Purgatory Debate - White vs Horn 2/17/2024

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February 25, 2024

In February of 2024 James White and Trent Horn did two, back to back debates at First Lutheran Church in Houston. The first night was on sola scriptura, and the second on purgatory. It was the conjunction of these two debates that was most informative and useful. We invite our viewers to listen to both debates and compare the assertions concerning the “deposit of faith” and “apostolic tradition” in the first with the argumentation in defense of purgatory in the second. It is very enlightening!

00:04: Welcome to First Lutheran Church. I'm Evan McClanahan. I'm the pastor here. I'll be the host and moderator for the debate this evening.
00:14: First, a few quick announcements. If you need to go to the restroom, it's behind me in a hallway.
00:20: You can access it through that door. You'll just have to get up and walk in front of everyone. We won't have intermission, so we're all at peace with it.
00:27: Do what you have to do. If you like these sorts of theological conversations and debates, you might want to check out, especially if you're in Houston, Theology by the
00:36: Pint, theologybythepint .org. We have monthly events and a podcast called
00:41: Theology on Air, so check out the website, and we want you to be a part of that conversation.
00:47: After the event, Dr. White, who his followers and listeners will know, he is in the midst of a five -debate teaching tour, so he is going to leave after the debate.
00:59: He's not able to shake hands and sign books, but if you're coming to the debates about a month from now, then he'll maybe be able to do that then, so please excuse him for that.
01:11: After the debate, Mr. Horn will be next door. He'll be signing books, meet and greet, yes?
01:18: You're probably familiar with both speakers and the introductions are in your program, so I'm not going to spend much time doing that.
01:25: I'll only say that if you want to learn more about our speakers, you can go to Dr. White's website, aomen .org.
01:32: That's, of course, for Alpha and Omega Ministries. And Trent Horn, you can learn more at trenthorn .com.
01:39: Both gentlemen, as you know, are prolific authors and podcasters and YouTubers and all -around influencers, as the kids say these days.
01:50: The format, for those who aren't in the room and don't have a program in their hand, 15 -minute opening remarks, 7 -minute rebuttal, 4 -minute rebuttal, 2 10 -minute cross -examination periods each, so that's 10 minutes, 10 minutes, 10 minutes, 10 minutes, 40 minutes total, then 20 -minute
02:08: Q &A. We're not doing Q &A from the floor. You will have to write your question and then
02:14: I will be the one who chooses which questions to ask. They will have one minute to answer and then a 30 -minute, 30 second response, depending on who the question is addressed to.
02:23: If your handwriting is not readable, if it's illegible, I think is that word, it will not be considered.
02:29: So please do your best and write carefully what you want the question to be. I will be picking those up before the cross -examination, okay?
02:38: So before the cross -examination is when I will be picking them up. That will give me 40 minutes to filter through the questions.
02:44: So then after that, we'll have 5 -minute closing remarks and that will be it. Normally in these events, the person answering in the affirmative goes first.
02:55: That will be true tonight. The question is, is the doctrine of purgatory true? Our Roman Catholic guest
03:01: Trent Horne says yes, so he gets to go first. So please welcome our first speaker tonight. All right.
03:13: Well, I'd like to thank James for debating this important issue and for debating me last night and First Lutheran for hosting this debate.
03:20: The Catechism of the Catholic Church says in paragraphs 1030 and 1031, all who die in God's grace and friendship but still imperfectly purified are indeed assured of their eternal salvation.
03:32: But after death, they undergo purification so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.
03:38: The church gives the name purgatory to this final purification of the elect, which is entirely different from the punishment of the damned.
03:46: Purgatory is not an alternative to heaven or hell, it is not a second chance to be saved, and it is not a place where sinners work to purify themselves.
03:54: Purgatory is the way Christ completes our sanctification or growth and holiness. Protestants already believe in sanctification, so they should have no problem accepting this final part of the process.
04:05: In tonight's debate, I will not be defending various theological opinions about purgatory, such as its duration or what it entails.
04:12: I will also not be defending secondary doctrines related to it, like indulgences, since there are Christians who deny indulgences but believe in purgatory.
04:20: The Protestant author C .S. Lewis compared purgatory to visiting a dentist and said, our souls demand purgatory, don't they?
04:28: The Protestant author Jerry Walls, a frequent critic of Catholicism, defends purgatory in his book,
04:33: Purgatory, the Logic of Total Transformation. Finally, the Eastern Orthodox believe in postmortem purification, but they don't call this process purgatory.
04:42: Now that we have a better view of what purgatory is, I'll present two arguments in favor of this doctrine.
04:48: First, there is the argument from spiritual cleansing. One, God can purify Christians of their desire for sin.
04:55: No one in heaven will desire sin. Some Christians still desire sin at the moment of death.
05:01: Therefore, some Christians will be purified of the desire for sin after death, but before they enter heaven.
05:09: Premise one follows from Scripture in God's omnipotence. If God can't free us from the desire to sin, he isn't all -powerful.
05:14: Premise two follows from Revelation 21 -27, which says of heaven that nothing unclean shall enter it.
05:20: In heaven, there will be no actual sin or even the desire to sin. Premise three is known from experience, especially in cases of Christians struggling with sin who die unexpectedly.
05:31: Since all the premises are true, the conclusion logically follows. We will be fully sanctified before entering heaven, even if we are not fully sanctified when we die.
05:40: Now, James might refer to Hebrews 10 -14, for by a single offering, he has perfected for all time those who are sanctified.
05:47: However, Paul says in Philippians 3 -12, he is not yet perfect. In Romans 7 -20, Paul says he does evil because of sin which dwells within me.
05:55: God will not allow sin in heaven, even if it is hidden under an alien righteousness of Christ that is imputed to us, as my opponent claims.
06:04: Instead, God will fully purify us, hence the doctrine of purgatory. Second, there is the argument from moral correction.
06:12: It goes like this, when Christians sin, God unpleasantly disciplines them to morally perfect them.
06:19: Some sins are not unpleasantly disciplined in this life. Therefore, God unpleasantly disciplines some
06:26: Christians after death to morally perfect them. Let's start with premise one.
06:32: Hebrews 12 says, My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor lose courage when you are punished by him.
06:39: For the Lord disciplines him whom he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives. The word translated chastises is mastigoy, which in every other use in the
06:49: New Testament is rendered scourging. The verse literally says, God flogs every son with a whip whom he receives.
06:55: The text goes on to say, God disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness.
07:01: For the moment, all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant. Later, it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.
07:10: Even though Christ saved us from the eternal consequences of our sins, God still allows us to suffer the temporary consequences of our sins, such as a disordered will that is attached to sin, a lack of full fellowship with God, the fitting justice of feeling bad when we have done bad, and even suffering in this life.
07:29: For example, God forgave David's sins of adultery and murder, but still punished him in this life through the death of his infant son.
07:37: God does not punish us arbitrarily, but to reorder our wills so we can be morally perfected in him.
07:43: Hebrews says earthly fathers do this imperfectly with their children, but God does this perfectly with us.
07:50: Now what about premise two? Paragraph 1472 of the Catechism says, A conversion which proceeds from a fervent charity can attain the complete purification of the sinner in such a way that no punishment would remain.
08:04: We can choose to receive God's correction in this life. We can choose to be sorrowful for the sins that we have committed and reorder ourselves to full fellowship with God, and we would no longer suffer the temporary consequences of our sins.
08:16: But not everyone does that, as can be seen throughout salvation history. Ancient Jews believe that the dead were purified after death in Gehenna.
08:27: According to Simcha Paul Raphael, a professor of Jewish studies at Temple University, Gehenna served as a realm of purgation and purification.
08:35: After this experience, the soul is sufficiently purified and able to enter the supernatural post -mortem realm of Gan Eden, the
08:43: Garden of Eden. In the second century before Christ, Judas the Maccabee made an offering of silver on behalf of soldiers who died in battle.
08:50: The Jewish text that records this act says, He made atonement for the dead that they might be delivered from their sins.
08:58: Jesus and the apostles also never taught that all believers immediately enter heaven free from any unpleasant consequences.
09:07: Jesus told his audience to make friends with accusers, or else they will hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison.
09:15: Truly I say to you, you will never get out till you have paid the last penny. The Protestant reformer
09:21: John Calvin said, If in this passage the judge signifies God, the accuser the devil, the guard the angel, the prison purgatory,
09:28: I shall willingly yield to them. To get around this, Calvin interprets Jesus' advice to be only about worldly law courts.
09:35: However, that doesn't make sense given the context in the previous verses of avoiding Gehenna due to anger with a brother.
09:41: Remember, ancient Jews believed Gehenna was a temporary punishment after death, where you were released once you had paid the last penny.
09:49: In 1 Corinthians chapter, oh, did I not have this? You can read that quickly there, let's see.
09:57: In 1 Corinthians chapter 3, Paul describes Christian workers at the final judgment.
10:03: Those who produced good works are symbolized by precious stones. Those who produced bad works are symbolized by hay and straw.
10:10: A fire tests the works and burns up the bad works. Verse 15 says, If any man's work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.
10:23: It's possible the works, the works symbolized by stones are the Christian disciples of these workers.
10:31: This corresponds to Malachi chapter 3, a passage that also talks about the temple, the day, the
10:37: Levites being refined in fire like gold and silver, and others being stubble that are burnt up.
10:42: The good and bad materials in 1 Corinthians 3 may very well be good and bad Christians at the final judgment, and the fire will reveal which ones were saved and which were damned.
10:53: That coheres with verses 16 through 17, which say, You and I are God's temple, and if someone destroys
10:59: God's temple, one of his redeemed creatures, God will destroy him. Only God can destroy what he has created, no one else.
11:06: Now, if a worker's disciples were damned or burnt up at the judgment, he would not go, the worker would not go to hell with them, but he would still be punished for his failure to shepherd them.
11:14: This corresponds with Hebrews 13, 17, which says, Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as men who will have to give account.
11:27: Could this be about merely judging the bad motivations of Christian workers, as James often says? Maybe, but it's more natural to see the disciples as a
11:35: Christian worker's work rather than his motivations, because the motivations are prior to any work that he does.
11:41: Besides, motivations are not mentioned in 1 Corinthians 3 at all, at least related to this small part of the passage.
11:48: Even if James were right, bad motivations, like pride, are sins, and God punishes sins.
11:54: The Protestant scholar E .P. Sanders says of 1 Corinthians 3, Paul is discussing people who will be saved, but they will be commended or lightly punished at the judgment, depending on their deeds.
12:05: Paul confirms this in 2 Corinthians 5 .10, where he writes, We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive good or evil, according to what he has done in the body.
12:16: In fact, the phrase saved through, as in saved through fire, when it's joined with a noun in the genitive case, is used overwhelmingly in the
12:25: Old Testament, Jewish literature, and the church fathers in an instrumental sense, or as a reference to purification.
12:32: That's why rabbis cited Zechariah 13 .9 in reference to Gehenna. I will put this third into the fire and refine them as one refines silver.
12:41: The biblical scholar Daniel Freyer Griggs, who claims the New Testament does not teach the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, admits, quote,
12:48: The fire of divine judgment on the day appears to be the circumstance through which the builder is purified of his sins, and through which
12:55: Christ saves. The BDAG Greek lexicon says the word loss in 1 Corinthians 3 .15
13:01: reveres to punishment, and in ancient Greek temple inscriptions, the word referred to fines that were leveled against incompetent builders.
13:10: However, in his book, The Roman Catholic Controversy, my opponent, like many Protestants, says the loss suffered in 1
13:17: Corinthians 3 .15 is only a loss of reward, and that it is not a punishment. But even if that were true, my position would still be correct.
13:26: As a parent, I punish my children all the time by taking away a reward they were promised. I'd call that unpleasant discipline, wouldn't you?
13:35: James even says in his book that it is, quote, terrifying to be in this position before God. Why?
13:41: We are only terrified of God because of the unpleasant things he might do to us. But God doesn't arbitrarily cause us pain.
13:49: He only does it for our good. So James admits it's possible God may provide unpleasant discipline, as described in Hebrews 12, after death.
13:58: That's premise two of my argument. In fact, the Protestant author Randy Alcorn summarizes 1
14:03: Corinthians 3 in a way that also supports my argument in an article he wrote on heavenly rewards.
14:09: He writes, Maybe one way to say, maybe one way to say it is that the loss of rewards is in some sense permanent, but the suffering of that loss will be temporary.
14:21: God will do away with the suffering, but that is after the judgment, after our giving account to the
14:27: Lord. The suffering of regret will be there at the judgment. How could it not be? Before entrance to the eternal state.
14:33: But then there is the learning and purifying and eternal rejoicing. So Alcorn says that the suffering of loss in this passage leads to moral reform and purification before we rejoice in heaven free from any attachment to sin.
14:48: That sounds like purgatory to me. In the second century, Irenaeus said after death, but before heaven, each class of souls receives a habitation such as it has deserved, saying
14:59: Lazarus received refreshment while the evil rich man received torment. James has claimed that prayers in the early church for refreshment for the dead,
15:08: Latin, refrigerium, are only an appeal for an increase in the heavenly happiness of the dead.
