Chris: Where we diverge is primarily in one concept, and that one concept informs everything else, which is what is the final authority in the life of a believer? In someone who follows Jesus, what is the final authority?
Narrator: Welcome to this episode of the College Ave Podcast recorded right here at College Ave Church in San Diego, California with our pastor, doctor Chris Hilken. If you've been following along or joining through our livestream, we'd love to invite you to worship with us on a Sunday. This podcast is made possible by the support of our listeners. If you've been encouraged by what you've heard and want to help more people hear episodes like these, you can give online and learn more about who we are at collegeev.church. Now let's get into today's episode.
Sarah: Hey, this is Sarah Powers.
Chris: And this is pastor Chris and every weekend, we are at our 11:55am service taking questions, but we didn't have time to get to all of them. So we're following up on the weekend sermon with today's topic.
Sarah: Yeah. And so we're jumping straight into a continued conversation from the topic from that Sunday message. And the whole series was created on the premise of we want to answer questions that real people in our church have. And so we posted that on social media. People commented, liked the comment that they wanted, their question asked.
And that kind of led to this whole conversation of Christianity and Catholicism. So that's the topic we're jumping into for today. The question that everything is built around is this, are Christians or Catholics more faithful to the biblical gospel? And so jumping straight into that, what do Catholics and Christians have in common, and where do they diverge?
Chris: Yeah. So first of all, what I wanna be really clear on is as a Protestant myself, right, pastoring a Baptist church and participating in all the creeds of the Christian church to recognize that when we're discussing these things, there are councils and there are catechisms and there are documents set out for this is what the Catholic Church teaches. So from the magisterial authorities from Rome itself to say this is what our church teaches. This is not what every Catholic believes. This is not what I would even say every Catholic I've interacted with even knows necessarily speaking.
So when we're answering this question, we're comparing the doctrines of x to the doctrines of y. And so I want to make that clear as we get started. And that's what in the sermon we did this last weekend, you'll see a lot of those quotes and pulled directly out of the text. So what do we share in common? High Christology.
Both Protestantism and Catholicism is going to look at Jesus as the high mark. He is the point. He is the savior of the world. He dies on the cross to take away sin. He is the, he is God in the flesh.
There's a strong emphasis in both on the Trinity, in both Catholic and Protestant circles, the high ecclesiology, a high order of the church, a belief in the joining together for teaching and understanding of God's word. We agree on a lot of moral issues. I would say we link arms on a number of different situations including, we are both pro life, we are, unambiguous in some of those moral categories.
Sarah: Mhmm.
Chris: Wilberforce fights right alongside people in the nineteenth– eighteenth century to fight against the abolition of slavery. So there's all these commitments in middle of that to moral categories that we agree on, high Christology, Trinity, emphasis on the church, and those concepts. Our moral value systems are very much in alignment across the board
Sarah: Mhmm.
Chris: As it were. So those would be some areas where we find common ground.
Where we diverge is primarily in one concept and that one concept informs everything else, which is what is the final authority in the life of a believer? In someone who follows Jesus, what is the final authority? Coming out of the Reformation era and into the Protestant movement as it were comes this idea of sola scriptura. And this idea, which you can argue in histories either predates the movement of what we consider to be the Catholic Church. When we talk about the Catholic Church, the word is a little bit– It's interesting because the word Catholic, big C, can mean the Roman Catholic Church, but the small c word catholic just means universal church.
So when a Protestant is talking about the Catholic church, it's not talking about the church as it existed in 215 AD. In 215 AD, there were not cardinals and bishops and popes and magisterial authorities and these kind of things. We see a conciliatory church arriving out of the first century. We see Acts chapter 15, a council's being called to figure out what's going on. There's no necessarily head of the council.
James makes a declaration. Peter makes a statement at that, but he's not the final shot caller. James actually makes the final concession about what they're going to do when it comes to these sort of Judaizers that were challenging the faith. So we see a council. When the Christian church has to come together and decide what it is.
They get together, the leaders get together, and they decide on things. But there was not what you would recognize to be this kind of people authority structure as it were. That evolves later on in the history of the church. And I go over all these dates, times, and events in the sermon that we did this past weekend, so I won't reiterate all those things here. That can be checked out on on our YouTube channel if you want to check those things.
