Pints With Aquinas - 7 Thing Protestants Misunderstand About Christianity (Dr. John Bergsma) | Ep. 523

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

Dr. John Bergsma is a Full Professor of Theology at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, in Steubenville, Ohio. He served as a Protestant pastor for four years before entering the Catholic Church in 2001 while pursuing a Ph.D. in Theology from the University of Notre Dame. He specializes in the Old Testament and the Dead Sea Scrolls, graduating with high honors in 2004. Dr. Bergsma's links: stpaulcenter.co/ICSB  stpaulcenter.co/jubilee  @stpaulcenter  @emmausroadpublishing  @john.s.bergsma  stpaulcenter.co/jubileecompanion 🍺 Want to Support Pints With Aquinas? 🍺 Get episodes a week early, score a free PWA beer stein, and join exclusive live streams with me! Become an annual supporter at 👉 https://mattfradd.locals.com/support 💵 Show Sponsors:  👉 College of St. Joseph the Worker – Earn a degree, learn a trade, and graduate without crippling debt: https://collegeofstjoseph.com/mattfradd 👉  Truthly – The Catholic faith at your fingertips: https://www.truthly.ai/ 👉 Hallow – The #1 Catholic prayer app: https://hallow.com/mattfradd  💻 Follow Me on Social Media: 📌 Facebook: https://facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/mattfradd 𝕏 Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/Pints_W_Aquinas 🎵 TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@pintswithaquinas 👕 PWA Merch – Wear the Faith! Grab your favorite PWA gear here: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com

Pines with Aquinas is brought to you by Truthly, which is a groundbreaking Catholic AI app built to help you know, live and defend the Catholic faith. Start your seven day free trial today when you download Truthly on the App Store. Coming soon to Android. I think you're not going to understand indulgences unless you understand Catholic ecclesiology and how the church views herself as the body of Christ. And you know, it's interesting that on that point because, oh, you know, what they find uncomfortable about the Catholic Church is that the church does things that they would reserve to Jesus. And I think that's the crux of it.

That's the crux of it. And what they're objecting to is that the church acts like Mrs. Jesus. It would be like, you know, my wife walks into the bank and cashes a check and says like, you can't do that. You're not John Bergsmuh. Like wait, if she's really Mrs. Bergsmuh, she absolutely can't. And if the church is really Mrs. Jesus, then she absolutely can write checks on Jesus' account.

She can act in persona Christi. All right, we get it. This all has to be part of it. You ready? Dr. John Bergsmath, thank you so much for coming. It's a bit of a distance from Steubenville when you would just drive up the road to be with me. Yes.

I notice you've brought far fewer books this time. Well, I got the most important book. Good on you. Yeah. Hey, I've been reading through the Ignatius Study Bible. It's a behemoth. That's my only complaint. It's really hard to move. It's theology of the body. You can get your curl reps in while meditating on the scripture at the same time. You know, they talked about back in the day that Bibles would be chained into churches, but for good reason.

I think about that when I look at the study Bible. Yeah, because it's about the size of one of those old cathedral Bibles that they would chain up. Yeah. But it's like, it's completely impractical. You can't just like, I'm going to take this to the coffee shop. No, you can't. You need a separate table that's strong enough to bear its weight.

You need a cart. You need like a dolly. I told Scott on I'm waiting for the automated version to come out or the self propelled version. That would be a pretty cool flex. I could see I could see new converts, you know, who get really enthusiastic and Franciscan just carrying it around in a wheelbarrow. Right. You know, I kind of like those mowers, you know, like self-propelled mowers. I'm like, oh, that was easy to flip. It's a self-propelled study Bible. Yeah. To lug it around. But how's it? Well, how have you enjoyed it? I've enjoyed it very much. One of the things I found helpful is trying to read a chapter a day. Yes. Which is not at all difficult.

Right. I found that very helpful. For example, my favorite book in the Bible, the one that moves me the most, the one that I feel closest to Christ when I read it, is what? Ezekiel, right? No. Leviticus. No. Song of Songs. Okay. Oh, sure. So being able to read a chapter and then read what the different saints have said, especially church fathers, has been really edifying.

That's beautiful. Now, did you forgive me for asking this? I'm sure this is an embarrassing question. We'll see in a minute. Did you contribute to it? Yes. I hate myself. Yeah, no, no, that's fine.

Yeah, so I wrote an introductory essay on salvation history, which is in the beginning, and I did the notes on Ezekiel. Oh, that's where notes on Ezekiel. Yeah, those notes I didn't care for. Yeah. Oh, you wrote them. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So it's just a small contribution. You know, that was, uh, when we all get to have in Curtis, Mitch is going to have many, many crown, many, many jewels in his crown. Scott will be bringing him drinks by the pool. Yes, I think so. And giving him a manicure. Cause yeah, many, many jewels in his crown. Scott will be bringing him drinks by the pool. Yes, I think so. And giving him a manicure.

Because yeah, no, really, Curtis Mitch is the unsung hero of that project and such a beautiful thing. He gave probably more than 20 years of his life to that. I mean, have you spoken to him about the reception of it? How does he feel about it? I haven't got a chance to, but that's a very good point. I got to give him a call and take him out for coffee

and talk about that. But I have not discussed that, but it is such an epic thing. You know, and this, you know, study Bibles have a long lifespan. I think this is gonna have an impact on English speaking Catholicism for the next century, okay? Come on. We're talking 100 years, we're talking probably three generations.

Come on. Yeah, yeah. Because when you look at the history of things like the Schofield Reference Bible, which is a famous Protestant, American Protestant study Bible, it easily had a century of impact on American, and still does, you know? Still is having an impact with its dispensationalism and so on. So, yeah, so a good study Bible can really impact multiple generations.

And this one is very evergreen, you know, because it stays close to the tradition of the church. It doesn't jump on faddish scholarship, stays close, you know, it's very, very judicious and moderate in its decision. So I think it's going to be a real resource for a long time. So yeah, kudos to Curtis Mitch and obviously Dr. Hahn and, you know, the other contributors, but the rest of us didn't do quite as much. You know how Protestants are very good at creating a Bible that you actually want to hold, you want to read, you want to take out in a coffee shop. I hope that Ignatius finds a way

to do that. I would love just the book of Exodus with the commentary in a leather-bound book so I can really do a deep dive into Exodus, for example. It'd be neat if they... Yeah, they have the fascicles. They have Exodus as an independent pamphlet. I know pamphlet, though. But you want to learn about it.

You want to look a bit more sophisticated. You want a bloody pamphlet when you're reading Exodus. You want to feel the weight of it. Not so much weight that you hurt yourself with the... You know what in a bloody pamphlet when you're reading Exodus. You want to feel the weight of it. Not so much weight that you hurt yourself like with the... You know what the thing is? Since COVID, we've not been able to get thin paper. Yes. So it was printed on a paper weight that they never intended or wanted for that volume.

They're just forced to. Same thing happened to my introduction to the Old Testament. Like the initial run was thick, but not crazy. But then they had to reprint it in the wake of COVID. And it increased by about a half inch or more in thickness because of just the lack of availability. So I don't know. I have no idea why a virus would cause thin paper to evaporate from the earth

But there's some connection shortages in in wood being turned to paper. I don't know. Yeah But but eventually I think the price of lumber went up significantly. Yeah. Yeah all those things Supply chain issues that I don't so do they have a plan to make it? They do. They got a plan to slim it down. So it's just not that thin, but closer to this. There's no way it'll be close to that. Yeah, if you get the ultra thin paper, you can do it. No way.

And I remember. You think so? Yeah, I remember. Maybe not this thin, but not too much thicker than this. Wouldn't that be incredible? Wouldn't it be great? Leather bound? It would just be incredible. Because the black New Testament study Bible is also on thick paper. So even if it was that size, I'd be happier.

Right. But you were saying it could even be smaller than the New Testament. You know, I don't want to go on record. I want you to go on record. But yeah, I think they they can get it down. So it's not too much thicker than this. And certainly the size of the black one, if they use the right,

cause it's a super thin, almost translucent paper that's really, I think it's really more cloth. I think is the kind of like our money, our money has no paper in it. It's all cotton. Were you aware? I knew there was cotton in it. I didn't know there was no paper in it. There's no paper.

There's no paper in American currency. OK. I think it's like 90% or something more cotton, actually. So it's more like a fabric. This is why I need a new feature in the studio, which I think we'll get eventually, where I call Jamie to pull it up, and we can both look at things on the screen. That's right. And we could do Google searches for things that come up. Yeah. Yeah, I did learn that. That's really interesting. Well, that's gonna be great.

Yeah. Well, thanks for the work you did put into it and all the work that St. Paul Center is doing. Yeah, well, it's a joy and I tell you the the St. Paul Center is just exploding like, you know, orders of magnitude like year over year in terms of the outreach. So I am very grateful, and I think part of it's the Jubilee year. I think that they're just graces and favors that are pouring out. Nice transition. It does come to mind, because we're just... The conversions and the impacts and the response that we're getting from our biblical materials at the St. Paul Center, just like, whew, it's like, what's going on? Just like the winds

at our back. Well, it shows God's faithfulness, eh? There's that old cliché, just because clichés are clichés that doesn't mean they're not true, and that God can't be outdone in generosity. And so just the amount, the investment that St. Paul's Center put in that gorgeous, brand new building in Steubenville. I mean, it's state of the art. It is. And I'm really happy to hear that.

Yeah, things are going well. It's a beautiful place to work. I'm so happy I could skateboard down there in 10 minutes, roll out of my bed, jump on my skateboard, and be at my office in 10 minutes. Did you have a skateboard? I don't have a skateboard. But if I did?

I would be killed by the potholes on Wellesley, as you are aware. So, wouldn't actually do that, but it is, you know, it's a half mile from my house and, you know, wonderful parking right there and just kind of walk right in and have everything I need for my vocation as a Catholic Bible scholar is there in that one building. And it's such a, I'm like, Lord, this is heavenly. Like I don't deserve to experience this on earth. So, but then, too much is given,

much will be expected. So I'm like, oh, I gotta make a return on this. So we're trying our best. Looks like you are. So you've got this new book, it's called Jesus and the Jubilee, the biblical roots of the year of God's favor. We'll put a link in the description below. I don't know if Emmaus Rhodes is going to give us a discount or not. They usually do. We'll put all that information below. We can negotiate that. But congrats on the new book. How many books do you have now?

How many? Yeah. How many books do I have? Have you written? More than 20. That's what I say nowadays. I'm not sure. That depends on if you count things like my dissertation,

which, you know, they printed a couple hundred copies and sold them for a couple hundred bucks a piece to research libraries, you know. So does that count as a publication? I suppose, but. It's gonna be interesting to see how books in general, like books that educate people, not just fiction, but how they fair and how they change

within the context of the new media. Right. Because it's possible that you and I could do a podcast like this and because you're so brilliant and charming and interesting, you might get heard more on a single podcast than you could potentially, I'm not saying you will, but potentially in a book. And I think that because of that kind of immediate return

on investment, I think a lot of people maybe either not writing books or books are just written in like little soundbite bits to kind of keep people's shortening attention span. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think, yeah. I think it's changing and the pressures are changing. And yeah, I think you're right that people are turning to the new media as a way to get the message out.

At the same time, I still know, I'm amazed at how many people still like to get a physical book. I do. And I do, too. I just love it. I'm like, oh, something that I don't have to look at my phone for. I don't have to pull it up on the screen.

You realize you're making the argument for why I didn't have to read the PDF that your publisher sent me, right? Right, right. It's so true. But I love a physical book. So many people do., right? I just said that. Yeah. It's so true, but I love a physical book. So many people do. Incarnational, huh?

Yeah, yeah. And there still are things, and I'm surprised. I think that, you know, oftentimes podcasts and books work in tandem. And it doesn't have to be a zero sum game where one side loses. But, you know, I think that people like both formats for different things.

There's something nice about having the book as a reference, something it feels solid, it feels unchanging. You can put it there on your shelf or on your desk, and you can refer to it and look back at it, and has that feeling of relative permanence. And then there's arguments that some arguments just have to be laid out in writing. And you know this.

Yeah. Yeah. You wouldn't want to be held necessarily to what you say in a three hour conversation. Yeah, exactly. But you get your book on the matter. It's like, this is the crystallized version. You can attack that, and you'd be right,

and I'd have to respond to you. Right. It's a different format. Yeah, it's a more formal. Like my book on marriage that just came out last year and with Baker, Marriage in the Bible, that's an example of a piece of scholarship with like every sentence was chosen with care, you know?

And you can't do that in a less formal, you know, oral environment. Yeah. But- When I think of the Jubilee, the first thing I think of is my conversion because it took place in the year 2000. Yours too?

What do you mean yours too? Because my conversion took place in the year 2000. Is that right? Yes. To Catholicism or- To Catholicism. Yeah, I was agnostic slash, I wasn't flirting with atheism

because I didn't really, the word hadn't come to mean what it meant 10 years ago, when it was trendy. But I was kind of agnostic. But in the year 2000, my mom sent me to Rome in Italy as part of that pilgrimage for the Jubilee year. Oh, no kidding. Yeah. So it was there that I-

Tell me the story. Well, I won't belabor it because people who watch the show regularly probably have heard it, but I went as a kind of angsty, agnostic kid who wore heavy metal t-shirts and black jeans and I was just, you know, swearing a bunch. I can see you doing that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm trying to grow out of some of those old habits.

But I encountered serious Christians for the first time in my life. The Christians I had met up until that point were just a little weird. Or I was just an annoying, arrogant teenager who found them weird when they weren't, but it just felt they were a bit socially awkward and silly. And I just thought Christianity was this myth we'd created to either make people do something or to make the thought of death more bearable. Sure. Comforting story.

Yeah. And I thought that that was a very sophisticated revival. Right? But then I go to Rome and I'm going just to meet ladies and to see another country. And I encountered these really normal, good looking, well rounded Catholics who are saving sexual marriage, who pray the Holy Rosary, who were attentive

during the Holy Mass. And I just thought, what the heck is this? Yes. Started asking a lot of questions of them, debating with them, you know, not in an aggressive way, began to pray. Sure. And the rest is history. Yeah, but you were sacramentalized as a child. So you didn't have to, you know, that's right, go through that barrier.

It was easy for you to kind of come back. Oh, yeah, go to confession and back in the good graces of the church. I mean, I didn't know enough to even know that I was separate. Does that make sense? Okay, yeah, I didn't even go, I'm going to make it. It was more just this gradual, I experienced the love that God had for me and the reality of meaning in the universe, that God had wanted a relationship with me. There was more to life than just get a job, retire, die. And it changed everything. I came home like one of those Christians who's

so happy it makes you sick. I was just over the top. So you really had a conversion experience. It was on... I'll give you one example, and then I'll hear about yours. But I had it, one of my friends said to me about several months after I came back, or maybe it was years after I came back.

He said it was like having a brother who went away to war and came back a completely different person. Wow. Now that isn't to say I wasn't still a knucklehead. That isn't to say and came back a completely different person. Wow. Now that isn't to say I wasn't still a knucklehead. That isn't to say I wasn't still involved in serious- Sinified. You know, but there was this joy and levity. Wow.

I just couldn't, I couldn't believe it. I was better than any drinking night I'd done. I was so joyful and I just loved the people that I met and I wanted everybody to encounter the love of Jesus. Isn't that amazing? You know, and I think all the things that the world offers, you know, sexual experimentation, you know, going, you know, clubbing, etc. Scraps. It is, you know, I often think of this litmus test, like go to all those places I just described and say, are the people there joyful?

No, no. You would never use that adjective. You never go to the club and say, oh, everybody here is so joyful. Right. Right? Yeah, you might say something like they're pumped. They're pumped or they're having a good time maybe.

But what's the difference? Isn't that interesting? Is joy? I think the difference? Isn't that interesting? Is joy? There's not a, there's not, I think the difference is there's not a peace and a calm that has already received the good and that can be in and can just remain there. Isn't it interesting how love, joy and peace are like a triad, you know, it seems like... Explain that. Well, love, joy, peace, the first peace, the first three gifts of the Holy Spirit,

of the nine that St. Paul lists. But you just put your finger on it. You said, why isn't there the joy in the club? It's because there's not the peace there. And that made me think love, joy, peace, and why isn't there peace? Because it's not true charity, because they haven't received the charity of the Holy Spirit, right?

So anyway, I just found it interesting how those three are kind of linked. I mean, the classic is faith, hope, and love, but there's also something to be said for love, joy, and peace. Do you remember, did you use to party as a kid? No, never. Straight arrow, man. You were way cooler than me. Yeah, no, I wasn't cool at all.

Well, objectively you were cooler than me, but maybe not the eyes of the world. I know what you mean. But you know, there's this sense of Friday night, here come the boys, here we go. But all of that excitement was in action. It was rarely when we rested. It was never when we, it was rarely when we rested. It was always the next thing.

Like wherever I am, I want to get the hell out of there. So let's go to this, let's go. It was always, it was never finding. It was seeking without finding. The anticipation of something and you kept looking for it. And if there ever was a resting, there was a legitimate good.

Like I remember times I'd get drunk with my friends and maybe we weren't fully gone yet, but we were kind of like laying in a field because I lived in a very small country town. And we might be just discussing things that were going on in our lives. And so, okay, now there is a bit of arrest because what we're experiencing was a legitimate good,

even though it may have been intermingled and surrounded by perversity. Sure, there was a kind of authentic charity, even if it was imperfect in that moment. Yeah. So 2000? Yeah, you know, I had no idea. We both made our journey into the church largely in the year 2000. Well, I couldn't get in under the wire, see, because unlike you, I wasn't sacramentalized. Well, I had baptism, right, which was valid, but I was outside the church. I'd never been confirmed. So I tried, but okay, I mean, so this is a story, and this is what connects with the book.

So in the fall of 1999, I was having so many doubts about Protestantism, which is probably gonna come up later in the conversation. I'd kind of given up on sola fide, faith alone, given up on sola scriptura, Bible alone, realized even from a Protestant perspective that these things don't work. And I wasn't the only Protestant that realized that these things don't work. And I wasn't the only Protestant that realized that these things don't work. Actually, I found that my seminary professors didn't really believe these things anymore themselves. And that was kind of a disconcerting discovery.

So I'm like, do I stay in this Protestant denomination that I belong because I'm having these doubts about theology? I wouldn't have phrased it as, oh, I'm doubting Protestantism per se. But I just like, I had these issues. I didn't have phrased it as, oh, I'm doubting Protestantism per se, but I just like, I had these issues, I didn't know what to do. So I decided to do what any good American would do in a state of quandary, which is go back to school, right? So, edumacation is the answer to everything. And so I thought, well, I'll go back and get a degree, a higher degree, and that will give me some time to sort my head out and find myself or find God or find the right denomination or something

like that. Well, make a long story short, I got accepted at the University of Notre Dame, which advertised itself as an ecumenical faculty, so I was going out to study with Protestants who were teaching at Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. And I get on campus and everything's a buzz because John Paul II was gearing up for the great Jubilee year of 2000, right? So I saw stuff advertised, events, et cetera, gearing up great Jubilee year 2000.

And I'll tell you, Matt, I was so cynical about this because I was a classic, you know, 16th century Reformation guy, you know, classic Lutherans and Calvinists. We have not forgotten about Johann Tetzel and his jingle about as soon as the coin in the coffer clings, the soul to heaven springs, and selling indulgences and, you know, fostering pilgrimages. And so this whole hype for the Jubilee year looked to me like one big, you know, fundraising effort to fatten the coffers of the Vatican. I'm like, well, those Catholics are still up to the same old papist

stuff after 500 years. And so we got into the year 2000, and at the beginning of the year, I was an anti-Catholic Calvinist in January of 2000. By December of 2000, I was emailing a priest friend of mine, asking him, what do I need to do to enter the Catholic Church? I actually sent him an email saying, what must I do to be saved? It's a little cryptic, tongue in cheek email. And he emailed back and he said, do I sense that you are inquiring about reconciling with

the Roman Catholic Church? Is something very nuanced like that? And I wrote back like, that's absolutely what I'm asking you. That's crazy. And he was over in 45 minutes. And how did you know him? Because he was a classmate in our,

some scripture classes and some patristics courses that he was in my same cohort. They accepted 13, I believe it was, doctoral students in 1999 at Notre Dame in theology, in various branches of theology, you know, Patristics, Morals, Systematics, Scripture, three of us in Scripture, a couple in Patristics. So I'm pretty sure he was in Patristics. But we had some courses in common because he had to, you know, we were forced to take, you know, to dabble a little bit in the Fathers and to dabble a little bit in both Testaments, you know, regardless of what field

we were in. So, you know, we had, he and I had developed a friendship, you know, in various classes that we had together and gone out for lunch a couple of times. And so I counted him as a friend. And when it came down to coming into the church, he was the first one I thought of. It's actually my senior, Michael Hintz, from the Diocese of Fort Wayne South Bend. Don't know if you've ever run into him. I don't think he'd mind mentioning what a wonderful role he had in my conversion. He was he who came to you in 45 minutes? Yeah, he was the kind of acting rector of the Co-Cathedral in South Bend at the time. And so I sent him this email.

