March 19, 2018 Show with Dr. Tony Costa on “An Assessment of the Arnzen vs. Bogle Radio Debate on ‘Unbelievable?’ UK Radio (Part 2)”

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

Now here's our host, Chris Arntzen. Good afternoon,

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio wishing you all a happy Monday on this 19th day of March 2018 and today is part two of an assessment of the

Arntzen versus Bogle radio debate on unbelievable radio in the United Kingdom.

I had a interview slash debate with James Bogle, who is a Roman Catholic barrister or attorney in Great Britain.

Right before Reformation Day, sometime in 2017, and Mr.

Bogle is not only an attorney or barrister in England, but he is also a

Roman Catholic apologist and head of a Roman Catholic apostolate there in the United Kingdom and we both began our discussions on the unbelievable radio program by giving our testimonies, myself giving the testimony of how

I, by God's grace and mercy, converted from Roman Catholicism to Evangelical Christianity and Mr.

Bogle giving his testimony of how he, being raised Anglican, eventually became a

Roman Catholic and then the discussion turned into a debate eventually, unexpected by me, and we had last

Friday, the 16th of March, the first part of Dr. Tony Costa's assessment of this debate and we are now going to be hearing part two of that assessment by Dr.

Tony Costa, who's professor of apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary. Unfortunately, the first few minutes of the program, due to a technical error, were not recorded today, so we are going to be joining

Dr. Tony Costa in mid -sentence as he is describing how he, having been raised in a

Roman Catholic Portuguese family in Canada, was first introduced to Evangelical Christianity.

So here is Dr. Tony Costa. And it wasn't until I was about 15 years old that I heard the gospel for the first time through two of my cousins who had come to faith, and when they had challenged me on my

Roman Catholicism, I was very disturbed by this. I thought

I was in the true church of Christ, and so that led me to try to refute them.

They basically challenged me to read the Bible, and they weren't trying to force convert me at all.

They just told me to read the Bible for myself and that the Lord would speak to me through his word.

Well, I took the Bible with the intention of proving them wrong, and as a matter of fact, when I took the scriptures and read them for the very first time in my life, the

Lord changed my heart. I was converted, I was regenerated, and after that I wanted to know more about my faith, and that led me into an academic pursuit of knowing the

Bible, knowing the Old Testament, the New Testament, the languages, the theologies, and so forth. And through that endeavor,

I went into post -secondary education. I obtained my Bachelor's and Master of Arts at the

University of Toronto in Religious Studies, Biblical Studies, Philosophy, Biblical Studies, and Biblical Hebrew as well, and Aramaic.

And then from there I went to do a PhD in Holland at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the city of Nijmegen in Holland.

I'm also an ordained minister of the Gospel, and so my passion is both academic and pastoral.

I currently teach at Toronto Baptist Seminary, and I also teach at Heritage College and Seminary in Cambridge, Ontario, which is a city about an hour away from Toronto, and I also do some seasonal teaching at the

University of Toronto as well. Great, and we'll be giving out your contact information later on during the program, but for those of you who just tuned in, apparently for some reason due to a technical difficulty the first minute or so before you began your testimony,

Tony, just the opening announcements were somehow not on the air nor being recorded by me, and one of those days

I'm hoping that my webmaster, who automatically records every show, has got this on recording.

But for those of you who are just hearing the program without the introduction, my guest today is

Dr. Tony Costa, Professor of Apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary.

We are discussing part two of an assessment of the Arnzen versus Bogle radio debate on unbelievable radio in the

United Kingdom. This was a radio interview that I had with Roman Catholic apologist and barrister or attorney, as they are called in England, barristers.

This began as a conversation, an interview on unbelievable radio hosted by Justin Brierley there in the

UK, and we were both, James Bogle and I, were both giving our testimonies of salvation or how we view ourselves as having either become saved or entering into the true church, as it were.

I was giving my testimony of having been born and raised in Roman Catholicism and left it, and then embraced the biblical evangelical

Protestantism. And Mr. Bogle, having been raised Anglican, gave his testimony of how he converted eventually to Roman Catholicism, and then the interview evolved or devolved, however you want to look at it, into a debate, not in so strictly a formal sense as some of the debates you have seen my guest

Dr. Tony Costa participate in, or James White, which are much lengthier and which are more rigidly timed and which have multiple parts that are more clearly differentiated from one another, such as opening remarks, rebuttals, cross -examinations, final remarks, and so on.

This was more of a freestyle conversation debate on the radio, and we are addressing

Dr. Tony Costa's assessment of that debate, and this is part two of that.

We began the first part last Friday, and where we left off, if I'm not mistaken,

Tony, is that we last left off addressing how, and by the way, if anybody wants to hear this entire debate that I had with James Bogle, you can go to ironsharpensirenradio .com.

If you click on Bogle, B as in boy, O, G as in George, L, E as in elephant,

Bogle, you will get that link to hear part one of the discussion that we're having today, because in part one we aired the entire radio debate at the very beginning or the very first hour of the show.

So if anybody wants to hear that later, you can do that. But where we left off in our assessment, or should

I say your assessment, of the debate, we were addressing

Mr. Bogle making the assertion that Protestants in history have been far more guilty of atrocious and barbarous, torturous executions and martyrdom of Roman Catholics than the reverse would be.

In fact, Mr. Bogle boiled it down to less than 300 people being executed by the

Spanish Inquisition, and I say less than 300 because he said there were 300, but some of those were an effigy.

In other words, they were mock executions done after the deaths of the people that were being declared to be heretical.

Now, is there any truth, even remotely, anything remotely true about that assertion that Protestants are far more guilty of barbarous executions in history than the

Roman Catholic Church? Well, I think, given the fact that the Protestant Reformation came in 1517, and about 100 years before, the

Roman Catholic Church was already burning heretics like Johannes Huss in Bohemia, I think the

Roman Catholic Church has had a longer history of executing heretics.

But I'm not a scholar of the Spanish Inquisition, so I cannot say what exactly the

Magisterial Reformers are, but it is a fact of history that some of the

Magisterial Reformers were guilty of executing Anabaptists. Luther vehemently opposed the

Anabaptist movement, as did Calvin. And so, it's not to say that Roman Catholics executed people, and we think of the

St. Bartholomew's Massacre that took place against the

Huguenots in France, which was a monstrous attack.

They ripped open pregnant women, exposing, of course, killing their babies, throwing them into the rivers, and so forth.

So, I think the Roman Catholic Church, I think, would have a lot more lives on their hands in terms of executing heretics.

But that is not to say that...I think Mr. Bogle was right that when Queen Elizabeth I ascended the throne, after she was initially imprisoned by Mary, Queen of Scots, who was a

Roman Catholic, and wanted to keep England under the

Roman Catholic Church in the papacy, Elizabeth I, when she came to the throne, she completely reversed that,

Queen Mary's idea of keeping Catholicism as the religion of England.

She made Anglicanism the religion of the Empire, of the British Empire. And it is true that people like Sir Thomas More, for instance, were quartered and eventually decapitated, and so forth.

I was actually there at the Tower of London, the place where Sir Thomas More was executed. Not at the same time, though,

I'm assuming. Not at the same time, no. Suffice it to say that some of the

Magisterial Reformers were pretty nasty as well, as was the

Church of England, the Protestant Church of England. But I would say that the Roman Catholic Church would have far greater numbers in terms of executing heretics.

