4 - Roman Catholicism, Part 2

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25 - Eternal State

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Well, welcome to the

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Striving for Eternity Academy's School of World Religions. We're glad to have you with us.

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If this is your first time with us, well then you missed some classes, just saying.

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But if it is not, I hope that you have picked up a syllabus. You can pick up a syllabus at our store at strivingforeternity .org

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or go directly to the store at store .strivingforeternity .org.

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You can pick up the syllabus. I believe they're $25 each, have all of the notes. Most of what we're going to go over today in this class is actually from a book that I wrote.

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Now, if you want more detail, then we're going to go over in class, I suggest you go while you're at the store picking up the syllabus, pick up the book,

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What Do They Believe? It's also available on Kindle, but you can pick it up from Striving for Eternity.

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The books are $15 each, I forget what they are on Kindle, I think maybe $5 each on Kindle.

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I believe, I don't know if you can get the hard copy at Amazon, working on that.

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So when you watch this, it may be available on Amazon or not, and the

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Nook and things like that, we're slowly getting it over. But that said, the book

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What Do They Believe will have much more detail than we're going to go over in class. It's going to have a lot more quotes from the sources.

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Now, what I have to say, let me address some things that did come up during last class.

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We're in the lesson, I should start with that, we're in a lesson on Roman Catholicism.

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This is lesson two of our series here, and we're looking at Roman Catholicism.

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And so some questions that did come up during the week, one is, well, the realization I can't please everyone.

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Some people say that I fool around too much during class. Others, as we saw posted, was, hey, great material, but a little bit too dry.

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I don't know, I just don't get it. Either I'm too dry or, you know, we were thinking, just saying someone here in the studio was thinking of throwing water at me so that I would be all wet and therefore the class wouldn't be dry.

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I don't think that would help. Thank you very much. The electronics don't do well with water, just saying.

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But we talked about Roman Catholicism. And one of the things that ended up coming up as we looked at last lesson, we were looking at what the authority is.

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And we looked, let me just as a way of a review to get into this, just to remind you, there were three things that we said that they hold as authority.

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One was tradition, all right, that the tradition of the

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Roman Catholic Church. The other was the scriptures, which we would agree with. And then third was the church.

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And we put the graphic up. It's this graphic here. It's a kind of like a target symbol with the scriptures at the center.

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But really, what do they, what does Roman Catholic Church require as necessary to understand the scriptures?

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Well, tradition interprets the scriptures. Well, who interprets tradition? Well, that's the magistrates.

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That's the church. And then we noted that their tradition is kind of also includes the local congregation and their tradition.

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And they're the ones that then interpret thus, what the magistrates. So you end up seeing that really the real authority becomes the church.

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That's what becomes the authority. And as was said, the question that ended up coming up is, how could you argue that the

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Catholic Church gave us the scriptures? Because that's the argument. What do you do with the

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Old Testament? And that's a really good argument because of the fact that when you look at the

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Old Testament, we knew the books of the Old Testament long before the

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Catholic Church was around, before Christ was on the scenes in human form.

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The Jewish people knew what the Old Testament consisted of. And so I think that's a pretty good argument.

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But they would argue that the church gets its authority by God. And that's the reason they're the only ones that can interpret

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God's word is because they're the ones that gave us God's word. Also, the fact that they know what is and isn't in God's word because the church said so.

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And so you see the real authority becomes the church, not the scriptures. This was really during the

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Reformation. What was so important about the sola scriptura, scripture alone.

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There were five solas that were known during the Reformation. Scripture alone, grace alone, faith alone,

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Christ alone, and for God's glory alone. Those were the five alones.

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And what you end up seeing in those is that the Protestants, those that were protesting the

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Roman Catholic Church, were arguing for the scriptures apart from tradition.

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Faith apart from works. We're going to look at some of that today. Grace apart from sacraments.

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We may get to that today. You know, these things are, you know, important.

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So we're going to look at this one now that really becomes interesting is, you know, right.

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We talk about salvation. It's by Christ alone. And we looked at Jesus Christ and I said, in this lesson, we're going to focus on Mary.

