Transcript

How about we begin with a prayer, yes?

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Father, we thank you for this night.

We ask your grace and your blessing upon us.

Please keep warm all those who are homeless, all those who will be struggling with the cold.

Help us to know your love, to know your will.

As we study about your divine word, your divine revelation, ask that you would help us to understand.

Please give us the gifts of wisdom, understanding, knowledge, and counsel so that we may know your will, know your truth, know you.

Give us a piety, fortitude, and fear of the Lord that we may serve you in this life and be with you forever.

We ask this through Christ our Lord.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

It's good to see you all.

Thanks for coming out in the midst of the nice Colorado summer weather.

It's a bit cold out there.

So tonight we're going to be talking about sacred scripture and sacred tradition.

And looking at, specifically, how is divine revelation transmitted?

How does God speak to us, and how is it transmitted throughout 2,000 years?

And then, what is this whole thing called sacred tradition?

As Catholics, we believe in sacred scripture and sacred tradition as the way God transmits his word.

So it's really important to understand what's sacred tradition.

Sacred scripture is obvious.

Bible.

Boom.

What's sacred tradition?

Is the Bible the only authority, which is this whole difference between us and Protestants, or us and non-Catholic Christians, or Protestant Christians, is they believe in sola scriptura, that the Bible is the only authority.

We talk about scripture and tradition.

And then we're going to talk about the deuterocanonical books.

Why does a Catholic Bible have more books in it than a Protestant Bible?

And then we'll end with some discussions on three private apparitions, or private revelations.

Our Lady of Fatima, Our Lady of Lourdes, and Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Okay.

So, kind of remembering this, we're going to talk about revelation, divine revelation, of course, to kind of bring the review back to this whole realm of truth.

What is truth?

Truth is the mind's correspondence to reality.

When our minds perceive reality the way it exists.

And we can know things that are true.

Right?

God exists.

That's either true or false, depending on whether he actually exists.

Jesus is the Son of God.

That's just not a belief.

That's a truth claim.

And it's a historical reality.

He either walked the face of the earth or he didn't. This guy that walked the face of the earth is either the Son of God, second person of the Holy Trinity, or he's not.

That's not just a belief.

We believe it.

But it's a claim about truth.

And there's two levels of truth, two types of truth.

One is, it's called natural truths, truths that we can know just by reason.

You know, I can know that if A equals B, and B equals C, then what?

A equals C. That's called logic.

We can know that God exists just by reason, which is called philosophy.

There's natural truths that we can figure out because we have intellects, because we have the ability to reason and to think clearly.

And then there's supernatural truths.

Supernatural truths are things that are not capable of being known just by reason alone.

God has to actually talk to us, actually has to reveal things.

And that's the same way with anything.

I can look at people all day, but they ain't going to tell me what they're thinking.

They can be thinking bunny rabbits.

They can be thinking Skittle Bars.

I eat Skittle Bars.

There's no such thing as a Skittle Bar.

Next great invention, right there, patent pending.

Skittle Bars, why hasn't someone thought of this?

I'm telling you, the building project is good.

We're going to make a million dollars, sell that to Skittles.

Anyway, so supernatural truths are things like the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

We know that God exists, but his inner life, that he's three persons, that has to be revealed.

And we talked about a few times ago that life's greatest questions actually do require revelation.

Because what we can know by reason has its limits.

We can know that there's a universe, and we can look at the universe, and we can learn a lot about the universe and physics and astrophysics and quantum mechanics and all these things.

Why is there a universe?

Why is there something rather than nothing?

Scientists can't answer that question because that's outside of science.

Why was there a Big Bang?

Why is there anything at all?

That's a question that has to be asked to the creator and say, Creator, why did you do this?

That's revelation.

What's the meaning of my life?

There's a lot I can know about the meaning of my life by reason.

I think I would say, and I think I can argue, that we can prove that the meaning of our lives, just on the level of reason, is to love the Lord our God, and to seek a relationship with him, and to seek to give ourselves in love, just by reason.

But we don't have time to go into that rational proof.

But who is God?

Does he care about us?

Does he care about any of this stuff?

How does God want me to live?

I can know a lot about morality just by reason, but there's a whole other level of, is there anything else that God wants me to be doing other than just not kill people, and not lie and cheat and steal?

How do I get to heaven?

How do I overcome the whole reality of the separation of my body and my soul, and get to heaven?

So we can never fully know these answers to these questions, and more, if God hadn't revealed them.

Okay, so we've talked about that.

We've talked about some divine revelation as necessary, because we desire more than just truth, right?

We're not here just to learn a bunch of stuff.

Hopefully you're here to learn a bunch of stuff to help you grow in your relationship with God.

My goal is not to give out a degree, but to give you Jesus.

Can you imagine the Easter Vigil?

You're walking up, and here's your diploma, you completed RCIA. I went to 26 weeks listening to Father Matt talk for crazy amounts of hours, for a piece of paper?

It's not going to get me any new job, it's not going to do anything.

What am I going to do?

I'm going to say, you're going to walk up, and I'm going to say, The Body of Christ.

You're like, okay, this was worth it.

I'll listen to Father Matt talk on and on and on, if I get Jesus out of the deal.

It's so high a calling, it's reasonable that God is going to reveal himself and reveal the truth to us.

This is what the Catechism says, it says, It pleased God in his goodness and wisdom, to reveal himself and to make known the mystery of his will, his will that men should have access to the Father through Christ, the Word of made flesh, in the Holy Spirit, and thus become sharers in the divine nature.

So because this high calling that, it's not just God wants you to be decent, he wants you to share in his own nature, share in his own life.

Well, man, that's intense.

And we look at Revelation, I think one of the kind of Catholic principles is that when God does stuff, when God reveals, he doesn't just speak a word, he does things.

His word is powerful, it creates, it happens.

And he says, let there be light, there's a universe that's created.

And that's going to be really important for understanding sacramental realities, this whole word and action, or word and material reality.

So God gives the Ten Commandments, what does he do?

Writes on stone.

When God calls the people out of Israel, he literally has to do these plagues, and he interacts.

Our relationship with God is not just him saying, hey down there, you need to do this.

He actually gets involved, and he gets involved and he does stuff.

It's like with Jesus Christ, he gets involved and he does stuff, and he dies on the cross.

If we want to kind of understand, why do we believe in scripture and tradition as the modes of transmitting divine revelation, we look at how God revealed himself.

And there's kind of a pattern.

So God wants to reveal himself in his will, because Adam and Eve turned away, they became oblivious, and so God wants to interact with the sons and daughters of Adam.

So the Lord speaks to a prophet, commands him to give that message to the people.

Like the Lord speaks to Moses at the burning bush.

Moses, I want you to go back and tell Pharaoh, let my people go.

And so he gives him a message.

The prophet delivers the message to the people.

Thus says the Lord.

Sometimes that's met with, kill this guy.

Sometimes it's met with, let's do this.

The Lord backs up the message with mighty deeds.

So Moses went to Pharaoh and told him, let my people go.

The staff, what did he do?

The staff turned into a serpent.

What did he do?

The plagues, he turned the Nile River into blood.

All the different plagues and part of the Red Sea.

So God backs up his word with action.

And that message gets handed down from generation to generation.

People of Israel hear the stories, and they tell the stories.

So one of our big questions then, this huge event.

If you're enslaved in Egypt for 430 years, that's 10 generations of children, and there's these crazy miracles and crazy things.

You see the river's part, the sea part, and you're walking through, and God breathes down fire on the mountain, and all these amazing things.

