Audio only:
Joe takes audience questions on the common Protestant claim that “Jesus alone is enough.”
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. First of all, apologies for the delay. We’re trying something new. I’m Joe Meyer. I’m joined today by my producer, metal Mike Kupris. Mike, do you want to introduce yourself?
Mike:
Hi, good morning everyone. My name’s Michael Kupris. I am the producer for Shameless Popery and I’ve been working with Joe for about a little over a year now. It’s been really good. It’s been very, very fulfilling. I do some editing rules for him, help him out with some content related stuff, and it’s been awesome. So what are we talking about today?
Joe:
Yeah, so well first, as I said, we’re doing something new. The format here is going to be a little bit of a blend between a normal episode and a live stream where it’s not going to be prescripted or prewritten prerecorded like a normal episode, but it’s also not going to be just a total free for all, like my normal Monday live streams. So the idea is each day we’re going to just each Thursday rather, we’ll get together, have some coffee and a conversation with me and somebody else. Today it’s Mike and explore a particular topic. So today, coffee wise, I’ve got some Trader Joe’s and I’ve got a cup that my wife gave me. It’s a pun. So we just got a new sofa, and so the cup says sofa is so good, and the topic is, well, why don’t you introduce the topic, Mike,
Mike:
Today’s topic is Jesus Alone Enough, which I didn’t even realize seems to be a big phrase or mantra that a lot of people in the Protestant and the evangelical space like to use.
Joe:
Yeah, I would say when we explore something like this, we want to make some distinctions because in a lot of ways we would say absolutely Protestants are completely right. To say Jesus alone is enough. But we’d say there’s other ways in which it would be wrong, even heretical to say Jesus alone is enough. So just to take two obvious ones, if I said I need Jesus and material prosperity, that would be a kind of idolatry. In fact, the reason, well, we’ll talk about this I’m sure in greater depth, but the reason St. Paul refers to covetousness as idolatry is because it’s a failure to believe that God is enough. So that would be one area where you thought you need Jesus plus that’d be clearly wrong. On the other hand, if I said, I don’t need God the Father, I don’t need the Holy Spirit, I just need Jesus, that would be absurd as well. So, oh, my wife says she doesn’t see the stream, but I think several of you do.
Mike:
Yeah, there’s a lot of people seeing this stream. Don, you worry about that. We’ve got 67 concurrent right now. We’re
Joe:
Good. Alright, great. Sorry. Anyway, there’s a way in which it would be wrong to say Jesus alone because to do that would be to separate Jesus from the Father, separate Jesus from the Holy Spirit. So when you ask Jesus alone, the question is are you making another God or is Jesus inviting you into something bigger than just you and Jesus? In other words, you don’t want to end up in a place where you say, it’s just me and just Jesus. Mike, any thoughts on that?
Mike:
Yeah, obviously we agree Jesus is enough to save us, but does that really imply that he alone saves us, which I think is what
Joe:
We’re driving towards? Let’s talk about that in terms of salvation because one of the ways this comes up is people will say, oh, Catholics make it too complicated. You’ve got Jesus and of the church or something like this. And the point there is Jesus invites us into a community. He invites us into the church. So it’s not actually fidelity to Jesus to say we’re going to have Jesus apart from the church, something like that. And so we have to just take Jesus on the terms he gives us, which may not be as private and individualistic as some forms of Christianity promote. So yes, if we are talking about there’s no other name under heaven by which we’re given to be saved, then absolutely Jesus is unique. He’s alone, nobody’s going to replace them. But if you talk about other aspects of salvation, you really can bring people to salvation.
So even when we’re talking about salvation, we have to be mindful of, for example, one Timothy chapter four, verse 16, which says, take heed to yourself and to your hearers. Hold to that for by so doing, you will save both yourself and your. So there is a sense in which we can talk about saving other people. Therefore we can talk about being saved by other people and not in a way where that other person is on the cross for us, but the person who shares the gospel with you really has a role in your salvation. And if you share the gospel with other people and bring them to Jesus, you really have a role in their salvation and not a way that threatens Jesus or his sovereignty or his uniqueness or anything like that. Oh, one thing, sorry, I’m jumping all over the place. This is very much a rough first draft, but I want to make sure people know given the format of these episodes, if you have questions or comments that you think are going to move things forward, feel free to add them in the chat.
Mike will pull them and we’ll share them. And so your questions, your comments can move the conversation forward. I’m presenting the big picture here and then I’ll respond to whatever you have. You can super chat them or not. We’re not really prioritizing super chats, we’re just prioritizing topical comments. So if you have something you think helps by all means share that I know already. Ld Bendik says, our Lord himself says that more is required. And then he quotes Matthew 7 21. Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father. So it doesn’t just say, just believe in Jesus repeatedly. When Jesus talks about salvation, he talks about other things like doing the will of the Father, or when you look at the separation of the sheep and the goats, you see this all very clearly.
