Vlad Savchuk’s 10 Catholic Distortions REBUTTED

Joe responds to Pastor Vlad Savchuk and his video Catholics vs Christianity.

Transcript:

Joe:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and today I want to respond to a series of arguments against Catholicism made by the popular Evangelical pastor, VLA de Savchuk. And full disclosure, I’m not particularly familiar with him. I’ve seen a few clips of him, but it turns out he’s massively popular on YouTube, so I’m going to try to be as fair as I can to him. It’s clear that we run in kind of different spaces. His blog is mostly focused on, as far as I can tell, spiritual warfare, demonic attack and possession. And similarly, like when you look up blood Uckk interview, which I often do to make sure I’m pronouncing people’s names right, I’ll try to find an interview where somebody else introduces him. His top result is an alleged interview with Lucifer. So this is the kind of stuff that he often does.

But on Monday somebody asked me to respond to a video that he made called Catholicism verse Christianity, and in it he lays out 10 arguments for why he’s not Catholic. And I thought I would go ahead and respond to all 10 of those arguments. But before I get to those 10, I want to just question the whole frame of putting in this as Catholicism versus Christianity rather than Catholicism verse Protestantism. And I think Pastor Vlad, as he’s called, knows better because he grew up in Ukraine where there are plenty of people who are neither Catholic nor Protestant, but would still be considered Christian. So the first kind of foundational question is are Protestants the only Christians and he is going to say No, Catholics and Orthodox are Christians, and then spend the rest of the video denying that. So here you can see his argument where he claims that most Christians are Catholic.

CLIP:

Why am I not a Catholic? 10 differences between Catholics and Christians, Christianity has about 2.2 billion people under its umbrella. Out of which 1.3 billion of people are Catholics, 900 million are Protestants and 220 million are Greek Orthodox.

Joe:

If you do that math, you’ll see that of the 2.2 billion Christians on earth, he says 1.3 billion of 59% are Catholics, 220 million are Orthodox. He says Greek Orthodox, I think he means all Orthodox and 900 million. So like 41% are Protestant. Now there’s a few problems with that. Number one, that adds up to 110% or 2.4 billion people out of 2.2 billion. So the math is basically the first error we have is him just trying to introduce the idea of how many different types of Christians there are. Nevertheless, let’s give credit where it’s due. Most Christians are either Catholic or Orthodox. They’re just disputing data as to whether it’s slightly more or slightly less than 50% of the world’s Christians are Catholic alone. So if you put all of the Protestants, all of the so-called independent, so like Pentecostals and non-denominational, those who don’t claim to be Protestant and all the Orthodox together of all the different kinds, not just Greek, you would roughly have the number of Catholics that there are.

And so it’s totally legitimate to say, okay, I’m coming from this tradition or this background and this is the form of Christianity I’m used to. What’s the difference between Catholicism and the brand of evangelical Protestantism that I’ve got? That’d be a completely legitimate question like asking what’s the difference between a dog and a pig because these adorable dogs don’t seem to know, but instead he presents this not what’s the difference between a dog and a pig, but what’s the difference between a dog and an animal and spends the entire time acting as if dogs aren’t animals or in this case acting as if Catholics aren’t Christians. Now I realize English isn’t his first language and I was ready to kind of cut him slack and say maybe he doesn’t mean it kind of in the way that it sounds. In one of the first clips that I saw of him, he refers to John Pope 23rd instead of Pope John the 23rd. So that kind of stuff. I’ve worked in other languages before and I’m much worse at every other language I’ve ever tried speaking than he is at English. So I wanted to cut him a lot of slack, but it seems to be intentional because he avoids saying Protestant and will correct it to Disse Christian to try to suggest that Catholics and seemingly by extension Orthodox don’t get count as true Christians.

CLIP:

Now in the rest of this video, I’m going to share these things that we differ with the Catholic church as Protestants and as Christians.

Joe:

What makes this more notable as kind of a misleading frame is that the form of Christianity that he’s representing isn’t faithful to historic Christianity. It’s not faithful to what the Christians of the first 1500 years believed, but it’s not even faithful to most of Protestantism. So I’m drawing this chart particularly from Wikipedia just to give a very brief sketch of an example. It highlights eight different major branches of Christianity, if you want to put it that way. You’ve got Anabaptist Anglicans reform, Protestants, Lutherans, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and then the ass Syrian Church of the East sometimes called the Chaldeans or the historians. And if you follow his argument, he’s going to hold positions that everybody except maybe Anabaptist rejects, but he’s just going to claim that the position he has, which is kind of vaguely an offshoot of an baptism is the Christian position.

And I think it’s worth highlighting this as a dishonest and misleading move because what he’s really saying is should we reject historic Christianity? But if he puts it that way, well that sounds like an insane and radical project. So he masks it by saying, oh, this is just the Christian position what everybody else believed for 2000 years, that’s a Catholic one or the Orthodox one or fill in the blank. And so doing, as I say, he presents these claims as the Christian position that aren’t just ones that Catholics and Orthodox would disagree with, but ones that Protestants would typically disagree with as well. So for instance, he’s going to claim that no Protestants believe the Eucharist is anything more than a symbol which is outrageously untrue.

CLIP:

Actually only one third of Catholics according to pure research believe that the elements bread and wine become literally the blood and the body of Jesus Christ. Majority of Catholics, 69% of them believe that it’s symbolic and that’s what most of the Protestants or all of the Protestants believe as well

Joe:

Contrast his claim there with Martin Luther’s claim in the large catechism that the sacrament of the altar meaning the Eucharist is the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. Now look, it’s true. The Lutheran conception of how Christ becomes bodily present in the Eucharist differs somewhat from the Catholic conception, but it is utterly false to say that no Protestant believes that the Eucharist is more than a symbol that’s simply not true. Or to take a more radical claim, here he is arguing, Hey, Catholics believe that the sacraments like baptism save, and this is why Martin Luther had to come along to correct that error.

CLIP:

These seven sacraments are not result of your salvation. They are necessary to your salvation. Starting from the first one, what baptism all the way to the last rite as Christians, we believe in Ephesians chapter two verse eight and nine, these are the words spoken by Apostle Paul that we are saved by grace alone. It’s one of the biggest differences between the Catholic faith and the Christian faith. It’s what Martin Luther argued, it’s what he presented as abuse in the Catholic church is that there was Jesus plus good works.

Joe:

What makes that claim so striking is that Martin Luther spends a great deal of time arguing that baptism does in fact save. So again from Martin Luther’s large catechism, he refers to how baptism saves us in what he calls the saving divine water. And then he gets sent to his theology of how that works and he cites two scripture for support from Mark 1616 that he who believes in his baptized will be saved at a time when Protestants accepted that verse as being part of the Bible. And then he goes on to pose a question, what if someone would say as Pastor Vlad does that? Because as a Lutheran Luther believes faith alone saves? How can he also believes that baptism saves? He poses a question like this. He says, what if they say as they’re accustomed to saying, still baptism is itself a work and you say works are of no avail for salvation, what then becomes a faith?

Well, Luther responds to this by saying, yes, our works indeed avail nothing for salvation. We can’t do anything of our own baptism. Hover is not our work, but God’s Luther believes the exact opposite of what Pastor Vlad claims. Luther believes about the relationship of baptism and salvation by faith apart from works. It’s simply right there in plain language. The guy who coins the concept of sofie does not believe that. It excludes a belief that baptism saves and then he goes on to say God’s works are saving and necessary for salvation and do not exclude but demand faith. So you can’t pit faith or grace against the sacraments or you’ve just completely misunderstood what the sacraments are. You’ve turned the sacraments into things that we do for God rather than things God does for us, and this is going to be a recurring problem throughout his entire argument.

