Pints With Aquinas - Your Protestant Objections ANSWERED (Dr. John Bergsma) | Ep. 583

Episode Date: June 15, 2026

Biblical Scholar, Dr. John Bergsma, a former Protestant pastor who converted to Catholicism, tackles the most common Protestant objections to the Catholic faith from confession and icon veneration to sola scriptura, papal infallibility, and the development of doctrine, using Scripture, early Church history, and his own conversion story. Ep. 583 - - - 📚 Resources Mentioned: The Gospel of John with Dr. John Bergsma: https://StPaulCenter.com/pints Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: https://stpaulcenter.com/store/ignatius-catholic-study-bible-old-and-new-testaments Dr. Bergsma Bio: https://www.johnbergsma.com/biography Theotokos Rosaries: https://dwplus.shop/TheotokosRosaries - - - Today’s Sponsors: Catholic Match: Download the app or head to https://CatholicMatch.com and find your forever. PreBorn: Make a difference for generations to come. Donate securely online at https://preborn.com/PINTS or dial #250 keyword 'BABY' Charity Mobile: Visit https://charitymobile.com/MATTFRADD to get started. Free Phone offer with code MATTFRADD  Hallow: Deepen your personal relationship with God today. Visit https://hallow.com/MattFradd to get 3 months free.  St. Paul Center:  Start your 30-day free trial today at https://StPaulCenter.com/pints - - - Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: ⁠⁠https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe⁠⁠ 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. - - - 📕 Get my newest book, Jesus Our Refuge, here: https://a.co/d/bDU0xLb 🍺 Want to Support Pints With Aquinas? 🍺 Get episodes a week early and join exclusive live streams with me! Become an annual supporter at 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://mattfradd.locals.com/support⁠⁠⁠⁠ - - - 💻 Follow Me on Social Media: 📌 Facebook: https://facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/mattfradd 𝕏 Twitter/X: ⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/Pints_W_Aquinas⁠⁠⁠ 🎵 TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠https://tiktok.com/@pintswithaquinas⁠⁠⁠ 📚 PWA Merch – ⁠⁠⁠https://dwplus.shop/MattFraddMerch⁠⁠ 👕 Grab your favorite PWA gear here: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com - - - Privacy Policy: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.dailywire.com/privacy⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When I ask you, why should I trust the church, you appeal to Scripture. And when I say, why trust Scripture, you appeal to the church. You seem to be assuming the Protestant might say that tradition is different to the Word of God. Why think that? Because Second Lesson 215 says by word of mouth. I think that wasn't eventually written down in what we have. So you take the position that everything that was passed down by word of mouth was written down. Let's talk about icon veneration.

People have a problem with that because it seems like idolatry. There's a big difference between kissing a photo of my wife and then having a carved image that I can pray to. You're asking for the prayers of the saint who's portrayed. I mean, that's semantics, isn't it? No, it's not semantics. Prayer means to ask in a sense. Not everything that Muslims believe about God is wrong. Is it possible to have such a perverted notion of God that we can no longer say you believe in God?

The immaculate conception of Mary seems like you have to do a lot of theological gymnastics to get to that belief. Actually, the Matic conception is one of the simplest of doctrines. She was normal. The rest of us are abnormal. For her, it was the way it was supposed to be. There we go. Look at this. Are those lit?

Not yet. I have to cut them, light them. Okay. You got to tell me what to do because I'm a newbie with cigars. Dr. Bergsma. Matt Fran. The Bergenator. Birkenade.

Iceberg. I don't know. What kind of nicknames do you? You skip you. Burger Meister. Really? No. Well, thank you for coming back on. Dr. B. That's what they call me, Dr. B. I always love talking to you. Yeah. Likewise. Yeah. And we've got some cigars here. You said you've never had a cigar before. No, I didn't say that. I said, I'm a newbie. I've had two cigars in my life. So I'll follow your lead and you can disciple me in the way of the cigar. I think I got too excited when you said, yeah, I don't mind. I always like to ask my guest, right? I don't want them to. Right. Mm. Just the best. Yeah.

So are these, tell me about these cigars. All right. That sounds like a softball because these are daily wire cigars. Okay. These are Michael Knowles' Mayflowers. This is his Connecticut. So it's, does it have a real Connecticut rapper?

Yeah. That's so cool. I used to live in Connecticut. And that was like a matter of state pride. Okay. That we grew these, yeah, the supremely high quality, you know,

cigar rapper. I think Connecticut, or Maduro or whatever refers to how long they have been, what's the word? Aged? Kind of. Yeah, fermented. Fermented. Yeah.

Yeah. So I went on YouTube recently in the community section and I said, what is your biggest objection? If you're a Protestant, what is your biggest objection to Catholicism? Because I know I say this a lot and I know it can sound a little condescending, but I actually like love Protestants. Right. And more than love, like and admire, not all of them, just like not all Catholics are worthy of admiration. Right. But I, you know, I've had different Protestants on my show in the past and they'll just casually tell me how they're leading their 10 year old in a Bible

study of Acts before bed. And I'm like, oh, you know, so there's so much, I think, we can learn from our Protestants, just how they live their faith today. And I know you used to be a Yes, absolutely. I used to be a Protestant. I was a Dutch Calvinist, kind of Presbyterians with wooden shoes and wimel cookies. Nice. Yeah, and I appreciate it a lot. It is partial Christianity, but... Partial Christianity? Partial Christianity. It had some of the sacraments, and it had the written word of God, or at least most of the written word of God, did have a genuine relationship to Jesus. Yeah. So there's a lot of things that I appreciated about Protestantism, obviously.

And actually, the biblical principles of the kind of Protestantism that I was raised in led me inevitably into the Catholic Church. So you can make a strong case for the Catholic faith based on the principles of a high view of scripture. and a docility to the Word of God that you find among evangelical prostans. So my evangelical convictions kind of eventually drove me into the Catholic Church to find fulfillment of them there. What was it like the... I don't think we give converts enough credit. Like we talk to people like, just convert, as if that's not the most distilled.

stabilizing thing they could possibly go through, or one of the most destabilizing? What was it like at the beginning where you thought, uh-oh, this might, this might actually happen? Like, I'm, this could, and then, does that make sense? Oh, yeah, 100%. Yeah, I was, I had a Catholic friend, Michael, Michael Dauphiney at the University of Notre Dame,

who was a couple years ahead of me in the theology department. And we were, we were getting together to talk about, you know, Catholic versus Protestant theology. And he was making a lot of headway because when I would object to the Catholic faith, he responded a way that I initially felt was extremely unfair. Yeah? He quoted scripture.

Okay. And I was like, you can't do that. Oh, cool. You can't, you can't quote scripture to defend the Catholic faith. Like, who does that? That's against the rules, you know. I'm the Protestant, you're the Catholic. I quote scripture.

You got to quote the books. Get with the program. Yeah, you know. But he broke the rules. he violated the protocol and he would quote from scripture to defend Catholic teaching. And that blew me away because I'd never met a Catholic who could defend their faith from scripture before. So I remember at one time getting close and I was like the Catholic face was starting to make head with me.

And then a friend of his brought over a child's like catechism book, picture book for us. And this children's catechism was trying to explain Mary as co-mediatrics to children. And it had this illustration with like the love of Jesus pouring out from his sacred heart on the cross. And it was like making this beam of flaming love down to the heart of Mary. And her emaculate heart was inflamed. And then it was flowing from her heart down towards our heart. So I'm like, ah, this is weird, you know, this is, this is marialetry. This is, you know, an additional redeeming person.

You know, they're making Mary into a fourth person of the Trinity. And so I remember getting really scared and like, oh, my gosh, I got to stop this Catholic stuff. I got to back up. This is getting bizarre, you know. And so I backed up for about a week. And then after a week, just the beauty of it started drawing me again. I'm like, okay, you know. I can't deny the beauty of this.

And so I went back and I started, you know, talking again with Michael and kind of we, we proceeded again. So I am really excited to tell you that I have partnered with Theotokos Rosaries. These are, without a doubt, the most beautiful rosaries I have ever seen in my life. If you're looking for a beautiful rosary that's also like an heirloom, something that you could have for life, Check this out. Go to dailywire.com slash shop and pick up one of these. This is more of the masculine one. This one, they based on St. Peter's Basilica.

So it has real stone beads and Italian olive wood. This one is inspired by Notre Dame in Lyon, France. Go to dailywire.com slash shop to pick one up today. And thank you to Theotokos Rosaries for partnering with us. I've said many times when I finally. When I finally got into reading the Apostolic Fathers and read the line from Ignatius of Antioch, where he says, stay away from anyone who refuses to confess the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, which flesh suffered for our sins and which flesh the father in his goodness raised up.

Kept reading that line over and over. That's a very, very early testimony to the real presence from a church father who was a disciple of the apostle John. And I was so convicted by that. I was like, oh, gosh, you know, the real presence is the original teaching. Ignatius must have got it from the Apostle John. If you got it from the Apostle John, then this is what John 6 means. If this is what John 6 means, then I'm faced with the testimony, both of sacred scripture and of early martyrs and those who knew the apostles.

How am I going to withstand the testimony of Scripture? and the early martyrs and contraband them. And if I'm not going to do that, then that means I've got to become Catholic because only the Catholics have stayed true to the teaching of the real presence. And the Orthodox? Yeah.

And some Protestants? The Orthodox, yeah. I don't know, it's squishy, I think, even among the high Protestants. But you could say the Orthodox. The Orthodox were off the table for me as an option because this autocephalous nationalist churches, to me that was just perpetuating Babylon, Babel, I should say.

And I could see that, no, the church should be universal, you know, not in national ethnic groups. So they were kind of off the table. So I was like, no, I need to become Catholic. And then I've said this many times, but I closed my eyes and I had this mental image of the Pope coming at me, John Paul II, dressed as Darth Vader going,

oh, John, I am your father. I just like, oh, no, this can I be. I felt like Luke, like, I'm going to drop from the antenna or whatever it is that I'm hanging on and just die, you know. I'd rather commit suicide than be reconciled. And the next day I went out, and I had decided in my heart that I was going to become Catholic at that point.

And Michael was asking me, well you know what did you think about the stuff I gave you to read what do you think about Ignatius of Anniac do you have any objections and I'm like no actually I don't I think I'm going to have to become Catholic but the way I phrased it was I think I'm going to have to go over to the dark side you know because for Protestants you know coming back to the Catholic Church you feel like you're capitulating to the evil empire and admitting that the rebellion was wrong and there there are a lot of analogies there but of course it's not the evil empire it's it's the good empire who was most angry or disappointed in you when you made that decision?

Two persons, my wife's grandfather and my closest brother. And how do they express that disappointment and how did you handle it personally? So I called it my brother because we had decided to become Catholic. And he called us up and invited us to spend Christmas at his house. Well, we realized that as catechumans now, we were going to have to go to Mass. And that we were going to have to attend Mass while we were staying with him over those days. So I called it my brother to explain the situation to kind of prep him for the fact that this is going to happen One of many tense conversations with my brother over the years we've had a lot of drama in the past 50 years

Anyway, so I called it my brother and I said Tim we're we're going to become Catholic And he said what? And I said Tim we're becoming Catholic and then there were silence at the other end of the phone. And after, it was like painful. I don't know how long it was. 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds. Finally, I said, is that okay with you? And he said, what?

Okay? Sure. Catholic, Buddhist, Muslim, whatever. Like, okay, this is not going well. So, anyway. Was he blindsided by this? Or did he see that you were gravitating towards the Catholic Church?

I think he was blindsided. I don't think that I'd give an indication to anybody that we were on this journey. All right. And what about your wife's father? Grandfather. Grandfather. Yeah, yeah. He found out through the grapevine because we wanted to see him for Thanksgiving.

Were you an employed Protestant pastor? No, I was in graduate school at a Catholic university at Notre Dame. So when were you a pastor then? So I was for the roughly five years prior to entering my doctoral program. Oh, I see. Yeah. I hear seminary or college and I just thought you were much younger, but I see. Yeah, yeah.

So, yeah, so we went over to her grandparents' house for Thanksgiving, the Thanksgiving following our entrance into the church. And so we had been Catholic for a number of months, but had not seen them face to face. And I remember walking up to the door of my wife's grandparents' home. and my grandfather in law, you know, coming to the door and opening the door quickly and say, John, you're leading your family to hell. Oh. It's like, oh.

And he meant it. He wasn't joking. No, he wasn't joking. He was angry. He meant it, he meant it, you know. But I appreciate that, Matt, because he was sincere. He was sincere. This is what he truly believed.

And he didn't soft pedal. And he was concerned about my salvation. Yeah. I took that better than people who were indifferent because it's not something to be indifferent about. You should be upset if somebody becomes Catholic and you think it's a false religion, you know? You should try to give them a fraternal correction. Was he open to conversation or not really? Well, yeah, we got into it, though.

And then I started quoting scripture that defended Catholic truth. And once he saw that there were some scriptures that supported different Catholic beliefs, he kind of got a little bit unsettled. And then he didn't want to talk about it anymore. And then he dropped it. Okay. So we didn't have a lengthy conversation. What's your advice to someone watching this who knows they have to become Catholic, but they're terrified of disappointing the people they love most?

Like, how did you deal with it? How should they? That's very painful. I would say that this is the manifestation of Jesus' cross in your life right now. That you're going to have to go through a kind of personal passion. where, like many of the saints, like Abraham had to detach himself from Isaac and make a pure offering. And you're going to have to make an offering of your family relationships. But I would also say it is highly likely that God will give that back to you.

And that's what it happened. I had to face the possibility of severing all of my family relationships and that maybe they would never recover. Not to mention your career trajectory. Right. Yeah, which is completely changed. Although I won't claim to have it as bad as those who were sitting pastors when they converted. You know, at least I was in grad school and had a few years to kind of recalculate. But I would say that except this dark night, accept the passion that the Lord is giving you,

be detached from those relationships, but have hope. because it gets better on the other side. And you may be overjoyed to see what God does on the other side of the suffering. Okay. All right. Well, as I said, on YouTube in the community section, a few weeks back, I asked them, what is your biggest objection to the Catholic faith?

We have 10. These are real objections that we really received, and these were the ones that were the most liked, the most popular. And so I wanted to share them with you today. But before we do, do you want me to teach you how to light that cigar? Yeah. All right, we'll put it in your mouth.

Okay. And then you just want to press this. Okay. And not too close because you don't want to like blow it up, but. I'll tell you when to stop. Here we go. Yeah, there's that path. You got it.

That's it. Keep going. You want to get a nice red circumference. And then like twist it around. You know what I mean? Twist the cigar the other way. Yeah, like that. With the flame.

Just like that and then go again. Yeah, you could have left it going. And yeah, you want to just get that absolute. Yeah, that does, that's good. That should be all right. All right. But you don't want to get sick either because you can get sick off cigars. So if you're not used to them, just go easy.

I don't want you throwing up halfway through the show. Yeah, that would be interesting. Yeah. All right. Let's just jump into it. Raddy C says, my main objection is the idea that I need to confess sins to a priest or ask for a priest or saints for that matter to pray to God in my stead. All right. So there's two objections there, right?

Multiple places in the Bible, Jesus flat out says, take your prayers straight to God. And then he says quite humbly, which is uncommon for a comment section, entirely possible there's something I misunderstood for the record. So God bless him for that. Yeah, absolutely. So there's so many different elements of that, Matt. First of all, it is true that we can pray directly to God and Catholics do pray directly to God. And we can ask God to forgive our sins. And we do like on a daily basis.

