March 16, 2018 Show with Dr. Tony Costa on “An Assessment of the Arnzen vs. Bogle Radio Debate on ‘Unbelievable?’ UK Radio (Part 1)”

Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister

George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

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

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

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

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

Now here's our host Chris Arnton. Good afternoon

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

This is Chris Arnton, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Friday on this 16th day of March 2018.

And by the way, after this program is over, if any of you want to log into ironsharpensironradio .com

and look up in the archives in the search engine for past programs podcasts, my interview that I conducted last year with a renowned

Baptist scholar, Dr. Michael Haken, on the subject of Patrick of Ireland, the true

St. Patrick of history, I urge you to do so, so you'll be prepared to bring that true figure of history, that great

Christian hero of history, up in conversation with family, friends, and loved ones when they may be celebrating a fictitious

St. Patrick's Day tomorrow on the 17th of March. But today, we are going to be having an assessment, a long awaited assessment, of the debate that I had, my first and only debate that I ever personally participated in as a debater, at least in any kind of public sense, the debate that I had with James Bogle, a

Roman Catholic apologist and barrister in the United Kingdom. I was invited prior to Reformation Day 2017 to participate in an interview on Unbelievable Radio in the

UK. I've participated on the phone, that is, while everyone else was in the

UK and in the studio, the Unbelievable Studios, and I was told that we would be giving our testimonies on that program, that is,

I would be giving my testimony of having been raised Roman Catholic, and then eventually converting to biblical evangelical

Protestantism, and more specifically, Reformed Baptist theology. And James Bogle, the

British barrister and Roman Catholic apologist and leader of a

Catholic apostolate out there in the UK, he was going to be giving his testimony of how the reverse happened in his life, how he, being raised

Anglican and Protestant, eventually converted to Roman Catholicism. What I did not know beforehand was that this discussion was intended to develop into a debate, which it did, not any kind of a long, very, very detailed, meticulously timed and moderated debate.

This was more of a radio debate, which tend to be discussions that are give and take between two people of opposing views.

So it did develop into a debate, and I'm going to be playing that debate for you right now.

It's a little over an hour, so I'm not going to waste any more of your time by babbling here.

And then we're going to have Dr. Tony Costa, the professor of apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary, joining us in the second hour of the show to give his assessment of this debate.

And we are also going to have him back on Monday for part two of this discussion, which will probably be on a much broader realm of issues regarding the

Roman Catholic Church, rather than just those issues brought up at the debate, depending upon what time allows us.

But without further ado, here is my interview slash debate with James Bogle on the

Unbelievable radio program in the UK, hosted by Justin Brierley. And welcome along to Unbelievable.

I'm Justin Brierley, your host for every week here on Premiere Christian Radio as part of Faith Explored, that brings different perspectives together to generate conversations that matter.

Really interesting program for you today. Let's get into it. Well, today on the program, we're hearing from a

Catholic turned Protestant and a Protestant convert to Catholicism. So if you like the inverse mirror of each other when it comes to their journeys of faith, we're going to be hearing this dialogue today as we mark the 500th anniversary of the

Reformation when the Protestant Church split away from the Roman Catholic Church. We're speaking to two people who both changed their minds about which one they wanted to be part of.

Well, Chris Arnzen is a Reformed Baptist and host of the Iron Sharpens Iron radio show out in the

USA. He was once a Catholic, he'll be telling us about why he became a Protestant and why he now actually critiques

Catholicism. If you want to find out more about him, ironsharpensironradio .com is the website.

James Bogle joins me in the studio. He's vice chairman of the Catholic Union of Great Britain, a barrister professionally.

He'll be telling us about his journey from Anglicanism to Catholicism as a young man and why he believes the

Catholic Church is the true church established by Christ. And I'm sure we'll cover a number of other issues in the course of the program.

We'll try and get to things like the issue of Mary, the Pope, salvation by works or grace and more besides.

But I hope you enjoy today's dialogue. A Catholic turned Protestant dialoguing with a Protestant convert to Catholicism.

So a warm welcome to you both, Chris and James. Welcome along to the program. It's great to be here. It's great to have you both.

Good to be here. Let's come to you first of all, Chris, you run a program that's not a million miles away from what

I do here on Unbelievable. You're quite often hosting people talking about faith issues, how to engage with secular culture and obviously hosting debates every so often as well.

Tell us a little bit, though, about what you do now, but how you actually came to be the

Christian you are today as well. Well, I was raised in a Roman Catholic home.

My mother was Roman Catholic. My father was Episcopalian, who did not convert to Catholicism until I was approximately 17 years old.

I was educated in parochial school. And here in America, they call parochial schools private schools.

I understand that that's not the case over there in the UK. But it was a Roman Catholic school.

I have nothing but really very fond memories of all of that. I was an altar boy.

I was a very religious young man. And I very much got along with the majority of the nuns who were teachers at that school, which was

St. Martin of Tours, Roman Catholic school in Amityville, Long Island, New York.

And I also got along very well with the priests, the parish priests there.

I departed from the Catholic Church, not in a formal way, but just by drifting away when

I was approximately 15 years old. I remember during a confirmation class before I was confirmed when

I was 14, we were given the opportunity to have a priest, our parish priest, sit in on a class at the school, where we were given the freedom to ask him any questions about our faith that we chose to ask.

And I can remember just becoming dismayed by some of the answers that didn't seem to sit right with me.

And the one that I specifically asked was, is heaven a real place or a state of mind?

And keep in mind that this is not long after Vatican II. This is a day and age when there were novel ideas being bantied about in Roman Catholicism.

It was a day of the beginning of very strong ecumenical relationships or attempts at ecumenical relationships with those outside of Catholicism.

We even had a Passover Seder one year at the school with a

Jewish rabbi, not a Messianic Christian rabbi, but a Jewish rabbi. And but I remember when

I asked that question to the priest if this was heaven, the place that I and everyone else who believes in heaven, the place that we long to go to after this life is over, he said in answer to my question that heaven was a state of mind.

Now I realize that that class could have been very easily been conducted in an evangelical or mainline

Protestant church, and that you might have heard an equally absurd answer or unbiblical answer.

And I know that that answer is not even reflective of Roman Catholic dogma. But I remember that was just a beginning, and it perhaps began a little bit earlier than that, but that was like a real crucial point when

I started to be very dissatisfied with Catholicism.

And I drifted as a young man into alcoholism and a very serious pot smoking, marijuana.

And for years I went on in that lifestyle and becoming more increasingly evolved in those things.

And by the time I was approximately in my mid -20s, 24, 25, a friend of mine had become a born -again

Christian in a small Pentecostal congregation and urged me to come there to worship with her.

At the same time, for years, one of my oldest brothers had been aggressively evangelizing me.

He had also had a born -again Christian experience, and he was evangelizing me.

And all of these factors combining together were beginning to chip away at my heart and get me to really start to rethink everything that I had thought about Christianity.

And eventually, I began a friendship by the presence of God with a local pastor in the town where I was raised,

Amityville, Long Island. This pastor's name is Mike Gaydosh, who is now retired from the ministry, but he was at the time pastor of Calvary Baptist Church of Amityville, Long Island, which was a

Reformed Baptist church. Today it is known as Grace Reformed Baptist Church of Long Island, located in Merrick, Long Island, New York.

After a merger with another Reformed Baptist church, they became one congregation.

And so the very first church, Evangelical Protestant Church, where I was convinced that they had the truth, that they were a reflection of what the

Bible actually taught in regard to most things, especially in regard to salvation,

I requested to be baptized. And I can recall that because I had repented from my serious abuse of alcohol and marijuana and so on,

I can recall that my Roman Catholic mom, who had some initial misgivings or apprehensions that I was leaving the faith of my youth, the faith she raised me in, the faith where I was baptized as a baby, she really came to rejoice in this conversion because she saw the stark contrast that came about in my life after my repentance.

And my mother, by the way, on her deathbed also embraced the gospel of the

Reformation, which I of course would believe is the biblical gospel, that she was trusting solely in the finished work of Christ on Calvary for her salvation, and she was dying of pancreatic cancer.

And this was not something that was pushed upon her.

She wasn't manipulated into believing this. It just very quickly came out of her where she just very calmly confessed that that is what she was trusting in, and she renounced prayer to Mary and the saints, something that was a daily habit of her for 70 years, or nearly 70 years since she was 70 when she went home to the

Lord. I'd just be interested to know, your father, how did he respond to you becoming a

Reformed Christian? He did not have any misgivings about it. My father was always an ecumenist.

My father was a Cub Scout leader, and he very much enjoyed—I don't know if the

Cub Scouts do this today because of of political correctness, I'm not sure, but actually this is somewhat of a politically correct activity anyway—but he used to take the

Cub Scouts to different houses of worship. That was like a common thing that the

Scouts did in America, at least at that time, and he would take the Scouts on a visit to Catholic church or Protestant church, even a

Jewish synagogue. Chris, so you've explained your journey very well there. In a sense, it sounds like you didn't have any problems with, as it were, your

Catholic upbringing, but certainly it doesn't sound like it necessarily made a huge impact on you in terms of spiritual devotion or kind of, in a sense, in a deep way.

