Pints With Aquinas - 91: 10 heresies every Christian needs to know about, with Trent Horn

Episode Date: January 30, 2018

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Welcome to Pints with Aquinas. I am Matt Fradd. How are you? Today I sit down with Trent Horn to discuss 10 heresies that every Catholic needs to know about. G'day, good to have you back here at Pints with Aquinas. This is the show where you and I would, well, we'd normally pull up a barstool Who's in your heart? heresies that everyone needs to know about because i think um yeah it's important that we learn from the heresies that are being committed in the past so that we don't continue to make them today it's a super good episode and um at the end he's going to answer some of your questions for those of you who ask me questions over patreon i got so many questions from y'all and so i apologize we only got to two or three because it was quite a long episode but we're going to have trent on

again in the future uh just do a whole episode where I ask him your questions. So thanks so much to everybody who asked questions. And a big thanks to everybody who is supporting Pints with Aquinas on Patreon. audio library of stuff. We have audio books that you'll have access to, monthly videos, whole all sorts of stuff. So if Pines for the Aquinas has blessed you and you want to become part of the Pines for the Aquinas tribe, I'm still working on that. That's not a very good name. If you want to help me out, do that. Go to pinesforthaquinas.com, click support, and there you can support me for as little as five bucks a month or more if you want, and I'd be super grateful. All right, here's the episode. G'day, Trent. How are you? Thanks for being with us. I'm doing well, Matt. Thanks for having me back. Lots of people are hearing about you more and more these days,

probably because you write about 500 books a year. Well, it's good. It's better than people hear about me because more people watch America's Most Wanted. So, that's always nice. Yeah, absolutely. I'm really pumped about today's episode. We're going to go over 10 heresies that we think that serious Catholics, especially the kind of Catholics who listen to this podcast, need to know about. So that's going to be super fun. But before we do, tell our listeners about your new book, which has an absolutely gorgeous front cover, by the way. It's called The Case for Catholicism, Answers to Classic and Contemporary Protestant Objections.

Right. So I wrote, I started writing this book in April, 2016, because I saw the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation was coming near. And I realized we didn't have a really up-to-date single volume defense of Catholicism against Protestant objections. The latest one we had was Carl Keating's book, Catholicism and Fundamentalism. That's crazy. It's so hard to believe, right? Because it's such an old book now. Yeah. It was written back in 1988, and there have been other apologetic works since then, but usually just on one specific topic, not just kind of a general defense of Catholicism. Or there's stories of conversions, like Rome Street Home, for example, but that's something different, too. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And there have been anthologies of conversions with

apologetics in them, but not a comprehensive case. So I thought, hey, we need this now, conversions with apologetics in them, but not a comprehensive case. So I thought, hey, we need this now, sat down, wrote it for about a year, and then published it with Ignatius Press right around the anniversary of the Reformation. And I think it's been really helping a lot of people. I bet. And it's pretty big, hey? Yeah. I mean, it's clocking in at about 360 pages. It's a fairly lengthy book. I mean, I treat the topics very rigorously, but it's still readable and accessible to the average person. The most people who would give it a go, I think they would get a lot out of it. Here's an interesting question. Do you think that this

book would have sold a whole lot more copies back in the 80s, provided that we had Amazon back then and stuff? Do you think the interest about the whole Catholic-Protestant dialogue was a lot more kind of intense back then as it is today? I kind of get the sense sometimes that Catholics and Protestants just sort of agree to disagree, and we kind of believe all the same stuff anyway. What do you think? No, I agree with you that back in the 80s, there was a big push. A lot of Protestants, including evangelicals, felt a need to, quote unquote, rescue Catholics,

witness to Catholics. And a lot of Catholics were leaving the church, going to these big megachurches or fundamentalist churches, and they felt it was a very important mission for them. And they felt the most important culture war to fight was helping Catholics come know the gospel. And that's why Carl was able to step in, because there was just such a dearth and absence of apologetic resources. Now, today, I think a lot of Protestants see

Catholics not as, you know, lost souls, but as fellow Christians that are needed to fight a lot of these battles, like against atheism, moral issues like abortion, transgender, same-sex marriage. They see Catholics more as allies and don't really feel the need to witness to them. But I mean, it's still definitely a big dividing point, and the book, I think, will help a lot of people in that regard. But it's a testament, really, to the work of groups like Catholic Answers that have been able to answer many of these objections and equip Catholics to show Protestants, yes, we are Christians, and look at how biblical and historical our faith is. That's cool. And do you think if a Protestant would have picked this up? I mean, I know there's all sorts of types of Protestants out there,

but do you think generally speaking, it's written in a tone that they'd be able to digest, doesn't come off as too combative and so forth? Oh, absolutely. I wrote the book. It's certainly written for Catholics, but I wrote it in a very charitable tone and I try to treat other Protestants, scholars and their arguments with respect. I mean, I disagree with them, but I still treat them with respect and show why they're wrong and try to offer things that Protestants can take as an evaluation of Catholic doctrine they may not have heard before. So I think this book is definitely one I've given it to several Protestants, and they were very grateful to receive it. I went through this big kick about, gee,

10 years ago now, where I was listening to a of like debates. And this was before the time of YouTube where all these debates were all compiled. You know, you had to find like a CD of Pat Madrid and all these different ones. And the tension in the room was incredible back then. As we said earlier, you know, in the 80s, I think it was Carl Keating who said at his first debate, there was someone there with a big placard that said, repent Catholic or something like that. Yeah. I don't see it like that too much anymore. I mean, uh, back at the beginning of the year, uh, January, 2017, I debated James White in front of an audience of about 1200 Calvinists at the G3 conference in Atlanta. And I mean, that's the lion's den right there.

But I found the people there to be very welcoming. They were very nice to me. And many of them said to me, we're really impressed. We really have to think more about what you said, because I think what impressed them is that I had more scripture references in my presentation than James did. And he's supposed to be the Bible Christian here. So I think there's a lot more receptivity there. I would not want to have been in your shoes going up against James White. That guy can be, oh, he's very excellent. He's brilliant. And he's also a little ferocious and sarcastic. I think, yeah. It was a fun sparring round. It was like the rumble in the jungle. So the rumble in Atlanta. So I think it was good, but I think ultimately he's a skilled debater.

But I think when people watch the debate, I think they were able to see that the Catholic position, really the historic Christian position on that question, which I spend a whole chapter on in Case for Catholicism Addressing, is really the biblical and the historical one, backed by the evidence. Cool. All right, before we look at these 10 heresies throughout church history, I think it's important that we distinguish between four different terms that are sometimes said or thought to be synonymous. And this is discussed in the catechism, incredulity, heresy, apostasy, and schism.

