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Today, Joe is trying something a new! He takes his first stab at doing a tier list, and what better way to start than by tackling the Protestant arguments against Catholicism? Which ones are actually compelling? Which ones are completely made up and terrible? Let’s see what Joe thinks…
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I want to do something a little different today. I want to take a couple dozen different Protestant arguments against Catholicism, and I want to rank them in a purely subjective way or almost purely subjective way in terms of how good and interesting I think the arguments are compared to how much they can just be dispelled by having the other person read a book. I dunno if you’re like me, I really like your lists. I like watching people’s videos. I have no idea why it’s not like this desire for order goes anywhere else, but it does help me, I don’t know, evaluate how convincing other people find arguments that maybe I’m familiar with. For instance, Austin from Gospel Simplicity recently did a tear list on Catholic arguments and how convincing he found them and unconvincing and his on my list would’ve looked pretty different.
So take it for that, right? These are the arguments I find, obviously not personally convincing because they haven’t convinced me to not be Catholic, but at least ones that maybe make me stop and think more. Or ones where I think like, oh, I see why a person struggling with that would think I can’t be Catholic. And then the ones that I’m sometimes a little baffled by the ones where I struggle a little more to think, yeah, I can see why someone would think that. So please take it in that spirit. And obviously I don’t mean any disrespect. If you find some argument more or less convincing, you might have a different list. And obviously the most important arguments are the ones that you are grappling with, and I’m happy to grapple with whatever arguments people have. So I’ve done the tier list in this order.
At the top are arguments that I find actually interesting, so I’ll give an example of this papal authority in the first thousand years. This you’ll often find, even though I’m putting it in a sample Protestant arguments list, this makes more sense as an orthodox argument where it’s like, okay, we’ll grant you that there is something like a papal office in the early church. We’ll grant that Peter has a special authority given to him by Christ. And we’ll grant that this even seems to continue through the bishops of Rome, but what are the limits of it? Is this just a first among equals? Is this something more? If it’s something more, what are the contours of it? How does that relate to the authority of the local bishop? How does it relate to the authority of an ecumenical council? Those questions are really good. I think there are answers to those questions.
I think those questions ultimately point to the Catholic church, but somebody asking those and not just assuming, oh, it must’ve been first among equals, or it must’ve been a primacy of honor. No, but to see that the answer to that is no, that it is something more than that. You actually have to do a little more digging. And so I respect people who can say, all right, I see all of this and this is my hangup and it’s kind of in the weeds, but it’s an important one. And it also points to something really true, which is there is an evolution in the papacy. There are things that look different today than they looked in the past. And if you watch my recent video where I talk about this from the mustard seed to the mustard tree, all of that is present there in Jesus’s parables about the church, the Kingdom of God parables or kingdom of heaven parables in Matthew 13.
That’s fine, but you can at least still see why someone would say, how do I know this mustard seed is the same one from this mustard seed? And so it’s actually interesting, the ones below that. I originally tagged this understandable, but I couldn’t figure out how to make all that text fit on one line. So I changed it to, I get it. And for the, I get it. I’ll give solo scriptura as an example. I don’t find the solo scriptura debate nearly as convincing or interesting as the one about papal authority in the first a thousand years. Here’s why I’m still going to find it more convincing than a world of Protestant arguments, but I think solo scriptura properly understood. The way the term is used today is what’s in technical terms called a mot and Bailey argument. A mot and Bailey is just a technical term, therefore a bait and switch.
It’s where you have two different positions, a strong one in a weak one. And so you’ll make the really big position and it’s not very easy to defend. So then when somebody attacks you, you’re say, no, no, no, I just meant this much narrower strong position. And the easy example for this is feminism. If someone says, you are not a true feminist because you think abortion is bad, then okay, your definition of feminism seems to include the legalized murder of children. But if I challenge that, then the pushback will be something like the bumper sticker, right? Feminism is a radical notion that women are people, well, obviously you’re using the term feminism to mean something safe and non-controversial. Women are people and something incredibly controversial. Abortion should be legal. And by using the same term for both positions, you can sort of switch around as it suits you.
And sometimes people will fall for this. I think it’s when you do it on purpose, it’s a dishonest argument, but sometimes people do it without really consciously knowing what it is that they’re doing. So a solo scriptura, the bait and switch, or the Maan Bailey works like this. One form just says, well, all you have to believe in to believe in solo script Torah is that scripture is divinely inspired or God breathed and nothing else has that same attribute of being God breathed in the same way. But a Catholic could actually agree with that, that scripture is God breathed in a sort of unique way. It is divine inspiration consign to writing. Now, we also know that God inspired people not just in what they were writing, but in what they said. For instance, when Peter gets up on a Acts two and Pentecost, the Holy Spirit is working through him, God is breathing that as well, if you want to put it that way.
