Is the Lust of the Flesh Sinful?

Welcome, once again, to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris, and we have a guest, a guest who's actually been on the program before, so a repeat guest, Dr. Jared Moore, Pastor Moore.

I know you're pastor of Cumberland Homestead's Baptist Church, so if that's okay, I'll call you Pastor Moore. How are you doing?

I'm doing great. John, thanks for having me, man. It's good to be here. I appreciate your ministry. You have stood. I appreciate fellas that are willing to stand when it costs them, and I know it's cost you in the past to stand on the Bible.

It's crazy. In SBC and evangelicalism, if you teach what was taught by everybody 10, 15 years ago, you're like a pariah now.

Yeah.

Yeah, I appreciate that, and same with you. I just appreciate that you're willing to take a stand. I know this has cost you to some extent as well. I know even looking for places to put the book out, which we're going to talk about today, The Lust of the Flesh, the big I'm assuming you reached out, and we won't maybe name names unless you want to, but some of the big publishers, they weren't probably that interested, I'm guessing.

Well, publishers did not think they could sell it.

Really? Yeah.

That was the big thing. Publishers did not think that they could sell it because of the content and subject matter. What's popular right now is kind of a halfway point between LGBTQ affirming and total rejection.

That's kind of what's popular right now.

I was going to say, these publishers that you probably reached out to, they are publishing books on the topic because they'll publish books by authors like Westhill, or I don't even know who all the names would be, Nate Collins, or whatever.

They'll publish these books because Greg Coles, they do what you just said, but a book that contradicts that narrative, they don't think they can sell that. That's interesting to me because it's the same topic.

It's just coming at it from a more biblical perspective.

I think that folks were surprised at who was willing to endorse it. When you look at the endorsements, as far as names, it's as good as any other book that you're going to find on the subject.

Yeah.

I know Rosaria Butterfield endorsed it. Who else endorsed it? Bigger names, just so people know.

Mark Jones endorsed it. Also Gavin Peacock endorsed it. Mark Coppinger, James White, Scott Christensen. All these fellows are legit authors and theologians.

Well, freegracepress .com, I know you told me is the place. Right now, that's the only place that's available. Don't look for it on Amazon or Barnes and Noble, go to freegracepress .com and you can order a copy of Lust of the Flesh by Jared Moore.

This is a needed book. I don't know if you've read books where, I've seen a few like this, where they start off and the book says, this is a book that never should have been written. It's kind of like the author's doing it because they're like, I have to do this.

I feel compelled to do this. I think God maybe even wants me to do this, but this really wasn't necessary. It shouldn't have been necessary because this is just obvious stuff. And I feel that way about your writing, just reaffirming what Christians have believed for a long time.

And now it's being challenged in circles that it wasn't before, in evangelical reform circles, even. That's the crazy part to me. And so I want to take people on a journey this morning a little bit through history and through the texts.

We've talked before on this show, so I know we might cover some of the same ground, but I think we're going to cover some new ground as well. And I think it'd be good to start with the Bible and what does scripture say about this?

And so I know you sent me two clips, maybe to get us started, we'll play one of them and then we can play the next one. I think maybe it'd be good to start with Sam Albury. The conference that he was speaking at, I feel like I've seen this.

Did you know when this was from the clip we're about to play?

2019, I'm not sure what conference it was, though.

OK, so this is from 2019. This is Sam Albury, who I know has been involved with Living Out, but he's one of the premier speakers on same sex attraction. And he goes to some of the most conservative churches, believe it or not.

I remember when I was in Lynchburg, he came to a very known as a conservative reform Baptist church in the community. And I had people even in my classes who were just loving it and going and seeing Sam Albury.

And so here he is in 2019.

Same-Sex Attraction, Temptation, and Sin

Sex attraction in and of itself sinful. I think this is a common question that comes up. If you could address that, that'd be great.

