Penal Substitutionary Atonement

Welcome to Have You Not Read, a podcast seeking to answer questions from the text of scripture for the honor of Christ and the edification of the saints. Before we dig into our topic, we humbly ask you to rate, review, and share the podcast.

Thank you.

I'm Dylan Hamilton.

And with me are Michael Deere and Chris Giesler.

We've got a couple of questions that we're going to try and answer with this episode, but we're gonna have one that we ask first and we'll answer it, and then we'll ask the second one after that because they may have some tangential points that we can coalesce at the end.

The first reads,.

Can I fellowship with those who reject penal substitutionary atonement? Michael.

The Meaning of Penal Substitutionary Atonement

So some of those words may not be all that familiar, but the penal substitutionary, it's called the penal substitutionary theory of the atonement. And it's not theory in terms of speculative thinking, but it's a way of talking about trying to coalesce the message of the scriptures regarding the gospel of Jesus Christ.

There are in history, in the history of theology, various theories of the atonement. Some of these are rather old as different writers in the early church began to try to make sense of the writings of the apostles and try to give some sort of cohesiveness to that, trying to do theology, trying to think God's thoughts after him and trying to state it clearly, especially for people who may not understand Christianity.

And so they wanted to give a type of explanation for what does it mean to be saved? What does it mean that Christ had died on the cross? Why is it important? And although many church fathers did a fine job, some came up with the ransom theory, the idea of God had to ransom us from the devil, which is not accurate given the expressions in the scriptures.

Other ideas emerge in which the idea has to do with, well, it's the victory, Christus victor, this is not really about blood sacrifice as much as it is about God's victory being on display and our salvation is a matter of our sharing in this victory from whatever oppression, the governmental theory of the atonement by Grodius speaking to God, putting things in the proper order, reconciling all things through the death of Christ on the cross.

And so there's a lot of different theories of the atonement, the penal substitutionary theory of the atonement is trying to use these terms to get at what the language of scripture repeatedly, clearly demands, that it is a penal sacrifice, meaning it satisfies God's demands.

There is a punishment going on, that God has the right to punish sin. So we're beginning with an idea about who God is in his holiness and his justice and that he has the right to punish his creatures whom he has made in his image and who have sinned against him, rebelled against him and that he has the absolute right to judge them as he said to Adam and Eve, in the day that you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.

When they decided to play God and decide for themselves the knowledge of good and evil, what good and evil would be for them, God punished them and they were exiled from the garden and God has always punished sin with death.

The wages of sin is death, is what the scriptures tell us. And so when we think of Christ's death upon the cross, the shedding of his blood, we see he who knew no sin, God made sin on our behalf. So he bore our transgressions, he bore our sins in his body, Peter says.

I'm quoting from Isaiah, I'm quoting from Peter, quoting from Romans, from Corinthians, God reconciles us by the blood of Christ. And we're talking about the blood of Christ, we're talking about the shed blood of Christ, the blood of the lamb in the Old Testament is the background to this.

It wasn't that the lamb bled a little bit and there was something magical about the blood, it was a picture of the lamb without blemish, without spot, dying, bleeding out as a substitutionary sacrifice because God demanded death because of his holiness and his opposition to sin.

And so the sacrifice died instead of the sinner. So it was satisfying the punishment that God had declared for sin. And of course, since it was the sacrifice in the place of somebody else, that's the substitutionary word.

So penal substitutionary atonement, thanks to Tyndale, at one meant, you can see the three words, the three syllables there, at one meant, his way of talking about reconciliation, his way of saying what occurs through this act of propitiation, this act of redemption.

And so there's a satisfying sacrifice that is offered up to God, but it is satisfying to God and it is satisfying for those for whom it is given. And so that there is one place where God and man may be reconciled, Jesus Christ himself, the temple, who declared himself in his own body, his own ministry, to be the temple, the place where God and man may meet.

To come to Christ is to come to Mount Zion,.

The mountain,.

The intersection between heaven and earth. He is the place of reconciliation. He is the God-man. There is one mediator between God and man, man, Christ, Jesus, but how is he our mediator? How does he bring us to God?

Peter says, well, he died on the cross. That's what Paul says. That's what the gospels say. That's what the prophets anticipated and what the covenants modeled and anticipated. And so that's what penal substitutionary atonement is.

