Bishop Robert Barron on Catholicism, Beauty, and Exorcisms (full interview)

hello hello hello i'm here with bishop robert baron for the first time on capturing christianity bishop it's great to have you here thank you for coming on capturing christianity cameron thank you delighted to be with you today yeah so we we were experiencing some technical issues before we went live and did i hear you right that you prayed and then right after that it started working yes one of the great patroneses of word on fire is the little flower to resolve and very often when these problems come up and one time it happened i was about to give a presentation to all the bishops of america this is many years ago and we were i know nothing about the tech side but we're missing the hamana cable someone said and the whole thing wasn't working so i went out in the hall and i just said all right little flower get us the hum and a hum and a cable and and about 30 seconds later this this perfect stranger comes down he was from the hotel and said hey someone's looking for the humming humidity cable so anyway just now we thought this is not going to happen something wasn't working i said all right little flowers just help us make this happen and then about 15 seconds later i heard you saying oh yeah i can hear you so anyway yeah i did pray that's amazing well if you don't know who bishop robert baron is he is the founder of word on fire catholic ministries and auxiliary bishop of the archdiocese is that do i have that right diocese okay archdiocese of los angeles he's number one amazon bestselling author and he's published numerous books essays and articles on theology and the spiritual life bishop baron's website wordonfire.org reaches millions of people a year and he is one of the world's most followed catholics on social media i got all this from your website by the way so this is all like don't don't rely on it don't don't feel too weird yeah uh well he is so his regular uh his his youtube videos have been viewed over 50 million times and he's had over three he has over three million followers on facebook so this is amazing i'm just so happy that we were able to to work this out so let's jump into some topics so i have a four different things that i want to talk to you about today and then if we have time we'll do some q a with the audience but so the first topic that i want to discuss with you is the argument from beauty i understand that you are one of the the foremost people talking about the argument from beauty for god's existence so is the argument from beauty your favorite argument or is it just one among many for you well i don't even know if i'd use the language argument from beauty so much no my favorite argument if you want to get really technical is the ontological argument i think rightly understood yes but after that the argument from contingency is one that i think most people have the easiest time getting their minds around the ontological argument there's so much explanation required i think to make it coherent for people so i usually use the contingency argument um i'd speak maybe of an approach to god by way of beauty which is simply a platonizing instinct going back let's say the plato's symposium and the feeders especially remember in the symposium when they have the series of speeches around the table and and the socrates remembers the narration by a woman named diotima who's like a mystical type figure and she talks about the intuition of the good and the beautiful and how you see it in the particular person or object then you move to a higher expression of beauty the beauty of institutions and the beauty of laws and so on and then finally she says you look out to the open sea of the beautiful itself well that little scene set the tone for so much in western philosophy and literature you see it in uh in dante you see it very clearly in james joyce and his famous account of when he sees the woman he will eventually marry for the first time and she's acting out if you want this scene looking out to the open sea of the beautiful but that comes up into the tradition uh if you want to talk about an argument from beauty the closest would be aquinas's fourth way in the summa one that people hardly ever talk about they talk about the argument for motion from causality the one for necessary being and even the fifth argument from finality but number four comes up out of the platonic tradition remember when he says we notice in the world things to varying degrees of nobility truth and and uh and goodness and so when we make those judgments we're doing it in light of something we intuit to be supremely good true and noble he's he's noticing you know what they call in the middle ages the the transcendental properties of being so not just any old comparison you know like oh that light's brighter than that one or boy that's that's a redder thing than that but these judgments within uh the unconditioned quality of being itself so thomas says that when i'm making those judgments i am at least intuitively aware of an unconditioned form of the good and the noble and the true and then he says uh that highest norm is also the cause of all the things within that genus since you know the supremely true the supremely good that supremely noble is the cause of truth and nobility and goodness in all the things that we see so it's a platonic participation metaphysics which thomas doesn't typically use he's more aristotelian so that'd be the closest to an argument if you want from beauty i would recommend what i call like an approach to god from uh the beautiful so that maybe you said a little context yeah well i was listening to a video that you did and i don't know where it was but it's it's one of the the one of the first things that pops up when i researched robert baron the argument from beauty and you were you were saying something that really resonates with me even though i'm protestant when i go into a catholic church and this has happened on numerous occasions i'm sort of taken aback by the beauty of the church and i've even been to the vatican myself and just going in there and looking around it's just so beautiful i've even thought to myself i'm like i kind of want to be catholic just because of how beautiful everything is and that was it was interesting what you were saying in this video you were saying that like beauty when you think about beauty it's not uh it it doesn't like it's not offensive what's the word i'm looking for it's not a threat yeah like when you think about some of these other arguments they're kind of threatening but the argument for beauty is not that you you want to just think about and something that's beautiful you you are naturally drawn toward well yeah go back to the transcendentals again so the good and the true especially today in our post-modern context you say hey here's the truth and i want you to acknowledge it that strikes a lot of people today as threatening or it's an imposition or even more so if you say well hey here's the good here's the way you should be living and you're not doing it and so get with the program that strikes a lot of people as as offensive but the beautiful i argue there is is the more the most winsome of the three transcendentals because it's not telling you immediately what to think or how to behave it's simply manifesting itself which is why by the way i just finished a lengthy lecture i'm going to give next march but i talk about this fact that of the three transcendentals the beautiful might be the most fundamental because for this very reason it it represents the moment of rapturous encounter with the real think of even a a baby looking up at the smiling face of his mother it's it's not telling you what to think or how to behave but it's it's a luminous invitation into the wonder of the world you know and so the beautiful might be the first place that we we start uh it's how our the eyes of our souls open up to the wonder the splendor of existence once we make that move then you say oh yeah now it corresponds to my inquiring mind it's true oh now it corresponds to my questing will it's good right but the primordial move you could say is is the beautiful how splendid the world is how marvelous even a little child right i mean can can be enraptured by it and also you're suggesting i think quite rightly that the beautiful um unselfs you if i can use that term you know the the beautiful takes you out of yourself we speak of aesthetic arrest right that the beautiful stops you it stops your uh