Audio only:
Joe dissects a poorly written, AI-sourced article from X that paints a laughably inaccurate picture of American Catholicism and Catholic Answers specifically.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and it’s not every day that as an apologist for Catholic Answers, I find our work called out in a piece shared by a city and US Senator, but this week I had that unique experience. So Senator Ted Cruz shared a piece by a Twitter user called Insurrection Barbie, and it’s an article, it’s over 8,000 words long, called The Long Game and the Conservative Right. But Cruz gave a very strong endorsement of this article. He said, “Read every word of this. It’s the best and most comprehensive explanation of what we’re fighting.” Now, I’m not 100% sure this was written by a human. It reads like AI slop. It’s filled with basic errors, but I think it’s striking that he shares this piece, which calls out Catholic answers twice by name and gets, as I said, just basic details wrong, completely misunderstands the theological and political things that are afoot.
And I thought to be worth addressing just a handful of the points made. So first, I mean, one of the first clues that maybe this wasn’t written by a human being is that there’s a section attacking this Catholic position called integralism.
Not Ted:
We used an AI voice to read the article to illustrate how ridiculous the article is. The voice was chosen completely at random, of course. The first is integralism, a pre-Vatican II political theology that holds the Catholic church should exercise direct authority over temporal governments. That religious liberty is a Protestant error and that a properly ordered state must subordinate itself to church teaching. This is not the position of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. It is not the position of Pope Francis.
Joe:
Now that’s kind of striking because as any human being knows, Pope Francis is not the Pope, but a lot of AI models have not updated that. So that’s the first red flag that maybe we’re not actually dealing with human to human debate here, that rather a robot is just spewing out builge and Ted Cruz is taking this as the best, most insightful commentary on a state of affairs where it doesn’t even … It’s commenting on specifically Catholic political actors and the world of Catholicism, and it doesn’t even know who the Pope of the Catholic Church is. But then it goes on to attack what it calls SSPX adjacent traditionalism, and particularly cites Nick Fuentes as operating in this world.
Not Ted:
The second is SSPX adjacent traditionalism. The world of the Latin mass hardliners, the society of St. Pius X, the ssedevacantists and near set of vacantists who regard this a second Vatican council as a catastrophic betrayal and the post-concealer church is illegitimate or gravely compromised. Nick Fuentes operates in this world.
Joe:
Now look, I’ve been critical of Nick Fuentes before, but this is a bizarre and unfair attack for several reasons. First, there’s nothing pre-Vatican II or dissident or anything about that about the apostles creed imagery. I don’t know what they could possibly find wrong in the apostles creed that they’re viewing as antisemitic or politically problematic. But either way, we still believe in the apostles creed. The Vatican has not disciplined anyone for praying the Apostle’s Creed. At every Sunday, you pray the Nicene or the Apostles creed. This is completely mainstream ordinary Catholicism. Now, it is true that people have used Christ the King in ways that might be an antisemitic dog whistle. So I understand what’s going on there. And I also understand that a lot of people are hostile to ecumenism and interfaith dialogue and the rest. It is very strange to accuse Nick Fuentes of being some sort of traditionalist SSPX, hardliner, SSPX adjacent when he’s absolutely explicit that he finds that whole world weird and is very comfortable just going to a Novus Ortho mass.
CLIP:
I was up there in Michigan with the church militant guys and I was going to go to a Novus Ortho mass on a Sunday instead of their super duper trad mass. And they looked at me like I was a heretic and I said, “Hey, Pal, the Pope’s on my side here.” And you’re sounding like a separatist.
Joe:
So again, just basic factual information is not right. The Pope is not Francis. Fuentes is not a tready.
Not Ted:
The third ingredient is imported European and Middle Eastern sectarianism. And this is perhaps the most important point because it explains something that confuses many American observers. Why does any of this feel so foreign?
Joe:
I think it should say, why does all of this feel so foreign? And the thing I want to highlight here is we should call this out. It’s bad when people on the far right accuse support for Israel of being some kind of international Jewish plot. It’s also bad when people say any criticism of Israel is part of some international Russian plot, but that’s exactly what’s going to happen here. Insurrection Barbie/ChatGPT just says like, “Oh yeah, this is all the work of Alexander Dugan and all of these malicious foreign actors.” And the problem with both sides doing this of just claiming that all of the support is this outside political meddling of this international cabal is twofold. One, it plays up xenophobic fears, and that’s not great, particularly if you’re worried about xenophobia towards Jewish people. And two, it discounts the legitimate reasons people have for things.
