I recently participated in a debate with a Roman Catholic Priest on the subject of the gospel. I thought I would share my opening statement here and in the future I may share more from the debate. But for today, the opening statement will suffice! It’s pasted in its entirety below:
The Roman Catholic Church is a Gospel-Denying Church
Affirmative Opening Statement
Allen S. Nelson IV – Providence Baptist Church
Mr. Moderator, I want to establish up front that tonight two different gospels will be presented on this stage. Both will use similar words. Grace. Faith. Justification. Both will talk about Jesus. But the two gospels you will hear will have very different definitions of these terms. We are using 2 different dictionaries.
Even in the first century there were those wanting to distort the gospel. Paul wrote in In Galatians 1:9:
If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.”
The word for “accursed” that Paul uses there is the Greek word “anathema” meaning, “deliver[ed] up to the judicial wrath of God.”[1]
The positions put forth on this stage tonight are irreconcilable. They both cannot be right. According to Scripture one of them results in being under God’s wrath for all eternity in hell. Quite serious.
Mr. Moderator, this is why I am here tonight. Not to win an argument. But for the sake of this community. For the sake of souls. For the sake of all those who will listen to this debate. I want to show my love for my Roman Catholic friends and neighbors.
I am here to present the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.
In Psalm 143:2, David says, “Enter not into judgment with your servant, for no one living is righteous before you.”
This is because David, a man after God’s own heart, understands God’s standard of righteousness. David was a recipient of God’s grace. But if he is judged upon his own deeds and merits, he will fail God’s standard.
Rom. 3:10 says, “None is righteous, no not one.” So, the question becomes: how can we be justified in God’s sight? This brings us to the heart of the divide between the gospel of Christ and the teachings of Rome. Being justified means “just as if I’d always obeyed God perfectly.” The question is, how do I get to that point where God says I have met that standard?
Do I meet it myself through a process of cooperation with God’s grace or is my condition such that I need God to judicially declare me righteous based on the finished work of Jesus Christ?
To be clear: the holiness of God demands personal, perpetual, and precise perfection to His Law. No slight. No faltering in any way. Not an ounce of misplaced motivation or bad attitude or one slip up will do.
To understand our predicament rightly, you need to understand God’s holy law. Are we going to relax God’s law to let people get in on imperfect merit, or are we going to uphold God’s Law and the only way in is someone else meeting that standard for us?
James 2:10 says, “whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it.”
Any who have failed the law at a single point, even the smallest of sins, is guilty of the entire law and is condemned. To tell a white lie incurs as much guilt as adultery in terms of condemnation before a holy God. This is God’s perfect standard.
NOW: Mr. Moderator, this is the official teaching of Rome. Some may not personally affirm these teachings, but they are official Roman Catholic doctrine. Rome says, in paragraph 2010 of the CCC, that God gives man initial grace in justification but then by this we can merit for ourselves and others the graces needed for the attainment of eternal life. We can merit graces, Rome says. But to merit something isn’t grace. If you give me a million dollars for cleaning your house, that’s quite generous. But I still merited it by cleaning your house.
Or, the Council of Trent session 6, paragraph 16 says “life eternal is to be proposed to those working well unto the end.” or RCC 2068 says “…all men may attain salvation through faith, Baptism, and the observance of the Commandments.”
Now, back to man’s guilt. Rome puts forth a false gospel that says here is grace. Here is initial justification. But you must cooperate with this grace and keep this up. Yet, no man can meet God’s standard through the Law, that is, the Commandments Rome says we can keep to attain salvation.
Trent, Session 6, Canon 14 says “If any one saith…that, by…faith alone, absolution and justification are effected; let him be anathema.”
What is Rome saying? They are saying it is not faith alone that brings you peace with God. Your continued and final justification depends on you working with God and in obedience to Rome.
One must work well to the end!
But how do I know I am working well? Is my priest supposed to tell me? And if my working well must meet God’s perfect standard of obedience, how can I ever have peace with God? I cannot!
This is a hopeless hamster wheel. You will not and cannot meet this standard. The standard is personal, precise, and perpetual perfection to God’s law. Rome simply places you back in the Garden of Eden. Your slate is temporarily wiped clean and you’re now back in the place of Adam!
Rome offers a do-over: original sin erased, but salvation now hinges on your lifelong participation in a man-made religious system of sacraments, penance, Mary, the Saints, Popes, Priests, & then the catch all of Purgatory to get you finally ready for heaven.
And in all of this Rome says in Trent, Session 6, Paragraph 9, “no one can know with a certainty…that he has obtained the grace of God.”
