335: Does the Pope Matter?

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Andrea Schwartz (00:02)
Welcome to out of the Question, a podcast that looks behind some common questions and uncovers the question behind the question, while providing real solutions for biblical world and life View. Your co hosts are Andrea Schwartz, a teacher and mentor, and pastor Charles Roberts.

Charles Roberts (00:21)
Hi, this is Charles Roberts. Welcome to another out of the Question podcast. I’m joined by host Andrea Schwartz. Andrea, how are you today?

Andrea Schwartz (00:29)
Fine. Looking forward to our discussion.

Charles Roberts (00:32)
Today we’re going to talk about the sensational publicity and some of it, rightfully so, about the recent death of Pope Francis, who died a couple of days ago, as of when we were recording this. And it’s hard to avoid any information about this because it’s all over the news media. And I suppose it’s a pretty big deal when the Pope passes away and then we’re on the verge of electing another Pope, even if you aren’t Roman Catholic. However, it also brings up the issue about the scriptural basis for having something like the papacy. And just really how significant is it that the Bishop of Rome is considered the supreme head of the church? And some people would have us think that supreme head of all churches, whether we like it or know it or not. Certainly it is hard and maybe not wise to assume that the Roman Catholic Church, even today has no influence or is not to be taken into account, certainly has and does. So Andrea and I would like to maybe chat something a little bit about this. And both of us have a background in Roman Catholicism, me as a former convert and she as a cradle Catholic.

Andrea Schwartz (01:46)
Yes.

Charles Roberts (01:47)
So maybe I’ll start off by asking you, Andrea, from your earliest days, when you were raised Catholic, was the Pope a big deal or a big issue in your spiritual life?

Andrea Schwartz (02:00)
Well, you have to remember that I started as a child there. I was baptized Roman Catholic. And I think it’s first of all important at the outset to differentiate between Catholicism and Roman Catholicism.

Charles Roberts (02:13)
Yes.

Andrea Schwartz (02:14)
Because the word Catholic appears in the creeds, one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. So Catholic just meant universal, that it had. Like if I said this is a. I could say this is a Catholic opinion. I’m not talking necessarily about a Roman Catholic opinion. I’m talking about somewhat universal, that all agree upon this. And in the creeds, when it talks about catholicity, it’s basically saying this is something that we all agree on, that the scope of Christ’s kingdom doesn’t have any bounds. But as you said, I was raised Roman Catholic. I went to 13 years of Catholic parochial schools. And then even the word parochial is kind of interesting because it’s actually the opposite of Catholic parochial means very narrow. But within the context of Roman Catholicism, there was this emphasis that if you as parents were Roman Catholic, whether nominally or very devoutly, your children should be raised that way. And thus my brother and my sisters and I went to Catholic school. So your question was, what about the Pope? Well, from my point of view, the Pope was there. He was a given. And there were some people who were enamored by the Pope.

Andrea Schwartz (03:39)
So if the Pope came to New York, which is where I grew up, that was a big deal. But I can honestly say, other than there was this guy, the Pope I don’t believe in, you know, internally it had any special significance. And then, as I like to tell people, as I went through my high school years, the religion class oftentimes was a very comparative religion class, and we’d study Hinduism and, and, and Buddhism. But you come away from that kind of experience as to, well, everybody has a right to do whatever they want. And so when I left high school, I pretty much left going to church on Sundays because now nobody was forcing me to things like that. But interestingly enough, Charles, aside from hearing that Martin Luther was a very bad guy, because that was part of Catholic history, history, I had never heard of this guy named John Calvin. And so later on coming to Faith, in my, you know, late 20s, early 30s, I was like, who is John Calvin? Only to discover that much of Protestantism that is faithful to Scripture would find its root in Calvinism.

Charles Roberts (04:55)
Yeah. And I. I’ll say a few words about my own Catholic journey, if I can put it that way, maybe in a little bit. But I’m glad you brought up the distinction between Catholic, Roman Catholicism, because I think this is an area where there’s a lot of confusion and misunderstanding, even among Roman Catholics and especially among evangelical types. And let me just say that what I will share about this is not something that’s ginned up by all of us who are Reformed and Calvinistic or theonomic. I had the privilege as a student at Westminster Theological Seminary to take three and a half years of church history. And the professor I had at the time used a series of books called the History of Christian Doctrine by Yaroslav Pelikan. P E L I K N Yaroslav Pelikan was a universally recognized church historian authority. He started out as a scholar in the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, and he later converted to the Orthodox Church. I had the privilege of hearing him lecture on one occasion. And this series is like four or five volumes on the history of Christian doctrine that starts, like, with A.D. 50, all the way into the medieval era is considered an unparalleled work, scholarship and history of the church.

