Truth Unites - Are Catholic Rituals Man-Made?

Episode Date: September 29, 2025

Gavin Ortlund responds to Ben Shapiro’s surprising comments on Protestantism and explains why the issue isn’t rituals themselves, but treating man-made ones as divinely required.Truth Unites (https://truthunites.org) exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth.Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites, Visiting Professor of Historical Theology at Phoenix Seminary, and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville.SUPPORT:Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunitesFOLLOW:Website: https://truthunites.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/X: https://x.com/gavinortlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/

This video is going to be a bit more direct and candid about my concerns about Roman Catholic teaching, but it'll take me a little while to build there, so hang with me. I've been thinking about this. Ever since a few weeks ago, I watched this discussion between Michael Knowles and Ben Shapiro, and they're talking about the role of rituals. And, you know, today rituals are cool. People want rituals. In 1995, rituals were an obstacle.

In 2025, rituals and hierarchy and liturgy. The more smells and bells, the better. This is all an asset now, which is interesting. So the question comes up in which expression of Christianity is that healthy desire best met? Would you lean Catholic over Protestant? Very, very good question. Very spicy. I actually know the answer.

I don't know if you know the answer to this, but I do know the answer to this. I would be shocked if you had any other heads. It's an obvious. I know you think it's an obvious answer. Now, Ben's answer here seemed to surprise Knowles because Noles is Catholic. Ben said Protestant. I understand all of the problems for the obvious, but yes, Catholic. So, no, give me a break.

I'll tell you. I'll tell you. But don't get too happy Protestants because the reason is because this would have greater contrast with his Jewish practice because Protestantism is about getting rid of the rituals. That is total cold. Okay, I'll tell you why. Okay, so in order for me to become a Christian, the central pitch of Christianity to me would be getting rid of all of the rituals. Right? I mean, that's like the central pitch.

You're saying you'd want to mix it up. You got to mix it. Yeah, man. I mean like if, like, I do more ritual than you, right? I'm like as Jewish as it's possible to be almost. And what that means is that if the, I've said this before, Catholicism is more similar to Judaism and Protestantism. Yes.

By far. There's no question because Catholicism, as I've said to Bishop Aaron, backfilled all of the ritual by basically saying faith, faith will save you not works. But also it turns out that if you think that that is like a practical way of governing, it turns out that you need hierarchy in actual work. So you heard that word hierarchy come up there at the end. From Ben's perspective, Catholicism is more similar to Judaism. He says no question, because it backfills a lot of the rituals and because it has a sense of hierarchy. Now, they're

being playful here. This was a fun conversation to watch them kind of bantering about this and laughing about it. I'll put a link in the video description. You can watch the whole thing. But Knowles did seem genuinely surprised by this answer. He called it cope. And part of the perspective comes out here in the way that he frames the differences. You're going to take the point. He's going to, it's fine. But my final point on this is, okay, I get it. One day you say, look, I've had enough of the rituals.

You're telling me, Ben Shapiro is going to, in just in order to get out of the rituals, you're going to go show up to the big auditorium with the smoke machines and the electric guitars. You're going to, I'm going to see Ben Shapiro in that audience? Now, this is very common as a way to frame Catholic versus Protestant dialectic. Catholics have more rituals. Protestants have chucked the rituals out the window. Catholics have beautiful architecture. Protestants have smoke machines and electric guitars. Catholics have hierarchy and liturgy. Protestants are democratic and spontaneous. Catholics have that which is ancient and sacred. Protestant has sort of contemporary entertainment-focused worship. Catholic is rich. Protestant is thin. You know, you get the idea. You've heard this. Now, hopefully, fair-minded people can see there's a lot of problems with this framing. One, of course, is Catholic and Protestant aren't the only options. Another is they're apples and oranges. They're not the same kind of thing. But the most basic response, I think, is what Ben said. I wasn't aware that

