SRR #63 | Piper and The Doctrine of Salvation

I do a podcast.

I'm not interested in your podcast.

The anathema of God was for those who denied justification by faith alone. When that is at stake, we need to be on the battlefield, exposing the error and combating the error.

We are unabashedly, unashamedly Clarkian. And so, the next few statements that I'm going to make, 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.

We are polemical and polarizing Jesus style.

I would first say that to characterize what we do as bashing is itself bashing. It's not hate, it's history. It's not bashing, it's the Bible. Jesus said, 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.

It is on. We're taking the gloves off. It's time to battle.

John Piper, Justification, and the Gospel Controversy

Okay. I want to welcome everybody back to the show. This is Simple Riff around the radio. My name is Tim Shjonassee and I'm here today with Carlos Montijo. 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.

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 I just basically didn't have any time left over for anything else during the week. I had to go back to work.

So that's pretty much what happened. And I would say that we sort of hit a hornet's nest with this article. 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. 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. 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, I would say, uncharitable things. Somebody accused me of being a slanderous liar. And I, you know, here's the thing. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. Now, we are not in favor of calling people heretics for any reason or saying this is heresy for just any little disagreement. As a matter of fact, just to give you an illustration, just to give you an example, we're going through what I would say is an excellent series with Tim Kaufman on eschatology.

And so if you haven't heard this series, please check us out. 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.

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. And when we look at this stuff that's coming out of Desiring God, we are very concerned.

Basically, I mean, we're dealing with the gospel, the doctrine of justification by faith alone. And I want to bring Carlos into this discussion, but just recently I sent, I think it was, I forgot where I saw this, but I saw it on Facebook.

Somebody said this is making the rounds. 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. This is, we're not just shooting in the dark here.

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. Let me see if I can find it. What date was this tweeted out? Okay, this was on October 14th, 2017 from the Desiring God Twitter account.

And it reads, you're not saved through faith alone. Be killing your sin. And then there's an article, I think, that came with this talking about killing your sin. And it's explicit. You are not saved through faith alone.

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. 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 Christian faith. We echo what Luther said. I'm going to read from R .C. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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, I think is it.

And I don't say that lightly. I don't think, I'm not trying to be dramatic here. 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.

So, let me bring Carlos into this. Carlos, thank you for joining me today. How are you doing?

Oh, man. Good. Tired, but good. There's a lot going on, obviously. This article got a lot of traction in a somewhat unexpected way. Because this is nothing new. 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. He's becoming a lot more vocal about his heresy. But I did want to point out a few things. It's actually pretty fascinating, because the article's already been translated into Spanish, and I believe it's being translated even into Russian.

So, pretty interesting how much traction this brief article is getting. And I wanted to give a shout-out to Pastor Shane Cassler, too. He was one of the folks there who left a comment commending the article and for the stand that you're taking for the truth.

And so I was very encouraged by that. I'm sure you were as well. And even though he's New Covenant Theology and we have our differences, he recognizes the importance of taking a stand for the truth. And so I was very encouraged by that.

It was a pleasant surprise, because there was some expected mockery and usual people who are fairly ignorant or just don't understand or they have a bias against biblical 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 quote Piper, you show where he's wrong, and you explain why he's wrong, so there is no slander there at all. 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. And rightfully so, because nobody's exempt, as we've said before. Nobody's exempt from scrutiny. Of all people, people like Piper should be under the highest form of scrutiny because they have so much influence.

Let me say something about Shane Casler. I reached out to him and let him know how much I appreciated his comment. For pastors out there that want to defend 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.

I commended Pastor Shane Casler, so I want to just recommend his blog. He wrote a piece on Piper titled, Piper and Lecrae, Liberal Slide Continues. Man, he's doing his job. That's what I love about this.

He's doing his job. 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. We're Reformed Baptists. We can talk about that.

We can care for each other as brothers. But when it comes to the gospel, let's stand and do battle for Christ and do battle for the gospel. So, check out his blog. Check out what he wrote in his article.

Like you said, we've gotten a lot of mixed reviews. Was there something else you were going to talk about, Carlos? I don't want to interrupt you too much.

I was going to quote. I'm going to be alluding a lot to the article by John Robbins called The Pied Piper, which he wrote back in 2002, outlining some of Piper's most pernicious errors and heresies. This is based on his book, Future Grace, which was first published in 1995.

