In his sermon, Paul Carrington addresses why Roman Catholicism is considered a controversial topic in the 21st century. He explores the historical context of the Protestant Reformation, highlighting Martin Luther's role in challenging the doctrines of the Catholic Church. Carrington argues that the Church's doctrines, particularly concerning justification by faith alone and the sufficiency of scripture, remain contentious. He critiques the Catholic Church for adding traditions that distort the gospel, such as the veneration of saints and the doctrine of Mary's immaculate conception. The speaker emphasizes the importance of understanding these key theological points when engaging with Catholics, advocating for a focus on the gospel and scripture. Carrington warns against the modern trend of ecumenism that seeks to unify different Christian denominations, including Catholicism, without addressing doctrinal differences. He encourages Christians to remain steadfast in their faith and to engage with Catholics in a compassionate and informed manner, emphasizing the need to focus on core gospel truths.

Thanks. Alright well let's gather back in. We're going to be spending some time here this evening speaking about the Roman Catholic Church and Scott asked me right before the talk, are you ready? And I said well how do you compress 1500 years of church history down into into 20 minutes but we're gonna give it a shot here this evening. But one of the questions I want to start off by asking us is why is Roman Catholicism even considered a 21st century battlefield?

You know you could ask the question, some might ask this question, wasn't the where matters settled 500 years ago we had the the Reformation of course and we're right on the eve of the 500th year of the Protestant Reformation and some would say, well hey the hatchet's been buried, haven't we moved long forward past that point? Or others might say, well and I've heard this, where the Reformation seemed to be almost an overreaction and fences just need to be mended. Don't bring up anything that will cause further division and surely things like calling the Pope the Antichrist was inflammatory and even hateful and harsh some might add. But I think the overwhelming majority of people, probably the majority, would come with the question, well aren't Roman Catholics questions? This is the first time I'm even hearing that Roman Catholicism actually isn't Christian.

Aren't they just like, say for example, the difference between Presbyterians and Baptists? You know everyone's kind of under the same tent, maybe at different ends of the tent, but definitely underneath the same government of Jesus Christ. Well, we're going to be talking about these things this evening and investigating it a little bit further. But the whole word Protestant really comes from obviously the word, the root of it being protest or protesting against something and it was called that for a reason when when we look at a man like Martin Luther where you know fifteen, five hundred years ago his as you could say his dungeon flamed with light. For the first time he saw something that had been covered over with layers and layers of false doctrine, he all of a sudden saw this and men like him, not only him, but men like him both became zealous for the truth and Jealous for the truth as well that it be preserved that it be spread abroad And so what he understood was that the gospel was the power of God unto salvation It had been shrouded, but now it had come to light again.

And I was reading Sibbes, he was he's talking he's written a book on the bruised reed and this is what he says in terms of truth. It says, truth fears nothing as much as concealment. Desires nothing so much as to be opened to the view of all. When it, when truth is unadorned, it is most lovely and powerful." And that's what captivated these men over 500 years ago. And so that 95 theses that were nailed to the door, that kind of became the spark.

They began translating the Bible into, you know, German, into English, and tracts were basically spreading like wildfire all across Europe. And there was no turning back. And in the period of that that time about 1521 right before a Luther was to come before the Diet of Worms in Germany. The week before in fact He was he was going to be excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church and he produced a book one of the three books that they were going to ask him to recant and Books that had been burned he had been persecuted and chased and it was called the Babylonian captivity of the church where he was accusing the Roman Catholic Church of holding the church in captivity just like Babylon held Israel in captivity, but from a theological and sacramental perspective. That was his view is that the Church of Rome is no different than Nebuchadnezzar and everyone else that had basically persecuted the people of God.

And so this was the climate at this time. It was very, very zealous and as I said, jealous for the truth. And this is what B.B. Warfield said about a hundred years ago and this is really important when we think of the varying worldviews that we're going to be discussing but this is what he says he says the chief dangers to Christianity do not come from the anti-christian systems Mohammedanism has never made inroads upon Christianity, saved by the sword. Nobody fears that Christianity will be swallowed up by Buddhism.

