In this episode Trent sits down with Presbyterian and popular Youtuber Redeemed Zoomer to talk about Protestantism, Catholicism, and the role of Church authority.
Check out Redeemed Zoomer’s Channel
Transcription:
Trent:
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent. Joining me today is Redeem Zoomer. Thank you so much for being here.
RZ:
Hey Trent. Thanks for having me on again.
Trent:
Well, now I’m excited for you to be here because the last time you were here, the setup was, I don’t know the best way to phrase it, but crummy comes to mind. It
RZ:
Was, it’s still better than any setup I’ve ever had in my videos.
Trent:
No, I love your videos. I really enjoy. We had a fun back and forth recently. Someone said to me, I got a reply saying, if you want to connect with Gen Z more, don’t play Super Mario World. But the reason I did that was I don’t feel like I shouldn’t pretend to be something I’m not.
RZ:
Yeah, and it’s not like most of Gen Z can’t watch a video unless somebody’s playing Minecraft in the background. That was originally what I did because I didn’t have a high quality camera to show my face.
Trent:
Right. So you just have something pleasant. It’s hypnotic. Actually. What’s nice about when you have Minecraft playing, when you’re talking about theology is it’s a three dimensional first person perspective exploring things. So it kind of lulls you into a nice sense of listening while you’re just walking around. Feels like
RZ:
Right. When I first started getting into Christianity and listening to a bunch of sermons and lectures, I would play Minecraft while listening to that, and that helped me focus on what I was listening to.
Trent:
So
RZ:
I wanted to recreate the experience for everyone else.
Trent:
The closest that I was thinking of when I was thinking, oh, what could I play to be an analog in replying to redeem zoomer, was maybe just exploring empty Halo three maps, because I mean, that’s what I did 20 years ago and still play. People don’t know when my username, but you may catch me on there. Alright, so what I wanted to talk today, we might touch on a little bit of some of the things we’ve gone back and forth on, but I wanted to especially talk about your views on Protestantism and get a better understanding of that. I saw you speak to Iron Inquisitor about this and you have some views. What’s interesting is I feel like you are much more concerned, it seems like about evangelicals and non-denominational than Catholics, which is different from a lot of other people who have concerns about Catholic theology. They tend to not think evangelicals are non-denominational that big of a deal.
RZ:
Yeah. Well, I’m glad you bring that up because a lot of evangelical creators have been calling me out recently that a messenger of truth guy said, oh, we’re redeem Zoomers not Protestant, because he seems to see himself as closer to Catholics than evangelicals, which I do. I do find a lot more agreement with Catholics than evangelicals, but so did Martin Luther and John Calvin. They were much harsher against the Anabaptists than they were against the Catholics and the evangelicals today are basically the same as the Anabaptist. It’s not identical, but evangelicals don’t really have any continuity to any group. So the same things that the reformers condemned the Anabaptists for are the same things that evangelicals believe,
Namely
Anti-institutional and no views of sacramental efficacy and no respect for church history.
Trent:
So let’s talk a little, because recently you said you are done being a Protestant apologist, whatever that means. Tell me about your thoughts on that and then we can get into what it means to be Protestant.
RZ:
Right. I just took a break temporarily because I was just beginning to study the resources and I noticed there were a lot of people who had studied a lot more than me, but weren’t making content. They were just kind of being lazy. I do think Catholics and Orthodox are much better at defending their beliefs and much less lazy about defending their beliefs. The second a kid conversed to Catholicism, he makes a channel like defending Catholicism, even if he’s 15 or whatever,
And
I know Protestant seminarians who’ve been studying for 20 years and they’re like, I don’t know man, I’m just too busy to make a YouTube channel.
Trent:
Why do you think that is?
RZ:
Well, most of these people that I was calling out are in the Protestant schism groups like the A CNA or the PCA and I think Theist mindset has pervaded made its way into most of conservative American Protestants
Trent:
When you call them Protestant schism groups. I want to make sure we get all of our terms clear here because a lot of people, when they think of schism, they think about departing from someone who has legitimate ecclesial magisterial authority. Are you talking about people who, it sounds like, correct me if I’m wrong, claim to be like a mainline Protestant denomination, but they’re not. There only are in name only
RZ:
Sort of, I think voluntary schism is a lot different than forced schism. There’s been many schisms in church history like the Caledonian versus the non Caledonian
And
The Great Schism and the Protestant Reformation. In none of those cases was there one group consciously and willingly and voluntarily departing from the mainstream established group? Nobody committed voluntary schism really until the Great Awakenings in America, which is really where Evangelicalism is birthed. So I think if you talk about what’s generally perceived as Protestantism, you have mainline Protestantism on one end, which has the historical continuity to the Protestant Reformation. On the other end, you have evangelicalism, which is Protestant in name only and has zero continuity to the Reformation.
