Pints With Aquinas - How Studying to Be a Protestant Pastor Turned Me Catholic (I Lost Everything) | Ep. 535

Episode Date: August 6, 2025

CONVERSION STORY: After a profound Christian conversion during high school, Brandon Eaves set out to pursue ministry full-time, earning both undergraduate and graduate degrees at Columbia International University with the intention of becoming a Protestant pastor—instead, his studies brought him to the Catholic Church. Brandon shares the intellectual and spiritual journey that led to his conversion, as well as the devastating challenges it posed to his marriage, his relationships within the Protestant community, and the course of his life. 🍺 Want to Support Pints With Aquinas? 🍺 Get episodes a week early, score a free PWA beer stein, and join exclusive live streams with me! Become an annual supporter at 👉 https://mattfradd.locals.com/support 💵 Show Sponsors:  👉 Seven Weeks Coffee – Use promo code MATT for up to 25% of your first subscription order + claim your free gift: https://sevenweekscoffee.com/matt 👉  Truthly – The Catholic faith at your fingertips: https://www.truthly.ai/ 👉 Hallow – The #1 Catholic prayer app: https://hallow.com/mattfradd  💻 Follow Me on Social Media: 📌 Facebook: https://facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/mattfradd 𝕏 Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/Pints_W_Aquinas 🎵 TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@pintswithaquinas 👕 PWA Merch – Wear the Faith! Grab your favorite PWA gear here: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com  

Pines with Aquinas is brought to you by Truthly, which is a groundbreaking Catholic AI app built to help you know, live, and defend the Catholic faith. Start your seven-day free trial today when you download Truthly on the app store. What was your opinion of Catholics right then? I thought it was a false gospel. Literally the first time that I had read anything from before the Reformation. So I went on this whole thing of like, I'm going to try to prove the church wrong. I'm going to try and prove the Catholic church wrong. It's starting my junior year, things started to sort of crack for me. It started to really become like, ugh, these are good points. I don't know what to do with them.

Like, you don't understand when you read the Bible, you're not just like reading it as if you're like this totally unbiased person. You read it through a theological system, and it's been given to you and you don't even realize it. I can put on all these different lenses in it. It apparently seems to make sense, but which of these lenses is right. Now, only one of them can be because the lenses are. contradictory. Everybody in my world was like, what are you doing? This isn't right. It was the darkest hour of my life, truly. As mad as this community is at me right now, my former Protestant community. These are truths that they taught me that I carry with me today. These are Catholic

truths. What about the current church? Because you converted during the Francis Pontificate, was there anything about that that turned you off? So, thank you so much for watching Pines with Aquinas. Before we get into the interview, I'd like to ask you to please consider subscribing over 58% of people who watch this show regularly are still not subscribed. So please do it. It's a quick, free, easy way to support the channel. We really appreciate it. Brandon, thank you for coming in. Yeah, thanks for having me. You're my first local guest. Ah, okay. Well, what the honor then. So a bit of background for those watching. I met you at Holy Family, where the fantastic Father Keegan is the parish priest. He was

singing your praises and he's very kind occasionally he'll do a whiskey night with the fellas of the parish and so i went to one of those and got to meet you and heard just a tiny bit of your story but it sounded so fascinating that i i was like man the world has to hear it so well i appreciate it yeah yeah yeah yeah so where we start the what's the what's the uh 50 000 or 5 000 foot view and then we'll get into it sure um grew up here in jacksonville grew up the second grade i think went to family got invited to a church um you know so that became part of our like weekly routine sundays and wednesday nights through about middle school falling out in the church walked away from the faith had a reversion back in high school and this was all

in the protestant context um went off to study undergraduate in scripture and theology after I finished, took a year of doing ministry, had questions, went back for grad school and grad school, entered the church. That's kind of... That's amazing. That's a convert from Protestantism. That's right. Okay, so you said you were invited to a church in around second grade?

So your family wasn't going to a Protestant? No, so we moved. I don't have any memories before seven years old of going to church. when we were like seven or eight, I was playing football with a guy whose dad was a pastor. And so we just got invited through him. But yeah, that really shaped our family life for like, I don't know, five or six, seven years. So elementary school and then through middle school. Parents got involved in the church.

And then, yeah, sadly, there's a little bit of a falling out there. I don't even really know a lot of the details of that. It really hurt my parents and my family, so they ended up stopped going, and then that was right of going into high school. Were you an intellectually brought in Christian around that time? No, no, not at all. I had basic understanding. Jesus was God. He came to save us. He died for my sins. He rose again, and he invites us to new life in him for the forgiveness of sins. I didn't really know anything more than that. I didn't know anything about the scriptures.

So, yeah, it wasn't, so my mom, she was on their, like, praise team. So she was, you know, Sunday morning, she would sing songs. So songs were something that was, you know, always played in the car. You'd hear kind of practicing around the house or singing around the house. So that was something that was important. a huge biblical emphasis in terms of like scriptural family studies or anything like that. And I think part of that, probably less on my parents and more on like just a lack of being equipped to do that by the church we were at. But what's funny is the songs ended up coming back

into play when I had a reversion. When I kind of really gave my life to the Lord, my junior year of high school, I was like, oh, I need to look up these songs on YouTube. Like I remember these. So your parents, they only started going to church when you were kind of invited. Did they grow up, Christian? Yeah. So I'm not actually sure really about my mom's side, I think loosely because my grandmother I know goes to church up in Ohio. She's from Ohio. So I'm not totally sure there. My parents, so my biological parents divorced when I was probably one or two, like very, very young. So I don't remember. remember a time of my life without my stepfather. And he has been a really great father figure in many ways for me. My relationship with my biological father is very strained. So, but on my stepdad's side, his mother was a very devout Protestant, a woman that loved the Lord, read her Bible frequently, prayed for her family. And so he, he,

grew up in a context with his brothers and sisters that were very Christian-based. All of them kind of have their own journeys. One of them became a pastor and is a pastor to this day. And the others, I think, all have sort of various relations with the church. So because of the falling out then in this church, did you stop going around high school? Totally stopped. Yeah. And so it was going into my junior or going into my freshman year of high school, totally.

stopped going to church and then yeah the football team really became like my friends that was my community and so i would say ninth 10th early part of 11th grade it was really seeking things of the world so you can put your stereotypical football player whatever you've envisioned that to be that was me you know cared a lot about what people thought of me i cared a lot about being popular um I lived the party life, you know, you can fill in the blanks there. So definitely a worldly life that I indulged in for 9th, 10th, and early part of 11th grade. And then, funny enough, it was my junior year, the Lord's so funny how he does things. I go into my math class my junior year, and there was two girls that walk in, they sit to my left,

and I had known not the girl right next to me, but the girl beside her, I had had class with her the year before. But I thought the girl sitting next to me was pretty. And I was like, well, I'm going to talk to her, Alyssa, so that I can talk to this girl right here. And so anyways, that was math class, my junior year. And then for those first like two months,

just kind of got to know Alyssa better and then the girl sitting next to me, Sarah. And yeah, I was very intrigued. Sarah was somebody that I didn't really know a lot about. She had a walk with the Lord, but she was very different. And I found that sort of appealing. I was like there's something, you're not like every other girl at the school. How was she different?

Well, she just loved the Lord. And so her priorities were different. Her values were different. Things she did on the weekends were different. You know, she just, there was a sort of grace about her that was attractive. And so I remember wanting to, homecoming was coming up and I wanted to go with her to homecoming. And so we were at this like school function thing. She was on like student council or something where they had to like throw this.

It's like a carnival-esque type thing for the school. I don't quite remember. But I was there and I was with some friends from the football team. And I was like, man, I want to ask this girl to homecoming, but I don't really know. And they're like, no, just go do it. go do it. I'm like, all right. So I go up to do it. I'm like, hey, I was just wondering if you had any plans for homecoming. Like, I'd love to go with you. And, you know, I was just like, so awkward about it. And she thought it was a joke. Oh. I know. Like you were making fun of her?

She thought I was making fun of her. Oh. I know. And she's like, I see all your football friends over there. And y'all, this is like a big joke. Like, I am not a joke. And she had a lot of respect for herself to be like, I'm not going to do this. Like, I'm not going to be treated that way. And I was like, oh no no no no like it's a big misunderstanding um because i think on her mind and it was true like a guy like me and a girl like her we just didn't we wouldn't naturally go to homecoming together you know so it was after that event well hang on did you were you were you able to convince her that you weren't joking yes so after the event when she was done like working it or whatever we were in the parking lot uh and i was like no i was actually serious like i want to go

with you. And she was like, well, I'm, I've, I don't really want to just because I know who you are and I know your background and all of this. And I was like, come on. Like, you know me. Like, we've been at math class this whole time together. Like, you know, we've, I really like, wouldn't want to go with you. And she said, all right, well, I'll go on one condition. You've got to come to church with me one time. I love Protestants. Yeah, I know. I know. I mean, I just don't know many Catholics would say that. Yeah, I don't know. But she said that and I was like, oh, okay. So I really thought about it. I was like, I don't know, that church, like, church isn't my, like, you know, I haven't been to church in years. Like, I would feel awkward at church.

Like, y'all don't know what I've done. Y'all don't, like, this is just, I wouldn't fit in. But I was like, but I do really want to go with you. So I was like, what's the worst? I can, like, suck it up one time and go to church. And I did. I went to a Wednesday, So they're in the parking lot, you went, okay. I said, yeah, I'm out of texted her or called her later and said, you know, a couple days went by, hey, I'll end up going to a youth group with you one time and then, you know, we can go to homecoming. That's what you meant by church, was it? Yeah, so it wasn't, yeah, it wasn't a Sunday, like service. Yeah, it was a Wednesday night.

And so there was a church in town in Mandarin that had a pretty really good youth group, actually. they met Wednesday nights and they had like a youth band that was actually pretty good and then they would like have these series of like teaching through the Bible. You know, it would be like the youth pastor would go, all right, we're starting our 10 week series on the gospel of John, you know, and we're going to look at whatever the signs in John's gospel. And we're going to see what Jesus has to teach us, you know. So it was one of those kinds of things. what was the experience like walking in encountering people for the first time i was so awkward and she was she she was very established in the youth group and so i walk in it's like it's like her her place you know everyone loves her yeah i'm field advantage yes and i'm like the new guy off the

block and she's i think at this point texted some people because the youth pastor immediately like walked up to us and um so i think she had like vetted some of the people in the youth group of like bringing this guy here's a sort of low down on who he is so I was like getting like vetted literally I walk in and there's like a hundred kids in this room and you walk in they had they called it the shop it was a it was like a ping pong table and some other stuff there's like a little hangout room there's a garage door and then to put up the garage door and you'd go in and that was like where you're like sort of like service was for the youth group night um so yeah when you first walked in it was like very invitational people

hanging out on the couch people talking yeah yeah yeah but i was getting like sort of like low-key interrogated like who are you what what are your intentions here like no way yeah that aggressively i mean not that explicitly but very much like this is a this is a weird amount of people coming up to like either they're like very overly friendly or this is sort of like vetting me out um so yeah remember very vividly not knowing when we went in when it was time for the youth pastor. He was a young guy. It was probably 25, 26, 27. And I remember him teaching through the Bible.

I don't even remember what passage or anything. I just remember I knew nothing. I think he referenced like Abraham. I'm like, who's Abraham? I don't know Abraham. But what he did was after that night, he came to me at the very end. And he was like, hey, I want to go get lunch at Sunny's barbecue. I was like, all right, that's like kind of weird, but sure, we can do that.

First of all, was your Sarah, is her name, was she, could you feel her looking at you to decide whether or not you were, an impact was being made? Because that to me is the most awkward experience of being brought places when people have an expectation of how you should be receiving it. Sure. I don't remember that, to be honest. I don't, I don't remember a lot of pressure from her. I remember the youth pastor coming up to me and wanting to get lunch and then me meeting with him.

What a guy. Yeah, to this day, I mean, a guy that loves the Lord, not Catholic, but a guy that's really on fire for the Lord. And yeah, it just has a very kind of missionary spirit about him. So we met at Sonny's Barbecue, and he literally drew the gospel for me on a napkin. It's like so Protestant desk. Love it. So, okay, you order your food. I want to know how somebody goes from, hey, man, yeah, take a seat to napkin and drawing. Yeah, he's a, uh, yeah, he has a great personality in the sense of like, uh, something that was very, for me, uh, sort of broke down some barriers. So he was, he was, he went to Orange Park high school. So he went to a public school. For me, that was like, I was a public school kid. You know, you have all the stereotypes of homeschooled kids and stuff like that. So he was a, he was a public school kid that played baseball. and then went to Florida State to play baseball.

So it was like right there, there was sort of a connection with athletics that I was like, okay, in my mind, up to that point, Christianity was a predominantly feminine religion, meaning that the people that took the faith seriously seemed to be only females in my life. This was the first male that knew the scriptures,

lived with purpose and mission, and really believed, you know, he really lived his life. He orchestrated his entire life around the gospel. And that was the first time I'd ever experienced that of, like, this is a guy who sort of gets me, like he gets sports culture, he gets high school culture, he went to public school, big university, like, he understands all the struggles that every high school kid would understand you know and yet he chose intentionally i'm going to throw that all the way and i'm going to live my life for the lord um tell me what the napkin drawing look like oh man this is

great so uh it was it was like um one side i wish i could draw it out right now it was it was like one's kind of one side gap in the middle yeah so it's you know boom yeah sort of boom man over here God over here. We've been separated by sin. You know, Jesus, the cross is like the bridge. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the big thing he said, he's like, if you were to place yourself on here, where would

you place yourself? I was like, I don't know how to answer this question. I was like, well, I can't be bad enough to go to hell. Like, that's, like, pretty serious. I don't think I'm quite good enough to go to heaven. So I'll just place myself right in the middle. I just, like, drew myself on the cross. And so from there, he was like, well,

you can't really place yourself there you're either you're either in christ or you're not you're either in adam or you're in christ and i don't think you use that language but essentially that's what he was trying to say um and his next move is actually really really important there was no again there was no pressure he just said i want you to think about this um i want you to just go home and pray about it and essentially do you want to receive the forgiveness of your sins and have new life with God? Or do you want to continue to live the ways of the world? The ways of the world leads to death and separation, but Jesus has offered you forgiveness and new life. And so you need to receive that gift. So no pressure. I just want you to think about it. And he really wasn't.

There was no, I never felt like strong-armed or anything like that. It was just like, okay. He seemed very genuine in his care and concern. So literally two weeks went by, and I'm in my room, and I remember this very vividly. It's midnight, and all of a sudden, I didn't have words to describe what was happening then. Now I do, but the Holy Spirit just brought all this sin to the forefront of my mind. And I just was able to look at my life very honestly and go over the past two and a half years. like what have I done with my life? I've I've thrown myself into sin and it's not satisfying. At rock bottom, I really wanted to be happy and to be loved and the things that I was pursuing

could not ultimately give the happiness and the love that my heart so desperately longed for. And so at that moment, I remembered my mom used to sing all these songs and I remembered some of the names of them. So I looked them up on YouTube. And from 12 a.m. to 2 a.m., I remember literally, first time I had probably cried, and I don't even know how long, but I wept, like, wept, wept before the Lord of confessing my sins, just feeling real contrition and sorrow for what I had done and asking God, forgive me. And I woke up and in a lot of ways, like I was a change person. I remember that junior year, that happened in the fall.

It happened in October. And I don't think I had missed a Sunday or Wednesday since. I fell in love with knowing who Christ was and who Christ is. and I fell in love with the Bible, and it was interesting, God started to change my desires. So I would get invited to parties and stuff, and I would go, I don't want to go. Yeah, come on, you don't want to go? Like, you used to always come. I'm like, I can't explain why.

I just, I don't want to go. And again, I didn't have language for it at the time, but, yeah, God was internally changing what I loved. He was transforming my loves. and the sin that I so desperately loved before, he was able to cast that in a light of, no, it's actually really bad for you. It doesn't bring you life. And so God had really, honestly, for a six-month period,

it was as if, like, God was just shielding me from so much temptation. And it was just a really sweet season of God protecting me from a lot of things to be able to really be nurtured in the faith. And it was. I mean, the church that I went to, it was a, still as today. It's a non-denominational church that really believed in teaching the Bible.

