In part one of Trent’s open-mailbag series Trent answers a variety of questions from his patrons.
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Welcome to a special Thanksgiving week episode of the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. I am currently sitting in my office recording this episode. My legs are killing me because yesterday I went and put my Disney knowledge to the test. On some previous Free for all Fridays, I’ve talked about how to hack Disneyland, so you don’t have to wait in any lines.
I put my skills to the test. How many rides, or attractions, I should say, I could do in a single day. The answer is 50. Five-zero. Well, I did 45 before. This time, my goal was 50. And then I tapped out at that. And I was done. My pedometer said I had walked/ran about 15 miles that day. So, that was enough for me, but I’m hoping in the future, maybe I’ll do a non-Catholic, nonfiction book on how to hack Disneyland and help people to avoid having tears at the happiest place on earth.
That being said, let’s get into today’s episode, we’re doing an Open Mailbag Q&A. If you are a subscriber to the podcast at TrentHornPodcast.com, for as little as $5 a month you get access to bonus content. Like last week, you at Patreons, you got access to part two of Jimmy’s dialogue with Steve Greg on the nature of the church. And a few weeks ago, you guys got access to submitting questions to be answered here on an Open Mailbag episode.
And if you’re a gold level subscriber or higher, you get priority placement in the Q&A queue, if you will. And now, I’ve gone through the questions and picked ones that I think will work very well here for our Open Mailbag today. So, why don’t we jump into them? Let’s see how many we can get through. Maybe we can do it all in one episode. If not, we’ll split this into part one and part two.
All right, question number one. “How do you counter someone who believes in reincarnation? I know a woman who puts a lot of stock in near death experiences, as well as people claiming to be able to identify events or people in past lives they should have no idea about. If I remember correctly, she cited Dr. Ian Stevenson’s book, 20 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. What are your thoughts on this?”
Well first, near death experiences are evidence that we are not identical to our brains. That we have some kind of an existence apart from our bodies. And so, it’s possible that the soul, God has infused knowledge into the soul when it separates from the body. And so, even after a person’s clinically dead, they could come to have knowledge of conversations that people had or things that are in the hospital.
Or I think there’s one case of someone seeing something on the roof of a hospital that they were clinically dead in. So, these kind of near death experiences, I think provide evidence that we are not merely bodies. We have immortal souls. But they’re not evidence that our immortal souls once inhabited other physical bodies besides our own. The Catechism is very clear. There is no reincarnation after death.
It cites a letter to the Hebrews which says that it is appointed for men to die once and after that, judgment. So, there’s no reincarnation. But what should we make of testimonies that people give, oftentimes, children give, of past lives experiences? Because you might have adults who say, “Oh, when I was in a past life I was this gypsy in 19th century England.”
Like, “Oh, maybe you just enjoy historical fiction.” The idea behind these arguments is that children are not intelligent enough or crafty enough to come up with stories of past lives. This is knowledge they couldn’t have just come up with on their own. And so, they must have received this from when they had an actual past life experience and they’re reincarnated.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, they lived a certain life. And now, they’re that same soul reincarnated into another body. And the late Ian Stevenson, he passed away in 2007, collected a lot of these cases in his own case studies on the matter. The problem with Stevenson’s research is that it often relies on children in cultures where reincarnation is something that’s part of the cultural milieu.
So, a lot of these children are in India, where there’s a cultural expectation for reincarnation. So, we’d expect them to come up with stories like these. Also, a lot of times they’re vague, they have ambiguity’s or they’re just mistaken. The stories can be interpreted in multiple ways.
I’ll give you an example from Robert Carroll who’s a skeptic of this. This is what he writes about one of these past lives cases. He says, “One case involved an Idaho girl who at age two would point to photographs of her sister dead from a car accident three years before she was born and say, ‘That was me.’ The believer thinks the two year old meant, I was my sister in a previous life.
