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Joe talks with Ryan Hurd who recently converted from Protestantism to the Catholic Faith, how studying Thomas Aquinas led him across the Tiber, and how this could be becoming something of a meme…
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I saw a fascinating discussion between three Baptists about people studying Thomas Aquinas and becoming Catholic. And I though a great person to talk about that whole concept with would be Ryan Hurd, a Protestant domestic scholar who recently became Catholic. So first of all, Ryan, thank you so much for coming on. Could you tell us a little bit about who you are, maybe just a little bit of your journey and how you ended up becoming a Catholic?
Ryan:
Yeah. Thanks, Joe. Yeah. So I’m a vocational theologian who primarily studies medieval theologians, especially Thomas Aquinas. Yeah. My wife and I recently became Catholic this past year, in large part due to just study of Thomas Aquinas over a number of years. And yeah, I continue to work in theology and pursue primarily doctrine of God is what I do with Thomas Aquinas, but I’m interested in all things Thomas.
Joe:
Wonderful. So when you say you became Catholic, what was your original interest in Thomas and what was your denominational affiliation or where were you in terms of the spiritual map at that point?
Ryan:
Yeah. So I grew up in a conservative Protestantism. Fundy Baptist is really where I come from originally. In my early teens and going more in my early adulthood, I became reformed and focused on the reformed Orthodox especially. So conservative Presbyterian world, Dutch reformed world. And then over the years, I became more and more interested in studying Thomas professionally and medieval theologians more broadly. I kind of started out in the early modern period studying what are called the reformed scholastics, essentially the counterparts to Roman Catholic neo-scholastic theologians. And I just went back earlier and earlier in time and moved into the medievals eventually into Thomas. And yeah, I’ve just camped out in him for the last almost 10 years now.
Joe:
It’s fascinating. I mean, I think for many Catholics, just hearing that there is anything of a lively Tomistic Protestant or Protestant Scholastic community might be a little bit eye opening, might be a little bit surprising. And it seems like you kind of, we’ll say, connected the dorts that led you slowly from maybe Calvin to Thomas to the Catholic church. Is that a fair way of.
Ryan:
Absolutely. Yeah. I think it is in God’s providence and his kindness. I believe very firmly that he led me from a place of really not having a lot of theological formation. Obviously heavily catechized in Protestantism. I was grown in the faith, in the Protestant sphere. And the Lord has always been very kind to me in those ways. But as I matured and became more intellectually focused and started to learn more about theology, especially in the more professional arena, yeah, I just kind of pursued whoever I found, this is very early, of course, but whoever I found was the better and better theologian, clearer and clearer and more faithful. And I came upon Thomas largely because I had learned Latin and I sat and read the summa in a baseball field for a summer. In order to strengthen my Latin, it’s not a very good way to strengthen your Latin reading, terrible Scholastic Latin, but that’s –
Joe:
You’re not making baseball sound like a fascinating sport if
Ryan:
You’re – Yeah, I suppose. But it was what did it for me and I’ve never looked back.
Joe:
Now, when you announced your conversion online, you gave a very brief sort of description of it. And people went, I think Apoplectic might be putting it mildly. I mean, it seemed like a lot of people who on the Protestant side had held you in a very high esteem were losing their minds about this and were very mad at you and very mad at St. Thomas Aquinas as well. And I was really struck by it. And one of the things that seemed to really strike a chord with people was this idea of the authority, the actoritas of Thomas. And I think a lot of people were confused by the role this played in your own story. So I thought maybe I’d ask you about that and then turn to this broader conversation from this podcast that Founders Seminary put out, basically asking about the question of Protestant Thomas becoming Catholic.
But just before I get into maybe their particular questions and objections, can you give a little bit of an explanation of Ektoritas and kind of the role that played?
Ryan:
Yeah. So Octoritas is the Latin version of our English authority. It means lots of different things and it functions in a lot of places in theology. A lot of Catholic versus Protestant dialogue today concentrates on issue of the authority of holy scripture versus say the authority of the Pope. In Scholastic theology, typically we speak of octoritas in a fairly significantly different way. And it has to do with what we might call today belief formation or what brings you to ascent to a certain proposition. And there’s a lot of overlap between those two spheres. So holy scripture has octoritas in the sense of, well, because it’s written by prophets and apostles who have this quality that moves us to ascent, we therefore do ascent. And then we also might want to speak about holy scripture having authority in the sense of right to rule. And that’s where you’re really getting into places of loggerheads between Catholics and Protestants.
But for me, octoritas in that former sense that involves belief formation or particularly ascent to various judgments that we focus on in technical scholastic theology. Scholastics are very concerned with the nature of ascent as an intellectual act to various truths. And also what brings us to ascent. So is it essentially a kind of rational argument terminating in a demonstration? Or is this merely what’s called an argument ex-octoritate, an argument from someone’s octoritas? And I keep it in the Latin, not just to be obnoxious, but because octoritas in this sense is really bringing together two kinds of qualities that a person has that makes it judicious to believe his testimony and ascent merely at his word. And those two qualities are both the knowledge or epistemic expertise that he has in a certain field or discipline, and then also his moral goodness. And both of those are brought together under this hub of octoritas, which for example, when St.
Augustine says, “I would not believe the scriptures except on account of the octoritas of the Catholic church.” He’s using that not in the sense of, “Well, the Pope’s right to rule and maybe we want to contrast that with holy scripture.” And so that’s where a lot of the early modern debates start to concentrate. No, he’s meaning this in the sense that the Catholic church has a kind of quality that grounds our ascent. And in fact, it’s kind of a proxy for divine octoritas, which ultimately is what is underlying our ascent of faith, which is most important when we talk about achieving supernatural truths and why we believe Holy Trinity and various truths regarding Christ and so on. Basically the Catholic mysteries. Well, we do so on account of the octoritas of God, this twofold quality that makes God reliable in knowledge. So he’s never going to be deceived about the facts, but also reliable as a testator.
