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Episode 50: Year A &#8211; 31st Sunday of Ordinary Time
In this episode of the Sunday Catholic Word, we spend our time focusing on two details found in the second and Gospel readings for this upcoming 31st Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A. The first detail comes from the second reading, which is taken from 1 Thessalonians 2:7b-9, 13. The relevant apologetical topics are Sacred Tradition and the Protestant belief in Sola Scriptura—the belief that Scripture alone is our infallible rule of faith. The second detail, which is found in the Gospel reading, taken from Matthew 23:1-12, relates to the Catholic practice of calling priests “father.”
Readings: <a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/110523.cfm">Click Here</a>
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Hey everyone,
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Welcome to The Sunday Catholic Word, a podcast where we reflect on the upcoming Sunday Mass readings and pick out the details that are relevant for explaining and defending our Catholic faith.
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I’m Karlo Broussard, staff apologist and speaker for Catholic Answers, and the host for this podcast.
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In this episode, we’re going to spend our time focusing on two details found in the 2nd and Gospel readings for this upcoming 31st Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year. The first detail comes from the second reading, which is taken from 1 Thessalonians 2:7b-9, 13. The relevant apologetical topics are Sacred Tradition and the Protestant belief in Sola Scriptura—the belief that Scripture alone is our infallible rule of faith. The second detail, which is found in the Gospel reading, taken from Matthew 23:1-12 relates to the Catholic practice of calling priests “father.”
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Let’s get started from the first reading. Again, it’s taken from 1 Thessalonians 2:7b-9, 13. Here’s what Paul writes:
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We were gentle among you, as a nursing mother cares for her children.
With such affection for you, we were determined to share with you 
not only the gospel of God, but our very selves as well, 
so dearly beloved had you become to us. 
You recall, brothers and sisters, our toil and drudgery. 
Working night and day in order not to burden any of you, 
we proclaimed to you the gospel of God.
And for this reason we too give thanks to God unceasingly, 
that, in receiving the word of God from hearing us, 
you received not a human word but, as it truly is, the word of God, 
which is now at work in you who believe.
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The detail that I want to highlight for our purposes here is Paul’s statement, “in receiving the word of God from hearing us, you received not a human word but, as it truly is, the word of God.”
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Notice Paul speaks of the “word of God.” What is he referring to?
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He can’t be referring to the New Testament because this letter to the Thessalonians is one of the first inspired documents of the Christian tradition. He also can’t be referring to the Old Testament because the immediate context reveals he was preaching to the Thessalonians “the Gospel of God” (vv. 2, 9), which for Paul is the good news of Jesus Christ.
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So, for Paul, the “word of God” that he speaks of goes beyond the boundaries of the written Word of God. It is identified as the truth of Jesus Christ transmitted through the apostolic preaching.
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Now, why is this relevant for apologetics?
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Well, as many of you know, a pillar of Protestantism is the belief that the Scriptures alone are considered the “Word of God” and thereby our only infallible rule of faith. This belief is known as Sola Scriptura, which is Latin for Scripture Alone.
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The “alone” part of this belief is emphasized in contrast with the belief held by Catholics and Orthodox that Sacred Tradition, along with Sacred Scripture, makes up God’s word, or divine revelation.
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Paul’s statement in our second reading for this upcoming Sunday’s Liturgy of the Word proves otherwise. For Paul, the “Word of God” is not restricted to the inspired writings of the apostles. The “Word of God” also includes the apostolic preaching.
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Now, the apostolic preaching is not “inspired” in the way that the sacred writings are, where the form of the message has God as its author. Rather, the apostolic preaching is “inspired” in its origin—that’s to say, the content of the message that they proclaimed, including their interpretations of the Old Testament prophecies, comes directly from God.
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Given this belief of Paul, we can see that for the first century Christians both Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition made up the sacred deposit of divine revelation.
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The question now becomes, “Does this form of the ‘word of God’—the apostolic preaching— continue to be present for Christians after the apostles died off when the apostolic preaching ceased?”
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As Catholics, we answer yes. This form of the “Word of God,” or Sacred Tradition, was entrusted to the bishops who succeeded the apostles in the apostolic office, the episkope (1 Tim. 3:1-3). Why would God make this “Word of God” present only for first-century Christians and not for Christians of all generations? It’s not fitting that God would will such divinely revealed truth to die off with the death of the last apostle.
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So, the Catholic paradigm of Scripture and Sacred Tradition is supported by the New Testament.
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Let’s now turn to the Gospel reading, which, again, is taken from Matthew 23:1-12. Jesus says the following,
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The scribes and the Pharisees
have taken their seat on the chair of Moses.
Therefore, do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you,
but do not follow their example.
For they preach but they do not practice.
They tie up heavy burdens hard to carry
and lay them on people&#8217;s shoulders,
but they will not lift a finger to move them.
All their works are performed to be seen.
They widen their phylacteries and lengthen their tassels.
They love places of honor at banquets, seats of honor in synagogues,
greetings in marketplaces, and the salutation &#8216;Rabbi.&#8217;
As for you, do not be called &#8216;Rabbi.&#8217;
You have but one teacher, and you are all brothers.
Call no one on earth your father;
you have but one Father in heaven.
Do not be called &#8216;Master&#8217;;
you have but one master, the Christ.
The greatest among you must be your servant.
Whoever exalts himself will be humbled;
but whoever humbles himself will be exalted.
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For many of you listening who swim in the waters of apologetics, you know the detail that I’m going to focus on here: Jesus’ command, “Call no one on earth your father” (v.9).
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The apologetical import is evident: How can Catholics call their priests “father” when Jesus explicitly commands us not to call anyone father? There seems to be a contradiction here between Catholic practice and the Bible.
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How can we reconcile this apparent contradiction?
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I’m going to share with you three ways that we can respond. The first two give reasons why Jesus can’t be forbidding the use of “father” in an absolute sense. The third response provides an explanation as to what he means. All three ways are taken from my book Meeting the Protestant Challenge: How to Answer 50 Biblical Objections to Catholic Beliefs.
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Here’s the first: the Bible approvingly uses the term father for individuals other than God. Therefore, Jesus can’t be restricting the use of the term “father” to God alone in an absolute sense. 
 
The Bible uses father to refer to biological fathers, which Protestants don’t deny. Paul quotes the fourth commandment in Ephesians 6:2: “Honor your father and your mother.”
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Paul refers to himself as a spiritual “father” in 1 Corinthians 4:15: “For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel.” If Matthew 23:9 forbade calling any man “father,” then Paul would be disobeying Jesus’ express command. But Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 4:15 are divinely inspired, and therefore can’t contradict what Jesus says.
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It’s also not uncommon in the New Testament for Christ’s ministers to view themselves as a spiritual father, showing that taking the role of father is also not off-limits.<a href="#_edn1" name="_ednref1">[i]</a> Paul calls the Galatians his “little children” (Gal. 4:19). He also views Timothy (1 Cor. 4:17; 1 Tim. 1:2, 18; 2 Tim. 1:2, 2:1), Titus (Titus 1:4), and Onesimus (Philem. 10) as his spiritual sons. Peter calls Mark “my son” (1 Pet.5:13), and John, like Paul, refers to his audience as “my little children” (1 John 2:1; 3 John 4).
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Here are a few other examples where father is used for people other than God, even in respectful and reverential ways:
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<ul>
<li>Abraham (Luke 16:24; Acts 7:2; Rom. 4:12; James 2:21)</li>
<li>Isaac (Rom. 9:10)</li>
<li>Jacob (John 4:12)</li>
<li>David (Acts 4:25)</li>
<li>The Jewish elders (Acts 7:2)</li>
<li>Older Christian men (1 John 2:13-14)</li>
</ul>
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A Protestant may object that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and David are not men “on earth,” and thus can’t be used in response to the challenge. But the Jewish elders and older Christian men were individuals on earth.
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Lest we say that the Holy Spirit is contradicting himself, and that the early Christian leaders directly disobeyed a command of the Lord, we must conclude that Jesus’ command to “call no man father on earth” doesn’t forbid calling anyone “father” other than God. There must be something else going on.
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A second response is that the principle of this challenge leads to absurdities when it’s applied to other things Jesus says in the immediate context. 
 
Before Jesus gives the instruction to “call no man father on earth,” he gives the same sort of instruction concerning calling men “rabbi”: “But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher [Greek, didaskalos], and you are all brethren” (Matt. 23:8). John tells us in John 1:38 that rabbi means “teacher” (Greek, didaskalos).
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If we were to follow the logic of this challenge from Matthew 23:9, we would have to conclude that we cannot call another person “teacher,” either, since Jesus is our one teacher. But several times the Bible uses didaskalos for people other than Jesus:
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<ul>
<li>1 Timothy 2:7: “For this I was appointed a preacher and apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher [didaskalos] of the Gentiles in faith and truth.”</li>
</ul>
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<li>1 Corinthians 12:28: “And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers [didaskalous]”</li>
</ul>
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<li>James 3:1: “Let not many of you become teachers [didaskaloi], my brethren, for you know that we who teach shall be judged with greater strictness.”</li>
</ul>
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As with Paul’s use of father to describe himself, here we must conclude that Paul and James, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, were not disobeying Jesus’ instruction when they referred to teachers other than God.
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As mentioned above, the first two responses give reason why Jesus can’t be forbidding the use of “father” in an absolute sense. Naturally, then, the question becomes, “So what does Jesus mean?” Our answer to this questions constitutes our third response to the objection: Jesus is using hyperbole to indict the scribes and Pharisees for their pride. 
 