Thank you so that you are able to engage with these topics. Thank you for submitting questions. And I say that having seen some of the questions and they're hard. So I say thank you through gritted teeth with some of those.

That first question is very, very significant. And it's not it's sort of on topic for this evening, but certainly, as I was mentioning earlier, talking about same sex attraction being part of my own journey, what I was meaning by that was as a teenager, I became increasingly aware of romantic and sexual feelings towards other men, became a Christian then when I turned 18.

And so then a significant part of my discipleship was what does it mean to bring those experiences under the lordship of Jesus Christ? And obviously, a key part of that is is honoring the teaching of Jesus about the godly and appropriate place for sex being within the covenants of a marriage between a man and a woman.

So I I knew I would have to to to say no to those desires in order to be a faithful follower of Jesus. Is same sex attraction a sin? Sounds like it only requires a monosyllable to answer it, and I hate answers that always begin with, well, Webster's defines, but we need to be very clear on what we mean by attraction.

Some people use the word attraction to mean the capacity, what some people would call the orientation. Is it a sin to have the capacity to be attracted to people of the same sex? And I would say on that issue, I don't think it is a sin.

All of us will experience certain forms of temptation. Virtually all of us will experience certain forms of sexual temptation. We don't tend to choose the particular form temptation takes. What is our responsibility is how we respond to temptation, and the Bible is very clear that we need to we need to flee sexual sin.

So the Bible makes a distinction between temptation and sin. Jesus in the Lord's prayer says, deliver me from temptation, but forgive me from, you know, forgive us for our sins so that the experience of being tempted is not in and of itself a sin.

It is, however, a reflection of the fact that we have a fallen nature, that we're even tempted in these ways is a sign that we are we're not the way we're meant to be, that we have the capacity to be tempted in that sense is a sign that we're fallen.

The temptation itself is not a sin. If we indulge the feeling even only within the privacy of our own minds, that is a sin. Jesus says in Matthew 5 that if someone looks with lustful intent, he's committed sexual sin in his heart.

So it's not enough to say, well, I've got the feelings, but I'm not physically acting. Jesus says, actually, if we are mentally acting, that is a sin. So temptation isn't a sin, but indulging feelings and fantasies, looking with a certain intent is a sin.

So even before we've begun to physically do anything, we've already committed a sin. And by the way, that teaching of Jesus convicts every single one of us. Every single one of us is a sexual sinner. And it's the flip side of something good that Jesus regards your sexual integrity as being so precious that it is not to be violated, even in the privacy of someone else's mind.

And theirs is so precious, it's not to be violated in the privacy of your mind. All of us have fallen very, very far short of that.

Okay.

Well, Pastor Moore, he said no to the desires, right? He said it's a sin to indulge, but capacity is not a sin, and we don't choose the form of sin that tempts us. So what do you have to say to that, biblically speaking?

It sounds pretty good.

Yeah, the gift of discernment, you know, to be discerning, you have to be able to tell the difference between truth and almost truth. And Alberry is presenting almost truth. And it's just it's empty rhetoric.

He can turn a phrase. I mean, what he describes as the capacity to be tempted, the apostle Paul calls his flesh in Romans 7. That's the closest thing, biblically speaking, of the capacity to be tempted by evil.

So let's look at Romans 7 together just briefly, what Paul says about his flesh in Romans 7, 8. But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness, for apart from the law, sin lies dead.

Paul's essentially saying in Romans 7 that he thought he was a pretty good person, obedient to God, until he heard the commands of God and realized that his heart is evil. His heart sprung up when it heard the command and produced covetousness.

So he doesn't say it produced a capacity or it produced something that is sinless or something that isn't sin. He says it produced covetousness. So Alberry seems to be saying that there is some sort of pre-desire, some predisposition that is before covetousness.

Paul doesn't say that. Right. There is no... You know, Paul says the flesh is sin. And Alberry, if he argues, you know, I don't know if he argues that the flesh is sin, but he says the capacity is not sin.