Yeah, and one of these days I am going to have someone who may be the top historian involved in martyrdom and so on, as to really get to the bottom of this numerically, because I think that the accusation of Mr.

Bogle was outlandish, actually. Yes. Especially when his main point was that the

Protestants executed Roman Catholics in a far more gruesome manner. Thomas Cramner, even when the

Church of England went back to Rome after King Henry VIII's death, they burnt Cramner alive.

So I don't know what he is referring to. Right, right. But again, of course, we know

Michael Cervaites was burned at the stake, and a lot of people tried to lay the blame at John Calvin's feet, but there's a lot of misunderstanding about the relationship of Calvin to the execution of Michael Cervaites.

In fact, Calvin tried to have Cervaites recanted so that he would not die that way, and in fact, he pleaded with the council in Geneva to be merciful and to offer him another form of execution.

And it wasn't Calvin's instruction or call to have

Cervaites burned. This was a common law throughout medieval Europe and into the

Reformation. It was part of European law that heretics were to be executed. And so this law came into effect ecclesiastically from the

Roman Catholic Church. As I said, before the Protestant Reformation, the Roman Catholics were already burning who they perceived to be heretics at the stake.

We could also remember Joan of Arc herself. Joan of Arc was executed by orders of the papacy, and then later they canonized her.

The very papacy that condemned her as a heretic later changed their mind and actually canonized her as a saint, and now today she's known as Saint Joan of Arc.

Right. And in case some of our listeners were unfamiliar with the name Michael Cervaites, who

Dr. Costa mentioned earlier, who's also known as Miguel Cervito, he was not

Roman Catholic. The Roman Catholic Church, if they had their hands on him, would have executed him very likely just as gruesomely as that Geneva council did.

And the Michael Cervito or Miguel Cervito or Michael Cervaites was an anti -Trinitarian.

Right. So just to make that clear that he was not Roman Catholic. He was a

Unitarian. He was a Unitarian. But again, it's important to realize that even when the call for execution was made by the council in Geneva, it had the approval of Philip Melanchthon as well and other reformers.

Mr. Bogle failed to realize or didn't want to pursue this line of questioning.

He failed to realize the reason that I brought up the executions. It wasn't to say that Protestants were completely innocent of this.

It was to make clear the severity of what the anathemas at the Council of Trent really meant.

Right. Or the severity of what those at the council meant by the anathemas.

We already proved from a Catholic rendition or version, a translation of the scriptures, the

New American Bible from a Roman Catholic bishop website, that the translation in Galatians 1 is accursed.

And as far as anathema is concerned, the word anathema that the Apostle Paul used in Galatians 1.

And so this was a very serious thing. And the reason that I brought up the martyrdom of Protestants or people who opposed the

Roman Catholic Church openly on those dogmas was that Mr.

Bogle was trying to insinuate that there was something much more mild and friendly and peaceful going on here in regard to the anathemas.

He kept saying it's just excommunication. That's all it is, is excommunication. But what happened to those people who were excommunicated in those days?

They were burned alive and tortured and murdered in many ways because they were believed to be teaching damnable things that were not only sending others to hell but sending themselves to hell.

Correct. Correct. Correct. That's absolutely right. I think he was sanitizing the

Council of Trent, the canons of the Council of Trent. And the idea was that because a heretic in the eyes of Roman Catholicism was seen as someone that could damn someone's soul to hell and therefore deprive them of God's grace, because that's what a moral sin is.

It's to deprive one of God's grace so much so that that soul goes to hell. So the Roman Catholic Church felt that it was a divine duty to, since the heretic is damned anyway, since the heretic is a son of Satan, then the safest alternative would be to destroy them and get rid of them and therefore get rid of their voice so that they will not convert others and in so doing damn their souls.

Well, one of the things that came up in the debate was that the

Roman Catholic Church gave us the scriptures, that we would never have had them without the

Roman Catholic Church. And it is a typical Roman Catholic assertion or claim that those that gathered at Roman Catholic councils chose what books would be included and what books would be excluded from the canon.

And of course the Old Testament canon of the Church of Rome is different because they include the

Apocrypha even though Jerome, who compiled the Vulgate, was very opposed to including the

Apocrypha since he knew that the Jews historically never viewed them as a part of their canon.

But how do you respond to a Catholic, or in particular Mr. Bogle, who made the claim that the

Catholic Church gave us the Bible? Well, this is a common argument, as you know,

Chris. The Orthodox Church makes exactly the same argument, that they're the ones who established the canon of the

Church. And I think you've already answered part of it, and that is that the canon of Scripture, if we're talking about the

Church establishing the canon, this is the old chicken and egg, which came first, the chicken or the egg?

In this case, what came first, the canon or the Church? Well, the Roman Catholics will say, well, the Church came first, and the

Church established the canon for us. But here's the problem, Chris. If you look at the

Orthodox Church, the Eastern Church, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, and so forth, while we hold the same canon of the

New Testament, their Old Testament has extra books in the

Deuterocanonical text, which we call Apocrypha. They have extra books that the Roman Catholic Church does not have.

So, for example, the Orthodox Church also has, for example, the Prayer of Manasseh.

They also have the 151st Psalm. They also believe in 3rd and 4th

Maccabees. The Roman Catholic canon of the Old Testament has 1st and 2nd Maccabees, which the

Orthodox also have, but they also add 3rd and 4th Maccabees. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church, interestingly enough, has an even larger canon of the

Old Testament. They add other books, like the First Book of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, and so forth.

And so, the question is, which church are we talking here? If it's the Roman Catholic Church, then why is it that the

Orthodox Church, which the Roman Church openly admits has a very ancient history, then how is it that the

Orthodox Church's canon conflicts with the Roman Catholic canon, the Roman Catholic canon conflicts with the

Ethiopian Church's canon, and so forth? And therefore, each of these churches claim to have this authority from God, and they have this claim that they are the ones who created the canon.

Well, why is there so much confusion over this? Well, historically, because Christianity emerged out of Judaism, all the early followers of Jesus were

Jews. Jesus himself was a Jew. And so, the question is, what books did the Jews regard as sacred?

And what books were laid up in the Temple? We know what those books were. They were the 39 books that we have in our

Old Testament. But the other problem here is, how would a 1st century

Jew, for example, how would a 1st century Jew know that Ezra was canonical, or that Esther was canonical?

Well, there was no church at that time in the Old Testament period, so how would they have known the canon?

And who established the canon? So, I think what we have here, Chris, is that the

Church has to make that claim, because if you hold to sola ecclesia, then only the Church has that authority to declare dogma, and also to declare the canon.

My position, and I think the Protestant evangelical position, has been that the canon is not something that the

Church created. The canon is something that the Church recognized and acknowledged.

And I have a quote here from Dr. Bruce Metzger, who was probably the greatest New Testament scholar,

Greek New Testament scholar, in the 20th century. Dr. Metzger says this, and I'm quoting, Neither individuals nor councils created the canon.

Instead, they came to recognize and acknowledge the self -authenticating quality of these writings, which impose themselves as canonical upon the

Church. And so I think that the Church heard the voice of the Master, and the

Church recognized the voice of the Lord. Jesus said, My sheep hear my voice, they recognize my voice.

And therefore, it's not that the canon was created by the Church, rather, the Church discovered the canon.

Yes, that is a very frustrating claim that you routinely hear regurgitated.

Pardon me if you're offended by that, folks who are Roman Catholic. But it is so often claimed that the

Roman Catholic Church chose what books to keep and what books to exclude, as if there was no canon before these councils.

