ERROR OF ROME

New Book: Where Rome Is Wrong


New Book: Where Rome Is Wrong (Part One)
An Exposure of Rome’s Authoritarianism, Totalitarianism and Sectarianism
Dr. Ian R. K. Paisley

This is a day of battle, a battle from which there is no discharge, “There is no discharge in that war”. Ecc 8:8

In every age there is room for men of peace but in no age is there room for men of peace at any price.

In the day of the toughest of battles when the great cardinalities of the gospel are under the most bitter assaults the work of the gospel must be in a state of constant belligerence. God has a controversy with the people. He who is not enlisted in the Lord’s battle and is not fighting in a “no surrender” spirit has practically gone over to the enemy.

The men of Church history like the Reformers were all men of war from their youth up.

They were not deceived by those who speak of the Kingdom of God as the cultivation of ‘the quiet life’ religion. There is no such thing as a quiet life Kingdom of God tranquillity. The times of the battles in the Church are the times of the cauldron.

The tonic for the gospel war is the battle for revival, the garments rolled in blood and the spirit of the baptism of blood.

The idea of cultivating a friendly feeling all round is simply not true Christianity. The truth has no friendly feeling towards the lie. Supernatural light has no friendly feeling to satanic darkness. Evangelisation has no friendly spirit to stagnation, and what is more, stagnation is never good.

Revival must always be a resurrection of new life poured out upon the church.

Sympathy for evil is nothing more than the bartering of principle.

There is something even worse than the passions let loose in the field of controversy. There are those who are not prepared for righteous controversy. There are those who shake off their responsibility to know and to defend the truth under the sway of selfish interests.

The greatest controversies of all history have something to leave to the church, something which enriches it forever.

We can well ask ourselves, ‘What was the direct result of the reformation?’

What was the result? Was it something new? No sir! Rather it was something as old as eternity, yet reborn and renewed in glorious Resurrection in Reformation Times.

What engrossed the attention of Luther also engrossed the attention of the Apostle Paul. What engrossed the attention of the Apostle Paul also engrossed the attention of King David and what engrossed the attention of David also engrossed the attention of Abraham.

Well, what was it? How can a sinful man be justified before a Thrice Holy God?

Again that question is the great gospel question, the colossal evangelical precept. It is the Gospel, the whole Gospel and nothing but the Gospel.

The Church of the Popes, the Roman Antichrists, talks about the Reformation Settlement; that the only self-pronounced true church has settled the question of the Gospel, by the settlement the church has made.

There is no such settlement in the way which Rome teaches. Rather, by the true gospel Rome has been unsettled and unsettled forever until it settles down in the flames of the eternal conscious retribution of the lake of fire. Rev 19:20 ‘And the beast was taken, and with him the false prophet that wrought miracles before him, with which he deceived them that had received the mark of the beast, and them that worshipped his image. These both were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone.’

The Reformation was not the settlement it was the beginning of the overturning of the false, wrongly called, Catholic Church, until its final overturning in hell forever.

Tiny men may make tiny conflict. Dwarfs may dwarf the subject. This doctrine is not national but international. It is the way of God’s Truth against the Devil’s Lie, the battle of angels, saints, apostles and prophets. Christians, play the man for the apostolic faith of Christ’s glorious gospel.

There are many who are rightly alarmed at what is happening today. The Church of Rome has had a revival, wedded to the false power of Ecumenical Charismaticism.

Rome has slowly but surely been healed from the deadly wound she received at the Reformation.

The battle for the Free Gospel of Sovereign Grace has been robbed from the people. The Churches of the Reformation have largely laid aside the Bible, the sole ruler of faith and practice, and revived popery marches through the nation with a devilish pride and demonic audacity.

The Archbishop of Canterbury is as Popish as the Clerical Bachelor on the edge of the Tiber any day.

It was only when the Reformation movement was chained to the Bible that nothing could stop the prevalence of Biblical Doctrine.