Otherwise you’d have to say, well, the Pentecost sermon either wasn’t inspired or became divinely inspired when it got written down, not when it was originally spoken, and those would be really weird conclusions. But nevertheless, there’s something special about the way scripture is written. It has a unique status in that regard. And so if that’s really all solo scriptura meant, it wouldn’t be particularly controversial. But notice something here, nothing in any of that explanation says all doctrines have to come from scripture or from necessary deduction. So you could have a doctrine that is true and binding and not found at all in scripture because you could say, yeah, scripture is divinely inspired in this unique interesting way, and also we’re all bound to believe in other things, even those not found in this unique interesting thing called scripture. And so what happens is you have these two positions, one position that says all doctrines have to come from scripture or necessary deduction from scripture.
And then another doctrine that says scripture is unique and interesting in the way it’s inspired. That’s a Martin Bailey, because the scripture is unique and interesting in this way that’s not particularly controversial. That’s like a women or people kind of argument. If it’s all doctrine has to come from scripture or from things that can be tied to scripture, the emanations from scripture, the deductions from scripture, that’s a much more controversial position. In fact, that position I would even say is kind of obviously false. So solos, scriptura, I get it. But I think it’s working in a lot of ways by somewhat misleading, even its proponents, by doing a little bit of a bait and switch where it’s not a very carefully defined term, which is why when you attack solos scriptura, one of the most common response you’ll get from other Protestants is, oh, that’s a straw man.
That’s not what I mean by sell a script Torah. Well, okay, if a bunch of people are using the same phrase for wildly different ideas of the relationship of scripture and doctrine, maybe we should just find a new vocabulary. Nevertheless, I’m going to put that in the, I get it. It’s at least an interesting idea. A lot of smart people believe in some form of solo scriptura, et cetera. Alright, beneath that, I’m going to put these doctrine arguments as mid, and a classic one is going to be your doctrine developed so regularly when we talk about the fact that, oh, we believe X, Y, Z, this Catholic thing, many non-Catholics don’t believe in Protestants will say, oh, that doctrine developed over time. The reason it’s mid is on the one hand, it often has some strength to it. It’s like, yeah, sure, we have a clearer understanding of this in the 21st century than we did in the first century.
On the other hand, it’s not a very strong argument, even though it’s getting something true. It’s ignoring the fact. Yeah, your doctrine also developed. Protestants today don’t believe the same thing as Protestants in the 16th century or of Christians in the first century. And it’s not as if somebody just hears the apostles preach on Pentecost and is like, oh, I get it, the Trinity, oh, I see the two natures of Christ. No, this stuff takes lot of contemplation and working out. And again, as with the mustard seed, there’s a sense in which this development ought to happen. The Holy Spirit is sent to lead the church into remembrance of all truth. Now, that notion of remembrance is really big because no new information is being given from after the time of the apostles. We don’t have some new revelation where the Pope or some prophet or the Mormon president, there’s nothing like that where somebody just says is like, I had a dream that this new thing is God wants us to start believing in this thing that we’d never heard of before. That’s not Catholic teaching. That’s not how that works. Development of doctrine is understanding what we already received at an ever deeper level.
A puppy grows into a dog, puppy doesn’t grow into a cat. So there is a difference, a principal difference between development of doctrine and deviation from doctrine. John Henry Newman is regularly given the credit for this idea. He is by no means the first. The early Christians talk about the necessity of the development of doctrine. St. Vincent of Lauren has a great bit on this and a bunch of others as well. St. John Cassin has some good stuff on this. So all that’s to say yes, it’s is mid, because on the one hand it’s kind of true, oftentimes not always. And on the other hand, it’s not a very interesting argument because if you understand your own history as a Protestant, you’ll realize, yeah, you have to believe in development of doctrine or else you can’t believe in the Trinity or you can’t believe in Christology. You just have to be completely, really out there as a heretic.
Okay, so then I’m going to say flimsy as the tier below that. A good example would be Catholic stuff is pagan, like oh, Easter, that comes from paganism, Christmas comes from paganism. This is a combination of number one, a lot of these claims are actually false, so it could go in the literally fake category. But number two, the word pagan there is doing a lot of work. So as Christianity spreads, a lot of people who had previously worshiped other gods or had been other religions, whatever, became Christian. Now they did things in a certain way. They dressed in a certain way, they used certain language to describe reality. They had certain holidays and customs and the like. And when they became Christian, they didn’t just suddenly forget all of those things and become first century judeans or something. No, they retained a lot of what they had before.
That doesn’t mean that they took pagan deities and just slapped saint names on them. I don’t think that’s true at all. But if they’re used to celebrating in a certain way, and now they want to celebrate, say the birth of Jesus, the way they celebrate might look like the way they celebrated anything else, a secular holiday, a pagan day, whatever. And now it’s Christian because the people were pagan and now are Christian. So if you’re used to having a big meal to celebrate, then when you find out the good news that Jesus froze from the dead, you might want to have a big meal. There’s nothing demonic or scary about that. So I find that argument really flimsy because on the one hand, a lot of the particular claims are actually just literally untrue. If you watch my videos on the origins of Christmas and Easter and all this Halloween, these are just not, literally, this stuff is not true.
