Audio only:
In this episode Trent replies to Redeemed Zoomer’s recent critiques of Catholicism and shows off his retro video game skills at the same time. Teaching With Authority by Jimmy Akin: https://shop.catholic.com/teaching-with-authority/
Transcription:
Hey everyone, in today’s episode I’m going to do something a little different. Last week Redeemed Zoomer released a video saying he studied Catholicism intensely for a month, on top of the previous study he’s done on the Faith, and he shared some reasons why his studies led him to the conclusion Catholicism is false.
RZ gave a casual explanation while playing Minecraft rather than a formal, knockdown argument, so in today’s episode I’m going to give my own casual response while playing Super Mario World. Why? Because I was born in the 80’s so I don’t know how to play Minecraft but I can still play a decent game of Mario, though as you’ll see I’m rusty. And yes this is me playing, here’s me with the same Super Nintendo I got for Christmas when I was 7-years-old and it still works.
I don’t have a capture so bare with the footage I recorded on my phone, but I figured you pefer this to generic play footage from someone else.
So RZ’s basic argument is that he’s not Catholic because Catholicism proposes an infallible rule of faith beyond scripture, the magisterium, mostly in the form of ecumenical councils. However, he says this rule has contradicted itself on salvation outside the Church and papal authority so it’s not infallible, therefore Catholicism is false.
First, I want to point out that RZ faces the same problem. He believes scripture is the only infallible rule of faith but those who reject biblical inerrancy claim scripture has contradictions. Now, RZ says the contradictions in Catholic history are irreconcilable but the contradictions in scripture can be reconciled. But both cases have similar difficulties, even on the same issues.
Consider the issue of no salvation outside the Church, which RZ first brings up. It comes down to this question: is it possible for non-Catholics to be saved, or is it impossible? RZ says the Council of Florence and Unam Sanctam say it is impossible but Vatican II says it is possible. He also says Bishop Barron and others go further by saying it’s probable they’re saved but Bishop Barron’s less than ideal answers in an interview with Ben Shapiro are magisterial teaching. The same goes for me if I don’t articulate my thoughts as clearly as I wish I had in an interview.
RZ faces the problem of alleged contradiction on this issue, but in a synchronic way rather than a diachronic way. Diachronic means across time, so when people say Catholicism contradicts itself they will go across 2000 years of Church history to find alleged magisterial contradictions. Synchronic means at the same time. So when people try to say the Bible, especially the New Testament, contradicts itself, they will go to different books written around the same time period.
RZ says “look Florence teaches non-Catholics aren’t saved but Vatican II says they can be saved.” Contradiction! But a critic of biblical inerrancy can do the same thing. They will say John 14 teaches non-Christians can’t be saved but Romans 2 teaches non-Christians can be saved. Contradiction!
We know there’s a tension in scripture on salvation outside of Christ because Protestants exclusivists have to explain the scripture that seems to say non-Christians can be saved, and Protestant inclusivists have to explain the scripture that seems to say non-Christians can’t be saved. The latter group, like Catholics, say these verses teach that nothing beside Christ saves us, but Christ can save a person without the person knowing it, which explains how someone who wasn’t part of the visible church could still have received God’s saving grace in some invisible way.
St. Thomas Aquinas even proposed that God could use some extraordinary mean to save a man raised by wolves and God wouldn’t let him go to hell just because he was ignorant of the Gospel through no fault of his own, or what we call being invincibly ignorant. A century before Vatican II Pope Pius IX referred to people being invincibly ignorant, so this isn’t a liberal, post-Vatican II concept.
Pius IX did condemn the idea that we can have good hope in the salvation of non-Catholics in his syllabus of errors and Vatican II says salvation is a possibility for those who are ignorant of the Gospel through no fault of their own. It admits that people often succumb to lies and final despair so that’s why the Church quote, “fosters the missions with care and attention.” So I agree some people take it too far and start to become universalists.
So my answer to RZ on this issue is that the Church has always taught that a person cannot be saved apart from the Church Christ established, but there has always a strain of thought, which can be seen even in early Church fathers like Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, that God provides a way to save those who are outside the Church through no fault of their own. In fact, in the first three centuries of Church history the phrase no salvation outside the Church was used for Christian heretics, not people who had always been pagans.
