Transcript

On Monday, I reviewed Wesley Huff's defense of Christianity on the Joe Rogan podcast.

But after finishing that episode, I saw that Rogan interviewed Mel Gibson, who also talked about Christ's resurrection.

So in today's episode, I want to compare both of these men's approaches and talk about how a lot of people misunderstand what it means to engage in evangelism.

What's interesting is that both Huff and Gibson criticize the Catholic Church.

And in a few weeks, I'll address Huff's recent comments on the canon of scripture, along with comments from other Protestants who think the canon isn't a big problem.

It still is for them.

But if you can't wait for that, check out Jimmy Akin and Joe Heschmeyer's response to Huff on Capturing Christianity.

And Mel Gibson, he said stuff like this.

There's a guy called, um, Bishop Vigano who says it's a counterfeit, parallel church, and it's- it's running an entirely different religion.

I actually don't- I don't adhere to a post-conciliar church.

I mean, we got a pope that brought a- a South American idol into the church to worship.

Really?

He did.

The Pachamama.

That's called apostasy.

Right.

That's a falling away from, and- and the very nature of apostasy means that you have to be part of it to fall away from it.

Mm-hmm.

So it's an inside job.

I'm not sure if Gibson subscribes to full-blown sedevacantism, a variant called sedeprivationism, or is just a kind of Catholic fundamentalism that uses hyperbolic language.

But regardless, if you want to share the Catholic faith to a largely nonreligious audience, you probably shouldn't lead with stuff like this.

I get that you should not ignore the church's warts.

I totally agree with that.

But dwelling on intramural Catholic disputes isn't really that helpful when we want to focus on the main issues at hand.

And if you'd like to hear a rebuttal of Mel Gibson's attacks on the church, check out Joe Heschmeyer's recent episode on Shameless Popery that posted yesterday.

I'll link to it in the description below.

Instead, I want to contrast on how Wesley Huff and Mel Gibson answered a similar question about why each of these men believes that Christ rose from the dead.

I covered this on Monday's show, but here's some of Huff's answer for review.

So what is your personal belief when it comes to the resurrection?

What do you think happ- do you have a belief or do you just try to interpret the text and try to see what is the message?

Well, I think, so as a historian, I do think it is a historical question.

You have a guy who objectively lived.

He objectively died, and then individuals close to his inner circle claim that they see him not dead.

Right.

When we do history, it's an inference to the best explanation.

Mm-hmm.

And so there are probabilities of things that have happened in history where we can say, okay, there's a higher probability of event A happening and a lower probability of event B happening.

So the example I often give is, like, Jonah being swallowed by the fish.

Like, that's low probabilistically, not that it didn't happen, but that, like, as a historian, we gotta, like, say, well, there's no independent cross-reference sources.

You don't have multiple attestation for this particular event.

The interesting th- thing about Jesus is that we have more evidence from different writings in the ancient world than we probably should have for someone of his stature.

And here's Rogan asking a similar question to Mel Gibson.

Who gets back up three days later after he gets murdered in public?

Um, who gets back up under his own power?

Buddha didn't do that shit.

Right.

You know?

So

You believe that was a real event?

Yeah, I do.

Yeah.

What brought you to that belief?

Is this something that you've always had or is it something you- you studied it and you've come to this conclusion because of the historical accounts and

Yes.

Uh, I think as a child, you know, one accepts things on faith because, you know, you're raised by people who are nice to you and they believe it.

And my dad was a pretty smart guy.

He was like Mensa smart, you know?

Like, real smart.

Like, back in 1968, he won Jeopardy!, right?

And then-

Really?

And then they brought all the Jeopardy!

winners back and he played all the winners and he beat all of them, too.

So he had a mind like a steel trap.

And his memory was practically photographic.

My memory is pornographic, but it's like- It's like his- his was like, I don't have that- that kind of mind.

Right.

Um, but I'm more, like, he did math and I, you know, I can't add.

But, uh, um So as a child, you learn, um, these things and you accept them on faith.

And I still have that faith, but as I got older, I came to it through intellect and through reading and putting things together and accounts, and then occurrences, like in my own life.

