The Journey Home - 2008-03-03 - Carl Olson

[Music] good evening and welcome to the journey home my name is marcus grodi your host for this program and this is the episode of the journey home that's open line first monday when we have the chance to invite back former guests who you've heard their story in detail if you've watched the journey home in the past but now they're here to answer more of your questions more of this program is for your phone calls and emails and so immediately i want to give you the phone number and email address so you can start to call us even before i tell you who's going to be on the show the phone number is 1-800-221-9460 outside north america you can give us a call at 205-271-2980 and you can send us an email at journeyhome ewtn.com now our guest tonight is carl olsen former fundamentalist he is a writer he has a book on the rapture he's got a book on the da vinci code uh refuting both of them not in favor of thereof uh he also is an editor uh actually you're there you're the not just the editor you run the ignatius insight correct so first of all carl welcome back thanks great to have you great to see you you're way over there on the west coast way far the left coast as we call yes but it's great to have you back and uh before we get into talking about your books and a couple of questions on this episode i always ask the guest to give a little five minute or so kind of summary of your journey remind the audience of your journey well i was raised in a what we call an anti-catholic fundamentalist home in western montana and i was basically raised to believe the catholic church was a false pagan entity and that catholics were not actually saved that we were with our little group of of kind of bible christians we were the true christians and that lutherans methodists maybe mainline protestants might be saved uh there were christians there but we really believe that the catholic church right small amount in the catholic church it was zero nobody was there now this doesn't mean that we were antagonistic towards catholics i like to point that out we actually had very good friends who were catholic and some of the families i was close to growing up were catholic but i just i knew that they weren't saved i knew they weren't really christians so i spent you know time informing them of their need to repent unless they went to hell and they still remained my friends to their credit uh so that was that was good and then i went to um after a couple years of art school uh after graduating from high school i went to bible college for two years attended an evangelical bible college in canada and that was actually a wonderful experience for me because i began to learn a bit about church history began to realize there was kind of a larger a larger world out there in terms of the christian faith and actually was even exposed to a few positive words about the catholic church although you know it was kind of said quietly and on the side and then really in the from 1992 to 1995 as i was dating my wife to be and after getting married we began this journey that ended up in us entering the catholic church in 1997 and that involved reading a lot praying a lot really going through a lot of you know the questions that a lot of evangelicals go through and becoming catholic questions about mary the pope authority you know the bible the place of a tradition the liturgy all these different things the eucharist of course and we entered the catholic church in 1997 and in that same year i began master studies through the university of dallas i got a degree from university of dallas in 2000 and then over the last eight years have has been i've been fortunate to work as an editor as a catechist in a couple of different settings all right as i've been listening to here a question comes to mind i hope i'm not throwing you a curveball but one thing that i've found in my own journey of coming into the church and i've talked about this on the air is that it's as if there were verses in scripture i never saw before i mean i knew the bible front to back but all of a sudden boom where'd that come from or boy i didn't see it that way it was and i'm thinking let's say that there are some folk listening who are really coming from where you were coming from right thinking about them what was the verse that nailed you it was actually a chapter and it was it was john 6 and it wasn't as it wasn't as though i was unfamiliar with john 6 i knew it was there between john 5 and john 7. but it was more that i had read that many times as a fundamentalist then as an evangelical um what was interesting is i never heard any sermons about it well especially the latter part of that chapter i never really had any of my classes in my two years of bible college that addressed what jesus meant when he says eat my flesh drink my blood now certainly it has been addressed and i went and i found eventually various fundamentalist evangelical works that dealt with it but what i found is they really didn't seem to me to be answering with satisfaction the shocking nature of jesus words there and so john 6 be for me became this passage that did not fit into the world that i knew into the christian theological vision that i was raised with where we tried to explain it away as a symbolic language or metaphorical language that jesus was trying to just use metaphor as when he says you know i am the vine or i am the door and as i began to read more and more about it and began to read early church fathers and began to read what the catholic church but also the eastern orthodox churches believe about the eucharist i began to realize that that belief that jesus is talking about actually eating his true flesh blood soul and divinity that that made sense to me especially looking at history and then looking at other patches of passages of scripture first corinthians 10 and 11 the the last supper narratives and so forth so i think john chapter six is a whole chapter for me was kind of a wake-up call for you really just cut through because um i know something that you're very interested in and that is our culture and the fact that we're living in a day the culture of the the of the sea of our world that we live in today is a radically different culture than our grandparents lived in and the way they understood morality and the morality that's out there and and there's a sense in which i mean there are good christian folk out there living that are blind to aspects of what they have picked up from their cultures that stand in a way and stand in the way of them ever opening to the catholic church would you say looking back that that was true for you i think so to a certain degree i was raised in a first of all by you know my my parents are wonderful