Transcript

Hey, everybody.

Sorry.

I was, uh, walking over to the office and could have run, but it's undignified.

Uh, okay.

It looks like I'm live, so why don't I go ahead and begin.

So for those of you who aren't used to these, uh, occasional public livestreams, here's how it works.

Uh, Vanessa is, uh, I don't know if you can say manning, manning the, uh, questions.

She's doing like, the moderation.

And so if you have a Super Chat, she will pull those and put them in a doc for me.

I also have, um, some questions from Patreon and some questions from, uh, last week.

So I'll Or from, I'm sorry, two weeks ago, last time.

So yeah, let me, uh, let me dive right in.

Um, previous questions I didn't get to.

Cruz said, Can we morally discern for ourselves that a grave sin is venial due to addiction and continue taking communion?

That's a bit of a dangerous, uh, self-assessment.

It's much better to trust the guidance of, uh, either a confessor or a spiritual director.

So, uh, for those who may not understand the question, things like addiction can, uh, limit your moral culpability.

But if you've done something that is objectively grave, the fact that you feel, uh, justified, you feel like you have mitigating circumstances, that's You, you don't really wanna be the judge in your own case in those kind of contexts.

So I would say it's much safer, morally and spiritually, to defer to, to an objective judge.

All right.

Um, LBD said, Please make a video on why people believe Ryan.

I mean, a lot of people grew up believing this is what the gospel was.

And almost every false version of Christianity has a really clear, simple, and even kind of compelling story that it tells.

So I'm just gonna run the risk of, of offending a lot of people, but I, I do actually mean this in a, in a positive way.

You take like, the Eastern Orthodox stories, like, We here in the east have never changed.

Everybody else has changed.

So stay true to the tru- you know, stay, stay in the truth.

Stay with us.

And that's a massive oversimplification of history.

But the story makes immediate sense and it's, it's kind of grabby, and people who are saying, I want something deeper, uh, they can see the appeal of it.

And there are elements of truth in what they're arguing.

Likewise, like the Lutheran story with the law and gospel, uh, it's a nice, simple, clear narrative.

The whole purpose of the law isn't that you're actually required to do these things.

It's just to show you how weak and incapable you are, and so then the gospel comes in to liberate you.

Th- These are really easy.

I can say them all in like, a sentence.

Uh, even like, Oneness Pentecostalism.

Father, Son, and Spirit?

These are different names for the same one God, one person, who's just doing different roles, like you're a, you know, a son and a student and a friend, or something like that.

And so you can go on down the list and with the easy believism, this kind of, uh, movement within Protestantism that Ryan is, uh, part of and sort of emblematic of, it's, Hey, when Saint Paul condemns works, he doesn't mean works of the law and uh, kind of covenantal participation.

He means any human effort.

And so literally anything you do makes it about you rather than God.

Now because we as sinful humans want to lower God to our level, we imagine that if we're doing something God isn't.

Now that's a pretty bad assumption.

So if I said, Who wrote the Gospel of Mark?

Uh, the answer could be Mark and it could be God.

Uh, Gospel of Mark is a pretty bad one to choose in the, in the context of Ryan, but you get the idea that it's not a 50/50.

It's not a 100%/0.

It can be 100% and 100%.

And you have to have a more sophisticated understanding of the way causality works, and a lot of Christians simply don't, and they want to put themselves on the l- same level of causality as God, or, or lower God to the same level of causality as humans, that God is just a being in the universe of beings.

And that's not true.

God is the ground of being.

So, uh, I think that's why people believe Ryan.

It, it makes intuitive sense in the way that like most heresies make intuitive sense.

Uh, which, you know, by the way, is, is why heresy exists.

Like, something like the Trinity is totally counterintuitive, uh, because it happens to be true.

Uh, the Catholic understanding of justification and salvation, all of this, i- is less easy to put in a kind of sound bite, but that's because it happens to be true.

All right.

Literal Trash I don't think you're literal trash . says, Hi Joe.

My fiance is a non-practicing Jew and I'm a practicing Catholic.

How do I navigate my faith with her as I continue on this path?

Thank you.

The fact that she's non-practicing means that a lot of this is probably going to be the same way you would reach out to anyone who is of no particular, uh, religion, that you can, uh, do the, the basic work of, uh, why do we believe that there's a God at all?

Why do we believe that this God is personal?

And so you can kind of work step by step through those things, and then you get to, well, how do we know, um, that this God has revealed himself in Jesus Christ?

Now that is gonna take a slightly different flavor when talking with Jews for two reasons.

One, positively, you have this rich resource to draw on called the Old Testament.

Now even a non-practicing Jew, if there's any appreciation, uh, for the religion at all, you can say, Look, God revealed himself to the Jewish people and there's a huge emphasis from Genesis forward on some future blessing coming, and the particulars of it become gradually clearer over time and it's very much identified with this coming figure called the Messiah .

um, the anointed one.

And so, Jesus comes into the world not just as the second person of the Trinity, a claim that made sense, you know, not to very many people, or the son of God, which was something that, okay, everyone can kinda grasp what that means, sort of, uh, but also as, as the long-awaited Jewish Messiah.

And so you have a particular frame in which to talk about Jesus and the role of Jesus, not to diminish or deny any of those other things, but to explain this is the guy, uh, that they'd been talking about.

Um, and, and then you, you know, ex- look at all of the reasons we believe in Jesus that you would look to, to anybody else.

You look at the resurrection, look for the case for the resurrection, everything else.

That's, that's the advantage you have with dealing with someone from a Jewish background, that you can, uh, draw on the story of the Messiah, which hopefully they know at least somewhat, uh, in terms of a predicted or a longed-for Messiah.

Second, uh, you have to be aware of the, the negatives.

You know, that there has been a long and often acrimonious history between Jews and Christians, and there are plenty of Christians who have literal and figurative blood on their hands for how they responded to Jews.

And that story is important.

We, in the West, often have a very short historical memory.

You know, like we were trading partners with Japan in 1980s, when there were still plenty of people who were alive from the time of Pearl Harbor.

I mean, there were people who were present at the event who were still, you know, in their 60s when, when this is going on.

So we, in many ways positively, have a very short historical memory for grievances.

But that can also be true of our own grievances against others, where, um, and, you know, I, I'm saying our.

Um, this is obviously a sort of unfair collectivizing of guilt.

But it is probably important to know, like, hey, if there's a community that has existed, um, in distinction from Christians, in some cases in opposition to Christians, and has been on the receiving end of negative treatment by Christians, there are different landmines you have to kind of navigate, uh, gently, and, you know, one might say pastorally, uh, to preach the gospel without vindicating the worst abuses of like the Jewish pogroms or something like this.

There's a much milder form, I would say even in terms of Catholic Orthodox dialogue, like on theology.

We're much closer than you might imagine from the way some Eastern Orthodox speak.

A lot of this is a long historic memory in the East, where, you know, it has less to do with the filioque and more to do with the sacking of Constantinople.

So getting all of that, uh, straight in your mind, you don't have to know all the minutiae, and you certainly don't need to get defensive about it.

You can just acknowledge, like, Look, eh, Catholics have done horrible stuff in the past.

And, uh, we are sorry for that.

I am sorry for that.

And then you can, you know, you can move forward.

So I don't know, hopefully, hopefully that helps.

Um, Davidoos just sent me, uh, PLN.

Is that Polish zloty?

What, what currency is that?

Yeah, Polish zloty.

Hey, I got that one on the first guess.

I'm, I'm pleased with myself.

Um, thank you, Davidoos.

All right, the Vale on the Vine says, Remnant theory is totally destroyed because we have record showing these other groups were not killed off/suppressed, right?

Many layers of no records.

Yeah, so there's a couple things to know with remnant theory, and actually there's I, I was watching another Protestant, or actually technically Church of Christ.

They don't call themselves Protestants.

They're Restorationists.

I was watching a, a pretty interesting Church of Christ, uh, YouTuber who was giving his, his review of my debate with Ryan.

Um, this wasn't recently.

I've, I've moved on, okay?

But he said something that was really good that's, that's really relevant to this, so I, I have to mention this.

Um, Tertullian's On Baptism came up in the debate, and in chapter 13, Tertullian says, Now th- those miscreants provoke questions, and so they say baptism is not necessary for them to whom faith is sufficient.

Uh, for with all Abraham pleased God by sacrament of no water but of faith.

And so Ryan said, Aha, look, these are, um, obviously faithful Christians who were suppressed by the church.

And I was like, It just says miscreants.

Like it doesn't say anything about them being faithful Christians.

We're not told any of their names or anything about them.

And I just argued from chapter 13, but the pastor, who, and I apologize 'cause his name escapes me right now, he went I think he's a pastor.

He might not even He might just be like a smart YouTuber.

I'm filled with self-doubt.

Whatever his name is, and apologies if you're watching this, uh, he pointed out like, Hey, this is, uh, explicitly written in chapter 1 against the Canine Heresy, which is a form of Gnosticism, so we actually know for a fact these were not Christians.

Like to ally yourself with, uh, the Gnostics when their theology is explicitly described as Antichrist in the New Testament, uh, is bad.

It's Like you're not just pitting yourself against, uh, 2,000 years of Christian understanding of the Bible, but you're allying yourself with the people who are like the open, uh, opponents of Christianity in saying, These are the Baptists of our, of our time in the early church.

It's like, you don't want, you don't want to take those guys on board.

So in response to these kind of remnant theories, I think it's important to always, um, try to track down as much as you can and say, Okay, these are the groups you claim are forerunners of usually the Baptists.

This is called the Landmark Baptists, that believe that there were 2,000 years of Baptists and we just call them by different names.

And this works really well if you don't know very much about church history and if you have a lot of kind of conspiratorial views about church history and a lot of suspicion.

But the minute you do any kind of, uh, scholarship or deep dive or research, you realize that these, these views are not just implausible, they don't make any sense.

So I'll give you a couple examples.Number one, in Trail of Blood and several other works like this, there are these claims that like tens of millions of people were being killed by the Inquisition or by the Catholic Church during this period.

And you look at the actual population of Europe and you couldn't kill tens of millions of people because there's only like 80 million people in the entire continent.

And it's like, well, how would that work?

And especially when you don't have things like concentration camps or trains or machine guns or You've got swords.

You're expecting me to believe that a group of Catholics somehow killed tens of millions of people with swords, leaving behind no record that even like secular historians of wars haven't been like, Remember that one war where the Catholic Church killed tens of millions of people?

And they're just like, Oh no, I forgot about that one.

Like, what are you talking about?

It doesn't make any sense.

So you've got like some pretty big math problems.

You also have some pretty big history problems in terms of, uh, when you find out which groups they're aligning themselves with.

We now have a lot of these ancient heretical documents, 'cause look, if I'm gonna give a defense for this view, there are times where Christians burnt heretical books.

Now, I don't care what you think about that, wh- whether you think it's good or bad.

They didn't want this kind of crud, um, polluting the minds of, of innocent people, and so there were books that were burnt.

However, two things.

Number one, that was never complete.

Uh, how could it possibly have been?

And so y- you have books that are stored away or, you know, they're in a cave somewhere, we find manuscripts, etc., etc., etc. Uh, that sort of thing is, is pretty common.

Number two, you have works which are written in response to in every particular heresy.

So even if you imagine, okay, there's like a billion Baptists nobody knows about, and somehow the Church, they kill them all, and they cover up that they killed all of them.

You know, not a billion, tens of millions, which is still crazy.

Did no one write against them?

There were no Christians who said, Hey, this is a dangerous heresy.

We want everyone to be Catholic, and so let us tell you why we think these Baptists are wrong.

There was no Catholic answers back then responding to them?

Like, what, what Where are they at?

Because until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library, um, we knew much of what we knew about the history of Gnosticism from Christian texts that were attacking Gnosticism, most famously a- Against Heresies by Saint Irenaeus.

And then when we discovered the Nag Hammadi Library, because it turns out you can't burn all the books, then it, it confirmed a lot of what we already knew.

