The Roman Catholicism Debate on BAM (White vs Staples - I)

The Debate Between James White and Tim Staples

In studio today, a couple of special guests who are going to be conducting a debate this Saturday. James White, he is the founder of Alpha and Omega Ministries, he's an author, he's a friend, he's written, I think, what is the best book out right now in the King James only controversy, in fact, that is the title of his book, as well as the Roman Catholic controversy.

He is a guy that I think is someone that I respect, not only for his scholarship, but the testimony of his life. It is a delight to have you.

It's good to be back with you.

You've been hanging out with your kids?

Hanging out with my kids, riding the bike, working on all sorts of things, the Lord's.

Teaching.

In fact, my systematic theology class at Golden Gate Seminary is sitting right now listening to the radio and listening to us and getting a chance to teach them is a real privilege for me. Teaching is a wonderful thing.

Now you are also involved with the NASD, a critical consultant on the American Standard.

Bible and working on that, there is an edition of that out that we are working on. Actually, most people would say I have a little bit too much to do, but it is hard for me to say no. The Lord opens doors.

It is hard not to walk through.

And of course, he is an incredible debater and he will be debating Tim Staples, director of Apologetics for St. Joseph's Catholic Radio, the first time I met Tim Staples, and I am glad to have you in the studio.

Well, it is great to finally meet you. I have heard a lot of you on the air. Nice to meet you.

And you have a radio broadcast as well.

That's right.

St. Joseph's Catholic Radio. We air on AM 1190, if I can do a little commercial there, from 5 to 6 every Saturday evening. And we are now on, we are excited about being on every week for two hours on a live worldwide broadcast on Mother Angelica's WEWN, so we are able to take calls from all over the world.

It is kind of exciting. We had our inaugural broadcast last week and it was very exciting.

Well, great. It is nice to meet you. Glad to have you in the studio. Obviously, you feel passionately about Roman Catholicism. You are a Protestant, in fact a youth pastor in the Assemblies of God, and you became a Roman Catholic in a nugget.

Give me the reasons why you converted to Roman Catholicism.

Well, Hank, as we were talking before the broadcast, I was what I would term a rabid anti-Catholic. I led quite a few, led my share of Catholics out of the church, being raised a Southern Baptist and later becoming an Assemblies of God youth pastor, as you mentioned.

I didn't have a lot of nice words about the Catholic faith. I believed the Catholic Church was the whore of Babylon, you name it. I was into it. I was more along the lines of a jacked chick, though, in those days.

And I don't say that with any sort of pride.

And by the way, just to make a clarification here, obviously you respect James White.

Absolutely.

And you like him as a person. You wouldn't put him in that category.

Oh, no.

Absolutely. In fact, I've been very impressed with him, just talking with him before the broadcast, and I'm very impressed with his work as well. That's why I wanted to debate him. But as for me in those days, I was very anti-Catholic.

And what happened, basically, is that I met a Catholic who really knew his Bible, really knew his faith, and he got me started studying. And I really dug in. I started to read the Church Fathers. I started to study Catholic apologists rather than just reading the anti-Catholic literature and such.

And I was surprised by the truth. I thought I'd get that title in there, James.

Yes, but there's a fatal flaw.

Now, obviously, when you look at a president like myself or James White, you make no bones about it. You believe that we are lost.

Well, objectively speaking, I believe...

Not that you are subjectively judging us, but objectively, based on the views that we hold, you would say our soteriology damns it.

Well, I would want to qualify that a bit, just a tad, by saying that, yes, when we're talking about these issues, and I think it's very important for us to state this at the outset, not only for right now, but also for our discussion coming up on Saturday.

We are talking about issues that divide us. These are things we cannot look past. When we're talking about disagreeing, about justification, how a person is saved, as we were talking about before the broadcast, we're talking about a disagreement over Jesus Christ and who Jesus is, because Jesus Christ is what he says.

Justification, Grace, and the Protestant-Catholic Divide

1 Corinthians 1 .30 says that Jesus has become for us wisdom, justification, sanctification. So, yes, objectively speaking, we disagree.

If we hold to Protestant distinctives consistently, you would say we cannot be saved.

But I have to qualify that, and I was getting to that, by saying that if, in fact, we have a Protestant, a said Protestant, I will use myself as an example. A 10-year-old kid who got saved at a Baptist church answering an altar call,.

