Audio only:
In this episode Trent sits down with Presbyterian and popular Youtuber Redeemed Zoomer to talk about Protestantism, Catholicism, and the role of Church authority.
Redeemd Zoomer’s Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@redeemedzoomer6053
Transcription:
Trent:
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent. Joining me today is Redeem Zoomer. Thank you so much for being here.
RZ:
Hey Trent. Thanks for having me on again.
Trent:
Well, now I’m excited for you to be here because the last time you were here, the setup was, I don’t know the best way to phrase it, but crummy comes to mind. It
RZ:
Was, it’s still better than any setup I’ve ever had in my videos.
Trent:
No, I love your videos. I really enjoy. We had a fun back and forth recently. Someone said to me, I got a reply saying, if you want to connect with Gen Z more, don’t play Super Mario World. But the reason I did that was I don’t feel like I shouldn’t pretend to be something I’m not.
RZ:
Yeah, and it’s not like most of Gen Z can’t watch a video unless somebody’s playing Minecraft in the background. That was originally what I did because I didn’t have a high quality camera to show my face.
Trent:
Right. So you just have something pleasant. It’s hypnotic. Actually. What’s nice about when you have Minecraft playing, when you’re talking about theology is it’s a three dimensional first person perspective exploring things. So it kind of lulls you into a nice sense of listening while you’re just walking around. Feels like
RZ:
Right. When I first started getting into Christianity and listening to a bunch of sermons and lectures, I would play Minecraft while listening to that, and that helped me focus on what I was listening to.
Trent:
So
RZ:
I wanted to recreate the experience for everyone else.
Trent:
The closest that I was thinking of when I was thinking, oh, what could I play to be an analog in replying to redeem zoomer, was maybe just exploring empty Halo three maps, because I mean, that’s what I did 20 years ago and still play. People don’t know when my username, but you may catch me on there. Alright, so what I wanted to talk today, we might touch on a little bit of some of the things we’ve gone back and forth on, but I wanted to especially talk about your views on Protestantism and get a better understanding of that. I saw you speak to Iron Inquisitor about this and you have some views. What’s interesting is I feel like you are much more concerned, it seems like about evangelicals and non-denominational than Catholics, which is different from a lot of other people who have concerns about Catholic theology. They tend to not think evangelicals are non-denominational that big of a deal.
RZ:
Yeah. Well, I’m glad you bring that up because a lot of evangelical creators have been calling me out recently that a messenger of truth guy said, oh, we’re redeem Zoomers not Protestant, because he seems to see himself as closer to Catholics than evangelicals, which I do. I do find a lot more agreement with Catholics than evangelicals, but so did Martin Luther and John Calvin. They were much harsher against the Anabaptists than they were against the Catholics and the evangelicals today are basically the same as the Anabaptist. It’s not identical, but evangelicals don’t really have any continuity to any group. So the same things that the reformers condemned the Anabaptists for are the same things that evangelicals believe,
Namely
Anti-institutional and no views of sacramental efficacy and no respect for church history.
Trent:
So let’s talk a little, because recently you said you are done being a Protestant apologist, whatever that means. Tell me about your thoughts on that and then we can get into what it means to be Protestant.
RZ:
Right. I just took a break temporarily because I was just beginning to study the resources and I noticed there were a lot of people who had studied a lot more than me, but weren’t making content. They were just kind of being lazy. I do think Catholics and Orthodox are much better at defending their beliefs and much less lazy about defending their beliefs. The second a kid conversed to Catholicism, he makes a channel like defending Catholicism, even if he’s 15 or whatever,
And
I know Protestant seminarians who’ve been studying for 20 years and they’re like, I don’t know man, I’m just too busy to make a YouTube channel.
Trent:
Why do you think that is?
RZ:
Well, most of these people that I was calling out are in the Protestant schism groups like the A CNA or the PCA and I think Theist mindset has pervaded made its way into most of conservative American Protestants
Trent:
When you call them Protestant schism groups. I want to make sure we get all of our terms clear here because a lot of people, when they think of schism, they think about departing from someone who has legitimate ecclesial magisterial authority. Are you talking about people who, it sounds like, correct me if I’m wrong, claim to be like a mainline Protestant denomination, but they’re not. There only are in name only
RZ:
Sort of, I think voluntary schism is a lot different than forced schism. There’s been many schisms in church history like the Caledonian versus the non Caledonian
And
The Great Schism and the Protestant Reformation. In none of those cases was there one group consciously and willingly and voluntarily departing from the mainstream established group? Nobody committed voluntary schism really until the Great Awakenings in America, which is really where Evangelicalism is birthed. So I think if you talk about what’s generally perceived as Protestantism, you have mainline Protestantism on one end, which has the historical continuity to the Protestant Reformation. On the other end, you have evangelicalism, which is Protestant in name only and has zero continuity to the Reformation.
And
Then you have schematic Protestant groups, which are usually conservative and they try to preserve some of the beliefs of the reformation more than the mainlines do,
But
They end up adopting an evangelical ecclesiology by rejecting the institutional church. So that’s why if you go to your old historic beautiful Episcopal Cathedral or Presbyterian church or Methodist Church, chances are it’s a mainline Protestant church. Chances are it’s not part of the A CNA or the PCA or the Global Methodist Church. These recent schematic offshoots.
Trent:
So let’s try to understand a bit. It seemed like your concern when you were saying you were done being a Protestant apologist, is that you want to focus on what you call the Reconquista initiative, your claim. Essentially, it sounded like before we reach out to Catholics, before we draw people into Protestantism, Protestantism needs to define itself and needs to clean house, and especially needs to purge these, for lack of a better term, liberal elements
RZ:
Within
Trent:
It.
RZ:
Absolutely.
Trent:
So you feel the need to do that. How would you reply playing devil’s
RZ:
Advocate,
Trent:
Someone says, rz, why do you care about that? I mean, Catholicism is just as liberal if not more liberal. Like Pope Francis said, who am I to judge? I mean, people say these things.
RZ:
Yeah, but they’re wrong. Catholicism is objectively a lot less liberalized than the mainline Protestant denominations, and that’s because the conservative Catholics weren’t cowards and they cared about their own heritage and they didn’t run away, and I respect them for that.
Whereas
A lot of the conservative Protestants in America, this is specifically in American context because in most other countries, the mainline Protestant churches are fine. Like in Brazil, the mainline Presbyterian church there, very historic, got lots of beautiful cathedrals. Technically Presbyterians don’t have cathedrals, but they call them that for tax purposes. And it’s mainline, it’s historic. It’s got a lot of universities, and it’s very, very conservative. It’s more conservative than the Catholic church in Brazil. But in America, because of this radical individualism in American culture, the conservative Protestants chose to split off from the mainline denominations, and that’s what let the mainline denominations drift. So liberal.
Trent:
Do you think part of that’s also due to being a religious minority? For example, in America it was primarily founded on Protestant ideals? Well, depending on how you define the Puritans, but
RZ:
Puritans are Protestant.
Trent:
Yeah. So Akins may not have thought that way about them, but so we’ll get to all of that Protestant foundation here. Whereas in South America, it’s more of a heavy Catholic influence. So the Protestants that are going to thrive, there are going to be maybe more traditional and conservative similar. I think, for example, you think about the decline of Protestantism in America. I think about the decline of Catholicism in Europe, for example, especially where it was just so big, but it turns into something where you rest on your laurels kind of.
