Audio only:
Having a chat with Austin Suggs from Gospel Simplicity about Catholicism, Orthodoxy and his personal faith journey.
Transcript:
Mike:
Go ahead.
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, here to have a cup of Joe with my friend Austin Suggs of Gospel Simplicity. Austin, thank you so much for being with us.
Austin:
It is my pleasure. I just looked at, I don’t know if this is the public title for the conversation, but the one in StreamYard. Your favorite Protestant YouTuber. I’m touched, Joe.
Joe:
Yeah, I will say two things. One, Mike chose the title, but two, I don’t disagree with the title. I think I said something about that on a stream once and he was picking that up. I was like, ah, my favorite Protestant channel. You are
Austin:
Now committed to that quote forever. I’m
Joe:
Going to put it on my own. Apparently so, which I’ve said things I’ve regretted much more.
Austin:
Well, I’m glad to not be the most regretful.
Joe:
It’s a low
Austin:
Part. There we go.
Joe:
So, what we normally do in this channel, we have some coffee and talk about some issue of theology, apologetics, et cetera. So, this morning got my coffee. I don’t know if you’ve got anything on your end, Austin, but I didn’t think to-
Austin:
You didn’t send me the memo. I’ve got one- No, I apologize.
Joe:
I got a second
Austin:
Coffee.
Joe:
It is called Cup of Joe, but I guess it’s not self-explanatory.
Austin:
I didn’t even realize that was the title. I
Joe:
Think I was just
Austin:
Called Thursday live streams. Okay. It’s all ruined from here. Well, alas. I’m just
Joe:
Kidding. I got to work on branding. That’s what I’m learning. But in all seriousness, maybe you can introduce yourself and give us a little bit of your own background.
Austin:
Yeah, for sure. My name’s Austin Suggs, which I find a lot of people don’t know my name, even who have watched my channel for a while. I often get called Justin or just that gospel simplicity guy. But yeah, Austin’s my name if people care to know that or use it. I run the channel gospel simplicity, which I’ve been doing for a while, has recently become my full-time job. I grew up in the evangelical church, eventually got interested in questions of Catholicism and Orthodoxy when I was studying theology during my undergrad at Moody. After my undergrad at Moody, I
Joe:
Went on to do- Sorry, just for people who don’t know, can you explain what Moody is?
Austin:
Moody, yes. The place where Bible is our middle name. Moody Bible Institute is a Bible Institute out of Chicago. And it’s kind of like one of the last holdovers from the era of Bible colleges. A lot of them have either shifted into just Christian universities or have gone out of business. Moody is kind of one of the original ones and that has stuck around. Basically, everybody there out of your 120 credit undergrad degree takes like 90 credits of Bible and theology.
Mike:
Wow.
Austin:
So yeah, it’s a lot. So that’s kind of their whole thing. They’ve got a couple different majors, but they’re all ministry related. And I studied theology there. So they kind of build it as an undergraduate seminary is the kind of type of experience.
Joe:
And I assume Moody’s a las name. Moody Bible is not just a reference to lamentations or something.
Austin:
No, it is not. Yeah. It is Dwight Lyman Moody, the mid 19th century evangelist. It is named after him. So he started
Joe:
Out with that. So you clearly had a passion for God, for scripture, et cetera, to end up at Moody in the first place. I think that’s fair to assume?
Austin:
Yeah, absolutely. So out of high school, I mean, during high school, I had a brick kind of brief deconstruction period, but came back, I think, even more in love with the faith. As I was figuring out, every junior in high school gets asked, “What are you going to do when you grow up?” And like most of them, I had no idea. But at that time I was really interested in studying medicine. I was thinking about doing something like Doctors Without Borders. I’d actually gotten in my senior year to a combined medical program where you have your undergrad and graduate kind of all set up. I had my roommate lined up. I was ready to do that, but I was also interning at my church at the time. And at the end of that internship, they offered me a full-time job and much to the chagrin of my parents who are very committed Christians, but also just American parents.
I decided to take a gap year and defer my enrollment into that program and see if ministry was for me. And during that time, I like to say the church made the mistake of letting me teach in the high school ministry because I absolutely fell in love with it, but I also realized how much I didn’t know. And so that’s why I wanted to go study theology at Moody because I figured that was the place where I could learn as much as I could.
Joe:
Beautiful. Now, how do we get from there to here and what does here look like?
Austin:
Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So my current kind of ecclesial context is that my wife and I worship in an Episcopal church down the road from us, which is kind of like Anglo-Catholic and its liturgy. I’d like to say there’s more Latin in our Episcopal liturgy than there is probably in like 95% of the Catholic churches near us. It’s Latin choral hymns and it’s beautiful and we really enjoy that. But that was kind of a process that we can get into, but was basically an interest in more liturgical expressions of the church. And it was something that we found locally and really enjoyed. But how I got to where I’m with gospel simplicity and interested in all the Catholic Orthodox stuff would be a different question. I don’t know if that’s where you were going or not.
Joe:
Well, all of that is, I think having people have a sense of where you are right now, because I already saw someone asked in the comments, they just didn’t know your own background, where are you? And I think the … I don’t know if you want to pull that up, Mike. There was a question where somebody asked, “Forgive me for not knowing…” Here it is. “Please forgive my ignorance because I don’t know what flavor of Protestant Austin is. Why doesn’t the universal attestation of real presence and church fathers convince him at least to Catholic Eastern Orthodox, maybe Luther?”
Austin:
Yeah. Great
Joe:
Question. Which I think this is already giving a little bit of … Because I think people are wondering, “Oh, okay.” You went from a non-denominational thing, you’ve clearly got some depth. I think people looking at your setup can see icons and you don’t seem like the stereotype of many people might have of a non-denominational person. It seems like you’ve been on some kind of journey.
Austin:
Yeah,
Joe:
That’s
Austin:
Definitely fair.
Joe:
What’s that look like maybe? And I know we’re going to talk about that probably a fair amount, kind of where you are, what your thoughts are, but that seems like maybe a good way to dive into the question from an angle.
Austin:
Sure. So when I was studying at Moody, two professors had a really big impact on me and both of them were Anglican and they didn’t cause me to become Anglican right away, but they got me interested in church history, what we might call the Catholic tradition generally speaking, which caused me to look into the church fathers and these types of things. And it was at that point that I became convinced of the real presence in some sense. I would say from there, how I think about theology today would be like a high church Anglican, but whose biggest theological influences are probably all Catholics for the most part. Most of my theological heroes are the people who were parity, I think would be the plural there in Latin, like the experts at Vatican II. I get in trouble with a lot of Catholics because I feel like I’m a bigger fan of Vatican II than most of the Catholics I know, but people like Henri de Lubak, Hanzers, Van Balthazar, Eves Kangar, John Danielu, these are the kind of people that I spend my free time reading.
So yeah, I would say that might describe my kind of theological trajectory from being really interested in church history, which I still am. And then I’m also really interested in kind of the project of what they call in theology resource mont, which is like-
Joe:
I almost seem like you’re on your own kind of resource month journey of retrieving all this stuff from the tradition.
Austin:
Absolutely. Yeah. I think that would be an accurate description of kind of my theological journey. So yeah.