During the time of Florence many people believed that those who weren’t Catholic were fully culpable for their non-belief and so one could say if they weren’t Catholic then they weren’t saved. But the discovery of the New World by Columbus fifty years later caused theologians to question the empirical assumption used in applying “no salvation outside the church” because some people were truly ignorant because of geographic isolation. Others still remained in ignorance, as 16th century Spanish theologians noted, because they were given a deficient Gospel at the hands of cruel conquistadores.
So this isn’t a contradiction. The Church, through its theologians, harmonizes apparently absolute exclusivist past magisterial statements in the same way Protestant inclusivist theologians harmonize apparently absolute exclusivist Bible passages – by noting the difference between objective salvation only through Christ and his church but God subjectively saving people outside the visible confines of his church through extraordinary means, like revelation to their conscience as seen in Romans 2:14-16.
When it comes to this issue, I would recommend you check out some resources that show how the Church’s doctrine on this issue developed without being contradictory. The Jesuit scholar Frances Sullivan has a book on this called No Salvation Outside the Church though I think some of his claims are a bit too far for my tastes. Jimmy Akin also discusses this subject in a chapter of his book The Drama of Salvation.
When it comes to the Vatican I definition of the papacy being found in the first millennium of church history, this depends on how you understand Vatican I and the papacy. The historical claims on councils, like the papacy in Vatican I or icons in Nicaea II, are not part of the council’s infallible definition. People like Elijah Yasi and Erick Ybarra have done great work at showing a moderate or minimal understanding of Vatican I’s doctrine of the papacy can be found throughout Church history, including in the first millennium so I recommend their work on those questions. I’ll link to Elijah’s video on this in the description below.
When it comes to icons I’ll revisit this hopefully in a dialogue with Gavin Ortlund at some point but this is another example where Protestants also have a burden of proof. Their view is that images are okay, even in churches for some of them, but you shouldn’t venerate images. However, the earliest Christians who were against icons didn’t even think you could have images at all, which is not the Protestant position so Protestants also have to say their view is a doctrinal development to some degree.
Nicaea II is condemning those who don’t’ follow the liturgical rubrics in the East that require icon veneration but no such rubrics exist for the vast majority of Catholics in the West, so it is not the case that Catholics must do things like kiss icons, they just can’t condemn someone who believes it is okay to physically show respect for a holy person in an icon.
RZ also said Nicaea II anathematized those who were friends with people who don’t’ venerate icons. But I don’t see a canon from the council that says that. There is a canon that anathematizes communicating with those who dishonor and revile holy icons, which is different than a Christian who just doesn’t venerate them.
But this also brings up the issue, as RZ mentions, that not everything in a council document is an infallible declaration. The councils use specific formulas for infallible decrees that are different from disciplinary decrees that are not perpetually binding. This is covered in Jimmy Akin’s book Teaching with authority so be sure to check his book out if you have questions on that, I’ll link to that below.
This is also a nice segue into the remaining minor points RZ brought up. He said that the Church’s infallibility isn’t so amazing because Catholics put a lot of parameters on it, like that not everything an ecumenical council says is infallible or binding, but Protestants do the same thing with scripture. They say scripture is inerrant but only under certain conditions. For example, RZ believes in theistic evolution so he would say Genesis I is without error but it isn’t trying to give a strictly historical description of how organic life came to be in the period before humans existed. Other Protestants disagree with him and say his approach contradicts scripture’s inerrancy and would prove Genesis is wrong.
RZ would say, correctly I would add, that biblical inerrancy doesn’t mean that everything the Bible says is true in a literal sense. He would also say that doesn’t mean everything the Bible teaches is normative today. The New Testament says slaves should obey their masters and women should wear veils, but RZ would probably say those are culturally bound prescriptions that aren’t binding upon Christians today. Women can worship without veils and it isn’t sinful for a slave today in another part of the world to disobey his master and escape from his slavery.