There are a lot of really important passages that explain that, that show forgiveness of sins and fellowship with God through the Holy Spirit comes through the death of Jesus Christ, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, his death and resurrection.

He was raised from the dead because he had not sinned, because he was worthy, because by his life, he now represents us before God ascended to the right hand. It's his righteousness that he pleads. He is our mediator.

He is our high priest, our advocate before the father. And so God, the just is satisfied to look on him, pardon us who believe in him. If we confess our sins, he is faithful to the work of Christ just because of the work of Christ to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

1 John 1, 9. In this is love not that we love God, but that God loved us and sent his son as a propitiation for our sins. The Bible is just full of it. Anywhere you look, you're going to find the scriptures talking about some way, somehow, the framework for or the actual bringing about of or the results of the penal substitutionary atonement.

It was wild back in 2006, 2008. This theory of the atonement, penal substitutionary atonement came under so much fire. It was weird. It was the thing to fight against. It was the thing to defend. So many books were published to defend the penal substitutionary atonement of the Bible.

It was very helpful, but it was all the focus.

Are you, sorry, are you saying it like kind of the elite evangelical level or like, would you say you saw fighting inside of churches about like between laymen and your local church fighting about this?

Where was it mostly? Where was that mostly at? Because I wasn't aware of the battle going on back then.

The Emergent Church and the Attack on the Cross

Yeah, so it began in the, and we talked about this last episode, but it began in the church growth movement when they realized that singing songs about blood just did not click with the audience. So that seemed to be a problem.

And then it just sounded weird and off-putting to talk about the father pouring out his wrath upon his son. And that sounded, and the people called it cosmic child abuse.

Oh, okay, that's where the term comes from.

Okay, now this was, now we have to remember that the secret sensitive movement, the market-driven church, morphed into the emergent church because post-modernism and a post-modern approach to Christianity became all the rage.

And for post-moderns, they said, this whole thing, this penal substitute atonement just does not work. One of the reasons why they said it doesn't work is because they kept on saying, they kept on having lines like, well, this is a Western development of thought.

And what they meant was that Martin Luther in his fight against Rome brought in all kinds of ideology that was foreign to the text in his fight against Rome. And thus, this was a Western mindset trying to make sense of the gospel, but it was foreign to the genuine Eastern background of the scriptures, which was much more organic and relational and it wasn't about this forensic, meaning legal consideration of an atonement.

Like Eastern. From which point in history, right?

Right, and so this was all the rage to say until someone kind of points out, it's like, you know, I think the Bible's pretty Eastern and it was full of blood sacrifice. And legal considerations, like, you know that Lamb of God is like, you know, a metaphor built off of the Old Testament and the Old Testament was full of lambs getting slaughtered because of sin and satisfying God.

Like, you remember that part? So it was kind of hard to maintain that robustly, but it was because of the emergent church, which was a development of the secret sensitive movement to try to say, we don't wanna talk about the bloody death of Jesus Christ, right?

Well, it seems like if you don't see the purpose of it, namely sin, if the church is not talking about sin and calling for repentance or anything, and you're, okay, then what is the sacrifice for even, then we don't need to be talking about it or singing about.

Well, that was one of the questions.

I mean, this is the new covenant in my blood, but I don't know, there's just seems like, it seems like when you have Christ and the apostles referencing the old covenant and talk, and when they're referencing the old covenant and the newness of the new covenant, but still tying it to those old, as metaphors to that, how do you get away from that in the house setup?

That's all I'm.

So they began to talk about, and again, they were funneling in a lot of ideas from Protestant liberalism that they had noticed a hundred years prior that talking about a blood sacrifice on a cross on Calvary was, just didn't fly really well with the sophisticates.

Okay, and again, you had to deal with, and miracles are icky things for your worldview. Okay, so they noticed this like a hundred years ago. This was nothing new, but it was coming now in a, like we can be, we can have this direct mystical, spiritual experience of connection with God without all of this hard and fast two plus two equals four doctrine.

This one-to-one ratio sacrifice stuff is, this is very Western. This is not very authentic. This isn't very genuine. God wouldn't demand something like this. This is ridiculous kind of a thing. And so again, it's like what began by, hey, we're gonna have church and we're still gonna have Jesus, but we're gonna make sure that everything you, everything possible will make you comfortable.

And then they find out that the gospel itself.

Made you uncomfortable.

Well, then we'll change that too.