But even when you have something where, oh, yeah, okay, so we have a day called Thursday that really does come from North Paganism, it comes from Thursday. But then the answer again is like, okay, well, so what does that mean if I say holy Thursday to describe the day Jesus institutes the Eucharist at the last Supper? I’m really saying Thor is holy. Only a really foolish understanding of language would lead to that kind of misconception. So it’s a pretty flimsy argument. I would be surprised to see someone finding this argument, anything other than completely uncompelling. But nevertheless, it’s still a tear above the arguments that are literally fake. Let me give you an example of arguments that are literally fake. You’ll have people say, the Pope is the antichrist, and they’ll give this argument. Catholics believe the Pope is the vicar of Christ, and a vicar is a representative and an antichrist, well anti a NTE before Christ, he could be standing in the place of Christ and therefore the Pope is the antichrist when you understand it this way.
And they’re just playing games with the word antichrist. And the funny thing about this, and it’s not good because they’re obviously leading people spiritually astray, and it is by spreading falsehoods. None of that’s good. But if you actually read what the Bible says about the antichrist, for instance, in Second John, when we’re told that the antichrist is the one who denies that Jesus comes in the flesh, that’s a reference to groups like Gnostics. They deny the bodily nature of the incarnation. Who opposed that? Well, the Catholic church who’s obsessed with the dignity of the body. Well, the Catholic church, there’s a reason why Catholics believe sacraments do something that Jesus really comes to us, not in a disembodied way, but actually bodily, both in the incarnation and in the Eucharist, that he actually wants to heal our bodies as he does in his earthly ministry and as he does in the sacraments.
And that the reason something like say, water baptism does something is because we believe that we are not just souls trapped in bodies and that Jesus isn’t just a spirit that was pretending to be bodily, but that we are a true union of body and soul. And Jesus is a union of body and soul and divinity. And so if you read the Bible, what the Bible actually says about the antichrist dearly, this is literally untrue. The people making this argument are dissecting a word without looking to how the Bible uses that word or defines it, and that’s terrible argument. So okay, those are the five kind of tier.
Let’s give another good one. Lukewarm Catholics, this is maybe the strongest argument against Catholicism. I don’t know if it is literally the strongest, but it’s got to be up there that many people, the Catholics that they know are really bad Christians, they don’t seem to take their faith very seriously. They don’t know the teachings of their church, they don’t seem to have any kind of relationship with God. They just seem like they’re going through the motions and they’re checking the boxes. Why is this a bad argument? Well, for many, many reasons, number one, these saints are one of the rebuttable proofs of Christianity. Meaning this is an idea. I’m very much stealing from Benedict the 16th, that you can make any kind of syllogism you want for why a certain proposition is true. But at the end of the day, someone can listen to your reason and they can think, well, I don’t see the flaw in it, but I’m still skeptical of the solution.
So maybe there is a flaw. But when you see the actual saints, when you see people who live a truly holy life, some part of you has to say, that person has something that I don’t, and they have something that I want and that is really attractive. And the attraction of it, you can’t simply intellectually wave it away quite as easily. So the flip side to that is when we fail to become saints, when we fail to become those incredible arguments for the truth of Christianity, we are doing a terrible disservice because this is a shot that anyone, it doesn’t matter how brilliant you are, it doesn’t matter how good at apologetics you are if you’re living a saintly life and other people see that, that is the foundation for evangelization and for apologetics, not for nothing. First Peter three 15, when we’re told to always be prepared to give a defense an alogia where the word apologetics comes from, it’s to give a defense for the hope that is within us.
So you should be living the kind of life where people want to ask why it is you’re living this way. So that’s what I would suggest there. But even more than that, I think lukewarm Catholics are a tremendous scandal because someone says, well, if everything you’re saying about divine grace is true, why do these people who maybe they go to the sacraments regularly continue to live in this very lukewarm sort of way? I think there’s an answer to that too. You can have the most powerful, I used to live like a half block from a power station. The park near our old townhouse was called Electric Park, which is a nice name to give a kid’s park because it was near a power station, which again, pleasant, my kids are filled with radiation, I’m sure. But the idea was like, okay, you get this incredibly powerful power station, and there would be times where not nearly enough times, there’d be times where all the lights in the house were off.
Now, why was it because the power station wasn’t powerful enough? No, it’s because occasionally the members of my house would remember to turn the lights off or I would, and so the power wouldn’t flow in. Well, likewise, when you come in contact with Jesus in person in the sacraments, whatever divine power flows from that encounter, but you can turn yourself off to it. And we see from the ministry of Jesus that people who spent a lot of time with him still rejected the divine power flowing from him. Think about the high priests, think about Judas. These people interacted with him a lot. Lukewarm Catholics are in a somewhat similar position, which is also why, by the way, St. Paul can warn in first Corinthians 11 about those receiving the Eucharist. It is absolutely possible to have access to all of these great divine gifts and still make nothing of it. So I think that’s an actually interesting argument, not in the sense of let’s read a book about that, but it raises a combination of theological objections and it sort of turns the heart away from the church because you see a lot of ugliness in terms of people’s lukewarmness. Alright, let’s see.
