Audio only:
Joe responds to objections raised in a conversation between Vlad Savchuk, Isaiah Saldivar and Mike Signorelli about relics in the Catholic Church.
Transcript:
Joe:
Even if the entire cross of Jesus was discovered intact, there would be no spiritual value to it.
CLIP:
I’ve never heard a Protestant just say, the cross is worthless like the cross. If you found it tomorrow fully intact and you knew it was the true cross, it is of no spiritual value. And that strikes me as just so outrageously un-Christian of an attitude to have. Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and today I want to look at both the biblical case for relics and some attacks on relics that have been made by three Protestant pastors, Isaiah Saldovar, Vlad Savchuk, and Mike Signor, rei. Now, when we’re talking about relics, we typically mean either something that has been touched to the body of a saint or part of that saint’s body. Now we treat these things with reverence and we believe that God can and does work through these things mightily. Now if your objection to this is just, wow, that’s weird and foreign to my background as a Protestant, I totally get it, but relics are very obviously biblical and we’re going to see this both from the positive case as well as the weakness of the cases made against relics by Isaiah, by Vlad and by Mike.
And I think you’ll see there is no good biblical argument against relics and very clear biblical evidence for it. So let’s lay out that positive case first. What is the biblical argument for relics? Well start with kind of what we know about Jesus’s ministry, that Jesus comes to heal not just souls but bodies as well, and that he does this by giving a great dignity to matter, meaning to material things. So to give just a couple examples, first you have the fact that he’s healing bodies in the first place. In Matthew four we’re told that he’s healing every disease and every infirmity among the people. This shows a dignity to the material world because your body is matter. If matter was bad, if the world was bad, then he might come to save your soul from your body, but he wouldn’t come to save your soul and your body.
We know as St. Paul says in one Corinthians 15 that he comes to save our bodies as well, that Christ rising from the dead is really just the first fruit. So we are also meant to rise from the dead. So we’re called to the glorification of the body, not the abandonment of the body. So the body is going to be really important. This is going to be a major point of contention in some of the attacks on relics. And Jesus’s healing of the body often involves these incredibly gritty kind of means. So the example I like to use is in John chapter nine where Jesus spits on the ground and he makes clay out of the spittle and he anoints the blind man’s eyes with the clay and then he sends them to the pool of sil to be healed and this anointing with spit and clay heals him.
Now, could Jesus have done that in a disembodied sort of way, but just saying the word of course he could have, but he’s showing us something by using these kind of material means he’s using the material world to heal both the material body and also to invite us to this kind of spiritual healing. And also he’s healing souls as well as bodies throughout this. But just recognize that the mission of Christ is not just one of disembodied spirituality, it is incarnate. And as a result, as that name suggests, it’s incredibly bodily. So how does this look in terms of subsequent kind of healings? Well, in James chapter five, we’re told if any of us are sick, we should call for the presbyters, the elders and have them pray over us, anointing us with oil in the name of the Lord. So you’ll notice there’s a bodily kind of element to healing even here in James five, that number one, you have the healing of the body again, and number two, you have this connection with oil with the material world.
But this is also where you get things like relics and arguably the first New Testament example of a relic is when a woman comes up and she’s suffering from a hemorrhage and she wants to be healed. And she says to herself, if I only touch his garment, I shall be made well. And so she does, and she is. Jesus turned seeing her. He said, take heart, daughter, your faith has made you. Well. There’s another event where someone touches Jesus and he feels the power go out from him, which is an incredible thing because it isn’t even just like Jesus says, oh, hey, I recognize by this physical gesture. But no, you have this encounter where someone through faith has this encounter with a physical object like the garment of Jesus and divine healing happens. That’s the entire case for relics properly understood right there. But there’s some more pretty clear biblical evidence.
So for instance, in Acts chapter five, the believers start bringing their sick out to the streets so that as St Peter walks by at least his shadow would fall on some of them. We’ll get back to this in a little bit, but it shows very clearly people believe in physical healings, not from Peter having a conversation with them or talking to them about faith, but literally just bodily passing by in his shadow, falling upon them that that is enough to bring this kind of healing. And similarly, in Acts 19 with St. Paul, we’re told that God did extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul, and it’s not just what we might expect Paul preaching and bringing this spiritual transformation, nor is it even just like Paul doing physical miracles. It’s even more than those two things, although certainly we don’t want to deny those two things said, even handkerchiefs and aprons were carried away from his body to the sick, and diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them.
So people were literally going up to Paul touching something against him and taking that to sick people and the sick people were made. Well, again, everything you need for relics is completely right there, but you might say, well, what about when it’s not just something touched to the body of a saint? What about when it’s the saint’s body themselves? Is that really biblical? The answer is yes. You find that all the way back in the Old Testament, Alicia dies and they bury him. Somebody else is thrown onto his grave, and as soon as this dead man’s corpse touches the body of Alicia, the man comes back to life. This is all recounted pretty matter of factly in two kings 13. So you can see both the items that have touched the saints or touched our Lord himself as well as the bodies of the saints are these conduits for incredible divine power.
And that’s why we treat them with great reverence by preserving them as relics. So you might say, okay, given what looks, I think like a pretty straightforward biblical case, what’s the case against relics? And so in this video called the Shocking Truth about holy relics and Catholicism, Isaiah Saldovar kind of takes the lead and makes an argument against relics, but really kind of against any physical thing having a spiritual importance. And I think we’ll see that as he lays out his case against relics and icons and rosaries and anything that kind of involves the body in this spiritual work. It’s a very disembodied, and Andy, I might even call it anti incarnate kind of vision of Christianity, and I think you’ll see that as we go. So he’s going to take the lead and then Vlad’s going to go next, and then Mike Signorelli is going to come up there. There’s a fourth guy here who doesn’t, as far as I recall, say a single word throughout this entire clip, which is like 10 minutes long. So I’m just going to focus on these three guys. If you’re wondering why I’m ignoring the fourth guy, he just like all he does is strokes his beard. It’s great, alright? But Isaiah begins by launching his attack on relics, crucifixes holy water and other things that he calls objects of worship.