godly people and i think the there were two things among other things they taught me that will always be with me uh you know by god's grace and that is love of jesus christ and love of scripture and so from very early age was memorizing you know scripture and so forth even though later as a catholic i realized that i didn't know the bible nearly as well as i thought i did but you know there was this i think kind of the utilitarian almost hyper pragmatic approach that you find in certain um maybe fundamentalist circles you know there's kind of that protestant ethic a kind of protestant view of things that maybe we could trace back in certain ways to calvin and you know of course there's a lot of different streams there within protestantism but what that led to for me was being raised in a setting where theology was not something where you tried to really investigate and go deeper and deeper into for instance what is the nature of the incarnation and how does that affect me what is the nature of the the trinity and what does that mean out in the real world it was more that we just accepted that the trinity exists that jesus was fully god fully man and that was it it was more of an intellectual ascent and that's where it stopped there wasn't a sense of of mystery a sense of theological depth that i began to find uh you know saying of course in the catholic church really but also you know you find it i think in eastern orthodoxy and and even uh maybe go back a few decades in anglo uh catholicism anglicanism and that really attracted me so in junior high i fell in love with the poetry of t.s eliot which is a very his christian poetry after he became anglican was very uh incarnational very sacramental and that attracted me uh because i for me basically being christian growing up was about following rules and about being good and also about loving jesus but you love jesus by being being a good person and and sometimes it was difficult to to see there was a bit more to it that there was a really a depth to the christian faith that i i missed that i kind of hungered for the in fact i'm wondering because of your background it probably gives you a unique perspective as you can see with your potential audience when you're writing your insight tell talk to the audience about your work with the ignatius insight because the blog in which basically it's an online magazine right so we have yeah i'm the editor of ignatiusinsight.com which is an online magazine for ignatius press who is my publisher and the idea behind the website which we started about four years ago was to interview authors have excerpts from books um to also really engage with cultural issues to engage with issues going on in the church and so we write we have articles up there some of which i write about various things that are going on um in the world of theology and you know movies books music a variety of things um it's just you know it's a free resource uh and it's really a wonderful thing for people who want to get kind of a spectrum of of topics you know to read and and then the blog is part of that as well in which we kind of that's more of a running commentary sometimes humorous uh sometimes more appointed uh you know we uh address various uh current events that are going on and really try to do it always with the mind of the church you know which of course is really at the heart of what ignatius press does it's always oriented to what the church teaches and believes and so it's really it's really a blast i mean i get to design the site i get to uh you know write i get to you know basically fiddle around on my computer all day in my pajamas you know as as bloggers apparently do according to some um so it's really it's been a it's been really fun and uh you know we've been able to develop a nice group of readers and uh it's it's fun to to hear feedback from them and to to find out what people are dealing with out there because they're like you say there's so many things going on in the church in the world uh it's a very puzzling difficult time in many ways and right so well you mentioned earlier that when you were brought up fundamentalist rejecting completely the catholic church and the authority of the history right right but you accepted the trinity i wouldn't say that i rejected the history i was completely oblivious to this okay right i think you know well well you didn't even know what to reject it i mean he just didn't have it it didn't wasn't necessary it wasn't important because all he needed was oh we had we had the bible and then you had martin luther and then you had billy graham and those were kind of the three and i you know i say that only half jokingly because by the time i was 18 and going into uh into college that was essentially my view of church history we had scripture we had the acts of apostles which of course talk about those first few decades after christ's ascension um and then it's really kind of blank for about 1500 years there's this little blip of the reformation which really for me growing up was not a big deal we didn't really talk about the reformation for us it was about scripture and having a personal relationship with jesus and if you wanted to study history that was fine do you believe that if someone would ask you was church necessary yes you would say yes i think one of the fascinating things about the little group that i was raised with and my father was one of the co-founding elders of this bible chapel is that they took very seriously uh where talks in the acts of the apostles about meeting together weekly of hearing the apostles teachings of the breaking of bread we actually had a weekly communion service and of course it wasn't actually the the eucharist but it was a very reverent and a very reflective time where we would usually hear either a last supper narrative or discourse or we would maybe read first first corinthians 10 or 11 or not john 6 of course because i had nothing to do with that but you know in our mind um i think it was actually that weekly communion service even though it wasn't truly sacramental that instilled in me kind of that longing that desire for the eucharist would then your church have looked at that passage in first timothy three that says that the pillar and foundation of truth is the church would they have seen as your church i actually you know we our church was actually called a bible chapel and one reason that it was named such was because the elders really believed that the church was this invisible body of all those who were in spiritual communion with jesus christ which you know included maybe even a few lutherans and methodists and presbyterians but certainly certainly our group and some others and we didn't want to use the word church on purpose we