Pints With Aquinas - The Right Way to Read Holy Scripture (Dr. John Bergsma)

Episode Date: February 13, 2025

Dr. John Bergsma is a Full Professor of Theology at the Franciscan University of Steubenville in Steubenville, Ohio. He served as a Protestant pastor for four years before entering the Catholic Church in 2001, while pursuing a Ph.D. in Theology at the University of Notre Dame. Specializing in the Old Testament and the Dead Sea Scrolls, Dr. Bergsma graduated with high honors in 2004. He is the author of numerous titles including Bible Basics for Catholics: A New Picture of Salvation History. Dr. Bergsma's links: Bible Basics for Catholics: A New Picture of Salvation History:  https://www.amazon.com/Bible-Basics-Catholics-Picture-Salvation/dp/1594712913/ref=sr_1_1 Personal website: https://www.johnbergsma.com/ 🍺 Get episodes a week early, 🍺 score a free PWA beer stein, and 🍺 enjoy exclusive streams with me! Become an annual supporter at https://mattfradd.locals.com/support 💵 Show Sponsors: Exodus 90: https://exodus90.com/matt Hallow: https://hallow.com/mattfradd 💻 Social Media:  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Pints_W_Aquinas TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@pintswithaquinas 👕 Store: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com/

Human literature is is filled with magic books that you open up and they suck you into the story. The Bible is this magic book that sucks you into the story and and the things that suck you into the story are actually the sacraments. Just need to get that snap just right. I just I just do to just in case. Okay. The first one's blurry. We're good. Dr. John Bergsmar.

Thanks for coming on again. Absolutely, Matt. So it's great. I don't know why you keep inviting me, but I've seen the numbers. Every time you come on. How many people don't want look at the numbers, but I'll tell you what does happen, Matt. I'll go to a speaking engagement and have the people that come out to you say,

I saw you on Pints with Aquinas. It's amazing, eh? New media. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, like this last one we did has almost 600,000 views. Oh my gosh. For a few months ago. That's like four times as many people as I speak to

in all my speaking gigs in the course of a year. The Lord has blessed you with a gift. He really has. And so people are hungry for the truth. Wow, yeah. Yeah. How much did you have to do with the new Bible that just came out, the Ignatius study?

Oh, the Ignatius Catholic study Bible? Yeah, yeah. I did the notes for the Book of Ezekiel, for which I'm very proud, and that alone was a lot of effort, but compared to the amount of work that went into the entire thing.

Do you have a copy, I assume? Yeah, Scott gave me a copy and I've been reading a chapter a day through Genesis. Oh, beautiful. And it's been really wonderful. Beautiful. Yeah, it's life-changing. Let me tell you a little backstory on that, Matt. Scott and I both grew up as evangelical Protestants.

And he's about a half a generation ahead, 15 years older. Matt Scott and I both grew up as evangelical Protestants. And when, uh, he was, he's about a half a generation ahead, 15 years older. Um, so when I was in high school and he would have been, you know, out of college or something like that, what happened in the evangelical world is this thing called the new international version study Bible came out from Zondervan and it just revolutionized, devotion of scripture because the notes were so great. It was very much like a mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis kind

of spirited thing. And it was very healthy and everybody got one. And that's really the inspiration behind the Ignatius Catholic Study Biola is to make that kind of resource available in the Catholic world. And I think it's an epochal, and I think it's going to change English-speaking Catholic Bible piety for the next century. I think it's probably going have a hundred years influence, I hope and pray. But especially if we can get it slimmed down a little bit, cause right now it's massive.

Yeah. Scott assured me that it would be about the same size as the New Testament one because of the thinner paper, and he lied. He didn't lie, he didn't know. But it's big. Yeah, post COVID we're having real trouble. Like this behemoth is like a half inch thicker than it used to be because we can't get thin paper post-COVID.

Oh, that's, was that what it was? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know why COVID would cause you not to be able to get paper, but it's something to the supply chain. Yeah, for sure. For sure. And we haven't recovered quite yet. Are they going to release just the Old Testament separately? I don't think there's any plans to do that Yeah, I don't think there would be enough interest. What about individual books? That's already been done. The even the Old Testament

Yeah, I didn't realize that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's how they funded. Yeah. Yeah, they're called fascicles And you can get you can I don't know if they're gonna still sell those or if they're gonna Quash that so that it doesn't compete with buying the whole thing sell those or if they're gonna quash that so that it doesn't compete with buying the whole thing. But, but yeah, those are out there for not for every single Old Testament book. I think they released maybe a dozen. But yeah, I know they released mine Ezekiel because they sent me a bunch of copies of it.

So I am so grateful for Scott for Ignatius for for Peter Crave, for Father Mike Schmitz, for Jeff Cavins, because 20 minutes ago Catholics were apologizing and making fun of themselves and knowing nothing about the Bible. And now the number one prayer app that contains the Bible, hello, the number one Bible app, Father Mike Schmitz. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's incredible. Thank you. Who had ever thought that that would be a possibility. Yeah. You know, and a lot of the credits gotta go to Scott Hahn. You know, he's at the base of a lot of this, but yeah, I mean, but you know, you know, he was being obedient to the leading of the Holy Spirit and he said yes, and a lot of other people said yes too.

And for that study Bible, we got to give a lot of credit to Curtis Mitch. He did like, you know, 85% or more of the grunt work for putting that in. And he's going to be like an unseen, unsung hero. You know, when we get up to heaven, Curtis is going to be walking around with all these gemstones and this huge crown. Everybody else is going to be like, who's here? I don't even know who that is.

The rest of you will be serving him drinks by the pool. Exactly. He's going to be the big hero in heaven. The Bible. All right. Let's, what I'm about to ask you isn't a clever question. It's just bare bones, simplest question. What is the Bible? What does it mean to say it's the Word of God? I had someone in this seat recently who doesn't necessarily like referring to it as the Word of God. He thinks it's inspired, but seemed to have a very low view of Scripture. So I guess to sum up, my question is, what is the Catholic view of Scripture? Yeah, the Catholic view of scripture is that...

In just a few sentences. Sure. I'm just joking. Yeah, no, actually, I think it's possible to put it in a few sentences. It's God's invitation to become part of his family. Yeah, it's a message from God where he invites us to become his children. That's what the Bible is from a Catholic perspective.

I think that sums it up. And that sounds really simple, but I think that's a hard-won statement that I just delivered there. Like, when I was 25 and an evangelical Protestant, I don't think I would have been able to summarize it like that. But in hindsight, you know, one of the problems, Matt, with biblical education is that it's often way too granular, way too high resolution. And so you take one book of the Bible and you go in depth. And in some situations, like you're, you get way bogged down with the details

and then lose a sense of the big picture of what's going on. And that was true of my Bible education. I mean, my mom started me reading the Bible through in a year when I was about 12 years old. And that was my, that was my, that was the sustenance of my spiritual life until I was about age 30, was daily Bible reading, five or six chapters a day

and kind of working through the Bible in a year. We had this devotional called the Daily Walk. It's probably still out there. It's an evangelical, kind of like the Magnificat comes weekly, but it works you through the Bible and, you know, tells you how many chapters to read on that given day and then has some commentary on what you read. And that really sustained my spirituality and nourished my relationship with the Lord all through my adolescence.

But the issue, Matt, was like I knew all these individual facts about the Bible and I knew all kinds of stuff about Abraham and all kinds of stuff about Noah. And there was even a sense in my culture that holiness was almost equivalent to knowing a lot of things about the Bible, or just like knowing the Bible well. But I did not have an idea of the coherence of the plot, you know, that there's actually a progression and a narrative arc from Genesis to the book of Revelation. And I didn't get that until working with Scott Hahn, essentially coming here in 2003 and doing what I'm out to do like a postdoc with Scott on on the theme of covenant and by the time that year was over and then I got hired

at Franciscan University and they were gonna you know put me in the classroom and I was gonna have the responsibility to keep 18 to 22 year olds awake for 75 minute periods and so in my desperation I, I was meditating on all that I'd learned working with Scott and so on. I'm like, oh, you know, and then the picture began to come into focus. I'm like, ah, this is a series of invitations by God to inviting us into his family and we keep rejecting him. And finally, he sends his own son to twist our arms behind our back, almost make us come into the family, kicking and screaming, because we have this perverse inclination to just hold God at arm's length.

And so, the fourth Eucharistic prayer sums up the scripture very well. It has this line, and you probably remember hearing it, but, �Time and again He offered them covenants and through the prophets taught them to hope for salvation.� That's a great summary of the Old Testament. It's like almost a perfect summary of the Old Testament. And then, you know, Jesus is the New Testament. So �time and again offering their covenants, teaching their hope for salvation through the prophets,

and then the coming of the Son of God, who not only gives the New Covenant, which is a family relationship, but is the New Covenant. He is the family bond. It's his body and blood that is the link between the people of God and the Creator. That's the profundity. I mean, we see this all the time at Mass.

This is the new and eternal covenant, or hoc est novum et eternum testamentum. But I don't think that we fully grasp the profundity of that, but what we're actually saying is that the Eucharist is the New Covenant. And part of the confusion about this is that in English, New Covenant comes across through the Latin as New Testament from Novum Testamentum. But then in English speaking Christianity, when we say New Testament, we think about a little book that we might carry in our pocket. I don't have mine with me, I'm so remiss today,

but, or the second part of the Bible, et cetera. But that's the funny thing, a little pocket New Testament, so to speak, that is not actually the New Testament. What Jesus identifies as the New Testament, which means new covenant is the Eucharist because in Luke 22 20, he lifts up the cup, you know, and he says, this cup is the new covenant in my blood, which means consisting of my blood. And of course it's his Eucharistic blood that's in the cup. It's not his physical blood, it's

Eucharistic blood, same substance, different accidents. But that's it. And what's true of the blood is true of the body. Right? So that is the new covenant. And let's not do a Bill Clinton thing here where we're like what does is mean? You know? Is is is, okay? So if the Eucharist is the New Covenant, then if you – and that's what New Testament means, so part of this, because in this country, in the U.S., we still have at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of baptized Christians running around calling themselves New Testament Christians.

And that's kind of ironic because for a lot of them, their whole religious practice consists almost exclusively in reading, praying, and preaching the New Testament as a book, which we should really call the books about the New Testament rather than the New Testament. And so there's a great irony if you're calling yourself a New Testament Christian and all your religious practice consists almost exclusively in reading, studying, and praying this book. I've said this many times, but I compare it to somebody who walks into the Chinese restaurant, reads the whole menu and never orders General Tso's chicken or anything else for that matter. Juba just reads the, you know, oh, such a beautiful menu. Look at the literary structure of the menu.

Look how it's laminated. Yeah. I want to read the menu in the original languages, you know, and don't get me wrong. I mean, I got nothing against the menu. I personally have a degree in menu studies from the University of Notre Dame and I can read the menu in Greek and Hebrew and do all the literary studies and analyze its literary structure. But at the end of the day, it is in a very real sense, it is a menu. That is to say it is a written document that points to a meal that points to an encounter. And

of course, it's so much more than a meal, right? But it is a meal, but it's a meal in which we take our Lord into ourselves, and it's very similar to marital union. He is our spiritual spouse. But the whole Bible points to it. And this has been the success of my little book, Biobasics for Catholics, is that this little book that uses my trademark stick figures, I'll try to find a good, yeah, it's a good page, I'll hold that up for the camera. So I like to use stick figures, as everybody probably knows, to communicate these things. But my big point in Bible basics is to show that the whole story of salvation leads up to the upper room and Jesus

giving us his body and blood in the Eucharist. And the Eucharist is central to Scripture. That is, you know, the Eucharist is the New Covenant. A New Covenant implies that there are old and temporary ones. I mean, if it's the new and eternal one, then there's old and temporary ones that went before. And that's the whole Old Testament. Yeah. Just to press back on your analogy there, and I'm sure you were being somewhat hyperbolic, obviously, but someone might say, well, okay, fair enough. If it's the menu that's inviting us to eat the Eucharist, once you have the Eucharist, you don't need the pages of the New Testament anymore. So there's obviously a difference.