He emailed me right back. I emailed him right back. And then like, bang, he was on our doorstep with a catechism in hand. He talked with my wife and I for about an hour and then said, I'm waving you guys from RCIA and I'm just going to schedule you for the next available time that the bishop will be in town to do your confirmation. And the next available time was not within the Jubilee year. It was February 24th, which was a weird thing, it was a Saturday vigil

before Ash Wednesday of 2001. That's as soon as we could do it. But you know, all the heavy lifting of my conversion took place during that year 2000. For you too, and on hindsight, as I was looking forward to this Jubilee year 2025, I thought, you know what, that's not a coincidence. That was at least partly due to the graces unleashed by John Paul II declaring that this is a holy year. Because when the Pope does that, I think a lot of people, when the Pope says this is going to be a holy year or a special observance or something like that, I think a lot of people, when the pope says, this is going to be a holy year or special observance or something like that, I think a lot of people react to it and think, well, that's kind of like Hallmark declaring that April 16th is

going to be sweetest day so that they have an excuse to sell a bunch of cards, you know? So this is an excuse to drum up some interest or some revenue for Rome. Totally, yeah. Yeah. But you know, that's not the case because in Matthew 16, 18 and 19, when our Lord, Jesus Christ, the God-man from Nazareth, when He says to Peter, you have the authority to bind and loose, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, whatever you loose on earth will be loose in heaven. What nobody knows is, if you do the study on this, that power to bind and loose in Judaism of the first

century, that was quite sweeping. And one of the things that came under its purview was establishing when the holy times were going to be observed, because that was a huge controversy among Jews. A big split between the Essenes and the Pharisees was when the holy days – it was the liturgical calendar calendar basically, when Passover should fall, when the other liturgical seasons. So the power to bind loose was the power to settle those arguments and establish the Holy Times and the Holy Seasons. So to cut to the chase, when the successor of Peter, who is heir to these powers given to him by the God-man Jesus Christ, when the successor

of Peter exercises that binding and loosing power and says, in this instance, for example, December 24th, 2024 to January 6th, 2026 is going to be a holy year, that makes it a holy year. Okay? Similar to, not exactly the same, but similar to when the priest says, this is my body, this is my blood, hawkas, corpus maum, it makes it so. It affects the transformation. And so that consecrates that time. And it's holy time whether you believe it or not, because neither you or I, at the beginning of 2000 put any stock in that kind of thing. I was like,

yeah, whatever, okay? But even though we didn't believe in it, we were being affected by the graces that were unleashed by the Holy Father declaring this holy season. And those graces were helping us to come into the church. And so, that's a big point I make in the book. One of the first points I make is that the Jubilee year is true. This is holy time every day of it. There are more graces available. The floodgates of heaven are open during this entire holy year. Whether you believe it or not, just like the Eucharist is really the presence of Jesus Christ, whether you believe it or not, but if you do believe it, then you can receive it and the subjective effects can be that much more. But you might still have subjective effects, even if you don't, just by the unleashing of God's grace

that comes from the Holy Father sanctifying. You know, and this is another thing that I think non-Catholics don't appreciate, and many of us as Catholics don't appreciate either, is the idea that time can be sanctified. I think we have an easier, we have an easier grasp on space being sanctified. Like a priest comes over, sprinkles holy water around the whole house, you know, because maybe you've had poltergeist phenomena or whatever going on, you know. So you call up a priest over to, you probably had the studio blessed. Yeah, yeah, so I think we get that

because it was what a Pilates studio before or something. Well, it was a yoga studio before. Yeah, so you don't know what was going on. So it's like, let's get the whole place consecrated, right? So I think we understand that much better, that space can be cleansed or can be purified or can be consecrated and so on. And I think even as Protestants, we got that.

As an elder in my Protestant church, we would go and we would bless people's houses and things like that. But the idea that you can consecrate time is a bit harder. We didn't do it in Protestantism, but it's very biblical. I mean, the first chapter of the, well, Genesis 2, God hallows the Sabbath day. He makes it holy. That's the consecration of time, you know? And then the Mosaic covenant consecrated certain periods, you know? And the early church did. And I remember being struck in my doctoral program at how seriously, you know, there was that cordo deciman controversy in the early church.

What was that? That was, when should we observe the Easter, you know? And those were some like, we should strictly do it on the 14th day of the third month, I think following the Jewish calendar. And then others were like, no, it should be certain thing after the new moon. And so this is a big fracas. And it's been years since I looked exactly at how they were arguing. But I remember when I was in seminary, in the Protestant seminary, reading about this and thinking to myself, well, this is crazy. They're all supposed to be Calvinists back then because everybody knows the early church was Calvinist, and Calvinists would never argue about the liturgical calendar. Like, it's just not a big deal, you know?

It's all symbolic, it's all metaphorical that you don't really have holy days in the New Covenant, and so on. So I was like, why are they arguing about this? But it was very seriously between, I think it was the bishops and Asia Minor against the pope, and they worked it out. But the reason why it was taken so seriously in the early church was they really believed in the consecration of time. So, and I think we, I'm starting to get that, you know, I'm starting to get that. I'm starting to get it as, now having been Catholic for 24 years, I'm starting to get past my inhibitions about indulgences and I'm starting to understand better,

not like I resisted or denied it or something like that, but I'm just understanding better that there are holy days and holy seasons and so on, and we really need to lean into them. So I tell you, I am excited about this Jubilee year. We are only like about, I think it's day 74 today into the holy year, which has 379 days of this holy year. So, you know, for me, I'm trying to live every day

of the Jubilee year intensely. It's kind of like Groundhog Day. I don't know if you've ever seen that movie, you know, like every day is the same for Bill Murray. And after a while, he starts to get into like, oh, I want to live each of these days really well, you know? And he grows. It's a beautiful movie.

I love that movie. There's a lot of Christian wisdom in that. But yeah, every day I wake up like, what day of the Jubilee year is this? I want to live this to well. I want to soak in the graces. I want to soak in the favor. Because it's, yeah, it's not just a Hallmark holiday. This is an outpouring of graces and transformation. Well, I want to talk more about that now. We've decided you used to be a Calvinist pastor, and so you understand a lot about how certain Protestants think.

And today we've decided to discuss seven things that Protestants get wrong about Christianity. We're going to go through them. But why don't we do this one first? Because I really would like to learn from you indulgences and pilgrimages and holy seasons, since it sounds like we're beginning to talk about this anyway. Right. Would that be okay if we get that one first? Yeah, absolutely. All right, so I know that an objection that people are going to have immediately, which they're going to pat themselves on the back for thinking so clever, is, well, if the pope can establish a holy season, and that holy season, let's say, unleashes certain graces of God or what have you,

such that people are more likely to convert or repent, then why not just declare everything a jubilee? Wouldn't that be the right thing to do? Yeah, in a sense, well, when you get into the theology of the jubilee, in a sense, the new Covenant is the New Jubilee and we're always in it. So, for example, certain rites of the Church, like the Chaldean Rite, they actually call their liturgy the perpetual Jubilee, and they break their liturgical calendar into seven seasons of seven weeks apiece, because the Jubilee was on a cycle of seven weeks of years. So every seven weeks of years you'd have a Jubilee, so they have that, because they get the point that – and we'll talk about this later, I think – when Jesus announces His ministry in Luke

4, there's all these Jubilee themes going on there when our Lord reads from Isaiah 61. So we are in a perpetual Jubilee, but as Pope Francis correctly says in his bowl of addiction, which is like the papal document that announced that 2025 was going to be a Jubilee year, he says, look, the Christian life, I forget exactly how he phrased it, but he says, it's necessary in the Christian life to have seasons of greater intensity. And I would say, you know, okay, how do you explain that? I would use an analogy. You can't have your foot on the gas pedal all the time. Well, to use an analogy, this would be like the high mass

and the low mass within the extraordinary form. You don't, someone might say this would be like the high mass and the low mass within the extraordinary form. Someone might say, well, if the high mass is objectively better in some sense, do it all the time. And I think the answer would be, well, you kind of can't because you're a human being who gets bored with things you shouldn't get bored with. Right. You'd burn out the engine, so to speak.

Yeah, yeah. You get a kind of a spiritual burnout. So there's a wisdom in the church. I mean, it's like, why don't we have Lent for the entire year? There's this tie of greater intensity, we get back in. But the church has a wisdom about how often these kinds of things should come around and how often we should be called to make a step forward. And so there's obviously things that come around annually,

like Lent, like Advent, like the Easter season, that give us opportunity to grow in a yearly cycle. And then there are super annual observations like the Jubilee year that come around only rarely, only a few times in a lifetime. That's why we've got to jump on it. Like when I heard that Pope Francis was announcing that 2025 is gonna be a Jubilee year, I'm sitting here doing the math in my head, and they usually come around every 25 years.

I'm like, 78 or 79? That's not guaranteed. Lots of people die before reaching 78. And especially with my family's track history of various illnesses and cancer and stuff like that, I might not make the next one. This might be my last Jubilee. And so I was sitting in Steubenville, Matt,

and the Pope announces this, and I'm like, okay, I did my dissertation on the Jubilee year. I wrote like a 250-page technical study of like every aspect of the Jubilee year and how it's been interpreted in the early page, a stage of the church's history, and in the Dead Sea Scrolls, I came into the church in a Jubilee year, You know, other, you know, I could mention other providential things that happened in my life that were all focused around the jubilee. And now this might be the last jubilee when I'm going to be alive, and I may be one of two Catholics in the world that did their dissertation on this, so maybe it's time to say something about it.

Now I don't wanna, you know, my dissertation, which is published, it's like one of the most boring books I've not recommended to anybody. Okay, it's really, it's not even Edify. You should read it for hello as a sleep story. Yeah, people would be confused and probably, I don't know, is there opposite of Edify, was it disedify? Depress. Yeah, by reading that. and probably, I don't know, is there opposite of edify, was it disedify? It's depressed.

Yeah, by reading that. But I wanted to pull the useful stuff, which is only maybe 3% of what I did in my dissertation. The 3% that was useful and edify, I wanna pull that and put that into a popular book and try to get people excited about this because I think it's a wonderful thing. And I think I see beautiful things happening in the church already, and we're only a few months

into this year. What do you see happening? Oh, I see conversions. I see an upswing in what we were talking about, the St. Paul Center, in the response to the scriptural stuff that we're getting out. Two days ago, I saw a news report, a Protestant in a major publication, published an essay complaining about all of the conversions to Catholicism that are taking place and saying that they've got to do something because they're losing too many intellectuals

and too many Protestant leaders to the Catholic Church. A few days ago I heard that the drop in the Christian population in the United States has halted, and for the first time in 30 or 40 years the percentage of Christians did not decline year over year from 2024 to 2025. And you, and stuff like that. And many other things that I could mention, but probably shouldn't mention on a podcast. Why not? But just get us into territory that we don't want to go to. But I just see the wind of the Holy Spirit seems to be at our back, and I'm very grateful to Pope Francis

for declaring it. And I just, I feel a sense of excitement. I feel like, yeah, you know, the wind is at our back, we're having gains, and this is not the time to rest on our laurels. This is the time to put the foot on the accelerator and live the rest of this year well and see what kind of and live the rest of this year well and see what kind of repercussions it has, because the church is the soul of the world. So when there's revival in the church, it has a ripple, domino, whatever kind of language you want to use throughout all of world culture, and we're getting an increasingly global culture, you know? And in an increasingly global culture, you know? And that's, you know, in an increasingly global culture, the strength of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church really comes to the fore, because it truly is a global church, you know, that has a place on the global stage.

It makes sense to be a Catholic in an international setting. This is another thing that got me out of my Protestantism. I don't know if we'll get into talking about this later, but my Dutch Calvinist tradition that I came out of, one of my problems I had with it was as I matured and understood Dutch Calvinism more and more, I'm like, well, it's just one of many, many Protestant approaches to Christianity. And so why would I ever say that everybody has to be a Dutch Calvinist? It doesn't have a kind of a universal normative claim on everyone. Right. Like it would be unusual if you were a Protestant missionary in the Congo inviting

people to become a Southern Baptist. Precisely. Precisely. And I was in an urban neighborhood that was largely ethnically not my ethnic background, and most of my parishioners were from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. I've been talking a lot lately about my friends at the College of St. Joseph the Worker, you know, Jacob Imam, Mike Sullivan, Andrew Jones and company, the guys who started the college that combines the Catholic intellectual tradition with skilled trades training. Well, listen to this. They're growing their program

and are looking to connect with experienced Catholic tradesmen to hire as instructors. So if you are an experienced carpenter, plumber, HVAC technician or electrician, and wanna help mentor and teach future Catholic tradesmen, go right now to collegeofsaintjoseph.com slash careers to connect with the college and see how you can become part of something truly special. And if you're watching or listening and know a tradesman who needs to hear this message, please invite them to reach out to the college. Again, that's

collegeofstjoseph.com slash careers, collegeofsaintjoseph.com slash careers. Thanks. careers, collegeofsaintjoseph.com slash careers. Thanks. And here I was asking them, or sometimes even requiring them, you know, to sign confessional statements and so on to be a member of my church that were specifically Dutch Calvinists. I'm like, why am I making Dutch Calvinists out of, you know, people from, you know, African American Baptist tradition or from, you know, Hispanic Charismatic tradition or so on. Did you try to downplay the word Dutch as you invited them into it?

Yeah, absolutely. We definitely downplayed Dutch, but you can't get away from Calvinism and you can't get away from the fact that it was a kind of ethnic reception of Calvinism. And I was like, what about my tradition would make it normative for everybody? And the answer to that is nothing. It's really not normative for everyone. And so it doesn't

really make sense in kind of an ecumenical, diverse, pluralistic situation. And I started looking for a tradition that would have a normative claim on all Christians. And I remember having a course in what was called post-Reformation orthodoxy, kind of like in the wake of the Reformation, like the second generation after Calvin and after Luther, you kind of get an entrenchment in Lutheranism and Calvinism where they kind of synthesize and systematize the thought of the luminaries that started the movement. So in the generations after Calvinism, you get a systematization of Calvinism and kind of like an establishment of parameters

in the boundaries of Calvinist orthodoxy and so on. I remember taking a course in that with a wonderful professor at my seminary, and somehow in the course, the topic of Eastern Orthodoxy came up, you know, like Greek Orthodoxy and its companions. And I remember coming out to the professor after class one day and say, we call them Orthodox, but are they really Orthodox? And he said, what do you mean? And I'm like, well, you know, we talk about Reformed Orthodoxy, you know, and these different things

that we should hold to as Reformed believers. And, you know, does Eastern Orthodoxy affirm these things that we consider to be, you know, guidelines of Calvinist or Reformed Orthodoxy? It's like, well, no, they're Orthodox according to the Orthodox tradition, according to their own parameters. And I was like, well, then what are we? And it's like, well, we're Orthodox Reformed,

we're Orthodox according to our tradition. Like, okay, so basically that's relativism, okay? That's relativism, Patrick. You know, that's, and so my professor, who I admired so much, was basically saying kind of different strokes for different folks. Was he saying that, or was he just saying, you know, they have orthodoxy according to their parameters

which are incorrect? No, well, okay, maybe he was saying that, but I don't think so. I think he was saying, everybody is Orthodox according to their own set of criteria. That's certainly how it came out to me. And that's not, that's not what I was looking for. I was looking for him to affirm that there are universal standards of orthodoxy that all Christians should follow. Because certainly the Eastern Orthodox would think that what you just said you were looking for, they would claim to have and teach.

They would, but the professor that I was dealing with was just like, well, we got our parameters, our standards, they have their standards and they're orthodox according to their standards and we all have these different standards. And the implication was, and it was very clear to me because I wasn't looking for him to say this, okay, the implication was, you know, there's not a universal standard that all Christians should adhere to. What I found, to my surprise, when I met, as you did, really impressive Catholics who knew their faith and were living their faith and could defend their faith, when I met those Catholics, I discovered a tradition that had a claim on everybody because it was a tradition that went back to the apostles

and to Peter and ultimately, obviously, to the Lord Himself. In that, I found a tradition big enough and a church big enough to accommodate everybody. I'm like, yeah, this is a kind of Christianity that makes sense in an international and'm like, yeah, this is a kind of Christianity that makes sense in an international and pluralistic environment. And this is a kind of Christianity where I could say, yeah, it lays claim on everyone. There is a reason why everybody should be Catholic. You know, it kind of reminds me of, you wouldn't remember this because you grew up down under, but when I was a kid, the Orange Growers of America had this ad campaign, orange juice, it's not just for breakfast anymore. Some of our listeners are going to be old enough

to remember that, because it was all everywhere on TV. Orange juice is not just for breakfast anymore, but that's true of the Catholic Church. Catholicism, it's not just for Catholics anymore. And this is what the guy was complaining about in that Protestant publication that I came across about two days ago. It's like all these Protestants discovering that Catholicism is not just for Catholics. It really is, it's a matter. And when we're going to talk about, and we're going to get into other differences between Catholics and Protestants here, but one thing I want to emphasize when we get into talking about Mary and the Eucharist and the scriptures and so on, is that the questions that we're raising are questions that every Christian has to deal with.

It's not like, oh, you only have to think about this if you were raised Catholic. It's like, no, if you're baptized and you want to follow the God man, the Lord Jesus Christ from Nazareth, then you gotta think about what books are canonical. You have to engage what is the role of the mother of the God-man in the church and in spirituality. You have to wrestle with the question, what is the nature of the Eucharist, this thing that Jesus himself, the God-man, calls the New Covenant. You have to engage with that. So it's not like, oh, again, if you're into Catholic stuff, or if you're into dialogue between Protestants and Catholics, then you can think about that.

If you're into that kind of thing, no, all the stuff that we're going to talk about in this conversation is stuff that every follower of Jesus Christ who wants to be sincere and wants to be intellectually honest has to wrestle with. Thank you. That's excellent. Okay, to this point, we talked about how Protestants misunderstand indulgences. We have a lot of Protestant viewers, like a surprising amount of Protestant viewers. Many of them are looking for a reason to become Catholic. They just have some intellectual hurdles they hope to overcome.

I think one of them is indulgences. How would you explain indulgences to a Protestant who's extremely wary of them? Right, yes. I mean, the first thing I would say is, Protestants understandably, I get this, I was there, I worry about anything that's not explicit in Scripture. But what I would say is the distinctions on which indulgences are based are actually present

in Scripture. Okay, so, you know, for us as Catholics, you know, we know that, and it's not just for us as Catholics, like, let me get back to what I said, this is just Christian truth. When we sin, it has a double effect. Sin incurs guilt, which is moral culpability, that is an impediment in our relationship with God, but it also creates damage, okay?

Sometimes the sin of our damage is even in the material order, and it's appropriate and even necessary to make reparation of some kind, like pay for whatever it was. You got drunk, you crashed your car into somebody's house, you got to pay. You need to morally make that right. But it's not just the material order that's affected by our sins, but it's also the moral order, something that we can't directly see, but is nonetheless more real than what we can see. So sin creates guilt and it also creates what the church traditionally calls temporal punishment, which is this damage to the moral order.

I wanna stay on that topic just for a moment, because I wanna make sure we are following the argument and that we're in agreement with you. Because I think that's right. I would imagine that all sincere Christians would admit, okay, if I got drunk and I crashed my car into somebody else's car, and then I wake up and I repent of that, and I believe that I've been forgiven, I think most serious Christians would say, obviously, I want to do what I can to make reparations.

Right. But in the moral order, can you help convince me why that's the case? I would imagine a Protestant saying something like, yeah, Christ has paid the debt for my sins and any damage that I have committed to myself in the spiritual realm has been made up for by my repentance and His forgiveness. Yes, yeah, no, I understand that. But in actuality, our sins do damage to our soul. And that's the primary place where the temporal effects of our sins is felt.

It's actually that it disorders your soul and that needs to be healed. So addiction might be a good example of that, right? A Protestant would understand this. If I watch pornography several hours a day for several years and I repent of it and I good example of that, right? A Protestant would understand this. If I watch pornography several hours a day for several years and I repent of it and I'm forgiven of it, it's not as if, oh, now I have no inclination to commit this act

of sexual, personal abuse. What's the word? Not masturbation, I like the old word for it. Fornication? Abuse. Abuse, self abuse. I think old word for it. Fornication? Abuse. Abuse, self abuse. Self abuse, I think we should use the word. More delicate.

I like the, well, it's more delicate, but it also shows the disgust we ought to have for such an act. Right, right, yeah. All right, so I think that could be an example, how we see that we disrupt ourselves spiritually, morally. Okay. Yeah, and I think it goes,

I think that's the primary damage is to our own soul, but I do think it affects others as well, okay? Because we're living in the communion of saints, you know? What would be an argument for that? How would you share that? Well, you know, I think that my progress in virtue, my growth in virtue, and my growing close to the Lord has kind of a positive spiritual impact on my children and on my wife. That's not just material or...

Example, my behavior. Example behavior is a big part, and I'm not denying that, but I think it's more than that. It's not just kind of physicalist and material and reductionistic. I really think it's in the moral order. And likewise, when we capitulate to sin and so on, I think at the very least it doesn't help our brothers and sisters in the faith, and maybe in a sense it could even weaken. And folks may have different views on that, but I think there is an objective, existent, spiritual and moral order, and when we sin, it does damage.

That needs to be healed. It needs to be corrected. It needs to be healed, it needs to be corrected, it needs to be fixed. And it's primarily in our own soul. But then, like I say, I think, you know, and you can get a sacramentologist in here, indulgences are intended to correct that disorder that's introduced into the moral order by our sins and into our souls. And you see this already in the Old Covenant because because interestingly, I always wondered about this, in Leviticus 4-6, there's actually two kinds of sacrifices established if you sin.

One is unhelpfully called the sin offering, and the other is unhelpfully called the guilt offering. And I say unhelpfully because actually the sin offering seems to be intended for guilt, and the so-called guilt offering really seems to be intended for reparation. And to me, to me it's fascinating because when you sin, you know, you had to offer the sin offering, but then you also had to offer the guilt offering. And the guilt offering was an offering to God that accompanied reparations that she might do in the material order. So if you had stolen or done some other kind of thing that damaged your neighbor, you had

to do that, you had to repair that in the material order, make a kind of material reparation, but then you also had to offer the sacrifice. And that's what suggests to me that, you know, the pedagogy of this was to teach the Israelites that you don't—it's not just a material damage that you've done, that there's a kind of spiritual damage that needs to be healed, that needs to be fixed, you know, however you want to describe it. So already in the Old Covenant, you see these sacrifices that express this distinction between the double effect of sin, the guilt and the temporal punishment that results from our sin. And so there's, as I say, there's a biblical basis for this distinction. So could we quickly, if you think it necessary, define what an indulgence is? It just occurred to me we haven't even said what we mean. Yeah, and this is a big, this is a huge area of

misunderstanding because the word indulgence in English has completely changed its meaning such that when people hear, you know, oh, the church offers indulgences, the first thing that comes to mind, and this is what I grew up believing, was that an indulgence was the church giving you permission to indulge, right? To indulge in beer or indulge in something else, you know, indulge in some kind of sin or some kind of, you know, disordered passion, and that the whole point was that you paid a sum, you know, you give Father 300 bucks and then you get an indulgence to go, you know, have a bender or something like this, and that's somehow okay. And that's, of course, completely, just a complete misunderstanding, and it comes because

the word has changed its meaning. If you go back and do the history of this, the term indulgencia in Latin meant an act of mercy or an act of clemency, okay? So I'm not even sure, you know, do we have a word for an act of clemency or an act of mercy? I don't know, we don't quite have something that I can think of immediately in English for that, but that's what it was, an indulgence. It was an act of clemency. Like if you did something terrible and the king just forgave you and said,

it's okay and I'll take you back into my employ and I'll allow you to keep your position, even though you ran away scared in battle or something like that, that was an indulgencia. That was an act of clemency towards you. So that has, the very term has completely changed its meaning into something else in English, which is very misleading.

