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[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] it so [Music] so [Music] hey welcome to pints with aquinas we've got dr scott hahn and cameron batuzi on the show today but before we get to them i want to give away 50 gorgeous pints with aquinas rosaries that i helped develop with the catholic woodworker if you haven't heard of the catholic woodworker click the link in the description below because this guy makes the most beautiful rosaries ever they're unbelievable and i work with him to develop these beautiful pines with aquinas rosaries all right so here's how i want to give

these 50 away the first 50 of you that become annual supporters on locals again the link is in the description i will send a rosary to okay these rosaries are worth 65 all you have to pay is the shipping so local locals is a lot like patreon but it's a free speech kind of alternative and they're not going to ban me for going against secular dogma you get the same things on locals as you do on patreon so go again click that link when you become an annual subscriber the first 50 of you who do

it as i say will get this rosary we'll reach out to you over the next few days to let you know whether you are one of the first 50 we may not even get 50 people there might be like three people who decide to do this we'll see um in addition to the things that you'll get like people would get on patreon i also run a morning podcast every single morning on locals it's called morning coffee it's about 8 30 or 9 eastern standard time it's a very casual laid-back chat a bunch of people show

up it's really great so i hope you'll check it out again click the locals link below become an annual subscriber and the first 50 of you who do that will get in addition to what you already get uh this beautiful pints with a quietness rosary cool cool does it have to be any particular team what does that be a particular tier no just whatever you can yeah because you you can be an annual subscriber i think you're like 10 bucks a month 20 bucks a month either i mean i'd like the 20 but if you

can't just do the 10 and i'll still we'll still give you the rosary that's how generous i am wow i know it's great and live g'day g'day welcome to pints with aquinas matt fradd here thank you for being here if you're enjoying this show so far which i know you are hit the thumbs up and do us a favor and share this conversation if you think it's worth sharing i've got cameron batuzi in the studio from capturing christianity and dr hahn who's a biblical scholar and teachers at franciscan university here in steubenville and we thought

it would be cool just to get around the table to have a chat about conversion catholicism the papacy cameron you've had several videos of late that have seemed to indicate to some that you are increasingly open to the claims of catholicism so we've actually locked the door and it's actually open right now no the other door that's locked we have guards vatican guards set outside and uh until you repent we won't in the live stream it's gonna be great i'm just joking it's really great to have you yeah thanks for uh for having me matt

it's great to be back in the studio this this studio i i'm just i'm so jealous of the studio yeah yeah that's true that's true i remember coming in here you may not know this but when he first moved in he brought me out here and we set up the whole studio with the cameras and the lights and everything and so it was it was uh no he explained that to me and then he invited you know us to have you over for dinner as well yeah i see that was all the same yeah video

of the uh basement library yes your memories was fun so i i kind of was i was thinking it might be helpful if we say a little bit about where we're at right so i i was sort of agnostic in my teens i went to world youth day which is this big catholic gathering in rome italy when i was 17 years old and had an experience of conversion came back as william craig sometimes says like one of those christians so happy it makes you sick that was me i was so on fire for the catholic

faith um what just maybe in like 10 seconds or more where where have you gone where are you at yeah so i started out uh charismatic and i got into apologetics and it opened me up to the world of philosophy and theology and everything and so since that point um it wasn't really until i met you that i started to really get an interested in the topic of the papacy not just the papacy but catholicism or more broadly and uh how long has it been since we've known each other a couple years yeah a couple

years three years so and i've i've kind of gone up and down with it so for the beginning of it only until recently my credence and catholicism raised like ever so slightly and then it kind of stayed at a certain level and then recently i started to look into my objections that i have to catholicism a little bit more deeply and i've been working through those so that they're no longer objections and so now i'm about i would say 50 50 um mainly due to this study that i'm currently doing on the papacy so i'm

about i'm sort of agnostic now on with respect to the question i'm not agnostic with respect to the question of god's existence i'm agnostic with respect to the question of catholicism versus protestantism versus orthodox so i'm kind of just on the some days i feel like i should be catholic some days i feel like i should be protestant some days it's both and in the same day so it's it's just uh it's not a very comfortable place to be in but that's where i'm at currently and dr han for those who don't know you a

little bit about your story okay so 36 years ago i entered the catholic church uh in my late 20s i had been a presbyterian pastor going back to when i was 14 i experienced the conversion to christ through young life then charismatic then calvinistic and then pastor and we wrote up a book my wife and i called rome sweet home our journey to catholicism and it's about to celebrate its 30th anniversary so how many books have been are in print and what how many languages is it in i think about 30 or 40 languages a

few um over a million um i don't really keep track i probably should and then you just read it i did yeah i uh well i've read parts of it i i'd like to be clear about that because i usually read parts of books i was uh i forget who's yeah i forget who said that like it's okay to read parts of books instead of like having to read from front to you know from cover to cover my philosophy is that with most books most books are like most stores i don't go in to buy

everything that owner wants to sell me i go in to buy the things i came for and maybe one or two things on sale yeah but i'm open to being surprised but i don't know and i don't necessarily feel like you have to read from stem to stern yeah we we were on vacation recently at well we were out of town for a wedding and so we were in mexico and i was reading through your book on the beach just like reading and there was a part on the solo script tura that i came across

and man you're uh your conversation with a student you uh your student asked a question and you said in the book you say that he uh that's a stupid that's a stupid question and then he said well just give me a stupid answer named jonas berlini he was taking a seminary course from me i didn't know at the time he was an ex-catholic and he was studying for the presbyterian ministry and uh we had been covering church history and got to the council of trent and uh and the reformers and so i mean it i

thought it was just a rhetorical question you know where in scripture do you find sola scriptura and i realized within a moment that he was dead serious and so i couldn't think of anything to say except that's a stupid question and then he was so unintimidated he just said well give me a stupid answer then you know he was actually working on a project dealing with justification by faith alone and he was strongly inclined to just kind of maintain the protestant position uh i think it was about 17 years later that john esperolini came back

into the church we're now facebook friends and i think his nickname on the online is the curmudgeon he's brilliant though and but in a low-key you know soft-spoken way but that was like putting a a stick in your younger brother your younger brother's bicycle spokes you know i i just flipped i i went home and i began to think about it like wait a minute i called gi packer rc sprawl these former professors who were like you know father figures to me and they were sort of like that's a stupid question or that's not in

the scripture you can't prove it obviously but it is our theological presupposition is what packer said and i knew it was over at that point i wasn't sure if it was catholic or orthodox or what but man that was as we would say the formal principle of the protestant reformation the principal reason why you justify the break from rome would you say it's due to deficiencies in protestant doctrines that you're open to catholicism or more because of catholic doctrines that are seeming more coherent and plausible that you're open to catholicism um it's really a matter

of my objections working through them and seeing that because i i was under the impression that you you can't be a catholic and annihilationist you can't be a catholic yeah you can't be a catholic and and deny divine simplicity so for the longest time divine simplicity was really the thing that kind of opened me up i would say so that and then reading through your book and especially the section on solos scriptura just just rethinking through that and realizing that there's there's more to the story it's a lot more complex and nuanced than it's just

you know you can't just assume that the bible is is all that there is so after going through that and then realizing through the work of joshua sidjawati the guy that i mentioned on my stream yesterday who he he's got this new model of and he's catholic he's a he's a catholic convert but he's got this model of divine simplicity which was the first time that i've heard this doctrine explained in a way that just sort of made sense to me philosophically and that that i would say is was probably the catalyst for me wanting

to look into this further because i i was i was not under the impression that i was going to be able to overcome that objection for years maybe uh maybe ever and then just you know out of the blue this i hear about this guy he's got this theory of divine simplicity that is just it's really high tech and and a high tech in the sense of like just really high flute and philosophy it's very difficult to uh to understand and also articulate and i'm not gonna try to attend i attempted it yesterday i'm sure

i butchered it i'm not gonna attempt it today but it's it's uh don't worry yeah removing different barriers to catholicism is really i think what has started me to be to being really really open to it so just working through those objections yeah so cameron well if catholicism says i must accept divine simplicity and i can't accept divine simplicity therefore i can't accept catholicism um is that an objection that you often encounter with protestants never never not once but i mean i i can appreciate it because once you realize the philosophical foundations for catholic theology