Neither is he ever going to deceive. God is essentially trustworthy. Octoritas is almost just trustworthiness here. Mode is a credibility. This is the whole realm. So for me, Octoritas was very important in coming to Catholicism in a bit of a weird way. I kind of have a weird story. Just because Thomas’s own personal octoritas was really helpful in stabilizing my mind with respect to places of Catholic and Protestant disagreement and gave me essentially as a kind of starting point, a kind of assurance to start exploring Catholicism in a little bit more tredulous epistemic posture rather than being harshly resistant, something like that. So there’s more I could say, but I don’t know if you have thoughts about that here.
Joe:
It’s really fascinating. I want to make sure that I’m understanding it and presenting it in a way that a normal person will come away and have a clear sense. But it seems like part of what we’re saying is when you’re talking about an argument from authority, we mean authority in two senses, that there is the governing authority, the powers that be, but there’s also a personal credibility authority. So when someone believes in the Sermon on the Mount, it might be partly because they’ve deduced this is the best way of ordering one’s life. And regardless of who said the Sermon on the Mount, I believe it either way. I just read these words. So yeah, that makes total sense. But for many of us, that isn’t it. It’s we know that Jesus said these words. And so on his authority, we accept them. And we do this even outside of the context of divine knowledge.
I mean, to give one not at all controversial example, when somebody says, trust the science, what they’re saying is the scientists know this area and they’re not going to lie or mislead about the data. And now of course, the entire debate becomes, well, how well do they know the area and how likely are they to lie and deceive? But those are all authority questions of those two different aspects of a proper authority. Is that a good understanding of what it is we’re talking about?
Ryan:
I think so. Yeah. And it helps us understand that octoritas is a function in everyday life. And all of us are ascenting to all sorts of truths, be they the question of if it’s raining outside or be it the question of God as a trinity. A whole range of truths that we’re all ascenting to, at least octoritas of various persons is at play at all times. It’s kind of like fish swimming in water. And a lot of people aren’t so conscious of that playing upon them. And maybe when they become conscious of it, it’s a little nerve wracking. But Thomas actually says it’s the mark of a well functioning intellect to ascent on account of credible person’s testimony. So that issue of credibility where we start talking about modives of credibility is where you really need to concentrate on whether you have intellectual grounds that are sufficient to heed this person as an authority in the subject matter and therefore ascent upon their word.
So there is not this idea of like seeding your own intellect or going into it the blind leap of faith. So faith isn’t blind in the sense of this prior. We’re able to make a prudential judgment based upon essentially rational grounds that recognizes this person is credible, ought to be believed. But when we actually make that ascent of faith, particularly when we’re talking about the Catholic mysteries, we’re not doing so based upon grasping their intrinsic intelligibility. We’re not doing so on account of rational arguments because these are truths beyond nature. They’re not deducible from the natural order. They’re not sub-contained within the gift of our reason that God has given us. No, they come from above as God reveals them to us whereupon we ascent again on account of the authority of God as revealing to us because he’s eminently trustworthy and we ought to do so.
Joe:
Beautifully put. I think it’s a very important way to frame that too, because I think when someone hears about an argument from authority or even when you talk about becoming credulous, we often have kind of a pejorative connotation to all of those things. And it just sounds like you’re deciding to allow yourself to be duped. And yet it does seem like there is this phenomenon of very smart and very seemingly holy Protestants who start to take Tom Sequena seriously in one area, doctrine of God, predestination, you fill in the blanks. And then they start to see the rest of his writing and thinking. And once they respect him as a reliable truth teller who is a deeply committed Christian, then all of his very Catholic sounding stuff seems like it is then given more seriousness than you would maybe give a random Catholic with whom you didn’t have that prior relationship.
Is that a fair kind
Ryan:
Of simplication?
Yeah. I think that’s absolutely correct. And particularly coming from a Protestant perspective, especially a conservative Protestant who is really trying to be faithful, there are so many aggressive caricatures of Catholicism still pervasive that are so deep in the mind of faithful good Protestants. You almost have kind of an invincible ignorance sort of situation. I would say arguably something like that in a lot of cases. And when you have been raised in an environment that actively teaches you that Roman Catholicism is idolatrous, Roman Catholicism is this, Roman Catholicism is that, any devout person rightly responds on that happens to be an errant principle, but at least on that presupposition with aggressive resistance and opposition. And what that does is that shuts down intellectual inquiry. Fear is the mind killer, to quote the Great Sage. And really – I
Joe:
Quoted that earlier today. That’s fantastic.
Ryan:
It’s such a great quote because it’s so true. What Octoritas does is that helps stabilize the mind and it makes you not afraid so that you can actually have a clear mind to start evaluating the arguments as they stand. And really, I would argue converting from Protestantism to Catholicism is not about becoming an expert theologian and resolving all the points of dispute. It’s actually more about learning how to solve the dispute and what’s really at stake. And that’s the issue of motives of credibility, I think is really fundamentally the right way to argue apologetically. Again, I’m showing my lagrange here. I apologize. But having the Octoritas of someone you really deeply trust and you have an intimate relationship with. And I think a lot of people become Catholics because their neighbor was Catholic or because their friend was Catholic. It’s that exact thing just in a slightly, in my own personal story, just a slightly more intensified.
I think Thomas’s Octoritas is a little bit greater maybe, but yeah.
