A Brief Introduction to the Reformation

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:21

I had sweats on, cut off t -shirt, and I walked up to him and said,

00:30

Hi James, my name is Paul Scouser, I'm a pastor of Calvary Albuquerque. He said, you look like a Calvary pastor. And he follows up, not moving on.

00:44

I spoke with James Blake. I'm ready to go.

00:56

Well, good morning. Is it still morning? Yes, it's still morning. It is good to be with you.

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I have three sessions today. Each topic, one that I'm very passionate about, and not nearly enough time to cover all of it.

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So I hope you have a deep seat in the saddle, and have your pen ready to go, because I have a lot of things

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I want to share with you. The first topic that we're going to be addressing today is the subject of the

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Reformation. And of course, that might immediately cause some of you to sit back and put your pen away and say,

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Oh, well, I was looking forward to something exciting. Because obviously, we might ask ourselves the question, why should someone in the 21st century care about what non -technological people argued about nearly 500 years ago?

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Let's face it, in our day and in our context, a lot of people look back at church history, they look back at subjects like this, and they go,

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Look, those people back then didn't have iPods, they didn't have computers, they couldn't use

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Bible works and accordions, and so on and so forth. Why should we really care what people back then thought?

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There is a lot of modern arrogance on the part of many people in the church as well. We look back upon the past and we go,

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Why should we care about what happened then? I only am concerned about what is going on in my day.

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Well, I'd like to suggest that the Reformation's impact upon Western history explains much of our modern world.

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People who do not understand how we came to have the political alignments we have, how

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Europe came to be the Europe that it is today, how Europe came to be the Europe and England that created our nation, that gave us our laws, our culture, our way of thinking, people who don't know things like that do not recognize repeated cycles in history.

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We don't recognize how often we repeat the same errors that we made in the past. And so we need to understand how the church came to be the way that it is today.

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Why is there a Roman Catholic church? Why is there an Eastern Orthodox church? Why is there a

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Protestant church? Why are there the divisions that exist? Can't we just all get past all of these things?

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Understanding church history would help us to understand how we got to where we are today and give us a solid foundation upon which to move into the future.

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The Reformation's impact upon the church was tremendous despite our modern ignorance thereof.

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It is amazing to me how many people pop up on YouTube and they start talking about modern beliefs and they think that what they believe is just simply what the

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Bible teaches. And they have no idea what anybody else has ever believed. They have no idea that what they believe has been given to them by someone who came before them.

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They have no idea the traditions that they hold. They just figure, well, this is just simply what all

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Christians are supposed to believe and no one else has ever believed anything other than this. Ignorance might be bliss, but that kind of blissfulness really does not help in a examination of what we believe and why we believe it.

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Now, again, since we have a very brief amount of time, I want to try to give you a bird's eye view.

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We need to understand what are called the material and formal principles of the

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Reformation. The material and the formal principles. The material being the substance of what the proclamation of the

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Reformation was. The formal principle being that which gave the form and foundation to that proclamation.

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What do I mean? The material principle of the Reformation was sola fide, justification by faith alone.

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That was what got Martin Luther going. That's what gets Albert Zwingli going, is this concept of justification being made right before God by faith alone in opposition to the

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Roman Catholic understanding of how a person is made right before God through the sacramental system of Rome.

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This is the material principle of the Reformation. This is what the Reformation was trying to communicate.

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The formal principle of the Reformation is called sola scriptura. Scripture alone is the sole infallible rule of faith and practice for the

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Church. Now, please notice that definition. You'll come back to this, but it's worthy to repeat it.

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Scripture alone is the sole infallible rule of faith and practice for the

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Church. Infallible rule. That does not mean that we don't have lesser rules or lesser traditions.

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The point is that Scripture is the sole infallible rule of faith, and if we have another rule of faith, if we have a confession of faith, if we have our traditions, these all have to be subject to the superior authority of the

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Word of God. Many times Roman Catholics will say, you have your rules of faith, you just don't admit it.

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Well, they would be quite right about some Protestants who say, well, I just go by the

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Bible. I've never met anybody who actually did that. I just go by the Bible. I live in a vacuum, no one's ever impacted me,

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I have no traditions whatsoever. Let me assure you of something, folks. Any person who says they have no traditions is a slave of their traditions.

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We all have our traditions. And if we don't recognize that, we will never be able to examine those traditions by the

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Word of God. That's a very important insight that I think we need to grab hold of. Now, get your jetpacks on, here we go.

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The background of the Reformation at absolute warp speed. The Reformation had a background that helps us to understand why it took the shape that it did and how that impacts us today.

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First, absolutely important, and I apologize for my voice up front, I should have grabbed a bottle of water or something like that.

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If someone could grab me one of those, that would help me a lot. Thank you very much. From the front row, very good.

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And it's cold, too, that's very good. Got one, got one, brothers, got one. We're good, we're good, we've got one. Of course, if we get through this one, we'll grab the second.

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All right. The Renaissance in printing. The Renaissance in printing.

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Out of the medieval period, a period where there was a great degradation of learning during the

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Roman Empire, during the Roman ascendancy, there had been a great deal of literacy and learning.