It’s a form of what C.S. Lewis calls bulverism, like, “Oh, you just believe that because you’re a man. You believe that because you’re a woman. You believe that because you’re receiving your news from this source or that source maybe, but is the thing I believe right or wrong? You haven’t actually shown me that by telling me I believe it because I’m a man and I watched this program or I listened to this commentator that doesn’t actually address whether the thing is true or not. ” And in fact, throughout this entire rambly 8,300 word article, there’s very little discussion of the truth of any of these things. It’s all just this kind of guilt by association. So we’re told
Not Ted:
That importation is exactly what is happening. Dugan’s geopolitical framework is Russian. The integralist political theology is drawn from pre-enlightenment European Catholic political thought.
Joe:
Hold the phone. Almost anything Catholics believe you’re going to be able to say comes from pre-enlightenment European Catholics or Middle Eastern Catholics or Catholics from before the modern age. So if your requirement for something to be a belief we have is that it has to be written originally by an American, it’s going to be a problem for things like the Bible, also the Summa, the writings of St. Augustine, whatever you want. Yes, of course we’re indebted to pre-enlightenment European Catholic thought and even much earlier than that. That’s part of what it is to be in Western civilization. We are not just the last 30 minutes in American political thinking. We have much deeper roots than that. And if that’s un-American, if that’s dangerous and bad, I think we just have very different understandings. I don’t think you can actually run a civilization where you say you’re not allowed to know anything before 1776 in America because even the founders, think about how much they’re indebted to enlightenment thinkers and how much those enlightenment thinkers in turn are indebted to others before them.
It’s just an absurd critique to say, “Oh, well, you’re drawing from thinkers who came from a long time ago.” Then they say-
Not Ted:
The SSPX traditionalism is French in origin, founded by Archbishop Marcel LeFevre, bishop who openly expressed sympathy for the Vici government.
Joe:
All of this from a Catholic perspective sounds a lot like these longstanding Protestant critique that Catholicism is too foreign and suspect and European and scary to be fully American. And Thomas Nast famously had political cartoons where he showed the Pope standing on top of St. Peter’s spying America as the promised land, which is such a hilariously 19th century Protestant way of understanding America. But that whole model of, oh, Catholics are these dangerous foreigners, it’s a gross thing for anyone to promote and highlight, particularly a sitting US Senator. I would expect, I don’t know, a Senator named Cruz to have at least a greater sensitivity to an appreciation for the fact that, yeah, I bet a lot of your ancestors were treated as second class Americans for not being wasps, and maybe you should be a little smarter about that, but fine. The worst part of this critique, in my view, is actually the part that comes next because a lot of this is just about how we should all be supporting Israel.
And when people question why we’re supporting Israel and try to convince Evangelicals not to just be blindly supportive of Israel, that this proves there’s an anti-Jewish plot and it’s all supported by the Russians and so on. But listen to these words. The
Not Ted:
Middle Eastern dimension adds another layer. Part of what Carlson Fuentes and their network have successfully done is import the sectarian framing of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as it exists in the Arab world and on the European left, a framing in which Israel is a settler colonial project, Zionism is racism, and Christian support for Israel is a form of complicity and oppression and introduced it into evangelical spaces where it has no native roots.
Joe:
Now, all I would say is you don’t have to be a foreigner to believe any of those things. Whether those things are right or wrong, treating those ideas as these crazy foreign things from either the Arab world or the European left is kind of absurd. This is the part I found most egregious.
Not Ted:
Palestinian Christian angle. Sympathetic pastors presented on platforms like Carlson’s as authentic voices of the church and the Holy Land is specifically designed to create cognitive dissonance for evangelicals who have never had to think of support for Israel as a form of Christian on Christian hostility.
Joe:
I think this gives away the whole game right there that yes, when you actually listen to Christians in the Middle East, a lot of them say, “Israel has treated us very badly.” And this is opening the eyes of many American Christians, including American evangelical Christians to say like, “Oh, I’m just sitting here imagining we’re supporting democracy in the Middle East and we’re supporting biblical Israel, but now I realize that these foreign policy decisions might be getting Christians in the Middle East killed, and now I’m having second thoughts. I’m more conflicted about this. ” And so the idea that this is bad, that people are now more aware of the impact this is all having on Christians and the Holy land is really remarkable. Politico had a piece from just earlier March this year, this called How the Rapture Explains the Rupture Over Israel on the right.
And one of the details pointed out there is that the Barna Group found that young evangelical support for Israel had plummeted from 75% in 2018 to just 34% in 2021. So I went and looked up the numbers, and it really is quite shocking that the blue lines there are young evangelicals, evangelicals 18 to 34. In 2015, 40% of them leaned towards Israel, only 3% of them leaned towards Palestinian and 55%, neither side, but I’m going to leave the neither sides out. So it’s 40 to three. By 2018, it was 21 to 18. So you went from having, what is that? A 13 to one disparity to something that’s almost one-to-one in just the span of a few years. And all of that is before October 7th. All that is before the war in Gaza. All of that is before you have things like Amnesty International suggesting that Israel’s committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
All of this is to say trying to come up with some cabal of influencers online or foreign powers or anything else that are tricking evangelicals into not blindly supporting Israel, I think misses the mark that there is a very demonstrable drop in support for Israel because people are seeing things on the news that they’re not comfortable with. And so yes, they are being forced to grapple with the fact that some of the things happening in Palestine aren’t great. Some of the things happening in Iran are not great. And you can believe the Jewish people deserve to be free from persecution and Israelis shouldn’t be persecuted and killed and also be uneasy about actions Israel’s taking both in Palestine and in Middle Eastern politics more broadly without being a hypocrite or antisemite or feeling like you have to choose just everything Israel does is okay or everything Israel does is the worst thing in the world.