And
Then you have schematic Protestant groups, which are usually conservative and they try to preserve some of the beliefs of the reformation more than the mainlines do,
But
They end up adopting an evangelical ecclesiology by rejecting the institutional church. So that’s why if you go to your old historic beautiful Episcopal Cathedral or Presbyterian church or Methodist Church, chances are it’s a mainline Protestant church. Chances are it’s not part of the A CNA or the PCA or the Global Methodist Church. These recent schematic offshoots.
Trent:
So let’s try to understand a bit. It seemed like your concern when you were saying you were done being a Protestant apologist, is that you want to focus on what you call the Reconquista initiative, your claim. Essentially, it sounded like before we reach out to Catholics, before we draw people into Protestantism, Protestantism needs to define itself and needs to clean house, and especially needs to purge these, for lack of a better term, liberal elements
RZ:
Within
Trent:
It.
RZ:
Absolutely.
Trent:
So you feel the need to do that. How would you reply playing devil’s
RZ:
Advocate,
Trent:
Someone says, rz, why do you care about that? I mean, Catholicism is just as liberal if not more liberal. Like Pope Francis said, who am I to judge? I mean, people say these things.
RZ:
Yeah, but they’re wrong. Catholicism is objectively a lot less liberalized than the mainline Protestant denominations, and that’s because the conservative Catholics weren’t cowards and they cared about their own heritage and they didn’t run away, and I respect them for that.
Whereas
A lot of the conservative Protestants in America, this is specifically in American context because in most other countries, the mainline Protestant churches are fine. Like in Brazil, the mainline Presbyterian church there, very historic, got lots of beautiful cathedrals. Technically Presbyterians don’t have cathedrals, but they call them that for tax purposes. And it’s mainline, it’s historic. It’s got a lot of universities, and it’s very, very conservative. It’s more conservative than the Catholic church in Brazil. But in America, because of this radical individualism in American culture, the conservative Protestants chose to split off from the mainline denominations, and that’s what let the mainline denominations drift. So liberal.
Trent:
Do you think part of that’s also due to being a religious minority? For example, in America it was primarily founded on Protestant ideals? Well, depending on how you define the Puritans, but
RZ:
Puritans are Protestant.
Trent:
Yeah. So Akins may not have thought that way about them, but so we’ll get to all of that Protestant foundation here. Whereas in South America, it’s more of a heavy Catholic influence. So the Protestants that are going to thrive, there are going to be maybe more traditional and conservative similar. I think, for example, you think about the decline of Protestantism in America. I think about the decline of Catholicism in Europe, for example, especially where it was just so big, but it turns into something where you rest on your laurels kind of.
RZ:
Right? I mean, to some extent that’s true. But there even are historically Protestant nations like Australia, where the mainline Protestant churches are mostly still conservative. The Presbyterian Church of Australia is, they actually had women’s ordination and they got rid of it. There is this one liberal Protestant denomination in Australia called the Uniting Church, but it’s sort of like the liberal minorities of all the other denominations who just sort of left and made their own thing.
So
Protestantism in America is completely cooked if we don’t all return to the mainline churches. That’s what I want to really communicate. So recently I did come back to Protestant Apologetics, and that’s why I responded to your video.
Trent:
Yeah, sure.
RZ:
But I’m specifically a mainline Protestant apologist. What I’m defending is not this category of Protestantism that includes non-denominational churches or Jehovah’s Witness or Calvary Chapel, or even the PCA. I’m defending mainline protest,
Trent:
The Presbyterian Church of America.
RZ:
Yeah. That’s thematic conservative group that left in the 1970s because they didn’t like that the Presbyterian church supported civil rights. And I know that that’s true because they’ve publicly repented of that, but that’s still why they exist.
Trent:
Right. Try to, I want to break the terms down here. I think I look at Protestantism, I have a different categorical framework. Your seems to be more institutional based. Just to understand who is a Protestant, it seems like your definition is more of a historical institutional continuity versus doctrine or methods.
RZ:
I mean, basically, yeah.
Trent:
Oh, good.
