Roman Catholic Theology 01

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Hey, we are beginning this morning in a series that I'm calling Systematic Theology, but I do want to add a disclaimer.
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Typically, a Systematic Theology course would go through theology in a very rigorous, specific way.
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We would begin with theology proper, and that would be the study of God as Father and God in regard to His nature being one in Essence 3 in person, so regarding the Trinity and things like that, regarding His characteristics of omnipresence, omnipotence, omniscience.
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We would look at those things regarding God, and then we would move on to Christology, which is the study of Jesus Christ, then we'd move on to pneumatology, which is the study of the Holy Spirit.
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We would look at soteriology, which is the study of salvation.
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We'd look at anthropology, which is the study of man.
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These are the things that you normally find in a Systematic Theology course.
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We're not going to be doing it exactly that way, and the reason why is because we're using a book, and I did send out an email.
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If you haven't had a chance to buy this book, I hope that you will.
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I hope that it's $12.
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If that is a financial impossibility...
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What am I hearing? Oh, a chop.
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Okay, I didn't see anybody moving, and I thought I hear this noise.
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I didn't realize it was in there.
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Okay, I encourage everybody to buy this book.
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It's $12 on Amazon.
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The title of the book is Charts of Christian Theology and Doctrine by H.
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Wayne House.
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Now, H.
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Wayne House was a seminary professor.
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A lot of these charts are ones that he used while teaching in class, but I must tell you it is not in a rigorously specific order.
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So, though we're going to go in order, sort of from from the front to the back, as is normally your way when going through a book, I want you to know that there's going to be times where there's going to be some skipping around.
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There's going to be times where I'm going to have to fill in some gaps on some things, because again, these are charts which are used for teaching, but the great thing about this book, and I have used this book for years.
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I've never talked through it, but I've used it for years.
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The great thing about this book is so visual.
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There's so much.
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At the beginning, not so much.
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It's just basically a lot of words and graphs, but later on when he starts getting to things like this, the graphic portrayal, this is such a beautiful visual, and it helps you sort of encapsulate what we mean when we say the difference of things like God's omniscience, how does that affect time and space and those things.
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So, some of the graphics in here I just find super, super helpful.
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The union of the deity and humanity of Jesus Christ is a great graphic.
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I've used this several times.
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So, that's why I want to use this book, because I know a lot of people are visual learners.
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A lot of people learn by seeing things on a page, and even though some of it's words, it's graphed out in such a way that we can use it and learn from it.
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And something else, again, this was put together by House.
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A lot of the things in here are not necessarily documented in such a way that he would have at the bottom like, you know, see this book or things like that.
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So, because of that, I'm making it my duty as the teacher to try to, as we go through the book, kind of document things for you.
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Where is he getting this information? Where is he pulling this from? In fact, this very week, I was listening to Dr.
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John MacArthur, and he was preaching on the same text I'm preaching on this morning, Acts chapter 12, and he quoted Ernest Hemingway saying something.
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Now, Ernest Hemingway was an atheist.
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Ernest Hemingway was really anti, huh? Drunk and everything.
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Well, he was, and he was very anti-God and anti-the Church.
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And so, in Hemingway, MacArthur quoted him, and I wanted to find the quote, and I have scoured every place I can find.
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I cannot find the quote.
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Now, I don't know if MacArthur simply quoted him in such a way that it was sort of not verbatim, and that's why I can't find the quote, or maybe it was so obscure that it hasn't made it to Google, but it's hard to find something that's so obscure it doesn't make it to Google.
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So, I've just decided not to use that quote.
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I found another one, because if I can't document it, and I'm not saying MacArthur's wrong, I'm saying I can't find the source, and if I quoted MacArthur, I would be doing what's called secondary sourcing.
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I would be relying on someone else's research, and that's sort of what we are doing in this book.
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We're looking at Dr.
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House's research.
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Secondary sourcing is not bad.
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That's what an encyclopedia is.
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Encyclopedia is not primary source material.
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It's secondary source material.
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In fact, you're not allowed, or not supposed to, when you do research papers, you're not supposed to quote encyclopedias.
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They're not primary source material.
