May 22, 2024 Show with Hans Fiene on “Responding to Roman Catholic Claims on Lutheran Solidarity with Rome”

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and put Pastors Luncheon in the subject line, and we hope to see you there. Today, I am so excited to have a returning guest on the program.

The first time we had my guest Hans Feeney on the show was, wow,

I can't believe it was nearly five years ago. September 25th, 2019, we had

Hans Feeney on the program to discuss an appropriate Christian use of humor. And Hans Feeney, if you don't already recognize that name, he is pastor of Prince of Peace Lutheran Church, which is a congregation in the

Lutheran Church Missouri Synod in Crestwood, Missouri, and he is creator of Lutheran Satire.

If you're not familiar with Lutheran Satire, you've got to become familiar with it, because it is truly one of the most hilarious things

I have ever experienced. And today, Hans and I are going to be addressing a little bit more serious subject, responding to Roman Catholic claims of Martin Luther's and modern

Lutheranism's solidarity with Rome on justification, the

Marian dogmas, and other issues. It's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Trapper and Zion Radio, Pastor Hans Feeney.

Good to be here. Why don't you tell us about Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Crestwood, Missouri.

As you may have discovered, many people outside of Lutheranism, when they hear about a

Lutheran Church, you bring it up in conversation, they have a knee -jerk reaction, they automatically may think that you are referring to an evangelical

Lutheran Church in America congregation, also known as ELCA, which is really inappropriately named because they are typically neither evangelical nor Lutheran, but the very leftist congregations.

In fact, there is one near me that has just decided to perform same -sex marriages.

So you have these people who automatically erroneously think that you're referring to one of these kinds of churches because they are so dominant numerically, at least here in the

United States. So why don't you tell us about not only the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, but the specific congregation where you pastor.

Sure. So I'm at Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Crestwood, Missouri. Crestwood is a suburb of St.

Louis. We are kind of in the hub of Lutheran Church Missouri Synodism.

So our church body has its headquarters here. One of our two seminaries is here. The other one is in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

So I have a wonderful congregation there that I've been serving for about four years, a great group of folks.

They would tell you we're a small congregation. We're really not in the grand scheme of things. We're kind of more of a mid -sized congregation, but we're kind of in between two rather large other

LCMS congregations. So we kind of have the appearance of being smaller, but it's a very nice manageable size.

I know everybody, a wonderful group of saints that I'm blessed to serve there. So our church body, the

Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, admittedly does not have a great name. That's because the folks back in the 1800s weren't really thinking about marketing too much.

Our full name, our legal name is even worse than the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod.

Our legal name is, the full name is the Lutheran Church of Missouri, Ohio, and other states.

Or something of that nature. I forget exactly what it is. So if you're leading with Missouri and Ohio, that's not a terribly thrilling name.

Nevertheless, so yeah, one of the downsides of the

First Amendment, I guess, is that in the United States of America, people are free to call themselves anything that they so desire.

So throughout much of the country's history, there have been basically people from different immigrant groups that have come in from various different countries that had

Lutheran presence. So you have German Lutherans, you have Scandinavian Lutherans, you have some

Lutherans from the Baltic areas. And essentially, if you wanted to say, all right, well, what exactly is a

Lutheran? Really the best answer to that question is there's a collection of writings known as the Book of Concord, which is written over the course of two generations.

The first generation is Martin Luther's generation. And that's stuff that they are writing primarily having theological disputes with the

Roman Catholic Church. So you'll find documents in there from that era that are

Martin Luther's small catechism, his large catechism, the Augsburg Confession, the

Apology to the Augsburg Confession. So the Augsburg Confession is a document that they present to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, which is basically their way of saying, hey, there's a lot of rumors about what it is that we're teaching.

Some of those rumors are true. Some of them are not. Here's what we believe. So they write that, the Augsburg Confession.

The Roman Catholics respond with a document called the Computation, which tells them where they're wrong, where they think that they're wrong.

And the Lutherans write back with the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, which is essentially a defense of the

Augsburg Confession. In addition to that, you'll later on have in the second generation, when there are some disputes with Calvinist groups and various reformed groups that have come up in their midst.

In the second generation, you have Lutherans clarifying and distinguishing themselves against a variety of reform doctrines.

So basically, historically speaking, to be a Lutheran is to confess the

Book of Concord. For a church body to be Lutheran is to confess the Book of Concord. But in the

United States of America, you can call yourself anything that you want. So the various groups that made up what eventually became the

Evangelical Lutheran Church in America really embraced a lot of poor theology, poor hermeneutics, poor methods of interpreting the

Bible, and eventually led to them going the same direction as many mainline denominations in the country.

So same kind of direction as the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, the same direction we're seeing the Methodist Church going now.

And they ended up kind of driving away, especially in the last 10 years or so, driving away a lot of their faithful.

So they've really gone gung -ho in favor of the LGBTQ stuff, in favor of the transgender movements, having all of them racing to see which can be the first one to have the first double -backwards, trans -binary bishop of their church body or whatever it might be.

But my church body, the Lutheran Church of Missouri Synod, still very much holds to the foundational

Lutheran documents, the Book of Concord. While these terms are not necessarily always helpful, so we would very much be considered a conservative church body in the sense of, theologically speaking, we have a strong belief in the inerrancy of the

Scriptures. We have a strong belief in, you know, so things we confess, the divinity of Jesus, obviously the virgin birth, six -day creation, kind of all of that stuff.

So that's basically the distinguishing factors between those two church bodies.

Well, I'm actually very happy to hear that you included a literal six -day creation.

I didn't know that that was an official stance of the Lutheran Church of Missouri Synod, and I'm delighted to hear it.

Yes, sir. And so, in other words, a minister cannot be a minister in good standing with the

LCMS if he was an old earther? So, here's one thing

I would say about the Lutheran Church of Missouri Synod, is that we have rather anemic doctrinal oversight.

So, on the one hand, we do have a statement called the Brief Statement, which is not the most well -known of our doctrinal statements, but yes, it is one that our pastors sign on to when they are ordained.

Which holds to the position of a younger six -day creationism.

Most of our pastors do. I'm sure there are some that don't, but unless they're quite obnoxious about it, probably nothing will happen.

Okay. So that's the best answer I could give to you on that. Sure, and I'm assuming that one of the ways in which

Lutherans and Baptists have a commonality as far as divisions amongst our own people, is that you,

I'm assuming, have confessional Lutherans and non -confessional Lutherans, just as we have among Baptists.

Yeah, that would be correct. So, there are certain, not just in our own country, but throughout the world, there are church bodies that have a kind of historical connection to the

Lutheran movement that will call themselves Lutheran, but don't actually confess all of the documents of the

Book of Concord. And from my perspective, we would simply say, well then you are deficiently

Lutheran. That this is just simply what the definition of the thing is.

Well, I want to make sure our listeners have the website for the church where you pastor.

It's PrinceofPeaceCrestwood .com, PrinceofPeaceCrestwood .com,

and God willing we will be announcing that later on in the program. And, of course, there is also a website for Lutheran Satire.

You've got to view as many of these hilarious videos as you possibly can. LutheranSatire .org,

LutheranSatire .org. I always highly recommend the video, which

I believe by now it's videos plural, but on St.

Patrick's bad analogies for the Trinity. I think that was the very first time I was introduced to your videos, was with that.

Sure, yeah. And nearly died of a coronary arrest laughing at that, and have watched and listened to it many times, every

St. Patrick's Day I always post that. Thank you very much. I appreciate the high praise.