What was the council that the Roman Catholic Church claims to have finally dogmatized the actual canon?

And I know that the Apocrypha was not dogmatically included until Trent, right?

Right, that's correct. It wasn't until 1546 -47 that the Council of Trent formally recognized the

Apocrypha. They don't call it Apocrypha, they call it Deuterocanonical. They considered those books to be canonical.

Now, it's funny, they call it Deuterocanonical, which means... It's secondary, right? Yes, which is strange.

The Holy Spirit has a secondary inspiration. It makes no sense. I mean, all scriptures

God breathed, there are no degrees of inspiration, they are equally inspired. And therefore, even by calling them

Deuterocanonical, they're acknowledging that they have a secondary status to the other books of the

Old Testament that are considered authentic. But usually what they do,

Chris, is they point to the Council of Carthage in North Africa, and they point to that council that Augustine also went with.

But the issue here is, and this is where they do a bit of a sleight of hand here, the Council of Carthage was not an ecumenical council.

An ecumenical council is the Council of Nicaea, the Council of Chalcedon, the Council of Ephesus.

These councils were considered ecumenical because the whole church, West and East, both were bound by those treats.

They both affirmed those treats. Local councils do not have ecumenical authority. And so, while Augustine tried to argue that the

Apocrypha was part of the Old Testament, Jerome vehemently debated him on this.

Now, Jerome, I think, had the better argument because Jerome knew the languages.

My heavens, he translated the Bible into Latin, the Vulgate. And Augustine, while he was a great philosopher, great theologian, great thinker,

Augustine was not a grammarian. He did not know the languages. Jerome taught them on that, for sure.

And Jerome only added the Apocrypha under compulsion by the Pope, and he did so with reservation and with a commentary that these books are not found in the

Hebrew canon. Now, Athanasius, the bishop, the great champion of orthodoxy,

Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, in his 39th

Festal Letter, which dates to about 367 AD, he sent out an Easter letter to those churches, and he enumerated the books of the

Bible, the New Testament, and in there he practically mentioned every single book that we have in our

Bibles today. Athanasius rejected the Apocrypha, as did Pope Gregory the

Great, and Cardinal Cajetan, the cardinal that interrogated Martin Luther himself, rejected the

Apocrypha. And so the first list that we have, we have the

Muratorian Canon that goes back to 170 AD, but it's fragmentary, and it includes other devotional books in there as well.

But the first official document we have is from Athanasius, 367

AD. He mentioned all the books that we have in our present Bible today. By the way,

I want to mention our email address. If anybody would like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n gmail .com. Please give us your first name, at least, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA. And please only remain anonymous if this is about a personal and private matter. Let's say you are a

Roman Catholic and you're starting to question your faith and you'd rather not draw attention to yourself, or perhaps you're a

Protestant and you are being tempted to leave evangelicalism and enter into Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy or anything else, and you don't want to draw attention to your identity.

We can understand that, so we will grant your request to remain anonymous.

But other than a personal and private matter, please give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence.

I also wanted to make sure that our listeners had the website for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, because that is where I read from the

New American Catholic Bible translation of 1st Galatians how the translators of the

New American Catholic Bible translated Paul's use of the term anathema and Galatians 1 to accursed, and Mr.

Bogle repeatedly was saying that the Council of Trent was not cursing people like witches.

Well, we know that they weren't cursing them like witches, but the term is clearly referring to somebody being cursed or accursed.

Am I right on that? Absolutely, absolutely, and that's why I had mentioned that if anyone consults a

Greek -English lexicon of the New Testament and they look under anathema, they will notice that it says exactly that, that it refers to someone who is under the divine curse of God, and that is why various Bible translations like the

King James Version, the ESV, and others translate anathema as accursed. And if you want to see for yourself how the

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops preferred that to be translated, go to usccb .org,

that's usccb .org, and if you want to find the specific place where they have the translation, go to usccb .org

forward slash Bible forward slash Galatians forward slash the number one.

And you'll see right there that the word accursed is there. The thing that we also got involved in in our discussion slash debate, meaning

Mr. Bogle and I, was that he was saying that sola scriptura, he was basically equating sola scriptura to everyone having his own personal and private interpretation.

Yeah, yeah. And what I did not have time to respond to Mr.

Bogle, because keep in mind I was on the phone and Mr. Bogle was in the studio and a lot more easily able to commandeer or dominate the discussion.

Basically, he would mention a number of different things that he was asserting as truth in regard to the

Roman Catholic Church or in regard to what he saw as heresy or a serious error in regard to evangelical

Protestantism. He would name a number of those things and then Justin Brierley would ask me, for my opinion, about one of those things.

Right. So it was very difficult to say everything that I wanted to say. But the Roman Catholic Church constantly makes the claim, as did

Mr. Bogle, that they have a far better opportunity to understand what was intended by the writers of the

Old and New Testaments because they have an infallible interpreter. And what I would have loved to have said if I had the time was, number one, your infallible interpreter did not infallibly interpret every verse of the

Bible, and number two, you don't have an infallible interpreter for your infallible interpreter.

Correct. Well, here's the interesting thing, Chris, and just before we move on to that,

I was able to pull up the leading Greek -English lexicon of the New Testament, BDAG, which is the

Bauer, Denker, Arndt, and Gingrich lexicon, published by the University of Chicago. This is the standard authority in New Testament Greek.

Very quickly here, the word anathema, under the section on anathema, it says that which has been cursed, cursed, accursed, and guess what they quote?

They quote Galatians 1, verse 8. There you go. It also, yep, and they also mention that it is the content that is expressed in a curse.

And so even the standard Greek -English lexicon of the New Testament, used by academics all over the world, testifies to the fact that anathema means to curse.

So getting to your question then, Chris, getting to your question, the idea that only the

Roman Catholic Church has the right to infallibly interpret every verse, I think that's a good point that you made, that the

Roman Church has not infallibly interpreted every interpretation that there is on Scripture.

That has been openly admitted by Raymond Brown, the famous, the late Raymond Brown, famous Roman Catholic scholar.

In fact, have they dogmatically declared ex cathedra the interpretation of any verse?

I don't, with the exception of maybe Matthew 16 on the keys of Peter and so forth, there is not, let's just say the majority of the

Bible has not had any infallible interpretation, with the exception of some like the

Petrine, the so -called conferral of the keys of Peter and the establishment of the papacy.

But what he did, Chris, was he quoted a passage from 1

Peter, excuse me, 2 Peter chapter 1 and verse 20, and this is a passage that many

Roman Catholic apologists take out of context. Here's the King James rendering, it says, knowing this verse that no prophecy of the

Scripture is of any private interpretation, and that's what he was quoting. And the

Dewey Rhymes version, the Roman Catholic Dewey Rhymes version, also says no prophecy of Scripture is made by private interpretation.

But what he's ignoring is that Peter is not saying that, he's not saying that people cannot have an interpretation of the

Bible. In the context, Peter is talking about prophecy and the way it was given to the prophets.

He's talking about the inspiration of the prophetic writings. And what he's telling us in 2 Peter 1 and 18, 19, 20 and following, is that when the prophets spoke, they spoke from God, they were carried by the

Holy Spirit, and they did not give their own private interpretation, because it came from God.

It was not their own human, fallible interpretation of events. So what Peter's talking about, he's not talking about some

Roman magisterium that is going to come down the road. He's saying that the prophets did not make this stuff up.