used the word bible chapel the emphasis really i think being on bible more than chapel you know the promise of our of our group was if you come you're going to hear a good sermon about scripture all right well then this is where i'm going to push you in an area that some of my audience may get mad at me but what gets me is the audacity of groups like yours use the new testament at all as the foundation for your argument because if you reject we know from history that the canon came later and so if you reject the the church that established the canon then right right do you have to use the doctors talk about that why is that an issue with the audience uh you know logically it makes it makes no sense but i think the way around it for us at least the way i was raised is that we didn't even think about it i mean things are easier to deal with when you don't even deal with them right so that was that was part of the way around it because for us we just accepted on faith that this was the bible i had this discussion with family members in the course of becoming catholic i would say i would say to them well by what logic do you believe that say the epistle paul's epistle to philemon belongs in the new testament and one response i received was well there you go doubting the word of god and i said well no the the point that i'm making is there's a there's a reason that it's in there and yet when you read philemon just by itself it never claims to be the word of god it never claims to be supernaturally inspired and yet it is in there we believe i mean i believe as a catholic absolutely those 27 books belong there but why and for me it was studying the early church and the history of how the the bible came into to be formed as a can in the new testament and of course the the old testament as well because you know the jews of jesus time didn't have you know there were different views about what was inspired um that was really eye-opening for me because you realize that the church came before scripture and that you know first timothy 3 16 is uh that was one of that that was another one of those verses that kind of hit you alongside the head where did that come from i mean i know i've read it 20 times 30 times maybe we should i mean first timothy yeah first timothy 3 16 yeah yeah the one about the song yeah the church being the household of church is the church what about the i was thinking the second timothy 3 where it says all scripture is inspired i mean that would have been another one that was an eye-opener once you realize that he could only have been talking about the old testament and the one that comes up too is in you know acts the apostles the reference to the bereans who studied scripture and that's oftentimes used as a proof text by i say fundamentalists who want to show you that it's it's scripture alone but of course the bereans the only scripture they had was the old testament they couldn't have been referring to uh new testament texts at that time and so you know what you find is jesus established the church he passed on that authority to christ or to his apostles and and uh and then they passed on to successors and that you know early church history as it is for so many protestants to become catholic was so integral for me um and in realizing that it was all quite different than i would have imagined um and so that was a key part of becoming catholic yeah absolutely i mean as protestants we had a problem with the idea that a human being could have the infallible gift right that the church claims that the pope has when he speaks cathedral yet we believe that the group of guys had that back when they established the canon of the new testament and they were inspired by the holy spirit to actually write and then well this is i had this actually this discussion with um some jehovah's witnesses at one time a husband and wife came to the door and it was that it was quite funny because the the husband was very polite uh in fact he seemed a little bit embarrassed by his wife's vigor she was very aggressive and so they immediately started out by attacking the trinity and the question i had for them was well why do you accept and use a catholic book to attack a catholic doctrine and just kind of what are you talking about i said well you realize that the catholic church is the one who said these 27 books belong in the new testament and that the decision to have those 27 books didn't come really in local councils until the late third century fourth and then into the 400s and yet that was well after the catholic church had begun to define the exact relationship of the father son and holy spirit and that doesn't really work i said besides the watchtower society wasn't uh formed until the late 1800s they said well we trace ourselves back to men like john wycliffe and john huss and my response was well the problem there is that john wycliffe and john huff us both believed in the trinity so how can you trace yourself back to them when they reject this belief of yours and again usually it's the case they just don't know they haven't taken the time to know that history we've got a number of emails on the callers take our first caller angie from iowa hello angie what's your question hi there um i have a question years ago i read the left behind series and i was intrigued by the idea of the rapture and getting to miss out on all that tribulation that was coming but i wanted to know when exactly did that theology the rapture um come into being how that how that came about yeah great question in fact i'm going to say before you jump there she doesn't just pull this question out of the blue you actually have a book you might want to mention because this is something that's very important to your background i was raised in this belief system the fancy name for it is pre-millennial dispensationalism i'll just call it the rapture doctrine for for ease of conversation and i i was immersed in this growing up and read books by hal lindsey i actually was reading the joke i make as i was i was reading tim lahaye's books well before the new york times ever heard of him because he was writing end of the world books back in the early 1970s and of course hal lindsey's book late great planet earth in 1970 that went on to sell like 45 million copies and it really popularized this idea of the rapture which is a supposedly a secret snatching away taking away of true believers prior to a seven year period of tribulation which is then followed by the second coming and so there's these two events well that's the the simple core of this belief system and it did not exist until the 1830s as a very cl you know clear uh kind of i'm saying consistent but a well-formed uh systematic theology and it was created by a man named john