Transcript

How's it going, everybody?

Uh, some of you are gonna be tuning into this a little bit late because I'm just finishing a Pints with Aquinas interview over on Matt's channel and, uh, it's just ending or just about to end.

So that's why we're starting half an hour late and wanted to kinda give room for people to, number one, not have to decide between me and me, 'cause that's stupid .

And number two, I wanted to make sure I was available right afterwards so if people had questions maybe arising from that, that they would have an easy place to kind of jump in.

Now, having said that, I had some questions left over from last time stream two weeks ago, so I'll go ahead and start with those and then probably we'll get the post-Pints people with, um, queries after that.

But if you have questions about anything, it does not have to be about the Pints episode, you don't ne-need to have watched that.

Just Super Chat it and I will get to it, uh, in order.

Um, okay.

@mezim says, Mainstream view of historical critical Bible scholars, e.g.

the Context Group, is that II Peter was forged.

Can we accept this and still call it inspired?

I would say no, because it'd be fundamentally not true.

Now, I think we need to be clear.

There's Okay.

Pseudepigraphical as opposed to forged, you're gonna find there's a little bit of a debate, meaning when can you write in the name of someone else and it's okay?

Because we know that there are parts of the Bible written in the name of someone other than the one who put, I was gonna say pen to paper, but whatever, put quill to w- you know, papyrus.

And the example that's always given here is Romans 16:22.

So Romans is presented as the letter of Saint Paul to the Romans, and yet Romans 16:22 makes clear that the physical writer of the letter was someone named Tertius, who also gave greetings.

Now, does that invalidate the letter to the Romans?

It does not.

The authorship that matters is divine authorship, and there are different theories about how much of a role Tertius played.

Did Paul dictate word for word what he wanted?

That's actually a hard thing to do, uh, with ancient technology.

Now, that might sound confusing.

I want you to give word for word dictation to somebody who is using, like, first century methods of writing.

One of the reasons a lot of ancient documents are shorter is not really that people had less to say.

People had plenty to say.

You know, we know Saint Paul preached for hours, and a guy literally, uh, fell asleep and fell to his death and, and yet, Paul's letters, you can read all of them and they're much shorter than that.

One of the reasons for that is that in the ancient world, because you didn't have speech-to-text or typing or anything like that, you had to be a lot more economical in word choice.

So it wasn't uncommon for professional scribes to hear somebody describe a thing, and they would have to figure out a smart, short way to present that because it-it's laborious to write everything out longhand.

Um, so all that's to say, there are a range of views that are consistent with divine inspiration in terms of how the human authorship works, and so a scribe obviously would not be, uh, a threat to that.

Um, what is the word?

Emin-eminisu?

Amanuensis.

I always struggle with that word.

An amanuensis, uh, somebody who takes dictation and copies things down, and all of that, but under the authority of somebody else.

That's one category that's pretty uncontroversial, but it, it does point to the fact that these things are not as cut and dry as some models of inspiration would have.

You know, like, there's the, like, verbal dictation kind of theory, like God is just telling the human authors what to say word for word.

It's not clear that even the human authors like Paul are giving word for word dictation to the human scribes.

Either way, it's an interesting question.

Uh, but then can you say something in the name of someone else that you're not working as their scribe directly, but you're writing it in the style of them?

If you're not m-meaning that to be taken literally, you're just doing it sort of in the person of someone else to say, like, what it You know, like, actually this comes up a lot with Jesus .

And I'm always uncomfortable with it, but you find this not just in, like, modern context, we find it in patristic ones as well, where people have, like, fake quotes from God or fake Jesus quotes where, you know, you-- Like, think about, like, political cartoons.

It'll be the Sermon on the Mount, and it'll be Jesus saying something, and somebody will ask some very modern question.

And then Jesus will be like, Obviously, it's, you know, whatever the author of the political cartoon wants it to be.

Uh, those things are not forgeries.

Whatever you might think of that, that's not a forgery.

Or when somebody, uh, presents a kind of imaginary dialogue with our Lord in a homily or for whatever kind of example rhetorically, as long as they're not claiming, like, this is a locution I got, that's not a forgery because there's no intent to deceive.

And you can find that.

You can find where the kind of the way interpretation of scripture works in, like, even some of the patristic writings.

Or I should say, not, not so much, like, the theological writings, like, the, the sermons, is that's a common tactic in sermons.

Um, I'm trying to think of those Oh, what are those God billboard?

There's, like, God quote bill- You, you know what I'm talking about?Yeah.

Here's, here's one.

It says, Life is short, eternity isn't.

God.

Well, God never said that.

Um, another one says, Let's meet at my house Sunday before the game.

God.

Now, that's not forgery.

So then you have this question of, well, can you have people writing in the name of a founder of a community that's now dead?

Because a lot of the historical critical critiques of 2 Peter, of sometimes the Gospel of John, of the, the pseudo-Pauline letters, are gonna say they didn't actually write those, they were written by other people in their name.

On the one hand, it's not a problem if somebody other than an apostle wrote a New Testament document.

That is, is literally a zero problem.

We don't have to believe Hebrews was written by Paul, we don't have to believe that Mark or Luke were apostles.

They don't even pretend to be.

They, you know, you- it's okay for someone who's not an apostle to write New Testament documents.

The bigger issue is if they're both not a New Testament author and they're falsely claiming to be a New Testament author, and they're trying to deceive you by making that claim, that's when I think you are just in forgery territory, and that's incompatible with the truth of the gospel.

In this case of 2 Peter, there are major stylistic differences between 1 Peter and 2 Peter, and the easiest way of explaining that is that he just has a different amanuensis.

We know that Mark was, like, the interpreter of Peter.

We know Peter did not speak Greek well enough to, like, write fluently in the language, in his own view, apparently, 'cause he has a translator.

That tells us I think everything we need to know to account for stylistic differences.

When you're writing different genres of letter with different people putting the letter together for you, a ghostwriter is actually different than a forgery.

Like, somebody writing Because this happens even, like, with papal documents.

The Pope is not just sitting down at the computer and writing the entire document.

Other people are helping put together drafts and everything.

He then reviews and approves, which is an important part, but he doesn't have to come up with all of that himself for it to be a document issued by the Pope, like, in, in the Pope's name.

This is his letter.

It's his document.

Uh, that's true with scripture as well, that if someone else prepares a text for Peter or for Paul and they say, Yep, that looks good.

Send it out in my name, and then especially in the case of Paul where he's physically signing it, that tells you Like, that's fine.

That's, that's great.

That's not a forgery.

That's pretty standard practice seemingly in the ancient world.

Actually, still pretty standard practice in a lot of areas in the modern world.

I mean, the amount of times a secretary or paralegal is doing stuff behind the scenes for a lawyer to make everything look nice and get it together, make it look professional, 'cause you've got people who are good researchers or good at argumentation, but they're maybe not the strongest writers.

It's a different skill set.

That stuff happens.

Or it's like it's a really perfunctory kinda letter, so they have, like, a form letter that they just modify, and that's all fine.

So I think you can account for the stylistic, uh, differences in 2 Peter without believing it to be a forgery, and I think if you do think it's a forgery, that is actually inconsistent with our view of inspiration.

Catholic Sam, good to hear from you again.

What's the best way you personally would describe the Catholic view of salvation?

PS, going to the Council of Trent conference in April.

Hope to meet you.

There is a Council of Trent conference in, like, six weeks, and you should go to it, and there's, like, I think 100 tickets left, so hope to see a lot of you there.

You guys are really nice to talk to in chat, but sometimes it's better to put a face with things, so cool.

Uh, Catholic view of salvation, yeah.

In the plan of salvation, God made us in goodness.

We are good creation, but we've been damaged through sin.

Through original sin, our whole species has been damaged.

Through personal sin, I've been damaged, you've been damaged.

God wants something more for us.

He wants something more for us in this life, and he wants eternal union, eternal union with us.

And to do that, he wants to make us like him, and he wants to do this with our free cooperation.

We would be completely unwilling and unable to do this on our own strength, but by the free gift of God, what's called divine grace, he makes this possible.

We receive this gift of salvation by faith, and nothing we do, faith or works, earns it.

It is a gratuitous gift of God.

Having received it, we become children of God.

We are born into the kingdom of God.

That is wonderful, but God wants more.

As 1 John 3 says, We are children of God.

What we shall be has not yet been revealed, but we know that when we see Jesus, we'll be like Him, for we'll see Him as He is.

So it's good that you become a child of God by faith.

That's not enough.

God wants more for you, unimaginably more for you, and this is something where your free cooperation is required.

You have to allow charity to increase your heart, the charity given to you by God.

You So faith, hope, and love are these gifts God gives you when you become his child, and you can act on them.

You can make acts of faith.

You can make acts of hope.

You can make acts of charity, and if you do that, they'll increase within you.

You will grow in virtue, and if you don't do that, and if you act against those things-It can kill the spiritual life within you.

And even if it doesn't kill it, it'll, it'll damage it.

It'll weaken it.

So in this way, it's very much like the gift of life that you've been given this gift freely.

You did nothing to merit biological life.

And yet now that you've got this gift, you have to respond to it.

