From Baptist Leftist to Conservative Catholic w/ Suan Sonna

g'day and welcome to pines with aquinas my name is matt fradd today on the show we have swan sonar we're going to be talking about many things his conversion from being a leftist baptist if that's even how he described himself i did he may not but we're going to be talking about that his conversion to catholicism i'm gonna do a deep dive in the papacy really brilliant young guy you're gonna love this interview but the reason i'm looking at you right now is to let you know that we have some new merch um which you can see on the screen right now and if you click the link at the top of the description below you can go and buy it right now and you too can be attractive so uh yeah i thought it was kind of cool we haven't really done much merch before but i thought we'd try our hand at it so again click that link it's 13 a t-shirt but you can also get that introverted but willing to discuss domestic metaphysics on sweaters and all sorts of things so help us out by doing that swan lovely to have you mate thanks for having me on yeah good good to have you you just flew in last night very late yeah yeah it wasn't too bad yeah yeah and you're from kansas from kansas studying uh philosophy at kansas state right and and so a 21 year old undergrad but also publishing in academic journals with like the best of them well i guess you know that's really impressive yeah yeah what are your specialties right now what do you uh so right now i'm really focused like in philosophy and ethics i really enjoy that topic and i enjoy how it intersects with metaphysics and so questions of uh for instance um what is normativity and is there a fact value distinction right so thomas addresses this with his natural law theory um but on my own time i'm really interested in the papacy and scripture yeah what do you do for fun what i do that's not impressive at all um i i play with my cat sebastian cool oh yeah he's a he's a he's a very aggressive cuddler okay uh and then i go to the movies with my friends and you know i go out and hang out with them have bonfires you know just normal normal things yeah yeah very good yeah well man it's great to have you we had you on the show once before to debate the papacy with protestant n stephen neems stephen demesh i'm sorry yeah and it was uh did christ establish an infallible magisterium yeah yeah that's right and you did absolutely excellent thank you that was amazing if people are watching right now and they want to see a fantastic debate on on the magisterium on the paper see go check that out because that was that was the bomb so yeah so i didn't know this about you until last night we all had the blessing of sitting around outside scott hahn's house yeah where like three protestants are in the midst of converting who will go nameless yeah it's somebody else who's right now discerning between orthodoxy and catholicism but you you were raised a baptist i was yeah what was that like oh it was great you know so just to give you a little bit about my back story my father is a baptist minister and my mother she has some theological education and so in 2000 my dad left northeastern india to come here and you know he was young guy he thought that he could manage you know just studying in seminary then coming back to india but about a year into his studies he realized that he just really couldn't live without you know his family and so the baptist church in kansas they raised enough money to get my entire family here in 2001 and so i grew up in a very good environment you know it was very bible centered very jesus centered and uh you know i grew up around a lot of missionary kids you know like my father's like my father's family you know and so i grew up with kids from africa from other parts of asia and it was a very very beautiful upbringing i have nothing bad to say about how i was raised as a baptist because they really emphasized love of christ and love of other people what were your thoughts about catholics as you were growing up or did you not have any yeah well i didn't have too many um i thought like their their churches were pretty especially the older ones that were downtown yeah i was going to say a lot of them about crap yeah you saw the beauty i only saw the pretty ones but i just they weren't on my radar and i just thought um you know a lot of my hispanic friends were catholic and so i said you know that's cool you know like i didn't really think about converting or i didn't have any negative thoughts i thought the stuff about mary was a little weird like all the statues and i wanted to know what that was about but i didn't care yeah you know i was happy so okay but this is interesting because before before you came to the church which was when uh i came in uh pentecost 2020. wow so last year yeah that's nuts does it feel a lot longer than that uh well i like to say that when i became catholic it just felt so natural that it was just the next evolution of my faith so to speak so i feel like i've been catholic my whole life actually wow uh yeah well i'm so excited to talk to you about the papacy and defending the papacy from scripture and objections people have towards it especially in this day and age where people aren't terribly fond of our current holy father yeah there seems to be uh you know even if people think he's okay they don't seem to look upon him as they did john paul ii say or yeah yeah so that'll be good but yeah so tell us a bit about your upbringing because you mentioned to me that when you went into university you started to sort of adopt sort of leftist yeah ideas so i want to know how you went to that and then how you went to being catholic yeah so it was actually more high school um so when i was in high school uh you know everyone around me was liberal and i thought like okay that's the reasonable thing to be right so be leftist be progressive uh i was super big into democratic socialism i was reluctantly pro-choice uh and i just believe that you know marriage is just whatever you make it to be right and so i i didn't really you know defend these traditional beliefs of the church of the faith even though you're a baptist even though as a baptist you know and so but then at the same time i was watching people like william lane craig i was really into apologetics and it just it didn't occur to me um until one day i forgot when but i just started i stopped and i asked myself like why do i not believe that marriage is a union of one man and one woman or why am i so hesitant or quiet about it you know because a lot of my friends they were very openly pro-choice and you know pro the red redefinition of marriage and so i just thought okay well why am i so hesitant why am i so quiet and so i started going to scripture and i started reading paul you know book of romans i started looking elsewhere and i just started realizing man i can't really get around um you know this position that i'm in you know i need to find a way to adopt the traditional perspective that seems to be there in the scriptures and so i started reading uh catholic philosophers and theologians like saint thomas aquinas robert george ryan t anderson john finis and it finally gave me the intellectual confidence to be able to say okay i accept the teaching of scripture because i see it in the natural law and i see it in the authoritative text of the word of god yeah you seem like a really intelligent guy who's open to where the arguments lead and somebody who's not just gonna go along with something because it's emotionally whatever powerful but so but so how did you begin to start having those beliefs about you know being okay with abortion yeah maybe in certain circumstances was it just because your friends held those views were you also thinking things through at the time i mean a lot of it was just kind of peer pressure in a way i didn't really think really deeply about it because i thought like okay um you know i'm i used to have a really big ego and now like i have no ego at all so but uh so back in the day you know i used to think like oh well you know this is what the smart people believe you know and i was looking around and most of the conservatives that i knew were like the really cringe you know like on youtube yelling and screaming into the mic you know that's funny because now i have the opposite impression really yeah like i'm open to whatever argument someone who claims to be leftist may have yeah but when i think of people shouting into their phone while they're driving against something it's not the conservative people though i'm sure they do that as well right right and so i you know i didn't grow up with a very good impression of conservatives and i didn't think they were very intellectual or thoughtful and so um yeah i mean i just i just adopted what my friends believed and it didn't occur to me until later wait a minute there's a problem here because i remember in particular you know i was pro-choice and i had a friend of mine named charles and i think he's fine with me mentioning him um he texted me while i was on a trip with my orchestra in high school and he said swan why are you pro-choice just out of the blue yeah just out of the blue just dropped it right on me and i was just enjoying you know the bus ride to wherever we were going and i told him like oh it's because i don't believe that um pre-born humans are persons so they don't have consciousness they don't have first person reflexive consciousness or whatever and then he's like wait but if you believe that then you ought to be okay with infanticide then and i'm like no no i know infanticide's a horrible thing you know once the child's outside the womb that's a totally different conversation but he's like well not in principle and then i started looking at some of the research he was sending in and i was like wait okay so some children aren't you know yeah aware of like a first person awareness until months after they're born and i'm like man i'm not okay with infanticide and then i started looking more into like what actually goes on in abortion and have you not looked at that no no no i just like you know like the way that people pro-choice people talk about abortion is they just say it's ending a pregnancy yeah right and it's like oh well you end up pregnancy you know you use contraception maybe or something like that so i was like okay it's not a big deal and even if it like you know you even if you do have to like kill the unborn life it's probably just a bunch of clump of cells it doesn't look too human or whatever and then i looked at the process and i looked at um what other philosophers like peter singer or i think it's um michael tooley had argued and i saw wait a minute their position leads to infanticide if i'm being if they're being faced with it and they're okay with it right and so i started talking to my pro-choice friends about this uh you know bringing up the science and the evidence and they they were like oh they didn't know that that was the ramification of their belief and so at first they seemed kind of open-minded because i was still one of them so to speak i was kind of like you know yeah but yeah you're not a threat yeah as a fellow liberal you know just i've been thinking about this you know and then um you know things changed when it became conservative but that's when i started really second guessing my beliefs on the issue now you told me that i think when you're in high school and you were struggling with the faith yeah you reached out to dr william craig yeah and he got back to you you have to tell us that story right okay so you know while i was struggling with the issue of marriage and abortion um i really got into the topic of also the interpretation of genesis chapter one and two in particular like do i have to be a sixth day creationist or do i have to be theologically liberal and just not take the bible seriously right and sorry for the theological liberals who might be you know um not happy with what i just said but uh regardless um i started having doubts because i'm like okay if evolution happened and there wasn't an adam and eve there was always death and suffering on the face of the earth and at least if you have the adam and eve story and the garden of eden then you can say you know there was a time when it was all good and we messed it up right but then i started resenting the story of adam and eve because i was like man i don't want to believe that we once had it right and we lost it you know and you know my dad who's a minister uh you know he would sometimes take me around to see you know what he does and to have me pray with him and i visited this elderly woman who was in the hospital and she was dying uh and you know in the in the hospital room there's like a crucifix so it's a catholic hospital and as i was watching her die and i looked at the well i didn't i didn't she didn't die in front of me but she was dying and i looked up at the crucifix i was like where are you you know where are you christ you're just letting this woman die you know and i thought like man is this the history of life on the earth is this what it's all been about is this is it really a god or do we just invent him you know and i started having these doubts and so i became agnostic and i told bill craig hey bill craig how did you get his email you just reached out over here so you know on reasonable faith they have like this q a portion and so you know i wrote to him there and i wrote out my objections and i wrote all my questions and everything and then i was like yeah there's no way bill craig's gonna respond because there's probably tens of others of questions that he wants to answer but he answered it and he destroyed me bill craig destroys swan sono we got to make that yeah yeah it's fantastic yeah i mean like uh he responded to my objections he showed me that i was being too rash that i was being too emotional basically and i wasn't thinking clearly through what i was saying and so i told bill craig hey can you like delete my name from the question and stuff and so now it's anonymous oh wow you can you know the number because we get a link to that below watch swan get destroyed honestly though but that because it was a question of the week probably yeah question of the week do me a favor send me that or do you mind sending me the link uh yeah i mean i mean you did say take your name off of it right you've developed since then i imagine you're okay yeah i mean like yeah you can you can look at it you can look at it if yeah it's pretty i look back and i kind of laugh at it because i'm like dang i got i got destroyed you know um but yeah so he answered that and then i reached out to him on facebook and i was like hey bill craig i'm so glad that you responded because now i feel like i can i'm i'm back to being a christian but i'm really uncomfortable but i'm getting there you know like i i was done being agnostic for the time um so i was only agnostic for a bit maybe like a few months or something like that and uh craig you know he's really sweet really generous and uh you know he said yeah i can make it anonymous and everything and so he really did help me get my faith back on track because he taught me that um you know even if you have all these doubts or questions like think about my arguments for the resurrection right and he said look at the arguments i've given there the kalam look at all these other things i've done right if the arguments are strong enough then at least you can say okay if you have a web of beliefs the thing that's at the center is the resurrection or it's the kalam or whatever argument you prefer for the existence of god and for the claims of christ and so i started realizing okay so i gotta find a way to reconcile this belief that i have that okay i think the earth is old um evolution happened and so i got to reconcile these two things and so i started reading tons of books on the problem of evil on the problem of natural evil and then eventually i came to a pretty comfortable position when it came to evolution and christianity yeah could we talk more about that about an adam and eve in yeah i remember being surprised that in the sympathologie aquinas asks the question in some way shape or form was there death before the fall right he says yes yeah and he said that adam and eve's choice didn't lead carnivorous animals or sorry vegetarian animals to suddenly become carnivorous yeah so that's something but uh yeah what was your kind of biggest hang up with adam and eve and where you are right now and then yeah so i'll tell you where i am right now so i do believe there was a historical adam and eve although at this moment though uh do you believe that for theological reasons or scientific reasons theological reasons um because i just i really i really have a hard time seeing how the story of scripture holds up if you don't have a historical adam and eve because they play such a central role right and so what i believe is that adam and eve were a special creation by god and that the garden of eden was kind of an oasis in which god allowed adam and eve to be our first high priest and they were able to represent all of creation and that when they fell they they showed to god so to speak that as human beings our highest representatives had failed and so adam and eve are like the maximum so to speak in the in in the genus human right so we can't go higher than adam because he's our you know our federal head he's the human being specifically designated by god to represent us until the new adam came along to be our new representative and if we are united to his body and his reality then we become a new creation right and so i i mean i accepted historical adam and eve the question that some of my catholic friends have brought up though is like do you believe swan that every human being naturally finds their origin and adam and eve um and the thing is like when i read the book of genesis i know i think pope pius xii he explicitly said it rejected um is it polar journalism collagenism something like that right where like multiple human beings appeared on the scene right or something like that rather than their origin and adam and eve my understanding from humanoid generous is that that language in which he seeks to call into question polygenism yeah is too vague to be thought of as a sort of papal declaration a sort of magisterial declaration yeah that's what i thought yeah because he seems to say there seems to be no way of reconciling i think if that's the language if i recall correctly yeah yeah but fair enough but i mean sure maybe maybe that's right though and so why do you think that so because you know i read you know when you read the book of genesis it's never explained where kane's wife came from yeah and it's like okay it does seem prima facie as you read those first few chapters for at least i'm not even making this claim i'm just saying it seems that there's other humans around exactly exactly and there's in the scriptures themselves provide no further explanation on where they came from right and so it seems to me that adam and eve were special creations of god just as the new adam and the new eve are special creations of god and so you can use that historical typology um but i also believe that because adam and eve failed you know a lot of people they're really embarrassed when you tell them that they evolve when they evolve from ape-like creatures or hominids right but i think like that's the point because sin brought us to such an embarrassing state because we were supposed to be you know in a sense over the animal kingdom and unique and different as rational animals but then when we look at our origin you know we're no different than the other animals to some extent right um and so i think that has to do in part with the fall because the fall i think has retroactive consequences as well as forward-looking consequences there's a lot to go into there but um yeah you you began by saying some of your catholic friends will say to you did we naturally come from adam and eve and then you talked about other humans perhaps so how do you reconcile that or where are you at right now right so i think that uh the rest of the human race evolved by evolution and they came about through that natural process under divine providence right but then adam and eve were the special creation of god to be our representatives before him and to be the representatives of all humanity okay yeah yeah i think it's important too like i can imagine hearing what you just said maybe 20 years ago right as i was sort of still becoming catholic or 21 years ago and being like oh come on like this is just like you're just trying to make your story work yeah yeah but we all do that i mean we all begin with what's more apparent to us and then from that vantage point try to make sense of what's less apparent yeah