So, this is almost like as old as I am. It's not really anything new. But Robbins echoes a lot of sentiments that as we dive into it, I'll quote them. I can't find the quote right now, but I'll cite them as we progress.

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. 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 The Gospel According to John Piper.

What had happened was I'd seen an article written by John Piper, and I realized this needed to be addressed. Piper's article is, what is the title of Piper's article? It's in our article. 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.

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. But when I saw this article, I didn't realize that anybody else had actually already started to address this.

And so I wrote a rough draft, and then I wrote a second rough draft, and then I sent it. I was corresponding with Tim Coffman through private messenger, and I tried to copy and paste his comments into the article.

And I said, I mean, they're long quotes, and it would just be better if he wrote it in himself. 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.

And so I want to say thank you to Tim Coffman. I mean, man, this guy is such a blessing to us. And he's aware of all this stuff. He knows what he's talking about. He knows Roman Catholicism like the back of his hand.

And he's a solid Protestant brother. So I felt really good that he was contributing to the article, that he was co-authoring the article with me. 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.

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 Piper. And so I wanted to say to our listeners that we knew that this was going to happen.

We know that there's going to be people out there that are going to defend Piper. We fully anticipated it. We expect it. One of them is Mark Jones. And I don't really have much to say about Mark Jones.

I've been corresponding with my own pastor about some of the articles that Mark Jones has written. And I'll just say I think he's completely off. But I want to point something out from an article titled

I think it's The Current Justification Controversy. And it's an article on the Trinity Foundation. But 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.

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.

When asked how a sinner is justified, the Westminster Seminary students answered, 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.

For most of the time, the seminary managed to keep the controversy in-house, and the church at large heard little about it. So long as the seminary could maintain the controversy within its walls, it kept Professor Shepard on the seminary faculty.

In 1981, when the board and faculty could no longer contain the controversy, the board did not renew Mr. Shepard's contract. The controversy then subsided, and he left the OPC, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church as well, where charges were pending against him, and joined the 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. It had not. Professor Shepard was not the only member of the Westminster faculty who taught justification by faith and works.

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. 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.

One of Westminster Seminary's oldest and most revered professors, Dr. Cornelius Van Teel, publicly defended Professor Shepard and his doctrine of justification by faith and works. Other Shepard defenders included Professor Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., now de facto dean of the faculty at the seminary, Dr. Samuel Logan, who later became president of the seminary, and Mr. 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. 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.

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 Piper's erroneous teaching. We're not surprised, but we are disappointed.

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, 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.

They're a little bit repetitious. We've heard them from several different sources. Several different people have said the same thing. And then we can just go ahead and try to comment on that. And then at the end of this podcast, what 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.

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 Piper out of context. And what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to read from Rachel Miller's blog.

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. But I was really grateful that she wrote this. I left her a comment saying thank you.

And her blog article is titled Salvation by Grace Alone Through Faith Alone in Christ Alone. And it was published on October 14, 2017. And she writes, 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.

In this way, he says we are saved through faith and works. This is not simply sloppiness or poor wording. This is what he is teaching. 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.

So Rachel Miller, good job. You hit the nail on the head. She identifies what so many people, it gets me so frustrated when people want to cry context foul and say that we took Piper out of context. We did not take him out of context.

Rachel Miller points that out. I didn't think that I needed to point that out, but she pointed that out. This is what he's saying. He makes a distinction between justification and salvation and justification and getting into heaven.

And he puts forth the idea that there is a final salvation which in some way factors in our works. And one of the things that I think he does is he takes James out of context, the book of James, because James is talking about displaying your good works before men, not before God.

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. Carlos, do you have anything to add to the fact that people are saying that we're taking Piper out of context?

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, that people have either ignorance or some kind of bias against the biblical teaching 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.

So there's a lot of background here that people, a lot of these people who make these claims are usually not aware of and they don't even properly understand how you're supposed to point out the heresy in the first place and identify it.

And so I was going to mention a few things from the Trinity Foundation. They have a lot of good material on this controversy. They have the original justification, the current justification controversy by O. Palmer Robertson.