And so none of that is to deny the sufficiency of Jesus in those things. He is desirous to be sufficient, but there is a clear sense in which there’s not just one commandment, love God or believe in Jesus. There’s a second commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. And so if your idea of salvation was it’s enough to believe and not love, that would be clearly wrong. St. Paul says, if I have faith and not love, I’ve got nothing. Or if your idea was it’s enough to believe in love God, that would still be not enough because I also have to love my neighbor. So there is an invitation into something bigger than a purely kind of individualistic vision of salvation. Mike, anything either you have or anything you see in the comments you think would drive this
Mike:
Forward. Hold on one second. Okay, so one of the things that it seems as though a lot of Protestants and especially prosperity gospel type people think of when they think Jesus alone is enough, is in the context of enough for providing for us in many ways like material, but sometimes even spiritual. So what are your thoughts on that, Joe?
Joe:
Yeah, there’s a couple ways of thinking about that. One is believe in Jesus and you’ll have material prosperity, the health and wealth gospel name it and claim it all that. And I think the most obvious rebuttal to that is that Jesus’ own family was poor and the son of man had nowhere to lay his head. You see this very clearly in the presentation when Jesus is brought into the temple 40 days after his birth, Mary and Joseph don’t have a lamb that they can afford to offer and sacrifice, so they offer a pair of turtle doves or pigeons, and that’s the offering you would make if you couldn’t afford a lamb. So we know how rough they had it in terms of not being well off because we can see that. And so if Jesus’ own family didn’t have great material abundance, if your idea is that if I just follow Jesus, I’m going to get rich, that certainly doesn’t follow.
In fact, we’re warned several times how hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God and how hard it is for the rich to be saved. It’s like a camel entering through the eye of a needle. So the better way of understanding the sufficiency of Jesus when it comes to money is that money isn’t what saves us. Money isn’t what makes us safe or secure. So I alluded to this earlier in the Old Testament, when Israel would fall into idolatry, they weren’t saying We no longer believe in the God of Israel. They had enough evidence that the God of Israel was powerful, he could save. He do all this stuff that even at their worst, they tended not to just fall into an atheism towards the God of Israel. Rather they fell into the idea that while God was real, he was not enough, that someone or something else was needed.
And so you’d turn to ball or you’d turn to any of these mooch, any of these false gods. And so it was kind of a God plus. And so we do want to watch out for Jesus plus in terms of anything that’s a rival to God, anything that’s an alternative to God. And now most of us today, we’re not tempted to be like, we’re going to turn to God and Krishna, but we are tempted to say things like, well, as long as I’ve got my 401k realistically not a 401k for us in this generation, as long as I’ve got my paycheck or I’ve got a little bit of savings, or I’ve got whatever, then I’m okay If I’ve got that in God, that’s enough. And God’s invitation is, no, that’s actually too much. What you want is to just be secure with Christ and then come if you’ve got prosperity, if you’ve got scarcity, all of those things become trivial by comparison.
Mike:
Alright, so Danny Holmes says, A Protestant objection I frequently hear is we believe you are saved by faith in Jesus. Catholics believed you’re saved by faith plus works plus sacraments, et cetera. How would you respond to this?
Joe:
Yeah, that this gets a lot of things wrong at a very basic level, that it’s combining different levels of causality. And I’ve given this example before, so apologies to those who’ve already heard it, but if I said, who painted the Sistine Chapel like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, if I said, what percent was it in Michelangelo and what percentage was it Raphael or something, you’d say, well, a hundred percent Michelangelo, 0% Raphael. But if I said, what percentage was it Michelangelo and what percentage was it paintbrushes, that question would be nonsensical. You’d say a hundred percent and a hundred percent because there’s no tension between those two. When we talk about faith, what do we mean by it? If by faith you mean simply an intellectual ascent that God is who he says he is. That’s not enough. And one of the clearest ways we see that that’s not enough is from the epistle of James where he points out that even the demons have that kind of belief and they shudder.
You believe God is one the devil does likewise. So if that’s all it took to be saved, the devil would be saved. That rather when we talk about faith, the just man lives by faith, there’s regularly a misuse of Abraham from people who I don’t think have carefully read the story of Abraham because they have this idea that Abraham has done absolutely nothing and then just trust that God is who says he is, and that’s it. It’s just an act of intellectual ascent. But the lines that St. Paul’s quoting from are from Genesis 15. Abraham has been following God since Genesis 12. And the important theme throughout the Old Testament is the just man lives by faith, he walks by faith. And so if you’re not doing that walking, then it doesn’t mean anything to say that you have faith in that sense. You can have the belief, but that by itself isn’t enough.