Yeah, like with the seeker sensitive, telling people you're a sinner is not very seeker sensitive. So you remove all of that messaging and it's about betterment. And then, cause I keep thinking of the ransom theory.

So where's the debt owed? The wages of sin is death. Well, in the seeker sensitive, there's no debt. There's no sin. It's just the devil made me do it. I'm not really a bad person. It's this external force making me do bad things.

Whereas the Bible talks about, no, the heart is deceitfully wicked. So you have to deal with that issue. If it's just an external force and I'm actually a good person, what's the need for this bloody sacrifice?

We don't need to talk about any of that type of stuff.

That's a good observation. And that's why there was, with a robust defense of the penal substitutionary atonement of Christ, there was also, with that, a very large focus on the doctrine of sin and talking about a lot of it.

Because if you weren't dealing with sin, then why would you need this sacrifice, right?

Right, cause if there's no, so the wages of sin is death and Satan's an outside force, but the debt is owed to who? Is God angry at sin or he's not angry about sin, he's just trying to save you from the devil.

Those are very different things.

Yeah.

So there was kind of, this was also around the same time as the Young Restless and Reformed movement. There was a resurgence of Calvinism and so on. Well, because Calvinism has a very robust doctrine of sin, so a marked theology that was always all the rage.

We were very cool when you talked about sin. And so there was a huge focus on that. I remember being early in seminary and I mean, everyone's reading John Owen and just getting into the real grit and grime, everyone realizing just how awful everyone was, which was funny because later the movement traded on that on an over-leveraging, an over-privileging of just, how deeply embedded and how horrible you are as a sinner, you don't even know.

And then later that was traded on to

You don't even know how racist you are?

Exactly. Yeah, and so it was a natural fit. And that's where any particular focus in our lives as Christians, any over-privileging of any good doctrine even, we try to ascend any of that to the right hand.

We're gonna get ourselves exposed. We're gonna be in danger of all kinds of false teaching. I think Herman Babbitt once said that every heresy in the church could be traced back to a wrong understanding of the Trinity.

And I'm not smart enough to, like he was, to figure that all out. To my mind, anytime we have anybody other than Christ at the right hand, all important to our thinking, anytime we have anything else than Christ our Savior, Christ our Shepherd, Christ our King at the right hand, over-privileging anything else is gonna set us up for a lot of conflict, disunity, false teaching can sneak in, we can be led astray.

And that's where it took me a long time to figure out what was going on, and I was subject to a lot of, I knew something wasn't right, but what was it? We were making so much of our sin, we forgot to make much of our Savior.

And boy, that's a cure-all, and it's scandalous. When you begin to exalt Christ, all kinds of church people can, I think there's a lot of unity there, but some people can get kind of upset. When you start talking about, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, that, I tell you, boy, people are gonna get upset with that.

Just to fly that flag and be happy about it, man, you're in for a rough ride.

But is some of that a reaction to the seeker-sensitive saying, there is no sin? And on the flip side, you're saying, yes, there's sin, but there's no condemnation. So it sounds almost the same, like there's no condemnation, because there is no sin.

And you're saying, no, we have a great Savior who paid for that sin, so there's no condemnation.

Right, well, that's the thing, is you can easily, I am not a fan of easy-believism, say this prayer, live however you want, and say, nobody can say nothing about me, because I claim Jesus. Not at all.

But one part of the work of God in our lives as Christians is that we are changed, and things are different now, and one of those things that are different is that we don't live under gloom and doom of condemnation.

That's part of the joy of salvation.

But mostly, at the time, in a great effort to defend the penal substitutionary atonement, this is how much we need to be forgiven, there was a really, really heavy emphasis, I would say over-emphasis, on sin.

The Puritans are great at that. And it was like all Puritan 24 -7. The Puritan hard drive came out, Joel Beakey was the greatest guy on earth, Puritan, Puritan, Puritan, Paul Washer got real popular real fast, because he's like, you know, you guys are awful.

And everyone's like, yeah, amen, we're awful. And you just had this idea of, you know, what's, if it's a problem, if someone runs around saying, well, I'm saved, so no one should say anything about any sin problem I have, you know, like no accountability, no sense of holiness, whatever, that's a problem.

What's also a problem is when someone says, I'm a Christian, and I am dirty, rotten, vile, evil, that's a problem, too, because there should have been some change, brother.

