In this episode Trent examines videos from the Protestant channel Got Questions? and questions their claim that there is only “one step” to be saved.
Transcript:
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic apologist Trent Horn, and today I want to talk about the allegedly easy way to get saved, at least according to some Protestants. But before I do that, please consider doing a definitely easy good work by liking this video, subscribing to our channel. That way you don’t miss any of our great content.
All right, so when I watch Protestant apologists, especially popular evangelicals, I often hear the claim that true biblical Christianity presents a simple way to be saved, whereas Catholicism makes salvation overly complicated. Here’s a few examples.
When you look at the Roman Catholic plan of salvation, it is a salvation of works and sacraments.
Along the way, however, they can commit these small sins, venial sins, which plunges them back down, and heaven forbid they commit a mortal sin, which knocks them completely off the plan of salvation.
And he must now receive sacraments. He must confess his sins to a priest, which is the sacrament of penance, and then he must be rejustified by doing good works, by doing penance, and once he is rejustified, then he must maintain his salvation through sacraments.
But the Bible teaches there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ, that when you put your faith in Jesus Christ, the work has been done. He saves you totally, completely, perfectly. Plucked you out of the world, you’re in the palm of his hand, and nobody can pluck you out of his hand.
So under Protestantism, and the majority of Protestants are evangelicals, all you have to do to be saved is simply accept Christ as your Lord and Savior. Catholics, on the other hand, distort the gospel, allegedly, with all these other requirements or works in order to be saved, like being baptized, receiving the Eucharist, avoiding mortal sin, going to confession. But here’s the thing, almost all Protestants have a bunch of requirements to be saved beyond just accepting Jesus as their Lord and Savior.
What they do is the equivalent of the iTunes terms and conditions. They add a bunch of small print of all the things you need to do in order to get to Heaven after you click on the agreement to make Christ your Lord and Savior. But the way they do this is by saying good works are not required to be saved, they’re just proof that you are saved. Okay, but it sure feels like that if I don’t do these good works, then there’s no proof I’m saved, which practically means I’m not saved. So the works are something I have to do to be saved. Here’s a video from the popular Protestant channel Got Questions that shows what I’m talking about.
Many in the Christian community make the mistake of presenting salvation as a result of a step-by-step process. Roman Catholicism has seven sacraments. Various Christian denominations add baptism, public confession, turning from sin, speaking in tongues, et cetera as steps to salvation. But the Bible only presents one step to salvation: believing. When the Philippian jailer asked Paul, “What must I do to be saved?” Paul responded, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.” Faith in Jesus Christ as the Savior is the only step to salvation.
First, you don’t need all seven sacraments to be saved. Only a tiny minority of Catholics have ever received all seven sacraments. People like married priests in the Eastern church or ordained widowers in the Western church. Second, I often see Protestants cutting Acts 16:31 short. “Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved, you and your household.” But how does the jailer believing in Jesus get his family to Heaven? Well, the next verses tell us. “And they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all that were in his house, and he took them the same hour of the night and washed their wounds, and he was baptized at once with all his family.”
Notice that Acts doesn’t talk about the other members of the household coming to believe in Jesus. They hear the word of the Lord, and then they were baptized. The Bible makes it clear in 1 Peter 3:21 that baptism saves us, but I’m not going to make this video a defense of baptismal regeneration. I cover that in a lot of other places.
What’s more interesting is that most Protestants say you should be baptized. Even if they don’t believe in baptismal regeneration, they say you should be baptized because Jesus commanded that we be baptized. So it’s not necessary for salvation, but I need to do it anyways. Okay, well, what if I refuse to get baptized? Well, then you would prove you weren’t really saved in the first place because you’re not being obedient to Jesus. Here’s Got Questions with a little more on that.
Baptism is an important step of obedience that every Christian should take, but baptism cannot be a requirement for salvation. To make it such is an attack on the sufficiency of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
So it’s not necessary for salvation to be baptized, but you still need to be baptized. It sure sounds necessary to me. I feel like modern evangelicalism relies on a weird sci-fi, timeline-bending, retroactive causation view of salvation. They’ll say Catholics add works to the gospel by saying you have to get baptized, you have to confess your sins, and if you don’t do these things, you’re going to Hell. But evangelicals say you don’t have to be baptized, you don’t have to confess your sins in order to be saved, but if you don’t do these things in the present or the future, that would prove you were never truly saved in the past, and so you aren’t saved in the present, and if you die in the future, you’ll go to Hell. Here’s more of the Got Questions video to see what I mean.