RZ:
Right? I mean, to some extent that’s true. But there even are historically Protestant nations like Australia, where the mainline Protestant churches are mostly still conservative. The Presbyterian Church of Australia is, they actually had women’s ordination and they got rid of it. There is this one liberal Protestant denomination in Australia called the Uniting Church, but it’s sort of like the liberal minorities of all the other denominations who just sort of left and made their own thing.
So
Protestantism in America is completely cooked if we don’t all return to the mainline churches. That’s what I want to really communicate. So recently I did come back to Protestant Apologetics, and that’s why I responded to your video.
Trent:
Yeah, sure.
RZ:
But I’m specifically a mainline Protestant apologist. What I’m defending is not this category of Protestantism that includes non-denominational churches or Jehovah’s Witness or Calvary Chapel, or even the PCA. I’m defending mainline protest,
Trent:
The Presbyterian Church of America.
RZ:
Yeah. That’s thematic conservative group that left in the 1970s because they didn’t like that the Presbyterian church supported civil rights. And I know that that’s true because they’ve publicly repented of that, but that’s still why they exist.
Trent:
Right. Try to, I want to break the terms down here. I think I look at Protestantism, I have a different categorical framework. Your seems to be more institutional based. Just to understand who is a Protestant, it seems like your definition is more of a historical institutional continuity versus doctrine or methods.
RZ:
I mean, basically, yeah.
Trent:
Oh, good.
RZ:
If I am some random guy in my basement and I decide that I agree with transubstantiation and purgatory, does that make me a Catholic? No, I have to actually join the Catholic church. So I think you’re comparing apples and oranges. If you compare the institution of Catholicism to the vague idea of Protestantism based on the five solos, which didn’t exist until the 20th
Century,
I define Protestantism the same way you would define Catholicism or Orthodoxy. It’s an institution. A Protestant is someone who’s part of a Protestant church, and a Protestant church is a church with roots in the Reformation.
Trent:
What if somebody said, well, I’m an evangelical, and their roots are the Anabaptists who were present at the Reformation, so why can’t I be considered a Protestant?
RZ:
So if you consider the Radical Reformation part of the Reformation, maybe there is some ambiguity in these terms, but there was a very clear distinction between the Magisterial Reformation, which was institutional, and the radical reformation, which was anti-institutional. And the magisterial reformers, Luther and Calvin and Swingley and Knox, they saw themselves as having much more unity with the Catholics than with the radical reformation. So if you want to just use the Protestant label because you have some Anabaptist heritage, that’s fine, but then you can’t claim Luther and Calvin as your boys the way a lot of these guys want to do.
Trent:
Right. I think that when I’m trying to put everyone in here, what are the consequences of your view? So I guess there are Protestants. Would it be easier if we just said there’s Catholic Orthodox Protestants and Evangelicals?
RZ:
Yes.
Trent:
Okay.
RZ:
That’s what I basically say.
Trent:
Okay. So for example, would you say not to, well, I think it’s fair to name names here, to see where people fall. Would you consider Gavin Orland a Protestant or an evangelical?
RZ:
So he’s an interesting case because he actually was part of one of the seven mainline Protestant denominations, the American Baptist Church, USA, and now he’s part of a non-denominational church, and I have publicly voiced my disagreement with him. I have the utmost respect for Gavin Orland. He’s great. I do disagree with him on the validity of evangelicalism though. So I think he definitely has a lot of Protestant roots.
Trent:
Well, his view of the Eucharist seems almost close to the Presbyterian spiritual presence view.
RZ:
It is. And there are some Baptists with roots in the Reformation. It’s just a very small group of them. The American Baptist churches, USA, are descended from the 1689 particular Baptists. They founded Brown University, they founded Rhode Island. They have a lot of Protestant heritage. The vast majority of Baptists you encounter today have no historical connection to that and are just non-denominational with a Baptist label.
Trent:
Right. Then moving on though. So I guess, would you say John MacArthur and William Lane Craig, not only are evangelicals, I feel like you’d probably want to label them heretics.
RZ:
Yes. They are not Protestants and they’re heretics. They’re not even, you don’t have to be a heretic to be an evangelical because John Piper, for example, is an evangelical, but he confesses that Mary is the theotokos, unlike John MacArthur, who said, Mary did not give birth to God. God was never born
Trent:
Naked. Him or Jesus’s blood is in God’s blood.
RZ:
Yeah. He’s way more historian than notorious. Nestorius said, it’s more accurate to call Mary the mother of Christ than mother of God, not Mary is not mother of God.
Trent:
Okay. So you’re trying to defend Protestantism and you think, okay, if we’re going to make apples to apples comparison, you’re going to pair the institutional Catholic church with its doctrines and methods. The comparison must be then to an institutional Protestant framework, which might include then confessional Lutherans, Presbyterians Anglicans, I guess. But we have to cut off, for example, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America or the, I mean, well, they have therefore same-sex marriage and female pastors, or you, I
RZ:
Don’t think we have to cut them off because just because the German Catholic bishops are teaching a lot of heterodox, that doesn’t mean we say they’re not Catholic. We say they’re Catholics in rebellion against Catholic teaching.
Trent:
Well, they’re not doing same sex weddings.
RZ:
That’s true. But I would still, there are Arian bishops in the Catholic church in the four, three hundreds, and they’re still technically Catholic bishops and stuff. They’re just Catholic bishops that are heretical.
Trent:
I
RZ:
Guess they’re part of the institution.
Trent:
So you’d have a preference then for let’s say a mainline church that has these liberal views and female pastors versus let’s just say a really conservative evangelical church that’s straight down the line on abortion, same-sex marriage, male pastors only. It seems like you have a preference for the more liberal mainline one. Am I hearing this right?
RZ:
Yes. And that’s kind of why I am doing the Reconquista, because all the mainline denominations are liberalized to the same extent that the ELCA, the Evangelical Lutheran churches,
Trent:
You just think they can be fixed.
RZ:
Yes. Because Athanasius didn’t split off voluntarily and start Athena’s free Bible church in the desert when the majority of the church was hijacked by heretics in the three hundreds. Both Catholics and Protestants agree it’s possible for the majority of the church at a particular time, at least the institution of the church to be hijacked by this or that heresy.
But
That does not in and of itself warrant scheming. And by the way, the reformers and the Presbyterian Scholastics agree with this. Robert Bailey is one of the four main Scottish Presbyterian authors of the Westminster Confession. So he’s a big deal, and he says that even if your church gets taken over by heretics, that is not a valid reason to schism. He said in one Corinthians, they were blaspheming the Eucharist, and in Galatians they were preaching a false gospel. And his exact words are yet from none of these churches. Did any of the apostles ever separate nor gave they the least warrant to any of their disciples to make a separation from many of them? Samuel Rutherford has a very detailed system for when it’s okay to separate versus when it’s not. And basically it’s if you’re excommunicated, then it’s an existential decision. You have to ask, was that excommunication valid? And in 99 out of a hundred cases it is, but the Protestant belief is that the excommunication of the reformers was not valid.
And
The reason I’m not Catholic, because everyone’s like, oh, if you want to retake the mainline churches, why not retake the Catholic church and make it Protestant? Because I respect the Catholic church. I respect that they have ized Protestant views. I’m not going to try and sneak into the Catholic church and lie about what I believe and try to subvert it. If somehow the Catholic church was able to tolerate Protestant views, I know most of the mainline Protestant churches would be happy to go into full communion with the Catholic church. But I’m sure that you don’t support that happening. I don’t think you want the Catholic Church to just take back what they said about Protestant theology.
