In this episode Trent sits down with Protestant apologist Gavin Ortlund to discuss what they agree and disagree about.
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Gavin Ortlund (00:00:00):
What is Christianity? And you and I can recognize each other. I would say you’re my fellow Christian, but I would say we have a different vision of where we set the boundaries. I don’t think it happened. That’s my issue is I don’t think it is true.
Trent Horn (00:00:12):
Criticizing us for disagreement, but you have disagreement too. It’s just oriented in a different direction.
Gavin Ortlund (00:00:17):
But that’s a fair critique. I’ve always said the best argument against Protestantisms I think is disunity and I think is the fragmentation impulse. So if someone were to say, “Well, why don’t you think that’s a decisive knockdown objection?” I think one thing I’d observe is I don’t know that I see in the other direction the solution.
Trent Horn (00:00:42):
Welcome everyone to the Council of Trent. My guest today is someone I have crossed paths with many times in person and online and videos. He is Gavin Ortland, the host of Truth Unites. He engages in a wide array of apologetics content and I’m just really jazzed you here. Gavin, welcome to the Council Trent.
Gavin Ortlund (00:00:59):
Fun to be here. Glad to be in person together. Looking forward to this.
Trent Horn (00:01:02):
I know. You already had a treat. I’m glad you were able to come visit me here in Dallas because I was able to at least restore one of the things you lost after leaving California, got to have in and out.
Gavin Ortlund (00:01:12):
One of the big grievances of leaving California. So In-N-Out has come to Tennessee, but I think I mentioned to you there was a three-hour wait the first day that it opened because there’s such a craze to go. So I still haven’t been since it’s there. So this is the first time I’ve had it in years.
Trent Horn (00:01:28):
I think I’ve found now in doing debates in a lot of places, I think it truly has a ecumenical power to it. I have not seen in any other establishment. I’ve seen so many pictures of people doing theological debates and they end up together.
Gavin Ortlund (00:01:43):
Exactly.
Trent Horn (00:01:44):
I think the last time I was there in and out, I was there with a Presbyterian, a Baptist, a Muslim, all a bunch of old from the TGT, the Gospel Truth Conference. So we were able to do that here. All right. We’ll
Gavin Ortlund (00:01:59):
Take the ecumenical progress however we can get it.
Trent Horn (00:02:02):
Absolutely. Let’s talk a little bit for people who aren’t as familiar with you. What is your background in doing apologetics? Because you were previously a pastor in California, right?
Gavin Ortlund (00:02:14):
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Yeah. Apologetics was kind of a second win for me in terms of my public career, I guess you could say. Yeah, pastoring a church, and then I did academic stuff, got a PhD and taught kind of adjunct and that kind of thing for many years. And then about sometime around 2018, 2019, I mean, I’ve always loved apologetics and I’ve always watched debates with great interest. And I think just coinciding my own interests with the sense of the needs and the culture, and we’ve talked about this a lot, just where Gen Z is at, where the culture’s at. There’s a tremendous amount of spiritual hunger, spiritual anxiety. And my own study led me into that. And then my heart just connected with wanting to help people. And just the basic … I know what it’s like to have doubts about faith and to feel anguish and wonder what if I’m wrong?
(00:03:07):
How do I know what’s true?
Trent Horn (00:03:08):
Now, did you grow up in more of a classical, well-grounded Christian home? You don’t have one of those dramatic … Well, actually, the last person I interviewed was Sean McDowell, and he grew up … Josh was his dad. But it seems like a lot of people say, “I got into this because you had this dramatic conversion experience,” but it seems like you’re probably blessed with, given what your dad does, pretty classical Christian upbringing. I
Gavin Ortlund (00:03:33):
Had a great family. In fact, the last video that I just put out on my channel was an interview with my dad, in- person interview, which was a lot of fun. So no, I had awesome Christian upbringing, and the churches that I went to were actually pretty healthy as well. So for me, it wasn’t a big dramatic thing, although I have been through seasons as an adult where I’ve kind of gone back to the basics and just thought from the ground up. But my love for apologetics is just I want to help people, serve people. And there’s so many needs right now. And I don’t think there’s any need that could be greater than just not knowing what is ultimately true.
