In this clip, Cy Kellett welcomes Joe Heschmeyer to discuss the challenges faced by a young man raised in a Oneness Pentecostal church as he explores Catholicism.
Transcript:
Joe Heschmeyer: I mean, I will say this, this is the first oneness Pentecostal sedevacantist contest crossover that we’ve encountered. We don’t have a 20 answers book on that yet!
Caller: I was raised a oneness Pentecostal. I left. I have a girlfriend, she’s Roman Catholic. But the thing about that is that she was raised as a save a contest. So a lot of the things that I’ve heard them say is very, you know, against the church, anti popes, demonic, stuff like that. But I also heard the same thing from the Pentecost side of my family. In fact, that was. I was literally growing up, I was scared of things like statues and whatnot because that to me, that was. I don’t. I was literally scared to be around them. That’s how bad it was. The weird thing is that my girlfriend’s family is super into that side of Roman Catholicism. But you know, they don’t believe in receiving Eucharist because you can’t go to the church according to them because all those are false priests or. Oh, so I’m kind of like in a weird place. I don’t know what you are and
Joe Heschmeyer: I know, let me give you maybe a 20,000 foot and then I’m happy to hear your thoughts after that. So one commonality, whether you’re oneness Pentecostal or civic contest or Catholic, is that you’re trying to follow Jesus Christ. And you will find people who are trying really hard to be faithful ending up in what I think you recognize as these wildly different places. So a good thing to start with is, well, did Jesus make it that hard? Like, did he make it that hard to understand his teaching? Because that should be a big red flag. And if he didn’t make it that hard, then one thing that follows from that is we should expect that the early Christians would get things basically right. That doesn’t mean you agree with them on like every small thing they thought. But you’d expect if this is not tricky, if this is straightforward, he’s presented the gospel, people got it, the apostles went out, people got it. That doesn’t mean everybody got it. There’s plenty of people who didn’t. But there’s going to be some clear visible evidence that people understand the message and are living it out. So then you would want to do things like read what the early Christians thought Jesus and the apostles had been teaching. And if it turns out that it’s radically contrary to what you’re practicing, that’s an enormous red flag. So, you know, you mentioned the Eucharist earlier. I think this is one of those areas where people from a Pentecostal background are actually sort of primed in a certain way. Because on the one hand, people Pentecostals put a big emphasis on miraculous stuff happening in the modern world, and they’re looking out for it. On the other hand, here’s Jesus promising this miraculous event, and it gets completely ignored. And it’s like, well, no, you’re actually being told that the bread and wine become his body and blood, and he uses that language. So if you use the same standard of we want to take the plain language of scripture and we want to be on the lookout for the miraculous, this should prime you well to hear about the Eucharist and say, oh, yeah, like, that tracks. This matches up with everything we were looking for. And then you read the early Christians and you’re like, yeah, they clearly believed this was a miracle in which the bread and wine became the body and blood of Christ. So all of that just, I think, fits very naturally in place. Even taking the best parts of where you came from originally in terms of challenges, you know, for somebody coming from a oneness Pentecostal background, a good test is to say, like, hey, in the garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus is praying, not my will, but yours be done to the Father. What’s going on there? Because if you believe the Father and the Son are the same person, then that doesn’t make any sense, that this is one of the clearest indications. Or when he says, like, the Father’s greater than I, or when he talks about speaking the things that he has seen the Father do. Or, you know, all throughout the Gospels, you have Jesus delineating the Father and himself. And then you have, you know, in the baptism, the heavens opening up and the Holy Spirit descending upon Jesus like a dove, and the voice of the Father from heaven saying, this is my beloved Son, in whom I’m well pleased. So you have the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, who is all right there, all clearly not the same person. Those kind of passages are going to point to there being three persons, Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And then you have passages like Matthew 28, which tell you to baptize in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. So then the question becomes, well, why does Luke often just shorten that to just baptize in the name of Jesus that he’s not giving a liturgical formula there? He’s not saying, here are the exact words said at the baptism. He is contrasting Christian Baptism with the baptism of John. And this is actually clear in Acts itself. So for instance, in Acts 19, when Paul’s in Ephesus, he encounters a group of believers who are trying to follow Christ, but they don’t have the Holy Spirit. And the reason they don’t have the Holy Spirit, we’re told, is because they were only baptized into the baptism of John. Now that doesn’t mean the baptism was I baptized you in the name of John. It means it was John’s baptism. And so he gives them instead Jesus’s baptism. But Jesus baptism isn’t just in the name of Jesus. Jesus baptism is in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, as we saw from Matthew 28:20. But that also explains why Paul says, did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed? They said, no, we’ve never even heard there is a Holy Spirit. And he says, into what then were you baptized? So notice that into what he’s expecting the Holy Spirit to be part of the answer to into what were you baptized? That it’s not just into the name of Jesus. You’re baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. So if they’d gotten a Christian baptism, they would have heard of the Holy Spirit by now. That makes sense.
Caller: Yeah. I mean that, that does make sense to me. And like I said, I’ve seen some of your videos, but I obviously still struggle with that whole concept after what I believed growing up. But I know as a Pentecostal, they also believe that you had to you it was mandatory to obviously be baptized just in the name of Jesus. If you were baptized any other way, it was not the right baptism. So a lot of people got re baptized. And it was also very like, sorry, mandatory to receive the Holy Ghost. Which the only way you could receive the Holy Ghost, according to them, was speaking in other tongues. How would you like answer that?
