Audio only:
Joe has a chat with Brayden from The Catechumen and Adrian from Sips with Serra whether Protestants partake in worship. If Protestants separate themselves from the Eucharistic sacrifice, how can they partake in worship?
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I’m here at the Catholic Creators Conference with Adrian from Sips with Serra and Brayden from the Catechumen. And I wanted to pose a question. So my most viewed video as of the time of recording is a video I did called Do Protestants Worship or Do Protestants Worship God. And the video has gotten a lot of pushback, both positive and negative feedback. And so I wanted to talk to two guys who are Protestant converts to Catholicism and kind of nuance the argument and say, what can we make of it and what are some ways to present it charitably and accurately. So first of all, gentlemen, thank you so much for joining. And why don’t we go one at a time and maybe tell us just a brief bit about yourself, your conversion of Catholicism, and then also introduce your channel as well.
Adrian:
Yeah. Hi, I’m Adrian from Sips with Serra. I converted, oh man. Let’s see. I was an evangelical Christian. I reverted to Protestantism in 2018. Stayed there for a couple of years and then realized, oh, the early church doesn’t really believe what we believe about the Eucharist, about baptism and things like that. So looking into early church history made me want to find a church that was more in line with that early church. So that eventually led to me becoming a Lutheran and then eventually a Catholic. And that’s a whole other crazy story we can get into. But yeah.
Brayden:
Hey, I’m Brayden from The Catechumen. Similar story. I feel like a lot of people these days are converting from evangelical kind of non-denominational Baptist dreams, and that’s how I grew up. I was Baptist non-denominational, and it really was encountering the church fathers recognizing, Hey, there’s no Baptists in these writings that I’m looking at. They believed in regenerative baptism and all these things as Adrian mentioned. And I just remember it was that struggle. Can’t we just be Anglican or Lutheran? They kind of look like Catholics, so we don’t have to go all the way. But it eventually led us to even just start looking into Catholic arguments that we hadn’t really considered before because we were taught to think Catholics were just kind of out of their minds and know what they were talking about. Didn’t read the Bible, so definitely turned out to be wrong.
Joe:
Did you make a stopover in high church Protestantism on your journey into the church?
Brayden:
No, we didn’t. We didn’t. And I was actually working as an interim youth pastor at a Baptist church whenever we started inquiring and got married, moved colleges, a whole bunch of changes, and we were just like, you know what? We need to figure this out, go the entire way. And thankfully it didn’t take us too long because I tend to hyper fixate on that sort of stuff. So the only thing I consumed every single day was just that sort of debates, all the things that are freely available online. So that’s part of the reason why I started the YouTube channel is because I feel like we all recognize the importance of having freely available content online to research these kinds of things.
Joe:
So maybe a good opening question on this would just be, did either of you encounter this kind of worship problem objection on your own journeys, or is it something you heard more about once you’d already become Catholic?
Adrian:
For me, it’s something that I didn’t really consider when I was a Protestant. I didn’t really think about what it meant to worship. I thought if I’m singing songs to God, if I’m saying nice things to God, then that is what worship is. But I hadn’t encountered that objection at that time.
Brayden:
So I remember at our non-denominational church, our worship pastor, we had the worship pastor, the lead pastor, all these things made it very clear, it’s not okay, here’s the songs. That’s when we worship. And then there’s the sermon, and then there’s the other things, the worship’s part of the song that was kind of like the ideas like you worship when you sing and then you listen to the lecture. The theology, at least within our perspective was like, okay, you worship God when you sing worship, praise and worship. You worship God when you listen to the sermon, when you read scripture, all these things. And I do remember whenever I was looking into the Catholic faith, there was this worship problem, hold up worship as we, and I know we’re probably going to get into this, but looking throughout scripture whenever there is some sort of act of worship that seemed to involve a sacrifice at least at the pinnacle of it. And so that was something that I started listening to and hearing of, but it didn’t become a super big problem for me like baptism, like the real presence, which I feel like it should have because the real presence of Christ and the Eucharist definitely goes with the sacrifice of the mass. So yeah.
Joe:
Yeah, I think you’ve teed that up very nicely with the sacrificial connection. There’s a great quote I’ve got here. Everett Ferguson, church of Christ Scholar says, sacrifice was the universal language of worship in the ancient world. And I think this is the key to cracking a bit of a mystery in the Bible recently on Catholic answers Live, someone called in and raised something related to worship from a Protestant perspective. I am going off of memory here, so I may not get the conversation exactly right, but I asked him, where do we see worship in the New Testament? He said, what place? And he said, the synagogue. And that’s just wrong. I mean, objectively the synagogue is good, but the synagogue is a place of teaching, like you said, listening to a lecture or a sermon. It’s a place of doing bible study. But the only time we hear even prayer in the synagogue mentioned together, or in Matthew six when Jesus says, don’t pray in the synagogue like the hypocrites do, who to pray in the synagogue and marketplaces.
So even there, Jesus isn’t saying synagogue bad, it’s just taken for granted. The synagogue’s not a place of prayer any more than a marketplace is a place of prayer. If you’re trying to do a public prayer there, it’s because you’re trying to be seen by other people. So we want to separate the synagogue from the places of prayer, which are the upper room, the lonely places. Jesus goes off to you pray always. So the place of prayer is sort of everywhere. But then there’s this special thing called worship that as we see from Jesus’s conversation with the Samaritan woman, happens in the temple in Jerusalem. This is John four 20 and 21. And so it’s like, okay, so what is worship and how is it different than prayer? And I think you’ve already started to tee up an answer to that.
Adrian:
Yeah, yeah. No, I don’t have anything to add.
