Host Cy Kellett welcomes Jimmy Akin to discuss why catholics call priests “Father”.
Transcript:
Cy Kellett: Welcome, Christian. Why aren’t you Catholic?
Caller: My Catholic? Cuz it’s a lot of rituals. I don’t find that stuff in the Bible. Jesus said you should pray to the Father. There’s only one Father, so I don’t know why.
Jimmy Akin: Yeah, Catholics do that.
Caller: Yeah, yeah. They’re breaking the law already.
Jimmy Akin: Oh, I see. Oh, calling priests.
Caller: Okay, well, are the priests trying to be the Father, like God is the Father?
Jimmy Akin: Nope. Priests are not the Father the way God is the Father.
Jimmy Akin: Let’s deal with that subject first and then we’ll go back and talk about rituals, which was the other subject you mentioned. So, Christian, you’re a human being, correct?
Caller: Yes.
Jimmy Akin: Yeah, just wanted to verify. So you have a father, correct?
Caller: Yes.
Jimmy Akin: And do you ever call your father Father or dad or Papa or anything like that? Dad. Okay. Is your dad dad in the same way God is Dad or Abba?
Caller: No.
Jimmy Akin: No. Okay. So we see there can be humans who are not God, and we’re all agreed they’re not God who can be referred to as Father even though they’re not Father is the way God is a father. So God’s the ultimate Father. We agreed on that. Is that correct?
Caller: Yes.
Jimmy Akin: Yeah. Okay, so then we come to a question now because in Matthew 23, Jesus says, you know, call no man Father and so forth, but we have to ask, what does he mean there? One possibility is that he’s prohibiting anybody from ever using the term Father for a human being, and he’s wanting to restrict it to just being used for God. On the other hand, it’s possible that he means it in a more restrictive way, like don’t confuse anybody else’s fatherhood with God’s fatherhood. So we need to figure out which of those possibilities. And there could be others, but those are the two I’d like to suggest for your consideration. Which of those do we have evidence that supports. Would you say, Christian, that we have evidence that Jesus was prohibiting anybody from ever using the term Father for a human?
Caller: Yes. Prohibited. Let’s call Father people.
Jimmy Akin: Okay, let’s explore that then. Let’s explore that. So when, when Jesus is 12 years old, this is in Luke chapter 2, and Mary and Joseph find him in the temple. Mary says to him, your father and I have been looking for you. And he’s referring to Joseph as Jesus father, meaning his adopted father, not his biological father. Would you say that Jesus would say that Mary broke the rule by referring to Joseph as Jesus’s earthly father about not calling other people father? Was Mary breaking that rule?
Caller: No.
Jimmy Akin: Okay. How about when we look in the Book of Acts and we find Stephen or Paul or other people addressing a gathering of Jews and they say things like, brothers and fathers, I got this message for you. Are they breaking the rule that Jesus established?
Caller: Not sure. Maybe not sure.
Jimmy Akin: Let’s then look at other New Testament authors like St. Paul. You would agree that when St. Paul writes his epistles, his letters, that they’re divinely inspired, correct?
Caller: Yes.
Jimmy Akin: Yeah. Okay. So when St. Paul writes to Timothy, he’s. He refers to Timothy as his son, implying that he’s Timothy’s spiritual father. Did that break Jesus’s rule, bearing in mind he’s writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit? No. Okay. When St. Paul writes to the Corinthians, he says, I became your father in the faith. Is St. Paul breaking the rule there?
Caller: No.
Jimmy Akin: Okay. No. When John writes to his readers, he refers to them as my little children, implying he’s their father spiritually. Is he breaking Jesus’s rule?
Caller: I don’t know really what he meant, but.
Jimmy Akin: Okay, I thought that’s fine.
Caller: Literally.
Jimmy Akin: Yeah. So I would say when we look at the example that’s set by the apostles, including when they’re writing under divine inspiration, they could perfectly well describe themselves as spiritual fathers and their converts as their spiritual children. And that would not seem to break Jesus rule because the Holy Spirit was inspiring them to say this and that would you end up pitting what the Holy Spirit says against what Jesus said? So I would suggest that we have pretty good evidence that what Jesus meant was not don’t ever use the word father for a human, but something much more restricted and commonsensical, like, don’t confuse the fatherhood of any human with the fatherhood of God. Does that sound reasonable? Like something maybe you could think about in the future?
Caller: Yeah, it makes more sense.
Jimmy Akin: Okay, awesome. So I hope that helps with that issue. Now, you also mentioned the issue of rituals. Okay, well, we don’t have a lot of descriptions of what early Christian services were like. We have some indications. One of the things, and I won’t go through it all, but I would make a few points. The first one is, if you look in the Old Testament, they had the Jerusalem Temple and they had a priesthood that they offered sacrifices, and the Psalms were basically the hymn book priests that they had choirs singing at the temple and so forth. You would agree that in the Old Testament there were quite a lot of rituals that were part of Jewish worship, right?
Caller: Yes.
Jimmy Akin: Yeah. So the question would then be, did God want Christians to overthrow all ritualism or did he expect Christians to have some form of ritualism, just like he had instructed the Jewish people to have? So we need to look for evidence and say, well, do we have any evidence that Jesus told the first Christians to chuck out all the ritual and not do any rituals anymore? I can’t think of any passages where Jesus says anything like that. Can you?
Caller: No.
Jimmy Akin: No. Yeah. So given that, that we have a precedent in Jewish worship for using rituals and Jesus can all the rituals, guys, I would expect that precedent to inform Christian ritual. And in fact, we have evidence it did. You’ve probably heard the ending that some people use for prayers. Forever and ever. Amen. That’s actually a fusion of forever and ever, which is what they would say in the Temple, and Amen, which is what they’d say in the synagogue. And Christians fused those two as part of our own Christian prayer tradition. Also, Jesus gave us the Lord’s Prayer as a model prayer to say. He also gave us the Lord’s Supper, or as Catholics call it, the Eucharist, to be part of Christian worship. And that’s a ritual. And then when we look in the Book of Revelation that depicts what’s going on in heaven, we see them using rituals up in heaven all the way through the Book of Revelation. So I would say that there’s a good bit of evidence in the New Testament that ritual is meant to be part of Christian worship. And this is really cool. A lot of people don’t know this, but we actually have a description from the mid second century. This is around the year AD150. So this is like 100 years after the time of Jesus. We have a description of how early Christians worshiped by the early church. Father St. Justin Martyr, he’s writing to explain to non Christians, here’s what we do in our worship services, because there were a lot of rumors that we were committing crimes and cannibalism and stuff. So he writes to non Christians to explain, no, guys, this is what we do in our service. And he outlines the Christian worship service, and it’s the same as the Catholic Mass today. So the Catholic Mass actually, we can show it being used, but all the way back to within 100 years of when Christ was crucified for us. So I would say we have good evidence from both the New Testament and from right after the New Testament that indicates ritual is meant to be part of Christian worship. I’d like to also send you Christian a daily defense so that you can explore more questions. But I hope that what we’ve covered so far has been helpful.