THE GALATIAN ERROR Charles Colson and J I Packer reach new `Heights of Hypocrisy' During my trip to England in 1999 I came across a recently published book called "Their blood cries out" written by Paul Marshall. It deals with modern-day persecution of professing Christians around the world. I have not read the book so cannot comment upon the content and so this article should not be construed as criticism of the book itself. Rather I want to comment upon 2 favourable endorsements printed on the book.
The first by CHARLES COLSON read as follows 'We must feel a sense of moral outrage that Christians in this day and age are being sold into slavery and are being tortured for their faith'. The second by J I PACKER read as follows 'The escalating world repression of some hundreds of millions of Christians which this landmark survey documents thoroughly, is one of the worst evils of our time. For all who care about human rights, human suffering and helping the needy Marshall's grim analysis is a must-read'. To MR COLSON I would say that God's true people feel a great sense of 'outrage' that millions of Roman Catholic people have been sold into the 'slavery' of the false system of Roman Catholicism thanks to the document [Evangelicals and Catholics Together - The Christian Mission for the Third Millennium - March 1994] drawn up by MR COLSON and 'Father' RICHARD NEUHAUS. Also if MR COLSON cared to check past history and present happenings he would discover that God's true people have been and are being 'tortured for their faith' by this very system of Roman Catholicism that he is so eager to embrace as being Christian.
To MR PACKER I would say that one of the greatest 'repressions' perpetrated upon any group of people is the dogmatic teaching [false] and requirements [useless] of the Roman Catholic system upon its members and MR PACKER by his endorsement of Evangelicals and Catholics Together [both in America and Ireland] is guilty of aiding and abetting this unholy system which is 'one of the worst evils of our time'.
Ecumenical "stones for bread" (Luke 11:11) in Ballymena On 7 November 1999, Russell Birney, the minister of a large and popular [especially with young people from neighbouring congregations] Presbyterian Church in Ballymena preached a sermon based on Paul’s epistle to the Galatians. The first 90-95% of the sermon could not be faulted but the final section betrayed Mr Birney’s ecumenical zeal as he totally twisted his accurate biblical exposition of events with an application designed to serve the cause of false ecumenism.
As he began to draw the sermon to a conclusion Mr Birney said :
‘Paul had been a missionary for 14 years and then God sent him to Jerusalem to check out the gospel to see if what he had been preaching was in agreement with what the Apostles were preaching. Yes Lord… I’ll go and I’ll take Barnabas and I’ll take Titus with me and they went to Jerusalem and they met Peter, James and John and had a private meeting with them. But something happened. Into that meeting there were a number of people who gatecrashed. They were the false teachers and they came up with the wonderful news that Titus hadn’t been circumcised and I‘m sure it was meant to have been a big shock to everybody but Paul says ‘I oppose them to their face, I didn’t give an inch to them’.
This was the error so strongly condemned by Paul in Galatians 1:6-9 where he referred to those who preached the added necessity of ‘religious ritual’ [circumcision] in order to be fully saved as preaching "another gospel which is not another". Theodore Epp in his study on Galatians entitled ‘Flesh and Spirit in Conflict’ wrote
‘The language used by Paul… is on the surface confusing. The puzzle is cleared up for us however when we find out that Paul used 2 different Greek words that have been translated "other" and "another" in the English text. One word is ‘heteros’ which means ‘one of another kind’. The second word is ‘allos’ which means ‘one of the same kind’. So when we give full play to these meanings we find Paul saying to the Galatians "I marvel that you are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ unto a different kind of (heteros) gospel which is not another (allos) of the same kind". Paul marvelled that these Christians had so soon accepted a ‘gospel’ which was so different in character and kind from the real gospel that it had no right to be designated ‘gospel’ at all’.
