Transcript

Welcome back to Shameless Potpourri.

I'm Joe Heschmeyer, and I wanna do something a little different today.

I want to take a couple dozen different Protestant arguments against Catholicism, and I wanna rank them in a purely subjective way, or almost purely subjective way, in terms of how good and interesting I think the arguments are, eh, compared to how much they can just be dispelled by having the other person, like, read a book.

Uh, and so, you know, I, I don't know if you're like me.

I really like tier lists.

I like watching people's videos.

I have no idea why.

It's not like this desire for order goes anywhere else.

But it does help me, I don't know, evaluate how convincing other people find arguments that maybe I'm familiar with.

Uh, for instance, Austin, uh, from Gospel Simplicity, recently did a tier list on, uh, Catholic arguments and how convincing he found them and unconvincing.

And his and my list would've looked pretty different.

So, take it for that, right?

Like, these are the arguments I find obviously not personally convincing, because they haven't convinced me to not be Catholic, but at least ones that maybe make me stop and think more, or ones where I think, like, Oh, well, I see why a person, you know, struggling with that would think, 'I can't be Catholic.' And then the ones that I'm sometimes a little baffled by, the ones where I, I struggle a little more to think, Yeah, that's, I can see why someone would think that.

So, please take it in that spirit.

And obviously, I, I don't mean any disrespect if you find some argument more or less convincing.

You might have a, a different list.

And obviously, the most important arguments are the ones that, that you're grappling with.

And I'm happy to grapple with whatever arguments people have.

So, I've done the tier list in this order.

At the top are arguments that I find actually interesting, so I'll, I'll give an example of this.

Papal authority in the first 1,000 years.

This you'll often find, even though I'm putting it in the, you know, uh, sample Protestant arguments list, this makes more sense as kind of an Orthodox argument th- where it's like, okay, we'll grant you that there is something like a papal office in the early church.

We'll grant that Peter has a special authority given to him by Christ.

And we'll grant that this even seems to continue through the bishops of Rome, but what are the limits of it?

Is this just a first among equals?

Is this something more?

If it's something more, what are the, kind of the contours of it?

How does that relate to the authority of the local bishop?

How does it relate to the authority of the ecumenical council?

Those questions are really good.

I think there are answers to those questions.

I think those questions ultimately point to the Catholic Church, but somebody asking those, and not just assuming, Oh, it must have been first among equals, or, It must have been a primacy of honor.

No, but to see that the answer to that is no, that it is something more than that, you actually have to do a little more digging.

And so I, I respect people who can say, All right, I see all of this, and this is my hangup, and it's kind of in the weeds, but it's an important one.

And it, it also points to something really true, which is, there is an evolution in the papacy.

There are things that look different today, uh, than they looked in the past.

And if you watched my recent video, uh, where I talk about this from the mustard seed to the mustard tree, all of that is present there in Jesus' s- parables about the church, the Kingdom of God parables, or Kingdom of Heaven parables in Matthew 13.

That's fine, but you can at least still see why someone would say, How do I know this mustard seed is the same one from this mustard seed?

And so it, you know, it's actually interesting.

The ones below that, I originally tagged this understandable, but I couldn't figure out how to make all that text fit on one line.

So, I changed it to I get it.

And, uh, for the I get it ones, I'm gonna, I'll give sola Scriptura as an example.

I don't find the sola Scriptura debate nearly as convincing or interesting as the one about, like, papal authority in the first 1,000 years.

H- here's why.

I'm still gonna find it more convincing than a world of Protestant arguments, but I think sola Scriptura properly understood, the way the term is used today, is what's in technical terms called a Motte and Bailey argument.

A Motte and Bailey is just a technical term, therefore a bait and switch.

It's where you have two different positions, a strong one and a weak one, and so you'll make the really big position, and it's not very easy to defend.

So then when somebody attacks it, you say, No, no, no, I just meant this much narrower strong position.

And the easy example for this is feminism.

If, if someone says, You're not a true feminist 'cause you think abortion is bad, then okay, your definition of feminism seems to include the legalized murder of children.

But if I challenge that, then the pushback will be something like, you know, the bumper sticker, right?

Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.

Well, obviously, you're using the term feminism to mean something safe and non-controversial, women are people, and something incredibly controversial, abortion should be legal.

And by using the same term for both positions, you can sort of switch around as it suits you.

And sometimes people will fall for this.

I think it's, when you do it on purpose, it's a dishonest argument.

But sometimes people do it without really consciously knowing what it is that they're doing.

So, with sola Scriptura, the bait and switch or the Motte and Bailey works like this.

One form just says, well, all you have to believe in to believe in sola Scriptura is that Scripture is divinely inspired or God-breathed, and nothing else has that same attribute of being God-breathed in the same way.

But a Catholic could actually agree with that, that Scripture is God-breathed in a sort of unique way, it is divine inspiration consigned to writing.

Now, we also know that God inspired people not just in what they were writing, but in what they said.

You know, for instance, when Peter gets up on Acts 2 in Pentecost, the Holy Spirit is working through him.

God is breathing that as well, if you wanna put it that way.

Otherwise, you'd have to say, well, the Pentecost sermon either wasn't inspired or became divinely inspired when it got written down, not when it was originally spoken.

And those would be really weird conclusions.

But nevertheless, there's something special about the way Scripture is written.

It has a unique status in that regard.And so if that's really all sola scriptura meant, it wouldn't be particularly controversial.

But notice something here.

