As Trent prepares to give a pro-life presentation in North Dakota he takes a few moments to break down his recent conversation with Brandan Robertson on homosexuality.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Minot, why not? Why not in Minot? And what in the world is Trent talking about? I will explain shortly, but first, welcome the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn, and I am on the road again. I am currently in North Dakota waiting to give a talk for the Dakota Hope Pregnancy Center here in Minot, North Dakota. Never been to this part of North Dakota. I’ve been to Bismarck, I’ve been to Fargo, but I’ve not been to M-I-N-O-T, Minot. Or as they say here, why not Minot? Is the motto and it’s a treat to really be here. It’s wonderful. I think something like 800 people are turning out for this pregnancy banquet. The local news came to cover the event and to interview me, which is a shock for someone like me from California where the local news, if they were to show up at a pro-life event, it would be anti extreme, anti-woman organizers gather, could Trump be responsible?
That’s what I would expect back home in California, but here, everyone’s been very pleasant. At first, I thought maybe the news came because they’re going to do a story like California man arrives in North Dakota, is shocked by lack of drag queen story hour, but plentiful plastic bags and plastic straws, but it’s wonderful. Everyone here has been very nice to me and we’re excited to here in about an hour to give a talk and to equip these 800 attendees to proclaim the pro-life message and to do so in a gracious way.
But what I wanted to do today for this episode is that a lot of people have been asking me to do breakdowns of the conversations that I’ve had. When I’ve had these big dialogues, I should break them down and comment on them a little bit further. Now, at first I was skeptical. I wasn’t sure I would want to do that. I just did the recent one with Brandon Robertson on whether homosexual behavior is a sin, and that was wonderful. We got a lot of great feedback from that. I want to keep doing dialogues like this, I want to fly people out.
Like with Brandon, what was nice about him is that he is a pastor of a local church, and what’s interesting is his church is in the news because they are trying to serve the homeless and they’re being prevented from doing so because of municipal regulations. And I said, “Look, there is a lot that divides you and I with our core beliefs, but I think we’re at least united. We would prefer to have the government stay out of our business.” So even when you meet people who you really, really disagree with on things, including very important things, it is refreshing when you can find things that you do agree with them on and you can build that common ground.
That’s what we should always do. If you know somebody who disagrees with you about the faith, even on important elements, even in a heated way, try to find common ground with them in any way, shape, or form because that demonstrates your humanity, you’re caring for them, that you’re a reasonable human being. We should always move forward with that. So I think it was a great dialogue, and what made it really helpful was that Brandon pastors the local church, so he just Ubered over to the studio and there’s something different about it. There’s something different about sitting across the table from somebody versus having them on Skype or on phone. I’m going to have some dialogue soon where it wouldn’t make sense to really fly the people out here. So I’m going to do them on Skype or I’m going to do them on phone, but others like the Timothy Gordon dialogue we have scheduled for October, Gordon and I are going to sit across the table.
We’ll probably talk for like three hours on feminism, on the Catholic teaching, on the death penalty. You’re not going to want to miss that. And we’re bringing him in for that because to me it’s worth it. I would love to bring all the guests into the studio here at 2020 Gillespie, because when you can sit across the table, you have just that much better of a conversation. And the people who make that possible by the way are those of you at trenthornpodcast.com, where as little as $5 a month, you keep the podcast going. You help me bring in people in the studio to have these great conversations, and you get access to bonus content. For example, we are unrolling my catechism study series and church history study series. I’m going to go through the whole catechism in a hundred easy lessons, and all of church history in a hundred easy lessons. And I’ll be doing about two lessons of each every Wednesday is what I’m planning.
So I had some last Wednesday, tomorrow we’ll be doing more, and they’ll come up each Wednesday. For patrons and other subscribers of course, you get access. We’re going to do our Q&A open mailbag episode next week, so if you’re a subscriber you get access to that as well and the ability to submit questions. Go and check that out at trenthornpodcast.com. Remember, your support is what makes this possible.
