Can a Devout Roman Catholic Be Genuinely Born Again?
00:00:00.000 | The core beliefs and the enshrined practices of Roman Catholicism deeply concerned the
00:00:08.440 | reformers 500 years ago, and those same concerns remain largely unalleviated for contemporary
00:00:14.160 | Protestants today, problems that we still see in the latest teachings of the Pope, and
00:00:19.240 | even in the most up-to-date version of the official Catechism of the Catholic Church.
00:00:23.640 | It all leads to a question over whether a devout Roman Catholic can be genuinely saved.
00:00:27.720 | It comes from a listener named Jimmy. "Hello Pastor John, a close friend of mine passed
00:00:31.320 | away recently. He was a great man, a good friend, a mentor to many young men like myself,
00:00:36.880 | and a devout Catholic. Will I see my friend in heaven, or does his theological views make
00:00:42.200 | this impossible? Can I rightly experience Paul's sorrowful yet always rejoicing mantra?
00:00:48.400 | Or was my friend merely a devout husband, a wonderful friend, and a good man?" In other
00:00:53.840 | words, do you believe devout Catholics can be genuine Christians?
00:00:59.000 | Before I answer that specific question, let me lay out again the reasons we should be
00:01:04.120 | seriously concerned with Roman Catholic teaching, and that at numerous levels, its contradictory
00:01:14.480 | stance toward Scripture that produces, I think, a kind of religion which I fear has led many
00:01:22.660 | people astray, even into destruction. And I do not mean that Roman Catholicism has a
00:01:30.160 | corner on that kind of misleading teaching. There are lots of brands of so-called Christian
00:01:38.360 | tradition that have damaged people by the errors that they represent. So let me give
00:01:47.040 | you six examples of what concerns me about Roman Catholic teaching, and that I think
00:01:54.000 | we should be very concerned about and steer clear of.
00:02:00.000 | First, we should be concerned that the Roman Catholic Church elevates the authority of
00:02:05.800 | the Pope and the church councils, when speaking in their official capacity as teachers of
00:02:10.800 | the church, to the same level as Holy Scripture. This has led many Roman Catholics away from
00:02:19.320 | a personal engagement with the Scriptures into a reliance on the church, even though
00:02:27.100 | the church is fallible, when they ought to be relying on the Scriptures, the very Word
00:02:34.400 | of God inspired and written.
00:02:37.200 | Number two, I'm concerned, we should be concerned, that the Blessed Virgin Mary—and
00:02:44.480 | I have no problem calling her that—is elevated to a position in practice where she mediates
00:02:53.420 | between the people of God and the Son of God in a way that undermines the direct priestly
00:03:00.100 | ministry of Christ between his people and God. This elevation of Mary beyond anything
00:03:09.500 | in the Scriptures, based solely on church tradition, distances the people of God from
00:03:14.760 | the enjoyment of personal fellowship with Jesus and the kind of relationship and assurance
00:03:21.340 | they might otherwise enjoy with him.
00:03:24.540 | Third, we should be concerned about the teaching of baptismal regeneration, the idea that an
00:03:34.540 | appropriate putting of water on the baby's head by the very work of the water—ex operae
00:03:45.380 | operato, by the very operating of the thing itself—by the very work of the water in
00:03:50.820 | the priestly act causes a change in the nature of the baby from lost in original sin to saved
00:04:00.660 | through regeneration. This notion has produced, I would say, untold, ill-founded confidence
00:04:09.620 | in the people of God who have little or no personal faith or relationship with Christ
00:04:15.380 | or love to Jesus, and yet because of their baptism believe they are heaven-bound.