I know I've done my job if I kill someone with laughter. And in light of today's topic

I would highly recommend that you look up the number of videos on Frank the

Hippie Pope. Have you gotten any negative feedback from those videos on Frank the

Hippie Pope, or any of your videos for that matter? Oh yeah, I'll always get some negative feedback.

Typically what you kind of have is you'll have folks who think everything's funny until I make a video taking aim at some doctrine that they hold to be true.

The Frank the Hippie Pope one I haven't gotten a lot. I think there's a sense in which Roman Catholics are more annoyed with him than they are with me, which is kind of part of the joke.

So it's a little bit hard to dispute that. Well I'm going to have to listen to the 12

Days of Christmas special, Day 7 Calvinist Christmas. I haven't listened to it or watched it yet.

Oh that's an old one, yeah. That was back in the days when I was just using the pre -made characters with robo voices.

Well I do not have a thin skin and I make fun of Calvinists even though I am one.

The only thing that annoys me is the frequent bombardment in social media of people who get everything about Calvinism wrong and seek to mock it.

Something is not funny unless it resembles the truth in some way, even if it's hyperbole, even if it's an exaggeration.

It could be funny even if you embrace the ideology or theology being mocked, but when it's just totally foreign to your own knowledge of what it is, it's just not funny.

I agree. You guys remember a few years ago before his whole legal issues when

Alec Baldwin was doing the Trump impressions on Saturday Night Live. And I thought it was the worst impression

I had ever seen because it had no air of truth to it. It was just a guy who clearly hated

Donald Trump, vaguely speaking like him in a way that just dripped with disdain.

And it wasn't even his personality, it was Ebenezer Scrooge. Right, yeah, so it had no air of truth to it.

Whereas the guy who does it now, who's on SNL, James Austin Johnson or something like that, really does a great one, as does the comedian

Shane Gillis, because they really get into the... You can tell that there's enough affection for him to actually understand what makes him appealing and why that's funny.

Right. Oh, and by the way, in case our listeners are unaware of this, and I'm not sure how many of my listeners are even aware of your

Calvinist podcast with my friend Keith Foskey, I'm sure many of you are, however, because I'm assuming that most of my listeners are theologically

Reformed and perhaps even more specifically Reformed Baptists, which Keith is one.

But my guest today, Hans Feeney, actually recorded the new theme music, which is utterly hilarious.

Oh, thank you. For your Calvinist podcast. That was a lot of fun to do. Yeah, I could tell you.

I was offering my services and Keith said that he'd love to do an 80s style theme song.

And my wife had recently... My wife will kind of put on... She's a stay -at -home mom, so she'll put on stuff that is not a problem if the kids are walking into the room.

And so she was watching Who's the Boss reruns. And that theme song was just stuck in my head all the time.

And it reminded me just of... That used to be a thing. That was the first two minutes of every sitcom.

It was just the insanely catchy, always very corny jingle. And I have a very strong love for those.

Yeah, the day of the jingle has died. You don't hear jingles typically in commercials or anything.

Jingles make everybody happier. I don't know why this has happened. And also jingles, just like music in general, which is why when we remember our alphabet growing up to a song, music helps us remember, which is why

I could rattle off a whole bunch of jingle slogans from decades ago, like,

Winston tastes good like a cigarette should. I know that's upset a lot of Baptists listening tonight.

And we could go on and on and on with those. But today, as I've already mentioned, we are discussing responding to Roman Catholic claims on Martin Luther's and modern

Lutheranism's solidarity with Rome on justification, the Marian dogmas, and other issues.

The reason why this, I think, is a very important topic is because, as you are likely aware yourself,

Pastor Hans, the Church of Rome, even in its most aggressive element apologetically, they are nonetheless, they is kind of an overly specific phrase, but the

Church of Rome is not a monolith. There are ultra -right traditionalist

Roman Catholics that have no use for ecumenism or anything involving

Vatican II, but the much larger percentage of Catholics, even if they would claim to be conservative, are trying to hold on to an ecumenical position with Protestants, and they are more frequently than ever before,

I think, that I've experienced, especially when you're talking about conservatives, they are trying to actually diminish the differences that they have with evangelicals rather than highlight them.

And anybody who saw recently Dr. James R. White, my dear friend, going back to the 1990s, his two debates that he had with Jimmy Akin, who is a

Roman Catholic apologist for Catholic Answers, I witnessed a

Jimmy Akin that I had not seen before. My experiences listening to Jimmy Akin, he was far more caustic and far more clear that the

Church of Rome had radically different positions on very vital issues to evangelicalism, and the sternness with which evangelical beliefs and practices were condemned was far more clear in days past, even not that long ago.

But it seems that the Protestant apologist is being challenged to second guess how strong the differences are between Rome and Geneva or Rome and Wittenberg and that both sides of the

Tiber River are a lot more alike than we dare to think. And typically what you will witness in exchanges, apologetically in debate, or even just conversations that I've had, immediately the

Roman Catholic apologist will bring up Martin Luther's devotion to Mary, the mother of Christ, and basically make claims that his devotion was identical to what

Roman Catholics do and participate in today. Now I also realize that Martin Luther was a work in progress, like everybody is, and Martin Luther did not have a mountain of reformers upon whose shoulders he could stand.

He was one of the very first, other than the proto -reformers, which were largely martyred by Rome.

But he was, in many senses, starting from scratch here, of course working upon the history of the patristic era and so on, which largely favored what he was standing for.

But where, in your opinion, and in the opinion of most Lutherans and their understanding of history, did

Luther, especially in his later years, wind up standing when it came to any kind of a devotion to Mary?

Yeah, so one of the challenges with determining what Luther's position on something was is sort of the question of, well, when are you talking about it?

At what point in his life are you talking about it? So early Luther is going to hold some positions that later

Luther doesn't quite hold. And then I think there's also kind of an important question to consider in all of this, which is how high of a priority was the issue for Luther at that specific point in his life?

So I think in a general sense, what you can certainly say, Luther had a higher regard for Mary than you would typically find in the

Protestant world today, and even certainly than you would find among certain Lutherans today. In the sense that Luther...

So, all right, so a thing that's helpful to understand about Luther is that for Luther, the two chief issues of the

Reformation are doctrine of justification and the role of the pope, the papacy.

Those are kind of the two main issues. And he'll certainly speak about other issues, and he'll talk quite a bit about in his debates with the subsequent reforming groups, subsequent reform groups.

He'll get into big fights with them over baptism, over the presence of Christ in the supper, and things of that nature.

But I think... So an example of this would be that Luther always confessed a belief in the perpetual virginity of Mary, which is not something that most

Lutherans today would confess. There's sort of debate amongst Lutherans as to whether or not that's a statement in our confessions that we're bound to believe.

The Lutheran confessions refer to Mary as the ever -virgin. But there's kind of debate as to whether or not...

Is that actually a doctrinal assertion, or is that just simply the common title of respect?

So in the same way that when you call... If they call the emperor

His Majesty, or whatever the term is that they use for that, is that a doctrinal assertion about the nature of the emperor's role, or is it just simply a title?

So that's kind of the question that's up in the air. I think Luther continued to affirm the perpetual virginity of Mary in large part because I think there were so many big issues there going on at the time that sort of quibbling about that would seem like an odd thing to put on your plate.

And likewise, Luther has statements earlier on in his time where he holds to a view of Mary that would be more similar to kind of the abuses that we would find in Rome today, that we would speak of in Rome today.

So Mary as a mediatrix, referring to Mary as the Queen of Heaven and things of that nature.

So language that would make us a bit uncomfortable today. Luther will essentially backtrack from that later on in his career.

