Talking about Rome's Claims via ScreenFlow

So I want to take some time to respond to an email that I was sent. The reason I'm doing it this way, to be honest with you, is because I'm at a conference, I'm putting presentations together, a book project has been kicked back into high gear, and that's really going to have to become a supreme priority for me.

And so sometimes the only way to respond to stuff is, you know, it's a whole lot faster to say it than it is to type it, even with voice recognition software, which I didn't bring my headset for anyways.

But furthermore, the questions being asked here are questions that, yes, I've answered dozens and more times on the dividing line, but they're relevant questions. There are people who have these questions, and so we need to keep answering them with clarity and with force.

And so I'm not trying to drag someone's personal email in the public. I'm not going to mention names or anything like that. But if I can respond and do so in such a way that I can help others at the same time, then it makes the investment of the time even all that more useful.

Rome’s Claims About Authority and the Need to Interpret Papal Teaching

So this is an individual who is looking at Roman Catholicism and is being hammered by the standard Catholic answers type, pick a few quotes from church history here, throw out questions about Sola Scriptura there, ignore completely the massive, massive historical problems, the massive problem that Rome's facing today, and that is just go read some popes from 150 years ago and compare them to Pope Francis, and anyone who can say, oh, yeah, same thing, what can I say?

You'll believe anything, so go ahead. I can't help you. If you can't see that the popes of just the 1800s and most of the 1900s, minimally, were completely at odds with Pope Francis today on so many things.

Well, there you go. And remember, once you cross the Tiber, whatever he says goes. And if what he says today is different than what a pope said 150 years ago, you're stuck with it. Nothing you can do about it.

That's your ultimate authority now. You can't question it. And just as you might say, well, the Bible says that no interpretation of scripture is personal. Well, that's actually a complete misunderstanding of that text.

We'll take a look at that a little bit later on. But you still have to interpret what the popes say. And you don't get to go back and look at, you know, go back and look up the papal syllabus of errors.

Read the papal syllabus of errors. Compare it with Francis and go, oh, yeah, it's the same thing. It's not. But what Rome will tell you once you sign on is, but you don't get to interpret the papal syllabus of errors.

Only the church does. So you can go back and find all these places where the church gave indulgences to people who went on crusades and in the inquisitions. And they murdered Christians. Pope Francis has apologized for those things.

But the power of the keys was used to give indulgences for those things. So it's relevant to the issue of the infallibility of the Roman church. But you don't get to interpret any of that. You don't get to interpret any of that.

Because you've signed your ultimate authority over it. So there you go. Nothing you can do about that. Here's a question on your show, on The Dividing Line. You mentioned something like this. Rome says they follow scripture and are under its authority, but they also interpret it.

How can they be controlled by something they control? No. Just last night I spent almost two hours here in Georgia speaking on Sola Scriptura and Sola Ecclesia. And what I said was Rome claims to have three sources of authority.

Scripture, tradition, magisterium. But the reality is she believes in Sola Ecclesia. Why? Because she gets to define what is and what is not scripture. She determines the canon. She gets to define what scripture does and does not say.

Infallible interpretation. She gets to define what is and what is not tradition. Out of the great body of patristic literature. She gets to say that is tradition, that isn't tradition. She gets to say what that tradition means.

So if you define all of scripture, and you define what scripture says, and if you define tradition and define what scripture says, how can either of those correct you? Because their very existence and interpretation is dependent upon you.

You're the ultimate authority. That's Sola Ecclesia. And that's why the church cannot be reformed. Because if you're infallible, then you've infallibly interpreted the scripture, you've infallibly interpreted tradition, and nothing can correct you.

So that's Sola Ecclesia. I think it's pretty obvious, actually. When you said this, it made lots of sense. Then something clicked in my mind. If Sola Scriptura is true, then we as humans would have to say this.

