So if you've seen part 1 of this video
series you remember that in my early adult life I had an encounter with the
divine and this was such an undeniable experience that I knew that I couldn't
go back to living my life the way that it was and since this experience
descended from the witness of a Christian family I thought that trying
to live my life in a pattern according to the Christian religion was a good
place to start. Before I carry on telling that story I wanted to point out that
this is a really massive topic and I feel like we can only scratch the
surface with what would be considered a reasonable length for a video like this
so please don't consider this a comprehensive treatment of this subject.
I also wanted to mention that this video describes my own struggles with trying
to resolve the controversy or the debate between Catholics and Protestants and if
you've read the title of it obviously I come out favoring the Catholic position
but I hope this doesn't sound like a condemnation of Protestants. I have very
fond and cherished memories of the time I spent in Protestant faith communities
and I have friends who I deeply admire even some pastors who are Protestant so
I hope this doesn't sound like I'm trying to establish my own supremacy as
a Catholic. So getting back to this story now that I considered myself a Christian
and was trying to live my life in a pattern according to Christianity I was
running into a problem which was I didn't know what that meant
so I felt like I needed direction and I started doing two things. The first was
reading the Bible and the second was going to church. As I was reading
Scripture though I felt a lot like the Ethiopian eunuch who's described in the
Acts of the Apostles when Saint Philip comes across him he sees that he's
reading Scripture and so he asks him do you understand what you're reading and
he replies, "How can I unless someone explains it to me?"
So I began to attend a variety of churches in the hope that someone could
explain it to me and while Catholicism was on my radar I was holding out hope
that I would find a fit somewhere else and the reason for that is that I
thought that it was... it seemed very foreign to me and also very intimidating.
One of the first things I noticed as I attended all these various churches was
a complete lack of consistency among them. They would all affirm some common doctrines but they all seemed to have a
very narrow focus on one aspect of the faith as if that's all it was. So at one
church they would talk about political activism and social justice as if that's
all it was. At another one they would talk about a
strict moral code that didn't even seem biblical to me. At another one they would
only talk about the spiritual gifts. And so I quickly became confused and felt
disenfranchised I felt like if God existed and he had a plan for revealing
himself to the world like the Bible seem to indicate, then why was his church so
scattered and confused? This was especially difficult for me to reconcile
with the church that I was reading about in the Bible which was unified through
an authoritative structure through the Apostles that Jesus had hand-picked to
lead his Church after he ascended into heaven. So if questions arose or there
was confusion the Apostles would authoritatively address it and draw some
conclusion about it and teaching about it. I didn't see anybody in the churches
that I was attending claiming that kind of authority let alone actually
exercising it. So I decided to take a step back from the whole church shopping
thing and I decided to do my best to try and learn about church history to try
and find out why there are these divisions and so for me I traced that back to the Protestant Reformation as the source of that division and I know some people
will wonder why I didn't take a closer look at Eastern Orthodoxy but I think
that for the sake of brevity that will have to be saved for another video. So I
began to learn about Martin Luther's Protestant Reformation and the Catholic
Church's response to that in the Council of Trent. My understanding was that up
until that point the church in the West had enjoyed unity. Going back to the
source of that division was really important for me because I know that we
have this temptation to argue higher level symptoms of an issue rather than
getting to the root cause. So often when two sides will debate an
issue like this they'll neglect their assumptions. So for example a Protestant
might say to a Catholic, "Where is purgatory in the bible?"
