RLL Ep.47: On the Constitution, Cadavers and Catholics and United Methodists Together

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Hi everybody, this is Steve Matthews. Thanks for joining me for episode 47 of Radio Luke's Lucid. The title of today's episode is
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On the Constitution, Cadavers, and Catholics and United Methodists Together. Now, okay, that's kind of a weird combination of things there.
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It doesn't really maybe sound like it's going to go together, but I hope that as we go through this that you see the reason that I've put those all in the title.
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Now, it does have one very obvious advantage. That title, that title, that title doesn't mean, and of course it's an alliteration.
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You know, it's where you use the same letter for words close together.
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I've always have to been, I've always been kind of a sucker for alliteration, like Constitution, Cadavers, and Catholics, and United Methodists Together.
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That, I don't know, I think that's kind of a nice alliteration there, using the letter C, words beginning with the letter
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C. Well, you know, today it's kind of interesting. You know, last week I mentioned that I was getting started on doing my live stream at about,
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I don't know, was it 12 30 or so on a Sunday morning, and I swore I promised
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I'm going to come back and I'm going to do a little bit better job of starting at a little bit better time.
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And I actually was able to accomplish it this week. I'm a little bit shocked. It's not super early.
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It's right now, it's about 10 30 p .m. Eastern time. So I beat my record last week by a couple hours, and that's pretty good.
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I think that's a respectable show. I'd like to do it earlier in the day, but I didn't quite get around to it.
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One of the reasons was because I was actually pretty lazy, and I did something I don't do all that often today, and that is
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I actually took an afternoon nap, which was pretty awesome. I have to admit, I truly did enjoy that experience.
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I kind of put a YouTube video on. I just kind of closed my eyes and kind of semi -slept and semi -listened to the video and some things like that.
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It was great. You know, it's funny, I remember when I was a kid, you know, and my mom would make me take an afternoon nap.
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I just hated it. I mean, it was like the worst thing. I just hated it. Why do I have to take this stupid nap? Well, you know, now, of course, as an adult,
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I think that I would give all of my possessions sometimes. I think I'd give all of my possessions just to have an hour's nap sometime in the afternoon, and I can't have one.
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Isn't it? It's kind of funny how that works, isn't it? I mean, the things we have, we don't want, and the things we can't have, we earnestly desire.
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And I don't know, I think there's probably a lesson there in Christian contentment somewhere, but I'll leave that for another time.
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But anyway, so I did at least get started a couple hours earlier this week than I did last week.
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And on top of that, I have a cup here full of, it's actually this hot apple cider that you can brew in a kerrig.
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And I have to admit, that stuff is, it's almost sinfully good, you know what
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I mean? It's really good. I love this stuff, and it's always a real treat to get a cup of that hot apple cider on a cold winter day.
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So that, I guess you call that comfort food, something like that. Anyway, it's good, and it's nice to have a mug full of that right now to start doing a live stream.
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So yeah, anyway, what are we going to talk about here today? Well, I'm going to talk about something that I promised myself that I wasn't going to talk about.
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And that is, I'm going to talk about the impeachment of Donald Trump.
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And I really, really, really did not want to talk about this, but it's been the biggest story this past week.
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And this being Saturday, February the 13th, the news just broke,
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I don't know, it's been within the last couple hours or so, that they acquitted Donald Trump at his second impeachment trial.
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And I'm going to try something here. I can do a screen share here on this restream.
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And let's see how well this works here. I don't know, hopefully you can see that here.
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I'm going to try to maximize this. Okay, here's an article, and this is from the AP. Trump acquitted, denounced a historic impeachment trial.
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And you kind of scroll through here, and it says, Donald Trump was acquitted Saturday of inciting the horrific attack on the
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US Capitol, including a historic impeachment trial that spared him the first ever conviction of a current or former
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US president, but exposed the fragility of America's democratic traditions, and left a divided nation to come to terms with a violent spark by his defeated presidency.
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And I'm not going to read through all of this. I'll put the link in the show notes here.
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But some of the language you see here in the
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AP is kind of interesting. So I'm going to read this one paragraph here. It says, the quick trial, the nation's first of a former president, showed in raw and emotional detail how perilously close the invaders had come to destroying the nation's deep tradition of a peaceful transfer of presidential power after Trump had refused to concede the election.
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Rallying outside the White House, he unleashed a mob of supporters to fight like hell for him at the Capitol, just as Congress was certifying
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Democrat Joe Biden's victory. As hundreds stormed the building, some in tactical gear engaging in bloody combat with police, lawmakers fled for their lives.
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Five people died. Okay, so that's the AP. So, you know, I like how they portray this.
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I mean, essentially, they say that, you know, you kind of get the sense that the writers of the AP really think that Donald Trump was actually guilty of inciting insurrection.
