Index
BRIEF REFUTATIONS OF ROMAN
THEOLOGY
BIBLICALLY, CAN CATHOLICS BE
SAVED?
Since I fully dealt with some Catholic doctrines in other books a brief
refutation of them will suffice here.
Roman Catholicism claim that people who die in unforgiven
mortal sin will go to Hell forever for God being infinitely good is offended by
sin infinitely. But if that is true then
our good works deserve unlimited happiness.
It is wrong to do evil to a person when you could do good
so if God sends people to hell then God is evil and hateful for he should
concentrate on their good merit. If we
are impenitent he should enable us to repent if we want to. So when there is a choice between an infinite
reward and infinite
punishment we should get the reward.
The Bible never says that only ordained men can confer sacraments or that
there is a sacrament of Holy Orders.
Anybody who the apostles laid hands on received the Holy Spirit and
burst out into charismatic gifts. This
has been interpreted as the sacrament of confirmation but this is wrong for the
Holy Spirit was already in them and he might have decided to make them
charismatic when the apostles showed their approval for them by laying hands on
them. This may have been a precaution in
case they would use the gifts for power and money and make a laughing stock of
God.
Prayer to the saints is idolatry. Praying to a saint either means that you think that she or he will have the best influence with God or that it won’t but you just pray to the saint anyway. If the saints have more influence then God is reluctant to do what you pray for. This is an insult to him and implies that the saint is wiser and stronger. And if the saint does not have any power over God there is no sense in praying to her or him. It would only be a cover for indulging the desire to worship other Gods. It would be better to go straight and form a direct relationship with God.
Idolatry is the worship of what is not God as sacred. It's a violation of the right God has to be worshipped.
"Our Lady is the surest, the easiest, the shortest and most perfect means of going to Jesus Christ" - St Louis de Montfort
The Holy Spirit is bypassed in favour of Mary. Whoever thinks that it is not enough to go to Jesus directly is really just praying to Mary while pretending it brings him closer to Jesus. If Jesus is as approachable and understanding and as human as the Bible says there is no need for Mary. To go to her is really bypassing Jesus while pretending that this bypassing isn't happening. Indeed the only Jesus it can bring one close to is the one in one's head not the real one. The Catholic Church believes Jesus is physically present in the Eucharist or communion. To say that you need Mary to go to Jesus is strange if the Church really believes one is united with Jesus in tremendous intimacy by receiving communion. Clearly then one must keep one's focus on Mary even then. That is like having sex with your wife while looking at your wife's mother and giving her the attention. The doctrine stops the Catholic from connecting with Jesus. You should be connecting with Jesus if he is what he is supposed to be. Mary can supposedly only bring us to him in two ways, by being like him and because she herself is his top disciple. But to run after a mirror is not to run after the person in the mirror. And her being top disciple is irrelevant. Even when getting baptised, the Catholic must see it in terms of getting to Jesus only through Mary. The baptism is not really intended to cause a connection with Jesus but only a nominal one. Therefore the baptism is invalid. Catholics cannot be saved for they have a false connection with Jesus.
Many people get a nice glow inside them when they pray and think of God. They pray without realising that they are praying to this feeling.
The best theologians say that God is being itself and you cannot talk about what God is only about what he is not. They say that the thought of a God who is in time and like us is idolatry.
If you adore your perception of God, you are not adoring God. Even if your perception is right that is not the point. You are still intending to honour what you think God is not what he is. It would take a miracle for a person to really honour and worship God.
Our hearts deceive us very well. We could think we are adoring him when we are actually adoring a mental and emotional image of him.
When people who pray to God find idolatry so hard to avoid, it must be nearly impossible to honour a saint and pray to a saint without being an idolater. The veneration of saints then must be rejected outright as blasphemous and heretical and corrupting. It is a turning away from the true good which is God.
