Shaun Newman Podcast - #504 - Jason Paone

Episode Date: September 27, 2023

He is a doctoral candidate in theology at the Catholic University of America,and works as an editor of the Word on Fire academic publishing imprint. Let me know what you think. Text me 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcast Patreon: www.patreon.com/ShaunNewmanPodcast

This is Late and Gray. This is Tanner Today. This is Donald Best. This is Granny McCoy. This is Steve Holmstrom. This is Viva Fry. You're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks.

Happy Wednesday. All right. This is going to, you know, harken back to James Coates being on the podcast. So before we get there, you know, and see what the phone line does today. Let's get to today's episode sponsors. Let's start first here. Blaine and Joy, Stefan Guardian Plumbing and Heating, home of the Guardian Power Station,

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fuel locations for more information. Visit them at Hancock Petroleum.com.com. He's a doctoral candidate in theology at the Catholic University of America, and he works as an editor of the Word on Fire academic publishing imprint. I'm talking about Jason Payon. So buckle up, here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today. I'm joined by Jason Payone. So first off, sir, thanks for hopping on. Great to be here.

I was saying to you, you know, we're going to get into everything about your background and everything else. But we were talking before we started, A1, I was hoping your name was going to be something like the last name. I was looking at it for so long, you know, PA1. I'm like, ooh, this can be an interesting name. And of course, pay, anyway, it doesn't matter. I was excited for how I was going to try and pronounce it. Anyways, I get a kick out of names, you know, do this. The other thing was, I was telling you about James Coates' interview,

and you'd listen to it, and I was, you know, partway through, I'm like, man, in my brain, I'm like, the phone line is just going to tear me apart. But in the nicest possible way, because listeners aren't upset. If anything, they're like, you need to get a Catholic on stat and refute some of this and talk about it. And so, I mean, somehow or another, we come to Jason, and we're going to talk some of that. But once again, thanks for doing this.

Thanks for coming on. Let's get into who Jason is because I got no clue. You got to tell me a little bit about your story and let the audience know who you are. So I'm Jason Payon, as I already said. I am a father of three. I and a husband, and I live in Texas, Dallas, Texas. How old are your kids?

My kids are 16 years old. I have a 16-year-old girl, which is quite a, It's quite a, it's a good time. It's a good time. It's a lot of, you know what they tell me. Never ask this question, but I'm like, how old are you? I am 37, I think. You start to lose track in the later 30s.

So you had a kid very young. Very young, yes, yes, I did. I guess I's not that young. 21, 20, 20? I think I was 21, yeah. My wife and I, we got, we met when we were like 15 years old. We've sort of the high school sweetheart story. we've been married for 17 years, I think, almost, or 16 years or something.

We've been, oh, sorry, 17 years. Don't let her listen to. We've been married for 17 years because we were married one year before my daughter was born. So that's a good way to keep track of it. Gotcha. Well, I sit here. I'm 37. I got three, but we are little ways behind you.

We're seven, six, and the little guy just turned four. And actually, I was almost texting you to be like, We got to cancelate because we had a long night last night. The little guy was in the hospital with Krupp, you know, the heart breathing and all that jazz. Like, you know what you're like, ah, this sounds. The worst thing of a parent is having a small child where you know exactly what it is. You're like, it's Krupp. This sucks.

It sounds awful. There's not much you can do. I mean, yes, there is in little ways. But it got to the point where, you know, he's throwing up and everything else and you go to the hospital. And what else can you do? So the night has been an interesting one. Sorry to hear that, Sean. John, yeah, I feel your pain.

Our kids, we've just been through a big respiratory illness of some kind, who knows. But yeah, you just sort of want to take the disease from them and, you know, suffer it yourself and spare them the misery because these little kids, they just really can't understand it. And yet, to help improve their immune system and everything else, it's not like it's the end of the world for them. That's true. I was actually having the conversation with my kids, my two oldest this morning at the dinner table. You know, they're like, oh, you know, and they're just down. And how did he get sick?

And that's terrible. Well, people get sick. Like, I mean, whoa, this isn't anything new, folks, especially Kroop. I mean, Kroop sucks. It just, it just does. But anyways, I interrupted. I heard three kids. I'm looking at you.

I'm going, you're not that old. So 16, how old are your other two? 16, 7, and 2. So I have a real spread. I plan to be a grandparent and a parent of a young child at the same time, apparently. Fairly. That is a spread. Yeah, right after my daughter was born, I entered college, and I've been a student since my daughter was about two years old. So I've been in college for a long, long time.

I'm just now finishing my doctoral program, that's why. And what did you go into school for? Initially, I wanted to be a priest, actually, when I was still a Protestant. And I wanted to be an Anglican priest. I sort of got really into C.S. Lewis and I just loved everything about C.S. Lewis. And I loved the Church of England, Anglican tradition. And so I joined that church and I wanted to be a priest. Halfway through my wife said, you know, I don't want to be the wife of a priest. Why don't you get into teaching instead? And little did she know, the teaching path is a good deal longer than

the priest path. So I'm still on it. But I also work for full-time as an editor. I'm sort of the editor of Word on Fire, academic. It's the academic publishing imprint of Bishop Barron's, Bishop Robert Barron's Word on Fire, ministry that he's created to kind of evangelize and to sort of give a presentation of what Catholicism is all about. So in some way, I guess I'm the right person to be on the show for you. Well, I did a little light digging on you. I don't love to know everything because then that spoils the fun of exploring a conversation. I'm like, who is this guy?

And I saw that. I saw your schooling. I'm like, well, that's a lot of years. That's a lot of time and study. What was it, you know, when you go back, you know, you said you wanted to be a priest right off the hop. I can't, I must be come from a different world. because I don't remember ever thinking that sounded like the career for me or, you know, the life path for me. What was it about being a priest, Jason, that you're like, that makes actually, I really want to do that.

Yeah, that's a really good question. And I sort of think when people ask questions like this, when someone has like a ready-made answer, it's probably not completely true. I think there's a great deal that's just mysterious about, you know, St. Augustine said this sort of thing that like we're mysteries to ourselves. But I can say that I remember reading C.S. Lewis is mere Christianity. And that was the moment where I sort of fell in love with the Christian tradition, fell in love with Christian theology, fell in love with the idea of God. And I wanted to serve God somehow.

And that was sort of the most obvious thing. I had been raised a sort of a kind of evangelical, a very, a branch of evangelicalism that was probably closest to Pentecostalism. It was non-denominational, but of course, non-denominational is a kind of denomination. And it was mostly like Pentecostalism, I would guess. But when I encountered C.S. Lewis's mere Christianity, for the first time, I got a taste. for the ancient richness of the Christian tradition. Unfortunately, there's been kind of historical tendency to kind of cut away, you know, pair away aspects of the tradition that have been too controversial or

complicated for the ordinary person to understand. And I think the result is just a really bare bones kind of Christianity that is still, you know, I think beautiful and elegant in its own way. but I was when I encountered, you know, sort of a more ancient, a more culturally rich form of Christianity, it just caught my attention and I've been sort of in its captivity ever since. Well, I just, we literally just talked about C.S. Lewis a week ago, maybe a little less. Screw tape letters. I got to read that one. I haven't read the one you're talking about.

When you talk about an ancient, more ancient, more full Christian, what do you mean? What have they cut away? Well, I think if you have one concrete example, the Nicene Creed. I didn't know anything about this Nicene Creed. Not an apology. Not the Nicene Council, the Nicene Creed? Yeah, I hope I'm saying that, right? Well, the adjective is Nicene.

But the city is called Niccia. Yeah, N-I-C-E-A, correct? Yeah, there's actually an actual... There's probably... Who am I kidding? Fair enough. Fair enough. I'm pretty sure I understand what you're talking about, but sorry, the creed. Yeah, fill me in.

Yeah, so in the fourth century, the church came together. The bishops from all over the world came together in what they call an ecumenical council. and to try to settle some questions about the nature of Christ. This was the original reason for calling the meeting. And the question was whether Christ was divine and really not whether he was divine, but how divine was Christ. There are people who sort of thought that he was,

he was like a god, but a lesser god, like a lesser deity than the father. This is famous Presbyter Arias thought this. But at Nicaeus, they settled that Jesus was, although he wasn't, he was begotten of the father, wasn't less than the father, wasn't inferior to the father in any way. And so he was equally divine. And that was the sort of, that was the theology that came out of that council. And then ultimately, a council later, or a couple councils later, there was council of Calcedon. And so sometimes people talk about the Nicino, sorry, the council of Constantinople is what I should say. So what we call the Nicene Creed today is actually the product of these two councils. And in that second council in Calcedon, they said basically the same thing about the Holy Spirit. The father, the son, and the Holy Spirit are all co-equal divine persons that share the same substance.