Trent Horn (00:04:08):
Well, it’s funny when I’m talking to people, sometimes people introduce me as Trent Horn. I’m a Catholic apologist. And I do believe that the Catholic faith is that which is true, good and beautiful and the answer to the world, but I’ve tried to be very clear that Catholic and Protestant distinctives are not the only things that I talk about. I mean, the very first book I wrote was Answering Atheism in 2013 because the reason I wrote that was because there were just so many, there were a ton of books responding to the new atheists from a Protestant perspective. And I thought, oh, well, I’d like to have something like a bit … There were a few Catholic books, but they were very cursory. And a lot of them, I think you can appreciate this with how internet is right now. The new atheists were snarky, Get Under your Skin.
(00:04:52):
And for a lot of people like, “Fine, I’m going to get under your skin the same way.” God doesn’t really want us to do that. We can be assertive. We don’t have to do the same thing. So that’s why actually I wrote Answering Atheism because one of my favorite books back then was The Last Superstition by Ed Faser. And that was a really great book combating atheism. I would never give it to an atheist though, because he’s really snarky in it. So I’m really glad that Ed has written a book called Fai Proos the Existence of God. That’s gone way beyond that. Oh, yeah, yeah. So it’s nice just to see that. But for me, when I go on channels, I often say, I want to reach the most number of people who are the furthest away from Jesus Christ.
Gavin Ortlund (00:05:31):
Right. And this is something that’s good for people who watch both of our channels to understand is that you and I have a lot of common ground because what I most deeply want to do is just general Christian apologetics. My next book is called Why Christianity Makes Sense. It’s just chapter by chapter walking through, starting with total apathy, trying to get someone’s attention. The last chapter is on why you should get baptized and why you should become a Christian. And that’s where my heart is at. I’ve gotten pulled into Protestant apologetics. I’m happy to do it, but honestly, it was the need that pulled me
Trent Horn (00:06:02):
Into it. Yeah. I was going to say, what pulled you in? I remember the first time I saw you engaging in Protestant apologetics. I’ll get to that in a sec, but yeah, what made you feel like, oh, I got to do something on this. You got pulled into it.
Gavin Ortlund (00:06:15):
Yeah. So I started a YouTube channel during COVID, pastoring a church in California, kind of needed a new challenge, was writing a book on the existence of God,
Trent Horn (00:06:23):
Wanted
Gavin Ortlund (00:06:23):
To put content out there on that. And then just watching the state of discourse on YouTube, I just felt like there are not as many good Protestant representatives, defending Protestantism. There’s lots of Protestants defending Christianity, but less so kind of explaining historic Protestant views. I mean, there are a few people out there. I don’t want to denigrate the contribution of people who have done that, but just the optics are Protestants need to step up their game here and just explain. I mean, my thing
Trent Horn (00:06:58):
Is- Well, especially a few years ago, I think it was a lot different. I’ve seen more channels that are defending distinct Protestant perspectives rooted in the teachings of the magisterial reformers, much more so in the past year or two than maybe I saw three years ago. I think
Gavin Ortlund (00:07:16):
You’re right. I think it’s growing. And I think if my thing is, if people are wrestling with these topics, I don’t want them to compare their anecdotal church experience to the best of Catholic apologetics. I want them to be exposed to historic Protestant theology.
Trent Horn (00:07:33):
Well, I think I’ve said this before, whenever you’re comparing worldviews, you always want to compare best to best, not best to worst. If you’re going to do worse, there’s got to be worse across the board, worst to worst and best to best, not one or the other. I think what’s interesting in the Protestant Catholic dialogue that’s happened over the past 40 years, I think in the ’90s and going the 2000s and 2010s, it was dominated by … There was a certain kind of evangelical writer who might’ve been very focused on biblical exegesis, engaging Catholics, but church history was real spotty. But I feel like your work and also the work of Jordan Cooper, Sean, Luke, and a lot of others have really tried to get people to reclaim that. I want people to look at history in general. I think it’s always great, but I think you probably … When you say a need, do you think that’s probably one of the biggest needs that you saw?