Well, if you keep going through Romans 7, Romans 7, 9 says, sin came alive and I died. Romans 7, 11, for sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. Romans 7, 13, it was sin producing death in me.

Romans 7, 17, so now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. Romans 7, 18, for I know that nothing good dwells in me that is in my flesh. Romans 7, 20, now, if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but that sin that dwells in me.

Romans 7, 23, the law of sin that dwells in my members. Romans 7, 25, with my flesh, I serve the law of sin. So he calls the capacity sin. That's the first issue, is that Alberry is using non-biblical terms to describe, you know, he's trying to get out of sin through rhetoric and turn a phrase.

Yeah, and you know, you got me in trouble last time we were on the podcast a little bit because you identified all these evangelical leaders who are saying some, they might phrase it differently, but they say essentially the same thing that Alberry is saying here.

They carve out a category that you don't see in Scripture for a non-sinful capacity or desire or whatever word they want to use, inclination that is not sinful, but it produces sin somehow. And I thought in our discussion with Doug Wilson, there was a right around the halfway point you had asked him that question.

And a lot of things clicked for me at that point because I thought, well, that's a good question. How can sin arise from something that's not necessarily sinful? How does that work exactly? Like, what are the mechanics of it?

I'm open to hearing an explanation, but all I keep hearing are there's this category. And it's internal temptation that's not technically sin, which is much different than the way Eve and Jesus were tempted.

So I don't know if you have anything to add to that, but for those who are not familiar with the background of our discussion here, maybe it'd be helpful to explain a little bit of the differences between the temptation that Eve and Christ had and then the temptations that Sam Alberry is talking about here.

So first, Alberry, with him talking about Jesus, notice that he goes from same-sex attraction to talking about Jesus first off. So he's comparing having an inner desire to commit sodomy with Jesus's temptation first off, which Jesus in Matthew 4 and Luke 4, the devil offered him food, angel protection, and to be the king of kings.

He offered him objectively good things. He tried to tempt him with objectively good things because he couldn't tempt him with evil. You know, the devil goes to the old David with lust, laziness, adultery, murder.

He goes to the new David or the true David with food, angel protection, and to be the king of kings, all good things that either God was going to give Jesus during his earthly ministry or after the cross.

And so to be tempted like Jesus, we have to be offered a good thing through an evil means. And if we reject the evil means, we've been tempted like Jesus. But desiring to sodomize someone in any form or inclination or whatever, your pre-desire or whatever you want to call it, is pure evil.

It is not good. It is not something that has good in it. It is turning God's design upside down. So we have to call it what it is. And you're not being tempted like Jesus when you have an inner inclination toward evil, right?

So to be tempted like Jesus, it would be like someone coming to you and you're wanting to provide for your family. And so they say, look, I've got this, you know, you sell these drugs for me or, you know, you go do this immoral thing and you say, no, wanting to provide for your family is good, but rejecting the evil means 100%, you know, would be you've been tempted like Jesus and you have not sinned.

But when you have an inner desire towards evil, an inner temptation towards evil, you've already begun to sin in your heart. That's what is happening with Eve in Genesis 3, 6. That's what's happening with what Jesus is describing in Matthew 5, where he's talking about lustful intent.

That's what Paul is talking about in Romans 7. That's what Paul is talking about in Romans 1, when he's talking about the passions that these men turned worship upside down, and so they turned creation upside down, their sexuality upside down, had passion for one another.

And exchanged the natural use of the male or female for unnatural use. And so in most cases, Christians are not being tempted like Jesus, they're being tempted like David or Peter.

What do you say, I know you already covered this in the book, but there was one author, and I can't remember which author it was, you can tell me, who made the argument that when Eve was tempted, the things that she was tempted with were actually objectively good things.