15:15: However, Kara Aspessi in her 2021 article on refrigerium in the academic Brill Encyclopedia of Early Christianity says that in classical literature, the term denoted coolness or physical relief.
15:27: She writes of these requests that quote, The use of the subjective demonstrates that final heavenly bliss is not envisioned.
15:34: Instead, that meaning of refrigerium, which referred to Hades, the interim region of either punishment or consolation is likely in view.
15:43: The third century passion of saints Perpetua and Felicity uses this same meaning when
15:48: Perpetua prays for her dead brother, Denocritus, to have refreshment after seeing him suffering in the afterlife.
15:55: The Protestant author Carl Olson admits that Clement of Alexandria, who lived between the second and third century, imagined an afterlife where the correctable sinner experienced a fire that sanctifies and does not consume.
16:08: In the city of God, Augustine wrote of some quote, who suffer temporary punishments after death.
16:13: In his writings, Augustine specifically uses the Latin phrase, Penae Purgatoriae, or purgatorial punishments.
16:20: Early Christian headstones like those of the second century Bishop Abersius asked for prayers for the dead, which makes sense if some of the dead experience unpleasant correction after death.
16:31: Finally, none of these early Christian sources say all believers immediately enter heaven after death without any purification.
16:38: According to Tertullian, for no one on becoming absent from the body is at once a dweller in the presence of the
16:44: Lord, except by the prerogative of martyrdom. However, this purification comes from Christ and does not detract from him.
16:52: According to Pope Benedict XVI, some recent theologians are of the opinion that the fire, which both burns and saves is
17:00: Christ himself, the judge and savior. The account with him is the decisive act of judgment. Before his gaze, all falsehood melts away.
17:09: So to make his case, James has to do two things. He has to show that all believers immediately enter heaven after death and have no postmortem discipline or purification, even though this is contradicted by scripture and Christian history.
17:21: And then he has to refute the two arguments that I offered. The argument from spiritual cleansing, God can purify
17:26: Christians of their desire for sin. No one in heaven will desire sin. Some Christians still desire sin at the moment of death, so they'll be purified before they enter into heaven.
17:36: And then the argument for moral correction. When Christians sin, God unpleasantly disciplines them to morally perfect them.
17:42: Some sins are not unpleasantly disciplined in this life. Therefore, God unpleasantly disciplines some
17:47: Christians after death to morally perfect them. If James cannot show what's wrong with these arguments, then you should reject his case and believe in the doctrine of purgatory instead.
17:59: Thank you. Well, good evening.
18:12: It's good to be back with you again this evening on a very, very different topic. I'd like to begin with a little more formal definition of purgatory from a well -known resource,
18:24: Dr. Ludwig Ott's Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma. I wish it had been bound a little better.
18:30: But anyway, speculatively, the existence of the cleansing fire can be derived from the concept of the sanctity and justice of God.
18:40: The former demands that only completely pure souls be assumed into heaven. That was just given to us from Revelation 21.
18:47: The latter demands that the punishments of sins still present be effected.
18:52: But on the other hand, forbids that souls united in love with God should be cast into hell. Therefore, an intermediate state is to be assumed whose purpose is final purification and which, for this reason, is of limited duration.
19:05: Now, I want to point out, aside from the fact that purgatory is yet another dogmatically defined concept within Roman Catholicism, that in the modern period, the language that Rome and Roman Catholic apologists use to describe it has changed really radically over about the past 70 years.
19:25: You'll notice, for example, Ott says this, the remission of the venial sins which are not yet remitted occurs, according to the teaching of St.
19:34: Thomas, it does in this life, by an act of contrition deriving from charity and performed with the help of grace.
19:39: The act of contrition, which is presumably awakened immediately after entry into the purifying fire, does not, however, affect the abrogation of the diminution of the punishment for sins, since in the other world there is no longer any possibility of merit.
19:54: Catch this. The temporal punishments for sins are atoned for in the purifying fire by the so -called suffering of atonement.
20:05: Satispatio is the Latin. That is, by the willing bearing of the expiatory punishments imposed by God.
20:12: So I'm a little surprised, I'll be perfectly honest, that in making this presentation,
20:18: Trent hasn't used the language that Rome has used in defining her own dogma, that this is a place of purification, not just from attachment to sin, but the remission of temporal punishments for sins, and that this takes place by our suffering, satispatio.
20:41: And I can understand why he wouldn't want to defend indulgences, but in Roman Catholic theology they are intimately connected, and that's in the catechism as well, and that is the idea of the treasury of merit, the excess merit of Jesus marrying the saints put into the treasury of merit, it's a withdrawal from that treasury of merit applied to a soul in purgatory that somehow then would in some way hasten this being made more like Christ and purification so you can enter into the presence of God.
21:14: It's a very, very different concept, and of course I'll be showing you some books later on that I would recommend to you if you want to really understand what has been understood about the subject of purgatory, is that it's plainly said by people like Cardinal Bellarmine that purgatory could not possibly be as short as 10 or 20 years, and could possibly be many hundreds of years in length.
21:40: So this is a self -undergoing of suffering, satispatio, that removes the temporal punishments of sins that is necessary before you can enter into the presence of God.
21:54: It's not just the idea that, well, we need to be sanctified, we need to be made in the image of Christ.
22:00: Well, yes, that's what God's doing, and everything that Trent quoted from the New Testament about Christ, the
22:07: Father disciplining His children and conforming us to the image of Christ, we believe all of that, but that is not because of temporal punishments of sins.
22:17: That is making us like Jesus Christ. That's the whole purpose of God's work of election.
22:23: You look at Ephesians chapter 1, what's it all about? Being in Christ and being conformed to His image.
22:29: And so it's a very different concept because what we're talking about really historically with Roman Catholicism, and I recognize modern
22:37: Roman Catholicism, I doubt Francis actually believes this, I really, really do, but at least the
22:43: Orthodox view is represented by someone like Ludwig Gott, is that this is a place, not just a state, it is a place that has temporality to it.
22:55: Having indulgences for tens and twenties and thirties of years would make no sense whatsoever if that were not the case.
23:02: And it is punishment that must be undergone before you can enter into the presence of the
23:12: Father. And so what passages were brought forward to present that kind of a concept?
23:18: Well, the only one really was 1 Corinthians chapter 3. So let's look at it. We'll look at a couple of others that were mentioned quickly, like paying the last penny as if that's what
23:27: Jesus is talking about is eschatology and punishment for temporal punishments of sin and stuff like that.
23:33: No, 1 Corinthians chapter 3, let's take a look at it. It's very, very important. I'm sure we'll be looking much more closely at it during cross -examination because Paul is talking about the ministry there in Corinth, and he says, according to the grace of God, which was given to me as a wise architect,
23:52: I laid a foundation and others are building upon it. Let each one look to be careful how he builds upon it.
24:00: So what's he talking about here? Is he talking about stuff after this life? He's talking about there in Corinth, how do
24:09: Christian leaders build upon the foundation that Paul has laid? He says, for no other foundation can be laid other than that which has been laid, which is
24:19: Jesus Christ. And if a certain one builds upon the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, what will be made manifest?
24:33: His work will be made manifest for the day will show it.
24:41: What is that day? Well, it's the day of the Lord. It's the day of judgment. So what is going to take place at that time is a manifestation of the character of the work that has been built upon that foundation.
24:57: The day will demonstrate that the day will show what that is because it will be apocalyptic.
25:04: It will be revealed and Puri by fire.
25:09: Well, what does fire have to do with that? Well, what's the difference between gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, and straw?
25:17: What's the difference between these things? Well, if you put gold in the fire, what's the result?
25:24: It becomes more purified. You remove impurities from it, but wood, hay, and straw, you introduce them to fire and they are destroyed.
25:33: They disappear. They cannot stand the presence of the fire for it says the fire will prove or demonstrate the nature of these works of what they are made.
25:46: That's what he's saying. It's very, very clear. If a certain one's work, not if a certain one, but if a certain one's work remains, which he has built, which he has produced, he will receive a reward.
26:06: But if a certain one's work is destroyed and consumed, he will suffer loss.
26:14: When Paul uses this, he says, I am willing to suffer loss of all things for the sake of Christ.
26:20: Same term. Paul wasn't saying I'm willing to be punished of all things for Jesus Christ. That's not what he was talking about.
26:26: So you can find other places where this term is used, but when Paul uses it,
26:31: Paul's using it of suffering of loss. He says he will suffer loss, yet he himself will be saved, yet so as through the fire.
26:42: Now, if my works are examined by God on that final day, and he knows the intentions of my heart, he knows the intentions of all of our hearts.
26:55: In that final day, he's going to reveal why everyone did what they did.
27:01: Now, is that connected to me? Is that something that will reveal something about me? Well, of course.
27:07: But it's through the demonstration of those works, which were built upon the foundation.
27:15: There is nothing here about different kinds of sins, mortal or venial sins.
27:22: There's nothing here about temporal punishments. There's nothing here about sadis passio. These are all things that come centuries and centuries and centuries later, and they go at their fundamental foundational level against how
27:41: Paul believed that any of us will ever stand before God. How do we stand before God?
27:49: Do we stand before God in a robe that is made up of the righteousness of Christ, Mary, and the saints from the thesaurus meritorium, the treasury of merit?
28:01: If you receive indulgences, then that's going to be part of your standing before God.
28:09: Are we standing before God in a robe that includes our own suffering, our own sadis passio in this life or in the next?
28:19: Or do we stand before God robed in the seamless righteousness of Jesus Christ?
28:25: He made him who knew no sin to be sin in our behalf that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.
28:36: Now, look, I can quote, quote, unquote, Protestant scholars who don't even think that's about you and I. N .T.
28:41: Wright doesn't think that it is. But the reality is that is the great exchange.
28:48: That is the foundation upon which any of us can have peace with God, and that's why this topic is so vitally important.
28:56: I believe purgatory is a doctrine that developed over the course of at least 1 ,400 years.
29:03: And when you look at any of the people that transcited in that early period of time, they did not, and Roman Catholic scholarship admits it, they did not have a developed doctrine of purgatory.
29:14: All you can do is point to, well, here's a little piece here, here's a little piece there. You put this, that there, and then this develops, and then
29:19: Gregory the Great hears about these visions that people had about the afterlife, and my goodness, read the book by F .X.
29:28: Shoup there on purgatory. Vision after vision after vision after vision after vision, and it all eventually comes together and is dogmatically defined, even though I would say the clarity of its definition hundreds of years ago is far clearer than it is today.
29:45: Modern Rome is somewhat embarrassed by the clarity of the doctrine as it was taught at the time of the
29:51: Reformation, but what does that tell us about the fundamental differences between us?
29:58: It tells us that when Paul speaks, when Paul lays out what is the gospel, what gives us peace with God?
30:07: Romans 5 .1 says, therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our
30:13: Lord Jesus Christ. How do you get to that point? Well, that's what Romans 3 and 4 is about. And as you follow the argument through, you get into chapter four, and Paul talks about righteousness being imputed to those who do not work.
30:29: Those who work receive a wage, what is due to them. But the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is reckoned to him as righteousness.
30:42: And then immediately he says, David spoke of the blessedness upon the man to whom
30:48: God imputes righteousness apart from works. And that's the works that come right before that.
30:54: Not E .P. Sanders, not N .T. Wright, not all the rest of that stuff. It's the works that are mentioned right before that, the contrast between believing and working.
31:04: And then to demonstrate what it means to have righteousness imputed to you, he quotes from Psalm 32, and he said, blessed is the man whose sins, the
31:16: Lord is forgiven, whose sins are covered over. And then he says, blessed is the man to whom the
31:22: Lord will not impute sin. And so one of the conversations that we need to have this evening is who is that blessed man and what does it mean that Paul could interpret the non -imputation of sin as the positive imputation of righteousness?
31:45: Because that's what Romans 4, 6, with the quotation verses 7 through 8, that's what's going on there.
31:53: Now, why is this important to you or not? It's real simple. How can you have peace with God? When you wake up in the morning, knowing your own heart, knowing the lust of your flesh, knowing the impurity of your words, and knowing the holiness of God, how can you have peace with him?
32:15: How can you know that if your life ends in this day, that you will enter into his presence and not spend 10, 20, 30, 40, or 100 years undergoing satisfacio?
32:28: How do you have that peace? The only way, and we don't believe the same thing about this, the only way you can have that peace is if you recognize that a true believer in Jesus Christ is a person who has received his righteousness, not only in the sense of the forgiveness of all of my sins, but his positive righteousness.
32:50: He has loved the Father perfectly, and when I receive his righteousness, then
32:55: I am seen in him. That's how we have peace, and that's really what we're talking about this evening.
33:03: Thank you for your attention. What you just heard from James was not an opening statement.
33:23: It was a rebuttal and an assertion that his particular view about the gospel and imputation means that there is no such thing as purgatory.
