SPEAKER_00: Seeking to understand Roman Catholicism.
SPEAKER_00: Last week we talked about Eastern Orthodoxy.
SPEAKER_00: The week before that, we did a 2,000 years of church history in 30 minutes.
SPEAKER_00: And by the way, if you missed that, you would find it really helpful to listen to, I think, together with the handout, it's all online, and that's a really important concept.
SPEAKER_00: It's like a big picture for understanding the church as we find it today, and for understanding things like Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism.
SPEAKER_00: Now, why this topic today, Roman Catholicism, why think about this?
SPEAKER_00: Firstly, we are part of the Reformed Church, and in part we are defined against the Roman Church.
SPEAKER_00: And I'll explain why as we go on.
SPEAKER_00: Also, we observe among the Roman Catholic Church evangelical Christians converting to it.
SPEAKER_00: So here the claims of the Roman Church to be the true church, to be the Catholic or universal church.
SPEAKER_00: The claim that they are the one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, like we say in the Creed, and some find that persuasive.
SPEAKER_00: And we thought about some of the reasons why last week, similar sorts of things to Eastern Orthodoxy.
SPEAKER_00: My punch is that for most of us, not all of us, most of us, Eastern Orthodoxy is a little bit more distant, but that Roman Catholicism is probably nearer to home.
SPEAKER_00: I know that many of us here have it in our own background or in our wider family or friends or neighbours, and it's important for us as reformed Christians to understand it.
SPEAKER_00: There are things actually to be on our guard against.
SPEAKER_00: We're to make the most of Bible spirituality, if I can put it like that, and make the most of the reformed tradition of which we are a part.
SPEAKER_00: There is a truth, there is a depth, there is a beauty, there is a rootedness in the reformed faith, and that's actually one of the things that will help to secure us in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: We also obviously want to just engage with everyone in our lives in a way that is wide, faithful, accurate, bold, and that includes uh friends and family who are uh Roman Catholics too.
SPEAKER_00: Now, if you've got a Bible in front of you, please turn to uh the book of Romans or in the New Testament, the very end, please, of Romans chapter 4.
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to read a short scripture.
SPEAKER_00: I will pray for us.
SPEAKER_00: So Romans chapter 4 and verse 25.
SPEAKER_00: Romans 4.
SPEAKER_00: Listen to God's word, verse 25, talking of the Lord Jesus Christ, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.
SPEAKER_00: So let me pray.
SPEAKER_00: Father in heaven, we praise you this morning for our Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, that in him is every spiritual blessing, in him is life and forgiveness and righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you that in union with him we find ourselves in grace because we are joined to the God of grace.
SPEAKER_00: Please, would you help us this morning as we think, as we think about a different way of understanding you and your word and your ways.
SPEAKER_00: We want to be accurate and careful and faithful.
SPEAKER_00: We want to honour Christ, we don't want to be led astray, we want to be a blessing to friends and family who think differently.
SPEAKER_00: So be our helper, we pray, in Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: The great differences between, on the one hand, uh Eastern Orthodox churches and Roman Catholicism and the Reformed churches stem chiefly from disagreements over what is the supreme authority for the church.
SPEAKER_00: That's the first big thing we're going to think about: authority in the Roman Church.
SPEAKER_00: So for the Church of Rome, Scripture and Tradition are of equal authority.
SPEAKER_00: That's not quite the whole story, though.
SPEAKER_00: Scripture and tradition are interpreted authoritatively by the, and here's the technical word, the magisterium, that is the Pope and the bishops in their teaching authority.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, and this is the conclusion that follows from this, supreme authority is therefore given to the church and to its head, the Pope.
SPEAKER_00: Now I hope you can see how that works.
SPEAKER_00: So on the one hand, Scripture and the tradition of the church, they're of equal authority.
SPEAKER_00: In effect, that is not correct.
SPEAKER_00: Actually, tradition and the church rules over and stands over the church, stands over the scriptures.
SPEAKER_00: Now, when we talk about uh the Roman doctrine of tradition, what we're talking about is this.
SPEAKER_00: We're talking about something that has developed over the centuries.
SPEAKER_00: It's the sum total of the Roman Church's teaching, the decisions of major councils, the writings of major theologians, the liturgy of the Roman Church, and also unwritten traditions.
SPEAKER_00: That's all of that together forms the tradition of the Roman Church.
