October 31, 2017 Show with Dr. William Webster on “The Gospel of the Reformation”

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Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

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Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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Now here's our host, Chris Arntzen. Good afternoon,

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

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This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Reformation Day on this 31st day of October 2017, and it has been quite a long time since I've had my old friend

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Bill Webster on the program. I'm really excited about having him on today.

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He is one of the foremost experts, in my opinion, of the Roman Catholic Church coming from the perspective of a

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Bible -believing Protestant, and he's also one of the most thoroughgoing experts on the

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Protestant Reformation itself. I'm sure that Bill would be too humble to describe himself that way, but I have no problem saying that.

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And Dr. William Webster is pastor of Grace Bible Church of Battleground, Washington, and he's the founder of Christian Resources.

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He's the author of quite a number of books, including some published by Banner of Truth and some which have been brought into print through Christian Resources.

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And today we are going to be discussing one of his books, which is very appropriate considering it is

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Reformation Day. We are going to be discussing the Gospel of the Reformation, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr.

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William Webster. Hi Chris, good to be here with you again. And it's great to have you here, and let me also introduce to you my co -host in studio with me, the

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Reverend Buzz Taylor. Hello, and it sounds like it's going to be another interesting subject today. And if anybody would like to join us on the air with a question of your own regarding the

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Protestant Reformation, or you could also include in that in regard to Roman Catholicism, the email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

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c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

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USA. And you may remain anonymous if you are asking about a personal and private matter.

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Let's say you disagree with your own pastor on theology, or you disagree with your own spouse on theology, or you are a

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Roman Catholic and you have questions that you want to ask anonymously. There could be a lot of reasons why someone might want to be anonymous, and we will grant that request.

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But if it's not something personal and private, please at least give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the

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USA. And Bill, if you wouldn't mind, even though we've had you on this program before since it's been so long,

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I'd like you to give a summarized version of your testimony of what kind of religious background, if any, you were raised in, and what providential circumstances our

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Sovereign Lord used in your life to draw you to Himself and save you, and then how you realized that you had a call upon your life to enter into the ministry.

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Well, I was raised Roman Catholic. I was born in the city of Memphis, Tennessee.

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I attended parochial schools all through my grade school years. When I was 14,

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I was sent away by my parents to a Benedictine monastery up in Rhode Island, the school in Portsmouth Priory.

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Nothing says, I love you, like that. Yeah, well, sincerely, my mother, at least, she was the main catalyst behind that.

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I think she had some secret desires that I might, you know, one day grow up to be a priest.

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That did not transpire. Of course, those who were truly born again are all priests, so in that sense it was fulfilled, but not in a

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Roman Catholic sense. But I was sent away to school. I attended this Benedictine monastery all through my high school years.

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Actually, I was expelled from the school my senior year because of drinking. I had come to a place in my life where all of religion,

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Christianity in particular, was very empty. There did not seem to be any real answers to the questions that I was asking.

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It was a very dark and frustrating time for me in my life.

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At that point in time, I went full bore into the world, fully embraced the life of sin, went off to college at SMU in Dallas, Texas.

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By the time I was 19, I was, for all practical purposes, an alcoholic and beginning to do very poorly in school.

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Providentially, my grandfather intervened in my life. He had a great influence upon me, not from a religious standpoint or spiritual standpoint, but just strictly from a family standpoint, out of love for me, wanting to help me.

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I really attribute to him and his influence my turnaround from a life of irresponsibility and drinking.

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I gave it up. I began to apply myself to my studies, ended up graduating from SMU in 1971.

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My goal in life at that point in time was to be a songwriter and guitar player.

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I had come through the sixties, loved music, had taught myself the guitar.

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It was the first love of my life. I was really struggling within, trying to figure out what the answers to life are all about.

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I became involved in a music group where I met my wife. We took a visit to her home.

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It was there that I had an experience through her brother with the occult.

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I had no clue what in the world that was. I had no categories for understanding a spiritual dimension to life, because in my mind everything was material.

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My eyes were opened to the fact that there is a dimension to reality that is indeed spiritual.

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It is inhabited by spirit beings. They are real. In this case, they are evil.

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There is also the spiritual dimension of good spirit beings.

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Those are angels that have not fallen. In this case, I became involved with Ouija boards, automatic writing, and other occult things that put you in contact with that realm.

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I did this in an innocent way, thinking I had made contact with a realm of reality in an agnostic type sense, where you feel you are sort of an elite.

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You have been able to enter into an experience of something here that the vast majority of people know nothing about.

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Through that experience, I came to the conclusion that if there is this spiritual dimension and it is real, there must be a

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God. I began to sincerely seek through that to know the

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God who is. I came back to the scriptures. I began to read the

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Bible. At the same time, there was a pastor in the town in which we were living at the time who gave me a set of tapes by Walter Martin, who was the founder of the

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Bible Answer Man. Walter Martin was an expert on the occult.

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This pastor really did not know how to help me as I was sharing with him what I was involved in and what

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I was experiencing. He gave me these tapes by Walter Martin. And God used those in a mighty way to open my eyes to understand what

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I was dealing with. He worked in my heart through the teaching of Walter Martin.

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It was not necessarily very deep with respect to the gospel, because he was dealing mainly with the issues of the occult and the danger of the occult.

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But in doing that, he also would teach scripture, and he would get into the gospel.

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There was a day where I was alone with the

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Lord, and I just very quietly repented of my sin, of my life.

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I gave my life to Christ. I told the Lord I wanted to be wholly His, and I trusted in Him and my life from that point was radically transformed.

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He filled it up. He gave me answers. He began to teach me the

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Word of God. It has been just an experience of growth ever since that day of learning more and more of the scriptures, more and more of the gospel, more and more of my own heritage, the history of the church, and the great heritage that is ours for those who know of the

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Reformation and who adhere to the truth of the Reformation, why it was so important, and the glorious aspect of that gospel and what it can do in a person's life to transform their life.

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I'm a walking testimony of what God can do in the life of a man or a woman who is walking in sin, who's dead in sin, whose life is empty, and who does not know

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God, and suddenly the truth comes. Your eyes are opened. You're raised from the dead spiritually, and you become a new creation, and your life is never the same.

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That happened to me, and it's an ongoing experience now for 45 years. I trust about God's grace it's going to be just a continual experience of growing deeper and deeper into knowing

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Him and knowing His word till the day I die and go on to be with Him. Amen. Well, I think that you can sense the passion in Dr.

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Webster's voice, and this is why he has dedicated a very large portion of his ministry to exposing the errors of Rome and to bring to light the truths of the

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Reformation from the Scripture, and this proves that this is not some kind of hateful agenda or bigoted agenda to oppose the

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Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church anathematized Dr.

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Webster and I long before we were born in the Council of Trent and the

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Rev. Buzz Taylor as well and all those who believe in the Gospel of the Reformation, and they have never recanted or overturned those anathemas, nor can they without toppling the dogma of papal infallibility, so that would be an impossibility.

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But when did you really become convinced, and how did you become convinced that God had placed a call upon your life to become a pastor?

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Well, when I was converted, my wife and I, and she had a son by a former marriage who

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I adopted, we moved back to Memphis, and there we became very rooted in a local church.

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It was an independent evangelical church, and it had a very high view of the

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Word of God, very committed to the preaching of the Word of God, and we got involved there in a ministry called

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The Navigators and became very committed to ministry, to growing in our faith, in our commitment to the

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Word of God, and unfortunately my wife,

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I was converted. She was raised Christian Reformed. That is a

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Dutch denomination. She was born here in the States. She's 100 %

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Dutch and Christian Reformed and very solidly Calvinistic, but she did not know

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Christ. Even as we were married there in the early years, she did not know Christ. Yes, in fact

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I interviewed Paula, your wife, on that a number of years ago on the old program. You did.

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Well, when we moved back to Memphis and got involved in the evangelical church, we were very involved in ministry, and over time my wife began to just sense this is not working for me.

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There's something really wrong here. The Christianity that I read about from people like the

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Apostle Paul, and I look at the Word of God, and I look at the experience of men who know God.

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You read the Psalms, and they're soaring on eagles' wings, and I'm sitting down here, and I have this emptiness.

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I don't know what's wrong. The gospel at that point that we were being taught was a deficient gospel in that it emphasized the necessity of understanding part of the essential truths of the

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Reformation, which had to do with justification by faith alone, grace alone, Christ alone.

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All of that about imputed righteousness, she would fully agree with. Nothing wrong there. It's just that Christianity was just doctrine.

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It was not a person, and she had always believed the truth.