Rogan and Gibson then talk about the Shroud of Turin for several minutes as evidence for Jesus's existence, crucifixion, and possibly his resurrection before saying this.

I buy it.

But- but that's not the only reason I buy it.

I mean, I think, you know, there's other logical reasons why I- why I believe.

So

Like what are those?

Oh, okay.

Stuff that happens in your own life.

The results you get from actually appealing to a power greater than yourself, you know?

And I mean, I don't think it's any secret, I am flawed in the fact that I am by nature born an alcoholic, right?

I did drugs, I did alcohol.

So And there was nothing that could stop me from doing that.

Nothing.

So I was really kind of on, you're on a downhill run.

So I regard the fact that I was able to appeal to something greater than myself to help me and actually stop me doing that .

I think that's a miracle.

Hmm.

It is, for me it is, and for many.

We are so flawed, and I am, I- I'm more flawed than anyone, you know, but it's, uh, um, something that you, I think And it's pretty safe to say I'm in the third act now.

You're in act two, right?

Mm-hmm.

Gesundheit.

But I'm, I'm like, I'm in the third act, man.

So you got, you have to think about the other side.

Yeah.

You have to think about what comes next.

Is there a next?

Yes, there is, I believe there is, and I think it's, um, uh, depends on how you live now.

And, uh, and the beauty of believing is that even for your transgressions, you can be forgiven, and you can be redeemed, but it's all up here.

Right.

You know?

It's the true acceptance and understanding of what you've done-

Mm-hmm.

and what you should do.

Sure.

You have to look at yourself honestly.

And how, yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Absolutely honestly, you have to be able to accuse yourself and, uh, and understand that there is, there's It's a great deal of mercy involved and the fact that I believe that God sent his son down to tell us, Okay, I'm gonna ransom you people from your fallen nature, and, um, and I'll give you a roadmap on how to do it.

And, um, and people do it.

There's even people that do it that have never even heard of it.

You know, some guy in the jungle some place, I'm sure.

Right.

You know?

You know?

Because the creator is above the law.

I mean, it's an interesting fact to note that the first canonized saint, do you know who it was?

No.

The first ever confirmed canonization as a saint was Dismas.

Do you know who Dismas was?

No.

He was hang- he was the thief on the cross next to Jesus.

Oh.

And he says to him, You're gonna be okay.

This day, you'll be with me.

Un-baptized, criminal, all that stuff, so

Wow.

The lawmaker is above the law, so there's a lot of mercy.

In watching their different styles, you can see that I can't make a strict one-to-one comparison between Wesley Huff and Mel Gibson.

Huff is giving a more comprehensive, apologetic defense with lots of answers and citations, which isn't surprising because Huff does apologetics full time.

However, Mel Gibson gave more gripping and engaging answers, which isn't surprising because he tells gripping and engaging stories full time.

These are just different approaches, and we need both of them when it comes to sharing the Gospel.

This coheres with what Saint Paul says about the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12.

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.

God arranged the organs in the body, each one of them as he chose.

If all were a single organ, where would the body be?

As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.

The eye cannot say to the hand, 'I have no need of you.' Nor again, the head to the feet, 'I have no need of you.' On the contrary, the parts of the body which seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those parts of the body which we think less honorable, we invest with a greater honor.

And our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty.

Some people need to hear someone like Wesley Huff give a rigorous historical argument for the resurrection, and other people just need to hear Mel Gibson say, Buddha didn't do that.

Which would be a good contender for an acceptable rhetorical use of profanity that I mentioned in my previous episode on swearing.

And someone like Mel Gibson might resonate more with a person who feels like a broken, failed mess that God can't love, which of course isn't true.

Or they might think they're the kind of person that's too rough around the edges for God to love, because Mel Gibson is kind of rough around the edges, but he's a wonderful witness and testament to the love and mercy of God.

Also, in order to appreciate both of these approaches to sharing the faith, we need to distinguish between two concepts that often get conflated: evangelism and apologetics.

Evangelism is just sharing the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ.