So let me just go over each of those real quick. And the catechism has a sentence on each. So incredulity is the neglect of revealed truth or the willful refusal to ascend to it. So that'd be kind of like, yeah, I get that the Catholic church teaches this about birth control, but I don't care. Or I get that the church teaches this about the immaculate conception, but you know, I don't really care or something like that. Heresy, it says, is the obstinate post-baptismal denial of some truth, which must be believed with divine and Catholic faith, or it is likewise an obstinate doubt concerning the same. So that's what we're going to be addressing today. So I think an example of

that would be the church says Mary was conceived without sin, and we just simply say, I don't believe it. It's not true. Now, apostasy and heresy, these are usually said, or there's some confusion about this, but apostasy, well, sorry, not apostasy, I'm meaning schism. Very quickly, apostasy is just the total repudiation of the Christian faith, but schism or schism, how do you pronounce it? Schism. Schism. So, schism and heresy are different, right? So, schism is a refusal of submission to the Roman pontiff or of communion with the members of the church subject to him. So, someone who's in schism doesn't necessarily deny any of the Catholic faith, right? They just refuse to submit to the Pope. Right. They refuse to recognize either the Pope's authority or the authority of those in communion with him, like other bishops. And we see

this most prominently with groups that claim to be Catholic, like, you know, the old Catholic church, for example, or we would also say that of our Eastern Orthodox brothers and sisters who are in schism. They don't recognize, they recognize the Pope has authority in the sense that the Bishop of Rome is a first among equals, but not that he has primacy or the charism of infallibility. So they don't recognize, they're not willing to submit to him as the supreme pastor over the church. And so in that case, they're in schism. A pioneer, like you said, apostasy is just when you are no longer a Christian. You no longer, whether you become Muslim, Jewish, or if you became Mormon or Jehovah's Witness, you have left the Christian faith.

Heresy, though, and it's important to tease this out a little bit, obstinate post-baptismal denial of some truth. So it can't just be that, oh, well, I don't believe it. It's that you refuse to believe it. You're obstinate about it. You demonstrate kind of bad faith, if you will. And it's post-baptismal. So someone who's never been baptized is not a heretic. They're not obligated to believe yet. Once you are baptized, you're obligated to believe. And if you don't, you may be in heresy. And the catechism goes on to say, must be believed with divine and Catholic faith. So that's the dogmas of the faith that have been declared to have been divinely revealed, not merely matters that are doctrine that are proposed. They have to be dogmas. So that's why the church has said

in recent documents that Protestants who are brought up in their respective ecclesial communities and reject Catholic teaching, because they've been brought up that way, and they don't demonstrate having bad faith, this kind of obstinacy to reject it, they wouldn't be heretics in this kind of formal sense that we're talking about. And so that's why we don't throw the heretic label out like that. Yeah, I think that's important to point out. So people like Luther and Zwingli and Calvin would have been heretics, but if you've been raised a Protestant, that's different. Yeah, or you think of individuals who were Catholic and then leave the faith, especially, you know, knowing what they ought to believe and then turning their back on it to embrace heresy. That would be where we'd fall under.

But yeah, so what we're talking about today are truths of the faith that are dogmas. They're part of the deposit of faith. They're divinely revealed. to give these truths the ascent of faith, and to be obstinate in denying them after our baptism would constitute heresy. Right. That's really good. And so, I mean, sometimes the term heresy is used loosely or even jokingly, but we're talking about, I mean, so when someone's in heresy, it's not like the church has to say, hey, you are in heresy in order for you to be in heresy, because it talks about like obstinate. So So that can't be like, you know, Joe Blow tells you that you should believe in the Eucharist. You're like, no, I don't think

the church teaches that. I don't believe it. That's not heresy, right? Is it different? It could become that if the person is not willing to be corrected and persists in this. Right. So you and I have gone back and forth and you chose 10, um, heresies throughout history. Um, I guess there was a lot to choose from, but you think it's important that Catholics who are interested in the faith, as much as nerds who listen to Pines with Aquinas are, you think these 10 are really important for people to understand? Yeah, I would say these are really, um, the top. And you asked me to pick kind of the top 10 that lead up to the Protestant Reformation. So these are the most, I mean, the most famous ones are

going to be earlier on in church history anyways. And many of them, almost all of them, still persist to the present day. I've thought about writing a book on heresies, you know, something like the zombie doctrine or something, or the heretical zombie, you know, I, heresies are there like something you think you kill them or they're like the horror movie villain. It's like, are they dead and you go and look and the body's not there and then they come back later in another movie and they always come back somehow. Yeah. It's like that line.

Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat the bad parts of history or something. So something similar here. George Santana. Yeah, those who do not learn from history are doomed. Those who do not learn history will repeat it. Or the funny parody line, those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it in summer school. So that's why it's important to understand these. Well, let's just go through them. The first one being Gnosticism.

Right. So this is a very early heresy in church history, and we see remnants of it even in the letters of St. Paul, that Paul was combating these Gnostic heretics and things that he was writing, though usually more in allusions. I think it's in the letter of Timothy. Paul says he talks about people who have knowledge falsely so-called, and that's a play on words. The Greek word there is gnosis. So he says, you know, those people who have knowledge falsely so-called. Gnosis, the Greek word, is where Gnosticism comes from. The Gnostics held that salvation was achieved by receiving secret knowledge passed on from the apostles. It's not part of a general kind of revelation. It's a secret knowledge you're given. And the knowledge differs based on Gnostic sects, but usually it involves believing that there are two gods, a dualism, a good one that created

spiritual realities and a bad one that created material realities, or that the universe is an emanation from the good deity and that there are other different names for the minor deities or in this dualistic set. So it's the idea here, it denies that there is one omnipotent, all-powerful, infinite God who created all things. And so that'd be the essence of Gnosticism. Another point of Gnosticism is it often treats the material as bad and the spiritual as good. So that's why in his letter to Timothy, when Paul says they teach doctrines of demons who forbid marriage and abstain from meat, I'm sorry, my fundamentalist friend, they're not talking about celibacy and fasting on Fridays.

The church doesn't forbid marriage. It just says if you are already married or you may have a vow of celibacy, you can't get married. Paul is talking about people who believe that material things like marriage and sexuality are bad or even eating meat is bad. That's what he's talking about and alludes to these Gnostics. I wonder, is there a connection here between Platonism and Gnosticism, this idea of emphasis being on the thought and the immaterial and not on the material? There is a little bit of a connection there. There were Christian writers like Clement of Alexandria who did a lot of work to synthesize Platonism and the Christian faith, but Aristotelianism is really more compatible with Christianity than Platonism. There are some Platonic thoughts that do correspond to Christianity, like Plato's idea

of the good being this kind of ultimate cause or reality, which we would call God. However, Platonism teaches more, for example, that human beings are just souls in bodies. We're like ghosts in machines, and we want to, you know, that Greek kind of platonic thought is about the soul escaping the prison of the body. And so it would, that's why when in Acts 17, when Paul is preaching in Athens, he's talking about the resurrection from the dead, and these people have no idea what he's talking about. He's like, what do you mean? He's talking about gods and resurrection you know what what is that because they believe it's more that the soul goes to the elysian fields or right what have you um that that's really the person not not so much the body yeah okay that's that's really cool so gnosis comes from the greek

word gnosis meaning knowledge and as you said there's there was multiple sects that might be gnosis it wasn't like there was one group, there was multiple sects that might be Gnostic. It wasn't like there was one group that all believed the exact same thing. It has to do with a secret knowledge. Do you see examples of Gnosticism today? Yeah, a little bit. You know, when I was studying recently, I'm working on a book, another book. I know. Thank you. Thank you. I'm glad you're doing this for the church. They're very important. Right. This is, um, moral madness. So it's on defense Catholic sexuality. I was reading about transgender and I was reading a book by a defender of transgender ideology. And what he said in the book, he's saying, look, some people think, uh, Oh, you know, as a guy, if I were a woman,

