Opening Statement

Are Roman Catholics Members of the New Covenant?

Debate with James White

I would like to begin by offering my thanks to Alpha/Omega ministries for inviting me to this event, and to James White for engaging in this debate with me. I have been looking forward to it, and I am genuinely glad to be here. I would also like to thank the many in attendance here, some of whom have come a great distance. It is a great pleasure to be able to address an issue of some importance in a way that I hope will be truly edifying to the larger Christian community.

Before proceeding to my argument, I would like to begin with an assertion so there will be no confusion about my position concerning the Church of Rome. I detest the errors of Rome, and I pray for the day of her repentance. Among those errors I would include the idolatry of the Mass, the use of images in worship, their profound confusion on the matter of faith and works, Purgatory, Mariolatry, merit, the saints, the papacy, and much more. In preparation for this debate, I read James White’s book The Roman Catholic Controversy, which I thought was quite good. Judging from that book, I do not know of any distinctive Roman doctrine concerning which James White and I would disagree.

At the same time, I believe our Lord’s teaching requires us to detest our own failings more than those of others, and, as a classical Protestant, I can only lament what the larger Protestant world has become. As someone who wants to be fully identified as a dedicated, convinced, and practicing Protestant-one who by the grace of God is going to die in the evangelical faith he was brought up in-honesty still compels me to state that I detest our sectarianism, in-fighting, gimcrack evangelism, hostility to covenant connections, and lack of historical awareness. These are our besetting sins, and I believe the best way to demand that Rome repent is to show them how. And no, repentance does not require returning to Rome. But it does require returning to the Scriptures, and it does require a new reformation. I fully believe that the issues we are discussing tonight are not at all peripheral to that reformation.

Before proceeding to my positive case, I would also like to make a brief preliminary argument (in order to set boundaries for what others might do with our discussion). I appreciate how James White has already framed his understanding of our debate, and so these remarks are not directed to him. But as one who has been condemned as a heretic by certain scribes in the Reformed Sanhedrin, some of whom could not locate their confessional hinder parts even if allowed to use both hands, I really cannot afford to participate in a debate like this without making certain things abundantly clear. I am sure you understand my dilemma-and perhaps your heart goes out to me.

At the center, this debate is really going to revolve around the question of whether or not Protestant churches should “receive” Roman Catholic baptism, thereby acknowledging it (at some level) to be a valid new covenant baptism. This means that part of this statement will necessarily be an exercise in historical theology, and not just an exegetical question.

I understand (fully) that just because certain Reformers held to a position does not automatically make that position scriptural or right. Synods and councils have erred, and do err. But bringing this up might prevent modern adherents of these same positions (like me) from having to endure the absurd charge of having abandoned the Reformed faith.

From 1517, when the Reformation broke out, down to 1845, when J.H. Thornwell and Charles Hodge differed at the General Assembly of that year over this issue, the overwhelming position of the Reformed churches was that of receiving Roman Catholic baptism. This was not an issue that can be dismissed as an unexamined holdover from the medieval era. It was thoroughly examined, and regularly debated. This was one of the defining issues that distinguished the magisterial reformation from the radical reformation.

As I said, this in itself does not make one position or the other right. To determine that, we must turn ultimately to Scripture, as I will seek to do in a few moments. But it does mean that a man should be able to hold this same position today without fear of being labeled sympathetic to Rome. This is not the road to Rome; it is the road our fathers took out of Rome. The magisterial Reformation was not closet popery, and yet some of us today who hold to certain positions articulated and defended in the magisterial Reformation too often have to endure this kind of profound misunderstanding.

So, who held to the view that Roman Catholic baptism was a valid administration of new covenant baptism? Among others, I would like to name (as my cohorts in crime) John Calvin, John Knox, Theodore Beza, William Perkins, Samuel Rutherford, Richard Baxter, Francis Turretin, Charles Hodge, and A.A. Hodge. Providing implicit support for this view would be the position outlined by the Westminster Confession of Faith. I am not going to quote extensively from all these gentlemen because we do need to get to the scriptural arguments. But I want to make it perfectly clear that this debate we are having is a comparatively recent intramural Reformed debate (since 1845), and it does not represent a clash between light and darkness, good and evil, Klingons and Smurfs.

So here are just a few quotations, to give you some idea of where I got my unsavory opinions. Bad companions, as they say, corrupt good morals.

The French Confession of 1559

“Yet nevertheless, because there is yet some small trace of a Church in the papacy, and that baptism as it is in the substance, hath been still continued . . . we confess that they which are thus baptized do not need a second baptism.”

John Calvin’s Institutes (IV.15.16-17)

“Such in the present day are our Catabaptists, who deny that we are duly baptized, because we were baptized in the Papacy by wicked men and idolaters; hence they furiously insist on anabaptism.”

Calvin’s Commentary on Amos 5.26

“So it is with Baptism; it is a sacred and immutable testimony of the grace of God, though it were administered by the devil, though all who may partake of it were ungodly and polluted as to their own persons.”

John Knox/Letter 1556

“No more ought we to iterate baptism, by whomsoever it was ministered unto us in our infancy; but if God of his mercy [should] call us from blindness, he maketh our baptism, how corrupt that ever it was, available unto us, by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

Samuel Rutherford

Samuel Rutherford provides us with an interesting case, because he not only argues for the legitimacy of Roman Catholic baptism, but does so while arguing for the legitimacy and necessity of Roman Catholic orders. Virtually all Protestants accepted baptism performed by Roman Catholic priests, while there was debate (for example) on baptism performed by Roman Catholic midwives.

“[John] Robinson [the Separatist] and our brethren acknowledge that the Church of Rome hath true baptism, even as the vessels of the Lord’s house profaned in Babylon may be carried back to the temple . . . But I answer, if baptism be valid in Rome [then] so are the ministers baptizers.”

Rutherford is not arguing a reductio here, but rather was arguing for the validity of Roman Catholic ordination.

A.A. Hodge

Evangelical Theology (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1976), p. 338.

“All who are baptized into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, recognizing the Trinity of Persons in the Godhead, the incarnation of the Son and his priestly sacrifice, whether they be Greeks, or Arminians, or Romanists, or Lutherans, or Calvinists, or the simple souls who do not know what to call themselves, are our brethren. Baptism is our common countersign. It is the common rallying standard at the head of our several columns.”

Note that Hodge called Roman Catholics his brethren. Note only so, but he managed that particular stunt in a Banner of Truth book. Nevertheless, despite this cloud of witnesses, if I am in error on this, and shown to be in error from the Scriptures, I hope before God that I would receive the truth in humility, and confess my fault. But if I were prevailed upon to do this, I would be confessing a characteristic Reformed fault, held by virtually all of our Reformed fathers for 328 years. I would also hope that those same Reformed fathers would be equally correctable on this issue, although Knox might present a little trouble. But in any case, for all of them, the arguments would need to be pretty good, and better than the arguments presented to them in their day.

Scriptural Argumentation

If the scriptural phrase new covenant is to be taken as synonymous with the elect, or the invisible church, then of course we cannot answer our question in the affirmative. With such an understanding, we could not say that Roman Catholics are members of the new covenant. But of course, because we would now be dealing with the secret decree and the invisible church, we also could not say that Southern Baptists were members of the new covenant, or Free Methodists, or Presbyterians. While I think that the doctrine of sovereign election is an important doctrinal truth, and one that I heartily affirm, I do not believe that this is strictly in view when the Bible uses the phrase new covenant. The number of the elect and the members of the new covenant are not an interchangeable set of names-until the last day. Put in familiar categories, the new covenant people in the New Testament are the visible church, not the invisible church.

And as we consider this question, it all comes down to whether or not the Bible teaches that the new covenant can be broken by any of the members of that covenant. Does the new covenant contain covenant-breakers? And because all of us in Adam are in some sense covenant breakers because of the first covenant made with man, the covenant of life made with Adam in the garden, I am pushing the question further. I am asking if the new covenant contains any covenant-breakers of the new covenant itself. Can the new covenant itself be broken?

I want to begin by setting a scriptural pattern, and I want to show how this pattern can be seen as culminating in a specific apostolic warning to the Church at Rome, which is the subject of our proposition being debated tonight.

Of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace? (Heb. 10: 29)

The book of Hebrews was written to a new covenant people, and it was written in order to head off a looming apostasy. That is what the entire book is about. In this verse, we learn that the sanctions of the new covenant are more severe than the sanctions under Moses-“sorer punishment.” The new covenant does not contain “no sanctions,” it contains “more severe sanctions.” If we allow the New Testament to define what Jeremiah meant when he prophesied of the new covenant, we will spend most of our time with the entire book of Hebrews. This book is where we receive an extended and inspired commentary on this prophecy of Jeremiah, and that commentary makes it plain that apostasy is a very real threat for new covenant members. Members of the visible church can and do fall away from Christ.

Now is apostasy a possibility for those who are decretally elect? Of course not, but here in this passage we find new covenant members who will receive sorer punishment because they trampled the Son of God underfoot, and reckoned the blood of the covenant, the blood which sanctified them, as an unholy thing.

For various reasons, we have a tendency to draw contrasts between the old and new covenant people at precisely those places where the New Testament draws parallels.

Wherefore (as the Holy Ghost saith, To day if ye will hear his voice, Harden not your hearts, as in the provocation, in the day of temptation in the wilderness: When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my works forty years. Wherefore I was grieved with that generation, and said, They do alway err in their heart; and they have not known my ways. So I sware in my wrath, They shall not enter into my rest.) Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God. But exhort one another daily, while it is called To day; lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. For we are made partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence stedfast unto the end; (Hebrews 3: 7-14)

We are not told that in the new covenant it is impossible for new covenant members to depart from the living God. We are not told that in the new covenant there will be no bodies scattered over the wilderness. We are warned, solemnly, again and again, about the dangers of hardening our hearts in just the way that our fathers the Jews did. Now whatever this means, it cannot mean that in the new covenant such hardening of heart is an impossibility. Again, for clarity’s sake, I want to assert that such apostasy, such hardening of heart, is an impossibility for the elect. And again, just for the record, I am so Calvinistic it makes my back teeth ache. And if the Synod of Dort had come up with six replies to the Remonstrants, then I would be a six-point Calvinist.

In another place, the Corinthian Gentiles were beginning to boast, and puff themselves up a little. We have baptism. We have the Lord’s Table. We have spiritual food and spiritual drink. We have Christ. Not so fast, Paul said. So did the Jews in the wilderness, and their bodies were scattered across the wilderness to provide a solemn example for you.

Moreover, brethren, I would not that ye should be ignorant, how that all our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea; And were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea; And did all eat the same spiritual meat; And did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ. But with many of them God was not well pleased: for they were overthrown in the wilderness. Now these things were our examples, to the intent we should not lust after evil things, as they also lusted (1 Cor. 10: 1-6)

In short, our fathers are our examples, and with a number of them God was not well pleased. But what does all this have to do with the Roman Catholic Church? Rome has fallen into the errors it has because she has refused to heed the warning explicitly given by the apostle Paul to that specific church-a warning very much like the ones we have just been considering.

The apostle could already see the stirrings of hubris in that church, in that ancient capital city, and so he spoke to it bluntly. The apostle Paul saw (with remarkable prescience) that the Church at Rome was going to be a problem, and he addressed it forthrightly. And the only thing that is more remarkable than the Church of Rome ignoring these Pauline warnings aimed straight at her besetting sins is that fact that Protestants have also largely ignored the fact that these warning were directed at Rome.

For if the firstfruit be holy, the lump is also holy: and if the root be holy, so are the branches. And if some of the branches be broken off, and thou, being a wild olive tree, wert grafted in among them, and with them partakest of the root and fatness of the olive tree; Boast not against the branches. But if thou boast, thou bearest not the root, but the root thee. Thou wilt say then, The branches were broken off, that I might be grafted in. Well; because of unbelief they were broken off, and thou standest by faith. Be not highminded, but fear: For if God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest he also spare not thee. Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God: on them which fell, severity; but toward thee, goodness, if thou continue in his goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off (Rom. 11:16-22).

“Rome, thou shalt be cut off.” Why? Because of unbelief and covenant presumption. Luther said it well when he said that sola fide is the article of a standing or falling church, and here is the text. Unbelief caused the Jews to be broken off, and “thou standest by faith.” Now this is not a statement that Rome has fallen into complete apostasy, but it certainly is a statement that Rome is capable of complete apostasy. She can fall away, she is not indefectible.

This being the case, then why could we not say that Rome has been broken off because of her formal and judicial denial of sola fide at the Council of Trent? Four comments:

First, the unbelief for which the Jews were cut off in 70 A.D. was a problem that had plagued them for centuries. God does not operate on a covenant hair trigger. All day long He holds out His hands to a disobedient people.

Second, if we drum out of the new covenant anyone who does not hold to a pure understanding of sola fide, then we have not only gotten rid of Rome, but also of most Protestants. Take, as one example of a Protestant Trent, this statement from the Free Will Baptist Articles of Faith. “The human will is free and self-controlled, having power to yield to the influence of the truth and the Spirit, or to resist them and perish.” Would we accept their baptisms? Well, of course we would.

Third, if we require a pure understanding of sola fide in order to be included in the new covenant, then we have denied sola fide. It is not faith plus a passing grade on the ordination exam. It is not faith plus anything. It is God-given faith in Jesus, period.

Fourth, this is not an issue to be decided by this individual or that one. Either God will do it in a signal and unmistakable way, as He did with the Jews in 70 A.D., or He will do it working through an ecumenical council of the continuing and faithful church. And unfortunately, the Protestant church is too fragmented to make the kind of statement that one day soon might need to be made. We are too much in need of repentance on this point to be entrusted with any judgment of the lack of repentance on the part of others. But more on this in a moment.

It is important for me to acknowledge that this has not always been my position. In the past I have maintained (although I cannot find where I said this) that Rome was guilty of a final apostasy at Trent, where in solemn ecumenical council she anathematized any who faithfully held the biblical gospel. This is no longer my position, and if my worthy opponent has found a quotation of mine that says this, and returns to this point to press me with it, I will merely say, “I changed my mind, and it is a practice I commend to you.” It is nevertheless still my position that what happened at Trent deserved removal from the olive tree, that is, from the catholic church. But I am now convinced that such a removal has not yet occurred. God does not always give us what we deserve.

Why is this no longer my position? First, I find no signal event of providence that could be interpreted this way. No blazing meteor has landed on the Vatican, while crying out, “Come out from among her, and be ye separate.” Secondly, there has been no concerted ecumenical rejection of Rome as entirely and completely apostate. It might be countered that the Westminster Assembly should count, and they reckoned the papacy as the antichrist. Does that not matter? No, because that Assembly occurred 198 years before classical Protestants began rejecting Roman Catholic baptisms in 1845. The men of Westminster would have been on my side in this debate-again, consider men like Rutherford.

The apostle Paul gives us a textual basis for all this in Ephesians:

I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called, With all lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love; Endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; One Lord, one faith, one baptism, One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all (Eph. 4:1-6).

The unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, which we are required to preserve, is foundationally Trinitarian. One God and Father. One Lord. One Spirit. Woven in with this Trinitarian reality is the phrase “one baptism.” Baptism into the triune name means what God says it means, and not what the men performing it say or think about it. Let God be true, and every man a liar (Rom. 3:4).

In principle, could anything happen in the future that would make Roman Catholic baptism “unreceivable” by faithful Protestant churches-with or without a Protestant ecumenical council? Yes, and I honestly don’t know if it is far off or not. The Roman church is shot through with theological liberalism, which Machen correctly identified as another religion entirely. And it is interesting to note in passing how Machen spoke of Rome in this regard.

Yet how great is the common heritage which unites the Roman Catholic Church, with its maintenance of the authority of Holy Scripture and with its acceptance of the great early creeds, to devout Protestants today! . . . The Church of Rome may represent a perversion of the Christian religion; but naturalistic liberalism is not Christianity at all (Christianity and Liberalism, p. 52).

But Rome now has a bad dose of that same liberalism. Couple this with feminism, the appeal of Mariolatry to the natural man, and it is quite possible that Mary will eventually get her big promotion, and people will be baptized into the name of a Quaternity. When the creedal core has rotted out, the liturgy cannot remain indefinitely the same. We see this in the mainline denominations which abandoned the faith in substance, but kept the old triune form for a time, a form which we should receive. Let God be true. But the rot has to spread, and eventually people will be baptized in the name of God the Mother, or Allah, or Shiva. And of course, all such baptisms are no baptisms at all.

So then, Trinitarian baptism, baptism into the triune name, places an individual into an objective covenant relationship with Christ. This does not mean that he is automatically regenerate, or that he is necessarily among the elect. The baptism, however, constitutes a word from God, and it requires of that person that he repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. If he does not, then he is a covenant breaker, and God will remove him from the covenant. If he repents and believes, then he is keeping covenant through the perfect righteousness of Jesus, the only perfect covenant keeper. If he repents sometime after his baptism, he does not need to be baptized again. This is the position of our Reformed forefathers, and it is a position that is fair and orderly.

The conclusion is that I believe that faithless Roman Catholics are in fact members of the new covenant. Otherwise, how could they be covenant breakers? To illustrate our difference, James White believes faithless Roman Catholics to be guilty of the sin of spiritual fornication. I believe them to be guilty of the far more serious sin of spiritual adultery. Part of my mission here tonight is to encourage my brother to be a little harder on Rome.