Well, actually, as a young boy, it did have an impact on me religiously. I was religious. I prayed often.

I believed in God. I believed in the truths of Jesus Christ. I believed he was

God and is God. And so I was not indifferent about religion or about the truths of God, but it just became a much more vivid change and reality for me later on when

I became, by God's grace, a born -again believer and embraced historic and biblical

Protestantism. And that change has also led to you actually speaking out and critiquing

Catholicism as well, because as far as you're concerned, it isn't a truly biblical expression of salvation by grace through faith.

That's right, and one of the core reasons for that is that the

Council of Trent, the Roman Catholic Council of Trent, declared hundreds of years before I was even a thought in my father's eye, the

Council of Trent declared that the gospel I believe, the gospel of the Reformation, is a false gospel.

So therefore, we have dogmatically a declaration that there are two different gospels we are talking about.

You have the gospel of the Roman Catholic Church, and you have the gospel of the Reformation, which all those who are embracing the gospel of the

Reformation, of course, believe it is the gospel of the Scriptures and the gospel of Jesus Christ. So when there are two different gospels being discussed here,

I find no support for the Church of Rome's gospel, and therefore

I embrace wholeheartedly the doctrine of the Scripture's gospel and the gospel of the

Reformation. Okay. Well, thank you so much for being on the programme with us today, Chris, and Chris representing our

Catholic -turned -Protestant side of the discussion today. Well, our Protestant convert to Catholicism is

James Vogel, who joins me in the studio. He's the Vice -Chairman of the Catholic Union of Great Britain and a barrister professionally.

James, thank you very much for coming in today, and tell us about your story, starting from a similar position to Chris, in a sense, because you grew up in an

Anglican household, and going to church and that sort of thing was certainly part of your normal routine, wasn't it?

Yeah. For the benefit of American listeners, can I explain that a barrister means a trial attorney?

It usually raises eyebrows. I appreciate that. Can I just say one thing, first of all?

My experience has been, in some respects, similar to Chris, in that he has found what he was given in his youth unsatisfactory, although at the same time it gave him some good things, for example, a belief in God, a belief in the gospel, a belief in Christ.

Same for me, in my Protestant upbringing, I should say that. And can I also say that I entirely sympathise with Chris's journey, because I suspect, and I hope

I'm not doing his teachers an injustice here, that he was given a very watered -down version of Catholicism, if not indeed a false version of it, as evidenced by the story that he told us of the priest who, when asked by Chris as a child a perfectly reasonable question, is heaven a real place or a state of mind, the priest said, a state of mind.

Chris was balanced enough to say, well, it could have happened in an evangelical or liberal Protestant debate. The fact is, unfortunately, that is happening a lot in all

Christian churches, an attempt to water down the gospel. And I think Chris and I would be on the same page that that is wrong.

I imagine you'd be on the same page on a number of moral and ethical issues as well. Very much so, yes.

I imagine your primary issues are doctrinal. Doctrinal, yes. And I think we should bear in mind, I hope

Chris doesn't mind me saying so, that certainly those who come from evangelical backgrounds, in my experience, we as Catholics, or at least

Catholics who genuinely believe the Catholic faith, have much more in common than we do against each other.

Having said that, there are, of course, some very significant differences. Take us back to your journey that led you to those differences. So, yeah, just going back to my own experience.

I mean, my family have been Protestants since the Reformation in Scotland, and we've been variously

Scottish Episcopalian or Presbyterian, and I think I'm probably the first Catholic in my family.

Although my parents were nominally Anglican, they had me baptized, although I noticed my baptism was not until I was the age of two.

But it would be wrong to say that they were church -going believing Anglicans. They were, shall we say, fairly typical of a lot of Anglicans.

They gave adherence to the Church of England in a kind of semi -detached sort of way, which is not uncommon in the

Church of England, which is, of course, a criticism that people from Chris's background will make of the

Church of England or Anglicanism or Episcopalianism as much as we Catholics do. So that's my background.

I went to what we call in this country a public school. In America, they would call it a private school, or I think you call them preppies, and a fairly typical

Church of England religion, which is, when I was at boarding school, we would go to church every

Sunday. We'd sometimes have church services during the week, but the doctrine was fairly flaccid.

But nonetheless, I had some quite good teachers, Church of England ministers, who prepared me for confirmation.

I later discovered from some of my newly -found Catholic friends that I probably had a better preparation for confirmation than a lot of modern -day

Catholic children have. Unfortunately, they often have very bad preparation. Mine was fairly simple.

I was taught the creed, the Our Father, and various doctrines of the Church of England, respect for the

Bible, but more importantly is that I personally believed. And after my confirmation,

I actually went to church on Sundays, which I think astounded my parents. Who expected you to sort of adopt their fairly nominal kind of approach?

Yeah, well, I think, you know, I mean, in the modern world, if you go to church, period, you're regarded as slightly odd, particularly in countries like England.

Actually, at that time, I was in Australia. In America, less so. I think church -going is regarded as much more normal in America, but in Europe and in countries of the former

British Empire, with the exception, I suppose, of black countries, where I think there's quite a lot of church -going, among the sort of white commonwealth, skepticism is the order of the day.

I went regularly on Sundays. Then we moved to another part of the country, and I went to a different school and stopped going for a while.

Then I went to boarding school and started going again because required, but I didn't mind at all.

I was very familiar with the Church of England service. It's a very beautiful service. Unfortunately, the Church of England has changed from the old 1662 service book, with its beautiful English, to something which is, frankly, execrable.

The Catholic Church has done something similar, alas. But I was fortunate enough to have the very pleasant

Cranmerian English. I don't agree with Cranmer, but I rather like his English. At what point, then, did your journey bring you into contact with seriously considering Catholicism as an option?

Well, I would say when I left school, I still had a belief in God. But when I got to university, university in the late 1970s was,

I suppose, more closely akin to a lunatic asylum. It was predominantly the academics, the dons, were of the left, some of the extreme left.

Most of the student bodies were dominated by extreme left -wing, not to say

Marxist, communist views. They tended to invite over representatives from the

North Vietnamese Communist Party to address the students and say how wicked the Americans were.

This was all fairly difficult for me, since half of my family were in the army. My father was a soldier.

I eventually became one myself. And my uncles and other relatives were serving in Vietnam against the

Viet Cong. I was greeted on the day one at university by the huge demonstration of the

Draft Resisters Union. I was offered marijuana, cigarette in my first lecture.

I mean, it was just a madhouse. And this went against your more, if you like, conservative leanings.

I was fairly liberal -minded myself, but this was not what I was used to. I can,

I think, put it that way. So I was fortunate enough to find some of my friends from when

I had been at school, the school where I was confirmed, and discovered that one of them had become a

Catholic, which surprised me, because I had been brought up as fairly typical Protestant ideas that were anti -Catholic.

In fact, somebody, some wag once said, an Englishman doesn't know what his religious beliefs are, but he knows jolly well he's not a damn

Catholic. I suppose that would have been my view at that time, and I would have said, so I was very surprised to discover my friend had become a

Catholic. So, of course, I immediately asked him why. He said, well, it's a wrong story.

I said, well, tell me. Over the next two years, he proceeded to do so, not only to tell me his story, but also, more importantly, to answer my questions and objections.

And I had a lot. And every time I presented with an objection, he was able to answer it fully and completely, which is rare these days.

You had a very unusual friend. Very lucky to have someone now. As it happens, he's extremely intelligent.

He came top in the class. He came top in the state. He had first class honours degrees, left, right and centre.

He is, as it happens, he's now a priest. He was an extremely intelligent man. And that was very fortunate, because that meant he was able to answer.

He was also extremely good at history. Cardinal Newman once said famously, to be deep in history is to cease to be a

Protestant. He was deep in history, and he ceased to be a Protestant. So this was a journey, obviously, an intellectual journey for you.

At what point did, you know, did your heart follow the intellect and you finally? It took me about two years to be persuaded.

And the first point is to be persuaded. I should just say his knowledge of history was so great that I remember when we were in history class together, our history master, if he was stuck for some historical fact, would say,

John, would you get up and explain? And he would get up and explain to the class better than the teacher. So I was very lucky to have that.

After about two years, I ran out of objections. I couldn't, you know, I raised all these objections, I'm sure Chris will raise in the course of this interview.

And he was able to answer them all. He was able to answer them all persuasively, rationally, intellectually, logically, and with conviction.

Now, having been intellectually persuaded isn't, of course, enough faith, as both

Chris and I'm sure will agree. And you, Justin, I'm sure is is a gift of God. It's not something you can earn.

It's not something you can work your way towards. It's a gift of God. You either you get it from God or you don't.

Of course, God will give it to everybody because God is God is love. And God wants to save everybody. So he will, at the appropriate moment, offer you faith.

It's up to you whether you accept it or not. I accepted it. I accepted it, but I accepted it not only with some what somebody has once described as a funny internal feeling, but because it seemed to me true, logically, rationally, historically, from every it was a meeting of the head and the heart then for you meeting of the head and the heart.

