Audio only:
In this episode, Trent Horn responds to Ryan from NeedGod.net, who argues that the Catholic view of salvation contradicts Paul’s teaching that we are saved “by grace through faith” and “not of works.”
See episode on confession: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5UG90KTs-U&t=1s&pp=ygUWZGViYXRpbmcgb24gY29uZmVzc2lvbg%3D%3D
See Taco Talks interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JffE2lkBkSs&t=61s&pp=ygUVdGFjbyB0YWxrcyB0cmVudCBob3Ju
See episode on Ephesians 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMWbvTy-43k&pp=ygUocHJvdGVzdGFudGlzbXMgbW9zdCBtaXNtdXNlZCBiaWJsZSB2ZXJzZQ%3D%3D
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Trent Horn (00:00):
Recently a Protestant named Ryan from NeedGod.net poked fun at one of my comments on salvation and he also criticized Michael Knowles and Matt Walsh on the question of whether you can know for sure that you’ll go to heaven.
Ryan (NeedGodnet) (00:11):
That’s not Christianity, my friends, but that is consistent Catholicism.
Trent Horn (00:14):
So in today’s episode, we’ll respond to Ryan’s critique and show where it misses the mark. But before we do that, I want to make sure you don’t miss the mark as well on all of our new content because YouTube often suppresses our more controversial content so that you don’t miss it, please click the subscribe button and share it so that other people can see it. It also helps if you can leave a like and consider supporting us at trrenthornpodcast.com to help us keep creating great sponsor-free episodes. All right, so let’s take a look at Ryan’s recent short about me. But Ephesians two does not conflict in any way with the idea that we do things in order to be saved.
Ryan (NeedGodnet) (00:48):
So Ephesians two says it’s not of our own doing to be saved. Trent Horan says there’s still things you must do to be saved. So not our own doing means we must do things. Okay. This recipe says keep rested, do not stir. According to Trent, that would mean let’s stir. The doctor said, “Do not touch the bandage. That must mean I’ve got to poke it. It’s going to help with the healing. The password field says, Do not share. Well, we know what that means. Hey everyone. My password is Perry the platypus. So when Ephesians two says, not of your own doing, it really means salvation is of me doing baptism, avoiding mortal sin, going to a man in a box, attending mass every single week, plus more. I think we need to get rid of this word not. That’s better. It’s a performance review. Congratulations, you’ve been saved pending quarterly evaluation.
Trent Horn (02:03):
All right. First, a secure password needs multiple elements like mine, which is Dufenschmertz with two zeros. Second, I get that Ryan is trying to be clever, but what would really show he’s clever is if he had systematically responded to my entire episode on Ephesians two: eight through nine, which is called Protestantism’s most misused Bible verse. In fact, he could have just gone midway through the episode to see what I meant by do things to be saved. We can reject this new covenant even after accepting it, as some did to which St. Paul told them, “You are severed from Christ. You who would be justified by the law, you have fallen away from grace.” So while we don’t follow works in order to be saved, God has prepared good works for us to do after being saved as seen in Ephesians 2:10. These works in themselves do not save us, but if we are disobedient to God and fail to do works in such a way that we gravely sin and lead a life that is incompatible with the Christian faith, then we forsake our salvation.
(03:08):
Many Protestants and Catholics talk past each other on Ephesians two eight through nine because many Protestants think that salvation only involves a single moment and everything that happens after that moment is because we were saved and nothing can ever change that fact. Catholics, on the other hand, believe salvation is a process. And so we agree there is a single first moment that represents our initial salvation and no work merits that salvation. We just faithfully receive it. And this corresponds to Ephesians two: eight. By grace, you have been saved through faith. Notice it’s in the past tense. But the Bible also speaks of salvation as a process that is not completed in this life and this process requires us to do things so that we don’t forsake it. First Corinthians 15: two, Paul speaks of the gospel quote, by which you are saved if you hold it fast unless you believed in vain.
