A Protestant and a Catholic Walk into a Bar... w/ Matt Whitman @The Ten Minute Bible Hour

[Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Applause] my so [Music] uh matt whitman great to have you on pints with aquinas nice to be here man this music is catchy too that adds to the effect yeah yeah i'm getting really pumped up over here um i set it off air i think this might be my most anticipated interview which is honestly no offense kind of disappointing because i've had some pretty big like theologians and philosophers on they're like yeah yeah whatever get whitman i understand i i'm not quite sure what to do with that i'm feeling really guilty that i didn't drop my water bottle in like a paper bag or something so that i could have long it's 10 in the morning oh i see yeah yeah well don't worry i'm drinking water as well um and i want to let everybody know right now that if we get 1 000 thumbs up in the next 24 hours i will send this glorious beer stein to matt whitman so hit that thumbs up and feel free to share this on facebook or wherever you're listening but matt it's really really great to connect with you i've dabbled in some of your videos and you are just terribly charming and you seem i know it might be easy to fake but you seem like very humble and very open and um yeah very honest in in your sort of interactions with people of different faiths and uh i hope i do that i want to do that more and so it was it's really cool that we get to connect yeah well it is easy to fake because you have the power of editing so all you do is you just go through it and edit out everything that's prideful and obnoxious and then people are like oh he seems like a nice guy it's a great trick i wish i had an editor for real life so i saw a bit of that interview you did with that catholic theologian while you were sitting down eating fries and i want to know how many comments referenced asmr that's what i need to know all right yes the comment section there was five percent people angry about catholicism and protestantism and then about five percent people concerned with us not eating the fries at a rapid enough pace and then about 90 what you just described i do the first video i started editing it and every time we take a bite of anything it was just a horrible sounding it sounded like an earthquake was happening i'm like oh i got to delete everything where we're taking a bite and then people started getting upset that we weren't eating enough you need to eat you need to get some muscle on those bones you're both too skinny yeah i'm sorry i can't win oh man so for those who are watching right now maybe they're not that familiar with you to tell us about your channel how you started it what the ride's been like sure yeah uh i i'm a historical theology guy i did the pastor thing for a long time and i was in a church in western wyoming out by jackson if people know where that is like beautiful rugged yellowstone teton mountain territory and it's one of the most remote places in the continental united states and so the whole congregation is just always traveling if you go to home depot that's a weekend and so two sundays a month was really good in terms of reliable attendance for somebody at our church they're like well i'm just gonna use this this fad that is the internet to make little short 10-minute more like daily show versions of the the sermons that we were doing every week where we would go straight through a book of the bible real slow let's keep up behind and i could keep doing things on sunday the way i wanted and then other people started watching and then more other people started watching and then eventually i got done doing the book of acts and i was like well what do you do next and then it was just like oh and the world is wide open i can cover anything i want to about theology or whatever and i decided to be kind of a cool place to play out my fascination with the history of christianity and why it evolved the way it did and why are there different expressions of the thing instead of just one monolithic block why is that my thesis would be that that's actually a good thing and that the gospel and the the message of jesus and redemption and the whole story has been in front of more people and resonated with more people because the gospel is so adaptable to different times different cultures different languages and so i i'm fascinated by the taxonomy of the church and how it all fits together and so i started making videos about that but instead of me going and wikipediaing a bunch of stuff and then acting like i actually knew it so you really didn't i started going to other people's churches and letting them explain where they came from and what they think and how they got there and what they do in church and so that's a lot of what i do now that's really cool i think the first video i saw of you was a video in which you talked about being a christian who deconverted which is all the rage these does and then coming back to faith which is a fascinating thing i think yeah oh you started with that one all right we don't have no no i mean that's the video you started with you're allowed to ask the question oh got you got you fire away everything's cool yeah uh no i but i thought it was wonderful really good yeah i i was cool with sharing most of that story but as i look back on that video i'm like man my slight guardedness on that the thing that it mostly masked was how much the process hurt and it was really profoundly painful to spend your whole life as a theist and then honestly just in a moment that that heart mind truth level gut check of yeah but like god you're still there right like when poo and eeyore would just kind of tap each other and be like i just wanted to be sure of you like i did that and i was like oh this is the first time ever that i honestly feel like there's nothing there and it was it's devastating i'm not sure i did a very good job of communicating how much that stung and how difficult and alone that process was but also how do you believe something you don't believe just epistemologically how do you think a thing you don't think how do you hold a conviction you don't hold and so yeah i just went through this period where i was forced to just be gut level honest it's not like oh my feelings were hurt by church and i just needed to rethink my faith a little bit it's like no i just genuinely went through a good stretch where i didn't think there was a deity or any first cause to anything and i have what an interesting process to take the whole thing apart and then be surprised when the whole thing came back together in a new and different way so yeah that's what that video is about yeah i i don't know if you feel like this sometimes like running a youtube channel that's relatively successful as far as subscribers and watches there's this constant nagging fear in the back of my mind that i'm going to end up a catholic hack you know like somebody who is just more interested in making that that youtube revenue that i am actually pursuing the truth and i i really do think that's not the case you know um i don't think i am um but i you know for example like what if you had this explosive youtube channel and you had a lot to lose in kind of deconverting you know i i really think it does take courage like i don't want people to be atheists but if you're going to abandon this thing that you've held to for so long and lose friendships and whatever else like that's that's a courageous thing and um again i'm not because i know in the comment box we get a ton of people saying how could you possibly say an atheist could be courageous but i do think it does take courage like these people who are singing in these big prominent evangelical churches and i'm sure catholic personalities as well to come out and actually lose something uh because as you say you can't believe what you can't believe anymore that does take courage yeah and i think the side that is hard to comprehend if you haven't been through something like that is the the desired genuine i mean the only people in your lives who you really know deeply are people who you've known through church and ministry stuff at that point or the vast majority why would you want to put them in a difficult spot just because you're going through a thing but also you can't lie about jesus you can't lie about faith as soon as you start lying to yourself or lying to other people about faith you got a problem now by lying i mean coming out and boldly saying this is exactly where i'm at this is exactly what i think these are things i never ever wrestle with i don't mean acknowledging doubt or strain or difficulty or being okay with asking questions and having those questions take a very long time to sort through i just mean like what you were describing becoming a catholic hack becoming a protestant hack becoming a person who pretends to think and feel and deeply hold things that you don't because it's your job and now you just got to stick with it because of some cost and you're in and you don't have anything else you can do so yeah i i respect anybody who's willing to tell the truth about where they're actually at and what they're actually thinking but yeah what i think oh go ahead please well i was just going to say i'm imagining people like say joel osteen or somebody who have these prominent platforms uh or for that matter pope francis i don't know but like imagine them kind of stepping away from that like the yeah the inc that just must be excruciating but yeah but i guess what's the alternative is you just start lying to yourself and i guess that's why i think we should always sort of not always but occasionally sort of reflect and question our own motivations because if it's possible for other people to be hacks without realizing it which i'm sure it is right people can be that deceived then it's possible for me i suppose and i so i ought to be at least somewhat reflective about that right well i think there's a third way but that third way doesn't fit very well with how we do culture right now and that third way is to give and receive patience with each other the third way is if i'd been in an environment and maybe i was maybe i just underestimated everybody in my life but i didn't tell anybody about this thing because i didn't want to do damage and i