But the idea, what is an indulgence? An indulgence is a dispensation of mercy or kind of like a gift of mercy from what's called the church's treasury of merits. It's kind of, you know, we have this idea of the communion of the saints, that we commune in spiritual goods. So if we use an analogy of like a treasury or like a storehouse, then you can think of all of the merits of the saints, the merits of our Lord, the merits of our Lady, all these things that have value. Remember how Jesus says, store up treasure in heaven. Well, what does that mean? Well, that spiritual good,

that spiritual merit that has been gained by our Lord and all His saints, by the whole Christ, Christ and His members, okay? Mm, because I was about to push back on that and say, surely whatever Christ merited was infinite, so why do we even need to talk about the merits of Mary or St. Jerome or whoever? Because they're all part of Him, you know? Remember what our Lord says to St. Paul, you know? Why are you persecuting me? He doesn't say, why are you persecuting my members? So that's the concept of the whole Christ in theology, Christ and His members. We're all joined to Him.

We become His extensions. Even in Protestantism, they'll say, your neighbor knows Jesus except you. You are the face of Jesus to your neighbor, right? So, you've got to do evangelism and you've got to set a good example, etc. You are a Christian and you know another Christ. Saint Josemaria says, we are alter Christus ipsa Christus. Very dramatic statement. That means we are other Christs, we are Christ Himself. Wow. But it's true, because in the Eucharist, we take His body into ourselves, and He incorporates us into Himself. And like, wow, that's huge, but I want to stay on task here.

So that Jesus says, store up treasure in heaven. So what is that treasure that's in heaven? It's the merits and the spiritual goods of the whole Christ. And the church who is Mrs. Jesus, the church who is the spouse of Christ, just like all of my money is at the disposal of my wife, Dawn Bergsba, and she has full authority to go and write a check out of the bank account and draw on all my resources. So the church as the spouse of Christ has the power to write a check on the treasury of merits and give it to her children to help them to be healed of the disorder that they've introduced into their own souls and into the, I would say, the broader moral order by their sins.

And so that's what an indulgence is. It's an act of mercy that helps to heal our souls. Okay, good, good. Yeah. Now, I think though when modern Protestants hear indulgence or think of it, I don't know if they would think what you thought as a Protestant. I think what they would think is,

this is the church unnecessarily making herself the middle man. And then it also plays into Catholics have to work for mercy. Whereas like all of this is unnecessary. If the death and resurrection of Christ is sufficient, then I don't need a middle man to decide whether or not to dispense mercy. I can go directly to him and he's powerful enough to do what he said he would do.

Right. And yet in the scriptures, in the very word of God, God insists on using middlemen. He tells Peter, whatever you bind, on earth will be bound in heaven, whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. When we go through the book of Acts, we see all these healings that are done by the laying on of hands of the apostles. We see the Holy Spirit given by the laying on hands. And you could say, well, God could just heal all those people directly. He didn't need to send Peter.

He didn't need to cure people by Peter's shadow. He didn't need to cure people by the handkerchiefs of Paul. He didn't need to dispense the Holy Spirit by the laying on of hands of the apostles. God could have just done zap, zap, zap, you know, and done all that directly. And yet He doesn't. And yet he uses the medium of the church. He uses the body of Christ. And one of the major points of the Book of Acts is that the very acts of power that emanated

from the physical body of Jesus during His ministry continue to emanate from the mystical body of Christ as we see the church grow in the book of Acts. So the very same kinds of miracles, Jesus goes up into an upper room and takes the little girl's hand and says, Talitha cum, you know, and little girl arise and he raises the little girl from the dead. And St. Peter in Acts chapter 9 does the same thing with the woman named Tabitha. I've always been struck, like, Talitha, Tabitha, and like, is there some connection there? I don't know, probably not. But the point is Tabitha, this woman who's died, and he goes up, and he takes her hand,

he lifts her. same kind of miracle. Likewise, with Aeneas in that very chapter, St. Peter, you know, Aeneas is bedridden in Acts 9, and Peter tells him to get up and take up his pallet and walk, and like, well, deja vu all over again, right? We saw that in the Gospels with our Lord. And so what's the point? The point is that from Peter, and not especially from Peter, but the other apostles as well, who are the body of Christ, as we see in Paul's great conversion episode,

where he's told that he's persecuting Jesus directly. So from the body of Christ, which is the apostles, these great acts of power are the body of Christ, which is the Apostles, these great acts of power are being unleashed, and this is the way God has chosen to work. And that's the mystery of God's will. Yes, God could do everything immediately, that is to say, without a mediator, and sometimes He does. And I believe I've seen some immediate acts of God where God just went and did stuff. But His usual means is to work through His church and to work through His saints and work through the members of His body. And I would say He does that in order to incorporate us into His divine work, because as a loving

Father, love is diffusive of itself, love wants to share itself, wants to invite us and to participate into the divine nature. And since the divine nature is merciful and life-giving and charitable, you know, he incorporates us into it, allows us to be the ministers of that divine charity so that we can participate in the divine life. And this is what it is like to share life with others. So those in holy orders get a real privilege to be dispensers of divine life and to enter deeply into the mystery of God's own life in that way. But we participate, the rest of us participate in it as well, according to our baptism and confirmation, etc.

So anyway, did that... Yeah, it's beautiful what you said, and I love what you had to say there about the mediation. It's like, well, that's terrific that you think it could be this way. The question isn't, couldn't God have done it this way? The question is, how has God done it? And there's an episode from the Old Testament that has been such kind of like a guiding star for me in my spiritual journey from childhood even to the present day. I think about it a lot. And it's a story about the healing of Naaman the Syrian. I'm sure you remember the story. So Naaman has leprosy, he's this famous general.

I'm sure you remember the story. So Nehman has leprosy, he's this famous general. He goes to the prophet, you know, this little servant girl says there's a prophet in Israel. And so he travels to Israel to be healed. And he expects that the prophet's gonna come to the door and, I don't know, wave over the spot and do some hocus pocus and call down fire from heaven. Doesn't do any of that, but tells him to go down

and wash seven times in the Jordan River. And he's offended by how simple and how humble that is. Yes. And he's like, the Jordan is just like a muddy creek. And if you've ever been to the Jordan, like you're like, yeah, you know, there are some very unimpressive places along the Jordan River where you're like,

oh, this is like the Buck Creek nature preserve back in Western Michigan. You know, it's like not very... But anyway, so Naaman says, I don't want to bathe in that muddy creek. There's better rivers back in Damascus that I can bathe in. But his servants come to him and say, Father, in this term of affection and respect that they have for him, you know, if the prophet had said, do some great thing, would you not have done it? So how much more when he just says to do this simple thing? So Naaman humbles himself, goes down, washes seven times in that muddy

creek of the Jordan, and when he comes out, his flesh is healed. Maybe one of the reasons why he was given that to do was because he needed humility in order to be healed. I mean, we could think about that, part of that. But when the church gives very simple things, like, you know, I didn't even realize this until I was working on the book, but the church attaches a plenary indulgence to praying the rosary together with at least one other person out loud. Okay, and I didn't even realize that. It's one of the easiest ways this, you know, Father Rippergerd points this out. It's one of the easiest ways to

gain a pleaded indulgence. And that's such a simple act. And the first act is like, how can just this act of this Marian prayer and the rosary is beautiful. Don't get me wrong, not say anything like that. But it's simple, it's something a child can do. It's like, how can a half hour praying the rosary with my son or something, how can that affect my soul? But that's a name and like attitude. It's like, you know, and there's a little bit of a plagianism in it as well,

which is like, I've got to do something to be saved. So I think our human nature says, no, I need to save myself, I need to do something to be saved. So I think our human nature says, no, I need to save myself. I need to do something big. Run a marathon, read the Bible in a day. That's right. So plenary indulgence, you gotta run 26 miles. You gotta fast for a week on water, something like that.

That would appeal to my Dutch, Northern European, my Dutch, Northern European, kind of residual, plagiarism, kind of, it's like we've got to save ourselves somehow. But the church says, no, this simple thing. And part of it is just the humility to do the simple thing that the church asks and to accept the spiritual help that comes through it. And of course, there are the usual conditions, which are attending mass and receiving communion, sacramental confession, and then the toughie is always being detached from all sin.

That is a toughie. I was gonna ask you that, right? Because here's how I came to really at least intellectually accept indulgences back in the day. I went, okay, I do believe that the church has been given the power, you know, through Christ to forgive sin. Okay, so if the church can do that, then surely the church can forgive or remedy through Christ the effects of sin.

Right. That might be a way to put it. Which is a lesser thing. Yeah, it's a wonderful argument. Yeah. Okay. So, but then it's like, okay, but I know what the conditions are for the forgiveness of serious sin.

You know, I don't have to have perfect contrition. If I go to confession, I could just be sort of afraid of being damned or something like that. And that's sufficient, so long as I choose to not sin again and to avoid the near occasion of sin. Okay. But when it comes to indulgences, you do have this murky be detached from sin thing. And I don't know if anyone can ever know that they've achieved that. If you're anything like me, you're like, I don't know if that it's possible. If you've achieved that, right. And I think it's also dependent on temperament and maturity. People might have different opinions of their own state.

You know what? So what's the point of indulgence is if I can't know I've received it anyway? Well, because that's only required for a plenary. So if there's imperfection in your detachment from sin, it's still a partial indulgence. Can you ever be certain subjectively that you're detached from all sin? Have you ever experienced that? And what is that like?

Oh, is it possible? Absolutely. I mean, God can give that to you as a particular grace. I agree with you that it's possible, but have you ever yourself been confident that you've had that disposition? Because that's my thought. I don't think you can know that. No, I wouldn't. It's not a question that I ask myself, because I don't want to get complicated. And I battled through a similar thing as a Protestant, which was assurance over salvation. Like a lot of Protestant traditions put a big premium on, do you know that you know that you know that you know that you're saved?" And I was trained to evangelize by challenging people, you know, if you die tonight, do you

know that you're going to heaven? And I understand that, and it can sound very pious to say, I know that I know that I know. I understand why that appeals to people. But the fact of the matter is, we can be self-deceived, you know, and that kind of, you know, absolute certainty of our salvation is not something that's normally given to us in the Christian life. We do have to live in the tension of, like St. Paul describes in the book of Philippians, where St. Paul himself, of like St. Paul describes in the book of Philippians, where St. Paul himself, you know,

the supposed author of all things Lutheran and Calvinist, you know, because Luther and Calvin thought they were getting everything that they believed out of St. Paul. But St. Paul himself says, I don't consider myself to have achieved it, but putting behind me what is behind, I strive forward to what is to be gained.

And Paul, in that passage, which is going to come up in the readings in Lent in a couple of weeks, we're going to have that, you know, I think it's on Laetare Sunday, actually, that attitude of putting the sins behind and striving towards the holiness that Christ has for us, and living in that tension and always having the sense that I need to grow, I need to continue progress. If I sit on my laurels, I could be lost, okay? That's an attitude that St. Paul himself fostered. And that's the healthy attitude. It's not a healthy...

It's not like I'm living in fear, like, oh, I sit at home at night scared that I'm going to go to hell. I said, no, I don't live in fear because I'm a child of God. I'm baptized, I'm a loving father, and the Father wants me to be saved more than I want it myself. So I have this confidence, but I know that I got to live in the tension of a continued striving in the path of discipleship.

Yeah, it sounds like the difference between naval gazing and a gaze upon the Savior. Right, right. So I think maybe what you were beginning to say, and correct me if I'm wrong, is the reason you don't kind of obsess about this detachment from sin for plenary indulgence is, well, even that itself seems disordered.

It's not about looking at yourself at all because you're dust. It's about looking upon the Savior as a child, trusting Him. You have to be childlike. So I'm trying to gain a plenary indulgence every day during the Jubilee year. It's a personal spiritual discipline. I'm trying to do this. And I don't worry about introspection about whether I'm totally detached from sin. I do what the church lays out in a spirit of childlikeness.

If it's a plenary, it's not. Even if it's not, even if I still have attachment, then it's at least a partial, and that's gonna be in God's hands, even if I still have attachment, then it's at least a partial, and that's going to be in God's hands, decide how much, you know? So what happens? And I don't even, and then I give it to my guardian angel, and my personal practice is I do the things to gain the indulgence, and then I pray, and I give it to the hands of

my guardian angel, and I say, guardian angel, you know whether I need this for myself or whether it's better for some soul in purgatory and I give it to my guardian angel to apply as he sees fit. Yeah. All right. That was a lot and it was excellently stated. Could we just say it one more time in as few words as possible for the Protestant

who I wanna like bring up to the table here and be like, all right, so I know you wanna be Catholic. He's about to tell you what an indulgence is and why you shouldn't be frightened about it. Go, say it quickly. Okay. An indulgence is an act of mercy that the church gives to her children under certain conditions to help heal their soul from the effects of sin in their life. That's beautiful. How did the church or people in the church abuse indulgences? And what did Luther and others rightly criticize?

Yeah. Well, okay. Luther was triggered by- Sounds like a biased language. Yeah, by Johann Tetzel. Luther. Yeah. Right. It was triggered by kind of the abuse of the sale of indulgences by Johann Tetzel and probably others as well, who were traveling through Northern Germany, selling indulgences that were being granted by the Pope.

And for the work to which the indulgence was attached was to donate to the building of St. Peter's Basilica. And the idea behind, you know, the idea behind the indulgence is the believer performs such a virtuous act, or the church invites her children to perform a holy act, an act of mercy, an act of charity, which will be good for others

and good for them, good for the person doing it. And then the church grants this indulgence, which is kind of a, you know, to use an image and an opening up of the heavenly treasury of assistance so that the believer has the help of the church, the help of the community, the saints, to be healed and to rectify the damage that sin has done in their own life. So one of those self-sacrificial works could be a sacrificial donation of money. And I think that we all know that the giving of money can be sacrificial. Anybody who's tried to raise money becomes well aware. This new studio. That's right. St. Paul's Center's building. That's right. And when you try to get other people to give you money to do something worthy, you find out how much resistance

there is in human nature to parting with money. So a sacrificial gift of money can be a very charitable, very admirable thing. It can also be abused, which is what we know just from watching the televangelists on YouTube. Absolutely. Right. So that was the ideal. That was the original intention. But on the other hand, there can be gifts of money that are really not self-sacrificial, and that can be calculating. And so this is what Luther was objecting to, that the church was selling these indulgences, these acts of mercy from the church, and it was trivializing the path of Christian discipleship by fostering a point of view that, hey, you know, I can sin and then I can be forgiven, and then all the results of my sin

can just be wiped away if I give some money to the church. And for the wealthy, it really wasn't a sacrifice. And so, you know, Luther objected to that. And yeah, so the practice of indulgences can be abused. As many things can be abused, the practice of sacraments can be abused and so on. And so that's what Luther is objecting to. Right. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. The abuse doesn't negate the use, however. Yeah. Yeah. Let's say that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So you think more on indulgences or?

No. No, I think that's helpful. Yeah. For over 20 years as a Catholic, I've really kept indulgences in my arms, like, because that's kind of like the most triggering thing for a lot of Protestants, because that was the thing that sparked the Reformation. And so I entered the church pulled in by the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. I'm like, I know that's true. That's right. That's testified in scriptures, that's testified in the early fathers, that's gotta be true. If you're gonna deny that, you might as well throw out all of Christianity,

because then you'd have to say that all the fathers are wrong, and the scriptures are wrong, and so on. So I got pulled in by that. I was like, oh, boy, this is really uncomfortable. But when I picked up the whole project of the Jubilee year and started to write on that, then I... You know what? I gotta confront this theology and practice of indulgence. So I gotta get past these inhibitions,

and I gotta do the name and thing. got to accept it with humility and just you know Trust that the church knows what she's doing And so that's what I'm trying to do During the whole year and I've seen fruit from it And I'm so grateful. Well, I think you're not going to understand indulgences unless you understand Catholic ecclesiology and how the Church views herself as the body of Christ and things like that. If you don't understand that at all, if you don't, you know. Right.

And you know, it's interesting on that point because some of my Protestant relatives have said to me, you know, what they find uncomfortable about the Catholic church is that the church does things that they would reserve to Jesus. And I think that's- That's the crux of it. That's the crux of it. And what they're objecting to is that the church acts like Mrs. Jesus. Okay? It would be like somebody, you know, my wife walks into the bank and cashes a check and says, like,

you can't do that! You're not John Bergsmah! You know, that's illegal! That's, you know, like, wait! If she's really Mrs. Bergsmah, she absolutely can. And if the church is really Mrs. Jesus, then she absolutely can write checks on Jesus' account. She can act in persona Christi. And that's kind of the scandal of it. It's the scandal of, Paul,

Paul, or Saul, Saul, you're persecuting me. Is that really true? Is the body of Christ so united to Christ that the body of Christ can act on behalf of Christ? And I think that the Gospels and Acts, and the Epistles affirm that and say, yes, the Church can act. The Church can... The representatives of the Church, the officers of the Church, can give the Spirit of God by the laying on of hands.

That's crazy, man! Simon Magus was like, hey, let me give you some money, I want that power too. You know? So that's really act on behalf of being the mediator of the very Spirit of God. So yeah, this is big stuff. So I think that... Yeah. And prostitutes are, you know, and I grew... Okay, so I grew up in a, obviously, in a prostitute domination, and we would never attribute that authority to our own group. We would never say, like, such and such a denomination, the such and such a church in North America, whatever. the such-and-such a church in North America, whatever, we would never say that our denomination could act in the person of Christ. Well, the reason we want to say that is because we can't trace our history back to the apostles, okay? But when you can, with clear conscience, trace your whole history back to the apostles and

back to Jesus, receive the Holy Spirit who sends you, forgive or forgive them, who sends you, retain or retained. When you have the confidence that you go back to that, then yeah, then you can attribute that kind of authority to the ecclesial body that you're in. It's really good. Yeah. Yeah. In other words, if you haven't yet accepted, or if you don't even

know what the church says about herself, don't even try to understand indulgences, almost. Or maybe if you do succeed in understanding indulgences, that will teach you about who the church is that might go that way as well. But I think that's really helpful. All right. Well, speaking of things Protestants misunderstand about Christianity, the Blessed Virgin Mary. All right, let me see if I can set this up, because I think Protestants get frustrated here. And many of them will say something like this, look, I love Mary, stop making it sound like

I disrespect Mary that I don't. No, she was a holy woman. She was the mother of Jesus. I have a lot of respect for her. I just think you Catholics make too much of her. I even hear Catholics say things like, she leads us to Jesus, but then you Catholics seem intent once we've found Jesus to point our attention back to Mary. You go into the average Catholic church and let's say you've got a statue of

Jesus on one side, this is actually William Lankregg's objection, I remember him saying this, a statue of the Blessed Mother on the other, you know, you'll see all these candles lit up to her, but maybe few to our Lord. How is the Protestant not to get the impression that we pay way more attention to her than Christ? So, you know, all about Mary, yeah, blessed among women, I'll say that because the Scripture does, but you Catholics take it way too far when it comes to Mary. Okay, I totally felt that myself. And that was my initial impression of Catholicism, it's like Catholics spend way too much time on Mary. But a lot of that was the fact that

I was only observing Catholicism from the outside and not the inside. And I was watching private devotions of Catholics, like group praying the rosary, stuff like that, the moms in the University Village where we lived, gathering for Wednesday rosary hour, something like that. I was only observing those things, and I wasn't going to mass. And I'll tell you honestly, Matt, one of the things that helped me get past this, when I saw what Catholics actually do for Christ in the Eucharist, I'm like, oh, they really are serious when they say, we don't do the same for the Blessed Mother, for Mary, okay? You don't genuflect to a statue of Mary, okay, but you genuflect to the Eucharist. When I saw Catholics prostrating themselves before to the Eucharist. When I saw Catholics prostrating themselves

before the exposed Eucharist, when I started attending Mass regularly and seeing how everything was focused on Christ's sacramental presence there and the glory of the Mass, and I had a sense of the glory of the Mass even when it was a low daily Mass, there was a solemnity about it that just was not present in the forms of worship that I had been raised with. And when I saw that the Eucharist was the source and the summit of Christian life and that the Mass was at the center of Christian life and the mass was at the center of Catholics' life, then the private devotions like lighting a candle after church to the Blessed Mother and the praying of Rosary, not to discount them, those are beautiful, but I realized that's not really central, that's not really central, okay? That's not really central. And when I got to know how Catholics lived and,

well, you know, you could be disordered, you know? If all you do is pray the rosary and you don't go to mass, it's a grave sin, you know? And there is the potential that one's spiritual life could be, you know, disordered with, you know, fully, you know, solely focused on devotion to a single saint without a proper relationship with Christ and the Holy Trinity and so on. So there's a valid point about having balance in one's spirituality. And there's even cases

of poor catechesis where in certain countries at certain times people may not be clear on what is the distinction between the Blessed Mother and a person of the Trinity. So wouldn't that be an indictment of the Church if these people don't understand it? Isn't it the Church's responsibility to teach it? It absolutely... That just proves the Protestant's point? Yeah, it is absolutely the church's responsibility to teach. So that is an abuse.