(04:04):
The word saved in this verse from the Greek, so the say, can literally be translated, you are being saved because it is in the present tense. In Colossians 1:21- 22, Paul says that Christ, “Has now reconciled sinners in his body of flesh by his death. In order to present you or y’all, since the Greek is second plural, holy and blameless and irreproachable before him provided that you continue in the faith stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel which you heard. This means it’s possible that you or I could not be presented blameless to the Father because we chose to not continue in the faith. As Christians, we are saved from sin, but we have not reached our final permanent salvation in this life, which St. Paul notes in Romans 13:11 when he says,” Salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.
(04:57):
“This means we don’t have complete salvation the first moment we believed or even in the present moment since salvation is only nearer to us now. It’s not fully arrived yet. Through baptism, we experience the first moment of salvation. If you’re an adult, this is accompanied by faith. If you’re an infant, you do not have mature faith yet, but the grace that helps your faith grow is given to you in your infant baptism. And infants are a perfect example of how you don’t do anything to be saved or to have this initial moment of salvation. Babies simply are saved by the waters of baptism because as one Peter 3:21 says,” Baptism now saves you. “The catechism of the Catholic church says,” Since the initiative belongs to God in the order of grace, no one can merit the initial grace of forgiveness and justification at the beginning of conversion.
(05:47):
“So I agree with Ryan, there is nothing we must do to be saved in the sense of being initially saved or the process of going from being in a state of original sin to becoming a regenerated child of God. In fact, Ryan often speaks about how other theologies are bad because they give room to boast about doing some good work to be saved, but we aren’t saved by any work.
Ryan (NeedGodnet) (06:11):
So I ask, does God want us to be able to boast in things that we have done as the basis of our acceptance before him? Clearly not. Paul explains in Romans 3:27 that because of what Jesus did, all possibility of boasting is excluded so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. Now some people might say,” Okay, but I wouldn’t boast in God’s side about my baptism. It’s not about whether you think you would or not. It’s that God doesn’t want to even give you an opportunity to boast and that’s why he makes salvation not based on works.
Trent Horn (06:45):
However, Ryan’s own view of salvation is an opportunity for boasting. It fails his own test because he pins salvation on a work, specifically the work of trusting in Christ. There is a possibility of boasting here because you can brag about how you spent so many hours researching, watching debates and analyzing the evidence before you prove to yourself that Jesus is God and then decided to put your trust in him. Ironically, the one way of being saved where you cannot boast at all is the way Ryan rejects infant baptism because infants cannot choose to do anything so they have absolutely nothing to bra. Learning apologetics can predispose you to being more open to accepting God’s offer of salvation, but apologetic efforts in and of themselves cannot save people. No human efforts can save us. All that saves us is saying yes to God’s offer of salvation, either for ourselves by submitting to baptism in faith or for our children by baptizing them because we have faith in God who will save them.
(07:46):
That’s why St. Peter said the following to the crowd in Acts chapter two. “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit for the promise is to you and to your children and to all that are far off everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him. As Christians, we did not earn our salvation through any good work, but we can still reject salvation that we didn’t earn. Adam and Eve temporarily rejected God by disobeying him. They didn’t earn their place in the garden, but they were still free to walk away from it. And the same is true of us who are spiritually regenerated in Christ. The only thing we must do after the first moment of our salvation in order to be saved is to not permanently forsake salvation by living in grave unrepentant disobedience of God.
(08:38):
That’s it. And if we do gravely sin against God like Adam and Eve did, then we just have to be reconciled to God whose mercy endures forever, which we know Adam and Eve did because the church celebrates their feast day as saints on Christmas Eve. The problem for Ryan though is that he holds a view of salvation that no major Christian believed for the first 1500 years of church history, which is the view that salvation cannot be forsaken. And so it’s impossible for a Christian to ever reject God and go to hell. That’s why Ryan makes it seem like we don’t do anything after being saved. Just let the recipe sit in the bowl. Just leave the wound alone. Just be silent about your password. Ryan also posts pictures of people working for salvation in contrast to people who are saved by doing nothing. You can just sit in the raft and be saved by faith alone as the Holy Spirit paddles.