felt like my options were i have a flag the flag is my soul i can cram that into the ground on this side of the line or i can cram that into the ground on this side of the line but that flag must be crammed and if it's not crammed well then you're you're nothing you're nobody so there's only you always have to be in a place of conclusion of finality and in a non-forgiveness culture which is what we've built for each other in the last 10 or 15 years which is one of the great regrets and disappointments of the moment in history that i share with everybody who's here right now that that air of unforgiveness means there is no time for ambiguity about where your flag is planted your flag planting provides power to one of only two binary options for how to think about the world and what philosophies and theologies you hold to so pick one and if you don't we have no use or time for you and so as a result i think everybody feels pressure to be like oh man i guess i need to let everybody know right now that my process is over i took a week and a half on it and i am now no longer a theist and i now think all of these other things because no man's land is a very lonely place even if the tribe is gross you've got to have one of those tribes or you are dead in the water homie and i would just love to give each other permission to give you permission my friend to give people watching this to give planet earth permission to just think about crap for a while yeah it's okay if the equation of how does an infinite god interact with finite humanity and what role does my belief play in that it's okay if that takes a minute it's okay does salvation come primarily through the mediation of the church in their relationship with jesus christ as the representative of christ on earth or salvation more of a sole fide kind of expression where this direct access to god and by faith alone is how like it's okay if you don't know the answer to that and you don't go out and slug it out with other christians who do like it's just all right to think about that for a while because it's kind of important and it's kind of hard those are excellent points i couldn't agree more very well put yeah and it's like nuance is weakness uh you have to be as black or as white as you can be and so like in like a catholic conservative circle it's like you you better mention devotion to the blessed mother within the first three minutes or else i'm curious about you know your allegiance or something you know and i'm sure something's similar with protestantism um and yeah we got our things yeah like there's there's stuff like that you know like people like in i'll share about catholicism you can feel free to share about protestantism right um i'm a big fan as a catholic of of saying something like this and this is what i kind of pinned to my profiles a faithful catholic is not only one who submits to what the church teaches authoritatively but is also one who does not demand uniformity where the church allows diversity of opinion or custom what happens in the catholic church what i just keep liking you more just i just you keep saying words and then i keep liking more this is fun yeah yeah so it's like you know like people get like in the catholic church there's a lot of devotionals right so you've got the rosary or you've got this particular medal or this kind of novena or this sort of and and when people get into a devotion that enriches their life tremendously they can sometimes talk about that devotion as if this is a non-negotiable but the catholic church doesn't actually mandate that catholics pray the rosary and feel free to check out my comm box after the video there's gonna be people who are really upset about that there's different expressions within catholicism right people who celebrate the divine liturgy of saint john chrysostom in the eastern catholic churches um and so yeah there's no patience even for that kind of nuance it's like we all have to be this one monolithic thing and you would think in catholicism given that the word broken down would mean according to the whole or colloquially universal that would be okay with a sort of universal expression of faith like here's another thing it's kind of funny like being in a universal church means that there's going to be kind of devotions that strike me as weird like in the philippines there's this devotion it's called the infant prague of jesus you should totally check it out it's like jesus dressed this is new to me yeah check it in a little kind of dress thing with a big crown on and i look at that like that seems weird to me but it's okay because not everything has to appeal to my sensibilities or particular tastes but my the whole point in saying that is just that there's no sort of patience for any kind of nuance right right right and i think there has to be or the whole thing would break and i think one of the things that we should be able to just reason our way to is if 2000 years after the life death and resurrection of jesus christ this religion still exists it must have a little give to it because the world has changed somewhat in the last couple thousand years and i think of installing like a floating floor have you ever done one of these like a pergo floor yes like a laminate yep okay when you do that you do not make your cuts with that floor all the way to your drywall or to your trim you know that that trim is going to cover a little bit of space that you allow and if you live in a diverse climate like i do as things get more humid as things get hotter and colder that floor is going to expand and contract and if you don't leave room for expansion and contraction in within a reasonable amount well then the whole thing is going to eventually warp up and just be ruined and you're going to end up having to replace the whole thing those traditions within protestantism that i see thriving have just enough give to allow for that kind of diversity on things that are secondary or especially tertiary those expressions of protestantism that i see falling off a cliff and having very little future are those that put in their floating floor all the way out to the trim all the way out to the walls and then any pressure from planet earth from culture society other expressions of christianity a newly discovered passage that nobody had thought about science and all of a sudden boom the whole floor is warped and that expression it's just wrecked and as soon as the people who are in it now are dead it's going to be gone it's going to be over and it seems to me that orthodoxy benefits from having a tremendous amount of flex out there at the edges very creedal very doggedly determined to stick to the language of calcidon but and that mystery clause that mystery emphasis within orthodoxy that allows for quite a bit of ebb and flow and i in my travels on the internet run into two brands of catholics i definitely hear from the type that it feels like their expression of catholicism is installed all the way to the trim and there's no room and it warps if anything happens to it and then i run into the crowd that seems to really appreciate and lean into that that diversity that in my estimation is allowable is not even just allowable but celebrateable within catholicism and is the reason that this ancient expression of christianity continues to thrive yeah and i suppose it's helpful to when as a catholic i think okay what is the church a catholic church what does it forbid what does it permit what does it encourage what does it mandate you know and i'm sure you and i would have obviously differences of opinion as to what's fundamental and what is something that we can take or leave but um can you put a pin in that continue it will you no you go well no i was just going to say let's find out like finish the thought but i want to find out so so so for example like baptism regenerates the soul i can't be like well does it though like as a catholic that's not an option for me but saying immersion or sprinkling or like that's an option for me now that's maybe i just thought of that off the top of my head that's not terribly profound but um sure let's take it out one more level though why does baptism read we've been there sorry you you broke up a little bit why does baptism regenerate the soul yeah um well because through the power of christ and through the the words of the sacrament and i would point to things like john 3 5 you know about being born of uh what is it i'm trying to be fancy with my greek who to toss kai penumatos yeah yeah you like that um yeah that this is something as a catholic that has been i would say understood universally that this isn't something and i'm not trying to get into a debate on baptism here i'm just saying how i understand it right that this is something that no church father that i'm aware of say who commented on john 3 5 interpret it to mean anything other than baptism has this real effect isn't merely symbolic that sort of thing and so many point in bringing that up was to kind of show this kind of distinction between as a catholic there are sort of non-negotiables and then there are certain things that are and i think what you're talking about when you're saying like floor all the way to the wall is i don't know it's kind of like i think in the face of a chaotic culture that we cannot understand or control and which we might have very little hope for we need to we we want to get very bloody clear about what's black and white like in a world of grey we desperately need a black and white you know in a world in which i feel like i'm falling i would like a foothold please um and i sort of think fundamentalism be it catholic or protestant is sort of born out of that sort of fear at least i've seen that in my own life i'm not even talking about other people in particular i just see it in my own life like when life is out of control the bloody bins will be on the curb by wednesday morning to be empty damn it you know what i mean like there's a i can't control my own life and my own emotions but i can bloody well control that and so i think uh in yeah yeah yeah i i mean we've got our list of essentials as well it varies a little bit from expression of protestantism to expression of protestantism we but the same thing happens i i think there is an insecurity one an insecurity in relationship to