Nothing in any of that explanation says all doctrines have to come from scripture or from necessary deduction.

So you could have a doctrine that is true and binding and not found at all in scripture.

Because you could say, Yeah, scripture is divinely inspired in this unique, interesting way, and also we're all bound to believe in other things, even those not found in this unique and trusting thing called scripture.

And so what happens is you have these two positions.

One position that says all doctrines have to come from scripture or necessary deduction from scripture, right?

And then another doctrine that says scripture is unique and interesting in the way it's inspired.

That's a Moton Bailey, because the scripture's unique and interesting in this, this way, that's not particularly controversial.

That's like a women or people kind of argument.

If it's all doctrine has to come from scripture or from things that can be tied to scripture, you know, the emanations from scripture, the deductions from scripture, that's a much more controversial position.

In fact, that position I would even say is kind of obviously false.

So sola scriptura, I get it, but I think it's working in a lot of ways by, uh, somewhat misleading even its proponents by doing a little bit of a bait and switch, where it's not a very carefully defined term, which is why when you attack sola scriptura, one of the most common response you'll get from other Protestants is, Oh, that's a straw man.

That's not what I mean by sola scriptura.

Well, okay.

If a bunch of people are using the same phrase for wildly different ideas of the relationship of scripture and doctrine, maybe we should just find a, a new vocabulary.

Nonetheless, I'm gonna put that in the I get it.

It's, you know, a- at least an interesting idea.

A lot of smart people believe in some form of sola scriptura, et cetera.

All right.

Beneath that, I'm gonna put these doc- doctrine, or excuse me, arguments as mid, and a classic one is gonna be your doctrine develops.

So regularly, when, you know, we talk about the fact that, oh, like we believe X, Y, Z, this Catholic thing many non-Catholics don't believe in, Protestants will say, Oh, this, that doctrine developed over time.

The reason it's mid is on the one hand, it often has some strength to it.

It's like, yeah, sure.

Like, we have a clearer understanding of this in the 21st century than we did in the first century.

On the other hand, like it's not a very strong argument, 'cause even though it's getting something true, it's ignoring the fact like, yeah, your doctrine also developed.

Like, Protestants today don't believe the same thing as Protestants in the 16th century or of Christians in the first century.

And it's not as if somebody just hears the apostles preach on Pentecost and is like, Oh, I get it.

The Trinity.

Oh, I see.

The, you know, the two natures of Christ.

No, this stuff takes a lot of contemplation and, and working out.

And again, as with the mustard seed, there's a sense in which this development ought to happen.

The Holy Spirit is sent to lead the church into remembrance of all truth.

Now, that notion of remembrance is really big, because no new information is being given from after the time of the apostles.

We don't have some, you know, new revelation where the pope or some prophet or, you know, uh, the Mormon president and he There's nothing like that where somebody just says, like, I had a dream that, like, this new thing is, you know, God wants us to start believing in this thing that we never heard of before.

That's not Catholic teaching.

That's not how that works.

Development of doctrine is understanding what we already received at an ever deeper level.

Uh, you know, a dog grows, or a puppy grows into a dog.

Puppy doesn't grow into a cat.

So there is a difference, a, a principled difference between development of doctrine and deviation from doctrine.

Uh, John Henry Newman is regularly kind of given the credit for this idea.

He is by no means the first.

The early Christians talk about the necessity of the development of doctrine.

Saint Vincent of Loron has a, a great bent on this, and a bunch of others as well.

Uh, Saint John Cassian has some good stuff on this.

So all that's to say, yes, it's, is mid, 'cause on the one hand, it's kind of true, uh, uh, oftentimes, not always.

And on the other hand, it's not a very interesting argument, because if you understand your own history as a Protestant, you'll realize, yeah, you have to believe in development of doctrine.

Or else you can't believe in the Trinity or you can't believe in Christology.

You'd just have to be completely, like, really out there as a heretic.

Okay, so then I'm gonna say flimsy as a tier below that.

A good example would be Catholic stuff is pagan.

Like, oh, Easter, that comes from paganism.

Christmas, comes from paganism.

This is a combination of, number one, a lot of these claims are actually false.

So it could go in the literally fake category.

But number two, the word pagan there is doing a lot of work.

So as Christianity spreads, a lot of pre- people who had previously worshiped other gods or had been other, you know, religions, whatever, became Christian.

Now, they did things in a certain way.

They dressed in a certain way.

They used certain language to describe reality.

They had certain holidays and customs and the like.

And when they became Christian, they didn't just suddenly forget all of those things and become, you know, first century Judeans or something.

No, they retained a lot of what they had before.

That doesn't mean that they, like, took pagan deities and just slapped saint names on them.

N- I don't think that's true at all.

But if they were used to celebrating in a certain way and now they want to celebrate, say, the birth of Jesus, the way they celebrate might look like the way they celebrated anything else, a secular holiday, a pagan day, whatever.

And now it's, it's Christian, because the people were pagan and now are Christian.

So you know, if, if you're used to having a big meal to celebrate, then when you find out the good news that Jesus rose from the dead, you might want to have a big meal.

There's nothing demonic or scary about that.

So I find that argument really flimsy, 'cause on the one hand, a lot of the particular claims are actually just literally untrue.

If you watch my videos on the origins of Christmas and Easter and all this, Halloween, these are just not, like Literally this stuff is not true.But even when you have something where, oh yeah, okay, so we, we have a day called Thursday.

That really does come from Norse paganism, it comes from Thor's day.

But then the answer again is like, okay, well so what?