It's not like the Chinese menu tells you how to live. Right, right. Well, this is interesting because what you just said is almost what St. Augustine says in his classic on Christian doctrine or De Doctrina Christiana. He says that if you can live the perfection of love, you don't need the Bible. And I remember reading that the first time, and I'm like, oh! You know, St. Augustine's saying that you don't need the Bible? But

there's a qualification, he says, if you can live the perfection of love. That's a big if. Right. So if you're like St. Teresa of Calcutta and you're virtually living the life of perfection already on this planet, then in a sense. But he goes on to qualify that. And St. Augustine was being hyperbolic, but he was doing it to drive home a point. And the point he was trying to drive home is that scripture is not an end in itself. It is valuable, it is worthy. I've dedicated my life to it, but scripture

directs us to a relationship with God. Now, notice I'm saying scripture. I'm not saying the Word of God, because the Word of God would be different than the Word of God we could define as a second person of Trinity, and that's a whole different matter. He's a person. But Scripture, you know, the Word of God written down as a book, it's beautiful, wonderful, worthy of veneration. The Church does venerate it, but it is given to us to lead us into that encounter. I was just thinking, do human beings speak for any other reason than communion? Isn't that the point of speech? Communion in some sense?

I would agree. Yeah, yeah, no, profoundly so. I mean, we could, we could, we might say things when we stub our toe. Maybe that's a little different, but speech is for the sake of communion. It is. And so God's but speech is for the sake of communion. It is. And so God's speech written is for the sake of... It's for the sake of communion of persons. You know, and we talked about this last time I was on the show when we were talking about faith in science.

I think at one point I was trying to, the secular worldview where what is primary and fundamental is things and material and then matter evolves and gives rise to persons and intellect and mind, you know, through, through a supposed process of material evolution. And that is completely contrary to the biblical and the Christian worldview where mind, that is to say person, intellect, agency, personality, precedes the material world and is the source of the material world. But you're absolutely right. And you know, what you're saying there, Matt, is very much what Benedict XVI developed in his post-Sinodal apostolic exhortation called

Verbum Domine, the Word of the Lord, where he called the synod of bishops together and they did it just focusing on Scripture during his pontificate. And then out of that synod he wrote this beautiful, it's almost like an encyclical really. And in the introduction he talks about that, about the very idea of the word. The fact that a word exists implies that there are at least two persons in the universe, right? Any universe that has a word exists implies that there are at least two persons in the universe. Right? Any universe that has a word also has at least two persons. Because every word has to have a speaker and it has to have a hearer. You know, somebody who's sending it out to somebody else who's going to receive it. Right? So if you just have one person in a universe, a hypothetical universe, that one person doesn't need language because he knows all his own thoughts.

But as soon as you have two persons, then you need word. So yeah, so at its very heart, every word is an attempt to establish communion. We say communication, right? A word is a communication, and at the root of communication is the word communion. So it's, yeah, it's an attempt to establish a relationship. And even the passing of information is never completely divorced from a desire

to enter into a relationship with the one that you're communicating information with. There are certain passages in scripture that seem like offhand remarks. St. Paul sometimes. How do we make sense of that? How is that the direct and inspired word of God? Right? Yeah, like in Acts where St. Luke has these we passages where he was traveling

with Paul and the level of detail gets ridiculously high in the we passages. It was like we went to this city, we went to that city, you know, we had a ship, right? We had this, you know, all this kind of detail. Like, um, how do I take that to my prayer? Yeah. You know, um, that's, uh, I think it would be, sometimes I think it would be, sometimes I think it would be more helpful if the Bible was just a series of maxims. Yeah. And those maxims were like, that's so, that's so non-incarnational though, because we're, we're not like sterile, you know, just reciters of instruction. Like you don't go home to your wife and like,

you just like here, I will now debrief you of my day. I did this, I did that, I did that. Okay, we're done with that, you know? Well, I mean, maybe some husbands too, have that great way to. Yeah, the wife isn't happy about that. She's not, you know? And they, you know, they've done these studies

where they put a listening device in a cafe and they listen to what people are talking about and they analyze what's actually going on. And they find out that it's mostly purposeless, and there's no information being transferred. And it's such a big waste of time, what actually is going on in people's conversations. So much of it is completely vacuous and Yeah, and and so what is going on?

Well, it's just it's it's relationship. It's communion So well, just let me put a fine point on that sure, if like some Thomas Aquinas says we are destined for an end that We cannot grasp and so God reveals himself to direct us We cannot grasp and so God reveals himself to direct us like in that sense I think of God's revelation as direction as here's what you don't know and here's what you need to know and it certainly is that Okay, so I just thought I guess I'm There's a part of me that thinks if it was just these maxims. I'm like, okay, this is extraordinarily clear. I've got it Let's go right, but it's it's more it's more than that because God is inviting us into a family relationship

and he's inviting us into a new identity. And identity requires memory. And so a lot of the Bible is the family memories so that you can become part of the family. Is this making sense? Yeah. Because memory is what makes you who you are. Yeah, it'd be like I became technically a citizen of your country last year. And you have a history that would be good for me

to understand and know about so that I can understand the country that's taken me in. Right. Did they require you to know some American history? Yeah, we have a video on that online, Josiah quizzed me with a ton of questions. Okay, so you probably now know more about American history. No, I think I knew about it You know, it's like most tests you study for you know, I think I knew the answers pretty well for about a week afterwards Most countries insist that you have some

training in the history of the country before you become a citizen. And the stories, right? Right. Not just the constitution, but. Right, you know, yeah, George Washington and the cherry tree, right? Yeah.

Did you have to learn that? No, I didn't have to learn that, but I've heard of it. Oh, okay, but you've heard of it, okay. All right, so that makes you American. No, so yeah, so, and why do countries do that? It's so that you can, without the memory, you don't have the identity. So if I'm really going to be a Frenchman and I'm going to be a citizen of France, I better the heck know something about French history so I can identify and so I can share the communal

memory. Gotcha. And so much of the Bible is actually that. It's the communal memories so that we can take on the identity of the family of God, so we can be children of the Father and know what the Father has done with the family from the beginning. This is another way of looking at the Bible. Human literature is filled with, I mean it's not filled, but it's a common motif in world literature that there are magic books,

magic books that you open up and they suck you into the story. So we probably all- And a branding story. Yeah. Is that what you're gonna say? Things like that, yeah. That'd be a good example of it.

And in a sense, the wardrobe in C.S. Lewis is almost like that as well. The story sucks you in, right? And, but the Bible is that magic book. The Bible is that, you know, of course I'm, you know, speaking colloquially here, but the Bible is this magic book that sucks you into the story.

And the things that suck you into the story are actually the sacraments. So the sacraments suck you into the biblical story. So baptism, you know, yeah, this is kind of mind-blowing, but when you are baptized, the priest in the rite of baptism, like, recites salvation history. He talks about creation, he talks about the flood, he talks about the Exodus and the crossing of the Red Sea, he talks about the baptism of our Lord in the Jordan and all these things. That's because when you are baptized, you are mystically brought into the story. And now I'm speaking in all seriousness. We can't see this, and it's beyond our comprehension, but through the

sacrament, through the mystery of the sacrament, we are brought into the story of the people of God, and the experiences of the people of God are made our own in the sacrament, such that once I've been baptized, I can say, I was there. I was there when the dry land rose up out of the waters at creation. I was there when, you know, the flood waters came and washed over the earth. I was there when the Israelites crossed the Red Sea. I was there when they crossed the Jordan.

I was there when the Lord was baptized in the Jordan, etc. All those types of baptism become my story in a very real sense in a way that, again, is beyond our understanding, but not merely a notional, not merely a nominal way. Because in baptism we receive the Holy Spirit, who is the animating principle of God's people throughout their history. So we really do enter into, you know, as God's people are the body and the Holy Spirit is the spirit of that body in a sense. And so we enter, we share the spirit of God's people throughout all time And all of those things become personal. Those are now applicable to us. Now, of course, there's great value in learning that story

with our intellect so that we can love God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength. It doesn't become more true of us if we know more about it intellectually, that the youngest baby that's just been baptized has been united to creation, flood, Red Sea, crossing of Jordan, and all the other types, just as much as I have, or anybody else has, as much as the Pope has. But since we want to love God with our whole being, there's great value in enlightening the intellect so that we can understand this

and appreciate it and, you know, be fully children with our minds as well as with our spirits. Praise God. Yeah. Yeah. You said you've been reading the Bible every year since you were 12. Have you kept up that practice or was it something you did just for a few years? No, I kept that up through high school and into college and then it got a little sporadic in grad school, but you know, it was still kind of the basic pattern. But no, I started doing other things. Once I became Catholic in 2001, I started attending daily Mass. Actually, I started attending daily Mass a year before I actually entered the Church. I just go to Mass. And since then, my relationship with Scripture has been a little bit different, but it's been mostly through the liturgical readings. That's mostly what nourishes my relation with God.

Do you think the transition from the one year to the three year was a good idea? For the Sunday cycle? Yeah. Yes. Oh, absolutely. I love the Vatican II election. In fact, I've written a four book series.

I should have brought it along. You got one there. You got one there? Okay. Whoa. Is that it? No, that's Scott's. Oh, I should have brought it along. You got one there? Okay. Is that it? No, that's Scott's. Oh, that's Scott's, sorry. That's Scott's, yeah.

Yeah, mine's bigger. Not that anyone's counting. Yeah, not that anyone's counting. Mine's like, I've got four volumes about the size of that Aquinas book. And once I'm, yeah, it's called Word of the Lord. Oh, I see. Word of the Lord, you're A, B, C, and then a fourth volume

that's for the fixed feasts and solemnities. For those who might be new cat, we have a lot of people who watch who are Protestants or who are converting and have just got no idea about the church and the lectionary. Tell us about it, about, you know, maybe how the old and the new fit together each day and what the three-year cycle entails.

Sure. Okay. So from the time of Trent until Vatican II, what we used in the Latin rite was a one-year lectionary that had the same readings for the same feast days and the same Sundays every year, so it's kind of highly repetitive, and did not have a whole lot of variety and really only exposed the people of God to a small representation of the Word of God. Now, I don't mean to knock it. And for its time, it was actually a big step forward

because you have to understand compared to what preceded the Roman Missal and the Roman Lectionary that went with it, had been a lot of laxity and local option. There wasn't a universal lectionary. There wasn't a universal lectionary. And, and so it was very hit or miss. And the role missile was a big step forward in it.

And in guaranteeing that crucial passages of the gospels and the epistles were heard by the people of God, kind of the best stuff. It wasn't a very big collection of readings, but it was the best. It was the best of the best. So that was great. And God used it with wonderful effects.

And so praise God for the older lectionary. But at Vatican II, they said, the small selection of readings that we have in Mass is not our most ancient tradition. They said, you know, the small selection of readings that we have in mass is, is not our most ancient tradition. The church fathers read extensively from the old Testament and they would at, at daily mass, you know, in the time of Augustine and Jerome, the, you know, Augustine was a bishop and he would preach through entire old Testament books

and entire new Testament books consecutively, you know, pick up where he left off the day before. And so there's a great patristic tradition of a very broad exposure of the people of God to most of the Old Testament, Song of Songs, Genesis, Ezekiel, et cetera. And, and so there was a desire at Vatican two to try to get back to, um, the, this more patristic, uh, spirit of a broader use of the word of God in the Eucharistic liturgy. And so, you know, I've done some studies on this. There's a whole bunch of, you know, you could get into the technicalities. But a group was created called Study Group 11, and it was consisted of mostly French and German

Bible scholars, and they put their heads together, and some liturgy experts, and they put their heads together and and tried to come up with a And they put their heads together and tried to come up with a very balanced lectionary. And they had to debate, should it be one year, should it be two years, should it be three years, should it be four years? And they settled on three years as the happy medium. They figured one or two years was not enough to really give God's people a broad exposure to Scripture. Four years started to get excessive.