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Because, I mean, the way they described here, listen to the language. I'm just going to read that again. It says here, rallying outside the
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White House, he, referring to Donald Trump, unleashed a mob of supporters to fight like hell for him at the Capitol. Well, this is really fundamentally dishonest journalism.
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Donald Trump did not unleash a mob of supporters to fight like hell for him at the
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Capitol. What he told people to do was to go peacefully and patriotically protest.
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That's not unleashing a mob of people to go fight like hell in some literal sense of the word.
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And the interesting thing was, of course, is that the actual violence that took place started during his speech.
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So, I mean, the people that were there that were apparently doing the initial, you know, the initial violence there at the
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Capitol building weren't even there listening to Trump's speech. They were there, you know, they were there, they were already there at the
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Capitol. Now, of course, it's one thing to say that Trump did not incite resurrection, incite insurrection.
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That Trump did not incite insurrection, which I don't believe that he did. It's another thing, you know, somebody could come back and argue, well, what
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Trump did was unwise. Now, I think you could make that argument to say maybe his rally on that day, maybe it was unwise, you know, especially in light of the events that took place.
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I think the events that took place did substantial damage to not just to kind of gave his presidency a black eye, rightly or wrongly, but also
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I think it definitely hurt, you know, Trump supporters. You know, it's given the
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Democrats a real opportunity to strike out at the people that they see as their political enemies and, you know, and brand them domestic terrorists and all sorts of other terrible things.
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They're using this as an excuse to expand state power. I mean, they still have troops stationed in Washington, D .C.
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They still have, as far as I'm aware, all the barbed wire fencing and all that stuff up. And you really seriously wonder if that's ever going to go away or at least go away anytime soon.
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It's very troubling what they've done. Yeah, I mean, in a sane country, in a law -abiding country, what would happen is that those people who broke the law at the
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Capitol would receive, you know, whatever punishment is due to them. And we go on.
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But that's not what's happening here. And what they're using this for, what the establishment seems to be using this for, is as a means to crack down on the liberties of the
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American people. And I think that that's very dangerous. And this is something that we as Christians need to be very much concerned about because some of the language—and
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I talked a little bit about this last week about the war on domestic terror—and some of the language that's coming out of people such as John Brennan or the bill that's there before Congress.
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What is it called? The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, I think is the title of it.
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And it contains some very incendiary language and some very concerning language that could, if this is put into effect, that bill ever does become law, do serious damage to the civil liberties of the
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American people. And this is not just people who are, say, conservatives or Republicans or Trump supporters, but all
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Americans. And all Americans should be very much concerned about the way that event on January the 6th is being used.
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It's deeply concerning. And you don't have to be a Trump supporter to be concerned about it.
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But anyway, you know, I promised myself that I wasn't going to talk about impeachment because I really don't think that the—it's not a topic that I find—I don't want to lend it any legitimacy.
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But again, it's kind of difficult when this is the biggest story in the week to not talk about it at all.
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So I did want to at least touch base on a few things and maybe bring to light a couple items maybe that haven't necessarily been talked about in the mainstream press.
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You know, that's one of the things when I do some of these, when I do the write a blog piece or if I do a podcast,
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I try to bring a little bit different angle to the story maybe than what other people have covered.
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So that was the basic outline there from the AP. But, you know, one of the things
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I've thought to myself about this whole impeachment trial is that it's just simply stupid. And I know maybe that sounds like a harsh word to use, but I don't know what else to say about it.
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That simply that it's stupid. And the reason why I say it's stupid is, well, just read the
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Constitution. Article 2, Section 4 of the United States Constitution reads, quote, the
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President, Vice President, and all civil officers of the United States shall be removed from office on impeachment for and conviction of treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors.
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So, you know, again, get the language, shall be removed from office. Now, Donald Trump is not in office.
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Therefore, he cannot be removed from office. And the idea of having an impeachment trial for someone who's not even a president any longer is ridiculous.
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I mean, this just goes to show, I think it goes to show a number of things. I mean, I think on one hand, it just shows the complete disrespect that we have in the year 2021 for logic.
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Yeah, I think back on the, there was that essay that John Robbins wrote, and this goes back, it's called what the crisis of our time.
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And in that article, in that Trinity Review, and it's also something that was been republished in a lot of in subsequent books and things that have been issued by the
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Trinity Foundation. John Robbins talked about the rejection of logic in, you know, modern in the modern day
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West. Now, of course, we go back to the Constitution, it was written in the 1780s. And it was written at a time when there was still respect for logic.
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And so when the writers of the Constitution talk about removing a president from office, and they put in the impeachment provision, they probably never dreamed that it would be used to try to impeach, quote, someone who had never been, who currently wasn't even in office any longer.
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I mean, just on the surface, the logic is ridiculous. And that's one of the reasons why
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I haven't wanted to talk about it, to discuss it, to write about it, because the whole thing just strikes me as just, it's logically absurd.