Charles Roberts (06:13)
And if people will resort to resources like this, they will find the history of the Christian Church generally. And since we’re talking about it, Roman Catholicism specifically is very different than what’s portrayed in popular movies and films and the pop culture among different ethnic enclaves of Catholicism. And let me give you one example. And this is standard, I think, Christian history. You know, after the death of the apostles and the expansion of the Church in the Greek speaking world of the Roman Empire, there was no Roman Catholic Church. There was no Protestant Church either, for that matter, in terms of specific names. But you had flourishing churches in Rome, you had some in Alexandria, you had some in Damascus, you had others in Jerusalem. And so these churches and hundreds of others that were established through them developed and began to in common, read specific texts of the Bible. And so over a period of time, what we call the canon of Scripture was codified through church councils. But they were simply codifying the fact that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were the four gospels that were used in almost all the churches, and they were universally recognized as authoritative.

Charles Roberts (07:33)
There was no Roman and Catholic Church council that said these are the four gospels that you must use. Some people like to think that, but the better scholars who will tell you, even among the Roman Catholics, no, that’s not quite the way it developed. So there was a Catholic Church, as you pointed out, the Church universal, the faith believed among all Christians that flourished for hundreds and hundreds of years. And compressing a lot of information here for the sake of brevity, what most people think of today as the Roman Catholic Church really did not emerge until the era of the early medieval time. And one thing you can find, for example, concerning their doctrine of the Eucharist, the real presence of Christ in the bread and wine, that doctrine, also called transubstantiation, was never universally defined by what would be the Roman Catholic Church until about the 8th or 9th century. So that’s a lot of centuries leading up to that point where there were differing views among the various churches about what exactly is taking place in communion. And even today, the Orthodox Church defines it rather differently than the Roman Catholic Church. So all of that to say that the development of the papacy, with the Bishop of Rome being the supreme bishop over all of the others, is something else that developed over time.

Charles Roberts (09:00)
So the idea that this one human fallible individual, regardless of his personal piety or lack thereof, could speak universally for the entire Church, it was simply unthinkable to earliest Christians, and what they would have agreed with is that what Scripture teaches and what has come to be believed among all the churches that follow Scripture, this is what speaks for the church and for Christians.

Andrea Schwartz (09:26)
And let’s remember that men like Martin Luther and John Calvin and a number of the other reformers would have considered themselves and did consider themselves part of this Christian church. Their efforts were to take out that which was not scriptural and reestablish the authority of Scripture. So you could say, well, there had to be a Catholic Church because there was a church. But I’m not sure that at the time everybody called it the Catholic Church. And it’s dawned on me that fallen man has a need and a desire for centralization, not unlike when the Hebrew people told Samuel, everybody else has a king. Why can’t we have a king? Well, they had a king, but there was no internal confidence that that gave them an advantage. Of course it does. If God is your king and you’re faithful to that king, as Psalm 2 tells us, no other king has a chance. But I think the concentration of power, putting everything on the hands of one guy is a trait that says we need to have a professional class of clergy. That means that the laity doesn’t really have to study and know all that much, because we already have these people who are doing it for us.

Charles Roberts (10:54)
Well, I think that we can see in the New Testament not only something that is contrary to the way the Roman Catholic Church developed and the Orthodox Church, but even some Protestant churches where you do have a structure within the individual churches. And you do find, for example, in the Book of Acts, churches coming together to make some sort of authoritative pronouncement about what is accepted and what isn’t, what is a matter for discipline or what is not. And Paul goes to the Jerusalem Church and the Council of Churches there, maybe that’s too, let’s say small c council of churches to get an opinion and a ruling about Gentiles coming into the church, for example, and whether they should be circumcised or eat pagan food, sacrificed to pagan idols. Now, the way that developed over time in what would become the Roman Catholic Church is that you had one central church with a pastor who was designated a bishop. Now, the word episcopoi, the Greek term, that’s where we get the term episcopal, which means bishop, but also the term presbuteros, presbyter, which generally is translated elder. They generally are used sort of interchangeably in the New Testament.

Charles Roberts (12:12)
But the way things developed over Time in Roman Catholicism, based on the culture in which it grew up, was that the man who was the bishop of Rome, which meant he was the pastor over all the churches in Rome, and they were largely house churches for the most part. In the early days, you know, he became a centralized figure, the sort of thing you were referring to. So it eventually got to the point where the individual pastors of those smaller congregations, they were accountable to him, and he had the absolute authority, small a absolute authority over the clergy and over the congregations. Now, what’s curious about that is that in the more decentralized form that we see in the New Testament, you have the same thing operating. If you are a member of a church, whether it’s a denominational church or not, and you have a council of elders, or in some cases they call them deacons. This is some sort of an authority structure in the church where decisions are made and things are accomplished, and the pastor will generally sit on that council. In my church, we call it the session S E S S I O N.

