The Jeff Cavins Show (Your Catholic Bible Study Podcast) - Your Questions and My Answers (Part 2)

Episode Date: March 15, 2024

My children have left the Church, what advice do you have? What kind of guitars do you own? These are just some of the questions that Jeff answers in this week’s podcast. Today, Jeff answers another round of questions from you, his listeners. The questions include inquiries about the Bible, evangelization, and some personal questions for Jeff. He answers them all! Snippet from the Show Learn to speak "Bible" so that you can share the faith more effectively with others. Email us with comments or questions at [e-mail]. Text “jeffcavins” to 33-777 to subscribe and get Jeff’s shownotes delivered straight to your email! Or visit ascensionpress.com/thejeffcavinsshow for full shownotes!

Welcome to the Jeff Kaven show, where we talk about the Bible, discipleship, and evangelization, putting it all together in living as activated disciples. This is episode 367, Your Questions, My Answers, Part 2. Well, hello, here we are. Easter is upon us. Well, right around the corner. We're in the middle of Lent. right now hope you're having a good lent and effective lent and that you just didn't give up you know something like ludophisks or leftovers or something like that hopefully this is a meaningful time of the year where yes you are buffeting your body not buffeting your body you are buffeting your body you are you are focusing your heart on jesus christ and you're

focusing your heart on that which really counts which is his word it's the the sacraments it's the relationship you have with Jesus. And I hope that's going to work out for you really well during this Lent. I know that during Lent, a lot of times people will tell me that that was the time where they felt this attack in their life, where things really, you know, started to happen. And they've almost felt like, well, I'm going to back out of this. No, that's not the time to back out of it. That's time to double down and keep your eyes on Jesus. He was in the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights. And well, that's better than Israel. They were there for 40 years. and you got 40 days here.

And in that 40 days, the focus is on your relationship with the Lord and growing. Say today, I'm going to do the second episode of your questions, my answers. I actually could make quite a few shows of this. I have several questions, a lot of questions, actually, that I haven't got to. But I wanted to introduce the idea to you of answering your questions. And if you do have questions that, you know, they're burning and you want to ask them whether they're theological, whether it's biblical, discipleship, all of that, or I'm finding out people have a lot of personal questions that they want to ask me

by personal meaning, things about my life or things that maybe they don't relate right to scripture or theology or discipleship, but, you know, everything kind of does. But you know what I mean? If you have a personal question, like today we've got some personal questions about things people have seen online in my office, what I do. but we have the show today divided up into two sections one bible and theology the second one is more of personal questions but if you do have a question here's what i was getting to you can email me the jeff caven show at ascensionpress.com that's it the jeffcaven show at ascensionpress dot com

give me a note i really would like to put some notes in the show you know the comments we'll grab them we will and maybe we'll get around to your question because if your question is burning in your heart, odds are there are other people that are wondering the same thing. Now, there's a couple questions today that maybe people aren't thinking about the same thing. Nevertheless, see, we're going to get to them today. And by the way, if you do want the show notes for this show, any show, all the shows in the future, just text my name, Jeff Kavens, and that is texted to the number 33777. That's 3377, and we'll get those show notes to you.

I know that sometimes people don't want to pull over on the side of the road or if you're jogging or working out or something. It's nice to know that if you heard a quote or you heard some kind of Bible verse or something in the catechism and you really want it, but you can't break, we got you covered. We got you covered. Okay, so let's go ahead and do this. We have the first section our Bible and theology. Here's the first question this week. And I think this is, I think this one was from a lady. I have children who have grown up and left the church. Common, isn't it? I have told them how much it hurts to know they aren't receiving the Eucharist or going to confession. One of them is

going to a non-denominational church. We went with. them one time, but it didn't feel like church to us at all. And we're wondering why it feels like it to them. Any advice? Well, that is a good question. That's a very common question, actually. And I, you know, my years with EWTN and Life on the Rock, I got that question a lot, a lot, where people were saying, you know, you came back, you were even a pastor and you came back, what was the key, why did you leave? And what can parents do to help their children come back, to the faith. So I would answer it this way. When we're talking about your adult kids now who have left the faith, we have to ask ourselves the question why they left. And in most cases,

people would say that the faith was, it didn't mean anything. It was irrelevant. It was irrelevant to their life. In other words, it wasn't answering any questions. It wasn't scratching any itches in their life. And so they really didn't see any point in continuing on. And at the same time, getting interested in in other things, studying, you know, paranormal activity or, or whatever it might be or crystals and New Age movement. And so they moved from being, quote, unquote, religious, Catholic, to spiritual. Ariana Grande said it recently in a video. She said that she's not religious. She's spiritual. She's very spiritual, raised Catholic, by the way, and talked about it and that's common where they will say I'm not religious meaning I don't go to church

