Audio only:
In this episode Trent shares an excerpt from a recent conversation he had with a Protestant about Catholic authority.
Full Conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hET6FoFfWH4
Transcription:
Trent:
Hey guys, I wanted to share with you today an excerpt of a recent conversation I had on Catholicism with Lucas of Methodist Ministries. He’s got an awesome channel and he was gracious enough to invite me on to talk about the church. So I’m going to share this conversation with you. If you want to watch the full conversation, click the link in the description below. And if you want to help us to have more conversations like that here in our studio to bring guests out, to talk with them about Catholicism, about Christianity, about important moral issues, please go and support us@trenthornpodcast.com. And one final note, I’m dressed a bit more casual in this conversation because my family was dealing with the flu, so I just kind of sauntered in hoodie and t-shirt to have the conversation. So I’m just not as formal as I normally am. But with that said, here’s my conversation with Methodist Ministries about the Catholic church.
Lucas:
And so when I look at Roman Catholics, when I hear their arguments of why they believe this, but I think functionally they know that they have to be judging this by the scriptures where it’s like, for instance, and not to throw the Pope under the bus because I know you’re a Roman Catholic, but when he says stuff like
Trent:
He’s jumped there a few times himself. So
Lucas:
On that note, it’s almost he didn’t even push
Trent:
Him, even if I was a Roman. So
Lucas:
Even if I was Roman Catholic, Trent, I would still be raising my eyebrow and I would be doing it with the scriptures in the back of my mind knowing, wait a minute, Jesus says, on the way the truth of life, no one comes to the Father but by me.
Trent:
And
Lucas:
So functionally, I’m acting as if the scriptures are primary, and I’m judging what he said by the standard. I’m finding it conflicting. So I’m finding it, even if I got under that is like I would still maintain this functional solo script Protestantism with very ingrained, and I couldn’t ever imagine as a Christian not living like that.
Trent:
Well, I think what’s important here is that as a Catholic, I use scripture as a standard in determining things. So I mean, if the Pope says something that contradicts the Bible, the pope’s wrong, the Pope, when he speaks, like I said before about levels of authority, when the church speaks and teaches believers, it has ranges of authority, the church might just give a recommendation to the world, a prudential judgment saying, Hey, this would probably be a good thing for leaders of the world to do to promote the common good of society. Now, that’s not even a doctrine that could just be saying, Hey, there’s poverty and here’s something you should think about when it comes to international debt. That’s not a part of the deposit of faith. But the Holy Spirit guides the pastors of the church and they can use their own prudence and judgment to provide wisdom for believers, and we can accept it or not and we should just give it due consideration.
Or the church teaches on doctrine saying, well, this is a corollary of the deposit of faith. This is what the church teaches on. This issue is developed and understood, and sometimes the church teaches infallibly, this is dogma. You have to believe this on pain of sin. Then similarly, when the Pope speaks, the Pope could just be giving his opinion on something, speaking off the cuff, he could be giving a teaching, but even in these cases, he could be wrong. He could make a mistake. There are popes that have been in error before and have had to be corrected. The only time the Pope is protected from error is when he formally binds the church to a dogma, when he makes an infallible declaration about something. So I think that’s why here if the Pope says about something you say, yeah, that was on a great take for example.
So for me, when I’m looking at it, I might say, yeah, I have scripture and tradition to say, all right, what’s going and what the church has taught and currently teaches because like I say, what does the church teach right now? So I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying, judging what any pastor says based on scripture, as I said before, it’s fine to say, Hey, does this contradict scripture? If it does, we got a problem here. But it’s the corollary of saying, oh, it’s got to also be explicitly found there. So I would say you’re right that if you’re just saying, Hey, this contradicts scripture, if it truly does, that would just mean that the Pope is speaking in a way where he could be fallible. But if he’s speaking infallibly, there’s no way it could contradict scripture because the Holy Spirit will guarantee that just as the Holy Spirit guarantees, the scriptures will not contradict each other.