If you want a great exposition of this recently Ferris at How to Be Christian had an excellent video from a day or two ago where he, he’s responding to taco talks and his recent interview with Trent and showing that the thing that he’s calling the simple gospel, he’s adding a bunch of stuff to the gospel. Even if you’re adding in alone, you’re still adding to the gospel. And if your idea is adding to the gospel, that’s not what we’re called to do. So adding anything, even adding in alone where God doesn’t have one is still an addition, still something we’re going to resist. So yeah, the person who says, I believe in Jesus, but then they don’t do what Jesus says, that’s not what the Bible talks about in terms of faith. If you love me, you’ll keep my commands. Jesus says, so if you have faith and not love, you’ve got nothing.
If you love Jesus, you’ll keep his commands. And he calls us to do things like get baptized, like do the works of God. And so this idea that works just flow naturally from faith, show me the Bible verse that says that. And as you’ll see, there simply isn’t one. Rather this is the outworking of faith and the thing that forms and completes faith. CS Lewis gives the example. I believe it gives the example of a bridge. If you have a belief that a bridge, there’s like a rickety bridge and you believe that it’s secure enough to hold your weight, that’s one thing to say you believe that when you’re just looking at the bridge, it’s a very different thing to say. You believe that as you’re walking the bridge. And so faith is the act of actually walking that bridge and not just sitting on the side saying, yeah, that would probably work. And it’s a very different thing. The just man lives by faith, he walks by faith.
Mike:
Ryan Fouts has a really interesting observation off of that last comment. He says Jesus quote alone, yes, but Jesus is never alone because he has a body and he incorporates us into his body.
Joe:
That
Mike:
Which I think also really highlights something that I’ve kind of, I don’t want to say struggled with, but struggled to fully ideate, which is this idea of in heaven we have theosis, but then also we’re still individual or the idea of praying to the saints as them as individuals, but really you’re praying to God through the saints or something like that. Maybe that’s an inaccurate way of describing it, but I feel like there’s kind of a parallel there.
Joe:
The incorporation into Christ is such a thing that to say Jesus plus his body, there’s something a little bit nonsensical about that. This is one of the, I think part of the issue here is just that we are separating Jesus and the church too much. And I think people who aren’t Catholic, who aren’t coming from a background with a big view of the church might hear that it might sound all sorts of alarms in terms of idolatry or something. But I always go back to Ephesians one which says that God has put all things under his Jesus’ feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all. So according to St Paul, the church is the fullness of Christ. This is what sometimes called Christus Totos that if you want the whole Christ, you need Jesus ahead In the church’s body that’s straight out of scripture.
And this is a recurring theme, particularly in Ephesians. St. Paul talks about the inseparability of Christ in the church that it would be like separating a husband from a wife or a head from a body. And so trying to take Jesus alone in a decapitated sort of way, you’re taking the head without the body, you’re taking the bridegroom without the bride that’s fundamentally un-Christian. And there’s a risk in which you sort of incarnate Christ because the point of the incarnation is that Jesus now has a body, this begins with his physical body in the first century and it continues through his mystical body, the church and the way that he makes his body sacramentally present in the Eucharist that the incarnation begins in the first century, but it continues for all time that this is a permanent change. It isn’t as if he ascends into heaven and the incarnation is over rather even in ascending into heaven.
This is a continuation of the incarnation even into heaven so that now there’s this bodily presence in heaven in this new and radical way that this is part of. So stepping back when we think about heaven, don’t imagine heaven is just like some far off place like by the planet CoLab rather heaven is the place in which God is in his fullness. And it is this realm that initially is simply immaterial and materiality is introduced into heaven in the ascension. And this is part of the union of heaven and earth and this union of heaven and earth is brought to its fullness in the creation of the new heavens and the new earth. That’ll be the full marriage of heaven and earth. But you’re already seeing this play out more and more through the growth and spread of the church. This is the spread of the reign of the kingdom of God that Christ’s kingdom is made visible through the church.
And so we can pray every day thy kingdom come because we believe that the kingdom is already here in one sense and is still coming in a yet fuller sense. And so we are the heralds of the union of heaven and earth. Were the heralds of the kingdom’s arrival into history and into the domain of earth that these two things aren’t meant to be at odds, heaven and earth, they’re meant to be in harmony and that’s what we come to announce. So to separate Christ from his own kingdom is no service to Christ. The king like to say, oh, I love the king so much, I’m going to separate him from his kingdom is not a service.
Mike:
Alright, John Roberts had asked earlier, Joe, do you feel like in some of the evangelical circles, it’s a race to the bottom for the lightest yolk? And I think his implication there is that you can throw so much of the onus on salvation on Jesus or so much of the onus for even your behavior on Jesus that it starts to take away your own onus.