You're going to tell that story.

But the question is, how are you going to keep that story from getting corrupted?

You know, we've all played the telephone game, right, as a kid.

I mentioned this before.

Start a message here, by the end of here, just in 20 minutes, it's going to be all crazy.

And so how is God going to protect his word and preserve his word?

Okay.

So in the Old Testament, what happens?

God the Father reveals himself and his plan for our salvation.

And he does that through a series of covenants, with Abraham, with Moses, with David, and the prophets.

In the New Testament, then, the Son of God, Jesus Christ, sent by the Father to complete divine revelation.

And Jesus actually doesn't just give us some more truths, he actually takes it on himself.

He says, I am the way, the truth, and the life.

He actually claims not to just be the giver of a new revelation, he claims to be the Word of God.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

So he claims to be the revelation of God in himself.

And then we see, when Jesus ascends into heaven, what happens at Pentecost, in the Acts of the Apostles, the Holy Spirit is sent by the Father and the Son to sustain and guide the Church through the Apostles, and guarding and proclaiming God's revelation.

They receive the Holy Spirit, they go out, and Peter proclaims the message.

They go around, they start establishing churches and baptizing and bringing people to the good news of Jesus Christ.

And the Holy Spirit, Jesus promises that the Holy Spirit's going to guard them and keep them in all truth.

And so, this is where we start to see this realm of Peter and the Apostles, the first Pope and the bishops, the first Pope and the bishops, and then their successors.

Okay.

So, one of the kind of words or phrases of the night is called a deposit of faith.

What is the deposit of faith?

The deposit of faith is the heritage of faith contained in sacred scripture and tradition, handed on in the Church from the time of the Apostles, from which the magisterium draws all that it proposes for belief as being divinely revealed.

So, everything that God has wished to communicate to the entire human race, we call the deposit of faith.

All of it.

And that's communicated, what does it say?

Contained in scripture and tradition, handed on in the Church from the time of the Apostles, and that's, so then the magisterium, magisterium comes from the word magister, which means teacher, the magisterium is the teaching authority of the Church, the Pope and the bishops, so they, when they come up with, when they say something, they're not just speaking like, hey, I think this is really good.

They're drawing from the deposit of faith.

God gave us this, and here's how it applies right now.

Okay.

So, this is also another phrase, it's called public revelation or divine revelation.

The revelation that God wishes all of the human race to know and to receive.

And that was closed at the death of the last Apostle, though our understanding and our application of it can grow and continue.

So, we don't believe in this, like continuing revelations or, hey, you know, God spoke to me there.

Oh, better call the printing press.

Time for another book of the Bible.

Nope.

The deposit of faith, everything that God wished to communicate, he communicated through Jesus Christ, to the Apostles, through the Holy Spirit, to the Apostles, and when John died, that was it.

Nothing else needed to be given.

Everything had been given.

Now, there's new situations that come up, like cloning and embryonic stem cell research and in vitro fertilization.

But all the way, all the stuff that we need to solve those problems has already been given with the teaching authority to infallibly say that is either in line with God's divine revelation or it's not.

Okay.

So, handing down the Word.

So, kind of going back to what we see in the Scriptures, we see Jesus preached the Gospel and fulfilled it by his life, death, and resurrection, right?

He then entrusted that Gospel to the Apostles and gave them authority to speak in his name.

And we mentioned this before, Luke 10, 16. He who hears you, hears me.

He who rejects you, rejects me.

And he who rejects me, rejects him who sent me.

So, Jesus gives the Apostles the ability to speak with the same level that he speaks, same level of authority.

You hear the Apostle, you're hearing Jesus.

That is a huge statement, a huge claim.

Oops.

And so, this fullness of revelation...

Oops, here we go.

We see the fullness of God's revelation at that time.

At the time of Jesus, revelation is handed on in two ways.

One is by the Old Testament.

You know, at this time, the Old Testament is complete.

There's not new books written in the Old Testament.

Why?

Because Jesus is there.

Jesus is there to fulfill the Old Testament.

And so, they have the Scriptures.

They have the Hebrew and they have the Sattuagit, which is the Greek translation of the Bible.

They got all the books.

But then Jesus is going around and saying stuff that's God's Word, because he is God's Word.

And so, this is called oral tradition.

Tradition means what's handed on.

Tradizio is to hand over.

Tradere is to hand over.

So, if I want to know what God's Word is, you know, I already got the Old Testament and the prophecies, and then I got Jesus saying, you heard it said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, what I say to you, which is a pretty bold statement for someone to say, you heard it was said in the Bible this.

I'm saying to you this.

Like, who do you think you are?

Oh, yeah, son of God.

Okay, we'll let you talk.

You know, that's a pretty big statement.

I say to you, love your enemy.

Pray for those who persecute you.

Do good to those who hate you.

All that Christ taught and the Holy Spirit revealed.

So, we see these two.

So, Scripture and tradition, we see it at the time of Jesus.

Old Testament and everything Jesus is saying, because Jesus didn't write down a book.

He didn't write a book.

He didn't say, okay, okay, thus says the Lord in here.

He just was like, thus says the Lord, because he's the Lord.

And the apostles are taking this, and they're not writing it down yet.

They're just, in 34 A.D., you wanted to know what Jesus said while he was still there.

What do you got to do?

You got to go to the apostles.

New Testament gospel hasn't been written yet.

First gospel's not going to be written until around 40, 45, 50 A.D. And all the New Testament's not going to be finished until around 90 to 100 A.D. You know, with the book of Revelation.

So, these two modes, the writings, Scripture, the oral tradition, spoken word, are then, these two modes were infallibly protected by the Holy Spirit from error.

We see this in John 16, 14, and John 14, 26, where he says, the Holy Spirit will guide you into all truth and bring to your remembrance all that I taught you.

The Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name.

Now I'm getting the two passages confused.

That's what happens.

I blame the cold weather.

It's stalling my brain.

In 14, 26, the Holy Spirit that the Father will send in my name, he will teach you everything and remind you all that I told you.

And then in 16, 13, but when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth.

He will not speak on his own, but he will speak what he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are coming.

And so, Jesus promises that they're given this authority to speak in God's name.

He who hears you, hears me.

But they're also given the Holy Spirit to bring to their remembrance all that he taught them.

So they're not just speaking, they're not just guessing.

The Holy Spirit is protecting them.

And this ministry of teaching and guarding the faith was then passed on to their successors, the Pope and the bishops at that time, with Pope Linus, who was the successor to St. Peter, and all the bishops who were the successors to the apostles.

And so we see this played out in a big way in Matthew 16. In Matthew 16, this is a really important Catholic verse.

I think we may have talked about it a little bit before.

So Jesus is on his way to Caesarea Philippi, and he says to the apostles, who do people say that the Son of Man is?

And they say, some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others Jeremiah, one of the prophets.

So they're like, hey, what's people saying about me?

Some people think you're Elijah, which is a prophet who lived 100 years ago.

They think you're like John the Baptist, come back from the dead, because he was beheaded, which is awkward because Jesus, John the Baptist baptized Jesus, so how could he be?

Anyway, they're saying, you know, sometimes people just say stuff, you know.

Jeremiah, one of the other prophets, they think, oh, you're just one of the prophets, come back from the dead.

But who do you say that I am?

So who do you think I am so far?

You've been with me for a while.

Who do you think I am?

Who do you say that I am?

And Simon Peter said in reply, you are the Messiah, the son of the living God.

