In this episode, Trent appears on the Pints with Jack podcast to analyze C.S. Lewis’s famous “trilemma argument” for the divinity of Christ.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. One of the Christian apologists who greatly influenced me coming to the Christian faith was C.S. Lewis. He’s probably affected tens of millions of people with his books like, Mere Christianity, A Grief Observed, Surprised by Joy, though honestly, he’s more famous in popular culture for The Chronicles of Narnia. My son, Matthew, actually, he just finished the audio book series of the entire Chronicles of Narnia. My favorite is that the last book in the series, The Last Battle, is narrated by Patrick Stewart. It is just tremendous. And when it got to the very end, where it’s like, this is the end of all of it, Matthew got, he got really sad. He’s like, “This is the end?” But the point of the end of The Last Battle is about the kids going to heaven. And so it’s not really the end. It’s the beginning of something great and glorious. And it provided a good opportunity to talk to him about heaven. So I’m just so grateful for the work of C.S. Lewis.
Trent Horn:
And that’s why I was grateful my friend David Bates invited me on his podcast, Pints with Jack, to talk about C.S. Lewis and the historical Jesus. Because I wrote a book called Counterfeit Christs, and David is doing a series on Lewis, and he was talking about C.S. Lewis and his thoughts on the historical Jesus. So he invited me to come on, talk about Lewis, early arguments for the historical Jesus, what does that mean, Lewis’s famous Lord, liar, lunatic trilemma. So it was really great, and be sure to go and check out David’s podcast, Pints with Jack. If you want to get a whole lot more great C.S. Lewis content, go and check it out. But without further ado, here is my appearance on Pints with Jack to talk about C.S. Lewis and the historical Jesus.
David Bates:
Hello, and welcome to another Pints with Jack Skype session. On the podcast this week, we were reading Letter 23 from the Screwtape letters. And it’s in this letter that Screwtape talks about what he calls the historical Jesus. This is what he writes, “We must encourage, once again, the conception of a historical Jesus. In the last generation, we promoted the construction of such a historical Jesus on liberal and humanitarian lines. We are now putting forward a new historical Jesus on marks in catastrophic and revolutionary lines. The advantage of these constructions, which we intend to change every 30 years or so, are manifold. In the first place, they all tend to direct men’s devotion to something which does not exist, for each historical Jesus is unhistorical.”
David Bates:
Now, as I was reading the letter in preparation for the recording, I was reminded of the book Counterfeit Christs, which was written by Trent Horn. So I thought I’d invite him onto a Skype session to talk about his book, and some of the ideas which are raised in this letter. Trent Horn, welcome to Pints with Jack.
Trent Horn:
David Bates, thank you so much for having me.
David Bates:
How is things in the great state of Texas? In San Diego, where you abandoned us, it’s now cold and miserable. The weather is crying.
Trent Horn:
Oh, it’s actually lovely here right now in Texas. It’s actually sunny, and my wife and kiddos went on a walk. It’s going to get hot and humid here soon. When you live in California, you take weather for granted. When you live in the rest of the country, it’s like, “Oh, it’s nice out. We better get outside, and they get the walking in while we can.” It’s beautiful, but I might have to get a vacation out there and do some live Pints with Jack with you, maybe in like July or August might be nice.
David Bates:
We will be far cooler. I approve.
Trent Horn:
Absolutely.
David Bates:
Well, let’s talk a little bit about your book, Counterfeit Christs. Because as I said in the introduction, when I was reading this letter of Screwtape, I just had all of the different counterfeits that you brought up in your book running through my head. So what was this book about?
Trent Horn:
Right. So Counterfeit Christs was my answer to the problem of who is the real Jesus. Everybody out there wants to have Jesus on their side. Whenever you look at debates online about Catholic doctrine, for example, there are… I think recently when they had the question about the Pope and the CDF saying that priests cannot bless same-sex unions, you go on the internet and people say, “Jesus would have blessed same-sex unions.” Or, “Jesus would have been in favor of socialism. Jesus would have done that. Jesus would have done this.” And then the other side says, “No, Jesus would have done the opposite.”