Brayden:
That’s great. No, yeah. And seeing the distinction there, it’s hard to imagine at least coming from a Protestant background, that there would be at least a hard line distinction between the prayer that we would offer to God, and especially if it’s adoration or singing psalms that praise him and things like that. And you think back to, let’s say the liturgical life of a Jew who’s not living in Jerusalem, going to synagogue, they would sing the Psalms, they would do these things. They would even do those things during the Seder meal in their own homes. And it’s hard to imagine, at least coming from the Protestant perspective, and I see why so many people are like, you guys don’t think Protestants worship God because we don’t offer such and such a sacrifice win when looking at those passages saying, look, we praise him. And St. Paul says it’s a sacrifice of praise, right? Singing Psalm, spiritual hymns, things like that. So would, like I said earlier, that would be the pinnacle of what a lot of low church evangelicals would think of when they think of Let’s go worship. Oh, we’re going to go sing a song in church with the congregation.
Joe:
Yeah. I think that’s very well said, and I don’t want to knock that right. I think this is probably one of the first places we want to nuance this
Of saying we don’t want say there’s literally no act of worship because Romans 12, one where St. Paul says to make sacrifices in your body, this is your spiritual worship. I mean, the first thing to notice there when Jesus talks about worshiping and spirit and truth in John four, some people hear that as disembodied, we don’t do anything with our bodies. We don’t need the Eucharist, we don’t need an altar, we don’t need a church. It’s all disembodied to the spirit and truth. Whereas for Paul, spiritual worship is explicitly embodied in Romans 12, but the idea that you can actually worship in the temple of your body in different ways, all the ways you mentioned sacrifices of praise, even the sacrifice of just being inconvenienced for the sake of another if done for the glory of God. So we want to affirm worship in that sense and still say, there’s this thing that seems really central to the Jewish concept of worship that’s very sacrificial. And if we don’t have something like that, we are missing something near the heart of worship. Right.
Adrian:
Yeah,
Brayden:
That makes sense.
Adrian:
Yeah. I mean, as a Protestant, I always felt like there was something more that something was missing in our Sunday services. I felt like, okay, we’re kind of singing songs, we’re hearing maybe even a very good speech, but I feel like there should be something more to this. And so I think that is what I found in the Eucharist, and it just happens that that’s what God had in mind.
Joe:
Yeah, beautiful. I mean, it does strike me as someone who was never a Protestant, that the boundaries between church and not church are a lot fuzzier within Protestantism. If you’re meeting, I’ve seen evangelical churches and strip malls, and if you’re coming together and you’re singing songs together and you’re praying together, you could do that in your car. So what is it that makes this different? And one thing could be the gathering the community, but again, if you’ve got other people in your car,
Brayden:
No, we wouldn’t say that there is a distinction. It’s like you can worship in your car, you can worship with other people, you can worship in your house, you can worship alone if you’re singing the same song, what’s the distinction other than there’s more people gathered around you? And I definitely think that in those circles it’s like, yeah, that is still worship. It’s the same kind of worship, same value of worship as it would be in a
Joe:
Service. It is just striking, comparing that you mentioned the early church earlier, comparing how they spoke about worship, theirs looks much more like the Jewish concept of worship going back to the diday in the first century or Justin martyr or senior anus in the second century. And they regularly will cite to Malachi one where Malachi one God is rebuking the Jewish priest and saying he’s not pleased with the sacrifices they’re offering at the altar, which he calls the table of the Lord, which is important later how St. Paul describes the Eucharist and that that’s going to be something that he sets aside in favor of gathering the Gentiles together. And then says, from the rising of the sun to its setting, a pure sacrifice will be offered to my name. That doesn’t look like they’re just singing songs that looks like there’s some kind of visible objective kind of sacrifice being offered. And St. Paul seems to connect that in one Corinthians 10, he compares the table of the Lord eucharistically to the table of the Lord and the temple and then the table of demons. So one Corinthians 10 has a great passage there, but then the Diday, Justin Martyr and RNA make this connection explicitly. So yeah, it makes sense when you read it kind of through that lens, but it’s fascinating if that’s not the background you’re coming from,
It just seems like there’s something missing there.
Adrian:
And I wonder if this is probably a tangent, but I wonder if this gets into also how we think of soteriology and penal substitution and things like that. Tell me, because people, man, I watch some Protestants who I love, they’re great and I watch their YouTube channels, but they described that God had to pour out his wrath on Christ on the cross because that was the only way that he could be just and merciful perfectly. And we don’t have to get into the differences that we have with penal substitution and all that, but I wonder if this has something to do with that. Because if worship is us singing songs to God or something, then in what sense are we receiving forgiveness of sins? Whereas in Jewish tradition, they would sacrifice for forgiveness of sins and if we don’t have a sacrifice for forgiveness of sins, and that’s just something that happened in the past and that doesn’t really happen now, the sacrifice happened on the cross and we don’t really have anything to do with that now. I feel like that disconnect kind of contributes to that theology.
Joe:
I have an immediate reaction to that. I don’t know if you wanted to jump in first. Okay.
The thing that I think a lot of people miss is understanding what sacrifice is. Something that it was helpful for me to realize was, oh, in the New Testament, they don’t explain how sacrifice works because everyone reading the New Testament in its original context came from either a Jewish or pagan background that had a very similar conception of sacrifice. So we hear sacrifice and we think of just the killing of an animal or the death of Christ, but that’s not it. That’s not accurate. You kill the Passover lamb on preparation day on the 14th day of the month of Nassan, but that’s not enough. Maybe it sounds bad. It’s not like there’s anything wrong with the blood of the lamb there, but that’s not the end of it. So the example I’d give is let’s say, let’s say you’re a kid in a family, you’re of the age of reason.