Like that's part of my prayer. I do. I break my daily what we call mental prayer. of the traditional terminology of kind of like interior conversation prayer in the Catholic traditions. You generally call mental prayer because it's kind of as opposed to vocal prayer. And I usually pray adoration, confession, Thanksgiving, and supplication. I kind of break my prayer into those four sections. So I'll spend a few minutes every day just praying in confession, you know,

and confessing to God my failings and so on. And on a weekly basis, I'll bring those to the priest. But as Catholics, we're only required to confess mortal sin, which is grave sin. And the distinction between mortal sin and venial sin or deadly sin and non-deadly sin is actually out of the epistles of John, specifically in 1 John, where he talks about a sin that leads to death. So this is a biblical distinction between sins that are death-dealing and sins that are not. It comes straight out of the Bible. So sins that are death dealing, we do need to go to a priest because at the end of John, we see in John 20, 22 and 23, we see our Lord after his resurrection, breathing on the apostles and saying to them.

Which is already striking because there's only one other place I know of in scripture that God breathed on anyone. Yeah. Maybe there's more. Which is Adam. Yeah. Yeah. Breathe into his nostrils, the breath of life. making him the first man, but also the first priest, as it were,

and he's a priest of all humanity in the Garden of Eden. And it's a priestly thing that's happening in John 20. They are a kind of race of new atoms. There is that motif, beginning of a new humanity. But it says, when he breathed on them and said to them, receive the Holy Spirit, if you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven. If you retain the sins of any, they are retained.

So immediately after his resurrection, Jesus confers on the, or shares with the apostles through the gift of the Holy Spirit, his own priesthood. Because the right and the power to administer the forgiveness of sins belonged to the priests in the Old Testament. People overlook this, but if you look in Leviticus 5, you'll find that if you sinned under the old covenant, you had to confess your sin. and people don't get the implications of that because the text is not explicit about to whom do you confess your wife, your neighbor, your best friend? No, in context in Leviticus 5, the one to whom you have to confess that is the priest. You have to go to the sanctuary, bring the animal, and you've got to tell the priest what it is that you did. Why? Why? Because the priest was the one who was charged with making sure that the ritual was properly performed and that you, you've got to tell the priest. You you had brought the animal that corresponded to the gravity of your sin. You know how this works like more serious sins required, you know, more expensive animals and so on. So, you know, if you look at the whole pattern in Leviticus 5, if you send under the Old Covenant, you had to go to the priest.

The priest would ensure that you were bringing the right animal, et cetera, and then he would offer it. And then after he had offered the sacrifice, then you were forgiven. So the administration of forgiveness of sins was a priestly responsibility under the old covenant. Our Lord, of course, is our high priest. He has that ability to forgive or decide not to, to retain sin, depending on his judgment about our contrition, our degree of repentance. But what we find here in John 20, 22, and 23 is Jesus sharing his priesthood, with the apostles who are the fountainhead of those in holy orders. Then later in Acts and so on will see the apostles appointing men to represent them

geographically or temporally when they cannot be there personally. And those are the Episcopoi and the Presbyteroy, which we come to call the bishops and the priests, the men in holy orders who will have this. And so, you know, I was shocked. I read this verse all the time as a Protestant, and the Calvinist interpretation was, if you forgive the sins of any of their forgiven, if you retain the sins of any of they are retained, Calvin said, oh, this is just through the preaching of the gospel.

Right. So the apostles are going to preach, and those who accept the preaching of the gospel are going to have their sins forgiven, and those who reject the preaching of the gospel are going to have it retained. But that's isogesis, Matt. There's nothing about preaching in here. The plain sense of the text implies a decision. If you forgive, okay, that's like your decision to forgive, the sins of any of they are forgiven. If you retain, they are retained.

And if you get into the Judaism of this or the background in Judaism, you find out that this statement is related to binding and loosing that shows up in Matthew 16, 18, 19, and Matthew 18, 18, whatever you bind, whatever you loose. So binding and loosing was related to the forgiveness or the retention of sins, as well as other things like the interpretation of scripture but then i'll tell you matt um for this for this uh objector who and like you i commend their honesty is wondering like why do i have to confess to a priest there's an even more direct passage um in um james five yeah that i want to talk about and uh i have a the whole talk that often share at parishes on on how i you know

encountered the sacrament of reconciliation. But I was preaching through James as a young pastor in my 20s, and I was doing a sermon on each of his five chapters. And it was going well. I got through one, two, three, four, okay. And then I got to five. And in five, uh, 14, it says, is any among you sick?

Let him call for the elders. Okay. And the word in Greek is presbuteroy, from which we get priests. of the church and let them pray over him, anointing with oil in the name of the Lord. Now look at this, our objected to like prayers of other Christians, right?

But here, this is in Holy Scripture, and it's saying, if you're sick, call the elders of the church, the presbyters of the church, and have them pray over you. So, and this is one of many exhortations to have others pray, okay? for you and to pray for each other. You know, St. Paul in numerous occasions,

encourages the Christians to pray for him. Like St. Paul will ask for prayer from other Christians, and he'll encourage Christians to pray for each other. But anyway, okay, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord, and the prayer of faith will save the sick man. This is the early form of anointing of the sick. Okay.

And the Lord will raise him up, and if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. And to this day, the anointing of the sick is usually conjoined with the sacrament of reconciliation if the person's coherent and lucid and so on and so here again we see this connection between the ministry of the presbyters who are appointed by the uh originally appointed by the apostles okay and the forgiveness of sins and then it goes on to say in verse 16 therefore confess your sins to one another and pray for one another So we are commanded in Holy Scripture to pray for one another.

So there should be no objection to seeking the prayers of other Christians. And there should be no objections to seeking the prayers of Christians who have gone on to be with the Lord. And people say, oh, that's the prayers of the dead. They're not dead. They're more alive than you and I are. They're in God's presence, you know. those saints whose bodies have died but our souls are enjoying god's presence even now they're enjoying a kind of life that makes our life down here pale by comparison so the church has always out of as as evidence and

manifestation of our confidence in eternal life and in the and in the blessed state state of the holy ones who have gone before us into the next life, we have always asked for their prayers and their intercessions. So we pray, we ask for the prayers of, you know, saints who are alive in the body, and we ask for the prayers of saints who are with the Lord in heaven. But we're commanded to pray for one another and also, but get this, confess your sins to one another. Now, that's awkward, huh? And the reason why this, you know, I want to talk about this, Matt, was I was a young past, in a downtown church. I had carte blanche to do whatever I wanted.

I had very little supervision. And I was trying to be a New Testament church and just read the New Testament and apply it directly. And I got to this, I was doing well all the way through James up to this point. I had no problem applying everything directly up to this point. But I was preparing my sermon on James 5. I hit that passage about confessor's sins to one other. and I thought to myself, what am I going to tell my congregation?

Are we going to pass a mic in the Sunday morning service to say, it's confession of sins time, you know? Who's going to be first? Yeah, but in fairness, I don't think any Protestant would ever think that that's what it has to mean. Okay. Why can't it simply mean that you should confess your sins to me as your brother Christian? Okay. I should confess my sins to you so that I'm not living in the darkness and that these sins don't,

uh, metastatize, metastasize. Okay. Right. Yeah, yeah. But, uh, it doesn't say anything about a priest. Right. Um, yeah, well, we'll come to that. Um, but, uh, that's true. But how do you implement this when you're a pastor of a congregation? How do you set up to do this regularly? I don't know if you need to. I think you could read that and just say, what, what Paul, Paul, what James, uh, is talking about is that we don't live lives of duplicity and that when we sin, we should humbly acknowledge this sin before a trusted Christian brother or sister and maybe ask for their prayers and ask for their advice. Why can't that be a decent conversation? That is a reasonable pastoral, you know, uh, uh, application of this passage. Uh, but does that happen? Um,

I think so. Uh, I think of accountability groups and men. You can, you can have these, yes, but those are, those are difficult to implement. And they pose many, you know, dangers. You know, you have groups of untrained people and they're confessing their sins to one another and you have the danger of people giving bad advice or being scandalized or lack of confidentiality. So, yeah, you know, there's high accountability groups

where maybe this could be implemented. But my point, Matt, was in my church experience, there was really no way to pull this off with a congregation. Yeah, I see what you mean. You're trying to do it within a church context. Right. I'm interpreting this as an individual context. Right.

In other words, I read this, I should confess this to my friend. And I suppose what you would say is it's within the context of calling the elders in to pray, calling the priests in to pray over me. Right. And is that why you would assume this is within a... I do agree with that. But where I'm going with this is there is there is, is no kind of regular, institutional, commonly understood, customary way of doing this within

evangelical Protestantism. What have you seen? Like, how have you seen this try to be implemented? Not. You haven't at all, huh? It generally hasn't been. Except in like maybe, you know, 12-step groups or high-intimacy groups like that. or maybe with a disciple maker.

Have you ever seen the pastor try to be the one to receive the sins of the congregation, not in the sense that he would personally absolve them? But that's what got to me was that I began to reflect on this, and I realized, oh, this is where Catholic confession comes in. Because what Catholics do is go to their pastor. That's how I viewed it as an outsider. Okay. That, oh, this is a great practice within Catholicism.

Catholicism has kind of a customary, institutional, regularized, you know, as it were comfortable, not exactly comfortable, but, you know, a way of living this out that works and that is regular and doesn't require some kind of contrived, you know, institution of a new practice within a congregation. And so, you know, I looked at this and I thought, oh, you know, Catholics can just go to their pastor and they confess in a situation of confidentiality and they get advice from him. And so all of the pitfalls that I could think of from trying to implement this in a regular congregation were avoided by the Catholic practice of confession. So I actually grew to admire the Catholic practice of confession as a way of carrying out what what James is commanding us to do. Confess your sins to one another. I thought that sounded to me like public confession, you know, which has a lot of dangers to it. Which was in fact how the church practiced confession, right? Right.

And it has. You're right, right. So. And even now under, in extreme circumstances, that could. Right. That could be the case. You know, if you are a practicing Catholic, dating, they tell me, I don't know, it's been 20 years, can feel a bit like wandering in the desert a bit. You meet someone, things seem promising, and then you find out you're not actually on the same page when it comes to the Catholic faith, and that obviously matters.

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environment. So anyway, I have another objection. Okay. Why wouldn't, it seems like if what he meant, what James meant was confess your sins to the elders, he would say that. I mean, how many elders were in every congregation during the time of this writing? One, two, eight, 20? Yeah, we don't know. If there's one, then it would seem strange to say confess your sins to another if he meant confess your sins to the priest or the elder. Yeah. Well, I don't think in verse 16 he's necessarily saying that the priest is the only one that one can confess to.

So I don't see like the, you know, all the dimensions of the sacrament reconciliation being taught here. Okay. But what I do see is the scripture is commanding us to confess our sins to other believers. and if you're not going to make regular use of the Sacrament of Reconciliation in order to carry that out, which is a safe, reliable, customary way that we have to do it within the Catholic Church, what are you going to substitute in its place?

I see. And I think for most Christians who are outside the Catholic Church, they do not have relationships of a level of trust where they are comfortable going and bearing their soul. maybe some very devout evangelicals do have like accountability partners, but that's unusual. It takes a long time to develop those kinds of relationships. And even there, there's sometimes hesitancy to be forthright. Whereas I had the experience, very dramatic experience for me, at least, of, for example, going to Rome in 2007 after I had been a Catholic for only six years. and going to St. Peter's Basilica,

and they had all these priests available for confession, and I was able to walk right up to a confessional that had the listing of the languages that the priest spoke and kneel down and begin talking to this priest who I did not know from Adam, who was a complete stranger, and within seconds I was bearing my soul to this other man, and he was reaching out to me in love and being my spiritual father,

and absolving my sins, obviously, but also giving me pastoral counsel that was laser-focused on what I needed most because I had been able to, within seconds, get right to the spiritual issues that I was battling with because we have this custom, this form, this institution, this right within the Catholic faith. And within minutes, I was parting from this man

that was a complete stranger to me, and yet in that moment of intimacy within the Sacrament of Reconciliation, so quickly we got right to the heart of what I needed to do, what I needed to change, how I needed to interact with God, was able to bear my soul,

we didn't have to spend months developing an accountability relationship or anything like this. And I went away thinking, wow, this is one of the beauties of the Sacrament of Reconciliation. It gives us a form and a practice

and a custom to carry out the confessing of sins to one another, that is so pasturally effective. And yeah, just from a, from a perspective of pastoral utility, it's just a, it's a brilliant practice. Yeah, it is. And I really appreciate you saying that that this verse isn't necessarily meant to explicate everything about confession. That is a frustration of mine when Catholics will find a verse and they'll try to make it explain exactly what the church teaches. And I think you're kind of making your case weaker by doing that. You could acknowledge that some evidence towards it without it having to be everything for it. And if you would just admit that, then it's like, okay, well, then there's some evidence for it, you know? And of course, we all do it. Right. We all do it.

But I suppose, yeah, so I'd like to think more about that. I guess within the context of calling the, it says elders, doesn't it? Right. Yeah, the Presbyteroy. Yeah, the elders. So they... And the elders doesn't just mean old people because we find out, for example, that Timothy is appointed as an elder, even though he's young.

So the elders was actually an office. And sometimes, you know, in the New Testament, frequently Episcopaus, from which we get bishop, is in that early stage, the Presbyteroy and the Episcopoi were virtually synonymous. you know, we come to say bishops and priests. But a little bit after the New Testament era, in the era of the early fathers, those roles become differentiated.

And then the chief presbyter in any area became designated as the Episcopause and, you know, had that kind of clarity of office. But yeah, anyway, I would say, the strongest case for confession to those in holy orders comes from, our Lord bestowing on the apostles the authority to forgive or retain sin after his resurrection and then that authority being passed on to the successors of the apostles.

I remember that verse was it John 20, 21? 22 and 23, I believe. John 20, 22 and 23. That's the sort of verse that I came across after my reversion to my Catholic faith. Right. And then I was confronted by a lot of well-meaning Protestants who told me, you know, I was wrong about the Eucharist. I was wrong about priests.

I was wrong about confession. I remember actually standing in my room, just reading the Bible as a newly converted Catholic and finding John 6 and being like, how is this in here? This is exactly what the Catholic Church teaches. Do Protestants not have this in their Bible? And that's a similar one where you're really like, whoa, I don't know how you could interpret that, at least prima facie differently. It's pretty clear.

Yeah, yeah. To say, for Christ to say to the apostles that you can retain some. someone's sin? That's power right there. It is. Yeah. Yeah, it's divine power being exercised by men. You know, they're really acting in Christ's place in persona Christi, we say. All right. Let me say, let me add offer, if you don't mind, something about prayers to the saints, right? Because you sort of said, the saints in heaven are more alive than we. And fair enough, the scripture says as much. But I think a Protestant might say, I agree with that. I just think that there's no biblical evidence that we ought to pray to the saints.

They might say there is biblical evidence that the saints in heaven pray for us, Revelation 5. Right. And that they're even offering our intentions. But that's very different to saying that we should explicitly call on them by name and ask them to pray for us. And sometimes the Protestant will say, wouldn't this have to make the saint omniscient? Or if not omniscient, just like this is, how many people are praying to this human in heaven, Mary, right now? And you expect me to believe that she's hearing all these prayers? Wouldn't you have to be Godlike in order to do that?

I think that's the problem a lot of Protestants have. Yeah, yeah. Well, the Holy Spirit is the answer to that. I mean, we, as 2nd Peter 1-4 says, we've become partakers in the divine nature. So the Holy Spirit makes up for the lax of our, you know, human limitations. And so the Saints in Heaven, you know, to use a poor analogy, and all analogies are how they're limitations, right? But my laptop doesn't have the computing power to do AI, right?

