Pints With Aquinas - From Calvinist to Catholic w/ Ethan Dolan

Episode Date: January 26, 2023

Ethan Dolan joins Matt to discuss his conversion from Calvinism while attending a Calvinist bible college, his correspondence with Dr. Scott Hahn during his conversion, and what Catholics get wrong about Protestantism. Emmaus Academic Promo Code: EAethan

So Thomas Aquinas wrote Daily Meditations for Lent. And so what I'm gonna do over on matfrad.locals.com is read those meditations and release them every day throughout Lent. So if you've been thinking, what's a cool way I could prepare for Easter, this would be it. Go over and support us at matfrad.locals.com

and you'll get a bunch of free things in return. One of those free things will be daily meditations for Lent. Matfrad.locals.com. Thanks. Ethan, great to have you on the show. Yeah, great to be here. Ethan, it is nice to have you. Thank you. All right, so here's how I understand what happened.

Dr. Hahn was on my show. It's a year ago, right? Over a year ago. Yeah, over a year ago now. And he talks about you and your brother, who were at the time Calvinist and at a Calvinist college. And that discussion led to your brother being kicked out of the Calvinist college, a college that you had already

been kicked out of for holding Catholic views. Yes, exactly. And then the next day, Dr. Hahn calls me in a panic. Matt, we need to edit that out. I didn't mean to say their names. And we somehow, did you remember taking that out? I don't know if you remember, stuff happens. Anyway.

I never heard that side of the story. That's funny. Yeah, he felt terrible about it. Yeah, it's cause I think Liam afterwards was like, can we get that video? I'd just love to keep that somewhere. Cause that was just awesome. Did you ever get it?

No, we didn't. I think we couldn't find it or something. Yeah, I think we probably used the YouTube editor to, because I think you said it at the beginning, to take it out. So it means it's lost forever. It was at the beginning and there's another part later on. So yeah, there was two parts. Yeah. So today we want to talk about your conversion, Calvinism, Catholicism, and things like that. So I'm excited because I don't know you. We've met a few times. So I'm looking forward to hearing your story. Were you raised a Protestant? I was raised a Protestant, yeah. My parents were

Catholics growing up and then they left the church a few years after I was born. So I was baptized Catholic, but I never spent a conscious hour, I could remember at least, in the Catholic Church. And they left because they ended up meeting a priest after just becoming more interested in the faith. They went back and asked about, you know, they just had questions about the faith and they were told, you know, you just do these actions and you get a mortal sin forgiven or something like that.

You know, they didn't understand the theology of indulgences. The priest likely didn't either. And so it was put in a way that they were like, I just do this action and I have sin forgiven. That's not really, it doesn't really make sense. That and then they were like, you know, Adam, Adam and Eve, they're not real. They're just, they're just these mythical kind of figures. And so my parents were like, yep, I'm out of here with that.

And so they became evangelicals. Then, and then my dad, after a few years, ended up becoming a Calvinist. Story there is just he was an elder at this evangelical church after being there for a few years. And he started just noticing things that were just like, this just doesn't sit right with me.

You know, like at a lot of churches like that, you'll have... In evangelical churches that aren't Calvinist. Yeah, it was more, we call them Arminians. They're a version of Semipelagians, as we would know them. So it's kind of like, you work together with God to be saved. It's not like God works salvation out in and through you. It's true in a sense that we work together with God, but again, we work together with him

because he works it in us, right? We love because he first loves us, loved us, right? So my dad would notice that things just didn't, they weren't working well. It was like, if you are just moved to believe, you know, come up on stage and sign your name on this thing or whatever, you know, it's like little things like that. It's like, give your life to Christ.

And you kind of do that once, and then people will just kind of fall away, walk away. It wasn't really super discipleship based, you know? And so my dad was like, this doesn't make sense. And so as he started talking with people a lot, at least this is the way the story was told to me, the pastor I had before I left to come to go to RBC, Reformation Bible College in 2018,

he walked up to my dad and was like, you are a Calvinist. And my dad's like, I'm a what now? He just called me, what'd you call me? Did he use it as a pejorative? No, no, it was like, it was a good thing in this case. But my dad was like, you called me a what now? And he's like, you're a Calvinist. And my dad's like, huh?

What even is that? He's like, predestination, this, that, and the other thing, you know, just works through it all. And my dad's like, you're right, I think I'm a Calvinist. And so he started reading all the Puritans and that's kind of when I started to- And that clicked with him. That clicked with you very well.

Yeah, I remember some of my first, I was around probably nine or 10 and we were still going to that evangelical church and so I was thinking I have to dedicate my life to Christ, which was really confusing for me even then. And this is gonna get into the conversion story too because all of this starts to make sense as you Start to grasp what the like how salvation actually works, you know When I as an outsider looking in and so this might be completely mistaken. I don't mean to offend anybody

Oh sure, but the Calvinists just seem like serious Protestants like the rad trads of the Protestant community Yeah, there's something true. And they all have beards. They all have beards. Just like radtrads. Although I think radtrads have patchy beards and Calvinists have like thick ass beards. Yeah, they have actual awesome beards. Yeah, that's part of the requirement, I think. You heard of Charles Spurgeon? Yeah, I mean, I think he's just the classic, you know, beard, cigar. He's a reformed Baptist, so he's like a, he's a Calvinist on the Baptist end of things.

So that's kind of a... So that impression that I have that's not based in anything but appearances, what's true about that as far as serious Protestants? I would say they definitely are serious Protestants. It's more serious today than you're going to find in evangelical groups, but you're going to find other very serious groups as well. There's very serious groups of Lutherans, Anglicans, there's some. Mason- Is there just more sort of academic rigor behind Calvinism today? Bregman- Yes, there is. I would say-

Mason- It's not that you can't find it in different Protestant communities if you go back far enough or read certain specialists today, but it feels like... They're the only ones who really have kept a solid tradition. I think they actually have confessions going through time. So it's a confession of faith, right? So the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Synative Door, things like this. Yeah, this is something that I get introduced to when I go to RBC. I didn't know a whole lot about it before that, but I knew my dad had read the Westminster Confession, said it was great, things like that. But there were like a

few disagreements when I started getting there that I had with my dad after time went on, because they believed in infant baptism and things like that. I had no idea what that was coming in. I was like, that seems weird. Don't, aren't you just baptized because, you know, it's a sign that you're saved, right, or saved, and don't really, it's defined as,

back then it was more like you're regenerated, which is kind of interior renewal by the Holy Spirit, right? But then there's justification and sanctification. So in Protestant theology, and this was what I was taught growing up too, is that justification is by a legal imputation. So Christ's merits on the cross are imputed to you or counted to you, and your demerits or your sin is counted to him. So God punishes your sin in Christ on the cross,

and he imputes his merits to you, right? So that's the basis of how salvation occurs in that system. So that is counted to you. And then on that legal basis, God will regenerate the believer. So the Holy Spirit comes in and renews them interiorly. The thing is- It sounds beautiful.

It is in some ways, it's until you start to- I know it gets ugly, but it's just the way you put that. It sounds very clean. Makes a lot of sense. Yes, you can put it very beautifully. And all of that, I think, is true in some sense. Just it's the way that it works itself out that it misses. And that's something we can get to a little more.

It's hard to know if we're going to circle back to this or if now's the time that we should actually exist. I'm afraid we won't get back to it. You're afraid. OK, so I love how you just put that. Why don't you say it as closely as you can? Yes. As what the Catholic Church teaches. OK, yeah. Yeah.

So from this is this is an immensely complicated discussion that's been going on for like over 500 years. Well you've got two minutes, so sum it up. Two minutes, oh boy. Okay, let's go. So the position the Reformed theologians take, at least later Reformed theologians, you have earlier ones who hold different things, is that there's a legal, yeah, the legal imputation of the righteousness of Christ to man's account, as it were, is what causes, it's temporarily at least before regeneration, so it comes in time before somebody is changed interiorly. So that's the forgiveness of sins on the one hand.

On the other, it's the infusion of grace, which a lot of reformed people are going to maybe object to. So this is one of the funny things too is I think when you look at the Westminster Confession, which is, it was done in 1646 by the Puritans, it's very, it's probably like the most used Calvinist confession of faith. That is going to talk about how in question 77 of the Catechism, the larger Catechism, it's going to talk about how justification and sanctification differ and that one is a legal imputation which is for the remission of sins and the other, in the other, God infuses

grace and exercises it there unto you, so something like that. I forget, I haven't read it in a long time. But that was something that stuck out to us when we read that is, okay, God infuses grace. Because in more popular discussions of it, you hear things like, we believe in imputation, whereas the Catholics believe in infusion. And it's like, okay, so how does this work if we have both?

And so as I started to read more, it just became clear that both are there in both systems. So there's imputation in the Catholic system and there's infusion in the Catholic system. So say, express it in a Catholic way, but as Calvinist as you can get. In a Catholic way. Does that make sense?

So that even the Calvinists can go, okay, so as a Catholic, I can accept, you know, it comes this close to my view. How what would the Catholic? Oh, yeah, okay So what the Catholic view is gonna look like is it's gonna flip the basis of the legal imputation And this is this is gonna be very different. So The basis of legal imputation is still Christ's death and resurrection. However, it's going to be because he infuses grace that he counts us righteous, right?

Because grace is a participation in the divine nature. Calvinists are gonna object to that all day long. And I think that's very sad, because when you look at scripture all over the place, we're called sons of God, right? And what does that mean when we back up, you know, John, John 1, 17, he gave them the right to become children of God born, yeah, to them who, yeah, to them who received

and he gave them the right to become children of God, who were born out of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God, right? And when you back up and ask the question, what is sonship? I think that's really how we get here. What is it to be a son? It's to share in the nature of the Father or the one who begets. Right? So just as a child shares in the flesh and blood of his father, right? So we are now begotten sons. We're begotten sons by grace, where Christ is the only begotten son by nature.

So he eternally is begotten of the father, right? And- So is it less legal, more familial? Is that- Yes, it's less legal. Well, you could put it that way, but it's more that what the adoption is and what grace is changes everything.

Because in the reform system, if grace is just a kind of a restoration of nature, which is really what it is, nature is just what we possess by virtue of being human, right? It's gonna go all the way back to this debate in the garden. What is, who is Adam? What is his natural constitution? Right, so this is what ends up getting me suspended. Just, I wanna still sum up the Catholic view. So you summed it up real nicely,

and I know it's difficult whenever you sum things up, as you say, this debate's been happening for hundreds of years, maybe longer. So it's a difficult thing to sum up. But what would you say of this? And I've heard Scott Hahn say this, right? We owed a debt we couldn't pay, so he paid a debt he didn't owe. Yes.

That's something a Catholic can say. That's something you have to absolutely say very easily. Okay, so how does that differ from what you just shared about the Calvinist future? Sure. So in the in the yeah, this is this is this is the problem is it's just an immensely complicated discussion. So try to speak right into the mic. Okay. is it's just an immensely complicated discussion. Try to speak right into the mic. Okay, thanks.

So in the reform position, the legal imputation is the basis for the infusion of grace. So because we are counted righteous before God, then we're regenerated. Then we're regenerated, yep. Whereas in the Catholic position, it's because grace is infused that we are counted righteous before God.

So now that's gonna get into the question of what is grace and why, for the Calvinist, does grace not, why are you not counted righteous on the basis of the grace that's infused? I guess that's a better way to clarify what I said before. Yeah, fair enough, and maybe you didn't, I don't wanna kind of like nail you to this point so we can talk about it for three hours. It's just, and it's, as you say, it's very complex. I mean, this is really the main thing. So I think if you work from here, this is the main difference, not only in this one area, but when it comes to Mariology, Intercession of the Saints, the Invalidability of the Church, everything is connected on this point.

Do you want to come back to this? everything is connected on this point. Do you want to come back to this? That would that I think this theme of sanctifying grace is going to come up. Okay. Everywhere. All right. So let's put a pin in that. Yeah, definitely put a pin in that. That'll be back. So your dad converts to Calvinism or is identifying as a Calvinist. Yes. And he shares this with you as a young child, presumably. And is it making more sense to you? Were you always a kind of intellectually engaged Christian or were you just doing what your parents did? Yes, I was. I was always thinking about what my dad was saying

and kind of reading. I remember thinking that what he was saying about predestination at first was like, oh, this doesn't seem right. Like, how can I be predestined for the foundation of the world to believe? Does that mean I'm not free? And I had all these kind of questions

about how that worked. But then my dad really just pointed it out in scripture, you were chosen before the foundation of the world, you did not choose me, I chose you, right? All these things everywhere. I'm just like, I can't object to that. That's right there in the text. How old were you when you were going back and forth

with your dad on this? I think 10 the first time we talked about it. That's impressive. So 10, and then he gave me, I mean, my dad is just wonderful. He gave me several books by Puritans around that age. They're not super hard to read. They're surprisingly straightforward,

but very devotional. And I think that's something I still love about them. Is that was really my first taste of like, like more depth in theology and then as I started reading more contemporary authors, I just felt like there was something missing. And I think that's very accurate to this day that I just just kept going back and finding, you know, from where we were, there's something missing here and there's something missing here until we end up, you know, basically climbing the ladder and reaching back to St. Thomas Aquinas and others. So he's, you know, he's my patron saint.