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And so it's by Christ alone, not Mary. And this is going to be something that if you did not grow up Roman Catholic, I did not.

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I grew up Jewish, but I've done the study to see what is the view that the

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Roman Catholic Church has on Mary. And I put this into this lesson on Jesus Christ, the section on Jesus Christ, because of the fact that really understanding the role that Mary has in the

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Roman Catholic Church, it's tied to the work of Jesus Christ. So I'm going to look to do that here.

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We're going to spend some time talking about Mary. Today, we're also going to talk about the Roman Catholic view of man's sinfulness.

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We may start the lesson or the section on salvation. I don't think we're going to be able to complete that.

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But if not, the next lesson, we'll wrap this up with the view of salvation and times.

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All right. This lesson will probably be one of the longer ones that we're going to deal with just because there was a lot in here.

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I'm hoping this will be the longest one. The one on Islam may take us a little bit longer. Just saying.

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But that said, let's dig into Mary. And I will say this again for those who maybe it's your first time watching.

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I'm doing more reading of my notes because this is material that I want to make sure

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I'm wording it correctly. I'm reading the quotes correctly. And I'm also going to say for the engineer's sake that if the slides come up in a hesitation than it usually does, that is because of the fact that this is not like I just give the scripture quotation and the engineer just knows it.

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Some of these passages, the slides that I put together just have numbers on them and it takes them a little bit longer to find that.

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OK, just so you know, we don't want anyone getting upset with the engineer because, well,

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I'll be the one to hear it later. So let's take a look at Mary.

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If you have your syllabus or if you have the book, What Do They Believe? The emphasis on Mary is unique with the

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RCC and I'm using the word R or the letters RCC for Roman Catholic Church.

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So it's quicker. OK, the doctrine of Mary was developed over time.

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There's your blanks there over time by the RCC. Well, that's interesting.

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You can say that, Andrew, can you support that? Well, sure. And remember, all these quotations are from the latest Catholic catechism that was blessed by John Paul the second.

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So let's do 491 if we could. Thank you. And I added emphasis to here through the centuries.

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Those first three words, I emphasize those through the centuries. The church has become even more aware of more aware that Mary, quote, full of grace, unquote, through God was redeemed for the moment of her conception.

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That's important. OK, that that verse, because to point out that the

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RCC refers to Mary, as it says in if we have 721, put that one up,

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Mary, all holy, virgin mother of God. They believe

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Mary is the ultimate example of faith. You could look at paragraph 144, 149.

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We're not going to look at those 165, 489, 2030.

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And if you I'm giving you these paragraph quotes, maybe you have access to a Catholic catechism. Maybe you don't.

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If you get the book, what do they believe? All of these quotes are in there. I put that in there in the book.

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I figure maybe you don't have access to Korans and different things that if you buy the book, you'll get all of the quotations there.

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So one thing we have to understand with this is many people that are not familiar with Roman Catholic doctrine believe that the immaculate conception is the conception of Jesus Christ, God becoming man.

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And that's the immaculate conception. That is called the incarnation. That is when God becomes man.

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That's called the incarnation. The immaculate conception is actually the conception of Mary.

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That's right. Mary, not Jesus. And the reason that that is is because they believe that in order for Mary to give birth to God, for Mary to give birth to a sinless being,

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Mary herself had to be sinless. And that thought is kind of if you're a critical thinking type person like myself, you're going to say, wait a minute, if Mary had to be sinless to give birth to a sinless being and therefore she had to be sinless, wouldn't that mean

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Mary's mother had to be sinless to give birth to Mary? And they're going to say, well, that's the beauty of the immaculate conception, that Mary was conceived without sin.

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The simple question would be, then why did Mary need the immaculate conception? Why wouldn't it have been Jesus?

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Right. I mean, if you think about that, if you're saying that Mary had to be sinless to give birth to a sinless being, but she supernaturally was made sinless.

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Well, then you have the issue of, well, then her mother would have had been sinless and so on and so on and so on. But the reality that you have is that Jesus is the one that would have been sinless.

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Now, in a Christian doctrine, it would be the belief that Jesus was born without a human father.

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Romans 5, 12 and following says that sin is passed on from father to son, from Adam to his children.