But my laptop is connected up to the web, and it can send stuff out and get messages back. So I think the Saints in Heaven are like laptops hooked up to the Wi-Fi of the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit is able to give them that processing, power, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to intercede and and to grant assistance and so on. This is, we're all webbed in, you know, the Holy Spirit is the internet for all Christians. We're all, we're all bound together by it. This is really helpful, because back in 1993, if you had have tried to explain to me a Tesla,

you know, I have a Tesla that drives me places and I have this thing called Spotify through which I can listen to literally any song in the world, you know, back. in the, well, maybe the late 90s, you had like the five-disc CD player that you could put into your car. But just trying to explain to me AI or how I could ask GROC something and she would know the answer, I would have said that's impossible. And so it's almost like we have to open our minds maybe a little more about the reality that we'll experience when in heaven. Yeah, I think so. That's good. Shall like, can I move on to that? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay, this is Fran Turner 6308 says, I get confused about the reformation.

Because there's conflicting stories and sources. I'd love to know exactly what happened and why it happened. I've been told that Catholics were burning people for wanting to make the Bible accessible to all, translating it into other languages. So I would love to talk to a Catholic theologian about this in depth. I wouldn't even call myself a Protestant or Catholic because I don't know enough. All I know is that Christ saved me and he is real. That's beautiful.

Lord of Jesus Christ. Yeah, yeah. Against humility being demonstrated on the internet is a very rare thing. So thank you for your beautiful question. I agree. That's a beautiful soul seeking for the truth in honesty and humility. And I just want to respect that. Yeah.

So the reformation was a very confusing time. And religious interests got tied up with political interests. And there were a lot of atrocities on both sides. And typically what happens, Matt, is we only hear about the atrocities that the other side to commit. So I grew up with like Fox's Book of Martyrs, you know, hearing about these terrible things that Catholics did, never heard about, you know, atrocities that Protestants committed,

you know, monks and nuns being slaughtered and things like this. So there's a lot of bad behavior to go around on both sides. I would say that in brief. Now, I'm not a church historian, so I can't go blow by blow through the Reformation and explain how, you know, it all unfolded. I can address, though, her question about folks being burned for translating the Bible. And I can affirm completely that nobody was ever burned just for translating the Bible. There were some individuals who were executed for heresy.

and some of those individuals did make or promote Bible translations, and typically the translations that they produced were strategically twisted to conflict with Catholic teaching or traditional Christian teaching. And so they had heretical translations of Scripture, but it was never the act of translation that was the issue. It was the other things that they were caught up in, rejecting the authority of the Pope, rejecting traditional Christian teaching,

other forms of heresy. It wasn't the act of translation, because there were translations in the vernacular that had been made and that were circulating before the Reformation. Luther was not the first one to translate the Bible into German, for example. One was made, I think it was in 1466. I want to say a Catholic German translation was made by a figure whose name starts with M. Medellin or something like this.

I'm slaughtering and I'm sure, but folks can quickly find that out. There were Italian translations made prior to the Reformation. There were partial English translations. But you've got to remember too, Matt, and all of us need to remember, the printing press was new. And prior to Gutenberg and the printing press, everything had to be copied out by hand. And most people were illiterate. Like we didn't have universal education.

So anybody who went into some kind of profession and needed to learn to read would need to learn to read Latin. Because every little principality or duchy all over Europe had their own. dialect and it was very difficult to understand each other across even you know small borders so the the only the only language in which there was a substantial body of literature to read was Latin you know if you learn to read your little dialect of German in the in the duchy where you're at that's great but there's hardly anything written in that got you so so there was a limited limited use four vernacular translations, because the idea was, well, if you can read, you're going to learn Latin.

And if you can read Latin, then you can just use the Vulgate. So that was a feeling. And if you wanted to communicate with the illiterate, then just have some educated person translate for them the Vulgate, because they're going to hear it orally anyway. But again, yeah, nobody was burned just for the act of translation. and, you know, both before and after the Reformation, vernacular, or we might say common language translations of the Bible were made by the church. And we should emphasize, too,

that the reason why the Vulgate is called the Vulgate was that when St. Jerome translated it at the end of the 300s and the beginning of the 400s, it was in the vulgar tongue of the people. Vulgar then didn't mean profane like it does nowadays, but just common. Like this was street, Latin. This was Latin as it was spoke on the street. And Jerome did this as a popular

translation of scripture so that the common people could read it in a language that they understood. And most of the traditional translations actually started out that way. You know, the Septuagint as well, the ancient Greek translation started out as a translation in the language of the day and then centuries rolled by and it became kind of an antiquated form of Greek. But so that just shows that the church can and did try to make, you know, translations that folks understood. Yeah. What do you say to this claim?

Because I've had a conversation with someone recently about this. You know, I might try to make the case for the Catholic faith. And it's almost like the person just sort of throws their hands up, no longer wants to deal with the technicalities, as if the technicalities themselves are peripheral. or that they somehow unnecessarily muddy the waters and they'll say something like, all I know is that Christ save me and that he's real. Right. And it's, it sounds virtuous because it sounds like I'm, I'm not claiming to be a biblical scholar.

I don't need any of that. All I need is Jesus. And it's like, okay, yes, but what has Jesus said that you need? Right. How do you respond to that kind of claim? Yeah, I get frustrated with that claim, Matt, because it, uh, it, doesn't respect all the things that are said in scripture. You know, if, if all I need is Jesus, and I just know that Jesus saved me, like, why do we have all this? Why do we have the Bible?

You know, why do we have the church, et cetera? So, uh, there's a lot of things in scripture. You know, and this is related to another frustration that I have, Matt, and that is people taking a single verse that talks about being saved. Like if you believe in your, if you confess with your mouth. Yeah. Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that he was raised from the idea. you will be saved. Okay, so they'll take that and run with that. That's all you need to do. Okay, just believe and confess, believe and confess, and you'll be saved.

Ignoring the fact that Jesus also says, unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you. Ignoring that, Mark 16, 16 says, He who believes and is baptized will be saved. Ignoring the fact that, you know, say in Ephesians, we get a whole list of vices, you know, the fruit of the flesh, and told that if anybody does any of these things, they're not going to be saved.

So there's a whole bunch of all kinds of commands all through the New Testament that are relevant to salvation. And we can't just, you know, pick one and run with it and ignore all the rest. And I think that folks have a misconception of what it means to believe in Jesus. When Jesus says, you know, have faith in me and you will be saved, something like this.

He says things like that all through the Gospel of John. But if you really believe someone, you're going to obey what they tell you, correct? And if you really believe, then you're gonna be interested in everything that they say. So we can't be doing this, this technique of reducing the Christian faith to a single kind of act or some kind of simplistic disposition, we have to search through, you know, the entire word of God and put together,

you know, a picture of the synthetic, you know, life of Christian discipleship, which includes a lot of things. You know, think of the sermon of them out. Jesus doesn't say, if you fast, if you pray, if you give alms. He says, when you fast, when you pray, when you give alms. So fasting, prayer and alms giving are a non-negotiable. Repentance is a non-negotiable. Baptism is a non-negotiable. The Eucharist, the flesh and blood of Jesus without which we don't have. That's a non-negotiable.

Faith is a non-negotiable. Okay, there's a lot. You know, it's a holistic picture. You know, we've got to resist this temptation and try to just, oh, I want it boiled down to three things or five things or something. Yeah, that's helpful. Can we move on to the next one? Mm-hmm. How is this for a year?

username, 81AC, Sprinkle, CA, 18 says, for me, it's the requirement to affirm certain doctrines like icon veneration, the assumption of Mary and papal authority under threat of anathema. Now, you can correct me if I'm wrong. I didn't know that we had to affirm icon veneration as much as not condemn it, but I might be wrong there. But fair enough, like, I think I understand where the person's coming from, right? they might say, all right, I understand you Catholics think you have some evidence for the assumption of Mary.

But to say that I'm damned, not that that's what anathema means and we can get to them, but to say that I'm damned if I don't accept it, just seems like an unrealistic expectation to put on me. But, or anyway, he continues, I don't see the distinction of Latria, Dulia, and Hyperdulia in the apostolic deposit. It worries me that it might be an accretion that gives a foothold to our pretext. disposition to idolatry. There's a lot there, but it's a well thought out comment.

Now, thank you for it. Yeah, absolutely. So there's a formal aspect and then there's a material aspect, right? The formal aspect is I have trouble submitting to the authority of the church and everything that she teaches, right? And then the material aspect is there's three things that the person raises. So we can deal with the formal aspect. And if you want to get into the material issues of those three things mentioned, you know,

And then there's the distinction of Latria and Hyperdulia and so on. But, I mean, all of that is worth talking about. I think, first of all, folks have to understand that the way the question is phrased, I thank the person, you know, writing this in and totally respect them. I understand where they're coming from. But they're dealing with a picture of the Catholic Church, like the church is eager to find something that you don't. believe correctly and then condemn you for it. And I want to assure everybody that the Catholic

Church is not eager to condemn anyone. And the Catholic Church wants to be gentle with everyone and lead people to a situation of trust. So when you, to become Catholic and to receive a baptism, it's not required that you have all of the doctrines of the church thought out and completely understood and are so totally confident that you can, you know, like personally prove them or something like this. It suffices for you to say, you know what, I don't understand everything, but I submit my intellect to the church. I believe the church is Mrs. Jesus. And just like a wife can write a check on her husband's account, okay? I believe that the church, as a person's, Mrs. Jesus shares in the authority of Christ and I will humble my intellect to Christ,

whose body is the church. And this is what I did myself, Matt, because I did not understand the Marian doctrines and I couldn't see my way through the papal infallibility prior to becoming Catholic. but I was absolutely convinced on the Eucharist. I knew Jesus was really present there based on the testimony of Ignatius of Antioch in the scriptures. So I said, I can become Catholic. I don't understand the Marian doctrines.

I don't understand the papal doctrines, but I will trust, okay? Why should I be surprised if Mrs. Jesus through the centuries has come to positions that I don't understand, immediately understand. Why should I think that I have everything right and that Christ's church, which he established, you know, has no thoughts that go beyond what my thoughts have ever been. So I made an act of faith. I do believe this is the true church. I do believe that the church

participates in the authority of Christ. So I'm going to submit my intellect to the church, and I'm going to trust. And that is faith-seek. understanding. That's a typically Augustine-Augustinian move. It's like, don't understand it yet, but I will believe it or I will place trust in it. And that's what trust is. Like, trust oftentimes is not something that after you go through a whole bunch of rationalization, you know, to completely understand. You know, you trust people, you know, etc. That involves a little bit of risk. So it's like, I'm going to trust Mrs. Jesus that she's right on this, even if I can't understand it completely myself. Then lay the,

within about two years of becoming Catholic, kind of all fell into place and the papal doctrines, the Marian doctrines, and so on. So if people are feeling like, oh, I got to get this completely figured out before I can become Catholic, and what if I never get it figured out? It's like the church doesn't require that of you.

The church only requires that you not publicly oppose it and that you submit your intellect to the church with an act of trust. And, yeah, William Lane Craig said something similar as to why he couldn't become Catholic. And he couldn't become Catholic because he doesn't agree that Mary was assumed into heaven. He doesn't agree that she was immaculately conceived, which is what the next question is about. So we won't get into that right now. And it's like, okay, yeah, fair enough.

So it sounds like you're saying you don't have to have it all figured out. But what if the Protestant's saying, no, no, that's not what I mean. I'm saying I actively distrust this thing you're taking. telling me. I actively doubt it and I don't know how not to. Right. It doesn't seem apostolic. It doesn't seem ancient. Okay. Then you need to look at it and and, you know, converse with the church and let the church make her case. We all have mobile phone service. It's time to support a phone company that supports us. Switch to our sponsor, Charity Mobile. They are different. They are proudly pro-life and impacting the culture of life in America. With Charity Mobile, there's no compromise.

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the challenge this June. Visit hallow.com slash Matt Fraud to get three months free. Let's make this June a month of surrender, connection, and genuine prayer. Again, that's hallow.com slash Matt Frad for three months free. You know, so then now we're getting to the material issues. There were three material issues there. What was it? The assumption of the bless some other? The papal authority and icon veneration. icon veneration okay let's talk about icon veneration you know people have a a problem with that because it seems like idolatry and I can understand that but the truth of the matter is the early Christians did not have a problem with images um nor do the Israelites right nor did the Israelites tabernacle right you had images in the tavernacle of heavenly beings right cherubim flora fauna cherubim uh things that recollected the garden of eden so

You know, when did icons become an issue? Icons didn't become an issue until the rise of Islam. And it wasn't in the Latin West with the Pope. It was in the East. So if people think that the Pope, you know, imposed icons, that's not the case at all. The way, how this all blew up into a huge controversy is some of the Eastern emperors probably prompted by the an iconic tradition in Islam.

which was becoming, and Islam was becoming very influential, also adopted an anti-icon or iconoclastic position and started to impose that on the faithful of the East. And the Christian laity were completely taken aback because going back to the first generations of Christians, we did not have a problem with portraying the saints in art or portraying Jesus in art and so on. And just like you would have a treasured picture of, you know, your mother.

You know, think of somebody who's maybe whose wife is deceased. And so he has a picture of his wife on his desk. You know, and periodically picks up the picture of his beloved late wife and, you know, and kisses the picture, you know. Now, what if you came in and grabbed that picture off his desk and threw it on the floor and started jumping up and down and, like, and bashing? I think the Protestant would object to that and say that's too simple. There's a big difference between kissing a photo of my wife and then having a carved image that I can pray to.

Oh, you're not praying to. You're asking for the prayers of the saint who is portrayed. I mean, that's semantics, isn't it? No, it's not semantics. Prayer means to ask in a sense. Yeah, yeah. But you're not praying to the icon. You know, the icon doesn't have power.

You know, we've got an icon over here. That's fair. You know, if I pray in front of that icon, I'm praying, I'm asking the Blessed Mother for her prayers in Jesus as well. You know, they're both portrayed there. I think the Protestant says it's something about the religious context that makes me uneasy. I'm fine, you kissing the photo of your wife. I understand what that means.

But it's something about the religious context that looks way too close to idolatry for comfort. And even if that itself isn't idolatrous, it can, like, you know, grease the pole, as it were, to get you there, which is part of what this person is saying. Well, I understand that. And that gets into the question below about these different kinds of veneration. Right. And what I'd say is that those distinctions are helpful and they are helpful to bring clarity

to the situation so that we do not begin to give the adoration or the worship of God, which is due to him alone to an image or to a saint, etc. So those distinctions help rather than hurt the desire not to slide into idolatry. And it became necessary because the language of scripture itself was not precise enough to make the distinction. Because in the New Testament, for example, you have a word in Greek proscaneto, which means both to bow down, but typically in the New Testament, specifically to worship. And people come and they worship Jesus frequently in the New Testament.

But that same word proscenet-oh, a couple of times, is used for persons. So in Matthew 18, the servant who was forgiven greatly, uh actually let me clarify um in matthew 18 that's the story of the unforgiving servant and he's forgiven by the king and then he goes out and tries to choke this guy who owes him like a hundred bucks and it says that that servant fell down and worshipped the other one proscano using the word that's usually used for worshiping jesus interesting but in that parable it's not considered wrong or that he's doing something bad he's just showing honor a deference to this more senior servant. Likewise in Revelation 3, Jesus is writing to the churches

in Asia Minor, and he talks about how in the future, those who belong to the synagogue of Satan are going to come and proscaneto to you, the Christians of whatever church it was that he was talking to there. And there, you know, Prasconaio, is used in a sense of bowing down and showing honor or veneration, the way that in ancient times people would to a king or a priest or a judge. But then at the end of Revelation, a couple of times John falls down and proscanetos an angel. And the angel says, no, no, no, no, you can't do that. You should only do that to God.

So what we're seeing is there's a kind of honoring that's appropriate for human beings. and then there's an honoring that's only appropriate to God. Both kinds of honoring show up in the Bible, but even biblical Greek does not have a word to make the distinction. So, and this is often the trouble in church history is that the language of scripture oftentimes doesn't make all the distinctions that we need to make in the Christian life, and so we need to come up with new terminology.