There should have been a Roman six change here.

But it's So the, you asked about it in academics. I think you had mentioned 2006, 2008, there's a big kerfuffle, and I didn't know about it at the time, but I know that in 2015, it had trickled down into like church levels, because we were having disagreements, NT wrong, with being brought up in Sunday school, people were latching onto Christus Victor over penal substitutionary atonement.

Yes, that really paved the way for that, didn't it?

Yeah, and so within talking about that, the question of can I fellowship with someone who does not affirm that, was something that I think a lot of people did have to struggle with, because they're talking about, what are you, like, what are you saying?

Of course, Christ is victorious, but in what way?

Yeah.

What does the Bible

That was a bit of a false dichotomy. It's like, to say, well, if you affirm penal substitutionary atonement, then you deny that Christ is, you know, that he won his victory through this. No, that's a false dilemma that you're putting on us.

Because it's both and, right?

Yeah, absolutely. But it is something where, for the followers of NT Wright and E .P. Sanders, in New Perspective on Paul, it was all about, again, your understanding of the scriptures is so Westernized because of those big, bad reformers.

You know, Luther, Calvin, they got it all wrong. And they didn't mean to, but they did. And so you've been getting it wrong all this time because of them, because you're just too Western-minded. So what you gotta do is have my mindset, which, where I have the secret knowledge,.

Right, Gnosticism,.

I have the secret knowledge of what was really going on in the minds of the apostles when they wrote these things. And so until you understand the Bible like I understand it, you don't understand it. Okay, and then you get to be a part of that secret club that you're in the know versus not being in the know, and then you're superior to everybody.

Sells a lot of books, too.

That it does. Now, it's not to say that NT Wright was wrong on everything. A lot of his work is helpful, but a lot of it, but again, when you take something too far, when you exalt something too high, where do you end up?

Nowhere good. And that's what he did. So whenever you read Wright, you gotta be ready for him to be wrong. And that's just the way that goes. I mean, Karl Barth the same way. He said some good things, and then he just kept on pushing it farther and farther, and then he got really, really wrong because he was overreacting to some things and unwilling to submit himself to have the faith as a child.

And to believe the thing the Bible obviously said. So can I fellowship with those who reject penal substitutionary atonement? Well, I think if someone rejects it, do they actually understand what they're rejecting?

In other words, I was gonna ask this.

Because you have that Ligonier survey that comes out every year or whatever, right? And so the people's understanding of the Trinity, or I think maybe even penal substitutionary atonement is on there as well, but it's like, it is so low, the understanding of any of these doctrines.

And I'm like, you might be fellowshipping with people who, and you don't know it, right? Like, that's kind of one of these things that it might fall under that category.

I've pastored people who don't know what this is. And I don't usually even, I don't say, that's just penal substitutionary atonement, right? But just preaching from the scriptures, explaining it. I want them to see in the text.

Hey, look there, see that word? Hey, look there, see that phrase? Hey, look there. And then look over here, it says it over here too. And look over here, it says it over here too. And then I do that. And then people afterwards, like, I've been coming to church all my life and I've never heard that before, but it's true.

So those moments, like, okay. But if I had come up to them and said, are you a follower of the penal substitutionary theory of the atonement? They're like, I don't know what you're saying. It sounds weird.

I ain't never been to penitentiary.

Yeah, exactly. And so some people just don't understand, and some people believe it, but they don't have those technical terms to describe it. Other people, like, again, the state of theology survey will show percentages about who believes what, and it can't be true.

But it is true that people will believe polar opposite things, like the percentages overlap where people are believing things that do not belong. I mean, they're breaking the law of non-contradiction and they have no idea.

So a lot of people's thinking is not orthodox because it's heterodox, not necessarily heretics, but they just, they don't know how it fits.

That's okay.

If they're willing to learn, someone may have been discipled and say, oh, you be careful about, you know, you're talking about, you know, blood sacrifice.

Yeah, I think even within the New Testament, as it's developing, and Paul asks people, who are you baptized under?

Yeah.

And these are people that you look at them like they're Christian, but they've never heard of the spirit. What are you talking about?

Yeah.

And there's the understanding, but then there's the work that God does in a person's heart.

So again, are they rejecting it because they understand what they're rejecting? No, that could be a problem. Usually if somebody knows enough about the penal substitutionary atonement to reject it, it means that they would be an advocate against it around others too.