So, uh, Nag Hammadi and Dead Sea Scrolls are within a few years, 1945 for Nag Hammadi, I think 1948 for the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And it's the same basic idea.

You find papyrus in a cave somewhere or um, just buried somewhere in a cool or at least not humid climate, uh, particularly if a cave somewhere was temperature controlled and it was guarded from sunlight and everything else, and it can last very long there.

So all that's to say, the remnant theory can't possibly be true.

Um, buh, buh, buh.

And think about all the other th- last point on this.

I know I'm going too long on it.

Uh, think about all the other heresies where we know about them primarily from the Catholic opponents, or at least partially because of the Catholic opponents, who might have their writings as well.

So, you know, like Tertullian with Montanism, for instance.

You have his early writings, you have his late writings, and both his Catholic and, and his heretical writings alike are, are preserved.

So the idea that we're gonna preserve all those other heresies but not this one, it just re- reeks of special pleading.

All right.

That's, that's hopefully more than plenty.

Derek says, How would you explain baptism is regenerative to a Presbyterian who believes it saves but isn't regenerative?

That you can't both be saved and not born again.

Now, the, the Presbyterian view is a little more, uh, nuanced, and so they're going to say that there is this occasionalist kind of connection, maybe that's not the right term for it, um, between the sacrament and the saving faith.

So that there's one sense in which you can say baptism saves and another sense in which you can say it doesn't save, and I would just have them draw those things out first.

Um, Redeemed Zoomer actually has a video saying, In what sense can Presbyterians say baptism saves and in what sense do they say it doesn't save?

And the more you, uh, kind of drill down on that, the clearer I think that'll be.

So you, you're gonna want to make sure you understand where that person is coming from first, because they're using language, I would suggest, in a somewhat different way.

Um, and then another question, I, I saw somebody else, uh, asked about this in the comments as well.

You, it's worth asking about the status of infants, both baptized and unbaptized, because it can really change a lot of where the conversations about faith go.

So, you know, for instance, if you're someone who is a, a traditional Calvinist and you believe in perseverance of the saints, that somebody, if they're saved, will never lose their salvation, then you have this problem of, well, what about baptized children?

And historically, the view Calvinists have taken is that their own children, the children of believers, are elect.

So if a child dies and the parents are Calvinists, then that child gets to go to heaven.

That is a strange kind of view in several ways.

I mean, it's There's nothing to do with baptism there, as I understand it, uh, so you don't need to baptize babies.

I mean, you can.

I'm not, I'm not You'll find Presbyterians who baptize babies.

But it does- it doesn't seem to be the baptism that saves, it's the member of the covenant community of the, the parents, like the covenantal, uh, participation of the parents.

But if that's right, one of the things that that raises is those infants can grow up and reject that and, and become reprobates, which seems to suggest that at least some people can lose their salvation, but I'm, maybe I'm just completely misconstruing.

So I will defer if there are people who are, um, more in the weeds on that.

That's my in- initial kind of off the cuff .

sort of answer.

All right, um, Dunn 64 says, Do a Catholic Avengers, please.

And that made more sense last time, um, but I'm gonna be at the Catholic Creators Conference, so if, if you haven't gotten your tickets, uh, I apologize it's too late, they're all sold out.

But next year you can, you can join and I will probably be there next year, I don't know yet.

Um, and I will probably do some, um, I've got I think I've got one or two panels lined up, and I'm, I'm maybe gonna do a video for Shammas Potpourri with some, some people you may know.

We'll see.

All right, Eric said So we're just now getting to the current livestream, but I just wanted to make sure everybody who gave money last time didn't feel ripped off.

So similarly, maybe I'll just get super backed up this time and, uh, we'll go from there.

Eric says, Joe, would you say that faith in the Catholic sense should always be understood as a working faith?

Would you say Romans 4:21 is consistent with that definition?

So, okay let me pull up Romans 4:21.

Um, well, let's put it in the context of, of Romans 4:20-21.

No distrust made him waver, consi- concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.

So, the problem with taking Abraham as an example of somebody who did nothing, and then it was credited to him as righteousness, is that that is not true of the story of Abraham at all.

You can literally go back and read in When God first calls Abram, uh, you know, it's Genesis 12.

The part that Saint Paul is quoting from is Genesis 16.

Or Genesis 15, excuse me.

So the idea that Abraham's done nothing is not true.

He's been walking by faith for three chapters, because God literally orders that he leave, uh, the country of Ur and, and come to a new land, and he responds, uh, by faith.

And we know this is by faith not just 'cause we can read Genesis, but also because Hebrews 11 explicitly says in verse eight, By faith Abraham obeyed as he was called to go out to a place which he was to receive as an inheritance, and he went out, not knowing where he was to go.

So that puts someone taking Abraham as the example of, you know, a n- non-working sola fide in an awkward position.

Are they going to say that as Abraham is walking by faith, quite literally walking by faith, that he's not saved yet, he's not justified yet?

Or is Genesis 15 talking about multiple instances of justification in an ongoing, uh, justification kind of sense?

Now Catholics would just say, Yeah, he is justified when he trusts God.

He is justified when he leaves Ur to go to the promised land.

He's justified like And the act of trust is still an act.

It's not just a set of ideas.

It is a commitment to, like, believe in God, but one that has to be actually concretely lived out.

Um, this is actually something Jordan Peterson gets right, that Alex O'Conor pointed out in his review of Jordan Peterson's, uh, like, 20 on one sort of debate thing.

Where, when Peterson says, like, What it is to believe is to stake your life on a thing, that is an over Like, that's not a good definition.

But that it's pointing to, uh, something about the nature of belief, that it's not just a set of ideas you have in your mind, but if you, if you will not act according to those design, or to those beliefs, then we can question in what sense you really have them.

Um, I'm reminded here of Moore's Paradox, like, I think it'll rain this afternoon, but it probably won't.

That doesn't mean anything.

That is, like, you can say that it sounds meaningful, but it can't Those, those two things can't both be true.

You can't both think it'll rain and think that you're probably wrong about it going to rain.

So we, we have to kind of watch out for that.

So yeah, all this to say Abraham, that is a bad example, uh, that people are using, uh, Saint Paul's use of Abraham to say, Oh, look, he did nothing.

What Paul is actually doing in citing Abraham is showing that Abraham is saved without works of the Mosaic Law, because the Mosaic Law doesn't exist yet.

If you read this in the context of Romans, the whole point Paul is talking about is are the Jewish people saved by their participation in the Covenant, and particularly in the Mosaic Law?

And if that were true, well, if circumcision and all, all of that is what saves you, that's a problem for the father of the Jewish people who wasn't a member of the Mosaic Law , or didn't, excuse me, participate in Mosaic Law, and was justified by faith before he even had circumcision.

And it's also a problem for people like Rahab.

So look for examples like those people, but then James points out, yeah, true, they're not saved by the Mosaic Law in any way, shape, or form, but notice both Abraham and Rahab are required to do good works, which are clearly not works of the law because neither of them have the Mosaic Law.

So you can read James in complete harmony with Romans if you understand what both of them are doing.

All right.

Uh, Ramseys Flores, mm, LetsMyPeopleGo says, Hi, Joe, I asked last week on Catholic Answers what a person is, but now I need help with what a subsistence is.

How does a subsistence differ from a being?

Ah, yes.

I'm trying to remember my Boethius off the cuff, because the major reason we distinguish a subsistence from a being is because of the Trinity, because God is tripersonal.

Like, there's three persons.

And a, a neat way to capture that is that there are three who-s in God and one what.

That when we say there's three persons and, and one essence, uh, th- this is saying that when we're talking about God, if we're saying what God is, there's one undivided divine unity.

If we're saying who God is, there's a tripersonal answer to that, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.And so the use of technical language like a subsistence is capturing that whoness that isn't, um, the same as being, because a being is a what, not a who.

So hopefully, I've been fair to Boethius and Trinitarian theology, and that's the, the simplest way I think I can explain it.

All right.

Matt says, What are your thoughts on why the Jews over time stopped pronouncing the Tetragrammaton?

Why did the church maintain this practice of not translating it in Greek?

It seems odd considering the name occurs thousands of time in Hebrew.

Yeah.

So re- remember that the original Hebrew scriptures weren't for private devotional use.

Like, it wasn't like people just had their pocket, uh, I guess, KDV, King David Version of the Scriptures that they were, uh, just carrying around with them, that these were used liturgically.

And at some early point, to avoid accidentally using the name of God in vain, they would just not say the name of God.

There were plenty of other names that were derived from it, uh, but that is consistent.

Like, you might be extremely careful to not say, like, Oh my God, but you will still say someone is godly, um, you know, This is a, a godly person, or you might even say godlike.

Some people even say godforsaken which, eh, m- metaphysically doesn't make sense.

But all of those kind of things are, are derivatives, and so there's less hesitation about using derivatives as opposed to using the actual name of God, uh, where the actual name of God is, is protected.

Now, I think the Ten Commandments are, are doing much more than, uh, just telling you something about linguistic use, but yeah, there you go.

Um, oh, oh, oh.

There's one thing I wanted to do, and I have not told her I'm going to do this, but I just dropped in the chat, this is Vanessa who's been Vanessa's been amazing at just, like, helping, um, do all the, like, pulling your questions, I'm not, like, spending half the time just reading through random comments, and she does a ton of great work behind the scenes.

She also makes all the shorts and everything else.

She is getting married this fall, and I thought if you wanted a nice, uh, way of helping somebody out who's at the kind of inauguration of their marriage, or a- almost at the inauguration of their marriage, you can get something for them off the registry if, if you so desire.

Uh, so yeah.

I just thought I would offer that if anyone feels interested.

I think it'd be a nice thing to do, and, and a nice way of showing Vanessa how much we, we care for her, and, uh, yeah.

There you go.

So yeah, there you go, Vanessa.

I, I hope, I hope that was okay.

I didn't wanna ask you ahead of time in case you said no.

Um, is that a good approach in life?

Hmm.

All right.

JCF150 says, Do you think there is any utility in discussing the benefit the Passover only be- applied to those who ate the lamb when discussing limited atonement with Calvinists, i.e.

the lamb died for the whole house, but only applied to some?

Yes, I do.

So, um, oh yeah, Bruce said, uh, Isn't that why even nowadays we say things like 'for heaven's sake' or 'for Pete's sake' to avoid saying God's name in vain?

Yes, but I actually think And minced curses are, are minced blasphemies.

Uh, that's a term for those.

Those are dubious.

'Cause on the one hand, Christ warns us not to swear by the gold in the temple as a way of getting around swearing by the temple.

We don't wanna play games with it.

On the other hand, there are clear practices, including in Scripture itself, of using some replacement word rather than the word you don't wanna say, either because it's holy or because it's unholy.

And, and oh, I guess I should've mentioned this part, 'cause this is an important part of it.

The Jewish idea of holiness includes the idea that you, you don't wanna profane it by bringing it in an- into common usage.

So you're not just profaning the name of God by saying oh my God in a sort of, uh, sacrilegious sense, but also being overly casual in how you speak of God.

So you know, I've, I've seen, um, like, Jesus surfing little bobble statues in the house of Christians who think it's just, like, a cute reminder of like, the relatability of Jesus, and it's like, you're not I don't, I don't like that.

I don't think you're getting enough the, um, exceeding and transcendent holiness of God that is, is so beyond us that those who touched the Ark were struck dead.

Now yes, we can approach with, with great confidence now, as, as Hebrews says, because of the blood of Christ, but we have to start with this surpassing holiness of God for any of that res- like, the, the divine intimacy has to come from a place of it's astonishing that God is even talking to us, even before we crucified his son.

Okay.

Well, sorry.

Let's go back to JCF's question, though.

With the Passover lamb, anyone who was a circumcised member of the house, so either someone who was Jewish or a, a foreigner who was traveling through who was willing to be circumcised, which e- foreshadows baptism, um, anyone who was willing to undergo that rite of inclusion into the c- covenant people, could eat of the lamb, and only those who did so were part of those, uh, for whom the sacrifice of the lamb was applied.

But that doesn't mean that the lamb's blood wasn't like, efficacious enough.