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So, it's not that it's wrong.
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It just is what it is, and we need to understand the difference between primary and secondary sources.
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So, when we're studying, those are important things.
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I hope I didn't just, everybody looks really bored now, so let me move on.
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Everybody's like, what is he talking about? This is important to me, and I want it to be important to you.
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All right.
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So, in this book, you'll notice at the top, oh, if you don't have the book, let me see your hands.
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Okay.
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I want to encourage everybody, if you can, try to get one, but in the meantime, I will be making copies.
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This is the first page of the book.
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There's a lady behind you, Erin, Miss Leandra, and Mr.
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Jason.
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Okay.
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The way that it's, if you, I didn't give you guys a copy of this, but if you look back here at the contents page, those of you who do have your book, you'll see that it's broken down like, number one, distinctive traits of theological systems.
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Number two, contemporary feminist theological models.
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That's an odd break that he makes there, but it is where he makes the break.
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So, the first set of charts is distinctive traits of theological systems.
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So, the first theological system that we come to in the book, on page three, is Roman Catholicism.
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Now, those of you who don't have the book, let me give you what else we're going to go through, and it's going to be in the weeks to come.
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The next one is natural theology, Lutheran theology, Anabaptist theology.
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Most of you probably heard of the Anabaptists.
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They were the, called the radical reformers during the time of the Reformation.
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Reformed theology, Arminian theology, Wesleyan theology, liberal theology, existential theology, neo-orthodox theology, liberation theology, black theology.
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That's a lot.
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Just the very first part of this book is going to take us weeks to get through, so kind of just know that we're not in a hurry.
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There's no reason to rush, but the reason why I think he set all this up in the beginning is because typically when people come to systematic theology, they're interested in learning what is it that separates so many people who would identify themselves as Christians.
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If you remember last week, I preached a sermon, what is a Christian really? What does it mean to be a Christian? And if we look at the world, I mean, if you just look at the world of America, many, many, many, many people identify themselves as Christians, but at least from our understanding of what it means to be a Christian would not fit that category in any way, shape, or form.
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They don't seek to follow after Christ.
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They don't trust that the word of God is the word of God.
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There's so many things that make them anti what we would say a Christian is, a person who trusts in the Bible, a person who trusts in Christ, and so the beginning of this study is looking at the distinctives of various types of theology, and now when we go through other theologies and we go to things like we get later in the book, we start looking at things like the Trinity, we can say, oh, you remember back here when we looked at liberation theology, or when we looked at neo-orthodox theology, they denied x, y, and z about this, or they would fall into this group or that group.
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So this kind of helps us establish a foundation upon which to build.
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All good? I understand, move forward.
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So this morning, we're going to look at the distinctive traits of theological systems, part one, which is traditional Roman Catholic theology.
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Now, I have been more than willing over the years to be very honest about my belief in regard to Roman Catholicism.
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I do not believe that Roman Catholicism has the gospel.
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I've written quite clearly on the subject.
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I've been as honest as I can about the subject.
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If you ask a Roman Catholic, what is the gospel, it will be different than what we teach the gospel is.
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And so I do not believe they have the gospel.
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I believe that they have a system which has been polluted by abhorrent traditions of men, and as a result, it has convoluted what was the pure gospel and what was given to the church by the Apostle Paul.
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And as the Apostle Paul said, I wrote this on a post yesterday, you know, Apostle Paul didn't say, if you have a gospel different than mine, you're a different kind of Christian.
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He said, if you have a gospel different than mine, you're not a Christian at all.
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You are anathema, you are a curse.
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And so, you know, the question is, do we have the same gospel as the Apostle Paul? And I would say Rome does not.
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But let's quickly kind of go through this chart, and I have made my own set of notes to go with it.
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If anybody wants a copy of what I've written to go along with these notes, you're welcome to make copies after class.
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Let's begin with the first thing, which is the nature of theology.
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In regard to Roman Catholic theology, theology is constantly evolving in its understanding of the Christian faith.
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The nation principle of accommodation and Cardinal Newman, that's James Newman's principle of development, reflect the changing nature of Roman Catholic theology.