Beneath that, there’s a related problem which is that his theology of grace is completely a historic, it’s not something that early Christians believed in. It’s not something that the Catholic church or the Orthodox church or historic Protestants believed in is such a radical misunderstanding of grace that it pits God’s grace against every sort of human activity, which logically doesn’t just undermine the role of something like good works. It doesn’t just undermine the sacraments taking to its logical limit. It even undermines the role of faith or prayer as I think we’re going to see pretty clearly. So to start with, what do we mean by grace Biblically? Because we hear this term thrown around and I think it’s worth actually giving it a little bit of a definition because you hear these lines like in Ephesians two, St. Paul says, for it’s by grace, you’ve been saved through faith and this is not your doing.

It is the gift of God. Now, two things to notice here. One, whatever grace is, it’s a gift of God and it turns out it’s actually a really good definition of grace. But second, it is something that we still access in some way and one of the ways we access it is through faith. Now, this is going to suggest that even though it’s not because of works, and we’re going to get into what that means and what it doesn’t mean in a little bit here, there’s still something going on, this thing we are doing, believing, having faith that is in some way related to how we connect with grace. So what is grace? Well, the Greek there is just car. It’s where words like charisma or charismatic gifts come from and it means favor or gift or thanks. So it’s God’s good pleasure, basically it’s his favor and his favors, and so as the catechism puts it, our justification comes from the grace of God.

Grace is favor the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become children of God, adoptive sons, partakers of the divine nature and of eternal life. So God aids us on the journey by giving us these gifts that we don’t deserve this free and undeserved help. That’s what grace is in a nutshell. Now, you might notice you understand it in that way. Well, there’s not just one type of divine assistance, one type of divine help, and so you’re going to have different types of graces that sounds legalistic to people, but it’s not. I mean, we talk about the charismatic gifts. Well, charisma is coming from this same root word, so the different gifts God gives people, all of those, whatever, those are the different gifts of the spirit. Those are all different graces. They’re gifts, they’re favors from God.

So as the catechism Islam to say grace is first and foremost the gift of the spirit who justifies and sanctifies us, but it also includes the other gifts that the spirit gives us to associate with his work. When God empowers you through the Holy Spirit to do X, the gift he’s given you is a grace quite literally. In that same context, then we can talk about the sacraments and sacramental graces. In other words, in the sacraments, these are gifts that God has given us, things like baptism and the Eucharist, the forgiveness of our sins, anointing of the sick. These things are places where we find the mercy of God, the favor of God, the grace of God. This is not something we’re generating like oh, if we just say the right words, we’re going to magically create the grace of God. No, but God promises to meet us in certain places.

Just as in the Old Testament, people would go to the temple in Jerusalem because they knew they could see God there. They could meet God there not see him literally, but they could encounter God there. That didn’t mean they were creating him there. It just means that they trusted God’s promise to show up when and where he said he was going to show up. Well, when he promises things like baptism or the Eucharist, we show up because we know he’s going to show up. That’s not works in the sense that St. Paul talks about. So what does he mean then when St. Paul says that this is by grace through faith, not because of works lest any man should boast? Well, there’s two ways of understanding that. First and foremost, St. Paul has in view the works of the Mosaic law. This idea that observing the Mosaic law would be enough to save you.

So if you look at Paul’s discussion of faith and works, he almost always mentions that both Jews and Gentiles can be saved. Now that clarification makes no sense if you don’t understand the context of what he’s talking about when he mentions works because the idea was, well the Gentiles, I mean because clearly, look, Gentiles can do nice things if works means human effort or human activity or nice deeds or good works in that sense, Gentiles could do that and even the most bigoted Jew in the first century would’ve known a Gentile can do those things. What they didn’t do was observe the Mosaic law like keeping kosher and circumcision and all of that. And so the claim at the time was that you had to follow the mosaic law to be saved, but this wasn’t a question of how much is human activity involved. This is a question of are we saved by the old covenant or by the new covenant because Christ doesn’t tell us we have to holding onto the old covenant and he said instead he’s fulfilling it and giving us a new covenant.

That’s the actual fight going on here and the relationship of faith and works. Do we trust God that he’s creating a new covenant or do we try to legalistically hold on to the old covenant? But the way to misunderstand it is as Pastor Vlad does that any kind of human activity is a work that’s not allowed to play any kind of role in salvation. And I understand where people get that from misreading the word works on its own without any kind of framework theologically for what’s going on. But notice what happens. It’s going to pit grace really against faith, but certainly against things like prayer. And so he’s going to argue that the church doesn’t have a role in salvation, but neither do things like prayer.

CLIP:

You cannot be saved by participating in rituals at your church. You can only be saved by the grace through faith in Jesus Christ. Prayers don’t save you. Baptism doesn’t save you. Taking holy communion cannot save you.

Joe:

Now, it should be striking to anyone who’s familiar with the Bible is how much Pastor Vlad’s declaration stands in opposition to the plain language of scripture. To give just one example, I just did a debate on this, you can go watch a much longer debate over on the channel apologetic dog getting into this question of baptism at much greater length. But first Peter three, to give just one of many, many examples on this subject, St. Peter talks about how in the time of Noah, eight people, Noah’s family were saved through water and according to him this prefigures baptism which now saves you. So Pastor Vlad says, baptism doesn’t save you, St. Peter says it does. How do we make sense of this? Because Pastor Vlad thinks something like the sacraments would be works. Now, St. Paul says it’s not St. Paul is actually quite clear in Titus three that we are saved by the mercy of God, not because of deeds done by us in righteousness.

So not just your mosaic law kind of works, but not even your good works have earned you justification. Instead, it’s by the virtue of the mercy of God and by the washing of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit. What is the washing of regeneration biblically it’s baptism, the washing of rebirth being born again of water and the spirit, and this is how this passage was universally understood by the earliest Christians who spoke the language and knew the apostles. So quite clearly baptism is not a work to the early Christians. It is a work to evangelicals like Pastor Vlad. And so we have a problem because it puts him in this weird place of saying baptism can’t save you, the Eucharist can’t save you, but neither can prayer that you’re to be saved by grace through faith, but that faith can’t take the form of prayer and that leads to this very odd moment where he then invites us to pray a sinner’s prayer, which by the way, a completely manmade Protestant tradition, but fine, he invites us to pray a sinner’s prayer but has to caveat that he doesn’t think it does anything.

CLIP:

If you’re watching this and you are ready to place your trust in Jesus Christ as your Lord and as your Savior, not in your pope priest tradition culture or church, but in Jesus, pray this prayer with me. Now, I’m going to tell you right away, sinner’s prayer cannot save you any more than any sacrament you will do in the Catholic church, but sinners do pray and God hears them and he answers that prayer, and all you got to do is acknowledge that you are a sinner, acknowledge that you need saving and ask Jesus to do that for you.

Joe:

So Pastor Vlad’s theology forces him to try to affirm two contradictory things. One at the same time he’s trying to say yes, God really does answer prayer, and so if you pray for salvation, God is good and he’ll hear you, but at the same time he has to also say, because his theology says, well, prayer is a work and works can’t do anything, that prayer can’t do anything in fighting prayer against faith and grace. It just shows how profoundly he’s misunderstanding these themes. It’d be like saying, oh, well the medicine can’t do anything because the doctor saved you. Well, how did the doctor save you? He saved you through the medicine. Well, likewise, how does God save you? There’s several ways you could answer that. You could say through Jesus, through the cross, through faith, through grace, and through things like baptism, and none of those are opposed to any other ones because they’re describing different parts of the salvation process.

So the idea it has to be a hundred percent one of those and none of the others is a completely forced. You’re forcing yourself into an unnecessary contradiction that is completely unbiblical based entirely on just not understanding what the Bible means by terms like faith and what it means by grace and what it means by works. If you’ve got those definitions clear, this whole problem goes away. When we pray and God is merciful to us, we have not earned the result of our prayer, but our prayer has still done something. If it doesn’t, then don’t pray. If you think prayer doesn’t do anything, then don’t do it. If you think it’s worthless to pray, which is what it means to say it doesn’t do anything, then don’t pray but don’t tell people you need to pray the sinner’s prayer, but also the sinner’s prayer won’t do anything for you because the only thing the sinner’s prayer is meant to do is veil upon the mercy of God to be saved.