00:04:21.140 | Fourth, we should be concerned about the offering of so-called indulgences, which the very present
00:04:32.020 | pope himself—not in some distant 16th century past—the present pope himself has offered
00:04:40.620 | in our day. It involves certain kinds of pilgrimages or special buildings or special payments which
00:04:50.540 | one can perform or attend so that an indulgence is granted by the pope which provides forgiveness
00:04:57.940 | of sins. This is an appalling detraction from the absolute uniqueness of the death of Christ
00:05:06.580 | as the provision for sins and personal faith as the means by which that provision becomes
00:05:13.620 | ours. Fifth, we should be concerned about the confusion
00:05:19.060 | over the doctrine of justification by grace alone, on the basis of Christ alone, through
00:05:24.940 | faith alone, to the glory of God alone. The Roman Catholic insistence that justification
00:05:31.860 | consists in the infusion of righteousness, which as our own virtue qualifies us to be
00:05:41.820 | accepted by God, is not the same as the biblical doctrine of God becoming 100% for us in the
00:05:53.460 | moment when by faith we are united with Christ so that his blood and righteousness alone
00:06:00.380 | become the ground of that acceptance. Sixth, we should be concerned about the centrality
00:06:08.700 | of the mass in the Roman Catholic practice in which the bread and wine are actually transubstantiated.
00:06:20.120 | They become the physical body and physical blood of Jesus so that the Lord's Supper
00:06:28.420 | takes on a power of salvation by the entering of the blood and the body of Jesus into us,
00:06:35.740 | which it never was intended to have in the Bible. It misleads millions of what's happening
00:06:42.380 | there. And finally, we should be concerned about
00:06:46.300 | the doctrine of purgatory in which a person after death may be given another chance of
00:06:53.660 | bearing some punishment so that finally they can make their way to heaven after doing appropriate
00:07:01.540 | penance there. The Bible holds out no such hope for those who die in unbelief. It is
00:07:09.740 | not found in the Scriptures. Now, having waved a flag of concern for those
00:07:17.700 | seven matters of Catholic belief, my answer to the question, nevertheless, is yes. I think
00:07:26.300 | there are genuine Christians who are devout and inconsistent Roman Catholics—devout
00:07:35.300 | in the sense that they are earnest and serious, sincere, and inconsistent in the sense that
00:07:42.820 | their true heart embrace of Jesus is better than their mental ideas or doctrines.
00:07:51.040 | If a person has a genuine encounter with the living Christ and recognizes the depth of
00:07:57.020 | human sinfulness and the hopelessness that we're in without grace and without Christ,
00:08:03.020 | and sees in Jesus the substitute that God provided to bear our punishment and provide
00:08:08.500 | all we need for acceptance with God, and that person throws himself on the mercy of Christ,
00:08:15.660 | despairing of all self-reliance, and cherishes Christ as his supreme treasure and hope for
00:08:22.740 | eternal life, that person will be saved, even if many doctrinal ideas are confused or erroneous.
00:08:31.620 | In other words, it is possible for a person's heart and his essential grasp of Christ to
00:08:39.500 | be far better than the structures of his doctrinal framework, and we may all be very, very thankful
00:08:47.880 | for this.
00:08:48.880 | Amen. I am thankful for this, and all without diminishing those seven corrupting doctrines
00:08:54.660 | that we must continue to oppose today. Thank you, Pastor John. And, Jimmy, thank you for
00:08:59.300 | the very good question, and thanks for listening to the podcast. You can stay current with
00:09:03.060 | the Ask Pastor John podcast episodes on your phone or device by subscribing to us in your
00:09:07.900 | preferred podcast catcher app. If you want to search our past episodes in our archive
00:09:12.460 | or send us an email of your own, even questions over other Christian traditions and how their
00:09:16.820 | beliefs and practices measure up to the Bible, you can do all of that through our online
00:09:21.660 | home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:09:22.900 | Well, on Friday, we're going to talk about joy. We talk a lot about joy in God here at
00:09:30.100 | DG and on the podcast. It's at the core of what we do. So how closely connected is the
00:09:36.020 | full experience of our joy in God to the charisma, the gifts of the Spirit outlined by Paul in
00:09:42.460 | the epistles of the New Testament, like in 1 Corinthians 14, where he talks about the
00:09:46.200 | gifts of tongues and prophecy? What is the relationship of those gifts to our fullest
00:09:52.060 | expression and fullest enjoyment of our joy in God? That is the next question. Until then,
00:09:57.660 | I'm your host Tony Reinke, and we will see you on Friday.
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00:10:03.060 | The Joy of God
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00:10:09.060 | The Joy of God