Joe:
All right. Very beautiful. I’m sure many people are going to wonder why Anglo-Catholic and not Catholic or why Anglo-Catholic, especially if so many of your theological influences are Catholic. I’m sure other people are going to wonder why Anglo-Catholic and not Orthodox. So do you want to take that as one giant question or do you want to maybe break it up? Because I think those would be interesting areas to explore. And I’ll say this, maybe a little bit of unnecessary preamble. Frequently, when I see Protestants openly exploring Catholicism, there can be a little bit of a boom and bust cycle where at first everyone clicks and they’re like, “Oh, we’re super excited.” And then if they don’t immediately say, “And I’m entering RCIA on Thursday,” then people say, “Oh, you were just doing this for the cliques.” And I don’t think that’s true.
I think the risk of alienating people is often much bigger than the traffic. I just think that’s a very cynical kind of take. But I think it’s better for people, because as a Catholic, you look at this and you’re like, “Well, of course, Catholicism’s true.” And it seems so natural. And so how can anyone think otherwise? But obviously that’s not the experience everyone has coming in, including people who might eventually become Catholic. It doesn’t always just seem completely obvious and self-evident. And I think it’s very tricky for all of us to sort of step outside of our own hermeneutic bubbles. I know this as a Catholic, when Protestants are like, “Well, obviously this Bible verse means X because it’s what they’ve always been taught that it meant that I’d say, well, it’s not obvious to me. ” And I think so often the evidence for Catholicism can feel the same way in the opposite direction of, well, clearly this Bible verse points in this Catholic doctrine or clearly the history of this points in this Catholic direction and it can be genuinely mystifying even if you’re trying to be charitable to say, “Well, how is someone reading this same corpus of evidence differently?” Like I said, unnecessarily long preamble, take that wherever you want to go with it.
Austin:
Yeah. So I’ll break up the Catholic and Orthodox reasons because I think they’re probably different and yeah, it might be helpful to separate those. So I’ll start with the Catholic and I think there’s kind of levels at getting into this as well. So I appreciate you bringing up kind of the boom or bust cycle. I also think as someone who’s a Protestant on the other side, not necessarily the cliques on the YouTube side, but I think there’s also this kind of boom and bust cycle as far as excitement about investigating questions like this and looking into the Catholic church. So maybe I can tell my own story a bit through that lens. I’ll start upfront though. So why am I not Catholic? I think my biggest difficulty with Catholic theology would be in people infallibility specifically, and we could get into why that is and what I mean by that, but I’ll put that up front so people aren’t kind of like waiting for me to explain it.
But then I’d say my experience looking into Catholicism feels kind of like that boom, bust or like hills and valleys type of thing. So when I first got interested in it, I think what evangelicals, especially who come from low church settings, when they start reading the church fathers, there’s this, wow, they look really different than my non-denominational megachurch kind of environment and they look a lot more Catholic and Orthodox than they look Protestant. And I think that is just like by and large a good assessment of the church fathers. They do look more Catholic and Orthodox than they look kind of non-denominational Protestant. And so I think for me, that created this sense of, what am I going to do? I also got kind of thrown into this by making a video about Catholicism that I had like a hundred subscribers at the time and got like 10 views on my videos and then I made something about Catholicism.
All of a sudden I was coming across all these arguments for Catholicism and I went into that like rabbit hole of binge watching like Trent Horn videos. And I don’t think you were making them yet. This was a
Joe:
While ago. Yeah, that was pre this channel. But watching
Austin:
All the debates and I think I had a first sense of, wow, like the arguments for Catholicism seem a lot better than the arguments I have in response. Maybe I should become Catholic right away. And then I think one of the biggest things that put the brakes on for me at that point was taking a class with a Calvin scholar and realizing, oh, wait, what I thought was Protestantism, my kind of mega church context of this looks a lot different than the reformers at the source. And so then it becomes kind of a different level of question, right? So it’s, “Well, is Catholicism right or do I love it? The trail begins.” Yeah, do I have the wrong typist reprotestantism? Yeah. And so I think that made me say like, “Wait, I should really get to know my own tradition because I felt like I was comparing Aquinas to my local pastor and I was realizing that’s probably not quite fair.” And as I was reading kind of the reformation sources, I was like, “Huh, this medieval period had some stuff going on.
These reformers seem to be making some sense, so I’m going to kind of slow it down and try to understand at that level.” And then I think there were certain Catholic apologetic arguments that didn’t quite land for me at that point because they began to be arguing against a form of Protestantism that I no longer thought was the best form of it. And then I think it took some time trying to understand my own tradition, those things. I’d say where I’m at now is a bit different in the way I look at these things, also having changed within Protestant traditions into a more liturgical, more sacramental tradition, where the questions I’m asking now as I spend a lot of time with Vatican II and the people that I like are more somewhat theoretical questions of like, what would be necessary for unity, also questioning not even just that because I think that was early on, but I think my view of what the Catholic church is has changed over time.
Joe:
Can you say more on that? I think that’s a really fascinating-
Austin:
Sure. Yeah.
Joe:
… just kind of thing to drop.
Austin:
Yeah, absolutely. How my view of the Catholic church has changed
Joe:
Over time. Yeah. You’re like, “Well, I didn’t realize before that it’s actually the horror of Babylon, but I assume that’s not it.
Austin:
” No, I might get myself in some trouble here. I don’t know. We’ll see. I mentioned in our video that we did recently that I’ve begun thinking of Catholicism as something akin to a theory of everything. And I think the vision of Vatican two is very compelling in a lot of ways in so far as it seems to be this grand project of synthesis and trying to see the good in literally anything that is good and how that can be kind of brought in to Catholicism, going through a filter and being seen in the light of Christ, all of those things. But that kind of outward look from the Catholic church towards the modern world. I made a video yesterday in which I probably very controversially said Gaudim at Spez might be the best document that Catholic church has ever produced, which might just tell you
Joe:
A little bit-That is very controversial. I will say that. But I think the thing you’re saying about the theory of everything, I want to make sure people are getting it because I think this is brilliant, that the Catholic church is in this position to say we have the fullness of divine revelation, we have this robust belief in the relationship of faith and reason, that scripture and tradition, as well as those things that we can know from sound philosophy and everything else, we can build on all of this and we have this longstanding tradition that we see both supported in scripture itself, as well as from the light of human reason, of believing even in things like the natural virtue of religion, that if you think of the Christian story as God reaching out to man, there is also this movement inspired by the Holy Spirit of man reaching out to God and without the fullness of revelation, that takes all these various forms.
So how do we recognize having the answer key as it were, where the various members of the class of people seeking God throughout the world, what answers are they getting right? And that’s not relativism. It’s actually the opposite of relativism, but it is a robust embrace of Catholicism is something more than just one theory among many that it’s pointing towards, as you say, a theory of everything, like a robust vision of the nature of reality. I guess first of all, is that a fair description of what you mean by a theory of everything? And if so, how does that kind of interact with …
Austin:
Yeah, so I think, and I probably haven’t articulated this that well. That was a really good description of what I mean by theory of everything. I think how that maybe shifts from my previous version was thinking of the Catholic Church as a bit more kind of defensive. And I think one of the struggles I have today is a lot of the people I mentioned as my theological heroes, they were also at one point banned from teaching theology. That’s one of the fascinating stories of Vatican too that some of the leading experts at the council just a few years prior were barred from teaching theology. And so it leaves me in this question today of going back to like, what is the Catholic church? Is it the church that’s barring a lot of my theological heroes from teaching? Is it the one that elevates them to experts at the council?