SPEAKER_00: And over time, as the centuries have gone on, divergent ideas have emerged, you know, ideas that have diverged from the teaching of Scripture.
SPEAKER_00: So let me just list a few.
SPEAKER_00: So the cult of Mary.
SPEAKER_00: So Mary is said to be the queen of heaven and the mediatrix of all graces.
SPEAKER_00: And biblically that's idolatrous.
SPEAKER_00: Various other things that have grown up around the cult of Mary, her immaculate conception, her sinlessness, her perpetual virginity, her assumption.
SPEAKER_00: Again, we will find no basis for this in Scripture.
SPEAKER_00: Connected to that, prayers to and through the saints.
SPEAKER_00: You'd have to say, on the one hand, that's uh blasphemous, but on the other, on the other hand, also, as in it, it takes away from our one mediator, the Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we come to the Father.
SPEAKER_00: But it also tells us something about God the Father.
SPEAKER_00: It suggests, doesn't it, that God is distant and so maybe even vengeful, that you need another go-between rather than God the Father, who loves us and who sent his son to adopt us.
SPEAKER_00: Claims about the papacy as being instituted by Christ directly, and that the Roman Church is the one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, and connected to that the Roman doctrine of papal infallibility, on which all of this really rests.
SPEAKER_00: Now, just a little side note, that was only declared to be a dogma, an official binding teaching of the Church in 1870.
SPEAKER_00: It arose back in the late 1200s as a result of an obscure row.
SPEAKER_00: No one had ever really formally claimed that until that point.
SPEAKER_00: In the intervening centuries, even a later pope rejected that doctrine as satanic because, surprise by surprise, an earlier pope had said something he disagreed with.
SPEAKER_00: So it's just worth just putting that in brackets.
SPEAKER_00: It's a hugely significant doctrine, though.
SPEAKER_00: But then also things like penance, come to that later, indulgences, transubstantiation, and the mass, priestcraft, purgatory.
SPEAKER_00: Now the key thing, you will find none of those things in Scripture taught either directly or by good and necessary consequence.
SPEAKER_00: So how do you justify that?
SPEAKER_00: The Bible says this, but we say that.
SPEAKER_00: How do you justify that?
SPEAKER_00: And the answer is well, you have to claim a unique authority for yourself, including the authority to develop new truth.
SPEAKER_00: Now, this idea and other key Roman doctrines were nailed down very sharply at the Council of Trent, 1545 to 1562.
SPEAKER_00: So on this issue, it was said distinctly and definitively: Christ has given the Pope authority over the whole Church of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: He and his bishops are in charge of interpreting both scripture and the tradition, and that includes the ability to develop things or draw things out from it.
SPEAKER_00: One significant name in this respect was Cardinal Henry Newman.
SPEAKER_00: He uh left the Church of England, he became a Roman Catholic, this is 19th century, and he was really key in this idea of doctrinal development.
SPEAKER_00: He came up with this idea of an oak tree.
SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, um doctrines and practices have changed over the centuries, but you know, look at an oak tree, it starts off as an acorn, same thing, but looks pretty different, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_00: One thing evolves into another.
SPEAKER_00: Very influential.
SPEAKER_00: Now, what about the reformed approach to tradition?
SPEAKER_00: It's really important to say that reformed churches, so churches that believe in sola scriptura, scripture alone, do not reject tradition.
SPEAKER_00: We are actually part of a tradition.
SPEAKER_00: We have a great cloud of witnesses who over the centuries have been faithful to the Lord in their lives and in their teaching, and we are part of it.
SPEAKER_00: We have been handed down things like ancient creeds, reformed confessions, the preaching of past centuries.
SPEAKER_00: Some of the work that the church has done over the centuries is what you might call a clarifying work.
SPEAKER_00: The church has reflected on the holy scriptures and done things like produce the Nicene Creed or the Westminster Confession of Faith.
SPEAKER_00: That is not, though, the same as developing doctrines and practices that are flatly contradicting scripture and are found nowhere within it.
SPEAKER_00: But the key thing is when we come to scripture and tradition, you know, the reform insists because the Bible insists that all human authorities are subordinate to scripture.
SPEAKER_00: So they are subordinate, they are lower authorities in the life of the church.
SPEAKER_00: Our supreme authority is sola scriptura, scripture alone.
SPEAKER_00: It rules supreme over all human opinions.