With a four-year cycle, the readings come around so infrequently that you don't build up a kind of a liturgical familiarity. Like a familiarity with, oh this is November, I'm gonna hear such and such, or on this feast day, these are the readings associated. So you came with a happy medium of a three-year cycle, and that worked very beautifully because then there are three synoptic gospels. There's three gospels that tell the story of our Lord's life in largely the same way, and that's Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And so each gospel was made kind of the basis of each of the three liturgical years. And then the Gospel of John, which kind of is very unique,

that could easily be infused into the seasons of like Lent and Eastertide. So every year we get heavy doses of the Gospel of John, because it's kind of the universal gospel and the theological gospel and all that. And then every three years we work through one of the three so-called synoptics, Matthew, Mark and Luke. Now we're wrapping up year B right now, we're in November, and that's the year of Mark. And Mark's a little bit too short to fill up a whole year,

so that's why we had in August, we had five Sundays that were taken from John six and all those Eucharistic homilies in August on John six. Cause that's infused to kind of fill Mark out. Cause otherwise Mark's a bit short. And another thing that they did, Matt, is that each gospel has unique content, like stories that only it tells

Mark is the least unique but it has some Luke is Probably the most unique but half the material and Luke is unparalleled Actually, John is the most but of the first three Luke is anyway So, you know only Matthew gives us epiphany for example, he's the only one who records the visit of the Magi. So he's always read an epiphany. Only Matthew gives us, for example, the parable of the bridesmaids, okay?

The five foolish and the five wise bridesmaids in Matthew 25. On the other hand, Luke is the only one that gives us the good Samaritan, the prodigal son, the rich man and Lazarus, and most of the best loved and best known parables are actually from Luke, and all in a certain section of Luke,

from about chapter nine through 19, there's a reason for that, but we don't need to get into that right now. But if you look at what Vatican II did, Matt, is in these three-year cycles where we work through Matthew in year A, Mark in year B, Luke in year C, we read all the unique stuff,

all the stuff that's not paralleled in the others. So we get a real feel for what's uniquely Matthew and a real feel for what's uniquely Mark and what's uniquely Luke. And then the core that they all have in common, we actually get by default in the great liturgical seasons that follow the life of the Lord. So the central readings that all three Gospels and sometimes even all four Gospels tell, So the central readings that all three gospels and sometimes even all four gospels tell, those are going to be hit at, you know, in Advent, Christmas, Lent or Easter is going to hit those. So it's really lovely. I can't get over it. I'm so happy.

And this is another point I want to make, Matt, is that when I was a Protestant, Protestants have this reputation, oh, they're so good in Bible. And I was pretty proud of my Bible knowledge, and I felt like Kentucky Fried Chicken, you know, they had these ads years ago, Kentucky Fried Chicken, we do one thing right, you know? We just do chicken, and we get chicken right. And I felt like when I was like, you know, when I was approaching the Catholic Church, I saw that the Catholic Church did liturgy, morality, church history. They did all of that much better than Protestants. But I thought, well, I'm KFC with the Bible, right? I do Bible right, you know? This is what my tradition

does. Subsequently discovered, no, actually, need the help of the Gallic Church even to do Bible. I was not doing it as well as I thought I did. In fact, the transition from reading the Bible as a Protestant to reading as a Catholic was in all seriousness is very much like watching TV in black and white and then getting your first color TV. Just the colors came alive once I started to receive the sacraments, because

what I was not experiencing in my Bible reading was the sacramental typology and all the images and the types of the sacraments that run through scripture. And once that's opened up to you, because you're participating in the sacraments, it's like, whoa! And so the Catholic life, I really have this sensation like I'm living in the Bible. And of all the books of the Bible, especially the book of Acts, it's like I really feel like we've never left the book of Acts. The book of Acts is of course the history of the church, and all the things that happen in Acts, they're basically still happening, and we're still basically doing all of it. And we're hanging out there, waiting for the return of Christ.

And it's such a wonderful thing as a Catholic to inhabit Scripture, you know. So if you have any Protestants listening, I mean, it's like, come on in, the water's great. I mean, not only does Not only does become being a Catholic not detract from one's devotion to scripture but just participating in the sacraments raises one's experience of scripture to this whole another level of this whole mystical level That that is so satisfying and so So invigorating and and now I've lost my train of thought. So where are we going with that? Well, we're talking about the Lectionary,

St. Augustine, I say, now that I've moved to Florida, I now say St. Augustine instead of St. Augustine. That's funny. St. Augustine said that the Old Testament is revealed in the New, the New Testament is concealed in the Old. But that's something we haven't touched upon. And something that blew me away the first time I learned it is how the Old in the lectionary

at mass, how the Old Testament and the New Testament are. Right. What do you say? Coordinated. Coordinated. Actually, the technical term is harmonization. So when the committee, study group 11, that put together the new lectionary that is so beautiful, they were trying to balance two principles that have run through the lectionaries going all the

way back to the Fathers. One principle is consecutive reading. Like week after week, you work your way systematically through a biblical book. So that's valuable. That's like Bible in a year. And in a certain sense, like every year for Catholics is sort of Bible in a year in a sense. It's at least gospel in a year, because we read most of one of the gospels through the Sundays, and it's like Sunday after Sunday, especially in ordinary time. So consecutive reading is the term for that. And that has a great value. But another value or another good is harmonization.

And that's where you line up the readings. I like to think of it as vertically. You vertically stack them so that they're all in harmony with each other. Like to use a musical analogy, like a chord, like if you do a C major seventh or something like that, then you stack all the notes on top of each other and they resonate like that.

And so every reading we got it, the first reading is the tonic and the Psalm is the third and the epistle is the sixth. And then the gospel reading is the tonic up an octave, or whatever you wanna do to complete the chord of the analogy, but the readings resonate with each other. And, but that harmonization,

and that's apparent to a lot of people. I mean, if anybody pays attention at Mass, if you look at the first reading at a Sunday Mass and then you look at the Gospel, usually you can tell, oh yeah, there's a thematic relationship. So for example, in August, we had five Sundays in August, and all the Sundays in this past August were actually taken from John chapter 6, Jesus' Bread of Life discourse where he does his Eucharistic teaching in the context of the feeding of the 5,000. And what Holy Mother Church does during those five Sundays is you read

every verse of, pretty much, I don't have to go back and check, but it's pretty much every verse of John six over the course of five Sundays. Why so much from one chapter? Well, because it's so central, you know, the eucharist is central to our faith, et cetera. And then the church rotates in first readings that have Eucharistic types. So the manna in the wilderness or the banquet, Lady Wisdom's banquet from Proverbs nine, where she invites the foolish to come in and, to come and eat of her bread and drink of

her wine. And so all these wonderful Eucharistic types are rotated in over the course of the five Sundays so that we see, we get a sense of how central the Eucharist really is to all of scriptural revelation and how scattered throughout, not scattered makes it sound like it's not intentional, but placed strategically throughout salvation history. We have these very important types of the Eucharist that build in anticipation until they're fulfilled.

Who put this together at the Second Vatican Council? Who was sort of, do you know who spearheaded that? Yeah, yeah, all their names are known. So it would be a mistake for me to try to recite all these individuals from memory. But like I said, what a project. I mean, yeah, yeah. Is that as mammoth as it sounds? It is. Yeah. So Paul the sixth first set up a large, like a macro committee and then the macro committee created a smaller committee just to work on the lectionary. I think the macro committee had responsibility for the liturgy more broadly, maybe the Eucharistic

prayers as well. And then they delegated, actually coming up with a lectionary to this group I called, it was called Study Group 11. And like I said, it was mostly, it was mostly German and French Bible scholars and a few liturgists. There was an odd American and, you know, and not, you know, a couple of Italians and so on, but it was, it was mostly French, German, not, you know, some of them were, were, you know, historical critical scholars, you know, some of them were, you know, historical critical scholars, you know, that I might have some issues with on certain issues, not that historical criticism doesn't have its place, but it's remarkable what a very faith-filled lectionary they came up with.

It's not a sterile secular lectionary that you might think would would arise if, you know, if secular historical critics had put something together. It really is a lectionary that breathes the beating heart of the church. The only criticism I'd have is they largely excluded the Song of Songs, which is a big bummer. Why? Why did they exclude it? Yeah, it's my favorite book. Yeah, because I think because allegorical reading was in disfavor back in the middle of the 20th century and the 60s and so on. And I think a lot of professionally trained Bible scholars and a lot of those on the committee were professionally trained.

It had a certain resistance to allegorization. And of course you have to heavily allegorize the Song of Songs. And so they left it to the side, but it was a favorite book to comment on in the Middle Ages, and a favorite of the Fathers as well. And I think it's Jean Danielou who says

that the two favorite passages of scripture for doing mystic Oji for teaching on the sacraments among the fathers were Psalm 23 and the song of songs those are their go-to text scripture and apparently Thomas on his deathbed was asked to give a commentary on the song of songs. Yeah. Apparently that exists somewhere. We don't have it, of course, but. Oh shoot. So if someone were to go to Holy mass every day for three years about how much of the Bible are they hearing? Yeah. Oh boy. I have these stats somewhere.

And more than 50%. Well, you would, you would hear, you you adhere like 90% of the Gospels, so very substantial. And I think it's something like 85% of the entire New Testament. So very, very substantial exposure to the New Testament. And then I think it's a total of like 13% of the Old Testament you would hear. And that sounds like a small amount, but as a professional Bible scholar,

as a lover of scripture, I will attest, it looks like it's a small amount, but it is the strategic passages. They are really well chosen to represent the continuity through the Old Testament. And you have to remember that lots of the New Testament is long genealogies and tedious to us, okay? You know, somewhat tedious descriptions

of cultic rituals and so on. Because much of the Old Testament functioned as what I like to call the general instruction on the mosaic missile. Not the germ, but the gym, G-I-M-M. And so Leviticus is like that. It's a liturgical manual for a covenant that we no longer observe. And it has its place, you know, as part of the memory of the people

of God and it's full of beautiful typology and it's worth studying, but maybe not something that requires a liturgical proclamation in the New Covenant. All right, here's a hypothetical for you. Sure. Suppose 10 years from now we have a new pope and he overturns Francis's Motu proprio on the Latin Mass and the Latin Mass gradually picks up steam such that it's becoming the normal liturgy Would you and then let's say the Pope makes some kind of concession. Would you want the? Lectionary to be kept like the three year cycle to be introduced into the Latin mass.

I would know, you know, probably, you know, people are getting out their torches and their pitchforks. It's like, no, it must be the Roman missile. And I understand that, but remember, you know, even worshiping in Latin is not our oldest tradition. We worship first in Aramaic and then in Greek. And if you look in the fourth century, it was North Africa that first started celebrating

mass in Latin. And that was a bit of a novelty. And Rome held out. Rome was kind of traditional and they were still celebrating in Greek, even though the vernacular had moved into Latin and was a little bit reticent. But then that transition was made. And so, you know, I think the, when we look at our tradition,

I think the more authentic, our more authentic tradition is broad exposure to scripture in the liturgy. And I'm, I'm, I'm appealing to the fathers for that. And the doctors as well, you know, I think that, I think that they, you know, in medieval times, they had more freedom and some of them would, you know, work through quite a bit of scripture if they had the proper training. And so anyway, so, I so I mean, my idea would,

I love celebrating the liturgy in Latin. And I think that it's very possible for the vast majority of human beings to learn enough Latin to be able to recite the ordinary parts in mass. And so to see a fusion of the extraordinary form with the contemporary lectionary would be amazing to me. But of course that would probably be easier to move.

Catholic mail, that's all it takes, isn't it? What's that? Catholic mail, that's all it takes to be elected as the Holy Father. So. Yeah, yeah, mail and ballots. I'd vote for you, yeah. All right, this is about, you know, we're about to be in the new year and a lot of people are going to be reading the Bible in a year. And I've done this,

I think at least twice. Yeah. That's right. Don't ask me how I spell no, because that's a very complicated word. But, you know, I think I've done this a couple of times where, you know, December hits, I get super pumped. I'm like, I'm going pumped I'm like I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it and I don't do it I'm like crushing it for about three months and then I don't thankfully there's a lot of people who've who are much better than I am and have done it, you know and have listened to say father Mike Schmitz's Bible in the year podcast but um, I don't know let's what would be the Advantage in doing that?

