T. A. McMahon & Greg Durel (Part 1)

Program Preview:

Our topic for today is Roman Catholicism, and we’re going to compare some of the major teachings of the Catholic Church with what the Bible teaches. And our guest is Greg Durel. He’s pastor of Heritage Bible Church of Gretna, Louisiana. He has a weekly radio ministry, which is devoted to educating Catholics and biblical doctrine. And he’s also one of the founding directors of Reaching Catholics for Christ and a speaker at RCFC’s national conferences.

Transcript:

Gary: Welcome to Search the Scriptures 24/7, a radio ministry of The Berean Call with T.A. McMahon. I’m Gary Carmichael. Thanks for tuning in. In today’s program, Tom discusses the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church with special guest Greg Durel, pastor of Heritage Bible Church in Gretna, Louisiana. Now, along with his guest, here’s TBC Executive Director, Tom McMahon.

Tom: Thanks, Gary. Well, as Gary mentioned, our topic for today is Roman Catholicism, and we’re going to compare some of the major teachings of the Catholic Church with what the Bible teaches. And our guest is Greg Durel. He’s pastor of Heritage Bible Church of Gretna, Louisiana. He has a weekly radio ministry, which is devoted to educating Catholics and biblical doctrine. And he’s also one of the founding directors of Reaching Catholics for Christ and a speaker at RCFC’s national conferences.

A goal of Reaching Catholics for Christ, by the way, is teaching evangelicals what Catholics believe and how to effectively witness to them. Greg, welcome to Search the Scriptures 24/7.

Greg: Well, thanks for having me, Tom.

Tom: Greg, in addition to your ministry as a pastor, you’re obviously concerned about the salvation of Roman Catholics. Why the concern, especially in this day when perhaps most evangelicals are satisfied that Catholics love Jesus and consider it offensive to attempt to convert them?

Greg: Well, that’s easy, because I spent almost half of my life as a Roman Catholic. I’m a tenth generation Roman Catholic, born and raised down here in New Orleans, and if you’ve been down through New Orleans or southern Louisiana, it’s overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. And so, friends, family members, co-workers, people growing up with schoolmates, everybody was Roman Catholic. And then coming to the reality of the gospel and the sufficiency of Christ as an adult, there was a burden there. Because I recognized that if I had died prior to coming to realize that Christ alone was my salvation and I needed to trust Him and not in my Church, or something that I was doing, I would have been lost forever. So, hence the burden to reach these people just to communicate to them the reality of the finished product: that Christ in John:19:30When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.
See All... said, “It is finished,” and, in fact, it is! So why are you trying to save yourself when your salvation is to be found on the Cross?

And so that was the Genesis behind basically everything that I’ve done since then.

Tom: And, Greg, you know, I mean, we’ve been buddies for a long time, and that’s our common background. I was 30 years a Roman Catholic, and when I came to Christ it was because evangelicals recognized that I was lost, and they ministered to me. I’m sure it was the same with you.

Greg: Well, you know, obviously—it was not, though, Tom. Not to interrupt you, but it was not. I knew some—what we would call “evangelicals” growing up; even dated a couple of them. And never was I witnessed to—ever! And it was when I was challenged by my bride, who’s been my bride forever now, but when we were contemplating marriage, etc., she was a practicing Jehovah’s Witness. And so, it was the challenge to me that I was deficient, and Jehovah’s Witnesses were correct, which…I wasn’t going to take that lying down, you know—I wasn’t going to have to be a Jehovah’s Witness. And so I set out to prove my faith was correct. And in an attempt to prove Roman Catholicism was biblical and what God had given to man to be saved through, I recognized that it was completely false. And that’s how I came to Christ.

And that, I think, so much the more forces me, because I recognize that basically, by and large, evangelicals have no witness to Roman Catholics at all.

Tom: Yeah, well, I thank the Lord that there were—that He brought some people into my life. I mean my wife, for example, her background was Episcopalian, and she came to Christ about a year and a half before I did, so (laughing) not only did I have—you know, you mentioned how you with Cindy, helped each other to come to the Lord, right?

Greg: Well, you know, not to date us, but you’re talking about those occurrences were a generation ago. And those things really don’t happen much anymore today because the modern-day evangelical coming up with you, an Episcopalian or a Roman Catholic is just another form of Christianity.