you know catholic theology is not reducible to catholic faith catholic faith goes beyond the theological and systematic formulation of the doctrine you know you you accept the doctrine by faith but then you explore it and explicate it by reason and you can you begin to recognize the necessity for divine simplicity uh because if god is complex you know if god is you know a process as whitehead would say you know we have to go back and rethink almost everything yeah and i i i appreciate this though i mean this is not something i i had

a classmate years ago in the 70s back at grove city college brian leftow oh yeah and we all knew he was a genius but he was a friend and so you don't think that you know your friend could end up being richard swinburne's successor there in oxford and all of the rusty i think he's at rutgers now but uh he was a brooklyn jew who converted to evangelical protestantism and then went through gross city and i remember him telling me he was at fordham surrounded by jesuits who denied divine simplicity eternality and all the rest

and you know here is this brooklyn jewish evangelical lutheran defending basically and some on aquinas on analytical grounds i mean he's sort of backed himself into analytical talmism of a sort you ought to have him as a guest brian left out he's awesome he really is i mean just doing stuff on arguments for god too now there are many different kind of approaches people take when coming into the church and of course you may not do that i'm not meaning to assume that you will some people find say the doctrines about mary objectionable or maybe

they just find catholic piety distasteful and there's a sort of like almost like a moral objection to it um where are you at with all that is there particular doctrines that you find hard to reconcile so i'm currently doing a uh a huge study on the papacy and that's that's where so after i worked through these objections that i had to divine simplicity to uh annihilationism which i'm i'm still kind of working through that one but uh there's another one i can't think of off the top of my mind i might be able to address

that at some point annihilationism but oh yeah that might be fun yeah but i called up my protestant friends and i'm like hey look i'm working through these objections my objections to catholicism are sort of falling away like what what's going on and what you know do you have any objections that i should consider to catholicism and everyone that i talked to which was basically just two guys they were both uh really strong on the papacy they said that the papacy there was no reason to affirm it and they gave me some reasons and vatican

one you've got this really strong claim about what the papacy is then it's been known from every age however when you actually look in the new testament and you look in very very early history it's not there it's not known to every age that there's one roman episcopate in rome or one roman bishop over everyone and so i started to look into this issue and i am working on we talked about this last night at dinner i'm working on a as complete as possible bayesian analysis of the papacy so i'm trying to take every single

piece of data that's relevant to the papacy run it through a bayesian calculation and then come up with a posterior probability of what the papacy if the papacy were true what that probability would be that it is true and so i'm currently working through all these different pieces of data trying to figure out how likely is this piece of data given the papacy how likely is this data given the falsity of the papacy so um yeah every day it changes like yesterday i on my stream i announced that the probability was 0.93 that the papacy

is true and as of today it's 0.74 so it's it's still positive but it's it still fluctuates as i go through and i think more about uh how the evidence bears on whether or not the hypothesis in question is true so that's what i'm currently working on and i have several different people that are helping me i have gavin ortland protestant he's the main one that's helping me on the protestant side of things great guys super winsome super awesome he's just there's so many good things i can say about him and then on the catholic

side that are helping me i've got swan sona and then jimmy aiken and trent horn i've i i've i realized that he's got a family swan has no family he has he has plenty of time jimmy has no family he has plenty of time so i'm trying to enlist the work of people that cannot be done great intellectuals yeah across the board yeah so that's that's my current project and i've decided that at the end of this once i look into each individual piece of evidence i assign a figure that i think is conservative and

makes sense then at the end of it if the probability says that i should accept the papacy then i'm gonna become catholic like that's what i've decided i think that this is probably the best way to rule out any kind of like understating any kind of evidence or missing pieces of evidence and not not factoring any piece of evidence in when it should be factored in i want to just the reason why i got so put on to the papacy in particular is because i was convinced by my protestant friends that it that the the

papacy is so distinctive that if it's true catholicism is true and if it's false then catholicism is false so it can decide between protestantism and catholicism it can decide between orthodoxy and catholicism it's the doctrine that is going to decide between like whether or not catholicism is true so if there's good arguments for it and we can come up with a high posterior probability that's the way to do it so far as i can see you know and maybe there's a better way of doing it but to me this is like the most comprehensive the

most uh the safest way to do it and yeah so that's what i'm currently working on well i still think that all roads lead to rome uh your road does seem to be slightly longer and more winding than mine yeah given bayesian probability and uh the inductive logic of the papacy and all of that but i i must admit that the idea of identifying the principal impediment you know and enabling yourself to approach it so that i can clear this hurdle if it's reasonable to do so i think invariably you're going to also encounter you

know other hurdles as you run the track and realize okay that was just the first one perhaps the highest bar you know the hardest one but it wouldn't surprise me at all if you know if you look at the body of christ the catholic church as i would understand it you realize of course that the pope is not the head of the church christ is and the pope is the vicar of christ on earth but christ is in heaven because there aren't two churches one up there one down here there's only one it's the mystical

body and so what you're studying in a sense really reminds me of like if you were looking at the x-ray of a person's body and you see the skeleton the skeletal structure the papacy would be in a certain sense the spinal column or you know there is besides the pope all of the other bishops as successors to the apostles the pope as you know is the successor to peter and so 2 000 years into this process you can assess this and recognize okay there's much more to the church than the hierarchy than the structure than

the political form that emanates from the papacy in rome all the way down to the bishop of steubenville um there is um you know the marian doctrines and devotions as you said there's also the understanding of the sacraments and the saints and so you know i would say that as you look at the x-ray recognize the heart and all the other major organs because there's a lot more than just the truth of the authority that resides in the bishop of rome and i know that will happen yeah again anybody who's fair-minded and open to the

holy spirit is going to recognize that going down this road you know even if your your friends and family members are saying you're jeopardizing your salvation cameron you know i think at the end of the day if christ is the head of the church then submitting yourself to his lordship and the authority and the truth of the word in scripture but also in tradition as scripture attest to it you know that's the only safe way to go that's the only way to avoid sinning against the light of christ that reminds me of dr plato's argument

that you've got to put your trust somewhere are you going to trust yourself or are you going to trust something else and then when it comes to christianity in particular what are you going to trust there are you going to trust your own reasoning capabilities are you going to trust the church he used a good analogy that i that i've been thinking about to this day is well i mean it's only been like a day [Laughter] [Music] but he used an analogy of his his sister has really good memory so when he's trying to think

back and like think about something that happened on some day in the past he calls his sister because she's more trustworthy she's a more trustworthy source of information than relying on himself and so he thinks about that in terms of the church like the church is more trustworthy than relying on himself and so i've been thinking about that the last couple days and it's been it's been really interesting to think about do you have any thoughts on that oh too many you know i i i'm a theologian alex plato's a philosopher so i approach things

in terms of the supernatural revelation that is divine he and you approach things more in terms of the natural reason the temporal order and not only the logical but also the commonsensical things like but i mean there's a marriage of the two obviously in christ the human and the divine but i think in the catholic synthesis it's just it really is a fruitful nuptial harmony between reason and and faith and so the idea uh you know it's like bob dylan back in the 70s you got to serve somebody you got to trust somebody you know

you trust christ but who's version you know and so i think we've all assimilated the ecumenical councils the first seven so we understand christology in a unified way but the church really does represent this corporate memory that the holy spirit empowers from my standpoint of supernatural faith but even from a standpoint of natural reason you look to the catholic church and you realize man it's gone through all kinds of tumultuous times and tumultuous bishops and popes and everything else you know and yet somehow you know apart from armies and apart from political parties and apart

from dynastic succession you know this has somehow been sustained and so on on the surface i think there's strong plausibility for lending credence to the memory of mother church that actually brings up a good objection i wanted to discuss with you today which is the bad pope's objection to catholicism and this is one that i have worked into my uh analysis here is there the idea that some popes have made really bad moral choices but we would expect popes to at least not not necessarily be perfect but act above a certain threshold of moral accountability

so how do you respond to uh this kind of bad pope's objection well i think you have to distinguish what we mean by bad popes because i mean starting off with peter you know as chesterton said in choosing simon peter jesus is showing that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link starting with the weakest link you know but i i see anorius as one pope who was cowardly in the most important area and that is doctrinal teaching and that's why an ecumenical council condemns him not for teaching heresy but for not suppressing

heresy you have pope alexander vi who famously was much more of a a military leader in war than he was the successor of peter in rome i think the the the biggest problem the the worst bad pope uh was benedict the ninth in the 11th century uh he becomes pope in 1032 around the age of 20. it looks as though the office was purchased for him by family members he left it and then he basically purchased that again uh and by all accounts he was extraordinarily immoral uh perhaps both ways i'll leave it at that