The fruit was good, right? And she just wasn't supposed to eat it because of this command of God, and that was the problem, but it wasn't necessarily wrong for her to look on it with desire. And I know you kind of smashed that argument, but I think people need to hear that because it's compelling for, I think, a lot of evangelicals today.

Yeah, so in Genesis 3, when Eve is talking to the serpent, she begins by telling him, we can't eat the tree, we can't eat of the forbidden tree, we can't even touch it, or we're going to die. And then the serpent says, has God really said?

And he says, no, it's going to be good for you. And so she then starts to see the tree the way the serpent told her to see it. And then she starts seeing that it's desirable and good for food and able to make her wise, and then she eats.

So for Eve, this is something Augustine argues about Jesus, that in order to have an evil inclination, because he is perfect, he would have to will the evil. He would have to create it in his heart. And that's the thing that people don't realize is that if Jesus had an evil inclination, he would have to fall in his heart in order to have it.

And the same thing with Eve, I argue in my book that she fell in her heart before she ate with her lips, because she ate it in her heart before she ate it outwardly. And by willing the desire in her heart, she rendered her false certain.

And Doug Wilson says that, well, he argues that, this is in an episode on Man Rampant with Sam Albury, he argues that Adam could have reached for the forbidden fruit, touched it, and said, oh, what am I doing, and pulled back, and humanity wouldn't have fallen, even though there would be some level of misbehavior in the garden.

I'm just like, what in the world kind of argument is that? He's definitely mistaken on that. Because in order to desire the forbidden tree, Adam would have to create the desire. And the author that you mentioned was Melinda Selmes, and she's a Roman Catholic author, writes for Spiritual Friendship with Wesley Hill's ministry that he started.

And she argues that it was the beauty and objective beauty, the goodness of the tree that tempted Eve. But that's not what the text says. The text says the serpent tempted Eve. It was not the goodness of the tree.

Like, why does the serpent have to be introduced in order for Eve to be tempted if the tree, its beauty, could have tempted Eve?

Right, right. No, yeah, it's a good point. And I remember the clip you're talking about, and I think the point you made was, well, what's this category of misbehavior that isn't sin? That doesn't make sense.

The Scripture doesn't talk about this non-sinful misbehavior. If it's misbehavior, it's sin, which I think is fairly straightforward. But there does seem to be an incredible amount of pressure and just an incentive to categorize certain sins, especially as somehow arising from an arena that's not sinful.

And I think on the same-sex attraction issue, it's obvious to us there's a political thing going on here and trying to make evangelicalism palatable to our overlords. But we sacrifice so much that I don't think on the front end we see we realize we're sacrificing to get there.

Why don't I play, unless you have something else to say, this Rachel Gilson clip, and and then we can go from there.

Same-Sex Marriage, Divorce, and Pastoral Discernment

So I'm actually happy that he asked that question because I'm going to piggyback off that. I read the definition of covenant to be an agreement, especially by lease, deed, or other legal contract. I have gay married parents because gay marriage is legal in all 50 states now.

So I guess my question is, where should I be in terms of my support of that marriage since it is the covenant of marriage? Should I be looking for, like, should I be supporting a divorce even though God said he hates that as well?

Or should I be looking for them to kind of, I don't know, I don't, I don't know.

No, I think it's a great question, right? Like, we know that the laws of our country don't match what God's laws say. That's fine. We don't live in ancient Israel. We don't live in the New Jerusalem. We live in America.

So we respect the laws of the land. As we think about, and especially, like, your parents, like, you love your parents. I'm sure you see them all, like, I mean, we also get annoyed with our parents, right?

Let's be real, right? But you see them as full people, like, you see, which is good. Like, we should be seeing all the people in our life as full people. So when we think about, I don't know your parents.

I'm not going to speak too particularly into it, right? But as we think about the question of people in a same-sex marriage who maybe come to know the Lord. This is a real situation that I've encountered in my life.