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Places of study and things like that. During the medieval period, there is a degradation of that. You don't have the

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Roman Empire controlling things, and so you don't have as much travel. Finally, in the Renaissance, you have, once again, the beginning of learning.

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And you have, for example, the rise of universities. I'll look at this in the second point here and then go back to the

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Renaissance. You have the rise of universities, major cities, again, becoming repopulated.

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You have the invention of printing. Absolutely vital. There were many people that, if we just looked at church history, if I look at someone like John Wycliffe, he seems like a more logical person than Martin Luther to have started the

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Reformation with. But it wasn't in God's timing yet. What made the

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Reformation possible was printing. The printing press was as much of a revolution in that day as the internet has been in our day.

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It allowed for learning and viewpoints and preaching to be disseminated far and wide.

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Up until the invention of printing, if you wanted to have your own Bible, you got to hand copy it.

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Now think about that one for just a moment. Given how hard it is for us to get people to even come to Sunday school on Sunday morning, how difficult would it be for us to get most people to copy

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Deuteronomy? Leviticus would never happen. Okay? It would be extremely difficult.

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So obviously, the availability of the scriptures, even in the languages of the people, the availability of the writings of Martin Luther and these others to be able to be disseminated amongst the people caused an explosion in the society at that time.

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Extremely, extremely important. That, of course, happens with Gutenberg's press in the middle of the 15th century, 1450s.

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You have the rise of universities. You have a Latin phrase here. You all need to learn some Latin today, aren't you? I'm excited about that.

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Ad fontes, which simply means to the source. To the source. The statement of the day was, look,

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I don't want to know what someone interpreted the Gospels to mean. I want to go back to the

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Gospels. I want to go back to the original sources, which included going back to the original languages.

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The church in the West had been using the Latin Vulgate for about 1 ,100 years. That's a long period of time.

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But there were many who were realizing, you know what? The Latin Vulgate is a translation of what was originally written by John or by Paul, or a translation of what was originally written by Isaiah.

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We need to go back to the original languages. So there became a new emphasis upon the biblical languages.

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You had a man by the name of Desiderius Erasmus. Erasmus was a Dutch humanist scholar.

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Erasmus, I know you just heard the word humanist, and you go, ooh, ooh, that's bad. Well, in our day, humanism has a different meaning than it did in the 15th and 16th centuries.

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A humanist was a person who believed that God had made man with such capacities that we could understand

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God's revelation. So Erasmus was a Dutch humanist, and his work was extremely important in that in 1516, he had printed and published the first Greek New Testament.

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Now notice I did not say he printed the first Greek New Testament. There had been a Greek New Testament published before his time.

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It was called the Complotentian Polyglot. Very fancily done. But the problem was, back in those days, if you were gonna publish a book, you had to get papal approval.

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You had to get the pope to approve your book. And so the Complotentian Polyglot, six volumes, was sitting in a warehouse waiting for all the red tape down at the

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Vatican to be gotten through. Erasmus got around that, got his out first, by dedicating this volume to the pope.

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So in 1516, the Novum Instrumentum came out, which was dedicated to Pope Leo X.

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And he sort of took a gamble, and it worked out. Erasmus then publishes the Greek New Testament, and keep that in mind, because that very

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Greek New Testament ended up being studied by a certain monk in Wittenberg shortly thereafter.

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Keep that in mind. There also had been a long period of papal corruption and the

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Babylonian captivity of the church. What does that refer to? Well, in the 12th and 13th centuries, the papacy, actually for a period of time during that period, left

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Rome and went to Avignon, France. And for a number of years, the papacy was located in Avignon, France.

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Then it moved back to Rome, but the French cardinals wanted it to stay there.

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So they set up a counter -papacy there. You had two popes for a lengthy period of time.

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And of course, they were both anathematizing the other guy. And the various states in Europe would follow one of the two.

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And so the fact that you had two papacies and two popes caused a lot of people to question whether the papacy really was

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God's way of organizing the church and providing unity to the church. Eventually, a council got together to try to heal this schism.

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They elected a third pope, but the other two popes wouldn't step down, so now you had three. This caused all sorts of difficulties and finally was not solved until about 1415 at the

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Council of Constance. There was also a tremendous amount of papal corruption. Everybody knew, it was whispered behind the back, and it was general knowledge, that to become the pope you had to have the most money, that the position was purchased, that the cardinals had a tremendous amount of influence and money.

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There was a tremendous amount of simony and nepotism, a lot of corruption, and a lot of theories that various popes died not because their time had come, but because their poison had come.

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And so there was a tremendous amount of papal corruption at that particular point in time.

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Sorry about that, I thought it was on the screen, and it's not. Now it is. Then we had, very importantly, the fall of Constantinople on May 29, 1453.

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Constantinople was the last bastion against the encroachment of Islam.