And I think more, and we see it in the numbers, more young evangelicals are certainly going that way. Now, this is what’s obviously upsetting the Ted Cruzes of the world, the insurrection Barbies of the world, but you can’t blame Catholic answers or any of these Catholic thought leaders for causing this drop in evangelical support for Israel. The call is coming from inside the house.
Going back to the article though, it says, this is the line that I was struck by again, that the Palestinian Christian angle, meaning when you get to actually hear from Palestinian Christians, for example, when the patriarchs and the holy land put out a statement warning that Christian Zionism was leading to a lot of them being killed, those kind of things, the article says, are specifically designed to create cognitive dissonance for evangelicals. But the whole thing is this is not cognitive dissonance. This is the opposite. When you have to confront the reality of your actions, that’s not what cognitive dissonance is. When you believe one thing and then the reality is something totally different and you have these two separate things that you don’t really harmonize in your mind, that’s the dissonance cognitively. For evangelicals who’ve never had to think of support for Israel as a form of Christian on Christian hostility, well, if it is Christian on Christian hostility, even if you’re not intending it to be, if the effect of it is we’re giving a lot of weapons to Israel and it’s leading to more conflict and innocent Christians are getting killed in the process, then yeah, that’s a good thing to grapple with.
And this isn’t particularly unique. I mean, you can look at the history of conflict across the 20th century. Oftentimes American support for involvement abroad goes down when you actually have video of what our support is leading to. This is much of the story of Vietnam. Whether you think that’s good or bad, at least understand what’s happening. If people are seeing the ugly reality of war and they’re saying, “I don’t want to support that. ” That’s not insane. You don’t need any kind of cabal, any kind of international conspiracy to account for that. Now, sure, would the other side in a war want to use the ugly images of war to demoralize American support? Absolutely. But that doesn’t change the fact that war is ugly and that people when they see it don’t want it. There’s nothing particularly shocking about that. But according to this article-
Not Ted:
None of this is accidental. All of it is deliberate and all of it is being imported into a country that uniquely among Western nations built its founding constitutional architecture specifically to prevent exactly this kind of sectarian conflict from taking root.
Joe:
Now, I find this whole thing bizarre to the point of almost insanity, meaning this, the idea that it’s perfectly American to just say, “I support Israel, I’ve got a US, Israel flag, lapelpen, and I support the Jews as they are engaged in this battle against their mostly Muslim Arab neighbors.” That’s not sectarian conflict. But if you say, “I’m actually uneasy about that, ” or more radically, “I support the Muslim Arab neighbors,” that becomes sectarian conflict. Why is the sectarian conflict not that we are supporting war in the Middle East or that we are promoting the interest of one religious and ethnic group over the interest of their neighbors? Why is that not the sectarian conflict? If the position that insurrection Barbie or Ted Cruz took was, “We should have nothing to do with the Middle East, we should leave Israel alone,” then it would understand saying, “Yeah, the American thing here is no entangling foreign alliances and we want to avoid this kind of sectarian conflict.” But when you’re the one supporting getting the US involved in the Middle East in these ways where we’re backing up Israel and wars we didn’t really choose for ourselves to then complain that the people showing footage of what that is doing are bringing sectarian conflict home to the US.
I mean, it would be like saying, “Oh, well, critics of the US’s policy and the Cold War and Latin America are bringing too much Latin American politics into things.” It’s like, well, maybe the CIA is doing that. Maybe our meddling is the thing that’s getting us entangled, not the people pointing the meddling out. And again, I say this while being perfectly comfortable saying you can support Israel, but to pretend like calling out the costs of that support is somehow off limits. That’s the part that calling out is just absurd. Okay, let’s turn to part two of this article, what they call the theological attack, targeting the foundation. The author, Bumano Robotic, says-
Not Ted:
You cannot dismantle evangelical political power without first de- legitimizing evangelical theology.
Joe:
Now, this points to a theme running through the article that I think evangelicals should be very annoyed by, where the whole thing that Cruz is promoting is the best analysis treats evangelical religious beliefs as useful, not true, that it’s important evangelicals have this view of solo scriptura. It’s important they have this view of dispensational pre-millennial theology because that’s helpful for US interests in the holy land. And that should be gross. It should be repugnant because it’s treating Jesus as a convenient crutch to get to the political goals that you want to get to, that evangelical political power is the thing worth protecting, and the evangelical theology is the means that we get to that end.That is pretty on the surface in the article.