He's really the one I would credit for most of this. Yeah, I mean, trying to explain the depth of the of the reform tradition is difficult. They have a lot, they've had, they have a lot of good stuff, right? I think most of it is excellent. I think they just go wrong on, on this point with grace and that leads off the path in several, several directions. And it's, what's difficult about a discussion like this is Yes. It's a free flowing. Yeah laid back discussion Yeah, right, and you'll never be able to summarize the reform position in a way Exactly that's felt appropriate to those who might be watching from yes, but you certainly wish to do that

Which I respect about I would love to and I'm planning to make other videos and stuff in the future, you know My friend Christian Wagner. I don't know if you've heard of him. I know of him. Yeah, Scholastic Answers, I think is his YouTube channel. We're planning on going through, yeah, he was expelled from school with me, same school. So there were three of us who got kicked out. There's 10 of us from there who have become Catholic. So it's been, yeah, it's been quite a ride.

Well, before we get to you going to the school, can you just sort of like maybe fill in the rest of that chronology? So your dad is sharing these Puritan authors with you. Presumably you find yourself convicted by the Calvinist system. Yeah. Speak to that a little bit more and then how that led to you going to this college.

Yeah, so back then I was understanding it more as everything there was viewed through more of just a soteriological lens. So that's just referring to salvation, right? How salvation occurs. So growing up and all the way through high school, I would get into arguments or discussions with people about Calvinism versus Arminianism. I was always a big Calvinist, so I'd have all kinds of texts prepared, just kind of

talk to people about it. And I just love doing that, because I just love to show God is sovereign in all things, and He works out His will as He does, and we freely cooperate in that. It's not like they actually eliminate free will in the Calvinist system. That's something that I think is very misunderstood as well. Calvinists and Catholics actually on predestination are nearly identical sometimes.

And then other times Calvinists take it a little too far and they fall into the anathemas of the Council of Orange and things like that. So there's some really interesting interplays. Similarities, yeah. I'm not sure if you ever read Jimmy Akin's article, A Tiptoe Through Tulip? Oh no, yeah.

In that article, he seeks to show how close a Catholic can get to the Calvinist system without being a heretic, as we would think it. All of them, if you were to slightly change the sense. If you change the sense, if you change the sense now we're just equivocating and that's silly, but at the same time like what they're trying to get at with total depravity I think is is exactly what we're trying to affirm in original sin. Well not exactly, it's it's this is it comes down to

sanctifying grace again. So because they don't see sanctifying grace as a participation in the divine nature or if if they do, they will say that, some will. They don't see it as an elevation to something above the nature of man. So it's just something that's restoring man's original constitution in the garden, right? So for a Catholic, original sin is the loss of sanctity. So original justice or original righteousness in the garden is where Adam possesses both sanctity, so holiness before God, which makes his soul pleasing to God. Or as Matthias Schaben puts it, he's my favorite theologian, grace is a certain participation in the divine nature

or array of divine beauty shed forth into the soul that makes the soul pleasing to God. Just absolutely beautiful. I remember just reading that right after I became Catholic and I was just floored, like, wow, that's just wonderful. But that's what's missing. So they have, there's sanctity, the holiness, what makes us pleasing before God,

and there's integrity, which causes man's lower passions, things like that, to be in submission to his reason. Right? So when Adam sins, it's a mortal sin, and so that sanctity is gone. So just as the way that we conceive of man, and is again, this is all kind of heady stuff, but the simplest way to put this is that just as the body lives in the soul, right, the soul gives life to the body, the Holy Spirit gives life to the soul, right? And so this is death for Adam in the garden, because his soul is separated from God, and now he's tending towards the nothingness out of which he was made. And so he ends up kind of just collapsing further and further into sin, right? And he dies within, this is another, a whole other topic, but he dies within, you know, the first day, both in a, both in the sense of he died spiritually that day, but a day is as a thousand years, a thousand years

is as a day, he died at like 980 something It's right. So if you take that the book of Jubilees will talk about that and it's interpreted that way That's a there's a lot of debate on that book though So not really gonna go in to a lot of it, but it's gone on really likes that book. Cool. Yeah Yes Yeah, we've had some really good conversations about it Yes. Yeah, we've had some really good conversations about it. Okay, so when you said you were in high school debating Arminianism, was Catholicism even on your radar? Did you know Catholics at your age? What was your view of Catholicism? Or was it as remote as, say, like, you know, Coptic Christianity?

Not nearly as remote as Coptic Christianity. that's still pretty remote even as a Catholic. But no, anytime somebody tried to argue that Catholics were actually Christians, I would have said no, no they're not. They deny justification by faith alone, right? So because they deny that you're saved by faith alone and works as part of that. Um, there's no way because you can't be saved on the basis of your own merits. You're saved by grace alone through faith. Right. So would you presumably look at other Protestants as not Christian also?

If they held similar things? Yeah, I would. Yeah, I would have. Nope. Nope. Yeah. I mean, I still, in a way, um, would, it depends on how you parse out the FaithWorks question. So that's kind of a big thing. But yeah, at that time, very negative, very negative towards Catholics, but not so, it was more just kind of, this is what I know, this is what I've heard.

There was always kind of a question there of how do they think about that? That doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. I always had questions from when I was like a little kid about like Catholic thought for some reason. Like, you know, I just remember reading all generations will call me blessed, right? And thinking, we don't really like bless Mary a whole lot.

I'm like, what does that mean? What does that look like? You know? Like, yeah, she's blessed. She gave birth to God, right? And I would have believed that. I would have been maybe less comfortable saying it then, but we don't really like, yeah, we don't really think about it that way. But it just felt like the world was a totally different world in a way than the world of scripture. Like, it just felt

like everything has changed what happened here. And I always remember thinking that growing up is like everything will test and all these blessings being passed down from father to son. And like, what is going on there? Can a father just bless a son? I don't even know. So, yeah. Not just the whole world was different.

The tabernacle, the heavenly bodies being commanded by God to be fashioned. Right. That seems weird for a Protestant, I'm sure. In a way, I thought, I always thought that was weird growing up. I never really, I always just thought, you know, that's just a bunch of like legal Old Testament stuff

and doesn't really have to do much with today. Find out that's dead wrong when I get to RBC and even Protestants, they're very good at typology. And that's something that I think Catholics maybe don't realize is that at least the Reformed tradition is excellent at that. Gerhardus Voss is, he's like the father of Reformed biblical theology, so they do all kinds of the stuff, like the baptism of Christ and how it relates to, you know, the flood and then the flood and then the Israelites going through the Red Sea and Elijah at the Jordan River and all these things. Like the same kind of stuff is just going to be taken in a slightly different, well not slightly, it's slight but it's big at once.

Mason- Yeah, a deviation in the beginning leads to... Bregman- Yes, yeah. Mason- Exactly. Yep. Mason- So when you went to this Calvinist college, what was your desire? What was your hope to do with whatever degree you were hoping to attain there? Sure. So I, I've always wanted to teach as either as a professor or in some capacity, I don't know. Around then is when I started to realize that I loved just reading scripture and understanding it and things like that.

But I'd say one background kind of reason that I never really talked about, really with very many people at all, was that I always had a struggle with knowing I was a Christian. And now this makes sense to me, right? Then it didn't, because in that system, just if you put yourself in the mind of a Calvinist for a minute, you're legally counted as righteous, and that's going to be the basis of you living a holy life, right?

Not because the legal part causes that, but because there's the legal, and then there's the ontological, or transformative aspect beneath it. So if I see that transformative aspect of me living a holy life slipping, it doesn't cause you to question why am I slipping so much as it does, was I ever justified to begin with? And so when it comes to that question of assurance of salvation, the Reformed claim they can have an infallible assurance of salvation, like infallible logically and experientially maybe not, but logically you can know because

you can see, you can know if you're justified by faith, right, you trust, and that is an infallible thing. But then I could see myself wondering, like, what does. And that is an infallible thing. But then I could see myself wondering, like, what does it mean to trust and how much am I trusting? Or am I even trusting? Yes, yeah.

So anytime I would fall into what I would call now a mortal sin, back then, I wouldn't have thought of in those terms, you know, struggle with like masturbation or something like that, which, yeah, that was mind-blowing to me when I found out that it's mortal sin as I got older. You know, I just learned that like right after

the teaching on baptism clicked. So at the time when I went to RBC, yeah, this is just one of those confirmations that Catholicism was the right direction. In RBC, just one more time for those at home. Reformation Bible College. Yeah. So this is further along,

but I'm just gonna skip here while we're on the topic. Yeah. Yeah, it was like, I had struggled with that kind of sin all the way through life, as most guys do. But at some point in there it clicked with me that that's a mortal sin and that baptism, by baptism that we can avoid all mortal sins, right? It's like, wow, by the grace of baptism,

the Holy Spirit indwelling me, this was like the first moment I realized like in a concrete, like very real way, the Holy Spirit dwells within me and changes not only, you know, the way I feel interiorly, but how I can act exteriorly. And just from that moment on, it was like, it was like kind of this, it's hard to explain, it just never had a hold on me again.

You know, it was just like gone from then on. Wow. That was just one of those like, just bizarre kind of confirmation moments of like, this doctrine led me to get rid of sin that I had been struggling with, you know, most of my life. And it's like, wow, that's powerful, you know? I'd love you to talk a little bit more about this idea of this infallible assurance of

our salvation. So like, it sounded like you were saying when you would see yourself sliding into serious sin it would cause you to wonder whether or not you were even a Christian, right? Yes. So what I want to know is what would somebody say in response to that? Like what does James White, who will undoubtedly watch this video, say in response to that? Yeah, so they're going to make it a distinction between objective and subjective assurance. So assurance as to the object of faith, so when I'm trusting in Christ who is the one

who saves me, right, versus me feeling like I'm saved. So it's that objective assurance that's gonna matter. The subjective can go up and down based on how you live. Sure. assurance that's gonna gonna matter the subjective can go up and down based on how you live sure I'm trying to think what a nice earthly or natural analogy might be you know like I don't know I'm trying just thinking on the spot here maybe you're deathly allergic to something right and then you start to feel sick and you suspect that maybe you accidentally had that thing you're deathly allergic to and you become paranoid about that. But objectively, you know, you never took that thing. This is a

bad analogy. Help me out. No, that kind of works. Yeah, it's like, you know, it's regardless of how you feel, something has taken place and that's what you put your dependence on, namely Christ and his action. Exactly. Not how you feel. Yes. It's Christ's action exterior to you alone that saves. I think that's a good way to put how reformed people think. But am I right in thinking that if a reformed individual apostatized, I never get that right,

apostatized? Apostatized? Either way. Is it really? Apostatized is how I would say it, but I've heard people say it both ways. So somebody apostasizes. I suppose at that point, his reformed brethren would say he was not actually a Christian to begin with, and we now know that. But that would, and I'm sure there's a good response to this.

So I'm not trying to straw man the position, but that would terrify me because I'm like, okay, so if maybe it wouldn't terrify me, but if there are people around me who leave the faith and I go ah, they were never a Christian to begin with But their subjective experience before that Apostatizing was presumably identical to mine. How the hell do I know that I won't one day do that? that was my that was my I mean I got a new and not a not an argument kind of a discussion with my favorite professor at RBC about this in class. And this is my point with him, it was like, if anybody can just walk away at any point and then they just weren't safe to begin with, right?

Then like, what are we even, what are we doing? Like, what are we talking about? Because I don't have an invaluable assurance, objectively in that case, because if I'm looking external lead to myself, I can see that there are people who trick themselves. So if I think I objectively have faith, what if I'm just objectively tricking myself?

So you have this kind of like, what is going on? Yeah, and is that, in your estimation, like is that a common sort of experience of, oh yeah, it is, okay. Oh yeah, all over the place. Yeah, that- Because I mean, right now, it doesn't sound terribly different to me as a Catholic. Like

I have a moral assurance of my salvation. Whenever I receive Eucharist, I'm stating I have a moral assurance of my salvation. And yet I know that people, I've seen people who are deceiving themselves. We all know people who are like, this person thinks they're good, but they're really bad. Yeah, right. You can see that sometimes. And you have to think, okay, well, if I'm right about that assessment, it's true that I could be as diluted. So I can't have an infallible assurance of my salvation, at least for that one reason. But so all of a

sudden it sounds like the Calvinist and the Catholic are having a similar experience, but they're talking about it in different ways. Yes, very similar. Because what we both came down to in that discussion with my professor was, you know, the way you really have assurance is by living the Christian life, partaking of the sacraments, hearing the word preached, things like that.

I mean, Catholics can answer the same way. And Aquinas in the Summa talks about this. He talks about like, if we despise the world, love heavenly things, that these are signs of our salvation. Yeah, there's all kinds of messy interpretation of like the anathemas at Trent against... I believe there's an anathema at Trent talking about the assurance of salvation that somebody

knows for certain that they are one of the elect. So for the Calvinists, they're going to say, we can. For Augustine and for Catholics, you're going to say, no, I can't know for certain unless there's some kind of revelation. Right. And that's what Ludwig Ott in the Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma points out is the Council of Trent never said one cannot have a moral assurance about salvation. Presumably, we ought to have that.