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She'd been thoroughly catechized, but the gospel had never really been preached, and she had responded where the gospel was being preached where we were in the church where we were, and doing everything she was told to do, but she did not know the

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Lord, and she was not converted. She finally got to the place, and we got to the place in our marriage where things were really going downhill, and it was a terrible conflict in her own heart.

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She was struggling, struggling, struggling, and then I was again providentially given some tapes by a friend of this man who was probably one of the most powerful preachers

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I've ever heard, but he began to proclaim an aspect of the gospel that I had not heard.

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It was all about the lordship of Christ. It was all about submission to him, the call of Christ on a man's life to be a follower, a disciple, and I suddenly realized that there is an aspect of this gospel that we have not been taught.

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We've been taught this is not necessary for salvation. If you're going to be a disciple and a follower, yes, that is where you want to go, but it's not necessary for being a

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Christian or entering the kingdom of God. Well, to put it just very in a short frame here, that message was used by the

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Spirit of God in one verse in particular, if any man wishes to come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.

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For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake in the gospel will save it.

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My wife understood that what Christ is saying there is that in order to enter the kingdom to know me, you must be a follower.

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That requires a submission of your life to me as Lord, or you will perish.

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That's what the word lose means there. The Lord used that passage of scripture to bring her into the kingdom of God after professing

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Christ. She was converted, her life was transformed, and I suddenly realized that all of the ministry

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I was involved in with the Navigators and all of the ministry we were committed to for the future, it was all turned upside down because everything basically in ministry, in Christianity, is grounded upon this gospel.

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This gospel is everything. As you have received Christ Jesus, the

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Lord, so walk in him. So that tells me then that entering the kingdom is an issue of receiving

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Christ Jesus, the Lord, and then how I live my life as a believer is grounded upon that foundation.

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And out of that experience, we went to a Bible school where it was a school run by the man who actually preached that original message that God used to transform her life.

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We went to that school and in the course of study there, I was asked to do a paper.

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It was basically, you know, if you're going to graduate, you do sort of a thesis type thing.

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And I chose to do a study on Roman Catholicism because that was my heritage.

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I had not really done a lot of study on Roman Catholicism since I had been converted, but I thought it would be really interesting to get into a fuller understanding, a more thorough understanding of what the

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Roman Catholic Church really teaches. It can be very confusing because we all use the same terms.

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It's just that if you're not careful, you can be deceived by the use of theological terms if you don't accurately define them.

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Well, as I got into this study, it became very apparent to me very early that the teachings of the

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Church of Rome, the soteriological teachings, were very antithetical to the Word of God.

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And I do have a real affinity, obviously, with Roman Catholics because of my upbringing, a deep concern just out of love for men in general for the truth of the

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Gospel because it is the Gospel that is the power of God to salvation. It is the

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Gospel that God uses to bring men into the Kingdom, to deliver them from their sin, to give them the gift of eternal life, to give them hope for the glory that is coming.

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And so I had a desire then to reach out to Roman Catholics with the truth of the

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Word of God. And so I wrote a book. It's the first book that Banner of Truth published called

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Salvation, the Bible, and Roman Catholicism. It's just a basic study of what is the

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Gospel, and what is the doctrine of Rome, and why are the two incompatible.

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After that book, I was confronted with the fact that if you're going to deal adequately with the whole issue of Roman Catholicism, and this was true in the

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Reformation, it's not just about the Gospel for the Reformers. That was primary, the

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Word of God is primary, but they were also concerned to show that the faith that they were promoting had a continuity with the faith of the early church, that soma scriptura is not a theological novelty that the

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Reformers came up with in the 16th century. That goes all the way back through the entirety of the patristic age right to the

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Word of God. And it was my desire then to understand these historical arguments of the

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Roman Catholic Church, because so many people basically come into the church on that level, and then they're hooked by the teachings of Rome that are soteriological.

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And there I took a very long time to delve into a lot of reading historically, a lot of reading of church fathers, trying to ferret through who the church fathers are, what their main emphases are, what the history of the church is, and it is very complex and it is very challenging.

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But as I began to do that in looking at the history of Roman Catholicism and the tradition of Roman Catholicism, the historical claims of Rome, looking at how that compares to the actual history,

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I began to do research and I began to look at the whole issue of soma scriptura. What was the early church's view of the

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Word of God? What is the issue with tradition? What is tradition? And it became very clear as you read the writings of the church fathers themselves, the whole basis upon which they do theology.

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Everything that they do is grounded upon the revelation of the written

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Word of God. And so out of that, I began to look at the sacramental system of the

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Church of Rome. How did that develop? And historically, what was the church? What did the church believe in the early centuries?

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And it was through that that I wrote a second book, the one that you referenced at the beginning of the program,

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The Church of Rome at the Bar of History. And in that book, what I do is

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I just go through the claims of the Roman Catholic Church for its tradition, for its church, for the papacy, for its distinctive doctrines, for example, on Mary, the sacramental system.

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And I looked at that from the standpoint of history and how it developed. And my point of interest there was to see how much of a continuity there is between what

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Rome claims for these distinctive doctrines that characterize this church as being

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Roman Catholic as opposed to just Catholic. Because the early church is Catholic.

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It's not Roman Catholic. It became Roman as time evolved, and over time it morphed, if you will, through doctrinal development, only it's not really development.

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It is a departure from the faith of the early church, and clearly it's very antithetical to the authority of the

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Word of God. It was just, I wrote these books, and it was just an area of real interest for me because of my heritage and because I have a real interest in history.

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I have a real interest in the Word of God. I have a degree in history from SMU. But I also just, you know, my main focus in all that I do is the

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Word of God. I'm not just focused on the issues that have to do with Roman Catholicism.

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I'm also very focused on the issues that have to do with Evangelicalism, because I think that obviously if we are

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Evangelicals and we come from the heritage of the Reformation, that these commitments to the

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Gospel and to the Word of God are enduring. They're eternal.

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We're talking about the eternal Word of God, and so these commitments then, the principles that the

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Reformation represents have to be an ongoing commitment to those who profess to be in the heritage of that Reformation and that message that is proclaimed through the

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Reformation. And my great concern in the day in which we live is that the Evangelical church has greatly departed from that heritage and from that commitment to the

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Word of God and from a true biblical Gospel. And so you have a need in the day in which we live for a mighty work of the

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Spirit of God in Reformation again, this time to the Evangelical church, although the

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Church of Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy also need to hear the Word of God. So tell our listeners about Grace Bible Church in Battleground, Washington, the congregation where you pastor.

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Tell us about the founding of that church and what its theological makeup would be, etc.

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Well, given what I just said about Evangelicalism, my wife and I and a number of other families from Battleground here were attending another church.

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It was an Evangelical church, mainstream Evangelical. Had a good pastor there.

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We were very committed to that church. That pastor was very committed to the

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Word of God. He ended up moving. He left the church to go to another area of the country in the search for a new pastor.

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They began, the elder board there who were responsible for seeking a man to replace the man who had left, they began to bring in people to preach, to introduce as possible candidates for becoming pastor.

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Well, it became fairly obvious fairly quickly that some of these men had a very deficient view of what the gospel entails.

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They were teaching that what you would, we typically would call easy -believism.

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And basically what easy -believism teaches is that salvation is in Christ.

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You come to Christ by faith. It is an intellectual assent in many cases to the teachings about Jesus.

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It's doctrinal in its basic content. And you have an intellectual agreement with the truth of who

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Jesus is and what he did. And that kind of faith, or it could be just a faith that says, well,

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I'm turning from all legalism and I am trusting Jesus to be my

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Savior, to justify me before God. But there's nothing about repentance.

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There's nothing about understanding what sin is, and the nature of sin, and the need for a turning from that sin, and a submission of one's life to Christ as Lord as part of what it means to be saved, to be delivered, not only from the guilt of my sin, but from the dominion, the state, the power, and the bondage of my sin.

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And we're going to pick up right where you left off after we return from our first station break. And if anybody else would like to join us on the air with a question of your own for Dr.

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William Webster, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

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Don't go away. We'll be right back with Dr. William Webster and the Gospel of the

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for providing us with a chance to learn more about the NASBible. And we thank the publisher of this Bible for sponsoring our most recent

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Bibles to give away. And we just thank them for their faithful sponsorship. In fact, we have been involved with the publishers of the

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NASB going all the way back to 1995, when I had my first, or should

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I say, when I organized my first Roman Catholic versus Evangelical Protestant debate on Long Island, New York.

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That was the great debate number one between Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries and Jerry Medetix, a

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Roman Catholic apologist who is with a apostolate, they call them,

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Biblical Foundations International, I believe it's called. And that debate is largely due to our guest today,

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Dr. William Webster, because I called Bill when I was challenged to find an

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Evangelical Protestant to face Jerry Medetix in a debate, and Bill said, oh, you want James White for that job.