Now, that was a struggle. The church had to get past that in the early ages, and there were some, you know, early bishops and so on that objected and said, I don't want to use any words that aren't used in, you know, sacred scripture. But we were forced to, like Trinity, for example. Most people do not have a trouble with the Trinity, but it is a non-biblical word.

So all we have in the New Testament is proscaneto, which means to fall down or to worship, to bend the knee, something like that. So later the church had to make a distinction. What kind of honor, you know, just as you would kiss a picture of your mother or of your wife, you can kiss a picture of the Blessed Mother, who's our mother in grace,

okay, but what is that called and what kind of interior act is that? And so the church came up with these distinctions. So there's Dulea, which is kind of a veneration or an honoring, and this is the honor that we showed to saints who lived holy lives. We have respect for them as older brothers and sisters in Christ. There's a hyperdulia, which is for the Blessed Mother,

because she has this singular role in salvation. And then there's Latreia, which is in Latin adoration, which is, that's only to God. That's what the angels are talking about at the end of Revelation, where John falls down to them. And they're like, no, no, no, no. That's only for God. So we come up with this language.

So I think that people should see there's a positive role for these distinctions that actually help us to think clearly, about what it is we're doing and what's appropriate to human beings and what's appropriate to the divine. All right, so fair enough. But how do we know if we're not slipping into one or the other? Like, what is the kind of subjective experience of offering adoration versus hypodulia? And if that's so thin a line, maybe we shouldn't be given hyperdalia to anybody.

Yeah, one could argue that, but I think that in the lived Catholic experience, this is not a problem. I, I, you know, when I would watch, okay, let me just give, you know, existential answer, okay, personal experience answer. When I was a non-Catholic and I would look at what Catholics did to the Blessed Mother, I was offended. And I thought, that to me looks like worship based on my, based on how I interpreted certain body language and certain terminology on my, my Protestant background. But, Matt, when I saw what Catholics would do in adoration and benediction and at Mass, I was like, oh, okay, what they do to the Blessed Mother really isn't, you know, what they do for Jesus and what they do for God. And that has been my experience as a Catholic as well. Yes, you know, praying the rosary, it looks very, you know, worshipy to a Protestant. but compared to the kind of interior and exterior acts that I make in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament,

there's like really no problem of confusion in my mind or in my experience. I kind of agree with that. I hope you don't mind me pushing back this much, do you? Sure, that's fine. I know you can handle it, which is why I like to try to steal man the Protestant argument here. I would push back on that and say,

I think that there is nothing a Catholic could do in the presence of the Eucharist, say, bow here. his face to the ground. I presume that's what you mean for prostrate, genuflect. I don't think you would have a problem in principle with a Catholic doing any of those things to a statue of Mary. I think you would just say, well, he knows what he means by that. Well, no, I would have a problem because there's a common ritual language, you know, so prostration in front of a statue of Mary, that way, I would take that person aside and give them a fraternal correction. If they were prostrated? Yeah. What if they said, well, I'm just submitted.

my prayers to her. I'm her little child I'm laying before. Okay, I would I would say okay well exercise and care in that because that's not how your gestures are commonly understood by the family. Okay. You know, so we have a we we have a family language, you know, and there's a ritual language, is a language of gesture, you know, in different cultures, different gestures mean different things, right? Yeah. Well, the universal, the international Catholic culture is certain, you know, you genuflect to to the divine you don't genuflect to the blessed mother yeah that's that's right if I saw someone do that I'd be very weird it would be weird right and you take him aside

and say hey you know maybe you didn't get good formation about this but that's generally understood as as expressing the interior act of worship which is not appropriate to a saint even a saint as a saint as glorious as the blessed mother okay all right what about those other ones do you want to talk about do you want to what do you want to what do you One of those. Iconvoneration, Assumption of Mary, people authority. Okay, just quickly on the assumption of Mary, you know, folks, we can push back really far, and we can get back into the third century, maybe even to the second century, with testimony of the Blessed Mother being assumed. But there's a couple of strong arguments for the, for the assumption of the Blessed Mother. One of the strongest is there are no Marian relics. and with all the other saints,

and even with our Lord, in terms of like the true cross, there is physical remains associated with their death. But the Blessed Mother is the one exception to that. And had she died and been buried in a natural way, we'd expect like, oh, this is a bone from the Blessed Mother or something like that

that would have been venerated. And you don't get any cult of the relics of the Blessed Mother because from the earliest time, you know, she was assumed into heaven. We did not have her body. So that's a pretty strong reason to be in this. But are they relics of some Joseph? I don't know of any.

I don't know either. I have to check on that. Wouldn't that be a defeated to your argument? Possibly. We have to check and see. Unless you wanted to say that Joseph died prior to Christ's death and resurrection, in which case they would have been. Well, yeah.

Yeah, this would be a reason because he wasn't venerated in his death the way, you know, Christian saints immediately began to do to martyrdom. So yeah, yeah. So, yeah, it's usually understood that St. Joseph died. Well, our Lord was a teenager. But I think it's fair to say that the level of veneration that was offered to the Blessed Virgin Mary in the early church far exceeded that of St. Joseph.

Right. And had her physical remains, you know, been present, we would expect to see that. All right. But we can also get, you know, very far back in testimony in the fathers and in popular literature, there's like a popular, it's called transitist literature,

which was like popular stories about the Blessed Mother being transferred to heaven that go back very far into the early period. What's interesting, though, Matt, is if you switch, if you put the emphasis on the other foot and say, try to find evidence of doubt or try to find evidence of a rejection of the doubt,

doctrine of the assumption, you'll find that the case for rejection of it is weaker than the case for it. Okay. So if you put the burden of proof on the other side and say, okay, produce historical evidence that the early Christians didn't believe this or that they rejected it or that they doubted it. And then your evidence is much later and much weaker than the evidence for the belief and for the trust. That's interesting. I hadn't thought of it that way. Yeah. So that's just something to help people maybe who are struggling with this. We should also point out to the biblical evidence that we often... Right, right. Revelation 12, for example, is often brought forward.

You know, you have this heavenly woman whose body seems to be in the heavens, you know, and she's portrayed as giving birth to Jesus, and the only woman in Scripture who births Jesus is Mary. And there's a transition from the end of Revelation 11 into the beginning of Revelation 12, where the Ark of the Covenant is revealed, but then it's not described. Instead, what is described is this woman. So she appears to be the Ark of the New Covenant who's already in heaven.

Now, folks can push back on that, but I think it's a provocative understanding, and I think, you know, ultimately it's correct, although I'm not sure you could slam down, you know, it's not a slam dunk argument. But, you know, in general, And it may be, Matt, that we should have begun with talking about the problem of binding ourselves

only to what is explicitly in Scripture. Because some of these questions that are coming in are based on a kind of a soul of scripture approach to the Christian faith, that if I'm going to believe something, it has to be an exegetical, slam dunk from the written word of God. And the church has never operated that way. And in fact, the scriptures do not teach solar scripture. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that, you know, everything that we need to know in order to do church or be Christian is contained in the scriptures.

The closest that the scriptures ever come is 2 Timothy 316. And all that that says is all scripture is breathed by God and is useful for teaching, correcting, rebuking, and training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, ready for every good work. And all of us as Catholics can say yes and amen to that, but 2 Timothy 316 does not teach Sola Scriptura, in the sense that everything that we need to know is in the written word of God.

Instead, we find three places, actually, where St. Paul urges us to hold fast to tradition. The clearest case is 2.5th, where St. Paul says, Stand firm and hold to the traditions. You are taught by us, whether by word of mouth or by letter. And it is the word tradition. Many Protestant translations render the word teaching there.

My Protestant translation rendered it as teaching. I was shocked when my friend Michael showed me it from his Catholic RSV. I looked up in the Greek, and sure enough, the Greek word is parodicus, which is tradition. So this is not something, you know, this is not, you know, Catholic trickery here. This is, this is the Greek of the New Testament. St. Paul himself says, hold to the traditions that you're taught by us whether by word of mouth, that's beautiful because that illustrates unwritten traditions that are passed down or by letter. And Paul's letters became collected into scripture.

So you might say that the one deposit of the faith, which is a broadest sense of tradition, is passed down in two forms, written and unwritten. So there are unwritten traditions. Not a whole lot. It's not like there's this huge body of knowledge that's only passed down by word of mouth and like bishops whisper at each other's ears at their ordination or something like that,

going back in a chain back to the apostles. But a lot of basic things that we just take for granted were passed down in unwritten form. One of the biggest ones is the list of biblical books. that is not in scripture itself. If you love the word of God, and I presume, you know, almost all of our Protestant brothers

love the word of God, the written word of God, you know, that's great. Well, if you love the word of God, love the table of contents, you know, and the table of contents is not part of any biblical book. That was actually passed down by tradition.

And it was only written down later, beginning in the late 300s, when after the faith was legalized in the Roman Empire, it became possible to hold church councils to clean up some confusion. And one of the things about which confusion had grown was what exactly are the biblical books? You know, there's a church over here in Ethiopia

that's saying that Jubilee's biblical, that's a Second Temple Jewish book that folks may not have heard of, but it shows up in some early, you know, Christian collections, you know, and over here they're saying that, oh, we're not sure that the John's apocalypse, you know, the book of Revelation should be in, you know, so there's a little bit of mess around the edges of the list of biblical books. So let's sit down under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and compile the list and, you know, and trust, you know, as it says in John 16

that the Spirit will lead you into all truth. That's a promise that Jesus gave to the apostles. So the successors of the apostles in the late 300s sat down at various councils and said, let's clean this up and establish clearly for everybody what has been handed down. And that's where we get our list of biblical books. So that's very important. If you don't believe in tradition, if you don't have respect for tradition, then you end up in the untenable position of having a fallible list of infallible books, a list that could be wrong of books that can't be wrong.

And that's a self-contradition. Say that again? That was a clever way you put that. Yeah, a fallible list of infallible books, a list that could be wrong of books that can't be wrong. Wow. Yeah. Couldn't way to put that. I haven't heard it that way. Right. So, so, and I came to realize this myself, Matt,

that if I gave up on tradition, then I give up on, I end up giving up on the basis of, of the list of scriptural books and so many other ways as well that I could illustrate. So honoring tradition really ends up also honoring the scriptures. They are mutually self-supporting.

I could illustrate that from so many personal anecdotes in my own life, but I'll just throw that out there and, you know, if you want to pursue it or if you want to go on to the next question. That's really good. That's really helpful. Thank you. Well, and this next question gets into

what we're talking about anyway. So any way, any way I can says, my biggest one is probably the immaculate conception of Mary. Seems like you have to do a lot of theological gymnastics to get to that belief. And fair enough, to that point I made earlier, I think it can sometimes seem that way, right? Like, I'm a Catholic, so I'm criticizing my fellow Catholics. I'm sure Protestants could do the same thing to Protestants, where it's like you need this doctrine to be clearer than it apparently is in the line that you keep appealing to, right? Yeah, so I actually don't, you know, I read that and I was, I had a different reaction, Matt. I read that I thought, actually the emacic conception is one of the simplest of doctrines.

It just is that Mary was the normal one. She was normal. The rest of us are abnormal. The rest of us are messed up and we've been messed up going back to Adam and Eve. And she was the one exception that just had a normal, for her it was the way. it was supposed to be from the beginning, which is that she had God's presence from her conception. That's really what original sin comes down to is an absence of the Holy Spirit. It's a void, it's a lack that leads to our disorder. There's a famous line in Westside story, the Broadway musical,

where I forget if it's the jets or the sharks, but they're talking about how the rest of society have used them and they say, we're depraved on account of we're deprived. And that pretty much accurately describes the original sin, which is that we're depraved on account of we're deprived. So the reason that we tend towards sin is that we're deprived of the Holy Spirit and we're deprived of that by the sin of our first parents who lost it. But with the Blessed Mother, she had a conception and gestation and so on that was as it should have been for the whole human race was that the Holy Spirit was present with her from the start. Because we're unique among creatures that God made. We're kind of, we're a sense not complete without God's presence in us. Being made in the image and

likeness of God means that we're made from the beginning with the intention that we would be vessels of the Holy Spirit and that we'd have this special relationship of communion with God. That's not true of the dogs and the cats and the trees. They weren't made as potential vessels of the Holy Spirit. but we were. And so she had that. So I think it's actually, the Maticacicumption is like, in terms of its complexity as a doctrine, it's really rather simple, I think. Now, as to the question of, you know, attesting to it in tradition and so on. In Scripture. And in Scripture. You know, I think that the fundamental, you know, we see indications of Mary's holiness in scripture, like, for example, the absolutely singular way that she's greeted at the

enunciation, you know, as, you know, called by the angel, by a Greek participle, meaning she who has been graced, you know, which we traditionally translate as full of grace. Nobody's addressed like that in salvation history. And am I right in thinking the angel calls her? Is it Kakari Temene? How do you pronounce that? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you got it.

That she's called that. Yeah, like as a title. In the Hail Mary, we say Hail Mary, full of grace. Uh-huh. But in the scripture, isn't it hail full of grace? Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Is that significant or not? Am I making too much out of that? No, I think it is. It's singular. We see Abram changed to Abraham, right? Simon changed to Peter. To be called full of grace. Right.

Who is referred to by this way? So what I would say is the central teaching about Mary is that she is singularly holy in a unique way. We can see that from the scriptures, but then it becomes a question of definition. Like, okay, well, how holy? Does that holiness extend to her birth? Does it go back even farther? You know, what does it imply? And so holiness is the central, you know, affirmation about the blessed mother.

and then it gets defined, like the picture of it gets sharper as we go through church history as reflecting upon it under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, we say, you know what, the proper thing to say is she's holy from her conception ultimately.

Okay? And this relates to another question that's going to come up, which is the development of doctrine. Right. You know? And what I would say is the development doctrine

is not the idea that, oh, the picture is changing and over time, we have a different picture of what the Christian faith is. I would say the picture of the Christian faith always stays the same, and we're cranking the focus knob. Oh, that's good. And it's getting increasingly defined and clear.

Yes. So we always knew that there was something special about the blessed mother. How special? Well, she's holy. Well, how holy? Well, all holy. Well, how far does that go? Is it go back to, yeah, that's got at least go back to her birth.

Okay, can we say anything more? Hmm, thinking about it, you know, what is fitting, what's appropriate, it. What seems to be required by other doctrines is that we affirm that she was holy even from her conception. Yeah, and I would say if as a Protestant you have a problem with that method of arriving at the truth over a period of time, well, you don't have that same problem when at the Council of Nicaea in 325, the church states definitively what the church had always believed, namely that Christ was homoosios. Yeah, of the same substance, right? But then the next, what's the next council, Constantinople?

Constantinople is 4.51-ish. Well, let's say, I think at Constantinople, didn't they have to clarify the human nature? Doesn't matter. Yeah. The point is simply that over time, the church is, I like how you put that, like dialing in the, how did you say it? Cranking the focus now. Yeah. So the picture becomes increasingly well defined.

Yeah. And certainly that, yeah, the early councils, Nicaea and Constantinople and Calcedon, we are becoming increasingly clear about how to speak about Jesus and the other persons of the Trinity. How, you know, we know that somehow mysteriously they're one and somehow mysteriously they're different. Yep.

