Simply Trinity Study (part 2)

Bethlehem Bible Church iconBethlehem Bible Church

0 views

0 comments

Simply Trinity Study (part 3)

00:02
Our great God, we come before you this morning just rejoicing as we think about this weekend, the opportunity we've had to give thanks for all the blessings that you grant us, to gather with friends and family, and to even anticipate celebration of the
00:20
Advent, the glorious miracle in which the second person of the Trinity, the
00:25
Lord Jesus Christ, took on human flesh and came to dwell among men.
00:32
Father, as we consider that, I pray that you would bless us as we look to your word and what it says about that event and about the
00:42
Trinity in general. I pray that you would strengthen us, encourage us as we look to these truths that the
00:49
Church has taught for 2 ,000 years. In Jesus' name we pray. Well, so, is there anybody who doesn't have a copy of the quiz?
01:04
Because I have an eternal supply of quizzes. So we've been going through this for a couple weeks, and I don't know where we are.
01:21
My wife volunteered very kindly to help photocopy.
01:29
I mentioned this before, how many of you have a copy of the book, Simply Trinity? If you don't, if you have the book, it's in the, there's a glossary in the back, and I apologize for this lifesaver,
01:39
I don't know why I decided to get one. I guess because I didn't want to have bad breath.
01:46
Anyway, there's a glossary in the back, and what we did was we put that glossary into two pages front and back, and we're going to hand that out, and so Janice says, well,
01:57
I'll make the copies. We should be seeing her sometime, because that, she's like, well,
02:06
I'm trying to get the front and the back, and then the machine jammed, and there you go, Bob's your uncle. Okay, so we left off last week at number 19.
02:18
How many questions were on this quiz anyway? Who wrote this thing? 27, wow.
02:25
I do have another one. I have two. Are you going to have three?
02:32
Four possibly. Well, actually, okay, I have three more. After that, you're done.
02:38
I'm cutting you off. Number 19. Is it possible that someone could use the
02:44
Trinity as a justification for homosexuality? Yes is the answer.
02:56
Is it correct? The answer would be no. I just said, is it possible? I like what
03:03
Barrett says, he says, just when I thought I'd seen it all, I picked up a book that had the word sexuality right there in the title.
03:12
I mean, imagine, you're looking for books on the Trinity, and you see one that has sexuality on it, okay.
03:19
While the books I just put down use subordination to support hierarchy, this book used a similar method but appealed instead to the mutual love between the father and son to support homosexuality.
03:35
These authors defended gay and lesbian marriages on the basis of functional roles within the
03:41
Godhead. Needless to say, not only is that heresy, it's blasphemy, and it's awful, but people who are given over to a depraved mind, what can we say about them?
04:02
They're depraved. And they will stoop, I mean, I just, you can't watch the news or look at the news these days without thinking, what level won't we go to?
04:18
I mean, when we're talking about, and it boggles my mind to think about parents taking their children to drag queen shows.
04:36
Why? Well, God gave them over, right?
04:46
Depravity going lower and lower and lower, I mean, men, I think, you know, Calvin once said that men are inventors of, you know, their minds or their hearts are idol factories.
04:59
I would like to propose that their minds are sin factories, they're always inventing new forms of evil.
05:07
Okay, number 20, true or false? And here we get back on a little more serious ground here.
05:15
Not that the other one isn't serious, but it's like, come on, how crazy can you get? Number 20, true or false?
05:22
Each of the persons of the Trinity has his own consciousness. I heard a false,
05:41
I heard some powerful silence, I heard some, hmm, what?
05:49
It's true. I like the confidence with which you said that even though it's wrong.
05:57
Okay, Dr. Barrett says, we have drifted from biblical orthodoxy by exchanging the
06:06
Trinity of our fathers for a social Trinity, one that can be manipulated to meet our social agenda.
06:13
We have redefined the Trinity as a society of relationships in which each person cooperates by means of his, then he adds in parentheses, or her, why?
06:26
Because this is what those lunatics do, own center of consciousness and will.
06:35
What a previous generation labeled the heresy of tritheism. So that we can use the
06:41
Trinity as our prototype for the type of human society we think best. Why is it wrong to say that each of the persons of the
06:49
Trinity has their own consciousness? Joni, okay,
07:03
Jesus said, I and the father are one. What do you mean? Did he mean one in purpose? One in essence, one in being.
