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In this episode Trent breaks down posts taking aim at Trent’s comments on the claim “Catholics worship Mary.”
Transcription
Trent:
Recently some prominent Protestant ex accounts and YouTubers took one statement I made about Mary and ran with it as if they finally got me, but they only succeeded in proving their own dishonesty and the truth of what I originally said. So here’s what happened. A few weeks ago I addressed the topic of whether Catholics and Muslims worship the same God. I said that Muslims or Monotheists who worship the one God acclaimed Pope theologians and saints have made in church history for a thousand years. That was the claim I wanted to defend because the specific claim Catholics and Muslims worship the same God can be very misleading. Even if it is true, it requires so much qualification. It’s not worth making because of all the controversy it raises. So I gave another similar example related to the claim that Catholics worship Mary, here’s the full clip, but I still don’t think it’s prudent to make the claim Muslims and Christians worship the same God.
You can show that claim is true, but you have to qualify it otherwise people will think that you’re committing religious indifferentism. It’s sort of like the claim Catholics worship Mary. That claim is true, but it has to be qualified so people don’t think you’re committing idolatry. Catholics give Mary the respect she is worth. They give Mary her worth’s ship since Luke 1 48 says All generations will call Mary blessed, but Catholics do not give Mary honor that is due to God alone. An honest person would take from this that I don’t intend to make this statement a summary of Catholic belief and even if I did, I’d have to qualify it so that it’s properly understood in contrast to what an honest person would do. Here’s what Lizzie a Protestant ex account posted. Catholics worship Mary. That claim is true, but it has to be qualified so people don’t think you’re committing idolatry.
Claim is true, claim is true, that claim is true, that claim is true. Her full ex name is farming in Jesus, which is quite appropriate because this is what we would call engagement farming. Lizzie and several other Protestant accounts posted an edited clip of what I said designed to create outrage and get clicks. That’s tempting to do on X because some accounts make ad money when they get more engagement. Her claim to putting the full statement in a reply post doesn’t justify this because hardly anyone is going to follow that link to get the full context. It’s like when a news article uses a misleading headline and then buries the full truth in paragraph eight. Now there’s a few things I want to point out related to this before I get into the counter arguments some of these Protestants made against me. First, it’s embarrassing to see fellow Christians resort to this kind of deceptive gotcha argumentation. If the tables were turned, they would rightly point out how unfair it is to selectively quote someone and leave aside his qualifications. For example, a Muslim could take the statement, the eternal God died to make it sound like Christians believe there was a time God went out of existence rather than the claim that the soul of the God man left his body before being reunited to it at the resurrection or consider this clip of the late Protestant theologian RC Sproul talking about God’s sovereignty and evil,
CLIP:
But it is good that there is evil. It is good that there is a devil or there wouldn’t be a devil or there wouldn’t be sin because God has ordained both the existence of Satan and the existence of sin and everything that God ordains ultimately is good.
Trent:
Of course, it would be dishonest to just take that clip alone and leave out spross qualifications.
CLIP:
We are never allowed to call good evil or evil. Good Augustine says that God ordains freely and immutably whatsoever comes to pass and then the parentheses that Augustine would say in a certain sense
Trent:
When Christians say God wills evil, the word wills must be qualified. God doesn’t actively will evil for its own sake, but he allows evil to exist or he passively wills it in order to bring greater good from it. Now, I think Calvinists have a much more difficult time explaining how God wills sin but is not the author of sin Given Calvin’s commitment to God ordaining everything that comes to pass, but I would at least engage a Calvinist arguments and his qualifications to it. I wouldn’t just selectively edit words out of context like what Lizzie and other Protestants did to me. This selective editing is similar to when atheists take the Bible out of context like quoting the KJV rendering of Isaiah 45 7 where God says, I form the light and create darkness. I make peace and create evil. I the Lord do all these things.