I love Billy Graham and my Baptist pastor, and I...

The qualification, invincible ignorance?

Exactly. I believe, you know, and I don't know this, we don't have the certainty of faith on this, but I believe that that is a good example of someone that we would term invincibly ignorant. They can be saved by following the light of truth that they have where they are.

James, your position, I ask you the exact same question that I asked Tim Staples. If, in fact, I were to ask you about Tim or any Roman Catholic that holds consistently to Roman Catholic distinctives, materiality being probably the centerpiece, what would.

You say?

It would be a little easier if Tim was not a convert, because I'd like to ask, you know, does he feel that he actually was truly born again in an experience when he was 10 years.

Of age?

But if he was a person and this was the only gospel he had ever heard, the gospel that is promulgated by the Roman Catholic Church, then I would say most definitely that what Rome teaches about grace, what Rome teaches about justification, is not what the Bible.

Teaches.

And in fact, you know, it would be a lot easier for me. You can imagine this. You've probably taken a lot of flack for dealing with the issue of Roman Catholicism yourself. It is very politically incorrect to discuss this issue as a Christian apologist.

Go talk about the Mormons. That's great. Go get them rah-rah, but don't talk about the Roman Catholics because, you know, Aunt Molly down the road is a real nice Roman Catholic and I don't want you talking about that.

It would be a lot easier for me if the book of Galatians was not in the New Testament. It would be a lot easier for me if I did not read that book and see what Paul teaches there, and if I was not convinced by studying the text of that book and studying Roman Catholic theology as closely as I have, that what Rome teaches goes far beyond the error that is found in the book of Galatians.

And since that book is there, and since I am under the authority of that which is God-breathed, then I must deal with those teachings. Tim and I, I think, agree, and it's somewhat refreshing because I think at least now dialogue can take place on the basis of at least some commonality of agreeing the other guy is wrong, but at least a discussion can take place because we're saying, look, what you're preaching and what we're preaching is different.

That's been one of my biggest problems when people come up to me and say, well, why not cooperate in things and so on and so forth? I say, look, it's not a matter of cooperation. Here is the issue, and I'd like to see if Tim agrees with me on this.

Tim, if you and I are standing outside an abortion clinic and Joe Q. Public walks up and asks both of us the same question while we're standing right next to each other, what must I do to be right with God?

Would you agree with me that we are going to answer, if we are faithful to our own positions, we are going to answer very differently?

And so we're sitting at a table here very clearly and saying that we're not talking about peripheral issues. We're talking about central issues upon which salvation hinges. So this is not some kind of a squabble about some peripheral stuff.

This is about the very heart of Christianity.

Notice, Hank, look at the subtitle of my book. It says, Catholic and Protestants, do the differences still matter? When I was at the CBA convention just last summer, you know the single most common comment I got was people would look at the book and they'd go, what differences?

It wasn't even a matter anymore of discussing, are they even weighty enough to discuss? There aren't any differences anymore. And this was primarily from Roman Catholics who came to me while I was at the booth at the convention looking at the book and saying, oh, there aren't really any differences.

Now, safe to say that you both believe that we can work together on common cause issues. But as far as the gospel is concerned, we're trying to evangelize one another.

In fact, our present holy father emphasizes, as does the church all over the world, that we need to work together on issues like abortion.

Hang together or hang separately.

Exactly. I was so happy to see him wearing a rush tie there. It tells me there is hope for James. But we need to cooperate and we need to see the things that we agree on and that we can work together to try to impact our culture.

But ultimately, folks, and this is crucial, we are talking about two different gospels and only one can be the true gospel.

Let's talk about that for just a moment. We're talking about the gospel. James, in as brief a period as you possibly can, articulate the distinctive from the Protestant perspective.

I believe the distinctive from the Protestant perspective, and I certainly believe that Tim will disagree with me initially, but I want to attempt to defend the thesis. The distinctive from the Protestant perspective is that we believe that Jesus Christ saves completely in and of himself.

Tim mentioned 1 Corinthians 1, verse 30. What precedes immediately that is the statement on the part of the Scripture that it is because of him that we are in Christ Jesus. Salvation is the work of God.