And say, okay, what we want to say is we want to use the word nature or essence to describe their oneness. We want to use the term person to describe their difference. So they are one what in three, whose. All right, so if you're like a lot of Catholics, you know you're supposed to share the

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And it really does help you love scripture again. So if you're somebody who wants to love scripture, be like, I don't know how to get back into it. This is for you. It's the kind of content that doesn't just inform you, okay? It transforms how you read scripture and deepens your relationship with Christ. know Christ, share Christ. Start your 30-day free trial today at St. Paulsenter.com slash pints or just become an annual

member right away. You'll love it. And when you do, they'll send you a free copy of the complete Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, which is an incredible resource for anyone serious about growing in their faith. Again, just visit st. Paul'scenter.com slash pints to start your 30-day free trial. Yeah, my point simply is sometimes you'll hear somebody say, that wasn't defined until now. And they think by that that they mean.

That wasn't believed. Right. And it's like, well, if that was the case, then you'd have to claim that the church didn't know that Christ was divine until the council of Nicaea. Yeah, it is Constantinople. So we have, yeah, 325 is Nicaea. Constantinople is in 381, then Ephesus. Yeah.

Okay. Yes, good. All right. Well, that's... Well, even within Protestantism, you know, I experienced this because we had a big fracas about women's ordination in the, in the denomination that I was in. and some of the some of the proponents of ordaining women as as pastors came forward and said oh there's nothing in our creeds that forbids it and that's true matt it had never been practiced it had

never been an issue so it had never been addressed it'd be like saying no one in the early church condemned it well if that's true i don't know if it is it's because no one proposed it nobody proposed it right and uh you know so you you would not, you can't draw the conclusion that because the reformed creeds and confessions never addressed the issue of women's ordination that it was practiced from the beginning of Calvinism. Actually, traditional Calvinism never had female clergy. Okay. And they just, they didn't put it into the statements because nobody was advancing it. When it, when it did start getting advanced, like in the 1970s and the 1980s and so on, then you get some conservative Calvinist denominations

making rulings against it and saying, no, it's a male only clergy. But the point at which they state that in some confessional document is not the beginning of the practice. Okay. They had all male clergy going back to John Calvin. Is this making sense? Yes. So even within development within Protestant groups, this phenomena shows up that, you know, only lately does something get defined. and the reason being that it never was, it was never challenged before. And so you don't need a definition against it until it gets challenged.

I love how you began this conversation about Mary as the normal one because something a Protestant might say is you're making her like God as if we're normal by being broken and depraved. Right, no, we live in the abnormal. Yeah. All right.

Now, we're going to, here's the, what, this is the fifth objection we've got from our Protestant community. Now, you've probably never thought about Soliscriptura before. All right. I guess that's a you have. Yes. Here is his biggest objection against Catholicism. And fair enough. Let's see. Solar Scriptura. He says, this means scripture alone is the ultimate authority. It is self-sufficient. Saying it needs another infallible mechanism only leads to infinite regression. It's like saying who made God and who made that being that made God and so on. Yeah, I've been thinking about this a lot lately. That's definitely false. Yeah, that's incorrect.

I have a lot to say about Sol Scripture. I'm going to smoke a lot. You knock yourself up. Several things I want to say. First of all, Soul Scriptura means different things to different Protestants. and it frustrates me a little bit when I'll hear a Protestant, you know, do a YouTube video, for example, and say, well, Solis Scribatured, what it really means is, and I think to myself,

who gave you the authority to decide for all Protestants what Sola Scripura means? When you say, what Sola Scripura really means is that this is my take on it. And I know from being in Protestantism, that Sol of Scripps are means slightly different things to different folks. Some have a more refined view.

Some have a more radical view. So, you know, some take Sol of Scripature to mean the scriptures have everything we need. We don't need any information outside of the scriptures to do church, to be Christians, etc. Some also understand by it that the scriptures are our only authority, and there are no other authorities. Okay. Now, you know, I watched a YouTube by Gavin Ortland on this, and he acknowledges some other authorities that are secondary to scripture. But let me just, you know, start off by reemphasizing. There is no passage of scripture that teaches Sola Scriptura.

in any of its senses. There's no passage that teaches that the written word of God is our only authority. There's not even a passage that teaches that the written word of God is our highest authority. There are other authorities in salvation history. There are prophets. There is the Lord himself in the flesh.

And in Second Thessalonians 2.15, as we looked at before, St. Paul says, hold fast to the traditions you were taught by word of mouth or by letter. And he doesn't say that, well, if it's written down in the letter, it's more authoritative than what we pass down to you in person. So he holds those in inequality. So let me first make the point, Matt, that there are several authorities and not just one

that are taught to us actually in the scriptures themselves. So one authority obviously is scripture. All scripture is God breathed. Okay, yes and amen. Scripture should have a kind of a primacy in our kind of hierarchy of authorities. Tradition, which we mentioned. In 2,000s 2.15, 2ndththosone 3,6,

1st Corinthians 112, in all those passages, St. Paul affirms the importance of tradition prodigists in Greek. So scripture, we've got tradition. and then we've got leaders too and folks overlook this but we're supposed to submit to our leaders

and at the end of Hebrews excuse me St. Paul urges us I take St. Paul to be the primary author of Hebrews but St. Paul urges us to obey our leaders and submit to their authority

Hebrews 1317, obey your leaders and submit to them, for they're keeping watch over your souls as men who will have to give an account. So there's an assumption that all Christians have some leaders and that they should be in submission to those leaders. I have an objection. Okay, go ahead. Derail you. I can give it later. Okay. Surely you wouldn't say, nor would you think the Bible means, that if a leader is asking you to submit to something that's contrary to Scripture, he should do it.

No. Secondly, similarly, you seem to be assuming the Protestant might say that tradition is different to the Word of God. Why think that? Why think that there are these two streams that have been handed down? Why not think that tradition, when he says tradition, he's talking about what the Bible teaches and nothing more. So it is all, it can all come back to Scripture.

Because Second Lesson, 215 says by word of mouth. So this is not tradition that's passed down in a written form. I think that wasn't eventually written down in what we have. So you take the position that everything that was passed down by word of mouth was written down. Sure, why not? Because the table of contents of the Bible was not. Okay, but apart from that. Give me one other example.

No, that's huge. Monogamy. Okay. Monogamy is not clearly taught in the New Testament. It's implied. I think there's... Fornication is condemned. Adulter is condemned.

If you agree with those two things, then monogamies are in the option. No, because it's not fornication or adultery if you're married to her. Okay. So this is, polygamy isn't outright condemned. It's not outright condemned and it's practiced in the Old Testament. Now, that's a, that's a classic case where the Christian church has always practiced monogamy, but it's not completely explicit in the written word of God. And throughout Christian history, different heresies have arisen, and many of them have challenged the teaching on monogamy, Islam and Mormonism being two prime examples. Okay. So what I want to emphasize, you know, folks think that by Sola Scriptura, that they are going to exalt and honor the written word of God.

What I discovered firsthand is that if you dispense with tradition, you leave the word of God at the mercy of Bible scholars. And what I experienced in Protestantism was we had a synod every year. And at any given synod of our church, some Bible scholar could get up and give some kind of revisionist interpretation and say, we've had it wrong for 2,000 years. We should really, I don't know, marry a male and a male or fornication really isn't bad. Or you can have an extra wife. or divorces, okay, or whatever, and anything imaginable, okay? And we've had it wrong for 2,000 years. And if we do this, if we apply this fancy little hermeneutic

to these couple of passages, it teaches something else. And when you don't have a reverence for tradition, you're at the mercy at any time of somebody coming along and making that argument, because you hold in principle that the church could always have been wrong about, her fundamental teaching. So what origin, the church father origin says,

the scriptures are more truly written on the church's heart than on the page. And the concept there is the Christian faithful understand the meaning of the scriptures and have been living out the meaning of the scriptures. And we don't need a Bible scholar to come along and tell us

that we've been wrong for 2,000 years. Part of what tradition is, is the set. of interpretations of Scripture that we simply think to ourselves that we take for granted. There's all kinds of understandings that we simply take for granted

from the Scripture and that have been passed down to us by previous generations. And the Holy Spirit guides that process. And if you don't reverence that process, which is to say, if you don't have reverence for tradition, you do throw the door open to actual radical change.

Folks don't realize this. They think that tradition is going to mean change. Actually, it doesn't because when you reverence the, when you have reverence for how the previous generations have understood the word of God, it makes it, it's a conservative force. It makes it more resistant to flamboyant change rather than the other way around. So your point is you don't have an option to have scripture without tradition. The question is, you'll have scripture, okay, and then whose tradition will you have? That is correct. And I was shocked in seminary when I got to the seminary, my master's program,

and I began to hear my professors in seminary talk about the reformed tradition, which is how Calvinism is often described by folks whose Calvinist roots come from the continent. So Dutch and German Calvinists tend to call themselves reformed. And so reformed tradition this, reformed tradition. that. And I went to my professors and said, I thought we're supposed to be against tradition. And my professor said, oh, come on, everybody has their tradition. Baptists have traditions. Eastern Orthodox have traditions. Calvinists have traditions. It's just a matter which tradition you're in. And I thought we were, you know, it's just the word of God. That's what I understood by

Solis scripture. We don't have a tradition. Well, if we have a tradition, what? We have a tradition, what basis do we have to claim that our reformed tradition should be normative for all Christians? Do you understand? Yeah. You understand that. Yes. And so this really began to bother me. And so I would go to my professors and say, you know, we believe that we're Orthodox Calvinists.

Can we insist that the Eastern Orthodox adopt our beliefs? And one of my professors said, no, that wouldn't be appropriate. They're Orthodox according to their tradition. and were Orthodox according to ours. And, you know, I just stammered and didn't know what to say, but what this seemed to me to be, and what it actually is, is a kind of just Christian pluralism. It's, you know, different strokes for different folks.

You have your approach to the faith. He has his. And we can't come to a knowledge of the truth. We can't figure out what is supposed to be true for all Christians. And it leads you to a kind of an epistemological despair. Or like, you know, we just have these, we have these different approaches to what it means to be Christian. And we have no higher court of appeal to which we can go to adjudicate between our different approaches. And that's because we don't acknowledge a successor of Peter.

That's what we were referencing earlier when we said, hey, look, I just love Jesus. Right. And they say that as if that's meant to be. what, a pure Christianity or something? And then you get into all kinds of trouble. It's a despair. It's a despair with lipstick on in a way. It's like eat, drink, and be merry kind of.

Right. Like, well, all I know is I have this life. Right. You know, you only live once. It's kind of similar to that where it's like trying to be like, all I know is this. We used to have a song that we sang in our Glee Club at my college that was about ecumenism. And one of the lines in the song was, It doesn't matter if we agree,

as long as we serve him faithfully. And me and my seminarian colleagues, there were several of us that were seminarians that were in this glee club, we would just ridicule that line, you know, because it was so obviously selling out on any specifics, any particular doctrines, throwing that all to the wind

and say, well, you know, we just love Jesus together. Yeah. And that as conservative Calvinist seminarians, we believed in truth and coming to the truth. Because the question is, well, what is it to mean faithfully? Like, that's where the rubber hits the road. Exactly. That's the thing they want to shy away from. No, doesn't know, just love him faithfully. All right, what does that look like? Just love him faithfully. Right. And the problem is you can't come to a common definition of faithfulness if the interpretation of scripture is left up to every individual. And this is the hidden of Sola Scripura that people don't recognize. I watched our good friend and brother Gavin Ortland

give a defense of Sola Scrippsura in, on YouTube. I think he had a half hour defense of Sola Scrippsura that I watched a couple of days ago. And the whole time that he's talking about the primacy of Scripture and Scripture's authority, I'm saying to myself, yes and amen, but who gets to interpret? Who gets to interpret? Who gets to interpret?

Who gets to interpret? Because if you're going to say that the church can err, which is what Gavin says is the central teaching of soul scripture, then who makes the judgment that the church has aired? The central teaching of soloscriptura is that the church can air? That's right. Surely he didn't say that. He did. The central, no, surely the central teaching of soloscriptura is that the scripture is the infallible word of God. No, no.

He comes back to the central idea of soul of scripture is that the church can err. And the church, therefore the church is just. judged by the scriptures is the idea. Okay. But the problem there is who makes the judgment that the church has erred? The scripture. Well, no, it's you, because you're interpreting the scripture.

Right. Okay, because the question is, the very, the substance of the question is, what do the scriptures mean? And the church interprets the scriptures this way, and you say, the church has got it wrong. On what basis, on your private, on the basis of your private interpretation? And what about when they say,

no, it's not my private interpretation. Again, they'll say, you're making this seem like Solo scriptura, and what do you say to that? No, the church has the authority to interpret the Word of God. 1st Peter 120, excuse me, 2nd Peter 120, says that no scripture is a matter

of one's own personal interpretation. Here we go. First of all, Peter says, you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation. because no prophecy ever came about by the impulsive man, etc. So, okay, well, if it's not a matter of one's own interpretation, who is the interpreter?

And here I want to make a huge point. In both the Old and the New Testament, Matt, God left us a continuing interpretive authority. In the Old Covenant, Moses says in Deuteronomy 17, if you have a case that's too difficult for you, some matter of interpretation of the law. And he gives several examples. One of the examples is a conflict in Hebrew. It's Dean Ledeen. That means like one principle of law

against another principle of law. So you're trying to adjudicate between different legal principles. What are you supposed to do? Are you just supposed to make your own best guess as an individual Israelite? No. what Moses says if any case arises requiring decision between one kind of, you know, homicide

another, it's translated here, one kind of legal right in another, one kind of assault another, any case within your towns, which is too difficult for you, then you shall arise and go up to the place which the Lord your God will choose. And coming to the Levitical priests and to the judge who is in office, you shall consult them and they shall declare to you the decision. I'm not going to read the whole passage, Matt. But this pertains to revelation. But exactly, because this, he's talking about the interpretation of Deuteronomy. He's saying, if you get a case that you can't adjudicate from the laws that I have

given you, you go up to the central sanctuary and you consult with the Levitical priests and then the judge who I understand to be kind of like a bailiff figure. And, and Moses goes on to say, they will declare to you from that place the decision. you are to be careful to do everything that they direct you. And if you don't do what the priest decides, you are put to death. The same penalty for blasphemy. So I don't have the time to go into all of the Hebrew here,

but suffice it to say that the decision of the priest, according to Deuteronomy 17, in the interpretation of law, is as binding as the divine law itself, which implies a kind of infallibility. right there. So just as you're put to death for blaspheme or disobeying God's word, you're also put to death for disobeying the priest's interpretation of God's word. So Moses left a continuing, living, organic, institutional voice through time with succession. You know, these priests were replaced one after

another in succession over time. One generation passed and another took their place at the central sanctuary. to interpret the word of God, Moses never left the Old Testament people of God in a solar scripture situation. There's a parallel to it in the new covenant, Matt, which is Matthew 16, where our Lord says to Peter, you're the rock, etc.

I'm going to give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. That's important, Matt, because the keys of the kingdom in the Old Testament were worn on the shoulder of the royal steward, who is the number two in the kingdom of David, and had the authority to open or close the throne room and therefore to keep you out or to admit you to see the king. That was such a great power that made him the number two in the kingdom.

So Jesus is making Peter the number two in his kingdom, which is his church because the church is the kingdom of David. And then he goes on to say to Peter personally using the second masculine singular. Like you in particular, Peter, whatever you bind on earth, And I'm going to give you the literal translation, whatever you bind on earth, shall have been bound in heaven. And whatever you loose on earth, shall have been loosed in heaven. Now, I took, I studied this passage in Protestant Seminary. I studied this passage in Catholic graduate school.

Nobody ever told me what binding and loosing meant. But it's no secret. The Jews know what binding and loosing means. The best commentary in this passage, anybody can get right now online and invite folks to do it. type into a Google search line, binding and loosing Jewish Encyclopedia. And what will pop up is the free online public domain Jewish and Psychopedia of 1906 with very famous American rabbi, Rabbi Kaufman Kohler, wrote an entry on binding and loosing. And he says, I'm just going to paraphrase, you know, quickly.