Now, back to the conversation at hand, to talk about what I talked about Brandon with. Got a lot of feedback. So, here are just some thoughts. I’m not going to systematically go through the conversation. In fact, originally I didn’t want to do episodes like these because I worried people would take it as me trying to play catch up and beat up the other person when they’re not here to defend themselves. And that’s not what I’m going to do.
And unfortunately, I had some people, even a Protestant on Facebook who’s very critical of my work. He’s a gentleman, he’s a gentleman and a scholar. He’s a great guy. In fact, I want his criticisms because I want to incorporate that into future works on the subject. I love when I get thoughtful criticism. I get mildly annoyed when I get thoughtless criticism mostly because it’s just a waste of my time. Like, well, you’re not helping me here. And not even saying that this criticism of me proves that my position was wrong or that I was wrong on something, but it reveals counter arguments that I did not reply to in my previous writings. And so, I love being able to come up with that because here’s how it goes in apologetics.
You started with apologetics, you put forward an argument, and then people will have objections. You have replies to the objections, then there are replies to the replies, and replies to the replies, and replies… And it starts to fragment. Like if you’ve ever seen a Mandelbrot design or fractals in mathematics and geometry, it can become… When you do an argument map, it can get more and more intricate. So, I love when there’s thoughtful criticism of my position from theologians or philosophers, because then I can say, okay, so that’s the third degree reply, here’s my fourth degree counter reply to what you’re saying. And we can make the conversation go deeper and deeper.
So that gentleman said, “No, go ahead and do that. Make a reply. I disagree with you, but I would love to hear your thoughts on the conversations you had.” And so I am… I hit the table again. I hope Nick can edit that out. I’m here overlooking the stage as everyone’s getting ready. I’ll probably have to run up here and get on stage pretty soon. I’m not holding anyone up because when I go and speak, that audience of course comes first, but right now I think they’re just wheeling out the salads and they’re trying to get all that together. I still got a little bit of time here to share my thoughts with you.
All right, here’s some things that occurred to me. First, they made me really want to bring on another revisionist scholar. I’d love to get Matthew Vines on the program in the future because you’ll see that the conversation really depends on your core assumptions. It was fascinating, when we listened to Brandon Robertson talking about his position, why homosexual behavior is not wrong. You’re always going to ask, and this is what I tried to do in these conversations. You should do as well. Get to the root, the foundation.
What is your foundation for sexual ethics? What is your foundation for ethics? What is your foundation for theology? For doctrine? What is your authority? Because that’s going to inform your answer on these positions. And Robertson’s is really… If you listen to the conversation, it was modern, secular thinking. Like when I asked him why is this wrong or this right? Why is incest wrong? Why is polyamory okay? And homosexual behavior is okay, but incest is not? And his reply was just, well, I look at the best studies, I look at the studies and this is what the studies tell us about these things. So when it comes to sexual morality, his worldview… And it’s very common, not just for people who subscribe to that kind of liberal Christianity, but it’s very common, people will just pick, okay, here’s what scientists say. Scientists give us so many great answers for things.
So, they’ll tell us what’s healthy or not healthy. And this is hard because one subset of sciences is medicine and medicine is great at curing the body of physical and even mental ailments. It is really good at that. But medicine in and of itself can’t tell us how we should live. It can’t tell us what is virtuous behavior or what is vicious behavior. It doesn’t have the ability to do that. It can tell you, well, if you do this, you’re likely to suffer this, but it can tell you consequences of actions, but not if those consequences are worth bearing. For example, if you look from a strictly medical viewpoint to the ancient Christians and you said if you confess that Jesus is Lord, you’ll probably be thrown to the lions or burnt on a cross or a beheaded. That’s very bad for your health. You probably should not do that.