07:24
Okay, now you just hit on a trick there, right? He said that it came to do the father's will.
07:31
What does that mean? I'm glad you're here,
07:38
Joni. No, I'm not going to make fun of you. I'm going to say that this whole idea of hierarchy is one of the things that this book is about.
07:45
Because there is no hierarchy in this sense. There's no eternal functional subordination between the three,
07:52
Charlie. Okay, Jesus says, not my will be done, but thy will.
08:00
So Jesus says, he has a will. And he says, the father has a will.
08:06
And Charlie says, what people do is they take the mystery of the incarnation. And by the way, let's just kind of reverse engineer this for a moment.
08:16
We'll get back to where Charlie was. If we have difficulty understanding the incarnation, how can
08:24
Jesus be truly God and truly man? And the two natures not mix, okay?
08:32
If we have trouble with that, and it is difficult to kind of wrap our heads around, then why wouldn't we have trouble with an eternal trinity where there's no beginning or end of the persons, but there are three persons, right?
08:50
And the problem that people have is they think, okay, Jesus says, I have a will. And I'm here to do the father's will.
08:58
Therefore, Jesus has a will that's separate from the father. Is that true? Yes, in his humanity, okay?
09:10
Is it true as a second person of the trinity? Does Jesus, the second person of the trinity, have a separate will than the father?
09:20
No, because I really should send this link out, by the way. If you haven't watched the Lutheran satire things, they're actually funny, but they're kind of instructive.
09:31
And they're short, and they're these little Irish leprechaun guys. You know, they're like four minutes long, too.
09:38
So it's kind of fun and easy, the easy way to learn the trinity. And what would they say?
09:44
They'd go, that's tritheism, Patrick, right? You've got three gods.
09:49
If you have three wills, three individual wills, you've got three individual gods.
09:57
And then you can have a system where the three of them kind of have a council, and they all put forth different ideas, and then they come to an agreement.
10:08
Now to us, as people, that sounds reasonable. And that's what cults do.
10:17
They take the incomprehensible, and they make it comprehensible.
10:24
They take what is just kind of mind -blowing, and they go, well, it's not really that mind -blowing.
10:30
It's just kind of like there's three individuals, and they come together, and they make up a plan, and then they carry it out.
10:39
What is really, to use my word, mind -blowing, what's really true is that there's one
10:50
God existing in three persons, and these three persons have how many wills?
10:58
One. One will.
11:04
There's one will of God. And so when
11:11
I asked, you know, each of the persons has, true or false, has his own consciousness or will, the answer is false.
11:22
And Daniel and I were talking about it last week. You know, what do we often do? We often say to ourselves that in order to be a person, one must have a will.
11:36
And do the persons of the Trinity have a will? Yes. They don't have their own individual will.
11:42
They have one will. Again, that just doesn't fit into our understanding of things.
12:00
Janet gave out the definitions here, so thank you. What's that?
12:07
And Anthony handed them out too. Okay, thank you. Anybody help you unjam the machine?
12:14
Patty did. Patty did. Okay. Of course. Naturally.
12:22
Okay, number 21. And these things, if you don't get it all, it's fine, because this is what we're going to be unpacking for several weeks here, is all these truths, and we're going to be expanding on them as he does.
12:36
And, you know, one of the things with this glossary is, not only can you take it home and read it, you know, for your entertainment pleasure, but as we're talking about these things during the class, you can go, wait a second, modalism.
12:49
It's listed right there, so you can look it up. I do think it's interesting, and we'll have to talk about his definition of modalism at some point, because he compares it to tritheism,
13:02
I think, and I found that rather odd. But, you know, maybe we should bring the leprechauns in and have them explain it.
13:13
Number 21, true or false, the best heretics use the
13:20
Bible to make their points. Absolutely true.
13:27
Absolutely true. And, in fact, you know, and I've made mention of this before, you know, sometimes the best heretics who are using the
13:35
Bible to make their points do what? They get saved, right?
13:42
They study the Bible, study the Bible, study the Bible, and after they stop proof texting and actually are reading the
13:47
Bible, sometimes the Lord converts them. I know a few Mormon missionaries to whom that has happened, where they're so intent on proving
13:57
Mormon doctrine that they wind up undercutting it. Here's what
14:02
Barrett says, he says, our dream team, and what he's doing, and what we're going to see in the weeks to come, is he's going to take voices from church history, and he's going to show what they taught, what their understanding was.