And the good things that are still present in that context are very good. And I fell in love with the Bible. So, that was my junior year. Did you fall in love with Sarah is what I want to know? Did you go to the prom with her? Did she hold up to her into the bargain? Yes, that's funny. So we did go to Homecoming and we did start dating.

We dated for two years and then we broke up and that was that. Um, it was sort of interesting, you know, the community that in terms of the youth group, that me and the youth pastor got really close and, um, he, he very much so trusted my intentions. But the other high schoolers for, there was about a year window where it was like, is he faking this for Sarah? I'm like, no, I'm not faking this. Like, what kind of guy? Can last this long?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I, I, maybe a month. Yeah, come on. You don't do that.

You don't upend your whole life. You don't leave your high school friend group and, you know, change the whole direction of your life for a, for a girl. I don't know. It just, it seems a little odd to me. And it didn't seem like people would really do that. Maybe they do. I wouldn't have personally. So, yeah, I mean, it was very much, it was very much a work of the Lord.

And so, yeah. We dated for two years, and then, like I said, we ended up breaking up. But, yeah, so it was my junior year, my senior year, just figuring out, I still didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. It was, can I just interject real quick? Sure. I want to know what your parents take on all this was, especially because they were let down by a previous church.

Were they brought into this community? Were they happy to see the transformation going on? That's a great question. They did not ingratiate themselves into that community. Um, I think they were happy with the fact that I, I mean, I was trying to live a holy life. Like parents aren't going to get mad at that. Um, there was definitely a lot of conflict, my senior year of me changing from this is kind of, you know, living in the deeds of the flesh to living in the life of the spirit. how should this impact our home life?

And I took it upon myself to almost try to evangelize and disciple my parents. I wasn't, that's just not my role. And it took me... Parents aren't great at receiving that. Yeah. They changed your diaper. Now you're telling them about the mysteries of the universe. Right.

And not only that, but like in some ways calling out what they did. And it took me a long time. It took me like two or three years to just be okay with the fact. of at the end of the day, my parents have loved me well. They've provided a good structure for me to grow and to flourish. They've provided for me. They were never mad that I went to youth group or went to church or, you know, whatever. My role for their intimacy with Christ is not going to be like the primary instrument or conduit. I'm going to be the background player that prays like crazy for them. And that's going to have to be someone else's job.

Just because every time I felt like I tried to insert myself, the relationship just went nowhere and got sour. This is such an important lesson. Just like if that youth pastor had been a little too aggressive, it would have turned you off. I mean, we're all like that. Right. When we get the sense that someone has a hidden agenda, you know, much more if it's a family member, all of our defenses come screaming to the forefront. And I guess it's just really important to to acknowledge that and to be, I think we've, yeah, I was 17 when I came to Christ, I came home, my parents were worried. I think they preferred it when I was like dressing in death metal t-shirts and being really angsty. They could understand that, but this new guy who wanted

to hug them all the time and was crying about Jesus, that freaked them out. So I think that is, that is really important. And that's a kind of humble, because I guess we can kind of cloak our criticisms of our parents in kind of spiritual language. Yeah, garb, you know, hey, I'm just trying to help you. Right. And you might be, but there's also part of you that's judging them. And yeah, that's going to be tough. So it takes humility to be like, I'm going to sit back and I'm going to pray for

these good parents who've done a lot for me, yeah. Yeah. Well, and unfortunately, it was a lot of trial by error. You know, I remember coming back calling my freshman year of college and my stepdad going, I couldn't wait for you to get out. and that was like such a dagger. Did he say why? Just because he was like you were almost unbearable to live with.

Because it was like Christian stuff? Yeah, just because it was, you know, shows we watch or things we do or things we say or how we don't, we're not going to church or we're, you know. And it was, I took it upon myself to want to call them out on everything like I'm some prophet or something. And it's like that just, I don't know, there's a certain, I think. sort of art between like you live the Christian life and you're going to expect persecution for living in the life of Christ. You know, Christ is very forthcoming about like, I did not come to bring peace. I came to bring a sword and I'll pit father against son, mother against daughter, you know, things like that. So there's a certain truth there that you want to hold on to.

And yet. And yet the other truth is like you can't just be a jerk about it. You can't just, you can't force conversion. And I think we sometimes too quickly apply to ourselves Christ's words. Yes. Like we are the sinless evangelizer and are being persecuted. Like, no, you're actually being really imprudent and kind of pushy. Correct. Stop it.

Correct. Correct. Correct. And yeah, that was on me. And that took me, like I said, it took me a long time to sort of understand that. And to really then to be okay with the fact that I'm not going to be that person. for my family, it'll be, I'm praying for them like crazy. I'm always here to answer questions, you know,

unless something super egregious is happening, you know, I'm not really going to say anything. I don't know. I don't know if that's wrong or not. That's sort of a work in progress, I guess. But anyway, early on, my senior year, that's kind of how it played out. So I don't think my parents were ever upset about the change of life direction.

They didn't always appreciate how then that came across, to me telling them how to live their life. And now as a parent, I'm like, yeah, that makes sense. But yeah, so my senior year, just trying to figure out, do I want to go to Florida State. I originally wanted to go to Florida State major in criminology and kind of go into, like, police kind of work. But at the same time, I had this growing love for the Bible.

And I was really trying to weigh what to do with that. And I remember very vividly being on a retreat, my senior year. fall of my senior year, and there was a high school retreat, and I still remember this series, actually. It was on the life of Moses, and Moses, he gives excuses to God in Exodus 3 for why he can't do what God's calling him to do. And so there's this kind of big takeaway of like, what are your excuses? You know, what is God calling you to do? And then are you giving him excuses for why you can't do it? And so I remember very vividly leaving that sort of night session. and going, okay, I just want to, like, pray and sort of have alone time to just pray with the Lord.

I remember going on a walk, and I remember going, Lord, like, what do you want? I tried to run my life, and it didn't work out. Since you have been in charge of my life, I've been fulfilled and happy, and I want to continue to do what you want me to do. life's not about me it's about you and as much as I can I want to live into that and I remember you know it wasn't like a voice or anything I just remember sort of an interior nudge if you will just a very prominent I want you to go and study the Bible and teach the Bible and of course those internal callings need to be confirmed exteriorly by the church and all those kinds of things you know you don't just want to take a one-time thing and run with it but yeah that was

the first time I kind of had that experience of, man, I think the Lord might be calling me not to go to Florida State and to go to a place to study scripture and study theology. And the pastor of the church and the youth pastor had both gone to a school in Columbia, South Carolina, Columbia International University. It was an interdenominational Protestant school. So it was eclectic in that sense. But they both went there. They loved it.

And so I said, all right, I'll go and visit. and I went up there to visit and I fell in love with it. It was an awesome campus in Columbia, South Carolina, sort of on the northern end, kind of tucked away. And yeah, it was great. And I really wanted to go there. Not sure if I was going to be able to go there or not. My parents really wanted me to go to a school in Orlando.

I think it was like in Kissimmee, Florida. I think it was called Florida Christian College at the time. I think they got bought out. I don't even know if they're around anymore. but they wanted me to go there because it would be cheaper and I was like I just I really really enjoyed my time visiting CIU I know people that have gone there I know the training they had I'd really love to go there anyway the Lord worked it all out um I was able and end up going up there and so yeah I spent four years of college up in Columbia south Carolina and then that's where

things started to get kind of interesting so um I would say to start like Was your hope after these four years to possibly become a pastor or a missionary of sort? Or what was your goal? I mean, because I think when I decided at a young age shortly after high school to go and do missionary work, my parents were looking at it pragmatically. Like how will this help you? What do you want to do with your life? Go to university, get a degree behind you, get some stability, then do it.

I'm like, nah. So that was very much my parents' wishes. Yeah. They wanted me to go Florida State and major in business or something, you know. And there's a very real thing there, you know, I mean, it wasn't ill-intentioned. It was, you're our son and we want you to not, like, be dirt poor and living paycheck to paycheck and, you know, I don't know. I just had a very real sense of it. That's just not where the Lord wants me to go.

And if, Lord, if you want me to go to CIU or wherever, like. Like, if you want me to study scripture and potentially think of ministry as a future option, you're going to have to make that okay with my parents. And over that senior year, like you did. And they ended up supporting me in that. They were very supportive of it. And so, you know, they've always been a little like, are you going to be able to make the money to be able to, like, have a family and live life and all that? You know, classic parent worries, but the Lord's been really faithful.

And if it were me at the time, I was just so enthusiastic, I don't care. It'll work out. It's so good that the Lord imbues young people with the inordinate level of confidence they usually have because I don't know if we would have got through those initial... I look at myself. I mean, I got married as an illegal, unemployed, a person. I got fired a month before my wedding.

I had moved to Texas. I had a job. I got fired for reasons I don't think were fair. Sure. We'll leave that to one side. And I was now unemployed and illegal and about to marry this woman. And I had to call her dad and be like,

so here's the deal. you know nice but if that happened to me today that might wreck my life but I think at the time I'm like all will be well yeah and it was and I wonder if a lot of that has to do with just the confidence of young people yeah yeah maybe so yeah went up to went up to CIU I'll call it CIAU for short and really love my time there it was it was really good one thing that was unique going in though was because I had kind of had a conversion back to Christ, my junior year, there wasn't an ecclesial indebtedness that sometimes certain people can feel if they, oh, I've grown up my whole life in the Presbyterian Church.

I could never imagine leaving that, you know. That wasn't true for me. I was very thankful for the church that I was attending my junior and senior year. There was a sense of like, I believe what they believe, and I see the scriptures the way they do and the world the way they do. and so there's a certain level of indebtedness there, I guess. But it wasn't like this deep-seeded generational. My family's been Presbyterian or Baptist for like, whatever, 150 years or something.

Did you encounter people who did have that sort of struggle at the university? I mean, it makes sense. Yeah, I would say that there were people that they would come from family situations where it was like, no, like my family's grown up, whatever, Presbyterian. And so that's what we are. And when I come to study, the thing that was unique about CIU is it was very eclectic. And so it was interdenominational. They had these five core values.

And then they had a doctrinal standard. And as long as you agreed with the doctrinal standard that was pretty basic and the five core values, it didn't matter. You could be a Baptist, non-denominational, Presbyterian. We actually, by the time I was there, there was a pretty decent Anglican community, ACNA. amongst the faculty and student body. So it was just very eclectic in that sense. So when you went up there, it was like, then you hear all kinds of stuff, you know.

So yeah, I started going up there, like I said, my freshman, sophomore, junior, senior year of college, it was a really healing experience for me. It was the first time of my life where it was kind of like an oasis. I was around Christian friends. Like, I didn't really have, because the church I went to wasn't the same place as the school I went. So I went to a public school in a different area of town. And so it was the first time it was like, man, I'm going to school.

I'm living in dorms, like my whole life with people that know Christ, that love Christ, that want to honor Christ with their life. It was just kind of a healing experience after high school of being just kind of tossed into the world. and trying to make your way there. So I really loved it. And yeah, there were a few things at CIU, I guess, that sort of were seeds. One of them was, like I said, the sort of eclectic community there. That would be one thing.

I would say things are pretty vanilla. My freshman and sophomore year, you're just kind of learning about different systems of thought. if I can use the, like, glasses. So everyone has a certain glass through which they read the scriptures, right? And there's a certain sense where there's an apparent, it seems to us anyways, a coherent account. Like a Baptist can have a coherent account through their glasses of the way they look at the Bible. The Presbyterian can put on their glasses and they have a coherent account. Now, I only think there's one coherent account, the Catholic one, but there's an apparent, it's possible to make these things work.

in other systems if, you know, you interpret certain scriptures in light of others and things like that. But for the first two years, it was just kind of learning, what do Presbyterians believe about infant baptism? You know, what are Anglicans? What are the Baptist? You know, where do we see this in the Bible? So. And when people are giving lectures, are they talking about this sort of thing, about this diversity among these different denominations? Because it's hard for me to see how you could justify that being acceptable to have one Christian group thinking this is necessary for your salvation and others seeing it merely as a symbol. Yeah, it's a great question. So I think, yeah, there's very much so an agreed upon doctrine, what they would maybe call

like primary or doctrines of salvation, you know, Trinity, Christology, things like. like that, that you didn't have any disagreement with amongst our faculty, no matter what they were. When it came to things like ecclesiastical structure, church polity, sacraments, you could have variety there. You know, it's interesting, the Anglican communion that was there, I don't remember, because Anglicanism is also a funny thing with it being so wide, like you can have a very evangelical-y kind of Anglican with a very Anglo-Cathletic kind of Anglican. I don't remember our Anglican faculty thinking of something like baptism as regenerative. Maybe a means of grace, but it was sort of ambiguous as to what that exactly meant.

And if they did hold that, it wasn't really like shouted from the rooftops per se. But I do remember there being differences on how people view the Eucharist, whether or not it was a reformed view with the spiritual presence of Christ or Lutheran view or, you know, a symbolic view or sort of Zwinglian view, I guess. But yeah, I don't really remember being a lot of problems there. It was very much the posture of the school of like, those are things that were free to disagree on. And so it'll determine where we go ecclesially, but it shouldn't determine whether or not somebody's in or out, if somebody's in Christ or not. so now on the face of it that seems fine right because you're like okay sounds good um however starting my i guess starting my junior year things started to sort of crack for me um i would say

i took a class well so to answer your question the the school didn't have really like a systematic theology department or a historical theology department. It was very much a biblical studies-esque kind of school. So like when you signed up for classes, like in the undergrad, I'm pretty sure they only had like theology one and theology two. But you could take a class on wisdom literature, Genesis, Exodus, the book of Psalms. You could take a class on the Gospels. You could take a class on Pauline letters. You could take a class on Revelation, Romans. And those are all full classes. So within those biblical classes, you know, if you get to, whatever, you're taking a class on the Gospel of Matthew and you get to the institution narrative,

well, in that class, now the professor might go, okay, here's how different Christians interpret the institution narrative of the Eucharist. So it would always come out in that sense, but it wasn't like we had a class on, hey, here's a class on the theology of the Eucharist, and we're going to read these guys from the history of the church on it. So what was your opinion of Catholics right then? Oh, I thought it was a false gospel. I thought, yeah, Catholics, it's not true Christianity. They don't have a, they don't have the pure gospel.

Whether you could be a Catholic and be saved was a little complicated. If you were a Catholic culturally and sort of ignorantly, and you just thought Jesus saved you from your sins, sure. But you couldn't be a knowledgeable Catholic and know the Catholic faith and be saved. So, yeah, I would have, like, Catholics in my mind would have been almost grouped as, like, unbelievers that you evangelize. So, yeah, I guess my junior year, there was things that started to not crack, sort of crack, but I didn't think Catholicism was the answer.

Like, Catholicism was never on my radar. So I would say the first thing that was really big for me of, like, a seed of conversion was one of the professors there. We had to do what we called field ed. And so for the people in my program, we had to go to a Christian elementary school and teach once a week. And we teach a Bible lesson. And that was preparing us for our senior year. The capstone of our program was to go for 10 weeks and teach in either middle school or high school and to teach like through the Bible at a Christian school. So, they had field ed that would lead up to that. The professor that taught field ed was actually a really

great communicator, a really great teacher, and he was very good at showing or at making typological moves from the Old Testament to the new. And so typology was something that he was very strong in, and it didn't ever feel stretched. For those at home, typology is. Yeah, sorry. So when a event or something in the Old Testament points forward to a New Testament reality, what was interesting, though, is the typology for him always culminated in Christ. So he would say, for example, like if you look at the story of Noah, Noah is a type of Christ, but that's where the typology would end.

He wouldn't say the arc is a type of the church, right? So, but that initial move of typology of seeing the Old Testament has a certain continuity and fulfillment in the new. And, you know, in the Old Testament, the new is concealed. And the New Testament, the old is revealed. So he was very good at that. So that was one thing that ended up coming up later. And then I took a class in historical theology.

So me and two other students went to our theology professor and we said, we would like to take a more rigorous class in theology. what do you have in mind? He said, well, let's do historical theology. So he said, okay. So it was my junior year. We took a class in historical theology, and that was literally the first time

that I had read anything from before the Reformation. Did it ever occur to you to do that? I don't really remember that being on my mind. I remember, like, you have the early church in the book of Acts. And then Martin Luther? Yeah.

