Praying to the Saints? A Catholic and a Protestant Talk

what's up my friends it's matt this is the 10 minute bible hour and here's what i think would be the one two three fourth installment of my ongoing conversation with dr jeremy holmes catholic theologian professor catholic bible guy this guy is humble and gracious and razor sharp and patient and so we've been having this back and forth that i've been slowly a little too slowly for some of your tastes i understand that slowly publishing over the last couple of years and this is different than the series that we do on this channel where i go into a church and ask how everything works and try to learn about this church here we both walked into it knowing that the goal was a little bit more back and forth for the sake of understanding the nuance of where each other coming from from a catholic perspective and from a protestant perspective i think it's been a ton of fun i'm very excited to share this installment with you so we will pick it up right where we left off we would look at the saints we would look at mary right like what awesome people yeah like i aspire to that i want to be as faithful to god in the face of adversity yeah and difficulty as mary was i want that yeah yeah and that to me is what the saints conjure i don't hate the saints i love the saints i think they're fascinating and interesting and idealize something and i think they're dead and i think they're separated from me and i think they are alive in eternity okay and in communion with god okay and i think at some point we will be in restored communion together with the the church triumphant and at that point the separation of of this world and sin and the gap between the physical present and the eternal will be resolved in christ and and i will i will be in that eternal communion with mary and the saints and everybody else and i look forward to that it's going to be amazing i think where we differ and it most manifests with mary is is in our beliefs on our access to those characters and what role they play right now sure yeah yeah um i would go to something like hebrews 11 where paul gives this catalogue of old testament saints right and he just goes through and he tells the story he mentions it and you know for someone who knows the old testament story it's this bing bing bing bing oh yeah yeah yeah i love that guy and then he can see and he says well since we're surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses let's run the race well and so he appeals to all those saints as witnesses that are kind of cheering you on um and so you know that's the kind of picture that that would get me started towards like uh seeing the saints as still involved somehow they're they're they're witnesses they're at least cheering us on their paul doesn't present them as they don't know what you're doing anymore but you should imitate what they did i think i can be at peace with the idea that that hebrews 11 could be read as they see what we're doing and they're it's not a metaphorical witness saying it's not the memory of them bears witness to what we're doing but they they see what's going on they get updates who knows how it works yeah but is the converse somewhere in scripture is there a passage you point to that says something about us being able to bounce it back their direction yeah um you know i don't know about like a good like one-off text that would just slam dunk that um the the other text i have in mind still goes the other direction which one is that that's in the book of revelation where uh john sees these the souls of those who were slain under the altar and then they complain to god hey how long is it going to be before you avenge our blood um which seems to events that they know what's going on down there and they have they still have a concern about it okay and then what happens immediately after that after they complain is there's an angel who takes us a golden sensor full of the prayers of the saints and the smoke goes up and and um i hadn't considered it that way i think all kinds of things break loose but it it appears as though the prayers of these murders are taken into account in in god's plan in that pattern but that's not what you were asking me for you were asking about it of some place where we here on earth are talking to them that to be honest i don't have a a text in mind for that um what i would have to play there is um something like um this just if i know that they're aware of me and that they're still interested how weird would it be if i tried not to to act on that in any way tried never to acknowledge that fact in my own life um so yeah it would be that is to say if the assumption is off the table that that um that they're out of communion with me then um wouldn't it be a kind of an odd behavior towards someone who's watching you is witnessing you who's cheering you on who's praying for you to pretend like that's not happening something would have to come out of that now what has to come out of that hmm we could we could argue it but it would seem like surely you'd do something to acknowledge that fact as we get out from the central ring of certainty of protestant thought or catholic thought as you scrutinize my thought beyond that central ring of certainty it just sounds different than if you're talking like yeah but tell me about the protestant view of the gospel okay this is the protestant view of the gospel how much bible do you want how much time do you have here it is and we finally overwhelmingly agree you get out into well how old is the earth according to the bible in the protestants it gets trickier and i feel like i'm asking you to wade out into those well outer fringes but here i think we've hit a point that it's that i think is helpful because it exposes one of those 500 assumptions that i think people really ought to be aware of as there which is that a yeah um it was interesting the way you captured it to me that that you'd be uncomfortable on these grounds proceeding to a doctrine um but you did you do do have this idea that um that we here and the saints in heaven are not in communion with each other until later um and at least not both directions and there um i guess you know you could go the other way and say um are you comfortable going from whatever foundation you have from that to sort of treating it as a doctrine or are we in some zone where it's not comfortable treating anything it's doctrine either way i'd be i'd be more in that range so for me the reason that it translates into maybe like a tertiary or quadrucci area i don't know what you call it after church here yeah like once you get out into that range