Like, does that mean if I say Holy Thursday to describe the day Jesus institutes the Eucharist at the Last Supper, I'm really saying Thor is holy?

Only a really foolish understanding of language would lead to that kind of misconception.

So it's a pretty flimsy argument.

I, I would be surprised to see someone finding this argument anything other than, you know, completely uncompelling.

But nevertheless, it's still a tier above the arguments that are literally fake.

Let me give you an example of arguments that are literally fake.

You will have people say, The pope is the Antichrist, and they'll give this argument.

Catholics believe the pope is the vicar of Christ, and a vicar is a representative, and an antichrist, well, ante, A-N-T-E, before Christ, he could be standing in the place of Christ, and therefore the pope is the Antichrist when you understand it this way.

And they're just playing games with the word Antichrist, and the funny thing about this, and it's, it's not good, 'cause they're obviously leading people spiritually astray, and it is by spreading falsehoods, none of that's good.

But if you actually read what the Bible says about the Antichrist, for instance, in 2 John, when we're told that the Antichrist is the one who denies that Jesus comes in the flesh, that's a reference to groups like the Gnostics, they deny the bodily nature of the incarnation.

Who opposed that?

Well, the Catholic Church.

Who's obsessed with the dignity of the body?

Well, the Catholic Church.

There's a reason why Catholics believe, you know, sacraments do something, that Jesus really comes to us, not in a disembodied way, but actually bodily, both in the incarnation and in the Eucharist, that he actually wants to heal our bodies as he does in his earthly ministry and as he does in the sacraments.

And that the reason something like, say, water baptism does something is because we believe that we are not just souls trapped in bodies and that Jesus isn't just a spirit that was, you know, pretending to be bodily, but that we are a true union of body and soul, and Jesus is a union of body and soul and divinity.

And so if you read the Bible, what the Bible actually says about the Antichrist, you're like, th- th- this is literally untrue.

The people making this argument are dissecting a word without looking to how the Bible uses that word or defines it, and that's just, like, that's a terrible argument.

So okay, those are the five kind of tiers.

Let's give another, um, let's give another good one.

Lukewarm Catholics.

This is maybe the strongest argument against Catholicism.

I don't know if it is literally the strongest, but it's gotta be up there, that many people, the Catholics that they know are really bad Christians.

They don't seem to take their faith very seriously, they don't know the teachings of their church, they don't seem to have any kind of, you know, relationship with God.

They just seem like they're going through the motions and they're checking the boxes.

Why is this a bad argument?

Well, for many, many reasons.

Number one, these saints are one of the irrebuttable proofs of Christianity, meaning, uh, this is an idea I'm, I'm very much stealing from Benedict XVI, that you can make any kind of syllogism you want for, you know, why a certain proposition is true, but at the end of the day, someone can listen to your reason and they can think, Well, I don't see the flaw in it, but I'm still skeptical of the solution, so maybe there is a flaw.

But when you see the actual saints, when you see people who live a truly holy life, some part of you has to say, That person has something that I don't, and they have something that I want, and that is really attractive.

And the attraction of it, you can't simply intellectually wave it away quite as easily.

So the flip side to that is when we fail to become saints, when we fail to become those incredible, uh, arguments for the truth of Christianity, we are doing a terrible disservice.

Because, you know, the, this is a shot that anyone It doesn't matter how brilliant you are, it doesn't matter how good at apologetics you are, if you're living a saintly life and other people see that, that is the foundation for evangelization and for apologetics.

It, you know, not for nothing, 1 Peter 3:15, when we're told to always be prepared to give a defense, an apologia, where the word apologetics comes from, it's to give a defense for the hope that is within us.

So you should be living the kind of life where people want to ask why it is you're living this way.

So that's what I would suggest there, but even more than that, I think lukewarm Catholics are, um, a tremendous scandal, because someone says, Well, if everything you're saying about divine grace is true, why do these people who, maybe they go to the sacraments regularly, continue to live in this very lukewarm sort of way?

And I think there's an answer to that, too.

Uh, you know, you can have the most powerful I, I used to live, like, a half block from a power station, the, the park near our old townhouse was called Electric Park, which is, you know, a nice name to give a kids park, because it was near a power station, which again, pleasant.

Um, my, my kids are filled with radiation, I'm sure.

But the idea was like, okay, you got this incredibly powerful power station, and there'd be times where, not nearly enough times, there'd be times where all the lights in the house were off.

Now, why?

Was it because the power station wasn't powerful enough?

No.

It's because occasionally the members of my house would remember to turn the lights off, or I would, and so the power wouldn't flow in.

Well, likewise, when you come in contact with Jesus, in person, in the sacraments, whatever, divine power flows from that encounter.

But you can turn yourself off to it, and we see from the ministry of Jesus that people who spent a lot of time with him still rejected the divine power flowing from him.

Think about the high priests, think about Judas, you know, these people in, interacted with him a lot.Lukewarm Catholics are in a somewhat similar position, which is also why, by the way, St. Paul can warn in 1 Corinthians 11 about those receiving the Eucharist unworthily.

It is absolutely possible to have access to all of the- these great divine gifts and still make nothing of it.

So I think that's an actually interesting argument, not in the sense of like, let's read a book about that, but it raises a combination of theological objections, and it sort of turns the heart away from the church, because you see a lot of ugliness in terms of people's lukewarmness.

All right.

Let's see.

Um, I guess related Well, okay, we'll- we'll get back to that one.

Oh, here's, here's a good, uh, I get it one.