There are one divine being together, but they subsist in three persons. So that doctrine, which we now call the Trinity, the doctrine of the Trinity, is not explicitly in the New Testament. It's not explicitly in the Bible. You know, you can find it all over the place if you're looking for it, but there's no, the word Trinity never appears and the word consubstantial never appears. The word, you know, hypostasis, which we translate as person, those don't appear in the Bible. So those were things that the church had to, those are truths that the church had to kind of elaborate and work out in a kind of dialectical process. And they were finally codified in this creed that for, you know, until very recently, I would say, Christians all over of all kinds, all stripes held that that creed to be sort of the defining set of doctrines that Christians, minimum. emily espoused.

So that's one thing like, you know, it's a surprising thing that there are Christians who have never heard of this Nicene Creed because it's just this essential. You were to find ancient Christians after the fourth century, they would all, they would all be able to recite the Nicene Creed. They would all identify the Nicene Creed as the quintessential statement of what Christians believe. I remember I remember reading about the council. And right away, I don't know if I ever, you know, it's,

funny how a guy's brain works right you are so interested in it as soon as i saw humans at their hands on anything to do with with the bible and god i went i'm out i'm just i as soon as i saw that i was like ah they're gonna they're gonna mess this up because like look at look at the way and i mean that was back then i i was a a young whippersnapper snapper for that matter like when i first heard about it because i was just like this is crazy why would they ever do anything to the bible But in your mind, Jason, that's a good thing. Well, I don't think it's a bad thing. I think if we rejected that, we'd have to reject the incarnation.

The incarnation is a point where human hands are the instrument of God. God takes on human flesh. He doesn't enter into history in some spiritual way that communicates directly into people's minds and enters into people's minds without the mediation of human persons and human institutions. And I think one thing that sort of distinguishes a Catholic sensibility from more recent for Protestant sensibility, some of them, not all of them, is that Catholics really endorse this idea of the incarnation as a principle that is reflected in the way God works in the world on all sides. God works through faulty human institutions. God works through faulty human flesh. God works through the people of Israel.

God works through the New Testament Jerusalem community and through the church that grew out of it. We don't think either that these are perfect groups of people, perfect councils, perfect institutions, and that their perfection is what produces, what infallibly carries the truth forward into the world, carries the gospel, and proclaims it.

But we think that somehow, despite all of the human imperfection, the Holy Spirit works through these human institutions, just like the sun worked through the human flesh of Jesus Christ. You actually raise very good points there. If we're going to let human hands write the Bible, it's not such a stretch to imagine the church coming together to discuss said Bible and try and clear up some things. actually that was probably one of the biggest realizations I had four months ago I remember looking back up the council because I'm like what the heck was that I thought they like tore pieces out of the Bible and they got like I don't know why my brain thought that because when you go back and read it you're like oh they were just arguing about exactly what you're talking about like that seems like such a reasonable thing to argue about you know even even then you know a couple of things and this is what stood out to me I went back and I listened to James on And I would love at some point to have like a roundtable.

I think it would be amazing to have a few different looks at this, you know, to just discuss. But one of the things he brought up was a council of Trent. And I was like, I would love your thoughts on that. And the fact that you don't recognize, and I don't know if this is true, the gospel of Paul. And I'm like, okay, well, and maybe I butcher what he said and I don't want to put words in his mouth. But that's two of the things that stood out to me about what James was talking about. about when it comes to Catholicism compared to the biblical Christian text? Mm-hmm. Yeah, so first of all, let me just say that I mean no personal, you know,

hostility toward Pastor James. I think he seems like a real upstanding, you know, servant of the church. And I think that a lot of what you hear in the interview with him is a sort of standard set of tropes that Protestants or a certain kind of Protestant that just doesn't know who he is if he's not sort of slandering Catholics. And I don't want to contribute to hostility between Protestants and Catholics. And I want to make it very clear. I didn't bring you on to me, as I told James, I just finished Thessalonians, right? I'm just working my way through it. So to me, I'm like, I'm just adding people of the discussion. This is just a little journey.

And all of a sudden, I got thrown, whether it's a curveball or a hayman, it doesn't matter. I stepped on a landmine. I was like, oh, my God, I did not see that coming. And I hadn't thought about the word mass. And when I go back and listen to it, I chuckle now. Because, you know, like, I mean, what a word to set off a collision course with this conversation. So you're just adding to the body. You're addressing a few of the things he said.

there is a ton of Catholics that we're listening to this. And we're like, please get somebody on that can talk to the Catholic faith. I'm like, all right. I just thought, personally, Christianity, and underneath it was like Catholics and Protestants and Baptists and on and on it went. And I'm like, I just assumed you were all like, I don't know, I don't know. You're all, you all look at the same bloody book. So I'm like, what the heck is going on?

Yeah. Yeah, you know, the situation with Christians today is in a way of the greatest testament against the gospel, I think. You know, the fact that Christians have such a horrible history of hostility to one another is really, I think, the reason why this, you know, the secular anti-Christian world exists. You know, there are a lot of philosophers and theologians who have argued that secularism is a kind of Christianity. You know, it's the secular philosophy. It doesn't exist in the East and in non-Christian places. And neither really do the forms of atheism and agnosticism that have prevailed in the West. There's sort of all Western, you know, sociocultural phenomena that have their roots in Christianity. You know, and atheists are inclined to say things like, I'm not, you know, I just believe in one less God than you do.

You know, so I'm not so different. And I think that there's a certain truth to that sort of sentiment. You know, and I think that the reason why Christians fighting with each other is the reason why all of these things exist. And, you know, so I think that we're still hashing out certain polemics and certain diatribes against each other that made more sense, I think, in the 16th and the 17th and the 18th sense. centuries than they do today. I think the average person can't really comprehend what the significance is of the kind of differences of doctrine that Father James pointed out, you know, about, you know, how exactly grace works and, you know, the specific details of the canon of the Bible. And so I think, you know, those things are not unimportant. They are important differences. And I don't want to

minimize them. At the same time, I don't think they need to separate us any longer. I think a lot of the hostility that Christians had in the early modern era had to do with historical grievances due to bloodshed, you know, these religious pogroms that both sides committed against each other. You know, so there was a long history of internecine bloodshed that explains some of the hostility. But really, you know, the truth is that our doctrines are much closer and are, our values are much closer than, then I think, you know, some, you know, to be fair to James, he's just being true to his tradition. This is the way that Protestants have historically understood their identity by contrast in opposition to Catholics. But when I was a Protestant, I started to reject that way of identifying myself. I wasn't just somebody who was defined by

my opposition to the Catholic Church. And initially, it was a Protestant. And initially, it was a was because I studied the history of the church. That was one of the things that didn't allow me to continue to think the way that Father James thinks. Because a lot of the things that he thinks are just historical fables. The idea, for instance, that the Bible was redacted by Catholics, you know, and then the Protestants restored the true Bible. That's sort of historical fiction. In the first place, where did the Bible come from?

you know, let's just start with that question. A lot of evangelicals seem to have this idea that it's just sort of descended from the sky, this complete canon just plopped out of the sky and there it was and that the Catholic started adding apocrypha to it and all that. It's really not, you know, it's obviously not the way that it actually happened. You know, the truth of the story is that the Old Testament was defined initially by a book called the Septuagint. Septuagint was a Greek translation of Hebrew,

holy books, a collection of Hebrew holy books. And that is what we call the Catholic Old Testament today, which really just the Septuagint. And the Catholics recognized, just as the Jews did, that not all of those books were of equal value, equal historical reliability, equal authority. And so there was a distinction between canonical and Deutero-canonical or canonical and what Martin Luther called apocryphal. And so the Catholic, didn't treat these Deutero-canonical books as having the same authority as the canonical books of the Old Testament, but they didn't cut them out of this pre-existing canon that was defined by the Septuagint. Neither did Catholics cut books out of the New Testament. But where did the New Testament

come from? Let's ask that question. Because again, that's not something that just plopped out of the sky, nor is it something that the Jews defined prior to the Christian tradition. The New Testament was defined by the Christian tradition. And there were all kinds of gospels and epistles floating around the Mediterranean. And somehow this set of texts, some of them aren't super obvious. It's not super obvious why they ended up in the New Testament. For instance, the epistle to Titus, this sort of this disciplinary memo to the church in Crete.

It's just sort of an odd thing that you wouldn't normally include that sort of book or writing. You know, it's like a letter. It's a very short letter in the New Testament. There are a number of epistles that are like that. Now, I think they all have a very good reason, but you can't see it if you just read the text, you know, superficially at least. The story of how those ended up as the Christian canon is really a story about the church. The church read those texts. Those were the texts that all around the Mediterranean, the church was using them in the liturgy and reading them together and collecting them and rejecting the other ones.

And it was really far long before the Council of Trent, the Council of Trent, like, officially, in sort of an official, you know, ecumenical declaration decided what the Catholic, what the canon was, what the Christian canon was. But the canon was already fixed long, long before that, you know, I would say, But really the canon was fixed when Jerome was commissioned to create, to update an addition of the text that were already being used. And this is called the Vulgate. You know, it's this common Latin translation that ordinary people could understand of the whole Bible, including the Old Testament and the books that were circulating at that point. But the truth is that the Gospels weren't written. they weren't written until, you know, in many cases in the second century, you know, so there was no New Testament. There were certain, you know, Pauline epistles floating around earlier than that, but it really wasn't until the second century that there was, that, you know, the gospels were written.

