The Conversion of Dr. Scott Hahn

dr hahn lovely to have you on the show thank you for being here great to be with you neighbor yes exactly a month and a half now nice i've been in steubenville and absolutely loving it you can't throw a rock without hitting a good catholic family you shouldn't throw a rock but if you well thanks for the invite it's great to be here in your studio yeah yeah honored to have you on the show you know there's a new crop of people out there who are considering catholicism uh who are tempted they might put it by catholicism and i thought it's probably been a while since you have shared your story to a large crowd large audience about your own conversion to catholicism but i know you've written how many books since rome sweet home uh somewhere between 40 and 50. that's beautiful yeah maybe more yeah i don't know i don't keep track yeah i read rome sweet home when i was serving as a missionary in canada oh wow and i just remember being really moved by it there were certain things that struck me and i'm sure you get told this repeatedly how's that book of yours rum sweet home doing oh uh again i don't know it's sold over a million it's in about 25 different languages it took us three weeks to write it was really therapy for us as a married couple we laughed we cried we prayed we apologized and forgave each other and uh she promised it would take three days i was surprised that it took three weeks but now we're coming up to our our 30th anniversary i think in 2023 for the book that is where we've been married 41 years but the um the book itself just took on a life of its own i've never gone back and reread a single section editing was kind of hard but it originally started with a transcript of uh a talk that we gave in tandem down in louisiana baton rouge's memory serves and it went so well that uh when it was taped we heard later on that somebody had transcribed the whole thing and so we got a copy of that and that was the rough rough draft of rome's sweet home because we would go back and forth and we never thought about writing a book we never thought about dividing it up into chapters that you know his and her that sort of thing the grace of god is just you know yeah what was once a little trickle you know has now become a river yeah i mean i was just talking to a friend recently about what it was like in 86 to come into the church now tom howard had come in in 85 very quietly and i had known about that but for about 10 years it looked more likely that he would go russian orthodox then at the last minute mid the last minute he was reading newman and other things and so he decided to go catholic and i didn't actually find out about it until a few months after it happened uh but back then you know in the 80s it was as unthinkable as like the chairman of the gop defecting to the soviet union or something you know it was such a you know it was not only unthinkable it was like the reverse because the catholics were becoming evangelical protestants back you know in this room yeah this would be 86 but in the 70s and up until 86 and you could count on one hand the number of apostolates you know like ewtn was just getting started catholic answers was still mostly a fledgling group um and i'm not sure what else there was ignatius press had just begun but there wasn't much else except if you if you liked old books as much as i did you know then you could spend hours and use bookstores yeah and read your way almost you know all the way to rome so would you say that the anti-catholicism if we want to use that language was was more prominent in the 70s and 80s it doesn't feel like that so much today no it doesn't i mean it uh and and converting to the catholic church is no longer a seismic event you know yeah picking up on the protestant richter scale would you have considered yourself an anti-catholic and what does that word even mean yeah i mean okay so in the 70s so i i experienced the grace of a young adult conversion when i was almost 14 i'd already spent about a year and a half in a series of juvenile court hearings for sales and possession breaking and entering mail fraud forgery and all of the other things that i won't go into for my mother's sake yeah um and then i found christ or he found me and and i was i was living in pittsburgh and that was sort of the the bastion of evangelical reformed calvinist protestantism rc sprole was just setting up the ligander valley study center there before moving it down to orlando and i was driving out to see him and to hear his bible study but he also had this thing called a gab fest and it was about an hour drive and i just looked forward to it week after week as a sophomore in high school and then he introduced me to dr gerschner his mentor who had a phd from harvard and taught at the seminary in pittsburgh and i mean these guys weren't just protestant they weren't just non-catholic they were as anti-catholic as you could come but it wasn't bigotry prejudice and hate it was just you know the sense that the pope claims to be infallible you know the head of the methodist church doesn't nobody else does yeah if this guy is not what he claims to be then there's a spiritual tyranny this web of deceit there's a sense in which i could i mean first of all i'm not really sure what we mean by anti-catholic because as you say if somebody looks at the claims of the catholic church and thinks they're false then they should want to help you reject those false things right um so what do you mean by anti-catholic cause sometimes i think we throw that around it's a little unfair someone just looks at catholicism and says i'm not anti-catholic it's just false and i want you to know the truth good question you know in looking back on the 70s i think there were at least three identical types three identifiable types of anti-catholicism i think mine was the minority report uh that was sprole and gerschner which tapped into the majority report of the protestant reformation because calvin and lutheran zwingli and knox disagreed on all kinds of things but the one thing they all shared in common was this conviction that the pope is the antichrist you know and not just heretical but i mean pretentiously diabolically right heretical um you know and so likewise the eucharist they don't just uh celebrate the eucharist they worship the eucharist right and if that's just a wafer a profound and sacred symbol but nothing more then you know most forms of idolatry are not as debased as that yeah yeah yeah then the blessed virgin mary and i don't even get me started because it just seemed like mariolatry and so it was the settled conviction that these beliefs were so contrary to scripture it wasn't even worth talking about you know just except they were so beyond the pale right yeah there was another anti-catholicism too that that stemmed from the 50s and the 60s as american culture was assimilating the catholic population but it wasn't altogether clear uh how catholics would relate to the pluralistic liberal democracy that america was and so right there was a political form of that and especially it came to head when jfk was running for president well will he take his orders from the pope yeah and then there was there was another type that uh my parents had especially my mom and that was a cultural anti-catholicism where you know the irish need not apply you know or the italians or and so these um these cultural catholics that were assimilating into american culture were always viewed by the wasps the white anglo-saxon protestants you know and condescending and patronizing terms and and so for all of these reasons and more you know just you don't defect to the soviet union if you're an american patriot you don't even look seriously into the catholic faith you're thinking about the unthinkable joe oh yeah that's good thanks for doing that yeah yeah okay all right so fair enough how how did you start hearing about catholicism and when did it start to when did you start to change your opinion about it yeah i mean that was a gradual process you know i was never as anti-catholic as i was pro-scripture i i loved the word of god i wanted to live under the lordship of christ i i believe that the word of god was insp inspired it was without error it had to be interpreted in a responsible way but i i basically wanted a biblical worldview and so in high school i remember writing my senior paper on martin luther for an english class 10-page requirement you know i think mine was 24 pages long this is in high school wow yeah and you're supposed to have like three sources i think i had almost 30 sources and i i just wanted to evangelize my english professor miss dengler and and all of my friends who might read it quick question i mean you said you had a conversion in your high school years what did your parents think of this conversion and your intensity for that they were relieved to be out of all of these yeah yeah you know and if a religion will do it for him that's great yeah and my and my mother began to slowly kind of follow me in the path of conversion wow it was gradual because she had some kind of experience back in high school that she just abandoned she thought she grew out of it just a phase and so when she saw it not only happening but but growing in me i think that she was sort of drawn to it but she was also reminiscing about it and so she would talk about her experience back in high school as i was going through mine but mine was much more intellectual i remember reading the bondage of the will by martin luther in 10th grade you know the five points of calvinism by steele and thomas in 10th grade sharing it with my friends upperclassmen you know just not just evangelizing them but theologizing you know and so it was just um it wasn't just a head trip because i had i mean christ filled my heart with not only the holy spirit but i mean with a love for the truth and you know if i were to trace the trajectory from then until now i think that i still have that love for the truth that would that would take me almost anywhere but now what i've discovered and it really i discovered in the process of becoming catholic after seminary and that is the truth that i love is the truth of love not the love of the 60s what you spelled you know l.u.v peace love you know woodstock and all of that because i i i must be honest i despise that word love i'm just yeah you know love means never having to say you're a sorry love story all of that stuff in the late 60s and 70s and besides rc sproul given a series of talks that just put me in their grip uh the holiness of god and he focused on isaiah 6. holy holy holy you know not love love love and i'm like yeah but what you discover at least what i've discovered is that the uh the truth that i loved and wanted to read and study and understand much better ultimately led me to the fact that the trinity is not just true the trinity is truth but the trinity is eternal love this interpersonal communion of love you know and god is not an eternal creation creator because however old creation is it's not eternal god is eternal so what is god eternally well the trinity is the only god there is and the trinity is the only thing god eternally is and so to discover a communion of love then suddenly what he does to redeem us how he fills us with the spirit why he demonizes us on all of that it's like those dominoes eventually fell into place but boy when you're looking at them you're realizing the good news that i believe back as a teenager just keeps getting better okay yeah without rhetorical exaggeration it's just it's more real it's more beautiful it's more powerful yeah but i'm fast forwarding i should go yeah what was it about catholicism that first struck you you were anti-catholic in college what was the first thing that happened that you began thinking okay wow they got that one right yeah that didn't happen in college uh in college i had an experience my freshman year with dr vanda capelli who just come from princeton and he gave a course in biblical theology at the same time all of my classmates were rushing off to this pentecostal church