But then what what kind of forms out of that is a modern day Protestant and a Catholic. If you're sitting here with me, the one thing we would totally agree on is the difference between the two.
Sarah: Mhmm.
Chris: That a Protestant is and a Catholic would believe this is wrong, is the Bible is a final authority on faith and morality. So that doesn't mean that it's not solo scriptura.
It doesn't mean a man sitting in his room deciding what the Bible says is what it is, but that the Bible is the final governing authority when churches have an argument about something. And if the Bible isn't explicitly clear on something, then you can use wisdom and secondary means and those kind of things. The church has super value. Ecclesiological structures has a ton of value in the life of the individual Christian, but it's not the final authority. The final authority is the word.
So if a bunch of church leaders got together and decided that murder was okay, well, sola scriptura says that's not true because scripture tells us point blank that it's not. It's the final say on things. And the Catholic position would be that there kind of exists this stool of three and these three things are the final authority on faith and morality and that would be scripture, absolutely, scripture is part of that.
But scripture as interpreted by the Magisterium, the Magisterium being the church authorities, the bishops and the papal authorities and Rome, those get to tell you what the different verses mean. So they get to dictate what was being said by the original authors and their authority on it is final. So it is scripture, but it's scripture through a certain lens or through a certain group of people as it were and also church tradition. So tradition, magisterial authorities, and the scriptures work together in this sort of triad of the finality of faith and morality. The Christian, the Protestant would say, no, no, no.
Those things can air. People can air. Councils can even air. You get a whole bunch of people together to decide on something, they can still be making a bad decision. So even if all the churches got together and we said, we think that this is the final word on this topic, we could get to heaven and God could be like, You guys are wrong.
Scripture was clear on this. Now, I obviously don't think that there's anything like that going on, but if there were, we could all be wrong about those things. And the Catholic church would say, no, we're not wrong because God has granted the authority through Matthew 16 and these other places, the pope to have the keys to the binding and the loosing of the interpretation of Scripture, and because he gave it to them, what they say is final. And what they what they think Matthew 16 means is final. What they think about paedobaptism or infant baptism is final.
So it hands the authority over to them where as a Protestant, we would argue the authority was never handed over to us to interpret scripture perfectly. We are given the responsibility through theology to interpret it accurately, but I would never stand up on the weekend and go, thus saith the Lord, and there's no chance I could possibly be wrong about this. Now I study for twenty, thirty hours for each sermon so that I'm not wrong, so that I can get what did the authors originally think.
Sarah: Mhmm.
Chris: But I also have to have an open hand going, there is a chance that I'm misunderstanding these things.
But by and large, we don't see those patterns playing out in church history as it were.
Sarah: Okay. Yeah. And so when it comes to kind of drilling down a little bit more, when I look at practices or even beliefs, it seems like there's differences as well in prayer, in forgiveness, in works. And a big one that stuck out to me from your message was this idea of repentance. And so from a Catholic perspective, that is usually associated with the idea of penance.
And so if repentance isn't to do penance, what is a biblical description of repentance?
Chris: Biblical understanding of repentance is to do an about face. So you're going in one direction and you're turning directly to the other direction. And in there's actually a, if you look at church history, the the Catholic church puts a man on trial in about the sixteenth century because he made a translation of the Bible that didn't run through the authority of the Catholic church, and a lot of really bad things happened to that guy, and ended up being executed because he would take passages that the Catholic church interpreted as like due penance, and he would change it to what it was more appropriately metanoia, which is to repent or to turn from something. And so this is the kind of this pattern that has played out in church history. This is, you can find this all online.
This is in the histories, the trial of these guys, you can look at it Wycliffe. I did, I went through all this in my sermon. But the idea of due penance is this concept that the saints that have gone before us, particularly those who have been venerated, they didn't just live a life of obedience to God and avoid these certain venial and mortal sins. They also performed all these different acts that were able to store up what we call the treasury of merit in Catholic doctrine. So this treasury of merit is a place that basically because you are gonna mess up so much, there's saints and other people have gone before you and Christ's work and all these other things are able to kind of, you can kinda open up the valve of the treasury of merit and hand people extra measures of grace that they can't get on their own.