And when I say you have to respond to it, it sounds like just a burden.

Oh, you've got to maintain your life.

But also you get to.

Like you get to do things you could have never done on your own because you could do nothing on your own.

You wouldn't be here on your own.

And now that you're here, you have this incredible gift of life that you can do all sorts of things with.

Well, the same is true with the spiritual life.

You can go be a saint in all these different ways using this grace that God gives you to make you a version of yourself beyond your wildest dreams.

So ultimately, what's the, the plan of salvation is to make you godlike.

God wants to make you godlike.

This is what Adam and Eve lusted for in the garden and tried to achieve on their own, and they couldn't.

But this is what God actually wants for each and every one of us.

And this, by the way, like this is the one thing that they could legitimately be tempted by in the garden because it's the only thing better than the Garden of Eden.

So what God wants for you is more than Adam and Eve had in the garden.

And Adam and Eve desired it and sinned to try to get it.

And we cooperate the plan of God because he wants to give it to us.

All right.

So that's the, uh, view of salvation related to that.

Dietrich Forrest says, Day one of nagging Joe to read Paul, a new covenant Jew.

Uh, yes, I need to.

And I'm putting that in my Google search thing so I have a visible reminder later.

All right.

Eisen 2012, or sorry, 212 Dude says, My evangelical wife has an objection to the authority of bishops and priests.

Bishops and priests in the Middle Ages were buying their way into power.

They weren't real.

How to reply?

Well, less so priests, but there definitely were bishops who, uh, committed the sin of simony.

And they, you know, like bribed someone to, to get office.

That doesn't in-- Like that's a sin, and they might go to hell for that.

Let's, let's be very clear about that up front.

Um, there's like a tremendous amount of corruption there, without a doubt.

Other times, there were things that probably weren't intentional simony, but were more like complicated.

And I'm not gonna get into all of the, the weeds with that.

But the example I would give is, is this.

Like today in America, you can give money to a political candidate, and it's a campaign donation, and it's legal.

It's completely allowed.

It's even, uh, uh, applauded as a thing people should do to be politically involved.

But it can sure look like bribery sometimes.

And sometimes it is bribery, and sometimes it's a felony.

And so you can imagine somebody years from now, uh, looking back at this and being like, Whoa, lots of people were just literally paying off politicians.

It's like, well, yes and no.

I mention that to say you have some out and out just this is clearly the sin of simony that you see in the Middle Ages.

You also have these things that were more complicated, where people probably didn't think of it as bribery, um, but more like something akin to taxation.

Is that good?

Nope.

But just, you know, if you're tempted to rush to judgment of them, it's, it's a complicated situation.

And one the church repeatedly cracked down on, by the way.

But it was kind of an uphill battle for a long time.

Um, having said that, the validity of the office is not impacted, and that's the thing that matters.

That they have valid holy orders.

And this is a, an important theological and historical point.

This comes up in the West in the fourth century in what's called the Donatist controversy, because you have bad bishops and priests there who did things like renounce the faith under torture or even turned in fellow Christians.

I mean, um, we've talked about abuse scandals in our lifetime, and they're pretty horrific.

But I don't think we've experienced an abuse scandal on the level of a priest like turning a faithful Christian and his flock over to the Roman government to be tortured and killed.

Like the amount that it would be difficult to trust after that would be a lot.

And a lot of these guys, after Christianity gets legalized, they wanna come back.

They want to make a public act of forgiveness and then continue being bishops and priests.

And the church understandably struggles with this.

There are people who are like, Yeah, clearly they You know, every one of us is a sinner.

Every one of us is forgiven.

But then there are other people who are like, Well, can they ever come back?

Maybe not.

And then they start saying, Well, maybe their sacraments aren't valid if they do come back.

And this leads to this theological controversy.

And in the midst of this, St. Augustine, who is one of the, uh, big-- Oh, yeah, uh, isn't civic consciousness kind of like Donatism?

I'm gonna say yes and not explain any further.

But yes, if you are seeing a certain similarity, a certain similarity exists.

They're not-- It's not a one-to-one correspondence, but you can find traces of that.

Um, sorry, that's not the chord.One of the points St. Augustine makes in this that's really brilliant is that when the followers of John the Baptist we see this in Acts of the Apostles hear about Christian bapti- baptism, they have to be re-baptized because what they had before wasn't a valid baptism and so this is What is that?

Acts twelve where St. Paul re-baptizes those who've only received the baptism of John.

Uh, not Acts twelve.

Acts Acts nineteen, excuse me.

Paul's in Ephesus.

Um, that's not a reflection on the morality of John the Baptist.

It's a reflection on the fact that what John the Baptist was doing was a mere symbolic baptism, and it wasn't a sacrament.

But what Jesus gives the apostles is an actual sacrament of baptism.

Like, we don't just have a symbolic baptism.

So if you've just received a symbolic baptism, now you need to have a sacramental baptism.

On the other hand, Augustine points out, those who've been baptized by Judas, because we know that the 12 go out preaching baptism, preaching and baptizing, excuse me.

All 12 go out.

This is very clear from the Gospels.

Jesus doesn't say, like, Don't trust his baptisms, and He doesn't do anything like that, and they don't seem to ever need to be re-baptized.

So, uh, this is the standard Catholic I mean, it's, it's dogmatic, but it's, it's, like, the standard Catholic take, at least from the three hundreds onward, that once we were faced kinda head-on with this question, it was really clearly like, okay, well, biblically, it's actually quite clear that the one who makes Christian baptism effective isn't the baptizer, and it's not the baptized.

It's our Lord.

That's how all the sacraments work.

This is what's called ex opere operato, that the sacraments work by the authority invested in them by Jesus, not by how holy the minister of it is and not how holy you as the individual recipient are.

Um, and if, if that weren't the case, we'd all be in trouble because it's easy to look at a bad bishop or a bad priest and say, Uh, how can they have valid sacraments?

Well, because if the validity of their sacraments turned on their own personal holiness, none of us are holy enough for that.

Right?

Like, none of us could possibly hope to be sufficiently holy, uh, to consecrate the Eucharist on our own holiness, on our own strength.

So there you go.

Hope that helps your wife.

Uh, DSMP Seven says, Was Abraham truly justified receiving sanctifying grace the same effect as baptism before baptism, or was it an incomplete justification that would require the completed work of Christ later?

AKA why was Abraham in Sheol?

Yes.

So he is justified in the sense of being made right before God.

He's-- We're told that pretty explicitly.

However, his sins are not finally resolved.

I wanna actually combi- somebody else says about propitiatory sacrifices in the Old Covenant.

There's a sense in which, uh, the sacrifices in the Old Covenant work in two ways.

One, they sort of put away the sin, and two, they're instances that call the individual Israelites to faith or the individual Jews or the Israel- individual Hebrews what-whatever age we're kinda dealing in.

Uh, it calls them to faith.

And so they don't work ex opere operato, but they do work in the way like a sacramental works like a scapular or something.

Where a scapular doesn't have inherent divine grace.

It's not given to us by Christ.

But faithful devotion to, you know, a miraculous medal or a scapular or something like this can increase your faith because it gives you, uh, like, a physical means of like, Oh yeah, I need to pray more.

I need to be more trusting.

I need to Whatever.

And so the obedience, the opportunities for obedience we find in the Old Covenant are means of real faith.

But the problem of sin is such that without Christ dying on the cross, faith by itself would not be enough to satisfy the debt of sin.

Uh, like, we don't believe that faith, whether your faith now or the, the faith of those in the Old Covenant, uh, saves in the way that Jesus saves on the cross.

So think about it that way.

Like, let's say Jesus doesn't die on the cross or hasn't yet died on the cross, and you have faith.

You're, you're Like, let's say you're a faithful disciple who dies right before Good Friday.

You believe in Jesus.

You believe everything.

You would've believed, uh, you know, you maybe even believe He's going to die on the cross and He's gonna rise from the dead.

You've, you've got a total understanding of all this stuff.

You don't go all automatically to heaven.

Uh, you're in this place of Sheol, where you're neither in punishment or damnation, but neither are you, um, eternally in the beatific vision configured to God in this way because something needs to ultimately handle the problem of sin, and Jesus is gonna do that on the cross.

All right.

Sky Knight says, You should make a video about Fatima.

You're not wrong.

Um, Cameron Bertuzzi suggested to me that I should make videos on, like, Marian apparitions and Eucharistic miracles because we sometimes don't focus on these really cool parts of the faith.

It's, it's tricky 'cause on the one hand, I wanna make clear people don't have to believe this stuff to be Catholic, and on the other hand, if basically any of these claims are true, that's a really good reason to be Catholic.

So I probably should.

You're probably right.

I don't have any immediate plans to do so.Um, Benitorios says, Me and my wife are Catholic and are in the process of making podcasts/videos to evangelize the faith and marriage.

Any tips?

One, figure out who your audience is.

That can change somewhat, but YouTube locks you into an algorithm pretty tightly, and it can become very difficult to get out of that if you change your mind.

Two, be consistent in style, tone, content.

Strive to make your stuff really good and really consistent.