i i would put it there simply on the grounds of ah biblically i don't feel at ease doing something that sounds like praying to someone okay other than god and this is my prophecy view the priesthood of all believers i would say there is one god one mediator between us and god it's right in christ jesus god right in the flesh christ jesus so in the past you know he spoke to us through all this other stuff and now jesus occupies that position alone the curtain has been torn there's all this theology to say there is no other middle man and so for me i would be building my theology on this point over that that negative prescription regarding other people standing in between and that positive prescription of having jesus stand in between and maybe i'm extrapolating that out too far i think there's a really big point we need to get to in one step one way to couch the way a catholic would talk to a saint that might make protestants feel more comfortable with it is that when we say about we say pray to saints what we're saying is we're asking the saints to pray for us to christ and um within the sort of catholic osphere there are certain linguistic differences we'll make where there are certain verbs we won't use of saints that we will use of jesus but that's all sort of insider baseball but it might be a little more comfortable for some people to think in terms of asking someone across the great divide would you pray for me because i'm having a hard time and to think is that possible okay well maybe if you think that's possible you're just a little bit closer to being able to sit down with someone like me the one thing you can reciprocate in a way you already have uh by just by talking which is you can remember and think of them which is just which is in a certain way maintains the bonds between the members of the body of christ it's it's good that the body of christ be united with the bonds of charity and if we loved the saints and asked them to pray for us that's actually something in a catholic viewpoint that they would appreciate because they are connected to you in a bond through that but i wanted to i wanted to to appreciate that thought i wanted to expose a a kind of assumption i make you know because you had i think rightly challenged how do i move from certain texts and certain ideas to this vision of being able really to do this how do you go from that's an interesting theory to i actually think this is true um there there you get just onto something that catholics and protestants have to deal with which is that catholics aren't interacting with scripture quite the way that protestants are right that is yes for catholics there's this idea that um everything scripture says is true everything scripture says is is helpful for salvation but not everything that has been said is in scripture uh and so there are truths that would have been known say to the earliest christians in the generation after the apostles that may never have been written down um and so those truths since all truth has to be one they have to resonate with and with what is written down right but a catholic doesn't feel the need to actually build his case simply from scripture a catholic will look at scripture and say am i going wrong nothing in here says i'm going wrong okay good right um where's a a protestant will more likely feel like well but your case doesn't go just from scripture you're bringing in extra stuff of the 500 assumptions this is on the mount rushmore that scripture and tradition thing just how do they rank i sat with father diaz at cathedral of the madeleine in salt lake okay great dude brilliant just off camera just pastoral gracious weird people coming in just kind as could be whether the camera's rolling or not yeah yeah maximum admiration i sit down first question what do you make of the bible we're not a people of the book every protestant in the audience just i told you well yeah i asked him a question he answered right you know whereas you sit down with a protestant if a catholic we're interviewing a wonderful gracious kind intelligent protestant and they said what do you do with church tradition they would say we're not a people of church tradition yeah and every catholic would go to the keyboard to correct that nonsense this has got to be top one two or three yep of of what makes us see it different yep and um again if i can just i i feel like i can like a a an instrument that only plays one note but if i can take it back to what i see as a fundamental difference between catholics and protestants is is jesus founding a concrete individual community or his fellowship a kind of principle that needs to be instantiated whenever possible if he's founding this concrete individual community then um that's that's the setting in which you you can begin to see how a catholic would think about scripture that is um scripture is not just given to you or to me or to this christian or to all christians individually scripture is given by god to this community it's the community's book and then you have a whole new dynamic so he's in a way you'd say yeah we are a people book in the sense that it's our book um and the greeks would say the same thing though literally my my greek orthodox pastor friend said the exact same thing it's our book we can do a will with it the protestant view would be what was scripture was evident before scripture was done being written because peter is referring to the writings of paul as scripture in the bible so within i mean those guys died in the 60s a.d so by the 60s we knew that the new testament was scripture so so when we hear like a council of hippo that's when the church decided what was in the book we're pretty skeptical about that well you know look at look at what all of these church fathers let's go to the church fathers look at what they all said about the text one none of them agreed on the books that aren't in there yeah all of them had overwhelming agreement on what is and we have categories for how much that agreement looked like it's very easy to quantify who thought what but the idea that the bible just got decided on a council one day and then it was suddenly bible which you've not postulated but a lot of people do protestants look at that and we go come on that story is a lot more complex than that and the scriptures were clearly in circulation within living memory of jesus they weren't all finished revelation came later yeah but um we would view that as yeah this was given to the community of faith but we would define the community of faith differently sure so while so i could absolutely enthusiastically be like yeah right on brother we see that the