to get re-baptized and i was going to join them too because i don't remember being baptized as an infant it didn't mean anything to me then or now and so my professor challenged me look into it i mean study scripture don't just follow your emotions and so i worked on the major research paper for his course on circumcision in the old baptism in the new it's administered to infants then is it administered to infants now and covenant became so obviously the key that would unlock that and answer the question that god would not include infants in the old covenant and suddenly exclude infants flesh that out no pun intended for those who aren't familiar with this sort of a parallel between circumcision and baptism yeah so the sign of the covenant that was given to abraham in genesis 17 was for all of the male children at the at the age of eight days to be circumcised and so they would cut off the foreskin of the male generative organ i'll leave it at that yep and uh that was the sign of the covenant it was a sign and seal of faith as paul describes it in romans abraham's faith and uh anybody who's 99 years old and consents to circumcision must have a lot of faith yes so when you look at how circumcision is practiced and to this day if you talk to an orthodox jew the hebrew word for covenant beret or they pronounce the bris is the word that is basically circumcision so when you use the hebrew word bries or breed it is synonymous with circumcision it is not just the entry it is the whole structure of living out the obligations of the covenant that you accepted when you were circumcised you know it's also living up to the family into which you've been born their values so for 2 000 years circumcision is practiced and then jesus institutes baptism you know make disciples of all nations baptizing them in the name of the father the son of the holy spirit in matthew 28. and so when peter preaches the very first sermon at pentecost in acts 2 repent believe and be baptized for the promises to you and your children to those who are far off so you know if you were bringing your kids up to get baptized at pentecost in acts 2 you know peter would not have said wait when i said the promises to you and to your children i didn't mean that they would get baptized no in the old covenant infants were included but now infants were excluded and you're like yeah why didn't you say so well yeah if infants were excluded now in the new you would have to say so but if if infants are included in the new and they're going to get baptized along with their households then of course you would go without saying it yep because it's just the continuity of the covenant the discontinuities changing from passover to eucharist from circumcision to baptism from the sabbath which comes at the end of the week to the lord's day which begins the week resurrection but as a calvinist i mean calvinists baptize babies that's right they think they're efficacious for the elect so it's all on the basis of covenant so this is okay so this is something you accepted not even really thinking what catholicism got this one we're not even near there yet that's right so you know every paper i wrote for the next four years as an undergraduate had something to do with covenant and they were usually longish and i was just enthralled by the research but in the last year or two i began to discover what has become so foundational for me and that is okay we use covenant and contract interchangeably in ancient israel you'd never do that because in a contract this is yours that is mine in a covenant i am yours and you are mine all right you exchange promises and then you exchange property and the contract is fulfilled and you might renew it or you might have nothing to do with that party ever again but in a covenant you don't just make promises you swear the oath you invoke the name of god the latin word for that is sacramentum and once you discover this as i did then you realize that a covenant was basically synonymous not with a transactional exchange but family communion and so okay if god is not just syria you know if god is not just renewing a contract with us but a covenant what does that imply well it implies that he's a father it implies that his people are a family that sinai was not like the constitutional convention it wasn't a social contract it wasn't a sacred contract it was a sacred covenant and i mean that's the difference between marriage and prostitution right i mean for them it's like seismic okay so i just thought well i'll make one adjustment because nowhere in reformed evangelical calvinist theology was covenant ever clarified in its definition as family bond and it's not just the nuclear family as it was aboard the ark with noah and his wife and their three sons who all had three wives you know it's a tribe under abraham who's the mediator of the covenant it's 12 tribes that form a national family at mount sinai and so if we're moving from the national in the old to the catholic the international in the new i mean this did take me two or three years to think through it was mostly through teaching scripture to people who would ask hard questions and i would try to think up and answer you know yeah for the moment so you didn't go get baptized with your friends because after this research you realized that your baptism was valid legitimate as a baby that's right yeah yeah and it was a funny response because you know these guys were were classmates they were good friends we would have lunch in the cafeteria but then suddenly it became obvious that they were ostracizing me because oh he just intellectualizes everything it's theology okay you know whereas we felt the holy spirit you know in the river and i'm like i was so grateful but i was also grateful that just as i didn't choose my family so i didn't choose myself i mean it was really given to me did you go back to this um university professor and tell him what you had found oh yeah yeah yeah and i've i've actually stayed in touch with him over the last 40 45 years yeah um okay well take us from there then um i want to get to the point where you started facing catholicism so you got you got married no that's okay but you got married in college after college we both graduated in 1979 uh we were in love working together in young life for the last two years of our four-year stint as college students and uh she was a dynamo she was amazing and so when we entered into marriage as a covenant uh i was so conscious of living out my theology and tracing this you know and so we went to seminary i was still known as not only non-catholic but anti-catholic and i dare say at our evangelical seminary nobody would have said oh i'm more anti-catholic scot yeah quick quick side note did you ever meet catholics and try to evangelize them oh yeah i mean that was my sport because i should have been fishing about guitar yeah i mean i i would i would target my catholic friends in high school and in college uh and just try to calibrate were any of them knowledgeable about the faith not a single one just kind of cultural right yeah i mean a number of them in fact i would say the majority i've kind of gone back to and if i drew them out i have sent them care packages of boxes with books and that's what they're saying very good yeah yeah and one of them in particular chris is now on the uh the board of the saint paul center which kimberly i founded wow that's another story for another day yeah so you got married yeah and and so our first year of marriage was our first year in seminary and so uh we're living it out we're contracepting of course i mean when my father-in-law our future father-in-law was giving us pastoral counseling because he was the one who who married us at college hill presbyterian church you know contraception was not an issue the only question was what form would you use you know yes and so it was i think it was our second year that kimberly was going full time her first year she was working down in cambridge near harvard and then our my second year was her first year i got the master of divinity she got the master of arts mine was three years hers was two but she took a course in christian ethics and she describes this in rome sweet home because she chose contraception which was such a non-issue i wondered why waste your time and so she she dove into it she read humane vitae and some other sources too and found out that until 1930 all protestant denominations were in complete lockstep with catholics on this and then suddenly in the last 50 years the sexual revolution yeah and so she began to question it and some friends of mine classmates were saying you ought to talk to your wife you know yeah she's got some pretty persuasive arguments well given the subject matter i thought it was appropriate to talk about it so he did and she gave me a book then it was entitled birth control in the marriage covenant i thought i owned every book with the word covenant in the title because they were all by protestants this one was by john kipley and 30 pages into it it's making me so uncomfortable i remember she's in the bedroom i just i threw it across the room and she heard it yeah and so i just admitted that i'm frustrated by arguments i've never heard before that just so obviously line up with scripture but also with natural law and a kind of sanctified common sense that i thought you know we ought to share and so i finished the book and i realized kimberly was right we were wrong since 1930 you know and the same denominations that we knew so well that had allowed contraception in the 30s and 40s were now advocating for you know unrestricted abortion rights for women as well i'm unfamiliar with the author of that book is he a protestant john kitchen he was a lay he's i think he's in his late 80s now he lives in cincinnati he's been a dear friend for many years his son chris went to francisco back in the night so he was a catholic yeah so you were reading a book by a catholic and john kiply was this really paradoxical figure because in the 60s and 70s there were no lay theologians if you were a layman you were a philosopher if you were a theologian you were a priest but there was a second anomaly about kipley in this book that in the late 60s and early 70s when he wrote it there were no theologians who defended humane vitae except for jermaine grize who was a layman but a philosopher primarily and john kipley who never got his doctrine but could really argue persuasively from biblical and but he was arguing on the basis of covenant theology that when you renew the covenant in receiving holy eucharist you don't you can't spit it out you know yeah there really is a sense in which that sign signifies a communion and even more in the marital act when you renew your covenant with your bride you know why would you do that and then deliberately prevent that life-giving love from having its consequences and it wasn't an argument that just pinned me down and counted a 10 and i was beaten into yeah yeah it was just it was the logic of love that i encountered for the first time where it's like okay that isn't just abstract philosophical logic as much as i love that because i was a good tomist since high school yeah uh but it was a logic that i had never encountered before that the the language or the logic of love that is expressed when these two bodies unite to renew a covenant it just follows you know that if you're eating food it's for nutrition and also for fellowship but if you're eating food and then spitting it out that's an eating disorder yeah you know and so this is a sexual disorder you know and it struck me that this might help me understand why our culture is just so corrupt and so perverse and so you know and darkened doesn't work so how did you make the choice to stop using contraception what was it like i mean my first choice was to stop believing that it's morally licit yeah and then when kimberly began to kind of talk about the implications practical consequences i'm like whoa let's not rush this and then it was obvious to me that i was just giving into fear and so you know within a matter of months we