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And I don't really like talking a lot about logical absurdities. But I suppose in this case, maybe I'll at least have to just to point out the degree of the absurdity.
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You know, and that's really the thing in the first place. And of course,
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I think secondly, you know, it's, I mean, it seems to me that it's really been used by Donald Trump's political enemies to excoriate both him as well as his supporters.
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And I think unfairly, I mean, when you think about it, I mean, they're trying to charge Donald Trump with insurrection.
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He told people to go peacefully and patriotically protest. That's not insurrection. That's not inciting to insurrection.
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As I mentioned earlier, I think someone could come back and say, well, it wasn't a wise thing for him to hold that rally.
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And I think you can make that argument. But saying that something is unwise is not the same thing as saying that Donald Trump incited insurrection.
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I do not believe that he did. And those people who went overboard on January the 6th, you know, somebody, you know, they broke the law.
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I mean, there's some video out there of some violence that took place.
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But, you know, those are, you know, those people, they should be punished in some respect or another.
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You know, some of them maybe did some things more than others did, probably. I think they're probably people who are guilty of breaking some law.
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And those people ought to receive their just punishment. And that's the end of it. But of course, they don't want to let things ever, you know, they don't ever want to let things just drop.
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You know, they want to keep pushing it and use this, as I had also mentioned earlier, to undermine the civil rights of the
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American people. And that's a very dangerous thing. And that's a very concerning thing. Now, you know, it's interesting, one critic in kind of talking about the whole, oh, this kind of impeachment farce, which
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I think is really probably the best term to use, just call it a farce. He likened it to something called, it was interesting, he called it the
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Cadaver Synod. And I remember reading about that years ago.
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And when he was talking about the Cadaver Synod, I had to look this up a little bit. And the Cadaver Synod is something that took place in Rome in 1897.
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And what it was is that it was one pope, it was Pope Stephen VI, who decided to put on trial the dead body of his predecessor, the predecessor pope, who went by the name of Formosus.
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And Formosus had been dead for, I think, about seven months at that point. But they dug the man's,
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I guess they got his corpse out of the tomb. And they propped it up in a chair.
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And they charged him, Formosus that is, they charged his corpse at any rate, with transmigrating sees in violation of canon law, of perjury, and of serving as a bishop while actually a layman.
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Those were the charges. And oddly enough, he was found guilty. He was convicted of these, probably on all counts,
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I don't know for sure, but probably on all counts. He didn't really have the ability to speak for himself or to face his accusers.
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And this is kind of a bizarre thing. And, of course, that's not the first time that you see that sort of thing taking place in the
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Roman Catholic Church. There is probably, I wouldn't be surprised if there were a number of people who had something similar done to them.
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But I know of one, there was one other person, one well -known person who was convicted post -mortem.
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And, of course, that was John Wycliffe. He received similar treatment. Of course, John Wycliffe is, you know, sometimes as Protestants, we call him the
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Morning Star of the Reformation, because he taught very vigorously against a lot of the doctrines of the
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Roman Catholic Church. And, of course, one of his great achievements, too, was translating the Bible into English.
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And his followers, the people that propagated the English translation that he made, they were called the
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Lollards. And this was all in the 14th century. I mean, it was some, you know, it was well over 100 years before Martin Luther was even born that this was taking place.
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So you see there's this great movement of God, of the Spirit, taking place in England in the 1400s.
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But, of course, Rome didn't much like John Wycliffe. And Wycliffe died in 1384.
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Now, some years later, and this is in 1415, so this is what, 30, 31 years later,
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Wycliffe was declared a heretic by the Council of Constance. And the
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Council of Constance declared that Wycliffe's writings should be burned. And they also declared that his body ought to be removed from consecrated ground.
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And so they dug him up, you know, 30 -some years after he had died, they exhumed his body, they burned his body, and then they cast his ashes into the
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River Swift. So John Wycliffe received kind of the indignity of having that done to him after he had died.
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And, of course, John Wycliffe is a great hero of the Christian faith, and we remember him, but this was certainly a great injustice that was done to him after his death, again, by the
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Roman Catholic Church. So there's another example of Rome doing that sort of thing.
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Now, that leads me a bit into another topic that I did want to discuss.
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And in this case, this is, I was talking about, this is the third C. We talked about the
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Constitution and how the Constitution applies to impeachment. We talked about the cadavers, or cadaver especially, in the issue with Pope Formosus.
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And then also there's the matter of Catholics and Methodists together. So this is our third
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C here. And there was an article that I read. This, I think, came out,
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I guess, what's this, the 13th? So yeah, this came out three days ago. It's dated, it's a press release from the United Conference of Catholic Bishops.
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It's dated February the 10th, 2021. And the title is that Catholics and United Methodists Together is a collaborative publication resulting from decades of dialogue.