SPEAKER_00: And the charge of the reformers and the reformed tradition is that the Roman Catholic Church has made scripture subject to the authority of man.
SPEAKER_00: And that is something that the Lord Jesus explicitly warns against.
SPEAKER_00: Mark chapter seven and verse seven.
SPEAKER_00: He says of them, in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.
SPEAKER_00: You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.
SPEAKER_00: He said to them, You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition.
SPEAKER_00: It's always been the tendency of the human heart to try and suppl the word of God.
SPEAKER_00: And that happens in different ways, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_00: In the the more modern era, it's liberalism and rationalism, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00: Or experience, what I feel supplants the word of God.
SPEAKER_00: This is in an institutional and pseudo-Christian version of supplanting the word of God.
SPEAKER_00: Let's go on.
SPEAKER_00: Second side of the handout.
SPEAKER_00: Let's think about the Roman scheme of salvation.
SPEAKER_00: A really key principle is that whatever you think the problem is will determine the solution.
SPEAKER_00: Whatever you think about the fall of man and human sinfulness will determine what you think salvation looks like.
SPEAKER_00: Now, let's think about sin and the fall, therefore.
SPEAKER_00: According to the Roman Church, Adam, back in the Garden of Eden, at the fall, what happened to him?
SPEAKER_00: Well, what he lost was what they call a super added gift, sometimes called sanctifying grace, that enabled him to ascend from natural to supernatural.
SPEAKER_00: When he fell, he did not experience a total corruption of his nature.
SPEAKER_00: Now, over the medieval period, there were different views on what the fall did to Adam and Adam's descendants to human beings.
SPEAKER_00: The majority view is what you'd call semi-pelagian.
SPEAKER_00: That is to say, at most, human nature was wounded, but it was not corrupted.
SPEAKER_00: So with that in mind, how is a person saved?
SPEAKER_00: So that's the kind of sin problem that we are dealing with.
SPEAKER_00: So people come into the world with this kind of sin problem, wounded but not a corrupted nature.
SPEAKER_00: Well, the salvation process begins with baptism, when righteousness is infused automatically into the person being baptized.
SPEAKER_00: And then they are brought into a state of grace.
SPEAKER_00: They receive what is sometimes called justifying grace, sometimes called sanctifying grace, but it's the same thing.
SPEAKER_00: Same term with different terms.
SPEAKER_00: And as long as the believer remains in the state of grace, this elevated state of sanctification or justification, he or she can then do the good works necessary to merit salvation at the end.
SPEAKER_00: They must cooperate with that grace through their good works.
SPEAKER_00: And stay in that state of grace through the sacramental system of the church, especially through the Mass, but also through other tools and the apparatus of the church, things like Mary and the saints, the relics of saints, and so on.
SPEAKER_00: And you need that sacramental system because you sin.
SPEAKER_00: Now, if you commit a mortal sin, so-called, a very grave offence, you fall out of that state of grace.
SPEAKER_00: When you sin, you go and confess your sin to the priest, and he will assign penance.
SPEAKER_00: And that might include ritual prayers, attending mass, going on a pilgrimage, other good works.
SPEAKER_00: And that then restores you to the state of grace.
SPEAKER_00: And your Christian life, therefore, looks like a circle.
SPEAKER_00: Confession and penance, restoration to the state of grace, trying to do good works, making use of the system of the church.
SPEAKER_00: You sin, you go back to the priest, penance, you are restored to a state of grace, and so on.
SPEAKER_00: At the end of your life, if you die outside of the state of grace, that is with unconfessed sins, you go to hell.
SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, you will spend time in purgatory before going to heaven.
SPEAKER_00: If your friends and family purchase indulgences on your behalf, you will spend less time in purgatory.
SPEAKER_00: And just by the way, side note, those of us who know anything about church history, don't think that indulgences only were a thing of the 16th century.
SPEAKER_00: They are very live and well.
SPEAKER_00: One key feature of this system is the Mass, the Roman Mass, and it's worth considering that for a moment.
SPEAKER_00: Lots of the things we said last week about the Eastern Orthodox worship service applies also to the Roman Catholic Mass.
SPEAKER_00: At the centre of it all is a sacrifice.
SPEAKER_00: There is an altar, not a table, an altar, and Christ is re-sacrificed.