Huge statement.

Jesus said to him in reply, blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.

So I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven.

Whatever you bind on earth is bound in heaven.

Whatever you loose on earth is loosed in heaven.

So Jesus changes Simon's name to Peter, which Peter means rock.

He says, Peter, you're a rock, and upon this rock I'll build my church.

And he gives Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven.

And as we've talked about before, if you have the keys to something, you have control over that something.

Keys to your house, I can ransack your house.

Keys to the car, I can drive the car.

Keys are a symbol of authority, both in the Old Testament and the New.

Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven.

So Peter says, this is how it is.

That's how it is.

Peter says, that's not how it is.

Then that's not how it is.

That's what binding and loosing means.

It refers to the ability to bind in conscience, to say, you have to do this.

And then we have to.

But also then to loose, to forgive sins.

To say, you know, he's going to give that power to forgive sins later.

All right.

So what we talk about as the three pillars of Revelation that we see, we see sacred tradition.

At the time of Jesus, we see it as the Old Testament.

And we see sacred scripture, the speech of God as it's put down in writing under the breath of the Holy Spirit.

And then the magisterium, the teaching authority of the church.

These three are kind of like three legs on a stool.

One without the other, or one without the other two, or two without the other one.

It's going to be missing.

It's going to fall over.

So, all throughout the history of the church, we've had this sacred tradition, sacred scripture, that which was handed on orally to the apostles and their successors and guarded, that which was written down, and then the authority to be able to tell us what it is and to keep us from going astray.

Okay.

So what is sacred tradition?

Sacred tradition, holy tradition, transmits in its entirety the word of God, which has been entrusted to the apostles by Christ the Lord and the Holy Spirit.

It transmits it to the successors of the apostles so that, enlightened by the spirit of truth, they may faithfully preserve, expound, and spread it abroad by their preaching.

So one of the visuals that I like to use is...

Okay, so you've got all of...

This is God's word, right?

God's revelation.

And all of that is tradition.

Sacred tradition.

Why?

Because God wants to hand it all over.

God wants to hand over all of the tradition, all of His word, so that's called tradition.

Traditio.

Tradere.

And some of that has been written down in Scripture.

Part of that tradition, part of what God has wished to be handed over, has been written down in the Scripture.

But we need both.

Why?

Because the Bible needs an interpreter.

What does this passage mean?

What does this passage mean?

How do I apply this thing?

How are you going to know that?

So the interpretation of the Scripture is part of tradition.

The very list of the number of books in the Bible, the list of the books, is part of tradition.

Nowhere in the Gospel of Matthew does it say it's written by Matthew, or is inspired by God, or should it be in this thing called the Bible.

That's tradition.

They say, well, it was the early church that did that.

Yeah, exactly.

And you're taking their authority on a God-level authority.

That's sacred tradition.

So, now to kind of contrast this, not to get into too much polemics, but just to kind of contrast, because if you're going to become Catholic, or if you are Catholic, there's going to be times where you're going to hear these questions of, you Catholics, you believe all these tradition stuff.

I believe the Bible.

Or they'll say, the Bible is the only authority about God's Word.

They'd say, where is that in the Bible, that the Bible is the only authority?

It's actually nowhere to be found in the Bible.

So, kind of this little graphic, I say, okay, I know it's maybe hard to see, but at the time of Jesus, you have Old Testament, Scripture, everything he's speaking, and the apostles are speaking, which is oral tradition.

And then we see this at the time of the apostles then.

The apostles are taking that.

They're taking the Old Testament, they're taking all of Jesus' Word, and they're handing it on.

Scripture and tradition, Scripture and tradition.

Now, some of the things that Jesus is saying is being written down.

But the understanding, all the stuff that the Holy Spirit's speaking to the apostles, still going on.

Now, they claim that as the New Testament's being written, tradition disappears.

So, once the Bible's written, there's no such thing as tradition anymore, no such thing as this oral tradition.

It's all in the Bible, and so now it's just sole scriptura.

And the thing we would ask is, where is that in the Bible?

Where is this event?

We see Scripture and tradition in the Bible.

Where is this collapse of the Bible only?

It's nowhere to be found.

In fact, the exact opposite is found.

Alright.

Now, some people are going to bring up, okay, Father, I thought traditions were condemned.

Like in Matthew's Gospel, oh, where is it?

I should have wrote that down.

Like in Matthew, I think it's Matthew 10. Maybe not.

Somewhere in there.

Okay, well, Jesus basically condemns the Pharisees for holding to their traditions and not keeping the Word of God.

Now, maybe Agnes can find that passage for me, when Jesus condemns traditions.

But one of the obvious things there is that Jesus is condemning human traditions that are clearly contrary to divine Word.

He's saying, you can find that for me.

It's in Matthew's Gospel.

Otherwise, I'll Google it at break.

So, what he's saying is, he gives the example of, you say that, the Scriptures say, honor your mother and father.

But you say that any gift I give over to the temple is korban, that is dedicated to God, and therefore release yourself from having to honor your mother and father.

He's saying, that's wrong.

Your human tradition of, I'm just going to give all my money to the temple and not take care of my parents, that's messed up.

That's a human tradition that they've invented, nowhere to be found in God's Word, nowhere to be found, and it's contrary to God's Word.

So, how we understand this is, so we make the distinction between small t traditions and capital T traditions.

Small t traditions, like in the Catholic Church, small t traditions can change.

Like when we stand at Mass and when we kneel, that's not in God's Word, thus says the Lord, stand at this time.

No, it's not there.

We just have to make a decision what we're going to stand or sit or kneel.

So this is, yes, in all the Catholic Church, 1.2 billion people at Mass, they all stand at the same time and kneel at the same time for the most part.

Well, that can change.

If the Pope came out tomorrow and said, I want you guys all to stand at the, I want you all to sit during the intercessions, the prayers of the faithful, they'll just be like, oh, the Catholic Church is no longer Jesus's church.

You'll just be like, dude, okay, fine.

You want me to sit?

Fine.

They're like, hey, the creed's kind of long.

Or we could say, you know, I want you to, I want you to just take a look, you know, we understand that some of these priests, they preach really long homilies.

So we're going to just kind of take, we're going to move a couple of things around, you know, get a little motion.

So we're going to all just go around, and they're not going to do that, but, you know, we're going to do like musical pews, you know, no, no, anyway.

I'm just kind of being silly, but, Big T Traditions, capital T things, are part of God's Word.

Like the word Trinity.

The word Trinity is nowhere found in the Bible.

But neither is the word Bible.

So, but the teaching, obviously, is very clearly in the scriptures.

That's a Big T Tradition.

The Holy Trinity is one God and three divine persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The list of books in the Bible, Big T Tradition.

So Big T Traditions cannot change, because they're part of God's Word.

Small T Traditions can change.

Well, like what vestments we wear, what color vestments we wear at Mass, or the style of the vestments, all those things can change.

And Jesus is condemning when the Pharisees are taking these small T Traditions that they've invented and making them contradict the Big T Traditions of God's Word.

And, of course, we don't do that in the church.

So. You found it?

Matthew 15. I had a digit right.

I had Matthew 10, so that's only five chapters off.

Anyway.

So scripture then actually points to the need to hold to tradition.

In 1 Corinthians 11-2, St. Paul says, I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions even as I have delivered them to you.

2 Thessalonians 2-15. So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, this is a key point, either by word of mouth or by letter.

That's perfect.

Word of mouth, oral tradition.