I follow scripture, and I'm under its authority, as it is Theanostas, but I also interpret it myself. That's a category error. You're confusing two completely different things. One is the church's, the Roman church's claim to have three sources of authority when, in fact, she has subsumed the other two sources of authority under her own authority.

And that's exactly what she's done with the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and bodily assumption and perpetual, all this stuff. Papal infallibility. Clear demonstrations of the fact that she's not under the authority of either scripture or tradition.

But what you're doing is you're discussing here how we know anything. And, of course, God made us communicating creatures, and he holds us accountable for what he's revealed in his word. When the Sadducees were arguing with Jesus about the resurrection, he said, have you not read what God spoke to you, saying, and then he quoted from the Old Testament, he held them accountable for what had been written in scripture 1 ,400 years earlier as if God had spoken it to them.

So God holds us accountable. He made us capable, and he holds us accountable for what he's put in his word. Never does he hold us accountable for the traditions of men. Look at Mark's discussion of the Corban rule, for example, in Mark chapter 7, where Jesus very clearly makes it clear that it doesn't matter if someone says a tradition came from God.

You test it by the scriptures. The Jews said the Corban rule came from Moses passed down orally outside of scripture. Hmm, sounds familiar. And Jesus said, you nullify the word of God for the sake of your traditions, and he condemned them for believing those things, which is exactly what Rome's saying to you that you need to do.

But the reality is all of us are in that situation, and you're not relieved from that problem by turning to Rome. Because once you swim the Tiber and say, okay, I'm going to follow whatever Rome says, you get to interpret what Rome says.

You have to. You have to. And the reality is your Roman Catholic apologist friends may be telling you about how wonderfully unified it is over on the other side of the Tiber River. If they're telling you that, they're lying to you.

Just straight-up lying to you. You can go to Boston College. Go listen to the Roman Catholic professors at Boston College. Go ahead. Do it. And you'll get a completely different story than what you're getting from them.

There's all sorts of liberal Catholicism. There's a wide variety of perspectives expressed. This unity idea is a complete charade. It doesn't exist. It's not there. And so I suggested this to you before.

Watch the debate that I did with Mitchell Pacwa on Sola Scriptura. In my closing statement, I come out, and I bring this big book bag out, and I start bringing out these huge volumes, the Code of Canon Law, the documents of Vatican II, the compendium of documents referred to by the documents of Vatican II, and the canons and decrees of the Council of Trent, and just stack up all these official publications of the Church.

There they are. Yay. Yee-haw. And then I asked a simple question. Does this pile of stuff actually help you to interpret Romans 5, verse 1, or does it muddy what Romans 5, verse 1 says? And the only possible answer to that question is it muddies.

It absolutely confuses what Romans 5, verse 1 actually says. And so the reality is you will find an incredibly wide range of interpretation of all of those documents. You will find Roman Catholic scholars, and they will disagree about what Trent meant by this, and all you've done is taken the less than 200 ,000 words of the New Testament and turned it into millions of words that now have to be interpreted and are interpreted differently by people.

How did that accomplish anything? It accomplished nothing at all. Oh, but we have a living magisterium. Yeah, you've got Francis, who doesn't seem to even think that he can judge on the issue of homosexuality.

That's strange, but... And you'll never really know if you follow Francis, if he was leading you rightly, because take a look at the debates, the two debates, one with Tim Staples, one with Robert St. Genes on papal infallibility, and listen to their contradictory answers to the fact that Pope Honorius was a heretic and was formally condemned as a heretic by all of his successors for centuries.

So that if you had followed Pope Honorius in his heresy at that time, you wouldn't have known that you were following heresy until afterwards. Maybe even after your own life. Hmm. That's not really helpful, is it?

No, it's not. It's not. So the thought that you had, evidently placed there, by your Roman Catholic friends, you don't seem to realize what they're offering to you doesn't help you. Because instead of just interpreting the Bible, now you get to interpret all the rest of this stuff, too, and you know even less about its background than you do about the Bible.

