Transcript

All right.

We're just gonna go with this.

It's gonna be slightly janky, but hey, this is like kind of behind the scenes-ish.

Uh, yeah, sorry for those of you tuning in.

This is like take three or take four, depending on how one, um, considers the accidental livestream.

And I think should firmly establish my technical incompetence, but also there's some kinda I don't know what the problem is, but I have a lot of problems with it, uh, like frame rate and all that stuff.

Who knows?

So I'll recap everything I said.

Um, Vanessa is going to kind of serve as a moderator, and I will try to take your, uh, questions if you wanna super chat them.

I also have some questions from Patreon, and I've got about an hour before I gotta, uh, take off.

So hopefully, uh, future ones will be a little smoother than this, because I'm gonna try to do this every like two weeks.

And I actually, believe it or not, did some technical stuff this morning, thought we were good to go, and then it just ended up not necessarily being the case.

That happens sometimes.

Um, okay, so Alyssa asked, uh, if the ch- Catholic Church officially teaches against penal substitution, or is it something people are free to believe?

I ask because I've met a lot of p- a ton of people who affirm it.

And the church does teach against penal substitution understood in a particular way.

So the When we're talking about any of these things, we wanna be careful with definitions.

Um, penal substitution in one sense would just mean Christ bears some kind of penalty for us, and that's true.

I mean, the fact that he dies, uh, everyone is going to acknowledge some sense in which Christ, by virtue of the incarnation, um, shares some of the penalties that are owed, not to him, but to us.

Uh, and so if, if that's all you mean by penal substitution, that's pretty unobjectionable, I think to any Christian theology of the cross.

Jesus died.

He was not owed death.

That's a consequence of original sin and so on.

That's not the form of penal substitution people mean by penal substitution or penal substitutionary atonement.

So we wanna watch out for, uh, what's sometimes called a Motte-and-Bailey, where the same term is used to describe both a relatively unobjectionable position that's easy to defend, and then an objectionable position that's, that's much harder to defend.

Uh, case in point, like people who say feminism is a radical idea that women aren't people, and then they say, Well, you're not a real feminist unless you support abortion.

There's, there's clearly a bait and switch going on by using the same position for an unobjectionable position, women are people, and an objectionable position that, um, you know, abortion should be legal.

So similarly with penal substitution.

When we talk about it, we don't just mean that Christ bears some kind of penalty.

We mean particularly that he suffers reprobation as if he himself were a sinner.

And that is explicitly denied in the catechism in paragraph 603, uh, which says, Jesus did not experience reprobation as if he himself had sinned.

Uh, Pope John Paul II, in a general audience in 2000, it's the general audience from Wednesday, May 3rd, 2000, uh, explains what it means when Jesus says, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

And he points out that on the cross, Jesus continues his intimate dialogue with the Father, living it with the full force of his lacerated and suffering humanity, never losing the trusting attitude of the Son who is one with the Father.

And there is, he describes it as the Father's mysterious silence and a cosmic darkness.

But despite this, um, Jesus continues to pray.

Psalm 22 is a prayer.

And so if you And, and by the way, all of this, uh, thematically is going to be in tomorrow's episode, which is gonna look at the historic Christian understanding of Psalm 22 and just what Psalm 22 actually says, compared to the way Reformed, uh, theologians have distorted Psalm 22 and Jesus' invocation of it to say the opposite.

So if you read Psalm 22, the psalmist cries out to God in gratitude that he has not turned away from him.

And that's the psalm that begins, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

So whatever it means to say, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

A starting point has to be, it's not the Father turning away.

And yet, if you listen to John Calvin or modern Calvinists like John MacArthur or R.C. Sproul, uh, John Piper, any of these guys, they're going to use Jesus invoking this psalm to claim that this proves the Father did turn away from him, which is the opposite of what it actually says.

And so that should be a, a great starting point to say, okay, we have to understand, uh, Psalm 22 i- in its context.

You know, like when Jesus cries out the opening line from Psalm 22, remember it's a prayer.

He's praying to the Father, and, and remember what Psalm 22 actually says.

Uh, and then, as I'm gonna explain tomorrow in the episode, I'll just I'll just kind of leave this one here.

Um, we also wanna understand it in light of what Jesus teaches about prayer.

That he's not contradicting, uh, the work that, that he's laid out in terms of how you pray.

So, yeah, uh, let me know if you've got more questions about that.

Uh, Michael asked if I wanted or if I had any more debates in the works.

Uh, and he suggested instead of debating people like James White, who seems like maybe he's not as popular as he used to be, to look at people like Mark Driscoll.

I was shocked actually to see Mark Driscoll's name on there, because I think of Mark Driscoll as a guy who was super relevant, say 15 years ago, and much less so today.

But if, if he is resurging in popularity, I'm, I'm happy to, uh, address him.

Uh, and then needgod.net, uh, these kind of people, I would I'd love to do a debate with somebody like that, uh, if we could find a good topic.

I have I don't have any debates currently lined up.

There have been a few of you who've reached out to me, uh, LDS, former Catholic, I think, like, non-religious now.

I'm, I'm trying to be smart about it, uh, because it is a, it's a big kinda time commitment to do well.

And I don't want to kinda do a sort of sloppy thing.

I'm, I'm much more willing at this point to say yes to kind of the more conversational style, where it's okay to just be, like, Oh, good question, I don't know.

But if I have to actually, like, have all my ducks in a row, that, that I mean, look, you saw how hard it was for me to do a livestream.

Imagine being ready for a debate.

All right.

GW asks about the St. Bartholomew's Day masu- cu- massacre, if I'm familiar with this bit of history, and if so, uh, if I know any good Catholic historian who tackles this particular event.