nelson darby and you know for me letting go of this whole belief system was was difficult emotionally because i was so attached to it growing up i remember going to bible camp and we'd sing this song called i wish we'd all been ready which was this big hit in the 1970s and it talks about being raptured and oftentimes the appeal at the campfire time was you know accept jesus as your savior now because if the rapture happens tonight you know you're going to be left here on earth to undergo seven years of intense tribulation some three-fifths of the world's population is going to be killed and so forth well as i began to study the historical origins of this belief system what i began to find is it didn't exist until darby who was an ex-anglican priest uh living in britain and ireland put this whole system together and i cover the origins of this in detail my first book will catholics be left behind but to put it succinctly he basically posited there are two people of god on earth the heavenly people the church and the jewish people who are the the earthly people and they kind of run parallel in human history and that at some point in the very near future god will need to snatch out the heavenly people the christians so he can get back to his prophetic work dealing with the jews which is going to involve in this system a 1 000 year reign on earth this davidic jewish kingdom that will supposedly exist at the end of time and as i began to study those historical origins as i began to look at some of the proof texts that are used you know first thessalonians 4 matthew 25 the book of revelation i began to see there were a lot of problems with it historically biblically theologically and and one thing i would point out here i think it's very important is that this is not a catholic versus protestant issue really because the most uh harsh i would say harsh sometimes very good critics of this belief system are certain evangelicals especially as you know marcus from the reformed or calvinist background they really dislike the rapture doctrine and there's many fine books written by evangelicals refuting this and i happily refer to them throughout throughout my book yeah in fact scott hahn and i went to gordon conwell seminary which was really basically a calvinist calvinist i hate to say it in general because there were 40 more than 45 different denominations represented there but the majority was more of a covenant theological theological versus dallas seminary down in texas which really was a representative of the dispensationalist right perspective now let me ask you this in your process of breaking through your fundamentalist background what you realize is that these ideas on the rapture were really added on to revelation to divine revelation or the book of revelation book of revelation book revelation well yeah because the you know the book of revelation as we're talking about earlier it has that warning yeah let me read it in case people wonder very end of revelation i warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book if anyone adds to them god will add to him the plagues described in this book now we used to say that meant you can't add another book onto the canon or you can't take a wake of a book of course luther did that right in the old testament but that's not really what he's talking about no i think it is that notion of adding our false ideas or false theologies or our wrong ways of interpreting and it's what it points to ultimately is the need for authority a proper body of authority that will will interpret and will handle those difficult passages those difficult issues that come up and of course we see that through church history um the first few centuries of church history again and again the issue is the nature of the trinity and the nature of the incarnation and so many of the early councils had to address the relationship of the father son and holy spirit or the two natures of christ or the two wills of christ and whether you know who who exactly was jesus christ um without that you end up with just a a continuing splintering uh in all these notions and so i think that's true that that even though we as catholics you know as chesterton talks about this of there's a lot of room to roam as catholics but there are certain things where the the fence exists there and it's not there to keep us from having fun it's to keep us from spiritually damaging or even damning ourselves yeah i remember when i was in seminary my professor who was a baptist was the one that taught me the analogy about when is the train most free on or off the tracks yeah you know so he was talking about the need for controlled freedom all right but his idea of an authority to determine what was true he called it the quasi-unanim conclusion of the church throughout the ages so what in other words what most christians believed in most places is true right so that's why he would argue the trinity right for example well i mean that's basically democratic theology and how do you know that's being guided by the spirit we have an email here randy from missouri writes hi i am an evangelical protestant and i watch your program regularly i often hear it said that the catholic church has the quote official unquote interpretation of scripture and this makes it superior to the protestant denominations but when i read the church fathers i find a wide variety of interpretations is there a commentary that you can recommend where i can look up this quote official interpretation of a given passage of scripture if none exists why not randy thank you for your email it's a good question and what a lot of people find surprising is that when it comes to exact specific verses or passages of scripture the catholic church has actually rendered infallible interpretation on only a handful of them and most of them have to do with the sacraments and that really came out of the council of trent now i think part of what's going on here is there's kind of a and i don't mean this in any way to be a negative comment but there's kind of a way of approaching this which might uh reflect the protestant mentality which is we need to interpret every single scripture what the catholic church teaches i think to put it generally is that there are there are basic principles that we have the trinity we have the incarnation and so we interpret uh scripture in the light of these things with the aid of the magisterium but the magisterium the teaching office of the church is not interested really in running around and interpreting every single script verse in the bible what has happened throughout history when you look at the ecumenical councils is that in most cases those councils were formed because there's some kind of convene because there was some