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Catholicism's trait of change is due mainly to the authoritative position given to the church's teaching.
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The church has the authority over scripture, so the church can make the authority as to whether or not to interpret it differently.
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I want to address in this what the Ignatian principle of accommodation is, because the interesting thing is it mentions accommodation and what we call the principle of development.
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Neither one of those things are necessarily bad, and so I want to just identify to you what they are.
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In fact, well let me just ask, anybody know what the Ignatian principle of accommodation is? Okay.
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Accommodation is the theological principle that God, while being in his nature unknowable and unreachable, has nevertheless communicated with humanity in a way which humans can understand and respond to.
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The concept is that scripture has accommodated or made allowances for the original audience's language and general level of understanding.
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That's basically the definition of accommodation.
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I don't disagree with that, and what I normally say when I'm teaching hermeneutics, which is how to interpret scripture, or if I'm teaching how to study the Bible, I'll say God has condescended in his language to speak to us in a way that we would understand, so as to communicate with beings that are lesser than him, because God is much greater.
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He is a different type of being than we are.
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I think we would all agree with that, that God is not like us.
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God is holy.
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He is completely other, and so to communicate with us, he has to condescend.
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He has to step down.
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He has to basically, as Sproul has said, God lisps when he speaks to us.
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He has to condescend to us so that we would be able to have a conversation with him in any meaningful way.
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So in that regard, I have not a big issue with accommodation.
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I think John Calvin really addressed accommodation a lot in the fact that he was looking at different parts of scripture and saying there are times in scripture where God is condescending to us.
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For instance, when the Bible says God undergirds us with his wings, or he reaches down with his hands, these are obviously anthropomorphic language.
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When it says God looks upon us with his eyes, or he holds us in his hand, God is spirit, and those who worship him worship him in spirit and truth.
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God is not a man like we are, but yet the Bible identifies his hands, or his feet, or his eyes as if he were a man.
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Why? So that we can understand him.
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How has Roman Catholic theology taken that to an extreme? Well, they say because there are these accommodations in scripture, then there are things that we do not necessarily have to accept as correct in regard to things such as creation.
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Well, God simply accommodated our lack of understanding, so we don't have to believe the creation story as it is.
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Now, I'm not saying all Roman Catholics would deny the creation story, but a lot of them, especially since the Pope has basically said it was okay, believe more in the evolutionary position rather than in the creation position.
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So, and the idea is, well, there's nothing wrong with that because creation is not a literal story.
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It's simply intended to accommodate a misunderstanding of a primitive people.
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So, you understand how accommodation can then become a negative thing, and how they can use it to overthrow.
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Because here's the point, I want to just use creation as an example.
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If the creation story is not accurate, at least in the sense that there was a literal Adam and a literal Eve, a literal original sin, and a literal fall of man, how then do we understand the Apostle Paul, who is not writing in any metaphoric sense when he says that in Adam all die, and in Christ all are made alive.
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If he uses Adam as the actual one through whom death comes, how then are we to say that Adam didn't exist, and how can we? I think that if we believe that Adam didn't exist, the entirety of our theological system has to be converted.
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It cannot remain the same as it is, because the demand of our theological system is that we are born sinners.
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I saw a guy argue on a post yesterday, and I really wanted to jump in, but I didn't have the, I didn't want to get an ulcer, but he was arguing that because God creates the soul of each individual, that every individual is born sinless, and that every individual is born a new Adam.
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And I said, you are making a logical leap because you are denying so much of scripture, especially the parts that talk about being dead in Adam.
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But again, I ended up not addressing, and you know, the computer can be such a terrible medium for interaction such as that, but I just remember thinking how easy you can make a logical leap, and yet it still be an unbiblical one.
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Because here's the syllogism.
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God is perfect.
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God creates the soul.
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God can't create anything imperfect, so the soul must be perfect.
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That's the syllogism.
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Or everybody's born without sin, which again, we believe is untrue because the scripture would teach different.
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So this is the type of thing, like I said, it's so easy to get off track with theology because people just, they create these ideas in their mind that are untrue.
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Now the next thing is Carl Newman's Principle of Development.
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The Principle of Development, I'm not going to read this, I have a very long thing.
