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In this episode, Trent debunks Protestant apologist Allen Parr’s claims about 7 false teachings of the Catholic church.
Transcription:
Trent:
In today’s episode, I’ll be responding to Protestant apologist Alan Parr’s video. The Catholic Church is promoting the seven dangerous false teachings. I’m not going to respond to the entire video because in several cases, par claims Catholic teaching is false because it isn’t explicitly found in scripture, but that assumes Sola s Scriptura is true, and since Sola Scriptura is not explicitly found in scripture, we could ignore those objections. Instead, I’m going to focus on the parts of Pars video where he says, Catholic doctrine contradicts scripture or where he makes positive arguments against Catholicism. So let’s get started. First, here’s an objection he offers to the practice of seeking the intercession of the saints.
Allen:
The first problem is this implies that some people’s prayers are more powerful than other people’s prayers, and I personally don’t think that the Bible makes the distinction and says, okay, you know what? If you can get a dead saint like Peter or Paul or Mary to pray or intercede for you, then that person’s prayer is somehow stronger. It says in James chapter five, verse 16, confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. And notice it says this, the earnest prayer of a saint, no, the earnest prayer of a senior pastor. No, it says The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results. So any person, whether they are the senior pastor or they are a deacon or whoever they are, or your next door neighbor, if they are a righteous person, it says their prayers have the power to be able to get wonderful results.
Trent:
That’s true, and it’s why Catholics ask other people they know to pray for them along with the saints in heaven. I don’t tell people, whoa, whoa, whoa. I don’t want you to pray for me. I only want St. Paul to pray for me. Catholics agree that any righteous person’s prayers are powerful and the saints in heaven are perfected in their righteousness. So par has not shown that we should not ask the saints to pray for us. He’s only shown we can ask many people to pray for us. Also, James doesn’t say that every believer is equally righteous. That’s just an assumption on Parr’s part when he reads James’s advice in James five 16, he doesn’t say the prayers of believers are powerful. He says, the prayers of a righteous person are powerful. And in that section he says, some Christians have special roles that other Christians don’t have like seeking the press, Roy, from which we get the English word priest to anoint the sick with healing oil. Par also comments on Hebrews 12, one, which after listing the heroes of the Old Testament, it says, therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before
Allen:
Us. And so I want you to think of Hebrews chapter 12, not so much as like a stadium where you have a stadium of people and they’re cheering you on while you’re running the race and there’s this heavenly stadium of people and they’re watching you as if they don’t have anything else to do in heaven. They’re sitting there watching what’s going on in heaven, excuse me, on earth, and they’re cheering you on. Go, Alan, you can do this. We’re praying for you. We’re in your corner. That’s not the right picture. Instead of thinking of Hebrews chapter 12 as a stadium, think of it more of a museum. What do you do in a museum? You go in, you look at this, you look at that, you have all sorts of examples of art. That’s the way we need to see this. This is not a scripture that we can point to suggest that the saints in heaven are praying or cheering on our behalf.
Trent:
Notice how pars view divides the body of Christ. I pray for people now, but if I died, would I forget about those people? Would I stop praying for my wife and children? Would I stop caring about what happens to them here on earth? This really shows the difference between the individualism that is present in some forms of Protestantism and the familial nature of Catholicism that seeks to expand God’s covenant family to include everyone in the whole world. Also, all par has done here is offer another interpretation of Hebrews 12. One, he hasn’t shown that the interpretation of Hebrews 12 portraying the Old Testament saints cheering us on in the race is false. Other Protestant commenters agree with the stadium imagery. In this verse, the Protestant scholar William Barclay says of this passage, Christians are like runners in some crowded stadium. As they press on, the crowd looks down and the crowd looking down are those who have already won the crown.
Ben Witherington says that athletic imagery unites the entire subsection of Hebrews, and it speaks of how the pilgrim has entered the stadium for the finish of the ordeal. The fortress commentary in the Bible also links Hebrews 12 one to this stadium imagery. So it’s certainly a plausible interpretation and saying that seeking the intercession of the saints is only valid if we see that exact pattern in scripture. That’s just another example of Solas Scriptura. Many Protestants refuse to pray to Jesus directly and they only pray in the name of Jesus to the Father because nowhere in scripture do we find people praying directly to the risen Jesus, except maybe Stephen’s vision of Jesus before is martyrdom. But as long as a prayer does not contradict scripture, then Christian freedom should respect the different kinds of prayers and requests that are offered among the members of the body of Christ.