These reports were, you know, put into, into text, into the written word. And why was that? Well, really, the apostles were still alive. And most, most people, you know, preferred to hear it from the horse's mouth, famous church. historian Eusebius once said that if he had to, he would read a written, you know, written gospel, but he would prefer just to hear it from the apostles or from somebody who knew the apostles. So there was this oral tradition in the early, you know, the early centuries of the church, and it wasn't until, you know, the apostolic generation started to die off that there was any need to write, you know, testimonies to Christ's life and death and resurrection. So the story is that the church long before the Protestants ever entered the picture had established a canon and that canon included the Deutero canonical text of the Old Testament. How did those, how have we come to think that those don't belong in the Bible today?

Well, the story of that is Martin Luther. Martin Luther translated the Bible again. He did his own translation, much like Jerome, St. Jerome did. But Luther was the one who decided those don't need to be in the Old Testament anymore. They don't need to be in the same volume. They still exist, obviously. But Luther thought they shouldn't be listed alongside the authoritative text of the Old Testament. But, you know, Luther wanted to cut other books, too.

He wanted to cut the epistle to the Hebrews. He wanted to cut the epistle to James in the New Testament. These are books that Protestants today still regard as sacred scripture, but Luther wanted to cut them, well, length and disagreed with him. He thought that the epistle to James was what he called the epistle of straw because its emphasis on the importance of works. This epistle James says faith without works is dead.

Luther didn't like that. So he wanted to cut that book. So really the story here is not about Catholics adding things to a canon. Catholics defined the canon, and Protestants wanted to cut. certain things out of that canon. Now, and I don't mean that as a kind of criticism of the Protestant tradition. I think that the canon is a bit more a bit more of an earthly physical thing than people realize it has more of a human history. You know, we do, you know, Catholics believe that

the Holy Spirit is behind both the authorship and the canonization of the Bible, but they are written by human hands. They were canonized by human decisions, you know, by, and And it was, it's not just like the supernatural book that floated down out of the clouds. So, yeah, I'll stop there. Well, that was a lot. I'm, I'm going, okay. Let's get a couple, let's get a couple things here. I just want to make sure that I don't skip over.

And if people are like, what the heck does that mean? Canon is just a set of like rules or principles, like a guiding thing, correct? Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's sort of the, you know, we use the word canonical to be like the offici, or the thing that you measure other things with. So in Greek, canon is just a stick that is like the standard length that you can use to measure things with. So a canon, a literary canon is like the standard literary composition

set of books that you can measure other things with. So it's the authoritative text. And so when we talk about a canon, it's like, when you're talking about the scripture, it means that these books are in it. it and, you know, it's a decided thing, what books are in it. So there are different canons. You know, the Protestants continued actually to do, to do these sort of revisions of the Bible.

Thomas Jefferson is sort of famous for doing this. He has a very, I don't even know what the end result was, what he kept in the Bible, but it was a very bare bones Bible with most of everything cut out, including the Old Testament entirely. And there were a lot of Protestants who cut out the entire Old Testament because it was too violent or too, you know, there were some who thought that it would, you know, it seemed like it reflected a different God or something like that. So, so, yeah, there's just been a proliferation of Bibles in the modern era. But traditionally there was, you know, there was, you know, some textual variations in different translations and things. But the canon was a fairly stable thing from about the fourth century on.

You mentioned rise of secular philosophy or maybe even religions. I don't know if you said religion or philosophy. When you talk secular or you mentioned atheism and things like that, is that what you're meaning by that or were you meaning something different? Yeah, that's a good question. Secular is a kind of a weasel word. It can mean a whole lot of different things. I mostly mean the idea that religion is something private and that there's this public world

that is neutral. There's like a neutral public space that no values, no religious values define what goes on in that public space. Like basically this is the opposite of the medieval world where, you know, sort of everything, Christian faith was, was present everywhere. You know, the way that it was part of the state, it was part of, you know, your ordinary life, your calendar was, was, was, was, you were living through like, you know, this, this is the way that Catholics still do their calendars. There's like a three-year liturgical calendar where you're sort of living through the stories of salvation history in a kind of chronological order. And so you celebrate at different times of the year, different parts of a Christian story.

And so it's like you're living through that drama of salvation. But the idea that there should be just sort of like you should live most of your life in the space where your faith is just. sort of absent, doesn't define anything there. And then at certain points, you step out of this secular space. The secular space includes obviously the political order. You know, the political world, you know, the hallmark of secularism is the idea that there's disestablishment of a religion from the state. You know, the state should not be sort of in bed with any particular religion.

That's the sort of centerpiece of the secular paradigm. But secularism is just this broad idea that there's this space that doesn't that that you know in which religion is sort of absent. You're in sort of a in between. Jason, you're, I should have asked this off the hop. Are you originally, you're an American or are you, what is your background? Where are you originally from? I am North America. I was born in Miami, Florida.

I'm an American citizen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I live in Latin America. The reason, the reason, the reason I ask is, I don't know. What you just said about secularism, just, I don't know, a little puzzle piece jolted in or what.

What you're talking about is like in the public square, keep your religion out of it. That's what you're saying right. And I'm thinking like for Canadians right now, man, if that isn't like what is going on, okay, so keep it out. We don't, we don't,

nobody's religion. Not get it out of here. Schools, get it out. Restaurant, get it out. We don't want to see it. Politics, nope, can't do that. Mm-hmm. Right.

But pretty much any other policy right now, you know, and I'm thinking, I'm certainly thinking pride folks, I'm certainly thinking LGBT2SL plus, I think IA community now. I think it's up to. Regardless. Many different letters in there, huh? There is. And the thing is, is like, that has been forced into the public square. So that is the public square now. But don't dare. Don't dare talk about any of this.

I mean, I catch a little bit of heat for bringing folks like yourself on. I think it's, I think if this is what gets you, me living in your head or Jason living in your head, you know, you've got to think about some things. Because to me, I find fascinating what you're talking about. But that part on the secular part is really interesting because over the, even just my life, probably your life. And I don't, that's why I was asking me if you're, I don't know how the states is. I just know how Canada is.

So in our school, you know, like our schools, obviously if you go to Catholic, it'd be different. But in the public school, like we're trying to remove all religion. Get it out. That stays in your house. You can, everything. But now all these initiatives on social justice, if you would, are all there. You can see them. Just walk in.

You're like, this is, this is interesting. Right? Because, you know, gone are the days of the Lord. You know, I go back at how many generations where the Lord's Prayer was part of the start of the day. Oh, Canada was start of the day. There was all these different things at the start of the day. And they're all, they've all been removed. because just like you said.

So I think I was catching what you're meaning by secularism. Absolutely. Yeah, you know, I think secularism is ultimately a kind of fallacy. And there are different sorts of secularism. Originally, the American Constitution was designed to encourage religion. You know, it was a group of sort of alienated Protestant radical, sort of radical end of the Protestant Reformation, Puritans. You know, they all moved to the new world.

in order to seek refuge from the persecution they were facing in Europe. And so they wanted a place where all of those kinds of Protestants could live out their lives faithfully. And so the whole point was not to abolish religion or to make so religion didn't have any influence in any public life of any form. The point was to foster faith, foster these communities that weren't allowed to exist. in Europe. And so the whole business of the separation of church and state in the United States was meant for that. It wasn't meant to say like Christians shouldn't, it shouldn't have a place in government. Christians and their values shouldn't ever be reflected in government. That was never the

point. Well, even if they wanted that to be the point, it's still reflective. I mean, like, so much of life in the Western world is, whether you want to admit it or not, folks, is based off Christian values. I mean, like, we just don't know. We just don't. think about it in those terms. Like I said, even secularism is sort of a religious idea. It was an idea that emerged in, you know, the religious pluralism of Europe, the Christian religious pluralism of Europe. This, you know, this idea that we needed to have a place where, you know, different kinds of Christianity could coexist. And that was the only possible if we sort of separated the church from the power of the state.

And so that was the point originally. And that's the reason why you don't see things like secularism in other places of the world. It doesn't make sense in, you know, in the, in the, in sort of Middle East, Arabic and Islamic world. It doesn't make, you know, and really it's like the concept of religion is also sort of an artificial thing. Like what is a religion? Why doesn't, you know, the LGBT movement count as a sort of religion? What kind of is? Yeah.

you know, it's just sort of an arbitrary distinction of, you know, these kinds of values are religious and those kinds aren't. These doctrines are religious and those aren't. You know, in the end of the day, secularism is, it's a fallacy because ultimately things that are very much like religions are taking precedence and, and having sort of a shaping our public life, shaping our common life, just not just not ones that are identifiably Christian. I had Tom Longel on. last week and we got talking about different movie trilogies okay now it wasn't a movie trilogy that I'm going to bring up because it's been lodged in my head ever since we talked about it have you seen the

movie inception I assume yes but hey maybe not yeah I have okay so you know how he puts the the idea in the lockbox and that like ruins his wife's life right because you can't get anyways you get the point right yeah right where along the line with Christianity the Bible is the first like origin point of where it splits. Because I'm very curious with that when you said there were pogroms against one another, and you were talking Protestant and Catholics,

which means essentially riots against each other, correct? Killings? Yeah, wars, full-scale wars, yeah. Okay, so before we get into any of that, I'm like, okay, so at some point, I assume, they were relatively the same. And somewhere along the line it breaks off, or was there always factions trying to control what the Bible and the New Testament and the Old Testament and all these stories were going to look like, and this was just a big fight since the beginning?