If somebody, let's say you've, you've got, I don know, Uncle Louie i- happens to be in town during Passover, and he's not Jewish, as you can tell from his name.

He's like, French or something.

And h- he, you know, has traveled to Old Testament times, so they're distant relatives.

He could either agree to be circumcised and then eat the Passover meal or, or not, and nothing on the lamb's end in terms of the efficacy of its death is impacted one iota as to whether it's, it applies or not.

Like, the shower in my house works whether any member of my family takes a bath or a shower or, or not.

So, the idea that like, we have to believe in limited atonement or else we're saying Christ's death isn't strong enough, is like saying, Oh, well, a lot of the members of your family smell, so I guess you don't have very good water pressure.

May not be the issue at all.

Maybe there's plenty of water and no one will avail themselves of it.

My family doesn't smell.

I need to clarify that.

This is purely, uh, an example.

All right.

Uh, Richard Daniel says, Can you refute Vlad Savchuk's bad arguments and lies?

He's a very popular Protestant pastor/online figure.

I don't know who that is, um, I believe I might have heard that name in Bram Stroker, but I don't know who that is.

Uh, if they're big enough and making arguments I think I have something to say too, I'm open to it.

I, when I'm, like, do a response video, I try to make sure it's someone who, uh, they're actually Like, I don't want to choose like a French figure, nor do I want to choose someone whose theology is so convoluted that I'm gonna need like 20 minutes to explain for non-members of that group.

'Cause even if you find like 100,000, I don't know, cult members, then, you know, like the Transylvanian Christian Alliance for whatever, uh, those people, if I have to spend so much time explaining what they believe, that's probably not gonna be a very good or helpful video for a broader, uh, kind of category.

Um, ba-bum bum.

Pratik Antony says, Hey Joe, there's been push for Eastern Catholics to stay in their own rites, e.g.

a Syro-Malabar couple married in a Latin church can have their marriage annulled as it is considered invalid.

That, well, that's So there's a couple things there.

It's, you, for marriage, the first thing to know is that marriage in the Catholic Church requires jurisdiction.

So something like baptism, if you have a friend who's dying, you wanna go and baptize them and they're open to being baptized, you can do it.

Now, that's, I, I guess the, the first kind of piece to put there.

In contrast to that, marriage requires jurisdiction.

Now this is a little more complicated for those who are not canonically Catholic at all, like Protestants, uh, but for a Catholic, you need a dispensation from the Church to marry outside the normal form.

So you can get married with the bishop's permission in a place other than like a normal church in front of, uh, the priest or deacon.

Because in the West, the idea is very clear that the couple is the one doing the marrying.

This is a difference in how the East view the sacrament, because they will say that the, the officiant, the priest or the deacon, uh, actually just the priest, is the one who, who creates the marriage with, with the act of blessing.

So it's set up liturgically, and the understanding is somewhat different.

And we want to respect both customs.

And so the, uh, Eastern code of canon law requires, if either party is Eastern Catholic, for it to be done in an Eastern Catholic church, or to have special permission from, I believe, the bishop, uh, to even have it in a Latin church.

So you can have like a normal Roman rite wedding, but you need the permission of your bishop if you're canonically Eastern Catholic.

And that makes a lot of sense if you're in like a deeply embedded, you know, let's say you're in like a Lebanese Catholic community and you grew up in that community.

This is like the neighborhood parish and everything else, and you fall in love with, you know, a British guy, and you decide you're gonna get married to him.

Or British lady, I don't know what sex you are.

And, uh, they're, you know, they're Roman Catholic.

Okay, fine.

But you wanna like, respect this endangered, uh, Eastern church and its customs and traditions and, and not just lightly throw them over.

Where that becomes a lot more problematic is you get like, these LA Catholics who are, you know, Armenian or whatever, because there's just like a sizable enough community, but maybe they have only gone to Roman Catholic church since they were baptized.

But because like, one of their parents is, you know, their, their father is Armenian and they were baptized Armenian, all this, they're canonically Armenian, and they're being expected to follow these, these canons that are not the canons of the church they attend.

That is a, that is a mess.

Uh, and I think the easy solution would be to make it easier for people to switch churches for valid reasons.

Um, but we want to not make that too easy, 'cause we don't Like, if parish hopping is bad enough, imagine, uh, rite hopping or church hopping in the kind of bigger sense.

And so, that's, uh, that's something we gotta watch out for.

I think it, I think it's a real problem, in terms of marriage law between Eastern and Western Catholics, 'cause a lot of Roman Catholic priests don't even know to watch out for that in marriage prep.

Like, oh, uh, you were baptized Ruthenian or whatever.

We need to make sure this is all okay before we proceed.

All right.

Spencer says, I bought Pope Peter.

Very good.

Thank you.

See his raised, that's like burnt to the ground, a lot of issues I had previously with Roman Catholicism.

My main issue now is about communion in one kind.

It seems to me we are commanded to eat and drink, not just eat.

Lutheran, by the way.

I mean, you know, the good news is, you go to almost any Catholic church, you can receive communion under both kinds.

I go to a small, one of the small handful of churches where that isn't really the norm, but most nonresort parishes you can receive under, under both forms.

At the risk in taking that as like, a, a demand that every layperson fulfill, I mean, there's, there's a couple, a couple things you could say to that.

Um, one is, Jesus is speaking principally to the apostles here, and by extension to their successors, uh, like with the institution.

Like when he says do this, that doesn't mean each of us has the authority to, uh, go out and celebrate communion on our own .

or celebrate the mass on our own.

Uh, and to that end, the priest is actually required to receive both species, the bread and wine.

Uh, and so, you know, uh, those to whom Christ directly commanded it are expected to fulfill that and do.

The rest of us, it is good on a symbolic level.

I- it's not a requirement.

And so there are, uh, prudential and pastoral reasons in kind of both directions.

I don't, I don't feel the need to get super in the weeds onto, like, why one would choose to or not to, only to say it's not a make-or-break issue in terms of salvation, and it's not something where we're disobeying Christ by not offering both.

And, uh, w- if you look at the history of the Church as the West moves towards this practice of receiving under one kind, they remain a valid church, and there isn't, like, some reformation that breaks out at that point.

So if this is something God required, then, at least in the West, it seems like we would be in a situation where no one is able to follow the commandment of God, um, because the canonical commands are, are different.

Uh, do-do-do-do.

Penitent says Um, oh, oh, sorry.

A- actually, you know, Spencer, because you're coming from a Lutheran background, I'm gonna add this.

We have a lot of agreements on the first half of the sacrifice of the Mass, in terms of the bread and wine becoming the body and blood of Christ.

The major difference is whether it remains bread and wine as well.

Lutherans are gonna say it's in with an under.

Catholics are going to say it's actually transformed into the body and blood of Christ.

And, uh, second, uh, the second half of Mass, where this is offered to the Father, Luther is very against that, because he thinks this is, like, a re-sacrifice of Christ, where if you're familiar with, like, the Passover sacrifice, et cetera, the eating of the lamb is not a separate sacrifice.

It is the second step in the same sacrifice.

And once you get that distinction right, then the fact that we are uniting our sacrifice to that of Jesus, presenting this to the Father, and then receiving it so we're incorporated into Christ's sacrifice makes s- uh, sense with that.

And then, oh, the last point, 'cause somebody mentioned this, intinction is another way.

Like, E- Eastern Catholics as well as Eastern Orthodox will, uh, dip the host in the chalice and, and commune that way, or they'll have, like, a golden spoon that has a little bit of both.

And so you receive not just both, but both connected to one another, which is a sign of the resurrection.

The Western practice emphasizes more the crucifixion.

You have the separation of the body and blood symbolically by having the two species.

And the East symbolizes the resurrection 'cause you have them reunited, and you also, this is why they use leaven rather than unleavened.

Unleavened, it symbolizes the Last Supper and the Passover.

Leaven symbolizes the resurrection.

So there's two kind of different liturgical praxes, both of which are permitted by the Church, uh, which are emphasizing two true things, like Christ has died and Christ has risen.

All right.

Sorry, Penitent says, I'm Catholic.

My Protestant friends ask me about how Catholics can believe in Mary's sinlessness when 1 John talks about sin.

Yeah.

I, I mean, 1 John says, If we say we are without sin, we're liars, and that's true.

Uh, 1 John is not written to the Virgin Mary, and I think trying to take it in that way is You know, this is one of those things where trying to take passages that are not trying to speak about Mary and building your theology about whether Mary did or didn't sin off of that, uh, let's at least recognize that that's not a very sound theological method.

Um, I've given the example before recently that if I wanna know what the Bible says about adultery, I should look at what the Bible says about adultery, not look at general principles and say, Aha, it says, 'To the pure, all things are pure,' and then try to draw my own conclusions about what that means.

Uh, s- all means all.

All things are pure, so adultery is pure.

That would be a mistake.

Well, likewise, someone who says, well, you know, Romans says, All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, or, or 1 John says that you and I are sinners and therefore that means Mary's a sinner, we're doing the same step.

We're taking a general principle and, and trying to apply it in a way that is a little dangerous and misleading.

That doesn't mean that's always wrong, but we have to be very cautious with doing that.

Do we have some other evidence that points to a different interpretation being the correct one?

And we do.

That takes a much deeper conversation about, for one, Mary's role as, uh, the Ark of the Covenant.

Uh, for two, I would bring in the early Christians here.

I know there are people who wouldn't, but when the early Christian debate is whether Mary sinned once or not at all, principally, like, those are the two major positions, that's so far from how Protestants are reading the same story that it should give people pause to say, like, Wait a second.

Why does everyone else think it means this and I think it means that?

That should give us the humility to say, What were they seeing that maybe I'm not seeing, and are they right?

Because it turns out their reading makes much more sense from, like, the Jewish background, uh, where, like, the Ark has to be completely pure and s- not because we worship the Ark, but because the Ark carries the one we do worship.

Much more could be said on that, but hopefully that, that sketches it out.

I, I think it's just a bad principle to take, uh, a generic statement and applying that.

Uh, Kaulan Rupkay says, Is free will a created but immaterial thing in the world, or is it more of a relation between our rational being and God?

It's a power of the soul.

Like, the intellect and will are powers within the soul.

I think describing them as relations or beings is, would be a, a false categor- I don't think it's either of those things.

I think it's a power.

In the same way that Not in the same way.

Like, the sensible powers, you know, like the sight you have, isn't primarily There's obviously a relational aspect.

You are looking at something in the world, so you could talk about a relational dimension to it, but it is a power.

It's a, it's a potency, uh, that you have.Um, okay.

Can someone ban Catholic Christian?

He just said Q39 is overrated.

I hope you had the burn ends.

Actually, I hope you didn't have the burn ends there.

I hope you had the burn ends next time, and then write the longest, most contrite apology letter I've ever read.

I'm just teasing.

Uh, every barbecue place I've ever been, I find a little, uh Depends on the day.

Like, you get the wrong guy in the kitchen, and you can overcook stuff real easily.

Um, okay.

So yeah, you, that's your, that's your one warning.

Uh, so yeah.

Hope that helps.

Uh, Daniel says, What does it feel like to be filled by the Holy Spirit?

After I prayed the divine office and received Eucharist, I feel great.

That's a really good question.

Well, okay.

That, that can be a sign of divine con- um, consolation.

I almost said contemplation.

Consolation.

And particularly, this is gonna sound so insulting if I say this the wrong way, particularly at the early stages of the spiritual life, we might have like, a huge surge of that.

Not completely unlike how in the early stages of a relationship, like with a lady, you might have like, the butterflies in your stomach.

But love is not principally to be measured in the butterflies.

Well, likewise, uh, consolation is great at kind of getting you going, but God will almost certainly withdraw it.

And there will be times where you are filled with the Holy Spirit.

You're doing everything you can.

You're in friendship with God, and God is pleased with you, and you can feel dry.

Mother Teresa is kind of the famous example of this, where she would have probably despaired of her salvation if not for a priest really e- explaining this to her, that like, sometimes the reason you can't see anything is 'cause you're too close to the light.