Yes. So I think that's kind of what's difficult is this is one thing I've been finding. I've been reading On Divine Revelation by Father Garagur-Gurang, I just worked through both volumes actually, and there's a whole section here where he talks about how, I forget whether he says it's at the time of the Reformation, but I think you can see this happening around the time of the Reformation either way. Forgive me if I'm strawman and Calvinist here, I'm really not trying to, this is just kind of my sort of hypothesis

Somebody critique me if I'm wrong but the It's that the speculative intellect which is what knows things in themselves And so it's like I can know this water bottle in itself Tends to get weakened or at least not distinguished enough from the practical intellect which looks at things in accordance with their use which looks at things in accordance with their use. And so you end up having a lot of arguments in Calvinist theology from the practical intellect or moral arguments, things like that,

from like a lower kind of reasoning, but not enough kind of speculative thought. And by speculative, I don't mean like, oh, we're just gonna fly off into the clouds. No, I mean like, yeah, I mean knowing the thing in itself in a very concrete way This goes back to the the discussion the garden again, too. They just will simply say For Adam he that is Adam is naturally made in holiness, right? And so Adam is holy by nature basically

It's not looking at it, breaking it down and abstracting. Yeah, Adam is one person. We're not gonna disagree with that. Historically, there's one reality in that Adam is one holy man who is made, right? He's made in holiness. The question is, what makes him holy? And so, the Reformed are gonna reject,

well, they're not gonna reject. The least the Reformed I was talking to reject, well, they're not going to reject, at least the Reformed I was talking to at RBC, our professors would reject most likely the idea that grace is an accident which inheres in the soul. So an accident is something that follows upon a substance, whereas a substance is what makes a thing what it is, so in itself. So Adam substantially is a man, right? And when he has grace, he's now a graced man, right? But if Adam doesn't

have grace, he's still a man, right? This is kind of the thing. So I think what ends up happening there is the language just isn't clear enough in most of the Reformed tradition, at least contemporarily. In the past, I can find positions where they very much will say grace is an accident that inheres in the soul. They just don't see it quite the same way. They're not going to call it a super added grace that comes from above. That's a whole theoretical discussion. We don't have to go into that. But this leads to, from the beginning, the differences in how we set up, how we view salvation history, which changes how we view our entire soteriology, the entire economy of the covenants.

Everything kind of hinges on that point of what is man and how does this all work together. Do you mind me asking how that conversation was resolved with your university professor about wondering whether or not you're a Christian? Because you said that that was a discussion you got into. How did that resolve? Oh, back to assurance? Yeah, sorry to jump back. No, no, no, you're okay.

That was resolved, I think, with us both agreeing on the fact that we just have to have the sacraments think about these kinds of things, right? And just live a Christian life. And the sacraments, think about these kinds of things, right, and just live a Christian life. And the sacraments for the Calvinist mean? Mean baptism and Eucharist, it's called sometimes, but the Lord's Supper is the general way it's spoken of. Whole, that's really, whole nother big discussion, but that's one of the main things

that really ended up converting me was recognizing the sacraments. Because when I went to RBC, those were many of the questions I had too, was like, what are the sacraments? I remember a conversation with my dad about how the sacraments are called means of grace. Like I found that in one of the Puritans or something.

And my dad was like, you know, I don't really know what we mean by that when we say means of grace. He's like, I do believe they give grace in some way. But what that means, I don't really know. And that just kind of left me like, huh, that is really odd. And my dad's position on the sacraments is going to be a lot different than what the Calvinists at RBC are going to hold. So his was more just like, baptism is just a sign, right? And communion, as we would call it growing up, was also just a symbol, right?

Just like crackers and grape juice, and you remember Jesus. Is this the view among all Calvinists? I don't think it was. No, no, not at all. So this is the view sort of taken by Zwingli. It's going to be referred to as Zwinglianism. It's a little more nuanced than that, I think, even in Zwingli. This might be good, actually, to help clarify the Calvinist position, or one of them,

to our Catholics who keep straw manning how Calvinists view sacraments. So explain to me how Calvinists often view the Eucharist and say baptismal regeneration even. Yes, okay. Baptismal regeneration discussion is... Let's start there and then we'll go to the other one. So I don't know whether my RBC professors are going to agree with me on how to interpret baptismal regeneration in the Reformed tradition, because I think there are a few people who have brought up this position and they weren't. I don't know how seriously their position was taken or anything like that, but it's kind of a difficult thing. All of these are. So I would say it ranges from, yeah I'll give a range of what the Calvinists will affirm on it. At the lowest point, and this is

where the kind of Calvinist I was being kind of a Presbyterian, more looking to the historical reformed tradition, I would say this is heretical even from that position is that it's just a sign. Now the difference is the Calvinists are going to say there's a sign and it's a sign in seal of God's covenant. So just like you have circumcision is a seal of the righteousness that Abraham had by faith, right? So it's a seal.

Now, when you really get into the definition of seal, it's like, I don't know that this is a whole lot different than being assigned, pointing to something else, but it helps confirm in the mind, at least to some degree, that God has promised that I will inherit salvation, right? So, if you're in the church, which is the visible church in the Presbyterian system. So Presbyterians and Reformed Baptists are going to differ massively. I'm very familiar with both of the arguments because I was a Reformed Baptist and then I became a Presbyterian. That's a big debate about the nature of the church.

And this is what the debate about baptism, I think, really centers on is the structure of the covenants in Scripture and how these things relate to each other. So the Baptist is going to see a discontinuity between the Old Testament and the New. So they'll see that infants were circumcised in the Old Testament, and so while in the Old Testament there were infants as part of the covenant, the New Covenant is a substantially different thing. So it is, as they would put it, one covenant progressively revealed, formally established. So it's revealed through time what the new covenant is through the other covenants, namely, and then it's established with Christ coming in the new covenant. But the new covenant changes things to some degree where it's only those who explicitly believe by faith that are part of the covenant.

The Presbyterians are going to go the other way, and this is what's going to lead to infant baptism, is they'll see a fundamental continuity with the old. So, infants are circumcised in the Old Testament, they're entered into the covenant. Why on earth would suddenly all of these infants just be excluded in the new? Like, we have no statements on this, so we have to assume continuity and work from there. And I think the Presbyterians are right on that issue. Now I do think at the same time they're holding baptism regeneration because the church is, or not baptism regeneration, I'm sorry, holding infant baptism because that's what the church had always done. So there's something you can see there as well.

But what it gets into with the sacramental positions, both in Reformed Baptists and in Reformed Presbyterians, is on the highest end you're going to see people holding that baptism does regenerate. For the elect. Yes, for the elect, not at the time of the administration of the sacrament, but when they have faith. So this is, this is in the Westminster confession of faith. I think the reform Baptist confession, the 1689 London Baptist confession is very vague. I don't know. I don't,

I don't know exactly. They kind of left it more open. I don't know why, but I don't know the history there at all. But so yeah, so it will regenerate through the sign. The question, there's gonna be questions in several theologians, like I think it's Cornelius Burgess, he's a Westminster divine, wrote a book called The Baptismal Regeneration of Laked Infants. And I came across that and was like, whoa, okay.

So the Westminster Confession, made a consensus document, it's a consensus document means there's... It's a consensus document meaning that there's all kinds of positions held by different theologians there, and they're trying to come together to form one ecclesial body. And so you have Anglicans in there, you have Presbyterians in there, it's a Presbyterian government, but you have people in the Church of England that were there, because the Church of England is moving in a Presbyterian direction at that time, is kind of the idea. That's really vague, but I don't have time to go into that, and I don't know it well enough, frankly. So, and just real quick, if you

can, the view of Eucharist. Eucharist. This, yeah, this is what. And again, there's a spectrum, but how did you view it at this college? How was it viewed at that college? Yep. Yeah, there's a spectrum again from just a symbol to to this position, which I think is right for the Calvinist, right? Is that it's, our professor put it as, where the Catholics will take Aristotle and say it's transubstantiated, so the form is in the thing, we're going to take Plato, so it's up in heaven. So the sacrament is

a participation in the body and blood of Christ on earth. You can put it that way, but it's more that we're elevated into heaven when we partake of the sacrament. So you really do share in the body and blood of Christ, just not in a substantial way. And while that sounds pretty close, and a lot of Catholics would maybe just be like, that's not really all that bad. It completely misses the point. The point is that Christ took on flesh to give us His life through His flesh, and so His flesh and blood are life-giving.

And so we have to partake of Him, the person there in His flesh and blood, of His nature, so our nature can be renewed by the Holy Spirit who's given to us through him. And I think that's what's missed. It's really very fundamental when you take what's in Eucharistic theology and apply it to just incarnational theology. Anything that happens in the Eucharist is happening in the incarnation, so it's kind of a picture of what's happening there. And that's, yeah, that's just not something that's really reflected on a whole lot, I think. Yeah.

So when did Catholicism begin to enter your orbit or you begin to enter its? Like, how did you encounter Catholic writers? What even made you interested in reading them? I think to myself, you know, like, suppose I became a Mormon, let's say. Yeah, it's like, I don't know if Catholicism was as much a stretch for you as Mormonism. But for me, I'd like, gosh, how would I even begin to enter that orbit? I would either have to have questions that can't be answered by my own tradition. And then I hear over there that the Mormons are answering it.

Well, maybe I'm attracted for some other reason. What was it about Catholicism? Yeah, so this is, there's like a million things at once again too. This is, yeah, I mean, I knew this was going to be difficult, but coming in, it was coming into RBC, I'd say the whole thing built and kind of culminated in my conversion, I would say. So it was like recognizing for one that the church isn't just little bodies of believers, right, separated with their pastors as their governors. There's actually a body that's supposed to be together. And so when I realized that it's completely incoherent to even think about scripture, right, you know, the letter to the Galatians, letter to the Ephesians,

Philippians, Galatians, they're writing to people who are in unity with each other, who are supposed to strive with one mind and one heart, you know, towards the goal of eternal life, right? And so, it's like, okay, that just doesn't even... That doesn't even make sense now, if we have all these separate bodies, what's going on? It's spoken of as a body, which means it's visible, right?

So I needed some kind of concept of a visible church, right? So there's a visible community of believers. The reforms offer that, right? And so that was part of seeing infant baptism makes sense too, was recognizing the Baptists have a different ecclesiology because they have a different understanding of the covenant, which is going to change the way governance occurs. All of it is so connected down to the finest thing, and that didn't click with me until around the time that Catholicism started to really make sense in my mind. So I'd say starting there seeing the connection to covenants rather than

Some kind of a kind of dispensationalism That I held before which is just it's a different position. There's a reason Baptists end up the way they do is they see the they see scripture split up into different dispensations Which aren't necessarily related to each other, but there's several kinds of Dispensationalism and that's just too big of a discussion again, too. I don't want to go into that but there's several kinds of dispensationalism, and that's just too big of a discussion again too. I don't want to go into that. It's not fun either. So that was a big thing. Seeing the sacraments is starting to make sense, just starting to move you know, ever so slightly closer. So is your mindset and view of scripture moving closer to Catholicism without

you yet realizing that Catholicism is the thing you're moving closer to? Yep, I never would have even thought, yeah. I recognize that this makes sense, but it was like I'm more thinking about what's biblical, like what is scripture saying, how do I best interpret scripture. You cannot avoid the idea of a visible church. And this is what I got into arguments with several of my friends about, you know, infant baptism, things like this. We discussed it all the time. That's like the thing you discuss as an RBC freshman. It's like a rite of passage, so to speak.