So in that situation, if you've got a situation where you've got tribespeople who are kind of syncretistic and aren't real clear on what's the difference between the blessed mother and the mother goddess, and all this kind of stuff, then that's a huge catechetical need. Yeah. And then there's a crying need, and if bishops and if priests don't recognize that, then that's a major problem. Yeah, I'd say to anyone watching right now who's Protestant,

one of the things that's lovely about Catholicism is we have a catechism. So if you wanna know what the Catholic Church officially teaches, not what some Catholic you met once had to say, or not what some Protestant apologist had to say about the church, you could right now go to another tab while you're watching this, type in catechism of the Catholic Church, Virgin Mary, and you can read what it is the church has to say about her.

Did you have the misconception or did you accuse Catholics of worshiping Mary when you were a Protestant? No, I had a good Catholic friend growing up in high school and I asked her questions about this. And he had a very pleasant way of describing how it was like in his spirituality. He would talk about when he would go into church, Central in the Catholic sanctuary on the military base, where he and I were both military brats, but Central was the crucifix in Christ right in the middle in the altar, and that was Christ right there

in the middle. But Christ can be intimidating because He is the God-man and He's the final judge and so on. And so, He would describe how you would see the image of the Blessed Mother on the one side and St. Joseph on the other side, and they reminded him of the human nature of Christ, and how St. Joseph and Mary were human beings just like me, and yet they were close to Christ, so Christ isn't scary, you know, so to speak. And it helped him to understand the humanity of Christ, and that he could approach the Lord of heaven and earth just as his parents did in Bethlehem. So I knew that Catholics worshipping Mary was a distortion of Catholic teaching. And by

worshipping, what do we mean? Attributing divinity to? Right, yeah. So that's a good question, because you will find, like in older English publications going back a couple of centuries, you'll find that sometimes they won't make a distinction between the worship that's due to God and the honor that's due to saints and other things that are worthy or meritorious. So we make this distinction in Latin, right? So we reserve the term adoration for God alone. This is the kind of worship that is due to God because He is the Creator. It's the adoration,

you know, you can use different synonyms, you can pile up the synonyms, but it's the acknowledgement of the Creator that is due to the Creator from the creature. And that's qualitatively different from the kind of honor that we pay to the saints. So to the saints, we honor them. In Latin, we reserve the term venerate for that. Veneration describes the kind of honor that we give to human beings that are noble, that are virtuous, that are examples of our faith, that we have love and affection for because they are an inspiration to us.

That's all veneration, but that's qualitatively different, again, from the worship that's due to God, for which we use the term adoration. Now again, you know, if you go back in English-speaking Catholicism, you can find Catholic texts from the 1800s to the 1700s that will sometimes use the term worship loosely to cover what we would say is veneration. Even in some Anglican wedding ceremonies, I believe the word worship is used towards the future spouse. Yeah, something like, with my body I thee worship, you know?

But think of British culture more generally where, you know, you'll say, is it time for tea, your worship? You know? I don't know what rank in the peerage gets the term worship, but, you know, your worship, you know? I don't know what rank in the peerage gets the term worship, but you know, your worship was a title, you know? Yeah, yeah. In that. And so, you've got to understand that against that background. And, you know, because I remember, you know, converting and having a non-Catholic friend of mine

send me some clip that she had found from some old English Catholic thing that said something about the worship of the saints or something like that. But they were, yeah, using the term loosely or according to its meaning at that time. So yeah, so we honor the saints, but we worship God, or we, again, to use the Latin, we venerate the saints, we adore the Lord. And I thought that that, you know, I was skeptical about whether Catholics were sincere about that initially.

But again, when I started, when friends invited me to Eucharistic adoration or to actually attend Mass, and I saw the kind of adoration that was given to Christ in the Mass in an adoration, in Eucharistic adoration, and I compared that to things like, you know, group rosary prayer, and like, yeah, they do make a distinction. Yeah, there are signs, gestures, and attitudes of the heart that they truly do reserve for the Blessed Trinity that's distinct from what they're doing to Mary, even though they do love Mary.

It's taken me about 22 years to appreciate Louis de Montfort's true devotion to Mary. And whenever we begin to talk about our Blessed Mother, I always cite this verse of his, but I think it's important. He says, I affirm with the entire church that next to God, Mary is less than nothing, you know, not even an atom next to He who is. And He never had, nor does He have now, any absolute need of her. And yet, things being the way they are. And I think that's really important because God chose to need Mary, just like God chose to save us by the cross. This is something that at least convinces me.

I shared it on my Substack recently, people got pretty upset. I was trying to help. I was trying to think, okay, what's the most offensive thing I could say about Mary to a Protestant? And here's what I think it is. I have been saved by the Virgin Mary. I think that's true.

Right. And here's why I think you should agree with me. If I said to a Protestant, thank God for the cross, I've been saved by the cross, you would understand what I meant. Right. You would understand that I meant that it was God's will from all eternity to save me by His death and resurrection, and that I wasn't attributing divinity to an inanimate object. Right. Okay.

So if I can say that poetically of the cross, but it have real meaning, I can say it all the more of a child of His who could have refused Him, yeah, who has a relationship with the Trinity unlike any other creature. I know you know all this, now I'm just preaching for those who are watching, I suppose, but daughter of God the Father, spouse of God the Holy Ghost, I mean, it was through Him that she conceived the second person of the blessed Trinity. If we can't call her a spouse in some sense, it seems to me reasonable to be able to do that. And the mother of the God man, St. Augustine's line comes to mind, he whom the heavens cannot contain, the womb of one woman bore. She ruled our ruler, she carried him in whom we are, she gave milk to our bread." So I think de Monfort's right,

if you want to understand the mother, begin by understanding the son. Because if the son was not even a prophet, then who cares about his mother? She lived so long ago. If the son was a prophet, okay, God bless his mother. There's certain kind of attention. But if he's the creator, you know, if it was through him that the world was created, then that's some, that's a truth that I do not know how to process. I could go into a cave and spend the rest of my life just, you know, just being awestruck at that idea. Who was this woman? So to sum up my rant here, it seems to me that sometimes it's as if the Protestants saying she's only the mother of God, and I want to say, whoa, just say back to me what you just said, but slower.

Yeah. You know, it's hard to grasp being the mother of God, and I think you're 100% correct. But sometimes, you know, that's too much. If we just start with her being the mother of the king, I think that's a little bit easier to grasp and to understand why she deserves honor. And as I was coming into the Catholic Church and kind of learning from my Catholic friends about how they viewed Mary, it suddenly occurred to me that all my Protestant life I had acknowledged that Jesus Christ was King of the cosmos, but I treated his mother as if she was a commoner. And that just doesn't work. Kingship works with royal families. The king can't be king and his mother just be a commoner.

The fact that he is king makes her the queen mother. It really elevates the whole family. And even if the Holy Family doesn't have a royal background, or the royal family doesn't have a background, you know how this goes in Britain. They give you a title, okay? Because you're part of the family now, so you sign one so that you're part of it. And maybe that's a particularly American thing, too, because we don't have a monarchy and we don't understand how royal families operate. But it's not possible for Jesus to be king of the universe and for his mother to be a commoner.

It's not possible for Jesus even to be the son of David and his mother to be a commoner. Because if you study the kingdom of David, you find out that the mother of the king ruled, okay, as the queen mother. Well, I got to, you know, not in competition with the king. I should, let me rephrase that, didn't rule as the king mother, but she reigned as the queen mother, and she had a particular role. And this is how I got past my Marian impediments and inhibitions. So I became Catholic because of the Real Presence, as I said to you, and the papacy and the Marian

doctrines, I kind of just put those to the side and said, you know what, I'm going to take them on faith, I'm going to trust that the Holy Mother Church knows what she's doing, and I'm going to just come into the church and ask the Lord to make sense out of that to me. And it wasn't until a few years after I'd come into the church, and I was at Franciscan University and I was teaching through the Old Testament, and I came to First Kings, and I was teaching an Old Testament course, so we had to go through First Kings. I got to First Kings chapter two, and that's where Adonijah, one of the princes, goes into

Bathsheba, who is the queen mother. She's the mother of Solomon, and he makes a request of her to go ask the king something on his behalf. And he says, go ask this for me from Solomon. He won't refuse you. And so she takes his request and she goes into the court of the king. So here comes Bathsheba. She's the mother of the king.

And when she enters Solomon's court, Solomon gets his big backside up out of his throne, gets on his knees and bows down to her. Now he's king of the known world, all right? He's got this Israelite empire thing going on. For how many people do you think Solomon got his big self off of his throne and got out on his knees and bowed? I would suggest you just for one person living

in the whole world, and that was for his mother. So he venerates her, and then he gets up, and most English translations disappoint, but it says he sat down on his throne, and then he had a throne brought for his mother. Most English translations say a seat, but I looked it up in the Hebrew. It's kisé. It's the Hebrew word for throne in both instances. So he sat down on his throne. If you're going to translate that as throne, then translate what he brings for his mother as throne as well. He has a throne brought, and he enthrones her at his right hand, which is kind of equivalent to crowning her, or we could say, marrying, coronation. And then he says to her, what would you like, mother? Whatever you ask, I will do for you.

And she says, I have this request. Please do not refuse me. And he says, make your request. I will not refuse you. So you see, and that was probably like a litany. That was probably like kind of a standard ritual that they went through when she would enter. They would go through this banter. That was kind of established, the things that they went through when she would enter. They would go through this

banter that was kind of established, the things that they would say, you know. And then you get down to the heart of it, and she would make the request. So you can see that court protocol was that the mother of the king got whatever she asked for when she entered the court of the king, that he himself venerated her, and he enthroned her at his right hand. And I read that, Matt, and I'm like, oh my goodness, this is all Marian typology. This is the role of the mother of the king in the kingdom of David.

And it's like one of those scenes from a movie, like I just watched Charade by Alfred Hitchcock with Cary Grant again, Like, you know, I just watched Charade by Alfred Hitchcock with Cary Grant again. And, you know, the premise of the whole movie is where is this treasure? Where is this treasure that they're looking for that's lost? And Cary Grant walks into this stamp selling bazaar in Paris and he looks at the stamps

and he suddenly realizes, oh, the treasure was in the stamps, you know? And then it flashes all these stamps. They're like, you know, like it's dawning on him, you know, all of this is falling into place. And so for me, you know, I read that like, oh my gosh, this is all falling into place. This is why Matthew and Luke begin with these royal genealogies all my life. I'd wondered about this, because my mother started me reading the Bible through in a year when I was 12 years old. And whenever I would read Matthew, whenever I would read Luke, you know, Matthew starts with this royal genealogy from David,

and all these royal things are said about Jesus in Matthew 1 and 2, the infancy narratives. Likewise with Luke, you know, Gabriel comes and tells the Blessed Mother that he's going to sit on the throne of David and rule over the house of Jacob forever. And I'm like, but he doesn't really do that, like, because the Jews are doing their thing to this day. He's not ruling over the Jews. So how was this ever fulfilled? I didn't realize I had like a dichotomy, like a big wedge. I would like drive a wedge between Luke 1 and 2 and Luke 3 through 24, you know, and Matthew 1 and 2 and Matthew 3 through 28. Just like I drive

a big wedge and all the royal Davidic stuff in those early chapters about Jesus' birth, I would separate from the fact that the other chapters begin with him proclaiming the kingdom of God is at hand. He's proclaiming the kingdom. Well, it's the kingdom of God, but it's also the kingdom of David, because he's the son of David. He's 100% the son of David, he's 100% the son of man, he's two natures in one person. And so, the kingdom that he brings, which is outwardly manifested in the church, the church militant is the outward manifestation of the kingdom of God, it is the Davidic kingdom. And so, if the church is the Kingdom of David, and how can we deny that? How can you deny that the church is the Davidic King,

especially when you understand in terms of church triumphant, church militant, so the whole church, okay? It's ruled over by the Son of David, so how can it not be the Kingdom of David? Well, it is. And so, if the Kingdom of David has a role for the Queen Mother, that she is, as we see in 1 Kings 2, she is honored, she's venerated, she's enthroned, we could say crowned, and she's given a role of intercession, where whatever she asks for is granted. Well, this makes perfect sense. So, if we think like Jews, if we think like Israelites, and we think in terms of continuity from the Old Covenant to the New, from the earthly kingdom of David to the transformed kingdom of David, I don't want to say it's not earthly, because you and I are earthly, we're part

of it, and we're right here. So, it's in the world, but not of the world. But if you see that organic development, that's like, oh, for the first time, like, the Marian doctrines made sense, grounded in salvation history, grounded in the development of covenants from the Abrahamic to the Mosaic, etc., ultimately to the Davidic covenant, which had a role for the mother of the king, and now Mary is permanently the mother of the king. And if Bathsheba had a role for intercession for the members of the kingdom,

how much more so would the perfect mother of God have this role of intercession in that royal sense? So, for me, understanding that the church really is the kingdom of David. And so what Gabriel said to the Blessed Mother is fulfilled. The true kingdom of David is being ruled over by Jesus at this very minute and will be until He returns. And He governs it through His representatives.

First of all, the man Francis, who's the successor of Peter the royal steward, and then through the others as well. It's like, yes, it comes full circle and it makes total sense. Thank you. Two things to point out. One is slightly before that episode where Solomon bows before Bathsheba or Bathsheba, you see while David is still alive, right, and is the husband of Bathsheba, that when she walks in, she's the one who prostrates. So the point I just wanted to make,

in case it was missed on anyone there, is that in the Davidic monarchy, the queen wasn't the wife of the king. I mean, Solomon had, what, 700 wives, 300 concubines? That's correct. Is that right? Imagine having 700 queens, right? Didn't happen. So the queen was always the mother, always. Right.

Am I wrong? No, you're not wrong. So then if Christ is the new David whose kingdom will have no end, then it follows biblically that his mother has this gebera role, this role of the queen mother, in some sense, right? Yes, absolutely.

And you can see that the role of the queen mother is an office because there's a famous episode in first Kings 15 where Asa, one of the few righteous Kings in the line of David, he deposes his mother, Maaka, from being queen mother. And I remember growing up, I'm like, how can you do that? You can't depose your mom.

She's always your mom. Like, what's going on here? But what it presumes is the role of the queen mother was an office that was held. And Asa deposes her because she commits idolatry. But it does point out that it's not simply a familial relationship or a personal charism, but it was a role that you could fill

and from which you could be, in this case removed. Now, blessed mother's sinless, so it's never an issue. But that's the story. And when you go through first kings and second kings, you'll notice again, and I always wonder about this when I was a kid, why it did this, but whenever it would mention a new king, it would mention who his mother was.

Like, why is that always? Like, why not mention the brothers, and other relationships, you know, and other relationships, but always, you know, Melee, King Anna's mother was who? That's because they were a ticket, you know, just like president, vice president. They went together. So if Solomon is gonna be King, that necessarily means that Bathsheba is gonna fulfill... She's gonna hold the office of the Queen Mother, just like you. Like Trump and Vance is automatically gonna be vice president.

They are a ticket. And you have competing tickets. And actually, First Kings begins with the ticket of Bathsheba and Solomon versus the ticket of Adonijah and Tygeet. So that was the rival and that has to be sorted out. And Adonijah actually in first Kings chapter two, Adonijah scheming, he's trying to manipulate Bathsheba,

but that's a whole different story. But yeah, so you see that. So you see that the mother of the king ruled, or I should say reign, because, you know, she doesn't compete with her son in terms of, you know, his directives and so on. But she had that role. And that role was primarily one of intercession, as we've seen. Isn't that great? Whatever you ask, I'll give you the perfect intercessor. So in the ancient kingdom of David, any subject of the kingdom who couldn't get justice through the usual routes, you know, your last court of appeal, your last resort was always to go to the

queen mother and let your issue be known. And she had the power to cut right through the red tape and go right to the king. Now, I like that and I don't like that, right? I get the analogy. I just don't think it should be pressed too far because someone might be given the impression that what we're saying is Christ's actually not omniscient and not omnipotent and doesn't have time to deal with your going to him directly. Yeah, yeah, that would be the case.

I mean- What would be the case? That it would give that wrong impression. Right, yeah, I could see that. Yeah, but I be the case. I mean- What would be the case? That it would give that wrong impression. Right, yeah, I could see that. Yeah, but I think this is true, like whenever we try to help people understand God, let's say, like we find ourselves, and indeed the Bible does give anthropomorphic language,

uses anthropomorphic language to help us sort of grasp this thing. And I think if that's true of God, then we shouldn't be surprised if we use it in our language of prayer. And I think that's maybe what we're doing, right? Yeah. But we wouldn't... No, I totally agree. But I think, you know, the question is, well, you know, God could do everything directly, you know, so why does he use the intercessions of the saints? And it gets back, it, similar to the question that we asked earlier

about mediation. Why doesn't God just zap, give us all the graces? Why do we have to come and receive the Eucharist? Why do we have to go to confession, for example? And I think the Lord does this in His wisdom to bind us all together. And it comes from seeing that God's will for us is not just that we enter into a personal relationship with Him, which is great, which is central. We don't want to say anything against that or degrade from that in any way, shape, or form. We do want to enter into that personal relationship with the Holy Trinity, who invites us into that participation in His divine life.

But God also wants us to come to know ourselves as the family of God and to enter into loving relationship with our brothers and sisters in Christ, with the whole family. So I know it's trite, but God does want to create one big happy family. And I know, you know, one holy Catholic and apostolic are the signs of the church, but I also think, you know, in all seriousness, one big happy family are theological terms for what the church is. And so there's a richness in learning to love God as He is in Himself, but also to love God in the angels and in the saints, as some of our prayers say. And that there's, you know, as St. Augustine says, you know, our goal, our ultimate end is to enjoy God in himself, but also to enjoy him

in others. And so that's why God in His wisdom and His providence chooses to use the intercession of the saints to bring His grace and favor and His assistance to His other children, and especially the intercessions of the woman that He chose as the mother of His divine Son. When did you first pray the rosary, and what does that mean in your life today? Wow. Yeah, so I'm a daily rosary prayer at this point in my life and have been for over 20 years. Shortly after entering the church, I started to follow the spiritual path of St. Josemaria Escriva.

And he recommended it. And there's kind of a distillation of his daily prayer schedule put together by one of the priests of Opus Dei. It was a popular essay back in the early 2000s, a little essay by Father CJ McCloskey called Seven Habits of Holy Apostolic Catholics. And that was one of my first pieces of spiritual reading

as a young Catholic and I've embraced that schedule and involved things like morning offering and examination of conscience at night. But one of the things was a daily rosary. So I've been doing that for over 20 years. When did I pray my first rosary? I am not sure. Were you a Protestant?

Probably, I probably, I think Michael Dauphiné, my sponsor, I think he probably worked me through it, probably prayed my first rosary with him. So you may have been in RCA. I was waived from RCA. That's. But I was kind of getting informal R.C.A. from Michael, my sponsor. When you first prayed the rosary, were you nervous as a Protestant? Like, will this offend God? I've thought so negatively about this for so long, or no, by that point you'd accepted the intercession of the saints?

At the community that we were living on in the campus in Notre Dame, we had some close friends who were Bible fundamentalists, and they were also on the road into the church, and the wife of that couple. It was kind of hardcore, you know, Southern fundamentalists, Bible-loaned, literalists kind of hardcore, you know, Southern fundamentalist, Bible loan, literalist kind of background. Again, that wife, who is a friend of my wife and my, she decided to experiment with praying the rosary, and she had this ecstatic spiritual experience. And she shared that and my wife and I were like, well, we'd like to try that. No, shucks.

We didn't have the ecstatic experience, quite the same as she did, but it was good. It was a good experience. And I especially liked the meditation on the different mysteries of the Lord's life. And this is another thing. I think that helped a lot. Like, and we should explain this because many Protestants do not know about the mysteries.

They just see the repetition of the prayer and the beats. Wouldn't you say? Yes. And they don't know that what you're supposed to be doing is reflecting on the major events of the life and the ministry of our Lord, you know, beginning with the joyful mysteries of His birth and childhood, and then the luminous mysteries of His career, and the sorrowful mysteries of His passion, and the glorious mysteries of his resurrection. So things like, you're supposed to, you know, let's do, yeah, the

glorious mysteries are the resurrection, ascension, descent, descent of the Holy Spirit, assumption of the blessed vision, the blessed mother and her inner coronation, right? Now prophets shouldn't have started with that because the last two are non-biblical and that's a hard point for a Protestant brother. Well, yeah. They're not against scripture, but not explicitly against scripture. I think we could point to Revelation 12. Exactly. But I think actually, I've tried saying this before, I'm going to try to make the case for

the Protestant, here's how you can pray the Holy Rosary, right? So here's, I really think this is how you could do it. If you're not opposed to repetitious prayer, that is to say you recognize that repetition can be vain, but doesn't have to. We can take an example of the angels in the book of Revelation saying, holy, holy, holy. Or simply every praise and worship song ever sung by evangelical worship leaders. Or every praise and worship song sung by, you know.

Or the fact that you might be willing to pray the Our Father every day. You might not be. There are people like Dr. William Lann-Craig who seem to indicate that maybe we shouldn't be repeating that word for word as a prayer, but I think a lot of Protestants would be able to pray in that. Well, I think what you could do is you could take the first half of the Hail Mary, which is actually how the Rosary originated, and just recognize that when you say Hail Mary full of grace, like you are using that scripture that was announced, that those words by the angel as the incarnation took place. This is the moment that God took flesh.