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And you can read through some of this here. And it reads this, representatives of the
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United Methodist Church in the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, USCCB, announced the release of the results of its latest round of dialogue in the form of a two -part publication.
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This eighth round of dialogue was co -chaired by Bishop David P. Talley of the Catholic Diocese of Memphis and Bishop Peggy Johnson, resident bishop of the
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Philadelphia Episcopal Area of the United Methodist Church. Now, of course, one of the things, there's a few things that we can talk about here in this, just in this paragraph.
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I guess in, one of the obvious things here is that the
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Roman Catholic Church has scored another ecumenical victory. And this time they've managed to pull the
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United Methodist Church into its orbit. Now, of course,
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Methodism, the doctrine of John Wesley, Wesleyanism, or Wesleyanism, I guess,
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Wesleyism, Wesleyanism, I guess is the correct word. As a
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Calvinist, as a Presbyterian, I don't have a very high view of Methodist doctrine, and I apologize if there's any, well,
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I was going to say, you know, I hope I don't overly offend any Methodists, if you happen to be listening.
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But as a Calvinist, I have substantial disagreements with John Wesley and with Methodism.
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You know, even in its most biblical or conservative form, I think it's a seriously flawed theology.
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And I can't say otherwise. I mean, the logic compels me to say, you know,
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I disagree with Wesleyan doctrine. Nevertheless, I mean, it was a church that at least historically was not at least formally connected with Rome, and now at least one substantial branch of the
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Methodist Church is connected with Rome, the United Methodist Church. They've signed this accord or this agreement with the
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United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. And they go on here, and this is the press release, it goes on, it talks about, oh, let's see here.
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There's two books. The first book is subtitled, We Believe, We Pray, We Act, emphasizes the importance of our shared recognition of one another's baptisms and pastoral commentaries on the
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Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the commandment to love God and neighbor. The second book, subtitled
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Shared Prayers and Resources, offers a practical guide for Methodists and Catholics to learn, pray, and worship together.
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Well, here's the problem. Of course, this is the case anytime you have Roman Catholic ecumenical activities with Protestants, evangelicals, what have you.
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The Roman Catholics always win, and the Protestants always lose. And here they're talking about shared prayers, recognitions of one another's baptism, et cetera.
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Well, Roman Catholic baptism is not legitimate Christian baptism. In fact, there's a book published by the
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Trinity Foundation, I think it was a James Henry Thornwell, I think. I hope
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I'm not messing that name up. But there's a book that's called Sacramental Sorcery, and Thornwell goes on.
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He was a Southern Presbyterian, Thornwell was, and he explains in that book that Roman Catholic baptism is not
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Christian baptism. And so, I mean, there's a very serious problem right there.
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And as far as praying together, again, Roman Catholics are not Christians, and the Roman Catholic Church is not a
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Christian church. Now, I realize that that is a pretty radical statement.
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It's probably a pretty offensive statement to a lot of people. And there's certainly a lot of pushback that you're going to find, not just from Roman Catholics.
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In fact, you might even find more pushback from Protestants, if you were to say that, than from Roman Catholics.
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I remember a number of years ago, I was at a Bible study, and we were discussing some things. Somehow the topic of Rome came up, and I made the point that the
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Roman Catholic Church believed in the real presence of Christ in the mass. And there were people there who should have known better.
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I mean, these are people who, theologically speaking, knew quite a bit.
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There was, in fact, someone who even had been a minister at the time. And I got a lot of pushback for that statement.
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And there were a lot of people who said, no, no, no, Rome doesn't teach that. Well, of course, Rome teaches that.
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That is absolutely central. That's not just a fringe doctrine. That is a central doctrine of the
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Roman Catholic Church. They believe in the real presence of Christ in the mass. Now, nowhere is this taught in Scripture.
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That is a novel doctrine. And as Christians, we have to condemn that from the
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Scriptures. And so there's really no way that we can recognize one another's baptism or pray together or say, okay, we're fellow believers because we are not.
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I mean, Rome explicitly rejects the gospel of justification by belief alone.
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They condemn people. The Council of Trent condemned anyone who believes in the idea in justification by belief or faith alone.
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They condemned them. And if you are a biblical Protestant, if you believe the doctrines of grace, you and I, all of us together, we stand under dozens and dozens and dozens of condemnations of anathemas from the
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Roman Catholic Church, and they have never removed those. And it used to be Rome was a little bit more honest than what they are now.
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And they would talk about Protestants. When they would discuss Protestants, they would call them heretics. And if you believe
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Roman Catholic doctrine, then yes, it logically must follow that Protestants are heretics.
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But of course, that was back in a day when there was at least a little bit more respect for logic. Now, I'm not saying that Protestants are heretics.
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They're not. Protestants are Christians, at least ones who actually believe Protestant doctrine.
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If you believe the doctrines that are outlined, say, in the Westminster Confession of Faith, if you believe those, what the
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Confession teaches about the Scriptures, what the Confession teaches about how we are saved, how we're justified through faith in Christ alone.