33:32: That was it. That's all that he offered you tonight to believe that the doctrine of purgatory is false. What are some things he didn't say?
33:39: He didn't cite any Bible verse that says that all believers enter heaven immediately at death and that they undergo no postmortem purification or punishment.
33:48: He didn't cite any scripture about the afterlife to support his view, whereas I did cite scriptures that describe the afterlife and support my view.
33:58: And how did James react to them? When I cited Matthew chapter 5 about paying the last penny, he gave a scoffer's response.
34:06: Oh, it doesn't mean that. Sorry, you're going to have to do a little bit better than that.
34:11: And he said, oh, like that has anything to do with eschatology, except Matthew 5, 21 through 30 is all about what happens to us after death.
34:20: That lust can send you to hell and anger can send you to Gehenna. So the scoffer's response will simply not work there.
34:27: The same with 1 Corinthians chapter 3. He told a great story. It's oh, it's just about revealing the motivations that different workers have.
34:36: Read 1 Corinthians 3 verses 10 through 15 for yourself and ask that if you're standing there at the final judgment and God burns up these works related to you, you shall suffer loss.
34:49: What are you losing? I cited a competent, well -respected Greek lexicon that says that the loss being referred to in 1
34:57: Corinthians 3 .15 is a punishment. The Greek word is zemiao. And James says, oh, well,
35:03: Paul uses loss. That's not the way Paul uses the word. Paul uses words in different ways in different contexts.
35:10: He hasn't rebutted anything that I put there. Also, James really manifested severe lack of understanding of the doctrine of purgatory.
35:20: What's interesting is that I cited from the official teaching of the Catholic Church, the catechism of the Catholic Church, James cited from one theologian who's respected, but a theologian and from other sources.
35:31: When you're going to be critiquing another view, you ought to represent the official teachings of that view, not just private thoughts and articulations of it.
35:40: And you should get the view right. For example, what is satis passio? Satis passio is not us working in purgatory to cleanse ourselves to get out of it.
35:49: The Catholic Encyclopedia says satis passio, quote, is often spoken of in a loose sense as satisfaction, spoken of in a loose sense of satisfaction.
36:00: Satis passio is a completely passive process where God cleanses us.
36:05: And I quoted from Pope Benedict XVI in an encyclical where he reflects upon theologians who say that this purifying process is just the encounter with Christ where all falsehood melts away.
36:15: We don't do anything. The souls that are in purgatory rest from their labors, as Hebrews 4 .10 says.
36:21: They know that they're saved. They know that they will not sin anymore. So if anything, they have joy that they're going to enter into heaven.
36:28: And there's no magisterial teaching that the joy of purgatory is outweighed by the suffering there, that while in this process of being purified, they recognize they can now rest from their labors while they undergo what has been the technical term, satis passio.
36:43: But he said, we don't undergo satis passio in this life. That shows he doesn't understand the concept.
36:49: Now, satisfaction, some people think, oh, satisfaction is just what Christ did on the cross. No, satisfaction, expiation, reparations, atonement, they all generally mean the same thing, to make up for something that was done, to make reparations.
37:03: Now, only Christ, the God -man, can give expiation, satisfaction, atonement, and reparation for the eternal consequence of sin, for fully turning away from God.
37:12: We can't do that because we're sinners. We have nothing to offer God except what God already gave us.
37:18: So if we fully turn away from God, only the merits of Christ can bring us back to God. However, when we partly turn away from God, when we as Christians sin,
37:29: God as a loving father will gently turn us back to him. And James talked about the temporal debt of punishment.
37:36: It's not a legal debt that we have to pay to satisfy some kind of divine ledger. Rather, God as a heavenly father and as the divine creator of the universe has what's called an order of justice.
37:46: God creates the universe and it's supposed to work a certain way because he's perfect, all -knowing, and all good. But we human beings have free will and we mess that up.
37:53: For example, one of the ways the universe is supposed to work is that when you do good, you feel good.
37:59: And when you do bad, you feel bad. That's how we're supposed to feel. But why do we sin? Well, a lot of times we sin because we feel good when we sin.
38:07: That was what Pope Paul VI called a perturbation in the universal order. And so because God has planned that it is fitting that if we're going to feel good when we do bad, then to reorder us into perfect harmony with him, we will feel bad for doing bad.
38:25: We will have sorrow. Now, I've already shown in citing the catechism, paragraph 1472, that by a fervent act of charity, one can remit all of the temporary consequences of sin in this life.
38:36: But not everyone will do that. James has tried to say, oh, well, of course we believe in sanctification. Of course we believe in conforming to God's will.
38:42: But he describes it as only a purely positive process where I've clearly shown in Hebrews 12, based on my argument, that this is, you don't have to use the word punishment.
38:50: I never used the word punishment in my argument. I said unpleasant discipline. And that's clearly what is being described in Hebrews 12.
38:57: God scourges. He whips every son he receives. Just read it for yourself and see that God, because he is a loving father just as our fathers, and I have kids, when they do bad and they feel good,
39:09: I want them to be reordered towards the good. So they have to feel bad. Now, God does this.
39:14: This is fitting. This is a fitting form of justice. God is all -powerful. He doesn't have to do this. He can just snap his fingers and reorder our divine will.
39:22: But it's fitting that he does that. So that leaves open the possibility that God in his infinite mercy can remit these temporary consequences from sin, based on, for example, things like the rewards that he has given to others.
39:34: When you hear merits, when James talks about merit of Christ and the saints, take out merit and put in rewards given by God.
39:42: And that's clearly taught in the New Testament. And the New Testament also teaches that God blesses people because of the goodness of others.
39:48: For example, God blessed in Romans 11, he blessed the Jews in Paul's time because of what their forefathers had done.
39:55: Or he can remit punishments. So when Solomon strayed from God's will,
40:01: God sought that Solomon would not lose his kingdom in 1 Kings 11 because of what David had done. He lessened the temporary consequence of Solomon's sin.
40:10: So there's a lot more to talk about of the things that James just got wrong. And I'm excited to do that when I come back.
40:34: Why do Lutherans have such a small little stand here? Is that where you preach from? A little more?
40:39: OK, a little more space. OK, all right. Hard to get anything up here. It really is. Well, I guess we're not going to be having a friendly discussion this evening.
40:47: That was a very unpleasant shot across the bow. No, that was my opening statement.
40:53: And everybody knows that it was a perfectly proper opening statement and that I did almost everything that Trent said that I didn't do.
40:59: So obviously, it's going to be a little bit more of a fangs out this evening. We were just told that,
41:09: OK, the scoffing thing. Well, if you want me to read all of Matthew chapter five, I would recommend to you as you're taking notes, begin at verse 21.
41:19: This is from the Sermon on the Mount. And you will see that it's talking about personal relationships between individuals, that you should not say raka, you'll be guilty before the
41:31: Sanhedrin. Is the Sanhedrin in purgatory, I wonder? I don't know. And whoever says you fool will be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell.
41:39: OK, there's punishment for personal relationships. How does that mean that when
41:46: Jesus says make friends quickly with your opponent at law while you are with him on the way so that your opponent may not hand you over to the judge?
41:54: What's that? What's the correspondence to that in regards to the concept of purgatory?
42:01: And the judge or the officer and you'd be thrown into prison. Truly, I say to you, you will not come out there until you have paid up the last quadrants.
42:07: So you're paying to get out. Is that what sada spacio is? I don't know.
42:12: But we heard that I don't understand this. I understand that. The fact of the matter is Trent Horn represents a modern, cleansed view of this.
42:21: Catholic Answers does this all the time. Anybody who goes back, pick it up. Buy it.
42:27: FX shoot. It's available. 10 books. Pick it up. Read it yourself.
42:33: This represents what Rome believed for centuries. Now, I realize Rome's changing.
42:39: We know what they believe about capital punishment for centuries. Now, they don't believe that. It changes. And while you should be quoting from the
42:45: Universal Catholic Catechism, well, that gets changed too. And it may get changed yet again in the future. The fact of the matter is if you go to Denzinger, which is much more exhaustive than Universal Catholic Catechism is.
42:58: If you go to Denzinger, look up terms like punishment and merits and see what's there.
43:05: Look up the thesaurus meritorium to say that, well, merits are just simply rewards that God gives.
43:12: OK, then how is it that to be a saint when you die, your excess merit goes into the treasury of merit?
43:23: Think about what that means. What's an indulgence? It's a withdrawal from the treasury of merit.
43:30: Don't you think there's a little bit something more to that? Doesn't that correspond to the concept of indulgences and how long you get out of purgatory for indulgences?
43:40: Yeah, there is an idea of punishment. Sadaspatio, the suffering of atonement.
43:46: I read from Ludwig Ott what it means, what it is about, and the necessity of undergoing it in purgatory.
43:53: And my whole opening statement was, if you understand what the blessed man is, you will recognize that there is a fundamental confusion in Roman Catholicism between sanctification and justification.
44:09: And that has been known that we're just simply going back over what has been debated ever since the time of the
44:15: Reformation. What does it mean to be justified before God? What does it mean to have the righteousness of Christ?
44:24: Rome says that's a legal fiction. Baptism actually makes you righteous before God.
44:31: And that's what makes you pleasing before God. And that's why you're going to go to heaven is because you're in a state of grace and you're objectively pleasing to God.
44:39: It's an infusion of grace into you. And the whole point of the Reformation was the re -emphasis that had always been there in Scripture, but the removal of the centuries of tradition, the re -emphasis upon the freedom of God to save in Jesus Christ perfectly to his own glory, not through a sacramental system that controls that grace.
45:06: And what that said to individual believers is that that individual believer now has not only direct access to God, not through a bunch of saints and angels and all the rest of these types of things, but has direct access to God because that individual has the righteousness of Christ, which is why the
45:25: Holy Spirit can dwell within us. And that righteousness gives us peace with God.
45:31: And that makes us the blessed man. Now, are we conformed to the image of Christ by God's fatherly discipline?
45:39: Yes, but that is not the working off of temporal punishments. That is not because I've gone to a priest, which doesn't exist in the
45:48: New Testament, and been given penances to do, and if I don't do them with the right attitude or with the right dispositions, then there's still temporal punishments left over, and that's why
45:58: I need to go through purgatory before I enter into the presence of God. That's nowhere in the New Testament. It said, James gave us absolutely nothing that says that we immediately leave this life and go into the presence of God.
46:10: And I go, and you gave us something that says that actually we go to a place called purgatory for an undisclosed period of time?
46:17: Do I need to go to Sardis Passio? No, you didn't. You quoted from various popes and sources like that.
46:24: You didn't give us anything from Scripture. It even comes close to that. So let's remember what this is really about, because in my experience, a discussion of purgatory reveals the fundamental and foundational differences between us as to how we believe that we will ever enter into God's presence.
46:45: Is it because I have been objectively made pleasing to God, and therefore I am brought into His presence?
46:53: Or is it because Jesus Christ didn't just make a way, didn't just make it possible, didn't just merit a treasury of merit, but He substitutionarily takes my sin in His body on the cross, and I receive
47:11: His righteousness? That is a completely different understanding. Both cannot possibly be true.
47:19: And so why is purgatory wrong? Because it fundamentally compromises the gospel that Paul taught.
47:27: Thank you for your attention. Fangs out.
47:42: James, you should have heard some of the things Luther used to say his opponents. I'd say what I said was pretty tame tonight.
47:49: I also think it was just terribly ironic for James to ridicule the idea that baptism is how you get to heaven right here in a
47:58: Lutheran church in a denomination that teaches baptismal regeneration. So I find that to be supremely ironic.
48:07: Notice what we're going through with our cases here. I presented two arguments with specific premises that logically led to a conclusion about the essence of purgatory, which is that it involves purification from sin after death, or it involves unpleasant discipline, or you would call punishment for sin after death.
48:26: I gave reasons for both. James never showed that any of the premises were false. He never showed there was a fallacy in any of the arguments.
48:32: He just basically said that they're wrong and offered saying, well, you know, Romans 5 says we have peace with God.
48:38: So therefore what? So therefore there are no temporary consequences to our sins? Well, the author of Hebrews 12, since scripture does not contradict scripture, the author of the letter to the
48:48: Hebrews would say that we have peace with God, but having peace with God does not entail that God is not our father.
48:56: God is still our father. We have peace with him, and because we have peace, God can then give us discipline so that we can be more conformed to his will, that we suffer the temporary consequences of our sins.
49:08: I think the problem for James really is that he rejects the idea of mortal sin and venial sin, but to be consistent, almost all
49:16: Protestants can't do that, because it's just obvious to everyone here. If you, no matter what you believe, there are some sin, if you're a
49:23: Christian tonight, do you sin? You bet you do. You sin on a regular basis, but they're minor sins.
49:29: But if somebody sinned on a regular, if they committed an abortion every day is different than committing some minor sin every day.
49:35: All of us, if you hold James's view, you do recognize there's a difference between the major sins that are incompatible with the
49:41: Christian life, like adultery, abortion, sodomy, and the minor sins that we commit that are not incompatible with the
49:48: Christian life. Catholics just call those mortal and venial. I don't see how you can deny those. So there are consequences.
