Monday is for Discussion
A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to sit down with a Catholic priest, a friend, and discuss the gospel. We had lunch at a local Olive Garden and after a wide ranging discussion I moved the conversation to the gospel itself.
“Pastor,” I said, “my understanding of the gospel is that I and every member of the human race, because of original sin and our own subsequent sin have a problem. God is holy and just, and he can’t allow my sin to go unpunished. To be a just God, he has to punish me with what the Scripture says I have earned by my sin—death (Romans 6:23). This is part of the curse of Adam. In Adam, according to the Scripture, I died (Ephesians 2:1-4) spiritually in relationship to God. Apart from Christ, I am dead spiritually, I am going to die physically, and I might die eternally if a remedy for my sin problem is not found.
But the gospel is the good news that …
4 …God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, … (Ephesians 2:4-6, ESV)
Jesus knew that if I paid for my sin, I would be eternally separated from him; I would die an eternal death. So he came in fulfillment of the Scripture, took on human flesh, lived a perfect and sinless life, satisfying all of the positive requirements of the Law, then voluntarily took my place in the gallows and paid the debt of death that I owed for my sin. He rose victorious from the grave proving that the He had conquered both sin and death and now lives to offer salvation to all who repent and believe in the gospel.
His shed blood is given in sacrificial atonement for all of my sin so that when God the Father looks at any one who has repented of their sin and believed the gospel, he sees not my unrighteousness but Jesus’ righteousness; he sees not my imperfection, but my Savior’s perfection. By grace, I am in Christ, and because I am in Christ, I am saved to a new life of obedience now and eternal joy when Christ takes me home. I don’t have a righteousness that is my own, but Christ has imputed to me his righteousness, that is, an alien righteousness, something from outside of me, something that he gave me as a gift” (Cf. Ephesians 2:8-9 and 2 Corinthians 5:21).
Questions: What do you think happened next? What’s to stop you from having this conversation with someone this week?
ChosenRebel's Blog 
I would love to know the response, and how the Gospel confronted his Catholic beliefs.
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My friend was a bit condescending but mostly agreeable. he objected to the use of the term “alien righteousness” when I spoke of imputation of Christ’s righteousness (which was what I expected). RCC theology as you know is centered on meriting grace so that your righteousness is in some sense (according to them) earned on the basis of your works plus Christ’s sacrifice. Overall the response was positive and hopefully got him thinking.
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I have had the opportunity to do this with a Roman Catholic priest also. He did not agree or disagree with what I was saying, but was patronizing, saying that we basically believed the same things, but would not go deeper into the differences in what the RCC teaches.
He just thanked me when the conversation ended and I told him I would pray for him that God would reveal the Truth to him. One interesting thing he admitted, though (and that I didn’t think he would admit) was that he discouraged his parishioners from reading the Bible for themselves. He believed they needed to hear it read aloud in mass so they could then have it explained to them by someone who had been trained by the “church.”
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