Tom: Yeah, see, that’s the thing that stuns me, and I’m sure it does you, even though we came to the Lord through searching the Scriptures or having people bring the Scriptures before us—Greg, thinking about my background, one of the things that influenced me greatly was, you know, I went to Catholic grade school, and Catholic military school, I went to Catholic high school; even in college, for a time, I was in a Catholic fraternity—or, well, a fraternity that had mostly Catholics in it—I guess maybe all Catholics, but through that time when I had a question regarding the Church or regarding some teaching that I had, whether it be through the nuns or the priests or whatever, I always got the same answer. They would say, “Because the Church says so; because the Church says so.”

Greg: Right.

Tom: But you and Cindy searched the Scriptures. I had people presenting the Scriptures to me, and that…back then, again, about 35 years ago, that was novel for me, because it wasn’t “Because the Church says so.” They showed me a Bible, and if I had a question, they pointed to the verse and would say, “Here, Tom, read it for yourself.”

Greg: Right, right.

Tom: Wow! Now, why has this changed? You know, we’re talking 30 years from the time you got saved—maybe 25 for you, 30 for me—what has changed among evangelicals?

Greg: Well, I think what has changed, we could say, perhaps, a fulfillment of prophecy, to the extent where the Apostle Paul says, “Before the return of Christ, there must come a great departure from truth…”—the body of Christ departing from the truth and the veracity of the Word of God. So, there’s been an abandonment of biblical authority. And then, I think what you’ve seen develop is something perhaps a term I coined last year, is the rise of subjective deism, where people decide, “Well, I think God is this,” and “I think God means this,” and “I think God is okay,” or “God does this,” and there’s no more final authority.

Again, you know, back to the “Yea, hath God said Society,” you know, “Did God really say this? Did God really declare this to be true?” And then it becomes subjective. And you hear it all the time: “Well, I don’t believe that.”

Even dealing with witnessing to Catholics, God love them, but I’ll run into them, Tom, and they’ll…I’ll ask them, “Well, do you believe the priest has the power to forgive sins?”

And they’ll say, “Oh, no, I don’t believe that.”

And I’ll say, “Do you believe the pope when he speaks in matters of faith and morals is infallible?”

“I don’t believe that either.”

I say, “Well, according to your own Church, then, you’re a heretic. You have to repent of that or you’re going to go to hell when you die.”

They say, “Well, I don’t believe that either.”

I say, “Then why do you call yourself a Catholic?”

“Well, just because I’ve always been that way.”

And so, again, even across the board, it’s just subjective nonsense that God is whatever I deem Him to be, and God will do whatever I want Him to do because He’s my God, you see. And I think that’s what’s occurred. A generation ago, the Bible was, in fact, authoritative in evangelical circles, and if you had a biblical principle and you confronted someone with chapters and verses in context, etc., they would concede, “Hey, look, you’re right and I’m wrong.”

But that’s just not so anymore. It’s to the point that it’s frightening today because there really is no gospel, no definitive gospel, any more, being presented.

Tom: Yeah. But there is a definitive gospel, and…

Greg: Absolutely…

Tom: …Greg, what I want to do, especially…you alluded to it, actually—you brought some information in on it—but I want to lock this down. You see, with all the Christian teachings that are found in Catholicism, and I know where you’re going to go with this, but I want to hear it, what in your view separates them from true Christianity?

Greg: Well, I don’t know how many we could say that are even valid. There’s a façade—there’s a façade of Christian things. But when you look past the façade, there’s nothing, because they’re not rooted—they’re not rooted in Scripture. You know, just for example, Hebrews:1:3Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high;
See All...—the Bible tells us that Jesus, by Himself, purged our sins and then sat down.

Now, what does that mean? Well, it means that Jesus by Himself purged our sins. And I’ve taught for years that for example, Purgatory is not a place, but Purgatory is a person. And Jesus is the Purgatory. Jesus is the Purgation of sins. That’s what Purgatory is about—the purging of sins. Well, Jesus, by Himself, purged our sins and then He sat down, testifying that it was a finished product. And so, if it’s a finished product, and Jesus, then, as John 1 says, was the Lamb of God who came to take away the sin of the world, and John:19:30When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.
See All..., He said He was finished, then why would anybody think for a moment that they had to sacrifice anything, or do anything, to pay for a sin? Because in suggesting that, they’re saying, “Jesus failed.” When He said, “It is finished,” on the Cross, He should have said, “It has begun.” Hebrews:1:3Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high;
See All... is a blatant lie, because then Jesus has not purged the sins. First John:2:2And both Jesus was called, and his disciples, to the marriage.
See All...: how can He be “the propitiation of our sins, and not of ours only, but the sins of the entire world,” if He has not, in fact, done that? If He’s not the satisfaction of the sin debt of the world, then who is He? And the Old Testament prophets foretold that the Messiah, God incarnate, would come to do just that—to do what Adam…what Adam broke, the second Adam, the Man, Christ Jesus, would fix. Now did He fix it or did He not?