realized that our change of mind had brought about a change in her body wow and so our firstborn was conceived you know as a result of that are you pastor pastoring a church at this point no i'm i'm i'm actually speaker of seminary [Music] yeah so what was it like did you let other people know that this is something we've decided the bible would prohibit contraception this isn't god's she did okay yeah i mean in a certain sense it was her radical openness to the logic of love to the word of god and to the christian tradition that protestants had shared up until about the middle of the 20th century and i was sort of ashamed because we had just swallowed hook line and sinker but also because my own covenant theology had been used against me and why had we as calvinist not seen this before and how could catholics like pope paul vi see so clearly and stated so compellingly i and we had a line in our family my mom used to say even the blind hog finds an acorn and and so i just thought well you know if you've been around 2000 years you're bound to get something right that's right you know we've just simply slipped we let it grasp but i think that it was sort of the hole in the dyke and so it just seemed to be a small adjustment and really i was just lining up with calvin and luther and hodge and warfield and all of the others so when i graduated in 82 and began to i began to pastor a church in fairfax at the time it was trinity presbyterian church i was a i was a fetus while you were doing that continue literally 82. god for life so you know when uh when michael was born that year december 4th kimberly had been in labor for over 30 hours and then a cesarean section of emergency and you know to see love become that sacrificial and to look at my wife's body as she's become a mother that also was a sort of revolution that starts in the five senses it reaches the heart and then finally the head and you realize that's what those body parts are also for yeah you know and that's what marriage is all about and that's what my covenant theology has been backing me into you know and by then i was already beginning to sense that the water was getting hot and my last semester i remember having this experience okay i've just interviewed they're offering me a position as the associate pastor trinity presbyterian they're asking me to preach at least 45 minutes each sunday to lead at least one preferably two bible studies catholics would have a heart attack 45-minute homily oh yeah i mean you'd be running a rail the time that i spent in the library my last semester was spent reading the church fathers because in my interview and conversation with the leaders of the church that was hiring me i realized all they knew sprawl they knew all of my favorite theologians and so i couldn't just get up and recycle material and so i went to the fathers for help to find new things that were really kind of ever ancient ever now were protestants doing that in your circles at the time going back to the early church fathers not even why is that why why is that it seems like such an obvious move that if we want to know what jesus meant what the scripture meant when it said this or that these things we disagree on what are the earliest christians think i mean back then we had church history and so we were expected to read some of the primary sources and i probably had read a few hundred but you were almost always exposed to the material that you know for example in augustine where he sounds like a proto-protestant right you know and so free will predestination and other matters too and so it's a selection that is based upon a protestant principle of selectivity and so we didn't i mean besides you know it's sort of like growing up by a creek and then suddenly encountering the ocean i mean the fathers we're talking about tens of thousands of pages and how do you begin to wrap your mind around that much besides calvin and luther they read the fathers so let's let it be filtered through them okay and i think that's what we did almost subconsciously by default some people read the fathers but even there i think it was a highly selective process do you think that catholics also fall into this trap of selecting just the bits that sound catholic and presenting them while avoiding verses that seem to support elements of protestantism or do you think no legitimately if you read the fathers you're going to see a catholic church well i mean that's a yes and no answer on the one hand yes i think we always look for the sources that will reinforce what we already believe but no i mean in this sense that newman's famous line you know to go deep into history to cease to be protestant to go into the early church fathers i mean you can't find a corridor or a hallway anywhere that is really and truly protestant it might not be about you know adoring the blessed virgin or worshipping the eucharist or invoking the saints but you can't go that long without encountering that yeah and when you encounter what's the most troublesome is not just that they're saying it but they're not debating it yes i mean it's just it's more assumed than asserted and it's more universal than it is a local belief that eventually convinced everybody else i mean in a sense that's the way protestantism grew and why it becomes like 20 30 40 000 denominations because you know we were the presbyterian church in america or the southern baptists we're regional we're local or whatever whereas this was universal by the second third and fourth centuries and so that's an interesting point what you said like you can learn almost as much about what the church believed by what they didn't debate i hadn't really thought of that before yeah i mean i i was surprised by the third fourth and fifth centuries that marian devotion marian doctrine is in the hymns it's in the prayers it's in the homilies but there's no debate i mean jerome fights helvidius but i mean the way he refutes helvidius is by appealing to the universal belief that mary was ever virgin and all that follows from it so these things were disturbing but i was really looking only for preaching material yes and so the series that i was reading from were the sunday sermons of the early church fathers four or five volumes that i would sign out read and that's when i began to realize that they interpret the scripture better than we do better than my favorite professors preachers and teachers that augustine's line that the new is concealed in the old and the old is revealed in the new isn't just a truism it was like exactly what they would do every single sunday and not just for a paragraph or two for a couple of minutes it usually shaped their sermons and they were obviously reading not just their favorite passages from the new testament they were reading through the scriptures in a kind of lectionary style that i knew was applicable to the synagogue and the temple in the ancient ancient israel but it was not what we did yes and so you know i remember compiling in my own journal a series of parallels between jesus and moses that i picked up from ambrose where you know hey give us some of those because there's people who are watching and they're completely unfamiliar that it could be any parallels so an example of typology would be to compare jesus in the new to moses and the old so you know god sends the savior at long last to save his people but as soon as the savior was born the savior needed to be saved because of herod's tyrannical decree the targeted baby jesus and all of the hebrew male children in bethlehem well ambrose and again augustine and others just show that well that's not the first round round one was with moses god sent the deliverer to deliver his people but the deliver needed to be delivered because of the imperial decree of this tyrant named pharaoh who targeted not only the baby moses but all of the hebrew male children and so you see how god saves the savior through a man named joseph but you also find joseph in the old testament where he like saint joseph is the son of jacob you know he's the great grandson of abraham and joseph is in the line of abraham for for matthew in chapter one but he's also described as righteous he's also a dreamer and he also took the holy family of israel the family of israel down to egypt for safety you know so these parallels were so obvious to the early church fathers i had taken graduate seminars on old testament books and knew but there was never that kind of inner penetration of the old and the new and again ambrose is just getting started so you see how the holy family comes out of egypt jesus passes through the water of the jordan and he goes out into the desert to fast for 40 days and then likewise you go back and moses leads israel out of egypt through the water of the red sea where they go into the desert and he fasts for 40 days and 40 nights during which time israel undergoes the temptations jesus passed the tests that israel failed but all three times he didn't just quote the old testament the devil does that in one of the instances but he quotes from deuteronomy 6 through 8 you go back and the father showed me that that's precisely where jesus you know that's where moses had explained to the israelites why did you fail because man doesn't live by bread alone fascinating yeah and these parallels you know and there were more so that after after fasting for 40 days he gets the law on mount sinai he gives it to the 12 tribes and then after jesus 40 day fast and passing the tests he gives the sermon on the mount you know and he says i have not come to abolish the law but to fulfill the law and the prophets and so moses gives the law but it's not enough so he chooses from the 12 tribes the 12 princes who will help him govern jesus gives the sermon on the mount it's the law of the new covenant not abolishing but fulfilling the old the next thing he does is to choose the 12 disciples well moses found he needed more so he appoints 70 other men and he anoints them with the spirit jesus says the harvest is plentiful the laborers are few so he appoints 70 other disciples and anoints them wow and you know moses goes up the mountain to spend a time with you know uh you know a day in prayer with the lord he takes aaron nadev to buy you jesus goes up the mountain to spend the day in prayer he takes peter james and john you know and the transfiguration occurs to jesus just like it did to moses it's crazy when his face is a glow they're like you've got to put on a veil we can't even look in your countenance and then on the mount of transfiguration who should appear but moses and elijah and that's the law and the prophets moses gave the law elijah was the greatest of israel's prophets they also happen to survive a 40-day fast like our lord but what they're talking about ambrose points out in luke 9 31 is jesus departure which was soon to take place in jerusalem only the word for departure in the greek is exodon and so here is jesus talking about a new exodus to moses who's none other than mr exodus himself and so if they had bothered to compare notes ambrose points out in augustine too where you know moses performed some signs you know the first uh turning water into blood the first of jesus signs is turning water into wine you know joe moses is also uh executing the well i mean he's healing lepers he's also um what are some of these other uh he's opposed by the leaders and persecuted and uh you know and jesus undergoes all of these parallel experiences and then of course the passover is the tenth sign and jesus of course is going to create a new passover which is what ambrose fastened his congregation's attention to because that's the eucharist that's the fulfillment of the old that's where jesus is established i can just imagine you reading this because of course the internet doesn't exist right you're just reading these books that may not have been very well read by other protestant friends of yours are you sort of looking around being like does anybody know about this right you know we had been debating my last year in seminary uh we were we were all involved my professor and a few