point for just like a discretion but um he was probably too busy sinning because he went from 10 32 i think to 10 48 and uh everybody recognized that this is a hellacious person on the throne of peter uh but what it did was to set in the motion uh the subsequent reforms so that saint peter damien writes letters to his successors saying you know the sodomy that is rife in the monasteries will be your responsibility and of course he doesn't identify benedict ix by name but i mean whoa uh but one century later the

gregorian reforms that the horrendous sin of benedict ix set an emotion establishes not only the papacy but the catholic church it sets it up for one of the greatest periods of doctrinal liturgical moral evangelistic renewal that it's ever seen and so just as the darkest hours before dawn so the most corrupt popes are usually coming right before reform and renewal so it can still serve a good purpose the the the bad popes yeah i mean again you don't just think of of peter you know uh satan has demanded to sift all of you it's second

person plural there in luke 22. but i prayed for you second person singular you know but he's calling him simon simon by his old name i have prayed for you well you'd think the intercession of christ would suffice to preserve peter from lapsing as all of the others did but no i mean he still denies our lord three times as a coward like what would he have done if he hadn't been prayed for and so that prayer of the lord says you know when you repent when you convert when you return strengthen the brethren and

i think that's almost an allegory or a symbol for what christ is saying from heaven to the vicar of christ on earth and that is when you wake up when you realize that compromise or just simply avoiding suffering is not the way to go but invariably when you look at a norris when you look at alexander the six when you look at benedict ix and other types of bad popes two thoughts you know one you see the christ is sustaining them in spite of themselves on the other hand you also realize that there's this whopping

disproportion between good popes and bad ones i mean you you need two hands to count the bad ones but you got over 200 good ones some are good some are fair some are great some are saints most are not you know the first to 20 plus were all martyred and so it's a mixed bag but i would say it's one that christ is not ashamed to say you know i'm the one who sustains that i'm the one who established that is there an analogy here too to the davidic kingdom so for example if pure moral

leadership is your litmus test for the right religion well if you lived in the old testament time you would have perhaps missed the true religion yeah i mean i i think that matt is the 64 000 question that i had to address and i i'd rather hear you than me but since you know you're asking about the davidic dynasty that have had a kingdom that have been a covenant i mean that has been my bailiwick for decades and you know when you see in matthew 16 thou art peter and upon this rock i will build

my church and the gates of hades shall not prevail against it i give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven so whatever you bind on earth will have been bowed in heaven whatever you loose on earth will have been loosed in heaven only in matthew 16 but matthew is the one evangelist who's drawing much more from the old testament than any other evangelist more quotations citations intertextual echoes but especially the gospel of the kingdom the kingdom of heaven and matthew but what jesus contemporaries would have thought of when they heard him preaching the gospel

of the kingdom is the kingdom of david it's not some utopia it's not some eschatological millennial thing you know it was the only covenant that god established that formed a kingdom the davidic kingdom the abrahamic family the mosaic nation and so that's what christ has come to restore but david and his successors never ruled alone in isolation so that when the son of david is crowned and enthroned and anointed in first kings one and two by chapters three and four he's established a cabinet of twelve royal ministers presumably from all the tribes but one and

only one is the prime minister to whom he gives the keys of the kingdom and isaiah just assumes that you know this in isaiah 22 15 to 23 where you have a bad pope well you have a a bad prime minister the chief steward named shevna is corrupt and so he's going to be leaving office but the primacy of that office is given to eliakim and the symbol of the primacy is that the keys of the house of david are passed from shavnah to eliakim and so you realize okay we can trace it all the

way back to solomon who appoints the 12 but then only one of the 12 is the chief steward the prime minister the major doma all the ancient near eastern kingdoms or monarchies had something like this and so jesus is not just inventing something de novo he's fulfilling the latest form of the divine covenant and as you said matt you know when you look at the davidic dynasty you need at least three hands to count the bad kings you need one maybe to count the really good ones and so if jesus you know it would have

been easy for him to justify look you know father with all due respect i can't enter into the human race through that dynastic line i mean look at manasseh child sacrifice look at david an adulterer and a murderer look at solomon you know 700 wives 300 concubines you know and yet god in spite of their weaknesses sustains this for the purpose of not only producing the son of david the first verse of the new testament the book of the genealogy of jesus christ the son of david the son of abraham but then to restore the

kingdom and to do so by appointing 12 no coincidence you'll sit on 12 thrones and judge the 12 tribes of israel but to one and only one he gives the keys and as you probably know you know the excavations known as the scavy of peter's tomb back in the 40s and 50s there were lots of forms of graffiti you know pray for but the thing that you find all over the tomb of peter are these keys you know there was such an awareness in the first second and third centuries in the period of persecution martyrdom

where you're not building seminary libraries you know and keeping good records that peter got something the others didn't have in matthew 18 they all have the power to bind and loose but in matthew 16 he alone gets the keys so back in the davidic kingdom if the minister of commerce wanted to open up trade say with ethiopia the queen of sheba but the prime minister said no what there wouldn't be any commerce or likewise if there's a minister of defense that he wants to go to war against syria the prime minister could rescind that or

affirm it and so they all have authority in a way that is derivative and participatory but the primacy is what jesus is referring to when he says i give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven and even davies and allison and protestant biblical scholars recognize this but i think what you're doing i want to just pivot for a moment cameron because what you're doing is profoundly interesting no less than my own theological investigations as to scripture the old and the new because the idea of the papacy as a historical fact as an empirical institution

as apparently a human organization that has somehow been sustained when nothing else looks like it and nothing else has been sustained like it and there ought to be some kind of rational explanation for it uh it could just be the luck of the draw you know he chose peter and we've had success in succession or it could be something more and i think what you're backing into is the something more there's like so many places to pick up on one place is uh on the davidic kingdom i think a good question for protestants is in

what sense did jesus come to re-establish the davidic kingdom because if you want to deny this typological connection between isaiah 22 and matthew 16 then the question arises then in what sense did jesus come and establish a davidic kingdom if it wasn't to resemble something like what's going on in isaiah 22. that to me is i mean this i almost want to call like gavin ortland on the phone it's just something i've been thinking about lately is in what sense did jesus come back and reestablish or rebuild the davidic kingdom you know obviously it can't

be in the same exact way there's got to be differences there's gavin's objection i don't mean to speak for him but does it boil down to you're reading far too much into this there really isn't yeah his objection to the papacy he's going well and especially i can't speak for him but i can say this that for 9 out of 10 protestants maybe 99 out of 100 the davidic kingdom is not on their radar unless they're dispensationalists and in which case they expect the davidic kingdom to be restored physically literally politically liturgically after we're raptured

to the heavenly jerusalem and he comes back and he gets down to building you know he gets down to business in terms of restoring that sort of thing and for a few months after my conversion back in the 70s how lindsay the late great planet earth dallas seminary i just i mean it was like turning on the fire hose and filling and then suddenly i realized wait this is really this is not tenable this is not ultimately defensible and so you go in search of an understanding of the relationship between the old and the new

and you know it took me many years but to find it at last in the early church fathers that was decisive because for them the davidic kingdom was not just a cluster of religious symbols it really was the final form of god's covenant in its earthly temporal state and so when christ relocates jerusalem from earth to heaven he's actually tapping into something that second temple judaism was well aware of you know that there is there's a a man-made temple and then there's a divine temple such as we read in revelation 11 19 there's an earthly

jerusalem but there's a heavenly jerusalem and the the temporal form of the old covenant is a kind of geographical political sign that is pointing the faithful to something much greater and so when exile comes when jerusalem's destroyed when the temple is demolished and desecrated it's sort of like wait god you didn't just say you wanted it you swore an oath to establish and sustain this and so this is why the opening chapter of new testament of the gospel of matthew goes all the way back to abraham and then to joseph mary and jesus in nazareth

to show the unbroken line of succession that god is faithful god you know god is true even if every man is a liar as saint paul would put it i want to come back to another thing that you said is that in matthew 16 verse 19 he's given the keys is that in 19 or an 18 i think it's in 19. i think it starts in 18 starts in 19. he's given verse 19. he's given the keys and then it says and then whatever you bound on earth will be bound in heaven whatever you loose