14:18
And, as I said when we began this a few weeks ago, is it's important to know, essentially, that we stand in a long line of faithful men who have taught these things from the beginning of the church and then hand them on to the next generation, and the next generation, and the next generation, because our goal is to hand them to the next generation.
14:42
So what he says here is, our dream team, these ancient people, and then some not so ancient, is not a replacement for the
14:52
Bible, but a time -tested guide to interpreting the Bible.
14:58
The Bible alone is our final infallible authority. But as the saying goes, every heretic has a
15:04
Bible verse. And, as we will see in chapter 2, the most dangerous heretics knew how to quote the
15:11
Bible better than anyone. So it was essential to use extra -biblical words to safeguard the
15:18
Bible's trinity from manipulation. I mean, even thinking about the word trinity, where's the word trinity in the
15:25
Bible? And the answer is, it's nowhere in the Bible. Is it taught in the
15:30
Bible? And the answer is, yes. And that's the key. Number 22, and this is where things start getting tricky.
15:41
True or false, the best way to understand the Bible is with the reformer's mantra, solo scriptura.
15:49
Dave! Okay, how many agree with Dave? Okay, a lot of you.
15:58
How many disagree with Dave? How many of you are just too cowardly to raise your hands?
16:06
Go ahead. All right. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Barrett says this.
16:16
He goes, Here's the point. Interpreting the Bible with humility, as God intended, means interpreting the Bible, listen, with the church.
16:25
Now, when you hear that, what do you think? You think magisterium. And what's magisterium,
16:32
Charlie? Okay, the office of the church as the fourth person of the trinity, which
16:41
I would disagree with as the fifth person of the trinity. After Mary, you know, it's a
16:48
Roman Catholic kind of idea, right? Why am
16:56
I not opposed to that? And I'll give you one reason here. Let's look at one of my kind of hobby horse passages.
17:06
And you know what's nice about Sunday school is you can ride hobby horses. Ephesians chapter four, verse 11, talking about Jesus when it says he and he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds, and the teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by waves of doctrine and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning and by craftiness and deceits and deceitful schemes.
18:05
And here's the idea. Jesus gives gifts to the church.
18:10
He gives these men throughout the ages. Why? So that the church might become mature and not thrown about by every wind of doctrine.
18:20
So when he says, read the Bible with the church, what he's suggesting and what I challenged my friends here from this group on Facebook who claim to be
18:32
Reformed, and I said, would you tell me who it is who interprets this passage here?
18:39
Which one was it? It was in Ephesians 5 .21, where they say, you know, mutual submission has to do with marriage, and I said, would you please tell me who it was who was the earliest interpreter who agrees with you?
18:53
And here was my point. If you're going to say you're Reformed, if you're going to say that you're confessional, and then you're going to say,
18:58
I have a new and novel and different way of understanding Ephesians 5 .21,
19:04
then what aren't you? Reformed, confessional, etc. Because you're like, well, forget church history.
19:11
Forget how the church has interpreted this passage throughout the ages. I know better. There's no humility in that, right?
19:24
New is not good, right? If we think 2 Timothy 2 .2, you know, these things you've heard from me, pass on to faithful men who will pass them on, etc.,
19:34
etc., etc. That's the Steve version. But here's the idea again. This idea of passing the baton, of not dropping it, of not losing it, right?
19:46
Of staying faithful. The once -for -all delivered faith, as Jude says.
19:53
That's what interpreting the Bible with the church means. Barrett goes on to say,
20:00
Many today will respond with a shout of protest. No creed but the
20:06
Bible. No creed but the Bible. All we need is the
20:12
Bible, which is what? What's that? Biblicism.
20:18
And it's also what the question says, solo scriptura. You know, Dave noticed that right away.
20:24
How did Dave notice that? He's smart. Some would say he's smart.
20:30
Some would say he's wicked smart. Some would say he's picky smart.
20:39
That man gets down to the details, you know what I'm saying? Solo, one little letter.
20:46
Solo instead of sola, right? No creed but the Bible. That shout, however, is a selfish individualism,
20:54
Barrett writes, or what I call a crude, narrow biblicism. And I even put that in red and bold in my notes, so that I wouldn't miss it because, you know, the eyesight isn't what it used to be.
21:06
That masks itself in the name of biblical authority. Solo scriptura, scripture alone, right?