The claim that praying to Mary, "Hail Holy Queen Mother of Mercy! Hail Our Life our Sweetness and Our Hope!" is really asking God to make her his instrument to save us and bless us is a lie. It pretends the prayer only seems to be all about Mary. In reality it is honouring her to please God. If that is true then why not say, "O God honour Mary for it pleases you". "O God hear the prayers Mary says for us". The Catholic alleges that he prays to the saints and to Mary in such a way that God is the real object. But the Catholics prayers could be understood as favouring the saints and Mary above God. They don't pray any different from people who prefer the saints to God!
If prayer is simple trust in God, "Thy will be done for you know what is best and have all power", then anything else, especially prayers to saints, is not honouring God.
Evil is what irrational. Praying to saints is evil.
It gets worse.
Here is an example of how it does. The Church has had
saints like Pope Cyriac who never existed (page 81, Handbook
to the Controversy with
Imagine then how bad it is that Catholics worship the Eucharist as Jesus Christ! They pretend that a wafer in which no physical change has taken place is still physically changed into the real body and blood of Jesus! That is worse than anything the pagans ever did! They never intentionally worshipped idols of wood and stone. They thought the spirits of the gods lived in them. That was what they worshipped.
The teaching of incoherent Catholicism is that what makes Jesus Jesus is not physical implies that he is not his body. Thus the Catholic Church is antichrist for denying the coming of Jesus in the flesh. It also denies that he is the Christ. The Christ means that Jesus is the rightful king of Israel and will rule from there one day. The Catholic Church calls Jesus the Christ but it means the wrong thing by the word. It makes him out to be a spiritual king - a king in name only and not a political king. However the word Christ means one who is anointed as a king like David - he was a political king. Read 1 John. It says that those who deny that Jesus is his body and is the Christ is not a child of God or begotten of God. They may think they are but they are destined to spend eternity away from God and are antichrists.
The
Apologists for Roman Catholicism say that though the Church says that
God’s existence can be rationally demonstrated she does not say that we have
succeeded in proving God’s existence yet.
But when one thinks about the five proofs of
Catholicism has made a dogma of the notion that faith is a supernatural
gift of God implying anybody who does not believe sinfully refuses the
gift. Faith must then be caused by
divine influence on the intellect – God putting ideas in your mind. If God manipulates your feelings to make you
believe that is the dangerous notion that you feel must be what God wants you to
believe. It would follow that everybody
who hears of Catholicism must feel that Catholicism is true if it is true and
God never lies. If the implanting of
ideas teaching is the true one then anybody who hears of the true Church must
see something in it that is the truth of God or get a feeling of God calling
them to check out the teaching and the Church.
He has received truth from God by it meaning that he gets the message
that it is the true Church. And if we cannot
see the faith as true unless God gives us light then we don’t have free will
with regard to faith. The doctrine of
faith being supernatural infers that ecumenism is nonsense for if the other
religions associating with the Catholic Church were good they would become
Catholic and so it espouses sectarianism and two-faced dishonesty.
E. J. Cuskelly, M.S.C.
wrote in The Kindness of God (pages 162-3) that grace is simply the
attractiveness of God. God does not put
energy into a person to attract him. It
is just a person liking God because God makes himself seem nice through
external influences. Obviously, grace is
not a free gift for God can’t help being the way he is. And the things that make God attractive like
nature and religion classes do not really do this. It is how we take them that does this and even then they fail. And so, it is not right to say John made me
like Mary for that is only liking John’s portrayal of
her and not Mary as she really is. The
Church is speaking nonsense. Pelagius
declared that grace isn’t necessary for salvation contrary to Catholic
doctrine. He said we could reach God
without God’s assistance but we find that the Catholic Church really teaches
the same thing! To teach that grace is
the attractiveness of God is a very narrow and bigoted thing to do. It dictates to other people what they should
find attractive. Many are happy enough
without thinking of God and take comfort in having a nice enough life after
death.