of my classmates in the international council on biblical inerrancy so we had a high view of scripture but there was a debate that was dividing all of these scholars and teachers and students dare we repeat the hermeneutic of the new testament writers in other words can we possibly read the old testament the way that the new testament writers did because they did it in a way that was reminiscent of the early church fathers who were just simply imitating their example but we never did it that way and the vast majority of protestant evangelical scholars even the narratives like richard longnecker would say no i mean they had the holy spirit they were apostles they had a kind of interpretive license to you know they could even misinterpret the scriptures but come up with the right teachings anyway whereas the minority report was uh based upon patrick faraban and this a small number of protestants who said of course you know paul didn't say imitate me as i imitate christ except when it comes to interpreting the old testament that's where i alone get to do what i do you know and so just imitating christ who taught the scriptures this way imitating paul who taught his congregations i'm i'm still absorbing this i'm about seven or eight weeks into the study of the fathers when i unpack the u-haul i have to preach my first sermon and i'm going through the gospels and afterwards for the first three or four weeks people are in the back shaking my hand as they're leaving saying where did you come up with this oh through serious personal research and study a lot of intellectual initiative you know i should have been using quotation marks behind the pulpit the whole time because you know i was plundering the patristic sources and after a few months i began to let them in on that and invite them to read it with me and a number of them began going down a trail which we wouldn't know exactly where it would lead but in less than two years i had studied and prayed myself into a crisis of faith because i also discovered besides these ancient fathers from the second third fourth and fifth centuries but uh donia lu and de lupac both were catholic cardinals you know and then also kangar and you know um a number of especially this guy named ratzinger uh i i found in them the same way of doing theology biblically that you found in the early church so you're reading ratzinger as a protestant now as a pastor of this church that's right i mean okay what was that like because i mean you've read this book about contraception you've changed your mind on that but as you say her broken clock is still right twice a day how did you start reading catholic sources what was that like for you as someone who was anti-catholic yeah i mean it's it's hard to summarize it it was even hard to explain it then but the uh the sense that they're not just right on contraception they're not just right on reading the old and the new together they're applying that to the eucharist we call it the lord's supper it's just a meal but wait a minute for them universally it was a sacrifice it would make more sense if it was a sacrifice because it's the passover of the new covenant but how can it be a sacrifice so these questions that were rising in my mind were being answered by the patristic sources and so the first thing i did as a pastor was to implement weekly communion we did it four times a year and they thought well that's just ritualism and i said well it's the renewal of the covenant so i said to my elders you know who formed this session of the congregation you know it is the liturgical counterpart to renewing your marriage covenant you know and so four times a year otherwise you know familiarity breeds contempt it's ritualism and so i got a unanimous vote eventually let's do it weekly yeah and so when we change to weekly communion it really changed the way we were experiencing god's word as a congregation the sacraments too and so um i mean i was saying that we are reformed protestant catholics that the roman catholics get it wrong but there's still so much that they have right we can't we can no longer just make this the syllogism if it's roman it's wrong that's right now we've got to look and see if they might be right every once in a while because the blind dog gets the acorn yeah and and again but who put rat singer in your hand how did you end up with him well i spent a lot of time in used bookstores then and now yeah i mean it's like a second i love it too yeah i love facebook stores oh you get lost in there yeah you know when we were reading uh a small gary smalley's book the the languages of love um we we figured out all of our kids we figured out mom but they couldn't figure out dad until my my daughter you know the love language is books that's my love language but i would spend a lot of time in used bookstores and i i had found don you lose the bible in the liturgy from shadow to reality i read the lupok and so i come up i stumbled upon it was a um a box of books for a dime and there was a battered copy of introduction to christianity by ratzinger i didn't know who he was seaberry published it so it might be methodist or episcopalian i'm reading it in 30 or 40 pages it still isn't obvious that he's catholic right and i'm like this guy thinks like me only more and better it's the covenant it is communion it is family it is god is father and then i kept reading and i'm like i'm getting deeper and deeper and more in trouble you know yeah and he recasts soteriology so that you know it's no longer the case that god the father is looking down on jesus hanging on the cross and he can't see his beloved son he can only see our sin and so he's only bearing the wrath that is being vented by the father you know that we've really deserved by us and that always bothered me i always defended it because that was the gospel according to luther and calvin and i thought for paul and ratzinger was explaining the deep logic of the atonement through jesus suffering in a way that was not substitutionary but representative as he put it and i'm like yeah that's the new adam and so by now i realize that my integrity requires me to resign from the past from the from the church i'd also been teaching at a local presbyterian seminary now why why did you have to resign i mean why couldn't you just adopt certain elements and yeah i mean i was so flexible i was so adaptable i was adapting every element to the protestant world you know thinking if i'm out in front and i am moving towards small c catholic things i can take them and so i did week after week for months and months but as i approached my first year and beyond i began to realize i am hiding secrets from them and you know the adage you don't keep secrets secrets keep you and so i was also hearing applause you know oh you're teaching your preaching is so good so i was invited to teach some courses at the local presbyterian seminary and those went even better than the sermons and so they'd invited me to consider being the dean of the seminary so i met with the chairman of the board one day for lunch to kind of show him i don't have my doctorate this makes no sense at all and he said we've discussed it we voted it's unanimous we want to offer you the job to be the dean you could teach the courses you want redesign the curriculum i'm like i would need a doctorate well we'll pay for that you know you'll go to catholic you and it was at that moment i realized okay i'm being duplicitous and i said to steve i can't tell you why i must say no but i must say no oh my goodness because this must have been your dream job it was the dream of a lifetime that i thought i might have when i'm 50 and i'm barely 30 at this point not even and so i go home kimberly has been fasting and praying for me thinking that i might be fired because yeah and when i told her what he offered me she was jubilant when i told her what i said to him i thought she was going to slug me and then she asked me why would you say no and all i could all i could say just came out sideways was you know someday i'm going to have to stand before our lord and give an account for what i taught the people he died for and i used to know what it was now i'm not so sure and i will not be able to hide behind my favorite professors and say lord i just taught what i heard them teach me and at this point i don't know you know and so she hugged me and she said oh i respect your integrity and i'm thinking well that will not put food on the table you know because i could sense that this was the end of my career as a seminary professor never becoming a dean as a pastor as well for a growing congregation that was getting more and more excited and and so she asked me what does this mean i'm like i'm gonna have to resign and she looked at me like okay so much for integrity i mean okay you have to but what are we gonna do you know yeah just just a question here because you know sometimes we can mischaracterize protestants as not believing in the real presence whereas we do obviously protestantism or protestantism is a broad range so so why why get so scared at this point why not just think well catholicism has some true beliefs but there are protestant denominations that also hold those beliefs so i just need to find that's right i was trying to prove to myself to my seminarians and to my parishioners that the overlap between catholic and protestant is not five or ten but more like 45 50 60 65 70 percent and when we were doing the communion the weekly communion we were still calling it the lord's supper i would refer to it as the eucharist because the early church fathers did but when i would explain real presence i could actually quote calvin and i'd used wallace's book calvin and the sacrament as my text for teaching the seminary course on the sacraments but whenever it came to calvin explaining what he means by real presence he would always default to spiritual presence yes but it's real presence and i'm thinking okay what does that mean how do you how do you flesh it out i mean no pun intended but i mean is there more holy spirit packed per square inch there at the eucharist than everywhere else you know it just doesn't make sense to reduce real presence to spiritual presence when the early patristic sources are unanimous about it being his body his blood soul and divinity his resurrected body but his body and and so i realized you know you can only play that game up to a point and now you're just playing games in fact i felt like i even told kimberly i feel like i'm playing church i am pretending to be able to confess the eucharist when it's obvious from scripture and the fathers that i am playing church that i am not really confecting what they would have identified as the eucharist there's no laying out of hands through the bishop these elders had laid their hands upon me using the orthodox presbyterian church black book but it just it began to feel like a close counterfeit to the real catholic faith and so you know i told kimberly i'm going to go in search of a church that fits what i'm finding in sacred scripture and in the early church fathers because it's not only exciting as my congregation would acknowledge it's true and i didn't think at that point that meant becoming catholic episcopalian perhaps probably orthodox so i began to look at the eastern and the russian orthodox churches and all and uh i came away i can't go into this i promise but i came away convinced that the arguments against the philly oakway being added the arguments against the filioque being true the filioque clause is just that part of the nicene creed where the spirit proceeds from the father and the son and this is really a kind of article of division for east and west and so the orthodox deny it and in the eastern right churches you don't deny it but you don't have to profess it yeah and so i realized okay you know i'm not going to be able to go orthodox even though their grasp of the liturgy encompassing heaven and earth matches what i'm finding in the fathers but so did jerome and others as well in the west so at this point i'm just in the desert cambril and i moved back to the