Let’s say you’re a 13-year-old kid and your family is poor and does not own the Passover lamb under Jewish law, you could share the Passover with another family. If you couldn’t afford your own lamb, how are you covered by the death of the lamb? Well, you didn’t raise the lamb. You don’t own the lamb, you’re not slaughtering the lamb well, the answer is very explicit. The blood is smeared on the doorpost and then you eat the lamb. Maybe you don’t even smear the blood on the doorpost, but you participate in the sacrifice. He become a partaker by eating. And again, one Corinthians 10, St. Paul explicitly says, this is how we become partakers in the altar in Judaism. And he also describes how the Eucharist as a participation, a partaking in the body and blood of Christ, which means we are receiving Christ’s bodily and blood through eating, which makes total sense from a sacrificial context.
And notice this is not a second sacrifice. This is not sacrificing the lamb. The lamb isn’t double dead, it’s still just as dead as it was. It’s a participation in the sacrifice that’s already in one sense, been accomplished in another sense, still needs to be applied. And so once you get that, then it’s like, okay, this tells me a couple things because the other thing to add is sacrifice requires this other thing in operatory aspect. You couldn’t leave the pen open and one of the lambs gets out and gets run over and then say, ah, that’s the one I sacrificed to God.
That’s not acceptable. That’s actually exactly the kind of thing that Malachi won is condemning of offering bad sacrifices. So the offertory aspect, there’s a laying down of Christ’s life that he does at the last supper when he offers his body and blood and then freely goes to the cross. And what penal substitution seems again, as an outsider to be missing, is Christ is the victim, but it’s not clear that he’s the priest, and Christ is explicitly the priest in John 10. He says, no one takes my life from me. I lay it down freely. And for this reason, the Father loves me, not the father pours out his wrath on me. The Father is pleased with the sacrifice in the sacrificial offerings in Judaism, and even in Paganism, there was no sense of God or the gods being mad at the sacrifice or at the priest. That’s just not how those worked. So yeah, it just seems like with the right sacrificial context, not only does worship come into clear of view, but as you say, soteriology changes pretty dramatically if you have a good Jewish understanding of what the New Testament is talking about, which is just taken for granted within the pages of the New Testament itself.
Brayden:
So it seems like at least under the old covenant sacrifice was something that you were bound to do to make reparation for sin.
Joe:
You’d
Brayden:
Take something of your own, whether that be a lamb or whether that be something as simple as grain. There were grain offerings and things like that and sacrifice it, give it up, and it would have some sort of propitiatory effect. Obviously we know from the new covenant that the blood of lamb and goats don’t take away sin, and that’s why we needed the superior sacrifice of Christ. And we offer up Christ’s sacrifice of the mass every time we go to mass. And so what that seems to indicate to me though is that while the sacrifice of the mass is superior to those old covenant forms of sacrifice, those lesser forms were still worship. They were still sacrifices even down to the grain offering.
And so if I were to give a little bit of pushback to the due Protestants worship, there does seem to be a theology and the new covenant not only giving a sacrifice of praise, but offer yourselves up as living sacrifices. And it’s almost like, okay, yes, they don’t have the real presence, even if they’re these high liturgical traditions, they don’t offer the Eucharist as a sacrifice, many of them. But even though they don’t do that, they have these lesser forms of sacrifices as baptized Christians being able to offer themselves up to God as true sacrifices, but not the one true superior sacrifice of the new covenant.
Joe:
I think that’s a very helpful distinction that the places you find the clearest acts of Protestant worship are not the places that immediately come to mind when you imagine like a Protestant service necessarily listening to the sermon is the least adjacent to worship biblically, and it’s still good. And don’t get me wrong, the synagogue is good, but the synagogue isn’t the temple and capturing that well, the temple doesn’t go away in the new covenant. And I think that a sacrifice in theology connected to a theology of temple is really important because the New Testament temple is the body of Christ. John two destroys his temple and in three days I’ll rebuild it, he’s talking about his own body, but then by extension, the eucharistic body of Christ, the church’s body of Christ is called the temple. And then your own bodies having been transformed into Christ through baptism in the Eucharist, you become a temple of the Holy Spirit.
You are a temple of God. And when we gather collectively, we gather as temple. And so I think even in terms of the difference between, you were talking about Jewish hymns of old and now there’s a deeper sense in which this actually takes on a greater sacrificial context because your body has been turned into a temple of God and maybe it’s worth defining a temple. It’s a place of divine dwelling and a place of divine sacrifice. If you look at why the temple existed, it was okay, we’ve got the arc of the covenant. We’ve got the place where God is, and we’d like to be able to build something beautiful to honor his presence. And because we know God is there, this is where sacrifice will be offered. Now your body is that place, but so is the church as the body of Christ. And these two are intimately connected.
The church, the body of Christ exists because of the eucharistic body of Christ. In one Corinthians 10, verse 16 or 17, St. Paul says, we become one body because we partake of the one loaf that he makes that connection pretty explicitly. But yeah, so I think that’s a very good nuance where you don’t just want to say, oh, Protestants that were sacrificing never worshiped God, that’s too far. It’s overly simplistic. There is sometimes a failure to understand sacrifice and worship and maybe a failure to distinguish it from prayer or from sermons, but that doesn’t mean it’s not present. It just needs to be kind of teased out, purified, and in some cases, maybe somewhat redirected.