That's not going to help much, is it? It appears to me this view is problematic. See, with Rome, at least there is a hierarchy, a hierarchy of people who happen to disagree strongly with one another on many things.

There's a hierarchy in the idea of apostolic succession. Ah, apostolic succession. Hmm. What is apostolic succession? Does that mean that Pope Francis has access to some secret traditions that no one else knows?

Where are these traditions, anyways? Where have they been written down? We're told, Roman Catholic apologists say, well, you see, there's this oral tradition, see, and it's passed down through the bishops, which is exactly what the rabbis said about the Corban rule.

Just to remind you of that. So, where's the evidence of this? Why hasn't Rome produced a collection of, here is sacred tradition, here are all the traditions we need to know about, and here they're laid out.

They've never done that for some strange and odd reason. And that's because there isn't anything that Jesus or the apostles said that we know they said outside what's in the pages of Scripture. Nothing.

Zero. Nada. There's no apostolic tradition. And in fact, if you take the time to dig into the early church fathers, they used the term apostolic tradition in one of two ways. Either they were making stuff up, for example, the earliest use of that phrase in the history of the Christian church was someone saying that Jesus lived to be more than 50 years of age.

Now, almost nobody believes that today, including within the Roman hierarchy. But that's the first use of the phrase. And it is used to defend a lot of weird stuff, much of which is not believed by Roman Catholicism today.

But the far more serious use of the phrase is to refer to things that are derivative from apostolic teaching found in the Scripture. And if you will take the time, to actually look carefully at what the early church said, not just to quote books, not just the little snippets you're given, but serious work, you'll discover that the term apostolic succession had a wide variety of meanings, some of which were valid, some of which were not.

But the reality is that what Rome has claimed in centuries later comes from apostolic succession had nothing to do with what was actually believed by the early church. There is no evidence whatsoever that the dogmas that have been defined upon that were actually delivered by the apostles to anybody.

It is, again, a game of shadows. It is the way that Rome can get away with introducing new teachings without actually having to provide any kind of basis in Scripture itself. And so, yeah, apostolic succession.

Nice claim. What does it mean? What does it mean? They all have the same view regarding dogmatic things. No, they don't. No, they don't. You're being deceived if you think that. There was a day when Rome was considerably more narrow in its expression than it is today.

I'll give you that. But today, I'm sorry, it's plain as the nose on anybody's face that while Rome once taught one thing, Rome has not taught universalism historically, Rome has not taught inclusivism historically, and yet it's plain as anything that the majority of the magisterium embraces one of those two positions today.

So it's changed. So this idea, it's just not true. You may think it's true, but then you've been deceived. Take it, you know. We see immorality paraded in churches and there is no absolute truth. You mean there's no immorality in Roman churches?

Really? You know, scandals and stuff? There is no absolute truth. My friend, you are... I don't know what picture they've painted for you, but go visit some Roman Catholic churches. Not just the ones they say.

Visit the ones that, hey, Rome lets them continue to be Roman Catholic churches. And you will see just as much weird secular liberalism and strangeness as any place else. And I've said many times, when Rome starts getting serious and starts kicking all these heretics out, great.

Till then, don't give me your apostolic succession garbage. Because you let these people just continue doing their wild, crazy stuff. Then this verse seems to affirm their side, knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of scripture comes from someone's own interpretation.

Well, you might want to look a little bit more closely at what Peter was saying there. And I've provided you with some resources that give you a rather extensive discussion of the exegesis of that text.

And by the way, Rome has never infallibly interpreted that verse. So I guess if we can't interpret it, and Rome's never infallibly interpreted it, then it's useless, isn't it? Right? Where's the infallible interpretation of that text?

Where has Rome said, this is the meaning of that text? Nowhere. There are lots of Roman Catholic scholars today that will say that Rome has never actually infallibly interpreted any text. Some will say there are seven.