And that is what the Catholic Church is. It's a meeting of the head and the heart. And one of the criticisms

I would make of evangelical Protestantism, it is largely a meeting of the heart only. Now, I personally believe and I want to emphasize this, that this is the

Catholic faith. We believe that is sufficient for salvation. If you believe that Christ is your savior and that you're sorry for your sins, as long as you aren't actively objecting or rejecting what you know to be true, that's enough for salvation.

Now, I will be accused by Chris of being a liberal for saying that, but actually it excludes an awful lot of people.

We've taken almost the first segment of today's show just to hear both your stories and time is flying already.

But just before we go to our first break, and then we start to get you guys dialoguing on this whole issue. I have one other important thing to say.

Well, go ahead and we'll go to our break. I then read a very important book, which I recommend to anybody who's contemplating the

Christian faith. I've got it in front of me now. It is by the famous Cardinal John Henry Newman, our blessed John, who was himself, of course, a convert, converted in 1845, having been a very prominent leader in the

Protestant Church, particularly in the Tractarian movement. And it's called an essay on the development of Christian doctrine, which he wrote in 1845.

And he got half, he got two thirds of the way through and eventually converted. And it's beautifully written and it answers so many objections about the

Catholic faith. And I just want to read one bit if I may. Go ahead. This is one of the things, this is what, this is finally what did it for me.

He says this in his chapter on the church of the fourth century, on the whole, we have reason to say that if there be a form of Christianity at this day distinguished for its careful organization and its consequent power, if it is spread over the world, if it is conspicuous by zealous maintenance of its own creed, if it is intolerant towards what it considers error, if it is engaged in ceaseless war with all other bodies called

Christian, if it and it alone is called Catholic by the world, nay by those very bodies, and if it makes much of the title, if it names them heretics and warns them of coming woe and calls them then one by one to come over to itself, overlooking every other tie.

And if they, on the other hand, call it seducer, harlot, apostate, antichrist, devil, if however they differ one with another, they consider it their common enemy, if they strive to unite against it together and cannot, if they are but local, if they continually subdivide and it remains one, if they fall one after another, make way for new sects, and it remains, it remains the same, such a form of religion is not unlike the

Christianity of the fourth century. Right, so it was the enduring stability, unity of the

Catholic Church that then, for you, was a proof of its truth. And most importantly of all, consistency and inerrancy of doctrine.

It never contradicted itself when it spoke with authority. We will,

I'm sure, get into these issues in the rest of today's programme. We've heard the stories so far of our

Catholic -turned -Protestant, Chris Armson, on the programme today, and James Bogle, who began as a

Protestant in Anglican background and was converted as a young man to Catholicism.

We're going to continue the discussion between them on today's show as we hear these two different stories that mirror each other in opposite directions, and as we mark the 500th anniversary of the

Reformation, we'll be asking what does it mean to be a Catholic, why does

Chris believe that it is unbiblical as a way of expressing the Christian faith.

We'll be back in a moment's time with more here on the show that aims to get you thinking unbelievable. So let's continue talking about your stories before we get into some of the specifics in the rest of the discussion today.

Time, I'm sure, will fly by so we may not get to that much, but Chris, having heard James's story, there you have an example of someone who obviously went on a sincere intellectual and spiritual journey and, you know, came out believing they really had found the truth about where, you know, the right direction to take in terms of the

Christian history and the Catholic Church's claim to be the true continuing, if you like,

Church of Jesus Christ. I mean, when you hear someone as obviously erudite and knowledgeable in these areas as James, is it fair to say he's made a good choice there, or do you feel that actually there's enough that you really don't believe

James can call himself a true believer, a Christian, given the journey he's taken?

Well, obviously, as I said earlier, since it is the Council of Trent, the Roman Catholic Council of Trent, that has dogmatically declared the gospel that I embrace, the

Protestant gospel, as false. In fact, I am anathematized by Rome for believing it.

I am declared accursed, and that dogma, and those dogmas, I should say, from the

Council of Trent can never be overturned. They can never be renounced ex cathedra by a pope because they are dogma, and as my friend

James, I'm sure, knows and agrees, there is a difference between something that is a dogma and a discipline in the

Catholic Church. A dogma is forever binding upon a faithful Catholic, and since the

Council of Trent declared dogmatically that my gospel is false, I would have to have no other conclusion than to believe that the

Roman Catholic Church has a different gospel than I do, and since there is only one biblical gospel,

I believe that the Church of Rome, obviously, as a Protestant, I believe that the Church of Rome has a false gospel, and just as the

Judaizers that Paul contended with, especially in regard to the

Church of Galatia in the New Testament, since he said that they had no gospel at all, and he declared upon them a curse,

I cannot reconcile in my mind how I can view those that are dogmatically faithful to the

Church of Rome in regard to the gospel as my brothers in Christ. Now, having said that, I believe that there are many

Roman Catholics who are my brothers and sisters in Christ because either knowingly or unconsciously they are believing in the biblical gospel in opposition to the dogmatic gospel of their own church, and I have met a number of people like that.

My mother, for instance, who I was telling you before, who on her deathbed embraced and trusted in the death of Christ alone as her one and only hope for her salvation, and that her salvation had nothing at all to do with her works, her ceremonial activity with the

Roman Catholic Church, etc. She never told me, I hereby renounce the

Roman Catholic Church. She never had any kind of official conversion into Protestantism. It was the gospel that she shared with me, and she renounced what

I would call the idolatry of Rome as well, and so therefore, she and many other individuals who

I have met, I would embrace as my brethren because of the fact that they share a gospel with me.

For a thoroughgoing Catholic like James sitting opposite me here, as far as you're concerned, he does believe effectively a false gospel, a gospel that you believe includes works at some level in order to bring about salvation.

Is that your view? And then we'll obviously cross to James. Yes, assuming that James agrees with the dogmas of Rome regarding justification and salvation, yes,

I would say that I would agree with you. Okay. So James, what is your view on this? Very simple.

Yes, I do accept what the Catholic Church teaches dogmatically, but let me also say I also believe on the

Lord Jesus Christ. I believe that he is my saviour, my personal saviour. I pray to him. I ask him for all the things that I need.

I believe the Bible is the infallible word of God. All of those things that Chris believes about those things,

I also believe. But that's not enough because you've got to ask yourselves a number of important questions about Protestants.

Now let me, before I say this, once again remind people I am not criticizing or saying or anathematizing or cursing or saying that evangelicals like Chris are going to hell.

I'm not saying that at all, and neither is the Catholic Church. And by the way, Chris knows that the Council of Trent did not curse either him or any evangelical

Protestants. And if they use the expression anathema doesn't mean a curse.

It means excommunication and Protestant churches and communions also excommunicate those who do not accept their doctrine.

And the Catholic Church does no more nor less than that. So you are not as I said at the beginning, we believe that if you sincerely believe in Christ, even though you may have errors, that doesn't stop you going to heaven.

You are judged by your lights, not by not embracing something you don't, you sincerely don't believe.

In other words, you're judged by your conscience. But there are a number of problems with protestantism. First one up is scripture.

I believe scripture is the infallible word of God. So do evangelical Protestants. But where does the scripture come from? How did you get the scripture?

And it's not enough to say, as the reformer said, sola scriptura, scripture alone.

Where does it teach in scripture that scripture alone is the vision for salvation? Answer, it doesn't.

Secondly, where do you get, in fact, scripture says the very opposite. 2 Peter 1 20 says, no prophecy of scripture shall be of any private interpretation.

What could be clearer than that? And if you recall the story of the Ethiopian eunuch who, when asked, did you understand the gospel?

He said, how can I understand unless I have an interpreter? He needed an interpreter. That interpreter has got to be an authentic, authoritative interpreter.

And that interpreter is the teaching office of the Catholic church. But the other thing you have to bear in mind is where did the scripture come from?

How do Protestants have a Bible? The answer is the Catholic church gave it to them. Because for the first 400 years of Christianity, there was no canon of scripture.

You could not pick up a book as I am now and say, this is the Bible. I'm holding up in my hand now a book that says the

Holy Bible. You couldn't do that in the first 400 years, because there wasn't one. There wasn't an accepted canon of scripture.

Of course, there were various books, but there was those that were accepted those by scholars. There was the disputed books, the so -called anti -legomenon.

And it wasn't until the council of Carthage of 397 that the Catholic church in that council of bishops accepted what we now have as the

Bible, which, by the way, included the second canon. And then again, in the council of Rome at 404, St.

Augustine was president of both of those councils, and he accepted their decision. It was then formally and finally confirmed at a later council, the council of Basel for our

Florence, and of course, later at the council of Trent. But it goes right back to as early as the council of Carthage in 397.

We have a Bible because the Catholic church gave it. So you've obviously outlined a number of issues you have with Protestants who claim all you need is faith alone through Christ alone and scripture.

Actually, you're saying no, we need the authority and teaching of the Catholic church, which helps us to understand and apply scripture.

And obviously, to what extent, though, does that bear on the issue of salvation specifically for you,

James? Do you need to add anything beyond believing in Christ's redemptive work on the cross to be saved, essentially?

Is it important that you do, I don't know, have any beliefs that are specific to Catholicism in that sense?

Well, the perfection of faith is in the Catholic church. But there are people who have varying degrees of faith, lesser or greater.