I'd really be into Brad Pitt. It's like, sorry, dude, you're a little bit into Brad Pitt. Cause if you were a woman, uh, you know, you would still be attracted to other women. You, who you are would not change no matter what body you were in. And I was like, this is narcissism. This is the idea that, and that comes from Dakar a little bit too. It gives it kind of a booster shot that the real person's this kind of immaterial self and the body is kind of no consequence. You know, it's just a shell we that the real person's this kind of immaterial self and the body is kind of no consequence you know it's just a shell we can hop in and out of and we see this kind of gnostic dualism all over the place in an age that doesn't think the body has that much value yeah i forget budjischewski's book that's his name right who wrote the meaning of sex i think

he you don't know how to pronounce it just call him him J-Bud. Yeah, J-Bud. You know J-Bud? Yeah. He made this good point where he's like, what does it mean to say that I'm not my body? If I am not my body, then when I kiss my daughter goodnight, I don't actually kiss my daughter goodnight.

Rather, I manipulate the husk that is not me to make it press up against the husk that is not her. You know, I mean, it's... Yeah, I feel like if you left your family to go on a trip and you just slowly rolled your car to tap your son before you left you know yeah i don't that that'd be the equivalent oh i get it yeah yeah your body was just a vehicle yeah it's like you know we we don't think of our interactions with people as like if we're driving a car around i'm like bye-bye and we honk the horn and we tap them with the bumper. We think this is who we are. I may have a body, that's

true, but I am also a body. Yeah. There's lots of examples like this that we naturally believe, I think as children, we naturally believe in God. We naturally believe as we grow older that we have free will. We naturally believe that we are our bodies and it takes bad education to lead us away from the truth in these areas. All right, well, let's talk about the second one, Marcionism. What's that? Marcionism is a variant. It comes out of Gnosticism. It holds this idea there's this dualism, you know, there's a good God and a bad God. Marcion was a famous shipbuilder in the region of Pontus. I think he gave a large donation to the church in Rome, but when they found out about his heresies, they gave him the

money back and told him to take your money and go, basically. His primary heresy, he embraced this Gnostic heresy, but he also applied it to the canon of scripture. So he said that the bad God of this dualistic thought, the bad God is the God of the Old Testament, and the good God is the God of the New Testament. And so in doing so, he said, well, the Old Testament is not the word of God. And he said most of the New Testament wasn't. He only accepted, I think it was just Luke's gospel and some of his letters. Yeah.

And that was it, basically. Now, in an address in 1997, Pope St. John Paul II, he said firmly to the Pontifical Biblical Commission, the church firmly rejected the Marcionite, to imply that error, reminding all that God's tenderness was already revealed in the Old Testament. The idea is that Marcion couldn't wrap his head like this wrathful God of the Old Testament. He's not the real God. And this is one you see all the time today. Oh, absolutely, yeah. But it's just as heretical now as it was then. Yeah, yeah, this idea that in the Old Testament, you know, God is a psychopath. In the New Testament, he's a fun-loving

hippie. Right, exactly. And you've written a whole book on this too, which you should plug. Yeah, I cover it a little in Hard Sayings. And what I forgot to mention earlier is Scripture shuts these things down. When it comes to Gnosticism, Paul says in Colossians 1.16, of Jesus, in him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible. Throughout Scripture, when it says God created everything, or like John 1.3, there was no thing which God did not create, then that means

he made the material, the immaterial, the matter and spirit. So, sorry, Gnostics, you know. And the same with Marcion, when Jesus said in Matthew 5, 17, I haven't come to abolish the law and the prophets, I came to fulfill them. That would count against the Marcion thesis. Okay. Yeah, that's good. I think this is why he didn't accept Matthew. Right. Yeah. I think this is often something that people don't hold explicitly, but they might treat the Old Testament as if it's somehow, you know, lesser canonized or something than the New Testament. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's great. Okay. The third heresy we want to look at today is adoptionism. Right. Yeah. So, adoptionism, that's an early heresy as well. I think it first started the Ebionite heresy in the second century. And adoptionism says that this is beginning our

look at the Christological heresies, the heresies about Christ's nature, saying that he was a man, the man Jesus, who later became the son of God at a certain point in his life, usually at his baptism. They say, well, he became divine then, or at least he became a chosen son of God then. Or sometimes they use a line from St. Paul about him being raised in power, raised in the spirit, trying to say he became God at his resurrection. But when we look at scripture, it's very firm that Jesus is fully God and fully man. And he's God throughout his whole earthly life. Because in the prologue of John, it says the beginning was the word.

The word was with God. The word was God. Then later it says the word became flesh and dwelt among us. The Word didn't cease to be divine when it became flesh, when it became incarnate in the womb of the Virgin Mary. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, I think a lot of people take 2,000 years of history where we've been commenting heresies for granted, don't you? And I don't want to pick on our Protestant listeners, many of them whom love Holy Scripture more than me and are great examples to me of how to be a good Christian. But I wonder if as a Protestant, you know, just to get your Bible and you open up and start reading,

you forget that 2,000 years has preceded you perhaps that has led you to these sorts of conclusions. Because if you knew nothing of Christianity and someone just handed you this book, the idea that it's all really straightforward and you wouldn't fall into these heresies, I think might be naive. Oh, no, absolutely. St. Peter says in 2 Peter 3.16 that there are things in Paul's letters that are difficult to understand, that the ignorant twist to their own destruction. So, yeah, you're absolutely right. For example, what's funny about this is when Protestants, and on my Facebook page, I had a lot of Protestants chime in and want to debate, because I wrote something on January 1st about the solemnity

of the mother of God and said, look, this is logic, people. You have to accept it if you believe in the divinity of Christ. And what happens is there was someone on there who denied mother of God and also kind of denied parts of the incarnation as a result. That when we say Jesus is the mother, I'm sorry, Mary is the mother of God, that refutes the adoptionist heresy. That Jesus didn't become God later in life. That if Mary is the mother of God, her child from conception onward was divine, was the second person of the Trinity. And that's why, you know, and that was affirmed at the Council of Ephesus. That's why what we have in creeds, in sacred tradition, what the Magisteria

teaches, you're right, it informs our theology thousands of years later. Yeah, I know that Tim Staples talks about this in his book on Mary, that once you start tinkering with the Marian dogmas, like the Theotokos, Mary, Mother of God, all of a sudden it unravels your Christology quite quickly. Yeah, and this is a dividing point that some evangelicals are divided over, including ones that are fairly conservative, actually. That's the debate over Christ's eternal sonship, because many of them say that he only became the son at the incarnation, that he was not eternally the son alongside the father. Like, Walter Martin believed that.