Joe:
And for those in the chat that are like, these guys are going to research more and convert to Catholicism, brother, the more I research, the more I realize how much heresy is in Catholicism, the more I look into it, the more I look at the objects of worship, which we’re going to go into. Number four is holy relic. So this is going to get people really mad. The rosary, the crucifix, holy water, statues of saints, the list goes on. In fact, I was looking up today on the Catholic International website, something like that, all of their objects and their holy items they call them, and guys, I went through 40 and I’m exhausted by all the items, the bells, the this, the statue of this, the statue of this person, this, there’s so many statues
CLIP:
And we’re off to a bad start because he’s conflated objects of worship and worship aids. So we’ll explain and object of worship is what you worshiped. God is the object of our worship. It sounds like we’re objectifying, but we mean object in the sense of there’s a subject and there’s an object. I worship God and the subject, the verb is worship. The object of worship is God. There are also aids to worship. So maybe you find reading scripture really helpful while you’re praying that is an aid to worship. It is a mistake to conflate an aid to worship with the object of worship. It would be ridiculous to say, oh, I noticed whenever you go to pray, you take your Bible with you, you must be worshiping your Bible. I would be conflating the aid to your worship with the object of your worship. So here he’s just asserting completely incorrectly that we think relics, crucifixes and holy water are objects of worship.
And that’s ridiculous. No one is worshiping holy water. People believe holy water, crucifixes and relics help them as they’re praying, as they’re engaged in worship. Now you might agree with that, you might disagree with that, but if your whole argument is built on the ridiculous idea that we think we should worship relics or worship holy water, then you’re off to a bad start. And so it’s pretty bad when you say you’ve done a lot of research and then your research is like you checked a website today and you can’t remember the name of it and then you get everything about it wrong. So we’re off to a bad start, but he’s then going to a quote, what he says is bible.org, I think it’s actually got questions.org, but maybe he found it on bible.org, but it’s going to be a Protestant take on Catholicism. He’s not researching from actual Catholic sources. I mean it sounds like he tried to find a Catholic website at one point, but he finds what he thinks is a good argument from what he says is bible.org.
Joe:
I found a really good excerpt on bible bible org and so I’m just going to read it quickly. And so we’re talking about holy items and then the guy that wrote the article really good said, one of the dangers in veneration of relics is the temptation to commit idolatry.
CLIP:
Okay, just notice before we go any further, that already has completely undermined his argument because his argument is it is worship, and yet he’s distinguished even in this quotation between veneration and worship. If the danger is the temptation to commit idolatry, then you’re granting that it’s not itself idolatry. I hope that makes sense. But if you say venerating relics is dangerous because it could lead to idolatry, you are sort of granting that it’s not already idolatry. You might think it’s dangerous, but you’re at least granting that it’s not idolatry. Now, I think we’re going to see that even the argument of it being dangerous isn’t a very strong argument, but we’ll continue.
Joe:
This is exactly what happened in ancient Israel. God told Moses, make a bronze serpent in order to save the Hebrew people from a plague of poisonous snakes. That’s numbers 21. The bronze serpent was kept by the Israelites as a reminder of God’s goodness and salvation. However, by the time the king has a kayah, the relic had become an object of worship. Hezekiah’s reform included breaking the bronze serpent in two that was made up by Moses because the Israelites had been burning incense to it.
CLIP:
So again, I think this argument is pretty self-refuting, right? If the argument is venerating, a relic could lead to idolatry. Therefore it’s bad to have any physical objects in the first place. And your example is the bronze serpent. The obvious counter is God ordered the creation of the bronze serpent. Are you saying God sinned by creating the bronze serpent? Because yeah, it’s true. People later, the bronze serpent, they later made a demon like got out of it, but the bronze serpent itself was a prefigurement of the cross of the crucifix. Jesus says, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the son of man be lifted up that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. And you see right there in Numbers 21 that God orders Moses make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten when he sees it shall live.
So you can’t say just because someone could. And in the case of the Israelites did misuse this physical depiction, this serpent on a pole that therefore the serpent on the pole was itself an evil thing. Unless you’re going to say God commit idolatry and God ordered Moses to create a idol. If that’s your argument that God aired by like he sinned in the Bible, that’s a much worse argument. And so otherwise you have to say, well, clearly the bronze serpent wasn’t inherently evil. Clearly even the bronze serpent was good. It was divinely ordained, it was created at the explicit instruction of God and it created great amount of spiritual good later. It’s true, it was misused, but it was misused not because people were using it as a worship aid to worship the true God. No, it was misused because people treated it as a false God.
They created a whole personality for it and everything else. So here in two Kings 18 that the people had started burning incense to it and had named it, nah, hush 10. Now you won’t find number one people burning incense to the relics or to holy water. You’re not going to find anything like that. You’re not going to find them creating some fictional God like nah, Huan and saying, oh yeah, when we’ve got the relics of the saints, we’re really recognizing this is our real God. Now, huan, that’s not happening at all. The problem is you find these passages in the Old Testament where people are actually committing idolatry and Protestants will say, aha, this is the exact same thing Catholics are doing. And the obvious counter is that people in Israel were openly worshiping a false God. They called naan. And that is not what’s happening in Catholicism.
You might think it somehow amounts to the same thing, but if you can’t recognize there’s a pretty obvious, pretty glaring difference between people saying, we’re worshiping naan rather than God. And someone saying, say the bronze serpent on a pole helps me remember God and pray to him better. One of those is good and one of those is evil. And if you can’t tell the difference between those, that’s a much bigger problem than your case against relics. But so far, this isn’t even really about relics. This is just about physical objects in worship. And so that’s why I say it seems like it’s a much deeper problem that Isaiah and Vlad have than just with relics itself. And I think that becomes very obvious in what you’re about to hear.
Joe:
And then two kings, that’s two kings 18, four physical aids to faith if not commanded by God are unnecessary and lead to idolatry. And the last thing I want to say, there’s absolutely no power in Christian relics. Even if the entire cross of Jesus was discovered intact, there would be no spiritual value to it. Relics do not in any manner whatsoever enable us to get closer to God.
CLIP:
I was genuinely shocked when I heard that because I’ve never heard a Protestant just say the cross is worthless like the cross if you found it tomorrow fully intact. And you knew it was the true cross is of no spiritual value. And that strikes me as just so outrageously unchristian of an attitude to have. I don’t know how you can believe that Christ makes peace by the blood of his cross. As Colossians one says that Christ actually redeems the world with the outpouring of his blood, blood that is soaked into the wood of the cross and believe you are saved by that blood and simultaneously believe that the blood soaked cross is powerless and worthless. It is a shocking and frankly blasphemous assertion. Additionally, the idea that he just says, I mean he’s quoting, got questions here, but it’s shocking that physical aids to faith if not commanded by God are unnecessary and even are going to inevitably lead to idolatry.