Brayden:
Right, right. Now, would you say that there’s a distinction between a Protestant and a Catholic doing maybe the exact same act of self-giving, whereas the Catholic might unite that to the suffering of Christ and the cross unite that act of service, act of worship, act of suffering and the Protestant might not? Would you say there’s that
Joe:
Much of difference? That’s a great question. I would say Saint Augustine, when he talks about sacrifice, says basically any good thing that you do for the sake of God constitutes a sacrifice. And so the problem is what about people who are doing these good things without a sense of a sacrificial theology behind it? My inclination is to say God is still pleased with that and it constitutes a sacrifice in some sense. But the operatory aspect is properly an important part of this. Imagine if someone in the Old Testament didn’t explicitly offer the sacrifice but was still trying to give it to God. My inclination is to say God understands that they’re still trying to give it to him. So good intentions do go a long way, but I want to caveat that slightly with Leviticus 10. So Leviticus 10, you’ve got Aaron, you’ve got the high priest and his sons Nadab and Ahu decide to worship God in their own way, and they offer unholy fire before the Lord. And explicitly they’re not worshiping a false God. They’re worshiping the true God on their terms, and God sends down fire from heaven and destroys them because if worship you think about the old English worthy ship, it’s giving the honor and praise and sacrifice and offering and all of this that is God’s worth. Well, putting God on my terms is not giving him what he’s worth because he’s worth approaching on his terms rather than ours.
And so similarly in numbers 15, when Cora argues all of us are priests and so therefore we don’t need a priesthood, he creates the first schism and the schism in the ground opens up and he and his followers are swallowed up again. They’re offering sacrifice to God. And so maybe in some sense the question of do Protestants worship is a good one to explore more deeply? What do we mean by worship, but do we worship properly? Is this the kind of worship God wants? And I alluded to the Muslim question earlier. I think many times, particularly Protestants hearing this of saying, we can acknowledge a sense in which Muslims worship the true God. They’re hearing, well, this is therefore just as good as anything else, but our implicit premise is it is not enough to worship God. You have to worship God properly in the way he wants. And if you’re doing it with bad theology and you’re doing it with disordered rights and everything else, that’s not it. And so we’re not just saying, therefore Islams equal to Christianity or Islamic theology is equal to Christian theology or anything like that. But I can understand someone who has a totally different theology of worship or maybe an under examined theology of worship would hear those words very differently.
Brayden:
I mean, Paul encounters pagans who have a purely natural religion in Acts 17, and he says That alter to an unknown God, the God that you worship, I’m going to declare him to you. And so it’s like they’re still referring to the same being, but it’s not the same, I guess value or the same kind of worship that God would expect of people living under the new covenant.
Joe:
And he says that pretty explicitly, I think going on in Acts 17 where the deeds done in ignorance were overlooked, but now they don’t have ignorance as an excuse anymore. I mean he says that fairly directly. So it’s certainly possible for someone to ignorantly with the best of intentions, offer worship to God, and he can be pleased with that, and it can be a sort of preparation for the fullness of the gospel.
Adrian:
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I’m trying to think of a good analogy. I love analogies. So let’s say it’s somebody’s birthday and they have whatever, a list of things that they want for their birthday, a registry or whatever, and then somebody brings something that’s totally way off the list has nothing to do with it. You still brought a gift to the right person, but it’s not what they had in mind.
Joe:
And
Adrian:
So somebody who brings the gift that they actually asked for is their gift is superior and analogous to worship. The worship that is done in the way that God prescribes is superior, but the other people who are trying to worship God but are just doing so in way off ways, they’re trying to worship the right God, they’re not bringing the right.
Joe:
I like that. Yeah. I am just imagining if for my wife’s birthday I got her chief’s tickets, she would suspect I’m offering a gift on my terms rather than hers. I’m giving her what I want to get, and she might be a little bit suspicious of the gift per se. Hopefully she’d like it. I’m afraid to try. She gets to go with you to the chiefs game.
Brayden:
Along those same lines, it seems to be that going back to intention, if you intend to give God the kind of worship that you think that he desires or has commanded, that’s loads different than knowing the list saying,
Yeah, I’m going to get something else. Because that would seem to be comparable to those first generation Israelites offering the kind of worship when they weren’t supposed to. We don’t know exactly what the unholy fire, maybe it’s the wrong kind of incense, the wrong blend. They picked up the wrong blend at the store and then the sons of Quora, they weren’t allowed to and they knew it because Moses told them. Moses was like, okay, here’s are all the things that you’re supposed to do. And guess what? The sons of Aaron over there, they’re the ones that do it, not you guys. But it seems in an entirely different context to say, okay, someone who is trying the best that they can given the knowledge, given the revelation that they have, I mean working just from the text of the New Testament alone, you can piece it together in a way that doesn’t give explicitly eucharistic sacrificial tones and present that to the congregation, say, this is what we’re doing.
Joe:
Yeah. My mom, when she was a little kid, decided to honor her family by washing the car, but she used comet, so she scraped off the outer coat of paint, and this was still an act of genuine charity. This was a beautiful thing she did for her family. They’d be totally different if she knew what comet was like and then chose to do that anyway, those would not be the same act. So yes, I’m not sure how grateful her family was with this gift, but yeah, you’re right. Well-intended misguided attempts to, everyone’s gotten a gift where you’re like, oh, I don’t love this, but I love the thought that you put into it. You don’t say that, but you hopefully still feel honored that the person made an effort to get you what they thought you would want. So hopefully God has a similar kind of approach to it, but it is a good reminder that if we haven’t thought deeply about it, we should think deeply about what kind of worship does God want? Since we talked about sacrifice, how would you handle the objection? Well, don’t. It’s all once for all. You got this once for all sacrifice of Christ, and here you are telling me that every time you go to mass, the sacrifice of Christ is presented to the Father. Aren’t you just completely contradicting scripture?
Brayden:
Absolutely not once for all, and we’re in the for all. That’s the one time back then and we’re in the for all, it’s for all time, and it’s available for all of us anywhere we are anywhere across the world. The Catholic church has spread, and I definitely think that when they forward that, and I remember using that same argument against my Catholic friend, the once for all argument is it’s coming from a place where they’re assuming the sacrifice of the mass is some sort of crucifixion, right? We’re killing Jesus, which is you said before
Joe:
Or assuming the sacrifice just means killing Jesus.