(09:29):
Or you don’t have to walk the tightrope, just sit your butt down and cruise to salvation at Jesus’ ski resort. You also see this attitude in Ryan’s response to me where he talks about how all you have to do to be saved is trust in Christ and so our obedience will automatically follow from the fact that we are saved.
Ryan (NeedGodnet) (09:48):
Trusting Jesus without my own doing is Paul’s point. That’s grace. And faith is not me doing something. Faith is being sure that Jesus did everything already to save me. Nothing left for me to do. And the good things I now do is simply out of thankfulness for all that he’s done for me.
Trent Horn (10:10):
First, those cartoons contradict Ryan’s message. In the raft cartoon, paddling represents good works, which makes it seem like salvation by faith alone means you don’t have to do good works at all. You can just not do anything and even gravely sin through inaction like never praying to God and you’ll be saved. But Ryan’s theology says that good works are an essential sign you are saved. So the cartoon should really have faith alone be an identical picture to faith plus works, but with the other guy saying, Paddle hard because that’s a sign you are truly saved. And if you don’t paddle hard enough, that proves you weren’t saved in the first place. Second, the Bible clearly teaches that our salvation depends on things we do and it is possible for saved Christians to not do them. In the sermon on the mount, Jesus said this. “Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my father who is in heaven.
(11:06):
On that day, many will say to me, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy on your name and cast out demons in your name and do mighty works in your name? And then I will declare to them, I never knew you depart from me, you evil doers. This should terrify us. Even if you do good works that please God, that won’t matter if you live a hypocritical life and gravely disobey God without repenting of this evil before death. That’s why St. Paul says in Romans two, six through eight that God will render to every man according to his works. To those who by patience and well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life. But for those who are factious and do not obey the truth, but obey wickedness, there will be wrath and fury. In the Bible, faith is not merely the act of acknowledging Jesus has done something for us and then we are thankful for what Jesus has done, which sounds like what Ryan means by trusting in Christ.
(12:01):
A significant part of Paul’s concept of faith translated from the Greek word pistis is the concept of faithfulness. Faith is not just trust or confidence in someone. Faith is obedience to that person because he is so trustworthy. That’s the thesis of Protestant author, Matthew Bates’ 2017 book, Salvation By Allegiance Alone. Forbates, obedience is not the fruit that faith automatically produces. Obedience is the faith that saves us. Saving faith is not merely a trust in Christ. It is an active present allegiance to Jesus the King and baits shows how the Greek word pistis is better understood as allegiance rather than faith. The word refers to who you faithfully serve, not who you merely believe in. For example, the New Testament’s instruction to confess Jesus is Lord isn’t a way for a person to merely say they believe certain facts about Jesus. In the ancient Roman context of the New Testament, this proclamation was a way of saying a person’s full allegiance was to Jesus Christ and to no one else.
(13:08):
Christians, as a result, were persecuted because they were unwilling to give someone like Caesar that same allegiance or obedience. According to Protestant New Testament scholar Don Garlington, righteousness is by definition conformity to the covenant relationship. It consists of a faithful obedience to the Lord whose will is enshrined in the covenant. Yet the beginning of faithfulness is faith. In keeping with the Hebrew term Hamuna, the Greek noun translated faith piste is two-sided. Faith and faithfulness. We can see this in Romans 1:17, which quotes Habakkuk two: four. The Protestant NIV translates Habakkuk two: four as the righteous will live by faith. But the RSV, both the Catholic and Protestant editions have a more faithful translation to the original Greek and Hebrew. “He who through faith is righteous shall live. Faithfulness is not the automatic sign of saving faith. It is a choice we make through the help of God’s grace to remain faithful to him.