It is corrupt forms of Christianity itself, which menace from time to time the life of Christianity. A pure gospel is worth preserving and it is not only worth preserving but it is logically the only saving gospel. And this is what the Apostle Paul was driving at. You'll remember if you've read the book of Galatians, where he marveled that these people that he had visited just years before, and where there was a revival in the sense that people had come to faith for the first time. Now he says when he writes the book to the Galatians, I marvel that you are so soon removed from him who called you in the grace of Christ to a different gospel, which is not another, but there are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ.

But even if we or an angel from heaven preach any other gospel to you than that which we have preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone preaches in any other gospel to you, then what you have received, let him be accursed." You notice he says the same thing twice to emphasize how important it is, how he will not tolerate a change or an aberration in gospel truth. And so what we're going to be talking about tonight just in these short minutes that we have here is, what were these men actually protesting? What were they actually looking at and saying, we can no longer in good conscience believe these things. And we want to do it in a way that's not unfair or misrepresenting, we're not going to be doing any personal attacks, but just deal with the unvarnished reality of what the Catholic Church teaches.

But here's the thing is that the doctrine of the Catholic Church is so twisted and distorted, far beyond anything that Paul was warning the Galatians about, those Judaizers who are coming and say you must be circumcised. The Catholic Church is guilty of a thousand more doctrinal crimes than just this group of Judaizers going through this small region in Turkey. And if they've received a harsh rebuke for saying men must be circumcised, think about the various doctrines of the Catholic Church where the intercession of Jesus Christ they've added the Saints which are barely concealed false gods. There's a million or a billion different false gods in Hinduism. And people say how terrible.

People bow down to these little stone statues, but thousands and millions, even some would say a billion Catholics will pray to Saint fill-in-the-blank for some specific need. Barely concealed idolatry, it's not even concealed. To the work of Christ they added Mary, where in 1854, how long is that? 1800 years after she had died, they came up with the doctrine that she was immaculately conceived without original sin and she never sinned in her entire life and her sinless soul and incorrupt body was then physically elevated to heaven. That didn't come until 1950 by the way, even though there's no mention of Mary after Acts chapter 1.

You have all other things, they talk about her as the mediatrix and co-redemptrix with Jesus Christ and I took this right from the Vatican website and I quote this quote You conceived the living God and by your prayers will deliver our souls from death What Christ accomplished on the cross they add the Eucharist and that's the host that they hold up, and they basically sacrifice Christ afresh on the altar every single week when they gather together. And there's so many out there you could go all the traditions of men, there's purgatory, they've invented the theory of papal infallibility that basically what the Pope has said he can never unsay because it's truth. And the Pope in fact is the vicar of Jesus Christ. He is Christ in the flesh, representing Christ speaking for flesh. And you could go on and on.

We don't have time to go through all of the false doctrines, but Calvin said it like this. So universal is the mass of errors by which they have overturned the whole of religion, that it would be enough to destroy and swallow up the church a hundred times over. That's what we're dealing with when we talk about the Catholic Church, but we're only gonna be talking about two particular things tonight, and I want to just go through those just a little bit more detail because when we understand these this is really what everything hangs on and the first one is really the the issue of the gospel number one and the other one that I want to talk about is really the sufficiency of scripture and if you're gonna engage with Catholics today you want to be driving hopefully towards these two key points the gospel and the sufficiency of scripture and so let's talk about the gospel what the what the church does the Catholic church does it's gospel it simply cannot save It's a gospel that is not actually good news. And how terrible it is to think that you're actually marching to Zion when in fact the path that you're on leads to destruction.

That is, I can't think of a more diabolical plot than that. Thinking you're serving Jesus Christ, like the people in Matthew 7, where they pull out their resume and say, Lord, Lord. And he says, I never knew you. It's a gospel that cannot save. And what was it that threw the Roman Catholic Church into such an uproar in the 16th century?