on earth will be loosed in heaven so but then in matthew 18 he gives that same ability to all of the apostles or whatever you bound whatever you lose so here's a question that i've got because in in jimmy aiken's work he believes that in verses in matthew 16 in each verse 16 17 uh 17 18 and i'm i want to make sure i'm getting the references right is that it it starts blessed are you simon or jonah in 17 that is 17 17. so in 17 and in 18 and in 19 the first part

of the verse is explained by the later two parts of the verse and so i guess my question this may be a better question for jimmy aiken himself because this is kind of his own view is maybe we could call him up uh so he he believes that in matthew 18 16 19 that the second part of the verse is explaining the first part so what we mean by the you are given the keys is explained by and then whatever you bound on earth will be bound in heaven whatever you loose on earth will be

loosed in heaven but if that explains the keys then wouldn't that then that connection still exist in matthew 18 such that all of the apostles would also have their own set of keys so to speak or a metaphorical set of keys so that's do you see the connection there i mean i first of all i'm grateful for jimmy he does masterful work and i wish you were here so we could defer to his explanatory judgment uh in lieu of that i would say that um you know when i was saying before that you know solomon

in first kings two three and four is established as king he establishes the cabinet uh the twelve royal ministers you know the evidence suggests no the evidence i think strongly supports the idea that like in every other monarchy you have a prime minister but that is not like a tug of war you know in certain issues it will be but in isaiah 22 you have the language i give you the key of the house of david he shall open and none shall shut he shall shut and none shall open which is just a variation on

whatever you bind and loose and again protestant scholars d.a carson davies and allison and others would support that so what well it's participatory it's not competitive it isn't one versus 11. unless there is a situation where you have bad bishops teaching bad doctrine and then you have the successor of peter convening a council perhaps and formulating the nicene creed or the calcidonian formula as we have in the 451 but you you really have something that you have to understand in terms of a hierarchy that is not a political power structure it's much more like an

extended family so that peter has authority and it is he possesses a primacy but i would say that he would joyfully defer to his brother bishops as christ has deferred to him on every occasion you know but the thing that isn't repeated in matthew 18 is the idea of the keys of the kingdom so that whatever you bind you know and i think we've got to get the verb tense right whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven okay so you don't have the earthly tail wagon the heavenly dog so to speak

the holy spirit is being poured out from christ the head to his vicar so that you know he doesn't always do it in a timely way he might not say the right thing in the right way at the right time but the popes over the years the centuries will invariably lead the church to an authoritative understanding of right doctrine sometimes in spite of themselves or in spite of delay or in spite of ambiguity but i think that is something that the other 11 shared in the lifetime of jesus and that this is why vatican won

teaching papal primacy and infallibility needs to be balanced with vatican ii that teaches episcopal collegiality because it's not a rivalry you know at times james and john made it seem like it is you know we want the right and the left but ultimately you see that if this is traceable back to the trinity the father is not threatened by having the son be the king of kings peter's not threatened by the other apostles proclaiming the gospel and defining doctrine and so this is why there really is a sense in which bishops to this day and

they number in the thousands participate in the charism of infallibility that is not ultimately traceable back to peter or the pope but the christ himself so that you know on this rock i will build my church he doesn't say you know you're the rock build me a church and the other eleven you'll get around to it as well it's on this rock i will build my church and as we explain in the notes of the ignatius catholic study bible the keys go back to isaiah 22 where hezekiah is establishing the prime minister after shevna is

deposed and aliyakim replaces him but you also have on this rock the hebrew tradition of the evan shetty yada the foundation stone laid in zion that you read about in isaiah 8 and in isaiah 28 as well so this is where we have the dome of the rock today the muslim shrine built over the foundation stone that what represents the temple mount and so here jesus is also tapping into something that is non-competitive that if peter's the rock that doesn't mean christ isn't no christ is first and foremost the rock and then peter who has

professed that faith then the other 11 as well and then all of us are living stones that are built into this spiritual temple as our first pope writes in his first epistle i don't really have anything to add on that um what about i mean that objection though that we should expect the popes to be more moral than they've been did that feel answered to you because to me that doesn't strike me as much of an objection because you could also say well if christianity were true you would expect christians to be better than they

are or if the davidic kingdom was truly willed by god and guided by god you would expect the kings to you know to reach a certain level of moral purity there is actually an atheistic argument it's called some the argument from meagre moral fruits or something like that where yeah yeah there's so yeah and i think it's it's a palpable one right when people look at the the immorality of christians i can see how that yeah would yeah but i mean my response to that is that it's that's not gonna be much evidence to uh

to give to atheism right so likewise yeah and so though it might be i mean i remember by your approach you shall know by their fruits you shall know them and for me i just thought of my catholic friends in junior and senior high school and i'm like wow you know case closed but yeah you know then somebody stated the obvious to me by their fruits you shall know them not their church you know and so when i was a presbyterian pastor i recognized that there were presbyterians who were not living up to what we

thought was right doctrine and right life you know and so you really have to look at those who are bearing the fruits that reflect the one the holy the catholic and the apostolic and by the saints fruits you shall know that this is one holy catholic and apostolic church and that too is what vatican one is getting at but you were going to say something i think i might have been wrong well i've my mind is jumping all over the place we can turn to uh another objection that i think would be fruitful to discuss

which is another objection from gavin is that his his basic objection to the papacy is that in the new testament and in very early history we don't see an explication of the very strong version of the papacy that's laid out in vatican one and so the the three things that he focuses on are infallibility supremacy and succession and so what he argues is that in the new testament even if you have some verses that may get you to some sort of seed form view of the papacy nevertheless in vatican one we have this really strong

view of the papacy that says it was known from every age so we can't go back to the seed form view we've got to defend as as catholics you have to defend that the papacy is found in scripture and at least in the early church somewhere this really strong view of the papacy but he argues that it's not found there that the opposite is actually found in acts 15 you've got the story where peter gets up and he makes a pronouncement everyone gets quiet but then it's james who ultimately settles the matter and that seems

more consistent with uh their they're not being a sort of supreme uh bishop in anywhere that's sort of ahead over above everyone else so that's basically the objection if that makes sense it makes total sense yeah yeah so it what are what are your thoughts on that where would you where would you even be i mean i have my own thoughts on it i could share i could share mine after you share yours okay well i just you you think and speak in sound bites i think and speak in terms of lectures and so i've

gotta i've gotta put my foot on the break here you know if that matters if that even helps you know on the one hand i would say that doctrine develops gradually and so you know mary wasn't assumed into heaven in 1950 when the dogma was defined obviously you know uh jesus doesn't become divine in 325 when nicea defines the the mystery of his divinity the books of scripture didn't become inerrant at the council of trent that's right that's right so it takes the church centuries to recognize what was there well you know it would take

us years to recognize what is light what is latent in an egg corn because when you look at an acorn and then you look at an oak tree it's a total disconnect there can't be any connection but what if organic growth and continuity does involve this acorn becoming a sapling and then eventually an oak tree okay well that's the catholic understanding of doctrinal development and so when you look in the old testament you find analogies so for example you you have the the conquest of the promised land uh that not only takes centuries where it

should have taken one or two generations it's also described in the book of judges as you know there are like a dozen judges mostly from all of the tribes and they're all basically decentralized they're disunited you know there was no king and so everybody's doing what is right in their own eyes well i mean that's reading history back into it where was there any necessity for there to be a king there's permission given by moses in deuteronomy 17 but judges is sort of like describing the history of the ancient church of israel in a way

that only you do retrospectively and so when you read first samuel you see okay now there's a monarch but it's saul who's a typical gentile king handsome strong milit you know and he he exalts himself over the priesthood of samuel then you find a man after god's own heart in david and you find okay there you have in david and the son of david the anointed one literally the mashiach the messiah the christ spell it with a small c because he's not jesus but you know you have the the son of david as the son

of god he is the messiah he rules in jerusalem upon the throne of his father and the temple that he builds becomes the center for all 12 tribes but it doesn't take long i mean solomon's dead at 9 30 and the civil war 10 tribes revolt against the temple and the house of david and so you have competing interpretations of what the law of moses really intended so for about 80 years you've got a monarchy it's almost like camelot a golden era a golden age but it's it's fleeting it's it's transitory and it was not

without its wrinkles to be sure so the analogy is such that you know if it took ancient israel which is just a nation you know literally generations to kind of get with god's program in terms of the unity of the country in terms of the sanctity of the holy land and in terms of the one who will represent god the true king you know and then even when they attain that it's lost within a generation or two the divided kingdom from 9 30 until 722 when the northern tribes are destroyed by syria and all of

