I have had at least 50 telephone conversations with a guy named Matt Slick over the years. Matt runs an organization which portrays itself as a Christian apologetics ministry. It has its own website and Matt has his own radio show. In addition to his radio and internet ministry he often debates people and leads Bible studies. Apologetics is his career and has been his sole source of income for decades. 

Matt is a Calvinist. He has a number of regular callers on his show and in those calls they basically chit-chat about shared beliefs and understandings. Matt is always calm as a kitten during those discussions, showing patience and friendliness with the caller and behaving quite graciously. 

His demeanor usually changes as soon as he receives a call from someone who has beliefs which are different from his (like me). As soon as he identifies any disagreement he switches into a sort of “attack mode” and becomes confrontational, dismissive, and sometimes he can become pretty agitated and lose his cool. He has gotten better at controlling his emotions over the years, but he can still become quite abrasive with callers with whom he disagrees. It actually adds a little excitement to what often seems like a boring private conversation about nuances in Calvinist beliefs. When he doesn’t have any callers waiting, which is fairly common, he kills time by sharing his opinions about current events and other faiths, including Catholicism. 

I have gotten to know Matt through his radio show because that is where I have called him on numerous occasions over the years. His shows have also been livestreamed on video since about 2019. Prior to 2019, he was prone to outbursts and to hanging up on me whenever he didn’t like my questions or observations. It is only since he started broadcasting via video that his manners have improved. Unfortunately, his theology hasn’t.

Matt frequently posts misinformation about the Catholic faith on his social media pages as well as on his website. Slick is not simply a Calvinist, he is a John Knox style Calvinist with deeply Puritan beliefs. In other words, he is aggressively anti-Catholic. He’s anti-Mormon, anti-Islam, and anti-alotofotherthings too, but his most deeply held belief is kind of a tie between Calvinism and anti-Catholicism. He frequently pauses his show to repeat his belief that Catholicism is not a true faith and that it is a heretical and false belief system which leads its followers to Hell.  

So why would I want to call the guy and discuss Catholicism with him? Do I hope to evangelize him and bring about his conversion? I’ll be honest, I don’t think anything I could ever explain would bring about his conversion. However, I’m not calling to help Matt. To a small degree I’m calling to improve my own skills as an apologist and an evangelist. However, I am primarily calling him to teach his listeners that they are not getting the whole story if their only source of knowledge about Catholicism is the Matt Slick show. 

At one time, I had called him so many times over the course of a year that I was known as “Bob From Nebraska” and some of his other callers would call in to discuss topics I had brought up or statements I had made. While I haven’t always been intellectually persuasive, I have always strived to be very gracious and reasonable, even when he would start yelling and hang up on me. Those were the days before he started streaming videos of his show. Now he is much more polite. But I would see comments and hear calls in which his listeners would mention that I was respectful and polite whenever I called. Even Matt would talk about that on his show after our calls. Others sometimes called him to chastise him for being rude during our conversations. Maybe he realized that hanging up on me was not showing people that he could actually defend his beliefs. I am a strong believer that it isn’t always the content of your message as much as it is the way you deliver it. However, I would always mention my sources, so people could look things up for themselves. My content is never as good as the sources I reference. 

I haven’t called Matt for nearly a year. I often give him time to say a few outlandish things about Catholicism before I call him to discuss a foolish statement he said and has long forgotten. Recently though, he published a short post on “X” which pointed to over a dozen different teachings of Church, claiming that each of the teachings are unbiblical and citing to portions of the Catechism of the Catholic Church for each one. I could go through each claim to show where Matt is mistaken, but that would take a lot of writing and you may not want to read all of it. 

I thought I would pick just one of them and hopefully demonstrate how a person can correct an anti-Catholic who comes to a topic with an abundance of bias and more than a little pride. So, I picked his criticism of the Catholic teaching on merit. This is something even most Catholics do not talk about around the water cooler, so it should be a nice exercise for any of us who have not studied theology in a reputable Catholic seminary. 

Matt wrote that he denies the Catholic teaching that grace can be merited. He cites CCC 2010 and 2027 as the Church’s teaching on merit. But that is all he wrote in his short post, which is an obvious effort to provoke a Catholic to call his show and confront him on his terms, on his turf, and before his very sympathetic audience. I may have to oblige soon. But for now, this article will have to do. 

His conclusion shows his (likely intentional) logical fallacy and his misunderstanding. As with his other efforts, he fails to simply point to the entire section on the issue, so it is not considered in its proper context. 

The very brief summary of the Church’s teaching is included in the section on grace and justification (1987 through 2029). There is a lot of the Church’s teaching on merit which needs to be understood in the light of grace and justification. The Catechism is not intended to be an exhaustive teaching, only an explanation of the teaching in order to allow the reader to go in more depth by reading and researching all the footnotes and the sources in the documents in the footnotes. 

Instead of just pointing to one or two isolated paragraphs and claiming that a Church teaching is wrong, which is basically what Matt does on all Catholic teachings, it is appropriate to look at much more than just a paragraph. This allows for perspective and understanding. There are of course volumes of writings on grace and justification, and the Catechism only provides the “nutshell” explanation, though the “nutshell” is very thorough. One can always follow all the footnotes and dig much deeper, but most of us have jobs and families which need our attention. Nonetheless, a reading of a mere 9 pages of the Catechism will provide you with an impressive knowledge of the Church’s full teaching on grace, justification, and merit. I highly recommend it. 

