Pints With Aquinas - Responding to TikTok’s Worst Arguments Against Christianity | Gavin Ortlund | Last Call Ep. 34
Episode Date: October 8, 2026It’s Last Call! Gavin Ortlund is reacting to viral TikToks attacking Christianity — covering Paul's authority, the Trinity, the Law of Moses, and universalism. You can get his latest book, Why Chr...istianity Makes Sense in the link below. Enjoy these episodes and exclusive content ad free, one week early with DailyWire+ : https://get.dailywire.com Pints: Last Call Ep. 34 - - - 📚Resources Mentioned: * NEW RELEASE! Why Christianity Makes Sense - Gavin Ortlund: https://a.co/d/09B2sjqK Theotokos Rosaries: https://dwplus.shop/TheotokosRosaries Truthly 30 Day Free Trial: https://get.truthly.ai/TlbX/MATT30 - - - Sponsors: Seven Weeks Coffee: Go to https://SevenWeeksCoffee.com/PINTS and subscribe to save 15% forever, plus you’ll receive a free gift. Use promo code PINTS for an extra 10% off your first order, bringing your first order savings to 25%, plus that free gift. St. Paul Center: Download the St. Paul Center app for free in the Apple or Google app store, or visit https://StPaulCenter.com/app Quo: Today's episode is brought to you by Quo, the business phone system built so you never miss a call. Try QUO for free + get 20% off your first 6 months at https://Quo.com/PINTS - - - Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. - - - 📕 Get my newest book, Jesus Our Refuge, here: https://a.co/d/bDU0xLb 🍺 Want to Support Pints With Aquinas? 🍺 Get episodes a week early and join exclusive live streams with me! Become an annual supporter at 👉 https://mattfradd.locals.com/support - - - 💻 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 – https://dwplus.shop/MattFraddMerch 👕 Grab your favorite PWA gear here: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Paul has this vision when he's on the road to Damascus.
The entire religion is based on this guy saying that I think he said all these things 20 years
after he said him when no one wrote it down and I never met him.
Paul is not inventing anything.
We have the words of Christ, we have other apostles, and then Paul himself is in dialogue with
all this Peter and James, the other pillars of the church.
Catholic convert, Gavin Ordland.
Destroyed.
You wish.
Right, very good.
Destroyed.
Today we are going to take a look at six TikToks that are going to try to argue against Christianity in one way or another.
I'm pretty sure you've seen this first one came out recently with Joe Roganus.
Let's take a look at it.
Paul was really kind of the creator of Christianity because he never met Jesus.
So Jesus never spoke to him and Jesus never wrote anything down.
And so when Paul has this vision, when he's on the road to Damascus and he has this.
this, whatever it is, some spiritual encounter that he says he met Jesus.
Like, we're taking, the entire religion is based on this guy saying that I think he said
all these things 20 years after he said him when no one wrote it down and I never met him.
So it's really Paul.
So I said Catholic convert, but we might have to both abandon faith in Christ.
Oh, but we're in trouble.
What do you think?
It's all over.
It's all over.
The founder of Christianity.
Oh, man.
So short clip, but there's a lot in there.
I'll be curious for your thoughts here too.
I mean, one thing that right away you might wonder
is why are we limiting the focus to just Jesus and Paul?
We've got a lot of other apostles.
I mean, the book of James is written maybe
in like the 40s AD.
This is very early, so even that right there,
you wonder, wait a second,
it doesn't have to be just these two figures
who are formative for Christianity.
The other thing is when people say Jesus never wrote anything down,
I would want to distinguish between that verse,
versus we don't have any confidence of what Jesus said.
Jesus didn't have to personally write something down for us to have knowledge of his words.
And even the most radically liberal, skeptical scholars think we know some things about the historical Jesus.
The Jesus Seminar, very liberal.
But they said for Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and the Gospel of Thomas, 20% of that material goes back to the historical Jesus.
No, I think it's way more than 20, but that's factoring in the Gospel of Thomas.
of Thomas 2, but even just 20% of those documents, that's a huge amount of information about Jesus.