That’s an outrageous kind of assertion with literally no support offered for it. So I am just struck by how much that sounds like gnosticism rather than Christianity. Now here I want to turn to the work of Christopher Hall who is a Baptist, I believe a theologian and historian who had a book called Worshiping with the Church Fathers. And he explains briefly what gnosticism is if you’re not familiar. He said it was a constant threat to the ancient church’s understanding of Christ’s person and work gnostic teachers taught for example, that matter could not be saved or redeemed. It was by definition evil. He goes on to say agnostic cosmology. The body indeed matter in all its manifestations can only be a hindrance to a human being’s relationship with the divine matter weighs us down, gnostic teachers proclaimed. That seems to be the argument God questions is making and Isaiah Saldovar is making that No, this can never be a helpful spiritual aid to have any physical object unless it’s directly ordered by God.
Now there’s no thoughtfulness of if all these physical aids are unhelpful, why is God ordering them in the first place? If they’re just going to lead to idolatry, why is God ordering them? Remember, God orders the physical age of the bronze serpent even though he knows it will eventually be misused for idolatry. So it’s not like God ordering it is going to prevent people from potentially misusing it. So if there’s not a real spiritual good coming from having these kind of physical aids, why is giving them when there is a possibility they could be misused for idolatry? I don’t hear even a little bit of thoughtfulness of what is God up to here. If your own worldview would say Matter just weighs us down, it’s only going to get in the way. Now in contrast to that view, which again is gnostic, it is not Christian, I would point you to Cs Lewis’s great explanation in mere Christianity where he explains that the new life is spread not only by purely mental acts like belief, but by bodily acts like baptism and holy communion.
It’s not merely the spreading of an idea, it’s more like evolution of biological or super biological fact. And he warns there’s no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That’s why he uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life in us. We may think that rather crude and unspiritual God does not. He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it. So I would just point to that, that if your spirituality doesn’t make sense of why Christ would, number one, take on flesh, number two, heal bodies. Number three, use material means to heal bodies. Number four, give physical aids to faith things like the bronze serpent. Then it probably is closer to gnosticism than it is to Christianity. And you should watch out for that. And I stress this because it is literally the theology of antichrist.
And I know that sounds like an exaggeration, but if you listen to what scripture actually says about the antichrist, it’s not like left behind the actual biblical case that antichrist is those who undermine and deny the incarnation as two John one seven says, for many deceivers have gone out into the world, men who will not acknowledge the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh, such a one is the deceiver and the antichrist. And again, I’m sure that sounds like strong language, but if you think about it, this idea that spirits are good and bodies are bad, which is very prevalent in much of modern Christianity, particularly in some maybe shallower strands of Protestantism. This is coming not from God because remember, the devil doesn’t have a body and Jesus does. So if you say pure spirits are good and bodies are bad, that is a denial not just of relics, right, to just say spirit, good matter bad spirit, good body bad.
That’s not just a denial of relics and preserving the bodies of the saints. It’s not just a denial of the use of something like icons and your prayer and worship. It’s ultimately a denial of Christmas and of the cross. And it’s an affirmation of the evil one. We’ll get more into this shortly because this is going to be kind of a recurring theme that at the heart of particularly I think Isaiah’s attacks against relics is him not understanding the role of both the body and of creation and the glorification of God. Okay? But I’m going to let him have the next word.
Joe:
Relics should not be prayed to. They should not be worshiped in any way or used to connect with God. Using relics in such a talismanic way is blatant idolatry. That’s Exodus 20 verse three and Isaiah 42, verse eight.
CLIP:
I’m going to get more into this shortly, but just notice right now that he is connected, and again, he’s I think indebted to gut questions argument here. He’s connected as idolatrous, number one, praying to relics, which we don’t do. Number two, worshiping relics, which we absolutely don’t do. And number three, using relics to connect with God, which is perfectly good. He’s declared all three of those things idolatrous without any explanation for why the third one is idolatrous. So again, think about the bronze serpent. If the bronze serpent is being prayed to and worshiped, particularly worshiped, that’s a problem. And in fact, that was explicitly the problem in two kings 18. They were offering incense to it. They’re making sacrificial worship offerings to it, and they had not been using it to connect with God. They had named it in a huan. It was a false God.
It was to draw away from God towards this false God that they could see. Now, in contrast, when God originally calls for the creation of the serpent on a poll that later becomes known as nahin, it was originally to connect them with God, to declare both of those things idolatrous. What God did and what the idolater Israelites did is again blasphemous to declare that I don’t even know how one would defend this claim, that using a physical aid to draw close to God is talson and idolatrous. Think about it. The Bible is a physical aid. Hopefully we can all agree the Bible, the physical book you have in your home is not the eternal God. It is created. It’s created first by the inspirational Holy Spirit. And even if it’s telling eternal truths, the Bible is not itself eternal. I shouldn’t have to explain that, but I’ve had people deny that.
So just want to make sure we’re clear. The Bible is not eternal. It is not the capital w word of God. The eternal word of God is Jesus Christ. The lowercase w word of God is the God-breathed, written record of God’s self revelation. And this happens over time and is preserved. And so if you have a physical Bible in your house that is not God and you don’t worship it, I think we’re probably on the same page about that. But nevertheless, it is helpful for drawing you to God. So it is a physical object, a book that draws you closer to God according to the argument that Isaiah just made. That’s idolatry. And I think that is completely baseless and utterly false, and I don’t see any way one would defend that. In other words, give me an argument that isn’t just special pleading. Well, God said to do this one and not that one, so therefore this one’s okay and somehow explains why these arguments being made against relics, against the bodies of the saints wouldn’t also be arguments against the writings of the same people.
If I can’t venerate the body of Peter and Paul, but I can venerate their teaching, neither one is God, but both are coming from God and God works through both according to scripture, God works through the body of Peter and Paul. He also works through the teaching of Peter and Paul. Why is it that one of them, if I honor and venerate it, it’s good. And the other it’s idolatry. What argument is actually being made there? Because in neither case am I thinking Peter or Paul is God. In neither case am I conflating Peter or Paul with God, either in their teaching or in their body. We recognize that they’re speaking of God, that God is working through them in their teaching. God is working through them in the power of their bodies as explicitly is taught in acts. So what’s the argument here other than just to assert that using physical aids to come to God is somehow idolatry, which is again, absolutely false. Okay? The underlying argument is one that I’ve heard many times before, but Isaiah’s going to argue this is a violation of John four when Jesus talks about worshiping in spirit and truth.