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If you believe those things, you're a Christian. You can't not be a Christian and believe those things. But you can understand them and not believe them, but if you both understand them and you accept those concepts, justification by faith alone, if you understand that and you accept it as true, you are a
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Christian. And you're not a heretic, you are a
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Christian. And if you are a Christian, you can't accept what the
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Roman Catholic Church teaches. We talked about earlier in the first topic we talked about, we talked about the
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Constitution and what it says about impeachment. Impeachment is the removal of a president, vice president, or I think what was the word, some other public official.
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Let's see, the president, vice president, all civil officers of the United States shall be removed from office on impeachment, foreign conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.
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So there's three classes of persons, there's presidents, vice presidents, and all civil officers of the
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United States. They're removed by impeachment. Logic, good sound logic requires us to say that somebody has to be in office in order to be removed from that office.
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Again, there's not a lot of respect for logic here in the 21st century. And it's been that way for a long time.
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This isn't something that just started here in the 21st century, this has been going on for a very long time, probably at least the last 200 years.
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If you look at the history of philosophy and theology, how irrationalism has really come to dominate the way we think or maybe don't think in the 21st century.
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So you can see it on the impeachment side of things. And you can see it here with these ecumenical dialogues, you know,
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Rome and some of these liberal Protestants, they want to put logic aside, they want to try to square a circle, they want to try to find unity in things where there really isn't any unity.
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And again, you can come back and you can criticize Methodist doctrine, but the point simply being is that this is just another notch in Rome's belt.
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This isn't the first church that they've struck an accord like this before. I know that they have had some accords with Lutheran churches, and I believe various, or I don't know if maybe accord is not the right word, but certainly agreements or understandings or documents of various sorts that have been signed by people from both the
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Catholics and Lutheran side of things. And I think there are some reformed churches in Europe where those agreements have been made, and they're not going to stop.
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You know, Rome is not going to stop. I mean, the whole idea is to pull all of the
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Protestant churches into the orbit of Rome. That's what they want to do. And it was interesting,
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I was reading a piece, going back and rereading a Trinity review from a couple years ago called
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If You Can't Beat Him, Join Him, by a gentleman named Marco Reale.
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I hope I'm pronouncing his last name right. It's R -E -A -L -E. I don't know if it's Reale or Reale. He actually is
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Italian, but he was born in Italy, but he lives in Great Britain now.
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And he's a Protestant, and he's a believer, he's a brother in Christ, and he's someone that, he wrote a very interesting piece.
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And it's actually something I hope to be able to interview him sometime in the not -too -distant future for Trinity Foundation Radio.
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So Lord willing, that'll be an interview that'll happen fairly soon. But when I was reading his piece, he was talking about Vatican II and how
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Vatican II really represented a big change strategy for Rome. Previous to Vatican II, when the
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Roman Catholics, the Magisterium, the Catholics, or the
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Popes, and the Cardinals, and the Bishops, what have you, when they would talk about Protestants, they would refer to them as heretics. Which, again, if you believe
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Roman Catholic doctrine to be true, that's logically what you would have to call Protestants. Again, not that Protestants are heretics, they're
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Christians. If they believe biblical doctrine, if they believe the doctrines of the Reformation, the doctrines of grace, the souls of the
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Reformation, they're not heretics. But if you believe Catholic doctrine, you must say that Protestants are heretics.
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But during the 1960s, during the Vatican, the second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, when that took place in the 60s,
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Rome tried to kind of change its tone. It kind of wanted to kind of soften the edges, I think. Maybe somebody in Rome started to think maybe that they could, as the saying goes, that they could catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
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And so instead of going and using the language of heretics to talk about Protestants, to talk about Bible -believing
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Christians, they started calling them separated brethren. Now, the term separated brethren I don't think originated with Vatican II, but it became much more prominent during Vatican II and, of course, in the years subsequent to that.
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And what's interesting is the document in Vatican II where this was really discussed was a document from 1968.
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It's called Unitatis Redintegratio, which is
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Latin, and it simply just means restoring unity. So they have this doctrine called restoring unity, and then they talk about Protestants as separated brethren.
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And so the whole theme of this, well,
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I guess it was an encyclical. I think I'm using the correct term for that. The whole purpose behind this document is to say, oh, so we've got these separated brethren over here, and in the interest of restoring unity, we're going to not call them heretics.
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We're going to call them separated brethren and hopefully try to bring them back to the orbit of Holy Mother Church.
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That seems to be the thought here behind Roman Catholicism. Well, again, logically, there really cannot be any unity.
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I mean, there's a reason why there was a Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther, when he nailed his 95 theses to the door at Wittenberg Church, he didn't do that with the thought of starting.
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He didn't say, I'm going to start the Protestant Reformation on October 31st, 1517. That wasn't how it was.