So I don't think we should say, well, Jesus didn't personally write things down, therefore we don't
know what he said. The other thing, though, and maybe the big one is Paul himself describes
receiving traditions that he inherits. First Corinthians 15, 3 in following, he says,
what I received, I passed on to you. Many scholars think this creed he's sitting there goes back
to the earliest of days of the church.
Christ died for our sins and was raised
according to the scriptures and so forth.
So Paul is conferring in Galatians 2
with Peter and James,
the other pillars of the church.
Paul is not inventing anything.
So, you know, I guess I'd want to say
these two things, and I'm curious what you'd add on,
is that number one, it's not just Paul
that we're interacting with.
We have the words of Christ,
we have other apostles,
and that Paul himself is in dialogue with all this earlier Christian witness as well.
I have nothing terribly interesting to add.
I just find it interesting that one of the reasons we love long-form discussions,
such as Joe does and me, he stole his idea from me, obviously, is, that's a joke,
is that we like to see people speak off the cuff.
However, to pretend that this is their fully fleshed-out, crystallized thought is also unfair.
I mean, that's not what we're doing.
I think we have every right to respond to Joe, but one of the real.
reasons we like long-form discussions over audiobooks is that even though the audio book could be said
to be this person's intentional, deliberate, crystallized thought, there's something nice about hearing
people talk things through. Right. But that was not a good thought. Next one. I'm here now to debunk
Christianity in less than a minute. And to do so, I'll leave my first witness, Jesus of Nazareth.
Okay, so Jesus teaches in the Gospel of John that the only true God is the Father. Who's that?
the only true God is the Father.
For those at the back, the only true God is the Father.
If the only true God is the Father, then Jesus cannot be God.
If Jesus is God, then he is lying.
If He's lying, it means he isn't God.
Therefore, if Jesus says the Father is the only true God, he isn't God.
If he's lying about the Father being the only true God, he isn't God.
Therefore, Jesus debunks Christianity in lesson.
a minute. Christians, you're welcome. The problem with TikToks is it forces you to say things
quickly. And when you're dealing with large categories like this, it's like, I think the other thing
that people like about TikTok is they might not know a lot, but they might know enough to say something
stupid in 20 seconds. And then they can go, hey, it was just a TikTok. It's all, it's all. Yeah.
But could you imagine, like, sitting this guy down with Brandt Petra or Dr. William and Craig or yourself?
It's like you would turn into a puddle, dude.
I love his accent.
Is he Irish?
Is that what that was?
I was trying to decipher that, and I'm not 100% sure.
Good beard, too.
So we like the accent, we like the beard.
I like the timer, but that's it.
The timer, the delivery's kind of fun, right?
I mean, we're not trying to have a cheap shot or drive-by critique here with this.
But, you know, I think, and I would say that he's raising an interesting challenge.
I mean, so the verse I think he's talking about is John 173, where Jesus is praying to you,
comma, the only true God.
Right.
And so that's a, I mean, that's a fair point.
This is complicated to try to figure out how do we, this has to do with, you know,
Trinitarian predication.
How do we speak of each member of the Godhead?
But my response would be to say, we can actually refer to the Father and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit, all distinctly as the only true God.
Because the adjective only there is not trying to designate the Father versus the Son and the Spirit,
but rather other gods.
And if someone said, well, that seems kind of ad hoc, why would you find that plausible?
I would say just reading John 173 in context.
because in the same book where you have this statement that the Father is the only true God,
you also have Jesus being called God left, right and center.
John 1-1, the programmatic verse here in the prologue, the word was God,
the climactic passage with Thomas calling Jesus, my Lord, and my God.
Even just two verses later, Jesus is with the Father and His glory before the creation of the world.
So to read John 173 in context, we've got to wrestle with all these verses where the Father is the only true God and Jesus is God.
And that is exactly what Trinitarian theology is trying to come to terms with, I think.
And I would just throw one other quick verse here, 1 Corinthians 8, 6, where Paul speaks of the Father as the only God, but then he adds on, or the one God.
and one Lord Jesus through whom are all things.
And we would never say, well, because it's one Lord Jesus,
therefore there's no lordship to the Father.
Oh, that's interesting.