Salvation is not about certain steps we must follow to earn salvation. Yes, Christians should be baptized. Yes, Christians should publicly confess Christ as Savior. Yes, Christians should turn from sin. Yes, Christians should commit their lives to obeying God. However, these are not steps to salvation. They are results of salvation.
Let me introduce you to a logical form of argument called modus ponens. If P, then Q; P, therefore Q. If I am in Dallas, then I am in Texas. I’m in Dallas, therefore I am in Texas. Simple, right? You can also reverse the argument with a modus tollens. If P, then Q; not Q, therefore not P. If I am in Dallas, then I am in Texas. I am not in Texas, therefore I am not in Dallas. Once again, it’s simple. If something is true via modus ponens, it’s also true via modus tollens.
Let’s apply this to the evangelical view of salvation. If you are saved, then you will get baptized and obey Christ. If P, then Q. You did not get baptized and you did not obey Christ, not Q, therefore you are not saved, not P. There’s no way around this. Even if you try to say that good works are the fruit or proof of salvation, basic logic shows that they’ve made them a requirement to be saved, which means evangelicals are wrong when they say there’s only one thing you must do to be saved.
No, there’s lots of things you have to do to be saved. They just say it’s proof you have been saved, but it amounts to the same thing. It sure doesn’t feel like getting baptized or confessing our sins is something we automatically do because we are saved. It feels like we chose to do these things, which means we could have chosen not to do them and suffered the consequences. And that would mean we are cooperating with God in order to be saved, or we’re performing works. We aren’t earning salvation like a wage, but we are choosing to remain in God’s kindness by cooperating with His grace.
And it’s not just getting baptized or confessing our sins. You also have to be obedient to Christ. John 3:36 says, “He who believes in the Son has eternal life. He who does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God rests upon him.” That means in order to prove you really were saved in the first place, there are certain sins you won’t commit on a habitual basis like fornication or drunkenness, and if you do commit these sins, you’ll ask God for forgiveness, not in order to actually be forgiven, but because you already have been forgiven. See what I mean about bending the timeline?
Finally, I want to point out that many Protestant descriptions of the Catholic approach to salvation are caricatures. They make it seem like you have to engage in devotionals like praying the Rosary in order to be saved. And to be fair, there may be some Catholics who claim this, and they’re wrong. They do a disservice to the faith in making someone think something’s obligatory for salvation when it’s not. Under the Catholic view of salvation, you just have to repent, believe, receive, and remain. Repent of sin, believe in Christ in His church, receive Christ in baptism, and remain in communion with Christ and His church until death. You have to avoid mortal sin, just as Protestants do, by not engaging in grave violations of the Ten Commandments. And if you do commit one of these sins, you must confess it to God, which for Catholics will be through the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
Now, a Protestant might say, “Yeah, but you also as a Catholic have to obey the Church, like by not eating meat on Fridays during Lent or going to mass on holy days of obligation, so it’s more complicated.” And that’s true. I’m not saying Catholic and Protestant views of salvation are equally rigorous in their description. There is in some cases more to the Catholic view of salvation. But in not having an authoritative church that can teach what is required of us to be saved, Protestants trade more obligations for more confusion.
Can I be saved if I use IVF or donate my sperm? What if I’m like that recent guy in the Netherlands who donated his sperm 500 times? As a Christian, can I look at AI pornography and lust after an image that’s not a real person? So you have the problem of modern evils that are incompatible with the Christian life, meaning that you can’t engage in these evils and be saved, but they’re not condemned in scripture, or at least they’re not condemned in scripture in a way that all Protestants agree.
In closing, my main point in today’s episode is a simple one. Protestants, especially evangelicals, stop acting like your view of salvation is simple and the Catholic view is complex. When you actually write out all the actions someone must do in order to be saved, including the actions they cannot commit as a Christian because they’re gravely sinful, then you’ll have a very long list. Instead of trying to dunk on Catholics by saying Catholics overly complicate what’s really simple, let’s just both compare our fully fleshed out views of salvation, however complex they may be, and simply see which one better corresponds to what God has divinely revealed to us.
And if you want more on this subject, I would definitely recommend Michael Barber’s book, Salvation: What Every Catholic Should Know. So thank you guys so much, and I hope that you have a very blessed day.
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