(14:09):
This is echoed in Galatians five: six, where Paul says,” The only thing that counts is faith working through love. “Or John 3:36, which says,” He who believes in the Son has eternal life. He who does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God rests upon him. Notice John 3:36 doesn’t say he who does not believe the son shall not see life. The text is instead focus on those who do not obey or no longer have allegiance to God’s s. So I would tell Ryan, “Of course, I fully trust Christ from my salvation, but trusting someone means you obeyed that person. For example, if I trust my doctor, then I will take the medicine he prescribes. Likewise, Jesus gave us instructions about what we must do to be saved, such as by eating his flesh and drinking his blood, which is why early second century Christians, like sainting nations of Antioch said things like this.
(15:02):
“Obey the bishop and the presbytery with an undivided mind, breaking one and the same bread, which is the medicine of immortality and the antidote to prevent us from dying, but which causes that we should live forever in Jesus Christ. Ryan’s unbiblical and unhistorical view of salvation also means he has an unjustified confidence in his own salvation that he uses to make other Christians look like they don’t really have saving faith. Consider his comments about Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles’s answer to the question, do you know you’re going to heaven when you die? Here’s what Walsh and Knowles said.
Ryan (NeedGodnet) (15:37):
Do you know for sure where you will go when you die?
Michael Knowles/Matt Walsh (15:41):
I don’t. I trust and I have hope in our Lord. I trust in Jesus and I consider hope to be a theological virtue and a demand, not just a nice feeling, but a demand that goes along with faith and charity, without which we have nothing. Do I know for sure where I’m going to go when I die? No, because I’m not God and I don’t know all. Only God knows that.
Trent Horn (16:07):
And here’s Ryan’s response.
Ryan (NeedGodnet) (16:09):
To me, not knowing where you go when you die is really to miss the heart of the Christian message. Christianity is not like Islam and other religions where you have to hope so. Maybe you’ll get to heaven. We’ll find out in the end, only God knows. That’s not Christianity because anyone who says to you, only God knows, I’ll find out, are really depending upon their actions to get them into heaven rather than what Jesus has done. With Christianity, Jesus said,” It is finished. “Not it has just begun, now you do the rest, it’s finished. So for anyone who just simply trusts in Christ that Christ has paid for their sins, they end up in heaven. They’re not going to perish but have eternal life as Jesus said.
Trent Horn (16:49):
The problem in this discussion is that there’s a huge chasm between I don’t know if I’ll go to heaven and I am 100% certain I’m going to heaven when I die. Here’s my answer. I have confidence but not a false perfect assurance I will go to heaven when I die because I don’t have perfect knowledge of the future. I can know with moral certainty I’m in a state of grace right now and would die in God’s friendship if I were to die right now, but I don’t know what I’m going to be doing months, years or decades from now. Maybe a horrible tragedy will be an occasion for me to walk away from the faith. I don’t think that would happen, but it’s not impossible. It has happened to other people so I pray it doesn’t happen to me, but for Ryan to maintain his view, he has to assume that this is impossible.
(17:40):
He has to assume a true Christian could never fall away and so anyone who does so permanently never believed at all and so they were lying about their faith.
Ryan (NeedGodnet) (17:50):
Now there can be people who claim to be Christians who stop claiming to be Christians and become atheists and things like that. They would never really believers to begin with because if they were, God would’ve brought them to completion and God would’ve sustained them. But the fact that they’re not sustained shows that they are not really belonging to Christ in the first place.
Trent Horn (18:08):
Along with contradicting scripture, which does talk about Christians being severed from Christ and falling from grace, like in Galatians five: four, this requires you to label millions of former Christians who have now died as a bunch of liars. Some of them might have lied, but all of them, that’s quite a claim. I find it more productive to just take former Christians at their word and patiently work to help them overcome whatever obstacle stands between them and being reunited to Jesus Christ and having that authentic faith again in him. Ultimately, this view of salvation can’t give you assurance at all because if you say unrepentant apostates were never saved in the first place, then the only way to not make them all moral monsters is to say that at least some of them deceived themselves and they thought they had true faith when they really didn’t.