SPEAKER_00: And it all relies on the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation, which means that the bread and wine are actually changed into the blood, body, and blood of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Now, this idea was not kind of plucked out of thin air.
SPEAKER_00: It relies on an ancient distinction.
SPEAKER_00: It goes all the way back to Aristotle, the distinction between substance and appearance, or substance and accidents.
SPEAKER_00: So think about the chair that you are sitting on.
SPEAKER_00: Your chair has chairness.
SPEAKER_00: There is something, it has a substance, it has an essence, chairness.
SPEAKER_00: And currently, it has the appearance of a chair.
SPEAKER_00: There's two things about the chair you're sitting on: its substance and its appearance.
SPEAKER_00: This idea goes all the way back to Aristotle.
SPEAKER_00: Now, again, side note, even just commonsensically, it makes no sense.
SPEAKER_00: No one has ever related to the world consistently in this sort of way.
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't work, it doesn't make any sense.
SPEAKER_00: Come to the Roman Catholic Mass.
SPEAKER_00: The appearance of the bread and the wine stays the same, but the substance changes.
SPEAKER_00: And it's all done through the action of a human priest.
SPEAKER_00: At a moment in the service called the Epiclasis, where typically they will ring a bell and call down the Holy Spirit to effect this transformation into the body and blood of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Substantially, it is a bloody sacrifice.
SPEAKER_00: And also very importantly, it conveys Excuse me.
SPEAKER_00: Losing my voice.
SPEAKER_00: Grace is conveyed automatically.
SPEAKER_00: The technical phrase is ex opera operato.
SPEAKER_00: It works by the working of the work.
SPEAKER_00: They always provide this grace as they are performed, this work by the priest.
SPEAKER_00: Now, why is this so wrong?
SPEAKER_00: Let's try and evaluate this.
SPEAKER_00: When we thought about the doctrine of salvation a few months back, we spent a session on justification by faith, and our very first session was on the doctrine of sin.
SPEAKER_00: Both of those sessions would be really helpful to go back to if you wanted to dig deeper into it.
SPEAKER_00: So I'm really just going to do a little bit of summarizing here.
SPEAKER_00: The Bible teaches that our state of sin and sinfulness is such that we are bound in sin.
SPEAKER_00: We are totally depraved.
SPEAKER_00: That is to say, every single part of us is infected by sin.
SPEAKER_00: And as a result, we are totally unable.
SPEAKER_00: We read things in the scriptures like, you were dead in sin.
SPEAKER_00: Not really wounded, but dead, but total spiritual inability.
SPEAKER_00: When you reflect on the Roman Catholic idea of justification, it is actually reconstructed as a combination of God's initiative and man's efforts.
SPEAKER_00: So it is called synergism.
SPEAKER_00: It's said that justification is a journey which for the Christian is never completed, and it absolutely depends on human works.
SPEAKER_00: One confusing thing, it doesn't sound like it, because you keep hearing words like grace and faith, but they mean something different.
SPEAKER_00: Importantly, the church and the human priests are exalted as channels of grace.
SPEAKER_00: Whereas the Bible's doctrine of justification, well, justification is a legal declaration by God of us that we are righteous.
SPEAKER_00: It is forensic, it's judicial, it is legal in character.
SPEAKER_00: The righteousness we are given is alien to us, it is outside of us, it is Christ's righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: It's not internal to us.
SPEAKER_00: The Lord does an internal work, the work of sanctification, but the work of making us righteous is an external work, and that's actually super important.
SPEAKER_00: And we are brought irretrievably into the grace of God in which we now stand.
SPEAKER_00: Because, and this is all rooted on our union with Christ.
SPEAKER_00: In the Roman system, grace is portrayed as a bit like a reservoir.
SPEAKER_00: You can imagine a tank of grace.
SPEAKER_00: You lose a bit of grace, and you can then go and get it topped up again.
SPEAKER_00: That is a completely unbiblical way of thinking about the grace of God.
SPEAKER_00: Grace is an attribute of God, it is Him.
SPEAKER_00: He is a gracious God.
SPEAKER_00: We experience grace.
SPEAKER_00: Saving grace because we are joined in union with the gracious God.
SPEAKER_00: Of course, for the Christian, there is a place for good works.
SPEAKER_00: The one who has been born again by the Holy Spirit of God will evidence good works by the power of the Spirit and in union with Christ.