Letter, scripture.

Boom.

2 Thessalonians 3-6. Now we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you keep away from any brother who is living in idleness and not in accord with the tradition that you have received from us.

These are clear.

And so it says, oh, the Bible's the only authority, you Catholics, to hold to tradition.

It's like, the Bible tells us we have to hold to tradition.

And one of these easy proofs or examples is, like I said, the canon, the list of the books of the Bible.

Nowhere in the Bible does it say, here are the lists of the books that are inspired by God.

Because you may say, well, Father knows.

If I open up my Bible, it's right there.

That's the publisher doing that.

You know, we've got to remember, these 73 books, they're just individual books that were given at individual times in history over the course of, you know, a thousand years or more, written by many different prophets, many different people, in many different areas.

So, they were then collected and put in a single text by who?

By the Catholic Church.

These texts were just floating around.

These texts were just being copied.

Because there wasn't a printing press.

Like, can I borrow this?

You know, back in Jesus' time, there's no such thing as this.

You would, like the concept of this, you'd have to be crazy rich to have, you know, to have all the texts of Scripture.

Because the printing press didn't exist.

The printing press wasn't around until the 1500s.

People would say, oh, you Catholics, you discourage people from reading the Bible, you chain the Bible, and you wouldn't let people read it.

That's not true.

That's a misconception.

The vast majority of the public couldn't afford books, so the vast majority of the public were illiterate.

And why did we chain, why would a church chain a Bible?

Not to keep people from reading it, but to keep people from stealing it.

Why?

It was really expensive.

It cost lots of money to hand copy a text on vellum or parchment.

It was expensive stuff.

You're not going to just leave it out there for someone to go in and steal.

It's the same reason we bolt down the tabernacle.

Oh, you're keeping Jesus from people.

I'm keeping people from stealing Jesus.

That's all I'm trying to do.

Now, we're blessed.

Now, we can download the Bible, we can read the Bible, we can read all these books, and we have it on our phones, and we have it on the internet, and we have these texts, you know, these Bibles that we can buy for a few bucks.

But, I mean, this would have cost crazy amounts of money.

You know, it would have been extraordinarily expensive.

And I think, I think on a real pragmatic, real practical level, it's also kind of a pragmatic, practical proof for tradition.

Would God have made the only way of knowing His Word, the Bible, something that was really hard to access for 1,500 years, because copying a text was really expensive, and only the rich could have it, or only a church.

Like, I think Protestantism, the reason why Protestantism can be appealing to people is because they think, look, I got my Bible, I can just go.

Like, 1,500 years, that's not how that happened.

That's not how that was.

I think God's going to establish a religion that the poor can listen to.

And that's not going to just be, go up to this random dude and listen to what he says and hope he's telling you the truth.

Go to someone who has divine authority, who is protected by the Holy Spirit, who cannot error, and then you can rely on that.

And then we can back that up with the Scriptures.

We can back that up with God's Word.

So, in 35 AD, you wanted to learn about Jesus, you had to go to a person, because there wasn't a text.

It's not to say that God's Word, the Bible is awesome, the Bible is God's Word, everybody should read it.

If you haven't read the Bible cover to cover, that's something you've got to do on this earth, right?

I mean, you've got to do it while you're alive.

It's a hard day to go to Jesus in heaven and be like, hey, did you read my book, bestseller?

You're like, no, but I watched all the episodes of whatever, you know.

I'm like, okay.

You know, we've all done the binge-watching of episodes and crazy amounts of TV, and we're like, I don't have time to read the Bible.

Seriously.

Seriously.

No. It is God's Word.

We need to read it.

We need to read the Catechism.

We need to learn about the tradition.

That's why you're here, obviously.

We know, Father, we're here.

The best way to read the Bible is a great question.

On a real practical level, I would encourage you to start with the New Testament.

Read three chapters a day.

Three chapters a day.

It would take you maybe five, ten minutes at most.

Seven minutes.

Because they're not like chapters of a big book.

They're small.

Like, you know, you might have two chapters on a single page.

So you read three chapters a day.

Spend time thinking about it throughout the day.

So it'd be a great morning practice.

And then once you finish the New Testament, then you go back and start reading the Old Testament.

And you can try to just go all the way through.

I usually encourage people to read the historic books.

And I can write down after break what the historic books are.

The things that are telling the historic events.

Like Genesis and Exodus.

Because there's a lot of wisdom books or law books in the Bible that can kind of trip you up if you haven't kind of seen the whole history yet.

So like Leviticus, a book of laws.

You start with Genesis and make it through.

You start in Genesis.

Genesis is good.

But there's a ton of sin in Genesis.

It really emphasizes, we need a savior.

Because this is all bad.

Like, so bad God's going to just destroy the earth.

And, you know, all these things.

There's just a lot of sin in Genesis.

A lot of important things happen.

And so you get through Genesis.

I remember I did this.

I was in college.

I was like, I'm going to read the Bible.

And I started with Genesis.

And I made it through Exodus.

And I got into Leviticus.

I was like, all these laws.

And then numbers.

It's just even more.

And all these prescriptions.

And then Deuteronomy.

And I'm like, ah!

It's like 140 chapters of just like laws and rules.

But those things are important.

But you've got to have the context.

Otherwise, you kind of get lost in it.

But start with the New Testament.

Start with Jesus.

Start with the fulfillment.

And then you go back and it can help you understand the Old Testament.

But I'll write down the list of historic books.

There's like 14 that will tell you the story.

That can be really helpful.

Okay.

So, how the Bible came to be.

It was written by prophets, apostles, and disciples.

Copied and passed down by the church.

And this canon of scripture was then formulated in the 300s.

The first list, the list of books given by Pope Damasus I in the late 200s.

And then one of the councils, I think, now I'm going to have to go look at my notes.

I think it was the Council of Carthage in the early 300s.

But I'm blanking right now.

So. But when someone says, oh, the Bible's the only authority.

And we can rightly say, well, why do you believe those books are inspired by God?

Well, they're in the Bible.

Where does it say in the Bible that they're inspired by God, though?

It's kind of a circular argument.

It's in the Bible, therefore it's inspired by God.

It's inspired by God because it's in the Bible.

Wait, no, no.

What authority do they believe that the Gospel of Matthew is inspired by God?

It doesn't say that it is.

If the Bible's the only authority, then it would have to say that it is.

Well, that's why we say, no, it's not the only authority.

The church has authority.

And the Bible actually speaks about the authority of the church.

In 1 Timothy 3.15, it says, The pillar and foundation of the truth is the church.

It's the church.

Okay.

So, why do Catholic Bibles have more books in them?

This was a lot of the questions in our question box.

The New Testament's the same.

26 books.

The New Testament's the same.

But the Catholic Old Testament has seven more books, which are sometimes called the deuterocanonicals.

Deuterocanonicals just means second canon or second list.

Now, there were two versions of the Old Testament used at the time of Jesus.

With differing canons, with differing lists.

The Greek Septuagint, and Septuagint is another word for 70, because it was translated by 70 people, and the Hebrew canon.

The early church mostly used the Septuagint in the New Testament, because the New Testament's written in Greek.

And so, the Hebrew canon, of the list of the Hebrew books, doesn't have this second canon, these books that the Protestants threw out that we still have.

The Septuagint has these books.

And so, we look at the early church, which list, the Alexandrian canon or the Antiochian canon, they're using the Alexandrian, the Septuagint, the Greek, because they're writing in Greek.