Post acts, there's, you know, the church gets corrupted. And then Martin Luther comes along and, you know, the reformers and Calvin and sort of saved the day. I'd be very overly simplistic for those, maybe that would be Protestants watching this. But that was sort of the view that I had. And so it was the first time of my life that I had read people from before the Reformation. And this textbook was a textbook where he would just kind of rip out quotes of early church. father's he had four sections he had here's all these chapters and then all these chapters have four sections in them early church medieval church reformation modern period so it'd be like what is

what's the history of atonement here's the early church was thought on atonement here's whatever augustine cyril leo the great whatever and he would do that kind of throughout And that was the first time where particularly with something like baptism, I remember being sort of confronted with, man, the early church viewed baptism in a very much a different way than I do. And I don't quite know what to do with that because in my mind, baptism is not regenerative. Baptism is a symbol of what God's done in me. And if I say it's regenerative, now that feels like a work. And so the idea of a work's gospel was very much like a trigger. word. You know, you don't want to fall under the anathema of St. Paul for the Galatians and,

you know, adding to the gospel. And so anyway, that was kind of the first time that I had experienced early church fathers that believed baptismal regeneration. They believed in a real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. And then they had a different church polity or church government than I would have ascribed to at the time. So I would say that didn't like recommend me, but it caused me to sort of broaden my horizon of what Christianity could be. Is Christianity is the truth really just my little, like, sort of niche church and what they say? And if so, what does that mean for all these people that lived before me, you know? Is there any sort of organic continuity with the past? So that was a big question.

Ultimately, by the time I get to my senior year, I'd become very sympathetic to Anglicanism. Why? Well, because I had some friends that ended up becoming Anglican during this time, and it seemed like the best of both worlds. Like, you could get some of the church's history, some of the churches sort of organic continuity

with the past while maintaining certain Reformation instinctives. And so I was, it was something that was appealing to me. It wasn't like I was fully committed to the Anglican church, but I remember when I went up to do my student teaching in Charlotte for 10 weeks, I went to an Anglican church there. And I was very sympathetic to a lot of the sort of theology of the sacraments that I was experiencing there. So, yeah, that happened by the time I was a senior. The other thing that happened was between my junior and my senior year, my theology of baptism had really started to sort of move away from merely a symbol to some sort of means of grace. I just couldn't really clarify what that meant.

And it kind of came to a head because I was interning at the church that I was, that I was at in high school. So when I came back home for summers, like I would, interned there for two summers. And I remember I had just taken a class. This was really fascinating. I took a class called church planting in multicultural context. And so that class was really interesting because it was like, what do you do if you're a missions organization and you go and you are missionary for a missions organization and you go and you plant a church? But you're not sent out ecclesially in terms of like, it's not like the Baptist church is sending you out. This mission organization is, which means you can have different sort of convictions about sacraments,

about infant baptism, about, you know, whatever. Well, now that gets a little hairy when you're trying to go to a new place and plan a church. So this class was very much of like, we're starting from the ground up kind of thing. And so I remember our professor saying something that struck me, he said, there's no such thing in the New Testament as an unbaptized Christian. obviously you have a thief on the cross but he was like you don't take the exception and make it the norm like baptism was very much so something that was not something you could just delay in the new testament or just put off or think it's merely some oh i can get to it later kind of thing like baptism in his mind was almost the first step of obedience such that if you didn't get baptized your whole salvation

is kind of in question because why aren't you obeying christ um So I remember going home, and at this time at the church back in Jacksonville, the youth pastor had left to take a different job. I'd come home to intern for the summer, and I was going to start that next week, but I was home a week early. So I went to the youth group on Sunday morning, like their Sunday school, I stopped in to say, hey, hey, see you guys in a week, whatever. And they were having a conversation about baptism, and I'm pretty sure they were going through like the book. of Acts or something. So Acts when Peter says, repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of sins and you receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. So they were talking about whether or not baptism was something that was necessary to be saved. And I remember they asked me, like the guy

who was sort of filling in in the meantime, he asked me in front of a group of like 120 students. All right. Oh, Brandon's here. He was just, you know, he's been studying for whatever three years at school. He can give us some help on this. And I'm thinking, oh, no, this is not good. because I know that convictionally now I'm I'm differing a little bit from where this church what this church would believe and say and I tried very hard to be like no yeah like no y'all've got it y'all can do it my opinion's not important right now I haven't started yet you know I just remember being like I do not want to answer this question they kept on pushing me and pushing me and pushing me and so finally I was like what's something

I can say that's sort of true, you know, that's kind of thread the needle here. So I just repeated what my professor said. I was like, well, I'll say this. I want to tell you about some amazing coffee we were sent recently. It was from seven weeks coffee, which is America's pro-life coffee company. They are on a mission to fund the pro-life movement one cup of coffee at a time. The reason they're called seven weeks coffee is because it's at seven weeks that a baby is the size of a coffee bean, and it's the same time a heartbeat is clearly detected on an ultrasound. They donate 10% of every sale to support pregnancy care centers across the country, and they've raised over $900,000 for these centers and have saved thousands of lives.

Now, let me tell you about the coffee, because, you know, it's one thing to have a great mission, but is the coffee any good, and I can assure you that is excellent. I had a cup this morning. My wife and I both love it. It's mold-free, pesticide-free, shade-grown, low-acid. It's organically farmed. It truly checks all the boxes. So go to 7weekscoffee.com and save 15% forever when you subscribe.

Plus, exclusively for my listeners, use the promo code Matt for an extra 10% off your first order. That's a 25% total savings on your first order plus your free gift. Remember, your order will directly help support a network of over 1,000 pro-life organizations across the US. Seven Weeks Coffee.com. There's no such thing in the New Testament as an unbaptized Christian. And so if you're in the room and you haven't been baptized yet and you identify as a Christian, like you have to get baptized. Like that's something you need to do.

And man, the room blew up. Whoa. Like blew up. Parent, like parent volunteers. Like, well, what do you mean? What about this? What about? And it's like, oh, wow.

So was the general, did you, were you there long enough before they asked you this question to get a sense of where the room was at? Namely, no, it's like a wedding room. It signifies some reality already established? Yeah, I think, I remember walking in, and it was like, they had already started their lesson or whatever for Sunday school. And I remember walking in, and I think it was, they very much like to do the sort of devil's advocate kind of thing of like the person leading it would go, okay, this seems like it says baptism is necessary for your salvation. Talk about that at your tables. Do you think that's true?

and then table talk, and then you have big talk, whatever. So then I am in the back, and they're like, okay, yeah, clear it all up for everybody. And I'm like, I'm not going to clear it up for you. Anyway, so I had said that, and it was a very sort of confusing reaction because it was something that it seemed like I was saying something that the church wouldn't have said. And I sort of was, to be honest. But I wanted to respect the church, and I didn't want to respect the church, and I didn't want to like come in and throw a grenade yeah so after that whole thing they were like hey

I want you to come back next week now that you've started and you'll just clear up the teaching on baptism so I said okay well in the meantime clear up what were they hoping that like anything that was confusing to students uh-huh could be cleared up in the next week did you have some people pretty upset with you at this point oh for sure yeah I mean when you say hey if you're somebody in the room and you identify as Christian and you're putting off your back baptism like you're being disobedient you're being just like you need to like get baptized and and to an extent of like if you don't you're almost questioning your salvation at this point because you're just being in direct contradiction to what Christ has called you to do and so all right the minute

you made that salvific claim now it's like like guard goes up now now now now it's heated well in the meantime, this news kind of makes its way up the chain to the lead teaching pastor. So in the middle of the week, I'm like working on this, you know, how can I say this? You know, blah, blah. And he emails me and he's like, hey, send me your lesson whenever you're done with it so I can look over it. So I said, okay. So I sent it to him and he goes, I want you to come into my office. I came into his office and he goes, you can't teach this. And I'm like, okay. And he's like, this is not what the scripture says. Now, it's one thing for me not to teach it out of respect for the church.

It's another thing to say, that's not what the scripture says. Right. And this is where for me there started to be a, you know, and I'm like, what do you mean? It's not what scripture says. Like, I'm re, St. Paul says in Galatians 327, if you're baptized, you're closed with Christ. Yeah. Roman 6th, through baptism, you're buried and raised with him. John 3.5.

Like, just pause there a moment. I've done something of a. research on the early church fathers, I can't find one that doesn't interpret John 3-5 as water baptism. Unless you're born of water and spirit, you cannot enter the kingdom of God. Every church father, I don't know one church father that doesn't interpret it. That way, who addresses that verse? I agree. Do you? Are you familiar with one? No. And I know we're kind of, right, we're deviating from the scriptures here. Right. And you'll probably get back to this in regards to the different lenses through which we see scripture. But it's, yeah.

I remember that just being shocking. And when you read Zwingli, have you read Day Baptismo? No, I have not, but a good friend of mine did. Are you talking about the quote where he says, I think all the fathers and doctors are wrong? This is almost, and I don't want to derail you from your story. But he says, when it comes to the issue of baptism, and he was referring to regeneration,

I can only conclude that all of the fathers and doctors have been in error. Right. Oh, how do you say that with a straight face? Yeah. But all right. And now that's unfathomable to me. Then, and for the person I was talking to in particular, that didn't matter. Yeah. It just that that's like, oh, well, you elevate human traditions over the Word of God, you know? Yeah. It's like, okay. So you tried giving him verses from scripture. Yes. I remember very, very vividly opening up to Romans 6 and him going, no, baptism is a symbol. And I go, where does it say that in this text? it doesn't you are taking that move you are taking that sort of lens and you are you are interpreting that into roman six roman six does not say it is a symbol it says in baptism we are buried with christ and raised with christ like i said galatians three we are clothed with christ um acts 238 repentance and baptism for the forgiveness of sins you receive the gift of the holy spirit

itis three, right, by the washing of water and regeneration. Peter's reference to Oax. Right. Yeah, in First Peter three. So don't sit here and just tell me it's a symbol because the Bible says so. If you want to say it's a symbol, that's fine, but you can't look at what I'm saying and say it's somehow unbiblical in terms of it's not a coherent, count of what the Bible's teaching. Like, you're, you're implanting or you're assuming symbolic

nature into this when it doesn't say that at all. And what's interesting is when you look at Roman 7, Paul's whole point is, in order to be wedded to Christ, you have to die to your marriage with the law. You know, so particularly for the Jews, it's like, well, how do you, how do you die to sin? How do you die to that master so you can be married and new? Well, you can only get remarried. through death, right? As Catholics, especially, I mean, we believe that about the sacrament of marriage. You can't just get remarried. You can only get remarried if one of the spouse dies. That severs the marriage bond. So what severs the marriage bond between the self and sin, or the Jew and the law? What severs it is death. Well, where does death take place? Roman six,

baptism. So anyway, I remember walking out of that conversation, and that was sort of the first time that I remember going, he went to the same college as me. He sat in the exact same hermeneutics classes I did. And when I took hermeneutics my sophomore year, for people that don't know that, hermeneutics is just a way in which we study the Bible, how to study the Bible, how to come to the correct interpretation of the Bible. What's interesting is at CIU, when you take the hermeneutics class,

you can follow the whole method, but you still end up with your Presbyterian professor, your, you know, your Methodist, your Baptist, you're Anglican. Like the hermeneutical method doesn't give you a unanimous consensus of what to believe in certain areas. So anyway, that was sort of the first time where I remember going, man, I'm starting to see scripture differently than my home church. was that what was that like we were afraid was that an alienating experience or like a sad

experience um yeah that's a good question i i would say it was a little scary in the sense of like this is this church is what was comfortable in terms of like i believed so deeply in everything this church did and sort of the way they taught the bible the way they the way they the way they disciples people, the way they lived on mission. It was just like, even to this day, there's parts of that church that I still really love. And so it was hard in the sense of like, man, I'm starting to see a sort of break in the way we see things. However, having said that, I was still under the impression that I can view it this way and it's not a problem. Like, that doesn't mean I have to be Catholic. And I'm not even saying at this point, it's regenerative. I'm just saying it's a means of

grace and I don't really know what that means yet. Um, so anyway, go back to CIA you. By the end there, I'm a little confused about what I should believe. By the time I graduate, I am very much thinking baptism in the Eucharist or means of grace. Um, I just not sure what exactly that means. Um, and so the, right after I graduated, there was a question of, do I want to go and do teaching or do I want to go into like a pastoral role or do I want to go in like a school context? So there was a church that had an opening for a youth director role that was actually

an Episcopal church. So they weren't part of the ACNA. The ACNA kind of, well, they're going to disagree with this, but it kind of broke off from them as a sort of reform movement, I guess. But it was interesting. This priest at this Episcopal Church said something that I, again, planted another seed. He said, when I interviewed there, I was like, I've heard about the Episcopal Church and how unorthodox they can be theologically. And I just don't want to work here if that's going to be your vision on human sexuality

and the priesthood and things like this. And he said, no, I actually. I'm actually a lot more orthodox Theologically than the Episcopal Church The reason I didn't go to the ACNA Was because you don't reform via schism You reform from within I was like

Hey you know what I respect that Like I appreciate that And if that's kind of your mission and your vision I'll try to if you would have me on Like I'll try and join you in that And we can make this Episcopal Church a place that, you know, is orthodox and this, that, and the other. So I did a year there.

During this year, too, I was engaged. The other caveat, this whole story is the pastor's daughter, I started dating her. And I ended up marrying her. So this Anglican church, is that here in Jacksonville? Yeah, the Episcopal Church is here in Jacksonville. And so that, your father-in-law is the, that was the conversation you had with him about the Orthodox. No, no, no, sorry. At the church I went to in my junior, like the pastor that I sat across from and I said,

Roman 6 doesn't say this is a symbol. No, no, sorry, you said that you were chatting with an Anglican and he said you don't reform through schism. Is that your father-in-law now? No, no, no. That was the, that was the Episcopal priest at the church in Jacksonville. Gotcha, okay. I'm just saying, so I worked for him for a year.

Okay. during that time, I was engaged to get married to the pastor, the church, the non-dominational church that I was at here in Jacksonville. I married his daughter. Oh, okay. So my father-in-law is that pastor. Gotcha. And, yeah, I would say that year in the Episcopal Church, it was good. I learned a lot.

I would say during that time, I had a friend who had become Catholic. well, he was already Catholic, but he went to Catholic school here in Jackson, but he also went to that non-denominational church for youth group. And then in college, he said, I'm going to stop going to the non-denominational church. And I'm just, I believe the Catholic faith. So when he went in that direction, that was like huge red flag for me. I'm like, we got to talk. And so he would send me questions and stuff, and I would send him questions and back and forth.

Now, at this point, is he actively just seeking whether he might be wrong or is he died in the wall Catholic and he's trying to give you the apologetics? Yeah, he's Catholic and he's trying to give me the apologetics. But I viewed him in such a way as like, man, I really do care about you. And I think that Catholicism is just flat out wrong. And it's not just like, oh, we can agree to disagree. it's like this is like damnation kind of stuff so like I'll study all this for the sake of convincing you that it's wrong so I went on this whole thing of like I'm going to try to prove the church wrong I'm going to try and prove the Catholic church wrong and you know tell me how that

happened how did you begin to do that what what books did you read websites did you visit yeah I mean I remember at first it was me going you know to your classic you know the gospel Coalition, Desiring God, R.C. Sprole, his kind of stuff on Catholicism. Anything that was accessible, like, I didn't have a good understanding at that point of, like, the reformed scholastics. And so it was just anything that was accessible today that I could find online or in print, you know, I would try to get my hands on. I really liked Paul Washer for a time who was very anti-Catholic but it was interesting because a lot of it at first was me saying something like you know Catholics worship Mary you shouldn't worship Mary you should worship God alone you know it was

just very much a straw man of Catholicism and so I would say for about two years I would tell my friend TJ what Catholics believed and he would go that's not what we believe so for the first two years, it was just breaking down false assumptions of the Catholic faith. And how did you become, how did you come to agree with him when he would say that's not what the church teaches? Because he would send me stuff. He would send me either the catechism or he'd send me Catholic Answers, you know, article on something about, and Catholic Answers actually does a pretty good job of that, of going. I think so. Here's the accusation about what we believe. Here's why that's not true. For their work, I think that they do a good job of that. And so, yeah,

he would send me tons of stuff like that, the catechism. He'd send me early church fathers on stuff. He'd send me, you know, hey, go read this from Vatican 2, or the council of Trent, or, you know, if you want to, like, initial justification, we believe that's totally by grace. And so, anyway, a lot of it for those two years was going, I have a, I have a view of what I think the Catholic church is. And then there's what the church really is, and those are two different things. And so for those first two years, it was really just breaking away of what I thought the church was. You know, we have a lot, a surprising amount of Protestants who watch this show. And it's great. We love you and we're so happy that they're watching. But I do think that is one thing that they

could do to the Protestant who's kind of scared about the Catholic Church, but is attracted to it. It's a real gift to have the catechism of the Catholic Church. So if you want to know what the church teaches, you can read that. Very often what we do is, sounds like what you were doing is reading about the Catholic Church from her opponents, but you could read the catechism of the Catholic Church and see exactly what the church has to say about what she believes regarding baptism and Mary and things like this. And you can disagree with her, but you could disagree with her on her own terms.

