May 10, 2024 Show with Dr. Tony Costa on “A Critical Examination of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel”

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Bishop Mari Emmanuel and the Wakeley Attack

On April 15th, Bishop Marmari Emmanuel of Christ the Good Shepherd Church in Wakely, New South Wales, was attacked by a teenager, shouting Allahu Akbar, the Islamic phrase in Arabic, which means God is great, repeatedly stabbing the bishop, which resulted in the bishop losing an eye and stabbing several other individuals in the congregation.

And this has brought even further attention to Bishop Marmari Emmanuel by people of all stripes of Christianity, whether they be Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Evangelical, who are lifting up Marmari Emmanuel as a hero, who are viewing him as a Christian leader, who are saying that we should be following his example of forgiveness of his attacker.

And so today, I thought it was very important, in spite of some of the criticism I've already received, to have someone on the program who is thoroughly knowledgeable of Marmari Emmanuel and discuss his theology, his church, to discuss his gospel, and to be more informative from the truth of the Scriptures to our listeners as to whether he should be held in high esteem as a genuine Christian leader.

In spite of any of the numerous admirable things that we can truthfully say about this man. And to do this is Dr. Tony Costa, a dear friend of mine for many years, a returning guest to Iron Trip and Zion Radio, who is the professor of apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary.

He's also an author, debater, and conference speaker. We may even be having him out to Pennsylvania in 2025 to debate on egalitarianism. He would be opposing the view that women have equal roles and functions in the body of Christ to men.

And we are still working on that, and hopefully that will come to fruition and we'll keep you updated. But it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Trip and Zion Radio, Dr. Tony Costa. Thank you, Chris.

It's always a pleasure to be on with you. Well, if you could, tell us about this Christ the Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley, and I may be mispronouncing that, New South Wales.

Yes, the Good Shepherd Church is a church that was established by Bishop Marmarie Emanuel. Let me just say right off the bat that that's not his real name. I mean, his actual name, his real name is Robert Schleiman.

He was born July 19, 1970, in Baghdad in Iraq, so he's Iraqi by birth. It came as a great shock to me. I thought he was an older gentleman. I just realized that I'm older than him. So that came as a great shock to me.

So am I. There you go.

When you've got a long white beard, it ages yourself decades. Oh, of course.

My wife says the same when I grow a beard. So he was born in Iraq, so he's Iraqi by birth, and he was ordained as a priest. In the Assyrian Church of the East in 2009, and then he became a bishop, actually two years later in 2011, of Christ Good Shepherd in Wakeley, New South Wales, Australia, and the reason why he goes by the name Marri Emanuel is because that was the name that he took when he was consecrated into the ministry or into the clergy.

The other thing we should also make clear, Chris, just for the sake of transparency, and I would also join my voice to yours, that I've also been attacked as well in my social media circles for bringing out the differences and the theological differences, and people act like we should just ignore those or just cover them up in light of the recent attack.

And so you can still have a transparent discussion on these things without taking away from the fact, as we're going to talk in a minute, that Bishop Marri Emanuel is someone who's actually a winsome character.

He's actually a very nice man. He's not a horrible person, as some people try to make him out as just this devious heretic, but we'll talk about that as well, and what counts as heresy as well in terms of his theology.

But I think it's important to realize, Chris, that we're living in an age where theology doesn't matter for most people. They just think as long as he's a nice person, he's making good claims and sermons, theology shouldn't hold us back.

And this is where I get very concerned, is that when we start seeing the dwindling of theology, that this becomes a very slippery slide that we get on. And so we need to maintain the sound doctrine that has been passed down to the Church, that is through the apostles and through Scripture, and hold on to that.

Let me just say that the ancient Church of the East came out of—it branched from the Assyrian Church of the East in 1964. It's not to be confused with the Chaldean Catholic Church. The Chaldean Catholic Church is in full communion with the Bishop of Rome, that is, with the Pope, and so their liturgy may be Orthodox or Orientalist Orthodox, but the Chaldean Catholic Church remains in union, that is, in full communion with the Pope as their head.

The other thing I think we need to also know about Maury is a bit of a controversial figure. He was suspended from his bishopric in 2014. And one of the reasons for that is that he was accused by the archbishop with violating certain canon laws, believe it or not, of the Council of Nicaea.