Trent:
Well, I think that we can make strides to come together like the joint declaration on justification between Catholics and Lutherans back in the nineties.
RZ:
But
Trent:
I do think for me to define Protestantism, I look at it in a little bit of a different way. I consider it more like, what is your authority? So I would look at, for example, so Catholics have scripture tradition. What is your infallible authority scripture tradition? And the magisterium Orthodox would have infallible scripture and tradition for Protestants. I’m going to bracket it into two. I would say that conservative Protestants would say that Scripture is the only infallible rule of faith for faith in life. And then liberal protestants would say they actually don’t have any infallible rule. They don’t consider scripture infallible. They might consider it authoritative. And then below that would just be like the non-Christians who say, like Muslims, who say, yeah, there’s some things that are true in the New Testament as long as they cohere with the Quran. But you see where I’m doing, where I’m just going up in the authority chain. So with Protestants, there’s the conservative ones who believe in the infallibility of scripture and then the liberal ones who don’t or give lip service to it. I think that’s the big issue there.
RZ:
Right. Are you defining authority as just infallible authorities?
Trent:
I do think that’s a big thing. Yeah. I think that that’s one of the big barriers between Catholics and Protestants is understanding that the magisterium, does it have infallible authority when it defines when the Council of Trent defines certain theological positions on justification as being heretical? Do you have to accept that or not? Because it’s been infallibly defined versus just something we might agree or disagree.
RZ:
So is your method of categorizing different Christian groups, just what they consider to be infallible?
Trent:
That’s not the only method. I think there’s other issues related to church polity. How do they structure their leadership, for example? But I think when I’m looking at what is the big difference between Protestants, Orthodox and Catholic, because you’re saying that Protestants also believe in an institutional church. Catholics have an institutional church. Well, the difference there is which authorities do we consider to be the highest authorities or which things are infallible and can’t be? When you’re talking about evangelicals now, how would you respond to this? Somebody says, look, it’s really good. The Protestant reformers came along because the Catholic church lost its way, and they’re saying, we need to do this theology instead to remedy the ills of the medieval church wherever it may be. But then what if someone says, well, in 300 years later, in the 18 hundreds, we see where the Protestant reformers lost their way and we’re reforming that. So why can’t they follow the same principle, I guess?
RZ:
I mean, they could, but that’s kind of a slippery slope fallacy, because if you say that even if the Protestant reformers disagreed with the evangelicals, their ideas inevitably led to that. The East Orthodox could say, even though the Catholic church doesn’t agree with Protestants, their ideas inevitably led to that. Then the Oriental Orthodox could say, even though the Eastern Orthodox don’t agree with Western ideas, their theology inevitably led to that. The Oriental Orthodox
Trent:
Person. No, I’m not just critiquing them. I’m not saying that the method, I’m not critiquing the method. I’m more trying to figure out what is your reply to them? Because it seems like you would like to stop this doctrinal or institutional shift away. Like say, Hey, let’s stay at the Protestant mainlines and fix it, not go away to something else. When these people are saying, what’s wrong with what we’re doing, we’re just applying the same kind of principle, whereas you want to put the brakes right here and with the mainline churches.
RZ:
Yeah. If you’re wondering, how would I respond to evangelicals, I would use kingdom theology that I’m thinking Evangelicalism is mostly gnostic, not literally, but gnostic in terms of their ideas of what the church is. They believe in mostly just an invisible church. They don’t think the church needs to have a visible, tangible, transformative impact on the world today, and that’s largely influenced by dispensationalism and rapture theology. So I would just argue against them with theology and scripture and saying that Jesus’ main message was not how to go to heaven, but the kingdom of heaven here on
Earth.
I think N Nt Wright, for example, does a great job at that, and he’s my favorite living theologian, and he’s a mainline Protestant, and whenever somebody asks me about kingdom theology or eschatology, I just defer them to NT Wright. He’s
Trent:
Great. Good old Tom.
RZ:
Yes,
Trent:
Exactly. So I see what you’re saying here, but I think one of the problems, and I think when you’re trying to say, look, we want to make these mainline churches, because what I see when people talk about, and people often give this criticism to me, you’re only focusing on the non-denominational and the evangelicals, and part of me is like, well, they’re the ones giving us all the critiques and making the arguments and doing the legwork out there. There’s just a few Anglicans, Lutherans and Presbyterians that are critiquing Catholic theology. I found actually a lot of the people in the past 30 years who’ve written books on this, they tend to be reformed Calvinists in a low church tradition. If you think about it,
RZ:
Maybe, I mean, a lot of the Calvinists, I would say, are not actually part of the Calvinist Church. If you think like John MacArthur or John Piper, and some of them are,
But
The reason that evangelicals are much more engaged in the debates with Catholics is because evangelicals are a lot more anti-Catholic than mainline Protestants are. The reason mainline Protestants don’t make as many polemics against Catholics is because mainline Protestants generally, we generally see Catholics as true Christians.
Trent:
Now, this is interesting. I’d want your thoughts because when you’re talking to Iron Inquisitor, you said when you’re looking at the institutional churches and especially the Confessions of Faith like the Westminster Confession, I think this is helpful for all of us to be on the same page because in your reply to me, I was also a bit unclear about what you thought about scripture. There’s a bit of an equivocation on something being infallible or something being inerrant.
RZ:
It’s a difference,
Trent:
And I think that gets mixed up a lot too. Technically, we would say infallibility is a property of an agent to make a judgment, and their judgment could be fallible. They could make a bad judgment or a good judgment. Whereas we would say in Errancy, is the property of a written document, does it contain an error or does it not contain an error? So your view then, well, we’ll talk about Westminster. I think you said that it’s inert, but I don’t think you would say that it’s inerrancy is due to a divine quality. It just happens to not have errors,
RZ:
Of course.
Trent:
Right. Okay. But when it comes to scripture, you would say, do you believe scripture? You’d prefer the term inerrant rather than infallible?
RZ:
No, I prefer infallible over iner.
Trent:
Oh, okay. So scripture has infallibility,
RZ:
Scripture is infallible. The Westminster confession is not infallible. I call it inert because I just subscribed to it fully the way every Presbyterian minister until the 1930s did.
Trent:
Now, so would you be referring, because what I’m talking about the idea that evangelicals would want to continue developing the mainline tradition of things that they felt like were mistaken. The Westminster Confession itself was revised in 1789 in the American church.
RZ:
Yeah. The version that I think is an errant is the revised American version.
Trent:
Okay. Yes. Because the original one has a not great part in section 25 about the nature of the church, which says this. There is no other head of the church, but the Lord Jesus Christ, nor can the Pope of Rome in any sense be head thereof. And that’s also in the revised version. The revised version removes the next clause of the Pope saying, but is that anti-Christ, that man of sin and son of perdition that exalts himself in the church against Christ? That is called God.
RZ:
Yeah.
Trent:
Right. Okay. Oh, that’s interesting. So you’re saying that the revision that happened in 1789 in the American church, that’s the one you consider to be an errand because it improved the earlier one?
RZ:
Yes. I think the church has the authority to revise its statements because the church is fallible.
Trent:
Sure. Do you see how that would open the people who will try to open the door to say, maybe we have been wrong, for example, on prohibiting female pastors. What would be your response to say, well, in this case, we’re not wrong versus something else?