It was really this. It was the scandal of justification, that a believing, repentant sinner could be saved by Jesus Christ by faith alone. And it threatened to overthrow the elaborate machinery of the church that they had set up for over centuries the sacramental system the priestly systems the confession the mass they even had things called indulgences which It's a total blasphemy that they created out of nothing and it could not allow the piercing light of the gospel to penetrate. And when Martin Luther, when he understood the gospel, everything broke open. But before that, this is what he says, I kept the rule of my order so strictly that I may say that if ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery it was I.

All my brothers in the monastery who knew me will bear me out. If I had kept on any longer I should have killed myself with vigils, prayers, readings, and other work. Does that sound like life? He was enslaved. And so they were attacking really the gospel at its root, this whole idea of justification, which is at the root of the book of Romans.

And the reason why the doctrine of justification is at the root of the Book of Romans, it's because justification is at the root or is that is the entire basis of biblical faith. You take that away and there's no such thing as biblical faith. And that's why Calvin said that justification is the principal ground on which religion must be supported by grace alone and by faith alone. And what Catholicism can allow is grace alone and faith alone. It's grace plus something else.

It's faith plus something. But if that something never ends, you're never at peace, you never know where you stand with God, much like Islam, which we're going to be hearing about tomorrow. And so in 1545 they had something called the Council of Trent which they set up which was a counter-reformation movement to stop the spread of the flames of the Reformation. They set up this council that went on for about 18 years and one of the things they did was declared anathema which means consigned to damnation. Anyone who actually believes in justification by faith alone.

If anyone here today actually believes justification by faith alone, that hasn't been lifted. You're still under the anathema of the Roman Catholic Church according to them. And so what they've been doing in saying this is they've actually anathematized themselves because they've rejected the only means of salvation and they've added to it works things like penance and priestly confession and all the other things we've talked about. And it fits really well when you think about it to the human frame because by nature we're all such earners. We want to contribute to our salvation by nature.

But what the gospel does is it strips down the pride of man to its very bones and it tells you that I'm sorry you can do nothing to assist in your own resurrection. Catholicism says there's the beach, get to the beach and swim across the Atlantic, 3, 000 miles, while bearing a 50 pound knapsack. And if you get there, all is well. They put all of the salvation on the actual individual, versus on Jesus Christ who bore their sins. And if you imagine the impact of the soul-stripping message of Tetzel where he said for every sin you commit you spend seven years in purgatory.

Can you imagine what that actually would mean? How debilitating that would be? And this is the gospel of Rome 500 years ago. I want to read you from Johann Tetzel. This is an actual quote when he preached near Wittenberg.

He said this, how shamefully you go about your business, open air preaching. You spend your money on every little trifle and oh how your loved ones suffer. Enough! Step forward. Leo the 10th, the Pontifex Maximus, vicar of Christ on earth has been gracious and merciful to you and has affixed his seal to this indulgence.

Now come and do your duty and now you have a very special deal reserved for you. For a little extra gilder, which is money, you can free yourself from purgatory. Yes, God be praised. Give to the church your might and the gracious Holy Father in Rome will see to it that you and all your dead relatives will be in paradise itself, not enduring for a moment the purging flames of purgatory. I remember just not too long ago about five years ago I was in a foreign country and I was working as a Hispanic country and preaching the gospel in a barrio and I sat down with a widow whose husband had just died and I was speaking to her about her husband and about the state of her soul.

And in the course of the conversation she told me that she had just paid $3, 000 to get her husband out of purgatory into heaven. That's equivalent, sorry, 3, 000 pesos which is the equivalent of 63 US dollars, to get her husband from purgatory, a place that doesn't even exist, to the very presence of God. A total blasphemy. And so that's what they've done. They've distorted the gospel entirely.