Is it the syllabus of errors or is it Galdiamet Spez? And I’m not doing this in a polemical sense of trying to say that the Catholic Church completely changed its mind. Again, I think Vatican II is actually great, but I think in the past, I was reading the Catholic Church primarily as Council of Florence, Council of Trent, syllabus of errors, things like this, which are all part of the tradition. And so the questions I often ask myself today is like, I can’t imagine being a Catholic in the 19th century. Then again, I’ve never been in the 19th century. So my opinions today are very 21st century opinions. I think Vatican II was great. I also understand the trad arguments against some of the continuity, which places me in a just very different position of thinking about Catholicism of I find the theory of everything version of Catholicism, like one of the most exciting intellectual projects I could conceive, but is it faithfully Catholic in the full sense?
So again, that’s a very different question than I was asking a few years ago when I was thinking like, “Were the reformers right about X, Y, or Z?” Or even not so much that. At first, it was like Sola Scriptura or Solaphide. Those questions all still matter, but they’re just a bit different than the questions I’m asking today. So that might describe my own journey with the Catholic Church.
Joe:
Yeah, that’s a really fascinating journey because I think you hit the nail on the head right at the very end there, that it’s not just a question of what do I think on this particular doctrine or that particular doctrine, but it’s this much broader vision of what is the Catholic church in relation maybe to reality in relation to truth and how do we make sense of the way this gets lived out? And I mean, if I can maybe just put maybe a gloss on one part that you said, because you’re right, the Nuvo Theology guys, I can’t speak French, the new theology guys from the early 20th century were very controversial, but a lot of the people who were pushing back against him were a certain type of Thomist and the whole timistic project when it began was very controversial for frankly, similar reasons of what do we have to learn from all these Pagans like Aristotle.
And then it became, what do we have to learn from these enlightenment thinkers or what do we have to learn from Vatican II? What do we have to benefit from even finding out what it is that these other religions believe and what we agree with them on? That kind of perennial question of saying, how do we take … Because if someone said tomorrow, I’m on a startup project on exploring the Catholic interface with interfacing Catholic interaction with Buddhism, apparently I’m not going to try to say it interface, Catholic interaction with Buddhism, that could be really good. That could be really synchronistic in a way that is really bad. And without knowing more about the project, it’s hard to know what to make of that, which I think speaks maybe to the discomfort people have had perennially in the church with everyone from St. Thomas Aquinas to Delubach and you see guys who do it really badly.
So I don’t have a good question formulated from that, but I think it sounds like that’s maybe where some of your current exploration is of how do we make sense of this sort of ongoing dialogue even within the church, as well as this ongoing dialogue between the church and the world or between the church and other expressions of Christianity or whatever it is. I can’t even tell if I’m being coherent.
Austin:
Yeah, I think that’s right. I would add a third layer to that.
Joe:
Please.
Austin:
And I think one of the most pressing ones is between the church and itself throughout history. And one of the areas of thought that interests me a lot is just not history as just the data of history at a given time, but looking at trajectories of theological history and like Newman’s Project of Doctrinal Development and how we make sense of that. And also how we make sense of the church in this era versus the church in this era. It’s this kind of the hermeneutic of continuity, of reform, of like, how do we make sense of going from the 19th century to the 20th century when there’s certainly shifts in attitude at the very least?
I used to look at those things as weaknesses for Catholicism because I’d engage more in the, are there contradictions, which is a good question to ask. Absolutely. It’s not unimportant. I think today I’m just also interested in what is going on here because if there is development, and I think development’s a word we can all like here, what does that mean for where the church has been and where it might go in the future? So yeah, I think that the church dialoguing with those outside of it is an interesting thing. The church kind of wrestling with those people within its bounds who are trying to do that is an interesting thing, but it’s not even so much like the interfaith dialogue that I’m interested in myself, but it’s just that movement of like, what can the church take in, including change or development within its own history?
Joe:
Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s very well said and it’s a good question to explore along the way. Do you have … I want to put this too provocatively. Go
Mike:
For it.
Joe:
Sometimes people end up being Anglican, particularly Anglo-Catholic as a sort of …
Well, it’s sort of a via media in a negative sense. And when the couple says like, “The marriage isn’t going well, but we’re not going to get divorced. We’re just going to live separately.” So you’re just like, “I don’t think this is anybody’s idea of how things ought to end up.” You’re not ready to just accept where this thing is going or whatever, and I’m not endorsing divorce, just for the sake of the analogy. Yeah, I get it. This would be almost the exact opposite in some ways, that you can have people who are carried along by seeing the force of the Catholic claim or the Catholic argument or the Catholic vision of reality, whatever that is, but then they still have some hangups and Anglicanism, and for some people, frankly, Orthodoxy can be an attractive option for people coming from a Protestant background where I think two things are true.
One, there often is much more definition in opposition. Protestantism exists in opposition in some way to Catholicism in a way that it doesn’t to Anglicanism and a way that it doesn’t to Orthodoxy. The relationship of even in what ways is Anglican Protestant and not Protestant,That’s a whole thing, but it’s not really defined in that way. I’ve talked to numerous people who their journey was, they were drawn towards the Catholic church and at some point either one spouse or a parent or somebody else sort of said, “What about Anglicanism?” Where it’s not like, “I read all these Anglican divines and was overwhelmed by this incredible English tradition of theology that I just knew this is exactly where I am meant to be or maybe where everyone is meant to be. ” For many people seems to be, “I’m not ready to take that jump at this point in my life, but I want something, as you said, with more liturgy, with more maybe tradition, with more reverence.” So do you find you have positive reasons for being Anglican vis-a-vis everything else, or do you find some unsettled tensions in terms of fully committing to being Catholic, or is that maybe a bad way of framing the question itself?
Austin:
I don’t think it’s a bad way of framing the question. I think there’s a few different ways of being Anglican, right? So there are those who say that, “Yeah, I’ve read the Anglican divines, or I think the Oxford Movement is the greatest expression of theology.” The Oxford Movement, for those who aren’t familiar, was what John Henry Newman was in, St. John Henry Newman was in before becoming Catholic helped start, which was like a retrieval project. So I think there are those who positively Anglicanism is the best on Anglican grounds. I think there are a lot who say Anglicanism is practically for me the best option, which I’d say while there are aspects of the Anglican divines that I find really compelling, I would say I land more in that category of not Anglican because everything else is wrong or Anglicanism is the height of the church per se.
I think I find myself in this tradition more so because I look at the Catholic church and there’s so much I love there, but I struggle to see how it lives up to its own claims about itself is often, I think, the way I would put it, that I think it has maybe set a bar for itself that it doesn’t quite meet. And then you kind of have this question in my mind of, okay, so if you don’t think it’s true in the sense of making good on its claims about itself, what do you do there? For some, you could just become Catholic and think, okay, like every church, it’s gotten some things wrong. Maybe the one thing it’s gotten wrong about itself is that it hasn’t gotten things wrong that it said it got right. Functionally, I know people who do that. Or I think you can say, “Okay, well then do I become Orthodox?
If not Orthodox, maybe if you like really precise doctrinal lines, Lutheranism I think is a kind of compelling one.” This might not be surprising to me or to people listening given my talk about theory of everything and kind of wide resource month type of thinking. But I think what Anglicanism does offer is a big tent that can embark on a project like that of retrieval and synthesis, not synthesis in the sense of like syncretism, but in taking truths and trying to understand them better wherever we find truth. And again, this all sounds like a lot of like interreligious stuff. That’s not primarily what I’m interested in, but more just like wide resource month within the Christian tradition. Anyway,
Mike:
I think Anglicanism- Interrupt here with the audience question. So we have Roberto asking, “Can Austin explain what is Anglo Catholic and why not just be Catholic?” I
Joe:
Think he’s kind of explaining the second part, but people may not be very familiar with the term Anglo Catholic. How is that different than being an English Catholic? Because if you just looked at a dictionary, those two should be the same thing.