And that's one of those fascinating verses
that I think actually helps us think trinitarianly
about these issues of predication.
We can speak of each member of the godhead
as the only God, the one true God, and so forth.
But the New Testament invites us to do that for each person
in the godhood, it seems to me. Now, I'd be interested in asking you how it has been that you have
taught your children about the Trinity, because it seems to me that many analogies are terrible,
or if they're not terrible, they break down too quickly and can cause more confusion than not.
Here's how I've done it. I've said, well, a statue is a being with zero persons,
and I am a being with one person, and God is a being who is three persons. I like that.
And then I go, do you understand? They go, no, I go, good. That's,
But how have you?
Oh, with fear and trembling.
That's a good analogy.
But I share your worry about analogies because so often they can go awry.
I don't know.
I probably just stick with the very simple grammar of scripture and just speak, you know, say to my kids, you know, we can pray to Jesus.
And we, did you know Jesus is God?
Do you know Jesus has never not been?
Do you know the Holy Spirit lives inside you?
Do you know he is also God?
What's funny and what's delightful about children is sometimes they're a little bit more open to mystery.
And they don't necessarily say, but I don't understand how that fits with this and so forth.
So children are maybe easier than TikTokers.
All right, let's take a look at the third video.
What makes Christianity a false religion as I've been waxing eloquently today?
Because it rejects the law of Moses.
That's what makes it false.
Pause, I just love that he begins by referring to himself.
was waxing eloquently. That's good. All right, keep going. It rejects the law of Moses.
It says that the law of Moses has been abolished, done away with, ended, abrogated, changed,
whatever. And as a result, that is a direct, that is, that is, according to the Bible,
that is the definition of a false religion. Did you know that?
Well, we shouldn't be surprised that a modern Jew would reject Christ's claims to be divine and to therefore reject Christianity.
But what do you have to say in response?
Yeah, I think it helps me in thinking this through to read the entirety of what we call the Old Testament.
And I'd want to take the word, I can't remember the verbs that he used for a Christian posture to the law of Moses.
It might have been changed or rejected.
words like this. Jesus' own word is fulfill in Matthew 517. I have not come to abolish,
but to fulfill. And I would say we have some reasons baked into the Old Testament itself,
as we call it, for being open to such a fulfillment. A key text here would be Jeremiah 31.
Within the Old Testament itself, we have this prediction of a new covenant that will
surpass and be superior to the old covenant. And so we Christians are not coming along,
treating this body of writings that sees themselves as self-sufficient. And trying to,
after the fact, superimpose some new category of fulfillment. We're actually noticing a theme
in what Jeremiah 31 is one sound point, but a theme all throughout the Old Testament,
including in the law of Moses that is forward-looking.
And we're claiming that Jesus is that hope that is looking forward to.
That point can be argued about,
but it's certainly fair game for us to note these clues in the Old Testament itself
that seem to be looking ahead saying this is not the final result
of God's revelation to humanity with nothing more to do.
And actually, no human beings really follow the law of Moses fully to do.
day. We have the temples gone and there's not the same sacrificial system and so forth. So we've all
got to sort of relate to this revelation God gave historically. But, oh boy, I think the short answer here
is just Jesus is so good and so compelling. And he's what it's been pointing to all along is what
I'd want to argue. Yeah. As St. Augustine said somewhere, the New Testament is concealed in the old,
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Oh, look at this guy.
All right, you guys.
If you ever seen my videos how I countercreated.
Christianity and debunk all the claims of Christian missionaries, you'll understand this proverb that a wise man once said.
Bees do not waste their time explaining to flies just how superior honey is to manure.
Well, what do you mean by that?
Well, there's a lot of things.
Let's start off with one major serious premise of Christianity.
They say, God said it is only begotten son.
and they're basing this on the Jewish scriptures, okay?
But if you look into the Jewish scriptures,
nowhere you'll find that God has a heavenly son.
So the religion is not based on Jewish scriptures.
There you go.
You're more charitable than me,
but I feel like this is like someone my age trying to be Gen Z
and it's not working.
Like what's that meme?
Hey, kids, or what does he say?
He's got the skateboard.
He talks about it.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I know the meme you're talking about.