that's all Protestantism was. No, but it's a particular type of Protestantism, correct? I think Ben is correct. This is a particular type of Protestantism that is often, this is, oh, this happens over and over. A particular form of Protestantism is framed as Protestantism. And surely Michael Knowles knows this as well. But there's a deeper and different answer to this as well. I want to make in this video three points about rituals. And the third will be my argument that Protestantism is the better context in which to meet the need in the human heart for rituals. Point number one, rituals are good. Some low church Protestants have this idea that rituals lead to a dead faith and spontaneity is spiritual. But that's not the case. I'll put up a dictionary, my dictionary's definition of ritual on the

screen, and if you just consider what a ritual is, you can see this is not the problem for three reasons. Number one, rituals are unavoidable. If you have four contemporary worship songs and then a 30-minute sermon, those are rituals. Nobody just has a completely unstructured and spontaneous form of Christianity. The only question is whether you have good rituals or bad rituals. Number two, rituals are thoroughly biblical. This is how God set up religion. First, just read the book of Leviticus. But even in the new covenant era, Jesus himself institutes rituals like the Lord's Supper and baptism, the sacraments. One example of this. Paul gets particular wording for the Lord's supper from Jesus. And Jesus commanded us to practice this regularly, not just once, but routinely, over and over, repeatedly,

and with physical objects like bread and wine, and to have particular life. And to have particular their language that we associate with it. So this gives structure and rhythm to our spiritual life, and there are many benefits for that. God was wise in setting up rituals in scripture. I feel like I keep saying the word ritual, strangely. Ritual. Sometimes when I'm recording, you just think, and I know I'll say wrong words, it points too. Anyway, third reason rituals are not a bad thing is people are craving them right now, especially younger people. Again, I said 2025 feels very different from 1995, the least seeker sensitive thing you can do right now is be seeker sensitive. People want the meat, they want the substance.

I'll put out the nerdiest, most academic video. You know, the church father's on some obscure topic, hour and a half, and people watch it. I'm amazed how much hunger there is for substance right now. That's true with our worship and our desire for rituals as well. And I think we have a responsibility to meet healthy needs. In this video, you'll see the thumb on the screen. I talked about this, how evangelical worship needs church history. And I'm basically saying, if my child comes to me and says, Dad, can I have a bowl of ice cream? I might say yes, but I might say no, because

ice cream isn't that good for you. But if they said, Dad, I didn't get lunch today. Can I have a banana? I'm, of course going to say yes, because I have a responsibility as a dad to meet healthy needs. I think we church leaders have a responsibility to meet healthy needs. One of those desires right now is a healthy desire for rituals. Of course it can go awry. Okay. So that's, but that's, but that's why I'm putting up videos on like the Lord's Supper and things like this. I think this is actually a way to meet needs right now. But there is a danger in the other direction, and that's my second point. Empty ritualism is bad. What is empty ritualism? This is when the rituals stop serving their purpose of pointing beyond themselves to Jesus and the gospel, and they become an end in

themselves. Now, no Christian tradition explicitly teaches this, but all Christian traditions can fall into it. and lest we low church types think that empty ritualism is only a problem for the high church movements, let me give an example. Take the idea of asking Jesus into your heart. Okay, there's nothing wrong with that language. It's not like that's bad theology. I don't think. There's similar language of reception like that in the New Testament, even more intimate metaphors for what it means to incorporate Christ. So I think that's totally fine. You know, when I prayed with my kids, we use language like this. when I've led other people to Christ, I sometimes use language like this, that's fine. But if you started to think that this ritual, this particular language and form of prayer,

maybe something like the sinner's prayer, is itself what saves you. Or if you start to think, I'm losing my confidence because I prayed that prayer. Now I no longer believe that that's the right way to do it. Things like this, you're starting to put your trust in the ritual itself, not in the person you're actually praying to while you're using this language. So this can and does happen, and it does happen in high church contexts as well. Today it's become very trendy to criticize evangelical and revivalist expressions of Christianity, but I just want to defend them for their good.