No, there weren't Protestants from the beginning. Like Protestants, they're the first Protestant presumably is Martin Luther. I mean, this is the story they tell. Martin Luther, you know, he started the Protestant Reformation, what, 1507? So that's the first time there's a Protestant Christian. before that, 15 centuries before that between Martin Luther and Christ, there are no Protestants. That particular kind of theology and, you know, there are no denominations. In fact, the concept of a denomination would be very confusing, I think, to early Christians.

And to people like St. Paul who said, you know, there aren't two bodies of Christ. There aren't two baptisms. There's one Christ. And so there's one church. And really the word Catholic just means not a sect, not a denomination in a way. It means the one universal church. And St. Augustine made a whole lot of this. He always would appeal to the Catholicity of the church as proof that some disagreement.

There were these Donatists in North Africa. Donatists were like more hardline, more devout Catholics. that disagreed with, you know, the moral laxity that some of the bishops had allowed and had embodied themselves at the time. And so they kind of separated themselves. And Augustine said, you know, even if you are sort of morally superior, you're either in the church or you're not. And there aren't two churches. There's one church. You know, this sort of refrain of early Christians, Ignatius of Antiox says the same thing. There's one church.

Ironaeus of Lyons, one church. You're either in the one church that is, you know, and sometimes broken and defective, but still the church that Christ founded with his apostles. And so it's really just, you know, Protestants aren't existing alongside Catholics. and in any sense until the 16th century. And that's when Europe divides. Before that, Christendom was just one, there was a bunch of different ethnic and political groups

throughout Europe, organized and kind of feudal, small feudal states and organizations. And it wasn't until the 16th century that you start to see these nation states. And really, there's a lot to be said about the, you know, the Protestant Reformation comes about for a lot of different reasons. Some of them are theological, but there are a lot of political reasons why we end up with these different denominations that, you know, that there were

people who disagreed with the church before the 15th century. There were, you know, Abugensians, Cathars, Wycliffites. Before that, there were all these Gnostic groups. And, you know, they sort of just, they existed. but there wasn't this idea that there were different church, you know, there were multiple churches. It was always just, you know, the Gnostics and these other Christians just rejected the Catholic Church, and they thought that that was just, like there wasn't a church.

There was just, you know, we were the chosen ones, we were the right people or whatever, but the idea of a church, you know, that there's a plurality of churches, that just wouldn't have made sense to the early, you know, to the early Christians. And I don't think it even made sense to the early reformers. They all just claimed that there was one church and that one church, it consists not in this institution.

You know, the Catholic Church has like an institutional aspect, you know, with the bishops and the Pope. You know, so that institution is pretty, you know, it's ancient. It goes all the way back to, you know, probably the second century. You know, it is continuous with the church. the church that Jesus founded. I believe that. Otherwise, I wouldn't be a Roman Catholic. But the early Protestants didn't believe in denominations.

They didn't believe that there were a bunch of different, there were just one true church and then the people that weren't in it. So, you know, both the Protestants and the Catholics thought that way. Only later on have sort of Protestants made peace with the idea that there's this plurality of churches. And I think that it's fun, you know, in a way, it's problematic. We have to say that there's one church. And, you know, I don't think we need to say that it's just the Catholic church. Somehow there's one church and it's broken.

You know, it's divided. But isn't it in you can tell you probably know your C.S. Lewis better than I ever will. But in screw tape letters, one of the things they talk about is get people going to multiple churches and bounce around and and never find a home and different things like that. And you go, you know, one of the offshoots, you know, like Martin Luther, you bring it back to there, one of the things he probably could not have realized, none of them probably could have realized. Maybe they did, who knows, can't go back. I would love, you know, what lovely fun it would be if we could have a time machine and go see some of these conversations play out.

But I assume, you know, like, there's no way he could have known that, by speaking out against the Catholic Church, by pushing away from it, that out of that would come so many different things. Like, I mean, you think it, like, I just drive around, I drive around my city now, and I go, okay, Catholic, I don't know what that is. I have no idea what that one is. Well, that one's, you know, okay, Protestant, okay, and there's a Baptist, and on and on it goes.

I mean, when I look at the Catholic Church, one of the things I was really curious to ask you about, was like, so they, so they talk about, is a Russian East Orthodox? Russian Orthodox, yeah. Or just Russian Orthodox. They talk about different, like, I don't even know. Even in Catholic Church, there isn't just like Catholic. There's like different, and I call them sex, because I honestly don't know what the heck to say about this, Jason, because I'm like, I just assume it's all the Catholic Church.

But now you have people saying there's, there's old. biblical Catholic Catholic Catholicism or there's the newer and I'm like you got to explain this one to me if you just take out Martin Luther and you you follow just the Catholic church why has there been you know one that is the the Russian Orthodox why do people stare at that is different from just regular yeah Catholic well yeah I should say I should mention the Orthodox that that's the original schism um and and I think the original schism that's the original schism that's the original schism that's the original I think there's a lot that can be learned about how Protestants and Catholics are related to each other by studying the way that Orthodox understand their relationship to Catholics. Orthodox Christians, you know, sometimes, usually the date of the schism, it's dated to like 1054 when, you know, the two churches sort of excommunicated each other.

So just I got my time frame down. I want to make sure on this. About 1,500, you got Martin Luther and the Protestant and boom, okay? But 500 years before that, roughly in the thousand mark, you have a break or a little bit of a split in the Catholic Church. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, you're right to say a break in the Catholic Church because Orthodox would say that they are part of the Catholic Church. They wouldn't say they're part of the Roman Catholic Church. but again, the word Catholic just means the single universal church.

And even, so even people like Martin Luther and there are Protestants that will say that they are Catholic with a lower case C, but they're not Roman Catholic. So Orthodox, they're in a lot of ways. They're like Roman Catholics. They have a liturgy. The liturgy is quite different, quite, you know, extraordinary, ancient, beautiful thing. A lot of singing, a lot of singing. a lot of standing incense. They have an iconostasis.

They use a lot of images. You know, it's a beautiful religious tradition, ancient, and it encompasses a whole lot of different kind of traditional diversity. You know, and then there's a whole lot of Eastern traditions that, you know, they're Greek speaking or they're even Aramaic speaking traditions. Very few now, unfortunately, thanks to ISIS. They're Coptic traditions from East. Egypt, there are Ethiopian traditions from Ethiopia, obviously.

And I went to Israel a few years back and went to the central church of Israel, which is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the really ancient church. And the beautiful thing about that church is that all these ancient traditions worship in the same church, and all these different chapels that are arrayed all around inside of the Church of the Holy Sepulch. Gar is this huge, beautiful thing. And you can just sort of walk through and just see the, you know, extraordinary diversity of liturgies that are being practiced there. You know, they're very, very different.

Different languages. Go ahead. I got to stop for a second. Liturgy. What do you mean? Oh, a liturgy is a sort of order of worship. So, you know, the ancient, so Catholics use a liturgy, and a lot of Protestants do, too, actually. Lutherans, for instance, they follow.

a liturgy. The liturgy is sort of an ordered worship program, you might say, involving reading of scriptures. So when I go to a Catholic church, one of the things I do enjoy about Catholic Church is they have structure. Now, at times, folks, I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but I'm saying it feels like a cult. I'm like, this is a little bit too much, but I do enjoy the fact it's like, this is what happens, then this is what happens, then this is what happens, then we have a spiel. And then this is what happens. I'm like, very ordered.

That's what you're talking about with a liturgy. Exactly. Okay. Yes, that's exactly it. Okay. So then bring me back to Israel. You're talking about, and I forget the name, but this giant building, which you would call it is a church.

Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Yeah. It's really a basilica. It's a huge, a huge church building that includes a whole bunch of chapels. So there's different altars everywhere. Underneath one building, now you're. you can walk through and see Catholics, and then the next one is like Muslims? Or is it all Christians? All Christians. They might not be all Christians that Father James would recognize,

but they're all ancient Christians that have, you know, these are, these are like little capsules of ancient Christianity. I think one thing that I think it's alarming to some like modern evangelicals is just how, how aesthetically different Christian worship was in the early centuries. And I think you can see how aesthetically different is by walking through the Church of the Holy Sepulchre because a lot of these ancient rights. Yeah, sorry, what sticks out? Like when you go back to that time, you're walking through it, you're like, holy man, I didn't realize they did that.