It is undertaken by the grace of God. The grace of God is sufficient to accomplish the means that he has, the end that he has for that grace. And so when I talk about being made right and having peace with God, the peace that I have is based solely upon the work of another.

That is the perfect atoning work of Jesus Christ. The righteousness that I have is only the righteousness of Jesus Christ. The good works that I do in a quote-unquote state of grace, whatever that might be, any good works that I do as a Christian, are not works that increase my merit.

They are not works that give me merit so that I may obtain eternal life having fulfilled certain conditions to be justified. They are works that I do that flow out of the changed heart that I have as a believer.

And the main issue to me is when I stand before God, I will stand before him clothed solely, only, and singularly in the righteousness of Jesus Christ which is mine by faith, Romans chapter 4 verses 3 and following.

The Roman Catholic who believes in their system of grace and the sacraments and the concepts of indulgences, supererogation, the treasury of merit, the excess merit of Mary and the saints and so on and so forth, the Roman Catholic who stands before God someday will be able to say that only through the grace of Christ was I able to do these things but I did X, Y, and Z, I had merit from the treasury of merit, so on and so forth.

The position that I have as a Christian is sure and final because it is solely the work of Christ. The Roman Catholic, and I have some quotes here from Tim and from other sources, that talks about the necessity of fulfilling requirements to gain justification.

Jesus Christ fulfilled them in my place. He doesn't just merit the grace of justification, he actually justifies me. Now that goes to the nature of man, sin, ability, sovereignty, there's a million issues there but you asked for a very, very brief one.

Now I think, if I could, I'd like to make an analogy and I think the error of what James has just said, and I must say we agree to a great extent with what he just said in as much as the Council of Trent said that we can do absolutely nothing to merit in any way whatsoever the initial grace of justification.

So you believe in grace alone?

We believe in the fact that we are saved totally. Now I'm going to make an analogy here. I believe James is falling into, and please don't hit me James.

I'm too far away to hit you.

He's falling into an error that is analogous to the error of the Aryans or the Jehovah's Witnesses in this regard. They will say...

He may not hit you but he's going to throw something at you after that.

They will say, they will take verses of scripture, and I believe that James and the Protestant Reformers do exactly this, take scriptures out of context. One scripture, and you know Hank, the Jehovah's Witnesses love to use...

But that is a fair claim to make. I mean, having known James White, and you know him as well, one thing that he does not do is take scripture out of context and develop a pretext.

He knows the Pentateuch, but I believe that he does. And let me finish my analogy. It goes like this. The Jehovah's Witnesses will look at verses like John 20, 10 and 1 Timothy 2, 5 that emphasize the humanity of Christ and say, see, we don't need to go any farther.

Jesus is man. There's one God, one mediator between God and man. The man Jesus Christ. Now we agree, we say to our Jehovah's Witness friend, we agree, absolutely, Jesus is God. He is in fact totally God, Hank.

This is very important. He's not totally Hank, he's totally man, but he is also totally God. He is not 50 God, he's not 50 man. He is totally God, totally man. So he's totally God, but he's not solely God.

He's totally man, but he's not solely man. In the same way, we would say, as Protestants, that though we merit absolutely no sense of the word, anything, as far as the initial grace of justification, once we are in a state of grace, then absolutely, the scripture I believe is very clear, we can and must merit things, including eternal life.

Now, so I think the error that James...

Could you repeat that and make sure everyone... I'm actually wanting to stop you and say, please make sure everyone heard exactly what you just said.

Okay, repeat it, and you get about 30 seconds, because we're coming up to a station break.

Well, I'll just use Romans 2, verse 6, that says exactly that, that through works, we merit reward from God, and the reward mentioned in Romans 2, 6, and 7 is eternal life. One of the rewards is, in fact, eternal life.

But now, the point is, I believe that James takes verses out of context that says, it's grace, it's grace, and he's falling into the same error of saying it's solely grace. No, it's totally grace, as St. Augustine teaches, as Thomas Aquinas teaches, but it's not solely God.

We are involved as well.

We're coming up to a station break. We'll be back in just a few moments. Please stay tuned. And welcome back to the Bible Interim Broadcast. I'm your host, Hank Hanegraaff, president of the Christian Research Institute.