He says, binding and loosing was terminology in ancient Judaism for the divine authority to interpret God's word for God's people. And he says, it's not, it was not, binding and loosening was not simply an academic decision about how to interpret the law, but the rabbis who exercised it had a spell of divine authority and their decisions were backed up by the celestial court. and then Rabbi Kohler moves from Jewish sources and comments directly on the New Testament and says this is what's going on in Matthew 16, 18, as well as in Matthew 18, where the same authority is shared with the apostles as a group. Binding and loosing is a divine authority backed up by the celestial court

to interpret God's word to prohibit or permit things, according to the interpretation of God's word. So just as Moses established priests to interpret God's word, Jesus gives Peter and the apostles as a group a priestly authority to interpret God's word in the new covenant. Now, many Protestants think, well, that just applies to the apostles, okay? But we're talking about an office.

When Jesus says, I'm going to give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, that belonged to the royal steward. And the royal stewardship was an office, which was passed down for one to another. We see that in Acts chapter one, Judas, who has died, is referred to as having held an office. And the word for the office in Greek is an episcopane,

literally an episcopacy, or as the king James translated, a bishopric. And so they cast lots and they appoint somebody to take, Judas's position. That establishes the principle that the apostles occupy an office that can be replaced by another when they die so that not just the first generation of the church, but all the generations of the church would have the benefit of divinely authorized leadership and interpretation. And that's clearly what's reflected in the early fathers, like in Clement of Rome,

who talks about apostolic succession, men who, who, uh, who, um, um, success. to the authority that the apostles have. So in both the old and the new covenants, the point is, Matt, that we have a continuing interpretive authority that succeeds down through the generations. In any given generation, we have either the apostles or men who are successors of the apostles who have divine authority to interpret the word of God for us. It is not up to us as individual Christian believers to just decide what God's word means. We consult the church because as St. Paul says in 1 Timothy 315, the church is the pillar and the bulwark of the truth. That is a dramatic passage. And from it, we know that St. Paul was not a Protestant because no Protestant would

ever say that the church is the pillar and the bulwark of the truth. Pillar means a support or a foundation. And bulwark means a defense. And in Protestantism, the church can neither be a support nor a defense of the truth because the church cannot be identified with any visible entity. The church is just an invisible collection of the elect, and we have, you know, Protestant denominations, but no Protestant denominations claim the authority to be able to speak for the bride of Christ, to speak for the church. But the Catholic Church does claim that authority because we are the church going back to the apostles. There are some things you can do when you are the faithful ones that always stuck around and didn't leave for some heresy, some culture, some schism.

And one of the benefits of being in that position is that with integrity, you can say, we are the same body that Jesus founded, and therefore we have the authority that Christ gave to his church. Okay, I have a question. Sure. So, Deuteronomy 17, you're saying. Okay, and you're saying that it wasn't up to an individual Israelite, say, to interpret a scripture in contradiction to what the priests or whoever.

Right. But where was that authority in the kingdom of David and where was that authority at the time of Christ? I mean, didn't the Essines and the Pharisees and the Sadducees disagree with each other? They did. What happened was that authority resided in the temple because what Moses says is go up to the go up to the place which the Lord your God will choose. That's the central sanctuary and consult with the Levitical priests.

Well, that continued all the way until the temple was destroyed in 587. Then it was resumed when they came back and reestablished the temple and rebuilt it in 517, reestablished the Levittical priesthood, and once again, that was up and running and functional. What happened was in 152 BC, Jonathan Affis, the Maccabee and King, forced his way into the high priesthood, and usurped the high priesthood. And that caused a religious crisis within Jesus. because he did not have the authority. And the people lost confidence in the high priesthood

as the interpreters of the law. And that created a religious vacuum. And into that vacuum rushed this scholarly class that was called the Pharisees. And they said, well, you can't really trust the priests anymore, but we've studied the law and we'll start binding and losing for you. It's like YouTube traditionalists.

And maybe people like myself, God have mercy. Like we're losing faith in the strong. losing faith in the institution. You can't trust the bishops. Right. Listen to me. Listen to me. Sorry, I didn't mean to throw myself and everybody else onto the bus there,

but there was a scary, don't you think? Right. It was. So in the time of our Lord, there was mass confusion because the rightful authority within Judaism had been corrupted and had lost the confidence of the people of God. And this is why Jesus comes and he says, okay, we're going to correct this problem.

We don't have effective. binding and loosing going on because we don't have a genuine priesthood, but I'm going to establish a new priesthood, and that is my 12 men. Wow. Okay. They are new priests of the new covenant, and they will begin to bind and loose. Would you, will you believe me when I thought of that? I thought it was a really clever objection.

I didn't know if you'd have an answer to it, but you've clearly thought about this. What about it? What about in the Davidic monarchy? Was there something similar established prior to the destruction of the temple? In the Davidic monarchy, the ministry of the priests continued under the patronage of David and his sons. So you were saying the same thing would have been in effect if somebody had a misinterpretation.

Wow. Yeah, even in Malachi, you know, there's instructions like, go ask the priests, you know, what happens when a piece of flesh, you know, touches something clean, you know, and the priest gives the decision. So you had mentioned our friend Gavin.

So he had said that the... He had said that one of the big reasons for believing in soul of scripture is that we don't have a continuing interpretive authority in either the old or the new covenants. And so if we actually do. Okay, all right.

We absolutely do. And it's interesting, you know, the idea of succession, I mean, this is so important. Like I think Gavin and many of our other friends think that the authority of the apostles ceased with them. But, I mean, let's be realistic. You mean to say that Jesus didn't understand that his, the institution he was creating was going to last for more than one generation. And they thought, well, you know, the first generation needs an authoritative structure. But after that, they'll be fine. 2000. For now, that'll be great.

I mean, no, we absolutely need that authority structure in every generation. And the earliest post-apistolic writings like, you know, Clement of Rome, or the letter that we usually call First Clement, nails this down right away. I mean, this is something that the church had to get clear immediately. It wasn't women's ordination or LGBTQ or marriage or, you know, contraception, any of these things that they had to nail down immediately. What they had nailed down immediately was we got to get the idea of succession down,

okay, and clarify that. And so guys who have succession from the apostles, you can't just dismiss them from office, you know, lightly, which is what was happening in Corinth. All right. What do you say then to the objection that this fellow has, that you end up in an infinite regression? And what he means is this.

when I ask you, why should I trust the church, you appeal to Scripture. And when I say, well, why should you appeal to, why trust Scripture, you appeal to the church. So it sounds, they would say, that you're stuck in this sort of vicious circularity. Well, no, I would say it starts with faith in Christ. I believe in Christ. What are my grounds for belief in Christ? Well, there's a historical case to be made that Jesus is the Son of God. And I believe that historical case is strong.

maybe it stops short of mathematical proof but the case for the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ which validates him as a true spokesman of God because it was a work of God to raise him from the dead I think that's strong enough to validate and I am willing to put my faith in Christ based on that historical evidence. Now, the evidence of scriptures is that Jesus established a church

and that he invested the church with his own authority, that it is his bride and that has an authority to act on his behalf. And the scriptures also testified that he shared his authority and his priesthood with the apostles. And then the book of Acts, as well as the post-apostolic writings, show that the apostles shared that authority with successors after them, men that they appointed that they called Episcopoi and Presbytero, priests and bishops, okay?

So those guys are still around today. So my first act of faith is on Christ based on the historical evidence. And then Christ establishes the church. And so derivatively, I believe in the authority of the church. And the church hands me these scriptures and tells me that these scriptures are the Word of God. Ultimately, there's no way that I would have of like philosophically or scientifically verifying that this is the Word of God, nor does my experience even

because some of these books really move me and some of them don't, you know? You know, Loveticus leaves me cold in parts of it, but, you know, the gospel of John, you know, screams inspiration all over, but it's not my, you know, it's not my, it's not up to me to decide what's inspired or what's not. Right, right.

The church gives us to me and tells me that these books from Genesis to Revelation are the inspired of Word of God. And based on my faith, in Christ and then my faith in church derivative from Christ, I now have a faith in Scripture's derivative of my faith in the church. Yeah, and I wonder if it's something like this. And that's why St. Paul says the church is the pillar and the bulwark of the truth,

because the church gives us this book and says, this is the Word of God. Yeah, and that's true of all of us, Catholic or Protestant, because some representative of the church at some point gave us this book and said it was God's word and we made an act of faith. It might have been our mother, might have been our father, it might have been a friend. Somebody handed us a Bible and said, this is the word of God as a representative of the church and we believe them. Right. I'm going to try out an analogy, see if it works. No, the church has never said, don't use your own intellect.

Yeah. So we're allowed to do that. Correct. But it's less of an epistemic jump to believe in the church and trust the church than to know everything the church teaches. Here's the analogy. recently I had to take my good wife to a hospital. I had to figure out which was the right hospital. Okay.

It's less of an epistemic leap to figure out which was the right hospital than to know all of the things that the hospital knows. Yes. Does that make sense? Yes. And because whereas scripture isn't self-interpreting, no text is, a living authority can interpret the text for us. And we don't need another authority outside of the church to interpret the church

because the church can continue to interpret the scriptures. We mentioned this earlier. Ephesus, 325, teaches that Christ is divine. Mm-hmm. All right. So then you go, well, maybe you have some more questions about that. Or maybe there are some errors that come up even after those pronouncements. It's like, well, okay, along comes the council of Constantinople that clarifies certain things.

Do you know what I mean? Yes. So a living voice. A living voice. And that's why the papacy is so important because even councils are kind of, punctilier, you know, they happen at a certain period of time and then they disband. What is that? I love that word.

Punctylia. I don't even know if that's a word, but, uh... No, you know it. You know if it's a word. Do you really? I'm gonna look it up while you continue to talk. I love learning. But by which I mean that they occur at a point in time.

Well, let's see if that's what the word means. And, um... Punctilia is an adjective, often used in grammar, an action that occurs at a specific instantaneous point in time. there we go. Knocked it out the park, Dr. Berg's punk till you. I'm smarter than I realize. Sorry, continue.

So, but that's why the ministry of the successor of Peter is so important because between church councils, he continues to manifest the living voice of the church to keep affirming that, yes, we believe these things. Because when the council dispans and the analogy is like is now out of the room. Okay. We're in the room. The room is a metaphor for the current age that we're living in, right? So the council's done with, they've disbanded, they're no longer in the room. Now that they're not in the room,

we can talk about them and we can say whatever we want about what they decided. And we can say, we don't think that they were right. Yeah. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the successor of Peter is always this guy in the room who's this living voice says, no, we do believe what they said. Yeah.

No, that's not what they meant. They meant what they said. We believe what we said. And so there has to be this constant reaffirmation that, yes, we still believe these same things. And that's the ordinary magisterium of the church. And it's a very, very important function. And every time that the pope gets up

and reaffirms the gospel and reaffirms the things that we have always believed down through this, it is keeping that living official, you know, voice to the church going. and keeping us on an even keel, headed forward. And the problem is without the ministry of Peter, there is doubt without a living voice in the room about whether we still believe these things,

about whether they got it wrong in the past, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we can't make theological progress because we keep rehashing the same old issues without being able to say that has been decided, We're done with that. We're done with that. We're moving on. And that's what I experienced in Protestantism was that at any point, you know, we'd have these annual synods. And potentially anything could come up because in principle we held that the church could err. So anything that had been decided by the church in previous centuries was up for grabs. And at any point, somebody could rise saying, we think we got the idea of the Trinity wrong. We think we got the idea of marriage wrong. We think we got the idea of the Eucharist wrong. blah blah blah and we can reopen up that re-open up that can of worms and rehash it and this is so many examples of this in Protestantism

some Protestant groups reopened the Trinitarian controversies and you have Jesus only Protestants who think that Jesus is the father and he is the spirit and they're all basically one person it's the ancient heresy of modalism that is very much alive and well in American Protestantism

among churches that call them apostolic churches. So these things get, you know, the Jehovah's Witnesses brought back the whole Aryan controversy and said, oh, we got Homo Uzius wrong. It's just Homo, he's tertium quid, et cetera, and so you're back to Jesus not being fully divine in that, you know, schismatic heresy.

So in order to make theological progress, We have to recognize the authority of tradition and the authority of councils. Yes, what councils represent is the apostles gathered together. In Matthew 18, Jesus told the gathered apostles that whatever they bound and loosed would have been bound and loosed in heaven.

So the apostles as a group have this authority. That's manifested in an ecumenical council. And also the pope by himself has that authority because in Matthew 16, Jesus gives that authority to Peter personally in the, you singular. So he and his successors after him can also bind a loose modopropropeo by their own authority. All right. You said you wanted to go on and on. I want to give you more room. Whatever. Yeah. Would you say to use a term from Alvin Planting that solar scriptura is self-referentially

incoherent? Yeah. In other words, if it's true, it's false. Yeah, it's self-staltifying because it basically holds everything we need to know is taught in scripture, but scripture itself doesn't teach that scripture has everything that we need to know. Yeah. So, yeah, it's self-referentially incoherent. All right, let's move on to the next objection from Born Again R.N. This person says there are multiple, but ultimately it's the gospel, which the apostle Paul defines the gospel explicitly.

Maybe we want to look this up in 1 Corinthians 15, 1 through 4. 1 Corinthians 151 through 4, which he stated was handed down to him and he's handing it down to us. There's nothing other than believing in the sufficiency of the atonement of Christ who died on the cross according to the scriptures and rising from the head according to the scriptures because the latter proves that the former was effective. I might be too stupid to understand the weight of this objection. But what is he saying? Well, it's this simple gospel thing. It's similar to what another questioner raised up earlier.

It's like, well, I know Jesus died for me. All right. So he seems to be saying then that it comes down to what the gospel is, which is stated in 1 Corinthians 15 1 through 4. And apparently, I suppose he would say that the Catholic Church is contradicting the gospel because it denies the sufficiency of the Atonement of Christ. What does it say there? Can you read? Yeah. It says, now I would remind you, brethren, in what terms I preach to you the gospel, which you received, in which you stand, by which you are saved. if you hold it fast unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance, what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance of the scriptures, yes and amen. Of course, what are the scriptures?

What books are scriptural? That's an interesting question. We would have to appeal to tradition to find that out. That he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance to the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the 12th, then he appeared to more than 500 brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive,

some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, last of all, as to when timely born, he appeared to me, for I am the least of the apostles unfit to be called an apostle because I persecuted the church of God.

And then in verse 11, whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believe. I think my understanding of that objection, Matt, was that the person is saying, this is all it is and you guys have all those bell smells and whistles

that have encumbered the simple gospel all you need to do to be saved is believe in Christ's atoning work on the cross see if that were true then surely the Bible would be a lot shorter maybe just three verses yeah four verses I would agree 1st Corinthians 151 through 4 and and while we're on the topic remember that the four gospels of Matthew Mark

Luke and John circulated in the early church and what they were titled was the gospel according to Matthew, the gospel according to Mark. Katta Markon, you know? Yeah. Karta Yohanin and so on,

according to John, etc. So the early church understood the gospel to be everything that was encompassed in these documents. You know, and you look at Matthew. Matthew's a long book. And it's interesting if the church fathers

were asked for a synopsis of the gospel, they generally went to the kingdom, the sermon on the Mount, excuse me. And if you're looking for like a praecee, like it kind of, this is a passage that helpfully, you know, encompasses it. They would go to Matthew 5 through 7. I found that out in Protestant seminary.