Mr. Moderator, Instead of magnifying the glory of Christ, Rome’s system turns the focus to human effort, sacramental rituals, a sacerdotal priesthood, and even idolatrous practices like the worship of wafers and idolatrous prayers to Mary.
One can go to Mass every day of his life and never meet God’s perfect standard. In fact, going to Mass only puts people further away from God’s standard.
This directly contradicts the Bible which says in Galatians 2:16, “yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.”
What Rome has put in the place of the Mosaic Law bears the same exact point Paul is making. They are affirming true things about Christ while adding manmade invented works to attach to the gospel thereby altering it.
1% poison in your coffee is enough to kill you. And Rome has gone far above that in adding to the gospel.
Thus, this hopeless gospel is a false gospel. And Rome’s gospel, according to Paul, is anathema.
And this is why I am here tonight. Not to offend for the sake of offense. But to shine forth light in the darkness. There is a way out. There is freedom. No one has to be enslaved to the Papacy.
But what is the way out? The biblical gospel.
Romans 4:4-8 says, “4 Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due. 5 And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness, 6 just as David also speaks of the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works: 7 “Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; 8 blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin.”
Mr. Moderator, this passage teaches that all of your lawless deeds, past, present, and future can be covered. The Lord is willing to not count your sins against you.
The Biblical Gospel can be summed up in one word: Christ. Not Christ +. Christ alone. All things necessary to man’s salvation are in Jesus Christ. 1 Cor. 1:30 says, “Christ Jesus…became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption…”
The command and promise of God’s perfect law is this: Do this and live. Disobey at any point in thought, deed, attitude, or motivation, and you will die and be punished in Hell.
Rome says: Do your part in cooperating with God in this religious system and attain eternal life, but you’ll never be sure about it until you die. And if you die in the state of grace, and that’s an eternally significant if, if you die in the state of grace, well, you will go to heaven after purgatory.
Mr. Moderator, I wonder who would want to hinge their eternity upon that little word “if”?
But here is the biblical gospel: Christ has done it all. God sent forth His Son, born of the Virgin Mary and under the law. Jesus fulfilled perfect, personal, perpetual, and precise obedience to the Law of God. Then he went to the Cross not merely as a victim but, Isaiah 53, as a willing substitute for sinners.
How can a righteous God NOT impute our sins to us? Because they were imputed to Christ. He bore our sins, all of them, in His body on the tree as our substitute.
The wrath of God is propitiated by His death. He cries with His final breath, IT IS FINISHED!
And in Romans 4:25 Paul says Jesus was raised for our justification. That is, it is His resurrection from the dead that secures our justification, not His being re-presented in the eucharist, which is a falsehood.
And so, “to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness…”
The righteousness of Christ is not infused into our souls. Rather, it is legally credited to our account – imputed to our account – by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.
One must be “in Christ” to go to heaven. And those who receive Him by grace alone through faith alone in His finished work alone, rejecting manmade systems, are in indissoluble union with Christ forever.
Their whole salvation is wrapped up in Christ!
God requires perfection from me by His holy standard. I cannot give this. But what God has required, Christ alone has accomplished.
When sinners puts their faith in Christ alone, they are forever and completely legally credited with the 100% obedience of Jesus as their whole and only righteousness, forgiven of all sins, past, present, and future, by Christ’s sufficient work.
In Rome’s system, Christ is necessary, but not sufficient. Grace is necessary, but not sufficient.
Paragraph 1996 of the CCC says grace is a “help.” The cooperative works of man become necessary to secure dying in a state of grace.
In the Papal system, one person is baptized, cooperates with grace, performs works, and merits heaven. Another is baptized but fails to cooperate and goes to hell. The final determining factor? Human works, not Christ’s sufficiency or grace’s efficacy.
This is not the biblical gospel that points us to the sufficient work of Christ whereby by His life, death, burial, and resurrection alone we have peace with God by trusting in Him. Rom. 5:1.
This is why Rome says in Trent Session 6, Chapter 11, “No one ought to flatter himself up with faith alone, fancying that by faith alone he is made an heir…” But the Bible says, in Romans 3:28, “For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.”
The Roman Catholic Church Denies the Gospel.
God declares us forever and completely justified based on the finished work of Christ alone.
Are you looking tonight for wages or grace? The wages of sin is death. But the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord.
Thank you, Mr. Moderator.
[1] Johannes Behm, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel, Geoffrey W. Bromiley, and Gerhard Friedrich (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1964–), 354.
