Audio Transcript

Today we talk about some of the deadliest errors of present-day Roman Catholicism. And over the next month, we look at Rome historically. This October, we’re celebrating the Reformation — Martin Luther’s great stand against the pope and against Rome’s spiritual abuses and theological errors. But Luther didn’t stand alone. Other men stood for this same cause, before and after him — people like John Wycliffe, William Tyndale, Thomas Cranmer, John Knox, and John Calvin. And many other lesser-known names paid the ultimate price in the Reformation — men and women, even teenagers, who stood against Rome, and who bled and were burned and drowned for it.

These stories of sacrifice are our focus in the month ahead, in a 31-day tour you can complete in just 5–7 minutes each day. It’s called Here We Stand. You can subscribe to the email journey today by going to desiringGod.org/stand. Or just go to desiringGod.org and click on the link at the top of the website. I hope you’ll join us in remembering the price paid for the spiritual blessings and religious liberties we enjoy today.

The core beliefs enshrined by the pope and in the practices of Rome that deeply concerned the Reformers five hundred years ago are some of the very same concerns for us Protestants today — leading to this question about whether someone in a Roman Catholic church could be genuinely saved. The question comes from a listener named Jimmy who writes, “Hello, Pastor John. A close friend of mine passed away recently. He was a great man, a good friend, a mentor to many young men like myself. And he was a devout Roman Catholic. My questions for you are these: Will I see my friend in heaven? Or do his theological views make this impossible? Can I rightfully experience Paul’s ‘sorrowful, yet always rejoicing’ mantra, or was my friend merely a devoted husband, a wonderful friend, and a good man? In other words, do you believe devout Roman Catholics can be genuine Christians?”

Before I answer that specific question, let me lay out again the reasons we should be seriously concerned with Roman Catholic teaching — and that, at numerous levels, its contradictory stance toward Scripture produces, I think, a kind of religion that I fear has led many people astray, even into destruction. And I do not mean that Roman Catholicism has a corner on that kind of misleading teaching. There are lots of brands of so-called “Christian” tradition that have damaged people by the errors that they represent.

Seven Deadly Errors

So, let me give you seven examples of what concerns me about Roman Catholic teaching and that I think we should be very concerned about and steer clear of.

1. We should be concerned that the Roman Catholic Church elevates the authority of the pope and the church councils — when speaking in their official capacity as teachers of the church — to the same level as Holy Scripture. This has led many Roman Catholics away from a personal engagement with the Scriptures into a reliance on the church — even though the church is fallible — when they ought to be relying on the Scriptures, the very word of God, inspired and written.

“I think there are genuine Christians who are devout and inconsistent Roman Catholics.”

2. We should be concerned that the blessed Virgin Mary — and I have no problem calling her that — is elevated to a position, in practice, where she mediates between the people of God and the Son of God in a way that undermines the direct priestly ministry of Christ between his people and God. This elevation of Mary — beyond anything in the Scriptures, based solely on church tradition — distances the people of God from the enjoyment of personal fellowship with Jesus and the kind of relationship and assurance they might otherwise enjoy with him.

3. We should be concerned about the teaching of baptismal regeneration — the idea that an appropriate putting of water on the baby’s head, by the very work of the water (ex opere operato, by the very operating of the thing itself, by the very work of the water in the priestly act), causes a change in the nature of the baby from lost in original sin to saved through regeneration. This notion has produced, I would say, untold ill-founded confidence in the people of God who have little or no personal faith or relationship with Christ or love to Jesus, and yet, because of their baptism, believe they are heaven bound.

4. We should be concerned about the offering of so-called indulgences, which the very Pope Francis himself offered — not in some distant sixteenth-century past. It involves certain kinds of pilgrimages or special buildings or special payments that one can perform or attend so that an indulgence is granted by the pope that provides forgiveness of sins. This is an appalling detraction from the absolute uniqueness of the death of Christ as the provision for sins, and personal faith as the means by which that provision becomes ours.

5. We should be concerned about the confusion over the doctrine of justification by grace alone on the basis of Christ alone through faith alone to the glory of God alone. The Roman Catholic insistence that justification consists in the infusion of righteousness, which (as our own virtue) qualifies us to be accepted by God, is not the same as the biblical doctrine of God becoming 100 percent for us in the moment when by faith we are united with Christ so that his blood and righteousness alone become the ground of that acceptance.

6. We should be concerned about the centrality of the Mass in the Roman Catholic practice, in which the bread and wine are actually transubstantiated. They become the physical body and physical blood of Jesus so that the Lord’s Supper takes on a power of salvation by the entering of the blood and the body of Jesus into us, which it never was intended to have in the Bible. It misleads millions of what’s happening there.

7. Finally, we should be concerned about the doctrine of purgatory, in which a person after death may be given another chance of bearing some punishment so that finally he can make his way to heaven after doing appropriate penance there. The Bible holds out no such hope for those who die in unbelief. It is not found in the Scriptures.

Can Catholics Be Saved?

Now, having waved a flag of concern for those seven matters of Catholic belief, my answer to the question nevertheless is yes. I think there are genuine Christians who are devout and inconsistent Roman Catholics — “devout” in the sense that they are earnest and serious, sincere, and “inconsistent” in the sense that their true heart embrace of Jesus is better than their mental ideas or doctrines.

If a person has a genuine encounter with the living Christ and recognizes the depth of human sinfulness and the hopelessness that we are in without grace and without Christ, and sees in Jesus the substitute that God provided to bear our punishment and provide all we need for acceptance with God, and that person throws himself on the mercy of Christ, despairing of all self-reliance, and cherishes Christ as his supreme treasure and hope for eternal life, that person will be saved — even if many doctrinal ideas are confused or erroneous. In other words, it is possible for a person’s heart and his essential grasp of Christ to be far better than the structures of his doctrinal framework, and we may all be very, very thankful for this.