other christian traditions if their thing is right my thing must be wrong and that's just a bad ethic of of the thought of ideas that whoa whoa whoa there's a lot of nuance here that is not necessarily true that if their thing is right my thing could be wrong i mean there could be more overlap than you figured both you could both but there's also you could both be wrong you could both be right about enough stuff that the shaded area of the venn diagram makes you effectively overlap as allies and then you can have a laugh and a good time and enjoy the conversation about the places where you don't those are my favorite people to hang out with uh conventional unity right like it's like the the period i went through that we were talking a little about a little while ago i i can't help but believe what i believe i would like to believe something different sometimes but if i don't then i didn't i would love to be persuaded of something i'm not persuaded of for peace at times but if i'm not persuaded of it i i can't help that and but there's a cent yeah like there's a sense in which like this i'm very sorry brother yeah there are certain things that i can't or in theory might not be able to convince myself of but it's based upon something that i am sufficiently convinced of and so except by faith you know and i think like for catholics that's kind of the nice thing about being a catholic it's like okay so there are certain teachings that i have to hold i i don't know how to figure that out right now but i've sort of submitted my intellect to the teaching authority of the church and so therefore i'm on board and while i personally have trouble figuring this out i'm gonna have to look into it a little more and i suppose you have something similar in christianity if the in protestantism if you have the bible teaching something emphatically you might say well okay i know i have to believe this i do believe that the bible's the inspired word of god and therefore this is going to have to fit if i'm going to maintain that belief in the inherent word of god yeah and i would say how that plays out in the mind of a protestant or let's just say non-catholic christian within the boundaries of creedalism because for example baptists would not claim to be protestant um seventh-day adventism it's not really protestant it's it's built a little bit different it flows out of a different thing so i think what you do with those difficult tensions whether they be with the authority of the church the local church the authority of the text it has a lot to do with how your historical tradition is structured and where the authority comes from for the eastern church and for western catholicism it's easy it's magisterium it's apostolic succession it's the authority of the church it's tradition it's very straightforward there is a centralized unified authority that is not the only authority but as you describe you're reconciling your questions and struggles your gray areas with those teachings but within protestantism you've got multiple versions of authority the anglican church would view itself as the continuing catholic church so they would say we didn't leave we're still part of the exact same thing and no we would still hold to all of these traditions we would look to the church fathers into tradition as well and we would also have to wrestle with that kind of thing the reformers the reformed traditions born out of calvinism john knox characters like that they would say the supreme authority is the text and that the text can be systematized and solved and so any friction you have is going to be with the text or with the distillation of the text into a confession like westminster it's the obvious one that comes to mind you're not wrestling against the westminster divines you're wrestling against that document and the shorter catechism that everybody's going through in that tradition but once all of the apostolic authority real estate was taken up and then once all of the biblical systematizing authority real estate was taken up after the 16th and 17th century you get into the 18th century in the 19th century and there's nowhere to go if you feel like you need to start a new church and so then you get non-catholic expressions of christianity that are rooted in a new apostolic succession yeah i had a vision while i was on my farm and god told me you went specific i went vague god told me where to get this new information and i got it and so i am theologically descended from the apostle paul god speaks through me and i am going to give you this new truth that sort of corresponds with the bible and people who wrestle in that kind of a tradition which i'm very wary of are are going to have to wrestle with the bible and the claims of the apostle skip or gary or whatever his name is in that situation but then furthermore you've also got expressions of non-catholicism where what you're wrestling with is what truth you believe is coming through the sign gifts and the spiritual devotional experiences you're having with the holy spirit in church and throughout the week now those last few things i described that's not really my expression of historical christianity i'm from this teeny tiny little sliver of scandinavian free church history where we're really into the life of the mind we're into the church fathers we're into historical creedal christianity we would not think of christianity as starting in 1517 after a 1500 year pause in the action we view ourselves as profoundly connected with all of that and profoundly grateful that expressions of christianity we might not agree with on every single detail did such a great job of taking care of the text of nurturing the life of the mind of preserving the thoughts and the beliefs of the christians on whose shoulders we stand so so for me what i'm wrestling with as a christian from my narrow little sliver of sort of protestantism is rome historically i'm wrestling with the eastern church fathers i'm wrestling with the creeds i'm wrestling with the text i'm wrestling with other apostolic claims that are more recent and potentially dubious and so i guess what i'm trying to say is protestantism as you know is not monolithic right and there's something i find really enviable about what you're saying which is man i know exactly what i am wrestling with whereas mine is so multifaceted confusing yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and that could either be seen as a sort of well g isn't that nice for you uh but it just so happens that that isn't how the christian expression you know ought to have evolved or you know from my perspective i'm like yeah it is nice and maybe this is the way it was supposed to be because i mean one of the things thomas aquinas talks about is you know there are certain things that we can know through philosophy there are certain things we could only know through divine revelation right so aquinas and the catholic church teaches that we can come to a knowledge that there is a god through examining the world around us but that god decided to reveal himself to us even that even in that sense of his existence because if we were left to our own devices we would either not come to know that he exists not have the time to sort of study philosophy and metaphysics come to all sorts of errors about this god that like he has a body or something like that and so it's really great that god has revealed himself to us and revealed what it is we need to know for our salvation in a way so that we don't we don't have to figure it all out for ourselves and i suppose those things that i would consider like no this is something we should know and submit to and and your this is something we should know and submit to it probably i mean correct me if i'm wrong but i would imagine you would think you're you probably have fewer things than i do as a as a catholic i often find that when i'm engaging with a protestant it's like i have more to lose than you do in one sense right because if i talk to you about why praying to the saints can be sort of reconciled with scripture and how yes there was development in the early church but it was adopted somewhat soon and you say okay yeah cool i'm down with that well you're still a protestant you know what i mean so like you can accept a lot more of my beliefs than i can accept of yours because if i start accepting yours then i'm i'm no longer catholic or as if you accept many of mine you know other than say the papacy or something then you can remain one of those protestants well i accept the papacy i mean the papacy is one of the historical patriarchs of the historical centers of christianity and is one of those roles that has profoundly contributed to the history of theology and i think as a protestant one of the most commendable things that comes out of the role of the papacy apart from you know the things that normally get brought up by protestants which are justifiably critiqued the papacy hasn't always had good days but i think one of the best things that's come out of it is somebody had to have the buck stop with them somebody had to navigate the unavoidable melding of church and state in christendom for a thousand years and had to figure out practical theological solutions just as you talked about that wrestling they had to wrestle they had to figure out a way to resolve these things and i i know that the pope does not always speak ex-cathedra does not always speak absolutely infallibly authoritatively there's a whole lot of things that popes have said that every catholic would reject every catholic would reject but there's a whole lot of other stuff that falls in that in between place where this is a innovative practical fits within the boundaries of historical catholic orthodoxy solution that actually resolves a gigantic crisis and everybody's better for that practical thinking on the part of rome on the part of the vatican and i think it's okay from the outside looking in to be historically grateful for those moments of practical solutions as a protestant yeah i don't have to wrestle with that stuff because we've never been in charge to that degree so my scandinavian free church tradition we never ran scandinavia we don't have to fix any of that or reconcile any of that we didn't have to make theological decisions that were that were built for