project and your program is what i'm gonna do what i'm gonna accomplish the beautiful can stop you in your tracks and it draws you up out of yourself well that's the diotima speech right beginning with the beautiful particular but then being drawn to ever higher instantiations of the beautiful until you look out to the open sea of the beautiful itself now art the catholic tradition clearly names god as the beautiful itself so god is the full expression of those transcendentals now go back to thomas's fourth way that's exactly what he's arguing there well how do you respond to someone who says that well beauty is just deny the beholder and i think that's probably the the majority opinion of most people today if you just get someone on the street stupid that's colossally stupid it's what i would say and that no one really believes that it's a it's a glib little phrase that's tossed around just as i mean it's as dumb as saying uh truth is in the mind of the beholder well no it's not i mean truth is objectively there the idea is to get your mind in line with it is to have a correspondence between your mind and reality because the reason i'm being so sharp about that is it's it's such a trivialization of these great realities when something's true it knocks you off your own pedestal you know we go through life with our little projects and how i'm so important but it's when something is true it is in your face it it resists all your attempts to manipulate it you know i'm saying two plus two be equal to four i don't care what you think about that i don't care what your program is it's true and it knocks you off your pedestal the same with the good um what would you say to someone what would you say to someone who says well look you know people disagree about what is beautiful some people think that landscapes are beautiful some people don't like landscapes some people love sunsets some people hate them so what would you say about that this is sort of argument from disagreement you see it in the re the moral argument as well but what would you say to someone who who makes that kind of objection well i would say to some degree that's just um you know grounded in in the preferences of our human nature i mean that's you might say i like i like trigonometry more than i like algebra or something it doesn't mean that one of them is not true maybe you're a connoisseur of landscapes you're particularly attuned to the beauty of landscapes but someone else is attuned to the beauty of portraits it doesn't mean one is not beautiful the other is so part of that is grounded just in our psychology and our subjectivity but it doesn't mean the subjectivity is determining the the nature of of uh the case you know because of your psychology you might appreciate an aspect of the beautiful more than someone else but it doesn't uh argue against the objectivity of it yeah i like to show somebody i would show somebody you say i don't like landscapes well let me show you why this is beautiful maybe you're not seeing it plainly so i wouldn't surrender i guess so easily people who want to subjectivize the beautiful will just surrender with those observations oh i guess it's all just you know subjective no show somebody yeah and it doesn't have to be that doesn't have to be the the end of the conversation either you can just start a conversation well no let's let's actually discuss whether or not you're right or wrong about this it doesn't mean that we're both not right or that there is no fact of the matter another question that i have related to the argument from beauty and then we'll move on to another subject is do you think that an atheist could run an argument from ugliness strictly speaking no because ugliness would be a provencio not something substantive it's like the problem of evil right evil's not a substantive thing but a privation of the good so i can think about good without thinking about evil but i can't think about evil without thinking about good the same way i mean i can think of beauty in itself without thinking about ugliness but i can't think about ugliness without thinking about beauty so one is a perversion of the other so it's not as though we've got two substantive realities fighting each other for primacy um we're grace we're sin abounds grace it bounds the more you know would be a biblical way of putting it uh no matter how much you talk about evil good is always greater it has to be because evil is a parasite it's not a substance all right so i want to switch gears and talk about a a different subject about exorcisms i wanted to ask you do you know how many exorcists are currently in the united states and it like bona fide exorcist do you know that figure that number have you ever been part of an exorcism no no i've known you've had an exercise no i've never been part of one do you uh i'm not up to it well let me ask you this then what is like the the craziest story that you've heard if you haven't been part of one i'm gonna assume that you've you've heard i have i won't tell you though there are some stories that will call your toes but i won't tell them but i've known exorcists um who do that work very seriously and i guess you know i'm resistant can i can i cite a protestant of authority here carl bart said the devil is so uninteresting and i really believe that is right devil's so uninteresting but so the fascination with the details of exorcism to me is kind of a tiresome path to go down uh i i know people who do that work and and they've got some stories that'll get your attention but the devil is too uninteresting and and he he wants us to get caught up in all this stuff and i do you think it's not do you think it's important for yeah do you think it's important for people to have true beliefs about these things so like is it important for people to to have a true belief about whether or not the devil exists or demons exist sure and so so yeah yeah in our culture but i i'm a little wary of the sort of interest in the details of exorcism i think that's okay not all together healthy but no absolutely the devil exists as a fallen angel no question what would you say and we got to be serious about that in the spiritual life what would you say in response to a skeptic about the existence of of devil of the devil or or of demons what would you say to convince them that there is such a person there there are such beings i'd probably again under this rubric of always seeing the primacy of the good over evil i wouldn't start with evil start with good does it make sense to believe in angels and you know there's obviously the biblical witness to angels but can you make a you know more of a rational argument i think yeah looking at some of the great figures in the tradition that have seen the coherence of belief in angels as we survey the nature of god's creation that seems to be ordered in the sort of hierarchical way god seems to delight in in a great you know multiplicity of of creatures doesn't make sense and this is both thomas aquinas and tayar de chardin make the same argument it doesn't make sense to say that god's creation ends with just the physically complex universe and they're simply yawns and abyss between that and and god wouldn't it make more sense to say no there's a whole range of purely spiritual creatures so like god pure spirits but like us creatures in whom essence and existence don't coincide and i think i think that's a coherent position to hold now if you hold that is it further more coherent to say that some of those angels would have fallen just as we fall you know just as our freedom is well exercised and poorly exercised might that not be true in that purely spiritual realm of creatures yeah it seems to me and so a fallen angel we call a devil i mean there's nothing that strikes me as really incoherent i can't point like now here's let me give you clear empirical evidence right i think those arguments have some you know coherence and then the bottom line though is the biblical witness to the existence of angels say more about that well it's from beginning to end of the bible i mean the angels are referred to throughout the scriptures their existence is taken for granted as messengers and again that strikes me as coherent if these realities exist if god wants to communicate with us if god delights in using secondary causes which he clearly does why wouldn't he use these secondary causes to um express himself and to bear messages as they do in the scriptures so to me that that makes sense now that's a faith