Or what have you? What stuck out to you? Well, one of, I mean, the one thing is just that if you were to look at a lot of this liturgies that are going on in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, like an untrained eye might think that they're Muslim. You know, like it's some kind of Muslims worship, you know, because they're speaking sometimes Arabic, sometimes Greek, sometimes, you know, some Middle Eastern foreign language. And a lot of times it's like a chant that sounds a little bit like, you know, sort of Muslim call to prayer or something. A lot of incense, a lot of strange, you know, liturgical implements and things. I mean,

As I've learned about the Catholic liturgy, which is really just a Western right. So in Christianity, the liturgy comes really out of Judaism. The Jewish earliest Christians were practicing Jews in the Book of Acts. They're still going to the temple. And so it talks about them breaking the bread and things like that. And there's indications like the very earliest Christians were doing these liturgical kinds of worship or performing liturgies.

And modern Catholics, modern Orthodox, modern, Eastern Catholics, we all are trying to preserve these ancient forms of worship, and they're sort of reflected in the ways that we,

the liturgys we use today. A lot of the prayers are very ancient in our current liturgy. And the basic structure of the liturgy is ancient too. There's a division of the liturgy of the world, and the liturgy of the table. Literary of the word is, you know, the part of the liturgy where we read different parts of the Bible, different readings of the Bible in a sequence that, you know, that goes through three years. And you read whole, you know, I think most of the Bible actually

through these three years. But so this is just the ancient, like when you, when you practice that liturgy, you're doing things that the earliest Christians were doing. It's kind of like this, this ancient dance that the whole church has been doing. And that's, I think, the really tragic thing about, about some Protestant communities. And like I said, not all of them have completely abandoned the liturgy. A lot of, a lot of Protestant communities do use liturgy. And like the Anglicans, the Episcopalians, the Lutherans,

the many others, Methodists, they all use some version of the ancient Christian liturgy. But, but yeah, that's, I, I think that if you were to either transport an apostle to a lot of modern American churches, North American churches, they wouldn't know where they were. You know, they wouldn't recognize it as a Christian, as Christian worship. You know, and I think if you were to transport modern American, North American Christians to, you know, the church of the Axe community, I think they wouldn't recognize that either. I think, you know, there's just a vast cultural difference there.

And that's not necessarily problematic. One of the things that I think is great about Catholicism is that it doesn't try to stamp out these sort of local, regional culture. So there are different rights within the Roman Catholic. I mean, I shouldn't say Roman Catholic. There are different rights that are in communion with the Catholic Church. Historically, you had the Orthodox and the Western Latin Christians. They were all part of the same church. They were all unified under the Bishop of Rome, the Pope,

even though they did all practice a slightly different liturgy. It's fine. And to this day, there are a bunch of different rites that still are practiced in the Catholic Church, the churches that are still in communion with Rome, different Eastern Catholic Maronite. There's an Ordinariate right that Anglicans who have become Catholic can continue to practice. So there are different kinds of liturgies in Catholic tradition. There's the Latin right, which is, I'm really there historically.

I've been two forms of the Latin right. There's the Latin form, extraordinary form. And then there's the Novus Ordo, which is the English or the English. or the it's the practice in whatever language a country speaks and these two have been kind of considered

the Latin right or the Western Roman Catholic right but but the Catholic Church acknowledges a whole bunch of different rights do you give any well a

well I guess I should go back the fact we're trying to do like an ancient dance as you said you know that's one of the things that is mesmerizing if I if I could say about reading the Bible you know especially when Jesus is walking around he's talking you're going like can you believe this guy holy Macon like he is saying some things and and you know and it just is like you know you but you got to read it I mean if you don't read it and you just and and and

then I mean even the form of praying in itself is this ancient thing right It just is. And so people before us did it and then and then, and you can go all the way back. And certainly to go back, I mean, what a trip, you know, me and Jason hop in a time machine and go see how they did it 2,000 years ago. Wouldn't that be something, you know? And I can see, like, you just think about it.

Every generation that comes by loses a little piece that the other generation had before because maybe they don't fully understand it. And then they, you know, and then you take 2,000 years of that. and and some division and and on and on it goes to where it sits, you know, and there'd be a lot lost in there. And I think that's what a lot of people, including myself, it's like, okay, so what have we lost? And let's just try and, you know, explain that out or talk it out so that people can find some things and dig into some different thought processes. Because right now there's a ton, there's a huge chunk of the Western world that's just left church. I've got no time for it.

They look at religion. They look at church. They're just turned off by it. And I'm going, okay, well, to me, let's figure some of this out if we can. I mean, that's not a two-hour conversation, and all of a sudden, you're there. Like, this takes a lot of time and effort and digging into some things and being interested in it. But certainly, you know, you go over the course of that much time, even in the Catholic Church. And you get to walk through a building where there's different liturgies being used.

Like, what a wild trip that must have been. No. Because, you know, you think, I just sit here and I go, it's one. Like, there's just one. There's a reason why it's one because you do this and this is the way we do it. And then I would assume that along the line comes whoever, and they go, though that's stupid, I want to do it this way. And I mean, they probably didn't say stupid, folks, but you get the point.

And then they slowly alter it and a slow alter becomes this giant thing years later. And that's the way my brain looks at it and works. And I just go, I want to get back to the core of this and see what's there. And I feel like, you know, with your background and Catholics in general, like they've got a long history here. So if I go back to the beginning, you know, what was there and what and you've and you've brushed on a few of those topics here today. Yeah, I think, you know, one one thing that I love about being a Catholic is that you have, approved access, you're allowed to love ancient things, you're allowed to study history and, you know, and that's not that Protestants aren't. There are a lot of Protestants that are very historically savvy. I think there's a certain kind of evangelicalism that tends to, you know, avoid history. You know, and John Henry Newman, he's this, like, he's kind of like C.S. Lewis. He was a, he was an English Oxford, Don, who, you know, he served the Church of England. But, you know, John Henry Newman ultimately converted actually to come. Catholicism, but he thought that history was, you know, he just think that you couldn't really be, you couldn't really be a Christian in the full sense of the word without being sort of connected to the past.

And, you know, part of, one of the sort of hallmarks of modernity is just sort of rejection of the past wholesale. I don't think there's a kind of traditionalism that's just about, you know, it's something like larping. It's something like just performing past and reliving past things in a way that's really impossible. You know, you really can't bring the past back and its full meaning and full reality because the world is different. You know, anytime you're trying to restore some past order, you're really just recreating some version of the present. It's just a stylized version of the predative. So I think there's a kind of traditionalism that is unhealthy. You know, it's a kind of nostalgic, you know, a nostalgia for the past that just refuses to live in the present.

But there's also a kind of progressivism that just wants, that understands the whole point of the present and the whole, the mandate of modern people is just sort of eliminating and annihilating the past. and forgetting it entirely. But isn't that the war that's been going on probably since the dawn of time, traditional versus progressive? You know, if you use those two words, the progressive is looking at the world today and going,

we need to adjust and everything else. And the traditionalist wants to be back where, you know, honestly, where 10 years ago was, let alone 2000. And it's this constant pull and push, or push and pull that is happening.

and a little bit more balance would probably do the world a whole lot of good. Because you got to forget everything that has gone on in the past, what a wild thought that is, you know? And I go, like, I want no part of that. There's so many gems in history. I mean, I'm talking to a guy who studied it, you know. To forget everything we've gone through is really a naive thing to do. There's so many wonderful lessons in the past.

And when you're talking about Christianity in general, I mean, the guy in the man in the New Testament, I mean, all of them that are walking around the stories, Jesus in general, like that's, that's 2,000 years ago. Like, and there's a lot of knowledge stuck in those pages where you're like, holy dinah, did I not realize that I should have been reading this with eyes wide open, you know, 10 years ago, let alone maybe even sooner than that,

but heck, I'm happy that I'm doing it now, you know. And to act like that has no relevance to today's world is like, honestly, insane. Because it does. It has transcended time. Right, absolutely. And, you know, I think it's impoverishing, too. That was one of the things that was really striking about when I encountered what C.S. Louis called mere Christianity. You see, I grew up in a tradition, and it would resent that word.

you know, it doesn't, it didn't see itself as a tradition. In fact, it's so, so, fought so hard to not be a tradition, but it is a tradition. It's a tradition of sectarianism that emerged from the 16th century, tradition that says it comes out of a movement, it comes out of a church or a tradition of some kind, and it cuts itself off from that and says, those, you know, that's bad, we're the right version, and it rejects so much of the data, so much of the culture, so much of the, of the literary, artistic intellectual achievements that it came out of. And each time it just sort of culturally impoverished itself. And so the world I grew up in was a world, an emaciated, culturally impoverished, sort of wasteland of a world that didn't produce good works of literature, didn't write anything interesting, didn't produce any good music.