college town where we first met and fell in love i am applying for a job at kroger's the local grocery store filling out an application to be a box boy i just have to make some money and so i see the president of the college where both of us had graduated he asked me what i'm doing i'm just here you know at the grocery store and he says you know i can't i heard you were back in town i've got an opening would you consider applying to be the assistant of the president it would mean fundraising part-time teaching and i'm like twist my arm please i would love to and so within a 24-hour period i had filled out the application to be a box boy at kroger's grocery store and ended up being for two years the assistant of the president i got a part-time job at the two presbyterian churches uh doing youth ministry which i thought was safe because i wouldn't be going into doctrine i wouldn't be doing sermons although i ended up teaching them all about the covenant as family pointing to the church which is international and catholic and you know so i think about 14 or 15 out of the 20 high school kids i was teaching ended up becoming catholics within the next 10 or 15 years uh which made me persona non grata at those congregations yeah and after two years it became clear to me that i had to dive into this for a doctoral program to really make certain that i i knew what i was doing and so reluctantly kimberly agreed that we could move to marquette milwaukee where marquette had offered me a full ride a scholarship and i'd gotten to offer a full scholarship at notre dame as well but they didn't have the people that i found at marquette father keith who was an expert on covenant theology and this other material that i love so much so that summer of 85 we moved out to milwaukee from grove city pennsylvania but not before she had extracted a pledge from me that i would wait at least five years to become a catholic and so i thought well that will make it look intellectually respectable to all of my peers you know yes and so uh my first semester near the end we have been reading through i think justin martyr and his description of second century worship and there were like eight or ten elements that he had enumerated i wondered what if any of that is left in a mass i don't i don't i never gone to a mass i never wanted to go to a mass but i just wondered is there is there any residue any remaining element and so i i found out that there was a mass on a weekday at noon in a basement chapel that's just sounded safe to me so i skipped lunch and went there with my notebook my bible sat in the back pew i'm just going to be like a journalist observing and writing and almost from the first minute you know i am looking at the list and i'm checking off every box from justin martyr it isn't some residue i mean the whole thing is residual the whole mass as justin described it as what i was experiencing and you know that's amazing because most people go to holy mass and later on down the line they hear about saint justin martyr and what he had to say and like oh wow that's just like mass whereas you had it in reverse you read it and then went looking for it for those who aren't familiar with it maybe quickly share with us what justin said because i think well the catechism has a paragraph i don't remember the exact number but i think there are nine or ten elements in terms of the opening right the uh the penitential right the the the prayers the reading of the scriptures you know and the preaching as well and then the eucharist and uh i'm missing a few of the elements but um i had them i had been reading them in a doctoral seminar and so to have each and every element line up every every single part of the checklist checked off uh it was prepping me for the the eureka moment because i'm not kneeling i wasn't standing i was just sitting jotting observations and when i heard the words of consecration for the first time in my life and i mean as soon as he finished that line you know take this and either this is my body i mean i'm looking straight ahead and feeling like all of my doubt is just draining out of my head my heart and i'm like my lord and my god that is you and i felt like doubting thomas like that is not bread that is your body what's going on here and then when he consecrated the chalice i found myself literally drooling with this holy thirst for the precious blood and i'm trying to sift through these thoughts these emotions and then everybody began to chant lamb of god who takes away the sin of the world by the time by the time they said it three times they dropped to their knees and he elevated the host and he says behold the lamb of god suddenly i have this eureka moment on aha you know i'm going to the back of the bible looking at the book of revelation where i knew from translating all 22 chapters that lamb of god is the title used for jesus there more than all of the other titles put together and no other new testament writer uses the technical liturgical term for the lamb of god and so i'm seeing it then i'm seeing holy holy holy the glory the amen the alleluia and i'm seeing in john's description of the heavenly vision this liturgy that includes the angels and the saints by the time everybody's back from having received holy communion they're kneeling silence giving thanks i'm looking down i've flipped through about 15 pages and i'm seeing for the first time in the apocalypse what i just saw for the first time in the mass and i'm like where have i been you know this is just a basement chapel uh a weekday mass but it's the heavenly worship of the angels and the saints and so everybody leaves after the benediction an hour later i haven't budged i'm sitting there somewhat stunned trying to figure out okay i went downstairs to a basement chapel for a monday mass i went through the wardrobe to narnia yeah i mean i lift up your hearts we lift them up to the lord i was lifted up to heaven the songs the prayers the sacrifice and the lamb it was a perfect match i spent the rest of the afternoon in the library i checked out about a dozen books i was going to tell kimberly but i thought better of it and so i i read the book of revelation that night with the greek there in the english translation and by around 3 am i closed the books i thought you know kimberly's a night owl if she's still awake i i deserve she deserves an explanation she was fast asleep so i didn't tell her and i went back the next day and for the next two weeks i was attending daily mass and matt i got to tell you it felt like 10th grade when i found myself reading scripture falling in love with our lord the pages of the gospels and especially paul only now it's the eucharist and so i get there early i stay afterwards i am kneeling before the tabernacle and i and i realized i gotta tell her so when i finally came clean and i told her the first thing she reminded me of was you still have four and a half years you promised yeah and so eventually after you know getting spiritual direction from a priest and meeting with monsignor broskowitz the pastor who eventually received me of the church i told her one night i need you to pray i need to pray about this because delaying obedience to what i know is true is feeling more like disobedience every day i had written that into my prayer journal i had practiced the line before dinner and when it came out she looked at me and she said that's clever you know i thought so too but i mean she knew i was sincere i was just being rhetorically sly or so i thought so she came to me later that night and she admitted that she had prayed and she knew what she had to do and that was to let me and she said how long will it be you know well it was less than five weeks so much for five years and and uh so she told me i i want to come when you're received to that easter vigil mass whatever it is and so for the next few weeks i tried to show her that you'll hear more of the bible in the mass than you've ever heard in our bible services you'll also experience the power of the real presence and finally it got just too tense i was trying to debate her into submission and slowly you discover you're not the third person of the holy trinity so we went on a date the week before that fateful night and then we were sitting in total darkness and she asked me to explain that i couldn't because no mass had been like the easter vigil before then we had candles then they were lit she said can you explain i said you'll see you'll see and i didn't know what i was going i just wanted to come off like the expert and and what happens you know with the exiltet and then the easter vigil literally it's so beautiful she was stunned and amazed as i was you know and then when the old testament readings are finished we had gone through seven old testament readings with a psalm in between every one you weren't kidding you know like yeah i told you i had no idea and then when we stood for the gospel and we read about the resurrection she was squeezing my hand so tight i i wasn't sure she was upset is everything all right this is glorious wow i told you you know yeah and then after the creed the after the homily the creed but the homily monsignor just brought all of these texts together tied under the eucharist and even she was really impressed by the homily was he leading you through rcia because you said five weeks that's a short time yeah i mean he said to me i said do i have to go through a whole year of rcia he laughed and he said you could teach the rcia at this point after our conversations yeah and so he said i could receive you i'll give you instruction so he had me reading a lot of newman cyril of jerusalem i can't remember all of the others but it was mostly stuff that i'd read before and he knew that but he also knew that i was pretty well prepared for it and so that night it was like the heavenly jerusalem opening up and welcoming home and then when i got home it was tension stress and all the rest and so the next four years are some of the most painful anguished reading in the rome sweet home book because i it really it took me a long time to live out okay i'm not the holy spirit i can't set her straight you know i can love her better with the help of the sacraments than i can without them but i'm going to have to let her hear her father in heaven and that's what happened about four years later on ash wednesday she shocked me in a phone call when i was out in california she was here in steubenville looking for housing and the rest as we say is history that is that's that's amazing i want to delve into other things sure absolutely and we've got some people in the live stream we have around 800 people watching right now what yeah and that nuts so i have something to do with your saturday no welcome i am so happy to have so many here but before we do that i have to say a thanks to our sponsors over at catholicchemistry.com catholic chemistry is the fastest growing dating site and app um it's modern and beautifully designed so if you are somebody who is single who is hoping that the lord is calling you to the sacrament of marriage please go check out catholicchemistry.com it was founded by a good friend of mine chuck gallucci the two of us used to work at catholic answers so he he's a solid orthodox catholic he found himself just unimpressed with many of the dating sites out there and so they've started this and it's absolutely fantastic here's one uh email they've received from somebody they said decided to message grace she lives only an hour away took a chance and asked if she wanted to meet up a couple of days later and we've been dating ever since so there you go grace is out there just waiting for you so click the link in the description below so that they know that we sent you and start your uh account over at catholicchemistry.com all right i've never heard of that before yeah yeah it's actually really glad i didn't need it yeah i think back in the day catholic dating sites seemed a little weirder than they do today whereas i think now today people realize a lot of people are on online and they even make you kind of say like are you a