Trent Horn:
So what’s fascinating, David, is that the commonality I find amongst everyone who talks about Jesus online is that the vast majority of them want Jesus on their side. If you can have Jesus on your team, you have the winning team. It’s like Michael Jordan and Space Jam. It’s like, “If we could just get him on the team, we’re going to win.” So that’s what everybody tries to do. So people always try to turn Jesus into a reflection of them.
Trent Horn:
And this idea of the historical, so what Lewis is talking about here, that the historical Jesus isn’t really historical, that was an observation that was also made decades before him, by a German scholar named Albert Schweitzer. He wrote a book called The Quest of the Historical Jesus, in 1906. And in there, he talked about how this quest for the historical Jesus had been done in the late 19th century. So you had these German forum critiC.S. who said, “Well, there’s the Christ of faith that we worship, and the Jesus of history who was the real Jesus,” I’ll say. And so what these 19th century forum critiC.S. tried to do is say, “Well, there was a Jesus, but everything he did was natural explanations. He was just a good preacher, a good teacher. He might’ve known some secret medicinal tricks.” One of them even claimed that Jesus walked on water by walking on rafts underneath the lake. And then of course, that’s where you get people like Venturini, and others, who said that Jesus didn’t really die on the cross. He just passed out and was mistaken for having risen from the dead later.
Trent Horn:
So I want to read you what Schweitzer writes, because it’s very reminiscent of what Lewis said. This is what Schweitzer wrote in 1906, “It was not only each epic that found its reflection in Jesus. Each individual created him, Jesus, in accordance with his own character. There is no historical task which so reveals a man’s true self as the writing of a life of Jesus.” So that’s why in my book, I have all of these different categories. And what they have in common is, the people who defend these categories usually belong to these categories of a false Jesus.
Trent Horn:
And I go to different areas, like the non-religious. So I have one called, Jesus is Nonjudgmental, Buddy. He’s your friend. He’s not going to tell you what you’re doing is wrong. Well, who promotes that? People who want to be your friend and not tell you what you’re doing is wrong. My counterfeits among ideologues, like people who say Jesus was for same-sex relationships or that Jesus was a socialist. Who are the most likely people to say Jesus was a socialist? It’s socialists. So it’s the idea that Jesus, the quote/unquote historical Jesus, becomes just a mirror reflection of yourself. And I have a lot of others in there. I have counterfeits from atheists, like the Jesus who never existed, which surprise, surprise it’s atheists who want to rebut Christianity as much as possible, non-Christians, Jews, Muslims.
Trent Horn:
So what I try to do, David, in the book is show, “Okay, here are the Counterfeit Christs, but here’s how you can tell they’re not like the real Jesus when we compare the Jesus we know from sacred scripture and sacred tradition.” So knowing a counterfeit Christ from the real Jesus is like being a member of the Secret Service, who knows how to spot counterfeit money. In order to spot counterfeit money, you have to know what real money looks like, down to the precise measurement. And then you can see the flaws in the counterfeits. That’s what I try to do in this book.
David Bates:
And in our discussion on the podcast, we spoke a little bit about Lewis’s trilemma. So I want to talk a little bit about that, as well, because I think that can help us do some sifting.
David Bates:
Now for those of you who haven’t come across the dilemma, this is what Lewis writes in Mere Christianity. “I’m trying here to prevent anyone from saying really foolish thing that people often have said about him, ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things that Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic, on the level of the man who says he is a poached egg, or else he would be the devil from hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was and is the son of God, or else a madman, or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool. You can spit at him and kill him as a demon. Or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about him being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
David Bates:
So how does this trilemma factor into helping us discover the real Jesus and recognizing the counterfeits?