Or the believer in reincarnation thinks that when a two year old looks at a picture of the sister who died before she was born, ‘Oh, that was her. That was her previous life.’ The skeptic thinks she meant that’s a picture of me. The skeptic sees the two year old as making a mistake. The believer sees her as trying to communicate a message about reincarnation.”
So, I would just challenge this testimony, but then also bring up other arguments, such as if we’re reincarnated, then … This is the same argument as Tertullian and Saint Irenaeus brought up in the early church when they dealt with reincarnation. If that’s the case, how do we know we’ve been reincarnated?
If we are reincarnated, then why don’t more people have memories of their previous, past lives? Also, this is one that Tertullian came up with. He said, “Look, if we’re all reincarnated, then every soul comes from a previous soul. And the human population wouldn’t grow.” And even in Tertullian’s time in the third century, he said, “But there is a growth in human population.”
And that’s what we’ve proven today, is human population has grown dramatically, especially since the industrial revolution. So, that means that you need to have either an ad hoc hypothesis that we’re all reincarnated except for the brand new souls that come into existence from the Astral plane, that account for the growth in human population.
Or that we’re not reincarnated. That God creates our souls. Our souls are created immediately. We don’t get them from our parents. They come from God. And that they’re created the moment that we begin to exist at conception. And then, that soul goes on to have an immortal existence and is reunited with the body at the resurrection of the dead. So I hope that’s helpful.
Question number two. “As an apologist, what would be your response to a Sedevacantist and to others who claim the Novus Ordo is bad?” So here, a Sedevacantist is someone who thinks that the See of Peter, the Holy Sea, the successor of the Bishop of Rome. That the Pope isn’t really the Pope. He’s an anti Pope, he’s not the valid holder of the Papal office.
And so, the see has been empty. It’s been filled by false claimants, by false Popes. And people will go back, usually I think they’ll pick maybe like Pope Pius XII, might’ve been the last valid Pope. And so, any Pope associated with the Second Vatican Council on ward is not a valid Pope.
So, I believe John Salzo, wrote a great book on this called True or False Pope. That goes into the errors of a Sedevacantism in more detail. But I would say, if you’re talking to someone who, whether they’re a Sedevacantist or they’re just more of a traditionalist. And there’s nothing wrong with being a traditionalist, someone who prefers the traditions of the extraordinary form. And then maybe the traditions associated with it, such as wearing a chapel veil to mass.
Going to extraordinary form where the mass is conducted primarily in Latin. There’s nothing wrong with that. The problem is, is when someone clings to those traditions so much, they believe that Christ church has become defectable. That you know, Christ promised the gates of hell would not prevail against the church. And yet, we’ve been without a Pope, apparently, for the past 50 or 60 years.
So, how we respond … And some of them will say, “Well, it’s because look at what’s happened with the Novus Ordo mass.” The new order of the mass was promulgated at the Second Vatican Council that allowed things like the vernacular language. Allowed, didn’t mandate, but it allowed the mass to be celebrated in the vernacular or common language of the people rather than primarily in Latin.
So, first you could find common ground and say, “Look, sometimes the Novus Ordo masses, they’re bad.” Some of them are pretty awful. I have sat through some absolute stinkers. I will tell you. They play that music and it’s going “Gather us in, gather me in.” I’m like, “Gather me out.” Some of the music I can’t handle. I’ve been to some masses where things are pretty liturgically out of bounds.
But I always grit my teeth and I know, look, as long as the mass is being said, validly, even if there’s stuff that is … it’s music, especially, that I’m not a big fan of. Hey, at least that’s Jesus on the altar. And I want to be able to receive Jesus. So, I think the question should be, not is it bad? People have different liturgical tastes. But is it lawful or is it valid? That’s the question.