And then I want to move on to maybe the narrative structure of Holy Scripture, because you alluded to that earlier, that these books aren't in chronological order. If you were to read them like you would read a story, you'd get lost. And you might know some of the big scenes of the Bible as it were, but that doesn't mean you know the overarching narrative. I mean, think of let's say the initial three Star Wars films. If you had never watched them but occasionally saw a clip on YouTube you might know some of the big scenes but if someone asked you what it was about you'd have no idea. You might be very confused how it all fits together.

So first of all, yeah, what would be your encouragement to us to maybe consider not that it's required, but to consider reading it through the year? Sure. So I, the first book I ever, um, published, you know, for, for popular consumption was this one. And I actually wrote this as, yeah, to address the issue that you're talking about, which is to, to introduce Catholics who have never gone through the Bible before to the storyline. And so I would recommend even before attempting to read the entire Bible in a year with Mike Schmitz, which I would say something like every three to five years, it's a good idea to read through the Bible.

Having that comprehensive exposure makes your experience of Scripture in mass so much richer because you have the background and the context. But this little book goes through the Bible and there are suggestions in every chapter. There's something like 10 chapters. And there's a suggestion in every chapter for a certain selection of chapters of scripture to read to go along with what I have in the book. And so I would recommend even before people attempt to do a Bible in year,

read my Bible basics and do the Bible readings that I propose with each of my chapters of that book. And if you do that, you will get the 30,000 foot overview, like flying from New York to LA and seeing the whole lay of the land. R. Yes. D. And it's a profoundly orienting experience, and you'll get the, an understanding of the progression. Then you can go back and then, yeah, highly recommend Father Schmitz's podcasts and then do that in a year as a next step after my little intro.

And another thing to consider too, I know Ascension has, I think, a three month Bible reading plan that, again, which we'll get to, takes you through the narrative of scripture. Sure. So that might be something good to do, because one of the things I've really enjoyed about this Old and New Testament Ignatius Study Bible is, as I said earlier, reading one chapter a day, because one chapter a day is something that even a wretch like me can do. You know, I think sometimes, yeah, we, we see things like a challenge more than an invitation to commune with God. Right.

Of course we want to commune with God. But maybe there is a good idea. Maybe it's like, just slow down. It's more important that you really choose. Yeah. Yeah. Chew on maybe a chapter a day or something like that. Maybe it's like, just slow down. It's more important that you really chew. Oftentimes less is more. Yeah, chew on maybe a chapter a day or something like that. Yes, I'm totally with you on that. In fact, last Lent, I led a Lenten devotional

that was live, it wasn't live streamed, but it was streamed from St. Paul Center where we just read one chapter a day from Exodus for the 40 days of Lent. And there's 40 chapters of Exodus. Yep. And that was a profound experience. I didn't know how it would turn out,

but it was delightful. And I was amazed at the correlations. At first I thought this isn't gonna work because we're gonna be in Passion Week and Exodus is talking about the construction of the tabernacle.acle. And then we've got Jesus in Passion Week and there's not going to be any. But actually there turned out to be these incredibly providential correlations so that on Good Friday where Christ is acting like a priest,'s, Exodus 38 is describing the high priestly garment, the building of the high priest, the making of the high priestly garment. It's like, whoa, this is just blowing my mind,

you know? It turned out so well. But, but that was a kind of a less is more kind of approach. Let's just take one book, a very important book, Exodus. It's one of the top 12, maybe. It's a very exciting and gripping story too, isn't it? It is, yeah. At least the first 23 chapters or so. And then you get a whole bunch of laws and then the description of the building of the tabernacle. Sure.

But yeah, yeah, the first 20 chapters or so is like extremely gripping and very powerful. But yeah, yeah, the first of the first 20 chapters or so is like extremely gripping and and very powerful. But but yeah. Yeah, you know, that's well, I was just going to interject and just say how much I love the Book of Genesis. I've read it twice now over the last several months, and I just love that I can relate to these wretched, wicked people that God chose. Isn't like writing straight with crooked lines. Horrible human beings. They're just idiots. I know, like and I am like like like us.

Yeah. Yeah. But you know, and Genesis 38. Like what on earth are you doing? You know, Abraham putting his wife out. Yeah, he was technically his step sister. But yeah, right, right, right. Yeah. Like farm here out as a con game to extort money from. It would appear that Noah, what happened with Noah? Is it Shem?

Ham. Ham. Ham. What do we think Ham is a couple? Yeah, he does something to Noah that he slept with his mother. Yeah, that's actually something I learned from reading that. From the Sturdy Bible? Yeah.

Yeah, because it pointed me to Leviticus, that to see your father's nakedness could mean to sleep with your dad's mom. Yeah Yeah, but it happens all the time and there's so much incest in But it's I don't know man I just find it just refreshing because I look at my own stupid life and I see how I refreshing because I look at my own stupid life and I see how I want so much to be good and how hard that is. Right. The things I want to do I can't do, the things I don't want to do I end up doing. And another thing too, Matt, is even our moral sensibilities, we're not aware how strongly

they have been shaped by Christ throughout Western civilization. And so, like, you know, some of the things that the patriarchs do and that we find them revolting, but we find them revolting because we're still raised in a Christian culture, but it wasn't revolting to them. And it's not revolting in a lot of societies. And you know, the pharaohs, their tendency was to marry their sisters. And you had a lot of weird stuff going on in the ancient world. So what it makes me appreciate is so much of what I take for granted as, well, that's just the natural law, or that's just the moral law, etc.

True enough, but without God's revelation and without the leavening influence of the gospel in our culture, we would not even be able to without the leavening influence of the gospel in our culture, we would not even be able to recognize the natural law a lot of the time. You know, we would be too confused and we would rationalize. I think Peter Crafters made this point, maybe you have as well, that the fact that the warts and sins of the main characters of the Bible are put on full display is in a sense an argument for its authenticity. Yes. Yeah.

Who else writes this kind of stuff? Same thing with the apostles. If you're trying to start a fake religion, you don't have the chief guy be called Satan by the hero of the story who may not have existed. You don't have the hero be accused of being a drunkard. Right. What is going on? Yeah. Yeah. No, it's, it's, it is a powerful argument for the authenticity. I quite agree with you. Um, you know, the,

the people of Israel are unique among the peoples of the ancient world because no other ethnic group writes such an unflattering account of their origins. The Romans didn't do that. The Greeks didn't do that. The Egyptians, all these other cultures like, where are the children of the gods? You know, these superhuman demigods came down and gave birth to our race and we were, you know, the master race. And what is Israel's like? Well, we were slaves, you know, and then we kept disobeying our God and you had to periodically send plagues to keep us in line. It's like, you know, who makes this stuff up?

Very interesting, isn't it? Is there anything else like that? There, no. There's no, no, no epics like that. And at least in the ancient Near East. So, yeah. Could we quickly go through the covenants before I forget to do it in this? And this episode ends. Yeah.

Because this, I mean, when I learned this back in the day from Jeff Cavens, it blew and I know Scott was on about this for a long time. It blew me away that there was this progression among the six yeah, and covenants within scripture and how God grows his family as it were. Yeah, absolutely. I know it'll be easy to get bogged down. So maybe if you could do a overview real quick

and then we could go into whatever you wanna go into. Sure, yeah, so it's very helpful to see that the story of scripture, the history of salvation is broken up into epochs or periods marked by different covenants, which are family relationships between God and his people. And so the first one is the Adamic covenant, which begins with just a married couple, Adam and Eve, and they're

in perfect relationship with God in the vertical relationship. The language of Genesis 1 and 2 suggests that they are a son and daughter. We could go into that, but it's a little bit detailed. And they're also in perfect relationship with the natural environment. There's peace between them and the animals in the garden. And real quick, what is a covenant? What is a covenant? A covenant is the extension of kinship by oath. Or another way to put it would be a way of swearing someone into your family.

Or you could say a family formation via oath swearing. It's almost like you've thought about this a lot. I have. You know, when I was a kid in the U.S., there was this popular TV show that lasted a few seasons called Grizzly Adams. It was about this trapper out in the Rocky Mountains.

And he is befriended by a Native American warrior who helps him survive his first winter in the Rockies. He is befriended by a Native American warrior who helps him survive his first winter in the Rockies. And when spring comes around, they've grown so tight through surviving the winter together that they go out in the woods and they cut the back of their hands and they bind their hands together with rawhide and allow their blood to mingle.

And that was supposed to be, I trust it's authentic, I don't know, but Native American ritual. And it's a covenant, and it's a great example of one. Because from that point on, they were blood brothers, and so now they were duty-bound to have each other's back just as if they had been born from the same womb. That's a great example. And in our faith, blood rituals like the Eucharist are so often used to establish a covenant because blood is fundamental to being family.

All right, so the extension of kinship by oath. All right, so let's go through these real quick. So you have Adam, you have a couple, the sign of the covenant is? The sign of the covenant is the Sabbath actually, the seventh day. So I like to draw a mountain, you know, because Eden was a mountain. I put a little stick figure Adam and Eve at the top, a little fruit tree representing this tree of life, and then a river coming out of the mountain, which is the river of life. And yeah, and

then maybe an angel or two, and some gold and some jewels to, because it's important to remember the Garden of Eden was the first sanctuary, the first place of worship, and Adam was the first priest. So you have kind of this perfect relationship, you know, their son and daughter of God, and they're a perfect piece with God,

vertical relationship, perfect piece with each other, and nature, horizontal relationship. That gets completely messed up when they defy God as their father, they break the family apart, they have to leave the family home, things go from bad to worse until their descendants become thoroughly depraved and God says, I'm going to have to wash the world clean and start over. And there's one righteous man that he can start over with, and that's Noah. And so God makes a floating garden, which is the ark, and that lands on a new mountain,

Mount Ararat. And Noah is a new Adam figure, and he gets off the ark and offers sacrifice. And then God renews the covenant that had once been with Adam, he now renews it with Noah. And so again, peace is established between God and man and that family relationship, but there's been some disruption because now there's killing and eating of the animals.

And so that means that even though that covenant is restored, it's not quite as good as it had been before, not quite as perfect, but it's serviceable. But even that doesn't last because in Genesis 9 Noah sins shortly thereafter by getting drunk and getting naked and then ham. If I was on it, how long was he on the ark for again? How many months? Like a year. If you were on the ark for a year with your family and that many animals it makes sense that the first thing you do is plant a vineyard and get hammered. I'm not saying it's good what he did, but it's

understandable. Right. So is it the drunkenness? Because it seems like the main sin in that situation was Ham's. Well, he takes advantage of his father, but you see, you know, later you got to read the Bible backwards and forwards against itself. And what you need to know is what's made clear later by Moses is that a priest is never to get drunk and he's never to get naked. So these regulations in the law of Moses that prohibit priestly nakedness and prohibit priestly drunkenness. And Noah is high priest over all humanity as a new Adam

figure. And so the drunkenness and the nakedness is a violation of his priestly dignity. Priests can never get drunk because then they might misuse their sacred powers and they should never get naked because then they bring, they bring disgrace and profanity upon what they represent, which is God, you know? So, it is fundamentally the sin of Noah. And then Ham takes advantage of that situation, but it reintroduces sin into the human storyline.

And again, things go from bad to worse. He breaks the covenant. He breaks the covenant. Through those sins, okay. So, and if you think about it, he breaks the covenant through the illicit consumption, the illicit consumption of fruit, which leads to nakedness, shame, and curse.