And they too can be saved according to their lights. Obviously, if you don't believe in God, or if you believe that Satan is

God, or ridiculous beliefs or thoroughly blasphemous beliefs, then your salvation is clearly problematic.

But let's turn to the Bible itself as to what is necessary for salvation.

First of all, you have to have faith. As I said earlier, that's a gift of God. You don't earn that. God gives it to you.

And you don't merit it. You get it because God is good and gives us good things.

We have to cooperate, though, with God. We have to cooperate with grace in order to be saved. We can't just say, dump a whole bucket load of grace on me and I'll be saved.

Let's see what the epistle of St. James says in chapter 2, verse 14 onwards.

St. James says this, What shall it profit, my brethren, if a man say he hath faith, but hath not works?

Shall faith be able to save him? And if a brother or sister be naked and want daily food, and one of you say to them,

Go in peace, be ye warmed and filled, yet give them not those things that are necessary for the body, what shall it profit?

So faith also, if it have not works, is dead in itself. But some man will say, Thou hast faith,

I have works. Show me thy faith without works, and I will show thee by my works my faith. Thou believest there is one

God, thou dost well. The devils also believe and tremble. But wilt thou know,

O vain man, that faith without works is dead? So you've got to do something with the faith to work ever.

Okay, let's allow Chris to come in on this. Go ahead, Chris. Well, I agree, obviously, with everything he read from the epistle of James because it is

God -breathed truth. And being a Calvinist, I would disagree radically with my so -called

Protestant and evangelical brethren, those that claim to be evangelical and Protestant, who have adopted a heresy known very commonly as either easy believism or cheap grace.

It's basically a repentant -less Christianity that does not require the bearing of good fruit.

And I can remember, I don't know if you folks in the UK are familiar with a slogan for Missouri, one of the states here in America.

It is known as the Show Me State. And I can remember a former pastor of mine humorously saying that James must have been from Missouri because it is the

Show Me State. And basically his epistle is about how we are to show our faith to be genuine, and it's through our works.

If we are merely a Christian in name only, as multitudes of both

Roman Catholics and Protestants are, who, you know, sometimes they are the bare minimum of activities involved in their lives, like going to church on Christmas and Easter and so on, maybe

Mother's Day. And I'm sure James is fully aware that that exists just as much in Catholicism as Protestantism.

But if you are not bearing fruit, if you are not bearing good fruit, then there is no sign of life in you.

You are not regenerate. You are not born again. So the Church of Rome obviously believes that these activities, these deeds are meritorious to give you an example of one of the reasons

I disagree with James when he said that I am not anathematized by the

Council of Trent. Well, in Canon 17, we read,

If anyone shall say that the grace of justification only befalleth those who are predestined unto life, but that all others who are called are called indeed, but receive not grace as being the divine power predestined unto evil, let him be anathema.

And then we have the other canon here,

If anyone shall say that the commandments of God are even for a man that is justified or constituted in grace impossible to keep, let him be anathema.

And we have other, oh here's the more, here's the more clear connection here.

In Canon 11, we have, If anyone shall say that men are justified either by the sole imputation of the righteousness of God or by the sole remission of sins to the exclusion of the grace and the charity which is shed abroad in their hearts by the

Holy Ghost and is inherent in them, or even that the grace by which we are justified is only the favor of God, let him be anathema.

And we have so many of the anathemas that would say that things that I clearly believe are brought me under a curse.

Here's an even more vivid one in Canon 24,

If anyone shall say that the justice received is not preserved and also increased in the sight of God through good works, but that the said good works are merely the fruits and signs of justification received, but not a cause of the increase thereof, let him be anathema.

That's more directly applicable to what we were talking about. For you, these are all examples of Catholic dogma which show that Catholics should, you know, believe that works are integral to salvation and grace and so on.

And for you, that obviously goes against everything that the Reformation did in terms of bringing back the centrality of, you know, salvation through faith by grace and not by works and so on.

And the Declaration says, If anyone shall say, well, I do say that the justice received is not preserved and also increased in the sight of God through good works, and that I do believe that the works are merely the fruits and signs of justification received.

In that passage from James there, Chris is saying you can talk about works, but James is clearly talking about these as a sign of someone's faith rather than the cause of it.

No, that's not what he's saying at all. Let's remind you what he says. He says, What shall I profit you?

You show me your works. If you can't show me your works, then your faith is dead. Quite clearly, works and faith go together.

But let me just say two things about what Chris has said. First of all, I didn't say that those views weren't anathematized by the

Council of Trade. I said they weren't cursed. We're not witches cursing people. Anathema simply means we set you apart because you don't accept the true doctrine.

Protestant churches do exactly the same. So Chris, are you prepared to accept that what's being talked about with these anathemas is actually effectively excommunication from the

Catholic Church per se? I'm saying that the Church of Rome is borrowing language from the

Apostle Paul in Galatians when they used the term anathema. The Apostle Paul declared an anathema on those who would add works to faith for justification.

Those who insisted, the Judaizers insisted. The one thing that we know that they insisted that be added to faith was circumcision, and we don't know anything else that they disagreed with Paul or the other

Christians on. We assume that they believed in Jesus Christ and the necessity of faith in him for salvation.

We don't have Paul criticizing them for anything else other than their addition, their requiring circumcision for salvation, and he declares an anathema.

He curses them, declares a curse upon them, and so therefore

I don't know how anyone could say that this anathema or these anathemas in Trent are not curses, especially when you consider that the

Church of Rome was martyring Protestants for believing in these things, and sometimes in very gruesome ways.

I'll allow you to respond to this question of the definition of anathema and also why, for you, we don't have to take this view of faith versus works and so on in the way that Chris obviously sees it.

Well, first of all, let's not get into comparative atrocities. I can assure you that the Protestant churches and Protestant monarchs were far more savage against Catholics, particularly in this country where we were hanged, drawn, and quartered on the order of Queen Elizabeth I.

The Spanish Inquisition only executed throughout its entire 350 -year history 300 people, and a lot of them in effigy.

Queen Elizabeth I executed, on the count of religion alone, 800 people in the first year of her reign.

So let's not get into comparative atrocities, but let's be clear about one thing. Anathematizing is not a curse, like a curse of a witch or something like that.

It's no different from Protestant excommunication. We're going to disagree about that, so let's move on.

What we have to understand here is that works don't save you, quay works. All you're doing is cooperating with the grace of God, okay?

So the difference between the Protestant -Catholic doctrine here is not all that great, but there is a difference, and we shouldn't pretend there isn't.

What kind of thing would constitute a work in a Catholic? Anything good.

Feeding the poor, being good to your neighbor, looking after your children, your wife, being faithful, working hard.

These are all works. Everybody agrees. But those aren't the things that bring you salvation. Cooperating with grace is necessary for salvation, okay?

It's not enough to say, I believe the gospel, but I'm going to go and murder my brother, okay?

Now, to be fair, evangelicals say, well, if you murder your brother, we're not sure you really do believe the gospel. But then you're getting into psychology.

Then you're getting into difficult areas where nobody can make a proper judgment. The fact is, you can make a judgment.

This guy may be an evangelical, but if he murders his brother, however much he says he believes the gospel, he's clearly not a good

Christian. That's really what St. James is getting at there. But there's another problem, and that's this.

Effectively, if the Protestant reformers, beginning with Luther, and by the way,

Luther condemned the epistle of St. James precisely because it said faith without works is dead. He called it epistola straminea, an epistola straw.

If we're going to say, well, the gospel arrives with Luther, throughout the history of Christianity, there is a sort of remnant somewhere who believe what the

Protestant reformers believed. Where is this remnant? Where is the evidence of it? The answer is there isn't one.

There were no people. Perhaps you might say the Lollards or someone, but before that time, from the very beginning of Christianity, there were no people believing what people like Luther and Calvin, Melanchthon, and the other reformers believed.

So what you're stuck with, and the difficulty that you have to overcome, is an absence of true

Christians for the better part of 1 ,300 to 1 ,500 years of Christianity.

This is clean contrary to the biblical doctrine that the gates of hell will not prevail against the church, because if for 1 ,300 or 1 ,500 years there are no

Christians, there are a few around the time of Christ, we think, but you won't find many there who adopt the same doctrine as Luther or Calvin, and then suddenly in about 1530 or 1507 in Wittenberg, bingo,

Christianity arrives with Martin Luther. It's just not credible. Well, if I believe that's when Christianity arrived, which

I don't, I would think that that is as equally preposterous as you believe it is.

I don't believe that that's when Christianity arrived, of course. I don't believe that Martin Luther invented novel ideas.

In fact, the reformers were making use of the patristic evidence for what they believed in their debates with Roman Catholics, and I very highly recommend a book, by the way, called

The Church of Rome at the Bar of History by William Webster, which is published by the

Banner of Truth Trust, where he goes through many of the origins of actual dogmas of Rome.

In fact, we're going to be picking up where we left off there in the debate that I had with James Bogle, Roman Catholic apologist

James Bogle, there in the UK. We have to go to our midway break right now, so please be patient with us.