RZ:
Well, I don’t necessarily subscribe to everything that my church says, and nor do I have to be a member of the church. We don’t anathema people in the Presbyterian church who don’t subscribe to every tenet of Westminster. We just say, you have to believe the essentials of the faith contained in the apostles and Nicene creeds.
Right.
That’s why you have to believe to become a member at A-P-C-U-S-A church. Typically. Sometimes it doesn’t get enforced. So hypothetically, if the church revised Westminster to say, oh, we don’t believe in predestination anymore. Now we’re like universalist, then I would disagree with that. I just think the current version of Westminster that the Presbyterian church uses has no errors. That’s all. I mean when I’m saying it’s iner, I dunno if you’d say the statement two plus two is four is inert because there’s no errors in that statement. That’s all. I mean when I say Westminster is an errand,
Trent:
Right, and when I say the Bible is aner, I also agree it does not have errors, but that’s because of a particular divine quality of the text, because it’s divinely inspired that something could be protected from error through human ingenuity or through the actions of the Holy Spirit, and we’d have to qualify that.
RZ:
Yeah. I don’t think Westminster has any divine protection against errors. I just think it happens to not be wrong. I can’t see anything in Westminster that I think isn’t biblical,
Trent:
But then that’s where the problem, because the goal of where you see things becoming, we asked why are things becoming more liberal in the mainline churches? They would say, well, we were maybe 1789 revised things, and it wasn’t just the Pope. There were other things that got revised that were from 1647. Maybe. Then there’s other things that we need to continue revising. It seems like to me, the problem, how do we provide uniformity along these mainline churches? If you try to go and join them? I’d say there are Anglican communions, Lutheran denominations, Presbyterian denominations, huge bodies that are just wackadoodle off the reservation versus I think in Catholicism, I would say that the Catholic groups that have gone off the reservation are very, very, very small in comparison like the old Catholic church.
RZ:
True.
Trent:
They’re very, very small in comparison, and I think what you guys need, if I can offer a suggestion, what about a Protestant pope?
RZ:
So we’re not going to have a Protestant pope.
Trent:
He’s not infallible, but he’s the head that gives unity to everything else.
RZ:
The Eastern Orthodox don’t really need a pope. The Oriental Orthodox
Trent:
Anglicans have the arch of Canterbury.
RZ:
I mean, yeah, different Protestant groups have different ecclesiology. It
Trent:
Hasn’t helped them much though either.
RZ:
It’s worth pointing out that the vast majority of global mainline Protestantism is not liberal. It’s mainly a problem in particular, individualistic Western where the conservatives have schismed off and done their own thing.
Okay.
So for example, how many Presbyterians would you estimate there are in America?
Trent:
Oh, that is a good church stat question.
RZ:
Just wild guess
Trent:
How many Presbyterians?
RZ:
Yeah,
Trent:
Let’s see. Well, numbers wise, well, Protestants make up 20%, and there’s about 70 million Protestants. That’d be about, sorry, 70 million Catholics. That makes up, that’s 20%, I don’t know, 20 million.
RZ:
There’s 2 million Presbyterians in America and the Presbyterian church
Trent:
Off by a factor of 10. Not a great
RZ:
Start. Yeah. PUSA is largely hijacked by liberals. There’s 2 million Presbyterians in America. There’s 20 million Presbyterians in Africa. All the churches there are very conservative.
Trent:
Africa will be majority of Protestants. By 2050, the majority of Protestants will be in Africa.
RZ:
Yes. And the global south,
Trent:
There are more Anglicans in Nigeria than England,
RZ:
Of course, and the African Anglicans are very conservative. The Anglican Presbyterians are very conservative. So the center of gravity globally of mainline Protestantism is not in the places where Protestantism is getting liberal.
Trent:
That’s why I’m hoping maybe we’ll get a African Pope recorded before the reveal.
RZ:
I have been supporting Cardinal Sarah since 2018. I didn’t just hop on the bandwagon because it’s cool.
Trent:
So we will see that this is recorded while the cardinals were in conclave.
RZ:
To answer your question, every single denomination, every single one, except for weird matic cults has gotten more liberal in the past 300 years. Even the Eastern
Trent:
Orthodox,
RZ:
Every group has gotten,
Trent:
Oh, yeah. Well, they went fully on board, not fully on board, but it’s pretty loosey goosey on contraception. And
RZ:
Yeah, every group has gotten looser on slavery, has adopted more modern liberal views of race. And by the way, that’s a good thing. And they’ve gotten more ecumenical also a good thing. Some of the modern developments are good.
Trent:
I think Catholics were always pretty solid on race because our adherence came from every racial group because of the nature of the church. I mean, the church was fighting against inner racial marriage bans back in the forties,
RZ:
But every church has still adopted more progressive stances on social and theological issues, some more than others, but it’s happened.
Trent:
But in some of these cases, they are justified understanding the role
RZ:
Of I agree. I think a lot of them are justified. I’m not even saying the Catholic church is bad for that,
Trent:
But the problem is then threading the needle between the heretics will use the ones that were justified in understanding that a certain evil might be tolerated a point in the past like slavery and say, there’s been a development here. Well, we can have all other kinds of crazy developments like, Hey, don’t use that to justify your other crazy. I think the problem becomes drawing the line. So I feel like you are kind of facing a battle on two fronts between people who want to go super far left. But then I think the other problem is what about when redeemed alpha gets even more hardcore based than you and says, we need to rescue the church from redeem Zoomers evolution and heliocentric heresies
RZ:
And
Trent:
Things like that, because then it can go too far in the other direction.
RZ:
I agree. I have basically equal struggles against people to the left of me, and the
Trent:
No redeemed alpha would be like, we got to rescue it from redeemed Zoomers heresies about evolution, Helio centrism and race realism.
RZ:
Yeah, pretty much. I think that’s always a danger if you believe in any development of doctrine. I do believe in development of doctrine. Just because something can be misused doesn’t mean you should abandon it. So yes, that is a legitimate danger that people will use legitimate developments to argue for illegitimate developments, but that’s just something we have to be watching for and something we have to be smart and wise about.
Trent:
So I guess then where it becomes the problem here, it’s where do we set the boundaries for doctrine? And that’s why I had the infallible and authoritative rules here.
So there’s infallibility, but I think a lot of people misunderstand that about the Catholic magisterium. The vast, vast majority of the magisterium teaching acts are not infallible, which is a good thing. If everything you’re saying is infallible, it doesn’t give you room to develop. It doesn’t give room for the Holy Spirit that might just be tolerating things that are being taught rather than divinely asserting certain things. But I think though, when it comes to Protestants, how do we put those parameters in there? That’s one. Where do we set the infallible guardrails? And then two might be like if you’re coming in saying, Hey, mainlines that have gone off the rails here, you need to come back. They’ll say, well, who says is the authority then just who’s better at making the argument from scripture and tradition? I think there’s an authority problem here a little bit.
RZ:
I think really the issue is power, because it’s not like the mainline liberals are saying, oh, we interpret scripture to think we can do all these liberal things. Really, they’re Marxists hired by George Soros who say, we don’t care what the Bible says. The Bible is not an authority. The only authority is the people paying us to hijack these churches. It’s a real problem in the seminaries. So you don’t really see Protestants who hold to the infallibility of scripture who are also pushing liberalism. It’s generally a hijack from the outside, and you could go deep into this. There’s a lot of money behind progressive hijack of the seminaries and what the conservatives did, rather than fighting it, is they just ran away, started
Trent:
Their own things.
RZ:
Yes.