John MacArthur is a prominent Protestant who believed that and then changed his mind later. But that's what you get when you start, you know, trying to just use your own biblical interpretation and not relying on what the church has received in tradition. And that might lead us to this fourth heresy, and that is Arianism. Oh, yeah. So Arianism, of course, is the teaching of the Bishop Arius that Jesus is like God in his nature, but not fully God in his nature.

Sort of like Michael Jordan or something. Yeah. Like a lesser God. Okay. That's not a good. Yeah. Well, the closest analog might be those who would deny Christ divinity might say that he's an angel or a super angel of some kind, a mighty created being who reflects the Father's glory, but is not divine in the same way the Father is divine. Jehovah's Witnesses. Yes, that would be the closest example today of modern Arians who hold that view. So, what's interesting with Arius, so at the Council of Nicaea, there was the debate over what Greek word to use to describe Jesus' nature. And the Orthodox, faithful Catholics, wanted to use homoousios, same nature.

And Arius wanted homoousios, adding the Greek iota. And so one iota of a difference does matter. Very good. Very good. I like it. Yeah. Yeah. You imagine if it was Christians in the 21st century America back then,

they'd be like, guys, it doesn't matter. Like, let's just love each other. It does matter. Damn it. Yeah. It certainly does. Otherwise, if Jesus is not fully divine, if he's not fully divine, then his death on the cross no longer has infinite value. If you deny the divinity of Christ,

suddenly you've denied the universal efficacy of the redemption. Because otherwise, because people, I was debating people and they say, well, no, he's not fully divine. You know, the spirit of God went into him as a man and he became the perfect man and died on the cross to undo what Adam did, because Adam is the imperfect man. I say that doesn't undo anything, because our sins are an infinite dishonoring, an infinite penalty to God. One perfect person doesn't undo that. I mean, there are people who, there are millions of human beings who have lived and never committed a personal sin. That would be children who die before the age of reason. That doesn't atone for anything though. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, that's great. Yeah. Makes

sense to me. So we've talked about heresies regarding God and Christ. This next one, this fifth one has to do with the Trinity, and that is modalism. What's that? Right. So, modalism is a modern name. This heresy is originally called Sibyllianism, though there's debate about whether Sibyllius in the second century actually taught this. There's a little bit of debate over it, but the idea here is that it's a Trinitarian heresy. It's a heresy of the Trinity. So what is the Trinity? The Trinity holds there is one God who is three persons, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, each of whom is equally divine. So when we talk about Arianism and adoptionism, they're kind of Trinitarian heresies because it denies that one member of the Trinity is fully divine, Jesus.

Modalism affirms each member of the Trinity is fully divine. What it denies is that they're actually three members. Modalists believe that God is only one person. There's one God who is one person who exists as three modes or roles, kind of. So he's the father sometimes the son and another uh it's kind of like if i say the trinity is like a man who is a father son uh and uncle at the same time you know for a father son and husband at the same time uh no that's one person with three roles right yeah so that was sibyllius taught that modalism most modern form you'll find today is the Jesus only movement. I was just going to say that. Yeah. Yeah. The oneness Pentecostals, they believe, yeah, they believe that, that God is Jesus and Jesus is the father basically. And so, um, so the father, son, and Holy Spirit, it's one person manifesting his divine personhood in these different roles.

So if you had like an elevator ride with a non-Trinitarian, what would you point to in Scripture to show that there is a God and he is three persons? Well, the personhood of God I would show probably John, when Jesus is praying to the Father. In John 17, 5, Jesus says, Father, glorify me in thy own presence with the glory which I had with thee before the world was made. If God is one person, why is Jesus talking about two people sharing glory before the world was created? And second, who is he talking to? Because if you deny the Trinity, if you deny God as more than one person, then Jesus is just kind of talking to himself and being a weirdo here. Right. Yeah. Being a weirdo here. Okay. Moving on to the sixth one, monophysitism, that's fun to say, and Nestorianism. Yeah, these are kind of two different spectrums. These are

later heresies. So, you know, we have the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, and then later the Council of Constantinople in 381. And so that helped to put a damper on Arianism and adoptionism and those Christological heresies. So people were firmly committed, yeah, Jesus is fully divine. Then the heretics start to attack Jesus' humanity, basically. So they're denying that he's fully God, but they're also denying he's fully man. So the monophysites, monophysis means one nature. So it is this belief, basically, that Jesus only you know one nature apollinaris believe this eutychius taught something like this saying that well yes the son became man in that he dwelled

in a human body but the body was animated by a divine spirit so it's a human shell walking around with god inside of it but then if you don't have a human soul and a human mind, you're not human. So that principle, you know, when they're trying to, or they might say, well, yeah, the divine nature and the human nature exists in Jesus, but the divine nature swallowed up the human nature like a drop of honey in the sea. Sorry, you're not human anymore. You've been obliterated. So it strips away Christ's humanity. Now, the Nestorians swung in the complete other direction.

They wanted to maintain that, no, no, no, Jesus is fully God and fully man, but what they ended up doing is separating Christ into two persons, that there is the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who's fully human, has a human soul and human mind, and that there is the Son, the incarnate Son, who is fully divine, and somehow they merge and join with one another. And so Nestorius, of course, is the guy who said that Mary did not bear God. She was not the Theotokos. She was the Christotokos. And so that's why, once again, the dogma of the mother of God is so important. It doesn't just fight adoptionism. It fights this Nestorian heresy. Right. And as it's been said, mothers don't give birth to natures. They give birth to people.

Yeah. They give birth to persons. So was Nestorianism a reaction to monophysitism? Was Nestorianism a reaction to monophysitism? Yeah, a little bit. You see that they're interrelated. One thing that was interesting, though, another bonus heresy I'll throw out here, is that as people were trying to interact later in the 5th and 6th centuries with monophysitism, it's funny, when some people try to counteract a heresy,

they work so hard to counteract it, they create another heresy. And so people said, okay, you're right, you're right, Nestorianism is wrong, Christ, the Son is not two persons, Jesus and the Son who merge together, that's wrong. But we got to help the monophysites, they're not going to come back to the church, you know, if they think that, you know, Christ has, you know, if they can't have their way, what's a compromise? And the compromise they came up with was monothelitism. And this is the belief that Christ was two natures in one person, but that he only had a divine will. He didn't have a human will. So they're trying to appease the monophysites. They're saying, look, will. He didn't have a human will. So they're trying to appease the monophysites. They're saying, look, he's got two natures. He's fully divine, fully man, but he only has a divine will.

