OUR DIFFERENCES WITH ROMAN CATHOLICISM (Part 1)

-{Mark 7}

-Coming into this week, I had set in my mind in one direction I was going to take in our study comparing Biblical Christianity with other religions, noting the differences, demonstrating why ours is the most excellent faith. I was getting ready to move on to various Christian cults starting with Mormonism. But then news broke that the Pope died and then I had good conversations with a Catholic who has lost faith. So, I’m like—I guess it is time to stop stalling and look at the differences of Evangelical Protestant beliefs versus Roman Catholic beliefs.

-People will ask me if Roman Catholics can be saved and go to heaven. My general answer is yes, but it would be in spite of Roman Catholic doctrine and not because of it. It will be because they have devoted their life to Jesus Christ, but they are just stuck in the muck of all the other things that Roman Catholic teaching throws in there.

-I also had been stalling on jumping into this particular comparison because I had no idea where to begin. There is just so many weeds to sift through. But I figured I would start on one of the big contrasts between Protestantism and Catholicism, and that is our source of authority for our faith and practice. I want you to look at:

Mark 7:1–13 LSB

1 And the Pharisees and some of the scribes gathered around Him when they had come from Jerusalem, 2 and had seen that some of His disciples were eating their bread with defiled hands, that is, unwashed. 3 (For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they carefully wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; 4 and when they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash themselves; and there are many other things which they have received in order to observe, such as the washing of cups and pitchers and copper pots.) 5 And the Pharisees and the scribes asked Him, “Why do Your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat their bread with defiled hands?” 6 And He said to them, “Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written: ‘This people honors Me with their lips, But their heart is far away from Me. 7 ‘But in vain do they worship Me, Teaching as doctrines the commands of men.’ 8 “Leaving the commandment of God, you hold to the tradition of men.” 9 And He was also saying to them, “You are good at setting aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition. 10 “For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘He who speaks evil of father or mother, is to be put to death’; 11 but you say, ‘If a man says to his father or his mother, whatever you might benefit from me is Corban (that is to say, given to God),’ 12 you no longer leave him to do anything for his father or his mother; 13 thus invalidating the word of God by your tradition which you have handed down; and you do many things such as that.”

-The religious leaders confronted Jesus because His followers were not doing what they thought they should do. It’s not a hygiene thing that they were talking about when they talk about the washing of hands. It was a ritualistic cleaning that the religious leaders had set in place for Jews to follow. Jesus’ disciples didn’t follow the rules that Jewish religious leaders had set up, so they were all up in arms.

-But Jesus makes a few distinctions. He first notes that the Jewish religious leaders were more concerned about following rules instead of following God. But then He makes a distinction between the rules that the Jews followed versus what it was that God required. No doubt, God has laws and commandments that people are to follow and obey. However, the Jewish religious leaders made up a bunch of manmade rules (or, we could call them traditions) that they said would put a hedge around God’s laws and commandments. But they then placed their own manmade rules on the same level as God’s commands.

-So, Jesus distinguishes between the traditions of men versus the commands of God. Jesus, in fact, points out their hypocrisy in that they were more willing to follow the manmade traditions than they were to follow God’s commands if it is to their own personal advantage. As Jesus points out, they say that they’re following God with their lips, but in actuality their heart is far from God. They have muddied the water with their traditions.

-And I believe that is where Roman Catholic doctrine finds itself. This is a subject near and dear to my heart because I personally had to make a decision of where my source of authority for faith and practice was going to be found—so it makes sense that this is where I would begin.

-To give you a bit of my testimony, I was born and raised in Wisconsin (but I moved to the South, so you can all forgive me of that transgression). I was raised very German-Irish Catholic from both sides of the family. I grew up thinking that if I minimally followed Catholic traditions and I didn’t kill anyone that I should be going to heaven. (And I still haven’t killed anyone, which I’m sure most of you are glad to know.)

-I had a disagreement with someone I knew who was of a different denomination. So, I decided to read the Bible to find proof-texts that would demonstrate why the Roman Catholic religion was the more superior religion—better than any other Christian denomination out there. Between reading the Bible and listening to Christian radio, I found something I wasn’t expecting. I found truth.

-I found out that I am a sinner who is headed to hell—being judged righteously by the just Judge. My sins separated me from God. But God so loved me that He sent Jesus who died on the cross and rose again, paying for sin and conquering death, so that all who believe in Him should not perish but have eternal life. So, as best as I knew how, I believed in Jesus and dedicated myself to Him.

-But now I was in a conundrum. It wasn’t a church or evangelist that led me to Christ, so I didn’t know what to do from there. So, I figured I would just get more involved in the Catholic Church. So, I started being more regular in my involvement in the Catholic Church, but at the same time I also dedicated myself to reading the Bible.