And sometimes, like you, your emotions sort of fail because God is doing something radical in you, and there's something just tremendously beautiful about this, uh, from the outside.

It does not feel tremendously beautiful, I think, from the inside.

When you're doing the thing God made you to do, not because you're getting an emotional buzz from it, but in spite of the fact that you feel like crud the whole time.

And you're not wallowing that, you, you just keep enduring, doing the thing you're meant to do, and just giving God out of your complete and utter poverty, that is pleasing to Him.

That's true of people who are acting holy in the midst of desolation.

Also true in the- y- you know, 'cause a lot of times when people are feeling low, it's not actually because of desolation.

It's because of things like, it could be sin.

That might be a sign you need to go to confession.

It can also just be physical stuff, like, when I'm out in the sun too long, I have a great deal of difficulty not being very crabby with my family.

I had to apologize to my wife the first time we went to the beach together, 'cause I didn't bring sunglasses.

I'm from the Midwest, and it didn't occur to me that the sun was gonna be at the beach, and that the sand was gonna be reflective, and I was gonna be squinting the entire time.

And, um, it wasn't that much, I didn't, I didn't love it.

Uh, so I was kind of a grouch, and I had to apologize afterwards.

And I've since learned, if I get too much, like sun, this is terrible, right?

Or like, too little sleep, I can feel, uh, all of that, uh, kind of weight of, and that heaviness.

So the thing that I would normally do really joyfully, I now do with a, a fight against a sour attitude, we'll say.

And that's okay.

One of the things I found very helpful in this was, um, Dom Eugene Bolen's book, The Difficulties in Ment- Difficulties in Mental Prayer.

And in that, uh, he talks about the prayers we offer where we're fighting with distraction the whole time, that those might be the most pleasing to God, where the prayer that was really easy for us, it feels amazing, that might be a freebie God's giving us, but not be actually that meritorious, because it was super easy.

We did the thing we wanted to do.

Like, when I play dinosaurs with my three-year-old, my wife is very impressed at first.

And increasingly, she's begun to suspect that maybe I just am an overgrown man-child who likes playing with dinosaurs, and that's why I'm, only too willing to have like, great dad moments with the boys.

Uh, so likewise, you know, like when I, uh, play like princess stuff with my daughter, and I have to be like some petty noble or whatever, and I don't really understand the geopolitics, and it's never perfectly explained.

That's maybe better as a dad move.

Well, likewise in the eyes of God, right?

So hopefully that makes sense, that it's good to feel the feeling of being filled by the Spirit, and that often is a real and true thing, particularly as you're getting acquainted with the movement of God in your life.

But don't panic if you don't feel that.

Don't panic if you feel that for a while and it goes away.

Um, St. Ignatius of Loyola has great stuff on how to navigate in the highs and lows there.

Matt, it looks like you sent some money, so thank you very much, Matt.

Knight of Stridon says, Will you make a video on the Immaculate Conception soon?

If not, what arguments can be made to prove/point to it?

Yeah.

I think a lot of it involves coming to see Mary in a totally different lens.

So Oh, uh, Saber says, Do higher donations get priority?

No, I just am going in the order that Vanessa gives them to me.

Maybe they should, I don't know.

Uh, I'll try to get, I'll get to everybody, whether it's this time or if I have to move some to next week or get, or two, two weeks.

I'll get to everybody.

Um, what was I And also, I randomly will see things pop up on the chat screen, 'cause it's like scrolling by on the, on the side.

So occasionally I'll see that too.

You get freebies.

Um, okay, Knight of Stridon says, asked if I'll make a video on the Immaculate Conception.

I don't have any immediate plans to do so, but it would be good to.

I mean, it's an important idea.

One of the reasons early Christians cared so much about Mary being perpetually a virgin was because of this idea that she has to be this pure vessel for God, and there's a close connection between sexual purity and, and spiritual purity.

This is not them saying that like, sex is evil .

in the context of marriage, and it's just not.

It is rather that the Hebrew concept of holiness means to be pure or set aside for one purpose and one purpose alone.

So, uh, holiness in this c- is, like, being set aside for God.

But y- this idea is, is so important.

Like, the reason you can't have mixed fabrics is because it's unholy.

M- the, it's part cotton, part polyester.

Choose a lane.

It's, it's divided, and you can't have divided things.

The reason you can't eat shrimp was because, well, is it a fish?

Is it a bug?

What's it doing?

It, choose a lane.

It's divided.

And so to be holy is to belong entirely in the thing you're meant to be.

So, you know, uh, a cow is a cow.

Great.

I can't mix meat and dairy if I'm, uh, you know, following kosher laws, because that's a blend, it's divided.

So everything has to just be, like, purely the thing that it is.

Does that make sense?

I, I guess you can't answer that.

I mean, you can in the chat if you want.

But, like, that idea is critical.

So Mary is holy in one sense, in the sense that she is just given completely over to God, that she doesn't have other children.

All of, like, the reason the early Christians care so much about this is because they recognized that the Biblical concept of holiness, which is this ancient Jewish concept of holiness, is this being completely entrusted to God, like holy ground.

So that obviously means that not only is she not divided in the sense of bodily divided, where she has other kids, but she's also not spiritually divided, like she has, you know, sins over here that she's gonna do instead.

Uh, so that's at the heart of, of what we're talking about.

The, the hardest part about the Immaculate Conception, strangely enough, wasn't that.

The hardest part about the Immaculate Conception was the em- embryology parts, because there was a lot of confusion about how conception worked.

Uh, the ancient Christians, the biology of the day, not just ancient Christians, ancient everybody, thought that, like, every generation was carried in the father, uh, in the sperm, because this is how seed works for plants.

So you can find even reflections of this, uh, in the Bible, where it talks about being in the loins of Abraham.

That's, uh, what Paul was kind of alluding to.

That's not literally true.

I hope I'm not, uh, ruining that.

Or, sorry, I shouldn't really said Paul.

It's, uh, Hebrews 7:10, that the future generations are still in Abraham's loins when Abraham meets Melchizedek.

That's a biological kind of reference, and one that is not literally true, that you actually have, like, half the gametes, not the full child.

But you, you, like, understand where they're coming from.

Like, and it actually makes complete sense.

When you plant corn, it isn't like the corn is half the DNA of the soil and half the DNA of the kernel of corn.

No, it's all the kernel of corn.

The soil is just necessary for receiving it, and then it grows into what it already was in potency.

Well, that's how people thought human procreation works, and our language still reflects that.

We talk about fertility and potency and all of that, like, impotency, and all, all of, like, it, the whole thing is linguistically built around this false idea of how babies are made.

And so as a result, there's this question, well, was Mary sinless when she's, like, in Joachim's, um, body, in his loins?

And that question turns out to just be completely wrong, because that's not how the baby part works.

So there you go.

But yeah, I, I should make a video on the Immaculate Conception soon, probably.

Well, I'm not going to any time in the near future, but I need to do s- well, maybe in the, maybe as we get closer to the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.

Christopher said, Chatted with a seminary-trained Baptist who insisted that there was a remnant of Protestant believers before the 16th century.

There must have been, since the whole Church taught different Gospel.

Said it's in the Old Testament.

Yeah, I would just really lean into how much that doesn't work.

I- when Jesus talks about the people of God being like a city on a hill, that does not sit neatly with the idea that the people of God's just, like, hiding out somewhere.

And by the way, the people imagined, uh, by these remnant Baptists, the people they're imagining are the worst Christians.

I mean, think about it this way.

There's this idea, like, oh yeah, there are true Christians out there, but they didn't openly acknowledge their faith because they were cowards and didn't want to die, and they didn't evangelize anybody, and they didn't leave us any records.

They didn't write about it in anything we have preserved.

They didn't even, like, write it and, like, hide it somewhere for Joseph Smith to find later.

Uh, just nothing.

They did nothing.

Meanwhile, the bad old Catholic Church is going out and evangelizing everybody and telling them about Jesus and sending missionaries to every known country on Earth, while these holy pure Baptists are doing nothing but apparently dying, and not defending themselves intellectually or physically.

Uh, man.

What I I'll take the Catholic Church over your imaginary Baptists.

Plus, as soon as you tell me who you think those Baptists are, it turns out they're just, like, people who thought marriage was evil because they're, like, h- very heavily influenced by the Gnostics.

And I actually did a video back in the day.

You can find it, I think it's called, Did the Catholic Church Kill Millions of People?

Or let me see.

Did the Catholic Church Murder the True Church?

is the title of it, from, like, a year ago.

Is that the one?

Yeah, think it might be.

Uh, yeah.

Looks like it is .

and I just go through and look at all of these different alleged pre-Baptists, like the Donatists, and you can read their actual writings.

So it turned out they did re- leave writings, they're just not Baptists, they're crazy heretics.

And Baptists would be embarrassed to be associated with them if they knew enough church history to know, uh, what it was they believed.

All right, Matt said, On a positive note, the work you and Jimmy et cetera are doing I think shows In an era where so much is available with church fathers et cetera, it's easier to overcome misconceptions of the Catholic faith.

Yeah.

I agree with whoever it was who said Protestantism's best aid was the printing press, 'cause it allows like you to just spread ideas no matter how good or how bad very easily.

And its worst enemy was the internet.

That so many of the Protestant claims that you can find even in books, uh, from pretty recently, they, they just are so clearly not true that it takes a little bit of Googling.

Like, that's, I think is huge.

I just saw, um I won't say, I don't actually remember who it was.

I just saw, uh, a Protestant who was making claims about Church fa- Oh yeah, I do remember who it was, um, but it doesn't matter.

They were making claims about the Church fathers believing in Sola Scriptura, and this Oriental Orthodox guy said, Well, let's just go back and look and see if that's what it actually says in the text.

And you can just compare the kind of, um, copy-pasted lists of, oh, here's what they allegedly believed.

And then you can actually read it for yourself and be like, Oh no, it doesn't say that in the Greek, and this is a bad translation, or this is a fake, uh, like just a fake quote.

And that sort of stuff takes so little time to debunk now, that it's, it's actually a little embarrassing that people are still spreading false claims.

Now I, I realize, it, it happens.

I mean, you can, if you're not careful, you can just forget to cross some T's and dot some I's.

I've fallen for fake tweets before, and AI generated stuff and all that.

And as I get older, I think that's gonna get worse.

But So I don't wanna be, I don't wanna be harsh about it, but I will say, the internet gives us a lot of tools to, uh, dispel a lot of the fake stuff as well.

Patricia says, Can we get Joe together with Jonathan Pageau and Wes Huff for an, a long form discussion?

All three are gen- gentle, kind, and knowledgeable.

Let's make it happen.

That's very kind of you, I appreciate that.

I would love to.

Um, I don't think it is going to happen.

I, I don't think Wes is that interested in sitting down with me.

Um, he has been invited to debate the Protestant canon, and I don't think he's interested in debating it.

But he did just break like, I think, like a two-month silence to do a little video on the Protestant canon.

So I, I might take that as what I can get and respond to that, uh, because he had some good points and I think he has some, uh, bad points as well in there.

And I, I wanna highlight both.

So I might do that for this Thursday.

Batman Incorporated says, Any chance on doing a response to Tim Pool's recent video about Catholics?

If you haven't seen it yet, prepare to lower your, volume of your expectations.

God bless.

Happy belated Father's Day.

Thank you for the Happy Father's Day Is it something that it would be worthwhile to reply to?

I don't know the answer to that, but I'd be curious, um, what your thoughts were.

Uh, Daniel Ward said, uh, Vlad is the most popular evangelical on YouTube.

He's at 2 million subs.

Somehow I, uh, just completely missed him.

Uh, Do you pray the Divine Office?

Yes.

I, well, I used to pray all the hours.

Uh, like, not just in seminary, but before seminary.

It, I can't really do that as well now.

Uh, but what I try to do now is pray the second reading from Office of Readings, and at least morning or evening prayer, uh, as one of the ways of having a little more structured liturgical prayer in my, in my day.

And I'm, I really recommend that to anybody.

Um, there's other, other things as well that can be good.

But, yeah, the Divine Office is beautiful.