the rest so it seems to me that as the church is expanding its principal point is not to become a political structure that can be universally recognized as a top-down hierarchy no it's an apostolic organism an extension of the body of christ thomas goes to india you know and they're all over the place no internet no radio no cell phones no tv so the decentralization the conquest now is to make disciples of all nations not just a tiny slice of turf the size of new jersey palestine you know and so it seems to me and

i i mentioned this to you before i got started this book by john calarafi and my friend scott butler keys over the christian world the evidence for people authority 3380 to 80 800 a.d from ancient latin as you'd expect but also greek chaldeans syriac armenian coptic and ethiopian documents what emerges is a gradual consensus you know two centuries into it you barely have a sapling but already in the second century irenaeus and versus hirasus against the heresy says you know we could do this with all of the bishops but i'll just do it with the

bishop of rome and then he traces the contemporary pope all the way back to peter identifying the unbroken line of succession and clearly implying that there is something unique about this line again not competitive as though it's him and so we don't need the rest of you but it's him and so we recognize the centrality of this particular role this figure so i would say you have primacy in the old testament background from matthew 16 you also have succession implied in the notion of the keys of the kingdom and you have infallibility implied when you

hear jesus say on this rock i will build my church and the gates of hades will not prevail against it so that whatever you bind on earth will have already been bound in heaven so christ is the head working through fallible instruments but we already know that christ can send the holy spirit down to infallible men like peter matthew mark luke and john so that they will not only teach infallibly but also write gospels that are infallible and authoritative so why not just sustain that project by empowering not only peter but all of his successors

and not only the 11 but all of their successors so that thousands of bishops and all of the faithful have access in the living tradition to an authoritative and infallible interpretation of sacred scripture what's your response to the objection that acts 15 actually on the other hand yeah yeah i would say oh contrairmo for i don't know him you know but i would say it's almost the exact opposite and this is something that i held as i was a protestant that you have in acts 15 much debate so in acts 15 6 the apostles and

the elders were gathered together to consider this matter and after there had been much debate this is no easy question this is not a slam dunk and so after there have been much debate what happens in verse 7 peter rose and speaks brethren you know that in the early days god made choice among you that by my mouth not paul's he's the controversial lightning rod figure but it was by god's providence my mouth the gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and believe so cornelius was baptized but not circumcised but he was baptized by

peter not paul and only after god had given peter that vision in acts 10 three times the sheet coming down from heaven with all of these unclean animals rise kill and eat lord i've never eaten anything unclean what the lord has cleansed you must not call unclean so peter you know it takes him three times to finally realize god is cleansing the gentiles so then the knock on the door and the baptism of cornelius and his household and so peter is the one who stands and speaks and as we were discussing this at bennigan's last

night over dinner god who knows the heart bore witness to them giving the holy spirit just as he did to us he made no distinction between us jews and them gentiles but cleanse their hearts by faith which is peter either quoting or echoing deuteronomy 30 verses 6 through 10 where god will circumcise their hearts in the hebrew becomes god will cleanse their hearts by faith in the septuagint the greek and so peter is recognizing the fulfillment of that and so basically he says this is it they're baptized therefore they're cleansed therefore they're equal to us

and all the assembly kept silence and then in turn they listen to barnabas and then paul as they relate to signs and wonders and all of the rest and finally in verse 13 james replies as the bishop of jerusalem presumably james the less he is obviously concerned about his own diocese the jerusalem jewish christians who are going to say wait a second you're going to baptize these gentiles and tell them they're full-fledged equal members of the family of god the body of christ as we are without circumcising you know wait and so what james is

doing is giving you know i would say on the one hand what peter is teaching has doctrinal authority that binds us 2 000 years later because you're baptized not only do you not need to get circumcised but you need not to get circumcised if you think that is obligatory when it's not on the other hand what james gives us is i think what you would describe as pastoral discipline in other words if that's true peter how are we going to maintain unity in the church between jews who are going to be easily offended at the

misbehavior that they perceive coming from baptized gentile believers and so on the one hand james basically validates what peter has said brethren listen to me simeon has related how god first visited the gentiles to take out of them a people for his name and with this the words of the prophets agree as it is written after this i will return and notice i will rebuild the dwelling of david that has fallen so james rightly perceives that this is how the kingdom or the house of david will be restored but the davidic covenant differs from the

mosaic covenant dramatically i mean there there's a continuity but a discontinuity at mount sinai gentiles were excluded at mount zion gentiles were invited and the temple built by the son of david the largest precinct was the court of the gentiles where they would learn that the god of israel is our father too and we can learn the psalms of david we can learn the wisdom of solomon we can discover that this is one international family in the kingdom of david but not in the nation of israel at mount sinai so james is basically saying you

know peter has led us to a something of a breakthrough this is going to be the unexpected way the davidic kingdom is restored and he quotes amos 9 11 and 12 the climax of the prophet amos and then he says therefore my my judgment and notice he says therefore my judgment whereas peter said the holy spirit he basically identifies his doctrinal teaching with the holy spirit and how can we put the lord to the test by imposing a yoke which neither we nor our fathers have been able to bear whereas james says my judgment is

that we should not trouble those of the gentiles return to god but should write to them to abstain from the following the pollution of idols from porneia or unchastity would have strangled them from blood and as i indicate as we point out in the notes of the ignatius catholic study bible if you avoid any association with idols like paul's describing to the corinthians if you know that this meat you're about to eat was sacrificed to a god in the pagan temple of corinth avoid it because the jewish brother is going to see you and stumble

so for the sake of love you know on the other hand you can eat anything because ultimately all things are clean by christ so by the 1400s that the councils of basil and florence identify james decree as pastoral discipline that served a temporary purpose to keep jews and gentiles united but then if you eat meat today that still has blood in it you're not excommunicated you know and so the point is that james is giving sound and necessary pastoral advice that is so fitting for that situation where you're going to try to create one family

one body one church with jews who have like peter struggled to recognize gentiles as anything but you know unclean swine and so for the temporary purpose of keeping them united let's let's let's apply this pastoral discipline and it seems to me it's a perfect illustration of the doctrinal authority of peter's teaching that settles the matter and then the episcopal wisdom of pastoral discipline that james recognizes as fitting and needed for the jewish christians not to end up turning their backs and walking out of the church i'm going to do the sound bite thing good are

you ready i'm so sorry for that don't be sorry you're kidding there was no that was great yeah no the sound bite thing is uh again from dr plato from yes or two days ago where he said uh this is basically just peter being a good pope well he said why if you want to use the argument that james concludes uh you know why not also think that that could possibly be an argument in favor of peter not having to have the last word or not having to lauder over the others it seems to be

equally in as much yeah and i find that pretty plausible like i when i look at acts 15 i mean just the fact that everyone gets quiet after peter speaks i think that counts for something yeah sure yeah it counts for something so even if james counts against that the fact that peter speaks and everyone is quiet that counts for something in favor so i ultimately i actually just adjusted my figure so uh now acts 15 doesn't provide evidence either way so now the probability is 0.78 okay well before we go on i want to

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has prayed different people have read sleep stories so if you think dr hahn's voice is very soothing i do he actually reads about 30 minutes of the book of romans that's right i also did the novena the saint jude my patron saint i was born on the feast of simon and jude and so uh some other things too yeah i really do appreciate the hello app you know i don't know you probably remember this but it felt like maybe 20 years ago we would say things like it's good for a catholic so such and such

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to hello.comfred and sign up there it really is a terrific app and i use it daily that's true true statement anyway that's nice yeah how uh how how oft you said you use it every day yes what do you like practically how do you use it i i play it has beautiful music so i play gregorian chant uh-huh you probably you've heard it in the house um i'll actually listen to a sleep story if i'm going to have a nap i think what did you use did you use it yesterday no uh no i didn't

use it yesterday but uh when i do have an app i'm like what a beautiful thing to go to sleep to the words of scripture yeah you know and it's and that's the other thing too like there are apps out there that are new age and that teach false things you do not want to start listening to them even if they have good things in them they could lead you astray the cool thing with hallow is it's 100 catholic 100 orthodox and so you don't have to worry about that it's yeah it's really good anyway

that's cool yeah yeah awesome yeah so um now how about the next objection are you ready yeah let me let me just do something sure sure lord help me to speak in sound bites um you don't have to be don't don't speak in sound bites on my accord okay uh well my students wish that i did okay okay you know i would say that in the opening chapters of acts luke is doing something that would almost um imply peter's uniqueness his his primacy if you will so for example in acts 1 we read in verse