um so in a sense we do that in every branch of science and i just realized too you know i i really so you know it's funny because a lot of young earth creationists um and you know i'm not trying to be disrespectful to anybody but a lot of young earth creationists we use the argument well if you drop the bible right in front of somebody you know what would they believe about human origins right when i was a kid i read the story of adam and eve and once i saw that the sun and moon weren't created until the fourth day i was like oh okay so day isn't being literally you you picked that up just from reading when i was a kid yeah i mean augustine addressed that you know you know i hadn't read augustine crazy yeah yeah but i was just like oh okay so okay there's some liberties being taken here but i see that there's like a historical core at least even if there's some extravagances on the side um but yeah i mean i just i didn't have that intuition as a kid and the more i got deeper into science i just started realizing like if you're really gonna take like the young earth creationist position you really have to do a lot of difficult bending and twisting with the evidence and uh i just i didn't want i couldn't do that yeah were people in your baptist church circles uh where do they fall in this conversation a lot of them are young earth creationists but i mean there's a among the i hate to put it like this but among like the more educated professor types you know their old earth or theistic evolution okay yeah yeah so then you started getting introduced to catholicism as you were reading these sort of new crop of what are they called the natural law theorists yeah and you know new natural law yes like george and others right um yeah so i got i i started paying attention to catholic philosophy and theology and i was like dang okay catholics are really smart but they're wrong about the papacy they're wrong about justification what's going on with mary you know i bet mary was a big hang up for me actually it is for many yeah and so i you know i had a hard time kind of accepting that and um at this point in the story you know intellectually speaking i had been convinced of conservative christianity right a belief in the dignity of human life from conception to a natural death i was convinced of that and then i was convinced intellectually speaking that marriage is a union of one man and one woman but um i started having a really hard time with accepting that because i had a lot of friends in the lgbt community in high school right and so i'm like how can i say i love you but i believe this at the same time and so growing up um because i didn't have my biological grandparents i had um i had adopted grandparents basically so you know elderly people in the baptist community who are like my grandparents and so my adopted grandfather he had died um a while back and so and that left a huge hole in my childhood when he passed away but my adopted grandmother she told me a story about how he took care of a of a gay man and you know he was struggling with drugs and other things and homeless and um my grandfather he would bring him in he would take care of him he would feed him he would do all that he could and you know whenever this this man would ask him you know why do you believe what the bible says about marriage my grandfather said yes but that's not going to stop me from loving you and when i heard that my deceased grandfather had lived that way i saw the perfect balance between truth and grace and i said christ like i never want to look at the words of christ and just say you know sweep it under the rug i you know i even in my life when i've struggled with god the father or god the spirit because it seems too abstract i've never lost a devotion to god the son and so i said god make me a good son of yours you know help me to accept what you've taught here in scripture what i see in the natural law and because of my baptist protestant grandfather's example that helped me get over the emotional hurdle and so at this time then you know i've ousted myself among my liberal friends they kind of give me weird looks we have these conversations they get really awkward and painful but at the same time though they know that especially like my transgender friends they knew that i wasn't going to oust them or treat them horribly they knew that they that they could come to me and talk to me about their problems and i treated them with respect you know um and so as time passed um i got into like this kind of spiritual wasteland because on one hand i saw that a lot of the conservatives i was listening to they didn't want to talk about natural law theory they weren't interested in what i was talking about you know um evolution heck no you know they just threw that all out the window and then um you know i felt like man but is there anybody else out there who's like me and i got on youtube one time and i watched this documentary called why beauty matters by sir roger scrooge on on bbc i love that i loved that man yeah yeah i actually just quick story reached out to him to see if he would endorse my book the porn myth because he had spoken so eloquently on pornography and he wrote back and said no but i had an email from him and i was just thrilled yeah i gotta tell you more about sirajur but first you know um sure why beauty matters yeah right why beauty matters so he that that really got me enchanted because at this time you know i intellectually and emotionally accepted the truths about the scriptures and what they taught about um you know human sexuality and the dignity of human life but i was just like man but i'm alone and life is difficult and then i watch this documentary about beauty and he talks about like the christian tradition and how we used to emphasize the centrality of beauty in our everyday lives and i was like i want that view of the world i want that enchantment that he's talking about you know and so i actually emailed sir roger scrutin and i told him this is when i'm about 16 i think and i told him like sir roger you've changed my life because i found your documentary i've been reading your books and he responded back to me and he said swan you know i'm so touched that a 16 year old like you has read my works you know and so over the years sir roger and i we developed a friendship through email and kind of a fun story too i invited him to my graduation party after i graduated from high school and he's like he was like you know swan i'd love to come but i'm right now on a lecture tour throughout uh europe and so i can't really come but he said i'm honored that you invited me and so yeah like he he was really instrumental in me loving beauty i just love that you somehow get on the email and just write to these bigs and they're right and see like a lot of people think that all these guys are too big they're too busy but if you really send them an email i think like 70 of the time they will respond did um did you and sir roger ever speak about faith because i could never get a real read on where he was i know he attended i think an anglican church very far from his home but i don't think he was a theist and i actually had an episode of my channel intellectual conservatism with a student of sir roger where we talked a little bit about his faith um and so i never talked about it with him you know formerly face to face or anything like that but when he was near his death uh i emailed sir roger one final email and i told him you know thank you for everything you did for me because if it wasn't for you if it wasn't for your philosophy i would have never become conservative i would have never become catholic if it weren't for you and i said i said sir roger i know you said somewhere that um you you're not really concerned about the afterlife and i said um but sir roger i really want to see you in heaven you know i really want to see you in heaven because we never got the chance on earth and he said swan thank you so much your email has given me the strength to endure this disease this illness and he didn't mention faith at all in his reply but i still pray for him and i still think about him and honestly um when i talked to his student sebastian morello on my channel he talked about how sir roger's funeral was very like rich with the psalms with scripture and he said this isn't this doesn't sound like the funeral of someone who didn't believe in god i think my theory is that sir roger had a hard time believing in god but because he believed in beauty so much because he believed in goodness so much and the enchantment and wonder of a human person of the delight of creation i think sir roger deep down did believe in god even if it was difficult for him to fully accept now you said you became a catholic last year right yes you're 16 when you're telling sir roger that you're now a conservative yeah what what did that mean to you what does it mean for you to have this sort of uh political transformation as it were from maybe you identified as a liberal uh to a conservative yeah well i mean so i think you know oftentimes uh people kind of complain like conservatives don't have a plan you know they don't have a strict set of principles or like a general grand narrative right so usually like with the political left you know you'll have a narrative about a kind of grievance where you have this power struggle the upper class the oppressor has you know um structurally systematically disenfranchised a certain group of people right whereas with the with the right you know it kind of takes for granted the history and traditions that are there so to speak and so um i started realizing that conservatism should be better understood as just this general attitude where i think sir roger put it best in his book how to be a conservative beautiful things are easily destroyed but not easily created right and at the core of the conservative vision of reality is a kind of what's called a tragic vision so thomas soule is a famous kind of articulator of this in his book a conflict of visions um and basically with the tragic vision there's this idea that no matter what you do there's just inbuilt human limitations you have to make the best of sometimes the worst options right and now i know it sounds pretty dark you know but i i appreciate it realistic the tough realism of it right because i had to go through that kind of tough realism in my own life i couldn't just believe what i thought was emotionally convenient and precisely because i loved the people that i was talking to the people that i wanted to help especially the poor and those who have been systematically discriminated against i wanted to think about what is really actually going to help them you know so i wanted to look at the research papers i wanted to study i didn't i remember i talked to one friend of mine who just said yeah i don't believe in economics what does that mean so he just he denied scarcity he denied opportunity cost he denied that economics was a thing you know and so he believed that you could just reconstruct society however you want it to be and i'm like but there there are natural inbuilt limitations right like human beings don't have this infinitely malleable human nature like we struggle with sin we struggle with darkness but we have this great of capacity for good but that capacity for good has to be instantiated through virtue and habituation towards virtue right it's a very aristotelian thought um but yeah uh for me conservatism i think at the core of it is one it's this recognition of human limitation but it's also this recognition that there is a moral law and that there is something transcendent to which society ought to be oriented towards right and so conservatives are perfectionists by that it means that the government shouldn't be morally neutral on controversial matters um contra the classical liberal tradition you know the government should have a conception of public morality enforce those morals um and ensure that the populist to the greatest extent possible follows through on that moral vision and so because i was a natural law theorist a cli you know thomas i i knew what that moral vision was for those who are listening right now who think that conservatism is synonymous with the republican party what do you say to them no it's not like uh the republican party i'd say oftentimes what passes as like a conservative in america is just libertarianism it seems that way yeah yeah but in reality conservatism is a much richer view of the world and you know i started reading the works of edmund burke during this time and you know roger is considered the spiritual inheritor of edmund burke and burke talked about how society is a covenant between the dead the living and the unborn right so you know society is not all about just who we are now it's about those who came before us who in a sense sacrificed and gave up their lives uh and made certain sacrifices and changes so that we could be alive so that we could have a society and that at the same time we hope to pass on our legacy to those who are yet to come and so i would say that the conservative view of a society is inherently not suicidal whereas a lot of views of society like for instance thomas paine who was was it yvonne levin considers him kind of like the paradigmatic thinker of the contemporary left today um he believed that every society had the right to recreate itself on the on the pr on the pretense of reason and no traditions no superstitions right so do away with that kind of stuff it's about you here and now recreating society in your image and that kind of view of the world leads to resentment it leads to anger leads to hatred leads to bitterness of the past it leads to a total disregard of those who are yet to come you know it i just had a thought yeah it was really fascinating because i remember when i was a kid and the internet didn't really exist right now um and then when it started to come in i remember thinking about people who were pornography performers and obviously a lot of my work has revolved around this and i thought gosh you know one of the arguments would be like you don't want to be a grandma one day and like have have people know this but i've noticed that it seemed to me from my perspective that people just don't care about what things will be like for them when they're older yeah so to your point about all that matters is right here right now you do get the sense that a lot of us just to hell with like five years from now 10 years from now how people will view me in the future yeah i mean i think a lot of young people today especially um this idea of thinking 10 years ahead gives them a lot of anxiety right a lot of pain and so what people believe now is because they don't believe there's a transcendent or higher reality to look to they just have to make the best of what they have now and so for instance you know this kind of laissez-faire view on human sexuality and social um ethics or public morality it comes down to this belief that well let me just be happy i mean i'm not happy now but let me find something that'll make me happy maybe it's pornography maybe it's you know getting wasted with my friends maybe it's uh you know making fun of the religious people and making myself feel better for whatever insecurities i have you know or deciding i'm a different sex and having reassignment surgery that sort of thing you know it let me redefine myself totally because when you start telling people no there is a natural law or no there you know there is a real human nature because the way things work exactly then they think oh you're imposing this on me right because um they view they view a lot of this kind of talk about objective morality as just a power game where for instance you know you and i right as men are imposing our morality on the bodies of women and hence you know we are anti-women because we're pro-life stuff like that yeah i'm having it's kind of like a football game where all the footballers start deciding that the rules don't apply and they can make up imagine the chaos that would ensue you know everyone's got a different idea of how things ought to work and there's no overarching narrative and so yeah it just leads to despair leads to frustration a deep frustration yeah i mean most people would believe something like mill's harm principle right where it's like you know as long as you have consenting uh adults and you don't harm unconsenting third parties then it's totally okay and this seems to me yeah how we understand morality today yep yeah so the only thing that's immoral is you using your autonomy to infringe upon mine right the end the end yeah yeah and so i mean one one of the problems there is that what is harm right um and then if you if you have a conception what harm is then what is a conception flourishing right is it really just up in the air totally and then when i got into natural law theory one of the principal questions is what does lead to human flourishing what leads to the good life and that was the thing that i really focused on and once i found that natural law of vision i just found this way more holistic and beautiful view of the world and the thing is you know i often say like the purpose in my life is to give people justified hope in christ in his church because a lot of times you know people think like oh you tell me that it's just too good to be true right um but what i found beautiful was not only the fact that i had this objective moral theory and it made sense of things it was literally a science of of human flourishing you know that's how aristotle wanted to view his theory of ethics but i also saw it was true it made sense of things right and so it had a security to it that nothing else did nothing else that i'd believed before [Music] during this time were you introduced to the writings of thomas aquinas and what was that like yeah so i i started reading thomas aquinas and uh you know i it was really hard to read him directly because you know it's kind of a little old-timey english and of course i wasn't competent in latin at all and so i couldn't read him in his original writings but i read a lot of people um who commented on his work or who were explaining his work so people like ed fazer um david oderberg who's a really good one um rob coons alex press you know all these guys i read uh thomas through them and they also took thomas into the modern context and showed why his ideas still work how okay you've talked a bit about your friends and how they reacted to this what about your family if you don't mind me being conservative well i suppose they probably would have been happy with that well so my parents they like to keep their hands out of politics you know um and you know my dad he tells me his political opinions sometimes but he wants me to keep quiet about them in public you know because he has to be careful about that sort of thing sure but um i mean they didn't mind uh i think they were pretty happy actually because at least it was based in scripture you know yeah yeah did you find some kind of alliances at the school you were at of people yeah this sort of yeah i had some like friends who were kind of like underground quiet about their conservatism and they're like yeah swan we really appreciate how you came out and just said you're conservative you know um and then even you know i did speech and debate in high school i actually i did it since middle school but then i carried on until the very end of high school and you know i gave a speech so there's an event called original oration where you write your own speech and i think it's about maybe eight minutes or seven minutes long if i remember properly um and i gave a speech about why i became conservative and it was really funny because a lot of the judges in kansas loved the speech right but then eventually like when i'd go to a college town and compete and i had a judge who was like in their late early 20s or late 30s they didn't want to hear it at all so you know but it was it was a fun time it was a good time so how did you stop being wooed into the catholic church yeah that's a good question okay so i started getting really into beauty um sir roger scrutin had a huge impact on me i started reading catholic philosophers and theologians and i thought okay catholics they're cool but they're wrong yes okay and about the end of high school i really wanted to go into princeton university and i became friends with robert george and i emailed him and talked to him and i applied early action and they deferred me into just regular admission time and so i said okay i'll wait for then and i was super anxious i was super worried i was trying to always you know be the top at everything i did and eventually i got rejected by princeton and my whole worldview just came crashing down okay so even though i was conservative yeah you know