And then, what happened is, in 90 A.D., so, the temple, the Jewish temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D., and Jesus had prophesied about this.

He said, God will not pass away before I see all these things.

And he talked about the temple being destroyed and people running to the hills and, you know, all this stuff.

He prophesied this, because God allowed the temple to be destroyed as a judgment.

They rejected Christ.

And so, he allowed it to be destroyed.

And so, after the temple was destroyed, temple sacrifice destroyed and ended, Romans are occupying everything, the Jewish people have a real dilemma.

What are we going to do now?

We can't offer sacrifices anymore.

And that was, that was at the core of their entire religion.

So, what are we going to do?

So, they met, it's called the Council of Jamnia in 90 A.D., to kind of reconstitute Judaism and kind of talk about what they're going to do now that they can't do sacrifices.

And one of the things they made a decision on was which Old Testament are they going to use.

And they chose the Hebrew canon.

It's called the Antiochian canon.

They chose the list of books in the Hebrew.

Christianity has always used the Septuagint until the 1500s, when Martin Luther chose to go with the Hebrew canon because those books, those specific books contradicted his entire theology.

The specific books in Greek contradict.

If you hold to those books, you can't, you can't be a Protestant.

They directly contradict Protestant theology.

So, Martin Luther chose to go with the books that the Jewish people in 90 A.D. chose to go with after and kind of in rebellion to Catholicism and Christianity.

Christians are using the Septuagint.

We don't want to use those Christians.

We're going to use the Hebrew canon.

Wait a second.

No. So, if you're a Christian, you're going to go with the Hebrew canon or you're going to go with the Greek.

You're going to go with the Septuagint.

You're going to go with those books.

You're not going to go with the ones that the Jewish people chose to go with after the birth of Christ.

You're going to go with the ones that the Christians are using who are following Christ.

Martin Luther also tried to throw out several books in the New Testament but he couldn't get away with it because he couldn't justify it.

He called the epistle of St. James, which talks about faith and works, he called it an epistle of straw.

The book of Revelation he also tried to throw out because he said it doesn't reveal anything, it just obscures everything.

And he actually changed, Martin Luther, one of the things that made him famous is that he translated into German.

And so, and when he was translating it he actually tried to change one of the lines in the Bible and actually add a word, the word alone, to we are saved by faith alone.

Instead of just we're saved by faith.

Because that was part of his doctrine, it was sola fide, we're saved by faith alone, whereas we believe we're saved by grace through faith and we need to respond in works.

We're saved by sanctifying grace, which we believe we're saved by grace through faith and we need to which we receive through faith and baptism, which we can lose through mortal sin, we can lose through our works, and we're called to persevere in those works, persevere in good works.

Okay.

So, scriptures written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit by human authors who wrote exactly what God wanted written for our salvation.

Written by many authors over a thousand years.

The scriptures have to be read and interpreted as a unity within the tradition of the church.

Within the tradition.

They didn't come, they didn't come, they didn't just, the Bible didn't just fall from the sky and say, you read it and figure this out.

They came from a group of people.

Thus says the Lord, Moses, to the people.

And you wanted to know what Moses meant, what God meant, you went to Moses.

It was, all these things came from a community, came from a people, the people of Israel, the people of the church, and it has to be read within that people.

The first five books of the Old Testament called the Torah say, well, I'm not going to be a part of the people of Israel, I just want to believe these books and kind of create my own religion.

Like, that all tells us to be, get back over here, you know, that's not how that works.

And sacred tradition is the proper interpretation of scripture.

And it has to be interpreted as it's intended.

So scripture is God's word, but it's not intended to be a physics book.

It's intended to be divine revelation.

So looking at the Bible itself, you know, we said that the Bible needs to be, needs to be read in the context of which it was, which it came from.

Which is the context of sacred tradition, context of the authority of the church, the authority that God has set up.

Just like the Old Testament, the book of Genesis needs to be read in the context of the tradition that was going on and the context of Moses who's writing it.

Okay, so, the Bible tells the story of salvation.

It's a revelation of God's steadfast love, His guidance, His mercy, and His faithfulness.

And obviously, the center of the scriptures is Jesus Christ.

It's the center of everything.

And when we're reading scripture, there's four levels or four senses to scripture that are, the first is the literal.

You know, we're not, we're not pure spiritualists.

When it says, Moses parted the Red Sea, he parted the Red Sea.

Well, God parted the Red Sea.

It actually happened.

It was a literal historical event.

When Jesus cures the blind man, that actually happened.

And so that's the first place we look at it, is just the literal.

This happened.

But then there's also the spiritual interpretation.

What does it mean?

Now, when God, when Jesus is healing a blind man, that's one, because He loves the blind man, because He wants to work in the blind man's life.

But there's also, when Jesus does something, it's also prophetic to the whole world.

It's not just like, oh, that guy's lucky, man.

He got healed by Jesus.

It's saying something to us as well.

And so there's the Christological or the allegorical.

How does this relate to Christ?

So, one of the things in the Old Testament is there was a time when Moses was leading the people around in the wilderness, and they started to complain.

They're like, we're tired of this wretched food that God is miraculously providing.

Like, not a good place to start, right?

God's miraculously providing food for you.

You start complaining because you want, like, some biscuits and gravy or something.

Like, that's not gonna be, it's not gonna turn out well.

Like, we're tired of this wretched food.

And so in punishment, God sends these serpents to go around the camp and start biting the people.

And as many of us are getting bit, we're dying.

And of course, they freak out and they go to Moses.

Moses, pray to God for us.

We're all dying.

And Moses goes and prays, and then God tells Moses, I want you to take a staff, and on the top of the staff, I want you to make a bronze serpent.

A bronze serpent.

And I want you to put it on that staff.

And anyone who looks at the bronze serpent will be cured.

Now, that actually happened.

They saw the serpent, and they were cured, they were healed, they didn't die.

But what's going on there?

So, in the moment, the spiritual sense is, you guys are sinning.

Where else was there a serpent?

Adam and Eve.

They sinned.

See, what he's saying is, sin brings death.

Like, you're sinning right now.

It's gonna bring death.

And so he sends kind of a symbol of the curse.

But Jesus actually makes reference to this.

He says, in John chapter 3, just as Moses lifted up the serpent, so too must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that all who believe in Him may have eternal life.

Since I already messed up one scripture passage, I'm just gonna double check, because now I'm a little hesitant.

Okay.

Yeah, I got it right.

That's good.

Yay, yay me.

Alright.

Not yay, Internet Explorer.

Dude, seriously, computer.

Alright.

So the Christological sense means something in the Old Testament points to something in the New Testament.

It's fulfilled by Jesus.

So Moses parts the Red Sea, and, okay, that happened.

What's the spiritual sense?

How does it point to Jesus?

What happens there?

They go through water to the Promised Land, and their slavery is destroyed by water, because the sea comes back and kills all the Egyptians following them.

How does that relate to Jesus?

Water.

Where else do we see water?

Baptism.

Baptism opens up the gates of Heaven for us, enables us to go to the Promised Land of Heaven, and destroys sin.

God destroys sin by water.

So something in the Old Testament points to something in the New.

And we may see that reference, as we see the reference of Noah and the flood, God destroys sin by water, and St. Peter makes reference to that.

The baptism is this new thing that saves us.

The moral sense, whoops, moral sense is, what does it teach us about how we are to live?

What does that whole event with the seraph serpents biting them teach them about how to live?

Don't complain about what God is giving you.

Be grateful.

We need to be grateful for what God has given to us.