We have to have a 12 -minute break, and then when we return, we will continue the airing, the recording of the debate that I had with James Bogle, and then we will have

Dr. Tony Costa of Toronto Baptist Seminary, professor of apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary, also a former

Roman Catholic who converted to biblical Christianity, and more specifically, who became a

Reformed Baptist. We will have him join us, giving his assessment of the debate, and I hope that you don't go away, because,

God willing, we are going to be back right after these messages from our sponsors.

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This is Chris Arntzen. If you just tuned us in, we have been playing and will continue to play the remaining five minutes or so of a debate that I had on the

UK radio broadcast Unbelievable, hosted by Justin Brierley. I had this debate with James Bogle, who is a

British barrister there in the UK, which is an attorney, and he's also the head of a

Roman Catholic apostolate there in the UK. And we had a debate.

He is a former Anglican who converted into Roman Catholicism, or converted to Roman Catholicism, and I, as anybody who listens to this program with any regularity, you know that I am a former

Roman Catholic who came to embrace what I believe to be biblical Christianity and the biblical gospel of Jesus Christ when

I became a Reformed Baptist. Before I continue playing the remaining five minutes of that debate, we will also, of course, later on after that, immediately following, we will have

Dr. Tony Costa of Toronto Baptist Seminary. He is the professor of apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary.

He will be joining us to give his assessment of the debate after the last five minutes are played, but before I do that,

I just have a couple of very important announcements. First of all, the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology is being held

April 13th through the 15th and also April 27th through the 29th. April 13th through the 15th, it will be held at the

First Christian Reformed Church in Byron Center, Michigan, and April 27th through the 29th, it will be held at the

Proclamation Presbyterian Church in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. I intend, God willing, to be at the latter event.

The theme is the spirit of the age and the age of the spirit. The speakers include Daniel Aiken, Richard Gaffin, Daniel Hyde, Conrad M.

Bayway, the man that I believe is the most powerful preacher alive on the planet Earth, Richard Phillips, Jonathan Master, David Murray, and Scott Oliphant.

If you would like to register for these conferences, either one or both, either the one in Michigan or the one in Pennsylvania, go to alliancenet .org,

alliancenet .org, click on events, and then click on the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology.

Please make sure you let the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals know that you heard about those events from Chris Arnzen on Iron Sherpa and Zion Radio.

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I can't thank you enough for your generosity and the encouragement that you have given me through your donations.

Before we get Dr. Tony Costa on the line, we just have five minutes more of the debate to play.

Where we left off before the break was where I was recommending the book

The Church of Rome at the Bar of History by William Webster, published by Banner of Truth, because my debating opponent,

James Bogle, was making the false assertion that Protestantism did not exist, in its theology that is, until the rise of Martin Luther in the 16th century, and that we are to believe that for 15 some odd years prior to Luther's ministry, the

Roman Catholic Church was in relative harmony and unison and was basically a monolithic religion where people agreed on the vast majority of everything, and I was declaring or refuting or rebutting

Mr. Bogle's comments by basically saying that it was absurd that Luther was the first to teach the things that he taught in the scriptures primarily, but he was also leaning upon the writings of the

Church Fathers themselves. But here we are picking up the debate at that point and it will only be five minutes or so until the conclusion.

I'm sure very quickly admit that some of the crucial dogmas of Rome that separate them from Evangelical Protestantism or even

Reformation Protestantism would be things that came about in the 19th and 20th centuries, and I'm speaking specifically of the formal declaration ex cathedra of papal infallibility in 1870 and the assumption of Mary in 1950.

So if we're going to talk about things arriving on the scene late in history like as if Martin Luther invented justification by faith alone, then we will have to obviously bring into consideration that some of Rome's dogmas were officially declared after some of our listeners were even born.

Before we go to a quick break, just a couple of minutes. I'll let you answer it in just a moment,

James, on the other side of a quick break. I mean, I did also want to come back to the issue that James raised right at the beginning, which

I think ties into some of what he's been saying just now, around the fact that as far as he can see, the stability, the continuity, the preservation of doctrine within the

Catholic Church compared to what you see since the Reformation of so many different strands of Protestantism is itself another marker of the truth of Catholicism.

What do you say to that, Chris? Because in my experience, many of the people I've met who've converted to Catholicism from some kind of Protestant evangelical

Christianity, that's often been a very significant thing for them as well. And I'm surprised at the number of people

I do meet who have converted in that way. Is there anything in that as far as you can see that makes sense to you,

Chris? No, because as our guest well knows, there are very few times in history where things have been declared as dogma by the

Church of Rome. And unlike the propaganda of the Church of Rome, that they are monolithic, that they are one true church, there are,

I would believe, more divisions amongst Roman Catholics that have not been disciplined or excommunicated.

There are more divisions than you would find amongst conservative evangelical Protestant. If you are not a conservative evangelical

Protestant, we would join many Roman Catholics in declaring you to be apostate.

Liberal mainline Protestantism isn't included in this equation because those of my brethren in conservative

Protestantism and especially conservative Reformed Calvinism would not even recognize these apostates who deny pillars of the faith such as the

Trinity, the deity of Christ, the virgin birth of Christ, the resurrection, the bodily resurrection of Christ.

These people don't even fit into the equation. When you're talking about the true church from your perspective, obviously,

Chris, you're talking about a certain subset of what we sometimes broadly call Protestantism.

Yes, and there are Roman Catholics, there are many Roman Catholics who are even teaching in Roman Catholic universities and seminaries who deny not only cardinal biblical truths, but Catholic truths.

There are a whole myriad of Roman Catholics. Rather like the one you ran into as a young man who didn't give you a good answer on the question of heaven.

But we'll come to that as well, I'm sure James will want to respond to a few of the things you've brought up there.

Towards the end of this section of the program, time is running away from us as ever. You're listening to Unbelievable on Premiere Christian Radio.

So we're concluding our debate on Catholicism and Protestantism. It's one of those shows where we bring a

Christian and another type of Christian together rather than a Christian and a non -Christian today. Chris Armsden is a

Reformed Baptist, the host of the Iron Sharpens Iron radio show. He was once a Catholic. He told us why he became a

Protestant and why he now critiques Catholicism. James Bogle in studio with me is vice chairman of the

Catholic Union of Great Britain. He's been telling us about his journey from Anglicanism to Catholicism and why he doesn't agree with Chris's assessment of the

Catholic faith. And just in that last section, Chris particularly was homing in on the fact,

James, that in his view, certain dogmas have arisen pretty late in the day when it comes to Catholicism, whether it be the assumption of Mary or other things.

So to claim that what Luther and Calvin brought was sort of a novel interpretation of Christianity is a bit unfair.

And of course, again, he said, and Catholicism itself is not this monolithic thing that you claim it to be.

It's full of people who disagree over doctrine, who are heretical in one way or another. So, yes.

Well, let me deal with the last one first, which is very easy. There is Orthodox Protestantism.

There are a lot of people within Protestantism who don't accept it. It's the same in the Catholic Church. It's what we're comparing as doctrines.

We're not comparing people who behave badly within those communions. It's the same applies equally to Protestants as to Catholics.

There are plenty of Roman Catholics, professors, priests who teach error, same in the Protestant Church. So that's a non -argument, doesn't get anywhere.

And the monolithic part of the Catholic faith is what its authoritative voice says and teaches consistently throughout history diachronically.

Not what a whole lot of people who are bad Catholics, who don't listen to their pastors or don't read properly or don't understand properly or are deliberately rejecting what they think, because that applies equally to any church.

It applies equally to other religions. Do you think people like Hans Kuhn should be... Of course not. Hans Kuhn completely rejects the

Catholic faith, has no right to call himself a Catholic and has already been made clear by the

Supreme Pontiff of the Church that he is not a Catholic. Why hasn't he been excommunicated then?

He's excommunicated himself according to canon law. Okay. He is self -excommunicated. And there are lots of people like that.

And who is this? I missed that. Who is self -excommunicated? Hans Kuhn, Professor Hans Kuhn. He's a very liberal

Catholic theologian. That's a non -argument. The real issue here, and I'm sure Chris would agree with this, is not whether there are bad

Catholics and bad Protestants, but what does each faith or confession teach? Is it consistent?

Is it true? Is it biblical? That's what this debate is about. Now, let's go to the

Marian dogmas, because it is often frequently said they're not biblical, or they're taught late.

They're not taught late. They've been believed since the beginning of the Church. All that had happened in 1950 and in 1859 is that there was a formal seal put on the definitions of what those beliefs were.

In other words, the wording of the belief was formulated by the authoritative magisterium teaching office of the

Church, the chief bishop, the chief priest. It wasn't just something which sprung up suddenly in the 1950s. The proof of that, let's take the

Immaculate Conception, which was finally defined, not believed, not created, but defined in 1856,

I think. That was believed by Martin Luther all of his life, and by all of the Protestant reformers, with the possible exception of John Calvin.

Here is what Luther said. He said, Mother Mary, like us, was born in sin of sinful parents, but the

Holy Spirit covered her, sanctified and purified her, so that this child was born of flesh and blood, but not with sinful flesh and blood.

The Holy Spirit permitted the Virgin Mary to remain a true, natural human being of flesh and blood, just as we. However, he warded off sin from her flesh and blood, so that she became the mother of a pure child, not poisoned by sin, as we are.