And so just a few I'll mention. He was accused of, for example, placing pictures in the Church. And if you look at some Assyrian churches of the East, they don't have pictures or icons. Really? Unlike the—yes.

If you look at some of their churches inside the inner sanctum of the churches, you will notice they don't have pictures. They'll have a bear cross. It would almost look like something Zwingli would have been proud of, you know, no images, nothing, just white walls.

And so—and the reason I know this is I've pastored and baptized a young—well, married girl, but both of them were from the Assyrian Church of the East, and so I got to know a lot about that particular domination.

So he includes pictures. If you notice in his videos, you'll have pictures in the background of Mary and Jesus, icons of Mary and Jesus, and you'll have one of Saint Cyril, for example. The other thing as well was you're supposed to live on the premises as a bishop.

You're not supposed to live with other people. But he was living apparently with his mother, I think, or something. And the archbishop says, well, you can't do that. It goes against canon law. And the other thing was his eschatology is—they called it very sensationalistic.

It almost sounds like a dispensational about the tribulation coming and so forth. So he got in some trouble with that. Another area he got into trouble with was over running his own charity work. And I don't know what's so bad about running a charity to help the poor.

But anyway, all of that to say that he apparently had—he had collided with the archbishop on certain issues. And so 2014, he's deposed as bishop. In 2015, he establishes an independent church. And his church, Chris, is not recognized.

It doesn't have any official status with the Assyrian Church of the East. It's an independent church, correct?

Correct, correct. And it is neither Roman Catholic nor Eastern Orthodox, correct? Correct.

So they're very different. So the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Eastern Orthodox, many of them would consider the ancient church of the East to be heretical because of the charge of Nestorianism.

Sometimes the ancient church of the East—the Eastern Church of the East, rather—is sometimes called Nestorian because it moved eastward. It went as far as China. They were Nestorian churches as far away as China and in India as well.

And so this brings up a whole debate. We'll talk about this as well, Chris, about whether Mary is the mother of Christ or whether she is the mother of God using the language of the Council of Ephesus and Chalcedon.

We can talk about that because these are honorific titles not for Mary. They're not to lift her up. They're actually to emphasize that Christ is God in human flesh. But we can talk about that. But there are some videos where Mari clearly disavows this language of mother of God.

He sides with what Nestorius said. We should call Mary Christotokos, which means the Christ-bearer, the mother of Christ. And Nestorius did not like the term Theotokos, which means the God-bearer, that Mary bore God the Son in human flesh.

But although Protestants are not Nestorian, they would side with the Nestorians on that issue, wouldn't they, most of us? This is sad, though.

This is sad because, historically, in the Protestant creeds, the confessions and the creeds of the Protestant churches, they affirm Chalcedon and Ephesus, and there is nothing wrong with giving Mary that title, Theotokos, as long as it's understood in the context that what it's saying is that Mary carried God the Son in the flesh in her womb for nine months.

She bore him. She is the mother of a person. She's not the mother of a substance. She didn't give birth—you know, a pregnant woman doesn't say, you know, I'm going to have—I'm going to have a blob of protoplasm.

She says, I'm going to have a boy, or I'm going to have a girl, and she knows that that's a person. And so Mary did not give birth to some substance like flesh. She gave birth to a person. And so who was that person in her womb?

Well, it was God the Son, second person of the Trinity in human flesh. So when the council called her Theotokos, what it was saying was not that she preceded God or mothered God or was a member of the Godhead.

What it's saying is the one she bore was the one person, God the Son, with two natures, the divine and the human. And it was to protect the hypostatic union of Christ. And apparently Nestorius was read as saying that there were two persons, the divine Son and the man Jesus.

And so Nestorius was taken to mean she's not the mother of the divine one. She's the mother of the human side, the human part. And this is one of the most controversial issues, Chris, in Church history.

Scholars today—Church historians still today will debate whether or not Nestorius was actually Nestorian. They believe that he was misunderstood. They believe that they were talking past each other. There was clearly a language barrier, Chris, between the West and the East.

They're hypostases and usia and prosopon and words like personae in Latin and talking about substantia, substance and essence. And so sometimes what would happen is some of these Eastern fathers, Greek fathers, and Latin fathers would talk past each other, and the Greeks would say, well, there's three hypostases in the Godhead.