Since the Bible elsewhere uses teacher and father for persons other than God, it’s likely that instead of forbidding those words in an absolute sense, Jesus is using hyperbole (exaggeration to make a point)—as when he commands to gouge out our eye or cut off our hand if one of them causes us to sin (Matt. 18:8-9).
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The purpose of this hyperbole in Matthew 23:8-9 is to indict the religious leaders for the disordered love they had for their roles of leadership. A disordered love that apparently led them to hold in contempt those they were appointed to lead. There are two clues that suggest this.
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First, in the verses preceding the teaching in question, Jesus says that the Pharisees “love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues” (v.6), and that they love “salutations in the marketplaces, and being called rabbi by men” (v.7). Then, immediately following the teaching in question, Jesus pronounces a series of “woes” to the Pharisees for their hypocrisy (vv.13-36).
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The second clue is found in verse 8, where Jesus emphasizes equality, saying, “You are all brethren.” This is not to say that all members of God’s family have equal roles. But it is to remind the religious leaders that before God they are equal in dignity with their brethren. Their leadership roles don’t make them any better than others insofar as they are all God’s children.
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The Pharisees had allowed pride to well up in their souls with the honorific titles of rabbi and father. Consequently, they began to have a disordered love for their superior roles, puffing up their self-importance and forgetting that their worth came from God—who is our ultimate Father and Teacher. It’s for this reason that Jesus rebukes them and puts them in their place, employing hyperbole to drive home his point that they need to be more humble and recognize that their leadership roles don’t make them better than others.
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Moreover, Jesus is teaching us not to confuse the unique role of teacher that Christ has—which is ultimate and permanent—with the role of teacher that anyone else has on earth, which is conditional and temporary. Likewise, we must avoid confusing the fatherhood that God has—which is absolute and not dependent on anything else—with the conditional fatherhood that anyone has on earth, which, whether biological or spiritual, depends on God’s fatherhood.
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Paul expresses this in Ephesians 3:15, where he writes, “For this cause I bow my knees to the Father [Greek, patera] of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom all paternity (Greek, patria, “family” or “fatherhood”) in heaven and earth is named” (Douay-Rheims). Paul’s point is that all fatherhood, whether biological or spiritual, participates in the one unique fatherhood of God, and establishes it on earth.
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As we’ve seen, God has given the role of teaching and fatherhood to people. And since he has chosen to do so, he’s not going to have a problem with our recognizing that truth by calling those people “teacher” and “father.” God is all in favor of us acknowledging his truth.
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Well, my friends, that does it for this episode of the Sunday Catholic Word. The second reading and Gospel for this upcoming 31st Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year gives us opportunity to do some apologetics when it comes to defending the Catholic understanding of Sacred Tradition and the practice of calling priests “father.” These are two very common topics and it’s necessary for us to be prepared to engage them.
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As always, I want to thank you for subscribing to the podcast. And please be sure to tell your friends about it and invite them to subscribe as well at sundaycatholicword.com. You might also want to check out the other great podcasts in our Catholic Answers podcast network: Cy Kellet’s Catholic Answers Focus, Trent Horn’s The Counsel of Trent, Joe Heschmeyer’s Shameless Popery, and Jimmy Akin’s A Daily Defense, all of which can be found at catholic.com.
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One last thing: if you’re interested in getting some cool mugs and stickers with my logo, “Mr. Sunday podcast,” go to shop.catholic.com.
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I hope you have a blessed 31st Sunday of Ordinary Time.
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See Jimmy Akin, A Daily Defense, 32.

The Biblical Support of Sacred Tradition

Opener: Is the blessing of throats and blessing of cars superstitious?

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Are Catholic Blessings Superstitious? Bible Questions

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DAY 237
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CHALLENGE
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“The Catholic Church was created by the Emperor Constantine when he made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.”
DEFENSE
Both of these claims are historically false.
Although Constantine is often credited with being the first Christian emperor, he didn’t make Christianity the official religion. What he did, together with his colleague and rival, Licinius, was issue the Edict of Milan in A.D. 313, which proclaimed religious toleration for Christianity among the other religions in the empire.
He also didn’t create the Catholic Church, which already existed in his day. Indeed, it had already been known by that name for more than 200 years. Thus, writing around A.D. 110, St. Ignatius of Antioch stated: “Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude also be; even as, wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church” (Letter to the Smyrneans 8).
The fact that Ignatius introduces the phrase “Catholic Church” without stopping to explain it indicates it was already in use, and he could expect people in the distant church of Smyrna to understand what it meant. This wide circulation therefore must have begun in the second half of the first century.
The meaning of the Greek term for “Catholic” (katholikos) is “universal” (from kata holos, “according to the whole”). It was introduced as a way of identifying the universal Church established by Christ (Matt. 16:18), as distinct from local congregations. “Very quickly, however, in the latter half of the second century at latest, we find it conveying the suggestion that the Catholic is the true Church as distinct from the heretcal congregations” (J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 5th ed., 190).
“The Catholic Church” was thus simply the common way of refer- ring to the original Church established by Christ, not Constantine.
Those who make this objection frequently claim that, at the time of Constantine, various doctrinal changes were introduced that are characteristic of the Catholic Church and that separate it from apostolic Christianity. However, no doctrinal changes were introduced. Even the definition of the divinity of Christ, which occurred during Constantine’s reign at the First Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325), was an affirmation of previous Church teaching.
TIP
On the doctrinal continuity of the Catholic Church from the first century onward, see Jimmy Akin, The Fathers Know Best.
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Constantine and the Catholic Church

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Did Mary and Joseph Vow to Live Chastely in Their Marriage?

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DAY 36
CHALLENGE
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“Catholics should not ask the saints for intercession. We have no evidence they pray for us.”
DEFENSE
We have evidence the saints pray for us, including Scripture.
First, we may infer from the fact that the saints are in heaven that they would pray for us. Being in heaven means being united with God, who is love (1 John 4:8–9, 16). When united with God, we will be transformed to be like him (Rom. 8:29; 1 Cor. 15:49–52; 2 Cor. 3:18; 2 Pet. 1:4; 1 John 3:2), for “nothing unclean shall enter” the heavenly city (Rev. 21:27).
Being thus transformed by the love of God, the saints are filled with love and so care about others. It is natural when you care about some- one to pray to God for that person. We can thus infer that, just as God loves us and provides for us, the saints love and pray for those on earth.
We also have direct evidence of their intercession in Scripture. Ju- dah Maccabee had a vision of two men who had died. The first was the former high priest Onias, and in the vision, “With outstretched arms Onias was praying for the entire Jewish nation” (2 Macc. 15:12). When he saw the second man, Judah was told, “This is God’s prophet Jeremiah, who loves the Jewish people and offers many prayers for us and for Jerusalem, the holy city” (2 Macc. 15:14).
2 Maccabees is not in the Protestant canon, but it is in the Catholic canon, so it is legitimate for Catholics to appeal to it to inform their faith. Even for Protestants, 2 Maccabees attests the pre-Christian Jew- ish belief in the intercession of the saints.
The book of Revelation, in the Protestant and Catholic canons, also shows the saints and angels interceding in heaven. In Revelation 5:8, we see the twenty-four elders, who appear to represent the leaders of the people of God in heaven, offering incense to God, which we are told represents the prayers of the saints. In Revelation 8:3–4, we see an angel offer incense to God, incense mingled “with the prayers of all the saints upon the golden altar” in heaven. Guardian angels also intercede (Matt. 18:10).
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Do the Saints Pray for Us?

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<a href="https://wvw.catholic.com/radioclub">Join the Catholic Answers Live Club Newsletter</a>
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DAY 26
CHALLENGE
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“Acts is not a reliable account of the history of the early Church. It is a work of ideology.”
DEFENSE
Acts is an extremely reliable history. Every historian has a point of view, and the fact that Luke was writing from a Christian point of view does not mean he was inaccurate.
The book of Acts is based on the evidence of eyewitnesses, like Luke’s Gospel (Luke 1:2).
It is easy to tell who the eyewitnesses in Acts were: Peter is a ma- jor source for chapters 1 to 12, Paul for chapters 13 to 28, Philip for chapter 8, and Priscilla and Aquila for chapter 18. Luke himself was an eyewitness for what scholars call the “we” passages, where the nar- ration switches from third person to first, describing what “we” did (16:10–17, 20:5–15, 21:1–18, 27:1–28:16).
Luke’s attention to detail is shown in many ways. For example, in chronicling the travels of Paul, he gives specific information about the time it took to arrive at different locations. This information is accurate, and it could not have simply been looked up in a reference work in the ancient world. This suggests Luke or someone in Paul’s circle kept a travel diary. The fact that Luke does not give parallel in- formation about travel times in the first part of the book, when Peter dominates the narrative, shows that Luke was faithful to his sources. He used the information they provided and did not invent such details.
The archaeologist Sir William Ramsay, initially a skeptic of Acts, reviewed the evidence and concluded:
Luke is a historian of the first rank; not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy; he is possessed of the true historic sense; he fixes his mind on the idea and plan that rules in the evolution of history; and proportions the scale of his treatment to the importance of each inci- dent. He seizes the important and critical events and shows their true nature at greater length, while he touches lightly or omits entirely much that was valueless for his purpose. In short, this author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians (The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament, chapter 18).
TIP
See also Ramsay’s book St. Paul the Traveller and Roman Citizen.
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The Book of Acts and History

<div>I’m a Protestant trying to learn more about the Catholic Church. but I’m struggling with the concept of relics. It still seems strange to take "souvenirs" when a holy person passes. Could you please clarify how and why this tradition began? </div><div>We’ve addressed your question previously in <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/relics">our tract on relics</a> and in <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/is-veneration-of-relics-condemned-by-the-bible">another response</a>.
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<a href="https://wvw.catholic.com/radioclub">Join the Catholic Answers Live Club Newsletter</a>
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Episode 100: Year B &#8211; 29th Sunday of Ordinary Time
In this episode, we focus on several details found in all three readings for this upcoming 29th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B. All the details converge together on a single apologetical theme: the nature of Jesus’ atoning sacrifice.
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Readings: <a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/102024.cfm">Click Here</a>
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The Nature of Jesus’ Atoning Sacrifice

Refuting Fr. Martin on “Discrimination” and Gay Catholic Teachers

In this free-for-all-Friday Trent shares his practical advice on dating that he gave to a local group of college students who asked him to give a talk on the subject.