Allen:
Many Catholics will say, no, no, no. We believe that too. This is not necromancy. This is appealing to the saints and asking to pray for us. Okay, I’ll give you that. But at the end of the day, the Bible is very clear that it prohibits any sort of contact with mediums or spirits of any kind of the dead because we are not to have any contact at all in any way with people who have passed
Trent:
On, except that on the Mount of Transfiguration, Jesus did speak to a dead person. Moses, the Old Testament’s prohibitions are against two-way communication or extracting information from the dead. That’s why they use terms like forbidding spirit inquiry. These verses do not condemn asking the saints in heaven to pray for us.
Allen:
Now, prayers for the dead is kind of the opposite. It’s this teaching that you can be a living believer and you can pray for those who have already died and your prayers can somehow affect their eternal state. And this is where the idea of purgatory comes in, which I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but the idea of purgatory is in the word. Purgatory is the word purge, right? And it’s the idea that you may die in a state where you’re not fully cleansed of your sin, so you didn’t go to hell, but you haven’t gone to heaven. And so you’re in this intermediate state called purgatory where you need to be further purged or purified from your sins before you can ascend into the heavenly kingdom. And one of the ways that the Catholics teach that a person can be promoted from purgatory into heaven is through the prayers of the living saints. So you can be alive and you can pray for people who have died in sinful situations and your prayers as a living saint can promote somebody who is dead from purgatory to heaven. Now, where do they get that from?
Trent:
Our prayers don’t cause someone to be promoted like getting a new job position or an early release from prison in this life. We pray for God to be merciful towards those he is sanctifying. For example, we might pray for a fellow Christian who is very sick for them to be comforted even if God is using that sickness to make that person holier. If you can ask God to help those he is sanctifying before they die, well, why can’t you ask God to help those He is sanctifying after they have died, but before they enter into heaven. Next up par critiques the practice of praying for the dead and dismisses Jewish prayer for the dead in second Maccabees by saying this isn’t found in the New Testament. He then says,
Allen:
Okay, so this might sound good, but the problem is that nowhere in the New Testament does it teach once again, encourage or exemplify in any way us making prayers on behalf of people who have already died. As a matter of fact, it says the opposite in Hebrews chapter nine, verse 27. It says this, and just as each person is destined to die once and after that comes judgment. This clearly implies that after a person dies, their eternal fate is sealed based on how they lived their life whenever they were living. It is appointed for a man to die once and after that comes the judgment. There is no implication in this verse or anywhere else in the New Testament that teaches that you can pray and affect someone’s eternal destiny after they’ve passed.
Trent:
That’s completely correct. No prayer can translate someone from hell into heaven or from heaven into hell. But prayers for the dead aren’t about changing our eternal fate as par puts it and even restates this later after this objection.
Allen:
So there’s no way to cross over between from hell into heaven after you’ve died. He said, Hey, you remember on earth you had your chance, right, but you blew it and now there’s no chance.
Trent:
I completely agree, but that’s not why we pray for the dead. We do that to help fellow Christians who God is still sanctifying after death because the moment they died, they were still attached to sin. Just as we pray for Christians being sanctified in this life, moreover, we are allowed to pray for those who have died even though we do not have absolute assurance that they’re not in hell. Just as we can pray for Christians in this life, even though we do not have absolute assurance that they’re true Christians, finally, the early Christians recognized the importance of praying for those who had died in the second century. Bishop Aus said the following, inscribed on his tombstone, pray for Aus and similar inscriptions can be found in the ancient Christian catacombs. Next we have pars criticism of transubstantiation.
Allen:
The very first Lord’s supper was not Jesus taking a piece of physical flesh out of his body or piercing himself to get blood out of his skin, pouring it into a cup and saying, Hey, drink my actual blood, or Hey, here’s a piece of my finger or a piece of my stomach or something like that and I want you to eat my No. They were drinking wine and eating bread. Clearly this was a symbol. It was a symbol of his body and his blood, not his actual body and his blood. Luke,
Trent:
Right? If Jesus took his finger and gave it to the disciples to eat, that’s not transubstantiation because what is being given is flesh under the substance and form of flesh. Transubstantiation is the reception of bread and wine, the appearances of those things along with the substance of Christ’s body. Since Jesus is the omnipotent God, there’s nothing to prevent him from giving his body to the disciples while he celebrates the last supper just as Christ gives us his body and blood in the bread and wine at mass, even though his glorified body is in heaven interceding for us at the right hand of the Father. I mean, this is the same guy who fed 5,000 people with two loaves and five fishes. So I don’t see why he can’t supernaturally feed every believer with his body. This is why St. Thomas Aquinas said that Christ gave his body in an impassable and immortal condition to his disciples.