Delighted that you've joined us for the broadcast today, inviting you to join us on air with your question, the U .S. or Canada, by simply dialing 888-ASK-HANK. I want to go back to Tim Staples. You wanted to clarify what you were saying with regards to sola gratia, and then there was going to be a brief rebuttal by you, and then we're going to get into another topic.

Then we'll get to phone calls.

Okay.

I wanted to just emphasize and make clear here that when we're talking about justification in the Catholic Church, we believe in justification by grace alone, through faith. But now, we have a different understanding of grace and faith.

Faith, saving faith, we say, is a faith that is formed by charity, or formata caritatis in Latin, formed by charity. Charity, by its nature, is an act. It's an act. It's not a warm, fuzzy feeling. It's an act of the will.

So we're talking about a faith that's formed by charity. But remember, when I say solely by grace, it's grace alone. That's what the Catholic Church sees, and I think a lot of Protestants don't understand that.

However, we don't exclude man's cooperation, even though, as Augustine said, even our cooperation itself is a gift from God, and Thomas Aquinas agrees. All of these things are gifts, so much so that when we get to heaven, God will, as it were, crown his own gifts.

However, what we say is that though it is grace alone, it's not totally God, because man is also involved. It's totally God and totally man, and the classic verse used among the many is Philippians 2, verses 12 and 13.

Work out your salvation. That's you. Work out your salvation with fear and tremble, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to do according to his pleasure. So it is both. I believe what James is doing is he's emphasizing one to the exclusion of the other in the same way that the Arians do, and they miss it on Christology.

I believe James is missing it on Soteria.

James, your response?

Well, as Paul said in Romans 11, six was on the basis of grace is no longer the basis of work, so that is grace is no longer grace. The very term grace itself excludes the concept of meritorious action, even the idea of adding human works that are caused by grace that can then create merit upon which eternal life is given.

But I think Tim will have to agree the vast majority of people who sort of observe the Roman Catholic-Protestant debate are not aware of what the specific issues are. I want to read very briefly from Ludwig Ott, where he says, the meritorious cause of justification is Jesus Christ, who has mediated between God and man, has made atonement for us, and then catch this phrase, Hank, and merited the grace by which we are justified.

That's a very important issue. What the work of Christ does is merits the grace by which we are justified. And then later on he says that the reason for the uncertainty of the state of grace lies in this, that without a special revelation, nobody can with certainty of faith know whether or not he has, and here's the operative phrase, fulfilled all the conditions which are necessary for achieving of justification.

I say in response to that, first of all, Jesus Christ does not merit grace. Jesus Christ justifies by his death those people who are united to him by faith. Secondly, the conditions of justification have been fulfilled completely and perfectly in my place by my Savior Jesus Christ.

That is the issue to me.

But would you agree, Hank, help me, we have to do something, we have to accept Jesus. Would you agree with that?

We receive Jesus.

So we don't do anything.

Even Augustine said that saving faith, which was discussed, is the gift of God. Again, we very vastly disagree. What was the first debate of the Reformation? It was between Martin Luther and Desiderius Erasmus on the issue of the will.

We believe that men are dead in sin and must be spiritually regenerated by the sovereign work of God. This is really where the issue is. It's always been this issue, and I'll be the first one to complain about it, admit.

Many Protestants today are doing what I call treading water in the Tiber. Now, Tim probably understands what that means, if he's been to Rome. I don't know if anyone knows Roman geography, but the Tiber River flows along the city of Rome, and there are a lot of Protestants today who, not knowing what the issues of the Reformation were, tread water in the Tiber.

They're not Roman Catholics, but they no longer really believe the fundamental and substantial things that caused the Protestant Reformation, those solas, sola scriptura, sola fide, sola gratia, sola deo gloria, sola Christus, all those solas, they figure, well, those things really don't matter anymore.

They do matter, and there was a reason why they were emphasized back then.

James, I think you've hit on something extremely important. You've just illustrated a very, very important disagreement amongst Protestants between the Augsburg and Westminster Confession here, and between perhaps, I'm not sure, Hank, where you stand on this, but I know Dr. Walter Martin, whom I used to, as I said, I was kidding with these guys before the broadcast, I used to worship Dr. Martin when I was...

I made a little statue. But what I would see as a serious disagreement between you guys is on the will, and is grace resistible? Does a person have a choice here? Can this person choose to accept or reject God's grace?