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And therefore, because Jesus didn't have a human father, he would not have had a sin nature.

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We're going to get to sin nature in Roman Catholicism in just a moment. But Mary is believed to be the new

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Eve, just as Christ was the new Adam. If we have 4 .11,

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if we could put that one up. There we go. Let's read this paragraph here. It says, the

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Christian tradition sees in this passage an announcement of the new

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Adam. And this is actually referencing the passage that I referred to, Romans 5, 20,

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Romans 5 12 to 21 refers to Christ as the second Adam.

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So this says that referring to this passage, who, because he, quote, became obedient to death, even the death of a cross, unquote, that's a reference, by the way, to Philippians chapter two, makes amends super abundantly for the disobedience of Adam.

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OK, now look in verse in paragraph one, 4 .11. Now, OK, so that was referencing paragraph 305.

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It says, furthermore, many fathers and doctors of the church have seen the woman announced in the

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Proto Evangelum. This is where Mary, the Proto, this is where Mary is pregnant with Jesus.

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And you have this, actually, truthfully, this is the first gospel, the first evidence, the

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Proto Evangelium, you see that in Genesis three, where right after the curse is the promise that there's going to be a woman, a child, a seed of the woman that will be the

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Messiah. So they're saying this is referring to Mary. It says, as Mary, mother of Christ, the, quote, new

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Eve, unquote. Mary benefited, first of all, and uniquely from Christ's victory over sin.

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She was preserved from all stain of original sin and by a special grace of God committed no sin of any kind during her whole earthly life.

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Now, they're basically saying that Mary was sinless. Now, right there we have dilemmas. See, Jesus was sinless because he was fully

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God and fully man being born without a human father. He could be born and not suffer the consequences of sin because of his not having a human father.

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Mary had a human father. Therefore, what would be the argument for her not having sin?

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Well, first off, they'd say that this was a special act. But why would it be necessary if God can do that special act?

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Why would he do it with Mary and not Jesus? Because you see no reference to that in the scriptures.

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And so I would say that when we look at this, we have to understand this from the Roman Catholic position that they have of Mary.

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All right. They see that Mary was born sinless so she could give birth to a sinless being and that she had, if you look in your syllabus, she had no choice in the conception of Jesus.

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She didn't have a choice in the matter. All right. Let me give you some quotes. If we have there's two on one.

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It's 484 and 511. There we go. Mary was invited to.

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Sorry, I said that wrong. I said Mary had no choice. Right. Sorry. Mary had a choice is my point.

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Mary was, quote, Mary was invited to conceive him in whom the whole fullness of deity would dwell bodily.

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Unquote. Paragraph 511 says the Virgin Mary corporated, cooperated through free faith and obedience in human salvation.

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She uttered her yes in the name of human nature. By her obedience, she became the

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New Eve mother of the living. Wow. I mean, so God makes her sinless and then invites her to partake in making a decision that God would make of whether Jesus would, whether God would enter humanity through her.

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What if she said no? This is the way my mind works. I mean, what if what if Mary said, you know what,

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I don't want to be pregnant. I just didn't want to do that. I mean, the stigma that I would have of not having a human father and having a child.

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Oh, the stigma that I don't want to do that. Right. I mean, we could get into the what ifs. But the reality is, is that they believe that Mary was given this supernatural conception where she was conceived without any stain, as we saw, of sin nature.

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Therefore, she was perfectly sinless and remained so all of her life. And that God invited her to make the decision of whether Jesus would enter humanity through her.

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So this shows a very high view of Mary. Now, the reason Mary becomes so important and why

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I tie this into the lesson on Jesus is because the RCC's position is that Jesus must continue to honor his mother.

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And therefore, intercession to Mary is the first step to interceding to Jesus. So to get to Jesus, you must go through Mary.

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Jesus will listen to his mother. And therefore, by giving, by approaching

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Mary, you have a better hearing with Jesus. This, I do think, flies in the face of some scriptures, such as in Timothy, where it says, we have no other mediator but the man

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Christ Jesus. And so what you have there is the case that we don't need a mediator.