Brayden:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you’d have to explain that to the Unbloody versus the bloody offering and things like that. But no, I mean it comes from a place of sincerity because a lot of them don’t understand Catholic teaching when it comes to that sacrifice. But no, it’s just funny to be able to point out we’re in the for all period, not the once period. True.
Adrian:
Yeah. I mean you mentioned earlier that when you’re partaking of the lamb that was sacrificed. You’re not killing the lamb every time you partake of it. It’s the same lamb. But yeah, like you said, this lamb is the lamb of God, the perfect lamb. So we are able to partake of him for eternity until we’re God willing taken home.
Joe:
Beautiful. One thing I’d give just as encouragement for anyone who hears this objection is go back and read it in Hebrews. And one of the things mentioned in the Once for All context is that Christ presents the blood once for all in heaven and then sits down at the right hand of the Father. Now significantly, that doesn’t happen on Good Friday. That happens 43 days later at the Ascension. So the author of Hebrews is not saying everything needed for the sacrifice is done on Good Friday because that’s not true by the terms of Hebrew’s own theology of sacrifice. And so there are once for all aspects, Christ has never crucified. His presentation of his blood in heaven is this eternal offering. And then we participate the for all aspect. As you say, we participate in that by because how does it apply to us? I like to ask the question of people, when did you get saved?
Different people from different backgrounds? It’ll be baptism or when they converted or they prayed to sinners, prayer, whatever it is. No one I’ve encountered has ever said, good Friday, like everyone Catholic or Protestant or whatever has some implicit understanding at least that the merits of Christ on the cross have to be applied in my life somehow. Maybe they have an understanding for how that works, maybe they don’t, but there is some way that we have to access and share in the sacrifice because if you have the Passover sacrifice, they kill the lamb and then they do nothing else. They don’t smell the blood on the doorpost. They don’t eat the lamb. Has the lamb been sacrificed? In one sense, yes, but not in a way that’s efficacious because it hasn’t been applied.
Brayden:
But it seems like they would say, okay, well in order for it to be applied in my life concretely, I don’t have to offer it back to the Father in the propitiatory the way that it is in the mass. Because I mean, it’s like our sacrifice and yours offered to the Father. That’s what we say in mass every single time. And so I can definitely say where they would try and push back and say, well, yeah, it has to be applied to me. I just accept the merits of the atonement and I don’t have to offer that up for some sort of reapplication.
Joe:
Yeah, I want to explore that. I think both of you’d be in a better position than me of maybe understanding that from an insider’s view, sort of.
Brayden:
Yeah,
Joe:
Because if you have a theology of sacrificial worship of some kind, even if it’s not maybe fully fleshed out, pun not intended, you have this sense of I need to make sacrifices in my body. Allah, Romans 12, I mean it’s right there. It’s pretty explicit
To then say, but those sacrifices aren’t going to be united to the sacrifice of Christ actually looks way more collegiate. I mean from an outsider’s perspective of what Christ did isn’t enough. I have to do my own thing separately over here. Whereas the Catholic view is all of our sacrifices are incorporated into the sacrifice of Christ and transformed into something that they aren’t on their own. So we take the bread and wine, the work of human hands, and it becomes the body and blood of Christ. So our meager sacrifices are then united to his perfect sacrifice and that’s what gives him merit. But otherwise, it’s hard to see what our sacrifices are doing at all. At least from my perspective, maybe someone can push back and say, here’s kind of how that
Brayden:
Makes sense. Merit’s a bad word from where I come from. So
Joe:
Fair enough,
Brayden:
We didn’t think any sort of work or worship or anything was meritorious before God. So there’s a distinction like, okay, God might choose to give you an extra mansion or two in heaven, but that’s not like you’re meriting it. It’s kind. It’s a free gift based off of the works that you did here on
Joe:
Congruent conent merit.
Brayden:
So no, but it was like, I can see where you’re coming from with the whole, it seems pian to say you don’t need to unite that.
Joe:
Yeah. I’m just wondering what is, maybe there’s no efficacy to our worship. Maybe our sacrifice and our worship doesn’t do anything, but if it does do something and it’s not united to the sacrifice of Christ, I actually find that much harder to explain then it doing something when it is united. If it’s united to the sacrifice of Christ and it makes perfect sense. I make up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ in my own body. That makes sense. My sufferings are united to his and they’re completing it in some way.
Adrian:
So you’re kind of asking what is the goal of Protestant worship?
Joe:
Kind of. Yeah. What is it doing if it’s not united to Christ?
Adrian:
Yeah, you wouldn’t say that. Well, I go to my Protestant church service so that I could receive the forgiveness of sins or so that I could receive the body and blood of Christ or something.
Joe:
Alright, can each of you, we’ll start with you Adrian?
Adrian:
Sure. Voluntold,
Joe:
Exactly. Steal man, the we’ll say broadly Protestant, a conception of what worship is for.
Adrian:
Oh, yeah. Okay. So I’m going back to my non-denominational mindset here. Worship is not for the atonement of sins because that was accomplished for us on Good Friday, and that’s applied to us. We accept when we have faith in Christ. So worship is purely to give glory to God. It’s not for us to receive anything. Obviously we’re edified by it, but it’s purely to give glory to God. And I would say that’s probably the strongest view of non-denominational what the goal of non-denominational worship would be.
Joe:
I know Joel Osteen’s wife said something in a sermon once she gave where she said, we don’t worship God for his sake. We worship God for our sake. And people were furious with her
Adrian:
About that,
Joe:
And she might’ve meant that in a narcissistic prosperity gospel sort of way. I’m not denying that. But there is one sense in which we would say historically that is actually closer to the Christian understanding God is not actually improved in any way by our worship. He is as infinitely glorious and as infinitely happy as he’s ever going to be. And we haven’t added one iota to that by our worship, but by having a right relationship with him, we are transformed. So it is fascinating to hear that perspective of this is for his glory and it leads to our edification. But
Brayden:
Yes, that’s secondary. No, Adrian, man, you just hammered it in there. I don’t know what the ad Yeah,
Adrian:
Thank you for watching.