The Marian dogmas being required.

So this one, the argument goes, okay, I'll grant maybe Mary is perpetually a virgin, maybe she's immaculately conceived, uh, maybe she's assumed into heaven.

But even if those things are true, how can you get away with requiring people to believe them upon pain of damnation if they knowingly reject them?

That- that's the argument.

And I think that's a, a good argument on the surface.

I, I mean, I really do.

I- I get it.

I- I understand the appeal of the argument.

Here's the answer I would make to that argument as, you know, as an aside.

This argument gets the idea of dogma wrong, because if your chief concern with dogma is, well, if somebody knowingly rejects it, they can go to hell, then the right number of dogmas seems to be zero.

You should dogmatize nothing.

But if the point of dogma is to help people grow in their relationship with God, then we want more dogma.

We wanna know more things.

Anything we can know with the certainty of faith, we should want to know it, because I wanna know as much as I can about God, and I wanna know as much as I can about Jesus.

So the don't dogmatize the Marian dogmas argument sounds a lot like the people who say don't evangelize, because then, you know, someone might knowingly reject the gospel and go to hell.

That is a backwards relationship to knowledge, where it says the truth doesn't set us free.

It says the truth, you know, creates this burden we need to be freed from.

So I, I get the argument, but that's why I don't find it as compelling as like the, the kind of top tier.

Okay, let's see.

Um, oh, uh, a good mid argument is Catholics aren't assured of salvation.

Here again, I think assurance of salvation, sometimes people mean, I'm saved right now, and you can have different levels of surety about that.

And other times, they mean, No matter what happens, I'm going to go to heaven for sure, and that's just false, and that's completely unbiblical.

You have plenty of passages like 2 Peter 2 that talk about people who are ransomed by Christ and then deny him.

You've got people like, um, Simon the magician in Acts 8 who believes and is baptized but then commits the sin of simony and then is back in the, uh, bonds of iniquity and his salvation is clearly imperiled.

Okay, so not a, not a great argument, um, for that.

And the other, the other thing, I think, with assurance of salvation, I've said this elsewhere, is I think it's largely It sounds good, and that's the appeal of it.

Like, hey, it's super easy if we all have assurance of salvation, and so that's a nice pleasant-sounding idea, but it doesn't read like Christianity.

Now, in, in fairness, you can find things about how to be surer of your salvation.

That's true.

That is, in the first sense of assurance of salvation, am I in right relationship with God right now?

But in response to this, I think it is still worth pointing out that there are people that you and I probably can point to in our own lives or maybe it's people we've seen on, on screen somewhere where they think that they're saved, and we are not as sure.

And they might think the same about us, so a proper approach of humility is going to say, at the very least, the assurance of salvation push has been pretty destructive, honestly, because the people convinced they've got nothing to worry about are often behaving in a way like they're spiritually bulletproof, and it's not great.

It- it doesn't, in my ex- very anecdotal experience, just mean people are striving for great holiness.

They're often complacent.

In the same way that if you're in a pass/fail class and you know you're going to pass no matter what, you maybe don't try your hardest.

So there's probably a reason why Jesus, when pressed on questions like, how many will be saved, stresses try really hard and basically assume that it's really hard to be saved, and then he deflects giving a lot of personal details about exactly how many or, or questions like that.

All right.

Um, let's see.

Oh, yeah.

Here's a good flimsy argument, the whore of Babylon.

Now, the argument here is the Roman Catholic Church is bad because the whore of Babylon is Rome.

And you might say, Why is that not just in the literally fake?

Well, because there's a sense in which it's right, but it's just conflating Rome.

So I really dislike when Protestants who wanna be taken seriously refer to Catholics by some pejorative instead of saying Catholics.

They'll say like, oh, Romanists or Papists or Rome, sometimes Roman Catholic.

Roman Catholic isn't pejorative in the same way the others are, but it's not usually the way Catholics describe themselves.

It's much more like a way Protestants who don't wanna say Roman Catholic, or, e- excuse me, who don't wanna say Catholic Church can get away from that, 'cause they don't wanna say, We're Catholic, 'cause then they, wh- what does that make you?

Uh, weirdly, I don't hear them saying like, Oh, we can't say the Orthodox Church, because then we'd be saying we're heterodox.

Like, people understand what a name is.

But fine, you know, I could talk about the disciples of Christ as a denomination, and I'm not saying I'm not a follower of Christ.So, I think it's a complete, like, it's a very strange sensitivity from some Protestants.

But as a result, they just won't use our actual name.

They'll say Rome.

And this is often the people who have, like, the biggest beef with the Catholic Church.

And here's the problem.

When you read Revelation, the whore of Babylon is identified with, like, the seven hills of Rome, and this seems to be a reference to the city of Rome and/or the Roman Empire.

And so they'll say, Aha!

It's Rome.

And since they've been calling the Catholic Church Rome, they kind of conflate the two.

This is a, a weird argument.

Now, I've pointed it out before.

I think 1 Peter 5:13, where St. Peter writes, From Rome, uh, is clearly a reference to hi- um, excuse me, from Babylon, he says, you know, She who is at Babylon, in reference to the church at Rome.

It shows that you can make this connection between Rome and Babylon.

But notice, he doesn't refer to the Christian Church in Rome as just, like, Rome.

It's the Church of Rome or the Church in Rome.

And that's still true.

Like, the Roman Catholic Church, we prefer to just call it the Church.

If you wanna say the Church of Rome or the Church in Rome, fine.