perspective you're looking you know at the bible and finding inspiration there and i think you can make a further sort of um you know rational cases i just tried to do but it's going to fall short obviously like a demonstration right yeah well so i was i'm trying to like categorize the two different things that you said there so the first thing was you it sounded like and help me help me i want to make sure that i'm understanding the argument correctly it sounds like you're saying that complexity is a sort of good and so if that's a good thing especially with as it relates to like the physical world and biological uh species and everything and then the complexity there it seems like we'd see that we'd want to see that same kind of complexity or at least we'd expect the same level of complexity in the spiritual realm as well is that kind of what you're saying complexity is a good thing yeah and even to say some between god who's a pure spirit and in whom essence and existence coincide so god is the creator ipsum essay and then we know by direct experience this realm of material creatures so material things in whom essence existence do not coincide isn't it reasonable to suppose there's something in between namely purely spiritual creatures so spiritual like god but in whom essence and existence do not coincide so they're creatures like us but purely spiritual like god and that would be an angel you know what's interesting to me uh is you go back to thomas aquinas the smartest man in the middle ages right and you go through the summit theologia he has an enormously large section on angels and now very few contemporary theologians uh bart balthazar would be two exceptions on the protestant catholic side but most contemporary theologians never ever talk about angels but the smartest man in the middle ages was massively interested in angels and i think that in itself is interesting you know and i'm just reversing some of the moves that thomas made that's uh that's a great segue into the next section i wanted to talk about was aquinas himself so why what's what's like your strongest the number one reason why you think that protestants ought to be studying saint thomas aquinas well that he's right about so many things and he said so many good and true and beautiful things you know i i'm being a little flipped there but um let me say this and i think many catholics don't appreciate this thomas aquinas was by his um his profession a magister sacrificing they called him in the middle ages that means a teacher of the sacred page he was a bible man so when you became a professor of theology at the university of paris you weren't like a teacher of systematic theology we'd say in our universities today you were a magister sacred pageant you were a master of the bible now if you're a master of the bible well then you've got to do bible commentaries and thomas did massive bible commentaries most catholics certainly even most catholic scholars don't know that much about thomas's biblical commentaries they are massive fascinating richly detail thomas some have argued knew most of the bible by heart because he cites it so frequently and often gets it a little bit wrong which means he wasn't bothering to look it up directly but his his knowledge of the bible is so clear in the commentaries now if you do bible commentaries what's going to happen it happened then it happens now is questions arise you know okay if this is true how can that be true and if jeremiah says this but ezekiel says that i mean which one is right and so what arose were what the medievals called uh question is disputate right disputed questions and that became the backbone of medieval intellectual life it's a magister sacrificing like thomas would would entertain a series of questions with putate and these public disputes would take place these wonderful public debates now now take those and sum them up and what do you get but a summa theologia a summary of theology now if anyone reads thomas and then includes most catholics that's almost all they ever read are the summaries that he gave us the summa conor gentiles the sumothalo ga but trace that process back it goes back to the bible he was a man of the bible and so i'd say to protestants that's a good reason to read thomas aquinas he's one of the great you know masters of the bible in the whole tradition and the best way to read his theology is as elaborate biblical commentary that's one thing i'd say yeah and that's a that's a good one because protestants like the bible at least right they claim to a lot a lot of them do but can we press it go ahead but the other point i want to make because and i love to get your take cause whenever i talk to thoughtful protestants i like to raise this issue um when i was a seminary professor i taught the course in the reformation so i had the guys read a lot of luther a lot of calvin calvin who's so much like aquinas in many ways then we'd read the decretals of the council of trent and so we'd look at the great 16th century debates right and we could revisit all those issue by issue and justification and original sin and so on and so forth but what always struck me was underneath these great debates there's a fundamental difference and i identify it as the shift from an analogical conception of being to a universal conception of being so in thomas aquinas is a prime example of this you have an analogical conception of being whereby god is ipsum essay god is what it means to be in the full sense and then creatures are um are participants in the to be of god they derive their being in its entirety from the sheer act of existing which god has therefore we name god in an analogical way from creatures right but the analogical conception of being is this participative understanding whereby the world is never in competition with god because the world and god are not beings against the same ontological background if that makes sense now like there's you and me and there's the camera and then there's god as a supreme being and then there's that other camera and he's not one being among many so aquinas for example will say god is not in any genus not even the genus of being it's his extraordinary thing to say right you think at least he's in the genus of being right there's you and me and there's god we're all beings and thomas says no no god does not belong in the genus even of being why because he's not one being among many okay that's a quick thomas aquinas well then go up through scotus go especially into occam and you see the shift from an analogical conception of being to a universal conception of being namely that being the word to be means the same whether it's applied to a creature or to god that means that it is true that god is a being among many now come up from uh akam into nominalism and then into the nominalism that shaped undoubtedly luther and calvin and many of the reformers and so i always sense behind the great debates about justification and so on is this fundamental shift from what i would call a non-competitive understanding of the divine human or divine creature relationship to a competitive one if if god is a being among many supreme being alongside of other beings well then it's hard to say god gets all the glory without saying and and i get no glory you know god does everything therefore i i have to do nothing and see as a catholic i i always balk at that when i read it the reformers i think well no you you can say both those things you should say both those things and and i'd go back to irenaeus right the gloria de homo vivans the glory of god is a human being fully alive and so what glorifies god is when we we are fully participating in his way of being that we are i'll use catholic language cooperating with his grace with tremendous uh panache and enthusiasm and that's what i've always intuited behind the 16th century debates you know between very smart people but it's a it's a more fundamental disagreement about the way god relates to the world non-competitively or competitively um so anyway and i think if you read thomas aquinas you'll get that idea you'll get the analogical conception of being which in turn makes a huge difference so i struggle a lot and i'll just be honest yeah go ahead i struggle a lot with some of some of the terminology that you use and other thomas used and uh not not necessarily like catholics at large but domestic metaphysics and to mystic philosophy is you've got to learn a lot of terms and so some of like the analogical being and univocal being it's