I don't know a good Catholic historian.

Uh, there are two books that I think do a fair job with it.

I've not read either of them, but I know kind of the gist of them.

Uh, Robert Kingdon has a book called Myths About the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre 1572 to 1576, and there he points out that, like, this event, um, gets really heavily politicized on both sides, where there's a lot of kind of narrative spinning about it.

So, a lot of what you're getting now isn't straight history.

It's history interpreted by one side or the other of a particular conflict.

Now, for those who aren't familiar, there was, uh, popular violence against Protestant Huguenots, and, uh, depending on how you view this, this was either a genocidal campaign of violence or a popular uprising to stop usurpers overthrowing the king.

I mean, those are the basically, like, the two ways the event gets kind of portrayed, depending on whether you listen to Catholics or Protestants at the time.

Because the Huguenots had a very tenuous relationship with the king, Germany had already been plunged into violence, Europe was plunged in an extremely deadly war, and so the Huguenots were, were viewed with a great deal of suspicion, um, for, you know, for much the same reason that, say, Germans and the US were viewed as suspicion during World War I, or the Japanese were viewed as suspicion during World War II. You know, it's like you're clearly allied in some sense uh, with this group that we are fighting against.

And so yeah, it is an ugly event.

I think we can say, um, an outburst of mass violence isn't something good, and at the same time, if we're being honest about it, we should recognize, one, the kind of political and historical context in which it arose, and two, that anyone acting like this is just on one side, that it's just, like, Catholics oppressing Protestants and, and ignoring all the Protestant suppression of Catholics or, or any of this, uh, is not really telling history.

They're, they're giving propaganda.

Uh, and that is true even for those who say, Oh, we just need to get rid of all these religious differences and, and just have, like, a secular state, because France goes in that direction.

They take a radically secular approach after the revolution, or even, you know, during the time of Napoleon.

And there are, you know What is that?

In the Vendée they have, like, a violent suppression, much bloodier, uh, than the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, violent suppression of, uh, those who insist on continuing to be Catholic in France.

So, every side engages in violent persecutions when they're in power, partly because they're afraid that if they don't, that they'll be overthrown.

And these fears are not completely unfounded, right?

I- take England.

I, I know English history better than French history on this.

You've got, on the English side, you actually have things like the Spanish Armada and the attempted invasion of England, so Protestant fears about a Catholic invasion were not unreasonable.

On the flip side, uh, when there was an actual Catholic king, he was overthrown by his own daughter in the so-called Glorious Revolution.

So, the idea that someone being a different religion than you wasn't just a a matter of one's private belief, but might actually lead to political insurrection, civil war, usurpation, and the rest, these were not unreasonable fears, particularly in that time and place.

So, there's not an You, you know, we just don't have that framework.

But if there was a group of people who said they were, like, uh, publicly affiliated with Al-Qaeda and they were, uh, attacked by a mob, I think a lot of people would be like, Well, maybe that's not so bad.

Because we don't think about that in, in terms of just political expression.

We think about that in terms of, you know, provocation of violence.

So if That's the closest analogy I can think of in terms of the way religious differences were being viewed, uh, during this, this time period.

So, it's not great.

I mean, I'm not, I'm not defending that.

I'm just helping to hopefully, um, make a little better sense of it.

All right.

Uh, Tino asked about Luke 1:28, whether it should say, Hail, full of grace, or, Hail, favored one.

It's showing that Mary has received grace, and fully.

So if, if you wanted to say fully graced, that might be a, a good way of describing that in terms of doing justice, uh, for the, the way the Greek verbiage works.

But highly favored, I don't l- like it in this sense, because it doesn't seem to have the connotation of divine grace.

Like, wh- I g- I guess I mean, look, there's, there's a way you can translate it that way and it's technically correct.

I'm not sure if an ordinary person reading that understands that the underlying Greek is referring to divine grace.

Maybe, maybe they do understand that, but as a result, I think full of grace, or if you wanted to do fully graced would is a better translation at communicating what's, what's being expressed there.

All right.

Alyssa asks, uh, about the point that Christ is the Pascal Lamb and the proper application of that sacrifice would include eating the lamb.

She said, I was reading Exodus 12 where God lays this all out and noticed but it also talks about how those doing Passover should be ready and should be dressed and ready to go out.

I assume this is a parallel to the Great Commission.

I think it's a really cool way of understanding it, that with the Passover there is a sending forth, and in the case of the original Passover, it's a sending forth away from Egypt, the place of slavery, to embark on the journey towards the Promised Land.

And if you read things like 1 Corinthians 10, i- this is one of the common go-to, uh, motifs, if you will, for understanding the spiritual life.

Now, I think we should understand it, uh, within that context as well to include things like the Great Commission.

Part of going forth on the journey to the Promised Land is going forth to proclaim the gospel to all nations.

All right.

Let's take some of the Super Chats now.

Alex says Oh yeah, first of all, thank you very much for the Super Chats.

I am very appreciative and appreciative for your y- your patience as, as I'm trying to navigate all this.

Um Oh, thanks also to the person who sent the cool statue behind me.

Uh, Alex said, Do you recommend any good courses in order to become a good catechist?

Preferably online, or any workbooks I can order for myself.

Still a new Catholic, willing to learn and teach the faith.

That's a really good question.

I don't have great catechetical online resources.

Uh, hopefully people in the comments can help.

I know Brandon Vogt, um, of Word on Fire does his own, like, courses or, like, online stuff, and 'Cause I've, I've helped out with some of that.

And, um, I, I think his stuff is really good.