But y- hopefully you get the idea that it's not Rome or the Roman Empire, like the city or the empire.

That, those are not the same entity as the Church.

And obviously, right?

Like, once you recognize that, hopefully you can see, yes, it's true, the whore of Babylon can be identified with Rome, but if you're conflating the city and the empire and the Church, that would be like calling the Sanhedrin and the Christians Jerusalem, and just combining all of that.

It'd be a mess.

Or if, I guess, maybe to take a, a more real example, sometimes the term Israel is used to describe the Church.

Sometimes Israel is used to describe, like, the plot of land, or even the people who don't convert to Christianity.

You've gotta make those distinctions and can't just say, Well, Israel is Israel is Israel.

That doesn't work.

It doesn't make sense.

Last point on that, um, remember the seven hills of Rome?

Vatican City is not within the old city of Rome.

It's on, well, Vatican Hill, which is not one of the seven hills.

So, when the whore of Babylon is identified as on the seven hills, that actually shows it's not the Roman Catholic Church, but that's, you know, there you go.

All right.

Um, let's see a good fake argument.

How about this one?

Millions killed in the Dark Ages.

Now, any time people talk about Dark Ages, it is, uh, cringe-worthy, because this is Enlightenment propaganda, you know, the people who called themselves the Enlightenment because of how smart they thought they were and how dumb everyone who came before them was.

I find those arguments to be pretty bad already.

But additionally, the people claiming millions, I've even seen hundreds of millions of, you know, Bible believers were killed by the Catholic Church, they just, no, they literally were not.

And when you think about how many people were alive in Europe at various points in, in, you know, pre-Reformation history, the numbers are so low, of even how many people are in, you know, Western Christendom, say, that they literally could not have done that.

Speaking of, uh, literally fake arguments, how about, uh, Catholics added books to the Bible?

You'll hear that one a lot, and it's also just literally untrue.

So, the argument goes, there used to be a Bible with 66 books, and then in response to the Reformation, seven books were added.

No, this is, that's a lie.

It's a falsehood.

And it's easy to point out that it's not true.

You can find any number of early church sources, the Third Council of Carthage.

You can look at the Latin Vulgate.

We have literal biblical manuscripts that you can look at and see that it's not true.

The Council of Florence affirms that there's a 73-book canon.

And what the Council of Trent does is just reaffirms what had already been believed but includes an anathema, and, and defines it infallibly.

Okay, so then people say, Well, okay, so, you know, y- you still didn't have it infallibly defined until Trent, but now you've changed the argument from you added books to the Bible to you didn't add books in the Bible, but your Bible wasn't infallibly defined.

Protestant bibles today aren't infallibly defined.

That doesn't mean that they don't have 66 books.

The Catholic Bible before Trent wasn't infallibly defined, but people knew how many books that it had.

So, it's just not a true argument.

Okay, let's go back up to the top and think of a good argument.

Marian dogmas as late developments.

I can see why people say, Hey, I don't see, you know, the case for, um, the Immaculate Conception or the Assumption of Mary, those two in particular, in the really early church fathers.

And there's some truth to that.

Part of the reason is, th- like, conception was pretty murky until much more recently in history, and so they talk about Mary as sinless, uh, from pretty early on.

You can find stuff that points to her sinlessness, but this being from the moment of conception, when conception is poorly defined, there's definitely areas where we have a clearer understanding about, um, when does the unborn child come into being, you know, that sort of stuff, that wasn't known to people early on, Catholic or non-Catholic, or y- believers or non-believers.

It's just a, a limitation of scientific knowledge.

Likewise, there's more of an interest in Mary's assumption as time goes on.

I don't th- I don't think there's any denying that, and there seems to have been a popular belief that Mary had been assumed into heaven, but you don't have, like, a lot of good writings on it.

So, there's two things that are kind of related there.

Number one, you have, you know, arguments from silence being made.

Number two, there's this question of development of doctrine.

So, I think it's an interesting argument.

I'm not persuaded by it, but I at least look at it and think, oh, yeah, that makes sense.

I, I get why people believe that.

Uh, let's see.

Um, oh, indulgences are unbiblical.

I'm gonna put that in the I get it.

Now-Here's, I hate debating indulgences.

I hate, like, answering questions about indulgences as a Catholic apologist.

And it's not because I don't believe in indulgences.

It's because I find it very hard to have a good conversation about them for this reason.

To understand what Catholics believe about indulgences, you have to have a lot of other ducks in a row.

Uh, things like, well, the twofold consequence of sin, that sin cuts you off from God, but then it also creates these what are called temporal consequences.

And so, you gotta have that.

You have to have the idea the church has the binding and loosening authority, and can actually dispense, uh, from this in response to certain things that we do.

There, you gotta have some idea of purgatory.

Like, all of that stuff has to be in place before indulgences make any sense.

And so, I think that can be defended, but you have to get so many other things in order to be able to see it, that it's not a good starting point, uh, to have an interesting conversation, I would say.

Another mid argument, oh, well, I guess we could do the mass resacrifices Christ.

That's actually kind of flimsy.

Yeah, I'll, I'll do the mass resacrifices of Christ, but that, I, I'm gonna actually go ahead and put that down as flimsy.

Because it's not true.

We deny that there's a second sacrifice, but it gets one thing right, which is that we are participating in the one sacrifice of Christ, in the same way that someone eating the Passover lamb is participating in the Passover sacrifice.

This is the Jewish understanding and always has been.