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The Seljuk Turks were marching toward Europe. As you may recall from history,

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Islam had arisen in the 7th century, between 632 and 732, it had expanded all across North Africa, up into Spain, up into the

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Holy Lands, toward Constantinople, Istanbul as it is known today. And in 732 that expansion was stopped at the

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Battle of Tours by Charles Martel. But that threat was still there, and that threat became extremely important at the time of the

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Reformation. In fact, one of the main arguments used against the Reformation was it was dividing Europe at the very time that Europe needed to be absolutely united to stand against the threat that was the invasion of Islam from the

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East. When Constantinople fell, many of her scholars, many of them Greek -speaking experts, fled to the

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West, and they brought their Greek manuscripts with them, which became very important in the rise of the

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Reformation. You also had the Inquisition, and that was the effort of the

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Roman Catholic Church to expertate heresy, to get rid of the false teachers, and it had been going on for a long time, especially the

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Spanish Inquisition. But, obviously, it likewise turned a lot of people off, in the sense that it caused fear rather than love for the

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Church, and actually only helped to increase the number of heretics.

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It didn't really help a lot at all. You also had the rise of Purgatory indulgences.

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Purgatory was not a doctrine that just popped into existence one day. It had developed slowly over time, from origins in the early

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Church, through Pope Gregory the Great, who had a more developed concept of Purgatory, but it was not until the 1400s that Purgatory really came into a full flower, along with the concept of indulgences.

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Now, an indulgence is a transfer from what's called the Treasury of Merit. In Roman Catholic theology, and this theology remains valid to this day, by the way, in Roman Catholic theology, you have the

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Treasury of Merit. The Treasury of Merit is made up of the excess merit of Jesus, because Jesus would only have to have shed a single drop of blood to redeem the world.

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But since he bled copiously, there is created an excess Treasury of Merit from that extra suffering, in essence, and the shedding of blood.

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Also in the Treasury of Merit is the excess merit of Mary, for Mary, certainly because she did not sin, had all this extra merit that she did not need to enter into glory, as well as the excess merit of the saints.

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Any of the saints who have entered directly into the presence of God, any extra merit they have beyond the merit necessary for not going to Purgatory, would be placed into the

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Treasury of Merit. This Treasury of Merit is then controlled by the power of the keys, which are held by the successor of Peter, who is the

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Bishop of Rome. And so an indulgence, then, is the Church drawing from the

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Treasury of Merit, in essence, giving it to your account. And this concept then became very grossly abused, in the sense that you had indulgences being sold for money.

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And, in fact, as many of you have ever visited Rome, you've walked into St.

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Peter's there, this massive, ornate structure with gold around the top, so and so forth, that was paid for by the indulgences of people there in Europe.

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That did not bode really well, did not go over really well, with many people, especially in the

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Northern lands. Why should our money be going to Rome to buy these fancy buildings?

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It should be staying here where we are. You had the Dominican indulgence seller,

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Johann Tetzel. He is said to have had the saying, when a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from Purgatory springs.

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And so you would have the actors who would come along, and it was believed that the vast majority of people, unless they were a saint, went into the flames of Purgatory when they died.

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And so you believed that your loved ones, remember, infant mortality rates were extremely high.

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In many areas, you'd have to bear ten live children to have one live through to adulthood.

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And so there was a tremendous amount of death all around you. The plague had decimated a third to a half of Europe only a hundred years before, and kept popping back up in various cities.

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And so everybody had loved ones who had died. And so you were being taught that your loved one was being bathed in flame and suffering, and for the temporal punishments of their sins.

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And so if someone comes along and said, well, for just a few gold coins, you can free them from their suffering so they can enter into eternal bliss.

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Well, how many of you are so hard -hearted that you wouldn't part with that money? And so this was the sale of indulgences that was taking place at this particular point in time.

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And it was right at that particular point in time that a monk in Wittenberg, Germany, began to discover the meaning of grace.

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And it was in the background of finding the sales of indulgences so very troubling to one

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Martin Luther that we have the beginning of this movement called the

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Reformation. Luther was a very introspective man. He is known to have spent as many as six hours in the confessional.

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Now think for just a moment what that means. If you are a monk, and you're living in a monastery, and you can spend six hours confessing your sins in the confessional, what can a monk get into that would take you six hours to confess?

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I mean, seriously. There's just not that much to get into. And so he obviously is extremely introspective.

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He is examining himself. He does not find peace with God through the sacramental system of Rome.

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If we had time, Luther's background, his history, his experience is extremely interesting.

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He had been trained initially. Initially his father wanted to go into law, be a lawyer.

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You've heard about his experience on the road when lightning struck near him, and he cried out to St.

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Anne, the patron saint of minors, his father was a minor, that he would become a monk and she would save his life.

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He lived, and so he felt that he had to do this. His father was never happy about that. He had lots of issues with his father along those lines.

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And when his father first came to hear him say Mass, he was unable to do it.

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In fact, when the time came to elevate the host and say, this is my body, he felt so grossly unworthy to handle the body of Christ that he had to let the person standing by take over at that point.

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And his father was extremely upset by this and embarrassed by this and so on and so forth.

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And so Luther's father confessor, Staukas, felt that maybe he was better cut out for a life of academics.

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And so he sent him off to do his studies and he became a professor of theology at the newly established

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Castle Church of Wittenberg, where Frederick the Protector there in Germany had established this new place of learning.