Trent:
So what we’re talking about infallibility though, I wanted to clear up something I saw in your response. I want to make sure I heard you right. You said you believe in the infallibility of scripture, but not the kind that would be asserted by the Princeton theologians like Bebe Warfield.
RZ:
Yeah.
Trent:
So what do you exactly mean by the in? Because I think that that’s really important to understand that because I think for many, you go back a hundred years when liberal Protestants were denying the virgin birth, for example. Oh, no, no.
RZ:
I have heard the same type of biblical inerrancy that most Catholics do.
Trent:
Okay. So how would that be different from Warfield or the Princeton theologians? What do you mean by that?
RZ:
So I think they focus too much on the original manuscripts of the Bible, which we don’t have. They say the original manuscripts that we don’t have iner. Okay. That’s not very helpful. That doesn’t really help with textual issues.
I think
It sort of makes a house of cards. So what I deny is what I call PDF and Errancy where there’s this platonic form of the Bible that’s just this PDF word for word letter for letter. And that is exactly how the Bible is supposed to be in Hebrew and Greek and Aramaic, and every departure from that is a departure from scripture. So the Princetonian in Errancy is like that imaginary PDF of the Bible in the original languages, in the original manuscripts iner,
We
Don’t have that. And I don’t think such thing exists because for emperor Nero, in some variance, his number is 6 6 6, and in some variance
Trent:
6 1 6, 1 6.
RZ:
And that variant was intentional. And some of the church fathers say that the varis in scripture are inspired.
Trent:
So
RZ:
When I’m rejecting Princetonian and Errancy, that’s what I’m rejecting.
Trent:
Okay.
RZ:
I’m not rejecting anything. Catholics. Think about the errancy of scripture.
Trent:
Okay. Yeah. So you would reject then someone from a liberal perspective, they might make this kind of argument. I don’t see anything wrong with female pastors because when Paul says, I do not permit a man to teach that comes from a forgery or an interpolation, that’s not actually St. Paul.
RZ:
Yeah. That’s not a valid way to argue from scripture. And the people who are arguing for liberalism in the mainline churches are not appealing to solo to do it. They are contradicting soul scriptura.
Trent:
But that’s what I was saying when I’m looking at Protestants, Catholics have three infallible rules. Orthodox have two conservative Protestants have one in scripture is an infallible rule of faith, and it’s the only infallible rule of faith. And then those who have zero, who might be more like the liberal Protestants who say scripture’s authoritative, but it’s not infallible.
RZ:
Right. But if you’re dividing people into which infallible rules they use, then you’ll have to divide Catholics because Catholics often disagree on what is infallible. Catholics often disagree on which papal statements are infallible, which councils are what part of which council.
Trent:
Well, I think they disagree about what is included in the rule, but I think all Catholics agree than the scripture tradition magisterium paradigm. They might disagree about what counts as infallible magisterium, but they agree with the concept of it.
RZ:
Sure. I just think that’s a bit of an arbitrary way to categorize Christian traditions if you’re just categorizing them based on which authority they think is infallible.
Trent:
I don’t think that’s arbitrary because you go to that authority to set your doctrinal guardrails just like yourself, would you would say that someone couldn’t say, well, I don’t agree with the virgin birth because Matthew and Luke are contradictory. That’s best explained by these being later traditions that were added to the text. I think you would say, no, you can’t hold that view because that contradicts the fact that scripture is infallible. That makes you more of a conservative Protestant than a liberal one.
RZ:
But then you’d have to group the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox and the Assyrian Church of the East together because they all hold to the same view of what is infallible, basically.
Trent:
Well, I think that there are in a similar plane, just like there’s going to be some Catholic splinter groups that believe scripture attrition the magisterium, but their magisterium is some guy who lives in Kansas.
RZ:
Yes.
Trent:
So I mean, yes, I do agree there’s going to be different groups, but there’s satellites around the same thing.
RZ:
I mean, you could categorize things that way. I just think that that’s not, we’re talking about when you talk about denominations.
Trent:
Sure. To me, it’s just like at each level there’s going to be a constellation of people that hold to that view, because under the scripture is the only infallible rule of faith. That would also include Jehovah’s Witnesses, and it would include Mormons because when I dialogue and debate with them, they actually, at least Jacob Hanson and I was talking to him, said he denies the Mormon church is infallible.
RZ:
I’ve heard some Mormons say that the Mormon church can make infallible decisions.
Trent:
So I guess it would depend which ones representing it. If they are correctly, then they would get up in tier three with us if they have scripture edition, infallible magisterium. I’ve heard other Mormons deny it, but the job’s witnesses say the watchtower always gets new light that it’s not infallible to get out of all the failed predictions and things like that. But I wouldn’t put them, but I would consider them. They’re not Christian because, so for you then to determine who is or who isn’t Christian, this has also been something I find difficult within Protestantism, at least from a soul script or a paradigm. Maybe the evangelicals have a harder time with this in deciding who is and who isn’t Christian. Because a lot of people say, oh, well Trent, that’s so easy. It’s just Trinity and the deity of Christ. I’m like, ah. It gets a bit more nuanced than that. I mean, then you have people like MacArthur, William Lane, Craig, and others deviating, and I think you have to go back to the creeds to help you.
RZ:
Yeah. I would say that they’ve definitely placed themselves outside the bounds of Christian orthodoxy, and I do not presume their salvation the way I presume the salvation of Christians who do not publicly commit heresies like that.
Trent:
And your reason for that is because the definition of what makes someone a Christian, would you say that definition is found primarily outside of scripture? Like in ecumenical councils or within scripture?
RZ:
I think the church has the ministerial authority to clarify what is essential and accidental to the gospel.
Trent:
Okay. So when would you say the church has done this?
RZ:
The Roman Catholic Church has a list of which baptisms are valid?
Trent:
Yeah, A rough list. Sure.
RZ:
Yeah. And I have a rough list of which Christian denominations are Christian denominations.
Trent:
Right. But the list that Catholicism would put forward is derived from previous infallible declarations about whose baptisms are valid or who is outside of orthodoxy, like at ecumenical councils at naia, Constantinople caldon.
RZ:
Okay. But does the Catholic church have an infallible canon of valid baptisms?
Trent:
No, it doesn’t have an infallible canon belt. Right, but I’m just asking, I’m just giving you the sources where they come from. So would you agree that for you list of who baptisms are valid and whose aren’t that that comes primarily from outside of scripture? Where are the sources? Where are you figuring that out
RZ:
From? It comes from the Presbyterian church.
Trent:
Okay.
RZ:
We have a universal ordinary magisterium that’s not always infallible, but we still have to ascent to it. So the Presbyterian church, now, there are some fringe Presbyterian groups that don’t recognize Catholic baptisms, but the P-C-U-S-A will accept your baptism if you are Catholic or Eastern Orthodox or Baptist, not if you’re Mormon or part of the Christian community of Rudolph Steiner, which is what I was baptized in as a baby. The Roman Catholic Church says it has an invalid baptism and so does the Presbyterian church. That’s why I got baptized for real in the Presbyterian church. So I don’t think there’s much of a difference. And much of my Protestant apologetics has been clarifying that Protestant apologetics looks a lot different when you actually have an authoritative normative magisterium. Maybe it’s not infallible, it’s still authoritative and we still have to submit to it. It’s still
Trent:
Binding. So for you though, it would be the magisterium of the particular Presbyterian denomination, not the PCA. Are you talking about P-A-U-S-A-P-C-U-S-A? The
RZ:
P-C-U-S-A,
Trent:
That is the particular authoritative magisterium that you as sent to?