This is how scripture speaks of it, that you eat the sacrifice, you become a partner in the altars.

Saint Peter, St.- St. Paul says this explicitly in 1 Corinthians 10.

Protestants who don't understand that think that we're saying there's a second sacrifice, like Good Friday wasn't enough, and so they use the once-for-all language of Hebrews, but that's just not what's being said.

Um, let me see.

Oh, oh, okay, well, let's put Peter wasn't the first pope at the mid-level.

Why mid?

Well, again, it's getting one thing right.

The pope has more, uh, clear interaction with, you know, like a, a pope today can talk about what's going on in Kalamazoo, and he can directly interact with the situation there.

Where a pope in the first century, the second century, third century, much more limited means to do that, for a lot of reasons.

Technology is better.

Uh, you know, uh, it's largely technological.

But you have much more direct authority of the pope in the ordinary lives of believers, uh, than you would have in a time when people were cut off by months or years from even being able to, like, talk to the pope.

So, is there development?

Sure.

We see the papacy growing, mustard seed into a mustard tree style, but the reason, and I did an entire video on this, so you can probably guess what I'm gonna say, people who say Peter wasn't the first pope tend to be real, um, evasive about who the first pope was, because it's, like, w- what el-, what other alternative are you going to present?

All right, at the bottom, at the literally fake level, this one is a hilarious one, Vicarius Filii Dei.

If you're not familiar, it's a Latin phrase found only in the Donation of Constantine.

It means vicar of the Son of God.

And donation, the Donation of Constantine is not a real letter from Constantine.

It's a medieval forgery.

And many popes were, uh, tricked into believing that it was real, but neither here nor there.

So, you'll find Protestants who say, Well, if you add up all of the letters in Vicarius Filii Dei, so V is five and I is one in Roman numerals, and, you know, the U is a V, so that's another five, you'll, it'll total up to 666.

Now, this is ridiculous for several reasons.

Number one, that's, you, you have numerology in Hebrew, where, like, different letter, every letter has, like, a different numeric value.

You have numerals, like Roman numerals, in Latin, but a lot of the letters don't have any numeric value at all, unlike Hebrew.

So, you just can't really do the same thing.

Also, that's not how Roman numerals work, where you have, like if you have, uh, for instance, the I-U-S would be IV if, if you're doing this.

Well, they're adding that up to get six, but IV is four in Roman numerals, so they're not even using Roman numerals as Roman numerals are actually used.

But the thing that makes this funniest is, the group that I see promoting this kind of nonsense the most are the Seventh-day Adventists, who's founder, or the co-founder, Ellen Gold White, if you add up the letters in her name, it also totals 666.

So, it's the most, like, hilarious kind of self-own in that sense.

I don't know, I find it really funny, and occasionally I, I see it in the wild where people will, will make that argument very seriously still.

Another literally fake argument, uh, Constantine started the church.

No he didn't, um, but it's amazing the number of people who think that he did.

You have Catholics talking about being Catholics, you have them talking about the Bishop of Rome and about the, you know, priesthood and about all this other stuff before Constantine.

And it's wild that people still continue to, uh, to think this.

Let's see.

Let's do an actually interesting one.

Um Oh, church abuse and scandals.

I think this is probably self-explanatory, but like with lukewarm Catholics, the bad behavior of Catholics is actually scandalizing, and there's not a good argument for it.

You, you can't just be like, No, actually, scandals are good, or abuse is good.

No, it's like, this is horrible.

Now, to the, uh, extent that there's an answer at all, it would just be, we reject this.

We think this is really evil, and, and we're sorry that it happened.

And, uh, we don't think it should be done.

But I can see why people are turned off from the church by that.

Uh, let's see.

Sacraments, not personal relationship.

That, I'm gonna put that in I get it.

It's almost a, an actually interesting argument.

It's related to the lukewarm Catholics.It's this argument like, Oh, you Catholics are so focused on sacraments that you don't worry about your personal relationship, or you'll have an, kind of a corollary.

You've got all this stuff on, like, devotions and all this, and you're not just, like, reading your Bible.

And I think the only reason I don't put it higher is the solution to it is really easy.

Like, the sacraments are great.

You also need the personal relationship.

You also need to pray.

You also need to read your Bible.

So it's like, yeah.

And, and the church says all of that.

So it's not really an argument against Catholicism.

It is a good argument against a certain way some Catholics live, of, of not taking their faith seriously enough.

Um, another I get it, I'm gonna give a, actually a contrast here.

I'm gonna put crusades bad at mid, but I'm gonna put inquisition bad at I get it.

And the reason is this.

People who knock the crusades, I'm old enough, you know, I, I just turned 40 in th- this spring.

I remember plenty of Protestants who were very comfortable with the Iraq War, very comfortable with invading another country, uh, because of something, something democracy, and yet were convinced that the crusades were like horrible.

And I, even then, was just like, the case for the crusades is way better than the case for the Iraq War.

Like, the crusades are much more obviously a defensive action against the spread of militant Islam and protecting pilgrims to the Holy Land and protecting holy sites from being destroyed by aggressively militaristic Muslims.

And that just wasn't really the case.

It was, you know, largely secular Iraq.

So I think the crusades, at least in principle, are fairly easy to defend.

Now obviously, there were abuses.

There were things that went horribly wrong as with many wars.

I think World War II is easy to defend, and I think the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki aren't.

I think they're morally, you know, abhorrent.

Now that's crusades.

Inquisition is harder because we don't kill heretics now.