There is a profound disagreement, and I believe it's been kind of swept under the rug between the eternally secure Baptists and the predestined Calvinists.

Well, I don't think it's.

Been swept under the rug. It's a question that comes up on the Bible Answering and broadcast all the time. Let's get to the issue of authority in just a second. I mean, that's another one of those foundational...

If I could, because I think that's a real good segue for me, in that I believe that one of the keys for me, in my experience, James, as a Protestant,.

Who...

I didn't want the Catholic Church to be true.

As a former Protestant.

As a former Protestant. And I was seeking and seeking. One of the things that really expedited the process, to be honest with you, is the plethora, is the enormous amount of disagreement amongst Protestants on essential, on key issues.

We're not just talking about, you know, bingo on Thursday. We're talking about disagreeing on the nature of Jesus Christ. We were talking before the broadcast about Dr. Walter Martin and the Kingdom of the Cults,.

Which I read.

And you know he taught that the Son is not the Eternal Son. He's the Eternal Word who became the Son. We have disagreements like that, that we as Catholics would say, my gosh, are you kidding me? That's absolute heresy.

But amongst Protestants, we're talking major theologians and so forth. Dr. Walter Martin, I'm sure that we would all agree, was a man of God. He taught this. So where do we go? Where do we go when we disagree over issues like this that are central to, not only soteriology, but even who Christ is?

Or, most importantly for me, in my process, where do we go if we're in the second or third century and we disagree like Origen did over the inspiration of 2 Peter? I'm not too sure, he says, about the inspiration of 2 Peter.

And I've got a list here of the different canons from bishops in the early church that disagreed over which books of the Bible were in fact the Bible. Where do we go? The issue is, we're dealing with the main.

And the plain things. Why do we need some external authority when the main and plain things are by definition main and plain?

I'll tell you why, Hank, because that, and obviously you know this is no offense to you, but I don't agree with the statement, the main things are the plain things, the plain things are the main things.

I would say that that is a tradition that is nowhere found in Scripture.

Who said, in essentials unity, non-essentials liberty, in all things charity. We're talking about those essentials that are so obvious that a child can understand.

Okay, well you made.

A leap there.

Augustine did say the essentials are crucial and liberty on the things that are not essential.

No, he said there had to be unity around the essentials.

Exactly, and I agree. But what he didn't say, and what I believe the sacred Scripture exactly says the opposite, is that the main things are often not plain. In fact, in 2 Peter 3, verses 15 and 16, St. Peter, in talking about Paul's writing, and what is he talking about, James?

Soterion, in Greek. Salvation. He says, St. Paul, writing about the long suffering of the Lord, salvation, writes in that many things that are hard to be understood, and the unlearned that is Amatheus, the undiscipled and ignorant, twist them under their own destruction.

This is a main thing, Soterion. And Peter says many of these things are hard to understand. Folks, we need an authority, and I believe the Bible plainly teaches.

Us that the church.

Has that authority.

An authority like the church that says purgatory is something that you as an individual need to believe in, and you have absolutely no biblical warrant for that whatsoever.

Well, obviously I disagree that there is absolutely no biblical warrant for that. I believe in the tradition you find many writers such as Cyril of Jerusalem, Tertullian, St. Augustine himself, who teach purgatory, talk about purgatory, and use many scriptures of Scripture to demonstrate.

Well, give me one.

Well, for example, 1 Corinthians 3, verses 11 -15, and also Matthew chapter 5, but let me just, to get things started here, 1 Corinthians 3, verses 11. And James looks like he is excited over there.

Salivating as a matter of.

Yeah, indeed.

St. Paul tells us, and just so we don't take all day here, I think what he teaches plainly here is he is teaching obviously on the final judgment. Now, I believe that we could also talk about the particular judgment here as well.

So you are reading 1 Corinthians. What now?

1 Corinthians chapter 3, and I am beginning at verse 11.

Okay. Let's read it.

10 -15 is the main passage that is normally.

Used.

For other foundation can no man lay, but that which is laid, which is Christ Jesus. Now, if any man build upon this foundation, gold, silver, precious stone, wood, hay, stubble, every man's work shall be manifest, for the day of the Lord shall declare.

It.

Because it shall be revealed in fire, the fire shall test every man's work of what sort.

It is.