Charles Roberts (13:17)
And the pastor’s function is different from the elders, but they all serve the same sort of purpose in administrating or administering the work of the church of Jesus Christ. So the elder board structure, in a smaller context is the diocesan structure of the Roman Catholic Church and other Episcopal churches, which has been blown up in a larger proportion. So if you shrunk it down, you would say the pastor of the church would be equal to the bishop and the elders would be equal to the priests. And of course, in reformed churches, we don’t offer sacrifices on an altar. Christ tells us in his word, in the Book of Hebrews in particular, that his sacrifice is once and forever, and it doesn’t need to keep going on and on and on. So this is another way in which whatever the fanfare may be about the death of any particular pope, and whatever its significance may or may not be, the New Testament, the Bible, the whole word of God also stands over and against some of these things and its distortions, either on the Protestant side or on the Roman Catholic side.

Andrea Schwartz (14:27)
And so I like the way you said administer, right in that word, administer, there’s the word minister. And Jesus said, those who be great among you will be the servants. And so somebody has to be the final say on some things. I recently got a question from somebody who said, I’m part of a homeowner’s association. For those who don’t know what that is, you have a number of people who buy into a certain portion of a development or Something and they have a homeowners association. And this allows for certain procedures or policies. So for example, I know people who their homeowners association says that they will hire the person who cuts the grass in front of everybody’s house. The idea of that is so that everything looks somewhat uniform and they want to keep up a certain level of care. What you do in the backyard is what you do in the backyard, but that’s that. Now we would never look at that and say that’s, you know, tenant of scripture. It’s a policy that if you join this group, this is what you agree to. And then you have people who head the homeowners association who basically enforce the rules.

Andrea Schwartz (15:47)
So the administrative functions of the elders and the bishop were to keep order. And since they’re God ordained positions, they should be looked at as appropriate because the Bible speaks to them. However, I don’t read any place in Scripture that they become the final say on what the Bible says, that the Bible is the final say on what the Bible says. And so I think the whole idea of pastors and elders have elevated to a point that says in some places will tell you what to think and what’s correct to think. And I’m not sure that the scripture ever points to that.

Charles Roberts (16:31)
Yeah, I think that depending on the context of the church and getting back to the Roman Catholic Church for a second, I mean, one of the challenges that we face in discussing the Roman Catholic Church, what it believes and teaches as an institution, it’s been around for over 1,000 years. And so I like to say to people, when you have an institution been around that long, just about anything you say about it can be correct. The one unique thing that the Roman Catholic Church has done, and I suppose to some extent the Eastern Orthodox Church, is they have managed to keep an organizational unity. So everything’s under one big umbrella. And although some among them may make it sound like there’s this total absolute unity, you know, the Roman Catholic Church is not like you crazy Protestants and evangelicals, where you got all these people starting their churches and all this sort of thing. Well, the fact is they do have that kind of diversity, but they’ve managed to keep it all under one umbrella. And you’ll find extreme positions within the larger big tent of Roman Catholicism from one end of the political, social and theological spectrum to the other.

Charles Roberts (17:45)
And I would invite anyone who would like an example of that from an official standpoint. You can get the catechism of the Catholic Church that I think was produced in the 1980s during the administration or papacy of Pope John Paul II. And it came, I think, more or less directly or indirectly out of the Second Vatican Council. The old Baltimore Catechism is what a lot of cradle Catholics of a certain age grew up learning. This catechism of the Catholic Church that was published 30, 40 years ago, I think was meant to revise and replace it. And if you go to that catechism and look up the term atheists or even Muslims, you will find that the Roman Catholic Church officially teaches that atheists may go to heaven, that people of other religions can become saved, whether or not they’ve ever believed on Christ or not. So it really. And then you’ll find some Roman Catholics who would shriek at that idea and say, well, this is an example of how our church has gone adrift and they blame it on this thing or that thing. So it’s simply not true that evangelicals and reformed people are off on all kinds of wild tangents, starting churches left to right and creating all kinds of havoc.

Charles Roberts (19:00)
It’s just that the Catholic Church has the similar thing. They’ve just managed to keep it under one big umbrella.

Andrea Schwartz (19:05)
And I’m glad you brought up the Second Vatican Council, because it brought to mind. So I grow up in the 60s, and one of the results of the council was to say that the Mass should be in English or in the native language rather than Latin. My early years, I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t speak Latin or understand it. And yes, they eventually have you learn it, but the songs were in Latin. And I remember my mother taking our missals, which would be the books that you, you know, bring with you to church. And she typed up all the English responses and put them over the Latin responses. And it was a big to do. And then they had to have songs that were in English because we didn’t have songs prior to that in English. We often would have the choir in the back and it would, you know, sing songs in Latin and you’d sing along as a kid kind of imitating things, but you didn’t know. And so it was a big deal to suddenly have something that you could go to church with and understand. But the idea was, if you were going to change tradition, what you were doing was establishing a new tradition.