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And then I remember saying to you, yeah, but Bill, I read in a Catholic magazine that he's just a hateful, bigoted monster.

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And you were like, oh, come on, it's a Catholic magazine. So thankfully,

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I did not believe the article in the magazine and believed you instead. And that began a very long relationship and friendship with Dr.

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James R. White, which still continues to this day. And I just wish that his schedule would free up so we could have him back for another debate sometime.

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But I would love to have you involved in a conference in the future.

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I know that my friends out on Long Island invited you to participate in their Reformation conference for the 500th anniversary of the

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Reformation. And I know that the providential circumstances prevented you from being out there.

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But I would love to get you out here in Pennsylvania at some point, whenever the Lord allows.

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So let's keep in touch about that. But before the break, Dr. Webster, you were talking about how the evangelicals that you were in fellowship with in a particular church were dismayed by the easy -believism that was dominant in the church where you were members.

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And this easy -believism is basically teaching a repentant -less Christianity, or a

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Christianity where repentant -lessness is a possibility for a true, regenerate, born -again believer.

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Yeah, it got to a point where they had a man that they put up for consideration to become pastor.

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And they had a meeting of the men in the congregation who wanted to come and we could ask questions.

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He had posted basically a synopsis of what his beliefs were.

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And as you read through this, it became sort of apparent to me that he was sort of deficient when it came to an understanding and a commitment to what the

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Scriptures teach is necessary in response. What is a man's response to be to the revelation of the truth of Jesus Christ?

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How do you enter into the experience of salvation? And as we got into that meeting and we began to ask questions, it became very apparent that he did not believe that a man had to repent of sin in order to come to Christ to know salvation.

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He believed that that should be something that would take place after a man is in the kingdom of God, but it is not a prerequisite or a condition for entering into the kingdom itself to know

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Christ. What ensued after that was then a meeting because that caused a bit of a disturbance by a number of us in the church and some others.

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And it was very clear the church was becoming rather divided over this issue, so we had a congregational meeting where all of these issues were discussed.

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It became very apparent in that meeting there was not going to be a meeting of the minds, that the church itself in its leadership was going to be committed to the kind of message that this man was committed to.

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And so we elected, myself and my wife and a number of others of us in the church, we elected to leave because I am firmly committed to the

39:03

Word of God, and the Word of God tells us that you cannot be identified with any kind of a ministry or person who misrepresents the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

39:18

So we left our desire, we were very frustrated obviously, it was a hurtful thing, but it was necessary.

39:29

We decided that we would go ahead and try to start a church. There were enough of us where it was very doable.

39:39

We began to meet together, we decided to seek a pastor.

39:46

I had no desire at that point in time to actually be a pastor, but as we moved along in this process, they asked me if I would temporarily teach and be a temporary pastor until we could find someone to do it full -time.

40:08

Like John Calvin. Well, I didn't have a William Farrell to call a curse of God on my head if I didn't obey him.

40:22

But the Lord, I mean, you know, I love to teach, obviously, I love to preach the

40:27

Word of God, I'm very involved with people, I love people, so I agreed to do that.

40:34

In my mind it was going to be temporary, but it ended up over the next year. Our search for another pastor was prolonged, it was not easy to do.

40:46

I kept preaching, I kept teaching, and eventually they came and just said, look, we don't know why we're looking for somebody else.

40:55

We want to ask you if you would just continue to do what you're doing. And that's how it came about.

41:02

I mean, I obviously prayed about that and just very much felt this is what the

41:07

Lord wanted me to do, and so the rest is history. That's what we've done, and we've been here since 19, or let's see, since 2002.

41:18

And that's Grace Bible Church in Battleground, Washington, and their website, which

41:24

I'll be hopefully repeating later as well, but it's gracebiblebattleground .org,

41:30

gracebiblebattleground .org, and this is an independent, baptistic, sovereign, grace -believing church, correct?

41:40

Correct. And well, let's move on to our main subject at hand now, the

41:46

Gospel of the Reformation. In fact, it's kind of interesting that some of what you said obliterates the

41:55

Roman Catholic stereotype that they often throw in the face of the heirs of the

42:02

Reformation or Bible -believing Christians. They will very often say that what the

42:08

Reformation brought about by having as a watchword or as a pillar of its existence, justification by faith alone or sola fide,

42:20

Roman Catholics will broad -brush the entirety of Protestantism and especially

42:26

Evangelicalism with the brush of easy -believism, the very thing that you departed from your former church over, and obviously something that you consider a heresy and something that the

42:39

Reformers would have considered a heresy, but if you could tell us exactly what is at the root of the

42:46

Gospel of the Reformation, and in what ways does it contrast with the

42:53

Gospel of Rome? Well, in order, you obviously have to have a standard by which you can make a judgment, and that standard clearly is the

43:02

Word of God. You come back to the Old and New Testaments. I mean, apart from that revelation, we don't know anything.

43:12

We don't know who God is. We don't know how to know him. The Gospel is clearly defined in the

43:19

New Testament, so in order to accurately assess what the issues of the

43:27

Reformation are and what the true Gospel is, you obviously have to come back to the revelation of the Word of God and how sin is dealt with.

43:35

That's the main issue. You've got two basic issues in the Reformation. One is authority, and the other is salvation, and so the clarion call of sola scriptura has to do with authority.

43:48

What is the ultimate authority in the church? Well, the ultimate authority in the church obviously is Christ. He's the head of the church, but how does he manifest that authority in his church?

43:59

It is through his Word, and the Word of God is given as a means to equip those who are true followers of Christ and to equip the church for the ministry that God has called it to.

44:14

One of the major callings of God in the church is the proclamation of the

44:19

Gospel. Paul told Timothy, preach the Word, be ready in season and out of season, reprove, rebuke, and exhort with great patience and instruction.

44:29

He says you've got to realize the time's going to come where men are going to walk away from the truth of the

44:35

Word of God. They're going to seek for those men who teach to tickle their ears, but he says

44:42

I'm calling you to reprove, rebuke, and exhort, and I'm calling you to do the work of an evangelist.

44:48

And he says in the presence of God in Christ Jesus, who is the judge of living in the dead, the very sober reality that under the authority of Christ you are called as a man of God in the church with this ultimate mandate to preach the

45:06

Word, proclaim the Word of God. Well, this is what the Reformation is all about. It's all about a recovery from moral and spiritual corruption of a church that over the centuries, and it took time for this to evolve, which began to withdraw the

45:28

Word of God from men. You get into the Middle Ages and the Word of God basically is in Latin.

45:34

People don't understand Latin. They're going through the mechanics of, you know, a religious service.

45:43

They don't understand anything about what they're doing. The church ultimately becomes their salvation, but they don't know the gospel.

45:52

And there is terrible corruption with respect to the Word of God and how the

45:57

Word of God is dealt with and how it is taught and the dogmas of the church and how they develop and how they're antithetical to the

46:04

Word of God. And the moral corruption is horrific within the overall structure, ecclesiastical structure of Rome from the head down.

46:15

I mean, it is just the immorality, the debauchery. You can read some of this stuff and you cannot read in public what characterized the

46:28

Roman Catholic Church over the centuries. And as you get into the Renaissance, the

46:34

Renaissance papacy and the cry of men, I mean, there were good -hearted men, men of great sincerity who were calling for reform, but the church continued just to go into deeper and deeper depravity.

46:53

There is the illegitimate authority claims of the Bishop of Rome and the

46:59

Roman Catholic Church to be over the Word of God, not subject to the Word of God.

47:05

Luther wrote three treatises right after a couple of, three years after he posted his 95

47:11

Theses, which really kind of defined his whole take on what he was committed to in his theology.

47:20

And one of the treatises he wrote was to the nobility of the German nation, by which he attacked the very foundation of the authority of the

47:31

Roman Catholic Church. And he said it's illegitimate. There is a tyranny spiritually here of this church over men's lives that is illegitimate.

47:41

And the church has irrigated itself over the Word of God. The church considers itself to be over the temporal rule of this earth, that they are not subject to the civil government.

47:54

They consider themselves over the Scripture. They're not subject to the Word of God, because ultimately, in their mind, the

48:01

Pope is the infallible interpreter of Scripture, and only he can accurately define and interpret what the

48:09

Word of God means. And then the hierarchy of the church itself, the

48:16

Bishop of Rome, and so it's unaccountable. And where, you know, the old adage, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts, absolutely.