Lucas:
And that’s why I fall back on too, where all Protestants and Catholics, I know even the EOS or Eastern Orthodox will uses argument too, where it comes down to how do you know what the Bible is or the candidate of scripture? And when you look at it too, everybody at the end of the day, another big factor, we’re all making a historical appeal and then relying on the Holy Spirit. But that would also to me though, be another reason why I’m a Protestant. Because if I accepted the Roman Catholic Church was infallible, and if I asked Roman Catholics or Eastern Orthodox, why do they believe that
Trent:
Would make a historical argument?
Lucas:
No, actually they make a biblical argument because they say the Holy Spirit. And then I ask them, well, you only know the Bible because of the magisterium. And so it seems to be circular where it’s like, well, the real question then would be how do you know your magisterium is infallible? And then again, it falls back on the Bible, but then you only know the Bible because of the magisterium. So it is just like a circle to me. So I’m finding once more there has to be a Protestantism principle here.
Trent:
Well, you’re correct that if you say, I believe in the Catholic church because the Bible supports the Catholic church, and if you say, I believe in the Bible because it was defined or promulgated, promulgated and later in foully defined by the Catholic church, that would be a circular argument Catholic because of Bible, Bible because of Catholic. That’s a circular.
Lucas:
I don’t think I explain that right.
Trent:
No. If that is the argument, then it is a circular bad argument that you’re correct there. Carl Keating, he was the founder of Catholic Answers way back in the eighties, so back in the olden times. And so he wrote a book called Catholicism and Fundamentalism. In that book, he says, correct, that’s a circular argument. The Catholic argument is more of a spiral argument similar to the Eastern Orthodox argument. The Eastern Orthodox who are at least thoughtful would do this too. It’s a spiral. So you would not go Bible to Catholic than Catholic to Bible. And this was actually the argument that I took to being Catholic. It was, okay, God exists. Did God reveal himself? Let me look at history. In all of history, it seems like there’s one promising candidate of God revealing himself. That’d be the person of Jesus Christ. Here are a set of historical documents that chronicle his life from those purely human historical documents.
I can come to the conclusion that Jesus Christ is God incarnate and he rose from the dead and he established a church. So these historical documents, he came, he died, he rose from the dead. He established a church built on the apostles. Alrighty, does this church still exist? How has Christ’s message been given to people to believe in him? So I go to the fathers, I go to the early Christian sources, and from them the evidence supports that this revelation has been given through scripture, through the word of God in a written form, scripture, the word of God in unwritten form, sacred tradition, and also in the teaching authority of the successors of the apostles who would be the bishops. That is where this revelation is safeguarded. And all of the bishops have their union with one another through the union. They have to the successor of St.
Peter that the church at Rome has a special authority amongst all of the other churches in Christendom because the Sea of Rome is a successor of Peter who is the leader of the apostles. And from that I can see, okay, then I can see, okay, this is the church that God has given and it’s imbued with his authority. And this church is also authoritatively taught about which writings are scripture and which are not to be able to settle that question. So for me, it’s more spiral. It’s starting with, okay, I believe in Catholicism because of historical documents, some of which are biblical, some of which are not. First Clement, the Diday, Ignatius of Antioch. So it’s the early Christian witness that brings me to the Catholic church. And the Catholic church helps to delineate what elements of this early Christian witness are the inspired word of God and which of the church fathers and which are ecclesial writers that turn into heretics later, like church. So I guess that’s where I would look at it. And so for me, I would pick Catholicism or Orthodoxy, but Catholicism first, then orthodoxy over Protestant, not
Lucas:
Oriental, not Coptic, Eastern
Trent:
Pick. I would pick them after Eastern Orthodoxy because there I’m also drawing from the tradition of things like the Council of Calden and the Caledonian Christology that has been embraced by the church. Yeah,
Lucas:
That makes sense.
Trent:
Although even there we’ve made a lot of progress and it’s a lot of semantics with the Oriental, you can
Lucas:
Make a lot of Eastern Orthodox happy by saying this probably.