And so if it doesn’t do that, what are you doing? Okay, so that is far and away the underlying background heresy that is leading him to so many of the things he gets wrong about the relationship between Catholicism and the fringe kind of Protestantism that he calls Christianity. But let’s address each of the 10 arguments that he makes in turn. Now, I want to be very clear at the outset here, I say outset like 20 minutes in, he’s going to give 10 different arguments. This is a scattershot sort of approach. He doesn’t spell out like theologically doesn’t make much of a case. He just says, oh yeah, this is a thing that we view differently. This is a thing we view differently. And so it’s going to be a little unsatisfying perhaps because I can’t go as much into depth on any one of those as I would like, and there may be some things that he says, I don’t mention everything. I’m going to try to make sure I get the crux of all of the arguments that he makes and if I’ve missed anything, I apologize. There’s just too much there and it’s too kind of thematically unrelated to answer in a coherent sort of way without this being unbearably long. So with that said, the first of his arguments is that we should recognize that only the Bible is the word of God, and here’s the argument in his own words,

CLIP:

The Bible is the word of God. The Bible contains the truth about God and the Bible doesn’t need to have things added to it. In fact, Jesus said that because of your tradition, you have made the word of God of no effect.

Joe:

So if by saying don’t add anything to the Bible, he means don’t make up your own book and add it to the Bible. Sure, Catholics and Protestants agree on that. We’re not just writing some papal and cyclical and saying this is in the Bible now, but if instead he means something like Christians are not allowed to believe any teachings not explicitly written in the Bible, where is that teaching explicitly written in the Bible? It seems like he’s doing the very thing he criticizes seems extremely self-refuting, but moreover, the thing that he’s criticizing tradition, once again, it’s good to know biblically what is this? Because it makes no sense to just complain about tradition any more than it makes sense to complain about writings. There are good and bad traditions. There are God-given traditions and there are man-made traditions. The word there is just posis, and it’s true.

You can have manmade traditions like this idea of Pastor Vlad has that only things found in the Bible are allowed to be teachings we hold to, but there’s also traditions given to us by God and we’re told that we need to hold onto As St. Paul puts in two Thessalonians two 15, the traditions which taught to us whether they were by word of mouth or by letter. Now what’s tradition by letter? Well, it’s the Bible and what’s tradition by word of mouth, it’s everything else. It’s still authentically the word of God but has been passed on orally. Remember at the time the New Testament is being written, the New Testament doesn’t exist yet, but definitionally, right? And so Christians were expected to follow things that were not found in the Bible yet calyx and Protestants have to agree on that, and so then you have to either say, okay, well second Thessalonians two 15 is scripture and there’s literally no verse that says everything got written down eventually, and so I’m going to hold those things which are passed on whether by word of mouth or by epistle because that’s what the Bible says to do.

Or you can just take Pastor Vlad’s approach and say, two Thessalonians two 15 no longer applies. Now we only go with scripture alone. There’s no Bible verse for this. It is a completely man-made tradition that’s literally nullifying two Thessalonians two 15 and then just label that position based on your tradition of men as the Christian tradition or the Christian position, but I think that is pretty self refuting. Okay, so Pastor Vlad goes on to say that the Holy Spirit and not the church guides us into the truth. This is how he can defend these manmade traditions he’s arguing for

CLIP:

And Jesus promises to us the Holy Spirit who will help us to understand the truth and who will lead us into all the truth. Jesus doesn’t tell us that I will send you the church and the church will be the one to lead you into truth.

Joe:

It’s true. He doesn’t technically use the phrase, I’m going to give you the church and the church will lead you into old truth, but he does promise to give us the church in Matthew 16 and then in one Timothy three, St. Paul refers to this church as the pillar and bulwark of truth, but it makes no more sense to pit the Holy Spirit against the church than it does to pit grace against baptism. This is a completely forced kind of tension. Now, pastor Vlad is right that at the Last Supper Jesus tells the apostles, not all believers, but the leaders particularly that the spirit of truth when he comes, he will guide you and it’s you plural there and to all the truth. So the question we should be asking is He’s going to guide whom into old truth. Jesus only spoke these words to the 12.

Does that mean that he really meant the writers of the New Testament, some of whom were apostles and some weren’t? It’s about 50 50. Does it mean that he means this for all individual believers? So you and I can each pick up a Bible and we’re going to be led into all truth. We’re going to know everything correctly. We’re never going to disagree with each other because the Holy Spirit is guiding both of us into all the truth. Doesn’t mean that or is it instead talking about guiding the church guided by its leaders, by the ministers put in place by God into all the truth. Because if it’s that one, then you can see how crazy it is to take this passage of promising the church will be guided into all truth, not me individually and to say therefore I don’t need the church. I can just come to all truth through the Holy Spirit by myself.

So if you actually pay attention to what the promise is in John 16, it’s not a promise that every individual Christian is going to be infallible. It just is not if anyone has promised infallibility, which seems to be part of what all the truth would entail, you can’t say you have all the truth if you have error. This infallibility is not being promised to me, it’s being promised to the church and in a particular way to the leaders of the church in some way. Now admittedly you might say, I don’t know how this is going to play out. There’s plenty of other passages that are going to help point to that, but we at least recognize this is not an anti-church passage. This is a pro church passage. Now, pastor VLA will say the church is important, but the church doesn’t have any authority to interpret the Bible, which is a wild claim I’m going to. Here he is making the claim himself.

CLIP:

Every Christian is part of the body. Christian is a member, but it’s not the church that intrepids the Bible. It’s the Holy Spirit.

Joe:

First of all, if you don’t think that the church has a role in interpreting the Bible, then quit your job. Don’t pretend to be a pastor if you don’t have an authority to interpret the Bible. Now, second, this opposition between the Holy Spirit and the church is so patently unbiblical. I think I only need to look to one place to show that in Acts chapter eight, an angel prompts Philip to go down to Samaria, and there he encounters an Ethiopian euch who’s reading the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and the Holy Spirit does not internally enlighten this man. Instead, the Holy Spirit said to Philip, go up and join this chariot. So the Holy Spirit is guiding but not within the man who’s reading Isaiah the Holy Spirit instead is inspiring Philip to go up and talk to him. Philip then says, do you understand what you were reading?

And the man does not say, of course I do. The Holy Spirit promised each and every one of us that we’d be led into all truth. He says the opposite. He says, how can I? That is how can I understand what I’m reading unless someone guides me? So notice there the biblical answer is the church does have a role because the Holy Spirit is leading the church to have this role. We’re going to see this even more when we get to Acts chapter 15, where one of the roles that the church has is to settle disputes about the meaning of the Bible, disputes about the meaning of the Christian message, and the Holy Spirit leads the church in such a way that biblically the church can speak with the authority of God, with the authority of the Holy Spirit to settle doctrinal disputes. We’re going to see that very clearly in Acts 15, but so much for the first argument then that we don’t need the church because the Holy Spirit is going to individually guide us into all the truth that’s clearly unbiblical clearly wrong. What about argument two? He claims there are a bunch of true churches that Christians believe that there’s not one church, one Lord, one baptism, that they instead believe there are a bunch of true churches even though these true churches disagree with each other on doctrine,

CLIP:

Christians believe that there are many true churches under the Lordship of Jesus and the Holy Bible, whereas Catholics believe in one true worldwide church under the leadership of the Pope.