Right. Yeah. Right. And that was what was, you know, G.K. Chesterton, he has this book on the stages of conversion and stage one is... I'm unfamiliar with it. Oh, wow. What does he say? So I hope I remember this right. It's three stages. The first stage is essentially what I'm describing now. You realize that the church has been abused in either the modern media or Protestantism. What you've heard about the church isn't actually the church. You know, I think it's Fulton Sheen who famously said, you know, there are a hundred people in the United States. Right. Yeah.

Who hate the Catholic Church, but a million who think people. do. Yeah. So anyway, that's kind of stage one is like when I started to understand what the church actually taught, and then I would hear my peers say Catholics believe that I would start defending the church. Yeah. Yeah. And G. K. Chesterson says, it's not because I ever wanted allegiance to the papist, you know. But if we're going to attack her, we better be right. Yeah, you know, but it's just doing justice. It's being, it's being fair. It's it's being just to our opponent. you know the classic like don't straw man steal man yeah and so so that's stage one you defend her from as an outsider yeah you defend her as an outsider not because you agree with her but

because you want to you want to fight fair stage two as you go well man she's actually maybe she's right um on this or that yes on this or that thing and stage two is very much like he describes it's like very happy and it's it's like an adventure you know you're it's you're in a you're in a new place you're just exploring a new island and it's exotic and cool and all these cool animals and you know whatever um and then stage three is terror because now you've come too close and you've come too close to the truth and it'll demand your life of you and that and that honestly that that reminds me that was me i want to get to that i forget which guest it was i have on the show. It may have been Keith Nestor, if you're familiar with him. Wonderful

fellow. I hope I'm getting this. It was either him or somebody else. They went up to Steve Ray. You know who that is? He's a convert from. Yeah, I've heard of him. He was a Baptist. And he said, I'm really close to becoming Catholic and I don't, I'm scared and I don't know what to do. And Steve said, you have two options. You either join the church or you turn and you run for your life. Something like that. Steve seems to encapsulate the terror. Yeah, it's true. And G. K. Chesterton says, you know, in that stage two to three, that's sort of like it's fun, but now it's terrifying. You've realized you've been trapped. But you haven't been trapped by the church. You've been trapped by the truth. The truth has trapped you. And you can't,

you can't now unsee it. Anyway, that's jumping ahead a little bit. But I would say during that year of working in the Episcopal Church, there was a breaking down those walls of what is the Catholic Church actually believe. And then my friend asking me questions that I didn't quite know what to do with. What was the next thing? So after baptism, which it sounds like you're more at this point in your life agreeable to the church's position, what was the next doctrinal thing that you went, oh, this could be true, which I presume added to the terror? So yeah, there was baptism. Then there was the Eucharist and I had started to become really sympathetic to the Eucharist. Again, didn't quite know what all this meant. I would say it really clinched when I saw for baptism. I started to believe

it was regenerative when I saw the connection of water and spirit in the Old Testament. So I'm pretty sure almost like every time you see water and spirit in the Old Testament, it's a sign of a new creation. So you have the spirit of God hovering over the waters at the creation of the world in Genesis 1. new creation. The flood, the flood waters covered the earth, and then Noah sends out the dove, symbol of the Holy Spirit. Well, the flood is just recreation through Noah. You see in the Exodus account, they go through the waters of the Red Sea led by the pillar of fire and the cloud, God's presence. They're a new creation, Israel, right? They are now sons of God, according to Exodus

19. When they go into the promised land, they go through the Jordan River, led by the ark of the covenant, water, spirit. Water and spirit, it's like, it signals a new stage in salvation history. And then when you get to Ezekiel 36, it's interesting because the prophet Ezekiel is prophesying about the new covenant and he says, God's going to sprinkle clean water on you and he's going to pour his spirit within you and cause you to obey him. Well, now when you get to John 3.5, right, water and spirit, okay, in a sort of Israel,

Jewish mind, water spirit has had this connection all throughout salvation history. Like, of course you're going to think it's about some sort of physical water, right? Like, you're going to think, yeah, Christian baptism, especially about time John's writing it. Like, it would be confusing otherwise for John to write it later to talk about it in that way. And then be like, no, I just an amniotic fluid. Yeah, right? I mean, you don't really do that. So, anyway.

Oh, that's fascinating. Thank you for sharing that. Whenever you feel the desire to go deep into typology, I give you full permission. Okay. That was beautiful. Thank you. Sure. Now, again, what's important, though, there is that you don't just get that by looking at John 3-5, right?

So when we talk about, like, a Protestant doctrine, like the perspicuity of scripture, scripture's clear, you know, sometimes Catholics attack that without understanding completely what the Protestant means by that. It doesn't mean that everything is totally clear. There's not obscure passages or whatever. And it doesn't mean you don't need to be trained or anything like that. No, you have to be trained. But there are certain clearer passages that will interpret less clear passages.

And that's a fine principle. As a Catholic, we believe that there are certain passages hard to understand that clear ones can shed light on it. The question, though, is like, which passages take priority over others? Do I interpret John 3.5 in light of passages in the New Testament all about faith, you know, or do I interpret John 3-5 in light of New Testament passages that talk about baptism and Old Testament typology, you know, so there's two ways to view which glasses do I put on. And so to me, I started playing that game a lot of like, no, when you look at baptism

in this way, actually, this makes perfect sense. And then when you see the way it's talked about in the acts of the apostles and then in the epistles, they very much seem to indicate that baptism is a cause of grace. It is regenerative. It is the means by which we are united with Christ. And then, like you said, now finally, the last straw is, well, let's look at the tradition of the church. So I played that game a lot with a lot of different things.

Baptism was one. Eucharist was the other one. I remember just being floored with, like, you know, Jesus is the Lamb of God. And John's gospel is so big on him being the Passover lamb. You know, John's emphatic in that, from John 1 all the way to the very end of the crucifixion. John's making a point that Christ is the true Passover lamb. Well, when you look at the Passover lamb in the Old Testament, right, they not only put the blood on the door, but they had to cook and eat the lamb. When you look at Exodus 24, when they made covenant with God, after they made covenant with God, it says they ate and drank and beheld God.

So part of covenant making was meal sharing. And so when you get now to the New Testament, and you see Jesus saying in the midst of the Passover, he's sort of reinterpreting the Passover in the New Testament of this is my body, this is my blood, this is the new covenant in my blood. Well, what do you do for covenant? What do you need for covenant? You need sacrifice and you need feast. Well, what do you have in the Mass? What do you have in the Eucharist? What is it?

It is a sacrifice and it is a feast. So I saw that how the New Testament was fulfilling the old. There's a certain continuity with the old and the new. And, yeah, John 6, another thing that was interesting there, right? So John 6, eat my flesh and drink my blood. Is that merely an idiom for believe in me? You know, Aquinas is interesting on this. Aquinas says, perhaps it could be, but it doesn't necessarily have to be just that.

And it's interesting there because I remember so vividly going, if you look at the progression of the bread of life discourse, Jesus says, you must work for the food that endorsed to eternal life. And so the Jews say, well, give us this food. And he says, I'm the bread that's come down from heaven. And then he gives five promises of what happens if you eat this bread. And then at the very end of that, I'm pretty sure it's like John 640, 42 somewhere in there. it says the Jews murmured amongst themselves because he said he's the bread that came down from

heaven is this man not the son of Joseph? So right there, they're doubting who Jesus is based on what they can see and not what Jesus says. Now, Jesus could have stopped the bread of life discourse right there, but he doesn't. He then goes and says, the bread that I give for the world is my flesh for the life of the world. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood. And then he gives these same promises. And they say, how can this man give us his flesh to eat? Right? What are they doing? They're murmuring again. That's their second murmur in the bread of life discourse. Well, Jesus doesn't back away. He just doubles down. You must eat my flesh. You must eat my flesh. You must eat my flesh. Right. This is a hard saying. Who can accept it? And many of his disciples

turned and no longer walked with him anymore. John 666 is a powerful verse because in John 615, they wanted to make him king. So at the height of Jesus's public ministry, he gives his teaching on his heavenly origins and his teachings on really the coming sacrament of the Eucharist and then people walk away from him. Who can understand this, right? Well, it's not the flesh, but the spirit that gives life. Now, a Protestant will look at that and say,

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Start your seven-day free trial today. Download Truthly on the app store. when I think what Jesus is saying there is no you can't understand these things via the flesh you can't understand these things naturally all who come to me have to be drawn by the father if you believe these mysteries they're supernatural they must be revealed to you and jesus i think is giving us two mysteries the mysteries of his heavenly origin that he's come down from heaven and the mystery of his flesh in the eucharist if you deny the flesh his body and blood in the eucharist because you can't see it, right? If you're disputing with the Jews, how can he do that? I look at the Eucharist.

It's not his flesh. It's not blood. If you're denying it because you see it and not because of what he says, then you have to do that same thing with his heavenly origin. Because when you look at Jesus, you don't see divinity, right? Like divinity's cloaked, so to speak, it's veiled through his humanity, and you have to believe that Jesus is divine via faith. Right? And you don't believe it because of what you see, but because of what he says. So I don't know, I saw that and I went, man, I believe Jesus is heavenly. He has a heavenly origin. He's the son of God.

And I believe that by faith, not because of what I see, but because of what he says. So then with the next dispute about giving us his flesh, I can't then turn around and go, the Eucharist isn't his flesh because it doesn't make sense to me or I don't see it or, no, he says it is. And I have to believe him on faith. And obviously, he gives you credible signs to believe it. Like you've had Eucharistic miracles in the history of the church. But anyway, so when you look at all that together, old and new, fulfillment, John 6th, you look at St. Paul in First Corinthians, a participation in the body and blood of Christ.

The biblical sort of, the biblical foundations for the Eucharist made a lot of sense. Same thing with baptism. So that was all happening my years. doing ministry. I left the Episcopal Church because my friend is starting to ask some questions that I wasn't sure the answers to. And in the book of James, it says that teachers will be judged more harshly. And I thought, I need to step away. I can't in good conscience continue to teach while having sort of these questions. And the questions now started to move sort of towards church authority.

And at this time, I still never expected to be Catholic. Were you processing any of this with your Anglican friends? That's a good question. So I was, yeah, I was processing. I had a couple of Anglican friends. So at undergrad, it's interesting you say that I had a certain friend group that were like my best friends and they were non-denominational Baptist, evangelical kind of type people, if you will.

They were like my best friends. So these moves for them seemed very like, whoa, he just went from being an evangelical to being a Catholic in like no time. Whereas really Protestantism is pretty wide. Like with Anglicanism, you can get pretty close to Catholicism without being Catholic. So for my Anglican friends, it was interesting. sort of the questions I started to have about the history of the church, organic continuity. They understood those questions and they sympathize with those questions.

My other friends really didn't. All this sort of came to a head when I went back to grad school. My friend had told me about a guy named Scott Hahn. I had no clue who Scott Hahn was. And he was like, oh, he was a Presbyterian pastor that became Catholic. And I'm like, Internet, you know, Scott Hahn. I saw he went to Gordon Conwell. Well, interesting, Gordon Conwell has an extension campus here in Jacksonville.

And so when I thought about going back to grad school, people were like, oh, go to Gordon Conwell. It's right here. And I thought, that's not a safe school. Scott Hunt went there, became Catholic. I don't want to become Catholic. So I thought, where's the safest place I can go back to? So I went back to CIA. Safe in the sense that it would prevent you from?

Yeah. Again, I had, at that mind, I was like, I don't want to be Catholic. I can never imagine becoming Catholic. And there has to be answers against the Catholic Church. And clearly Gordon Conwell didn't give them to Scott Hahn. And this isn't me trying to denigrate Gordon Gondwell at all. I don't know anything about them. They could be great.

No, I get it. Just saying there was a popular guy. He became Catholic. Clearly, the school didn't do it. Yeah, didn't work. Didn't take. What year was this that you were about roughly? So I graduated my undergrad in 2016.

I did a year of ministry, 2016 to 27. the internet's in full swing so are you watching debates um again it not really i mean i think i had stumbled across a little bit like at this time like james white and that kind of thing um this is when i set up my podcast incidentally two 2016 almost 10 years ago now so and by that point you know you got those jimmy aiken james white debates and things like this had you come across jimmy Aiken at that point? I don't think I came across like Jimmy Aiken, Trent Horn, and Catholic Answers until I really went back up to CIU. Yeah, honestly, there wasn't a lot. Since then in Protestantism, there's been a huge retrieval project. What does that mean? Like, you know, like the old

classic, like to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant, right? Like, one that quote gets taken out of context, I think, a lot. But second, Secondly, I think a lot of online Protestants that have a sort of like online presence are starting to go, wait a second, we have just as much acclaim to church history. Gavin Oldland. And so, yeah, right. So they do these retrieval projects. Yeah. There wasn't, I don't remember that being around as much.

At least, if it was being worked on, it wasn't accessible. I agree with you. I haven't seen that. Like, it was really just like you've got the Catholic church and you've got like James White over here just, you know, just saying whatever. So, yeah. Well, did James not give you any confidence? Not really. He certainly speaks with confidence.

Yeah. Oh, man. I really don't want to be mean. I don't want you to either. James White is great. comes to debating of like getting the crowd all rowed up because it sounds so like, you know, elegant and, um, you know, you've put your, you know, stakes and your good works and we trust nothing but the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ. And the crowd goes wild and, you know,

whatever. To me, I was like, okay, that I don't really care for like the rhetorical flare here or whatever. Like what's kind of the meat of it? Um, I don't know. I was never really, it was never super convincing to me personally. And I don't know. That could be me. I don't know. But I remember going back up and the next big thing that happened was I had a friend who had walked away from the faith at CIU. And the reason why that was so important is because all of my community, we had come from a very reformed tradition, and I mean reformed broadly there, just meaning like you're not going to be able to lose your salvation. And that doesn't mean like an easy, grace, like you can live however you want and you're saved, but no, like the saints will

persevere. And so if you walk away from the faith, then that means you never really had your salvation. That sounds really nice in theory. The problem is we just didn't have any real life examples of people walking away from the faith. And it's a lot easier to hold that sort of belief system when you don't see it, if that makes sense. Like, it's easy to say, yeah, the saints persevere. Look at all of us. We're persevering. But the minute one of your close friends completely walks away from Christianity and then you're left with the fallout of going was he ever saved in the first place like that was a very jarring experience because you've got and then if he can do it how do you know you won't correct and that's where

it was another break of man we we dunk on the Catholics all the time for this lack of assurance. But you're telling me that our good friend fooled our entire school community. He fooled all of us. He fooled all of our professors. And a lot of our professors were also pastors. So they were spiritual men, you know. He fooled all of this. He fooled himself and he's not really saved. Or if he is, he's going to come back later. But like, there's no guarantee of him coming back later. You know what I mean? And so it was just like, how can I look at this man in the face and say, you were never of us?

To me, it just seemed like I couldn't do that. So now again, now you go back to the Bible and you're going, okay, well, when you look at passages in the New Testament about losing your salvation, we had always interpreted those in light of God's passages about his sovereignty and going, this isn't sort of real threats, so to say. these are just means of warnings that carry Christians to persevere. But now you have to rethink of it and go, well, can you make shipwreck of your faith? If Jesus does plant the seed of the gospel in your heart, can you choke it out? You know?

So, yeah, that became a very, a very important question for me because it had real existential components to it. Like, can I sit here and really be assured of my salvation now? I didn't think I could, you know, at least, at least in the infallible sense that they wanted to say you could. Of course, you can have a moral means. And I think even Aquinas actually, interestingly enough talks about that, right? Love God, hatred of sin. You can, I mean, every time we take the Eucharist, that's what we say, essentially, right? That we don't believe we're in a state of moral sin.