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We have Christ. He's our mediator. He's our sympathetic high priest, as Hebrew says.

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And I would argue we don't need a mediator. We don't need Mary as a mediator.

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I'm not going to give all the quotes again. If you want to get all these, I would encourage you to get my book, because there it'll go into a lot more detail.

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But let me give you some things here that I will give you. The RCC believes that Mary was given special grace from birth, that she could later bear

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Jesus Christ. Therefore, her life is different because she's the only human to live a sinless life, which, by the way, makes a problem for Scripture.

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See, we could say that when Scripture says, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, that includes every human being except for the one unique human who is

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God, the God -man. The Roman Catholic Church can't really say that because Mary is not part of that all then.

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All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God except Mary, a human being that's not God. You see that in, let's see, in paragraph 144, the

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Virgin Mary is faith's full, perfect embodiment. So, she's this example of faith that we should be looking at.

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And the RCC believes that Mary had some role in this decision of being able to bear

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Christ, which again, I'm going to be really clear with this because this is an argument that you have to look at.

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And you have to understand it becomes an argument that the Muslims will use. Mary is held to a very, very high standard given attributes, even attributes seeming of deity, but the

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Roman Catholic Church never claims that Mary is God. That's important because Muslims think that they do hold to that.

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But she is given, such as being able to have input into the decisions

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God makes before the foundation of the world, as far as, you know, the Savior, right?

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Mary wasn't born in Genesis 3. She wasn't around.

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God made this decision that he would bring in a Messiah, a Savior through a woman and Mary's invited into that.

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So, we have to understand that. We have to understand that when it comes to the

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Roman Catholic Church to have a very high view of Mary, almost, almost to a point of worship.

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I want to be clear. Now, I mean, there may be some Roman Catholics that do worship Mary, but overall they would not, the doctrine would not support the worship of Mary.

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But it does seem like they do. I mean, they come pretty close. She is in a place that is as close to being

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God as a human can get, all right? To the point that in heaven, we should look forward not only seeing

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Christ, but Mary too. Do we have, let's see, do we have 487?

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Okay, so let's put that one up. There we go. What Catholic faith believes about Mary is based on what it believes about Christ and what it teaches about Mary illuminates faith in Christ.

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So, you see, they're held up. How about 721? This is a longer one. Mary, the all holy virgin mother, and we're going to get to that ever virgin part in a moment, ever virgin mother of God as a match for work of mission of the son and the spirit in the fullness of time for the first time in the plan of salvation and because of his spirit had prepared her, the father found the dwelling place where his son and his spirit could dwell among men.

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In this sense, the church's tradition has often read the most beautiful texts of wisdom in relating to Mary.

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Mary is acclaimed and represented in the liturgy,

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I can't speak today, as the seat of wisdom in her, the wonders of God that the spirit was to fulfill in Christ and the church began to be manifested.

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So, you see that they have this very high view of Mary. Let me talk about this idea of mother of God so we can be clear about this.

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Mary is often, if you're looking at your syllabus, this is number one there under Mary, mother of God.

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It is a title that's given for Mary and Mary is often called the mother of God. Throughout the catechism, you'll see that.

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Just to give you a couple, paragraph 469, 493, 495, 508, 509 and others.

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The Roman Catholic Church believes that it was Mary's, according to 506, do we have 506 by chance?

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I don't know if I gave you that one. I don't see it popping up so I'm going to assume that I didn't. Okay, let me read it.

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Paragraph 506 says, quote, faith that enables her to become the mother of the savior, unquote.

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So, due to the teaching that Mary was the mother of God, the RCC believes that she was, quote, was enriched by God with gifts appropriate to such a role, unquote.

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That's paragraph 490. Now, let me explain historically where this title mother of God came from.

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This was not a reference to Mary in the first couple centuries. It was a reference to Jesus.

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When Jesus's deity came into debate in the second, third centuries and fourth century, the argument was they referred to Mary as the mother of God.

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The emphasis being on Jesus being God, not on Mary as the mother, but on Jesus's deity.

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That's how it was originally argued. Later on, that title became a title for Mary to reference her in this very special relationship, special position as a title mother of God.