Is it a valid thing to undertake? Doesn’t the church have the authority? If Matthew 18, “The church has the authority to bind and loose.” Then doesn’t the church have the authority to bind and loose or to prescribe different disciplines, when it comes to liturgical worship? And we talk about it all the time that disciplines can change in order to facilitate the faithful to help them to enter into the mysteries of our faith.
The Eucharistic fast would be an example of that. Eucharistic fast went from all night before receiving communion, to three hours, to one hour to facilitate more frequent reception of the Eucharist, for example. Now, some people will quote Pope Saint Pius V document, Quo Premum, written in 1570. That promulgated that what is now the Tridentine Mass or what we now call the extraordinary form.
And he said of that liturgy that was put forward, it says in that document, “We likewise declare and ordain that no one whosoever is forced or coerced to alter this missal. And that this present document cannot be revoked or modified.” And so, some people will take that to mean that this promulgation for the Tridentine Mass, it says right here it can’t be revoked or modified. It can’t be altered.
So, you can’t have the Novus Ordo Mass of the Second Vatican Council because that would violate Quo Primum. But once again, this is a discipline. What it is saying here is that no one at that present time could revoke or modify it. No authority, unless one that is equal or greater to the papal authority could do that. If a Pope could bind a future Pope in the area of discipline.
In the area of discipline or saying how the church’s teachings are lived out. If one Pope could bind every single Pope in the future to matters of discipline, then the Pope would not have what Canon law says is his full and supreme authority over the church. He would be bound by these disciplinary procedures. Now, of course, the Pope, the church, no less can’t change teachings that have been infallibly defined.
For example, that when you have teachings that are infallibly defined, there is no way they could ever be reformed. They can no longer cease to be taught. That’s why they’re called infallible, their irreformable. But that applies to infallible teachings. To disciplines, for how the church has lived out. What that says in Quo Primum, it’s talking about how no bishops or priests could go and just change the mass that had been promulgated.
Much the same way that you see in the general instruction on the Roman missal today. It talks about how the priest, this might also be in Sacrosanctum Concilium in Vatican ii. It says, “No one, not even a priest can alter the words of the mass, the words that are specifically written in the missal for them to say.”
So, you can find common ground with them to say, “Yeah, it’s not always the best, but look, does the church have Christ’s authority or not? If it can’t make these changes in disciplinary matters, then it doesn’t really have the ability to bind and loose that Jesus promised in Matthew 16 and Matthew 18.”
Question number three. “Any tips to develop the prayer life for people who lean more on the intellectual side of the faith? I relate to your situation about not being strong with being spiritual.” Well, I think you can be strong with being spiritual without having certain emotions accompany that. I would like to think that I have a strong spiritual life, but the affect developments of my soul aren’t necessarily moved with the same emotions that I see in people who have more of a charismatic experience.
I see other people who have more of those strong movements of the soul than I do. But you can still have a strong spiritual life even if you don’t get the same emotions of other spiritual people. So, I would say find things that speak to you spiritually. Every person is different. I know for me, that music and atmosphere can have a very calming meditation.
So, I’ll give you an example. I currently attend a Byzantine Catholic church. I’ve been doing that for over a year now with my family. We really enjoy it. I think in a future episode I’m going to invite a Byzantine Catholic priest on and we’ll talk more about the Eastern Catholic churches, how they differ from the Western Catholic churches.
They’re still fully Catholic, fully in line with the Pope, where they’re similar and where they’re different. But I was listening to a wonderful podcast my wife introduced to me called, A Light of the East. And I think it’s on EWTN Radio. And it has an Eastern Catholic priest who explains Eastern Catholic theology and liturgy.
And what I loved about it, is he said, “We arrive at the same place but in different ways.” for example, we want to be contemplative. And so, for some people, what’s best for them to be contemplative is absolute silence. And that silence allows them to be contemplative to think about God. And so, they may gravitate towards the silence that you find in the extraordinary form, for example.