FFAF: So I was asked to give a talk on dating . . .

Dr. Michael Barber explains why &#8220;spiritual, but not religious&#8221; is a mistaken mindset in light of man&#8217;s social aspect and his dual nature of body and soul.
Transcript:
Host: Enrique in Texas, watching us on YouTube live, you are on with Michael Barber. Enrique, what&#8217;s your question?
Caller: Hello, I wanted to say first that I love your show, I listen to it like every day, and I wanted to ask about my friends. Well, my friends always say that they&#8217;re not spiritual but they&#8211;like they&#8217;re not religious, but they&#8217;re spiritual. And I often find myself not knowing what to say to that, and I was wondering if you had an answer to that.
Dr. Barber: They say that they are spiritual, right? And I would say, as Catholics we&#8217;re spiritual too, right? Catholic spirituality is crucial. I&#8217;d be more interested in why they want to oppose the notion of Christ or the Church or, you know, organized body of religion, because as humans, we&#8217;re not just spirit, we also have a body. And so if you&#8217;re going to have a faith, it can&#8217;t be something that is disembodied. It can&#8217;t be something that&#8217;s merely abstract. And it also can&#8217;t be something that&#8217;s merely individualistic, because as human beings, as Aristotle would say, we&#8217;re social animals, and so to imagine that you can somehow have spiritual beliefs, and not in any way relate to a larger community, a larger tradition, I would say that&#8217;s a kind of inhuman understanding. That would be problematic. Anyway, that&#8217;s my perspective.
Host: Enrique, does that help you?
Caller: Yeah, thank you.
Host: Oh very good. Great. Well, thanks for the call today.

What to Say When Your Friends Aren’t Religious but They’re ‘Spiritual’

In this episode Trent rebuts even more silly atheist memes from the Internet.
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Transcript:
We&#8217;ve covered awful atheist memes before and we&#8217;re going to do it again here on the Counsel of Trent. So why wait, let&#8217;s jump right into it. Here&#8217;s the first meme. &#8220;On the fourth day, God created the sun. If God created the sun on the fourth day, how the hell had four days passed?&#8221; What&#8217;s hilarious about this meme is that there&#8217;s a variant of it that&#8217;s at least 1600 years old. St. Augustine argued with gnostics who made this same objection to the Bible, which is why Augustine said that the account of creation, the Book of Genesis, is not a literal description. Instead, Genesis is a thematic description showing God creating all the realms and populating them with different creatures. That&#8217;s why Augustine said God made everything in a single instant. And that quote, &#8220;The sacred writer of Genesis, was able to separate in the time of his narrative what God did not separate in time in his creative act.&#8221;
Next, &#8220;We tried a Christian society run by the rich. It was called the Dark Ages for a reason.&#8221; So in this meme we have an image of an execution that shows someone being killed by having their limbs tied to horses who run off in different directions. What&#8217;s funny about this meme is that this is a medieval painting, but it&#8217;s depicting a killing of Saint Hippolytus in the third century, which was of course during the Roman Empire and 200 years before the so-called Dark Ages, which weren&#8217;t really that dark because it was the church that kept Western civilization going by copying ancient manuscripts after the fall of Rome. Here&#8217;s the next one, &#8220;Dear religious people, don&#8217;t worry when atheists become the majority and it will happen sooner than you think, we will treat you far better than you have treated us when you were the majority.&#8221;
You know, I really want to believe that. Except when you look in the past at what happened when militant atheists ascended to power like in the Soviet Union or Pul Pots Khmer Rouge, it didn&#8217;t turn out very well for religious people. And of course, let&#8217;s not forget about secularists today, who want to ban so-called hate speech and take children away from their parents just because the parents don&#8217;t want their children mutilated by so-called gender reassignment surgery. Finally, there&#8217;s no guarantee that non-religious people will be the majority globally in the future. That may happen in the United States, but some projections show that globally non-religious people will decline overall due to low birth rates and that the fastest growing global population are actually Muslims. All right, now let&#8217;s look at two memes that both use the argument from geography for atheism. &#8220;Think of a God you don&#8217;t believe in. Determine which standards of proof this God does not meet, apply those standards of proof to your own God, wonder why you didn&#8217;t see it sooner.&#8221; And this one, &#8220;There are almost 5,000 Gods being worshiped by humanity, but don&#8217;t worry only yours is right.&#8221;
The biggest problem with these memes is that they don&#8217;t define what the word God refers to. God for these critics is just any super being people worship, but that&#8217;s not God. God is the infinite act of being itself, unlimited in power, knowledge, and goodness. God is not a being in the universe. God is the ground of being. So God is infinite in all respects. The reason I don&#8217;t believe in Thor or Zeus or Buddha, who isn&#8217;t a God in Buddhism by the way, I don&#8217;t believe in these creatures, is because they&#8217;re finite beings. I believe in God and these beings are not God no matter what you call them because they are limited and finite. In their respective mythologies, these beings often come into existence, they change, they&#8217;re ignorant of some things, they&#8217;re thwarted and sometimes they do evil.
The fact that they exist in time shows they are not God because God made time itself. Since these mythological beings are not pure actuality, they are not God. They may be super beings, but they&#8217;re not God, which is why I don&#8217;t believe in them because I believe in God. I agree with classical theists like Aristotle and Jewish and Muslim philosophers, that there is one infinite God. We may disagree about how God revealed himself to humanity, but we can agree that one infinite God does exist. Moreover, atheists can&#8217;t say, I must reject the God of the Bible because he sounds like a God of mythology in some parts of the Old Testament. That&#8217;s because I interpret the Bible in accord with what reason tells me about God. So if I know from reason that God cannot have a physical body as part of his divine nature, because God created all material things from nothing, then that means the Bible&#8217;s descriptions of the Father having a body must be non-literal.
There are examples of God giving humans a non-literal image of himself, which is called a theophany. Finally, this meme can backfire on atheists. Imagine you&#8217;re at a party and 95 out of 100 people there say they heard a loud noise outside but they disagree on what the noise was or what it sounded like. Would you agree there was at least a sound that the 95 heard something even if they disagree about it? Or would you agree with the five people who said there wasn&#8217;t a sound at all? Now, large groups of people can be wrong about things, but they&#8217;re usually more often correct than incorrect, which counts in favor of large groups of people, at the bare minimum, rejecting a strictly material atheistic view of the universe as being the common consensus of human experience. And at a bare minimum, I would appreciate it if you could like this video and subscribe and definitely consider supporting us at trenthornpodcast.com so we can continue making great content.
All right, here&#8217;s a classic meme that continues this mistake of confusing God with other beings. &#8220;God can&#8217;t exist because of Eric, The God-Eating Magic Penguin. Since Eric is God-Eating by definition he has no choice but to eat God. So if God exists, he automatically ceases to exist as a result of being eaten. Unless you can prove that Eric doesn&#8217;t exist, God doesn&#8217;t exist. Even if you can prove that Eric doesn&#8217;t exist, that same proof will also be applicable to God. There are only two possibilities. Either you can prove that Eric doesn&#8217;t exist or you can&#8217;t. In both cases, it logically follows that God doesn&#8217;t exist.&#8221; I would just ask what is meant by Eric being a penguin? If he has feathers and occupied space and time, then he&#8217;s not God. And if he&#8217;s a timeless spaceless penguin, then he is not a penguin because penguins by definition are a kind of physical temporal bird. God is simply that which no greater can be thought.
So if you can think of a being that can annihilate God, it will just turn out that that being is God and you need to refine your definition of God. Next we have a monument to famous atheist Madalyn Murray O&#8217;Hair. &#8220;An atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist believes that deed must be done instead of prayer said. An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated.&#8221; Christians literally invented the hospital. The Catholic Church is the largest non-governmental provider of healthcare in the world. Think about how many hospitals are named after a person from the Bible like St. Luke versus someone like Charles Darwin. Survival of the fittest and altruistic hospitals don&#8217;t really go together and anyone who says Christians do not care about helping the downtrodden simply hasn&#8217;t read the Bible.
James 2:14-17 says, &#8220;What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him? If a brother or sister is ill clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, &#8216;Go in peace, be warmed and filled,&#8217; without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.&#8221; Next, we have arguments for atheism, which is a huge library and arguments for theism, which is just a Bible on an empty shelf. But there are hundreds of books on arguments for theism or the existence of God that are published by academic presses like Oxford University Press. There aren&#8217;t similar quantities of books or any books as far as I know, from major university presses defending the existence of Santa Claus or fairies or any other mythical creature. Instead, the existence of God is a major feature of philosophical debate. So you&#8217;ll see powerful arguments on both sides that need to be addressed. This one is more of a cell phone. Atheist dad says, &#8220;I don&#8217;t wear anything that states my lack of belief. So why do Christians feel the need to share to the world their belief system?&#8221; And the next picture is him wearing an atheist shirt with the tag, &#8220;Worn With Pride.&#8221;
Next, we have, &#8220;You like computers? Thank this gay atheist, Alan Turing, Father of Computer Science.&#8221; Okay, so computers prove homosexuality and atheism are good things? This is probably just a perpetuation of the stereotype that atheists contribute to science and religious people don&#8217;t, which is absurd because of all the religious people who have contributed to science in Western civilization. If you&#8217;re an atheist who likes the Big Bang Theory, the cosmological model, not the awful TV show, then you can thank Monsignor George Lemaître, the Belgian priest who helped to discover it. And the memes that defend Jesus never existing are easily the most embarrassing. This one, we have Hollywood Jesus, Realistic Jesus with and without clothes, and finally, Real Jesus. And it says, &#8220;404 error. Character not found.&#8221; Atheists who reject the historical existence of Jesus are like Christians who think the earth is flat. They are the fringe minority that modern scholarship does not take seriously. In his book, Did Jesus Exist? The agnostic scholar Bart Ehrman writes, &#8220;The view that Jesus existed is held by virtually every expert on the planet.&#8221; All right, thank you guys so much for watching. If you&#8217;d like more replies to atheist memes, check out my previous episode on that subject. And don&#8217;t forget to like this video and subscribe to our channel. Thank you all and have a very blessed day.