Andrea Schwartz (20:21)
And other than the idea of we get our marching orders from Scripture, it ended up being we get our marching orders from the. This centralized place, whether it’s the diocese, the. The papacy in general.

Charles Roberts (20:35)
I remember growing up in my neighborhood in Columbia, South Carolina. I like to say that back then, in the late 50s, early 60s, you could probably have fit all the Roman Catholics in the entire state, you know, into one large room. There weren’t that many, but there were a few in the neighborhood where I grew up. And later on, when I converted to Catholicism in the the early 1970s, some of those people were still living in the neighborhood where I grew up. And they didn’t seem terribly excited about me having converted to their church. And I found out that one of the reason was not so much me personally, but they themselves had quit going to Mass. And it all was related to what you were just describing. And this has been one of the major fallouts in the Catholic Church. And we see this division even today. I mean, for hundreds and hundreds of years, you had millions of Roman Catholics whose faith was defined and shaped and their worshiping piety was shaped by the old Latin Mass. And that was a priest largely, who has back to the congregation throughout most of the Mass, chanting and speaking in a language that most people didn’t understand.

Charles Roberts (21:45)
And by the way, for the record, in the medieval era, there were even priests that didn’t understand Latin. They had memorized the words, but they had no idea what a lot of it meant. They were illiterate in some cases. But at any rate, when the Vatican Council came in and changed all of this, it frankly destroyed the faith of many, many people. And they not only changed all of this, and certainly it’s a good thing to be able to understand what your worship service is saying and what’s going on, but there wasn’t a lot of groundwork laid. And they not only did that, but the sort of visual things that went along with that in Roman Catholicism, the stations of the cross, the shrines to Mary and Peter, the incense, the incensing the altar, the tabernacle with the candle burning in many parishes, these things just simply disappeared. And so it was just a blow to the stomach of a lot of Catholics who just said, you know, forget this, I’m going to go to the Methodist church down the street. And I don’t think that the Catholic Church handled it very well in that regard.

Charles Roberts (22:48)
And so even today there are many Catholics, I think Roman Catholics, who believe that the Second Vatican Council was some sort of Masonic plot and they go to unauthorized traditional Latin Masses. And it’s a growing number of people who, they call themselves trad Catholics, traditional Catholics.

Andrea Schwartz (23:07)
You’ll even see signs that say traditional Mass at 8 o’clock in the morning or 5:30 in the afternoon. And modern or things like that. What’s interesting when you talked about how when the ruling or the consensus came down that we were going to allow people to understand things. You go back in history, and a lot of the early martyrs in the Reformation era were basically put to death because they translated the Bible into people’s languages so they could understand it. And the established church at the time didn’t like that. And a lot of these people, if it was found out, for example, that the Lord’s Prayer had been translated into someone’s native language, that was terrible. And these were grounds for inquisition and all that sort of stuff.

Charles Roberts (23:59)
Yeah. I guess for whatever reason, the people who were making those kind of rulings and putting people in the flames and burning them to death for translating the Bible into English or whatever it may be, they somehow either ignored or didn’t know anything about the Eastern Orthodox Church, which for over a thousand years had had everything in the worship service in the language of the people. You know, Greek, Russian, Slavic, Aramaic, Arabic. All of these were native languages of people. And they worshiped using their native language every Sunday. And I remember when I was having a conversation with a Greek Orthodox priest many years ago, the Catholic parish that I belonged to at that time, the then Pope, John Paul ii, had given permission for the parishes in some diocese, if the bishop thought it was good to have the old traditional Latin Mass, you know, on some sort of rotating basis, not necessarily every Sunday, but this particular parish, they decided there were enough traditional Catholics going there that they wanted this done. This is in the 1980s, so probably for the first time in 30 or 40 years, the traditional Mass was said at this parish, and there must have been 500 people there, and they weren’t all Roman Catholic.

Charles Roberts (25:11)
And the Greek Orthodox priest, he came to it, and I was chatting with him later, and he said, I’ll never forget when the Vatican Council pretty much decreed that everything would now be in English. He said, I realized that was going to be the end of the unity in the Catholic Church, because the Latin commonality is what held everything together. But it’s worth asking the question and thinking about this. Jesus did not speak Latin. The early apostles didn’t speak Latin. They may have understood a few words because the Romans occupied their area, but they were native Aramaic speakers. They probably understood some Greek and some Hebrew, of course. So where did this whole Latin come from? Well, it came from the Roman Empire, which was the dominant language of official Rome. And I bring this up because this is another example of a cultural influence that really has no basis in Scripture. And I think largely the structure that we were talking about earlier, where things get a little bit distorted, that too came from that cultural context. And we can extend this right on into the worship practices. I mean, there were an entire pantheon of gods and lesser deities among the Romans and the Greeks, and they had their special days and their special feasts.