practical temporal societal management when you say you accept the papacy you mean you accept it uh historically and you see the value it played in church history that's obviously different to say saying you accept the papacy as it stands today and it's you see what i'm doing yeah yeah but i see i like what you're doing though i mean i think it's important that whenever we have a disagreement we begin by by pointing out how we agree you know like meeting where we can is always a good idea yes i do not believe that god is the son and the papacy is the moon who reflects with accuracy the reality of the sun in everything i i don't view it as a protestant as being such a unique role i also don't share the protestant any of my friends and brothers who are proud that the pope is the antichrist and nothing redemptive has come from that place but that's just not where i land on those issues so like for you when you engage with catholics and orthodox is there a sense in which like you're like you know i am i am actually open to becoming a catholic or do you more have you pretty much settled that no but i can see the value in many of the things you do and i'm willing to adopt some of those things i find beneficial yeah closer to the latter um yeah it's just it's not new to me and i think maybe it's the way i do the videos and that i don't want to go tell someone else what they believe i want to ask and i want to hear how they would say it that's and what they think but i it's it's not like look i have a ton to learn i don't know most things in the world obviously but but i mean this is what i do this is what i care about is historical theology so so it's not like i swing by a catholic church and just have an off-the-cuff conversation with a priest or i talk with one of my clergy friends from within catholicism and they're like oh yeah well this is what we believe and why and i'm like what oh oh well that that is okay wow what am i doing how do i convert for the most part it's like oh no okay i better understand the cohesiveness of your system it's just that none of those things strike to those handful of core assumptions gotcha that yeah that would cause me to to say oh yeah well catholicism makes the most sense and i want to be in yeah yeah yeah yeah and do you i imagine you'd get tired of people in your youtube comment section saying things like become orthodox become catholic you're like this isn't helpful thank you for dropping by no but i definitely get become orthodox and um you know things like that you know and it's like okay do you ever reply to those uh i should do it in a sort of snarky way dude no one's ever put it that way before but now you say it yeah i do that sometimes i do that exact response like oh wow i oh orthodoxy is truth well i just had no idea but now that you've commented that here i uh i guess it's time for me to immediately convert you know here's something i want to bring up that i think has to do with what we're talking about you know we live in a multi-cultural multi-faith society we don't live in 13th century you know italy we live on streets with atheists and jews maybe and maybe muslims or protestants different versions of protestantism and so we're having to kind of wrestle with things that perhaps people didn't have to in the past it would be a lot easier to be like we're right that's the heretic and that still might be the case but i mean that kind of like black and white world view it's difficult to maintain that when you are encountering people who prima facie seem just as rational and as good as you are and they have what at least again on the face of it appears to be coherent they they have a they have a different narrative that seems to make sense of the data of human experience and so it's like what do i what do i do with that um how i'm saying a lot of things but you know how confidently am i to hold my worldview given that there are there exist people who could question me into the ground and and make me seem like an idiot and okay so then what options do i have okay am i not to hold a world view well that is one am i to hold one loosely uh thinking constantly that anything will give at any point okay but that's sort of self refuting too because there's obviously people who could talk you into the ground about why you're wrong about holding your worldview loosely do you see what i'm sort of approaching yes yes i feel like that's the conundrum of the moment my friend yeah we we had this vision that if you put us all in a room together globally it would totally work we were doing this melting pot thing was like let's put our ideas together let's put everybody together from all over the world and america will lead the way the west will lead the way and we've got this new notion of liberal tolerance that got us through the 19th and 20th centuries a little bit clunky but we defeated evil and the last of the global authoritarians and let's just make a device that lets us all be in the same room together and it should move us toward utopia with better understanding of each other and it has not done that it has not delivered on those promises even though i really like the internet because it allows things like this to happen i think we're still in the shock and awe phase of the internet where we had no idea how differently other people saw it we had i mean is it any coincidence that the views in the west toward islam have shifted so much in the last 20 years nobody ever talked to a muslim 20 years ago and so now you look at it and i think people in the west are much more equipped to be like oh well there's that kind of muslim thought and there's that kind of islam and then whoa that's the kind i saw in tom clancy movies okay i do recognize that but i didn't know any of this other stuff existed at all and then yeah you have to reconcile that and furthermore i don't think most protestants knew any catholics i i mean i still hear 2001 caricatures of protestantism ah martin luther ripped books out of the bible we don't have a pope he can't do that that didn't happen that's 1990s catholic apologetics stop with that but you still hear that from protestants from catholics from orthodox these old lines that people threw around during the youth group age of the 1980s and 1990s and now you hear them and they just feel like relics well you can just go ask a lutheran i mean you have the internet you can even go find a german lutheran in germany it's not that hard anymore and you could just find out what they think and have a civilized conversation and a drink and it'll be fine and so what's happening is that we are i think we are just right now my friend seeing the inflection point where we emerge from the shock and awe moment of awe crap people don't think what i think and they're not as stupid as i'd been told and and everybody else makes sort of sense and as i'd hoped yes and if everybody else makes sense then the things i think can't be real and i'm freaking out here a little bit and you know what screw the whole thing i'm just not even going to be religious anymore then if there are going to be this many options i'm just out i'm going to deconstruct and further i'm going to declare my independence from this confusing religious thing i used to do by holding the exact opposite views on every single issue with passion and vitriol and with religious fervor but i think we are seeing the end of what can be accomplished with that kind of response at some point in the age of the internet we will move past the shock and awe moment and we will have to reconcile what we think with what everybody else thinks we will have to figure out a new public ethic of tolerance like we had to figure out coming out of the age of absolute monarchs during the enlightenment you're going to have to figure out how to coexist with people now i think we have two great answers for that one is is the gospel and the forgiveness and patience of christ that comes with it and the other is liberalism i know people hear that and they're like oh liberalism like you mean like things that people who vote differently than me think i just mean classical western secular tolerance where you don't hurt other people or mess with their stuff because of their ideas you do you me do me and we disagree where we disagree we agree where we agree and we live peaceably together make each other prosperous by doing business voluntarily together these are good options that can get us past all of this but it's not a surprise to me that we blinking stepped into the light of the internet immediately panicked and freaked out at what we saw coming out of everybody else's mouths had 20 years of division and hostility and anger that bled over into our politics it ruined our art it just wrecked everything but we can't do that forever everybody's tired of it everybody's sick of it religious people not religious people and i think what happens next is we move toward that impulse of of reconciliation reconciliation with people reconciliation in our own brains with what we do with ideas that are different than ours i think there's going to be an impulse coming up to say okay you think baptism is salvific i don't but if jesus didn't die on the cross you don't think baptism is salvific so we agree on the thing before it for sure and we can explore that and then have fun again a pleasant drinking conversation about how christ on the cross might be meted out to people yeah and what role the church plays in that and at the end like i'm just completely at ease at this point with a high five over that i totally understand your position i like you i think that works i got this other one and i think we're good here let's move forward i think that's the age we're coming into and i hope friendships like this one help to make those things happen yeah that's that's really interesting stuff and i suppose i like what you said there about the kind of 90s relics or things we heard in youth group and i'd be interested to see how many of those you think i would hold i suppose there might be some and you know um but that's the whole point of talking to each other right to sort of disavow ourselves of characters and straw men um yeah and why did you do it do you remember any of that 90s apologetic stuff about protestantism okay um you want to do solo scriptura uh sure we think that yeah