exact same way but then that question again comes back to maybe one of the other four of the top four mount rush more different assumptions and that is the uniqueness of rome the primacy of rome where is that church headquartered how physical do the boundaries of that church yeah how did god ordain them to be and of course protestants and catholics are going to see that differently just for people who may be listening in i need to circle back and just say when i said you know that the church would say it's our book ice did not in any way mean to imply that means the church can do what she wants with it the design of scripture if that makes sense as a phrase like the way god built it is to be situated in a community so that that community is sort of the context within which scripture is in its native habitat and you can read it well and then that would make sense with the idea of there are certain things everybody just sort of knows because they've been in the community and then that aids them in reading the bible well in other words there are certain assumptions that that need to be pre-built in order to read the bible that the bible itself may not give you the protestant is comfortable with the individual christian just as an individual christian reading the bible and how he's going to be able to handle that the catholic is comfortable with the individual christian as a member of a community reading this book which was given to the community so it's a it's a it's a common good not a private possession and if you read it as a common good you'll be pretty well and that what that looks like boots on the ground sometimes involves authorities saying things sometimes does not often involves hearing the bible within a kind of echo chamber that you have because of the community you're in but it's it's uh it's never an encounter with the bible just as mine but always as ours but but i think that does cash out in a practical way to to what you were saying right that there's a there is like you could put it in terms of more confidence and less confidence on certain certain things and if you take into account the other 499 assumptions i get it and if you take into account the other 499 from the protestant side i think it makes sense too and let me push on one thing though um because you know i spent quite a while uh having to read historical critical exegesis of scripture and um one thing that has impressed me is you know the the sort of history whereby benedict spinoza says if you cannot answer all these questions about the original author and the original audience then you cannot read the bible we spend two or three hundred years saying i'll bet we can answer the questions and then people i'm saying oh we can't answer the questions as well as we could and that's what we thought we could and and so then you you either give up on the project and spinoz is right you can't read the bible or you reject pronunciation you know i i think maybe that kind of dogmatic historical critical thing he was doing was crazy i just bring that up to say as you've pointed to the fact that it can be difficult to discern what is an apostolic tradition versus another tradition which may be good and venerable but is not apostolic it seems like there's also a lot of difficulty discerning how would the original audience have heard this who were they what was the situation and i guess all i wanted to underline was that the the thing about trade the the the thing about tradition implies a certain way of reading scripture which is to recognize that helps in a conversation to realize oh you're not going to zig when isaac yeah right there's going to be a different move and all and then i think what you're pointing out about the the the role of what we would call the magisterium the teaching authority um is another sort of ramification of this again this fundamental idea about the visible uh church that is at the end of the day either christ gave a teaching authority to this visible institution and he's going to take care of that and make a cash out or he didn't and this is a terrible idea i have the luxury of being able to to look at catholicism and say i i'm sorry i don't care what my protestant friends who don't like you guys say i think you knocked this out of the park and this and this and i just can't argue with that and even if i don't like that yeah it's a really fair point you're making here at the same time i don't care what my catholic friends might say there's certain stuff i look at and i go i'm sorry that just wasn't your best day and church shouldn't have done that the church shouldn't have done that and that blood got shed there come on guys there's just there's two thousand years there's so many opportunities to get it right and to get it wrong and maybe if i were to fill out a comment card on catholicism and drop it in the box on the way out the door from the denominational headquarters it'd be like hey i worry that sometimes you guys paint yourselves into the corner like like you don't there's nothing you can really do if you got it wrong but it's okay like hey from your friend who's rooting for you and thinks you're pro gospel and christians like yeah yeah i wouldn't beat you over the head with it if you came out and we're like yeah sometimes we got stuff wrong and we did here and this is what we did and it's cool that we interpreted it this way then we thought more and we do it this way that's cool whereas it feels like because we exist and the orthodox exist you guys are right in the middle if i were in your shoes i would feel pressure all the time to definitely be right and to feel like we just cannot be wrong a catholic should not think that everything the church has said was said at the same volume so to speak said with the same level of authority there are a few things that the chur where the church has expended all her authority on this like if we're willing to say if we're wrong in this we're just done christ hasn't been raised from the dead this is it's over and exercise and futility um yeah and they were to say we're going to put our whole body in front of this you'll you'll get to this doctrine over our dead body and maybe you'll get there um but there's a bunch of other stuff that the the church authorities say where they're invoking their authority but not at that pitch so you wouldn't so you wouldn't dig in like that over like well maybe indulgences don't quite work that way jake obviously has a church teaching that says this is how it is and this is how it works but it's not it's not at the same volume as christ has risen from the dead well you you'd have to we'll see the thing with the crisis