And I think a proper way to understand that is... So Luther's not a radical reformer. From a

Lutheran perspective, I would certainly say that one of my criticisms of the subsequent Protestant movements is that there's an impulse to develop your doctrinal positions by essentially starting off with a kind of gut or sort of a reflex reaction of saying,

I want to be as un -Catholic as possible. I want to look as little like the Roman Catholic Church as possible.

What do I need to do in order to be very comfortably not

Roman Catholic looking? And then kind of working a theological justification for it afterwards.

So for example, I've had this argument with many people in the kind of reformed world about the presence of Christ in the supper.

And so Lutherans, we don't exactly hold to transubstantiation in the sense that we don't seek to explain the mystery of how

Christ can be present in the sacrament. So we don't hold to the position that we don't try to explain it from a kind of metaphysical standpoint by saying the, so the doctrine of transubstantiation is the substance changes, but the accidents remain.

So it looks and tastes and smells and feels like bread and wine, but in its substance, it is the body and blood of Christ.

That's not a philosophical way that we try to explain it, but we hold to the belief that Jesus is indeed present, that when we eat and drink the sacrament, we receive upon our tongues the very body and blood of Jesus Christ.

I've had a lot of arguments with reformed folks throughout the years that have kind of eventually gotten to the point where it's basically that's just too close to Rome for comfort.

And so this was never the way that Luther approached the Reformation. His approach was never, I want to hold a position that's contrary to the

Pope. His position was if someone is asserting something that is contrary to the scriptures, then he'll speak up.

Contrary to what he believes the scriptures teach, then he'll speak up. If they don't, he won't. So I think, yeah, at the end of his life, what you can say is

Luther has come from a world and still remained quite comfortable with a level of devotion to Mary that would be uncomfortable to a lot of folks in the

Protestant world, but he does not hold an idolatrous view of Mary by any stretch of the imagination.

He doesn't, doesn't, is no longer confessing her to be the co -mediatrix.

I don't even know how to say that word. The co -mediator, the co -lady mediator, female mediator.

Mediatrix, I think, is the word. Yes. But I have to think really hard as I'm trying to say it to say it properly.

Mediatrix and co -redemptrix. Right. Yeah, co -redemptrix. That, this, there we go.

We're going to go to our first commercial break, and if anybody has a question of your own for Hans Feeney on the differences between Lutheranism and Roman Catholicism in light of the fact that Roman Catholic apologists frequently try to strongly diminish any differences, not only between them and Lutherans, but between them and the broader evangelical world.

If you have a question about that, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

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Go to royaldiadem .com today and mention Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. We're now back with my guest today,

Hans Feeney, who is a pastor in the Lutheran Church Missionary Synod and we are discussing a very important topic,

I believe, especially in light of Roman Catholic apologetics.

This is responding to Roman Catholic claims on Martin Luther and modern Lutheranism's solidarity with Rome on justification, the

Marian dogmas, and other issues. If you have a question, send it to chrisarnson at gmail .com

chrisarnson at gmail .com and before I go to a listener question,

Hans, you were talking about the Eucharist before the break and how the

Lutheran view is not quite the same as the

Romanist view declared to be essential at the Council of Trent that teaches transubstantiation where the elements are literally transformed.

You do not believe that view and I learned years ago never to tell a

Lutheran pastor that he believes in consubstantiation either because... Right, yeah. We don't even know where that term came from.

There's never been a term that we ourselves have used. Right. But you have a different view from the evangelical church at large typically in that it is more than a spiritual presence of Christ among the gathered people eating the supper and more than just a memorial.

But as far as your difference between the Lutheran view and the

Roman view and perhaps even Luther's view in contrast with Rome, do you worship the elements as Roman Catholics do?

I was raised Roman Catholic. I was an altar boy and I didn't even know until I was a

Protestant that the reason why Catholics are supposed to genuflect when they enter into the sanctuary of a

Roman Catholic church and for those of our listeners who don't know what that means it's kind of a half kneel where you don't go all the way down to the ground and you cross yourself.

I didn't even know why I was doing that as a Catholic although I definitely knew that it was taught that the elements of the mass were the literal body and blood of Christ.

I knew that. But what I didn't know was that I was supposed to be genuflecting because Jesus Christ was literally present on the altar and therefore

I had to do that in respect of the fact that God was there not as all

Christians believe he's on the present but specifically he was there in the bread and wine.

Now how would the Lutherans differ? I mean do you lift up the elements in a way that you adore them, worship them, do you believe that, would you actually say that this is

God, etc.? So it kind of depends on what your definitions of those words are.

So we believe we are receiving Christ's body and blood that this is not merely a symbol. We don't hold to the

Reformed view that we are spiritually ascending to heaven but as I said and this is the, and the arguments that we'll oftentimes have with the

Reformed well sometimes we'll speak similarly but where you're always find a different answer is if you say all right a person comes and eats and drinks what does he receive upon his tongue?

And at that point that's really where you can kind of see the divide where Lutherans say we receive the body and blood of Jesus and the

Reformed will say merely bread and wine. So but a distinction between the

Roman Catholics and the Lutherans on the issue of how the elements are treated is for Lutherans our position is essentially

God gives us the sacrament Jesus comes to us for the purposes of eating and drinking his body and blood not to parade it not to parade them through the streets not to become sort of tokens not to become kind of spiritual tokens of adoration right so that you aren't to Jesus did not institute the sacrament so that you could take the host home and worship it or keep it as a you know as a good luck charm under your pillow but rather that it was given for the purposes of eating and drinking so we eat and drink it and we leave it at that.

Okay we have a listener Reverend Christopher I'll give his full name since he is a minister

I usually don't give the full names of listeners Christopher Bacalupo Minister of Religion commissioned at Trinity Lutheran Church of Islip, Long Island, New York and he says

R .C. Sproul used to like to say that Rome anathemized the gospel in the

Council of Trent interestingly enough it would seem that Paul anathemizes

Rome's understanding in the first chapter of Galatians many Christians would tell us not to consider them meaning

Roman Catholics Christians based on this we Lutherans do how might this be explained?

Yeah so I think there is a distinction to draw first of all between so there are

Lutheran fathers that spoke of what they called the felicitous inconsistency which is a fun phrase to say which is essentially that someone can belong to a church body that teaches something while they themselves don't believe that and also that someone can be taught something but it just doesn't click for them and they still end up clinging to the truth despite the false teaching that's there so for example

I had one of my favorite stories from my time training to be a pastor when I was on what we call vicarage which is the third year of my seminary studies it's like a year long pastoral internship and there was a lady in the congregation who was telling me she grew up Methodist and she was telling me the story about when she joined the

Lutheran congregation there and became a Lutheran and so she's talking with the pastor and she's going through instruction and he's teaching her what

Lutherans believe and they get to the Lord's Supper and he says well we believe we're actually receiving the body and blood of Christ in the sacrament and he says but I know you didn't believe that growing up and she says oh sure

I did and he said well the Methodists don't teach that and she said sure they do and he said

I love you but no no they don't and what the issue was was she just grew up in a church you know so the

Methodist church comes out of the Anglican church the Church of England that tradition and the

Church of England's Book of Common Prayer was largely influenced by Lutheran sources so she grew up just hearing the pastor say the words of institution right so Jesus takes the bread and says this is my body takes the wine and says this is my blood and she wasn't so Methodist that she just never had anyone tell her oh no we don't actually believe that we believe that that's just symbolic language so that would be an instance of what from our

Lutheran perspective we would call the felicitous inconsistency I think when it comes to when it comes to the