48:24

Well, this is what the Reformers were facing. A church that has distorted the

48:31

Word of God, a church that has claims of illegitimate authority, and what you have in the

48:37

Reformation then is a recovery of the truth of the Word of God. You have the translating of that Word of God into the language of the people, and then the recovery, the actual preaching and proclamation of that Word, which is what the

48:55

Word of God itself calls for. But that authority of the Word of God, and going back all the way into the patristic age to look at how the early church, what their commitment to the

49:07

Word of God was, and what their practice was, the ultimate authority over the early church was the written

49:13

Word of God. The Word of God is the ground and pillar of the faith of the church, and the church is here to support the truth.

49:23

It's not above it, it's under it, and it's accountable to it. And that is what the

49:28

Reformers were calling for. When that Reformation first started, they were not calling for a revolution.

49:35

They were simply trying, and it was really taken out of their hands. I mean, Luther, he was used of God to begin the

49:43

Reformation, but he had no intent at all, or envisioned any of that happening.

49:50

His main concern with the 95 Theses was to have a debate, a debate there among the professors about the legitimacy of indulgences.

50:04

And some students took those 95 Theses, translated them into German, spread them all over.

50:12

I mean, the printing press was now the new technology, and through that printing press, what

50:18

Luther had written was distributed all over Europe in a matter of weeks, and that then morphed into what we know as the

50:26

Reformation. It was the catalyst God used to begin to expose these fundamental issues of the

50:33

Word of God and the illegitimate authority claims of the Bishop of Rome and the Roman Catholic Church, but the issue was the

50:40

Gospel. And in fact, we're going to pick right up where you left off when we return from our midway break.

50:46

This is a longer than normal break. We have to comply with the regulations of Grace Life Radio 90 .1

50:54

FM in Lake City, Florida, who require a 12 -minute break between our two -hour segments.

51:02

So I hope you'll be patient and make use of this time also to write questions for Dr.

51:07

William Webster regarding our topic. And we're going to be back as soon as possible with a continuation of our discussion right where we left off.

51:17

But I thought since we have such a long break that it might be nice to introduce to you

51:23

Party Hardy Marty and the protesters. During the 16th century, the

51:31

Church of Rome reached its height of power as well as its depth of debauchery, greed, and corruption.

51:38

One of the most vile and greedy puppets of the papal throne was a member of the

51:44

Dominican Holy Order named Johann Tetzel. Tetzel sold indulgences to the spiritually ignorant and enslaved laity, warning them that this was a necessary means to purchase the souls of their deceased loved ones out from the torments of purgatory.

52:01

A limerick became popular in that day that went, when a coin in Tetzel's kaffa rings, a soul from purgatory springs.

52:09

This abuse of papal power through pilfering the poor, pious, and peasant people did not go unnoticed by a young German Augustinian monk who was once one of Rome's most faithful and loyal subjects.

52:22

Outraged by the level of greed and wickedness that the Church sank to, this monk nailed his protest to the practice of indulgence selling to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, hoping to spark a debate with the intelligentsia of Rome.

52:37

The hammer blows as these 95 theses were nailed to the church door were like cannon fire heard around the world and ignited the blaze of a holy inferno that is still burning brightly today.

52:50

This holy inferno is the Protestant Reformation. That Augustinian monk who ignited it was me.

52:57

Hello, I'm Martin Luther, and this is my story.

53:33

I'm the great reformer. Reforming the church was my goal, but the

53:44

Pope threw me out like some bad sauerkraut, flushed me right down his

53:52

Vatican bowl. I would not indulge that dirtbag

53:59

Johann Tetzel, so they threatened to twist my spine up just like a pretzel.

54:09

Yeah, I'm the great reformer. The Pope put a price on my head, but while out on the run

54:23

I married a nun, sure beats living with guys who bake bread.

54:32

That's very bold guys wearing robes baking bread. My lady sweet Katie gave up her old habit.

54:44

She once dressed like a penguin, now multiplies like a rabbit.

54:52

Yeah, I'm the great reformer. I turned

54:59

Texas church upside down. Tell those

55:04

Greece boys that Trent centuries after they came and went, I'll be dead, but that won't keep me down.

55:13

Mmm, they wanted to slice me and dice me and feed me to the papal palace puppy dogs, but I'll bet you that in the 21st century that I'm...

55:33

Here's one for the big man in the big hat, in the big chair in Rome, the

55:41

Pope. I desiccate this to him. You don't own me.

56:12

Don't push me around like you're papal punks. You don't own me.

56:19

I'm no longer one of your fear -filled monks, so don't tell me what to do.

56:41

You don't own me. I'm not just another one of your toys.

56:49

You don't own me. I won't ring your bell just like your older boys.

56:58

So don't tell me what to do. And don't tell me what to say.

57:10

Tell me how to pray. The solace before I kiss my lady.

57:28

You don't own me. Go read the notes that I mail to your store.

57:36

You don't own me. I'm not taking your paper bull anymore.

57:45

So don't tell me what to do. And don't tell me what to say.

57:52

And don't tell me when to kneel. And don't tell me how to pray.

58:00

The solace before I kiss my bae. And don't tell me what to do. And don't tell me what to say.

58:06

And don't tell me what to do. And don't tell me how to pray. For I won't bow to kiss your ring.

58:14

I might be a stone hill that's covered with snow, but I know when I dive into heaven

58:20

I'll go. That's why I'm a Christian warrior. To defend solely day of the

58:27

Lord. You don't own me.

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I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. Hi, I'm Mark Lukens, Pastor of Providence Baptist Church.

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We are a Reformed Baptist Church, and we hold to the London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689. We are in Norfolk, Massachusetts.

01:00:00

We strive to reflect Paul's mindset to be much more concerned with how God views what we say and what we do, than how men view these things.

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01:01:01

Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours, with just about an hour to go, is

01:01:07

Dr. William Webster, pastor of Grace Bible Church of Battleground, Washington, founder of Christian Resources, and the author of a book we are discussing today, amongst many other books that he's written,

01:01:19

The Gospel of the Reformation. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own for Dr.

01:01:24

William Webster, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

01:01:33

Please give us your first name, at least your city and state, and your country of residence. If you live outside the

01:01:39

USA, please only remain anonymous if it's about a personal and private matter over which you are asking.

01:01:45

Before I return to Dr. Webster, I just have a couple of very important announcements to make in regard to special events being run by some of our sponsors.

01:01:55

The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals is conducting their annual Quaker Town Conference on Reform Theology at Grace Bible Fellowship Church of Quaker Town, Nov.

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17 -18. The theme is For Still Our Ancient Foe, a reference to Satan from the classic

01:02:14

Reformation hymn by Martin Luther, A Mighty Fortress. The speakers at this conference include

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Kent Hughes, Peter Jones, Tom Nettles, Dennis Cahill, and Scott Oliphant.

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If you would like to join me there, I will be there, along with Rev. Buzz Taylor at an

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Iron Sharpens Iron radio exhibitor's booth. If you would like to join us, go to alliancenet .org,

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alliancenet .org, click on Events, and then click on Quaker Town Conference on Reform Theology.

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The 17th of January is exclusively a Spanish -speaking edition of the conference, and the 18th through the 20th is all in English.

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01:03:54

And by the way, I plan to be at the G3 conference as well, manning an Iron Sharpens Iron exhibitors booth there in Atlanta, Georgia.

01:04:02

So I hope to see many of you there as well. And finally, the most uncomfortable portion of the program, as you may know by now, is when

01:04:11

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01:05:30

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01:06:44

And now we are back to our guest, Dr. William Webster.

01:06:51

And Dr. William Webster has been discussing his book, The Gospel of the

01:06:56

Reformation. And when we went to the midway break,

01:07:02

Dr. Webster, you were basically going through a summarized version of Martin Luther nailing the 95

01:07:09

Theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg. And if you could pick up right where you left off.

01:07:15

Well, that basically was a catalyst who was dealing with the ultimate issue of authority.

01:07:21

What is the ultimate issue? What is the ultimate authority in the church? Is it Christ, who is

01:07:28

Lord of all, who manifests his lordship and his headship through his word and his gospel?

01:07:34

Or is it the Bishop of Rome? Is it the Bishop of Rome and the church hierarchy that are the head of the church and, well, not the head of the church, the

01:07:43

Bishop of Rome alone would be the head of the church, but who are over the word of God. Luther, in nailing those 95

01:07:52

Theses to the church door, the castle door at Wittenberg, basically was hitting the tip of the iceberg.

01:08:00

Underneath that tip, which is above the water, is a huge massive edifice developed through the centuries of teaching on authority and salvation.

01:08:16

And what happened was when he began to question the authority of the Bishop of Rome and he began to bring the issues of salvation, which is partly what the indulgence controversy had to do with, and purgatory, he began to bring this back to the authority of the word of God.

01:08:35

It opened the floodgates. And now we had suddenly a recovery of the original languages of Scripture.