The Catholic Church officially says that it agrees
with the Bible teaching that we carry original sin which excludes us from the
kingdom of God. The Bible says that this sin is basically us usurping
God's right to make the rules. We have original sin through Adam and Eve's
fault. They were forbidden to have the knowledge of good and evil and they
took that knowledge and estranged themselves from God. God's problem was
that they wanted their perception of good and evil to be independent of what God
said. The Catholic Church teaches the doctrine of natural law. This
is the doctrine that morality can be worked out rationally. The Church
says the atheist can understand it and believe it and work it out if he or she
is honest. This makes morality independent of God. Catholics are
barred from Heaven and estranged from God by believing this doctrine.
This is so forced. It is only taught because the Church wants its theology to fit the clear Bible teaching that nobody however good deserves Heaven and that Heaven is not a reward but a free gift. It is so easily seen that it is forced and artificial. If God rewards only his part in our good works then we cannot really deserve Heaven. Our good works are ours even if they are done with his help. It is not all his work. The statement that we deserve Heaven contradicts the idea that God rewards his part in our works. We might benefit from this reward but he is really only rewarding himself not us. Just because we benefit doesn’t mean that we are rewarded. It’s a by-product.
Either we earn Heaven or we don’t. To accept the Catholic doctrine is only to adopt self-deception. It is a major sin.
The Catholic Church says that Christ was God and sinless and that Mary
was sinless as well. A man once called
Jesus good and Jesus asked him why he called him that for nobody was good only
God. Christians argue that the man was
using flattery and Jesus is saying he does not like that. So Jesus is saying he is not good in the
flattered way. But Jesus said nobody was
good only God which is a strange way of correcting a flatterer. The simplest interpretation is that Jesus
denied his own sinlessness and that he was God. So when he was not sinless how could anybody
else be? The simplest is the one
meant. The gospellers just copied the
story from Mark and nobody bothered to think about it. If they had it would have been deleted from
Mark and they would have tried to bury the story. Jesus was not sinless and so Jesus was not
God.
BIBLICALLY, CAN CATHOLICS BE SAVED?
Protestants know, not believe, that when Paul said that no one could be
saved by law-keeping (Galatians
This is what Paul would say to Catholics,
You must forsake the Roman Catholic Church
because she is not a Christian Church.
If you believe you shouldn’t abandon it, you are guilty of abandoning
the faith taught by Christ and which was transmitted to myself
and the other apostles. You are becoming
an apostate and may be beyond sincere repentance. To go to Heaven you must leave the Roman
Church.
Getting saved involves holding that Jesus is
our Lord and substitute and repentance for all sin, past and future. The repentance is invalid if it includes only
past sins for since you are taking once for all salvation you have to repent
the future ones as well. The Jews
repented all their past sins and availed of the promise of forgiveness in the
Law and Paul said that they still weren’t right with God for they sinned again
as soon as they got forgiveness (Romans 3) so God will not accept repentance
for the past alone. Remember that there
is no salvation for one that does not believe in once for all justification by
faith alone which does you forever for you cannot get rid of sins without
intending to. That is why Protestants must
present the gospel to Catholics if they love them. Most preachers seem to forget that repentance
for the sake of the past is not enough.
I hope that this lecture will help make improvements in its own small
way.
I wrote that nobody is totally free from sin
and sin must be punished by God and that there is no condemnation for those
that are in Christ Jesus. They get away
with their sins for Jesus paid for them despite still having them.
The Catholics must ask Jesus to forgive all their sins, the ones that are past and the ones still to come and trust in his substitutionary atonement to possess everlasting life with God in Heaven. But this means denying their religion which puts them outside the Church.
If a Catholic comes to Christ, he or she must formally defect from the Catholic Church. Upon defection, the obligation to pay money to the Church, to believe the doctrines of the Church and to obey the Church ceases. It means you are respecting yourself as a Christian free from the Church. It means you are not supporting the Church any more for as long as your name is recorded as Catholic you are supporting the Church and letting it be declared that you are part of the Church. The Bible says that if you are Christian and have sex with a prostitute you become one with her. In the same sense, you are one with the Church as long as you have your name on its rolls. It is true that you have left in your heart but you must do more than that. You must formally defect. If you do not, then your salvation and accepting Christ were somehow self-deception and not real.