Mr Birney continued ‘Well the leaders of the church had it in their hands - would they demand that Titus be circumcised? No, they welcomed Titus without imposing any restrictions or requirements on him. They were big enough to see that God was bigger than their little ideas and do you know Peter and James and John were absolutely thrilled - over the moon we would say - over the moon at what God was doing and they said it to the delegation from Antioch - put it there - and they offered them the right hand of fellowship.
[Please note they offered the right hand of fellowship to brothers who had no time for or association with a system that constituted "another (different kind of) gospel"!] …You see if we’re agreed on the gospel we can shake hands with a person even if God has called that other person in a different way to a different kind of work to a different emphasis. We can go to that person and we can say I recognise the gospel that you’re preaching and may the Lord bless you even if you take some others from me, you’re preaching the Word and that’s what matters’.
So far so good. Then Mr Birney goes on to relate how Paul challenged Peter because of his separation [through fear of the Judaisers] from the gentile converts and spoke of how ‘with great courage Paul rebuked him - what are you doing? What you are doing is not true to the gospel… you are saying to these gentile brothers you have to be circumcised before I will eat with you - you have to be circumcised before I will accept you as a Christian brother - it is no longer enough to be saved by grace you have first of all to become a Jew. You see the seriousness of that? Well if you do see the seriousness of that then you’ve got a problem as I’ve got a problem because God’s doing great things in our land today’.
NOW WE COME TO MR BIRNEY’S TWISTED AND FALSE ECUMENICAL APPLICATION OF THE ‘GALATIAN ERROR’. ‘God is saving the most unlikely people. God is saving people out of every denomination and none. God is laying His hand on the most unlikely, even we would say unworthy people and He’s bringing them into new relationships with His grace and in His grace and we have to face up to that. What if He saves some Roman Catholic people? Praise God you say - why do you say Praise God?
[Personally I say ‘praise God’ because He has saved them in spite of and not because of Roman Catholicism] …but what if some of those people say - I don’t want to leave my church, I want to stay in there. You see there’s a group within the Roman Catholic Church called ‘Evangelical Catholics’. We’ve had them along speaking at a midweek service. We’ve had one of them along and we’ve been reading in the papers, in the letters columns and all the rest and from all that they write you cannot but say - Praise the Lord - Yes - Yes - Yes! There’s a tremendous danger that we say to those people - we’re delighted but we can’t accept you until you become Protestants. Now that’s the EXACT ANALOGY. I was speaking to one such and he said to me, he said ‘you know you people have been saying that it’s by grace that you are saved through faith and not of yourselves and now you’re saying to us that you have to add something to that in order for you to accept me as a brother in Christ - you have to come out of your church
[remember it’s the Roman Catholic Church] before I will accept you as a brother in the Lord’. I think that’s something we have to wrestle with because this was the Galatian error. So we have to in some way work it out in order to preserve our purity not to commit the Galatian error and heresy. Let us pray.
THIS IS AN APPALLING MISAPPLICATION OF THE TRUTH AND TEACHING OF GOD’S WORD! The ‘Galatian error’ was that of the Judaisers ‘requiring people to enter into a system of faith + works for salvation’ - a system that Paul condemned with "anathema". The ‘Galatian error’ was not [as Mr Birney stated] believers today ‘requesting people to leave a system of faith + works for salvation’ as represented by the modern-day equivalent of the Judaisers namely Roman Catholicism.
In his book ‘Salvation, The Bible and Roman Catholicism’ former Roman Catholic, Bill Webster wrote ‘It is quite clear from this that in Roman Catholicism faith in Christ alone is not sufficient for salvation. It is also necessary that one keep the Ten Commandments, be baptised, become a member of the Roman Catholic faith and partake regularly of the sacraments. It is not Jesus alone but Jesus plus all these other things. Significantly all these other things are practically identical to the Judaiser’s system and teachings’. [p 91-92[. Mr Webster then goes on to list 15 practices/teachings held in common by the Judaisers and Roman Catholicism.