Brayden:
Yeah. Go subscribe to Sips with Sarah. No. Yeah. Worship is for God’s glory. Worship is not for us to elicit some sort of, I don’t know, gift from him, benefit from him. It’s purely to glorify and raise his name high and say, look, God, you’re worthy of everything that I’m offering. My body’s a sacrifice. I’m offering my lips as a sacrifice singing praises to you, Psalms, hymns. And it’s solely for that reason, not so that I can receive the forgiveness of sin, but that’s where I’m coming from as a former Baptist. So Lutherans would say something slightly different,
Joe:
And certainly I think it is a fine answer in one sense to just say, we do this because God tells us to do this.
I wouldn’t be satisfied with that answer. I think that that’s sort of, because I said so we can do better than that, I would suggest, but it’s at least part of the answer surely of, well, Christ told us to do this. Even if we don’t have any deeper theological reason, we’re going to do it. But it does seem like we should be asking why is he telling us to do this? And what happens when we do it compared to not doing it? Even if you’re not going to disobey, do you do it more often or less often? Does it matter? Does it change your life? Does it have a theological kind of implication or no?
Brayden:
And it’s tough too because there’s so many blends, brands of Protestantism, right.
Joe:
I don’t expect you to speak for everybody.
Brayden:
Yeah. I mean, when we did that video on the propitiatory sacrifice with Peyton, I mean, you
Joe:
Shot that after in case people don’t know this.
Brayden:
So we did a video right after his debate with James White, with my Lutheran seminarian friend Peyton, and it’s on my channel, the Catechumen. And we just talked about the Lutheran perspective on whether the mass is a sacrifice and in what way, because it seemed like in the debate that you and James did, it was kind of like, okay, I’m coming from this low church reform Baptist perspective that isn’t representative of, and this was a critique of many Protestant friends of mine that I know. It’s like that’s not really representative even of the reform tradition, right?
Joe:
Yeah. They would say it’s a sacrifice of praise, but it’s not the represenation of the sacrifice of
Brayden:
Christ. Yes.
Joe:
So I actually find that really fascinating. That actually looks much more like you’re sacrificing Christ to me of, so you have a sacrificial mass and Christ is bodily present, but it’s not the Good Friday sacrifice. It’s some other sacrifice.
Brayden:
They just say that when the body and blood of Christ have been made present at the consecration, it’s not offered back up to God for the forgiveness of sins in that offering. You receive it and they would say that justifies you and the corporate confession that justifies you when you hear the soothing words of the gospel that justifies you. And so for a Lutheran, it’s like, yeah, I go to mass because I want to receive the forgiveness of sins because the best of my works, or at least a venial sin, so I need to receive the forgiveness of sins a ton. But then it’s like reform Baptist, non-denominational Baptist, that sort of realm. It’s like, well, first and foremost, God says the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So really God’s trying to benefit us by us hearing the word, by us worshiping him.
And then it’s like he’s pleased by our worship, he’s pleased by us listening to his words, and we’re trying to be equipped by listening to the word to go out into the world and be obedient, things like that. But it really is like, okay, we’re obedient to God. This is for our spiritual benefit. It’s not that we’ve received the forgiveness of sins. The vast majority of Baptists, at least that I knew, was like, okay, you’re saved. You’re eternally secure. If you start doing bad things and you’re not repentant, then maybe you weren’t really saved. But it’s not like you need to receive the forgiveness of sins again because you’re already forgiven
Joe:
You or you don’t.
Brayden:
You should ask for forgiveness, but you’re already forgiven because you’re eternally justified. So it’s not like you can commit a sin and be in a state of mortal sin, as in not a friend of God. It’s like you commit a sin. It’s like, oh, that’s bad. But you don’t need to go and have the atonement reapplied to you per se.
Joe:
I think this is a really good reminder because I think as Catholics we’re looking for uniformity and Protestantism that isn’t there. We’re expecting on some level that Protestantism works the way other religions, whether it’s Catholicism or even non-Christian religions. If you said, what do Muslims believe? You can say, these are the five major pillars. And every faithful Muslim believes those things. And if they don’t, then you’re like, well, okay, there’s some weird offshoot, they’re Drews or there, whatever. But with Protestants, depending on what part of the country you’re in, the particular flavor you get may be wildly different from the particular flavor that you get somewhere else. I’m in a much more Baptist part of the country, but if I go up to Minnesota where it’s much more Lutheran or you go somewhere else and it’s just, don’t assume the other person is coming from a particular background. And I can understand the frustration, Lutheran theology of sacrifice is actually rich and nuanced. I think it’s wrong in some ways, but it’s very different than a sort of Baptist repudiation of a lot of the stuff Catholics and Lutherans would actually agree on. And I think our conversation with your friend Peyton captured that in some ways, the first half of the canon of the mass where we present the sacrifice of bread and wine, and then Christ is made present Lutheran and Catholics can make sense of each other’s views
Quite easily. It’s what happens next that we tend to part company. What would be your recommendations for Catholics who are watching this, who want to present some form of the worship problem argument to their Protestant friends? So I guess the first tip would just be like, don’t assume they’re a Baptist.
Brayden:
Yes, yes. Just read all the Protestant confessions, memorize exactly what they say. No one, don’t say Muslims, worship God and Protestants. That’s overly simplistic,
Adrian:
Please.
