SRR #63 | Piper and The Doctrine of Salvation

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I do a podcast. I'm not interested in your podcast. The anathema of God was for those who denied justification by faith alone.
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When that is at stake, we need to be on the battlefield, exposing the error and combating the error.
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We are unabashedly, unashamedly Clarkian. And so, the next few statements that I'm going to make,
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I'm probably going to step on all of the Vantillian toes at the same time. And this is what we do at Simple Riff around the radio, you know.
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We are polemical and polarizing Jesus style. I would first say that to characterize what we do as bashing is itself bashing.
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It's not hate. It's history. It's not bashing. It's the Bible. Jesus said,
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Woe to you when men speak well of you, for their fathers used to treat the false prophets in the same way, as opposed to blessed are you when you have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness.
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It is on. We're taking the gloves off. It's time to battle. Okay. I want to welcome everybody back to the show.
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This is Simple Riff around the radio. My name is Tim Schjonesy, and I'm here today with Carlos Montijo.
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We didn't have an episode last week, and if you all follow our podcast and our blog, you might have seen that we put up an article about John Piper.
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And really what happened was I was in a rush to get this out, and I spent all of my time on the article, and then
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I just basically didn't have any time left over for anything else during the week. I had to go back to work.
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So that's pretty much what happened, and I would say that we sort of hit a hornet's nest with this article.
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No joke. We knew that when we published this article, I thought to myself that one of the first things that people would post would be the articles in defense of Piper, and sure enough, that's exactly what happened.
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And we knew that we would get a lot of mixed reviews, a lot of mixed comments on it, and that's exactly what happened.
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We had people that really came out in support of what we were saying, and we had some people come out and say some very,
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I would say, uncharitable things. Somebody accused me of being a slanderous liar, and I, you know, here's the thing.
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I made valid, sound inferences, logically valid and sound inferences from the statements that Piper himself made in the article, and so we're sticking by it, but we are here today, and we are going to sort of go over some of the stuff that people have been saying and sort of try to address some of these things.
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Now, what's really interesting is if you heard our criticisms of Tim Keller, we did a whole episode addressing our critics, and the reason why is because it's almost like we live in an echo chamber.
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We hear the same things over and over and over, and so it really gives us an opportunity to just say, okay, we're going to try to address some of these things.
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And today, I don't think that we're going to address all of the responses in defense of Piper that we might get, but I do want to try to address some of the more common ones.
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And, you know, one of the things that I also want to point out is for us, this is a gospel issue, and this is extremely important for that reason.
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Now, we are not in favor of calling people heretics for any reason or saying this is heresy for just any little disagreement.
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As a matter of fact, just to give you an illustration, just to give you an example, we're going through what
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I would say is an excellent series with Tim Coffman on eschatology, and so if you haven't heard this series, please check us out.
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But one of the interesting things is we got an email from somebody who was saying, like, if you don't say this about who the pope is, and if you don't take this position, then you're a heretic, and it's heresy.
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And, you know, we don't want anything to do with that. You know, we want to be balanced without compromising our position and our convictions.
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And when we look at this stuff that's coming out of Desiring God, we are very concerned.
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Basically, I mean, we're dealing with the gospel, the doctrine of justification by faith alone. And I want to bring
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Carlos into this discussion, but just recently I sent, I think it was,
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I forgot where I saw this, but I saw it on Facebook. Somebody said, this is making the rounds.
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And so I sent it out to the guys from Semper Ephraim on the radio just to show them, like, you know, this needs to be called out.
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This is, we're not just shooting in the dark here.
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There was a tweet from DesiringGod .org, and the tweet, you know what, and I don't think that I have the date on the tweet.
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Let me see if I can find it. What date was this tweeted out?
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Okay, this was on October 14, 2017 from the Desiring God Twitter account.
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And it reads, you're not saved through faith alone. Be killing your sin.
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And then there's an article, I think, that came with this talking about killing your sin.
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And it's explicit. You are not saved through faith alone.
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So today we're going to be talking, we're going to be addressing some of the comments that we've received, and we're going to be talking a little bit about the doctrine of justification.
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I want to talk a little bit about why I think that things like this get missed within the church. But first what we want to do is we want to just state outright that we believe that the doctrine of justification is the central affirmation of the
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Christian faith. We echo what Luther said. I'm going to read from R .C.
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Sproul's book, What is Reform Theology? Luther said this. This is, quote, the article with and by which the church stands without which it falls.
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R .C. Sproul goes on to say, Luther had this to say about the doctrine of justification by faith alone. This doctrine is the head and the cornerstone.
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It alone begets, nourishes, builds, preserves, and defends the church of God. And without it, the church of God cannot exist even for one hour.
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Folks, I really, I can't say this enough, and I'm not trying to exaggerate, but I really believe that we are potentially facing a crisis of our time.
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I think if you want to write about something, if you want to study something, this controversy right now over the doctrine of justification by faith alone,
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I think is it. And I don't say that lightly, I don't think, I'm not trying to be dramatic here.
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My concern is that whole churches and whole denominations are going to be swept away into thinking that there's a final salvation that has something to do with our works.
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So let me bring Carlos into this. Carlos, thank you for joining me today.
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How are you doing? Oh, man, good. Tired, but good. There's a lot going on, obviously.
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This article got a lot of traction in a somewhat unexpected way because this is nothing new.
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This is really nothing new, but I guess it is new for some people, perhaps a lot of people, and Piper's becoming a lot more blatant about this stuff.
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He's becoming a lot more vocal about his heresy. But I did want to point out a few things that it's actually pretty fascinating because the article's already been translated into Spanish, and I believe it's being translated even into Russian.
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So pretty interesting how much traction this brief article is getting.
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And I wanted to give a shout -out to Pastor Shane Casler, too. He was one of the folks there who left a comment and, you know, commending the article and for the stand that, you know, you're taking for the truth.
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And so I was very encouraged by that. I'm sure you were as well. And even though he is
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New Covenant Theology and we have our differences, he recognizes the importance of taking a stand for the truth.
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And so I was very encouraged by that. It was almost a pleasant surprise because there was some expected, you know, mockery and usual, you know, the people who are fairly ignorant or just don't understand or they have a bias against biblical
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Christianity for whatever reason. That was a pleasant surprise in spite of all of the other stuff that people have been saying that's negative or whatever, and especially that one guy that accused you of slander, which ironically that itself is actually slander because it's completely unwarranted because you,
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I mean, you quote Piper, you show where he's wrong, and you explain why he's wrong. So there is no slander there at all.