Not Ted:
The movement’s entire political architecture rests on a theological claim that God made an eternal, unconditional covenant with the Jewish people that the modern state of Israel is a fulfillment of biblical prophecy and that Christians who bless Israel are obeying a direct divine command. Remove that conviction and you remove the moral engine that has driven evangelical political engagement for half a century.
Joe:
Now, I think there’s actually a lot of truth there. I think it is certainly true that if you want to understand evangelical views on foreign policy, some of that is just Cold War, some of that is just pro- democracy, but a huge portion of it are these set of largely untrue theological beliefs that evangelicals have believed. And so one of the reasons in that political article, political article that I cited to earlier that it talked about this plummeting and support for Israel is because evangelicals are less likely to believe these things anymore. Protestant fundamentalists had their own overlapping eschatology, dispensational pre-millennialism, which as the article explains, was a complicated eschatological or in times framework that was once deeply familiar to tens of millions of American Protestants and was essentially a detailed scenario for how the world would end. So the idea was God worked through these different dispensations or historical eras that we are currently in what was called the church era, and that this would suddenly close with a rapture in which the true believers were taken up into heaven.
Then you’d have a seven-year tribulation, the antichrist war, all of this. And at the end, Christ would return and establish a thousand-year reign of peace before the final judgment. Now, that set of beliefs is no longer believed in as much by Protestants. And that’s really important because as this article notes, as the Insurrection Barbie Post notes, this was a major driver because the idea was, oh, look, Israel and the Holy Land, this is the Israel of the Bible, and if we support them, this is going to be this trigger for the end time. Now, I’ve done a couple videos on this. One of the reasons evangelicals don’t believe in this as much anymore is these prophecies have repeatedly not come true. There were a series of predictions prominent dispensationalists made about the timeline for when Jesus would return in the 1980s because the idea is, oh, look, we’re going to support the creation of Israel in 1948, and then 40 years later in 1988, Jesus will return.
And none of that happens. And so when time and time and time and time again, the dispensationalist timeline turns out not to be true, people start to question, well, maybe you’re reading the Bible wrong. Maybe your reading of the Bible is not correct or maybe your understanding of Israel is not correct because none of the things you think are going to happen are happening. So the article goes on to say, “This prophecy once supplied the why of Evangelical Zionism.” The obvious question is why it supplies less of it now. And the answer I would give is fewer evangelicals believe in this kind of dispensationalism. It’s still popular. There’s still a lot of people who believe in it, but it doesn’t seem to be nearly as popular as the 1990s. You have the Left Behind series. You’ve got prominent people like Kirk Cameron, and Cameron has rejected all of that now.
So we can see particular prominent figures who have repudiated their earlier support for this kind of theology. But additionally, you just have less doctrinally serious Protestants today, and the political article acknowledges this. Part of this is doctrinal drift. Dispensationalism emphasizes a literal interpretation of the Bible hasn’t disappeared, but evangelical scholars and pastors have noted it’s declining dominance in Christian intellectual life, but also younger evangelicals are less likely to inherit dense institutionally reinforced systems of belief and more likely to inherit a package of cultural and increasingly partisan cues. So Christianity today reports on evangelical fracture described in a movement splintering into subfamilies with some younger cohorts less committed to older doctrines or rituals, including weekly church attendance. And so the article goes on to basically suggest for a lot of young evangelicals, evangelicalism is more kind of a MAGA worldview and less a specific set of theological commitments.
Now, obviously that’s not true in a broad brush kind of way, but in as much as there is this divergence, that means there’s going to be less interest in or commitment to a particular escatological end times view that would then support a particular kind of foreign policy that ironically, the very thing that the article I’m critiquing is guilty of, of treating evangelicalism simply as a political tool to support a set of policies ends up becoming self-refuting because if people don’t really believe it, if it’s not really the worldview they’re operating in, then you can’t draw on that worldview as support for your foreign policy. All right, so let’s pivot from dispensationalism, which I’m going to actually return to, to Solascriptura because this is closely related. You’ll notice even in the earlier descriptions, dispensationalism really stresses take everything literally. Now, they don’t really. It doesn’t mean that they take it literally when Jesus says, “Eat my flesh and drink my blood,” but they purport to take things very literally.
So the article says one of the attacks is the attack, the assault, I should say, on Solascripturo. And insurrection Barbie says,
Not Ted:
“The theological bedrock of Protestantism is sola scriptura. The doctrine that scripture alone is the supreme authority for Christian faith and practice. Every Protestant denomination, including every evangelical tradition, traces itself back to this principle.”