Charles Roberts (26:22)
And a lot of that was just simply with in air quotes, baptized by the Catholic Church of the time. And the pagans were told, well, you’re no longer going to offer sacrifices to Zeus and Hercules and whatever you’ll now offer them for the saint, so and so and memory of the Blessed Mother and this sort of thing. So all of that was just simply brought over into, with a Christian veneer over the top of it. And that included also the structure of the church where you had one supreme pontiff, supreme head, which I think that was the title that the Caesars assumed as well. Pontifex Maximus, the supreme high priest of the. The Roman religion.

Andrea Schwartz (27:03)
And see, a lot of times people grow up into something. I was making a comment yesterday. Why was I a Catholic? Well, I was born into a Catholic family. Why is someone a Mormon? They’re born into a Mormon family. Why is somebody Muslim? They’re born into a Muslim family. That doesn’t make everything equal and everything acceptable to God. The bottom line has to be the scripture. But when you talk about the pomp and circumstance and you still see it today in some churches, Anglican churches, Episcopal churches. I remember growing up, every May, we’re coming up to May. In our grammar school, we had something called the May Procession. And we all got into our. I wouldn’t call them costumes, but the same outfits that we had gotten into for our first communion or our confirmation. And we would parade around the streets and there would be an image of Mary and we would be singing praises to Mary. I didn’t particularly like it, but it wasn’t because I had religious objections. Usually it was hot and you had to wear these nylon dresses and it was like, not a. A pleasant experience, but it’s what everybody did.

Andrea Schwartz (28:13)
And so you would come up with the conclusion, not that I don’t like it in principle, I just don’t like it in practice, but looking back on it now and, and understanding what Jesus’s mother, Mary would think now in that she’s, you know, she just died and she’s among the saints that live, that this would be an anathema to her in terms of people worshiping her. And so the whole idea of what you’re used to, you do it. Your behavior is there, but you don’t necessarily understand why. So when I left in my mind the idea that Christianity wasn’t worth it, I didn’t investigate anything else because, you know, I had been taught that the rest of them were just protesters, Protestants, so don’t pay any attention which God ordained it this way. But I got involved in things that were just as religious, but they didn’t have the sense of that kind of. Or Christian religion.

Charles Roberts (29:12)
One of the things that we’re sort of dealing with in this discussion is the replacement of biblical belief, biblical doctrine, the faith and practice of the Church of Jesus Christ that arises from belief in what Scripture teaches. And that means the older and newer Testaments versus the influx of Greek philosophical and pagan categories that modified and changed many of these things. I’ve even heard some Roman Catholic. I know, one Roman Catholic scholar in particular, who basically said that it was God’s ordained purpose to create a Christian church that included the philosophy of Aristotle and that somehow Greek philosophy was a creation of God to be used by the Christian church. And I’ve always found that kind of a striking admission. And I don’t know how many Roman Catholics actually think that way about it, but he certainly did. And he was, I think, a bona fide scholar. But I think that as we, you know, discuss this issue of the death of Pope Francis, I remember recently, like the past day or two, hearing somebody on one of the major news broadcasts saying, it doesn’t matter if you’re a Roman Catholic or not. The death of a Pope and the election of a new one has tremendous significance and implications for everyone.

Charles Roberts (30:42)
So I’m wondering, Andrea, do you agree with that statement? And if so, why or why not?

Andrea Schwartz (30:47)
You already know the answer to that.

Charles Roberts (30:49)
Question, but pretend I don’t.

Andrea Schwartz (30:51)
I’ll pretend you don’t. Again, it’s this idea. If Jesus Christ is not King of Kings and Lord of Lords, then you’re going to need somebody else to hold that position. And the whole idea that when the Pope speaks, you know, he speaks with the full authority of God. Now, what I find very interesting is you’ll see a lot of people’s comments. I hope the next Pope keeps with the progressive nature of Pope Francis. Other people say, I hope the next Pope goes a little bit more conservative and will adhere more to what we’re used to. In other words, if it depends on the man, well, then we’ve sort of laid aside the man, the fully man, fully God person of Jesus Christ, and that somehow or other we need representation on Earth because obviously Jesus Ascended, sitting at the right hand of the Father just isn’t enough. In other words, the Holy Spirit just isn’t enough. And so you’ll get Catholics in America, especially because I still am in touch with people I knew when I was younger and I went to school with. They’ll consider themselves, quote, unquote, good Catholics and still think abortion is appropriate, still think you shouldn’t speak out against people who are lesbian, homosexual, transgender, in some cases are against the killing of preborn children, but not in all cases.

Andrea Schwartz (32:26)
And in other cases, they’re against the killing of preborn children, but they think the death penalty, which again is ordained by scripture for certain offenses, is wrong. So this apparency of everybody thinks the same, oh, you’re Catholic. I, I think that’s almost meaningless now. Like, oh yeah, well, you wouldn’t want to date that person. He’s Catholic. Or oh yeah, that person’s a Catholic, as if you know everything about him. Well, you and I both know that there are many antinomian Christians who call themselves Protestant or pro, you know, part of Protestant churches, and they have equal error in terms of what the Bible says and what their marching orders are.