Brayden:
And yeah, we’re getting a lot of flack for that. We got to do some damage control. No, but yeah, I think that goes for a lot of Protestant Catholic controversy and debate. Don’t assume everyone’s a Baptist. And I understand the critique coming from my Lutheran and Anglican friends, like, oh, you guys just only address, you guys think only non-denominational is Protestantism, that no other Protestants exist. But at the end of the day, if you’re going to try and focus on Protestant apologetics, you’re going to try and hit as general of an audience as possible.
Joe:
That’s right.
Brayden:
And the vast majority of people who are going to be listening to you from the Protestant world, they’re not going to be your super rad Lutheran. They’re not going to be your, oh, I hold to all the Anglican Divines and I read all these people. That’s like a super, super small demographic that shouldn’t be ignored, but it’s difficult. We shouldn’t present it in a way that says, Protestantism says this.
Joe:
Yeah. I think that’s very tricky. And I find that very hard to do in terms of accurately presenting a clear and clickable title or thumbnail because it may be 90%, it may be 95%, but you’re not going to usually get a hundred percent on anything. So I’ve been trying to figure out good ways to do that that are fair and charitable, but also clear, because you can’t just be like, oh yeah, there’s technically a couple outliers, and so therefore we’re not going to address this thing. If somebody said, Republicans believe in X policy on any policy, you could find people that don’t. But it’d be ridiculous to say, well, Rutherford behaves doesn’t agree with Donald Trump. It’s like rather Herbie Hayes was in the 19th century. So likewise, when you’re like these historic Protestant confessions that are of no applicability to most Protestants today, why should those trump what actual Protestants believe? They don’t have an infallible standing. They don’t. You could pull an Anglican divine, you could pull a magisterial reformer, and they might or might not agree with somebody today. Yeah. But in any case, you’re absolutely, I think right to say tread that carefully so that you don’t end up misunderstanding or misrepresenting somebody accidentally.
Brayden:
So what we’re saying Protestants is you need to come up with some new categories. We can’t. There’s magisterial protest, come up with a few different ones. That way we can get it straight, so it’s your fault not and
Adrian:
Make them short. So we can fit it in the title of
Brayden:
The
Joe:
YouTube videos. Yes,
Brayden:
Catchy, short,
Joe:
But it should be things people actually recognize for themselves. There’s a lot of, I think Protestants trying, not a lot. There’s a handful of Protestants trying to reclaim what they view as traditional Protestantism. And this has been a sort of project from some Presbyterians and others like Keith Matheson, I think Redeem Zoomers doing some of this. And they’re trying to reclaim these things from the much bigger and more popular and more outspoken evangelical, very low church kind of conceptions that are often divorced, not just from Catholic tradition, but even from Protestant history. And so I understand that desire, but if they’re creating boxes that the people they’re describing don’t accept for themselves, you can’t insist everybody else call it solo scriptura when nobody who believes in it calls it that. It’s just a pejorative term you made
Brayden:
Up. Yes, yes.
Joe:
It’d just be like saying, well, you can only call Catholics or Romanist. It’s like, no, that’s the
Brayden:
Term. No, they just got to accept it. I’m accepting. I’m Catholic Inc. So they got to accept solo scripture.
Joe:
Exactly,
Adrian:
Yeah. And we also, you used to be a Baptist. I was raised in non-denominational basically. So we speak to what we know the most and what we were raised in, and also what people around us believe most likely. So when I make a video, oftentimes I have my family in my mind, okay, well I had this conversation with my whatever relative, and so this is what they have to say about this. Let me respond to that objection in this video. So that’s kind of informing our videos, which is why a lot of people might feel that we’re kind of targeting certain Protestants over others.
Brayden:
Well, it’s much more likely for a Baptist to convert to Catholicism, in my opinion, because it’s a much more radical break when you see
Joe:
The black and white a lot
Brayden:
Clearer. Yes. Whereas if you’re coming from a high church, Anglican, Lutheran, it’s like the issues can get really nuanced. I mean really nuanced.
Joe:
Yeah. I talked to a Lutheran young woman who was in OCIA and you were just coming to actually increase, she wasn’t even in OCIA and she was trying to understand the difference between Lutheran and Catholic theology and the Eucharist and trying to present it in a way that didn’t make her eyes completely glaze over of in with and under verse transubstantiation. And so I just said, well, do you worship the Eucharist? And she said, well, no. I said, we do black and white, but a lot of that stuff you can be kind of in the weeds. Okay, so watch out for the nuance. Watch out for what the other person is saying. So it seems like anecdotally sometimes there’s a conflation of prayer and worship, and I think this comes up in how we talk about Mary and the saints because when we say, oh yeah, we pray to Mary, we pray to the saints. I think many people here we are offering divine worship to Mary and the saints. How would you address that? How do you clarify that misunderstanding? Because it’s a big problem for how we understand worship in general.
Adrian:
Yeah. I think I’ve had this conversation with family and basically I just kept having to ask, what is worship? And just driving that home, what is worship? And so I’ve gone through this with family where they’ll say it’s praising and like, okay, well we praise kids when they do something right. We praise dogs when they do something right, when you’re trying to train a dog or something. So is that worshiping the dog? No. Well, it’s whatever you wanted to say. But eventually went through the cycle and my relative was like, okay, smart guy, then you tell me what worship is. Since you’re asking me all the questions, I’m like, okay, well let’s go to the Bible. When in exodus Moses was saying, let our people go so we can go worship God. They want it to go sacrifice to God. That was what they meant by worship. So I think just clarifying that and just getting them to understand what worship actually is. Biblically, biblically, we understand that these other aspects like prayer and praise and singing, songs are all elements that can be associated with worship, but and of themselves, they’re not worship. We can direct those things to other people or areas of life that are not worshipful.
Joe:
Yeah, I think that’s a great way of capturing that. This is the thing we do. Only if someone is offering an animal sacrifice to their friend or to their dog, rather than just giving him his bowl of food. You make an oblation to him. You’ve definitely made an idol of your dog, but just calling him good boy or singing a song to your dog, if that’s something you want, I might judge you, but that’s not immoral. Yeah, that makes sense. I like that distinction. Anything you’d add to that.