Joe:
We worship the Lord in spirit and in truth, not by idols, not by relics, not by icons, whether genuine or fake.
CLIP:
Okay? This is one of the most abused passages in scripture when Jesus says in John four to the Samaritan woman, that the hour is coming in now is when the true worships will worship the father and spirit and truth for such. The Father seeks to worship him, God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit. And truth, I should say at the outset, I understand why someone who doesn’t have a deep theological knowledge or knowledge of the Bible might think that that is saying agnostic thing, okay? God is disembodied. Therefore true worship is disembodied non-material kind of worship. But if you know the Bible, you should know that’s clearly wrong because spiritual worship doesn’t mean disembodied worship. On the contrary, St. Paul says in Romans 12, I appealed you therefore brethren, by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.
So according to Paul, spiritual worship is bodily worship according to Isaiah, not the prophet Isaiah, but Isaiah Saldovar spirit and truth somehow precludes any physical dimension to worship, which is why he can just cite to spirit and truth as some kind of argument against not only idols but also relics. And he again seems to be just taking for granted that spirit and truth means disembodied worship, whereas biblically spiritual worship is bodily worship. Romans 12, one again. So what’s the underlying issue here? It’s a pretty frequent misunderstanding of the spirit flesh relationship that you’ll sometimes find this juxtaposition between spirit and flesh. And if you’re coming from a worldview that’s been saturated with gnosticism of spirit, good body, bad, it’s easy to hear spirit and flesh as if it’s saying the soul is good and the body is bad, but that’s not what’s being said. S Augustine makes this point by looking at Galatians where St.
Paul talks about the works of the flesh and he points out that the devil is guilty of many of these works of the flesh, things like hatred, variance, emulation, strife, envying, and he said all these evils pride is the origin head and it rules in the devil, though he has no flesh for who shows more hatred to the saints, who is more at variance with them, who more envious, bitter and jealous. So when St. Paul talks about the fruit of the spirit and contrasts it with the works of the flesh, Augustine’s point is this is not about soul verse body because the devil who is a spirit with no flesh is guilty of these works of the flesh. So that should immediately make us say, okay, something else is going on here in scripture. And Augustine points out it’s not by having flesh, which the devil doesn’t, but by living according to himself, in our case, I’d be according to man, that man became like the devil.
So to trust in flesh doesn’t mean to trust in your body. It means to trust in yourself. Like when it says all flesh shall see, the salvation of Lord flesh is often a shorthand way of describing humanity. So to trust in flesh is to trust in yourself rather than to trust in God. So spirit verse flesh is divinity, verse unaided humanity like the Holy Spirit as opposed to you trusting in yourself. It’s not your soul against your body. And this becomes very clear if you have a careful attention to the way this kind of contrast is used in scripture. So for instance, in Ephesians chapter two, St. Paul says, among these, we all once lived in the passions of our flesh. Now you might think that just means bodily, but it doesn’t. He says, following the desires of body and mind. And so we were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.
He’s not saying that all of your sins were sins of the flesh in the sense of sexual sins or drunkenness or glutton or anything like that. No. When he talks about passions of our flesh, he means explicitly both the desires of the body and the desires of the mind. Your spiritual temptation to envy is just as much a sin of the flesh or a passion of the flesh in the sense Paul’s it in Ephesians two, similarly in Romans eight when he talks about the contrast between flesh and spirit, he says, but you are not in the flesh. You are in the spirit if the spirit of God really dwells in you. Now, obviously Paul is not saying you don’t have a body anymore. That would be an absurd reading of Romans eight. Rather, he’s saying, you don’t trust your own humanity unaid it. So what does it mean then to worship God in spirit and truth?
It doesn’t mean that you’re going to worship God in some kind of disembodied way, like you’ve suddenly become an angel and you can worship God without using your body. You can’t do that and God is not asking you to do that, rather worshiping God in spirit and truth simply means you are looking to him for worship rather than coming up with your own form of what worship is supposed to look like. This is why we take the idea of worship having principles very seriously. It’s why we reject the idea of just do whatever feels good to you, kind of worship like we want to worship God the way he wants us to worship him. That’s what it looks like to worship in spirit and in truth, those two go together for a reason that look to scripture, look to what God has revealed, look to the 2000 year history and really 5,000 year history of how divinely ordained worship has looked. And then follow that rather than trusting in your own ability to come up with some new way of giving pleasing worship to God. Okay? So worshiping in spirit and truth is not a good argument against relics because relics are part of what we find in the biblical account of how people are encountering divine power. So what about the argument that this is against the 10 commandments?
Joe:
The Bible says in Exodus chapter 20, you shall make yourself no carved images or no likeness in heaven on an earth or under the water and bow down or serve them. And what’s happened in the Catholic church, you guys can like this or not, as you have made idols of worship over relics, for example, the rosary. How often do Catholics run to the rosary and start rubbing the beads and praying the prayer? And again, you’re not running to Christ alone by faith alone. You’re running to an item, you’re running to an object, you’re putting your faith in holy water, you’re putting your faith in a rosary, you’re putting your faith in a crucifix. You’re putting your faith in objects. And how many times guys do we see in Bible don’t worship idols?
CLIP:
Okay, so let’s look at the underlying biblical basis of the argument that Isaiah is making here in the 10 Commandments. God forbids the creation or bowing down to or serving of what’s called a pestle. And the question becomes, what is that? And the word can be translated two different ways. It can be translated as engraved images or it can be translated as idols or an idol. So is God telling us not to make idols or is he telling us not to make any kind of engraving whatsoever? And I think we can find pretty clear answers to this from looking at the rest of the Bible as to what is and is not meant here. So for instance, Exodus goes on a few chapters later and God commands the creation of cherub out of gold and he calls for them to be hammered out. Additionally, you have engraved figures carved into the temple like you have carved figures of the Cher palm trees and open flowers.
And so if God is literally against the engraving of images as such, then he’s contradicting himself. He is ordering a violation of the 10 Commandments pretty shortly after giving the 10 Commandments and that kind of God who contradicts himself is an absurdity. But there’s another problem that I don’t hear people talk about, which is if the 10 Commandments simply prohibited engraving ironically, that would leave open a whole category of idolatrous imagery that isn’t made by engraving, it’s made by painting or whatever else. There are other ways of making an idol rather than literally engraving. So if you understand pestle, it was prohibited in the 10 commandments to be an engraved image. You’ve bizarrely created a situation where a painting of an idol wasn’t condemned, but like a quarter would be because it’s an engraved image. And that seems pretty obviously to be wrong, that what’s being prohibited here.