Forsaking the Bible, the God of the Bible has forsaken us. The fight is on in the nation against the increasing political plots and treacheries of Rome. The potsherd of the world striving with the potsherd only destroy one another and establish no truth whatsoever.

But there is another sphere to the ecclesiastical sphere today and that is the European sphere.

Europe, shattered at its heart at the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, is seeking to rebuild its tower of Babel confounded at the Reformation. Satan cannot cast out Satan so Church and State will come together and join one another to continue what was begun many centuries ago. A united Europe is the theme, the Order of both the political Europe and the ecclesiastical Europe. This united Europe is anti-biblical, anti-God’s law and anti-Christ.

The final Apostasy of Rome is demonstrated in the steps which she took after the Reformation.

THE COUNCIL OF TRENT

This was a council which was different from all others. It was a finalising Council sealing the brand mark of total apostasy onto the Church of the Popes.

The spiritual and moral leadership of the Reformers had rightly seceded from the putrid ecclesiastical body. All that would arise from the ghastly corpse was a stench. The Pope reigned supreme in the Council of Trent and ever since.

The deification of the Pope is the final act that can well be called the apostasy of popery. The Papalising of the Church of Rome in the Second Century through the monarchical Pope was the FIRST ACT toward the spiritual and irreversible tragedy of Rome. This was caused by the deification of the monarchical BISHOP.

THE SECOND ACT was the Deification of the Reigning EMPEROR, the association with the throne of the Roman Emperor Constantine.

THE THIRD ACT was the final adoption of the Babylonian Harlotry of Transubstantiation. The mass was described as an atoning sacrifice for the sins of the living and the dead.

It was by this that the awful power of the sacrificing PRIEST was locked around the throat of the Church.

THE FOURTH ACT was the promulgation of the Immaculate Conception of Mary and her sinlessness which came about in the nineteenth century. HERE WE HAVE A FALSE GODDESS FIXED INTO THE WORSHIP OF THE CHURCH.

THE FIFTH ACT IS THE PROMULGATION OF THE INFALLIBILITY OF THE POPE. Here we have fastened to the throat of the Church the fallible hand of so called infallible Pope.

No wonder we say God has removed Himself from the Church of Rome. She is now no true Church but the Church of the Great Abomination, Babylon revived and the final apostasy. Having forsaken God forever, God has forsaken her forever.

The Great Armageddon is her Doom and certain Damnation her never-ending end.

It has been well said that the Bible has more to say to the Church than the Church has to say to the Bible and that the Bible can explain the Church as the Church can never explain the Bible.

WHAT IS BEHIND THE REFORMATION?

So often today Rome invites us to go behind the Reformation and discover and consider what we will find there.

So be it. I will go behind Roman Catholicism; I will examine its origin. I will examine its history and I will examine what is presented as proof that Rome is pure undefiled primitive Christianity.

To go behind the Reformation, to get right behind it we must go to the New Testament, the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles and the Revelation.

To get behind the Reformation we get to Christ, Christ as persented in the Gospels and Epistles.

The Reformation, remember, was not a new religion. The Reformation was a rediscovery of the old religion. The Gospel of the New Testament is the real Gospel of the Church of antiquity.

The New Testament Church is viewed in the New Testament in its ideal sense and its local sense. There is no mention in the New Testament of the high religious state as the Church. In fact such an organisation is mentioned only in the Book of Revelation in the setting of Apostasy.

Roman Catholicism as the State Religion as we know it had developed in 320AD and was connected by the international religion of the Roman Emperor Constantine.

The so-called Roman Catholic Church arose as distinct from the unified New Testament Church which was a visible number of communities, holding ‘One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism’.

Let me say that, at the Reformation, the Lord broke Roman Catholicism. Remember, that it was in the Second Century that there came into being, what developed into the Roman Church distinct from the local New Testament Churches.