i hadn't worked on a lot of the inner problems that i had you know okay and so like still the ego was there and stuff like that but then i was crushed by that rejection you said earlier that you were full of ego then and you're not anymore was this part of that th this was part of the humbling process because you know people always say don't pray to god to humble you well before i got rejected by princeton i did pray for god to humble me that's where you went wrong and then that's when it happened you know so my ego was destroyed i got rejected from princeton i i had to completely you know reevaluate everything and uh when i got into college during my first year at kansas state i was miserable every single day like it was a palpable misery that i could feel and um it was during the second semester of my freshman year i decided to sign up for a class called medieval political and social thought and uh just to give you a bit of a back story here like even though uh in high school after i became christian again you know i started preaching ministry because as i said before especially after i listened to sir roger scrutin i was really interested in re-enchanting people's view of the world and so i preached about um cultural evangelism i preached about how do you reach people today who don't believe in grand narratives who have lost faith and hope in god and institutional religion and so the focus of my ministry uh especially at the conferences and churches i preached at was how do you minister to people today how do we go from christendom to secularism and so i took this class during the second semester of my freshman year and that was the precise subject of the class how do we get from christendom to secularism and so we read you know the greats like aristotle socrates aquinas um and all them and then eventually we read the book a secular age by charles taylor yes excellent yeah and in that book um we learned about how the protestant reformation led to secularism and it was just like a brick fell on my head that's how it felt because i was like wait my tradition the thing that i've aligned myself with what was his basic argument for how that happened yeah so there's a lot of inner working pieces of his argument and so i don't want to say that i remember them all i don't remember all of them but let me just reiterate at least what i got from the class and what i think happened right so i think what happens is that one is that the reformation is a fundamental break from the christian tradition it's a fundamental kind of recreation of yourself right and so we'll create christianity now in our image we'll go back to the scriptures we don't need the institution we don't need the tradition what we need is just the bible itself okay and at that process then um you know with that rupture of tradition it goes down to the individual okay so then it's not hard to see then how secular liberal democracy kind of came out of this kind of view of the world where you know you had people disagreeing all the time about doctrines and scriptures and they were killing each other over it because they had no universal authority they subscribed to anymore and they didn't believe that there could be a universal authority to subscribe to and so they had to develop these doctrines like let's agree to disagree let's tolerate each other you know especially in the writings of voltaire and others during this time they're like guys let's just tolerate and live together despite our disagreements right there wasn't an urge to really settle the matter on a universal level you know you'd have private theologians write about it but there wasn't a way to actually settle it definitively for all of christendom right and so at this point then you know you you get the the inner workings of a secular liberal democracy a secular liberal democratic order and at the same time also you lose a sacramental view of reality now this doesn't mean that the prod that you know that lutherans or protestants don't believe in some form of sacramental realism right but that view begins to go out the window slowly but surely especially with zwingli and others today and then your own tradition the baptist right exactly you know it's just a symbol uh the eucharist that is um and so at that point then the material world and the supernatural realm become two separate realities at least functionally speaking within your own liturgy right and that of course the liturgy bleeds into society as well and so at that point then you know the idea that like god's interaction with the world is kind of like in this epicurean model becomes popular right and so what i mean by that and this is something that nt wright has proposed so it's not my original idea is that god has to kind of force his hand into the natural world in order to make things work and so you know take something like paley's watch right um you know like uh you know on on its own the natural world couldn't trade a watch and so you need this kind of exterior outside of the world designer to come in and impose order right that's what's going on here and then the process like when evolution comes around it's really easy just to do away with that view of the world because you don't have now this metaphysical sophistication of let's say reality participates in god right and god has built order and natural law into things themselves right that becomes a harder sell right and then god slowly but surely becomes kind of pushed to the back he a lot of this view of like the of god as a fundamental metaphysical explanation kind of goes out the window you know you get the rise of volunteerism of divine command theory right that the dictates of god is what has to determine objective morality and at this point too you know you have the scientific revolution happening not too long after the reformation and so at this point then you get a view of reality that is mechanistic so you get a philosophy of nature that believes that we're basically machines um that doesn't believe in kind of this top-down causation but that everything is just a conglomerate of parts okay and so at this point i remember i think it's thomas hobbs who's a famous uh you know proponent of the mechanical philosophy of nature he says that aristotle is a tool for the pope and so aristotle gets thrown out the window and of course like the scientific revolution a lot of things about aristotle get kicked out except for the metaphysics as other people would argue but a lot of the aristotelian science gets thrown out so in the process all these things are happening together and ultimately you know um the protestant world is left without this foundation that it once had and so it can it gets hit harder than i would say than the catholic worldview so to speak um at that point and so that's how secularism comes about you know because when you start saying that okay you know catholics are superstitious for believing in the real presence um or you start saying things like um catholics are superstitious for believing in rituals and all that you don't really sound that far off from the materialists who think we're superstitious for believing in the virgin birth of the death and resurrection of christ or the incarnation hmm yeah thanks for sharing that so during this study of taylor you began to be more open to the catholic view yeah i mean well i was just at first saying okay i need something new you know so i didn't know where to go and i had a friend of mine named olivia reach out to me after class and she said hey swan would you like to go to mass with me on sunday and i said yeah i'd love to go god bless olivia i know uh yeah she's great and olivia invited me to mass and i show up and i sit in the back by myself and um you know i've never been to a mass before so i have no idea what's going on i've been inside a catholic church before i went to a catholic funeral once but like like a mass you know like i've never been to one where i can remember it fully i sit in the back and i'm watching the priests walk up and you know they have the gospels and the you know the red book of the gospels and everything they have incense going and i'm like yeah this is great you know this reminds me of what sir roger scrutin was kind of talking about and the beautiful pictures that i've seen at various churches throughout my life in my childhood you know i thought about all that and you know first mass ends and oh by the way i should give a shout out to my church uh the st isadora's catholic student center father gail hammerschmidt was the one who was giving the homily that day and he's a big he's a big golf junkie and so this homily was about golf somehow that's all i remember actually from the homily so uh yeah there's that this is another reason we should be incorporating beautiful elements into our liturgy because people often forget the homilies where they're left with how they felt exactly and so i kept on going to church every single sunday so i you know in the morning i go to baptist church in the evening i'd go to catholic mass and i kind of folks know you're doing this no they don't but i'm loving the double life at least for right now you know um i was having a blast and then you know summer comes by and i you know i don't go to mass during the summer but my dad you know i he he hires me to work at his um his ministry in downtown kc where he works with people from uh you know impoverished backgrounds and new immigrants you know and so yeah like i have so much respect for my father because he really showed me what it meant to have hospitality towards other people he really showed me the human dimension of christ in you know in my own father and so that was really important to me because he really did cultivate a love for humanity and even you know i'll give a shout out to my mom because she also cultivated a love of children within me because you know um ever since i became pro-life i just began to love children more and more and then i thought to myself like man how could anyone want to do away with the gift of a child's life and i know that like children can be tough and they can be annoying at times but like that's another human being that's what i once was that's what you once were right and so you know i noticed that when you spend more time with children you see a very authentic reflection of your own humanity but you also gain a better sense of discernment because when i was around kids it made me think about how i want to be a father but it made me specifically discern what kind of father i want to be and so we'll get to that later but right now you know i'm helping out my dad's ministry and you know a lot of the kids are hispanic and uh you know a lot of them are from catholic families right and so i'm exposed to that quite a bit over the summer and then i start praying i start thinking about the faith and near the end of the summer um i'm going to my baptist church and they have this moment where they're saying all right you know come on down if you want to be baptized again so i didn't know at the time that it's a sin to be baptized twice right but like they were they were just chill about it they're like yeah come on down you know if you want to rededicate your life to christ and so i've been baptized when i was younger about maybe 12 or 10 something like that but i felt like i didn't know what was going on yeah and so i was like yeah let me get baptized again you know and so before i went up to get baptized again i said god make me a saint give me the courage to do this because i felt kind of embarrassed like i'm rededicating my life and people think i'm really devout but maybe i you know i have things to work on so i get baptized again and um they tell me you know in a few months from now we'll send you your your baptismal certificate and everything because when i was a kid my church didn't have like a baptismal certificate so like i didn't get until later um and so i returned to the school year and i go up to libya and i say hey olivia i'm ready to start asking questions about catholicism and she's like swan that's great but let me direct you to my friend andy and so andy is a calvinist was a former calvinist who became catholic and so he had a very similar background of mine because like his dad was a calvinist minister and his mom um was also i think protestant at the time and so you know andy and i started getting coffee every single morning and i started bringing up my questions about papers about the papacy about mary about justification it's funny though because i never had a problem with the eucharist um and i know for a lot of people that that's a huge hang up but i'm like hey if that's jesus i want to eat him okay like i don't care you know and you know and even growing up too as someone from from an asian background um people always said like swan why are you eating that weird thing or whatever and so i was just used to just being like okay i don't care if some it's weird to eat something right and so that wasn't a problem for me and so thank god for my asian culture because that made it really easy um yeah so i asked mir i asked andy about mary the papacy and justification and one by one he shot down my objections and he showed me in scripture where the basis was for these things and in particular he he exposed me to the typology between the ark of the covenant and mary and so just to give like some background on this right i mean like um when the ark of the covenant is captured again i want to see the phillips from the philistines or something like that and it's brought to king david king david jumps or he leaps or he dances with joy and he says how is it that the ark of the lord has come to me and then it says that the ark stayed in the hill countries of judah for i think three months right and then in the new testament when mary visits elizabeth elizabeth's uh child in the womb john the baptist leaps with joy and she says how is it the mother my lord has come to me and then it says that mary stayed there for uh three months in the hill countries of judah and i saw that i was like dang okay and then i started looking more and i think the the precise greek word that's used in the septuagint the greek old testament to describe god overshadowing the ark is the exact greek word used in the new testament to describe god overshadowing mary and this was actually by steve ray in his article on catholic answers and so shout out to steve ray um and i looked at that and i was like man you know i've been training myself as a philosopher to be intellectually consistent to be open and fair with the evidence because i was already conservative and i had to go from liberal to conservative i knew how to control emotions and bias to the greatest extent possible do me a favor pass me that new king james new testament that little brown leather book right in front of you yeah that one there it's that bottom one you just pull that out because it's it is fascinating like once people start making those connections to mary being the ark of the new covenant i mean the other thing of course is hebrews points out that in the first arc you've got three things you've got the manna which fed the israelites you have the rod uh that that buttered aaron's rod which represented the high priesthood and then you have the the stone tablets and of course in mary you have the fullness of these these things not a symbol of the high priest but the high priest himself you have the word of god and and you have the bread of life so that that stuff's all really terrific the other thing that i think blows people away too is when you come to revelation right end of chapter 11 which you may have got what we're going to speak about but i want to pull that up as you can see yeah well and i'll mention something real quick too which is that um i know that some protestants have raised the objection where how how about um you know when usa touches the arc and it dies right so why doesn't anybody touch mary and the ol and the new testament and die and it's like well in order for a typology to be valid it's not necessary that everything carries out right because christ is the new adam well where's his fall when did he doom all humanity no it's like no you don't need to have a point for point right could i just read this for folks because i think what often happens we don't realize that these chapters and verses were inserted in the when the 14th century the middle ages at some point so we tend to read the chapters as end of this story on to the next story when you realize that those chapters are artificial then read this right this is the end of chapter 11 verse 19. and of course this is the king james it might be a little different but and the temple of god was opened and in in heaven and there was fein in his temple uh this is the old old new king the ark the ark of his covenant and there were lightnings and voices and thunderings and an earthquake and great hail and of course like as as steve reyes pointed out like it's been 500 years since the ark has been mentioned it's been lost and so here you are you've got the ark being mentioned for the first time here in revelation and that's the end of the chapter so if that's it you'd be like dude no what there's gonna be more well there is more and so when you read that in context right there was lightning and voices and thunderings and an earthquake and great hail and there appeared a great wonder in heaven a woman clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet and upon her head a crown of twelve stars and being with child cried travailing in birth and pained to be delivered yeah mm-hmm i mean your friend andy was he pointing this out as well he was pointing that chapter 12. of course one objection people sometimes will have to that is well that's the church with the 12 apostles or it's israel you know with the 12 tribes yeah and this is another point about typology that needs to be made is that something can signify multiple things that's true that's true and like uh i mean that that precisely goes into the point about uh peter being the rock of matthew 16 18. d.a carson in the expositors bible commentary you know d.a carson's a famous um protestant biblical scholar and he goes to town on people who make this argument that oh well no only christ can be the rock and you can't have peter be the rock or christ is the cornerstone so peter can't be the rock he he he refutes all those objections by saying that no typology is quite flexible you know a type can be applied in multiple different ways yeah i want to save this wonderful papacy stuff yeah until after the break i know there's a lot that we got to get into there i'm really pumped to get into it but okay so he's knocking down these objections when it comes to our lady the eucharist what do you think was your biggest objection and i don't just mean generally like the papacy or mary was there a specific thing that you found very difficult to overcome not really a veneration of statues or well that was kind of weird that was kind of weird um but i mean i was like but if everything else is true then i can overcome that huh you know what i'm saying um i think the general thing that i struggled with is just should i become catholic you know like i mean why can't i just be a happy protestant over here you know like hey you got you catholics you have great things in your liturgy you have a great tradition and i really love your saints and i really love your philosophy and your theology but i don't need to become catholic right that's that was my impression and so i really needed to be convinced to cross the tiber so to speak and to become catholic um but like things like justification uh when i was a kid my sister while i was in elementary school my sister was really troubled with james especially i think it's james 2 25-26 when james talks about how or 24 when he talks about how man is not justified by faithful but by works and she's like but paul says you know we're not justified by uh by works but by faith and then james says this and she's like how do you harmonize this right and i was like i was like my sister's name is moy i was like boy it's not a big deal you know your faith is what unites you to christ and then through your works you participate in christ and you endure until the end faithfully that's what my answer was and so when i heard andy tell me oh yeah that's basically the catholic position i was like whoa wow you know and like because you know throughout my life i heard various like protestants try to explain the the the theory of justification that they hold and i just started noticing that when you put the beliefs logically together it's basically the catholic position if you're not just a total theological determinist right um and you believe that there's some sense of participation in christ you have to remain faithful to him right until the