01:08:42

The Scriptures are beginning to be translated into the language of the people. You have men who are becoming into an understanding through the word of God, by the power of the

01:08:54

Spirit, the truth of what it means to truly be saved and what the true church is and what true authority is.

01:09:01

And this gospel message, it's a protest. The Reformers are protesting corruption.

01:09:09

It's a corruption of the message that God gave in his word. It's a corruption.

01:09:15

It is a protest against the corruption, both spiritually and morally, of the ecclesiastical authorities within the

01:09:24

Church of Rome, calling for reform, calling for accountability to the word of God.

01:09:31

The Church of Rome basically hardened itself against that preaching, much like the

01:09:39

Jewish nation did when Christ was preaching, calling them in many of the same ways, with the same principles, back to the gospel, back to the authority of the word of God, and back to a true experience of what salvation means and the life that is lived out of the experience of salvation in him.

01:10:01

This is what the Reformers were seeking to do, and the very heart of it all was, first of all, the authority of the word of God, but out of that, the definition of what this gospel is.

01:10:11

When they began to do that, they ran head -on into conflict with the Church of Rome and its sacramental, sacerdotal, syncretistic form of salvation.

01:10:21

Faith alone, Christ alone, grace alone, those words alone are very important. The Roman Catholic Church will use the terms grace and faith and Christ and justification, sanctification, but that word alone is what defines the protest, because it is the word of God that points us to that little word alone.

01:10:43

Salvation is not in a church, it's not in sacraments, it's not in a man's works. This is what the

01:10:49

Roman Catholic Church is teaching. You need the grace of Christ. He went to the cross to deal with original sin.

01:10:56

He went to the cross to purchase grace for men. The Church is the channel of that grace.

01:11:04

Therefore, the Church becomes, in its priesthood, in its sacraments, a mediator between the individual and Christ, who is the

01:11:13

Savior. You cannot know salvation without the Roman Catholic Church as a mediator.

01:11:19

The Church calls itself a universal sacrament of salvation. So what the

01:11:25

Church, what the Reformers discovered when they came to the word of God and the

01:11:31

Lord opened their eyes is that salvation is in Christ alone. He alone can provide the salvation and all that is necessary for men to be reconciled to God, for their sin to be dealt with.

01:11:48

And that's the main issue. And so we come back then to an understanding of what is the gospel.

01:11:54

You've got to go back to the beginning. We have a Creator. That Creator is the ultimate authority over all things.

01:12:02

He's a holy God, a just God, a righteous God. He's also loving and merciful and gracious.

01:12:09

But He has revealed His will in His law. And that law is given for every man and woman on the face of the earth to understand the purpose for which we exist.

01:12:21

We were created by God for God. And that is defined for us by the law of God.

01:12:28

It tells us why we're created. We're created for Him, for His glory.

01:12:34

We're created for a relationship with Him, to worship Him exclusively, to be in submission to Him with the totality of our life, to walk in obedience to Him, to love

01:12:45

Him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. So the law of God has two basic categories.

01:12:52

The first category has to do with relationship with the living God. Secondly, out of that relationship with a submission to His will in all of our behavior and our thoughts, our attitudes, our desires, our motives, our actions, our speech, all of that is to be submitted to His will which is revealed in His word.

01:13:11

But that comes out of a relationship of submission and love and trust and obedience.

01:13:19

So that forms then an understanding of what the gospel is all about because man has sinned.

01:13:28

He has rebelled against God's law. That's what sin is.

01:13:34

In 1 John 3, 4 we're told sin is lawlessness. It is anomia, that is antinomian.

01:13:40

It is opposed to the law. We are rebels against God, rebels against His law, rebels against His word.

01:13:47

We go our own way. What is central in our life is self. We rule our life.

01:13:54

We direct our life. The greatest idol in a man's life is self because he is opposed to God, a rebel to the

01:14:03

God who created him. The law of God has two requirements. That we love the

01:14:10

Lord with all our heart and walk in obedience to Him. But what it basically says is if you want to get to heaven, you have to be perfect.

01:14:23

The law of God requires perfect obedience. Galatians 3, 10 says whoever is under the law is under a curse because the word of God says curse is everyone who does not abide by all things written in the book of the law to perform them.

01:14:39

That's perfect obedience. That's the command of God. He's a holy God. Man has rebelled against the law of God.

01:14:48

We are transgressors. The consequence of that transgression is eternal death.

01:14:55

There's an eternal hell. The judgment and the wrath of God. This is the need of man.

01:15:03

We are all under the law. There is a creator we are accountable to. Every one of us who lives on this earth will one day die and we will face our creator.

01:15:14

The great need is to be reconciled to God because we are separated from Him. We are dead in sin.

01:15:22

Our sin will condemn us for all eternity. The great need is to be reconciled to God.

01:15:27

It is to be saved. That is what Jesus Christ has done. That is why He came. He is the

01:15:32

Savior of the world. The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. We all have guilt before God under the law.

01:15:41

All you have to do is look at the law and think about that law in terms of your motives. To love the

01:15:48

Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength 24 -7 never deviating from that. To never act in a way that is independent of Him.

01:15:56

Never go your own way in selfishness. Living for your own will. Living for yourself.

01:16:03

That crushes us to the ground. Jesus said every man who looks on a woman to lust for her has committed adultery in the eyes of God.

01:16:13

There is no way you can look at the law of God and walk away feeling that oh yeah

01:16:18

I'm okay. We are all guilty. But that law, that sin has to be dealt with.

01:16:24

The Lord says a soul that sins shall die. There is a consequence to that. And that death is eternal.

01:16:31

God in His mercy and His grace sent the Lord Jesus Christ who was God and man.

01:16:38

Jesus Christ second person of the Trinity becomes incarnate. He becomes man.

01:16:44

He is the God -man. The one mediator between God and man. And in His life

01:16:50

He lived a perfect life. The perfect righteousness that you and I are required to live

01:16:55

He lived for us. He fulfilled the law of God for us. He was born of a woman, born under the law.

01:17:03

That He might redeem us from the law because the law condemns us.

01:17:09

He lived that perfect life that we are required to live but then He also went to the cross to bear the penalty of a transgressed law for us.

01:17:19

The work of Christ in atonement is a forensic work. It is a work satisfying the penalty of the law of God.

01:17:27

That's what Galatians 3 says again that He, all of us who are under the law are under a curse.

01:17:33

Christ became that curse for us that we might be delivered from that curse.

01:17:39

He laid down His life in death. He paid the penalty by bearing our sin.

01:17:47

Our sin was imputed to Him and then He bore in His own body on the tree the outpoured fury of the wrath and the judgment of God against the sin of men.

01:17:59

The Lamb of God, that sacrificial offering once for all, it cannot be repeated.

01:18:07

It is, as scripture says, a once for all sacrifice. It deals with the totality of sin and He gave up His life in death and then

01:18:18

He was raised from the dead for our justification. Now justification has to do with guilt, the guilt of sin and the need of man to have righteousness before God.

01:18:29

We have no righteousness. There is none righteous, no not one, all have sinned and have fallen short of the glory of God.

01:18:35

We are devoid of all righteousness. Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to all who believe.

01:18:43

He is the righteousness of God. That is the phrase from the scriptures that used to confound

01:18:49

Luther that he found judged him because he thought the righteousness of God was the judgment of God.

01:18:57

God is holy. He is righteous. He is a God of wrath against sin. He came to the place where the

01:19:03

Lord opened His eyes to see, yes, the law of God does condemn. The law of God is a holy standard.

01:19:08

It is inflexible but the righteousness of God is also

01:19:14

God's righteous provision in His Son to give us what we could never achieve in our own way, in our own works, and that is to give us a righteous standing before Him which delivers us from the condemnation of the law, from eternal judgment, which brings total and complete forgiveness of sin because in that atonement the

01:19:38

Lord Jesus Christ cancels out, it says in Colossians 2, the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us which was hostile to us.

01:19:48

He's taken it out of the way. He's nailed it to the cross. So when we come to Christ, and it has to be by faith alone because He alone has done the work that is sufficient to deal with our sin,

01:20:03

He lived a perfect life under the law, perfect righteousness. He went to the cross to bear the penalty of our sin and He bore that sin and He gave

01:20:12

His life as an atonement to satisfy the righteous justice of God against our sin.

01:20:22

No man can do that. Nothing is acceptable to God but that. And so that's why it's faith alone.

01:20:30

It's grace. What we deserve is the judgment of God. What we get because of this great exchange that takes place in Christ is mercy and grace because God in Christ has fulfilled the law for us.

01:20:47

That's the glory of justification because when a man comes to Christ in faith alone repudiating all of this self -righteousness which the

01:20:58

Roman Catholic Church was and is still teaching men, that you merit eternal life by your works.