Joe:
Yeah, the kind of easy believism is what that sometimes gets called. And who was it? Was it Dietrich Bonhoeffer who says Grace is free, but it’s not cheap. I think it’s a good line. God freely gives his grace, but if you cheapen it by treating it with that kind of I reverence, that’s not faithfulness. Now look, the fact that there are Protestant theologians who push back against that should show. We’re not talking about all Protestants here, but this very, you can say the sinner’s prayer and you’re good to go. It’s almost like checking a box and then one saved, always saved. This is a form of Protestantism, a form of evangelicalism, a form of non-denominational that exists and is worth highlighting. Don’t assume if you’re Catholic talking to a Protestant, don’t assume that person you’re talking to automatically believes that. But there are tendencies in that direction.
If you notice the work that a lot of Protestant YouTubers are doing, it’s really trying to call modern Protestants back to more historic Protestantism where it was more like Catholicism and kind of halt the descent into this kind of bare minimum form. But if you think about it, this is in some ways the natural outgrowth of what begins in the reformation. Protestantism doesn’t add, it takes away. So we believe in faith, but then they add in alone. So it’s faith alone. Now we believe in scripture, but then in scripture alone, we believe in the glory of God. They get separated from the saints and the way God has made glorious in his saints. All of these things where it becomes a, we’re going to keep this part of our Christian heritage and we’re going to say that’s it, and we’re going to take that part to the exclusion of some other part.
We’re going to take faith and not works. We’re going to take scripture and not tradition. We’re going to take God glory and not the way God’s made glorious in the saints. And once you start that process of reducing Christianity, even if you’re trying to protect it from what you see as innovations, that reductive process isn’t going to just stop in one generation. Other people are going to say, well, you didn’t take away enough. And so you’ll have people who just basically say, Luther wasn’t Protestant enough, we need to go further. And you can have that kind of spirit of 15, 17 if you want to say it that way, where, alright, you’re off to a good start, but you didn’t get far enough away from the Catholic church. This is a lot of what the Puritans are doing. They don’t think the Anglicans have gone far enough. We need to purify the church from any vestiges of romanism. And so we need to take it further. We need to take it further. And eventually in the American expression of this, this does get to reducing to where even baptism becomes optional, even things Jesus explicitly says to do. Well, if you think you have to do that now you’re relying on yourself. And it’s like, no, no, you’re literally just obeying the thing you were told to do.
Mike:
Alright, Sebastian Torres actually has an interesting question regarding the intercession of the saints when praying for intercession of saints. Do we need to word it in a way that specifically does not attribute divine power to the saint or can we be very direct as long as we know it comes from Christ?
Joe:
Oh no. I mean if you ask a saint to intercede for you or to do something for you, you’re not going around God. This is the difference between magic and miracles. There’s a lot of scholarship trying to explain what that difference is because if you just think about the way it looks from the outside, magic and miracles might look the same. A great example of this is before Pharaoh, Aaron, his staff turns into a serpent, but then the Egyptian magicians, their staffs turn into serpents as well and Aaron’s staff swallows theirs up. But nevertheless, there is a clear sense in which someone looking at that would say those two things looked the same. Maybe one of them had more powerful magic, but they both look like magic. So what’s the difference between magic and miracles? Magic is an attempt to either control or go around God that you consult dark forces or use some kind of spiritual power apart from God, like divorced from God to try to bring about some end, or you try to compel God or compel depending on the religion one of the gods.
Whereas the miraculous relies subserviently on divine power that God is able to bring about his good effects and we entreat him and we rely on him and we trust in him. And so that’s the key difference right there. Well, there’s similarly a difference between consulting the dead in the way the witch of indoor does where you’re trying to go around God and saying a prayer that the saints will intercede for you or act. And we see the early Christians are very clear that they’re very comfortable calling on the saints for their help. Even in the catacombs we find these prayers to the saints for their protection and one of the oldest known prayers, the sub toum Presidium, the original dating of this, put it around two 50. There’s been a lot of controversy about whether that dating is correct, but there’s an old manuscript that it’s papyrus number four 70 that has a copy of the sub presidium when the prayer just goes beneath thy compassion.
We take refuge of theotokos God bearer, mother of God do not despise our petitions in time of trouble. But resco is from danger is only pure one, only blessed one. And you’ll notice that is a very high prayer in terms of Mary and devotion. You are asking Mary directly to help you and not just like, Hey, say a prayer for us, but rescue us from danger and somebody who doesn’t. So the fact that the early Christians were praying in that way is I think very telling. In fact, the prayer has such a high maryology in the sense that it has such a high view of Mary that some scholars refuse to believe it’s as old as it appears to be based on the manuscript and the lettering and the whole, it appears to be much older than people realized that we were praying to marry in this way.
And I should add here two things. One, prayer is one of the hardest things to document historically because think about all the prayers you’ve ever made, how many of those are written down and how many of those are written down in a place where somebody else is going to find them years from now and preserve them? Probably the answer is not many, if any, that is because you’re talking directly to God or because you’re talking to one of the saints, you’re not writing some letter to them. That’s just not how it works. And so unlike an epistle or a theological treatise or something where you might make a bunch of copies and send them out and there’s more chances for it to be preserved, most prayers are lost to history. I mean, they’re not lost in the sense that heaven receives them, but they’re lost in the sense that we don’t have the historical evidence for it.