So re- like it doesn't have to be the same length, but you It may be especially early on you should think about keeping things at a certain length, and be mindful of the kind of length your audience wants and what the format sort of lends itself to.

Are you looking to do, like, a really long conversation with your wife, or are you m- looking to do more like bite-sized chunks people can incorporate in their own life?

And then finally, because you're in the context of family and marriage, uh, the catechism has some very good stuff on this, and there's some good church documents on education as well, which is kind of an adjacent topic.

So, uh, Pope Pius XI, uh, Divini Illius.

What is it?

Uh, what's the third word there?

Magistery from 1929.

So good.

Uh, so yeah, I'd read what the church has to say on that.

Obviously John Paul II has a lot of stuff to say on man and woman and marriage and all this.

Take there And then one thing I'm not good at and that my wife's always telling me is people want to know you kind of personally.

And so if you can incorporate a little more real life without it being awkward or, like, super cringey.

Like, you don't have to share all of your, like, deepest, darkest marital secrets, but having some sense of, like, who you are is gonna help people to be interested in your stuff and wanna see more of it.

Like, have some way of standing out from the crowd, 'cause there are a lot of people.

Um, there are a lot of people who are interested in that topic, and there are a lot of people who kind of dabble in that, but having something that really stand out, like high quality, well-made, engaging conversation that's relatable, I think there's always room for more of that.

All right.

ComeTheNight.

Hey, this is Metal Mike, my producer.

Maybe this should would be worth doing a full show/cup of joe on, but why has Mother Church said that there's no more public revelation?

Why couldn't some writings of saints post apostles be considered scripture?

Because the fullness of revelation is the unveiling of God in Christ, which is then witnessed to in a unique way by the apostles.

And, uh, so we're left with this task of contending for the faith delivered once for all to the saints, in the words of Jude 1:3.

So yeah, I think you can find a pretty clear case from that from the New Testament.

I will admit, though, I don't actually know that the New Testament by itself would be definitive.

Like, I think if you understand the theology of what revelation is, then I think that would be, uh, kinda one way to get there, but I'm not sure from sola scriptura you would know that there was no more public revelation.

From church history, it's certainly clear that, that there is none.

Someone said, How much do you want for your statue in the back?

Mike, how much did we pay for the statue in the back?

And, uh, w- we should, we should double that and buy another one to replace it.

This is not technically simony.

I'm just kidding, everyone.

Don't be scandalous.

Uh, Dinkle Dork says People just, they choose all kinds of names.

I attend LDS church with my wife every week, formerly LDS, not a syncretist, and jokingly introduce myself as a Latter-day Catholic.

What do you think is the best way to evangelize my LDS neighbors the truthfulness of the gospel?

Great question.

Uh, I just There was a lot of LDS related questions on the, the Pints interview I just did that you can go watch that over there.

Sorry.

Real quick, somebody said, When you said Mike, I thought you were talking to the statue.

It's St. Michael.

Hey, Mike.

Excellent.

Okay.

Best way to evangelize the LDS. I have a certain model I have internally.

I don't always live it out as well as I try to.

But number one, the LDS are kind of hardwired to expect that they're gonna be treated badly, and they have reason for that.

They've been treated badly.

But it also means that they can sometimes jump to that as a conclusion.

Like, if you're a jerk about their theology, particularly out the gate, you've just walked in You know, it'd be like being a jerk as a man to a woman who you know has had a lot of bad history with men.

It doesn't take much to cross that line, and it can be very hard to undo that.

Uh, like, it's very tempting to just lump anyone who's critical of LDS theology as, like, anti-Mormon and, you know, all that.

Now, some of that, you're just gonna find that anywhere.

I was reading the comments on Trent's recent video where he is, like, mildly critical of Wes Huff and Gavin Orland.

I only watched the first few minutes of it, to be honest with you, and I, I read some of the comments, and the comments were just accusing him of lying.

I mean, if you know anything about Trent, like he goes out of his way to try to make sure he's understanding people correctly, that he's not misunderstanding their view, even, like, sending his scripts and, you know, really going above and beyond.

Sorry about that.

It just cut out there.

Don't know why.

Anyway, they Like, uh, he goes above and beyond to make sure that Well, and that doesn't, that doesn't get rid of the possibility you can still misunderstand people.But what should be very clear to anyone watching is Trent is never gonna purposely lie about somebody for clicks.

Like, he doesn't need to do that.

The amount that you lose from doing that is tremendous, and the amount you gain is minimal, and also it's a sin .

So he's just, like, not that guy at all, and yet people are very quick to jump to that.

So y- anyway, all that's a long way of saying some of that is baked into online discourse especially but when you're evangelizing a Mormon, it's easy to come off that way without trying to, even if you're trying to just be, like, fair and honest.

You actually have to be a little intentional about being extra gentle and recognizing where we might agree, without downplaying the truth but making sure the person is in a spot where they can receive it.

Uh, I'm always a fan of Blaise Pascal's kind of approach when we wish to correct another with an advantage, and what is this?

Paragraphs nine and 10 of the Pensée.

Uh, you have to first recognize from what direction they're approaching the matter and then affirm what they're getting right, and then you can show the parts that they've missed, and they're more open to it.

And that's just across the board.

That's if you're telling someone they have the wrong religion, if you're telling somebody, like, their approach to doing something at work isn't right, or if you're navigating something in your family, et cetera.

If you don't start with, Here's where we actually have some agreement, here's what you're doing well, let them see that you're coming from this with a place of love, and not in a condescending way, but authentically.

Like, Hey, there is some stuff you do that I'm really impressed with.

And that's easy.

Like, if, if you're i- particularly those of us who aren't going to LDS church every week, where many of our encounters with LDS in the wild is somebody, like, coming to your door.

God bless 'em.

Yeah, 18, 19-year-old kids who could be drinking, doing drugs, hooking up, and instead they're going door to door to try to tell people about Jesus Christ.

Even though I think they're getting tons of stuff wrong about Jesus, if you can't say that there's something admirable in that, then I think you're missing something really big.

Like, there is so much where you're just like, Man, you've got your act together in a lot of ways that I'm impressed by, and I hope more Catholic 18, 19-year-old kids aspire to that level of seriousness about God.

Now, here's why, having said that, I'm not Mormon, and here's why I hope you'll be open to the fact that God wants something different for you as well.

You know?

That Kind of frame it that way.

To start from a place of clear and explicit charity and finding areas of agreement, which again, should not be too hard.

There are, are plenty of areas that, uh, we can agree on.

And then also you can, you Particularly from a Catholic perspective, this is a little bit of a tricky thing, but they do recognize that there needs to be something like keys.

Problem is they understand that stuff so differently that it can seem like a point of agreement and might actually not be a point of agreement.

But they can at least say, Hey, look, if the Great Apostasy didn't happen, then we should be Catholic.

That is often not a thing that's hard to get a Mormon to admit, and then you're like, Okay, cool.

Let's just focus on that one issue.

Um, we can leave everything else more or less aside.

And that can be a very effective way of sort of focusing in.

Much, much more could be said on that.

I mean, again, you can watch the interview I just did with Fred, um, or you can watch, like, the conversations with Jacob Hansen on Capturing Christianity or the debate I did with him, or some of the episodes I've done on this channel.

I might do a book on this topic as well, but I don't know.

I was getting pressured right before this stream to do a book on this subject.

All right.

Random YouTuber says, Hi, Joe.

Did early Christians originally observe both the Sabbath and Sunday, and did the Bar Kokhba revolt lead them to abandon the Sabbath in favor of Sunday alone?

Can you look more into SDA claims?

Well, few things.

The SDA claims originally, uh, are that this was changed by the Pope and the Emperor Constantine.

Like, you can read Ellen White's claims about this.

Like, she puts all this as happening in the 300s.

She's completely wrong about that.

I did a recent video on that.

Like, we know she's a false prophetess.

She gets a ton of stuff wrong.

This is one area where we can see tons of evidence.

Like , her claim, this is a popular Adventist claim even now, is that the early Christians worshiped on Saturday, and then in the early 300s at the urging of Constantine and the bishops, the Pope had this changed to Sunday, and that this was an attempt to make Christianity more palatable to pagans who were used to worshiping on Sunday.

All of that is wrong.

Number one, there is no pagan group in Rome that is worshiping every week on Sunday.

Like, that's just completely made up.

Uh, people will be like, Oh, well, it's called the day of the sun.

Yeah, 'cause the Roman days, uh, were named after the sun and the moon and the planets.

That doesn't mean that they're worshiping the sun and the moon and the planets, even though it gets confusing 'cause, like, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, like, those are also names of gods.

But this was, uh, an astronomical calendar, so it just represents the heavenly bodies.Also, so I mean, literally any day of the week, including Saturday, which is named after Saturn, which is named after the planet Saturn, which is named after the god Saturn.

Any day you choose, you can be like, oh, the pagans had a day named after a god on that day.

Well, yeah, that's true of every day of the week.

But actually not true of the Romans because theirs were named after celestial bodies and the sun is not the center of Roman worship if you know anything about the Roman pantheon.

There's a lot that could be said on that.

It just gets like really basic historical facts wrong.

So no, it would have made absolutely no sense to switch to Sunday because people were used to worshiping on Sunday because they weren't used to worshiping on Sunday.