That book itself has a fascinating history. The back of the book reads this. Originally written in 1983, the current justification controversy was barred from the pages of the Presbyterian, the 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. So as you can see, it was fascinating because nobody wanted to publish Palmer Robertson's manuscript.

And so what he did is he ended up publishing his own manuscripts, handing them out. 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.

Isn't that crazy? I mean, we're talking about the gospel here. And it's like, is the 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.

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 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?

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. So, and there's another really good volume by the Trinity Foundation called The Companion, A Companion to the 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, very important books that really give you the context and the primary source material for the controversy.

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. The church that denies this gospel is a false church.

The church that obscures this gospel is a falling church. 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.

In the current justification controversy, Dr. O. Palmer Robertson discussed the first controversy that erupted in the conservative Presbyterian circles in the 20th century. In this companion to that volume, Dr. Robbins discusses the roots and fruits of that controversy.

Also included in this volume are documents from the Shepard controversy and an essay by Professor Robert L. Raymond. This is outstanding material. There's also another book that's related called Not Reformed at All, Medievalism in Reformed, quote-unquote, churches.

This is by John Robbins and Sean Garrity. And this one focuses primarily on Doug Wilson, but a lot of these false teachings are very similar forms of neolegalism and initial and final justification, all of those things.

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. There had to have been a setting up for something like that so blatant to happen.

And Robbins, he does a very good job of pointing out in his article on the Pied Piper, pointing out that these errors from the very inception of the OPC and the Westminster Seminary. He writes here, this movement is a confluence of several winds of doctrine that the Trinity Review has been warning our readers about for decades.

The reconstructionism, theonomy of Rushduni, North, Bonson, and their disciples, North being Gary North and Bonson being Greg Bonson. The theology of paradox of Van Teel and his disciples, the neo-orthodoxy of Barth and his disciples, and also the redemptive historical hermeneutic of Voss and his disciples.

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 Presbyterian theologians like Van Teel and the other men that he listed.

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.

They are the face...

If you're a presuppositionalist, you know all about Bonson. I can imagine that a lot of people might get upset that we're throwing him in there.

Yeah, and it's not just Bonson. It's Van Teel himself. It's the other guy, John Frame. It's all of these men who are Van Teelians. There was something that Van Teel taught in his method that really laid the foundation for a lot more errors to be propagated.

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, 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. And that's why you have so many different branches that were influenced by Van Teel and by the OPC, Westminster Seminary, like Reconstructionism and Theonomy and Shepherdism, Norman Shepard's false gospel of justification by faith and works.

All of this stuff has been brewing for years. And it even goes back to...

Let me just say this. Actually, it really surprised me, and it still does, when I found out that Van Teel defended Norman Shepard in light of the fact that he went after Gordon Clark the way that he did 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 Van Teel's notion of analogy. And the way that they went after Clark, and then years later to find out that they defended Dr. Norman Shepard.

And I believe, if I'm correct, but I believe that they even went back and listened to Dr. Norman Shepard's lectures from his classroom and basically confirmed the fact that, yeah, he was teaching the doctrine of justification by faith and works.

And so for him to go and defend Dr. Shepard, that to me is just astonishing. And I think it really highlights just the fact that some people... We're criticizing Piper, and just some people, they're just going to defend him.

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 Judaizers for compromising the doctrine of justification by faith alone.

And it doesn't matter. 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 OPC from its very beginning, with the Clark-Vanteel controversy and the way in which the Westminster faculty that came out of the CRC or the Christian Reformed Church and how they basically hijacked the original vision that Gresham Machen had and Clark had, and those who agreed with them had for the OPC itself and for...

Really, they were the ones who were standing in the more faithful Presbyterian tradition, the Scottish Reformed tradition. That's not to say that the Dutch Reformed are not... There is a solid Dutch Reformed tradition, but then you have this very irrational, mystical branch of it stemming from theologians like Bavink and stuff like that, and that basically the controversy that began with the Christian Reformed Church and its split with Herman Hoeksema and the founding of the PRC basically bled over onto the OPC with these ministers who came from that denomination.

This goes back years and years, so it's very important to understand that this has a long history, and of course it goes back to Biblical times when obviously the devil is going to try to distort the Gospel with many counterfeits, and so that's why it's important to have a solid understanding of this.

As Luther says, the article by which the 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, because this is so foundational to Christianity itself.