I can't think of the exact word.
I don't know exactly what you're talking about.
I'm always nervous myself about trying to be too like Gen Z because I love Gen Z.
But I do know that meme.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's so funny to laugh at.
I mean, I love the delivery.
The, the, uh, the, uh, aphorism or saying that he brought in there about manure and so forth.
Yeah.
I mean, that's kind of interesting and certainly applicable to some matters.
But then he, he's going to, you know, we base our,
our beliefs about Jesus and the Jewish scriptures and the Jewish scriptures, God doesn't have a son.
Yeah.
I mean, a first thing I would want to say is we don't just base them on the Old Testament.
We also think God has given another revelation of himself with the New Testament.
That's why it was continued revelation.
Otherwise, we'd just need the Old Testament and we could derive all Christian doctrine from it
if we were to follow that.
Yeah.
Does that make sense?
Oh, yeah, exactly.
Right.
And just like in any other relationship, we get to know, the idea.
of progressive revelation, Christian speak of. I think this is very reasonable. I mean, we can make the
metaphor of in any relationship you have, you get to know someone better over time. And what if it's the
same with God? What if we get to know him better over time? It makes sense that we get more
information about the relations between the father and the son in the New Testament, because that's when
the son becomes incarnate. If one of these persons in the Godhead becomes a man, it makes sense
that's in connection to that, you're going to learn more about him. But I, and this is probably
too much to really canvas too much here, I do think there are hints and clues and seeds about
the, let's say that God may not be unipersonal just already in the Old Testament. You want to
give us one? Oh, boy. Sure. So I'll say two things. One is there's this whole movement. It's not just
Christians who come along and wonder about this.
There's a whole movement in ancient Judaism talking about the two powers in heaven.
And they're getting this, and this was very controversial, but they're getting this idea
from text in the Old Testament.
My favorite might be Psalm 110, where David writes, the Lord said to my Lord.
And I don't, I think it's a fair thing to wonder how this might have puzzled some of the rabbis
to say, who's David's Lord?
and I've listened to some of the interpretations from some of our Jewish friends about how to read Psalm 110.
And they'll sometimes say it's this royal Psalm written by people in David's court about David.
So David is the Adonai there and things like this.
But from that passage and so many others, Psalm 14 or Psalm 45 is another where a royal Psalm is speaking to God.
and then it says, therefore God, your God,
has anointed you above your companions,
quoted in Hebrews 1.
There's enough there that makes you wonder.
Another thing would be the angel of the Lord being worshipped.
You just wonder.
I'm not saying the Trinity is clear in the Old Testament,
but I do think that the Trinity clarifies things.
It's not totally out of the blue.
It brings clarity to some things that are,
that already would have raised questions for people about these different seeming persons who are
all called God and all worshipped. And how do we understand that? And the other texts that I...
So we're not saying these particular seeds in and of themselves point to a triune God,
but what we are saying is once we've been convinced of the triune God because of further revelation,
that can begin to potentially make sense of these passages. I think so. It's kind of like,
what you said, the Augustine quote about
new and the old concealed. It's like
imagine the light when it's
just, the light is just
rising, you can kind of make out some shadows.
And then
20 minutes later, the sun is higher and you can see
more clearly. That's how I understand
Old Testament to New
on the Trinity. All right, let's
take a look at the next one. You know one of
many passages in the Bible that proves
Christianity is a scam?
No.
When Jesus
said,
is greater than I.
Okay.
I love this.
I'll give you another one.
You know when he told the Pharisees,
I could do nothing
without the father.
Actually, I'll give you one more.
I'll give you one more.
Jesus told his disciples,
don't cling on to me,
but go and tell the others,
I am going to my father
and your father.
I'm going to my God
and your God.
Right, that's true.
Now, again, it's the hubris of modern man who probably has a very basic understanding of
scripture to say, for 2,000 years, some of the greatest minds have never considered these
objections.
Right, yeah, yeah.
Which is probably something, you know, like, to be fair to this fella, it's something
we can all fall into, right?
Like how many times as a Protestant have you thought to yourself, I wish...
who were they responding to as a Catholic?
Like maybe you wish that we would actually take your argument more seriously.