Right. So we have to have some sort of assurance. And the sixth session at the Council of Trent didn't condemn a moral certainty in our salvation. Right. Yeah. So more of, yeah, more of it was just, I thought I was in an existentially different place than the Catholic when in reality I'm not. And actually, I would, if I could, I would almost go farther into say, I think is the Catholic, we can actually have a little bit more certainty because of the sacraments. Because the sacraments aren't dependent upon me, obviously I need to have things.

in order to receive the fruit of the sacrament, but God's grace is present. Like, it's not a psychological game. Yeah. You know. Well, you have to work yourself up emotionally to feel it. Yeah, or psychologically. And, you know, and so now, in fairness, like, the reform will differentiate between, like, objective assurance and subjective.

But I think that distinction just gets lost because it's like, well, if my objective if I can't really know if I'm objectively saved because I could walk away at some point then the objective assurance doesn't really do much the objective assurance has to be linked to the subjective in some way anyway

that's a whole conversation but point is I came to the understanding okay it seems like you can really lose your salvation I just watched a guy do it it seems like the New Testament teaches that that you can you know I had to reinterpret now certain verses and going maybe that's a legit warning maybe

you can lose it, but now it brings up a whole other question, right? Well, if you lose it, how do you get back? So now we're getting into the sacrament of confession and all that. So there was a sort of window here from my time again at CIU of I'd already believed sort of these things about baptism and about the Eucharist. It wasn't very long until I started to appreciate the sacrament of confession, especially when you look at Jesus, right? I mean, it, seeing it now, it's hard to unsee it, but what does God do? God, the Father, sent his son that we might have the forgiveness of sins in new life. Then Jesus in the upper room after his resurrection, just as the father has sent me, like Jesus is the chief apostle, really, the sent one,

just as the father has sent me, so I send you. And the apostles are going to be doing in their ministry, they are going to extend Jesus' ministry to the church. And they're going to do it. And they're going to do so in a visible fashion, which makes sense to me because I'm a body, soul composite, and I learned things through my senses. So around this time, I started reading the suma, and man, where did you start? You know, I started, I think, in Turchiopar's, so part three, and I just started, I think, with, I think, the sacramental section, because that was kind of my big questions. And, you know, sometimes people get scared to approach people like Aquinas. And there's definitely parts that are hard to understand, and you might mess up.

or whatever, but I would say all in all. I think you can read his understanding of baptism and the Eucharist and sort of, and the general gist go, this is what he's saying about the sacraments. And it just, it made so much sense. How did you go from being, doing your grad work, not wanting to become Catholic to reading Aquinas? I was trying to figure out answers to my questions. And so, I mean, I would stay up. There was like a six-month window here where I was staying up just into ungodly hours of the night. I was really, I was tormented. I was now in a crisis of faith. Are you dating your now wife at this point? We're married. You're married. Yeah. So yeah, that's a good question. So a lot of the questions that my Catholic friend was

asking me, during that year, I was engaged and I thought, I don't really, one, I don't have time to think about this, trying to plan a wedding. Two, I don't really know if, yeah, I might believe this about baptism in the Eucharist, but if that's all that it is, you could stay, I mean, some Baptists now are saying that they can believe sort of a sacramentalized understanding of baptism in the Eucharist. So it's like a, there was never really a threat for me of like, I'm going to be totally changing like my whole life or anything. So is your wife coming along with you in this journey, at least in this initial stage that we're talking about? Or is she just like, oh, that's cool. He's really intelligent and likes theological discussions. And I trust him. Yeah, I

would say that um i would say my wife is she does not have the sort of disposition that i do in terms of wanting to study things theologically um like she doesn't have the disposition of like a theologian in that sense um or someone that's like very inquisitive in that sense she she very much so has the heart of a child to receive from those in authority over her sort of the teachings that they give. She is much more interested. She would rather sit down instead of reading a book on the history of infant baptism. She would want to sit down and read like a spiritual work. Yeah. And so yeah, it took me a little bit of time to honestly be okay with that because I was like, well, I have these big questions, and you don't seem to really be bothered by

them, you know, you're wanting to think about, which is very good, honestly, probably more beneficial than what I was doing in some respects, but like, how can I love God more? How can I love my neighbor more? That's just kind of her, how God's gifted her and how she walks her Christian life. And I think you need both, you know. So yeah, I would say in that year there wasn't really, we would try to talk about it. she was, I mean, she was trying to plan a wedding. We were trying to plan a wedding.

There was just a lot of other stuff. After we got married, though, that whole process of planning the wedding was now something that was, just didn't require as much work. I mean, you know, planning a wedding. It's just like you got a lot to think about and stuff. You're doing marriage counseling, marriage prep, trying to figure stuff out and order things and plan things. So after that, it was almost like, okay, that's taken off my plate.

Now I can have some mental capacity to think about some of these questions. And that's where it started to really become like, these are good points. I don't know what to do with them. And so, yeah, I went back to CIA. So the baptism thing happened, Eucharist, confession, justification was another big one. I read St. Augustine's. grace and free will, and chapters 15 through like 21 in that, just give a beautiful outline of, I think,

a Catholic understanding of justification of we're saved initially by God's grace. It's totally unmerited. And then we're going to distinguish that, so to speak, in terms of like eternal life, glorification as the kind of culmination of the Christian life. and God is going to not reward us for our works, just in our works themselves, per se, but God's going to work in us. So Augustine's favorite verses in those sections are Philippians chapter 2, verses 12 and 13, work out your salvation for fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you both to will

and work for his good pleasure. So I started to see for the Catholic Church, there is this initial moment of death to life that's totally by grace, it's totally unmerited. But now we're called to walk in union with Christ, but our walking, our participation now, as we journey towards the end, we fight the good fight, we run the race. My very running of the race is nothing other than God working in and through me to work for his good pleasure. It is Christ in me, the hope of glory. It is, I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.

And so, yeah, I would say that sort of solved a lot of the tensions I have. about the Catholic view of justification because I'd done a project earlier in undergrad about N.T. Wright and John Piper, they had a disagreement about justification that came out during my undergraduate years. It was big news and how to interpret works of the law and all this kind of stuff. So anyway, when I was reading Augustine, I saw not exact overlap with N.T. Right by any means, but there was a certain sort of overlap with like when God rewards us at the final, judgment, he's rewarding our spirit rot works, which is nothing else to say. When you reward you, he's rewarding nothing than his own glorious grace when he crowns you. So anyway, things like that.

And of course, Augustine is the great opponent against Pelagianism, semi-Pelagianism being condemned by the church. And that must have given you some hope that, okay, so if the church is being condemning this heresy, it's not committing it or it's not meaning to. It is. Right. Yeah, for sure. And I think at this point, too, I had started to realize the reformers were actually a little different than what my community thought the reformers were. So like I went back during that year that I was away from school and I started reading through Calvin's institutes. It was very interesting for Calvin. Calvin, I don't think ever, he never saw himself as this radical, you know, break from the tradition. Calvin thought that he was the true inheritor of the early church. Now, why is that an important move? Because for Calvin, he thought, I have organic continuity. In other words, he prized, if you will,

or he thought it was important to have organic continuity with the past. Whereas I don't think that was an intuition that was there with my friend group. So I started to realize, look, you guys claim the reformers, but you don't even really understand their whole vision. Like, you know what I mean? The reform was that the fathers are with us, right? If they appealed to the church fathers to justify what they were saying. Right, right.

And so now it's just a question of, okay, well, which appeal is right? Is it the Catholic appeal or is it the various Protestant appeals to the early church? But the point is, everyone's going to the early church. So I had a professor that said the Reformation was just as much about Augustine as it was about Paul. Yeah. And so, anyway, when I would talk to my friends about this and they'd go, well, organic continuity of the past, tradition, like, it just didn't seem a big deal. And I'm like, yeah, I'm not an issue.

Yeah. And I'd be like, I just, I don't really know how to even have this conversation in because, like, are you saying the church just went corrupt? What about the end effectability of the church? What about Jesus' promises in Matthew 16? Like, you know, so that was very frustrating. um when i was back up in school was there was a community of friends that just felt sort of they didn't see the importance of it and they were sort of dismissive of it and didn't really

get the whole like lens thing like you don't understand when you read the bible you're not just like you're not just reading it as if you're like this totally unbiased person like you read it through a theological system and it's been given to you and you don't even realize it like Pastor Billy at, you know, First Baptist doesn't just, yeah, he teaches the word, but in teaching it, he's giving you a system in a way in which to read the Bible. You don't even realize he's doing that. So now when we have this conversation, it's hard because you're condemning me for adding to the Word of God when in reality it's impossible to read the Bible without a set of glasses on. So anyway, it really became a game of which glasses are right. so yeah at rock bottom then it was a question about the papacy to me well what was your opinion let's say as you began your undergrad and then now of eastern orthodoxy and was that ever a

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and a habit of prayer. There's honestly so much excellent stuff on this. app that it's difficult to get through it all just go check it out hello.com slash mat frad the link is in the description below it even has an entire section for kids so if you're a parent you could play little bible stories to them at night it'll help them pray fantastic hello dot com slash mat frad yeah that's a good question i eastern orthodoxy was something that might as well have been more foreign than catholicism for me in undergrad um when i got to graduate school I didn't really find that orthodoxy, and for people that might listen to this or whatever, I'm not by any means a scholar at any level, but I never found orthodoxy to be really compelling,

so I just never really went down the road of it. The reason I never found it compelling was because it seemed like there's actually no way, even within the orthodox system to arbitrate between differing opinions, you know, and there's no really way to prevent schism I didn't see in the Orthodox communion. Like you have different Orthodox communions that are in schism with each other. They've anathematize each other. Some of them I feel like they think our sacraments are valid. some of them are like no they're not valid so they're just it didn't seem really to solve the doctrinal

confusion number one number two as i understand it again i just never really went down the road so i could be totally misrepresenting them but the idea that the faith that you and i believe today is exact literally and explicitly the same faith that st iron ais believed as if st iron ais was like explicitly in writing venerating you know the assumption bodily assumption of mary like we just don't have that. So this idea of doctrinal development, you have to, you have to work that into a system somehow. And I just didn't really see, do they do that, can they do that? Yeah, I think doctrinal development is a term that makes Eastern Orthodox uncomfortable, nervous. Sure. Yeah. And they might say, well, we're fine with it in this sense, but not this one. Okay, yeah, I don't know. That's fine.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by whatever system you adopt has to incorporate some form of doctrinal development? Yeah. So I think there's a difference between when we talk about the deposit of faith. I like to imagine it sort of like a gold mine. So the deposit of faith that Jesus has given to us and to his apostles and the apostles are given to the church is this gold mine. And there's the objective deposit.

Everything that we will ever believe in the Catholic Church is contained within this deposit, within this gold mine. subjectively now from the mind of the church though we go and we sort of plumb that deposit we dig up the gold and as we go and dig up the goal we discover more gold now having said that there are certain doctrines that were given the articles of faith that were given to the church that are going to be there from all time. But there's certain connections or certain consequences of those articles that have been now teased out and fleshed out over the history of the church.

So, for example, you know, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, if somebody wants to say transubstantiation was not believed in the third century, fine, so be it. And I'm not here to say yes or no to that. but what was true is that they believed in the real presence the exact mode of real presence okay if you want to debate that fine whatever but what does real presence really mean you know transubstantiation is the way the church has said this is what it means to be really present you know so that would just be one example of going that's how we tease it out yeah yeah Or another example might be like the bodily assumption of Mary.

Matthias Shabin will state there is no record, none at all. That's why I love Shabin. Shabin's my favorite theologian. He says there's no record at all of Mary's bodily assumption in the first like four, five, six centuries. We don't see it in record until around, I think, 5th, 6th, 7th century, somewhere in there. I could be getting the centuries a little mixed up, but somewhere in that time period. So now does that mean it's like anti-biblical or something?

Well, no. And Shabin has all sorts of reasons for this. He's saying, well, we already believed these sorts of things about Mary. And if we believe these sorts of things about Mary, then those who get teased out in the church subjectively now as she plums the deposit starts to realize, wait a second, no, Mary is bodily assumed in the heaven. She is the queen of heaven. She is immaculately conceived, you know.

So I guess that's what I mean by doctrinal development. Like there is a sort of development of doctrine as the church continues to ponder the Word of God. And the Word of God continues to shape the life of the church. And we ponder it more deeply led by the Holy Spirit in the community. communion of the church, particularly the Magisterium, that she over time is going to come to know the truth more and more. Now, obviously, there's sort of rules and how that works. Like you can't disagree fundamentally with what's come before. Now it's a corruption, not a development. So anyway, all of this for me sort of culminated with, at the end of the day,

there's a question of authority and there's a question of the papacy. And, the papacy can sort of be the judge between these different lenses because i can put on all these different lenses and it's it apparently seems to make sense but which of these lenses is right now only one of them can be because the lenses are contradictory like they say contradictory things about the bible so which of these lenses is right and that's where i came across saint vincent of Lorenz, his work commendatory. And man, when I read St. Vincent, I felt like he was speaking to me. How do I know the truth of Catholic faith from error? Well, universality, antiquity, and consent. Does the church universal believe it? And what's interesting,

him for universal didn't mean like majority opinion. For him, universal, I think meant do the Is there sort of an ecumenical council? Do the, does the Magisterium teach this? Like in his mind, universality was sort of located in a sense there. If there's a question in the church that's sort of causing division today, what does the ancient church have to say about it? If there's a question amongst the ancient church about it, what does the most common opinion upon the doctors say?

You know, so anyway, St. Vincent had a way in his, in his era, that first rule for St. Vincent was a way in which he was able to discern where Catholic faith really is and where it is not. Because for St. Vincent, he grew up in a very much so a interpretive pluralism. St. Vincent says in the beginning of his commendatory, there's as many interpretations of Scripture as there are interpreters. Scripture seems to be capable of as many interpretations as there are interpreters. And so is scripture sufficient of itself? Well, yeah, but it's also deep and not to mention, we have the wounds of sin.

You know, we think of Aquinas and the four-fold wounds of sin. Well, if we have wounds of sin, well, scripture could be clear all day, but scripture can be clear. And if I'm blind, it doesn't, the scripture's clarity doesn't help me, you know. If my eyes are bad, I need corrective lenses. So anyways, St. Vincent gave a way for me to go, okay, where can the church, where can the truth be found? And also, St. Vincent, his second role is doctrinal development. It can develop over time. And it can develop in different ways. And there's different kinds of developments that you could have.

And so anyways, all that was kind of nice and neat for me. At rock bottom, it came down to the papacy and saying, is the papacy something that Jesus established? And of course, you have your textual evidence for that. You have, you're the rock. You have the keys of the kingdom with Isaiah 22. You have your, the chief shepherd, feed my sheep. Peter, I'm praying for you that your faith may not fail. So you have those things. And yeah, I came to see, as for the papacy, that it's not in either or.

So Pope Leo the Great was really beneficial for me in this in sermon three of his towards the very end of the sermon. He talks about Peter as the umpire, the foundation, and he names like four or five titles. And he says, by these, we know the mystical association he had with Christ. In other words, the office of the papacy is a participation in the prophetic kingly and priestly ministry of Jesus. It is a participation in his rule and authority. It is not against it. It participates in it. And so when you look at it, at the life of the church, there are different degrees of participation in those three offices of Christ. By virtue of our baptism, we're all called to be prophet, priest, and kings. However,

the hierarchy of the church takes upon those sort of responsibilities in a fuller sense, right? So for the papacy, the papacy is participating in the authority, in the governance, in the headship of Christ the head. The papacy is participating in the infallibility of Christ. So, yeah, I would say, I would say that was really big for me. And then when you see it throughout the early church and, you know, the papacy in the early church is an incredibly complicated issue. I would just merely say this, is that you do see, I think, in the early church, and it kind of starts to culminate by the time, especially you get to Pope Leo, St. Leo the Great, and then even after him, you see a continually growing awareness of the infallibility of the Roman church, right?