So you could pray that without the second half since you're not yet on board with the intercession of the saints while meditating upon these particular scriptures. I think that's, and the other prayers are the Our Father and the Glory Be. Come on. Right, and that's it. And that puts me in mind of something, and I really want to share this, I really want to get this off my chest. When you are a Protestant, hewing close to the text of Scripture is so important. And for me as a Protestant, arguments that were exegetical or like came, were very close to what scripture specifically says, were often the most persuasive. And what you see in Luke 1, if folks have a problem with honoring

the mother of Jesus with Marian veneration, I think it is helpful to reflect on the fact that the Bible itself shows Marian veneration going on, that the first examples of Marian veneration in human history are actually recorded in sacred writ and are inspired by the Holy Spirit. So first you have angelic veneration of her, because Gabriel comes and addresses her as full of grace, or she who has been graced in the Greek form of the word there, the Lord is with you. And this is a singular greeting in all of scripture. Nobody is greeted in such a remarkable and extraordinary and favorable way of all the

angelic appearances that we have in the Old Testament and so on. And then what is, you know, he just praises her and her son, and he says, the Holy Spirit will compound you, the power of the Most High will overshadow you. The angel uses a word for the Blessed Mother that's used of the glory cloud of God descending and overshadowing the tabernacle at the end of the book of Exodus. Okay, so Gabriel, this angel is likening the blessed mother to a new tabernacle, which was the holy dwelling of God, which of course makes sense,

because she is gonna become the dwelling of God. So is that not showing some honor to her? Is that not venerating her? Real quick, this cloud that's being referenced, what's the Greek? How do you know it's the same? Episcasus, okay, the power of the most high will overshadow you, that verb overshadow.

If you look in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, that's what's used to render the Hebrew of Exodus 40 when it describes the... The glory cloud? The glory cloud, yeah, overshadowing the tabernacle. Okay. Right. So, okay, so you have angelic veneration of the Blessed Mother in that passage, and then

this is amazing, the visitation. We just gotta look at this. So Mary shows up on the doorstep of St. Elizabeth, and we have to recall the disparity in social status between the two of them to the eyes of the world, right? Because the Blessed Mother was quite young. I would say maybe 15, something like that. And she's betrothed to a blue collar worker, a guy who works with his hands, from Galilee, which was the West Virginia of Israel. It was the hill country,

where you could get off of the grid and get lost in a holler. That means a valley for those who are not familiar with Appalachian culture. So she comes from hillbilly country, and she's married to a blue collar worker, and she's a teenager, and she shows up on the doorstep of Elizabeth. Elizabeth is married to a high ranking priest who works in Jerusalem, which was the New York of Israel, and she lives in the hill country of Judea, which is the Connecticut of Israel. I hope you're

getting these as an Aussie. And so age and marriage to a blue-blooded priest and all of that, that all gives status to Elizabeth. And so to the eyes of the world, Elizabeth has all this status, the Blessed Mother has nothing. Again, I's talking about human perspective. But then look at how Elizabeth greets her teenage cousin. Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. That phrase, blessed are you among women, that is a Hebrew idiom that means you are the most blessed of all women. Okay, that's how you phrase that, because Hebrew does not have the superlative. So if you want to express an idea like, Bob is the fastest man, you have to say, Bob is fast among men.

If you say, Bob is fast among men, that is an idiom for Bob is the fastest man alive. So, blessed are you among women, that means you are the most blessed of all women. Is that not showing her honor? Okay? To say something outrageous like that? And blessed is the fruit of your womb, which implied means, and the fruit of your womb is the most blessed of all, kind of carries that superlative idea over. And then she says, why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? I don't know if you have teenage cousins, but if your teenage cousins should have the tour... You typically don't fall all over yourself like, why is this granted to me that my teenage cousin should show up on my doorstep? But look at this. And she's a high-ranking woman herself. Elizabeth is a

woman of status. She's like a great poopon lady, you know, who lives in Connecticut. But she regards it as an honor that the teenage blessed mother shows up at her house, and then, behold, when the voice of your greeting came to my ear, etc., blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment, so she invokes this other blessing." So this high-class lady is bowing and scraping and verbally bestowing all kinds of honor, I mean, literally superlative honor among all female human beings upon her teenage cousin, that is clearly veneration of her. And why? It's all because of this phrase right there, the mother of my Lord. That's one of the titles of the Queen Mother. So Elizabeth is recognizing that because Mary has in her womb the future king.

That gives Mary the status of queen mother, and Elizabeth, being a woman who's knowledgeable about the Scriptures and salvation history, understands that that place is Mary above her in kind of the rank of the kingdom of David. Yes, Elizabeth is married to a priest, that's a high status position, but Mary is going to be the mother of the king, and that's even a higher position. What do you think Elizabeth meant by Lord? The mother of my Lord? Yeah. I mean, she's the Davidic Messiah. That's what I think she meant by that. Truthly is a groundbreaking Catholic AI app built to help you know, live and defend the

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it starts to fade into the sense of divinity. Right. So I wouldn't say it's full out divinity at this point. Yeah, that's what I was driving at. But later in Luke, this term Lord, increasingly it becomes clear that we mean Lord also in the sense of the Lord God of Israel. But Luke, a lot of people say, well, why aren't the Gospels a little bit more explicit about the divinity of Christ? John is quite so, but Matthew, Mark, and Luke, people think that they soft pedal it.

Actually, the indications of Christ's divinity in all the Gospels is extremely strong. Just read Dr. Petrie's new book. Yes, I just read half of it two days ago. Isn't it amazing? It is exceptional. I texted him, thanked him for it. What is the name of that book? It's Divine Christology. Yes, maybe that's the subtitle, but please everybody go and buy that book, Catholic, Protestant. It is the best response to all this nonsense scholarship that took place from the Jesus

Seminar and other people trying to discredit the Scriptures, trying to say that these were writings of sort of propagandist evangelists, but not actually true things that took place in the Scriptures. Yeah, yeah, it's awesome. But yeah, but you know, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, they take you on a journey and they let you figure it out. They let you get the joke, right? The joke is not funny if it's explained. So if you just say, well, Jesus is God, like, well, that's too quick.

And I'm like, how can a man be God? All right. But I'll tell you a story where Jesus just tells the wind and the waves what the heck to do. And everyone said, who is this? Right, and I'll let you figure it out. Who walked on seven miles of- When you figure it out for yourself, it has more of a impact, right? So I think it was a pedagogical move.

Okay. But anyway. Speaking of the Holy Rosary, I have a rosary here I wanna give you. There is a group called Theotokos Rosaries. I want to give them a shout out. Tell people to go follow them on Instagram. I think these are the most beautiful rosaries I've ever seen. And while I was talking to you, I thought I should get it for you. So wait there. All right. So they sent me a bunch of these to give to my guests. Oh, that's so kind of them.

Yeah. So I mean, that's a, that's pretty, uh, it's pretty spectacular. Oh my gosh. Oh, that's so kind of them. Yeah. So I mean, that's pretty spectacular. Oh my gosh. Yeah. It's a very masculine color. Yeah. They have several, and that's the most masculine. So I thought I'd give it to you, being a masculine dude. Now, why?

OK, here's what's really cool. What is this bead here? Yeah, that's amazing that you picked up on that right away. They have a different bead for each decade, depending on which decade you're on. So you see the first one has the bead as the one of the 10. The second decade has that bead on the second of the 10. You see this?

Yeah. Yes, okay. Yeah, especially if I put her, oh, there we go. I got it in the right direction. You have to pray that way to get it. Oh, neat. And so you can remember tactically, which, man, doesn't have a wonderful feel.

Don't you love the heavens? Yeah, you want a good rosary. I like the way my mate Gabby put it. He's like, we spend so much money on our iPhones. It's like there's something human about having a nice Bible or a nice rosary. You can pray it furiously and it won't fail in the midst of you're like,

yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think there's this, now let's get into our pet peeves about rosaries, right? All rosaries are great. Obviously ring rosaries, little rosaries, big rosaries. I know people have different preferences and that's terrific. But for me personally,

yeah, you can either have a rosary, it's gonna break, or there's also these rosaries that are so bulky that they just seem impractical. Like you put it in your pocket and it, yeah. Anyway, so say a prayer for Pines and me. Absolutely, I'd be happy to do it. Beautiful.

Thank you so much. It's good to have the Blessed Virgin, we have more things we wanna get through, so are you okay moving on? Yeah, absolutely. What do Protestants get wrong about the Eucharist? And of course, I think it probably is important to say before we get into this. And I don't mean this as a disrespectfully at all.

I actually and I'm not saying this to sound like I'm backpedaling to make my Protestant listeners like me more. I actually think there is a lot that we can learn from our Protestant brothers and sisters, just like there's obviously a lot that Protestants can learn from us. So I do have Protestant friends I've learned a lot from. That said, Protestantism doesn't exist. There are Protestantisms. And so when we talk about the Eucharist,

it would be unfair and just incorrect. To broad brush. To broad brush. But you know more than me because you used to be a Protestant. Right, so you have to be a Protestant. Right. So you have high church Protestants, some forms of Anglicans and Lutherans who regard themselves as being very close to the Catholic tradition and believe in a stronger form of

Christ's presence in the Eucharist or even have a real presence theology. So I think like Missouri Synod Lutherans come very close to a Catholic understanding of Christ's presence in the Eucharist. But the problem there, of course, is that their officers don't have authority and succession from the apostles to confect the Eucharist. So that's a major issue. But then you have, I think,

but the vast majority of Protestants, at least in the United States, are essentially Zwinglians in their understanding of the Eucharist, which is, you know, Zwingli was a Swiss reformer who just said, ah, it's just, it's all symbolic. And that's de facto what I was as a Dutch Calvinist in America, and I think most of

my Calvinists in the pew, Calvinists in the pew, basically regarded as, you know, it's all a symbol. And I think, you know, Southern Baptists and varieties of Methodists and so on pretty much had that attitude. So the Lord's Supper is this symbolic act that we treat seriously because Jesus treats it seriously, we perform so often in obedience to Jesus' words, and it symbolically represents the passion of Christ, and maybe there's kind of like an intense experience of Jesus' spiritual presence maybe when we do it. So that's the view that I had, and I think that's pretty widespread. And what's wrong about that is that it drastically misses the centrality of the Eucharist to the whole plan of salvation in Scripture. And looking back on it, Matt, I'm floored that we didn't get this because in my particular

tradition, for example, in Dutch Calvinism, we were very big on the covenants of Scripture. In fact, my home church, my church of record was called Covenant, such and such reformed church. So covenant was in the very title of our local parish. That's how big covenant theology was to us. And a lot of the things that Dr. Hahn and I as well do, like in my Bible basics, and I think we've talked about the covenants on the show before, a lot of that my Bible basics, and I think we've talked about the covenants on the show before. You know, a lot of that was not new to me as a Catholic, that we're doing things like that. But it was like we fumbled at the two-yard line, because you follow the covenants, you got the Adamic covenant, Noeic, Abrahamic, Mosaic, Davidic, the New Covenant promised in the prophets. But then when it comes to the New Testament,

we didn't look carefully at what Jesus himself identifies as the New Covenant. And this is in Luke 22, 20. At the Last Supper, he takes the chalice, or the cup, depending on your English translation, and says, this cup is the new covenant in my blood. Well, hold on right there! That's huge! What does it mean, this cup? Well, when we talk about a cup, like if I say, hey, drink this cup of water, I'm referring to the contents, right? Nobody actually drinks a cup because it would stick in your throat. So, Aegeus says, this cup, he's talking about the contents of the cup. That's why he says then, in my blood, referring to what's in the cup. And it's not his physical blood that's in the cup,

it's his sacramental blood. He didn't open a vein and pour it, and that would be his physical blood. He took the wine and transformed it by his words. So His sacramental blood is in the cup, and then He identifies it as the new covenant. Well stop right there! That's huge! I'm sure that when Peter and James and John and Philip gathered around the table, when they hear Jesus say, this cup is the new covenant, they're like, wait, did know, did he just say what I thought he said? Are we doing this now? Is this going down here? Because they have been waiting for 600 years for the new covenant. Back in 587, the year that Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians,

the prophet Jeremiah, who's one of the three biggies of the prophetic tradition, he prophesied Jeremiah 31-31, the days are coming, says the Lord God, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with them when I brought them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, my covenant which they broke, and I had to show myself to be their master. But this is the covenant that I will make with them in those days. I will put my spirit within them." Now I'm not getting Jeremiah exactly right, but he goes on to describe, you know, I'm

sorry, when I place my law within them, etc., and describes a whole bunch of beautiful things, all of which happened to us, the forgiveness of sins and beautiful things, all of which happened to us, the forgiveness of sins and so on, all of which happened to us through baptism and the gift of the Holy Spirit. So, that's Jeremiah 31, 31-34, the new covenant oracle of Jeremiah, and Jeremiah is the only prophet that uses that term, new covenant, and he says, not like the covenant that I made when I brought them out of Egypt, which is clearly the Mosaic covenant. So this New Covenant is going to replace the Mosaic covenant.

The Mosaic covenant is the basis of all the Judaism. It's like the whole religious system is based on the Mosaic covenant. So if you're going to introduce a New Covenant, that's going to turn everything upside down. It's going to revamp everything. And so when Jesus says, this cup is the new covenant, he's saying, my Eucharistic blood is this new covenant that's going to replace the one that's huge in itself. So what Jesus is doing with the 12 apostles in the upper room is as earth-shaking as what he did with the 12 tribes at the foot of Mount Sinai through Moses so far. That in itself is huge.

But then what he identifies as the covenant, because a covenant is a kinship bond that's formed by an oath. Dr. Hahn worked on this for his dissertation, came up with that definition, wading through a ton of scholarship to come up with that very concise and succinct definition. The extension of kinship by oath is a covenant.

So a covenant is a family bond, and that's key to understanding Scripture, that God is always trying to make us His family. So this is why there's, you know, as the fourth Eucharistic prayer says, time and again you offer them covenants, and through the prophets taught them to hope for salvation. Well, one might say, why is God always offering covenants? Is it just like one darn thing after another, like Henry Ford's view of history? You know, God just keep doing the same thing, expecting different results? Like, no, the point of offering covenants is that God is again and again inviting us into a family relationship with

Him. That comes back to that one big happy family idea that we talked about earlier. A covenant is a family bond. So, Jesus is saying the new covenant, the new family bond is this cup. It's my blood. And we can extend that to the body as well, His Eucharistic presence. So, his flesh and blood is the family bond. Well, that makes, actually, that makes perfect sense because you are what you eat. So if you take his body and blood, you become his body and blood, you become him, and then you share in his sonship with the Father. It's like, okay, this all makes sense, and this is the new one. So if this is the new one, this is the one that supersedes the Adamic, the Noaic, the Mosaic, the Davidic. It's the new covenant. This is huge, and it's the Eucharist, okay? And I don't know how we missed it,

because I guess what we did as Protestants is we read those passages and we thought, well, I guess what we did as Protestants is we read those passages and we thought, well, what he means there is that this bread and wine symbolizes my self-sacrifice on the cross, and that's where the covenant is made. Because if you had asked me as a Protestant, I think if you'd ask most Protestants, where does the new covenant come into effect? Well, it's at the cross, it's the passion of the Lord, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, those two events are connected, okay? But it's the Last Supper and the cross cannot be separated from one another, and Dr. Hahn has spoken on this, you know, quite a bit. And I like the way Hahn does it in many different ways, but especially if you follow Han's fourth

cup theory that our Lord suspends the Last Supper by not drinking the final cup and then drinks it at the cross, and that connects the upper room to Calvary as one liturgy through which the new covenant is brought in. And like, yes, that just, you know, comments to clients would say, that sounds fitting, okay? That really resonates. That really makes sense. So but the Eucharist, what our Lord actually identifies as the new covenant is His Eucharistic body and blood.

And of course, that cannot be separated from His sacrifice, because just as on the cross, His side is opened and the blood and water flows from His side, and the Church Fathers said that is the sacraments flowing from the side of Christ. That shows that all of the sacraments flow from the passion and death of our Lord on the cross, including the Eucharist. It flows from that. But it is the Eucharist specifically that is the New Covenant, the family bond. And that's why we call it the Most Blessed Sacrament. It's the source and the summit of the whole Christian life. So, you know, we would, as Protestants, we would, you know, cut up Wonder Bread literally into little squares and put it on a plate. And we had these shot glasses of grape juice that we had in purpose

made trays, you know, and every month, every couple of months, we would have the Lord's Supper in our local congregation. We'd pass those plates of the Wonder Bread through, and you'd take your little square, and you'd take your little shot glass of grape juice, and you'd wait for the pastor to give the word, and then you'd eat that, and you'd and drink that and then you'd think real hard about Jesus because he says, do this in remembrance of me. And there was great sincerity and great salinity and great, you know, not knocking any of that. You know, we meant well and we were trying to obey the words of Jesus. But it was kind of like a wake. What is a wake? Wake is a meal after somebody's died to keep their memory alive.

And that's kind of how we understood, like do this in remembrance of me. Now, if we got into this, I would even argue about that translation. Cause if you look in the Greek, I think it should be translated, do this as my memorial offering. Because the word that Jesus used, the onam nason,

is the word that was used for the memorial offering in the temple, which is a grain offering offered to renew the covenant between God and his people. And so what I think that our Lord is really saying there is do this as the grain offering that's going to renew the covenant between God and his people in the new covenant era. That's its cultic language it's liturgical language,

and it's not just, oh, think hard about me when you have this snack. Because in English, our term remembrance is so thin, we just think it means calling things to mind. But in Hebrew and in the Old Testament, they would often use the term remember to express the concept that we would express in English with the term renew.

So you know, like the Psalms have this refrain, some of the Psalms have this like, remember your covenant, oh Lord. Well what sense does that make at all? It's like, is God up there like, oh, I've got some people down there that I made a commitment to them. Oh yeah, I don't want to forget them. No, that's absurd. Of course,

God remembers. But it wasn't until later in Hebrew that they started to form a word that meant renew, and you only find it in later books of the Old Testament. I think early in Israel's history, they just used the term remembrance to express that idea of calling to mind and making afresh. So remember, your covenant really meant renew your covenant. That was the point, renew it in the present, okay? You had made it in the past, but you're renewing in the present. So that's the idea of do this in remembrance

is really the idea of covenantal renewal at any time, at all times, from the rising of the sun, even to its setting, a perfect offering, as comes from the prophet. And that expression too, from the rising of the sun to its setting, that means both spatially and temporally at all times, because it's from the beginning of the day to the end of the day, from east to west, right? That means all places, all times. So anyway, so what did we get wrong about the Eucharist? We got wrong

at centrality to Christian faith and practice. And so we would look at the Catholic Church and like, why are they celebrating what we call the Lord's Supper all the time? As Protestants, we regard that as disordered. We're like, they should have more preaching, they should have more hymns singing. Those are the real... the real, you know, preaching and singing hymns, that's real worship. But, you know, they're doing all this ritual with this, you know, with the bread and the wine, and that's excessive, and they shouldn't do it all the time. And that's why I say we fumbled at the two-yard line, because we understood about covenants in the old covenant, but when it came to the new covenant, we missed identifying what is actually the new covenant.

And the new covenant is not a book. I think we're, I don't know if we talked about this in previous shows, but if you, we're confused because of all the translation that goes on, right? So New Covenant gets translated into Latin. In Hebrew, it's Habarith Hadash, in Greek, it's Hekene Diotheke, that comes into Latin as Novum Testamentum, right? And we get the term New Testament from that. But if you go out in Jacksonville or Steubenville and you just ask people on the street, what is the New Testament, they're gonna say, well, it's the second half of the Bible, you know, it's Matthew through Revelation.

But that's not what Jesus identifies as the New Covenant, okay, the New Covenant according to Jesus is His sacramental body and blood. It's not a book. The 27 books, Matthew through Revelation, that's not the New Testament, because the Testament is Latin for covenant. Those are the books about the New Testament. But the New Testament itself, which means New Covenant, it's actually the Eucharist. And so I can't remember if I've said this on the show before, but I want to tell my students, look, if you're calling yourself a New Testament Christian, but your whole religious practice really just focuses around reading, praying, and teaching the book, then

the book of the New Testament, then you're basically like the person who goes to a Chinese restaurant, reads the whole menu and never orders General Tso's chicken. It's like, yeah, the menu's great, but the menu is supposed to point to a meal. And it's not that I have anything against the menu. I love the menu. I can read the menu in Hebrew and in Greek, and I can do literary analysis on the menu. But at the end of the day, as can read the menu in Hebrew and in Greek, and I can do literary analysis

on the menu, but at the end of the day, as beautiful as the menu is, but it points us to a sacramental encounter with Christ that takes place through the Eucharist. All right. Well, speaking of the book, what do Protestants get wrong about Scripture and tradition? Yeah. Oh, boy. The biggest thing that Protestants get wrong about scripture and tradition is this idea of sola scriptura, or the Bible alone, the idea that the Bible alone is sufficient for everything that we need to do to be church, okay, to function as the body of Christ.

Everything that we need is in scripture and that there's no need for tradition, okay, other than, or any kind of instruction or really anything else besides the written word of God. So you don't need a magisterium, you don't need a teaching authority, and you don't need an authoritative tradition. There's so many things wrong with that, but the biggest thing that's wrong with it, Matt, is it's unbiblical.

And this is kind of the argument that takes it out at the knees. It's one of the strongest arguments that I encountered when my friend Michael Dauphiné, who eventually became my sponsor to the church, when we got to the point in our conversations where we were arguing polemically about Protestantism and Catholicism, but when he got to the point where he showed me that there is no text of Scripture that teaches Sola scriptura. I was blown away. And he told me, I said, John, you know what? Sola scripture is unbiblical and there's no passage in the Bible that supports it. And I said, sure there is. And he says, okay, well, name one. And I went to where everybody goes, which is 2 Timothy 3.16. It's a famous passage, it's one of the most explicit passages in Scripture about the role of the Word of God in the Christian life, and St. Paul says, �All Scripture

is inspired by God, yes and amen, and I have no problem with that as Catholics, and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work." Oh great, there's Sola Scriptura, except it's not, because everything that's said in us first, we can fully affirm as Catholics. It says a lot of great things about Scripture. It's inspired, it's profitable for all these different things, and it's necessary for the man of God to be complete. That's all true, but nowhere in there does it say that Scripture is all you need. And Michael pointed that to me, and I'm like, yeah, you're kind of right. It says a lot of great things about Scripture, but it doesn't say that's all you need.

Now, what some theologians and apologists try to do is play with the word that's translated profitable. All Scriptures are played by God and profitable, and they try to make that into something like sufficient, but you can't do it. You look in the Greek, and it basically means helpful in Greek, and you can't press the meaning of that word to mean like it's all sufficient for everything. And I think that all responsible Bible scholars would admit that, that this verse is really not teaching that the Bible alone is all that you need. Well, where do you go from there? Well, that's the best you got.