I mean, if you are, like, outspoken, say a jihadi or y- even, like, a radical of some types, you might be punished by the government or, you know, you're not allowed to come into the country, whatever.

People are more accepting of that.

But having just destructive ideas about God, um, they aren't used to the idea that that might be something that the state should police because, you know, it, it is in fact incredibly, uh, destructive.

I mean, you look at the effects of l- letting heresy spread and what it does for the stability of a society, and ideas have consequences.

But nevertheless, the Inquisition is harder to defend at a, certainly at a basic level.

It takes a lot more work to say, Well, this was good, that was bad.

And it's a more complicated story.

Now the death count from both the crusades and the Inquisition is wildly inflated in a lot of people's minds.

But you can only make that point so much without it sounding like you're just saying, Well, 1,000 people would be okay, but a million would be bad.

And so it's harder to defend for those reasons too.

So I, I'm gonna put it at I get it.

I'm not persuaded by it, but I, I understand it.

Um, let's see.

Um, okay.

Mary had other children.

This is literally false, but I'm gonna put it in flimsy because it's not so obviously literally false as the tier beneath it, the literally fake ones where you can, you know, read a book and see that it's not true.

Uh, the case for Mary having other kids, if you've seen my videos back and forth with Ryan from Need God, uh, they're, it, the case is really bad.

It's, none of the arguments that prove it actually prove it, and then you have things that strongly suggest Mary didn't have other kids, like Mary being entrusted to the disciple John.

So I find it, uh, quite flimsy, but I can at least understand why people would believe in it.

All right, let's go beneath even that to the Catholics have another gospel.

The problem with this one is it's a tremendous self-own.

If you say you don't believe in the same gospel as early Christians and, you know, it, the idea of forensic justification that is kind of the hallmark of the distinct Protestant view of justification, Alister McGrath acknowledges is a theological novum of the 16th century.

And I think he's right about that, and I think it's very hard to prove otherwise, to find anyone who sounds like a Protestant.

So if you say you have another gospel than Catholics, you're saying you have another gospel than the first 16 or 1,500 years of Christians.

And then you're the kind of heretic that Saint Paul is warning against, about those who come in later days and prey upon the flock of Christ.

Uh, the people who can point to 2,000 years of continuity in their view and justification, that's not gonna be the people he's warning about 'cause we didn't arise in later days.

So that's why I say it's a, a kind of a self-own.

Uh, similarly, things like Catholics worship statues, I think that's kind of ridiculous.

Catholics worship Mary.

I mean, these things are literally not true.

What they usually reveal is that you have kind of an impoverished understanding of what worship is.

Um, there's more that could be said to that.

But you look at, for instance, the fact that intercession is good.

We are called in 1 Timothy 2 to make intercession for one another.

We see Saint Paul reaching out, asking others f- to intercede for him.

It is okay to go for other people, to other people for intercession, and that includes any other member of the body of Christ.

The body of Christ doesn't just exist on Earth, it exists in heaven.

And then as for statues, statues aren't just, like, an evil thing.

It's a very strange idea that some Protestants have, like all statues are evil, when you have statues being ordered.

Like, the cherubim, uh, are ordered to be built above the Ark of the Covenant.

People are bowing down before them.

God orders the bronze serpents to be made even though he knows some people are going to idolatrously worship it, and it has to later be destroyed.

So God makes statues even if there's a risk of the statues turning into idolatry.

You make the kind of doctrinaire iconoclastic case you can't have images, you can't have religious statues at all, and you do have to argue against God in the Bible.

And I think that puts you in a pretty weak spot.All right.

I'm gonna go and put call no man Father, flimsy, because it's just really obvious that St. Paul presents himself as a spiritual father, talks about the spiritual fatherhood of Abraham in Romans 4, so on.

Like, it takes a little bit of Bible reading to realize like, oh, you're taking that line pretty out of context.

The only reason it's not literally fake is, I mean, it's literally true.

Jesus says that.

It just doesn't mean what people think it means when they take a, a really surface-y level.

Let's see.

Um, salvation being too complicated.

I'm gonna put, that's actually interest- eh, I don't know.

It's, it's, I'm gonna put it between actually interesting and I get it.

I guess I'll put it in actually interesting.

The idea being here, if you're someone coming from a Protestant background, it sounds like you've got to jump through so many hoops.

I'm gonna put it in I get it, 'cause it's not actually that good of an argument.

Uh, you gotta jump through so many hoops, it sounds like, to be Catholic, but you can make almost anything sound that way.

Like, if you talk about what you have to do just to be alive, in terms of you gotta eat things and drink things and sleep, and you can't, like, drive on the wrong side of the road.

You gotta do all this stuff.

What a legalistic way to maintain your life.

Don't you know life is a gift from God?

You know, you could do that with biological life.

And of course, the sane response to that is, well yeah, life is a gift from God and you have to maintain it.

And this is true of the spiritual life as well.

But I get, you know, ese- especially on the surface level, especially coming from a really easy believism background, Catholicism can sound bad.

Uh, too much worldly power.

I'm gonna put that, I'm actually gonna put that as actually interesting, because there is this idea of like, should the church be this comfortable with being powerful in the world?

I think there's good questions to be asked there.

I don't think those are arguments against Catholicism as such.

They might be arguments to act in a certain way or not.

Um, and this is the danger of having a, a church that is successful.

This is the danger of having a church that converts a lot of people, are that some of the people you convert might be rich and might want to give honors to the church, and what do you do with that?

And the answer to that biblically is complicated.