Joe:
I mean, I think you’re making a very good point that the person who starts to take Thomas’s ideas seriously because they see enough from him to justify that is doing the same kind of movement towards ascent that the person who says, “Wow, my neighbor seems very holy. I want to learn more about. Give me the reasons for the hope that lies within you,” which is very much a biblical way of coming to the truth. Absolutely. This is the roots of apologetics. Now, you talked about kind of the way some Protestants will frame Catholicism. And one of the things I was hoping to talk about with you today is this video that Founders Ministries put out from Founders Seminary down in Florida. And the title is The Dangers of Roman Catholicism. And it’s between three men who I think are, I want to say all PhD love, Tom Askel, Graham Gunden, and a Dr.
Christopher Cleveland. And one of the things that was fascinating to me about it was just the fact that they felt it necessary to make this in the first place because they were pretty clear. The cards were on the table. They had Christopher Cleveland on because he was someone who has studied Thomas in the context of the Puritan John Owen. And they joke, “Oh, you studied Thomas and didn’t become Catholic?” Which is already showing there’s enough of a tendency for stories like your own, call it the herd mentality. There you go.
That they feel it necessary to acknowledge this phenomenon and respond to it. So Mike, can you play clip one?
CLIP:
It’s fascinating, Chris, that there’s so much hesitation, fear, warning today in our circles, in reform circles, particularly reformed Baptist circles about studying the medieval theologians, particularly Thomas. And it’s not without some reason for that, but how do you address that? How do you think about what you have done in your academic studies and what’s going on today in the whole retrieval movement that’s discovering more and more sources that weren’t available to us 20 years ago? And then there does seem to be this Canterbury trail that people are falling into and following. And you’ve had to deal with that too as a professor, right?
CLIP:
Right. Right. Yeah. So I’ve had multiple friends and former students who have gone in various directions, Anglican, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic. And it’s been interesting to see and unfortunate in a lot of ways. I think one of the biggest issues is that you need to first and foremost, read these guys confessionally. You can’t read them and avoid and just act like, “Oh, well, this must be the truth.”
Joe:
So the thing that struck me about that was first them acknowledging. Tom Askel says there’s a lot of fear within reform circles about reading medieval theologians, particularly Thomas. And the reason they’re worried about reading these medievals is that they’re worried they’re going to read them and find out that they are presumably these really persuasive Catholic theologians that are going to then make people want to become Catholic, which is I think a really fascinating thing to be worried about, particularly given one’s views. I don’t want to straw man views on predestination, but it’s a very strange thing to worry that you can’t expose someone to a theologian like Thomas because it might make them become Catholic. It’s particularly if you think that the Bible is very clearly on your side with it. Now we’re going to eventually get to Dr. Cleveland’s argument about confessionalism, reading them through a Protestant lens on purpose to avoid becoming Catholic.
But before I even get there, what do you think about their description? Because I know Dr. Cleveland talked about having various friends and former students who’ve become Anglican or Orthodox or Catholic. Have you seen something similar maybe in your professional and personal context as well?
Ryan:
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I resonate actually with this clip fairly deeply. I think I understand where they’re coming from. And again, their suppositions here, to me, it makes a lot of sense. So if you believe that there’s a very powerful arguer named Thomas Aquinas who was very, very correct and helpful in defending the truth in say doctrine of God, where Protestants tend to want to copy and paste from Thomas, but he epically got it wrong in the other areas of theology, then yeah, there’s going to be some caution that you’re going to want to give even in wisdom and prudentially speaking. I think there’s a little bit different. Well, who’s actually studying these arguments? And if we’re needing to gatekeep people from pursuing intellectual inquiry out of fear, like, well, maybe your hold on the truth isn’t quite as solid as you might want to attest.
But I do understand, I think, what they’re saying pretty well. And the phenomenon is definitely real. There are a large number of folks whom this characterizes to various degrees. And it does seem that the more time you do spend with the great Catholics theologians, especially someone like a Thomas Aquinas, the Lord providentially uses that to bring folks into, from our perspective, into a deeper knowledge of the faith. And yeah, that phenomena is very real and Thomas is very powerful.
Joe:
Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. And as you were saying that, I was thinking of Doug Beaumont in his book, Evangelical Exodus, where he’s just looking at the stories of all of the evangelical seminarians who became Catholic just from one Southern evangelical seminary in North Carolina. I believe that was Norm Geisler’s. And Geisler writes a book responding to Catholicism. And if memory serves, his co-author on that book ended up becoming Catholic after that. I mean, it was just like this fascinating. You see all of these people who, the more they study it, the more they’re becoming Catholic. And on the one hand, I completely understand what you’re saying where if you know there’s a theologian who is wrong on a certain area, it’s perfectly understandable to say, “Hey, watch out for them on this.” I mean, even as Catholics, we would say, “Thomas gets the immaculate conception wrong, or he gets this wrong.” Those kind of things.
And we wouldn’t say that personal authority just means infallibility. That we wouldn’t say just blindly follow literally whatever this guy says, which is I think maybe the caricature version of your own argument, your own story. But on the other hand, I’m partly just like, I don’t have a good framework for knowing a group. I can’t think of anything where a group of Catholic seminarians went in believing the Catholic faith, and then a bunch of them became convinced that Protestantism in some form was true and there was a big exodus in the other direction. You have plenty of people who go from being Catholic to Protestant or Catholic to nothing or Catholic to whatever, but it typically is teenagers, young adults, and the people who are not very well formed in their faith. Whereas the converts in the other direction seem to be much more. So the fact that this is a phenomenon that they’re worried about at the seminary level, I think is really interesting and an important way of understanding and framing it, particularly when you hear how they want to answer it.
Because the answer is, just putting my own cards on the table here. I think the questions that they want to ask in response treat these intellectual converts as if they’re just making a very irrational decision and they don’t seem to take it super seriously in terms of just giving it the credibility of thinking through the argument very deeply. So Dr. Cleveland, for example, this is the first question he would ask somebody like you.