I don't do all those things I don't give up meat on Friday's night I don't go to confession or anything like that but redeeming value here I am spiritual and that can mean anything almost today that people are spiritual so oftentimes when people leave they leave because they saw the faith as irrelevant now when it comes to your kids that have left and they're going to a non-denominational church. And what I'm going to share with you here in a moment as far as what I would do can be for either it became irrelevant or they are going to a non-denominational church. And it's kind of exciting.

And they've got loud music. They've got big flat screen TVs. They got smoke on the stage when people start worshiping. It's like a kind of an orchestrated heaven on earth or something. And that's what they're really getting into right now. So when it comes to those who are going to a church, church like that. The first thing I would say to you is pray. And you may have said, well, I knew you're going to say that, Jeff. That goes without question. Well, it goes without question to say

that, that we need to pray. But you'd be surprised at how many people get that advice and then they don't. They literally don't. They just turn around and start, you know, feeling bad about it again. But they don't really pray. And when I say pray, I'm saying this, if your children are that valuable to you and you want them back in the church and you're really serious about it, I would pray like that. I would pray like you're serious. In other words, I'd be going up to the church quite a bit for holy hour. I'd be going up to the church quite a bit to spend an hour in prayer and hounding heaven for your kids.

I think that you can, in some ways, measure the degree of your seriousness by the degree of your passion and you're reaching out to the Lord in prayer. If somebody was going to tell you that one of your children was going to die in a month from now, unless you interceded, Well, I have a funny feeling you'd do some serious intercession. You might even be ordering, you know, grubhub up at the church. You'd be up there all the time. And that's what we have to ask ourselves. Is my prayer serious enough? Do I take this serious enough to where I will storm heaven and ask Jesus to bring my child back?

Bring them back. That's number one, is to pray. Number two, you don't want them just back in the church. Oh, Jeff, how can you say that? Because it's the truth. If your goal is simply to get them to start attending to church again, that is such a low goal. Because look around you in America today and see how many people go to church but still do not have that relationship with God and they don't understand what they believe. They don't know what the gospel is.

You don't want them just back there. You want them to become a disciple of Jesus. You want them to fall in love with the Lord. you want them to be passionate about their relationship with Jesus, at least as passionate as you are. And you want to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and say, do I want my kids to become like me as a Catholic? That's a really good question to ask. So when parents say to me, I want my kids back in the church, I'll say, that is, that's not a good goal. It's not a good goal.

A good goal is for them to fall in love with Jesus and to find that great expression of love for Jesus in the church. and they will be fed in the church and they will receive all of the graces in the church because if they want more of Jesus, man, this is the place to be. The Eucharist, you kidding me? Okay, so those are the first two things. Third, if they're in a non-denominational church,

you need to start speak in Bible because the language that we use as Catholics is a meta-language, meaning that it is a language that is hard to understand that expresses realities that we love and enjoy. Like spending time in a holy hour before the monstrance thinking about original justice. Well, that's not going to fly. All of that was meta-language.

Most people didn't want to have a clue what I just said there, but we assume that they do and why wouldn't they want it, we want it. And when it comes to talking to your adult children and they're in a non-denominational church or an assembly of God or an evangelical church, you've got to start learning to talk Bible. And when it comes to the things that have meta-language attached to them, drop them for now. Just drop them for now.

You know, when you mention the Holy Father to an evangelical or a non-denominational Christian, they think you're talking about God. They don't have a clue you're talking about the Pope, not a clue. And so there's two ships going by in the middle of the night right there. so I recommend that you start talking scripture you start talking the word of God start reading it more highlight in your Bible the verses that are really meaning a lot to you when you get together with them share with them that you know that Galatians 220 just came alive this week to you

they're going to look at you like say what since when did you start reading the Bible I left because you weren't reading the Bible oh honey I love the Bible I love the Bible I love the Bible And, you know, we don't use it as a doorstop anymore, honey. We read it now. We read it. Well, they're going to be surprised to hear, in many cases, mom and dad talking about the Bible or expressing their love in terms of your relationship with the Lord in Scripture.