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It's a baseless false accusation that people get worked up because of their favorite fans or authors or whatever, their teachers are being put on blast or they're being put on the dock.
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And rightfully so because nobody's exempt, as we've said before, nobody's exempt from scrutiny.
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Of all people, people like Piper should be under the highest form of scrutiny because they have so much influence.
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Let me say something about Shane Casler. I reached out to him and let him know how much
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I appreciated his comment. For pastors out there that want to defend
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Piper's error, I would much rather go to a New Covenant theology church with someone like Shane Casler than sit a moment in a church with somebody who's going to defend this indefensible error.
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And, you know, I commended Pastor Shane Casler. I want to just recommend his blog.
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He wrote a piece on Piper titled, Piper and Lecrae, Liberal Slide Continues.
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And so he's, you know, man, he's doing his job. That's like, that's what
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I love about this. It's like he's doing his job. You know, we can disagree about secondary issues, but when it comes to the gospel, it's like, yes, okay, we don't agree about New Covenant theology.
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We're Reformed Baptists. We can talk about that. We can, you know, care for each other as brothers.
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But when it comes to the gospel, let's stand and do battle for Christ and do battle for the gospel.
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So check out his blog. Check out what he wrote in his article. You know, and like you said, we've gotten a lot of mixed reviews.
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And was there something else you were going to talk about, Carlos? I didn't want to interrupt you too much.
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I was going to quote, I'm going to be alluding a lot to the article by John Robbins called
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The Pied Piper, which he wrote back in 2002, outlining some of Piper's most pernicious errors and heresies.
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And this is based on his book, Future Grace, which was first published in 1995.
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So this is almost like as old as I am.
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You know, it's not really anything new. But Robbins echoes a lot of sentiments that as we dive into it,
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I'll quote them. I can't find the quote right now, but I'll cite them as we progress.
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Yeah, that's not a problem. I'm going to be reading a lot of what John Robbins had to say because I think that it's very important.
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But one of the things that I wanted to say is our article is titled, and we're going to put it up in the show notes, but our article is titled
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The Gospel According to John Piper. And what had happened was I had seen an article written by John Piper, and I realized this needed to be addressed.
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And Piper's article is – what is the title of Piper's article? It's in our article.
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Let me look it up. Are We Really Saved by Faith Alone? Say that again? Are We Really Saved by Faith Alone, or Does God Really Save Us by Faith Alone, or something like that.
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Yeah, we need to state it accurately so people can look it up. It's in our article, and I really want people to read both articles.
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But when I saw this article, I didn't realize that anybody else had actually already started to address this.
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And so I wrote a rough draft, and then I wrote a second rough draft, and then I was corresponding with Tim Coffman through private messenger, and I tried to copy and paste his comments into the article.
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And I said, like, this just – I mean, they're long quotes, and it would just be better if he wrote it in himself.
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And so he beefed up the intro, and he added some of the stuff in Matthew that he wrote, and he really helped me to polish the article.
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And so I want to say thank you to Tim Coffman. I mean, he's – man, this guy is such a blessing to us. And he's aware of all this stuff.
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He knows what he's talking about. He knows Roman Catholicism like the back of his hand, and he's a solid
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Protestant brother. So, you know, I felt really good that he was contributing to the article, that he was co -authoring the article with me.
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And what happened was we published it, and then almost immediately after that, I realized through Colleen Sharp from Theology Gals that she knew people who had actually already written about this stuff.
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And I was very – just I was blessed by that. And we're going to get to that in a little bit, but one of the other things that I was – we also knew was the fact that people had already defended
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Piper. And so I wanted to say to our listeners that, you know, we knew that this was going to happen.
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We know that there's going to be people out there that are going to defend Piper. We fully anticipated it. We expect it.
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One of them is Mark Jones, and I don't really have much to say about Mark Jones.
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I've been corresponding with my own pastor about some of the articles that Mark Jones has written, and I'll just say
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I think he's completely off. But I want to point something out from an article titled –
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I think it's The Current Justification Controversy, and it's an article on the
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Trinity Foundation. But, you know, in pretty much every controversy where you're trying to point out, hey, this prominent teacher, this prominent pastor, this theologian is saying something that's wrong, in just about every instance you're going to have people who are going to rise to their defense.
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In this article, I'm just going to read this. It says, The Justification Controversy actually began 30 years ago in 1975 when students of Professor Norman Shepard of Westminster Theological Seminary gave the wrong answer to questions posed by presbyteries examining them for ordination.
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When asked how a sinner is justified, the Westminster Seminary students answered by faith and works.
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Their incorrect answer led to an internal debate at the seminary that lasted for seven years, ending with the dismissal of Professor Shepard from the faculty in 1982.
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For most of the time, the seminary managed to keep the controversy in -house, and the church at large heard little about it.
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So long as the seminary could maintain the controversy within its walls, it kept Professor Shepard on the seminary faculty.
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In 1981, when the board and faculty could no longer contain the controversy, the board did not renew
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Mr. Shepard's contract. The controversy then subsided, and he left the
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OPC, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church as well, where charges were pending against him, and joined the
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Christian Reformed Church, where his views were non -controversial. With the return of relative calm, many people outside the seminary thought the doctrinal problem had been corrected.
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It had not. Professor Shepard was not the only member of the Westminster faculty who taught justification by faith and works.
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In fact, the reason that the controversy lasted so long was that the majority of the seminary faculty on board of trustees approved of his teaching and defended him against his critics.
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So when the seminary board, bowing to outside pressure, finally let Professor Shepard go, most of the faculty at the seminary agreed with his doctrine, opposed the board's action, and continued to teach his doctrine.
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One of Westminster Seminary's oldest and most revered professors, Dr. Cornelius Van Teel, publicly defended
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Professor Shepard and his doctrine of justification by faith and works. Other Shepard defenders included
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Professor Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., now de facto dean of the faculty at the seminary,
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Dr. Samuel Logan, who later became president of the seminary, and Mr.
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John Frame, now teaching at Reformed Theological Seminary. These men and others ensured that though Professor Shepard was no longer at Westminster Seminary, his teaching would continue in the institution.
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And so we see that even with somebody like Norman Shepard, and this was a huge controversy, he had people who were very well respected.
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These men rose to defend the heresies of Norman Shepard, and we are not surprised that people like Mark Jones are rising to the occasion to defend
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Piper's erroneous teaching. We're not surprised, but we are disappointed.
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So with that in mind, I think one of the things that we want to do is we want to sort of address some of the criticisms that we've received.