And likewise, right?
Like when I'm said, someone might say to me that we worship Mary and proof of that is that we call her the mother of God,
therefore she's somehow the fount of Christ's divinity or the triune God.
And you're like, please listen because I would respect you so much more if I knew you were listening.
Which is actually why I think many Catholics appreciate you is because we feel like you're trying.
understand us. And I'm sure you feel that way about certain Catholics. We're like, okay, at least
they're trying here. So this, again, I know it's a TikTok, so you can always hide behind that
and say, I only had a minute, so what do you expect of me? But anyway, what's your response to this?
We've already kind of touched upon it with the Trinity and the one true God. Right. Yeah, yeah.
How these biblical passages relate to the doctrine of the Trinity is a tricky topic. And I can see
how Christians reading through these verses, but I think you can struggle with this a bit and
wonder, how do I understand this verse and that verse? But I think you're right in just reminding
us, you know, Christians have been aware of these verses for a very long time. And I think
Trinitarian theology is this very elegant and beautiful way to make sense of what God is revealed
in Scripture. The Trinity is not laid out in all the details there. But it really,
it's a faithful reading, I think, of these texts. And so in these, in these, these
examples, it's consistent with Trinitarian theology to speak of Jesus in his incarnate status,
depending upon the Father, calling the Father, my God, speaking of the Father as greater than Him,
that is all perfectly consistent with the Trinity. We believe that Jesus in his incarnate
status is depending upon His Father. I can do nothing apart from Him, although that verse is interesting,
because then he goes on to say something, and I'll butcher this in my memory, but it's something
along the lines of, and whatever the father is doing, I am doing also.
Something like that.
So a lot of these verses are actually very interesting and nuanced.
But the toughest one here might be the father is greater than I.
There we just ask, greater in what sense?
I don't think it's best to take it as greater in the sense of being or ontology.
This is Jesus in his incarnate mission as a man, having taken on a human nature,
being obedient to his father's sending, which is consistent with what we believe about Trinity.
But there again, we just go to, let's read that statement in the context of John.
And John is taken out a club and hitting us repeatedly.
The word is God.
He's the only begotten.
He's being called God.
Even in Matthew, we find him worshipped by the disciples.
So what we want to do is take all the verses and put them all together.
And that's where I think Trinitarian theology is like a tool that really helps it all click into place.
That's great.
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That's definitely my experience every time I read Leviticus.
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Last one. All right, Liam McAllister. What's up? Let's do it.
All of religion is false. Every single religion that man has ever made. Islam, Judaism, Mormonism, Buddhism, Taoism, every single religion is false.
But you know what's the worst religion of all? The worst religion that man has ever made, the man is ever
invented, it's the religion of Christianity. Christianity is the worst religion that man has ever made.
You know why? Because they come in the name of our Lord Christ Jesus and they blaspheme God every
single day in their churches and their temples, saying that God is an evil tyrant that will lose most
of his creation to his own creature, Satan himself. He will torture most of his creation
forever in hell, forever, and there's nothing that he can do about it. Well, the real God of the
Bible saves all of mankind. He's the savior of all mankind, especially
of believers, all of creation will be reconciled back to God through Christ, Jesus, and that as a fact.
First thing to say is, it's interesting that he begins by accusing all religions of being false,
but then he calls Jesus our Lord, and he seems to believe in the scriptures.
And so suppose we would have to take him at his word, I suppose we would say, so, first we'd have to
define what a religion is, but presumably he thinks he's right, and so if I was to agree with him,
would I now be part of the true religion. But I suppose the deeper question here, and it is a
difficult thing to wrestle with, is the idea of eternal separation from God, but take it however
you like. I interpret this as he seems to be perhaps a universalist from what I caught at the end
there, believing that all will be reconciled to God in heaven one day. Two little phrases
struck me as I listened to that. One was the phrase, and there's nothing he can do.
about it with reference to God.
So all creation will fall away.
And then as though if you're not a universalist,
you envision God sort of hamstrung, backed into a corner,
he can't redeem everybody, something like this.
That language was kind of interesting to me.