Famously, Constantine institutes Sunday as a day of rest because it wasn't already that.

Also, he is basically the one who gets the modern calendar, like seven days, much more normal in the Roman Empire.

If you're familiar with, it was like seven, eight weeks.

Before that, they used a system of Kalends and Ides.

So, you know, like they were the Ides of March.

That's like the middle of the month.

So they didn't have the month broken up in weeks.

The way, you know, just everything about this claim is just getting basic historical facts wrong.

And then you read Christians in the first century, second century, third century, well before the time of Constantine, and it's clear they worship on Sunday.

They tell you why they worship on Sunday.

So can you worship on Saturday?

Well, you should worship God always.

So in that sense, of course.

Ignatius of Antioch, who is writing before the Barcobo revolt in like 135, talks about this.

Let me see.

It's letter to the Magnesians.

Yes.

We're talking about those who are brought up in the ancient order of things, meaning the Jews.

They've come to the position of a new hope, no longer observing the Sabbath, but living in the observance of the Lord's Day.

It just couldn't be clearer than that.

That's about 107.

That's clearly not based on a revolt that hasn't happened yet and won't happen for another quarter century.

So, yeah, their original claims were completely wrong in the early 300s.

Now they're going to change it to the mid 100s, and it's still completely wrong.

Because Ignatius is not even our first to talk about like the Lord's Day.

The book of Revelation does.

So, yeah, it's simply not true.

Okay.

Eric says, Joe, I've often heard you ask Orthodox how we'd know which councils are ecumenical, but isn't this retrofitting the authority of the Pope back into the conciliar canons?

The councils don't claim this.

I'm not sure what you mean about retrofitting it.

Maybe you can explain.

Let me just put the issue as neutrally as I can.

We don't have to mention the papacy at all at first.

One, there are multiple bodies that claim to be ecumenical councils.

And two external appearances seem to look like them.

Many of them are convened by the emperor, and they are participated in by a bunch of different bishops.

Some of them are convened by the Pope.

And then they make these decisions and people agree on things, and then they go their separate ways.

That's as neutrally as I can, just basic facts.

Just like if you were to say, how do we know which books belong in the Bible?

You don't have to start with anything about the papacy and just say, well, look, there are multiple books that seem like they're candidates to be books of the Bible.

You know, like obviously a cookbook is probably not going to go in the Bible.

You got a bunch of books that look like they might be Bible books, like the Epistle of Barnabas or 1 Clement or any of these.

Even leaving aside the crazier ones like the Gnostic writings.

You have plenty of early Christian writings where you say, well, why isn't that in the Bible?

So you've got a bunch of candidates for things that seem like they might be in the Bible in that case or things that seem like they might be ecumenical councils in the other case.

And then you say, okay, well, how many real ecumenical councils are there?

How many of them are valid?

And how do we know?

Now, most Orthodox are going to tell you there are seven ecumenical councils.

Some are going to say there are eight or nine.

The fact that there isn't even basic agreement on how many there are is a problem.

But that is a minor problem in comparison to the other one, which is, well, how do we know which ones and why?

Like on what basis do we say Chalcedon is a valid council and the robber council is or the robber synod isn't?

I don't know how you would answer that.

I know two popular answers and I know they don't work.

Two popular answers are that there is this modern Orthodox take on receptionism.

This is, I think, as far as I know, this is basically a 19th century explanation.

I don't think in the early church anyone was arguing for receptionism because it's basically a Protestant idea.

That an ecumenical council is only valid if the people receive it.

That inverts the relationship of the flock and the shepherds.

It also is question begging because you have councils that are received in the West and not the East.

Or you have councils that are received in Alexandria and not Greece.

So received where?

By whom?Well, these ones are received by the Orthodox and therefore they're Orthodox because the Orthodox are Orthodox.

That just doesn't really work.

So I think receptionism doesn't actually make sense.

Another related one isn't just reception by the, you know, church writ large, but you'll find a particular theory that, oh, you have to have all of the patriarchs of the church have to accept it.

It doesn't actually work.

One, you'd still have to have papal acceptance for it to be a valid council then.

Two, we know it's just historically not true.

Patriarch of Alexandria doesn't accept the Council of Chalcedon.

It deposes him.

Okay.

There's plenty of these cases where those who disagree with the council are declared deposed.

The authority of the council doesn't depend on them accepting it.

Uh, the council is superior to them.

So all that's to And, and everyone, Orthodox or Catholic, should be able to look at that and say, Yes, an ecumenical council has to be more than the authority of a random patriarch or a random bishop.

The question then becomes, well, what about the Pope?

And it so happens that the seven councils in the early church that are accepted pretty much universally by the Eastern Orthodox are the seven that the Pope accepts.

And Second Ephesus, he didn't accept, and so they don't accept.

So if you accept the papacy as a necessary requirement for a valid council in terms of papal reception, then all of history lines up and all that data makes sense.

If you don't use that hermeneutic and say, Hey, that's just retrofitting, okay, then show me a hermeneutic that works because I don't see one, and the two that I've seen Orthodox throw out clearly don't work.

All right.

Nice.

Uh, Joe Heschmeyer says, It was funny seeing you on Daily Wire.

Clavin once read a comment of mine and some folks thought I was you.

It's me, your distant cousin with the same name.

I've got a funny Joe Heschmeyer story, not about me.

But I've got a second cousin by the same name who, uh, we're in the same dio- we were in the same diocese, I'm on the Missouri side now.

We were in the same diocese and I was in Rome studying in seminary, and there was an article in the Catholic paper about the opening of a fraternity parish in Kansas City, and the photo caption said, you know, like, Here's the bishop meeting with Joe Heschmeyer, and I was very confused.

I was like, I am several thousand miles away.

I wasn't there.

And then I looked at the picture and realized it was you.

Uh, okay.

Tradition and truth.

Talks about the four senses of scripture and the catechism has a great section on this.

Uh, Saint Augustine talks about this quite a bit.

But tradition and truth says, Can you explain the four senses of reading scripture that Saint Augustine discusses?

Just know the way you teach figured you'd far better than my pro- I added the far.

Be better than my professor.

LOL. I misread, but it sounded like I was just inflating your compliment.

Well, thank you.

All right, let me pull up the relevant portion of the catechism, 'cause there's a cool couplet that doesn't really work in English.

You'll see what I mean.

All right.

Beginning in paragraph one fifteen, According to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two senses of scripture, the literal and the spiritual, the latter being divided into the allegorical, moral, and anagogical senses.

Don't worry, this'll make more sense in a minute.

The profound concordance of the four senses guarantees all its richness to the living reading of scripture in the church.

Now, it bothers me that in paragraph one fifteen it says you can distinguish between two senses and then immediately gives you four , but there's three different spiritual senses of scripture.

Uh, but what does that mean?

Okay, so first, when we say the literal sense of scripture, it doesn't mean quite what that word normally means in English.

Literal comes from littera, the letter.

The literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of scripture and discovered by exegesis following the rules of sound interpretation.

All other senses of sacred scripture are based on the literal.

So, um, Pope Pius XII talks about this, that one of the things when we are This is in Divino Afflante Spiritu on promoting biblical studies.

The literal or like authorial meaning isn't just like what do these words mean to us today.

That's not a great, uh, way to do it.

Something more than that is needed just for the literal sense.

Because you're saying what would these words have meant at the time they were written?

What do these words mean to the author writing them?

There might be a deeper meaning that lies beneath those words, but there's like an obvious surface level kind of reading.

But that doesn't mean a dictionary definition.

So if I say it's raining cats and dogs out, that does-- the literal sense doesn't mean felines and caine- canines are coming down from the sky.

It means it's raining very hard.

Because those words said in that way to an English-speaking audience in the twenty-first century s- connote, uh, raining hard.

Now, maybe I'm using the fact that it's raining hard as a metaphor for something deeper.And we can get into the spiritual sense.

So when John in the Gospel of John at the Last Supper talks about Judas leaving the table, it says, Judas went out and it was night.

The phrase went out and the phrase it was night have a clear literal meaning.

He literally leaves the Last Supper, and it literally is nighttime.

But it shouldn't take you too much to see there's a deeper meaning to those words.

Like Judas went out from Christ, he departed him, and this is the night that Judas has entered into.

He has turned from the light to the darkness.

Uh, paragraphs twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight talk about how of, uh, divino afflante Spiritu, talk about how to determine like the literal meaning of scripture.

So that's where you need things like an awareness of, uh, like e-the way even something like exaggeration.

Like when Jesus says, If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off, the literal meaning of that is not to cut it off.

Again, in the way literal is used by, uh, ancient Christian writers.

Literal means like the, the letter of the level.

Oh, let me put those words in the right order.

The level of the letter.

But then you also have these three spiritual senses, the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical.

And paragraph one seventeen talks about this.

The allegorical, uh, we, uh, can acquire a more profound understanding of events by recognizing their significance in Christ.

Uh, thus the crossing of the Red Sea is a sign or type of Christ's victory and also of Christian baptism.

Second, the moral sense.

The events in scripture ought to lead us to act justly, as St. Paul says they were written for our instruction.