Joe:

Now, hopefully Pastor Vlad considers St. Paul a true Christian, but Paul doesn’t meet his criterion of a true Christian because Pastor Vlad claims a true Christian has to believe that there’s a bunch of different churches that are all true churches, and Paul believes the opposite. He says that we many are all one body and by one spirit we were all baptized into one body. So through baptism we enter one body, which is one of the ways he refers to the church in Ephesians four. He says, there’s one body in one spirit just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism. So there aren’t a bunch of different creeds being professed by different denominations teaching different things. In all equally true that can’t logically be true and it’s completely unbiblical. Now he’s going to claim all the true churches agree on what the core doctrines are.

I’ve done multiple videos on this before that Protestants don’t agree with one another even about which doctrines are the core doctrines. Not only do they not agree on core doctrines, they don’t even agree on which things are and are not core doctrines. So this is just not true, but the idea that there’s more than one true visible church is completely unbiblical, not just unbiblical in the sense that it’s not taught in the Bible, but specifically we’re told there’s one church in the Bible. Jesus clearly founds a visible community of people and he calls it a church. It’s not an invisible group. It has leadership. It has the apostles, and at the last supper, which remember he’s there with the 12, he prays for those that they may be one even as we are one meaning he and the Father, then he turns and prays for us, those of us who will believe in the future through what the apostles preach, that you and me and what is his one prayer for us, that we will be one even as he in the Father are one, so that the world can believe that the Father sent him.

In other words, when Christians are going around preaching heretical doctrines and they’re disagreeing with each other and doing all this stuff, it really does serious damage to the body of Christ and it does serious damage to the proclamation of the gospel. When you have people making these wildly misinformed videos like Catholicism verse Christianity for instance, that is not helping the proclamation of the gospel, biblically speaking, it’s not you’re tearing up the body of Christ. This is the kind of thing in Galatians five, the St. Paul lists the sin of the flesh that those who do it won’t inherit the kingdom of God because the church is one. And so when you work against that oneness, you’re not just disobeying Christ’s direct prayer, you’re also according to Jesus, undermining the proclamation of the gospel. So no biblically Christians don’t believe there are a bunch of true churches.

Many Protestants have made peace with the fact there are a bunch of true churches in their view because they clearly don’t have one denomination, but there’s no biblical support when you read acts you don’t have take just a really obvious example. Paul and James have followers at least who don’t get along, and there are those people who come down from the party of James who are fighting with Paul. I don’t think any of us would doubt that if Paul and James were Protestant, they would’ve just formed their own denomination a long time ago. They would’ve done separate churches and done their own thing, but they’re not Protestant and they don’t do that. In fact, nobody does that. Nobody thinks they can just break away from the visible church in acts of the apostles. There’s clearly one visible true church. There’s no question about it. And in fact, this is what Jesus came to do, and he tells us that explicitly in John chapter 10.

In John 10, he says, I have other sheep that are not of this fold, meaning those who aren’t just the Jewish believers, but non-Jewish believers like Samaritans and Gentiles, I must bring them also and they will heed my voice. So there shall be one flock, one shepherd that cannot just mean one invisible flock, if that’s what he meant. He already has it that there are invisibly believers all over the place. Fine done. He’s talking about gathering together the faithful into a visible body, a flock with a shepherd. And then he, well, actually this is right before that. In the same chapter, he describes himself as the sheep gates door. He’s the door of the sheep and he says, if anyone enters by me, he’ll be saved and he will go in and out and find pasture. And he contrast this with thieves and Roberts who try to lead the flock without having been called by Christ without having come in by the door.

They just decide on their own initiative that they feel qualified to lead, and he refers to them as thieves and robbers, and he says, truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheep fold by the door but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber. In contrast, he says, he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. Now, in one sense, the shepherd is of course grace. He’s the good shepherd, and in another sense, he’s talking about entrusting the flock to someone who will come in by the sheep gate, and who is that someone? Well, you don’t have to look very far in the New Testament to find the answer to that. It’s right here in the gospel of John because in John 21, Jesus entrusts Peter with the care of the entire flock.

He says, Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these meaning the other apostles? And then he says, feed my lambs, and then he tells him to tend my sheep. Now, there’s nowhere else in the Bible where the entire flock is entrusted to the care of one man. So Pastor VLA is going to try to pit the leadership of Peter against the leadership of Christ, the leadership of the Pope against the leadership of Christ. This is again, quite unbiblical. So I would say there’s very clearly one flock biblically, we see it in Acts lived out. We see it prophesied as part of Jesus’s mission to gather the lost tribes together and to gather the faithful wherever they may be into one body. We see it proclaimed by St. Paul, and this is absolutely the biblical teaching. We want to juxtapose this then, as I said, with those who are thieves and robbers who’ve come in by another way, what does that look like?

Concretely, biblically in Acts 15, some people came down. Now I want to be clear. They don’t even go as far as Protestants do in forming a separate denomination. They remain part of the visible church, but they went out without authority, and so they went out and start preaching this heretical doctrine. Now, they’re not preaching heresy on purpose. They’re clearly preaching what they understand Jesus’s message to be, what they understand the Bible to teach. There’s these Old Testament passages that talk about circumcision as a perpetual covenant. So okay, that must mean it’s still ongoing from a scripture alone perspective, completely understand where they’re coming from, but they don’t have the authorization of the church. And so the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, criticizes them sharply saying that they went out without authority. Although we gave them no instructions, they went down and troubled your mind.

And you compare that with, for instance in Romans 10 where St. Paul says, how can men preach unless they’re sent? If you think you can preach just because you are called to it and at the age of 16 like Pastor Vlad, you just start becoming a preacher. That is absolutely not how this works in terms of Christianity. That’s how a thief or a robber works. You just decide, oh, yeah, I think I can lead these sheep i’s not how it works. It works because you’re either called directly by Jesus Christ as St. Peter was or you’re called through the church as Acts 15 talks about. If it’s not one of those two things, and Pastor Vlad wasn’t called by either the Catholic church or directly by Jesus. And one of the ways you know that is those called directly by Jesus invariably can produce miracles to prove it, then you’re a sheep thief. You’re a robber.

In contrast to this, as I said in Acts 15, the one visible church speaks with the authority of the Holy Spirit. It corrects the error of those who’d gone out without authority. And it says in response, what seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us, meaning the church, the leadership of the church should the apostles and the elders, and notably they’re instructing on a thing where there is no explicit biblical instruction. And the question is, what parts of the Levitical law should new believers continue to hold onto with the authority of the Holy Spirit? There’s settling this question that doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen in Protestantism. There is no body in Protestantism that has the authority to gather all the different denominations of Protestantism together and speak on behalf of the Holy Spirit and settle all the doctrinal disputes. If there was such a thing, it would’ve happened.

It would’ve said, Hey, we’ve been fighting about Methodism and Lutheranism and Calvinism and anti baptism and fill in the blank for centuries. Let’s just call a council and we’ll settle the whole thing. But they can’t do that because there is no one capable of determining what the core doctrines are because they don’t have the one church church capable of doing that. But that exists biblically in the New Testament. You find that church in Protestantism, you don’t okay so much for the second argument, argument three. This is a kind of long and convoluted argument about Matthew 16, but it’s standard fair in some ways. The idea, oh, in Matthew 16, when Jesus says to Peter, you were Peter, which means rock, and on this rock I build my church that it must not mean that there’s a lot of common confusions and misrepresentations about the passage, and Pastor Vlad repeats several of them and introduces one I’d actually never heard before.

So first I want to give just a brief, why would we think this passage is about Peter? Well, partly parallelism, if you look at the context in Matthew 16, Simon has just confessed Jesus’ identity as the Christ, his identity in his role. Jesus then responds by declaring Simon’s identity and his role, namely as the rock. And so just as he goes from calling Jesus to Christ, Jesus goes from calling Simon Peter. There’s a very neat parallelism. It’s hard to miss. But then Jesus also mentions 10 times in the span of three verses that he’s talking about Peter specifically. Now that might sound like an exaggeration, so if you’ll bear with me, let’s just look at the 10 times that Jesus specifies. He’s talking about Simon Peter and not somebody else or something else. Beginning in verse 17, he says, blessed are you, you singular. Then he says, Simon Barona.