traditional catholic and do you pray the rosary you got to choose all these things so there you go but all right okay glory to god so you got brought into the catholic church um let me ask you this what would your advice be to somebody who's watching right now and they do feel sort of drawn to the catholic church ah but they're nervous or they're afraid what would you say i mean i would say get back to the basics and that is um remind yourself and our lord that you jesus christ are my savior but you're also the lord of lords and so i want you to exercise your lordship in my life more not less more than ever before second you know the word of god inspired in sacred scripture is just that it's the word of god it's powerful and so just because solo scriptura might be wrong doesn't mean that the primacy of scripture in your life isn't really a useful instrument to follow our lord and to live out his lordship and so keep reading scripture prayerfully carefully you know and the third thing obviously would be to read the church fathers little close to this yeah read the church fathers you know jurgens three volumes work the faith of the early fathers is such a great source but i would also i would also say that if you think you might be mostly convinced make this more than an intellectual head trip supernaturalize this by going to the saints or especially the blessed virgin mary you know i got to the point where i felt like 99 out of 100 catholic teachings were true but that last 100th element was marian doctrine marian devotion it just seemed so foreign to me and so i remember just kind of phil feeling uncomfortable with my own pride and reluctance and so i i somebody had given me a rosary i picked up the beads and alone in my office at work i just said lord if this offends you i apologize in advance but honestly i don't think it will because you gave your mother to be my mother and you've empowered her like i could never empower my mother but i'd like to you know so i'm going to pray this and i'm going to entrust to her some intention that has felt like it's impossible and i did finish the rosary and that is what really flipped a switch because it didn't occur to me suddenly but months later i realized that not only had she heard my prayer and answered it after i had almost given up but she'd also manifested other kinds of things that you would associate with a mother who loves you more than you realize and you know i was saying this a few minutes ago uh at the at the top of our conversation that these two guys who drove all the way down from orlando to palm beach prayed a rosary together as brothers as protestants slowly and when i asked them if they never prayed and they mentioned that they just finished they looked at each other and you could almost sense that their fraternity had become supernatural you know not just in christ but also in the blessed virgin and so i would say you know that the rosary has become my favorite prayer for 36 or 37 years it's made the gospels come alive she's blessed my research my scholarship my marriage my family and then here the year of saint joseph as pope francis announced it you know you suddenly begin to see marian art and the beauty of our lady through his eyes that's what he woke up to that's what he went to you know to sleep with and there's just a sense that i would say make it so that it travels from the head to the heart all right here's another question from eric holmberg who's one of our patrons thank you eric he asks this what would you say to a protestant who is hungry for tradition liturgy and the eucharist but is considering orthodoxy to put it another way what is the single best refutation of the orthodox claim to be the true church jesus founded well i hadn't encountered the writings of james likudis yet but i would recommend him uh james lacutus was orthodox he became catholic and then he became the president of catholic china for the faith and a dear friend of 30 years we plan to reprint his books they're available at bookfinder.com and maybe amazon but bookfinder.com gives you the widest and the cheapest choices i would also say this that i wanted to go orthodox i was drawn to the tell us why yeah i mean you don't you don't have the the pope the stumbling block of the pope at least yeah i mean i was ordained a pastor and i could be ordained as a married man a priest in the orthodox church and so i wouldn't have to commit professional suicide like i would if i became a catholic and so what i did was i traveled around and i visited some orthodox christians and i also visited a few orthodox churches and i realized very early that that orthodoxy is ethnic there's greek there's ukraine there is estonian there's serbian there's russian and you know i i always sort of no i didn't always i had recently become suspicious of denominations you know and just the proliferation of denominations and then when i realized there were more than a dozen autocephalous orthodox bodies that are all defined by their ethnicity i coined a term back then called denominationalism that if there's one thing the new covenant isn't that the old covenant was was ethnic and nationalistic it was israel first and it just struck me that when i went to a greek orthodox church it was more greek than i could be and i felt like an outsider and so the other thing too is the filioque way and we can't get into this but it's one of my favorite discoveries that if you just just just for people at home the philly oakway was something inserted by the church after the council of nicaea that's right the orthodox are right on that but your point is that the the orthodox are wrong to deny that the holy spirit proceeds from the father and the son that's right i mean in the seventh century and beyond you have a semi-aryan heresy spreading in the west mostly in spain that the church in the west has to respond to and so the bishop of rome does by inserting the filioque so that the full divinity of the holy spirit is affirmed more explicitly but there's also more to it than that because there was already tension between east and west and so the east didn't accept that decision and began to controvert it over the course of the next few centuries until finally in 1054 they have the mutual excommunications and so more calmly and dispassionately i went and looked at the philly oak way kind of wanting to find that the orthodox were right but you know by common consent the only way we know the so-called eternal processions of the son from the father and the holy spirit from the father and through the son or from the father and the son the only way we know the eternal perceptions are through the temporal missions and nobody disputes that in the temporal missions the father sends the son to become man and according to the farewell discourse in john 15 and 16 the father and the son send the holy spirit and so if the missions reveal these eternal processions and there's no way to know the processions apart from the missions then you know if everybody is affirming that the father and the son send the holy spirit then how can the holy spirit proceed from the father and not from the son and you know there are other things too it's one of my favorite topics but it's so esoteric nobody really do you think that eastern catholics that it would be good if they began adding the filioque because sometimes i'll encounter eastern catholics who almost essentially want to be orthodox and begin to adopt beliefs that the orthodox church holds or deny beliefs that the catholic church teaches i met a christian eastern catholic and he really didn't want to have to accept the immaculate conception for example and for him i think he was thinking well if i if i go to this church maybe i don't have to accept the immaculate conception because it's basically orthodoxy but sort of with the pope do you see what i mean we need another hour on this oh i'd love it i would love it too okay but i mean i feel like once i struck down this road it's like a san francisco street i won't be able to stop [Laughter] long boarding down the same okay let's do that another another time um here's a question from our patron um david barr actually it's a comment he says two years ago i started reading the apostolic fathers to prove my brother wrong who was considering catholicism at the time as of this easter two of my brothers my wife and myself are all coming into the church scott hans testimony and scholarly work and pints with aquinas contributed significantly to my journey god bless wow you must love it that must never get old hearing things like that well you're ready yeah yeah glory to god i once met a priest who said lord use my and he used a different word dung as manure for their growth so like use it all use the things i say that are good uh chris uh says thank you for your super chat he says dr han are you able to put into words how you read scripture differently as a catholic which may help other protestants in how to read the bible you know this again is a tip of an iceberg type of question and answer so i mean yes what i would pinpoint is this a liturgical hermeneutic that scripture was written to be read in the liturgy for the purpose of illuminating the mystery that is about to happen and then the eucharistic mystery is exactly what fulfills the word of god in scripture and the fact that jesus only uses the phrase the new testament one time in luke 22 20. and the earliest reference to the new testament in the new testament is in first corinthians 11 25 in both instances it's referring to the institution narrative paul says on the night he was betrayed he takes the chalice and he says this is the cup of my blood the blood of the new testament jesus doesn't go on to say write this in remembrance of me he says do this and most of the 12 never ended up contributing a single book to the collection of 27 that we call the new testament but not because they were lazy or disobedient but because he said do this and they did this jesus never wrote anything he never commanded them to write anything i'm glad that some of them did most of them didn't but what they all did was this eucharist that he calls the new testament and so for me one of the biggest breakthroughs was that the new testament was the the sacrament before it became a document according to the document and it doesn't devalue the new testament as a document in fact it invested with a sacramentality to draw from pope benedict's language in verbum domini that scripture itself is sacramental you know and so when you see that the canonization of the new testament occurs roughly around 380 with pope damasus but that same year that same pope in the same city of rome also canonized what we call the roman canon well what a coincidence well no the new testament was canonized as a liturgical enactment and the roman canon was canonized because this is the first half of the mass of the catechumens this is the the liturgy of the eucharist and so one hand washes the other you get so much more out of the bible not only connecting the old to the new but connecting sacred scripture with the sacred liturgy and from there it isn't like while you end up having to kind of forget about a biblical worldview now suddenly you have a sacramental cosmology a sacramental liturgical anthropology that we were made for worship and i mean i have letter and spirit the book i also have consuming the word so many of my books show what difference it makes to read the bible liturgically well here's a question from my sister emma fred she we were speaking last night and she said she was reading the new testament ignatius study bible which you helped put together and right uh emma says this um thank you for your time and effort you put into the ignatius new testament study bible i'm up to revelation and it is so beautiful i am learning so much will you ever do an old testament study bible if so do you have an eta yes we do and yes we have okay so it was in 1997 that father fess who asked me if i would help and i said yes but only if you hire this grad student who just graduated he's living with my family curtis mitch for 