CLIP:
So what would you say then to the person who says, “I used to be a Protestant, used to be Presbyterian, used to be a reformed Baptist, but now I read the church fathers and now I am Eastern Orthodox or I’ve read Aquinas. Now I’m Catholic.” So what would immediately come to your mind for a person who says that? Where would you begin to try to help probe to get his thinking out?
CLIP:
Right. And my first thought is at what point did that authority supersede scripture’s authority? At what point did the authority of the fathers or whatever, elevate itself above the authority of scripture? That would be my first question.
Joe:
So let’s take that as the first question. Why do you value the actoritas of Thomas over the actoritas of God breathed scripture, Ryan?
Ryan:
Yeah. So I think I would respond by rejecting his presentation of the Catholic position. It’s just not the case. When we talk about the octoritas or the authority of holy scripture, which is deriving from the prophets and apostles to whom God personally revealed himself, their authority is supreme. And it’s a full stop after that sentence. There’s no qualification and there’s no secret Jesuitical footnote that’s actually – Unless
Joe:
The Pope says so. Yeah.
Ryan:
Yes. No, the authority of holy scripture is supreme. And when I say that though, I’m boiling it back to the authority of the prophets and the apostles, because technically speaking, texts don’t have this quality of grounding ascent, except derivatively on persons who have this quality of grounding ascent. This quality, again, that we’re calling authority. So it’s even a little bit off kilter to start talking about holy scripture and its ability to ground our judgments of faith, except as a proxy to running back to prophets and apostles to whom God has revealed himself and upon whose word of testimony we sent. Thomas Aquinas is very clear about this graded level of authority, if you like. And yes, holy scripture is at the top. And it’s also a little confusing to me how this caricature prederves because this is ST1Q1, I think it’s A9, whether holy scripture or whether soccer doctrina is argumentative.
You look down to Thomas’s resolutions, the objections, if memory serves as either number one or number two, where Thomas starts talking about how the theologian, when he’s doing what Thomas calls soccer doctrina, how he argues and what kind of arguments produce the sort of necessity of conclusion that ground the kind of solidity of ascent that has that highest solidity, the solidity of ascent of faith. Well, he says only authorities from canonical scripture and arguments that are taken from them are the ones that ground our ascent at this highest level. So to convert this into Normi terms, scripture is supreme. And sola scriptura in this sense is absolutely true and has always been, if I can say, the Catholic position.
Joe:
Yeah. I think that’s very surprising for a lot of people, just hearing what you just said there, because we often oppose a certain kind of sola scriptura. But if we mean that scripture is a higher authority than individual church fathers or anything like this, then yeah, that is certainly. I mean, none of the fathers carry the weight of scripture in terms of its authority.
Ryan:
Yes. And a Protestant will often, for lack of better terms, proof texts from the fathers where they are protesting their insufficient authority by contrast to the authority of canonical scripture. So Augustine will have a large number of quotations. And this is why, again, Thomas continues right in that quotation. He says, “Holy scripture and arguments taken from its authority, canonical scripture are the only ones that the theologian uses arguing from necessity and properly.” That’s a little bit more of a technical thing. But arguing from necessity. And then he contrasts to authorities of the holy fathers. And he says they have a subordinate authority and they don’t produce this kind of necessity in soccer doctrining. He says only arguments from them are only plausible probability are in Latin. They have a sort of plausible ascent. Again, there’s some technicality scholasticism here. But the point is the gradation here is very clear.
Scripture, church fathers. And Thomas then would even. Thomas is not going to start loudly touting his own authority here, but Thomas would place himself in even maybe a third level of doctors of the church. We were talking about the great medieval theologians here behind the fathers, subordinate to holy scripture. Again, this is kind of super basic and there’s no secret Jesuitical footnote that’s changing this dramatically or drastically when you look into the qualifications. And so yeah, I just would reject this as a false caricature.
Joe:
Yeah. If this isn’t page one of the Summa, it’s at least very close. And so it is fascinating that people wanting to talk about the influence of Thomas don’t seem to have enough of an idea of Thomas’s own framework for authority. I mean, basically they’re suggesting, sounds like, that Protestant Thomas who become Catholic didn’t make it past page one of the Summa and yet somehow became so enamored with Thomas. It’s hard to square those two ideas. They have a very untimistic view of Thomas. It’s not impossible as a position, but it does seem to just fundamentally misunderstand what the conversation is even about, which I think is really unfortunate. Because I think it is important from a Catholic perspective to say, no, no, we don’t think Thomas is above scripture. If there was an area where Thomas says one thing and Jesus says another, or Thomas says one thing and the apostles say another, we know – Jesus says every time.
We know who wins. Don’t worry. Yes. But
Ryan:
I think – Well, that’s really important because I do think, I In fairness and justice to the Protestant position here, we’re talking about a situation where two different persons are asserting either part of a contradiction. So we have Jesus saying it is raining outside and St. Thomas saying it is not raining outside. And then the question is, well, whose arctoritas wins? The question is, well, the answer is Jesus every time. There’s no question. This is obvious and there’s no competing with the authority of Christ, which is supreme. That’s an issue of when you actually know what either person is saying. So I do think where the Protestant position is slightly askew from even what we’re discussing here and kind of rebutting here is, well, the issue is more in the realm of interpretation. So who has the authority to interpret is actually more the question, even historically, you go read someone like a Francis Turaton and the question in which he is facing off against the authority of the Pope is who has the right to decide and bind the interpretation of holy scripture?