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And it was later in history that she became having this special title that was supposedly reflective of her special position and special relationship.

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Now, with that, we see secondly that she's called the mother of the church, the mother of the church.

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And here, as great as the ministry of Peter, what they would say is the first pope, is to the

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RCC, Mary's ministry is greater because she is the mother of the church.

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If you look at paragraph 733, do we have that? We have that with 507.

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Okay, so let's put that up then. We'll just look at the second one with 733. All right.

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So look at this. It says, Mary goes before us all in holiness. That is the church's mystery as the bride without spot or wrinkle.

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This is why the median, I cannot talk today.

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The Marian dimension of the church precedes

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Peter's, okay, the Petrine. So what you have there is

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Mary is preceding Peter. Mary has a special ministry to the church as the mother of the church and intercedes, that's your blank there if you have your syllabus, intercedes to her son in the working of redemption.

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Do we have paragraph 970? Okay. Mary's function, this is quoting from that,

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Mary's function of men in no way obscures or diminishes the unique mediation of Christ, but rather shows its power just as the priesthood of Christ is shared in various ways, both by his ministers and the faithful, and as one goodness of God is radiated in different ways among his creatures, so also the unique mediation of the

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Redeemer does not exclude, but rather gives rise to the manifold corporation, which is but a sharing of this one source.

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And so what you end up seeing there is Mary is this intermediator, this, as I say in that blank there is intercessor, she is given a special privilege where she is going to be interceding for the church.

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So she's called the mother of the church. So you're seeing a pretty high standard.

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She ultimately becomes the one that the church must go through. On earth the church would go through the

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Pope, which is in direct succession as we mentioned in last class from Peter. Now you have the church, even the

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Pope would go through Mary. This was one of the reasons historically, if you know John Paul II, when he was shot, he said he saw a vision of Mary and that's really where the view of Mary really became strengthened.

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It was very much expanded with this vision supposedly of the

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Fatima, the seeing of Mary. And you'll see people have these visions of Mary all over the place.

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And they hold to that to say that they're interceding, even the Pope, with Mary to get to Christ.

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Mary is called, and we saw this already, the all holy sinless one. The all holy sinless one is this idea that the

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RCC teaches that at conception Mary did not have the effects of original sin and was preserved from all stain for the rest of her life.

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Now I've already given you those passages so I won't read those again. But let's look at number four, which is the ever virgin.

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The ever virgin, the Roman Catholic Church refers to Mary as the ever virgin. We've seen that in a couple already.

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Sometimes referred to as the blessed virgin. They believe that Mary remained a virgin even after the birth of Jesus.

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Do we have paragraph 500? There we go. Okay. Against this doctrine, the objection is sometimes raised that the

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Bible mentions brothers and sisters of Jesus. The church always understood these passages as not referring to other children of the

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Virgin Mary. In fact, James and Joseph, brothers of Jesus, are sons of another

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Mary, a disciple of Christ, whom St. Matthew significantly calls the other

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Mary. They are close relations of Jesus according to the

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Old Testament expressions. And so what you have there is they're arguing that Mary remained a virgin.

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Since she was sinless, they argue that any more children born to Mary would have been sinless.

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So God allowed her to give birth only to Jesus. So this is now, I've given you the scriptural references of where we get the idea that sin is passed on from father to son.

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Okay. Romans 5, 12 to 21. We use that to understand how original sin propagates and is passed on, the sin nature,

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I should say. And so here you see the Roman Catholic Church would argue, based on the doctrine of Mary, that sin is passed on to the mother.

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And so if she had relations with Joseph, Mary would have given birth to a sinless being if she had another child.

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That's the argument. So let's deal with a couple of things here. One, the references to Mary's other children are references where you see it being referred to as brothers.

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Now, I've heard some Roman Catholics that will argue that there is no word for cousin, so they were close cousins, as you see referenced there in that quote that we just gave.

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They say it's a close relations and some Roman Catholics will say there is no Greek word for cousin, so they use the word brothers.

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There is a word. You can see that a different Greek word used when it speaks of Paul's cousin, when it speaks of, who's the other one that is mentioned as having a cousin in the

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Bible? I think it's John Mark as a cousin. So you do see the two different words.