01:21:06

It's by grace but it's a semi -Pelagian type of soteriology where men are aided by grace to work and merit their own salvation.

01:21:19

That is a profanation of the gospel. It subverts the very truth of what it declares to men that we are saved apart from the works of the law.

01:21:29

The works of the law are summed up in love. We cannot be saved by works because God requires absolute perfection and if we sin he requires eternal death.

01:21:40

So there you go. There's absolutely no way you can bring works into this equation but men constantly try to do that.

01:21:47

They try to make themselves acceptable to God by what they are or can do and Luther did that for 10 or 12 years just striving, striving, striving to make himself acceptable to God until God opens his eyes to understand what is the righteousness of God.

01:22:04

When a man comes to Christ he is declared righteous by God. He is robed in the righteousness of Jesus Christ which is as our sin was imputed to Christ his righteousness is imputed to us.

01:22:15

All of our sin is removed and we are in a state declared by God of being righteous before him for all eternity because once a man is in Christ that work of justification is an eternal work.

01:22:32

It is not a process. It's not based on works. It's based on the righteousness of Christ being given as a gift to the center by which he stands in a state that is the same state that Jesus Christ himself has before the judge of this universe.

01:22:53

All condemnation is gone. All judgment is gone. Our sin is gone. We stand righteous in Jesus Christ.

01:23:01

Now that has to be by faith alone. Paul says that in Philippians 3 whatever things were gained to me those things

01:23:08

I've counted as loss for the sake of Christ. More than that I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing

01:23:17

Christ Jesus my Lord for whom I have suffered the loss of all things. In order that I may gain

01:23:25

Christ and may be found in him not having a righteousness of my own derived from the law but that which is through faith in Christ the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith.

01:23:37

That is the most glorious truth you could ever lay hold of if you understand your sin. That all my word you are forgiven.

01:23:44

You are accepted by God. You have a standing of righteousness because of the one who is the righteousness of God.

01:23:51

It's a gift of God to you. It is pure grace and mercy and this is eternal.

01:23:58

There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. You can never lose this.

01:24:04

That is standing you have for all eternity before God. But that said Jesus Christ is not just a deliverer from the guilt of sin.

01:24:13

He's not just one who imputes to us righteousness which is his own. He also delivers us from the state and the dominion and the bondage and the power of sin as a ruling power in our life.

01:24:26

He raises us up from the dead. He regenerates us and makes us a new creation.

01:24:32

He gives us a heart of love for him of love for God. A heart that hungers and thirsts for righteousness.

01:24:40

We become a sanctified people in him. In first Corinthians 1 30 it says by his doing by the sovereign work of God who raises us from the dead and unites us to Christ by his doing you are in Christ Jesus who became to us wisdom from God and righteousness and sanctification and redemption.

01:25:02

That's a summation of salvation and it's all in Christ. It's all about knowing a person and when you know that person you are simultaneously justified by the righteousness of Jesus Christ for all eternity.

01:25:17

But you're also regenerated and you're sanctified. Your life is set apart and you are made a new creation in Christ and you become as Romans 6 says a slave of righteousness.

01:25:31

Your life is transformed. You're indwelt by the spirit of God and you walk in the power of the spirit in obedience to the will of God just like Jesus Christ did because in knowing him we become conformed to his image.

01:25:46

Our life is submitted to him as Lord. That's what it means to be sanctified. Apart from that we can't be justified and Calvin said that.

01:25:56

Calvin said do you want to know righteousness and justification? He said first of all you have to know

01:26:03

Christ. But he said secondly in order to know him you must also receive him as your sanctification and know him as your sanctification.

01:26:16

In order to know justification we must know Christ. In order to know Christ we must repent of sin and turn from our rebellion and from this world from all legalism and thinking that there's anything that I can do to merit salvation be it a sacrament or a religious work or being involved with a church or ministry.

01:26:40

There is absolutely nothing that I can hold on to as Paul said in Philippians 3 and in fact he says if you don't turn from legalism from self -righteousness from this notion that somehow you can work and earn your way to heaven that you cannot know

01:26:59

Christ. One of the prerequisites of repentance is turning from all works.

01:27:05

By grace you are saved through faith that not of yourselves it's a gift of God not as a result of works that no man should boast.

01:27:14

So that repudiation of legalism is absolutely essential but also the repudiation of what we call lawlessness, sin, antinomianism, that rebellion against God and that's why the discipleship teachings of Jesus are so important to understand because he makes it very clear that a true believer a person is a true

01:27:39

Christian is not someone who just professes him and says Lord Lord as he says in Matthew 7.

01:27:47

Not everyone who says to me Lord Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven but he who does the will of my father who is in heaven.

01:27:54

It's not just a profession of doctrine of theology of acknowledging that he is

01:27:59

Lord it's submission to him as Lord so that we actually walk in submission to the will of God our lives are sanctified they are righteous so that we're not only imputed with righteousness but we have an imparted righteousness we are transformed to be made into the image of Jesus Christ and then the day is coming as it says in first Corinthians 30 of redemption that's glory that's glorification when we will be utterly transformed into the very image of Christ in our body so that we are glorified beings and there the very presence of sin is removed and we will live in a state of absolute perfection for all eternity.

01:28:42

Amen and we've got to go to our final break right now and obviously I think that we've got to get this episode of Iron Trip and Zion Radio on sermon audio because that's one of the best sermons encapsulating the gospel that I've ever heard and I would love for everybody listening to share this program and that that powerful message from Dr.

01:29:03

Webster especially share it with your Catholic friends so that they can hear the stark contrast between the gospel of the holy scriptures and the gospel of the idolatrous and superstitious false church of Rome but we are going to be coming back

01:29:24

God willing in a matter of minutes with our final segment of today's program and we'll be seeking to have your questions answered by Dr.

01:29:34

Webster so don't go away God willing we will be right back right after these messages with more.

01:29:46

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That's 631 -385 -8333 or visit liyfc .org.

01:30:48

That's liyfc .org. Hi, I'm Buzz Taylor, frequent co -host with Chris Arnzen on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

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I would like to introduce you to my good friends Todd and Patty Jennings at CVBBS, which stands for Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service.

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That's cvbbs .com. Let Todd and Patty know that you heard about them on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

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And if you go to cvbbs .com, find out about the offer they are currently having.

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If you purchase $50 or more, you're going to be receiving a very valuable book on the

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But it is a book that is contributed, it is written by, co -authored by, a number of Reformed authors that will sure to set you straight on what the

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But that is going to be the offer for November for those in the

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Iron Sharpens Iron audience who purchase $50 or more from cvbbs .com.

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But tomorrow we'll have more details on that book. And we are here with the final segment of our interview with Dr.

01:33:15

William Webster. And if you'd like to join us on the air before we run out of time, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

01:33:23

chrisarnson at gmail .com. And I have a question for you,

01:33:29

Dr. Webster. I usually don't read the entire name of individuals writing in, but since this is a pastor of a church with an excellent reputation for biblical orthodoxy,

01:33:42

I figured I will, as I typically do with pastors who write in questions,

01:33:48

I figured I'd give him a plug. Pastor Chris Powell of the

01:33:55

Covenant Baptist Church of Toronto, he has a question for you.

01:34:01

And he says, Hello, Bill, I have greatly appreciated your work as it has helped me in my study of the

01:34:07

Reformation and Roman Catholicism. My question has to do with a common claim that Martin Luther and the reformers assertion of the imputation of Adam's sin, and the imputation of Christ's righteousness to believers is a theological novelty, which the reformers invented.

01:34:23

For example, I have been listening to a video by popular writer on the early church named

01:34:28

David Burkott, or Burko, I don't know how to pronounce that B -E -R -C -O -T, in a series, what the early

01:34:36

Christians believed about imputed righteousness, which seemed to suggest, that seemed to suggest, he says that twice, that the entire early church didn't take the view that Luther did.

01:34:48

So I was wondering what your thoughts would be on this issue. Thank you. Did the entire early church not believe in what

01:34:58

Luther taught as far as imputed righteousness? No, you have to come back to this issue.

01:35:09

When you look at the Western Church, the Western Church basically had a Latin Bible. Alistair McGrath brings out this point in his book on justification, that Augustine, for example, misunderstood the meaning of the word justification to mean to make righteous, because the

01:35:29

Latin, basically the way it was translated, does mean to make righteous, when the Greek actually means to declare righteous.

01:35:39

The thing, when you read through the teachings of the early church, are you going to find a very precise definition of everything that you would find, for example, the precise theological definitions that you find in the controversy of the

01:35:56

Reformation? The answer is no, because it wasn't a controversy at the time. When you got into the issue with Pelagius and Augustine, for example, it became very precise.