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And so as he studied, he gets a hold of, remember Desiderius Erasmus, the newly printed

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Greek New Testament. And he's in the Augustinian order, so there's already an emphasis in Augustine's writings on grace and so on and so forth.

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And so as he's studying the text, he recognizes that in the

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Latin Vulgate, in numerous places in the New Testament, you have this phrase, punitentium agitate, do penance.

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And he's been doing penance his entire life. He would fast, he would try to sleep in Germany on a cold stone floor without a blanket to do penance for his sins, to receive forgiveness from God.

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But then as he looked at this new Greek New Testament, he'd look over at that and he'd discover that the

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Greek word that was translating was metanoia. And he starts to dig into the meaning of the word and he discovers that metanoia does not mean to do penance.

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It means to have a change of mind, a turning away from sin and positively a turning toward God.

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And begins to see that those aren't the same concepts, those aren't the same things.

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At the same time, Johann Tetzel is in the neighborhood preaching his indulgences. And Luther is scandalized by what

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Tetzel is preaching. And so he writes the 95 Theses.

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Now, you may have heard of the 95 Theses before. In fact, October 31st, 1517 is the date when

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Martin Luther walked up to the castle church of Wittenberg and he nailed these 95

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Theses to the door or to the door jamb next to it. And a lot of us have the idea, oh, there is

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Luther and he's now a Protestant and he's challenging the Roman Church. Well, if you've read the 95

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Theses, they're written by a Roman Catholic. Now, there are many, many people in Europe that would have agreed with what

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Luther was saying. He was not trying to start a new church. The idea of the

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Reformation was the farthest thing from his mind. He was, as a professor, putting out a challenge for debate.

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Remember, they didn't have ESPN back then, okay? They didn't have football teams.

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And the great way of entertainment back then was when one university would challenge another university to debate.

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And all the students would go along and they'd sit during hours during the debate and then afterwards they'd go out and get into trouble in the streets or whatever city they were in.

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That was a road trip back in those days. And so what Luther was doing was he was challenging anyone from another university or within his own university to debate the issue of indulgences.

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And he laid out 95 theses that he would be willing to defend and debate. Now, there was nothing new about that.

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There was nothing overly exciting about that. But printing had been invented. And somebody came along, realized this was a hot -button topic, copied down the 95 theses, took them to a printer, and reprinted them.

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Because you see, at this time, there was a rising feeling of nationalism amongst the

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Germans and amongst many others. For many, many years, people just viewed themselves as being

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Christians, not as being German Christians. But nationalism was on the rise.

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And a lot of people didn't like the fact that they had these Roman overlords and that their money for indulgences wasn't going to build churches in Germany, it was going to build churches in Rome.

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And so, this struck a nerve. And so, without trying to have this happen, all of a sudden,

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Luther's 95 theses are found all over Germany, and they get a lot of attention.

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Now, this begins a process. Luther, for example, debates a man by the name of Johann Eck.

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And Johann Eck at the University of Leipzig. And Eck forces

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Luther to start realizing, to start understanding, that if he was going to take the position he was taking, that the

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Bishop of Rome was wrong about this, maybe he was wrong about other things as well. In fact, during one of the sessions, during their debate,

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Eck gets up and he starts reading all these statements. He says, are these the statements of Martin Luther?

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No, these are the statements of Jan Hus. Now, who was Jan Hus? Jan Hus was a

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Bohemian priest, who about 100 years earlier had been martyred, had been killed by the

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Roman Catholic Church as a heretic. Jan Hus was a follower of John Wycliffe.

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He was one of the pre -Reformation reformers. He believed in things like justification by faith, and the sufficiency of the scriptures.

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But he had been burned as a heretic at the Council of Constance in 1415.

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And so what Eck demonstrated, the parallels between Luther and Jan Hus, Luther had to go to the library and find out what

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Eck had actually said. And it was coming back from that debate that Luther realized,

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Jan Hus was right. And that is what started him realizing that he was in big trouble.

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And that he had to decide whether he was going to continue this direction, or whether he was going to recant.

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During the next few years, he starts coming out with books that really look Protestant. They look as if they are being written by someone who is recognizing the

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Bishop of Rome as an Arab. But Rome does not react very quickly. Normally, he would have been hauled to a stake and lit up very, very quickly.

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But Rome was extremely distracted at this time. And what is more, he was teaching at a university that was the favorite of an extremely important political figure,

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Frederick. And since Europe is fighting the Muslims, the

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Emperor realizes he needs Frederick's help. He needs Frederick's money, he needs Frederick's armies. And so there is a period of time during which, normally there would have been a reaction.

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But there wasn't in God's Providence at that particular point in time. So finally, what happens, and we'll look at this a little bit more toward the end, but finally,

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Luther is summoned before the Diet of Worms, which is always one that when

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I'm teaching high school students and junior high school students, they always start laughing. Not a Diet of Worms, that's funny. But that's what it was called.

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It was a meeting where he does appear before Charles. And it is at that time when he has shown his books,

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Will You Recant? The church has determined that these are heretical. Will You Recant? Luther asks for 24 hours.