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Some of the people that are defending Piper. So Carlos, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to sort of list off some of the things that we've heard.
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They're a little bit repetitious. We've heard them from several different sources. Several different people have said the same thing.
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And then we can just go ahead and try to comment on that. And then at the end of this podcast, what
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I'd like to try to do is we'll see how long we go, but I want to kind of go over the article that we wrote.
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So the first thing that I think we hear a lot, and I knew that we were going to hear this, was that the context issue, that we're taking
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Piper out of context. And what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to read from Rachel Miller's blog.
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And I would encourage everybody else to go out there and read this blog. We're going to post it up on our show notes.
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But I was really grateful that she wrote this. I left her a comment saying thank you.
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And her blog article is titled Salvation by Grace Alone Through Faith Alone in Christ Alone.
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And it was published on October 14th, 2017. And she writes,
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Piper is saying that we are justified by faith alone in Christ alone, but that there is also a final salvation separate from justification that includes our works.
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In this way, he says we are saved through faith and works.
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This is not simply sloppiness or poor wording. This is what he is teaching.
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And it is clear from the context of the article. And it is contrary to scripture and to the reformation and to the reformed confessions and catechisms.
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So Rachel Miller, good job. You hit the nail on the head.
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She identifies what so many people, it gets me so frustrated when people want to cry context foul.
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And say that we took Piper out of context. We did not take him out of context. Rachel Miller points that out.
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I didn't think that I needed to point that out. But she pointed that out. This is what he is saying. He makes a distinction between justification and salvation and justification and getting into heaven.
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And he puts forth the idea that there is a final salvation which in some way factors in our works.
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And one of the things that I think he does is he takes James out of context, the book of James.
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Because James is talking about displaying your good works before men, not before God.
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And this is actually something else that Rachel Miller points out in her article too. It was crazy how much in tune we were with her article.
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Carlos, do you have anything to add to the fact that people are saying that we are taking Piper out of context?
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Yeah, definitely. Well, the problem, and I've already said this before, we've already noted this, that this tends to stem from one of two issues or both.
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That people have either ignorance or some kind of bias against the biblical teaching.
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And against what the Bible says to do in situations like these. And also about how to properly discern and identify false teachers in the first place.
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So there's a lot of background here that a lot of these people who make these claims are usually not aware of.
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And they don't even properly understand how you're supposed to point out the heresy in the first place and identify it.
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And so I was going to mention a few things from the Trinity Foundation. They have a lot of good material on this controversy.
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They have the current justification controversy by O.
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Palmer Robertson. That book itself has a fascinating history. The back of the book reads this.
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Originally written in 1983, the current justification controversy was barred from the pages of the
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Presbyterian Theological Covenant Seminary by the faculty of that seminary. They feared offending the faculty of Westminster Seminary, which taught and continues to defend the doctrines that are contrary to scripture.
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So as you can see, it was fascinating because nobody wanted to publish
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Palmer Robertson's manuscript. And so what he did is he ended up publishing his own manuscripts, handing them out.
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And so I guess the Trinity Foundation got a hold of them and they decided to publish the book itself. So, fascinating history behind that book.
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Isn't that crazy? I mean, we're talking about the gospel here. And it's like, is the
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Reformation over? I mean, it's crazy to me. It's crazy to me to think that because they didn't want to upset faculty members, or they didn't want to upset another denomination, or they didn't want to upset people, that they wouldn't publish something of this importance.
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They wouldn't publish something like this. Yeah, well, obviously it would look really bad and tarnish their reputation because how is it possible that the very bastion of Reformed Orthodoxy, you know, the
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OPC and Westminster Seminary, could be harboring such a disgusting infestation of Romanist teaching, false teaching and salvation by faith and works, by virtually the entire faculty?
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I mean, that was just, and that's why they kept it under wraps for so long, for almost the entire duration of the controversy itself.
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So, and there's another really good volume by the Trinity Foundation called The Companion, A Companion to the
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Current Justification Controversy by John Robbins. I've read both of these books and they're outstanding. They're not very big books, they're very easy to read, and they're very important books that really give you the context and the primary source material for the controversy.
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And so on the back of this book says, As the Apostle Paul demonstrates in his letter to the Romans, the heart of the gospel is the doctrine of justification through belief alone.
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The church that denies this gospel is a false church. The church that obscures this gospel is a falling church.
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Today there are influential churchmen and putatively conservative churches who obscure or deny the gospel of justification through faith alone, hawking new perspectives and new paradigms on salvation.
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In the Current Justification Controversy, Dr. O. Palmer Robertson discussed the first controversy that erupted in the conservative
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Presbyterian circles in the 20th century. In this Companion to that Volume, Dr. Robbins discusses the roots and fruits of that controversy.
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Also included in this volume are documents from the Shepard Controversy and an essay by Professor Robert L.
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Raymond. This is outstanding material. There's also another book that's related called
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Not Reformed at All, Medievalism in Reformed Churches. This is by John Robbins and Sean Geraghty, and this one focuses primarily on Doug Wilson.
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But a lot of these false teachings are very similar forms of neolegalism and initial and final justification, all of those things.
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And so the thing that Robbins points out is that these errors are nothing new, and they actually stem from even further back than that.
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There had to have been a setting up for something like that so blatant to happen.
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And Robbins, he does a very good job of pointing out in his article on the
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Pied Piper, pointing out that these errors from the very inception of the
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OPC and the Westminster Seminary. He writes here, this movement is a confluence of several winds of doctrine that the
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Trinity Review has been warning our readers about for decades. The reconstructionism, theonomy of Rushduni, North, Bonson, and their disciples.
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North being Gary North and Bonson being Greg Bonson. The theology of paradox of Van Teel and his disciples.
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The neo -orthodoxy of Barth and his disciples. And also the redemptive historical hermeneutic of Voss and his disciples.
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So all of these people, this error stems from a sort of paving of the way by previous errors and previous false assumptions that were established by these very influential
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Presbyterian theologians like Van Teel and the other men that he listed.
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And so I can see why a lot of people would have a hard time with that because these men are the most popular and influential men in Presbyterianism today.
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They are the face... If you're a presuppositionalist, you know all about Bonson.
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I can imagine that a lot of people might get upset that we're throwing him in there.
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Yeah, and it's not just Bonson. It's Van Teel himself. It's the other guy,
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John Frame. It's all of these men who are Van Teelians. There was something that Van Teel taught in his method that created, that really laid the foundation for a lot more errors to be propagated.