But that also means the second point that however old this papyrus four 70 is, that’s not going to be the first time people prayed this sub to ’em, that there were earlier prayers. That prayer, I mean this is not the first time that that is a ritual prayer that we see liturgically, et cetera. That’s not the first time that prayer is prayed, but it’s also not the first time people prayed prayers like that. So however early, whether it’s two 50 or whenever it is, we know that the prayer itself would be even older than that and prayers like that older yet. So that gives us a strong indication. I think that the early Christians were perfectly comfortable asking Marian the saints for their intercession and they weren’t afraid that God was going to be threatened by it. If you ask a brother or sister in Christ to help you with a problem, that’s not a lack of trust in God.
So think about it this way. Let’s say you’re really wanting a job and you pray to God that he’ll open the doors for you and then you meet somebody who’s in the industry you want to get into and you ask them to put in a good word for you. Is that a lack of faith in God? Absolutely not. Because God is working hopefully through that person you asked for those doors to be open. This might be one of the ways that God is opening the door. So there’s no tension there, there’s no conflict there. It’s not like you’re saying, I’m going to trust this person instead of God, but rather I trust that God can work his will either directly through a miracle or something or indirectly. This is built into the whole structure of humanity. This tension between God’s direct action and his action that’s mediated through human beings is a false choice. And I think we see this in a thousand different ways in the way that we interact with God. But if I said, who made you? You say God, you say your parents, those answers are both right. So I would say something similar with the saints like who’s helping you? God, the saints. Sure, yeah, both. That’s fine. God’s helping you through the saints. God can help you some other way as well.
Mike:
Before we get too far away from specifically Mary Gracia, prima had an interesting comment. Joe, could you speak to the Jesus alone stuff removing him from his mother, what she offered in her role?
Joe:
Yeah. This is one of those things where I understand why people who don’t come from a background where Mary was emphasized might look at that and say, this feels completely unnecessary. This feels extraneous. And to them I would say, look at Revelation 12 that you can see very clearly that the mother of Jesus has some kind of special role. So let’s start Revelation 12 and then we’ll work through it. Revelation 12 describes a woman who’s cloth to the sun with the moon under her feet and on her head is a crown of 12 stars. She’s in heaven, she’s with child, she cries out in prop pens of birth and anguish for delivery and she gives birth. We’re told, and this is verse five, she brought forth a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a wr of iron. Well, who is that?
Well, in the obvious sense, that’s Jesus. So some heavenly queen gave birth to Jesus. Now you can understand that as Mary, that’s the obvious direct plain sense of scripture. You can also take it metaphorically for Israel and the church. All of that is right. It’s not either or even the child to rule the nations with the rod of iron. That language is coming from the psalms, that’s coming from Psalm two. And in Revelation two the saints are described as ruling with the WR of iron. And in Revelation 19, Jesus is described as ruling with a rod of iron. So this same image from Psalm two is used to describe the saints and Jesus, this woman is the mother of the saints and she’s the mother of Jesus. She’s Mary and she’s the church. She’s all of the above. It is not an either or the devil is at war with her.
He’s depicted as the dragon and as the ancient serpent. So we’re told Revelation 12 is highlighting that this is the ancient serpent, which is a reference to of course Genesis three. In Genesis three, the devil is told that he’s going to be at war with the woman and with her seed. And I’ve mentioned this before, but on the surface that sounds like Eve at the time, Eve’s name is woman. But Eve’s sons are Cain and Abel and neither of them poses some great threat to the devil that rather the seed of the woman is of course Jesus. And the reason we say the seed of the woman is because Jesus doesn’t have a biological father. So the seed there is the seed of the woman because it’s the son of Mary, if that’s right, if the early Christians were right in seeing Genesis three 15 as part of the proto evangelism, the first gospel, this is the first prediction of the incarnation.
It’s a prediction of the virgin birth, which means this is both a prophecy about Jesus. It’s also a prophecy by extension about his mother that he’s going to be born of a virgin tells us not only about him, but about who his mother is. She’s a virgin. And so the woman there in Genesis three 15 should properly be understood as Mary because the child of the woman is Jesus. And what child is this? So it’s Mary’s child. So you have this callback in Revelation 12 to Genesis three’s prophecy of a battle between the serpent and the virgin mother. And that should give us an additional reason to believe Revelation 12. In addition being about Israel and the church is also just literally about Mary. It’s very strange for people who pride themselves on taking the plain language of scripture to ignore that the mother of Jesus might be Jesus’s actual mother.