Charles Roberts (33:09)
Yeah, and what you just described is an example of what I was talking about earlier, where you have this institutional unity, but a significant diversity of opinion and belief, even if it contradicts official, in this case, Roman Catholic doctrine. But I think that one thing that’s worth considering, again, going back to the small C idea of being a Catholic, is the fact that when we do study the history of the Christian church, we do find in the New Testament and the development of the churches in the earliest history, a following of the New Testament pattern of having pastors, elders and deacons and congregations and mission work and the observance of the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. And what’s even more interesting is that when you trace, and I’m saying when you. I’m referring to the scholarship of people who have looked into this sort of thing. When you trace the development of worship in the Christian church, you find a certain framework almost from the very beginning that has endured in sometimes corrupted form, as in the case of the Roman Catholic Church or the Eastern Orthodox Church on one end of the spectrum.

Charles Roberts (34:22)
And then it’s been totally obliterated, as it is in many evangelical mega type churches today, where there’s really no worship to speak of. They call it that, but it doesn’t bear any resemblance whatsoever to the earliest worship of the early church. But going right from the very Beginning of the Church. Up until the modern era, the basic structure of worship was a call to worship, a confession of sin, reading of Scripture, a singing of hymns or psalms, the receiving of the Lord’s Supper, a sermon, a teaching on the Scripture and a benediction and a dismissal. And in one form or another, those things have existed from the very beginning. Now the church I pastor and the denomination that I’m in, and many other Protestant churches and Reformed churches, we regularly confess the Nicene Creed, the Apostles Creed, we even use the Chalcedonian Creed and an Athanasians Creed. Athanasian Creed. Those are not easy to repeat in a worship service. But you know, those are as much a part of our heritage as true Catholic Christians as they are anybody who claims to be Roman Catholic. It’s just a point that the Protestant reformers themselves. You’ve mentioned John Calvin several times.

Charles Roberts (35:35)
I challenge anyone to get hold of a good English translation of the Institutes of the Christian Religion that you know Calvin’s magisterial work. And you will see footnote after footnote where he refers to the teachings and the writings of the early church fathers, St. Augustine and many others who are sometimes claimed to be the exclusive property of the Roman Catholic Church when they’re nothing at all of the sort. They are the heritage of all true Bible believing Christians.

Andrea Schwartz (36:06)
So Jesus said, you’ll know they’re Christians by the way they love one another. He also said, said, love me, keep my commandments, he who does the will of my Father. And so there weren’t denominations then, although I imagine just people being people. The Laodiceans might not have liked, the Ephesians who might not have liked, the Galatians who might not have liked, you know, whatever. We don’t have to assume that the early church had no sin. Obviously all have sinned except Christ himself. So the whole idea of acknowledging yourself as a sinner and understanding the principle of Scripture that says you can’t save yourself and no one can save you other than the Holy Spirit is how we should view brothers and sisters in the faith. He didn’t say, you’ll know they’re Christians by their denominations and then listed out all the good ones and all the bad ones. And so those lines of opposition, I’m not saying there aren’t real differences between stated beliefs, but if you’re going to deal with people one on one, and one of the things you see in the early church, it was very local, it wasn’t administered miles and miles and miles away, there might be input, there might be questions like, how do we deal with this?

Andrea Schwartz (37:25)
But ultimately it involved people interacting with each other, helping and supporting each other. And so I remember one of the criticisms that some of your more established reform people would say against RJ Rushdoony is that he’s just too easy on the Catholics. He’s just too easy on the Catholics. And one person wouldn’t even write a foreword to one of his books that we ended up Publishing after Dr. Rushdoony passed away because he was just too easy on the Catholics. Well, Rushdoony’s theology said, those who are in the family of God are the elective God. And. And this has been established before the foundations of the world and judge them the way we’re supposed to judge in terms of righteous judgments, in terms of how they line up with Scripture. But I even had a conversation with a man on Easter who said, oh, the Catholics, you know, I just. And he just saying Catholic was enough to dismiss someone. And I looked at him and I said, there are true believers in the Catholic Church. And. And if you say they’re not because they’re in the Catholic Church, then you must think that God’s election has to do with someone passing a theology test, as opposed to actually love the Lord, acknowledge their sin, and live with the prompting and obedience to the Holy Spirit.

Andrea Schwartz (38:48)
So I think we’ve gotten into these factions and. And I think in a lot of ways, Charles, it’s sort of like off the point.