But we have a different value to show that no, wait, bodily health is not the most important thing. And it goes on and on from that. But you saw that even he could not see that he eventually… Robertson’s helpful for me in this conversation because when I tell people, look, your position saying that homosexual behavior is nothing wrong with it, it logically entails polyamory. It logically entail saying that sexual unions do not have to be monogamous. And so Matthew Vines, who wrote God and the Gay Christian back in 2014, I think he still holds a view that Christians ought to be monogamous, but why? Robertson’s main view was that the morals we get from the Bible are distorted because they come from a patriarchal society. That’s one thing I wished we could have gotten deeper into in the conversation.
We touched on it a little bit at the end about patriarchy. In his book, he goes into it much more in depth, and I’ve heard this argument before. Matthew Vines makes a similar argument in his book, God and the Gay Christian. Because what Vine says is that Leviticus, what they were against, they were against homosexual behavior. Not because it violated the created order, but because it violated the masculine order. The idea here is that men are in charge, women are subservient to men. So, if man allows himself to be penetrated, that overturns the apple cart and it overturns the patriarchal order. And so, what Robertson and Vines and these other revisionist theologians will say is, “Well, we don’t base our ethics on this misogynistic patriarchal worldview.” As evidence, Vine cites in his book God and the Gay Christian, early church fathers who refer to the passive participant.
You’ll notice at the end of the conversation when we talked about 1st Corinthians 6, nine through 10, about those two Greek words, arsenokoitai and malakoi. What do those words mean? If you talk to people… And I had people link to this online trying to say, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. These words don’t refer…” They only refer to pederasty. The idea of man boy love. This is grown men exploiting young boys. That’s the only thing that Paul was concerned about. No. If that were the case, Paul could have used a word like pederasty. He could have explicitly spelled it out.
But here’s the knockdown argument for me and I shared this with Robertson and he didn’t have a compelling reply. Now, we didn’t have a long time to get into this. That’s why I feel bad it tailored out at the end, but we were going close to two hours. So, I felt like we had a substantial conversation. If Paul… The words are arsenokoitai, the man betters. In 1st Corinthians 6, nine through 10, the adulterers, fornicators, the idolaters, they will not inherit the kingdom of God. The arsenokoitai will not inherit the kingdom of God and the malakoi will not. Well, what are these people doing that will mean they cannot inherit the kingdom of God?
Well, it seems very clear. The arsenokoitai is a word that Paul may have coined himself that literally means in Greek a man better and it is the Greek translation of… I think it’s [inaudible 00:00:11:55]. The Hebrew verse, the Hebrew phrase in Leviticus 18 that condemns homosexual behavior. The arsenokoitai are the active participant in homosexual behavior. What among homosexual couplings might call the top, the penetrator, at least between two men who are engaged in relations. I don’t want to get too graphic, but unfortunately we have to in this subject to say, well, is this moral or immoral? The penetrator is the active participant, the arsenokoitai. The malakoi would be the passive participant, that penetratee, the penetrated, which tends to be, and it’s kind of similar today… is still somewhat similar today, the passive participant, the one who is penetrated is the feminine one.
In the ancient world, these individuals would put on makeup, speak in high voices. They would wear feminine apparel. They acted very feminine. And so, the ancient church fathers would say, “Don’t allow yourself to be penetrated. Don’t be a man woman. Don’t be a man woman.” And so, Vines and Robertson will say, see, this is misogyny. What’s wrong with being a woman? There’s nothing wrong with being a woman. They’re saying that what’s wrong here is men are acting like women and women are inferior. But guess what? We know men and women are equal. So, it doesn’t matter if a man acts like a woman, who cares? Because we know men and women are equal.
No. Paul believed men and women were equal. In Galatians 3:28, he says that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, free nor slave, neither male and female. He doesn’t say male or female. Actually, go back to the Greek in Galatians 3:28, you’ll see he uses the words male and female, but he doesn’t join them with the Greek word for or, he joins them with the Greek word and, or kai. And what that means is that when we are in Christ, we still retain our male and female identities, but we’re not divided by social or political considerations about what it means to be male or female.