for me these these terms i would have to like really sit down and get clear on like what these terms mean before i could say yeah the reformation came out of this distinction that that happened sort of organically i don't really have any developed thoughts on that you want to you want to help me out a little bit or do you want to move on to another topic no we could talk about it um yeah so tell me why you think that because i didn't i remember you've had william blaine craig on the program haven't you you right yeah a few times when we we had a very interesting day together it's a couple years ago and we had a an academic you know exchange and we had a more popular talk in the evening but the academic exchange was all about the idea of god's simplicity and i i knew that craig had you know taken exception to that but that's exactly on the point i'm making and so i was again presenting the two mystic idea which not just thomas but i mean really most of the great tradition holds to god's simplicity which is simply a way of saying that in god essence and existence coincide to be god is not to be any particular thing to be god is to be to be that's the way uh a contemporary catholic theologian puts it to be god is to be the sheer act of existence and that means he's simple metaphysically because in any creature you have even an angel you have at least the distinction between what the angel is and that the angel is those are distinct and that's why we call an angel a creature but in god they're they're not distinct to be god is to be to be uh that's the ground of an analogical conception of being now all creaturely forms of being from angels to to insects would be participations in they'd be reflections of um the the pure act of existence which is god and so they don't exist competitively if we increase in being it doesn't threaten the to be of god how could it because our being in its entirety comes from god and so if i'm if i find glory even in my own moral works that glorifies god it doesn't take glory away from god you know and that's that's why i always block it when i read luther with all his tremendous rhetorical power and tremendous theological insight but i always balk at that point as though he's always caught in that dilemma of i can't give anything to the creature because it'll take away from god and i'm like no no i don't think you got to play that game um anyway that's that's a i would say distinctively to mystic and certainly catholic view now now craig walked that i mean craig denies the simplicity of god and does see god as a being and sees no problem with that the we had actually a group of people that day and the catholics were all lining up you know with aquinas and saying no we don't want to call god a being because it leads to all these uh dilemmas and problems yeah well this is a good chance for us to switch into i wanted to talk about catholicism for the last half of the show or however long that we have together so my first question is why are you catholic you know one way i put it is uh i'll quote one of my mentors cardinal francis george of chicago he said the catholic church has all the gifts that christ wants his people to have so christ wants to share all his gifts with his people the scripture the liturgy sacraments the eucharist mary the mother of god uh bishops as successors of the apostles apostolic authority the supreme apostolic authority of the pope that all of these are are gifts that christ wanted his church to have and that's why cardinal george i think would say he's a catholic now he added this which i think is very important he said it doesn't mean for a second that other christian churches don't exercise some of those gifts better than we do you know so i'll say it i mean humbly and gratefully the marvelous uh scriptural insights i've gotten from from protestant writers over the years i think i mean nt right uh it's had a massive impact on my own thinking about the bible i think theologically someone like stanley howard was had a big impact on my thinking i'll go back further carl bard is a is a theological hero of mine paul tillich i did my doctoral work on paul tillich go back to the great reformers as i mentioned calvin reminds me many ways of aquinas look at the great protestant preachers of the 20th century uh many of whom i've i've directly heard um are they better preachers in many ways than catholics yeah yeah so are some of the protestant churches using for example the gift of scripture and preaching better than we are yeah in some cases but the catholic church has all the gifts christ wants his people to have we here's another way to get at it there's a another mentor of mine dr eward cousins died some years ago but and he was someone by the way very involved in the ecumenical conversation loved uh talking to non-catholics and he said part of the genius of catholicism is we never threw anything out there's a there's like a grandma's attic quality to catholicism you know you go up to grandma's attic and you can find like all kinds of stuff and maybe i haven't seen that in a long time but yeah there it is we didn't throw it out it's up there so grandma's attic is it can be yeah we didn't go through iconoclastic moments of saying well let's just get rid of this or get rid of that we we again we had it certainly flawed and compromised but an instinct to hang on to it here's another way to get it i'll mention carl bartigan again who might reverence uh and i'm sure you know this line where bart said you know that damnable catholic and that's what he didn't like you know faith and reason uh jesus and mary faith and works is is we tend to say um all the time and then said i think that's that damnable catholic and well i like the damnable catholic and i think that's part of the genius of catholicism that it's both and not either or um analogical rather than dialectical so those would be a couple ways to at least gesture toward it yeah i was in that same i think it was in the same video or maybe it was a different video that was listening from you and you were mentioning like oh no no it was one you you just did an episode on street epistemology with peter pagosian yeah and yeah and and that was that was really interesting one of the things that you said was like when someone asks you what's the real reason that you're this or what's the r is this the reason why you're catholic or is this the reason why you're christian and you just tore that to shreds you were like that is not how it is in reality we're what we are because of all sorts of different things and reasons and experiences no quite right and so what i'm doing there in answering your question is kind of like gesturing here and there and there's this and that but yeah it's like saying why did you marry that woman i mean i can't just sum that up and oh yeah here's why let me tell you exactly here's here it is no there's a million reasons and i can articulate some of them most of them i i can't articulate so that's true you know that's true but i'm just kind of gesturing toward some i guess instincts or intuitions yeah no i like that i like that it's not just this one patent yeah answer it's just all right here's my here's my second question should i become catholic yes is my blunt answer uh now you want to press that because it's the fullness of truth and i want to share that with you it's uh something i've come to love and reference as the fullness of truth and stay with cardinal george all the gifts christ wants his people to have why wouldn't i want to share those with you why wouldn't i want to offer all that to you um now if you want to press the issue does that mean i'm damned no no that's not catholic teaching you know that a non-catholic even a non-christian can be saved now my critics please listen to what saying and not saying i'm not saying will be saved i have no they can be saved that's the catholic teaching so if i wouldn't press it so much immediately in that direction i would say i've got something i found so beautiful and so compelling and of course i want to share with you yeah let's let's talk more about that you said that in catholic teaching you can't non-christians can be saved where is that where is that in the in catholic teaching uh lumengencium 16 so the second vatican council um that jesus is the fullness of salvation if anyone's saved he or she is saved through christ but there are participations in the grace of christ on offer even in other christian religions even in non-christian religions vatican 2 goes