I think that one healthy strength and contribution of evangelical movements within church history is this emphasis upon a personal born-again experience, which is a legitimate protest against empty ritualism that often happens. Just read what Whitfield and Wesley had to say about the new birth in the context of their preaching in the First Great Awakening. Wonderful example of a healthy emphasis against empty ritualism. But those first two points are something that all Christians can agree on. The Catholic and the Pentecostal can come together to say rituals good, empty ritualism, bad. The question is, where do we differ? And this is my third point and my final point that I'm going to take some time. This is where it'll get a little spicy just because I care so much about the truth

about these topics. Point number three, which rituals? This is the dividing line between Catholic and Protestant. It is not whether we should have rituals or even how many we have, pure and proper. It is which ones? What are the rituals that Jesus and the apostles actually set up and actually wanted us to recognize in practice. And asking that question enables us to see why Protestantism is the better option, because unfortunately, Roman Catholicism has added on man-made rituals. Let me explain what I mean by this. Whenever I give a criticism, I pray and put my heart in the right place so that I'm not speaking out of frustration. I want to speak in charity, but I also don't want to shy away from just speaking plainly. And this is just true. I think it's

pretty obviously true. As you get to the end of the video, I think and hope you'll kind of see, like, yeah, some of these really are pretty clear cut. There's not a, it's not like one side wins by a small margin. It's just clear. Let me explain what I mean, though. Manmade does not just mean something that reflects a human decision in any sense. We all have manmade traditions. That's completely unavoidable. A church building is literally manmade. Okay, it is the construction of human beings. So what we mean by manned. made rituals is those which claim to be divine but are not in fact divine. Human traditions that claim and purport to be divine traditions. This is what Jesus is condemning in Mark 7. What the Pharisees

were doing is claiming there was an oral law from Moses in addition to the written law that they had propriety over. And in making that claim, Jesus is saying you're actually putting your traditions over the Word of God. Theoretically, you hold them together, but actually you're nullifying the Word of God. That's what he says. We'll come back to that at the end. And this is the Protestant concern about Catholic rituals.

Same thing. You take that which is human, and you put it up there allegedly parallel to that which is divine, but now it's running the show. Here's how C.S. Lewis put it. To us, the terrible thing about Rome is the recklessness as we hold

with which she has added to the deposit of faith, the tropical fertility, the proliferation of credenda. that means things to be believed. You see in Protestantism the faith dying out in a desert, we see in Rome the faith smothered in a jungle. Let me give five examples. First, let's go back to the sacraments, which I just mentioned. We Protestants generally believe in two. Baptism and the Lord's supper. We think these are the two sacraments that were directly set up by Christ himself as signs and

seals of the New Covenant Gospel. But the Roman Catholic Church teaches that there are five more. and the Council of Trent anathematized those who say there is any other number than seven or denies any of those one, and any one of those seven, as you can see on the screen. It's just those seven, and you can't say it's six or eight, and you can't take any of those seven off the table and say it's not truly improperly a sacrament. And yet, there is not one Christian in the entire first millennium of church history who said that. The idea of seven sacraments specifically is a late medieval accretion, and I've documented that in this video. You can go watch to see.

There is absolutely no reason to think this is true that Jesus actually envisioned a church with seven sacraments. If that was the case, then you would expect that someone, somewhere within 1,000 years of that historical fact would have noticed this or taught this or talked about this. and there really is just no way around that. So this is a problem. So this is one example. I'm trying to give examples here of the smothering in the jungle like C.S. Lewis is talking about it, but be a Protestant because you get the right rituals. You get the correct sacraments. Here's how Herman Boving put it. For Protestant Christians, it is enough to have the word and the two sacraments instituted by Christ. In them, if they accept them in faith, they possess the whole Christ, the full treasure of his merits, perfect righteousness and holiness and unbreakable fellowship with God, to which I would just say,