There's nothing else in Scripture that even comes close to teaching the idea of Sola Scriptura. However, and this blew me away. Surely you didn't cave in on the spot. No, no, no. What kind of fight did you put up? Or did you just say, I need to reflect on this some more? Well, yeah, I said that. But Michael followed up.

Like first, that was kind of a left hook, right? And then he comes in with a haymaker from the other side, which is that the New Testament affirms tradition in multiple places. And I was not aware of this. And one of the first places he went was 2 Thessalonians 2.15. And there it says, So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter. And Michael read that, and I remember like, I was like, let me see that. And I grabbed his Bible and I read that. And like, why have I never

heard anything like that before? So I went home later day, and I got out my personal Bible, which was a new international version, which is a very popular evangelical Protestant translation. And I went to that passage, 2 Thessalonians 2.15, and I read it, and there it said in my Protestant version, So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the teachings which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter." And I'm like, that's interesting. The Catholic RSV says traditions, the Protestant translation says teachings, so which is it? So I got out the Greek, and sure enough, in Greek, it's the Greek word for tradition.

It's the word parodysis, which is the same word that's used in the Gospels when, for example, Jesus criticizes the Pharisees for their tradition. But then I did a word search on that and found that there are three places in the letters of Paul where Paul affirms the value of tradition, parodysis. And in all those three instances, my Protestant translation in English changed the word tradition to teachings whenever Paul used it favorably, but whenever Jesus used tradition unfavorably, like when criticizing the Pharisees, it used the term tradition. So if you're raised in that, with using that translation, you grow up knowing

the New Testament well, but thinking that there is no positive role for tradition in the New Covenant and in the apostolic era. And that's just false, because not only here in 2 Thessalonians 2.15, but then in the next chapter, 2 Thessalonians 3.6, as well as 1 Corinthians, I believe it's 11.2, St. Paul commends, yeah, 1 Corinthians 11.2, Paul commends the early believers for holding fast to tradition. So here, Matt, we've got this irony that no place in Scripture is solo scripture taught, but in three places in Scripture, the value of tradition for Christians in the New Covenant is affirmed. So that is a game changer, I think, especially if you're trying to hew closely to kind of an exegetical theology or derive your theology from the text of the Bible itself.

You kind of got this paradox that you're saying that the Bible alone is all we need, but the Bible doesn't say that. So that's really an extra biblical principle. The Bible itself affirms that you also need tradition. Now, I think part of the confusion is how we use the term tradition today. If my ancestry is Irish and somebody else's, we might have different traditions that we have taken on from our family members, and they might cohere in some ways, but differ in others. It's sort of loosey-goosey, and it's not strictly necessary for our way of life. But what does the Catholic Church mean

when it talks about necessity of tradition? Yeah, well, we distinguish between what we often call in English capital T tradition versus small t traditions. And this is very helpful to me because I didn't understand what was the concept of tradition. I'm like, is the infant of Prague, you know, is that devotional tradition on the same level

as the doctrines of the Trinity? Or, you know, what are we saying here? And the answer to that is no. You know, devotional traditions like the infant of Prague and many other things are really not even what we mean by tradition in a theological sense. So tradition in a theological sense, we mean it's often called capital T tradition. We mean by tradition in a theological sense. So tradition in a theological sense, we mean, it's often called capital T tradition, we mean divine tradition. We mean divine teaching,

which was passed on from the Lord, the God man, Jesus of Nazareth, from him to the apostles, but was not necessarily committed to writing. And a lot of this teaching was kind of implicit. You might use the phrase inscribed, or was kind of written into or embodied in the practices, in the worship, in the customs that Jesus taught the apostles and then were handed down. In what the New Testament consists of? Yeah, and a great example is the table of contents of the Bible itself. This is kind of like a really good example to use, because the list of scriptural books

was never committed to writing by our Lord or by the apostles. That was passed down by practice and by oral tradition all the way down to the late 300s when it starts to get written down in church councils. And when, for example, the Council of Rome met in 382 under Pope Damocles I, one of the things that the pope wanted to do was write down the list of inspired books. They weren't making anything up, they were just recording what had been passed down to them in an unwritten form. So they were writing down the unwritten tradition. So the problem there is if you want to dispute tradition, you want to say tradition is untrustworthy, then your table of contents of your Bible is untrustworthy, and you can't be confident that these books and only these books are the Word of God.

So that undercuts the whole, you know, Sola Scriptura mentality. I think a Protestant's probably open to that idea. I think where the Protestant, and I don't mean to speak for them, but here we go, gets nervous is when it sounds like, you know, okay, we know what the scripture is, because it's right there. But when you're talking about traditions, I don't know what you mean. Is there a list of some traditions written in places? And if there isn't, how can I trust you, Mr. Catholic, that you're not just making up things willy-nilly and telling me that there either something on the authority

or on the level of scripture or not. Yeah, absolutely. Because you call tradition the word of God. Yeah, yeah, no. That's a great, and I totally relate to that. And that was my fear too. It's like, uh-oh, you know, if tradition is authoritative, then we're placing it above the Word of God or something like that, or it's going to damage our respect of Scripture, it's going to damage the authority of Scripture.

But actually, precisely the opposite is the case. And I witnessed this firsthand, because what I witnessed in evangelical Protestantism is that people's doctrine could change at the whim of Bible scholars. And so, in my group, we had an annual convention of the leadership of the church, which was called a synod, and every year this group met and they had pluripotential power, they had total power to change our doctrine or do almost anything they wanted when they were in session. And this group could be swayed by whatever the latest fad of biblical scholarship was. So a Bible scholar could get up and say, I did a study on this word that Paul uses, and I believe that women can be ordained, or I believe that,

you know, persons of the same such can have physical relations, or whatever it was. And you could so rapidly, you know, go from believing one thing to suddenly believing something else as your official denominational standards, because Scripture became a kind of wax nose that could be manipulated by whoever could, you know, whatever Bible scholar, you know, could get a following and persuade other people. Now, Origen very helpfully says in one of his writings that the Word of God is more truly written on the heart of the church than it is on the page. And that's beautiful.

Let's ponder that. What that means is the proper understanding of Scripture is kind of latent in the hearts of the faithful, in the church as a whole. Not in any individual person like their opinions reign, but how the body of Christ has understood the Scriptures over time. And we have to trust, and we do trust, that the Church, who is the spouse of Christ, has not been misunderstanding the Scriptures for her whole history. Okay? So the proper understanding of Scripture has been latent within the Church, and that's part of what tradition means. It's part of Capital T tradition. And that's part of what tradition means. It's part of Capital T tradition.

So if you come along and say, oh, I think that persons of the same sex can have physical relations, that's totally fine, and that's basically marriage, as a Catholic, you look at it and say, that cannot be right, because we believe in the truth of tradition. And one of the things that tradition encompasses is the proper understanding of Scripture in the hearts of the faithful. And the hearts of the faithful down through the centuries have never thought that about marriage and about sexuality, etc. And that's authoritative.

And you can't come in and just make an argument about a Greek word or a Hebrew phrase or something. So that's how I was coming at it. I saw the abuse as a soul of Scripture in terms of discounting centuries of meditation on Scripture by the saints and by the fathers and so on, and being able to throw all that out and just say, well, we should change doctrine because I have an argument based on a Hebrew word. And so I saw tradition as protecting the meaning of Scripture. It's meaning that it has had over the centuries from one generation of believers to another because tradition says we don't just throw out

what the Spirit has impressed on the hearts of the faithful in terms of understanding God's word down through the centuries of the church's life. Yeah, I'd wanna invite people, if they wanna see an absolute demolition of arguments for solo scriptura, watch Jimmy Aiken debate James White. I believe it was from last year, so 2024,

was around then, it was an absolute, yeah, yeah. He got a hiding. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jimmy really took him to the woodshed. But, um, well, I guess we could say to the Protestant, then you don't need to fully understand what the Catholic even means by, uh, by the word of God being given to us in scripture and tradition in order to first reject solar scriptura. And do you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Solarura is unbiblical, so you can reject it for that meaning.

The problem with defining tradition is sometimes we're not, we're so close to tradition, which is kind of, you can think about the tradition as the faith being passed down from one generation to another, and we're so close to it sometimes that we don't recognize it. But when something arises in the church's history're so close to it sometimes that we don't recognize it. But when something arises in the church's history that's contrary to it, there's a kind of instinct among the

faithful that like that's not the tradition. And I think a helpful analogy for this is the way that children understand proper English grammar even if they can't define what a subject and a predicate and so on is. So if you say to a child, there is the red big truck. The child's like, that doesn't sound right. It should be the big red truck and the little blue truck because there is actually a rule in English grammar that size is supposed to proceed color

when you line up adjectives. And I wasn't even aware of it myself until maybe three years ago. And then somebody pointed out, you may have these children books like the big red truck and the little blue truck and so on. It has to be in that order. I mean, that's proper.

I mean, you can still understand it, but it sounds wrong if you say the blue little truck, et cetera. And even a child kind of recognized what sounds right and what sounds wrong. And so kind of the rules of grammar are embedded in the child's understanding of the English language, even if they can't articulate them. But when somebody arises and doesn't speak English well, the child

– that guy speaks funny, you know, he doesn't speak right. And that's a little bit of an illustration of how true Christian teaching can be passed down, and we're not always even aware of it. There may be elements of the tradition that we're not fully conscious of, but a heresy may arise in 2030 or 2050. Somebody may say, what about this? And it's something that hadn't been brought out before. But the gut of the faithful are going to be like, that doesn't sound right, okay? And then we ponder the faith that we've received, and we articulate it further, and then you have things like church councils that articulate it and write it down, and

you start writing down the rules of the grammar. You say, no, you know, size needs to precede color. And you actually put that as a rule, okay? And that's how theology develops over time, and that's how the tradition increasingly becomes expressed in the written documents of the church as we meditate on the mystery of the faith that's been entrusted to us and then gets expressed more clearly through the centuries. That's what we call the development of doctrine. So it begins, you see what the Marian doctrine says as well, but I'll throw it back to you. Yeah, no, no, thank you. All right, so another thing we think Protestants misunderstand about

Christianity is the canon of Scripture, speaking of the canon of Scripture and inspired contents. I remember, after my conversion, I went and served in an apostolate in Canada where I would travel and evangelize in high schools, and I was told, make sure you bring a Bible with you. So I brought the Bible with me that my mom had up in her cupboard, and lo and behold, it was missing seven books and sections of some other books. And that was the first time I realized that Protestants have less books in their Bible than Catholics do. So Protestants will sometimes accuse Catholics of adding to the scriptures, whereas Catholics accuse the Protestant Reformers of having removed books.

What's the truth here? Yeah, yeah. There is so much confusion about this issue at every level of the discussion. So one almost doesn't know where to start. But part of the problem is because as modern Christians, we are so pampered and so used to being able to just go down to a Christian bookstore or a religious goods shop and go in and ask for a Bible. And we can pull one off the shelf and all the decisions about which books should be in there have already been made for us.

It's already been nicely bound and translated into a language that we can understand, and we don't have to think practically about how this all developed historically. But this is an invention, even this, we take this for granted as a book, but this was invented. There was a time before these things were around. And there are some very old, this is called a codex, first of all, a codex is a book consisting of leaves of paper that are stitched on one side, you know. So the technical term for this form of book is a codex. The plural is codices. But there are other forms that books can take. They can be written on a scroll. You could have a very long scroll with the book of Isaiah on it, for example. Or you could have tablets, you know, or you could have an e-book, etc. So there's many different forms. This form, the Codex, became popular around the

time that our Lord was born, and then it took over from the scroll concurrent with the rise of Christianity. And there are several scholars that believe that actually it was Christian missionary effort that popularized this form of the book. Because when you're doing mission work, it's much easier to carry a book around like this, that you can set stuff on top of, it's very durable, etc. You can immediately get to Chronicles just by opening it up. Imagine trying to lug around a scroll that had the entire Bible on it. You can't set anything on top of the scroll because it will crush it.

You can only write on one side because the back gets smeared with your hands. It's really cumbersome. If you're in Genesis but you want to get to Revelation, you have to, like the old VHS tapes, you have to just go fast forward all the way to the end. So these are really convenient format. But when you're going to make several books and you combine them all together, you've got to make sure that you make that decision correctly. And so in the late 300s, we start getting a bunch of church councils that are making decisions about the canon of Scripture. Basically, they're writing down, as we just said,

the unwritten tradition that had been passed down from Jesus. And what made it so pressing at that time was the Roman government was putting up money to have Bibles copied for every cathedral church in the empire. And if you're gonna make a big Bible that's gonna be bound on one side, you don't wanna come back a month later and say,

"'Oh, we no longer believe that Judith is here, you know, that is kind of awkward. So you want to get it right. So they worked on, those councils worked on writing down the tradition. But, you know, this, let's review this from, oh boy, where do we even begin to crack this nut? Let's put it this way. The seven books that are in Catholic Bibles but are not in Protestant Bibles, Catholics we call them the Deuterocanonical books, which is an unfortunate term because it means the second canon, which implies that these books have a secondary status, which is not true.

Or came later. Yeah, yeah. The term is really a medieval term. Protestants often call those seven books the Apocrypha. And one of the first things that we have to understand is these seven books are not a collection and they are not a unit. Okay, they're not like the law, the prophets, the writings, and the Deutero canon. Okay?

Actually, these different books belong to different genre categories of the Old Testament. So first and second Maccabees, for example, are historical books. They belong in the collection of historical books. They are not the same genre as the Book of Wisdom and Sirach, which are wisdom books. Those two belong in the wisdom category. Baruch is a prophet that always follows Jeremiah because he was so closely related to Jeremiah, and so on. So, the different Deuterocanonical books belong to different genre categories, and they never circulated as a unit or as a collection in antiquity. So, when you read Protestant scholars on this, and even sometimes Catholic scholars, they will say broadly sweeping things

like, the Church Fathers did or didn't approve of the Apocrypha. Wait a second, there was no Apocrypha in the sense of a collection. It was just books like Judith, Tobit, First and Second Maccabees, and each one of those books has a separate history in terms of its approval by the church and how it was considered. And with some of them, certain church fathers said, yay, and certain church fathers said, nay. But it's ultimately the pope and the councils that decide that. But again, they are not a collection. Another misconception that a lot

of folks have is that there was a canon of Jesus' day, like all the Jews were agreed. And the usual proof for this is brought from the Jewish historian Josephus, who's, you know, we're indebted to him for most of our information about first century Judaism. So he was a contemporary of St. Paul. He lived through the destruction of Jerusalem. He fought first on the Jewish side, then on the Roman side, so he knew a lot about first century politics. And he retired to Rome on a Roman pension and wrote these voluminous books of history about all of Jewish history, but especially about the times that he was most familiar with, which thankfully for us

was the time of our Lord and the apostles. So Josephus has this one passage in his work called Against Apion. It's a kind of a defense of Judaism where he says that the Jews have 22 sacred books. And a lot of people latch onto that and look at what Josephus says, and hey, this is proof that all, you know, the Jews were all agreed. And so, and this is the Old Testament of Protestantism, and this is the modern Jewish Bible, it's Josephus' 22 books. The problem with that is you look at what Josephus says, and it's really hard to square the 22 books that he describes with the 39

books that are in Protestant Old Testaments and Jewish Bibles. And it really looks, honestly, like there's not a perfect match. We can kind of figure out what Josephus is talking about, but he probably either didn't have Job or Ecclesiastes. One of those was out. It's not clear that he had Esther. A bunch of things. So, if you're trying to use Josephus as proof that all the Jews were agreed on the Protestant canon in the time of Jesus, that's not going to work for you. No reputable scholar is going to make that argument.

The actual state of the case, Matt, was that the Jews were in rampant disagreement about which books were inspired and which weren't. You had the Sadducees who said it was only the five books of Moses. You had the Samaritans who said it's also only the five books of Moses, but their form of it, they had a slightly tweaked form of the Pentateuch. You had the Pharisees who kind of went with the 22 books idea that Josephus mentions, because Josephus was a Pharisee.

Then you had the Essenes who had their monastery at Qumran, for example, and they had books in their collection of scriptural books like Jubilees and First Enoch, which almost nobody accepts as canonical, and other works as well that they regarded as inspired. And Tobit, Tobit they had within their collection. So the Essings have a big canon, Pharisees have a medium canon, the Sadducees have a very small canon, and all the Jews are in disagreement. And who's going to solve that? Well, the Messiah is going to solve it.

Everybody's waiting for the Messiah to solve this and a dozen other issues like the calendar, and all of that came under binding and loosening. All of these different opinions came under binding and loosening. Jesus comes and He establishes, He has His own authority, establishes the authority of Peter and the apostles to bind and loose, which is the authority to make decisions about matters like this. What books are canonical? When should the feast days be observed?

All that stuff came underbinding and loosing. So the Lord taught the apostles by example, which books to quote as inspired, passed down in unwritten form down to the late fourth century when it starts to be written down. The key council to remember is the Council of Rome in 382 under Damasus I. That's the first time we get the Catholic canon in the form that we have it today. It's important to emphasize that, that every single book that Pope Damasus I kind of gave the stamp of approval to at the Council of Rome in 382 is exactly the canon that Catholics have. That we have today. Yeah, so we're talking already in the time of Saint Augustine and Saint Jerome,

the canon is established. I was shocked, Matt, when I got to the University of Notre Dame in the fall of 1999 and had to take a required course in patristics, and one of the things that we had to read was St. Augustine's classic On Christian Doctrine, which he wrote, obviously, in his own lifetime, but which continued to be the handbook for the interpretation of Scripture all the way through the medieval period. So, For Centuries, On Christian Doctrine was kind of like a central handbook on biblical interpretation for Catholic clergy, theologians, etc. I'm reading through St. Augustine and I get to his discussion of canon, and he says, you should accept the books which are revered by the older and more honorable churches over

those which are held by lesser churches, and you should accept the books that are accepted by the most rather than by just a few churches. And he says when you apply those principles, this is the list that you come up with, and even he gives a list just like we got it in Catholic Bibles today. But I'm reading this as a Calvinist. You got to understand Calvinists love Augustine, they revere Augustine. Calvin got his ideas about predestination from some of Augustine's writings. So Augustine is my hero, and I'm reading him and he's saying, Tobit, first to second back is like, no, this can't be true! He can't be accepting the Catholic

canon of scripture, but it's in Augustine. And then it's in Thomas Aquinas, it's in Bonaventure, you know, it's in the medieval doctors and elsewhere. I was just shocked. So you often have this Protestant polemic, right, that Catholics added the seven disputed books to the Old Testament at Trent. Yes. And this is the claim, because what they'll say is Trent was the first ecumenical council where these were defined. Even that is incorrect, because it was the Council of Florence in 1441 that was the first ecumenical council to list the canon as we have it. 1441 is before the Reformation breaks out. And the interesting thing about the Council of Florence

was it was very ecumenical, because the Greek emperor, remember there was still an Eastern emperor at that time because it wasn't until 1453 that Constantinople was captured by the Turks, so you still have that Eastern presence. And the emperor came over with the Eastern bishops, so the predominantly Greek-speaking bishops. So you had the Latins and the Greeks together with the emperor and the pope, just like ancient times at Florence. They hashed everything out and they actually reunited east and west.

And that's the way things should be. You say, well, why aren't we reunited today? Why is there still Eastern orthodoxy? Well, it's because when the decision was brought back by the Eastern bishops, the Eastern laity rebelled and then shortly after, you had the Turkish onslaught and it all became moot because they were under the heel of the Turks. But anyway, 1441, Florence, that's where they hammered out the common, and what they did was they just reaffirmed Rome 382. They reaffirmed Pope Damasus I.

So the Catholic canon has been around, reiterated by the saints, reiterated by councils, reiterated by popes through the centuries, long, long before the Reformation. So clearly, just as a matter of history, we did not add them to the Bible. They were there in the Catholic Church long before Protestantism arose. And there's only one book of the seven Deuterocanonical books that really impinges on any Protestant Catholic issue, and that's Second Maccabees, because the end of Second Maccabees 12 talks about prayers for the dead. And that implies that there's a place like purgatory, some place in the life to come where the prayers of the faithful who are living physically can help you get to heaven.

So it implies purgatory. But nothing else in the rest of, you know, the Deuterocanonical books, Tobit or Judith or Sirach, really even impinge on the issues that are between a prophet and Catholics. I think what happened was in the heat of debate, Luther, you know, arguing about indulgences which are connected to purgatory, Luther arguing about indulgences which are connected to purgatory, because if that damage to our soul is not healed on this earth, it's got to be healed somewhere else, and that's purgatory. And there's passages of Scripture that, to me at least, seem strongly to support the idea of purgatory. But anyway, Luther was trying to get out of that, and because 2 Maccabees 12 was so strongly in favor of prayers of the dead, he adopted kind of an extreme defense by saying, well, 2 Maccabees isn't canonical.

Yeah. And he fell back on the Jewish canon. And he even said things regarding the Book of James, I believe. I'll throw Jimmy in the stove. Something to that effect. Called it an epistle of straw because it contradicted his understanding of faith alone. James uses the term faith alone, but only to deny it. It's like, you're not saved by faith alone.

So yeah. It's like you're not saved by faith alone. So yeah. It's pretty wild. I mean, I know the response from a thoughtful Protestant is, we don't follow the Protestant reformers. We follow the Bible. Fair enough. But when you look at some of the antics that Luther got into, it was pretty bad.

It is. Yeah. There's a collection of Luther saying, I think it's called Luther and His Own Words. I think it was put together by a own words, I think was put together by a Catholic priest. It's still in print. You can find copies on Amazon.

So it's hilarious. I feel badly reading it, but it's all the most outrageous things that Luther said that were collected over the years. Well, you have done really well. We only have one more, one more. And after that, there's no more misunderstandings. Protestants get everything else right. Obviously we could have come up with more. And it kind of touches upon what we've already talked about. How do Protestants misunderstand? What do they get wrong about justification and salvation?