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He knows that his life is going to be forfeited. And he has been given the very same promise of safe conduct to the

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Diet of Worms that Janibus had been given 100 years earlier. As he rode into the city, he saw scrawled upon the wall,

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Martin Luther, Jan Hus, the German Hus.

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So he knew that his life was in danger. So he asks for 24 hours. He agonizes. He's brought back before Charles the

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Emperor. He's asked, Will You Recant? And he says, Unless you demonstrate to me by plain reason in my scripture that my books are contradictory or they're against sound faith, that I cannot recant.

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And then in German he says, Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anderes, Gott helfe mir. Here I stand,

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I can do no other, God help me. He leaves Worms, fully expecting to die.

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He is kidnapped by Frederick's men and whisked off to the castle church in Bartburg and is kept safe there.

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And, in fact, is very influential for a number of years after that, dying in, as I recall, 1546, 1545 to 1546.

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The Reformation is successful under Luther in northern Europe. Ulrich Zwingli in the

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Swiss cantons, likewise at about almost the exact same time as Luther, just a little bit after Luther, is extremely influential in Zurich in bringing about the

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Reformation there. Interestingly enough, early on, both Luther and Zwingli play with the idea of believer's baptism, recognizing that infant baptism of everyone who is born in a culture will automatically end up resulting in a state church that will always be impure.

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Both step away from that perspective because the princes and overlords will not allow that to happen.

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Infant baptism is the basis of the tax system of the day. It could not be touched.

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Calvin is actually a second generation reformer. He comes along at a later period of time.

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His conversion is around sometime between 1532 and 1534. He leads the

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Reformation in Geneva. There are many brave souls in England. John Knox in Scotland, major, major names.

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Of course, this results in Rome's counter -Reformation work beginning with the Council of Trent, which met from 1546 to 1564.

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They were extremely successful in retaking lands that had become

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Protestant. To this day, you can basically see the dividing line in Germany between Northern Germany, which is

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Lutheran, and Southern Germany, which is Catholic. The Jesuits came out of that particular period of time and they were extremely effective in arguing against the

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Reformation. Of course, they stopped selling indulgences and doing things like that, which was helpful as well.

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The essence of the Reformation's gospel, of the Reformation's message, was a gospel of peace.

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Salvation by grace, the end of the endless cycle of sacramental forgiveness under the control of Rome.

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You live in an area where there are many, many, many Roman Catholics. In fact, I would imagine that there are many here who are former

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Roman Catholics yourself. You understand the sacramental system, especially as it has been practiced historically in the

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Roman Catholic system. Now, we live in a Western land, and in many places in the

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United States you have a very liberal form of Roman Catholicism. But if you know how

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Roman Catholicism exists in Old Mexico, if you know how Roman Catholicism exists in Spain, then you understand

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I'm seeing some heads nodding up and down. You know what I'm talking about. The power of the priest, the necessity of attendance at Mass, the constant cycle of forgiveness through the penitential process, the saying of the

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Hail Marys, the pilgrimages, the indulgences, the fear of purgatory, all of those things that are part and parcel of old -style

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Roman Catholicism. The Reformation comes along and says that's not how you're made right before God. God is the one who makes men right before himself.

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He does so freely of his own grace. There is nothing to be added to what Jesus Christ has done.

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The positive message of the Reformation was justification by grace, through faith alone, through Christ alone.

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Grace is not simply something that you need to have to be saved. God's grace actually saves.

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The Reformation was never about the necessity of grace. Rome has always said that grace was absolutely necessary.

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It drives me insane when I see well -known individuals in evangelical circles standing in front of audiences saying,

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I recently read the Council of Trent, and the Council of Trent says you absolutely necessarily have to have the grace of God.

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If you say that you can be saved without the grace of God, you are anathema. Well done.

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I'm sorry, but it amazes me how many people today are Protestants and they have no idea why the hell.

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They have no idea what the Reformation was about. And these people will stand up in front of audiences and say,

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Rome preaches the necessity of grace. The Reformation was never about the necessity of grace.

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The Reformation was about the sufficiency of grace. We all agree we must have

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God's grace. The question is, is God's grace in and of itself enough?

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That's what the Reformation is about. And there are so many today who are not Roman Catholics because they will not submit to the

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Bishop of Rome, but they're not Protestants either. They're paddling around in the middle of the

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Tiber River. The Tiber River forms the western boundary of the city of Rome. And for many generations, it has been popular to liken conversion to Roman Catholicism as swimming the

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Tiber, crossing the Tiber River into Rome. Within the past two years, a well -known evangelical has gone back to Roman Catholicism by the name of Frank Beckwith.

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He was the head of the Evangelical Theological Society at the time that he did so. And if you read his story, which he just did a dialogue with Timothy George up in Wheaton, if you read his story of his reversion back to Rome, you will see many of these issues laid out very, very clearly.

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A group of us are writing a response to that book right now. I've already written a chapter going through Dr.

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Beckwith's own statements. And on many of the central issues of the Reformation, he had never left

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Rome. He had never embraced the absolute sufficiency of grace, a viewpoint of law, all these things that are central to a proper understanding of what it means to be

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Reformed or to be Protestant or to reject the Roman Catholic Gospel. So positively, justification by a grace that actually saves.