Trent Horn:
Right? Well, I’m amused, David, because I always appreciate Louis’s reference to the poached egg. That’s such a British thing to say, what he would be like, because it helps us to overcome a common misunderstanding of who Jesus is. In my book, Counterfeit Christs, I talk about how I went to a teachers’ inservice once. And I had talked about grave, mortal sins and grave matter, why you need to go to confession. And these Catholic high school teachers said that I was being judgmental and I wasn’t like Jesus. And one of them said, “Jesus would never say to not give communion to someone.” They said then. “Jesus would never condemn people.” I said, “Have you ever read Matthew 23, where Jesus condemns the Pharisees. Have you not read?” I love it when Jesus says, “Have you not read?” Have you not read about when Jesus said do not cast pearls before swine, don’t give Holy things to dogs?
Trent Horn:
People want to, they have a vague idea of Jesus from their faded memories of Sunday School. And that’s what Lewis was really dealing with in the late ’40s and the 1950s, when he was trying to evangelize regular people in England. They had faint memories of Jesus from their primary school, but it’s mixed in with what they just want Jesus to be. And the most common one is the nonjudgmental buddy. So the idea here of the trilemma is trying, as Jesus… I mean, sorry, Lewis is saying, “Look, Jesus is not just some wise teacher you can ignore. Look at the things he said. He claimed to forgive sins. He claimed to be able to confer kingdoms like the father, that salvation was only through him, that unless you knew him, you didn’t know God. He claimed to be able to condemn people to everlasting punishment in hell.” So he could not be a good teacher. He would either be a liar, so a bad man, one Latin phrase it’s like deus et homo malis, I think.
David Bates:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn:
It’s, in Latin is, basically Lewis’s argument is, either God or a bad man.
David Bates:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
He’s either lying-
David Bates:
Lewis didn’t come up with this trilemma. He was recycling it from Chesterton, who recycled it from the church fathers.
Trent Horn:
Yes. Absolutely. The idea here is that Jesus is either God or a bad man. He’s either a bad man who knows he’s a bad man, which is a liar, or a bad man who doesn’t know he’s bad, or deficient, which would be a mentally ill person. My wife used to work at a mental hospital. She met many people who thought they were Jesus, but they don’t act it. Here’s the thing. The trilemma starts to break down. You say, “Well, if Jesus preached so many virtues, how could he be the bad man who knows he’s a bad man?” And Jesus is so wise and engaging people, like when you talk to people who claim they’re Jesus, who were chasing people around the 7-11 parking lot, and showed up at my wife’s mental, county mental health, they don’t sound like the Jesus of the gospel.
Trent Horn:
So I’d say the biggest strength, David, of the trilemma is, it forces us to get serious about Jesus. You have to take a real controversial stand. Either he is God, or he’s a bad man. What I appreciate about this is that some atheists take the trilemma and they go with it and say, “You know what? Lewis is right that Jesus wasn’t God.” You have Dan Barker, who I’ve debated twice already. He says Jesus was a really awful person. Christopher Hitchens, who’s kind of the anti, I consider him the anti-C.S. Lewis.
David Bates:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
I’ve thought about this, and feel free to steal the idea if you want to do it, because I have too many books I need to write, figuring out… Actually, someone will come up with this or Peter Kreeft will write this. He’s already a Cecil-
David Bates:
Well, he’s got to spare five minutes.
Trent Horn:
Oh totally. But you know how he did Between Heaven and Hell?
David Bates:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn:
The old Kreeft book, where JFK and Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis meet in the afterlife. Somebody’s got to do a dialogue book where C.S. Lewis and Christopher Hitchens meet. It would just be delightful. And it should be someone who’s English, to get it done right and proper. But in any case, what Hitchens said, he said, “I’m a strong non-admirer of Lewis, but I am bound to say, Lewis is more than honest here about the trilemma. Absent a direct line to the almighty and a conviction that the last days are upon us, how is it moral to teach people to abandon their families, give up on thrift and husbandry, to take to the stony roads? How is it moral to claim a monopoly on access to heaven, or to threaten waverers with everlasting fire, let alone to condemn fig trees and persuade devils to infest the bodies of pigs? Such a person, if not divine, would be a sorcerer and a fanatic.”