More Silly Atheist Memes (REBUTTED)

Episode 75: Year B &#8211; 5th Sunday of Easter
There are three details that we focus on in the readings for this upcoming 5th Sunday of Easter, Year B. One detail comes from the second reading, taken from 1 John 3:18-24. The relevant topic is the role good works play in our salvation. The other two details are found in the Gospel reading, which taken from John 15:1-8. The apologetical topics that come to the fore are the Catholic interpretation of Jesus’ words “eat my flesh . . . drink my blood” in his Bread of Life Discourse in John 6 and the possibility for a Christian to lose the gift of salvation.
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The Readings: <a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/042824.cfm">Click Here</a>
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Eating the Flesh of Jesus

How does the pope choose who will be elevated to a bishop or cardinal?

Can we disagree with the pope’s statements?

Why hasn’t any pope successfully consecrated Russia?

Isn’t it reasonable to ask whether the pope is the real pope with so much confusion within the Church right now?

Canon 285 permits clergy to hold public office. Can the pope hypothetically serve in public in the U.S?

How much input does the pope have on appointing people in the Vatican? Especially people who have a scandal background?

What is the pope’s recourse with a disobedient cardinal?

&#8220;How Does the Pope Choose Cardinals?&#8221; This episode explores the complexities of papal authority, including how the pope selects bishops and cardinals, and whether it&#8217;s reasonable to question his role amid current Church confusion. We also delve into the pope&#8217;s influence on Vatican appointments and the implications of Canon 285 for clergy in public office.
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How Does the Pope Choose Cardinals? Bishops, Cardinals, and Authority

Is there a relationship between the term sacramentum and oath. Would calling a sacrament an oath detract from its proper meaning?

Should you keep engaging with a person who is having a sin conversation and wont correct it?

In this episode Dr. Marcus Peter answers questions about the covenants of God. He discusses how covenants tie into our modern Sacrements and how covenantal theology is key to understanding the Catholic faith!
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The Covenants of God – Questions About Sacraments and Oaths

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If the golden plates existed as described, could they physically hold the entire Book of Mormon?

<div>The translation of 2 Timothy 2:15 - why does the Catholic bible read "imparting" while the King James Version (KJV) bible reads, "rightly dividing the word of truth." </div><div>While various translations use different words in 2 Timothy 2:15, they all convey the same point as we can see in considering the verse in a larger context (2 Tim. 2:14-15): that we are called to be faithful in discussing and sharing the word of God, lest others be led astray. Let’s consider three translations, one Protestant (KJV) and two Catholic—the NAB, which is proclaimed in the Mass reading, and the RSVCE, which is used in biblical citations in the Catechism:
<blockquote>Of these things put them in remembrance, charging them before the Lord that they strive not about words to no profit, but to the subverting of the hearers. Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth (KJV).
<a>Remind people of these things and charge them before God—to stop disputing about words. This serves no useful purpose since it harms those who listen. Be eager to present yourself as acceptable to God, a workman who causes no disgrace, imparting the word of truth without deviation</a> (NAB).
Remind them of this, and charge them before the Lord to avoid disputing about words, which does no good, but only ruins the hearers. Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a workman who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth (RSVCE).</blockquote>
Whether one is dividing the word, imparting the word, or handling God’s word, they all affirm the same principle: be faithful in communicating the word of God and don’t be a stumbling block for others.
Finally, St. Paul is primarily speaking here of the gospel, the oral proclamation of the word of God, because a good number of the New Testament books had not yet been written, let alone authoritatively recognized and compiled into the biblical canon through the power of the Holy Spirit (see John 16:13). Indeed, he’s speaking of the word of God that is heard through preaching, thereby affirming Sacred Tradition (Ephesians 1:13; Colossians 1:15; see Acts 2:42). Which is why Paul expresses concern about &#8220;the subverting of the hearers&#8221; (2 Tim. 2:14, KJV, emphasis added), not the hearers, given that the overwhelming population of the world was illiterate—and would be for many centuries—illustrating the unworkability of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/whats-your-authority?ref=farodefe.org">sola Scriptura</a> from the earliest days of the Church.
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2 Timothy 2:15 Exhorts Faithful Sharing of God’s Word

Is my understanding of faith compatible with Catholicism?

Is it permitted to be buried in a Buddhist cemetery?

Can God bring greater good without suffering?

&#8220;Is my understanding of faith compatible with Catholicism?&#8221; This episode explores the nuances of faith within the Catholic tradition, while also addressing questions about burial practices in Buddhist cemeteries and the role of suffering in God&#8217;s plan for greater good. Tune in for a thoughtful examination of these important topics.
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Is My Understanding of Faith Compatible With Catholicism? Suffering and Burial Practices

In this episode Trent explores the Mormon faith and their unique concept of God.

Do Mormons Get Their Own Planet After Death?

In this episode Trent offers his thoughts on the recent economics roundtable he took part in and does in in-depth analysis of the GameStop stock “rollercoaster” and sees how our faith should view this aspect of the free market.

Economics De-brief and the GameStop Rollercoaster

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DAY 272
CHALLENGE
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“Catholics use statues and pictures, but the Ten Commandments prohibit such religious images (Exod. 20:4–6; Deut. 5:8–10).”
DEFENSE
The Ten Commandments prohibit making idols, not religious images.
Idols are manufactured objects that people falsely believe to be deities. Their use was commonplace in paganism, and God rightly prohibited the Israelites from making them. However, not all religious use of images is idolatry, and God commanded the religious use of images in the Old Testament.
At one point the Israelites are being bitten by serpents, and God had Moses make a bronze serpent “and set it on a pole; and if a serpent bit any man, he would look at the bronze serpent and live” (Num. 21:9). Looking at the bronze serpent to be healed was a religious act God authorized. (Nevertheless, when the bronze serpent began to be worshipped as a god itself, it was destroyed; 2 Kings 18:4).
Similarly, God commanded statues of golden cherubim be made at each end of the mercy seat on the Ark of the Covenant (Exod. 25:18–22). He similarly commanded images of cherubim be woven into the curtains of the tabernacle (Exod. 26:1). When the tabernacle was replaced by the temple, images of cherubim were fashioned on the temple’s walls, its doors, and its veil (2 King. 6:29–35; 2 Chron. 3:7, 14). And there were two giant (15–feet tall) statues of cherubim in the holy of holies (2 Kings 6:23–28; 2 Chron. 3:10–13).
The inclusion of these images on the ark, in the tabernacle, and in the temple indicates their religious function. They represent the inhabitants of heaven, the angels who surround God. In our age, now that humans have been admitted to heaven (Rev. 6:9, 7:14–17), it is natural for statues of human saints also to be placed in churches.
Most significantly, by virtue of the Incarnation, Jesus inaugurated a new age in which God took on visible form. It has been natural since then for Christians to depict Jesus in religious art. This includes the Protestant community, where two-dimensional images of Jesus are common. Adding a third dimension to make a carving or statue does not fundamentally change the situation.
All today recognize that images of Christ and the saints are merely symbols of the individuals they represent (a precursor of modern photographs). They are not idols (see Day 307).
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The Use of Religious Images

In this episode of Catholic Answers Live, Karlo Broussard tackles tough questions from converts and curious Protestants. Can Protestants receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit if they haven’t received the sacrament of Confirmation? What does the Church teach about Mary as Queen of Heaven—and is it essential to salvation? Karlo also responds to the common claim that the intercession of saints was borrowed from Greco-Roman paganism. Finally, are indulgences still a part of Catholic practice today, or are they just a relic of the past?
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Holy Spirit, Mary, Saints, and Indulgences—What Catholics Really Believe

In this episode Trent reveals how some arguments for atheism unintentionally refute more than most atheists are willing to give up about reality.

5 Ways Atheism Becomes a “Universal Acid”

In this episode Trent responds to Catholic author Gary Wills and the many, many errors and fallacies in his defense of abortion in the New York Times.

Correcting the New York Times on Biden, Bishops, and Abortion

FFAF: How to Spend Money in an Evil World

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DAY 68
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“If praying to Mary is good, why don’t we see it in the New Testament?”
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DEFENSE
We would not expect to.
Not every teaching has to be present in Scripture (see Day 5), and not every practice consistent with Christian liberty has to be documented in the New Testament. It took time for Christians to work out the implications of the deposit of faith Jesus gave the apostles.
Scripture shows an awareness that we can pray for the dead (2 Macc. 12:42 and, quite possibly, 2 Tim. 1:18) and an awareness that those in heaven intercede for the living (2 Macc. 15:12, 14; Matt. 18:10; Rev. 5:8, 8:3–4). It was not long before Christians took the natural step of asking those in heaven to pray for them (see Jimmy Akin, The Fathers Know Best, chapter 52).
Whether this practice was already in use in the first century, we do not know, but if it was, we still would not expect to see references to Marian prayers in the New Testament. Its documents are not private devotionals and are not the type of literature we would expect to contain such references. The Gospels are set during the life of Christ, when Mary was clearly still alive, and Revelation is a prophetic work that records almost nothing of John’s life outside the vision.
We do find references to personal prayer in Acts and the epistles, but there is a good reason they, too, wouldn’t include Marian prayers: Mary was probably still alive. According to the Protoevangelium of James (chapters 8–9), Mary was betrothed to Joseph when she was twelve. This was a common age for girls to be married (boys typically married in their teens). The Talmud describes the onset of puberty as the preferred time for a daughter to be married (b. Sanhedrin 76a-b).
If Mary was thirteen when Jesus was born, then, based on the traditional date of his birth in 3–2 B.C., Mary would have been born around 15 B.C. She would be seventy in A.D. 55 and eighty in 65. Acts was written in A.D. 60, and the New Testament epistles were written between the late 40s and the mid-60s. It is thus quite possible that Mary had not reached the end of her earthly life.
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Praying to Mary in the New Testament

No, 90% of Catholics Aren’t Leaving The Church…

In this episode, Trent gives us an update on his family life as well as some exciting courses he will be recording for the Catholic answers School of Apologetics, including one designed to keep you from becoming an “apologetic chat-bot.”