And when you line it up like that, you're like, oh yeah, I've seen that before. Deja vu. That's what they did in the garden. Consumption of fruit, naked, machine curse. Right? So it's a, it's a repetition or recapitulation there. Again, things go from bad to worse until all humanity unites to defy God by building this tower, which was like a siege ramp into the heavens that are going to assault the divine abode. That's, um, you know, the tower of Babel. And that provokes God to scramble their languages, which forces them to disperse. But now we've got the sad situation where humanity is alienated from God and alienated from one

another. So what's a poor divinity to do in order to get everybody back into being quite literally one big happy family? And I don't use that tritely. It really is in all theological seriousness that is God's intention that we all be one big happy family. And that pretty much correlates with one holy Catholic and apostolic church. But anyway, so what's it got to do? Well, God adopts a different strategy,

not going to wash the world clean with water again and start over. No, we're not going to reboot everything. Now it's like an infiltration strategy. I'm going to start with one man and his family can infiltrate using this man, Abraham. And that introduces us to the next epoch. Okay. And, um, so the sign of the covenant with Noah is important that there is a sign for each covenant or is it? Yeah. I mean, it's helpful. I think it's helpful for us, um, to remember. Yeah. Yeah. To remember.

So the rainbow perhaps or circumcision. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the sign of the covenant, uh, for, um, no, not circumcision yet. That's the sign of the Abraham covenant. Right. Right. But yeah, so the Sabbath was the, was the sign of the Abraham covenant. But yeah, so the Sabbath was the sign of the creation covenant with Adam and the rainbow was the sign associated with the covenant with Noah. And let's not miss the progression there. You go from a married couple to a family with Noah. And then when you move to Abraham, you're now moving to a tribe, because he's a tribal chieftain. And God takes his time with Abraham,

makes a covenant with him in three stages. And take us too long to go through all the stages, but the climax, what happens is God makes a covenant, then tests Abraham's faith, builds the covenant again, tests his faith, remakes it again. The climax is the biggest test of faith when God asks Abraham to sacrifice his only begotten son, Isaac, by laying him on the wood at the top of a mountain and offering him to God in the clearest type of calvary that you get in the Old Testament. And the real issue there is God's testing Abraham and Isaac to see if their love is like the love of God, because the Holy Trinity is gonna have to undergo

that sacrifice, that self-giving sacrifice of Calvary. And so it's like a test, are you guys willing to do what I'm gonna have to do in order to save humanity? And amazingly, Abraham and Isaac rise to the occasion and they prove by their actions that yeah, we are willing to trust and to love to such a degree that we're willing to do something which seems abhorrently absurd and counter intuitive, which is much like the cross. And so God calls off the actual sacrifice at the last moment, and they offer a ram instead. And then God speaks from heaven in Genesis 22, 15 through 18,

and swears an oath. And here's where you need to know that an oath is what forms a covenant. And God says, I swear by my own self, says the Lord God, because you have done this and have not withheld from me your son, your only begotten son, I will surely bless you." And then a whole bunch of blessings are enumerated. But the climactic one is, in your seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed. That means through your descendant. So that's the covenant with Abraham.

It's now Abraham's at the head of a tribe, and so we've had that progression of couple, family, tribe here. And, but now there's the covenant with Abraham, which is a family relationship with God, is guaranteed by a unilaterally sworn oath of God. That means a one-sided, both like God takes it upon himself solely to make sure that this happens, that through Abraham's descendant, blessing is going to be spread to all humanity. That's the answer to Babel. Babel kind of like alienated everybody and lost blessing for the whole human family. But we're going to restore blessing through Abraham's line.

And then after Abraham, it starts progressing, we might even say quickly. So actually, God had given three promises to Abraham that he would make him into a great nation, give him a great name, which means royalty, make him into royalty, and bless all the nations through him. So after Abraham, God- Did Abraham violate the covenant?

He had some covenant violations, but prior to Genesis 22, where the whole covenant is sealed by the divine oath, that's unilaterally sworn. So after that, there can be no, even if Abraham were to offend, it's still guaranteed by the divine oath. And St. Paul makes this point very strongly in Galatians.

He says, look, the Mosaic covenant was all on the people of Israel to keep the covenant, but the Abrahamic covenant was guaranteed by a divine oath. And so our salvation is really founded on the Abrahamic covenant. And that's very true to this day, when Abraham went through the, kind of a dry run of Calvary with his own only son, Isaac,

that was where our salvation was locked in by God's oath. And St. Paul will actually call that oath in Genesis 22, the oath of God there, he'll call it something like the proto gospel. He'll call it something like the proto gospel. He refers to the scriptures preaching the gospel to Abraham in that passage. So it's very dramatic. So anyway, so after Abraham, God sets about fulfilling that first promise, which is that Abraham is going to become a great nation. So he arranges for Abraham's descendants to go down to Egypt. They become numerous enough to be a great nation, but all they need now is some laws and some land. So God sends them a savior figure, Moses, who leads them out of Egypt to Sinai where they get

law. And then his intention was to lead them up into the promised land where they would get the land. Of course, that got derailed because of their sin with the golden calf and so on. But eventually under Moses' successor, they get into the land and they have the laws that shape them into a civil society and they become a great nation. Okay, so that's the first promise that God had given to Abraham. And that's also what we call the Mosaic Covenant, the covenant where God enters into a family relationship with all of Abraham's descendants who are now no longer just a family or a tribe, but they are now a multi-tribe nation. Okay, so that's the Mosaic Covenant.

The sign of the Abrahamic Covenant had been circumcision at a certain point in God's walk with Abraham. He gave Abraham that mark for himself and all his male descendants. That would be an external sign that they were part of this family relationship with God. But the sign of the covenant for Moses is actually the Passover. So the observance of the Passover. So if you fail to observe the Passover, you're cut off from your people. And that's actually very important then because that anticipates then the Eucharist, obviously at the center. And so, so much of what happens to the people of Israel

in the Mosaic Covenant is an anticipation or a type of what's gonna be fulfilled in the church. So you have the Mosaic Covenant, and that's what we often think of as the Old Covenant. And under that covenant, Israel becomes a great nation, but not yet great name, which means kingship. And that has to wait for a few centuries till we get David. And David is this young boy that's anointed as one of the first kings of Israel by Samuel, Samuel the last of the

judges and one of the first great prophets after Moses. It's a very interesting thing in 1 Samuel 16, Samuel anoints David with the horn of oil. And David is filled with the Holy Spirit in 1 Samuel 16. It says the spirit rushed on David from that point forward. And so David's almost like a proto-charismatic, okay? He's got the Spirit. And the Father regarded David as really like living in the New Covenant in advance because having the Holy Spirit's what we usually associate with the New Covenant is that we have the gift of the Holy Spirit.

So David has that. So he rises to be king over the people of Israel. So you've got the, Israel has this spirit-filled king, and under David and his immediate successor Solomon they reach the heights of glory. And God makes a special covenant with David, and we call that the Davidic covenant. And according to that covenant, David and David's heirs would be children of God, would be sons of God, and they would rule not only over Israel, but actually kingship over all the nations was promised to David and his heirs. And that's what we celebrate in the last great slum to the year, you know, the Feast of Christ

the King. So there you've got that kingship, and so we've got a progression, you know, married couple and family and tribe and nation. And now we have a royal empire with this covenant. So this is the Davidic covenant. And this is going to be the last great covenant of the Old Testament, as a matter of fact. And, you know, what happens is after Solomon, things go south and the kingdom begins to unravel. And during that period, God sends one prophet after another to warn God's people to turn away from the erroneous path that they're on.

And the prophets start promising a new covenant. The people of Israel are in a terrible moral state, and they're about to experience judgment for all their sins and all the breaking of the Mosaic law that they are committing. But the one bright thing is that the prophets promise that God is going to bring about a new covenant which is going to restore all the good things associated with David. So that's a son of David as a king, a Spirit-filled king, a temple, a pure temple, like Solomon built the temple, and a a holy city, Jerusalem. So you see that in many passages of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel.

So I like to call that the New Covenant in the Prophets. And that's what Jesus comes to fulfill. And when you move to the New Testament, the very first verse of the New Testament, which is this is the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham from the get-go. It's tying Jesus to three of the great mediators. The first one is to Adam, because this line, this is the book of the genealogy of of comes actually from Genesis five, where the whole sentence is, this is the book of the gene of the genealogy of

Adam. But Matthew one, one is, this is the book of the gene of the genealogy of Adam. But Matthew 1 1 is this is the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ. So the parallelism suggests Jesus is the new Adam. And then he's called not simply a son of David, of which there are many running around, but the son of David. Okay. In other words, it's used as a title. And that's a royal title. So he's the heir. And likewise, son of Abraham as a title, not just a son of Abraham, but the specific heir of Abraham. That is to say the one through whom blessing is going to come to all the nations. So then we get the genealogy and you start going through Matthew and you see Jesus being a new Moses by feeding the people with supernatural bread in the wilderness, and being a new David by casting demons out of people the way David cast demons out of Saul. And it all comes to a climax in Passion Week, where Jesus makes this promised new covenant

in a two-step process. First in the upper room, he raises the cup and says, this cup is the new covenant in my blood, which means consisting of my blood. In other words, he gives his body and his blood as the family bond, as the covenant. It is the covenant. Okay. The Eucharist is the covenant. It's what links us to the creator God. It's the flesh and blood. Well, you know, body, blood, soul and divinity of his son links us. It's, it's like the chain. It's, you know, it's the bond, it's the glue that links us to God as his family. So he does that in the upper room.

And then what he did by faith and sacrament in the upper room, he confirms by the gift of his physical body at the cross. And there at the cross, we see our Lord's side opened and a new river of life flowing out of his side, just like that river of life flowed out of the Garden of Eden. And so if you compare like the Garden of Eden, you know, a mountain with Adam at the top and the tree of life and the river of life, and then you look at Calvary and you've got the new Adam and you've got the tree of life, and its fruit is Christ's body. From His side comes this river of life in the form of blood and water.

That stands for baptism and Eucharist, blood for Eucharist, water for baptism. And that flow from the side of Christ is the new river of life, which is really the sacraments. And if you think about it, Matt, the sacraments are like a river through time and space that carries the Holy spirit to us. It's the flow of the Holy spirit through time and space. And one of the mental exercises often do like I'm doing a parish mission. I'll have everybody close their eyes and say, okay, imagine Jesus on Calvary, see the, uh, the, the, the flow of blood from his side,

making that river of life now rise up and let Calvary get smaller below you and watch that river flow down into Africa, watch it flow east into Asia, watch it flow north and west up into Europe, watch it cross the Atlantic to the North and South America, Oceania, okay? Then roll the centuries, you got the age of the fathers.

You got the medieval period. You got Renaissance, Reformation, early modern, contemporary. Open your eyes. Where are we? Well, we're kind of lost somewhere in East Central North America. And it's 2000 years later. And is the river still flowing? It is.

And I drank from the river this morning because I got to mass. And every time you go to a Catholic sanctuary, you're actually going back to Eden. Every Catholic sanctuary is a sacrament of the garden. And they say like, you know, upwards of 90% of the world's population is at least within a day's travel of the nearest Catholic place

of worship. And that means most of the world's population has relatively easy access to return to Eden and to be able to drink from the river of life, to eat from the tree of life, which is baptism in Eucharist, and be restored to being a son and a daughter of God. So it all comes full circle, and that's what we're living in now. Elon Musk talks about Terra forming Mars, but Jesus has Eden formed earth. Okay. He has spread the, Jesus has spread the garden and distributed over the whole earth so that there's Catholic sanctuaries everywhere.

Every one of them brings you back to the garden and enables you to regain what our first parents lost, which is that, that child relationship with the Creator God, to become once again a son and a daughter of God. And we don't mean that really symbolically, we're not talking metaphorically. No, through baptism you are changed, okay? In a way, analogous to the Eucharist. It's not quite the same as transubstantiation, but it's analogous to it because in transubstantiation

you have the natures are being changed. But our nature is changed, or at the very least we might say elevated, because what was potential, we all have the image of God, but what's conferred upon us is the likeness, which is the presence of the Holy Spirit through baptism. And so we're indelibly changed in that, and we become children of God. Before that we were potentially children of God, but then through baptism we become children of God and we share His nature, okay? In a more profound way, even then we're children of our own parents, okay? We don't become united in spirit with our parents, you know?