So, um, Augustine Institute has great stuff as well.

I imagine they would be good for this, and then Holy Apostles I believe also has stuff.

I don't know much, uh, you know, I, I'm just I'm not familiar at a deep level with any of that.

Additionally, if you don't have the Formed app, um, or a subscription to Formed, you can honestly, like Every parish seems like they've got a Formed subscription.

You can probably get it for free through your parish.

And it's fantastic, it's, it's great if you're looking for, like, good, uh, stuff to watch during Lent, but also, uh, good formation materials.

That is a really invaluable free resource.

So hopefully something there.

Um, jcf150 says, Thanks so much for all you do, Joe.

I'm sponsoring my friend Jared as he joins the Church this Easter thanks to no small part to your work.

Well, God bless you.

And, uh, congratulations to your friend Jared.

Tell him welcome home.

And, uh, those of you watching, please say a prayer for Jared and for all those coming in at Easter, 'cause I know this is a very rich, spiritually fruitful time of year.

All right.

Phillip says, Joe, my wife and I are being confirmed this Easter after confirming from Promises, and your books and channel have been incredibly important for us.

Thank you.

Well, you're welcome.

I'm, I'm thrilled to hear all of that.

That, that is wonderful, really good news.

And I'm, I'm These aren't questions so I'm breezing through them, but I, I trust, uh, that people will be praying for you and your wife as well, Phillip.

All right.

The Thomistic Institute and Philosophy Podcast says, How would you explain to a friend that theology/apologetics is important and not worthless?

Two ways.

Let's, let's talk about theology, then let's talk about apologetics.

The way that I would talk about theology is like this.

Like, let's take for a starter, uh, that when we're talking about religion we are talking about a relationship and not just a set of rules.

But rules are an important part of any relationship.

So, uh, as a result we, uh, care about the rules.

Like, morality and all that stuff matters.

But additionally, in a relationship you want to get to know the other person.

Like, I've, you know, had people where I've, I've met them enough times and I can't remember their name, and there's a certain amount of shame with that, and, and appropriately because it's like, oh no, no, you should, you should know the name of somebody that you've, you've met multiple times.

And you should know something about them.

I saw this illustrated really well in a homily once.

And now, trigger warning, there's gonna be some liturgical abnormalities in this.

I don't normally like when homilies incorporate somebody else, but this worked really effectively.

So the pastor, uh, was talking about the relationship of catechesis and evangelization, and, uh, kind of the awakening of the relationship to God.

And he did this by interviewing the altar boy.

I think it was an altar boy, it may not have It might have been an altar girl.

And that's gonna be relevant in a second here.

'Cause he just says, like, What's your favorite color?

What's your favorite sport?

You know, basic questions you might ask a qui- a kid.

And then he says to the people in the congregation, Okay, most of you don't know this person, and you're gonna forget all this stuff very quickly.

And case in point, I, I cannot tell you any of the answers.

But he said someday he's gonna meet some nice young girl, and she's gonna care a great deal about the answers to those questions.

And that's gonna matter to her.

And his point was, you have to start with the relational aspect.

You can't start with just saying, Here's the, here's the, you know, um, theology, in a, sort of a deep way, because if people don't have that relationship, that's not gonna There's no framework to make sense of it, and they're not going to respond to it.

But once you have that relationship, those questions matter.

Like, if I said, like, I love my wife but I can't tell you anything she cares about or is interested in, what books she likes, what movies, uh, which jokes of mine drive her nuts.

You know, and I You know, and that's, that would be a real sign that for all of my protestations about how much I care about her, something is lacking in my attentiveness to her.

So that's why theology matters, because we can't honestly say that we love God and also act indifferent to the truth about God.And if you want a good description of that, chapter one of Frank Sheed's Theology and Sanity, I think it's chapter one, uh, talks about that.

That's, that's why is theology important.

Why then is apologetics important?

Because in many, uh, couple reasons.

The act of faith is an act of the will, but it is in relation to the intellect.

Like, you have to choose to believe, and God always gives you enough room to not choose to believe.

And this is the, uh, freeing but also frustrating part of the faith.

There's always enough ambiguity that if you want to doubt, you can.

Uh, and so there is an act where you, you have to trust.

But there are things that can impede that.

And so the work of apologetics cannot provide the virtue of faith for you, but what it can do is it can get rid of some of the obstacles, some of the things that might cause you to doubt, some of the things that might be assembling block.

Again, if you wanna use a relational context, uh, there m- maybe you meet the girl of your dreams, but she lives in a different city, and finding out, oh, actually, she's moving to your town, or she's open to moving to your town, or you've got a great job offer in her town, or whatever, w- well, that doesn't immediately mean that you're gonna marry her, but it gets rid of one of the obstacles that might prevent you from taking that seriously.

Well, likewise with apologetics, a lot of what we're doing is just getting rid of the obstacles, getting rid of the things that cause people to not take the question of Christ as seriously as they should.

Uh, so as a result of that, we want to, uh, give Yeah, l- again, we can't, we can't give the virtue of faith to you, but we can get rid of the stuff that might get in the way of that, or we can try to.

I My M- uh, like, the second in command at Catholic Answers just texted me to say there's a weird, uh, video of me on YouTube trying to figure out my camera situation.

There's actually, like, two or three right now, I'm gonna have to delete those in an hour.

Until then, good for my humility.

So yeah, hopefully that helps, uh, if we want to understand God better.

And then the last reason I say on apologetics is go back to 1 Peter 3. If your call is to be able to give a reason for the hope that lies within you, there's two things you should take from that.

Number one, this is still personal to you.