originally that's straight out of the word of god which is at another level from what even the church teaching would be that is if the magisterium says something she can only do that in the service of reading the word of god um but um but even if you say okay setting aside the things we just know because like paul said it or luke said it or something like jesus rose there even the remainder the you know think about how authority works you know if you're a dad right you sometimes you say um hey go do this and if your kid comes back and says i was gonna go do that something came up and i thought it was a better idea to go do the other thing you go oh okay yeah you know be careful next time okay right sometimes you just like you put it down and you say you're going to do this my whole my paternity is on the line here you're going to do this this is the law that's just the way authority works there is no authority that's all on or all off okay and church authority is no different for a catholic sometimes it's all on but not most of the time and part of being a catholic theologian is learning how to hear the level that's intended and so there could be things that have been taught by the church where the church herself had reserves the possibility of turning that around later on because she didn't teach it in a way where she put all her authority on the line okay that's that's enormously helpful and i think that's another one of the 500 because outside looking in especially from a protestant who you know somebody really doesn't like you guys and wants you to fail in order for them to feel like they're right right there's not going to be the level of nuance you just described it's going to be binary 1-0 you said a thing you were wrong therefore how do we know you're not wrong about everything or whatever it might be and to be fair to protestants in this situation there are a lot of catholics who think this way that if if there was a sentence and a magisterial document then it's just gospel truth um but they just they need to be more educated as catholics that that's that has never been the church's understanding that if she wants it to be completely binding on everybody forever and ever amen she there are certain links that she needs to go to to make that clear okay we've both touched on religion and violence persecuting church there's some yuck in the middle ages i mean the church went from being a persecuted church to straight up a persecuting church and that fluctuated depending on who is in charge innocent the third eventually called a crusade against heretic christians in france i mean you look back on it in the moral context of now yeah and well no catholic i've ever met is like yeah stupid cathars we tricked them into coming out and we got them all like no one feels good about that i don't know any catholic that i've ever met in my entire life who advocates for violence toward people who think the wrong thoughts and my question is is there is there a theological mechanism that changed or was it just kind of a coming around to yikes that was not our best look we're not doing that anymore [Music] the very next video on this channel is going to be the final installment with dr holmes i'm not going to make you wait for this next one i have very intentionally put a lot of room between these catholic theologian conversation interview videos because i don't want the whole channel to feel like it's about a conversation between catholicism and protestantism the conversation is much much bigger than that and i've wanted to go and visit other churches in between and have other conversations in between to inform this when we come back to it dr holmes has been great he was great in what you just heard and i really appreciate what he has to say next and just his willingness to go where we go next the question of violence in the church it's a difficult question but when you have an institution that spans 2000 years that goes all over the globe and spans every culture just about you're going to have different assumptions over time and in different places about the church and the state and violence and violence and culture and how all of that works together so it's a very difficult question but i appreciate that he was willing to go there with me and that will be the very next video on the channel and the final video from this particular series that i've done with dr jeremy holmes who again i cannot say thank you enough to additionally i want to say thanks to africa renewal this is a group i've been working with for some time now they work primarily in uganda and their objective is to be redemptive make things better in a place where somebody needs to go and make things better and so my wife and i sponsor a little girl named monica we're crazy about her even though we've never met her in person yet and i know a whole bunch of you on this channel have gone and done the same i'm starting to get stories back of kids who now have sponsors the primary thing that africa renewal is doing with this 40 bucks a month for sponsorship right now is making sure that kids get in school with the way things are working out with covet and everything else if you can get a kid into school that covers two meals every single weekday which is gigantic so a lot of the food needs and the educational needs get met there additionally medical care is not easily accessed in uganda and that 40 bucks a month helps to meet those needs as well bottom line is this i am asking you to consider supporting a child for 40 bucks a month in uganda through africa renewal at africarenew.org tmbh they are sponsoring this show so that i can sponsor them back so that we can effectively cut into this gigantic backlog of kids who need help who are in the system but who don't have a sponsor yet so that's what we're working on together thank you for considering that one way or another whether that ends up making sense for you i appreciate you just being interested in what's going on in this larger world and the difficult situations that other people face africarenel.org tmbh thanks also for being here and a part of this conversation next video we're going to try to really break down where we go next with this big project that we're engaged in together in terms of trying to understand other expressions of christianity i'm matt this is the 10 minute bible hour i appreciate you and let's do this again soon

Channel: The Ten Minute Bible Hour

Views: 74,344

Keywords: Bible, Theology, Study, Matt Whitman, TMBH, No Dumb Questions, Matthew, Jesus

Id: 5WKFCoM6CZo

Length: 26min 49sec (1609 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 06 2021