amen to Bobbing. Second example, the right of clergy to Mary. Priestly celibacy is a man-made ritual, not a divine one, even if it is a discipline rather than a dogma, and it's not universally required and so forth. Of course, I'm familiar with all the ways people push back, but they misunderstand the claim here. This should not be a burden required of any clergy in any place. and the reason is we have in the New Testament very clear teaching on this topic. We literally possess multiple qualifications lists for offices of Presbyter and Bishop,

which another point is we think those are the same office, but that's a separate point. Here, what you can notice is in both qualifications lists, the purpose of which is literally to tell you this is what you require of this office. This is what you look for. This is what you have to have. and both include the phrase husband of one wife as well as teaching about this person's attitude towards their children. Now whatever else that means, it leans at least this much that if you're a presbyter or a bishop, you can have a wife. Furthermore, that's the apostolic practice. Peter

himself, as well as other apostles, had wives. Peter, allegedly the first pope, was married. Now, I know that they'll say, well, this is not a universal and constant dogma. I understand that. It's a discipline. Nonetheless, that's not my point. My point is, basically, don't contravene God. The forbidding of marriage is spoken negatively in Scripture in the New Testament. As, you know, for example, 1 Timothy 4, this is one of the doctrines of demons that Paul anticipates is going to come up.

People who forbid marriage. They take an overly ascetic view. So when the scripture, the very word of God, very plainly makes it clear, you can have a wife if you are an overseer or a presbyter in the church, you shouldn't come around and change that. The way Martin Kempnitz puts this is when the question is so clearly settled in Scripture, if you come along and improve upon what it commands, what is this other than to place one's mouth in heaven and to justify the wisdom of God, to want to instruct and help God with our counsels, to answer back to God, yes, to contradict one's own creator. That is a problem.

And so this is another example of why I would want people to be a Protestant because you get the correct rituals, where, for example, clergy are free to follow God's own calling on their life for whether to be married or single. See my video for a fuller case for that and how it unfolds in church history as well as the biblical argument. A third example, devotion to Mary. Devotion to Mary is a huge part of Catholic spirituality. Consider how many times you pray the Hail Mary in the rosary. Think of the Marian feast days in the liturgical calendar. Think of all the travel to Marian shrines built around Marian apparitions. Think of consecration rituals where a person formerly,

dedicates themselves to Mary. And then, of course, dogmas that are obligatory with respect to belief, like immaculate conception and bodily assumption and so forth. Now, as Protestants, we want to honor Mary. She is a great woman of God, a great model of faith, and absolutely unique as the godbearer, the Theotokos. But this hugely expanded role of Mary is not a divine ritual. This represents a series of man-made rituals that slowly evolve over the course of church history, that wouldn't be recognized by Mary herself, that wouldn't be recognized by the apostles, that take century after century after century of slow evolution before they get there, and unfortunately, they often spiral up into great excess,

even to the point of eclipsing or backgrounding the role of Christ himself. For example, one of the motifs in medieval prayers to Mary is petitioning Mary to divert or placate the wrath of Jesus. You'll find that a lot in medieval prayer to Mary. And this is simply incorrect theology. Jesus is the placator. He is the atoner. He is the diverter of divine wrath. This problem was fully resolved without remainder at the cross when he died on the cross.

And so the appeal here, you know, we will hear the appeal that the intercession of the saints is just like when we ask our friends to pray for us. But I never ask my friends to divert the wrath of Jesus. Never. I know that Jesus himself has already done that on the cross. So this appeal that, oh, it's just like what we already do with living saints is hollow. This is a man-made tradition. Here's a fourth example that relates to that, and that's prayer. Protestants believe in prayer to God alone. And this is what we think basically God has said. We should practice prayer as God has taught us. Christianity is a divinely revealed religion.