heresy about some vital point of doctrine whether it had to do with the nature of jesus christ the trinity the sacraments church authority or whatever and then that was addressed and then of course scripture was appealed to and of course there would be a appeal to statements by the church fathers the the church in looking at these early church fathers you know justin martyr polycarp augustine and so forth doesn't say anywhere that every single thing written by these men is infallible or that every single thing is completely correct what it says is these are very worthy guides that these are the early witnesses and in fact there's really only a few of the early church fathers where they they actually were in complete absolute conformity there's always a little something where things had to be clarified later on that a church and part of that just stands to reason if you're writing like justin martyr in the middle of second century we can't expect him to have figured out every single nuance of things as that you know as they flow down through time because there's no internet there's no blogger exactly television radio there's no printing press and so you might live way over here all your whole life i've never heard a copy of ephesians read to you in your church and you have you know i think the issue of of language and culture were very very big when you look at those first four five six centuries of the church a lot of misunderstandings some of them very unfortunate between the eastern and western uh churches and that part of that went into the eventual split between the eastern orthodox and the catholic church but you know as far as a commentary i mean i would really just say go first of all if you're interested in what the catholic church teaches go to the catechism of the catholic church it's uh i like to call it not glibly but it's one stop shopping in the sense that there you'll find really your questions about so many things answered as far as what the church teaches and then there's the the huge wonderful index in the back with all the references to church fathers to scripture and then go there and look up those passages that intrigue you but you won't find the church interpreting specifically every single verse of the bible would you say what's your thought on this this is the way i've looked at how do you interpret scripture as a catholic versus how i may have done it as a protestant and to me the one the keys of the catholic understanding of interpretation of scripture is the importance of of the kind of concentric circles of context how do you understand ye must be born again you know john 3 well you don't want to take that verse out of its immediate context of that paragraph or the immediate context of the book of john the whole book of john the immediate context of the new testament the immediate concepts of the entire bible in the media context of sacred tradition which scripture's a part of and then you've got the rule of faith of the church i mean all these contexts are absolutely important to understanding what it means to be born again and when as protestants we didn't always do that right we would take that verse then we might grab another verse proof text or a line two things that really if we were honest about the the context in which they were written why they were written putting them together is really not quite right and yet sometimes we would do that i think a great example of how scripture should be approached is pope benedict's book jesus of nazareth which is a profound book a beautiful book and he gives proper credit to biblical scholarship where appropriate he also shows that we need to read the scripture with in the with the mind of the church with the heart of prayer with the with the proper attitude and disposition i think it's a great example of how to do that let me take one more phone call before we take a break this comes from george in wisconsin hello george what's your question for us my question for your guest is what is the great apostasy that fundamentalists always turn to to say that the catholic church is not the one true church thank you george i think that's where the church says it's okay to drink beer i think that's no i um there well it it's usually it's usually used and i think it's sometimes used in different ways but i think it's usually used to refer to the reign of constantine in the early 300s and that is a point of really clear demarcation for a lot of not all but for a lot of of protestants especially more fundamentalists maybe some evangelicals again speaking generally because many of them like say dr tim lahaye wrote the co-author of the left behind books in his non-fiction books he talks about how constantine took pure unadulterated christianity and paganized it and brought in all these pagan elements and this is where we have the birth of of roman catholicism supposedly and we have all these corruptions of the pure the pure faith founded by jesus christ now the irony to that is that dan brown the author of the da vinci code says it's the exact opposite that that constantine ruined great beautiful paganism by incorporating bringing in christianity i don't know if you know those two men can get together sometime and work it out but uh it's it's kind of ironic because really when we have a chapter senator miso and i have a chapter on constantine in our book the da vinci hoax and in writing that it was fascinating to study first of all i think constantine is really one of the most complex enigmatic figures of the ancient world i think he did a lot of good things a lot of great things but he was not a theologian he convened the council of nicaea that's a very big plus obviously a key council in church history but you know constantine was not always theologically orthodox he had political motives he had other things that were going on you know what's important though is that you do see when you look at the church fathers when you look at the councils that there's a clear stream of consistency when it comes to the church articulating the relationship between the father son and the holy spirit talking about the person of jesus christ and you see that of course in the the creed as it began to be formulated over you know between the council of nicaea the council of constantinople and so forth all right thank you carl let's take a break we'll get back in a moment with your questions for carl olson [Music] [Music] [Music] uh [Music] [Music] welcome back to the journey home our guest tonight is carl olson carl give me your website again to make sure they case they want to go check out your your blog it's ignatiusinsight.com and all one word okay so all right very good and they can find out about your books both there as well as religious catalog