Seven verses. Well, they've got a lot of work to do. You'd get caught up. You'd think after 2 ,000 years we'd have an entire commentary. Hundreds of volumes that would give us exactly what we need to know.

It's not there, is it? No, it's not. But it is interesting. I'd like to know, given the principles that you're accepting, how do you know what that says? Rome can't tell you because Rome hasn't defined it.

So are you really saying, well, we don't know what it says. We can't know what it says. That's not what it's talking about. Take the time to look at the text. What Peter is actually saying is that no prophecy ever had its origin in the human will.

But men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. That's what the text is saying. That the origination of Scripture itself does not come from some man saying, I'm going to write Scripture today.

No. Instead, men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. This is a description of the very mechanism of inspiration itself. It has nothing to do with the idea that we, as believers, are to look to somebody else to interpret Scripture for us.

Now, what many Roman Catholic apologists try to do is they try to create a false dichotomy. They try to say, well, it's either just you and your Bible under a tree, or it's us, the Church, and all of our wisdom of the past, and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

And, of course, that's a misrepresentation. I have benefited greatly, for example, especially in the work that I do in defending the deity of Christ, against all sorts of folks. And if you notice, Roman Catholics don't do nearly as much of that as we do.

I wonder why that is. But, anyway. I've benefited greatly from reading, for example, the great Bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius, on the Incarnation, for example, and against the Arians. And he argued very much the same way that I do today in regards to the deity of Christ and the same text of Scripture and things like that.

And I'm greatly encouraged when I read Athanasius or when I read Augustine on the Trinity. And so, sola Scriptura is not the same thing as solo Scriptura. We learn much from the generations that have come before us, but we do not make them infallible authorities.

We do not give their writings some kind of ultimate religious authority. And, of course, Rome doesn't either, because I can go toe-to-toe, again, dozens of debates. You can go watch them yourself. I can go toe-to-toe with the Roman Catholic and early church sources.

Many people can. There are people even a lot better than I am at doing that. You can go to all sorts of folks, and you can go back and forth, back and forth, and quoting the early church fathers. And in some areas, I think very plainly, the truth is firmly against Rome.

For example, I will say this directly. We've never lost a debate on the papacy. When I say we, I don't mean Protestants as a whole. I've never lost a debate on the papacy. You can't, as long as you know history.

You just can't. The Roman Catholic claims concerning the interpretation of texts, well, look, the papacy itself, and this is recognized by serious, honest Roman Catholic historians, not necessarily apologists, but serious, honest Roman Catholic historians, will admit to the fact that the greatest developments in the concept of papacy were based upon fraudulent documents, the Donation of Constantine, the Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals.

These were made up. The quotations in them were made up. Hey, I can turn up the light a little bit. You can actually see over there. They were made up. They were fraudulent, and yet they were central to the definition of the papacy.

We today know that those foundational documents were frauds, and yet we still have the papacy. It's still hanging there in midair, basically, even when we've discovered that the sources that were used to initially establish it were fraudulent.

So there's all sorts of stuff like that that I just don't think you've had a chance to look into yet. So I've said from the beginning, don't rush. Put together a list of resources. Don't rush. I'm not sure what you're...

Well, you're young, and so you don't think you have tomorrow. A lot of young people are impatient. Look these things through. I'm absolutely confident that if you take the time to actually look at the facts, that things...

The early church fathers are not the friend of modern Roman Catholicism. Because modern Roman Catholicism has defined as dogmas things that none of those early church fathers believed. And I'll say it again.

There was no one at the Council of Nicaea that believed as dogma what the modern Roman Catholic Church teaches today as dogma. Nobody. Were they not Christians? Or has the gospel changed? That's a question.

Okay, so the text from Peter is not saying that we are not to interpret the scriptures. The text from Peter is saying that scripture is divine origination. Peter told... Jesus told Peter to feed and tend his sheep.