SPEAKER_00: But they are not the basis of our justification.
SPEAKER_00: Just think about this pastorally and personally for a minute.
SPEAKER_00: On the Roman system, your justification goes up and down.
SPEAKER_00: On a good day, you are more justified.
SPEAKER_00: On a bad day, you are less justified or indeed not justified.
SPEAKER_00: Assurance of salvation is an utter impossibility and is actually specifically condemned as heresy by the Council of Trent.
SPEAKER_00: You can see why, can't you?
SPEAKER_00: If saving righteousness is reliant on my works, I can never be sure that I am saved or will stay saved.
SPEAKER_00: Whereas the Bible teaches the imputation of Christ's righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: I am clothed with the righteousness of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And therefore, assurance is possible because salvation depends on him and not on me.
SPEAKER_00: And you have to say that when lined up against Roman doctrine, genuinely this is like paradise.
SPEAKER_00: It is like the gateway to heaven.
SPEAKER_00: Well, actually, it is the gateway to heaven.
SPEAKER_00: What about the church and the sacraments?
SPEAKER_00: The Roman Catholic Church turns the sacraments into magical rites that people rely on for salvation instead of faith in Christ alone.
SPEAKER_00: Now, we don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water.
SPEAKER_00: We don't want to reject the idea of God working in and through baptism, in and through the Lord's Supper.
SPEAKER_00: They are signs and seals of the covenant of grace.
SPEAKER_00: But it is when we receive them with faith that they become to us gracious gifts.
SPEAKER_00: They're not sort of magical rites that work automatically.
SPEAKER_00: When we receive them by faith, when we receive all that is signified through baptism and the supper, we do genuinely receive those things.
SPEAKER_00: Onto the back page of the handout.
SPEAKER_00: Here's a complication.
SPEAKER_00: A puzzle, which might actually occur to some of us.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes Rome seems softer than it used to be.
SPEAKER_00: And I'll try and explain what I mean by that.
SPEAKER_00: In the early 1960s, there was a really significant Roman council called Vatican II, the Second Vatican Council.
SPEAKER_00: And it seemed a totally new direction.
SPEAKER_00: The Roman Church acknowledges three significant Roman Catholic councils.
SPEAKER_00: The Council of Trent back in the 1540s, reacting against the Protestant Reformation.
SPEAKER_00: The first Vatican Council at the end of the 19th century, it reacted against modernity.
SPEAKER_00: It elevated papal infallibility to this status of dogma.
SPEAKER_00: But then in the 1960s, Vatican II seemed different.
SPEAKER_00: It affirmed non-Catholics.
SPEAKER_00: It even affirmed other world religions and certain trends in modern society.
SPEAKER_00: It even opened the door in the Catholic Church to certain liberal ideas.
SPEAKER_00: Now there was no change of doctrine, of course.
SPEAKER_00: The Roman Catholic Church cannot change its doctrine.
SPEAKER_00: Remember, papal infallibility, so whatever we have said before, stand.
SPEAKER_00: It is like a word from God.
SPEAKER_00: But a key principle of Vatican II was absorption or embracing.
SPEAKER_00: So the idea was that non-Catholic Christians, what we now treat them as separated brothers, not heretics.
SPEAKER_00: They are almost part of the Roman Church without realizing it.
SPEAKER_00: Similarly, even of non-Christian religions as being somehow related to the Catholic Church.
SPEAKER_00: But the key point was that Catholicism is the umbrella that includes or embraces it all.
SPEAKER_00: It even incorporated the charismatic movement.
SPEAKER_00: That is one feature of the Roman Church since the 1960s.
SPEAKER_00: Now, observers of the Roman Church would say they are focusing on absorbing evangelicalism.
SPEAKER_00: Here's a quote from a reformed pastor who passed us in Italy.
SPEAKER_00: The Roman Church does not really change in its fundamental commitments.
SPEAKER_00: It adds new layers, it adds new colours, it reshapes them in terms of attitude and tone.
SPEAKER_00: But the core, the heart of what Rome stands for is never, has never changed.
SPEAKER_00: It expands itself but does not purify itself.
SPEAKER_00: It embraces new trends and practices but does not expel unbiblical ones.
SPEAKER_00: Now one big challenge is the Roman Church's use of language.
SPEAKER_00: We hear many words that we are familiar with as Bible Christians, as Reformed Christians.