They were inspired writers, that these were not their own interpretations. They were guided by the

Holy Spirit to write what God wanted them to write. So neglecting the context of this passage, they turn it into this attack on Protestants for the belief that we believe in the perspicuity of Scripture, and that we can understand the

Word of God. And therefore, they will wrench this passage out of context to argue that we cannot properly interpret the

Scriptures, we need the Roman Catholic Church to do that. And then when he quotes Acts chapter 8, where we read about the

Ethiopian eunuch, and Philip goes to him, and the Ethiopian eunuch is reading the prophet Isaiah chapter 53, he's reading the scroll of Isaiah.

He takes the saying of Philip, where Philip says, you understand what you're reading? And the Ethiopian eunuch says, how am

I supposed to understand unless somebody explains it to me? Well, that's a pretty big leap to go from that, well, this proves that we need an infallible magisterium to interpret the

Scriptures to us. And remember, Philip is not an apostle. Philip there is a deacon. He's not even an elder of the

Church, he's a deacon. And so these are desperate attempts to scour the

Scriptures to prove sole ecclesia. And we have to go to our first break right now, if anybody would like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail dot com, chrisarnson at gmail dot com.

Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA. Please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

And we would actually love, I would prefer myself, to have listeners write in who are

Roman Catholic. I don't want to exclusively confine this to only

Roman Catholic listeners, but I would prefer that Roman Catholic listeners respond to either attempt to refute in some way what

Dr. Costa is saying, or they just want to voice their disagreement with him on something that he is saying.

But of course anybody, whether you are Catholic, a Protestant, a Jew, a

Muslim, an Atheist, a Swedenborgianist, we would love to hear from you with your questions at chrisarnson at gmail dot com.

chrisarnson at gmail dot com. Don't go away, God willing, we will be right back with Dr.

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W -A -T -S -O -N, and you'll find out everything that you need to know about this sale. Well, we are back now with Dr.

Tony Costa. We are discussing part two of the debate that I had with James Bogle on Unbelievable Christian Radio in the

UK, hosted by Justin Brierley. I had a conversation that transformed into a debate,

James Bogle being a Roman Catholic apologist and barrister, which is an attorney, there in England, and he is also leading or heading a

Roman Catholic apostolate there in the

UK. I, myself, being a Bible -believing Protestant, and of course, the reason they had us both on together was that I was a convert from Roman Catholicism, and Mr.

Bogle was a convert from Anglicanism, so they wanted to give two testimonies in the reverse and then have a debate.

Of course, it was not as rigidly timed and structured as a formal debate would be with a moderator.

This is more of a conversational -style debate that I had, but we are returning from part one that we conducted last

Friday on this discussion, and if you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com, and we were talking about, before the break, that Mr.

Bogle and Roman Catholics in general will assert that they have an upper hand with knowing the true teachings of God, the true doctrines of God, the true dogmas of God, because their

Pope is their infallible interpreter, their Magisterium is their infallible interpreter, and we do not have one, and going back to one of the other points that I was making,

Tony, and I'm sure you agree, that the dilemma that they have is they do not have an infallible interpreter for their infallible interpreter, and each individual

Roman Catholic is certainly not an infallible interpreter of their Pope's encyclicals or anything else that he says or writes for that matter.

Yes, it's somewhat of a circular argument, because they claim that they have an infallible

Magisterium, but there is no infallible interpreter who interprets the infallible interpreter, and so it ends up going in a circle, and that, again, was done deliberately, obviously, because the

Roman Catholic Church wants to assert its supremacy through the papacy, of course.

They want to assert its supremacy over not only Christians, but also to assert its supremacy over anything that claims to be

Christian or that claims to be a church, and so if they have this infallible teaching office, this

Magisterium, then that means that the average person cannot understand the

Scriptures, and the Roman Catholic Church has made this very, very clear, that the teaching office of the

Scriptures belongs only to Mother Church, and that the laity are dependent on the teaching and the interpretation of Scripture as set out by the

Roman Catholic Church. Yes, and then we also have the assertion from Mr.

Bogle, and this is a, it's not just uniquely Mr. Bogle that makes these assertions, he was actually repeating things that are very, very, very frequently repeated by Roman Catholic apologists when defending the faith and attempting to reveal the errors of Protestantism, or even the fallacies of Protestantism.

They claimed that Luther, when he arrived on the scene and finally was reaching a point where it was clear that his gospel was different than the

Church of Rome, and many other things that Rome binds upon the consciences of their followers, or its followers, or her followers, the

Roman Catholics will claim that these were new novel ideas that Martin Luther introduced to Christendom for the first time, and so Mr.

Bogle was making the assertion that if Luther was true, and if we as the heirs of the

Reformation are right, Christianity did not really begin until 1517, or the 16th century, and this is really an easily refuted argument, is it not?

I mean, didn't the Reformers gain such traction and gain so many followers in part, not only because they, like Athanasius, were referring to the

Scriptures as their sole infallible authority, but they did use the fallible teachings of the

Church Fathers to at least bolster their arguments, didn't they? Absolutely, absolutely.

The Reformers were very well trained in the patristics, and in fact,

Luther, when Luther went into the Augustinian monastery, he was an

Augustinian monk, and also Calvin. Calvin himself depended heavily on the writings of Augustine, and all one has to do is simply go to the

Fathers, and I just have a couple of quotes here that I could quote to you. This is from Clement of Rome, who is dated about the late 1st century.

We're talking about a patristic writer who comes at the end of the 1st century, that is in the 90s

AD, and so for example, Clement of Rome says things like this, God has chosen the

Lord Jesus Christ and us by Him. He says as well, therefore

He, that is God being desirous, that all His beloved ones should partake of repentance, confirmed it by His almighty will.

And then he says, when He wills, that is God, and as He wills, He does all things, none of those things which are decreed by Him shall pass away.

And then he says, this blessedness comes upon those that are chosen of God by Jesus Christ our

Lord. And he makes other claims to this effect that, for example, making it manifest that through the

God. And so Clement in his writings talks about God's sovereign right to choose

His people, and he talks about how we are redeemed and saved by faith and not by anything that we have done.

And this is just Clement of Rome. Other writers like Justin Martyr, writers like Ignatius, for instance, use similar language that we are saved.

For example, here's Ignatius. He says, in predestination, there was such a difference between the infidels and the elect.

I mean, that almost sounds like you're reading John Calvin. But here's Ignatius about AD 110. So I think that what

Mr. Vogel said there, Chris, was patently false. It's demonstrably false.

There are scores of passages from the Fathers that argue the same thing that Luther did.

There's a very good book, incidentally, on this whole question. I'm not sure if you're aware of it, but there is a book out by,

I think the author's name is, here's the author's name, it's by Nathan Boussinesq, and it's entitled

Long Before Luther. Yes, I actually have it, I have it, and I want to interview

Nathan on that book. Yes, the subtitle is Tracing the Heart of the Gospel from Christ to the

Reformation. It's an excellent book. It's also available on Kindle. But Dr.

Boussinesq does a great job of showing that what Luther was saying in the 16th century, and what

Calvin was saying, what Wycliffe said, what Jan Hus said, what Zwingli was saying, was already being said long before, in the 19th century.

So, I don't want to impute any malevolence to Mr. Bogle, but that is clearly a sleight of hand.

And we have to go to our break right now, our midway break, that is, which is longer than most. Please be patient with us.