Allen:
He took some bread and gave thanks to God for it. Then he broke it in pieces and gave it to the disciples saying, this is my body which is given for you. Do this in what remembrance of me. This is supposed to be an act where you just simply commemorate or memorize or excuse me, or remember if you will, the sacrifice that Jesus provided for us on the cross. This is not the actual blood and body of Jesus.
Trent:
The Lutheran scholar Akachi Jeremiahs has shown that the Greek word translated remembrance in this passage and Amon refers to more than just a purely spiritual recollection. The same word occurs in numbers 10 10 saying this shall serve you for remembrance before your God and the original Hebrew text means the same thing. Likewise, Hebrews 10, three says, in these sacrifices, there is a reminder of sin year after year. In both cases, the sacrifices are not for human beings to remember what God has done for God to figuratively remember what human beings have done. Jesus is literally saying, offer this memorial sacrifice to God for me, and that sacrifice just is Christ himself who St. Paul calls our pascal or Passover lamb.
Allen:
So we as Protestants believe that this is more symbolic, right? It’s similar to where Jesus said, I am the door or I am the vine. We know that Jesus is not really a door and he’s not really a vine. He was speaking in symbolic language in the same way saying, Hey, this represents my body, this represents my blood, but in no way is it going to supernaturally turn into the actual physical flesh and blood of Jesus. Not only this, the early church did not teach or practice or support the doctrine of transubstantiation. This was a doctrine that was developed hundreds of years later after the original Lord’s supper was taken. So I think we can clearly debunk this false teaching of transubstantiation. Let’s move on to false teaching. Number five.
Trent:
When Par says Protestants, I think he means evangelicals. Catholics can sometimes slip into a bad habit of treating Protestants as all having the same beliefs, which isn’t a good idea because there is a big difference between high church Protestants like Anglicans or Lutherans and other Protestants who are committed to the teachings of the early reformers and more modern non-denominational evangelicals. But even Protestants can make this same error as par does here. Lutherans, for example, believe in Consubstantiation. The Eucharist is not merely a symbol of Christ’s body. Christ is spiritually present in the bread, wine and receiving the Eucharist has effects like communicating the forgiveness of sins. This was a big source of contention during the Protestant reformation as Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli famously clashed over the Eucharist at the Marburg Colloquy Zw Lee’s view went on to become the precursor for modern memorial views of the Eucharist like Par is defending.
And while you could quibble about whether the early church fathers were talking about trans substantiation, because that’s a later theological explanation of the Eucharist, you cannot say they held the pars memorial view of the Eucharist. Saint Ignatius of Antioch said that heretics confess, not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our savior Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins and which the father of his goodness raised up again, Justin Martyr said the Eucharistic prayer at mass changes the bread and wine so it becomes the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh. The Protestant scholar, j and d Kelly says of the second century, father IUs EU teaches that the bread and wine are really the Lord’s body and blood. His witnesses indeed all the more impressive because he produces it quite incidentally while refuting the gnostic and doty rejection of the Lord’s real humanity.
Allen:
Now, there is a huge list of mortal sins that include but are not limiting to the following, and I found this on a Catholic website. I’m going to read just a few of them. Alright, homosexuality, fornication, voluntary murder, taking advantage of the poor idolatry, stealing drunkenness, pride, envy, lust, gluttony, sloth or laziness, neglecting of Sunday obligation like mass or worship, abortion and even masturbation. Alright? So if you commit any of those mortal sins, you could be in jeopardy of being cut off from the promises of heaven
Trent:
First. Some of these are only grave matter under certain circumstances. Being a little bit lazy is not a mortal sin, but many of these other examples are clearly mortal sins. I’m sure Par would say that a Christian who fornicates or has an abortion should confess those sins to God and treat those sins differently than other minor sins we commit every day. Also, notice he said even masturbation. That’s a little odd. Now, in many cases, this is not a mortal sin. If you have, for example, a young teenager who just entered puberty and so they’re less culpable because of his diminished psychological capacities and the pressures of hormones overwhelming him. In some of those cases, masturbation may not be gravely sinful, but par himself has compared masturbation to things that might only be bad ideas like texting while driving and saying that even for fully mature adults, masturbation is not an outright sin
Allen:
Is this wise. Paul says that all things are lawful for me, but not all things are beneficial or expedient. In other words, what he’s saying is there’s a lot of things that the Bible doesn’t say This is wrong or this is a sin. We can smoke crack, we can snip cocaine, we can text while driving. It doesn’t even say that if you’re single and you’re dating somebody that you can’t spend the night with them. But are any of those things that I just mentioned wise, will they get us closer to God? And the answer is no, and I would put masturbation in that same
Category. So
Trent:
This can be very instructive to see how in rejecting the concept of mortal sin, some Protestants end up smuggling grave sins into the Christian life.
