📖 Cults & World Religions — Unit 8: Roman Catholicism

Anchor: Ephesians 2:8-9; Romans 3:28; Hebrews 10:14; 1 Timothy 2:5 (NKJV)

A Word Before We Begin

This unit is different from every unit before it, and we must say so at the outset. The Roman Catholic Church is not a cult. It confesses the Trinity, the full deity of Christ, His virgin birth, His atoning death, and His bodily resurrection; it holds the ancient creeds that we ourselves hold; and within it are many millions who love the Lord Jesus and trust in Him. In this land above all, the Catholic Church is woven into the history, the family, and the heart of our people, and we do not speak of it lightly or from the outside. Many of us came from it; many of those we love remain in it. So we come to this subject not as strangers attacking a rival, but as members of the same family who long to see one another rest fully in Christ. Our aim is not to mock what is dear to our neighbors, nor to pretend the differences do not matter, but to honor what we share, to speak honestly and gently about where we differ, and to point everyone — Catholic and evangelical alike — to the finished work of Christ. (A word on what this unit is not: it treats the official teaching of the Catholic Church, not the folk practices that have grown up around it, which we will consider separately in the next unit.)

What We Share

Before we speak of any difference, we must say plainly how much we share, for it is a great deal, and honesty requires us to begin here. With Roman Catholics we confess one God eternally existing in three Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We confess that Jesus Christ is truly God and truly man, conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary, that He died for our sins, rose bodily from the grave, ascended to the Father, and will come again. We hold the same Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, and we receive the same New Testament as the Word of God. We agree that all have sinned, that no one can be saved apart from the grace of God and the work of Christ, and that faith is necessary. These are not small things; they are the great things, the very heart of the Christian faith, and on them we stand together against every form of unbelief. Whatever we go on to say, let it never be forgotten that we say it to those who confess with us that Jesus is Lord.

Where We Differ, and Why It Matters

And yet there are real differences, and some of them touch the gospel itself, so that we cannot treat them as though they did not matter. They gather around a single question, the question that once divided the church in the Reformation and divides it still: how is a sinner made right with God, and where does he rest for his salvation? The Reformers did not doubt that Catholics believed in Christ and in grace; their concern was that certain teachings, however sincerely held, added to the finished work of Christ things that could only obscure it — human tradition alongside Scripture, human works alongside faith, and human and saintly merit alongside the merit of Christ. We take up four of these: the question of authority, the question of justification, the question of the finished work of Christ, and the place of Mary and the saints. We examine them not as a different religion, but as a family disagreement about how fully to rest in Christ alone.

Authority: Scripture, or Scripture and Tradition?

The first difference concerns authority: where do we finally hear the voice of God? The Catholic Church teaches that God's revelation comes to us through Scripture and through sacred Tradition together, interpreted authoritatively by the teaching office of the Church. The Reformation answered that Scripture alone is the final and unerring rule of faith — not because tradition and teaching are worthless, but because they must always be tested by the Word of God, and never set above it. Our concern is a biblical one. Jesus rebuked the leaders of His day for "laying aside the commandment of God" to "hold the tradition of men" (Mark 7:8), and warned that tradition can even make "the word of God of no effect" (Mark 7:13). Paul wrote that "all Scripture is given by inspiration of God" and is able to make the man of God "complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work" (2 Timothy 3:16-17) — complete, needing no further rule above it. And the noble Bereans were commended for testing even the apostle Paul's preaching by "search[ing] the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so" (Acts 17:11). We honor the great teachers of the church and learn much from them; but the Scriptures alone are the word that judges all others.

Justification: By Faith, or By Faith and Works?