And that’s a slightly different thing. That’s asking what does Jesus actually mean when he’s speaking, say, Aramaic? And we’re not sure if he’s talking about whether it’s raining outside or something else. Who has the authority to bind interpretation as slightly different from this issue of who has supreme authority as we’re discussing here?
Joe:
Yeah. I think to give kind of your earlier example, where a case where Jesus says it’s raining and Thomas or somebody were to say it’s not raining, you have a clear contradiction. But if Jesus said it’s nice outside and Thomas said it probably wasn’t raining, then that is an interpretive question.
CLIP:
Yes.
Joe:
And so the question isn’t, is Thomas above Jesus? The question is, do the great doctors and the fathers have a higher authority in interpreting scripture and interpreting the moral law and philosophy and all of these things than I do or than my Protestant confession does or something like this. We’re going to talk about confessionalism, hopefully at least briefly. But yeah, I think that’s a good way of framing it. So if I may, the other question that Dr. Cleveland wanted to ask, well, he sort of poses this as an objection that you’re not really doing this for intellectual reasons because nobody ever converts for an intellectual reason.
CLIP:
And what I’ve found universally with every single convert is that they don’t convert because of some intellectual reason. They convert because they want to convert. And there may be reasons for that. They may be just this rosy picture of what it looks like on the other side, but they do it because they want to.
CLIP:
Yeah. It’s interesting. Ben Shapiro is famous for his facts don’t care about your feelings statement, which it’s so true. Facts don’t care about your feelings. But I think what is actually more true and more important for us to understand is that feelings don’t care about your facts. I want to believe what I want to believe and you can give me any sort of facts that you want to give me, but that’s not going to dissuade me from the things that I want because the affections are more powerful. They’re stronger than the intellect.
Joe:
So I though that was a really fascinating kind of argument that universally, every single convert, that’s the language he uses. What I found universally with every single convert is they don’t convert because of some intellectual reason. But we’re talking, it sounds like in the context here, we’re talking people in grad school or beyond who are reading medieval theologians and then converting. That doesn’t sound like there was a pretty girl at the Bible study and I switched to her church. I don’t know exactly who would even fall into this category. Elsewhere in the interview, they talk about how no one becomes Anglican except for aesthetic reasons. And a lot of Anglicans got triggered in the comments. And I actually agree with the Anglicans on that. I don’t think you could look at somebody like Matthew Barrett, for example, and say, oh, he’s just going from Baptist to Anglican because feelings.
I don’t even know exactly how to frame the question because the description was so different than my own view of the reality. So I want to be charitable to, yes, all of our motives can have these subrational things that maybe we’re not conscious of. I don’t know. Can you maybe steal man and respond to what Dr. Cleveland said there?
Ryan:
Yeah. I mean, I hope I’m not obnoxious, but I do largely accept the charge actually. Tell me more.
Well, I say that because yes, when you are reducing to merely, well, there’s liturgy, Catholicism has liturgy or they have the incense and it smells nice. Yes, when you’re being reductive like that, this is obviously very silly and people convert from very, very carefully thought out reasons that involve a lot of intellectuality. And I can attest that in just my own personal story. Yeah, there was a lot of careful intellectual thought that went into it. But with that said, the ascent of faith is an act of the intellect operating under the command of the will, definitionally speaking. And the will perceives that it is a good thing to ascend. And when we’re talking about goods that move a human person, well, there are all sorts of goods that God is using to bring people into knowledge of the Catholic faith. Some of those goods are the smells and bells.
The fact that yes, we are hylomorphic beings. That is to say we’re not just brains in a vat, but we have rational souls that are suffused with materiality or materiality suffused with irrational souls, I suppose. And so passions definitely play a part in conversion. And that’s okay. That’s called being normal. And passions can be bad and lead you into falsehood. That’s true. You can be hoodwinked by your passions, but also passions alert you to what is good and right as well and can be well functioning. So yes, I admit the charge that there are a lot of these volitional elements that bring together cumulatively, not that you are doing something subrational or against reason. So a lot of the issues of motives of credibility that are primarily grounding the goodness of the decision that the will is targeting in the ascent of faith. A lot of those motives of credibility are initially, are there any contradictions here?
It’s a very negative thing. So say from a Protestant perspective, do Catholics worship Mary?
Answering no to that and removing various doubts and intellectual perplexities is a very solidly intellectual process that requires a lot of firm arguments that make the ascent of faith not the sort of blind, again, subrational faith that I think you’re very concerned to preserve. And rightly so. But as I see in my own self, I see in many other people perceiving the goodness of Catholicism and perceiving the modus of credibility that make it credentially and even justly obliged to make this decision. I think that’s actually how faith works. So yeah, maybe I’m being a little – No,
Joe:
I think that you’re being very charitable to the view. I mean, partly you’re adding another dimension because I think he was sort of pitting maybe the intellect with the passions, or at least that’s how I interpreted it. But bringing in all the other volitional elements that you are drawn to goodness.
And this is a solidly Christian way to proceed actually. Psalm 34, taste and see that the Lord is good or taste and see the goodness of the Lord. It doesn’t just like, don’t just rationally work through, here are these syllagisms that point to the fact that there must be a God and here are all of these proofs that show Jesus seems to be the Son of God and he rose from the dead. You could work through it all dryly intellectually, but despite the stereotypes of scholasticism, that’s not the actual thing that you’d be pointed to by a scholastic of like, no, no, this is not just true. It is also good. And this was one of the life changing things for me was hearing from Father Gertek, a solid Tomist, that the ascent of faith is not merely an act of the intellect, but an act of the will as well.
And that’s true for every Catholic. That’s true for every Christian who has ever vowedly made an act of faith. And we can sometimes –
Ryan:
It’s of the definition of what we mean by act.
Joe:
Right.
Ryan:
Yes.