Protestants like Lizzie would point out that the evil here refers more to natural evil or calamity and that God causes evil by permitting it to happen rather than directly creating it just as it’s childish to exclaim cc, the Bible says God creates evil while actively ignoring what the text means. It is childish to claim cc. A Catholic apologist says Catholics worship Mary while actively ignoring what said apologist means. Second, their actions proved my point that there are some statements that even if they are technically correct, they’re still prudent to say because they often confuse or mislead people. In fact, a while ago our ex account posted a clip of me saying that Catholics should not make over the top declarations about Mary and the saints that border on idolatry simply to own Protestants because this kind of rage, bait, hinders evangelization and some people took issue with that, but if me saying don’t say controversial statement X was used by dishonest actors to create confusion, how much worse is it when a Catholic willingly provides fodder for these critics by enthusiastically saying controversial statement X?
Because they like enraging non-Catholics more than evangelizing non-Catholics, although some people complain that my advice was a kind of illicit tone policing a crime they never define. For many of them, tone policing seems to mean telling me I said something wrong or imprudent, all I can say is being unable to even entertain the possibility you were wrong or imprudent is a huge sign of immaturity. If you disagree with a correction, then make a case for why what you said is acceptable. Don’t just whine about the fact that a person had the nerve to correct you and the Bible gives instruction for Christians that many of these people would consider illegitimate tone policing. Here’s just a few verses two Timothy 2 24, the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kindly to everyone, an apt teacher forbearing correcting his opponents with gentleness. Colossians three, eight, but now put them all away, anger, wrath, malice, slander and foul.
Talk from your mouth. Ephesians 4 29, let no evil talk come out of your mouths but only such as is good for edifying as fits the occasion that it may impart grace to those who hear. And if this is a kind of evangelization that you agree with, then please hit the subscribe button so you don’t miss out on our content that always strives to impart grace to our hearers and please consider supporting us@trenthornpodcast.com where for as little as $5 a month, you get access to bonus content and you make this channel possible. Now, let me get into some of the arguments I saw in response to my statement about Mary being taken out of context. One was the claim that Catholics are just redefining words when they say they worship Mary in an older sense of the word, but words change meaning all the time a phenomenon we call semantic shift.
For example, in the theme song of the Flintstones, it says We’ll have a gay old time, but that doesn’t have quite the same meaning today. I can say it’s true, we will have a gay old time, but since that needs to be qualified, then maybe it’s best not to say it in the first place. And semantic shift also happens in translations of scripture. The King James Bible renders Matthew 1914 suffer the children forbid them not to come to me, which modern Bibles render let the little children come to me. The word worship has also undergone a semantic shift In the past the word meant, as I said in my original video, giving someone their worth, honor or worth ship. And we still do this, we call judges your honor, and in some places they still call mayors your worship. The old English prayer book instructs a groom to tell his bride on his wedding day with this ring I the wed with my body ivy worship and with all my worldly goods I the end Dow the Protestant scholar DA Carson agrees this prayer does not make the man’s bride a goddess.
He concludes that in all such usages, one is concerned with the worthiness or the worth ship old English worth ship of the person or thing that is reverenced. Today the word worship tends to refer to religious devotion given to God, and so that’s why I said in my episode, I don’t like saying Catholics worship Mary. It can give off the false meaning that Catholics believe Mary is a goddess. I said that statement is true if it is qualified, namely by using an older definition of worship that just means to give people the honor or worth that they are due. This is why Catholics have traditionally used three Latin words to describe the levels of honor that they give to someone. As St. Thomas describes in the summa theologian, dulia refers to honor given to the saints and hyper dulia refers to the honor given to Mary the mother of God.