Most of you, including most of you watching this, are not called to be apologists in the way that those of us at Catholic Answers are called to be apologists, and that's okay.

But you are called to be an apologist in your own life, to be able to explain, in the face of all the, and of all the reasons you could not believe, why do you continue to believe?

That matters a great deal, and so you've gotta be able to do that.

And so apologetics matters for that reason as well, uh, because you It's not enough to just say, like, I rationally choose to believe despite having better reasons not to.

That's not good enough.

If we really believe that God is the truth, truth is not irrational.

He is the logos, like, Christ is the logos, the, the root of all rationality is right there, so faith as a result can never be irrational.

It can go beyond human reason, but it can't contradict it.

All right.

JCF150 says, Quick question.

I've been asked to give a presentation to some open-minded Protestant friends on why we have a 73-book canon.

Any advice on avoiding rabbit holes and honing in on key issues for this to really get through to them?

Yes.

I would say this.

Number one is start with the fact that it is a messy situation, that you're going to find early Christians who have a different Bible than modern Protestants or modern Catholics, and o- one of the reasons for this is you're going to find ancient Jews at this same time period who have a different Bible than modern Catholics, modern Protestants, or modern Jews, that the Bible in the time of Jesus isn't bound up in one book.

The so-called Codex, a forerunner of the book, is largely a Christian invention.

We were w- I mean, we didn't literally invent the Codex.

We're the, the first adopters of it, and, uh, I think it's Lev Grossman had a Wall Street Journal article on that back in the 2010s, early 2010s.

If you press me, I could probably find it, uh, but it's, I think it's called From Scroll to Screen or From Yeah, and it's just looking at the history of communications technology.

And, but while you have scrolls, you don't need to put them all in one book, and so there's less of a pressure to figure out exactly what the boundaries of the book are because you have, like, the Scroll of Isaiah, but then you might have, like, 1 Enoch, and they're all just in your library.

And so which ones are the ones you considered inspired or not, that may be something only you know.

You don't have a different shelf for them necessarily, and maybe something you haven't even thought deeply about.

And so one of the ways we see this l- is looking at the Dead Sea Scrolls.

It is not at all clear, uh, from the mere presence of a book if that means it was regarded as inspired or not, because it, these are loose scrolls.

When the codex is formed, when you have actual Bibles being formed, uh, the pressure to figure out which books are in and out, uh, is much higher, and Christians are actually pushing this, uh, pretty heavily.

The other pressure is before that.

So the codex pressure, I'm gonna say like fourth century, like in the 300s, but you go back even 200 years before that, the other time you see something of a pressure is when it's Christian-Jewish apologetics.

So in the second century you will find, uh, Christians mentioning which books did the Jews a- accept and which ones they reject.

And so explain that kind of background because there's a good chance that they've heard some of these second-century sources, saying, Aha, look at this shorter Old Testament.

And explaining to them that's not them saying this is the Christian Bible, that's them saying this is the Jewish Bible.And so as you're going through history, there emerges a Christian Bible, a distinctively Christian Bible of 73 books, particularly in the West.

Now, if you trust that the Holy Spirit is guiding this process, then we're in a good place.

If you don't trust the Holy Spirit is guiding this process, that everybody can get the Bible wrong, it doesn't seem there's any good principled reason to believe in the 66-book Bible.

Uh, unless you believe that the post-Christian Jews were protected by the Holy Spirit in a way that Christians weren't.

And then if that's what you believe, like, well, then go be Jewish and not Christian.

Right?

If, if that's your belief system, that Christians aren't led by the Holy Spirit, those who rejected Christ were led by the Holy Spirit, then the logical conclusion isn't Protestantism.

The logical conclusion is Judaism.

I'm not recommending that.

I'm suggesting that just in terms of internal coherence, the, the case for the Protestant 66-book canon is remarkably weak.

And I, I like to ask people, like show me an exact 66-book Protestant Old Te- or Protestant Bible, excuse me, used by anyone in the early church as an actual physical book that a church was using anywhere in history before the Reformation.

And it's not there.

You have Rufinus and Jerome arguing for it, but Jerome still translates, uh, the Vulgate, and he still will quote to the other books as scripture, although he has a, a tiered list of scripture.

We don't have to get into all of the reason why.

And if they raise Jerome and Rufinus, you can just say, Okay, so if the church thinks the Bible is one thing, and you get Jerome who thinks it's a different thing, who should we follow and why?

Because if you say we should trust Jerome even if he disagrees with the church, w- I have no idea what principle would lead you to that conclusion, and I don't think you can hold that conclusion and still, say, reject Jerome on the perpetual virginity of Mary or something.

Um, z- uh, hopefully that's clear.

Like it seems like a, a lot of the way Protestants are using the early church on this and many other questions is they're figuring out the conclusion they already believe, and they're looking for someone, anyone to back up that conclusion rather than honestly listening to the church fathers and, and having their beliefs formed from that.

Like, they're just looking for kind of citations of support.

So okay, hopefully that's clear.

Um, oh, Brendan asked if Sheed's book Theology of Insanity is, is orthodox.

Uh, far as I know it is.

Sheed was, uh, phenomenal.

His work comes from being like a, a s- basically a street preacher in England, and, uh, a very well-respected one.

So I've only heard good things about Sheed.

I've not made it all the way through that book.

Um, his book To Know Christ Jesus is fantastic, another great book for, um, just knowing Jesus better, but if you want good spiritual reading.

Uh, Richard says, Thoughts on my decision to wait until my wife is ready to convert?

Bad idea or good?

I have a deep longing for the church.

Richard, I would say if God is calling you, go now.