If we want to know what was behind the Reformation there was the New Testament. With the apostles dead the apostle’s ministry was still available in the New Testament. It was, above all, not so much Reformation Truth or Reformation Zeal or Reformation practice but Reformation Faith, ‘The just shall live by faith’ – the mystery of Reformation.

That faith is summarised in Romans 10:4 ‘For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth’.

If we go behind the Reformation we cannot stop at the first century of the early church, nor at the second century.

We must rather go right back to Christ Himself, to His Advent, Incarnation, Life, Words, Miracles and Mystery and especially to His Cross work and Blood shedding, Death and Ascension for sinners. To His Prophethood, His Priesthood and His Kingship and to His present ministry in the Holiest of all and to His Second Advent, Reformation Truth is ‘We preach Christ crucified’. This is the Gospel, which brings about such revivals as the Glorious Reformation of the 16th Century.

‘Being justified by Faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ’

Pope Pius IX, the Pope who proclaimed himself ‘infallible’ was the victim of a self-idolatry which seems hardly sane, and which reminds us of some phases of another career. The German Emperor allows himself to be referred to in an expression like “the Gospel of your sacred majesty.” And Pius would use phrases like this “Keep, my Jesus, the flock which God has committed to Thee and me.” He would apply to himself, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” He regarded his troubles as a renewal of the sufferings of Christ. One of his cardinals spoke of him in 1866 as the living incarnation of the authority of Christ. Veuillot (1866) identified the crucified of Jerusalem and the crucified of Rome, as far as to say to both alike, “I believe in thee, I adore thee.” In 1868 the great Catholic Newspaper of Rome said, “When the Pope thinks, it is God thinking in him.” Faber proposed an act of devotion to the Pope as a supreme test of Christian sanctity. In 1874 a Jesuit paper applied to Pius the words, “Which of you convinceth me of sin?” And there was a hymn sung by the German Catholics celebrating his priestly jubilee in 1869, “Pius, priest, our sinful age, wondering, finds no sin in thee.”’
New Book: Where Rome Is Wrong (Part Two)
An Exposure of Rome’s Authoritarianism, Totalitarianism and Sectarianism
Dr. Ian R. K. Paisley

We take Luther as the Representative of the true Protestant – a witness for the truth.

We note him especially as he stands before the Royal and Ecclesiastical Representatives of ‘The Holy Roman Empire’ and cries out, ‘Here I stand, I can do no other. So help me, God!’

Luther, it can be truly said, was ‘great in life and in soul’.

Luther’s conscience, as he inherited it from Adam, was not the driving force in his personality but Luther’s conscience reborn and sprinkled with the Saviour’s blood was the driving force within him.

Although he was naturally afraid, he was as strong as a lion as he witnessed his good confession.

He stood up against the so-called Almighty Church and with immeasurable independence he declared the sentence of God upon it.

He had a courage more than sublime and an independence more than colossal.

You see, Luther was living up to his calling. He knew his calling. The question of the difference between the Protestant and the Romanist is on this nature of revelation. The Roman Catholic knows it only as a system, the Protestant knows it as salvation.

There was a difference between Luther and Erasmus.

Erasmus was the champion of the new learning, the Renaissance as it is called. His claim was for intellectual freedom, a new culture with human reason, human thought, human beauty and human grace.

Luther was the champion of the new birth. He was not reformed, he was regenerated. He did not have a toning up of his human life, he had an impartation of divine life.

Luther was the champion of the Gospel. The Gospel had made him what he was. He had been set free not from the load of the Church but from the guilty load of his own sin. He had escaped the corruption, which is in the world through lust. His was the simplicity of faith in Christ and Christ alone.

Luther had witnessed in his inmost soul the serenity of the gospel. The gospel had gone down into his heart. It was dreadful. But then came sweet grace, sweet pardon, sweet love, sweet blood, sweet cleansing and sweet forgiveness.

He became a new man, a pardoned man, a justified man, a saved man, and God’s man. His was trust. His was confidence. His was life. His was power. His was deliverance. He was a Christ committed man.