For other people, having chants and prayers and music allows them to reach that contemplation. Because similarly, like when you pray to the rosary. You pray to the rosary, “Hail Mary full of Grace” and you say it over and over. Or the Divine Mercy Chaplet, over and over and over. It’s not vain repetition. When you’re praying that, it becomes meditative.
The prayers kind of melt into the background, you enter into the mystery you’re contemplating. That might be harder to do if it was just completely silent. So for me, I love in the Eastern liturgy, having that continual … There’s not a lot of silence in the Eastern liturgy. And what I love about that is that continual chants and prayers, where the assembly, not just the the choir, but the assembly is chanting and praying with it.
Allows me to enter into a contemplative state in an easier way than maybe silence would. Now, that’s different for different people. That’s why we have different traditions in different ways, especially in spirituality, to try to come close to God. So, I would just say for you, don’t feel locked into a particular way of growing closer to God in spirituality that works for other people.
There’s a wide variety of spiritual disciplines in the church. There’s Lexio Divina, there’s the Rosary, Divine Mercy Chaplet. There’s Eucharistic adoration. There’s all different kinds of way that we can enter into our spirituality. And I would recommend that you would go and seek that out. And try different things to see what speaks to you.
Even just contemplating beautiful art. Going into a church that has beautiful icons or iconography or statues, lighting a votive candle. There’s different things that will speak to us. Whether it’s different kinds of music, atmosphere. Different kinds of readings and scripture. Just reading scripture and meditating upon that might be helpful. Try different things and see what speaks to you uniquely when it comes to your heart and how God has fashioned it.
Number four. “Could you explain why the new age movement is problematic? Specifically, the thoughts of Deepak Chopra, energy, vibrations and all that other new age jazz. Is it all just pseudoscience?” Yeah, a lot of it’s pseudoscience or it’s just basically common sense. So, take for example, the principle of Fung Shui. So, Fung Shui is a principle that if you organize your room or your house in a particular way, you’ll feel calm and at peace.
Now in one sense, that’s common sense. Messy bed, messy head. If you have your home and it’s a complete wreck, you’re going to feel like a complete wreck. Because your mind is scattered because everything’s dirty. It’s not organized. So, it’s good to organize your office, your room, your home so you can feel more at peace. You can Marie Kondo, tidy up this mess. That’s a great thing to do.
But, and this is tangentially related to Marie Kondo a little bit. I don’t know how much of this she brings in her work, but Fung Shui also says that inanimate objects have particular spiritual energies and these spirit energies have to flow through your home in a particular way. That’s where I call shenanigans. No, we don’t believe in that. And it’s not good to dwell into that kind of stuff.
That there are these kinds of new age energies that emanate from inanimate objects. There’s obviously physical energies in the world. There’s gravity, there’s a strong nuclear force. But when it gets beyond that to these kind of vague concepts of energy and consciousness. Or that your consciousness can create reality. That’s where it becomes problematic, especially with new age.
And Deepak Chopra’s another example of this. If you check out my book, Counterfeit Christ, there’s a whole chapter in there on Guru Jesus. And Guru Jesus is the idea that, well, Jesus said he’s God. But we’re all God because our consciousness makes reality. I think Deepak Chopra even once said that if we stopped thinking about the moon, it wouldn’t exist.
That’s six month old thinking. That’s your infant mindset. Like, “Oh, yeah. That’s why little babies love peekaboo.” Because they think you go out of existence, they don’t have object permanence. And yet, that’s what Chopra kind of peddles with this whole consciousness creates reality. He says, “You’re right. Consciousness could cure cancer.” Now, in one sense the body, if you think that you’re sick all the time, that can make you sick.
But your body can heal itself really well in a kind of psychosomatic way. So, when you talk about this new age stuff, there’s usually like a kernel of truth in it, but then it just goes off the rails really quickly. So, if you want a more decisive refutation of the Guru Jesus, the misreading of Jesus that turns him into a new age guru. Check out my book Counterfeit Christ.