But that’s what the passage talks about. And then Revelation 1217 says in the dragon was angry with the woman who was the woman, the mother of Jesus, and went off to make war on the rest of her offspring on those who keep the commandments of God and bear testimony to Jesus. So that tells us two things. Number one, undeniably irrefutably. We have a mother and the devil is at war with our mother. Is that mother Mary? Is it mother church? Is it both? I would say both. But either way you’ll notice that a me and Jesus alone kind of view that cuts out the mother is not faithful to scripture because scripture doesn’t cut out the mother. And I think it’s very clear given that that we should take, well, particularly I always say this, if scripture in both Genesis three and Revelation 12 depicts the two teams as the devil’s team and the woman’s team, I mean you might be uncomfortable with that, but that’s what scripture does. So then the question is, whose team are you on? Are Mary’s team or are you on the devil’s team? And somebody saying people tearing down Mary saying Mary’s unnecessary, et cetera. They’re not helping Mary’s team. They’re helping the other team instead.
Mike:
Alright. And then a follow-up question from Daniel Covey. He asked on Mary several prominent online Protestants have recently expressed concerns with the work of St. Louis de Monfort, especially his true devotion to Mary. Wondering if you have any thoughts, Joe?
Joe:
Yeah, I would say I’m constantly reminded of St. John Henry Newman’s line about not treating love poetry like police reports that one of the things going on is that you can have a strong devotional language that is not literal and is not meant to be literal. And it would be a mistake to treat those expressions always as literal. So it’s been said, if you think he’s big on Mary, you should see him talk about Jesus, think about how much he has to, so there’s this language that is over the top and exaggerated that we are uncomfortable with, but that problem is on us. So we have really since the 19th century got this idea that true and literal mean the same thing. And so anything that uses exaggeration, we view that as kind of a form of dishonesty or a deviation from the truth in some way. And that’s a shame because that’s not accurate. It’s like people who think that the only facts or scientific facts, the only facts are things you can prove in a lab that’s reductive and it’s reductive in this way that’s really destructive that if this is not a world’s greatest dad mug. But if it was, that would not be a lie. Not because I’m the world’s greatest dad, but because that expression is meant to be an honorific that’s not meant to be taken literally.
Mike:
Can I also jump in just really fast? Yeah. I have this happen so much with my atheist and agnostic friends where it’s like, oh, well it can’t be proven true or you can’t believe that something is absolutely true unless you can scientifically reproduce it
Joe:
And
Mike:
It’s irritating because they don’t realize that empiricism has its own belief system built underneath of it.
Joe:
Yeah. Dr. Derek, I don’t know how to spell Derek, so apologies to Derek, I can’t give his YouTube channel spelling, but he is a professor who just did a thing on can we prove that God exists with science? And his point is no, that’s not how that works. And it’s not how it’s meant to work. There’s not even a possible way you go about creating a lab experiment that proves, oh, we discovered God in the lab. What would that even look like? It’s a nonsensical sort of request. It’d be like saying, okay, I want you to go to the lab and prove that Mongolia exists. That is such a deep misunderstanding of the kind of thing you’re wanting to know. You’re not going to prove the existence of Mongolia in a laboratory or if you can, I can’t imagine what that experiment would look like.
So those kind of things are things I think we need to be mindful of that if your standard of proof, if your epistemology is that reductive and that broken, then you’re not going to find the results that you’re looking for. But this is a problem with you and your view of the world within the scientism. How do you prove the universe exists? Let’s say you believe in the big bang. Can you make the big bang in a lab? I sure hope not. If you’re making micro universes in a lab, what are you doing? What are we talking about there? So we have unique and unrepeatable events, even in the natural sciences that we’re incapable of reproducing. That doesn’t mean we don’t believe in them. There are plenty of things like that. The Paleolithic era is not something you’re going to be able to reproduce an laboratory. So if that’s your standard of evidence, that’s an idiotic standard of evidence. To put it very bluntly and it’s worth asking, is the claim all true facts are scientific a true fact that you can prove scientifically? It’s not. It’s a philosophical, it’s a philosophical belief system. And so you’re using philosophy to argue against philosophy, which just shows you haven’t thought as deeply about the problem as you should have.
Mike:
All right, so we did have two $50 Super chats come in. Wonderful. And we did say we’re not prioritizing super chats today, but these are very relevant to the conversation. The first one is, love you Joe and Metal, Mike, thanks for everything you do. Thanks. But the second one is directly relevant and that’s from Gage Waltz. Is there a way to defend Catholics that may have statues and devotions that seem like on the surface competing with Jesus to outsiders or is there something out of balance good to see you metal Mike unleashed the comedy memes, Joe?