yeah so depending on what you mean by that right right yeah yeah so for me and and again please forgive me if this comes off as as you put it kind of like 90s youth group stuff because that isn't what i'm trying to do as i as i bring this up so i know this isn't a new idea yeah yeah i'm not trying to stump you with this but this as a catholic sort of makes sense to me right it's like uh you have this collection of books 73 or 66 and it doesn't sort of um come with an inspired index and so you need to if you want to say that matthew's inspired or galatians or hebrews is inspired how was it you're going to come to that opinion when there were multiple texts floating around the first and second century some of which were considered canonical and it seems to make sense to me that if you have an authoritative church you can get an answer but if you don't then solar scriptura in that narrow sense seems to me like self-referentially incoherent like i don't know how you do that um i don't know how you don't end up just becoming the authority that determines what is and what isn't canonical you can look to fallible men in the past and see what they thought but if they're only fallible and can't make any sort of definitive statement i'm not sure how it is you can come to the conclusion that the bible you have on your desk there is is inspired and and you pointed out martin luther now the the first sort of canonical list comes from pope lee when is that three council at rome i want to say 321 or something like that um pope damascus number the first yeah yeah the roman official list okay well there you go yeah fair enough but see this this has the festival letter is floating around and you've got even the mauritanian cannon you've got even the heretical cannon um right but this comes from a i mean you probably know you probably know more about this than me but the my understanding is you've got a pope uh pope damascus the first council of rome 381 gosh i forget and and he's he's got a list that that that seems to be here's the authoritative canon and that's what catholics have today um and then that's ratified by carthage and hippo and then obviously finally in trent we're in as a response to the protestant reformation but um all right i i've shared enough there but but um yeah it seems to me that that having a church that's infallible makes sense i don't see how protestants get sort of inerrant books and can be that confident of it it seems like again here's a little here's a little line for you that you might be that might seem a little cute and it is and that's that the the bible is not an instruction manual for a church still in shrink wrap right but the but the the bible presupposes a church already in existence and you and of course you know that of course you agree with that but yeah i do agree with that yeah i i think that i think that's a really well articulated expression of what i understand the catholic position to be yeah and again i think within the boundaries of a certain set of assumptions that is going to make the most sense and why wouldn't you think that from the outside perspective looking in given the benefit of a couple thousand years of church history the protestant would look back and say authoritative infallible church decision whoa like i don't really want to go through the laundry list because i don't want people doing that to me and i have a laundry list but i mean yikes we had multiple popes denouncing each other from multiple holy sees in the 14th century the tradition seems to get disrupted at times there is not agreement at times theology certainly evolves i would view that as a strength of the catholic church but the protestant position or response would be okay first of all we hold a different assumption on the authoritativeness of one unique church body and a different position on just the track record it seems like there are enough exceptions to this accuracy that i just that that doesn't strike the outsider as compelling the second part of the response that i think you would usually hear and i think i think this would be that the the canon was discovered canon was a ride but he bind on earth bind in heaven loose on earth loose in heaven authority of one branch of the church and again i know it's nails on a chalkboard to some of your catholic listeners and i don't mean it that way i'm just trying to articulate the position and we would say well scripture presupposes scripture i mean within the epistles we see peter and paul acknowledging other scripture as scripture even by name at one point revelation seems to presuppose that other stuff that's already been written is scripture the gospels definitely assume that the old testament canon is scripture with very few missing citations uh we would look at the deuteronomic canonical literature and say oh the nature of the illusions or references there are entirely different in spirit and in set-aside quotation form then the references directly to the agreed-upon canon between jews protestants catholics and orthodox had agreed upon canon anything referenced there is pretty uniquely referenced so we would say there there is uh some indexing that goes on but i would agree with you that there there's limitedness it's not like you get a a table of contents on the new testament but at the same time it's not tough for me to go and look at who the late 1st century early to mid 2nd century church fathers look at who they're quoting look at who they're talking about at the church seems to have had a really clear sense of what were the gospels long before there was any concentration of power in rome by long before i mean like the amount of time the united states has existed as a country before there was clarity on these are the gospels and these over here ain't the church wasn't powerful enough in the early first century to suppress a an early version of the gospel of thomas they couldn't have killed it they didn't have the ability or the network or the authority to just earn the books or make it go away that's anachronistic it's not until much much later that you can even imagine that any organization in europe could have controlled thought or words so much we just don't see that happening and as evidence i would cite the the early persecutions where they couldn't make the bible go away and they had the full authority of rome the empire the army so yeah now the fact that these other books slide to the back burner isn't threatening i think the only ones where there is a question would be those those books like shepherd and the ddk show where how they're being employed you raises a question are they being employed in the same way as scripture is employed and the decay overlaps a ton with matthew where matthew is extrapolated as sort of a book of services in the decay so i don't find it weird or threatening at all that people found that distillation of church practice to be useful or effective but even the teachings there on baptism are not as neatly historically catholic or protestant as probably either of us would like them to be so it just seems like there's clarity with the exception of a couple of books that both catholics and eventually protestants ended up regarding in the new testament as not being authoritative or scripture anyway but useful for for teaching or review and so the protestant position would simply be we think that cannon was incredibly evident long before the council of rome hippo or carthage especially trent and that what was happening there was a formalization of things that were already so evident that any other decision than that would have caused a huge church mutiny when somebody says you know oh i see yeah so for you and you're like well how do you know hebrew is a scripture or something you say well i can look to the early church and i can see quite early what was decided upon as scripture and i accept i mean i'm not trying to put words in your mouth but you're accepting the authority of those early christians and what they decided scripture was not so much what a sort of or authoritative place within that community of believers would say it's more just the believers as a whole the kind of consensus they came up with some protestants would get really bent out of shape about that but i briefly described my little narrow sliver of tradition and i wouldn't get out of shape about that at all yeah you stand on the shoulder that's right you got different you got different protestants obviously some would say it's like self self authenticating and these sorts of things and i don't think you'd say that this idea that i read it and i just know in my gizzards that it's inspired yeah and you hear that again that's a one of those we've got dozens of lame 90s anti-catholic apologetics that we got told in youth group that just simply don't hold up and aren't a fair characterization of catholicism and are easily buried and counter-attacked but this is one that i hear a lot that i feel the same way about coming from the catholic side well uh protestants believe that a little baby naked angels just lowered the bible from heaven out of nowhere and like i'm sure there's some kind protestant person who likes christian songs and stuff and has a mug that has a bible verse on it and they'd rather not think about it and that's what they believe but no that would not be the historical protestant position uh now we think there was a process that involved the work of the holy spirit the authority of jesus endorsing um commissioning even different writing as well as the measure of internal consistency and this is very catholic i think but apostolic authority behind those various texts so your your historical protestants going to have about six or seven tests for canonicity and down at the bottom i think a lot of us would acknowledge look like even rome confirmed this like so this is a place where we should be high-fiving not just this is why we should be it's sort of like when you get into an argument how the first important thing to do is to clarify what it is you mean by that thing you're saying um yeah and it's in a similar way i think catholics make the mistake of thinking of protestantism as a monolithic whole as opposed to recognizing the the different nuances and variations of protestants that there are um so you'll see kind of catholics say you've