so far to say even in a non-believer of good will following his conscience is in fact following and responding to the grace of christ though he doesn't clearly know that so john henry newman for example calls the conscience the aboriginal vicar of christ in the soul beautiful description it is in fact christ calling me to be an upright person and so on so one can be saved in these indirect ways by means of a participation in the grace of christ that would be catholic teaching so if that seems on the face of it and maybe maybe it's not at a like a sort of deeper level but that seems to be in conflict when i go to catholic mass as a protestant i can't partake in the eucharist why why is that if if non-cat if you have non-catholics for you that's out of respect for you because when i as a catholic priest hold up the transubstantiated host and i say the body of christ i'm proposing to you what catholics hold this to be when you say amen you're saying i agree to that i accept that i respect your lack of belief in it so i'm not going to put you on the spot and say the body of christ and force you to say amen so i i turn that around i don't think it's catholics being inhospitable i think it's catholics respecting the the non-belief of non-catholics i'm not going to compel you to say amen to that proposition until you're ready you know so i don't see it as aggressive or exclusive by any means and you know it's uh i i'd like to draw you into the fullness of catholicism that means the mass ultimately absolutely so what i most want to share with you is the eucharist that's what i want to share with you that's that's the body blood soul and divinity of jesus that's the fullest sign of his presence on earth that's what i want to share with you but but you're not you're not there you don't accept it i'm not going to put you on the spot so no i i don't read it at all as some kind of you know exclusive move uh that's that's an interesting response so let's switch skiers and talk about eastern orthodoxy for just a second how what what is like your number one reason why you think that the catholic church or the roman catholic church is the true church and not the eastern orthodox well again the main difference there will not be sacramental not be the priesthood or the eucharist it would be the the primacy of the pope and i see that as a great gift and i'm a follower of john henry newman that there is a living voice of authority to determine and adjudicate disputes that come into the life of the church that's indispensably important and from a catholic perspective the appeal simply to the bible let's say a more classically protestant move or even an appeal to the church fathers it might be closer to a orthodox move those are appeals to texts or to distant figures the appeal to a living voice i can we can get on a plane you and i and we can fly to rome and i'll i'll bring up here's the successor peter uh here's the one who has the final authority to adjudicate these uh matters in the body of christ that's a gift to me in a grace that and that's the i think the main point of demarcation between the two but as i said again i i reverence a lot of orthodox theology love it love orthodox theologians so again are they exercising certain gifts better than than we yeah probably but we have all the gifts that christ wants his people to have uh anytime you want to invite me to rome and like show me around happy to go so just shoot me an email uh so so one thing that i wanted to ask as well was what do you think is the absolute best thing and maybe maybe you don't have an absolute best thing what is the best thing that came out of the reformation i think you know a a re-stress on the primacy of grace a re-stress on the on the bible and the centrality of the bible a re-stress on preaching and i say re-stress here to say that you know luther and calvin and company were getting these things of course from the great tradition but they had been to to some degree occluded to some degree under emphasized i i always stand with uh eve congard you know that name uh french dominican in mid 20th century active at vatican ii very involved in the ecumenical conversation wrote a great book called true and false reform in the church which is looking at this whole issue of what's valid and what isn't in the reformation and one of his comments was if luther had not gone so far he would have been the founder of a lutheran order in the catholic church that would have put special stress on the primacy of grace and it's always struck me as right um i'll say it bluntly where i think luther went too far is the famous sola if he'd said grazia prima i'm we're great with that we're fine with it grace first that's a biblical principle and when you violate that by the way everything goes off the rails i quite agree that's the whole pelagian problem and and augustine saw it and everything goes off the rails if you deny the primacy of grace but don't say grazia sola see because to me that was our old universal conception of being problem you know uh grace as opposed to works grace is opposed to our cooperation only grace nothing no no then it got to that it was overstressed and it led to all these dilemmas and problems so i think if he had stopped there you know or even have a bible scripture of prima yeah absolutely thomas aquinas believed that absolutely scripture first thomas never thought like philosophy has some primacy over the bible never never he's a magister sacre pagine so if if those had been um again i'm swinging as a catholic expressed more cautiously in a more disciplined way i think we could we could have just benefited enormously from those moves and that's what i to this day continue to derive from the great reformers and from the protestant tradition you know when i was reading the post liberals for the first time is 20 years ago or longer most of them were protestants but this great re-stress on the primacy of the bible i love that i love that it woke me up in some ways you know so i continue to derive great benefit from that how can catholics and protestants have better conversations uh one thing i think is the bracket for the moment the 16th century um conversations and let's we got a common enemy right now which is a very aggressive form of secularism and i think we can find so much common ground in fighting for uh god and fighting for the language of transcendence i'll give you an example you know i first heard of william lane craig 2010 because i was i was in rome as a visiting scholar at the big seminar in rome and one of the students there said he knew i was into you know apologetics and evangelization and he said you know this william lane craig and i said uh no never heard of him oh my gosh you gotta watch him and so i went on youtube and found all these wonderful debates between him and hitchens and dawkins and i thought man alive this guy is good and and he's using our stuff he's using all this wonderful catholic philosophy you know and and and i told him this personally face to face i said i thought when the new atheist emerged christians were shamefully bad the people that went up against them were so bad they were so ill-equipped to deal with them and then there was craig thank god and then there was william lane craig who finally had some you know intellectual chops and knew their perspective and can argue out of our great intellectual tradition so i love that i benefited enormously from him he's another example um [Music] yeah so uh the the next question i have it has to do with something that came in the new came out in the news fairly recently it was about a priest who found out late much later in life that he wasn't properly baptized so can you tell me about what happened with that and what are your thoughts on it yeah it's an interesting case the vatican just ruled on this matter that you know the legitimate form of baptism is pouring water or dipping someone in water the minister says says i baptize you in the name of the father and of the son of the holy spirit that's the right matter and form of the sacrament as we say in catholic theology and the importance there is that when when i say as a priest i baptize you it's not you know bob baron's baptizing you you know robert baron with his cool you know spirituality forget that i'm i'm operating in persona christie we say i'm in the person of christ so the eye is not my it's christ's eye right which is why you can't say as as the deacon in this case said many years ago we baptize you implying thereby