Oh, I thought we were going to talk about theraments. Oh, wow, we have two more. Two more, yeah. Which one you're gonna take first? Well, let's take the sacraments first. Yep. I would say what, you know, and again, like you said earlier, not trying to dump on our separated brethren, right? They got everything wrong.

They don't have everything wrong. They have a lot right in their brothers in Christ. We share the bonds of the Holy Spirit. But I would say from a Protestant perspective, the sacraments are things that we do, and from a Catholic perspective, the sacraments are things that God does. And I think that's the fundamental misunderstanding. Now if you take that question to the Scriptures and say, what impression do the Scriptures give? Do the Scriptures give the impression that the sacraments are something that we do or that they're something

that God does to us? I think that you're going to come out on the side of saying, hmm, Scriptures make it sound like the sacraments are things that, where God is acting on us. Because St. Peter says things like, baptism now saves you, okay? St. Paul says in Romans 6, you are buried with him in baptism, and so you'll be raised to a new life. It makes it sound like baptism really does something to you. In Acts, Peter says, repent and be baptized, and you will receive the Holy Spirit. Again, that makes it sound like baptism is conferring the Holy Spirit on you, which I think it does. I think it's the obvious meaning, I think that's true. And you look all through Acts and you have the laying on of hands, sometimes

in terms of confirmation, sometimes in terms of bestowing Holy orders, but the Holy Spirit is conveyed by the laying on of hands. And again, that's a divine action that's taking place upon you. Now, in Protestantism, virtually all the sacraments are regarded as, you know, and again, this is a generalization because as you pointed out, there's Protestantisms, right? So, but for most American Protestants, the sacraments are things that we do. So, my understanding of baptism was it was an external profession of my faith in Christ. And really, my family did it, because I was baptized as an infant. But basically,

the attitude was the parents step forward and on behalf of their child, make an act of faith in Christ on that child's behalf. And then the external sign of that act of faith is the water baptism. And likewise in the Lord's Supper, we would have clung to those words that say, as often as you do this, you proclaim the Lord's death

and resurrection until you come. So the Lord's Supper was an external act by which we proclaimed our faith in Christ, but again, it was something that we did. And in neither baptism nor in the Eucharist do we believe that God did something to us through that ceremony. It was an outward sign of our faith. So now, some Protestants are going to be different. There's Protestants who have a strong view of baptism that believe in... You know, baptismal regeneration is the technical term. They do believe that baptism does something to you. And there are some high church Lutherans and Anglicans who probably believe that God acts through the Eucharist,

for example. But for the most part, and those were the only two sacraments we had, baptism, or they were the only two things that we called sacraments. Now, in hindsight, I realized that even though we called baptism and Lord's Supper, or Eucharist, we called them sacraments. Our view of them did not even qualify as being a sacrament, according to Catholic theology, because in Catholic theology, they are external signs through which God works, okay? And they're primarily a divine act. And, you know, this is huge, and this, you know, I gave a talk that I give on this based on John 9, where Jesus says we must work the works of God while it is huge, and I gave a talk that I give on this based on John 9, where Jesus says, we must work the works of God while it is light. Night is coming when no one can work.

And He heals that man born blind in a way that's a typology or an image of foreshadowing of Christian baptism. That man is born in darkness, in John 9, that's like we're all born in the darkness of original sin, and then we wash and we see the light, you know? That's the sacrament of illumination, which is sacrament of baptism, which is a work of God. Now, oftentimes, Protestants and Catholics talk past each other when they're talking about the sacraments, because the Protestants are thinking these are things that we do to profess our faith in God, and the Catholics are thinking these are things that God does to us. And so when we say something like, we're saved by the sacraments, that offends Protestant sensibilities, because they hear Pelagianism. They're like, oh, I go to mass, I get myself baptized, I go to confession and do these other sacraments.

I perform these rituals and I'm saved by performing these rituals. But that's not the Catholic mindset. The Catholic mindset and belief is that in baptism the Holy Spirit acts on us. Baptism is something that God does to me. Confirmation is something that, again, the Holy Spirit is doing to me. In the Eucharist, Jesus comes to me and assimilates me to Himself. In reconciliation, Jesus absolves me. So, yes, there are physical postures and there are words and things that we do to dispose ourselves to receive it.

Yeah. Right? But it's always the action of the Holy Spirit upon me. Perceptive. Right. So it's like throwing yourself in front of a bus. The bus does all the work. Right? Well, that's a good analogy. There are things that you could do to dispose yourself of the bus. So yeah, so going to mass on a Sunday and coming down and sticking out my tongue is like throwing myself in front of the bus.

But the bus of Jesus, you know... It's far less damage. Right. Yeah. You know, it hits me. And so if I think that... I think that if Protestants and Catholics understood that distinction... That's really helpful.

I've never heard that before, and that really does feel like the crux of it. Right. Then help them understand that we're not plagiarized when we say that we're saved by the sacraments, because we believe that God acts through them. And all salvation is the grace of God. It's all the grace of God. Even our response is empowered, preceded by and then empowered by the working of the Holy Spirit. Now, when do we have a sort of universal agreement in the church on the number of the sacraments? Boy, that's out of my league because I'm a Bible scholar. I'm just an unfrozen caveman Bible scholar. It develops. I know it develops in the early church, but I couldn't tell you.

Yeah, yeah, that's okay. Thanks. That's a question for a church historian. It becomes clear, but it's another one of those things that it's the grammar of the faith that becomes clear as the church moves through history. Yeah. Well, it's also fascinating too, that the Orthodox have the same amount of sacraments,

isn't it? Right, right. You know, they might call them something different, but it's the same thing Yeah, it's almost like if you think of Protestantism orthodoxy and Catholicism as three brothers Mm-hmm and Protestantism is the youngest brother right the older brothers are in a much better position to tell you what they remember than That's true. That's very much true And you know that's why a lot of people lot of Protestants come back, and there's a fair number of Protestants who are converting to Orthodoxy because they're looking for that. I considered Orthodoxy for a while, my wife

and I did, but the breaking up into national groups did not speak to my heart. To me, that perpetuated Babel, that perpetuated the divisions of humanity that began at the Tower of Babel. And if you compare the Tower of Babel to Pentecost, you know, Pentecost is the reverse of Babel, and that's implicit in our liturgy because one of the readings for the Feast of Pentecost, well, like one of the vigil readings is from Genesis 11 and the Tower of Babel story. And so, my understanding, the church does many things. The church is primarily to reconcile us with God, but the church is also to reconcile us with each other. The church is to reunite

the human family. It's not its primary purpose, but it is one of its purposes, okay, after reconciliation to God, then to be reconciled with each other. And when you have autocephalous national churches, you can't get the reconciliation, and it just manifests itself in so many examples throughout the history of Orthodoxy with the inability to coordinate and act together as a unified church because of the lack of recognition of an authority figure with teeth, so to speak, that has true power to bring together. And sometimes, frankly, that's the power of coercion. It's the power of like, he says it and I gotta do it.

And this is why I don't resent the papacy for having that power because I've seen so many Protestant ecumenical movements and I always look at what they're saying, like this is never gonna work until somebody has the teeth to really make a decision and compel some folks to just have to put up with it. I'm sorry sorry you lost.

Like you meant well, you had a great argument, but your argument's just wrong, you know? That reminds me, I once knew a girl who was part of an independent, fundamentalist Baptist church and we... Aren't they all? Yeah, we went out for breakfast. And I said, so who's like, like who's in charge?

And she gave me this short spiel about, well, no one's in charge. And I'm like, okay, but like who's in charge? And she went, that guy. Right, right, right. That's always so, in fact, it's worse when there's in these groups, like you mentioned, I've run into other like cult, even cult like denominations, but that's the case. The more they deny that somebody's in charge, the more oppressive. It's almost like communism. Like communism is in denial about anybody. We're all equal, all the animals are equal,

except if some animals are more equal than others, right? Yes, yes, yes. But the denial of it. Animal farm, just go to. Exactly, yeah. But the denial of it makes it worse. So under communism, you have even worse oppression than when you had a monarchy where it was just out in the open.

It's like, yeah, the guy with all the fancy clothes, he's in charge. At least it was up in front. And then also there was a kind of noblesse oblige about that. It's like, well, the nobles have an obligation to be kind towards the serfs, you know? And so at least you could ask for some mercy, but a communism is like no acknowledgement that those in charge are in charge and then also no mercy for the poor, you know, and there's ecclesiastical versions of that,

but I'm sorry to digress so much, but that's, yeah, anyway. All right, that's good, that's good, I think. Let's do the final point, and that is to say what Protestants misunderstand about salvation in Christianity. Oh, okay. And this has to do with, I wanna address a couple of things, faith alone. Yeah.

One saved, always saved. I'd like to kind of address, and then maybe the assurance that we Catholics should have, the appropriate assurance Catholics should have in salvation. Yeah, yeah. Well, Dr. Hahn has some really wonderful writings on this. I'd recommend folks check out his approach.

And Michael Barber also has written a great essay on the role of faith and works in salvation, which is in a collection... Boy, who is the... Maybe it's Zondervan in their Four Views. It's Baker and Zondervan has a Four Views series. And there's one volume that's called like Four Views of the Role of Works. And Dr. Michael Barber has an essay in that. And it's one of the best things I've

ever read in my whole life on the relationship between faith and works and how that plays out in the Christian life. And even the Protestant contributors to that for views, I were like, wow, Barber's pretty good here. So anyway, so know, I'll do my best as an Old Testament scholar and as a convert. But first of all, salvation by faith alone is unbiblical. Okay, the only time that that phrase, faith alone, actually occurs in the New Testament is actually in James, where James is saying, we're not saved by faith alone. Even St. Paul, you know, it's just amazing, like the book of

Romans is often blamed for us, you know, for Protestants, Luther in particular, for coming up with the idea that we're saved by faith alone. Now, Paul definitely says that we're saved by faith, but he never says by faith alone. And there's passages in Romans, Romans itself, that are just so striking. Romans 2, much of Romans 2, for example, sounds like James. I mean, look at some of the things that St. Paul says, Romans 2, 6, He will render to every man according to his works. Hold on, is that Paul or is that James? To those who by patience and well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality,

he will give eternal life. But for those who are factious and do not obey the truth, but obey wickedness, there'll be wrath and fury. Wow, that sounds very much like we're going to be judged by what we actually do. And he goes on, and in verse 13, he says a very Jamesian, or you might say Jacobian thing, because you know the Apostle James, really, Jacob? Yeah, you knew that. He says, it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the

doers of the law who will be justified. Romans 2.13. Ouch! And then, you know, this is another thing about salvation by faith alone. I may have shared in a previous episode with you, Matt, how I had this training session when I was being taught how to evangelize in the inner city, where we knocked on the door of this middle-aged woman and my evangelism trainer. We went upstairs and sat on our couches and he led her through what we called the Roman road, which is these verses taken from the Epistle to Romans, and led her in the sinner's prayer. And then after she prayed to receive Jesus, he asked her, now that you've prayed to receive Jesus, if you went out and robbed a bank and shot people, would you still go to heaven? And she said, no. And he said, yes, you would, because salvation

is by faith alone, and once saved, always saved. So now that you've placed your faith in Jesus, you can never lose your salvation, etc. And what you do doesn't matter and can't result in your damnation. And I'm listening to this go along, and I'm thinking, wait a second, I agree with the lady, because I don't think you can just pray to receive Jesus and then go out and shoot people and rob banks and be assured of your salvation. But what came back to me was a number of Scripture verses, one from the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 7, 21.

Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. And then in Luke 9, where our Lord says, If anyone comes after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me. Both of those passages, and those passages are kind of representative of Jesus' style of teaching. Jesus never tells people, oh, salvation is easy. In fact, he tells them it's hard. He says, straight and narrow is the road that leads to salvation, and broad is the way that leads to destruction. Many there are who go on it. So Jesus never does a soft sell, he never does a bait and switch. Jesus in all of his proclamation never tells people, oh, this is really easy, you make an act of faith and what you do doesn't matter,

really easy, you make an act of faith and what you do doesn't matter, etc. Jesus is up front. This is going to involve suffering, you're going to need to follow me, you also are going to need to take up your cross, etc., etc. And Matt, in all honesty, and before you and every one of my Christian brothers and sisters and before the whole world, I confess that I was uncomfortable with the fact that the way that we evangelized as evangelical Protestants in terms of salvation by faith alone did not match the way that Jesus proclaimed the Gospel. And I could tell from the Gospels that Jesus was upfront about the demands of discipleship, and He was calling people to what Dietrich Bonhoeffer would call costly discipleship upfront, and there was total transparency from the beginning.

And that really shook me up about what does salvation by faith alone mean? And especially after that experience with that evangelism trainer who was showing me how to preach the gospel ostensibly. And that started me on a journey. After that experience of evangelism, I began to really ask myself, like, what do we as Protestants mean by salvation by faith alone? What do we mean by that? Do we mean something as crass as what he told that woman in her upstairs apartment that you can just go out and shoot people and it's not gonna affect your salvation? If that's not what we mean... And I think most Protestants would hear that, it's like, no, we don't mean that. We're not at that extreme. They'd probably say something like, well, saving faith will necessarily manifest itself in works and so on. Well, once you start making

those nuances and those qualifications, you're moving towards a Catholic position. And after four years of reading on this and thinking about it and reading the Scriptures and different Catholic and Protestant writers, I came to the conclusion that one of two things is the case. Either salvation by faith alone is just wrong and contrary to explicit statements of Scripture, like those that I've mentioned, or by the time you adjust what you mean by it... And you find yourself up in Catholic land.

Yeah, yeah. I like to say you back your way into the Catholic position by the kitchen door. That's basically, you kind of like work yourself back, because you find yourself in the Catholic. Oh, here I am. So yeah, that's it. Give me an example how that happens, the backing in. The backing in. Well, in the year 2000, there was a big signing between... There's the joint statement on justification between the Catholic Church and the World

Lutheran Federation or something like that. I'm not getting the right acronym, but one of the Lutheran worldwide families. And we had that. And I was present in South Bend when the Catholic Bishop of South Bend and the Missouri Synod Lutheran Bishop of that region, I don't know what his C was, came together and we had a joint celebration of our common baptisms. We couldn't celebrate the Eucharist together, but the Catholic Bishop and the Lutheran Bishop both came. And I remember the Catholic Bishop, who was Bishop Darcy of Fort Wayne, South Bend, that the Lutheran bishop led a very, very nice prayer at this joint service. And so as he was headed back to his seat, the Catholic bishop, Darcy, leaned over to him and said, that was a nice prayer.

And the Lutheran bishop said, that's because we're the true Catholics. So anyway, it's kind of interesting. But anyway, I respect Protestants who, you know, high church Protestants, and some Lutherans are like this, who really believe that they are the remnant of the Catholic Church. I think there's a kind of intellectual honesty that they have that I respect, you know. But anyway, where was I going with that? So that's an example of, you know, where by the time you nuance what you mean by salvation, by faith alone, you come into agreement with the Catholic position. Now what I want to make clear is that the Catholic position is not that we are saved

by our own effort. That's Pelagianism, and that's what many classic Protestants, Protestants who hew closely to the Reformation and to the teaching of Luther and Calvin, they think that the Catholic Church to this day teaches a form of Pelagianism whereby we save ourselves or that it's faith and works, and so it's partly God and it's partly us. Right. 50-50. 50-50. And certain things that Catholics say can be misconstrued this way, and Catholics

can be confused about it. I don't think there's perfect clarity among many Catholics about how exactly this works. But there is a Pentecostal solution to all these arguments about what Paul means by justification, sanctification, and it's in Romans 8. The key to this whole argument, is it faith, it's his works, the key to the whole thing is the working of the Holy Spirit. And it's in Romans 8, and it's not, I don't think it's that hard really to understand. And St. Paul says, God has done what the law, by which I think he means the old covenant, the Mosaic covenant, weakened by the flesh, this is Romans 8.3, people will recognize,

could not do by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin. He condemns sin in the flesh in order that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit." That's it. And then later he says, those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind and the spirit is life and peace.

And then in verse 12, he says, So then, brethren, we are deathers not to the flesh to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh, you will die, but if by the spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. And that's key, and that's so poignant here at the beginning of Lent, putting to death the deeds of the body, because putting to death in Latin is mortis facio, that's where we get mortification, that's literally to put to death. So during Lent, we practice these acts of self-denial where we try to kill off, okay, our tendencies towards sin.

We try to tame and reduce the power of concupiscence in our life and eliminate it to the degree possible by mortifying ourselves, by putting to death these sinful tendencies, our disordered passions, our besetting sins, etc. But it's all through the working of the Spirit. So yes, we are saved by faith, not by faith alone, but saved by faith. Faith, I like to say, is the hand that we reach out to receive the Holy Spirit, which is given to us by God ordinarily through the sacraments, especially through baptism and then renewed through the reception of the Eucharist. So faith is the hand, faith is the act of reception, faith is the openness to God that

allows Him to give us this gift which is His very self, which is the Holy Spirit. And then we're saved by faith but not faith alone because the Holy Spirit now is dwelling within us, and it's the Holy Spirit now is dwelling within us and it's the Holy Spirit that does the works. That's why Paul says the righteous requirement of the law is fulfilled in us who walk according to the Spirit. The Holy Spirit enables us to do what we cannot do in our own power,

which is follow the twin command of love, love of God and love of neighbor, which sums up the whole law. So the Spirit-filled person actually, ironically, fulfills the law by loving God and loving neighbor, not with their own resources, but by being docile to the power of God that dwells in them through the Holy Spirit. So it's not my work, this is why St. Paul says, it's not I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And then the corollary of that is, my good works are not my own, but they're the work of the Holy Spirit. And so we don't,

that's why boasting is ruled out, right, as St. Paul says, because it's not by our own power. It's ruled out, right, as St. Paul says, because it's not by our own power. Every good thing that we do is actually worked by the Holy Spirit who dwells in us. So we give praise and glory to God who's working in us. We don't get arrogant, etc. We thank God. If every good thing that we do, we should thank God for because we only do it by His power through the Holy Spirit. And this resolves the whole conflict, I think.

Let me put it far less eloquently, and you tell me if I'm not a heretic. I think sometimes Protestants, when they hear works, they think of it like we said earlier, tradition. It's like, okay, there's this list, but it's not clear, and so therefore we can't trust it. Likewise, they hear works, and it sounds like we're saying there's a specific amount of

good things you have to do, and if that is outweighed by the bad things, you go to hell. But really, the Catholic Church teaches, yeah, faith, so being brought into right relationship with God, ordinarily through baptism, plus not mortal sin. That's it, and you're saved. Like, once you're given the gift of salvation, unless you willingly reject it, and you're saved. Like once you're given the gift of salvation, unless you willingly reject it, you will be saved. So theoretically, there could be an example where someone's baptized and doesn't do anything that's discernibly good. You could think of someone who's seriously mentally handicapped or something like that and is

like confined to a room for a short amount of time before they die Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah, I don't know I just think being that overly simple at least about it can help put them. Yeah. No that that's that's helpful at the same time, you know that that could be misunderstood because it would be a grave sin of omission if you live for 20 years as a Fully capable, fully capable Catholic adult. And didn't do anything. And did nothing but fail. I agree with you. That's why I agree with you. You gotta be a little bit careful.

You do, you do. And that's why I try to clarify with these severely mentally. Because yeah, I mean, it's clear from the scriptures, if you fail to take care of your family, right, like you're worse than an unbeliever, isn't that the line? Yeah, right, right. That could be a mortal sin of omission. Right. So isn't that the line, worse than an unbeliever? Yeah, yeah. So if you're worse than an unbeliever, and an unbeliever is damned, I'm not sure how that makes you in any better position, right? So yeah, right there, you have kind of biblical

proof that sins of omission can be mortal in nature. So I agree with that. I just was trying to push against the misconception that there's some list of things I've got to do. There's no way I can know that. And therefore, I can never be certain that I've done enough. Right, no, no. It's a daily joyful walk with the Holy Spirit. And it's just being docile to the Holy Spirit on a daily basis.

And not stressing and not getting into navel gazing. You know, the catechism sums up the entire discussion of justification and sanctification by quoting one of the most tear-jerking, sorry, I've got gotta remain composed because this passage from Tereza Lesue always makes me lose it, because it's just one of the most sublime things that any of the saints have ever written. But the catechism quotes Tereza Lesue, and she says something, I'm gonna try to get it as accurately I can. She says, in the evening of this life, I do not want to appear before you with my own merits, all

of which are nothing but dirty rags in your sight. But I wish in the evening of this life to center myself here. You're good. To practice some centering practices. She says, in this eating of this life, I want to appear before you clothed in your own righteousness and have no merit except what you yourself

have given to me. I'm not getting it precise, but that is the gist of what she's saying there. And I encourage folks to look that up in the Catechum's discussion of justification and sanctification. I think that's so beautiful. That's the path. That's the little way.

That's the path of the little flower. She has such total confidence in God as her father and such humility and understanding of herself as God's little daughter. She's not worried about her salvation because she knows that the father loves her, but she's not saying that, oh, this justifies me going off and doing whatever I want and living the Christian life and not progressing in Christian discipleship, she just wants to receive from God His own righteousness. She wants to receive it from Christ. And that really is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the righteousness of Christ. And He has poured out to us so abundantly if we will receive Him through faith. And faith is important.

And what we can learn from our Protestant brothers and sisters is the importance of faith, which we sometimes do not emphasize enough in Catholic piety. Like in, you know, for example, in the reception of the Eucharist, the subjective effects, the personal effects of what the Eucharist will do for us in our lives depends on our dispositions. And so if we bring small faith to the Eucharist, we're not gonna see the fruit of Christ's Eucharistic presence as if we bring big faith. And in prosenitism, there can be a salutary emphasis

on really trusting God and making large acts of faith for God to work in your life. You know, an emphasis on that subjective, you know, disposing yourself to God's working. And sometimes we just, you know, as Catholics, we'll just say, well, objectively, the real presence is there. It's there whether you believe it or not, you know, just come forward and receive and He'll do His work.