So thanks be to these saints and thanks be to those who have gone before, who have practiced obedience above and beyond what humans did or we could do because they've helped bridge the gap between what we've done and what we need in order to be saved. Christ is the perfecter of faith. That's Catholic doctrine too. But then there's this sense in which we have to, in order to maintain that and to fulfill our responsibility is, do penance. So you have all the different sacraments of the church.
And then where you've messed up on those things, have to go to confession and confession will give you a certain number of things to do to make up for the things that you've done wrong, to open up this treasure of merit to people to be able to kind of bridge this gap as it were. And different Catholic practices, even in in looking up this and even researching this sermon, in meeting and talking with other with people who are in the Catholic church, they're gonna disagree on some of the different terminology to you. So I'm trying to be as generous as possible
Sarah: Mhmm.
Chris: And as vague as possible and also to use the different language that's used inside of it. But to due penance is to make sure that we're doing not just believing in what Christ did, but that it's not just by grace that we have been saved and it's void of anything that we do, but there's also a works on the the backside of it.
Right? So they're they're taking the book of James and they're looking at the concept of faith without works is dead, and they're adding that into what would be a very non Protestant view of things, which is we are saved by grace through faith, not of ourselves, not by works that no man can boast. So while there'd be an agreement on that, that's why you're saved, to retain that or to stay in that or to be in quote unquote good standing or to avoid purgatory for a longer thing. There's just certain parts of it that are holistically unprotestant. Right?
You got Johann Tetzel who's selling indulgences and the old saying during the the time of Luther when a coin in the coffer tings up soul from purgatory springs. You can purchase your these different indulgences to get your loved ones out of purgatory or to shorten the time of someone else inside of purgatory. We would reject these wholesale as Protestants.
Sarah: Mhmm.
Chris: But when the magisterial authorities get to dictate what the scripture is saying, they also get to dictate which books of the Bible are included and discluded and which one, which traditions are inside and outside of that.
And so a lot of these things you can't make an argument from from the scripture. Right? Like the selling of indulgence says you're not gonna make an argument from the 66 books of the Protestant canon. But when you when you have other books included in that in the Apocrypha or the the deutero– the extra Deuterocanonical books. These these other things that are added into it, you can derive these theologies out of those concepts.
So that would be some of the big divergence between those two things. So that would be what we agree on. And then what we disagree on is the things that the magisterium looks at and says, well, we know that you probably could make a great case from this strictly from scripture, but there's also other things that we need to make rulings on and other things that we believe that, of course, you can't find them in the scripture. We're not a sola scriptura people. We also have the authorities in there.
And when we jump outside of the text and start to add other things into it, which they believe through tradition and and Matthew 16 and the magisterium can be included rightfully, we reject all those things wholesale. So that'd be the big divergence between those two things.
Sarah: Let's go deeper there. When you say the magisterial authorities could make a decision on things outside of scripture, maybe it's a modern day application where scripture just doesn't have things about screen time or things about, you know, modern things that dating, things like that. When a Christian or Protestant encounters those things, how do you approach those types of questions if it's not here is a proclamation thus saith the Lord about this.
Chris: Yeah. You use kind of this trial of three is what I would talk about with anyone that I was counseling. The first one is scripture. So the first question you'd ask is the scripture clear on this? We call them green and red light issues.
Does the Bible command this or forbid this action? So let's say I want to date someone who doesn't believe in Jesus. Is the Bible mute on that concept? No. That you shouldn't be unequally yoked to non believer.
Do not be misled. Bad company corrupts good character. Right? There's what what relationship James talked about. What relationship does fresh water have with salt water?
And and how could, continuing the on in first Corinthians, where Paul is talking about bad company corrupting good character. Think it's 15:33 of first Corinthians. He says, for what relationship has light with darkness? James talked about the same thing. Right?
These these concept of you got a fig tree bearing olives or you've got a fresh water and salt water. And while James is talking specifically about this, the tongue being able to glorify and glorify God and curse man at the same time, this concept still is pervasive throughout the text, which is we can't say that Christ is the most important thing and then pursue someone who thinks that something else is the most important thing. How could we arrive at the same conclusion? So we would say, well, that's a red light issue then for us as Christians. The Bible has spoken and so we just bow and submit to that.