The Bible does not say all Christians are equal before God because some Christians are destined to receive rewards in heaven for their saintly conduct and others will lose their rewards because of their sins. Something Protestants often bring up when they try to explain away the loss that saved people experience that is described in one Corinthians three 15. Although this doesn’t refute purgatory because losing a reward can still be a purifying punishment. So I would ask Protestants, what is the most honorable of all of God’s creatures whose reward will be greatest in heaven? Would it not be the woman who bore the creator in her womb and forever remain faithful to him? And so of all creatures, she’s the most highly honored, even if she’s still infinitely small in comparison to the one true God. That’s why above dulia and hyper dulia is Ria the honor of sacrificial worship that is given to God.
Alone in the fourth century, Saint epiphanies condemned the co meridian heretics who gave sacrificial cakes to statues of Mary because sacrifice can only be given to God. Some Protestants mock this reasoning by saying worship of any kind including dulia and hyper dulia should only be given to God. But worship in the broadest sense is similar to honor and the Bible commands us to honor people besides God like our own parents. When Protestants say we can give honor to creatures and worship to God, Catholics say the same thing when they say we can give dulia to creatures and Ria to God. Now, some Protestants mock dulia by saying that maybe the Israelites only gave dulia to the golden calf or Baal and not tria. So what they did wasn’t sinful, but the Israelites treated these objects as if they were the God who brought them out of Egypt and treating a creature as if it were the creator is the textbook definition of idolatry.
Second, this example doesn’t show that you cannot give veneration or dulia to a creature. The context and not just the act itself determines if reverence is appropriate. For example, a husband should not hug and kiss another woman on the cheek, but he can give his children a hug and kiss on the cheek. Likewise, neither latia nor dulia nor honor of any kind should be given to idols and false gods. They should only be rebuked and rejected, but honor can be given to God’s servants while the highest honor is reserved for God alone. In fact, one commenter tried to use this analogy to make her point that actually makes my point. She tried to compare the honor of dulia that Catholics give to saints to a husband looking at other women. She basically said that when Catholics claim they’re giving Mary hyper dulia not tria, this is the same as a skeezy husband saying, I’m not touching another woman, I’m just looking at another woman.
But a man’s sexual love should only be directed to his spouse, which includes the prelude to sexual love like glances that arouses sexual passions. However, the honor given to marry in the saints is not the formal beginning of idolatry in the same way lustful glances are the formal beginning of adultery. Honor is a much broader category, and so we naturally give different kinds of honor to different people. As I said, a husband withholds physical affection from some people. He gives it in small measure to other people like his own family members and he fully gives physical affection only to his spouse. The commentary’s argument seems to entail that all honor should be given to God alone and none to creatures, but that would be like saying A married man should never say I love you to another woman, even his own mother because he supposedly can only say those words to his wife. We can honor creatures and we should honor some creatures, but we should give our highest honor and worship to God alone. Ryan from ne god.net also challenged the older definition of worship being applied to venerating the saints.
CLIP:
It sounds like he’s speaking of worship here is giving someone the respect that’s owed to them by his definition. Then if you have respect for your living parents and so you say thank you to them, are you worshiping them? I would say no, but if I was to set up a shrine to my parents, that would be a different story and people do that in places like Vietnam for their ancestors and they call it ancestor worship. This is where they basically set up some sort of shrine to their ancestors and they’d bow down or kneel to their images. They would offer gifts to them. They would pray to them for guidance or protection. They would hold ancestor veneration days. They would place their trust in their ancestors for help with blessings and health and they’d see their ancestors being able to intercede with the divine and even give their ancestors special titles like great protector or honored one. And I think any Christian looking at that would say, that’s just wrong. That’s idolatry.
Trent:
The main problem with Ryan’s objection is that he takes a practice that is superficially similar to veneration of Mary and the saints and then says This proves both are illicit forms of worship, but they’re only similar in aspects that are good and they’re dissimilar in the bad aspects. For example, there’s nothing wrong with keeping an image of a deceased relative in your home. You might even put flowers next to it and light a candle. You might remember your relative on the day of their birth or their death and honor their memory with your own titles for them. Like number one, grandpa Idolatry is also when a person treats a creature as if the creature were the creator and give that creature on or due to God alone. But asking a deceased relative to pray to God for you is not idolatry. At worst, it’s superstition, but Ryan has made no argument to show that we cannot through God’s almighty power seek the intercession of loved ones in heaven just as we seek their intercession when they’re here on earth.