So like in Irenaeus, every church must agree with this church on account of its preeminent authority. Now, what's interesting is, on the face of it, that's not talking about the Pope, that's talking about the church, right? However, if you look at Ignatius, well, where's the church? Well, the church is where the bishops are? right so there's a sense in which that's another thing of doctrinal development right okay you have the primacy of the roman church well if you take that the roman church is a pillar of orthodoxy well it's not a far move from there to tease out well who's the head of that church well the bishop is well what would that mean about the bishop well in certain times and conditions he can teach the truth infallibly right

so anyways pointed i'm not trying to make history in the early church easy by any means i understand that as i started doing study in early christian history that there are certain varieties of interpretations of the early church now the protestant looks at that and says see that's why we just need the bible you've you've just you've just punted it a step further now instead of talking about the scriptures we're talking about the fathers and i go no that just shows the need for a living voice, a living voice that continually arbitrate when needed between judgments and discern which early church traditions are ones that ought to be kept, maybe which ones should we not keep, maybe how can we, you know, whatever. So anyway, yeah, that was kind of kind of the big thing

there. What about the current church? Because you converted during the Francis Pontificate, was there anything about that that turned you off? I know speaking to other converts who read their way into the church as you did, there tends to be this disappointment when they read what the church is, they have these ideas of how it should look, and then they maybe enter parish life or see what the Pope just did, and then it can be like wet water. Sure. Sorry, not wet water. Oh, water is wet. Cold water. It's thrown on your face, you know. So, I'm Honestly, Pope Francis never really bothered me. And it's not because I always agreed with him or whatever.

I never saw, how do I say this well? I didn't see anything that Pope Francis did for me personally, at that time especially, as being something that was detrimental or somehow, somehow destroyed, Catholic faith. There might be times where it was clouded or times where, you know, whatever. But it's not like he ever got up, called a council, and they said, yeah, you can, you know, whatever, homosexual acts are fine. Like, it's not like he ever said that in any sort of official capacity.

You know, so what Pope Francis, you know, did, you know, with whatever. certain media member and what he said on an airplane this that like i just i don't know that kind of stuff was like it's a little bit above my head and if pope fran if i really need to know something from pope francis it'll come through my bishop and my priest okay at least i would hope as you were gravitating towards catholicism did you have friends try to point you to some of the scandals within the church the sex abuse scandal the yeah sure but again it that doesn't to me that's like saying okay well, there was churches in Jacksonville 10 years ago. There was a huge church, and a youth pastor got caught in a sex scandal.

Does that mean that non-denominational Christianity is evil? No, it just means that that guy's a sinner and he did something wrong. And this was really something to see when we say, like, the marks of the church, it's one holy Catholic and apostolic. Holy, whenever you and I sin, we don't act really in a strict sense on behalf of the church. Like, we've unplugged ourselves from the life of grace. And so, you know, just like the church can't teach heresy, the church can't commit sin in a strict sense. And so, I don't know, some of those things never really bothered me, per se.

Yeah, I think it ultimately came down to the papacy and seeing the papacy as an outgrowth or in the context of revelation and church unity. um the papacy is a means to an end and so as an outsider coming in it was like everything's about the pope and that seems scary but when you realize the papacy is a means to an end then it's not so scary anymore because there's a lots of means to ends right in the catholic church like the sacraments in a way are means to an end um baptism is a means to an end of union with christ so so the papacy is a means to what end uh i think the papacy is a means to the end of one the application of of Revelation. So Matthias Shaban makes this argument really beautifully in his handbook of Catholic dogmatics 1.1 on theological epistemology when he talks

about how God wanted to establish a kingdom that was a universal kingdom of truth and holiness that could go forth to all nations in order for all people to have, you know, live the truth or believe the truth and live in a holy way. Well, you're inevitably going to have questions about the truth and questions about morality as time goes on. And so how does God, it would be fitting that God would give us a way to accomplish those ends, right? And if you think about it in scriptural terms, like think about Jesus' high priestly prayer. For me, that became almost fundamental because in Jesus' high priestly prayer, he says, Father, I pray for them that they might be one even as you and I are one. And so the unity of the

church ought to reflect the unity of the Trinity. And not only that, but the unity of the church ought to be a supernatural sign to the world. Why should we be unified that the world might believe through them? So there has to be something supernatural about the unity of the church. Well, if it's just going to fall into schism and fall into, you know, fall to shreds, so to speak, well, then there's nothing supernatural about that sign to the world. So in order to preserve that, right, you have the papacy in order to arbitrate at certain times in order to protect unity. And you see that, I mean, not for the papacy, but you see that in a magisterial sense

in Acts 15. You have a question about circumcision, you know, it's causing division in the church. There was not autonomous churches over the Mediterranean. The church in Galatia couldn't go, oh, thanks, Peter and Paul, like, good stuff. at the council of Jerusalem, but we don't agree, you know. Now, the Protestant can respond to that and go, well, that's a fair point, but that's only because Revelation hadn't closed yet. And I go, well, fine, but the need still persist even after Revelation closes. Or if it doesn't persist, show me where Revelation teaches that it won't.

Yeah, either show me where Revelation teaches that it'll cease to persist, or show me in the early church where it ceased to persist. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, again, I think Pope Leo's great here. He says, just as what Peter confessed in Christ has to endure, so what Christ confesses and Peter must endure. So if Jesus's confession, or Peter's confession of Christ, indoors, right, throughout all the ages, so too what Christ established in Peter must endure. I don't know if I'm convinced by that, but I think it sounds very poetic. I don't know why that has to follow. I guess I have to read Leo's whole thing, but just because I say something of Christ, which might be always true at all times, I don't know why it follows that his response to me

has to mean that there will be a succession of... Oh, well, sorry, yeah, just because of that confession, you are the rock on which the church will be built. So if the church is going to endure to the end of the ages, then it can only endure insofar as it indoors on that rock. Okay. And that rock, therefore, must endure. Now, the question about the rock, right? Well, again, I think Aquinas is great here. The rock can mean Christ, the ultimate rock. The rock can mean the confession. The rock can mean Peter.

So I think Aquinas would say something like, who's the rock of the church? The rock of the church is Peter insofar as he confesses Christ the rock. Well, good thing, according to Luke, he's always going to confess Christ the rock because Jesus is praying for him. Yeah. So anyways, there was that. So yeah, I don't know, when you see... Has terror ended at this point in your journey?

Oh, no. I was scared for a long time. Yeah, I think that, you know, all this sort of came to the fore. And then the last thing to say is that ultimately, I understand that people can go, well, you're just interpreting the Bible like I am and I just come to a different conclusion. Granted, I would say there is a little bit of a difference when you look at the motives of credibility and the marks. of the church. So I think most fundamentally that'll kind of distinguish certain things, but, you know, that the church is one holy Catholic and apostolic. I don't think you see that in every other church. Every other church does not have the fullness of those marks. Only the Catholic

church does. And so when you look at her sort of motives of credibility with the four marks and certain internal marks of the church, you know, Vatican One talks about that. I think that gives a strong case for why Catholicism is true and Protestantism isn't. But, but, but, you know, Yeah, so anyway, I started to see that even in order for a church to function, right, that you almost have to function as if infallibility is the case. Like, no one in their right mind at some non-denominational church here in Jacks, for the church I grew up at, for example, is going to challenge the pastor and the elders. at least at least the like layman like you know your your banker or whatever like they're pretty

much sitting there and they're receiving their words as as the truth of the matter you know whenever that church goes to practice the excommunication if they were to ever if a church were to ever excommunicate somebody on theological grounds right there the minute you do that you're functioning as if you are adding a rule of faith that is a little bit, that is distinct from the scriptures themselves, right? Like, they all have their doctrinal standards, and you need to agree to these doctrinal standards. So if you excommunicate someone, particularly for like Trinitarian or Christological

controversy, I think by that point, you're living as if infallibility is true, even though you don't claim to possess it. and so when they say no we're not making any such claim we're simply showing that what this person is teaching is contrary to the word of god that's why they're being excommunicated it's got nothing do with us right but the catholic says that same thing and so yes that that might work for like you know it's hard to point to someone like arias because every camp agrees arius is the bad guy but maybe something that's a little less for the Protestant that might know this. People like Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware and evangelicalism have been teaching the eternal functional

subordination of the son for, I don't know, 20 years in order to ground their understanding of marriage. So when I was at CIU, you have marriage and you have, you know, well, the man is to be the head of the house and the woman should submit to him as the head of the household. Okay, fine, fair claim. But they grounded that in just like Jesus submits to the Father. Well, Jesus does submit to the Father in the economy, in the incarnation. But they would then take what was true in the economy and apply it to the Trinity and go,

the Son eternally submits to the Father. Well, now you're going, what does it mean that the Son eternally submits to the Father? What do you mean submits? Are there different wills in the Trinity? Now we're getting the tritheism. That kind of sounds Aryan. Yeah. Right.

So the point is, is like they have all their verses that they point to to show that that's true. I think, man, if you teach that, you're now really starting to really destroy the doctrine of the Trinity in ways that are really foundational to the Christian faith. So, but they have their verses for doing that. So anyways,

that's what I mean of like, You can say, well, the Word of God doesn't say that. That might be fine, but that's not going to morally allow everybody to be able to easily access the truth. So I don't want to get into the predicament. What I'm not saying is that you need the Magisterium in order to read your Bible always. Like you can't know anything if the Pope doesn't say something or something. But that's not what I'm saying. In order for the whole church, the scholar,

the mom, the dad, the banker, the plumber, all of them alike. In order for them all to easily believe in the truth, it would be fitting that God would establish an office that could easily dispense the truth that we ought to believe. Right. Wouldn't that be great? Yeah, not everyone has to be a elogent. To clear up confusions, you know? Right. Gee, this reminds me a little bit of Aquinas in both Summers, but he talks about the awkward results that would follow if man were to have to merely rely on philosophy to attain knowledge of the existence of God and certain attributes of his, which he says, of course, we can come to understand apart from faith. But he says, but it would take people a long time. Most people aren't like intellectually equipped. Even if they were

intellectually equipped, they would arrive at it with all sorts of errors. Right. And so you would think it's almost like Aquinas is saying, it was fitting therefore that God would reveal himself to us such that those errors would be easily dispense with. And so by analogy, I'm saying it's sort of like that with the church. It's like, well, wouldn't that be nice? Right. If we didn't just have to rely on innumerable interpretations of given passages, if God established a living voice that could...

Right. But now the necessity has changed, right? So for philosophy, it's not strictly necessary. Like, it's possible to attain the truth. It's just incredibly hard. even probably without, well, I don't know, with the wounds of sin, it's incredibly hard to do that, right? So it's fitting that God would reveal himself,

not only that we would believe supernatural mysteries, but even natural truths so that we can access those easily, right? So there's a moral necessity there. So, yeah, that's what I'm talking about with the papacy. Yes, it could be the truth that you have a guy that picks up the Bible and reads it and through a lot of prayer and study on his own comes to the truth about the doctrine of the Trinity. Like I don't want to dismiss that, you know? Maybe that would be the case. But that's not going to be the case for 8 billion people in the world. It's just not.

And so in order for there to be, so there the papacy fits as like a moral necessity, in order for ease, for everyone to profess the truth, in order to really actually have a kingdom. like one kingdom. And I started to see that, you know. So you see Jesus give that authority to his apostles. And then you see Paul in the pastoral epistles with first and second Timothy. There's a fourfold commission that gets passed on to Timothy that, you know, Shabin really talks about. I think Shabin, for those that are really, really committed to wanting to learn Catholicism beyond maybe

some ultra-accessible readings, you know, like I think, like, Catholic answers and all that has a good place and stuff. If you're looking for something a little bit more substantial, I would say Matthias Shabin, his mysteries of Christianity is just beautiful, but his dogmatics, particularly 1.1, I think it would be helpful to hear, like, for example, from like Gavin Oritland or some of these other popular Protestant apologists to deal with maybe some of some of those claims that you would find in someone like a Matthias Shabin. I think that would be, it would kind of further the conversation a little bit, I think. You know, Scott, did I tell you this?

He's a giant Shaven fan. You did say that. For my 40th birthday, he showed up, and that was his gift. It was a book by Shaven. So the first, so if people are interested now, what is that one book you would say, go to Amazon and just get this book? What would it be? Yeah, you can go to Amazon, you go to St. Paul's Center for Biblical Theology.

Matthews Shabin 1.1. So it's green. There's 1.2 on faith, but 1.1 is called theological epistemology. Great. And it shows how, it's great in a lot of ways, but it shows that you have to understand the papacy in light of revelation, church unity, you know, even the church's mission to go and preach the gospel to all nations. Like even within that, there's a certain implicit sort of authority of going to all nations and preaching the truth infallibly and things. So anyways, infallibility, it's just couched in sort of a much better place, I think, than just saying, hey, what does rock mean, ergo infallibility? You see it as a whole system. So I like to imagine it as like a spider web. I began to see with Catholicism, you can't just

pull on the string of the papacy. When you pull on that, string you're pulling on the whole web you know or you're pulling on four or five other things and these four or five other things are things we already agree to you know so um those are already in place and the papacy is the nice sort of central piece and all that so i started to do that with papacy with mary's the same thing um but yeah all that culminated and i was terrified you know i mean i'm i'm in grad school and at this point i had told my friends hey, I'm starting to read Catholic stuff. Like, I want you guys to pray with me about it

and to, like, if you want a dialogue about it, I'd love to dialogue. It was tough. You know, they weren't in grad school. They had full-time jobs. And so it's like I couldn't expect them to just read as much as I was. But, yeah, there came to a point.

I remember sitting in my apartment, and I was just terrified, like honestly terrified of, I've drawn too near to the truth now to go back to Chesterton. The trap has been set and the trap is the truth and and it was

simultaneously like exciting but scary at the same time because what did that mean for my life? And yeah I would say right there when I told my wife I wanted to be Catholic I don't mean to ask

questions that are too personal so you can just tell me you don't want to go there if you don't want to but is your wife's father still a pastor of this church yes okay yes um yeah i love my wife and i love her family dearly and particularly my father-in-law i don't know if he understands the ways that he has shaped me there's so much that i've gleaned me there's so much that i've from him um so yeah i have my differences obviously i'm not i'm not there anymore um but i don't view my past as a rejection of my past you know um your your past as a rejection of your past sorry yeah i i don't view like my days in protestantism as it's not like i totally reject everything um you know there's certain things, of course, that there's rejection to, but I view it in a lot of ways

as a fulfillment of, like, they cared a lot about the unity of the church. Well, I care a lot about the unity of the church, you know. They cared a lot about obedience to Jesus, even when it gets hard. Like, even if the whole world, so to speak, were to be against you, you know, even if you go and you get persecuted for your faith, like at the end of the day, you have an allegiance to Jesus over all things. That was a truth that they taught me that now I had to walk and they were the ones that were mad about it you know and i don't mean they as in i mean just that whole community my grad graduate school just everybody everybody in my world was like what are you doing this isn't right no it is right it is the truth and all the sort of um

backlash that i get that doesn't change what i'm going to do because you have taught me this is your fault yeah you all taught me and it's a true thing like we're called to follow Christ no matter our cross, no matter what it means. And so how did you break the use to your good wife? Yeah, we were in our apartment, and I remember just kind of saying, you know, babe, I think, I think this is true. Like, I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to follow through on this. um yeah and she was obviously she was crushed i mean she didn't see it coming yeah uh i think

i had asked her i was like hey can you want to think about this and pray through this with me and she was just like i'm not there it was it was almost like the journey by that point was almost even too foreign um and i wasn't going to push her in that you know and um so Yeah, it was very hard for her. You know, I mean, in her defense, it's like I married somebody with a whole life and vision of what our future could look like together. And when you become Catholic, that changes almost everything. You know, it changes our family life.

It changes where we go to church on Sundays. It changes intimacy. It changes kids and how they grow up. And it just, it changes everything, you know. So, yeah, it was very, very difficult there for a long time. But God has been really good. And, you know, particularly for her and I, he's done so much healing for us that's been great and so much love. and that there's a way in which that that sort of conflict in our marriage

for people that are listening and if you're going through it if you just get through it if you just stay the course and get through it one thing I regret and this goes beyond just her but just my whole community I felt so misunderstood because I would get told. I remember my friends brought me into a room in a house and they sat me down and I hate this. This was in front of my wife. It was just, it was messy and it was like, and they were all very well-intentioned, like the best of intentions. I would just say, but very ignorant. And they sit down and they go, Brandon, we're calling you back to your first love. We're calling you back to Jesus. and I'm like, okay, number one, you just haven't, you have no idea what you're talking about.