You know, so, yeah, that's that's what we always it always came down to that. And I just landed on that that position because I think it makes so much sense of what's going on in the Old Testament and leading into the new, right? Is that it's an actual body of people. Now the way that that works, the way that that works is going to be totally different from one to the other. So when you switch ecclesiology, the difference between the soteriology and the ecclesiology is what gets us there, is that for the Catholic, every baptized person is regenerate,

unless they put up some kind of block, and are just like obviously not wanting to know, wanting to accept grace, right? Then it would only regenerate if they were to repent and turn to grace. So the example would be someone being forcibly baptized as an adult who doesn't wish to be. Exactly, yeah, yeah. So in that case, that's the only reason

somebody wouldn't receive regeneration. In the reform view though, anybody who falls away, who's reason somebody wouldn't receive regeneration. In the Reformed view, though, anybody who falls away who's baptized didn't receive regeneration, right? And so now, what does that do to the church, right? So if you look at baptism that way, now everybody is united to Christ by grace, by sharing in his life through the sacraments, right? Because as St. Leo put it for the Catholic, you know, what was once visible in our Redeemer has passed over into the sacraments, right? Because as St. Leo put it for the Catholic, you know, what was once visible in our Redeemer has passed over into the sacraments. So by sharing in

the sacraments, we share in the life of God through the humanity of Christ, which is given to us in the sacraments under various forms as different participations in His ministry. For the Reformed, they're just more, they're visible, the sacraments are visible preaching of the gospel, right? So it preaches the gospel in a visible way. So it's not a sharing in the life of Christ as much as it is a picture of what's going on. That's going to change the way the church is viewed. Like I said, I'm just trying to make sure these dots are connected so I'm not just speaking disconnected from anything, you know? That's gonna change the way the church is viewed, because the visible church now for

the Calvinist is going to be the visible body of believers, but then the invisible church is gonna be those who are united to Christ actually and really by faith, right? It's, wow, I'm realizing that that's going to sound almost exactly the same as a Catholic, but we mean very different things. So when somebody's in the visible church, it means they have or had grace as a Catholic. It doesn't for the Reformed. So if you're in the invisible church, you've certainly been justified and you're certainly going to heaven. For the Catholic, that's not the case. It's if you're brought into, if you're brought into grace, you have to persevere to the end in that grace, because grace is like the seed of glory. It grows up into eternal life, right? You know, the verse, the rivers of living

water flowing from the believer, right? If you think of it that way, Jesus words to the woman at the well. I know I'm quoting the verses all off. I've read in like a bunch of different translations, so I screw it up every time. But yeah, that's where it changes things a lot, is seeing the two different positions there. And seeing the visible ecclesiology, the much more like strict visible church in

Catholic teaching was a result of the sacramentology. I wouldn't have been able to recognize how that made sense without seeing sacramentology. So yeah, that's part of it. Visible church, was there other things that you were beginning to accept that were more? Yeah, visible church, I'd say accepting things like the sacraments actually conferring grace in some way. Like accepting Calvin's view of the Lord's Supper. And did that get you in trouble at the Calvinist school? No.

So what was it that began to get you in hot water there? Yeah, what started it there was really, well, it was that that started moving me more explicitly, I'd say. So when I would talk with our professor in theology of the Reformation specifically, was the class we were in. Me, the Reformation specifically, was the class we were in. Me, my friend Michael Hall, who also converted,

I think you met him the other day actually. Yeah. Yep. And my brother Liam, we were reading through all the Eucharistic debates, because our professor's been reading through them for like 20 years and studying through them, because he just, he loves studying that stuff.

I mean, he's just very passionate about the Reformed view of the Lord's Supper. So we were reading through those and it just struck us that how similar transubstantiation is to the other position. And we're like, that's really not that weird of a position. You know, like it kind of makes sense. And we already were, well, I'd say we started

reading Aristotle a little later, but at that time we were thinking about that, how for one, that's interesting. We see the language of the Father's always talking about how it is the body and blood of Christ. And our professors write to say in a way that they don't really define, strictly speaking, what that means. about how it is the body and blood of Christ. And our professors write to say in a way that they don't really define, strictly speaking, what that means. Now, I think you do see it

really clearly sometimes, like Cyril of Alexandria, who says to Nestorius that if Jesus is not God, we eat the flesh of a mere man. So it's like we're cannibals, practically, we're not eating the God man, what's the point? And so it's like that is something more than just a, more than just kind of a mystical thing. Figurative language. Yeah, there's a real kind of eating, which they're going to agree with the language of real presence. They're not going to agree with transubstantiation specifically. So you gotta be really careful with the language there.

So as you and your friends at this Calvinist college are maybe becoming more open to the Catholic view of transubstantiation and a visible church, at that point are you trying to incorporate these understandings into your Calvinism, or are you thinking Catholicism is looking more likely? Yeah, no, I would not have considered the Catholic Church as, for one, even when we started reading St. Thomas and I recognized. You were just like, great, he got this one right.

He got this stuff right, I think. Then the question, seeing that was like, okay, the reform positions are either wrong or these are maybe synthesizable, I don't know, or like, I didn't really know where I was. I, are you and your friends looking, like I know you weren't really looking at other Catholic authors, but were your friends who you were meeting with to discuss these things

looking at Rome? One of them was, one of them was, he, Michael Hall, who we met the other day, he was, he read through St. Thomas' Prima Pars, his like first or second year in Doctrine of God, because there's all kinds of things in that area in Reformed theology where there's a bunch of people who start to question, I can't say the word, immutability, and things like that start to move in more of an open theist, something like that kind of direction. Now that's very much opposed to Reformed theology.

Our professors know that, we're very clear in teaching that. And so that they, you know, as my professor would say, they just, you know, basically copied and pasted Thomas's doctrine of God You know just like the stuff's great. Yep run with it, you know, so he read that and And then he started reading he's much more in a philosophy than theology. And so he always just kind of had this like Suspicion he was like, you know, they seem to just think a lot more about these kinds of things Those were the things I heard then I thought he was nuts. I was like, you're absolutely insane. Like you're dumb. What's wrong with you? You know,

I actually said that to him one time. Cool. How did he respond to that? He was like, okay, man, whatever. You know, I was, I was being very stubborn. I don't want to truncate your story, but can we get to the point where you started getting into hot water? Oh yes. Yes Yeah, so this is where yeah the sacraments change things And then I guess as we really started looking at this more we were like, okay

We need to I need to like see what a mass looks like and one of my friends was going to so what? Can you get a bit closer to the mic there? Yeah, why are you even looking at mass? Okay? That's what I question. Why isn't it just? Synthesizable so when I if I say if I started being attracted to Calvinism, yeah, just practically speaking I always I always am just so in awe of converts because I can't imagine how I always am just so in awe of converts because I can't imagine how disrupted my life would become if I converted. Like that's a real practical issue that has to be addressed.

And so if I was being drawn into kind of Calvinist thought, the very first thing I would do is try to synthesize it. I certainly would not be looking at the kind of Calvinist, at least right away. Yes, that's what we did. When you said hot water, I immediately thought of getting kicked out of school. Well, sorry, that is what I meant, I guess.

That's what you meant? Okay, yes. So yeah, that would require skipping a little bit. Okay. Yeah, going back, I guess when I really started to see these things, it was questions, right? How can we try to synthesize these positions?

Because if there's something we can do there. Yeah. So that would require, that would mean you not having to go look at a Catholic mass. I wouldn't have, I would not have wanted to at the time still, if we're here in the timeline. So I guess it's hard because we're jumping around. Staying in one place, I guess when I started to recognize, it started here. I was driving back, I was engaged at the time.

We didn't end up working out with ulcers and several other things. But I remember driving home one day and she just looked at me and was like, you have no attention span. What is wrong with you? Why can you not pay any attention? And I was like, how dare you? I didn't say that, you know, but then I went upstairs and sat down. You're an idiot too!

He just started accusing everybody. Yeah, I went upstairs and sat down on my desk and was like, she's totally right. I have no attention span. I've just been playing Call of Duty Warzone all summer. Which was awesome. Absolutely awesome. Warzone 2 is fun too. This should be a Catholic version where you run around just forcibly baptizing the people you're about to kill.

Alright, sorry, keep going. Anyways. Which wouldn't take effect anyway. version where you run around just forcibly baptizing the people you're about to kill. All right, sorry. Anyways, I just remember sitting there, you could do the old Louie the Ninth, the best way to deal with a heretic is to run my sword through his innards. Cool. Yep. Yep. Came across that quote pretty early. Loved it. All right. So you had no attention span so you had no attention span I had no attention span and I was just not not living life as we go on from a thousand different yes anyway you have no attention this will bring us back okay and I just remember sitting there being like wow I'm not

focused on anything at all I'm supposed to be getting married in a few months things like that I really just got gotta like pray, like repent, and just do my homework, right? And because of where I was kind of at from earlier, my homework was writing like several papers in St. Thomas because it led me to the questions of what's going on with the Reformation? Why are all these things kind of looking the way they are?

I need to understand Catholic thought before I can understand Reformed thought in a certain way, right? Because we're arguing against them, and I can't understand our arguments unless I understand their positions. I'm assuming the Reformers understand Catholic positions. And from then on, I just like sat down,

started reading, and got to work, and then realized like a week later, as like baptismal regeneration and a few other things started to like really click realized like a week later as like baptism regeneration and a few other things started to like really click in place and I was like whoa this is like like life as I know it at this moment is like over you know um once I saw baptism regeneration it was like there's no there's no synthesizing um once you have that position um actually actually down there's no way Because I was looking at it from the lens of the infusion of grace and things like that before. It didn't get to

the means of the infusion of grace, which was baptismal regeneration. And so that changes things gigantically. So once I saw that, it was like, yeah, I'm at least not, I can't hold the reformed doctrine of justification anymore I think right it was like this is my general inclination so I'm gonna try to live as if the Catholic way of viewing things is true right so now at this point you know Catholics no this is a way I'm so impressed by people like you and dr. Hahn people who it's not like they were being convinced or strong-armed or it's not like it would have

been convenient if you'd become a Catholic because all of your friends and girlfriend are Catholic. It's the exact opposite. Yeah, yeah, right. It was awful. Yeah. Um, awful, very weird time. Um, did that then.

So when you realize that the Catholic view of baptism regeneration was correct, did you immediately go, yeah, yeah, fine, but they're definitely wrong about Mariology, contraception, all these other things. And therefore I don't have to be too afraid. I didn't, no, I didn't, I did kind of the other. It was like, they were right on this. Transubstantiation is not as alien as I thought. This requires further, further research. I can't just kind of step back, but I also have to recognize

that I see baptism regeneration. This makes a lot of sense to me from scripture, makes a lot of sense to me from the perspective of the church fathers, right? It was mostly Augustine that made it click when I was reading Augustine on perseverance for class. Me, my brother, and Christian Wagner, we all were kind of like, okay, so we receive in baptism grace, and then God gives us the gift of perseverance. Only those

who God has predestined to receive the gift of perseverance will receive it and actually persevere to the end. So that's a pure grace, right? So if somebody falls along the way, they were still a Christian because they still had grace and were united with Christ, but they fell away. And I'm like, that makes more sense of the assurance issue. Beautiful. I love that. What do we do with baptism itself? And what do we think about how this worked with assurance? And then realizing from then on, that's Augustinianism. As Calvinists, we would have claimed we were Augustinians, right? And we are in the sense, we would have been in the sense that we held predestination and things like that, but, and so we stayed in that tradition, but this is on the sacraments and it's like clear

what's going on there. So now is that a works-based righteousness is the question that pops into your mind is, you know, if it's baptism, is that a, first of all, yeah, this is an earlier step too. There's so much to go into, but one of the biggest things was seeing that the sacraments are not so much works I do as works God is doing, or as things God's using to work in me.

So it's God who does it. So that the whole Donatius controversy, we studied that in one of our classes. Trying to put this in a coherent order is massively hard. I tried, I thought about how to do this beforehand, and I was just like, you know, I'm just going to kind of just got to roll with it and see what can happen. But there's just so many different beautiful things all at once. When did you first read a Catholic other than the saints? Was it not during this period of your searching? I read, I mean I'd read, I'd,

what Catholics did I read? I'm trying to think. Because I would think if I was being drawn into the Catholic Church from outside, I'd want to be like, what are people saying today? It was basically inconceivable to me at the time that Rome... It's still inconceivable. Fair enough. So why would you bother reading them? Right. Yeah.

So at that time, it was just St. Thomas and taking St. Thomas and thinking about scripture and then relating that to Sola Scriptura and things like that. That broke my mind when I saw that was Sola Scriptura Like if I can interpret scripture, this is like traumatic, you know, like it's like do it's like Oh my gosh, just brush aside all the other topics we've been talking about. Let's stay here for a moment. What broke your mind? Um, I just just recognizing that St. Thomas, St. Thomas's view of scripture, of baptism, of, of communion, of several things worked coherently. Just like on the other hand, I could coherently interpret scripture through a Calvinist lens.

That just like, I was like, how is that even possible? Right? I don't understand. Because I mean, Aquinas doesn't address solo scriptura. No, he doesn't. So what's what about what his coherence broke your mind? Okay. For me, as an as an individual, my mind was broken by the fact that there are several systems of thought that I can hold and look at scripture through different lenses and have them make sense. Yes. That just made me go, like, what?

How can I, like, how is, practically speaking, how are we ever supposed to have a unified church? Right. Because if that's possible, like, who's to decide? The coherence alone isn't what justifies me holding this view. It has to correspond to what's real. Like, is God really regenerating me when I'm baptized, or is he not? It's sort of like in pulp fiction, whatever that golden thing is in the box. I don't know if you ever watched it. It was a long time ago.

I wouldn't recommend watching it. There's like, you could come up with a host of different things. Like it's never explained. It could be Elvis's gold suit. It could be whatever. So all of those things might be coherent, but the coherence isn't enough to prove the thing real. That's what broke your mind. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I, I mean, I already knew to some degree that that was the case. I just didn't think that scripture, I could actually read scripture in two different ways and have it come out that way. And so that was my first like.