And you can tell this both from the context of the 10 Commandments themselves where it’s talking about worshiping other gods, but also from the other ways that this word is used throughout the Bible, it’s clearly referring to idols. So it is wrong to have idols and Catholics and Protestants agree on this 100%. You can’t just say because we’re both against idols. Therefore your engraved thing is an idol because then you’ve gone back to confusing engraved things and idols, and that’s a pretty basic mistake. If you don’t think it’s wrong to have a coin because an coin uses an engraved image and you can recognize that that doesn’t automatically make it an idol, then you should be able to recognize that when it’s not George Washington but St. George, there’s a pretty clear pattern throughout the scripture of this by the way. So there’s 24 times where the word pestle is used and it always and only means idol.
It never is used for other engraved images like the engraved images on the temple or the Cher. There’s plenty of other non idolatrous engraved images and this word is never used for it so clearly, even though the word could be read either way, contextually, a good reading of the Bible will say God is meaning it the same way He means it every other time where he talks about how much he hates idols. So don’t have idols. It doesn’t matter whether you engrave them or paint them or build them out of wood, don’t make idols. And conversely, images are not automatically condemned unless you’re worshiping them and then turning them into an idol. So we will agree, don’t do that, but that’s not something we’re you might think it is. That’s based on a lot of ignorance. Case in point, Isaiah here has completely conflated idols and relics and rosaries.
But think about it, a relic isn’t a carved image at all. It’s like a body part of a saint or something that touched the body of a saint. So even if you think pestle just literally prohibits the carving of images, well, good news relics aren’t carved images, neither are rosaries, they’re neither relics nor images. I mean, granted, you’ve got like a cross sometimes at the end of one of them, but the beads aren’t like a depiction of something. We’re not thinking like, oh, Jesus’ face looked like a bead. No, he’s not like a Lego man. So it is a completely incoherent kind of conflation of rosaries relics, images and idols and it doesn’t make a lot of sense. If you’re coming from an evangelical world, maybe you can kind of take for granted Catholic’s bad and connect the dots in a certain kind of way. But if you stop and think about it and say, what does the Bible actually say? Isaiah has no case here. So what about Vlad? Because Vlad pipes in next, and interestingly he is very polite about it, but he kind of pushes back by pointing out that scripture doesn’t say anything like what Isaiah has said. Now, VLA is still going to argue against relics, but he’s at least going to try to ground his case more in scripture than Isaiah does.
I think you explained it really well. I do want to highlight that we are do see in the scripture also handkerchiefs being used from Paul to heal the sick. Peter’s shadow was used to heal in the theory. God can use objects like anointing oil, the bones of Elijah. The problem happens is when these things become formulas and the problem that happens is when these things become means to help us worship God, to help us get closer to God.
Now, he says he agrees with Isaiah, but you’ll notice he takes a completely different kind of approach. He points out that scripture repeatedly points to things that look like relics being used by God in a good way. His argument is that the problem is that when these things become means to help us worship God, to help us get closer to God, but that’s exactly why they’re given to us, right? Why would God have used things like Peter’s shadow or handkerchiefs touch to the body of Paul or the bones of Alicia, if not to call us closer to him and to help us to worship him better? So Vlad has this argument that we don’t want them to become a formula or a means, but I don’t have any idea where he’s coming to that conclusion biblically because it seems very clear that the reason God is acting is to show his power and to draw us closer to him.
Like the whole reason God is working through Peter and Paul, et cetera, is that we will want to come closer to him through that. The reason Jesus heals people’s bodies isn’t just to show the dignity of the body, but also to help them to come closer to God. And you see that very clearly with the healing of the paralytic, for instance, where Jesus heals his sins and then to show that he has the power to forgive sins, he tells him to rise and walk. So the idea that this bodily stuff is fine unless it brings us closer to God or we use it as an aid to draw closer to God is a very strange kind of argument. And the only way Vlad even tries to defend it is by citing to two passages that have nothing to say about the subject at all. Exodus 20, which we already saw, and Isaiah 42,
Exodus chapter 20 and Isaiah 42, it warns us against making and venerating images as a means to help us draw near to God.
But flag’s claim that Exodus 20 and Isaiah 42 warn us against venerating images as a means of drawing close to God is very obviously false. Exodus 20, as we saw, talks about not creating idols and worshiping false gods. People were not creating false gods as a means to draw closer to the real God. They were creating false gods as an alternative to the real God. Similarly, Isaiah 42, the lining question is verse eight where God says, I’m the Lord that is my name, my glory I give to no other nor my praise to grave and images. So in that context, and again the word there is the word for idolatry or for idol. The issue here wasn’t people were using some physical thing to draw close to God. God gave physical things to help them draw close to him, the image of the cherubim, the images on the temple, et cetera.
The issue here is that they were not trying to draw close to him. They were drawing away from him and giving divine glory to somebody else. He says that explicitly in Isaiah 42 verse eight, it just isn Vlad’s case is just built on claiming scripture says things that literally doesn’t say in the two places that he cites. But let’s go back to Isaiah because Isaiah Saldovar is going to say that he’s not trying to disagree, which is a great indication that he is in fact disagreeing and he’s going to give some pushback on the scriptures.
Joe:
If I could just add one thing, and I’m not trying to push back at all of Vlad saying or play the devil’s advocate, but I love what you said about the handkerchiefs because even in Acts 19, the Bible says God gave Paul the power to perform unusual miracles. Even his handkerchief would heal the sick and demons would be cast out again. It doesn’t prescribe us to go out and buy handkerchiefs, which I think that could happen. God can do anything, but it’s not a prescription to handkerchiefs are now an idol that we use.
CLIP:
So against Isaiah 19 being used to support relics, Isaiah’s argument is that God gave Paul the power to perform unusual miracles. And that’s just not true. That’s just not what it says. It says that God did extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul. That might seem like a subtle difference, but remember when the woman touches the hymn of Jesus’ garment, or in this case when the handkerchiefs or aprons are carried away from Paul’s body, the sick Paul is not personally there. God’s power is working through physical objects connected first to Jesus and then to the saints in a way where the individual agency of an intermediary like Peter or Paul isn’t necessary for the Holy Spirit’s action. That should be very clear. Paul is not present when these handkerchiefs are carried away from his body to the stick explicitly. He is not bodily present and still diseases are leaving them and the evil spirits are coming out of them.