Like, I haven't left Christ. I still love Christ, you know, but that just shows where they were at. Like, again, fine motive, very ignorant, though, and that was very damaging because when I said, no, I'm going to continue on this way. For them, that was pride. And so now the accusation is moved from sort of a conversation about, like, what does the Bible teach about X, Y, Z, or how does the early church understand X, Y, Z to, you know, Brandon, you're going rogue. This is classic Brandon, you know, you just, you just want to go rogue. And it's like, no, I've actually, I've been, like, red-pilled. We thought we were on the mainland. Do you think I'm going to

the island. In reality, we're on the island. I'm not trying to be different. I'm trying to go back to where I think the church historic has been. Like, I'm rejoining the community that we left 500 years ago. So anyways, there was a lot of that. It was just really difficult. So, yeah, there was a lot of brokenness, especially with my friends, like the people that sat me down, Those were all groomsmen in my wedding, and my relationship with each of them took a big hit. You know, some of them have, we've, like, restored relationship. One of them just said, no, like, we're done, essentially. So it was really hard.

Kind of the fallout of all that. So you were baptized at this point, so how did you get confirmed? Did you go through RCA? Yeah, so that was interesting. So this was all, um, So I told my wife it was January of 2018, I think. January of 2018. I didn't enter the church until Easter 2019, though.

So, and that was because of just, I think, two things. One, it was really messy. Like the priest, the priest understood my situation and was made actually aware of my situation by not me. I'll just leave that at that. He got contacted, basically, about me. So my situation was very, very messy. He had said, look, you just need to come in.

And one, you've been in the books, but you haven't actually lived the Catholic life. And he was right about this. You know, he's like, you need to come to Mass and just live through, you know, the church's life, start to understand a little bit more of the liturgy, you know, start praying. Like, you've been so deep in the textbooks.

Like, take a break, honestly, from the textbooks for a minute and just journey with the church. So, yeah, it took me a year and a half to come in, and I sat through an RCI class that I was like, I felt like I already know all this stuff. It's fine, you know, whatever. I'll sit here. But I actually really loved it,

because the kind of cohort that I came in with, one of them was a former Anglican priest. Wow. And it's like, man, if you're going to do this, like talk about a guy who's probably studied all the issues, like this guy could probably teach the class and he's got to sit through it. So there were several of us that were like, we're probably equipped to teach the class. We're not going to, obviously. We're not Catholic. But we would just talk, man.

Man, that camaraderie must have been so refreshing. It was awesome. It was awesome. Because they would have experienced being misunderstood as you did. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, and that's what I meant to say about that. For people that watch this, if they're going through it, what I do regret is I felt misunderstood,

and I felt like I always had to justify myself. No, no, no, Catholics don't really believe that about Mary. Let me explain. There's a time for explanation. There's a time not for it. I wish I was just silent. And I think of Jesus, right? It is trials where he is silent.

Because at this point talking, the mind is made up. So how would you have done it differently? I think I would have said. If somebody had to come back to your first love and you guys believe this and that. I think I would have said, man, instead of trying to argue about every little thing, I think I would have been like, guys, I do love Christ a lot. I don't think we're in a space right now for you all to be able to, for us to be able to dialogue fruitfully about this.

Um, so maybe let's maybe catch up in like four or five months, but I never did that. Um, and I said, no, no, you don't understand. Like we don't like, we don't worship Mary in the way you're thinking of it. You know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, no, baptism, blah, blah, you could. So, and it was just like that. Yeah. That's not, it wasn't needed, um, at that time. And so that's my one regret. That's my biggest regret is feeling like, man, I should have just, stayed quiet because the more I talked, the more it was they thought I was prideful because I just disagreed with everybody. And it's like, and then that was frustrating.

So I'm like, man, y'all are impugning, like, sinful motive here because I disagree with everybody. Yeah, I disagree with all of you. I disagree maybe with our professors at school, but like the Christian world's a lot bigger than you and our professors at school. You know, it was funny as the Anglican community at my school. they understood me perfectly. So even after I became Catholic,

I would go with my Anglican friends and their Anglican priest to a bar in Columbia like once a week to get drinks and talk and hang out. And we disagreed. How many of your Anglican friends were smoking a pipe? I need to know. Is it every single one of them? No, more than they were more classy.

They were into the cigarettes then. Okay. So, but yeah, you know, I mean that I will say It was a comfort because they at least understood the sort of intuitions, the sort of motivations, the sort of, you know, whereas some of my other friends, like we talked about earlier, they just, they couldn't get there about why certain things were important. Why does it matter what Ignatius of Antioch said, you know? So the Anglicans did understand that. And so we just fell on different ends of it. And, you know, for me, it's like, well, I can't, I can't force you to believe this.

like I can just present what the church teaches and you do that what you will, you know, ultimately faith is a gift of God and God's got to give it. And so, um, so yeah, that was sort of the fallout. So I did a year and a half to enter. And then it took me three years, uh, I committed career suicide. I mean, I didn't know what I was going to do with my life. Um, so I started working in ophthalmology. So I looked at eyeballs all day. Uh, for three years. I was a technician and then I ended up scribing. And yeah, throughout that time, I just had a real burning desire to continue to study. So I ended up doing an online program at Ave Maria. It was funny. I applied to go on campus there and I got accepted and they were going to give me a really

nice scholarship for the graduate program. My wife applied to a job in Jacksonville at the same time. We both got acceptances the same day. So we ended up moving back to Jacks. and I ended up doing the online program at Ave. How would she have felt going to a Catholic school like that? I don't know. My thing was like, well, we're in Columbia. Ave's by the beach. You know, she loves the beach.

I was like, we're the beach. Kind of by the beach. Yeah, well, you know, if we live 30 minutes from Ave, you know, then I can drive to school, we'll return from the beach, and, you know, it'll work. But, yeah, anyway, so. How did you, I'm sorry, I have so many questions. How did you break the news to her father? or did you not? Did somebody else do that?

That is a great question. It could be too personal too. I want to reiterate. I'm not trying to. I'm fine to answer some of these questions. Some obviously I'm going to be a little bit guarded on. Looking back on it, my intention was very good. I sort of regret this. I had told my friends about me starting to delve into, because once I went back to grad school, I was like, I'm fully anticipating finding answers within Protestantism. but on my journey there like hey guys would you want to think about this with me read some stuff talk about it together um i never really talked like that with my father and the law my father

and law um he he doesn't like love to sit down and have like theology conversation and so for me i was figuring well because this issue is already something that he wouldn't really care about there's going to be really no point in talking to him about it. And then as the months went on when I would start thinking more about Catholicism, I wasn't, to me it was like, this is going to be too huge of a thing to where I don't want to say something, them get freaked out, and then may not do it anyway, if that makes sense. I didn't want to receive sort of the, and it was all. on me so like I'll accept that you know it's me assuming how they might react to me thinking about

certain questions but um it was me thinking okay I don't want to deal with like the fall out of that if I'm not actually going to do it um so yeah it was pretty quiet with them but I was open to my friend group um so yeah how'd they find out um I mean I told my wife first and then I'm pretty sure she, like, immediately called them as, like, her first kind of phone call. So we didn't really have a sit-down conversation. I don't think until after. But, yeah, I mean, they were really disappointed. Again, I don't want to go too much in detail into that.

The Lord's done a lot of good in restoring a lot of relationship there and finding commonalities that we can really celebrate. And I love them. I love both of them. My father-in-law and my mother-in-law are very godly people. They're virtuous. They care a lot about Christ. They want to follow Christ with their lives. So there's a lot of ways in which I look up to them with parenting and raising kids and family life.

And, you know, so they've done a really good job of that. Yeah, I mean, they were obviously very hurt and disappointed. That's not the, me being Catholic was not the direction that they had envisioned for their daughter. And as a parent now, like, I can understand that, you know. So it was very hard for them. Because my father-in-law, again, is not the one to want to, like, sit down and talk theology all day. There wasn't really that sort of, like, well, tell me how you came. to this kind of conclusion or you know it was kind of just what we disagree and this is not

biblical and it's like okay well we'll just agree to disagree on that kind of thing so so yeah they they took it very hard I know I think is anyone would like if my daughter came home and said no our my Catholic husband now wants to be a Protestant I'd be like that's a lot you know yeah and so many Protestants they view Catholic as pseudo-Christians in the way that the Catholics might view the Mormon. So it might even be more analogous to say if you're... Yeah, honestly, like, speaking more broadly to than just my in-laws, but just sort of a certain section of that whole community,

I might as well seriously have become, like, Muslim. Like, it was sort of the same visceral reaction. It was that jarring. and I had never met a I had never seen anybody who had done what I did like you know I didn't know about like EWT in the Journey Home or Scott Hahn like it just that was not our world I had never known anybody that had become Catholic I know people that become Anglican but you know they were still safe so yeah it was very much I felt like I'm sort of on my own here, because I don't know anybody else to kind of talk to about this.

There's no one I can call or reach out to and be like, hey, when you did this a year ago, what was your experience like? There was none of that. So, yeah, I mean, it was very lonely. Well, thankfully, this conversation is going to be what you could have had for many people who are watching. And a question that comes up repeatedly in Pynes community is of a Protestant who wants to convert to Catholicism, knows their spouse is dead set against it. And they are not sure what to do.

And from one vantage point, you can see someone saying, what do you mean you know what to do? Follow the truth. And that's easier said than done, especially if you think that in making this choice, your marriage might blow up or your spouse might separate from you.

Maybe not, but you're not sure if you really want to kind of test that plank. When I spoke to Dr. Hahn about this, he said it got to a point where delaying conversion felt increasingly like disobedience to the Lord. Delayed obedience is disobedience. That's right. And he and I would highly recommend everyone. I mean the reason I think the best book to give to somebody to help them understand the Catholic Church who's just like, okay I'm kind of interested

is Trent Horn's book, why we're Catholic? Sure. But there's something about a story that just grips people more than that book, right? And that's why I think Dr. Hahn's book has done so well. Right. You know, so anyway, so I would recommend people get that book, but what, what is your, and it's hard to give advice, right? Because I'm asking you to give specific advice, which you can't give when you don't know the specific relationship.

But what would you say is a word of encouragement or advice to people in that situation? Yeah. Dr. Hahn is right. Delayed obedience is disobedience. That is a truth to keep in mind. On the other hand, I think there is sort of a prudential question of how to implement it all and when and how soon and all that. You know, I would say ultimately find a priest

and talk to a priest for spiritual direction. That would be my first advice. But in terms of just based off my experience, I would say there has to come a point where you take the step to obey. When or how soon I'll leave that between them and the Lord and their spiritual director.

following Jesus sometimes demands crosses and Jesus says take up your cross and follow me and Jesus's teachings and the truth sometimes divide even families what was funny is it was the darkest hour of my life truly. It was the most lonely I think I've ever been in my life. And I had felt like everyone in my life turned. And they were saying, we didn't turn, you left us. Fair enough. But I never had a doubt that what I was doing was right. The Lord has a funny way of accompanying you in the midst of suffering. And so I would, I would honestly, I would preach promises to myself. When you're, when you're alone and you're going to walk the path of obedience and it seems like the whole world is crucifying you, you need to tell yourself, this is light,

momentary affliction, preparing for me an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison. Right? That's, that's Paul in 2 Corinthians 4. the present sufferings are not worth. It cannot be compared to the glory that will be revealed to us. I remember Job 1 and thinking, Brandon, who do you love more? Do you love the gifts or do you love the giver? Do you love the gifts of your friendships?

Do you love the gifts of your wife? Do you love the gifts here, there, the other, the gifts of your community, or do you love the giver of the gifts? So I would say, yes, there's a prudential question in how to sort of legit go about it. And I'll leave that to their spiritual directors to sort out with them. But in term, there will come a point where God calls. And in loving your wife, there's no such thing as loving your wife and not becoming Catholic. Like, becoming Catholic is the truth.

It is where Christ is. It is where Christ communes with us. It is the fullness of how he's revealed himself. And ultimately, in the Eucharist, he wants to give himself fully to us, he and us, we and him. I'm the vine. You are the branches, right? So that intimacy of communion happens within the church. God has assigned salvation to come through the sacraments, and you need them.

And that was really real for me. Like, I had realized I've gone, I've gone 23 years of my life and I've never been to the sacrament of confession. And my first confession felt like it was like eight hours long. It was like, I went through everything, you know? But it was a real thing of like, no, if I need the sacrament of confession to be forgiven of my sins, like, I have to go. I can't, I can't wait.

So there's going to be a point in time where you got to take that step. And when you do, yeah, you might walk a lonely path. I walked a lonely path for a very, very long time. For a very long time, I walked a lonely path. And I didn't get on the internet. I didn't, you know, a lot of people, they convert now and they want to make a YouTube channel. Get off the internet. Like, you know, I was for three years just reading, praying, trying to put my own life back together.

And, yeah, but I would say I preached promises to myself, and I rested on the fact that, and again, these were all promises that they taught me. So these were all things that, again, I could feel like, no, you know what? As mad as this community is at me right now, my former Protestant community, these are truths that they taught me that I carry with me today. These are Catholic truths. These are Catholic, this is Catholic obedience. you know um so yeah i preach promises to myself i reminded myself of christ invites us into suffering not because he hates us but because he wants to transform us and there's that beautiful passage in c s lewis right that the heart is broken open um by suffering right you it's very

easy for people that are suffering to retreat and to bury themselves and and to resist love, right, and to resist, to resist the other for the sake of protecting yourself. But to go, no, I have to continue to love and pray for these people. These are my family. These are my friends, you know, and the heart gets broken open by suffering in love so that God can mold your heart to be a cruciform. heart so that you could have the heart of Jesus Christ, you know. So I would just preach to

myself constantly and remind myself of the truth. So I don't know, I could go on for a long time about that, but that was interesting. It is so important that we stand on the promises of scripture. This is, have you ever heard of Evagrius of Pontus? No. He's, I don't know from what era he lived, but revered in the Eastern Orthodox Church and also Eastern Catholicism, he's got a book called Talking Back. And the point is how to talk back to the devil. And this is an ancient book. And it sounds like a clever avant-garde title.

But no, this is. And so he'll go through the deadly sins. And it'll essentially be like when the devil says this, you say, and it's always scripture. And it's a whole book of this. And I just think that's, the point is that we follow the example of our blessed Lord who refuted Satan in the desert with scripture. Right. So it's beautiful to hear that you did that. Yeah. And there's an example there too of, right, even of Mary, right, she treasured and pondered these things in her heart. So the mysteries of the faith. And obviously it wasn't necessarily in the context of suffering. But, but yeah, this sort of

treasuring and pondering the word of God in my heart. Yeah, talking back, preaching to yourself. It's so vital. You've got to do it. I keep coming around to this topic. And I'm just like in the introduction to Christianity, Benedict points out that the word credo was what was said in response to proclamations of the faith. You know, kind of like what we did at the Easter Mass, you know.

Do you believe in God? Father Almighty, you reject Satan, you know, I do. Okay, we're also being evangelized, to use that word, ironically, by the world. And we have to reject lies. Right. And we have to acknowledge that we've accepted lies about God's intentions towards us, just like you said earlier. He's not doing this because he hates me.

He's doing this because he wants to transform me. Right. Like, but not to feel shame if I've been living under that lies. that he actually hates me like he's actually he's not coming through for me and doesn't want to not but rather to recognize it and then reject it yes there were in the midst of that time you know that there's this there's this weird it's just this weird commingling of things in the heart right like when you're walking the path of suffering you're you're sort of going between like despair on the one hand and is this despair or is this just sadness am i

you know and then there can be a sort of uh how do i say this right um for some people people can like like pain if that makes sense i guess um and like pain in what sense like um like um or or if uh like yeah i'm suffering for christ you know but in the midst of that it's like i'm despairing because what's happening to my life right now you know so there's all there's all sorts of emotions that people go through um i would just say yeah at rock bottom there was there was a deep there's a deep suffering there and there were there were moments where i remember thinking like lord you've given me a cross that that i can't carry but i don't know know who else is going to carry it like you can carry it but what does that really mean how does that

actually work um like i don't have a community that you can work through as a secondary calls you know like um so i don't know i think i felt really really really lonely in those times and then in the midst of that loneliness god would he would just comfort me i don't know it was just like a supernatural comfort of you are doing the right thing you are going on the right path this is where I'm calling you this is the church that I have found it and again all of those things are things this comes back to apologetics like you can't prove the mysteries of faith like you can't argue someone into the faith faith is a gift from God and so it for me it's like I believe you, Lord, you know, to whom shall I go?