I met a woman recently in St. Louis who was actually in this, she was in a marriage to a woman and was processing what to do because she had come to the Lord, but her wife hadn't. We need to recognize in this situation, right, that these are some very tender things.

And if we just walk around being like, I've got some great ideas, like, you don't know anything. You don't know anything about what this relationship has been like, the joys that it's provided, the heaviness it's provided.

Like, we never approach these situations with swagger. If someone is a trust, if we've got a relationship where they're trusting us to speak in and trusting us to draw near, we want to listen really carefully.

Like with any person, discipleship is going to be a process. And so I'd say if someone in a same-sex marriage comes to know the Lord, it's not like, okay, what we've got to deal with first is your same-sex marriage.

Like, our discipleship is our whole person. When we come to Christ, there are a lot of things that need attention, that need forgiveness, that need healing, that need adjusting. But I do hope that over the course of discipleship for someone in that position, they're going to have a chance to examine what the Bible says about sexuality.

And they're going to have a trustworthy person to walk through with them what that means for their life. When you're a child, especially when you're in that weird stage where you're like, for the first time, an adult child relating to adult parents, that's weird, right?

It's just weird. You used to be five and they were old and now you're like, old but not as old. If you're a parent relating to someone in that situation, you've already got that strange dynamic on top of something that is theologically and emotionally really heavy.

So I would say, as their son, you love them and help them in whatever way, right? You love them as you try to follow the Lord, as they try to follow the Lord, to come around the Scriptures together and figure out what's going on.

I do think that it's pretty normal for someone who comes to Christ to see, oh, this isn't the way God designed to use my sexuality. They don't have to negate all the good things that they've experienced with the person that they've been in a relationship with to recognize that God says something else about sexuality.

They might end up making a very big cost. I've known some people who decide to stay in that relationship legally but to live celibately, to break off having sex. That has happened with some couples who both come to Christ.

I've known some couples where one person came to Christ and decided that in order to honor the Lord, he needed to be celibate and his husband decided to leave him. Paul talks about this reality in 1 Corinthians 7.

Sometimes if a spouse comes to know the Lord, the other spouse can't abide it and they leave and then that person is free. But sometimes it will mean getting a divorce. God hates divorce. He does. It breaks that image of marriage just as surely as anything else.

What's interesting is though God hates it, it is still sometimes allowed in the context of a broken world. I think it's really challenging, for example, to read the end of Nehemiah. If you're not familiar with Nehemiah, it's after Israel had been sent away, exiled for their disobedience and they're being brought back to the land.

And they're told, like, you were exiled for disobedience, be obedient, be obedient, draw near to the Lord. This is a beautiful thing. Okay, I've got to stop, I've got to stop. It's not a sermon on Nehemiah.

But even if they come back to the land and they renew their vows and they draw near to the Lord, they end up marrying these foreign women. Which is expressly what God told them not to do. The Jewish people needed to stay a unique whole so that when the seed of Abraham came, Jesus, he would be able to fulfill the promises about him.

They needed to stay a people. It was very important. And they disobeyed and they got into these relationships. And what Nehemiah did is he broke up those relationships. God doesn't love divorce. Sometimes the consequences of our sin are extremely complicated and very messy.

It means we can't be simplistic people and we cannot be proud people and we can't be people who just have these little set answers. When we're walking alongside real human beings, we need to really meet them where they're at.

We need to be whole people. There's this really interesting thing, Matthew 7 .1. You may know it. It says, judge not lest you be judged. So sometimes we make that sound like I'm not ever allowed to say anything about anyone's morality.

Which is really weird because in that paragraph, Jesus talks about us correcting each other. Judge has two English meanings, right? It can mean to make a judgment between guilty or innocent. Or it can also mean to discern.

Like I need to judge what classes I'm going to take next semester. Jesus is not calling us to not discern. He's calling us to not think we have the power to declare whether someone's guilty or innocent.

We don't have that power. God has that power. But we do have the responsibility to help each other. Later in that paragraph, he says, why are you trying to help your brother with the speck when you have a gigantic log in your eye?