So it is not true. Exodus 19 just literally does not say God gave Paul the power to perform unusual miracles. God is the one working these miracles through them. So if that’s idolatry, then you would expect the Bible to condemn it rather than praising it as a demonstration or divine power. So I don’t think you can look to Acts 19 as anything other than an endorsement of relics. You can say, oh, well, they’re extraordinary miracles, so therefore they don’t happen anymore. I guess might be his argument, and I think we’re going to see him make that argument a little more later on. But extraordinary miracles here is not saying this happened very rarely. This is clearly happening habitually enough that people are bringing them to the sick and they’re working so much for Acts 19. Then what about Peter’s shadow in Acts chapter five
Joe:
And then for example, the shadow healing people. Actually, the Bible never says his shadow healed anybody. It says they thought and they were putting people in his shadow so they could be healed, but it doesn’t actually say the shadow was healing anybody.
CLIP:
So this is a pretty strange case. His argument is, well, the Bible never says that it actually did help anybody, but of course it does. Acts five verse 14 to 16 and more than ever, believers were added to the Lord multitudes, both the men and women, so that they even carried out the sick into the streets and laid them on beds and pallets that as Peter came by, at least his shadow might fall on. Some of them, it doesn’t just say they thought it might help. He’s completely adding that scripture. Instead, it says, the people also gathered from the towns around Jerusalem bringing the sick and those afflicted with unclean spirits and they were all healed. So he’s got two arguments he’s making. Number one, this didn’t work very often. These were unusual miracles, and number two, we don’t know that it actually worked at all.
People just thought it was going to work, but scripture says they were all healed. So I mean the extent to which he’s trying to find an argument against relics, even when scripture clearly is supporting the argument against relics is fascinating. I don’t see any reason to do this to scripture. Just accept what it’s saying, follow spirit and truth. Don’t make your own manmade opposition to the idea that God might work through a physical object, be an obstacle to just accepting what scripture teaches that God chooses to work through all kinds of material means that’s what it actually looks like to worship him in spirit and truth. But Isaiah’s worried that somehow this is going to lead people accidentally into idolatry.
Joe:
But I think we’ve taken things to the extreme even with handkerchiefs, and I’ve seen God do miraculous things through handkerchiefs. But I think if we take those and now when we go to our churches, imagine we have handkerchiefs everywhere and now we have handkerchiefs on a little hanger and we’re all now these become idols of worship, where now I’m looking to a handkerchief to heal me. I see it one time an unusual miracle, and guys, unusual means not normal. So as a not normal occurrence, now I look at that and I begin to accidentally worship that. That’s where I believe the Catholic church has gotten into idolatry, where they’ve taken objects that represent the cross, which is not wrong to represent the cross or the rosary, and they start looking to those for life and for this and that,
CLIP:
Again, Isaiah’s whole argument is like this was kind of a one-time event or at least not a normal event. And Acts just does not say that at all. It depicts this as a pretty regular thing. The diseases are leaving the people and the evil spirits are coming out of them. As we saw with Peter’s shadow. All of them are getting healed. But moreover, the Catholic church isn’t full of handkerchiefs on hangers. So if your worry is that we’re going to fill our churches with handkerchiefs on hangers and we’re going to accidentally start worshiping them, these are anxieties that are not rooted in scripture. No one in acts is worried about this. And so if your understanding of how idolatry works is that you can accidentally slip into it without even knowing because you’re trusting God’s power through some intermediary, that’s just not how idolatry actually works.
And I would point to the fact that there’s plenty of biblical passages that talk about idolatry in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, and it’s things like trusting in someone or something other than God, like trusting in money. Covetousness is idolatry according to the New Testament, but trusting that God can work through an intermediary is different. And I understand that people get that confused, but the fact that you can save someone else by preaching the gospel to them doesn’t make you an idol just because you bring the saving gospel to someone. Likewise, the fact that divine power can come through the Bible or through a relic or through anything God wants it to come through doesn’t make those things like dangerous almost idols, and it’s completely unbiblical to worry about that in that way. It is just you don’t find people in the New Testament worrying about that.
And so I would point to that as an indication that this is not a good objection. The fact that he’s inventing this imaginary church where people have hangers with handkerchiefs as the, this is what could happen if Acts five and Acts 19 happened. Because remember the thing he’s worried about happening did happen, and it’s from God. Peter’s shadow actually did heal people. Handkerchiefs pressed to the body of Paul actually did heal people, and those were never depicted in the Bible as acts of idolatry or even dangerous things we need to be worried about. But I want to look to the last thing he said. He says in passing that it’s okay to depict the cross. And I’m confused about that to be honest from his own. I mean, certainly I think it’s good to depict the cross, but if your argument is Eng grave images are evil, what about an engraved image of the cross?
Don’t even have a cross with Christ on it. That’s fine. You still have a carving of an image, an image of the physical object, the cross upon which Jesus hung. Is that an idol or not? If engraved images are bad, then okay, you shouldn’t have a cross if it’s okay to carve across but not okay to carve across with Jesus on it. Where are you getting this from? Because it’s certainly not coming from Exodus 20. It just seems like a whole series of man-made anxieties that are being applied to scripture rather than drawn from scripture. But there’s one last argument, and it’s something that he’s kind of alluded to before, this idea that even those scripture clearly depicts relics, they don’t happen enough for us to have to deal with them.
Joe:
And again, I’m not trying to contradict anything Vlad saying, I just think we have to look at things that are not normative and go that happened in scripture, but we don’t see anywhere else where bones are getting thrown on somebody and then coming back to life, even though God can do that and God can use any object, God can use a camera. God can use a remote to a tv. He’s sovereign, but we don’t worship those things that God uses. I think I personally believe the Catholic church has done with the rosary and the crucifix and other things.
CLIP:
Look, we don’t worship the things that God uses. We understand the difference between an intermediary cause and the difference between a prayer aid and an object of worship. You can’t just say, I personally think that the Catholic church has committed idolatry and give no evidence of that other than your inability to distinguish between those things. But additionally, the heart of this idea that this isn’t normative in scripture, that even though there are multiple references to relics, we’ve got the bones of Alicia, we’ve got, I mean the woman touching the hymn of the garment of Jesus seemed like an obvious case. You have any number of incidents where Jesus touches someone or something and healing happens through that. That seems like relics right there. I don’t know why it wouldn’t fall in the same category. You’ve got Peter shadow, you’ve got the handkerchiefs touched to Paul.