I would also recommend the Pontifical Council on, I think Ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue. Has a great document on new age, called Jesus Christ the Bearer of the Water of Life. And what it says here is that a lot of new age, especially Deepak Chopra, they promote monism. The idea that all is one, everything is just one consciousness.
There’s no distinction among any of us. And so, the goal is to empty oneself and to have no distinctions whatsoever. You are the drop that reenters the ocean. When the drop goes back into the ocean, the drop ceases to be. And that is not what we believe at Catholics. We believe that we are all individuals created by God who have immortal souls, who will continue to exist for all eternity.
So, this document, Jesus Christ the Bearer of the Water of Life says that this view of monism, that there’s only one universal being of which everything and every person is a part. In as much as new age monism includes the idea that reality is fundamentally spiritual. It is a contemporary form of pantheism. The idea that God and the universe are the same thing.
It’s claim to resolve all dualism, leaves no room for a transcendent God. So, everything is God. And a further problem arises for Christianity when the question of the origin of evil is raised. So, evil either has to be an illusion. It’s not really real. Now, we believe evil is a privation. It’s an absence of good, but it’s not an illusion. Like a hole in the ground is an absence of dirt, but it’s real. You can fall into it.
So, Eastern religions try to say that evil is just completely illusory, which is not true. We feel its effects. Or that evil is a part of the universe. But if God is the universe, then that means evil is a part of God. And as they say on Dukes of Hazard, “You’re going to be in a whole heap of trouble.” So, that would be something I would say is why new age is fundamentally incompatible with the claims of the Christian faith.
Question number five. “How do you answer the trolley problem?” Ah, near and dear to my heart, philosophy. This is the classic ethical experiment. Actually there’s a YouTuber named Vsauce, who did a whole thing where … Well, let me explain the trolley problem and then I’ll tell you about Vsauce’s experiment. Trolley problem is this … Tali poblem? I feel like one of my kids here. Which when they see a trolley, they get super excited.
So, you’re on a trolley, it’s going down the track. There’s a fork up ahead. If the trolley continues down the line, it’s going to run over five people. Don’t ask me how they got there or why they can’t get out of the way. If you pull a switch in the trolley, it will divert and run over one person. And the question is, do you pull the switch? If you do nothing, the trolley runs over five people.
If you pull the switch, the trolley runs over one person. What do you do? About 75% of people will pull the switch. And I believe that’s the correct answer. It deals with a moral principle called double effect. I can engage in an act that has a bad effect, but one that I do not intend. So, in this case, I know that this one person will die if I flip the switch. But I’m not intending their death.
If they happen to survive being run over by the trolley, I would rejoice. I would be so thankful. I don’t intend their death to save the other five. Instead, what I intend is to divert the trolley to save the lives of the other five people. Now, you can switch up the trolley problem to show this distinction. So, another variant of the trolley problem is that you have a fat man on a bridge.
And he’s very, very, very large. And you could push him off the bridge and he’ll land in front of the trolley and he will stop the trolley before it runs over the five people. Now, what do you do in that case? Now, here I would say, “No, I’m using the man as a means. His death is a means to stop the trolley.” And so, in this case I am using his body as a means to stop the trolley. And I would say that that case would be immoral.
So, you know when you do these trolley examples, it eventually goes to if you’re the utilitarian who’s okay pushing the fat man off the bridge and pulling the lever. If you’re straight utilitarian, that morality is just about producing the most amount of good. Then you’d have to say it’s okay to kill one innocent person in order to harvest their organs to save the lives of five innocent people.
And so, most people don’t want to go down that route. But I think double effect explains why you can pull the switch in the initial trolley situation. It’s because you understand. You foresee that one person will die when you divert the trolley. But it’s something that you do not intend. Now, there is a corollary to this that tries to trip people up a little. And that’s the variant called, the track that loops back.