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Through faith alone. That does not mean a naked, bare, empty faith.

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But that faith is the only means by which justification comes. It cannot be faith plus merit.

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It cannot be faith plus all of this active obedience to sacramentalism. It is faith and faith alone.

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Through Christ alone. There is no treasury of merit where Christ's merit is mixed together with the merit of Mary or of saints.

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One either stands before God clothed solely in the righteousness of Jesus Christ or one stands before God clothed in some tattered robe that you've stitched together of the righteousness of yourself and others.

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There can be no mixture of the two. That was the message of the

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Reformation. Where does the Bible teach these things? That, of course, is the most important thing that we can address in the last 20 minutes that we have together this morning.

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Well, now this afternoon. I want to look at just a few.

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I would encourage you, if you have the opportunity to listen to some of the debates I've had the opportunity of doing.

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We haven't had much success in getting Roman Catholics to debate for a long period of time.

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I think the memo went out a long time ago that said, this isn't to our benefit. Let's stop doing it.

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But for a number of years we had the opportunity of engaging some of the leading Roman Catholic apologists in debate.

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I did five debates with a man that I have a tremendous amount of respect for.

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His name is Father Mitchell Pacwa. If you watch EWTN which you do have here locally,

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I saw you have seen Father Pacwa many, many, many times. He basically took over for Mother Angelica after she had her stroke.

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Father Pacwa is a scholar. He speaks 12 languages. Every time we've had a debate, he's never engaged in ad hominem argumentation.

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He has never been disrespectful. He's never backed off from saying what he believes to be true. So the debates that we've done on justification, the mass, papacy, sola scriptura, and the priesthood have been,

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I think, amongst the best debates that are available out there on the subject of the

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Protestant Roman Catholic divide. It was in light of this text that in January of 1991

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I debated Mitchell Pacwa in San Diego. We were standing in front of the high altar of one of the largest churches in Southern California Roman Catholic churches.

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I was honored to get to defend the gospel and the sufficiency of the death of Christ in that particular context.

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And we had the opportunity of asking questions of each other, and so I had crafted a question for Mitchell Pacwa.

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And basically I talked about two things. First of all, I talked about the greatest commandment. The greatest commandment is to be to love the

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Lord our God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and the second is like unto our neighbors ourselves. And I said, now, if that's the greatest commandment, then clearly breaking the greatest commandment would have to be a mortal sin.

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In Roman Catholicism, we have different kinds of sin. We have mortal sins and menial sins. A mortal sin destroys the grace of justification.

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You see, you become a child of God by baptism. Baptism washes away the stain of original sin.

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It justifies you. You're made the friend of God. You enter into what's called the state of grace. If you commit a mortal sin, that mortal sin destroys the state of grace and you're now the enemy of God.

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You have to be reconciled through the penitential process, confession to the priest who his sacerdotal authority is able to pronounce the forgiveness of the eternal punishment of your sin, and then he gives you penances to do to work off the temporal punishments of your sin.

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You have to go through that or if you die as the enemy of God in a state of mortal sin, at least in old

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Catholicism, you would be going to hell. Now, I realize that today a large portion of the leadership of the

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Roman Catholic Church are universalists. Everybody's going to heaven anyways. But that's not what Rome has always taught.

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And so anybody who talks to you about how Rome, we all believe the same thing for 2 ,000 years, is living in a fantasy world.

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That's simply not the case. The old teaching was you die in a state of mortal sin and you will go to hell, even though you were once justified.

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But you can also commit venial sins. The venial sins do not destroy the state of grace. But there are temporal punishments for those venial sins.

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And it is the stain of those venial sins and the punishments, the temporal punishments of the mortal sins that cling to your soul and require you to go to purgatory unless you have purged yourself of these things through your good works.

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That's what purgatory is all about. So, what I said to Father Paco was, if breaking the greatest commandment isn't a mortal sin, then who knows what a mortal sin is?

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And you see, Rome has never given an exact definition of what mortal sin is. Oh, you have to do it purposefully.

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And there has to be intent. But you see, we all know that having talked to one priest over here and gone to confession, and then gone to another priest over here and gone to confession, you got different answers as to what sins were.

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There's no dogmatic definition of what a mortal sin is. And so I said, therefore,

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Father Paco, if it is possible that before you lay your head upon your pillow this evening that you could commit a mortal sin and become the enemy of God, how can you understand these words of Romans 5?

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Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our

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Lord Jesus Christ. I said, you see, Father Paco, you and I both know that that Greek term,

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Irenae, in Romans 5, 1, in Paul's mind, what's the background of that? It's the

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Hebrew term shalom. And Father Paco, I know that you speak Hebrew. And you know that shalom is not merely a ceasefire.

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There is no shalom on the borders of Israel to say because there are tanks sitting there with their guns trained toward the other side of the border.

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And there are rockets being fired across those borders and there's armed people. That's not shalom.

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That's not peace. That's just a ceasefire. This text is saying that the person who has been justified by faith has a wellness of relationship.