Joe:
As an aside, I would highlight this as a problem with Solascriptura. Think about all of the different types of Protestantism, think about all the different major camps of Protestantism. And when they’re all using Solascriptura as a principle and coming to these wildly different conclusions, that seems like a red flag for Soloscriptora’s workability. If the idea is, hey, if people just faithfully diligently read scripture, they’re going to come to the right answer, then I think Protestants have a lot of explaining to do why we don’t see that happening in real life. Why don’t Methodists and Presbyterians and Baptists and Quakers and fill in the blank all agree with each other? Why don’t the reformed agree with the Armenians? Why don’t Evangelicals agree with mainliners? You can go on and on and on.
If faithfully, diligently searching the scriptures led by the Holy Spirit is what we’re all called to and what we’re all capable of, why don’t we see the results of that? Shouldn’t we see one, at least broadly speaking, worldview? But we certainly don’t see that. A lot of evangelicals and a lot of Protestants more broadly would completely reject dispensationalism. Dispensationalism is largely an American phenomenon. You don’t see much of this outside of the USA. And so this idea that this is just what someone would come to if they read the Bible is simply not true. They’re really complicated charts and you have to have a lot of hours of explanations to get you into a dispensationalist way of reading the Bible that might seem like second nature to someone who grows up in it, or this is the only form of Christianity they’ve been exposed to, but it’s certainly not the only way of reading scripture and is not the way Christians have historically read scripture.
So that seems like a problem with sola scriptura. You certainly don’t seem to get from sola scriptura to dispensationalism reliably. You don’t seem to get from sola scriptura to any one view of Christianity reliably, but we’ll continue. They say-
Not Ted:
The Catholic church considers sola scripture a heresy. The Orthodox churches consider it contrary to tradition, both hold that scripture must be interpreted through the church’s authoritative teaching, which means individual Christians cannot simply read the Bible and conclude that God made a covenant with the Jewish people that remains operative today.
Joe:
Now, two things. In this article, it had previously been like, no, we’re not attacking Catholics. We’re just attacking these bad French Catholics that aren’t representative of Catholicism. But here it’s very clear. If you don’t agree with Solah Scriptora, you’re the enemy because sola scriptura is important for this kind of very literalistic reading that Israel means the modern nation state of Israel. And so now it is much more nakedly like, yes, you can’t believe what Christians have historically believed. You can’t be Catholic or Orthodox. You can’t read scripture through the lens of the church. You have to just be an individual Christian simply reading your Bible and concluding, “Oh, well, this covenant with the Jewish people remains operative today.” Now, look, we would say the covenant with the Jewish people remains operative today in some senses. A lot hangs on what do we mean by the Jewish people, hangs on what we mean by operative today.
Covenant theology is nuanced theology. And if you’re not able to engage in nuance and you don’t have a deep rooting in covenant theology, then I think you’re going to run into some problems. But okay, here’s where Catholic answers gets called out.
Not Ted:
The online assault on solo scripture has been running for years through Catholic answers.
Joe:
Running through Catholic answers is such bizarre conspiratorial language. It’s not, “Hey, a lot of Catholics working for Catholic answers are against solo scriptura and debate it and show why it doesn’t work.” It’s rather that somebody is running this through us. I don’t know who that somebody is, I guess the Russians, but like Alexander Dugan isn’t even Catholic. So I don’t know, maybe he was secretly behind the creation of Catholic answers nearly 50 years ago, but that doesn’t really make sense because his book came out in 1997, long after Catholic answers, but okay. So
Not Ted:
The online assault on solo scripture has been running for years through Catholic answers, YouTube debates, conversion testimonies, and TikTok content targeting young evangelical men specifically. The argument is always the same. Your reliance on personal Bible reading is epistemologically naive, historically ignorant, and intellectually embarrassing. You need the church. The church says the covenants with Israel are fulfilled, superseded in Christ.
Joe:
This is an overly unnuanced treatment of the church’s view that we would say the covenants are fulfilled. Superseded is not a great way of describing that, that Christ comes to fulfill the promises to Israel. He is the Jewish Messiah after all. And so the idea that those covenants remain unfulfilled and therefore operative because they’re not fulfilled would be a repudiation of Christ as if he didn’t come. Now, those who don’t know Christ, it isn’t as if God has simply abandoned people with whom he’s made covenants in the past. That’s true whether we’re talking about the Noeit covenant with the Gentiles or the Mosaic covenant with the Jewish people. So we don’t go to the sort of extreme view of supercessionism, but there is a sense that, yeah, As the covenants are meant to prepare for the coming of Christ and they did. And so to that extent, sure, the covenant, you’re no longer required to keep kosher.
That’s true if you’re ethnically Jewish or Gentile. And that’s really clearly just biblical.