It's at the very heart of the Gospel and at the very heart of Christianity, that if you have this wrong, you just overthrew everything else. It's completely worthless without this doctrine being accurate and being taught correctly.

It really is that important, and that is why I'm submitting to our listeners that this really is a crisis, that we see somebody like John Piper who is going to the Together for the Gospel conference, and he's teaching this false idea of salvation.

It's astonishing. So this really is that bad. Let me ask another question, Carlos. One of the things that has been labeled against us, once again, is just that we're being divisive, that we're being schismatic, that this is divisive.

The thing about doctrine is it does divide. Doctrine divides. Doctrine divides those who believe from those who don't, and it divides truth from error. John Robbins, I think, has the perfect reply to somebody who says that you're being a schismatic.

John Robbins writes, and this is in the book that he wrote, Can the Orthodox Presbyterian Church be Saved? On page 7 he writes, because apparently, Reverend Dr. Peter Wallace accused him of being a schismatic.

And so Robbins writes,. Apparently Wallace does not know that a schismatic is someone who causes division by teaching doctrine contrary to Scripture. Quote,. Note those who cause division and offenses contrary to the doctrine which you learned and avoid them.

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.

Many Presbyterian elders, including Wallace, get the meaning of the word schismatic precisely backwards. 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.

And I would say that we are doing what Romans 16, 17 says. Which is to mark them. We're marking him. And we are avoiding him. Especially Carlos. I mean, you think about the demographic of El Paso, Texas.

I've said this before. We live on the border of Juarez, Mexico. We have a large Roman Catholic community here in El Paso. And then you couple that with how big Piper's platform is. And it's a recipe for disaster.

And when you have people in our city who go to DesiringGod's Twitter account and they read,. You are not saved through faith alone. I mean, that can wreak havoc on people who are trying to wrestle through what Roman Catholicism says and why it's wrong.

And that can wreak havoc on people who are coming out of Roman Catholicism. I mean, we have a heart to reach people who are stuck in, who are held captive in Roman Catholicism. 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. And I know you don't either.

Why the Bible Commands Public Rebuke of False Teachers

Yeah, so to add a little bit to what you said. It'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. We have an explicit command from the Bible to be divisive, which you already alluded to in Romans 16, 17, that says to mark them.

And so, well, first of all, in 1 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. So the Bible explains that this is actually a necessary process.

This is a very necessary process of heresies creeping up within the church, and then men who have discernment and who identify these errors and call them out the way the Ephesian church judged these false apostles that the Revelation talks about.

So this is clearly commanded in the Bible for us to do. And like Romans 16, 17 says, it clearly says to mark them, to keep an eye on those who cause dissensions and hindrances contrary to the teaching which you have learned, to turn away from them, 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 John says, that in giving them an open door, we participate in their wicked deeds. 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.

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 Catholic, Tim, and so we understand that this has the stench, the sour stench of Romanism all over it.

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 Roman Catholic doctrine of salvation because in the Roman doctrine, the Roman Catholic view of salvation, you only start out with grace through baptism, but you have to maintain that grace yourself by the sacraments of the church and by, essentially, your own good works.

And so this is really nothing but Romanism on a fig leaf, essentially. 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.

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, denies that faith is assent to understood propositions and belittles or denies propositional and literal truth, denies that faith alone justifies, denies that knowledge is necessary for salvation and condemns those who insist on knowledge as Gnostics, denies the meritorious work of Christ, denies the imputation of active righteousness of Christ to believers, asserts that water baptism regenerates, washes away sins, and is necessary for salvation, asserts that believers can lose their justification in salvation, asserts that the final justification of believers depends on their performance, asserts that God accepts less than perfect obedience for fulfilling the conditions of salvation, asserts that persons who are neither elect nor believers of the gospel are nevertheless members of the covenant, asserts infant communion, asserts that good works are necessary conditions to obtain or retain salvation, asserts that chronological theology is superior to systematic theology, asserts that eschatology is soteriology.

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 federal vision heresy, the neolegalism, the Norman Shepard controversy, the justification controversy, the, and there's another popular one, the 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. And not be deceived by even the likes of men like who have respect and who have influence and authority in the Protestant church like Piper or, you know, men who are 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 the problem, 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.