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You see a word. And the interesting thing is that with Paul, it says his sister's son.

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So you see the relationship. You understand it is a cousin. So these passages where people say, where we have

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Jude and James being brothers of Jesus, they are children that came after Jesus was born.

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Jesus was born of a virgin. She never had relations with Joseph until after Jesus was born.

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The argument that Roman Catholic Church would say she was ever virgin, in other words, she never had more children because Joseph and her never had relations.

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In the scripture, it says that this was before Joseph knew her.

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The word know there means to have sexual relations. The context there meaning that afterwards he did know her.

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Okay, he did have sexual relations with her. But what you see in Roman Catholicism is this idea where you actually see original sin, the doctrine of sin being affected by the doctrine of Mary because Mary, in their view, had to have been sinless.

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Therefore, original sin, the effect of sin is passed on from the mother to the child, not from the father to the child.

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That's an important distinction because Christ is the new Adam. So sin is brought into the world through the first Adam.

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Christ is the new Adam, the second Adam that can restore that. And so what you have there is this idea that sin is passed on through the first Adam but can be forgiven through a second

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Adam. Now you have the notion that you have a new Eve. So I guess therefore you see this idea that sin is now passed on through Eve and why you needed

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Mary as the new Eve. So it does wrap up nicely as a system and this is the thing you always have to understand.

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Any theological system or religion, Roman Catholicism, they have their ducks in a row. Don't think that they just say these things and they haven't thought it through and they don't try to wrap everything up.

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There are holes in them. I do see holes. But what I'm trying to point out is that they do have things wrapped up where they're going to have answers for some of these things and we have to work through them.

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And what we're trying to do is explain what they do believe so you can rightly understand their position.

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I'm also trying to explain where I think that we would see some problems with those beliefs. Let's take a look now on sin, on the doctrine of sin.

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The Roman Catholic Church believes that all humans, except Mary by the way, are born with the effects of original sin.

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However, baptism removes, that's your blank there, removes, baptism removes the effects of original sin and leaves a person with a wounded nature or a weakness towards sin.

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The Roman Catholic Church clearly believes that man's will is completely free to choose good or evil,

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God or sin, once they're baptized. The Roman Catholic Church also differentiates between mortal sins, willful acts of deliberate disobedience of a grave nature, and venial sins, willful acts of a lesser nature.

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And so we're going to look at some of these. And as we do this, we have to keep in mind when we look at the

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Roman Catholic Church with this view of sin, the baptism we're going to get to in a few minutes because it is part of, well we may actually not get to it fully because it's part of the understanding of their doctrine of salvation.

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A failure to understand God's purpose in creation causes the RCC to have a wrong view of sin.

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God's purpose for all of creation was His glory. However, the RCC believes that, quote,

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God created everything for man, that's unquote, that's paragraph 358.

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Therefore, they end up seeing sin from a man -centered view.

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They see sin as a, quote, offense. Actually, do we have 1849?

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Let me see if you put that up. No. Okay. Well, then

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I'll read that. It says, they see sin as, quote, an offense against reason, truth, and right consciousness.

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It is a failure in genuine love for God and neighbor caused by a perverse attachment to certain goods.

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It wounds the nature of man and injures human solidarity, unquote.

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And by the way, if you read the book, What Do They Believe?, you're going to see

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I have hundreds and hundreds of quotes and I did not put them all in our study here. So some of these things

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I have from my notes that I may have forgotten and not given in the slides, it's not the engineer's fault.

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It is mine for not providing that. But let's just give you some things. The Roman Catholic Church sees sin solely controllable by man's actions.

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Therefore, a habitual sin continues where Christianity would see the Holy Spirit's involvement in working in a heart to change a person about their view of sin.

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The Roman Catholic Church believes a child of God is one united nature, spirit, and sinful, not two natures of one body.

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And the thing there being is we have to understand that the Roman Catholic Church is going to see sin differently than a

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Protestant would or someone like myself would be a separatist. I wouldn't consider myself Protestant. I'm not protesting the

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Catholic Church. I don't believe I didn't come from the reforming of the Catholic Church. I came from a tradition that was always against the

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Catholic Church, separate from it. Even though the Catholic Church tried to stamp them out where they could, there were always people who did not believe in Roman Catholic doctrine.