Like think about all of the people who say, Well, can I wait to bury my father?

No, don't, don't wait.

If he's calling you, obey immediately.

And this is one of those places where, uh, our obedience to Christ has to be greater even than our duties towards our family.

Like, if Jesus is calling you to go in a way that you know is gonna be a sword of division within your family, well, he promised that, right?

Father-in-law divided against daughter-in-law, all that stuff.

It's, it's all there.

And so it might be that he serves as a sword of division for a moment with you and your wife.

Um, so I would, I would act immediately.

As soon, as soon as you know Christ is calling you, delayed obedience is disobedience.

Uh, but second, I think there's a way of approaching your wife, and hopefully if your wife is a devout Christian of any stripe, she'll understand what I just said there.

And then you just ease off of her where you're not putting pressure on her.

And maybe this actually gives her more space to discern without feeling like she's holding you up or being an obstacle to you.

So hopefully it, it's something that's beneficial actually for you both.

Um, Alvin says, Some Catholics can believe Mary had or didn't have concupiscence, but paragraph 405 says concupiscence results from original sin, and Trent says it remains only in those who had it, uh, section V, canon 5. So can Mary be free from original sin yet still have an inclination to sin?

I have not looked closely at this exact question 'cause this is pretty specific.

My understanding is that Mary being freed from all stain of original sin is also freed from concupiscence.

Now this raises other questions, uh, namely how does she still die?

So okay, let's do a little bit of a dive on this.

Uh, when you read, uh, the documents the church has said, most famously Pius XII looking at the Assumption of Mary, it is technically not a church doctrine whether or not, uh, Mary died.

But it is overwhelmingly the majority view.

And, uh, as a result, like the, the normal view is Mary did die.

But it's like well, okay, if, if death is related to original sin, how do we account for that?

I, I think the place I would look is in Luke chapter 2. In Luke 2, uh, you have the purification offering.

And Protestants will sometimes point to this to prove, in very heavy quotation marks, that Mary must have been a sinner because she offers a sin offering.

And this is a mistake in s- or she actually offers a purification offering.

But being richly impure is not the same as committing an actual sin.And if you go back and, uh, read what it says, i- it says that one who has received sa- has received seed, excuse me, is to give this purification offering.

Now, Mary knows she has not received seed.

She, um, if you believe in the virgin birth, whether you believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary or not, you have to acknowledge Mary was actually exempt from offering the purification offering under the terms of the Mosaic law, and yet she still submits to the decrees of the law despite being, uh, free in this regard.

Jesus talks about this f- in his own capacity.

So for instance, in Matthew 17 with the temple tax, Jesus says, um, What do you think, Simon?

From whom do kings of the earth take total tribute?

From their sons or from others?

Peter says, From others.

Jesus said, Then the sons are free.

However, not to give offense to them Scandal.

And then he, he submits to pay this tax that he's actually exempt from.

So I mention that to say, it is possible to undergo aspects of something that you are freed from, and I think that's the right way of understanding why Mary dies, in fact why Jesus dies as well, without resorting to something like penal substitution.

Um, and so for that reason, I unless I were to see something extremely clear to the contrary, my understanding is Mary did not have concupiscence because that is one of the natural consequences of the fall, uh, towards which, uh, we don't see any evidence that Mary, uh, struggled.

We don't, we don't find her struggling with that.

Even the things that you might misidentify as sin, you know, like she's worried about her son when he goes missing, that is a healthy normal reaction.

And just like we don't condemn Christ in the garden for having i- a natural bodily, uh, revulsion towards death, we don't have, uh, any kind of moral judgment upon Mary as a mother looking for her child feeling a natural bodily anxiety, right?

Like, that's mislabeled as sin in both cases.

All right.

Gabriel says in Matthew 2:23 Joe, would you say Matthew 2:23 is an oral prophecy lost to history or a conglomeration of multiple prophecies as Michael Brown tries to argue?

So Matthew 2:23 says, uh, He should be called the Nazarene.

If memory serves, the word there is probably a play on the word for branch, uh, that Christ is the branch, and so I think that's what's actually going on there, that it's, it's not a literal, like, quotation.

It could be an oral prophecy.

I think it's instead a play I want to say it's in Isaiah, that it's like Nazar, N-A-Z-A-R. Uh, I'm only going off recollection here, so the details of that could be entirely wrong.

Actually, I can let me look right now.

Um Yeah, Isaiah 11:1.

N-Z-A-R, there it is.

So, uh, ih- Nazareth is kind of a play on branch.

So I think that's what Matthew's doing, but it is a little bit ambiguous.

Tiago says, Joe, when will you take the red pill on predestination?

Are you familiar with the Dei auxilios controversy?

I am familiar with the Dei auxilios controversy.

I'm a huge Francis de Sales fan, and he, I think wisely, as a doctor of the church, didn't jump in on either side of that controversy because he saw deficiencies on both sides and was pretty influential in getting the Pope to just say, like, Hey, we're in the middle of a big fight in the Reformation.

This is maybe not the time for the Jesuits and Dominicans to try to tear each other apart.

Uh, friendly fire, guys.

If you want a good book on this, I would recommend Father William Most's book, Grace, Predestination and the Salvific Will of God.

Uh, I know, I know even within Catholic answers, you're gonna get different people who fall different places on those questions.

I would just say this.

Wherever you fall on this, we want to affirm the universal nature of the salvific will of God, that God desires all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth, and that Christ dies for everyone.

If you end up with something like limited atonement, I think you've gone in a bad direction.

That still leaves a lot of questions for how, uh, free will works, what we even mean by free will, how all that interacts with divine grace.