Okay. You, you want one nature. Can't do that. I can give you one will, but the problem, you know, it's, it's, it's bartering is going on. And this is correct me if I'm wrong with, this is something that William Lane Craig subscribes to. Yes. Yes. Yeah. He's a, he's a, yeah, he's a monothelite. and I actually reference him in Case for Catholicism, because people will say, well, with Sola Scriptura, you know, you don't, you know, people will say, well, we do Sola Scriptura, but we also listen to the councils of the church, the ecumenical councils. But here's the problem with that, though, is that Craig knows the ecumenical councils. I mean, he talks about, you know, he teaches them in his defender's classes.

But the problem is he'll say, well, yeah, I listen to the councils, but only as much as they agree with my interpretation of Scripture. So he rejects the third council of Constantinople that condemns monothelitism. So, yeah, it's interesting here. So, they're saying, yeah, Christ is fully human, fully divine. He's got two natures, but monophysites, he only has the divine will. He doesn't have a human will. But if you don't have a human will, you're not fully human. I mean, think about Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. He says to the Father, not, you know, not my will be done, but thy will be done. So So what would Craig's rationale for this be? I mean, does he see us leading to absurdities if you begin to say that there are two wills?

Yeah. He would say it basically turns into an historianism that if you have a will, it's identical to a person, uh, which isn't the case if we consider it just, you know, it's a mode of operation that's not synonymous with what it means fully to be a person. Now I get a little bit too technical for our day-to-day, but yeah, he comes at it from a philosophical perspective, and your philosophy does inform your theology. Yeah, absolutely. All right, well, let's move on to the seventh heresy, and this is something that Protestants sometimes accuse Catholics of, and that's Pelagianism and semi-Pelagianism. What are those?

Yeah, so Pelagianism arose in the fourth century. It's named after a British monk named Pelagius, and the idea here is that Pelagius was really concerned about moral laxity. He went to Rome, saw Christians, and he believed, he attributed this error, this moral laxity to Augustine's doctrine of grace, saying that people, you know, well, if God predestines those who are saved, and I can only act with God's grace, if I fall into sin, it's because God hasn't given me enough grace to overcome sin, so it's not my fault, so it doesn't matter. And so Pelagius was reacting to this distortion of Augustine, and what he said was, no, it is possible, we're made in the image of God, you can achieve moral perfection in this life, which actually is true through the grace of God.

Where Pelagius goes wrong is he believes you can do this apart from the grace of God, so it's your responsibility if you sin and you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps and have moral perfection, which no, obeying God's law, doing anything to please God is only possible when we cooperate with God's grace. That we cannot persist in our salvation or attain moral perfection to be with God apart from God's grace. And so you're right, people say Catholics teach that we do good works to get to heaven, and that's just not true. That's just slander what the church teaches. Now, am I right in thinking that Pelagius thought that

Christ saved humanity and that he came to be an exemplar of how we ought to live? So we just kind of, or is that, maybe that was someone else. That may have been someone else. I don't entirely remember what Pelagius' view on Christ's redemption and atonement were. I just knew he believed that the graces that are accrued for us in Christ's sacrifice, if there are any, are not necessary to lead a morally perfect life. So what happened, though, is the church ended up condemning Pelagianism. I believe it was condemned finally at the council, well, first at the Council of Carthage in 418, and then finally ratified at the Council of Ephesus in 431. But like I said, it's zombies, or it's kind of like the Hydra from Greek mythology,

that when you cut off one head, two more appear in its place. And so what happens here is that they refute Pelagianism, but then a new doctrine emerges, semi-Pelagianism. So these people will say, okay, you're right. Obviously, we cannot grow in grace. We cannot grow in moral perfection. We can't become morally perfect. We can't grow in our goodness before God apart from grace. We need grace to do that. We need grace to continue in our salvation. But what the semi-Pelagian said was, however, you don't need grace to begin salvation.

So they believed that if I realize I'm in sin, I could just say, you know what, I'm in trouble. God saved me. And I could approach God on my own and ask for salvation apart from grace. And that is also not what the church teaches that in our spiritually dead state, we cannot even, we cannot do anything of our own to merit initial salvation, neither faith nor works. All we can do is accept it or reject the grace that God wants to give us. And because God wants to save all people, he gives all people grace in some form to make it possible to receive his gift of salvation. And this, of course, semi-Pelagianism was condemned later at the Council of Orange in 529. So why is it, do you think, we're going to talk in our 10th heresy, which will be antinomianism, that's a heresy often, we'll get to that in a second,

but that Protestants might fall into. Why is it, do you think, that Catholics, perhaps more than Protestants, might tend to fall into Pelagianism or semi-Pelagianism? Well, I think that can happen to Catholics feeling this or being accused of this, because we believe in sanctifying grace that renews our souls, and that by cooperating with grace and doing good works, our justification, the justification of the righteous, it can increase in God's sight, which of course makes sense of what James says in James chapter 2, that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone, that what we do pleases God. Our actions, what we do, allows us to grow

in holiness, to grow in charity, to grow in righteousness in God's eyes. Where you mess up, though, is when you think that if you receive the sacraments, do good works, avoid works of evil, that you're doing it all on your own. That's Pelagianism, if you think you're doing it all on your own, and you're not cooperating with God's grace. And the biggest Bible verse, of course, that Protestants throw at us here, which I agree with firmly because it's talking about initial salvation and not every aspect of salvation, is Ephesians 2, 8 through 9. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God. So I'm sorry, Pelagius. And isn't that why Catholics are fine and have always been fine baptizing babies?

Right. They haven't done anything to merit anything. Ain't done nothing. Except poop in their sleep, which I don't think if you paid me a million dollars and went try and poop in your sleep, I couldn't do it. So it's pretty impressive in some sense. I'm sure it must be relaxing for them, anxious for us. Right. Okay. Well, thanks for that one. Let's move on to iconoclasm. What is iconoclasm? Yeah. Iconoclasm has appeared in modern vocabulary as somebody who smashes, um, something, you know, who's do say if you're iconoclastic, you know, you say something everybody likes, you know, you try to take it down and say, nah, it's not that big of a deal. That's not good. Iconoclasm literally means the icon smashers. Uh, and this was the heresy that, uh, taught that, you know, it's,

it's, it's a violation of the commandments or it's wrong to sculpt images of, uh, either God, you know, the father, the son, the Holy spirit, or saints in heaven, or any kind of imagery, especially those that are in churches. This came about a lot in the 7th and 8th centuries and was eventually condemned at the Second Council of Nicaea. Now, I've been attending a Byzantine church, Byzantine Catholic church, for a couple of years. I forget the feast day, but there is a particular feast day in which we celebrate, you know, the church rejecting and condemning as heretics, the iconoclasm, and we process icons all around the church. It's kind of a fun day. Oh yeah, absolutely. And what I would point back to is, you know, people say, you know, it's wrong to make graven images, you know, I'd say, well, could God ever, you know, command us to break one of the commandments? Obviously not. But the problem