It was all just sort of trite and narrow and poor, You know, just a cultural poverty that I didn't really realize until I encountered the richness of something that had the full body of the ancient. And in mere Christianity, it's a book that aspires to be bare bones. But the theology that I encountered in that book compared to the world I grew up in was just astounding. It was astounding. And really, so it was like the culture. and the wealth of, you know, C.S. Lewis is just such a brilliant writer and thinker, and I could see that the way his engagement with the past had shaped his imagination.

And it's just marvelous. C.S. Lewis loved the medieval world. He studied it. He was an aficionado of the medieval world. And he wrote a book called The Discarded Image. It's a beautiful book. Highly recommended. it's just a study of medieval, medieval cosmology.

But you see his medieval imagination in all of his works, even especially his space trilogy. And but it's just that wouldn't, that richness of imagination just wouldn't be possible if he had been a sectarian who rejected the past wholesale like that. And I think, I think C.S. Lewis was a connoisseur. I think that's the key to tradition, to doing it right. You know, we don't try to repristinate,

don't try to just like bring the past back in every aspect, preserve every jot and tittle of it, and make sure that we don't lose anything at all. You know, that becomes a kind of larping. I think the point is to be engaged with it, deeply engaged with it, to know what needs to be carried on and what needs to be forgotten and abandoned.

Because there are some things that we just, that we don't need, you know, to resurrect. We don't need to resurrect, you know, slavery, things like that. You know, there are things, you know, the ancients understood better than we do. And every, like C.S. Lewis said, every historical era has its own, you know, its own insights and its own blind spots. And I think that's why, you know, engaging the past is so important. It just sort of gives us perspective. It's like leaving your country so that you can get a perspective on it.

You can't really do that if all you have ever known is your own. culture. G.K. Chesterton called it the democracy of the dead when you let, you study the past in order to allow people of the past to have some influence on the present. So, yeah, I think there's a kind of intelligent connoisseurship of the past that makes for a robust and, you know, a flourishing present. And, you know, if I may say one more thing, an example of this was the Renaissance. The Renaissance They were progressives. The Renaissance movement was a progressive movement to be sure. But it was a progressive movement that resourced the past.

It turned back to the classical traditions to look for things that we had overlooked and to restore them. In some ways, the world was changing during the Renaissance era. There was city-states emerging where the feudal world was a much more decentralized kind of political arrangement. And so the humanists needed a new way to understand life inside in cities. And they turned to the classical world because the classical world was a place where city states were sort of, you know, was a very urban society. That was just one reason why they turned back to the past. But they were key point is that they were progressives.

You know, there were people who were not trying to preserve the status quo, but quite consciously trying to change it in certain ways. But they weren't just trying to abolish the past. I think that is a sort of crude, mindless progressivism that just thinks that the past equals bad, get away from it. And the whole moral agenda of the progressive, and many times I think this is the way that progressives think today, if they don't articulate it, is just a sheer abolition of everything that belongs to the past. The future has to look like something utterly and entirely different. Now, I think that's insane, partly because it's impossible. You know, there's nothing that's so new about the present or the future that can that can make it look utterly, utterly unlike the past.

But the only way we know what to do with the future is by looking at the past and seeing the sort of getting inspirations from it. And that's what, you know, the Renaissance humanism. I think that's what that's a great example of that. They move forward. They were progressives, but they did it by looking at the past. Yeah. incorporating the past is well I don't know

I had the epiphany once upon a time on this thing where I'm like you know if I went back a hundred years the people back then were pretty much no different than me except they heck they were probably smarter than me but the difference was technology I mean let's just look at where we're living now and in the last hundred years

the advancement in in a whole different, like just across the board in technology. It's not even remotely same, you know. Somebody from 1702 walked in in 2023, they'd be like, what is going on, you know? And they'd speak in a different language. They'd have different terms for things. And all you've got to do is read a few different books to understand. The language has changed.

Culturally, we've progressed, you know, to use that word. And certainly technologically, we've advanced, like, to, insane levels, you know, it's, it's pretty wild to think how far we've come. But the average person is, is roughly, you know, the same, cares about the same things, thinks about the same things once, you know, for the most part, roughly the same things. We just go about it in different ways now because, you know, only less than 100 years ago where I'm from, you know, they had to worry about shelter. You know, I've interviewed a lot of folks who grew up in the late 20s, early 30s, 40s, and they talked about the cold and how cold it was here, right?

Because the ability to build a house is different back than Titus now. So you can tell your pain points were different. I would say they weren't too worried about gender ideology in school. I'm going to assume that that did not cross their brains. Now, I'm not saying there wasn't other problems in school, I'm sure there was. But overall, that wasn't crossing their brain because they were worried about how they were going to keep food cold. in the summertime, oh wait, they went to the river by us and cut ice blocks and built things and manual labor was, you know, everybody was beat the crap out of us these days, you know,

like it must have been hearty, hearty people. When we, I'm getting this off topic here, when we look at the Catholic Church, when we look at, I've had different people on here, and I want to ask you about baptism, right? I don't know how much you've looked into it. I don't know if this is, but one of the things that I had a guy on here talking about was, and I can't remember if it's Catholics, I can't remember, I want to say he said all the churches, baptized in the name of the son, the Father and the Holy Spirit, don't know if I'm right or bang on in that, folks, and he said they have it wrong. You need to baptize in the name of Jesus, because that's what they do in the New Testament. As after, I don't know, I'm not, I guess this is where I'm getting,

getting your thoughts on this because one of the things was they were baptizing in the wrong and it's different yeah I'm not super familiar with that tradition I suspect that I think I've heard of this before I've got Jason's brain working yeah you got me stumped you got me stump no I I'm it one of the nice things one of the points where where I think there's possibility for a lot of ecumenism is that most Christians accept the baptism of most Christians. Catholics think that the baptism of Protestants is valid and sacramental. Again, it is because they invoke the name of the Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And I feel like it's maybe the Seventh-day Adventists that do the baptism in the name of Jesus.

There are a couple of, you know, this is one sort of, I don't think the obsession with doctrinal details is really originally Catholic. I think that's something that Catholics do become obsessed with doctrinal details too. And I don't think that there I don't think that the differences are insignificant. I think that the invocation of the Trinity is essential. You know, I don't think I don't think it's a valid baptism if it's if you don't invoke the Trinity. But there's a kind of there's a kind of Christian that that seems to look for something in the Bible that they can latch on to and say, aha, I will build the church off of this.

They create an entire church. It's based on, I think the seventh day Adventists kind of do that with the, they think that everyone's wrong to be worshiping on Sunday. And so they worship on Saturday, which is the Sabbath day. And so I may be confused here. No, no, no. But when you look back at, When you look back at the journey of the Catholic Church,

this is an interesting thought because you're right. People are going, wait, it says in here to baptize the name of Jesus, and it says it here again here, and it says it over here, and it says it over here. Is it possible in the long history of the Catholic Church that little details get just changed over time so where you baptize in the name of the Trinity? but in the beginning or in the writings of the New Testament, I don't know at the beginning, you know, I don't want to confuse things here, that that was the way it was supposed to be.

And over time, it just gets changed ever so slightly. On this particular issue. And once again, we don't have to stick strictly to baptism. But you're right, there are people that are looking at the text these days. And probably all across the history of, of when the Bible was created till now, that are like, but hey, it says right here. I mean, that's what's interesting, honestly,

about discussing the Bible is like, you're gonna see things I never saw. And another person is gonna, and by introducing them all into the conversation, it's like, what does that mean? Heck, that is the Council of Nicaea, is it not? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they're arguing over Scripture

and the interpretation of Scripture. And one of the interesting things about Nicaea is that, You know, is that the Orthodox party, the party that went out in the end for the doctrine of the Trinity, and Athanasius admits that both doctrines could be read into the passages of Scripture. So you could think that the New Testament says that Jesus is, the son is less than the Father. That's, in some sense, a legitimate interpretation of Scripture. But, you know, and that's just because the scripture is not like a legal document.

It's not designed to exclude all wrong interpretations. And, you know, this is something that the ancient world understood this better than we do. Generally, texts don't, they only have so much power over us. You know, I think it was Plato who said that only a fool commits a serious thought to writing. because writing is gets away from you you know people can interpret however they want and a writing can't defend itself you know only of the living that's why i hate text that's what honestly you think of today's world why things on a text chain right when you get in a group of people say something and you're like that's not what i meant yeah yeah oh my god let's just have a conversation right

like and you think what's one of the biggest forms of communication right now twitter it's like Oh, boy. Short hand. Short hand, not, you know, and when you go from oral tradition to putting things into a book to interpreting that, I actually get what you mean. That makes a lot of sense. Because as soon as you write things down, how do you get all your thoughts to make it make sense? Yeah. Yeah, I don't know.

There's some modern hermeneutist who says it's like a hermoneudicist is somebody who studies the business of interpretation. Studies interpretation. And he says that after an. author is finished writing a book, he's just one more reader. You know, and so there's a, you know, texts have a weird way of getting away from their author and the meaning of the author. How do you know what the Bible means? Well, the early Protestants would say that it was self-evident.