Two fundamentals lay at the heart of Luther’s spiritual experience.

I. THE FOUNDATION OF THE WORD OF GOD
II. THE FOUNDATION OF THE FAITH OF CHRIST

Luther believed that the Word of God was the foundation of the Church.

His faith was not built on tradition, not upon Popes and Bishops. It rested not on invention but rather on revelation.

The way was opened by God alone and only God could keep it open, or keep it shut.

The foundation of the Church was the Gospel. The Church is the fellowship of the gospel.

The Gospel of the Church is the Act of God. In Christ reconciling the world unto Himself the gospel is the Work of God, the deed of God. The gospel is God in Christ, God in His Cross and God in Redemption. Only Christ could save. Only Christ the Saviour can save the sinner. The preaching of the Cross is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.

Luther knew the assurance of salvation. He knew that it was to be able to:-

My fierce accuser face
And tell him Christ had died.

Luther gave back to Christianity the preaching of the simple Gospel, the New Testament Gospel, plain, simple and life imparting.

When we speak of Justification by faith alone we do not speak of dry dogma but of thrilling everlasting life.

‘Justification is an act of God’s free grace wherein He pardoneth all our sins and accepteth us as righteous in His sight only for the righteousness of Christ imparted to us and received by grace alone’.

Luther believed in the Church as the edifice of Grace alone. He believed in grace as the only Gospel, the Gospel of Christ who is in Himself Grace and Truth.

Faith to Luther is direct contact with Christ crucified, not as a condition of grace but as He Himself.

This is the true faith of Christ. It is not the faith of the Church of Rome. It is not the faith of the sacraments.

Romanism is not the Gospel. The faith of the Son of God is the gospel. To believe anything else or anyone else is to commit spiritual suicide.

Indifference to this is one of the ways to the death which never dies.

New Book: Where Rome Is Wrong (Part Three)
An Exposure of Rome’s Authoritarianism, Totalitarianism and Sectarianism
Dr. Ian R. K. Paisley

What is the great divide between Bible Protestantism and Roman Catholicism? It is the office and nature of the Priest.

In this issue Bible Protestantism goes one way and Roman Catholicism goes the opposite way. There is on this vital subject the fork in the road. Between the Anglican and the Free Churchman the contention is also the priest.

The struggle is on the one hand the priest and on the other the family. To Rome, marriage and the family are inferior. The priest represents celibacy, confession and the sharing of the secrets of marriage love to a third person.

Roman Catholicism exalts the priesthood. It raises the priest to the standing of God and gives to Him the power to create God in the Mass.

Roman Catholicism is priestism. It is reversal and that means degeneration.

The whole idea of the Roman priesthood is one of development. The Roman priesthood grew on to the church. It had a false start, which led on to greater and greater apostasy.

The Roman Priesthood is not in the New Testament. It has no place whatever there.

The New Testament knows everything about the priesthood of all believers. The true and spiritual office of the whole church is a nation of priests. Neither the name nor the position of the Roman Priest has a place anywhere in the New Testament.

The Church has but One Priest and that is our Lord Jesus Christ. Christ has only one spouse one bride and one wife. There are no sacrificing priests in the New Testament but One Great High Priest, Jesus the Son God.

The early Church held to this truth. Augustine asserted, ‘All are priests as members of the One Priest’.

It was Tertullian, about 200 AD who says, ‘Where there are three there the church is, if they be but laymen’.

The Roman priesthood turned the early Church like a tide. It was the intrusion into the Church of the priesthood of paganism.

It was Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage who pushed the universal priesthood of all believers aside and fastened upon the church the so-claimed magical priesthood of Rome.

The evolution of the pagan priesthood in the Papist Church grew apace.

No better course could be adopted in order to discover the real nature of Rome’s Antichristianity than to examine a text book which is a ‘must’ for her priests in preparation for their priesthood.