RZ:
Yes.
Trent:
And so why as sent to that rather than to the Lutheran Missouri Church Synod, for example, or a conservative Anglican magisterium.
RZ:
I mean, my magisterium right now is not conservative, but
Trent:
Right. The one you would
RZ:
Sure.
Trent:
Oh, okay. So you’re sorry for everybody who’s got you. We got acronyms flying up the wazoo up here to keep everything straight.
RZ:
Yes. Protestant doesn’t. So
Trent:
You are in PCA?
RZ:
No, I’m P-C-U-S-A.
Trent:
Right. But you said it’s not Oh, because you’re trying to
RZ:
Yeah, I’m in a majority liberal denomination trying to retake it.
Trent:
Yeah. Okay. So P-C-A-P-C-U-S-A, but which one would you consider to be the actual conservative Presbyterian denomination that kind of ran away?
RZ:
The PCA is the conservative offshoot that ran away.
Trent:
Oh, okay. Sorry, I got confused here. I thought because you said they were like schism men off. I thought they were the far liberal one. Nevermind.
RZ:
No, the liberals are the ones who kept the institutions. The conservatives are the ones who ran away. And every modern church split has been the liberals keeping all the stuff and the institutions and the brand and the conservatives running away Take my ball and
Trent:
Play somewhere else.
RZ:
Yeah. The A CNA is also schematic. The Global Methodist Church also schematic conservatives, they actually won the vote and left the church. American conservatives are
Trent:
Just the vote about same-sex marriage.
RZ:
Yeah. American conservatives are just so cowardly, and we see this with other institutions like fundamentalists in the early 20th century were retreated from the universities and started their own retreats. Bible colleges instead. And we see this with the Boy Scouts when the Boy Scouts got liberal, people just made Trail of life instead. So conservative retreatism is this big, big paradigm that I’m trying to work against.
Trent:
So I guess when it’s like, okay, as a Christian you need to submit to magisterial authority, but you’re in an odd position because it would seem like the PCA has more authority because it’s more doctrinally sound. But you want to fix the P-C-U-S-A and have it retain its authority.
RZ:
Yes.
Trent:
So it’s like you have to submit to it except for the parts where they’re kind of bonkers right now.
RZ:
Well, there are sort of lesser authorities that are Orthodox in the P-C-U-S-A. My pastor is fully orthodox, so I advise people to try and find P-C-U-S-A congregations that are orthodox. There’s hundreds and hundreds of them. Even if only 20% of the P-C-U-S-A is conservative, that’s still 1600 congregations
Because
The PCSA is just so big. It’s like during the Aryan crisis when the majority of bishops were Aryan, should people have
Trent:
On the east,
RZ:
Sure. But should people have split off and started new ecclesial communities or should they have just weathered the storm and wait for the church to correct itself?
Trent:
And that will get back to then the identity of what is the church that Christ established. And that’s going to be a big question, and I appreciate that you take this institutional ecclesial and hierarchical view of what the church is, that it’s a visible church. This has been one of the hardest times I have when I’ll talk to Protestants and talk about, well, what is the role of the church? And I’ll get answers like, well, the church guides believers, it guides them to sound doctrine. It disciplines believers who are wayward in the faith. And I’m thinking, well, because what I hear, and this is not you, you’re a minority view. What I hear from a lot of other Protestants or evangelicals,
RZ:
I don’t think I’m a minority view. I think I’m a minority view on the internet.
Trent:
On the internet. Yeah. Well, it’s a different world up there, but even when I just meet people who go to churches that are not Catholic or Orthodox, but church, the fallback position is, well, the church is just the invisible bond between all Christians.
RZ:
Yeah, that’s not true. There is a sense in which
Trent:
We can talk, but that church can’t help me do squat.
RZ:
Yeah, exactly. The church is not purely invisible. We do talk about an invisible church, but we’re not saying that that’s the only way to talk about the church.
The
Church is also visible. It’s an institution with buildings and people and rules that you have to submit to. It’s not just the imaginary set of all believers,
Trent:
But it seems like what you’re saying now is while P-C-U-S-A is, you guys are trying to fix things and people are trying to pick the right denomination. And I think that’s a hard time for anybody who goes in and says, well, I’m not on board. I think there’s a lot of people that might be in this boat. They listen to you, listen to other people, and they realize, wow, evangelicalism has a lot of problems. And it’s like, sorry, Gavin, I’m going to dunk on low church. He did that video recently, and like I said with you, I love Gavin. I would love to have him sit down and offer his perspective on these things, and they think, I want to get more mainline. And then they look out and they see, they have to answer the question, Lutheran Presbyterian, Anglican Methodist. But even within those, it’s like, oh, watch out for that domination. We still need to fix that one. Or Yes, go to that one. We’re in the midst of we’re just pardon our dust. It’s kind of like you’re treating P CSAs like, come on in, but pardon our dust. We need to fix up stuff while we’re here.
RZ:
Sort of. But a lot of people forget that all the seven mainline Protestant denominations, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist, Episcopal, reformed Baptist and Congregationalists are all in communion with each other. So it’s a lot like Eastern Orthodoxy where you have different jurisdictions with different identities and even different theologies sometimes, but they’re all in communion. We can all take communion at each other’s churches. We all share pastors sometimes. We all share the same seminaries.
Trent:
The Lutherans don’t have a close communion.
RZ:
The EL CMS does not. The EL LCA. Now, the lc MS is not,
Trent:
I would expect that at the El CA.
RZ:
The El CMS is not atic.
Trent:
Here’s your Sparkle Eucharist.
RZ:
Well, here’s the thing. I think this is a reason why the internet is unhelpful, because the vast, vast majority of El LCA pastors are not like the Sparkle Creed lady, but she’s the one that gets all the cliques. A pastor faithfully preaching the word and administering the sacraments in his congregation is not going to go viral on the internet. The reason you see these priestesses reciting the sparkle Creed and talking about how God loves abortion, it’s very clear people are falling for their trap pay attention,
Trent:
But the body itself still supports evils like legal abortion, same sex unions, female pastors. That’s the problem.
RZ:
Once again, I’d say it’s always possible according to every tradition for the majority of the church, the institutional church at any given time to fall into heresy. But we believe that there’s a promise from the Holy Spirit that the gates of hell will finally not prevail against the church.
Trent:
Yeah. I guess what it feels to me is when you’re saying people go and they want to get out of evangelicalism, go into mainline, it seems to me the standard they’re going to end up using in sifting through to find the right one would just be applying just biblical standards to these which ones are Orthodox on what the Bible teaches on life, on marriage, on theology. And so they end up going back to the old paradigm they had as evangelicals of just the Bible alone to figure out what I’m going to do. But then you’re saying, well, no, we need to follow. It’s not just that we need to have an allegiance to the institutional church that has its roots in the reformation, even if it’s really, really corrupt right now.
RZ:
Well, everyone has to make this decision. Everyone has to choose which church they’re going to submit to. Everyone has to make that private judgment of whether to submit to the Catholic church or the Eastern Orthodox Church or the Oriental Orthodox Church or the Assyrian Church of the East, or the True Orthodox Church or the Presbyterian or mainline Protestantism, which is all united.
Trent:
Right. Well, I mean when you say it’s united, it’s
RZ:
United institutionally. I know it’s not very united theologically, but the same could be said about everyone,
Trent:
But there’s why differences there when it comes to important issues like infant baptism, for example, or children receiving the Eucharist. A lot of things that do relate to questions dealing with salvation, for example.