that somehow the community was was baptizing and so the vatican ruled on this and said yeah it's it's improper it's invalid to say we you have to say aye you know. well then this young priest said oh my gosh you know i actually have a videotape of my baptism i'll check it out he did and indeed the deacon said we baptize you so he realized that moment in light of the vatican's ruling that he wasn't actually baptized and since he wasn't baptized he hadn't validly received first communion because he got a baptism to receive for his communion he also wasn't confirmed validly which meant he wasn't ordained validly to the priesthood so he was not not only not a priest he wasn't a christian and so he had to be re-baptized and given first communion and confirmation and reordained by the bishop so it's an interesting case because it shows the importance of these objectivities when it comes to the sacraments is that do you see anything wrong with that it seems like a tragedy almost well that someone could go this long yeah go ahead yeah but does it mean he's outside the grace of christ no i mean christ uh here's the formula we use christ binds himself to the sacraments but is not uh bound by the sacraments that's to say it's christ's own choice that this is the ordinary means by which he wants to communicate his grace to his church but does that mean that that person now was completely outside the grace of jesus no jesus can also operate as it were around the sacraments but it's not to denigrate the importance of the objectivity of the sacramental action and formula um so that's kind of the middle ground we want to find on that question okay you don't want to say it's some some sharply legalistic either or you know um but since ordination is something that comes through the church it's extremely important that it be done in an ecclesially responsible way would anyone disagree any of your your would anyone in the catholic church disagree with what you just said there oh they might but they wouldn't be in accord with catholic theology i mean there might be catholics that quarrel with that but they wouldn't be in accord with our theology oh yeah i'm thinking about the sacraments as being like a a sort of normal thing that happens and then sometimes there are outliers that can still be saved apart from those apart from the sacraments you can be saved i wouldn't i wouldn't bring the question of salvation into it right away i mean christ saves whom he wants to save so again he's he binds himself to the sacraments but is not bound by the sacraments he he chooses this is his ordinary means by which he wants to express his life but it doesn't mean that he's he's constrained by the sacraments so i wouldn't that's the salvation you know so i'm gonna ask you one one last question and then we will get to some q a we'll do as much as we can i don't have a whole lot of time with bishop baron today but so here's here's my last question we'll go to some q a from the audience what do you make of the so-called bad popes argument against catholicism and so the basic gist of it is that there's some really bad popes in the history of catholicism and that's not necessarily something that we would expect to find if god had established a church like this and this isn't necessarily meant as like a knock down proof against catholicism but it's it does i think provide some evidence that catholicism may not be true what are your thoughts on this argument no not at all i mean to me that's just in line with our doctrine of original sin i mean that people go bad they tend to go bad i take that for granted and that doesn't exclude popes so for example the teaching authority of a pope uh the pope's infallibility when when under very strict circumstances articulating the church's teaching that's a whole different question from his moral rectitude i mean right the worst person in the world but he's still playing the role the pope should play as the uh the one who adjudicates doctrinal disputes and so on so no to me it doesn't tell a thing against catholicism that people let's let's take it to the extreme suppose that every pope was really just morally awful would that provide any evidence at that point or would you still say well no that's original sin leads us to think that people would be bad would there is there any kind of threshold that would no go back to peter how how do you assess saint peter uh morally i mean sustain is a pretty mixed bag you know he's good and bad and all right he sets the tone for all the papacy you know i mean there's something beautiful about him and there's something deeply fallen and compromised and he denied the lord three times at the moment of truth he's the first pope you know so i no that didn't surprise me or set up really any conflict in my mind at all right we're getting up and saying jesus christ is not divine now we have a serious problem if a cop rose up and said there are actually five persons to trinity then we'd have a serious problem but his moral failures no that to me doesn't tell against his authority all right let's move to some q a from the audience and i'm just going to skip around we've had a lot of questions come in so i'm just going to skip around this one is from daniel finlay he says and this goes back to the section we were talking about exorcisms he says bishop baron can a christian become possessed i've done two exorcisms on devout christians what are your thoughts i usually point to ezekiel 8 6-13 showing that the temple had demons and the ark of the covenant was in the temple yeah sure christians can be possessed all right i don't know what you want to say about that sure they can i mean it's again i don't want it because to me the devil is boring bart was right about that but you know it's can we cave in can we surrender to the suggestions of the devil and his temptations and so on to such a degree that he becomes this sort of new center of our existence yeah i suppose that's that's possible and christians are susceptible to that too all right here's another question from the jason 909 he says what advice would bishop baron give to a new catholic who is trying to discern slash navigate through the rad trad movement first of all tell me what the rad trad movement is what is that it means radical traditionalist and it's it's on the radar screen now so people who well in many ways they're hearkening back to the time before the second vatican council so this great reforming council of the 1960s that set the tone for catholic belief in practice you know a lot of the radtras i don't want to speak too generally but a lot of them want to go back before vatican ii some go so far as to deny the authority of the second vatican council here's here's a quick answer can you quarrel with as i do some of the ways vatican 2 was implemented some of the awkward ways sure can you find things prior to the council that maybe were occluded too quickly and are still valuable yeah absolutely can you say that vatican ii itself is not a legitimate council and its authority is is questioned no you can't say that so that's where i draw the line with the rad treads uh i share with them uh a concern about the way the council is implemented in some cases i don't share with them a denial of the authority of vatican ii here's a here's a really serious question from meow meow meow he says i i think it's a he three of my friends committed suicide after drawn out struggles only one was christian purgatory or endless hell oh it's up to god i mean i'd never presume to pronounce on that only god can read the heart read the soul um i mean we we can name certain moral acts as intrinsically uh disordered but but that's just to name something objectively when you're talking about sin you have to talk about full engagement of the mind full engagement of the will you have to talk about mitigating circumstances you've got to talk about someone's background as a confessor in confession you'd search out some of those questions but only god can determine in that ultimate sense so i would never presume to pronounce hmm yeah i wanted to just add to that that protest in any kind of theology i think most most well if you read the bible basically nothing in the bible says that suicide is some kind of like unforgivable sin there's nothing in the bible that says that now that's not to say that everyone should just go out and do that not at all if you let me let me say this too if you are struggling with anxiety or depression because that's what i struggle with not all