So, how does that work? So, here you’re still going down the trolley down the line and it forks up ahead. If the trolley goes straight, it runs over five people. If it goes left, if you pull the switch, it runs over one person. But what happens if you add an extra bit of track so it’s not a V anymore.
The trolley goes and then it diverts into a loop where if the trolley goes over the five people, that will save the life of the one person. Or, if it goes over that one person, it will save the life of the five. Because that one person will will stop it in time. It will reduce the momentum so the trolley doesn’t loop back and hit the other five.
How is that not like the case of the fat man on the bridge? And I would say in this case, you’re in a forced option that you have to choose. And now you’re in a case where you’re just choosing the lesser of two evils. You’re just choosing, does a train run over one person or does it run over five people? It’s going to run over one or the other.
Because here’s the thing, if you say, “Well, Trent, you said you can’t push the fat man off the bridge because you’re using him in order to save the lives of the people on the track. And so, if that’s wrong. Then in the example where the track loops back and the trolley goes left and it runs over the one. But because, and this is gruesome, it hits his body, it loses momentum and doesn’t hit the five.
Then doesn’t that mean you’re using the one in that case as a means to an end?” Well then, what I would say is you’re in a lesser of two evils, at this point. Where now you have an option where I could either use one person’s death or use five people. Because if the trolley goes left, that one person’s body slows it down to save the five. Or if it goes right, those five people’s bodies slow it down to save one.
So, here I’m just stuck in a forced option. It’s one or the other. So, I would choose the lesser of two evils that I am, quote unquote, using one person. And when I say forced option, I mean sometimes we have choose option A or option B in a moral deliberation. Or there’s usually a third option, which is I don’t choose A or B, I’m not going to do anything.
In a dilemma or in a choice where that’s a forced option. Not doing anything is a choice. You can either act or not act. And that’s the case in the trolley example. So, here in the track that loops back, you either pull the switch, it runs over one, uses one person to save the five. Or you do nothing, which is still doing something. And you use five to save one.
So, here I would just choose lesser of two evils and use, quote unquote, one person, in order to not run over the five versus the other way. But it’s still different than the fat man on the bridge example. It’s definitely different than the case of the person in a hospital who you kill to take their organs to save five people. And so that’s ethics. Ethics gets hard.
You try to get down to these particular principles and you might say, “Oh, this trolley example, what does that have to do with anything in real life?” Well, what do you do in a case where an unborn child implants in the fallopian tube, for example? What do you do when in an unjust war, there’s genocide happening in another country but the enemy soldiers use human civilians and shields to protect them?
You run into these difficult cases which is why we have principles like double effect. And we have to think through our ethical decisions. Which by the way, if you like this trolley example, look up Vsauce. The letter V, and then sauce like barbecue sauce. Vsauce is a guy who has a lot of great learning videos on YouTube. He did one on the trolley example where he got people in a fake control room thinking they were diverting an actual train when they weren’t.
He screened them psychologically to make sure it was ethical. But it’s still an interesting thing to see, that he got real people in there to think. Would they pull the lever? And I think a lot of them did not pull the lever to divert the trolley. They just kind of froze up. They weren’t sure what they should do. So, Vsauce trolley problem on YouTube. You may find that interesting as well.
All right, let’s try a few that are easy, maybe as we draw ourselves near to a close here. Did Moses ever use psychedelics? Some people say that’s how he would talk to God as a burning bush because he was taking hallucinogens. No, the bush … Here’s the problem. The bush was burning but it was not being consumed. And it’s something that Moses was actually experiencing.
If he was just completely off his rocker, then when he went back to Egypt, why did these other plagues happen? How was Moses able to free the Israelites without this actual miraculous help? Some questions though, you just have to say, “Nope. Moses was of clear sound mind and body. He was not using any hallucinogens.”