-But, here’s the thing, the more I went to the Catholic Church and the more I read my Bible, the more I noticed that there was some sort of disconnect between the two. So, I had come to a crossroads. I couldn’t follow the Catholic Church as an authority and Scripture as an authority. I would have to choose—who or what was going to be my authority for what I believed and how I lived?

-I made the decision that Scripture would be my final authority for everything because that is what led me to the truth about Jesus Christ. So, I dedicated myself to studying and following what Scripture said—went in search of a Bible-believing and Bible-preaching church because that is the final authority. Little did I know that a few years later God would use that decision and commitment to call me to preach and teach the Scripture. But that’s a different story for another time.

-Why did I think that Scripture as authority and the Catholic Church as authority could not mix or coexist? The Catholic Church believes the Bible, don’t they? They think it’s inspired by God, don’t they? Yes, the Catholic Church believes in Scripture, but it’s a little bit more complicated than that. They also believe that there are traditions that have been handed down or figured out over the past thousands of years that are just as authoritative.

-To align it with the verses that I read, yes they have the Word of God, the commands of God, but then they mix in with it what we believe (and I think rightly believe) are the traditions of man. You may wonder where they get half the things they believe. Where do they get all that stuff about Mary being sinless and a perpetual virgin and assumed into heaven and all the other things they believe that we’ve never heard of? It comes from their tradition.

-They believe in what is often referred to as the sacred deposit of the faith. Yes, there were the things that got written down in Scripture, but there were a lot of things passed along verbally or otherwise that are also part of the faith. They believe that there are teachings and practices that Jesus gave to the apostles that they never wrote down but that they handed these things down to the first generation of popes and bishops who handed down to the next generation—so on and so forth.

-And as Ron Rhodes explains what Catholics believe:

The metaphor that many Roman Catholics use to explain this is that of two streams flowing into the same pool. Two streams—Scripture and tradition—flow into the same pool of divine revelation. One stream is not enough. If we have only one streams and not the other, the Second Vatican Council tells us that we do not have in our possession all that God wants us to know. The Council of Trent likewise said that the Bible alone is not sufficient for faith and morals, thereby making tradition a necessity. These two streams of Scripture and tradition together communicate all that God wants us to know. The Word of God is not just the Bible; it also includes tradition. Therefore, both Scripture and tradition must be accepted and honored with equal sentiments of devotion and reverence.

-Now, according to the Roman Catholics, the traditions are not merely doctrines and teachings handed down, but they are things discovered in the ebb and flow of a life of faith. Jesus didn’t merely tell people what to believe, but taught things in ways for people to discover. So, when the Church comes up with a teaching, they merely have figured it out.

-But what they teach is that the Roman Catholic Church is the final authority in interpreting and discovering and teaching. It is the Church that determines what is believed. The foundation of faith is the Church placed upon Scripture and Tradition.

-To give you a historical example of this in action, in the 1940’s and 1950’s Pope Pius XII asked the bishops of the church if the teaching of the Assumption of Mary should be official dogma. The Assumption of Mary is the belief that Mary didn’t die, but was just taken into heaven—kind of like Enoch. The Bible obviously says nothing about this. But Pius thought it better to clarify the scope of the Church’s teaching authority before making that leap (that was heartily received by the bishops). So, he first set out a letter that said:

God has given to His Church a living Teaching Authority to elucidate and explain what it contained in the deposit of faith only obscurely and implicitly. This deposit of faith our Divine Redeemer has given for authentic interpretation not to each of the faithful, not even to theologians, but only to the Teaching Authority of the Church.

-So, in essence Pius was saying that the Church alone has authority to figure out the obscured teachings and determine what is to be believed and taught. And then he went on to codify the teaching of the Assumption of Mary. Notice what he did there—he first told the people that the Church alone has that Teaching Authority to then push that teaching.

-But here’s the thing. This teaching obviously is not in the Bible. Of the 88 men that Catholics recognize as Fathers of the Church (Clement of Rome, Polycarp, etc.), only two had any hint of the idea, and these were men from the 7th century. (Meaning, for the first 700 years of church history, there wasn’t even a hint of this teaching.) It is not found in any of the creeds and confessions. It’s not found in the teachings of any of what the Catholics call Church Doctors. And yet, there it is.

-This is different from what we as Evangelical Protestants believe. We believe in what is called Sola Scriptura. It means Scripture alone. We believe that the Bible is the sole, infallible, and ultimate authority for Christian faith, doctrine, and practice. And we want to spend some time defining and defending that view. And we will start that next week. But, for now, we want to pray that Catholics will turn from manmade traditions and turn to a true, biblical faith...