CONCLUSION
Catholics deny the Bible doctrine of salvation and so their religion is a
hindrance not a help to salvation.
BOOKS CONSULTED
A GREAT LEGACY, Rev RJ Coates,
A ROMAN CATECHISM WITH A REPLY THERETO, John Wesley Protestant Truth
Society,
A WOMAN RIDES THE BEAST, Dave Hunt, Harvest House,
ALL ONE BODY – WHY DON’T WE AGREE? Erwin W Lutzer,
AN ACCOUNT OF ARCHBISHOP JAMES USHER 1581-1656, ND
Emerson MA PhD,
APOSTOLICAL SUCCESSION, James Heron, Outlook Press,
BIBLICAL EXEGESIS AND CHURCH DOCTRINE, Raymond E Brown, Paulist Press,
BUT THE BIBLE DOES NOT SAY SO, Rev Roberto Nisbet,
Church Book Room Press,
CATECHISM OF THE
CATHOLICISM AND CHRISTIANITY, Cecil John Cadoux,
George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1928
CATHOLICISM AND FUNDAMENTALISM, Karl Keating, Ignatius Press,
CHRISTIANS GUIDE TO ROMAN CATHOLICISM, Bill Jackson, Colonial Baptist
Press,
CITY OF
DAWN OR TWILIGHT? HM Carson, IVP,
Leicester, 1976
DEAR CATHOLIC FRIEND, John R Rice, Sword of the Lord,
DIFFICULTIES, Mgr Ronald Knox and Sir Arnold Lunn,
Eyre & Spottiswoode,
DOCUMENTS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH, edited by Henry Bettenson,
Oxford University Press,
ENCHIRIDION SYMBOLORUM ET DEFINITIONUM,
Heinrich Joseph Denzinger, Edited by A Schonmetzer,
EVANGELICAL CATHOLICS A NEW PHENOMENON,
HOW SURE ARE THE FOUNDATIONS?
Colin Badger, Wayside
HOW TO CHOOSE YOUR VOCATION IN LIFE, Thomas Artz
C.SS.R, Liguori
Publications,
INFALLIBILITY IN THE CHURCH, Patrick Crowley, CTS,
IS THE
IS THERE SALVATION OUTSIDE THE
LETTERS TO A ROMAN CATHOLIC PRIEST, H A Ironside,
Loizeaux Brothers,
LION CONCISE BOOK OF CHRISTIAN
THOUGHT,
LIVING IN CHRIST, A Dreze SJ, Geoffrey Chapman, London-Melbourne 1969
LOOK! THE DOUAY
BIBLE AGAINST
MORAL PHILOSOPHY, Joseph Rickaby SJ, Stonyhurst Philosophy Series,
Longmans, Green and Co,
NEW CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA, The Catholic
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ROMAN CATHOLIC CLAIMS, Charles Gore MA, Longmans,
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ROMAN CATHOLICISM,
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THE BIBLE REFUTES ROMANISM Philip H Rand Protestant Truth Society,
THE
THE CHURCH AND INFALLIBILITY, BC
THE CHURCH OF ROME AND THE WORD OF GOD, Rev Eric C Last, Protestant Truth
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OP, TAN,
THE PRIMITIVE FAITH AND ROMAN CATHOLIC DEVELOPMENTS, Rev John A F Gregg
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THE RICHES OF
THE STUDENT’S CATHOLIC DOCTRINE, Rev Charles Hart BA, Burns & Oates,
THE
THE VATICAN PAPERS, Nino Lo
TRADITIONAL DOCTRINES OF THE
TREASURES FROM GOD’S STOREHOUSE, Dr Bill Jackson, Colonial Baptist Press,
VICARS OF CHRIST, Peter De Rosa, Corgi Books,
WHAT HAPPENED! Francisco Lacueva, Evangelical Protestant Society,
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YOU CAN LEAD ROMAN CATHOLICS TO CHRIST, Wilson Ewin,
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www.catholic.com/library/The_Anti_Catholic_Bible.asp
Christians versus the Lies of Catholicism