The second difference is the deepest, for it is about the gospel itself: how is a sinner justified — declared righteous — before God? Here we must be fair. The Catholic Church does not teach that we are saved by our works apart from grace; it teaches that salvation begins with God's grace and is received through faith. But it does not teach that we are justified by faith alone. In its official teaching, justification involves grace working within us, our cooperation, the sacraments, and the good works that follow, and it can be lost by grave sin and regained through penance. The Reformation, returning to Paul, confessed that we are justified by grace through faith alone, resting on the finished work of Christ, received as a free gift and not earned by anything we do. This is not our invention; it is the plain teaching of Paul: "a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law" (Romans 3:28); "to him who does not work but believes on Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness" (Romans 4:5); "by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast" (Ephesians 2:8-9). Our Catholic friends will point to James, that "faith without works is dead" (James 2:26), and they are right that a living faith always bears the fruit of good works. But James speaks of the works that prove faith to be real, not of works that earn our standing before God; the root is faith, and the works are its fruit. To rest our acceptance on anything we add to Christ is to lose the freeness of the gift, and with it the peace it was meant to bring.

The Finished Work of Christ: The Mass, Purgatory, and Merit

The third difference follows closely, and concerns the sufficiency of what Christ has already done. From the one truth that Christ's sacrifice is complete flow several disagreements. In the Mass, the Catholic Church teaches that the one sacrifice of Christ is made present again upon the altar; Catholics are careful to say this is not a new sacrifice but the same one re-presented, yet our concern is that a sacrifice continually re-offered seems to dim the glory of a work already finished. For Scripture presses the word "once": Christ was offered "once to bear the sins of many" (Hebrews 9:28); "we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all" (Hebrews 10:10); "by one offering He has perfected forever those who are being sanctified" (Hebrews 10:14). From the cross He cried, "It is finished" (John 19:30). In the same way, the teaching of purgatory — a cleansing by suffering after death before one may enter heaven — seems to add to the cleansing that Christ's blood has already accomplished, for "the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin" (1 John 1:7), and Paul longed "to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord" (2 Corinthians 5:8), with nothing in between. And the whole machinery of indulgences and merit, which once so troubled Martin Luther, adds human and saintly credit to an account that Christ has already paid in full. On each of these, our plea is not less honor to Christ but more: to let His finished work be truly finished.

Mary and the Saints

The fourth difference concerns Mary and the saints, and here especially we must be both truthful and gentle, for it touches what our people hold most tenderly. Let us be fair about what the Catholic Church actually teaches: it does not hold that Mary is God, nor that she is to be worshiped as God is worshiped. It honors her as the mother of the Lord, holds her to have been preserved from sin and taken up to heaven, and asks her and the saints to pray for us, as one might ask a living brother or sister to pray. We gladly honor Mary too: she was "blessed among women" (Luke 1:42), a woman of remarkable faith who said, "Let it be to me according to your word" (Luke 1:38), and all generations rightly call her blessed. But our concern is that devotion and prayer directed to Mary and the saints, however carefully distinguished from the worship of God, tend in practice to give to creatures what belongs to the Creator, and to place mediators between the soul and Christ where Scripture sets Christ alone: "there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus" (1 Timothy 2:5). We may go to Him directly, and we need no other to carry our prayers. In this land the devotion to Our Lady is bound up with the love of home and heritage, and we speak of it with all tenderness; but the greatest honor we can give the mother is to obey her own last recorded words: "Whatever He says to you, do it" (John 2:5) — that is, to go straight to her Son.

A Redemptive Aim

So we do not come to this church as to an enemy, but as to kindred with whom we share the great confession, and from whom we differ on how fully to rest in Christ. Our aim is redemptive, and it is the same for the Catholic who loves the Lord and for the many who are leaving that church for evangelical faith, as so many in our own congregations have done: that all of us would come to rest, wholly and restfully, on the finished work of Christ, and receive the righteousness of God as the free gift it is. To those who are troubled by an account never quite paid, by a heaven never quite certain, we hold out the word of the gospel: "having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ" (Romans 5:1). We honor our Catholic neighbors, we rejoice in all that we share, we refuse to caricature or to scorn, and we long, in love, for every one of them to know the peace that comes from resting in Christ alone.

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