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Let me just say this.
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The Principle of Development is that theology develops over time, and that, and this is really a very important teaching in the Roman Catholic Church, is that theology is always evolving, essentially.
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Now, I will say this, there is a difference between the evolution of dogmas and the Principle of Development.
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Because the Principle of Development, at least as it was expressed by Cardinal Newman, was the idea, sounds like my child is screaming, Cardinal Newman argued that of course there's been development in doctrine.
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It wasn't until 325 that the Church fully expressed a complete and proper understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity.
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And while I would say that the doctrine of the Trinity existed prior to 325, I would agree that it was the Council of Nicaea that brought into wholeness the understanding of the nature of Christ being homo, I'm sorry, is it homoousia? No, the homoousia is, yeah, same substance.
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The argument of Nicaea was whether Christ was homoousia, homoousia, or heteroousia.
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Is he of the same substance of the Father, similar substance of the Father, or is he a different substance than the Father? Homo, homoi, homo, hetero.
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You know, familiar with those terms because of other issues, obviously.
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And the addition of the iota, homoi, is the, you ever heard the phrase, it doesn't change at one iota? The argument there is because there's a huge change between homoousia, same substance, or homoousia, similar substance.
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Is Christ of the same substance of the Father, or is he of similar substance? And that's where the debate of Nicaea really came down.
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The Arians argued he was homoousia, he is similar substance but not the same.
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And it was the Athanasius that was arguing for the same substance, and there was this great debate.
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And ultimately, Athanasius won, and the Nicene Creed came about in explaining the Trinity.
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Problem is, the Arians then, there was a huge Arian resurgence after that, a huge battle, so there had to be other councils that came later to fight the battle for the Trinity and to maintain that solid theological teaching.
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So anyway, getting to all that, my point being, when Cardinal Newman makes the argument, yes, there have been developments in doctrine, he's not so much arguing that there have been changes, but simply there have been times where doctrine has been more clearly defined.
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And that's where he would argue for the development.
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And we wouldn't debate that.
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We would say that the Reformation was one of the greatest moments of redefining, not redefining, I'm sorry, rediscovering theological truth that had been lost.
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Right? Wouldn't we agree that the, in fact, don't we go by a phrase, a Latin phrase? I think I've used it some here in the church.
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What does that mean? Always reforming.
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Semper reformanda.
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Always reforming.
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But reforming to what? Scripture.
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Always.
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That's where the reformers, you got to go back to the scripture.
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You got to go back to what the Bible says.
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You got to do that.
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And that's where, again, the wheels come off the cart of Roman Catholicism.
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Because they believe that because the church has the authority and that scripture and tradition carry equal weight, they are allowed then to believe things that are contrary to scripture because tradition says that it's so.
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They would never say it's contrary to scripture, but certainly things that are outside of scripture, such as purgatory, Mary, things like that.
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Yes, sir.
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The Ten Commandments from the Roman Catholicism.
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Yeah, well, they combine one and two and then they separate nine and ten, or ten into two.
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Did y'all know that about Roman Catholics in the Ten Commandments? The Ten Commandments are different in Roman Catholicism.
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In Roman Catholicism, the ten commandments, have no other gods for the Lord, do not make any graven images, do not use the Lord's name in vain, remember the Sabbath, honor your father and mother, do not commit murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not lie, do not covet.
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That's the ten as we would express them in Protestantism, or as I see them expressed in scripture.
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Or in Qur'an.
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Or in Qur'an, because we teach it in our karate class.
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In the Roman Catholic system, the first two are combined.
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Have no other gods for the Lord, do not make any graven images, one command.
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And thus, the losing Lord's name in vain is two, and then go down through.
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And then when it comes to coveting, coveting is separated into coveting the different things.
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You know, in scripture it talks about coveting not your neighbor's wife nor his goods.
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So those are separated at the end in the Roman Catholic understanding of the Ten Commandments.
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So it doesn't change what's in them, it changes how you number them, but it does, as Rob made the point, it does open the door for them to be able to sort of wedge in some of their graven image worship, which is obvious in Roman Catholicism, that they are setting statues up, they're kissing them, they're bowing down to them, they're believing all kinds of fanciful things, such as the crying statues or the bleeding statues and things like that.