We’re equal in Christ. And I mentioned this Robertson that Paul is not… Now, he certainly holds to a first century views on things, certain customs that he was speaking about that are not binding to us at this time. Like the idea that women must wear veils. That was something. He doesn’t talk about how if you don’t wear veils, you won’t inherit the kingdom of God. But he does talk about showing proper reverence and that men and women are equal. But because we are different, we will show our reverence to God in different ways. But Paul also goes on to say things that are very egalitarian. In 1st Corinthians 7, we blew past this quickly in the conversation, but I want you to stop and think about this. In 1st Corinthians 7, Paul says that your body is not your own. The wife does not own her body.
The husband has a right to the wife’s body in the conjugal rights of marriage. Now, you might say, “What a misogynist.” Well, guess what? Paul then goes on to say the husband’s body is not his own. The wife has a right to the husband’s body and to his conjugal rights. In fact, you go all the way back to the book of Exodus, I think it’s Exodus chapter 21, that a woman who is sold into slavery to be a wife essentially. And this is at a time, of course, where you know it’s not something that the Bible highlights as a positive good. It’s you live in a primitive time where there’s no credit, there’s no credit cards, there’s no banks. You could be in a position where you either sell yourself as a slave or you starve to death. But the trajectory of scripture is to always move us towards the ideal.
But even back then, because the catechism talks about how Old Testament laws were imperfect and provisional to move us to the good. Even then, a woman who was sold into slavery can leave the man she is sold to if he does not provide her food, shelter, or marital rights, that she has a right to his body. When you go through scripture and go back to Corinthians, Paul says that women can prophesize in church. For example, they can prophesize just like men can. They just can’t teach in church because that’s reserved to men who are ordained to holy orders… So that’s a whole… and we’ll probably go into this more if I get a good dialogue or a conversation on why women can’t be priests.
But you go through when Paul talks about female teachers that he had like Aquilla and Priscilla. He ain’t no misogynist. But he reflects the created order that God gave us. That is what is important to Paul. And so, the argument that Paul is just a misogynist who worries about this male order toppling doesn’t reflect the fact that in Romans chapter one, what Paul is talking about here is about creation unraveling. In Romans one he says, look, the Trent Horn dynamic translation, Romans one, “Even the Gentiles are under God’s judgment because they can know from reason alone that, one, there’s a God, so you shouldn’t worship idols. And two, sex is made for men and women, not for people of the same sex.” And you can just know that by looking at the very design in creation itself.
It was actually very fitting that on Friday I had a conversation… I was pulled in at the last minute to do a show on Catholic Answers live because the guests who we are going to have on the second hour was unavailable. So, I heard Darren talking about it and I said, “Hey, happy to help out. What do you want to talk about?” I said, “You know what? I just had this great dialogue with Brandon Robertson. Let’s open it up to the phone lines, talk about homosexuality in the Bible.” And I had a caller. Listen to that caller. It was a really interesting call. Go back to Friday’s episode of Catholic Answers live.
The guy called in and said, “I think you Christians get this wrong.” He said, “I’m a better Christian than most Christians.” He said, he’s an ordained minister with a degree in psychology and that already gives me some red flags, which is why asked him, “Do you have a degree in theology, because this is a theological question.” The question of whether homosexual behavior is sinful or not is a theological question and he said, “Well, I studied theology and I switched over to psychology.”
I really wish I’d asked him where he was ordained because it would not surprise me if he was ordained by the church of the internet. Just because somebody’s ordained, just because somebody a pastor, as Shania Twain once said, that don’t impress on me much because lots of people with kooky views can find other people who share their kooky views and receive accolades and accreditation from these individuals. I want to look at the arguments that people have, but I still, at the very least, I want to see if they got bonafides. Do you even know what you’re talking about? And it was clear because I was talking about scripture with him, and he didn’t even know the Bible passages I was referencing. Yet, I’m sure he goes around telling people he’s an ordained minister, which makes me think maybe he was ordained by the church of the internet.