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And Robbins argues, and I think rightly so, that because Van Teel argued, his position basically undermined the doctrine of revelation by saying that there's divine truth and there's human truth and it doesn't coincide at any point.
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And making very unbiblical arguments like that, it really paves the way for all kinds of other heresies and false teachings to creep out of that.
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And that's why you have so many different branches that were influenced by Van Teel and by the
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OPC in Westminster Seminary, like Reconstructionism and Theonomy and Shepherdism.
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Norman Shepherd's false gospel of justification by faith and works. And all of this stuff has been brewing for years.
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And it even goes back to... Let me just say this. Actually, it really surprised me, and it still does, when
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I found out that Van Teel defended Norman Shepherd in light of the fact that he went after Gordon Clark the way that he did.
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And the whole Clark -Van Teel controversy. And after reviewing what that controversy was about, it was clear that Clark was right when he criticized
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Van Teel's notion of analogy. And the way that they went after Clark, and then years later to find out that they defended
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Dr. Norman Shepherd. And I believe, if I'm correct, but I believe that they even went back and listened to Dr.
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Norman Shepherd's lectures from his classroom and basically confirmed the fact that, yeah, he was teaching the doctrine of justification by faith and works.
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And so for him to go and defend Dr. Shepherd, that to me is just astonishing.
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And I think it really highlights just the fact that some people...
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We're criticizing Piper, and just some people, they're just going to defend him.
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It doesn't matter what we show them. It doesn't matter how bad it is. It doesn't matter that the anathema of God was given to the
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Judaizers for compromising the doctrine of justification by faith alone. And it doesn't matter.
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They're going to defend him. These people are always going to have defenders. It doesn't surprise me. Yeah, and that's unfortunately sadly been the case with the
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OPC from its very beginning. With the Clark -Van Teel controversy and the way in which the
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Westminster faculty that came out of the CRC, or the Christian Reformed Church, and how they basically hijacked the original vision that Gress and Machen had and Clark had.
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And those who agreed with them had for the OPC itself. Really, they were the ones who were standing in the more faithful Presbyterian tradition, the
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Scottish Reformed tradition. That's not to say that the Dutch Reformed are not. There is a solid
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Dutch Reformed tradition, but then you have this very irrational, mystical branch of it stemming from theologians like Bavink and stuff like that.
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The controversy that began with the Christian Reformed Church and its split with Herman Hoeksema and the founding of the
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PRC basically bled over onto the OPC with these ministers who came from that denomination.
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This goes back years and years, so it's very important to understand that this has a long history.
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Of course, it goes back to biblical times when, obviously, the devil is going to try to distort the gospel with many counterfeits.
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That's why it's important to have a solid understanding of this. As Luther says, the article by which the
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Church stands or falls, because you can have a whole bunch of things right. You can have a whole bunch of doctrines right, but if you have this one thing wrong, you just basically overthrew all of Christianity.
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This is so foundational to Christianity itself. It's at the very heart of the gospel and at the very heart of Christianity.
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If you have this wrong, you just overthrew everything else. It's completely worthless without this doctrine being accurate and being taught correctly.
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It really is that important, and that is why I'm submitting to our listeners that this really is a crisis.
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That we see somebody like John Piper who is going to the
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Together for the Gospel conference, and he's teaching this false idea of salvation.
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It's astonishing. This really is that bad. Let me ask another question,
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Carlos. One of the things that has been labeled against us, once again, is that we're being divisive, that we're being schismatic.
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That this is divisive. The thing about doctrine is it does divide.
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Doctrine divides. Doctrine divides those who believe from those who don't, and it divides truth from error.
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John Robbins, I think, has the perfect reply to somebody who says that you're being a schismatic.
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John Robbins writes, and this is in the book that he wrote, Can the Orthodox Presbyterian Church be
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Saved? On page 7 he writes, because apparently,
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Reverend Dr. Peter Wallace accused him of being a schismatic.
35:12
And so Robbins writes, apparently Wallace does not know that a schismatic is someone who causes division by teaching doctrine contrary to scripture.
35:23
Quote, note those who cause division and offenses contrary to the doctrine which you learned and avoid them.
35:30
End quote. Romans 16, 17. Robbins writes, it is those who cause divisions and offenses by teaching contrary to biblical doctrine, not those who are offended by false teaching who are the schismatics.
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Many Presbyterian elders, including Wallace, get the meaning of the word schismatic precisely backwards.
35:53
And that would basically be my reply, is we're not being schismatic. Honestly, we believe that Piper is being a schismatic by teaching contrary to what we've learned in scripture.
36:06
And I would say that we are doing what Romans 16, 17 says, which is to mark them.
36:12
We're marking him and we are avoiding him. Especially, Carlos, I mean, you think about the demographic of El Paso, Texas.
36:22
I've said this before. We live on the border of Juarez, Mexico. We have a large
36:28
Roman Catholic community here in El Paso. And then you couple that with how big
36:36
Piper's platform is. And it's a recipe for disaster. And when you have people in our city who go to DesiringGod Twitter account and they read, you are not saved through faith alone.
36:51
I mean, that can wreak havoc on people who are trying to wrestle through what
36:58
Roman Catholicism says and why it's wrong. And that can wreak havoc on people who are coming out of Roman Catholicism.
37:06
I mean, we have a heart to reach people who are stuck in, who are held captive in Roman Catholicism.
37:14
We have a heart to reach these people. I don't want this getting out to the people that I'm trying to talk to.
37:21
And I know you don't either. Yeah, so to add a little bit to what you said.
37:28
That's funny because these people clearly don't seem to understand or realize that the Bible in cases like these commands is to be divisive.
37:36
We have an explicit command from the Bible to be divisive, which you already alluded to in Romans 16, 17.
37:46
That says to mark them. And so, well, first of all, in 1
37:51
Corinthians 11, 19, it says, For there must also be factions or heresies among you so that those who are approved may become evident among you.
37:59
So the Bible explains that this is actually a necessary process. This is a very necessary process of heresies creeping up within the church.
38:09
And then men who have discernment and who identify these errors and call them out the way the
38:18
Ephesian church judged these false apostles that the Revelation talks about.
38:25
So this is clearly commanded in the Bible for us to do. And like Romans 16, 17 says, it clearly says to mark them.
38:35
To keep an eye on those who cause dissensions and hindrances contrary to the teaching which you have learned. To turn away from them.
38:41
To mark them and to have nothing to do with them. To not associate with them. And the reason we're not supposed to associate with them is because, as 1
38:51
John says, that in giving them an open door, we participate in their wicked deeds.