So okay, that first you was about Simon. Then if that wasn’t clear enough, he called him by name. Third, he says, flesh and blood has not revealed this to you. To whom? Well, you singular again, Simon, my father in heaven. I tell you, this is the fourth one. Okay, tell who Peter, you. Oh, there it is again. Who? Peter, you are Peter. Okay, so now you just see over and over and over again. He’s just saying, I’m talking to you. I’m talking about you specifically individually, Simon Peter and on this rock. Now we’re to believe that after having just said you, Simon Peter or Simon Barona you, you Peter. Now when he says this rock, he suddenly switches the reference. So just pause on that because then allegedly he switches right back on this rock. I’ll build my church and the gates of Haiti shall not prevail against it, and I will give you who’s he talking about?

Well, still talking to Peter, I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven and over you Peter, bind on earth shall be bound in heaven whenever you peter loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. This is so excessively obvious that 10 times he’s addressing Peter explicitly personally, directly and individually that as DA Carson puts it, if it were not for Protestant reactions against extreme Roman Catholic interpretation, it is doubtful whether many would’ve taken rock to be anything or anyone besides Peter. If you’re not worried about this being a papal passage and you just say objectively what does it appear? Jesus is saying, well, it appears that he just called this guy rock and then said Upon this rock, build my church. That seems to be about him. So you might say, okay, and DA Carson, by the way, is like a Protestant.

This is not some Catholic saying that, and there’s plenty of Protestant scholars who say that as well. Now, I admit there are people on both the Catholic and the Protestant side who’ve read this passage differently. I don’t mean to deny that, and in fact you can read it as about Peter’s faith and about Christ and all of that, and you can still believe everything the Catholic church believes. But I think there’s a very clear reason why so many people believe the passage is about Peter because it certainly looks like it’s about Peter. So what is Pastor Vlad going to say in response?

CLIP:

Now in Greek, Peter’s name is Petros, which means stone. But when Jesus said, on this rock I will build my church, he used a different Greek word, Petra, which was a collection of rocks knitted together to form larger slab,

Joe:

And this was the argument I never actually heard before. I’ve heard Protestants try to claim patros means like a pebble and patro means like a giant rock. That’s not true. You can actually read plenty of other Greek literature and see that’s not true, but I’d never heard anyone claim that Pat doesn’t mean a rock. It means a bunch of rocks hued together into a slap that’s just completely untrue. I mean, you can read the strongest concordance where Pat means like a rock, a cliff, or a ledge. So it doesn’t mean a bunch of rocks put together. He’s using that to try to say, oh, all of us are rocks and when we’re put together, we are the foundation of the church, or maybe our faith is, or maybe Jesus or anybody but Peter. But it’s not true. So for instance in Mark 1546, when Jesus is laid in a tomb, it’s hue out of a rock.

It’s the same word pat there. It doesn’t mean it’s hue out of a slab of tinier little rocks. That would be a very weird place to bury a body. No, it’s hue out of like a giant mass of rock. That’s what the word patriot means. In any case, whether you go with Ros’s Pebble, it’s not if you want to say pebble, you say lithos. If you want to say petros, petros like a Greek word play meaning small rock, big rock or I guess small rock, bunch of rocks macro made together into a slab that’s just all untrue. It presupposes for one thing that Jesus is making a Greek wordplay in Matthew 16, and we know for a fact he’s not. We can question in many cases what language was Jesus speaking when he said these words? We usually assume he’s speaking Aramaic, but that’s often hard to prove.

In this particular case, it’s not hard to prove because in John chapter one, verse 42 we’re told explicitly that the name that Jesus gives him isn’t originally Pats at all, but the Aramaic PHAs and pha or Fus just means rock. So it just says, you are cafa and on this cafa I will build my church. Now you might say, well, why then does it say pets and pet in the Greek if there’s not a word play going on? Very simply because the word pets was no longer used for rock in the first century. Lithos for a small rock, pet for a large rock, but Peter had already been known as pets long before the gospel of Matthew is written, and in fact, pet would’ve been a girl’s name. So it makes sense why he’s known as pets rather than pet. That’s the only reason. It’s a gender difference that you can’t say Petros Patros. You can’t say Petra as a translation of kfa kfa. This happens with some regularity where like a word play in one language doesn’t neatly carry over into another one. So here the word play, if you want to call it that, is you are cafa and on this cafa, I’ll build my church. You are rock and on this rock I’ll build my church. It’s really that easy. But nevertheless, pastor Vlad is going to say, no, actually the leader of the church wasn’t Peter, it was James.

CLIP:

First of all, it contradicts the Greek, but also it contradicts the writings and the church history because we see that actually James was the pastor in Jerusalem church and Peter was more of like an apostolic leader coming and establishing churches

Joe:

At a certain point, this just looks like kicking against the goat. You’re looking for any kind of reason you can, to not accept that Peter has this authority given to him by Christ, even though there’s so many passages that point to that authority. And I think there’s something genuinely tragic about that because it is really arguing against a massive weight of biblical evidence. I mean, to give you a few examples, and I’ve written an entire book, Pope Peter, if you want much more on this, Peter’s name is mentioned more than every other apostle, including all of the different guys named James put together more than all of them put together, and he’s described in a clear way that shows his leadership. To give one example in Acts chapter two on Pentecost, the 12 disciples are described this way. Peter’s standing up with the 11. Peter is not listed as just one of the 12.

He’s something more. He’s clearly not something less. He’s clearly one of the 12, but he’s got some additional authority that’s being signaled here. So if you say Buddy Holly and the crickets, I don’t need to ask which one’s the leader because you’ve already told me. So when you say Peter and the apostles, and that kind of phrasing appears several times, including on Easter morning, that tells us something about Peter’s unique role. But then Peter gets arrested and after he gets arrested, he comes back, he’s miraculously afraid, and then he tells the Christians, tell this to James and to the brethren. So now what has he done? He’s tapped James as his successor in Jerusalem while he departed and went to another place. This is Acts 1217. And so from that moment forward, we see James having this pride of place in Jerusalem, but he didn’t use erp Peter’s authority.

Peter laid the foundation of the church of Jerusalem, builds it up for the first 11 chapters, and then hands off the reigns to James, which is exactly the Catholic claim. We don’t claim Simon Peters of first Pope and he lived and died in Jerusalem the whole time. We clearly believe he went on to Antioch and then to Rome. That’s what the early Christians tell us. There’s plenty of evidence of that. And so saying, oh, well look, somebody else was running the show in Jerusalem after he left. Well, of course they were. That’s no argument against Peter’s authority, but okay, there’s one more claim he’s going to make against Peter’s authority that’s actually more outrageous because of just how blatantly false it is and the fact that he’s got to know most of the people watching this aren’t going to know that he’s not telling the truth here.

CLIP:

And so we don’t see that Peter appointed another guy to be his successor after he died, and it was embraced by the early church. It was until centuries later that this, or hundreds of years later, that this idea started to become more popular as Christianity gained political influence in the Roman Empire.

Joe:

Now, I don’t know if he’s lying, but he’s certainly not telling the truth because he’s claiming that this idea that Peter had successors wasn’t a thing believed in for centuries until after the Roman Empire, and that’s simply demonstrably untrue in the work against terraces. Saints of Leone in 180 discusses this at some length. He says, if you want to rebut heresy, you can look at the tradition and derive from the apostles and look particularly to the church built by the apostles, Peter and Paul at Rome, and he explains, you can then trace the succession of bishops from them. Peter and Paul build up the church, then entrusted to others, and then goes on down to in his day, Arius, why Rome? Why is he focused on Rome? When he tells you it’s a matter of necessity that every church should agree with this church on account of its preeminent authority.