22 years curtis mitch has been doing all the heavy lifting i am so glad to be the general editor but i have really needed to guide him very little we we basically can finish each other's sentences but in december of 2020 uh we finished the last book of the old testament zechariah and so thanks be to god and thanks be to curtis mitch that this labor of love that has spanned more than two decades should be out i suspect i don't think by the end of 2021 there's just too much editing still to be done but i think there'll be a one volume wow volume i mean a one volume edition of the ignatius catholic study bible you might say well the new testament is just too thick those use thick pages we'll probably end up using onion skin but hopefully not the kind that your marker bleeds through you know so just like the protestants have 30 or 40 study bibles we're going to have this one and i'm just so grateful and emma thank you for reading through the whole new testament that makes my day and she also asks what is your number one recommendation for an old testament study bible for someone with a short attention span in other words she doesn't want something too academic but until your book gets here what would you recommend as an old testament study bible well i would say so many of the individual old testament books are now out from ignatius press genesis is a standalone exodus is as well i believe deuteronomy certainly the psalms the wisdom literature the prophets and so by the time emma gets through all of the ones that are out we'll have the rest out the whole thing will be there yeah excellent let's see here based byzantine thank you for your super chat says dr han i have been a huge fan of you since i was a kid and reading rome sweet home really oh sorry and reading homes i was wondering why he was reading romans at home as a kid and rome a reading room seeing home really solidified his faith as a teenager just because we've mentioned this book wrong sweet home a few times where can people get that book well it's available from ignatius press i'll put a link in the description sure actually yeah and obviously from jeff bezos at amazon you can go to bookfinder.com my favorite spot and find it more cheaply a used version and you can get something that is fair or good or like new but i also just communicated with mark brumley who father festival was put in charge of ignatius and mark invited kimberly and me to do a uh a recorded version we've never done an audio version some other person did and so within the next year or so we are really eager to go back you know i i think it's excellent yeah and we also are thinking about approaching ignatius about possibly doing like a 30th edition you know it came out in 93 so in 2023 we could kind of add uh an afterward and reflect upon three decades of what it's like to live this and you know i i we have six kids and now 20 grandkids just from the first three oldest the next two jeremiah and joseph are actually in the seminary studying for the priesthood for the diocese and so may 21st please remember our jeremiah in prayer that's when he's going to be ordained a priest and then joe will follow a year later to the transitional diaconate and end of the priesthood but i i must say that i knew that the catholic faith was true when i came in you know 35 years ago i just had no idea how true it is how beautiful the truths are how powerful the beauty of the catholic faith is it's like the good news it wasn't subtracting the gospel from as a protestant it was adding but now i just feel as though it's more like multiplying the good news exponentially yeah without exaggerating it it's like too good to be true it's the truth this is something i keep encountering with protestant converts they don't think they had to shed any of their old beliefs necessarily obviously some they're entering something much larger and more grand i want to ask you your ques about solar scriptura uh how would you define it because we don't want to straw man uh our protestant brothers and sisters as they would define it and then why is it false okay so there are two ways to approach solo scripture like there are two ways to approach sola fidei um you know faith alone i mean aquinas puts into his eucharist to kim sola fide sufficient only faith suffices when it comes to the mystery of the eucharist and so i would say that a catholic could affirm sola fide only faith will justify us adverbially it's only but not faith alone adjectivally if faith is alone then it's dead without love and likewise i would say that the dominicans already in the uh the 13th and 14th centuries were affirming not sola scriptura but primus scriptura as brian tierney and other historians have shown and that is only scripture technically speaking is inspired word of god the magisterium is protected by the spirit so that it only teaches infallible truth and faith and morals when it is teaching in a definitive way likewise the sacred tradition is like is efficacious that that when you celebrate the sacraments they affect grace whether the priest is holy or immortal sin but but there's something unique about inspiration inspiration our tradition means dual authorship it's not 50 50 human and divine it's more like christ it's a hundred percent human but it's a hundred percent divine so matthew mark luke and john aren't stenographers or amanuenses they're full writers they're authors but the holy spirit is the principal author and so i would say that you end up discovering in the catholic tradition a higher view of scripture than you'll find among the southern baptists but it's always subordinated to the in the incarnated word but the incarnated word is precisely what you find in the eucharist and so scripture is always subordinated to that but the cut you know the cut to the chase the short answer is that when i read scripture i discovered in scripture that scripture is not the only authority that's the conventional and protestant way of thinking of sola scripture that scripture alone is the authoritative source for the word of god when in fact scripture tells us in 2nd thessalonians 2 15 hold fast to all that you've received from us either in writing or by word of mouth hold fast to the tradition the parodisus and so paul is reminding the thessalonians and all of us that what we have to hold fast to is the tradition and there are two forms written and oral tradition written is obviously scripture oral tradition aren't the whispered secrets in the convents and the monasteries but what you have in the liturgy the prayers of the eucharist that go back to holy thursday in the upper room and much much more the fact that we do worship on sunday not the sabbath we do baptize infants and not circumcise them all of the oral tradition is what scripture points to as being uniquely authoritative alongside of scripture but once you realize jesus said do this not write this then you're grateful for the writings but you realize that the writings began 25 30 40 years after the death and resurrection and so how could the church flourish and spread well because they were doing this and what is this we call it the eucharist jesus called it the new testament so the new testament church was spreading the new testament faith before the new testament books were even begun and so just second thessalonians 2 15 likewise first timothy 3 15 where you have scripture telling us that the pillar and foundation of truth is the church the household of god now i would have preferred if paul had said that the pillar and foundation of truth is scripture but if scripture is pointing to the church as well as to tradition then you realize that sola scriptura is nowhere taught in scripture but in fact what scripture does teach subverts the notion of solo scripture as though that is our only authority no i remember even calling dr j.i packer and dr rc sprole and asking these guys you know where does scripture teach solo scriptura you know and they would point to second timothy 3 16 only scripture inspired but you know scripture's inspired but it doesn't say only scripture is authoritative and so packer was really honest with me he said you know it really is for us the presupposition of our faith as evangelicals and like wait a second if our presupposition is not demonstrated from scripture how could we say that you can't believe anything unless it's really that's right i i've found it helpful when speaking to protestants to say that tradition makes explicit what's implicit in scripture although that's not always the case because you have the books of the bible that aren't implicit in scripture i don't think it's either implicit or explicit that god won't inspire further apostles either or through or you know if jesus revelation ended with the death of the last apostle i don't see that in there if jesus is establishing a new covenant and that's a kind of family you know in most households more is caught than taught you don't write down all the rules you just live the life i would say that the liturgical tradition of the church is prior and that scripture is finally written and canonized for the liturgy to be read and proclaimed and all you know i remember asking father joseph leanhart at marquette he was a jesuit he's a patristic expert how would you respond to sola scriptura he was a a jesuit i was still a protestant and he looked at me and he knowingly said okay if you recognize second thessalonians 2 15 and you're reading augustine for this doctrinal seminar on augustine i think augustine would say that really what scripture teaches is solo traditio tradition alone and that there's oral tradition but there's also written tradition but the transmission of the truth and the life that's what scripture teaches that's what augustine teaches and that's also what day verbum chapter two teaches and that sent me stirring to read dave chapter two and i'm like it nails it yeah i can hardly think of a single person i've ever talked to who read daily vermouth the dogmatic constitution on divine revelation one of the 16 documents of vatican ii and arguably the most authoritative and you know the most formative or transformative you read the first three chapters and you realize they don't have a lower view of scripture than anybody but they recognize that the overarching category that is drawn from the new testament is the tradition that is the transmission of the truth of the life of christ that comes from the spirit to the apostles through the sacraments and the proclamation of the word and all the rest and once you just adjust your lenses that way suddenly it's like three-dimensional it's scripture liturgy and the magisterium but the magisterium is not like the supreme court the magisterium is like an apostolic organism they're proclaiming scripture they're celebrating the sacraments and they're empowered by the spirit to teach infallibly what you need to know to avoid the toxin of heresy and that sort of thing uh declues views who's got an excellent youtube channel that people should check out says like you i love saint thomas and the communio theologians many think they are i think he's about here we go uh let's see here sorry that just got uh i think he's saying many of them are being criticized today does that make sense yeah sure they're somehow here it is sorry many think they are incompatible even label the communio thinkers as modernists what would you say another hour please uh let me try to give bullet points you know my favorite theologian in the 20th century is the dominican regional garage lagrange by far he is the best expositor of saint thomas who's the best expositor of augustine was the best expositor of the old and new testament uh my second favorite is ratzinger who i think is the best of the new the nouvelle the illusion the best of the racehorse month theologians i i think that de lupoc is brilliant i have learned so much from him but when it comes to nature and grace i think that he's wrong but for all the right reasons because he wants to re-historicize with the old and the new so much of what would have been become abstract categories of nature grace