Horn Family Update and “Don’t be an ‘Apologetic Chat-Bot’”

What does Revelation mean when it says that those who overcome will be the ones to rule in the new heaven and earth with Christ?

How is it possible for Jesus to offer himself up if he offered himself up first at the last supper but did not die till the next day?

Mat. 25 talking about the sheep and the goats. How are they saved by grace if it feels like they were separated and judged based on works?

Gen.6:1-2 What are the nephilim? What interpretation does the Catholic Church take?

Why would Jesus so pure be tempted by the devil?

Who are the sheep and the goats?

Do we know what happened to the cross immediately after the crucifixion and where it is today?

It feels like the Church has moved away from numerology in the bible? Why should Catholics avoid it?

Who are the “sheep and the goats” in Matthew 25, and are we judged by works or saved by grace? In this episode of Catholic Answers Live, Catholic Answers apologists unpack this key passage before addressing other challenging questions from Scripture. They explain what Revelation means about reigning with Christ, how Jesus could offer Himself at the Last Supper before the crucifixion, and what the Church teaches about the mysterious Nephilim in Genesis 6. Additional topics include why Jesus allowed Himself to be tempted, what happened to the cross after the crucifixion, and why Catholics are cautious about numerology in biblical interpretation. A thoughtful discussion on salvation, Scripture, and Catholic theology.

Who Are the Sheep and the Goats? Bible Questions

Are Catholics the only members of the Body of Christ?

Did the prophecies in the book of Revelation already happen?

Is there a way to establish that the John 6 discourse is related to the Last Supper? The Bible is a catholic book

Alleged contradiction - Unam Sanctam has contradictory teachings about Salvation outside the church. I am confused about the explanation of martyrs in heaven?

Why would the Church burn heretics when the bible says to let the wheat grow among the weeds

How do you know if you love God?

Can you give the Catholic explanation of these verses from Ephesians 2:8-10?

&#8220;Did the prophecies in Revelation happen?&#8221; This question opens a discussion on the interpretation of biblical prophecy, alongside inquiries about the connection between John 6 and the Last Supper, and the complexities surrounding salvation as discussed in Unam Sanctam. Additional topics include the Church&#8217;s historical actions regarding heretics and understanding love for God.
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Did the Prophecies in Revelation Happen? John 6 and Salvation

In this episode Trent sits down with Fr. Sebastian Walshe to uncover connections, clues, and pieces of wisdom hidden in plain sight within Jesus’ parables.

“Finding Hidden Treasure in the Gospels” (with Fr. Walshe)

In this episode Trent examines an attitude among “non-denominational” Christians that downplays doctrine and says “all that matters is just believing in Jesus.” Trent shows how belief in Jesus must correspond with obedience to Jesus’ commands and that requires sound doctrine.

The “Just Believe in Jesus” Fallacy

Heretic

Perfect Day

The Beast

Mission Impossible

Faith and Movies

What are the top 3 reasons for the reliability of the gospels?

Have you considered the work of Bart Ehrman and his problems with what Jesus really said?

Is it safe to assume that St. Luke was one of the 72 that was originally sent out?

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&#8220;What are the top reasons for Gospel reliability?&#8221; This question opens a discussion on the foundational aspects that affirm the Gospels&#8217; trustworthiness, including the significance of eyewitness accounts. Other topics include the challenges posed by Bart Ehrman regarding Jesus&#8217; words, the role of St. Luke among the apostles, and the criteria used to determine authentic Gospels versus apocryphal texts.
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What Are the Top Reasons for Gospel Reliability? St. Luke, Eyewitnesses

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How to be a “Lion Heart” Catholic (with Devin Rose)

In this free-for-all-Friday Trent shares his recent interview with Michael Lofton where he discusses his recent debates as well as pro-life issues hitting the news.

FFAF: Sola Scriptura, Purgatory, and IVF (New Episodes Air 04/15)

