Anderson, SC

Click here to find a team or start one of your own!

The following report is a continuation of yesterday’s story and comes to us from team leader Caleb with our team in Greenville, SC:

Russel, a Protestant evangelist who we’ve engaged before, came to talk about man’s natural goodness and because of the fall, his necessity for infused goodness from God in order to overcome his fallen nature. We discussed the nature of works and grace, the value of good works which have to be done in Christ in order to be meritorious, and how good works flow from our faith in Christ. He wanted to point out that everything we do is filthy rags since the fall. I pointed out that Catholics don’t believe in total depravity and explained why, emphasizing that man’s original nature, which God created good, is not totally corrupted. Unbelievers can do inherently good things. And we both came to an agreement that because God is absolutely good, man’s goodness, even if good, pales in comparison to God’s goodness, but ultimately we need to be united to Christ in faith in order to please God for our salvation. He agreed with everything I said. He then emphasized the idea that man, in his pride, will make up his own way. At this point he mentioned something about man made religion and I knew where he was going with it (many Protestants make this accusation about Catholicism), but directed the conversation to the fall in the Garden of Eden. I talked about how at its essence sin is going our way and not God’s – exactly what Satan thought he could do. I also pointed out that Satan does not have creative power – evil is a deprivation of good. Satan is called the destroyer for a reason. He wants to mar and destroy God’s good creation, but he can’t totally destroy it. I brought it back to the image of God in every human being and pointed out that no matter how sinful a person becomes they still bear the image of God. Our conversation on this topic went on for quite some time until I brought it back to when he mentioned man made religions and told him that Satan wants to destroy the Church, which is One, and has created chaos and confusion with denominationalism. This is when the gentleman selling goods next to us decided it was his turn to start preaching to the Catholics.

Russel and I begin along the same line of discussion, with much respect to each other. We talked along the lines of historical evidence for the papacy, but he came down to the conclusion that he is a Bible alone believer and that no matter what the historical evidence and the Church Fathers, if you can’t prove it from the Bible alone, it doesn’t hold water. I pointed out that although we believe in the authority of scripture as Catholics, we do not believe in it alone, because it did not come about alone and neither is there any passage in the Bible that explicitly teaches the Bible alone. But I said, if I hold myself to the Bible alone, I can point out several passages from Scripture that point to the primacy of Peter and the gift of infallibility given to the authoritative body of the Church that Christ founded for the proper interpretation of Scripture. We went back and forth: Me trying to convince him that the gift of infallibility is necessary in order to maintain the unity of the faith with the canon of Scripture itself included and many other notable Christian doctrines like the Trinity and the Divinity of Christ which took time to develop; and him asserting that the Holy Spirit was given to all believers to give them private individual understanding on how to interpret the Scripture properly without a governing authority. I pleaded with him to understand that this idea has led us nowhere but disintegrated Christianity into all these denominations and subjectivism, a result that even Luther himself lamented at the end of his life but was clearly evidenced by the many heresies at the time of the Church Fathers, like Arianism, which appealed to their own interpretations of Scripture. He was not budging on this and left me with a challenge in these words, “Just as I tell Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormans (apparently we are a cult as such), listen to the Holy Spirit and read the Scriptures without any influence from Catholic sources.” He didn’t know that it was this very practice that led me to the Catholic Church and to the realization that Scripture is not a matter of private interpretation (2 Peter 1:20). Christ left us a Church which is the Pillar and Bulwark of Truth (1 Tim 3:15). To interpret differently than what the very Church that God founded is man-made religion.

Praised be Jesus Christ!