So that's important. Start thinking Scripture with them. There will be a time to introduce some of this other stuff, and they may even bring it up. And that's the time to do it. Keep the important things important and where there are. at. Communicate. That's the name of the game. Now, another thing that I recommend is that if you get a chance to give them a book by anybody who had left and came back or was a convert, there are some

good books out there. And I'll put it in the show notes for you. One of them is, there was a book that, I think my good friend, Pat Madrid, Pat, if you're listening, love that book. That was a big, big book surprised by truth. There might be volumes one and two now, but I think it was 11 convert stories in the first one and wow did that thing get mileage a lot of people read it and they read all these different stories i'm not in that one people have asked me that for years but there's a really good stories really good stories my story is called my life on the rock and uh you can get that at ascension my life on the rock rome sweet home dr scott hon fantastic book that's that is reached out and touched so many people by the way let me back up do you know that my life on the rock my

my autobiography, there was one family that I think it was five siblings, all came back to the Catholic Church one after another in reading one copy of it. They all passed it on to each other, my life on the rock. You can get that at Ascension. Rome Sweet Home, Ignatius put that out. And Stephen Ray has Crossing the Tiber Curtis Martin made for more. It's an argument for God. It's very good. C.S. Lewis, mere Christianity, is always a good book. It's always a good book. have to be Catholic or Protestant to really like that. It is really a good book. Anthony Flew, if your kids are struggling with atheism, and atheism, let's face it, atheism is sort of this vogue thing right now. It's become kind of popular. It's cool to be an atheist in some ways. It's

quite empty. Anyway, the guy that Anthony Flew, I think he was in the UK and he was the president or the leader of the atheist society over there. He wrote a book called There Is No God originally. And then he began to get together with intellectuals and scientists and biologists and everybody else that's aologist. And he changed his mind. And he became a believer that there was a God. And he wrote his second book, There Is, and the word no is crossed out God. There is God. And that's a good book. I'll just tell you that. Anthony Flew, F-L-E-W, put in the show notes for you. So those are some things I would recommend right there. I'd recommend those. Another quick question. In my Bible, the footnotes have letters like J, E, D, and P. And I don't know

what they refer to or what I'm supposed to be doing with them. Can you tell me what they're for? That's a good question. Yeah, there's a lot of Bibles out there, like the New American Bible in the Catholic Church, that has in the footnotes in the Old Testament. Primarily, these type of notes are the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, the first five books of Moses. And in the notes, they will put a little abbreviation, J, or E, or P, or D. And those four letters stand for a particular school that the editors of the Bible, not the Bible itself, but the editors of the Bible, believe that there was a certain school that was editing and rearranging things to get across their own philosophy.

So J would be the Yowist. I'll put these in the notes for you, too, by the way. You don't have to figure that out. But J was the Yowist, E was the Eloist, D, the Deuteronomist, and then P was the priestly. And so these are four different philosophies, four different approaches, you know. And they believe that somebody's been kind of messing around and editing this book, and those notes are supposed to help you figure it out. Now, this is a part of the historical critical methods, which was originally introduced in the late 1800s by Julius Velhousen, who is a German theologian.

It's called the documentary hypothesis. And that's all it is is a hypothesis that four different philosophic schools were editing and each one is represented there and the true scholar knows how to identify him. Well, I can tell you this, that the historical critical methods, higher criticism there, was okay for some things, you know, philology or linguistics, archaeology, but the conclusion when it comes to the scientific methods is that they can yield something, but they cannot do what the church prescribes in biblical studies to get the most out of it. And so I'm going to say something here, and that is this. If you're young in the Bible, if you're just beginning in the Bible, I would ignore those for now. It may be sometime down the road. You might want to look into it and you might find it interesting. And maybe it's going to yield something for you. But there is a way of studying the Bible that Pope Benedict reintroduced that goes all the way back to the Middle Ages.

And it's called the Quadriga. and the quadriga is four different things that you need to pay attention to, one literal sense and then three spiritual senses. And you can find these in the catechism. In fact, let me just grab my well-used catechism right here. I am already, have already well-used my new ascension press catechism. I love it. Okay, so here's what I would say. It's paragraph one. 115 to 117 in the catechism, the senses of Scripture. So the first thing that you want to look at when you study the Bible is the literal sense. That's the meaning conveyed by the words of scripture.