Overwhelmingly, the consensus in Roman Catholicism—in the teaching of Roman Catholicism—is that He didn’t fix anything, but He created a new way, a new means, a new system, for us to have a shot at fixing it. So they remove the idea of salvation, and then they inject their concept of probation. So everybody is on probation now. We’re working our way for a chance to be good enough to merit eternal life. That’s the exact opposite of what the Scripture teaches.

Tom: Mm-hmm. It’s a rejection of the gospel.

Greg: Complete rejection. It’s an overt rejection of the gospel.

Tom: Greg, you know this story, but I want to share it with our audience. Our good friend is Jim McCarthy, who wrote a book called, The Gospel According to Rome, which is a fantastic book. It’s one I like to use when I’m teaching about Roman Catholicism. But anyway, Jim was a missionary to Ireland, and he was on a bus with a nun, and they were having a conversation and the nun was—this was in Ireland—and the nun was upset that Jim had left, you know, the Mother Church. But in their conversation, as they were talking, Jim got the idea that “what I’m hearing from the sister is that maybe she is a believer. You know, this is starting to sound really good.” But then, the nun said, “You know, here’s the difference between you and me. You believe that Jesus paid the full penalty for your sins. I believe that He paid 99 percent, and I have to pay that one percent.” Now, here’s the question: What is the penalty? And this is what everybody has to come to grips with, whether you’re an evangelical out there or professing Christian in some way, some form, this is what you’ve got to understand. What is the penalty? The penalty is separation from God forever!

Greg: Right.

Tom: It is an infinite penalty. It’s death. That’s separation. It’s not just physical death, but it’s spiritual death. Greg, what’s 1 percent of death?

Greg: (Laughing)

Tom: What’s 1 percent of infinity?

Greg: That’s right.

Tom: You see, it’s an important point. Again, for our audience, what Greg has been saying is that this is a penalty that only God could pay, but we’re dead—we’re separated—if we haven't received what Christ has done for us. And for Roman Catholics, this—an image of this, every time they go into a Catholic Church, who’s still hanging on the cross?

Greg: Right.

Tom: I mean, there, visually, Christ has not paid the full penalty.

Greg: When you think about it, Tom, how could you pay for the 1 percent?

Tom: You can’t!

Greg: What would you do? Now, obviously, God requires divine perfection. Adam was a perfect man married to a perfect woman in a perfect environment, and he couldn’t keep one rule. Couldn’t keep one.

Tom: Right.

Greg: So, the law’s given to testify to man that man is in fact a sinner. The law was never given to save anyone. It was given to validate the fact that man needed to be saved and Messiah could do it. So if you believe that Jesus came to die for your sins, you’re going to put a little parentheses in there, and say, “Well, He came to die for 99 percent of my sins”? Well, where do you get that concept from? You don’t get that from the Scripture. It has to be taught to you. It has to be learned behavior. And it sounds cute to say, “Well, I believe He paid for 99 percent of mine.” But again, it goes back to the subjective part—the subjective deist says, “Well, yes, He paid 99 percent, but I must pay 1.”

“Well, who says?”

“Well, I say!”

Well, that’s foolish! Why would you want to not accept the full payment? It was given, it was done for you. It cost Him greatly. It cost you nothing. It’s given to you by grace. It’s a free gift. Why would you reject it? And that’s the stumbling block. That’s the thing they just can’t seem to overcome.

Tom: Yeah. Greg, one teaching that I got from you that I really love is the “Do” and the “Done.” Okay? Can you explain that for our audience?

Greg: Well, it’s just the fact that why are you trying to do something that’s done? Romans 10, Paul talks about the zeal that the Jew had but they were ignorant of the righteousness of God, going about to do—in other words, they were going about to establish their own righteousness, which they could never do. Now, Paul goes on to teach that they were doing it out of their own ignorance—their rejection of the reality of what the Lord was doing for them. It wasn’t because they didn’t have the Scripture, because he also tells us the oracles of God were committed to the Jew. So the evidence was there, but they decided, in and of themselves, that they would establish their own righteousness, and the fact, he says that that righteousness has been done for them by the Lord.