49:55: The consequence of mortal sin, you completely turn away from God, and so you have to, through God's grace, return to God through reconciliation.
50:01: But through the minor sins, we turn away from God, and God in his fatherly discipline chastises us, just as our earthly fathers do.
50:10: Now, he said, well, I'm misrepresenting, you know, he says that I'm sanitizing purgatory.
50:16: That's not true. You go to the Catechism in paragraph 1472. It says, to understand this doctrine and practice of the church related to indulgences, it talks about grave sin depriving us of communion with God.
50:26: On the other hand, every sin, even venial, entails unhealthy attachment to creatures, which must be freed, purified either here on earth or after death in purgatory.
50:34: This purification frees one from what is called the temporal punishment of sin.
50:40: So the punishment must not be conceived of as a kind of vengeance inflicted by God from without, but as following from the very nature of sin.
50:50: That sin separates us from God, and we suffer that can either fully separate us or partially turn away from God, and we recognize we don't have full communion with him.
50:59: The order of justice has been disturbed. And so God reorders that in his loving fatherly will.
51:06: I also think it's interesting. I would ask James, well, when did his view come into existence in the history of the church?
51:13: He didn't reject any of the fathers and historical witnesses that I gave that this is something that has been continuously known in church history.
51:21: Finally, this is compared to the doctrine of hell. Many Christians have different, they agree what hell is, but they disagree on the nature of hell.
51:27: Is it a red devil poking you in the butt with, you know, a pitchfork? Or is it more of an abstract thing, the separation from God?
51:34: Just because Christians disagree about the precise nature of hell, hell exists. Just as Catholic theologians disagree about the nature of purgatory, it does not follow that there is no purgatory.
51:44: Thank you. Let me suggest that since you all have access to the net these days, in light of the assertion that was just made that this belief has been continuously known in church history,
52:07: I would recommend to you, there has been a very interesting exchange of videos between Trent Horne and Brother Ortlund on this particular subject.
52:17: They are very lengthy, hours in length, and so I would invite you to take a look at those. And do I get on the inside of the joke for having quoted him now?
52:27: Okay, all right, because he mentioned that in your debate, so there's an inside joke going on there.
52:33: So anyways, I would suggest you take a look at that because the reality is, again, you look at Lagoff, you look at Roman Catholic historians, they will tell you this is something that developed over time.
52:44: The idea that this was the universal idea based upon a headstone or a prayer here, when there were so many different perspectives.
52:55: For example, Gavin Ortlund spent a lot of time on John Chrysostom. Chrysostom, really, I was actually very surprised, believed that you should pray for the damned, those who are not going to heaven.
53:07: I found that a very strange aspect, but the point is there was all sorts of different perspectives, and it was not until the 1400s that you have a dogmatic distillation of all these things into the perspective that now is represented in the universal
53:24: Catholic catechism, even if not to the fullness of what has been taught in the past. But let me just address this idea of mortal and venial sins, because even the definition was just now given to you.
53:34: It wasn't a full definition. A mortal sin, in at least historic Roman Catholic theology, is a sin that destroys the grace of justification.
53:46: So when you receive baptism, you are put into the state of grace, and you are justified by baptism.
53:55: But if you commit a mortal sin, that state of grace is destroyed, and you have to be rejustified.
54:03: So there are eternal punishments for that, and there are temporal punishments for that. Now, a venial sin does not destroy the grace of justification.
54:12: That's the primary distinction between the two, is whether it destroys the state of grace.
54:19: Because if you die outside the state of grace, then you're going to go to hell. Again, I don't think that's what the majority of the magisterium actually teaches today, believes today, anyways, personally.
54:30: But that is the historic perspective that's going on there. That distinction is not biblical.
54:37: Even Roman Catholic theologians will tell you, exegetes will tell you, if you go to 1 John, there's a sin unto death, a sin not unto death.
54:44: That's not talking about mortal and venial sins, that's talking about committing apostasy by cursing Jesus Christ.
54:49: That is, that simply is not a teaching that is found in the New Testament. It has to be read into the
54:55: New Testament in light of later doctrinal developments from centuries down the road. Why say?
55:04: Evidently, Trent feels that providing biblical argumentation on the nature of what it is to be in relationship with Christ is insufficient.
55:17: You have to have specific terminology, just like last night, you have to have specific terminology in regards to sola scriptura, you have specific terminology here.
55:27: If we have righteousness in Christ's, in God's sight, by union with Christ and the imputation of his righteousness to us, all the rest of this stuff doesn't make any sense.
55:41: If that's what Paul was teaching, then you cannot turn Paul against Paul. You cannot make him contradictory to himself, and that's what you'd have to be doing in taking the view of purgatory.
55:53: Thank you. I just want to mention that.
56:07: Okay, ten minutes, ten minutes, ten minutes, ten minutes. We'll go first. You ready to go? All right, so James, let's, your main argument seemed to be because of your view of the imputation of Christ's righteousness, people do not suffer temporal punishment from their sins in purgatory, and God judges us not based on our merits or the merits of others, but the merit of Christ that is imputed to us, and that's what he looks at, at the judgment for each of us.
56:40: Is that basically your view? That's a rather surface way of putting it, but I won't, we'll have to fill out the details.
56:50: The righteousness that we have when we die is the righteousness of Jesus Christ, and that determines the fact that to be absent from the body is to be present with the
57:04: Lord, is based upon that and not upon anything else. Wait, you, were you just quoting 2
57:13: Corinthians chapter 5 verses 8 through 9, to be, and you said it's to be absent from the body is to be present with the
57:21: Lord. When Paul speaks of his own desire to be with Christ… No, I want to stick about this verse.
57:32: Are you aware that the verse actually says, we would rather be away from the body and at home with the
57:38: Lord, not to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, is a common misstatement of it, 2
57:45: Corinthians 5 .8. I'm not sure what the distinction that you think is being made there.
57:52: The distinction is many Protestants will say that there is no purgatory because to be absent from the body is to be present with the
57:59: Lord, and there's no intermediate state. But 2 Corinthians 5 .8 doesn't say that. In fact, verse 10 says, we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ so that each one may receive good or evil according to what he has done in the body.
58:11: Okay, and so for we walk by faith and not by sight, we are of good courage for rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the
58:20: Lord. Therefore, we also have as our ambition, whether at home or absent, to be pleasing to Him.
58:26: In 1 Corinthians 3, it says that… Is that talking about a saved person who will suffer loss?
58:33: So we're leaving that one going to another text? You bet we are. Oh, okay. All right. I thought you had said there was something else going on there.
58:41: 1 Corinthians 3 is definitely talking about a saved person who is building upon the foundation of Jesus Christ that has been laid by the
58:53: Apostle Paul there in Corinth. What do they lose? Well, if you want to skip that far in, we're going to be looking a whole lot more closely to it, but they lose a reward.
59:10: Well, I need to correct that because it actually says, verse 14, it's the one whose work remains, which he has built, receives a misthos, a reward, but if anyone's work is burned up, he shall suffer loss.
59:32: So it doesn't specifically say loss of the same reward, but it does say loss of the same reward, but I mean, that's just sort of an assumption that you would come to.
59:41: Okay. What does, in order to determine that the reward is lost, what does
59:46: God see in that person? Does he only look at the righteousness of Christ and then determine that a reward will be lost, or does he see something else?
59:54: That's not what this text is about. This text is about the testing of the works, specifically verse 13, each one's work will be manifested for the day we'll show it.
01:00:07: Why does the believer suffer something when only the work is tested? Why doesn't just the work suffer?
01:00:16: Well, where's the term suffer? Suffer loss. Well, but again, that's the same term that, and I was astonished that you said this, when
01:00:27: Paul uses the term, the consistent use by Paul, and that has to be the first thing you ask in defining a term is how someone uses it in their own writings, is that he says he has been willing to suffer the loss of all things for the sake of Christ.
01:00:42: He wasn't saying that he was undergoing punishment. When Paul uses words, does he always use them in the same way?
01:00:49: No, but it is the first place you go to is to ask what the syntactical category, the lexical domain that he is utilizing, and if he's not, if he doesn't use it in multiple different ways, which he doesn't in his writings, then if you're going to say this is the one exception, you have to provide something in the context that demonstrates that that's the case.
01:01:10: Does the BDAG Greek lexicon say this is referring to punishment? It is one of the meanings that is given, yes.
01:01:15: Is the meaning connected to 1 Corinthians 3 .15? I don't have it in front of me, but I'll take your word for it. Okay. But BDAG is not my ultimate interpretive device.
01:01:24: That's fine. Nor yours. Is the loss of rewards a bad thing for the believer? Again, this is talking about determining what is gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, and stubble.
01:01:39: What is being shown is the nature of the works. Now, I agree.
01:01:45: If my works are burned up, I'm very much a person who is going to be deeply troubled by that taking place.
01:01:54: So James, if God looks at you and says, you worked with bad motivations as a
01:01:59: Christian worker. These were the glorious rewards you would have had. Now you will never have them.
01:02:05: Will you feel bad? Yes, I'll feel bad. Okay. So after death, so after death,
01:02:12: God is... Except this is at the day of the Lord. So this is the great judgment. It's obviously not referenced. So let's say we make it to the day of the
01:02:19: Lord. Who knows? Maybe that's what the Amber Alert was about. Who knows? We'll see. But... It may have been a silver alert.
01:02:25: They're looking for me. So my point there is just that if a father causes his child to feel bad because the child did something bad, is that punishment?
01:02:43: Different context. I'm just asking. I'm asking something very general. If you want to leave 1 Corinthians 3, and we can now maybe go to Hebrews or something like that, that's fine.
01:02:51: But we can't connect these things together because this is not talking about a father making a child feel bad.
01:02:58: This is talking about the justice of God revealing why workers in the church did certain things.
01:03:06: If an authority takes away a good thing from me because I did something bad, is that punishment?
01:03:13: That's not what this is talking about either. So you don't think that God permanently revoking heavenly rewards because we worked with bad,
01:03:22: I would say, sinful motivations in this life, that's not a punishment? That's a demonstration to the world at the day of judgment of what was gold, silver, and precious stones and what wasn't.
01:03:34: I'm very thankful that that's going to take place because there's so much false stuff going on in the name of Christ today that I can know that at the final day, there will be justice done.
01:03:45: I agree. Now, let's go to my other argument then. How much time do we have, by the way?
01:03:50: We have 2 minutes and 25 seconds. All right. 2 minutes for this first half. So just look at my argument.
01:03:57: So premise 1, God can purify Christians of their desire for sin. Is that true? Yes. No one in heaven will desire sin?
01:04:03: Right. Correct. Do some Christians still desire sin at the moment they die? Yep. Okay.
01:04:10: So wouldn't it follow then that after death, those Christians, something will have to happen to them so they will not desire sin when they enter into heaven?
01:04:18: Yeah, death is a definite transitional issue. But unfortunately, what's missing from the argument is the concept of punishments.
01:04:28: I'm not talking about punishment. I'm making an argument from purification. The doctrine of purgatory in your own official documents does use the term punishments.
01:04:36: So that's where the issue is. You're confusing.
01:04:42: One of the issues where we disagree with one another is you're confusing sanctification and justification. Okay. Well, what
01:04:47: I have quoted from, and I'm just quoting from the official magisterial teaching, I did make two arguments and we just got done talking about punishment.
01:04:53: You just didn't want to accept 1 Corinthians 3 is about punishment. So I'm talking about purification. No, you can't interrupt me.
01:04:59: I get to interrupt you. You'll have plenty of time for that next round. So you agree though, you agree that God, if our sanctification is not complete at death, it will be complete before we enter heaven.
01:05:11: Yes. Okay. So under some Protestant views of purgatory, such as what
01:05:17: C .S. Lewis or Jerry Walls or others argue, would that be a
01:05:22: Protestant view of purgatory? That would be a biblical view that you would say is acceptable. With Jerry Walls sitting right there,
01:05:27: I'll say no. Is he here? Yep. Say hi. Wave. There he is. Hey, look at that.
01:05:35: We got to hang out and talk later. That says all you need to know there. But I tried to be very clear.
01:05:44: This is your time. Well, I'm all starstruck now. I've only got... But that's why...
01:05:54: Well, that was an effective work on my part, wasn't it? Was that pretty good? Huh? You got to give me... I'll give you that. That was a good ringer there,
01:05:59: James. Okay. But I think Jerry can appreciate this. I understand there are different models of purgatory.
01:06:05: There is a model that could be called the sanctification model and another that we might call the satisfaction model.
01:06:11: But satisfaction doesn't mean you're paying a legal debt of punishment. It means that you are undergoing...
01:06:18: It means that you are making amends for what you can. Was that meant to be a question? No, it was just me coming off being starstruck.
01:06:23: Jerry, we'll talk later. All right, there you go. There you go. Continue on?