Joe:
Yeah, it’s a great question. The thing I would say is the fact that there are devotional statues might be alien to someone who doesn’t come from that, but it would be a mistake to view that just automatically as idolatry. And there is a double standard here, and I kind of get why, but we should call it out as a double standard. Nevertheless, if I go to Geneva, Switzerland, the place John Calvin was, there’s a giant larger than life reformation wall with huge statues of the Protestant reformers, particularly the Calvinists like the Swiss reformed. Do I think that people are idolatrous because they have statues of John Calvin and not Jesus? No. It is funny, it’s ironic that they have huge graven images of John Calvin who hated statues, but that doesn’t automatically make it idle worship because the point about, so one of the issues here is the term translated in the KJV is grave an image, the Hebrew word there is idol is al.
So yeah, it certainly it comes from the etymology four, two engrave, but it only means idols. There are other images that are carved and they’re not ever described with this word. So for instance, God commands the creation of the charitable. So there are charitable statues in front of the Ark of the Covenant. People are bowing down in front of them because they’re bowing down before the ark. This is not idolatry because they’re not giving divine honor to those statues. Rather those statues of the angels are pointing us to the reality of God, that the angels are meant to remind us of the presence of God who is beyond image and therefore our hearts are lifted up to him. That isn’t a threat to God’s honor or glory. And those images are never described in scripture as idols, as engraved image, even though they literally are engraved and they literally are images.
The thing that scripture is prohibiting in the 10 Commandments and elsewhere is idols. And idols are carved images to which you address divine honor. And so you can have pictures of loved ones, you can have statues, you can have statues of your brothers and sisters in the body of Christ, of the angels, et cetera. And these are not of themselves idols. Now if you’re giving divine honor to them, which I highly doubt, but if you’re giving divine honor to them, then they become idols and you shouldn’t do that. And if you’re tempted to give divine honor to them, then don’t use them, get rid of them. But it’s folly to imagine that that’s what the problem is. And here’s what I’d say here in the New Testament, we are warned about idolatry, but we’re not warned about idolatry in the sense of carving images and offering divine worship to them.
We’re warned about idolatry in the sense of things like covetousness and materialism and trusting in mammon, meaning a lot of Protestants are worried about what they perceive as a speck in their Catholic neighbor’s eyes when they should be worried about what is my relation to material possessions, what is my relation to money and to things like this because that’s the actual risk of idolatry that the New Testament warns us about. And so if you’re worried about stuff the New Testament doesn’t warn us about and you’re not worried about the stuff that it does warn us about, that’s an ever present temptation that we trust on our own strength, we trust in our financial riches and so on, then I think your priorities are wrong. So I get that somebody who is not used to having images in their religious settings might bulk at it, might be uncomfortable with it. A lot of that is just a matter of it being alien, not a matter of it being wrong.
Mike:
Alright, so Fred asks, Hey Joe, I had a discussion about Jesus alone with evangelicals. How can one get them to start the thinking process and overcome their ignorance without coming off as prideful?
Joe:
Yeah, I like to begin with Jesus’s words in the gospel of Mark. He says, repent and belief for the kingdom of God is at hand. And twice Matthew describes what it is. Jesus is preaching as the gospel of the kingdom. So a lot of Protestants have an idea of what the gospel is based on a particular read of Galatians and ignoring what Jesus says the gospel is and that the gospel involves the kingdom, it’s the gospel of the kingdom. So if your idea of the gospel doesn’t include the kingdom, you don’t know the gospel. And so I think starting there of saying, okay, here’s how Jesus presents the gospel and here’s what you just told me the gospel was. That can be very helpful. And again, if you look at Trent’s discussion, sort of debate with Taco talks or if you look at Ferris’s unpacking of that in how to be Christian, that recent video, those are kind of themes that they unpack and explore that’s worth because a lot of people have this idea that somewhere it says the gospel is faith alone apart from not only works of the law, but any good works and apart from baptism and all this.
And you just say, okay, cool, where is that? And it’s just not there in scripture and nowhere is that described as the gospel. So one of the points that Pharis makes in that video, which I think is worth stressing, is St. Paul doesn’t say to the Galatians, here’s the gospel because he says he’s already preached it to them. He’s pointing out the way that they’re going wrong and trusting in the Mosaic law, but that’s not telling positively. Here’s what the gospel is. So someone trying to work from that backwards to say, therefore the gospel must be X is doing a lot of work where they should be listening and they’re just building a theological structure. There are direct proclamations of what the gospel is throughout the four gospels and you go with that. Now here’s an important point that a lot of people miss. Why are works of the law bad and doing the works God has prepared for us good because the just man lives by faith.
So one of the things it means to believe is to trust that God has told me to do X and I’m going to go do X. But if I say, God has told me to do X, but I actually don’t think that’s enough, I need to do Y as well. Now I am actually saying it’s not enough to listen to God, I have to also do this other thing. So the Old Testament faithful, when they would do the works of the Mosaic law, they were doing them because God told them to. And that’s faithful, that’s good. That is actually living by faith. But now that law has been fulfilled. And so somebody who says, I still need to do that, that’s no longer faithful. Think about Moses. He’s told to strike the rock and water, become forth and he’s faithful and he does it and water comes forth later, he’s told to speak to the rock and water will come forth and he doesn’t trust us enough.