I guess related, okay, we, we’ll get back to that one. Oh, here’s a good, I get it. One, the Marion dogmas being required. So this one, the argument goes, okay, I’ll grant, maybe Mary is perpetually a virgin, maybe she’s immaculately conceived, maybe she’s assumed into heaven. But even if those things are true, how can you get away with requiring people to believe them upon pain of damnation if they knowingly reject them? That’s the argument, and I think that’s a good argument on the surface. I mean, I really do. I get it. I understand the appeal of the argument. Here’s the answer I would make to that argument. As an aside, this argument gets the idea of dogma wrong. Because if your chief concern with dogma is, well, somebody knowingly rejects it, they can go to hell, then the right number of dogma seems to be zero.
You should dogmatize nothing. But if the point of dogma is to help people grow in their relationship with God, then we want more dogma. We want to know more things. Anything we can know with the certainty of faith, we should want to know it because I want to know as much as I can about God. I want to know as much as I can about Jesus. So the don’t, the Arian dogmas argument sounds a lot like the people who say, don’t evangelize, because then someone might knowingly reject the gospel and go to hell. That is a backwards relationship to knowledge where it says, the truth doesn’t set us free. It says the truth creates this burden we need to be freed from. So I get the argument, but that’s why I don’t find it as compelling as the kind of top tier. Okay, let’s see.
Oh, a good mid argument is Catholics aren’t assured of salvation. Here again, I think assurance of salvation, sometimes people mean I’m saved right now, and you can have different levels of surety about that. And other times they mean no matter what happens, I’m going to go to heaven for sure. And that’s just false, and that’s completely unbiblical. You have plenty of passages like Second Peter, chapter two. They talk about people who are ransom by Christ and then deny him. You’ve got people like Simon, the magician in Acts eight, who believes in his baptized, but then commits the sin of simony and then is back in the bond of iniquity, and his salvation is clearly imperiled. Okay, so not a great argument for that. The other thing I think with assurance of salvation, I’ve said this elsewhere, is I think it’s largely, it sounds good, and that’s the appeal of it.
Like, Hey, it’s super easy if we all have assurance of salvation. And so that’s a nice pleasant sounding idea, but it doesn’t read like Christianity. Now, in fairness, you can find things about how to be sure of your salvation. That’s true. That is in the first sense of assurance of salvation. Am I in right relationship with God right now? But in response to this, I think it is still worth pointing out that there are people that you and I probably can point to in our own lives, or maybe people we’ve seen on screen somewhere where that they’re saved and we are not as sure and they might think the same about us. So a proper approach of humility is going to say, at the very least, the assurance of salvation push has been pretty destructive honestly, because the people convinced they’ve got nothing to worry about are often behaving in a way like they’re spiritually bulletproof.
And it’s not great. It doesn’t, in my very anecdotal experience, just mean people are striving for great holiness. They’re often complacent in the same way that if you’re in a pass fail class and you’re going to pass no matter what, you maybe don’t try your hardest. So there’s probably a reason why Jesus, when pressed on questions, how many will be saved? Stress is try really hard and basically assume that it’s really hard to be saved. And then he deflects giving a lot of personal details about exactly how many or questions like that. Alright, let’s see. Oh yeah, here’s a good flimsy argument, the horror of Babylon. Now the argument here is the Roman Catholic Church is bad because the horror of Babylon is Rome. And you might say, why is that not just in the literally fake? Well, because there’s a sense in which it’s right, but it’s just conflating Rome.
So I really dislike when Protestants who want to be taken seriously referred to Catholics by some pejorative. Instead of saying Catholics, they’ll say like, oh, Romanist or Papus or Rome, sometimes Roman Catholic, Roman Catholic isn’t pejorative in the same way the others are, but it’s not usually the way Catholics describe themselves. It’s much more like a away Protestants who don’t want to say Roman Catholic or excuse who don’t want to say Catholic church can get away from that. They don’t want to say we’re Catholic is in. What does that make you? Weirdly, I don’t hear them saying like, oh, we can’t say the Orthodox church because then we’d be saying, we’re heterodox. People understand what a name is. But fine, I can talk about the disciples of Christ as a denomination. And I’m not saying I’m not a follower of Christ. So I think it’s a very strange sensitivity from some Protestants, but as a result, they just won’t use our actual name.
They’ll say Rome. And this is often the people who have the biggest beef with the Catholic church. And here’s the problem, when you read Revelation, the who of Babylon is identified with the seven hills of Rome, and this seems to be a reference to the city of Rome and or the Roman Empire. And so they’ll say, aha, it’s Rome. And since they’ve been calling the Catholic church Rome, they conflate the two. This is a weird argument. Now I’ve pointed out before, I think one Peter five 13 where St. Peter writes from Rome is clearly a reference to, excuse me from Babylon. He says, she who is at Babylon in reference to the church at Rome, it shows that you can make this connection between Rome and Babylon. But notice he doesn’t refer to the Christian Church in Rome as just like Rome. It’s the Church of Rome or the church in Rome.