And they would say, no, hypostasy is the nature, not the persons. And they accused each other of being modalists. So all of that to say, there's a lot of ink that has been spilled on this topic. And Dr. Michael Haken and many other Church historians, I believe, have already have addressed this.

It continues to be addressed whether or not Nestorius was unjustly condemned.

Why the Critique Is Not Heartless

Now, let's immediately and briefly—because it's not the main reason we're doing this show—but briefly respond to the charges of quite a number of people who heard about this program in advance through social media, that we are being heartless in giving any kind of critique of Mari Emanuel, especially right now after he is recovering from losing an eye to the attack of this teenager who I'm assuming may be Muslim.

He might be just—. Yes, he was. Okay, because—.

He was a Muslim, Chris. He was 16 years old. He was a Muslim. It's been confirmed by the media, by the police. And he was crying out—and I heard it on the video before YouTube yanked it out—he did cry out, Allah hu akbar, Allah hu akbar, God is greater, Allah is greater.

And then you could hear him saying that if he didn't insult my prophet, I wouldn't have attacked him. Okay.

Well, I'm glad you clarified that, because obviously we have leftist spoiled brats here in the United States on college campuses using Arabic phrases in support of Islam and Palestine, and yet these very people would not last five minutes under Sharia law.

You know, you have drag queens saying, free, free Palestine. Oh, yeah. We have them here at the University of Toronto.

They took over the campus. They called it Little Gaza, and they have no idea what they're talking about. And then you have, again, you have LGBT groups like Queers for Palestine, and they're told over and over again, in Gaza, they would find the highest building and throw you off of there and then stone you to death.

Right, well, can you defend what we're doing today, breaking the law? Briefly, because, especially in regard to the timing. This man was recently attacked and could have lost his life, but lost an eye.

So is this wrong timing for us to be doing this? No, no, I don't think so.

We were going to talk about it anyway. I know it was on your list of things to do. Right. We were going to talk about this anyway. I know you, Chris. Well, you were going to cover this. I know you, Chris.

Like I said, we've known each other for many, many years. It's not a matter of timing. It's a matter of, look, theology matters. And we hear our common friend, Dr. James White, say this over and over and over again.

Theology matters. And when Christians say things like, well, you shouldn't be talking about us, not in light of what's happening, and especially now. Look, it's one thing to lose an eye. And I really feel for him because losing an eye is very traumatic.

But theology is important. The gospel is at stake. I don't think the Apostle Paul in Galatians would go on a temporary leave just so not to offend certain people in the Galatian church. He came right out and said, no, this is another gospel, and that other gospel is anathema, and it will damn your souls.

So I think that the truth of the gospel, as Paul says in Galatians, the truth of the gospel was under attack. And so we were going to talk about this regardless.

And he's also returned to his church, and he's preaching again. He's not still in the hospital bed.

Right, right, right. So he's come back to the church, and he's still preaching theology. So I think it's important for us to realize that Satan does not take any coffee breaks, and I don't think Christians should as well.

We should always be ready to give a defense for the hope that we have in Christ. And this is not, as you know, Chris, this is not to demean Mario Emanuel as we will talk about. He is a winsome character, and he's charitable.

Yes, and I also, before we go into the critique aspect further, when we come back from our first commercial break, he is a hard person to be pigeonholed. He is an extraordinarily gifted orator. I am sure that there are many evangelicals who would sell all their possessions if they could possess his gifts at oratory.

He is captivating. And the thing that makes him even more dangerous, perhaps, is that he, as I heard in a message today, he sounds like he is preaching the true gospel very often. He sounds like he is preaching the gospel of the Reformation.

He sounds sometimes like he is teaching total depravity as far as the nature of man before regeneration. I was listening to a sermon that lasted over an hour today, and I barely could come up or find anything that he said that I disagreed with in the few times in the midst of the sermon when there were disagreements with Reformed theology that were obvious.

They were the same kind of things that many Armenian evangelicals would commonly say in a sermon. But then he contradicted the whole sermon at the very end before his prayer when he was saying that we must believe in transubstantiation and the literal flesh and blood of Christ present in the Eucharist to be forgiven.