Joe Heschmeyer: You know, because there were very, very clearly. First Corinthians 12 talks about how not everybody has tongues. It’s a gift for parts of the body. So this is 1 Corinthians 12, beginning in verse 27. Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church, first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then workers of miracles, then healers, helpers, administrators, speakers in various kinds of tongues. Notice he’s put it at the very end of the list of spiritual gifts God can give you. And then he says, are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts? Of healing. Do all speak with tongues? Do all interpret? Do all? And the answer to those questions is clearly no. No, no, no, no. Not everybody’s an apostle. Not everybody’s a prophet. Not everybody’s a teacher. And you get that abundantly throughout the rest of the New Testament. So it’d be wild to get to the bottom of the list and say, oh, everyone is supposed to do this. Because he’s just made it very clear that the answer is no. And then he says, but earnestly desired the higher gifts, and I’ll show you a still more excellent way. And then he talks about the gift of love, that the one thing all of us are called to have is love, not some supernatural gift. It’d be cool if you could work miracles, but it’s much more important if you can love God and love your neighbor.
Caller: Yeah, thank you for that. That’s a really good answer. I just. I remember feeling really bad because there were people who literally prayed for years in the church and they, you know, never spoke in tongues. And it was like, well, they can die tomorrow and, you know, they’re not going to heaven. Growing up, that’s what we thought. So. So. But I don’t adhere to that belief. But anymore, my last question would be, how do I deal with, I guess, both sides of my family, with my girlfriend’s side, who are very against the current Catholic Church because they’re a city of a contest. And then my. On my side of the family that are super, one is Pentecostal, like literally every single one of them. Multiple families, multiple, you know, aunts, uncles, whatever, they. That are very against the Catholic Church,
Joe Heschmeyer: I say a few things. One, take courage. You know, no servant is above his master, and they rejected and persecuted Christ. So when you suffer for the sake of Christ, you can know that God will reward that he is not going to be outdone in generosity. So take heart in that. That doesn’t make it easy, but it does make it worthwhile. I hope, you know, if you can look at the great martyrs of old people, look at everything they gave up for Christ, and you might be getting called into a tiny version of that. Second, become a saint even more than you already are, that you have a calling here to live this radically holy life, that when another family member wants to judge you, they have to sort of stop and say, but he has gotten a lot better. But he might be holier than me. But, you know, and all if they have to stop and question even those things, if you are more charitable, if you’re more Faithful. If you’re more loving because of this, that makes it a lot harder for them to, you know, criticize. And third, I often go back to this. In Matthew 13, Jesus compares the kingdom to a mustard seed, which is the smallest that grows into a mustard tree, which is the largest. That in their own way, one of the things oneness Pentecostals and Sedevacantists have in common, and there aren’t a lot, is that they’ve found these bizarre fringe attempts to follow Christianity that doesn’t look like a mustard tree. You can go your whole life without meeting a sedive contest. You can go your whole life without meeting a oneness Pentecostal. But the largest form of Christianity on Earth, the largest religion on Earth, is the Catholic Church. Now, if Jesus is to be trusted that he is not coming to found some obscure sect of only the people who’ve spent way too much time online, that he’s instead come to create the kingdom for all peoples. One of the promises in the old covenant is that the Father’s house will be a house of prayer for all people. And Jesus fulfills this first in the purification of the temple in John 2, but then he also fulfills it in creating the new temple on earth, which is his body, which is both his physical body that dies on the cross, his body in the Eucharist, and his body the church. And so first Timothy 3:15. This is a household of God. And so this is to be a house for all people. We talk about in Matthew 28 about making disciples of all nations, but you’re not making disciples of all nations. If you’re a French citive contest where you know there might be a dozen people in your particular form of you can’t even go to Mass cause you don’t have like actual priests. You’ve gone so far off the deep end in one direction that you’ve just ended up in like a radical form of Protestantism. And at the same time, if you’re oneness, like you’re a fringe of a fringe of a fringe, and that doesn’t look like any of the things that were promised, that this is the kingdom of God, established honor, spread throughout the world, that you want to find the obvious answer. And Catholicism, for all of the critiques people might want to throw at it, is objectively the obvious answer. Somebody who had, you know, just landed on planet Earth and said, I want to find out more about Christianity is going to be more likely to ask the Pope than they are to ask some random oneness Pentecostal Church in Miami because there’s a billion people with the one, and I’ve never even heard of the other one. So that idea. Then finally I tie that in with Daniel 2, where Jesus talks about creating kingdoms on earth. He’s got the four kingdoms and the fourth kingdom. And if you said you listened to some of my stuff, you might have heard me talking about this recently. The fourth kingdom, which is Christ, or during the fourth Kingdom, the Roman Empire. A stone cut out by no human hand strikes the foot of the statue of the Roman Empire and then builds into a mountain that’ll never be destroyed. The stone struck the image, became a great mountain and filled the whole earth. This represents the entrance of Christ and his church into the world during the time of the Roman Empire and spreading across the whole earth as this indestructible kingdom. That’s the promise. And the Catholic Church fulfills that in a way that Sedevacantistism and Oneness Pentecostalism simply don’t. Why don’t we do this? Why don’t you call back if you’ve got more questions and we can send you a copy? You said you had just bought some books, so tell the call screener if there’s a book by, say, me, Trent or Jimmy that you don’t have yet and we can go from there.