Allen:
I don’t think we should go as far as to say that there are some sins that are greater than others just because they carry a different consequence. As a matter of fact, James says it this way, for the person who keeps all of the laws except one is as guilty as a person who has broken all of God’s laws, right? So once again, different consequences for sin, yes, but to suggest that hey, you’re further away from God if you commit this sin versus this one. I think that goes far beyond what the Bible teaches.
Trent:
James is not saying all sins are equal. He’s saying you don’t get to pick and choose which commandments to follow after chiding Christians for showing favoritism to the rich. James says, but if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors for whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it. For he who said, do not commit adultery said also, do not kill. If you do not commit adultery but do kill you have become a transgressor of the law. Once again, James is not saying all sins are equal in gravity.
Allen:
So according to Catholic theology, there is no assurance of your salvation. Let me give you an example. Let’s just say that you are having sex outside of marriage and you die in the act of having sex outside of marriage. You didn’t have a chance to repent. That’s a mortal sin. You’re cut off from God, which means you’re more than likely going to go into purgatory, which means somebody who is living is going to have to pray for you so you can be purged of your sin, so you can be promoted from purgatory up to heaven because you died in sexual sin, in mortal sin and you didn’t have a chance to repent. That’s the idea behind this
Trent:
First, if you die in mortal sin, you can’t go to purgatory through the prayers of other people. The catechism of the Catholic church says the following of those who die in God’s friendship after death, they undergo purification so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven. The church gives the name purgatory to this final purification of the elect, which is entirely different from the punishment of the damned. If you die apart from God, then you stay apart from God for all eternity. Also, almost no Christian theology gives absolute assurance of salvation. What would par say if a guy at his church died while having sex outside of marriage? He might say that person was saved anyway. He’s just going to have consequences after death for his sin, which sounds a lot like purgatory or he might say that that person in his church wasn’t saved in the first place.
But notice you still don’t have assurance under his view. Par complains that Catholics lack assurance that they’ll go to heaven in the future. But under Parr’s view, which is common among Protestants, you can’t have assurance you were saved in the past because it could turn out later. You were never saved in the first place. The Catholic view just makes more sense because we have a way to examine our conscience now in this very moment and determine if we are in a state of grace. But Protestants have absolutely no way of knowing if there conversion in the past was genuine because many people who truly thought they were saved later left the Christian faith. I did an episode recently about the book I kissed dating Goodbye and the author Joshua Harris, who was huge in the Christian speaking circuit 20 years ago. Now he is not a Christian anymore and some people say he was not saved in the first place because of it. Here’s Protestant YouTuber daily disciple giving his review of Harris’s book.
Daily Disciple:
I’m not going to pull punches here. I’m going to tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly. Quick note. In terms of Joshua Harris, I don’t believe that you can be a Christian for 20 years and all of a sudden decide, oh, I don’t want to be a Christian anymore and kick the Holy Spirit out of your body and become unsaved. I believe that people that leave the faith and say, oh, I want nothing to do with it anymore after being a part of it for years and years, I don’t think they were a Christian in the first place. When God seals you, when God transforms you and indwells you with his spirit, you can’t do anything about that. He’s going to keep you in that way, and so that’s a conversation for another time. But all that to say is that I don’t believe Josh Harris was a Christian when he wrote this book. Even though he had a lot of the terminology and some of the theology together, his heart had yet to be transformed. But
Trent:
If we all could have been fooled 20, 30 years ago about whether Joshua Harris was a Christian and Harris could have even fooled himself into thinking he was a true Christian, how could any Protestant know he hasn’t likewise fooled himself and that he was never saved in the first place? He can’t, which shows this whole backwards retroactive explanation of if you were ever really saved in the first place or not. Well, it really takes away the peace that God gives us in the gospel that you can know right now whether you are in a state of grace or whether you need to humbly approach God and ask for forgiveness of a major sin to be reconciled with God again, par even has several videos where he gives advice on what to do if you sin, and he’s talking about major sins here, major and minor sins, two types. He doesn’t say you have to do this for every single sin you commit. So really most Protestants do believe in mortal and venial sin. They just use different vocabulary to describe these two types of sins.