I don’t know. But I asked him, we went to that in Romans one. He was jumping all over the place, but I think the argument he was trying to make on the Friday show, which I wished I had drilled down into more, he was saying, “Paul’s talking about nature. It’s unnatural. Well, Paul didn’t know that homosexual behavior is natural. You see it all over the animal kingdom.” Well, yeah. You see animals do all kinds of things that are natural for them, but unnatural for us. You see animals forcibly copulate with one another. But guess what? That’s not natural for humans to do. It’s rape. Now maybe it’s natural in the sense that it happens statistically, but when Paul is talking about homosexual behavior being against nature or dealing with nature, he uses the word phusis, [cata 00:19:07] phusis and [para 00:19:08] phusis, against or for nature.
What he’s talking about here is the human nature written into our very being that comes from the book of Genesis. Like when you read Romans chapter one, Paul doesn’t even say the men and the women. He says the males and the females. He uses that word, male and female, not man and woman, because that’s the same language that is used in the book of Genesis to talk about male and female. And look, Paul was definitely aware of non-pederastic homosexual relationships. He almost certainly was aware of this because he was a knowledgeable man who traveled the Greco Roman world. He could quote Greek philosophers off the top of a hat, Greek poets. And so, he would have known, for example, to compare the Genesis account of creation with Greco Roman accounts of creation and marital love. Well, the Genesis account, you know quite clear, that woman is made from man. Taken from his side.
The word is translated rib, but Robert Gagnon showed that it’s better translated side. And so the two, the [inaudible 00:20:11], the side that’s taken from the man, Gagnon says in the Hebrew it forms a perfect counterpart. The woman is the counterpart of the man anatomically and sexually. And so, that makes sense why the two become one flesh because God made them to be complimentary with one another. Contrast that with Plato’s Symposium. I’m almost positive this is in Plato’s Symposium. I don’t have my computer in front of me. I’m just going off the cuff here and Minot, why not? One of the Greco Roman myths about sexuality is that at the beginning, we were all… I like this myth a little bit because it’s fun. We were all connected to another person and we got around by doing cartwheels.
So, we were like connected face to face and we were connected. And there were male, female connections, male, male, and female, female. And then, there was a divide and what we’re always trying to do is we’re always trying to find that person we were connected with in the beginning. So, it’s a soulmate creation myth and it’s cute. But there, you see an understanding that it could be two men or two women and not just pederasty, adults. That among women, there was no pederasty among women. That always took place among adult women.
In fact, men who engage in homosexual behaviors in the Greco Roman world often thought that women sinned or committed evil deeds by engaging in homosexual relationships with one another. So, even those who engage in these relationships that Paul would condemn would agree with Paul that what the women were doing were wrong and it was always among adults.
Same to too in Plato’s symposium, Plato talks… has characters who talk about how there are men who engage in these lifelong relationships with other men. The Roman author Juvenal talks about… He’s a satirist and he talks about how there were men who were getting married to other men in Rome. It was never widely accepted, but it was something that people knew and understood. So Paul, he was aware of this, and so trying to rewrite the text I think ultimately doesn’t work. What you end up having to do is to take out the texts foundations and that’s what Robertson does. He takes out all of the foundations. That guy who called the show, by the way, he took the foundations. He says, “I’m a better Christian than most Christians.” I said, “Well, do believe Jesus is God?” “Well, no, I don’t.” “Well, then you’re not really a Christian then because that’s the core belief of Christianity.”
But the other thing people ask me about is why would Robertson care if he’s a universalist? He believes everybody’s going to heaven. And I’d love to have a universalist on the show by the way. I’m going to see maybe if maybe I can have David Bentley Hart come on. He just wrote a book on universalism. He’s a fascinating character. He’s an Eastern Orthodox theologian and he’s written on universalism. I’ve heard universalism is the idea that all human beings will in some shape or form get to heaven. You might say, well, what about hell? Well, the universalist will tell you hell is a temporary place where you’re punished, but not forever. So, hell becomes purgatory for universalists. And I love though… Remember, I had Randall Rouser on and he defends annihilationism.