You have, for instance, in Luke 8, wealthy women who accompany the apostles and take care of them financially.

The approach that Jesus and the apostles take is not just get away from us everyone who has wealth.

It's not.

It's to use the wealth for the glory of God sometimes.

But those are hard questions, and so the worldly power thing can be sort of tricky.

Like, how do you navigate that well?

And, you know, similarly, Luke 22, the apostles are seated, enthroned in Jesus' vision of heaven.

So having even like the imagery of thrones and power and all of that, uh, is not bad as long as the recognition is, this is pointing to the kingdom of God and not just earthly authority here and now.

Nevertheless, we also wanna use authority in, on Earth in a good way.

If, if we can use the authority of the church to, you know, op- oppose injustice in the world, we should.

But how do you do that?

Those can be kind of tricky questions, and I, I think that's worth kind of acknowledging.

Um, on the, let's see, confess directly to God.

I'm gonna put that one as flimsy because, I mean, it's, I guess it's, you know what?

It's literally not true.

I'm gonna actually have to put it down in literally fake, because no.

Scripture, of course you should confess to God directly, but you're also told to confess your sins to other people, and the apostles are given the ability to forgive sins.

So how do you take the really clear text, you know, confess your sins to one another, you might be forgiven?

How do you take all of these things and just say, I'm not gonna do any of that.

Sorry, Jesus.

Um, let's see.

Purgatory in the Bible.

I'm gonna put that at the I get it level because again, as with the indulgences, it's, a lot of this is just the worldviews are so different that it can become hard to plant this one idea in a Protestant frame.

See, here's what I mean by that.

Some ideas Protestants can take their existing worldview and get some new Catholic idea they haven't heard before.

They can see, okay, that is true and they can incorporate it in their overall vision of reality.

With purgatory, and with particularly the question, where is purgatory in the Bible, you've combined, I've got this lens of sola Scriptura, and I don't see this word, and it's, it's a, already a bad way of doing theology.

Where's the Trinity in the Bible?

Where is Jesus saying, I am God, in the Bible?

You, you know, you can do this to really tear Christianity apart if you wanna do it that way.

Uh, or you can kind of work on unraveling the false way of treating Scripture and the false way of treating, treating theology, but those are harder things.

So when someone is asking the question in good faith, I think they usually are, like where is purgatory in the Bible?

You can point to people praying for those who have died.

Uh, you can point to all of that, which hints at a state of purification.

You could look at St. Paul talking in First Corinthians about those who are saved but as through fire, but you don't just have like a very clear, here's the word purgatory, here's the idea fleshed out, as it were.

It takes a new way of reading Scripture.

So I, I get it.

I understand why people don't immediately see the truth of this Catholic teaching.

All right.

The last two are both gonna have to go at the bottom of literally fake, and the first one is confusing.

Well maybe, you know, I'll put this at flimsy.

People who say the Bible's authority comes from God and not the Catholic Church, so Catholics will say, How do you know which books are in your Bible?

And in response to that, sometimes you'll hear Protestants make this objection.

What's the problem with that?

Well, we agree with that.

Vatican I explicitly points out that the Bible's authority doesn't come from the church.

It comes from God.

But that doesn't answer the question of w- why do you know that you've got the, the right books of the Bible, and you still need the church to identify the books in some way.

Now, much bigger conversation could be had, but it's arguing against what's actually a straw man, and I've heard plenty of people who should know better, uh, like Michael Kruger, who's written an entire book on multiple s- things on, on the canon .

has said numerous times that Catholics believe that the authority of the Bible comes from the church deciding on certain books.

So, if the church wanted tomorrow to be like, You know what?

We like Trent Horn's book, Why We're Catholic.

We're gonna make that part of the Bible, it would suddenly become divinely inspired?

No.

That's just, that's not true.

And so, that argument is literally fake, but the thing it's trying to defend, that the authority of the Bible comes from God, who's the one who inspired it, like, the church didn't inspire the books.

God did.

That, we actually agree on.

So, it's a bad argument not because it's defending something false, but because it's attacking something false.

And then the last one is, I've heard the argument against purgatory, Well, don't you know that St. Paul says, 'To be absent from the body is present to the Lord'?

And this one, I'm sort of stunned at how bad of an argument it is.

It's a misquotation of scripture.

Uh, St. Paul is talking about that he would prefer to be absent from the body and present to the Lord.

He nowhere says those are the only two states.

But I'm stunned by how bad it is because someone who believed this would have to say hell doesn't exist because , well, if the devil doesn't have a body, he must be present in the Lord.

W- What?

Like, just think about it for a second, but people are so eager to try to find some text from the Bible to disprove purgatory, that they're left sort of making a verse up.

I don't think they're doing it on purpose.

I think they're just desperately looking for something th- so they have a biblical argument against it, and there's not a good biblical argument against purgatory because all the evidence seems to point to people did pray for the dead.

They certainly did in the Old Testament and the New Testament as well, and that only makes sense with something like a purification process.

More could be said on purgatory, of course.

But there you go.

Those are the arguments that, uh, Mike and I came up with th- that I thought were worth answering.

I'd be interested in how you would rank them yourself.

Which arguments, maybe in your own journey, did you find persuasive or unpersuasive, easy to answer, hard to answer?

What were maybe your hang-up issues?

And, I don't know, were there good ones that I, I should mention?

I'd be happy to do something like this next time if this sort of thing is interesting to you.

All right.

For Shameless Potpourri, I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

God bless you.