Not Ted:
The pattern has been documented. Young men raised on the certainty that the Bible provides complete answers and counter arguments they cannot immediately rebut, lose confidence in their evangelical framework and begin searching for more authoritative tradition. Well,
Joe:
Look, if your version of solo scriptura can’t actually solve these problems, if it doesn’t resolve these covenantal interpretation issues, or it doesn’t settle these major questions of whether I should be this kind of Protestant or that kind of Protestant, yeah, maybe that is a sign that you have an unworkable framework. That’s not some malicious conspiracy. Just like when people are confronted by the consequence of their actions and change their views, that’s not a conspiracy. You’re just coming to realize like, oh yes, I had this naive view that if we all just read the Bible, we would interpret it the same way my church did. And now I find out that there are smart, holy Christians who interpret the Bible differently than I do. And so there’s clearly something more that’s necessary. That’s just part of maturing. And the more people do that, the more they realize that a lot of solo scripturist claims turn out not to be really workable.
If you think it’s important that we have clear answers on this, and then you see that solo scriptural practitioners don’t agree on what those clear answers are, then I do think it creates a problem that needs to be investigated.
Not Ted:
What gets discarded in that exchange reliably is the evangelical conviction that God’s covenant with the Jewish people remains active and that Christians are obligated to stand with Israel. This is not accidental. It is systematic.
Joe:
Now, this is just delusional levels of conspiratorial thinking. The Catholic Church has been opposed to Soloscriptora from the advent of Solascriptura being promoted as a distinct theological system in the 16th century. We find it addressed head on at the Council of Trent. This is before there is a nation state of Israel. The idea that this is some kind of conspiracy to get after Israel is a monomaniacal way of understanding theology where everything is just interpreted through the lens of how does this change or impact our support for the nation state of Israel? And it really does seem to make an idol of a country where everything serves Israel, including our theological commitments to scripture and tradition. Like when St. Paul tells us Thessalonians to hold fast what they’ve received from the apostles, whether by word of mouth or by epistle, he’s not meaning that as an attack on the nation’s state of Israel.
He’s just telling you solo scriptura is not how this works. All right. Continuing in the article. This is what they call the trad Catholic online pipeline.
Not Ted:
Beneath the major figures runs a sprawling ecosystem of Catholic and Orthodox content creators who have been running the theological attack for years. Catholic answers, YouTube debates, conversion testimony videos. This ecosystem specifically targets young evangelical men by attacking solo scriptura, arguing the Protestant reformation was a civilizational error and presenting intellectual seriousness as synonymous with the path to Rome or Constantinople.
Joe:
This part is very repetitive, so I apologize, but this is what you get when you have an 8300 word article.
Not Ted:
The pattern has been documented. Young men raised on biblical certainty and counter sophisticated arguments they cannot immediately rebut, lose confidence in their evangelical framework and convert.
Joe:
Now look, I’m all for biblical certainty. I’m not for conflating that with Solo Scriptura because biblical certainty doesn’t mean you are certainly going to understand the Bible correctly. If you look at the Bible itself, think about the number of times Jesus says something and his crowds misunderstand. So if somebody said, “Oh, these people are misunderstanding,” and you said, “Wow, I can’t believe you don’t believe in the certainty of Jesus’s words.” That would be a completely inappropriate response. The problem is not with Jesus’s words. The problem with people not knowing how to understand Jesus’s words and frequently that understanding is very simple. They understand it very literally and very unintelligently, and that turns out to be wrong. Jesus says, “Destroy this template in three days, I’ll rebuild it. ” The temple he’s speaking of is his body. Even today, you have evangelicals who think there’s meant to be a third temple built in Jerusalem.
The third temple is Jesus’ body. John two says this explicitly. The prophecies made at the last chapters of Ezekiel about living water flowing from the side of the temple. They’re fulfilled in Christ when his side is pierced and water flows out. He is the temple. There’s not some third building. This was a very basic mistake people made in John two and a very basic mistake you see evangelicals making today. And I highlight this because this is called out, but that’s not a problem with Jesus. That’s not a problem with the Bible. That’s a problem with misunderstanding the words of Jesus and misunderstanding the Bible.
Not Ted:
What is observed but rarely stated is that these conversions reliably produce men who no longer share the conviction that God’s covenant with the Jewish people remains operative. They have traded one foundation for another, and the new foundation does not include Genesis 12: three.
Joe:
And that’s just not true. The new foundation has a better understanding of Genesis 12: three, which despite the way insurrection Barbie and others present it, doesn’t say anything about supporting Israel because the words are addressed to Abraham. Now, the Lord said to Abraham, “Go from your country and your kindred and your Father’s house to the land that I’ll show you and I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and him who curses you, I will curse. And by you, all the families of the earth shall bless themselves.” So then the question becomes, okay, well, obviously this includes more than just Abraham personally. This is going to be something where it includes his descendants. Which descendants? And as I’ve addressed it before, if you go off bloodline, it would be his oldest son, Ishmael.