So, you pay your house note for…once a month you’re paying your mortgage, and you make the last payment. Well, are you going to go in next month and pay it again? Well, that would be foolish. Why? Because it’s done. It’s finished.

Tom: Yeah.

Greg: You know, why would you do something that’s done? Makes no sense!

Tom: It makes no sense, but it’s why in Ephesians it talks about really, not by anything that we’ve done—well, actually, that’s Titus—but the point here is that there are only two belief systems. It comes down to two belief systems. One is biblical Christianity, which Christ did it all. It’s done. And then there’s works-salvation. And every religion—every religion—even atheism falls under that label of works-salvation. And it’s not acceptable. It cannot get it done. It’s an eternal and infinite penalty that only Christ, being God…

Greg: But it’s palatable to people because it gives them value. It gives them a sense of importance. Again, “Gee, I can be like God. I have a role here. I’m the co-Savior; I’m the co-Redemptrix. I’m helping God bring forth the salvation, etc.” It gives man value apart from the Lord. You know, we both believe in the total depravity of man, the biblical total depravity of man, which means what? Man, in and of himself, is unworthy of anything. Paul says, “In our flesh dwelleth no good thing.” Isaiah says, “Our righteousness—our human good—is equivalent to filthy rags by God’s standards.” So, what could you and I produce? What value do we have apart from Christ? We have no value apart from Christ. The carnal man, the unregenerate man, rejects that. Because he wants to embrace the concept that he has value in himself. “Well, look, surely God’s not going to consign me to hell, because look what I have done! And look what I am doing!” But they fail to recognize that God requires divine perfection. You can never have failed. You can never have sinned to qualify. You have to be sinless, and we know we inherit Adam’s sin. So everyone born is born a sinner. Everyone born is born dying. What do we need? We need the Savior. The Old Testament was written to paint the picture that God would become man for the sole purpose of redeeming the creation.

Now, we have the Incarnation, we have the virgin birth, we have the life of Christ, we have the death on Calvary’s tree, and what do religious people say about that today? “Oh well, I have to do this and I have to do that.” What a poor Catholic does, he goes to the Mass, and the Mass is what? A man stands up, he puts on vestments, and he calls himself another Jesus. And he’s going to sacrifice Jesus again for the sins that Jesus already paid for.

Tom: Mm-hmm. Greg, the term there is “immolation,” which means “to kill.” It’s a sacrifice on the altar. That’s what they’re attending.

Greg: And kill again, and again, and again. You know, you mentioned Jim McCarthy earlier. In his video, Catholicism: Crisis of Faith, I thought the most cogent point in the whole thing—he was interviewing a Catholic theologian. And he asked a Catholic theologian a very simple question. Basically, I’m going to paraphrase it, because my memory’s not that good, but basically, what he said was this: “You believe that on that altar when you transubstantiate the bread—or you change the bread and the wine into the body and blood of Christ—that you are sacrificing Him again. That you are offering Him up for the sins of the world.”

He says, “Yes.”

“And do believe that’s a valid sacrifice?”

“Yes, I do.”

He says, “Well, then, why do you have to keep doing it?”

And all he got was a blank stare from the theologian. And he said he shrugged his shoulders and he says, “Well, you know, I guess I really don’t know.” He had no answer for that.

Tom: You see, that’s why, as you mentioned earlier, there are many Catholics who say, “Well, I don’t believe this. I don’t believe that.” Well, what about this? “Well, no, I don’t really believe this.”

You know, Dave Hunt, who you know, I’ve worked with for three decades, Dave would like…well, he would say, “Well, wait a minute. If you’re picking and choosing [remember, we call it “Cafeteria Catholics, right, Greg?]…”

Greg: Right.

Tom: “…If you’re picking and choosing something, if you don’t believe this in terms of what the Church says, why would you believe anything the Church says? What’s your point of arbitration here?” It’s ludicrous. Just like the priest. Just like it was for you growing up and for me growing up as a Catholic. If we tried to question something, we were put off. So we just kind of fell out of it. Said, “No, we’ll just go along with the Church unless there’s something that I don’t like, and then, you know, in my own heart and mind, I’ll deal with it.” But it’s the blind leading the blind.