Charles Roberts (38:54)
Yeah, I used to say that the average evangelical Christian’s understanding of church history went something like this. You had the Jesus and the apostles and the Apostle Paul, and then for maybe over a thousand years, you had not really much of anything. And then you had this guy Martin Luther, and then you had Billy Graham. And that’s their understanding of church history. The fact is, the Protestant Reformation took place in the 1500s. Prior to that time, there was nothing. There was no Protestant Church, there was the Roman Catholic Church. There were heretical sects and groups. It was the Orthodox Church. And so you’ve either got to say that there never were any Christians after the Apostle Paul died until Billy Graham came on the scene, or Martin Luther or Calvin or whoever you say, or you’ve got to account for the fact that the Lord moved through the things that existed at the time and all of their faulty nature to accomplish his will and save his elect people. So, yes, the Lord doesn’t have to go by what we think he should be doing and tell him what to do. On the other hand, he has revealed his perfect, infallible Word in Holy Scripture, and Holy Scripture must be interpreted and understood.

Charles Roberts (40:10)
And one of the great blessings of the Protestant Reformation is that we have not only the Bible in our own language, but we can read it and understand it for ourselves. But as R.C. sproul once commented, along with that is the responsibility to read it and understand it correctly. And I think this is where the creeds and the confessions of the Church can be a great help.

Andrea Schwartz (40:31)
And there has to be a basic humility that comes along with if God has opened your eyes to see that certain things are true and other things are not, how you communicate those things is important. And I wouldn’t say how you do it is just as important as the truth itself, but it’s a close second. Because like I said, most people do believe because that’s what they have done and they have believed. So if you’re going to help someone come to an understanding of something, their presuppositions have to change, their ideas have to be altered enough to even understand what you’re saying. And then I believe we’ve done our job and the Holy Spirit does the rest. And I think that’s an important thing to keep in mind.

Charles Roberts (41:20)
Well, I totally agree, and I will say this much autobiographically, you mentioned this earlier about, you know, you’re being raised a Catholic. Well, I was raised in the Methodist Church. And at some point in my teenage years, it occurred to me that the only reason I was a Methodist is because I was born into a family that that’s where I was baptized in that church and was confirmed in that church. And that to me didn’t seem like an altogether good reason. And so I started exploring and I knew a number of Roman Catholic kids who had left parochial schools to come into the public schools. And that was the conduit for me joining the Roman Catholic Church. But what I found later was that the church I thought I was joining really did not exist. I mean, obviously the parish did and the structure was there. But I think a lot of people, they get a romanticized view of Roman Catholicism that’s based on Hollywood movies like the Shoes of the Fisherman or Becket or Quo Vadis. And, you know, they get all starry eyed with that and think, this is, you know, this is the church I’ve been.

Charles Roberts (42:27)
This is the church of all ages. But the reality is rather different. And I think maybe to sum all of this up, the death of Pope Francis is an example of that. Where you had a papacy and a pope who espoused on one side certain traditional Catholic doctrines. And on the other, he apparently said it was okay for priests to bless so called same sex marriages. He encouraged any and everybody to get the COVID vaccine, even to the point where there were many Catholics who wanted to take a religious exception where they was mandated. But because of this Pope’s pronouncements, they were in a bind. You know, they said, well, you want to take an exception to getting this vaccine, but your Pope has said you should get it. So he was a real mixed bag, and many of these men who have been in that position have been that way. So I’m certainly not happy that the man died. But on the other hand, I think we should recognize that human beings of all sorts come and go, but the word of God endures forever as we read in the book of Isaiah.

Andrea Schwartz (43:32)
Okay, so I’m going to share an anecdote and I sort of did this to you as we were doing some preliminary discussions. But back in 1986, 87, there was a movie that came out called Saving Grace. Now, how did I find out about this movie? Quite accidentally, for those of you who remember Blockbuster, when Blockbuster would have sales, they would oftentimes put their VHS tapes at a discount price. And so it was not unusual for my husband and me and sometimes the kids to go in and buy up titles for a dollar. And this looks like a good thing. Anyway, so we watch this movie, Saving Grace, and the premise is that a man is elected Pope. And it starts off seeing how they do their election process. He doesn’t really look like he. He’s very uncomfortable with it, but he says, you know, I accept in the name of the Lord. And then you get to see how the Pope lives and all the pomp and circumstance. And ultimately what happens is he feels very out of touch. When he became a priest, he became a priest because he enjoyed working with people, helping people, administering God’s love through his acts of service.

Andrea Schwartz (44:52)
And so he’s going through a crisis. Like, I’m just like this figurehead. What does it matter? Anyway, as the story goes, one day he’s out gardening in the Vatican and a piece of paper starts to blow away. And he tries to go get it. And he opens the door and he gets there, but the door closes and now he’s locked out of the Vatican property. And he sort of enjoys it because he’s going around the. I guess the Italian soccer team had just won the World cup, and he’s out among people, and he really likes the freedom of it. Anyway, previously there had been a young girl who had come to the Vatican to say, our village doesn’t have a priest. And so he uses this as an opportunity to go to that village, and he sees a devastated people who are hopeless, who are just basically, they have no hope. Anyway, so we watched the movie and we liked it, and I went and brought it up, and I sat down with Dr. Rushdoony, and we watched it together. I cannot tell you how. I mean, I never. I’d never really gone to the movies with Rush, so I can’t really say how he normally reacted, but as the story progresses, he was, like, clapping his hands, going, this is Christian reconstruction.