For in that moment, when she conceived, she was a holy mother filled with the Holy Spirit, and her fruit is a holy, pure fruit, a once God and truly man in one person.

By the way, he also believed in the perpetual virginity of Our Lady. He also believed she was the mother of God.

He used that expression. He used it all his life. Some of his followers do not accept this. I mean, obviously, he would have believed these as a

Catholic, but he continued to believe them as a Protestant. All his life, without exception, he believed them.

He believed all seed except Mary was vitiated by virginity. Okay, let's see what Chris has to say then to that. This is not a novel doctrine.

This has been taught since the beginning of the Church. And some surprisingly Protestant people believed it too.

Philip Melancholy believed it. Well, let's go to Chris. Chris, that's an interesting turn -up, isn't it? That Luther, who birthed the

Reformation in many ways, actually accepted what you would regard, obviously, as probably heretical doctrines.

Well, first of all, that's one of the reasons that I believed, as did Luther, in sola scriptura, not in sola

Luther or sola Calvin. These are mere men who I disagreed with on a number of things.

Martin Luther believed in baptismal regeneration, which I reject. And Lutherans today, who

I trust are accurately interpreting Luther, believe you could lose your salvation if you're truly born again, which

I reject. So just because a great hero of the Reformation may believe in something doesn't mean that I must agree with it, because if it's not in the

Scripture, I won't. But the issue of Luther is to remember that Luther was among the first of the

Reformers who never intended to leave the

Catholic Church and form another church. And he was, over decades in his life, shedding things that he had believed all his life, gradually, when he was a

Catholic. He retained, even to his death, some of those things. But there are different Martin Luthers, if you will, in different stages of his life.

He didn't always believe in everything he believed as a Catholic, even though you may find him repeating some of those things later on.

And of course, I am not a historian. I'm not even a trained theologian.

So I would point people to a debate that I just recently had arranged between Dr.

Tony Costa of the Toronto Baptist Seminary, who is a former Catholic who became Protestant, and my other friend,

Robert St. Genes, who's a Roman Catholic apologist. They are both friends of mine. In fact, I've known

Robert much longer, the Roman Catholic apologist. And they just debated very recently on the immaculate conception and perpetual sinlessness of Mary.

If you go to YouTube, you could find that if you just type in Tony Costa debate with Robert St.

Genes. And of course, Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries has debated Catholics for many years.

I orchestrated personally 10 of them. And you could go to AOMIN .org to find out about all of those

Roman Catholic debates. So as you know, when I was invited to participate today,

I thought that we were merely giving our testimonies and having some exchange. I didn't think this was going to be a formal debate, something that I have never personally done.

I've only arranged many debates. Well, I appreciate you stepping into the role of the debater today in this conversational style, obviously, that we're doing today.

I understand we can't address every concern and issue that comes up. And so we are going to have to draw things to a close in just a couple of minutes time.

James, you want to make a final comment? If I may? Yeah, yeah. I'm sorry if Chris feels slightly ambushed.

I apologize for that, Chris. But it is important to remember that there is one thing that Counsellor Trent did reject with detestation, and that was the

Calvinist doctrine of double predestination. The idea that God sends people to hell, whatever they do, he has said from before time, you're going to hell.

I don't care what you do, whether you try to be good, whether you try to believe, whether you try to have faith, you're going to hell.

That should be condemned. It is a monstrous doctrine. It is a wicked doctrine. It is an evil doctrine.

Because of the way you defined it. Protestantism, it ran into the sand towards the end of the 18th century.

Congregationalists, I appreciate Chris is not a Congregationalist, so this is not directed at his people. They believed, they were, by the way, the followers of Oliver Cromwell, the man who was responsible for butchering children in Drogheda in Ireland.

They believed that they could vote in their congregations for doctrine, and that is what they decided to do in the middle of the, or towards the end of the 18th century, in New England in America.

They voted on, guess what folks, the Trinity. Because you can search the scriptures as much as you like, you will never once find the word the

Trinity. You will find Christ saying, the Father and I are one, but this requires interpretation. Half of them voted against the

Trinity and became Unitarians. The other half remained Trinitarian congregations. That is why you have a church on either side of the green in so many places in New England.

And those Unitarians eventually became Deists, and many of them lost their faith. By the way, a lot of the

American founding fathers were Unitarian Deists. And a lot of the places that were Unitarian meeting houses are now secular societies and that kind of thing.

Well that is what has become New Ages. And you seem to be insinuating that once you devolve, if you like, that authority from the

Catholic Church, you end up seeing all kinds of different people. You don't know where it's going to end. You don't know where it's going to end. I mean,

Chris, I'll let you have the last word as we just start to close out today's program. I mean, for you, why should someone who's currently a

Catholic, let's say, be a Baptist? Well, not a Baptist, but certainly someone who obviously believes in the

Reformed view of Christian salvation. Well, because if you read the

Book of Galatians, the Apostle Paul condemned as false teachers those who added anything to faith in order to justify them.

In that case, it was circumcision. In Roman Catholicism, it's much more than that. There are more ceremonial, ongoing rights and activities that are required to cooperate with grace.

And by the way, I agree that if the definition of double predestination that James gave was accurate,

I would wholeheartedly condemn that as a false teaching. But it is not an accurate definition, because in Romans 8 .8,

according to what we believe as Calvinists in regard to total depravity, those who are in the flesh cannot please

God. So therefore, you don't have this situation where most of humanity is really trying to please

God, and they really want to believe in Him biblically, and they really love

Him and have repented, but they are not of the elect and will be cast into hell.

That situation does not exist, because only the elect of God are given new hearts and therefore do respond with good works, as we heard earlier in James.

So there's not this, there's nobody on the day of judgment who is actually a genuinely repentant believer who is going to be cast into hell because he was not of the elect and he didn't know it.

Oh, I didn't have the lottery ticket of the elect, so I'm going to hell. This is a scenario that will never occur.

We're going to have to draw things to a close there. Thank you both for a spirited engagement and representation of your different positions today.

James Bogle has been with me, vice chairman of the Catholic Union of Great Britain. If you want to find out more about them, catholicunion .org

.uk. And James, thank you for telling us your story and obviously making a defense of your

Catholic faith. Chris Arnzen is a Reformed Baptist host of the Iron Sharpens Iron Radio show. You can find that at ironsharpensironradio .com.

Chris, thanks for joining me on the program as well today. It was my pleasure. I really enjoyed it. Nice to meet you, and by the way,

I didn't feel ambushed at all. I just was surprised that there would be actually a debate that didn't feel ambushed though.

Oh good, I'm glad to hear it. Have a nice day and God bless you. You too. And thank you for listening. We're going to be hearing some of your feedback to recent editions of the show.

This is the program that aims to get you thinking. Hope it has today. Well, there you have it.

That was the debate that we had, James Bogle and I, the Roman Catholic barrister there in Great Britain, that we had sometime right before Reformation Day last year.

I here on the phone in the United States and James Bogle there in the studio at the unbelievable radio headquarters there in,

I believe, London in the UK. And now, right after a very short break,

I apologize to Dr. Tony Costa that we have been keeping him waiting longer than I thought. That was a little bit more than five minutes that was remaining on that debate.

But we're going to take a very, very brief commercial break and then we'll be back with Dr. Tony Costa, who will be giving his assessment of this debate, not only for the remainder of today's program, but the entirety of the two -hour program on Monday, God willing.

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Now we are finally back to the discussion where we're going to have

Dr. Tony Costa, who is Professor of Apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary.

He is going to be giving his assessment and critique of the debate that I had with James Bogle on the unbelievable radio program in the

UK, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, my dear friend Dr. Tony Costa.

Hi Chris, it's a pleasure to be with you again. And I apologize for having you holding on there longer than I expected.

That's quite all right. You know, they call us Canadians, God's frozen chosen, so we're always a bit, we take a time to defrost.

Well, that term is applied for Calvinists everywhere in the world, I think. Apparently, yes.

Well, first of all, let's have your overall opinion of the debate and be merciful to me, because it was my very first debate and I didn't even know

I was having one when I got on the phone to do this. I think you did very well,

Chris. I had the opportunity to listen to the whole debate this morning, and I think you held yourself up quite well, considering the fact you didn't think you were going into a debate.

So I think the responses you gave were very good. The Roman Catholic gentleman,

I found some of his arguments and objections to really be repeats of the old usual critiques that Roman Catholics throw at Protestants, but there's nothing new under the sun here.

And of course, there have been Roman Catholics who have emailed me after this debate who have said that I was dodging issues.

Well, I wasn't dodging anything, because if you notice during the debate, Justin Brierley would ask a number of questions to Mr.

Bogle, and Mr. Bogle would respond by discussing a number of issues, and then the host,

Justin Brierley, would specifically ask me about one of those issues. And so, and it's always, by the way,

I'm not saying anything here to insult Justin Brierley. I'm looking forward to having him on my program as a guest soon.

I really enjoyed this exchange. I hope that he has me back, and I think

Justin did an excellent job. And I enjoyed even the give and take with James Bogle.

I was not insulted personally by anything he said. I think that he kept a respectful demeanor throughout the program, in spite of the fact that we had sharp disagreements with one another.