the time but sometimes it gets really bad i have sometimes i get really bad anxiety sometimes i get really bad depression but if you are struggling with that don't keep it to yourself please you might think and that's kind of like that's when i'm experiencing those those times it feels like you're alone it feels like no one else can really understand what you're going through or can really appreciate or even talk to you about it don't get in that mindset because it's completely false you might think it's not like when you're going through these times of anxiety depression probably your thoughts are not as rational as you think they are to be honest and so if you're struggling with that please talk to somebody talk to your doctor there are medications that you can take for anxiety and depression that could literally change your life so please don't like don't think that there's no options get serious with it especially if you're dealing with suicidal thoughts call somebody talk to somebody right now i just want to say that before we yeah on all right so so here's a question from joe sharp he says tomism this is a theological and philosophical question tomism holds that the persons of the trinity exist as subsistent relations within the godhead how can a quote unquote relation be a person in any sense or be able to say i am the son who is distinct in any sense from the father he's distinct by way of relation not by way of essence and so the father son and spirit share the same divine essence the same godhead if you want so they're not distinct as things not distinct so we say um you know you and i are distinct persons so we're distinct beings but that's not the case with god they're distinct by way of of relation and procession we would say and that's why aquinas reaches for that highly paradoxical language of subsistent relation because he knew very well from his aristotelian background the one thing a relation can't be is subsistent right substances are subsistent and they have relations and relations are are dependent so he's playing with the language in a way the same way he does with transubstantiation for example so he's playing with the language to try to make this very subtle point that the persons are distinct but not distinct by way of um of substance but by way of sheer relation and origin theology to unpack all that but right yeah i'm not expecting us to be able to go as deep as we'd probably need to in a lot of these all right so here's a cranman photo cinema he's our videographer when we go and do uh live events and everything in interviews with people he says was the old testament church infallible and did we need an infallible church to get the old testament canon well we need the church for the whole canon i mean the bible's developing over centuries as you well know and its final form doesn't come till late second early third century and it's the church broadly speaking still in its pretty primitive stage but the church broadly speaking that canonizes what we now know as the scripture and that's a standard bit as you know of sort of catholic apologetics that the church preceded the scripture um and they're in a sort of symbiotic relationship of course you know they're the primacy of the scripture but at the same time the scripture never exists apart from the church it's the church's book so i would say you needed a long period of sifting and and debate and argument and liturgical development before the church said here are the texts that sum up our life and sum up the meaning of what we're trying to communicate and hence we get the you know canonical scriptures there's a question from maverick christian he says what is papal infallibility exactly some think it's quote unquote anything the pope says is right no right so don't think of it as the pope is an oracle so that's why like a lot of catholics i get a little nervous uh when people start putting microphones on the pope's face on airplanes uh and now i'm not blaming the pope i'm saying but the danger there is he has to pope a question he put a microphone and the pope says something oh that's it that's catholic teaching well no we don't treat the pope as an oracle uh you know we respect the pope's point of view etc but infallibility is so rarely invoked and it's at these um rare moments when summoning his full apostolic authority a successor of peter the pope adjudicates a matter of faith and morals that's so central to the church's life that it needs this clear uh declaration the second vatican council is a good example un we say uh pedro at sue petro with peter and under peter so the council gathered under the authority of the pope has a supreme authority within the life of the church but on very very rare occasions the pope summoning his personal authority as successor peter can declare something infallibly in in faith and morals but it's not like it's happening every day don't treat the pope as an oracle and pope said it's going to rain tomorrow well then it must rain tomorrow i mean no no serious catholic holds anything as silly as that all right here's a question from matt boyer i'm close to converting my family to catholicism there is so much that feels right my problem is the papacy how can i have faith that it is true upon this rock i'll build my church and it comes from christ i see the promise made to peter and to his successors which was recognized you know early on in the life of the church and then then i would apply the the newman hermeneutic that i discussed earlier the importance of a living voice of authority uh newman who for a long time you know as an anglican felt that the church fathers were that voice so if there's dispute there's question we'll go back to augustine go back to chrysostom go back to jerome and they'll adjudicate it and he realized well gosh they kind of disagree with each other and we only know them in their books but there is this living figure the successor of peter who with the other bishops is claiming authority and that's a great gift i use the example of umpiring you know i played a lot of baseball as a kid i've i've been a like a coach with with little kids and you know that i mean baseball game will devolve into into complete bickering in about five minutes if there's no clear authority right you say hey kids go play have a good time i'll go over and you know smoke a cigarette well it'll devolve into bickering in five minutes unless there's a strong voice not just hey let's let's check out the rule book because well i don't think it means this there's a living voice on the field who says you're out hey um you're crazy yeah i know you think i'm crazy but you're out okay the game goes on thank god for the umpire even as we we get mad at him so that's how i see the pope and the authority of the bishops thank god for them now i am a bishop so i have to identify with this but uh thank god for this living voice of authority that allows the life of the church to go on as long as i'm on this point let me just say something further um i know this from especially uh when i was playing basketball is you can under referee a game that's true and i've been talking about that if you're not calling anything the game will will devolve you can also over referee a game right if you're you're blowing the whistle every little move travel up well then the kids don't play right so a good referee is kind of he knows what he's serving is the flow of the game he's not serving himself like hey look at me i'm the no the referee you want him to kind of disappear you don't really even notice him because his purpose is to facilitate the flow of the game well that's how newman and i agree with him here saw the the bishops in relation to the life of the church which is teachers and catechists and preachers and missionaries and you know i'm saying that's the flow of the game that's the life of the church so from time to time a voice has to speak out to say oh nope no wait a minute no no you can't do that i don't know that's going too far no play ball look i i'm off the court if if the authority is fussing with every little move or worse starts playing the game let me get let me do it that's kind of defeating the purpose the purpose is to serve the flow of the game now in my analogy the life of the church to let the life of the church flourish and that's why the papacy is important you you want an umpire a referee to push back a little bit on this idea of like we need kind of a pope or some kind of authority to what we don't have that authority when