Roman Catholic church what I would say is they have the creeds that the gospel is still preserved in their liturgy it's still preached by certainly by many priests throughout

Roman Catholicism it's still believed by many people in the church and it was through the teaching that they received in those congregations that they came to saving faith while at the same time saying and I'll give for an example for your listeners a quote from one of the canons of the

Council of Trent so for those who don't know the Council of Trent is a Roman conference that's held after the

Lutheran Reformation and it's not actually until the Council of Trent that this is established as the

Roman Catholic teaching on the doctrine of justification which is something that Lutherans always like to point out it's not as though Luther came along and he said

I'm going to take this doctrine that's well established in Roman Catholic teaching and throw it out the window he was what he was asserting was not something that was actually contrary to established

Roman Catholic teaching at that point it is now though right and that's why many reformed historians and scholars will say that is when the church of Rome officially became apostate well and it's also where I would say it's where the church of it's where the

Roman Catholic church formally became what we refer to as the Roman Catholic church right so as I say as I've often said to my

Catholic friends in the divorce between Rome and the Lutherans the Lutherans got the church's theology and the

Roman Catholics got the church's real estate so so what so that's always been the

Lutheran position we aren't teaching something new so canon 11 for example of the

Council of Trent on justification says if anyone says that men are justified either by the sole imputation of the justice of Christ or by the sole remission of sins to the exclusion of the grace and the charity which is poured forth in their hearts by the

Holy Ghost and remains in them or also that the grace by which we are justified is only the good will of God let him be anathema so so I it's a little bit wordy

I suppose for some folks and but essentially what they're saying there is okay if you're saying when you say that we're justified by faith alone if what you mean by that is this is the

Roman Catholic this is what the Roman Catholics are saying is if you mean that it's simply by God's declaration so imputation meaning

God declares it to be yours like a it's a legal decree in the same way that when

I when my wife and I adopted our son our youngest of my four sons is adopted and when we adopted him the judge legally declared him to be my son we didn't have a surgical procedure to put some of his blood in me or vice versa to make our

DNA dwell within each other but it was a declaration of the one in authority so the

Lutheran position on justification is that it's it's a declaration it is declared to you that you are righteous and that you receive that that decree only through faith not by works the

Roman Catholic position was well of course you need faith to receive it but your faith must be sufficiently living so as to produce good works which are then also part of the process of preserving that justification within you so I'll kind of read through this canon again just to make this a little bit clearer if anyone says that men are justified either by the sole imputation of the justice of Christ or by the sole remission of sin so if you're justified simply by being declared that your sins are forgiven to the exclusion of the grace and charity which is poured into their hearts by the

Holy Ghost and remains in them then let him be anathema and this is a very straightforward anathematizing of the gospel of the chief what

Lutherans would refer to as the chief article of the faith which is that man is justified by grace through faith alone so I think there's a sense in which we can say that there are so the questions are how do we view the

Roman Catholic Church in light of that does it cease to be a Christian organization and I suppose that you can say yes and you can say no based in certain ways so we can say yes and that their baptisms are still valid they confess the trinity it's still a

Christian church and that the gospel is still being preached in their congregations in a way that it's not in say a

Mormon congregation so Mormons deny the trinity so if someone came to me and said

I grew up Catholic do I need to be rebaptized in your church I would say no of course not your baptism is valid if someone came to me and said

I grew up Mormon do I need to be rebaptized I would say it's not a rebaptism because what you received was not actually baptism because the

Mormons reject the trinity so you can't give the gifts of the trinity rejected so in that sense we can say that there is still a preservation of the church within Rome but if one holds to the anathemas of Trent if one knows them and holds to them then one is not a

Christian so even though there things I liked, for example, about Pope Benedict, and he was a bit friendlier to Lutheran than previous popes, right?

If the pope's position is that you go to hell for believing that you are justified by grace through faith alone and not by works, then if that's what the pope believes, then the pope is not a

Christian. And just to clarify Reverend Christopher's assertion that evangelicals in general, perhaps even more specifically

Reformed Christians like myself, would say we do not consider

Roman Catholics to be Christians. That is a bit strong because there are

Roman Catholics who have a true gospel and a true understanding of justification in spite of the false teaching of the

Council of Trent. There are many Roman Catholics who are totally ignorant of the Council of Trent. There are

Catholics who either knowingly are disagreeing with the Church of Rome on salvation and justification, but there are also those who think they're in harmony with Rome, having an identical gospel as their evangelical neighbor does.

So just to give you a quick example, my mom was Roman Catholic all of her life.

Six weeks before she entered into eternity with Christ, she was on her deathbed, dying of pancreatic cancer, and she made it extremely crystal clear to me that the only reason she was going to heaven was that she was trusting in Christ's death, burial, and resurrection on her behalf, that none of her good deeds or religious ceremonies or faithfulness was in any way earning her way to heaven.

She made that very clear to me, and she wasn't coached. And I am certain that my mother is in heaven, not because she's my mother, but I'm just certain because of her profession, and I'm certain it was genuine, that she is waiting for me there in heaven.

But if you were to ask my mom right before she took her last breath, Virginia, are you

Roman Catholic? I'm assuming she may have likely said yes. Right. Sure.

She would not have said, no, I'm a Calvinist, or no, I'm a Reformed Baptist, or, you know, she wouldn't have said.

And to add on to that, to kind of give a point of comparison that I might be helpful, a while ago, so I had a member whose mother died, who all her life had been a

Christian scientist, which is definitively not a Christian organization. No confession of the

Trinity, no confession of the divinity of Jesus, and yet throughout her life, he talks to her about what it is that he believed, and at the end of her life, she confessed faith in the triune

God. So she died a Christian death. The difference between those situations, though, is that she did not become a

Christian because of the Christian science church. She became one on account of her son's confession that was coming from outside of her church.

And there are plenty of, there are countless people who, as you pointed out before,

I can only imagine the small percentage of Roman Catholics who've ever even read the

Council of Trent. It's a bit like when I get into arguments with some of these rather kind of obnoxiously anti -Semitic folks on Twitter who will point out all of the terrible things that the

Talmud says about Jesus to justify their hatred of the Jews, and I won't in any way, shape, or form defend what the

Talmud says about Jesus. But the question is just simply, how many Jews do you think are actually familiar with what that says?

And so the difference there between the woman who grew up in a Christian science world and your mother is that despite the false theology of the

Roman Catholic Church, it was still from within the Roman Catholic Church that she was taught who

Jesus was. It was within that church that she received the waters of holy baptism.

And so we can say that there's clearly a difference between a church body that has outright rejected the faith and a church body that is sort of, well, you know, so there's a category in theology, there's orthodoxy, right, there's heresy, and then there's heterodoxy, which is the truth mixed in with falsehood.

And so I think that's certainly where we can place the Roman Catholic Church. And we have to get to our midway break.

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But today I want to introduce you to my senior pastor, Doug McMasters of New High Park Baptist Church on Long Island.

Doug McMasters here, former director of pastoral correspondence at Grace to You, the radio ministry of John MacArthur.

In the film Chariots of Fire, the Olympic gold medalist runner Eric Liddell remarked that he felt

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I sense that same God -given pleasure when ministering the word and helping others gain a deeper knowledge and love for God.

That love starts with the wonderful news that the Lord Jesus Christ is a savior who died for sinners and that God forgives all who come to him in repentance, trusting solely in Christ to deliver them.

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That's 516 -352 -9672. That's New High Park Baptist Church, a congregation in love with each other, passionate for Christ, committed to learning and being shaped by God's word and delighting in the gospel of God's sovereign grace.