That's what it is. When you have yellow light issues, yellow light issues might be, I'm thinking about whether or not to start a Bible study with a group of non Christians, or I'm gonna we're starting a church and we're wondering whether or we should have drums in the sanctuary, or we're, I'm a Christian and I'm thinking about whether or not to celebrate Halloween, or I'm raising my kids and, let's use this one, I'm raising my kids and I don't know whether or not to talk about Santa with them or not. Well, here we we start with the first process. The first part of the triad as it were is, does the Bible speak about this?
Does the Bible talk about Christmas? No. Right? Does it talk about Santa Claus? No.
If your Bible talks about Santa Claus, we've got a huge problem. Right? It doesn't.
Sarah: Right.
Chris: So then the Christian's stuck going, uh-oh, what do I do?
Now this is where I can see how helpful it would be to have a magisterial authority that says, guys, don't worry about it, we'll tell you what to do.
Sarah: Mhmm.
Chris: We will instruct that. And I think there's actually something really beautiful about that of someone who's trying to navigate faith early on in life.
They just get an edict from Rome that says, here's what we're gonna do. Here's what we're not gonna do. I'm not slamming that at all. I think that a church body could even yield to another authority and go, you know what? It's kind of fuzzy for us.
Can you help us with how to do this? I don't think there's a problem with that as it were. However, I don't think the scripture teaches that I need to be submissive to that– to be submissive to some magistrate authority who exists in Rome. I don't have that's not incumbent on me to do that. So the next step in that process, if I'm a Protestant and not a Catholic, is to say, well, if the Bible doesn't rule on it clearly, it is what we call a yellow light issue.
Right? Yellow light just like at a stop sign or a stoplight. Red is stop, green is go. Yellow is like, you either need to stop or you need to hurry through the intersection. Right.
If you're driving right now and listening to this, like, don't hurry through intersections, but you know what I'm talking about. No one's confused on what I'm saying.
Sarah: Yeah.
Chris: But so you you can either go or stop and both might be wise at different times.
Sarah: Mhmm.
Chris: So you're starting to use wisdom conversations. So the second thing I would turn to then, the first one is the does the Bible speak on it? The second one is do I have a personal conviction about this? So sometimes the the spirit can speak to us and go, for you, this is a no. Okay.
So I think of some of my friends who have struggled with alcoholism historically speaking.
Sarah: Mhmm.
Chris: And so they go to a party, and at this party, it could be a wedding. And let's say they're serving wine at the wedding, and it could be perfectly acceptable as the bride and groom are having their toast of champagne and they both get a flute of champagne and they're drinking it and they're doing it in a controlled setting and everything, right? Like, they could look at that and go, okay, they have the permission to do that.
Sarah: Mhmm.
Chris: The scripture talks about not getting drunk, but it doesn't say anything about prohibiting drinking. We see this at the wedding at Cana in John chapter two where Jesus makes what is essentially a 180 gallons of wine from the jars that are there. And yet for my buddy who's there who has a history of alcoholism, it's actually wrong for him to drink. Why?
Because he feels in his spirit, if I drink this, I'm not gonna be able to stop myself.
Sarah: Mhmm.
Chris: So he has this personal spirit conviction that says, as for me, I'm not gonna take a sip of any alcohol. So if he has that personal conviction and he takes a drink anyway, he has now crossed the spiritual boundary in his own heart that he is being told by the Holy Spirit that he can't cross. That's a problem for him.
So personal conviction comes next. The problem is when that person starts to go up to the couple and goes, hey, I'm not– here's my history with alcohol, so you can't drink anything. Well, that's problematic because your personal conviction shouldn't be spilling onto other people in your life who don't have that same one. Here's the exception. The scripture says, do not let your behavior cause another to stumble.
So this is another part of the trial we have to look at, our community. We get wisdom from our community. So what does my wise counsel tell me? What does my life group tell me? What does my what could my pastor tell me about this?
Doesn't mean he's an infallible authority, but it's someone else we should check with. And then to recognize, well, I don't want to make someone in my life stumble or fall. So if I'm at a dinner with my friend who previously is an alcoholic and he doesn't drink, and I know he's kind of tepid or kind of weird about that, but I'm not gonna do it because I don't wanna cause him to stumble. Maybe it's a new believer and all they've seen in their life is that people who drink are abusive and rude. Well, if I'm going out to dinner with them, wisdom says, well, I'm not gonna order a drink then.
I'm not going to participate in those things. So we start with the Bible. Is it clear? If not, it becomes a yellow light issue. That kick us into the second gear.