RZ:
Yeah. I do think that all the seven main lines in their confessions are united and all that’s necessary for salvation,
Trent:
Which would be what
RZ:
The apostles and ene creeds.
Trent:
Well, except for the ones that won’t say the ene creed, even at their services, they have theological, there’s Baptist, they did that whole thing where they were voting on it, and they couldn’t even agree on that.
RZ:
The Southern Baptists aren’t one of the main lines. They’re historic enough to be a mainline. They’re not like the in communion with the rest of us. Historic Baptists are fine with the ene creed.
Trent:
Okay. Because yeah, that gets another issue of figuring out, okay, what is necessary for salvation? But even the apostles creed in the ene creed, if you’re saying that MacArthur, John MacArthur and William Lane Craig put themselves outside of the bounds of orthodoxy for monotheism and historian, but then you’re having to enlist the other ecumenical councils beyond just these ancient creeds.
RZ:
Well, the other councils mainly clarified the meaning of the first two creeds, and I think the church has the ministerial authority to clarify that. So we’re not saying that, oh, maybe you accepted the apostles and ine creeds, but you’re not a Christian because you didn’t accept this additional thing. What we’re saying is if you don’t accept that Jesus is one person that marries the mother of God, then you’re not really accepting the first two creeds.
Trent:
Well, they would say they accept the creeds based on how they understand what the creeds mean, and the creeds don’t explicitly refer to issues dealing with deism or Christ, OTOs versus Theotokos,
RZ:
And the church has the ministerial authority to make judgments about that.
Trent:
Okay. I guess the only other thing, well, I guess I have one last question here to pull everything together. I am super glad you were able to come and sit down with me
RZ:
On
Trent:
This. I want to really improve the conversations. Catholics and Protestants are having one in tone, just like yelling at everyone saying that they’re heretics submit to Rome or else, or just some of the rage baiting Catholics due to Protestants and Protestants have been doing to Catholics lately. It’s like, come on, knock it off. So that’s one. But I think also it’s interesting for you and I talking about levels of authority and the institutional church to have these interesting conversations about authority beyond just the packaged objection, counter objection. So I don’t know, do you have your thoughts on just how we can make these conversations better between Catholics and Protestants?
RZ:
Yeah, so I heard a very good quote one time that in debates, clarity is more important than agreement. A debate is successful, not if one person converts the other, because that almost never happens. But if both sides gain a greater clarity of the other side’s possession. So the Catholics watching this, I’m not asking that you all become mainline Protestant. That’d be nice, but I’m not asking that. I think you’re fine. In the Catholic Church, I want you all to understand what Protestantism is. Protestantism is the seven churches that came from the Reformation and debatably their offshoots as well, but not evangelicalism. The main goal of my Protestant apologetics slightly
Has
Been just to think of Protestantism and Evangelicalism as two completely different forms of Christianity, because Protestantism, according to the reformers and the confessions, and the existing churches today that are descended from them sees itself as much closer to Catholicism than to evangelicalism. So I would like, I guess my plea to Catholic creators when they’re responding to John MacArthur or Rage bait Twitter accounts that say there was nothing special about Mary whatsoever. It’d be helpful if they use the word evangelicals instead of Protestants.
Trent:
I think that’s helpful, and I’ve tried to use those two terms interchangeably. I think it’s helpful for Protestant to refer to, I guess, these mainline denominations that you want to call them. I think where it gets difficult though is when I say evangelical, help me run through this. It seems like evangelicals just have a lot more doctrinal in spite of them having less institution. They seem to have more doctrinal unity than the mainline churches because you’re trying to fix all of this liberalness. Within the mainlines. There’s not as much of that in evangelicalism.
RZ:
There’s not liberalism in terms of social issues as much. I mean, evangelicals will disagree amongst themselves on every social issue. The extent to which homosexuality is okay, there’s the whole side B debate in evangelicalism. They’ll disagree on birth control and IVF, they will disagree.
Trent:
Or do you think maybe they have just as much a problem? They just got better pr?
RZ:
They have way better pr.
Trent:
Maybe
RZ:
That’s true. I don’t think they have as much liberalism as the mainlines, but I think that’s because there’s big money invested into hijacking the mainlines. And the reason they want to hijack the main lines is because, as I’m sure Marxists always want to hijack the institutions, there’s a reason that Scotland has been hijacked and not Somalia by the leftist because they care about
Trent:
The Somalians. Do the hijacking, sorry. Sorry. Only the bad pirates on the coast.
RZ:
Yeah, because Marxists care about hijacking the centers of power, and if they are invested in hijacking the mainline churches, that tells me there’s something very valuable about those mainline churches. And they tried to hijack Catholicism to some extent. Catholicism, I think resisted it better.
Trent:
Well, that’s why I kind of think that there’s a lot of people who will espouse very, very liberal views that are totally antithetical to the Catholic magisterium, but they can’t give up that Catholic identity even at the bare minimum of, I went to Catholic school for 12 years.
RZ:
Sure.
Trent:
Because I think they really see the Catholic church kind of having main character syndrome here and still they’re like, I still want to be a part of that somehow.
RZ:
I know what you mean. I know what you mean. I’ve talked to those people. I think we’re talking a bit too much about the theological issues. I think there is politics behind this too. Sure. You know about the Frankfurt school and Antonio Graham, she’s long march through the institutions, right?
Sure, yeah.
Yeah. So these Marxists literally said we need to do a long march through all the major cultural institutions of the west, especially the mainline churches. And then they went and did that. So people ask me, when are you going to give up on the mainline churches and just go join the PCA or another conservative offshoot? I ask WWMD, what would Marxists do? Would they ever give up trying to subvert an institution? No, they wouldn’t.
Trent:
You don’t think that maybe you just joined the conservative offshoots and the liberal ones just die on the vine anyways because the demographically people just aren’t interested in them.
RZ:
I mean, demographically, that’s probably what’s going to happen, but I don’t want to sacrifice all that heritage because it’s not like the conservatives are just going to flourish and get all these beautiful cathedrals and
Trent:
We want our buildings back
RZ:
And they’re not like the PCA is not going to invent Princeton 2.0. It’s like, yeah, if the P-C-U-S-A dies, then the Protestant heritage, or at least the Presbyterian heritage in America is just cooked. And it’s still fine in Ireland and Brazil and Australia and Mexico. But I care about the American Presbyterian heritage.
Trent:
Oh, not to, I know I said I was wrapping things up. I don’t want to open a ton of canon worms, but I appreciate your reply to me. And I think it had a lot of thoughtful elements to it. And I understand. I think your position is interesting. It’s basically, yeah, I think Catholicism is false, but I’m not going to go on a crusade to turn Catholics into Protestants. That’s not your Right
RZ:
Now I think Catholicism is true. Christianity.
Trent:
Yeah. It is similar to someone who might think Calvinism is false. We’re not going to go on a crusade on that. It’s something they’re fine to let be. But the point I was making, and I was trying to be very understanding, I was not trying to do, when I was pointing out, you’re saying my problem with Catholicism is it makes these infallible claims, but that holds them to a standard of if you contradict yourself, that’s big problem if you want to still be infallible. And when I was bringing up that point about the Bible, I was actually not saying you were arguing like an atheist. My point was more if you, and it’s good. I’m glad you have the traditional view of scripture being infallible, that there is a clarity that I think will come forward that when you put forward an infallible rule, I think if you’re going to revitalize a lot of these liberal institutions and Protestantism saying that scripture is the infallible bar to judge against is going to be a very helpful tool to be able to do that because so infallibility is an asset in providing that kind of clarity, but infallibility has its own liability when people don’t like that asset and want to attack it and try to find contradictions and things like that. That’s all I was saying is that for people who see this with Catholicism, I think anyone who uses an infallible standard to provide doctrinal clarity will have to explain and raise defenses when people try to attack the infallible standard. That was the point I was trying to make.