So your thought was if I read it wrong, then things will start contradicting. You didn't realize you could start from many different points and make all the things coherent. Am I getting it right? Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah, because it really depends. You're gonna... Calvinists are gonna say all the time, Scripture interprets Scripture, right? You take fundamental points and you interpret Scripture with Scripture. But when you come up with multiple coherent systems, what interprets the right interpretation? Yeah, what's a clear passage and what's an ambiguous passage? I mean, like, how do I determine that? Because what's a clear passage and what's an ambiguous passage? I mean, how do I determine that? Because what's a clear passage to a Catholic and what's a clear passage to a Protestant

are going to be different things. And then we have different definitions of words, like faith. We have different definitions of, you know, like we have a word that's that important and it's defined in a fundamentally different way. Which for them it's more just, it's like believing for the Calvinist, that is, I've realized I've gone all over the place. This is helpful for me. It feels like we're getting down to a bit of a nub.

So when you have words like faith, and it's like, you know, it's historical belief that, you know, the incarnation, things like that happened, belief in the revealed teachings, right? And you trust, right? That things like that happened, belief in the revealed teachings, right? And you trust, right? That's the way that they define it. Whereas the Catholic is gonna define faith as an intellectual assent to that God teaches this thing on the basis of certain signs.

So we're gonna see, you know, miracles happening and then Christ speaking and say, okay, because of that miracle, Christ's words, I believe are true because he just showed that he's divine, not human. Or well, he's divine and human, but you know what I mean? It's succeeding the powers of human nature and all created nature. But that led me to just be like, we don't have like a definition book that came from scripture.

Like, how am I supposed to, I can never work through all this myself, there's no way. In a certain way, there's no point in trying, but that was the moment that faith, faith, hope and charity started to make so much more sense to me concretely, although I couldn't define them well. I just remember thinking, I have to believe that he exists

and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him and just continue on, right? I can't just stop or I will become hopeless and I will just die, you know? Like, I'll just like lose it, you know? So when you brought this up to your friends and professors, what was the response? I can't remember a specific conversation where I talked about this at the moment. I'm sure there was. This is what's always kind of confused me

when I'll hear a Protestant say that Catholics really oversimplify and misrepresent what sola scriptura means. They do. It doesn't mean sola scriptura, it means reading it within the tradition, and we also have these different professions which guide us. Right. But that's never seemed satisfactory to me because presumably if a confession was at odds with how I'm interpreting scripture, why do I have to go with the confession that isn't infallible and inerrant? Well, it's because the elders of your church have come together and agreed that this this is how

we should interpret scripture. And so you're not trusting in some kind of divine reason. Yes, well that's my point. You're trusting in human reason. They can. They can. It's just a question of whether they are. And so, yeah, practically speaking, and this was another thing that I realized as well,

was that practically speaking, the Westminster Confession is used as if it's invaluable, right, in some ways. Now you have exceptions that are made to the Westminster Confession of what you can hold un-doctored and things like that. But it comes down to it, if somebody's denying the Westminster Confession of faith and they're holding something

that they believe is scriptural, and you have to excommunicate them, it's gonna be on the basis of the Westminster Confession of faith, right? And so like you see that, and so that's how you interpret scripture. How do you, how does this like practically speaking, is there a big difference?

From that angle, no. From other angles, yes. Because yeah, because if the teaching, if the teaching of the Catholic church or the teaching of the church in general is completely irreformable, unchangeable, what are our words? Are our words signifying divine realities that are unchangeable or are they not? And so this is a debate even in the reformed world, I think, is that you have people like John Frame who argue that Calvin was right to argue against

Cyril's interpretation of Christology, for example. It's like, what are you thinking? You know, like that is nuts. And I thought that as a reform person too, like, no, that's like the council of Ephesus is, you know, like all over the place, you know, that you cannot just question these, these, um, these creeds and confessions that way. Like this, this is a very clear statement of Christology, right?

And it's very, very obviously biblical. And so how can we go there? But the ground of it is scripture, right? So it seems to communicate to me that our words, like what we say, cannot fully represent, I don't even mean fully, I mean, it's just substantially represent something that's above us.

So it comes down to faith and reason again I think the the role of the speculative intellect but I'm speculating not in the sense of speculative intellect right now so I don't want to go too far but that's just my general kind of thought is that it's a it's just the it's it's an epistemological sort of sorry can I ask a clarifying question about that? Because it didn't... Are you saying that they accept that you need outside authority to interpret Scripture like we do, but then they deny that it's infallible? I just... that's what I heard, but I'm sure that's not correct. Well, it seems to be a concession to the Catholics that says we're going to need something in addition to scripture

So that we can be faithful to what God has revealed so we can actually know it well at the problem it just seems like Like on a practical level It just seems like an awful idea to say I need an authority and the authority is not infallible Because then it seems that you're saying that the interpretation can be infallible, which in practice makes scripture for you infallible because the way you're reading it, therefore, is through a fallible lens, if that makes sense.

That's why I had to ask. Yeah, I see what you're saying. No, they're gonna say that the creeds and things like that, they're not infallible in themselves. They're gonna say the Nicene Creed is inerrant, but they're gonna say because it aligns with how scripture is teaching. So this is merely human teaching,

but those are divine. That's the word of God, is scripture. It's how God actually speaks. It's a fully divine and fully human book or truly divine and truly human book. And then it's truly the Holy Spirit, who's or truly divine and truly human book, and then it's truly the Holy Spirit who's the author who truly writes through men, right? But they're going to, yeah, they're going to say that the Church is a human institution, right? And so I think, I mean, I've

never explicitly heard somebody say that. Say what? That it's just a human institution, right? But I think it's somewhat assumed that the Holy Spirit is not guiding in such a way that there's gonna be no errors, right? They're gonna assume there's gonna be errors and that things are gonna have to work out through time. But yeah, they're not gonna say it's infallible on the basis of the creeds or something like that.

Okay, sorry, I just wanted to ask, the way I heard it I was like, surely they do not actually think what I just understood. But on the other hand, they are going to have some kind of outside authority in just human reason. Well, some of them, most of them, unless you go like a whack kind of route, human reason has its own kind of authority because God endowed human reason with the ability to know things, right? And so it's not like you can just pick up scripture and then just like read it

without having any kind of outside knowledge of like what a tree is. You know, you can just read tree in here and suddenly know what a tree is. That's not how it works. Like human reason has to take in things before you can read the text of scripture. So in that sense, human reason becomes an authority,

but there's no like strict institutional authority the way we're thinking of it. So tell me the first time you got into trouble. What happened and then back up from there and tell me what it was that got you in trouble. Yes, so a few friends went into the school and were just worried about us. When I went and talked to them after, that's what they said, is they were just concerned that we were heading in that direction.

They wanted to make sure we were talking with professors and things like that. I had been. I'd already been talking with... My reaction was right away, I'm going to go talk to the professors. This is too big of a risk. This is like, this affects everybody in my life. Like if God came to earth and told us this is what baptism means and we got it wrong, we kinda got a big problem on our hands.

So, yeah, so I was just very open, but yeah, they went to the professors and we got an email. We got an email back asking us to come in and discuss our commitment to the doctrinal standard as put in the student handbook. So we're like, okay. And me, Michael Hall, Christian Wagner, and my brother were all called in. At the time, like I said,

I was practically holding justification in the Catholic sense, right? So where it's an infusion of grace, the renewal of the interior man is the basis of the legal imputation. The doctrinal statement, they, I think they emailed it to us or something before we went in and when we went in for that first meeting, they asked us kind of what we thought of it. And so there were only two professors, the professor I'd been talking to the whole time,

and he was like the student head at the time, I think. He's like a student pastor, I believe. And they kind of just asked me questions about the paper. And I was like, I can affirm the words here, like I can affirm that justification happens on the basis of a legal imputation, but I know what you mean and I don't mean that. They asked about the sacraments and I was like, I don't agree with you on the sacraments either.

No, there's really no way I can agree with you on that right now. I could be convinced otherwise, but like I can't see it here. And I forget exactly where I was, but I remember somebody asking me about like, so what are you thinking about going to Rome? And my answer was like, I just saw a video the other day of Pope Francis talking to a little kid and how the little kid, the little kid's dad who was an atheist is going to go to heaven.

And that is just like out there, you know? And there's there's, you know, that's what I have to say at the moment, I don't know, you know? This is, it's a lot, a lot to think about. And so after that, my other three, the other three went in as well. And then we came back in a few days later. So you weren't together as you were being questioned?

No, the question is one by one. So then they brought us in the next few days, all the meetings were like half an hour apart, you know, and it was like, it was like, Liam would meet with them, then Christian would meet with them, then Michael would meet with them, then I would meet with them. The fact that they put me last was a general indication to me. I knew the other three had said they could agree

with the doctrinal statement. So Liam at the time could. Michael could as well. But Michael was also like questioning the entire notion of who are you to ask me what my private thought is, right? I'm not sure that that's something that's like normal to do, his question, like what I'm thinking interiorly. Like trying to proselytize other students. Right, we're just thinking through this. Yeah. And he was much more quiet about it than me. I was out there like, I have to ask questions

because I need to know, right? And I can't just sit here. So he was in the last semester of his senior year. So he didn't end up getting suspended or anything. Christian, when they came in for that second meeting, they questioned him more. And he ended up getting himself expelled. And then for me-

How did he do that? Well, if anybody knows Christian, he's very intense, right? And so I love him to death, you know? And it's like my favorite quality of his. It's his best and his worst quality at once. But he goes in and they're just started asking him questions about like the sacraments. Like, so you believe seven sacraments as an Anglican.

And he's like, well, yeah, but like there's two of the gospel and there's five of the church. And these are not the same kind of sacraments as the two of the gospel. That's like really niche, weird Anglican position. I'm sure we can find videos of him talking about it. I never really got into the Anglican world very much. But he was like, no, I very much hold what I'm within your tradition, right? I'm

Reformed, I'm not a Catholic. And they're like, you're Catholic if you're holding positions. He's like, I'm not a Catholic. And he said, one of them looked at him and said, you were a Romanist. He's like, I'm not a Romanist. Like, I'm not. Like, what are you saying right now? And they're like, no, you are. Like, you're just, you're not being honest.

You're kind of like slipping around. And I could see how it could look that way, you know? That's clearly, it's really not what he was doing, but I could see from outside how, if you're affirming seven sacraments, you can look that way. Then they asked him questions about like, the apocryphal texts and things like that,

like what do you think of those? And he's like, I think they could be written in the liturgy, I don't think they're necessarily infallible. This is at least my memory of it, I could be written in the liturgy. I don't think they're necessarily infallible. This is at least my memory of it. I could be wrong. The Deuterocanonicals he's referring to. Yes. Yeah. And they were like, no, no.

And he's like, then I deny your opinion with the church Catholic. And it was like, whoa. And so he got called back in and expelled. And my meeting meeting, um, my meeting was, yeah, uh, so one of the weirdest kind of memories I have was they, they called us in and there was like, I think there was four, well, there's four people in the room. So like the president of the school, the academic Dean,

somebody who was recording the, like what was going on. And then like the pastor, um, and they, they kind of talked with me and said, you know We're gonna have to suspend you until you can grant our statement of faith We would love to still talk with you through these things But yes, and you do to your own admission that you can't grant it at least in the same sense And thank you for not equivocating or something like that We're gonna have to suspend you until until then seems that seems like a reasonable response. Yeah, right. It was. I think it was. Thanks.

I was willing to discuss with you until you could hold those views. They didn't just sort of banish you. Yeah, right. I don't I don't I don't really have any any qualms with the way they handled it.

I think I think maybe if they had asked me more questions, I would have appreciated it, you know, but I had already been talking with Dr. Math. I don't want to name anybody. Not shaving. Oh, I see. Yep, yes, with one of the professors there and we talked through a lot of this stuff. They knew that. I don't think there's a great danger in naming him, but it, yeah,

so they knew kind of that I was talking with people about it, maybe that's why they didn't feel inclined to ask a ton of questions, but it felt to me just very, very odd, the way that it went, you know, like it just happened very quickly, and I did appreciate the way it was handled, you know, the academic dean, very loving and kind man,

I met with him several times afterwards and we had just some wonderful conversations. But he said in there, this is really for you in a way, like this is a crisis, you need time to process this. It's like true, I do, yeah. And then they said, we started kind of hearing bubbling up among the students and I was like, did I cause that? You know, I really didn't mean to cause a gigantic thing among the students.

This was not at all my goal. And he's like, no, no. We just kind of heard things going on, and we just really wanted to check in with you guys and make sure you were still holding our statement of faith. And the president of the school kind of looked over and was like, you actually care about what's going on with the students. And I was like, I do.

I mean, I really, this is a big thing. This is the gospel we're talking about. And he was like, yeah. And then he was like, you're a good man. And that was like the best compliment I ever got. I was all being suspended hearing that. It was a really weird kind of moment. But yeah, it's been complicated since then. I haven't had my credits transfer to another school or anything yet, so I'm

still trying to figure that out. But from there is when... How did you get in touch with Dr. Harm? Yeah, here we go. Yeah, this is where it gets fun. That guy, we'll call him Scott. Hey, I want to say thank you to the greatest prayer and meditation app in the history of prayer and meditation apps. You know what I'm talking about? Hello, as in H-A-L-L-O-W. Check this out.