And sometimes the way we represent it is as if Jesus said, take the log out of your own eye and sit down and shut up. That's not what he says. He says, take the giant log out of your eye so that you can help your brother with his speck.

If you are really excited to be someone who runs around pulling people's specks out, you shouldn't do it. Do something else.

Okay, make it stop. That was a long clip, but she just kept getting worse. Man, where was that? When was that?

That was 2018 and she works for the ministry called Crew.

Oh, that was at Campus Crusade event.

Or Crew. Crew.

Is that Campus Crusade?

Yeah, Crew is formerly Campus Crusade. They changed the name to Crew because Crusade was, you know, offensive. Man, so you don't have swagger. You have little set answers I'm hearing from Rachel Gilson.

If you say, we got to work on this first. I mean, I'm thinking of someone who, let's say, struggles with like a sin, obesity. Well, not that that's a sin, but the gluttony and it's led to obesity and it's obvious that that's a problem in their life.

I can see a Christian saying, well, once they get saved, you know, there's going to be all kinds of sins they have that will be corrected. As Christ does a work in them. So don't be the spiritual police and go after every single one immediately because you can't.

But if it's a sin, like if it's something that's like they're living in consistent sin, it's killing them. You know, they're, Christians have a responsibility to say something in that case, even if it's gluttony.

Or even, you know, I picked that sin because it's a sin that's often not talked about. But in this case, I can't, it's like the most obvious thing in the world. If you're in that kind of a relationship, I just can't see that as like, well, he's got a tendency towards, he eats a little too much.

It's like, that's much worse. It's like so much more obvious. So that's just my take. But I'd like to hear what you have to say since you wanted to play that clip.

Yeah, I just want to point out and expose Rachel Gilson for the false teacher that she is. This clip was 2018. She legitimized same-sex marriage. She even, she said it was a divorce if, you can only get a divorce if you're married.

Right, it's not a divorce if it's a same-sex marriage because there's no such thing as same-sex marriage biblically. God has, you can't become one flesh with a same-sex person. It's impossible. Because when you look at Genesis 2, you know, a piece of Adam is removed from him to make Eve.

So he's missing something from his body. She's missing her body. And God brings the two back together to become one flesh, which is the sex act of a male and female in the covenant of marriage. And what God has joined together, let not man separate.

The two shall become one flesh. That cannot happen in a same-sex marriage at all. God hasn't designed it that way. So she legitimizes same-sex marriage in that clip. She has never publicly responded to that clip.

She's memory-holded, which is just like a politician. I'm so sick of evangelical leaders publicly teaching heresy. And that's heretical teaching to give legitimacy to same-sex marriage. Teaching heresy, and then when we raised Cain about it back in June, because she was teaching at an SBC event, me and other pastors raised Cain about that.

And she released a statement that she affirmed biblical marriage. And she never has addressed this clip. She's never addressed her false teaching publicly where she legitimized same-sex marriage in that clip.

She said that it was God hates divorce. Well, in the context, he's talking about divorce of marriages that he has joined together. Male and female. He's not talking about same-sex marriage. That one clip alone should disqualify her from ever teaching Sunday school.

Until she publicly repents. But today, you can literally teach heresy, and it can be on video. And be like four or five years ago. And you can just memory-hole it and act like it never happened. Just like a politician.

Who are you going to believe? Your own eyes? Or Rachel Gillison's statement on marriage that she's released in the past year? Do I even have to say what's wrong with that clip?

Not really.

There was something that caught my attention early on before she said all of that. She said, we respect the laws of the land. Even if they contradict what the Bible says. And the context is the law that profanes marriage.

I don't know what other conclusion to reach. We let the Obergefell decision stand. And we respect it to some extent. We don't challenge it, I guess. That seems to be the useful purpose that her teaching serves.