got either the real presence of christ in the eucharist or the complete more kind of baptist idea that this is merely a symbol without taking into consideration the different ways different protestants might explain it as being christ's presence or something like that so point is i'm just trying to say is um as satisfying as it is to sort of sort of think i already know what you mean before telling you why that thing that you think is wrong it's it it it and it's and it's less less satisfying in a sort of trivial sense but but to rather be like okay so explain to me this and actually try to understand what the other person's saying which it's like that's the opposite of what social media is for you like social media doesn't exist for like long form thought out questions and getting to know what it is you mean it it exists to slam dunk on people by quote tweeting them and making them look stupid yeah i'm sorry i was driving through a pittsburgh yesterday and i saw a billboard i don't know some kind of uh some government worker or some person they were slamming and they said this guy voted for you to be in traffic i'm like what a jerk like i hate traffic i'm against that yeah yeah um well and all of that stuff comes back to to that phenomenon you and i were discussing just a little bit ago it it forces the flag planting yeah if i've only got a few sentences that anybody's going to bother to read and that the app will even allow me to post well i better make it hot if i want people to pay attention to me and i want to see it at the table i better come in hot because you and i both know coming in hot is way more productive in terms of views and the algorithm and traffic in general coming in patient really goes viral you're going to get patient level results yeah it doesn't work it doesn't get it done it doesn't get clicks and and so social media just the way it's built is it's made to empower people who demand you plant that flag right now and so i hear constantly from protestants who are mad that i like you and that i like catholicism and though i'm probably not gonna convert right now i just like it it's funny as as you were saying that i took a look to the comment section and there's a guy here wes whoops do you see that on your screen wow what's happened this is terrifying here we go this guy is like where do things get debatey i'm a bit behind yeah that's like yeah i get it i don't know do you think we're going to continue to disappoint it's just way more interesting um well can i tell you what i'm interested in all right like here here's what i want man um i've been thinking about that question a lot lately what do you want really deeply what do i want why am i doing this okay let's do it one i would like to make a living i have a family and i love them i think it's my biological and theological responsibility to provide for them i want my kids to thrive i want to give them opportunities i want time i want flexibility primarily because i really like my wife we're in a beautiful place in our relationship right now i just like being with her i like hanging out and thinking and being close to her i love being with my kids they're all in that everything sticks phase of learning i want to teach them all everything i want to give them everything so i i want enough money to make my family go i want enough time to have relationships with my wife and my kids and the people that i deeply love i want to fill my head with the best ideas of the smartest people who i might happen to agree with or disagree with from ages past they made their knowledge and their process available to me and i want it those are things i want deeply personally fourth thing that i want in a more existential sense is peace i just don't want to feel like i'm in a fight with everybody anymore that's what i spent my teens and my 20s on i'm right everybody else is an idiot there's only one way everything must be binary i'm just tired man i i don't think that's a reflection of truth or reality i think the nuance is where the beauty happens and where honesty and friendship happen and where laying your head on the pillow at night and feeling at peace with your neighbors and with the world happens so i want that here's the thing i want though from all of this business that i'm doing that i sense that you are doing and that is i don't want to put it back together i don't think that would be good for christianity i don't want to pretend that everything that names christ would best fit right under the same heading i think if we did that it would erode the effectiveness and credibility of whatever heading we all crammed under be it orthodoxy be it catholicism which version of catholicism let's say western be it baptistic thought or reformed thought it would wreck the effectiveness of that thing if we all crammed under there what i want is to get to a place where we experience real convictional unity i cannot help but think the things i think what you are saying makes sense on every level the fact that i don't think the things you think is not a rejection of what you think we have a few key distinctions also i was born in a certain place to certain parents i've read certain books as exposed to certain things you add all of that up and what what i believe it's just what makes sense to me it it does not mean that it is universally and finally correct but man it is a great vessel for me given all of those variables i can't change to encounter within the boundaries of historical creedal orthodox christianity to encounter christ and to live out my life as a christian in a way that i hope is effective and redemptive and beautiful i don't need my version of christianity to ultimately win and triumph over everyone else's thing for me to feel right or like i get to go to heaven what i want what i yearn for is to get to a place where we craft a different ethic in the age of the internet that enables us to be together without necessarily having to solve every last thing i just don't think we're going to solve it without burning each other down or without blood i think what is far more prudent is to develop a new ethic a third way that is not i wholesale agree with whatever you think i just want to get along or i wholesale reject whatever you think and i will fight you to the very end to destroy you so that my thing might win i want a third way and i want it bad yeah well first of all thank you for for saying that and i love just your honesty about you know i want time my family i want peace and and and i wholly concur with all those things and i just i just love the vulnerability there i think that's that's beautiful um let me say the more antagonistic thing first and then backtrack from that like i want you to be catholic you know i i want people to be catholic i think catholicism is the full fullest expression of christianity that god wants for christians that is what i think now i'm not able to defend all of those things to everybody i've ever met but i don't know anybody who's able to defend all the tenants of the thing that they hold but i don't think that that has to come about through a way that diminishes our reach and effectiveness i think it's clear christ prayed that we would be one you know saint paul i think it's in first corinthians like is excoriating them for the divisiveness within them uh within that body you know uh did you know were you baptized in the name of paul that sort of thing i think the divisions among christianity aren't something to celebrate in in one sense right i think they weaken our witness to the world this lack of unity is a problem but um i think we i think we also agree because i'm not saying a sort of false unity i mean we kind of began earlier in this discussion when i talk about catholicism i'm talking about this sort of universal church and there are certain things that you have to accept i think your list your sort of circle of things or list of things that you would want people to accept is probably smaller than mine but if you can accept the fact that you probably right want your muslim neighbor to come to know jesus christ and to abandon islam like i would hope that's what you think yeah so i do think that yeah but and you hold that but not in like a jerk way not in a violent way not in a i'm uninterested in listening to you or learning from your way so like just like you hold that towards the muslim i would hope that as i say something like that which i hope wasn't too abrasive but whatever is that i want protestants to cath yeah what persons be catholic i hope it's not in that abrasive jerky triumphalist i can't learn anything from you anyway kind of way because i don't feel that way like what i'm about to say might sound pandering and i don't know maybe it is but i i think there's also truth in it like i know protestant christians who put me to shame and and who teach me to have a like one of those people is john eldridge from from wild at heart love the man i know the guy yeah yeah love love him love him you know and says things i disagree with but he also teaches me about how to grow in my intimacy with jesus christ i've got friends in portland oregon who uh put me to shame with their daily scripture reading and things like this so so i guess all of that to say um that i think i think our lack of unity does weaken our witness to the world and i think that we can i think the law does want us to be one and wants a sort of unity among essentials but then i suppose the question then is like what's essential and what isn't and that's where we disagree yeah a couple of one i appreciate all of that i appreciate that you want me to be catholic i mean what a disappointing thing it would be if you believed what you believe about catholicism and didn't want me to be it yeah i i'm quite certain that almost everyone won't like my answer to what you said there but to your point that you want me to be catholic my response would be i am i'm absolutely a part of the universal church now i don't happen to agree with all of the historical precedents that caused a certain expression of catholicism to land on rome as having some sort of unique centrality i'm not persuaded of that biblically as a historian i'm not persuaded of that necessity that's why i would give my hat to rome and say hey i'd give a whole lot more credit there than most