They've got sleep stories. You can learn how to pray the rosary. They have audio books. They have my lo-fifi incidentally, but check this out, you can even let Dr Scott Hahn put you to sleep at night, not because he'll come over to your house and strangle you, that'd be weird, although for the right price. Check this out. Good evening. Oh come on. And welcome to tonight's Bible story. Do you hear the rain in the background? My name is Dr Scott Hahn. You will not be able to listen to the first three minutes or pass the

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Maffrad.locals.com. Back to the show. Yeah, this is I'd say this is where it gets fun, because we have, I had, I had just been suspended, Liam was not, and I was like, what on earth do I do? I just got suspended from school, my parents are not very happy, understandably. We can talk about my parents' reaction later,

but they're understandably not very happy. I don't know what to do, because I'm in my last semester of my junior year, maybe technically a senior by credits, I forget exactly how it works. But I just need to figure out what I can do with school. And so I sent an email to Franciscan, which I only did that because I think,

when I was looking this morning at my email from Father Gregory Pine, he'd recommended him. Okay, we gotta go back to that, maybe. Let's go back there first. Yeah, because I wanna know who the first Catholic was you reached out to. So it was Father Pine. How did you do that?

Liam and I were, yeah, the whole story with Father Pine is crazy, won't be too long, but it's well worth telling. Liam and I were canvassing out for like a political candidate in Florida, and this is just what our job was at the time. We'd just drive around and talk theology and stuff like this, and I think one day we just had the question, what actually do Catholics say like today about faith and works?

And this was probably even before I granted baptism or regeneration, and this is probably like really, really close at the beginning. It was like, you know, we're like, what, what do they say? And we look it up and find a video by Brent Petrie, and he just uses all like completely scriptural language. And I was like, yeah, like scripture does only say faith alone one time.

And it's where it says not by faith alone, but that doesn't mean that justification by faith alone is wrong you know that's just um that's just it's just different context from james to romans right and so thinking about it that way um but it uh yeah that that led us to finding father pine on the on the on the tomystic institute and so we watched a few of his things, and we're just like, wow, he's just going from cookies to the Trinity. And the way he's connecting these things is just glorious,

and he's speaking with such beauty and elegance, and also with authority. He's saying, this is what baptism is, this is what baptism does, and immediately the text popped into my mind in scripture. You know, he speaks as one with authority and not as their scribes. And I just remember thinking that's similar to,

you know, cause every time we talk about the sacraments in the Reformed world, it's like, well, there's this position, there's this position, there's this position, there's this position, and these are all within our, you know, boundary. But whereas, you know, you hear Father Pine talking, baptism is this, and this is this, and this is this, and it builds this beautiful thing.

And just the way he would go from like the existential to just the mysteries of the faith just in seconds, and seamlessly show the connection between the Trinity, to the incarnation, to sanctifying grace, to us, to just like living the Christian life. And I was just like like this is just stunning And I don't know, you know, it's it's beautiful, but I don't want to get just get caught up in words He also seems to know what's going on Tomas seem to be pretty intense. So at least if there's Catholics that are good

We should reach out to them and see if maybe we can synthesize stuff, right? And so It's then father pine this really long email, I just read it this morning actually. And I was like, well, I think I emailed them, I was like, can I get Father Pine's email? They sent it back and were like, yeah, sure. And so I emailed him and was like, okay, so I have all these things,

it was everything we talked about regarding faith, hope, and love. We didn't mention that, but that's what sanctifying grace is in its created aspect, it's faith, hope, and love. We didn't mention that, but that's what sanctifying grace is in its created aspect, it's faith, hope, and love. And so that was like, okay, justification by the infusion of faith, hope, and love versus by imputation and all these things. And I kind of summarized all that and Father Prine was like, whoa, seems like you have a pretty good idea of what's going on there. Let me just suggest that you read the treatise on grace by Saint Thomas, so these questions in the Summa, to these questions in the Summa. I was like, sweet. So we sat down and read those and just realized that Catholics are by no means

semi-Pelagians. And this is what we always thought as Calvinists, right, is that Catholics taught that it's God who works, and then we kind of like complete God's work in a way. But no, it's like God works 100% in us, and then we 100% work out what God does. So as Khergu Lagrange would put it, there are causes in two different genera of causality. So God is the primary cause, right? And we are the secondary cause. So just as it rains, when it rains outside, God gave us rain today, right? We could say that, but we can it rains outside, God gave us rain today, right? We could say that, but we can also say the cloud caused it to rain today and the whole precipitation system and all this stuff. God uses the secondary cause by effectually moving it to do that. And it's like, beautiful. So now our salvation, recognizing the Catholic view, salvation is a truly

divine and a truly human act. So it's truly divine in that God's the one who works it through human agents. And so the human agent is a real second cause that God is assisting and moving to work out their salvation with fear and trembling. That was something that I think the Calvinistic position has to some degree, but I'd say they would more emphasize that it's all God, none man. Right, so this was something that really balanced it. For me, it was seeing that, like, wow, there's beauty there, you know?

And Father Pine and I, we had tons of emails back and forth. We got on several video calls. I emailed him before I got called into the office thing, and he was like, oh man, I'll be praying for you, that's quite a struggle. And we just kind of talked through this stuff and tried to... He gave really good advice, a lot. You know, he was like, really, just like, you're not a head on a stick, you know? Take your time, like you're a human being with like a life,

and you got to like, just breathe breathe and kinda think through these things. The Lord understands where you're at and He's working with you. Father Pined is wonderful. And then finding you guys, it was so funny, Liam and I driving around hearing you guys gush about Mary and we're like, these Catholics, you know, like they're so great on some stuff. And then they just gush about Mary, how she's like the, you know, the ladder down whom God descends. Like, what does that even mean?

That's ridiculous. And then as we start to think about it more, it's like, no, wait, like God actually came through Mary. It's like, kind of like that. So we kind of think of her as a ladder from heaven to earth. So the language actually kind of does make sense in a secondary kind of way.

Or it's not like idolatry, you know, it's just really poetic, flowery language we probably wouldn't use, you know? And that started this whole thing on just like the sense of our language, right? How we use our language and how this leads to different positions. Father Pines just really showed us things there,

just recommended books, Charles Jornet, a few other guys. We did read Catholics, Jornet, I read him on the mass. Read St. Robert Bellarmine a lot, but those are saints, but that's the Catholic saints, right? Just like very much not, whereas St. Thomas were like, maybe he was Catholic, maybe he wasn't, Don't really know. He was back then. He was pretty sure. Yeah, he was pretty sure. I'm pretty sure now, but, but back then, you know, I was so, um, yeah,

that was pretty incredible. Okay. So when did you get in touch with Scott? And how did that happen? So that was after I emailed Franciscan andan and was like I need help. I'm stuck and why Franciscan? Why did you look? I think father pine recommended it. I knew it was a close one and I was thinking of school options Yeah, I think I knew dr. Hahn was up there father pine went to Franciscan. So yeah. Yeah, he recommended that he recommended several the Thomistic ones around and I knew dr. Hahn was there but I didn't really know much about Dr. Hahn. I just knew he was a convert from Presbyterianism. So I think I put in there at the bottom or something.

Like I know Dr. Hahn was a Presbyterian convert. If there's anything you can do to help, I would love to hear about it. I didn't even know really who he was, like I said. But later that week, that weekend, I got a text, hey, Ethan, it's Dr. Hahn. I'm in Florida. He's so great. He does that with everybody. He does. He's just wonderful with that. It's

almost like he, I mean, I don't want to speak for him, but from the outside, it looks like he is a man who believes that it is God's mission for him to bring in every Protestant. So he just smells blood and goes in, but in the most respectful, beautiful way. Yeah. And he, yeah, he texted and said, you know, well, if we can call, but I am in Florida right now. I just happen to be in Palm Beach, Bombay, Bombay.

And if you'd like to come down or something, and we're like, yes, I'd love to come down. We would love that, yes, that is accurate. Yeah, yeah, right. I mean, and then Liam, this is one of these moments where this is just like another kind of confirmation sign moment, you know, where it's like, this is clear divine providence.

Liam is stuck working at a Pizza Hut, and I really want him to come with me, right? I'm like, I gotta go and talk to this guy who I barely know. He quit his job on the spot. No, that would have been so cool. Yeah, it would have been cool. But it didn't happen that way. He was stuck working there. He'd already taken a few days off. I went out front of the Pizza Hut and was like, I'm just going to go in and I'm going to talk to his boss and just let him know, like we're talking to somebody, may not have another chance, you know, this is kind of a really important thing for us,

you know, stuff like that. But I was like, you know, we just started granting intercession to saints, like maybe three weeks or a month ago. I'm gonna pray to the saints first and just kind of wait, and Liam will call me, right? So I call him, or so I pray to the saints and just sitting in the parking lot,

and I'm just kind of waiting. All for the pizza place? Yeah, the pizza place, I'm just kind of waiting. All for the pizza place? Yeah, the pizza place. I'm just kind of waiting and I'm like, Liam's going to call me. There's no way God's just going to allow me to go meet this guy alone. I don't know who he is. He could just be some big jerk. Who knows?

It's so funny to say now, but I have no idea what's going on. And so I pray through that and sit there and I'm like, yeah, nothing, nothing. Liam hasn't called me. Let me just go inside and maybe, you know, secondary causes like we were talking about a minute ago, maybe I'm supposed to be the secondary cause to kind of, you know, that's how God's going to work to answer the prayer, right? So just go inside and talk to them and they're like, no, he can't, like, we got to keep him. And I'm like, come on, like, that's, I'm like, Liam, he can't we got to keep him and I'm like my come on like that's I'm like Liam you can't figure out something else out. Like why don't you just leave? He's like no, I can't I'm like, okay So I'm like I'm gonna go back outside I went back outside and pray to second litany of the saints and I'm like I'm waiting it's gonna happen

And so then I was like waited a few minutes didn't happen. It's like okay going back in and so went back in again I was like Liam. Can you back in. And so I went back in again and was like, Liam, can you come? He's like, I can't do, you're going to just have to leave if it hits like this time. I mean, I was like, why don't you call your other boss? Because you said something about your other boss not being in or something. And he's like, okay, I can do that. And he calls the other boss and the other boss is like, no, we need you here. And Liam's like, Dang it. Okay, so he I gotta stay here And I'm like if you had to went directly to Jesus Christ without usurping his authority by going through these middlemen Yeah, right. I know

Then I went out and Then I went out and Liam was like if it hits like I forget what time it was like 1115 for example You just got to leave and I was like should be late. Yeah, he's like here You're not gonna make it. I mean, you just gotta go and I was like if it hits like I forget what time it was like 11 15 for example you just got to leave and I was like you'll be late yeah he's like you're not gonna make it I mean you just got to go and I was like mmm fine man I just sat out there and I was like I'm praying one more leading the saints and like halfway through this leading the saints I get a call Lee Ethan Ethan my boss just came in feeling super guilty she just said let's just go just go and worry about make up the hours later and Liam comes running out and we're like

Dude are just praying ladies and saints No way. I was like, yes. He's like what? And we're like all hype driving back to his apartment so he can grab his grab his stuff and he goes He goes running inside where everybody all of our friends are hanging out in there. You know, this is like primetime We're doing all kinds of research, like books stacked like six feet high, you know? And we're just like, this is crazy. And they're all like, what are you doing back?

And he's like, the saints are praying for me. And he just grabs his jacket and like runs out, and everyone's like, what the heck just happened? That was just one of those, one of the most fun moments right there. And as we're driving down, we're like, you know, we should pray through the rosary together. We've not prayed through it yet.

That's intense. And so yeah, we prayed through all 20 mysteries for the first time and it was two and a half hour drive. For some reason, it took us the entire two and a half hours to do it. I think we stopped and ate some pop tarts or something along the way, but... Oh yeah, we did. We definitely did. The Cinnamon Pop-Tarts... Mmm.

The best. Oh, it's so good. Even while you have a metabolism. So, were you not afraid of offending God as you were praying to Mary? Well, we didn't even get to... This was earlier that I dealt with that, right? Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fair enough. We can talk about that experience if you'd like,

but there's plenty of reactions to Protestants who came around to that. I was at first, but after realizing, she's just, why couldn't, well, yeah, we'll actually go back to that, because it involves Christian Wagner, and it's actually another really kind of notable moment. Oh yeah, so we can deal with that. Sure.

After. But here- Let's not lose the momentum. Yes, yes. Protestants in cars, getting coffee, going to see Scott Hahn. Yes. So this was the first Friday in the first Lent, I think, that we'd ever thought about doing.

So we're like, oh, we can't eat meat. Interesting. Okay, so we're gonna keep Lent. We get there and we're like, let's grab some food. Oh wait, it's it's Friday in Lent. We gotta get like fish. Yeah. And so we got like a McDonald's Filet-O-Fish something. They're like, okay, we're gonna go meet Dr. Hahn now at this random parish and we we walk in and there's Eucharistic Adoration going on. Never seen Eucharistic Adoration before. That's weird. I was like, okay, what is going on?