We receive from them our bodily nature. But with God, he fathers us in a way that's even more profound. Beautiful. Let me ask something. I hope it doesn't sound too cynical. Why doesn't it seem that way then? Why don't many Catholics seem like outposts of Eden?

Or why don't many Catholic churches seem that way? You go into a Catholic church and some Catholic churches are uglier than your local post office. And even if they aren't, you don't have necessarily a sort of phenomenological experience of it being something different. So isn't this just beautiful poetry that isn't really true? just beautiful poetry that isn't really true? No, it's so much more than beautiful poetry. No, it's more true than any poetry and it's true whether you feel it. I mean, like everything you just said,

you know, virtually concerned sense perception. It's like, well, I walk in, I don't necessarily feel it. Well, you don't feel spiritual reality, okay? Because we don't have � the five senses are all designed to detect matter and energy. They're not designed to � we don't have a sense that detects divine presence. Now sometimes we have something that we call a sixth sense, where we do have a sense of the presence of God, but that's not one of the five physical senses. And we're so tied, we're so much like Pavlov's dog, we're so conditioned to judge everything by our five senses that, oh, if I walk into a Catholic sanctuary and I don't get some kind of sense

perception that I'm back in Eden, then it's not really the case. And so, if I go to the Phipps Gardens in Pittsburgh, those's beautiful botanical gardens there, then I walk into the jungle area and I'll feel like I'm back in Eden. But that's just a sensation without the reality. But St. Peter's downtown may not feel like Eden, but it's the reality apart from the sensation. Now there's value in building Catholic churches

that are beautiful and that communicate to the senses. And I think what that does is it helps us to be disposed and to get into the right frame of mind, to be more receptive, and it makes the act of faith easier. And that has helped many people convert, like they've walked into beautiful Catholic churches and the beauty is a testimony to them and moves the heart and makes it easier for the heart to make the act of faith. But ultimately it's an act of faith. And even if we were on the battlefield and a priest came dressed in fatigues and just set up a little table

and proceeded to celebrate Mass, he would be making Eden present right there, even if we were in a wasteland where everything had been blown up by artillery shells. So again, we're too tied to the physical senses. And in a way, I would argue that the whole path of Christian discipleship is a pedagogy, it's all a pedagogy to wean us off of dependence on the five senses. And this is why I think, for example, why we don't get a zap when we take the Eucharist. Maybe we've talked about this on previous shows. Like when I was a young Catholic, for the first several years I was a Catholic, I'm like, okay, if it's body, blood, soul, and divinity, why don't I feel anything when I come forward?

Why don't I be like a little high, like, ooh. Well, the reason why God doesn't attach like a physical sensation to the Eucharist is that if he did, why would people come to mass? They'd come because they'd like that sensation and we would be no better than heroin addicts. We'd just be coming for the sensation. But the point of the Eucharist is precisely

to get to wean us off of our addictions, you know, to get us to the point that we, we act on the, on the basis of faith and trust in God's word and not on, you know, feedback to the senses. So yeah. You don't want to push that too far though, do you? Because I could see someone making an argument for why we need to make Catholic churches uglier. Well.

Because if it was beautiful, then maybe people are only coming for the nice music and for the beautiful churches. I think there was almost something behind the whole ugly movement. I don't know what else to call it in church architecture. You know, it's like, go back to the Trappists, because the Trappist spirituality kind of is that. It's like, let's remove the supports to the senses and Trappist, you know, liturgy and, you know, is all very sparse.

And so some of that movement in modernist church architecture was to make stuff sparse and kind of this monastic thing. And it seems more inspired by communist brutalists. Yeah. Well, that's what it ended up looking like. I don't know if that was what, I don't think that's what they intended, but that's, that was the end result was like the rest of everybody was like, it looks like, yeah, it looks like communist brutalism. But I think that, you know, to, to interpret their motivations charitably, I think that they were trying to, you know, have this monastic spirituality. But there's a reason why only some are called to that, you know?

And that's kind of like, you know, that's like, you know, dark knight of the senses kind of thing. Let's remove the sense support. And God does that for some people that are on a spiritual journey into depth, and that has its place. But for the vast majority of us as lay people, we are faced with other kinds of struggles that God gives us. And we're not asked to give up all sense consolation in our vocation.

Wow. That's so helpful. I'm going to be thinking about that for a long time. Thank you for that. Dr. Bergsmar. Yeah. So we did Adam. Well, we know of it. We did Abraham. Let's just go through real quick. So you begin with a holy couple in Adam. Adam breaks the covenant. We then have a holy family in Noah. Adam breaks the covenant. We then have a holy family in Noah who violates the covenant. We didn't have God swearing by himself to Abraham

that what he would make of him a great nation, give him a great name and that through his seed, the world would be blessed. And so from that, from, from the tribe with Abraham, we go to a holy nation with Moses to a holy kingdom with David and then a holy Catholic and apostolic church, right? Which is a spiritual kingdom. Yeah. Which when we say it's a spiritual kingdom, we don't mean that it does, that it lacks external historical or material manifestations.

It certainly does. We have parishes, we have schools, we have hospitals, you know, so we're visible and we're present. It's not a, it's not an invisible kingdom. It is a kingdom that is in this world, but it's not of the world as we're going to hear in our gospel reading for the feast of Christ, the king in a couple of weeks. I just, I'm still, I'm just so blown away by what you just shared about.

If we would get a little higher, then we would be going to holy mass daily. No better than heroin addicts. That's really profound. Right. Yeah. Yeah, because I've been reading a lot of the Carmelite saints lately and this idea of of nada. Yeah, John's nada being the the steps to the king and kind of, yeah, not relying too much on methods of prayer and things like this sense experience, but just an immediate. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This this is the the danger of charismatic revivals. I was about that's what I was going to. Yeah. Yeah. Which which have their place in church history. danger of charismatic revivals. That's what I was going to. Yeah. Yeah. Which have their place in church history. And there've been many throughout church history,

like where God, you know, in his, in his providential wisdom starts attaching external manifestations to the gift of the Holy Spirit. And you get healings and gifts of tongue and so on. And those are all good. They all have their place. But the danger of those movements is people get attached to the signs rather than to God.

And- To extend your analogy, if we're going to mass like cocaine addicts, we might be going to a festival of praise, if we're going to mass like cocaine addicts, we might be going to a festival of praise like we'd go to a circus. Right. Or, you know, it's such an incredible sensation to get slain in the Spirit. I want to have that sensation again. And then it's similar to getting high. Now, look, I'm not knocking, I'm not saying you should never, you know, that being slain in the Spirit or having some extraordinary experience with the spirit,

not saying that those things are bad. They can be good in themselves, but we need to embrace the reality that they are gifts given by the giver. And we want to develop our relationship with the giver and not become too attached to the gifts. And so that's why I think God periodically then will withdraw those. And so you see it comes in waves, you know, throughout church history,

like we'll have the extraordinary manifestations for a while, and then God withdraws them. And I think he does that lest we become too attached to the gifts. Oh, praise God. I want to tell you about Hello, which is the number one downloaded prayer app in the world. It's outstanding. Halo.com slash Matt Fradd. Sign up over there right now and you will get the first three months for free. That's like a lot of time. You can decide whether it's useful to you or not, whether it's helpful.

If you don't like it, you can always quit. Halo.com slash Matt Fradd. I use it, my family uses it, it's fantastic. There are over 10,000 audio guided prayers, meditations and music, including my Lo-Fi. Hello has been downloaded over 15 million times in 150 different countries. It helps you pray, helps you meditate,

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

It'll help them pray. Fantastic. Hello.com. Slash Matt Fred. All right. So we're going to take some questions from local supporters. Some of these questions we may have addressed, so feel free to give it another kick or we can go to another one. Grace asks, what are your thoughts on reading the Bible chronologically? Yes, my thoughts on reading the Bible chronologically is that it is good to do, but it's not the only way to read scripture, but it's something that you should do at least once in your life and thereafter do periodically. So I'm not sure what she means by chronologically.

If she means in... I think she... Oh, well, that's a good point. Because it's... Yeah. I don't think she's talking about genesex, levity, snobbish, neuronomy. She might mean the chronological. She might mean like the absolute... Yeah. There are such a thing, there are such things as a chronological Bible, they're not super common, but some people have like produced editions of the Bible where they actually arrange all the books by presumed date. I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't get one of these so-called chronologically rearranged Bibles.

I would, I would rather read the Bible in what we call canonical order, like read it in the order that the Church has given it to us in, which is roughly chronological after all. It roughly goes from creation until the verge of the New Covenant, especially if you use a classic Catholic Bible like the Sixto Clementine Vulgate, which is the basis of the RSVCE and RSVCE2 that Ignatius Press puts out, where you got 1 and 2 Maccabees at the end of the Old Testament. So I'm definitely for it. Again, to reiterate, I would do it at least once in your life and try to periodically

go back to, like I said, every three to five years, go back and like, oh, I'm going to read through the Bible chronologically or sequentially again this year, just to refresh it. Michelle asks, how do we explain to Protestants why they should not have taken out the books they took out without referencing the Bible saying not to do so? I don't understand that last bit. Well, yeah, I think she's referring to the end of the Book of Revelation, which Warrens, yeah, Warrens don't add or detract from these words,

which is kind of a recapitulation of the end of Deuteronomy. But the thing about that last statement in Revelation is it only concerns the Book of Revelation itself. It's not a blanket thing for the New Testament. But okay, so what's being raised here is the whole issue of the seven books that are no longer in Protestant Bibles. And I have a long answer to that,

which is to tell the whole history of how that came about, which we don't have the time to do. But let me put it in a nutshell. Luther in the heat of debate was arguing against purgatory. And when his debate partners pointed out that purgatory is implied by a statement in 2nd Maccabees that it's a good thing to pray for the dead. He adopted the radical rebuttal of decanonizing Second Maccabees and then he couldn't just remove Maccabees from the Bible. He had some kind

of principle or some kind of rationale that he was appealing to. So what he did was he appealed to essentially the Jewish tradition, which also influenced Saint Jerome and Saint Jerome who learned Hebrew from a Jewish rabbi. And so Saint Jerome casts doubt on seven books of the Old Testament, the so-called Deuterocanonical books in his prologues to the Vulgate. And St. Jerome's doubts were rejected by the church as a whole, notably by Augustine, but then other church councils.

But Luther went with St. Jerome's doubts and essentially adopted the Jewish Bible as the Christian Old Testament. Okay, so that is what Protestants are doing. They're basically using the Jewish Bible as their Old Testament. And I hate to be blunt about it, but what Protestants do is reject the Christian tradition of Old Testament scripture, which was crystallized, written down, and affirmed by the late fourth and early fifth century councils of the church. Going back especially to the Council of Rome in 382,

under Pope Damasus I, the same pope that commissioned the Volgate from St. Jerome. It's under Pope Damasis's I that we first get the Catholic canon as we have it today written down in a church document, and thereafter it's just affirmed. But Protestants like to say, oh, these books are never part of the Bible, but read Augustine. Augustine lists all of them as part of the Bible. That's a shock to Lutherans and Calvinists. It was a shock to me when at age 30, after getting two master's degrees in Scripture from a very fine Calvinist seminary in the U.S., I read Augustine on the Canaan scripture

for the first time and discovered that these so-called non-biblical books that I thought that Catholics had added into the Bible at the Council of Trent were actually listed right there by St. Augustine. So St. Augustine lists them, all the saints list them, all through the Middle Ages, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, they all list them as scriptural. And then Luther calls them into question and they're reaffirmed by Trent. But here's something important that I think all of our listeners should know, Matt, and that is there's a Protestant accusation out there that no ecumenical council ever affirmed the seven deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament as part of the canon prior to Trent. And that's part of a polemic against Catholicism where they say, you Catholics added them in at

Trent. However, that's not true because the Council of Florence in 1441, roughly, it meant over a series of years, but the Council of Florence, which was an ecumenical council, lists them all in 1441, which is like 70 or 80 years before the Reformation breaks out in 1517. So they actually were included in ecumenical council long before the whole Protestant fiasco was on anybody's radar. Well, excellent answer. Thank you. Dad jokes all day, says, every time I try to read the Bible,

my stupid human brain shuts down when order unbelievable things are spoken of for example in The book of Maccabees it is mentioned that though they forcibly circumcised boys I start thinking that's weird and it throws off my study I want to hear Noah was hundreds of years old there seems to be a lot of these Situations in the parts of the Bible that I've read I know my brain doesn't compare to God's wisdom But how do we handle these mental hurdles that don't make any sense to our modern mindset? Love the honest question. Yeah, no, that's great. Well, this is why Jesus says, unless you enter the kingdom as

a little child, you will not enter. So we have to become like children. And one of the attributes of children is an attitude of trust. Okay, so when you get to these things, first of all, I'd say like the forcible circumcision of boys, that's not necessarily advocating that as a rule. And this is important, we should make that point. I think when people approach scripture, they often assume that they're going to read a book that is like a children's story Bible that is going to be full of edifying stories

that have a moral lesson that is going to help you to do wrong and to do right and avoid evil. Right, exactly. And then you read the actual Bible, which is full of, as we were saying about it, rascals and con men and promiscuous individuals and murderers and all this kind of stuff. And we're scandalized because we think, oh, this is all supposed to be good stories.