protestants who were going off of 90s apologetics critiques i see the necessity of the role i appreciate the role just don't view it as uniquely holding the binding and loosing powers described in matthew chapter 16. don't see that connection and that is one of those key assumptions that is a very significant jumping off point one way or the other if you are persuaded of that then i'm not catholic but if you're not persuaded of the uniqueness of that historical claim well hey yeah i'm catholic and i have within myself the latitude within the creeds within the historical teachings to say i'm skeptical about that and the reason i'm skeptical about that is because i don't view that particular chair or those chairs surrounding it as having the unique authority to ultimately and finally decide that now the 90s catholic apologetic that i know you don't think that you heard this one growing up and i heard it too would be oh so you guys just make up whatever you want yeah there are versions of christianity that do that but no have you ever met a reformed christian they can't just make up whatever they want i mean the theological box and system and precision that they have whether i agree with all of it or not no they can't just make up whatever they want it's not some loosey-goosey thing it's incredibly precise and theologically binding they have a process for it and they would cite authority for that and their the authority that a reformed geneva style christian would cite would overlap in in majority with the authority that a catholic theologian would point to and the key distinction here is what do we do with those five patriarchies and what do we believe about the historical shaking out of where the authority that christ clearly vested the church with where does that authority truly lie and how does it manifest that is a key ecclesial distinction that exists between my little slice of protestantism i can't speak for everybody and a catholic and i i know how offensive even odious even i'm turning off this dang video this guy seemed nice but i'm done that kind of comment is for me no yeah we have catholicism you can't say you're catholic but oh i see but i am quite myself as catholic i'm catholic yeah yeah well i mean obviously there's different senses in which we use the term and so i would agree with you in one sense and not in the other sure and i'm at peace with that yeah i'll sleep tonight um yeah i'm gonna be okay um okay what do you want to do now because we we have a lot of people who have kind of comments and questions i don't know if you need to go hang out with that beautiful wife of yours or if you want to take a few of these now let's just do it i got a little time i'm getting hurt me too dude i haven't eaten today we've got a super chat here golly i've got to do better at this man can you see what i'm doing on this screen i can get some of it yeah i'm tr yeah i can't it's it's my fault here we go ready set boom boom okay super chat guy says as for solo scriptura you're an idiot no he doesn't say that this is the only way to discern false doctrine jesus doesn't change so any new doctrine must be in line with scripture but jesus doesn't change so any new doctrine how do you read that question i think it sounds like what he's saying is if basically the protestant position that if something is incongruent with scripture then i'm not i'm not going to accept it or if something is in contradiction with the explicit or even implicit mandates of scripture then i think he might be a protestant i got an idea how about i answer the ones that are critiques of catholicism and you answer the ones that are critiques of protestantism that's fine with me can i try it yeah yeah okay let me give this thing a shot um so this is this fellows this fellow is a product this is a protestant because he's got a follow-up but you go for it okay i would say to uh to this comment that sometimes the text is abundantly evident in terms of what it teaches is there some other way other than christ no he is the way the truth and the life that's it did god make things or did someone else make things god made things did jesus christ participate fully increa in creation colossians 1 john 1. there's no argument on these points and so i would think that if the bishop of rome stepped out tomorrow is like hey new thing uh this is authoritative this one counts it turns out jesus christ did not fully participate in creation he's the first and greatest created being of the father he's still worthy of worship but the bible doesn't mean that anymore that's not what we believe catholics would revolt you can't do stuff like that with the things that are utterly foundational and christian within catholicism where it gets trickier and the reason i think we got to be a little bit patient on this point is that the history of the church is a very big one and a very diverse one and even as protestants we have to admit that we look at several of these texts and some of them are more difficult than others many are right through the front door and straightforward but i understand the appeal of the high church catholic system in saying where there is confusion or challenge leave the interpretation to the magisterium we will get this one how did i do on the catholic side how did i do yeah i think it's fun no heresy there well i i i just i kind of like the idea of you responding and me not having to critique you so i was just thinking i'd just let you speak and then i'd go to the next one honestly yeah let's do that so but see so here's an answer this is the same bloke he says for instance why would jesus say in john 14 6 that he's the only way to the father and then later tell us to go through mary god doesn't contradict yeah so i mean there's so much to be said here like one thing i find that's helpful to do like for catholics when they speak to protestants about mary is to begin by saying what they don't mean so just like a protestant or catholic if they are to speak to a muslim who's convinced we worship three gods the first thing you do is say what you don't mean and that's the sort of guard rails the sort of bumpers that kind of bumper bowling it's like well somewhere in between here but it can't go over here uh right and so i think it's important that catholics i agree like if i i think i can see maybe i can't because i've always been catholic but i i can appreciate a protestant being like dude this looks a lot like idolatry i see that you say that it's not but there's a ton of candles burning before her statue and just seems like you guys are way too into it like i get it she was his mom and she was probably super cool and stuff but you need to chill a little like i can totally i think i can totally appreciate that i think the first thing i would say i went to a church one time where they were where they were kissing pictures of jesus and mary and there were way more lip marks on mary so yeah you know why i think i think that is i think that's a sort of a natural tendency to be more affectionate to the feminine like honestly i just i think that's just like i think people like devotions to mary because maybe they've had a bad experience with men or you know like i honestly think there's some natural explanation that can go along with that but anyway so i think the first thing to say is like catholics don't worship mary uh we think that mary is nothing or less than nothing compared to he who is but we think that just like we can ask earthly christians to pray for us we also think that we can have heavenly christians pray for us and so in that sense uh just like i can go through you to jesus by asking you to pray for me or my wife or something like that i can go through mary to ask her to intercede for me i think catholics and protestants we've been divided for like 500 years there's obviously a lot of differences in our language and how we use terms and we should be aware of that when we talk about things and i think one of those words would be like pray you know like when a catholic uses the word pray he doesn't always mean it synonymous with worship he might mean it in a sort of old english sense when you say like i pray thee i ask thee you know now that doesn't mean i'm right to do it it's just i think it's important to kind of make some clarifying statements yeah whereas when a protestant thinks of prayer especially a protestant in the last hundred years they're gonna think of the acts acrostic you guys have this in catholicism yeah yeah the order for prayer adoration confession oh thank you yes no i don't know i haven't seen that yet so if you're praying right you know and i think this is a reasonable biblical distillation of what prayer to god is you adore god you confess your sins you offer thanksgiving and then and only then are you prepared and have you approached the throne of god with the right posture to bring up whatever stuff you might need to bring up for your own benefit or the benefit of others and so if that's how we think of prayer and i think it's a great way to think of prayer then you use that same word to talk about mary and i'm like i feel nice adoration toward another and sinful human being and i know that's nails on a chalkboard for many catholics but that's it i'm hanging on that that's one of the biggest getting off points for for protestants on the merry thing is the i now she we believe with utter conviction now she had problems she had flaws she was a person she was blessed like crazy and unique among women but i mean she needed to be saved just like everybody else and um how could she be born without sin unless i i mean the argument that jesus couldn't be born without sin if he was carried and someone who had sin well then how does that work for marriage that's not the argument yeah yeah that's not the catholic argument though like it's sometimes formulated like that though catholics will say things like she had to be sinless or else jesus contracted sin yeah and that's you know that that's not what the church teaches right yeah yeah yeah yeah it's cool talking to someone who knows like five steps ahead of what i'm saying this kind of makes it interesting we're gonna get together for a beer one yeah well sign me up but i don't know it's about the knowing but i really like that comment because you you do the exact same thing that i