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Going back to 2005, one of my very favorite guests on Iron Sharpens Iron is

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I need a church in the subject line. That's also the email address where you can send in a question to Hans Feeney, and today we are discussing the differences and the commonalities between Martin Luther and modern -day

Lutheranism and the Roman Catholic Church, especially in light of the fact that the

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chrisarnson at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence.

We have Josh in Plainview, New York, who wants to know, how do you reconcile

Martin Luther's firm belief in justification by faith alone and his belief in baptismal regeneration, two things that seem to be carried on by modern -day

Lutherans? Yeah, that's a great question. This is a question that Lutherans get asked pretty often, so it helps to kind of go back to our to sort of the very beginning as to what we actually believe baptism is.

Because there's a kind of syllogism that I think a lot of folks in the non -Lutheran world are working with, a lot of folks in the

Protestant world are working with, and it basically starts off with that we are not saved by our works, baptism is a work, therefore we cannot be saved by baptism.

And I don't know if that's maybe the perspective that the gentleman who's asked the question is coming from, but and there's also then folks are coming from kind of a reformed background,

Lutherans don't believe in the perseverance of the elect in this, certainly not in the same way, we would still, there's a sense in which we would say we believe in it, but not in the way that your typical reformed would.

So we don't believe, we believe that one can lose one's salvation. So this is basically how it is that we view the issue.

So baptism we would say is, we agree on the principle that we are not saved by our works.

The disagreement comes in on the issue of what we believe baptism is. We don't believe that baptism is a work that we do for God.

We believe that baptism is God's work in us and for us and through us. So for example, when

Paul talks in Romans chapter six about how we've been made dead to sin and alive to Christ, it's by baptism that we've been made dead to sin and alive to Christ, it's by baptism.

So baptism is not something that we're doing, but it's something that Jesus is doing in us through which we are tied to his death and his resurrection.

Elsewhere, you know, so Paul will talk in Titus chapter three talks about baptism being the washing of regeneration and renewal of the

Holy Spirit. So this is kind of my go -to analogy for this. We don't see a contradiction between saying that we're saved through faith alone and that we're saved by baptism, because what we're ultimately saying is that to be saved by faith, to be saved through faith, this is why

I like Paul's formulation in Ephesians chapter two. I think it's a very helpful way that he puts it for us, obviously divinely inspired, but that we're saved by grace through faith.

So it's on that we are saved, the reason we are saved is because of God's desire to save us. It's out of his gracious desire to give us the love that we haven't earned.

And that grace, or rather that salvation, it happens because of grace.

It's received through faith. It's through faith that we come to possess it. And in the same way, we would say that we receive the benefits of baptism through faith and that those benefits are not received apart from faith.

So my go -to analogy with this is it's like if you go to the doctor and the doctor says, okay, you're dying, but the good news is

I have a pill that I can give to you. And if you swallow this pill, you'll live. So there's a sense in which you can say the doctor saves because he's the one giving you the medicine, right?

There's a sense in which you can say that the pill saves because the pill contains the medicine.

And then there's a sense in which you can say that swallowing the pill saves in the sense that that's how you come to possess what it is that the pill gives.

So within the confines of this analogy, God is the doctor, salvation is the pill, and baptism is swallowing.

So baptism doesn't cause salvation. It's not a work that we do that merits salvation, but it's a means through which

God ties us to the death and resurrection of Jesus. It's a means through which God delivers that medicine of immortality to us.

And baptism, and therefore in consuming that pill, we come to possess the benefits of it.

Through faith, we receive what it is that baptism gives, right? So I may have actually said the analogy wrong, right?

But the baptism is the pill. If I said it wrong, I apologize. So the doctor is Jesus, and the doctor is

God. The pill is baptism, swallowing is faith, right? So what the pill gives is of no value to you if you reject it.

In the same way that if you stick your finger down your throat and vomit up the medicine after you've received it, that doesn't mean the medicine doesn't save, but it does mean that you haven't benefited from the medicine.

So in that sense, from a Lutheran perspective, we don't see a a contradiction between these things.

Faith receives what God puts into baptism. And so baptism saves because it's delivering that to us, and faith saves because it receives that.

So it's just describing salvation from different aspects, rather than these being different causes of salvation.

Now, how would an Orthodox Lutheran view someone, for instance, the major denomination that I can think of that, other than some apostates from within it that have become completely sold out to a social gospel, but there are a remnant of Bible -believing,

God -fearing, conservative members of the Salvation Army. And one of the odd things about them is they do not believe in water baptism in the modern -day church, or probably ever since the apostolic era concluded.

And therefore, these people are not baptized, and yet some of them, perhaps many of them, believe in our triune

God, they believe in justification by faith alone, and many of those things with which both

Lutherans and Calvinists would cherish, but they haven't been water baptized. How would you view such a person?

Yeah, so I think what we can say is that there is a distinction between rejecting baptism, or rather, so for example, when

Jesus says in Mark's Gospel, whoever believes and is baptized shall be saved, whoever does not believe will be condemned, right?

That baptism is, again, a means of being brought into the family of God, but it's not the only means.

So people can come to the faith prior to being baptized, they can be Christians. So if a man goes through instruction, says, great,

I believe all of this, I want to be baptized, it's a Saturday night, I want to be baptized at the church service tomorrow morning, and he's hit by a bus on his way to church and dies, we would certainly not say, oh, that man wasn't a

Christian because he wasn't baptized. However, there's the issue of despising baptism.

I don't know enough, I really don't know anything about the Salvation Army other than that the guy who started them was named

Abraham Simpson, that's the only thing I remember about them. They had the same name as Homer Simpson's dad, that's the only thing

I remember from seminary. So I'm not weighing in on that specifically, but if I had someone come to me and say,

I'm a Christian, I believe in Jesus Christ, I believe in the Trinity, I believe that Jesus is my Savior, but I don't believe that I need to be baptized,

I would certainly question whether such a person was indeed a Christian when you have such a clear command from Jesus to be baptized, and yet is despising the gift.

So again, I would draw a distinction between the absence of the gift and despising of the gift.

We already have an email from Teresa in Rochester, New York, who says that she thought that William Booth founded the

Salvation Army in the 19th century. Well, that's not our part. That could be correct. I just remember someone named

Abraham Simpson associated with the Salvation Army. Okay. And by the way, folks, just to get a contrary view on is

Roman Catholic baptism, Christian baptism, eight, no, seven years ago,

September of 2017, I had Reverend Jeffrey Waddington, a

Presbyterian minister, ironically, who is a former Salvation Army member who converted to Presbyterianism and was baptized.

Jeffrey Waddington conducted a program with me on the theme is Roman Catholic baptism,

Christian baptism, where we examined the writings of J.

H. Thornwell, a Presbyterian of the 19th century who strongly rejected

Roman Catholic baptism. And by the way, just to let you know, that is a minority view amongst

Presbyterians. Most Presbyterians would agree with my guest that they would accept a

Roman Catholic baptism, but there is a minority of those who joined

Thornwell in rejecting that. I just thought I'd let you know that if you want to listen to that interview, go to iantrepansionradio .com

and type in Thornwell into the search engine, T -H -O -R -N -W -E -L -L.

I'm sorry, go ahead. No, I was going to say it sounded like you were going to say something. Yeah.

So one thing that I think is probably worth mentioning that I think is often misunderstood in Protestant circles about the

Roman Catholic Church, to be fair to them, going back to Paul's formulation in Ephesians chapter two, for by grace you have been saved through faith and this is not the result of works so that no one may boast.