You know, it was just sort of, you didn't need anybody to tell you how to read this book. You didn't need anybody to tell you what it means. You just look at the book and it tells you what it means. And a lot of, some Protestants, not all Protestants, again, a lot of, not all Protestants accept this doctrine of Solis Scriptura, that the only authority should be the scripture itself, and that not all the Protestants accept that. And the reason is that, and we find this out in the early decades of the Protestant Reformation, the Protestants can't agree about what it means. You know, one of the very first thing that split the Protestants apart, you know, the reason why

we now have Lutherans, Calvinists, and other different groups is because they couldn't agree what Jesus meant when he said, this is my body at the Lord's at the supper, the last supper. Martin Luther, and this is something that a lot of Protestants don't know, Martin Luther believed that Jesus meant that literally. He meant that when you sacrifice or when you, sorry, I shouldn't say the word sacrifice, when you, when you celebrate the Eucharist, what the Catholics call the mass, that Martin Luther thought Jesus Christ is really present in the Eucharist. He's really present in the bread and the wine.

Martin Luther thought that. He took Jesus at his word so that that passage was literal. John Calvin didn't. Swingly didn't. They both thought that Jesus was speaking metaphorically. He was speaking symbolically. It wasn't literal. Martin Luther, you know, so Lutherans, I believe Lutherans still take a literal view of,

like the Catholics, they believe. the real presence of Jesus in the wine and and bread of the Holy Eucharist. And so that's just an example of how, you know, how fallacious the idea is that it's just obvious what scripture means and that there's no difficulty about interpreting it. And the reason why you sort of need something, I mean, the reason why the Magisterium of the Catholic Church exists is largely just to be kind of authoritative teacher to explain what Holy Scripture means. And it has this continuous relationship with these books,

with the sacred scriptures that it canonized. You know, it's, it's like contemporary, but it comes with that the scriptures come with and out of the Catholic tradition. And so it sort of makes sense that the Catholic tradition is the thing that interprets it. Now, Martin Luther was part of the Catholic tradition. He was an Augustinian hermit. And I think a lot of Protestants, if they were to go visit,

you know, jump in the time machine and go visit Martin Luther, they would think they're looking at a Roman Catholic most of the time. You know, in a lot of ways, his style of worship, his theology, his sensibilities, they're very Catholic. He was in many ways, they're very much Catholic. And certainly, as regards his view of the Eucharist, you know, there's a lot of, there's not much difference between Roman Catholics kind of articulate Christ's presence in the sacrament differently, but ultimately there, we both say that, you know,

Jesus is really present in the wine and bread. You know, when, I've got to get this thought out, otherwise it's going to torture me for the rest of the day, but when you talk about an author after he's done a book as just another reader. Actually, I would say after this podcast is done, I just become another listener. Like if I go back and listen to it, there's a whole bunch of things that I've probably missed. There's a whole bunch of things that people want me to ask and on and on and on and on and goes, right? And then you think you go a year and then you come back and listening and go, because now you'll know a whole bunch of different things. I'll be like, man, you know,

and that's one of the lovely things about keeping a conversation going, right? Of not, I don't mean just today, but I mean, you know, over the course of a year or two or, or, et cetera, et cetera, because then you can build on things and start to discuss a whole different list of questions and ideas. I have two thoughts. One is, when I stare at the Catholic Church, I see a power structure that, you know, you brought it up early on, that the state and the church they wanted to separate, right? because and when there is something that is powerful as the Catholic Church,

unbeknownst to it, or maybe even they realize it, it would attract bad human beings, dark human beings. I don't know, evil human, I don't know. Sure. People that would like to, in the history of the Catholic Church, have you ever looked into that? Like, over, because as it gets bigger and more powerful, it would be easier to sneak through the cracks and then,

I just look at politics. I simply look at politics. I don't need to look at anything else. And you see like some bad human beings got in there. Not all of them. For sure. Once again, anytime there's a power structure where one person or a group of people

get to control a large portion of people, for some reason that really attracts some people that aren't so great. Have you looked into any of that? Yeah, yeah. You know, you don't have to look very far. Corruption is sort of everywhere in, in the history of, of the church politics. It's not pretty.

I think people often don't pay enough attention to all the wonderful things that the church has done for the world. You know, all the universities, the hospitals, a lot of the civil institutions that exist today are sort of things that Catholic and Catholic monastic communities created. But the church has been, is constantly fighting with internal corruption. But there's no doubt, no doubt. The church has done at times horrible, wicked things. And if we had to rely on the holiness of clerics, we'd be in bad shape. There's just no doubt about that.

And Martin Luther wasn't wrong. He was not wrong to see a church desperately in need of reform. There were practices of, you know, manipulative practices of indulgences. there were, you know, in the 14th century, you know, the Pope and bishops were sort of handing out appointments to different seats in the church, different positions of authority in the church, to the highest bidder, you know, so secular politicians could just sort of buy a bishopric, a seat to, you know, in a certain region, and start collecting money, you know, It's sort of like a second form of taxation.

You know, there definitely, there's no doubt, and I never want to deny that. And there's no chance of reforming an institution that can't admit its own, you know, sort of its own problems, its own corruption. What the Catholics think is that just in the way that Jesus' human flesh was not ultimately so imperfect that God couldn't work through it, that despite all of its faults, Catholic Church is still the instrument for God's salvific work in the world. So, yeah, I'm 100%. And, you know, the truth, nobody is more frustrated about corruption in the church than Catholics.

I mean, a lot of times we're the ones who suffer from it, suffer the most, you know. And our children are, you know, the sex abuse crises, they've, you know, just, you know, just ravaged people's lives. And in the fact that, you know, we Catholics are just constantly pulling our hairs out when the church continues and doesn't, you know, we don't see progress in reforming these things. And I think there's just the church has to constantly be on this kind of reform war path or else it just falls into all kinds of corruption. You know, so there are different ways to deal with corruption.

It's everywhere. You know, you can either go to the sectarian thing and just start a new church every time you find corruption, or you can fight the corruption from within and maintain unity. And Martin Luther did a lot of great things for the church, even though he left it. You know, he started a Catholic counter-reformation movement that actually did have a lot of positive effects on the state of the church after the Protestant Reformation. but yeah the church still today still very desperately in need of reform do you know uh statistics wise like how how big the church is like amount of i don't know bishops and cardinals and do you can you just like rattle that off or you're just like well it's a raid around here no i'm afraid

no i don't i don't i don't know um probably as much i try it's like watching sausage making you know you don't it's it's not a pleasant thing to study too carefully the politics of the church and so i don't i can i can't tell you numbers i can tell you some things about the scale of the global church uh but i can't i can't i'm afraid i can't say much about the scale of its uh institutional hierarchy i was just uh yeah what 1.3 billion that'd be members but i was i was just i was just I'm curious, like, how many people are part of the, let's see if Google will give me a number. How many people?

There you go. More than one million employees in an operating budget of nearly 100 billion to run parishes, diocese, primary, and secondary schools, nursing homes, retreat, centers, hospitals, and other charitable institutions. So one million people, roughly. Wow. Now, I don't know. Once again, folks, don't take my word on that.

That is Google spitting me out an answer. Yeah. but just you know I was just you know like when you talk about the politics and it once again I mean this in the best possible way folks when I look at the Catholic church it just is a big giant institution and and it's got a very very what is the word I'm looking for important like message to help spread to the world but When you have a giant institution, if we've learned anything on this podcast over the last three years, it's giant institutions have a problem with, you know, when you talk about some of the corruption and inter-politics,

and you realize like one million people, that's a lot. But then you realize there's, you know, how many billions of people on the planet, you got one billion people are Catholics? You go, like, actually, you know, like, that's a very powerful organization all over again, you know. there's a reason why Catholics kind of stand alone, if you would, and people attack from all different sides. It's interesting. I was just curious, you know, with the size and scope of what we're talking about. Yeah, and there's something to be said for the idea that the physical form of the church

sometimes has gotten in the way of its mission. And this was definitely the case in like the end of the or the beginning of the 19th century. when the church actually had like a small kingdom of its own, the papal states of Italy. This was a time when part of Italy was owned by, was like a sovereign state controlled by the church, by the Pope. And to this day, you know, the small patch of land inside the middle of the Vatican, the middle of Rome, or just not really the middle. the Vatican is a sovereign state, but that sovereign state was much larger and had a lot of citizens right now. The Vatican doesn't really have a lot. It doesn't really have like a citizenship that includes laity and stuff like that.

But in those days it did and levied taxes and things like that. And sometime near the end of the 19th century, those lands. were sort of forcefully taken away from the church. Church didn't have a very powerful army, and Italians sort of reclaimed those lands, or not reclaimed, just claimed them. And it was viewed by Pius the 9th at the time. It's this massive tragedy.