The other area that we want to look at is the sufficiency of Scripture. And what the entire system of Catholicism says is that the Scriptures are not sufficient. They must deny sola Scriptura in order to maintain their system because you can't limit yourself to what is God-breathed. If you do that then you tie the hands of the papacy. And what they've actually said in the past is that Sola Scriptura is really a blueprint for anarchy.

They blame that, the Reformation, because of the fact that men would say, I stand on the Word of God. And that created the anarchy that they they look at it as anarchy. And so because Scripture doesn't have the final say in Catholicism, they can create any novelties they like. We've talked about a bunch of them already. But what Christ said in his day to the Pharisees, he says, you make the Word of God of no effect through your tradition which you have handed down.

It would be the same thing that he would probably say to the Roman Catholic Church where they have said that tradition precedes scriptural truth, precedes the Bible. And so what Rome has said it can't unsay. Once they've made a declaration, the Pope, it can't be undone. When they say that Mary was sinless, spotless, and was assumed into heaven just like Christ. There's no changing that.

There's no going back on that. As a Catholic, you must believe these types of things. And think about how dishonorable this is to the Word made flesh. Jesus Christ, the Word of God. When you say, yeah the Word of God is important but guess what?

Tradition trumps the Word of God and where there's a conflict, what do they do? They put the Word of God away and build on their own traditions and it's not innocent by the way either a lot of it was to do with control and raising money and doing all types of other things as well when you think of how Jesus Christ so oftentimes would would say it is written it is written it is written and they say that's not important or it's secondary to what is actually said. It's very, very dishonorable. And so what's at stake when we're considering Catholicism is nothing less than the glory of God, Revealed in the gospel of his son that only grace could raise us up from the dead through the spotless land being punished on our behalf This is what's really at stake. And so a lot of what I've just said happened 500 years ago, but when you fast forward to today and what the climate currently is right now, guess what?

All of Trent's convictions, the Council of Trent's convictions, they still stand. As I said you're anathematized if you actually believe that you are justified by faith alone. That word alone is probably the most important one. And Catholic salvation is really a journey that requires ongoing participation in the sacramental system. There's never any assurance of faith.

And this is what John MacArthur says in 2013, almost yesterday, in the big scheme of things. He says this, that in the long war on truth, the most formidable, relentless, and deceptive enemy has been Roman Catholicism. It is an apostate, corrupt, heretical, false Christianity. It is a front for the kingdom of Satan. Does that seem strong?

If it's strong it's because he's hearkening back to what Paul said as I quoted earlier in Galatians chapter 1, when you begin to twist the gospel, it is no longer a gospel. It is no longer the words of God. And in these days that we're living in right now, the big word over the last 100 years has been ecumenism, where you've got this desire, ecumenism simply means universal, where you have the entire church body, including and headed up by the Catholic Church, gathering together to say, let's bury the hatchet, let's let bygones be bygones, let's not let doctrine divide us, Let's just unite around the things that we can agree on and the things that are not agreeable we can put aside. And in the 1960s Vatican II was begun. They had one in the 1870s and Vatican II was really this strategic decision to ride the tide of modern sentiment which is this reigning cry for toleration at all costs, above unity, above truth.

And it capitalized on an abysmal lack of discernment that is currently in the church today. And what they couldn't accomplish with the sword 500 years ago with persecution, what they could not accomplish, they've now accomplished in a large part through diplomacy and trying to win people over and capitalizing on ignorance. And really what the main thrust is is that they want to win back separated brethren, that's what they call Protestants now, we're separated brethren from Rome to join in a search for reunion. All roads lead back to Rome is kind of the message, but they have not repudiated any of their dangerous damning heretical doctrines. None of that's been put aside at all.

They still keep to those things. There's been No reversals of the anathemas at all. And a lot of times even among among Christians what you see is you know what the Reformation might have been a bit of an overreaction. In fact some people could be quoted as saying that the Reformation was a tragedy. Not the Catholics but people who claim to be Christians.