This is not of yourselves, not the result of works so that no one may boast. There is a common misconception that Roman Catholics deny that we are saved by grace alone.

They don't deny that we're saved by grace alone. Sufficiency of grace is what they denied. Right, yeah.

And the issue is how is that salvation received?

Is it received through faith alone or through faith and works? Now that's still obviously a very important distinction, but you can find this, for example, in the in the

Catechism of the Catholic Church, the very first of their statements on justification.

The grace of the Holy Spirit has the power to justify us, that is to cleanse us from our sins and to communicate to us the righteousness of God through faith and through baptism.

And they'll go on to say, you can find this online if you just google the Catechism of the Catholic Church, that they do affirm that it's through grace alone that we're saved, that man is not saved, they will not say that properly man is saved by his works, but rather that, but the problem with their understanding,

I would say as a Lutheran, the problem with their understanding of justification is for Lutherans justification is a declaration, and for Roman Catholics it's a process.

And likewise for Lutherans, and for I think probably in the general Protestant world we can say the same thing, grace is understood as favor, it's the

God's disposition towards you, whereas for Roman Catholics grace is more properly understood as a substance that kind of continues to grow within you.

So they'll talk about sort of getting measures of grace. So with that view in mind, Roman Catholics see grace as this begins the process, and justification is part of the process of you being saved, but it's not kind of the entire thing.

And that really is where the issue breaks down, and I don't know if we were planning on touching on it, but a lot of the claims that people will make today that Lutherans and Roman Catholics have put aside their differences on the doctrine of justification are just simply not true.

All that they've really succeeded in doing, certain Lutherans, not my Lutherans, but certain Lutherans all they've really succeeded in doing is essentially saying we both agree that we're justified, we both agree that we're justified by grace, we both agree that faith is involved, we both agree that people will have works in the process, and then we'll just sort of not explain how the recipe actually works.

So to use a kind of chemistry analogy, it's sort of like if you're debating what an element is, and one person says, well, this is hydrogen because there's, or rather this is water because there's hydrogen and oxygen here.

And another guy says, no, that's hydrogen peroxide, which also is made up of hydrogen and oxygen elements.

And it just depends on how are they put together, what's the order of things. And when you have a different order of things, you have two completely different elements in the end, two completely different chemicals in the end, one of which will give you life if you drink it, and the other will kill you if you drink it.

So when you get the order of things wrong, it is certainly a problem.

But to be fair to Roman Catholics, properly speaking, their theology is not

God saves you—their theology is not that the reason you are saved is because you did good works.

The reason you're saved is the grace of God, God's desire to save you. But works are for them necessary in that process of actually bringing it to completion.

Now you are speaking of Roman Catholics, especially apologists, that are more familiar with actual

Roman Catholic dogma. Right. I'm saying, yeah, I'm saying official Roman Catholic doctrine. You will find a ton of Catholics who 100 % believe that they are saved by being good people.

Yes, yes. That would be, in fact, in my experience—and keep in mind, I was raised Roman Catholic—the vast majority of the average

Catholics that I meet will, when you have a conversation with them, it will come out that that's really what they're trusting in.

You know, the scale that their good deeds are going to outweigh the bad deeds.

Right. And because I haven't committed murder and adultery and thievery,

I am pretty sure I'm going to heaven. Right. Our friend, your fellow

Missouri Synod Lutheran listener, Christopher Bacalupo chimed in,

A .B. Simpson was a Presbyterian minister who founded the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Oh, I got the wrong one.

Okay. Thank you for clarifying. This conversation would not be complete without something that comes up all the time lately, not only in public exchanges and discourse and debates between Roman Catholic and Protestants, but even in my own experience, casual conversations with Catholics that perhaps are a little bit more learned than the average

Catholic. And that involves the

Lutheran -Catholic Joint Declaration on Justification that was spearheaded, from what

I understand, by the Lutheran World Federation. And even

Jimmy Akin, Roman Catholic apologist with Catholic answers, brought this up during a recent debate with my friend,

Dr. James R. White, where he was trying to set forth the idea that, you see, even the

Lutherans have come around and they are in large agreement with the

Roman Catholic Church on justification. So you're really making a far greater deal of this difference than the reality would suggest.

But the Lutheran World Federation is not some organization in harmony with a denomination like the

Lutheran Church of Missouri Synod, is it? No, not at all. Right. No. So the Lutheran World Federation is an international group made up of church bodies like the

Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and then a bunch of European kind of state churches that have long ago shed their

Lutheran distinctives. They have some folks in there that are more Orthodox in their theology, but they have a ton of folks that are,

I mean, just not even Christians. So the Lutheran, and here's, all right, here's my just very kind of frank take on the

Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, which was published, originally signed in 1999.

There's a kind of, there's a problem, I think, that a lot of progressive church bodies have, which is the authenticity problem, right?

So if your church has been run over with higher critical text theory, if you don't actually believe the

Bible is divinely inspired, if a large amount of people in your circles reject the divinity of Jesus, the miracles of Christ, and all of that,

I think there's just simply a part of you that knows you're fake, that knows that you're not, you're not really actually what the church is.

And you can have your own reasons for existing, and your own reasons for putting on the robes, and your own reasons for calling yourself a church, but I think folks in those groups are haunted by their own illegitimacy, which is why they have this strange impulse to always want validation from the

Roman Catholic Church. It's kind of a weird thing if you think about it. If you're a church body that says women should be able to be pastors, we should accept gay marriage, we should accept trans, blah, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff, why on earth would you want the approval of the

Pope? That's the last guy on earth. If I wrote a theological article, and Pope Francis told me that's the best thing

I've ever read, I would really, really be afraid and doubt myself as a theologian.

I wouldn't want him to agree with me. So then the question is, well, then why do they want that? Well, it's because the

Roman Catholic Church has the air of authenticity about it. They seem to, as much as you may not really believe it, they just seem to be what is the real true organization, and if you get their approval, you know, you're

RC Cola, and if RC Cola partners with Coca -Cola, then you know that you're really the real game in town.

I think likewise from the Roman Catholic end, there's a tendency to recognize, of course they believe that they're the one true church, and no one else is really valid, but you have to do something to give the appearance that you're kind and thoughtful, and that you're wanting to bring about reconciliation with these various church bodies, and you recognize that your people are leaving for them, and so that you want to do something that indicates that you're hearing the complaints of people, and that you're not just ignoring the presence of the

Protestant world. So you combine those two forces of the Roman Catholic Church trying to look agreeable, and the

Lutheran World Federation trying to look important, and you get the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, and here's ultimately the problem with the

Joint Declaration, is it's all a problem of definitions. So again, we go back to, if we go back to the formula and say we confess that we are justified by grace through faith, okay, the problem is the terms justification and grace.

Roman Catholics and Lutherans don't have a universal definition of them. They don't have shared definitions of those terms, which is why we get totally different answers to the question of how the process works.

So in the Joint Declaration, they never define those terms, and then let me just read to you a quote that was put out, this from seminary,

I went to Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana, that was put together right around just after the

Joint Declaration was published. It says, this is a quote from the journal article on that, the foremost defect of the document is that it does not come clean on the most glaring conflict between Augsburg and Trent, so Augsburg referring to the

Lutherans. For Lutherans, justification is essentially forensic, that is, God declares the sinner righteous on account of, and in Christ, Roman Catholics define justification as an internal transformation of the believer, a process, this is what

I'd said before, for Lutherans, it's a declaration, for Roman Catholics, it's a process, which Lutherans place in the area of sanctification.