But in retrospect, you know, it was sort of like the world had changed, and that sort of model of the church just wasn't working anymore. and the transformation of the institution of the church in that case turned out to be providential. And the church has actually been able to do things and operate in a way that it wasn't able to. I mean, one example is that Catholics historically have always been under suspicion in every country where they live in European, like Northern European and even Catholic countries, suspicion that they are actually agents of the Pope and that the Pope could call on them. they could be like used against the country where they where they live you know that was always

a concern especially when the church was a country of its own right you can see how that could create a conflict of interest which which country are you citizens of Catholics so when the when the Pope lost those states I think those kinds of concerns started to recede into the background and Catholics were now free to sort of be citizens of their own countries without so much suspicion. So the transformation of the institution, I mean, the church is institutional form. There are some aspects of it that can't change, but there are other aspects of it that I think are subject to change and often do change and have to change to sort of suit the order of the world around it and to be able to play its role in proclaiming the gospel.

You ever wonder what's in the Vatican? Have you thought about that? Like, man, wouldn't that be a trip to get in there and see what they actually have. Oh, I would love it. Yeah. You know, it was sometime in the 19th century that the Vatican started opening up to have scientists and scholars to come in and use Vatican resources, Vatican, you know, massive Vatican library. Someday I will.

Someday I'll go and check out the books. But, yeah, it's amazing. I've been in the Vatican before. The day you get in there, Jason, is the day. day I'm like, we're going to talk about that because I feel like that's probably one of the best kept secrets under the sun is what's in the Vatican. Well, there's some secrets there, but any scholar can go in and request to view certain manuscripts.

And the Vatican is actually, you know, one of the things that I've recently discovered and very happy to have discovered it, you can actually browse, the Vatican's digitized a lot of the ancient manuscripts it holds, and you can actually just go browse, you know, ancient medieval manuscripts online. And I've actually been doing that. I've been reading Thomas Aquinas and some of these original manuscripts that he wrote with his sloppy handwriting. So, yeah.

Before I let you out of here, I had one other thought. And it was, I don't know enough about this. So, you know, you take it or leave it or what have you. One of the other things I've always heard is Catholics remove books from the Bible. And so I think a book of Enoch, and there's probably a bunch of other ones. Is there any truth to that? Is that, I don't know, was that rated at the start of when the Bible was made, or is this down the road where they started removing things like that?

My understanding is that it's completely false, that Catholics precisely don't remove books from the Bible, and that's really what some Protestants have had grievances about, that they didn't cut out of the Septuagint canon, what the books of the Jews, the Hebrews, considered to be Deutero-canonical. I'm not 100% sure about the book of Enoch. I know the book of Enoch.

I've read it, but I don't know if it's... So once again, sorry, this is, once again, this is Google telling me, but it says by the 5th century, the book of Enoch was mostly excluded from Christian biblical canons, is now regarded as scripture only by the Ethiopian Orthodox. Oh, boy, that's a name. Tahiti Church and Eritrean Orthodox Tahiti O church. I tortured those names, so I apologize.

But the fifth century, so that's, you know, 300 years roughly, you know, later. And once again, you know, the thing I can do for, the thing we could do too is, the conversation never has to stop, right? Me and Jason and folks can shoot off some things. One of the things I enjoy about your background is how much you've dug into things and stared and studied and everything else. So, you know, if you go, man, like, leave that with me and I dig into it some more. That's cool, too, because one of the things, and I don't know, honestly, for me,

is better than, I think, and kind of whatever. It's like, well, actually, I don't know. Like, I'd love to dig into that because one of the, things on here is we we hope to explore some different conversations some different questions and get to the bottom of some things yeah yeah um yeah check out the ethiopian uh orthodox that's a really neat tradition by the way um yeah so my sense is that what what what this because the the the canon isn't really top down defined um until the council of trent um there's sort of a uh organic development of a And there are certain points where the Magisterium, I think one of the, I think it was Pope Urban the second maybe, who, no, it wasn't, it was, there was a Pope who commissioned Jerome to do his translation of the Vulgate.

And that translation was the thing that really settled the canon de facto. You know, it really wasn't a de jure definition of a canon. It was just sort of de facto. And I think probably the same holds for the book of Enoch. My guess is that, you know, it might have as much to do with the difficulties of transmitting text in the ancient world. Where, in order to make a book, somebody had to sit down with, you know, you sort of had to come up with the paper or the parchment. which involved, you know, killing animals or harvesting papyrus or something, and it was a very expensive process.

And so to create a book, you really had to be sort of judicious about what you were going to put in it because that thing was expensive. And it's expensive to have somebody devote thousands of hours to writing, to copying, you know, a new manuscript. So it might have as much to do with the fact that this, you know, the book of enoch wasn't really being used for any liturgical purposes and mostly its interest was a scholarly thing but you know again it's it's a when they say it was removed from the canon i don't i don't know that that was a magisterial decision it wasn't like a decision that the

church hierarchy made as far as as far as i'm just again i'm just sort of shooting from the hip here guessing um my guess is that it was it's sort of a scholarly thing that scholars just copying it over scribes but but I yeah I really you know just my sense is just that these sort of decisions tended not to be sort of made by councils or or popes at this point until and not till you know a good till later it was you know that the what ended up being used as the Christian canon really was just a much more organic story you know As I hear some things pick up in the background, I do want to, and I just, you said Council of Trent again, and I'm trying to rack my brain.

Did we address what Council of Trent was at the start? I'm actually like, I can't remember if we talked about it, but Council of Trent has come all the way back up. It was one of the things I wrote down right at the start. What was the Council of Trent, and when was it? The Council of Trent occurred just shortly after the Protestant Reformation. So I think it was 1545 maybe. Okay. It was the council that was called sort of in reaction, response to the rise of sort of Protestant.

Of Martin Luther? Yeah, Martin Luther and others. Yeah, different Protestant countries starting to, you know, to sort of disagree with the church and make public disagreements and published. You know, again, the Gutenberg Press is already in play. and there's all kinds of literature flying around and Catholic responses. And so the Council of Trent was in large part a reaction to the rise of Protestantism and an attempt to sort of give definitive answers to questions that had arisen because of Protestant challenges.

So in some ways, Trent is a bit of a reaction to Protestantism. But in Trent, in Trent, all they're doing is addressing, Are they removing anybody? Are they, or what's, why is Council of Trent even then a big deal? If all it is is the Catholic Church getting together going, okay, we got to address Martin Luther here. Like, what the heck is going on? We've got all these attacks coming in. Is that all that happens in the Councilor Trent or is there more to it?

I mean, there's a bit more to it, I'm sure, but I think that was the occasion that brought it up. And then, of course, the Council of Trent, its significance really has to do with how it, defined Catholic culture and sort of the agenda of theologians in the church for until really until the Second Vatican Council. The Second Vatican Council is a point where, you know, so if Trent had the tendency of being a kind of reaction to Protestantism, you know, Second Vatican Council kind of takes a different posture in a way. not discontinuous with the Council of Trent, but it's the first time I think there's enough

distance from all these rivalries in Europe where Catholics can say, all right, let's try to find a way to say something positive to the modern world, say something positive to the Protestants, embrace them as our brothers. And this is sort of the first time where Catholics are sort of encouraged to acknowledge the goodness of Protestant traditions and encouraged to sort of find ways to make peace with their Christian brothers that are outside of the Catholic Church.

So yeah, in a way you can say that the Trent, you know, it canonized a virgin, it canonized the Vulgate. So it canonized the Bible that had already been in use for some time. But it canonized it just as a way of saying, no, Martin Luther's Bible is not the true Bible, this is the true Bible. And Martin Luther's Bible was the one that was

original. That's the one that was, there was something novel there. Martin Luther grew up with the Vulgate. The only Bible he ever had was the Catholic Bible. That's where, that's where, you know, his Bible came from. There would be no Bible to talk about if the Catholic Church didn't exist, you know? But so Martin Luther, when he translated it, that's when he made these editorial decisions and wanted to cut things out and did cut things out. And so, And so the Catholic Church saw people translating Bibles into different vernacular languages and making new canons up. And so the Catholic Church wanted to clarify for the Catholic flock what was in the Bible

and what wasn't because up until that point it really hadn't been magisterially defined. And so it defined the Bulgate, the Six-Toe Clementine Bulgate, which it was the form of the Bible that Jerome had translated sometime, I think, in the fourth century, that had developed, you know, not in massive, significant ways, but in small translational ways, you know, different discovery of different texts and improving it in certain ways, you know, especially in the Old Testament case, where the discovery of, you know, of Jewish texts, of a, of, you know, of older Hebrew texts kind of helped to improve the translation that was again derived from a Greek translation called the Septuagint but anyway I don't want to get to the weeds there we've been in the

weeds for some time I appreciate you coming on and doing this Jason I'm you know I joke to the how much time we got he's like as long as you want I'm like all right well what comes with time is the weeds either way I appreciate you hopping on and doing this and you know I'll be curious what the thought process from the listeners is after this because they're there's as much the ones asking for this as anyone they want to have some balanced discussion on both sides of this thing and it's great come out so i appreciate you you hopping on and doing this with me my pleasure Sean it's been a great conversation i enjoyed it