end um and then i started realizing that a lot of them when they when i point this out they'd say oh no no but it's not it's that sounds works based and i'm faith-based right and i'm like but logically speaking you know like your belief leads to this and so it was kind of like a protestant piety where they wouldn't admit that no you have to participate and remain faithful right and works is the way in which you do that by remaining faithful in the lord yes i think when protestants hear faith and works they think there's a certain amount of works that i have to do in order to be good enough to be saved and that's the under that's the misunderstanding and you know the council of trent is just incredible because i i recently you know i read it again at least a part of justification yes and it makes so clear that christ is the one who begins the good work in you right and um you know you can't merit initial justification there is no work that you have to do in order to be invited into the family of god and be united to christ except for faith right and faith is a gift from god and so in the process then as you endure towards final justification towards final unity with god you're being sanctified the sacraments are giving you the strength to make it to the end you are meriting grace in the sense that you know you're showing to god that you are a faithful son and daughter of his and so god loves you as a father and showers you with grace to help you make it to the end right i mean scripture is so clear like in second timothy 2 12 that you know our goal in life is to one day reign over creation with him but it also says that if we reject him then he will reject us and so i already knew uh as a baptist that yeah eternal security is bunk well the other thing i think protestants and even catholics don't realize speaking to your point about uh is the seventh session i think on justification something like that and what it what ludwig points out is that trent never said that a catholic cannot have a moral certainty of his salvation right just that we cannot have a sort of infallible certainty sure right and i remember that being tremendously helpful for me when i was struggling a lot with scrupulosity this year there's really just no way of knowing that i'm united with christ well it's interesting because i actually never struggled with scrupulosity um because one is that i just have a really strong faith in christ and i love him and so i get i just when i look outside and i see a beautiful mountain or i see a beautiful sunrise i'm just like yeah god loves me and then that's all i need you know i'm like a kid in that way and that's beautiful oh you know i actually i actually um i actually prayed when i got baptized again um god make me like a child so make me like a saint and make me like a child and so i've just always like valued that kind of simplicity but uh yeah when it comes to scrupulosity uh you know because my dad's a pastor i had already been kind of like doing proto-confession with him you know so i was just like i just like hey dad i've been really struggling i don't know with i've been cursing or dad i've been kind of mean to my sister you know and then i just confessed those things and he would give me advice and so i was already used to talking to my dad and so it's like oh i'm just going to the confessional talking to my father you know like it wasn't a huge leap for me you know that it reminds me of something i wanted to share i remember hearing a talk from scott hahn actually yeah back in 2003 i think how when were you born what year was 2000 yeah what month january okay i had my conversion to christ that year in july oh july that amazing but a few years after i'm at this conference in canada and scott's given this talk and he had this great idea of having this year of jubilee for your kids basically right and and basically saying all right um today if there's something you've done wrong that you feel bad about yeah you can come to me and you get no punishment at all wow no matter what it is or what you've done there will be absolutely no repercussions yeah well i mean i mean there might be a you need to say sorry to your sister or mother or something like this the penance right yeah yeah but but i thought that was great and so there's been a few times in my life speaking of children confessing to you yeah yeah that i've said that to them and i think i think it's about time that i do that again like hey i love you and as a kid i remember making mistakes and feeling really bad about it and being afraid that i'd be in trouble so i want you to know you have till the end of tonight to come up to me you can pull me aside tell me anything you've done and you were having zero punishment that's beautiful that's beautiful yeah go scott hahn yeah yeah so i mean at this point then you know andy and i have been talking about the faith and um there's there's one day where i'm sitting okay and it's really i'm really weird in this way too so like i was i was texting andy and i was like i am 75 certain that i'm gonna become catholic now and andy andy later he'll say like why the heck swan were you like telling like percentages or whatever i don't know i'm just like that maybe i was like i'm a math guy i was i hate math actually asian guy who hates math but no i think it was like uh i was really reading uh richard swinburne at the time and base theorem for the resurrection and so i was just using probabilities to describe my dispositions but can i ask who was andy converted by like what was he reading or who was he looking to that that's a good question i wonder um so from what i remember of andy's conversion story um you know he was kind of like the you know cage stage calvinist and he'd go to my parish saint isidores before i was there and he would kind of be obnoxious and talk to the priest and annoy the focus missionaries and everything yeah and then one day like i think it was elizabeth mugler who's now elizabeth lee's um she like began like kind of challenging him i think and then he started asking questions and slowly but surely he became catholic oh that's great i'm just so grateful to god for people like carl keating and pat madrid and you know scott hahn who really did a lot of this work that i i imagine if you were to ask andy or ask this focus missionary it was because of the blessings that they have been yeah yeah definitely no no but um let's see here so um you know one day andy and i are sitting down we're talking and i'm like okay if i become catholic right like what do i need and so we talked about like um baptism and i said oh well i was baptized a second time you know but i don't have a baptismal certificate you know and i get a text from my dad and my dad says hey something came in the mail just now while we were talking and in the conversation and i was like oh okay and i said just bring it up you know when you come this weekend um and my dad brings it up and it's my baptismal certificate and i'm like whoa okay god so do you want me to come become catholic okay uh let's see and so um you know i that kind of blows me away but i'm like i'm not sure i'm not sure just i'm not sure just yet and then one day andy and i are in a bookstore and i just start crying all of a sudden i know it's not very macho to admit but i start crying i start getting emotional and then i realize that i was made for the catholic church like christ did not intend for us to be without a home and you know a big part of my life has been you know kind of reclaiming my my my traditions as an asian american right going back to my roots and who i am and i realize that like the saints are my ancestors in the faith they're my family they're they are the ones in heaven who are praying for me who are watching out for me and the church and her traditions the history of the catholic church no matter how difficult and messy it is that's my family history that's my church you know and so i was like why have i not been home why have i lived the first 20 years of my life homeless and i told andy that and andy said you know swan god is not going to waste the time that you've been protestant and so i at that moment said yeah i'm going to become catholic but that doesn't mean that it was easy that doesn't mean that i was finally over all my objections because i was still struggling with some things in particular what is it going to be like when i tell my parents that i became catholic what's going to happen to my childhood friends and the people who knew me in church and um what's going to happen with things like you know the papacy and all these other things that i'm supposed to believe now right like am i going to be okay with that and so funny enough i start um reaching out to some protestant theologians that i know and i'm like hey guys convince me to not become catholic because i don't want to tell my mom and dad that i become catholic because it's going to be so embarrassing it's going to be so painful i was really well known in my baptist community and i just don't want to be an embarrassment on everybody you know because as soon as you start telling you know if the protestant baptist minister's son becomes catholic that's embarrassing yeah you know because it's like dang like were you not a good enough minister to your son or did you not raise them properly you know and and that's not what happened right precisely that's not what happened but anyway um so who are you reaching out to i'll keep them yeah that's fine yeah but people who are teaching in universities yeah these are actual like theologians and philosophers who are published in this area especially against catholicism and so i call up this one guy and i'm like hey um tell me why the papacy is false because i know you've written on this and he goes through his objections and i'm like i know how to answer all these objections because of the things that i'd already studied on the papacy in scripture and i'm like man why why is this not working why why can no one refute these objections because you see the thing is i was no longer interested in kind of the stock objections i knew that protestants kept on misunder a lot of protestants kept on almost willfully misunderstanding what papal infallibility means or willfully misunderstanding what the church believes about the sacraments about justification and so i was like i'm done with the nonsense i'm done with the straw men give me you know steel man the other person's position and show me why it's false now as this person was offering objections to the papacy yeah and you thought yeah i've heard these i've responded to them yeah did you respond to them i was really nice and i just said oh yeah thanks thanks you know like i didn't want to get it i mean did you the reason i ask that is i think sometimes you have to begin with the simpler objections in advance right there is it possible that he would have had better objections had you have pressed him i mean that's a possibility but then i mean there were times where i kind of responded and i was just like oh but i'm not sure if that argument works and then so he just and then he would just drop the argument or move on to another one right and also i've read this person's work and so i know the more advanced versions of the arguments and um that's all i'll say about that okay but um yeah i just i was just like god why can no one refute what's going on here because most of the time people were just responding to straw men and so i started reading about saint thomas aquinas and you know saint thomas was 19 when he secretly wanted to join the dominican order and i was 19 when i secretly began wanting to become catholic you know oh actually so then i was 19 confirmed when i was 20. okay so i got the timeline a little mixed up but anyway i also heard about how st thomas's parents react when he wanted to become dominican and i was like yeah saint thomas is my man can't be worse than what that was she did the mother did at least the father may have been deceased since about that point but right so you know i prayed to saint thomas and i was like okay saint thomas are you listening to me because if you're there i need help because i now know i need to tell my parents that i'm going to become catholic and i remember as soon as i ended my prayer i heard this voice respond to me and it said swan you've been a good son to your mother and father but now i want you as my own and that voice i knew was from god because like when god speaks you know because god doesn't go through temporal succession you know all time is just instantly there for him in one single moment so to speak i felt like it just hit me instantly and you know like a ray of light i was getting the words you know from the beam so to speak and so i knew it was god and i was just like wow okay i gotta tell my parents now and so i told my parents and it was rough because um my parents were in denial and they said no you're not you're not becoming catholic what are you talking about and i was like mom dad look and then i was trying to argue with them and do my apologetic method and they're like no we don't want to hear it and it was just disappointing it was sad because for most of my life you know i was known as the good son i was very faithful to my parents they were very proud of me because i did speech and debate i was really good at that i had excellent grades excellent behavior you know i was a very good obedient son i was always there to help my mom and dad when they needed help and now they see the son who they raised who they love just kind of betray them if i could put it bluntly they felt like they were betrayed and so time goes by and uh i talked to my protestant a protestant minister who's like a mentor of mine um and you know we get breakfast together and i'm talking a lot about saint thomas aquinas i'm talking a lot about the catholic church and then i tell them oh by the way i think i'm going to become catholic and my protestant spiritual director he says swan i think this is the holy spirit leading you and so this protestant minister you know gave you expecting a lot more pushback i was i was and he just was so sweet and so kind and he heard my story and i was telling about all the things i was learning and and discovering about the christian tradition and he said swan i think this is the holy spirit leading you and so i was driving back to my college town and i remember i started playing the uh the ave maria in my car and it started raining you know and and then like the rain went away and as the ave maria climaxed i looked up at the sky and i saw and i mean maybe this is just me being kind of a pseudo-mystic i don't know but i looked up at the sky and i saw the cloud like i saw the clouds form like a woman's eye i could see like the individual eyelashes looking down at me and everything and i was like whoa mom you know like is that you trying to reach out to me and so you know as time goes by i pray the rosary and one time i'm praying the rosary this word comes to me and it's the nattos right and i'm like what is this you know so weird and then i check it up and it's like it means non-violent death and i'm like why is this coming to me while i'm praying the rosary sorry this word is a word you hadn't heard before i've never heard of it before and it just came to my last video explain that to us slower um because that's going to confuse some people still praying yeah i was praying and this word comes to me i've never heard it before i haven't studied greek i don't know a lick of latin right and the very next day my sister and i are going to the library and my sister says hey swan did you hear the news last night and i said what and she said one of our friends fathers passed away peacefully in his sleep and i was like whoa and then i told her about my experience with the rosary and she's like you know get out of it i don't i don't remember what she said but she was surprised not to say the least right and so i was like okay god you know i i knew intellectually speaking that the catholic church was true do you think that that was a word for your future or about this friend's dad i think it was for the friend's dad i think it was just showing me that like the rosary can really reveal things that the blessed mother is really active in the world and that she can allow me to see things before they come and also like it was a very peaceful death like it wasn't bad or ominous at all and so um you know the prayer how did you figure out what that word meant i googled it as one does yeah i was hoping you were going to say you went to the library with your sister and pulled out a big dusty book yeah googling is fine right the hollywood version will be like that yeah okay and so um more times go goes by i'm still reading i'm still learning more about the catholic faith and in particular i started doing research on the papacy like really hard and this is the point where i discovered the isaiah 22 matthew 16 19 parallel and i start really cranking that argument up and doing all the research i can and this is even before you've been confirmed before i've been confirmed right so i started really doing hardcore research on this just to confirm that am i in the right direction you know and at this point i was expecting you know i might see a commentary that says okay peter's the rock but there's nothing else to it right um but the deeper i saw it you know there were protestant scholars left and right who are recognizing the matthew 16 19 isaiah 22 22 parallel in which in isaiah i want to get to that later later he just okay sure so yeah i was studying that you know and i got deeper into it i was like whoa okay there's something here right and then i have my adopted grandmother come over for uh for dinner one night and um you know my family's a bit estranged at this point because of my conversion to catholicism but we haven't told her yet and so at dinner i tell her because i trust her you know this is the woman who's basically my grandmother she raised me my whole life and i tell her grandma i'm gonna become catholic i you know i already had the right of uh acceptance or something like that and she said swan your dead grandfather would be ashamed of you oh i was hoping that was going to go in a different direction yeah i'm sorry to drop it but i'm so sorry yeah she told me that and um she said show me in scripture while you're becoming catholic and so you're like sit down lock the door right let's do this and so i got my laptop and i was getting ready and she's like oh no no no get me a real bible yep and so i got i went downstairs and i found a bible and i brought it back up and i said okay grandma look here and i showed her the isaiah 22 matthew 16 19 parallel and she was quiet at first but she didn't really have anything to say and then i forgot what exactly happened oh when when i was going up and down rummaging through the house to get the physical bible i kind of cried and i told my grandma are you trying to humiliate me and then she i think she realized at that point that she had gone too far but i mean the damage was done and even like the next day when i visited her again um i still felt like she had she was i still felt embarrassed and still felt the pain and that was like the lowest point of my conversion because that point you know my parents let me really know that they were really upset that i was becoming catholic and my sister who was not discerning well she was interested in catholicism but she was seeing how i was being treated and she's like swan i'm really scared you know like you're you know you're just being beat up so to speak right and i really needed god's help to go further and so you know i start thinking about how christ died on the cross for me and he never let go of me on that cross he said you know it is finished right he took the fourth cup he didn't finish until the very end he he endured the cross for me and who am i to turn back from his church and abandon her when christ never abandoned me and it's precisely because of christ that i am catholic it's precisely because of christ that i remain catholic it is precisely because of christ that i was willing to be humiliated and embarrassed lose childhood friends and start my life over because i began reading passages like in matthew and luke when it talks about how you have to love me more than your own mother and father in order to enter the kingdom of heaven or jesus says if you hesitate on the plow then you're unworthy of me and i had to choose at that moment between christ or my parents i really had to make that decision and i said christ i'm yours and so i made the choice to become catholic can i ask what your relationship is like with your mom and dad and grandma now i haven't talked to my grandmother since um and i know that that relationship needs to be reconciled but it's still painful yeah because as i