Trent Horn:
So it’s like Hitchens, and what I appreciate about Hitchens is, he gets it. He did an interview once with a liberal Christian who said, “Well, Mr Hitchens, you just go after fundamentalist Christianity, not the kind of liberal Christianity where we don’t believe in all that divinity stuff,” essentially is what she said. And Hitchens said, “Look, if you don’t believe Jesus is God, you’re not in any meaningful sense a Christian.” And that was Hitchens. That was an atheist calling it out for what it is. So the trilemma is strong when it forces us to get serious about Jesus, I would say.
David Bates:
And one of the things that I think it does is, it forces us to look at everything that Jesus said.
Trent Horn:
Right.
David Bates:
So when I’ve met people who like the buddy Christ, it’s they remember a couple of episodes of VeggieTales, an occasional children’s liturgy that they attended, or something that one of their school teachers told them at some point. But that’s it. It’s a very blurred image of Jesus and a very selectively chosen. And when I meet such people, they’re often very shocked when I tell them that Jesus spoke an awful lot about sin and hell, and he even began his preaching with, “Repent.”
Trent Horn:
Right. “Turn away.” What are you turning away from? And he’s very clear in Matthew 25, what will happen to people who fail to live out the life of faith by performing the corporal works of mercy, the sheep who follow Jesus, to eternal life, the goats who don’t, to eternal punishment. So it forces us to absolutely take Jesus seriously. But the trilemma is not a foolproof argument. It has its weaknesses, of course. So I don’t know if you want to [crosstalk 00:15:29]?
David Bates:
Yeah, yeah. Let’s talk about it. The most common one I hear is, “Well, come on. Lewis has left out a very obvious fourth option, another L, Jesus is a legend.”
Trent Horn:
Right. Yes.
David Bates:
That’s our way of getting out of this trilemma.
Trent Horn:
Absolutely. And so Bart Ehrman, the agnostic new Testament scholar at UNC Chapel Hill, that’s what he says. I think it’s in his book, How Jesus became God. There’s a great response to that, by the way, written by Christian scholars called, How God became Jesus. Super good book.
Trent Horn:
But so Ehrman and others will say, “Well, you could argue that Jesus’s claims to divinity, Jesus never claimed to be divine. These are legends that accrued later.” Or that, “The stories of Jesus’s teachings and miracles, these are legends. These are myth.” And so I disagree with the contention that Lewis was just ignorant of this L, of this other part of the trilemma, and that he should have made it a quadrilemma.
Trent Horn:
Lewis’s trilemma is based on the assumption that the New Testament documents are accurate and we can get to know the real Jesus through them. And when you read the New Testament, and come to the idea, this is Jesus. What do I do with him, you’re faced with Lewis’s trilemma. But Lewis’s assumption was not a mere assumption. I think he had good reasons to believe the documents are reliable and they’re not mere myths. In Surprised by Joy, his retrospective autobiography, this is what he says about the gospels. He says, “I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the gospels as myths. They had not the mythical taste. And yet the very matter which they set down in their artless, historical fashion, those narrow unattractive Jews, too blind to the mythical wealth of the pagan world around them, was precisely the matter of the great myths. If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this, and nothing else in all literature was just like this.” So speaking about the gospels, he says, “Well, no. I I’ve read myths.”
Trent Horn:
And to echo Lewis’s point, David, when I’ve surveyed ancient literature to see other competitors to Jesus, like when I read, the closest competitor to Jesus in the first century was a wonder worker named Apollonius of Tyana. There is a biography written about him, about three centuries later, precisely to make him a competitor to the growing Christian Church. So right off the bat, we have a huge time gap and a motive for writing that makes the document not reliable. When you read it though, about Apollonius, it comes off as myth. “It is said that Apollonius did this. And I have heard Apollonius did that.” And then at the end, when he supposedly rises from the dead, one of his disciples is sitting around, or they’re all sitting around drawing geometric figures in the ground. And one of them wakes up from sleep and says, “Apollonius has risen.” He’s having a dream. He’s not accessed anything like Jesus.