Number seven. “How do we know which Bishop that Saint Peter ordained was the Pope because didn’t he ordain several men as Bishops?” Certainly, Saint Peter, probably ordained several people. Saint Paul talks about laying hands on multiple people to hold the episcopacy, to hold the Bishopric, or to be a presbyter, to be a priest. What we would look at here are early lists among the Church Fathers that talk about the various sees and how they are filled.
One of them can be found in Eusebius, who is a church historian. But even before that, in the mid second century, we have the list of Bishops of Rome who were ordained from Saint Irenaeus. And these are very ancient Apostolic lists to see those particular Bishops and how they were ordained.
So, going back to the very earliest part of the church, the writing of Saint Irenaeus, I think it’s Against Heresies III.33, I remember that in Against Heresies. Book three, chapter three, section three, Saint Irenaeus talks about this unbroken succession of those who held the Bishop of Rome.
Let’s look at number eight. “Trent, I would love to hear your thoughts on Protestant views versus Catholic views of the atonement. So, Penal substitution, satisfaction theory, Christus Victor. I need clarification.” So, the church teaches that Christ died for our sins on the cross. And theologians have come up with different ways of explaining what Christ exactly accomplished for us in his death on the cross.
So, what the church teaches is that the one theory of the atonement that we as Catholics are not free to accept would be the theory of the atonement called Penal substitution. That would be the idea that Jesus took our place on the cross and he took our punishment on the cross. That Jesus was punished in our place, so we did not have to be punished.
The Catechism says, “Jesus did not experience reprobation as if he himself had sinned. But in the redeeming love that always united him to the father, he assumed us, in the state of our waywardness of sin to the point that he could say in our name from the cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ Having thus established him in solidarity with us sinners.
God did not spare his own son, but gave him up for us all, so that we might be reconciled to God by the death of his son.” Paragraph 603 of the Catechism. Now, some people will look at passages like second Corinthians 5:21 and say, “Well, no. Christ, he literally took on our sin, in the sense that he was punished in our place.” Second Corinthians 5:21 says, “For our sake, he, God, made him, Christ, to be sin who knew no sin. So, that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
Some people will say, “Look, he made him, he took on our sins.” Now, clearly this can’t be interpreted literally. There are some Christians who think Jesus had an actual sin nature. Christadelphians believe this. That Jesus had a sin nature like us. But Hebrews 4:15 makes it very clear that we have a high priest who can identify with our weaknesses in every way, tempted just like us, but never did sin.
So, this can’t be taken completely, literally. So, what does it mean for our sake, he made him to be sin who knew no sin? I think the most plausible interpretation of second Corinthians 5:21, is that Paul is saying, he made him to be sin offering. A sin offering to God. And that would be the satisfaction theory of the atonement that Saint Anselm first proposed in the 11th century.
And has been popular in the church ever since. The idea that Christ was not punished in our place on the cross, but Christ voluntarily gave himself up for us as a sacrifice. A sacrifice of love, that because his death has infinite value, because he’s a divine person, the offering of his death. The the value of that sacrifice is such an offering to God. It has so much worth.
It balances out all the weight of our sins. Imagine a scale and the goodness of Christ’s sacrifice infinitely outweighs the badness of our sins. That doesn’t mean everybody’s going to heaven. It just means there is a super abundance of grace accrued for us on the cross, that now it is up to us to freely choose to accept whether it will be applied to our souls or not.
And so, I mean it’s interesting to make this parallel but there’s an episode of the TV series South Park. Which by the way, I would rate that morally offensive. I also stopped watching South Park years ago because I think it got kind of old, got too crude and it was just kind of old. I didn’t find it that funny anymore. But there is an episode where they satirize debt and people getting into credit card debt.
And they also talk about the passion. I think this was one of the Passion of the Christ came out. And so, long story short, Kyle, their one Jewish friend on the show ends up taking on the role of Jesus. Everyone loses their jobs because they’re in so much credit card debt. So, they have to go and take jobs at Little Caesars Pizzeria and they dress up as Roman soldiers.