told you before my adopted grandfather he was the one who really helped me in my journey to see christ and to have her say that he's ashamed of me because i remember like you know after school i'd go to his grave and cry because i loved him so much and you know when my adopted grandfather died he wanted to be buried so that his body faced the east so that when jesus returns he could beat everyone to jesus and have him first and so he was the embodiment of christ to me and to have her say that it almost destroyed me if i'm being honest but you know i have to forgive her and uh ever since then my my parents they they become more accepting they still they still don't want me to be catholic but they they've kind of accepted that this is what i am now i love the compassion that you have towards your mum and dad and understanding how difficult it must be to have a son of a baptist pastor become become a become a catholic you know like i think that's right i think that takes that would take a great deal of courage to look that square in the face and so yeah i'm sure that's beautiful that y'all are kind of reconciling somewhat yeah yeah it's it's been a lot better and um you know my dad he actually had a catholic priest over for dinner one time and so you know we're making moves you know we're anyone in your close circle uh looking into the catholic church since your own conversion last year i mean the conversion was prior to that but you came into the church last year yeah well i mean um i think she'll be okay if i say this my sister joined the church that's why i was asking in a circle i see what you're doing man no like my sister entered the church and so she has such a great marian devotion and i'm so proud of her for all the things that she's doing and so yeah i mean she's been discerning but also through my ministry uh on intellectual conservatism and doing debates on other channels various people have reached out to me and said swan you've been helping me become catholic you've been helping convince me of the papacy and so on and so forth and so what i always try to do is i always try to reach out with these people because one thing i learned that i that i didn't really like about sometimes you know the big evangelists is that they brag about like oh i converted 20 000 souls yesterday or whatever i don't want to treat anyone like they're a number right because they are god's beloved and so i want to keep in touch with them i want to help them and so i have been getting a lot of people who have been helped by the things that i've been doing and so i really appreciate it yeah glory to god now i suppose because you did such a deep dive into the papacy yeah orthodoxy probably wasn't even an issue necessarily a lot of people kind of leave protestantism into something fuller and those are the two options before them without getting into the isaiah matthew sure sure sure yeah was that a thing for you yeah i mean so for a while i kind of thought about like huh why don't i become orthodox right and then um i looked into the papacy right and then i was convinced of it from scripture and also personally for me like because of my protestant background i really wanted scripture to be the first line of proof and then whatever comes later can be made sense of through scripture or you know that sort of thing and so i really created about scripture um and what i saw in scripture was precisely christ rebuilding david's kingdom yeah okay very good well what i want to do now is take a three-minute break we want to come back we want to talk about the paper c we're going to do a deep dive into the paper scene so if you're watching right now don't go anywhere and then we're going to take some questions from uh super chatters and and patrons sound good all right sounds good all right sweet all right i wanna say thank you to ethos logos investments for supporting this show el investments.net pints i guess when i was a bit younger i thought that investing was something that only rich people did or old people did or rich old people did i didn't realize it was something that i should be looking into as well and when i began looking into it i realized i don't want to invest in companies that are doing immoral things and that's where ethos logos investments comes in they were founded to work with individuals and institutions within the united states that seek to infuse their morals into their investment portfolio with portfolios that adhere to the us conference of catholic bishops responsible investing guidelines you can be sure that you aren't profiting from intrinsic evils like abortion embryonic stem cell research pornography or human trafficking please go check them out ethos logos investments is what they're called el investments.net pints there's a link in the description below el investments.net slash pints for employers they offer socially responsible and catholic 401k and 403b options as well so yeah go check them out el investments.net slash pints securities offered through securities america inc member finra sipik ethos logos investments and securities america are separate entities advisory services offered through securities america advisors incorporated yes the second group i want to thank is hello hello h-a-l-l-o-w dot com slash mattfradd hello.com mattfradd hello is a fantastic app that will help you to pray and meditate it's not like new age mindfulness apps that lead into wrong ways of thinking this is a hundred percent catholic and it's super sophisticated if you go to hallow.com and sign up there you'll get a few months for free before deciding if you want to pay a minimal amount every month to have access to their entire app now you can download the app right now and you'll get access to certain things for free so be sure to check that out if you just want to you know play around with it and see what they have to offer but if you want access to everything that they have like sleep stories and bible studies and all sorts of beautiful things like that you you have to pay a certain amount every month to get access to that if you want access to everything for a few months just go to hello.com mattfraddhallow.commatrad and sign up there thanks [Music] we are live swan great to have you back again uh i often get made fun of because uh this show is of course called pints with aquinas and uh it's quite well known now i think that i'm not a big beer guy but this was given to me by derek cummins who you met last night yeah yeah who i met as a patron um and he showed up we had a beer together so this is that nice i'm a stout guy do you like beer or no yeah i do yeah good stuff you're 21. yeah this is a relatively new thing yeah everyone thinks i'm like a phd student or a grad student just because you're more brilliant than most phd people we've met you know yeah man what a gift what a blessing so i'd love to do this i'd love to kind of maybe have you kind of what do they say the 5000 foot level i forgot 50 thousand foot left help us sort of understand the basic argument for the papacy from scripture in a kind of more general shortened way okay and then maybe we can kind of go into it a little more specifically so the case for the papacy fundamentally rests upon the messianic identity of jesus okay okay so the messiah comes from the hebrew word messiah which means the anointed one okay and so the people who would be anointed in ancient israel were the prophets the um king and i believe it's the um the judges that might be wrong though but like those those people were the ones specifically ordained the prophet the priest the king yeah i think it's those three but anyway so um yeah it's a prophet the priest and the king so these three people are anointed with oil and in particular we know that jesus in the new testament is the son of david he's coming to fulfill the davidic covenant made in second samuel chapter eight i believe it is or seven second samuel vii and so in this case then uh the case for the papacy is based upon jesus rebuilding david's kingdom in the new testament and fulfilling what was yet to come and so um i mean that's where i begin at least to start off with okay i kind of stumbled through that no no that's all right i mean you didn't expect to be kind of put on the spot no it's okay about that yeah yeah all right um so when a protestant says to you where's the papacy in the bible how do you start leading them through it right okay so i begin by just talking about that typology between david and jesus and i'd say okay look let's look at the davidic covenant here all right and so in second samuel chapter seven we see that uh god or god through the i think it's the prophet um nathan is giving all of these promises to david and these aren't conditional promises right so it says that even when your son sins or fails and is corrected by the rods of men my love my patience will not leave him okay so some people have made the objection that the davidic covenant is conditional and not unconditional no this is going to happen no matter what and in particular it says that one of these sons will establish the davidic throne in house forever and that this son will be god's son in the new testament that's clearly fulfilled and especially in luke chapter 1 verse 32 32-35 it's explicitly laid out that jesus is the foretold davidic heir who's going to establish his father's kingdom forever both and it describes both god and david as his father to just kind of sweeten the deal you know what i'm saying and even matthew's gospel makes such a big deal of jesus being the arab david um okay so then at this point then i'd say we agree then okay that jesus is the son of david he's gonna rebuild david's kingdom and they're like yeah okay i agree with that and then i'll point out to different passages you know where jesus is called the son of david or for instance when jesus says in matthew and luke's gospel that i'll give you 12 to the disciples i'll give you 12 thrones on which you'll judge the 12 tribes of israel right and then in the old testament in second kings solomon has 12 governors over all of israel and other people have made this parallel it's not just you know catholic swan trying to draw any parallel he can right right right there's a paper caught up when the apostles became kings but i think jonathan wells or somebody like that um might have gotten that wrong but that's the name of the paper and so he makes the parallel right and the whole point is that jesus is reviving right the davidic kingdom and then i say okay let's look at matthew 16 18 and 19 right so this is the famous declaration at caesarea of philippi where jesus says to you know to peter you know thou art peter and upon this rock i build my church the gates of hell will not prevail against it i will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven and whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven and i say you know and then i point out okay i mean there's several different directions i can go at this point right at this point let's let's do the let's do the objections to the rock thing can we do that oh sure yeah yeah yeah okay upon this rock right um so some protestants have made the objection that the rock is peter's faith that the rock is peter's confession or the rock is jesus himself right and so this objection has effectively been buried in scholarship it's been the consensus since the 1970s that peter the person of peter is the rock of matthew 16 18. this is explicitly stated in uh charles talbert's commentary his panda commentary on the gospel of matthew he points out that at least back to i think charles burgess in 1976 uh the quote is um the opinion has shifted towards the identification of the petra as the person of peter rather than christ or peter's faith okay so the 1970s this is already gaining steam and then in about um the night in 1985 the encyclopedia britannica finally definitively states yeah the majority of scholarship now today accepts that the person of peter is a rock of matthew 16 18. and if anyone's familiar with abingdon presses the new interpreter's bible commentary specifically leandra e keck's commentary on matthew or kecky leander he states and i think this was published in the late 90s that the consensus or early 2000s the consensus is still that the person of peter is the rock of matthew 16 18. okay so on what grounds is there this consensus right i mean one place to begin is by pointing out that um you know matthew 16 18 parallels peter's declaration about christ because peter says thou art the christ the son of the living god and then jesus says thou art peter right and so it's directly to peter now in parallel to what peter has said about the identity of jesus so just as peter blesses jesus jesus now blesses peter and reveals his identity right and so at this point then in the greek the greek word that jesus uses is taute now i'm not saying that jesus spoke the original sentence in greek but at least in the gospel of matthew right so taute in strong's greek i believe it's three seven seven eight um it means this and it means same right so when you're gonna say like you know um for instance in the beginning of matthew's gospel it talks about how joseph had a dream right about the blessed mother and how it was okay to be married to her right even though she was already with child it says that joseph pondered these things and i think the greek word there is tauta right which is a variation of taute in the plural and so it means when it says these things it means the same things that were referred to before elsewhere in jesus gospel in the gospels when jesus mentions for instance the laws the law of moses and he says if you break any one of these things he uses tauton there right and so in each of these instances taute is used to convey that the same thing previously referred to is carrying over okay so now in the greek uh you know jesus is saying thou art peter and upon this rock this okay same taute okay so in the greek you know the word is petros and petra right if jesus spoke aramaic in this particular passage it would have been kepha kepha so there would have been no distinction and so that's why landry keck and i think it's michael j wilkins in the niv application commentary in matthew they both say that to our english ears the gospel matthew should actually be read like this you are rock and upon this rock i will build my church right so in reality like you know in our english translations when we see like peter and rock and we think like oh yeah those are two separate things that's not really accurate to the original language right and this is not just swann saying this right and so who was previously called rock peter okay so then when we get to the petra so we already have someone called petros or rock and then we get to petra then we have taute used which means this same rock who was just called rock the person of peter right and so this is a very simple point but for those who are unfamiliar with why petros and petra were used instead of petros and petrol just very briefly yeah okay and so this is also recognized by scholarship as an insignificant difference so in in the 2011 ivp commentary on matthew by craig s keener he points out that by jesus's day petros and petra were basically interchangeable right there was not a sharp distinction between both of them um and i think even oscar coulmon the famous lutheran scholar he says that this is really a distinction it's a poetic distinction at most like it's not that major so the reason why um there's petros and petra is because peter's a man right whereas in general i think rocks were referred to in the feminine okay and so the point is that jesus is not saying you are peter and upon this peter i'll build my church he's saying you are rock and upon this rock i'll build my church so the rock is gendered for peter but then when he refers to this rock he's just using a you know the rock right the word rock without a gender for it with the feminine gender but that's not a significant difference at all in terms of the original language and scholars know about this anyway um and even what's interesting too is that d.a carson in his expositors bible commentary on matthew he even says that if the protestant interpretation were correct we actually know what greek word jesus would have used to make the point clear right which is a stone of any size and g and carson points out that jesus precisely doesn't use lithos to preserve the pun between peter as rock and the rock of 1618 right jesus is using a pun on peter's name and so i mean that's just some of the evidence there right but i mean it gets deeper too so one of the things that scholars look for is you know if there's a phrase in the gospel is there something around the same time period where maybe someone's called rock or maybe this is used elsewhere right so we know that um let's see here we know based on a later mid-rash and a mid-rash is a rabbinic commentary on the scriptures specifically on numbers 23 19 it's called the abraham petra mid-rash and in this mid-rash you know god it talks about god looking for solid soil on which to build the world and everywhere he looks it's fragile it falls apart it's not good enough and then god sees abraham and he says aha now i have found the rock on which i'll build israel okay so abraham is called rock abraham is viewed as the foundation of the jewish people and then you look and you see that in the thanksgiving hymn scroll of the dead sea scrolls it mentions the fact that the jewish people are built on a rock okay and then finally in isaiah 51 1-2 it says uh you know i think it's isaiah saying talking to the people and he says look to the rock from which you were hewn and the quarry from which you were dug look to abraham your father and sarah your mother right and so the jewish people already understood that abraham was the rock on which god had built old israel and so now peter becomes the rock of the new israel of the church and so there's that parallel there it's recognized by scholars you can't miss it and even um charles talbert in his commentary matthew he points out that this is precisely what has convinced the vast majority of new testament scholars to form the consensus today that the petra of 1618 is peter and then you know way more about this than me obviously but tetullion in his work monogamy talks about peter being the foundation that right that holds up the church other early church fathers how are they also interpreting yeah so i think um oscar culmon was the one in his book on simon peter disciple and martyr where he talks about how the oldest interpretations the earliest interpretations that we do have like tertullian as you mentioned um i can't i can't remember all the fathers off the top my head but there was an early recognition that yeah peter is the rock of matthew 16 18. the only difference then was how the fathers theologically expanded upon that right right yeah yeah i mean even if you just like read through the new testament peter obviously has a primary role yeah even the fact that i learned this you know back in the day peter or simon or kaifus right the the this this person is mentioned 195 times in the new testament the next uh apostle after that is saint john at 48 times yeah it's not that difficult to see he obviously has a primary role i mean that's different to saying that he's the rock perhaps but it's sure yeah i mean and so at this point too like i don't think it's tenable anymore um to deny the primacy of peter okay some protestant scholars have attempted to do that but i think most are now recognizing yeah peter clearly is the the primary spokesman and leader of the disciples you can't deny it um and so part of the reason why you know you can point out is for instance in i think it's matthew 10 2 when it lists off the names of the disciples it calls peter specifically first or protoss and dale allison the oxford bible commentary he states that this is not just first on the list but first in the most privileged status yeah and then there are other commentaries too like i read this one commentary i forgot by who but it's by a liberal scholar um and the liberal scholar complained ah and here we are this is where we get pet shrine primacy you know matthew just had to put this in his gospel you know and so it's kind of funny to think about but yeah um there's clearly a primacy given to peter uh i'm trying to think about what else you know and you know when you're a protestant and you're reading through the bible you miss all the times that peter speaks on behalf of all the apostles because you just take it for granted oh yeah okay peter's talking again peter's talking again you know let's just go through some of them just really quickly right i mean he is as we've already said the rock upon which christ builds his church yeah it was it was from peter's boat that christ proclaimed