Those are very tricky, complicated questions, and I'm, I'm happy to, uh, try to answer some of those and leave some of them to say, yeah, there's some of this we don't know.

Like, there is something mysterious about the way the will works, but all of us have experienced willing.

Uh, Darkwing says, Does the church have any official teaching on dispensational post-millennialism and supporting the Temple Institute?

Is the Temple Institute one of the groups trying to build Are they trying to build the Third Temple?

Yeah, that's So yes, the catechism, um strongly condemns millennialism.

What paragraph is that?

Tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch.

Like, we reject the idea that Christ is going to literally build a physical temple on the Temple Mount.

676, and, uh, this very physical, worldly, shallow kind of reading.

So when we talk about the temple, the temple is the body of Jesus.

That means first and foremost, his historic body, which suffers, dies, buried, and rises again.

Destroy this temple, and in three days I'll rebuild it.

That is what it's referring to.

It's not referring to building a new building.

And when streams of living water flow from the site of the temple, as Ezekiel foretells, this is referring to the piercing of the side of Christ.

By extension, that's also going to be referring, uh, to Christians, that you you know, the, the church writ large is also the body of Christ.

Therefore, the church writ large can also be rightly called the temple of God.

But then you also have, in John 8 Jesus talks about, uh Oh wait, is it John 8? John 9? Hang on.

John 7, I was going in the wrong direction there.

Was never gonna find that.

I was m- walking east when I should've walked west.

Uh, in John 7, Jesus says, If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.

He who believes in me, as the scripture has- says, out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.

Now if you go and look, you're not gonna find a scripture that says, Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.

This is in a, a reference to the Ezekiel prophecy from the side of the temple.

And then he says, Now this he said about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive.

So your body, like Christ's, is supposed to, uh, be configured to him in such a way that streams of water flow out from it.

In this case, meaning the Holy Spirit.

So you The temple is not a building.

The temple is the body of Christ.

And, and the reason for that is if you understand what a temple is, a temple is a place of divine presence and a place of divine sacrifice.

We see that par excellence on the cross.

We see that in the Church and the Eucharist.

We see that in your own body, in the spiritual worship in your body.

Romans 12:1, To offer within yourself, uh, bodily sacrifice, this is your spiritual worship.

So that's what it means, and that's why, like, people who take a very surface-y read, like dispensationalists tend to do, uh, they're just missing the Biblical meaning.

And so they're coming up with a conclusion that's radically different than, not just the first 1,500 years of Christianity, really the first 1,900 years of Christianity.

Uh, Richard says, You, Trent, Jimmy, and Christian Wagner are my heroes, BTWs.

Thanks.

Also best explanation of Ecce ecclesia et nolle salus.

Yeah, you can't have God as Father if you don't have the Church as Mother.

This is something that the Church clearly believes in.

You've got that s- from Cyprian, I believe, Cyprian of Carthage in, like, the second, third century?

Uh, third century.

So it's very early on, you've got Christians talking about this.

And that makes sense.

If the Church is the fullness of Christ, as Ephesians 1 says, then to try to have the head without the body is a decapitated Christianity.

And that doesn't work, right?

So you can't have the shepherd without the flock.

You can't have the head without the body.

Can't have the king without the kingdom.

Now, there's two ways of thinking about then, uh, what that means.

On the one hand, if you are in right relationship with Jesus, this means that whether you know it or not, you are in relation with his body.

In 1 Corinthians 12, St. Paul talks about those parts of the body that might claim not to be part of the body, but still are.

So there are some people who are walking around who say that they're not Catholic, and in the eyes of God, they are.

Uh, there's a This is actually prefigured, I would argue, in the Old Testament, in Psalm 87.

Um, Psalm 87's a short psalm, the first half of it just praises the holy city Zion, and then it says, Among those who know me, I mention Rahab, that's Egypt, and Babylon.

Behold Philistia and Tyre, with Ethiopia.

This one was born there, they say, and of Zion it shall be said, 'This one and that one were born in her.' For the Most High himself will establish her.

In other words, there are gonna be some people, even from the enemies of Israel, that in the eyes of God are part of the house of David.

They're part of Zion, they're part of Israel.

And that is prefiguring, of course, that there are gonna be some Gentiles who, someone imagining Israel in a very limited, a very kind of dispensationalist way of just people being ethnically Jewish or something, is gonna miss that.

Um, but we would say there may be people who say, I'm not Catholic, who God says, Yes, you are.

Just as in Psalm 87, there might be some people saying, I'm not Israelite, and God says, Yes, you are.

We don't know who those people are.

They're saved by some kind of ignorance, and because they're in right relationship with God in some way.

Obviously in an incomplete kind of way, but if we believe that, you know, the sacraments do what they do, including the sacrament of baptism, if we believe that, that God is not bound by the sacraments in the way we are, then we have to hold out that there are those, maybe many, who will be saved despite having an imperfect relationship with the Church.

This becomes, uh, clearer in cases where somebody maybe didn't even know about the Church.

So St. Gregory of Narek, there's a, a question about what his relationship was like, uh, with the papacy, you know?

D- 'Cause during his life, Armenia's pretty cut off, and there were schisms.

But he didn't go into schism.

He grew up in the only Church that he knew, with sacraments, and honored God.

Like it To say that, Oh, he can't be saved 'cause he didn't, like, personally go and explore the West and find out about the Pope, that's, I think, a misunderstanding, and, and actually makes Christianity much more of a theology quiz than a, a spiritual relationship with God w- supported by the sacraments, right?

The That's kind of the pro side.

The con side is, someone who intentionally rejects the Church knowingly is rejecting salvation, and this didn't change.