(19:02):
But doesn’t that apply to you and I? Couldn’t we also be in the same boat and deceive ourselves and think that we had true faith when we really didn’t? You can see this in my dialogue with taco talks on this very issue.
(19:14):
Well, have you ever seen someone where it seemed like, oh yeah, I would say they seem like a legitimate Christian, genuine, trusted in Jesus, held to your theology, and then they became an atheist and never returned to the faith. Have you ever seen anyone act like that? Or heard of someone?
Taco Talks (19:33):
Of course. Yeah, but they leave us to show us that they were never really of us. That’s 1 John 2:19.
Trent Horn (19:39):
Okay. Is it possible then that let’s say you give me the formula and I’m saved, could it be possible I’m in the same boat as that guy and I was never actually saved in the first place and I deceived myself?
Taco Talks (19:54):
Potentially, yeah.
Trent Horn (19:55):
I agree that some people who fall away from the faith never truly believed in the first place, but there is no evidence that this is the case for everyone who falls away. What ends up happening is many people who believe in once saved, always saved, end up having a crisis of faith where they think that their doubts or their habitual sins means they weren’t truly saved in the first place because they didn’t have a mature enough faith, especially if they got saved as a teenager or a child and so they need to get saved all over again. You can find all kinds of discussion forums with people worried they weren’t saved in the past because their lives don’t have all the good works that are the proof of their past salvation. So if you’re a Christian who doesn’t know if you are saved, let me offer you some assurance.
(20:39):
If you were validly baptized, then nothing can remove this mark on your soul. If you’re not baptized, get baptized. And if you are baptized but you worry that your current sins means you were never saved in the first place, reject that lie. Nothing can undo your adoption as a child of God through baptism. All you can do is be like the prodigal son and run away from God through sin, but God is like the father in that parable always waiting for his son to return and God has given us a way to return to him. Just as we approach a minister of the church when we are first united to God through baptism, we approach a minister of the church to be reunited to God through confession of our grave sins. Grave sins are not a sign that our past was a lie and that we were never Christian.
(21:24):
They are a sign that we have temporarily turned our back on God and the grace of God calls us back to him. That’s why Jesus told the apostles, whose sins you forgive are forgiven and who sins you retain are retained. I love being Catholic because I can prayerfully ask God to show me where I stand in relation to him through something like an examination of conscience. And if I have stupidly rejected God through grave sin, I can pray to God to forgive me. Contrition or guilt for sin can be imperfect in the sense that we just want to avoid punishment or it can be perfect because it is sadness about offending God. The catechism of the Catholic church says this. When it arises from a love by which God is loved above all else, contrition is called perfect contrition of charity. Such contrition remits venial sins.
(22:12):
It also obtains forgiveness of mortal sins if it includes the firm resolution to have recourse to sacramental confession as soon as possible. As a Catholic, I don’t live in fear that I’m going to go to hell if I can’t find a priest for confession. God can save anyone if through no fault of their own, they don’t utilize the ordinary means of salvation God gave us. Even many Protestants believe that God saves people who through no fault of their own never knew Jesus, but that doesn’t take away the necessity of preaching the ordinary means of salvation through Jesus Christ and his church, which initially saves us through baptism, guides us to have faith in Christ, spiritually nourishes us with the body and blood of Jesus Christ that we must, as Jesus says, consume to have eternal life, which we do through the Eucharist, and it repairs our relationship with God through the sacrament of confession.
(23:02):
We don’t have to worry about whether we did enough good works to prove we were truly saved. We can know the waters of baptism made us God’s adopted children and the Holy Spirit convicts us of grave sin and leads us to confess those sins. As I noted in a previous episode, whenever the New Testament describes confessing sins, it always does so in the context of confessing to other people such as in the context of the elders in the church or the priests who have the power to anoint the sick with oil, which obtains for them the forgiveness of sins, which today we call the sacrament of the anointing of the sick. For more on the Catholic view of salvation, check out my new book, Salvationist from the Catholic Church, how Christ uses the church to bring us to him and the other episodes linked in the description below.
(23:47):
Thank you all so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.