but they're operating on the assumption that everything that is taught within
Christianity must be explicitly found in the Bible which for a Catholic it isn't. So without addressing those assumptions we're not really getting anywhere. So the
core of the debate for me seemed to rest on the Protestant doctrines of sola
fide and sola scriptura and these especially more than anything seemed to
confront the catholic position so I decided to narrow my focus there. Sola
fide or faith alone means that we are justified or saved by faith alone in
Jesus. Faith in this sense means like a passive assent or belief in Jesus. Sola
scriptura or scripture alone is the idea that the Bible is the only divinely
inspired and authoritative source for understanding Christian doctrines. The
Catholic position as I understood it was that yes we are saved by faith but not
faith alone; that there are other factors that contribute to our salvation and the
same with scripture. The Catholic Church affirmed that yes scripture is divinely
inspired and authoritative but it's not the only source of inspiration and
authority. They claimed that Jesus established his own Church that was also
authoritative and divinely inspired. So as I was being introduced to these
concepts I would read the Catholic position about what they teach and then
I would read the Protestant position about what they believe and then I would
read the Catholic response to that or the Catholic understanding of what the
Protestants believed and then the Protestant understanding of what the
Catholics believed and something that stood out to me, and this was a pretty big
red flag, was that the Catholic Church would describe the Protestant position
in terms that were pretty consistent with the Protestants described their own
position to be but the Protestants would describe the Catholic position in wildly
exaggerated and absurd terms. So there were claims that Catholics worship the
Pope or Mary or the Saints in place of God or that Catholics were accustomed to
trying to buy their way into heaven through indulgences or that Catholics
were punished for reading the Bible and the lists just kept going on and you'll
probably read similar strawman arguments in the comments to this
video and as an objective observer approaching this material for the first
time I was really turned off by that. If you want to learn how to defend the
Catholic position against anti-catholic arguments like that you just need to get
really good at repeating the phrase, "We don't believe that. I think you just made
that up." So something else that stood out to me was that the Protestant position
was very bold. The use of the word alone made it so that their doctrines were very
strictly defined and in my opinion it made it very easy to test for validity. So for example, imagine if somebody claimed that Canada is the only country
in the world where you'll find happy people. Well there would be two things
that would have to happen for that The first is that you would actually have to
be able to find happy people in Canada and the second is that it would be
impossible to find anybody who's happy outside of Canada. So if I wanted to test
it, that's what I would do. I would go to see if there are any happy people outside
of Canada and if I do find that there are then that claim completely falls
apart. So it seemed to me that testing the validity of the Sola doctrines using
similar logic would be pretty easy to do. So starting with Sola Scriptura which is
this idea that scriptures are the only authoritative and divinely inspired
source for knowledge of Christian doctrines. So if that were true then two
things would have to be true. The first is that that would be explicitly taught
within the Bible itself because if it's not then it can't be true since the
Bible is our sole source for finding these doctrines about faith and this is
clearly a matter of faith. The second thing is that it should be
impossible for me to find anything else in Scripture that says that there is
also another kind of divinely inspired authority. So premise one is that the
Bible is the only infallible authority for matters of faith and morals and
remember it can't just say that it is an authority, it has to say that it's the
only authority. So the passages in the Bible that Protestant explanations for
this would always point me to was found in 2nd Timothy chapter 3 where it says
that all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching rebuking
correcting and training in righteousness. So when I read that I noticed a glaring
omission. It does not use the word alone. It says that
scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching it but it doesn't say that it's
the only thing that is God-breathed and useful for teaching. So let me use an
analogy here. For example imagine if I said that my grade six teacher Mrs.
McKay was a great source for learning math and science. Would you then
interpret that to mean that she is the only source for learning math and
science? Well of course not because I didn't say that she's the only one just
that she is one. So already it looks like premise one is failing and I also found
it really strange that in the entire Bible this is the only scripture verse
that they could point me to that was fundamental to the Protestant
Reformation. So moving on to premise two I shouldn't be able to find anywhere
else in the Bible in which an authoritative source is defined other
than Scripture. So even as an ignorant and naive reader of the Bible, something
that seemed abundantly clear as I read the narrative the New Testament was that
Jesus was preparing his disciples to take over where he left off, exercising
the same divine authority that he had. In other words he was establishing a
Church that would inherit the authority that he had which was, up until that
point, the sole province of God. Now if that's not infallible divine authority I