Allen:
In other words, Catholic theology teaches this. It teaches that while faith is the root of justification, it is not alone sufficient if it does not produce good works in accordance with God’s commandments. Some of these good works that is expected to continue in the path of salvation include but are not limited to the following. So I want you to notice all of these works that are expected for you to continue to do to remain in a state of being saved. You could also rephrase it as okay if these works should accompany those who are truly saved. Okay, let’s just read it. Works of charity. Things like feeding the Hung or visiting the sick clothing, the naked sheltering, the homeless, participating in the sacraments, baptism, Eucharist. Once again, the sacrament of reconciliation, observance of the 10 commandments, acts of personal piety and devotion like prayer, fasting such as in the time of Lent personal devotions, things of that nature, living a moral life as well as evangelism. You need to continue to do all of these works to remain in the right standing with God.
Trent:
I really wish Par had put up a citation here instead of just the header Catholic theology because I have no idea where this quote comes from. The only thing you have to do after being saved by grace alone is just not die in a state of mortal sin. It isn’t a mortal sin to not volunteer at a soup kitchen, for example, or to fail to do many good works. Failing to do good only becomes gravely sinful under very specific conditions like purposely rejecting to go to mass, which is gravely sinful because Jesus commands us to keep the Sabbath holy, which is Sunday for Christians. Also, what parr is saying here is the same thing Protestants say all the time. They often say we are saved by faith alone, but faith is never alone. You don’t have a true faith if it isn’t accompanied by good works. Listen here to Alan Parr critiquing free grace theology. This is the view that you don’t need to do any good works to be saved. You could have faith then lose your faith or do really, really bad works until death and under free grace theology, you will still go to heaven. Par says, works don’t save us. But a true Christian will still do good works.
Allen:
Your works don’t save you. You were saved when you believed. But what you’re doing when you live a life that’s obedient to Christ and you’re producing good works and you’re producing the fruit of the spirit, you are just giving evidence. You’re just giving proof that the belief that you made back in 1978 or 82 or in 2021, you’re just giving evidence that that was actually real. That was actually genuine, right? That’s the idea behind this.
Trent:
But this sounds almost identical to what par criticized before about Catholics saying that faith must be accompanied by good works.
Allen:
You could also rephrase it as okay, if these works should accompany those who are truly saved, the
Trent:
Catholic view just provides more spiritual comfort here. I don’t have to look at my life and wonder whether I’m evangelizing enough or I’m feeding the hungry enough to know if I have real faith, I can just do an examination of conscience and see if my life could be more saintly or God forbid, if I’ve committed specific grave sins that have forsaken God’s sanctifying grace. Now, a Protestant might quibble about what counts as a grave or mortal sin, but they have to deal with the same issue when they make a distinction between whatever two types of sins they believe in major and minor or habitual or rare or compatible and incompatible with the Christian life.
Allen:
If you’re a Catholic, I want you to truly embrace this passage of scripture because this is what the Bible says about salvation and what is required for salvation. God saved you by his grace when you believed, and you can’t take credit for this, it is a gift from God. Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it. So once again, to be clear, salvation is 100% an act of God.
Trent:
That’s a very loose translation of Ephesians two, eight through nine. But Catholics can still agree with all of that. I cannot boast about how God led me to be baptized at the age of 17. That was because of his grace, not my righteousness. But that doesn’t mean that since that time my salvation required nothing on my part being saved required me to not reject the free gift of salvation through grave sin. Only God can get me to heaven, but you and I can certainly get ourselves to hell. Par ends the video talking about confessing sins to a priest. But I’m going to save that for a later episode. I’m doing that focuses just on the sacrament of confession. So instead, I’d be happy to sit down with Alan Parr to talk about these topics, especially his view on mortal and venial sin. So maybe we can get a discussion going between the two of us. Otherwise, I just want to say thank you guys so much for watching, and I hope that you all have a very blessed day.