29 brought into the symbol. The Western church before the Reformation read this without strain: Augustine — final judgment secundum opera, justification by grace, the judged good works being themselves God’s gifts (“when God crowns our merits, he crowns nothing other than his own gifts,” Letter 194; On Grace and Free Will); Aquinas — merit always within the economy of grace (Summa I-II qq. 109–114). The creed’s close is standard catholic soteriology, not Pelagianism: judged according to works, saved by grace, the works themselves grace-wrought.

The Reformation flashpoint. What was unstrained for Augustine became a fault line in the sixteenth century. Qui bona egerunt … ibunt in vitam aeternam, read in isolation, sounds like works as the ground of salvation. The careful Protestant scholastic answer was the formula judged according to, but not on account of, works: works are the necessary fruit and the public evidence of justifying faith, never its meritorious cause (Westminster Confession 11, 16; Augsburg Confession IV–VI; James 2 held with Romans 4). The modern resolution is the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church, 1999; affirmed by the World Methodist Council in 2006): justification by grace through faith, with the renewed life and its works as faith’s fruit and the criterion of judgment, not its cause. The clause that divided the West has become a place of convergence.

The comminatory frame and the Victorian storm. Verses 1–2 and 42–43 — the two perdition clauses — were the lightning rods of the nineteenth-century Athanasian Creed controversy; the interior seams were not. The 1873 Synodical Declaration of Canterbury ruled that the warnings are “a solemn warning against the rejection of the Catholic Faith” and that the church “doth not herein pronounce judgment on particular persons.” J. N. D. Kelly’s standard study reads the creed as a chanted catechetical psalmus whose warnings frame the instruction; the genre is doxological-pedagogical, not juridical. The full historical and interpretive dossier on the comminatory clauses is at [[athanasian-creed/whoever-wishes-to-be-saved]]; this verse is its closing bracket.

The ring. Haec est fides catholica / Fides autem catholica haec est is deliberate ring composition. The creed is an artful whole — a Gallic psalm of the Office, c. 500 — not a checklist; it ends by returning the reader to its beginning. That structure is itself an interpretive datum: the document is meant to be re-entered and re-prayed, not filed.

Lines of Interpretation

Two disputed questions converge: the relation of judgment according to works to salvation by faith, and the force of the final perdition clause (the climax of the comminatory question traced from [[athanasian-creed/whoever-wishes-to-be-saved]]).

Patristic

Tradition: Augustine, Enchiridion, On Grace and Free Will, Letter 194

Augustine holds secundum opera judgment and sola gratia salvation together without tension: the good works the judge reads are themselves the fruit of grace — “God crowns his own gifts.” The perdition language he takes with full seriousness and without a roster of the lost.

Strengths

• Dissolves the faith/works dilemma at its root: the judged works are grace’s fruit, so the judgment is grace’s vindication, not its rival
• Holds the warning’s gravity without claiming to read the register of the saved

Weaknesses

• “Crowns his own gifts” can be heard as a verbal solvent rather than an account, if not carefully unfolded
• The seriousness of ignem aeternum still presses pastorally, which Augustine does not soften

Scholastic

Tradition: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II qq. 109–114 (grace and merit)

Aquinas distinguishes meritum de congruo and de condigno, all strictly within grace: no work merits the first grace; grace-wrought works are truly, by God’s covenant, the matter of the judgment. Qui bona egerunt is read inside the order of grace, never against it.

Strengths

• The most precise statement of how works can be judged without being the ground — merit is itself a gift’s operation
• Keeps the judgment real (works genuinely count) and grace primary (they count because God first gave them)

Weaknesses

• The merit vocabulary, detached from its grace-frame, was exactly what fed the Reformation rupture
• Technical to the point of needing the very translation the pew rarely receives

Lutheran and Roman Catholic — the Joint Declaration

Tradition: The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (1999); World Methodist Council affirmation (2006)

The signatory communions jointly affirm: sinners are justified by grace through faith; the justified are renewed and do good works, which are the fruit of justification and the criterion (not the cause) of the judgment. Verse 42’s qui bona egerunt and verse 43’s fideliter crediderit are thereby read as fruit and root, not rivals.

Strengths

• Dissolves precisely the false either/or the verse seems to pose, and does so on a signed, ecumenical basis
• Reads verses 42 and 43 together as the creed sets them: believe faithfully (root), having done good (fruit)

Weaknesses

• Not universally received (some confessional bodies dissent), so it eases rather than ends the dispute
• It resolves the faith/works question; it does not by itself resolve the perdition-frame question, which is distinct

Reformed

Tradition: Calvin, Institutes III.11, 14, 18; Westminster Confession 11, 16

Justified by faith alone; judged according to works as evidence. Calvin: works are the “fruits and signs” by which faith is known and the judgment proceeds, never the price. The perdition clause is read (as at [[athanasian-creed/whoever-wishes-to-be-saved]]) as the objective truth that there is no salvation apart from the true God truly confessed.