Well, the same thing is true for many of the disciplinary canons of the ecumenical councils. In fact, I thought it was interesting when RZ criticized the councils for getting more complicated over time. That’s would be expected as Christendom becomes more expansive in history. Nicaea was held before Christianity was the religion of the Roman Empire and Christianity wouldn’t become a unifying force for the state until centuries later in the early Middle Ages after Rome’s fall. That’s when the councils become more complicated and need to excommunicate kings and heretics causing harm to the body of Christ.
Some of RZ’s critiques aren’t even about infallibility at all. For example, he disagrees with the Council of Constance saying only the bread should be given to the laity and not the chalice containing Christ’s blood. But there is no infallible prior teaching saying both must be given that this contradicts. RZ just says Jesus commanded that both must be given, but Jesus neve said that. Jesus gave an instruction at the Last Supper to the Apostles but that doesn’t mean this is normative for all Christians going forward. In John 6:58 Jesus says whoever eats his flesh will live forever, without mentioning his blood and in 1 Cor 11:27 Paul refers to those who eat the bread *or* drink the cup, which implies that people may take one or the other.
RZ also said Thomas Aquinas didn’t believe in the Immaculate Conception, which some people like Christian Wagner doubt so you can check his research on that. Regardless, Aquinas still believed Mary was sinless but he thought Mary’s freedom from sin came just after her conception. Since knowledge of human development was hazy during this time, such as Aquinas believing in delayed ensoulment, this would make it understandable why he might have some doubts about the immaculate conception but Aquinas’s views are still far from modern protestants.
Finally, RZ says he doesn’t like Aquinas because Aquinas endorses natural theology, using reason to know some facts about God’s existence and nature. RZ says this leads to Vatican II saying Christians and Muslims worship the same God and, I think this is implied, the inclusivism that allows for salvation of non-Christians and non-Catholics.
Joe Heschmeyer and Jimmy Akin both did videos recently on Christians, Islam and the same God question so check them out on that. If I can add anything else of substance might in the future but they show saying Muslims worship God or the one God who created the universe, even though they deny the trinity, has a long history in Christian thought before Vatican II.
But more to the issue of Natural theology, if you don’t start with basic facts about God built on reason this can easily lead you into false and heretical views about God. For example, through reason we can know God is necessary, infinite, timeless, immaterial, and unlimited in knowledge, power, and goodness. This means we must reject interpretations of scripture that make it seem like God is ignorant or powerless, like that he repents or has body parts, as divine condescension, meant for ancient people in salvation history to better understand the ineffable God. Once again I wonder if it is contradictions that bother RZ, or that Catholicism affirms doctrines he disagrees with, like natural theology which is infallibly affirmed at Vatican I. Also, see my debate with Jay Dyer if you also want a defense of natural theology.
Ultimately, the way I look at this is that anyone who believes in an infallible rule of faith, whether it’s Protestants with sola scriptura or Catholics with scripture, tradition, and the magisterium, is going to have the problem of apparent contradictions in those rules. So the way I approach the denominational question is to ask who has the least problems to deal with?
Each side has to deal with critics who say their infallible rule has contradictions. But Catholicism and Orthodoxy have a much easier time showing how get to Jesus rising from the dead to the 27 book inerrant canon of the New Testament because they have recourse to authoritative sacred tradition, and I’ll address that in a future episode on the canon and why it’s still a problem for Protestants.
I appreciate that RZ wants to have a Reconquista and rescue Protestants from liberalism, especially Presbyterians. But he will have to deal with people who say, “biblical inerrancy has so many contradictions, we can still get the Gospel from scripture without believing scripture is infallible.” To which RZ would say, no you can’t, that’s how you got a mess of women sparkle priests officiating gay weddings. But RZ says we can get the fullness of the Faith from scripture alone and we don’t need an infallible magisterium, to which I’d say no you can’t because tha’s how you got the mess of Protestants who can’t agree on essential doctrines. You see for example, in Protestants who criticize redeemed zoomer for believing that Catholics are Christians.
And that’s one reason I enjoy talking with him and engaging his work and I really appreciate that he tries his best to understand Catholicism even though he disagrees with it. And he and I are scheduled to have a dialogue soon on my channel so stay tuned for that. With that said, thank you guys so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.