his first sermon uh at the end of john's gospel christ makes peter the shepherd of his sheep we've already mentioned how many times he's been named he takes a leadership role at the first council yeah it's he who proclaims the first sermon right at pentecost uh what else have we got well also like in acts chapter five he's the only person well so there are only two times that god kills someone in the new testament in the book of acts um and peter and peter is one of those only times when he rebukes ananias and sapphira the other times god rebukes a public official i think herod um for claiming that divinity or whatever but and he sends an angel to do it but peter is the only human agent in the new testament who can bring death with his rebuke cool all right so peter plays a primary role i'm wondering like what the what those in the comment section are objecting to at this point well galatians 2 always comes up well let's do that yeah so i mean what goes on in galatians 2 is kind of interesting and so basically you know paul says that he rebuked peter to his face and everyone's like oh well peter just got owned right because this means that he's not infallible and so one is that's a misunderstanding of papal infallibility because what's going on in antioch is peter is dining with the gentile christians and then james emissaries the judaizers come down and they begin to pressure peter to not dine with the gentile christians anymore and so peter kind of chickens out and he moves away from them right and so paul is really upset that peter has gone back on his word in the acts 15 jerusalem council where peter very eloquently spoke on behalf of the entire church beginning in verse seven you know and declared you know we're just we are justified by grace through faith in jesus christ not by circumcision right and so um what goes on here then is not a a teaching failure on the part of peter in a very loose sense you could call it a failing to teach moment but it's more a moral failure on peter's part where he just chickens out he doesn't have courage but he's not going back on the doctrine that he taught officially in his capacity in the council okay that's the first thing to point out the second thing to point out is that um the greek that paul uses here is really interesting i think it's a kara prosopon or something like that and so the greek here um as pointed out by philip elsler in his commentary on galatians published by rutledge press he points out that the greek that paul uses here is typically used when you are opposing someone to their face and you lose so for instance uh in the book of deuteronomy and elsewhere in the old testament in the septuagint the greek you know variations of cataprisopon is used to show when someone has done a military assault and they fail and so what paul in effect is saying is that i try you know i rebuked peter to his face but i failed and so it's really it's not an instance of paul dunking on peter it's an instance of paul saying i tried to oppose peter but i failed in some way somehow and so it's not this kind of triumphant i opposed him to his face that's an english misreading i don't know if you're tired of making this parallel yeah we want to definitely get to it at least in this interview um between you know the the prime minister and yeah i don't think we've really dug into not yet yet so do you want to do that yeah sure okay so um you know i've given a lot of uh descriptions of this argument you know on capturing christianity when i debated gavin ortland on my own youtube channel but to basically go through like how i view the argument right what i'm trying to establish is first you know that matthew 16 19 is harkening back to isaiah 22 and what i'm trying to show there is that with this parallel peter and eliakim are being compared to one another and that comparison is significant okay and so um there are several different arguments i use to show why this parallel is not just a coincidence but let me first respond to an initial objection right so when i debated gavin ortland on capturing christianity he mentioned the fact that he thought this was typology run amok right so i was just like you know finding this type and just you know milking it and trying to find whatever i can but i asked him during the q a like are there any other typologies that you accept that aren't explicitly made in scripture and he said he was open to being convinced of mary as the ark of the new covenant he was open to that and my point there is that if you're open to it then you actually at least be open then to the typology i'm presenting here because the new testament never straight up explicitly in very nice clean terms calls mary the ark of the new covenant but the parallels are so strong that you'd have to put your head in the sand to deny them okay and so when it comes to peter and eliakim the parallels i would argue are just as strong okay so one of the things to point out is that in isaiah 22 22 there's a corrupt prime minister named shebna who is being deposed by god from his office as prime minister because he had carved a tomb in a place that god did not allow and so god says you know i will strip you of your tunic and your girdle or your sash and your robe um depending on your translation right um and i will give i will put the key and then he talks now to about a like him right i would take my servant eliach him and i will put the key of the house of david on his shoulder and whatever he opens no one will shut and whatever he shuts no one will open okay so there we have it now how do we know that these are parallels the first thing to point out is that there's a common structure between both of these passages right both elijah and peter receive keys and with these keys comes a definitive kind of exercise of them opening and shutting binding and loosening right and we know based on the rabbinic literature during the time of jesus or even you know a little after during the talmud that binding and loosing was the rabbinic power to interpret scripture and discipline the community and excommunicate heretics this was the power to bind and loose and you can even see this in the gospel of matthew chapter 18 verse 18 when uh you know christ talks about actually 17 to 18 when christ says you know and if he won't listen to the church then cast him out right and treat him as a heathen and then jesus says whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven jesus is showing that the church has the power to excommunicate because of binding and loosing but moreover we know from josephus who's a jewish historian during the first century and records the destruction of the temple he refers to the power of the sin of the pharisees to bind the conscience of the people and to uh discipline them in public with their administrative authority as the power to bind and lose so we literally know what it means we have that we have that parallel right there in the first century from the writings of josephus and even like most protestant scholars today they don't deny that this is what it means to bind and loose to interpret scripture and discipline the community that is to say to interpret scripture in a legal normative sense in uh in hebrew this is known as halakhah to give a legal normative definitive ruling on a doctrine of faith and morals and then to bind and to lose to excommunicate heretics okay so there's a similar structure similar powers are given to both eliakim and peter um and then there are other ways in which we can trace similarities between peter and eliakim right so in the very in verse 25 of isaiah 22 a liocum is compared to a firm peg that will one day give way right whereas peter is compared in the new testament as the rock of christ church okay so both peter and elia come are compared to objects eliakim receives his keys before the destruction of jerusalem in the old testament and in the jewish calendar this occurs on the 9th of auv which is the jewish you know month of and the babylonians when they destroy jerusalem and surround the temple and sack it they use the the romans in the new in the new testament in 70 a.d use the exact same strategy and they destroyed the temple on the exact same day and so both peter and elia can receive their keys before the destruction of jerusalem and so there's a there's kind of an apocalyptic theme going on here i mean another parallel that i could point out is that um in the old testament when you have a like him getting installed as prime minister you have this theme of going from corruption to purity in the new testament we know that in caesarea philippi there was a giant rock dedicated to the worship of the deity pan and it was dedicated to caesar augustus and so and also we know that there was a stream that went around this rock and led to the gates of the underworld or the netherworld right jesus mentions that in matthew 16 18 and 19. and so in effect jesus is saying you know upon my rock upon my temple shall be the the church right and he's kind of declaring war on the pagan powers whereas in the old testament you have shebna being replaced and god finally installing the good final prime minister all right and so i mean we have all these parallels that are going on between the old and new testament we know in the gospel of luke when jesus reveals that he is the messiah in the temple he cites from the book of isaiah and so in matthew when his messianic identity is revealed it makes total sense that he'd refer back to isaiah again i mean and so i i think i can go on and on with all these parallels but the fact is is that there's also widespread recognition among scholars who aren't catholic of this parallel so for instance um let me see here patrick gray in the 2017 retluge guide book to the new testament he states the fact that many scholars discern an allusion to the israelite practice of a king granting a prime minister authority over his house and to make binding decisions on his behalf even rt france and his commentary matthew evangelist and teacher explicitly states that um that that it's generally recognized that the keys of isaiah 22 are the general metaphor for what's applied here in matthew 16 19. craig l blomberg for crying out loud and a new testament comment a commentary on the new testament use of the old he says it is almost certain that the keys of matthew 16 19 are identical to isaiah 22 22. um in the new bible commentary published in the 1970s by edited by donald guthrie and others it's also said it's almost certain that the keys here are the keys of isaiah 22 22. and so i can go on and on and on about all these parallels and all the hours that i've studied on this but yeah it's there why is it then what's the reluctance in accepting it for like this fellow you debated on cameron's channel what's his name again gavin orton i really enjoy him he seems like a very reasonable even tempered fellow he's a good guy and i like him a lot yeah so so what's the what's the problem because it doesn't seem like typology run amok right i mean yeah at all and you've got all these other protestant scholars agreeing with you right why not just accept it and i think i know the answer right like why not accept it and then yet try to show that you know peter wasn't didn't have kind of the gift of infallibility or that he didn't succeed no one succeeded him in that role yeah and then also i wanted to ask you you know matthew 17 doesn't christ give the power to bind to lose to all the apostles 18 18 yeah yeah yeah uh yeah so that's a that's a good question um let me answer that second one first if you don't mind right okay so yeah all the apostles get the keys excuse me the power to bind and loose in matthew 18 18 right and so doesn't that mean that peter doesn't have a unique function uh i think the first thing that i point out is that it is unique that peter receives it singularly right and so for instance when jesus says you know whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven when he says it in matthew 16 19 he uses the greek word sau which means you singular but then when he mentions the other apostles he uses the word which means you all right basically yeah yeah yeah and so i mean that's one thing to point out and the second thing is that i remember reading in dale allison and wd davies commentary on matthew 8 to 18 it's the international critical commentary in the new testament they point out that even though the apostles are also given the power to bind and loose the way in which christ speaks of peter can only be said a peter alone because remember as we said before peter makes the declaration about christ and then christ makes the declaration about peter and then peter is spoken of in terms that no one else can be spoken of his name is specifically you know changed from simon to peter right rock and then jesus says i'll give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven jesus never explicitly says that of anybody else and we can talk about the book of revelation but um that's the point that i'd make there right i think there are plenty of ways to distinguish between matthew 16 19 and matthew 18 18. but even some protestant scholars like ulrich luz and others they make the argument that so they're redaction critic critics and so a redaction critic kind of tries to look at the way in which the writer of the gospel edited or redacted certain things to fit their kind of theological agenda or whatever and so some people have made the argument that well it looks like matthew 18 18 is the older more primordial phrase and that originally matthew 16 19 just didn't happen that's what some will say right but oh rich loves points out in his book studies in matthew that even if that's the case what that means is is that matthew has concentrated the power of the binding and loosening of the apostles into one man into peter and so even if you take the redaction criticism route we still have a good case for petron supremacy and infallibility um and so those are some of the things i point out in response that doesn't detract from the uniqueness of peter but i could see some protestants saying well it's it's obvious that the apostles had this role of teaching and excommunicating yeah i mean obviously i mean they wrote some of them wrote letters in the new testament books of the new testament which we know to be inerrant um but the idea that this passed down is the problem is that a tactic that uh yeah how many take or is it mainly just that no he wasn't given primacy and so even you know to kind of go back to the original objection that you raised about like you know why doesn't a protestant just grant it right i mean for those who do grant it what they'll say is but yeah there's nothing about succession here right you know and so i mean there there's a way to respond to that as well which i'll get to later um but let me see what else i wanted to say um i wanted to point out too that some protestant scholars who do accept it they'll just say you know still it doesn't get you to the papacy it doesn't get you to everything that you need to in order to establish you know the roman catholic doctrine um but even you know d.a carson in uh the expositors commentary he does mention the fact that um in matthew 16 19 when it says whatever you buy on earth shall have been bound in heaven whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven you know it has been interpreted and it can be interpreted as saying that peter receives infallible communication of god's authority or god's rulings from heaven to earth and so you can still get petrine infallibility and supremacy from these particular passages yeah i think the other thing i point out too is that um what is it in hard sayings of the bible edited by ff bruce and other prominent conservative protestant scholars they point out that peter's binding and losing authority is most dramatically expressed in acts chapter five i think interesting is it verse i think it's verse 11 and six when um when peter rebukes ananias and sapphira right and we so we know that buying and loosing is the official declaration that an apostle can make right in order to rebuke someone or excommunicate them right and so peter is using his disciplinary functions to rebuke ananias and sephirah and both times they fall dead and what effect bruce and others point out is that this is this is fulfilling what christ said to peter in matthew 16 19 that heaven has ratified and has condoned peter's judgment so much so that god dramatically backs it and so as i mentioned before even if the other apostles which i do think they do have the power to bind and loose none of them were ever as dramatically backed as peter in his official rulings yeah let's talk briefly though about the uh the succession right yeah yeah so this is this is the crazy thing so i used to think that apostolic succession could only be established by a priori arguments so for instance you just say yeah i mean like but wouldn't it make sense if christ established this institution that um you know he there would be this enduring line of successors um you know but then and so like that argument only goes so far with a protestant who might be willing just to deny straight up yeah after the apostles the whole thing just ended right and then you just had the general dispensation of the gospel among these bishops and presbyters um but what i discovered was actually i was going on a debate uh i was doing a debate on sola scriptura on the channel the gospel truth and as i was preparing for this debate i was looking through the life and times of jesus the messiah by alfred etterscheim who's a famous jewish jewish convert to anglicanism and edershein pointed out that the lower tribunals and the greater tribunals of second temple judaism that is of the sanhedrin and the lower courts they originally were ordained by the laying on of hands okay and whenever they would ordain they had three men present and at least one of the men ordained had to be able to trace his ordination through joshua into moses or else he just didn't have the same authority wow right and then i started looking further into uh i think it's lois jacobs book um the oxford companion to the jewish religion and i read her entry on ordination and she likewise pointed out that in the second temple period which is the time of the new testament they believed that you had to have ordination through joshua and to moses in order to be able to serve on the sanhedrin and issue valid binding rulings on all of israel and so at that point then i realized that okay in the new testament clearly the laying on of hands was used to ordain people and we know that paul himself was once a pharisee and even in the acts 15 council there were jews there were pharisees who had converted to christianity who were present too and so this is really part of the makeup of the church right you have the jewish legal structures being implemented into the ecclesiology of christ into the church that he built and so you know even the words binding and loosing were words to describe the rabbinic power to interpret scripture and discipline the communities right and so at this point then i started realizing that when irenaeus and others are talking about this doctrine of apostolic succession they aren't making it up i see irenaeus is not just using a tool against the gnostics this is in the judaism of the time of christ and we know clearly that christ passed on the teachings of the legal structures of his time right because in part we know because jesus is the new moses in deuteronomy 18 15 moses says that a prophet like you like me will rise up from among you and you have to listen to everything he tells you in the new testament jesus is constantly described as this prophet like moses who does things like moses in the gospel of luke jesus ascends the mountain with the 70 or the 72 although 70 is probably a more accurate number because in the old testament in the book of numbers when moses ascends the mountain he takes 70 elders with him okay so i also looked and i read the works of the rabbi araya kaplan i don't even i don't know if i'm saying his first name right but it's the handbook of jewish thought and in the second volume of that compendium he talks about how the jews believed that before the construction of the third temple right before the construction of the third temple the messiah would come and the sanhedrin would be redeemed it would be restored and they based this on isaiah chapter 1 verse 25 to 27 when god through isaiah makes the promise to the jewish people that i will restore your judges as they were in the beginning as they were in the days of moses so i was reading a book by edited by marcus bachmiel called i think it's uh studies in early christian ecclesiology or something like that and there's a chapter by michael goulder and michael goulder points out the apostolic