Strengths

• Keeps the sola fide unambiguous while taking the works-judgment seriously as evidential
• The “fruits and signs” formula is exactly calibrated to the verse’s juxtaposition of crediderit and bona egerunt

Weaknesses

• Tends to relocate the perdition clause’s force into the objective/decretal, blunting its catechetical bite
• The evidential reading, loosely held, can drift toward an antinomianism the verse forbids

Anglican

Tradition: the 1873 Synodical Declaration; the 1928/1979 quarantine

Anglicanism argued these very clauses in public and ruled them a warning against rejecting the faith, not a verdict on persons — then made the creed optional and finally moved it to “Historical Documents.”

Strengths

• A documented, honest metabolizing of the hardest clauses, reading them by genre and intent
• The Declaration’s distinction (warning against rejection, not judgment on persons) fits the creed’s own framing structure

Weaknesses

• Open to the charge of saving the clause by no longer letting it say what it says (see [[athanasian-creed/whoever-wishes-to-be-saved]])
• The quarantine resolves by attrition, not by judgment — the church neither confessing nor disowning it

Modern / Ecumenical

Tradition: Kelly’s genre analysis; the universalism debate; the Joint Declaration legacy

The modern consensus reads the comminatory clauses as the church’s solemn testimony that the faith is not optional — not a divine roster — and reads qui bona egerunt through the Joint Declaration’s convergence. Against universalist pressure on one side and a merciless certainty on the other, the verse is heard as: the gospel has content and the life it produces is real, and indifference to either is not safe.

Strengths

• Lets the verse say something true and grave — faith and its fruit matter ultimately — without a pastoral cruelty the creed’s own structure does not require
• Integrates the faith/works convergence with the warning-clause hermeneutic into one coherent reading

Weaknesses

• “Warns against rejection, not persons” is a defensible reading, not a neutral one; ignem aeternum still says what it says
• Over-qualified, the clause warns no one of anything — the opposite failure, which the verse’s plain gravity resists

Wesleyan Voice

Here the long arc closes. This clause, with the opening one, is why John Wesley struck the Athanasian Creed from The Sunday Service of the Methodists in North America (1784). The first annotation in this series ([[athanasian-creed/whoever-wishes-to-be-saved]]) set out the deletion; the last must complete the account, because the creed’s own structure has, by now, shown exactly what Wesley cut and what he kept.

He kept the doctrine — all of it. The Methodist Articles of Religion I–IV are the substance of the entire creed: the Trinity, the two natures, the one Christ, the deity of the Spirit. He kept the works-judgment seriousness: Sermon 15, The Great Assize, is a sustained exposition of exactly qui bona egerunt … reddituri rationem, and the Wesleyan synthesis is precisely the resolution this verse requires — justified by faith alone, judged finally according to the works that living faith inevitably produces, “faith working by love” (Sermon 5, Justification by Faith; Sermon 43, The Scripture Way of Salvation). Wesley holds, without strain, exactly what verses 42 and 43 juxtapose: believe faithfully (the root) and done good (the fruit). The Joint Declaration’s convergence, which the World Methodist Council formally affirmed in 2006, is Wesley’s own instinct ratified ecumenically. He even kept the worship-frame: the whole of Charles Wesley’s Hymns on the Trinity is this creed adored rather than recited.

What he would not transmit was salvus esse non poterit / in ignem aeternum as a clause the gathered church recites by formula over the unconverted. Wesley’s gospel of universal prevenient grace, his “Catholic Spirit” (Sermon 39), his lifelong refusal to unchurch those who held the essentials while differing in opinions — none of it could speak the absque dubio peribit frame in the church’s own liturgical voice. And the creed’s structure, traced clause by clause through this commentary, vindicates the precision of his edit. The perdition language is the frame (verses 1–2, 42–43); the interior seams were mild (verses 28, 29). Wesley did not cut the faith, the worship, or even the gravity of the judgment. He cut the frame — the church damning by formula — and kept everything the frame enclosed. That is not doctrinal minimalism; it is a discriminating theological act, and the empty place in the Methodist books where this creed would stand is itself a Methodist confession: we hold every doctrine of this creed, and we will not damn by clause.

Charles Wesley wrote the Wesleyan ending to the creed’s ending. The Quicumque closes in fire and “cannot be saved”; Charles closes every judgment hymn in mercy. “Lo! he comes with clouds descending” takes the judgment with total seriousness — “deeply wailing, shall the true Messiah see” — and then turns, in its last breath, not to terror but to longing: “O come quickly! … Everlasting God, come down.” That is the Wesleyan reading of verse 42 in a single hymnic move: the judgment is real, and the church’s last word about it is not peribit but come.

Hymnody

There is no hymn on “everlasting fire” — you cannot sing a damnatory clause, just as you could not sing the one that opened the creed ([[athanasian-creed/whoever-wishes-to-be-saved]]). What the church sings instead, at exactly this point, is the judgment taken seriously and ended in mercy, and that pairing is itself the verse’s right interpretation.