In this free-for-all-Friday Trent reveals the origins of his favorite cheesy music genre, &#8220;Yacht rock&#8221;.
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<div>Transcript:
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Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
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Trent Horn:
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Are you just trying to get away this weekend? Do you need to go sailing? Do you need to ride like the wind, or is that silly? Is that just something only a fool believes? If you like all of that, then you&#8217;ll probably like the genre of music I&#8217;m going to be talking about today here on Free-For-All Friday. We need to be free. We have to go out, get out on our yachts and travel and listen to our yacht rock on Free-For-All Friday here on the Counsel of Trent podcast. I&#8217;m your host, Catholic Answers apologist, Trent Horn.
On Mondays and Wednesdays, we talk apologetics and theology. Friday, we talk about whatever I want to talk about, and today I want to talk about my favorite genre of music that I just recently learned has a unique name to it. I didn&#8217;t know it had a name to it before. I called it easy listening, but it&#8217;s not narrow enough because easy listening doesn&#8217;t fall under it. Like Kenny G for example, (singing) going on with the saxophone. Oh, I like Kenny G, but that&#8217;s not my favorite genre of music to listen to. My wife would call it doctor&#8217;s office music, and she always rips on me for it. She loves this genre of music, by the way. She does like it, but she makes fun of me for it. I&#8217;ll put it on. She says, &#8220;Ah, Trent, that sounds like the music they play over the speaker in the doctor&#8217;s office when you were a kid waiting to go in.&#8221;
You sit there and you&#8217;re reading your Highlight magazine. You&#8217;re staring at the aquarium with the weird lights, the wood-paneled aquarium in the older doctor&#8217;s offices, and they call you in, and they have this kind of easy listening music from the late &#8217;70s, early 80s. Because when I was a kid and went to the doctor&#8217;s office. That would&#8217;ve been 1989, 1993. So what were they playing then? They were playing this kind of easy listening stuff from the late &#8217;70s and the early &#8217;80s, and I think it just kind of imprinted on me ever since then.
So it&#8217;s called yacht rock, also called West Coast sound, which makes sense because I love West Coast stuff. I love this West Coast sound from the &#8217;70s and &#8217;80s, really popular among white people. I&#8217;m going to be honest with you, this is white people music. There is no other way around it. But I also like music popular among black people in the early ;90s on the West Coast, Dr. Dre, Easy-E, Ice Cube, NWA, all of that. So maybe I&#8217;ll do a whole other Straight Outta Compton episode that we could talk about.
So it&#8217;s called yacht rock, and I learned about the term because I was looking for local musical groups to go see a concert here in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. I just like to go out sometimes listen to live music. So I was looking at different things like, &#8220;Okay, do they have any good bands?&#8221; And there&#8217;s a band called The Windbreakers that&#8217;s playing. Actually it&#8217;s playing very soon. I&#8217;m going to go out to see them. And I was looking them up. I thought, &#8220;Okay, I&#8217;ll look them up on YouTube and say, &#8220;These guys look funny. It&#8217;s just a bunch of guys, middle-aged white guys on a boat with their nautical hats and glasses and they&#8217;re called The Windbreakers.&#8221;
And I listened to a demo video of them and I listen, I realize, &#8220;Oh my goodness, all these songs sound the same.&#8221; And they&#8217;re all the songs that I love, like Christopher Cross. (singing) Ride Like The Wind. Other things like Kenny Loggins, Toto, Africa. So Africa. (singing). Putting all that together, listening to it. What a Fool Believes, Michael McDonald, all of this stuff. And I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Wait a minute, these guys can do all this.&#8221;
It all sounds the same when they do it, because it all belongs to the same genre. It all belongs to the genre of yacht rock. So I&#8217;ll play a little clip of it so you get the idea what I&#8217;m talking about. I worry about playing the actual songs for copyright reasons, but I think if I play The Windbreakers covering it, I should be okay. I highly doubt anyone&#8217;s going to come after me. So I&#8217;m going to play a little bit of these guys covering these songs and you&#8217;ll see they&#8217;re all pretty similar in their structure.
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Trent Horn:
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So as I said, that&#8217;s the kind of music I really like. Is it cheesy? Yes. Do I love it? Absolutely. So let me talk about the nature of the genre because it&#8217;s also called soft rock or California sound. It wasn&#8217;t called yacht rock until 2005. So when talking about it here, it says, &#8220;The term yacht rock did not exist contemporaneously with the music the term describes.&#8221; It&#8217;s talking about music from 1975 to about 1984, also called West Coast sound, adult-oriented rock. It became identified with yacht rock in 2005, coined by JD Ryznar in a online video series of the same name. So you can go on YouTube and you can watch this. You just search for yacht rock series. And it is a fictional dramatization of the rise of this medium. It&#8217;s a fictionalized dramatization of guys dressed up as like Kenny Loggins, The Doobie Brothers, Michael McDonald, Christopher Cross, and imagines all of them in Southern California interacting with each other and how the music came to be.
And it begins with an intro by the host for each one. So it&#8217;s a funny series. And once again, there&#8217;s some morally offensive elements, some swearing, things like that in it, but it&#8217;s pretty hilarious. They take liberties of some of the history. But it&#8217;s funny. And in the mid 2000s, that web series, it&#8217;s got over a million views on YouTube, it helped to bring a resurgence of this late &#8217;70, early 80&#8217;s music to a new audience. So people like myself is when I would&#8217;ve been in college, for example, and listened to this. So let me talk about these kind of lyrics. And the idea is that this is the kind of music if you were a yuppie in 1983 and you were playing it on your yacht and you&#8217;re going sailing in the marina at Long Beach or San Diego or something like that, that&#8217;s what you would want to hear is this kind of stuff.
And the themes of it are really funny because a lot of themes deal with &#8230; It&#8217;s a weird music, that it&#8217;s happy, sad music. There are those songs, right? Think about Cat&#8217;s in the Cradle. It has a happy, upbeat element to it. (singing) And when you listen to the whole song you&#8217;re like, wow, this is an absolutely depressing song because it&#8217;s about a guy, he doesn&#8217;t have time for his kids. And then when he is an adult, his kids don&#8217;t have time for him. And it&#8217;s like, &#8220;No.&#8221; (singing) And I love that cheesy stuff. I love it. So it&#8217;s happy, sad music. It has an upbeat, happy element, but the lyrics are actually kind of darker and melancholic.
And that&#8217;s something similar with yacht rock, that a lot of the themes deal with escape. &#8220;I have to get away. I&#8217;m a fool. What have I done?&#8221; So I imagine these yuppies, they&#8217;re out on their boat, away from their wife and kids just for a minute of peace and quiet out on the harbor. And maybe they&#8217;re just thinking, &#8220;I just want to get away from it all. If I could just take this boat and get down to Mexico, I would be happy.&#8221; Relax, buddy. I think you&#8217;re okay. Your job probably still has a pension. We don&#8217;t even have those anymore in the mid 2020s. And homes cost like what? $120,000 in California. So you&#8217;re living just fine if you&#8217;re a yuppie in 1983. Okay?
So reading here from what it says here online, what are the key elements of yacht rock? Like you&#8217;re thinking, Christopher Cross&#8217; Sailing (singing), from your Michael McDonald. This stuff. Here are the three defining rules of yacht rock.
One, keep it smooth even when it grooves with more emphasis on the melody than on the beat. So that seems right. When you listen to a lot of these songs, very rare to hear drums. It doesn&#8217;t have heavy drum beats to it. It&#8217;s very smooth. Keep it smooth, even when it&#8217;s grooving. It&#8217;s more about the melody than the beat. You&#8217;re kind of swaying with the melody rather than tapping your feet to the beat.
Number two, keep the emotions light, even when the sentiment turns sad as is so often the case in the world of the sensitive yacht rocksman. It&#8217;s a very sensitive man on his yacht trying to sail his way through life. Keep the emotions light even when the sentiment turns sad. And it&#8217;s interesting when you listen to the subtext of the lyrics in a lot of these songs, or Take Me Away to Margaritaville. All of these songs. It&#8217;s always like some woman. I mean, most songs are about a woman that you&#8217;re having problems with. And so you have this sad element, but it&#8217;s still light even though the lyrics are kind of melancholic. (Singing) That is not Margaritaville at all.
And the third rule, always keep it catchy no matter how modest or deeply buried in the trackless the tune happens to be. You got to stay catchy when you&#8217;re doing it. So it goes on to talk about how things are on the border of yacht rock, which I find interesting. It says, &#8220;Not all yacht rock is soft. Some of it has a harder tempo to it.&#8221; So you have a Toto, for example, (singing) or Footloose. It says here, &#8220;Footloose is yacht rock, not soft rock.&#8221; I don&#8217;t know. Footloose, I mean, that one, you are just stamping your feet. It&#8217;s Footloose. You have to cut loose and dance to that. I feel like maybe if you&#8217;re having a dance party on your yacht, you&#8217;re going to play footloose. Also says Thriller is here. Nah, come on. I&#8217;m going to put Footloose and Thriller. That&#8217;s on the fringes of yacht rock. So I&#8217;ll go down here and read a little bit more about some of the origins of the music.
It says, &#8220;Yacht rock was art untouched by the outside world. By contrast to what followed, this was probably the last major era of pop music wholly separated from the politics of its day. Yacht rock represented an introspective individualism that emerged after the death of the mass movement idealism of the 1960s. Its reassuringly vague escapism was boosted by the rise of FM radio, which brought together two consequences of gender emancipation, women who controlled household spending and men who felt freer to convey their emotions in song. The roots of yacht rock can be traced in the music of the beach Boys whose aesthetic was the first to be scavenged by acts like Rupert Holmes.&#8221;
It talks also about Captain &amp; Tennille. So you hear like Love Will Keep Us Together. Of course, that was wasn&#8217;t a Captain &amp; Tennille song. They covered that song. Was originally done by &#8230; Who did that? Neil Sedaka back in 1973. And then Captain &amp; Tennille covered it later. So it was also credited with bringing back groups like Hall &amp; Oates, the resurgence of yacht rock. I love Hall &amp; Oates. I love any song that has purposeful clapping in it. (singing) Trent, don&#8217;t quit your day job and sing. No, I won&#8217;t do that. I&#8217;ll wrap up you with a few other elements of yacht rock that are commonalities to it.
So another list talks about these common elements of it, that it has a high production value. It was using elite LA-based studio musicians and producers to make the tracks. It has jazz and R&amp;B influences, use of the electric piano. Ah, that sweet and soothing electric piano. An upbeat rhythm called the Doobie Bounce. Of course, The Doobie Brothers are associated a lot with yacht rock. And as I said before, complex and wry lyrics about heartbroken foolish men, particularly involving the word fool. (singing) Oh my goodness. So I don&#8217;t know. So that&#8217;s it. That&#8217;s all I just wanted to talk about today.
It&#8217;s always fun for me to explore different genres of music, to see what&#8217;s out there. Because you think maybe there&#8217;s only, what, 12 genres, rock, classical, country. We play both kinds of music, country and western. But when you start to think about the different genres, it&#8217;s like a fractal that goes in an infinite number of directions to group music in. But that&#8217;s a little bit more about me. Do you like yacht rock? Maybe you really like it like I do, and you found a kindred spirit and maybe you just absolutely detest it and now you know more about where this thing you detest comes from. So maybe next time I&#8217;ll talk about some of the other genres that I really enjoy. But yeah, I hope you guys enjoyed this and yeah, that you have a very blessed weekend.
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FFAF: Why I Love “Yacht Rock”

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What’s the Point of Confession? Understanding the Sacraments