Trent Horn:
When you read these ancient historical mythic accounts, you get the sense of myth, of once upon a time, a long time ago. You really don’t get that with the gospels. In fact, as Lydia McGrew and Timothy McGrew and others have argued, two very good evangelical scholars, there are these little coincidences in all the gospels that tell parts of the same story by different authors that begin to interlock together. And there’s this little eyewitness details and little things in them that just don’t come off as myth.
Trent Horn:
So I think that Lewis’s trilemma rests on the New Testament documents being reliable. But I believe that Lewis’s assumption they were reliable was a well-founded one.
David Bates:
And actually I can tell you that in an earlier draft of the radio broadcasts, which were eventually to be compiled into Mere Christianity, he did briefly address it.
Trent Horn:
Oh, really?
David Bates:
But it seems to have been cut, basically because he didn’t want to get distracted by that rabbit trail.
Trent Horn:
Right.
David Bates:
These were short talks and they had to be punchy. So he wasn’t trying to cover all of his bases. It’s kind of like the criticism of when, say, someone complains about the Kalam Cosmological Argument, that, “Oh, well this doesn’t get you the Trinity.” Well, it’s not meant to.
Trent Horn:
Right.
David Bates:
There’s one main thing I’m trying to do here. And the thing that Lewis is trying to do in that chapter of Mere Christianity is saying, “If we take the new Testament documents at face value, if we look at the things that Jesus said and did, there’s one thing that we cannot say about him, and that’s that he was just simply a good moral teacher.”
Trent Horn:
Just a mere inoffensive teacher. Jesus is called in scripture, the rock of offense. He offended. Mere moral teachers, he’s basically supposed to be like the first century equivalent of Mr. Rogers. Nobody is trying to put Mr. Rogers in the electric chair, but that’s what you do if you crucify the mere moral teacher, Jesus Christ. He had to be saying offensive things. The question is, what were those things he was saying? And I would say, the offensive things he was saying was, that he was making radical claims to his own divinity. Although the most potent objection to Lewis’s trilemma comes from any New Testament scholars who will say that, “Well, when you really examine the New Testament with the, you get the Jesus Seminar, the Jesus Seminar were the people who would vote on whether Jesus really said what he said. And I think they said he only said like 20% of the New Testament. They use colored beads to talk about, like red, he definitely did; pink was probably; black was like, no way, he never said this. And so a lot of [crosstalk 00:20:49]-
David Bates:
So you end up with an, our Father, where we can say, well, he definitely said, “Our.”
Trent Horn:
Right, well, I think actually the only part they would have said to that, that he said, was Our Father, the unique introduction. The rest is just… Well, and also the Jesus Seminar though, David, it’s funny. They would use these arbitrary standards by saying, for example, if Jesus said something that either sounded like Judaism before him, or the church fathers after him, then it was borrowed from Judaism, or the church fathers put it in Jesus’s mouth. As if Jesus, a Jew, would never draw from the Old Testament, and that the church fathers would never draw from Jesus. Somehow we have to get, the only authentic things from Jesus are the things you and I never… nobody takes seriously.
Trent Horn:
It’s silly, but they’ll point out… And it’s even believing scholars do this. I’ll give you an example. N.T. Wright, the bishop, I think it’s of Durham, he’s an Anglican Bishop and very smart guy. He’s actually written a very good defense of the resurrection called, The Resurrection of the Son of God. So Wright is very good, very good on Paul. He says, though, in an article he wrote on C.S. Lewis, he said, “Lewis is great, but he really doesn’t get some New Testament scholarship.” For example, Wright writes, “When Jesus says your sins are forgiven,” that’s in Mark 2:5, “He is not claiming straightforwardly to be God, but to give people out on the street what they would normally get by going to the temple.”