It takes a little bit of getting used to if you've got like the four-volume set, but if you get like the app iBreviary, and you download the, um, podcast, uh, Liturgy of the Hours, or singing the Liturgy of the Hours, any of these, Paul Rose, uh, Lalo Rose's brother, I believe, has a very good Liturgy of the Hours, uh, sung daily podcast.

Uh, Gabe asked me to help him understand what it means to be eternally generated.

Oh, well, it is 2:00.

Do I wanna try to get into eternal generation and spiration?

Or should I save that for, for the first question?

Both of those ideas sound bad.

Let me say this.

I'm gonna give a completely inadequate, uh, sketch.

But I don't wanna like overwhelm people next time by beginning with deep Trinitarian theology.

Oh, sorry, was talking about the price of Bibles in the ancient world.

I just heard a stat that it was like 400 I think actually Wes Huff talks about this, that in the early church, it was like $200,000 basically for a hand-printed Bible, just 'cause of how labor-intensive it was, and the materials and everything else.

Okay, Gabe's question though.

Um, the Father speaks the Son.

So there is a relationship of sending within the inner life of the Trinity as well as in the, what's it called, the economy.

So, like, the inner life and outer life of the Trinity, you have a reflection, that we don't have direct access in the inner life of God.

We come to know about the inner life of God from looking at the way God interacts with the world.

That's the shortened version.

And one of the ways God interacts with the world is that the Father sends the Son, not the other way around.

And John describes it as the Father speaking the Word, and through this speaking of the world, where the whole world comes into being.

And so, um, the Son is Son.

He's not Father.

He's not the one sending, he's not the one, um, generating in that sense.

He's not the one taking the, as it were, initiative in divine love.

But h- that doesn't mean that he is created, or that he comes to be at some point in time.

He's existed as long as the Father has existed.

Uh, the likewise with the, uh, spiration or the, the breathing of the Holy Spirit.

One of the reasons we emphasize that the Father, uh, breathes the Spirit through the Son, this is at the heart of what the Filioque controversy is actually about, is that we don't wanna just sound like the relationship of the Father to the Son is the same as the relationship of the Father to the Spirit 'cause that's not true.

And we also need some way of delineating the dis- the relationship of the Son and the Spirit.

And, uh, if you don't have something like that, then it's not clear what connection there is between the Son and Spirit.

Um, so I would say given all of that, we have Or maybe let me give you this, this piece.

God is love, and what it is to be love, He doesn't become love at some point.

It isn't that God suddenly goes from being just, like, a dude waiting around to love.

That's not it.

God is love and always has been love.

And the action of love involves a lover and a beloved.

And so the presence of lover and beloved has been in God, not just in the world, but in God from all eternity.

And that's what eternal begetting and spiration is all pointing to, that there is this dynamism between the Father and the Son, where the Father pours out everything of what it is to be God upon the Son except for fatherhood 'cause He can't give that.

It's who He is.

And the Son responds with this equal infinite outpouring of love.

And the fructus, the fruit of that love is the Holy Spirit.

It's not just an impersonal gift.

It is personal, and, and personal in the fullest sense of that.

Those are theologically deep waters.

And I hope that yesterday you got at least a taste of that in Trinity Sunday.

I think this is something where there's a beautiful chance to do some of the deep dive.

And sometimes, uh, homilists are a little bit afraid or, or ignorant about how to do it well.

But my own pastor said, uh, we should be mindful of Frank Sheed's description of a mystery, where it's not like, Oh, this is just a big unsolved case.

It's more like you're in an art gallery that is an infinitely long hallway.

And so you go deeper and deeper and deeper.

And wherever you go, you uncover, like, one gallery after another.

And you'll never exhaust it all, but just immeasurable riches everywhere you turn.

That's how the inner life of God works.

That, that is how all of this should be understood.

Um All right.

And then, okay, well, because Gabe had another Trinitarian question, and in light of liturgically where we fall, I wanna answer that as well.

He said, Can you explain how Trinitarians explain Revelation 1:1, where God gives Jesus the revelation?

Why Godhood only to the Father?

Yeah.

That's It's a good question because, uh, there is this sending, as I alluded to before, where the Father reveals through the Son, but the Son is also the revelation Himself.

So this is part of the, uh, ongoing kind of mission of the Son in the world.

So Hebrews 1 says, Many in various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days He has spoken to us by a Son.

So He speaks to us by the Son, but then Hebrews says, He reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of His nature, upholding the universe by His word of power.

So we have this idea that Christ isn't just some messenger.

He is also in some mysterious way the message itself.

Um, he is the image of the invisible God.

Uh, what I'm blanking on what ver- oh, Colossians 1:15.

I was thinking it was 1:14.

Colossians 1:15 says that Christ is the image of the invisible God.

And that is really critical because it's not saying that He's the image of God the way you and I are made in the image of God.

It's that he is the actual image of God, not just made in it, but he is the one we are made in, in a real way.

That it is through him that the universe comes into being.

Uh, so his relationship is radically unlike the relationship of created things.

All right.

Shh, shh, shh, shh.

Okay, I'm gonna do a couple more 'cause I don't know.

I've got, I've got the juice, if, if you've got it.

Dennis says, Rosicucans claimed to be custodians of the esoteric teachings of Jesus Christ as revealed to his apostles.

What do you make of this notion?

This has always been rejected by Christians.

And, like, they say You see this most clearly in the Gospel of John, uh, where Jesus is te- teaching openly.

Um And th- like he really dispels the idea that there's a, a secret set of teachings 'cause this is the, uh, the whole idea of Gnosticism, right?

Like, there's a secret Gnosis, and that has, like, knowledge.

And, uh, you see this in the early opponents, so, uh, against heresies.

Saint Irenaeus really heavily cracks down upon this as well.

Um, so yeah.

It, d- and one of the points that Irenaeus makes is, if Jesus had a bunch of secret teachings, who do you think would know it?

And his point is, like, well, the Pope would know it, right?

And yet the Pope says there's no secret teachings, so therefore there's no secret teachings.

I'm obviously heavily paraphrasing him, but he makes that point.

That's one of the reasons he traces the apostolic succession of the Bishop of Rome in book three, chapter three is to show these guys don't know what you're talking about.

You There's also a very, a good letter that Irenaeus wrote called Against, uh, Florian or Florinus?

What's it called?

Um Yeah, Florinus.

It's really important, 'cause Florinus was a fellow student of Saint Polycarp, the Bishop of Smyrna, where Irenaeus had grown up.

And Florinus had become a Gnostic, he'd become a believer in these secret teachings.

And Irenaeus's letter is like, Hey, dummy, uh, you and I both learned Christianity from Polycarp, whom knew the Apostle John and studied under him.

Remember how Polycarp didn't know anything about Gnosticism?

Doesn't that kind of prove that there's no such thing as this secret set of teachings?

Again, heavily paraphrasing, but that's his point.

And you can make that point.

One of the reasons I think we need to be very serious about the teachings of the first 200 years of Christianity, and when this is why I focus on that period in my book, The Early Church Was the Catholic Church, is in that period people could still make that move.

Uh, they could say, Yeah, I actually know someone who knew the apostles and they didn't have secret teachings.

Otherwise, like you can't disprove that from scripture alone very easily, 'cause someone could just say, Well sure, that's what the public teaching says.

But the whole point is we've got these other private teachings that aren't what the public gets to know about.

Um, ba boom, boom, boom.

John says, Do you agree with Pope Francis that Christians and Muslims are spiritual brothers and Islam is a religion of peace?

Also, what about Abrahamic family house?

Don't like the Abrahamic family house, although there is some precedent for things like the U.S.

Military Academy, where you'll have a multi-denomination/multi-religion, multi-faith, uh, kind of prayer space.

And I get why in some context that kind of thing can make sense.

So you've got like a Catholic chapel and a Protestant church and a mosque, and I think a synagogue in the same place in Colorado Springs.

And, you know, 'cause whoever's the cadet needs to be able to go to church on Saturday or Sunday, or whatever.

Uh, so those kind of things, I, I get it.

Don't love it.

I don't think we wanna like lean into that as an ideal.

In terms of being spiritual brothers, it so heavily depends what we mean by that.

The term is used in different ways, that there's, uh, types of brotherhood created by creation, there are types of brotherhood created specifically by baptism.

Muslims share the first, not the second.

Is there a kind of affinity like brotherhood created by following after the God of Abraham?

Sure.

Uh, but w- we can use the same word in different senses.

So if you say like, Is a non-Christian a brother?

Well, Paul would say sometimes yes and sometimes no.

It depends heavily on, on what sense of brotherhood we mean.

Because God is Father in different ways.

Uh, Folusi says, If the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, and Mary's the mother of Jesus and the spouse of the Holy Spirit Now spouse of the Holy Spirit is something that isn't like a Catholic teaching.

I get where it's coming from, and you'll find some support in like Maximilian Kolbe, uh, Saint Maximilian Kolbe.

But y- you know, it's, let's be clear that like the church does not teach that you have to say like, The Holy Spirit is the spouse of Mary, 'cause we, we want to honor, I mean, it's day after Father's Day, we wanna honor Saint Joseph, who has this special role that is not replaced, uh, by the Holy Spirit.

But fine.

Doesn't that make the Holy Spirit its own grandpa?

No.

But I think that was a joke.

Uh, Froghus Thomisticus said, I'd be interested for you to share your views on reprobation after that Redeemed Zimmer episode.

Do you agree with the conclusions of Saint Thomas Aquinas' Prima Pars question 23, article, uh, 225?

I actually just did, and I did not actually just do.

In the video coming out on Tuesday, I talk about the love of God and how that, like what it means to say God loves or hates anyone in the Hebrew sense of that, which is actually quite different than I think people realize.

That God is described as hating someone if they break the covenant, mm, because that's a kind of a mistranslation, uh, of sana, like the, the word being used there, sanae, um, that you actually, if you understand that with anything like the range of meaning of the English love or hate, you're, you're eventually misreading the passage.

So that's gonna change how we read a lot of the underlying texts.

Uh, with the Thomistic view of predestination, I would say read it in conjunction with the other stuff Aquinas said about predestination.

You, there's a sense, I mean, certainly there's predestination in the singular sense is affirmed in his church teaching, that, that it has to be very clearly upheld.

Uh, predestination in the negative sense as like God actually willing that some people not go to heaven and, and simply put, uh, is not compatible I think with either Catholic teaching or just the scriptural data itself.

Um, but I was gonna say for Thomas's own views, the Summa Contra Gentiles book four, uh, question 159, it's pretty simple.

It's the two, uh, paragraphs where he explains how it is that people can go to hell, and on the one hand say that this is 'cause they, they didn't Like, we, we have to say on the one hand, salvation is a divine grace.

Like, it is by grace you are saved.

That has to be true.

So then you say, Well, what about the person who isn't saved?

Is that because God didn't give them grace?

And Aquinas says, No.

God did give them grace and they refused it.

And so we can talk about them being predestined in the sense that God foreknew that they were not going to, uh, accept these graces.

And so there's this big question in the history of Thomistic thought as to Thomas's own views about whether predestination, uh, is in view of foreseeing merits or not, particularly in view of reprobation.

That question is an interesting one.

I, I think many of Thomas's successors may not be accurately understanding Thomas's own views on this.

Um, but all of that is, I think, much more downstream from, from the question of what's actually true.

'Cause there's two questions.

One, is this true?

And two, is this what Thomas thought was true?

Uh, so okay, hopefully that helps.

Spencer says, About to start at the early Church of the Catholic Church.

I hope this is good as Pope Peter.

If I convert, I'm buying multiple copies of Pope Peter to lend out as apologetic material.

Praise God.

Spencer and I have two reasons for wanting you to convert, but the first one is still the, the big one.

It's for your own good.

And there's something so beautiful about Catholicism.

It's, uh, incommunicable, and that doesn't preclude there also being all sorts of messy, bumpy, and everything else kind of aspects too.

But I, I'm so grateful to be Catholic.

Modern Paper says, Do you have any background in statistics?