01:06:30: Okay. Okay, let's go back to 1 Corinthians chapter 3. Let's actually work through this one because it's so vitally important.
01:06:41: Beginning in verse 10, Paul is the architect who has laid a foundation there in Corinth.
01:06:49: Would you accept that to be a good starting place? Yeah, sure. And now he says other people are building upon it.
01:06:57: In Corinthians, you have the super apostles. There's obviously people questioning Paul's authority and stuff. So this is probably the background of what he's referring to, right?
01:07:06: Yeah, he's talking about Christian workers. But he's using them as an example. It doesn't follow that what he says only applies to Christian workers.
01:07:14: Okay. So when he talks about oikadomai, to build upon the foundation, do all
01:07:24: Christians... Is this a universal statement? Or is this something specifically about people who are building upon the foundation in the church?
01:07:34: Well, it is specifically about ministers like him or Apollos. But Paul also says in his letter, he refers generally to Christians and saying we are
01:07:42: God's co -workers. We are a kingdom of priests, as Peter says in his epistle.
01:07:49: So all of us are called to build on the foundation of Christ to build up the body of Christ. Okay. So it's a specific example, but it largely applies to all
01:07:55: Christians. Okay. But in this particular text, he is specifically talking about those who are building upon the foundation in Corinth.
01:08:04: If you want to expand upon that outside of that, I'm not going to argue about that.
01:08:12: But when he says, if a certain one builds upon the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, or straw, would you agree that the fundamental difference between the first three and the last three is their durability under testing by fire?
01:08:33: Yeah, there's a symbol that there is something defective about the latter that is revealed and something that is superior about the former.
01:08:42: And so however you interpret it, it will ultimately go back to there is something morally superior about some who are tested and they withstand it and some that is morally defective and that will be revealed, whether it's a person or even a motivation, as you claim.
01:08:57: Okay. So what does Aragon mean when it says that each one's
01:09:03: Aragon, each one's work will be made manifested? What is that work?
01:09:10: Is it not the work that has been built upon the foundation? Well, it could mean different things.
01:09:15: It could refer to their motivations, as you say, for why they have engaged in ministry.
01:09:22: But I gave an argument based on the work of Freyer, Griggs, and others that the Aragon, the work, are actually the disciples that they were forming.
01:09:31: What their work were raising up other Christians to be holy, and if they had bad motivations, they were lackluster, they were poor pastors, and their disciples suffer or go to hell, they'll be held responsible for that.
01:09:43: So yes, I looked at that book and it is a unique idea, which he admits is not mainstream at all and certainly does not agree with the
01:09:51: Jerome Bible commentary. But so the work that will be manifested is converts?
01:09:59: Disciples or other Christians that are being ministered. And I said that's one possible one, even your interpretation would be fine.
01:10:05: But how can that be gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw? A convert's a convert. I mean, there are people who can be...
01:10:11: Because it's symbolized, just like in Malachi chapter 3, the sons of Levi are symbolized as gold or silver, they're symbolized as stones in Malachi 3.
01:10:20: Okay, so their work is their disciples. Yes, I think that's a good interpretation.
01:10:27: And the day will show it, for it will be revealed by fire. Okay, so what does that have to do with their being purified via satisfacio in purgatory?
01:10:44: What is... Because we're talking about their disciples, who's being purified? Well, it's possible that the fire is purifying the morally superior ones that only have light blemishes.
01:10:57: Fire, pyro, is used frequently as a purificatory imagery in the
01:11:03: New Testament. How it reveals, people have different ideas about that. So it would reveal for the ones that are costly stones, their slight imperfections are removed.
01:11:13: But for the ones that are objectively morally defective, wood, hay, or straw, they are destroyed at the judgment because they are actually not united to God.
01:11:22: They are damned. So they had this... And it's revealed who is saved and who is damned because we don't know that in this life.
01:11:30: And then the builder is judged for what happened to his disciples. That's just, that's one explanation, one interpretation.
01:11:36: So you don't have an infallible interpretation of this text? No, the Catholic Church only offers a handful of infallible interpretations of Scripture.
01:11:43: And this isn't one of them that is even close? No, it's just one I'm putting out there and I think it's pretty neat. Interesting.
01:11:49: So, for the day we'll show it. What is the day?
01:11:55: The day is the final judgment of the end of the world. When Paul was writing 1 Corinthians, he was probably under the mindset that the day of the
01:12:02: Lord was very soon within his lifetime. Though by the end of his life, he seems to come to the conclusion the day of the
01:12:08: Lord is further off. So he seemed to be under the understanding that he and other workers would not have a natural death.
01:12:14: They would probably be present when the Lord returned. So you said in your book that you got that from Jimmy Akin.
01:12:20: I thought I'd give him credit. Oh yeah, Jimmy's a great guy. So there you go. So, your argument that this is the day of the
01:12:30: Lord, if it is the day of the Lord and Paul understood what the day of the
01:12:35: Lord was, then it couldn't be purgatory because my understanding is that purgatory is something that is experienced by an individual before the day of the
01:12:48: Lord, right? Well, for most people, if we die, the day of the Lord has not arrived. We have not come to the second coming or the judgment of sin that's in, for example, 2
01:12:56: Corinthians chapter 5. So the purification that takes place after death is something that happens now.
01:13:04: And I need to be clear about this. The official teaching of the Catholic Church, there's no teaching on the duration of purgatory.
01:13:12: There has been theological speculation about that. But just as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, we'll be changed in the twinkling of an eye.
01:13:18: Maybe the case that after death, the purification process is instantaneous. Or time is different in purgatory.
01:13:24: St. Thomas Aquinas said, in the afterlife, we go through eternity. So the time that is connected to earth or in purgatory is too disanalogous to judge.
01:13:33: That's why when you said that indulgences take time off in purgatory, medieval people did not believe that.
01:13:40: We'll get back to that one in just a moment. But so to make this relevant to purgatory, you have to accept the idea that Paul had an erroneous idea of when the day was going to take place because the actual doctrine of purgatory would indicate that, are people undergoing this now?
01:14:05: If it's temporal? Are there souls in purgatory now? Yeah. Yes. Okay.
01:14:11: And the day hasn't come yet. Nope. Pretty sure it hasn't. So the fundamental assumption that has to be made that you argued and borrowed from Jimmy Akin is that Paul was wrong about the day.
01:14:25: And at the point he wrote 1 Corinthians and then later got a better idea that it was going to be way down the road.
01:14:32: Yeah. But there's nothing problematic about him thinking something is going to happen and then something doesn't happen.
01:14:39: I don't see the problem there in Paul thinking God is going to do one thing and he doesn't.
01:14:45: He's not making a declarative statement. The day of the Lord is going to come on X, for example, that would fall under biblical inerrancy or something like that.
01:14:53: But even if that's not the case, the point is, he is saying that at the final judgment, so whenever the day takes place, so at the final judgment, there is going to be negative consequences for people who did bad things in this life.
01:15:08: That purification will take place. The day of the Lord is not the embrace of the beatific vision.
01:15:14: There's still going to be a judgment, the separating of the sheep and the goats, the judgment that is in 2 Corinthians 5, verses 8 -10
01:15:20: I already spoke about. So there's no problem in Paul thinking and saying, yeah, at the final judgment, before you enter into heaven and have the beatific vision, there will be judgment and there will be purification for the saved who are not fully sanctified.
01:15:32: Okay, but so you're, are you, are you thinking that apocalyptic time means purification? No, it means, it means reveal.
01:15:40: Okay, so the revelation by fire is showing what the works were, or you say what converts are, but then it, but then it goes on from there.
01:15:50: It says that the fire will make this known. And if a certain's work abides, which he has built, he'll receive reward.
01:16:01: So, um, is this in purgatory? Is this in purgatory?
01:16:07: The church doesn't teach that purgatory is a place. I think that's where we're having a disagreement here. Once again, there's speculation about that.
01:16:14: But is this, is this purgatorially done? Is this a process of purification? Yeah, just like what
01:16:19: I quoted from Randy Alcorn, that when you, when bad things happen to you at the judgment, like losing rewards, you're going to feel bad.
01:16:26: And God doesn't make us feel bad for an arbitrary reason. He does it so that our wills are reordered so we can be perfectly holy and enter into heaven.
01:16:45: All right. So, so far have we found agreement that someone could hold a model of purgatory that would be called the sanctification model, that just that God completes our sanctification after death?
01:16:58: I don't have any idea why purgatory would be associated with that. Because I think you just said, just a moment ago, that purgatory might be instantaneous.
01:17:12: And hence, there could not possibly be any objection that you would make to then say to a non -Catholic who says that when we die, we enter directly into the presence of Christ and we have been transformed.
01:17:27: And therefore, the new is fully manifest and the old has passed away.
01:17:34: And we can enter directly into the presence of God. But it won't be the process of death because all of us die, but not all of us go to heaven.
01:17:43: It's not death that would change us. No, of course not. But we have already been given a new nature in Jesus Christ.
01:17:49: And so we have already been made new creatures. We live in the now and the not yet. We are already in that position where we love
01:17:56: God and we have those desires for God and we have that new nature. And when we die, those final attachments to sin, that abiding sin that we struggle with is gone.
01:18:06: And so we are now clothed. I'm going to finish this sentence. We are now clothed in the righteousness of Christ and therefore can enter directly into his presence.
01:18:14: So wait, when does our attachment to sin vanish? At death.
01:18:21: Does that happen to everybody? No. So you're saying at death,
01:18:27: God purifies us of sin. We've already been purified from the punishment of sin, but we still experience abiding sin in our life.
01:18:37: That's what sanctification is about. That's what conformance, the image of Christ is about. And then when God calls us out of this world, he now has us going to a different place.
01:18:47: And so the reason for the continuation of that struggle is gone and we enter into his presence, not on the basis of who we are or what we are, but on the basis of what
01:18:57: Christ has done in our place. So the reason I desire sin in this life is something related to my soul, correct?
01:19:05: Related to my soul? Yeah. That there is something about... It's abiding. We call it abiding sin.
01:19:11: We call it the continuing. We're no longer under the reigning power of that sin, but it is still in our fleshly body.
01:19:22: So I'm not sure what you mean by soul at that point. In your soul. Is it possible that this sanctification model of purgatory can be a, that it is, it could be instantaneous.
01:19:33: Could it also be a process just as we go undergo a process of sanctification in this life, that God will have us undergo a process of sanctification in the next life?
01:19:43: Is that possible? The Bible does not teach that. And I'm assuming that you're referring to something other than the
01:19:49: Roman Catholic doctrine, because then we have to talk about punishments for, temporal punishments for sin.
01:19:56: Let's go to, I have a few other grab bags here. Uh, what would you say, who would you say is the earliest
01:20:03: Christian that held your view on the afterlife that, uh, there are no post -mortem punishments or, uh, purification or anything like that?
01:20:12: Peter, Paul, James, uh, the entire... All right. Let me rephrase that. What Christian after...
01:20:18: No, no, no, no, no. What Christian after the apostolic age? Honestly, in light of, uh, of, uh, these, especially books like, like this by, uh,
01:20:29: Brian Daly, um, this documents the wide range of views and the fact that even looking at someone like Gregory the
01:20:38: Great, you can find him in one place saying we go directly into the presence of God after death.
01:20:43: Were there any fathers in there that denied purgatory, said that all believers immediately enter heaven? Okay. Denied purgatory.
01:20:50: It wasn't even a concept. So how could you deny it? They didn't, they didn't deny that the Dallas Cowboys choke all the time in the playoffs either.
01:20:57: So, uh, but that's still a reality. Did, uh... Sorry, Tom. Sorry, Tom. Sorry.
01:21:03: Did Augustine believe in purgatory? Uh, not in the way you'd believe in it. No. Did he believe that after...
01:21:08: He made, he made statements concerning, uh, afterlife purgation, but that has nothing to do with...
01:21:14: Did he say that after death people suffer pene purgatoriae? Yes, but that had not been defined in the way that is defined by the
01:21:24: Council of Florence. Okay. Was it? I am, I am asking you if there...
01:21:29: Okay, since you like to quote people, Brian Daly says no. Okay. Where does he say that?
01:21:36: In his section on Augustine, he very clearly delineates the limitations of his understandings of any type of, um, there's, there's nothing that would, that would give rise for example, to the concept of indulgences and the thesaurus meritorium and all the rest of that kind of stuff.
01:21:54: That's still way down the road. You have to allow for the development in church history.
01:22:01: Are you going, is there any person in church history after the apostolic age who you would say that, yeah, their views on the afterlife, uh, when it comes to post -mortem purification or punishment, pretty similar to mine?
01:22:13: Well, uh, even John Chrysostom, uh, very clearly in his, uh, and you know this, you, you, you're the ones doing the videos on these things, uh, very clearly gave, uh, funeral orations and things like that, talking about the immediate entrance into the presence of Christ.
01:22:27: Did Chrysostom believe that the damned could be saved? Not be saved, no. He said they should pray for the damned to mitigate their suffering.