Trent Horn:
So you’ll get people like Wright, who will say, “Well, you can’t really get explicit claims about Jesus being divine in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. John, you can. Bart Ehrman says, “In John’s gospel, he’s divine. No doubt there.” But he’ll say “John’s gospel is too late to tell us about the historical Jesus. Matthew, Mark, and Luke,” he’ll say, “You don’t really see that.” But I would disagree. And there are areas you can go, like if you get the authentic sayings of Jesus, they, they heavily point in that direction. One of my favorite examples is the Parable of the Wicked Tenants. That’s one that most critical scholars believe Jesus did share, about, there’s a vineyard with wicked tenants. And they took over the vineyard, and the vineyard owner sends the servants, who get beaten and killed. But then he sends his son, and they kill the son to take the vineyard.
Trent Horn:
Of course, the vineyard is imagery that was often employed in the old Testament to describe Israel. So they all know who’s talking. And the tenants are going to be the Jewish priests and the leaders. Alarm bells go off in what Jesus is talking about here, “God sent the prophets. You killed them. You didn’t listen to them. Now he’s going to send his son.” And this is clear, where Jesus is identifying, not as a prophet. He’s saying he is the son of the vineyard owner, who is God. And not a son of God in a metaphorical sense, like prophets or other people, but in a more immediate sense of that. So lots of other examples.
Trent Horn:
Even in the synoptics, when Jesus says, “I have come into the world. I have been sent.” Sent from where? That goes back, talking about preexistence, which is something only God can have. So I would say that there is, when you look even for the trilemma, you can get good evidence for Jesus claiming… He doesn’t say he’s God, but he acts with divine authority, especially in the synoptics. And you can find that to buttress the trilemma argument.
David Bates:
Very often when you speak to Muslims, they will ask the question, “Where did Jesus say, ‘I am God. Worship me”?
Trent Horn:
Right.
David Bates:
And it has to overlook so much implicit Christology, to look at the things that he said and did where he forgave sins like he was the one that was chiefly offended, where he speaks of the scriptures, and he says, “You have heard it said, but I tell you.”
Trent Horn:
“But I tell you.” Mm-hmm (affirmative). He spoke with one as authority, the rabbis, and the rabbis today, they always say, “Rabbi, so-and-so says this. Rabbi so-and-so said that.” Jesus never did that. It was truly shocking in his time, and even afterwards, that when he is interpreting the law, he doesn’t need any other rabbis for authority. He knows what it means, because he wrote the law. So I think that’s another, it’s definitely another important point to raise up.
David Bates:
Now, before we leave that legend trilemma, what would you recommend for someone that wants to explore why that isn’t a valid option? Books about the reliability of the New Testament or why Jesus isn’t a myth?
Trent Horn:
Oh, well, let me pull one off of here for you. It’s always nice having your little, and that’s just a part of my bookshelf behind me, but providentially, it always has what we need there. This is a cool book I’ve really enjoyed called, The Jesus Legend. I’ll hold it up, so you can see it here, The Jesus Legend by Paul Eddy and Gregory Boyd. And it’s the case where the historic reliability of the synoptic Jesus tradition, so it deals with mythicism, the idea Jesus never existed, but also makes a good case as to why we can trust the historical reliability of, essentially what’s written about Jesus in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
Trent Horn:
There’s a lot of other books that could be out there to recommend on this point. William Lane Craig has a good chapter on Jesus’s divinity in his textbook, Reasonable Faith. So that would be scholarly works. But also, I think just to know who Jesus is and to have that closer relationship with him, Peter Kreeft has a wonderful little book called Jesus Shock.
David Bates:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
But I think it’s just good for the regular person just to read. And then you got Counterfeit Christs, if you’ve got time to go in there to cover some of that stuff.
David Bates:
Well, we’ll talk about your book one more time before the end. But before we get to that, given Screwtape’s strategy here, that every generation, let’s come up with a new imagination of Jesus that’s built along some kind of ideological lines, how do we ensure that we find the real Jesus among all of these imposters?
Trent Horn:
Yeah. I think that to find the real Jesus, we have to cling to him. And the way we do that is we ask, “What did Jesus give to bring us closer to him?” I Timothy 3:15 says, “The pillar and foundation of truth is the church of the living God.” So throughout the past 2000 years, it is the church that has given us the safeguards to understand who the real Jesus is. When the Arians said, “Jesus is like God, but not actually God,” it was condemned at the Council of Nicea.