21:13
That's the cry of the Reformation, has been misunderstood, even radicalized, to mean me and my
21:20
Bible alone. You know, me, myself, and the Holy Spirit. That's all I need. You ever heard that?
21:28
I'm sure you have. But that is a mindset captive to our culture's
21:34
God, autonomous individualism. In other words, again, me, myself, and I.
21:42
I don't need anybody else. I can understand what the Bible means on my own.
21:49
And that way is the path to heresy. It fails to recognize that everyone who picks up a
21:57
Bible is located within history and embedded within a specific tradition. Okay, let's just back up a little bit.
22:06
Here's the issue. And I'll, again, use Mormonism as kind of my foil.
22:13
Joseph Smith said the truth disappeared from the planet from the time the apostles died out until he arrived and prayed and restored the truth.
22:24
1 ,700 plus years without the truth. Problem.
22:34
Jesus said he would build his church. You know, there's this whole idea of the once for all delivered faith, etc.
22:42
Jesus said he gave gifts to the church. Why? So that the church wouldn't be thrown around by every wind of doctrine.
22:48
Which, when you think about it logically, if the truth disappeared for 1 ,700 years, that means that the church was tossed about by every wind of doctrine.
22:58
It was defeated. You know, it was an utter zero for 1 ,700 plus years.
23:07
Christ was defeated. So when somebody says, you know,
23:14
I have this understanding of Scripture, the question is, is that right?
23:22
Is it new? Is it novel? Is it wrong? And the way we check it, one of the ways we check it, is by comparing it with the way the church has traditionally understood passages.
23:32
If somebody says, for example, well, I think that election, the doctrine of election,
23:38
God's choosing, is simply that he looks down the corridor of time, sees who's going to believe when they hear the gospel, and he chooses on that basis.
23:52
Okay? Then we could look back at church history and say, well, who's believed that? And we would see a tradition of people who believe that.
24:00
And typically, they would be people who say that man either has a free will or a partly free will.
24:09
And so then you can argue about those things. But here's the point. The point is, if you go to the
24:17
Scripture and you come up with an interpretation that's different than, let's say, than our confession, then there has to be a reason why.
24:29
And you have to kind of wrestle with it. You have to look and examine who's believed it. And if nobody's ever believed it, if you've got a new and novel interpretation, then you have to ask yourself, why would
24:39
Jesus keep this truth from the church for 2 ,000 years and then reveal it to me?
24:45
Is that humble or is it arrogant? And Barrett's answer is, it's arrogant.
24:52
Christ doesn't keep the truth hidden from his people. Thoughts or comments before we move on?
24:58
Yes. Some of them were Paido -Baptists. Some of them were not. Well, I'm going to answer this.
25:05
Rather than going down a rabbit trail, I'm going to make it easy. I saw, and I really should dig this up too,
25:13
I saw a History Channel thing on the thing, a show.
25:21
It was just a thing on the History Channel. A show on the
25:26
Asia Minor, what's Cappadocia, which is one of the churches that Peter wrote to in 1
25:35
Peter, where he's writing to these Christians that are being persecuted. How do we know the
25:40
Christians in Cappadocia were being persecuted? Because they're living in caves. They're hiding out.
25:49
So they're living in these caves and they go through, they've unearthed these caves here, and they go in there and they're kind of amazed because they've got this system that draws air in and then draws it in over this stream of water they've got there, so it kind of cools the caves down and all that.
26:08
They're just remarking about this engineering, and the one thing they don't really go into, but they show us, they go into this little chapel that they've got built there, and then they go to the baptismal font, and the baptismal font is big enough to dunk somebody in, and this is like the 3rd or 4th century, and I'm going,
26:27
I don't know, man, that kind of looks deeper than you'd need for a baby. It looks like they're ready to dunk whole people.
26:36
So I think the idea of infant baptism, I mean, it can be argued, and it is argued.
26:43
I think either side would say that they're appealing to Scripture. You know, we land on the
26:53
Baptist side for a number of reasons that I don't want to go into, but I don't think it's fair to say that the
27:00
Baptist tradition is a late one. I think it's more, the infant one is more of a late emphasis, in part because when the
27:11
Reformation comes along, the battle is about the gospel and not about baptism, and I think there were pragmatic reasons for infant baptism then, and the pragmatic reasons were basically war.