And so, it ends up being that Kyle takes out a credit card of his own and pays off everyone’s debts and then he’s just exhausted from it. And then the other kids like carry him off like Jesus’s carried off to the tomb. It’s absurd. But when I watched the episode, I thought this is not that bad of a representation of the satisfaction theory of atonement. So, it’s not like Jesus is punished on the cross in our place.
So, in the episode, Kyle, one of the main characters of South Park takes on the debts the town people have accrued by taking out his own credit card and just paying off all of their debts. Because he’s got this infinite, unlimited credit limit. And so, he goes and does this. And if you look actually in the Bible, for example, in comparing the Lord’s prayer on the Sermon of the Mount, in Matthew, in the Sermon on the Plane in Luke. A difference between them is that in the scripture, sins are also referred to as debts.
You know, forgive us our sins, our trespasses or forgive us our debts. So, sins are often considered, especially in the ancient new Eastern world, in the Hebrew world, as a kind of debt we have to God. So, if we imagine that Christ’s death on the cross, it was kind of infinitely valuable. It’s able to pay off the debt of our sins and even more so than that.
Another theory of atonement though, that was popular in the early church, but I would call it an incomplete theory. Is called Christus Victor. Now, that re-articulation of it comes from a Swiss theologian Gustaf Alan from the 20th century. And he looked at the Church Fathers, that there were early theories of the atonement that, you know, in the Bible it says that Christ gave himself as a ransom for us.
And so, some thought of the ransom theory of atonement that what Christ did on the cross is that he rescued us from the devil, that the devil had us in his grips. But the devil had no rights over Jesus. I’m sorry. Well, it goes back that Jesus’ death on the cross paid a price to the devil. And that price set us free from the devil’s ownership. But later, theological reflection, we see, well no, the devil can’t own us in that way.
And God doesn’t pay the devil to free us. God has dominion over everything. So, that doesn’t work. Other Fathers propose that when Christ died on the cross, the devil arranged his crucifixion. But the devil fell into a trap, that he had rights over us because of original sin. But he had no rights over Jesus who is sinless. And by arranging his crucifixion, the devil gave up his rights over us.
And so, Christ was victorious over the devil in this sense. So, the Christus Victor is the idea that in the atonement, Christ is victorious over death, over the slavery of sin, over the devil. And I think that’s true. Christus Victor is correct that the Bible routinely says Christ is a victor. He has defeated death. He has defeated the devil.
Where Christus victor falls short as a theory of the atonement, is that it doesn’t explain how Christ is victorious. Well, how did he beat the devil? How did he free us from sin? And that’s where I think the satisfaction theory of atonement is better at explaining that Christ freely offered himself as a sacrifice of love to the father.
And his death is so good and merits so much grace as a result, that it outweighs the ugliness and the evil of our own sins. And the only thing that would prevent us from receiving the victory of Christ, gained for us on the cross in this way through this sacrifice, would be if we either choose to not accept it or accept it and then reject that sacrifice.
Later to the Hebrews in chapter 10 says that there can be sins for which no sacrifice remains. That Christ sacrificed on the cross. People will say, “Oh, it’s one sacrifice, it’s done.” And it is, Christ only died on Calvary once. But that sacrifice has to be applied to our souls. And even in Hebrews chapter 10, it says that if we sin, no sacrifice remain.
We can be removed from Christ. We’re no longer in Christ. We no longer in mortal sin, have the benefits of Christ’s sacrifice applied to our souls. And we have to seek reconciliation with God in order to have that supernatural grace infused into our souls to establish friendship with God once again, if we were ever to have broken it before.
Well, hope this is helpful for you all. Definitely did not get through all the questions. I’ll probably do one more episode here, see if I can get through how many more I can get through. But there’s so many good ones. Ah, so many good ones. But we’re going to get through as many as we can. So, stay tuned for part two of this week. And I hope you have a very blessed day.
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