And that’s still true, like the Roman Catholic Church. We prefer to just sculpt the church. If you want to say the Church of Rome or the church in Rome, fine, but hopefully you get the idea that it’s not Rome or the Roman Empire like the city or the empire. Those are not the same entity as the church. And obviously once you recognize that, hopefully you can see, yes, it’s true, the horror of Babylon can be identified with Rome. But if you’re conflating the city and the empire and the church that would be calling the Sanhedrin and the Christians Jerusalem and just combining all of that and it’d be a mess. Or I guess maybe to take a more real example, sometimes the term Israel is used to describe the church. Sometimes Israel is used to describe the plot of land or even the people who don’t convert to Christianity.
You’ve got to make those distinctions and can’t just say, well, Israel is, Israel is Israel. That doesn’t work. It doesn’t make sense. Last point on that, remember the seven hills of Rome, Vatican City is not within the old city of Rome. It’s on, well, Vatican Hill, which is not one of the seven hills. So when the horror Babylon is identified as on the seven Hills, it actually shows it’s not the Roman Catholic Church, but that’s, there you go. Alright, let’s see. A good fake argument. How about this one? Millions killed in the dark ages. Now, anytime people talk about dark ages, it is cringeworthy because this is enlightenment propaganda. The people who called themselves the Enlightenment because of how smart they thought they were and how dumb everyone who came before them was, I find those arguments to be pretty bad already, but additionally, the people claiming millions, I’ve even seen hundreds of millions of Bible believers were killed by the Catholic church.
They just know they literally were not. And when you think about how many people were alive in Europe at various points in pre Reformation history, the numbers are so low of even how many people are in Western Christendom say that they literally could not have done that. Speaking of literally fake arguments, how about Catholics added books to the Bible? You’ll hear that one a lot and it’s also just literally untrue. So the argument goes, there used to be a Bible with 66 books, and then in response to the Reformation, seven books were added. Now that’s a lie. It’s a falsehood and it’s easy to point out that it’s not true. You can find any number of early church sources, a third council of Carthage. You can look at the Latin Vulgate. We have a literal biblical manuscripts that you can look at and see that it’s not true.
The Council of Florence affirms that there’s a 73 book cannon, and what the Council of Trent does is just reaffirms what had already been believed, but includes an anathema and defines it infallibly. Okay? So then people say, well, okay, so you still didn’t have it infallibly defined until Trent, but now you’ve changed the argument from you added books to the Bible to you didn’t add books in the Bible, but your Bible wasn’t infallibly defined. Protestant bibles today aren’t infallibly defined. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have 66 books. The Catholic Bible before Trent wasn’t infallibly defined, but people knew how many books that it had. So it’s just not a true argument. Okay, let’s go back up to the top and think of a good argument Marion Dogmas as late developments. I can see why people say, Hey, I don’t see the case for the immaculate conception or the assumption of Mary, those two in particular in the really early church fathers.
And there’s some truth to that. Part of the reason is like conception was pretty murky until much more recently in history. And so they talk about Mary as sinless from pretty early on. You can find stuff that points to her sinlessness. But this being from the moment of conception when conception is poorly defined, there’s definitely areas where we have a clearer understanding about when does the unborn child come into being. That sort of stuff that wasn’t known to people early on Catholic or non-Catholic believers or non-believers is just a limitation of scientific knowledge. Likewise, there’s more of an interest in Mary’s assumption as time goes on. I don’t think there’s any denying that. And there seems to have been a popular belief that Mary had been assumed into heaven, but you don’t have a lot of good writings on it. So there’s two things that are related there. Number one, you have arguments from silence being made. Number two, there’s this question of development of doctrine. So I think it’s an interesting argument. I’m not persuaded by it, but I at least look at it and think, oh yeah, that makes sense. I get why people believe that.
Let’s see, oh, indulgences are unbiblical. I’m going to put that in the, I get it. Now, the, I hate debating indulgences. I hate answering questions about indulgences as a Catholic apologist. And it’s not because I don’t believe in indulgences, it’s because I find it very hard to have a good conversation about them. For this reason, to understand what Catholics believe about indulgences, you have to have a lot of other ducks in a row. Things like, well, the twofold consequence of sin that sin cuts you off from God, but that it also creates these what are called temporal consequences. And so you got to have that. You have to have the idea the church has a binding and loosening authority and can actually dispense from this in response to certain things that we do. You got to have some idea of purgatory, like all of that stuff has to be in place before indulgences make any sense.
And so I think that can be defended, but you have to get so many other things in order to be able to see it that it’s not a good starting point to have an interesting conversation. I would say another mid argument, oh, well, I guess we could do the mass re sacrifices. Christ, that’s actually kind of flimsy. Yeah, I’ll do the mass resacrifice Christ, but I am going to actually go ahead and put that down in flimsy because it’s not true. We deny that there’s a second sacrifice, but it gets one thing, right, which is that we are participating in the one sacrifice of Christ in the same way that someone eating the Passover lamb is participating in the Passover sacrifice. This is the Jewish understanding. It always has been. This is how scripture speaks of it, that you eat the sacrifice, you become a partner in the altars.