27:27
If you look at the, I would invite anybody to look at the history of the Thirty Years' War, and basically how was it that the
27:34
Lutheran church was strong enough to withstand Catholicism because of infant baptism, because people were born into the
27:44
Lutheran tradition, and so they were able to kind of fight for it and that kind of thing. But that's a whole different topic here.
27:54
I want to stay on the Trinity, but there are arguments on both sides, but I would also say if you watch the debate between MacArthur and Sproul on infant baptism, that was pretty instructive, mostly because the biblical arguments were all in MacArthur's favor, and so Sproul says, essentially, we were there.
28:21
He says, now that my good friend John MacArthur has told you why the Bible doesn't teach infant baptism, let me tell you why
28:28
I believe it anyway. And that didn't strike me as a very good argument. Okay, so there are a few things there.
28:35
One is, you know, the typical errors are using faulty hermeneutics, right?
28:43
Descriptive, turning the descriptive into prescriptive. You know, how you can stop the sun from moving, you know.
28:54
Yeah. Yeah, Acts 2 is the favorite. I mean, that's probably the favorite passage of heretics because you can do all sorts of things with that.
29:03
But also, a failure to use systematic theology, right?
29:08
To understand the Bible in a systematic way. But, you know, getting back to what you were saying in the original thing here, if these men throughout the ages have taught things, subsequent men have come along and challenged them, right?
29:31
Whether the earlier teachings were heretical or not, or whether the new teachings were heretical or not, and there have always been these kind of,
29:40
I want to call it wrestling matches, but they're basically theological struggles where they hammer out the truth.
29:49
And sometimes these were done with, I want to say conferences, but councils.
30:00
Councils, and sometimes these have been done in other ways, but the great truths have always won out.
30:09
You know, they've been tested, they've been tried, and they're still true. And that's why, you know, when somebody like MacArthur and somebody like Sproul can get along, well, how can they do that?
30:20
Because the main things are the main things, and infant baptism isn't a main thing.
30:26
But, you know, salvation by faith alone, that is a main thing. So we die on those hills and not on the other ones.
30:35
But let's move on here. The idea, and here were the point I wanted to make, just solo scriptura, scripture alone, or biblicism, versus sola scriptura, which means that ultimately scripture is the ultimate authority, but we can't ignore how the scripture has been interpreted throughout the church age.
30:59
We can't do that, because the Bible tells us not to do that. Other thoughts before we move on to number 22?
31:07
Okay, Dave. No, I would not agree with that.
31:23
Okay. What I would say is there was a war waged against the gospel, and a war waged against the
31:31
Word of God, and often within or under the banner of Christendom.
31:37
I mean, when the Church of Rome was chaining the
31:42
Bible in the church, not letting people have a copy of it, burning at the stake anyone who wanted to interpret it into the common language, what were they really doing?
31:53
They were really trying to keep people from varying at all from Roman Catholic teaching.
32:01
They were trying to keep people from the truth. Daniel. See, and I don't know if that's a direct quote from Burkhoff or not.
32:09
The question was, isn't there a progress of doctrine? And I think, here's what
32:15
I would say. The answer is, no, there's not a progress of doctrine. There's a progress in the systematic compilation of it, of a really refining,
32:28
I would say. The truths are there. Sometimes they're stated better, more coherently, and more systematically.
32:36
But I wouldn't agree that we're learning new truths as we go along.
32:42
I haven't studied enough Augustine to know that. So I would say, did Augustine probably have some things wrong?
32:48
Yes, but we're talking about, again, the fourth century. And I think what's helpful for us, whether it's
32:54
Augustine or Augustine or Aquinas, or anybody, is to understand that nobody, and not even me, no one person has everything right.
33:10
I think it was Calvin who said that nobody has more than 80 % of their theology right. And I'm encouraged by that for one reason more than any other, because I think when he was saying that, in my mind,
33:23
I'm like, he was really thinking about eschatology, because everybody makes a hash of that. But to your bigger point,
33:35
I just think that if we really study, did he have some things wrong? And I think the answer is yes.
33:42
And that's what I mean by, over time, things get more refined, things are challenged, things get better and better and better.
33:51
And to this extent, I would say, if somebody came along and said, you know what, here's a better statement of faith than the 1689, and we read it and we go, you know what, that is a better statement of faith, then we'd adopt it.
34:05
It's not like the 1689 is God -breathed, right? Andrew? Yeah.
34:21
Yeah, it's very close to progressive revelation, right? There's a progress in revelation in the scripture itself, right, where things get more refined.