Yes, he did. Have you ever looked into what the early church interpreted that to mean? Because the reason that Jesus had to specifically address Peter was because of what? Because of Peter's denials? Three times?

Do you love me? Peter becomes saddened? Why? Because three times Peter did what? Denied Christ. Which the others didn't do. And it says, this certainly seems that Jesus is bestowing upon Peter some sort of supremacy other than his flock.

Over, I guess, over his flock. Really? So when Peter himself says he is the fellow elder, was he just being falsely humble? Where does scripture show this happening? It must have happened in Acts chapter 15, right?

I mean, if Peter has supremacy, in Acts chapter 15, you have a church council. You have the very nature of the gospel and whether Gentiles are going to be required to become Jews first. And so Peter ruled that council, right?

Oh, no, he didn't, actually. Any serious reading of Acts chapter 15, James ran that council, not Peter. Peter testified. Paul testified. And no one said, okay, Peter spoke and that's it. That's not how it worked.

There simply isn't any evidence of this. Why would the New Testament look the way it is if this theory was true? Why not just have Peter just answer all the questions? When Paul called the Ephesian elders to him in Acts chapter 20, as he's going to Jerusalem and he knows he's never going to see him again.

And he says, man, I know after I leave, men are going to rise from your own ranks and they're going to speak perverse things and draw away the disciples after themselves. It's going to be tough. It's going to be rough.

Same thing with Timothy in 2 Timothy 3 when he's saying difficult times are going to come. There's going to be apostasy and so on and so forth. You would think, if this theory is true, if Peter has been given supremacy, that the next line is going to be, so therefore stick with Peter and his successors in Rome, right?

In both 2 Timothy 3 and in Acts chapter 20, in both places, what does Paul do? I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up, which is able to give you an inheritance amongst the saints.

What does it say to Timothy? Timothy looked to that, which is theanoustos, God breathed, nothing about Peter, nothing about his successors, zip, zero, nada. What was wrong with Paul? Your theory makes Paul really problematic, really problematic.

And again, guess where this type of interpretation of these texts started to come about later in church history? It only seemed to come from Rome and when they first started using it, oh, you should see the responses of some of the early church fathers when some of the Roman bishops started trying to lord it over others.

It's great stuff. Have you taken the time to watch the three and a half hour debate with Jerry Matitix on the early church fathers on this subject? Why rush? Take the time. We're confident. You just can look at it, find these things out for yourself.

And by the way, just in passing, if the Petrine promise in Matthew chapter 16 is supposed to be for Peter and he's supposed to be made the shepherd in a way that the other apostles, he's given the keys in a way that they're not given the keys, then when did Peter receive the keys?

Because it can't be Matthew chapter 16, the verb there, doso, is future. I will give you, not I am now giving you. So when did that happen? Because see, the only two answers are Matthew doesn't say. He thought it important enough to record the promise, but he didn't think it important enough to actually record the fulfillment.

There is, however, very obviously, a place where it is fulfilled, and that is Matthew chapter 18. There's only one problem. Peter is just one of the apostles who receives the authority of binding and loosing, not above the others, but together with the others.

That's Matthew's understanding, but that's not Rome's understanding, because Rome isn't under the authority of Scripture. Do any Catholic teachings contradict themselves? Can you give me examples of the Roman Catholic Church changing view or flip-flopping?

Well, contradict themselves. Obviously, I don't find Rome's... The standard of analyzing Rome's teachings is the Scripture. So if it's unbiblical, which of course, again, Roman Catholic can't even go there because you can't correct Rome's teachings by the Bible, because you can't understand what the Bible says, unless Rome tells you what it says.

So once you've bought into that, then Rome's biblical by definition, not by fact any longer. But the issue of Rome's teachings is the novelty of them. Like I just said, there was no one at the Council of Nicaea that believed what you have to believe today as a Roman Catholic, to be dogmatically in union with the Church.