do your youtube channel is like mine i mean it's roughly the same number of people are showing up you do other things around the internet as well you do the podcast thing i i really get it i think i understand some things about your experience and do you get to a place where it's just tedious when you get certain messages or comments or it's like there's a chess board sitting in front of you and somebody walks up and they're like guess what i'm moving this pawn forward two spots what do you make of that you're like i know and now i move this pawn forward and i know what you're gonna do now you're gonna move the horsey yep your horse goes there just a second now i have to move my bishop there now yeah go ahead do the next thing like i know i've done these 20 first moves 10 trillion times and it's not that i don't like you it's not that i don't care about you it's not that i don't want to spend no that's not true i don't want to spend it that's just you find it ultimately unconvincing yeah it's just like we've done it like i said what you're going to say and you know what i'm going to say well that's true so yeah fair enough the only problem is you don't know what the end is with the person you're dialoguing with and so the same patience you want to extend towards say a protestant or catholic who's having doubts about things you want to extend to the aspiring budding apologist who's trying to take you down and so it you know it's like trying to okay and and maybe just and maybe instead of being like okay you moved your porn let me get like let me get here's what i do maybe being like okay like let's focus on why you move japan first like tell me tell me about about this pawn move you know that's exactly the play that's exactly the play but so often that is unsatisfying for the person who wants to have the conversation they yeah they want to do the first ten moves i say this you say this you cite this verse i cite that verse and all of that is easily and readily google-able i really like you just said i like to get to the human part of the conversation as quickly as possible so i got a friend and he's asking this with with some uh with some with with a smile so don't take this to be as sort of intense as it sounds but he says someone's got a gun to your head and you have to choose catholic or orthodox what do you do and i should say this this patron of mine he left his position as a protestant youth pastor and is now currently feeling very torn between orthodoxy and catholicism so again he's asking this with a smile but what would you say to that or do you want to just say no shoot me oh i can hit um if he's on this side of me i use my left hand in a sweeping motion to knock his arm away then i spin that arm behind his back disarming him with a twist and i'm like i'm just i'm not picking and you're a jerk you need to learn more about the lord okay is that not an option well just to be clear like he yeah he's he's being funny like he's he's he's he's not he's not actually forcing you to take a side so that he knows where your flag is planted so i suppose to put it kind of yeah and i see what you're doing you're being funny and i'm taking you as serious which is making everything awkward but i suppose if you were to sort of say you know what i find i find that i find orthodoxy or some version of orthodoxy less less problematic than catholicism or vice versa would you want to say something like that on uh i i wish you gave me anglicanism as a third option because i would pick anglicanism um if you uh yeah i don't know i think i think right now my gut would say that i would simply because of the unknown elements and what seems like a bit more flexibility to yeah fit the protestant liquid into i think i would be orthodox in the short term i suspect the way my mind is wired which is very western would cause me to gradually feel friction in that environment and then if those were still my only two options i think i would gradually end up catholic that's just my guess for how it would be i love it i love it hey you know you and i had this and we'll maybe end on this because because my wife just texted me and i just suddenly realized i have to do something that i haven't done um but you and i were saying the other day how like it can be sad when you feel like you're just not with some of your youtube subscribers anymore like people who are like with you and then they say something you're like ah dude i know that you're on my side and we should agree and you want me to agree but i can't hear so i'm about to do that so this this is something that someone just threw up and i'm just like dude what are you doing and this is this is what's called begging the question right i'm curious what flaws the this protestant thinks the perfect queen of heaven and earth has it's like dude like yeah like bless you like i get it right if you assume that mary is the perfect queen of heaven then you would also have to say that she wouldn't have laws would she right yeah yeah um i would say respectfully there's about 10 trillion questions i could phrase like that to just aggressively fire right back that are utterly fruitless if the question is asked out of goodwill the first thing i would point to would be the text in the middle of the book of matthew when jesus family clearly doesn't understand what he's doing and they come to collect him before he goes on a road trip with them to nazareth they they don't know what to make of what he's doing yet they don't get it if the flawless queen of heaven is the flawless queen of heaven she should have unlimited clarity on exactly what christ was trying to accomplish and would not come and not even attend his sermon she sat outside and skipped it because of whatever social pressure she was feeling does that make her a bad woman no yeah the best woman who i hold in crazy high regard the highest regard of all the women who've ever existed for me and i would hope any protestant is mary mother of christ but i mean even in the text she needed taking care of so jesus signed someone to take care of her on his way out the door and she clearly didn't get everything that was going on she had flashes of belief do whatever he says he knows what he's doing at the wedding at cana but then also she isn't sure what to make of it so is that a flaw not one that you get after anybody about i just told you i have a whole bunch of flaws like that but yeah it means she has limitations and she does not know all of the things and she was in a process of understanding who exactly this person was she gave birth to in the first place i'm not threatened by that at all and it doesn't diminish my view of her remarkable quality or how she's blessed among all women did i take that question too seriously have i done wrong no i think it's great and and i'm not gonna do that thing where i kind of respond and say what i think because i just i think the the main point that i loved about what you just said was the beginning bits like okay if this were asked in goodwill i think that's just something we got to challenge ourselves about like am i am i asking this like sometimes people would say like uh i don't know like uh you know what's the greatest book of all time and why is it the brothers karamazov you know like that kind of funny kind of thing and so obviously that's a joke but it's like yeah it's like am i am i asking to learn what you think or am i just trying to stump you yeah all right um let's do just well let's wrap up this is a pleasure matt i really am appreciative for our discussion and uh thank you kindly for agreeing to come on my show what else you want to say nice things about it it's been a treat yeah i do want to say nice things about you yeah i'm i'm apprehensive about jumping on especially with uh a live stream yeah because well i look i'm not trying to pick a fight with the last person who made a comment but that's why i'm apprehensive because the internet does that and it's just it's a mix of not getting it in terms of social dynamics a mix of passive aggressive weirdness and that person doesn't have to be on a camera with their name and their face and their reputation pushed to the middle of the table so easy for them to say and so when i find allies who care about things that are beautiful and redemptive they care about the text they care about the christians who came before us they talk like a normal human and they don't need me to think all of their things in order for us to try to be useful in each other's lives and i'm just thrilled about it i i allies are hard to come by man i want them and so i this dang well better not be our last conversation man i i like your style and i think you i think you make your expression of christianity look beautiful and that's that's among the highest compliments somebody who does what i do for a living can give i thanks man i love the way you represent who you are and what you believe thank you well it's a pleasure and i think i might be on your show in the near future so i look forward to that people who are watching we're gonna do that uh yeah yeah click so in the in the title we have uh 10 minute bible hour thing click click that link be sure to go subscribe and let's see right now 1030 people watching it's funny like people will like invite me to come and speak at a church i'm like dude it's just so hard for me to justify leaving my family when like you can do this you know you know come speak to 10 people like well yeah but i also have four kids and i can yeah yeah and i like them as soon as i don't i'll come but right now yeah just just let people know we have 712 likes uh this is definitely a bit cheeky but if we get up to a thousand likes i'm going to send this bear stein to matt let's be honest i'm just going to send it to him anyway thanks for being here everybody god bless thank you so much matt have a lovely day thank you for having me this was [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Music] so [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Pints With Aquinas

Views: 18,884

Rating: 4.9658117 out of 5

Keywords: aquinas, catholicism, catholic, pints with aquinas, matt fradd, theology, debate, religion, st. thomas aquinas, thomas aquinas, philosophy

Id: z4cnqTCKNBs

Length: 90min 45sec (5445 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 17 2021