And it's this, what was the intent of the author? What was the original intent of the author? You want to find that out. So you're looking at words, you're looking at language, you're looking at customs and manners, and, you know, all of that type of thing. That's good. You're just looking for that first. Then you're going to get into what's called the spiritual senses. But it's actually just spiritual sense. It's not plural. Spiritual sense. But it's divided up into three areas. So these are the three that are mentioned in paragraph 117 of the catechism. Number one, the allegorical sense. What does this text in the Bible? It could be anywhere in the Old Testament, anywhere in scripture. What does this have to do with Jesus? What does it have to do with Jesus, the allegorical sense. You've got to ask yourself that question.

Number two, the moral sense. The moral sense. If you get into some of these theological journals, they may call it the tropological sense, but the moral sense. What's that? That's how it applies to you for your instruction. And then the third is the anagogical sense from the Greek word meaning leading. And here you're looking at the significance of the future.

You're looking at heaven as a true homeland. You're looking at the new heavenly Jerusalem. So if you will take that and you will look at paragraphs 115, 116, 117, I would read that whole area. That's 115 through 119. And it'll give you a good background on that. But, oh, and there's a couple books I would read on it. If you're really interested in this, I'll put these in the show notes for you. There's two of them by Dr. Scott Hahn and Ben Weicker, Dr. Ben Weicker, who taught

at Winona, St. Mary's in Winona for many years. One is called politicizing the Bible, the roots of historical criticism, and the secularization of Scripture from 1,300 to 1,700, which would involve, by the way, the Reformation. That's one, politicizing the Bible, roots of the historical criticism. I'm going to put that in the show notes for you. The other book that they have, which is very good, is called the decline and fall of sacred scripture, how the Bible became a secular book. That's Han and Wiker as well. So I'll put those in the notes for you. And then the third one is the Ratzinger report. Cardinal Ratzinger, before he was

Pope Benedict, what did he do? He was interviewed about a lot of different topics. In Ignatius, I think, is the publisher here. And he went through a whole section on what you're asking. And it's brilliant, brilliant. He calls the historical critical methods. a hermeneutic of suspicion. In other words, someone's messed with this. We're going to figure it out. That's not what I would suggest. I would suggest taking the Bible for what it is and what the church says it is,

and that is the Word of God, and it's good for you, and you read it as a narrative in this final form, and God's story is buried in here. That is what the Great Adventure Bible studies and the Great Adventure Bible are all about. All right. We're going to take a break. We'll be back. We'll get into some personal questions. You're listening to the Jeff Kaven show. Hi there, I just wanted to hop in real quick to tell you about a great way to listen to both Bible in a year and Catechism in Year. It's called the Ascension App. Not only does the app contain the entirety of both podcasts, it also includes transcripts of each episode, the full text of the Great Adventure Bible and the Ascension Catechism, over 1,000 answers to tough Bible questions we couldn't get to in the podcast, bonus content from the Bible and ear companion, and so much more. This app really enhances the experience of the podcasts and helps you get more out of the Bible and Catechism, I highly encourage you to check it out in the app store. Just search Ascension app or text the letters APP to the number 71391 to get a download link

sent directly to your phone. Thank you so much again for being part of this community and God bless. All right, welcome back. Welcome back. With all of the questions that we've been getting here, we're going to move, I think we're going to move a couple to the next one. Maybe we'll have another one of these quickly. If you want these kinds of shows, I love answering your questions.

Let's turn to personal questions for just a few minutes here today. Number one, this is an interesting one. Someone said, I saw one of your YouTube videos and you had a couple of guitars in the background. What kind of guitars were they? Now, some people might be thinking, what do you want to ask a question like that for? But I'll tell you what, if you're into guitars, then you're curious. if you're into motorcycles and you see me sitting on one. You think, what kind of motorcycle is that?