right on the rapture and on the da vinci hoax right and you had a question earlier about the great apostasy and you said during the break you want to make another comment about that well because they're as i kind of mentioned there's different dates given by different groups i mentioned constantine so for a lot of groups i think for maybe say some baptist some fundamentalist they would say that constantine brought about this great apostasy where pure christianity becomes paganized and you know like dr tim lahaye refers to this as uh pagan babylonian mysticism which i jokingly say to people in case you don't know that's a negative term but also the the seventh-day adventist groups refer to a great apostasy and in in seventh-day adventist theology this has to do with the recognition of sunday as the lord's day because in seventh seventh adventist theology saturday remains the sabbath and so um in seventh-day adventism to worship on sunday is a sign of the the mark of the beast which they trace back to the catholic church and so it depends on the person you're talking they might be referring to different events or different times those are those are two that come to mind and there might be others as well oftentimes it's linked to a date the person has in mind of when the papacy in their mind the papacy was established so i've heard people say well the papacy was established in the 600s or the 500s or whatever and that was the time when true christianity was lost obviously it doesn't stand up to good historical scrutiny all right very good let's uh we got a phone call from julie from arkansas hello julie what's your question hey marcus hello um i've been journeying into the catholic church for about eight months now the lord kind of started dealing with me about 10 years ago and it's taken me that long to finally do it but we're going through a program in our church it's called wine catholic are you familiar with that i'm not sure that i am no it's a thing put together by the catholic church to help teach the members of the church what the faith is all about and one and it's one thing that i've had a discussion with some of the members of the church is works and grace and a lot of the catholics at the church feel like works is such a big part of salvation and they don't see the picture of grace and i might be wrong in understanding this but could you give me a clearer picture or how to to explain this because i really feel that it's grace is salvation works without faith is dead and i know that works are important in growing as a christian but god does the work as far as our salvation julie thank you so much for the question great question mark can you answer that mark well it is a great question i think it's a very important one because obviously the whole issue of grace and salvation is a key dividing point between catholics and and and various protestant groups i think to try to put it simply the way i would say is that grace and works for catholic do not compete with one another first of all it's grace that saves us it's god that saves us once we have been filled with the the life of god and here's for me one of the key things in in was recognizing and reading the catechism and reading other works of catholic theology is what the catholic church teaches is that we're not just covered with the righteousness of christ as some protestant groups teach that we are actually filled with his divine life that we actually become partakers of the divine nature as peter writes in first peter 2 2 4 i believe and that that's a it's something you find emphasized throughout both the western and the eastern church in the eastern church and i attend a byzantine catholic parish there's this real emphasis on what's um called theosis which is participation in the actual trinitarian life of god and in the west we might call that grace to put it you know kind of simply we by being baptized uh enter into that divine life of god after having been baptized we truly are children of god we're sons and daughters of god it is then that our works animated by grace done out of love for god animated by the holy spirit that our great our works actually do have value do have um a real purpose and meaning to them so the catholic church is always taught i think very clearly when you look back at the councils that man by his own efforts cannot save himself we do not have the natural ability to save ourselves that's completely impossible it has to be the work of jesus christ who brings that grace and introduces us through the power of the holy spirit into communion with the father and then once we have that communion with the father we are able to to do good works and this is why you know paul writes about working out our salvation with fear and trembling he's talking about in the context of grace now as a son and daughter of god you are to do things you know this is something i missed as a fundamentalist reading scripture i always kind of passed over those places where jesus talks about you know feeding the poor feeding the hungry doing good works and it's always in context of communion with the father because that was jesus you know as pope benedict points out in his book for jesus it's always comes back to being in a relationship with the father and then through the gift of the holy spirit drawing us into that divine life so there's not a competition grace is what saves us but working out our salvation in grace through the the good works that god gives us to do is an integral part of that as well i'm going to throw a big challenge at you oh because you were trying to throw this thing at me you want me to sing don't you well i won't do that to the audience but but part of this problem with faith versus works can be seen from a uh you know a proof texting right uh cutting up of scripture you just throw scriptures at each other you know and you know i think this this scripture is important and this one isn't and this one's more important than the next i mean so you have that kind of an interpretation of scripture but it goes back to luther and calvin during this time when there was this issue of nominalism right and i'm going to throw that word out for you to the reason i want to do this is because i never heard of the influence of this philosophical idea that so influenced this whole concept of faith and works and how we're saved right that's a good one well nominalism was a philosophical position taken by well william of ockham back in the uh the 1400s and and hopefully any you know philosophy professors out there watching can can email me later and tell me how badly i do but basically occam said that there are no universals and what he meant by that is when we talk about a chair akhem would say you can identify this object