SPROUL: It's a gross act of idolatry to be praying to Mary and to the saints. That's a
very serious matter. And I think that there are thousands, perhaps millions of people within the
Roman Catholic Church who really are trusting in Christ and Christ alone for their salvation,
not trusting the way of salvation that their own church teaches, just like there are multitudes
of people in Presbyterian churches that don't believe in the Reformed doctrines. So that's
the happy inconsistency of our friends who are in Rome. But they have to understand as I'll
be talking about this afternoon that Rome has categorically, consistently, and clearly denied
the gospel. And no matter all other good things that they do, opposing abortion and affirming the
Trinity and all of that, the anathematizing of the gospel at the succession of the Council of Trent,
which has never been rescinded and reaffirmed as recently as the Catholic catechism, disqualifies
Rome in my opinion as a valid church. And I think it's an apostate body, and so with that in mind,
I believe that every true Christian who really is trusting in Christ has a moral obligation to
leave that communion and to identify themselves with a church, not that it's a perfect church,
but a church that is a valid church, a church that doesn't deny an essential truth of the Christian
faith. And as long as the gospel is an essential truth of the Christian faith, you don't want to
be in a communion that denies it and get into this kind of stuff where "I believe in Jesus,
but I'm praying to His mother," or "I'm praying to these saints. I'm attributing to His mother and to
the saints the powers of intercession that belong only to the Mediator, to Christ Himself." And now,
I think that you can be a Christian and have all kinds of error in your theology, just like
John talked about in his congregation. We have the same approach at Saint Andrew's. You don't have to
affirm the Westminster Confession of Faith to be a member of Saint Andrew's. You do to be an officer,
but not to be a member of the church. And so, all of us have error mixed in with truth in our faith,
but some of this error is extremely dangerous. And, you know, for example, again most people who
go to churches, whatever communion they're in, are not all that deeply informed about
the theology of that particular communion or what's going on even in the worship service. I,
for example, being a student of Roman Catholic theology, could not possibly participate in a
Mass because I know what the doctrine of the Mass is, that the church teaches that you have
a real sacrifice of Christ in the Mass, unbloody to be sure, but it's still a sacrifice. And again,
at Trent, it is defined in terms of sacrifice. I had a friend who was in the Roman Catholic
communion and was leaving it, and we had a discussion about that. He went to his priest
and complained about this business of the sacrifice, and the priest told him, he said,
"Well, your friend doesn't know the Latin of what we really teach." And he came with that to
me and so I showed him Trent. And I said, "You ask your priest what the Latin term sacrificio
means in English?" And that was the end of it. It's a real sacrifice. There are priests out
there who don't believe it's a real sacrifice, even an unbloody one. But that's the official
teaching of the church. How can you believe in the once-for-all atonement of Christ and participate
in a celebration of His being sacrificed again, as unbloody as that may be? That's ghastly.
LAWSON: May it never be.
SPROUL: Other than that, I don't have opinion.
MACARTHUR: I just would add a footnote to that, and of course I believe that, and probably over
fifty percent of the people in our church through the years who have come to Christ have come out of
Roman Catholicism because we have a large Hispanic and Asian population in Los Angeles with Catholic
backgrounds so we're very used to seeing people liberated from that. But one of the other things
that is tragic about that view of praying to the saints and to Mary is that it strikes a
blow against the gracious character of God and Christ. The idea of all of that is that God is
very tough and He's wrathful and somewhat transcendent rather than imminent. And you
don't really want to go directly to God which, of course, flies in the face of what Scripture says,
that God is compassionate and marked by loving-kindness and shows mercy to thousands
and is tender-hearted and weeps through the eyes of Jeremiah, and the same would be true of Christ,
but the idea is you don't want to go directly to God because you know He's preoccupied and He's
somewhat indifferent and transcendent. And you don't really want to go to Jesus because He can
be pretty tough as well, but Jesus can't resist His mother and God can't resist Jesus, so that's
the chain. You go to Mary because, you know, Mary can soften up Jesus and then Jesus can take it to
the Father. The assault that that is on the saving nature of God, God who is by nature a Savior and
full of compassion and mercy toward sinners, can be pled with directly, this whole layering of that
assumes that God's less than gracious, merciful, kind and compassionate and sympathetic to the
sinner is a blow against His nature and the nature of Christ as well.