The Eucharist is just here, I'm just gonna like, you know, sit down and kneel, like I do believe it's Christ, I, at this point, but I'm trying to figure out, like what is going on here, this is really odd, you know? And so I was like, this is the moments where it's like, the idolatry bells are going off, like am I worshiping bread? And it's like, no, if like, you know, this is not just bread, it's the body and blood of Christ. Right? And so I'ming bread? And it's like, no, if like, you know, this is not just bread,

it's the body and blood of Christ, right? And so I'm sitting there like, this is odd, I can't really do much, but I just was overcome, overwhelmed by this, like, like, like there's just this burning feeling you kind of get. I feel like this happened several times where it's like, you're just like stirred to love of love of God in a way, you know? And that would happen like every time we came across some kind of really like notable truth, it just really like, you just like struck by something, you know, and that was one of those moments

where I was like, this is something different. I don't know, yeah, this is very serious, but I can't stay for more than like three or five minutes. This just feels too much for me. So Liam and I left and I think that's when we went to go get the filet fish who showed up, found a place and we went and grabbed that came back. And, um, yeah, we met Dr. Hahn. Um, had he just given a talk or something? Yeah, he was giving a talk.

Um, he was giving a talk. They did like reserved seats for us up at the front and we're like, Whoa, weird. Um, I've never had that happen before. I don't know how I feel about this. Um, but he gave a talk and it was just wonderful. First time I ever heard him speak. And it was really kind of a confirmation that the stuff we were reading is practically applied at least somewhere.

And it was like, wow, this is pretty incredible. And we talked with him after, you know, a whole bunch of people went up to try to talk to him and he talked with them for a little bit and then was like, I really got to go talk to these guys. Like they came down here for this and, um, yeah, we sat down and started talking. He just asked us a few questions about like what we were reading, what school we were going to, things like that. Um, and we answered him and he was like, Reformation Bible College, that's founded by R.C. Sproul. And I was like, yes, R.C. Sproul. And he's like, R.C. Sproul is my mentor, you know? John Gerstner and R.C. Sproul, I learned so

much under them. I'm so thankful for them. They, you know, they helped me see, like, the truth in many ways, you know? And I think we just, like, really connected from that moment, you know, which is just a lot of the same stuff we were looking at that brought us into the church in some ways. And so it was great. But he just, he asked us, well, the first thing he said that just really stuck out at me was like,

so you're reformed, you'll never stop believing in predestination. He's like, you'll always hold it. I hold it even stronger now than I did before. And I'm like, really? He's like, yep, you'll see it very experientially, I think, in life or something like that. And I remember thinking like, that's, I'm glad, because that's one of the big things for me that I just could not, like, I like looking at scripture, there's no way

you can avoid it. And, and then he asked, he's like, so, so like, where, how much have you guys, like studied? What do you, you know, have you prayed the rosary yet? You know,, he's like, so like how much have you guys like studied, what do you, you know, have you prayed the rosary yet? You know, and we were like, yeah, we just prayed through all 20, all 20 of the, I don't even remember what they're called, the things, you know, and he was like, he's like, oh, the mysteries, yeah,

and we're like, he's like, wow, you prayed through all 20 mysteries. And we're like, yes, and he's like, oh, I gotta go get you guys books. And he's ready to go, got up and ran off and grabbed us like a whole stack of books and Liam and I are like, yes. And he's like, oh, I gotta go get you guys books. And he's ready to go. He got up and ran off and grabbed us like a whole stack of books. And Liam and I are like, wow, this is really cool.

We talked to him about all kinds of things. I mentioned one of our professors and he's like, oh, he's brilliant. I love his books, you know? He's like, I disagree with him, but I love his books. And he's such a great scholar. So much better, a much better scholar than I'll ever be. And we're like, wow.

As there's some high words., um, and, um, how important was it that this man that you're meeting is seeing the good in the things that you saw good in. Very, you know, I think that is important as we try to kind of evangelize. It's like, as opposed to being judgmental and pointing at what's so bad and wrong about this or that tradition, there's so much good to be found everywhere. And he already said, Arcee Sproul, this professor,

meeting you where he can with predestination. Yeah, yeah, there was so much, so much there. I mean, I was just talking with him about this last night, how it's really like, Protestantism is, talking with Dr. Hahn about it last night. I live with Dr. Hahn, that's why I bet for viewers don't have that context. We'll have to fill in that gap in a sec.

Yeah. So we're talking about that, how really, everything that is taught that's really good in Protestantism is first found in Catholicism, but it points back to it too. You know, like you get back to Catholic thought and it's elevated and raised beyond itself by what Catholic thought is doing, you know. There's just such a beauty in that and that there is good everywhere. I wouldn't have converted, for example,

without having Vatican II's Lumen Gentium, frankly. Like there's sections of it where I'm like, okay, that's kind of ambiguous. I don't know how to interpret that, you know? But without seeing grace operable outside the visible boundaries of the Catholic Church, there's no way I ever would have been able to look at the Catholic Church and be like, that makes sense, you know?

It would be completely incoherent to say that. So you and Liam driving back, what was that experience like? How was Liam reacting to the conversation? I hardly remember the drive back. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe in the future we have Liam come too. Was there still a lot to think through after you chatted with him or was it even more to think through? Did you have more of a direction of where to go? I mean, given that you've given you all these books.

Not at the time. Yeah, we read a few of the books. I read, yeah, I'm, I'm forgetting the name of the book, but yeah, one of his, the one on Revelation name of the book but this is his yeah one of his the one on Revelation Oh the New Covenant is um, what is that code? Everyone's screaming at what you get the video right now. Yeah, I know is that code It's not the Lamb's Supper. Yes. Yes, that's a good job. Yep. That's the one Read read that and and yeah, just giving giving an interpretation of Revelation through liturgy with something

Beautiful, you know just recognizing that our one of our professors has already presented something similar But not quite to the same degree as dr. Hahn calling the new covenant the the sacrament of the Eucharist, right? Recognizing that is like, okay, that's a really big thing. So yeah, that helped. But I'd say by this point, we were, in some ways, I was like, I'm pretty much ready to become Catholic, but I also have a kind of, I don't know, I see the system makes sense, it's coherent, it's beautiful, I've seen actual effects in my life from viewing these things, like I mentioned earlier, with sin, right, then, but does it actually correspond to reality? And fallibility is a really, really big claim, right?

Really big, and so it took a long time for me to just come to think about it and come to agreement with that in a very like experiential and real way. You know, like I could in my head, like, okay, that makes sense. But to look at the Catholic Church as it is now, you know, Pope Francis, things like that, that was a struggle to some degree, but it helped me clarify papal theology and well, not papal theology, you know, Pope Francis, things like that. That was a struggle to some degree, but it helped me clarify papal theology, and well, not papal theology, you know what I mean, papal doctrine, things like that. Yeah, those were some hard questions. I mean, my professor, he did a lot of interaction

with the guys at Cult of Communion for like years. He just will barely interact with Catholics anymore. So this is one of the hardest things, is that even with where I was going, he was like, I think you're too far out. There's no way you're going to be able to hold another position. You're practically holding that the Roman Catholic Church is true. There's no way. There's not even a point in having this conversation in a way. We should have had this conversation earlier. And I was like, but I don't, I don't, I still don't share his opinion on that. I really don't. I think, I think he views the Catholic Church. I feel like he sees the way we view the Catholic Church and just equates

it to the way we view scripture in a way. Maybe not, I could be wrong. But that's kind of the general impression I've got from our tons of emails, where the Catholic Church is really the application of revelation to people. So the faith exists above and before in a certain respect, logically speaking. Like the Catholic Church is the one who preaches the doctrine, right? The apostles are part of the church, right?

So scripture comes from the church in that sense, in that God uses the apostles to write the text of scripture, but it's really the Word of God speaking in them, and the Word of God who speaks and moves in the church, right? Because He dwells within the church, the Holy Spirit is the soul of the church, just as He is the soul of an individual Christian. And I think that distinction isn't made clear enough that the church is applying revelation to the people, to individuals, and to, you know, communities. And it's not like it determines the deposit of faith, which is external, right?

So that's something that's, yeah, that's something that's not clarified well, I think, in a lot of contemporary Catholic theology that leads to at least some confusion with Protestants. You had mentioned that some of Pope Francis's actions had, at least were potentially stumbling blocks to union with Rome. Talk about that, because I imagine that's true of a lot of folks. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, I don't want to say too much, but there's real, like, scandal, I think, caused by some of the actions and words

that he said, but at the same time, I think people don't quite understand the teaching of the church on the fact that Popes can err, just not when they're speaking ex cathedra or they're not binding the church to believe something. And so seeing that, for me, it was not really all that big of a problem once I recognized that. And I recognized that very early on.

So it was a worry in the sense that if this is happening frequently and all the time throughout history, for example, if it's everywhere, right, that we just have these awful popes who just, you know, I don't want to say happen to not err, right, this is looking at it as a Protestant, right, looking at it from outside, like they just happen to not be wrong on Catholic doctrine when they're speaking in this, in particular circumstance, right? That's maybe a general sign that the Catholic Church isn't true. That was kind of the objection that I would have, if I were to put it into words now, that was in my head, right? But yeah, that just really didn't, it didn't really strike me as all that meaningful once I considered that Israel was God's chosen, like, prophetic nation, as it were, to preach

the gospel to the nations through God's covenant with David, which makes it, you know, an international, worldwide kingdom is the idea. That's just not a big concern. There's a ton of evil kings, right? And they could be wrong and all kinds of things. The question was really about the nature of the high priest, things like that, in the Old Testament. Can he be wrong when declaring an interpretation of the Pentateuch, things like that? I still don't know. I tend towards no, because there's that passage in John where Jesus talks about how you have

to listen to what the Pharisees say, but don't do what they do, because they sit on the seat of Moses, right? So what does that mean? It seems to suggest that they have a kind of authority from God to interpret it, which would imply a kind of grace given with the authority to protect them from error and such a thing like that. And then in the other passages where the high priest prophesies saying that Jesus would... And then in the other passages where the high priest prophesies saying that Jesus would... Is it not better that one man should die on behalf of the people than that the whole nation should perish? And he doesn't know what he's saying, but he's saying something that the Holy Spirit

takes to mean something entirely different. So there's kind of questions about authority. But I'd say we didn't take the normal approach of is the papacy true, therefore everything else? It was kind of, if the papacy is true, we're gonna see the truth of these other things, and then I'm not gonna be able to prove historically or something like that,

that this is necessarily like the case. It doesn't work that way with any dogma of the faith. Right? Well, there are some dogmas we can know infallibly through reason, but most of them are above our reason. Not in the sense that like, they're not reasonable. It's just that they exceed human reason. Like the Trinity, we would never be able to arrive at the Trinity on the basis of reason alone,

because when God creates, God, the Trinity works in unity. So if you think about this, we trace back all created effects, what are we gonna get to? Is the unity of God, not the Trinity of God? How could we get there from created effects? We can't. We have to know that on the basis of divine revelation alone. And so recognizing things like that,

we're very key to understanding that kind of relationship and how we should be kind of looking at it. Was there a single doctrine that was the biggest obstacle, whether or not you dealt with that at the beginning of this conversion and process or the end? I think just the, yeah, I would have granted the infallibility of the church that Christ founded very early on. That I wouldn't have a problem with. The question is, what is that church

and how are we to define its boundaries? So I'd say the thing that gave me the most struggle was just saying that this concrete historical real institution that is the Roman Catholic Church or the church is in union with the Roman Catholic Church are is is you know like the church that God established. Earlier you had said that it broke your mind when you realized that there was several ways to read the Word of God and several coherent accounts maybe more than several, and I thought that was a really great point. So you're currently submitting to what you consider to be a coherent account of scripture,

if you want to put it that way, maybe that's the wrong way to put it. How do you know you're right then, if there are other coherent accounts of scripture? Right, that's what's difficult. And now I am going to argue that there's not actually another coherent account. Okay, it seemed that way to you, but now what's difficult. And now I am gonna argue that there's not actually another coherent account Okay, it seemed that way to you, but now it doesn't. Yeah. Yeah in itself. It's not coherent To us it can appear that way

So Yeah, that's that's a It's kind of a difficult point because now that I look at the scriptures through a Catholic lens, I can see that verses not only suggest the doctrines of the church, they're explicitly teaching Catholic doctrines in a way that I don't think is avoidable in many cases. And so that changes the way I'm going to read scripture by scripture. Right. Um, and so this goes back to the Canon issue as well, like the candidate scripture, who's to say that I can't take out James and not

wisdom, right? Say James and wisdom, um, contradict. Why would I take James over wisdom? Right? Like how do I, how do I make that call or who is to make that call? It was just some kind of interior movement of the Holy Spirit to make me recognize one or the other. Well, how is that useful for maintaining a unified body? Are we really supposed to maintain a unified body? Is really the question that I think once that question's answered, it leads you either to Rome or the East or

Or and makes Protestantism look like it's not really an option anymore. Hmm Newman's quote to be steeped in history is to cease to be Protestant How offensive is that to you now? How true do you think it is? I think I think I do think it's true. I think he's I think he's definitely right. St. John Henry Newman had a certainly a big impact on me reading his essay on the development of doctrine. But yeah, like I said a minute ago in itself, that may be true. But to to a Protestant, don't leave with that.