01:22:35: He did not say they could be saved. Okay. All right. That's different. All right. Let's go to the, uh, issue related to punishment.
01:22:44: All right. So my other argument here, um, my timer stopped. Evan, how are we doing on time? Three minutes and 57 seconds.
01:22:50: Okay. Three minutes, 55 seconds. Okay. Let's go back to my, my other argument then about sin and punishment.
01:22:56: So premise one, when Christians sin, God unpleasantly disciplines them to morally perfect them.
01:23:05: Would you say that that's true? Um, God conforms the elect to the image of Christ.
01:23:12: And that is described in the book of Hebrews as a father lovingly, uh, chastising his children, uh, because he wants to be us to be holy as Christ is holy.
01:23:23: The term unpleasant doesn't, isn't relevant. Okay. Well, in Hebrews 12, 11, it says for the moment, all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant.
01:23:36: Later, it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. Doesn't that clearly say that God unpleasantly disciplines us?
01:23:44: If you want to use that term, I will allow you to do so. I will never preach a sermon using that term.
01:23:50: I'm sorry. You won't preach what the Bible says. So, all right, let's go ahead. That's a cheap shot and you know it and everybody in the room knows it too. So no, it was, it was a fun one of it out there.
01:23:57: All right. Uh, so I think, I think that's very clear, uh, that when Christians sin, God unpleasantly disciplines them in order to morally perfect them.
01:24:05: He's not an arbitrary, capricious monster. Uh, then that would go to premise two.
01:24:11: So is, is it impossible? So if God does unpleasantly discipline us, uh, are you saying if that happens, it only happens in this life before death?
01:24:26: Yes. How do you know that? Because that's what Hebrews chapter 12 is talking about. My son did not regard lightly discipline of the
01:24:33: Lord, uh, nor faint when you were approved by him. For those whom the Lord loves, he disciplines and he flogs every son whom he receives.
01:24:39: And so, uh, this is being conformed to the image of Christ. Uh, and that's
01:24:46: God's purpose in leaving us in this world. Otherwise he could just simply, hey, you got saved. Boom. You're out of here, straight into heaven.
01:24:52: No worries about it. But instead he wants us to live out the life of Christ here upon earth.
01:24:57: Okay. So that's an assumption you're making. I'm asking you, is it possible that God, how, how do you know he only does it in this life?
01:25:07: How, how do you know that? Like, is there a scripture verse that says that? Well, again, uh, I'm, I am,
01:25:12: I am a solo scripture believing biblicist, and I have not seen anything in scripture that tells me that after this life, that this, this, uh, concept of purgation or whatever
01:25:24: I'm saying unpleasant, unpleasant is going to be, uh, continued, uh, in the presence of God.
01:25:31: If I get to the presence of God in heaven and he permanently revokes a heavenly reward because of what
01:25:37: I did on earth, would you call that unpleasant discipline? It wasn't a matter of that. There are a number of false assumptions there.
01:25:44: Okay. Uh, you are assuming that first Corinthians chapter three, that the reward has somehow quote unquote been rescinded or something along those lines.
01:25:52: That's not what the text is talking. What is, what is lost? What is lost in first Corinthians three? He shall suffer loss of the things that he built.
01:25:59: The loss of what? Well, uh, didn't you earlier? Go ahead.
01:26:05: The only context in first Corinthians chapter three is the building upon the foundation that this individual is doing.
01:26:12: So that was work within the church. It's not about converts or anything like that at all. Uh, it's the things that he did.
01:26:18: And so when it is demonstrated, I could name names of certain people that everything they did, the millions they spent, uh, the buildings they built and everything else.
01:26:29: Uh, the, when that great day demonstrates that they did that completely for themselves, then that is all burned up.
01:26:37: It's all gone. And he's got nothing. That's the loss. Okay. Didn't earlier, you say though, that he would receive a wage, a miss oaths.
01:26:45: No, that's the person who's, who's working. That's the person who's work. Oh, stop.
01:26:51: That's the person whose work does not burn up. That's he's the one that receives the missiles. Right.
01:26:56: Okay. I've got to watch my timer a little more closely. Stop. Okay.
01:27:07: Sorry. How many times do you have to tap it? Okay. We've got 10 more minutes, right?
01:27:12: All right. Good. There's some people in the audience not saying good, but that's okay. All right.
01:27:18: We go straight back to first Corinthians chapter three. So in verse 14, that's pretty much where we were.
01:27:28: If a certain one's work remains, which he has built, he will receive a reward.
01:27:37: What is that reward? Well, we don't know exactly. We would imagine probably some kind of glorification or honor, something related to heaven since this is the day of the
01:27:48: Lord. Okay. And the person who receives this word, is this a saint or a person who goes to purgatory?
01:27:56: It says here, it seems to be someone, it doesn't talk about that person suffering any kind of loss or needing purification.
01:28:08: So it only talks about them being rewarded in heaven. But it's possible that somebody could be purified of sin after death and still receive heavenly rewards.
01:28:16: Jesus says, store up for yourselves treasures, not on earth, but treasures in heaven. So the only ones in verse 14 are the ones who built with gold, silver, and precious stones.
01:28:28: Would you agree with that? Can you ask again, please? In verse 14, the ones who receive a reward are the ones who built upon the foundation with gold, silver, and precious stones.
01:28:41: Yeah. The ones who acted well in this life will receive a reward. That's the doctrine of rewards. It's very common in the
01:28:46: New Testament. Okay, so are there saints, and we have completely different definitions of saints, but are there saints who built with gold, silver, and precious stones?
01:29:06: Are there? Oh, well, the church doesn't have a dogmatic teaching about whether all canonized saints immediately went to heaven or whether they underwent purification.
01:29:15: It's possible that someone who we recognize as a canonized saint, someone who is definitely in heaven, went through a process of purification before that point.
01:29:23: The church doesn't have a teaching on that. In fact, it seems probable that some of them did. So saints are not individuals who have more merit than temporal punishments upon their souls and hence go directly into the presence of God?
01:29:38: The word saint has different meanings. When it is used in the New Testament, it refers to Christians in general.
01:29:44: The word saint has applied a technical meaning in Catholic theology to refer to someone the church has officially taught is currently in heaven or a canonized saint.
01:29:55: But saints are not perfect. When you read the lives of the saints, especially grumpy Jerome, you see that.
01:30:01: So, all right. So this judgment can't be of...
01:30:11: All right, I'll skip that part. If a certain one's work is destroyed by the fire, these are the ones who built with wood, hay, straw, right?
01:30:21: If a certain one's work is... Verse 15. I'm so sorry,
01:30:27: James. I'm just hopelessly distracted because I'm going to lose a bet of 50 bucks if you don't ask me who the blessed man is. But all right, we'll just keep going.
01:30:34: We can keep going. This is fun. So, verse 15.
01:30:43: If a certain one, his work is destroyed, he will suffer loss.
01:30:49: So, is it your idea then, is what you're presenting to us, is that if a certain Christian leader's converts are proven to not be true
01:31:00: Christians, that that person will be punished? Yeah.
01:31:06: Is that what you're saying? I think that that is a view that makes sense of the passage. I wouldn't impose it on others. It's one that I think makes a lot of sense.
01:31:13: And as I quoted before, Hebrews 13, 17 says to submit to those who have authority over you, your leaders in the church, who are men who will have to give account.
01:31:24: But even if we say that the works are just things they did in this life, motivations that they had, the point is that the works are bad in a moral sense.
01:31:37: Bad moral things are sins. And so they are receiving a punishment, but it is a temporary punishment, not an eternal punishment.
01:31:46: And that is the foundation of the doctrine of purgatory. In Romans 4, 6.
01:31:52: All right. I don't think it's fair, whoever did the bet, because you set it up.
01:31:58: So I'm just simply saying. You can ask whatever you want. Oh, yeah, sure. In Romans chapter 4,
01:32:08: David speaks of the blessedness upon the man to whom God imputes righteousness apart from works.
01:32:19: Um, do you believe that God imputes righteousness by faith?
01:32:28: I do believe that anyone can, that the point that Paul is making there in Romans 3 and 4 is that anyone can come to righteousness in Christ before God, whether they are a
01:32:39: Jew or a Gentile through baptism, all of their sins are washed away. They do no work.
01:32:44: There's nothing like circumcision where they earn their place before God. They simply come and receive Christ in baptism.
01:32:50: And after baptism, none of their sins are held against them. The blessed man is anyone who has received
01:32:56: God's forgiveness. When God forgives, his sins are not held against him. Does the term baptism appear anywhere in Romans 3 or 4?
01:33:01: No, but the point is the blessed man is how we ask, how does God forgive us? And that's very clear when
01:33:06: Paul talks about baptism in Romans 6. So we'll only get to baptism in Romans 6, but in Romans 3 and 4, we just have to read
01:33:14: No, in Romans 3 and 4, that just as if we're talking about David, why is David a blessed man?
01:33:19: It's because God forgave him of the sins of murder and adultery. And so those sins would no longer be held against him.
01:33:26: And the blessed man is anyone who got the forgiveness of God. You're jumping ahead. So hold on.
01:33:31: Verse 4 says, to the one working the misthos, which we also saw in 1
01:33:36: Corinthians 3, the misthos is not reckoned or imputed as a gift, but what is owed.
01:33:45: But then verse 5, the contrast to the one not working, but believing in the one justifying the ungodly, his faith is reckoned as righteousness.
01:33:56: Do you see that Paul is contrasting an attitude of earning something from God with an attitude of faith in the promises of God?
01:34:08: Right. And the Catholic teaching is not that we earn anything from God by our own merits or that we earn rewards or salvation as some kind of wage that God is obliged to give us because of equal value for our works.
01:34:20: What you're referencing there in Romans 4, verses 3 through 5 is related to the fact that anyone can come into forgiveness from God, whether they're
01:34:28: Jew or Gentile. N .T. Wright says this passage, Paul is ruling out any suggestion that Abraham might have been just the sort of person
01:34:35: God was looking for so that there might be some merit prior to the promise. Yes. And yet when we get to verse 5, it does say that his faith is reckoned to him as righteousness, right?
01:34:48: Yeah. The Catholic teaching on justification is that they're not mutually exclusive, that God can declare we are righteous, but he also makes us righteous.
01:34:58: Just as God declared, let there be light, he also objectively made light exist when he made the world.
01:35:03: On what basis can he say that someone is righteous? Don't they have to be righteous to be declared righteous?
01:35:09: Well, no. God has to make us righteous. He takes us as sons of Adam and makes us as sons of Christ.
01:35:15: By sacramentally infusing grace into us, right? Yeah. That's what Catholics believe. Not by faith.
01:35:21: No. What the Catholic Church teaches and what Lutherans would teach and what Anglicans would teach is that baptism is something that we receive by faith.
01:35:29: It's not any kind of work. Okay. So then he uses kathaper, just as David speaks of the blessedness upon the man to whom
01:35:40: God imputes righteousness, chorus ergo, without works.
01:35:46: Yeah. What are these works? Probably the works related to, in an immediate context, as I said,
01:35:53: Paul is most concerned about the relation between Jews and Gentiles. That's why in Romans 4, 9, he makes the distinction between the circumcised and the uncircumcised.
01:36:02: So it's those works that would give you entry into the kingdom of God. He's saying you don't need that.
01:36:08: He's saying you don't have to be a good Jew in order to be a good Christian. So it wouldn't be the works that come from ergods ameno in verse 4.
01:36:16: The one working the wage is not reckoned according to grace.
01:36:21: So there's a distinction? To receive justification for God, you don't have to do any work. You receive baptism as a grace from God.
01:36:28: That's why an infant, when they are saved, they cannot possibly work. They don't do anything but wriggle around.
01:36:34: And if you mortally sin and reject God, you can return to God through humble faith and receive
01:36:40: Him in the sacrament of reconciliation. That's not a work. Okay, so unfortunately the answers have gone so long that I'm not actually going to be able to fulfill your bets.
01:36:48: So but in verses 7 and 8, do you not see that Paul is defining the imputation of righteousness as the forgiveness of sins?
01:37:02: Yeah, and you can talk about it. As I said, they're not mutually exclusive. But the point of the matter is that just if you're arguing that, well,
01:37:09: God imputes righteous to us so He does not reckon our sins or He does not impute our sins to us, it doesn't follow from that that there's no consequences for our sins.
01:37:18: Does that mean that once God reckons us as righteous, that therefore if we choose, if we end up becoming an unrepentant apostate, we will end up going to heaven because God does not impute those sins to us?
01:37:31: Like that doesn't follow at all. Okay, come to the end of the cross -examination period.
01:37:46: I think I need a round of applause. I know we're going to do that more, but to have gone that long without clapping just felt wrong, and they worked really hard with that.
01:38:02: So we have a lot of questions. I have no idea if this is a serious question or not, so I'm going to get it out of the way because it's for both of you.
01:38:11: When will the both of you submit to the One True Church of Pastor Jim's Holy Apostolic Independent Fundamental KJV and Just Be Baptist?