Austin:
Sure. And I’ll be clear here that it can mean different things. So for some, Anglo Catholic can refer to groups of Anglican churches that are in what are known as like the continuing Anglican movements or various offshoots of Anglicanism wherein the ecclesial governance is all churches that have this specific outlook, not only on liturgy, but also theology. I’m not in one of those. I worship been in an Episcopal church. I describe it as Anglo-Catholic because of its liturgical style. And when I use Anglo-Catholic in a liturgical sense, I really just mean it has a more formal, more reverent, robust, traditional liturgy in its expression. So think again, choral Latin hymns, maybe the use of incense, vestments, all of those things, because within Anglicanism broadly, you can have Pretty low church expressions all the way up to very high church expressions. So I mean it not in the polity sense, not in the sense of denomination within the Anglican movement.
I just mean it in a liturgical sense. Does that answer that question?
Joe:
I mean, I get what you’re saying with that. We’ll see from Roberto if he finds that explanation helpful.
Mike:
Yeah.
Joe:
We don’t need to necessarily get into even the continuing Anglicanism. That’s kind of the schism that happens over women’s ordination back in the ’70s. And then that’s different from the ANCA. Yeah.
Austin:
ACNA. I
Joe:
Do that every time. ACNA. I don’t know why. Anglican
Austin:
Church North America.
Joe:
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Sorry.
Austin:
No,
Joe:
You’re fine. The ACNA where that splits over issues of sexual morality like same sex relationship stuff kind of broadly. Is that a good description? And so you’re in a church that’s in communion with people who maybe don’t share their theological principles. Is that fair to say? I mean, I guess that’s true in a circumstance.
Austin:
Oh yeah. I’m sure I wouldn’t agree with everyone in the Episcopal church at all. So I think this is where Anglicanism … And that’s another kind of Anglican versus Episcopal. Sometimes in American context, people use Anglican to mean ACNA, but Anglican is just a way of describing the Church of England broadly, the Anglican communion. Anyway, I think one of its great benefits is that it’s a really big tent. I think one of its great drawbacks is that it’s a really big tent. So you have a lot of latitude within the Church of England. From the very beginning, I would say, in what you can believe, I mean, the 39 articles are not all that restrictive and the way they’ve been interpreted over time hasn’t been. I think often Anglicans have seen their unity coming from two things. One, relationally, like agreeing to stay in communion with one another.
And two, in terms of devotionally praying with the book of common prayer, which I think the book of common prayer is just an absolute treasure, which is at a personal level. Maybe my favorite thing about Anglicanism is just being able to use that to structure my own devotional life. So yeah, I forget where I was going before.
Joe:
No, I think that’s helpful. The latitudinarianism is an interesting kind of principle within Anglicanism as well, of giving as much sort of bandwidth to believe various things, even maybe contradictory things that you can have different views. So one thing that can be very confusing for a Catholic looking in and to say, what do Anglicans believe on X is there rarely is an answer. I mean, it’s often some Anglicans believe this and some Anglicans believe this radically different thing. And in some ways, on unsettled matters of doctrine, that might actually be laudable.
On other things, it can be, again, speaking as a Catholic, mystifying. So if you say something like, “Well, what’s happening from an Anglican perspective in the liturgy? Is the bread and wine becoming the body and blood of Christ? Or is he in with an under or is it a symbol?” It seems like you’re going to get very different answers within Anglicanism. I mean, the 10 articles of 1536 had a very high Eucharistic theology. The 39 articles that you alluded to before reject transubstantiation seemingly, but it’s not clear what they’re kind of putting forward as a positive Eucharistic vision. And it seems like within the maybe family of Anglicanism, there are answers maybe all over the place, maybe even within the same congregation. And so is the idea, well, if this priest or this congregant believes it’s Jesus, said it’s Jesus then, but not otherwise … I want to be charitable to the Anglo-Catholic perspective because I love aesthetically Anglo-Catholicism.
I love what I understand of the idea of what they’re trying to do. I think I share Neumann’s sense that I’m not sure it works as a project, ultimately. I mean, he’s, as you say, one of the guys who kind of founds the thing and then concludes that it can’t work. But yeah, so particularly if you are willing to go here, specifically on the Eucharist, what is your understanding of what’s happening and what does that mean if the person next to you or maybe the priest doesn’t share that same view of the Eucharist?
Austin:
Yeah. So I think I could probably answer this at a couple different levels as far as functionally, what does that mean if you and your priests disagree or you and the person next to you disagree. But doctrinally, I think the general thrust of the Book of Common Prayer would be towards a view of, I would say, real presence, but probably more in the Calvinistic sense of that, as far as presence by the power of the Holy Spirit and less of a localized presence. So I often describe the difference between Calvin and Luther directionally, as far as what’s happening in the Eucharist, as far as is Christ coming down and being present in with and under the elements, describe that as a downward arrow and Calvin’s being an upward arrow, so that in those elements, by partaking in those elements, you’re brought up to truly participate or partake of Christ’s flesh and blood.
Now, interesting things happen in the Book of Common Prayer, like historically and what is the most Anglican of Anglican moves, I think, was that … I hope I’ve got these dates right. The book of common prayer undergoes a couple revisions very early on. The 1559 edition, I think it was the 1559, had very, let’s say, more Zwinglian language to it. So it was like, do this emphasis on remembrance, emphasis on remembrance generally, but then three years later in 1562, it’s much more literal. So it’s take, eat, this is my body that’s brought back in, in the words of the institution there, feed on Christ is brought in. And so what they do in the kind of authoritative version of this in 1662, but this came out before that in two, they just put the two together. So you get those long words of institution where like half of it sounds Vingley and half of it sounds Lutheran and they just kind of put them both there.
But I think the general thrust is probably more towards a reformed sense. I mean, the 39 articles are fairly reformed in their theological outlook, I would say. So functionally, what does this mean? Well, I think the way I would think about the Eucharist would be one, having people in the congregation that disagree with you on what’s happening there might be problematic in some sense, but I think is also just inevitable. In any church, no matter what their official doctrine is, people in the pews might disagree, but you could at least adjudicate whether one is kind of with the church or without the church. But yeah, at a functional level, the person in the pew next to you, whether that’s in an Orthodox church or a Catholic church, might have a different understanding, whether by bad catechesis or going against church doctrine. I think what is happening in the Eucharist, I don’t think necessarily depends on … Well, how do I want to put this?
Joe:
Yeah, I think you’re getting to … I understand obviously any denomination, any church you go into, you might have someone who does and doesn’t believe in what that church believes about the Eucharist. My question is more like, does it change what’s actually happening? Because if somebody … We would say if somebody doesn’t believe in the mass, the mass is still happening. They might receive unworthily, they might receive ignorantly, but that doesn’t mean that, “Oh, well, it’s just bread for them.” We wouldn’t say it’s not Schrodinger’s Eucharist where the receiver changes what’s happening.