Grace Life Radio, 90 .1 FM in Lake City, Florida, requires a 12 -minute break between our two hours, so please be patient and take this time not only to write down information from our advertisers, but also write us a question if you have one, and send it in as soon as you can to chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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And don't go away, God willing, we are going to be back after this break with more of Dr.

Tony Costa and his assessment of the Arnzen -Bogle debate on Unbelievable Radio.

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Anyway, we have just a couple more announcements to make before we return to the discussion with Dr.

Tony Costa. First of all, the Philadelphia Conference on Reform Theology is coming up.

It has two locations and two different dates. We have from April 13th through the 15th, the event will be held at the

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click on events, and then click on Philadelphia Conference on Reform Theology. The Spirit of the Age and the

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And we are now back with our guest Dr. Tony Costa. Dr. Tony Costa, for those of you who tuned in late, he is the professor of apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary.

This is part two of a program that we began last Friday, an assessment of the Arnzen versus Bogle radio debate on Unbelievable Radio.

If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com. Before I go to any listener questions,

Dr. Costa, I just wanted to follow through with a couple of more thoughts on some things that Mr.

Bogle said that time did not allow me to respond to. We were talking about before the break the idea that Luther never,

I'm sorry, that the church never in its history taught those things that are believed to be unique of Martin Luther.

That, you know, over 1 ,500 years had passed by in Christian history and no one ever taught anything remotely close to what are known today as the five solos of the

Reformation. And the two that the Roman Catholic Church obviously has the most problem with are

Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide. Those are the two that they openly condemn.

They, I think, are inconsistent with all the others, even though they may claim some kind of allegiance or shared agreement with the other solos of the

Reformation. They clearly and don't make any bones about condemning

Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide. But the claim that Luther invented these things is not only false, but they have their own problems if they're going to use that kind of argumentation.

They have their own problems in that their dogmas of the immaculate conception, papal infallibility, and the assumption of Mary did not become dogmatically defined until 1854, which was when the immaculate conception of Mary was dogmatically defined.

Papal infallibility was defined in 1870, dogmatically, and the assumption of Mary was dogmatically defined in 1950.

And by the way, for those of you who think the immaculate conception of Mary is referring to Jesus' being immaculately conceived, you are wrong.

It's regard to Mary being immaculately conceived without sin in her own mother's womb and perpetually remaining sinless until being taken into heaven at the assumption.

But these very late dogmatic declarations are basically waived off as not being important facts because, as Mr.

Bogle had claimed, the churches always believed those things, but they just dogmatically, or she, the church, just dogmatically defined those things in 1854, 1870, and 1950.

But isn't that really a bizarre claim to think that these things, nearly 2 ,000 years after the birth of Christ, the church would have waited that long to dogmatically define these things if they were consistent throughout the history of the church as being universally believed?

And by the way, I did not intend to convey to Mr. Bogle that they just appeared out of nowhere in those dates.

I didn't mean that at all. But if you could comment on that. Yes. Well, let me just say that the position of Augustine, St.

Augustine, on election and predestination and so forth, Augustine, as I pointed out earlier, who is regarded as the doctor of the

Western Church, one of the doctors of the Western Church, canonized by the Roman Catholic Church, St.

Augustine was the source for much of Luther and Calvin's idea of election, predestination, reprobation, and so forth.

Because Augustine spoke about the massa dominata, that the masses are damned. And because Augustine leaned so much on this idea of sovereignty, the sovereignty of God and election, so forth, in the 6th century at the

Council of Orange, the Roman Church had to begin backpedaling a bit.

And what they did was they granted Augustine, but then they also disagreed with Augustine, and they adopted eventually a view that we call semi -Pelagianism, which basically says that man cooperates with the grace of God.

And so what we find is that if Augustine actually was alive today, most of what he believed would be declared heretical by the

Roman Catholic Church, including the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception and also the

Assumption of Mary. So in terms of these dogmas that they talk about, the bishops at the

Council of Nicea, there's about 318 bishops there, not one of them believed any of this. He actually made a mistake,

Chris, I don't know if you noticed this, but in the discussion, Mr. Bogle actually placed the

Immaculate Conception, the dogma, in 1859. It is, as you correctly noted, 1854,

December 8, 1854, to be exact. And in the Ineffable Deus, the name of that document that was put up by Pope Pius IX, that document makes the assertion that this has always been believed in the

Church historically, and that that is just nonsense. The bishops of Nicea in the 4th century, not one of them held to any of those views.

And if you look at the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church does not accept the doctrine of the

Immaculate Conception, because the Eastern Orthodox Church does not accept the doctrine of Original Sin, and therefore,

Mary had no Original Sin that had to be basically expiated or removed at the time of her conception.

And so the Eastern Orthodox Church rejects the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. And so when these dogmas came out, these dogmas were declared infallibly, not so much...well,

1854, it was the Pope and the Council, the Magisterium, and so forth, because the doctrine of papal infallibility was not yet developed until 1870.

That's when the Pope alone could proclaim dogma. But in 1854, it was the Pope and his

Magisterium, the bishops and so forth, in unison with the Pope. And so the problem with these dogmas is they give the impression that Christians have always believed these things.

And that's simply not true. If you look at the debate that you hosted, Chris, in Carlisle, with myself and Robert St.

Genes, I demonstrated by quoting pervious fathers, where some fathers like Irenaeus and others,

Basil, maintain that Mary did sin, that she committed the sin of pride, ambition, and so forth.

And so it's very disingenuous to say that this has always been the faith of the Church. But then, what the dogma does is that the dogma basically says whoever will deny this will forfeit their souls if they do so.

So not only do you have to believe it, because it's a dogma of the Church, but you would forfeit your salvation if you deny it.

Well, the thing that I actually—it just dawned on me when we were conducting this interview.

I'm not sure why I didn't think of it earlier. If I did think of it earlier, I don't remember thinking of it earlier.

But it's interesting— That's why you need an infallible interpreter. Or just a much more intelligent guest than myself.

Or an infallible interpreter to tell you which Puritan wrote which book. Well, at least

Thomas Watson is a good man of history, a solid Puritan. But anyway, but it's interesting how the

Protestant understanding of sola scriptura and the sufficiency of Scripture and the perpiscuity of Scripture is caricatured by Rome to believe that we can just privately interpret the

Bible any way that we wish. That is their claim. And yet, Mr. Bogle and others will claim that the

Protestants throughout history have martyred more people more gruesomely than the Roman Catholic Church has.

Well, if they could interpret the Bible any way they wanted to, why would they be murdering so many people?

And the reason why they oppose sola scriptura, Chris, is very obvious, because it threatens the authority of the

Roman Church. If sola scriptura is true, and the people of God can hear the voice of God in the

Scriptures, then why do we need a pope? Why do we need a hierarchy in the Church? Why do we need sacraments?

Well, because if you want to receive grace, you need to go to the Church, which has the sacraments, and the grace of God is conveyed to the sacraments.

So you can understand why the Reformation was such a threat to the

Roman Catholic Church that they saw fit to call the Council of Trent to anathematize all the doctrines that the

Reformers proposed. But this is it. If sola scriptura is true, if the five solas are true, you have just dismantled the hierarchy, the authority of the

Roman Catholic Church, and it just comes down like a house of cards. So this idea then, as Mr.

Bogle asserted, that these dogmas that did not become officially declared ex cathedra until the 19th and 20th century, the mid -20th century, in regard to the

Assumption. The assertion regarding that the

Catholic Church just formally sealed these teachings that have always been believed in the 19th and 20th century is without historical warrant or documentation, right?