It involves telling people about how Jesus' life, death, and resurrection have made it possible for them to be saved from their sins.

Apologetics, however, is a subset of theology that provides a rational defense of the Christian faith.

In many cases, these two things go hand in hand.

You might tell someone the good news about Jesus Christ, or evangelize him, but if that person thinks this good news is too good to be true, then you might consider it necessary to give good reasons for the person to think this good news is indeed true.

But evangelism and apologetics don't always go together.

You might tell someone, Hey, your life is a mess, but no matter what you think about yourself, God loves you, so go into that church and ask Jesus to change your heart.

In response, the person might say, You're right, I will.

That's a case of evangelism, and no apologetics were needed.

But in other cases, a person who wants the gospel to be true might just have doubts and ask you to help their unbelief, so you might share apologetics with that person to clear away objections and errors that are keeping them from fully embracing the faith.

We need both of these things, but I've noticed two errors that come up in this matter.

More liberal Christians will say that we only need evangelism, and the only defense we need to offer for the faith is our own holiness.

If people just saw how holy we were, then they would believe.

And that might be true for some people, but if you only do good works like feed the poor and never tell them anything about Jesus Christ- then you aren't doing evangelism.

Besides, there are many non-Catholic, non-Christian, and even atheistic people who also do works of charity.

So we need to share what makes our lives different beyond the good works that people see us do.

And you might be at the soup kitchen telling a homeless person about Jesus and they might present an objection to you related to the problem of evil, and say, How could there be a God when he lets such awful things happen?

Or they might ask you about the story of Jesus and say they think the whole thing is made up.

In those cases, you'll need apologetics done correctly in order to help the person come to faith.

On the other extreme though, more conservative Christians sometimes reduce evangelism and sharing the faith to just one apologetic debate after another.

Now, I love doing apologetics and clearing away errors to help people see Christianity is true, but sometimes amid debates, debunking videos, and the cheering and jeering on each side of an issue, apologetics can turn into something that takes away from faith.

It can become, at best, a distracting game or sport, and at worst, a sinful idol.

People who fall victim to pride sometimes become addicted to being the best apologist who wins debates and owns people.

They relish making those who disagree with them feel dumb and small, and that hurts the overarching mission of sharing the Gospel.

C.S.

Lewis summarized this danger in his famous Apologists' Evening Prayer.

It goes like this, From all my lame defeats, and oh, much more, from all the victories that I seemed to score, from cleverness shot forth on Thy behalf, at which, while angels weep, the audience laugh; from all my proofs of Thy divinity, Thou who wouldst give no sign, deliver me.

Thoughts are but coins, let me not trust, instead of Thee, their thin-worn image of Thy head; from all my thoughts, even from my thoughts of Thee, O Thou fair silence, fall and set me free.

Lord of the narrow gate and the needle's eye, take from me all my trumpery lest I die.

You also get Christians who become so obsessed with apologetics that they think the faith is just something that has to be logically proved to every person, and that's all evangelism is.

The psychologist Abraham Maslow once said, If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

And if all you have are apologetics sound bites, then everything looks like a theological debate.

And that might be true if people were all Vulcans who only analyzed the logical element of an issue.

That is a most illogical attitude.

But human beings also relate to storytelling, aesthetics, and personal testimony.

I remember one woman at an event, I'll call her Barbara, she came up to me and said, I wish you could be in my pocket so I could always pull you out when someone needed to be convinced of the faith.

I told her, Yeah, but what if those people don't need Trent Horn?

Maybe they don't like Trent Horn.

What if that person needs to hear Barbara's story instead?

I want to help people with this channel, and I'm grateful for the people who have been helped, but there is no single human person who is the best ambassador for Jesus Christ.

Christ himself chose 12 disciples, as well as St. Paul and others to share the Gospel to the ends of the earth.

I'm sure there were people who resonated more with St. Peter in the first century and some who resonated more with St. Paul or St. John and it's by God's providence that each of these men evangelized the right people in the ancient world, so that from those few first followers, Christianity became the largest religion in the world today.

I told Barbara that maybe your friends won't be helped if they hear me because they might find me annoying.