Austin:
Yeah. So I would say that from … I’ll start with the priest and then come to the person because I think the person’s a little more complicated. I think the worthiness of the priest, and I think this would be an idea that we’d agree on, their moral worthiness at least, isn’t decisive in what happens with the Eucharist. I think if you have a bit more Calvinistic understanding of what’s going on there, it’s less of a change in the elements right there. So it’s even less dependent on the priest in that sense. But the person, there is an intraprotestant debate whether the one who receives unworthily truly receives Christ or not. And I think there probably would be Anglican disagreements on this. I’ll put all this with the caveat of there are people that are much better at explaining traditional Anglican theology than I am. Again, most of the people that I spend my time reading are Catholics, but I would say that it doesn’t change what’s happening, even if I don’t fully understand what’s happening with the elements, but I do think there’s room within Protestant theology to say that the person who receives not only … Well, it’s more so whether or not they have faith in Christ, whether they’re Christians, what do they receive?
I think there’s space within Protestant theology to say that perhaps what they’re receiving is not quite the same in that way, because they’re not united to Christ, that the elements then aren’t bringing them up into union with Christ on a Calvinistic view. But I don’t think that one understanding what’s going on in the Eucharist or having the completely right theology about it would determine whether or not they partake of Christ. Just as we could say, someone who had … Well, actually, I don’t know in Calthic theology, if someone had an intellectual disability such that they couldn’t understand trans substantiation, they weren’t able to do that, would they be able to receive? Because I know you don’t give communion to children in the Latin, right?
Joe:
Yeah. So I mean, the right there is a very important question. The standard usually is for someone to be able to understand that it’s not ordinary bread, but in the case of … I don’t know how this is normally handled in the West with severe intellectual disabilities, I believe … I mean, there’s no reason spiritually they wouldn’t be able to receive. They may not have an appreciation. The reason ordinarily in the West that there is this time of making sure that the person can discern that this is Christ is, I think, twofold. One, we want to spiritually prepare them for this encounter. And two, we want to take seriously everything St. Paul says about not receiving without discerning the body, but someone who’s just literally incapable of discerning the body for reasons of intellectual inability, I don’t think that would be a barrier to them receiving.
And as you sort of alluded to, this is very easy in the East where even infants receive communion. So I mean, it’s clearly not a bar in terms of validity.
Austin:
Right. And so I guess the point I was going to make there as I’m getting to this roundabout way is I don’t think someone having a right theology of the Eucharist in terms of having it all worked out is determinative of what they receive. I guess I would put myself as just a bit more undecided on the question of like, if someone is not in Christ, can they then partake of Christ in the Eucharist? I think a more reformed understanding would say no, because those things would be put together, one’s union with Christ and what one is having in the sacrament, because again, it’s a directional move rather than it being focused on the elements. But that was probably a long and obtuse answer to what was- Well,
Joe:
I think people who are familiar with the history of the different expressions of Eucharistic theology or the different camps, you have a clearer sense of where you are with it. I know we’ve gotten questions already on papacy, and I think you’ve alluded … One of the common themes that’s come up in your story, both in what you are drawn to and struggle with in Catholicism and what you’ve liked in Anglicanism seems to be this idea of a unit … If I can put it in words you haven’t, a unity and diversity of saying like, how do we have a common thing where we’re not just … Because the broadest way would just be like, I’m going to be an agnostic. I want such a broad view of everything that I want people who both believe in and don’t believe in God. And so I’m going to start the Church of Agnosticism where we stand for literally nothing and so everybody is welcome because we’d have no principles whatsoever.
And that might be a caricature of Anglicanism, but that’s not really what Anglicans believe. Everyone, no matter how latitudinarian they are, has to say we’re united in some way in something, that there has to be at some point a boundary where you say, up to here and no farther. And some people might draw those boundaries very broadly, some of them might draw them very narrowly, but someone somewhere has to draw a boundary or you have no definition to the thing. If a term means everything, it means nothing. If body stands for everything, it stands for nothing. Every political movement, every definition of a word seems to … You can have a word where maybe there’s a little bit of an amorphous boundary where it’s not precisely defined. Vickenstein gives the example of the word game, like what does and doesn’t constitute a game is something where we know some clear cases and then there’s a lot of fuzzy cases, but it can’t be just literally everything or it ceases to be a usable term.
Again, long-winded prep. So someone’s got to draw boundaries. The papacy is obviously an important part of that conversation. Ecumenical councils are obviously an important part of that conversation, but I also know that even in that role, there’s a lot of controversy with that. So where you are in your journey now, do you see the papacy, and if you want to add acumenical councils, you can, you don’t have to, as an important source of unity, as a cause of disunity and factionalization, or some third thing I haven’t anticipated in that formulation.
Mike:
Just want to quickly call out Matt Frad’s with us here in chat saying, “Austin, what a guy.”
Joe:
You got to do it in the right voice.
Austin:
Hey, Matt, thanks for watching.
Mike:
Hell no, not happening. Pardon my language, sorry. I’m not offending Matt Frad with an Australian accent right now.
Austin:
Nice. Yeah, I won’t do that either. Okay. So how do I look at the papacy? Yeah, not to plug my own stuff, but I did just explore this on Substack if people want maybe a slightly more coherent version of my thoughts where the conclusion of that article, it was like church unity in a post Christendom era. And what I say there is in a time that we live in today where we don’t have civic rulers enforcing doctrinal unity, which I think is an aspect of church unity that’s often forgotten in our modern discourse about why the church is or isn’t united. For the record, I’m not calling for a modern confessional state. That’s just like a historic-
Joe:
When you were talking about what unites Anglicans, I thought you were going to at least mention Allegiance to the King as the head of the Church of England, which is historically that was the boundary, but fair.
Austin:
So I think that Catholics have adapted to that situation the best. And I think the papacy is the most efficient means of carrying out church unity in the situation we’re in today. So points to the Catholic church for that. I think what I say in that article, or maybe it was an article before that, I’ve been exploring these things on Substack, is that- You’ve
Joe:
Had like 39
Austin:
Articles. What was that? I was
Joe:
Saying you never mentioned the stupid stupid job.
Austin:
It was an Anglican joke. No, that was good. That was good. I was like, “I don’t know if I’ve had 39. I don’t know how many I’ve wrote.” Anyway, I’m slow. Here we go. I think something we have to separate is the papacy could be an adaptive mechanism that the church came up with for governing the church and happens to work well for promoting unity, but that’s not actually what the Catholic church claims about the papacy. I mean, it does claim that it is good for promoting unity, but the claim is more than that. So I would grant that the papacy is that, that it is a good way of having unity, especially without even needing necessarily civil rulers to enforce it, even if that might have been a help throughout a lot of history. The question though is, I think I say in that article, but if the papacy is not founded by Christ, then our faith is in vain and our faith in the magisterium is in vain, riffing off Paul there on the resurrection.
So that’s kind of the more difficult question, but I would grant that it is a good way of ensuring unity. I would even, I probably shouldn’t say this online. I don’t know. I don’t get, this is just a freebie for all the Catholic apologists out there. I don’t get why you guys don’t like draw on Vladimir Solovia more because he like was Orthodox and then became convinced of the papacy and he has this wonderful book like Russia and the Catholic Church or something like that. And he puts forward the argument against ecumenical councils really working for this. And he basically says like the papacy, this is the way this could work. And in a lot of ways I would agree with him. If we want doctrinal unity and we want it in a certain way, like the papacy seems to be in the kind of front runner right now for like, “This is a way it could be done.” But the question again is just not, it has to be more than is this an adaptive mechanism for ensuring unity or-
Joe:
Absolutely.
Austin:
… is it true?