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There creates a lot of mysticism in the movement.
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So anyhow, we see how the development of doctrine happens, and that is not necessarily a bad thing as long as we are not developing new doctrine, but we are simply discovering what the scripture says and understanding it better.
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That's what we're supposed to do.
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I do always say this though, if you come up with something that no one has seen in 2,000 years, you're probably not right.
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You heard that before, haven't you? If you come up with something that everybody else is going, say what? Yeah, I mean, it's probably not correct, and that's what people say, well, what about Martin Luther? He came up with the doctrine of justification by faith alone, and that was something no one had seen in, at that time, 1,500 years.
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That's not true.
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All through church history, we see the teaching of justification by faith.
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I do think that the battle for justification was something that was needed to be fought in the time of Luther, and thus there's so much more written about it then, but it's certainly not something that the Waldensians long before, who we would call the first reformers, the Waldensians, long before Luther had taught and believed such things, and prior to him, you go back to the early church and you'll see things, and of course the Apostle Paul, you know, his justification is by grace through faith and not of works, so.
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Alone was the word.
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Alone is the issue.
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Threw into the mix the monkey wrench, so.
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Yeah, alone was the issue.
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The only place in Scripture, and a lot of people don't realize that the only place in Scripture where faith alone is used is when it says in James, you are not saved by faith alone.
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So, of course, people threw that at Luther and just were not, of course, understanding that justification by faith alone is simply a euphemism for justification through Christ alone, meaning that our faith is in the completed work of Christ and nothing that we can add to it.
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That's the problem of modern theological systems, is there's always an attempt to add something to the completed work of Christ, and Luther's point was that it's completely sufficient, completely sufficient.
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All right, we're never, where are we at time-wise, because I'm not even through the first little block.
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This book is going to take a long time.
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Let's look now at the Revelation portion.
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The Bible, including the Apocrypha, is recognized as the authoritative source of Revelation, as well as tradition and church teaching.
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So, you see there, there's Scripture is authoritative, but it's also tradition and church teaching which is authoritative.
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The Pope also makes authoritative pronouncements, ex cathedra, that means from the chair or from the seat.
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On issues of doctrine and morals, these pronouncements are immune from error.
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The church is the mother, guardian, and interpreter of the canon.
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The canon, of course, is the Scripture.
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So, the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church is that you have the Scripture, you have church tradition, which is equal to Scripture, and then, of course, you have the Pope who can make himself equal statements of truth.
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And I heard yesterday, I was listening to a podcast called Is the Pope Catholic, which I thought was a nice title, because, you know, the old joke is Pope Catholic, haha.
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But it was Dr.
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Whiting was talking about the fact that there's a lot of talk that the new Pope has a document that essentially seeks to bridge the gap between evangelicals and Catholics and is seeking to ride simply on the movement which has begun.
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If you ever heard of the ECT, Evangelicals and Catholics Together, this is essentially his attempt to kind of codify that and say, yes, we are together, we all believe the same gospel.
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And really, I don't know how that could be.
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I don't know what the concessions are going to be, but it's going to be interesting something to look forward to in the next few years because he speaks with authority.
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He has the authority to do such a thing.
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And were he to do it, it would certainly cause a major shift in the world of Catholicism, in the world of Protestantism.
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Because, again, I love the story Sproul tells of the group of seven guys who came to his office.
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Did he ever tell you that story? Did he ever hear that story? Sproul had like seven guys show up at his office one day, and they were so excited because they said they had received from God a spirit of unity, and that they now were no longer divided.
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And it was, you know, it was a Roman Catholic, a Methodist, a Baptist.
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There were several guys representing different churches, and they said God has granted them a spirit of unity, and they're no longer divided, and they have such a fresh spirit of unity among them.
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And now they just feel like they can conquer the world with the gospel because of this new powerful revelation that has been given to them.
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And Sproul said, that's fantastic.
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He said, but let me ask you this just very quickly.
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He said, is man justified by faith alone or not? He said within two minutes they were all arguing with each other.
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He said, they all started arguing.