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A positive, peace relationship exists between the redeemed sinner and God.

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And I point out that as the text says, this is something that has happened in the past.

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Therefore, having been justified, we now have peace. And so,

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Father Paco, how can you say that you have shalom with God if by the time you put your head on your pillow this evening, you can be the enemy of God?

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How do you have peace? And one of the reasons that I really like Mitch Paco, and I continue to pray for Mitch Paco, is that Mitch Paco is willing to say things that other

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Catholicologists aren't willing to say. What do I mean by that? Well, he gave an answer.

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He had, like, two minutes. He gave an answer, but it didn't really address my question. And so I had an opportunity to redirect it.

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And when I had the opportunity to redirect it, you can listen to the debate yourself.

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We still have it available. It was videotaped. I'd love to be able to watch it, but there are other Catholics that videotaped it and won't allow it to be distributed.

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That's too bad. But anyways, so you can listen to the audio recording, and you can listen. And you hear a what?

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And then you hear him say, I don't know.

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And that's not something that a lot of my opponents would be willing to say. But in reality, that's the problem.

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Because in Roman Catholicism, you don't have true peace. The peace doesn't come to you because of what

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God has done in Jesus Christ. Because you have this mass that is a what? Representation of the one sacrifice of Christ that never perfects anyone.

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You can go to mass 10 ,000 times, 20 ,000 times in your life and still die imperfect.

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How is that the sacrifice of Christ? Which, according to the book of Hebrews, perfects those for whom it was made.

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They don't have any foundation for true and lasting peace. It is a man - centered system.

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And man will always mess it up. Why do we have peace with God? It's through our

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Lord Jesus Christ. And it's because God is the one who justifies. Justification is not some process we work.

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It is a divine act. God justifies.

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And we cannot outdo Him. But to establish the heart of the message, one had to deal with Rome's authority claims.

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And her subjection of Scripture to the authority of papalism. This led the formal principle of the

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Reformation. That being sola scriptura. This came about only after the material principle was enunciated.

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In other words, it was when Rome started responding to what Luther was saying that Luther was forced to recognize there's a contradiction between what

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Rome's teaching and what the Bible teaches. So I have to pick my authorities here. What am

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I going to go with? And it is right here that Rome attacks us all the time in this day.

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And it is right here where Rome has won the battle for many people who are not

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Catholics but they're not Protestants anymore. And maybe they never were.

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When you have someone who abandons sola scriptura, the highest view of Scripture, that Scripture is sufficient to function as the sole rule of faith in the church.

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Once they've abandoned that, they're not really Protestants anymore. For example, this means the gospel of grace is founded upon the assertion that the

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Scriptures are sufficient to define the gospel. If you don't believe the Scriptures are sufficient to define the gospel, then you're not going to have any foundation to publish, to proclaim anything with authority.

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Rome denies this to this very day by definition and by necessity. This is one of the major differences between us.

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And it was so painful for me to watch that dialogue that took place only last week.

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I think it was last weekend. Maybe even maybe it was even just the beginning of last week.

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Between Frank Beckwith and Timothy George Wheaton. Because all these things just danced around.

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We know what the issues are. For example, before session of the

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Council of Trent, 1546. Furthermore, to check unbridled spirits, it decrees that is the

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Council, that no one relying on his own judgment shall on matters of faith and morals pertaining to the edification of Christian doctrine, distorting the

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Holy Scriptures in accordance with his own conceptions, presume to interpret them contrary to that sense which

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Holy Mother Church, to whom it belongs to judge of their true sense of interpretation has held and holds.

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You can't interpret those scriptures contrary to how the Church interprets them. Because the

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Church is infallible. Well, how do you check the Church's interpretation? You can't. Once you make the

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Church infallible, you don't have sola scriptura. You have sola ecclesia.

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The Church as the sole, final authority. Rome can talk all she wants about being subject to Scripture and tradition.

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She is not. Think of the last two dogmas that Rome has defined about marriage.

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Bodily Assumption and Immaculate Conception. How do you check those out? How do you test as to whether those are truly dogmas?

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Things that must be believed to be a part of Christ's Church. You can't do it by Scripture.

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There's nothing about either one in Scripture, by any stretch of the imagination. So what's the only authority you can believe that upon?

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The authority of the Church. I'll never forget debating Jerry Mattox in Long Island back in the middle 1990s.

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Jerry Mattox when he'd be converted to Roman Catholicism was a doctoral student at Westminster Theological Seminary, Masters degree from Gordon Conway.

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And he's no longer an Orthodox Roman Catholic, he's a Seventh -day Countess. But at the time he was with, he'd been with Catholic Answers, he was the first person

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I ever debated on anything in the 1990, August of 1990. And he had left

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Catholic Answers and I debated him on Long Island. And in a debate on, I believe it was either the

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Solus Matura or the Doctrines of Mary, one or two, he made this statement before this entire audience. He said, you have the exact same warrant and foundation to believe in the

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Resurrection of Jesus Christ as you have to believe in the bodily Assumption of Mary. And that's the church.