I’ve read other annihilationist scholars and one of them talking about universalism says universalism is the triumph of hope over [inaudible 00:23:28]. So, Randall is actually a hopeful universalist. He wishes universalism were true, but I think he would agree there’s not overwhelming evidence to accept that view. It’d be great if it were true, but there’s not overwhelming enough evidence to actually embrace it. The few other things I want to get to before I run out of time with you and I got to go and get on stage. One thing would be some people ask me online, why didn’t you make more of a distinction between ritual and ceremonial… Sorry, the ritual laws of the Old Testament and the moral laws. Well, I didn’t use those words as much, but I did say to Brandon, look, you can agree some moral principles in Leviticus carry over to today. Like prohibitions on incest. And he said, “Well, yeah, but not because they’re in Leviticus.”
So, he and I would agree there are moral principles in Leviticus that carry over. The question is how do we determine those moral principles? That’s why I spent a lot of time talking about Jesus. So, what’s funny is when I listen to Robert Gagnon talk about this, or Preston Sprinkles, or others, that most of them, when they focus their presentations on the Bible’s teaching on homosexual behavior, they go to Jesus. They don’t just go to what Paul said or Leviticus says, they don’t go to the knots. They go to the positive commands. And I think that’s good because if we see what the Bible tells us is God’s plan for sexuality, then it becomes starkly clear. Is starkly a word? I don’t know. It becomes abundantly clear that sexual behaviors outside of the marriage bond between a man and woman are not a part of that plan.
So, that’s why we spent maybe an inordinate amount of time on Jesus, but we both agreed Jesus is Lord, he’s God. So, it was a good place to start. But I think ultimately, even Robertson was not willing to take Jesus at his word because I say, look, Jesus says remarriage after divorce is adultery. And Robertson says, “Well, I would agree to try really hard not to do that.” Well, Jesus doesn’t say try really hard not to do this. He says, “Don’t do this.” And here, what I wish I could have brought out more explicitly, is that Jesus closed the loophole on serial polygamy. So, serial polyamory is when you have romantic relationships with more than one person consecutively. And I would say we have a lot of serial polyamory in this culture. A lot of it, but from Jesus’s perspective, that’s no different than polyamory all at once, because you’re still married to your previous spouse if the marriage is valid.
So when Jesus closed the loophole on divorce and remarriage for that serial polyamory, he was implicitly closing the loophole on regular polyamory, which should be abundantly clear. But you’ve got people like Robertson who are forced to accept that. Which brings me to the other thing that I think is fascinating is Father James Martin’s endorsement of Robertson’s book, that he is such a tricky individual because I know when people… People bring this up to him all the time online and he maybe says, “People hate me, and they’re the rad trad Catholics and they’re not fair.” Well, dude, you endorsed this book. And I would say why would you endorse this book? And I know what he could do. He could backtrack and say, “Well, just because someone endorses a book, Trent, doesn’t mean they endorse everything in a book. I bet you’ve endorsed books. You don’t endorse every single sentence in the book, but there’s ideas that you find helpful. And so, I agree with Brandon that we have to be warm and inviting and create an inclusive environment for people who are LGBT. But I never said we should change the church’s teachings like Brandon’s saying.”
Well, okay, but that’s the main thrust of Robertson’s book. It’s true, I’ve endorsed books where just because I endorsed it doesn’t mean I agree with every single thing the author has said, but I endorsed the book because I agree with the main thrust of what the author says. If someone like Brandon Robertson gave his book to me and asked me for an official endorsement on the back of the book or to say something about it on Twitter, I would say something like though I disagree with the book’s fundamental conclusions, this book is written well and it poses challenges sincere Christians must face. I endorse books.