39:00
And that's why it's so important not to in any way associate with these men and to call them out and call out their heresy for what it is.
39:07
And so that's how seriously the Bible takes, that's how seriously God takes this. And so one of the things that you mentioned regarding Roman Catholics is that this, the reason this is so, you and I were both raised
39:22
Catholic, Tim. And so we understand that this has the stench, the sour stench of Romanism all over it.
39:30
And that's exactly what John Robbins says in the article, the Pied Piper article. He says that this movement is in principle a rediscovery of the
39:38
Roman Catholic doctrine of salvation. Because in the Roman doctrine, the
39:43
Roman Catholic view of salvation, you only start out with grace through baptism.
39:49
But you have to maintain that grace yourself by the sacraments of the church and by essentially your own good works.
39:56
And so this is really nothing but Romanism on a fig leaf, essentially.
40:01
And there's actually some very useful markers that Robbins has listed here to help us identify what exactly the neolegalism teaches, like John Piper, like Norman Shepard, like men like that.
40:18
And so he points out a few of these things here. The first one is that neolegalism denies or renders insignificant individual election to salvation and zealously condemns individualism.
40:31
Denies that faith is assent to understood propositions and belittles or denies propositional and literal truth.
40:38
Denies that faith alone justifies. Denies that knowledge is necessary for salvation and condemns those who insist on knowledge as Gnostics.
40:46
Denies the meritorious work of Christ. Denies the imputation of active righteousness of Christ to believers.
40:51
Asserts that water baptism regenerates, washes away sins, and is necessary for salvation.
40:56
Asserts that believers can lose their justification in salvation. Asserts that the final justification of believers depends on their performance.
41:05
Asserts that God accepts less than perfect obedience for fulfilling the conditions of salvation.
41:11
Asserts that persons who are neither elect nor believers of the gospel are nevertheless members of the covenant.
41:18
Asserts infant communion. Asserts that good works are necessary conditions to obtain or retain salvation.
41:25
Asserts that chronological theology is superior to systematic theology. Asserts that eschatology is soteriology.
41:33
So those are a handful of markers that you can use to help you identify some of the false teachings being promoted by this neolegalist movement that has gone under different names such as the
41:47
Federal Vision Heresy, the Neolegalism, the Norman Shepard Controversy, the
41:53
Justification Controversy, and there's another popular one, the
41:58
Auburn Avenue, the Auburn Avenue Theology, New Perspective on Paul. A lot of these have many of those markers that we just read from, so that's very important to keep that in mind.
42:12
And not be deceived by even the likes of men who have respect and who have influence and authority in the
42:22
Protestant Church, like Piper or men who are
42:28
Presbyterians. And this is one of those things that I also wanted to point this out, that Robbins does a really good job of pointing out, because one of the problems, and we may not be able to draw this out too much in this episode, maybe in the next episode we'll be able to draw it out more, but there is of course the issue of whether the
42:47
Reformation is over. And sadly, a lot of Protestants don't understand the fact that the
42:54
Catholic Church is still very much alive and in effect today.
43:00
It's still doing in some ways even more damage than it was doing before the Reformation happened.
43:05
And so one of the things that I really appreciate Robbins pointing out in the article is that these people don't leave, a lot of these people don't necessarily leave the
43:21
Protestant Church to join the Roman Catholic Church. What they essentially do is adopt Roman Catholic teaching and practice and into their own
43:32
Protestant churches or Presbyterian churches or whatever they may be. And that's what you see happening so much in this movement.
43:39
And that is exactly why this type of heresy is so pernicious and so hard to, sometimes can be difficult to identify, because it's clever.
43:49
And this quote by Robbins really crystallizes what we ourselves have been expressing for a very long time, that the most pernicious and the most effective errors and heresies are really the ones that are couched in the language of piety and orthodoxy.
44:13
And they're couched in the language of biblical phraseology.
44:19
And so that's why it is so important to recognize that it's not just the fact that they're using the biblical terms.
44:28
You have to be careful to watch out for the fact that they could be redefining them as Piper does.
44:33
Piper redefined several key definitions like faith and works. Let me go ahead and read from his article on Pied Piper because he says essentially exactly what you just said.
44:48
That the attacks that are most difficult to see are the ones that are crouched in piety.
44:56
And this is the quote itself. I'll just read it so that people can have it. The most effective attack on truth.
45:04
Yeah, that's what I was going to read. That's fine. I didn't think you had the article. Go ahead. I'm just kidding.
45:13
The most effective attack on the truth, the most subversive attack on the doctrine and completeness, of the completeness and the efficacy of the work of Christ for the salvation of his people, is always couched in pious language and biblical phraseology.
45:28
That's why it's so important to be able to look past the surface and really get a hold of how they're defining and using these terms.
45:39
One of the things that you said, we've been talking about how Piper's view is essentially
45:47
Romanism. One of the comments left on the blog was left by somebody who was really upset at the fact that we would compare
45:58
Piper to Roman Catholicism. Or compare what he was saying to Roman Catholicism.
46:04
I want to read one of the comments. Tim Coffman responded to this and I thought it was excellent.
46:12
Responding to the person, he says, Coffman goes on to write,
47:10
If anyone sayeth that man may be justified before God by his own works, whether done through the teaching of human nature, or that of the law, without the grace of God through Jesus Christ, let him be anathema.
47:26
Coffman inserts this comment. This appears to me to be consistent with Piper's view of initial justification.
47:35
Then Coffman goes on to quote Council of Trent Canon 24.
47:41
Quote, If anyone sayeth that the justice received is not preserved and also increased before God through good works, but that the said works are merely the fruits and signs of justification obtained, but not a cause of the increase thereof, let him be anathema.
48:02
Coffman inserts this comment. This appears to me to be consistent with Piper's view of final justification.
48:11
Coffman goes on to write, According to Piper, works cannot be, quote, merely the fruits and signs of our justification already obtained, end quote.
48:22
Otherwise, he would acknowledge that final justification is grounded in Christ's substitutionary righteousness alone, the same ground upon which our initial justification was declared.
48:35
But Piper does not believe, quote, the said works are merely the fruit and sign of justification obtained, end quote.
48:43
And thus the Council of Trent does not condemn him, nor he the
48:49
Council of Trent. For this is the core of Roman Catholic theology. And thus
48:54
Piper had to walk back his initial assessment that, quote, the core of Roman Catholic theology is a heresy, end quote.
49:04
And I guess he's quoting Piper there. Of course it is. Piper should have no qualms about saying so.