I noticed you were the most well-spoken and well-read when the Pew Research, uh, came out.

Statistician myself.

I'm very honored you say that.

I love stats stuff.

I Okay, here.

Fine.

Cards on the table.

I'm a stats dork in a completely amateurish kind of way.

But Nate Silver's Silver Bulletin is, uh, was for a long time the only Substack I was paying for at all, just to read more about stats.

Uh, and you know, sometimes it's sports, sometimes it's politics, sometimes just, like, understanding how stats work, uh, like, uh, what is it?

Bayesian theoretical stuff, all that.

I find that stuff really interesting.

And I'm, I try to be very careful with it.

I've known people who've gone on to become statisticians and have, like, been able to bounce stuff off of them before.

So I, I do try to, um Yeah, I, I j- I try to do that well.

Oh, I'm sorry.

John, you, you asked already if, if Islam is a religion of peace.

I take Benedict's view that you can see a change seemingly in Muhammad in the writings of Islam.

I honestly think calling it a religion of peace or not, is in some ways kind of a waste of time.

And this is also why I don't care deeply about the debate of, like, who's a true Calvinist.

Because Islam and Calvinism and these things are not these immutable divine realities.

So if tomorrow 100% of Muslims decide they're gonna believe a different thing, that becomes the view of Islam.

And to say that it's not is to give Islam a greater status than it deserves as a man-made system.

And s- so I think that's, uh, what I would stress.

Like, I think when people say Islam's a religion of peace, they're not making a sociological claim, like, Oh, Muslims get along with everyone they're with.

Clearly, that's not always been the case.

Um, I think they're more trying to push the practicing Muslims in a direction of peace, drawing on the elements within their theological system that, that could lead them in that direction.

Uh, Jake said, If you had to choose, who do you think authored Hebrews?

Bergsma thinks it was Paul and Luke working together.

That's actually a really interesting theory of them kind of doing a collaborative.

I have no idea.

I mean, it certainly seems to be a companion of Paul, if not Paul himself.

The style is different enough that it probably isn't Paul.

It doesn't read like a Pauline epistle in terms of the very personal kind of greeting.

Uh, this could also, though at least somewhat owe to, uh, the intended recipients, where it's not being written to a bunch of Gentiles.

But the fact it's being written to the Hebrews might also argue against it being Pauline, given Paul's own mission.

Uh, so yeah, I think Luke is a perfectly plausible sort of theory, or any number of other people who were, uh, associates of Paul, deeply fluent in what we might call Pauline Christianity.

But there are still some unique theological notes in Hebrews.

Like, it emphasizes the priesthood of Christ in the way no other book in the New Testament does.

So yeah, just a guess.

The Great WAH says, Can you speak to whether or not the disciples were baptized in their Trinitarian form, or if Pentecost is that for them?

So okay, early Scilabax, before he went totally heretical and crazy, he talked about sacraments as an encounter with Christ.

And I think that's a very good understanding of what we're t- talk about when we talk about sacramental theology.

That sacraments are guaranteed ways of meeting Jesus, they are ways of encountering Christ.

And so as a result, um, the apostles have that in some sense.

We are given no details about, like, what their water baptism looks like.

But the thing that baptism is pointing to is, uh, present in the life of the apostles.

Like, if we understand why baptism matters, it's this way we meet Christ, then they have that.

And I think if you have that kind of theology, then something like baptism of desire also makes sense.

But still, it would seemingly be, uh, absurd for the apostles to go out baptizing, as we see them doing in John 3 and John 4, without themselves having been baptized.

That seems ridiculous.

So that plus Jesus' reference at the Last Supper to the fact that they've already bathed seems to point to the fact that they were baptized.

And we are not told of the form of baptism that the apostles do, uh, either how they received baptism or, significantly, the kind of baptism that they were doing as they're going around preaching in John 3 and John 4, that there is something, uh, mysterious about this.

But it seems like it has to have been a Trinitarian baptism, because they're not re-baptized.

Whereas the people who got John's baptism in Acts, they have to get re-baptized.

And one of the things that Paul brings up when encountering these people is they haven't heard of the Holy Spirit, 'cause they've only got the baptism of John.

So what do we glean from that?

That a Christian baptism involves some invocation of the Holy Spirit.

That seems to point to it being, uh, Trinitarian.

But that, we're, we're putting pieces together that are not explicitly spelled out.

Mm, but it makes sense.

Even if they didn't have a full understanding of what it means to say Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Jesus was clearly claiming to be the Son, and the notion of the Spirit of God was already something the Jews believed in.

The tri-personal nature, that had to still kind of be fleshed out, so to speak.

Uh, but they wouldn't be that crazy to imagine Jesus saying, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

All right.

Jake says, Bergsma calls Hebrews the work- words of Luke with the heart of Paul.

Yeah, I think that, that seems pretty plausible.

Um, stylistically, I don't know how similar Okay, here's the thing.

What, what we have of Luke is biographical, and Hebrews is so much not a biography that it's hard to know how different, um, to expect Luke to be when he switches genres.

All right.

Angelos Schizou says, If the saints have bodily preservation, then why do we apply wax on them?

So not all the saints are incorruptible.

Some of them are.

And incorruptibility is sometimes a seemingly permanent gift, other times just a temporary one.

I did go disturbingly deep dive on human decomposition and was, uh, well, just waiting for the FBI to, uh, knock on my door, because I was having to Google, like, uh, uh, uh, at what speed human bodies decomposed in different soil types and everything else.

The stuff I do for you.

Uh, very weird, very disturbing stuff.

Didn't realize it, I guess it makes sense.

Uh, it is pretty much like papyrus.

And maybe that's not a respectful enough way of saying, you know, the nature of the body, but if you're in a damp environment, if, if there's groundwater that leaks in and all that, it's often pretty short work for your body before decompensat- decomposition.

So when, um, somebody is unearthed months and years later and they look like they died very recently, we want to preserve that.

And so sometimes there will be a thin layer of wax placed over their body, not to create an artifice, but to preserve, this is what we found when we uncovered their body.

'Cause it could be that now, uh, freshly exposed to the elements, uh, there will be some additional threats from decomposition.

We're not claiming their bodies, like, indestructible.

Like if you find the incorruptible body of a saint and, uh, like, burn that body, it'll still burn.

But yeah, so this, this came up in the Sister Wilhelmina thing.

Actually, I, I'll share with you if I can, the yeah, the taphonomist.

Uh, oh, sorry.

It was actually a biological anthropologist who reached out to me.

So I did a, a episode called Was This Nun's Body Miraculously Preserved?

And I argued tentatively, it seems like Sister Wilhelmina might be an incorruptible.

But again, incorruptibility can imply temporarily or, or longer.

And then somebody reached out to me, and I'll, I'll just read you the email.

He said, Hi, Joe.

I just finished listening to the Shamans Potpourri episode on Sister Wilhelmina and her incorruptibility.

I'm a biological anthropologist who did all the forensic anthropology in the state of Montana between late 1991 and around 2005, with occasional cases since, somewhere around 200 cases total.

I'm not an expert in taphonomy, but I have had students and sat on the MA thesis committees with other students who have done research on taphonomy in Montana.

This, by the way, is exactly how experts talk, where they just spend way too much time explaining why they're not really the best experts 'cause there's someone in an even more specialized way.

Whereas, like, YouTubers are like, Yeah, yeah.

I've heard about this.

This is amazing.

I'm, I'm total expert.

So they already, like, if you wanna ever convince someone you're an expert, just spend 30 minutes explaining that you're not an expert.

This is how Germans are when they talk about how their English isn't good, and then you're just like, Your English is better than mine.

But anyway.

He says, Montana is, of course, uh, different from the Missouri climate, but not as different as, say, Florida, Tennessee, or Texas.

Everything you said about forensic human taphonomy was exactly on the mark.

You did a great job of presenting the findings of taphonomy.

It's definitely not an exact science, but it has some regularities to it.

I've seen the body of Sister Wilhelmina on TV, and it is definitely much better preserved than what I would expect for a non-embalmed body after four years of burial.

I obviously can't go so far as to say that the preservation is miraculous.

I also can't say that it's not.

What I noticed from the brief view on TV is that the part of her body I can see, i.e.

her face, seems very dry to me, as if there has been some desiccation.

You might also describe this as mummification.

However, it's hard to say much from just seeing the body without a side-by-side view at what she looked like in life or immediately after death.

There are forensic anthropologists in Missouri who could be consulted if the church wished to do so.

In any case, impressive f- episode.

Uh, anyway.

Th- uh, he's very nice.

But it, it gives you a sense of kind of what a complicated science that is.

So what we're doing with that, we don't wanna prematurely declare someone an incorruptible, because there's all sorts of reasons someone could actually not be.

And I think the wax is a way of kind of just settling the state of play, as it were, saying, This is what they looked like when we found them.

Um, long answer, but it let me geek out about an area that I know very little about, but, uh, I find very interesting.

Um, Oscar said, Joe, in your view, what do you think is the primary reason Christians fall away from the faith?

I would say they, they don't have an intimate enough relationship with Jesus, that if Christianity remains at the level of ideas, then it will fall away.

It'll fade away.

If it just becomes a propositional thing, um, that's a serious problem, and that's not a, a good You know, they're like, Why do couples drift apart?

Well, they stop talking.

Uh, and sh- you know, that's pretty much why Christians fall away as well.

They, they stop talking.

They, they allow other things to get in the way, whether it's sin or just other distractions, or they just never had that kind of intimacy in their encounter with Christ.So I, I think that's not the only reason, of course, but that, that's a big one.

And it makes you much more susceptible to things like scandal and confusion and sin and all that when it comes up.

Luke says, Hey Joe, love your content.

You converted me from Protestantism.

Praise God.

I, I'm only an instrument here.

Uh, Have you seen Christian Wagner's take on how double predestination understood correctly is Catholic dogma?

I There's a form of double predestination that can be affirmed as a Catholic, and there is, uh, certainly a Catholic dogmatic belief in predestination, which you can see reflected in the catechisms description on predestination.

I'm not familiar with Wagner's claim that double predestination is itself dogma.

Uh, and I wanna know a lot about what he He's, uh, very precise typically in how he speaks, so I, I imagine he means that in a very particular kind of way.

Um, but no, there, there's And actually, I just I, oh, I was trying to say this earlier.

I've got this upcoming video talking about love and hate in the Bible, but at the very end it links to a video I did like maybe two years ago, um, called Were the Early Christians Wrong about Predestination.

And it was, uh, yes.

Yeah, Were the Early Christians Wrong about Predestination, looking at the pre-Augustinian Christians on it, and then asking the question of what Augustine's own views were.

I think that can be helpful background, that the early Christians clearly don't believe in anything like the Calvinist idea of that term, but there is clearly a sense of predestination that, that the church rightly affirms.

Um, ba-bum bum.

And then significantly, like biblically when we talk about predestination, it never means predestination to hell.

Uh, Father James, Barely Protestant, said, Interested in a debate with me on Apostolicae Curae?

I mean, why?

I don't under- I, I don't know enough about what you would say in response to it from your own perspective, but like, the Pope has the competency to say who does and doesn't have valid sacraments.

He says the Anglicans don't have valid sacraments.

So as a Catholic, of course I'm gonna take that view, and it's, it's held at, uh, about the highest level of teaching authority, uh, as the CDF, uh, clarified in the Professio Fidei, uh, issue, uh, with Ratzinger.

So apas- absolutely null and utterly void holy orders because you've changed it from a priestly ordination to being more like a Protestant ministerial ordination.

But if you're someone who doesn't accept the traditional teaching on priesthood of like what it looked like, and doesn't respect the authority of the Pope to even determine the form of sacraments, um, like it just seems like a weird thing even have an opinion on.

Like, of course an Anglican thinks Anglican or- or like orders are valid.

But that, it just seems kind of circular in terms of its thinking.

So I mean, I'm not super interested in that debate with you.

I, 'cause I don't see, uh, how it would be fruitful.

Um, but maybe I could be convinced on that.

Um, but the next debate I'd love to do is if I can find someone kind of reputable with a, a decent size audience who's well-respected, who will be willing to try to defend that there are exactly 66 books in the Bible.