And one of my New Testament professors told us, the fathers regarded the servant of the Mount as the synopsis of the good news. And I was offended because the sermon on the Mount does not teach salvation by faith alone. And that's what I thought the gospel was all about. I thought if you wanted a passage of scripture that encapsulated the gospel, surely it would be some chapters from Romans, where Paul says we're not justified by works of law, but by faith, you know, he doesn't actually say faith alone,

but we kind of slid that idea in there. But look, you know, the sermon I'm out, that's three chapters long. Look at all the things it says, you know. Talks about not being angry against your brother. Talks about forgiveness. Talks about adultery, divorce, prayer, fasting, almsgiving. It's very practical, you know.

So I resist, I think we talked about this before, like really resist these, attitudes towards the Christian faith that say, well, it only comes down to this. And like, as long as we get this, I guess the implication is we don't have to worry about the rest of the things in revelation. But it doesn't come down to one simple thing. Otherwise, like you said, the New Testament would be a lot shorter. The next objection comes from ascension by dissension, who says, a small problem would be that you worship the same God as Muslims and you do because you don't. don't want to hurt their feelings. Yeah, that's a great, that's, that's exactly what the

catechism says. Right, right. Yeah. We don't want to, we don't want to hurt the Muslims' feelings, yeah. All right, let's, so I got some, maybe if you don't mind, I'll finesse this a little bit. I'm okay, and maybe I'm wrong to be okay, you tell me, saying that, um, Muslims and Christians believe in the same God. And here's why I'm okay with it. And then you can tell me if I'm wrong. Um, suppose you were an atheist. and I was a Christian and I was telling you why you should believe in God. And then you got a book, let's say, by William Lang Craig, who lays out his famous five arguments for God's existence. And after that, you decided, I think I believe in God, you know.

And by God, you might mean the uncreated creator of the universe. I would say, all right, you might have a lot of deficiencies, a lot of perversions, a lot of falsehoods in your current understanding of God. But I would think I'd be comfortable saying we worship the same God. even if at that point you hadn't yet accepted that God was a Trinity, even if at that point you said, I don't believe God's a Trinity. I mean, is that fair? I think so. And that's exactly what I would say as well. And the church fathers, for example, believed that Aristotle and Plato and Socrates had reasoned to the existence of the God that we as Christians worship. Obviously, the church fathers did not believe that Aristotle, Plato, Socrates,

had correct notions about all the different truths about God, about who he was, et cetera. Obviously, their understanding of God was very deficient, very limited, limited to, you know, some basics like he's the creator, he's all powerful, he's all intelligent, things like this. but their understanding of God was sufficient to recognize that, yes, we are both worshipping the creator who is the ground of being. There's only one such entity, okay, in all of reality. And so we're both worshiping them.

And Paul says something similar in Romans 1 when he talks about, you know, what may be known about God is clear to them. And then he gives a few attributes of God that are evident from creation. He says, what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible nature, namely his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that they have been made so they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him. So Paul is saying that the primitive notion that most human cultures had of a creator being who is majestic, you know, who had brought all things into existence, that that is the same God that we worship, even though their notions about him were confused or rather limited. So in the same way, in that sense, we can say, yeah, we worship the same God as the Muslims.

Why not hold off on using the word worship? Because I'd want to know what that means. Now, first of all, here's what Lumen Gensium, well, this is quoted in the catechism, but it's from Lumen Gensium. The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the creator. Now, just to be clear, the church doesn't teach that, you know, Muslims and Jews will be saved in saying that, right? And here is specifically talking about Muslims.

It's just saying it includes them. Clearly, we want them to come to the fullness so that they can have salvation. In the first place amongst whom are the Muslims, these profess to hold the faith of Abraham. Profess, that's interesting. And together with us, they adore. All right, so that's synonymous. That's worship. They adore the one merciful God, mankind's judge on the last day.

Yeah, not everything that Muslims believe about God is wrong. They believe many true things about the one creator God, that he is one, that he created all things, that he has revealed himself. to mankind, that he's going to judge the world. In fact, that he's going to judge the world through Jesus. People don't realize this, but Muslims don't believe that Muhammad is going to come back in judge humanity. They believe Jesus is going to come back in judge humanity. So Jesus has a, as an important role in Islam. And in the Quran, Jesus is called the Word of God. So there's, there's many true things that they believe about, about God, and that we can affirm with them. So, you know, if you have those understandings of the Creator God, you're a little bit closer to the truth than if you believe in 50 promiscuous, you know, river deities or something like this.

Okay, but let me press back against this a little bit. Is it possible to have such a perverted notion of God that we can no longer say you believe in God? That believe in the same God? Yeah, I think that's possible. Like if you believe that God is, God was once a man as we are. now, let's say, and progress to godhood. And that this being lives within the universe. Yeah. And that there are actually other gods like him that we're not actually bound to worship. It's just this one god we're bound to worship. Like at what point do you go, you don't. That's not.

Like you could say subjectively you worship God. Okay. Like psychologically. Right. But philosophically, you don't believe in. What you mean by God is a completely other being. Yeah. So what, like, Where's that line? Well, it's up to the church to decide what that line is. But the description of God that you just gave was a description of God that he's not the creator and he's not the ground of all being. And he's not the necessary being, you know. So I think that's an important criteria there. You know, what we mean by God is the necessary being.

And the Muslims mean by God that as well. Okay. Allah is the necessary being, the creator. And that distinguishes the constant, you know, we think of the concept of God with a capital G from gods of the small G. Richard Dawkins doesn't get this either. You know, he thinks that, you know, by God, we just mean some kind of supernatural being.

But, no, we have a very specific sense of that meaning in the Judeo-Christian tradition. By God, we only acknowledge one God because God is the necessary being and there can only be one necessary being as Father Spitzer has demonstrated, many others. He's probably the most recent. But you would say a view of God

that is mutable wouldn't be a necessary being and yet you wouldn't tell Protestants they don't worship God who believe in a mutable changing. What Protestants believe? William Lane Craig doesn't believe in divine simplicity, for example.

Okay. Yeah, so I'm sure you know of, we don't have to pick on William and Craig but just there are Protestants who deny divine simplicity and that God changes, that God, you know, like... That starts to get squishy,

that starts to get gray. But I would say, I think that Protestants in those camps probably don't fully realize the implications of their incorrect notions about God. Yeah, but, okay, but that's what we just said earlier about the people who believe that God was once a man. Obviously, I'm talking about Mormons,

Right. Right. So they don't understand the deficiencies in that either. So why not say they will? No, no. But they're not holding that God is the creator and the necessary being. William Lane Craig is going to, it believes that God's the creator. He's the ground of being. He's the necessary being. So we're talking about the same person, okay, in reality. And then he has some notions about the necessary being that if taken to their logical conclusion, really, cause some epistemological damage to that notion. But I would suspect he doesn't realize the full implications there. I'm of the opinion that all of this sort of chest beating online in which people say that Muslims worship a demon say, I think a lot of that's bluster. I think a lot of that is them trying to say how different and how wrong the Muslims are. And it's like you can say that without having to. deny what the Catholic Church teaches. Right. Don't you think? I would, yeah. So it's like if my, if I have, if you're telling me my choice is between this YouTuber who's calling me a beta male for saying Muslims believe in God, right. The same God or the Holy Catholic Church. And it's like, all right, well, I'm, you can say that and I'm going to go with the church. Yeah, yeah. We're not, we're not saying, you know, uh, worshiping the, worshiping the creator, um, is,

is compatible with having very wrong notions about the character of the creator. Okay, say that again? I said, worshipping the creator is compatible with having some very wrong notions about the character of the creator. So, yeah, and that's, I mean, because in Islam, well, you know, Allah has these aspects, has these attributes of perfection, which are true of the creator, that he's all merciful, that he's all knowing, that he's all powerful, that he's all powerful, all these things. But then the implications of some of their beliefs impinge on God's goodness, his truthfulness, for example, and so on. Yeah.

Well, this is a, thank you for taking that question, because I know you're a theologian and biblical scholar, not a philosopher, and this was kind of... Yeah, I'm mostly a Bible scholar. So, even theology is an in a way of game for me. That's a good way to put it. All right. Let's see.

Fuel motive, 8716, says, why is there not a succinct document listing every dogma? I've been, I've shared this frustration that must be believed in order to be Catholic. Why hasn't the church published an infallible document listing every dogma up until this point? And add to it when the dogma is newly defined. That's a, I, do you at least, even if you think that's a bad question. formulation. Don't you, tell me what they mean. Steal man that for it for me.

Well, they said, like, tell me everything I need to affirm. Yeah. You know, just put it all out there. Yeah. You're telling me you going to believe these things. Yeah. And the catechism is an attempt to do that. This, you know, that's the purpose of it.

Like, believe all this. Okay, this is central, you know. But the catechism is not exhaustive. But you see, as Catholics, we're like, we trust the church. The church is Mrs. Jesus. you're never going to be able to reduce to writing everything that the church believes and is. Okay, there's always going to be some, a little bit of leftover. And the leftover is tradition.

I mean, this is Eve Kangara, the meaning of tradition, you know? I don't know, that's a wrong way to phrase it. But we discreet. We discover, let me give you an illustration. We discover things that we believe that we're not quite aware that we believed before. Let me use an analogy. A few years ago, I encountered, you know, children's books. And children's books will often be titled something like, you know,

the big red truck or the little blue truck. And that sounds right to our English ears. And if you say the red big truck or the blue little truck, it's like, that's weird. I was not aware of this, but there is a rule of grammar in English that size precedes color. So it is proper to say the big red truck,

the little blue truck. I didn't know the rule. I didn't know that there was such a thing. I could understand what people were trying to say if they said the blue little truck, but it sounded funny. So what that illustrates is, I knew how to speak good English.

I knew how to speak English well. So true. Okay, I knew to speak English well. I knew what sounded idiomatic, even though I wasn't aware of a particular rule. But if somebody learned English as a second language came along and said, the blue little truck, I'm like, they sound funny. And a lot of the church's deeper understanding of the faith over time is like that. We know what we believe. We know the Christian faith.

Here comes a heretic who says, the blue little truck and the red big truck. And we say, you don't know how to speak Christian. We don't speak Christian like that, you know? But we weren't even kind of conscious of it until it was challenged. And then we like, and I'm like, you know what? I see. We ought to write that rule down.

I see. Okay. Size precedes color. And we weren't even quite aware of it because it was just so close to us that we weren't conscious of it. So that's why I say all that the church has and believes

can never be written down. Some of the things that we've believe are so close to us that like a fish in water, we're not aware and we're not going to be aware until a heretic comes along in the year 3000 and says, you know what, blah, blah, blah. And we're going to say, you don't speak Catholic right. And we're going to have to commit that, you know, to the rule book. So this is the development of doctrine. Yeah. Isn't that funny? Like there's so many heresies. Like we could imagine the year 3000 saying, someone saying that Mary was a was an extraterrestrial. And you're like, well, we didn't know we'd have to address this one.

Rob robots need to be baptized. I don't know. So whatever it might be. All right. Um, okay. This, this is, this is a good one. And I hope to spend some time on this. So Brad Bowers says, the contradictory list of supposedly infallible statements. This is his objection. This is why he can't become Catholic. Redeemed Zuma, who's a YouTuber, Protestant, His video on Roman Catholicism contradictions is on point and Trent's rebuttal of it is insufficient. Now, I've seen neither of those videos. Maybe you haven't either, so we're not committing to either of those things. I don't tend to find Trent often insufficient, so people might watch that video.

He says, that problem alone kills any serious consideration of converting to Roman Catholicism for me. We should point out that Roman Catholicism was a slam. that Anglicans used after the Reformation. Interesting. Right? So, you know, they were, yeah, it's like, I understand what you mean, but it's like, like, I for example, am a Ukrainian Catholic. I'm not a Roman Catholic.

I didn't know if you knew that. I didn't know. But it's like both of us are Catholic. Anyway, what's that? So don't wonder you're so odd. I know, right? He says, there is just not enough consistency in church history or the Pope. Sometimes the church history is lacking or even a.

against Catholic dogma in many places. Vatican 1 is without any historical support in its doctrine regarding the Pope's authority. Can you coup do about that? Let's see. I mean, come on. Don't say any. You can say not sufficient. But I say any.

You just leave yourself open. And the three popes crisis and the need for a council to resolve it shows. All right. I'll let you answer that. And then I have a specific example I want to give you. Yeah. There's so many different aspects to that question. What would you like to me address for?

Well, all the contradictions among, because you often hear a Catholic say, like, there's no contradiction in fallible claims. And it's like, well, here's, I can give you an example right now, unless you have one in mine. Well, I think the one that he gives is. Well, this is mine, actually. This wasn't his. This is the example. Well, I mean, you could, you could, you could, you know, are you talking about the contrast we've seen between, say, extraceum nola solace and Florence versus. Can I read this? Okay. So I want to thank the Protestant who are, you know, are you talking about the contrasts we see between, say, extra ecclasium nola solace and Florence versus. Can I read this? Okay. Okay. I want to thank the Protestant who are. I want to thank the Protestant who are. I me at my talk at some university at some point recently. He asked me this question, and I said the thing that every Catholic should say when they don't know. I said, I don't know. It took me a while to learn that. All right. But like compare the Council of Florence to the Second Vatican Council. Okay. So let's just read this from the Council of Florence decree for the Jacobites. Quote, the Holy Roman Church firmly believes professors and proclaims that none of those existing outside the Catholic Church, not only pagans, but also Jews, heretics and schismatics can have a share in life eternal. But that they will go into the eternal fire unless

before death, they are joined with her. It's like, all right, that's pretty straightforward. Is that false? Because the Second Vatican Council seems to think so. At least this is the objection, right? Lumen Gensium 16. Those also can attain to everlasting salvation, who through no fault of their own, do not know the gospel of Christ or his church, yet sincerely seek God and move by grace, strive by their deeds to do his will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience. Like that prima facie seems like a contradiction. Yeah. So that's an example. I'm sure this fellow could probably give you a hundred more. So what maybe you want to address that specific example? Yeah, I'd like to address that specific example. That is an apparent

contradiction, which is not only in church councils, but it's in the scriptures. Because first of all, let's talk about the apparent contradiction in scriptures, because the Bible, the New Testament will say things like, unless you eat the flesh and drink the blood of the son of man, you have no life in you. Okay, that sounds like absolutely clear. You got to take the Eucharist, otherwise you have no life. Matthew, Mark 16, 16, he who believes and is baptized will be safe. Okay, that seems to be absolutely clear. If you're not baptized, you're going to hell. Okay.

And, you know, on and on, a number of things. You know, confess with your mouth, believe in your heart, Jesus Christ, you will be saved. Okay, clear. If you don't confess and believe specifically in Jesus, you're going to hell. Any number of things. So all of that, I am the way, the truth in life. No one comes to the Father but by me. There is no other name under heaven by which you must be saved.

than that of Jesus Christ. Okay, that was from Acts, and that's from John 14, in reverse order there. Okay, so all of these passages, that like, Jesus is the only way. You have to have the sacraments. You have to do this, you have to do that, no other option.

And then Paul in Romans 2 says, beginning in verse 12, all who have sinned without the law will also perish without the law, and all who have sinned, sinned under the law will be judged by the law. For it's not the, here's, etc. I'm going to jump down to verse 14.

When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, well, their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them. On that day when, according to my gospel, God judge. the secrets of men by Christ Jesus. Their St. Paul makes it sound as though those who have not the law, these would be pagans who live and die apart from the Israelite tradition

through which God's revelation has been passed down. So these are, you know, tribes people in Europe in the context of St. Paul's Day, maybe, okay? who have an inner sense of the moral law, we can say the natural law, because everybody has a sense of the natural law, okay, and that their consciences possibly may excuse them at the day of final judgment.