likewise donaloo and khangar i would say what matt levering is doing he's a dear friend and a great scholar and a very prolific writer he's doing racehorse montomism tomism is the noun racehorse mont is the modifier there is so much truth that is rediscovered by going back to the sources although if you go back to the 1800s you'll discover that the thomas like franzaline and others were doing the same thing that the lubach and khan gar and dania lou were doing only better but i don't think it's an either or i think if you subordinate racehorse month theology to the perennial philosophy of aquinas you're going to end up with the happiest and most fruitful intellectual marriage you can have okay yeah thank you dennis vu says dr han hi from one of your former students hello to dennis we text almost every week oh really he says can you comment on what attending the latin mass has done for you i attend daily how has this changed your prayer life and perspective of the sacred liturgy all right first of all every valid mass is heaven on earth it's inexhaustible you know uh every valid mass novus ordo or the trident you know the the traditional latin mass uh i am more at home in the novus order because for so many years that's all i knew that's all my parishes did uh but i must admit that um going to the traditional latin mass at our parish at noon on sunday has been transformative um and i have a preferential option for that which has been around for more than 1500 years you know we're doing something that is a valid experiment and you know concocting eucharistic prayers in the 60s canonizing them in the 70s and you know but i can't help but wonder if lex orandi lex credendai is true lexor randai the law of prayer the law of worship is the basis for lex credende the law of belief but also lex vivendi that is the law of life you know if you can just tinker with this and change it you're going to set an emotion expectations that will conclude well we can change the doctrine we can change the morals as well what's happened yeah and so i would say we've got to affirm the validity of the novus ordo mass and recognize it is inexhaustible i think we can also recognize the objective superiority of the latin mass without becoming mad trads that's what i most of the rad treads i've known over the years are angry i describe myself as a glad trad as a a trento costal as a stratismatic i'm a catholic and so you gotta write a new book with all of these puns well it's it's all of the above we don't have to give in to the sectarian impulse to say that this one movement is going to save the church yeah no the mass will save the church however it's celebrated validly in the orthodox in the eastern rights or in the dominican rite or i want to ask you what do you see as positive in this new movement of young people desiring the heritage that was never given them right well i mean then what should we be careful of and i think you're already alluding to it in becoming angry but well i think they're rightly saying to the older generation look you know you ended up rejecting something and that is the traditional latin mass and all of that went with with it we don't have the choice i mean in a certain sense you abandoned something that you felt perhaps was inferior or whatever out now moted but i think the next generation is coming up and saying you know give us a chance exposure to let us be exposed to that and when they are i think all of the the fads of the 60s the 70s the 80s into the 90s i mean fad is just an acronym for a day and you know and so i think there have been a lot of liturgical fads you know i was hearing about one priest was describing a marijuana mass in 69 after woodstock yeah and we heard about clown masses and other things too and so i just feel like let the experimentation die out you know and let the novus ordo continue and let us prepare for it at our mass 10 a.m at st peters uh it's beautiful it's beautiful it's out orientum we have the latin rails yes and we receive on our knees at the older rail as well and so to me there really is a glorious convergence um that can be done and that should be done i think it will take the next generation of priests because i can't speak for my two seminarian sons but i get a sense that they and their classmates are open if not eager to sort of appropriate both streams and make it you know i grew up in pittsburgh three rivers stadium monongahela the allegheny becomes the ohio river now i live alongside of the ohio river and i feel as though i live where the confluence of the novus ordo and the latin come together in a beautiful life-giving way okay thank you dennis yeah there's a lot of people who are like glad trads rise in a sense there's an awkwardness in reclaiming a tradition that was never yours because you weren't given it it's almost like going to an antique store and buying something beautiful but it's not really yours it's somebody else's and so i think that awkwardness that we're seeing among younger catholics myself included who are super excited about tradition is just that right it's going to be nice to see when it becomes second nature good analogy thank you yeah yeah because you know growing up i thought i thought of it uh yeah i wish i wish that i i wish i had it you know i wish i wish somebody had exposed me to the rosary to the incense i wish they didn't try to be and i know i'm not making a false dichotomy here i'm not saying you can either have a sloppy nervous order or a beautiful tridentine mass of course you can have both of each but i wish somebody had exposed that to me you know everywhere else i see irreverence it would be nice to see deep reverence in the here's a question we can never answer and that is what would it have been like if all of these rad trads had grown up only with the latin and only with the family rosary i mean would they have gone through an adolescent phase where they too would have preferred the fads of whatever decade they were raised in you know and so i don't think that the blame game is something that either side will win i just think that what we have to do is say yes and yes at yes you know both hand is the latin is the catholic phrase and uh oh here's another question for you what i think there are a lot of people who and i was one of these for a while felt um like a bit of a refugee uh i lived in atlanta and many of the parishes around me the holy mass wasn't celebrated with a great deal of reverence and so i ended up going to a byzantine church because it was there that i found reverence um but i think maybe there's a danger there too uh and i'm not sure i wonder if natural piety should lead us to want to be a part of our own heritage and not to quickly set it aside and adopt some sort of ruthenian traditions or something like that do you have any concerns about that or not really who's the australian saint again that is saint mary mckillip and you were telling me before we started that she was how was your relationship with the bishop like my understanding i got to look this up to get all the details right so i apologize if i'm getting it wrong but i believe saint mary mckillip was excommunicated by the bishop of adelaide uh who may himself have been an alcoholic she never spoke up or criticized him and eventually she was sort of brought back into the church i think there's something profoundly catholic about that especially if we want to become saints where we um it's not like a cover-up allah watergate but it is like you know shem and japheth walking in backwards to cover the nakedness of noah as saint jose maria points out and i must admit i mean opus dei has been my tribe in israel and so when they do this novus ordo because i've never seen them do the traditional latin mass it is so beautiful it is so sacred it is so reverent and transcendent that i i wasn't but on the other hand i must admit that when i was in milwaukee becoming a catholic you know you could go and it was ring around the altar i remember in the uh the chapel of saint john of arc where we were commanded by the priest to stand around the altar you know i quietly slipped out but i remember just those few awkward moments where let's just kind of wing it and uh and so i've been in many liturgies in the 80s where all of the experimentation was still going on i'm just thinking you know if if if you had to give up your career for this i don't think you would feel so comfortable just kind of dabbling um i don't want to judge their hearts but at the same time the objective reality of the mass when it's celebrated according to the rubrics with reverence you know it just is so amazing i would one last thought i was just talking to a dear friend a former student who's been celebrating the traditional latin mass for the last two years and he was describing the first time and he went back into the sacristy after it was done sang it for some carmelites and the mother superior came back and he just said this is the single most joyful day of my life because i have never been at mass where i disappeared yeah where i was joined with you all of the sisters and i was able to worship our lord it wasn't my personality it wasn't my accent it wasn't anything that was me i disappeared and this is the single most joyful day of my life do you have any advice though for a catholic who might say i just want to go to a byzantine catholic church and maybe kind of abandon the western heritage as it were well i mean the quick advice was the what was given to me when i was thinking about that myself going byzantine catholic you know my my priest friend said look you are a westerner you know german and english and so is kimberly it's not fair for you to impose that on her i mean it's one thing to change faith culture but he also pointed out that you know to shop around to do church shopping is such a vestige of your protestantism yeah and so to find the most exotic blend of coffee that's understandable but to find the most exotic blend of liturgy you know that is the subjectivism of your own background your protestantism and so you know i just think that you know you bloom where you're planted you are who you are and so if you're in america you're part of the west for better or worse and the occidental is not like inferior to the oriental you know no matter what you hear there really is a sense in which breathing with both lungs doesn't privilege the right over the left you know okay oh that's helpful dr han this has been an absolute pleasure and i cannot wait to have you back on the show especially because you're up the road now so it'll be very easy tell folks what how they can learn more about you uh the saint paul biblical center for example and sure well 20 years ago kimberlyn i founded the saint paul center for biblical theology it's available at st paul center dot com and we really had this mission of teaching scripture you know teaching catholics to read the bible from the heart of the church biblical literacy for laypeople biblical fluency for our clergy and for our educators as well but just falling in love with our lord and also reading the scripture liturgically to experience the liturgy in biblical terms that there is really a kind of uh one hand washing the other and when that happens what we find is just like on the road to emmaus did not our hearts burn within us as the scriptures were opened but always order to the opening of the eyes of faith to the real presence of christ in the breaking of the eucharistic bread and so i've done a number of books i won't go into those but nowadays i'm really working almost exclusively with emmaus road publishing and emmaus academic which are the two publishing arms of the saint paul center and there are so many good books that i see lining up and i just signed a contract with emmaus road for that aquinas books yes all right well thanks so much for being here oh what a joy [Music] is [Applause] [Music] so [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Pints With Aquinas

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Length: 98min 52sec (5932 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 27 2021