as a chair but there is not a universal idea of a chair that exists well through a series of of rather complicated steps what that led to when luther and calvin were taught forms of nominalism was this idea that god is so separate from man that he for god to actually give us his divine life and to have us participate in that would be completely contrary to the nature of who god is compared to who man man is and you know i'm not doing it justice justice here but basically uh even though it's a very complicated philosophical series of thinking it leads to really profound consequences and it was really i think underpinning luther and calvin as they said there's no way that god will actually uh infuse us with divine life that it must be god kind of covering us with christ's righteousness and um and there's nothing right our our our will is so depraved that there's not a thing we can do that's good right and so there's not not a good work we can do in any way so i mean there's they have these major separations which in reality for luther and calvin where in some sense in fact luther a reaction against some of these other teachings and the danger is that we end up with this dichotomy which has existed for 500 years that wasn't in augustine it wasn't there as an issue and so we're still fighting the battle it's a great question we're still fighting the battle it forms this radical break that that you really don't see you don't see in scripture obviously god is completely other but you know the the the catholic church and again i want to emphasize the eastern orthodox churches because i think that i think the ancient historical witness to this is a real a real problem uh that that protestants have to address um and that is both the catholic church eastern orthodox churches emphasize that we are truly filled with the divine life of the trinity and it's uh it's a really beautiful and profound uh and the catechism um talks about this at length and i forget the exact paragraphs but it's got some beautiful passages about this teaching yeah we go on the back of the catechism look up james chapter 2 verse whatever it is 23 24 20 to 24 yeah right about uh faith apart from work yeah just look up grace then go back and find the paragraph and the whole section on grace and the catechism is really beautiful yeah yeah very good all right i didn't mean to corny there but i thought that was a the reason i want to do that is because i've never heard the word nominalism as a protestant pastor and i really would love protestant pastors to look at the history of that and see how it so influenced the reformation and still influences theology in a way that wasn't there before and a book i know you've read and uh would be uh father louis boyer's book the spirit and forms of protestantism and father bought was a former uh lutheran pastor who became catholic ended up being a theologian of vatican ii and he talks very charitably i think very fairly in that book about the influence of nominalism and how it this philosophical idea uh impacted luther and calvin superb book reprinted recently by scepter press and is available i'm sure on religious catalog okay let's take this email from mary from new york dear marcus and carl in some of paul's letters e.g first corinthians the early church meetings are described as having members exercise their gifts paul encourages them to do so in an orderly way some sang songs they spoke in tongues others shared their gifts of prophecy etc what has happened to those meetings in the use of those gifts in the catholic church today thank you mary great question i'd first by preface it by saying that that uh it was ironic uh it's kind of funny that the way i was raised i was probably almost as anti-pentecostal as i was anti-catholic growing up in fact if somebody would ever remember to visit our church and accidentally start clapping during a song we probably would have tossed them out for being you know too excited too too excitable enthusiastic um i'd like to point out i think this is a very important truth the catholic church is the largest charismatic church in the world it's the largest charismatic body of christians in the world and by that i mean i'm talking about the charisms the gifts of the holy spirit and you know again the catechism is a great reference point here for those gifts um i think what you see in the the early church speaking very generally uh throughout those first few decades is that there definitely were these kind of very public displays of the gifts of the holy spirit that were given and and actually as you go down through history you see it happening again and again in various places the point that paul makes in various places in first and second corinthians is that these should not be disruptive these do not take the place of genuine church authority these are not meant to be kind of the the point of being a christian to have to speak in tongues for instance that's not the point of being a christian it is a gift given to certain people you know part of the debate historically has been was it just given for a certain period of time or not but i think you know for for a catholic the point is is that the gifts of the holy spirit have continually been given down through history and that various people are given various gifts of the holy spirit and sometimes they're not very public or even sensational or exciting gifts but they're gifts of everything from from teaching to to to correction to even even gifts of doing certain good works of helping those who are in need these are charisms of the holy spirit pope benedict has written i think quite a bit about this in various various places um book by ignatius press on the um that's i believe it's either out now or it's coming out soon on the um the holy spirit in the works of the holy spirit and and you know i think he strikes that balance of the structure of the church the authority of the church but also the reality of the charisms of the holy spirit and so they are there okay very good joel from new york hello what's your question for us tonight hi marcus great show um carl i was wondering the fundamentalists do they believe in the blessed virgin mother and the saints and do they uh which one was was the one that brought you back to the catholic faith thank you thank you who says which one it means which of the saints oh we should have said it's great thank you yeah good question i'm really glad he asked this question about mary because um when it comes to i think what we call a true blue fundamentalist which i really think i was raised in that which is very kind of negative towards the catholic church we actually went out of our way to not talk about mary we avoided mary in all of my some 20 23 years being fundamentalist