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I mean, Martin Luther had some complaints against the teachings of Rome, and he wanted to have a debate.
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He wanted to have a scholarly debate. He wanted to fix the problems with Rome. He saw Rome as a legitimate church that needed some fixing.
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It needed to be reformed. Well, what he found out Rome wasn't going to be reformed.
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There was no interest in the part of the popes or the bishops or the cardinals or the priests or the people who ran the
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Roman Catholic Church. There was no interest in changing their doctrine. They were quite happy with things the way they were.
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Of course, they declared Luther a heretic, and they excommunicated him, and thus really the
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Reformation began in earnest. At least for all the problems that the
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Roman Catholic Church had, at least they were willing to recognize the fact that what Luther was teaching didn't square with what they were teaching, and that there was no middle ground there, that either they were going to have to repent and come over to Luther's side, or Luther was going to have to come over to their side, or barring that neither side was willing to move, that they were going to have to go their separate ways, or from their standpoint, they wanted to boot
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Martin Luther out, which they did, which they did, and that's the split that exists.
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And the issues that divided Rome from biblical
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Christianity have not gone away. They haven't gone away at all. Justification by faith alone, that was the hinge on which the church turned, or I think the head
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Martin Luther put it, he said that was the doctrine of the standing or falling church. That was the central issue at the time of the
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Reformation, and it's the central issue in the year 2021. That hasn't changed, you know, some 504 years later, yeah, 504 years later now, we're going on 504 years,
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I guess this fall it'll be 504 years on October 31st, 2021.
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But that doctrine of justification by faith alone, how is a sinner declared righteous before an all -holy
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God, that is the central issue. And if you can't agree on that, there's no basis for unity.
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And of course there isn't any. I mean, there's no basis for Roman Catholics and Christians to get together and pray together and recognize one another's baptism, because we don't even agree on how sinful men can be saved, you know, how sinners can approach an all -holy
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God and live to tell about it. We can't agree on that.
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I mean, and again, you know, this is an issue that hasn't gone away, even though the
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Roman Catholic Church, and in response to this, at least partially in response to that, a lot of,
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I think at the very best, I think that you could say, a lot of very confused evangelicals have tried to soften the edges and tried to find some common ground.
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There isn't any common ground. There's none to be found. Well, anyway, one of the things about this, one of the reasons
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I wanted to talk about this is because in some respects, reading this whole thing about the documents and the collaboration between Rome and the
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United Methodists, it's just another example of some of the, at least from my perspective, very thoroughly depressing news that is out there every day.
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I mean, there's just not a whole lot of good news. In fact, I think there's, I said it last week, it seems like there isn't any good news at all a lot of times.
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And you see stuff like this, and it's just, well, yeah, I mean, okay, there goes another church organization getting sucked into the orbit of Rome.
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And of course, you can tell the United Methodist Church is already substantially in very, very bad shape because they talk here, they talk, one of the participants from the
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United Methodist side is somebody by the name of Bishop Peggy Johnson. She's a resident bishop of the
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Philadelphia Episcopal Area of the United Methodist Church. Well, now, we don't agree as a
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Presbyterian, I don't agree with the Episcopal form of church government.
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I'm a Presbyterian, so I agree with Presbyterian church government. And so,
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I mean, that's one problem. But another problem here, of course, is they have a woman in that position. And I know that this is very controversial in a lot of places, but the
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Apostle Paul did say, I do not suffer a woman to teach or have exercise authority over a man. Women should not be in positions of deacons or of elders or of preachers, ministers.
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There's no biblical basis for doing that. What that is, is that is a result of feminism.
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Of course, feminism is something that's been very prominent over the last 200 years, and it's gone through various waves, and it has done enormous damage to churches, and it's done enormous damage to society at large.
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And I don't want to go down that route too much right now, but I hope to be able to talk about that some in more detail at some time.
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But, I mean, you see this very commonly, and the fact that you have the United Methodists, that they have a female bishop representing them at these talks with Rome, I mean, it's just indicative of how badly fallen that church is, because it's not difficult to understand that a woman should not be in a position like that.
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And again, by a lot of people, that would be considered a radical thought.
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That just, again, goes to show you how little respect we have for theology, and just how badly decomposed the
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Protestant Reformation has become in our day. But more commentary on that,
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I'll leave that for another time. But one of the reasons I wanted to bring this up is because, again, you look at what's going on here between Rome and the
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Methodists, and frankly, it's discouraging to me. I look at that, and I get frustrated.
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It's like, oh, the bad guys win another one. But I wanted to give you a little different take on that, because one of the things, as Christians, as Reformed believers, is we believe in the decrees of God.
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We believe that God is sovereign, and that He works all things according to His will, and for His own glory, and also for the good of His own people.
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That's kind of a very brief summary of the whole idea of the decrees of God. God is not passive in history.