Vatican II reaffirms this.

Those who know they're called to be part of the Church who refuse to enter are refusing to follow Christ.

Like, that just follows logically.

All right, this is actually, I think, a nice tie-in to the next question.

Yana says, What would you say to people arguing that Jews are not the chosen people, that Jews and Israel are separate and most of the disciples are not Jewish?

I don't know what it would mean to say most of the disciples are not Jewish.

If it means the original 12, that's, that's certainly not true.

What it means to be the chosen people originally is talking about bearing the old covenant.

God sets aside a people to be bearers of divine revelation.

This is fulfilled in Christ, w-And so there are covenental promises made with Israel, but it's not meant to be a second track of salvation.

It isn't like, Well, either follow Jesus or just follow the old covenant.

That's not it.

Um, the new covenant comes along to fulfill the old covenant.

So a Jewish believer at the time of Christ, like say, Saint Peter, wasn't called to just observe the Mosaic Law, he's called to follow Jesus.

And this also means no longer being bound by certain aspects of the Mosaic Law, what are called the ceremonial precepts.

That's a much bigger question I'm not gonna delve into just for, for time reasons.

Um, but this does mean that Israel has a unique relationship that nobody else has, you know.

I- I'm coming from like an Irish and German and all that kind of background.

Those ancestors in the distant past believed in false gods.

They didn't have divine revelation, but Israel was chosen for this purpose.

They had the oracles of God.

And so this means that, like, Jewish tradition and history has a unique kind of status that isn't true of say, like, ancient Irish tradition.

And so even in terms of, like, what do you keep when you become Christian, there are all sorts of questions where there's gonna be a sort of special status, uh, for those coming from a Jewish background.

So yeah, much more could be said on that, but there's clearly a choosing of Israel in terms of Abraham's immediate progeny, but also, and I think more importantly, his spiritual progeny.

Uh, Jesus makes this point in John 8. Paul makes this point in Romans 4. All right.

Lil Guy 2020 .

All right, Lil Guy.

Says, Being Confirmed this Easter.

Congratulations and welcome Home.

Two questions.

Any tips for preparing and being closer to God in Lent?

Yes.

Uh, number one, do the 40-hour fast.

This is something that has been largely lost in the church, but if you read the USCCB's webpage on fasting and abstinence, they really encourage you not just to fast on Good Friday, but also on Holy Saturday, which makes for It's a long, it's a long one.

But fast until the Easter vigil and then go do the Easter vigil.

Uh, this You can find this back in the first century in the Didache, that you were to fast before baptism.

Now, in your case, you're not getting baptized, it sounds like, but confirmed.

But still, spiritually preparing for that sacrament by fasting and just have, you know, like a small amount.

You don't wanna pass out during the Easter vigil.

It's a long one.

So, but just have, like, the kind of minimum that you need to, to get you through.

Second, taking So the last two weeks are sometimes called Passiontide, and we're now in, we're now in Holy Week.

And so Lent has this kind of increase in intensity as you go forward, which is great, 'cause it means if you were kind of slacking off during the first part of Lent, it's not too late to, to lean in.

And so this week, be more severe.

So you know, cut out secular music, say.

Even if it's, like, totally harmless, totally fine.

Just get rid of anything that might be, you know Like, do some penance you weren't even doing before.

And then what we do for the last three days is we don't even use lights in the house.

We just do little, like, candles.

Now we have little battery-powered candles too, 'cause we have a one-year-old who likes to throw things, and live flames aren't great for that.

So technically we're still using a form of electricity with the batteries.

But we, we try to enter into darkness for, for the Triduum, uh, to really embrace that.

And then after the Easter vigil, we turn on all the lights and, and experience the light of Christ.

So there's, there's ways of really, like, leaning in and entering in in a serious way.

And then I would say also, uh, get some good spiritual reading, uh, to take this seriously.

If you haven't discovered Office of Readings in the Liturgy of the Hours, that can be a really good, uh, place to start in terms of experiencing the wisdom of the saints.

So what I like to do is I don't even m- usually do, like, the whole Office of Readings.

I, I will do morning prayer or evening prayer, and then do just a second reading from Office of Readings, which has oftentimes a writing of the saint of the day.

And that can be a great way of entering in a little more every day.

Uh, and then Holy Saturday in particular has a fantastic second reading in Office of Readings.

If you have a phone that has, like, a smartphone, um, iBreviary, I-B-R-E-V-I-A-R-Y, is a great place to, to find all this.

All right.

And then your second question was about annihilationism.

Uh, are we talking about souls that die?

Annihilationism isn't, uh, the Catholic view.

Now it is Without affirming annihilationism in that full sense, you can recognize, as I think C.S. Lewis points out, that if you were to see the souls in hell, the things that make them lovable are no longer present, you know?

And so in that sense, while they haven't been completely blipped out of existence, they might be unrecognizable, because it's only the kind of rotten parts that have rejected divine grace.

Um, again, much more could be said about that, but let me just leave it on that kind of teaser.

Uh, Monkey Boy King asks, Can a Catholic apologist cause scandal by misrepresenting someone without naming them, labeling them a false Catholic with controversial views, and denying them any chance to clear things up with them?

Well, yes.

It sounds like you've got a particular beef.

I don't know what that beef's about.

But yes, if Obviously the answer to that is yes.

Um, Ryan asks, When can we It says, Site, S-I-T-E, after communion?

After the bell?

Gosh, Ryan, I'm not 100% sure what that question is asking.

Is the question Oh, w- when can we sit after communion?

Oh gosh, I'm a fool .

Thank you.