But let's start right at the beginning. The first thing that got the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up, that James Bogle said during this exchange, was when he quoted the often repeated line from the 19th century

Anglican bishop or cardinal, or Anglican who converted to Roman Catholicism and became a

Roman Catholic cardinal, John Henry Newman, to be deep in history is to cease to be

Protestant, or to be steeped in history is to cease to be Protestant. I have found 180 degrees opposite to be the case in my own journey out of Roman Catholicism and studying history.

What do you have to say about that yourself? I agree. I agree with you as well, that there are those who studied history and they've left

Roman Catholicism and became Protestant. And likewise, there's people who were

Roman Catholics who investigated history, and they went into the Orthodox Church. Same with Frankie Schaefer, the son of the late

Francis Schaefer, who, well, now he's an atheist, but he had also gone into the Orthodox Church.

So, I mean, pay your dime, take your pick. That argument can go three ways. There's Protestants who became

Roman Catholics, there's Roman Catholics who became Protestants, and Roman Catholics became Orthodox, and so forth.

So, I don't think it's a very solid argument on the part of Cardinal Newman. Right, especially when you're talking about some of the primary dogmas of Rome that are believed today and practiced today.

When you look into the patristic evidence, most of them are totally absent.

And what they will do, I have noticed Roman Catholic apologists will take a phrase and blow it up into this gigantic dogma that the patristic evidence does not support at all.

Like, for instance, the fact that you will hear Church Fathers use the phrase, the real presence of Christ, as if there are no

Protestants who believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. They will blow that up to mean, that must mean transubstantiation.

Right. And things like that. So, a lot of the time what they do is they commit anachronistic fallacies where they simply read back into the

Fathers' modern Roman Catholic dogmas and so forth. And that's the problem.

They begin with the assumption that all the Fathers were Roman Catholic. But then the

Orthodox begin with the assumption that all the Fathers were Orthodox. And my lesson that I teach my students, and I think

Dr. James White has said the same thing, is that let's let the Church Fathers be the Church Fathers. We don't have to turn them into Presbyterians, into Lutherans, into Reformed Baptists, and so forth.

Let them be who they are. And they're not, they contradict each other, they were never considered to be infallible in the same, in any way, like the

Scriptures are. So, I think you're absolutely right. There's a lot of anachronistic fallacies that go on with the treatment of the

Fathers in Roman Catholic apologetics. Now, I don't know if there's anything else you care to mention about history right now, but I have another thing that immediately caught my attention.

Yeah, well, if I could just add, if I could just mention that they were quoting

Cardinal Newman, but Cardinal Newman took the position of the development theory, the acorn -to -the -oak -tree idea, that is that he would argue that some of the doctrines developed or evolved within the history of the

Roman Catholic Church. So when Mr. Bogle kept arguing that the

Marian dogmas, for instance, were always taught in the Church, in the history of the Church, they were never denied.

That goes contrary to what Newman argues about the development theory. But when he said that the fourth century, the

Roman Marian dogmas, which is demonstrably false, I mean, at the Council of Nicaea, we had about 318 bishops there, and not one of those bishops affirmed anything about the

Immaculate Conception or the Assumption of Mary. Not one of them believed anything about these

Marian dogmas that Roman Catholics believe in today. Well, the next thing that immediately caught my attention was this notion that Mr.

Bogle has. In fact, this is not exclusively a concept that Roman Catholics teach, but I hear

Arminians and non -Reformed Protestants say this routinely, that God offers faith to everybody, and it's up to us to accept faith.

Now, the thing that puzzles me about that phrase that I hear repeated a lot by non -Calvinists is, when in anyone's life is

God offering them faith? People are confronted with whether or not they are going to believe upon Christ and repent and follow

Him, but when is this divine offering of faith ever coming into anyone's life?

In fact, I guess you would need faith to accept faith. Yeah, it's prevenient grace, what

Wesley and other Arminians would argue was prevenient grace, where God gives grace before grace comes.

So it's the same idea here, and of course, when Arminianism began in Holland under Jacobus Arminius, the

Reformed Christians at the time rightfully said that Arminianism is nothing but a return to Roman Catholicism, just without the

Pope. And so you'll notice that Rome and Arminian brothers and sisters will agree on the idea that everyone is given faith, and that people can freely choose that faith or reject that faith.

But I think one very good point you made, Chris, during the debate, was you quoted Romans 8 .8, that those who are in the flesh cannot please

God, and therefore faith necessarily must be a gift from God to us.

Yeah, that whole concept, I mean, it's as if there is a blind spot there where these folks, both

Roman Catholics and Arminians, don't recognize that you would need faith to accept this offer of faith.

So who gives you that? You know, who gives you that faith? The other thing that struck me initially, or early on in the debate, was the comment that Mr.

Bogle made about when he came to faith in the

Roman Catholic Church, or when he came to accept the faith and the gospel and the religion of Roman Catholicism, it was a meeting of the heart and mind, and he said, evangelicalism is by and large just a meeting of the heart.

Now when I heard that, I said to myself, I guess Mr. Bogle doesn't watch the

Journey Home radio or TV program, I should say, with the parade of former

Protestants that come on to the program to give their testimonies as to why they converted to Catholicism, and the vast majority that I have ever heard are all based on emotion and sentimentalism, the way they felt when they saw people receiving the

Mass, where Scott Hahn even says he began to salivate and say that he didn't want

Christ just in his mouth, now that he wanted him in his stomach as well. You have a lot of very earthy, fleshy -based reasons.

Now of course, you could go by a case -by -case situation, where you're going to have

Protestants who became Catholics because they were scholarly, and they, in their distorted understanding of history, came to believe in the teachings of about the dogmas of Rome having been taught throughout the entirety of Christendom since the gospel was first declared in the

New Testament era. But you have that situation also with Protestants who were former

Roman Catholics who, after studying the Scripture, after learning what the

Hebrew and the Greek passages were really saying and so on, you could go on and on with how the intellect was a major part of conversions.

Absolutely, and I think that would be my case. When I came to faith in Christ and I started to examine

Christianity at a deeper level, it was definitely a mind thing as well, but not to take away from the heart.

I think that Mr. Bogle committed the straw man fallacy there. He basically accused Protestantism of being just this heart, this feely thing, which is really a straw man, because, as you rightfully noted, that is not our position.

And you could find just as many Roman Catholics, I mean, when you really consider the fact that the idea of mysticism and contemporary spirituality is all based on Roman Catholicism.

The idea of having mystical experience with God or the saints and so forth. So I think that was a gross mischaracterization of the

Protestant position. Yes, and I am in full agreement with Mr.

Bogle that there is a lot of sugar -coated, syrupy, sweet, mushy, gushy things going on in evangelicalism that are based solely on emotion.

I'm not saying that Mr. Bogle used those descriptions. I'm using those descriptions, but I'm not trying to give the impression that I believe that the evangelical world is some think -tank of geniuses that have come to their conclusions purely by study and so on.

But, of course, we know that the emotion is involved, and, in fact, if somebody is not rejoicing that they have been rescued from sin, death, and damnation, there is something wrong with them, and they probably are still dead in their sins if they're not having an emotional response to that.

Well, the other thing was that, and you've already touched on this, that the thing that was very appealing to Mr.

Bogle in his being drawn to Roman Catholicism is that the Roman Catholic Church never has contradicted itself in the realm of dogma, if you could comment on that.

Yes, sure. I mean, the Roman Catholic Church has, indeed, contradicted itself.

I mean, when we consider the fact that one of the bishops of Rome, Honorius, for example, advocated for monothelitism, when you consider the fact that you had the bishop of Rome in the days of Irenaeus attacking the

Eastern Christians because they were celebrating Easter on the 14th day of Nisan, which corresponded to the

Passover, so much to the point that Irenaeus had to basically object and put

Victor in his place, Bishop Victor in his place. We also have the problem of the

Nicene controversy. After Nicaea in 325 passed the decree that Christ was homoousios, of the same nature with the

Father, almost immediately the whole empire went Aryan, under the supervision also of some of the bishops of Rome.

And so there are times when you have these so -called popes going against orthodoxy, advocating heresy like Honorius did with monothelitism.

You had popes claiming, not to mention the Babylonian captivity of the

Church, and the whole time period where you had three rival popes who were anathematizing one another and moving the headquarters from Rome to Abignale in France.

And so the history of the Roman Catholic Church demonstrates that there were contradictions.

And the modern Roman Catholic apologists will say, well, you have to understand the pope is only infallible when it speaks ex cathedra, or ex cathedra, but outside of that the pope can also make mistakes.

Yes, and of course we all have to recognize, and if the

Roman Catholics are going to be honest as well, there is a lot of stuff up for grabs within the

Roman Catholic Church and in the realm of disagreement because, as I said to Mr.

Bogle, there have been very few instances in the last 2 ,000 years of church history where there have been ex cathedra declarations by popes and where things have been dogmatically defined.