01:38:22: Okay, anyway. Uh, yes. And then someone else bribed me or bribed
01:38:28: Dr. White with a Chick -fil -A card. I don't know. So are you keeping that?
01:38:35: I don't know. No, I'll give it to you. Here you go. I think it's, I think it's just for a cookie though.
01:38:40: So we're going to come to that question, but Trent is asking questions first. So, no, didn't
01:38:48: I already do? We already did that. No, I'm sorry. You're answering questions that came in. I'm sorry.
01:38:55: Had you guys worried there. Sorry. Apologies. Okay, so 20 minutes with this.
01:39:03: I'll go through again, one minute to answer, 30 minutes to respond if the question is for you or not for you. Okay. Had a lot of people ask about the thief on the cross.
01:39:13: Kind of surprised that didn't come up. So how do you respond to Luke 23, 43?
01:39:18: Today you will be with me in paradise, said Jesus to the thief on the cross. The argument seems to be that purgatory does not exist because the thief would have had to undergo purification or temporary punishment for sins.
01:39:31: And Jesus said today, you'll be with me in paradise. I don't find that to be a good argument against purgatory because number one, as I quoted from the catechism, paragraph 1472 by a fervent act of charity and turning to God in sorrow for sin, all of the temporal consequences or punishments of sin can be remitted.
01:39:49: And I think the thief clearly did that. He in a heartfelt said to Jesus, remember when you come into your kingdom, he rebuked the other thieves on the cross and he suffered a torturous death.
01:39:58: So you could say that he was purified through voluntarily accepting that punishment. Also, as I said, purgatory is something that the duration is not taught by the church.
01:40:08: So it still could have happened in a short period of time if he needed that after death. Also, Jesus did not go to heaven immediately that day, right?
01:40:17: Because he had to descend into hell, preach to the spirits in prison. He didn't rise gloriously until Sunday. Paradise refers to a region of the underworld, an interim where purification could take place.
01:40:28: I'd also caution that the thief on the cross. All right. One minute, 30 seconds. That's brutal.
01:40:36: Once you assume the authority of the church to define these things, then you can utilize that to interpret all the
01:40:44: Bible the way you want to. There is nothing in scripture about purgatory. We have not seen anything that names it.
01:40:50: It has been assumed from the beginning. And the reality is the thief on the cross simply trusted in Christ and Christ says,
01:41:00: I can save you perfectly. And that's what all of us can trust in. But I actually want to allow you,
01:41:08: I'm not actually sure of the question. So you might say it has nothing to do with it. But the question is this.
01:41:13: How does the meaning of the Greek word aiou, a -i -o -u, affect the conversation tonight?
01:41:21: Or does it? Or do you get that for nothing? Are we talking about aeon? Yes. A -i -o, well, it looks like a u, but it may be an i.
01:41:31: It's probably final form nu. Okay. I'm assuming that someone may be referring to the age to come, the
01:41:44: Matthew 12, Mark 3, in the age to come versus an eternal sin, which we didn't end up discussing, shockingly.
01:41:53: I wish you had betted on that. Other than that, I just, I don't know what to assume is the background.
01:42:01: Okay. I'm sorry. No, no, I worried that, but they did bribe me. So, I want to give you…
01:42:08: You read it. I think you have earned your wage, so. Let me give another question.
01:42:17: Do, this is for Dr. Wright, do high church Anglicans who affirm sola scriptura and believe in purgatory affirm a different gospel?
01:42:30: Well, a high church Anglican would have to use, if there could be a high church Anglican, would have to use the 39
01:42:35: Articles. And the 39 Articles were thoroughly reformed. The problem is there has been development since then.
01:42:45: I have preached in many Anglican churches down in Sydney, Australia, where they are very, very conservative and they believe in justification by faith and things like that.
01:42:53: And I have a picture of me and an Anglican minister staying next to a little baptistry, and I'm going like that.
01:43:00: But they believe in justification by faith. So, as to what other
01:43:05: Anglicans have come up with after the 39 Articles, I can't really comment.
01:43:13: But if you're, anything that is going to cause you to believe that there is something outside of faith and faith alone as the means of justification becomes extremely problematic.
01:43:24: But they don't have quite the same level of dogmatic defining authority as Rome claims for itself.
01:43:31: Oh, hush. Yeah, I would say that when you look at, and this is important when people see
01:43:37: Catholics and Protestants debate. Protestantism is a very wide demographic, and there are going to be
01:43:44: Protestants who are much closer to the Catholic position. And certain issues have no problem with it, such as baptism, regeneration, something
01:43:51: Lutherans and Anglicans heartily agree with Catholics on. King Henry VIII was called defender of the faith.
01:43:57: He wrote a defense of the seven sacraments. So, if your theology has priests and has sacrament of confession and has penances, and you understand that there are temporary punishments for sin in this life, that the church has some authority over, then you're one skip hop and jumping away to a doctrine of purgatory as Catholic.
01:44:15: You're not that far off. Okay, Trent, another question where Jesus is on the cross.
01:44:24: Based on Hebrews 10, 12 to 18, although this is a reference to the
01:44:29: Gospels, what did Christ mean on the cross by saying, it is finished? There are different interpretations of what that means.
01:44:38: It could just mean that his passion was now complete. I actually have a video on my website that there are people who erroneously say that it is finished means paid in full.
01:44:50: That is a misunderstanding of the Greek term and its abbreviation used in manuscripts. What was not finished was our justification, for example, because Paul says in Romans 4, 25, that Jesus was raised for our justification.
01:45:04: He also says in 1 Corinthians that if Christ has not been raised, your faith is in vain. So, our salvation was not finished at that moment.
01:45:10: It may refer to his prophetic mission, the passion is finished, or Scott Hahn in his book,
01:45:17: The Lamb's Supper, proposes an intriguing hypothesis that what is finished by drinking the fourth cup of wine, he finished the supper that he started the night before.
01:45:28: You can read that in Hahn's book, The Lamb's Supper, if you're interested, and his academic book, The Fourth Cup.
01:45:34: I don't know if it strikes everybody else the same way it strikes me, but when I first started debating
01:45:39: Roman Catholics, one of their main arguments was, we're not like you Protestants. We can go to the
01:45:45: Pope and we can find out exactly what a text means, and yet when we get into these texts, what we hear is, well, it might be this, it might be that,
01:45:52: I don't know. We might read this book over here, we might read that book over there, and it just seems to me that there's less confidence in the interpretive authority than there once was, but I'm out of time.
01:46:04: Dr. White, if you die and are saved, but struggling with a deadly sin, pride, lust, etc.,
01:46:15: do you just go straight to heaven, and can you show that with Scripture?
01:46:22: Again, the Scriptural teaching is that we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our
01:46:27: Lord Jesus Christ, that we possess his righteousness, and according to Hebrews 10, we have been perfected by that once -for -all sacrifice made in our place, and so when you talk about struggling with a deadly sin, it almost sounds like some type of mortal sin concept being presented there, and again,
01:46:43: I reject the idea of the mortal venial distinction, but the reason that I go into the presence of the
01:46:49: Father is because there has been a transition. The old has passed away, the new has come, that is a reality now, and then at death, it becomes the final reality, so that that attachment is no longer there, that abiding sin is no longer there, and the reason that I can stand in the presence of God is because I am clothed in that righteousness.
01:47:15: He was made sin in my place. That's why I can then go directly into his presence.
01:47:21: Yeah, I find the response a bit confusing. It seems to make sin to be something that we're freed from from death simply because it sounds like our souls are separated from our bodies, as if sin is just something we have once the soul leaves the body, it doesn't struggle with sin anymore, but that doesn't make sense because damned people, when they die, they will sin and continue to sin in hell, even though they don't have their bodies, so that would show that sin is something related to our souls, so after we die, death is not the automatic process that sanctifies us.
01:47:49: If we still need sanctification, God will do something to complete that process, if necessary, after death.
01:47:56: Okay, for Trent, if sin can be paid for temporally and we can be sanctified via purgatory, why was
01:48:06: Jesus' death necessary? Jesus' death was necessary because we cannot make satisfaction for the eternal consequence of sin.
01:48:16: The eternal consequence of sin is that we have accrued an infinite debt against God, our actions separate us from Him, and we're born in original sin.
01:48:25: We do not have sanctifying grace. We are children of Adam. We have no right to stand before God.
01:48:31: The only way we can come to God is that Christ made satisfaction, and He made it possible so that through His merits, it's super abundant, every single person, if they choose to receive
01:48:43: Christ, can be saved. So Christ merits and satisfies the eternal consequences of sin.
01:48:49: However, as Christians know, when we still sin, even when we're saved, there are temporary consequences. God, Jesus took away the permanent and eternal consequences, but when we sin, we create disorder in the will, unhealthy attachments to creatures, discord amongst the brethren.
01:49:04: These are temporary, finite consequences of sins for finite, partially turning away from God. What we didn't just hear and what was just said was anything about the union of the believer with Christ and the fact that what
01:49:20: Christ's death actually accomplishes is perfect and complete in behalf of that particular individual, the elect, that union with Christ and that substitutionary atonement, that really is part of what we're getting at this evening and what that actually ends up resulting in.
01:49:43: Okay, question for James. Could Peter forgive sins?
01:49:50: Why is the fact that the disciples could forgive sins not evidence that Christians confessed their sins to a quote -unquote priest?
01:50:01: I direct people to the debate that was done a number of years ago between myself and on the subject of the priesthood.
01:50:07: I think it was very, very useful and helpful to people, and Mitch is a great guy. There are no priests in the
01:50:14: New Testament. The apostles are told that they can proclaim the forgiveness of sins, but that's through the proclamation of the gospel itself.
01:50:22: That's what the whole point of it is. We can say to anyone, turn in faith to the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will find him to be a perfect and powerful
01:50:29: Savior. That's what the forgiveness of sins is about. It's not the individual saying, I have some sacramental mark upon my soul that gives me the power of transubstantiation and also the power to assign punishments to you and penances and everything else.
01:50:46: That is a, again, something so far removed from New Testament Christianity that it illustrates to us just how much development is required to get to the sacramental system itself.
01:50:58: I would say that's not a correct interpretation. In John 20, 23, there is no mention of proclaiming sins, and in fact, the proclamation of the gospel is something that had been done at the beginning of Jesus's ministry.
01:51:09: Jesus gives something new. He breathes on the apostles, so in a sense, the apostles are now God -breathed, and he tells them whose sins you forgive are forgiven, whose sins you retain are retained.
01:51:21: In fact, as I cover in my book, Case for Catholicism, the New Testament never tells us to confess our sins to God.
01:51:28: God is never an explicit object to say to confess our sins. When it talks about confessing sins, that's in James chapter 5.
01:51:33: It says, confess your sins to one another. Question for Trent.
01:51:41: Can you explain why the Catholic view on purgatory has changed since the mid -20th century?
01:51:47: This kind of speaks to the concept of development. Yeah, I would say that doctrine develops, and this is the same.
01:51:55: It's also true for Protestants. If you compare the early magisterial reformers to later reformers, the different understandings of theologies are sharpened and focused, and some views fall into dissolution over time.
01:52:09: The understanding of purgatory begins with a very basic concept of purification or punishment after death based on what someone has done in this life.
01:52:18: There are two different models of purgatory, and we see them in the magisterial sources. In fact, that's covered very well in Jerry Walls' book.
01:52:26: You see a sanctification model, purifying after death, or a satisfaction model, remitting punishments for sins.
01:52:32: The development in Catholic theology seems to be an idea that the satisfaction or the suffering of the temporary consequences of sin, that the purification is the punishment, instead of those two being separate ideas that they may just be two different ways of describing the same thing.
01:52:52: Anything can be explained by using the term development. If there's a problem, slap some
01:52:59: Newman on it is how it has been said, and I think it's very properly said. I've already recommended, and if you have a real interest,
01:53:07: I really suggest to you this book by F .X. Shoup on purgatory. It gives you a real deep insight into what was understood for hundreds of years, and I really do believe there has been a move away from that in the modern period.
01:53:25: Question for James. Can you sin after being saved? If so, how can sin enter heaven?
01:53:35: Well, of course, and that's the whole point of, you know, 1 John does tell us, by the way, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just.
01:53:44: Who would you confess that to? That would be to God. So, yeah, there's a direct place where we are confessing our sins, and there is no concept of a priest there.
01:53:53: But yes, we experience abiding sin in our life. How, then, can we continue to have the presence of the
01:53:59: Spirit within us? How, then, can we continue to have fellowship with God? Well, it's because he made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf that we might be made the righteous of God in him.
01:54:11: It is that fundamental imputation of the righteousness of God to us that makes us right before God, and that sin has been covered over.
01:54:18: That's why the blessed man is not the blessed man one day, oops, not the blessed man the next, oops, blessed back, back to the, not the blessed man.
01:54:26: No, a Christian is the blessed man because Christianity is focused upon what
01:54:33: Christ does to the glory of the triune God. That is the most important aspect that we need to understand, and it's
01:54:41: Christ's righteousness that gives us our peace with God. So, it's not sin entering into heaven.