don't know what is. So what are some examples of this? In Luke chapter 10
Jesus prepares his disciples and then sends them out to heal people in various
towns and villages and to tell them about the kingdom of God and he says to
them, "Whoever accepts you accepts me and whoever rejects you rejects me and the
one who sent me." That's pretty serious. If you reject Christ's followers who were
sent out as his messengers, then he's saying that you are rejecting him. It's
obvious that he wanted his disciples to go out and stand in his place as if they
were him. In first Timothy chapter 3, St. Paul describes the Church as the pillar
and foundation of truth and then in Matthew 16 Jesus gives Peter and the
Apostles the keys to the kingdom of heaven and he says that whatever they
bind on earth will be bound in heaven and whatever they loose on earth will be
loosed in heaven. So in other words heaven itself would be
compromised by their teaching authority. That's pretty big! So lastly Jesus did
something that was an undeniable transmission of his God-given authority
to his disciples.Remember that when Jesus healed people he would often
forgive them of their sins and the religious authorities that heard this
decried it as blasphemy because they rightly understood that only God has the
power to forgive sins and so this meant that Jesus was somehow placing himself
in the position of God. So then in John chapter 20 Jesus appears to the Apostles
and tells them that as the Father sent him he is now sending them which again
establishes this precedent that Jesus is expecting them to stand in his place and
represent them and then in verse 23 he goes on to breathe on them and says,
"Receive the Holy Spirit, whose sins you forgive they are forgiven and whose sins
you retain they are retained." In other words the authority to forgive sins
which as we've already described was an authority that only God had up until
that point. Now this is also where Catholics get the sacrament of
confession from in the Bible. Now there are a lot of other places in the Bible
where the Church's divine authority is established and exercised but for the
sake of time I think we just need to move on to Sola Fide, but suffice it
to say that for me it was clear that the Bible was not the only divinely inspired
source according to the Bible itself. Moving on to Sola Fide. If faith or
belief in Jesus is the only thing that provides salvation then it should be
impossible for me to find anything else in the Bible that is described as an
essential component of salvation. Instead what I found in reading the Bible was a
lot of emphasis on what we did and how we behaved in response to Jesus. So in
John chapter 14 Jesus says that anyone who loves me will obey my teaching and
my Father will love them and we will come and make our home with them. Now he didn't say that anyone who believes in me, but anyone who obeys my teaching. Now that's something that we do. Then in Matthew 19, a rich man comes up to Jesus and asks him point-blank what he
must do to enter into heaven and I thought well if there was ever something
that would resolve this question this has got to be it. So if Sola Fide were true , Jesus' response, if he was a good teacher, would
be something like, "You don't do anything you just believe in me and then you will
enter into heaven," But he doesn't say that at all. He says, "Follow the
commandments and sell everything you have and then come follow me." So remember, if faith alone is true then we shouldn't be able to find any other instance in
which the Bible describes other aspects being essential to salvation and already
we found a very explicit example in in the sayings of Jesus himself. So then in
Matthew chapter 7 Jesus points out that not everyone who calls him Lord will go
to heaven. He says that only the one who does the Father's will will go to heaven
and he says that those people will object and they'll say but Lord we did
great deeds in your name and we performed miracles (so obviously these
are people of faith) but Jesus says that because they didn't do the Father's will
they won't go to heaven. So clearly, to Jesus, faith, which these people obviously
had because they confess that Jesus is Lord, is not enough. So then we have the
Epistle of James, which Martin Luther actually tried to have removed from the
Bible because it contradicted his doctrines in such plain and unambiguous
language. In fact this is the only place in the Bible where the words faith alone
actually appear. So in James chapter 2 he says that a person is considered
righteous by what they do and not by faith alone. When I read that I tried to
give Protestant apologist the benefit of the doubt to see how they dealt with it
but every explanation I came across seemed like a desperate evasion of that
very plain declaration. So as I studied this question I found that all the
essential premises that were needed to support the Protestant Reformation
doctrines fell apart. I began my attempt at resolving this question without any
biases towards Protestantism and in fact I wanted the Protestant position to be
true because I found way more attractive qualities in the Protestant churches
that I was attending but if I was going to be true to myself in this conviction
that I was gonna follow God at all costs, I knew that it meant becoming Catholic.
Thank you guys for watching that. If you enjoyed that then please like it and
share it and subscribe and come follow along for more content and if you want
to support the making of these videos please consider supporting the
business that makes them possible. Holds Worth Design is a digital marketing
and communications company that specializes in web design print design
branding videography and all that kind of stuff and this is with a special
emphasis on churches and ministries as well so if you know somebody that needs
those services then please consider passing that along to them and check out
the website which is www.holdsworthdesign.com