If Paul’s message to believers concerning the Judaisers was ‘Stay out of a false system of faith + works for salvation because it is accursed of God’ can anyone seriously doubt that his message to professing believers today who are wanting to stay in the Roman Catholic system of faith + works for salvation would be ‘Come out!’ In Ephesians 5:11 he wrote "and have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness but rather reprove them"
And God’s command of Revelation 18:4 still stands today as a guide to those who having been truly converted might consider staying within a system that proclaims a false gospel "Come out of her my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins and that ye receive not of her plagues".
As for Mr Birney’s acceptance of the group known as Evangelical Catholics let me quote from their own leaflet ‘Evangelical Catholics are committed to a respect for and obedience to the teaching authority of the Pope and Bishops of the Catholic Church unless that obedience goes against one’s conscience as enlightened by Scripture and Church teaching’.
In the foreword [page 5] to the 1994 Catechism of the Catholic Church the Pope wrote concerning it ‘I declare it to be a sure norm for teaching the faith’. Paragraph 1129 of that Catechism states ‘The Church affirms that for believers the sacraments of the New Covenant are necessary for salvation’. If professing believers cannot see that this is the modern-day equivalent of the ‘Galatian error’ then there is something radically wrong with their spiritual eyesight.
The crunch question is this - do Evangelical Catholics accept the teaching of Paragraph 1129? If they do they are promoting a modern-day ‘Galatian Gospel’. If they don’t they should cease calling themselves Catholic for their own Roman Catholic Church condemns them with its own ‘anathema’. The Council of Trent [Session 7: Canon 4] declares ‘If anyone says that the sacraments of the New Law are not necessary for salvation but are superfluous and that without them or without the desire of them men obtain from God through faith alone the grace of justification, though all are not necessary for each one, let him be anathema’
Until this problem [a problem that concerns the very essence of the gospel] is cleared up true believers should not extend the right hand of fellowship to those calling themselves Evangelical Catholics for to do so would be to disregard the commands of God already quoted regarding separation from error. It would also be to be guilty of Peter’s role in the ‘Galatian error’ as Paul explained in Galatians 2:18 "For if I build again the things which I destroyed [the need for religious ritual - circumcision] I make myself a transgressor". By being willing to publicly fellowship with those who claim to be ‘Evangelical’ but still ‘Catholic’ [ie - still wedded to a false gospel] Mr Birney is guilty of the role played by Peter in the ‘Galatian error’.
Let me finish with 2 quotes. The first is from a book review written by Michael Cunningham who before his conversion was a Roman Catholic and a terrorist. The book reviewed was ‘Evangelical Catholics’ written by Keith Fournier a Roman Catholic. Mr Cunningham wrote ‘One cannot be a Romanist and an evangelical at the same time. They are mutually exclusive doctrinal systems, opposed on every essential and fundamental matter’. [Evangelical Times - December 1991]
The second quote is from a newsletter I wrote back in 1991 called ‘Evangelical Catholics - Are They?’ In the newsletter I referred to an exchange of correspondence I had had with Paddy Monaghan - spokesperson for the Evangelical Catholics. I wrote the following ‘If Mr Monaghan does not truly believe the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church…his group can no longer be classed as Catholics in the sense of Roman Catholics and in obedience to the Word of God should leave the false system of Roman Catholicism. Until he and his group do this then fellowship with them would not be possible.’ [Please note that I never called upon Mr Monaghan and his group to ‘become Protestants’. I simply called upon them to separate as the scriptures command from any system that proclaims a false ‘gospel’].
Such action is in obedience to the Word of God and is certainly not to be viewed as Mr Birney taught as the equivalent of the ‘Galatian error’. Rather Mr Birney is the one who stands guilty of such ‘error’ as he is himself disobeying the clear command of God’s Word by willingly fellowshipping with those who still claim to be Roman Catholics. (Source: Take Heed Ministries, UK - Cecil Andrews)
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