Yeah, it's not spelled out, but it certainly does seem to suggest. That's right. And, okay, so that leaves open the possibility that hey maybe, you know, Gentiles who don't have special revelation, who don't have the word of God or explicit testimony to Jesus Christ, maybe by obeying what's written on their heart, they might be excused at the day of judgment. And that's the same thing you will see in the church fathers. Did you want to see that? What's that? I don't know, do you want to see the exact

examples? No, I've, I've, you know it. And I like your first, but the very, the very fathers, like Augustine and Ironaeus and Justin Martyr, who are very emphatic about the necessity of joining the church. They also will have statements within their writings where they leave open the possibility that maybe Socrates and Heraclitus, for example, Justin Martyr mentions those two, that maybe they will be saved because they followed the logos, okay?

John 1 talks about Jesus as being the logos. the reason that animates the universe. And so Socrates and Heraclitus did a very good job of discerning the God's, we would say, maybe God's natural law that animates the cosmos. And so Justin Martyr was open to the possibility that those virtuous pagans would be saved. And other fathers leave open the possibility

that those, for example, I mean, a common example, that the father's used is those who desire baptism but are killed before they are baptized, nonetheless are saved by what we call a baptism of desire, even though they didn't have the sacraments and they weren't visibly part of the church. And even the possibility of those who follow the natural law written on their heart. So if you look at, if you look For example, many, many theologians from the era of the evangelism of the Americas, many of the Spanish, Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits,

who are involved in preaching the gospel to the Native Americans in Central and South America, were willing to leave open the possibility that virtuous pagans from within these Indian cultures who followed the natural law written in their heart with sincerity and knew the Creator God and loved the Creator God and were willing to do what He commanded, even though their understanding of what it was that he commanded was subject to confusion and limitation because they weren't beneficiaries of Special Revelation

that they could possibly be saved. Long before modern progressivism and liberalism and so on, you could find it in their writing. So you find this dichotomy in the scriptures, you find it in the fathers, and you find it in the statements of the councils. What I would say about those two statements is that when Florence says all these people

who are outside the Catholic Church can't be saved unless they reconcile with her, what Florence is assuming is that these folks are consciously rejecting the Catholic Church. And you cannot, as the Catechism says this, as well. You cannot know what the church is and then consciously reject her and be saved. Okay. If you know what the church is and you decide, despite that, I don't want to be part of her, no, you can't be saved. But like Paul and Romans 2 and like many of the fathers and many of the

theologians throughout the ages, the church leaves open this possibility of those who, through no fault of their own, don't have the benefit of the fullness of revelation, but follow the lights that they've been given in sincerity and love God and try to serve him with humility. And the church asserts that that is, that is the work of God's grace in their heart. They're not doing that of their own accord. And they're not saved apart from Christ if they are. No, absolutely not. It's the, it's the grace of Christ working in their heart. Because we're not plagiar here. We're not saying that these virtuous pagans save themselves by their own human power. We're saying, no, that was God working outside of his usual means, outside of the ordinary means of grace, God was giving them

grace to lead them towards himself. Here's Justin Marta's words from the first apology. Quote, we have been taught that Christ is the firstborn of God and we have declared above that he is the word of whom every race of men were partakers and those who live reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists as among the Greeks, Socrates, Heraclitus, and men like them. So also those who live before Christ and did not live by the Logos were ungracious enemies of Christ and murderers of those who live by the Logos. But those who live by the Logos and those who so live now are Christians, fearless and unperturbed. Yeah. Yeah. So the virtuous pagan who follow the natural law, the natural law is the Logos,

the Logos is Christ. They are, you know, mysterious Christians. So it sounds like this is a development of doctrine, right? Yeah. Like when the countess is a government. of Florence were speaking, it didn't have in mind, maybe the term hadn't even been really fleshed out of invincible ignorance. Yeah. That is to say, not only ignorant, but not responsible for the ignorance. Right. And of course, the church doesn't teach that if somebody is invincibly ignorant, they will be saved. Yeah, yeah. Just that they might be. Opens, yeah. Okay, that's. Holds up with a possibility for that. That's really helpful. Yeah. This leads into the final objection, unless you had more to say. No. And that has to do with development of

doctrine. So McGee Bentel says development of doctrine, how to justify it. What are its limits? The more I think about it, the more it seems like it gets to a place of epistemic nihilism and a radical relativism. If anything can get developed, then what is the unchanging truth? I know you'll say something like truth itself is unchanging, but what we know about what is true gets uncovered as time goes by. But obviously to me, this seems like a non-answer and cop-out. Yeah, that has not been my experience. That's not how I see reality either as a Protestant or as a Catholic. When you look at the history of Protestant denominations, there you truly get a situation where anything is up for grabs. I mean, compare what the Episcopalians believed 150 years ago versus what they believe and what

they're doing now. You know, it's such a radically different thing. But conversely, look at what the Catholic Church teaches now and what she taught in the early centuries. One of the major factors of my conversion was that when my friend Michael got me to read the apostolic fathers and I was working through Clement of Rome and Ignatius of Antioch, thanks be to God, I had enough theological formation to realize that as I was reading through these guys, that they were affirming all of the basic axioms of Catholic theology. I remember literally thinking to myself, if you just give me the principles that Ignatius of Antioch accepts, I can derive the rest of Catholicism down to what it is today from those axioms. Maybe if folks have had geometry in high school, you

you know how you start with these axioms in Euclidean geometry, and then you can derive theorems from it, you know? Like you can work out, well, the implications of these axes are, you know, these angles do whatever. And that's the way I saw it, that Clement of Rome, like, give me apostolic succession, give me sacramental realism and sacramental regeneration, give me the importance of the visible unity of the church,

etc. Give me the veneration of tradition as well as the veneration of scripture and so on. And everything else that the Catholic Church believes down to the present day kind of, it can be derived, so to speak, from those basic principles. Look at Justin Martyr's description of the worship of early Christians, and you'll see it sounds like mass as we celebrate it today. There is so much continuity. the divinity of Christ, his equality with the Father and the Spirit, Christ's presence in the

sacraments, especially the Most Holy Eucharist, the authority of the apostles, and by derivation, the authority of their successors. It is clearly the same religion, even though it's grown and and become deeper. So far, you know, far from being a counsel of despair or some kind of principle that leads to epistemic nihilism, what development of doctrine is to me extraordinarily hopeful. And what development of doctrine means is, as the centuries pass,

we enter into the faith that we've been given, more and more deeply. We begin to realize its implications, and we begin to understand better and better how to speak of it with precision. Through experience, we learned that certain language used to describe our faith really doesn't work well in the long haul, and that other language to describe the faith does work well and preserves us from error and from heresy. And so we come up with terms like Homo Uzios versus homoosios and person and nature and, you know, infallible and inerrant and so on. And so we come up with terms that allow us to describe what we believe with greater precision than the first Christians experienced, even though the content of what we believe is essentially the same.

And the analogy I used earlier, you know, the picture doesn't change, but the picture gets more and more in focus, as we proceed. So we can draw clearer, sharper lines around the different dogmas that we believe, the different teachings that we believe and get more and more precise. And because we have a living interpretive voice, we are able to deal with questions that arise that were not foreseen by previous generations. Previous generations didn't have to deal with, for example, with, you know, chemical contraceptives in exactly the same way, although they did have some. So already, there was already an initial response to abortion and contraception because there are primitive forms of that in the early church. And then that's become more precise, you know, over time.

But things like AI, you know, it's not anticipated. IVF. Right. Right. Absolutely. Intervenous. In vitro fertilization. In vitro fertilization. Thank you. wasn't foreseen in previous January. So the church has to respond. You know, what do we say about IVF? It presents different moral challenges. Well, thanks be to God, even though the scriptures don't directly address IVF, we have an authoritative interpreter of the scriptures who can apply the principles of the scriptures to this current challenge and tell us clearly what is right and what is wrong with respect to that so that we're not left in a cloud of unknowing and like, well, we can't come to the truth. We can't figure out what the truth is. So it's precisely the reverse

of what our objector is describing. He thinks that development of doctrine means we never know what we're going to believe and anything can be anything. And it's actually not that way. The development of doctrine is a conservative force. It's ever greater clarity. We don't believe that we do three, you know, that we do one 80s in the development of doctrine and turn around like, now we don't believe that. No, we progress in our understanding. Now we believe it more accurately. Now we believe it more deeply. And as new challenges arise, we have the living interpretive voice, which allows us to know the truth about these unforeseen realities that have come up in the progress of history so that we can know the truth and not be just, you know.

to and throw back a wind of doctrine. Correct. Yeah, absolutely. How does someone might say, well, what about capital punishment? I mean, this is sanctioned in scriptures. Right. Doesn't seem like you could call it evil. The church has taught why it was valid. Yeah.

Now someone will say, the church says it's invalid and always evil. And so there's a one eighth one that church has made. What do you say to that? Yeah, well. Because the church would appeal to a sort of devalive. development of doctrine here. Right. Yeah, yeah. That's a good question. And what I would say is, you know, when you look at the gravity of the decrees that have been issued about capital punishment and the terminology that has been used, I think that a reasonable understanding of what

recent popes are teaching in this area is essentially a practical and a pastoral, exhortation to the church in our age that the popes in their wisdom as successors of Peter's and successors of Peter and being led by the Holy Spirit are calling upon us the Christian faithful to oppose this form of punishment and to look for alternatives judicial alternatives. But we have not received from the Pope's kind of dogmatic declarations that rule capital of punishment as intrinsically evil, because that would indeed contradict things that the church has said in the past. So I think that we want to keep communion with the Holy Father, currently Pope Leo the 14th,

submit our will and our intellect to his counsel as the successor of Peter, and pull in the same direction. And as the spokesperson for the church and led by the Holy Spirit, if he's calling us to oppose the death penalty in this age, then so it should be done. But I don't think that anything that the popes have said in the recent pontificates rule out the possibility that in the future, the posts may judge that a different,

circumstance prevails and maybe practically and pasturally, we do need to go back to having recourse to that form of punishment. You're saying if the church had have declared infallibly that the death penalty was always intrinsically evil, that would be a 180. Right. But by saying that it is inadmissible. Which is a poorly defined theological term. Yeah.

It's not a traditional terminology in theological discourse. Right. So it might be. unhelpful, but it's not saying, I mean, this sounds like a bit of a cope. I feel like you and I coping right now, because I'm not sure how I feel about it. So that's a good question for you. What is a Catholic to do when they look at this? And I don't know if I agree. Right. What is one to do? You know, what one does is one keeps communion with the successor of Peter because there's always safety in that. And if there's some kind of error, we can stand before Jesus with

absolute clear conscience because, Lord, I was following orders, okay? The one that you left to us and entrusted to our, you entrusted us to his shepherding care. And you, O Lord, in your wisdom, appointed this pastor, this universal pastor at this time. And we trust in his guidance. And so we submitted. So if there's any error on that part, it's not on us. It's on the Lord.

And I'm not saying that there's any error. But there's always there's always safety. There's always safety. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like a Pascalian kind of wager. Yeah. But my point too is, can popes ever be wrong? Or are they always right?

Even in serious matters? No. Curious matters, right? Like changing words in the catechism, catechism is an infallible document, is not an infallible document, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's not like everything that's, yeah. So. Popes, yeah, popes can air in their personal opinions. You know, we understand the infallibility of the pope to imply in two basic situations.

There's the ordinary exercise of infallibility when the successor of Peter reaffirms what has always been taught by the church that is infallible. That's the ordinary exercise of infallibility. And the extraordinary or unusual exercise of infallibility is when he makes a self-conscious defining act in the area of doctrine. And there are customary, there has been a development of what the customary external signs are when the Pope wants to make such a decision. So there's language and circumstances that have become customary to for we declare we declare we define etc So the pope can indicate externally where it is his intent to Make a formal declaration and definition of of doctrine and for those at home Pope Francis never did that

He did not do that done that yeah I think John Paul the second did that with male priesthood. I think you used that Yeah, yeah, that might have. So as to strengthen the brethren anyway. So I know that everyone who's watching right now is, I am, impressed with your knowledge of scripture. And it reminds me of something that Dr. Hahn once said. He said that, you know, familiarity with the scriptures isn't what leads to boredom of them. Or, you know, it's actually, it's actually the other way around that the familiarity leads to,

like, fascination and wonder, right? So the whole reason I say this is, as we wrap. up, I want to point people to St. Paul Center.com slash pints. There'll be a link below because you guys have done a really excellent job at providing some Bible studies taught by people like yourself and others. I just wanted to give you a word. I want to really encourage people sign up. I believe there's a discount on an all access annual membership for Pints washers.

That's available at St. Paul Center.com slash pints. Yep. And now's a good time to join the St. Paul Center because my course on the Gospel of John has just dropped. I think people would really enjoy that. I had a blast teaching it. St. John is my favorite part of scripture to teach. I get really passionate about it. And I think folks will enjoy that.

But we got so much good content on there. We got tons of highly produced Bible studies that are plug and play. And they're very well done, too. Well done for that. Yeah. Folks can take them to their parishes and hook up their laptop to a screen and then just lead a discussion afterwards. It's the easiest way to lead a Bible study cover. I've got to be honest just sitting here with you.

I'm like, I want to do this with my wife. Like at the end of the day, you're a bit fried. Like let's watch Dr. Berg's talk about the gospel of John. So I'm just looking this up. And again, there'll be a link below so people can click it St. Paul. So there's no dot. ST Paulcenter.com slash pints. You get 30 day free access, figure out if you want it or not.

And if not, presumably you can cancel it. But yeah, I've always been really impressed with the quality that's coming out of there. So thanks for the good work you're doing over there. Yeah, you bet. Anything else you want to tell people about? Boy, yeah, there's lots of things I want to tell people about. I got to respect the parameters of time. Yeah.

Well, and thanks for the work you put into the excellent Bible study. The Bible commentary, sorry. Yeah, the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible. Yep. I was thrilled to see. People might not know this, but I don't know. When Ignatius printed the first Bible, I'm not sure if they had access to the thin paper. So the Bible was this big. But it's actually, I was shocked at how manageable it is right now because of the thin paper. Like it could almost be used as your personal Bible. Sure. Yeah, the personal size that's just come out. Yeah. You can manipulate it with one hand. Yeah. So I just bought it the other day. I was in a copy of books. I'm like, there it is. It's excellent. Yeah. I got a copy of myself. Because, you can manipulate it. The big one hurts my lap. Yeah. You know it's heavy.

You need, you need like a... Is this your personal Bible? This is, yeah, this is an unadorned, noteless... Yeah, do you... So why do you have a noteless Bible? I was interested that you didn't have notes and underlines and things in it? Well, this... I should qualify.

My own personal Bible is all marked up and it's falling apart. So I did not bring it with me because it does not stand up well to the rich. of travel. So I got a more physically intact Bible to bring along. And I'm kind of frustrated because it doesn't have all my marks and everything in it. So how long have you, this Bible that's falling apart? How long have you had it? 25 years. And you were a Catholic then? So it's a Catholic Bible. And what is the translation? So it's the RSVCE2. It's like this. Yeah. It's, it was originally a hardbound. And I've had it rebound twice. And the second rebinding. And the second rebinding is now failing. I still, I put it in a, I put it in a gallon zip lock bag to keep it

all together. That's amazing. And I bring it to class and I take it out of the, if you remember, would you please send me some photos of this? Yeah, I will. I will do that. Don't they say that someone who owns a Bible that's falling apart, a Bible that's falling apart is usually owned by somebody who isn't? Right. I don't know if that's drawn out. Is it? That's beautiful. What is your one piece of advice to people who want to love scripture but can't make themselves do it. Can't make themselves do it? That's a fair, honest question, isn't it? I would get a pocket New Testament like this one.

That is a daily reader. And there's just three minutes a day. You can read through the New Testament in a year and keep that in there and just do it when you go to the store or something like that. I think that's one of the easiest ways. That's just an idea. It's a good one. Dr. Bergsmouth, thank you for your time.

Absolutely. Thank you, Matt. Appreciate being on.