15 in those days peter stood up among the brethren the company person was an all about a 120 so there were 12 apostles he is the prince of the apostles always named first in every list but there are now 120 more or 120 altogether and he recognizes the problem and that is a successor for judas and so he explains from scripture the scriptures had to be fulfilled which the holy spirit spoke beforehand by the mouth of david concerning judas who was guide to those who arrested jesus and so what he suggests then he quotes two

psalms one let his habitation become desolate in other words now that he's dead let his house remain vacant on the other hand his office let another man take and so this second quote there in psalm from psalm 109 verse 8 in the greek it's his episcopal or in the king james it's his bishop rick so if judas dies and even judas leaves a vacancy that peter recognizes that it would be important yeah and so what do they do they draw lots by peter's initiative you know it's not petrine monopoly it's petrine primacy but it's a

collegiality so all the apostles are participating in this act but they choose saint matthias by drawing lots well where is the only other place we have drawing lots well in luke 1 when zechariah is chosen to offer the sacrifice as the priest lots are drawn and that falls to him and so luke is assuming that you know his prequel luke's gospel and then when you read acts 1 you could almost get a sense that this is becoming the priesthood of the new covenant and matthias is going to be the successor to judas and if judas's

office is vacant and it cries out for his successor how much more would the others when they die end up also calling out for that succession and then in acts 2 i've never heard that before yeah in acts 2 the holy spirit falls upon all of them but who is the one who gets up and addresses the crowd verse 14 peter standing with the eleven and that's the key he is the one who goes on and on about jesus life death and resurrection and so peter is exercising his primacy over the apostles in acts 1

but in a collegial way over all of jerusalem and preaching that sermon at pentecost again in a collegial way and then in chapter 3 peter and john going to the temple at the hour of prayer the lame man silver and gold have i none you know the rest of the story you know so peter and john raise this man they heal the lame man and then peter goes on to preach why and how that happened in the temple precincts and you don't preach there without a license and so he's in trouble there but it's almost

as though peter is exhibiting this unique authority entrusted to all of them but especially to him by healing and then by preaching even in the temple precincts where only levites and scribes are allowed to preach and then when he's put on trial for that in acts 4 he's there before the council of sanhedrin with peter and john but the only one who speaks is peter not john and he's not defending himself he's basically putting the sanadrin on trial for executing the author of life and so peter's gently and subtly exercising a sort of spiritual primacy

over the eleven in one over jerusalem in two in the temple in three in front of the sanhedrin in four and then just ask ananias and sapphira he's exercising authority within the church too because when they lie to him about how much they sold the property to what does peter say how would you lie to the holy spirit and i could just read ananias mind i didn't lie to the holy spirit peter just who do you think you are i lied to you but he never expressed any of that because he drops dead right on

the spot and then and when peter confronts ananias his wife later on sapphira she repeats the same lie and i mean there are all kinds of questions about the discipline you know for ananias and sapphira but not about peter's unique role exercising primacy in the church in five the sanhedrin and for the temple and three pentecost jerusalem and two and the other apostles in chapter one and by then luke is on a roll you know and so by the time peter basically authenticates paul's gospel that it's christ and him alone faith through baptism not circumcision

in the works the law you know who's going to stand up to peter well james finesses that with pastoral discipline but i would say that peter authenticating paul's gospel is precisely why the letter is written and circulated among the churches at the end of acts 15 and why paul can go forth to his second missionary journey totally confident that i've got the backing of the pillar apostles in jerusalem yeah i don't know if it's 79 but yeah it's now it's at 81 percent okay uh it's it's fun see isn't it it is fun at some

point of the next hour i'd like to take questions from our supporters but i also don't want to yeah um let's do i have one more question and then i think i'll be i'll be good sure cool so let's turn now to uh first the the first epistle of clement and he mentions basically multiple bishops in rome thoughts yeah i mean what you will find is a model of the church back then that is surprisingly different than today you know because we you have the mod episcopacy i think prevalent in many sources but the idea

of the plurality is not only necessitated by the lack of any unified form of mass communication but this is continued long into the middle ages as well we're in a city you might have different bishops but only one metropolitan uh and i i i won't mention the names of my colleagues who who who feel the same way but i would sense that this would be a pastoral exigency for today as well bishops end up practically being bureaucrats and administrators who can't preach and teach on a daily basis precisely because they've got the sprawling bureaucracy to

administer finances and everything else personnel human relations and so in the early church you do find bishops in rome but none of them are claiming to be the successor to peter and there isn't any debate in clement or others that you have multiple successors to peter by the time you move from 12 bishops as successors to the 12 with adding matthias you end up with literally hundreds of bishops as the gospel spreads from jerusalem judea samaria into the ends of the earth but it really does arise as the practical necessity to have a father figure

over the expanding household in any given region and because rome wasn't just like steubenville a small city that you can just kind of walk through in an hour you have lots of neighborhoods lots of regions of rome you're going to end up with lots of bishops as well so what about the idea that there was still there had to have been if the papacy is true there had to have been one bishop who was head over all of the other bishops but he doesn't mention that does that count as any evidence against the papacy in

your view that he doesn't mention one who's over the others you know it doesn't arise to the level of an objection in as much as it's coming from clement i mean even if clement is only a presbyter at this point he's a presbyter in the church of rome and he's writing with this awareness that the corinthians recognize are you an authority that pertains to the church of rome and if clement is writing as the majority of scholars suppose you know as the bishop of rome so it's line as cleat as clement sixtus cornelius all of

these that are named in the eucharistic prayer are the successors to peter generally all were martyrs for the first century or so you know clement is writing in a way that i would say is similar to peter when peter writes first and second peter he's not flexing his muscles he's not strutting his stuff he's talking about how these elders are shepherds he refers to himself as an elder just as jesus says you know the first shall be last it takes peter a long time to learn that lesson but the greatest among you shall be one

as one who serves i think what you're finding in peter's epistles is what you're finding an echo of in clement as well that there's an awareness that just because there is a center doesn't mean there's no circle in fact it's what makes the circle it makes what holds together the the center will hold as the circle expands and you end up with literally thousands of bishops and they're not singularly traceable back he's touching the computer he's touching the computer that's making an adjustment no i'm not i just think of swan and jimmy i wish they

were in the room because i can address this you know but i'm not a church historian so what trent horn has said about it is that just because there's mention of multiple bishops doesn't mean that there's no head bishop over all the other bishops that's right just like if you were to mention that the democrats decided on something if you were to say that in today's language that doesn't mean that there's no head over all of the democrats the house speaker that's right and in new york city minneapolis and lots of metropolitan areas you have

the archbishop and you also have other bishops in that city i was just in pittsburgh where bishop david zubik is but he has what we call you know auxiliary bishops but they're bishops they're not like you know vice presidents or co-pilots they're bishops they could lay their hands upon and therefore ordain priests and that sort of thing so there really is in the teaching of vatican ii uh the plentitude of apostolic authority resides not just in the archbishop but even in his assistance those uh bishops that we would call auxiliary all right i want to

take some questions from our supporters on patreon and locals and i want to apologize in advance because there is no way that i can get to all of the questions that have come in maybe we can think of can i ask neil how many people are watching yeah how many people are watching okay okay it's amazing all gonna hit the like button every single person is hitting the like button right now ah thank you well as i say i apologize i won't be able to get to all of these but i'll do my best ryan

pope i felt like it was good to start with this man okay a supporter and no doubt an attractive man says and i know because i know him to cameron i understand that your wife's family runs a protestant church there in houston that you and your wife have been connected to realistically speaking does this effectively kill any chance of becoming catholic uh no no not at all not for me because my the journey that i'm on is i suppose my own journey like my wife has her own journey that she's on and she right now

i feel like she's almost just open to it happening just because i've been talking about it for so long and for so long i mean basically since we've been together the conversation started and she's kind of uh loosened up she's she's almost like just at the stage of acceptance that it's it may happen at some point so it's not it's it's not something that's going to hold me back we don't even attend that church anymore so it's it's not really something that's going to hold me back personally supporter amy fennis has a question both cameron

and dr hahn cameron how has the current pope pope francis affected your views on the papacy and then dr han how has the current pope affected your evangelization efforts so starting with you is it a stumbling block at all i haven't looked into it to be honest so i'm looking at history and i'm looking at the the new testament primarily right now so i'm not focusing on i haven't focused on that i can't speak on it okay yeah i mean pope francis has said some wonderful things but not typically on an airplane in a press