But if you instead go off of the covenantial promises, it would be his younger son, Isaac. And Jews and Christians agree it’s Isaac. Muslims would say it’s Ishmael. St. Paul talks about this in Galatians chapter four, that it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave and one by a free woman, but the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, the son of the free woman through promise. And he says, now this is an allegory. These women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai bearing children for slavery. She is Hagar. Now Hagar is Mount Sinai and Arabia. She corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. Notice what Paul is saying here. That in his day, there were Jewish people who insisted they had right to the covenant because they were of the bloodline of Abraham.
And Jesus had warned them, “Don’t say your children of Abraham, God can raise up children from these very stones.” And he says to the Pharisees that they’re of their father, the devil. I mean, very strong language. Don’t just claim that you have this lineage from Abraham. Because as Paul is pointing out here, that would logically be a better argument for Ishmael to raise. So you’re using Ishmael kind of thinking. So President Jerusalem is using this slave thinking. Hagar is this image of slavery. She is an Egyptian, she is a slave, and she represents not the freedom of the covenant. The freedom of covenant is by faith and not by bloodline. And so Paul says, “But the Jerusalem above is free and she is our mother.” That when we are talking about Israel, when we’re talking about Jerusalem, we are talking about the Jerusalem above Sosa St. Paul.
Now, sometimes you have to be careful in reading scripture when he’s talking about the Jerusalem above and when he’s talking about the present Jerusalem, but that’s the distinction. He’s clearly distinguishing these two. But Ted Cruz has no understanding of this and he’s very clear about this. He says, oh, well, when the Bible says Israel, it means Israel. And he makes fun of Tucker Carlson for not accepting that view. Dave DeCamp had a very memorable response where he said, “If I name my son Jesus, would you worship him as God because he has the same name as Jesus from the Bible?” And here’s the thing. Here’s why this response works in my view as a good answer because if you actually read scripture, and it’s very clear from Ted Cruz’s interview with Tucker Carlson, he couldn’t even name where these promises were made, like what book of the Bible he couldn’t even narrow it down to the book.
He just knows somewhere it says something about blessing Israel. If you read the actual history of the Old Testament, you’ll see that in one Kings 12, the United Kingdom is divided. The 10 Northern tribes separate and form what they call the kingdom of Israel, and the two Southern tribes become known as Judah. Now, think about everything Ted Cruz has said. Think about everything Insurrection Barbie has said. You’ve got a country occupying part of the Holy Land, calling itself Israel. Flash back to that time, who would you be obliged to support? When it says Genesis 12, God will bless those who bless you and curse those occurs to you. Who is the you? Is it Israel or is it Judah? Well, Israel’s the one called Israel. I mean, Israel’s Israel, right? That’s Ted’s whole argument. But no, the northern tribes are the faithless ones. The remnant in the South are the ones who’ve preserved the faith.
And so one Kings 12 says, “So Israel has been rebellion against a house of David to this day.” And it stresses. There were none that followed the house of David, but the tribe of Judah only. Later, the northern tribes, Israel, will form a new capital, Samaria, while the Southern tribes in Judah will continue to have Jerusalem as their capital. So you can actually see that on the map. The same thing happens, meaning you get these points in history where you have a fork in the road, and the fact that one group may not be faithful, but still calls themselves Israel doesn’t mean they’re automatically the right one, the one we have to support. St. Paul in Romans 11 talks about it like this. He compares it to an olive tree, and he says, “If the root is holy, so are the branches.” But if some of the branches were broken off, now I should note here, he’s talking to the Gentiles, and he’s talking about those Jews who were faithless, who refused to accept the Jewish Messiah Jesus when he came.
He said, “If some of those branches were broken off and you, a wild olive shoe were grafted in their place to share the richness of the olive tree, do not boast over the branches. If you do boast, remember that it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you. ” Now, this is one of the clearest descriptions of what’s happening that God doesn’t … Sometimes the people who don’t believe in dispensationalists are accused of replacement theology, and that is a complete misunderstanding. God remains faithful to his people, but there are times that parties to the covenant break off. We saw that in one kings. You have the northern tribes who break off. They eventually become Samaritans. They don’t just continue to receive all the covenant blessings and promises of the covenant because they stop holding to the faith and the covenant.
Now, if Ted Cruz and insurrection Barbie were right, this is just an unconditional covenant, then you would think every bloodline descendant would hold to it, but that isn’t what happens at all. It’s possible for branches to be broken off. St. Paul could not be clearer about this point. And so those who are faithless then and now break off from the covenant promises. In the Old Testament as well as in the New Testament, the righteous live by faith. That’s not some New Testament invention. That is from the Old Testament. So those who don’t live by faith are broken off from the covenant. Those faithful Gentiles are grafted in. They become co-heirs of the promises of Christ. This is all very explicit. That’s not abandoning one people for a new people. Imagine if you have a family and let’s say you have some kind of family feud and some of the members of the family, they run away, they storm off, they cut off all contact with the family, they repudiate any connection to the family.