There was nobody there that believed, for example, in the concept of indulgences. And yet the Pope just gave... Did you see what the Pope did recently with his opening the sacred doors and the pilgrimages and the Jubilee year?

Yeah, I remember all that stuff and Romans, no, not Romans, Galatians. No, it's not Galatians. It's not in the New Testament. It's not in the Bible. So there's just, you know, all this stuff about priests.

Where are these sacerdotal priests in the New Testament? And these sacraments? Where are these sacraments? You can assume these things, but you can't demonstrate them from Scripture. And especially, I mean, look, the Marian dogma is indefensible.

Indefensible. Less than 100 years ago, Rome defined as a dogma the idea of the bodily assumption of Mary. And why do we keep going back to that? Because it's the most recent thing where Rome has said, we as the Church define this to be dogmatic, de fi, de truth.

And yet it is indefensible. You can't defend it. It's unbiblical. No serious theologian, no serious exegete would ever argue that the New Testament writers believed in any of this. No serious historian would argue that this is a part of the apostolic testimony or witness that's found anywhere.

So it is the novelty of these things. And then when you study Church history, teach Church history, you get to watch the development of these things over time. And it's not from a study of Scripture, it is from moving away from Scripture.

The whole concept of where indulgences came from and the issues, watch my debate with Peter Stravinskis, father, doctor, double doctor, Peter Stravinskis on Purgatory. Watch it. Listen as I cross-examine him in 1 Corinthians chapter 3.

It's painful, but it needs to be watched. It needs to be watched. And if you think, well, it's just Stravinskis, okay. Then listen to the dividing line debate I did with Tim Staples just a few years ago on the subject.

Because the reality is, these things are indefensible. They developed at a later point in time that makes them contradictory to the Bible. And that's the only thing that's really important. The other issues just don't really matter.

Would you be willing to do a debate on the dividing line with the apologist with whom you're speaking? So you're telling me that this apologist is better than Tim Staples, Jimmy Akin, Patrick Madrid, Mitchell Pacwa, Gary Machuta, the more than a dozen, Jerry Matiticks, the more than a dozen professional Catholic apologists that I've debated in the past.

Is that what you're telling me? Get us in touch. Has this person published any books? Has this person taught anywhere? Do they know the biblical languages? Why is this person better than all these other people that we've already engaged over and over again?

Because I looked through another document you linked me to, and it's all just, honestly, very surface-level Catholic answers, EWTN stuff that we have reviewed and refuted over and over and over again.

And if we need to go back over it again, I suppose, but it's not like the information hasn't already been provided there. So there's those basic issues. And I just highly recommend to anyone, look up, what did I call it?

I think it was called 10 Reasons Not to Join the Roman Catholic Church. Someone asked me once to write an article, give me 10 top reasons not to join the Roman Catholic Church. It's on our website, aomin .org.

Look it up. I'm sure Google will pull it up. And take your time. Take your time. Listen carefully. Check things out. Go get some books that aren't written by people that are involved in the controversy.

For example, J. N. D. Kelly is a non-Catholic, but he's not involved in apologetics or anything like that. He's just a very, very, very well-known church historian. Read his Encyclopedia of the Popes.

Encyclopedia of the Popes. Check it out for yourself. And tell me, oh yeah, this is plainly apostolic succession, right there. Take the time to look at those things. Reference, I mentioned Bill Webster and David King's three-volume work, the older works by Good, Whitaker, Salmon.

Take your time, check it out. I'm absolutely confident of what the result is. Now, don't get me wrong. I've known lots of people. I can give you names of people who knew about all those sources, still became Roman Catholic.

Because there are other reasons to do this. The real question is, are you looking for truth? Or are you being influenced by things other than that? Emotions, feelings, desires that get in the way of actually knowing the truth.

That's the real question. Hope these answers have been useful to you and to others who have taken the time to listen. Thanks for listening. God bless.