college of the new testament is clearly a redeemed sanhedrin wow so jesus clearly established and rebuilt the jewish legal structures of his time and so the magisterium mat is not this roman invention it's a very old jewish institution that goes back to moses as you were looking into becoming catholic did the current papacy and scandals within the episcopate uh maybe cash shade or doubt on your studies no how why not because i'm here for christ and i know that whatever happens in rome christ will take care of his church i know it sounds childish and simple but that's what i am that's what we're called to be isn't it yeah like i i just have i just trust christ that he won't abandon his church because i seen on the cross how he didn't abandon me i looked through christian history times where the church seemed like it was going to fall apart where it was going to break and i've seen wow christ was there with his church or even when i was studying the new testament you know and as i mentioned before with the app with apostolic succession i doubted these doctrines i had questions about them and then i constantly found that there were answers that were right under my nose that didn't just demonstrate to maybe some slight extent what i was talking about but to an incredible confirmatory extent and so i said christ i trust in you jesus i trust in you now obviously this this particular paper see this is the only time we've ever had problems with a pope right i mean every other pope prior to pope francis has been essentially impeccable right yeah and every prime minister of israel was great too you know so tell us about uh pope you know was it benedict the ninth or some scoundrels within within church history if you're familiar maybe you're not i don't know yeah i mean so you know i've heard about these cases like the borgia papacy um what is it that one time they dragged a dead pope in his corpse and just had him on trial i mean sodomite popes popes that stole the papal cutlery popes that rode off into battle popes that had mistresses right i mean there's all these all these bad things that were heretics yeah who are they were condemned like popenorius right um yeah i mean so i mean i was aware of these cases but i guess i'll say two things here right one is that um we already know so two i would say maybe three things right so one is that we i like because i already knew about shebna and how corrupt he was and how god punished him and replaced him his office i know that in the new testament church which we are in right now that whenever the new prime minister makes a mistake or is corrupt god will punish him and bring in a new guy just as he did in the old testament so i i'm not too worried and we may have a series of bad guys in the future right right and i mean even the you know the book of james talks about how teachers will be judged more harshly and even uh jesus when he talks about i think in luke 12 the steward who is going to be giving off his property and all of his possessions and off his sheep or you know something like that um he'll be judged more harshly if he's not faithful so i'm like okay um you know this pope is maybe this pope is bad right not saying like this particular pontificate but just in general he's going to get punished by god and so that doesn't mean that he doesn't have a valid office or that he doesn't have real authority and it was kind of funny because um you know growing up uh when i was politically liberal my parents were always like okay swan i know that you don't like the current president or whatever and you're protesting all the time but he has a valid chair he has a valid authority and for me in my mind i was just like no you know if he's morally bad then i'm just going to dismiss his authority but then i look at scripture and jesus says in matthew 23 2-3 obey the scribes and pharisees for they are seated on the seat of moses but do not do as they do for they preach but do not practice right and i was like oh dang okay and i'm right now trying to finish a paper describing why jesus is not speaking just hyperbolically there but he's speaking literally but um let me let me see what else i was gonna say oh the last thing i was gonna say too is that um you know growing up in 2016 my family and i we became american citizens you know so we've been living in america all this time and we were finally deciding to become citizens and a lot of people were asking me swan why are you trying to become american right now because everything is so bad you're repetitive but you know they were just saying like swan things are so bad in america right now and even though i was liberal too like i knew about like slavery and the discrimination against minorities in america throughout history and all that and they're like why would you want to become american and i said it's because i believe in the principles of this country like even though um you know things aren't good right now i think back to what martin luther king said he said be true to what you said on paper right and that's the that's the kind of patriotic kind of protest that i think i was trying to embody right this kind of be true to what you said on paper be true to what you believe in right and so it was easy for me to become american because i love this country and i love the principles it stands for when i became catholic and people were saying but why do you want to become catholic with all the scandals and the bad popes and the bad history i'm like well it's because i believe in the principles of the church i believe in its theology i believe that it was founded by christ and so just as it was easy for me to become american it was also easy for me to become catholic despite all the things that have happened yeah yeah all right i want to take some questions now from super chatters and patrons uh before we do i have two things i want to let people know the first is we have some new merch and these are t-shirts and badges and stickers and all sorts of things that say introverted but willing to discuss to mystic metaphysics they're currently 13 for a limited time and they're going to go up a little bit but the link is in the top of the description below click that get a shirt share it on social media we'll share it for you as well we'd love to see you uh sporting that i also would love to hear what kind of reactions you're getting also the second link in the description below is to swan's uh excellent podcast so click that and subscribe to him there i also want to let people know that if you are a patron so if you either give on patreon or directly at pints with aquinas.com give swann recently recorded a seven-part series on the papacy in which he does a very deep dive uh so if you are loving this and you just want to go even deeper because you're crazy uh no because you love the church and you want to help defend it um yeah that you can get access to that right now just by being a patron or if you're not yet a patron you want to be a patron you'll get access to that right away so let's uh let's see here i've got some questions from patrons if we get uh uh super chat let me know coming up yeah yeah all right so austin says uh sarabia thanks for being a patron he says swan i shared your debate with gavin to a protestant friend of mine who was a biblical scholar and his biggest criticism against you was typology analysis are shaky as he feels it is trying to fit square pegs into round holes due to this he mostly threw out your arguments how do you recommend responding to this criticism okay first of all briefly because we've talked about this a bunch what is typology and give us an example of when it has gone a mark and how do we know that it's not yeah okay so typology is this idea that what is there in the old testament foreshadows and points to something in the new testament and so generally speaking what counts as a type is a person an event or some type of symbol right so for instance the manna that came down from heaven christ states in the new testament that he is the manna that has come down from heaven in john 6. um so an instance in which typology might have gone awry i'm trying to think about if there are any historical examples of that um insofar as i can tell i ca i can't think of anything off the top of my head uh on like an instance in which typology has gone bad at least historically well what about theoretically theoretically what is it what are the guidelines that prevent catholics from drawing too much yeah typology so as i as i've been actually thinking about this in writing about this in in hopefully my upcoming book right that's that's kind of it's kind of tough to write a book while you're in university right now but um one of the things that i've been looking at and noticing and i actually i did a debate um against sarah from hamilton where i discussed kind of the standards for typology one of the things that you want to start off with is just the baseline orthodoxy of the scriptures right and so what you usually want to see is like okay the typology that i'm beginning with is it based on something that is true about christ so for instance if i have to say um you know for instance christ isn't let's say fully human because of maybe i don't know um some thing that happened in the old testament right that i'm trying to draw from then that's not a good place to begin in the first place right so you begin with orthodoxy you begin with places in which typology is explicitly clear okay so there are times in which it's clear like for instance when paul talks about how christ is the new or the second adam who's life-giving um or even when it talks about how in in acts chapter 5 i think verse 32 when peter explicitly calls jesus you know he refers to him as the moses as the new moses who is prophesied in deuteronomy 18 15. um and then when i make my case for the papacy what i actually think people should begin from because it's fundamentally based on christ begin with jesus and being the son of david or being the new david because that is so clearly there in scripture and what i'm saying is is that as a consequence of christ being the son of david and the new david you get this typology affecting peter just as for instance you know because christ is as we said before christ is our high priest christ is the bread of life christ is the word of god we can also build in the typology to mary and the ark of the covenant these things bleed over or for instance like you know in the davidic kingdom uh we know that the the queen was the mother right and so when we call mary the queen of heaven and earth or uh you know eve was known as the mother of all living things right um when we make this this connection back to mary through christ that's totally fine to do at least if you accept that i know that and this is going back to something we talked about earlier some protestants don't accept any typology beyond what's explicitly stated which to me seems like a totally arbitrary and loaded standard um in the first place now um let me see here um so some of the stan those are those are some of the standards right the other thing you want to see is that are there so many uncanny similarities that you'd have to be putting your head in the sand in order to avoid them right and that's kind of the crude way of putting it but could you at least see as a virtuous agent who's openly honestly considering the evidence there are so many parallels here that i can't just say there's nothing going on right and so one of the reasons somebody some have said swan just call it an illusion don't call it typology right um one of the reasons why i call it a typology is because i think that what's going on here is that um when you have multiple parallels conglomerating around you know two events or two figures or two persons whatever when you have all those conglo those parallels conglomerating together and concentrating there then you can say okay that's the type the thing that unites it all together is the type does that make sense and so it's kind of like the form matter distinction right you have all the matter there and then the form is what unites it and puts it all together right and so that's how i view typology there um now i mean another thing you want to look for is whether or not other scholars who aren't catholic yeah you know what's interesting is this this fellow says to austin that your typology analysis is shaky i think a question you could ask back is what's an example of typology that isn't shaky like yeah i mean he's he's taking on a burden of proof in saying this right and like um and that's a good thing to point out too i'm trying to get through a lot yeah because i like being thorough you know yeah um one thing is i mean consider this for instance right suppose that you had moses in the old testament in deuteronomy 18 15 saying a prophet like me will arise from among you and you have to listen to whatever he says right and then you go into the new testament and imagine if peter never said in acts chapter 5 verse 32 you know this is jesus is the one who was spoken of suppose you only had the parallels between jesus and moses you would still have enough to demonstrate that peter excuse me that jesus is the new moses right um and so my point here then is that the parallel between jesus and the new moses or jesus being the new moses is so strong that you don't even need the axe 532 explicit identification by peter himself you know and i mean i can go on and on about all the parallels yeah yeah yeah oh sure yeah someone knocked on our door out there but i locked it so they can't get it nice yeah what's the super chat well maybe i can see it right oh i see it here hope good friend what a legend yeah he says what thanks for your super chat by the way ryan what area of historic judaic history are you currently mostly interested in appreciate you brother also princeton rejected me too hey what's up ryan hey okay um yeah i don't want to bash on princeton though uh but uh so um let me see here i'm currently focused really a lot on second temple judaism and so the period after the reconstruction of the first temple um during the time of jesus and the dead sea scrolls and then i'm also interested in talmudic judaism so this is during the period in which the talmud is assembled within the first i want to say 500 years after christ that's when the palestinian and then the babylonian talmud are brought together and these are like the definitive texts of judaism the tradition of the fathers the jewish fathers that is handed down and codified those are the periods i'm looking at okay father james thanks for being a patron says swan how would you respond to a historical critique of the papacy posed by matt whitman in a recent pints interview i don't think you've seen that so you can't comment on that directly but the basic point is that the centralization of authority in rome took far too long to be credible yeah so i mean the when you talk about the centralization of authority in rome there are two dimensions to that question right this could either be a question about when did the mana episcopacy arise in rome or the second question could be just the church at large right and so i am doing research on you know the monarch episcopacy when did it arise in rome but before i get to that let me just get to the church at large right what you see throughout the fathers is never a denial of the primacy of rome there's never a denial that it is the unique pet shrine see there's never a denial that it is the first among all the apostolic seas right um and then even like i think when they try to install constantinople as the new rome they just said let it be second to rome they didn't try to replace rome's primacy right and all those sorts of things or even you know people like pope leo basically declaring that it's by divine right that rome is the first sea among all of them right and so i think what what it's there's a there's an agree there's a sloppy kind of misreading of church history sometimes in which someone is trying to say like oh yeah rome was just kicked around and never you know treated with respect and dismissed right no i mean that's not clearly what happened what happened is that the church always recognized the primacy of rome but there was always a question on how then does that how do we work that in with the rest of the church right because for instance i remember i was talking to father patrick ramsey on a reason in theology yeah and he said but if rome is the one true like if rome is the supreme church right then doesn't that mean that antioch or alexandria is less in the body of christ right like aren't they all fully the body of christ and that would that was an objection that he had and i think that's getting at the heart of the historical question of the church on how do we receive this doctrine of the primacy of rome and of the roman pontiff and so you have two ways of reconciling those two things right one is the roman catholic ecclesiology the roman catholic ecclesiology is that yes all churches are the body of christ with apostolic succession right um they are all the body of christ and just as if you attacked my hand you'd be attacking me um you know if you attacked any one of the churches you'd be attacking the body of christ right but if you were to attack my head then you'd be attacking something unique and central to who i am it's the fundamental vessel that is kind of controlling everything else and that's rome is often referred to as the put of the church the head of the church right and so that's how i'd use that body analogy to defend uh at least the roman catholic ecclesiology now i wanted to bring this up too you had a debate with ubi petross who is an orthodox yeah apologist i suppose you'd call him online i thought it was an excellent debate the two of you were very respectful very knowledgeable what was something that ooby brought up that shocked you or was there anything that he brought up that shocked you or caused you to think more about this question so he didn't cast any serious doubts on my belief or acceptance of the papacy what surprised me though was that he was so open to using the jewish evidence and the jewish sources because usually a lot of the orthodox that i've interacted with at least online they've said i don't care what some rabbi said i don't care what josephus said in the first century and it's like okay so you want me to quote mine the fathers that's what you want me to do but like as a historian you're wanting to look at the earliest sources and especially since christianity came out of second temple judaism you know you'd want to look at the sources there to get on the ground on what the apostles and the disciples are talking about what they believed yeah and also like a lot of the orthodox are really happy when i was defending apostolic succession based on second temple judaism and so it's like oh but don't use it for the papacy you know and that's not all the orthodox by the way just to be fair yeah yeah okay all right let's see here lindsay clark thank you for being a patron lindsay she says swan with the with the extent of your knowledge i cannot yay will not accept that you are 21. uh michael and amy beaumont thank you they say swan as a convert what are some of the major hinges that need to be oiled for someone to willfully open themselves to the early evidence for the papacy and scripture tradition and the writings of the first millennium put another way what are some of the defeaters that prevent an openness in the first place among protestants i think so but a lot of protestants believe in solo scriptura right and so they'll say you know i remember i was listening to and i love michael lacona to death like he's so great i had him on my channel before actually um and i was listening to mike lacona and lee martin mcdonald who i've also had on my channel both incredible new testament scholars and they were talking about the deuterocanonical books and the uh apostolic fathers and they said yeah it's not scripture but it's good for reading right but i'm like what clement says is not just good for reading like he's making a claim about what jesus and the apostles taught and it's incredible and so you know i didn't realize this at the time but when i was in the process converting but i learned this later so clement in chapter in first clement chapter 44 verse 1 to 3 of his letter he says so too our apostles knew through our lord jesus christ that strife would arise over the office of bishop and therefore having received perfect foreknowledge they added those already mentioned and they being the apostles and afterwards they the apostles added a codicil or a provision or a rule to the effect that if these men should die other approved men should succeed to their ministry now scholars have traditionally dated first clement around 96 to 98 99 a.d right