We are not in the driver's seat for what prayer is. We are responding to what God has said. And so we want to look to the period of public divine revelation, which all of us can agree ceased with the close of the apostolic age. And when we do that, we see that asking for the intercession of deceased people has never been a thing. This is nowhere taught or modeled anywhere in God's revelation, despite the fact that we've got hundreds of prayers. Like Nehemiah 1 and Daniel 9 and 1st, Kings 8 and the Lord's Prayer and the entire book of Psalms. So many examples of prayers, but they're always to God.

You don't have Noah praying to Abraham, or Abraham praying to Noah, or Moses praying to Noah, or Moses. praying to Abraham, or David praying to Moses, or the latter prophets praying to David, or the apostles praying to the Old Testament saints, or Justin Martyr praying to the apostles, or Ironaeus praying to Justin Martyr and so on and so forth. Rather, this practice only developed very gradually by a slow process of additive accretion such that patristic prayers are far milder than medieval prayers. And if you study church history, you can just watch it mushrooming up more and more and more. And the Protestant concern is that we have to test these developments by divine revelation, just as we test a lesser authority by a greater authority. And we want to pray as God revealed that we

should, and we think that means pray to God alone. And so this is another example of where, if you're a Protestant, you get the right rituals. You practice prayer as God has revealed that it should be practiced. final example, this is the one that concerns me the most actually, and I have done a video on this as well, and that is the necessity of confessing mortal sins to a priest. Now, we all believe in confessing sin, James 5, for example. But Catholic teach that confession is a sacrament, the so-called second plank after baptism, that it is made unto a priest specifically, usually privately, and that the priestly absolution in response to confession is a judicial act that administers divine forgiveness to the penitent. I just put up one example from the Council of Trent there. In my video on this, which you can see

the thumbnail on screen, I lay out a much longer case. All of these topics, I've kind of given a more thorough deep dive elsewhere. This is summative here. But to summarize, there is no biblical warrant for this understanding of confession. It is not present in John 2020. and it is not practiced in the early church. When we sin, we don't need a second plank. We return to our initial baptism with repentance. What David does when he's confronted by Nathan is a good model of how you repent of a serious sin. There's no second plank. And so what I would say to Ben Shapiro, if I was talking to Ben Shapiro and to anyone else is the reason to accept Protestantism is not if you just dislike rituals or you want less rituals.

The reason is it has the correct rituals, the ones that are founded in Scripture, founded upon divine revelation. Final thought. Even though I address this, I know, I'm always thinking in the back of my mind of responses, and I know probably the most common one will be, but Protestantism has a lot of man-made rituals too. And granted, that is true to differing degrees in different Protestant contexts. the difference is that we don't claim infallibility, and so there is the possibility of reform.

What becomes the deepest problem and a real deal breaker is when you have a man-made ritual that is mandated as if it had divine backing, but in fact it doesn't. And that is the case with these five examples here, as well as many others. And the reason this matters so much, unfortunately, it gives me no pleasure to say this, but it must be said, is that this does have the effect of nullifying the word of God, as Jesus said to the Pharisees. That is the consequence he derives from this human tendency. When you falsely claim a divine and infallible backing to your rituals, when they do not, in fact, have divine and infallible backing, then you end up placing yourself over the Word of God.

Even though they are theoretically put parallel with the Word of God, it actually muzzles it. Here is how the historian Philip Shaft put it. The whole tendency of the Roman Catholic Church has for its object to subordinate the Bible to tradition and then to make itself the infallible judge of both. So purportedly, you've got scripture and tradition together constituting the Word of God and the Magisterium is in the role of interpretation. But the role of interpretation is what is really in the driver's seat. And that is how you end up with things like the bodily assumption of Mary and all these other examples that I listed here, which I think any honest appraisal of church history must conclude are not apostolic and yet are mandated.

In other words, they are man-made rituals that are purported to be divine falsely. And so the upshot of all of this is, if you're going to be a Christian, be a Protestant Christian and submit to the rituals and the doctrines that are actually from God.