Gratitude produces joy.

The more we start saying, well, I'm not a millionaire, so I resent the fact that I'm making all this.

The more we do all of that, we're missing out on the joy of what we do have.

Because everything we have is a gift.

And we get into this whole realm of I deserve more.

You don't even deserve to exist.

Life is a gift.

You didn't create yourself.

This whole thing is a gift.

And there's suffering because we mess it all up.

But we need to be grateful for what we have.

An eschatological, or anagogical, big words, right?

You're like, oh man, there's a Scrabble word for you.

Eschatological, anagogical.

So eschatological or anagogical means what refers, how this relates to the end of the world.

How this relates to the eschaton, the end, the end of time.

So when Jesus, I'm trying to think of something, how it relates to heaven, how it relates to the eternal significance.

So when Jesus gives the apostles the power to forgive sins in John 20, 23, literal thing, they had the power to forgive sins.

How does it relate to the end of time?

Because that's gonna help people get to heaven.

And when he talks about the church, he establishes an actual church, but it also points to the fact that the church is gonna be his bride in heaven, too.

God's gonna create a new heavens and a new earth.

All right.

Why is all this important?

Because as Christians, as believers, as Catholics, we are called to conform ourselves and our way of life to divine revelation.

God has spoken to us, and his word is a word of life.

And he does call us, if we believe in him, we have to follow him, and we have to follow his word.

We're not lords.

We can't say, yeah, I believe in Jesus, but I do things my way.

Then you don't believe in Jesus, you just kind of think he's true.

Like, to believe that Jesus is Lord, well, even the devil believes that.

But if you believe that Jesus is your Lord, then we have to actually follow the way our Lord has said.

And he has spoken, and we can't reject his word without rejecting him.

So the Catholic view of revelation holds us accountable and keeps us from being lords of the truth.

You know, I remember when I was going through my conversion and I was going to the Protestant church for a while, and I was kind of thinking about Catholicism and trying to figure all this out.

I remember at one point thinking, like, okay, one of my friends was like, you just need to read the Bible and figure it out.

And I had two thoughts in my mind.

This is an extremely important and extremely large book.

Are you telling me that I have to read this entire 3,000 page book and figure it out myself?

There goes the next 20 years of my life.

You know, it's like, that sounds really exhausting.

And I kept thinking, like, I think God is smarter than that.

Like, I think God would do something better than that.

Like, instead of just, here it is, figure it out.

Oh, by the way, your eternal salvation depends on figuring it out.

Ah! Like, can you call a ulcer?

But I also, you know, I also remember thinking, like, well, what if I come up with a different interpretation than someone else?

Like, how are you going to solve that?

Well, I think the Bible says this.

It kind of lends itself to, well, I think the Bible says it's okay for me to sleep in on Sunday and not go to church.

Because where does it say that you have to go to church on Sunday?

It doesn't say that anywhere in the Bible.

It's that explicit sentence does not exist in the Bible.

But it doesn't say in the Bible, don't chop your arms off and sell them on eBay either.

You know?

It's like, come on.

Like, just because something's not explicitly word for word like you want to see it.

Obviously, they see in the scriptures, they see they gather as a people and keep holy the Sabbath.

And you see in the Acts of the Apostles, how are they doing that?

They're gathering on the Lord's day.

Like, it's very clear.

But if I don't want to go, I can impose, it's called eisegesis, I can impose my views on the Bible and say, well, I just need to accept Jesus.

So it lends itself to a lot of, it lends itself to sin.

It lends itself to a sinful interpretation based on what I feel like doing rather than an accountability.

I remember one of my, one of my coworkers was a, he said he's a born again Christian and I said, well, where do you go to church?

And he says, I don't go to church.

I just have the Bible.

I said, well, the Bible talks about going to church.

The Bible just says you need to believe.

And I remember, and in seminary when I was studying to be a priest, I got, I got this guy come up to me and we got into this discussion.

It was interesting because he said, he started off by saying, I don't want to, I don't want to pick a fight.

And then of course he picked a fight, you know.

And I said, okay.

And he started off by saying, what, you know, I remember, I can't remember, I'm trying to remember his question.

He said basically like, what is the good news?

And one of my friends was like, wrong.

I was like, I don't want to pick a fight, eh?

You know.

And I tried to give an answer.

He's like, wrong.

And I was like, oh my gosh, okay.

And through this conversation with him, I asked him, well, what do you have to do to get to heaven?

What do you have to do to be saved?

Just believe, man.

Just accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior.

Well, I said, then why did Jesus say he who believes and is baptized will be saved?

He didn't say just believe.

Why did St. Peter, when he got asked, what must I do, in the name of the Lord Jesus, for the forgiveness of your sins and you shall receive the Holy Spirit?

Well, the Bible just says, you know, if you believe in your heart and confess your lips that Jesus is Lord, you'll be saved.

Confession, you know, it's like, okay, yes, that line is in there.

But the other line is as well.

So, if you have St. Paul saying you need to believe in order to be saved and you have Jesus saying you need to believe and be baptized, what do you do?

You say, well, Jesus, you're wrong.

He's not saying the other half isn't necessary.

Paul didn't say the only thing you need to do is believe.

You know, and the things that they'll quote as saying, well, the Bible says that, or the scriptures say that all scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching.

It's like, yeah, that's great.

But it doesn't say that the Bible is the only thing inspired by God.

And it says, Yeah, you're not equipped without the Bible.

If you want God's word, you want to be equipped as a Christian, you need the scriptures.

But that doesn't mean that's all you need.

That doesn't logically follow.

It's like saying, if you want to eat this meal, you're going to need this fork to be ready to eat.

You might also need the spoon and the knife.

That doesn't, so you see how that's not mutually exclusive.

There's no place in the Bible that says the Bible is the only authority.

It says it is an authority, but it also says tradition is an authority.

And so I remember just thinking like, this kind of vision of, I just take the Bible and I come with my own beliefs.

That just leads, there's no accountability there unless I want there to be accountability.

Whereas as Catholics, there is a lot of accountability.

It's not easy being Catholic.

I told you this at the beginning, right?

Being Catholic is tough.

Why?

Because you're constantly held to a standard that you can't get to determine.

And you can't just read the passages that you want to believe or read the passages that you want to read and work on the things that you want to work on.

When you go to confession, you got to confess it all according to the Church's standards.

You can't be like, yeah, I'm going to confess being mean to my aunt, but I'm not sure where I stand about this whole mass thing, so I'm not going to confess that.

Sorry dude, you're not forgiven.

We have to confess on God's standards.

There's an accountability.

And we say, well, this new issue comes up with God doesn't really talk about it, so kind of fair game.

God must not care about it because it wasn't in the Bible.

You don't have certainty about something as serious as embryonic stem cell research.

No, we believe that God has set up an authority, just like he did with the apostles, and they gave their ministry to others, his office, let another take, that's what they quote in scripture, to be able to determine those things.

So the Pope can say, no, embryonic stem cell research that causes the destruction of a human embryo and elicit, and is participating in murder, it is not going to be good for the human race.

Oh, well, it can come up with cures.

The ends don't justify the means.

You can't do something evil for a greater good.

And science, in that case, has proven that embryonic stem cell research, no cures.

Adult stem cell research where you just take stem cells from an adult, doesn't cause the death of anybody, has actually produced a lot of cures, like over 70 cures.

The science there is real.

And you can get pluripotent stem cells without killing an embryo, like from the umbilical cord or amniotic fluid.