Uh, it actually depends a little bit liturgically on what country you're in, and I would follow the congregation.

Uh, I like to kneel until the priest stands, but if it's a situation where doing so draws unnecessary attention to you and it's better to sit and continue to pray, that could be appropriate as well.

Um, but typically, you kneel and tell, uh, the priest as your ǀ Oremus, the Let us pray, and then the closing prayer, but some places do it differently.

And, and this is one of those things that is left up to more local discretion.

Gage said, You mentioned there were two books and only mentioned one.

I don't know what the context was there.

Was it Theology and Sanity and To Know Christ Jesus, or Grace, Predestination, and the Salvific Will of God?

I've mentioned several books.

I don't know which Sorry, Gage, wasted your money there.

Um, all right, Richard says, We've been attending mass together since we got married four months ago.

We pray the rosary together every night.

I feel like she's very close and I worry that breaking my promise will push her away.

I don't know what your promise was.

Uh, if you made a promise to her specifically that you wouldn't do that, then that's something you have to also discern.

Like, obviously you have a higher allegiance to God.

Like, if you promise somebody you're not gonna serve God, that's a You can't make that kind of promise.

But you can at least kind of discern that with her and ask to be released from it, rather than just kind of ignoring it.

Uh, Billy says, Hi, Joe, how do you respond to the objection that the ordained can't reliably trace their ordination back to the apostles?

Yeah, that's I think that objection is not a good one, because we can trace it back pretty far.

And people in the early church had records we don't have, and we're convinced they could trace it back further.

So like, for instance, uh, in 180, Irenaeus can trace every bishop of Rome, in 200, Tertullian talks about how every church founded by the apostles can do that, Irenaeus says the same thing.

So we know that there used to be a wealth of written records that we no longer have because the writing is now gone.

They didn't have many computer.

And so we've lost some of those things, but we have every reason to believe that those were real.

Oh, second book for the Saint Bartholomew massacre.

Yes.

Um, yes, where did I have that?

Sorry.

This is the other thing.

I jump all over the place with this.

Uh.

Doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.

The first one was c- called Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559 to 1685.

The second one is by, uh, R.M. Kingdon, or Robert M. Kingdon, called Myths About the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacres, 1572 to 1576.

You can tell a book's gonna be exciting when it has the date range.

Also, apologies in advance to those of you who might still be asking questions.

I do have to jump off in just a couple minutes here because I am, uh, speaking to 7th and 8th graders in about half an hour.

All right.

Um, so yeah, Billy, finishing up your question, we know that the early Christians kept track of these records.

So even if we can't trace all the way back to like, the 1st century, we know that there's nothing that, that would have been, uh, enough to sever that cord.

Second, the church takes concrete roots.

So for instance, with the ordination of bishops, you have three ordaining bishops, not just one.

So even if you had like a worst case scenario like, oh, that was a fake bishop who was just going around pretending to ordain people, well, there's two others.

You're fine.

You've got fail-safes.

Um, and then ultimately, you know, we trust the Holy Spirit is not kinda tricking us.

This is one of those places where if you're in a situation where you've done everything right by the books and through some mysterious way that you don't know about things aren't as they appear, you know, like it's a fake priest giving you communion or absolution, you have to just trust that God is good and no one is going to Hell because they got tricked.

All right.

Elvin says, Eastern Catholics say transubstantiation happens at the Epiclesis, invocation of the Holy Spirit.

Latin Catholics say at the words of institution.

So does it actually happen at different moments in each rite or do they just believe differently while it occurs at the same time in both?

The order is also different between the divine liturgy and the mass.

Uh, we would just say that the Holy Spirit is called down and when the priest says, This is my body.

This is my blood, it is in fact Jesus' body and blood.

The exact moment that occurs is something that God has not revealed and the church has not defined.

Um, so in the past when this was I wanna say it was disputed in the University of Paris, they said don't offer worship.

So also remember when the priest is facing ad orientum, this becomes less of an issue because you're not even looking at the host between when the priest calls down the Holy Spirit and when he does the elevation.

When he does the elevation, worship.

Before the calling down of the Holy Spirit, this is bread and wine.

There is a moment in there and it might be, you know, a minute or two as, as he's praying that part of the canon of mass, uh, where the church has not defined like the exact moment in which it happened.

In the same way that like when you were conceived, we would say your life begins at conception.

There are a couple moments where we don't know Actually a few days if you don't have like a sonogram or something, uh, where we don't know whether conception has occurred or not.

That doesn't contradict kind of what we believe.

Um, Logan says, I've been told you were kicked out of Italy back in your golden days.

I was not.

I was actually the fastest approved in my class for, uh, going on for the next year.

But as I was getting closer to ordination Oh, oh, no.

I was kicked out of Italy.

Not out of seminary.

I was kicked out of Italy.

I forgot about that.

Uh, I had, I'd forgotten to renew my, my paperwork so I had to go back and renew it in the US. It was embarrassing.

Uh, I just had to fly back to Chicago and then it didn't even Like, it was a 24-hour kinda turnaround, but they made me leave and come back 'cause they were, they were mad about it.

Uh, Chloe, you've got a great question about the two swords.

There's a whole branch of two swords theology, of people interpreting that in terms of secular and ecclesiastical power, but I'm gonna have to just stop right there.

So, uh, apologies to Pete's Face, Ryan, Monkey Boy King, and Chloe that I didn't have more time to kinda get through your questions.

And yeah, same time, same place, two weeks?

Sound good?

All right.

God bless you.

Hopefully next time I'll figure out how to use the camera properly; otherwise, you can just enjoy my salt and pepper hair.

All right.

Peace be with you.