And I will play that clip after we return from the first commercial break. But so I'm not discounting this man as not having any gifts. He's biblically literate. He has infinitely more scripture in his sermons than Joel Osteen does, and very often is correctly interpreting them.

So this is what makes this man more of a paradox. It makes him more confusing. And some people who have only heard perhaps some sermons or parts of sermons by him may be thinking, other than the weird costume, what do you have a problem with this guy?

This guy sounds like he's born again. He sounds like he's got the same gospel as I do, and I'm a member of a Reformed Baptist church or a Presbyterian church or what have you. But you have to do enough listening to find where he is in grave area, even to the point of damning error.

And let's go into that when we return from our first commercial break. If anybody has any questions for Dr. Tony Costa on Mari Emanuel and his theology, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail dot com.

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The Eucharist, Transubstantiation, and Salvation

We're now back with Dr. Tony Costa, Professor of Apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary, and we are providing for you a critical examination of Bishop Mar-Marie Emanuel of Christ the Good Shepherd Church in a suburb of Sydney, Australia, and Tony, I'm going to play a clip.

You are with us, right Tony? Okay. Yes, yes sir. Just wanted to make sure. I'm going to play you a clip. Oh, the rapture hasn't happened yet, Chris. I'm going to play you a clip of Mar-Marie Emanuel that was at the very end of a sermon that in most ways sounded excellent to me, unless I missed something.

He even gave a great analogy that I had never heard before of when Jesus Christ said he came to bring the good news to the poor, and he was saying, when you give money to a beggar, how are they acting and speaking in truth that they are truly poor?

You know, because there are a lot of scam artists out there, and one who is truly poor has no inheritance and cannot work. It is absolutely impossible for them to work, for them to be rightly out there begging, and he compared that to a spiritual pauper.

The spiritual pauper who is lost has inherited nothing but the sin of Adam and death, and he cannot work to gain eternal life. There's nothing he can do, and therefore, Jesus Christ gives him that good news that he can be the heir of a great inheritance and can have eternal life, even though he cannot work at all for it, which was another contradiction in his theology, because he sounded like a Calvinist at that point.

Right, right. But right at the end, this is what Marmar Emmanuel had to say.

Take my body, fig, and take my blood, grapes, and I have plugged my body, which is the fig, out of the thorn, and I have plugged my blood, which is the grapes, out of the braise. He took the sins of the whole world.

He took the sins of the human race, thorns and the braise, and made them a crown over his head, and out of this crown, thorn of crown, he gave me his body and blood from the cross. It is his body and blood in the truth.

It's not symbolic. It's not bread and wine. It's the body and the blood of Jesus Christ, and if you don't believe in that, then you are still living in sin. You're still captive. You're still bound. When you come and believe that this is the body and the blood, and you receive it, believing that it is the true body and the true blood, your sins are forgiven.

Jesus came to proclaim liberty for you, who as a sinner, willingly and unwillingly, captive and bound, thorn and braise, thief and robber.

Well, that is the clip I wanted to play, and we have been disconnected by Dr. Costa, so hopefully he can hear me now. Can you hear me, Tony?

I can hear you now, yes. I just lost you when you were playing the clip.

Okay, well, he was basically saying that you are still enslaved by your sin if you are not acknowledging that the elements of bread and wine in the Eucharist are not bread and wine, that they are the true body and blood of Christ.

Right, right. And so therefore, it's interesting that there are evangelicals who would be, and of course ecumenical Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, who would be saying, how dare you denounce someone as being a false teacher, as being dangerous, just because they disagree with you on certain things.

This is a wonderful man. He is willing to be a martyr for what he believes. He's forgiven the person that stabbed his eye out of his skull. Would you do that? Would you be willing to forgive that person?

So how dare you? Well, here you have Maramari Emanuel. That was not an ecumenical statement with evangelical Protestants, because we don't eat the real flesh and drink the real blood of Christ.

Do you have any further comment on that? That's right. Well, yes. Well, that's not the Gospel. I mean, in the Gospel, 1 Corinthians 15, 3 -4, Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, was buried, was raised.

And the Gospel is the gift of God in Christ Jesus. It's the free gift of eternal life. And that is not—the ordinance of the Lord's Supper is for regenerate Christians. It's for the Church. But it's given to you when you come to Christ.