It does help evangelicals make peace with the regime. In their minds, at least. That they can exist in a state of a non-threatening state. So they won't be censored by the IRS or something like that.

I don't know that she's thinking through all those implications. That just seems to be the pressure and where it's coming from. I think that was an admission in the beginning.

Yes. Think about that in American history. Think about the big sins of American history. Think of chattel slavery. She would not be teaching or opposing the law of the land in that day. Jim Crow laws.

She would not be teaching against those. She's like Andy Stanley. They don't come against abortion publicly. They don't come against same-sex marriage publicly. Which means that the big sins of the culture, they're just going to lay down and accept.

Try to, like you said, make peace with the regime. Make peace with Antichrist. If we're following what the Apostle John says in 1 John 1, 1 John 4. Where he literally calls those who deny Christ are Antichrist.

I'm sure, I haven't looked into it, but I'm sure Rachel Gilson, like most evangelicals in elite circles, will lionize abolitionists and MLK and these figures that are viewed as heroes now. Because they did not respect certain laws.

They opposed certain laws. In our own day, it's clear to see where the pressure is coming from and why. I think maybe we've been going more than half an hour. Maybe it would be good to switch gears now and talk a little bit about the reformed tradition.

Because many of the Christians listening are interested in that. Or the Protestant tradition, really. I think when you talk about reformed in your book, you're talking about historical Protestants in the context of breaking away or trying to purify the Catholic Church.

You're viewed today as maybe niche or just, you're not in the mainstream. But at one time, in our circles, theologically, your view was the accepted view by pretty much everyone. That's the thing your book shows, which I think is so valuable.

In one of the chapters, you show Augustine and then you show, in detail, then you show a number of the reformers. Some of them I had not even heard of, who all agreed with the position that you advocate on concupiscence.

Do you want to give us maybe a survey of that and then what changed?

Concupiscence in Augustine, the Reformers, and Trent

Yeah, sure. So, up until the 1500s, as far as confessionally, doctrinally, virtually all Christians believed that evil desire is morally culpable sin. The Roman Catholic Church, even at the Council of Trent, argues that original sin is morally culpable sin.

That's why you have to be baptized as an infant to take that original sin away, or you go to hell. That's what they argue at Trent. Where Protestants and the Roman Catholics disagreed was not what sin is concerning original sin.

What they disagreed on is what sin is in Christians, whether it's in the baptized or in those who have faith. For Roman Catholics, they argued that once the baptism takes the guilt away, so concupiscence no longer has guilt, and it can no longer produce guilt unless you willfully submit to it.

So they believe that sin changed in the baptized. But Protestants argue that no, sin remains the same in the baptized, it's just imputed to Christ. We're no longer held accountable for it. Christ is held accountable for it, and we receive his righteousness.

So that was the big difference. It wasn't over what sin is. But then today, the modern Roman Catholic Church today has a semi-Pelagian view on the doctrine of sin. They believe, they argue it's not just in the baptized that original sin is not morally culpable.

But they argue that in everyone it's not morally culpable, unless you submit to it. And so it's strange today, but the Council of Trent would say that modern Roman Catholics are heretics. If you go back and you read the Council of Trent, 1540s, 1545 to 1563, I think.

But if you go read just the confession that came out of that, and what the smoke and gun, if you will, at Trent, is that they produced two forms on the doctrine of concupiscence. The first form had Augustine mentioned, and it had Aquinas mentioned.

Both of them arguing that, because they're Augustinian monks that were still in the Roman Catholic Church. They were the minority, though, at that point, because they all were becoming Protestants. But they were arguing that the relic of sin, I can't remember which one it is.

I think it's Augustine that says relic, and then one says the material. But both Aquinas and Augustine, or Thomas is better to say, because Aquinas is where he's from. But Thomas, both of them were mentioned, but then the argument came from those who were dominant that if there's still the relic of sin in Christians, how can there be any form of sin left in Christians and God not hate it?