49:11
And yet, for some reason, he does. Thank you, Tim. So, you know,
49:16
Carlos, Tim is just, this guy knows his stuff. And I am so grateful for him to be a part of this ministry.
49:25
Alright, so we had, I wanted to ask you this, Carlos. So we're calling out Piper. Is it necessary, because I've heard this repeatedly, is it necessary for us to call
49:36
Piper before we call him out? A lot of people that, and even people that I dearly care about.
49:42
So, you know, be careful in how you respond. But a lot of people have said, you know, well, like,
49:51
I think you should have called him. Like, that probably would have been the first thing to do. Like, did you try to call him?
49:56
Did you try to contact him to ask him what he means? And one of the things that I've said is that Piper's an intelligent guy.
50:03
He is articulating exactly what he means to say. These are established views.
50:09
And I think that once people can realize, like, this is actually a view that is established.
50:15
It's recognizable. And he's articulating it.
50:20
He articulates it well. Yeah, well, it's funny because you're actually giving him the benefit of the doubt because he's so clear as to what he's saying.
50:29
But there's a lot of potential issues when people make that claim or have that complaint or take that issue with you or with us when we call people out in this manner.
50:42
I think it could stem from a number of different problems or issues. I think one of the things is that some people, they seem to default to Matthew 18 for everything.
50:55
And let's go ahead and read it just so that we have the context there. So in Matthew 18, a lot of people think that Matthew 18 applies to all situations of church discipline, but that's not necessarily the case.
51:09
And so, okay, so Matthew 18, verse 15, Jesus says,
51:15
If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault in private. If he listens to you, you have warned your brother.
51:22
But if he does not listen to you, take one or two more with you, so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses, every fact may be confirmed or every truth may be established.
51:30
If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a
51:35
Gentile and a tax collector. Truly I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven.
51:43
So the problem with this is that this is not talking about all situations of church discipline.
51:49
Jesus is clearly saying that if somebody commits a sin against you personally, you go tell them their fault in private first because it only affected you, basically.
52:01
It's not some public sin or public proclamation of error.
52:07
And so when you have a situation that mirrors more closely what Piper is doing, like what happened with Peter and he was playing the hypocrite, he was denying the gospel not in his doctrine but in his behavior by catering to the
52:20
Judaizers and denying justification by faith alone by participating with the
52:26
Judaizers. Paul rebuked him and withstood him to his face and in front of everybody.
52:31
And that's exactly what the Bible says to do. When there is a public proclamation of error, a public sin like this, you're supposed to rebuke it in the presence of all.
52:44
And that's what the Bible says. Yeah, one of the reasons why you do this publicly in the hopes that nobody would be misled or led astray by the error.
52:57
And let me go ahead and read from John Robbins' article, Why Heretics Win Battles.
53:04
I think it's a great article. I definitely recommend it. I think I've probably read this before on the podcast, but it's worth reading again.
53:11
John Robbins writes, Quote, We can learn a great deal from the example of the Apostle Paul in Antioch and his letter to the
53:20
Galatians, for he was neither slow to recognize error nor timid in correcting it. Our failure to learn from and imitate
53:27
Paul is a principal reason why heretics win battles. Paul recognized doctrinal error quickly and acted swiftly to correct it.
53:35
He wrote, Quote, But this, meaning a problem over the preaching of the gospel, occurred because of false brethren, to whom we did not yield submission even for an hour, that the truth of the gospel might continue with you.
53:49
Galatians 2, 2 -5. Paul did not put up with, that is, yield submission to, error or those teaching error on the gospel, quote, even for an hour, end quote.
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He was quick to recognize error and quick to correct it so that, the truth of the gospel might continue with you, end quote.
54:08
While his concern was doctrinal, it was not academic, for he did not tolerate those who were teaching error in the churches.
54:15
He understood the error and he refused to tolerate the men who were teaching or abating error in the churches.
54:25
Paul explains further how Christians ought to respond to those who obscure the gospel. Quote, But from those who seem to be something, whatever they were, it makes no difference to me.
54:36
God shows no personal favoritism to man. For those who seem to be something add nothing to me, end quote.
54:45
Galatians 2, verse 6. Paul was not impressed by a person's status in the church. God is no respecter of persons and neither was
54:52
Paul. Church status, church office, educational credentials afford no immunity. In fact, the biblical rule is just the opposite.
55:00
To whom much is given, much shall be required. The greater the office, the greater the responsibility in the church.
55:07
That is why Paul told Timothy, quote, Those, meaning the elders, who are sinning, rebuke in the presence of all.
55:15
First Timothy 5, 20. So, whatever Piper is, whatever status he has, it makes no difference to us.
55:23
And, you know, I'll further say that I don't care that other prominent men like MacArthur or these other men that are going together for the gospel,
55:34
I don't care that they haven't seen this problem. In Jude 4, we read, quote,
55:40
For certain men have crept in unnoticed, who long ago were marked out for this condemnation.
55:46
Certain men have crept in unnoticed. Okay, I don't care that these other prominent theologians aren't noticing them.
55:56
I mean, it would be nice, but what I'm saying is I'm not going to just sit around and wait for John MacArthur to confirm what we're saying.
56:07
We don't need to. We have our Bibles. Other people, like the
56:12
Trinity Foundation, they're calling these things out. Other people, like John Robbins, call them out.
56:18
So, that should be enough. But, you know, John Robbins goes on to say,
56:24
False teachers appear to be sheep, but are not. And the ideas they teach, at least at first, appear to be true, but they are not.
56:31
And, once again, many times these things go unnoticed. You know,
56:37
I just want to point this out. In Acts 20, verses 20 -29,
56:44
Paul told the Ephesian elders, he says, Quote, I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock.
56:52
And from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things to draw away the disciples after them.
57:02
So, let's just pause on that verse real fast. Paul, he says, once I'm gone, as soon as I'm gone, fierce wolves are going to come up from among you.
57:13
And notice he says, and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things.
57:20
Paul says that these wolves will come from among your own selves. They would be those that they least expected.
57:28
My question is, do we think that this couldn't happen to us today? Do we think that there couldn't be men from our own camp, our own quote -unquote reformed camp of teachers who might arise speaking twisted things?
57:42
I mean, if it could happen to the Ephesian church, it certainly could happen today in our little circle of people that we like.
57:52
And this is why in Acts 20, verse 31, Paul says, Therefore be alert, remembering that for three years
57:59
I did not cease night or day to admonish everyone with tears. And then notice in verse 32 that Paul commended them to God in his word.