Then there's the anagogical events.

This is, uh, from the Greek word for leading.

We can view realities and events in terms of their eternal significance leading us toward our true homeland.

Thus, the church on earth is a sign of the heavenly Jerusalem.

Then there's a couplet.

The letter speaks of deeds, allegory to faith, the moral how to act, anagogy our destiny.

So let's take a couple real examples.

1 Corinthians chapter ten.

I want you to know, brethren, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.

Okay.

What's the literal?

The Israelites literally, they leave Egypt, they pass through the Red Sea, and they leave slavery and head on this journey towards the Promised Land.

That's the surface level, and, and that is literally meant.

But there's also clearly a spiritual take where this is showing like this is our journey right now.

Um, that spiritually this prefigures baptism, and it prefigures the way that Christ is the fulfillment of Moses.

Like Moses is prefiguring what Jesus is gonna do.

So you have water and the Spirit, and St. Paul is like, Yeah, look, there's water and the Spirit.

We are meant to not just see this cool connection, we're meant to react to it.

So we're meant to notice things.

For instance, that Nevertheless, with most of them, God was not pleased, for they were overthrown in the wilderness.

That's verse five.

Great.

Here's this thing prefiguring baptism.

We see it in the Old Covenant.

You've gone through the fulfillment.

They had just like the prefigurement of baptism.

You've got the fulfillment of baptism.

But hey, remember how despite that, they still sinned in the desert and they were overthrown in the wilderness?

What might that mean?

What might that mean to us?

Are we just remembering historical details?

Not according to St. Paul.

He says, Now these things are warnings for us not to desire evil as they did.

Okay.

So here are these people who were baptized, so to speak, and they still rebelled from God and were destroyed.

Don't do that, in other words.

Like Paul is denying once saved, always saved, and denying it not just because God wanted to make sure we would know that that was false when that false teaching would come up years later, but because we need to watch out so that we don't desire evil as our forefathers did, and so we don't fall into those kind of traps.

Then he says in verse eleven, Now these things happened to them as a warning.

They're written down for our instruction, upon whom the end of the ages has come.

Therefore, let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall.

That's the moral sense.

When you read about some craziness in the Bible and you're like, Wow, uh, that person rebelled from God and it destroyed their life, that's a good indication that we are seeing what not to do.

Uh, frequently, the Bible doesn't tell you, Don't do this, do that.

It just shows you.

But when it's showing you, it's showing you what to do and what not to do.

So these things are written down for our instruction.

St. Paul says that.

And finally, you have the anagogical sense.

We are, as a church, on this journey towards the Promised Land.

What is our Promised Land?

Well, it's our heavenly homeland.

And so we aren't just focused on, okay, what did this mean about the baptism I had in the past?

It doesn't just mean about what I should behave like morally now, but also how do I make sure that I'm laser-focused on the Promised Land so I'm not just wandering in the desert, so that I can set true Christian hope on this thing that God is leading me into?

So those are-- that's just like one example, but those are the four senses of scripture.

I hope that makes sense.

Gage Walt says, So in other words, synod symphony doesn't change matter and form of ordination.

Correct.

Um, I'm happy to say more if you want, but yes.

That's an earlier question follow-up.

Uh, Dennis Villano says, Would you consider interviewing Dr. Yonatan Adler, discuss what came before Judaism?

I don't really do interviews on this channel.I also don't know Dr. Adler but I-it's unlikely.

I mean, just somebody like Matt would probably be-- like Matt Fradd would be a more likely choice.

Uh, One Home For All says, I need a good way to defend the Catholic Church about the Pharisees.

Many Protestants use that to attack Catholic religion.

I explain, but it seems not to be enough for them.

Okay.

I was just having a conversation with, uh, Protestant friends.

Let's see what-- I think is kind of on his way into the Catholic Church, but is struggling, and this issue came up for him today, and he reached out to me about it, and he shared with me a sermon.

And in this sermon, I'm not gonna Um, uh, One Home For All, I am literally getting to your question right now.

Uh, in this sermon, this Protestant preacher is attacking the Pharisees.

And the great irony, like if you're like, Dear Lord, I thank you I'm not like the Pharisees, you're doing the Pharisee thing that Jesus calls out.

So don't, don't approach it like that.

Like, if your idea of the Pharisees is, Here's something those bad Catholics do, don't do it.

Like, that, that's not a good understanding.

In this sermon, the preacher attacks the Pharisees for legalism and he says legalism is defined in the dictionary as a strict conformity to the letter of the law rather than its spirit.

Okay.

Good.

Fine.

But then he gives the example of the Corban rules, where the commandment that says to honor your father and mother, which included caring for them in their old age, was just kinda set aside.

Like, the, the Pharisees invented a loophole or, well, their predecessors invented a loophole where if you were doing something for God, that you could use You could use that money for Him-- or excuse me, for, yeah, for God, rather than for your parents.

Which on paper you're like, Okay, that doesn't sound so bad, but people were abusing this to basically just justify not taking care of their aging parents.

And so they were just nullifying what God actually said to do by inventing some new thing they were gonna like do for God, but it just let them do their own projects.

So notice, that's not legalism.

Like what they're doing is wrong there, but the problem isn't that they are blindly observing the letter of the law while ignoring the spirit of the law.

No, they're just ignoring the letter of the law completely.

Like, if they were blindly observing the Ten Commandments and honoring their father and mother, they wouldn't have Corban.

So one thing that I think is important to recognize is people criticizing the Pharisees rarely have a good grasp on why what the Pharisees was doing w-was wrong.

And the reality is there's multiple things Jesus criticizes.

There are times where they're being legalistic, where they're blindly, uh, observing the letter of the law, like not working on the Sabbath, in such a way that it violates the spirit.

So it becomes this real burden of making sure that I'm not doing anything that counts as work, and that ironically deprives a day of rest.

Because I'm so restless about making sure I'm not working, that it becomes like this stressful thing, and then I can't do like good things.

And it's like, wait a second, what is going on here?

Why would it be better for you not to do good things?

So get the actual critique about the Pharisees right, first of all, because a lot of people have this vague idea, Well, the Pharisees are bad 'cause they have traditions.

No.

That's not what the Bible says, and that's not true.

Everyone has traditions.

Protestants attacking Catholicism are doing so from the perspective of their traditions.

Uh, what were the particular faults of the Pharisees, and how can we all avoid those faults?

Don't be Pharisaic where you just say like, Oh, it's just the fault of my Catholic neighbor.

I don't have any of those faults.

I thank you, Lord, I'm not like that.

Like, don't do that.

Say like, What are the Pharisees actually doing wrong?

And ironically, the Catholic Church gives very clear, concrete rules to better avoid these traps.

So there's this principle called epikeia.

If blind observance of the letter of the law violates the spirit of the law, you're not to do it.

Classic example is this.

You're supposed to lock up every night at nine o'clock.

Let's say one night, somebody's broken in at eight thirty.

You call the cops, they're on their way.

Nine o'clock rolls around.

Should you lock up, leaving yourself and the i-invader, like home invader, and lock the cops out?

No, that would be idiotic.

Why not?

Because the point of lockup at nine is safety, and safety is not served in this particular instance by blindly locking up.

You should instead leave the door open, maybe run out of the house yourself, right?

Like, don't just keep yourself in.

And, you know, like a blind observance of the law there would be idiotic.

The Catholic Church teaches that.

Uh, and then beneath that principle of epikeia, there's also this principle of basically like what would the lawmaker want me to do in this situation?

Where you, you do what isn't explicitly called for to try to, to fulfill the spirit of the law.

That's not legalism.

That's observing and honoring the spirit of the law.

That's what Jesus wants us to do.

That-- So yeah, the, the two traps to avoid are setting the law aside in favor of some man-made rule, or blindly following the law in a way that undermines its purpose.

And the more you know the purpose of why God has said XYZ, the better.Um, Trent has an episode coming out soon, I think, on sexual morality, that if your approach is like you can't do anything before marriage, you can do anything after, then you haven't understood why certain acts are prohibited by God.

Like if you think-- I'm not gonna give e-extreme examples, but if you think like sexually degrading activities are okay in marriage, then you don't get why they're wrong in the first place.

Like you-- that's actually much closer to legalism.

Like you're blindly following the letter of the law without understanding what you're doing or why.

Um, ba, ba, bum, bum.

So yes, I think Protestants who attack Catholicism for saying we're l- too much like the Pharisees understand neither Catholicism nor the Pharisees.

But I'm open to pushback on that.

More could be said.

Mando says, Moses and Elijah were at the transfiguration, and they come from shale or heaven.

I'm inclined to say shale.

I might work with somebody who thinks heaven.

But I think they came from shale.

I don't think they were in, um, the full presence of God and beatific vision for the reasons outlined at the top of the show.

I can say more on that if you want, but I think I've already kind of explained the-that reasoning.

All right.

Afavesk says, A family has an issue.

Person A suggests to talk about the issue in front of a priest with the intention that the priest sit as a neutral party.

Can slash should the priest be burdened like this?

Person B says they're too busy.

Well, I mean, you can ask the priest.

I don't know how important the issue is.