What are my personal convictions about this? When I pray about it and seek the Holy Spirit, what does the Holy Spirit say about this? If I still don't have clarity on that, I go to the church. I go to my wise counsel. I go to my pastor.
I go to these other things and I come to a ruling. I don't know of an example where someone has walked through that whole process and still not known in their heart and with conviction what they ought to do in a situation. So we don't have a magisterial authority.
Sarah: Mhmm.
Chris: You could actually come to two different conclusions on exactly what to do, but Jesus seems to give us space to disagree on some secondary and tertiary issues and it not be the be all end all point of evangelicalism.
Sarah: That's a super helpful tool, the green light, yellow light, red light. And zooming back out, one big criticism that Catholicism might have of Protestantism is the splintering of denominations, because we don't have a central authority that any church could be teaching anything. And so do you think that that is a real drawback of the reformation?
Chris: Yes and no. Doctor Jim Smith, he he puts it this way, he says, no one group can encapsulate the fullness of who Christ is. So in that sense, what I would argue is if a magisterium is required in order to rule on topics that Christ wasn't explicit on or that the New Testament doesn't tell us explicitly what we should do with them, there's two lenses. One is, well, then we need a group of people that tell us exactly what it is.
The other one, the Protestant view is, well, then maybe God is good with freedom in this category as it were. So if I'm reading through the lens of an egalitarian lens, which is that men and women can assume all roles inside of a church or through a complementarian lens, which is that men and women are equal and valuable, separate and distinct in roles inside the household, inside of the church. Or I might be might have a lens of collapsing categories altogether that God doesn't care about the differentiation between men and women. There's a lot of different areas you can look at with that, but then I can have a personal conviction and go, I'm speaking here as an egalitarian or as a complementarian to look at either side. If I'm a complementarian, I might go, well, I read scripture to say that women can't hold these specific roles, so I'm not going to go to a church where they do.
And someone else might then come to a church with only men being permitted to be pastors and go, that doesn't fit with what I understand the scripture to be. So they go to a church that might have a female pastor. Something about that seems to indicate from the throne of God that God's not going, no, I just need one church to do this one thing. So unity is not the same thing as uniformity. And what I mean by that is I don't think that we're gonna get to heaven and God's gonna line up every church and has one straight line of here's exactly what I intended and give yourself a grade on plus or minus anywhere from one to 10 on how far you are away from that one perfect church line.
What if that doesn't exist? What if instead there's this circle of orthodoxy and inside of that, people, because of the way that they're built and gifted and see things differently, God goes, you're going to– you're going to be built more this way. You're going to interpret things this way. And yet around the throne of Christ, you're gonna have the Baptist and the Lutheran, the evangelical, and the reformed. You're gonna have these– everyone is surrounding the throne doing what?
In their own tribe, nation, and tongue worshiping the lamb, and those are gonna be bigger than any dispute we had on Earth. What if that's part of the beauty of the separateness even of the church in those different areas? Because when it comes down to it, there's a lot of people down in this area, and you might be listening to this show right now, but I think of the people I've got relationship with here in San Diego, Benji Horning from Light Church, Chris and Larry up at North Coast where I used to work for a decade of my life. Matt Hammett over at Flood. You've got just a a wealth– Miles McPherson at Rock–
These people that I'm doing life with or that I'm getting mentored by or that I'm in basketball games with on a regular basis, you put us in a room and you have us argue theology, we're gonna be able to argue it and we're gonna stand our ground on stuff. And yet it's not we submit those things under exactly what the the theologian once said, which is in primary things, we need unity, the cross of Christ, the creeds, those kind we need unity in that. In secondary things, we need to have liberty to have the freedom to go. We don't see this the same, but in all things, should have charity. So whether we agree with someone or not inside of the Christian Orthodox Church, orthodoxy meaning ascribing to the creeds, ascribing to the main things in church, we need to have the permission to go, I don't agree with you.
You don't agree with me. You're down the street from me, but you better know that if you ever need me from your church, I'm gonna be right here because we're all carrying the same banner of Christ. I don't think that dilutes the beauty of who Christ is to say there's gonna be a differentness between how you see things and I see things. Like Jim Smith said, no one group can encapsulate the fullness of Christ. I think there's real value to that.