St. Paul says it’s explicitly in one Corinthians 10 Protestants who don’t understand that think that we’re saying there’s a second sacrifice, like Good Friday wasn’t enough. And so they use the ones for all language of Hebrews, but that’s just not what’s being said. You can see, oh, okay, well let’s put Peter wasn’t the first pope at the mid level. Why mid? Well, again, it’s getting one thing right? The Pope has more clear interaction with a pope today can talk about what’s going on in Kalamazoo and he can directly interact with the situation there where a pope in the first century, the second century, third century, much more limited means to do that. For a lot of reasons, technology is better. It’s largely technological, but you have much more direct authority of the Pope in the ordinary lives of believers than you would’ve in a time when people were cut off by months or years from even being able to talk to the Pope.
So is there a development? Sure, we see the papa seed growing mustard seed into a mustard tree style. But the reason, and I did an entire video on this, so you can probably guess what I’m going to say. People who say Peter wasn’t the first pope, tend to be real evasive about who the first pope was because it’s like what other alternative are you going to present? Alright, at the bottom, at the literally fake level, this one is a hilarious one. Vicarious Philly de, if you’re not familiar, it’s a Latin phrase found only in the donation of Constantine. That means vicar of the son of God. And the donation of Constantine is not a real letter from Constantine, a medieval forgery. And many popes were tricked into believing that it was real, but neither here nor there. So you’ll find Protestants who say, well, if you add up all of the letters in vicarious Philly de, so V is five and I is one and Roman numerals, and the U is a V.
So that’s another five. It’ll total up to 6, 6, 6. Now this is ridiculous for several reasons. Number one, you have numerology in Hebrew where every letter has a different numeric value. You have numerals like Roman numerals in Latin, but a lot of the letters don’t have any numeric value at all, unlike Hebrew. So you just can’t really do the same thing. Also, that’s not how Roman numerals work. Where you have, if you have, for instance, the I US would be iv if you’re doing this, well, they’re adding that up to get six, but ivy is four in Roman numerals, so they’re not even using Roman numerals as Roman numerals are actually used. But the thing that makes this funniest is the group that I see promoting this kind of nonsense the most are the seventh Day Adventists who was founder or the co-founder, Ellen Gold White.
If you add up the letters and her name, it also totals 6, 6, 6. So it’s the most hilarious kind of cell phone in that sense. I don’t know. I find it really funny and occasionally I see it in the wild where people will make that argument very seriously still. Another literally fake argument. Constantine started the church. No, he didn’t. But it’s amazing the number of people who think that he did. You have Catholics talking about being Catholics, you have them talking about the Bishop of Rome and about the priesthood and about all this other stuff before Constantine. And it’s wild that people still continue to think this. Let’s see, let’s do an actually interesting one. Oh, church abuse and scandals. I think this is probably self-explanatory, but with lukewarm Catholics, the bad behavior of Catholics is actually scandalizing and there’s not a good argument for it.
You can’t just be like, no, actually scandals are good or abuse is good. No, it’s like this is horrible. Now, to the extent that there’s an answer at all, it would just be we reject this. We think this is really evil and we’re sorry that it happened and we don’t think it should be done. But I can see why people are turned off from the church by that, let’s see, sacrament’s not personal relationship. I’m going to put that in. I get it. It’s almost an actually interesting argument. It’s related to the lukewarm Catholics. It’s this argument like, oh, you Catholics are so focused on sacraments that you don’t worry about your personal relationship or you’ll have a corollary. You’ve got all this stuff on devotions and all this, and you’re not just reading your Bible. And I think the only reason I don’t put it higher is the solution to it is really easy.
The sacraments are great. You also need the personal relationship. You also need to pray. You also need to read your Bible. So it’s like, yeah, and the church says all of that. So it’s not really an argument against Catholicism. It is a good argument against a certain way. Some Catholics live of not taking their faith seriously enough. Another, I get it, I’m going to give actually a contrast here. I’m going to put Crusades bad at mid, but I’m going to put Inquisition bad at. I get it. And the reason is this, people who knocked the Crusades, I’m old enough, I just turned 40 and this spring, remember plenty of Protestants who were very comfortable with the Iraq war, very comfortable with invading another country because of something democracy, and yet were convinced that the Crusades were horrible. And I even then was just like the case for the crusades is way better than the case for the Iraq war.
Like the Crusades are much more obviously a defensive action against the spread of militant Islam and protecting pilgrims to the holy land and protecting holy sites from being destroyed by aggressively militaristic Muslims. And that just wasn’t really the case was largely secular or Iraq. So I think the Crusades, at least in principle, are fairly easy to defend. Now, obviously there were abuses, there were things that went horribly wrong. As with many wars, I think World War II is easy to defend, and I think the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki aren’t, I think they’re morally abhorrent. Now, that’s crusades inquisition is harder because we don’t kill heretics. Now, I mean if you are outspoken, say a jihadi or even a radical of some types, you might be punished by the government or you’re not allowed to come into the country, whatever. People are more accepting of that.