Andrea Schwartz (46:09)
This is Christian reconstruction. And I would encourage people, you can watch the movie for free on YouTube. It used to not be available on a service, but I rewatched it yesterday on YouTube so you can see it. But it had nothing to do with Catholicism. Roman Catholicism is Christian reconstruction. It’s what a believer does in terms of putting faith into action. And I think you’ll end up smiling. And for those who don’t know a lot about Roman Catholicism, you’ll get a dose of it, because you’ll see at the beginning of the film what the whole pomp and circumstance looks like. And it ends with him giving an Easter address to the crowd because he’s back now being the Pope. And of course, we just had the Pope that died on Monday give his papal address. So I think it’s a timely thing to watch.

Charles Roberts (47:00)
But.

Andrea Schwartz (47:00)
But the important part is, what is Christian reconstruction? It’s building the kingdom. And you actually see this depicted in the movie, not just building, but how you deal with the enemies of God in the process of them trying to destroy your work. So I highly recommend the movie. It’s really. It remains one of my favorites ever. And maybe that was because I got a chance to watch it with Rush, but he then asked me at the time, can you buy copies of this? And I think to get a copy of VHS cost like 20 to $50. I don’t remember at the time, but I sent him a couple, and he passed it around to the staff. He said, they need to see this. So I think that we do need to separate sometimes form from content, that the most important aspect of our faith is content. And sometimes it’s going to come in different forms. And I think especially you, Charles, who, in your journey, I think, did the smorgasbord of trying almost everything to. In your search for truth, but that you’re going to find some aspects of truth along the way. But of course, Jesus is the capital t Truth.

Charles Roberts (48:11)
Yeah. And I did see the movie at your recommendation, and I did see it on YouTube. And you know, what I took away from it, apart from the things that you’ve already mentioned, is that you have here an individual, regardless of who he is, who is attempting to either consciously or unconsciously live out the teachings of Jesus, that by this they will know you’re my disciple if you have love for one another. Well, what does that look like? It’s not just having, you know, warm, fuzzy feelings about somebody. It means putting your shoulder to the wheel and getting to work to help people who need help. In this case, it was, like you said, a village that they needed water and a few other, you know, essentials. So, yeah, I can see why Dr. Rashtuni was so excited about it from that standpoint. And yeah, if we’re going to follow Jesus teachings, then that looks like something. It’s not. Just something that feels a certain way.

Andrea Schwartz (48:58)
And when you are obedient to scripture, guess who will recognize it? The people God has called will gravitate towards what you’re doing and your endeavor. And the people who hate God will also notice you. And I think that was very clear depicted in the movie. In terms of movies, let me say I also watched recently the latest movie on bishops and cardinals and the papacy called Conclave, and I don’t recommend it because it’s pretty obvious that the movie has a point. I. I think maybe they knew that this pope was either ill or something like that. But within it you get to see even the various factions within this homogenous group, which isn’t all that homogenous, those who want to promulgate sexual preferences and things of that nature. So I Saving Grace is a much better movie to watch, but you can see on the flip side how it’s divorced from serving people. And it’s much more in the movie, the more recent one, on pushing an agenda. And it, if you, you know, make it through the movie, it’s not God’s agenda.

Charles Roberts (50:13)
Well, Andrea, I think we’ve plumb the depths of these issues. And again, I mean, to some extent it is a big occasion when a pope dies and a new one is being elected, if for no other reason. It’s all over the news and that kind of thing. But I hope our listeners have gained something from this discussion. And I think you’ll agree we would love to hear from folks who may want to comment or make suggestions for other topics. Would you share the email address they can use for that?

Andrea Schwartz (50:41)
[email protected]. that’s how you reach us. And as far as the book that a particular person did not want to write an introduction for, it’s called the Cure of Souls, and it’s about this is by Rushdoony, and it’s about confession and what it actually means. And I think that’s a very useful understanding of confession, the faith and the need for confession, and divorce it from the standard idea of the Catholic confessional and things of that nature. But it’s a very potent book and it really talks about the basis of our faith. So I would recommend that one.

Charles Roberts (51:25)
And I think we’re in the midst of a spring sale or something like that, the Chalcedon.edu website, so it’s a good time for people to avail themselves of that. Very excellent title. Thank you for mentioning the title, because I was going to ask you what that was.

Andrea Schwartz (51:38)
Yes, very good. All right, folks, thanks for joining us and we’ll talk with you next time.

Thanks for listening to out of the Question. For more information on this and other topics, please visit Chalcedon.edu