But no, the human characters in the story are not the heroes. God is the hero. And what we're seeing is our sin on display and God saving us despite the fact that we do all kinds of things like forcibly circumcise boys out of a rash, misplaced religious zeal, things like this. So that for some of them. And for some of the other things like the miraculous elements or the longer ages and stuff like that. Sometimes, you know, I teach my students when you face these kind of contradictions, you're not sure like how should I understand these large ages of the patriarchs? Do I take that literally?

Do they count years in a different way? The answer is we don't actually know, you know, not sure what exactly to do, but you know, adopt the situation, adopt the disposition of Augustine, right? Faith seeking understanding. Okay. And say, Lord, I trust that this is true, although I may not know how it is true. Okay. So I accept it, I receive it, I'm not sure exactly in what way it's true, but I know that it is true, okay? So I accept it, I receive it, I'm not sure exactly in what way it's

true, but I know that it is true. And so you kind of, you have to sometimes live in a certain kind of tension, right? But that's the act of faith. And St. Augustine says that God intentionally put some of these apparent contradictions into Scripture to test our faith, and some of them become resolved. This is, I mean, a lot of this is part of the human condition, living with unanswered questions. No matter what worldview you adopt, you're going to run into things that don't make sense. Right. That doesn't excuse us from trying to come up with a sensible understanding of the world, but you're absolutely right. You're not gonna cover every single base in this lifetime. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Jeff says, how to explain that the earth didn't have to be made

in seven days to Protestants? Well, that's an incorrect dichotomy because it's not a characteristic of Protestantism that they all believe in a literal 24-hour creation, nor is it a teaching of the Church that creation did not happen in a literal 24 hours. And so there's this common misunderstanding. It's also the case with predestination. Some people think, oh, Protestants believe in predestination, but we don't. That's not really true. There's been a long discussion on predestination within the Catholic church. And there's two traditions of thought. There's the Dominican and the Jesuit thought on predestination. But likewise, in terms of creation within, within the Catholic church, we have a

lot of, the church allows us a lot of freedom about, about what to believe, at least currently she does. She may define things more precisely in a future generation. But at the present moment, the church permits both belief in a literal 24 hour day, you know, seven day creation week, as well as taking it more or less poetically and embracing theistic evolution. And so we've talked a lot about those issues in previous podcasts, but one thing that we

ought not to do is whether we're theistic evolutionists or literal creationists, we ought not to call each other heretics because the church allows us that latitude at the moment. Thoughts, says T.J. Holsweiss. Thoughts on the Douay-Rheims version of the Bible? It is my personal favorite. It is a well-made translation, or do you think it has some issues? Yes. Okay, great question. I personally do like the Dewey Reams myself, and in fact,

what I use for devotional reading of the New Testament is one of the last updates of the Dewey Reams that was ever done before the New American Bible was executed in the 60s. Is that the little, the new pocket? Yeah, the little New Testament that they usually. I love that one as well. Yeah, yeah. And I've always loved it, and I didn't know what translation it was

because when I tried to read the Douay Rheims, I just think to myself, I just like the King James way better. Right. It just reads so much more beautifully and easily to me than that. But I didn't realize that this one. Yeah. It's an, it's an updating of the Dewey Reams.

It was called the confraternity edition. So it's a little known English translation that was a, like a modernization of the Dewey Reams. And I think it reads quite well. And, and you're in touch with the Dewey Reams tradition. The strength of the Dewey Reams is that it's translating the Vulgate. And the Vulgate is itself a kind of act of interpretation. And it has a certain, the Vulgate has an authority for us as Latin right Catholics. It remains actually our official form of scripture. And I think that this is sadly neglected, but what I, the way I see it is, is any,

any translation is also an act of interpretation and that, um, St. Jerome in translating the scriptures into Latin, uh, is kind of representing the, the church's tradition and, and in kind of representing the church's tradition and kind of executing an active interpretation when he brings it into Latin. And that has authority for us. And I think that where possible, we should follow St. Jerome in the interpretive moves that he makes in translating from the Hebrew and the Greek.

I think that represents an authoritative way to do it. It's not maybe an infallible translation. I think there's a couple of places where he might agree that St. Jerome didn't quite capture the Hebrew this way. And it also doesn't make it unnecessary for at least scholars to learn the Hebrew and the Greek and work from those languages. But the Latin Vulgate does and should have a kind of religious authority that deserves a certain amount of veneration, especially within the Latin Rite, that we should respect and refer to and be aware of.

What was the translation you referred to? The Confraternity edition. Confraternity. Are they still publishing, producing this? Printing it? Well, Scepter Publishers produces the New Testament in a confraternity translation, but I'm not aware if anybody still publishes the entire Bible in that form. That would be something to look into.

Constance asks, what is a way to humbly but effectively share with a non-denom Christian the concept that even though a truth may not be explicitly laid out in the Bible, the theology of the truth is there. It's really hard to explain this when the person does not believe the Catholic Church has authority to interpret the Bible. In particular, my non-denominational friend nearly went into orbit when I greeted her on All Saints Day. I didn't realize it was something that would make her worry that I am on the path to hell. Yeah, so that's a big hairy question. And the problem is that in many ways, Protestants

are to Catholics like members of our family that got abducted and raised by somebody else, and that years later finds out, oh, I'm actually a bergsma, and comes back to the family home and is disturbed and distressed by how we cook dinner and our family habits and the things that we do, it's all weird to them because they've been apart from the family for so long. And so this Protestant friend that's freaked out by all saints, that's because she hasn't been raised in the family even though she's our sister through baptism. But then more to the point, the first, the first part of the of the viewer's question there

was how do we How do we Explain to a Protestant that the truth might be in Scripture even though it's not stated Yeah, and I think an analogy helps An analogy would be this you'd say I think an analogy helps. An analogy would be this. You'd say, you got a little boy, and he's six years old. Does this boy know the formal laws of English grammar?

And you'd probably say, oh, well, he could not articulate them. He couldn't tell you what a subject is and what it means that the verb has to agree with the subject in number and in person or whatnot. All of that grammatical terminology would be lost on him. But he does know that if you say table dog bite that that

is not good English, but the dog bit the table does make sense. And he knows what proper English is and what it isn't. And if you say something like, um, uh, the red big truck, the six year old will know that that doesn't sound right because there's actually an unwritten rule in English. I was only only became aware of that, aware of this recently, like within the last five years, but there's actually an order of adjectives in English, such that we never say- The red big truck. The red big truck, you don't do that

because size comes before color in English adjectives. So it's the big red truck and the small blue truck. You don't say the blue small truck. You don't say this the blue small truck That sounds awkward to me like mmm. I mean, you know what it means. Yeah, but you're like Wouldn't correct you right? He's just trying to think it through but yeah, if you were writing it down or speaking more properly That doesn't feel right size would come first right and a six-year-old would say doesn't sound right should be the big red truck Yeah, so we see is the boy intuitively knows the rules,

even if he can't articulate them, which shows how there can be knowledge that a person has, even if they can't explicitly describe that knowledge. The boy actually knows, so to speak, and there's these famous examples of this with Socrates and Plato, where, you know, teases the rules of geometry out of a boy, right? And showing that there can be latent knowledge within a person. And in the same way in scriptures, there can be latent truths

that are kind of the grammar of faith that aren't explicitly stated. But nonetheless, when you're trained in this, in this book, that's not a Bible that I'm, I don't have a Bible here, but when you're trained in this book, you, you kind of intuit the grammar of faith and that's what the church does. And that how, that's how the church develops doctrine. That's really helpful. You know, heresies come along and the heresies are like, I think we should say small blue truck. And did I get that right? No, I'm sorry. I think we should say blue small truck. And everyone says like, that doesn't sound right. Yeah. You know, yeah, it doesn't sound like the proper grammar of the faith, you know, and that's how they get defined. And then we become aware, we become self aware that, oh, there is a proper language to this.

And then we write the rule down. And that's what ecumenical councils do. But the mistake is to think that, oh, the ecumenical council is making the rule. They're not. They're just recognizing, you know, through the conflict with heresy, the church comes to an awareness of what she latently believes. And then she writes it down explicitly, and then the explicit description, the formal description of the grammar of the faith builds over time.

Will Barron Was there, I mean, we're kind of on the same topic here, so I'll ask you this. As a Protestant, when did you come to believe that Sola Scriptura had to be false? Oh my gosh, that was still while I was in Protestant ministry. That would have been awkward. Yeah, I tell this story all the time because I was like a 24-year-old pastor in this little neighborhood that at best could have supported maybe one healthy, functioning Christian church,

but there wasn't just one church. There was like six little churches in this neighborhood, my Dutch Calvinist Church, another Dutch Calvinist Church, a Charismatic Church, a Hispanic Fellowship, a group that called themselves the All American Baptist Church, and then the Pentecostals sending in a bus on Sunday mornings to grab people out of our neighborhood, and all this plural formity of Christianity. When I would talk with these other pastors, I discovered that we were teaching everybody different things about baptism, different things about marriage, different things about sexual morality. Like there was nothing on which we were all in unison.

And you were all going back to the Bible to justify these things. Yes, but we were all claiming a Bible alone. We were all claiming Sola Scriptura. And when I was young and naive, I would go to these other pastors and I'd try to discuss them. I'd try to persuade them to accept infant baptism. And I would quote a whole bunch of verses, like Acts 16, the Philippian jailer's whole family being baptized, or Acts 2.38 or thereabouts where St. Peter says the promise is for you and for your children, you know, and so on. Let the little children come to me from Matthew 19. I quote all these verses.

And then to my surprise, the other pastor would start quoting verses at me. And as I like to say, it always degenerated into verses, verses, verses. I quote my verses, he quotes his verses, and these verses in conflict. And that's what soul scripture always ends up degenerating into. I just got the verses, verses, verses. That's excellent. Yeah.