Years ago, I heard Matt talking about his desire to talk with a Catholic about merit, so I called his show. We spent four full days in one week talking about the Church teaching on merit. We had shorter conversations the following week. In Matt’s mind, merit is something you have earned, so it is just another way of claiming that Catholics believe we have to earn our way to Heaven by performing continual good works. This is a heresy called Pelagianism which the Catholic Church defined and corrected in the 4^th-century. Therefore, it is fairly obvious that the Church does not teach that we can earn our salvation by performing good works, right? Well, not in Matt’s mind. Nonetheless, he patiently discussed the Catholic teaching on merit with me for at least four hours over about six days on live radio. At the time, his patience with any Catholic caller was very rare. I later found out that he thought I was a priest, as did many of his listeners, so that may have accounted for his willingness to listen, as he may have thought I was an “official” representative of the Church. In reality, each of us are official representatives of the Church when we publicly discuss the faith with others, but for someone like Matt, being on the payroll is more important that just being a faithful practitioner of the faith. Be that as it may, in a subsequent conversation with him weeks later, he asked me if I was a priest and I burst his bubble by explaining that I wasn’t. Everything we discussed for those long calls came from the Scripture, the Catechism, the early Church Fathers, and Church Council documents. Within the Church’s teaching on grace and justification, the nutshell of the Catechism’s nutshell on merit is this: 

1. Christ merited justification for us by his passion, death, and resurrection (1992). Citing to the Council of Trent, the Catechism defines justification as not only the remission of sins, but also the sanctification and renewal of the interior man (1989).
2. Justification establishes cooperation between God’s grace and man’s freedom (1993).
3. The grace of God is the source of our justification. And grace is defined as “favor” and the “free and undeserved help” God gives us so we can participate in the life of God. 
4. The supernatural gift of grace is sanctifying, and is given to us through baptism (1996, 1997, and 1999).
   1. The Catechism also talks about the nuanced differences between habitual grace, actual graces, special graces (charisms), and sacramental graces, but I won’t discuss those for purposes of this piece.
5. Through grace, the Holy spirit gives us each certain gifts and charisms which allow us to collaborate with God in the salvation of others and in the growth of the Church (CCC 2003). This a pretty important paragraph for this particular discussion.
6. In CCC 2006 we finally get to merit, defined as the recompense owed by a community or a society for the action of one of its members. The recompense (reward or repayment) is beneficial or harmful, depending on the member’s action. Good things come to the faithful, painful things come to the unfaithful. However, the reward or payment is not the satisfaction of a debt owed to us, it is still a free gift from God. 
7. In CCC 2007 the Church clearly declares that we have no strict “right” to merit.

Now we are approaching the paragraph Matt cited and we are better positioned to understand it because we have followed the Church’s discussion for numerous prior paragraphs. 

• “The merit of man before God… arises from the fact that God has freely chosen to associate man with the work of his grace… so that the merit of good works is to be attributed in the first place to the grace of God, then to the faithful.” (CCC 2008)
• Because of God’s divine justice, He bestows merit on us when we collaborate with him in the work of His grace on earth (CCC 2009). Because God is just, we can be confident that we receive merit for the good works we do in His name and by His grace. Here, the Catechism cites to St. Augustine’s Sermon 298 in which St. Augustine preached about merit as a gift from God in about the year 425 AD:

“Therefore, you kept the faith through the mercy of God, not through your own strength. For the rest, therefore, the crown of righteousness is laid up for you, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to you on that day. He will reward according to merits, therefore he is a righteous judge. But even here, let not your neck be raised, for your merits are his gifts.”

If you recall, Matt cited paragraph 2010 as the erroneous teaching that “that grace can be merited”. By now, I think you understand that the Church does not teach that “grace can be merited” on your own. In fact, 2010 explicitly states that “no one can merit the initial grace of forgiveness and justification”. The nuance missed or ignored by Matt is that after our receipt of the free gift of sanctifying grace in baptism, we can merit additional grace, : “additional” being the key word, hence the explanation of the types of merit (strict, condign, and congruent) below. 

There is more to know about merit. Matt and I discussed this at length on his show many years ago. Unfortunately, he apparently did not understand that, nor has he understood the Catechism’s nutshell version. But for a very short recap of “the rest of the story”, I’ll summarize it here. There are three kinds of merit, condign, congruous, and strict. 

1. Condign merit is the merit God has explicitly promised such as the reward for works of mercy in God’s name (in collaboration with His grace), as set forth in Divine Revelations such as Matthew 20:1-16, Romans 2:6-7, Revelation 22:12, 2 Timothy 4:7-8, and James 1:12. 
2. Congruent merit comes from doing a good work in God’s name and by His grace which is not explicitly set forth in Divine Revelation but which is consistent with it in every way such as prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.
3. Strict merit is only when the action equals the value of the reward received. This is something only God can do, and has only happened once since the creation of man: Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection, where he merited our justification. No person, no matter how saintly, can engage in an action which equals the value of their own salvation, much less the salvation of every soul ever created by God.  

God grants us sanctifying grace in baptism and then we, by this grace, are moved to collaborate with God in serving Him, and in that process, we can receive additional grace. Apart from God, we cannot merit any grace, before or after baptism. In short, Matt is mistaken, and part of his misunderstanding is likely intentional while some of it is due to his unconscious bias. Matt thinks the Church teaches that a person can achieve “strict merit”, and that is simply not the teaching of the Church. I’ll have to call him soon to help his listeners see that there is much more to the Church’s teaching than Matt wants