You got all those things, but all of that isn’t enough. It’s not normative enough. And this points to a frustration I have with this idea of the regulative principle of worship, which is related to this, that we can only do the things in worship that we clearly see laid out in the Bible. Everything is forbidden unless it’s explicitly authorized or permitted. Number one, that rule is itself not found in scripture. So would by its own term seemingly be forbidden. But number two, how often does something have to be depicted? Because I just mentioned there’s a bunch of references to relics, but apparently they’re not enough for it to be something that is brought into the way that we pray. In contrast, there’s one time in scripture where we see anyone praying directly to Jesus, and that’s the stoning of St. Stephen. So is that enough times and what are the rules to this?
All feels pretty ad hoc. So is that normative the one time Stephen prays to Jesus, or do we have to see a bunch of times because apparently we need a bunch of times for the bones. We need a bunch of times for the shadow. We need a bunch of times for the handkerchiefs. We need a bunch of times for things touched to Jesus or the saints. How many times? I don’t know, but that’s kind of where his argument ends up. Okay, so that’s Isaiah’s argument. What about Vlad Vlad’s argument? I almost felt like he was trolling, and I don’t think he was, but listen to this argument and see if you notice a certain irony in it,
Or like the rod of Moses, it became actually the rod of God from the point that Moses dropped it. The Bible refers to it as the rod of God, but we don’t see that rod being passed on to Joshua. We don’t see that rod ever be used again in Israel. We don’t see that as a pattern for Elijah. For Elijah. So yeah,
Moses has a rod and we don’t see it passed on. We don’t actually know what happens to it after the time of Moses. And so Vlads seems to be saying this is an argument against relics. So if we were to form that as kind of a logical thought out argument, it would be something like if relics were real, then you’d expect the rod of Moses to be preserved. I don’t know that that really proves much. The fact that one individual rod isn’t preserved. It’s kind of a weak argument from silence. But the thing that made me wonder if he was messing with us at first was that the rod of Aaron is preserved in exactly the way he’s describing. Like Hebrews nine mentions that the rod of Aaron was contained in the Ark of the Covenant. So if the argument is if these things really were these powerful spiritual conduits of grace like a relic, we’d see them preserved passed on.
We literally do that not with Moses’s rod, but with his brother Aaron’s rod. So is there an important difference that I’m missing for, well, it doesn’t count as a relic if it’s coming from Aaron, it has to be from Moses. There’s literally a miraculous rod that God worked this mighty power through preserved in the Ark of the Covenant. This is the standard that Vlad is laying out for what we’d seemingly have to see for relics. And the good news is we do in fact see it. Vlad then goes on to kind of have a shotgun approach where he sort of says, he repeats his point about don’t let it become a formula, and then he just makes some arguments that, oh, this is all really about money. And then he just kind of claims people don’t have a relationship with the Holy Spirit.
We don’t see this as a pattern. So just because like Isaiah said, God’s anointing rest on a person and in that moment, the Lord can use that person as they pray with anointing oil. Or in that case with Paul, they took the garments or the woman touched the hem of Jesus’s garment. But we don’t see that as a formula because the power rests on the person and the person that distributes this power is the Holy Spirit. So we look to the Holy Spirit and just because he can use in certain cases those things, but then to market it and then to monetize it, because that’s really what it’s all about. It’s really about money. At the end of the day. It has very little to do with miracles. It has a lot to do with money. And then some people really don’t develop relationship with the Holy Spirit, so they depend on these physical things.
I don’t think any of these arguments are particularly strong. I don’t think he thinks they’re strong enough to really sit with them and develop them. He just sort of throws them all out. But let’s consider some people know the Bible really well, and they might even think that this makes them good Christians when they should be trusting in God instead. Does that mean then we shouldn’t read the Bible? Of course, not. The fact that somebody might abuse this gift from God. A physical thing like a Bible or a physical thing like a relic is not an argument against it. If God wants to work through it, he can and will. The fact that we might thwart his work by allowing it to go to our heads when he does a good thing us or misusing a gift that he gives us is not an argument against a gift. Even all the talents God has given you all the gifts, spiritual, physical, whatever kind of gifts. Think about all the ways you may have misused those and not put them in the service of God. Those are not good arguments against that. So sure, maybe there are people who get greedy about relics. I don’t really know how this is all about the money. People don’t pay to see relics. You’re not even allowed to sell relics. It’s literally a condemned, you can be excommunicated. It’s a condemned crime.
I don’t really get how this is all about the money, but he’s just kind of claiming, oh yeah, this is just a get rich quick scheme or something. Similarly, he says, some people don’t develop a relationship with the Holy Spirit. That’s surely true of some Catholics, some Protestants, et cetera. Not a strong argument against the Bible or against relics. The Holy Spirit worked through physical things in scripture, including the bodies of the saints, including things touched to the bodies of the saints. Pitting those physical objects against the Holy Spirit is unbiblical, and as I’ve said, it’s gnostic. So, okay, that was Vlad’s argument. I want to turn down to Mike Signorelli. He’s the third guy in this conversation. He hasn’t really spoken up until now, and the first thing he says is actually kind of a telling, just sort of admission of where this conversation has gone.
I want to take another angle real quick that I think will help because the chat right now, a lot of people are upset about this, but they don’t understand the rosary. They don’t understand this.
So one of the fascinating things about this is that Mike, Isaiah and Vlad don’t seem to agree. What the problem with relics is, if you listen to each of their cases, they all go in wildly different directions. Isaiah seems to think it’s wrong to have relics at all, that they’re inherently prone to idolatry. Vlad seems to be arguing that you don’t want to let it become formulaic or use it for money somehow. And then as Mike has kind of indicated he’s going to go in a different direction yet, and I would just comment at the outset here, when you are presenting all of these disparate unconnected critiques of a belief system that isn’t your own, and the people who actually have that belief system are telling you in the chat live, Hey, you’re not actually getting this right, you’re misunderstanding our belief system. You don’t understand what you’re critiquing.