was that in Numbers 21, 9, Moses makes a bronze serpent. So God punishes the Israelites for their bickering, for their grumbling against him and sends serpents that bite them and poison them. So what I would have done if I was God. bite them and poison them. That is so what I would have done if I was God. Right. So it says in Numbers 21.9, Moses made a bronze serpent, set it on a pole, and if a serpent bit any man, he would look at the bronze serpent and live. And later, of course, it says that God commanded the Ark of the Covenant to be created and have cherubs and angels drawn on it. There are angels in Solomon's temple. So, what that commandment about graven imagery, it prohibits idolatry, creating something, an image, and worshiping that image as if it were a god,

not images that help us understand who God is and direct our worship toward him. And there's also embroiderings of the angels in heaven, too, in the, gosh, sorry. The temple in heaven. Thank you. Well, not the temple in heaven, but the actual earthly temple, you gosh sorry the temple in heaven thank you well not the temple in heaven but in the actual earthly temple you know as solomon is commanded right yeah that's why i'm breathing yeah so there you go all right let's uh let's well let's move on to the next one memorialism memorialism this is an important one to discuss i think because well you tell us what it is first what's memorialism first um the name's not really out there. I kind of made it up because I wanted it.

Maybe that's why I'm asking. Yeah, I haven't heard of it. There's not really a name for it. So I wanted an ism, so I call it memorialism. Let's coin it. So we're moving, so if you notice, we've been moving forward in church history in the 7th and 8th century. Yeah. Now we're getting to the 11th century, and we're getting to one of the first explicit denials 11th century, and we're getting to one of the first explicit denials that Christ is truly present in the Eucharist, and that it's merely a memorial sacrifice of Christ, that Christ is not actually present in the bread and wine, it does not become his body and blood. And that was proposed by

Berengar of Tours in the 11th century, some later. I think this is, sorry to cut you off, I just think this is going to shock a lot of people. Like, I imagine a faithful Protestant listening to this might think that this idea that Catholics have about the Eucharist is strange at best and just idolatry at worst, but this idea that it wasn't until the 11th century that you've got the first guy being like, nah, I don't think so. Right? Oh, yeah. Now, to be fair, early in church history, when you see church

fathers talking about the Eucharist, they don't have an explicit framework to discuss it, just like they don't have an explicit framework to discuss the Trinity. So there's theological imprecisions in their writing. So some of it could be similar to what Lutherans call consubstantiation, that Christ is present spiritually in the bread and wine, or transubstantiation. Now we do see Greek fathers especially using words like trans-elementation, saying that no, something really does change in the bread and wine. It's no longer bread and wine. But later, the word transubstantiation is introduced more in the Middle Ages. It's used at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 to underscore, no, the bread and wine really, at their substance, undergo a change and become the body and blood

of Christ, to combat this idea that, no, it's just a kind of a memorial sacrifice that Christ isn't truly present. But you're right that when you look at the writings of Christians, of Catholic Christians, the first thousand years of church history, they affirm that the Eucharist is not a mere memorial. Christ is truly present in the bread and wine. It is his body and blood in some way. And you got to think like, if you're an apostle and you're walking around with this guy called Jesus, and he's raising people from the dead in front of you, and he's giving blind people sight, like in that mind frame, you know, if he's sitting down with you and he says, this is my body, I think you're a lot more willing to accept it than perhaps today when you're not used to seeing miracles happen all around you. Right. Yeah. It's funny when people say like,

well, how could he hold his own body in his hand when he was saying that? I'm like, you're going to say a guy who just fed 5,000 people with a few loaves and fish and raised people from the dead. How did he do it? I mean, if he's all powerful why can't he are you questioning his omnipotence the omnipotence of the incarnate son yeah how did he create the universe out of nothing because if he can right if you can do that you can do anything right how do you think like how would you approach this with with a protestant because it does seem really bizarre you know because i i sometimes i imagine myself chatting with a protestant who thinks okay no i totally get it i think it's really cool that you have that respect for the lord's supper like no no we believe it's like actually the body of christ oh yeah no i know you that's super cool

as long as it's like no no listen we actually believe that i eat the body blood soul and divinity of the second person the blessed trinity like that is super weird and i think unless you can see that it's weird you haven't fully really understood what we're talking about. You know what I mean? Yeah. And it's weird for us, especially as Christians removed from a Jewish context. I say,

wait a minute, look at this though, is Jesus. He's not celebrating the Passover at Passover. He's instituting a new Passover. The Bible refers to Jesus as the Paschal lamb over and over again. Paul says that Christ, our Paschal Lamb, has been sacrificed. John the Baptist says the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

And so looking at all this from a Jewish lens, seeing that Jesus is literally making himself a Paschal sacrifice, which, of course, you would eat in order to receive the full benefits of, in order to receive the full benefits of, that helps us see in a way that, you know, we may not in a 21st century non-Jewish context. So that's why I recommend, for example, of course, I cover this very, in a whole chapter in Case for Catholicism,

but Brant Petrie's book, Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist is also a really good read on that subject. Cool. All right, well, that leads us to the 10th and final heresy, and we're kind of making our way up to Protestantism. And by the way, the reason we've been talking about Protestantism so much in this episode, of course, is because of Trent's new fantastic book and the fact that, you know, Reformation anniversary. And that has to do with antinomianism and eternal security. What does that mean? Yeah, these are both variants. You

can call both eternal security. I chose that this is interesting. So this heresy, basically the idea is a Christian can never lose his salvation. If you are a true Christian, then you will go to heaven, you will persevere. No Christian could ever apostatize or fall into mortal sin and go to hell. or fall into mortal sin and go to hell. And this one began at the Reformation. You cannot find it prior to John Calvin. You absolutely can't. And in my debate with James White, I challenged James, where do we find this before Calvin? And he said, well, look up Fulgencius. But he didn't even give me a citation, and he can't, because I quoted another Calvinist author, John Jefferson Davis, who says, no, it's not in Augustine, it's not anywhere until Calvin. But however, there's two different kinds of eternal security. So there would be the Calvinist eternal security, like James White defended in the debate, which says a Christian will never lose his salvation. If someone says they're a Christian, and then they become an

apostate, all that proves is they were never really saved in the first place. That was the argument James tried to make in the debate. That's one kind of eternal security. There is another kind, though, that's called once saved, always saved. And that's the idea, if a true Christian commits a terrible sin or even becomes an apostate, becomes an atheistic serial killer, he will still go to heaven. Doesn't matter. And so that would be antinomianism. Antinomian means against the law, meaning that since we're in Christ, we're under no law whatsoever, only grace, including the laws of the Ten Commandments. You can murder, steal. You may be denied heavenly