And of course it would be far less than 2 ,000 years because popes didn't exist in the first centuries of the

Church. But there is, as I said to him, there is, and I was wondering if you agreed with me,

I believe without hesitation that there is much more division amongst

Roman Catholics under the umbrella of Roman Catholicism than there is amongst conservative evangelical bible -believing

Protestants. And the reason why I am very specific about that is we believe that if you're denying the inerrancy of the scripture, if you're denying the the historicity of Jesus and that he was truly man and truly

God and born of a virgin and who died on Calvary to make payment for the sins of his people and that bodily rose from the dead and ascended into heaven and so on and all the other dogmas of the faith or the pillars of the faith that we as Protestants believe, if you reject those, we don't even think you're a

Christian. Whereas Roman Catholicism, they will grant the title and the comfort of being

Roman Catholic to a much wider spectrum of people who believe all kinds of insane things.

Am I right? Oh, absolutely. I mean, we have the city vacanists who don't believe that since Vatican II there has been a true pontiff on the chair,

Peter, and others that carry the Latin mass in violation of Vatican II's admonition to have the mass in the vernacular.

You have churches that will only have the mass in Latin, and then not to mention the uniate, that is, the

Orthodox churches that came under the umbrella of the Roman Catholic Church, but they nonetheless hold to the

Orthodox liturgy, they hold to the Julian calendar, and so forth. And not to mention all of these professors who deny these cardinal points of the

Christian faith. Up here in Canada, we have a Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, who is a Roman Catholic and who is an advocate of abortion and made it a condition that unless you're pro -choice you cannot be part of his party in government.

He's a Roman Catholic, and to this day I've been asking the Archbishop of Ottawa, why is it that the

Roman Catholic Church has not excommunicated and removed Justin Trudeau?

And I think this is the problem. They talk about excommunication, but they never excommunicate them.

Yes, and what do you make of this cop -out,

I think, and please forgive me, Mr. Bogle, if you think that's a harsh word, but to say, like, for instance, when

Justin Briarley brought up Hans Kung, and he's excommunicated himself, according to canon law.

Yes, I think Mr. Bogle, no insult intended,

I think Mr. Bogle has to study the Greek word anathema. I don't think Paul meant that the Judaizers just excommunicated themselves, but they could still stay within the

Churches of Galatia. I doubt very much that's what Paul intended. The word anathema is a Greek word, and it means to be under the divine curse of God.

It definitely entails the idea of curse, and therefore when

Mr. Bogle kept saying, well, all anathema means in the Council of Trent's canon laws, all it means is that you've been excommunicated from the

Church, but that is not the meaning of anathema. That is not the historic meaning of anathema, and I would challenge

Mr. Bogle to find any Greek lexicon of the New Testament that supports his position.

I don't think he'll find one. Yes, he kept saying, I am not cursing you,

Chris Arnzen, and no Catholic has ever cursed a Protestant or anyone else like a witch.

He kept saying, like, witches. We don't do this, but it's interesting. If you look in the

Roman Catholic edition of the Scriptures, one of the

Roman Catholic editions, there are obviously a lot more than one, but if you go to the website of the

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the edition that they chose to use on their own website, the

New American Bible, not to be confused with the New American Standard Bible, which is a

Protestant Bible. In fact, the sponsor of this show, but if you go to Galatians, where you have in chapter 1 and verse 8, this is the way this

Roman Catholic edition of the Scriptures reads, but even if we are an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel other than the one that we preach to you, let that one be accursed, and then in verse 9, as we have said before, and now

I say again, if anyone preaches to you a gospel other than the one that you received, let that one be accursed.

So this is not some Protestant development of their morbid imagination.

This is actually what, as you just said, not only what the Greek term means, but the

Roman Catholic Church uses it at least in some of their translations.

Absolutely, and if you do a search on various Bible translations, you'll notice that many of them say accursed, the

King James, the ESV, and if you were to just consult

Alexcon, that's what you would find. Now the NIV gives you more of a dynamic translation, it'll say let them be eternally condemned.

So this definitely carries the idea of a divine curse, a judgment of curse that comes upon those who violate and pervert the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And of course, for the sake of this discussion, none of those Protestant translations means anything if you're having a conversation with a

Catholic. The translation that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops used should have some importance to them, and it uses the term accursed.

Of course, that's what it means, and I don't think Mr. Bogle understands the Greek meaning of that Well, even if you want to take his definition, which is kind of strange, he says it just means excommunication.

Well, who are you excommunicating? I mean, who is someone who is to be excommunicated?

You don't excommunicate someone because they have a different understanding of eschatology than you do, unless it involves denying the physical, visible bodily return of Christ and the future resurrection of the dead or something, but you're not going to excommunicate someone who has a different form of liturgy than you do, and you could go on and on and on with differences of opinion that Christians have with one another just because of the fact that we are not infallible, inerrant, and perfect, sinless people.

But you're excommunicating people because you believe they are damned, and that they are heretics, and that they're dangerous.

Right. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. I mean, biblical excommunication is shown in 1

Corinthians 5, where Paul's dealing with a man in the Church who has committed a gross sexual act with his stepmother, and the

Apostle Paul calls for this person to be physically removed from the local Church assembly.

That's excommunication. Excommunication doesn't mean, well, if you disagree with us, you're really not a Roman Catholic, but you can still go to Mass.

That makes absolutely no sense. And so I've met myriads of Roman Catholics who have told me that their view of communion, their view reflects more of a

Protestant view. They say, well, the elements are simply metaphorical or symbolic, but according to the

Catechism of the Catholic Church, if you deny transubstantiation, you've placed yourself outside the context of the

Mother Church. Right. And growing up Catholic, and I'm assuming this is still the official teaching of the

Catholic Church, they don't want Protestants or others who deny transubstantiation receiving that sacrament.

Absolutely not. It's clearly stated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church that those who do not share the view of the

Roman Catholic Church in terms of transubstantiation are asked not to partake of the communion service, and they can go up and cross their hands on their chest to signal to the priest that they want to receive a blessing, but they are prohibited from partaking of the elements.

And I wish our Protestant brothers and sisters would realize that, because they treat the Lord's Supper like it's a spiritual

McDonald's or a drive -thru. Yes, I mean,

I have been at weddings and funerals, and I will see some of my professedly born -again believing evangelical

Protestant friends going up for a Roman Catholic Mass if the wedding and the funeral is in a

Roman Catholic Church, and they're having a Mass, because not all of those ceremonies include a Mass, that's something. But I'm sitting there astonished, and I've said to my friends or acquaintances, why did you do that?

Well, I just know what I believe in my heart about the Lord's Supper, and I also didn't want to be disrespectful. Well, they don't want you doing that.

Of course. I mean, that local parish priest might not care, but the Church of Rome does not.

In fact, if you remember, there was something scandalous with President Bill Clinton, I don't know if he was in Africa, he was somewhere overseas when he went forward to receive a

Roman Catholic Eucharist. And the Roman Catholics were upset in the media.

That's right, exactly. So I think we have to be careful, because by partaking as Protestants, by partaking, we are basically affirming that we're affirming our consent with the

Roman Catholic Church, when again, Paul warns us that the believers in Corinth, that they're not to drink of the cup of the demons and the idols, and they're not to partake of the meat offered to idols.

And so what he's basically saying is, when you sit down and share a meal in a spiritual context, you are unifying yourself to that position, or to that particular religious orientation.

So I think Protestant Christians have to realize that this is something that we cannot participate in.

Now when we return on Monday, I want us to pick up at the discussion, where discussion became over the martyrs and those who were being tortured and executed for being heretics.

The reason, it seemed to escape Mr. Bogle's mind, that the reason that I brought up the torturous executions and gruesome deaths of people that the

Church of Rome anathematized in those centuries, not only in the 16th century, but prior and after, the reason

I brought that up was because he was just claiming it was some kind of mild -mannered excommunication, and I brought it up for the reason that why were they being burned at the stake and disemboweled, and so on.

But we'll pick up where we left off there next Monday, this coming

Monday. I obviously know that Protestants were guilty of gruesome activity at times in history against, not only against Roman Catholics, but I think even probably numerically more predominantly

Anabaptists and others. Yes. But we'll pick that up where we left off. Do you have any final words in about a minute or so before we go off the air and before we return next

Monday? Yeah, I think we should also not only touch on that, but I think we should also touch on,

I think he really misinterpreted James 2 .14 and also 2 Peter 1 .20.

Those are key texts that I think we should also address, and I think he ignored the context in those particular passages.

Well, I know that the Toronto Baptist Seminary website is tbs .edu,

tbs, for Toronto Baptist Seminary, .edu. Do you have any other contact information? Well, they can always visit my website if they'd like, it's

Tony Costa, all one word, .webs, w -e -b -s, .com, and they can find some of my articles there and some of the

YouTube videos. They may also want to check out a series of videos that I've been doing with a friend of mine, a pastor friend here in Toronto, and it's called

The Third Degree. All they have to do is go to YouTube, punch in Tony Costa, The Third Degree, and there's a whole set of apologetic videos there, and Third Degree has nothing to do with Freemasonry.

And the website again is TonyCosta .webs .com.

TonyCosta .webs .com, and webs has one b, w -e -b -s. W -e -b -s, correct.

Well, thank you so much, Dr. Costa. I look forward to having you back on Monday. I want to thank everybody who listened today.

I hope you all have a safe and blessed weekend and Lord's Day, and I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far, far greater

Savior than you are a sinner. We look forward to hearing from you and your questions for Dr.