Brayden:
So worship just seems to me to be the highest form of honor that a creature could give. And if it’s the highest form, then that would indicate that you value this person, this being above all other things, you value them above all other things. And I think that even from a Catholic perspective, worship can be expressed in different ways. Prayer can be worship, prayer can be an act of adoration. We can pray in adoration before the bus of sacrament. And so when Protestants, especially low church Protestants who don’t have especially a liturgical setting where they’re doing these rituals with the Eucharist and things like that, it’s prayer is one of the highest forms of worship that they offer as do your daily prayers, honor him, glorify him. You don’t have this theology of praying to anyone else. So prayer seems to be inherently an act of worship to them because they don’t understand how you could pray to someone else and it not be honoring them as the creator of all, as being able to answer your prayer and you honoring them through the prayer. How can you honor someone else other than God through the prayer? And that’s where those distinctions really matter. Offering sacrifice, veneration versus Lara versus Dulia. But then you start bringing up Latin turns and they’re like, okay, sofas. Whatcha are talking about
Joe:
Technically? Yes.
Brayden:
Yeah. So yes, it’s tough until you get them to recognize that certain, they would say singing this worship song about God is worshiping God. Well, people make songs about other people all the time. If you sing that, are you worshiping that person? Well, really it’s what you say, it’s your intention. It’s all these different things. And so it’s the same thing with prayer. In the prayer that we give to the saints and Mary is not the same kind of prayer that we give to God. And ultimately our prayers directed towards Mary and the saints. That’s not the end goal. That’s not the end goal talking to them. It’s to have them ask God on our behalf something. And so ultimately it’s directed to God as the final, final end. It’s never like, what’s up Mary? You having a good day. It’s not, you’re telling Mary isn’t the end all be all of your prayer if you’re praying to Mary. That’s right. Right.
Adrian:
Yeah. It’s kind of a weird cultural divide that’s kind of happened because if you only experience prayer in the context of directing it to God, then hearing about prayer to somebody else is going to be like, well, that’s obviously disordered because the only time I’ve experienced prayer is directly to God.
Joe:
Yeah. I mean, the only time you’d ever encountered animals was reading about the golden calf, been hearing about people saying, good boy to their dog might strike your ears as obviously blasphemous.
Adrian:
Yeah. Yeah.
Joe:
So yeah, it makes sense.
Adrian:
I was asked a question recently, and I don’t think I gave a good answer and maybe you can help me out. So somebody asked me recently, okay, if sacrifice is the highest form of worship and we offer the once and for all sacrifice of Christ in the Eucharist to the Father, then in what way do we worship the Holy Spirit and the Son if we’re not offering them sacrifice in some way?
Joe:
Yeah, they’re involved, I would say, in the sacrifice offered to the Father in such a way that they aren’t the direct recipient as the Father is, but the offering of the Son is made through the spirit to the Father. So there’s this Trinitarian act of worship of the Spirit leading us to the Son, to the Father. So there is a sense in which the principle person of the Trinity being worshiped is the Father in terms of liturgical worship. I mean, I don’t think you can get around that just historically and theologically, and I understand why that can lead people to say, what do we make of the rest of this? But we still make sacrifices offered with reference to the other two. You can make up what is the lacking in the sufferings of Christ and unite it with Christ where you have Christ in view as you’re offering a sacrifice throughout your day. So particularly outside the mass, I think you maybe see that more, or there are just times where something is offered in a general way to God rather than to one of the persons of the Trinity.
Brayden:
Well, it’s not even just the sacrifice of the mass, it’s just the our Father. Right. The Cree, the apostles and nice and creed seem to the Father Almighty. Right. And so yeah,
Joe:
Actually your timing is very good. So a little behind the scenes peak. We’ve recorded this before this episode has come out, but I have an episode that will have just dropped maybe two days before. I don’t know the sequence. We’re going to do this in where it talks about a Mormon objection, which is that we should not pray to Jesus and we should not worship Jesus. And it touches on a lot of those things. That’s awesome. So I will refer to that as another place that people can
Adrian:
Explore. Go watch that. Yeah.
Joe:
Yeah. Okay. Well thank you gentlemen. And so if you want to give us a little bit of where to find you and maybe what you’re working on right now.
Adrian:
Yeah. You can find me on all platforms at Sips with Serra. Right now I’m working on a lot of apologetics or polemics directed towards Islam. Kind of a new direction I’m going because it’s interesting.
Joe:
Yeah.
Adrian:
Yeah. So that’s what I’ve been working on over there. It’s been a lot of fun. Very interesting. I’ve also been memorizing scripture with members, so check that out.
Brayden:
Beautiful. Epic. I’m Braden. You can find me at Siper anywhere you look online. No catechumen on YouTube. Catechumen on X or Twitter.
Joe:
Do you want to spell catechumen for people?
Brayden:
Yeah. CHAD. The CATE. C-H-U-M-E-N. The Catechumen.
Adrian:
Yes. You just gave yourself the most confusing shout out.
Brayden:
Yeah, that was two false leaves. Just cut that. Just cut that. No, and Brayden Cook on Instagram. That’s where you can find me. I’ve been working on a lot of things behind the scenes, including waking up at 4:00 AM every day to hang out with my son because he’s asleep. Progressing really bad. Maybe dropping a disc track soon. Let’s
Joe:
Go towards your son.
Brayden:
Yeah, towards my son.
Joe:
Go to sleep.
Brayden:
Yes, exactly. Yeah, exactly.
Joe:
Alright, well thank you all so much and thank you all for watching. For Shamus Pop, I’m Joe Heme. God bless you.