rewards, but you will still go to heaven. I think Johannes Agricola was a very early antinomian who taught this. And you see this today with people like Charles Stanley, Bruce Wilkinson, I think Wilkinson's another one. I think their website is faithalone.org. They take faith alone really seriously in that you are saved by faith alone works have absolutely nothing to do with it I've heard antinomianism being described as this God likes to forgive, I like to sin

so it's a perfect relationship basically yeah, they try to say it's a big deal in that you'll lose your heavenly rewards, but if you still get to heaven that's still okay with me this is probably a bit of a straw man if we would apply this to the majority of Protestants don't you think? you'll lose your heavenly rewards. But if you still get to heaven, that's still okay with me. But I mean, this is probably a bit of a straw man if we would apply this to the majority of Protestants, don't you think? Well, I don't know. I thought that this is a fringe view too, but there's a fair number of people who support, I mean, maybe not the majority, but it's not an

insignificant number. If you look up, you know, just look up once saved, always saved. There's a lot of debates about it. And what they'll say is, you know, well, it's good for you to be holy. It's good for you to follow God's law. But they're really hung up on the idea. They're so afraid of saying salvation is by works, which we agree salvation is not by works. We mentioned this earlier, didn't we, about this sort of the pendulum swinging to the complete other side. So it's like, we know we're not saved by our works, so therefore I can commit adultery and rape and murder and I can still be saved. Therefore works have absolutely nothing, even the work of avoiding evil has nothing to do with salvation. But when you look in scripture and see my debate with White and the chapter on eternal

security and the case for Catholicism, I mean, it is just overwhelming. We see the words of Jesus, the words of Paul, the letter to the Hebrews, the letter of Peter, constantly warning us to persevere in faith, to persist in God's kindness, to not be cut off from Christ. And if you say salvation can't be lost, as I did in white with the debate, you empty these warnings of any meaning. They just reduce the passages to these weird jumble of words that don't make sense in the English language. They're warnings that have nothing to worry about. What would you point to as a scripture verse to kind of combat this? Immediately, I think of John 6 somewhere where they say to Jesus, like, what must I do to do the work of God? And he says the work of God is this, to believe in the one he has sent.

So there is a work that you must do to be saved. Yeah, but unfortunately, some Protestants will say, well, as long as I believed at one point, I'm okay. So now later, though, in John, in John chapter 15, Jesus says, you know, I am the vine, you are the branches. My father is a vine dresser. The branches in me that don't bear fruit will be cut off and burned. The branches are believers united to Jesus. They will be cut off and burned, which is a allusion to hell. Another verse would be Romans 11, 22. That is where Paul says, note the kindness and severity of God, severity towards those who have fallen, but kindness to you provided you continue in his kindness, otherwise you too will be cut off. Um, and it's funny, actually in the debate with James,

I brought up this verse and I said, who is Paul talking about James? He's, I mean, Christians are non-Christians. You know, it doesn't make sense unless he's talking to Christians who can be cut off from God. And he tried to say, he's talking to the antisemitic Gentiles, like the antisemitic popes of the middle ages. And so he just threw a rhetorical bomb to try to get out of it. And then he was saved by the buzzer. But I mean, when you look at the verses, I just think it's very, very clear that God's gift of salvation is a free gift to us. And like any free gift, you can throw it away if you don't want it. But God, like the father of the prodigal son, is always waiting there if we make that foolish decision to welcome us back into his good graces. Yeah, I remember one Protestant friend saying to me, God would never

disown his son. And I said, well, that's true, but the son can run away like the prodigal son. He can reject the love of the father. Okay, so those are the 10 heresies so that we think every Catholic should know so that we don't repeat them. So yeah, thanks so much for that. That's super, that's super interesting. Okay, everybody, now we're going to take some of your questions. Okay, here's another, here's a question. A common criticism of the church and of the Bible I encounter is each historical stance, each's historical stance on slavery, particularly Christ's neglect to mention its intrinsic evil. How would you respond to these criticisms? Actually, I respond to this in depth in my book, Hard Sayings. I have two chapters on slavery,

one on the Old Testament and one on the New Testament. And there's a problem with the objector's argument or what their claim is that slavery is intrinsically evil, I would ask them to define what slavery is. It would depend how you define it. If you define slavery as forcing someone to work against their will or restricting their movement and forcing them to work without compensation, the problem here is we actually still do this. When prisoners, for example, we don't let them leave prison, and sometimes they can be forced to work, and we don't pay them for what they do. And so if you see, like, in the time of Christ, for example, if you captured, if you went to war with an enemy, and you had prisoners of war, you would probably essentially,

you can't let them run about in civilized society necessarily. You'd have to force them to work in a labor camp perhaps. Now, it wouldn't give you the right to mistreat them or treat them like chattel or animals, but you may restrict their movement and require them to work because they've now been subjugated. Or the other example that's easiest for people to wrap their heads around would be criminals doing this. So once you remove the idea that it's intrinsically evil, that there could be circumstances where a person, they are forced into labor for a certain period in a certain place, then we see, well, maybe Christ can't condemn slavery entirely for a specific reason. Now, in the Gospel of Luke, when Jesus quotes from the prophet Isaiah, he talks about how, you know, that now that he has come, he says that I have come, you know, to set the captives free. He quotes a lot of Isaiah, and he mentions that line, and that can

certainly be a reference to freeing people from all kinds of slavery, slavery to sin, and even temporal kinds of slavery. What we have to understand also is when we think of the word slavery, we usually think of American antebellum slavery. You kidnap people in Africa because they are a different race, and then you make them work and you own them like property and can treat them however you like. That is not the slavery that's described in the Bible. So if you look in the time of Jesus, for example,

the majority of people were slaves, and many people would end up as slaves because they owed debts that they couldn't pay off. And so they essentially have to work off their debts because you have an economic system where you don't have unlimited credit and Chase Bank to back you and stuff. Your only source of collateral is yourself. Basically, if you get into tremendous debt, you just end up into essentially debt slavery. Now, slavery was so common in ancient Rome. It was so common, uh, that the emperor had to pass, uh, I'm sorry. It was common. Not only was it common, but many slaves were freed, uh, when they reached a certain age or a certain status. In fact, it was so common, the emperor had to pass a decree

forbidding the release of slaves under several conditions. So what you have here is you have Christians operating in a world where slavery is part of the economic backbone, but they talk about treating slaves with dignity that other people didn't recognize. I mean, slaves, in Galatians 3.28, it says there's neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, that we're all one in Christ. They're entitled to be a part of the kingdom of God like anyone else. You know, they have full dignity and they should be treated as such. And this helped to lay the found work for the later abolition of slavery as economic systems changed throughout the centuries.