Joe:
I mean, right, because there’s a lot of things that would be, “Well, this works very well.” And you could even have things that, like the pantarchy where you have the patriarchs, we don’t claim that’s of apostolic origin. So maybe that’s a good way of structuring a church from a pragmatic perspective, but that’s a very different, like that is a prudential question, not a, this is going to determine whether you become Catholic or not. I mean, one of the things I say in Pope Peter is if the papacy’s driven should be Catholic, if the papacy isn’t true, no one should be Catholic. And it seems like you have the same … Is it fair to say you have the same sort of read of the history that it’s not enough to say this works or it doesn’t work? There’s a much deeper question to be asked there.
Austin:
I’d agree with the way you said it at the end. I would agree with half of the claim in Pope Peter. So I would agree that if the papacy is true, everyone should be Catholic. I am not convinced of the second half of that because I think you could have a situation where … And it’s kind of similar to my disagreement with Lewis on liar lunatic Lord. The papacy could be just sincerely but mistaken, or it could even be that depending on-
Joe:
Well, yeah, certainly I can accept that it could be sincerely mistaken. My thinking is if it’s sincerely mistaken, we shouldn’t say we believe that Jesus established a church that in that case he seemingly wouldn’t have established, even if that church is innocent in its delusions.
Austin:
Yeah. I guess the way I would put it is, let’s say that this isn’t going to happen, right? But next year, some Protestant apologist writes the definitive work that disproves the papacy. I don’t think at that point … And Catholics agreed like, “Man, yeah, case closed. Papacy is wrong.” I don’t think the Catholic church should shut its doors. I think it would just adapt to that and say, “Okay, our claims about the papacy were wrong in one sense, but we could still say of all of our options for governing the church, this is the most adaptive one. And so we might have to massage some of the claims we’ve made about it, but I wouldn’t say that therefore everyone should stop being Catholic. I think just what it means to be Catholic would change in that situation.”
Joe:
That’s interesting. I mean, it’s very pragmatic in a certain way. Okay, that’s actually related to a question I wanted to make sure I asked you.
Mike:
There’s
Joe:
A lot that seems that you have an attraction to, and not just have an attraction to, that’s too relativistic. It seems to me, and correct me if I’m wrong, there’s a wealth of things that you think the Catholic church has gotten right that were in many cases surprising to you coming from a Moody Christian background. People have to heard the beginning to know I’m not insulting you there.
Austin:
I’m so moody. Yeah.
Joe:
Exactly. And even in terms of things that we agree, Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox on, things like the three hypostasis and one divine substance in the Trinity, or the way the two natures cohere in an unmixed but united way in Christ person,
Those very subtle questions and those things where time and time again, it seems that the church is getting things right, not just on the softballs, but getting things right on the curve balls, the things where the answer is quite surprising. And the church says this thing that when you first hear it, you’re like, “That’s not at all what I think. ” And then you do a little more digging and say, “Well, actually the church was right and I was wrong.” In my experience, this happened over and over again. I think even from having heard the bits of your story that I’ve heard, you’ve had something of this experience as well, but there are still areas where you say, “I can get this far, but right now I can get no farther.” And my question is what you think is happening, not in the areas where you still struggle to see whether the Catholic church is right or maybe where you think the Catholic church is wrong, but what you make of all of those surprising successes
Because is this that the Holy Spirit was leading the church on some of these things and then I don’t know what you think of branch theory, maybe started leading different factions of the church in different directions or … Do you see what I mean by that? Were they just lucky? Is this the wisdom of crowds or is this the work of the Holy Spirit or is there some … Maybe I’m giving you a false trilemma right after you warn me that Lewis gave a false trilemma. Is there some other way of viewing this thing? Because how did we get so much right if there’s a fundamental, even innocent, self-deception about who and what the church is?
Austin:
Good question. So the way I look at the history of this, I think it depends on the issue we’re talking about. So when we talk about something like the three hypostasies and the one Usiah and the Trinity, let the record show, I think that’s right. I also think that I think that’s right, probably solely on the grounds of tradition, which maybe not solely, but the mix of tradition and the credence to which I give that is really high. And so I don’t know that it’s necessarily like I’ve exhaustively looked at all the alternative theories on this. I remember one of my theology professors saying, and this is going to sound very Catholic, some things just aren’t on the table. And he didn’t mean that in the sense of like, we couldn’t ask questions about these things. He wasn’t trying to shut down discussion, but he was like, “If you’re going to do theology within the broader Catholic, like lower case C tradition, we’re not going to redo the Trinity.
We hammered that one out. Move on, figure out the next question.” And I think when I look at something like the Council of Calcidan, we brought this up once, I think, actually on Keith Little’s channel, I find that to be an incredibly complicated sense. Again, let the record show, I affirm the Council of Calcidan, but I don’t know that I could have come up with that on my own. And I’m not entirely convinced that it’s better than the way that the Coptic Orthodox Church has understood it over time, especially in the light of the sense of maybe we’ve been saying the same thing with different words. And so whether our words were better than their words, I don’t know, but I’m a Christian in the West, I take it. So I think some of those things, on the one hand, that’s like a strong argument maybe for the Catholic church.
On the other hand, it’s not so much like a, “Wow, I can’t believe they got this right,” so much as a I’m in this stream. I’m not outside of it deciding if it was right in the just broad lowercasey Catholic concelier tradition.
I’ve never looked at it from the outside really because I’ve never read the Bible not thinking that God was a triune. Before I could read, I was told that Jesus is God. And I don’t think that makes it just a relative claim at that point. I don’t think it means it’s not true, but I also recognize it wouldn’t be surprising to me that I think this is right because that’s just kind of the water I’ve always been swimming in, but I do, again, for the record, think it’s right. I guess on other areas where I’ve been surprised that the Catholic church was right on smaller things, I think in some ways it has shifted my thinking. And at the beginning you think, “Ah, the Catholic church must be wrong about all of these things because that’s just what you think as a low church Protestant.” And then you realize the Catholic Church has been the largest expression of Christianity with the greatest minds at its disposal for a really long time.
I don’t think it’s surprising that it got things right, but I feel like I’m probably missing the thrust of your question somewhere, so I’m going to let you-
Joe:
I mean, you said you don’t know that you would’ve come up with the tom of Leo left here on devices. I’m paraphrasing you there. But I think it’s fair to say almost nobody would. You have people who aren’t … I guess even in the way you’ve just formulated that, you have certain credle and traditional commitments that you just sort of start from in terms of a hermeneutic of how you read the text. I think without those, we’ve certainly seen a lot of people who are trying to be faithful followers of our Lord go in wildly different directions up to and including rejections of the Trinity getting Christology wrong. And I don’t just mean wording it in a different way where maybe we’re saying the same thing in different words. I mean just out and out, modalism, tritheism, whatever else.
The Trinity maybe seems self-evident now if those are the waters in which we’re swimming. And I think we would both say the Trinity is correct, but it strikes me as being correct in a way that isn’t intuitive, where, oh, there are three persons in one divine substance, is the kind of answer it’s hard to imagine someone even thinking up as a multiple choice option because you see what I mean? It seems like the church got this one right in a very surprising way where it better explains the evidence in any of the alternatives. Even though like you, I’ve always been a Trinitarian, so I’ve never had this situation of being on the outside looking in, but in terms of the ability to explain all of the biblical data, say, I would suggest we can say pretty objectively, Trinitarianism accounts for the biblical data in a more robust way than any of the options that take the three persons to the exclusion of one substance or take one substance to the exclusion of three persons, where that’s doing a good job of one part of the data and not the other part.