conference that's where he reminds me of peter you know who just opens his mouth to put his foot in it um but at the same time we love him we pray for him we revere him and his office and so i would say what pope francis has done you know is so good at so many levels and so questionable at other levels problematic you know i'm i'm kind of a glad trad as you know matt and so the suppression of the traditional latin mass you know raises a lot of questions in my mind about prudential

judgment especially given the german bishops etc etcetera but at the end of the day you know he is gleaming compared to pope benedict ix or alexander vi and others as well so we've had stellar popes for quite some time that even if he is a little lackluster in his clarity and precision you know no surprise i also think it's really useful and important for us to advance the new evangelization apart from something that could almost end up becoming something more like a personality cult i remember when i converted back in 86 when john paul was

still young i met him in 92. it was so inspiring but i also remember you know having studied the church history the popes and all of this this sense of like okay there's a lot of chaos after vatican ii but don't put all of your eggs in just one papal basket because this guy is so you know extraordinary and john paul obviously was but i i came from a tradition that was partisan that ended up with personality cults televangelists and that sort of thing so i was wary even early of putting too much weight on

one peg even if he is you know saint john paul ii or pope benedict you know and so i i think in a helpful way the church is rediscovering its own decentralization that uh it isn't the pope that we are to listen to it's christ it's also our own bishop it's also our own pastor but we really do submit to the word of god the word and fleshed in christ but the word alive in scripture and tradition and so you know it's it's sobering but at the same time i think it's profoundly uh animating uh

also jimmy aiken just texted back and he said he'd be happy to for us to call him put him on the live stream okay but i also maybe we've passed that point so i'll leave yeah i mean i'm open to it or i can just call him after the show okay uh thank you jimmy yes emma asks dr han are there any parts of cameron's looking into catholicism that remind you of your own conversion oh too many i mean we were talking about this at dinner last night you know especially with brittany you know because

kimberly and i were you know so deeply united in ministry for years and when i was a pastor you know she not only played piano but she just did a lot of stuff around trinity presbyterian church and then when i began to move into this catholic direction she was not budging and so it reminds me of the freedom that you're affirming for your bride that i had to recognize from mine uh it's complicated it's really complicated and i've been reminded too that you know people can't force anything on her exactly and she can't force anything

on you you know and so i had a friend who ended up converting but he waited until his wife did and he rebuked me said you should have waited till kimberly well i would have said hell would have frozen over you know if if kimberly knew that i was waiting for her she admitted this later she would never have even opened a book but because i said look you know you've got to submit to the lordship of christ and give an account on the last day and not to me but to him so must i

and so if the light of god's word is so clear that i've got to submit to the lordship of christ and i told her delaying obedience is feeling more like disobedience every day and she's like okay in that case you've got to do what you've got to do and then later on she said well you know if i ever become catholic i would not get up in front of people and share my story and i said well girl you know i think you ought to wait until you not only think it's true but you had

to wait until you couldn't wait you know you would be eager to get up and share the discovery of not just the truth but the beauty and the power of the catholic faith and she said i don't think that day will ever come you know well it did you know and i would say that kind of freedom is not something i gave her it's something she already had and she recognized it in me before i recognized it in her and so we focused on dating and romance and raising the kids and telling them stories and

that kind of stuff so we identified the common ground which was much more substantial than the significant differences but you so easily fixate on those differences that you end up with a dysfunctional relationship brad mead asks this question is for both scott and cameron i'm drawn to catholicism but don't know how to feel about mystics what are your thoughts on the accuracy of and reliance on the visions of mystics maybe that's more a question for you well first of all i too am a little wary of mysticism and mystics you know the old line is

mysticism begins with mist and ends with schism and at the center is the eye oh wow and so i'm wary of mysticism on the other hand you know since we're here with pints with aquinas i would emphasize how thomas was a contemplative first and foremost more than just a rigorous philosophical brain his heart for christ was so in love and uh his prayer life and his devotion to christ's real presence in the eucharist etc etc and i'm thinking also of garagu lagrange reginald garrick lagrange who arguably was the greatest domestic theologian of the 20th century

and john paul's doctoral supervisor in rome and he write he wrote a book that we were privileged to translate with matthew miner's help and publish through emmaus academic called the sense of mystery and this is so important to recognize that the doctrines that we believe are sacred mysteries when jesus says to peter flesh and blood has not revealed this to you he could have said philosophical and historical arguments did not lead you to profess your faith in me my father who is in heaven has revealed this to you there's you know natural reason can go

so far supernatural faith goes beyond reason but not against it although at times it might feel like it goes against it bottom line is i think you know i i'm a thomas but i prefer to tell my students i'm a mystic because thomas was a mystic spell it with a why and what thomas is best at doing is showing that the sacred mysteries are so true so real so beautiful so powerful that you shouldn't just kind of develop the head but the heart but the heart follows the head and that's where mysticism i think goes

off the rails sometimes yeah i i would say your thoughts as i've said before that a faithful catholic should not only submit to what the catholic church teaches authoritatively but he should also not demand uniformity where the church allows diversity of opinion or custom and that the revelations so-called of mystics if that's kind of what he's referring to can never rise to the level of public revelation that must be ascended to by faith and so sometimes you see people getting really excited about a particular apparition or a particular mystic who's allegedly conveying something from heaven

well we're not bound uh to submit to that um it it might be said by the church to be worthy of belief but that's important even with church approval of an apparition or a mystery you know it's a nissan upstate there's nothing offensive that doesn't mean that it rises to the level of public revelation and therefore becomes part of the object of our supernatural faith no it's worthy of credence but credence is not the same thing as fides we have a question from supporter ryan anthony this is a good question we didn't bring this up

yet i don't think does it count against the papacy that it wasn't defined until vatican won shouldn't we expect something so central and important to be defined much earlier yeah that's the the objection of the recent pope dognization yeah i mean that was my objection for a couple of years and then you know it's it it takes someone stating the obvious you know and that is shouldn't they have defined the divinity of christ within the first generation i mean certainly paul is assuming that jesus is divine in the christ in the philippians 2 and elsewhere

but i mean new testament scholars today could pass a lie detector test and contend that no it isn't clear that paul was affirming the divinity of jesus we had to wait until what 3 25 in the council of nicaea and even there the holy spirit's not defined as a divine person until 381 so you know god basically has humans to work with and even though it's god the holy spirit nevertheless it kind of feels like tar or sludge at times so it takes the church a long time and typically it isn't the case that you

have a definition until you have a heresy that is denying the truth so aries the presbyter who is who's denying the divinity of jesus is almost the precondition for the doctrinal definition the formula that we recognize with the nicene creed and for centuries literally the pope had christian monarchs catholic kings in france and everywhere else to kind of enforce whatever the teaching was and suddenly in 1870 when the when the dogma is defined you go back to 1789 and the eldest daughter of the church france with the revolution you know rope spear the reign of

terror the beheading of the nuns and the priests and so on you know suddenly all of the nations you know by 1848 dozens of former catholic nations are now in total enlightenment revolt and so if you don't have the political backing that would give you temporal support to enforce the doctrine and the morality what do you do you basically have to say what christ says to caiaphas and that is you'll see the son of man riding on the clouds of heaven in other words at that moment in history you have so many denying the authority

of the pope that the gloves come off and the definition is given saying look the pope is not authoritative because he's got catholic monarchs to back him up the pope is authoritative because this is what christ established so this is a this is authority that transcends the political the human the secular it is and always was divine and heavenly and i would say that the heresies that came with modernism you know and then also with the revolutions were god's providential forcing the church to back into the recognition of the need newman did not support the

definition of the dogma but newman was living in england where you know there was still persecution but it wasn't france it wasn't the revolution it wasn't the violence of the other continental countries that were not just ex-catholic but profoundly and violently anti-catholic yeah i only have that as counting as very small evidence okay this is why i brought up the inerrancy of scripture being defined at the council of trent because this is something that a protestant might say just just like well how could the papacy not be defined much earlier well you could say the

exact same thing about the scriptures but it was around the council of trent that we're responding to protestant objections yeah and i like the idea that it was because something was happening in the church like there was a sort of person who was going against and that's why we needed to have someone come in and give the documentation like final and that's true for 381 the council of constantinople it isn't until the new matamakians are denying the personhood of the holy spirit that the cappadocians have to stand up with saint gregory nancy and kind of