Such a textbook is ‘Dignity and Duties of the Priest or Selva’. (A collection of Materials for Ecclesiastical Retreats. Rule of Life and Spiritual Rules) by St. Alphonsus de Liguori.

Just how high Alphonsus is reckoned in the scale of precedence of Roman saints can be seen from the 'Notice' which appears in the preface to the volume. It concludes with this eulogy ‘LIVE JESUS, MARY, JOSEPH AND ALPHONSUS!’

JESUS DIED TO INSTITUTE THE ROMAN PRIESTHOOD

“Jesus has died to institute the priesthood. It was not necessary for the Redeemer to die in order to save the world; a drop of his blood, a single tear, or prayer, was sufficient to procure salvation for all; for such a prayer, being of infinite value, should be sufficient to save not one but a thousand worlds. But to Institute the priesthood, the death of Jesus Christ has been necessary. Had he not died, where should we find the victim that the priests of the New Law now offer? a victim altogether holy and immaculate, capable of giving to God an honour worthy of God. As had been already said, all the lives of men and angels are not capable of giving to God an infinite honour like that which a priest offers to him by a Single Mass.”

The above statement is a hideous blasphemy. ‘Christ died for the ungodly.’

‘God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets’.

‘Hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son, whom He hath appointed heir of all things by whom also He made the worlds. Who being the brightness of His glory, and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high.’

‘But this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God.’ The purpose of the Blood‑shedding on the Cross was not to institute the massing priesthood of Rome but to purchase the redemption of the people of God.

Any system which holds such an unscriptural view of the Work of the Cross as Rome does is plainly not a Christian system at all but is part of the system of Satan and Antichrist.

THE ROMAN PRIEST EQUAL TO CHRIST

“Were the Redeemer to descend into a church, and sit in a confessional to administer the sacrament of penance, and a priest to sit in another confessional, Jesus would say over each penitent, ‘Ego te absolvo,’ the priest would likewise say over each of his penitents, ‘Ego te absolvo,’ and the penitents of each would equally be absolved.”

THE ROMAN PRIEST GREATER THAN GOD

“Thus the priest may, in a certain manner, be called the creator of his Creator, since by saying the words of the consecration, he creates, as it were, Jesus in the sacrament, by giving him a sacramental existence, and produces him as a victim to be offered to the eternal Father. As in creating the world it was sufficient for God to have said, Let it be made, and it was created. He spoke, and they were made, so it is sufficient for the priest to say, ‘Hoc est cnim corpus meum,’ and behold the bread is no longer bread, but the body of Jesus Christ. ‘The power of the priest,’ says St Bernardine of Sienna, ‘is the power of the divine person; for the transubstantiation of the bread requires as much power as the creation of the world’.”

“With regard to the mystical body of Christ, that is, all the faithful, the priest has the power of the keys, or the power of delivering sinners from hell, of making them worthy of paradise, and of changing them from the slaves of Satan into the children of God. And God himself is obliged to abide by the judgment of his priests, and either not to pardon or to pardon, according as they refuse or give absolution, provided the penitent is capable of it.”

The practice of the Roman priesthood submerged the universal priesthood of all believers and the only real and active assertion of the believer is priesthood in the world today is in Biblical Protestantism.

The Reformation purged out the pagan priesthood and banished the title “priest” as the name of the Christian minister of the Word of God.

Well may we ask, what is the real nature of the universial priesthood of all believers? We as Bible believing Protestants do not reject the priesthood. That is something which is inherent to the entire church of all believers. We are a nation of priests – a royal priesthood.

The Church, the whole church, is a priesthood. The Church has not got a priesthood but is a priesthood.

While acknowledging the priesthood of all believers Rome goes on to virtually destroy the New Testament priesthood and to elevate its conceptions of its own pagan priesthood.

The Council of Trent is specific and plain, I quote:-

‘The outward priesthood belongs not to all the faithful, but only to certain men, who are instituted and consecrated by the imposition of hands and the due rites of the Church to a specially sacred ministry. And the power of this outward priesthood is the power of offering to God the great sacrifice of the Church for the living and the dead – the Mass.’