And so far I've had a little trouble finding somebody who, uh, you know, but we're still looking.

It, I mean, it'll be interesting.

Um, yeah, Wes Huff, I don't think he's, like, open to debating it, but he seems like he wants to argue it.

So I'd love to if we, we actually just like have an actual debate on it.

Uh, Jose said, Would you be able to make a video on church history from different points of view?

Catholic and outside sources if possible.

Would you ever collab with Sam Shamoon?

Um, I don't know what you mean by church history from different points of view.

I've talked a little bit about like church controversies, where sometimes you'll You know, so one of the things I argued is that there are certain early church controversies where Protestants of like a low church variety don't seem to have a clear side.

You know, like there's a debate over which is the true Pope.

Um, a, a Protestant would have to be like, Neither.

Or there's a debate between the Christians and the Gnostics about the sacraments, or there's a debate with the Donatists about which priests are able to validly, you know, consecrate the different sacraments.

And on a lot of these, your ordinary evangelical is, uh, gonna just be like, Everybody's wrong.

Everybody's wrong.

And that, that seems kind of absurd.

Um, and so I've, I've done that.

If that's what you mean by different points of view, then I have.

Uh, if, if you mean something different, I, maybe.

Uh, Catholic and outside sources.

Yeah, I try to mention I actually, if you, if you watch, I try to bring in a lot of non-Catholic, especially like historians and scholars.

When they, when I go through like a subject area, I'll often either say, Let's look at the church fathers themselves, or it, I'll say, um, you know, Here's this well-respected Protestant historian telling you, like, everybody in this period believed the Catholic thing.

Because from law, the Usually, like non-sworn testimony is not admitted into evidence, but there's an exception if it's a statement against party interest.

Like if somebody is saying something that's actually embarrassing to their side, that carries more weight.

So I try to do that as well, where if somebody is saying the Catholic side is right and they're not Catholic, I, I try to prioritize that.

Uh, James says, Apostolicae Curae is internally inconsistent.

I mean, it's not.

Like the idea you've just like cracked some internal incoherence in this document that nobody else has found, I think it's, uh, it's not a very serious position.

Uh, but go for it.

I mean, if you think that there's like a great case, like go make that case.

But if you can find a bunch of other people and this becomes like a big movement where people think you've got a really good argument, I'll probably respond to it.

But otherwise, I, I just don't take that very seriously.

It just seems more like arrogance than, than an actual theological position.

Um-All right.

I mean, rarely is anybody's position obviously internally incoherent in a few pages.

It happens, but it's usually people who are not well-lettered and careful, and an official, like, uh, I don't know, papal decree that's been carefully, like, proofread and screened and is making, like, a legal-style argument and stylistically is set up to look like a British legal brief to make it more understandable for the I don't know, man.

I just don't think that's a, uh, probably you're, probably you haven't cracked it.

All right.

Malachi says, How do you go about proving how the long preservation of the church proves that it's divine since we've had help from secular arms?

Well, we've often had very much not help.

We've been under extreme persecution for a long time.

This is one of those things that I think, uh, has to, uh, be just l- something you kind of, like, you either understand or don't.

Like, the people have been trying to persecute and eradicate the church for a very long time.

And not just Christianity in some notional abstract sense, but the church as an actual lived reality that was a threat to secular authorities like the Roman Empire.

Like, the Roman Empire was not interested in getting, getting rid of the philosophy of Christianity or a theological system.

It's, uh, focused specifically on, uh, getting rid of the Church, which was like a rival power to itself.

And so either that is or isn't something the Holy Spirit has, has aided the Church in.

If it is, and for 2,000 years the Church hasn't been destroyed, then that debunks all the theories of apostasy that seem like a pretty necessary precondition for a lot of forms of Protestantism.

And if not, then the Church is just weirdly lucky, because even, you know, if you're imagining, like, the Middle Ages or something, the Pope is still not a huge military, like, even when he has secular arms.

Like, the Holy Roman Empire invades Italy multiple times.

And if, like, anyone who thinks, like, the Pope secured his authority with secular power, it's not really true.

Um, I, Father Jack, I'm gonna have to just probably, uh, disagree with you there.

I do, I knew, uh, John J. Hughes, Father John J. Hughes, who, who became, of course, a, a Catholic priest and received a conditional ordination because he recognized the question of the validity of his own orders as an Anglican.

Um, I actually had dinner with him when we talked about all of this.

I also wouldn't go to him He, he has certain things.

He was against the Church's teaching against homosexual, uh, practice seemingly and said that the Church's teaching was intrinsically disordered.

So I wouldn't point to him as some great expert who can, like, neutrally observe this kind of stuff.

In certain areas where it got a little close to home for him with both Anglicanism and homosexuality, I think his own biases, uh, got in the way of his usual scholarly detachment.

Okay.

Um, Louisa Oven said, I've wondered for a while now.

God is of course immutable, however, people often speak of Jesus becoming human.

Surely this is a change.

Oh, yeah.

It's a great question.

It would be if Jesus becoming human meant that there was a change on the divine side.

There isn't a change in Jesus in his divinity, and there isn't a change in Jesus in his personality.

He remains a divine person.

He is not As strange as this is to say, he is not a human person and is not a human being in that sense.

He's a divine person who takes to himself a full human nature, body and soul, with all the powers of, uh, you know, of, of a human.

And in that, uh, he doesn't change in his divinity.

Something new happens, but it is created from nothing.

So even the change is not he was just like a human who then becomes divine.

That would be a heresy.

It is rather that his humanity comes into existence.

So hopefully that's, that's clear.

It is a, a very common thing where the way we talk about it is a little imprecise.

12 Pillars asks, Will you make a video on the upcoming anniversary of Nicaea?

That's a good idea.

I hadn't really thought about that.

That might be a good, um, topic.

Okay.

Ike says, What to do if drawn to Gnosticism/Perennialism?

Or, or, is that Perennialism?

I think just recognize that Christ came to save everyone, the great and the small alike.

And so as a result, we want to be very cautious of anything that doesn't stress that, doesn't emphasize that.

That you don't need a bunch of secret teachings.

You don't need any of that stuff to follow Jesus.

And as a result, uh, any system that imagines Jesus was tricking the greater crowds and actually gave his secret teachings to this select group, but that elect group claimed not to have his secret teachings and didn't tell anyone they had the secret teachings, I think there's big reasons to question that, I mean, pretty obvious reasons to question that.

Jesus stresses that he was in the temple teaching openly day after day.

So I don't think you can square the Gnostic claims about God with Jesus' claims about himself.

As a result, Gnosticism was endlessly factious.

Like, there were constantly in-fights within Gnosticism, uh, that, you know, as a result they, they couldn't agree on anything.

So that's another red flag.

Like, if, if Gnosticism is true, which of the many various forms of Gnosticism are true?

And since everything is being adjudicated by, like, secret knowledge, there's no real way for reason to enter and settle the debate.Um, oh, cool.

Modern Papist says, I studied under Nate's father at MSU.

Very cool.

I redacted the name, for the record.

Um, Yuba G says, Student going into medicine, Protestant bioethics seems less consistent than Catholic bioethics.

Could this stem from an issue with sola scriptura?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, there's several issues.

But, um, without a Magisterium capable of adjudicating ever-changing areas Yeah, like, b- look, a couple guys from Catholic Answers, not me, but, uh, Jon and Chris who, who kind of run Catholic Answers, went to an AI ethical conference at the Vatican.

The Church is constantly in this situation of having to adjudicate these new challenges, uh, that, y- you know, emerge on the horizon.

Bioethics, AI, all this stuff.

And if you're going off of just what does scripture say about, you know, bioethics, or the Industrial Revolution, or human cloning, or AI, you won't find anything there.

And so you need something more sophisticated.

Not new revelation, but a systematic and principled way of, of saying when and how do we apply these principles, and what does that mean?

Which requires, number one, that you have a certain view of the relationship of faith and reason.

And number two, that you have a kind of rigorous theological tradition and philosophical tradition to be able to draw upon.

Like a lot of what we're doing, in a lot of contexts, involves things like the principle of double effect.

And so you have I've talked to plenty of Protestants who reject double effect, who see no difference between, uh, allowing someone to die and, and es- and then, like, directly killing them.

Those are If you can't get that distinction right, you're in, you're in trouble.

And so, there's all sorts of, uh, kind of theological issues where, where this comes up.

Um, Vanessa, real quick.

How are you doing?

I've, I'm making you work a lot longer than you thought you were going to, but I'm, I'm enjoying the conversation, and it seems like there's still a bunch of people around.

Uh, okay, great.

Well, I'm gonna keep going then for a little bit.

12 Gauge says, I heard it claimed that the Greek and Latin words for justification have different meanings.

Therefore, Catholics twisted the theology of justification with Council of Trent.

Have you heard this before?

I have heard this before.

It's not true or fair.

Um, now it is true that the, uh, like even the term justification and sanctification, they are structured both in Latin and in English as parallels.

Because the earliest translators of the Bible into Latin understood that just as you're made holy in sanctification, you're also made just in justification.

That it's not a legal declaration.

And that parallelism that you find explicitly in Latin and in English and in most languages today, you don't find that explicitly in the Greek.

The Greek could mean to declare, uh, or could mean to make.

It, you aren't gonna solve that one just by looking at a dictionary definition of the word.

That's not how most theological disputes are, are going to be solved.

This is not a trick at the Council of Trent, and in fact, this was pretty standard Latin for a thousand years.

Uh, rather, uh, as Alster McGrath says in Iustitia Dei, this idea that you're simply declared, and not actually made just, in justification is a theological novelty.

The divorce of justification and sanctification is a theological novelty of the 16th century.

So if anyone is coming along and changing things, it is exclusively, as McGrath, the Calvinist, says, it is a Calvinist, and, you know, more broadly the Protestant side of the equation.

But yeah, there's no trick there.

John Davis, you already asked if, uh, I think Islam is a religion of peace.

I'm not I've already answered that question.

I don't know what else you're You're wanting just like a yes or no?

I gave you a longer answer.

Um, also how old do you think Aisha was when Muhammad consummated her, with her?

Uh, she says she was nine, which is, which is gross.

But that's based on a Hadith, and I know there are some Muslims who, who will disagree with that.

That's if my memory all serves correctly.

Daniel Ward says, What do you think of Papal minimalism?

So I need to do more reading on this, and I have to just plead partial ignorance.

The little bits I understand, that the Pope has this duty to, uh, govern in a way where he is governing with the, uh, rest of the teaching authority of the Church, and that we find this kind of leadership throughout 2,000 years.

If that's what's being said, yeah, I think that's absolutely correct.

If something else is being said, I might have a different kind of view.

But there seems to be some notion, and, uh, we've seen this borne out both in word and deed, that just because the Pope is the head doesn't mean he should rule in a kind of, like, autocratic style.

And every time Popes try to do that, now included, ordinary Catholics will push back.

And so if your understanding of Papal authority is just reading the documents of Vatican I without any broader historical context, you might come away with a, a skewed perspective.

Partly because Vatican I is kind of an incomplete council.

By that I mean, the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and Vatican I abruptly pauses, and then never unpauses.

And so it was actually, uh, John XXIII who closes the First Vatican Council so he can open Vatican II.

Because he went to call a council, and was like, Well, technically, the last one was never finished.

So it's kind of like the Korean War, where there's no technical end date to the Korean War, w- we just have a very long ceasefire.

Not really like that, but you get the idea.

And so as a result, Vatican I talks a lot about the role of the papacy, and then the rest of the ecclesiology of the Church is sort of put on pause.

And so someone taking just that partial truth without the rest might come to the wrong conclusion.Like if, if your book on the Trinity starts with the oneness of God, and then the author has to go fight in the Franco-Prussian War, and then never comes back and finishes it, you might come away with the wrong theology, because you're viewing part of the evidence without the bigger picture.

So one of the things Vatican II does is emphasizes a need to govern in union with the bishops, and the bishops explicitly are not the vicars of the Pope.