Trent:
Now there’s some Eastern Orthodox, what’s funny, there’s some that are everybody who is not their particular follow their guy on this one mountain in Greece, and if you don’t listen to that guy, you’re going to hell. And then you’ve got a lot of the patriarchs you want to sprinkle for baptism. Sure, why not? It’s not a big deal. Yeah,
Lucas:
They’re very funny online
Trent:
Too. Yes, online Catholics, online Orthodox, not really. It seemed I deal with obnoxious. There’s obnoxious online Protestants.
Lucas:
Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent.
Trent:
Whereas there’s regular Protestants would just be meet me as a Catholic and be like, oh, praise the Lord, father God, thank you so much. That Trent’s here. My name’s Caleb. I’m so glad you’re at our church. He would just be a normal, I’m sorry, I had to those stereotypes in there of praising Father God and the guy’s name is Caleb, but I always had a talk and I said, imagine a Protestant comes to me, I don’t know his name, it’s Caleb. And then a guy came up later
Lucas:
In skinny jeans, by the way. What? Right in skinny
Trent:
Jeans. Totally. And then the guy came up after my talk and he said, I’m Protestant, I really liked your talk, and yes, my name is also Caleb. It was the best. So yeah, just going back there. So for me it’s like, okay, how do I get across a gap from early historical documents, Jesus’s Lord to these books are the inspired word of God, they’re an infallible rule of faith. Are they the only rule or the other things that could be an infallible rule like the Council of Nsea, these ecumenical councils, do they have authority just because they agree with scripture or do they have authority because all the bishops of the world got together and taught this? So for me, it’s about getting across the gap from the historical evidence that of the God man two, one of three authority structures. And I personally, I find it’s a very solid bridge to get to Catholicism and orthodoxy and more solid to get to Catholicism. But it’s more like the bridge to Protestantism is, there’s a game that I bought for my kids that I played as a kid called Forbidden Temple, where that you have to get the guys across and it just,
Lucas:
Oh,
Trent:
It’s a suspension bridge, and if you land, you press the ILE down and it shakes the bridge. I remember that. It’s a much shakier bridge for me to get to Protestantism. So for me, when it comes to evidence, I don’t think you need to have a knockdown drag out argument for Catholicism. It’s kind of like that joke. It’s like if a bear is chasing after you, how do you get away from him? The answer is you just have to run faster than the other guy who’s with you.
So it’s like even if I say, okay, the preponderance of evidence for Catholicism, it gives me a 50% confidence level. Okay, well if Protestantism is only 20%, then it’s like I’m going to go with Catholicism as long as it’s higher and there’s a forced option, it’s going to one of these three. There’s not some weird hidden one out there that’s been hidden for 2000 years, or it came back in 1830 or something. I look at it and I think that makes it more manageable for people. And honestly I think it’s similar if I’m talking to an atheist saying like, Hey, look, you don’t have to have a hundred percent confidence in Christianity, just that you have more confidence in Christianity than any other alternative view.
Lucas:
I guess that’s a good way to put it from your point of view, the spiral. Because for me, I do recognize that I’m viewing it literally where my first principle is going to be the scriptures, and that’s why I would even bring up that objection as I did with how do you know your Bible or your authority is infallible or maybe not infallible a hundred percent, but even normative in many regards. So really, as you know, we’re just expressing the ongoing debate between Protestants and Catholics, Roman
Trent:
Catholic. So for me though, the place that I started is not just, I’m going to start with scripture. I’m going to start, okay, the only infallible authority I am aware of is Jesus Christ. Well, to start, there’s an amorphous God and then becoming a Christian, Jesus Christ is the only infallible authority I am aware of now, and I know he is because I’ve looked at historical evidence. So when I said historical argument, it’s the Bible, but also any early Christian witness that tells me about who Jesus is, okay, then it’s like, all right, Jesus is the infallible authority. Could there be other infallible authorities? So Protestants say, yeah, Jesus and scripture. Okay, could there be others beyond that? And so that’s where my line of inquiry starts to go. Thank you guys so much for watching, and remember, if you want to watch the full conversation, click the link in the description below. Thank you all so much, and I hope you have a very blessed day.