So this growth, we say, is for those who have already been saved, about which, too, there are different understandings.

Roman Catholics have understood grace as if it were almost a substance, which is poured into the soul initially by baptism.

Lutherans with Paul see justifying grace as the favor of God, God's gracious attitude, whereby he accepts sinners.

The title of paragraph 4 .2, justification is forgiveness of sins and making righteous, could be understood in a

Lutheran way. The famous paragraph 72 of Apology 4, this is speaking of the Apology of the

Augsburg Confession, so this is Lutherans in the 1500s talking to the Holy Roman Emperor about what they believe, says, makes it clear that faith being made righteous in justification means only receiving the forgiveness of sins.

Clearly, this is not what is meant in the joint declaration. However, the formula of Concord expressly rejects the view that justifying righteousness consists of two pieces or parts, namely the gracious forgiveness of sins and a second element, renewal or sanctification.

So to kind of simplify this, basically, the point is when people say, oh, Lutherans agree,

Lutherans and Roman Catholics agree on this. Here's what they agree on. They agree that there are things that they agree on, and then they agree that there are things that they don't agree on, and they agree that the things they don't agree on don't stop them from agreeing on the things that they agree on.

That's literally all that the joint declaration really asserts, and then it concludes, well, all those condemnations that we hurled at each other in the 16th century no longer apply.

So they say the anathemas of Trent don't apply to the Lutheran churches, and the

Lutheran churches' condemnation of certain Roman Catholics' beliefs, that doesn't apply to the

Roman Catholic Church today. But what the joint declaration never does is explain why they don't apply.

It just simply says, we agree on some stuff, we don't agree on other stuff, the stuff that we don't agree on doesn't mean that we don't agree on stuff, therefore, we don't condemn each other.

So it's just a giant exercise in nothing. It's a bunch of Lutherans who basically were content to not clearly define what it is that they believed in order to get pats on the head from the

Pope, and it was Roman Catholics not clearly defining what they believed in order to make it seem like they were playing nice with a group of people that they still don't consider to be a legitimate church.

So it's just a giant exercise in nothing. Now, just to highlight one of our differences between you and myself and those that would typically be amongst

Reform Baptists, Calvinists, Protestants, and so on, is obviously you and I have a view that Rome is far more different than biblical

Christianity than the average Lutheran understanding. One of the reasons that many folks like myself believe that is there is a reason why

Rome gruesomely tortured and executed people that disagreed with them on issues such as the ones we're discussing.

One thing that popped into my head when I was watching the debates with Jimmy Akin is if the differences that Jimmy Akin is insinuating are not all that grievous or great or there's not really the chasm of difference that many

Reformed Christians view the differences between Roman and Calvinist Christians to possess, one of the reasons why

I find that odd, that approach, is that why would there have been

Protestant martyrs at all if we're that close? And I know that there were

Protestants that martyred other Christians and most of those that were martyred by Protestants were also

Protestants. We've got to keep that in mind. And the Church of England, of course, was a political struggle that was a pendulum going back and forth between Rome and the

English Church of the Reformation. But why is the view that you seem to have a more softened view than I have?

Um, that's a good question. You know, I mean,

I think one of the challenges with understanding Reformation history, I suppose, is that there is always a political element to things, and the political element always exacerbates violence.

I mean, that's just kind of an inarguable fact of Church history. I think what we can look at is we can say, well, the brutal persecution of those who were turning away from Roman false doctrine was in part an attempt to keep control over the world and also an attempt to keep money flowing in.

I mean, it was a very important thing in Luther's Reformation was the selling of indulgences was bringing in a boatload of money for the

Roman Catholic Church. And if you deny the Pope's authority to sell them, and then if you basically when you teach the doctrine of justification through faith alone, and you teach the sufficiency of Christ's righteousness, that rips the engine out of the whole money -making scheme.

So I think one of the reasons why people seem to oftentimes have a bit more of an ecumenical attitude today is because there's not the same level of world destabilizing -ness to us disagreeing about these issues.

That's kind of already come and gone. But we shouldn't take from that that these issues aren't important.

So I think what we found is we found ourselves in a position where we can say, where we can have more polite conversations than we had in the past, but the politeness doesn't actually have any bearing on how important the actual issue is.

And kind of going back to what you were saying before, so I'll concede that some people have a false view of what

Rome's actual teaching on the doctrine of justification is. But the question is, the problem is, is that far more than Protestants have a false understanding of what

Rome's teaching on justification is, Roman Catholics have a false understanding of what

Rome's teaching on justification is. And the reason for that is precisely because of the failure to understand the doctrine of justification properly.

In the Protestant world, we certainly have our own issues, and it's not an issue in our circles.

It's a human nature. It's part of the fallen human self -made religion to believe that we're saved by our works.

But it's a lesser problem in the Protestant world than it is in the Roman Catholic world for people to be trusting in their own righteousness, precisely because we have maintained a clearer understanding of the doctrine of justification.

I know that doesn't really answer your question, but I think in the end, again, the way

I look at things is, one, is that felicitous inconsistency, so that people can certainly be lifelong

Roman Catholics and be profoundly faithful, pious Christians whose hearts have not been corrupted by that specific false teaching.

But that doesn't mean that the false teaching isn't dangerous, right? So you can have a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and a bottle of water in front of you, and your church may be producing far more hydrogen peroxide, but that doesn't mean that everyone's going to end up drinking it.

I'm going to read a question from a listener to you, and then

I'll have you answer it when we return from our final break. Anders in Oshawa, Benin—I'm probably butchering that city in Wisconsin— Oshawa, Benin.

Anders says, other than the Missouri Synod and Wisconsin Synod, what

Lutheran bodies do you trust and recommend? And we'll have you answer that when we return from our final break.

And don't go away, folks. We'll be right back. James White of Alpha Omega Ministries here.

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Pastor Bill Sousa, Grace Church at Franklin, here in the beautiful state of Tennessee.

Our congregation is one of a growing number of churches who love and support Iron Sharpens Iron Radio financially.

Grace Church at Franklin is an independent, autonomous body of believers which strives to clearly declare the whole counsel of God as revealed in Scripture through the person and work of our

Lord Jesus Christ. And of course, the end of which we strive is the glory of God.

If you live near Franklin, Tennessee, and Franklin is just south of Nashville, maybe 10 minutes, or you are visiting this area, or you have friends and loved ones nearby, we hope you will join us some

Lord's Day in worshiping our God and Savior. Please feel free to contact me if you have more questions about Grace Church at Franklin.

Our website is gracechurchatfranklin .org. That's gracechurchatfranklin .org.

This is Pastor Bill Sousa wishing you all the richest blessings of our sovereign

Lord, God, Savior, and King Jesus Christ, today and always.

I'm Dr. Joseph Piper, President Emeritus and Professor of Systematic and Applied Theology at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

Every Christian who's serious about the deformed faith and the Westminster Standards should have and use the eight -volume commentary on the theology and ethics of the

Westminster Larger Catechism titled Authentic Christianity by Dr. Joseph Morecraft.

It is much more than an exposition of the Larger Catechism. It is a thoroughly researched work that utilizes biblical exegesis as well as historical and systematic theology.

Dr. Morecraft is Pastor of Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia, and I urge everyone looking for a biblically faithful church in that area to visit that fine congregation.