Greg: Well, you know, a great example of that—I can remember growing up as a child, we had on the—I guess, the liner—the head liner of our vehicle, we had a St. Christopher medal there. And when we were going to take a trip or something, my dad would stop, and he would say a little prayer to St. Christopher, you know, St. Christopher, the patron saint of travellers, and so forth and so on. Supposedly St. Christopher would watch over you when you were traveling then, and protect you from accidents, etc., etc., and some believed keep you from running out of gas and flat tires and a few other things. Anyway, you would pray to St. Christopher. Well, you know, in the mid-80s, the Church announced that St. Christopher was, I guess, being defrocked as a saint, because Saint Christopher didn’t even exist.

Tom: Right.

Greg: There was never a person by the name of Christopher—never a saint. It was all made up, fabricated, no evidence for it. So they removed him. And I thought to myself, I thought, “What about all—all of the people with those things in their cars, and the prayers? Who was that going to? Who were they crediting that to?”

So I remember going into the Daughters of St. Paul’s bookstore, the Catholic bookstore here run by the Daughters of St. Paul. And I went in, and I was going to buy something, and the lady and I were talking, and I said, “Let me ask you,” I said, “what do you think about St. Christopher, you know, not being a saint anymore?”

And she looked, like, both ways, and she lowered her voice, and she leaned over and she says, “Oh we don’t believe that. You keep praying to him. He’ll watch out for you.”

Tom: Right. See, and it goes on. Greg, let me add this to it. Probably about six years ago, my wife and I were in Hawaii, and we were in a surf shop. And guess what? There was a whole display of St. Christopher medals for the surfers.

Greg: Right.

Tom: Unbelievable.

Greg: So, I mean, how do you rationally—you know, what do you do with that? How do you rationalize that? If you’re a person, and this is your faith, and you’re taught from a child that this person can do this for you, and that person can do that for you, and then that is removed, that is removed. You know, another example of that would be the rosary. You know, you can’t be a Catholic and don’t know what the rosary is. And you can’t be a Catholic, and not major…you know, your First Communion, your Confirmation, and you don’t know a rosary, you haven’t prayed a rosary, etc. Well, you go back and you ask someone, or you just investigate beyond the surface the origin of the rosary. What are you going to be told? You’re going to say, “Well, Mary appeared to St. Dominic and told Dominic to pray this, etc., for blessings, etc.,” and that’s what they’re going to tell you. You might even get a little tract on it, a little bitty booklet. But when you go back and you really study, and you, for example, you go to the older—the 1906 version of the Catholic Encyclopedia—you go back and you read that, and what do you find? You find their own theologians reveal in print in the encyclopedias that—they’re not on everybody’s shelf; most people don’t know, but—their own historians and their own theologians tell you what? That not only did Mary not appear to Dominic, but the concept of the rosary was not even present in the time that Dominic lived. And that it was the invention of a monk, which they referred to perhaps as delusional, by the name of de Rupe who later on concocted this idea. The question then follows, well, now that you’ve learned this, centuries removed, you learn this—obviously, you have to remove the rosary and all this system of prayers from the Church. And they say, “Well, no, even though it wasn’t given by Mary, it’s become valid in the piety of the people.

Tom: Yeah. It’s amazing, Greg, how these ideas—the Catholic baggage—the ideas hang in there. We could go to the Reformation and say, “Oh, that was a wonderful movement on the part of those who were Catholic and then wanted to reform the Church,” but they brought so much baggage: infant baptism, and so on, that it’s amazing what man hangs onto and has no basis for, but nevertheless, it’s the going thing, so you get involved with it.

Greg, we’re just about out of time for this segment of our program, but we’re going to have you back next week, and we’re going to pick up right where we left off for the sake of helping people to better understand Roman Catholicism, its dogmas, and how it compares with the Word of God.

Gary: You’ve been listening to Search the Scriptures 24/7, with T.A. McMahon. For more information about Greg Durel’s ministry, go to his website at heritagebiblechurch.com.

We offer a wide variety of materials to help you in your study of God’s Word. For a complete list of materials and a free subscription to our monthly newsletter, contact us at PO Box 7019, Bend, Oregon 97708; call us at 800-937-6638; or visit our website at thebereancall.org. I’m Gary Carmichael. Thanks for tuning in. And we encourage you to search the Scriptures 24/7.