If any man's work abide, which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward. If any man's work burn, he shall suffer.

Loss.

But he himself shall be saved, yet so as by.

Fire.

Folks, that is an excellent definition of purgatory. We are talking about a place, Hank, that is after death, it is not heaven, and it is not hell. Now, you call it the final judgment.

Now, you wouldn't say that that is an explicit statement. You would say that that is an implicit teaching. Yes.

Purgatory is implied.

There.

But remember, things like the Trinity, Homo.

Lucis, and the.

Roman Catholic doctrine.

Of purgatory are not.

Explicit.

The word itself, as James knows, is the.

Council of Nicaea,.

Homo Lucis.

I was just referring to your response to that. We are talking about a passage that is frequently used by Catholics to say, look, the Bible implies that there is a place called purgatory, and as a prophecy, you would say that purgatory denies the sufficiency of Christ's atonement upon the cross.

I would not only say that, but I would point out that 1 Corinthians chapter 3 has nothing to do with the Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory.

In purgatory, the.

Purgatory is a place where you are a saved person who goes into this place with temporal punishments of sins still clinging to your soul. You must have these temporal punishments for sins cleansed before you can go into the presence of God.

You must undergo what Ludwig Ott calls sadaspatio, the suffering of atonement. Without this suffering on your part, you will not enter into the presence of God.

James, it's not only suffering for sins, but it's also venial sins as.

Well.

Thank you very much. That is true. I just wasn't emphasizing venial sins. The simple fact of the matter is that when you die, your process of sanctification is not yet completed, and hence you must undergo sadaspatio, the suffering of atonement.

Now, 1 Corinthians chapter 3 is talking about the judgment of your works, not your soul. There's nothing about.

Merit there.

There's nothing about suffering to gain merit. It has nothing to do with any of those things, but it does take us to the main issue, and that's this. You see, the Roman Catholic, and I'm going to make this point at the debate, the Roman Catholic is not able to do biblical exegesis.

Not because he lacks the ability, but because he does not believe that the Scriptures are the final and ultimate.

Authority.

There are two positions being presented here. I believe in sola scriptura, the Scriptures, the God-breathed revelation of God in the Scriptures, are sufficient to function as a sole infallible rule of faith of the Church.

The Roman Catholic, I will argue, believes in sola ecclesia, that is, that the Church is the final authority, and I demonstrate this by this. In Roman Catholicism, the Church defines the canon of Scripture.

It tells you what Scripture is, and then tells you the interpretation of Scripture. So the Scripture is the canon of Scripture. The Church defines the extent of Scripture and the meaning of Scripture.

The Church defines what is and what is not tradition, whatever tradition might mean to individuals, and what tradition does and does not teach. Hence, since the Church defines all these things, these things cannot be a superior authority to.

Her.

They do not exist separate from her and above her to correct her. So the two positions are sola scriptura, sola ecclesia. Those are the two positions that are in this debate. Very rarely do Roman Catholics bring out clearly the sola ecclesia part.

They like to attack sola scriptura. Now, Tim said, well, there are all these different viewpoints.

You've got all these.

Disagreements amongst Roman Catholics. Well, we know there are all sorts of disagreements amongst Protestants. There are all sorts of disagreements among Roman Catholics. For example, Tim has told me he believes in what's called the material sufficiency view of Scripture.

But Jerry Matitick believes in the partum-partum view of tradition that was part of the Council of.

Trent.

The point is, they don't.

Know.

The Church hasn't defined that. There's Augustinians who emphasize the.

Sovereignty of God,.

Dominicans who take another viewpoint. There's all sorts of controversies that the Church has not solved. Therefore, if it is an argument against the sufficiency of Scripture that men disagree about what it teaches, men disagree about Vatican.

II.

They disagree about the Council of Trent. They disagree about everything the Church has taught. Does that make those sources insufficient? You see, it is not a valid argument against the sufficiency of the Bible to point out that men disagree about it, because that assumes that we come to the Bible with some perfect knowledge.

We come to the Bible with our sins, our traditions, and things like that that cause us to have those disagreements.

The Debate Over Authority and the Church's Role

We're coming to a station break. My in-studio guest, James White, the founder of Alpha and Omega Ministries, and Tim Staples, director of Apologetics for St. Joseph's Catholic Radio. We'll be back in a moment.