Okay.

It's easier to believe that God wishes there to be one Pope rather than six billion.

Because if the Bible is the only authority, then I'm my own Pope, dude.

Because the Bible ain't going to yell at me and say, hey, you're interpreting me wrong.

It's not going to do that.

It's going to let me.

Because it's a book.

It's God's Word.

But, you know, there's no human voice there.

Whereas one Pope can say, nope, we've got to stay on track here.

And it's a greater vision of God's love for us.

A greater vision, for me, I think, what's easier to believe?

That God said, here's the Word, figure it out.

If you get into fights, form your own church, because you're not going to be able to really have, there's no final say.

And if you can't, if you can't decide on how to agree, you're just going to have to go off your own way.

Or is he going to say, I'm going to establish an authority here.

I'm going to give them the entire divine revelation, the entire tradition.

I'm going to put some of it in written form.

And then they're going to have that, so that anybody can access it.

Anybody can read it and be edified and be a way of hearing God speak to them.

It's his love letter.

But if they want to, if they're getting confused, there's an authority here to say, this is what God means.

And this is everything that we should communicate.

And that authority is going to be protected by the Holy Spirit until the end of time and they're going to prevail.

Even if they're popes who have been sinners, even if they're bishops who have done bad things, that they're not going to contradict the teachings of the church.

The pope and the magisterium is going to hold fast, even though they're sinners.

I think that's a much greater gift of love.

Sure, it's challenging because then we're accountable.

But for me, I'd much rather have clarity than ambiguity when it comes to things like getting to heaven.

And in Matthew 7, Jesus tells us, at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, He talks about this whole realm.

And I think it's kind of a cool, cool thing.

So in Matthew 7, He says, Everyone who listens to these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock.

The rains fell and the floods came and the winds blew and buffeted the house, but it did not collapse.

It had been set solidly on rock.

And everyone who listens to these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a fool who builds his house on sand.

The rains fell, the floods came and the winds blew and buffeted the house and it collapsed and it was completely ruined.

Now, He uses the word house on rock.

Where else do we hear Him talk about rock?

You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my church.

AKA house.

Jesus is a wise man who builds his church on rock.

Peter, the Pope.

Not a fool who builds his house on sand.

Lots of opinions by lots of people.

Everybody read the Bible themselves and come up with their own interpretation.

That's sand.

Rock.

Singular.

Sand is, by definition, plural.

Lots of it.

Okay.

God wishes to reveal Himself to us and share His own divine life with us and He's given all these things so we can know that.

Alright, so to summarize.

Three pillars of Revelation.

Sacred Tradition, which is the living transmission of the entirety of Revelation by the successors of the Apostles under the guidance and protection of the Holy Spirit.

Sacred Scripture, the speech of God as it's put down in writing under the breath of the Holy Spirit.

And the Magisterium, the teaching authority of the Church.

The Pope and the Bishops were the successors to the Apostles.

The interpretation of Scripture must be in union with Sacred Tradition and the whole of Scripture.

The New Testament came after the Church, was written by the members of the Church under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

The Old and New Testaments were put together by the Church.

It was written for members of the Church.

Therefore, it must be read within the heart of the Church from which it came.

Maybe you've had people say, Oh, I go to a Bible-based Church.

I go to a Bible-based Church.

We're not a Bible-based Church.

We're the Church that gave the world the Bible.

You know, we're the Church the Bible is based off of.

So, like a Bible-based Church says, I'm gonna take the Bible, I'm gonna read it, and I'm gonna come up with my own Church.

We're not that.

We're the ones that gave the Bible to the world.

We're the Church that was there when the Bible was being written.

You know, Matthew was Catholic.

Mark, Catholic.

Luke, Catholic.

John, Catholic.

Peter, Catholic.

So, are our beliefs rooted in the Bible?

Of course.

But it's the other way around.

The Catholic Church existed before the New Testament was written.

It was the Church that produced the New Testament.

It was the Church that put the Bible together.

The only reason we have this is because of the Catholic Church.

It was because monks copied it in monasteries, and the Church preserved it and protected it throughout crazy amounts of wars and destructions and lootings and pillages.

The only reason we know about God, the only reason we know about Jesus Christ is because of the Catholic Church.

Okay.

So, some references that you might be interested in, kind of in this realm of the subject, is A Father Who Keeps His Promises by Dr. Scott Hahn, a great book where he goes through the main covenants of Scripture, like the covenants with Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David.

Kind of gives a way of understanding all the Scriptures through the five covenants and the promises that God has made.

Very beautiful book.

You can understand the Bible.

Peter Kreeft goes through each book.

Like, what's the history of Jeremiah?

What's going on in the book of Jeremiah?

What's the context?

So, it's just a book by book.

It's kind of a good reference guide.

Where is that in the Bible?

By Patrick Mergid.

It kind of goes by all the issues.

Like, where is the issue of the Immaculate Conception in the Bible?

Where is this issue in the Bible?

What's all the teachings there?

Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic by David Currie, I think is one of the best explanations I've seen.

What?

It's a great book.

Where he basically, he was a Protestant, he was a fundamentalist, and he became Catholic, and so he writes the book using all the language that fundamentalists or Protestants would use and talks about Catholicism.

Because sometimes we use words when we mean different things, and so he kind of talks about that.

And he has a great explanation of Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition in the Magisterium.

One of the best I've read.

And then, of course, Catholic.com,

as you probably would imagine.

Catholic.com,

another great website.

Okay, so I mentioned, this isn't in your notes, obviously, because I just wrote it.

If you were looking at studying the Scriptures, and you just wanted to look at the history, the historical books, I mentioned, you know, starting with the Gospels, but in order, Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, those are going to tell the story from let there be light, until the Apostles going out and proclaiming the good news.

And all the other stuff is going to be talking about those things at that time, but they're going to be wisdom literature, Psalms, and other laws, and other things that are in the Scriptures.

So I'll leave that up.

And then we'll keep forgetting.

Take just a couple minutes for some questions.

We'll start with the ones in the box.

And then I'll try to go through So I think I answered all the questions of why did the Jews in Palestine reject the seven books found in the Catholic Bible?

Because that's what the Christians were using.

Why were the seven books not accepted?

Why did it take a while for these books to be canonized?

I mean, they were canonized all together at the same time.

What were Martin Luther's doctrine and all reasons for rejecting the Deuterocanonical books?

Because it talks about praying for the dead, and it talks about purgatory.

It doesn't use the exact word, but it talks about offering sacrifices and praying for the dead, which contradicts total depravity, which contradicts this whole notion of salvation, as you're completely corrupt.

God covers you with his righteousness.

And if there's this thing called purgatory, then you can't be completely corrupt, you can't be covered with righteousness, you have to be able to be made right, made better.

Because that's explicitly mentioned in 1 Maccabees, there's just no way.

What is the Church's view on organ transplants?

The Church's view on organ transplants is that donating a non-vital organ, an organ that's not going to kill you, can be a good and meritorious thing.

And you can do that while you're alive, or you can do that after you've died.

Obviously, it's not okay to donate an organ that's going to cause your death while you're still alive.

Oh, my spouse needs a heart.

You can't do that.

But it also means that if someone is going to donate their organs after they've died, they need to actually have been dead.

There's a real issue, and it's the reason right now why I've donated an organ, I've donated a kidney to one of my friends, but I'm not on the organ donor list.

Because how they do organ donations in our United States right now is not in line with Catholic teaching.

And so that's what needs to change, and we need to get that to change.