01:36:07

There were aspects of these truths that obviously the church had taught for a long time, but when the controversy arose and there was a for a clear definition of things, that's where you get the preciseness of the theology.

01:36:23

That's exactly what happened at the Reformation, when you have a recovery of the

01:36:28

Word of God in the original languages and you understand the forensic nature of what

01:36:36

Christ is doing on the cross of Calvary and the teaching of imputed righteousness. It's right there in the apostolic writings.

01:36:46

Then that preciseness becomes very prominent. When you go back into the writings of the early church, you find major threads of the

01:36:58

Reformation teaching of faith alone, grace alone, apart from works, in Christ alone.

01:37:08

There is the belief that salvation, they don't define it very clearly, but salvation means that you come to Christ and you're saved and then you are sanctified.

01:37:18

They don't define it in the precision of imputed righteousness. But when you look at the

01:37:25

Word of God and you look at the writings of early church fathers, such as Clement of Rome, Hilary of Poitiers, Basil of Caesarea, Ambrosiaster, Chrysostom, you look at Augustine.

01:37:40

Augustine, for example, said, a man is not justified by the precepts of a holy life, but by faith in Jesus Christ, not by merits of deeds, but by free grace.

01:37:51

That's a summation of the overall view of most of the leading theologians of the early church.

01:38:00

They're not defining things with the precision of the Reformers, because the controversy is not the same.

01:38:07

But the heart of faith alone, grace alone, Christ alone, is definitely there.

01:38:14

Marius Victorinus says, faith alone in Christ is salvation for us. Hilary of Poitiers said, faith alone justifies.

01:38:23

Basil of Caesarea said, we are justified solely by faith in Christ. The issue is whether you're in Christ, and understanding that there is no work that you can do, that you are a lost sinner, unrighteous and ungodly.

01:38:38

The only hope of salvation you have is this one who is righteous, and your life has to be united to him.

01:38:47

Therefore, it is by faith alone in Christ alone, because he alone can deal with our sin and cover our sin and make us righteous in him.

01:38:58

And that is basically the truth that is proclaimed in these theologians of the early church.

01:39:09

That is why the Reformers can hearken back in their controversy with the

01:39:16

Church of Rome to writers like Ambrosiaster, to men like Hilary of Poitiers and Augustine.

01:39:27

Augustine was probably the leading theologian of the Reformers in his teaching on grace.

01:39:34

So this thought that, you know, the teaching of faith alone in Christ alone, by grace alone, is somehow novelty, is just totally false.

01:39:45

It's a misrepresentation. Now what we do need to emphasize is that this, and this is not necessarily modern,

01:39:56

Augustine deals with this easy -believism in his treatise on faith and works, for example, in the

01:40:02

Spirit and the Letter. There's an easy -believism there that creeps into the church, and he has to deal with that to tell people, if you're coming to Christ, it means your life is going to be transformed.

01:40:14

You're going to live a holy life. So the overall view of salvation that the early church had was that you're justified in Christ and then that will bear fruit in a walk of holiness before God.

01:40:28

Granted, over time there is a corruption of an understanding of the sufficiency of Christ to save, and there's the bringing in of this idea of human merit.

01:40:42

That does run, you find these parallel streams running side by side with one another, but it is a total misrepresentation to suggest that the early church had no concept at all of faith alone, grace alone,

01:40:57

Christ alone. All right, well thank you, Pastor Chris, and by the way, you are going to receive, as a free gift from Christian Resources, a copy of the

01:41:08

Gospel of the Reformation, Salvation from the Guilt and Power of Sin by our guest,

01:41:14

Dr. William Webster, and that will be shipped to you by our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com.

01:41:22

So we thank Todd and Patty Jennings at cvbbs .com for shipping out all of our winners in our audience, their free

01:41:30

Bibles, books, DVDs, CDs, and everything else they win by submitting questions. Thank you so much,

01:41:35

Pastor Chris Powell of Covenant Baptist Church in Toronto, and we hope that you keep listening to and spreading the word about Iron Sherpa and Zion Radio.

01:41:45

We have Ted in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, who says, congratulations Chris, I wasn't sure we'd make it to this day.

01:41:53

I'm so glad you're having Bill Webster on as your guest. He really helps bring things full circle.

01:42:00

Why it seems like only yesterday that Pastor Joe LoSarto tipped me off about this interesting guy out on Long Island with a unique Reformed talk show.

01:42:08

What is, and now here he is asking his question to you, Dr. Webster, what is Dr. Webster's assessment of the current

01:42:16

Pope? Does this unusual papacy have any implications for how Bible -believing

01:42:21

Christians might best share the Gospel with Roman Catholics? Interesting.

01:42:29

I think that this is a good way to challenge our more conservative and traditionalist

01:42:34

Catholic friends about the papal infallibility, because it seems that they are very silent in public about this

01:42:42

Pope. But if you could comment. Well, there's obviously a great deal of dissatisfaction, if you would put it that way, with many who are conservative

01:42:55

Roman Catholics with this Bishop of Rome, because he seems to be very soft and moving in a direction that would take the

01:43:04

Church in a direction that is very opposed to what it has traditionally stood for in terms of human sexuality, in terms of the family.

01:43:17

This Pope seems to want to reach out,

01:43:23

I guess, in some sense of mercy and grace to people, but I think it's misinformed, it's misguided, you know, to not take a firm stand on homosexuality when the

01:43:36

Church has traditionally been very strong, and to suggest that he cannot be a judge, and no man, obviously we're not saying we can be a judge, but the

01:43:46

Word of God is already judged. You can take your stand on the Word of God. It's very clear. To begin to move the

01:43:53

Church away from the direction of the stances that it has taken, which are good stances, is very concerning to a lot of people, and you know,

01:44:04

I don't know a lot about all of the ins and outs of where this Pope really stands on a lot of the issues.

01:44:11

You just see things in the news that, you know, would be greatly concerning if I were a Roman Catholic and conservative, that would be raising all kinds of red flags in my mind.

01:44:25

But obviously, I mean, you look at the history of the Church, there have been contradictions all through the history of the

01:44:30

Church. Infallibility, that can be,

01:44:36

I mean, there's absolutely no way the Bishop of Rome is infallible. The Third Ecumenical Council, which is, from a

01:44:46

Roman Catholic standpoint, an infallible council, condemned as a heretic the Bishop of Rome. So from an historical standpoint, the

01:44:54

Bishop of Rome is not infallible, he can't err, he has erred. What is this

01:45:00

Pope going to do? In the minds of many who are conservative, he already is a heretic, I think.

01:45:06

But that's a conundrum for them to deal with. And I don't know what to say from that standpoint.

01:45:15

You have to take your stand on the Word of God. To say, out of a sense of graciousness, you know,

01:45:22

I can't judge a man, but the Word of God does. And I can stand on the

01:45:28

Word of God, and I can tell him what the to the need of that man about his sin before a holy

01:45:35

God. That's what the great scandal is here. Yeah, in fact, I want to organize a debate with a conservative

01:45:45

Roman Catholic apologist on the theme, Is Pope Francis a safe and faithful shepherd and guide?

01:45:57

And I want to see if I get any takers on that theme from a conservative Roman Catholic apologist.

01:46:03

Is Pope Francis a safe and faithful shepherd and guide?

01:46:08

I asked my friend Robert Syngenis that question, if he would be willing to debate that theme.

01:46:16

This is when he was in my studio about a year ago. And he said, is that a trick question?

01:46:23

But Roman Catholics think they somehow escape the heresies of Pope Francis by claiming, well, he hasn't declared anything ex cathedra that would be in disagreement with historic

01:46:43

Roman Catholicism. But that does not take into consideration the fact that millions of people view him as a safe and faithful shepherd.

01:46:54

So therefore, nearly anything he says is going to be taken seriously by many naive

01:47:00

Catholics as the right way to go to follow and be obedient to Christ.

01:47:07

Am I not right? Yeah. Again, where does he stand on a lot of these issues?

01:47:18

It's a murky thing. You know, he's come out with certain statements, and he's wishy -washy.

01:47:24

He obviously is more liberal than the hardcore, tridentine, conservative type

01:47:33

Roman Catholic. But he is the head of the church, and he's moving it in a certain direction.

01:47:41

I don't know what you do as a Roman Catholic in that case. You know, you can fall back upon the councils and say, well, this pope is clearly an error, but he has not spoken ex cathedra.

01:47:59

And so, you know, it's easy to take refuge in the fact that he's just a man with his own personal opinions.

01:48:06

And that has hardly ever happened in the history of the church, though. So how could you view this person as a shepherd of the flock of the body of Christ when he could be spewing all kinds of heresy just because he didn't announce it ex cathedra?