And so these are the dangers that we're living in, and a lot of this is culminating right now. When you look around, you've got the World Council of Churches. You have ECT, which was really a movement of the 80s, which is evangelicals and Catholics together. Just last year a few of us attended something up in DC called Together 2016, which was a movement 500, 000 people gathering on Washington Mall to celebrate what unites us and forget about the things that divide us, all headed up primarily by Catholicism. And it's as though Christians, like Esau, are willing to exchange their birthright for a bowl of soup.

We've taken the gospel and said, not all that important, but let's race together for unity. This is the current climate of the times and so one of the major results of all of this is that to even hint that Roman Catholicism is not indeed Christianity will earn you if not strange glances something even more Sinister some sort of a darker response from people. What do you mean? Catholicism is not Christianity. I thought it was just another denomination Within Christianity how dare you say who determines all these types of questions and you're put on the defensive for defending biblical doctrine.

One of the things that came out of ECT or Evangelical and Christian together or Catholics together was that Catholics and evangelicals should not proselytize was the word. In other words, Catholics should never try to evangelize evangelicals and evangelicals should not try to preach the gospel to Catholics. And that seems to be another major effect of all of this as well. And so they've conceded so much ground. And so just in wrapping up, one of the things we want to consider, especially for young men and those that are gathered here today, all of us really, is what you don't want to do is be a Christian like the majority of Catholics are Catholic.

What do I mean by that? It simply means that someone can be a Catholic just like an Italian is Italian. They simply inherited it from their parents And if anyone is sitting here today that's not born again, you don't sit in any better position than a man who's bowing down and praying to so-and-so or worshipping Mary. It's really no different. And what I mean is that search your heart to find out have I been born again?

Am I walking with Christ? Because if you're not born again when temptation arises what you will do is you will crumple like an empty pop can. You won't survive when there's any temptations. The other thing we want to do also though in light of what I just said is learn to distinguish and what I mean by that is when you're witnessing to people don't assume that a Catholic understands all these things. I was a Catholic for 20 years I'd never even broke the binding of a Bible till I was 20.

I wouldn't know what half the stuff I just said was, even though I would claim to be a Christian or a Catholic. I didn't know what the Eucharist was or all these other things. And so what I'm saying is that you don't want to just assume that, right? Just like Jesus Christ, you could see how when he met with Nicodemus in chapter 3 of John he dealt with the woman at the well in chapter 4 totally differently and so just learn to distinguish am I dealing with Nicodemus a doctor of the law a real hard hard-nosed hardcore Catholic or am I dealing with someone who's just a cultural Catholic? And let that determine how you're gonna speak, because most Catholics have never ever heard the gospel.

Be aware of that. And if so, avoid talking about topics like transubstantiation, right, or Mariology, and all these other types of things that's going to get you into just rabbit trails, but really focus on things like what is repentance? What does it mean to be born again? Who is Jesus Christ? What did he come to accomplish?

Those types of things. So you need to know your doctrine. And then the last thing I would just say is this, is that as we come to the eve of the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, recognize that the Reformation is not even, It's not really ever over, is it? That we're still fighting for the faith or contending for the faith which was once delivered to the saints. And so just as repentance is not a one-time thing nor is the Reformation.

And So the need to resist the the winds of compromise are ever-present and we need to know the God in whom we believe We need to know his word and then as someone said previously we need to go out and proclaim The word of God to those our Catholic neighbors friends relatives co-workers, but speak the words of Jesus Christ that they might be saved. Let's pray. Father, we do thank you, Father, for enlightening us and pulling us out of the the mire and the muck of false religion, many of us, oh God, from different walks. And we thank you for your grace. Thank you for justifying us, for making us whole in your sight.

Father, we do pray that you would open up a way for us to be able to speak to our neighbors and friends, coworkers, family, on the power that is in Jesus Christ, the good news of the gospel. May none of us be ashamed of it Lord, but stand upon it and glorify you in all that we say. Lord we do thank you and pray that you would be with us this night in Christ's name, Amen.