but recent scholarship from thomas herron and even i talked to matthew j thomas who recently has published um what is it paul's works of the law and the perspective of second century reception scholarship is now moving towards identifying the letter of clement the first letter of clement that is before the destruction of jerusalem in 68 a.d okay so i mean that is to say that the letter was written before destruction in jerusalem in 70 a.d probably 68 a.d or some or 69 ads some of the estimates right this is to say that this letter by clement is so early that it predates the gos some of the gospels depending on what you believe about the the date of the gospels it predates or well it doesn't predate paul's letters but it's so early that clement is clearly a reliable eyewitness to what the apostles taught and you can't dismiss him right off the bat right this is so early because i remember when i was like you know thinking about becoming catholic and i was like okay can god can you find me a source that's outside the bible but knows the apostles and is trusted by them and then you see i think in philippians 4 13 paul says that he's sending a group of women to the philippians and he says and i'm also sending to you clement whose name is written in the book of life right and michael lacona in his book the resurrection of jesus a historiographical approach he not only defends the early dating of clement but he also defends that the the clement of philippians 4 13 is clement of rome who becomes the fourth bishop of rome and is the one who writes first clement right so what i'm saying is this letter is so early that either clement just has a terrible memory or he's straight up lying to your face right about what he's saying here right and the thing is you know we have no reason to think that he was lying especially if he was he was trusted by the apostle paul right and his name is in the book of life incredible you know and then clement is saying the apostles taught the doctrine of apostolic succession and jesus told them to protect the office of bishop so you know let's say that you believe in sola scriptura right in second thessalonians 2 15 paul says obey the traditions that were handed to you rather whether written or by word of mouth we have the tradition of the apostles clement it's right there so what are you going to do with it if you accept the infallibility of scripture then accept when paul says accept the traditions and we have the traditions there's no excuse okay eric melvin who is a patron and a handsome fellow i've never met him but the fact that he's a patron just i assume it you know that's the only people who support us are handsome people i grew up baptist he says converted in january this year it seems like a lot of millennial baptists left christianity because of atheist arguments and some come back after finding apologetics catholicism or orthodoxy i say this with a bit of humor and a bit of hope meaning no snark or offense one day protestants will stop their protesting and the church will be whole again and the baptists will probably be the last to come back under the stipulation that there is a baptist right with baptism by immersion and old-time hymns there was no question there he just wanted to say that any he thought so i mean i love the baptist and um i would just say that they'd feel totally at home in the catholic church with his love for christ well look here we go we got another comment another patron here who is a baptist it always blows me away i've got like muslims atheists protestants people who support the show eric says my wife eric melvin so thanks eric my wife and much of my family and friends are still baptist oic so he's not and i have a great deal of respect for baptists there is really a great sense of community in many of the baptist churches i've been to and many baptists care deeply about their faith and evangelism it's grand to hear from the other baptist converts to catholicism who followed a similar yeah path tomorrow you can't beat a baptist potluck there's nothing like it on earth yeah all right i just thought of an appropriate baptist joke i'll tell you i'll tell you after the show andrew boyle or bewley or you might know this person because he says swan what is the best university in the country and why is it kansas state oh sweet yeah andrew um i mean i think what makes kansas state so great is saint isidores i think that's an orthodox answer yeah that's okay yeah yeah all right oh the philosophy department is also really great and the professor who taught the class on medieval political and social thought she's great yeah man this is fun who do you most enjoy grappling with when it comes to the papacy protestants or orthodox you know um i really like protestants who are open to the jewish sources who understand new testament scholarship who have read new testament commentaries and they're like sophisticated right so when i read a d.a carson's commentary on the gospel of john and he was critiquing the catholic interpretation of john 21. i really just enjoyed reading what he had to say because carson knows the jewish sources right and he knows you know a lot of the he he does a good job defending sometimes the catholic position against protestant straw men and so i really enjoy reading those types of scholars a lot because it's like i it's kind of funny because um sometimes when i'm doing all these debates i'm dealing with protestants who are like really anti-catholic or who are saying like i don't want to hear anything about no mid-rash and yeshna or whatever you know and then when i had a lee martin mcdonald on my show who's a you know prominent new testament scholar we were like talking the same language like we got along so well and i felt like yeah like we we get along really well you know and so it was really nice uh yeah i really love protestants who take the jewish sources seriously and want to have that discussion yeah yeah yeah benj benjamin handelman who's a patron an all-round great guy says does swan have a patreon would love to support him yeah yeah i do have a patreon uh you know just it's intellectual conservatism i remember at first i was really hesitant to make a patreon account because i was like yeah i'm not doing this for the money you know and also i'm discerning with the dominicans we'll talk about that right and so i was just like i don't want to like get wedded to money at all or anything like that and so i mean i just appreciate whatever you can donate i think i have someone right now giving like 70 cents that's great like honestly it's and anything is really valuable to me yeah well you're putting out great work i think it really is excellent and i've got people who i really respect have you heard of swan sona so you're doing great stuff brother um we have a question here in the live chat like i'm not going to try to say this person's name but can you ask suon swan why do i keep saying swan like the bloody bird they can be black in australia can you ask swan for his favorite work by a church father yes i can what is your favorite word from a church that is a good question man neil thank you this is see catholic jamie is crushing it he just put up your patreon in the live chat oh snap thanks man i think um irenaeus against heresies is just really good mm-hmm i know that's kind of a boring answer but like i just i love i love just seeing i love it i love seeing his mind and i love seeing um you know especially like when he gets really down and dirty defending the necessity of apostolic succession and he says if you have fallen away from this primordial succession then you've lost the truth i'm like dang okay um sarah just sent in the super chat she says how do you react to catholics who openly criticize the pope i mean it's not wrong i think to criticize the holy father and to disagree with him but i think i really take problem with when they're using bad arguments or they're using arguments that would basically lead to set of accountism i respect the authority of the church i respect the authority of the holy father and i don't believe that christ would abandon his church into nothingness you know the seed of peter's not empty and never will be until the end of time um and so yeah i mean like i'm okay with people saying like oh i don't like when pope francis issued the motu proprio or something like that right but when they use arguments that are not well thought out they're misleading other catholics or they're using arguments that could basically lead to sediment continuism that's yeah it's game over for me yeah help benjamin hannon just started donating on patreon look at that right now dude you just made an extra 70 cents a month yeah yeah um all right so everyone in the chat is asking me if they can hear the baptist joke so i'm going to say it but i'm going to say it in a way that if there was a kid in the room it wouldn't be too scandalous oh no but if you do have a kid in the room you know you might want to pause it but here it is um why won't baptists engage in the marital embrace while standing up i'll put it that way okay now the answer is why why because it may lead to dancing oh yeah okay [Laughter] all right uh good so swan love that one so you're just certainly i'm gonna i'm gonna pour myself some lug of all on you sure you don't want a bit of a lager ball oh i'm good yeah have you ever had scotch logo it's the greatest scotch i don't think in the world yeah yeah so that's cool if you don't want to accept it good you can just drink your water bottle filled with vodka yeah yeah no no all right so you're discerning the dominicans i am tell us about that yeah okay so i gotta finish up my conversion story and then i'll give you the rest of the details yeah yeah yeah because it goes into um some of the stuff that happened um so i'm gonna do i'm gonna light this cigar but i'm afraid it's just way too smoky in here when i do that no do it do you think go ahead it's not too bad all right so if it gets if it gets too bad yeah yeah this is where we're gonna see uh neil aka catholic jamie although i've been told by your friend i guess that you know what i mean when i say catholic jamie yeah i know what you mean that soon jamie from joe rogan will be just called heathen neal so neil is going to work around the cameras to see that my smoke doesn't invade the set too much but if it does just let me know and i'll put it out conversion story brother excited to hear about it okay so this is like coming into the final few months of my conversion right and so i you know i've done i've had the right of initiation the bishop knows who i am and all that and so um i go to confession right before pentecost right because you know because of covid we had to kind of basically cancel easter vigil or they had the priests had to have it separately yeah sure um and so you know i'm getting ready to go to confession i confess my sins and then as i'm walking out i hear that same voice that spoke to me when saint thomas when i asked for the intercession of saint thomas and the voice says swan you wait it says swan i will give you intimate access to my body and you will never hunger for love again and for a lot of my life you know i had struggled with am i good enough as a man you know um am i desirable am i ever going to be a father because i really desired fatherhood right right and you know i thought more about that and when i heard that voice saying you'll never hunger for love again i was like okay i'm gonna be okay so i go up and i receive the eucharist for the first time during pentecost and i bite down and i hear like this loud crack as i'm chewing down the host and then the first image that comes to my head is the body of christ being broken on the cross and then i realized at that moment like this is the real thing this is christ you know this is my savior and as time passes i begin talking to a dominican priest and you know because of saint thomas aquinas i love the dominicans and so i reach out to father james dominic rooney who i had on my channel of the central province and um he's talking to me and he says swan you know you should be thinking about how religious life is a marriage to god and i thought about that i was like huh that's interesting and then i thought about it on my own and i thought about how you know like the the dominican vows right you know uh poverty chastity and obedience right when you're married to someone your property becomes their property right your body belongs to them so that's the way of chastity and um obedience right so god is my superior of course and so i'm being married to him and so i'm submitting myself to him and his will and to helping his church right and so i said yeah i want to be married to god i want to give my life totally to christ and you know when i was back in high school actually and i was dealing with you know telling my lgbt friends that i'm now a traditional christian i prayed you know because i thought about what what what am i telling them that they need to accept they need to be celibate you know if they're not going to live out the natural office of marriage and i was like dang can i really handle that or can i really like you know tell them to do that and change their lives in that way yeah and then i prayed when i was in high school god make me celibate so that i can show the world that you can complete a human soul and i there are times i regret that because i'm like oh you know there's a nice lady i want to take her on a date but then now like i'm just becoming so comfortable with that vocation and every single day like i'm walking down campus and sometimes i'm like i don't want to be in these civilian clothes i want to be in a habit you know or even like you'd rock a habit yeah yeah you'd look right in one you know it's funny too because like um you know this phone that i have i used to not have a smartphone at all or i i had the smartphone then i switched to a dumb flip phone and eventually like i learned my lesson about poverty and i was like i can't live with the flip phone anymore and so i switched back um to the smartphone but ever since i've been discerning like poverty um chastity and obedience it's changed my life because now like you know sometimes i regret i regret saying this but sometimes like i'll show up to mass and because i really don't care how i look although i should because it's christ right but like you know coming from a baptist tradition you just show up as you are to church wherever that might be yeah i just sometimes show up as i am and i don't care if i look nice i don't care if my tie isn't fully you know together or whatever because if my cuff links aren't right right right because i care about i care about christ you know i care that's what i'm here for you know and so um you know sometimes i'm distributing the eucharist during altar when i'm alter serving right um sometimes i'll see people walk up and you know some of them are welders and so i'll see like oil on their hands or i'll see like through their hands then the roughness the age and and all that and i'm just like that's beautiful because there's a you can see someone's whole life in their hands and i'm giving you christ now and then one day you know uh there's a group of kids who are coming up to receive the eucharist and i give i put the eucharist in someone's hand and i'm like this is the kind of father that i want to be because i want to give them christ yeah and then one time during mass i'm praying and then i see like these two fires in my head right i can see that one fire is like the fire of like my desire for biological fatherhood and this other fire is spiritual fatherhood and it's like huge it's humongous it's all kinds of colors you know and i'm like wow i want to be a priest i want to give up everything for christ and you know when i was in the process of converting and i was going through a lot of the difficulties i said i'm ready to lose all things for christ who completes me and i really do believe that you know a human being can be truly happy with only christ you don't need the things of this world you don't even need to be married right you can find total happiness in him alone that is a that christ is enough not just to complete you know your life now but forever do you have to wait a certain amount of time after being brought into the church before you can be accepted into seminary so i heard it was like three years or something like that so i've only been catholic for two years by the time i you know um i think apply yeah but the dominican said i think we can make an exception for you nice have you looked into the different provinces or are you stuck on the i'm loyal to the midwest yeah i'm loyal to the central province good for you yeah although i have a friend of mine who's asserting with the eastern province and so i give him hell for it but you know no i love the eastern province you know yeah oh man that's beautiful yeah so what what comes next these next couple of years finish the undergrad keep publishing and academic journals yep god willing you'll be accepted into the dominicans yeah yeah um and then from there i'm going to continue you know doing research on the papacy i really want to finish my book but i used to i used to say like december is probably when i'll have the draft finish but i kind of doubt that now and so we're just gonna see i'm just gonna try to work and see what i can do maybe i'll take a gap year who knows what will come next but uh you know one thing i learned from my priests father gail hammerschmidt is you know discernment is just taking like one step on a pond and waiting for a stone to appear and then you take the next step and the next step and wait for the next stone to appear and so i'm really just going day by day uh i'm not terribly worried about what comes 20 or 5 or a year from now yeah yeah awesome and what are you coming up on your excellent podcast uh so i'm going to have a philosopher by the name of daniel bonovic talk about a conservative vision of economic justice so that'll be a lot of fun and um let's see here i recently had eric yabara elijah yasi and michael lofton discussing vatican one in the first millennium and so this is basically like just to give a little teaser right i they effectively show that in an ecumenical council the east actually accepted the supremacy and infallibility of the pope and so they they provide multiple examples of this and through orthodox saints you know and so what will probably happen now is we'll you know i'll have them back on again to defend their thesis against several objections we kind of structured it like a mini conference you know and so yeah i'll continue to work on doing work on the papacy and then catholic theology and ethics and you might be hosting a debate on your channel soon can you talk about that um not yet because we haven't confirmed it yeah but all the more reasons for people to subscribe so they don't miss out so that's the second link in the description below and also catholic jamie just put up your link in the live chat so people can click that and subscribe yeah well thank you matt yeah yeah i want to keep chatting i just i'm oh that's good i'm really like self-conscious that this cigar smoke is too much it's not too bad as long as you blow it away what if we do this what if we uh what if we wrapped up and then did a post show wrap up over on patreon oh would that be okay so we'll do that and then if you're a patron watching right now uh we we will publish it and so you can watch it live and you can even ask questions and we'll just ask their questions directly while i smoke and we don't see swan anymore because he's in a cloud of smoke sound so everybody who's watching thank you so much for being here do us a favor please click that thumbs up button please subscribe please click the bell button that all really helps us out be sure to subscribe to swan's channel linked below and then also we've got that wonderful catholic swag which we can show up one more time maybe maybe maybe maybe introverted but willing to discuss to mystic metaphysics and if you are a patron be sure to check out the post show wrap up also i should let people know who are interested that we're actually currently developing a patreon alternative on pints with aquinas.com so if you're someone who's been giving directly and you wish you had the patreon experience you're about to and soon we'll just be pushing people through to that but anyway there is uh that's that so good good good good um so anyway if you're a patron go over to patreon.com mattfradd and uh we will be sure to post that video right away cool thanks so much

Channel: Pints With Aquinas

Views: 17,851

Rating: 4.9457626 out of 5

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

Id: 6rcCy61y3yQ

Length: 157min 25sec (9445 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 21 2021