No, don't leave with that. No, don't lead with that. Don't even bother going there. You're reading theologians through a theological system as well, not just in Scripture. Now there are very, very good scholars in the Reformed tradition that will just flat admit, you know, I mean, they'll almost all admit that, um, that baptism regeneration was held by the early church. I'm always impressed with Zwingli's goal in his work, De Baptismo, he says, and this is almost verbatim, uh, when it comes to the matter of baptism regeneration, I can only

conclude that all of the doctors and fathers have been in error. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not, that's nuts. That's not comfortable. And let me, let me explain the logic as to why though, because a Protestant is just gonna hear us. Yeah. Protestant is just going to hear us and go, well, they just hold this really high notion of tradition really arbitrarily. It's like, no, no, because the Holy Spirit really does indwell people and he really does move them to right action

and right thought, right? And so when you have a consensus of thought among the fathers of the theologians, we can see that, first of all, these are not only brilliant men, but they're holy men, and that the Holy Spirit has worked in them to speak. And so when there's a consensus like that, it's, we don't take it as the word of man, but the word of the Holy Spirit speaking in them.

Now it's not authoritative in the same way that scripture is. It's going to help us to make doctrinal definitions and things like that. But again, that's a secondary mode of infallibility, not a primary mode where it's the deposit of faith itself. So like there are dogmas, for example, if we were to come out and declare 50 years from now that Mary is the Mediatrix of all graces or something, which all the Protestants listening now are like,

ah, what is that? That's really not as hard of a doctrine to explain as you would think. But anyways, if we were to do that, it's declaring something that's in the deposit of faith of itself, but it's not there subjectively to us. So while it's a dogma in itself, and it's something that every Christian should hold,

it may not be understood by us, and it's not binding in time for us to hold as Catholics. Yeah, so that's a pretty key thing to explain. Back to the Mediatrix real quick. There's a few ways to put that. I think my favorite way to think about it is that Christ, who is the substance of all grace, all grace comes through Christ, came through Mary. Right? So she's the mediatrix in that she's in the middle,

so to speak, right? That's all that means, just the Latin kind of word, right? And Christ comes through her. And so all graces come through her in that way. There's other senses in which we talk about it too, but I think we could just leave it there. That was where I was like, hmm, that's more, that's acceptable. Even when I was a Protestant recognizing that, it's like the language is kind of high, different, but if it's a secondary thing and it's not meeting mediator between God and man in the same way as with Christ, now we're talking about the meaning of words, not about realities, and we have to get down to the realities, the things signified by the words, not just the words. If you ever find people just arguing about the use of a word, it's generally a good sign that you

just want to like back up and... What do we mean by that? Yeah, we don't have our definitions down. We really should clarify that before we move forward. You'd be surprised how often that happens. You know, I feel like everybody gets in arguments like that sometimes where we just assume a word means something and we have different meanings. And what's so frustrating is on social media, people aren't there because they have hours of time

to invest into some deep thought. They're there to quickly dismiss you and reject you. And so the, what do you mean by that? Almost never ever happens. Yeah. Yeah. It's infuriating. Um, I had Swann Sona on the show over a year ago and you had just arrived. And if I'm not mistaken, it was the next day you were brought into full communion with the Catholic church. True. How did that happen? Um so Swan, Swan... What a guy by the way. I've been talking with him a lot lately. Swan, I found him online on YouTube I think arguing about the papacy. He made his argument about the new Eliakim, which I know is blown up online lately. But I found one of his debates to be just absolutely

incredible. Which one? I forget who it was with. Was it with Ortland on Capturing Christianity? No, it was a previous one. It was against like a younger Protestant. I think it was a It was a previous one. It was against like a younger Protestant. I think it was a Baptist, reformed Baptist or something. And I was just amazed by his arguments from somebody so young, you know. It's infuriating for me. This is incredible.

And so I told Dr. Hahn about him and I forget exactly how we got in touch. Swann and I somehow got in touch later on. And I think it was through Dr. Hahn, because Dr. Hahn found him and then found his email or something and called him and was like, Swann, you've got to come up and visit. You've got to come up to my house and visit. And then he called me and Liam and was like, gotta come up and visit when Swan comes and visits. And we're like, okay, we can do that, yeah.

And so we came up at September 20th of 2021. And that's where I met you. And yeah, we just hung out for a while and had some really good conversations. And then the next day I was on the drive up, the entire drive up, this is it actually, the question, now that I think about it, that held me up was, indulgences, I was stuck on them for a little while.

Because it was like, how does the logic of these work? I don't understand. If they're just an imputation, now we're back to the imputation infusion thing, what is the basis for the imputation? Is there a basis for the imputation? I don't know. And so recognizing that it's subordinate to friendship, right? So charity is a kind of friendship with God, where you will the good of God and he wills

the good of you. And recognizing those things helped contextualize it so that God is forgiving the temporal punishment due to sin on the basis of friendship with another saint or even Christ's merits, right? Because it's the treasury of merit. In a certain sense, it's just Christ's merits, right? The merits of the saints are merits of Christ, if you think about. In a certain sense, it's just Christ merits, right? The merits of the saints are merits of Christ, if you think about it in a certain way, because Christ's merits are the cause of the merits of the saints, both in kind of every way, right? The efficient cause, formal cause. He causes them to work out their salvation, right? And so they're his merits. So it's,

it's because of that, that God can forgive sins as he will. Right. Um, and so recognizing that I was like, okay, I can, I can hold that position. Um, and that's the last kind of thing that I was hung up on. And so I feel like I should come into communion with the church, otherwise it would be rather dangerous. And since I was already baptized Catholic, I just had to go to confession. So I just went to confession the next day and What was that line? Do you remember going to confession prior to that? You were much younger. Oh, oh no, I was, I didn't when I was younger because... You never went? No.

So this was your first confession? Yeah, yeah. Like I said, I never spent like a conscious hour that I could remember in the Catholic Church. That's right. So what was that experience like for you? Because it happened rather quickly, didn't it? Didn't Scott kind of hook you up?

Yeah, it did happen quickly. He texted or called one of the priests down at St. Peter's, Father Michael Baker. And had you spent a great deal of time writing out the serious sins you could remember? No. Well, yeah, I did. I wrote out a lot, but I kind of just went through categories. It wasn't super. Yeah, super hard to figure out But it was a cause we're not bound to confess that which we've forgotten either. Yes, exactly. Yeah Excuse me And it was yeah, it was a really interesting kind of new experience, but I've just felt very Like this is really good. You know, he gets a lot off your off your conscience You know, it's like really relaxing and that's something even for my Protestant friends, I know several who are like, man,

I would love to have confession, you know, I really think that would be a wonderful thing. Yeah, I've never been a Protestant Christian, but I've heard Jimmy Akin say that when he was, he would, and this is just his experience. I'm not saying this is universally the experience of Protestants, but he would have to kind of bend his mind into knots to finally feel forgiven having repented. And he said, one of the things he finds so relieving as a Catholic is you don't have to do that. You just have to confess and receive absolution. And it doesn't really matter how you feel it's been taken care of. Yeah, yeah, it's wonderful. Yeah, are you in touch with any friends from your old Calvinist school? Yes, um, quite a few actually. How many of them think you've gone nuts or have left Christianity and how many of them are

open to considering your arguments? I don't think there's been a single one that would say I'm not a Christian. open to considering your arguments. I don't think there's been a single one that would say I'm not a Christian. Who's actually engaged you probably. Yeah, I'm sure there's many outside that think I'm like nuts and some kind of apostate, but nobody I know well who's actually talked with me would say that.

A lot of them see that Roman Catholicism is reasonable. They just don't necessarily subscribe. Yeah, that's an interesting thing. The reactions I got were not nearly as harsh in some ways as I would have expected. It was difficult with my parents at first, but they were just worried. They still are.

They're just very loving people, you know? Great parents. So... What's your advice for people out there who may wonder what their responsibility is towards their non-Catholic parents? Because these people change your diaper, and the idea that you're going to somehow declare the truth to them and have them convert must be a hard pill to swallow for parents. How are you interacting with them? What have you learned? What should other kind of Catholic children of non-Catholic parents take into account? Yeah, a prophet has honor except in his own hometown, right? I think that's

something you're gonna find there is, they raised you and gave you food and life and taught you most of what you know. It's gonna be difficult to kind of say, I think I'm right. So it's just something, just live, show them you love them, you know, and be there, don't just separate and disappear,

something, you know? Yeah, I'd say that's the most important thing. So what's the next step for you? You doing your masters here or? I'm still trying to figure out my bachelor's. I still gotta figure that out. There's a lot to figure out very quickly. I'm hoping to go to Franciscan and stay with Dr. Hahn for a little while longer.

And for those at home who might think, well, why would you be living with Dr. Hahn? They have a large house and over the years they've had hundreds of people live with them if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, I think it was like 60 something. Yeah, okay. Yeah, but yeah, they have a lot of students stay with them. So I've just been staying there for a little while and it's been great to get to know them. Really has.

They've been so generous and kind. Yeah. Actually, anything else you wanna touch on? Yes, there's a few other, you know, Eric Ibarra? I didn't even cover like the church we ended up going to and anything like that. Oh my gosh, that's like a huge part of- The church you visited?

The church we went to in Orlando. So we were received into the Anglican Ordinariate. And so at Incarnation Catholic Church down there, it is our first ever mass, our first ever actual Catholic mass that Liam and I went to was Ash Wednesday. The Inclusionary? Yeah, the Inclusionary.

Oh, what a blessing. How beautiful. It was just transcendent. When we sung the Our Father, it was just like tears in my eyes, just one of the most beautiful experiences because we'd never sung that as Protestants. So then how does that work? Because I'm an Eastern Catholic, but I was brought in to the East.

You were baptized, presumably Roman Catholic. And how then were you brought into the ordinary? We had a dispensation from a bishop so that I could just be confirmed in the ordinary. So I do belong to the Inglian Ordinary. But Liam and I were confirmed January 2nd of 2022. Could you do me a solid? Could you buy that Lutheran church down the road?

And let's make that an ordinary, an ordinary parish. I would love that. Let's make that happen. I really would love that. That would be, it would be incredible to have an ordinary parish. But that parish was just, just glorious. So anybody who's in Orlando, please go by there.

Say hi to Father Holiday for me. Just a wonderful place. Oh, also, Eric Ibarra, he goes there. He goes to that parish. So we ended up talking a lot. I interact with him fairly often. And yeah, he's just, he's wonderful. He is. So get his book in the paper seat and read that. Have you read it yet? I've read like a hundred pages but I

haven't even put a dent in it. I've not read it yet. It's massive. I've not read it yet. Actually I have a discount code too for I don't know if this is okay with you. Do you? Yeah for M.A.'s academic. So EA Ethan it'll be 25% off if someone wants to use that. Yeah they were kind enough to to use that. They were kind enough to give me that. We should have thrown that out at the beginning. Could we put that in the description of this video? So EA. EA Ethan, I think it's capital E, capital A, Ethan. Thun. Yeah. It's going to be EA and then Ethan. Just to clarify for the viewers, you get, like, that's to support you, right? The promo code?

That's for, that's for M.A.S. Academic. Yeah, he doesn't get money from it. He's just, he's just shilling Scott's books because he lives there and that's a kind thing to do. Okay, very cool. Also, M.A.S. Academic puts out amazing books. Yes, yes they do. Yeah, good. I should get a promo code and start making that sweet money from them. Promo code, I'm sorry. I was going to say,

just type in the words. I'll tell you that joke later. All right. Yeah. I'd say the, the last thing I want to touch on is just, um, just the beauty of the Catholic faith is really what, what drew us in, in many ways, you know, not, not so much the liturgies and things like that is just seeing like the coherence of the theology and how everything fits together in this kind of incarnational lens. Like seeing the church as the continuation of the incarnation just amazed all of us, I think, in recognizing that it's Christ's ministry really continuing on throughout the

ages. So the union that Christ has with the church is not like, it's not a metaphor, it's metaphysical. And that's something that I think is misunderstood a lot, is that people just hear body of Christ and they think, okay, yeah, we're just like this visible body of people. It's like, no, Scripture uses the language of like joints and ligaments and all these things. And that's to signify something, something much greater that can't be expressed. Cause Paul says all over the place, I speak to you in a human way as to children,

right? It's a much higher union than we can possibly imagine. A spiritual union is much greater than something merely physical. Now we have both with Christ and that he took on our flesh and offered it to the Father as a pleasing aroma, right? And we're united to him in that way. It's just glorious. So that's just the main kind of theological things that just, wow. Yeah.

Awesome, dude. Well, thank you for being on the show. God bless you and your dear friends and your old professors and the good school you went to. Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you're living here in Stubi.

Me too. Me too. Thank you for having me on. Yeah, you're welcome.