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He brings these things about. He doesn't just allow things to happen, but He actually brings them about. And God, in His wisdom and His power, has brought it about that the
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United Methodists and the Roman Catholics would get together and sign these documents. And He does that for His own glory, again, and also not just His own glory, but also for the good of His people.
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And I wanted to give you an example, just maybe a little personal testimony here of what this means. And so, when you see stuff like this, that you don't get totally discouraged.
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I mean, it's frustrating to watch this type of thing, but as Christians, we know ultimately that the good guys win, even though there seems to be so much evil going on, and there seems to be nothing to stop it.
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And I wanted to talk a little bit about this, something from my own experience, and how I came to Christ, how
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I came to faith and a Reformed understanding of Christianity.
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And this goes back into the 1990s, and I was in my late 20s or so, and I was doing a lot of reading in theology.
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I had kind of grown up in church, but I had gotten away from it. And I was doing a lot of reading in theology, and I was also very interested in politics.
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I still am interested in politics. I think I've maybe mentioned this before, I've always been interested in politics. I don't remember a time when
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I wasn't. But I was reading, it was actually the National Review, I had a subscription to the
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National Review. And in the National Review, they always had, typically had a book review section.
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And I remember reading in the National Review that there was this new book out, it was called
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Evangelicals and Catholics Together, and it was Chuck Colson or Charles Colson was sort of the lead, one that was given the most credit for writing this,
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I guess you'd call him the lead author of it. And the review in the
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National Review was very positive, they thought this was a great book. And that didn't surprise, I guess it's not surprising, because of course, the
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National Review was founded by William Buckley. And he's deceased now, but if you remember
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William Buckley, he was a very prominent conservative for a number of decades from the 50s, I'd say well up through the end of the century, really,
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I can't remember when he died. But he lived, I think, at least in the 90s, and maybe even after that.
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But he was a very prominent figure in American conservatism, and he was a Roman Catholic. And the editorial stance of the
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National Review was unsurprisingly, very pro -Roman Catholic. And so this Catholic conservative magazine came out and was talking about how great this new book was called
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Evangelicals and Catholics Together. And in looking at that, I was honestly, I was a bit,
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I was concerned. You know, when I first saw the title, I thought, you know, I don't like the sound of that.
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And I wanted to check it out for myself. So I actually went out and I got a copy. Now this was actually back in the days before Amazon, if you can remember that, this is the mid 90s, when the whole internet thing was just getting going.
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I actually had to go out and buy a copy of it at a bookstore. And there used to be these weird things that are called bookstores.
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I know that that may be hard for some people to understand if you're younger, but they actually did exist.
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There are physical bookstores you could walk in and actually touch books and pull them off the shelves and this sort of thing.
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And so I went and I bought this book, Evangelicals and Catholics Together, and read it. And I was appalled by it.
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Now, you have to understand, I don't know. I may have been saved.
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I don't know for sure. I do know that I didn't know very much theology, but I was doing a lot of reading in Scripture.
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I know I can say this much at the very least. I know that God was calling me.
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It wasn't a thing where Steve Matthews was seeking God on his own.
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God was calling me, and He was causing me to be interested in the Scriptures. He was causing me to do a lot of reading.
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I was reading the Bible, I was reading other books. And when I read this Evangelicals and Catholics Together, I was appalled by it, because it was pretty evident to me, even though I didn't know very much, it was evident to me that the
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Protestant side, as represented by Chuck Colson and some others, they were giving away the store, and the
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Roman Catholics weren't giving up anything. It was a one -way street. I mean, the Roman Catholics were basically eating
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Colson and his buddies' lunch, but they didn't seem to understand that for whatever reason. And I went out, and I actually got the copy that I was looking at earlier before I did the podcast.
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And they have all these kind of very skeptical and sometimes angry notes in the margin criticizing a lot of the statements that were in this book.
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And I remember when I got done with it, I was very bothered by it. I was very upset by it, because it seemed to me almost intuitively that there was something very wrong going on here.
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And I had to stop, and I had to ask myself this question, though, why is this wrong?
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And I started to realize to myself, I couldn't answer that question. If somebody came up to me and said,
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Steve, I know you're opposed to this whole evangelical and Catholics thing, but why is it wrong? And I would have said, well, it's just wrong.
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It can't be right. This is just wrong. And well, I realized that's not really a very good answer, is it?
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Say, well, this is just wrong. So I decided, I said, well, I need to go.
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I need to learn. I need to figure out what's going on here and why I believe what I believe.
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And I did some searching around, and I eventually came across a book by R .C.
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Sproul. And this book by R .C. Sproul, it came out shortly after evangelicals and Catholics came out, and it was written specifically as a refutation of evangelicals and Catholics together.