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And so this is the thing where Roman Catholicism makes it look like they were the only church, the only people giving a belief system.

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And that just isn't the case. I need to move on if I'm going to get through my notes. All right. Let me get to original sin. Original sin.

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Letter A here in your syllabus. The Roman Catholic Church believes in original sin, meaning that the sin nature is transmitted from Adam to every human being except Mary.

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Now, paragraph 402, don't put it up as quick. So let me just. All men are implicated in Adam's sin.

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Now, notice right there, you see the contradiction that I referred to earlier. They understand that Adam was the one that that everyone's felt the effects of sin through Adam.

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But if Mary had more children, they would have been sinless. So they're not seeing they haven't really maybe thought through the contradiction there that if sin is passed on from father to child, then

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Mary didn't need to be sinless. Christ needed to be without a human father, which he was.

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Therefore, he didn't have the sin nature passed on to him. Mary did not get her sin nature.

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She was supernaturally without sin nature, but she didn't get it from her mother. She got it from her father. And if she had more children and she did,

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James, Jude, others, they would not have been. They would have had a sin nature because Joseph was their father.

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OK, this is an important thing. In letter B, though, the idea of a wounded nature and a weakness towards sin, this is going to become important because when we look at salvation next lesson, you're going to see this idea of a free will becomes very important to their doctrine of salvation.

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But this idea of a wounded nature, the RCC does not believe that human that the human nature has been totally corrupted by sin, but only wounded and in a weakened state, as we saw in paragraph 405, baptism removes the effect of original sin, so we're just wounded.

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They believe that baptism washes away the effects of original sin and leaves the baptized person with a wounded nature that is inclined to sin, but not in bondage to it.

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And this becomes shows the importance of why they put such a heavy emphasis on the on baptism, because baptism is going to wipe away that original sin that becomes necessary.

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And this is why you're going to see when we talk about salvation, baptism becomes an essential thing because you need to have that original sin cleared so that you could be in a state where you have a true free will.

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So for those theologians, those people that like studying theology, let me just give you this.

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The RCC does not understand the extent of sin's effect in being of man.

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Their view is that sin was more of a bad example. This is what's known as Pelagianism, a view of the fifth century and not much more.

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So they say it's just it's a bad example that we have. We're born neutral if we're baptized, then we're neutral.

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And so sin is really a bad influence. So you have to understand that.

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Now, this brings up the issue, though, as I've mentioned already, of free will. Letter C in your syllabus.

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The RCC teaches that man's will must be completely free to choose

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God in order to respond to God's call on man. So you see, and this is you'll see as paragraph 27, 33, 160, 180, 311 and 364.

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The human will was not affected by Adam's act of sin in the garden.

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The human will is free to make godly choices without the influence, that's your blank there, the influence of sin.

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So you see, this is what during the Reformation, those solas that I mentioned in the beginning.

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Sola Scriptura we looked at last week under authority, meaning that they believed in Scripture alone, not tradition.

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But here you see this idea by grace alone, through faith alone and Christ alone, you see them now being influenced here.

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Because you see that we, this idea that we don't, we're not influenced by Christ.

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So we don't really need Christ to save us. We have to make godly choices. Start contrast to Christianity.

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Again, I may not have said this in the beginning, I don't think I said this in the last class, but when I talk about Christianity versus Roman Catholicism, that may rub some

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Roman Catholics the wrong way. I'm just making a distinction that the Roman Catholic Church made during the

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Reformation in the Council of Trent where it said people like me that believed in the Scriptures, in Biblical Christianity, not believing in tradition, not believing in the

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Roman Catholic Church, not believing that we needed to be baptized in order to remove this effect of original sin, but believing in Christ alone, through faith alone and grace alone, having the nerve to believe something like that, the

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Roman Catholic Church said, I would be condemned to hell. So all I'm doing is saying, look, if the

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Roman Catholic Church is going to say that we're condemned to hell, they're not saying that they're

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Christians the way I'm Christian, okay? They're making a distinction between us.