In this episode, Trent examines a common objection to the claim that the Old Testament shows homosexual conduct is sinful.
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Transcript:
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast. I&#8217;m your host Catholic Answers Apologist, Trent Horn. And today I&#8217;m going to address a common objection to the church&#8217;s teaching on homosexuality. But before I do that, I myself have an objection. Some of you have not subscribed to the channel yet, but that&#8217;s a good thing because you can be one of the subscribers that gets us to a hundred thousand by the end of next month.
So if you want to help us reach that goal, click the subscribe button. And of course, if you want to help us reach more people, please support us at trenthornpodcast.com. All right, so the catechism says that scripture presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, paragraph 2357. But some scholars and activists say these passages are taken out of context. They say that even if some Bible verses seem to condemn same-sex behavior, they don&#8217;t apply today.
And so the Bible doesn&#8217;t really say homosexual conduct is sinful, which is hard to claim when the Bible clearly says things like, &#8220;You shall not lie with a male, as with a woman, it is an abomination,&#8221; Leviticus 1822, and, &#8220;If a man lies with a male, as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination, they shall be put to death. Their blood is upon them,&#8221; Leviticus 2013.
The most common objection to citing these passages in Leviticus in particular is I would call it the shellfish objection. A critic says Christians are inconsistent for following Leviticus. Leviticus is prohibition on same-sex behavior, but not its other prohibitions, including on seemingly innocuous behavior like eating shellfish, Leviticus 1110 or mixing fabrics, Leviticus 1919. In his book, The Gay Gospels, Keith Sharpe writes, &#8220;Until Christian fundamentalist boycott shellfish restaurants, stop wearing polycotton T-shirts, and stoned to death their wayward offspring, there is no obligation to listen to their diatribes about homosexuality being a sin.
This objection was popularized in a letter to Dr. Laura Schlessinger written in the 1990s. The author, J Kent Ashcraft, asked Schlessinger about her view that homosexuality was quote a biological error and is condemned in the Bible. Ashcraft wrote a satirical letter of agreement saying, &#8220;When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle for example, I simply remind them that that Leviticus 1822 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some other elements of God&#8217;s laws and how to follow them.&#8221;
Ashcraft then asks Schlessinger questions like whether he should kill a neighbor who works on the Sabbath because of what Exodus 35 verse two says or whether eating shellfish is abominable? The letter sarcastically ends, Thank you again for reminding us that God&#8217;s word is eternal and unchanging.&#8221; This letter was also used for an argument in an episode of the West Wing. And even Father James Martin, surprise surprise, uses this argument when people ask him about Leviticus and homosexuality.
Fr. James Martin:
My friends get their hairs trimmed, including the hair around their temples. Even though this is expressly forbidden by Leviticus 1927. How should they die? And this is my favorite. Now we&#8217;re laughing, it&#8217;s good to laugh because people use the homosexuality texts in that way without any historical context. This is my favorite. My uncle has a farm. He violates Leviticus 1919 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his&#8230; With the homosexuality things that come from Leviticus, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread, cotton and polyester. So that&#8217;s context. I think we need context. Thank you.
Trent Horn:
All right, so what&#8217;s wrong with the shellfish objection. The Old Testament contains some laws that were only binding upon ancient Israel, the ritual ceremonial laws. And other laws that would be binding for all people and all times and places, the moral law, especially those found in the Ten Commandments.
The former ritual laws were temporary in nature. They were meant to keep Israel a unique and holy nation in comparison to the debauchery of its pagan neighbors. But the latter moral laws, they forbade evils like murder or adultery. These laws were not pedagogical in nature. They were meant to permanently protect God&#8217;s people from sin. That&#8217;s why even though Jesus declared all foods clean, he did not declare all sexual relationships to be clean.
And so Jesus affirmed the mosaic laws prohibition on adultery. Or decide another example, even though St. Paul said circumcision was not necessary and could even hinder a person&#8217;s salvation, he also said that the man in 1st Corinthians, Chapter 5, who was having sex with his stepmother, a violation of Leviticus 1808 and Deuteronomy 2230 by the way, he said, &#8220;That man should be cast out of the community.&#8221;
In Galatians 3 verses 24 through 26, Paul says, &#8220;The mosaic law was our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian. For in Christ Jesus, you are all sons of God through faith.&#8221;
The word rendered custodian is pedagogos from which we get the English word pedagogy. In the ancient world, a pedagogos was a kind of babysitter who taught children in his care of valuable lessons. And the mosaic law taught God&#8217;s people how to understand his unique and absolute holiness. The Old Testament scholar, John Goldingay puts it this way, &#8220;Food is an expression of identity. God takes that fact and makes it contribute to the forming and articulating of Israel&#8217;s identity. Jews don&#8217;t eat pork. It&#8217;s one of the things that makes them stand out and keeps them separate.
God is holy, which means being different, being set apart. Israel is holy, which means being different, being set apart as the Jewish people have always been. Their distinctive customs meant they were always distinguishable from other people&#8217;s.&#8221;
One analogy I use for the ritual and the moral laws would be with my own children. So I have two rules for my children. Hold my hand when you cross the street and don&#8217;t drink what&#8217;s under the sink. Eventually my children get old enough, they don&#8217;t have to hold my hand anymore, but they will never be old enough to drink what&#8217;s under the sink. There are certain things that are always bad for them no matter what. So when it comes to Israel, the ritual laws did not have to be permanent. They were necessary for growth and development for keeping Israel distinct. But the moral laws are permanent because these actions are always sinful no matter what.
The goal of being distinct, from surrounding pagan culture is also seen in laws that condemned activities like cross-dressing in Deuteronomy 22, where planting more than one seed in a field, or as I mentioned earlier, wearing a fabric of different materials, Leviticus 19.
All of these offenses involve the idea of illicit mixing. The catechism says that God&#8217;s revelation involves a specific divine pedagogy. God communicates himself to man gradually. He prepares him to welcome by stages, the supernatural revelation that is to culminate in the person and mission of the incarnate word, Jesus Christ. In Romans 7:12, Paul says, &#8220;The law is holy and the commandment is holy and just and good.&#8221; But Hebrews 7:19 admits the law made nothing perfect. The law was good, but not good enough.
It also contained what the Second Vatican Counsel called imperfect and provisional things like animal sacrifices or ritual cleansing laws that would not be a part of God&#8217;s final universal plan to redeem all of humanity.
All of these things would point to their ultimate fulfillment in Christ, and so they would at some point no longer be necessary once Christ came in the flesh. But the moral laws would always be necessary because they reflect God&#8217;s will for all people and especially those under the law of Christ as Galatians 6:2 puts it.
So do the Old Testament&#8217;s laws on homosexuality fall under the temporary ritual laws or the permanent moral laws. We can know the Old Testament&#8217;s prohibitions of homosexual behavior are part of the perpetually binding moral law because Leviticus 1822 is sandwiched between moral laws, not ceremonial ones.
Verse 20, condemns adultery. Verse 21, condemns child sacrifice. And verse 23, condemns bestiality. Moreover, Leviticus makes it clear that actions like adultery, bestiality, and same-sex relations were part of the moral law that also applied to non-Jews. Only Jews were expected to follow things like the dietary rules.
God had judged the other pagan nations for engaging in moral defilements, and he expelled them from the land for doing so. Leviticus 1824 through 25 says, &#8220;Do not defile yourselves by any of these things for by all these the nations I am casting out before you defiled themselves and the land became defiled so that I punished its iniquity and the land vomited out its inhabitants.&#8221;
However, the late revisionist scholar John Boswell claims that these prohibitions were actually part of the ritual ceremonial law because they describe homosexuality as an abomination. Boswell writes, &#8220;The Hebrew word toevah, here translated abomination does not usually signify something intrinsically evil like rape or theft, but something which is ritually unclean for Jews.&#8221; But toevah is often used to describe serious moral offenses that even Gentiles could be held accountable for committing. These include murder, lying, adultery, child sacrifice, and oppressing the poor.
Other revisionist claim Leviticus is only condemning prostitution that took place in pagan temples or sex between men and children, petiresti. But the passages in Leviticus do not limit either their condemnation or their punishments only to certain kinds of homosexual behavior. For example, the texts never say, &#8220;You shall not lie with a male prostitute.&#8221; They just say, &#8220;A male shall not lie with a male as with a woman.&#8221;
Ancient Mesopotamian texts like the Almanac of Incantations do describe consensual same-sex relationships during this period. It wasn&#8217;t an unheard of concept in the ancient world. So Leviticus is condemning these kinds of relationships, not just prostitution. There&#8217;s a word for prostitutes in Hebrew, kedeshem, but it&#8217;s not used in these passages. The law also treats this as a consensual act between two adults because both individuals are given the same punishment for breaking a law, which would be unjust if this were petiresti, an act committed against a child who doesn&#8217;t deserve any kind of punishment.
Moreover, unlike with idolatry, murder, adultery, or breaking the Sabbath, the Old Testament never prescribes the death penalty for violating mere ceremonial laws like the kosher food laws. Leviticus 20 mandates exile for someone who becomes unclean by having sex with a menstruating woman, but it prescribes death for adultery, bestiality, and same-sex behavior.
All of which fall under the unchanging moral law. The fact that today we don&#8217;t enforce such harsh penalties for these acts does not mean these acts are not serious violations of the moral law. The idea that Jesus upheld the Old Testament laws might surprise people who believe he simply, simply did away with them. But Jesus said, &#8220;Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets. I have come not to abolish them, but to fulfill them,&#8221; Matthew 5:17.
In some cases, this fulfillment took the form of strengthening these laws such as when Jesus commanded the love of both neighbor and enemy. And when he condemned lust as a type of adultery. Or when he condemned anger as a type of murder. When it comes to sexual ethics, Jesus strengthened those laws as well, especially with his teaching on divorce.
If Jesus would not approve of divorce to serve a sexual ethic based solely on consent and instead say that a sexual ethic must be rooted in the permanence established in the creation narratives of Genesis, then there is no way Jesus would approve of sexual relationships that completely contradict the sexual complementarity male female pairing that is also taught in those same creation narratives. God made man, male and female and created sex as a way for men and women to become one flesh.
This is something that cannot happen in a same-sex context because the bodies of people of the same-sex have no procreative potential. And no an infertile opposite sex couple and a same-sex couple are not both infertile. One has a procreative potential blocked by disease or a disorder, whereas the other couple may be completely fertile. They just aren&#8217;t engaging in the marital act so they can never be said to become one flesh.
Finally, when revisionists use the shellfish objection, they&#8217;re almost always inconsistent about it. Father James Martin will use this objection to say, Leviticus&#8217; teaching on homosexuality no longer applies today, but he will use Leviticus&#8217; teachings on the foreigner in the land to apply it to modern issues of immigration. He&#8217;ll quote Leviticus 1934, &#8220;The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the native born among you.&#8221; And he&#8217;ll take that and just completely ignore the differences between the culture of the Bible and modern nation states and say that, that basically means we should have an extremely open immigration policy.
Even though these are two completely different contexts that are being mentioned. Here Leviticus can be applied to modern debates about immigration, but it can&#8217;t be applied to sexual acts like homosexuality that did exist during the time when Leviticus was written even though modern nation states and borders and issues related to immigration were not in existence during the time of Leviticus, it&#8217;s simply inconsistent.
All right, so I hope this was helpful for you and that it can help you show people that the Old Testament is not something that we can just reject because we feel like it no longer applies today. That&#8217;s what the heretic marcion did in the second century. The Old Testament reveals God&#8217;s eternal moral law for his people and the New Testament perfects that law on the person of Christ who through his grace, allows us to live out God&#8217;s law to be a light to the world. So thanks again so much for watching, and I hope that you all have a very blessed day.
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The Bible, Homosexuality, and “the Shellfish Objection”