Trent Horn:
And when you had heretics, in the Eastern part of the church, saying that Jesus’s divinity and humanity are put together like a blender, so he’s like half divine, half human, he has one nature, part divine, part human, or that the Christ, the eternal word, was joined to a human body at a later point of this Jesus fellow, that was all condemned at the Council of Chalcedon, in Ephesus. That’s why we say Mary, we refer to her as Theotokos, the mother of God, or God bearer. So I would say clinging to the church has given us 2000 years of guardrails to keep us away from the false Jesuses. So knowing that, reading in the catechism, I think is around in paragraph 470, around there, you get a great teaching about, this is who Jesus is. This is the real Jesus.
Trent Horn:
But also going back to the source, reading the New Testament. Father Mike Schmitz is doing the Bible in a Year podcast. If you can’t do that, read the gospels in a year. Read one chapter a night from the gospels. One chapter, Monday through Friday, is about … there’s about 260 chapters in the New Testament. You’ll get it done, maybe pick up a little on the weekends, since we’re starting the year in March. You can get that done in a year. But be close to Jesus in reading scripture, to hear from him and to dwell in his presence and adoration and the sacrament, receiving them in the sacraments. The closer to you are to Jesus, the better you will be able to hear his voice. Jesus says in John 10, “My sheep hear my voice. They know me and I know them.” So that, I think, is the key, is to not make it merely academic. The academic books are helpful. I write them all the time, and they’re good to do. But there’s no substitute for the real thing, for the real deal, the real thing.
David Bates:
Lewis said, “If you want to get wet, you got to dive into the water. If you want to get warm, you get near the fire.”
Trent Horn:
Right? Or it’s like, when Jesus talked about a map with the RAF, he gave like, he went and told about theology and they said, “I’ve felt the real thing on all those cold desert nights, and this is nothing like that.” But theology is like a map. It’s like yeah, you’re never going to really experience the wilderness without a map. If you look at a map, you can’t get the grandeur of Yosemite. But a map will keep you from walking off El Capitan. So I think that’s important with understanding Jesus. The catechism gives us like a map, to not fall off the cliff. But you got to go off for a hike. Read the new Testament. Go to adoration. Keep your map with you so you don’t get lost, but just spend some time in nature.
David Bates:
And also then, you benefit from 2000 years worth of Christians who have pondered the same sorts of things, read the same sorts of passages, and you get to benefit from their experience.
Trent Horn:
Absolutely.
David Bates:
Trent, thank you for coming on this Skype session. Where can people go to pick up a copy of your book, Counterfeit Christs?
Trent Horn:
Well, they can get it online and anywhere where Catholic, good Catholic books are available. So yeah, so the book is Counterfeit Christs, and I hope it blesses your readers and anyone who wants to learn more about the real Jesus.
David Bates:
And obviously, the only podcast anybody should ever subscribe to is Pints with Jack. But if they did want to subscribe to another podcast, what would you recommend?
Trent Horn:
Well, you might enjoy the Counsel of Trent podcast. That’s available on iTunes, Google Play, and now on YouTube. We talk about apologetics and theology on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I often do rebuttal videos on my YouTube channel to popular anti-Catholic videos on YouTube. And then on Fridays, we do free for all Fridays and talk about all kinds of fun stuff. So that’s the council of Trent, C-O-U-N-S-E-L You can check that out, as I said, Google, iTunes, and the episodes are also available on YouTube.
David Bates:
Wonderful. And listeners, join us next time when we’re going to go further up and further in. Cheers.
Trent Horn:
Hey guys, thanks for listening. And don’t forget to check out Pints with Jack. Get a lot of great C.S. Lewis content and other refined content from Mr. David Bates, always a wonderful source of knowledge and wisdom. So check out Pints with Jack and be sure to go to trenthornpodcast.com to support everything we’re doing with the Counsel of Trent podcast. Thank you guys so much, and I hope you have a very blessed day.
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