SPEAKER_00: But here is the thing.
SPEAKER_00: When it speaks, for example, of grace, it has a non-biblical conception of grace.
SPEAKER_00: It almost always bolts it together with the sacraments and the church and the priests who are critical in dispensing that grace.
SPEAKER_00: Whenever it speaks of faith, it always bolts it together with our works and locates in those works something which justifies us.
SPEAKER_00: When it speaks of the glory of God, it also speaks of the veneration of the saints and Mary, things which rob God of glory.
SPEAKER_00: So similar identical words, but with different meanings and associations, and you just have to have your radar up to that.
SPEAKER_00: How do we relate to family members, friends, colleagues who are Roman Catholic Christians?
SPEAKER_00: I guess we've been thinking about the doctrines of the church, the spirituality of the church.
SPEAKER_00: What about the people of the church?
SPEAKER_00: Now, obviously, there are plenty of Christians in Roman Catholic churches.
SPEAKER_00: They are Christians because, by the grace and mercy of God, they are inconsistent.
SPEAKER_00: So they don't follow through on all of the distinctives of the church of which they are a part.
SPEAKER_00: So when you find a Christian in the Roman Church, they are a Christian despite the distinctives of the Roman Church, not because of it.
SPEAKER_00: We do need to be really clear that the distinctive teaching of the Roman Church is enough to keep people from heaven.
SPEAKER_00: It hides Christ, it obscures him, it hides the true grace of God, it encourages a works righteousness, and it presents a form of worship which is idolatrous and is blasphemous.
SPEAKER_00: R.
SPEAKER_00: C.
SPEAKER_00: Spruell made, I think, a helpful comment.
SPEAKER_00: I am happy to make common cause with Roman Catholics on social issues, but we have no common cause in the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: Now, social issues.
SPEAKER_00: Much of the Roman Church is very conservative on social issues.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, God be praised for the attitude of most of the Roman Church to things like euthanasia or abortion.
SPEAKER_00: But we don't, though, have a common cause in the gospel with them because the errors of the Roman Church are so serious.
SPEAKER_00: Actually, in 1546, with the Council of Trent, they anathematized what we would consider the true gospel.
SPEAKER_00: They actually said it was damnable.
SPEAKER_00: And that has never been undermined or revoked.
SPEAKER_00: Now obviously, we we love our Roman Catholic friends and family.
SPEAKER_00: We want to love them and pray for them.
SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't assume that uh most Roman Catholics understand their own church.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, let's be honest, there are there are plenty of people in Reformed churches who actually don't understand the distinctive reformed churches.
SPEAKER_00: And that's just that's just life, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00: And in this context, that's a that's possibly a saving grace.
SPEAKER_00: So don't assume that most Roman friends, Roman Catholic friends, understand their own church of which they're a part.
SPEAKER_00: When they do understand, they need to leave it.
SPEAKER_00: But that might also be a very, very hard thing to do.
SPEAKER_00: When we understand what the Roman Church teaches, well, I hope it becomes really clear then that, well, we shouldn't attend a Roman mass.
SPEAKER_00: It is a blasphemous form of worship, it robs glory from Christ, it is false.
SPEAKER_00: In interacting with Roman friends, you know, neighbours uh over the years.
SPEAKER_00: I think my I think my encouragement would be a very simple one.
SPEAKER_00: Look for opportunities to read the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: Um to not assume that because somebody is in a church that they will have familiarity with the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: Don't assume that.
SPEAKER_00: That would probably be a terribly wrong assumption.
SPEAKER_00: But do look for opportunities just to open the scriptures and read a gospel.
SPEAKER_00: And I would probably begin with a gospel, and in there you meet obviously the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, and obviously you are also encountering authority.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the word of God does come to us, it's self-authenticating, it comes with the power of God.
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna pause there.
SPEAKER_00: We did we do have a few minutes for uh questions of any shape, size, or form if um anyone would like to ask them.
SPEAKER_00: Pop a hand in the air if you if you've got a question.
SPEAKER_00: Let's start off with uh Dan and then we'll go back, Ray.
SPEAKER_00: So the the Bible of the Roman Catholic Church is both the same and different.
SPEAKER_00: So 66 books, Old Testament, New Testament, with the addition of a bunch of books which are typically called the Apocrypha.