So, I mean, the question, like if somebody were, let me put it this way, when it says, can I fellowship with those? No, what do you mean by that?

Yeah.

You couldn't be a church member here. So no fellowship as church members, right? If you reject the gospel of Jesus Christ, having been given every opportunity to understand what it is, and if you reject it, like, I don't believe Jesus Christ died for my sins to satisfy the wrath of God.

Like, okay, well, why are you a member here? Or why do you want to even be a member here? That doesn't make any sense. So fellowship, I mean, in terms of an official thing, right? Now, so that's, I think you should be very specific about that term.

Fellowship means what? Being a church member with them. Now, if you mean, can I be at a picnic with them? Yeah, you can be a picnic with them. Yeah, you know, can I be at the same job with them? Yeah, it's like, is it okay to be related to these people?

You know, they come to my family reunion. I have to be around them.

Is that okay?

That's a whole different thing. But it is a test of fellowship.

Yeah, well, I think in the question, you nailed it. They reject penal substitutionary atonement. That's actively like, I deny that. I don't, that's not what I believe Jesus was doing. That's a pretty big issue.

Now, to be clear, a lot of the work done to defend penal substitutionary atonement was done by Calvinists, right? So they're bringing the doctrines of grace and they see a very logical step between penal substitutionary atonement and a limited atonement, irresistible grace, unconditional election, everything else.

So that was done a lot by the Calvinists. Now, I will say that there are plenty of people who believe in the penal substitutionary theory of the atonement that don't believe in, right, the idea of Christ died for the elect.

Now, the Bible says all, and we rejoice in the word all, that Christ died for all without distinction. But they would say Christ died for all without exception. And so they have this idea of Christ making it possible to be saved, not for sure that he saved anybody, but that he saved, and I actually had a professor in my seminary said, just because Jesus Christ down on the cross doesn't mean anyone was gonna be saved.

And got some amens for it, because he was talking about in terms of pure potentiality, because to...

So he would affirm Christ fulfilling the promises of God.

Yeah, and that if anybody is saved, it's because of the blood of Jesus, because Jesus Christ died on the cross. But he was trying to protect God from being the author of evil by exalting the will of man and so on.

And I understood what he was after, annoyed me, but he would believe in penal substitutionary atonement, but just, I would just consider it a heterodox move, but I can still fellowship with him. I mean, I'm like, okay, I can fellowship with you.

That's not a problem with me. Because again, I'm not Foskey's definition of hyper-Calvinist, meaning unless you believe the doctrines of grace, I think you're a heretic. Right, that's, no, you know, you can be an...

I'm a real Dean or a three-pointer or whatever. Like you don't have to, I can still fellowship with you, even though you're not a, you're a five-point Calvinist.

Yeah.

So can I fellowship with those who reject penal substitutionary atonement? No, neither can I fellowship with those who deny the divinity of Christ.

Right.

Right, Paul says in Galatians, bring any other gospel, you're anathema. And the gospel particularly is the person and work of Christ. Okay, so straight on, the person and work of Christ, who he is, and his death.

Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and the Meaning of Brother

Okay, so being focused on that. I think there's like a follow-up question to this, unless you want...

Yeah, no, we can go ahead and hit that. The follow-up question to this, we think was probably asked in succession. It says, what is your view of Eastern Orthodox and Catholicism? Can they be viewed as brothers.

Despite their official teachings? Yeah, no, the official teachings, just to be clear, the official teachings is that Eastern Orthodox, which is a lot of different communions from the Coptics to the...

Armenian.

To the Russian Orthodox, all that. They officially, officially are not brothers with Roman Catholics, right? There was a big schism, you know, way back over the Philokee controversy about the Apostles' Creed and about whether you could, you know, can I venerate 3D images or 2D images?

You know, what kind of images can I bow down before? You know, there was a big, big, big issue with that. And do you cross, do you do the cross with two fingers or three?

Big deal.

They're officially not brothers. Now, despite what many leftist and communist and globalist type of leaders in Orthodoxy and Catholicism say, try to sound very much universalist, the official teachings are they're not brothers and the official teachings are that all Protestants are not brothers with them.

So I sat down with a Roman Catholic for two or three hours and talked about what do the councils say? What does the Council of Trent say? Council of Trent says that if anybody believes that you're saved by grace alone, through faith alone in Christ alone, they are anathema cut off from God.