I don't know how qualified the priest is.

But if the priest is someone who both sides, uh, respect, I think it's totally fine to say, Hey, would you have an hour to sit down and talk about this family problem with us?

And you can even sweeten the deal by being like, We'll get you lunch.

Um, I think the thing I would say is you should be clear up front.

So I used to be a seminarian, and even now, there are sometimes times where somebody will ask to meet up for coffee or lunch or something like this, and I don't really know going in, like, are we literally just meeting up for coffee to hang, or do they have an issue they wanna talk about?

You know, sometimes it's like I've-- someone I haven't seen in five years.

And sometimes we're just catching up, and other times they have an issue.

My advice is just be upfront about which one that is, just so the priest knows what he's saying yes or no to, and then respect the fact that maybe he's too busy to do it.

And you can, you can say all that, like, Hey, you might be too busy, but if you're free sometime in the next few weeks, we'd love to have lunch with you and talk to you about this problem that we're, we're trying to resolve.

Would you be open to that?

I think that's completely okay to say.

Dinkleberg says, You should totally do a book on the only yes topic.

Okay.

The people have spoken.

The person has spoken.

All right.

Learning Biz Cath says, How can we avoid making indulgences sound like a point scoring system, i.e.

doing X indulgence gives you ten years off purgatory?

Yeah.

I think the church moved away from temporal language with purgatory for some good reasons.

One of them being, uh, that it can sound like a point scoring system.

And that, uh, seems to throw people off more than I mean, it's like this.

Most people, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, non-Christian, anybody, kinda knows there's bad actions, there are good actions, and within that realm of good action, some of them are better than others.

Within the bad of, uh, within the realm of bad action, some of them are worse than others.

But once you start putting numbers next to them, like murder is seven times as bad as theft, that seems like weird and, y- you know, people are gonna say legalistic.

That's not really what legalism is.

That seems that seems like, like you're trying to quantify the qualifiable, and people push back against that.

You can kind of, uh, Billy Beane Christianity if you're from like sabermetrics.

If you-- and this might be too deep in the world of baseball stats.

If you've seen Moneyball, that was about Billy Beane.

Like the, uh, the guys who said, Here are all of these things that previously just been like eye test.

Let's find these really incredibly specific metrics to measure how often does this guy get on base, uh, how often does he steal bases, how oft-- you know.

And then it maybe it's not the really glamorous guys who are swinging at every pitch and, you know, launching some bombs, but then, you know, your Salvador Perez or somebody where you strike out unnecessarily 'cause you swing at everything.

Not to This is not just a venting session for this.

Uh, but I wanted to try to capture this reality, that some people were going for all these amazing things and then not getting the basic stuff.

And some of the pushback was, well, we got this eye test, we-- you can just look, uh, at, at both and, you know, that's, that's not enough.

Oh, One Hope For All says that answer is not satisfactory.

I say this to them.

What, what is not satisfactory about it?

I think on the Pharisees answer?

Yeah.

Tell me more why I, I would be happy to do more on that.

I don't know what it is you're, you're missing.

And it may just be that they don't accept your answer.

There may not be a better answer you can g-- they might just disagree with you.

Okay.

Anyway, so the putting numeric things next to it is gonna set some people off is all I was saying with that kind of long-winded example.And so you just, just be aware of that, and you should respond to that.

So you can just say it's a total indulgence or a partial indulgence.

We don't have to put a number by it.

All right.

Speaking of which, Jess Bemutis, Bermudas, says, The Protestant told me purgatory makes sense to finish sanctification, but a baptized deathbed convert still seem to have a lifetime of attachment to sin/addiction to be purged.

Why doesn't this convert need purgatory?

They could.

Um, they might.

As though there's a couple things.

One, baptism is removal not only of the sin, but also the punishment due to sin.

So people who get baptized, they are not on the hook for any of that.

That is a special grace of baptism.

Two, you can have a case like the famous thief on the cross.

The thief on the cross is dying for his sins, and he consents to this.

He recognizes the justice of it.

He stops asking to be taken off the cross, and he unites his suffering to that of Jesus Christ, saying, Jesus, remember me when you come to your kingdom, and comforts Christ in the moment of his agony.

He does these tremendously good works while going through this difficult purgation for his sins here on Earth.

So in that case, I think it's completely reasonable to say, yeah, he probably paid any attachment to sin off in the sense of the temporal consequences.

He suffered those.

We watched him suffer those on the cross.

And I think that's actually This, this is-- I don't know if I'm quite, uh, trollish enough to do this.

But if you read the account of, of the good thief, it does occur to me that he seems to point to the need for satisfaction for sin.

Uh, let me see the verse here.

It is Luke twenty-three, I think.

Yeah.

One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying, 'Are you not the Christ?

Save yourself and us.' But the other rebuked him, saying, 'Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation?

And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds.

But this man has done nothing wrong.' And he said, 'Jesus, remember me when you come in your kingly power.' Now, this is a fascinating passage.

I've not, uh, I have not done an episode covering this, and I've actually not seen anybody else point this out, that at one and the same time, the thief on the cross says, I need to trust in Jesus, and I do trust in Jesus, and also, I need to get the just reward for my bad deeds, which is suffering.

And Jesus doesn't say, Hey, if you say you're getting the reward for your deeds and suffering on the cross, you're not trusting in me, the way certain Protestants would say.

Like, oh, if you've got to do something, then you must not trust in Jesus.

That's not Jesus' response to the good thief at all.

The good thief is simultaneously trusting in him and accepting suffering owed to him for his sins.

That's everything we believe with purgatory.

It's the twofold consequence of sin.

But there's this eternal consequence of sin that only Jesus can resolve, and that Jesus does resolve on the cross.

And there's also temporal consequences of sin, that when you screw up your life, you might have screw-ups in your life as a result.

And yeah, that's on you, and Jesus doesn't just automatically take that away.

So I actually think the good thief on the cross might be a sneaky good argument against, um, a lot of these Protestant views, an argument for the double consequence of sin.

Jess, let me know if that answers your question.

I sort of was all over the place.

Oh gosh.

I don't actually have the name attached to him, but somebody said, My dad wants to have the host placed in his mouth, but the Eucharistic ministers either refuse and place it in his hand or oblige him, but only after a nasty look.

Feelings hurt, now he just does not come to receive.

How can I convince him to receive?

Oh, it's Lucky Larry.

Sorry, Larry.

Uh, wow.

Um, couple things.

One, I'm really sorry about that.

That should not be happening.

And the church has actually been very clear that you're not meant to do that.

This was something where, uh, in, I don't know, like twenty years ago maybe, the Vatican gave clear instructions to the US not to do this to people.

Let me see if I can-- I'm not gonna be able to find it right now, but, um, that's gonna stop me from trying.

Um, ba-bum-bum-bum.

Yeah, this is general instructional missile, paragraph one sixty-one.

If communion is given only under the species of bread, the priest raises the host slightly and shows it to each, saying, 'The body of Christ.' The communicant replies, 'Amen,' and receives the sacrament either on the tongue or, where this is allowed, in the hand, the choice lying with the communicant.

So very explicitly, very clearly, the priest and the extraordinary minister has no authority toUm, police somebody else receiving in that way.

Um, there used to be language about, like, instructing people, uh, if they tried to receive kneeling.

But in two thousand and four, the Congregation for Divine Worship, like, made them stop because you can't stop people from kneeling for communion or send them to reeducation camp for that.

Uh, that's perfectly valid.

So yes, he is completely in the right.

I would say two other things.

One, if he's receiving on the tongue to please our Lord, then tell him, Well, you might receive some amount of persecution from other people.

And a nasty look, it's mild as these things go, so offer it up for Christ.

And if it's throwing you off that much where you're literally not even wanting to receive at all, then just receive in the hand.

Like, it's valid to receive in the hand, and if, if the choice is I'm gonna receive on the tongue and I'm gonna just be completely distracted by somebody giving me a bad look, I'm gonna be super anxious about the fact they might or they might just, like, tell me they're not going to.

Um, the other thing is Sorry.

It's about E- Eucharistic ministers, and I know that term technically includes the priest as well.

But if you've got a priest who's, like, well-formed, this shouldn't be happening.

And, and so I think another thing to answer this is to talk to the priest and maybe write to the bishop.

I don't know your parish.

I don't know your diocese.

I don't know how effective that is, but that shouldn't be happening.

You've clearly got church law on your side here.

But having said that, it'd be better to receive in the hand than not to receive, or to receive on the tongue and ignore the dirty look than not to receive.

So the solution that he's settling for about giving into hurt feelings is not the way to go.

Uh, either do this thing for Christ or don't.

But don't give up just because, uh, you might get pushback from it, 'cause you're going to.

Uh, Mikey Moon says, Hi, Joe.

How did Luther go from wanting to spread the abuse of indulgences to denying sacraments?

And how did the Reformation spread so well?

Were the laity in Europe that upset with the church?

Yes and no.

Few things.

One, uh, famously, Luther's original critique is a pretty specific, pretty technical critique on indulgences.

He doesn't deny indulgences.

He doesn't deny purgatory, doesn't do any of that.

Um, he literally condemns those who would deny indulgences.