I could follow it. This is hard. Who can accept it? So I really have to believe all these extra things. If I do that, I get to have no job. Family's going to be so ticked at me. No friends anymore. It's just life, it might as well.

It's just like a life career suicide kind of stuff, you know. to whom shall we go you have the words of eternal life we've come to believe that you were the holy one of god so i don't know there's just there's a very real grace in those those moments of deep suffering and yet god was with me uh never never sort of doubted that what i was doing was the right thing um and yeah i would just preach promises to myself that the suffering is not in vain and the lie of the enemy is to think that you are doing the wrong thing you see how much you're suffering because of it and that would get told to me that would get told to me by people of that former community this is god's judgment on you what do you do with that no it's not

God's judgment on me, right? This is where the famous Job is the corrective to the Proverbs, right? Proverbs are, give general statements about if you do good, you'll be blessed and if you do evil, God will follow that with judgment, right? I mean, that can be generally true. But Job is the corrective of that. Sometimes the righteous person suffers. And again, I'm not trying to say I was blameless and everything.

I wasn't already shared earlier how I wish I would have kept my mouth shut more. But yeah, I don't know. There's a real feeling that people are trying to say, look at your life now and where it's leading. This isn't of God because you're suffering this badly and this much. And then you go, well, I don't know. When I look at our Lord in his path, it's straight, it's narrow, and it leads to Calvary.

You know, there's this verse, I'm pretty sure it's in Luke's gospel, or it says he fixed his face on Jerusalem. There's a Jerusalem turn for Jesus. It's like he fixed his face on the cross, and the hour was coming. And in that hour, right, in John's Gospel, the sign of the book of signs, the true sign is the crucifixion. That's where God's glory is chiefly revealed. So anyway, there's just a, there's a lot of comfort there. If you're going to die with Christ, this is Romans 6.

In order to be resurrected with Christ, you must die with Christ. Romans 8 you must mortify you must kill the deeds of the flesh you must slay the deeds of the flesh you know in order to have life in the spirit so yeah anyway I've talked a lot about that but that was sort of the those were the dark hours and those are kind of what got me through it you've given some general advice to people who may wish to convert against their spouses will but what advice given your own experience would you have for those who have converted how should they treat their unconverted spouse, how much should they engage them? How much should they just surrender them to the Lord without? Yeah, I think that'll be a lot of, well, Scott Hahn famously said, I think, in his

book that he was told by a priest, less theology, more love. And that's very true. Part of that, too, will be upon the disposition of the spouse. What are their natural dispositions in terms of intellectual curiosity and theology and versus, you know, living out the Christian life and things like that. I have never, ever, ever had success, ever. Sitting down and going, all right, babe. So what are your thoughts about transubstantiation? That just is not, it's not going to work. And it's, I could do that maybe with a friend, but there's something about the marriage relationship that just, at least in my context, it's just not how it works. So I would say my wife needed to see me live for a very long time, a faithful life, a godly life.

Because, and there's a truth to this, right? Like, what good is your faith if you have not love? You have faith to move mountains, but if you do not love, you are a clinging symbol and a noisy gong. and so I would say for people out there that you've converted and I share the heart so desperately I think of St. Paul in Romans 9 where he says I wish myself could be cut off for the sake of my brethren and that's powerful language like St. Paul is saying he would stand in the gap like I would suffer hell for the sake of my kinsman according to the flesh like that's that's kind of loaded um i think for people that have family members that either aren't

catholic or aren't christian i think and you have a a real desire for god's name to go to the nations you understand paul there so i would say for that person who your your spouse isn't catholic um yeah get on your knees and start praying and pray and pray and pray and pray and pray and love and love and love and sacrifice and um you know i mean like i said that that's all you can do you cannot strong arm someone into conversion you can't you can't argue your way into it it's a gift of faith and god has to give it and so you've got to plead with god to give that gift God has to open eyes to see the full truth, right? So that would be, I guess, one thing.

I will say there was a point in time where I told my wife, like, hey, we did double church for a long time just because of our family situation. But before that, it would be I would go to Mass and then I'd meet up with her and we would go to church together. And there came a point in time where I said, if this is going to work, you got to start coming to Mass with. me. I'd be curious to know what she thinks about this, but when I say when she started coming mass with me, it changed our relationship. It did. It did.

She was able to see firsthand now what the Catholic Church really is like. It wasn't so scary anymore. It's not, you know, Mary with horns on her head or something and Satan behind her and, you know. sacrificing kittens to her or something like it's it's not and so she's been coming to mass with me for you know several years but this point and man that that has been so good for our relationship because while she doesn't agree with everything she's able to go man there's a lot here that I think is really beautiful that I can really get behind that I can really celebrate

people can pick up too when you're trying to hide your adventure efforts in a way that's more annoying. What I mean is, oh, no, look, I'm not trying to evangelize you, but like, let's have Father Keegan over for dinner. Hey, Father Keegan, what do you think about Mary? Like, people are allergic to that, and I think rightly so. Because it feels like all you're doing is taking an interest on what you think is wrong with them and not a holistic interest.

Sure. I remember I was like that with my mate Cameron Batuzi from, I don't know if you know who that is, from the get-go. him and I would debate stuff and you know I'd just make it very clear like yes obviously I want you to become Catholic so it wasn't a oh man I mean you know like let's just where does the evidence lead it was no I want you to become Catholic but if you never become Catholic I love that we're friends and that won't change right I think that's a lot actually a lot more disarming to be forthright and not cagey for sure my wife has no misunderstandings about where I stand where I think she ought to be

So, yeah, in terms of like, there's got to be that honest communication there. So, you know, there might be once a year where I go, hey, babe, I know we haven't talked about this. I love you. I really want you to consider the faith. Like, what would that be like for you, you know? And then that's it, right? But she knows I pray for her every day that she'd be Catholic. Like, that's not it.

That would be disingenuous. Like, do I really believe what I believe is true or not? And if I do, then I literally want everybody to be Catholic. So when you said you would double church it sometimes, that means you're going back to the place from which you were exiled, is just wrong a word? Is this a different church? Yeah, it would be a different church.

Okay. And again, when I'm-exha, I don't mean exile. You didn't make it seem like that at all. Yeah. When I'm, because my conversion came to post-college, the high school church that I had went to I was already far enough removed from them where like it was a shock to them

but it wasn't like that was you weren't like going there every week right right right right was Mary a big deal for you what was the biggest deal you know contraception was there a what was the thing about the church that you were like

I maybe they're wrong about this thing this is my biggest hurdle I mean yeah the papacy was a huge hurdle you know Mary was another one but once you've got the papacy right everything just correct so there is sort of these things of like and I don't know the right way or wrong way to do it sometimes people do one of two you can either go here's

these whatever five different doctrines that are controversial I'm going to study each of them and see where I come and then I'll tackle the papacy, right? But the funny thing is, is that in certain respects, the Magisterium of the Church is going to sort of tailor the way, if you will, that you answer those questions, right? Or if it doesn't, that goes back to earlier. Do I need the papacy to come to this understanding of Mary?

Maybe not as a physical necessity, but as a moral necessity so that all people can come to this understanding of Mary, the papacy's needed, right? So you could short-circuit all that and go, well, let's just go to the papacy and go, what do we think about that? And if we get that right, then by default,

we get the other things right. You know, people kind of can pick what way they want to go there. Mine was more, I'm studying these different things, and then I agree with half of them. Some of them I can see what the Catholic is saying. I'm willing to believe it, but I'm not sure. Let's see what the papacy,

how that kind of unfolds. In terms of other than the papacy, I would say contraception was hard. I mean, that that was like not talked about in my community at all, at all. It was very prevalent for young couples to contracept. It was very prevalent for older men to get vasectomies. And like that was, that was just culturally very acceptable. And so, yeah, I remember, you know, thinking about contraception.

And I remember the first time I read Humanevite, and I thought, man, this is prophetic. Like, it really was. It was prophetic. When you look at what's happened and the widespread increase of the contraceptive mentality, everything that was stated what happened in Humaneity has come to pass. Widespread divorce, widespread fornication, and, um, just a degeneracy, a moral degeneracy. And even at the end there, they talked about how, right,

if governments get in charge of this, like they could really do stuff with it. Well, I mean, China did that very recently with the Uyghurs, actually, a Muslim community. They would force IUDs. And so, I don't know, it just, when you see that and you go, we really got to step back and go, is this right?

And then when you look at contraception, for me, what became compelling about it was obviously you have the philosophical kind of natural law theories of it all of what are certain things for, and you can take that route. But then to see the beauty of it for the spiritual life, like there was just no comprehension, I don't think, in the community I came from in their mind of like, I'm going to abstain from sex. for the sake of maybe money's too tight and we can't get pregnant right now so we're going to abstain for whatever a month or you know during your fertile period or whatever um this sort of

practice of self-control right in a lot of ways contraception just alleviated that and so or it didn't force you to practice it um so i don't know when i saw that in terms of the spiritual life, I was like, man, it just, it makes sense, firstly, from the sort of philosophical kind of undergirding of it all. But then when you see its consequences in the spiritual life, I think, man, it's a pretty, it's a pretty fitting thing that God would say no to this so that it can help the spiritual life flourish. In terms of exercising self-control, viewing your wife is not merely an object for your own pleasure and things like that so yeah that was something that um yeah it was hard initially because it was like well what does that mean this is so foreign but once

you kind of saw it that was something that was um that i that i embraced mary was a little bit mary took me a long time actually i would even go so far as to say the theology of like maryology made sense cognitively, and I assented to it, but even the, like, devotion to Mary even took me even after becoming Catholic, it took me a long time to sort of be okay with it at a heart level in terms of like, am I speaking too flowery here? And, you know, I mean, I remember a classic the first time I ever pray to Hail Mary. You have the pre-prayer before the Hail Mary prayer. The pre-prayer is, God, if what I'm doing is sinful, please forgive me. Okay. Hail Mary, full of grace.

But yeah, I mean, again, with Mary, too, I don't know. Over time, I began to really appreciate, I think, really three things about Mary. Number one, Mary is a model of obedience with her fiat, right? Let it be done unto me according to thy word. she's a model of sort of mission in terms of do whatever he tells you right at the wedding of cana and then she's a model of contemplation she treasured and pondered these things in her heart right so and sort of like the active life and the contemplative life the contemplative life is the one that we're destined for in the beatific vision and mary modeled that well and so I don't know just seeing her as

sort of like a signpost. Have you read much of Colby's kind of pneumatology and what he has to say about the Blessed Virgin? No, I have not. Have you heard the idea of just like, you know, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, it's through the Blessed Virgin Mary that the Holy Spirit becomes fruitful because you have the Holy Spirit, you have Christ proceeding from the Holy Spirit and the Blessed Virgin Mary? Right. How uncomfortable does that make you? I would have to think about that a lot more. I would have to dissect that a little bit. He says something to the effect of it's not the case that Mary is the Holy Spirit incarnate. Right.

Good, good. We're in agreement there. And then he goes, however, he kind of presses the language as far as you're allowed, it seems. I mean, insofar as you want to say Mary's the mediocris of grace, there might be an association there, which, you know, I can be fine with. Obviously, the fullness of grace came through her. So in that sense, if she's the mediocris of grace, then.

so be it. And also another sense, I mean, I don't know, you think of like, it's a lot of complicated interpretations, Revelation 12 and who the woman is. But if you want to take Mary as the woman in a sort of way, in addition to Israel and the church, well, if that's true, then we are her children. And so, you know, she's our mother. The longer, the longer I live in the Catholic faith, the more whenever somebody says something startling about the version of Blessed Virgin Mary, I'm like, go further. Go further. It's no way near far enough. It's nowhere near far enough.

Yeah, I just think she's the bee's knees. I mean, she's the greatest human person to ever live. Yes. You know. But I do think it is important that, you know, converts or those looking to convert realize what it is the church is demanding and what the church isn't. Like, the church is not demanding that anybody find Louis de Montfort, you know, inspiring or his writings necessary.

I think that's just helpful to distinguish between what the church is commanding and what the church is encouraging, what the church permits, what it forbids. You've got to get those right. Otherwise, what happens is you find a particular saint or devotion inspiring, and then you start talking about it as if the church is commanded that people do it. And when they don't necessarily vibe with that particular devotion, they feel like there's something wrong with them or that they're somehow sub-Catholic, which they're not on that basis, yeah? Right. Right. So I know a lot of Protestants talk about when they come into the church, they get like devotion fatigue. Was that something you dealt with? Yeah. Not that I really remember. I mean, I remember having a devotion to St. Vincent of Lorenz for a long time. And it's interesting. Like some of my devotions to certain saints have changed over the years. You know, I would have a devotion to St. Augustine. and to St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. Thomas Aquinas, I don't know. I grew in my devotion

for Mary. Honestly, not until even I moved back to Jacksonville. And I had entered the church in Columbia, South Carolina. So I was Catholic, and yet I wasn't praying the rosary every day. It wasn't until I got to Jacksonville that I would have an hour lunch break for the job I was working in ophthalmology and I would go in my truck and eat lunch and pray the rosary. And, yeah, I was able to see a lot of fruit from that. I prayed, obviously, for my own growth and holiness and for people that I loved, that they would enter the church. And it's funny enough, one did. You know, a good friend of mine from that community, he ended up entering the church a few years ago here in Jacksonville. He was actually at Holy Family for a while, and he taught with me at the local high

school, but he just moved away. So anyways, what about this TJ fella? Is that his name? Yeah, TJ's a focus missionary. Good on him. Yeah, he's still a focus missionary. Yeah, he's good. I mean, he's bounced around. He's been with focus now for several years. Yeah, he was he was sort of instrumental just in the question asking, right? Like there sort of came a point where, because he was a year or two younger than me and he was at Auburn for his undergrad. And so there came a point where my responses to him, he just wasn't familiar enough for the literature, but he got the question to ask, and that was the question that haunted me. And so, so yeah, anyway, but he's doing really well.

Yeah, I've talked to him as much as I can, you know, he's out in, like, I think he's in Utah now with focus doing stuff. As we wrap up, do you have anything online? you want to point people towards? I know you just said you're kind of against new converse, I've been immediately beginning a YouTube channel. So I doubt you have a YouTube channel. No, again, I'm not against it.

I just... I get the point. Yeah, like just simmer for a little bit before you jump online and start. Right, maybe like be Catholic for like five seconds before you tell other people about what the church teaches and stuff. No, I mean, I'm... I don't know.

I did a little podcast I started and I was like, eh, this is a lot. I don't know if I'll revisit it at some point or not. I do have I'm on Twitter okay that's basically I think it'd be important not that you're bound to respond to people but if there was somewhere people could kind of reach out to you yeah sure do you reach out to me on Twitter X um what's your handle yeah brandon eves I think maybe seven or something something like that brandon eves you got your photo in there yeah sure that me cheesin um so yeah I would say I would say there um so yeah I I might end up doing something

for a little podcast I want to do on Matthias Shabin. Please do that. Wouldn't that be lovely? Even just having someone... Do you know, I did a book study with Scott, but I didn't stick to it. But I do remember feeling deeply inspired when I was reading him, Shabin.

So I would love to have someone like yourself kind of hold my hand and walk me through, and I think a podcast would be a great way to do that. And I think Shabin's great. I think Shabin's great. And I think he's an ecumenical. you're able to think about him from an ecumenical perspective too because even something like justification right like for the protestant just of the imputed righteousness of christ is the foundation of justification whereas for shabin it's the crown so it's not that we're getting rid of imputed righteousness of christ he's just flipping it um so i don't know it's just a way he does that with a couple different things where it's easy to go okay i don't have to completely disregard this teaching i was taught I just need to change its location.

Instead of being the foundation of the building, it's the crown of it. Yeah. You know, so there's just things like that for him that I think are really helpful. And he's the best theologian I've seen, him in St. Thomas Aquinas,

on showing the interconnection of Christianity. Yeah. Of the mysteries. How it all holds together. So that's right. Yeah. Well, thank you. God bless you.

Thank you for taking the time and such a long amount of time to come and hang out with me. Absolutely. Thanks for the invite. Yeah. So, we're off. But I wanted to ask you about truthfully,

I don't think so. I don't think so. I co-founded this company. It's an AI company. It's like CHIPT went to...