That's correct, that's correct. Again, all one has to do, I mean, there's a quote there that he gave from Cardinal Newman that the more you study history, the more you cease to be

Protestant. I found it to be quite the contrary. The more I learned about history, the more I realized how false the claims of the

Roman Catholic Church is. And Chris, we also have to understand that in the history of the

Constantine, which was believed for centuries to be an actual document that the

Emperor Constantine granted the city of Rome to the Roman Catholic Church, where the

Vatican was built. And then we look at the pseudo -Isidorian decrees, where they have also been proven to be fraudulent.

I don't know any Roman Catholic today who would dare to say that they're authentic. But the pseudo -Isidorian decretals, 90 % of the quotations from the

Church Fathers within that document were fraudulent. And so when you consider the fact that a lot of these documents in the history of the

Roman Catholic Church, like the Donation of Constance in particular, these were demonstrably fraudulent. St.

Thomas Aquinas did not know. He quoted from the pseudo -Isidorian decretals. He had no clue that they were fraudulent.

We can't blame him. He thought they were authentic. But his works are filled with references to these decretals.

And so we have to look at this and we have to ask the question, where's the beef?

Where's the evidence for this? And now to say that Martin Luther believed in the assumption of Mary, well, there was a lot of talk in Roman Catholicism.

Mary kept being elevated and elevated and elevated to the point that by the time you come to the

Medieval period, there's a very strong Marian devotion in the

Roman Catholic Church. And of course, Luther, you've got to cut him some slack here.

The guy came out of the Roman Catholic Church, of course he had all of these. I hope you pardon the pun here,

Chris, but I call them Roman Klingons. Luther and the

Reformers had Roman Klingons, and so Luther, out of all of them, if you notice, he held to consubstantiation and baptismal regeneration.

The later Reformers, you'll notice, they were able to shrug these Klingons off. But in the case of Luther, the early

Luther definitely had this view that Mary was taken up to heaven and so forth. But the later

Luther rejected it. In fact, he repudiated the feast of Mary's assumption, and the later

Luther clearly rejected this idea concerning Mary. But what Roman Catholic apologists do is they always go to the early

Luther. And yes, the early Luther was still committed to this Mariology.

But the later Luther rejected it, just like he brought up Luther's calling

James, the letter of James, an epistle of straw. Yes, that's true, the early Luther did have that view.

But the later Luther came to fully accept James. And it was not taken out of Luther's translation.

No, no, I have a German copy of Luther's New Testament, and it's right in there.

But what I'm saying is Luther did change his view on James, but that's never mentioned by a

Roman Catholic apologist. Right, and I'm going to read you a question right now from Joe in Slovenia.

Dear Brothers Chris and Tony, thanks for skillfully handling another great topic. I've always been puzzled by those who want to affirm that Roman Catholicism and Protestantism are both

Christianity. Wouldn't simply appealing to the law of non -contradiction clear this up?

Since we oppose each other on so many fundamental issues, isn't it disingenuous, at the very least, to consider both belief systems to represent the same religion?

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit. Thank you very much Joe in Slovenia. And I would agree with Joe myself, although I would have to give this caveat that I believe that there are

Roman Catholics who will be in heaven, but it's because they believe the true gospel.

And whether they believe the true gospel knowing that they are rebelling against Mother Church, meaning the

Church of Rome, or whether they just think that the gospel they believe is the gospel of the

Church of Rome, whatever it is, if they are truly trusting in the finished work of Christ alone for their salvation, they are my brother and sisters in Christ.

But if you could comment on that yourself. Well I think Joe's point is well taken, the law of non -contradiction.

We cannot be saying that we both have the same gospel, and our dear brother

Billy Graham, who is now with the Lord, unfortunately I think was overly compromising in this area when he once claimed that the gospel that Pope John Paul II preaches is the same gospel that he preaches.

Well if that's the case, then we're in trouble, because the gospel of Rome is not the gospel of grace. It cannot be the gospel of grace alone and the gospel of grace plus works, because that would be a contradiction.

As Paul says, if it's all of grace, it's not of works, but if it's works, then it's no longer grace.

So what I would say as well, Chris, is that all the Reformers, as you know, the Magisterial Reformers, all of them came out of the

Roman Catholic Church. Luther was saved when he was still in the Roman Catholic Church, as I believe

Calvin was, and Zwingli, and Johannes Huss as well. But what

I would add is, from my experience, Chris, I find that many Roman Catholics who come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, usually in the long run, do not stay in the

Roman Church. They feel uncomfortable. They cannot balance their convictions through the

Scriptures with the Mass and so forth. So what I have found from my own experience is that Roman Catholics who come to faith in Christ generally tend to leave.

It may take a while, but they generally tend to leave the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church, they have a doctrine, a

Jesuit doctrine, called the Doctrine of Invincible Ignorance. And the Doctrine of Invincible Ignorance maintains that there will be

Protestants who will be saved, even though they've rejected the true

Church of Rome. And the reason why they call it Invincible Grace is that there's well -meaning

Protestants out there, but they're just so invincibly blind, they cannot see that the Church of Rome is the true

Church. But they have this, what some Roman Catholic theologians call, they have this desire of baptism, the baptism of desire, and therefore

God will be merciful and accept them. But I generally think,

Chris, that, and again, I'm not God to judge the hearts of men, we have to understand, I think Augustine once said that when we get to heaven, we'll be surprised to find people there that we thought would never be there, and we'll also be surprised to find that there won't be people there that we thought would be there.

And so my general experience from my own ministry, Chris, is that most Roman Catholics who come to faith in Christ generally tend to eventually lead.

Some of them go into the Catholic Charismatic Movement, which I think just makes matters worse. Yeah, I have found some within the

Charismatic Catholic Movement more committed to Mariolatry than your right -of -the -mill Catholic, so they are not really closer to Protestants by and large.

That's correct, that's correct. The only reason that they might have some more, something more in harmony with Protestants is that they are more inclined to read the

Bible, perhaps vigorously, and are encouraged to do so by many of, or at least some of their churches and leaders, but they are certainly not more, they are not more similar to Protestants in their devotion and worship.

Right. And as far as the Invincible Ignorance is concerned, I think that modern -day

Catholics stretch that beyond credibility as to what it originally meant.

I think that that was more intended to refer to people who had mental retardation or brain damage or other circumstances that prevent—according to some

Catholics today who are modern ecumenists, almost everybody who is not a

Catholic is Invincibly Ignorant, unless you are perhaps a very knowledgeable, trained scholar of Catholicism who rejects it or something.

I mean, it's really ridiculous. Right. Right. Well, Vatican II as well, believe it or not, actually says some atheists are going to be saved as well, and because of their good works and their virtue and so forth, it's kind of hard to square that off with Hebrews 11, 6, that says that he who comes to God must believe that he is, and that he's a reward of those who seek him.

So it's kind of hard to be saved when you can't even believe in a being that the Bible says you have to believe that he exists.

And they're willing to grant that also to Muslims and Jews as well, that they'll come to salvation without necessarily coming through Christ.

Yeah, the book by Peter Kreeft, Ecumenical Jihad, is an example of that kind of granting salvation or hope for salvation for people who are not only of different religions than Roman Catholicism, but even to agnostics and atheists.

Right. And even within, unfortunately, some wings of the evangelical church, there was just a pastor,

I think just recently in Brooklyn, New York, a pastor of a megachurch who came out and basically said that the idea that Jesus is the only way to heaven is insanity, and that we should stop preaching that.