Because right now, you just put yes to organ donor, and they can do whatever they want, basically take whatever they want.

And so what they can do is say they want your heart.

If you're on the operating table in a regular secular hospital, what they're going to do is they're going to keep you on life support until they get that other person there, and they're going to rip your heart out, which causes your death, and then put it in the other person.

They don't let you die.

That's immoral.

That's doctors committing murder.

Because morality is not based on circumstances or consequences or what we think is going to lead to the best.

It's based on actions.

So if a person has died, heart stopped beating, brain dead, it's okay to take their organs because they're dead.

But it's not okay to cause death by taking their organs, which is a way a lot of hospitals take their organs because they're consequentialists.

They think, well, this increases viability because they don't have to experience necrosis, they don't have to experience death, or getting it much more fresh.

Sorry, the ends don't justify the means.

You cannot directly cause the death of an innocent human being, and you can't use the argument they're going to die anyway.

You don't know that.

They could be miraculously healed if they wait until they actually die.

Yeah?

Right, okay, yeah.

Sure.

We're going to have a whole class on bioethics and the issue of end-of-life issues and whether it's okay to pull the plug on someone.

And so the short answer is if there's no hope of recovery and the only thing that's keeping them physically respirating is the machine, and there's no hope, it's okay to keep them on that if you wish, but you're not morally obligated.

But if there's a hope of recovery, like the person just went under surgery to have their gallbladder removed, and they're on a respirator because something happened, but they're fine.

It can't be like spouse, oh, now's my chance.

Because there's a realistic hope of recovery that's called ordinary means.

So we're obligated to do ordinary means of preserving our life, food and hydration, medical care, what it's shown to show some type of benefit.

We're not morally obligated to do extraordinary means, which is like the respirator, but one of the things that is required is as long as your body can process food, you have to give food and water, even if it means a feeding tube.

That's ordinary.

And there's a risk of what's going on in many nursing homes today is people are being morphined unconscious and then allowed to starve to death.

And they say, well, the person's going to go in a few days.

Everyone goes in a few days if you don't feed or give them water.

Like, you knock someone unconscious.

And so, you know, at the end of our lives, our bodies do start shutting down.

We're no longer able to process food.

You put food in the stomach, it's just going to explode.

But so long as that body can process food at whatever level it can process, we're required to give food and water.

Otherwise, we're starving the person.

So there's a real risk.

We'll talk about all those specifics about what we need to do and how we need to really spell out how to care for the elderly, how to care for ourselves so that we're respecting our beliefs because with euthanasia being much more popular now, it's much more common.

I go into hospitals and this person's morphined unconscious and they say they're probably going to go in a few days.

I'm thinking to myself, of course they're going to go in a few days.

I would go in a few days if you morphined me unconscious and didn't give me food and water.

So, it's a bit risky.

How was the serpent part of God's original plan or why?

Well, you know, God created all the angels.

Some of the angels fell and became demons.

And demons can appear as whatever they want.

And this demon appeared as a serpent and tempted Eve and Eve fell.

Was it God's plan for the serpent to tempt Eve?

No. God didn't plan, it wasn't God's plan for the devils to turn away from God.

God knew that Eve was going to be tempted because he knew the devil turned away and was going to go make war on the people of Earth.

But it wasn't God's will.

So God allowed it because he knew he could overcome it.

Just like God allows any evil, he allows evil because we have free will.

The evil one has free will, we have free will.

The evil one went and tempted, Eve responded.

And they did that freely.

God respects our freedom.

But in God's bigger plan of salvation, he allowed it because he knew he could overcome it in Jesus Christ.

He crushed that serpent.

Alright.

There are so many translations of the Bible these days.

Which is the most accurate and which is the least accurate?

I don't know about the least accurate because there's so many.

So that's kind of a God question.

I would say the most accurate English translation is the Revised Standard Version.

The Revised Standard Version, which was produced in the 1600s.

And I think that's the most letter-by-letter, like word-for-word translation.

I think most Biblical scholars would agree that you could take that English translation and actually translate it back to the Hebrew and the Greek and actually be very, very close.

Because that's called a word-by-word translation.

They try to maintain that consistency.

Whereas the NIV, for example, is a sentence-by-sentence translation where they try to just get the gist or the meaning, but they're not trying to get exact word-for-word.

So the NIV is a Protestant translation.

I would not recommend it.

I don't know what the NAC is.

The NAB, which is the ones we gave you, it's a good translation.

It's the ones that the USCCB produces.

The reason why we got you this versus the Revised Standard Version, to be honest, is because it's $10 cheaper.

So, sorry.

The Revised Standard Version, the Ignatius Bible, Ignatius Press produces an Ignatius Revised Standard Version Bible Catholic Edition, and that's the best one on the market.

Especially if you get the Study Edition, because it has all the commentary in it.

It's going to have those footnotes where there's references to either Old Testament, where those things are mentioned, or other passages in the New Testament that relate.

So, personally, I have the Ignatius Study Bible of the New Testament, and I think it's just top of the mark.

And then I have the Ignatius Bible itself, which I think are just really good.

The King James Version is okay, but most King James that you're going to find do not include the books of the Old Testament.

It's pretty rare today to find a Catholic version of the King James Bible.

It probably can, but it's okay, but I don't like it because it uses a lot of Old English.

And it's kind of hard to understand.

I would say the Revised Standard Version uses a lot of just kind of normal English that we use today.

There's still some the's and thou's in there, but not as much.

And then there's some out there like the New Living Translation that are kind of paragraph by paragraph translations that really lose the accuracy, really lose a lot of the depth.

I think it's really important to have that word for word because God's Word matters, and a single word could connect to a ton of things in the Old Testament.

But if we're just kind of getting the gist, we might lose those connections.

Okay?

All right.

I keep looking at my watch.

Habits.

What does the tree of life represent?

What is it?

So the tree of life in the Book of Genesis in the Garden was access to immortality, to be able to live forever.

And they chose, instead of choosing the tree of life, immortality in the Garden, and to be allowed to live forever, they chose the tree of knowledge of good and evil to decide for themselves what's right and wrong, to kind of play God and say I think this is okay, and I'm going to do my own way.

And because they did that, they lost access to the tree of life.

Now, in Scripture, the New Testament talks about the tree of life as the cross.

The cross is the new tree of life.

It's the new way to experience eternal life and immortality.

So, the...

All right.

So... I didn't get to my Catholic cool stuff.

So... We'll have to save that for next time, unfortunately.

Sorry.

How about we close in a prayer?

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Father, I just ask your blessing upon all of us here and our family members.

Please keep us safe as everyone drives home.

Again, please, Lord, provide find ways to bless and provide for all the homeless, all those that are out in the cold.

And help us to know your will, help us to know your goodness.

Help us to cherish your word through Christ our Lord.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

So, one just real practical encouragement this week.

I really want to encourage you to start reading the Bible.

Because God will speak to you.

You know, it's... One, it's awesome, because you learn about Jesus.

But when you're reading Jesus' life, put yourself there.

Put yourself in that moment.

Put yourself in the sand with Jesus, you know, as he's on the Sea of Galilee.

And God can do that.

He can speak to you.

He can come to your page and just, boom!

Hit you like a ton of bricks.

And that's God's word to you.

Because God's word is living and effective.

So we'll talk also next time about how to pray with Scripture.

How to actually hear God speak to you by praying with Scripture, okay?

Because I think it's a really important thing.

God bless you guys.

Have a good night.