You should have the humility to listen to that. Now, I know it’s not always right. I’ve had plenty of people accuse me of straw manning when oftentimes it’s just like I’ve argued against a different version of Protestantism than the one they happen to have. I know people overuse things like strawman as an excuse to avoid even legitimate critiques, but I also know if everybody’s responding by telling you that you’re missing the mark, there is a good chance you’re missing the mark. And we should have the humility to recognize that. So in this case, I think they’ve completely misunderstood the biblical case. I mean, Vlad kind of engages with it. Isaiah makes some incorrect, like just objectively false claims about the scriptural support. But there’s a good indication here, people aren’t worshiping the rosary. And so if your argument against relics is that you’ve conflated relics in the rosary and said people worship the rosary, that’s not a good argument. In any case, Mike’s going to offer a different argument completely.
Some of the relics were like martyrs remains. Some of the relics were items from their life. And the real issue that I have with it is it’s this idea that Peter was more holy than you could ever become.
Joe:
It’s
CLIP:
The idea. And that to me is where the false gospel comes in because where it’s like they’re a saint, but we’re not a saint. They’re holy, but they’re holier than us, but we’re not as holy.
Here’s the thing, it’s true. You are called to be a saint, but it’s also true. Peter is holier than you, and it’s not humility to deny that it’s actually true. And one of the indications of that is people were laying the sick out so that Peter’s shadow would pass by and they were healed. That wasn’t just happening with every Christian. It wasn’t like every time a Christian walked by a sick person, they immediately were healed. Peter had a spiritual power that not everybody else did. And so yes, it is true. We’re all called to be saints. No, it is not true. We’re all equally holy. No, it’s not true. We all have been given the same spiritual powers, and so that’s just completely objectively wrong. Acts 19, God did extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul. Paul is being singled out there in scripture as someone God is working through in a special way that it is not the same as the hands of everybody else.
You can’t acknowledge that God is doing something special in Peter or Paul because that would suggest they’ve got a power you don’t have. They do have powers you don’t have. They do have spiritual authority. You don’t have, they are holier than you. Matthew 25, the parable, the talents, this is a helpful analog. All of us are called to be saints. All of us are given the tools to be saints. But in Matthew 25, Jesus compares it to a master going away on a journey and he gives one servant five talents to another two to another one. Two things to note there. Number one, a talent’s an enormous sum of money. Nobody is being ripped off no matter whether you’ve got one talent or five, you have an enormous spiritual gift from God. So to that extent, I actually agree with Mike, don’t use the fact that saints are holier than you or have gifts that you don’t have as an excuse to bury your talent. Agreed. But also Mike is wrong by saying we all have five talents. We don’t. God actually has given more graces to some people than others. He’s given more spiritual gifts to some people than others. This is explicitly scripture. And so this American idea that all men are created equal is just not true of divine grace and is patently unbiblical. So how does Mike try to support this?
And that is very problematic and the relics are connected to that because the reason why the item that person would have so much value within Catholicism would be because you believed that that person achieved a level you could never achieve.
Wow.
So which is really anti-biblical. So just Romans chapter one, verse seven, to all in Rome who are loved by God and called to be his holy people plural, right? One Corinthians chapter one, verse two, to the church of God and Corinth to those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be his holy people. And so over and over and over again, we are called to be saints.
The obvious thing to point out here is it doesn’t say anything like what Mike is trying to use it to say. Once again, they’re quoting scripture but not representing it. Well, it’s true. Romans one, seven is written to all God’s beloved in Rome who are called to be saints. And similarly, one Corinthians one, run to the church in Corinth to those sanctified in Christ Jesus. Neither of those passages or any other passages say everyone is equally sanctified. Everyone is equally as saint, everyone is equally holy. Everyone has equal spiritual gifts. None of those passages are found in Romans one, in one Corinthians one or anywhere else in the Bible because those are false doctrines. This false premise leads Mike to the false conclusion that we are all called not just to be as holy as Peter, but actually to be as powerful as the apostles as well.
Same thing like the miracles that they operated in the New Testament. We believe that those signs will follow those who believe and that people are still praying for the sick and seeing them recover. They’re still casting demons out and they’re still carrying on the work of ministry. And so we’re not going to make a relic of a little piece of Apostle Pagan’s beard because we believe that the power is actually the Holy Spirit at work in and through him. And I think that’s a very, very important statement that needs to be made. So even the concept of relics actually deletes your own personal responsibility to do the will of God and then his power to wash you with the blood of Jesus and then make you just as holy as Peter, just as holy as Paul and just as powerful.
This is a little bit like saying, Hey, look, we’re all drafted to be in the army, therefore we should all be generals in the army. We all have the ability to be the general just as much as the general does, and that’s just not true, and it’s completely again without biblical foundation. So Brex, as we’ve seen, are clearly biblical and they were not an excuse and are not an excuse for any of us not to be the saints God has called us to be. On the other hand, Mike’s doctrine that we can all be as powerful as the apostles and have the same spiritual gifts as them is pretty clearly false. In one Corinthians 12, St. Paul points out that we don’t all have the same spiritual gifts. He says, we’re all the body of Christ and individually members of it. So that’s an important first point.
This is where I agree with Mike. You’re called to be a saint, but he then says, God is appointed in the church. Notice God not. You can’t just decide you’re going to be an apostle or a prophet or a teacher, a worker of miracles or a helper or healer, et cetera. Those are not your things. God has appointed those in the church, and Paul even says, are all apostles, are all prophets, are all teachers? And the answer is no. And if you think the answer is yes, that’s a problem. The fact is you weren’t called to be a powerful apostle healing people just because they touched your body or your shadow Peter and Paul were. And so we want to respect and honor the unique gifts and talents that they were given because these are ways that God worked through them, and that is not something that should threaten you, nor is that an excuse for you not to be the saint God has called you to be on the contrary, think about Hebrews 11.
Hebrews 11 goes through names, individual names of people who live by faith and presents them as a great cloud of witnesses that have surrounded us and ruining us on the journey. We look to the saints not as an excuse not to become saints, but as recognizing as the Bible does that they’re the cloud of witnesses that are cheering us on our own journey. And it’s why people like St. Paul can say, be imitators of me as I am of Christ. He’s that he follows Christ in a way that most other Christians don’t and that we can grow in our spiritual life by copying him. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to have the exact same gifts as Him again, God, to extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul, and that’s beautiful. This is why we want to honor the legacy of Paul and any relics of St. Paul we might happen to have. For that reason, I would say pretty clearly relics are biblical, and the case against relics is a weak one. I think we’ve seen that from three different angles here. I hope that’s helpful for any of you who may be struggling with relics, if there’s some objection to relics I didn’t cover in this, by all means please let me know below. If I’ve missed the mark on any of this, I’d be happy to hear your feedback. For Shameless Popery, Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.