SPEAKER_00: So they are inter-testamental literature, shouldn't be in the Bible, but are, and some of the faulty doctrines and practices of the church sort of may come from the Apocrypha, possibly.
SPEAKER_00: I guess, but I guess one of the one of the key things is that even when the Bible is present, it's not present in the same way that God willing, please Lord, it would be present for us.
SPEAKER_00: Here is something that is present in our midst to rule us.
SPEAKER_00: Um there is scripture in a in a Roman service.
SPEAKER_00: Uh my strong impression is not as much as, for example, in an Eastern Orthodox service.
SPEAKER_00: Um, but the question is, what do you do with that scripture?
SPEAKER_00: Is it your rule?
SPEAKER_00: Does it stand over you like this?
SPEAKER_00: Or functionally is it actually beneath the apparatus and the superstructure of the church?
SPEAKER_00: So I think that's probably quite a key distinction.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, go on.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so how do we think about folks who move from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism?
SPEAKER_00: Anne Witcombe, obviously in the news recently, a very clear example.
SPEAKER_00: Is that because of something about Anglicanism rather than something about Catholicism?
SPEAKER_00: I think it's I think it's probably both.
SPEAKER_00: So someone like um Anne Widakombe, and I I think of friends and family members who have made a similar journey.
SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, reacting to the bluntly extreme liberalism of the Church of England.
SPEAKER_00: Um, so for Anne Whiticombe, it was over issues like uh the ordination of women to uh, as the Anglicans will call it, the priesthood and then to the episcopacy.
SPEAKER_00: And she just found this intolerable.
SPEAKER_00: And actually, quite a lot of uh Christians in the Church of England at that point made that jump.
SPEAKER_00: And unfortunately, some jumped to Roman Catholicism because I think they they thought they were going back to the original church, the unchanged church, the church that doesn't change with every shift of society.
SPEAKER_00: And you've just got to say the Church of England is dying because it is just blown around by every wind of doctrine, and they thought we're going somewhere solid and unchanged.
SPEAKER_00: And there's both a grain of truth in that, but there's also a terrible misjudgment in that.
SPEAKER_00: Anne Whiticom was a wonderful Christian lady.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was plain as the nose on your face.
SPEAKER_00: You listen to some of the things she said.
SPEAKER_00: She knew and loved the Lord, she had a great delight in sharing Christ, but she made a bad call in terms of the church she joined.
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, not the only one.
SPEAKER_00: No, so one so one feature of Roman Catholicism is clerical celibacy, and that that really stems from two things.
SPEAKER_00: One, I think historically, the Roman Church, and it's worth saying not only the Roman Church has had a faulty view of uh marriage, family, sex, you know, good gifts of God in creation, and for whatever reason, something's gone a bit twisted, and you think, well, actually, hold on, these are second order things.
SPEAKER_00: You know, the hoi poloi can have those things, but if you're super spiritual, and the medieval's distinguished between the spirituals and the rest, they actually called them the spirituals, that if you're spiritual, you must be unmarried and celibate.
SPEAKER_00: It's worth saying also that's not the whole story.
SPEAKER_00: Um, the the dogma of clerical celibacy was only introduced, I think it was in the 11th century, because Roman Catholic priests were having children all over the shop and were leaving their livings to them.
SPEAKER_00: That is to say, their jobs and the lands and the income that was associated with them.
SPEAKER_00: So it was frankly a pretty venal reason for trying to stamp out a pretty predictable human practice.
SPEAKER_02: So that that was that's the origin of um clerical celibacy.
SPEAKER_00: I mean Roman Catholic Guild is like a it's like a trope or a stereotype in culture and literature, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00: But if I mean I've had various Catholic friends over the years, it's a it's a thing, it's a real thing, there's a reason it's a stereotype.
SPEAKER_00: And if you're in this kind of if you're in this cycle with which which which really just depends on yourself, oh what a wake and a burden.
SPEAKER_00: And you and you and you read this, you read the conversion of Martin Luther, and you think, yeah, it genuinely is.
SPEAKER_00: When he discovered this from the Psalms and from Romans, that you are justified by faith alone, it's like, oh, the chains have fallen off, and genuinely they just had fallen off.
SPEAKER_00: Um Christ welcomes you.
SPEAKER_03: And what do you do is that feels like a very blurred line between Catholicism and High Anglicanism?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, so the very, very blurred line between Roman Catholicism and High Anglicanism or the Anglo-Catholic movement.