And so he strikes it again. The first time he did it, it was an act of faith. The second time he did it, it was an act of faith. Listen, is because he didn’t trust that he could just listen to God and do the thing God told him to do. He wanted to do the old thing. So in the judaizer controversy where people say, you have to be circumcised, you have to follow the mosaic law, et cetera, they’re not listening to what Jesus is telling them they need to do. Now they’re saying, what did we used to have to do? And going along with that. So that becomes an act of faithlessness. When you say Jesus’s words are not enough, you see a clear expression of this. People who think you still have to be a Sabbath keeper, even though the New Testament does not tell you that in fact says it’s quite the opposite.
They’re saying what God is calling us to is actually not enough. We have to go back to the old law. We have to go back to the old covenant. We have to go back to the Old Testament and do those things and then we’ll be good. And it’s like that is actually a lack of faith. And that is called out repeatedly in the New Testament. But somebody saying, Jesus told me to get baptized, I trust him. I’m only going to go get baptized. That’s not a lack of faith. That’s literally what faith is. So if your idea of faith is juxtaposed from faithfulness, that’s a bad understanding of faith. If your idea of Jesus’ Lord is separated from his lordship and action, that’s a failure to understand what does it mean to be Lord? He’s in charge. What does it mean for him to be in charge? I’m doing what he tells me to do. And so to say Jesus is Lord, and then you don’t treat him like Lord. That’s just the people who say, Lord, Lord, but don’t do the will of the Father. And those people are not saved. We’re told that by Jesus himself.
Mike:
Okay, circling back to the intercessions of the saints, Jayna Thompson writes, but what about people who put statues or pictures of St. Michael and pray to or say they’re protected by it? Isn’t that undue reverence? And I think it’s interesting to bring up the idea of the saints not interceding for us just through what we would conceive as verbal or contemplative prayer, but actually manifesting the intercession in somewhere, believing that they can do that.
Joe:
If I’m understanding it correctly, there are ways you can be superstitious in your relation to physical things like scapulars, statues, et cetera. And so if you’re imagining that I said this prayer in this way and therefore I’m going to get what I want, or I’m going to be protected because I’ve got this statue, right, that would be superstitious. But that’s just kind of a disordered. When we talk about the virtue of faith, one of the deviations from that is superstition where it’s not a proper orientation of faith, but that’s partly just describing the wrong agency to things. So yeah, don’t do that for sure. You are muted. Mike,
Mike:
I am muted. Sorry, I didn’t see that. Mickey Maddox says, I have to be honest, in cultural Catholicism in the Philippines, there are a lot of people who fall to heresy when it comes to our relationships with the saints. And I think that I’ve heard that happens a lot in Latin America as well.
Joe:
So I think there’s two things. One, if that is true of you or your culture, your context, whatever, then don’t. Two, I’d be careful about judging my neighbor on this because sometimes it’s the vestige of faith. So I’ve mentioned this before, Catholicism is what we might call a thick culture as opposed to a thin culture. There’s a lot of stuff to it and there’s a lot of cultural attachments to it, and that can be very good. In fact, healthy cultures often have that. Judaism has that, which is why you have people who are still identifying as Jewish, even if they don’t go to synagogue, or even if they don’t believe there’s still something there that makes ’em feel attached. You can have that in Catholic cultures as well. And as a two-edged sword. On the one hand, that by itself is not enough. That can be a kind of lukewarmness.
On the other hand, sometimes it’s through those kind of strange attachments people have that this is what brings them to ultimately a living faith, that they’re not just completely secular, they’re not completely cut off, they’re not just completely outside of Christianity. They have some kind of connection. So yeah, if that becomes superstitious or if it becomes kind of a substitute for a real living faith, that’s a problem. But if this is one of those even kind of emotional connections people might have where it keeps them in the fold in some way, God might use that as kind of the tug upon the string. If you’re familiar with the image from Brideshead Revisited.
Mike:
Alright, I think that captures most of the relevant comments we got today.
Joe:
Wonderful.
Well thank you to everybody who joined in. We’re going to do this again next week. Hopefully it’ll be a little smoother when we get started. We’re getting the kinks out still. And by all means, feel free to add your comments below too if you have other good questions you think we should be including to tackle as sort of a conversation starter. And this will be the basic model that we use. It’ll be me and Mike or me and somebody else. And then we’ll just take your questions and your comments as we move forward. So again, thank you to everybody. Thanks to Mike, thanks to everybody who commented, thanks to everybody who gave Super chats and all of that, and look forward to seeing and hearing from you next week and in the future. Alright, God bless you.
Mike:
God bless everybody.