Since they have a relationship with you, maybe they would benefit best from hearing your sincere testimony about Jesus Christ and what he's done in your life.

If you want to sprinkle a few arguments in that testimony that you've heard from this channel, that's fine too.

So when I hear people debate about who should go on Joe Rogan's podcast to represent Catholicism or Christianity, I want those people to know that it is important to have a solid defense of the faith on such a large platform, but you and I don't have control over that.

What we do have control over is going out in the one platform that God will judge us on, our own lives, and sharing the faith with people we actually know.

And we might use different arguments and different approaches, and that's okay, as long as those approaches are not scandalous or objectively bad or mistaken, since it's never good to have a falsehood blow up in your face when you're trying to talk to someone.

In some cases, we should be open to different kinds of evidence.

For example, Mel Gibson stressed the evidential value of the Shroud of Turin for showing that Jesus rose from the dead and that can be helpful for some people, but we need to be careful not to put all of our eggs in one basket or cloth.

Since, as I noted in my previous episode on what Jesus looked like, there are issues people bring up with things like recent evidence that the shroud is 2,000 years old.

There are assumptions that call that evidence into question.

So we should be open to a wide variety of passable evidence and arguments, and we also shouldn't place heavy burdens on people.

This would be similar to what I mentioned before about the imprudence of dwelling on intra-Catholic disputes and drama when trying to share the faith with non-Catholics.

There's a time and a place for that, but we should follow St. Paul's milk before meat principle he outlines in First Corinthians 3. He writes, But I, brethren, could not address you as spiritual men, but as men of the flesh, as babes in Christ.

I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it, and even yet you are not ready.

Finally, I'm really optimistic about Christians being able to share the Gospel to a wider world.

In the past 20 years, we've seen the rise and also the decline of so-called New Atheism.

Here's a clip from Inspiring Philosophy showing what Joe Rogan said about Christianity just a few years ago.

Notice the change in his attitude today.

Christianity, at the end of the day with no proof, everything is mythology.

If you have some proof that there was a God, that this God had one son and he made this son come down and get the ****** beat out of him and nailed to a board so that we could all have no sin, do you have Can you show me some studies?

Can you give me Do you have a box of evidence that you could pull out and we can examine all the different pieces?

Many secular people thought that rejecting religion would lead to a more rational world.But as the world becomes more irrational and perverted, some of these people are gravitating towards the ancient foundations and traditions of Christendom as a return to sanity.

This cultural decline reminds me of the following quote from Frank Sheed's book Theology and Sanity, written in 1947, that's become quite prophetic.

Whether this is grasped or not, a moral code must be founded on something.

A society can accept a moral code without any conscious awareness of its foundation, provided the code is of long standing and not questioned.

But in a generation like ours where everything is questioned, the foundation must be clearly seen, and apart from God, the foundation cannot be clearly seen.

The practical result for the average man of our generation is that when he is faced with what his grandparents would have called a temptation, he has nothing to judge it by.

His first reaction is, 'Why shouldn't I?' This simple principle, 'I don't see why I shouldn't,' so sane, so reasonable, begins by justifying divorce and birth control.

It has already gone on to justify all sorts of abomination.

It has not ended yet.

Yet in the absence of a moral law explicitly forbidding them, why should the will fight against the things which promise pleasure?

The few might be willing to impose a discipline upon their own desires, not in the interests of morality but in the interests of spiritual fitness, of well-toned spiritual muscles, but not the mass of men.

For them, unless there is the clearest and most compelling reason against, there can be only the following of inclination, the avoidance of effort, flabbiness, and un-muscularity of soul.

The mission field is well-populated, and all of us need to go out beyond our comfort zone and be willing to have those awkward conversations that God could use to save someone's soul.

Matthew 9:35-38 says this, When Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.

Then he said to his disciples, 'The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.

Pray therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.' And that's a prayer I hope we can all say.

If you'd like to learn more about how to avoid the dangers of apologetics, I recommend Mark Brumley's book The Seven Deadly Sins of Apologetics.

Thank you all so much, and I hope you have a very blessed day.