it comes to determining whether or not the roman catholic church is the true church over eastern orthodoxy so we don't have an authority to adjudicate us there so what are your thoughts on that yeah so you're looking for like like a meta authority i suppose i would just claim it from no but i just claim it from within i mean the it's the it's the pope claiming the authority given to him by christ you know the the the petrine uh promise given by christ and so he's because we're kind of looking for suppose the unmoved mover the you know the first instance would be that the authority that he's he's going to build his church on the rock of of peter's confession i think that's the ground for it from from jesus is that what you're saying so it comes from jesus yeah the authority granted to peter by by christ okay why could why couldn't that be the a sufficient answer for say a protestant like jesus is the head of the church well because you know like why do we yeah why do we need a pope or something well in a way i'd say ask jesus because it's it's what he did he he said you are peter and upon this rock i'll build my church see i say as a catholic god delights in using secondary causes it doesn't denigrate him or his authority in any way to include us in it and so he delighted in saying i i want to designate this apostle of mine this simon barjona to be the rock upon whom i build my church and i want to communicate to him this flawed and finite fallen human being my authority and it's not an either or but at both end it's christ's authority but it's it's given so peter can participate in it um you know so it goes back to our earlier point is is you're pressing understandably in a more protestant direction which i see is again sort of competitive you know if if he gives it to peter then somehow i'm i'm i'm giving less glory to christ and i said no christ himself gave it to peter obviously not thinking his glory was going to be compromised so here's a question from gina m this is going to be our last question it's on the same topic so that's why i'm bringing this one in today yeah please uh for the last one it says there is no this is what she says there is no single quote-unquote interpreter of the law in the old testament as i understand it there were many rabbitic schools if god didn't provide an infallible order there why assume he would do so after christ well but there's a kind of wouldn't you say the way the rabbis always appealed to their teacher and their teacher their teacher finally back to moses who received it from god on mount sinai i mean that there was an authority structure and it was mosaic i would say and then appealing through moses to the to god um so i know there's something like it's something analogous to it it seems to me in the old testament um moses and you know jesus is the new moses that's everywhere in the new testament i mean he's he's the new lawgiver and he's moses in about a thousand different ways in the gospels so i would say that's kind of an analogy with it is the mosaic authority so let's close it out today by mentioning you i already talked about your website at the very beginning of this wordonfire.org tell me about these like amazing magazines that you have let's see if i can oh gosh tell me about these because these are beautiful as a my background is in photography so when i look through this it's just beautiful it's so it's gorgeous so tell me about the what are these all about are you making these yeah thank you i'm very proud of those uh they're for the word on fire institute so we have a large institute now largely an online reality people join they get specialized courses and videos and instructions in really how to evangelize so what i want to build up is a is a community of mostly laypeople who will then go out into the world as evangelizers the magazine there which is gorgeous and and todd warner is the editor and we have a wonderful design team we're on fire been working with us for a long time and they produce this beautiful and i think very truthful and informative uh journal that comes out four times a year but really you join the institute and you get that journal it's designed to form evangelizers i don't have this yet and i may end up getting it as well but tell me about the bible that you just put out is it just about the the gospels or is it one gospel yeah tell me about the the bible yeah i'm super proud of that project uh volume one is out which is the gospels but what we're trying to do is present the bible in a way that will make it first of all readable for people so it's not you know double columned and little tiny print and little fussy footnotes but laid out like a novel you know but then what we're doing is is on almost every page there's some very beautiful work of art some illustration that that uh highlights or you know uh brings out a feature of the passage and then we have loads of commentaries so it's kind of like a medieval gloss you know we have uh augusta and we'll have chrysostom and we'll have anselm and we'll have john paul ii and then there are a number of things for me from my sermons and all that over the years so the idea is as you're reading the bible you're looking at artwork that brings out its meaning and you're also looking at commentaries helping you understand it we designed it for uh nuns you know the n-o-n-e-s those who are becoming more and more dis-affiliated those who might have very little sense of the bible but we wanted it to be beautiful as well as true that it would some of you that you'd like to hold in your hand and look at and savor you know i'll go back to another earlier question again the glory of protestantism is the is the recovery of the primacy of the bible vatican ii called for that it said we need to have a revival of the bible i still think it's largely not happened in catholic circles so we see this project as as part of vatican ii's call to to bring the the bible more and more uh especially to catholic people so what would you like to say in closing or at the at the end of this exchange is there anything you'd like to leave with the audience you know maybe i go back to the point you and i spoke of a few minutes ago which is how catholics and protestants can make common ground today you know as you can tell i love the questions of the 16th century they're it's me fascinating and and we can and should talk about it but there are more important things now uh making common ground uh secularism is soul killing and i see it every day you know especially with young people who who are imbibing now from the culture this poisonous atmosphere of a materialism a scientism a secularism and it's soul-destroying and i think the christian churches should come together to fight this and that's why you know the example your example and william lane craig and people in the protestant space who are you know defenders of the faith and defenders of belief in god good good let's make common cause yeah i think that's so important too i just wanted to highlight that as well yeah we need to be coming together that's why i'm having these conversations with matt fradd and other catholic big catholic you know it's just it's so it's so important that we do that anyways thank you so much for coming on uh hopefully we can do something else again in the future but yeah it's been great so thank you so much let me talk for having me today talk to the audience real quick so thank you guys for watching if you've enjoyed this interview today then uh if you'd like to see this thing continue to happen this youtube channel you can subscribe that's the first thing you can do but if you'd like to support this ministry you can head over to patreon.com slash capturing christian that's the wrong thing there it is patreon.com capturing christianity the link it to uh to support this ministry is in the description of this video right now we're offering 12 apologetics courses for beginners if you're a beginner and apologetics you'd like to learn some of the arguments for god's existence and even the problem of evil is one of the courses that we cover there then this is the course that you want there's 12 different courses they're all available right now on our patreon again that's patreon.com capturingchristianity thank you guys for watching we will see you later and christianity is true [Music] you

Channel: Capturing Christianity

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Length: 70min 15sec (4215 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 22 2020