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In this eye-opening episode, Jimmy Akin tackles the big questions: Did Jesus rocket into space? How does it square with our 93-billion-light-year universe? He masterfully decodes biblical symbolism—from the rising cloud to Daniel’s Son of Man—revealing Jesus’ divine exaltation as the “Visible Yahweh.” Bridging ancient faith and modern science, Jimmy shows why God presented the Ascension this way and what it means for us today. Don’t miss this thrilling deep dive!
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TRANSCRIPT: 
Coming Up
This week, we’re celebrating Ascension Thursday—the day that Jesus ascended back to heaven.
So . . . what actually happened here? Did Jesus go into the upper atmosphere? Did he fly off into outer space?
Let’s get into it!
* * *
Howdy, folks!
We’re in our second year of the podcast now, and you can help me keep making this podcast for years to come—and get early access to new episodes—by going to <a href="https://patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast">Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast</a>
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What Happened at the Ascension?
The New Testament contains two accounts of the Ascension of Christ.
The first is at the end of Luke, where it says:
Luke 24:50-51
[Jesus] led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands he blessed them. While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven.
The second account is found at the beginning of Acts, where we read:
Acts 1:9-11
And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes, and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”
These passages would have been understood by ancient readers as recording a miracle. The Latin word Miraculum means  A Wonder, something that incites wonder—and wonder certainly would have filled the original witnesses of the Ascension.
Modern people also recognize that these passages record a miracle, but they can struggle with this event in a way the ancients didn’t. This is because our knowledge of the dimensions of the cosmos is different than theirs.
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The Ancient Cosmos
There were a number of models of the cosmos in the ancient world, but one of the things that they all agreed on is that it was small (at least, by our standards).
The most common model held that the earth was at the center of the universe, and around it was a set of nested, transparent spheres.
Directly or indirectly attached to each sphere was one of the seven classical planets:
<ul>
<li>Sun</li>
<li>Moon</li>
<li>Mercury</li>
<li>Venus</li>
<li>Mars</li>
<li>Jupiter</li>
<li>Saturn</li>
</ul>
The Sun and the Moon counted as planets because any light in the sky that didn’t maintain a fixed position relative to the stars was considered a wandering star, so the Sun and the Moon counted as “Wanderers” or = Planétai.
The Sun and the Moon definitely change position against the background stars.
That’s why people have different “Sun Signs” in astrology. Sometimes the Sun is located in the constellation Leo, sometimes in Virgo, sometimes in Libra, and so forth.
The Moon and the rest of the planets also wander around against the background stars.
But these background stars always maintain fixed positions with respect to each other, giving us the constellations.
And these “Fixed Stars” were assumed to be attached to their own sphere, which was just outside the orbit of Saturn.
The sphere of the fixed stars was regarded as the ultimate boundary of our universe, and since it was just beyond Saturn, you can see that the universe wasn’t very big.
Even the Greek philosopher Archimedes, who believed in a larger universe, thought that it was only two light years across.
He wrote about this in a book called The Sand Reckoner, in which he estimated how many grains of sand it would take to fill the universe.
In case you’re curious, he concluded it would take 8 x 10^63 grains to fill the universe.
For Christians, the realm beyond the fixed stars would be the realm of God—the ultimate heaven. It was known as the Empyrean Heaven.
And given the small size the universe was believed to have, it would not be difficult to imagine that when Jesus ascended, he quickly reached the ultimate heaven and sat down at the right hand of God.
As Hebrews says:
Hebrews 1:3
[Jesus] is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.
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The Modern Cosmos
Things are more complicated for us. By 1919, many astronomers thought the universe was 300,000 light years across and that it contained only the Milky Way galaxy.
We could see distant galaxies, but they had long been thought to be just spiral-shaped nebulas that were within the Milky Way. So what we call the Andromeda galaxy used to be known as the Andromeda nebula.
However, by 1929, Edwin Hubble had realized that the “spiral nebulae” were not part of the Milky Way but were, in fact, distant galaxies outside of ours, making the universe at least 280 million light years across.
Today we know that the visible universe is 93 billion light years in diameter, and that’s just the part we can see.
We have evidence that it’s actually at least 250 times larger than that.
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A Modern Difficulty
This creates a difficulty for moderns. Even if Jesus left the earth and began traveling at the speed of light, he would still be well within the Milky Way galaxy, he might not even have gotten as far as the star Deneb (alpha Cygni), and he wouldn’t leave the visible universe for another 93 billion years.
A skeptic thus might mock this situation and point out that the Second Coming should occur long before then, so Jesus would have to leave earth and then turn around in space—without having reached God—to come back.
Of course, any such mocking would be premature, because on the Christian view, it was God who wrote the laws of nature, and so he’s not bound by the light speed limit.
He can have Jesus move at any speed he chooses, and he can even have Jesus instantly move (or teleport) to wherever he wants him to be, including heaven.
Many people think of heaven as a spiritual realm rather than a physical one, and it’s certainly not part of our physical universe.
You couldn’t fly there in a starship, no matter how much faster than light it could move.
But heaven must be physical in one sense: It must be capable of at least receiving bodies, because Jesus and a few select others have their bodies with them in heaven.
These bodies may not be extended in three dimensions the way objects are here on earth, but heaven must be capable of receiving them in some way, even if it’s unimaginable to us.
Given that God is omnipotent—and thus able to bring about any state of affairs that doesn’t involve a logical contradiction—we don’t need to worry about the physical limits that we are subject to or precisely how Jesus got to heaven.
That’s something we can leave to God.
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The Ascension Teaches God’s Message
But how are we supposed to understand what happened at the Ascension itself? Why did Jesus rise from the earth and then disappear behind a cloud? Why didn’t he just disappear in a burst of light or something?
The answer is that a dazzling burst of light wouldn’t have communicated what God wanted the witnesses to understand. Jesus had disappeared in front of the disciples before, like he did for the two disciples on the road to Emmaus.
Luke records that, as they were eating,
Luke 24:31
Their eyes were opened, and they recognized him. And he vanished from their sight.
But this didn’t signal that the post-Resurrection appearances were over. In fact, the two disciples immediately returned to Jerusalem, and Jesus appeared to them again, right there.
So if Jesus had simply vanished instead of ascending, the disciples might have assumed that Jesus would keep appearing to them.
He had already been appearing to them for weeks. At the beginning of Acts, Luke records that
Acts 1:3
He presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.
So if Jesus just vanished the way he had on other occasions, the point might not be made that this was the end to the post-Resurrection appearances. Neither would it communicate that he was now enthroned in heaven.
And God wanted to make it clear that now things were different. Jesus was going to God and would not simply keep appearing in bodily form.
As the Catechism says,
Catechism of the Catholic Church 665
Christ’s ascension marks the definitive entrance of Jesus’ humanity into God’s heavenly domain, whence he will come again; this humanity in the meantime hides him from the eyes of men.
And the Ascension makes this clear in terms that the first disciples could understand.
Jesus rising above the surface of the earth communicated that he was going to heaven—which was pictured as being “up” from an earthly perspective—and thus a break with Jesus’ earthly existence.
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The Cloud
The cloud is also an important element in the symbolism God was using, though many people today miss it.
Acts 1:9
And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.
Acts 1:9 says two things about what happened: First, it says that “he was lifted up,” and second, it says that “a cloud took him out of their sight.”
The Greek word for “took” in this passage is Hupolambanó, which means “to cause to ascend, take up.”
Many modern translations ignore part of what this verb means to smooth the passage out into good English, but the thought is that he was lifted up and then a cloud took him up and out of their site.
This establishes Jesus as a cloud rider, which is an attribute of God. For example, in Psalm 68, we read:
Psalm 68:4, NAB
Sing to God, praise his name;
exalt the rider of the clouds. 
Rejoice before him 
whose name is the Lord.
This is just one of multiple passages that depicts God as riding on the clouds, and in Daniel, God shares that status with another figure. In Daniel 7, we read:
Daniel 7:9
As I looked, thrones were placed, and the Ancient of Days took his seat; his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne was fiery flames; its wheels were burning fire.
So here Daniel sees God seated on his throne in heaven, up in the clouds, and then this happens:
Daniel 7:13-14
I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him.
And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.
So Daniel sees one like a son of man—literally meaning someone who looks human—also riding on a cloud, being presented to God, and then God gives him a universal kingdom over all peoples that will never be destroyed.
This triggered a lot of speculation about the Son of Man figure in Second Temple Jewish literature, and since he rides a cloud like God, is presented to God, and is given a universal kingdom like God, the Son of Man came to be regarded as a second divine figure.
This second figure came to be known as the “Lesser Yahweh” or the “Visible Yahweh,” and this complex of ideas became known as the “Two Powers in Heaven Doctrine.”
This is also the background to Jesus’ interaction with the Jewish high priest at his trial. In Mark 14, we read:
Mark 14:61-64
Again the high priest asked him, “Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?”
And Jesus said, “I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.”
And the high priest tore his garments and said, “What further witnesses do we need? You have heard his blasphemy. What is your decision?”
Now claiming to be the Christ was not a blasphemy. God was expected to send the Christ or Messiah, so claiming to be that figure was not blasphemy or speaking against God.
Neither was claiming to be the Son of the Blessed—that is, the Son of God. The Jewish kings had long been regarded as adopted sons of God, as Psalm 2:7—one of the psalms about the Jewish king—says:
Psalm 2:7
The Lord said to me, “You are my Son; 
today I have begotten you.”
As a Jewish king, the Messiah would also be an adopted son of God. That would not be blasphemy, either.
So why does the high priest accuse Jesus of blasphemy? It’s because Jesus invokes the Two Powers in Heaven doctrine, saying, “You will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming with the clouds of heaven.”
Jesus is saying, “You know the Lesser Yahweh figure? The Visible Yahweh? That’s who I am. I’m that guy.”
In other words, Jesus is claiming not just to be the Messiah and not just an adopted son of God. He’s claiming to be divine himself, and that’s why the high priest regards what he’s saying as blasphemy.
And this brings us back to the cloud that carries Jesus up at the Ascension.
The cloud makes it clear that Daniel’s prophecy is now happening: the Son of Man is being presented to God in heaven, where he will be given a universal kingdom and reign until his return.
The cloud also explains why the disciples are then told,
Acts 1:11
Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.
That is, he will return in his divine capacity, riding on a cloud.
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Conclusion
All of this is why God used the symbolism he did in how Jesus departed from his earthly ministry.
Greater familiarity with the relevant biblical texts thus makes clear the symbolism God was using and what it was communicating to the disciples.
It’s asking the wrong question to say, “How far up did Jesus go when he ascended?”
God was not concerned with teaching the disciples about the structure of the universe. He’s interested in teaching them about what was happening with Jesus: Jesus would not continue among the disciples but was going to be exalted as a divine figure besides God until his Second Coming.
God thus drew on the symbolism that was resident in the disciples’ imaginations—and in the Jewish Scriptures and the teachings of Jesus—to make this clear.
What happened in physical terms after Jesus disappeared from their sight might be interesting for us to know.
I personally suspect that it was at this point—once he was out of the disciples’ sight—that he simply disappeared from our universe and then appeared in heaven in whatever way heaven receives physical bodies.
But this was not what God was interested in teaching, and so we must leave that matter to him.
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God bless you always!

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