Right. That shows the case in point of why we ought to define our terms before continuing to argue about something, right? Someone raises something like slavery, which is a real buzz term. We need to know what we're talking about. That's great. Here's a softball, interesting sort of question. It's from Juanita Stevens. She just wants to know, what's the most difficult class that we took in our Masters of Philosophy? So I don't know, maybe she's at HACS. I don't know. What was yours? Must be a fellow Holy Apostles alum or a fellow student. I did a lot of great classes there, but the most difficult one.

For me, I think the most difficult really had more to do, not so much with the subject, with the teacher, but for me, I suppose it was modern philosophy. Having to read Wittgenstein and pretend I was interested was difficult. Yeah, it's hard. Well, one of the most difficult classes for me, but it was actually one of the most enjoyable, was I had ancient philosophy and nature and metaphysics. But for that class, we met every week and we would have an open Socratic discussion about the material, which some of it can be kind of dense. And that really puts you on your toes in a way that, you know, filling out a discussion post may not necessarily. So having that interaction, I think, and dealing

with, you know, when you're reading Aristotle, it's pretty dry stuff. Pretty difficult. Yeah. I mean, Wittgenstein, the problem there is I can write it off as saying that's just nonsense a lot of the times. But Aristotle is putting a lot of good points out there. It's just hard to get through because it's so intricate. Yeah. So that might have been the difficult stuff for me. I remember after having read all this stuff in my Masters in Philosophy, going back to books that I used to find difficult,

I'm like, oh, this is like reading a magazine now. Right. Yes. All right. Here's one question from Craig Benko. He says, I often hear people struggle with questions similar to, if God is perfect in his existence, why did he bother creating us? We are not needed for his existence. I can understand that it was a loving act to create us and allow us to love him, but why even bother? I usually do not have a great way to answer this in any sort of satisfactory manner. Right, yeah. So I always try to figure out where this objection is coming from, and I think a lot of it comes from the idea that we think of God with

different kinds of models in our mind. You know, I mean, even atheists do this. They think of what God is. You know, we think of God maybe as a ruler or an engineer or, you know, an amazing parent. I think a lot of people want to think of God, even atheists, when they critique God, he's an engineer. He, you know, builds this universe, but this is inefficient. That's not great. If you've just got the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, you've got a perfect system here. Why would you do any more? And I think that neglects the role of seeing God maybe from the model of being an artist. You might say, why would you bother painting? You've got a perfect, clean, white canvas here. It's perfect. Why do you need to do anything more to that? And you would

say, well, because the art that comes from this, you know, artists don't make art just so they can sit around and gawk at it. They make it because the world's a better place with that art expressing that kind of beauty. So if you have beauty, truth, and goodness all within God, within the Trinity, So if you have beauty, truth, and goodness all within God, within the Trinity, it's even better when it is expressed through creation. So I think maybe that's one way to look at it. We think of God as artist, not just as a sterile engineer. Then we can understand, well, why would God make this just like an artist would? Because it's good, because it's wonderful, because it's something more than just him.

He doesn't need it. It's good for us who were created. And it's just this creative, good, loving reality just flows from God because of his nature. All right. I'm going to ask you one more question. And it's this one. What is the most common question you are asked in apologetics and what's a question you'd like to be asked more in apologetics? That is a super good question from Kevin Kennel. Thank you. That is a really good question, actually. Yeah. Oh, the most common. So the most common, and then the one you think ought to be asked more, but isn't. Sure. Uh, the most common one, like when I'm on Catholic Answers Live, it's probably questions about, honestly, I would say purgatory in general. But for me, a lot of it is Catholic doctrine about, you know, praying to the saints or maybe some moral issues. People know I study moral issues a lot. So abortion or same-sex marriage, but doctrine-wise, praying to the saints, I think, is intercession of the

saints is one that comes up time and time and time again, really. And I think it's an important issue to discuss. It's a stumbling block for many people. What would I like people to ask about? Because I imagine people are going to ask questions based on the interactions that they're having. And so, back in the 80s, I'm sure the questions were all, you know, Protestants objecting to Catholic teaching stuff. Whereas today maybe it's more atheistic and. Oh yeah. I still get a lot of those. Like my daughter's an atheist, my son's an atheist, just like on atheism. How do I show them God exists or how do I answer them? So it's just kind of the basic opening salvo. I have your book on my desk, Answering Atheism. Excellent book. Everyone go get it. That's right. The questions I like, I love questions where philosophy interacts with our faith. And so we can think about these

philosophical concepts more and drill deeper into them. So like saying, you know, well, what, you know, which theory of time is right? The A theory or the B theory? How does that affect God's eternity? You know, is it, is the resurrection of the dead possible? You know, no one's called me yet to talk about like Peter Vanden Wagen is a philosopher who said that, you know, maybe the resurrection of the dead is not possible. He says, he uses this analogy. He says, you know, I'm walking down the hallway one night and i knock

over the stack of blocks my a tower of blocks my three-year-old made and he says even if i had laser precision and i put them back together i could never get the tower of blocks my son made back again you'd always be me trying to recreate it but that one tower is lost so he'd say even if you put all your atoms back together is it still you you know are you is that still you or is it just the tower of blocks being reassembled and my answer that makes me think of that makes you think of star trek like right yeah like the transporter and stuff is it you my answer to vanden wagen is well the problem here is that human beings are not an extrinsic collection of various sub-objects.

A tower of blocks has no unity. Its unity is imposed upon it by a creator. And the tower of blocks is just, you know, you're talking about the achievement of your child and not your own achievement. But a human being has intrinsic unity. And that gives us more of an identity than a tower of blocks so for example if i have my father's old watch an old pocket watch and i take it apart i clean all the elements in it i put it back together and it's ticking is it my father's watch yes sure i'd say it definitely is yeah but you took it apart and

put it back together is it the watch that he built? Yes, it still is. We still feel it is, even though I took it apart because I just restored the unity it once had. I like that. Yeah. So you want people to ask questions. Yeah. Cause I'm sure you get millions of questions every day about things you've answered millions of times. So there you go. If someone's listening and they listen to Trent Horn on Catholic Answers Live, give them a call and ask that question. They'll be super impressed. Little philosophical things are always fun. Well, I can't thank you enough. This has been super fun, and people are going to get a lot out of it.

So thanks for your time. And tell us how people can learn more about you and see the cool stuff you're doing. Yeah, I would recommend that people visit Catholic.com, search for my name. You can find my radio shows, my magazine articles, my books that are currently offered. If you'd like to learn more about me or if you'd like to request me to speak at an event, you can go to catholicanswerspeakers.com.

It's our new speaker website. If you'd like to have me come speak at your church or your school, or if you want another way to get ahold of me, you can go to my personal website, trenthhorn.com and i can receive messages there as well all right thanks so much thank you matt always a pleasure to have trent horn on pints with aquinas thank you to everybody who has been listening if

you want to leave us a review on itunes we'd certainly appreciate it and thanks to everybody who supports pints with aquinas on patreon. God bless y'all. Talk to you later. Bye. Who's gonna survive? And I would give my whole life to carry you.