And then he traces how they entrusted, they build up the church and then committed it to Linus in terms of the succession from Peter, well, from Peter and Paul, you have Linus, then you have Anus, Clement and so on. And then he ultimately says in this order, and by the succession, the ecclesiastical tradition from the apostles and the preaching of the truth have come down to us. This is not something he’s inventing in 180, he is documenting what the Christians of his day claimed and believed, and it matters. EU is not from Leon, he’s not even from Rome. He’s actually from Smyrna. One of the early hubs of Christianity, his bishop growing up was St. Paul Carp, who is a disciple of the Apostle John. So this guy, he’s that close in time to the apostles. He didn’t know them, but he knew people who did.

And he believes, oh yeah, Peter and Paul build up the Church of Rome, and there’s Episcopal succession from them what we would now call like papal succession. That’s not hundreds of years later. That’s not after the time of the Roman Empire. None of that stuff is true. And so his arguments against the papacy aren’t just ones where I disagree with his ex Jesus, but where he’s literally making false claims about the meaning of words or about the historical evidence. And you can see for yourself these claims aren’t true. Alright, onto the fourth argument, he says, well, there’s a priesthood of all believers and on this argument, yeah, we agree with him. Yeah, there’s a priesthood of all believers very clearly. This is Catholic church teaching.

CLIP:

Number four difference is Christians believe in the priesthood of all believers. Catholics believe in the sacrament of holy orders where bishops, priests and deacons receive a seal of God giving them sacramental authority overlay Catholic people.

Joe:

The catechism talks about the priesthood of all believers. In paragraph 1268 by baptism, we share in the priesthood of Christ says, and it goes on to say baptism gives a share in the common priesthood of all believers. So if you think that’s a takedown of Catholicism, and you could literally just quote the catechism, say, aha, what about the priesthood of all believers? And the Catholic church is like, yep, yeah, yeah, we believe in that. Maybe you haven’t found some important difference between Catholicism and the thing you’re calling Christianity. The real thing that’s happening here is like many Protestants, there’s this idea that if there’s a priesthood of all believers, therefore there must not be holy orders. And this is Pastor Vlad’s argument, and this argument is so demonstrably untrue that I think I can explain it pretty shortly here. The passage that he and everyone who makes this argument looks to is first Peter chapter two, verse nine, where St.

Peter reminds us, you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people. So all of us were chosen race a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people if we’ve been incorporated through baptism into the church. That’s true of all of us. And so the argument goes, aha. Well, therefore there must not be ordained priests. That conclusion pretty obviously doesn’t follow, but just in case that wasn’t clear, a lot of people don’t seem to realize that Peter is quoting from Exodus here. This is a near quotation, maybe a paraphrase of Exodus 19, where God says, now, therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my own possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests in a holy nation. So the proclamation of being a nation of priests and being called in that way, yeah, that’s something that was promised in the Old Testament.

Did that mean there were no Old Testament priests? Have you read the Old Testament? Of course there were. So it’s possible to both believe in a certain kind of priesthood of all believers and a special kind of priesthood of those in authority. Now, pastor Vlad is going to argue that there can’t be this kind of authority over the laity. What Bible is he reading? I don’t just mean Old Testament, I mean New Testament as well, because that’s not biblical. That might be like American. Nobody’s in charge of us, no kings, whatever. That’s not Christian. It’s not the kingdom of God at all. The kingdom of God has authority, not just Christ as king, but he’s given authority that he shares with the leaders of the church. And he says this at the Last Supper in Luke 22, when the disciples are arguing over greatness, he doesn’t deny leadership.

He says, let the greatest among you become is the youngest and the leader is one who serves. So there’s going to be a leader, and they’re going to have to be like Jesus, who’s among us as one who serves among them as one who serves. He goes on in the next verse to say to the 12, you are those who continued with me in my trials as my father appointed a kingdom for me. So do I appoint for you? So he’s sharing kingly authority, not with everybody, but with the 12, so that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones judging the 12 tribes of Israel. Then he singles out one of the 12 and tells him that he’s going to have the task of carrying even for the other 11, saying, Simon, Simon saying demanded to have you, that he might have you all like wheat, but I’ve prayed for you.

Now he switches from you plural to you singular, that your faith may not fail and when you’ve turned back again, strengthen your brethren. So all of the apostles are to serve and lead the people of God, the church, the laity, and Peter is called to serve and lead even the other apostles that doesn’t look like priesthood of all believers and therefore nobody else has any authority. It’s priesthood of all believers. And also there’s this other authority. Now we could get into the whole theology of priesthood as to what that looks like in terms of the Eucharist, but he doesn’t squarely focus on that. So I’m going to leave that aside, but I’ve addressed that elsewhere. He does talk about the Eucharist though that’s his fifth argument. He claims that Christians all just believe the Eucharist is a symbol. This is demonstrably, and I want to say emphatically untrue.

CLIP:

Number five, Christians believe that communion elements are symbolic, but capitalism teaches that once priest consecrates the elements of communion by saying, this is my body, then bread and wine become the body and the blood of Jesus Christ.

Joe:

Now to be perfectly clear, we believe that the elements are also symbolic, that they represent the body and blood of Christ in some way. But we also believe that when Jesus says, take eat, this is my body, that he actually means that, that he’s not just speaking metaphorically there, that even though the bread visually symbolizes his body, there’s a miraculous transformation whereby it becomes his body and that the God who can speak the universe into existence has the power to do that. Now you might say, well, why do we believe that? Well, well, one reason is he said it was, this is my body. Find another expression where he says this is X and he doesn’t mean that, but fine. You look to John six as well because there are times where he uses metaphorical language. And I would even argue in John six, we have an example of metaphorical language.

Jesus says, I’m the bread which came down from heaven. And so the Jews listening to him are trying to figure out what that means. And so Jesus responds by explaining what the metaphor means. He says, I’m the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my blank. What does he say there? He’s explaining what the metaphor means, that the metaphor of bread means something and he doesn’t say, it’s my teaching. He instead says, it’s my flesh. So if you’re a Protestant, you have to believe Jesus is speaking metaphorically when he says he’s the bread come down from heaven. And that when he explains that metaphor is a metaphor for his flesh, that he hasn’t actually given the right answer. The metaphor is a metaphor for his teaching or something else.

Or the metaphor of bread is a metaphor for flesh, which is itself a metaphor for something else. And the whole thing doesn’t make any sense. So if you interpret the fact that when Jesus uses a figure of speech and it confuses people, he explains it. He’s doing that here. He’s used this confusing expression by being the living bread come down from heaven and he doesn’t just mean I’ve come from heaven. That’s also true. But he means more than that. He’s comparing himself to the manna which came down from heaven was the sustenance of the world and that is his flesh. Now, this is how the early Christians understood him. I mentioned Polycarp earlier, one of the students of the Apostle John, another student of John’s, was Ignatius of Antioch and writing against the S, writing to the smy, excuse me, about heretical groups like Gnostics.

He warns that they abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our savior Jesus Christ. So you have these gnostics because they don’t believe Jesus really came in the flesh. They think that the Eucharist is just a symbol. And Ignatius writing in 1 0 7 probably condemns this in the strongest terms. He says you can’t have fellowship with them. But he also says that those who speak against this gift of God incurred death in the midst of their disputes. In other words, they spiritually die. This is mortal sin, but it were better for them to treat it with respect that they also might rise again. So he’s saying, if you deny this, you’re cutting yourself off from bodily resurrection. And you might say, that seems kind of strong. That seems kind of harsh. Where’s he getting that from?