I just endorsed an anthology by John Loftus, The Case Against Miracles. I gave it an endorsement. I didn’t say I agreed with it, but I said it presents a formidable case Christians have to confront. But notice that Father Martin does not do that. He’s just smiling and says it’s a great book and congrats to Brandon on it. Tricky, tricky individual. As the old Connect Four commercial used to say, “Pretty sneaky, sis.”
Finally, I think it’s important. The argument… Remember at the beginning of the dialogue with Brandon, we talked about you know a tree by its fruit. And Vines uses this argument too, and Brandon uses this argument, and I believe as I said in the dialogue, it’s a gross misinterpretation of what Jesus is saying. Jesus is not saying you can know a teaching is true based on how you feel after accepting it. Because when Paul accepted that Jesus is Lord and as he’s compelled to a witness to the world, Paul felt pretty crummy. He was stoned, he was lashed, he was shipwrecked.
Paul endured major pain and frustration, but he knew it was the right thing to do and he continued to do that, to promote that. What Jesus is saying is that you can tell a teacher is false by the fruit of their teachings, their false teachings give away they’re a false teacher. And I think that’s abundantly clear. Look what you have with those who try to revise the Bible to say homosexual behaviors is okay? You eventually get to, “We were not changing the faith. We’re just saying that these same sex couples, they can be equally parts,” but it doesn’t work like that because then you never stops there. It’s, well, also these polyamorous couples. And our atheist friends, they’re not going to hell because nobody’s going to hell. And you don’t have to believe Jesus is present in the Eucharist and pornography is not that wrong.
Mark Regnerus, a wonderful sociologist, actually did a study of Christians, their views on sexual morality, and quote unquote gay Christians. Those who identify as gay and engage in homosexual behavior, but also say they’re a Christian. Those who identify as gay and lesbian Christians, their views on pornography, abortion, adultery are the same as or more supportive than the general public. So, you know a tree by its fruit, that you see these authors and what they propose, it never just stops with the one heresy. It’s the same with the people who promote women’s ordination. The people that promote women’s ordination start with saying a woman should be a priest and they want you to think it’d be no different. It’s just a woman who’d be up there giving the homily and consecrating the bread and wine. Except when she says this is my body, you can’t really be in persona cristae because Jesus became man. He became male.
That’s an important essential part of his identity. Something that is extremely important. Right after the fact that he became a member of the species homo sapiens, becoming man is the second most important thing. I’m not going to get into that though. We’ll do a whole conversation on that some other time, but my point is they’ll say it’d be no different. It’s just a woman up there. She says this is my body. That doesn’t really work though. It never stops there though. Because when you read these defenders of women’s ordination, they also want to change the church’s teaching on contraception, on marriage, on abortion. They’re almost always pro choice. They believe that patriarchy is running the church and women should be able to do whatever they feel like doing as some kind of strange counterpart to that. Some kind of weird matriarchy or toxic femininity as I might call it.
It never stops there. You know a tree by its fruit. And so you can judge something. I would ask you that when you judge something, don’t judge it just by the winsomeness of the person making the arguments, that it’s flowery rhetoric or it sounds really good. Look at the evidence, look at the arguments. Does it make sense? Do they have support from scripture, from tradition, from sound reasoning for what they believe? And I hope on this podcast I always help you learn how to discern who is presenting the truth and who is not by using sound principles of reasoning and faithfulness to the teachings of the Catholic faith.
You guys are great. And guess what? I think I got to get up on stage soon so please pray for me. Though, by time you hear this, hopefully I will have made it safely home already, but I’ve got other great events coming up here soon. And our conference is next week. We might have still some late seats available, but do pray for that, that it goes well. Catholic Answers Conference, the early church was a Catholic church. You’re not going to want to miss that at catholicanswersconference.com. You know what? I might be able to get you guys a copy of my presentation at the conference, maybe here on the show a week or two after. Let’s hope for that. So, thank you guys so much and I hope you all have a very blessed day.
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