“Lo! he comes with clouds descending” (Charles Wesley) holds both: the wailing and the come quickly. “Rejoice, the Lord is King” turns the Judge into the hope — “rejoice in glorious hope! / Jesus the Judge shall come” — the same Judge, now sung as the church’s longing, not its dread. “Love divine, all loves excelling” sings the destination of qui bona egerunt not as wages earned but as grace completed: “changed from glory into glory … lost in wonder, love, and praise.” “And can it be”: “no condemnation now I dread.”

And Haec est fides catholica — “this is the catholic faith” — has, in the end, the largest hymnody of all, because the catholic faith sung is the whole Trinitarian and Incarnational repertoire this commentary has been tracing: every Gloria, every “Holy, Holy, Holy,” every Christmas and Easter and Ascension hymn. The creed ends in a sentence about perishing. The church does not end there. She ends, as she always has, in the doxology — which is the bracket back to [[athanasian-creed/the-trinity-to-be-worshipped]] and the truest gloss on this verse the church possesses: the catholic faith is, finally, not a threat survived but a God worshipped.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

This is the last clause of the creed and the place to gather everything.

Resolve the faith/works fear, and let it cut both ways. The anxious believer hears “those who have done good shall go into life everlasting” and concludes the verdict must be earned, and despairs. Tell them plainly what Augustine, the Joint Declaration, and Wesley all say: the works the Judge reads are the fruit of living faith, not its root. You are not asked to earn the verdict; you are asked to have the faith that bears the fruit the verdict reads — “faith working by love.” That is liberation. But the same verse turns the other way for the comfortable believer who has reduced grace to a transaction that costs and changes nothing: the judgment is real, and it is according to works, and a faith that has produced no life is not the fides the creed means by fideliter firmiterque crediderit. The verse comforts the striving and unsettles the complacent — the exact Wesleyan double edge, and the pastor should preach both, not one.

Read the fire by the whole creed, honestly. Do not explain ignem aeternum away; the creed says what it says, and intellectual honesty (a throughline of this whole commentary) forbids pretending otherwise. But do read it as the creed’s own structure asks. The perdition language frames the document — it opens and closes it — while the long interior, the actual teaching, ran mild (verses 28, 29). The 1873 church read the warnings as a solemn caution against rejecting the faith, not a roster of the damned the church is competent to publish, and the genre supports that reading. And then say the Methodist thing without flinching: this clause is why our tradition does not recite this creed — and our not reciting it is not unbelief but a confession. We hold every doctrine the creed teaches. We will not damn by formula. The empty seat where the Quicumque would sit is, for Methodists, a sentence to be read aloud.

Close the ring — and then leave the creed for the doxology. The creed ends where it began: this is the catholic faith. Take the congregation back, in one sentence, across the whole arc this commentary has walked: everything between the two namings of the catholic faith — the Trinity hammered through eleven verses, the two natures fenced with surgical care, the gospel narrated, the judgment named — existed for two ends the creed itself stated. That we may worship (verse 3) and for our salvation (verse 38). Not as a quiz to be passed. Not as a weapon to consign others. The catholic faith is the worship of the triune God who became flesh for us, held whole, lived in love. Name, one last time, the two idols the entire creed has been refusing: the contentless faith that believes nothing and so risks nothing — the warning’s true target, turned inward on a comfortable church — and the merciless certainty that turns the faith into a verdict on other people, which Wesley’s deletion refused. The creed forbids both. And then do the thing the creed’s own last line points past itself toward: the final word of the Athanasian Creed is salvus esse non poterit, “cannot be saved” — but the final word of the church’s actual life is not that. It is the Gloria after the psalm, the bread in the open hand, the hymn that ends “lost in wonder, love, and praise,” the Amen of world without end. The creed was always the fence. Send the people, as the creed’s own first and last word about worship intends, to the field.

Further Reading

• Matthew 25:31–46 — the judgment of the nations (the verse’s direct source)
• John 5:28–29 — those who have done good … those who have done evil
• Romans 2:6–11; 14:10–12; 2 Corinthians 5:10 — judgment according to works
• Ephesians 2:8–10 — by grace … through faith … created for good works (the resolution in one text)
• James 2:14–26 — faith and its works
• Revelation 20:12–13; 22:11–15 — judged by what was done
• Augustine, Enchiridion; On Grace and Free Will; Letter 194 (“God crowns his own gifts”)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II qq. 109–114 (grace and merit)
• The Council of Trent, Decree on Justification; the Westminster Confession 11, 16; the Augsburg Confession IV–VI
• The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (LWF/RC, 1999; World Methodist Council affirmation, 2006)
• Convocation of Canterbury, the Synodical Declaration on the Athanasian Creed (1873)
• J. N. D. Kelly, The Athanasian Creed (Black, 1964)
• John Wesley, Standard Sermons, Sermon 5 (“Justification by Faith”), Sermon 15 (“The Great Assize”), Sermon 39 (“Catholic Spirit”), Sermon 43 (“The Scripture Way of Salvation”)
• Charles Wesley, “Lo! he comes with clouds descending”; “Love divine, all loves excelling”
• The opening warning clause, for the ring: [[athanasian-creed/whoever-wishes-to-be-saved]]