58:10
And he says, quote, and now I commend you to God and the word of his grace. And there's more to that verse.
58:16
But what I find fascinating is that one of the things that I think
58:21
Mark Jones was trying to do was he was trying to bring up all these other people from history that may have said the same thing or something similar to Piper.
58:31
Well, what is he doing? He's commending you to the statements of men. You know, I did quote
58:37
John Murray in the article. I did quote Dr. Robert Raymond because what they said actually agreed with scripture.
58:45
But when somebody is trying to put this off as, you know, this is the reformed tradition, they're going to bring up quotes of what somebody might have said, even if it's
58:55
Calvin. You know, Calvin said something very similar. Well, OK, we're going to commend you to God in his word.
59:02
And that's exactly what Tim Coffman said. Because I asked him, I said, what do you think about this? And he said, he says,
59:08
I don't, basically, like, I don't really care. They're quoting men. In our article, we quoted
59:13
Jesus and Paul. There's an obvious difference there. We're commending people to God in his word.
59:21
Carlos, you have anything to add to that? Yeah, well, I wanted to back up a little bit from that's another very important problem that these false teachers, they tend to use the classical reformed, especially reformed
59:38
Christians of the past, like Calvin, Luther, et cetera, in order to justify their position. But many times, in many of these cases, they actually twist those authors like they do the scriptures.
59:49
And so it's very clever and very damaging in how they package their heresy to try to make it so palpable, more palpable for people.
59:57
But the thing is, when it comes to people saying things like you should have contacted him or things like that, another problem that could happen is that where this could stem from is a sort of like when we address the
01:00:15
Matthew 18 issue, that's clearly it doesn't apply in all situations. And then there's the issue also of like, well,
01:00:22
I mean, the funny thing about this is that it's actually impossible to get a hold of Piper, certainly not in person and not even on the phone.
01:00:33
Like the guy has a massive platform, your email or what, if you ever try to contact him, it would probably take forever, if at all, for him to reach him directly.
01:00:45
And so what people don't understand is they don't seem to know how to operate or how to apply
01:00:54
Christianity to today. And even into a common sense situation like that, where emailing or contacting
01:01:02
John Piper like that, it would probably fall on deaf ears. And the other thing is, the ironic thing about it, about this, is publishing an article like what
01:01:14
Semper Reformanda did against Piper, that's gaining some traction, that's actually a more likely possibility that Piper would try to get a hold of you guys because of the article and the attention that the article is drawing.
01:01:29
And he might feel compelled to follow up with you guys about what was said in the article. So that's the ironic thing, is that first, it would not happen, it would never happen.
01:01:41
And that's not to say that we can't email him the article, sure, like yeah, we can email him the article now that it's published, and just so they can give him the courtesy of the fact that it's out there.
01:01:54
But that's not a prerequisite for exposing their error. And that's actually contrary to what the
01:02:01
Bible says to do. And so, going on to this, or go ahead, were you going to say something?
01:02:08
Yeah, I was just going to say, I don't think he's going to contact us. It might force him to address the topic, but he's not going to contact us.
01:02:19
He may do it in the very, probably indirectly, he might end up doing it. The point is just simply that, that it's impossible to contact somebody with a platform like that.
01:02:35
And that's why it's also even more important regarding his status, that it's because of his status and his platform, that it's even more necessary and important to bring light to this and to shed light to this, because he has, like we've already pointed out, his influence is so far reaching that it can really, he's doing a lot of damage and deceiving many.
01:03:00
And so, one of the big issues behind all of this and the way these neolegalists try to make their false teaching more palpable is by quoting
01:03:12
Reformers and respected theologians of the past in their favor, or attempting to do so in their favor.
01:03:19
And one of the things that really bothered me, it really irritated me about John Piper's article, the one about are we really saved by faith alone, is that the article itself kind of was almost based on a false premise, because it was about the five solos of the
01:03:38
Reformation, right? Sola gratia, sola fide, sola Christo, sola scriptura, and sola solideo gloria.
01:03:50
So, those five solos are one of the foundations of the Reformation, right? That's where you actually get the term.
01:03:56
In fact, the term evangelical comes from the fact that you held to the fundamental principles of those five solos, which was the material and the formal principle being sola scriptura and sola fide.
01:04:09
And so, that's what it means to be an evangelical. And that's what it means, you know, people use the term now and they have no idea what it means or where it comes from.
01:04:17
It doesn't mean anything now. It means nonsense now. But the fact that he was trying to say that these five solas are correct insofar as they're worded correctly, it was sort of like a false, like a red herring.
01:04:34
Like it's a non -sequitur, because the solas are shorthands.
01:04:41
They're theological shorthands for what the Reformers and the Reformation theology clearly expressed about justification by faith alone, etc.,
01:04:49
etc. And so, but he was almost like sort of putting a spin on it, saying that like, well, you have to formulate them correctly.
01:04:56
It's like, well, okay, I mean, you have to explain them according to what they actually mean, but that's it.
01:05:04
I mean, of course, you can distort what they mean if you don't actually explain what they meant. The whole article is about the five solas.
01:05:11
And that was the ironic thing, because he tries to affirm that we're justified by faith alone. And then he says, you know, he makes a distinction between final salvation, saying that we're saved through our works in final salvation.
01:05:25
And then at the end, he affirms the five solas again, and he says that we're justified by faith alone.
01:05:31
And that was just a very clever, subtle, deceptive way of trying to make himself repeat the same thing that the
01:05:39
Reformers were intending. And it's ironic, because that's actually the exact opposite of what the
01:05:46
Reformers intended, that those theological shorthands don't represent anything at all, what
01:05:51
Piper was saying, because that was precisely the error that they were rebuking and rejecting and refuting. And so this goes back to all of the clever ways in which false teachers, like from Neo -Orthodoxy,
01:06:05
Karl Barth, a lot of these men, they would use Calvin and use Luther and use these influential theologians in similar ways to try to justify their heresy.
01:06:14
And so I wanted to read from Robbins, where he explained some of this stuff in more detail.
01:06:22
There's a really good quote here about that. Okay, so here it is. So Robbins here says,
01:06:28
To all appearances, the proponents of this neo -legalist theology intend to stay in Protestant churches and in effect transform them into theological colonies of Rome.
01:06:38
Of course they deny that they are doing any such thing and assert that they are rediscovering a, quote, rich tradition that the
01:06:45
Reformation or the usual interpretation of the Reformation has obscured. One of their tactics is to reinterpret the
01:06:51
Reformers so that they said something different from the Romanists, but not much different.