They are successors to the Apostles in their own right.

Um, I saw a certain then, um, controversial bishop, now former ordinary, uh, say that on Twitter, that, I'm not the vicar of the Pope, I'm a successor to the Apostles.

And people called him a schismatic.

It's like, no, no, that's explicitly church teaching.

Like that's So you'll have Catholics who defend an exaggerated view of the papacy that is not what the church has ever taught, including at Vatican I. And so if, if papal minimalism is pushing back against that, I think that's, that's all fine and good.

It might be doing something else, in which case ƒʋᵉʷᵗᵗᵃᵈʰ.

Uh, Ben says, Why do the Catholic and Orthodox views on purgatory differ?

Is it merely a difference of precision?

Did the Orthodox view change after the Great Schism?

This is one of those things where the core idea, one has to be made completely righteous to stand in the presence of the living God without any attachment to sin whatsoever, that's very clearly in scripture.

Like nothing impure is gonna stand before God.

That leaves the question, what happens to those of us who die in friendship with God?

So we're not going to hell, but not completely purified.

And so the notion is that there's some kind of purification that happens before we stand before God.

And this seems to be what Saint Paul is pointing to, or at least echoes what Saint Paul is pointing to in First Corinthians, where he talks about those who built on the foundation of Christ.

Some have built on it well and will receive a reward.

Others have built on it poorly, and they'll be saved but as through fire.

And so fire becomes one of the chief motifs through which Western Christians understand this purgative process is also, you know, think about a refiner's fire purifying gold.

So it makes sense given all of this.

The East embraces that same notion that we have to be made righteous before God, but will often express it very differently.

And so it's, it's not entirely clear to me how similar we are because, uh, for one thing some of the particular Eastern ideas like tollbooth theology, uh, they, uh, they don't have the standing of like official Orthodox teaching, the so-called aerial tollhouses, but they've been endorsed by a lot of Orthodox saints.

Uh, so if you take something like that, there's still a recognition of a purification process.

Um, ba-bum bum.

So yeah, it, it's not just like the Great Schism.

It, it's because we're, we're both doing work on the same theological data in both the East and the West, and some of it takes some time.

12 Pillars asks, What is the Catholic equivalent of theosis?

It's theosis or, uh, divinization.

Uh, Would Christians receiving a glorified body at final judgment relate to the Eastern concept?

So yeah, we are to be made partakers of the divine nature.

This is very clearly taught in scripture.

First John 3 says we're already children of God, which is indescribably beautiful, but that what we shall be, we haven't yet seen.

Um, but that we, when we see him, we'll be like him, for we'll see him as he is.

So let's find it here.

The catechism talks about all of this, and it's so much like, uh This is a topic I should probably actually talk about, uh, in a future episode soonish, because it, it's one of those things that's like once you know it, it's so beautiful it changes your whole theology.

Um, where Sorry, I gotta find what paragraph that is.

Well, okay, actually, paragraph one.

When the fullness of the time had come, Christ sent his Son as our redeemer and savior.

In this Son and through him he invites men to become, in the Holy Spirit, his adopted children and thus heirs of his blessed life.

So that if sons then heirs language of Saint Paul, what is it we're inheriting?

Well, go to like the parable of the prodigal son where he says to the older son, All that I have is yours.

Like what it is to be an heir is to inherit God himself.

And so then you, uh Oh, there it is, paragraph 460.

I was thinking 640.

Don't become old, guys.

It's the worst.

When talking about the reasons for the incarnation, it says, The Word became flesh to make us partakers of the divine nature.

For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man so that man, by entering into communion with the Word, and thus receiving sonship, might become a son of God.

For the Son of God became man so that we might become god.

Some translations will say gods.

The only begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature so that he, made man, might make men gods or God.

Either way you put it, it's, it's really shocking kind of stuff, but those quotations are from Irenaeus, Athanasius and Saint Thomas Aquinas.

So this is very much an Eastern and Western tradition, because this is very clearly scriptural.

Um, but you have to understand it properly or you'll go in some pretty crazy directions.

Ross Henry said, I just finished the video by Apologetic Dog and Ryan, and was wondering if that interested you enough to review their review.

I found it entertaining.

I'm not gonna review their review almost definitely.

I don't, I think that you don't wanna become the story as the apologist.

I also have not watched their review, so I don't know what they said.

If there was something worth responding to, I might respond to that if somebody lets me know about it.

But-Um, like I mostly wanted to watch what other people had said so I could critique my own performance, see which things worked well and which ones didn't.

And it was, it was very helpful actually.

But I can't just like make everything be about, it's very easy for that to just become like an ego trip or something.

And that's not healthy.

Uh, Weird Pocket says, Read the in between state between death and resurrection.

Thomas seems to say we aren't human after death because humanity is comprised of body and soul.

If we're not human, how can we be happy?

Yeah.

It's, you're not fully you.

I know that sounds like a Snickers commercial.

You're not yourself when you don't have your body.

Um, you are a union of body and soul.

And so we can talk about you in certain ways, referring to just your body or just your soul.

But in the full sense of you, you're both.

And so you don't, I, I've seen people say um, Oh, you're a body, you don't have a soul.

Or, You're, you're a body who happens to have a soul, or a soul that happens to have a body.

But that's not correct.

That's not accurate.

Uh, you are the union of body and soul.

And as a result, you have to actually, uh, be glorified at the level of the body and the soul.

And so when your soul is in heaven, you'll be filled with infinite bliss before God.

But you'll be filled with an even fuller infinite bliss before God when you are complete in yourself.

Now here's how we can draw that distinction.

Think about Therese's sister who gave the great analogy of filling up a thimble with water and filling up a bucket with water.

Both are filled to overflowing, but one of them is still bigger than the other.

So in the glorification of the body, one thing that happens is in a certain way, uh, your bucket gets bigger, because now you can worship God in a fuller way.

Hello World says, What duty do we have to protect our brothers from varying false witness about other traditions without offending them?

I'm a low church Baptist for now.

I think it is important, and that's a hard question to answer in an absolute sense.

I see people get things wrong on the internet a lot.

And knowing when do I need to actually step in and say something is tricky to do, because especially online, you could literally spend your entire day just correcting people.

But that's not good for you, and it's probably not that helpful for them.

But in person conversations you can sometimes have more leverage.

I was at a wedding many years ago, the friend of mine who's Calvinist.

And in the line to get food, the person in front of me was like, Are they a Catholic or a Christian?

And I really wanted to be like, What?

What do you mean by Like, come on.

Is that in France or in Europe?

It's, come on.

So that kind of thing is like even when people are wrong about Catholicism, I will occasionally hold my tongue, believe it or not, because I, I just deem it not worth the effort to try to correct them on that point because it's not central enough and it doesn't seem like that's the thing holding them back spiritually.

Like there's other reasons that guy should probably become Catholic.

I don't know him and wasn't really qualified to, uh, sort through all of that in line to get like buffet dinner.

So there are plenty of times where I don't correct even when people are wrong about Catholicism, and certainly when they're wrong about other Like people will still say 40,000 Protestant denominations, and I have to just like grit my teeth and not be like, Don't use that.

Like don't say 40,000.

That, that methodology is not great, even though it's probably actually a lot closer to 40,000 than, uh, many Protestants would like to admit.

There's nevertheless a sense that there are just times where you say, Okay, I'm gonna let this person make that mistake.

It's, I think, important to distinguish as well when someone is asking a question versus when they're just like casually mentioning something.

But having said all that, if someone says something to me that is like materially false and they seem like they're open to maybe hearing that they're wrong, I think I, I really should.

All right.

12 Gauge says, Run into a lot of videos, YouTube, AI generated sermons claiming to be key Catholic figures like Pope Leo and Bishop Barron.

Have you seen these recently?

I've seen people on Facebook with Pope Leo quotes that aren't real.

That's really alarming that people are using AI in that way.

Uh, what is going on with your algorithm that you're getting those?

I'm, I'm sorry to judge you.

I just, look, probably if you click on one of them, you get a bunch more.

That's so disheartening.

Like people saying like, Oh, here's this obvious like political point that they just wanted to say.

Pope Leo totally said this thing about wokeness.

I'm like, No, he didn't.

Stop tricking boomers.

That's not very kind.

Um, all right.

We got like two more questions.

John Davis has another one talking about Muhammad.

I feel like I've already answered all this, buddy.

I, there's a couple people who obsessively, I mean literally obsessively, ask questions over and over again about Islam.

And I'm wondering if you're one of those people under a different username, because I had to block somebody who was on every video was asking questions about Islam.

I don't understand why, uh, or how that's helping.

So 12 Gauge literally paid $2 for a Super Chat to blame his wife for the algorithm.

I just, I, I have no words.

I'm so happy with that.

Um, oh, Winston asked my favorite video game.

I don't play very many video games.

I love like strategic kind of war games, you know, like the Risk kind of families of games.

Uh, Crusader Kings 3 I'm not great at.

And there's some stuff you have to like not You can go in weird directions with it.

But creating a Pan-European empire-I'm not above trying to do that.

Um, so most games, I have a game I play a lot of evenings called trying to stay awake after putting the kids to bed, and I lose it sometimes.

You're, you're in your golden years.

All right.

Um, Lake Lewis said, How do I answer atheists questioning God's morality in Jeremiah 19:9?

Yeah.

The, the way causality is described in Hebrew is very confusing.

So Jeremiah 19:9, God is foretelling the horrors of what's going to, uh, befall the people he's warning against in Judah and Jerusalem.

He says, I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and their daughters, and everyone shall eat the flesh of his neighbor in the siege and in distress, with which their enemies and those who seek their life afflict them.

Now, God is not literally forcing anyone to commit cannibalism, but he is permitting them to be under siege, and in that siege, they are freely choosing to commit cannibalism.

God is not the author of evil, but some of the ways God's actions are portrayed in the Bible, um, sound like, uh, He is the author of evil.

So the hardening of Pharaoh's heart is a great example to show this principle, but you'll, uh, this principle is kind of all over the place.

So go to Exodus.

In Exodus 8:32, it says, Pharaoh hardened his heart.

But then in Exodus 9, it says, The Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh.

And it's like, well, which is it?

Well, uh, Pharaoh hardened his own heart in response to God.

And so that doesn't mean And this is, uh, I think, a very helpful thing.

I believe it actually comes from origin originally, that when one person hardens their heart in response to God and the other one softens their heart in response to God, they are responding to the same one divine initiative.

Just as the same sun will melt butter and harden clay.

Now, does that mean the sun really likes butter and hates clay?

It does not.

So people taking this to mean God likes some people better than others, that is not what that means.

Uh, and it certainly doesn't mean God is the author of evil.

Now, to be clear, I don't, I don't mean to deny that God does give different amounts of graces to people.

You're not gonna get that from the misuse of the causality language f- from Hebrew though.

Um, Daniel asked me, Since the time of William the Conqueror, we all had surnames.

What does your surname mean?

I've heard Heshmeyer means, uh, shepherd.

I think that's actually wrong, and I have not been able to find, uh, any accurate information on that.

My grandma was a Hagerty, and that was a funny one because it just means unjust.

So that's I don't know how they got that name, but ouch.

All right.

Um, all right.

12 Pillars says, In my opinion, Orthodox are hung up on purgatory as an unbiblical place, thus placing poor souls temporarily in Hades.

And so it's, yeah, it seems like a way of trying to give a, a strictly biblical answer to that question, but they're dealing with the same theological data.

That's, that's all I would say, is like the notion of a post-death purification of some kind is, is clearly biblically taught and traditionally taught, and it helps to account for why we pray for the dead and always have prayed for the dead.

The Jews pray for the dead, Christians pray for the dead.

Um, so that's, I think, an important kind of point.

All right.

Everybody else, please, I'm gonna send it one more time.

If you, uh Whoops.

If I can find it.

If you want to contribute to Vanessa's wedding registry, I'm gonna put that link in the chat once more.

And then after that, I'm gonna call it a day and go get some lunch 'cause it is three o'clock here .

All right.

Um, hope you have a wonderful day, and God bless you all.

Peace.