And so what we're finding is even some of these churches that claim to be evangelical, you're finding certain pastors beginning to move in the same direction that the

Roman Catholic Church is moving. We're going to go to our final break right now. If anybody would like to join us on the air with a question of your own, now is the time to do it before we run out of time.

Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in here on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, our guest today has been and will continue to be for the next 25 minutes or so Dr.

Tony Costa, Professor of Apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary. We are addressing part two of an assessment of the

Arnzen versus Bogle radio debate on unbelievable radio in the United Kingdom. We began part one of this assessment last

Friday with Dr. Costa and this is our second and final part of his assessment. And if you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com,

chrisarnzen at gmail .com. One of the most crucial issues obviously that was brought up during the debate is the issue of the gospel itself.

And specifically in reference to the aforementioned epistle of James that Mr.

Bogle was referring to in regard to Luther's rejection of it, saying that it was an epistle of straw.

And of course you just before the break were speaking about how that was not an ongoing belief of Luther until his death.

It was just something that was initially something that was burdening him as he began to discover all sorts of things by interpreting the scriptures into his native tongue.

And just basically he was on a snowball that was rolling and he was discovering new things constantly that he had never seen before.

Not that they were novel to the church, but they were new to him, some of them. And he sometimes was most likely in fact was certainly hasty on some issues.

And in fact we who are Baptists don't believe he was enough of a reformer or we don't believe that he changed or let go of enough of Rome's baggage as a reformer.

In fact let's see we have RJ in White Plains New York who says in regard to the martyrdom of heretics, were not the

Anabaptists martyred far more often by Protestants historically than Roman Catholics?

And is it not true that killing those in disagreement has never been a part of either

Anabaptist or Baptist history? And since you two are Baptists you can claim with certainty to a

Roman Catholic that our heritage has never included the martyrdom of our theological enemies.

Yes, he's absolutely correct there. The Anabaptists who evolved in Europe as well and in places like Switzerland, they were for the most part against any form of religious persecution.

They were pacifists in that regard. The Mennonites for instance, modern -day Mennonites and the

Amish are Anabaptists in their historical roots and many of them are pacifists.

They don't even, some of them will not even participate in warfare or even being enlisted into the armed forces and so forth.

But it's very true that the Anabaptists did not endorse any form of persecution of those who theologically differed with them.

The one exception would probably be the Anabaptist movement in Munster, Germany, that established virtually a theocracy where there was abuse, there was polygamy, anarchy, and Luther himself, the

Lutherans as a matter of fact, endorsed, and the Roman Catholics endorsed the use of force to stomp them out, to basically shut them down and dismantle them.

But I think the reason for this, Chris, is the reason why the Anabaptists did not move in that direction of executing heretics is because the

Anabaptist movement emerged out of the understanding that the church and the state are to be separate. This is where we get the

American Constitution, the idea of the separation of church and state as an Anabaptist concept.

The Magisterial Reformers followed what's called sacralism. Sacralism means that the church and the state are wedded together and this, of course, traces its roots to Constantine, where he merges the church and the state together.

So the Magisterial, that's why they're called Magisterial, because they believed in the power of the magistrates. Calvin, Luther, Zwingli, all of these

Magisterial Reformers, if you noticed, they were all paleobaptists, simply because the baptismal roles were also the tax roles of Europe.

That's how they could keep record of taxes and so forth. But because they were wedded to the church, they also were wedded to civil authority, so that they also used the sword of the civil state in executing heretics.

The Anabaptists rejected that notion. They said, the kingdom of Christ is not of this world.

He calls us to be separate from the world. And therefore, the Anabaptist ecclesiology was that while we are in the world, we're not of the world.

The church cannot be in tandem with the civil authorities. And so that's really the reason why the

Anabaptists were very tolerable of others who had different beliefs.

And again, if you look at the U .S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, you will notice that they understood the concept of separation of church and state, and they understood that government shall make no laws regarding religion and so forth.

And that they are indebted to the Anabaptists, and also to the Puritans who came to the Americas to the colonies before their secession from England.

People like George Whitefield and others who came and were heavily influenced by this idea of separation of church and state.

Well, thank you, RJ. But I was actually intending, I kind of got sidetracked with that history of Anabaptist and Baptist non -violence when it comes to theological opponents.

The main thing that we need to get to is the gospel and the affirmation of, or should

I say, the claim of Mr. Bogle and all Roman Catholics is that the

Epistle of James is teaching us that works cooperate with faith and grace in order to inherit eternal life.

And no matter what I said, or even how Justin Brierley, the host of the debate, no matter how many times he was trying to reaffirm or at least re -quote me in regarding to works being just an evidence of saving faith,

Mr. Bogle kept saying, it doesn't say that, it doesn't say that, it doesn't say that, it says faith without works is dead. And he derived from that, that that must mean that works cooperate with faith in order to save a person, that they're not just evidence.

I don't know why that would require one believing that, believing as James said, faith without works is dead.

Well, if a baby doesn't cry after it is slapped by the doctor or spanked, however you want to phrase it, after it's born, sadly and tragically, unless the baby is mute or something, the baby is dead, it's been born, it's been stillborn.

Right. But the crying does not make the baby alive, it's just an initial sign of that.

And isn't that the same thing with works? Faith without works is dead.

I don't know why it is so complicated for a Roman Catholic to see that this does not require faith, that does not require works being meritorious, even if you are viewing works not in a

Pelagian way, which even Mr. Bogle and the Church of Rome in general would reject Pelagianism, but they still believe works are cooperating with grace to merit eternal life.

Right, and that's why they are semi -Pelagian in that respect. They reject Pelagius, but then they are semi -Pelagian because Pelagius taught the same thing, that we could cooperate with God and bring about meritorious works.

But the problem here is that the Roman Catholic interpretation of James 2, which by the way is not emphatically interpreted, the

Roman Catholic interpretation of James is the same interpretation that all the cults use.

The cults like Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, Way International, all of the non -Christian cults all go to James 2 to justify their belief that we're also saved by works.

But the key verse in James 2 is verse 14, where James says, what good is it my brothers if someone says he has faith but does not have works?

And here's the crucial question James asks, can that faith save him? And the way that phrase is written in the

Greek text, there's a negative particle there, which if you know Greek you'll know what I'm talking about, but there's a negative particle there, the

Greek word me, and when the Greek word me is used it anticipates a negative answer.

In other words, James is expecting the reader to say, can that type of faith that has no works, can that faith save him?

And the answer is no, it cannot save him because it's not genuine faith. Now what

James does in verse 20 is, James points out, and this is another text that they quote,

James 2 20, where James says, do you want to be, let me just grab that here, verse 24 rather,

James 2 verse 24, James says, you see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone, and the

Roman Catholic pegs that phrase, it's not by faith alone like you

Protestants teach, it's not sola fide, but again that's not what James is saying. What James is saying here is that in James 2 he's talking about if someone comes into your assembly and they are poor and they have poor raiment and you begin to discriminate amongst them and put them to the back of the assembly, he says, are you not showing partiality?

And then James proceeds to say, if you say to the poor, God bless you, go on your way and be warm and be fed and you do not do anything to feed that poor saint, he says again, are you really being a disciple of Jesus Christ?

In other words, what James is getting at is there's two types of people in the church, those who have faith but have no works and those who have faith but show their faith by their works.

James is weeding out the counterfeits in the church, in the local assembly. In other words, a true

Christian who has genuine saving faith will produce works just like an apple tree produces apples.