01:06:58
We, the neo -legalists tell us, have misunderstood the Reformers and even the Apostle Paul himself.
01:07:04
And so this is why it's so important to recognize that. This is why church history is so important as well, because false teachers will use church history to their advantage, especially on people who don't know better, to bolster their views.
01:07:19
And so of course we don't rely on the opinions of men, but God uses teachers to edify and to build up and to teach his church.
01:07:27
And so it's important to glean from the history of the church and from the teachers of the past and to make sure that we understand them properly so that when false teachers use them, we can identify them if they're being used incorrectly.
01:07:41
Yeah, definitely. I agree with you. Well, I think those were the major objections that I wanted to tackle.
01:07:50
But Carlos, do you know what year John Robbins wrote his article on Piper? Yeah, as I mentioned earlier, it was 2002.
01:07:58
Okay. I want to point something out. This is astonishing to me.
01:08:03
So John Robbins writes, Daniel Fuller explicitly denies justification by faith alone and explicitly asserts justification by faith in works.
01:08:15
Piper, his faithful student, trusted friend, and editor, arrives at the same conclusion.
01:08:21
Piper denies justification by faith alone. While professing to accept biblical soteriology, which makes his work all the more dangerous.
01:08:32
John Piper wrote that book, I think you said in 1995?
01:08:38
Yeah. And I know that it has been revised. One of the things that we did in our article was we quoted
01:08:43
Piper from different sources. One of the quotes was from Thomas Schreiner's book, which was published in 2015.
01:08:53
What we're trying to show people is that this was not a slip of the pen. This was not sloppiness.
01:08:59
Just like Rachel Miller pointed out, this is not sloppiness. Robbins, in 2002, saw the error and tried to alert people to it.
01:09:11
And I remember having conversations with you, Carlos, a number of years ago, where you were just trying to point this stuff out to me and point out some of the problems that you were seeing in Piper.
01:09:24
And I myself had a knee -jerk reaction, like, what are you talking about? You're crazy.
01:09:30
Everybody's a heretic to you. And I couldn't see it. And you know what's amazing?
01:09:37
If you go back and listen to the episode that we did with Tom Jodatus, I asked
01:09:43
Tom and Carlos to weigh in on Piper. And I said, I'm not really sure where to place Piper. And then
01:09:49
I talked a little bit about this article, and then I went and I did my homework, and I looked it up, and I researched it, and I realized, folks, this is heresy.
01:10:03
It's not just a secondary issue. It's wrong, and it's wrong on the gospel, and it's absolute heresy.
01:10:10
We're saying this so that the truth might continue with you. And we're saying this because we're not going to yield to this even for one hour.
01:10:21
And we're going to say this in the presence of all, that we really hope that Piper repents.
01:10:29
We really hope that he – and here's the thing. We don't need him to clarify. We don't need him to clarify his position.
01:10:36
We don't need clarification. We don't need a fuller explanation. We need him to recant his position.
01:10:44
It's wrong. There's no future justification or final justification or final salvation that has anything to do with your works.
01:10:54
You're holy and completely justified from the initial justification to the final justification completely and totally based on the merit of Christ alone, through faith alone.
01:11:06
So that's what we have today, Carlos. I think that's a good place to close it out.
01:11:13
I was initially going to read the article. I still might do that. I still might go through and read the article and attach it to either this one or another one next week because I think it's really important that people hear what we're saying, read the article yourself, read what
01:11:31
Piper wrote, read the tweet that came out that said,
01:11:37
You are not saved by faith alone. And just real quick, the article, this is interesting.
01:11:47
Referencing that tweet that came out of the DesiringGod Twitter account, the tweet said,
01:11:54
You are not saved through faith alone. There's an article, and the article articulates, it's written by somebody else,
01:12:03
I didn't look up his name, but the article is not by Piper. But the tweet was bad enough. But the author of the article wrote,
01:12:10
Quote, If you have a pet sin, you must renounce it at once. Your salvation depends on it.
01:12:17
But what about being saved by faith alone? You're not.
01:12:23
You're justified through faith alone. Final salvation comes through justification and sanctification, both initiated and sustained by God's grace.
01:12:32
That is exactly what Roman Catholicism teaches. The details may be different, but it is the same concept.
01:12:41
And the author of that article, coming out of Piper's ministry, articulating
01:12:47
Piper's view, says, But what about being saved by faith alone?
01:12:52
You're not. Yes, you are. That is heresy.
01:12:59
And this is the gospel. I will stand firm on this.
01:13:05
I'm ready to go to war with this. This is serious error.
01:13:12
And Semper Reformanda Radio is ready to go to war over this issue. The Bible says we are in a spiritual war.
01:13:20
We don't fight in the flesh. We defend the faith through argumentation.
01:13:30
I'm in prayer over this. I can't tell you, this is bad.
01:13:36
This is really, really bad. I think that's a good place to close it out.
01:13:45
Carlos, I want to say thank you to Colleen Sharp for all of her help.
01:13:51
She's been very, very helpful in providing articles and resources and getting that to me.
01:13:59
We are looking forward to continuing our series on eschatology with Tim Coffman.
01:14:07
We've been away from that for too long, and we need to get back to that. And we are looking forward to Tom Giuditis joining us as a regular contributor to the podcast.
01:14:19
So we're very excited about that. Carlos, do you have anything to say before we go?
01:14:25
There's a lot more that could have been said that we could say. I'll just conclude with saying that what that article expresses and what
01:14:35
Piper has been expressing for some time now is a blatant denial of Ephesians 2 .8,
01:14:42
which says, For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.
01:14:52
It's a blatant denial of the simple gospel doctrine of justification by faith alone.
01:15:00
We didn't even get into all of the other errors that lay the foundation for Piper to even begin to make those deductions or conclusions, because all of this stems from many other errors, like his denial of the covenant of works, and his denial of the works principle in the
01:15:21
Bible, what he derogatorily calls the debtor's ethic, similar to Tim Keller.
01:15:30
There's so much wrong with this teaching, and we've only just barely scratched the surface. Again, we encourage our listeners to look at these articles.
01:15:43
The resources, we'll have them posted up as well. I'm sure we'll have to dedicate more time to this in more detail, because it is such an important issue.
01:15:58
Hopefully, people have something to chew on for now, and we'll hopefully see just how important this really is, and just how wrong
01:16:07
Piper really is, and people who follow that false teaching, and why it needs to be renounced and called out.
01:16:15
Amen. Alright, that's going to conclude our episode. We will check you next time. God bless. This podcast is a member of the
01:16:21
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