Well, he’s getting from Jesus Christ and from the gospel of John Ignatius was a student of John’s. He knows about the gospel of John in John six. Jesus says, unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I’ll raise him up at the last day. So you should read Ignatius’s words through the lens of John and vice versa. John’s words through the lens of Ignatius that Ignatius knew what John taught and John knew what Jesus taught. So right there we see I think pretty clearly that there’s a reason Christians for 2000 years have believed Jesus’ words weren’t just a symbol. And so it’s grossly untrue to claim, oh, the Christians believe the thing that was actually the gnostic belief that it was just a symbol. While deriding the Christian belief as non-Christian, you’re playing a game with language there that is worth calling out because it’s just not true. Okay, argument number six, pastor Vlad thinks there are only two sacraments. And furthermore, as far as I can tell, he doesn’t think they do anything. Here’s how he explains it.

CLIP:

Number six, Christians have two sacraments. Catholics have seven. Now, when I say sacraments, meaning like these two ceremonies that Christians observe, it’s water baptism and the holy communion.

Joe:

Now I’ve explained a lot of the underlying theological problems here where he’s pitting sacraments against grace and this is just not true. So in his view, there’s only two sacraments. Baptism and holy community doesn’t really tell us why just those two and they don’t seem to do anything. They cannot be means in which we receive the grace of God because he thinks of them as human efforts. He’s like rituals we’re doing for God for some reason. So he’s turning them into this kind of legalistic works thing. But if that’s what they are, then don’t do them. We’re not to do legalistic works. So if that’s what you think they are, then you think Jesus is telling you to do something you’re told not to do. That’s a problem. In contrast, as the catechism points out, this is a place where we encounter the grace of God.

Remember, grace is this unearned unmerited favor. But there are places where you can find grace. Pastor Vlad is right. If you pray to God for mercy, you can find God’s mercy. That’s a place you can find grace. The things we call sacraments are other places that you can find grace. In paragraph 1578, the catechism says like every grace this sacrament, it’s talking about holy orders. But this is true of every sacrament can be received only as an unmerited gift. You can do nothing to earn the sacraments. So I get Pastor Vlad is worried that we don’t want to make salvation anything where we are earning grace or earning salvation or anything like that. That is not the Christian understanding of the sacraments. And I’m not just speaking for the Catholic church here. Look at the Church of England, the Anglicans, they say, what is a sacrament?

A sacrament is a pledge of God’s love and a gift of God’s life. God takes earthly things, water, bread and wine and invest them with grace. Think about it this way. Look at the ministry of Jesus Christ. I’m going to take just one example in John nine. There’s a man born blind and Jesus spits on the ground, makes clay with the spittle, anoints the man’s eyes. That’s the language John uses. That’s really striking language because if you read the sacramental kind of language elsewhere, anointing is a common theme, but fine, he anoints a man’s eyes with clay and then tells him to go wash in the pool of silhouette. Washing is another term we find associated with particularly baptism. So the man went and washed and he came back seeing. So you might ask a question, what saved this man’s sight? What caused this man to go from blind to seeing?

Was it Jesus or was it anointing or was it washing? And the answer is all of those, and it’s crazy to pit them against each other. The man himself says in verse 11, the man called Jesus made clay and anointed my eyes and said to me, go to Swo and wash. So I wash, I went and washed and received my sight. It wouldn’t be enough for the man to be like, yeah, Jesus can probably do what he said and then do nothing with it. Jesus chose that the way he was going to encounter this man’s woundedness and heal. It was through anointing and washing. And that’s also how he encounters our woundedness and heals it too. And we don’t have the right to tell him he’s not allowed to do that because we want him to heal some other way. That wasn’t good enough for the Pharisees.

They asked him again and he again stressed. He put clay on my eyes and I washed and I see there it is. That’s how this works. Don’t pit the grace of God and the power of God against these human instruments God chooses to use, whether that’s clay or oil or water or human beings. He uses all of those things in his service and those are means by which we encounter the grace of God. So I don’t want to go one by one through all the sacraments. I mean I kind of do, but I’m worried this is going to be way too long if I do that. And so instead, let’s just take one example where he talks about the forgiveness of sins.

CLIP:

Of course, we believe indifferent. The Bible says to confess your sins to one another that you might be healed. There is no reference of us confessing our sins to one another so we will be forgiven.

Joe:

So according to Pastor Vlad, confession can heal you, I guess physically, but it can’t heal you spiritually. It can’t bring about the forgiveness of sin. I dunno what he’s basing this off of. He has a pretty interesting theology that I don’t see a lot of other people articulating, but when he’s ex quoting James five 16, I just don’t know what he’s understanding it to mean because he’s not understanding its meaning pretty clearly. James five 16 says, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man has great power in hiss effects, well healed. How healed physically no healed spiritually pretty clearly. Similarly in one John when it says we confess our sins, he’s faithful and just and will forgive us and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Pretty clearly the confession is tied to the forgiveness of sins.

Likewise, in one John, we’re told to pray for other people that their sins can be forgiven. So it’d be very strange to say, yeah, confessing and having other people pray for you is really good, but it can’t bring about the things that confessing and praying for other people can bring about what theology is leading him to that conclusion. I just don’t know. In any case, we know confessing your sins to one another can be a means by which we receive the grace of God and forgiveness. But there’s a special reason why as Catholics, we go to priests in particular. Well, that’s not to exclude. If you’ve got to go to your neighbor and pour out your heart, that can be an incredible place of divine encounter. The sacrament though is tied to priestly confession because the ministers of the church were given an authority not given to the laity.

We find that very clearly in John 20. Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit upon the apostles and says, if you forgive the sins of any, they’re forgiven. If you retain the sins of any, they’re retained. So whatever you understand to be happening there, there’s a power given by God to do something they couldn’t have done the day before of forgiving sins. So we want to go to those guys and get our sins forgiven. We can’t go to those 12 particularly, so we go to their successors. Alright, argument number seven is that we are saved by grace. But that’s literally the Catholic argument and only if you deeply misunderstand what grace is, would you imagine that anything other than that is true? So if you want to support from the catechism, paragraph 1996 talks about how we’re saved by grace. So we don’t disagree there, just don’t pick grace against all of the ways grace comes to us. Argument number eight, he says, Christians don’t pray to the saints or to Mary. In fact, he specifically claims it’s okay to go to other people to pray for you, but not okay to go to married, pray for you. And he doesn’t, I think, do a good job of explaining what this difference is or why the saints in heaven aren’t allowed to do the things that the saints on earth are allowed to do.

CLIP:

We don’t need to go through other believers to the Father. Now with that said, it does not mean that when you are on earth and you need other believers to stand in the gap with you, that you cannot ask somebody to stand in prayer with you. But this is different when Catholics pray to Mary, when they ask this queen of heaven, this virgin Mary to help and intercede on their behalf to Jesus Christ,

Joe:

Okay? Again, remember that one of the reasons you go to other people and confessing your sins is because as James five 16 says, the prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects. We know intercessory prayer is powerful, and so we want to go to other people and ask for their prayers. Look, this doesn’t just include the body of Christ here on earth. The body of Christ includes everyone incorporated into Christ by baptism, thus both here on earth and in heaven and and it’s purgatory as well. But we’re going to leave that for the next one. The saints in heaven are interceding for you. One of the ways I think you could point to this is in Luke 16, in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the rich man himself is worried about the fate of his brothers while he’s in torment.

He might be in hell, he might be in shale. It’s not super clear. Hades not entirely clear from the text, but this wicked man has enough concern for his brothers that he doesn’t want to see bad things befall them. The idea of the saints in heaven are not praying for you or not aware of what’s going on is a wild misunderstanding of heaven. And there’s something really tragic about not appreciating the heavenly glory. We’re promised enough to realize that this is part of it. If the saints aren’t willing to pray for you, they’re not in heaven. Revelation eight presents the angels going before God and lifting up a sensor full of incense containing the prayers of all the saints. Now you can debate whether that’s the saints in heaven or the saints on earth or both, but at the very least you have the angels interceding for the saints on earth, or you have very clear evidence of the saints in heaven praying.