Gavin Ortlund (00:08:26):
That’s a big part of it. And that’s my academic work is in historical theology. So that’s where I felt like maybe I could make a contribution. But yeah, I mean, I think the average Protestant doesn’t know church history at all, and so it makes people very vulnerable to the claim to be a Protestant, you don’t have any sort of real authentic relation to church history, and I don’t think that that’s the case. So yeah, that would be a huge area for need. And then also just being able to celebrate common ground. Sometimes it feels like the only Protestants who will speak up for Protestantism are those who have nothing nice to say about non-Protestant Christian traditions. So that’s another area where it’s like you want to be able to have, I’m trying to find the right balance. Let’s honor the disagreements. Let’s not take away from the fact that these go deep and they matter, and we can honor that and argue about them, but then we can also come together when it’s appropriate.
Trent Horn (00:09:19):
Yeah. And I think, so we’ll talk about agreements and disagreements here in our chat. I think starting with things like agreements, it’s interesting how you felt like, okay, a lot of Protestants will defend fundamental Christianity, but you don’t see a lot of Protestants uniquely responding to Catholicism or defending Protestantism, co-Protestantism, at least with rigorous arguments. So you feel like there’s a need, you need to step into that. I felt something similar, I guess in the reverse, I felt like there were a lot of Catholics willing to defend Catholicism, the Catholic Protestant distinctives. But then when I would try to see, well, who’s doing debates on the resurrection? Who’s doing resurrection apologetics? Who’s really responding to atheists? Who’s doing pro- life apologetic work? Because for example, I got involved in pro- life apologetics. Well, in college, I started doing that 2006, 2007, and there were two groups of people I was learning from.
(00:10:20):
So there were Protestants on the ground who had popularized arguments. People like Randy Alcorn had a book, or Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments, Greg Kokel, Scott Klusendorf, Stand to Reason Crowd, people like that. But then I saw there were, oh, there’s Catholic philosophers who’ve written on this and no one’s seeing all their arguments that are up here in academia. People like Frank Beckwith, Patrick Lee, Chris Kazor. So I’m like, oh, how can I synthesize this and get our people really out there? But especially on the fundamental Christian apologetics, my heart is especially, I would really want … And that’s why I often, I’ll have in my episodes be talking about the divinity of Christ. I think once I was like, and this Messianic prophecy says this, if you want more Messianic prophecies, Gavin Ortland has a video. And it’s so funny. I’ve gotten some people giving me flack about that.
(00:11:15):
Why are you telling people to go to Gavin Ortland’s channel? He has this anti-Catholic content. I’m like, “You make a Messianic prophecy video. You make an argument on divine hiddenness. If you’re not, then don’t get in the way of people who are making good stuff.”
Gavin Ortlund (00:11:32):
Yeah. If we can’t come together around the basics, then we’re going to be weaker on those things. I mean, you just think of, I think we’ve talked about this. Most of the people in the world that need to be reached need the basics. Even some of our own sheep, they don’t know why they believe the divinity of Christ, or they’ll have a counterargument to that and they will not have any sense of preparedness to answer that. So I think we can come together around those things. And then you mentioned seeing a gap between scholarship and the online world, that’s another problem I see is most of the best work from both of our traditions is unknown just generally at the lay level. And so however we can be a bridge, that’s a lot of what I’m trying to do is kind of step from that world into the popular level world.
Trent Horn (00:12:18):
Do you ever get flat? I’m having fun talking to you because it feels like a mirror image sometime of myself. If I were Protestant, I would do a YouTube channel where I talk about Protestant a bit, but I like talking about Christianity and I care about the scholarship even if it makes people mad. People will give me flack when I’ll say, “I know that’s a popular argument you like, but the scholarship actually shows it’s really weak and we probably ought not use that. ” And it’s a favorite among more traditional Catholics and people gripe at me about that. I don’t know if you’ve experienced the same thing on the Protestant end.
Gavin Ortlund (00:12:49):
Say it again.
Trent Horn (00:12:50):
I didn’t follow that. There’s an argument in your camp people like, and you say, “Well, the scholarship says that’s not a really good argument.” We probably shouldn’t use. And people are like, “Why are you getting mad at me about my pet argument?”
Gavin Ortlund (00:13:01):
I know. No, I mean, well, people have an anti-scholarship mindset sometimes, and I want to be careful not to go against that too much because scholarship is flawed. It has its own biases and it has its problems, but it’s also a tool. And I think if we just sort of generally are suspicious of anything that we benefit from in terms of scholarship, we’re in trouble. Even just to be able to translate these texts and engage the ancient world at all, you have to engage scholarship. So ... Read more on Catholic.com