01:48:22

The last one was in the 1950s, correct? The last dogmatic proclamation.

01:48:27

That was the Assumption of Mary. Right. Yeah, by Pius XII. So, I mean, it's really absurd that they would view this man as their vicar of Christ, as their shepherd, when he could basically say nearly anything he wants as long as he doesn't say anything ex cathedra that would be troubling to their consciences.

01:48:47

I don't think he's going to say anything he wants, but by the same token, when you look back in history, you go back to the

01:48:53

Renaissance papacy and the people who claimed these bishops of Rome as their shepherd.

01:48:59

These men were scandalous. I mean, Francis is a saint.

01:49:06

I'm not kidding. I know. I know. I know what you mean. Oh, you know, you go back and you read the account of these men, and you know, there is an entire probably 100 -year time in history back in the 10th and 11th centuries called the

01:49:23

Pornocracy. It defines the papacy. It was so utterly debauched.

01:49:30

And the Renaissance papacy holds a close second to it.

01:49:39

These men are supposed to be the preeminent example spiritually for the church at large, and they are utterly corrupt men.

01:49:51

They're not concerned in the least about the commitment that they're supposed to have to the church.

01:49:58

Okay, we better move on to some other questions. Thank you, Ted in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. You've also won a free copy of the

01:50:03

Gospel of the Reformation. Please make sure we get your full mailing address. We have David in Ada, Ohio. Are the

01:50:09

Roman Catholics in the pew taught what was decided in the Council of Trent? I'm assuming that would be according to or depending upon what parish you're in, right,

01:50:19

Dr. Webster? What was the question again, Chris? Are the Roman Catholics in the pew taught what was decided in the

01:50:28

Council of Trent? I know that even way back in the 1970s when I was in grammar school, because this was after Vatican II, not long after Vatican II, and even as I remember as a teenager from time to time visiting the church when

01:50:45

I had really abandoned any meaningful relationship with Catholicism in the 80s, I don't remember anything like that coming from the podium there in the

01:50:55

Roman Catholic Church that I was a member of. In fact, I can distinctly remember the last parish priest

01:51:01

I had as a Roman Catholic saying from the pulpit, We're all God's children, gay, straight, you name it.

01:51:08

I can remember that was the exact phrase to use. So hardly that was not somebody who would be echoing Trent. But anyway, wouldn't it be depending upon the parish?

01:51:16

It would depend on the parish and the priest. But what you can say is that when you read a Roman Catholic catechism, what you have is a synopsis basically of what the

01:51:25

Council of Trent teaches. So you're going to be catechized in Trent without knowing it's Trent.

01:51:30

Yeah, but you're going to be getting contradictory information as well, because at the time of Trent, they didn't believe that Muslims were adoring the same true

01:51:39

God that they do. No, that would be anathema to Trent. No way. No, what you have here is an evolution of the church's teaching and its tradition.

01:51:49

The church has moved away from this notion that you have to be in conformity with the tradition of the church.

01:51:57

It's now what you call living voice. And that is, this is at Vatican I, where they decreed papal infallibility.

01:52:08

In opposition to all of the church historians, many of them who stood up to oppose on the basis of the tradition and history of the church, they said, tradition is disloyalty.

01:52:21

It's treason. We are not looking here at tradition and history.

01:52:27

We're looking at the living voice of the Spirit of God in the church at this point in time. And therefore, whatever is decreed right now for dogma is what is tradition.

01:52:38

And therefore, if this is decreed now, we can believe that implicitly they believed this back in the centuries preceding.

01:52:46

That's the view of the church now. But Trent, if you read the

01:52:52

Catechism of the Catholic Church, Council of Trent is quoted over and over and over again. Councils are quoted over and over and over again.

01:53:01

Papal decrees are quoted. So it's right there in the catechism. It's just that most

01:53:06

Roman Catholics don't have a clue beyond a little bit of catechism what their church really teaches.

01:53:14

They sure don't have any real understanding of church history. Very few have ever read

01:53:20

Vatican I or Trent. They don't know the anathemas. They would probably be horrified.

01:53:26

In fact, if you were to say to them, do you realize that if you do not submit to every one of the dogmas of your church, if you question in the least any of these, you're no longer

01:53:45

Roman Catholic and you're excommunicated. Yes, and I've had even traditionalist

01:53:51

Catholics tell me different things about my own spiritual state. Patrick Madrid told me that since I was born and raised a

01:53:59

Catholic and apostatized from it that I am in very serious peril and in realistic danger and probability of going to hell, whereas others who are either equally conservative as he is or more have said, hey, born a

01:54:15

Catholic, baptized a Catholic, you're still Catholic, pal. So, you know, and of course they don't even have certainty or a full assurance that they will be in heaven anyway, even they who are

01:54:30

Roman Catholic. Isn't that the sin of presumption if you believe with certainty that you're going to heaven?

01:54:35

It is a sin from their standpoint of presumption. No man can know for certain that he's going to go to heaven except the word

01:54:42

God tells you. You can know with certainty that you will. Jesus said, my sheep hear my voice,

01:54:48

I know them, they follow me, and I give eternal life to them, and they will never perish.

01:54:55

Amen. And we have Ronald in Eastern Suffolk County, Long Island, New York, who says something that a previous listener said is confusing to me.

01:55:06

That would be Pastor Chris Powell. I understand that the Catholics reject forensic justification as a legal fallacy, but I thought that they all believed in the imputed sin that we receive from Adam at conception because they believe in original sin.

01:55:24

If you could clarify this. They do believe that. They believe in original sin, but that's one of the controversies between the

01:55:31

Eastern Orthodox Church. The Eastern Orthodox do not believe in original sin, but the Western Church does.

01:55:37

The Roman Catholic Church teaches original sin. Christ died for original sin. And they believe that sin is imputed to all of humanity.

01:55:46

Yes, you were born a sinner. That's right. So there was something, I guess, in Pastor Chris's question before where he was saying that both things, the imputed righteousness of Christ and the imputed sin, are considered both to be legal fallacies.

01:55:59

It's only one of those that's considered illegal. It's just one, yeah, and I don't think Chris meant it that way. But yeah, the

01:56:06

Church there is true to Scripture and what it says about our being born in Adam.

01:56:13

We are imputed with the sin of Adam. In Christ, we are imputed with His righteousness.

01:56:21

Just as our sin was imputed to Him, His righteousness is imputed to us. Well, thank you,

01:56:27

Ronald, in Eastern Suffolk County, Long Island. Please give us your full mailing address so we can ship you out a free copy of the

01:56:34

Gospel of the Reformation, compliments of Christian Resources, the publishing ministry of our guest,

01:56:40

Dr. William Webster, and also compliments of CVBBS .com. We'll be shipping that out to you.

01:56:46

We have time for one more quick question. We have

01:56:52

Arnie in Perry County, Pennsylvania, who wants to know, how do we let our

01:56:57

Roman Catholic friends realize that to be an ecumenist means to abandon even their own dogma, that it is a fallacy that we can have spiritual unity until they repent of their idolatry and false gospel?

01:57:15

Well, their perspective on ecumenism is that you're going to come over to their side. They're not going to compromise.

01:57:22

And so what happens is, with like ECT and some of these other meetings with Roman Catholics, it's the

01:57:30

Protestants who are, you know, compromising. The Roman Catholics have never compromised, and they're not going to compromise.

01:57:38

And in order to have ecumenism that works, where you have unity, somebody has to compromise.

01:57:46

And what happens is, if you can be a Roman Catholic and you can embrace the

01:57:52

ECT Accords and say that you can come into a unity with a

01:57:57

Protestant on the gospel, not just the culture war and not just fighting with the issues of abortion and some of the other cultural issues that we face that are clearly sinful, but when we start talking about the gospel and salvation, that's where nobody who is true to what the

01:58:19

Word of God teaches or who is true to what Roman Catholicism has dogmatized in its councils and through papal decrees, there's no room here for ecumenism.

01:58:32

And we are out of time, brother, and I want our listeners to know that the website for Christian Resources is christiantruth .com,

01:58:40

christiantruth .com. And once again, the website for Grace Bible Church of Battleground Washington is gracebiblebattleground .org,

01:58:49

gracebiblebattleground .org. If you could hold on, Dr. Webster, I want to schedule you for another interview on your other book,

01:58:57

The Church of Rome at the Bar of History, the Banner of Truth publication. Will you hold on, please?

01:59:04

Sure. And thank you so much for being our guest today, Dr. Webster. I want to thank everybody who listened, especially those who took the time to write in questions.

01:59:10

And I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater Savior than you are a sinner.