01:54:46: That sin was already dealt with in Christ. I'll just say that I address 1 John 1, 9 in my book and in several articles.
01:54:53: In verses 8 through 10, the context is related to publicly confessing things to other people like our faith.
01:55:00: When you read early church historians, it's very clear. Look at the Didache. Look at Irenaeus, for example, who condemns women who go to church and gather who do not publicly confess sins, that the sacrament of confession was public.
01:55:14: That's well established among Christian and church historians. And so, in seeing that, the early church was very concerned about the effects of sin on someone, even if you are saved.
01:55:28: I think it's your turn, Trent. I'm getting lost, sorry. I think probably one more question for each of you is all we have time for.
01:55:36: What are your thoughts? This was mentioned in the remarks, but I think it's important to sort of focus here on this.
01:55:44: What are your thoughts on Paul saying to be apart or away from the body is to be at home with the
01:55:50: Lord? How does that allow for purgatory? Yeah, and I already addressed that in speaking with James.
01:55:56: This is a very common misquotation of Scripture. So, people say, oh, to be absent from the body is to be present with the
01:56:07: Lord. Rather, Paul is expressing a hope. We are of good courage. We would rather be away from the body and at home with the
01:56:15: Lord. But he understands there's work we have to do in this life. But it's very clear that Paul is not teaching that once we die, we are just immediately in the presence of the
01:56:26: Lord and embracing the beatific vision, because he says in verse 10, we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ so that each one may receive good or evil according to what he has done in the body.
01:56:38: And so, to receive evil because we did bad things in the body, that sounds like a postmortem punishment for the purpose of our purification.
01:56:46: It is a promise that we will be in the presence of Christ. And of course, that judgment before the behemoth seat of Christ takes place in heaven, in the presence of Christ.
01:56:56: These are redeemed people, and this is not some type of idea of punishment, satisfacio, anything like that.
01:57:04: The reality is Paul recognized the vital importance of knowing in the body, and if I'm not in the body,
01:57:12: I will be in the presence of my Lord. Okay. And then, again,
01:57:19: I think last question then for James. What purification is Paul referring to, if not purgatory, in 1
01:57:27: Corinthians chapter 3? He's not referring to purification. The text is really, really very clear, and we tried to walk through it.
01:57:38: What he's talking about, the only term that is being translated as purification is zemiao, and I didn't know that the
01:57:46: Protestants who worked on BDAG had been given the charism of infallibility interpretation, but the reality is
01:57:55: Paul's use of that term is to suffer loss. That's how he always uses it when he uses the term.
01:58:03: And it's simply a recognition that the day of judgment will reveal clearly what is gold, silver, and precious stones, what is wood, hay, and straw.
01:58:12: It has nothing to do with converts or anything like that, and so it's not a matter of purification. It's not a matter of punishment.
01:58:19: It's a matter of the revelation and demonstrating why people did what they did and who did it for the glory of Christ.
01:58:27: I cited 1 Corinthians 3 not as an example of purification, but as an example of unpleasant discipline because James says, you know, you turn it into just purification.
01:58:34: You're getting away from the traditional view of punishment, but then when I say 1 Corinthians 3, he says, oh, it's not really punishment.
01:58:41: Well, if you look, for example, here in Le Jaffe, the book that James recommends, he says that the first person who did the first real exegesis of 1
01:58:48: Corinthians 3 .15 in the history of the church was Ambrosiaster, and he considered it very clear,
01:58:54: Ambrosiaster says in the fourth century, that to suffer loss is to endure reproof for what person when subjected to punishment does not lose something thereby.
01:59:04: Okay, we are almost done. We have five minutes for each speaker. Again, Trent will go first.
01:59:11: James will go second. These are their closing remarks for the evening. We're good?
01:59:19: All right. Okay, well, let's draw everything together. So I presented two arguments for the doctrine of purgatory, and the first one showed that we are sanctified in this life.
01:59:31: Some people, this process of sanctification continues after death, but is completed before we enter heaven.
01:59:37: So if we are still subject to sin, desire sin, if sin has any influence on us or dwells within us in any way, we cannot be in heaven because nothing unclean can enter heaven, as the book of Revelation says.
01:59:50: So I think we made a lot of progress tonight that James seemed actually very open to what has been called the sanctification model of purgatory that is also embraced by other
01:59:59: Protestants. But second, I didn't just rely on that model. I also spoke about unpleasant discipline after death, another word for punishment.
02:00:07: Many times Protestants will hear Catholics use terms and import meaning into them that isn't there, so that punishment is satisfying some kind of legal standard to earn our way out of, when rather it's about accepting the
02:00:23: Father's discipline to reorder our wills and for him to set right the order of justice, to respond to when we partially turn away from him, he gently guides us back, just as our earthly fathers have done with us.
02:00:35: And James just tried to make distinctions. He tried to say, and I gave an example of that happening at the judgment at the day in 1
02:00:42: Corinthians 3, and James said, well, you know, it's not really punishment.
02:00:49: That's not what's happening here. It's discipline, making all these distinctions.
02:00:54: I would ask you just to read the verses for yourself. Read Hebrews 12, 6, 2 through 8, or 3 through 8, sorry, 3 through 12.
02:01:03: Read the whole Bible. Read Hebrews 12. We'll start there. There's a great podcast to go to,
02:01:09: Bible in the Year, if you need to do that, by the way. And I showed in both those arguments, both the argument for sanctification as well as the argument from unpleasant discipline.
02:01:20: If you don't like the word punishment, it still follows with everything. And I also quoted from official magisterial teaching of the
02:01:28: Catholic Church that is in harmony with what has been taught before. I think it's important to understand that teachings on eschatology, the end of life, they develop.
02:01:39: That many Protestant views of hell were much more graphic 300 years ago. I remember when William Lane Craig did a debate on hell with an atheist.
02:01:46: The atheist quoted earlier Protestants and even Catholics who talked about children burning in ovens and things like that, whereas now the discussion of hell is much more sanitized.
02:01:56: It's still bad, but it's eternal separation from God. So we see developments in those things. So why does the doctrine of purgatory matter?
02:02:03: It matters because we've seen there is a distinction between mortal and venial sin. I think that's obvious.
02:02:09: Sin impacts us. We know deep down, even if we are saved, when we sin, something has gone wrong in our relationship with God.
02:02:16: We feel sorrow for our sins. And that's a good thing. God wants us to feel that way because he wants us to return to him.
02:02:23: There is a natural order of justice through divine grace that he draws us to himself. And we can't pretend like that isn't there or sugarcoat it with other language.
02:02:31: I'll leave you with the words of C .S. Lewis, who I think put that very well. He said, Even so, sir,
02:03:00: I assume that the process of purification will normally involve suffering, partly from tradition, partly because most real good that has been done me in this life has involved it.
02:03:10: So through all of this, we can be confident that I've shown this from scripture. I've shown this as the witness of the church.
02:03:15: James never cited anyone in the post -apostolic witness or church history that held any view related to this.
02:03:22: It is a novelty in Christian history, not something grounded in what the church has passed on for centuries.
02:03:28: And this gives us hope and confidence that we can pursue holiness in this life, that God loves us.
02:03:33: He is our heavenly father, and he will bring us to perfection and full sanctification, whether in this life or the next, and that we can be confident in the transforming love of Jesus Christ, who doesn't just legally erase our sins with a fiction.
02:03:48: He extinguishes every trace of them from our souls so we can be, as St. Paul says, new creations in him.
02:03:55: And that the doctrine of purgatory is good news for that, to seek out this sanctification and to be able to fully conform ourselves to Jesus Christ.
02:04:04: Thank you very much. Because we have short memories,
02:04:13: I want you to remember what Trent just said, because it summarizes the sad tragedy of the distinction between biblical gospel preaching and what is found in Roman Catholicism.
02:04:31: He just called the imputation of the righteousness of Christ a legal fiction.
02:04:39: That's what the Reformation was about, and that's what this debate should be about.
02:04:45: If you want to know more about the historical stuff, he just said, oh, this is what it's always been.
02:04:52: Roman Catholic scholarship knows better. Read Brian Daly. Read Lagoff.
02:04:57: They will give you a good indication and good summary of the development over time of these concepts.
02:05:05: This was not something that, well, Ignatius taught it, and no, you have a little bit here, you have a little bit there.
02:05:12: It was really dependent upon Clement of Alexandria and origin, and there, what was inputting into their theology was not a pure biblical stream by any stretch of the imagination.
02:05:23: Look it up for yourself. Read, shoot. These are Roman Catholic sources, by the way. Read these books for yourself to find out what purgatory used to mean about all the thousands of visions of what purgatory is about and the temporality and the
02:05:39: Sabatine privilege that when you wear the brown scapular, I wonder if there's someone in this room wearing the brown scapular right now, because the promise is that when you die, that Mary will come down into purgatory and release you on the
02:05:53: Saturday after your death. If there's no time involved with that, how do you get to Saturday unless everybody dies on a
02:05:59: Saturday? I don't even know how that works. These are the historical realities, but I didn't get into all the historical realities in a brief debate because this is about what was just said.
02:06:10: Illegal fiction is the assertion of the New Testament. You won't find the term purgatory in here.
02:06:17: You did not find anything about temporal punishments in here. That was all, every time Trent went there, he's quoting from the universal catechism.
02:06:25: He's quoting from a pope that lived 2 ,000 years after the birth of Christ. This truly is the issue, and this is why we have the division.
02:06:36: This is why I was attacked during the day today because you weren't really clear in what you were saying about Roman Catholicism debate last night because I made a distinction between the
02:06:47: Oneness Pentecostals who have a Christological error and reject the doctrine of the
02:06:52: Trinity, and my objections to Roman Catholicism because we don't disagree on the doctrine of the
02:06:58: Trinity. What we disagree on is what is listed by Paul in Galatians as something that fundamentally divides, and that is the gospel.
02:07:11: And if, in fact, you can identify as a legal fiction the assertion of the imputation of righteousness, which we just got done looking at in the original text of Romans chapter 4,
02:07:27: Paul, just as David speaks of the blessedness upon the man, what?
02:07:32: To whom God imputes righteousness apart from works.
02:07:42: Oh, it's a legal fiction. That's done by baptism, but you don't get that until you get to Romans 6. That's reading the text upside down and backwards, and the reality is, let's be honest, after last night, all the rest of this discussion of history and everything else is irrelevant.
02:08:00: Trent believes in purgatory because Rome tells him to. That's his ultimate authority, and therefore church history will be interpreted in light of that, and the
02:08:09: Bible will be interpreted in light of that, and you can grab hold of anything and bring it into that ultimate authoritative claim.
02:08:18: We have not seen anything. We went through his arguments in cross -examination, and in my answers,
02:08:24: I demonstrated why his any of that.
02:08:31: Who is the blessed man? Is the blessed man the one who is only right after being baptized?
02:08:38: The blessed man right after he walks out of the confessional?
02:08:44: Blessed man, not blessed man. Blessed man, not blessed man. Justified, not justified. Justified, not justified. Is that really what
02:08:50: Paul was arguing in Romans chapter 4? As he said, go read Hebrews 12.
02:08:56: Yeah, but also go read Romans 3, 4, and 5, because that's where you have the biblical teaching on how we can have peace with God, and it denies the concept of purgatory.
02:09:08: Thank you. We really are the beneficiaries of really a lifetime of learning, and it's not a small thing that we've been able to listen to this tonight.
02:09:29: Debates are really a starting point for further exploration. I hope you understand, can't answer all questions, so you have to go do your homework now based on what you've heard.
02:09:37: I want to give these gentlemen a few minutes, Dr. White, to get to his vehicle and get some sleep tonight, because he has to preach tomorrow, and Mr.
02:09:48: Horne may also be teaching tomorrow, I don't know. But he'll be signing books next door, and if you guys want to go ahead and make your way there so you're not, you know, mobbed in here.
02:10:00: It's in March with Layton Flowers on John 6, and then, honestly, a debate where I think
02:10:11: Trent would be 100 % on my side with Dale Tuggy. You know
02:10:17: Dale Tuggy. If he brings a friend, I'll join you.
02:10:24: Well, and on that we could. Yeah, and he is really the king of the
02:10:31: Unitarians, and so it's going to be on the deity of Christ and the biblical testimony to who
02:10:36: Christ is, and the main reason I'd want you to come back, aside from the importance of the debates, is when we do it,
02:10:43: I'm going to be going next door, and I don't care what diseases I end up driving home with as a result, but I do apologize because the church will tell you,
02:10:55: I always stand over there late into the evening greeting people, and some of you have been here before the debates, and I miss doing it.
02:11:02: I'm sorry, but I hope you understand the wisdom when I still have three and a half weeks of teaching and debating to do, to try to, and I'm not feeling well at all, so please pray for me in that way, and I look forward to seeing you in a couple weeks.
02:11:16: Thank you for letting me. The only reason
02:11:25: I can be over there to shake hands is I have three little kids, so I've already gotten everything. Have a great night.