But again, in this way that I don’t think you could reverse engineer very effectively. I don’t think you could just start with the biblical data, put a hundred people who’d never heard of the Trinity in a room and say, “What’d you guys come up with? ” And have any reliable indication that a majority or maybe any of them would say, “Okay, I think it is three persons and one being.” Do you see what I mean? I mean, because partly we don’t have any earthly encounters with multipersonal beings in terms of the creative world. So that’s just one example, but it’s an example of the church seemingly not just being led, like Oh, it’s the smartest people, the holiest people in the room, so of course they’re going to come up with the right answer. But it seems to be, from my perspective, an act of the Holy Spirit guiding the church into the fullness of truth and would be hard to explain on a merely human level as evidenced by the fact that on a merely human level, it hasn’t really been replicated.
I’ve never heard of someone who’d never heard of the Trinity kind of stumbling into that as the explanation of the data.
I don’t know. Does that make sense? I don’t think we can just say, “Well, this is what we’ve accepted, so we’re just going to accept it out the gate in a pluralistic society in which plenty of people don’t accept those starting premises, unless we’re just going to do a kind of presuppositional form of theology.” Sure.
Austin:
Yeah. I think there’s a tension here. So on the one hand, I would grant that these seem like strokes of genius, we could say, and not just a stroke of genius in the human way, but in this must have been guided by the Holy Spirit. At the same time, you said, “I think this is objectively correct.” And so if it is objectively correct and we have any access to objective meaning and texts, it doesn’t seem inconceivable that someone could get to that. And I think also we’d have to wrestle with the fact of it’s not as though Trinity was first proposed, we would both agree at the Council of Nicia. I mean, maybe Homo Usias was like a genuine Holy Spirit inspired stroke of genius, but Turtolian got to Trinitas and we wouldn’t say, at least in the same way, I don’t think that that was guided by the Holy Spirit in the same way a council we might say was guided by the Holy Spirit.
So I think there at least has to be the possibility of people getting to that without the council or without a kind of direct-
Joe:
Oh yeah. Sorry, just to clarify, when I talk about the Holy Spirit leading the church into the fullness of truth, I don’t just mean … Obviously I would say at the council, but I would include within that the whole movement of the Census Fidelion being led in this direction that we can look back and say, “Aha, this great tradition has gotten these things right.” And it doesn’t seem to just be this one thinker was really brilliant and this really crazy innovative idea, but there was something of a shared theological tradition that found increased nuance and expression and development, but we can still see it as clearly the same thing going through history and becoming more defined. The council would be part of that story, but I don’t mean to just be like, no one had ever thought of the Trinity and then in 325, they all came up with it.
I would push very hard against that as exactly the wrong kind of view of history, because that sounds much more like just a total break from the tradition.
Austin:
Right.
Joe:
So yeah, I’m glad you’ve clarified that too, because I didn’t mean to say it that way.
Austin:
Right. And so I would agree with that. And I would agree that the Holy Spirit is guiding the church generally, but I think we’d have to recognize a bit of maybe our own priestopositionalism coming out here because I think you had said I’ve never seen in history where someone just comes to the text in kind of a purely human way and comes to this conclusion. If I’m butchering that, feel free to let me know because I think someone could say, “Wait, if we don’t assume that the Holy Spirit was guiding Turtolian, isn’t that precisely what has happened?” Isn’t the historical data precisely that humans read this and came up with this conclusion? Now we can say it feels unlikely that there must have been something else going on here, but I do think if I’m just going to be fair to the skeptics, we might be doing a little bit of that chicken and egg with the Holy Spirit of it’s inconceivable without the Holy Spirit, but
Joe:
Only if you’ve already said the Holy Spirit. For the record, I think Theophilus uses it 20 years before Tritullian. I mentioned that because Theophilus is not a heretic where a litters is bad. Yeah, does make it
Austin:
A little more complicated.
Joe:
Yeah. If the first mention of Trinity came from someone who left the church and became a mottanist, that’d be a problem. But no, I think you’re right to say, okay, so here the early Christians are … Maybe we can put it this way, where hopefully I can strip it of the priest oppositions. The early Christians with whatever tools they’re using, scripture, the apostolic teaching and explanation that maybe isn’t as immediately accessible to us, whatever guidance of the Holy Spirit, whatever tools we might use, say they’re using, the early Christians are explaining the biblical account using Trinity from the late 100s, and this becomes increasingly kind of nuanced and explained over time, and that this seems to do a good job of explaining the biblical data. I’m not suggesting they’re limited to the biblical data. I don’t think that they are, but this does a good job of explaining the biblical data in a way that no other explanation similarly has that same explanatory power.
And then today, if you were to just say, “Okay, everyone, just read these texts and tell us.” Maybe I’m inadvertently making an argument against Solascriptura that maybe with a broader interpretive tradition, more people would come to a Trinitarian reading, but they couldn’t get it from scripture alone. And maybe, I don’t know, maybe that’s how you would counter with that. It just seems, and maybe the Trinity’s not the best example to use. It just seems like there’s so many issues where in terms of dogma, the church has this incredible track record over time of landing in the right spots time and time and time again in spots that even like high church Protestants would say, “Yeah, these were the right spots.” And spots that a lot of our fellow Christians are failing to kind of land in today.
Austin:
Yeah. Sorry. I can
Mike:
Quickly interrupt. Because we’re a little over and out. Okay. Yeah. I’m sorry. Several viewer comments that we should get to here
Joe:
For
Austin:
Other people here. Yeah. Not you, Mike. I knew you
Joe:
Were here. Okay. There’s John Robert’s question. It starred, Mike, this is back in the very early part of your kind
Mike:
Of- Before we get to there, I think we should hit a few Super Chats first.
Joe:
I’m fine hitting Super Chats or not hitting Super Chats. With these conversations, I want to prioritize the discussion. Let’s go to John Robert’s question.
Austin:
That Super Chat’s one of my patrons though, so just shout out to Bill. Thanks for the superchat.
Mike:
What’s the question? Yeah, Bill says, “Great that you have Austin on today. My five cents. When looking, use the Lord’s own prayer, thy will be done to honestly ask God to put you where he needs you in his church. He won’t disappoint.” It’s a beautiful sentiment and I agree. All
Joe:
Right. John Roberts, I don’t know if it’s the chief justice or not, wanted to know if you’re a dare we hoper because of your express love for- My
Austin:
Expectation for that. Yeah. I would say yes. Yeah. I mean, I think Balthazar is more complex here than people often summarize him to be, but insofar as the theological virtue of hope, which I take him to be making his argument, yeah, I think we can and should hope, but I don’t think Bambaltas or myself would say that that should give us license to assume and thus live as though it is definitely the case and become lax in our evangelism, our moral lives, et cetera. But yeah.
Joe:
If you want to jump down, Mike, to Channel 74, broadcast he asked or she asked. I don’t know if there’s one near you, Austin, but if you became Catholic, would you join the Ordinariate? There’s a couple, you can answer that or however you want to answer that.
Austin:
Oh, no. So there are two ordinary churches near me, which I’ve meant to go to. I think the answer would be yes. If I became Catholic, I joined the Ordinary. Most likely, I mean, having not been to those churches. And the reason I’d say that … Well, one, I love the Anglican liturgy and I love the Book of Common Prayer, and I wouldn’t want to give up either of those things if I didn’t have to. Two, if my wife were to attend a Catholic church with me, which I don’t know if she would, I don’t want to kind of rope her into this, but it would be the least liturgically jarring should we do that together because it would be most similar to where we’re at. So yeah, I think-
Joe:
I mean, I don’t want to put you in an awkward spot in terms of having to share your wife’s dream, but if you are okay sharing this much, what was her own background pre where you are now? Did she also come from a lower church Protestant world or something else?