But having just destructive ideas about God aren’t used to the idea that that might be something that the state should police because it is in fact incredibly destructive. And you look at the effects of letting heresy spread and what it does for the stability of a society and ideas have consequences, but nevertheless, the inquisition is harder to defend. Certainly at a basic level it takes a lot more work to say, well, this was good, that was bad. And it’s a more complicated story. Now the death count from both the crusades and the inquisition is wildly inflated in a lot of people’s minds, but you can only make that point so much without it sounding like you’re just saying, well, a thousand people would be okay, but a million would be bad. And so it’s harder to defend for those reasons too. So I am going to put it at, I get it, I’m not persuaded by it, but I understand it.
Let’s see. Okay, Mary had other children. This is literally false, but I’m going to put it in flimsy because it’s not so obviously literally false as to beneath it. The literally fake ones where you can read a book and see that it’s not true. The case for Mary having other kids, if you’ve seen my videos back and forth with Ryan from Need, God, the case is really bad. It’s none of the arguments that prove it, actually prove it. And then you have things that strongly suggest Mary didn’t have other kids like Mary being entrusted to the disciple John. So I find it quite flimsy, but I can at least understand why people would believe in it. Alright, let’s go beneath even that to the Catholics have another gospel. The problem with this one is it’s a tremendous cell phone. If you say you don’t believe in the same gospel as early Christians.
And the idea of forensic justification, that is kind of the hallmark of the distinct Protestant view of justification. Alistair McGrath acknowledges is theological novum of the 16th century. And I think he’s right about that. And I think it’s very hard to prove otherwise to find anyone who sounds like a Protestant. So if you say you have another gospel than Catholics, you’re saying you have another gospel than the first 16 or 1500 years of Christians, and then you’re the kind of heretic that St. Paul is warning against about those who come in later days and pray upon the flock of Christ, the people who can point to 2000 years of continuity in their view and justification, that’s not going to be the people he’s warning about because we didn’t arise in later days. So that’s why I say it’s a kind of a cell phone.
Similarly, things like Catholics, worship statues, I think that’s kind of ridiculous. Catholics worship Mary, I mean these things are literally not true. What they usually reveal is that you have kind of an impoverished understanding of what worship is. There’s more that could be said to that. But you look at, for instance, the fact that intercession is good. We are called in one Timothy two to make intercession for one another. We see St Paul reaching out, asking others to intercede for him it is okay to go for other people for intercession, and that includes any other member of the body of Christ. The body of Christ doesn’t just exist on earth that exists in heaven. And then as for statues, statues aren’t just like an evil thing. It’s a very strange idea that some Protestants have, like all statues are evil. When you have statues being ordered like the Cher bomb are ordered to be built above the Ark of the Covenant, people are bowing down before them.
God orders the bronze serpents to be made even though he knows some people are going to idolatry worship it and has to later be destroyed. So God makes statues, even if there’s a risk of the statues turning into idolatry, you make the kind of doctrinaire iconoclastic case. You can’t have images, you can’t have religious statues at all. And you do have to argue against God in the Bible. And I think that puts you in a pretty weak spot. Alright, I’m going to go and put call no man, father flimsy because it’s just really obvious it’s St. Paul presents himself as a spiritual father, talks about the spiritual fatherhood of Abraham and Romans four and so on. It takes a little bit of Bible reading to realize like, oh, you’re taking that line pretty out of context. The only reason it’s not literally fake is, I mean it’s literally true.
Jesus says that. It just doesn’t mean what people think it means when they take a really surfacey level. Let’s see, salvation being too complicated. I’m going to put, that’s actually interesting. I don’t know. I’m going to put it between actually interesting and I get it. I guess I’ll put it in actually. Interesting. The idea being here, if you’re someone coming from a Protestant background, it sounds like you’ve got to jump through so many hoops. I’m going to put it in. I get it because it’s not actually that good of an argument. You got to jump through so many hoops it sounds like to be Catholic. But you can make almost anything sound that way if you talk about what you have to do just to be alive in terms of you got to eat things and drink things and sleep and you can’t drive on the wrong side of the road.
You got to do all this stuff. What a legalistic way to maintain your life. Life is a gift from God. You could do that with biological life. And of course the sane response to that is, well, yeah, life is a gift from God and you have to maintain it. And this is true of the spiritual life as well. But I get especially on the surface level, especially coming from a really easy believism background, Catholicism can sound bad. Too much worldly power. I’m going to put that, I’m actually going to put that as actually interesting because there is this idea of like should the church be this comfortable with being powerful in the world? I think there’s good questions to be asked there. I don’t think those are arguments against Catholicism as such. They might be arguments to act in a certain way or not. And this is the danger of having a church that is successful.