Without emphasizing that, it really is important to dispose ourselves to the graces, to come and expect change. I mean, you know, I'm a daily communicant, many people are, we can go to mass on a daily basis and sometimes it's like it gets into a routine, and like, well, if I'm receiving Jesus every day, how come I'm not more, you know, being changed more? Well, part of it is because I go to daily Mass, I don't expect to come out any differently.

I can drive down to St. Peter's, I go in, I receive our Eucharistic Lord, I run out, run back up the hill to St. Paul's Center, go about my work, and I'm not expecting any kind of radical changes. Part of it, it's not the only thing, but part of it is we don't receive because we don't expect, we don't dispose of ourselves with faith. I think for myself, if I approached the Lord in the Eucharist on a daily basis with greater confidence in Him, it's something that I need to work on. I think I would see more fruit in my life. You know, so our Protestant brothers and sisters can encourage us in that.

But boy, where were we going with that? I wanted to touch on one final thing before we wrap up, and that is the assurance we can have in our salvation, right? Because as Ludwig Ott points out, and then I the assurance we can have in our salvation, right? Because as Ludwig Ott points out, and then I think it's the sixth session at the Council of Trenton on Justification, Ott says the Church doesn't say we cannot have an assurance of our salvation, but he makes the distinction between sort of moral certainty and the certainty of faith. I think that's important to realize as well. It's not like Catholics are walking around

thinking they're going to hell. I mean, they might think that, but it's only if they have good reason to. Yeah, that would be disorder. That would be something to take up in spiritual traction if you're running around thinking that you're going to hell. I mean, yeah, no, I think that's very good. What I would say is, this is where the theological virtue of hope

comes into play. Yeah, we don't have a moral certainty of our salvation nor can we like do- We have a moral- Well, okay, I'm sorry, yeah. We can have a moral certainty. I mean, every time you receive the Eucharist, you're essentially stating that you're in a state of grace.

Right? Yeah, yeah. If you're in a state of grace, right? Right, yeah, yeah. If you're thinking about it. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, so how do we want to phrase it? You don't have an absolute certainty or some kind of mathematical certainty of one's salvation. But at the same time, in the Christian life, it is a virtue to have a lively confidence in your eternal salvation that is part of the theological virtue of hope. So faith, you know, people get faith and hope confused, and we use the terms interchangeably

in much of, you know, Christian colloquial discourse, but faith has to do primarily with what's been accomplished in Christ. So I have confidence that Christ has died for my sins, etc., my salvation has been won on the cross. Hope has to do with our expectation for the future, what is yet to come. And so it's a virtue, an aspect of growing in our relationship with Christ, an aspect of our growing in holiness to have an ever-increasing joyful confidence in our eternal reward and our eternal beatitude that never devolves into a swagger or a...

Presumption? devolves into a swagger or a presumption exactly that you know some kind of that I've got it all together or I've arrived. We have to maintain that attitude of St. Paul and Philippians that I'm always striving forward. But striving with hope, with confidence and knowing that God is our loving Father who wants us to be saved even more than we do. Yeah, I think that line from Psalm 51 is important. Restore to me the joy of my salvation, yeah? Yeah, absolutely. Kimberly Hahn talked about that in their book, Rome Sweet Home with Scott, that we ought

to have a joy in the salvation that Christ has won for us. Right, yeah. And the same Psalm, you know, restore to me, you know, take not your Holy Spirit from me. Yes. Which presumes that we have the Holy Spirit. Yes. And joy is one of the fruit of the Holy Spirit. And I think we're talking about that, love, joy and peace at the beginning of this conversation. Yeah, look at that, just come and talk about it together. Okay, one final time,

tell people why they should get your book on the Jubilee. Oh, please, please, get the book on the Jubilee, because it's, as far as I know, it's the only book out there that explains the biblical theology of the Jubilee. It's not a long read, it's like a three-hour read, and I just want to encourage every Catholic, really every Christian, take advantage of this holy year, 2025. Soak it all up. It's not going to last forever.

This may be the last one that you're going to have in your lifetime. All these graces are there. It's objectively there whether you understand it or not, but it's so much richer if you understand what's going on. I mean, I show in the book, for example, that the Jubilee year came every 50 years for the ancient Israelites, but they didn't practice it consistently. And so the prophets had to look forward to the Messiah as the one who would bring it. That's what Isaiah's talking about in Isaiah 61 when he says, the Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. It's talking about the Messiah announcing the Jubilee year. And intentionally, that's the passage that Jesus begins His ministry

with in Luke 4 when He goes to His hometown, Nazareth. He preaches from Isaiah 61 and says, the shortest mic drop homily of all time, this scripture has been fulfilled this day in your hearing. Okay? Drop the mic. I am the fulfillment of Isaiah 61, but what that means is, I am the Messiah who's come to bring the eternal Jubilee year. And the Jews were not, you know, completely boneheaded about what the Jubilee meant. The Essenes knew that the coming Jubilee year was going to be primarily spiritual and that what the Messiah was going to bring was freedom from the debt of sin and from slavery to Satan. Not money debt, not human slavery, the debt of sin and slavery to Satan.

If you look in Luke 4 and 5, Jesus delivers on those immediately. He goes to Capernaum, casts a demon out of a guy in the middle of the synagogue. Interesting. The next chapter, they lower the paralytic on the mat, and he tells the man, son, your sins are forgiven you, right? So that's what the Essenes, which was a major group of Jews, was expecting. You find it in the Dead Sea Scrolls. There's a document in the Dead Sea Scrolls called 11 Q-Malchizedek, where they talk about their Jubilee expectations around this messianic,

divine Melchizedek figure who's going to come at the end of time according to the weeks of years that are predicted in Daniel 9. So anyway, I lay that out all in the book, so you can see that if we understand our Lord's ministry in terms of Jewish expectations of the Jubilee year and the Jubilee theme going all the way back to the ministry of Moses, that Jesus comes and He delivers, and then He gives His Jubilee powers, His Jubilee powers to forgive the debt of sin, to release people from slavery to sin, He entrusts that to the apostles who pass it on to their successors down to the present day, 2025, and Francis,

the successor of Peter, and our bishops and every diocese, the successors, the apostles. And so the sacraments are Jubilee powers of Christ, and these Jubilee practices are rooted in this wonderful tradition of the people of God that goes all the way back to this year of freedom that would come around once in a lifetime for the ancient Israelites. But I also have practical suggestions in the book about how to live the Jubilee year better. And yeah, please, please, please get the book. In three hours, it'll make your experience of 2025 so much richer.

Like, oh, I see this now. I understand this now. And you can lean into it and it's gonna it's gonna change your life. It's gonna change your family's life, it's gonna change your parish's life, it's gonna change your diocese's experience, it can have a ripple effect that's gonna expand out from you and just have such a huge impact. I want to tell you about Hello, which is the number one downloaded prayer app in the world. It's outstanding. Hello.com.com.

slash Matt Fradd sign up over there right now and you will get the first three months for free. That's like a lot of time. You can decide whether it's useful to you or not, whether it's helpful. If you don't like it, you can always quit. Hello.com. slash Matt Fradd. I use it. My family uses it. It's fantastic. There are over 10,000 audio guided prayers, meditations, and music, including Mylofi. Hello has been downloaded over 15 million times in 150 different countries. It helps you pray, helps you meditate, helps you sleep better. It helps you build a daily routine

and a habit of prayer. There's honestly so much excellent stuff on this app that it's difficult to get through it all. Just go check it out. Hello.com slash Matt Fred. The link is in the description below. It even has an entire section for kids. So if you're a parent, you could play little Bible stories for them at night. It'll help them pray. Fantastic. Hello.com slash Matt Fred.

All right. So this is our after hours segment with Dr. John Bergsmoh, where we take questions from our beautiful supporters who are all very attractive and very handsome. Sounds good to me. Yeah. Aaron says, in what way should a married couple pray anything specific for a daily prayer time together?

Oh, the rosary is always a good bet. Can I tell you why I think that praying with... Here's how I think praying with your spouse will fail. If you think that you have to feel a certain way when you pray with her, that it's supposed to be some intimate ad lib, then you'll feel like you're failing 98% of the time. Don't you think? Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah, and I would also say, you know, it's... couples ought not to feel like they have an obligation to have intense prayer times together.

I think that's too much pressure on the relationship. Sometimes, you know, prayer can be very personal, and sometimes even with one's wife, it's hard to be completely transparent before the Lord and so on. But prayer together is obviously good. It can be a good thing, it can be a strengthening thing. And yeah, you know, the, the rosary is a good, a good place to start, Divine Mercy Chapel, I mean, all these wonderful recited prayers that were great for a couple of people. Dr. Bob Schuette suggested this, and I think it's excellent. He says, so when you, he's like, here's the way you can pray with your spouse. So the husband leads, and you put your hand on your wife, you know, and you say, Lord, I thank you for my wife.

A couple of words, nothing more than 20 seconds, you know? Wife does the same thing, you know, thank you for Matt, bless him. So you're thanking and you're asking God's blessing. And then the two of you say, one, our father. And you don't have to feel anything. It's okay if you feel like you're saying the same thing every day. That's okay. Just do that. And I really, really appreciated that. Yeah?

Yeah. That's nice. Again, I'm not telling people they have to do that. I just say, if you want to pray with the spell, it's like, that's a way you could do it. Yeah. Because I do think, like, it's probably true in most of life. If you think you're failing at something, you'll quit it. Right.

And if you think you're failing at Bible reading, you'll quit it. If you think you're failing at prayer, you'll quit it because you don't like feeling like a failure. Right. But if I can just realize that my morning meditation is a success if I sit and don't get up, and I try, I bring my kind of intellectual faculty and I try to do it. That's a success. Doesn't matter how I feel.

Don't you think? Yeah, yeah, that's good. People should know that we've been talking for over four hours. If I'm rambling, I would like to apologize. This is the aftermath. Okay. The aftermath.

The afterm-aftermath. Yeah, I like that. Noah, and there's a lot of these, so feel free. We don't have to give exhaustive answers to them. What does Catholic financial charity look like? What does balance between giving to the church, mission trips, the poor, gifts, for friends and family look like? Yeah, I'm not an expert on that. Other people are. There's Catholic financial authors, so what I'm going to share is just very basic. But a priest once told me Catholics should tithe, and I totally agree, all Christians should tithe. And he recommended 5% to your local parish, 4% to your own apostolates and discretionary things that you want to

support like couple to couple league or something like that, and 1% to the diocese. And I think that's a pretty good rule of thumb. And I've tried to practice that. And yeah, but you know, St. Josemaria said, think of yourself as father of a large and poor family, and consider the church's needs as another child in the family. So you would use, in that kind of situation, what would you do? You'd use your resources well, you know, but generously and not self-indulgently, right?

So, but yeah, there's a lot of good stuff has been written on this. St. Josemaria also pointed out that detachment from our goods is not in direct relationship to how many goods we have. He used to tell the story of a beggar in Madrid who had a single silver spoon. He'd hide this silver spoon, he'd go into the soup kitchen, look around, look both ways, pull out a silver spoon, and eat a soup with the spoon,, look both ways, pull out a slur spoon and eat a soup with the spoon, look both ways and put it back.

And his spoon was his precious, and there was no detachment at all from his one possession. On the other hand, there was a wealthy Marquesa who had inherited all this property from her ancestors, and just lived a very simple life, ate a simple diet, and sponsored religious works and gave generously to convents and so on out of her wealth. And she was living in detachment. But we should guard against using that as some kind of excuse. Oh, yeah, well, I could become extremely wealthy then and indulge, you know. We keep looking for rationalizations

for personal indulgement or... Indulgence, yeah. Yeah. So indulgence in the wrong sense. The wrong kinds of indulgences. It reminds me of how people will point to Christ in the temple and justify their anger. Right. Like, no, no, he's the God man. You're not. He's a lot more likely to be able to be angry and be good.

Cedric says, what leverage does the Pines for the Aquinas team have on you to get you to come on so often? Blink three times if you need help. Thanks for all your precious insights and teachings. God bless you. Oh, thank you, Cedric. Sean Morrissey says, will there be a second volume to a Catholic Introduction to the Bible? There absolutely will be. That's probably the question that I get asked the most in all venues that I speak at. I am hard at work. Dr. Petrie has finished the drafts of all the chapters on the 27 books of the New Testament. Those are in my possession, and I am going through

and humbly condensing them, trying to... We got to save on size. We're over to be condensing them. We've got to save on size. We're over the word count. So I'm trying to cut down word count while respecting all of the amazing content that Dr. Petri has put into the book and adding a few insights here and there from areas that I'm conversant in. So hard at work on getting it out. and I hope to have it done. We hope

to have it in the hands of Ignatius by the end of the summer. Wow, really? Yeah. How will that not just be another Catholic Bible study at that point? Like the Ignatius study Bible, I mean? Well, study Bible is a very different genre from an introduction. An introduction is really a textbook. You're not going through each chapter and verse. You're just giving what, summaries of each book?

Or... Yeah, yeah. Actually, we do a little more chapter and verse kind of stuff than maybe an introduction ought to. So it's pushing the line, it's pushing the genre line almost into a commentary on the New Testament. But yeah, it's gonna be a reference work that really is for use in seminaries and theology programs, theology departments and stuff like that. For a scripture where a study Bible is more for devotional reading, primarily. Yeah. Fair enough. Zachary Herron says, Dr. B, would you pray for me? I'm coming from a Calvinist background, but I'm at the point where I need to join Christ's church. This brings my wife great distress. Converting would be

throwing a grenade into the room. I've come to think the worst thing to do is just abide in Christ for a long while until life settles. Would you have any advice for this situation?" Again Zachary is his name. Yeah. Yeah. That's a heart-rending situation to be in when you're not in union with your spouse. But advice, yeah, first of all, pray a lot and ask for the working of the Holy Spirit.

Pray to your guardian angel and the guardian angel of your wife and ask for the guardian angels to negotiate and bring the two of you together. This is again from St. Josemaria, is to get the guardian angel of your loved one on your side. I would say you can delay and talk, but at a certain point, you do have to act. And that's not a... Sometimes that's not easy to decide, but what I would do in... What was our friend's name? Zachary. Yeah. Zachary here. Yeah. What I would recommend for Zach is he needs some spiritual direction in his immediate

situation. So I would encourage him to reach out to a priest, a mature layman, and start meeting regularly to talk about his spiritual life and the situation, and then together with his director, discern when the appropriate time is to enter into the church. I think there's an appropriate time to wait and talk with one's spouse and see if one's spouse wants to join one in entering in the church. But that can't go on forever. What do you do if the spouse says,

I'll leave you if you become Catholic? I mean, I'm just thinking of an extreme situation, because he does say it would be like throwing a grenade into the room. Right. I would make clear to one's spouse that you will always be faithful to your marriage commitment and that you would never leave them or forsake them because that marriage is a sign of God's fidelity. It's an icon of God's fidelity. So you'll always love your spouse, support your spouse in whatever they do. But at the same time, Jesus says, whoever loves father, mother, husband and wife, children, et cetera, more than me, is not worthy of me. And so your love for Christ has to be primary, and

you have to act in obedience to Christ first and foremost. And that's actually for the benefit of your spouse as well, because being in union with Christ is the source of your love for your spouse. And love and truth are always united. So love follows truth and vice versa. So the truth of Christ in the Catholic Church, that's also the way of love. And so you may have to say that, you know, I'm going to join the church even though you object, not being happy at all about the objections, and wanting a good and strong marriage and to uphold all of one's responsibilities as a

spouse, but believing that the best thing that you can do for yourself and for everyone that you love, especially for your spouse, is to be united to Christ and His church. So that's a hard one. Yeah. But that's, again, that shouldn't be something that you walk through alone. That's why the church offers a spiritual direction and why it's important to get it. Well, you don't know this fellow. Adam, this is a short paragraph.

That's all you know about him. So he really needs someone in his own life who knows all of the details who can speak into that. Exactly. Yeah, I think that's good advice, but thank you. Tim Paul, I like this question. Describe your perfect day. My perfect day?

I would get up, go to my office, and things would be quiet for the entire day. And I could just finish the New Testament introduction. And then I'd go home at a reasonable hour, have a nice meal with my family and be able to relax with my wife and kids at night. That'd be the perfect day. That's good. I like this question from Marty Stafnik. Can you speak about Jesus praying, not my will but thine be done? It sounds like Jesus had a will that disagreed with the fathers. And how do we square that?

Yeah, yeah. A lot's been written on that by more astute people than myself. But what I'd say there is, is Jesus' primary will, is that the will of the Father be done? I mean, think about what he's saying, okay? Not my will, but your will be done. This means my will is that your will be done. And I think what Jesus is saying is, you know, when Jesus says, not mine, but yours, Jesus is submitting, it's our Lord's human nature submitting to the will of the Father. He had a true human will, okay, because he had all the faculties of a human being. And just like all the rest of us, he had to learn to submit his human will, which was influenced by, you know, the body and the contingencies of being a human being. But he had to submit that to

the will of the Father. So it's natural in his perfectly innocent human nature to be revulsed or to be put off by the horror of the passion, which is a grave injustice. I mean, it's natural and in even a sense it's good that we'd be horrified by the grotesque injustice that the Passion represents and our Lord was as well. And it would be almost inhuman for Him to desire to want to go through that in his human nature. But again, he's willing to submit his human will to the will of the Father. And ultimately, what that's expressing is that Jesus, even in his human will, our Lord's greatest desire is that the Father's will be done. And so that's beautiful. It should be the truth for us as well.

We might want to check out the Ignatius study Bible. Yeah. That topic too, for those who are interested. Laurels of Dante says, when you converted, who was your patron saint? Oh, St. Francis de Sales. Yeah, St. Francis de Sales is the patron saint of converted Calvinists. Yeah, I was actually at his tomb last year. Were you?

Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah, folks, don't recall the story. The pope appointed St. Francis de Sales as the bishop of Geneva, but John Calvin had taken over Geneva by force, so he was never able to actually take possession of his sea. And so he wandered around as an itinerant bishop and did evangelism out in the fields and forests and did a lot of pamphleteering,

writing Catholic pamphlets and slipping them under doors and converted a lot of people, brought a lot of people back to the Catholic faith. Timothy says, who do you think wrote Hebrews? I think it was a collaboration between St. Paul and St. Luke. Oh, wow. Interesting.

The language of Luke and the thought of Paul. Interesting. Wow. Yeah, that's not original with me. There's a number of people who think that. Daniel S. says, what's currently the best version of the Bible for the regular layman? Good question. I still think I would give the edge to the RSV CE2, which is the version I got here. It's best known, I think, in circles as the

Burgundy Ignatius Press version. I still give it an edge, but I will say that the ESV Catholic Edition, which is being published by the Augustine Institute as the Augustine Bible, it has some nice features and in certain passages, I would prefer it on a particular passage. And the revised NAB is not half bad in a lot of different books, and I love it for the Gospel of John because they render the I Am statements literally in English, and I think that's important for understanding the divine claims of our Lord in the Gospel of John. And I used it in the Old Testament introduction for the minor prophets. I think the minor prophets in the NABRE are quite good. So those are all good options. I just give a slight edge to the RSVCE2, though.

Here's a question on evolution. So the person's not asking you to take a position, but you might want to answer it either way. Francesco says, "'What is the best scientific argument against evolutionism? And do you think we can argue against it without being labeled flat earthers?' Hmm, I don't know whether we can argue against it

without being labeled. Ha ha ha. Being labeled might just be something I don't know whether we can argue against it without being labeled. Being labeled might just be something that we have to accept. But different arguments grab different personalities and different intellects differently. Some people find one argument very persuasive, others find another. I think one of the easiest arguments to grasp and one of the most objective arguments and one of the most undeniable arguments

is that the fossil record just doesn't support it. Onogenesis, which is the gradual transformation of one species into another, is never documented in the fossil record. And that's according to one of the winners of the American Paleontological Medal, which like the annually they give a medal to the greatest paleontologist in the US at that year.

And one of the winners just outright said, you don't find onogenesis in the fossil record. You don't find this gradual transformation. People are shocked to hear that. Of course, Berg's was got to be wrong. Berg's was just a Bible scholar. Okay, well, I'll tell you what. Why don't you get Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True, which is a popular book still in

print, aging a little bit. But Jerry Coyne is an evolutionary paleont is an evolutionary biologist, I believe it is, at I think it's the University of Chicago, a very kind of militantly atheistic Darwinist. And so he wrote this book maybe 10, 15 years ago, Why Evolution is True, and he's supposedly bringing out all this overwhelming evidence. Well, he's got a chapter in there on the fossil record where he has the diagrams of the different animals. And if you know how to interpret those diagrams, you'll realize that he doesn't give a single diagram in that chapter that shows a true ancestral-descendant species relationship, and that actually shows the development

of species over the time. He always shows animals that are what biologists call at the ends of the stems, kind of at the ends of the branches of any evolutionary tree and not central to the trunk. Even in his longest, he puts his most effort behind a chart of whale evolution, that he says, well, this is just overwhelming evidence. And he presents a whole bunch of putative ancestors of whales.

But if you look at the little diagrams that he's using, even he himself is not claiming that we have found an ancestral species to whales. All we find is animals that exhibit varying degrees of adaptation to an aquatic environment. And then if you get into the dating of it too, that's a whole issue because recent finds have shown that whales are older than he realized when he wrote the book. And the transitional window that he gives in the book has now collapsed to a geologically blink of the eye, essentially for whales to come into being.

So anyway, rambling a little bit, but the fossil record shows dramatic sudden changes in geological history. And it's really conundrum for everyone. You know, for creationists too, they have to explain it. And young Earth creationists explain the fossil record by saying, well, these different rock layers are different stages of the flood where different ecosystems were washed away and buried by mud and that turned into rock, etc. I give them credit for at least recognizing the nature of the fossil record and trying to accommodate it.

I find a lot of denial among traditional Darwinists who either don't know or won't acknowledge the sudden transitions that are amply documented all through the biostratigraphic column. So that's what I'd say. The fossil record is easy for me to grasp. It's objective. It's there. We're not talking about theoretical stuff, you know,

it's supposed to be a history of life on earth and it doesn't follow the pattern that you would expect if Darwinism were true. Thanks for being on.