And then the other thing, it sounded like he was saying,
something along the lines of God losing creation to Satan,
which was a very interesting language,
if I caught that accurately.
So I think the conversation to have with this person would be to draw, maybe if I was talking to him,
I'd ask him some questions to try to draw out and better understand.
What is it that you are envisioning here?
What is your understanding, your perception of how divine judgment works according to Christianity.
It's also strange to cast this as Christianity is false because he seems like he's...
Yeah, it's weird.
That's what I was confused about too, because I don't think a universalist would say every religion is false.
and Christianity is the most evil religion.
That's what I'm confused about.
But again, the nature of TikTok.
We should probably stop trying to understand these things at a certain point.
Yeah, but so then I think we'd go, the conversation,
we're probably funneled towards these New Testament passages that are appealed to
that I think he might have referenced about all shall be saved.
And let's work through what is being taught in these.
And we need to look at that word all and ask, you know,
does this mean all without exception?
or does it mean all without distinction?
Does it mean all without any restrictions or all of a group
or what is being gotten at there?
But I think it sounds like the discussion would also get into
the nature of divine judgment.
And if universalism is not true,
are we to then envision God can't do anything about it?
Some of his creatures go to Satan.
and I would want to cast a different vision of what a non-universalist picture might have.
And I don't see it as God being limited.
It seems to me the scriptures speak of God's judgment as actually good and just and an expression of his power.
Not a limitation upon him, but an expression of his power and his power over Satan himself.
I think, I respect people who struggle with these issues about universalism,
But one of the things that really should, again, we want to have humility in these tough conversations, think about Satan himself.
Do we, does a universalist believe Satan will be redeemed? That's a fair question.
There are some who would bite the bullet and say yes. Yes, there are. For some, it's just all humanity. Some, it's Satan and the demons as well. But just to ask that question even, kind of gets us into, this is tricky. This is not something to be superficial about. And I,
So in a conversation with someone coming from that perspective, I just want to ask them lots of questions to understand.
And then I think we go to the scriptures and we work through some of these passages.
And I just want to try to make a case for a different way to think about God's judgment.
I think that's what I'm sensing in this video is, no, I think we can think of God's judgment actually, not as limitation, but actually as his lordship over all and his commitment to good and his relentless desire.
for what is just and right and good.
But I understand God's judgment is not an easy topic to think about,
but there's a different way to come at it, I think.
Well, I would recommend an interview I did recently with Dr. Ralph Martin
on the topic of hell if people are interested.
I don't know if you've done videos on Eternal Conscious Torment.
One a long time ago, yep.
If we looked that up.
You have just, I want to wrap up,
you've released a book that I want you to tell people about,
and part of why I'm excited for you to tell them about it
is it has endorsements, not just from Protestants,
but from Catholics like John Bergsmir and Robert Coons and Timothy Paul and also Orthodox.
I think it's an excellent book and it's a book that I wish somebody had given me when I was a 16-year-old agnostic.
So thanks for writing it. Why should people pick it up?
Thanks for letting me talk about it. Yeah, it's a very ecumenical book. It's a broad case for Christianity.
It's basically what I tried to do is following in the footsteps of a book like mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.
of course I can't do it as he did it.
But that kind of book, a more accessible overview.
For someone who doesn't have any pre-commitments,
maybe they're just open and searching,
the book starts off by just saying,
here's why you should be curious about religion.
And here's why you should want to think about this topic.
And then I go through God, Jesus, the Bible, and faith.
The title of the book is Why Christianity Makes Sense.
And the theme is that Christianity
doesn't just make sense of the world around us,
though that is, I believe, true.
But it also makes sense of the deepest longings in our heart,
what I call the ache, that restless desire
for something that we can't quite put words onto.
And so I'm wanting to, I hope the book serves people
and just gives a brief account of how someone might come to think,
yeah, Christianity really puts the pieces together,
not just out there, but...
Yeah, and I'd highly recommend it,
And just for those who are at home watching this, who might be a little confused, the book is
perfectly compatible, I would say, with orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protestantism.
So this, yeah, so people could check that out.
We'll put a link in the description.
Gavin, thanks so much.
Thanks for having me.
It's been fun to talk.
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