This is the danger of having a church that converts a lot of people are that some of the people you convert might be rich and might want to give honors to the church. And what do you do with that? And the answer to that biblically is complicated. You have for instance in Luke eight, wealthy women who accompany the apostles and take care of them financially. The approach that Jesus and the apostles take is not just get away from us, everyone who has wealth. It’s not, it’s to use the wealth for the glory of God sometimes, but those are hard questions. And so the worldly power thing can be sort of tricky. How do you navigate that? Well, similarly, Luke 22, the apostles are seated enthroned in Jesus’s vision of heaven. Having even the imagery of thrones and power and all of that is not bad as long as the recognition is this is pointing to the kingdom of God and not just earthly authority here and now.
Nevertheless, we also want to use authority on earth in a good way. If we can use the authority of the church to oppose injustice in the world, we should. But how do you do that? Those can be kind of tricky questions. And I think that’s worth acknowledging on the, let’s see, confess directly to God. I’m going to put that one as flimsy because I guess it’s, you know what? It’s literally not true. I’m going to actually have to put it down in literally fake because no scripture. Of course you should confess to God directly, but you’re also told to confess your sins to other people. And the apostles are given the ability to forgive sins. So how do you take the really clear text, confess your sins to one another, you might be forgiven. How do you take all of these things and just say, I’m not going to do any of that.
Sorry, Jesus. Let’s see. Purgatory in the Bible. I’m going to put that at the I get it level. Because again, as with the indulgences, a lot of this is just the worldviews are so different that it can become hard to plant this one idea in a Protestant frame. So here’s what I mean by that. Some ideas, Protestants can take their existing worldview and get some new Catholic idea they haven’t heard before. They can see, okay, that is true. And they can incorporate it in their overall vision of reality with purgatory, particularly the question, where’s purgatory in the Bible, you’ve combined, I’ve got this lens of solo scriptura and I don’t see this word and it’s already a bad way of doing theology. Where’s the trinity in the Bible? Where’s Jesus saying, I am God in the Bible? You can do this to really tear Christianity apart if you want to do it that way.
Or you can kind of work on unraveling the false way of treating scripture and the false way of treating theology. But those are harder things. So when someone is asking the question in good faith, I think they usually are like, where is purgatory in the Bible? You can point to people praying for those who have died. You can point to all of that which hints at a state of purification. You could look at St. Paul talking to one Corinthians about those who are saved, but as through fire. But you don’t just have a very clear, here’s the word purgatory. Here’s the idea, fleshed out as it were. It takes a new way of reading scripture. So I get it. I understand why people don’t immediately see the truth of this Catholic teaching. Alright, the last two are both going to have to go at the bottom of literally fake.
And the first one is confusing. I’ll put this in flimsy. People who say the Bible’s authority comes from God and not the Catholic church. So Catholics will say, how do you know which books are in your Bible? And in response to that, sometimes you’ll hear Protestants make this objection. What’s the problem with that? Well, we agree with that VI can one explicitly points out that the Bible’s authority doesn’t come from the church, it comes from God. But that doesn’t answer the question of why do you know that you’ve got the right books of the Bible and you still need the church to identify the books in some way. Now, much bigger conversation could be had, but it’s arguing against what’s actually a straw man. And I’ve heard plenty of people who should know better, like Michael Krueger, who’s written an entire book on multiple things on the canon, has said numerous times that Catholics believe that the authority of the Bible comes from the church deciding on certain books.
So if the church wanted tomorrow to be like, you know what? We like Trent Horn’s book, why we’re Catholic, we’re going to make that part of the Bible, it would suddenly become divinely inspired. No, that’s not true. And so that argument is literally fake. But the thing is trying to defend that the authority of the Bible comes from God who’s the one who inspired it. The church didn’t inspire the books. God did that. We actually Creon. So it’s a bad argument, not because it’s defending something false, but because it’s attacking something false. And then the last one is, I’ve heard the argument against purgatory. Well, that St. Paul says to be absent from the body is present to the Lord. And this one, I’m sort of stunned at how bad of an argument it is. It’s a mis quotation of scripture St. Paul is talking about that he would prefer to be absent from the body and present to the Lord.
He nowhere says those are the only two states. But I’m stunned by how bad it is because someone who believed this would have to say Hell doesn’t exist because, well, if the devil doesn’t have a body, he must be present to the Lord. What? Just think about it for a second. But people are so eager to try to find some text from the Bible to disprove purgatory that they’re left sort of making a verse up. I don’t think they’re doing it on purpose. I think they’re just desperately looking for something. So they have a biblical argument against it. And there’s not a good biblical argument against purgatory because all the evidence seems to point to people did pray for the dead. They certainly did in the Old Testament and the New Testament as well. And that only makes sense with something like a purification process.
More could be set on purgatory of course. But there you go. Those are the arguments that Mike and I came up with that I thought were worth answering. I’d be interested in how you would rank them yourself. Which arguments maybe in your own journey did you find persuasive or unpersuasive? Easy to answer, hard to answer. What were maybe your hangup issues and I don’t know, were there good ones that I should mention? I’d be happy to do something like this next time if this sort of thing is interesting to you. Alright, for Shameless Popery, Joe Heschmeyer, God bless you.