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He said, that is the hinge that we turn on.
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Is man justified by faith alone or not? And, you know, these guys who find unity often find unity in a language of trickery.
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Because all Roman Catholics would say we're justified by faith.
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But none would say we're justified by faith alone.
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And that's where the difficulty rises.
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And that is the article upon which the church will stand or fall, says Martin Luther.
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Next thing on here under Revelation, it says, many post-Vatican II, and Vatican II, of course, was a council document.
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Many post-Vatican II Roman Catholic scholars have deviated from the traditional teaching of the church in this area, have embraced higher critical perspectives on scripture.
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And if you're not familiar with higher criticism, essentially that attempts to take the scripture and because here there's textual criticism is not bad.
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I engage in textual criticism.
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Hopefully you do too.
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Textual criticism is whenever you examine the original documents to try to see what the original author's intent was or if there are several different variations of the manuscripts to try to determine what was the original.
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That's textual criticism.
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That's not a bad thing.
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Higher criticism, though, is being critical of the truth claims of the text.
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Men like John Dominic Crossom, who believed that the feeding of the 5,000 was not a miracle, but simply was Jesus convincing those who had to share with those who have not.
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And thus it's a great socialist miracle because he got the haves to share with the have-nots.
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That's what the feeding of the 5,000 is all about.
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But that's, you know, that's higher criticism.
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That's saying things like Jonah could not have survived three days in the belly of a great fish.
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Thus that story must be parabolic.
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It cannot be a literal story.
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The story of Adam and Eve, of course, can't be literal.
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So that's higher criticism and that's what a lot of Roman Catholics, but I would say a lot of Protestants as well, have adopted such an interpretive paradigm.
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Yes? If they're going to question those type of miracles, then what about the virgin birth and the other type of miracles? Sure.
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Absolutely.
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Absolutely.
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And that's what happens.
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Do they ever address that? Well, guys like John Dominic Crossom wouldn't believe in the virgin birth either.
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And he doesn't believe in the resurrection.
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He believes Jesus's body was eaten by dogs.
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It was buried in a shallow grave and eaten by dogs.
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He said that publicly.
30:04
Higher criticism is essentially a toe into the water that ends it.
30:12
So this is all a supernatural miracle is anti-supernaturalism.
30:16
Basically just questioning the...
30:20
Can I find a natural explanation for this? And the natural explanations often either run a ground or run a face to the scripture saying, no, that can't be, can't be, can't be.
30:31
And like I said, anti-supernaturalism is the soup of the day because everybody wants to be scientific.
30:39
And man, turning water into wine is not scientific.
30:42
So we got to find another explanation.
30:44
Walking on water was because of a big freeze that came in.
30:48
Yeah.
30:48
Stuff like that.
30:49
Stuff, silly stuff.
30:51
Yeah.
30:51
I say silly.
30:55
Peter fell through the ice.
30:58
The whole story.
31:00
All right.
31:00
So that is, we've seen that.
31:04
They've embraced higher critical perspectives and have rejected the infallibility of the Pope.
31:08
Now, again, this causes rifts within Roman Catholicism because there are some Catholics, of course, who accept the complete authority of the Pope, and there's some who don't.
31:16
And the Pope says what? Well, you ain't a Catholic.
31:20
And I remember it was, I think, John Paul II.
31:22
He said, you can't be a cafeteria Catholic.
31:24
You can't come in and take what you want and throw away what you don't want.
31:27
You take it all.
31:29
So he was pretty aggressive.
31:31
You cannot do that.
31:34
And so that's why I could never be Roman Catholic.
31:36
Not only because I believe they have a false gospel, of course, that would be the number one thing, but also because even if I thought their gospel was correct, so much of what they've added, so much of the things that have been so unbiblical, the veneration of Mary and giving to her worship, and which we'll see later, probably next week, because the time's running out.
31:55
But when we see what they've done with Mary, it's completely abysmal.
31:59
It's not just unbiblical, it's satanic in certain situations.
32:04
I mean, you see these people just crying out to Mary for their salvation.
32:10
That's so sad.
32:11
What's going to happen now with this Pope? Because the areas are so beyond any semblance of what the Bible says.