Joe:
Right, right. The acting part of the act of faith is because there’s a movement of the will.
CLIP:
Yes.
Joe:
That I think can be something we sort of downgrade and downplay. So I appreciate you giving a stronger kind of version of this, but I think it would be a danger to maybe divorce these things because you can imagine an irrational system that sounds really good. And so it’s really attractive, but it’s not rooted in truth. And so you can kind of pit goodness and truth against each other. If I may, I want to pivot here because one of the things that they talk a lot about is strangely, not just reading and accepting Thomas on his own terms. And I though this was really fascinating, particularly if you’re going to suggest that these conversions aren’t being done in an intellectual sort of way, to suggest you actually need a hermeneutic to resist going where the logic would normally go. So this is a very lengthy conversation.
I want to be fair to it, but maybe if I could just play a couple of different parts here. So the first thing is going to be this question of whether or not it’s nuts to read the church fathers and Thomas on their own terms the way it might be nuts to read Moltman and Bart and other people on their own terms.
CLIP:
This is fascinating. It just reminds me of the professors I had going through the PhD program that it’s an epistemological issue. How do you study sources? And we were force fed Moltman and Bart and stuff that we had to dive in to that. And they said, “You’ve got to read them on their own terms. You’ve got to try to understand. Don’t come to them as an Orthodox Baptist. You’ve got to read them on their own terms.” And I tried to do that and I think I don’t understand their terms. Their terms are just nuts here. It doesn’t fit with scripture. But we were encouraged to just kind of try to be neutral. You’re going to be the observer that doesn’t have any kind of biases. And of course that’s just nuts. You can’t do that.
Joe:
So depending on what he means there, I think there’s a question of whether we interpret things in a purely neutral way. I think you can argue everyone brings their own biases to the table. And I think that there’s an important distinction that Cleveland goes on to make in response to that, that you should actually try to understand an author on their own terms, even if you disagree with them, to understand where they’re coming from and why. And I think you’ve actually done a good job in this of saying, “Yeah, here’s what I think these guys are saying and here’s why.” That doesn’t mean you have to agree with them. But I think to throw out it is just kind of nuts. Because I mean, the context here was reading Thomas Aquinas that, oh no, you can’t understand the world through his lens. That’d be crazy.
I know. In some sense, maybe it’s impossible because we live in such a different world. But in response to that, Dr. Cleveland in particular promotes this idea of confessionalism. And that’s something that they all kind of touch on a little bit. So I want to give a sense of what they describe as kind of the spectrum of confessionalism.
CLIP:
And with confessionalism, there’s this spectrum of private interpretation. Whatever I say that the scriptures say, that’s what the scriptures say. And then on the other end of the spectrum, there is church tradition too, where whatever the fathers have said and whatever the magisterium of the church is, that’s what the scriptures mean. And so I’m just going to take whatever the magisterium of the church is, which is a Roman teaching. But then both of those ends of the spectrum, both of those ditches I think could be really dangerous for one’s soul. And so confessionalism is so helpful in saying the scriptures are ultimate. They are our final authority there and errant and they’re inspired. And so I’m not coming at the text or I’m not coming at any issue believing like, here’s my own private interpretation. This is what I believe the scriptures to teach and I didn’t come at this on my own.
I have had help in doing that.
CLIP:
Right. And that’s so important for understanding what we’re doing with that because we’re not setting up another Pope with our confession. We’re not setting up another Catholic magisterium. The point is that with the confessions, we believe scriptures teach these things. I thought
Joe:
That was really fascinating that he talks about how in his own story, he was able to resist becoming Catholic from the influence of Thomas Aquinas because he read them through the lens of John Owens and through the lens of the London Baptist Confession and so on. And so there is a spectrum where on the one extreme, you just have private interpretation. And then on the other extreme, you have the magisterium of the church. And in between, you have this idea of the confessions. And I wanted to kind of kick it over to you to see what you though of that idea and how you would respond to it.
Ryan:
Yeah. I think confessionalism in these circles means a lot of different things. So we’re dealing with Baptists at the moment. Presbyterians confessions have a different kind of connotation. Dutch reformed is much more similar to Presbyterians. But Baptist confessionalism tends to be a bit of on the weaker side. If you look at classic Protestantism, confessionalism, in my opinion, functions equivalently to how the magisterium functions. So in the sense that there is a body of propositions that the individual can refer to as verified propositions. So these are confirmed to be true. And you can use those as a point of reference to, well, when you come up against a point where there’s an actual contradiction between say what Thomas Aquinas is really saying here in ST, whatever, and what Westminster Standards chapter three is saying, well, you know that this is a true proposition and that the opposite is condemned proposition and therefore don’t listen to Thomas there.
He got that one wrong. In my opinion, this is really what confessionalism is in these circles. And it is basically equivalent to magisterium in this narrower level. Now, there’s a couple of important differences that need to be taken note of. One of them would be for a Protestant, confessions are always emphasized as subordinate to holy scripture. Again, I think there’s a little bit of bait and switch there, even as we were talking about the issues of authority.
Confessions, they have binding authority, but it’s only insofar as scripture. They’re truly derived from holy scripture. Well,
Yes, a Catholic would also say that essentially about the Magisterium. This is a little weird to compare and contrast Protestantism and Catholicism on. But one of the real differences I think when push comes to shove is that confessions are not infallible. They are reformable. They are at least in theory. And for that reason, even though they have this kind of epistemic verification position for the average person, and I think wisely and prudentially, we all need kind of a check as we hear different things. And we need to recognize like, okay, whether we’re pulling out Denzinger or the Westminster Confession, all persons have this. And this is a wise and prudential way to live because not all of us are called to be professional theologians. And maybe even those of us who are very, very small on that scale. So point being, I think confessionalism is basically the equivalent of Catholic magistering in a lot of these ways with some important differences, especially having to do with how reliable and permanently reliable it can be.