It's the only anathema in the Ninety-Five Theses.

I've mentioned that before.

It's pretty fascinating.

This hits big because people were really outraged, both legitimately and illegitimately.

So legitimately in the sense that Tetzel probably was preaching in a, a sloppy and maybe even irreverent way about the teaching on indulgences.

The reality is indulgences are good.

And at the time, one of the ways you get an indulgence is by helping to contribute to the care of the church, by doing things like paying to help financially support the building of the church.

That can be the sin of simony if you're doing it for the wrong motives, but it's not automatically.

St. Paul in 2 Corinthians is very clear that those who give will be rewarded if they are cheerful givers.

So the fact that you can give and have a spiritual reward from it is something all Christians should agree on.

So this is the kind of fine line on indulgences I've talked about before.

Spiritually rewarding giving is biblical.

Buying spiritual goods is damnable.

How do you know which one you're in?

It's a matter of intention.

What are you trying to do?

If you're trying to do a good thing for God, you can know He'll reward that, and maybe you're someone who can go and build the church.

You have those skills.

Maybe you're someone who has a bunch of money and you can pay somebody else to build the church.

Either way, good, great, wonderful.

God will reward that.

Uh, but if you're like, I'm gonna write a check so that I can receive heavenly reward and don't have to, like, commit my life to Christ, nope, that doesn't work like that.

And it's something all of us should be very cautious of, whether you're Catholic or Protestant.

I think this is something you have to deal with in the world where you have people who might have means to give.

But you're like, Yeah, but I wanna make sure you're also, like, really striving to be a saint, and you're not just trying to write a check to get around that hard work of getting to heaven.

Um, so if you send enough super chats, you will go directly to heaven.

No, I'm just kidding.

So people were upset about indulgences, somewhat for legitimate reasons because it, it's a confusing thing, somewhat also just for obnoxious nationalist reasons.

If you read, like, Luther's letter to the German princes Obviously I'm going to open that up.

It's the open letter to the Christian nobility of Germany.

Um, it doesn't have the full thing there.

Let me see if I can find the full letter.

Okay.

Yes.

He plays into nationalism in a really big way.

Um, let me see.He says, now that Italy is sucked dry, they come to Germany and begin oh so gently.

But let us beware, Germany will soon become like Italy Already we have some cardinals.

What the Romans sink- seek by that the drunken Germans are not to understand until we have not a bishopric, a monastery, a living, a benefice, a heller or a thinning left.

Antichrist must take the treasures of the earth as it was prophesied.

So it goes on.

They skim the cream off the bishoprics, monasteries, and benefices, benefices.

And because they do not yet venture to turn them all to shameful use as they have done in Italy, they only practice for the present, they only practice for the present the sacred trickery of coupling together ten or twenty prelacies and taking a yearly portion from each of them, and so on and so forth.

So he plays into like, Don't let German money go to Italy.

Don't let the church take all the money.

They're gonna rob you blind.

They've done this to Italians, now they're gonna try to rob us Germans.

And that's a, you know It's the equivalent of someone saying like, We get too many taxes.

Okay, that's like the most positive, attractive message someone could come up with.

The rent's too high.

You know, obviously everyone wants to hear the bad guys are taking money from you.

The church has too much money.

The church is taking your money.

Wouldn't it be great to not give the church so much money?

Everyone's like, Yeah, it would.

So that's one of the reasons he's popular.

I mean, very clearly.

And he, and he leans into that.

He- he's very clever.

That's fifteen twenty, like the early days.

Without denying any of the theological critiques that he has, he's also playing on money issues that people are really tempted to want to side with him for.

And then you couple that with things like the English Reformation, where if you read the stripping of the altars, the English people don't even want the English Reformation.

You've got a lot of landed nobility who are paid off by the king, who receive a bunch of church lands.

Like look at a map of where all the monasteries were in the United Kingdom, and they're confiscated by the English Crown and they're given away, which is why you have like Downton Abbey.

Why are people living in an abbey?

Well, because they stole all this land from the church, and then they were given to the, you know, the powerful people to side with the king.

And the peasants revolted, and then they were violently suppressed.

Like, that's the actual story.

It was not that the English people were like overwhelmingly wanting to be Protestant.

They weren't.

Anglicanism was imposed by force, uh, by the king and the landed elite who, who used violence at home and in Ireland and abroad to, uh, try to impose their will.

I mean, that's just the actual history of the thing.

Um, but there's other reasons as well.

I mean, um, those are And you also have all sorts of geopolitical things going on, like the French Crown is supporting the, the Reformation to try to destabilize Germany and the Holy Roman Empire.

You have different German princes.

Like, there are people who are absolutely I wanna be very clear about this.

There are people who are led by conscience, who they're trying to follow Jesus Christ.

But a lot of the stories about the Reformation are credulous to the point of being like hagiographies rather than real histories, where they act like all of the Protestants were really like high-minded and everything else.

And it's like, no, no, clearly a lot of these guys had big financial motives in wanting the Reformation to succeed.

And that even includes corrupt people like Cardinal Richelieu on the Catholic side, who are, you know, helping the French support Protestantism to try to destroy Germany.

Uh, the other The last thing I'd say on this, 'cause it's just a detail people don't often talk about, I mention it in one of my books.

The printing press in fifteen hundred is present in about a third of the cities of Europe.

So about a third of the cities in Europe have a printing press in their city by fifteen hundred.

The ones that do are about fifty percent more likely to become Protestant.

So one of the parts of the story is Protestants were really good at using print media before Catholics were.

Like I think right now, I'm biased, but I think Catholics do online Catholic-Protestant apologetics better than Protestants do.

It's much easier to find good, well-researched Catholic channels, et cetera.

And there just aren't a ton of Protestant ones.

Like you would If you ever have a mental list, there's a good chance your mental list is the same as somebody else's.

But if you're like, Here are the last five Catholic podcasts I've listened to, there's a good chance even I don't know like three of them, and they're like really good.

That's the situation we're in right now, which is great.

That was not the situation we were in with print media originally.

The church was slow to know what to do with the printing press.

We printent- we printed the Vulgate, like the, the Bible in Latin, and they would use it to promote like papal encyclicals.

They'd do like mass printing of those.

But a deeper engagement of like, Hey, this is actually a way to reach like the growing number of literate middle-class people who can now afford a book where they couldn't before, we were slow to get anywhere off the ground with that.

And Protestants, like especially Martin Luther, was great with this.

Uh, he used pamphlets, he used kind of gross humor, and he knew how to do the populist thing well.

And so, I mean, this is probably gonna be an example that offends a bunch of people in a bunch of different ways, but there's an obvious comparison between what Martin Luther is doing in fifteen seventeen and what Donald Trump is doing in twenty sixteen, where somebody is speaking directly to the people in this way that completely breaks the, the powers that be and the systems that are not used to speaking and acting in that way, and promoting these ideas that become like wildly popular, whether they're good or bad.

They're just like the kind of things people want.

Like if somebody says like, Hey, no taxes.

Hey, no tithes, no, you know, indulgences.

No, no money going to, uh, foreign countries.

I mean, Luther and Trump, there's The comparison is there.

That's all I'm saying.All right.

Um, I've got a couple more questions and comments.

I think there's like five more.

I'm gonna try to, try to knock out all of these.

If you have other questions you want to have addressed in a future episode, just let me know.

Thomas Wilson says, Hey Joe, came across Pope Gregory the Great's idea of the three Petrine sees in response to the first one, equals doctrine in the East, distressed primacy of Peter.

Should we as Catholics use this more in apologetics?

Yes.

So all of the Pentarchy That's funny.

So you've got the three Petrine sees, Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, that are all connected to Peter in a very obvious way, but really Jerusalem could be on that list as well, because Peter is the first leader of the church in Jerusalem.

You see it in the early chapters of Acts.

He hands that authority over to James, but it's very clear that Peter is the first one running things.

Uh, and then he leaves the city and goes on to Antioch and then to Rome.

So he founds the church in Antioch, he founds the church at Rome, his student Mark founds the church in Alexandria.

And Constantinople's authority, in as much as they have it, is derivative of Roman authority.

That because they are New Rome, they, um, have kind of an echo of Roman authority.

So all five of the Pentarchal sees make sense in light of the Apostolic See, Rome.

Uh, so we can talk about the Petrine sees or Apostolic sees plural, but the Apostolic See in the singular is always Rome.

So yeah, that's-- I think that's a great point.

Um, oh, Mango Bango.

I do have thoughts on the SSPX conference.

Yeah, I was just talking to somebody with the SSPX. I had lunch with them on Saturday, and I think I'm gonna do an upcoming episode in like two weeks on that.

I'll have more thoughts next stream, but just a little preview of thoughts there.

Fly Eagle Fly, I'm imagining that's Joe.

What a horrible username.

Why'd you make me read that?

Says, Nice job debunking Ashley Hayes.

You will have to It's Hicks.

Uh, you'll have to watch tomorrow.

Uh, and or if you're on Patreon, you can see it right now.

I've got an episode of-- a long one for tomorrow, if you still haven't gotten enough Seamus Pupari today.

Smarty Smarty said, Can you do a video comparing true versus LDS Holy Spirit?