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Now in Trent 2, the second Council of Trent, they said we were just separated brothers, so they softened it.

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But the reality is they still make a distinction between us and the Roman Catholic Church. So when

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I'm using Biblical Christianity or Christianity, I mean it in the Biblical sense, not in the

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Roman Catholic sense. If you have a problem with it, hey, the Roman Catholics are the ones that condemned us, all right?

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They're the ones that put the decree out. So blame them. Take it up with the

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Catholic Church. But this idea of a free will becomes really important. The RCC believes that man must have remained with free will after the fall because of the divine nature, divine image of God in man.

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Much of the argument is based on man's ability to reason and have intellect. Therefore, we choose God. However, Scripture says that man should not rest upon his own understanding, his reasoning, intellect.

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The issue of freedom is an issue of the will refers to the belief that man, his will is not influenced by outside sources such as sin.

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And Christianity would believe that man's will was influenced by sin and is captive to sin and a slave to sin as Romans 5 and 6 say.

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And so what you have is a case, and I've provided in my book many passages that go into, actually in my notes here

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I have 1, 2, 3, 3 pages of quotations to support that.

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This becomes essential because what you're going to see, again, just like when we looked at Judaism, this idea of a free will that man has a right to choose becomes essential in this understanding, all right?

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We're going to wrap it up there with that. We'll pick up salvation and eternal state next lesson.

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If you have any questions about this or anything else that we've taught, you can email us at academyatstrivingforeternity .org.

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Again, you can pick up our syllabus or my book, What Do They Believe?, at store .strivingforeternity .org.

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If you would like to have us come out to your church and do our seminar,

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Bible Interpretation Made Easy, we would love to come out and have a seminar in your church.

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It's a weekend seminar. Come out for a weekend. We will teach you how to interpret God's Word in 8 hours, 6 sessions.

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It's a Friday night and Saturday. Please contact us at strivingforeternity to schedule that. Also, coming up very soon, if you're watching this live or shortly thereafter,

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NorCalFire .org. You can get the information for the NorCal Fire coming up in San Jose, California.

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Justin Peters, James Warner Wallace, two great speakers. We're going to be providing some great messages there.

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I encourage you to go and register now at NorCalFire .org. With that, before we go, we'll wrap up with our brother or sister of encouragement.

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We want to encourage you to encourage others. Our sister of encouragement this week is

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Angela Braxton. Someone sent me an email saying, would you please encourage

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Angela Braxton? Angela is a sister who I've gotten to know well.

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I have done a lot of ministry with Angela. We have done, I think, almost every

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Super Bowl outreach that both of us have done, have been together. She's come down to Jersey Fire many times.

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She's been with me at the Jesus Loves Chinatown. She's been with me, I think she was at the Reason Rally.

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Many outreaches. Here is a sister who loves the Lord and loves caring for the lost and sharing the gospel with the lost.

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She goes out to abortion clinics sometimes alone to share the gospel with mothers that unfortunately want to kill their children.

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She sometimes feels very alone. Even though she has

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Christ with her, sometimes she doesn't have the brothers and sisters from her church coming out and standing with her sometimes as she's handing out gospel tracts.

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She can feel discouraged. I know that because I've spoken to her.

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So, encourage her this week in her faithfulness at giving the gospel out. She is very faithful at handing out gospel tracts.

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She orders the Striving for Eternity's Most Important Message You Could Ever Hear CD and hands those out.

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She hands out the 180 DVDs. She is just someone who wants to see people come to know

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Christ. So, would you encourage Angela this week? That would be a great encouragement to her if you would encourage her.

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Let her know the things you might say, like at her funeral, before she's dead. Let her know how wonderful you think she is this week.

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You can contact us. You can encourage her as many people do in the Facebook group for Striving for Eternity.

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We have a Facebook group and a Facebook page. The Facebook group is a place where we interact and you can talk about these lessons with one another.

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Throw out some questions where we try to post different things and people try to throw things in there to transition to the gospel.

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Just a place for discussion. So, it may be a good place for you to have some discussion. So, until next week, remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.