And then as time goes on, other people marry into the family and have kids and everything else. You haven’t replaced your family with another family. It’s still your family, but some people have left your family and other people have joined your family. Your family remains your family. This is how it is with Judaism. The church is not some Gentile creation. The church is a Jewish creation formed by Christ with the 12 apostles who are all of Israel. And Gentiles are then brought into this thing that has Jewish roots. This is one reason why we shouldn’t be antisemitic. It’s also another reason why we shouldn’t be dispensationalists because if you understand that view of the covenant, then it shows that no, the straw man of replacement theology is just not what’s actually happening here. That the covenant is being fulfilled with the church, that the faithful of Israel are being united with the faithful Gentiles.
And this is good news for everyone. St. Paul goes on to say, You will say branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in. That is true. They are broken off because of their unbelief, but you stand fast only through faith. So do not become proud, but stand in awe for God did not spare the natural branches. Neither will he spare you. But then he says, this is not just bad news. Even the others, if they do not persist in their unbelief will be grafted in for God has the power to graft them in again. For if you’ve been cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree and grafted contrary to nature into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these natural branches be grafted back into their own olive tree? The message of St. Paul is good news for Jews and Gentiles alike.
And this is the message of Jesus Christ. It’s good news for Jews and Gentiles alike. Read John 10. Jesus has faithful Jews. He has faithful Gentiles and he comes to unite them together in one flock so there can be one flock and one shepherd. That’s not antisemitic. It’s not anti-gentile, but it’s also not putting the Jews in some special place where they’re automatically saved or that they’re automatically unconditionally elected to these promises. No, the covenant works as a covenant has always worked and not every blood relative receives the promises of the covenant. This is abundantly clear if you trace the covenant throughout the Old Testament and then read about the covenant in the New Testament. Okay. Final thoughts. Part seven, the 10-year architecture. So says insurrection, Barbie.
Not Ted:
Step back and the long game becomes visible in its entirety. Now I
Joe:
Want to point out this 10-year architecture is very strange because we’ve been at this way more than 10 years, but we’re told.
Not Ted:
Years one through three, theological inoculation. Make evangelical theology seem intellectually embarrassing to young conservative men, accomplished through the solo scriptura online attack pipeline, the Catholic conversion apparatus, and the too smart to be a Protestant messaging. The goal is not conversion. It is doubt. A young evangelical who no longer feels confident defending his theology is already partially detached from the political commitments that theology grounded.
Joe:
Again, notice the only reason they care about your theological beliefs is because they’re politically useful. These people are using you. Second, for us, the goal is conversion. In fact, I would say this, whoever’s watching this, Catholic, Protestant, neither of the above. I want you to go closer to Jesus Christ. I want to grow closer to Jesus Christ. It’s a lifelong journey. And I want to do the things Jesus wants me to do, and I want you to do the things Jesus wants you to do. And if that is useful to my political views, great. And if it’s not, God’s will be done because he’s in control and not me. I’m never going to use you for some political ends that I’ve discerned, and I resent people who nakedly do that. And I hope you do as well. So my goal is not to leave you in doubt.
My goal is to help you, hopefully, listen to the voice of the good shepherd as he promises that there will be one flock with one shepherd. We should find that one flock. We should be part of it, whether we’re Jewish or Gentile. And that’s why I’m a Catholic. That’s why I hope you’ll be Catholic. As Jesus prays, we’ll all be one as he and the Father are one. That’s my prayer for us as well. So the people sowing this kind of dissension and doubt, they’re not caring for you. They’re not looking out for you. They’re not telling the truth. They are using you theologically because it’s useful for a particular foreign policy project. And watch out for that. I don’t particularly care what your views are on Middle Eastern foreign affairs. There’s a wide variety of views you can take and be a faithful Christian, but don’t fall for people manipulating you theologically to try to get you to fall lockstack into their view of foreign policy because there’s something really spiritually disastrous about that.
Now, if you want to know more about why this view of dispensationalism is wrong, I’ve got two videos on that. One is a longer explanation that looks at dispensationalism and some of the prominent proponents of it and how they’ve gotten all of their prophecies wrong. I’ll link to that in the comments below or in the description below. But the other one is on Ted Cruz specifically and why he just gets all of the theology about Israel wrong. And since Ted Cruz is the one who was promoting this, I thought it might be an appropriate place to end here by linking this video where I go into more depth about why Ted Cruz is wrong about Israel and the Bible. For Shamus Popri, I’m Joe Heschmeyer.
Not Ted:
And I’m not Ted Cruz. God bless you.