32:21
You know, I mean, it's just totally, it's totally, I don't mean antichrist.
32:29
You know, I mean, all the things that are...
32:30
And he is so popular.
32:32
Stay on the bandwagon? But do you realize he is so popular among so many, and because of his positions, which are very liberal, and because the world has liberalized so much, I mean, he is welcomed with just as this great bastion of truth.
32:50
And he's so, that's what I say, as the Pope Catholic, so much of what he's saying flies in the face of real Roman Catholicism.
32:56
Well, there's some things that he's come out with positions that are very liberal, but then next thing you know, Rome comes out and says, well, no, we're upholding conservative tradition.
33:06
And it's like, yeah, kind of like the modern politicians, they're saying one thing and then covering their faces every time.
33:12
Comes to an issue of is he infallible or is he not? Does he have authority or does he not? Not in my house.
33:17
Well, you know, speaking about that with the Mary, the whole issue with some of the saints, we've got friends that are Roman Catholic, the baby that died that's now a saint, and it's like they prayed to these saints.
33:31
Oh, yeah.
33:32
I wasn't there.
33:33
My mother was in a funeral, and it was a Roman Catholic funeral, and they said, you know, don't pray for this person anymore.
33:40
Now you can pray to him.
33:44
Don't pray for him anymore.
33:46
He's now in heaven.
33:46
Now you can pray to him.
33:48
How do they even know? I mean, what about the purgatory and all that? It's nonsensical, man.
33:54
Yeah, yeah.
33:55
Don't try to, but you were going to say.
33:56
No, no, it's a perfect storm because of this new pope and his global acceptance.
34:02
I mean, he's making a state visit to the U.S.
34:04
and you don't think that's a huge deal.
34:07
Oh, yeah.
34:07
I wish I could go.
34:08
Tony Miano is going to preach up there.
34:09
Man, I wish I could be right there beside him.
34:12
But you were talking about the unity among evangelicals and the attempt to cross the bridge.
34:17
It's going to happen, and you're going to see all of the mainline Protestant denominations jump right in with two feet.
34:23
I mean, they've already sold their soul in essence anyways.
34:26
There's nothing they stand on, and so you're going to see vast rows of all of those mainline denominations jump out, and there's only going to be a few denominations that take any kind of stance against it.
34:42
I mean, you're going to see portions of even Presbyterian and Baptist denominations that just jump right in with both feet, and the reality is this.
34:51
If you have Roman Catholic friends, they need the gospel.
34:54
Absolutely.
34:56
I saw recently, and I don't remember where, but it was a Pentecostal conference of some sort, and it was one of these big-name guys.
35:05
It wasn't Copeland, but it was one of the guys that was sort of on the same bar with Copeland, and he was saying that he had talked to the Pope and that now there was this great unity between them, and in Charismaticism, there is a lot of weak theology, and wouldn't it be to them a great thing to have this sort of stamp of approval from this leader of such a large body of what would call themselves Christians? I just think, real quick, what's happened in a lot of denominations is people don't know what we believe about the Bible.
35:42
We don't know what other people believe about the Bible.
35:45
We just are so quick to rush into unity, because I tell you, the more I engage in the community now, it's not about just redemption.
35:54
It's about what do we know, and what does the Bible truly say, because there's so much error out there.
35:59
Yeah.
36:00
Well, guys, thank you all for coming.
36:03
I'm sorry if you came in hoping that we were going to start with theology proper, because obviously we're not.
36:08
I hope that this will be helpful for you all.
36:11
The next week, hopefully, we'll finish Roman or Catholic theology and move on to what's called Natural Theology, which is very important to understand.
36:19
So let's pray.
36:20
If y'all don't mind, give me one more minute, and let me pray.
36:23
Father, I thank you for the opportunity to just talk about these things, and I do thank you for so many who came out this morning desiring to learn more about your word.
36:33
I pray that this would be helpful for them.
36:35
I pray that I would be used of you to help instruct them, and that you would instruct me through the study time that I have in preparing for these lessons.
36:43
Use us, Lord, for your glory.
36:45
In Christ's name, amen.