Interesting idea.

That might be a good thing to cover if I do a book.

Like what is the role of the Holy Spirit in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?

There's this fascinating thing on, uh, whether there are two personages in the Godhead or three.

Mormon thought has changed over time on that score.

Um, Ratzingerian Tomas says, Hi John, a lay Dominican, had a friend in our chapter struggle with assenting to the church's social doctrine on ecology in a recent formation module.

Any a-advice?

Love your work.

Yes.

I would say ecology of the body is where I would go.

So the fact that we need to care for the earth, I know there are people who hear that and they're like, they roll their eyes and they're like, Oh, look at the church being all political.

And it's like, guys, the stewardship of creation is literally the first thing we're told to do.

Well, one of the first things we're told to do in Genesis one, right?

God says, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.

So you've been entrusted with creation.

Material creation is in the care of man.

You know, spiritual creation I have no idea why it keeps cutting out like that.

Anyway, there's spiritual creation, angels that are above you, but then material creation, uh, the earth, fish of the sea, birds of the air, every living thing that moves upon the earth, is placed under your care, under your dominion.

And so start with that.

And then if you look at the instructions given to man, um, that very much is tied to that.

Even like the naming of animals is establishing a certain kind of relationality between man and creation.

So the care for the earth is not just some like liberal social justice blah, blah, blah.

No, it's like this is a basic Christian duty from page one.

Then a-as I said, tie this with, um, m- Benedict XVI. Talks about human ecology and a lot of the idea of human ecology Oh gosh, there's Okay.

Um, he had the general audience in two thousand and nine.

Uh, and then he talks about it in Caritatis veritatis.

I think that's where he introduces the idea.

Let me see.

Yes.

Okay.

Basic idea is this.

You can approach the world through a mentality of manipulation and domination or through a mentality of dominion, care, recognition, and so on.

There's a technological impulse where we say knowledge is power and the idea is to just dominate and alter and change and everything else.

And that is anti-ecological.

It will destroy the planet, but it also destroys the human person and it destroys one another.

So you see this in a lot of ways.

You see this in IVF. You see this in transgenderism of like, Hey, you don't like your body, change it.Here's some chemicals here's whatever.

Uh, here-- you know, like, there's all this stuff that comes up that we, we face all the time There's versions of this in artificial intelligence that we're dealing with right now but the idea is pretty simple Our task is to accept reality first Now, there might be some morally acceptable and appropriate ways of altering reality, but we need to start with accepting and appreciating and caring for reality as God has made it.

Your body, your neighbor, your world.

And only if you start from that posture of receptivity and discovery are you appropriately, humbly, uh, in a position where you can do any kind of modification at all.

If you start from an approach of domination, modification, disposability and everything else, it's really bad.

It, I think it's really destructive.

I-- this is one of the things I said during COVID. Uh Oh, wait.

Catholic Christian wants me on for a couple of more hours?

Oh, sorry.

Catholic Christian says he's gonna stream after this.

Uh, I've got one more question after this.

How about that, brother?

Um, what was I saying?

Oh, yeah.

So, like, during COVID, people are like single use everything.

If you go to Starbucks, you can't use your own cup.

They're gonna give you a plastic cup if even if you're getting water, and they're gonna throw away the cup and get a new cup every time you wanna refill.

That is insanely I mean, it's insane for a lot of reasons, but I'm not gonna touch that.

It's insanely destructive of the environment.

And when people are going like that, like, when that's kind of the approach, uh, towards things around us, it's a pretty short step before that's also the approach we have towards people around us.

Like, I don't think it's actually insane to say a plastic culture creates the conditions for, like, the trans confusion and everything else in a way that a, a culture that Like, this is-- Look, here's the two-word version: touch grass.

That there actually is something in getting out and being in creation that restores you to sanity.

And so an ecology rooted in that, of respecting the Earth and respecting, uh, yourself and your neighbor, is something that all Christians should be able to get on board with and isn't gonna fit narrowly into, like, the two-party system, but who cares?

All right.

Plate Body says, Not Catholic yet because of Dignitatis Humanae and Nostra aetate as well as the apparent change to the death penalty.

I see these as contradictions that are hard to overcome without mental gymnastics.

Any help?

Yes.

On the issue of religious freedom, there is an excellent debate between Thomas Pink and, uh, Father Ron Heimer.

How do you spell Ron Heimer?

Um, okay, it's Martin Ronheimer, R-H-O-N-H-E-I-M-E-R. They wrote back and forth, kind of sparring on this question, and then they had a debate at Notre Dame, um, in twenty fifteen.

It is excellent because I think they both present coherent cases for two ways of interpreting the status of religious freedom.

One is there's a change in the church's non-infallible teaching.

Like, there is an actual, like, we were wrong before, now we're, we say this instead.

The other is, no, that's not what's happening, and in fact, the document signals that's not what's happening, um, because famously, Dignitatis Humanae says that it's leaving the traditional teaching untouched.

Religious freedom, in turn, which men demand is necessary to fulfill their duty to worship God, has to do with immunity from coercion in civil society.

Therefore, it leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies towards the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ, meaning we don't have to affirm a radical secular libertarian view of, like, you can promote whatever you want and we're gonna-- everything's equally good.

No.

It's perfectly fine to say if somebody's promoting things that are obscene and vulgar and false and everything else, then you don't have to give them airtime.

You don't have to promote it.

You don't have to use the resources of the state.

What you can't do is, like, coerce them into believing because faith is, is an act of the will and of the intellect enabled by divine grace, that you can't force someone to make an interior act of the intellect and the will, and you can't give them divine grace by force.

It doesn't work like that.

So God and God alone can enable them to make that act of faith.

So having policies that approach that from understanding traditional Catholic anthropologies is fine.

Uh, that doesn't mean we have to And so in other words, one of the ways people have kind of interpreted religious freedom is wrong, but okay, fine.

Um, and then let's see.

Nostra aetate.

Yeah, I've talked about this a little bit before.

It depends.

Um, oh, sorry.

Carl says, I think I'm too stupid for Catholicism like I'm watching Christian Wagner, your video, and I have no idea what's going on.

Okay.

I didn't do a good job explaining this one.

That's why.

And it's a little bit in the weeds.

So on this one, the question is religious freedom.

Like, how much freedom should people have?

Because on the one hand, Catholics will traditionally say error has no rights.

And that's true.

Error has no rights.

Something can't both be false and a right.However, individuals do have rights, and that includes the right to worship God in the way that conscience tells them to within very broad parameters.

Meaning, like if somebody says, I think I'm supposed to offer human sacrifice, we don't have to just be like, Cool, go for it.

We can use coercion to stop that.

But we're not meant to simply use coercion to try to make Catholicism, uh, become the world's religion or something.

So there's a limit to the coercive power of the state.

What those limits are, there's an ongoing debate about that, and this is one thing where I know there was a question with the SSPX. One of the things the Society of St. Pius X is trying to get the Vatican to really clarify is what's the proper understanding of Nostra Aetate and the proper understanding of Dignitas Humanae.

I think that for a lot of reasons, an approach of you have to tell us or we're gonna go into schism is not the way to do it.

I think just take a traditional hermeneutic, and if somebody tells you you're wrong, let them tell you that you're wrong.

But interpret it in keeping with the church.

That's how we've always done things.

Don't assume tension.

Don't assume contradiction.

Now, I understand that's trickier here because so many people read this as a contradiction, and many of them were very happy to do so and then ran off and did crazy stuff in the name of, uh, you know, Well, we can't really affirm anything's true anymore, so if you're just like a faithful Buddhist, that's just as good as being a Christian.

That's not what we believe.

That's never been what we believe.

And I think you can find plenty of statements from popes, including Pope Leo, Pope Francis, Pope Benedict, that make it very clear that's not what we believe.

Um, yeah, similar with Nostra Aetate, I suspect it's on like the Muslim stuff, but it's actually a pretty traditional view that Muslim worship is aimed at the true God, which doesn't automatically make it pleasing worship.

Cain and Abel are both aiming their worship at the true God, but God only accepts the valid worship of Abel and not the half-hearted worship of Cain.

So the question of who the worship is directed to is one part, but it's not the only thing we're, we're worried about with worship.

Maybe you've got a different issue with Nostra Aetate.

Let me know if that is the case.

But I see that more as a matter of emphasis than anything else, that we were focusing on the positives we have in common rather than focusing on the things that we disagree about, which ironically is one of the first points I made early on, is that that's actually a good thing to, to be in the habit of doing.

All right.

Hope I answered everyone's questions to your satisfaction.

I know at least one of you said I did not, so I'm sorry about that.

Um, and then I've got Mango's question on the SSPX, and then Bronca's question on, uh, favorite pope next time, and then random YouTuber just has a question about the Epistle of Barnabas and Gospel of Barnabas for next time as well.

So those three will lead us off.

I think Vanessa also had a question she wanted me to answer about drums in church.

So tune in next time.

I think it's just two weeks from today.

Let me double-check.

Schedule-wise, today is the 23rd.

So yeah, I believe, um, March 9th.

Looking forward to talking to you guys then.

All right.

God bless you.