I've never thought of that. V-E-R-S-E-S. That's right. Yes. Verses, verses, verses. Wow. Right. That's how soul scripture degenerates into,

or what it degenerates into. It's a shouting match of your verses versus his verses. And the problem there is you don't have a common authority that can make a judgment and decide whose interpretation is correct. That kind of Supreme Court for biblical interpretation really is the magisterium. It's an ecumenical council or the pope by his own authority. And since Protestantism rejects that adjudicating authority, then you're left with something

similar to what you have in rabbinic Judaism, where just everybody has to choose which pastor they're going to follow, and then you just follow the interpretation of your pastor. Or you just follow your interpretation of your pastor, or you just follow your own. And I had a shocking experience, Matt. I don't know if I shared this on a previous episode, but when I was a young pastor, one of my elderly friends in the congregation

told me that there was this very famous theologian in town who was still alive and had an open house every Sunday where he would discuss theology. And I was enthralled to know that this guy was still alive and had an open house every Sunday where he would discuss theology. And I was enthralled to know that this guy was still alive and still coherent and that I could go talk to him. And my mother had talked, you know, my mother just put this man on a pedestal and I grew up hearing his name and like, you know, he's the touchstone of orthodoxy and everything. And so we went over to the home of this revered theologian

on a Sunday afternoon, and there was some seminarians and some young pastors there, and they were all engaged in conversation, and the theologian's wife greeted us and offered us coffee and sat us down in the living room, and we started to enter into the conversation. And as we entered into the flow, we began to realize that what was being discussed was the fact that this revered theologian was no longer going to church except when his wife made him, and he no longer belonged to any local congregation or any denomination. He was just completely free-floating under nobody's authority. And all of us present there thought that this is not a good thing. You should be under

somebody's authority. You should belong to a local congregation. You should identify with a denomination. And he said, no, I don't have to do that. I can be a universal Christian like Billy Graham or the Pope. I mean, if you think about that, those are bad analogies, right? Because Billy Graham was a faithful Southern Baptist, I believe, and the pope is clearly identified with a specific group, you know? So neither Billy Graham nor the pope were just free-floating, you know, anti-authoritarian, lone ranger Christians in any sense of the word. But this man wanted to cite them as some kind of precedent for him being a free-floating,

unattached, his own authority. And so the conversation was going back and forth with the theologian, all these people present. And I screwed up my courage, and I raised my hand, and he called on me, and I said, you know what your problem is? You're making yourself your own arbiter of the truth. And I thought I'd really kind of rebuked him there,

you know, and that was a zinger. And he looked back at me and didn't even blink. And he said, well, that is the Protestant principle, isn't it? And the next, he called on the next guy. And I was floored. I was like completely flabbergasted. And a couple of minutes later, I motioned to my friend and we just left.

And we drove home in absolute silence because, you know, this is the situation, Matt. I was sincere, but I was naive. I truly believed in Sola Scriptura, but I did not realize its implications. The implications of Sola Scriptura are that each individual Christian ends up as their own pope. Because once you reject the interpretive authority of the church and the interpretive authority of the tradition, there's nothing else left except your own opinion when you read the Bible.

The problem is that the Bible does not interpret itself. The Bible has to be interpreted. And who's going to interpret if it's not the church and it's not tradition, then it's, it's just a little old you. And so that is the logical, uh, you know, redux you out of absurdum of soul scripture. And there is no way around it. Yeah. I'm trying to think of how to steal man, the Protestant position. You can't, you can't. People write to me and they say, well, you can use this method and you can use that method. I'm like, give us the best method. Give us the best argument.

Because I could see someone saying what you're referring to is solo scriptura, not solo scriptura. And you have to read it in light of the tradition. You have to read it in the. That's your opinion. That's my response when people say to me, oh, it's so it's, you know, I believe in prima scriptura, not sola scriptura, whatever.� I'm like, that's you, okay? That's your view. What you're saying is my methodology is such and such.

But whose authority is behind your methodology? It's you saying that. Is there a church council that endorses your idea of prima scriptura, whatever that means in your context. And even if there were, for you to agree with it is only to say that your interpretation of scripture matches what this council said. So that's why I accept the council. Right, yeah, not because the council has authority, but because- It lines up with what the Bible says as I interpret it. As I interpret it. You're still ending up as your own arbiter.

And folks say, you know, well, you know, we all have to make our decisions and we all have to, you know, make our own choice, and so there's a sense in which I and you have chosen to submit to the Catholic Church. And that is true, you know, so we all make a decision about our own life fate, you know. But it truly is different, and that's why the Roman Catholic Church does not have a tendency to split up into 50 million little groups, okay? And I saw this even within my lifetime, like every few years there was a schism off of our denomination, you know? And it's just not that case as a Catholic, because as a Catholic you truly have religious trust that the Church's Magisterium is smarter than you. And even

when the Church's magisterium makes a decision that you're not comfortable with and you don't agree with, you submit to it. And I truly believe that sometimes God sends us councils or popes that we're not comfortable with to test our faith. Because if councils and popes only ever did things that at least on the surface agreed with us or what our inclinations and our preferences were like, then we would never have to make that act of faith in the Holy Spirit working through the church. So sometimes we are given troublesome teachings. I trust in faith that they're all, you know, ultimately will be, you know, verified as Orthodox and so on.

That's an act of faith. But sometimes we're given teachings that appear at the time, at that time in history and that time in our culture, to challenge us, and that's to test, are you really a Catholic? You know, are you going to give religious submission of your intellect to the Holy Spirit guiding the church, or are you going to have this Protestant perspective that only one agrees with my predilection? And so the act that I made to come into the church was to submit my intellect to the church. And I had to do that on the issues of Mary and the papacy, because I didn't see my way clear fully to understand those

doctrines before I became Catholic. I became convinced of the real presence, and then knowing that the real presence was calling me into the Catholic Church, I made an act of faith, and I said, Lord, I don't understand the papacy fully, don't understand the Marian doctrines fully, I'm just going to trust that your church knows better than me. And I submitted my intellect and I entered in and then it was faith seeking understanding. Sometimes God asks you to make the act of faith first and then the understanding comes.

That's good. I'm glad you're saying this because I've had a lot of people who watch this show frequently. They'll write to me and say, I wanna be Catholic, but I feel like I'd be a hypocrite if I joined because I don't know how to accept the Immaculate Conception or something else. What would your advice to them be?

Well, I would say, look, what are you convinced of? Are you not convinced of the real presence? I mean, to me, that's like locked down, you know, from scripture and from the early fathers. I think we can verify every way from Sunday that the authentic Christian, that the authentic teaching of the Christian faith is that the the Eucharist is the real presence of Christ. And if you're convinced of that, then you've got to become Catholic, because we're the only ones that have stayed true to that doctrine. Maybe Orthodox. Not maybe, they definitely have. Yeah, you could argue that. But, you know, okay, Orthodox is a different question. Let's set that aside.

That would be a different apologetic if we're dealing with it. But if it's Protestant versus Catholic, then you gotta become Catholic, as those are your two choices for the sake of the Eucharist, and that's what I did. And then, yes, I do recommend to people, look, make the Augustinian move, face seeking understanding, make an act of trust. Why would you expect it to be the case that God's Holy Church, which is guided inerrantly by the Holy Spirit, would just happen to always agree with your opinions such that when you encounter God's Holy Church is like, oh, what do you know? God's true church completely agrees with me. You know? And I thought, I thought that's how I thought it

was like, it's unlikely that I would be raised outside the church and then I would just discover that the true church taught nothing that was challenging to me. I thought it was probably pretty likely that when I discover the true church, it probably teaches some things that I find challenging. And so I made the submission of intellect. But then once you start receiving the sacraments, things start to make sense. And things that you didn't believe or you found difficult after you start receiving the graces of the sacraments, it's like, oh yeah, that does make sense. And I see why they believe that.

I didn't believe the tradition, you know, that our Lord passed through the womb of the mother, like light through glass. I thought, oh, that's just a pious thing. But that's how he rose from the dead. That's how he walked through the wall. Right. And there's all this stuff in the Gospel of John that the tomb was a womb. There's all this womb.

Wow, I had no idea. We can't do it now, but I do this in a talk. Yeah, we can do like an hour long talk where the Holy Sepulcher was the womb of mother earth. And he passes right through, the angel doesn't come down to roll away the stone so he can get out. He's already left.

He, am I not right? He just- I mean, I'm sure you are, but tell me why. Yeah, well, because he doesn't, because when he rolls away the stone, the tomb is already empty. Okay, he rolls away the stone so that the women can get in and see that it's empty.

Oh my gosh, I've never thought of that before. So he just passed through the walls of the Holy Sepulcher the same way he passes through the walls of the upper room. That would have been funny if Christ was like, ah, little help here. Yeah, right. The angel has to roll. I've resurrected, but yeah. It's hard to knock on this thing and be heard.

Michael, I can't get that stone off, you know. Wow. He didn't have to do that. He just passed through, just like he passed through the burial cloths, because the burial cloths are just laying there. Nicodemus used 100 pounds of myrrh and atlos to embalm his body. All that stuff dries and it's like a cocoon. You're all cocooned up. You can't get out of that even if you were alive.

And they just see the empty cocoon sitting there when Peter and John run into the tomb. That's why John believes because he's just looking at this like mummy shaped wrapping and no Jesus inside. Like he'd been vacuumed out or just passed through. And that's what he did. He passed through it, you know, and I think left his image on the shroud, which is over the whole cabang. Have you seen my episode on that? No, I haven't. I got to see that. You do actually. Yeah, I'm sure I do.

It's probably had about 2.5 million views. Yeah. Over three hours. I don't know anyone who knows more about the shroud than it was father Andrew Dalton. Oh yeah. Oh, absolutely. He knows it's incredible. During that episode, I knew that people would convert and we actually paused and offered a prayer for those people. And you should go check the comments. There's multiple people who said they've converted to Christianity. Just from hearing this account. Glory to Jesus Christ. You know, when I was a Protestant and about 12 years old living in Connecticut

at New Line of Groton sub-bases down there, the shroud came through to, I believe, Groton, which is a little Connecticut city across the river from us. And they did like a week long symposium and all like the synodologists that, you know, had spent their lives working on the scroll were there and they were presenting these technical presentations as well as popular ones.

And it just blew everybody away. And like all the Christians, Catholic, and Protestant from the whole region in southeast Connecticut and as far away as Boston and stuff like that, we're driving down and it was just amazing. And I was, that whole experience totally convinced me. So I've always been a believer in the shroud long before I came into the church.

And people don't, you know, people just didn't know. I would talk to me like, oh, I don't believe in the shroud. I'm like, have you actually looked at it? Like, this stuff is mind blowing. Well, it's because of the fake news that came out from, was it Time? What about the dating issue? Yeah, I forget who it was,

but the same people who cast shadow on it said that they were wrong. I think the same publication issued a retraction. A retraction on it. Of course, nobody came to battle. Yeah, yeah, that's unfortunate. It's pretty wild. I really would encourage everybody watching this right now. And you go watch my interview with Father Andrew Dalton on the Shroud of Turin,

because it is an absolute game changer. It was sensational. Mm hmm. Yeah. What a gift. Sometimes I'll do these episodes. I've done some with you where I think if that's all I ever did, you know, I've been doing this for almost 10 years points now. Like if just that one episode that'll do. Yeah, that'll do. So true. Praise God. Some of my did, you know, I've been doing this for almost 10 years pints now Like if just that one episode that'll do yeah, that'll do so true. Praise God some of my books, you know I'm so grateful for you as we as we wrap up. Yeah, please tell people about these sure sure. So yeah folks

Check this out Bible basics for Catholics Great way to get started in reading the Bible and understand the Bible and then I have sequels I would recommend this one next, which is New Testament Basics. It goes into greater depth just on the New Testament. And then Psalm Basics, which after the New Testament probably the most important part of the Bible is the Psalms. And then more recently I did Love Basics, which follows the theme of marriage through Scripture, Genesis through Revelation. I thought it would help people due to the confusion about marriage in our culture,

to help people realize that it's not a human invention, it's not a human creation, it's actually central to God's path of salvation, literally from the Garden of Eden to the New Jerusalem, from Genesis 1 and 2 to Revelation 21 and 22, and all along the way, you know, marriage is right at the center of what God's doing with the human family. And it's always this icon of his relationship with his people. So anyway, I thought that would be helpful. And this behemoth, Catholic Indirection to the Old Testament,

this is like everything you want to know about the Old Testament We're afraid to ask if you're if you're doing the father Mike Schmitz Bible in a year It's a good companion volume to doing that. Well, it's funny you say it's a behemoth, but after seeing the Ignatius study Are you doing one of the New Testament sir? This is you and Brant Petrie. What a man Yeah, Brant's done with his side of the New Testament thing and I'm going through Brant's Chapters and and and doing like copy editing and cleanup stuff. I'm I'm batting cleanup For dr. Petrie and his stuff is amazing. People are gonna

love the New Testament when it comes out. I'm working hard to get it out. So grateful for you and all that you've done. Thanks for coming on the show today. Yeah, absolutely. It's been wonderful. Boom!