It’s got to be one of those two things because it’s got to be the saints in one or the other place or both. So yeah, in one Timothy two St. Paul says that we should be making intercessions for all people. So very clearly Christians should go to one another for prayers and should pray for one another. And that includes the saints here on earth and the saints in heaven. And there’s no coherent reason that pastor of Vlad argues for why that’s good here on earth, but we’re not allowed to enlist air support if the prayers of a righteous man are efficacious. If our righteousness matters in some way that God doesn’t hear the prayers of the wicked, well then those who are free from sin in heavenly glory seem like they’d be in the perfect spot to be praying for us. Okay, argument number nine.

I alluded to purgatory and he’s arguing against purgatory and this is a pretty common objection. So I want to sketch it out very briefly while also being mindful of the fact this is a long episode and giving kind of an overview more than a deep dive. In Revelation 21, we’re told of the new Jerusalem that nothing unclean shall enter it. So if you have any spiritual and cleanliness, you are not fit to stand in the presence of God. This is not a new idea. This is pretty clearly the old and New Testament teaching about the holiness of God. So what happens in that situation? Well, in Isaiah six, we get this pretty directly answered for us. Isaiah realizing he’s in divine presence, says, woe is me. For I am lost, for I’m a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips for my eyes have seen the king, the Lord of hosts.

So Isaiah, who is probably holier than you and I worries. I am not holy enough to stand in the presence of God. And God doesn’t say, nah, you’re good. Good enough. No. One of the seraphim instead brings a burning coal and purifies his lips through fire and says, behold, this has touched your lips. Your guilt is taken away and your sin forgiven. That purgation of his sins happens right there. And that’s the whole Christian idea that your sins have to be purged. That purification will either happen in this life or if you die in friendship with God but not completely purified, it’ll happen after you die. So what is Pastor Vlad going to say in response to that? Well, he’s going to just blatantly misrepresent the teaching about purgatory and instead claim that purgatory is that people who die opposed to God get like a do over if people pay enough money. None of that’s true, but here he is arguing it.

CLIP:

So we don’t believe, and there is no instance in the Bible in the New Testament of the presence of purgatory or the steps of the cross, meaning you can receive redemption after you die even though you rejected Christ and you did not follow Christ while you were alive.

Joe:

So as I say, that’s simply not true. The catechism is quite clear and plenty of church teaching is quite clear that purgatory refers to the final purification of the elect, not the wicked, which is entirely different from the punishment of the damned. So yeah, you have the eternal fires mentioned in Matthew 25 of the Ded, but you also have other fires mentioned of those who die in friendship with Jesus but are still in need of purification. In one Corinthians three, St. Paul says nobody can lay a different foundation than that which is laid. That is Jesus Christ. And then he talks about two different groups building on the foundation of Christ in different ways. So notice he’s not talking here about the damned, that’s not what he’s talking about. He’s talking about those who build well and those who build poorly on the foundation of Christ and says that each man’s work will become manifest for the day, meaning the day of judgment will disclose it because it’ll be revealed with fire and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done.

This is not hell fire. This is a purgatorial, a purifying fire. If the work which any man has built on the foundation survives, he’ll receive a reward. If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire. So the idea that there are some who have built their life founded upon Christ, haven’t lived perfectly, need to be purified and are purified before the day of judgment through the refining fire and will suffer loss but be saved. That’s all straight Pauline theology from one Corinthians three. And it’s only by misrepresenting what purgatory is that he argues against it. Alright, 10. The final argument, pastor Vlad says, Christian ministers can marry. Now this is a strange argument because of a few things. Number one, it’s not the case that in the Catholic church there are no married priests.

The Eastern Catholics, as the catechism points out married men can become priests. And this is also the case for other things like Anglican converse. So it’s not something where we’re claiming like a church dogma. It is true in fairness that once you’re ordained, you can’t marry somebody else. We don’t want priests trying to date members of the flock. That doesn’t work, particularly if you have things like sacramental confession. There’s just lines that for a lot of reasons, both pastorally and theologically, that yeah, we don’t want pastors trying to pursue members of the flock romantically. But this idea that celibacy is the ideal, an ideal which the west has embraced in a certain way is biblical. Whether you think it should be the rule or not, to deny that celibacy is the ideal, it’s just to argue against the Bible. In Matthew 10, Jesus talks about those who’ve become eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.

And he says, he who is able to receive this, let him receive it. Now he’s very clear not all men can receive this precept, but only to whom it is given. But it’s clearly the ideal. Similarly, St. Paul in Corinthians seven who is a celibate says, I wish that all were, as I myself am, but each one has his own special gift from God, one of one kind and one of another. So he realizes not everybody has a gift to become celibate, but it’s a good gift that he wishes everyone could experience. He says to the unmarried and the widows, I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do. Nevertheless, he admits, if you’re struggling with lust, it’s better to marry than be a flame with passion. So clearly the spiritual ideal biblically is celibacy, even though that’s not what everybody is called to. But here’s how Pastor VLA is going to argue instead, because he can’t just say celibacy bad, he has to say, well, it has to be completely optional. You can’t require it.

CLIP:

Catholic priests are prohibited and forbidden from marrying. In fact, in the Bible, Paul talks about these people who add to the Christian liberties by making laws that Jesus didn’t give us.

Joe:

You might be wondering why does he use that particular language? Why does he actually stop to make sure he uses the phrase forbid marriage instead of prohibit? Well, because he wants you to think of one Timothy four. And it’s a completely unfair kind of characterization of the doctrine of celibacy or the practice, I should say, of celibacy because in one Timothy four, St. Paul warns against the doctrines of demons, including those who forbid marriage and forbid certain foods. Now what’s Paul talking about? He’s talking about the error of narcissism which viewed the body as bad and therefore viewed marriage as evil. Now, if you watched Pastor Vlad’s video, you know that he knows that marriage isn’t evil in the eyes of Catholicism. We actually give it a greater value than Protestants do. We believe it’s a sacrament because in Ephesians five, St. Paul referred to it as a great mystery.

And mystery is a Greek word for a sacrament. So we think that you become one flesh. This is a place of divine encounter and grace in a way that you can live out the union of Christ in the church in a small level. We don’t forbid marriage and the syns agnostics do. Nevertheless, it’s true. We don’t allow people who’ve already made one vow to make another vow that’s contrary to it. That’s true. If you’re married, you’re not allowed to get married to anybody else. That’s not the kind of forbidding of marriage St. Paul’s warning against. But likewise, if you’ve promised celibacy, you’re not allowed to get married to somebody else because that’s also incompatible. So then the question becomes, well, is St. Paul’s saying it’s evil to have people take pledges of celibacy? And if you think that’s what one Timothy four is saying, you’re going to be really surprised when you get to one Timothy five in one Timothy five St.

Paul’s talking about what’s called the order of widows, and he says not to have a woman who’s under 60 enrolled. In fact, we should refuse to enroll younger widows because they’re going to want to get married. And so incur condemnation for having violated their first pledge. What was their pledge? Well, very clearly in the context of one Timothy five, these are women pledging perpetual celibacy now that they’re widows in exchange that the church is going to take care of them. This is the forerunners for modern nuns and religious orders in a lot of ways. So the idea that you can’t have a group of men or a group of women who are pledging celibacy because that’s not what Christians do, pastor VLA is not just arguing against the Catholic church of today. He’s arguing directly against St. Paul who doesn’t just encourage people to be celibate in some context. He has them take pledges upon pain of condemnation if they violate them. So there you go. Those are 10 reasons that sure Catholicism looks different than the idiosyncratic form of Christianity that Pastor Vlad represents. But it’s not an argument of Catholicism against Christianity. I think on all 10 of these, you can look at the history of Christianity and find Christians believing the Catholic thing rather than the pastor of Vlad thing. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heshmeyer. God bless you.