Ryan might say that’s not possible, but that’s far different than saying such an act as idolatry. In Exodus 2012, God says, to honor your mother and father, and the verse uses the Hebrew word chabad. The same word is used in Proverbs three, nine, which says, honor the Lord with your substance and with the first fruits of all your produce. Obviously the Bible doesn’t say parents and God should be treated equally, and we don’t offer sacrifices to our own parents, but children should recognize their parents’ worth or their worths ship. Since the word worship has changed in meaning, it feels awkward to say we worship our parents, but we do honor our parents and Catholics, honor the saints and Mary, if the word worship is what bothers you, fine, let’s drop that. My whole point was that we should not use statements if we disagree on the meaning of the key terms.
In the statement St. Paul said in two Timothy two 14, avoid disputing about words which does no good, but only ruins the heroes. Now, a Protestant like Ryan might say, the problem isn’t just words but behavior like bowing before these images or kissing them. However, many people affectionately kiss images of deceased loved ones and Protestants don’t call that idolatry, although some like the protesting account want to throw shade at children kissing a crucifix of Jesus, which baffles me because now I guess Catholics are being accused of showing Jesus too much honor instead of too little. But what about bowing? Here’s Patrick from the Bible in context response to me that focused on this aspect of honoring Mary and the saints.
CLIP:
In Exodus 20, God not only forbids his followers from creating images for worship,
Trent:
You mean like the wooden crosses that are often at the front of many Protestant churches,
CLIP:
But he also forbids them from bowing down to them as well. In Hebrew, bowing down is the same as worship. God has never accepted this practice of bowing down before statues. In Deuteronomy four, he even warns them not to make anything in the likeness of male or female, including Mary or the saints.
Trent:
Deuteronomy four says, beware lest you act corruptly by making a graven image for yourselves in the form of any figure the likeness of male or female, take heed to yourselves lest you forget the covenant of the Lord your God, which he made with you and make a graven image in the form of anything which the Lord your God has forbidden you. This passage is talking about idols to false gods, not any images at all. God previously commanded Moses to make a bronze serpent in numbers 21 and one. King six described Solomon’s temple being adorned with images of angels and plants. Finally, there is no command in scripture for believers to show signs of respect like bowing to God. The Bible says not to bow to or serve false gods and idols, but it also describes God’s people showing these signs of respect to other humans.
In Hebrew, the main word for worship is shaka, which means to bow down, but it’s not used exclusively for God. Genesis 42, 6 says, Joseph’s brothers came and bowed themselves before him with their faces to the ground, and one kings 1 31 says, Bathsheba bowed with her face to the ground and did ob sense to the king. In ancient Greek, the closest word to worship would be prosc, which is often translated worship, but it too is not used exclusively for worship of God. In Revelation three, nine, Jesus says, of the enemies of the church that I will make them come and bow down before your feet and learn that I have loved you. John uses Kinson a form of eu, and so the passage literally says they will come and will worship before the feet of you. So to pull everything together, we need to be careful about the language we use so as not to confuse or mislead people.
That’s why I said that even if a statement is technically true, it might be imprudent to share it. We should be careful, but we should be able to speak without having to neurotically watch our language in order to keep anyone from ever taking us out of context. Fellow Christians especially should have the decency to not do that. Protestants who act in good faith like redeemed zoomer, know Catholics, don’t worship Mary in the sense that they worship God and that the word worship also has older uses that can refer just to giving someone the honor or respect he or she is worth. Maybe in the future I can have one of these members of these Protestant X accounts here in the studio to debate or discuss these issues, and if you come down, I promise we will not edit out any of the qualifications you need to make when you state what you believe. Thank you all so much for watching, and I hope you have a very blessed day.