And so in theory, confessions can always be reformed and changed if we come to a point where we realize, oh, holy scripture was actually saying the opposite of what Westminster said. Okay. And so on and so forth. And so therefore the function of that authority in these more confessional circles is therefore heavily subordinated beyond. And this often is what Presbyterians mean by subordinating the Westminster standards to Holy Scripture. They mean that functionally speaking. So you go to a church trial and you have to prove things from the letter of holy scripture and only Westminster standards as kind of a quick cheat sheet. Well, that’s not how we treat the magisterium as Catholics. It’s not just a quick cheat sheet to scripture, even though it also is a cheat sheet to scripture.
Joe:
Yeah. Is it equivalent to earlier in the conversation, we were talking about in Thomas using the sayings of the fathers compared to the canonical scriptures. Would it be fair? Because it seems in one sense that they have a similar sense of the status of the confession as a subordinate authority to what we would say with like the fathers or Thomas himself. On the other hand, when they talk about reading these guys confessionally and not just reading them confessionally, at one point they make the, I think, facially implausible charge that Thomas is as much of a Protestant as he is a Catholic. Now, I don’t think anyone reading Thomas freely without putting on blinders on purpose is going to ever come to that conclusion. And the fact you need these reformed blinders and confessional lenses to make sense of it in that way is probably telling.
But given that there are in fact contradictions between Thomas and the confessions, including over what scripture means on certain things, you might imagine a situation where person A, reads scripture a certain way. Thomas reads scripture a different way. The Westminster confession reads the same scripture a third way.
How should a person sort those things out? It sounds like they’re saying, “Well, we don’t want to just default to personal interpretation and we don’t believe there’s an infallible magisterium. And we don’t think you should go to Thomas. We don’t think you should go to the great theologians of old the medievals or the church fathers.” It seems like it’s putting the confession as the answer to which of those interpretations you should default to. Is that a fair understanding of the position? Because if so, that actually puts these very infallible confessions above the fathers and above the doctors of the church.
Ryan:
Yeah. That’s always been my understanding. I want to do justice to these views, these thoughts, these concerns. And my understanding and my experience is essentially what they’re saying is when it comes up to a place where Thomas says it’s not raining and Westminster says it is raining, you need to understand it is raining. And that’s how confessionalism and reading Thomas through confessional lens is what it means as far as I can see. And then the question is, well, is the Westminster standards, does it have sufficient modes of credibility to –
Joe:
Command that,
Ryan:
Yeah. To command that kind of ascent? And I think the answer is very clearly no. But then again, a lot of Protestants don’t really think in those kinds of terms of modes of credibility sufficient to command ascent.That’s not really how they’re thinking about even the ascent of faith. It’s very equivocal between the systems. So I don’t know. I always get the sense that these conversations just are so just different thought worlds that have a lot of overlap. But once you kind of enter in the thought world, it’s hard. It’s very, very hard in charity and injustice to each position to convert back and forth between systems. And if you’re like me, as cradle Protestant now become Catholic and I think fairly tomofied in my head, you start to have two streams of consciousness and you’re almost schizophrenic going over here. And it’s just a very difficult thing to merge together.
Joe:
Yeah. It makes sense. And it can be very difficult as someone who wasn’t brought up Protestant to enter that world in a way where I can accurately, charitably kind of embrace it on their terms and say, okay, here’s how they’re getting from A to B to C, when that doesn’t appear obvious outside of certain presuppositions. And so in some ways, what they’re talking about is confessionalism. It was reminding me of Thomas Kuhn’s arguments about hermeneutics and the structure of scientific revolutions, that when we’re accessing new data, we interpret it through the lens of the system that we broadly understand to make sense of the world. So he uses the example of when people believed in geocentrism, they would look at the other planets in the sky and they assumed that they were wandering stars. So even the word planet comes from the Greek term for a wandering star.
Because if you assume that there can’t be other planets also in rotation around the sun because you don’t think that we’re rotating around the sun, then the only way to make sense of it is, well, these bodies appear to just be wandering around. If you assume heliocentrism, you don’t have to assume they’re wandering anymore. Now they have a fixed rotation. That kind of thing where they were seeing, it wasn’t like they didn’t see the planets. They did. They didn’t know what to make of them in the system that they were interpreting data through. Eventually they get so many things that challenge that system that they have to convert.
Ryan:
Change the system. That is interesting. And it’s different from what I was trying to charitably interpret as well because there’s a point at that interview, I listened to it over my coffee this morning. There’s a point in that interview where they say something like Thomas Aquinas teaches justification by faith alone. And I think that they would probably point to that as an example of reading Thomas through a confessional lens. And that’s much more like what you’re saying here, where you have a kind of raw data coming from Thomas Aquinas and you’re interpreting it according to the grid of the confession. So it’s not really an issue of we’re facing up a contradiction and we’re going with one. So it is definitely different from what I’m saying.
Joe:
Yeah. I mean, I think it’s probably both of those things to be clear. Okay. If I may, there were a couple closing questions I though about. I think I’ll just kick them over to you both. You can answer one or both of them. Number one is for anyone listening who maybe is new to Thomas, maybe they’re coming from a Protestant background and they’re afraid of Thomas, where would you recommend they begin? And the other question is, do you think faithfully reading Thomas on his own terms has the kind of magnetic force that is naturally going to lead someone to become Catholic? There’s a very practical question there and a very loaded question. I’ll let you decide trouble
Ryan:
Here, Joe.
Joe:
Yeah.