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So I thought, well, okay, this is very helpful. I had heard the name R .C. Sproul. I didn't know that much about him, but I knew he was a
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Protestant. He was a Presbyterian. And so I started reading through this book, and I remember in the course of reading the book, he provided some,
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I think, some very good information that began helping me to understand things. And one of the things that he taught in that book was the importance of the word alone.
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When you would read through evangelicals and Catholics together, the evangelicals say, yeah, you're saved by faith, and the
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Romans would say, yeah, we're saved by faith, and we all are saved by faith, and blah, blah, blah, and let's get together and have a big group hug and sing kumbaya or something.
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Well, what Sproul started talking about or talked about in this book was he said the word alone is missing.
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He said in Protestant doctrine, in biblical doctrine, we're saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in the finished work of Christ alone.
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And when you would read through these documents, when you read through the evangelicals and Catholics together book, the word alone was missing.
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They would agree, okay, yeah, we're saved by faith, by grace, through faith, because of Christ, but it wouldn't be alone.
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Because of course, if the Roman Catholics, if they're being honest, they can't really say you're saved by faith alone, by grace, through faith, in Christ alone.
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They can't say that because they don't believe that. They believe that Christ has to do his thing, and then you have to do your thing, and you've got to take your works, and you've got to mix your works with Christ's works, and maybe bring in some of the merit of the saints and Mary, and you kind of mix them all together, and that's what gets you into heaven, but that's not.
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It's the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, ascribed, reckoned to us, and received by faith alone, in Christ alone.
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That is how we are saved. That's how we're justified. That's how we're saved. You say justified, I mean, that's really kind of a shorthand for just saying you're saved, because when you're justified, you are saved.
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If you're justified, you inevitably are saved. It's not like what some very confused,
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I think you might even say heretical teachers teach, that somehow you can be justified, but you're not saved.
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Those two things must go together. There's no exception to those, but again,
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I don't want to—that's a great topic, but I'm going to put that aside for now. I'm not going to go down that particular trail at this time, although it's one that's very worth discussing.
49:57
Where was I? Oh, yeah. So the word alone was missing. So that was one big thing that I learned in reading
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R .C. Sproul. There was something else, though, too, that I got out of it. It was one of those lights -on moments, and maybe you've had that, maybe when you came to Christ.
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Have you ever had this experience where you didn't understand something, and all of a sudden, boom, it just became crystal clear to you?
50:24
Well, I remember reading through this, and R .C. Sproul started talking about the
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Protestant doctrine that regeneration precedes faith.
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That first you're regenerated by God, through the Holy Spirit, and that regeneration is what prompts you to have faith in Christ.
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I was just absolutely blown away. I was floored by this. In fact, I don't think I've ever had anything hit me harder in all my life.
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It was just like all of a sudden, you being in a dark room, and boom, all these lights come on. It was really an amazing experience because I had grown up in a church, and this is true of most
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American churches, certainly Arminian churches. They teach that faith precedes regeneration.
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In other words, you have to have faith in Christ, and then at some point, you're regenerated. You're saved.
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Well, no, it's the other way around. It's the regeneration that takes place, and that's what causes you to believe.
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That was really when the Bible as a whole started to make sense to me, for the first time in my life.
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I was 30 years old. I was absolutely just blown away by this. So this is something that I got from reading
51:44
R .C. Sproul. Why was I reading R .C. Sproul? Because I had read Chuck Colson's book,
51:50
Evangelicals and Catholics Together, had been deeply concerned and bothered by it, and understood that I needed to know why it was a problem.
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So it's kind of interesting how God used this really heretical movement,
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Evangelicals and Catholics Together, trying to bring together two sides where there's really no basis for an agreement.
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He used that book to help save me. It wasn't just that book by itself, but he used that to really goad me into doing some study, and in doing that study, he taught me the truth.
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And that's kind of an amazing thing. So that's why I say when you see some of these Evangelical -type movements, or these
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Ecumenical -type movements, and you see the—and it's frustrating, it is.
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It's disheartening to watch some of this stuff. But we know that all things work together for good to those who love
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God, to those who are called according to His purpose, as the Apostle Paul says in Romans chapter 8.
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And this is just an example of how God uses something that is in itself sinful.
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I mean, these bishops, these cardinals, the popes and that, that have pushed for this kind of ecumenism, they mean it for evil.
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But God means that for the good of His people. He certainly meant that for my good.
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And I think that was an amazing thing. And sometimes when
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I look back on it, I think that's maybe kind of an odd way to become a
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Calvinist, to be saved, to become a Calvinist, and in my case, eventually a Clarkian.
53:34
Maybe that's a little bit of an odd story. But that's what God used to bring me to Himself. And so anyway,
53:41
I wanted to share that testimony with you. Well, I think that's probably a good time to wrap things up here for today.
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So I just wanted to say to everybody, thanks for listening. To those watching the live stream, thanks for joining me for the program.
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I really do appreciate that. And until next time, may the Spirit of truth guide you in all truth as you read and study