34:31
But the idea that we're somehow progressing in doctrine would be wrong, because that's just kind of too close,
34:42
I think. Okay, and so I want to table this, and I'm going to table it this way.
34:48
You just mentioned the Eastern Orthodox Church offering their ransom theory of the
34:54
Atonement. And we can get back to when the Eastern Orthodox Church came into being and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
34:59
But here's what I would say. I would say this is kind of like if we're in a, don't ask me why, but we're mining, right?
35:07
We're mining truths. We're trying to refine our sense of truth or whatever. Well, the Eastern Orthodox Church basically went off on a different vein.
35:17
I mean, they just left, or they left. They just went off and did their own thing.
35:26
They have some wrong ideas, and so that would be one of them. And that historically has been what's happened.
35:36
New denominations come along, and they emphasize this or that or the other thing, and the question is, do they get things wrong?
35:43
And often that is the case. I want to do number 23, and then we're going to close. Number 23, well,
35:50
I don't even know if we'll get through this. So let's try. Which of these is the better approach?
35:58
A, only the Bible has any value. Tradition contributes little. B, tradition helps us interpret the
36:05
Bible properly, but Scripture is the final authority. Or C, Scripture is infallible, and so is tradition.
36:16
B is correct. And here's where he outlines this, and you know what?
36:22
I know somebody's going to ask me this question, and I'm going to say up front, I don't know. He says, because here's the three options he outlines in the book, and they're in the shaded portion of the book in case you want to look for it.
36:37
Tradition is zero. Now, he gives tradition zero, one, and two. Now, here's what I say, I don't know.
36:43
Why aren't they tradition one, two, and three? I don't know. I mean, if I were a scholar, I'd say tradition one, two, and three, but these scholars are like, oh, no, we need to start out with tradition negative one.
36:53
I don't know why they do this thing, you know. They've got tradition zero, tradition one, and tradition two.
37:01
Tradition zero. Radicals and rationalists. And that was, only the
37:08
Bible has any value, tradition contributes little. And he says, since the apostles, the church has been lost and must be reinvented.
37:17
This is kind of ultimate biblicism, right? Tradition is worthless and wicked.
37:24
At best, it carries little value. Only the Bible is the authority and source of theology. Now, that's pretty absolutist.
37:31
There's probably tradition one -half somewhere in there, but I digress. Tradition one, the
37:37
Protestant reformers. The church has been lost but needs reform. Has not been lost but needs reform.
37:46
Tradition is essential to reform, helping us interpret the Bible properly and carries authority in the church.
37:53
But scripture is the final authority. And you can read in that and you just think about what was going on in the
37:59
Roman Catholic church and you can see the kind of pushback. You know, you can hear
38:04
Luther saying, there's some error here and it needs to be cleansed.
38:11
And tradition two, which is the Roman Catholic view, tradition is a second source of infallible revelation on par with or even above scripture.
38:25
Even above scripture. So when Charlie says the magisterium is the fourth person of the
38:30
Trinity and he mistakenly said that he meant fifth, then what he's saying is the church teaching, if it rubs up against the
38:42
Bible, you know, if the Bible says this and church tradition says this, then which one wins?
38:49
Church tradition. Your understanding of scripture is wrong. Whereas we would say, if the confession rubs up against the
38:59
Bible and the Bible clearly teaches this and the confession teaches that, then the Bible wins and the confession should be ignored on that point.
39:10
Again, I'm not sure why it's tradition zero, one, and two. And I apologize on behalf of logical people everywhere.
39:21
Yeah, I don't know. Maybe that's it. You know, when you're in those schools, you just have to kind of focus on theology and not on other things.
39:31
Again, this is, but we're in tradition one, right? Protestant reformers, the church has not been lost but needs reform.
39:39
When you hear constantly reforming, semper reformanda, you know, always reforming.
39:48
Tradition helps us, but it is not infallible. Scripture is the final authority.
39:54
Questions before we close? Yes, Dave. Yeah, I mean, you know, just to comment before you finish here,
40:02
Luther's idea in the beginning wasn't necessarily to leave the Catholic Church, it was to change the Catholic Church.
40:08
So go ahead. That's a good question. You know, why would we call it a cult now? Of course,
40:13
I don't want to steal all of Mike's thunder, but he won't be talking about that for several months. We're going to do that on a
40:18
Sunday evening. But a few points. One is, you know, the idea of, what's the word with regard to Mary?