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For details on Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia, visit heritagepresbyterianchurch .com,

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

I'm thrilled to introduce to you a church where I've been invited to speak and have grown to love,

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It's such a joy to witness and experience fellowship with people of God like the dear saints at Hope Reformed Baptist Church in Corham, who have an intensely passionate desire to continue digging deeper and deeper into the unfathomable riches of Christ in His Holy Word, and to enthusiastically proclaim

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But today, I want to introduce you to my senior pastor, Doug McMasters of New High Park Baptist Church on Long Island.

Doug McMasters here, former director of pastoral correspondence at Grace to You, the radio ministry of John MacArthur.

In the film Chariots of Fire, Olympic gold medalist runner Eric Liddell remarked that he felt

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That love starts with the wonderful news that the Lord Jesus Christ is a savior who died for sinners and that God forgives all who come to him in repentance, trusting solely in Christ to deliver them.

I would be delighted to have the honor and privilege of ministering to you if you live in the Long Island area or Queens or Brooklyn or the

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That's nhpbc .com. You can also call us at 516 -352 -9672.

That's 516 -352 -9672. That's New High Park Baptist Church, a congregation in love with each other, passionate for Christ, committed to learning and being shaped by God's word and delighting in the gospel of God's sovereign grace.

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Welcome back. I also want to remind our listeners that this program is paid for in part by the law firm of Buttafuoco &

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and make sure you mention Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. As I was saying before the break, we had

Anders in Oshwaubenon, Wisconsin. And I'm sorry if I'm mispronouncing that.

He is writing us from Lutheran Land, Wisconsin, which next to Minnesota, I'm sure, probably has the highest concentration of Lutherans in the

United States. I could be wrong. But he wants to know, outside of the

Lutheran Church Missouri Synod and the Wisconsin Synod, what Lutheran denominations you recommend.

And he's actually assuming that you would recommend the Wisconsin Synod. I'm not sure if that's true. I know that they seem to be, in my experience, a much more rigid group, an isolationist group.

But what do you have to say about that? I think that's probably not entirely accurate.

I was laughing at his question and your response to it because that's also presuming I would recommend the

Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. Which is, you know, it sort of depends on the congregation,

I suppose. No, I mean, to give people kind of a brief rundown on the lay of the land, so for most of the past 40 or so years, 35 years or so, the

Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has been about twice the size of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. We're down to probably around two million members at this point.

I mean, our numbers are maybe around two and a half million, but I imagine if cleared up the books a little bit, we'd be closer to two million.

So the ELCA, although I think is now probably down to around three, and it won't, I think in the next 20 years or so, will probably end up being larger than they are.

They're just hemorrhaging members left and right because they haven't really given people any compelling reason to join.

There's the Wisconsin Synod, where probably the reason they're kind of seen as a bit more standoffish is they have an understanding of prayer where they will not pray with other

Christians in certain circumstances. Not even other Lutherans, right? Right, so not non -Wisconsin

Synod folks. It's a bit more complicated than that, to be fair to them. After the

Wisconsin Synod, things get very small. So on the one hand, I suppose

I could spend some time talking about what those various church bodies are, but it's kind of hard to recommend, to say whether or not

I'd recommend them to someone who will probably never encounter them. But yeah, and I mean, what

I would say is this, that we do have some doctrinal differences with the Wisconsin Synod. If you are in a town where you have a

Missouri Synod, this happened to my grandmother who moved to Florida. She moved, I won't go into lots of details about it, but lifelong

Missouri Synod Lutheran moved to an area where the Lutheran church, the LCMS church there was a mess for a number of reasons, and she started going to a

Wisconsin Synod church where she was very faithfully served by the pastor there, and I'm very, very thankful for that. So yeah, so I mean, if someone said to me, oh,

I'm going to a Wisconsin Synod church, my response would not be you should leave. That would be my response if someone said to me, oh, we've been going to this church,

I think it's Evangelical Lutheran in America, I'd say you should find another church to go to. But I wouldn't say that about the

Wisconsin Synod. And I have had ministers attend my pastor's luncheons from the

AALC, and I've been told that the American Association of Lutheran Churches has much in common with Missouri Synod.

Is that true? So we're in fellowship with them. I don't mean to be rude to them, but sometimes

I forget that they exist. They're rather small, and there's a kind of a complex history there, but we are in fellowship with them.

So we are in communion fellowship with them. We can share pastors, and their pastors can serve in our congregations and vice versa.

And I know that you guys have a few more of them up in your neck of the woods. We don't have, I've never lived in an area where we had,

I don't think I've ever met in person a guy who was a pastor or been in an area where one of those congregations has been.

So I don't mean any disrespect to them, but they're not on my radar a whole lot because I've never really been around them.

And this may be even smaller, but I also know that we've had Lutheran pastors attend my luncheons from the

Association of Free Lutheran Congregations. Yeah, okay, so those guys are a bit, those guys will range from very, very faithful Lutherans to legitimately not

Lutherans, as in like having non -Lutheran pastors serving them. They're congregations that have a very, very, very strong congregational polity and are very resistant towards any kind of church body oversight.

So they can have constitutions that say we have to be served by a Lutheran pastor. There are ones that don't.

I had, so a friend of mine had been at an AFLC congregation, and he and a bunch of other people left because the pastor there decided they weren't going to practice infant baptism anymore, which is pretty essential for being a

Lutheran. So yeah, so those guys can be great. They can also be entirely non -Lutheran.

Well, I want you to summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today regarding the subject we've been addressing.

Yeah, the Lutherans always referred to justification as the article on which the church stands or falls.

How man is made righteous before God is the most important issue. It's not not to downplay the importance of other issues, but that's the way that the medicine gets into your heart.

To know who God is, to understand the nature of God, is also to understand the work of God.

So that when we know who Christ is, when we know that everything that we need to be righteous before God, God himself has provided to us, and that he has given that to us as a free gift received through faith.

That is the core of the Christian faith. That is the foot of Jesus crushing the head of the serpent that destroys all anxieties, all fears, all worries, all wickedness that's born from thrashing around trying to live a life that's pleasing to a

God that we can't understand and can't find, where we only end up tearing ourselves apart and tearing apart those we love.

All of that is solved when we know that Christ himself is our righteousness, and that everything that we need to be pleasing to our

Father in heaven has already been given to us. Well, thank you so much for being such a superb guest today,

Hans, and I look forward to having you back on the show frequently if you are so disposed, and I really had a wonderful time with you.

I want to thank Christopher Bacalupo, who we mentioned before, a listener who is on the ministry staff at Trinity Lutheran Church in Islip, Long Island, New York.

He just sent me an email that says that he has a website concerning the

Lutheran World Federation that is in an official position by the

Missouri Synod, a new paper on the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, and so if anybody listening wants that email,

I'll forward it to you from what Reverend Bacalupo has sent us. Good German name.

Yeah, one of the very rare Italian Lutherans, I'm sure. We have a few, but yeah, not many.

And I also wanted to tell Reverend Bacalupo and any of our listeners, if you are a first -time questioner today, you have won a free

New American Standard Bible, compliments of the publishers of the New American Standard Bible, nasbible .com,

and also compliments of Cumberland Valley Bible Service, cvbbs .com, who will ship that out to you at no expense to you or to Iron Trip and Zion Radio.

And don't forget about Pastor Hans Feeney's websites. The website for Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Crestwood, Missouri is princeofpeacecrestwood .com,

princeofpeacecrestwood .com, and the Lutheran Satire website is lutheransatire .org,

lutheransatire .org. I want to thank everybody who listened, especially those who took the time to write in questions, and I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far, far greater

Savior than you are a sinner. God bless you all, and I look forward to hearing from you and your questions for our guests on Iron Trip and Zion Radio in the days ahead.