Okay, so real quickly, this is for the guitar people out there. I have several guitars. I have several electric guitars and I have a couple of acoustic guitars. I never said anything about being good, but these are the guitars. I have two PRS guitars, Paul Reed Smith. I have a Silver Sky, and that is a John Mayer edition. He used to play a 63 Stratocaster. from Fender and he he went over to PRS and they built him a very modern version of that 63

strat second a PRS DGT and that is a special guitar with PRS with double humbuckers and split coils that that's all I know that's meta language but it's a beautiful beautiful playing guitar I also have a Yamaha rev star professional two P90 pickups kind of a twangy P90 pickups like the old, like the old Les Pauls used to have. I also have two acoustics. I have a Martin D28 and I have a 1965 epiphone Cortez. There you go. Never have to talk about that again, right? Number two, I saw you with Matt Frad and you showed your computer files, which were all connected to a program. You mentioned that you studied using a linking method. What was the program? The program is called Obsidian. Now, what an obsidian does is I take all of my notes. I write everything that I do

in just text files. I don't use word and all that. I use text files. And Obsidian is a program that looks down on my folders, my text file folders, and shows me all of them. And then I can start linking all of these documents together that need to be linked. Like, for example, if I had a document on Abraham, and then I had another document on the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22, I could link those together. If I had another one on Isaac, the son of Abraham, I could link Abraham to Isaac. Now, after you've been doing this for years,

everything starts linking. And it looks like this graph that is just beautiful. It's just beautiful. Should I put one of those pictures on the notes? I'll do that for you, okay? I'm going to take a picture of my second brain. I'll put it in the show notes for you. And this is what Obsidian does.

And I'm not going to spend any much time on this because it really takes some time to explain. Maybe I'll do a whole show on it someday. Obsidian's free. It's free. And it is just very cool. Link your thinking. That's what we're trying to get people to do because when you link your thinking, you come up with new ideas. You see different things.

It's really a lot of fun. And so I even do things like I'll sit down on a piece of paper and I'll write down Abraham. And then I'll give myself two minutes. I'll hit the timer and I will just link as many ideas to Abraham as I possibly can. Just write them down quickly. I'll do it on the computer screen. I'll write Abraham and then quickly after that, I'll write Abraham. And then I'll say, there it is, 25 ideas just like that.

And it's an exercise in linking all the things you know that are related to Abraham. And it just helps you learn so much. how long did it take you Jeff to come up with the Bible timeline chart it has changed my whole approach to the Bible and the faith thank you that's an easy question it took me 48 hours 48 hours to do that first one I was 25 years old I had the idea in my head I saw that chart in my head and I went out I was going to a Hebrew class and I didn't end up going I went to a meat market got a big piece of paper went to an arts and craft store and got some markers and rulers and yardstick. And I went home and I stayed up for 48 hours and built that first Bible

timeline chart with all the books that I had. I had them all open and I wasn't even tired after 48 hours. I was so stoked. And then I brought that chart to some scholars. They looked it over. I did some tweaks. And that was the first version. And I didn't even share it with anyone for a long time. It's just for me to study with on my desk. And it was later that I started showing people the Bible timeline chart and they said, man, I want one of those. And the rest was history, especially after coming into the Catholic Church. It just took off. And then it's different now in that there are more books because the Catholic canon has seven more books. And then there's other things that are important to put on there. But I never thought that a 48-hour period would define your

life. But there you go. And the final question, how is your dad doing? Jeff, I heard that he was in hospice. And thank you. I appreciate that. And I would ask you to pray for my dad. He's, he's in hospice. And, you know, it's a time to love your elderly parents. It's a time to give back. It's a time to take care of them and do to others the way you'd want people to do to you. And it's a gift. It is an opportunity. It's not a problem. And the catechism says that one way of praising God is to take care of your elderly parents. And so I'm in full song right now, praising God and worshiping God. And so thank you for praying for my dad. He's his name is Robert. He goes by Bob. I'm called Bub. And that's Bob and Bub. I'll keep you in the loop on that. But thank

you so much for bringing that up. I deeply appreciate it. He's a great man. I've had a couple of shows in the past where one was called You Don't Know My Dad. It's called You Don't Know My Dad. And it was a what was it that was an early show here it is it's show 15 this is show 367 that was show 15 uh you go back and look it's called you don't know my father it's an interesting story i think you'll like it let's pray my friend in the name of the father son and the holy spirit thank you jesus thank you lord for all you're doing in in my life i thank you for all you're doing in my friend's life and as we've been able to spend this time together friends talking about you and talking about the good things of being a Christian and living.

I thank you, Jesus, for blessing, my friend, and I thank you for challenging them to go deeper and deeper. Lord, you've never, ever disappointed me, and I know you'll never disappoint my friend. And so we say to you, praise be to you, all glory be to you. You are the creator of the universe. You are completely awesome and totally holy. And we love you today.

In the midst of this Lenton season, Lord, help us to grow. closer to you. In Jesus' name, amen. Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.