convening and supervising the council to define the constantiality of the holy spirit as the third person and we're often running you have nostorious denying that mary is the mother of god and so theotokos in 431 at ephesus and so you really do have to match the providential allowance of certain heresies with the providential guidance of defining certain dogmas wesley phillips thanks for being a supporter wesley he says my brother is trying to discern orthodoxy versus catholicism after being raised protestant and then non-practicing in his adult life praise the lord i converted in 2014 and my

parents are coming into the church this saturday at the easter vigil what would be the best points to discuss with someone struggling between going towards orthodox and catholicism who have you interviewed on this question recently eric he was excellent and i would strongly recommend that you go to my youtube channel and search eric yabara and and point him to that how do you spell his last name y-b-a-r-i-a that's right yeah yeah i would say go to eric and there are others too james lacoutus has written a number of classic works on this subject as a

convert from orthodoxy in rome's sweet home i alluded the fact that i was sort of drawn to um a more byzantine approach to the liturgy and to orthodoxy and when i discovered autocephaly the idea that you have all of these autocephalous orthodox bodies you know the greek the russian now the estonian the ukrainian it just struck me as not the same as protestant denominations but a kind of denominationalism that these ethnic national churches are self-headed that's literally what autocephalous means and so you know i remember being at marquette when an orthodox scholar came and uh

was asked the question you know when do you think there'll be a pan-orthodox council he said well that'll be numbered among the four last things because you're not going to have all of these autocephalous orthodox bodies agreeing and then submitting and that's when i knew you know that is no way that's a that's a fraternal association that utterly lacks any true paternity and obviously god is the father working through christ but christ is working through all of the apostles but especially peter and the successors of peter and so it just struck me at the time

we have a polish pope he's not an italian then a german you know and now a south american and so the newness of the new covenant is that it transcends ethnicity not just the jewish but the italian or anything else that would represent an ecclesiastical reduction to the greek to the russian to the estonian or i think there are well over a dozen different orthodox bodies that are all autocephalous final question because then the three of us are going to go to holy mass so i figured this would be an appropriate question okay is that

all right sure yeah this comes from mate 88 how to tactfully explain without offending to a non-catholic friend visiting at mass you that they should not receive holy communion the priest typically explains at christmas and easter and funerals but not at most masses i hesitate to invite because i did the advice to my stepdaughter many years ago at christmas she went up for the blessing all but she received instead so i want to ask you first did you find that somewhat offensive that you can come to a catholic church maybe maybe i'm just like i

don't find it offensive at all yeah go i'm just am i am i weird like do a lot of protestants have issues with that you know my my response is and this might sound a little harsh you go i remember something you said last time that we were here and it was like this is actually done for you right yeah yeah good memory you had forgotten that um yeah no it's funny last week we had jordan peterson here at the university and he spoke and he came to noon mass and he was in the front

row so we could all kind of watch the priest and then in the corner of her eyes watch jordan peterson as father dave ivanka our president said he was presiding he was like a child in this this awe-struck sense of wonder just taking in all of the songs the prayers the gestures the the vestments and all of that and he went forward oh but he he proved he knew that that would have been a and father dave laid his hands and he prayed for me blessed him and all of that and then at the end

of his presentation that evening he did the same thing and that was you could tell visibly how father dave i have such respect for him excellent job didn't he yeah interviewing peterson wait so so i go up there and i put my hands like this and that signifies it you'll receive a blessing instead of holding you can do that yeah half hour from now okay i didn't know that was even an option well yeah it is the thing i mean i agree when i when i went to mass for the first time in the basement

chapel on campus at marquette i remember hearing the words of consecration and realizing both head and heart this isn't bread anymore this is what i didn't have the power to do even when we started celebrating the eucharist every week i was playing church this is the real thing and by the time he consecrated the chalice i'm like that's his precious blood what's going on inside my head you know and when they said the lamb of god and the people came forward for holy communion i knew this wasn't the same thing that we did when i

was a protestant when i was a presbyterian pastor you know for us it was so profound and sacred but it was like a handshake it was like a hug maybe even a kiss but in reading the church fathers i realized why they would link it to the marriage supper of the lamb because it's not just a supper it really is a one flesh union eucharist to communion is the bridegroom saying to the bride this is my body and so you're entering into what is a sacramental analogy for marital intimacy and once you recognize that you

know it makes total sense it did to me that if i'm ever going to identify myself radically with the bride of christ as the catholic church then and only then would it really be fitting to share in this level of intimacy and at that moment suddenly i realized why my friends who were offended we have open communion why is yours closed well i would give a handshake to a stranger i might even give a hug to a parishioner i might even give a kiss to you know a close friend on the cheek you know but

that is reserved only for the the covenant of marriage and this unique bond that christ calls us to share by identifying ourselves with the church as his bride and so i didn't have that hang up but only because i had already gotten to the point where if the eucharist is what they say it is it's not the same thing as what we've been doing yeah all my life final thoughts uh on the discussion so far yeah i kind of want to know are you giving yourself a time limit on this list because well this could

go potentially forever yeah so what i'm waiting on now is uh jimmy akins working on a systematic list of different data points that are going to be in favor of the papacy i'm waiting i'm waiting on that from him swan sauna has a list of 15 that he's going to give me and i haven't i just haven't had time to call him i've had i've had several conversations with uh gavin already and so i pretty much know where he stands on all of this and i've got the data points from him i'm going to re-watch

something that he's got but i would say i'll i'll try to have some kind of answer to this uh maybe a couple of months good for you so and knowing jimmy as i do you'll get a list more comprehensive than thomas aquinas could have put together i'm sure like that that man's brilliant and meticulous yeah and he's uh i mean i'm just i'm so fortunate to be in this position where he would be willing to do this for me yeah and we were in a fortunate position too to be with you to accompany you as

the the parlance goes um i would also say that if you do end up accepting the truth of the papacy you know that really is like discovering okay this is the country that i want to be a citizen you know i want to be naturalized but it's a process you know so that you know once the papacy becomes true to you you know what the church teaches i mentioned to you last night you know that you want to dig the tunnel from both sides you know the head the historical arguments bayesian probability but at the

same time the heart but not just the heart as emotion but the heart is devotion so that the eucharist the blessed virgin mary doctrine but also devotion the saints these things make sense but as i i drove home last night i was thinking about this isn't just like a tunnel being dug from both sides you know i went to grad school at gordon conwell seminar up in boston when they were beginning beginning what they called the big dig which was like this whole tunnel complex and it strikes me that's probably a more fitting analogy for

what you'll end up doing and that is not just a straight-line tunnel but you'll be looking at the saints you'll be looking at the blessed virgin the other sacraments you'll be looking at things besides the papacy and you know it just represents you know recognizing the catholic church is true from the outside is not the same thing as allowing yourself to really be transformed as a catholic within and uh i think that will be involving not just the next couple of months but give yourself as much time as the holy spirit wants great well thank

you so much to everybody who's watching the live stream do us a favor click that like button smash it destroy it roundhouse kick it or whatever and if you've enjoyed this conversation you thought it was worth your time it'll certainly be worth others time so please share this on facebook that's a great way to support the channel and we will see you next time thanks does cameron have a youtube channel does cameron have a youtube channel no no he doesn't all right see you later tell us about your youtube channel yeah so i run capturing

christianity it's a christian apologetics organization non-profit organization and we do videos primarily on apologetics but also as a result of being friends with matt fratt i also have been doing videos on catholicism so for and against i recently did the case for the papacy and then the case against the papacy with some really high top-notch guys and so that's what i do on my channel is i i i'm a layman but i interview all the experts and help and that's how i have all the fun let's link to his channel below because he's going to

make a great catholic uh youtube channel one day i would really miss if i didn't mention yeah that's a great yeah i love it just being cheeky lord hear our prayer the saint paul center also says much of what i've been saying this this morning in our time together uh yeah let's put a link to that youtube channel it's excellent um the saint paul center dr james muir dr john bergsman a whole lot of other teachers uh we've got over 40 full-time co-workers it's really exciting and so saintpaulcenter.com and we have the word of the

lord we also have letters from home and breaking the bread and that sort of thing but i just want to say cameron again ten thousand thanks for your integrity your honesty and your transparency which bespeaks humility and may the lord bless you on your journey and thank you for allowing me to be a part of it and thank you man amen thanks for being here all right man thanks a lot all right