And what James is talking about is justification before men. Paul in Romans 4 is talking about justification before God.

Justification before God is by faith because God looks into the heart. And so Abram believed on the

Lord and it was credited to him for righteousness. But James is saying men cannot see our hearts.

The only way that men can see that we are indeed believers in the

Lord Jesus Christ is if we exhibit that faith in action. In other words, when we see people doing what they believe, then what does

James say? They are being justified before men. And so this is what the Lord Jesus meant in Matthew 5 when he said, let your light shine before men so that they may see your good works and glorify your

Father who is in heaven. So James is not teaching that it is faith and works and that works cooperates with faith.

He's talking about people who claim to follow Christ, but they have nothing to show for it.

So the proof is in the pudding as they say. And therefore, what James is talking about is not this faith plus works equals salvation.

I think it was Charles Spurgeon, Chris, who said, it is faith alone that saves, but faith that saves is not alone because it's accompanied by good works.

And that's what James was getting at. Yeah, I actually heard that quote being credited to Calvin, but who knows?

We'll have to look that up later. Yeah, we need to check our infallible interpretation. Yeah, I think a lot of the hang -up is that because of the fact that the

English translations of the epistle of James, I believe in every instance,

I don't know of any other way that it's translated, but where we have the specific word justification in verse 24 of James 2, you see that a man is justified by works and not by faith only.

People are hung up on that term as if it's always used in reference to being made right before God.

And one could easily also say, well, if that's the case, then

I guess 1 Timothy chapter 2, verse 15 is teaching that women are actually saved through trial bearing, meaning that they are made right before God and entering into heaven through trial bearing.

Obviously the term saved there, the English term saved, is not being used like saved is being used in other areas of the

Scripture. Correct. That's correct. Well, if that's the case, then that means that if women don't have children, then they're lost.

You have to be a married woman, and you have to be a mother. And if you're not a married woman who's a mother of children, then you can't be saved.

Well, obviously that's not what Paul is saying. Paul is no doubt echoing the proto -evangelium, that promise given to Eve in Genesis 3 .15,

that through her the seed would come that would be the savior of the world. And so Paul is saying that women are saved, even today, as well as men, because of the seed that came from the woman.

Now one, I think it was the final thing that Mr. Bogle mentioned during this debate, he said one thing that was certain in regard to the

Council of Trent condemning a teaching is the grotesque and monstrous teaching of double predestination.

And then he went on to wrongly define what double predestination is. He said that whatever they do, whatever they do, men will still go to hell if they are not among the elect, if they are not predestined unto eternal life.

And when he is stressing whatever you do, you may go to hell, well, he is conjuring up an image of faithful Christians who love and follow

Jesus Christ, who are repentant and believing upon him and living exemplary lives, and then dying and finding out,

I'm sorry, you don't have the election lottery ticket, you're going to hell. And this is just a fallacy.

There is never going to be an event in the future where men are before the judgment seat of God, and he is sending them to hell even though they were repentant believers upon the

Lord Jesus Christ. Right, right. Yes, that was really a straw man on Mr.

Vogel's part when he was talking about double predestination. It's just a gross mischaracterization.

And we're not dealing with innocent folks here. Paul says in Romans 1 that they are without excuse.

And let me just quote Clement of Rome again. Clement of Rome says, in predestination, there was such a difference between the infidels and the elect.

And so he clearly understands that in predestination, there are the infidels, that is the reprobate, and there's also the elect.

And he refers to it as a monstrous doctrine, which is very strange because Augustine believed that.

Augustine talked about the Massa Damnata, that the masses were damned to eternal punishment, but only the elect of God would be saved.

And so if you're willing to say that it's a monstrous doctrine that Augustine taught, well, that's quite strange, because he is revered as a saint in the

Roman Catholic Church. But it all comes back to this, Chris. You know, who has the right to sovereign elect?

Is it God alone, or is it man in cooperation with God? And this is the hard teaching in John 6, when people, when the majority of the disciples abandoned the

Lord, what did they say? They said, this is hard teaching. Who can accept this? And what was the hard teaching?

The hard teaching was, no man can come to me unless the Father who sent me enables them, draws them to me, and I will raise them on the last day.

So this has been a hard doctrine right from the start. And so the moment people kick back and kick against the goads and say, well, this is monstrous, this is wrong, they're simply echoing the critic in Romans 9, 10, 11, who speaks up and says, then why does

God still find fault since he brings everything to pass? And the response that Paul gives is, but who are you, a man, that you should speak back to God?

So he can call it monstrous. It's not a monstrous doctrine, because God sovereignly has the right to choose his elect, and human beings who go into eternal damnation do so because they are guilty.

Not because they're innocent, not because they really want to repent. It's because they are morally accountable and morally guilty before a holy

God. Well, I'd like you in the next three minutes to summarize what you most want etched on the hearts and minds of our listeners today.

I want them to realize that at the end of the day, what's going to save their soul is not their faithful commitment to the

Roman Catholic Church. What's going to save their souls is the Lord Jesus Christ alone. And it's my prayer that, just as myself as a young Roman Catholic, I took up the

Bible, I read the scriptures, I asked God to speak through me, to reveal his

Son to me. And to my great appreciation and my gratitude,

God was merciful to me. God did save me. He brought me to salvation. And so my prayer is that Roman Catholic friends will realize that they can have assurance of their salvation.

And that assurance comes solely through the Lord Jesus Christ. You don't have to depend on the sacraments to save you.

You don't have to fear that you're going to end up in purgatory one day. If you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, you will be saved, you will have eternal life, and you will be in the presence of Christ.

And that's my prayer, that they come to the Lord Jesus Christ and accept him as Savior and Lord. Amen.

Well, I want to make sure once again that our listeners have all of your contact information.

I know that the Toronto Baptist Seminary website is tbs .edu, tbs, for Toronto Baptist Seminary, dot edu.

And if you could share with our listeners your own website. Yes, my website is tonicosta, all one word, dot webs, w -e -b -s dot com, that's tonicosta .webs

.com. I also encourage your hearers, if they want to follow me on Twitter, my

Twitter account is at t -m -c -o -s underscore Tony, t -o -n -y, at t -m -c -o -s underscore

Tony, t -o -n -y. And also, if you're interested, there's a series of videos that I put out on apologetics that my good friend

Pastor Suley Prince and I have put out. It can be found on YouTube if you just put in my name,

Tony Costa, and the third degree, the third degree, you will find those videos that will offer some educational resources for you.

And you could also hear my debate in full with James Bogle. We played it last

Friday on ironsharpensironradio .com. You could go into the archive to hear last

Friday's show, part one of Dr. Tony Costa's assessment of that debate. So if you listen to that interview, you will hear the entire debate

I had with James Bogle on Unbelievable Radio. But you can also go directly to the

Unbelievable Radio website, and that would be at premierchristianradio .com,

premier, p -r -e -m -i -e -r, christianradio .com, and then there's a search engine near the top of the page at the right top corner.

All you've got to do is type in my name, Arnzen, and if you do that, if you enter that, the debate that I had with James Bogle in both audio and written form will come up on the screen.

Also, I want you to know that tomorrow we are having a debate right here on Ironsharpensironradio between Douglas Wilson and Joel McDermott, who is the current president of American Vision.

They are debating on whether or not the Old Covenant civil penal code is still in place in the

New Covenant in regard to homosexuality. They are going to be having a debate on that live tomorrow on Ironsharpensironradio, and I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater