Joe responds to Pastor Vlad Savchuk and his video Catholics vs Christianity.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and today I want to respond to a series of arguments against Catholicism made by the popular Evangelical pastor, VLA de Savchuk. And full disclosure, I’m not particularly familiar with him. I’ve seen a few clips of him, but it turns out he’s massively popular on YouTube, so I’m going to try to be as fair as I can to him. It’s clear that we run in kind of different spaces. His blog is mostly focused on, as far as I can tell, spiritual warfare, demonic attack and possession. And similarly, like when you look up blood Uckk interview, which I often do to make sure I’m pronouncing people’s names right, I’ll try to find an interview where somebody else introduces him. His top result is an alleged interview with Lucifer. So this is the kind of stuff that he often does.
But on Monday somebody asked me to respond to a video that he made called Catholicism verse Christianity, and in it he lays out 10 arguments for why he’s not Catholic. And I thought I would go ahead and respond to all 10 of those arguments. But before I get to those 10, I want to just question the whole frame of putting in this as Catholicism versus Christianity rather than Catholicism verse Protestantism. And I think Pastor Vlad, as he’s called, knows better because he grew up in Ukraine where there are plenty of people who are neither Catholic nor Protestant, but would still be considered Christian. So the first kind of foundational question is are Protestants the only Christians and he is going to say No, Catholics and Orthodox are Christians, and then spend the rest of the video denying that. So here you can see his argument where he claims that most Christians are Catholic.
CLIP:
Why am I not a Catholic? 10 differences between Catholics and Christians, Christianity has about 2.2 billion people under its umbrella. Out of which 1.3 billion of people are Catholics, 900 million are Protestants and 220 million are Greek Orthodox.
Joe:
If you do that math, you’ll see that of the 2.2 billion Christians on earth, he says 1.3 billion of 59% are Catholics, 220 million are Orthodox. He says Greek Orthodox, I think he means all Orthodox and 900 million. So like 41% are Protestant. Now there’s a few problems with that. Number one, that adds up to 110% or 2.4 billion people out of 2.2 billion. So the math is basically the first error we have is him just trying to introduce the idea of how many different types of Christians there are. Nevertheless, let’s give credit where it’s due. Most Christians are either Catholic or Orthodox. They’re just disputing data as to whether it’s slightly more or slightly less than 50% of the world’s Christians are Catholic alone. So if you put all of the Protestants, all of the so-called independent, so like Pentecostals and non-denominational, those who don’t claim to be Protestant and all the Orthodox together of all the different kinds, not just Greek, you would roughly have the number of Catholics that there are.
And so it’s totally legitimate to say, okay, I’m coming from this tradition or this background and this is the form of Christianity I’m used to. What’s the difference between Catholicism and the brand of evangelical Protestantism that I’ve got? That’d be a completely legitimate question like asking what’s the difference between a dog and a pig because these adorable dogs don’t seem to know, but instead he presents this not what’s the difference between a dog and a pig, but what’s the difference between a dog and an animal and spends the entire time acting as if dogs aren’t animals or in this case acting as if Catholics aren’t Christians. Now I realize English isn’t his first language and I was ready to kind of cut him slack and say maybe he doesn’t mean it kind of in the way that it sounds. In one of the first clips that I saw of him, he refers to John Pope 23rd instead of Pope John the 23rd. So that kind of stuff. I’ve worked in other languages before and I’m much worse at every other language I’ve ever tried speaking than he is at English. So I wanted to cut him a lot of slack, but it seems to be intentional because he avoids saying Protestant and will correct it to Disse Christian to try to suggest that Catholics and seemingly by extension Orthodox don’t get count as true Christians.
CLIP:
Now in the rest of this video, I’m going to share these things that we differ with the Catholic church as Protestants and as Christians.
Joe:
What makes this more notable as kind of a misleading frame is that the form of Christianity that he’s representing isn’t faithful to historic Christianity. It’s not faithful to what the Christians of the first 1500 years believed, but it’s not even faithful to most of Protestantism. So I’m drawing this chart particularly from Wikipedia just to give a very brief sketch of an example. It highlights eight different major branches of Christianity, if you want to put it that way. You’ve got Anabaptist Anglicans reform, Protestants, Lutherans, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and then the ass Syrian Church of the East sometimes called the Chaldeans or the historians. And if you follow his argument, he’s going to hold positions that everybody except maybe Anabaptist rejects, but he’s just going to claim that the position he has, which is kind of vaguely an offshoot of an baptism is the Christian position.
And I think it’s worth highlighting this as a dishonest and misleading move because what he’s really saying is should we reject historic Christianity? But if he puts it that way, well that sounds like an insane and radical project. So he masks it by saying, oh, this is just the Christian position what everybody else believed for 2000 years, that’s a Catholic one or the Orthodox one or fill in the blank. And so doing, as I say, he presents these claims as the Christian position that aren’t just ones that Catholics and Orthodox would disagree with, but ones that Protestants would typically disagree with as well. So for instance, he’s going to claim that no Protestants believe the Eucharist is anything more than a symbol which is outrageously untrue.
CLIP:
Actually only one third of Catholics according to pure research believe that the elements bread and wine become literally the blood and the body of Jesus Christ. Majority of Catholics, 69% of them believe that it’s symbolic and that’s what most of the Protestants or all of the Protestants believe as well
Joe:
Contrast his claim there with Martin Luther’s claim in the large catechism that the sacrament of the altar meaning the Eucharist is the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. Now look, it’s true. The Lutheran conception of how Christ becomes bodily present in the Eucharist differs somewhat from the Catholic conception, but it is utterly false to say that no Protestant believes that the Eucharist is more than a symbol that’s simply not true. Or to take a more radical claim, here he is arguing, Hey, Catholics believe that the sacraments like baptism save, and this is why Martin Luther had to come along to correct that error.
CLIP:
These seven sacraments are not result of your salvation. They are necessary to your salvation. Starting from the first one, what baptism all the way to the last rite as Christians, we believe in Ephesians chapter two verse eight and nine, these are the words spoken by Apostle Paul that we are saved by grace alone. It’s one of the biggest differences between the Catholic faith and the Christian faith. It’s what Martin Luther argued, it’s what he presented as abuse in the Catholic church is that there was Jesus plus good works.
Joe:
What makes that claim so striking is that Martin Luther spends a great deal of time arguing that baptism does in fact save. So again from Martin Luther’s large catechism, he refers to how baptism saves us in what he calls the saving divine water. And then he gets sent to his theology of how that works and he cites two scripture for support from Mark 1616 that he who believes in his baptized will be saved at a time when Protestants accepted that verse as being part of the Bible. And then he goes on to pose a question, what if someone would say as Pastor Vlad does that? Because as a Lutheran Luther believes faith alone saves? How can he also believes that baptism saves? He poses a question like this. He says, what if they say as they’re accustomed to saying, still baptism is itself a work and you say works are of no avail for salvation, what then becomes a faith?
Well, Luther responds to this by saying, yes, our works indeed avail nothing for salvation. We can’t do anything of our own baptism. Hover is not our work, but God’s Luther believes the exact opposite of what Pastor Vlad claims. Luther believes about the relationship of baptism and salvation by faith apart from works. It’s simply right there in plain language. The guy who coins the concept of sofie does not believe that. It excludes a belief that baptism saves and then he goes on to say God’s works are saving and necessary for salvation and do not exclude but demand faith. So you can’t pit faith or grace against the sacraments or you’ve just completely misunderstood what the sacraments are. You’ve turned the sacraments into things that we do for God rather than things God does for us, and this is going to be a recurring problem throughout his entire argument.
Beneath that, there’s a related problem which is that his theology of grace is completely a historic, it’s not something that early Christians believed in. It’s not something that the Catholic church or the Orthodox church or historic Protestants believed in is such a radical misunderstanding of grace that it pits God’s grace against every sort of human activity, which logically doesn’t just undermine the role of something like good works. It doesn’t just undermine the sacraments taking to its logical limit. It even undermines the role of faith or prayer as I think we’re going to see pretty clearly. So to start with, what do we mean by grace Biblically? Because we hear this term thrown around and I think it’s worth actually giving it a little bit of a definition because you hear these lines like in Ephesians two, St. Paul says, for it’s by grace, you’ve been saved through faith and this is not your doing.
It is the gift of God. Now, two things to notice here. One, whatever grace is, it’s a gift of God and it turns out it’s actually a really good definition of grace. But second, it is something that we still access in some way and one of the ways we access it is through faith. Now, this is going to suggest that even though it’s not because of works, and we’re going to get into what that means and what it doesn’t mean in a little bit here, there’s still something going on, this thing we are doing, believing, having faith that is in some way related to how we connect with grace. So what is grace? Well, the Greek there is just car. It’s where words like charisma or charismatic gifts come from and it means favor or gift or thanks. So it’s God’s good pleasure, basically it’s his favor and his favors, and so as the catechism puts it, our justification comes from the grace of God.
Grace is favor the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become children of God, adoptive sons, partakers of the divine nature and of eternal life. So God aids us on the journey by giving us these gifts that we don’t deserve this free and undeserved help. That’s what grace is in a nutshell. Now, you might notice you understand it in that way. Well, there’s not just one type of divine assistance, one type of divine help, and so you’re going to have different types of graces that sounds legalistic to people, but it’s not. I mean, we talk about the charismatic gifts. Well, charisma is coming from this same root word, so the different gifts God gives people, all of those, whatever, those are the different gifts of the spirit. Those are all different graces. They’re gifts, they’re favors from God.
So as the catechism Islam to say grace is first and foremost the gift of the spirit who justifies and sanctifies us, but it also includes the other gifts that the spirit gives us to associate with his work. When God empowers you through the Holy Spirit to do X, the gift he’s given you is a grace quite literally. In that same context, then we can talk about the sacraments and sacramental graces. In other words, in the sacraments, these are gifts that God has given us, things like baptism and the Eucharist, the forgiveness of our sins, anointing of the sick. These things are places where we find the mercy of God, the favor of God, the grace of God. This is not something we’re generating like oh, if we just say the right words, we’re going to magically create the grace of God. No, but God promises to meet us in certain places.
Just as in the Old Testament, people would go to the temple in Jerusalem because they knew they could see God there. They could meet God there not see him literally, but they could encounter God there. That didn’t mean they were creating him there. It just means that they trusted God’s promise to show up when and where he said he was going to show up. Well, when he promises things like baptism or the Eucharist, we show up because we know he’s going to show up. That’s not works in the sense that St. Paul talks about. So what does he mean then when St. Paul says that this is by grace through faith, not because of works lest any man should boast? Well, there’s two ways of understanding that. First and foremost, St. Paul has in view the works of the Mosaic law. This idea that observing the Mosaic law would be enough to save you.
So if you look at Paul’s discussion of faith and works, he almost always mentions that both Jews and Gentiles can be saved. Now that clarification makes no sense if you don’t understand the context of what he’s talking about when he mentions works because the idea was, well the Gentiles, I mean because clearly, look, Gentiles can do nice things if works means human effort or human activity or nice deeds or good works in that sense, Gentiles could do that and even the most bigoted Jew in the first century would’ve known a Gentile can do those things. What they didn’t do was observe the Mosaic law like keeping kosher and circumcision and all of that. And so the claim at the time was that you had to follow the mosaic law to be saved, but this wasn’t a question of how much is human activity involved. This is a question of are we saved by the old covenant or by the new covenant because Christ doesn’t tell us we have to holding onto the old covenant and he said instead he’s fulfilling it and giving us a new covenant.
That’s the actual fight going on here and the relationship of faith and works. Do we trust God that he’s creating a new covenant or do we try to legalistically hold on to the old covenant? But the way to misunderstand it is as Pastor Vlad does that any kind of human activity is a work that’s not allowed to play any kind of role in salvation. And I understand where people get that from misreading the word works on its own without any kind of framework theologically for what’s going on. But notice what happens. It’s going to pit grace really against faith, but certainly against things like prayer. And so he’s going to argue that the church doesn’t have a role in salvation, but neither do things like prayer.
CLIP:
You cannot be saved by participating in rituals at your church. You can only be saved by the grace through faith in Jesus Christ. Prayers don’t save you. Baptism doesn’t save you. Taking holy communion cannot save you.
Joe:
Now, it should be striking to anyone who’s familiar with the Bible is how much Pastor Vlad’s declaration stands in opposition to the plain language of scripture. To give just one example, I just did a debate on this, you can go watch a much longer debate over on the channel apologetic dog getting into this question of baptism at much greater length. But first Peter three, to give just one of many, many examples on this subject, St. Peter talks about how in the time of Noah, eight people, Noah’s family were saved through water and according to him this prefigures baptism which now saves you. So Pastor Vlad says, baptism doesn’t save you, St. Peter says it does. How do we make sense of this? Because Pastor Vlad thinks something like the sacraments would be works. Now, St. Paul says it’s not St. Paul is actually quite clear in Titus three that we are saved by the mercy of God, not because of deeds done by us in righteousness.
So not just your mosaic law kind of works, but not even your good works have earned you justification. Instead, it’s by the virtue of the mercy of God and by the washing of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit. What is the washing of regeneration biblically it’s baptism, the washing of rebirth being born again of water and the spirit, and this is how this passage was universally understood by the earliest Christians who spoke the language and knew the apostles. So quite clearly baptism is not a work to the early Christians. It is a work to evangelicals like Pastor Vlad. And so we have a problem because it puts him in this weird place of saying baptism can’t save you, the Eucharist can’t save you, but neither can prayer that you’re to be saved by grace through faith, but that faith can’t take the form of prayer and that leads to this very odd moment where he then invites us to pray a sinner’s prayer, which by the way, a completely manmade Protestant tradition, but fine, he invites us to pray a sinner’s prayer but has to caveat that he doesn’t think it does anything.
CLIP:
If you’re watching this and you are ready to place your trust in Jesus Christ as your Lord and as your Savior, not in your pope priest tradition culture or church, but in Jesus, pray this prayer with me. Now, I’m going to tell you right away, sinner’s prayer cannot save you any more than any sacrament you will do in the Catholic church, but sinners do pray and God hears them and he answers that prayer, and all you got to do is acknowledge that you are a sinner, acknowledge that you need saving and ask Jesus to do that for you.
Joe:
So Pastor Vlad’s theology forces him to try to affirm two contradictory things. One at the same time he’s trying to say yes, God really does answer prayer, and so if you pray for salvation, God is good and he’ll hear you, but at the same time he has to also say, because his theology says, well, prayer is a work and works can’t do anything, that prayer can’t do anything in fighting prayer against faith and grace. It just shows how profoundly he’s misunderstanding these themes. It’d be like saying, oh, well the medicine can’t do anything because the doctor saved you. Well, how did the doctor save you? He saved you through the medicine. Well, likewise, how does God save you? There’s several ways you could answer that. You could say through Jesus, through the cross, through faith, through grace, and through things like baptism, and none of those are opposed to any other ones because they’re describing different parts of the salvation process.
So the idea it has to be a hundred percent one of those and none of the others is a completely forced. You’re forcing yourself into an unnecessary contradiction that is completely unbiblical based entirely on just not understanding what the Bible means by terms like faith and what it means by grace and what it means by works. If you’ve got those definitions clear, this whole problem goes away. When we pray and God is merciful to us, we have not earned the result of our prayer, but our prayer has still done something. If it doesn’t, then don’t pray. If you think prayer doesn’t do anything, then don’t do it. If you think it’s worthless to pray, which is what it means to say it doesn’t do anything, then don’t pray but don’t tell people you need to pray the sinner’s prayer, but also the sinner’s prayer won’t do anything for you because the only thing the sinner’s prayer is meant to do is veil upon the mercy of God to be saved.
And so if it doesn’t do that, what are you doing? Okay, so that is far and away the underlying background heresy that is leading him to so many of the things he gets wrong about the relationship between Catholicism and the fringe kind of Protestantism that he calls Christianity. But let’s address each of the 10 arguments that he makes in turn. Now, I want to be very clear at the outset here, I say outset like 20 minutes in, he’s going to give 10 different arguments. This is a scattershot sort of approach. He doesn’t spell out like theologically doesn’t make much of a case. He just says, oh yeah, this is a thing that we view differently. This is a thing we view differently. And so it’s going to be a little unsatisfying perhaps because I can’t go as much into depth on any one of those as I would like, and there may be some things that he says, I don’t mention everything. I’m going to try to make sure I get the crux of all of the arguments that he makes and if I’ve missed anything, I apologize. There’s just too much there and it’s too kind of thematically unrelated to answer in a coherent sort of way without this being unbearably long. So with that said, the first of his arguments is that we should recognize that only the Bible is the word of God, and here’s the argument in his own words,
CLIP:
The Bible is the word of God. The Bible contains the truth about God and the Bible doesn’t need to have things added to it. In fact, Jesus said that because of your tradition, you have made the word of God of no effect.
Joe:
So if by saying don’t add anything to the Bible, he means don’t make up your own book and add it to the Bible. Sure, Catholics and Protestants agree on that. We’re not just writing some papal and cyclical and saying this is in the Bible now, but if instead he means something like Christians are not allowed to believe any teachings not explicitly written in the Bible, where is that teaching explicitly written in the Bible? It seems like he’s doing the very thing he criticizes seems extremely self-refuting, but moreover, the thing that he’s criticizing tradition, once again, it’s good to know biblically what is this? Because it makes no sense to just complain about tradition any more than it makes sense to complain about writings. There are good and bad traditions. There are God-given traditions and there are man-made traditions. The word there is just posis, and it’s true.
You can have manmade traditions like this idea of Pastor Vlad has that only things found in the Bible are allowed to be teachings we hold to, but there’s also traditions given to us by God and we’re told that we need to hold onto As St. Paul puts in two Thessalonians two 15, the traditions which taught to us whether they were by word of mouth or by letter. Now what’s tradition by letter? Well, it’s the Bible and what’s tradition by word of mouth, it’s everything else. It’s still authentically the word of God but has been passed on orally. Remember at the time the New Testament is being written, the New Testament doesn’t exist yet, but definitionally, right? And so Christians were expected to follow things that were not found in the Bible yet calyx and Protestants have to agree on that, and so then you have to either say, okay, well second Thessalonians two ... Read more on Catholic.com