Ryan:
Exactly. I love Thomas’ all my heart. He means the world to me. I don’t expect a lot of people are that kind of fanboy status or ought to be. Yeah. But that’s just been what he is for me. He’s been everything. So with that said, I study Thomas constantly and obsessively, but I’m not sure that actually going directly to Thomas himself is maybe the most useful way for just the normal person to really grow in their knowledge of the truth. So if you’re interested in more Tomistic or faithful teaching, I recommend the Tomistic Institute. Always go to the Dominicans. If there’s OP at the end of the name, you read the book. These sorts of things. But I do find that because Thomas is so technical that a lot of people don’t, when they encounter him, they’re not equipped to read him with prophet. And I take very seriously people’s time and the kind of effort that they have to put in to get the good.
And I just don’t think for a lot of people, at least initially when they are inquiring about Catholicism or something like that, Thomas might not be the way to go. Also because I just really fundamentally don’t believe that the way to go about questions of becoming Catholic from Protestantism is not becoming a Theobro on the internet, is not solving all sorts of weird, obscure micro conclusions about this and that. And I say that as someone who tries to do that professionally. I think that it’s not a wise and right and just way to go. The issue of motives of credibility is so important here. And this is the way that the ascent of faith is made. And when you are considering questions of converting to Catholicism from Protestantism, yeah, they’re going to need to be times where you recognize caricatures that you’ve held and you need to deal with arguments that show, “Hey, Catholics don’t actually pray to Mary when we say pray to Mary on Protestant terms.” These sorts of things, very important.
I’m not trying to say radical things and then move on. But when you convert the meanings of terms, there’s so much equivocation between the systems. A lot of the real Protestant worries are just not characteristic of genuine Catholicism. So this is a long-winded answer. I wouldn’t recommend a lot of people go to a lot of Thomas directly. You might read, however, say his commentary on the Apostles Creed, which was a series of sermons that he actually delivered to lay people essentially. So this is Thomas talking about the fundamentals of the faith, the Apostles Creed, what he considers 14 articles of the faith and trying to be Mr. Scholastic, but do so in a way that’s really, really helpful and actually is going to illumine your mind for real. I think a lot of people get glazed donut when they’re reading the summa and they think that they’re having real intellectuality when maybe that’s not happening.
Summa is super technical. So take that with a grain of salt. That would be my humble recommendation. Then maybe the compendium of theology. But honestly, just go look at the Tomistic Institute and all the videos the Dominicans put out or listen to Joe Heshmeyer. The second question though, does Thomas have this kind of magnetic power? Is he the boogeyman?
It depends on my mood today. I’m going to answer yes. I’m going to answer no. There’s an awful lot of Thomas that if you accept Thomas on doctrine of God, there’s no kind of necessity when we’re talking about Dadeo Uno stuff, natural theology stuff. There’s no kind of necessity internal to that, to concluding Catholicism from Thomas’s natural theology. So you’re never going to read the first, if I can say, three books of the SCG, the Summa Contragantiles, and become Catholic in any kind of necessary way. And the reason why that’s the case, and point of fact, Thomas really emphasizes that this is the case, is because all of those truths that he’s arguing for are accessible to anyone who has the light of reason, which we all have by virtue of being human. So there’s no kind of intrinsic necessity of becoming Catholic when you study his natural truths when you’re dealing with doctrine of God.
When you’re starting to deal with doctrinally trinity and Christology, which is where there’s overlap between Catholics and Protestants on, especially traditionally. In theory, Protestants and Catholics don’t have any major disagreements, or at least they ought not have any major disagreements over issues of Trinity and Christology. However, there is something called the nexus of mysteries. Vatican one talks about The nexus of mysteries where it’s not any kind of necessity, but if you accept the principles of the Catholic faith, any one of the principles, there’s a kind of drive internal to those principles that’s not going to be any sort of syllogistic necessity, but there’s a kind of internal plausibility to the set of mystery, some of which Protestants disagree over with Catholics. So these are issues of the sacraments, issues of grace, things of this sort, the nature of the mass, and all of these other truths that Protestants and Catholics do disagree with.
Yeah, if you read Thomas Aquinas and you’re dealing with any sort of supernatural truths, you are going to be loaded, at least to some degree, praise God to conclude the Catholic faith. Whether you have enough steam intellectually, enough time, and whether God is kind to you to bring you into that knowledge by way of that very long route of concluding is another question. But then finally, I’d say Thomas’s octoritas is something that increases as you study him.
We talk about Octoritas in a very technical sense as a stable and mind independent quality that is proper to a person. So Thomas’ actual knowledge, Thomas’ actual moral goodness that is sufficient to ground ascent to his word. However, Octoritas kind of grows as it plays upon the listener. And as you develop in your docility to Saint Thomas as a great teacher, a great guide to truth, the force of his Octoritas grows upon you. And that’s where I do think a lot of the Protestants worries about people reading Thomas and becoming Catholic have grounds. Again, I’m being radical here, conceding the point, yes, if God is kind to you and if you don’t put up volitional roadblocks, and if you don’t have any sort of aggressive intellectual sorts of perplexities and you encounter St. Thomas in his sanctity and his knowledge, maybe God will use that to bring you into the knowledge of the faith.
So I do think there’s a lot of truth to that, but there’s qualifications as well.
Joe:
Wonderfully put. Ryan, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate this
Ryan:
A lot. Thank you, Joe.
Joe:
And for those of you who may be wanting more on Saint Thomas Aquinas, and particularly on the way in which there’s this intellect and will interplay, the way that our hearts and our emotions and even our struggles with sin can interact with our desire to know and love God more. Thomas has a brilliant section on what he calls the eight daughters of lust. So for anyone who might be interested in that topic, encourage you to check it out right over here. For shamas I’m Joe Heshmeyer. God bless you.