RZ:
Yeah, and I think Catholics do need to try and explain the infallible, the supposedly contradictory statements in their infallible magisterium, just the way Protestants have had to explain the supposedly infallible Bible contradictions.
Trent:
Sure,
RZ:
Absolutely. I think they’ve done a very good job at it though.
Trent:
Yeah. And I think that there are good explanations. I historically, and I really appreciate what I love about Gen Z is this is a positive and a minus in your generation. I love that Gen Z religious, be they strong mainline Protestants or Catholics, they want to get to the nitty gritty and the fine details of theology.
RZ:
Yes.
Trent:
And so that’s a good thing. So I see a lot of good creators online with Catholicism like answering the question, well, do the church contradict itself on no salvation outside the church? And they’re going through Florence, they’re going through, and I’m saying they’re going through the primary sources and they’re going to the theological voices at the time to rev provide context like what Tomata said, that you could still be saved even if you ignorantly followed an anti pope
RZ:
For
Trent:
Example. And so I appreciate they do that. My only concern is I worry sometimes about Gen Z sometimes they can’t see the forest for the trees that you’ll have people who get so obsessed with critiquing or defending Philly Oak Way and then they’re posting horrible stuff on their timeline.
RZ:
Oh yeah, that’s for
Trent:
Sure. So that’s my honest assessment of Gen Z Christianity online right now.
RZ:
I just think Gen Z online has an overload of information. Nobody ever had access to this many perspectives and this much information before. And if you have all these supposedly infallible exclusive churches making exclusive claims, then the nitty gritties about the Phil Oak Way actually do matter because that makes the difference between Catholicism and Orthodoxy
Trent:
Or the differences between the Lutheran Presbyterian and Baptist view of the Eucharist.
RZ:
I think that’s a bit different because none of us really are exclusive. None of us really achmat the other or ever have.
Trent:
Well, I do think it does get a little bit important about whether it’s important,
RZ:
But we don’t think that your salvation is in danger if you get it wrong.
Trent:
Okay.
RZ:
So I think it’s a bit less high stakes. That’s why I think.
Trent:
But I think even just for critiques, when we’re trying to just do theological discussions, I hate when Catholics basically say all Protestant Eucharist is just a cracker and grape juice. It’s like, come on man, come on. At least the very least, read four views on the Lord’s Supper. That’s actually a decent anthology covering the major views on that. So bringing it then full circle. I think what can help then for the dialogues in Catholics and Protestants is to invite a lot more of the heftier, theological and historical data to be nuanced about the different positions. And then we can just have a better discussion that way.
RZ:
I agree.
Trent:
Very good. Well, we’ll have to have you back for that. Or maybe we’ll do a round table and we’ll have an evangelical. We can both beat up
RZ:
On it. Get Gavin Orland here.
Trent:
Well, I want to have Gavin out soon. Get
RZ:
Gavin Orland and Jay Dyer and then that’ll
Trent:
Be fun. No, Jay is an interesting fellow. We certainly had a debate on natural theology and I
RZ:
Thought that was a very interesting debate.
Trent:
No, and I thought he was very actually cordial in that debate. A lot of people give him grief about his, and in some of his online behavior is worthy of grief being given. But I think he was fine there. But I think if I was to do a four way, it might be me, you, Gavin Orland Orthodox father. Actually, Lauren Clean work, I believe is his name. I dunno if you’ve ever heard of him.
RZ:
I know
Trent:
He’s really solid. He wrote a book called Healing This Broken Body. So he’s a very astute and scholarly Eastern Orthodox priest and he wrote a very good defense of the perpetual virginity of Mary, actually.
RZ:
Nice. And I believe in that. And the Pcsa confessions also teach the perpetual virginity of Mary.
Trent:
Exactly. So Father Lauren clean work, it’s called iParts, and he defends the Eastern epiphany view of the brethren of the Lord. So you hold the perpetual virginity of Mary. Yeah. What do you do with the brethren of the Lord? What’s your out out?
RZ:
I mean, I don’t have a solid position. I wasn’t there, but I think they’re most likely Joseph’s children from a previous marriage because we don’t hear about Joseph when Jesus has all grown up. He was probably a lot older, and that means he probably had a previous marriage and his previous wife died or something. It’s like that’s not the only possible explanation.
Trent:
It’s something you can see yourself leaning towards.
RZ:
Yeah, I think that’s the Occam’s razor explanation. It’s the simplest explanation
Trent:
And that’s one that I’m firmly behind, but I don’t an mathematize anyone who has Jerome’s you though there are Catholics who would take from all of this. I can’t believe that he doesn’t believe in Jerome’s U and that Joseph was married before. That’s the one thing. That’s the hard part. You see Protestants and Catholics get worked up about these doctrinal issues. Like, guys, we got the world’s going to hell in a hand basket here. We need all hands on deck.
RZ:
I do agree that there does need to be more maturity online, and I’m a bit hypocritical sometimes. I haven’t been the most mature, but it’s right that we shouldn’t be debating like the nitty-gritty of the Phil Way or Mia Pacificism and then posting the degenerate content on Twitter.
Trent:
Yeah, all of us should be that good example. I think you’ve been a good example for other Protestants to engage. And I would, well, that’s why I wrote my book, confusion in the Kingdom. We have that problem too. We’ve got the hierarchical guardrails to prevent even the most liberal Catholic parish is not doing same-sex weddings that will go up the chain real fast to Rome. We’ve got the hierarchy to do that, but we still have insidious liberalism. So I wrote my book Confusion in the Kingdom, which deals with honestly probably a lot of the same stuff that you’re seeing in the P-C-U-S-A of saying with homosexuality, transgender feminism. Well, maybe they just give this squishy, maybe it might be this a little bit. And then the liberal camel gets its nose under the tent and who knows where it will go. But that’s why I would love in the future, we could band together just for, because there is a Catholic recon case that needs to be done against these liberal elements. So I’ll fully support you in what you’re doing to root out evils of things like people defending all kinds of evils on the left in the Protestant churches. I’m happy to help you clear that out.
RZ:
It’s funny you mentioned a Catholic Greek Conta. My mom’s Catholic. She’s a big fan of your stuff. She actually asked me to start a Catholic Greek Conta group, so I actually did that in my Discord and they changed their name to FOIA Christie because they didn’t want to use our recon ISA brand. But yeah, I did technically start a small Catholic recon ISA group on Discord.
Trent:
Well, I think that there are, it’s nice if you can get that in parishes. I remember actually going to a Newman Center that was run by the wackiest liberal Dominicans, but then people were fighting against it for a while. And finally when we got a new bishop, they could go to the new bishop and be like, can
RZ:
You get rid of him?
Trent:
And then just out the door. Thanks so much for stopping by today.
RZ:
Thanks for having me.
Trent:
Thank you. And everyone else, be sure to check out Redeem Zoomers channel if you haven’t already. I’ll link to it in the description below. Hope you guys all have a blessed day.