evangelical i remember one sermon about mary and it was on mother's day and basically it was mary was a good mother well let's hope so obviously she was in contrast i remember at least three or four sermons about rahab the harlot that story from the old testament right well the point here is and here's a great example i have a an aunt a wonderful woman loves loves jesus but very fundamental so we had this discussion about mary and she said well mary was just a biological vessel for the birth of jesus and i said to her if your husband referred to you as a biological vessel for his children what would you do to him seriously but the point is that she i don't think she actually meant to disparage mary i think in fundamentalism that oftentimes the the underlying premise is that we we can't ever appear to be very catholic we have to avoid all appearance of what might be construed as catholics of catholicism and so to say anything overtly positive uh laudatory about the blessed mother who of course we never referred to as a blessed mother would it just we couldn't do that it would be taking away from jesus as a fundamentalist i kind of viewed i had a certain amount of affection let's say it's a pie and if i were to take a bit of that pie and give it to mary i'd only have a certain amount left to give to jesus and if i gave you know this amount to this saint or this amount to that saint then pretty soon i wouldn't have enough love for jesus and that's kind of a simplistic way of explaining it but i think there's a lot of truth to that and so the idea is if you were to pay too much attention to mary you would actually be taking away from christ whereas the beauty of the catholic church's teaching about mary is that true devotion to mary is always animated and comes from a love for christ because what is mary all about what is the whole focus of mary's life what is the whole reason for mary's being it's her son jesus christ this is why she's the first disciple this is why she herself was was conceived without without sin and i the blessed mother you know the question was which saint i think the blessed mother i have a background in art and back even some six or seven years before becoming catholic i was doing paintings of the madonna and it just there to me there was a beauty about trying to portray mary and i i really i'm more and more convinced that mary played such a key role in my wife and i becoming catholic and i think that's true obviously everybody becomes catholic yeah yeah although i will wonder whether you heard very many sermons on luke chapter one verse 48 that says before behold henceforth all generations will call me blessed right you probably never heard no that you know that was kind of like john six there were just certain we you know we didn't read you know mary's great magnificat we didn't focus on that you know we would have a christmas time we would read uh you know from luke's gospel and uh and maybe we would even hear some of that but it would be you know it was read and there was no discussion it was understood this is a it's a great point isn't it um you know i think what marcus is referring to is that you know people sometimes fundamentalists will say to catholics so why do you still have christ on the crucifix he's resurrected you know why is he up there and the question kind of the smart allied question that comes back from catholic apologists is well why do you have a nativity scene jesus is not a baby anymore and the point is of course is that all of these things are meant to remind us of the reality that christ was born as a baby that christ hung on the cross for our sins and of course we know that christ now is in heaven at the right hand of the father if we didn't believe there was a resurrection there would be no crucifix right exactly we wouldn't there had been none of that because it would be a symbol of absolute defeat and shame without the resurrection yeah we would never heard of jesus if there was a resurrection yeah okay aaron from california emailed dear carl was there a particular doctrine or theological point that first piqued your interest in the catholic church or that you found particularly exciting and what catholic authors did you begin reading early in your journey oh great yeah great question i think at the heart of my wife and i becoming catholic for both of us was the reality of the eucharist it was reading not just john 6 but other passages of scripture and then reading what the catholic church taught beginning with the early church fathers thomas aquinas the catechism of the catholic church john paul ii um the eucharist kept coming back to that reality if if jesus in john 6 in saying eat my flesh drink my blood meant it as he seemed to be saying it very literally to the point where some of his disciples actually left him the only place in the gospels where disciples leave him over a doctrinal point then then who who was i to say no forget it you know i had an evangelical friend who would say well you believe it's actually the body and blood of christ and i believe it's a symbol what's the big deal i said the big deal is if i'm right you're wasting your time if if i'm wrong i'm committing absolute it's it's all or nothing it really is as far as authors um i point to to early church fathers ignatius of antioch uh thomas aquinas john henry newman and some and then gk chesterton played it played a huge role um walker percy and flannery o'connor two great southern writers i know near and dear to your heart in their fiction and non-fiction um and then a couple of anglo-catholics c.s lewis and t.s eliot also helped me um in becoming catholic and then john paul two and then um in becoming catholic i did something that marcus i didn't realize that catholics weren't supposed to do i read the documents of the councils including the documents of vatican 2. i make that joke but i found the documents of vatican 2 especially lumen gentium to be absolutely beautiful and so all those helped me in becoming catholic all right last couple seconds one more time with your website in case somebody wants to get in touch with the website it's ignaciousinsight.com and uh or just go to ignatius.com which is ignatius press site and you can link from there to ignatius insight all right carl it's always a pleasure thanks marcus see you thank you and god bless you for your work thank you for joining us on the journey home we've got a lot of things coming up in the next couple months ewtn and for the pope's arrival let's pray for ewtn and mother and the sisters god bless you see you again next week [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

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Length: 56min 39sec (3399 seconds)

Published: Mon May 03 2021