Austin:
We met at church. So yeah, we came from the same church. We met when we were 18 and 16, we’re long distance all of college, got married two weeks after college. Yeah, she was Lutheran before that, I don’t know, maybe till she was like 10 or something like that. And so being in the Episcopal church now has been a funny revert back to a more liturgical tradition, which she would’ve never expected. But I will say she is our church’s biggest fan. Yeah, she has loved the Episcopal church. She’s on the Altar Guild. It’s so fun now. Altar Guild, for those who don’t know, they set up the altar and we’ll go to church and she’ll be pointing out, not only did I put that candle there, but this is what it means. And she absolutely loves it.
Joe:
Beautiful. Well, I mean, certainly if you end up going the ordinary route or becoming Catholic, please express to her that we desperately need people with liturgical sensibilities and Catholic churches. Okay. Two more things if I can knock them out. This might be too big of a question to ask at this point in the stream, but St. Joseph prayed for us said, “As someone who used to be Anglo-Catholic, what convinced me was my affirmation of absolute succession. If I believed my bishops were valid from this doctrine, the gates of Hades could never prevail.” I mean, it’s not exactly a question, but I’m curious if you have an immediate reaction to that. And if you say that’s just too big to hit right now, I totally respect that.
Austin:
I don’t think it’s too big to hit probably because I don’t fully understand it. I would’ve thought that as an Anglo-Catholic, they would’ve believed their bishops had valid apostolic succession. So I would’ve thought an argument for Apostolic succession of Rome wouldn’t have been as compelling, but maybe I’m not understanding the thrust of the question. Do you feel like you have a better read on it then?
Joe:
I’m not a hundred percent because the way, usually if you hear Anglo-Catholic to Catholic absolute succession, that means I concluded they didn’t have valid orders. And that might be what’s happening in that question. But the other way of reading it might be that if you believe absolute succession existed in the West up to the point of the Anglican Reformation, how do we harmonize that with the idea of a total loss of small O Orthodox faith? I don’t know if that’s where he’s going with that, but I could see those being the two ways that could be interpreted.
Austin:
Yeah. And I guess I would just say on the latter part, I don’t view it as a total loss. And I think probably from what I’ve shared, I think the Catholic Church has gotten a great deal right, but I would disagree with certain other points. But I don’t know, maybe more than that would be too in the weeds.
Joe:
Okay. And then getting back to the interpretive tradition conversation we had a couple moments ago, Green Emperor says, “I was just going to say, coming from agnostic background, I get what you’re saying, Austin, of coming to the text with no tradition.” That’s why I always ask, “How do I know Arias is incorrect?” I think that might be a good way of wording it because there were smart people when you read the history of the early heretics, when you actually read their writings or the writings of the people who defended their positions, we might imagine like, “Oh yeah, these people just hated the Bible and wanted to compromise with the world or they were just puffed up on human philosophy.” It’s like, no, no, they’re doing theology and they’re coming to conclusions we would now recognize as wrong, but how do we know that we are right that they’re wrong?
Yeah, I guess I won’t give my own thoughts any further. I’ll just ask you what you would say to that.
Austin:
Yeah, this is good. So I think one of the big underlying questions with Arias, and there’s been a lot of really good work done on Arias, not at least Rowan Williams, shout out to an Anglican there, has done fairly groundbreaking work on him, is the question of whether Arias was actually more traditional in some ways than the likes of Athanasius. If that is the case, I think that does really interesting work on the question. I’ve asked about the Catholic Church throughout history and some of the early conversations we were having of what does development look like because in that case, I think we would, I would still say Athanasius was correct. And this is all provisional and if such a thesis is right, but it’s actually because it’s better able to make sense of all of the data. It’s not just kind of, okay, this is more traditional in the sense of I can attest more people on my side of it throughout history, but actually as this is developing, it’s growing into a further fruitfulness, a further explanatory power that maybe we wouldn’t have anticipated at the very beginning, but once we see it, we’re like, “Wow, that’s it.
” If that’s the case, I think it makes it difficult because I think something about knowing a doctrine is right becomes not only it’s looking backwards, it’s pedigree kind of going in the past, but actually going forward as well. For those who would really want to explore this argument, I think David Bentley Hart’s book, Tradition in Apocalypse, is where he kind of puts forward a thesis like this, that we know doctrine, not just by its first cause, but by its final cause, so where it’s heading, which is maybe a even more radical sense of doctrinal development. But if Eris wasn’t more traditional, but he was at least equally biblical in the sense of his arguments were not equally right about the Bible, but could adduce the same amount of proof texts. Yeah, I think it becomes difficult in that sense as well. And we have to think about what does it mean for me to know a doctrine is right?
We could either say, “I’m just going to have less certainty about that than I thought I was going to have. ” We could say it has to do with being able to have the most explanatory power, or it could have to do with just trusting the church. I think there’s probably other options as well, but I think those are a couple just initial sketches on that question. I think it’s a really good question.
Joe:
Yeah, I think that’s very well said. And actually, one of the things you raised there, I’m completely … Is it Cardinal Manning, I believe it was, the sort of, I don’t want to say rival to St. John Henry Newman, but the two of them had an uneasy relationship. People maximalist.
Yes. But if I’m not mistaken, one of the points Manning made was that you can’t just imagine that you do tradition by just doing historical archeology, like just saying, “Well, here’s all these patristic quotations.” That’s an important part of it, but how do you know if a church father is getting something right? What if this is an area where their theology had to be corrected by the ongoing movement of the Holy Spirit and the history of the church? And I think that something like Arias and pre-Arias quasi-arians is a really interesting example of that thing being done. Do you just count noses to say what the right answer is at the time of athanasius, that wouldn’t have looked good amongst the bishops it would seem, or how do we do this responsibly and how do we know
What to listen to even when we’re exploring the church fathers? And we’d say patristic consensus and that the church has this important role in recognizing it. But I think, yeah, you’re raising this really fascinating and beautiful point that you know what? There’s so much more here, Austin, I think we should cap the conversation here with my gratitude to you for your time. There’s so much in terms of like, how do we make sense of this wealth of theology and how do we make sense of the wealth of the spiritual tradition of the 2000 years of Christianity? And hopefully you’ve given people a renewed appreciation for someone grappling with that in this deep way and hopefully inviting us to grapple with it in a deep way and maybe appreciate aspects of this that we haven’t noticed or thought about at as deep a level. So thank you very much for coming on.
Obviously, I think I speak for everyone in the chat that we’d be happy to have you come back and kind of explore this or other topics at a much greater depth because I think there’s just so much here. So yeah, thank you.
Austin:
Absolutely. Happy to come back anytime. I really thought you were going to say, I speak for everyone in the chat that would love for you to come home, but that’s
Joe:
Why. I’ll say this. Everyone-
Austin:
Which might also be speaking for the chat. I don’t
Joe:
Know if everyone wants to accept that. We pray for Austin and his wife and that the Holy Spirit will lead him in the direction he’s to go. And if that happens to be Rome word, I will pretend to be shocked.
Austin:
Oh, well, Joe, this is an absolute pleasure. And Mike, also, thanks for that. Everyone who’s been
Joe:
Listening. Yes, Mike, thank you very much for doing all the polling comments and herding cats and everything else. All right. Well, thank you guys. It’s a pleasure. Thank you for everyone for tuning in for Shamus Popri. I’m Joe Heschmire. God bless you all.