While acknowledging the priesthood of all believers Trent exalts far above it her own unscriptural pagan priestly cult and what is more, empties the universal priesthood of all belief as the result of the pretended magic of baptismal regeneration.

Trent teaches plainly that the priesthood of all believers is not theirs by virtue of their faith but in virtue of their baptism, so that the inward priesthood is wholly dependent on the pagan priests of Mother Church.

Moreover it is not necessary, for the power of the outward priesthood should have the grace of the inward. The outward priest has all the power of the priest no matter how filthy he may be in his everyday living, because his priesthood rests not in his personal faith and holiness but on his appointment.

He does not need to be the truly regenerated man, he only requires to be the Church created priest.

Power and sanctity are not joined. They may be entirely divorced but the man is still a priest because his priesthood is not attainment but appointment.

The Roman priest may be as filthy as sin but that does in no way hold against the validity of his priestly powers. He can live in sin but his powers are unchallenged and unchallengable.

Roman Catholicism makes the assent of the Church an instutution instead of the Gospel. It believes in a church rite rather in Christ’s faith.

‘The two priesthoods have, in fact, nothing in common except the name. They are not an essential and spiritual connection. The cleric is above the Church; he becomes the Church; he is described as a God. He draws his official power directly from God. His is the sole medium of grace for believers, who become and remain such only through the sacraments in his hands. And yet he need not be a personally holy man.’

Bible Protestantism is in clear antagonism to Roman pagan sin- practising priests.

The individual believers have no mediaterial place, Christ is the only mediator between God and man.

Luther declared a simple truth when he said:-

‘We take our stand on this. There is no other Word of God than that whose publication is enjoined on all Christians’

The temper of the hour in which we live is to a large extent pagan priestliness. It longs for the material, that which is seen in its worship. It has rejected the teaching of Christ. ‘He that worships Him (the Father) must worhsip Him in spirit and in truth’. No wonder the Reformers rejected the worshp of Rome. The penitents in the worship of today dress up. The penitents in the Bible rent their clothes.

We hear a lot about cultured Protestantism today. Cultured Protestantism is Protestantism without the Gospel!

There are those today who are more content to be in a cultured Church than in a true Church. They respond to the amenities of a cultured society better than to the vigour of the Christian faith.

‘The real roots of the Roman reaction lie in the unrealised Romanism of Protestants. And the Protestant root of a mass priesthood is the idea so dear to the English mind, so central to a rational broad Churchism in every Church, and so plausible as the ethical movement – the idea that the best action or conduct is contributory to salvation instead of produced by it. This is the Pelagian and Synergistic (man helping God to save himself), faith of medieval Catholicism reappearing in the circles of humanist Protestantism. Nothing is in more distinct contrast with the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone, nor in contrast more fatal. To adopt it is in principle to renounce the Reformation, whether it be done on agnostic or on Catholic lines. The Reformation had to break away for its life both from the Catholics and from the humanists. These, as I have said, took up Luther, but he outgrew them’.

‘It was not mere sacramental works that the Reformers denied to have saving value, but ethical no less. It was not the mere ritual of worship that Paul fought when he led Luther’s way, but that of conduct as well. Man can contribute nothing to his own salvation. “Work out your own salvation, for it is God that worketh in you.” Yes, but God the Redeemer. What works in you is the redemption which you have already apprehended by faith alone. The words were spoken not to the natural conscience but to the redeemed. Any form of Synergism (man’s ability to help God in saving him) is fatal to justification by grace alone, which is the base of the true Protestant priesthood of all believers’.

Christianity is a religion and a faith before it is an ethic. It is ethical because of its faith in the supreme and all-inclusive ethical act of God in the Redeemer.’

There is much we must learn and there is much we must forget.

To be taught of God is to unlearn much and to grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

What must I do to be saved?

Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved. Acts 16:31.

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