So that's why baptism—we believe baptism, praeto-baptism—we believe baptism should be performed after someone has come to faith. Just like Acts 2 -38, the people heard the Gospel, and then they were baptized when Peter preached.

And then in terms of the Lord's Supper, the Lord's Supper, again, is for believers. It doesn't make you a believer. It doesn't regenerate you. It's what regenerate believers do in commemoration of Christ.

And so when you make transubstantiation a basis for salvation—and Rome would agree with that—but then Rome is much more open and much more liberal. They're inconsistent, Rome.

Correct. Modern Rome, not the traditionalist guys.

Correct. That's right. And so he was doing well. I mean, he was doing well. I mean, it's almost like the Judaizers, where they're preaching Christ, preaching the crucified Christ, the risen Savior. They're preaching the Gospel, and then they said, but you need to be circumcised, and you need to keep the law, and so forth, to be saved.

So this is the issue. The theological problem with Mari Emanuel is that he comes across, he preaches out of the Bible, and his very stellar message, as you yourself have noted, but then he'll bring this aspect of the tradition of the Church.

He'll bring that aspect, and it is a tradition of the Church, Chris. Transubstantiation developed and evolved in Church history, and it really comes out when you come to the 11th and into the 12th century, especially with Thomas Aquinas, as well.

It's absent in the patristic era, is it not?

It is. It is. It's absent, and there's clear references in the early fathers, Antionicene fathers, of the Supper of the Lord being a figure of His body, a figure of His blood, and so forth. And it's not until you get into the turn of the millennium that you start getting this talk about fusing real presence and transubstantiation together.

So the early fathers could speak of the real presence of Christ, but not in terms of transubstantiation.

And they did not worship the elements of the Eucharist.

No, no, no. In fact, that evolved—well, that was already current in the time of Thomas Aquinas, and it starts, I think, around the 1200s A .D., or end of the 1190s to the 1200s. That's when you start having the adoration of the Eucharist.

And Aquinas himself talks about how he adores the Eucharist, the host, as Christ himself. And so that developed within Church history. I mean, the Greek Orthodox Church, the Eastern Church, has nothing of this, and nothing like this.

And so it's clearly a development in the Western Church.

Marian Veneration and Intercession to Mary

Well, now I'm going to play another clip of Mar Mary Emanuel, where you really hear his full-blown idolatry. And this is in regard to Mary, the mother of Jesus.

We thank you, God, for choosing Mary to be the vessel, to be the ark, to be the citadel, to be the second heaven. You are so unique, Holy Mother. In every aspect, you are unique. In every aspect, you surpass every human being, even the angelic orders.

Your Son, who is God, Jesus Christ, has elevated you, and venerated you, and venerated you above every level, including the angelic orders. I bow, I bow with humility before your feet, begging you, Mother, to intercede to your beloved Son, because if there is any heart that understands the sacred heart of Jesus Christ, it's the heart of Mary.

Mother, I beg you, intercede to your Son to have mercy on me, I the sinner. You are my Holy Mother, who lives forever, who is with me forever, who prays and intercedes for me unceasingly. I thank you, God.

I thank you, Lord Jesus, for giving me such a perfect, wonderful, unique, special, so, so, so elevated of a human being called Miriam of Nazareth. Mom, intercede for all of us, to your beloved Son, to have mercy on His church, and to have mercy on this turmoiled world.

Holy Mother, I beg you, from the bottom of my heart, pray and intercede to your Son, to have mercy on every lost sheep, on every sick soul, on every soul that is being held captive, imprisoned in dungeons, whether they are spiritual, satanic dungeons, or physical dungeons.

Through your intercession, may your Son release them. And there you have that disturbing, idolatrous portion of a sermon from Marmari Emmanuel. And there are evangelicals, many, who will say, we are quibbling over tertiary issues here.

They will say, that's at worst misplaced devotion, but it's not idolatry. I mean, give the guy a break. Mary is a unique woman in church history, and we should remember her with reverence. He just goes a little overboard, but this is clearly going into the realm of idolatry, isn't it?

Well, yes. I mean, words like, I bow, I bow with humility before your feet. And he calls her the ark, which is also what Roman Catholics refer to her as. He calls her the second heaven. She has been elevated, and even Christ Himself venerates her.