Okay, so if you believe the basics about the gospel, if you believe in penal substitutionary atonement, you are not a brother, you are not Christian, you are cut off from God anathema according to the official teachings of Roman Catholicism.

And Vatican II did nothing to change any of that.

No, yeah. So if you just, so I would say, if you're gonna take up their official teachings, you just gotta read, read Vatican II, read Vatican I, read the Council of Trent, get the highlights, look at the table of contents, go to the relevant passages, go look at the Roman Catholic Catechism, go read what they say.

And what you'll find is all manner of false gospel, false worship, idolatry, an absolute obscuring of the gospel. And in so many different ways, a denial of the person and work of Jesus Christ.

This question is very much just the flip side. Can I fellowship with someone who rejects a doctrine found in the Bible versus can I fellowship with someone that accepts an official teaching of the church?

Yeah.

I think Justin Peters just put out a bunch of stuff for Reformation Month on Roman Catholicism, talking about some of the basic issues and to get an interview with somebody as well. And it's pretty helpful.

He's very organized in his thinking. But there is a lot of information out there you can go access. I know James Wyatt's done a bunch on Roman Catholicism and so on and just, hey, this is what they say.

So are you gonna do with what they say or what?

What about someone who doesn't, is unaware of the official positions of the church and maybe they're attending Eastern Orthodox or Catholic Church?

You're talking about like Oklahoma Catholics?

Cafeteria Catholics. They're kind of picking shoes and they're like, I don't necessarily get into all of that, but this is where I was raised.

Right.

So this is another fruit of seeker-sensitive, market-driven church. Why would you go to a big box church with the fog lights, lasers, the band and all of that? For the experience. This is what the charismatic groups have to offer.

This will be an experience. What does a Roman Catholic church offer you? If you don't even get three quarters of what they're actually saying and teaching and doing with all of this hullabaloo, why do you go there?

Usually the claims are tradition, longevity, historicity. Those types of things, that's what you usually get.

Their buildings are cooler.

Acoustics are great.

Acoustics are great. There's ceremony. There's an experience that happens. The Greek Orthodox even more so. They're swinging incense all over the place and there, you know, smells and bells. You go for the high church experience because it's not like the other ones.

Like, I'm tired of going to the big box experience. I'm tired of going to the traditional experience. I want a different experience. It feels different. It feels like something actually happened and there is an attraction there.

So yeah, I can imagine that somebody who doesn't really care much about the official teachings, the official doctrines of the church, are attracted to, I want to have a better experience at church. It feels so dry and normal where I normally go.

This feels like it's real, like it's genuine, like it's ancient. It's like it's calling to me.

And one of the things I've noticed recently, there's a teammate of mine that I just had like a two or three hour conversation with that grew up in charismatic circles and then Southern Baptist circles when he got into high school.

And now he's in a Catholic church in Tulsa with his brother. And one of the things that he emphasized was kind of a, still a, not just like an emphasis on it, but like families were allowed to be like family groups within the church kind of a thing where it wasn't, he really decried like kind of the, like we were talking about this forced segregation earlier that he found in evangelicalism and where that emphasis on multi-generational faith and bringing like hordes of kids and just everybody lopping in together, he really said like that's, that emphasis helped him to go ahead and start attending this Catholic church at Tulsa.

So I know that's some of it for specifically young men that's an attraction as well.

Yeah, and so there could be a lot of reasons why. If somebody is reading the official teachings of the church and like this is really compelling, right? And they start talking about coming home and all these other things because they really like Thomas Aquinas and they've been very compelled to go that, and there's several lot of different seminaries that have so stressed certain Romanist presuppositions that there are certain Presbyterian and Baptist seminaries that a lot of guys have gone completely Catholic, Roman Catholic.

So when they're doing that, they're doing so on the claims of what they're going to be teaching and propagating and pushing for. And all the while they're saying, I'm not giving up the gospel, so on and so forth.

But when that is pushed, I've watched it. James White is a good example that when you push that, it's like, okay, let's talk about Mary. Let's talk about the official teaching to the church. Okay, let's talk about the perpetual sacrifice of Christ, the repeated sacrifice of Christ.

And let's talk about the mass.

Let's talk about that.

Let's just push this. Let's talk about prayers to the saints. Let's push this. And just time and again, it's awful. I mean, it is so pagan. And so, yeah.