40:27
Her, well, the co -redemptrix thing, that's new.
40:36
Yeah, the veneration. I mean, a lot of the doctrines concerning Mary didn't come in until well after the
40:42
Reformation. And, in fact, I also,
40:47
I mean, I'd have to look this up, but I don't even believe things like, I mean, they were certainly on their way to, like, papal infallibility, but I don't even know if that had been disseminated as a doctrine.
40:59
But there are a number of changes that have happened. And, I mean, even the Council of Trent, if you read the
41:04
Council of Trent, which is a response to the Reformation, the Council of Trent says anyone who believes in salvation by faith alone apart from works is anathema, accursed.
41:17
In other words, in trying to stop the Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church became even more contra -gospel than it was before.
41:27
Whereas previously it has sought to obscure the gospel, it has sought to even persecute those who taught the gospel.
41:34
I mean, like burning them at the stake like they did with Jan Hus and other people.
41:41
I mean, Jan Hus was probably the proto -reformer, but other men who had either taught the gospel or tried to preach the gospel were hunted down and executed.
41:55
So, you know, even today, though, here's what I would say. That there are
42:01
Christians within the Roman Catholic Church. And you say, well, how can you say that? Because I think there are people within the
42:07
Roman Catholic Church who don't believe all that the Roman Catholic Church teaches. And there is, there are nuggets of the gospel within it.
42:19
And if you sort it a lot, you could eventually get it. The problem is, the more confirmed you are, and I use that word on purpose, the more confirmed you are in the
42:30
Catholic faith, the higher up you go. You know, here's the easy question. Could the
42:35
Pope be saved right now? Is he saved? And the answer is no.
42:43
Could he be saved? Well, anybody could be saved. But here's the problem for the Pope. If he gets saved, then what happens?
42:52
Yeah, they're going to force him out. He's either going to resign or they're going to force him out. As soon as the Pope stands up and says, you know,
42:57
I'd like to announce a few things. We've had this wrong for the last 500 years. Salvation is by faith alone.
43:04
You know, there are going to be snipers ready to take him out. Can't do that. You know, the
43:09
College of Cardinals would have an emergency meeting and, you know, the Pope's lost his mind and we need to get rid of him. But there's a sense, to answer your question directly, since the
43:22
Reformation and even prior to the Reformation, there was a movement within the Catholic Church that has only accelerated and become less and less
43:30
Christian, more and more dogmatic about things that it ought not to be dogmatic about. In other words, it really has turned into a cult with a separate system of salvation, a separate system of revelation of information.
43:48
You know, how does somebody get saved? Well, they can never know if they're saved in the Catholic system. Contra of the
43:54
Bible. You know, these things have been written that you may know, that you may know you have eternal life.
44:00
Catholic Church says you can never know that. It's presumptuous. Roman Catholic Church says that even if you live a really great life, you know, in their eyes, that you still go to purgatory because Jesus isn't enough.
44:17
Roman Catholic Church says Mary must intercede for you with Jesus because Jesus is not predisposed to be kind toward you.
44:27
You know, you need Mary to intercede for you. That's why they pray to her. Why do they pray to the saints?
44:33
Well, that's another problem. But there are all sorts of problems with the Roman Catholic Church, so many then that I think most
44:42
Christians would call it a cult. Well, okay, we need to close, but here's what
45:03
I'd say. There's a difference between a sociological cult and a theological cult. Okay? Rome is a theological cult, not a sociological cult.
45:12
It's not like leaving, what's that? Yeah, it's not like leaving that or leaving like Scientology.
45:21
It's not like leaving that, you know, where you're going to get shunned and all these other things. Or even like leaving the
45:28
Jehovah Witnesses. But it is definitely a theological cult when you have sources of information that supplant, that replace the
45:38
Bible. So it's only a cult in that sense. Okay, let's pray.
45:46
Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for the truths of Scripture, even as we look to difficult topics, as we talk about the nature of the
45:58
Trinity, definitions of personhood and of will and all these things that sometimes just boggle our minds.
46:09
Help us to grasp these truths and to understand what the
46:15
Bible teaches better. Help us to even humble ourselves and to accept what men throughout the centuries have taught.
46:26
Even as we struggle, we wrestle, and we think, well, these men, they grappled with them by your grace and they seem to have understood it rightly.
46:36
Help us to do the same. Father, I pray that you would just prepare us for worship here this morning and help us to worship you,