SPEAKER_00: So from day one in the Church of England, there were people who wanted to go back to Rome or incorporate bits of Roman doctrine and piety in the Church of England.
SPEAKER_00: This uh grew and grew and grew in the 19th century, something called the Oxford movement.
SPEAKER_00: And it would be worth saying that the Oxford movement and Anglo-Catholicism is deeply embedded in the Church of England today.
SPEAKER_00: So you do have Reformed and Evangelical Christians, you do have uh liberals, and you do have people who are in certain respects indistinguishable from Roman Catholics.
SPEAKER_00: Now, they would disagree with the idea of papal authority, which is why they are in the Church of England rather than in the Roman Church, though brackets, I actually think some of them are also in the Church of England because they want to be married in terms of clergy rather than the Roman Church.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, just that's just being honest.
SPEAKER_00: And that's not it's sort of laughable, but it's also right, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, marriage is a gift from God.
SPEAKER_00: I mean it's a doctrine of demons, says James, to sort of enforce that kind of thing.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, an Anglo-Catholic worship service is indistinguishable from a Roman Mass, and they will often be called a Mass now.
SPEAKER_00: And the Anglo the Church of England minister, you know, wildly contradicting the 39 articles of religion, will talk about uh transubstantiation.
SPEAKER_00: There will be an epiclasis, uh, he will wear the vestments of the Roman Church.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's even fancier than uh Roman Catholic worship.
SPEAKER_00: I've had Roman Catholics sort of raise their eyebrows at how extraordinarily ornate and formal and superstitious is Anglo-Catholic worship.
SPEAKER_00: And we have to let's just be really honest, the you know, the parish church in the town, another church just over there, are way off the end of the of the spectrum in terms of um yeah, the the doctrines of uh the mass.
SPEAKER_00: And it's just it's both blasphemous, but it's also a complete contradiction to their own articles of faith.
SPEAKER_00: But then if you're in a denomination that's actually not enforced your own articles of faith for about 300 years, then it's not surprising.
SPEAKER_00: It's like anything goes.
SPEAKER_00: So I guess it's sort of that's it.
SPEAKER_00: That's a thing to grieve over.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, genuinely, it's we should grieve over it and we should pray for the reformation of the Church of England.
SPEAKER_00: There's going to be a Church of England or a Church in England, and you know, God be merciful, would it be a purer?
SPEAKER_00: Or else just bluntly just destroy it?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, those really are the options.
SPEAKER_00: Go on, really the last word.
SPEAKER_00: So I wouldn't I wouldn't say of the Roman Catholic Church that it's a cult.
SPEAKER_00: I don't think that's in the sort of a modern sense of the word cult.
SPEAKER_00: Um I think I think uh I think control and the removal of kind of autonomy would be certain really key features of a cult.
SPEAKER_00: There are things about it that kind of remove your independent your ability for independent thought and decision.
SPEAKER_00: Now, obviously, that is possible in the Roman Church, it's possible in any church, actually.
SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't say that that is a distinct feature of Roman church, as I understand it.
SPEAKER_00: I I think it is it is so far in error because of its approach to authority in the Bible and what it teaches about how you are saved.
SPEAKER_00: Just friends who are in the Roman church, those like I said before, those who are actually real Christians will, in a sense, have drowned out their ears to those distinctives and will, through the scriptures or through other things, will have encountered saving grace and they will know Christ, but they will not know assurance.
SPEAKER_00: It's by definition impossible.
SPEAKER_00: Um, yeah.
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna pray and then we'll uh press on.
SPEAKER_00: Um, Father in heaven, uh, help us to understand all of these things of which we have been speaking.
SPEAKER_00: Pray for clarity and uh wisdom, uh, pray for a joy in the gospel and a graciousness and a boldness in sharing the wonderful things that we have been given.
SPEAKER_00: We come before you as utterly undeserving people.
SPEAKER_00: We are not better than anyone else.
SPEAKER_00: We understand our sinfulness, we bless you for revealing the depths of our darkness, but we thank you that in the Lord Jesus we have something so supremely wonderful.
SPEAKER_00: And we do pray that the light of this gospel, the gospel of grace, of justification by faith alone, would shine mightily and brightly through us and through reformed churches, and we pray for the reformation of other churches also.
SPEAKER_00: We ask that in Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.