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Exact same thing. Think about that. A belief you can't even find in the early church placed on the exact same level as the

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Resurrection of Christ. That's what happens when you abandon Solus Matura.

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And that's why they attack Solus Matura constantly. Constantly attack the

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Solus Matura. Well, how do we respond to that in six minutes? We look at texts that address the subject.

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The classical texts. You probably know them, but let me just make sure to emphasize them. As Paul said to Timothy, Timothy you've known from a young person the

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Holy Scriptures. They're able to make you wise in the salvation which is in Christ Jesus. Timothy, the man of God, listen to me, all

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Scripture is breathed out by God. It's possible for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness.

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The man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work. I asked Patrick Madrid, then vice president of Catholic Answers in a debate in San Diego 1993.

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I said, Mr. Madrid, is it a good work to teach the infallibility of the Pope? Well, of course it is.

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How do the Scriptures equip you to teach the infallibility of the bishop of Rome?

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It says for every good work. The Scriptures can equip you for every good work. How do the

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Scriptures do that? Well, of course he came up with an answer. But it wasn't a good answer.

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Because the Scriptures know nothing about a bishop of Rome. There was no bishop in Rome when any of the

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New Testament was written. In fact, there was no monarchical episcopate, that is a one bishop form of church government in the city of Rome until around 140.

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Yet the Scriptures say, Paul says, Timothy, the Scriptures are sufficient to do what?

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To equip you for every good work that you as the man of God are called to do. And when you're called to reprove, to teach, to correct, to train in righteousness, there's only one source you need to go to,

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Timothy. You would expect that this is where Paul would have said to Timothy, well,

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Timothy, just follow the successors of Peter in Rome. That's where you need to go. He doesn't do that.

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He does not direct him to the successors of the bishop of Rome. He directs him to the

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Scriptures just as he did in Acts 20 with the Ephesian elders. Knowing this, first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture, 2

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Peter 1, 20 -21, no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation, or the prophet's own interpretation.

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No prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. There's something special about Scripture.

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The traditions of Rome do not have this origin. They do not have this background.

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They do not have this source. When Rome says, oh, well, the apostles delivered these things via tradition.

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To whom? Show me. Show me anybody. If you want to go to, oh, for example,

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I'll close this one. If you want to go to 2 Thessalonians 2 .15 Still then, brothers, stand firm and hold the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter.

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This is where they always go. See, here you have tradition, and tradition exists in two ways. It exists by our spoken word, preaching, and the written letter.

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There you have it, oral and the letter. Why don't you Protestants believe that? Well, what was actually going on here?

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What's Paul talking about? When he talks about our spoken word, is he talking about something that was not to be found in the scripture?

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That he preached something to the Thessalonians that is not to be found anywhere in the New Testament? Are you telling me seriously that when he preached to the

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Thessalonians, he taught them about papal infallibility, the bishop of Rome that didn't exist yet? That he taught them the

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Marian dogmas? How could he have taught them the Marian dogmas? The Marian probably wasn't even dead yet. Are you telling me that all these things that Rome has added to the gospel of Jesus Christ, Paul taught these things to the

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Thessalonians? Show me that historically and they know they can't. That's why in the late 1800's

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John Henry Cardinal Newman developed the concept of the development hypothesis.

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Where you don't have to actually find things in history anymore. It's just sort of like the acorn in the tree, you see.

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You know, as long as you can find a little something that might be similar to that, then it can grow over time into this great tree.

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He realized there was no way. The early church did not believe what modern Roman Catholicism teaches.

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I said many, many times to opponents, show me a single bishop at the

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Council of Nicea in 8325 that believed everything you believed dogmatically. It can't happen.

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Many of the things Rome has defined as dogma have not even been thought of yet. So it was amazing when

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Pope John Paul died and for weeks on end all you hear are people on the radio and the television talking about how oh the church of 2 ,000 years we've all believed the same things for 2 ,000 years.

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That is a naive and fallacious assertion that cannot be substantiated.

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Sola Ecclesia versus Sola Scriptura. So what about us today? Well, we face all the same issues.

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The gospel has not changed. The issues of the gospel has not changed. How man was made right before God has not changed.

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Rome seems to be changing, morphing while claiming to be the same, changing at the same time.

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Many Roman Catholic priests, they are universalists or at least inclusivists. That's all true.

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But the pressures against us to abandon the gospel remain the same.

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Our society says how dare you say there is only one way of salvation? How dare you say there is only one way of peace with God?

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And so each and every day you in essence are brought before the council and you are asked will you recant?

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Will you go along with the world and say well, that's just true for me, it's not necessarily true for you.

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Will you with Luther say here I stand, I can't do anything,

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God help me. God enabled him to do that and we have all lived with the benefit of his bravery.

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What about future generations? What about us? Will we by God's grace stand firm on these issues?

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If we love the gospel, if we love God, and if we love our fellow man, we must continue the work of the reformation.

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Let's pray. Indeed our heavenly father we thank you for this brief period of time where once again we can think back and we can thank you for those who have come before us who are willing to give everything that the gospel might be heard.

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We would ask that you would help us to understand these things, live in light of these truths, and live to your honor and glory in this society and our day.