RZ:
If I am some random guy in my basement and I decide that I agree with transubstantiation and purgatory, does that make me a Catholic? No, I have to actually join the Catholic church. So I think you’re comparing apples and oranges. If you compare the institution of Catholicism to the vague idea of Protestantism based on the five solos, which didn’t exist until the 20th
Century,
I define Protestantism the same way you would define Catholicism or Orthodoxy. It’s an institution. A Protestant is someone who’s part of a Protestant church, and a Protestant church is a church with roots in the Reformation.
Trent:
What if somebody said, well, I’m an evangelical, and their roots are the Anabaptists who were present at the Reformation, so why can’t I be considered a Protestant?
RZ:
So if you consider the Radical Reformation part of the Reformation, maybe there is some ambiguity in these terms, but there was a very clear distinction between the Magisterial Reformation, which was institutional, and the radical reformation, which was anti-institutional. And the magisterial reformers, Luther and Calvin and Swingley and Knox, they saw themselves as having much more unity with the Catholics than with the radical reformation. So if you want to just use the Protestant label because you have some Anabaptist heritage, that’s fine, but then you can’t claim Luther and Calvin as your boys the way a lot of these guys want to do.
Trent:
Right. I think that when I’m trying to put everyone in here, what are the consequences of your view? So I guess there are Protestants. Would it be easier if we just said there’s Catholic Orthodox Protestants and Evangelicals?
RZ:
Yes.
Trent:
Okay.
RZ:
That’s what I basically say.
Trent:
Okay. So for example, would you say not to, well, I think it’s fair to name names here, to see where people fall. Would you consider Gavin Orland a Protestant or an evangelical?
RZ:
So he’s an interesting case because he actually was part of one of the seven mainline Protestant denominations, the American Baptist Church, USA, and now he’s part of a non-denominational church, and I have publicly voiced my disagreement with him. I have the utmost respect for Gavin Orland. He’s great. I do disagree with him on the validity of evangelicalism though. So I think he definitely has a lot of Protestant roots.
Trent:
Well, his view of the Eucharist seems almost close to the Presbyterian spiritual presence view.
RZ:
It is. And there are some Baptists with roots in the Reformation. It’s just a very small group of them. The American Baptist churches, USA, are descended from the 1689 particular Baptists. They founded Brown University, they founded Rhode Island. They have a lot of Protestant heritage. The vast majority of Baptists you encounter today have no historical connection to that and are just non-denominational with a Baptist label.
Trent:
Right. Then moving on though. So I guess, would you say John MacArthur and William Lane Craig, not only are evangelicals, I feel like you’d probably want to label them heretics.
RZ:
Yes. They are not Protestants and they’re heretics. They’re not even, you don’t have to be a heretic to be an evangelical because John Piper, for example, is an evangelical, but he confesses that Mary is the theotokos, unlike John MacArthur, who said, Mary did not give birth to God. God was never born
Trent:
Naked. Him or Jesus’s blood is in God’s blood.
RZ:
Yeah. He’s way more historian than notorious. Nestorius said, it’s more accurate to call Mary the mother of Christ than mother of God, not Mary is not mother of God.
Trent:
Okay. So you’re trying to defend Protestantism and you think, okay, if we’re going to make apples to apples comparison, you’re going to pair the institutional Catholic church with its doctrines and methods. The comparison must be then to an institutional Protestant framework, which might include then confessional Lutherans, Presbyterians Anglicans, I guess. But we have to cut off, for example, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America or the, I mean, well, they have therefore same-sex marriage and female pastors, or you, I
RZ:
Don’t think we have to cut them off because just because the German Catholic bishops are teaching a lot of heterodox, that doesn’t mean we say they’re not Catholic. We say they’re Catholics in rebellion against Catholic teaching.
Trent:
Well, they’re not doing same sex weddings.
RZ:
That’s true. But I would still, there are Arian bishops in the Catholic church in the four, three hundreds, and they’re still technically Catholic bishops and stuff. They’re just Catholic bishops that are heretical.
Trent:
I
RZ:
Guess they’re part of the institution.
Trent:
So you’d have a preference then for let’s say a mainline church that has these liberal views and female pastors versus let’s just say a really conservative evangelical church that’s straight down the line on abortion, same-sex marriage, male pastors only. It seems like you have a preference for the more liberal mainline one. Am I hearing this right?
RZ:
Yes. And that’s kind of why I am doing the Reconquista, because all the mainline denominations are liberalized to the same extent that the ELCA, the Evangelical Lutheran churches,
Trent:
You just think they can be fixed.
RZ:
Yes. Because Athanasius didn’t split off voluntarily and start Athena’s free Bible church in the desert when the majority of the church was hijacked by heretics in the three hundreds. Both Catholics and Protestants agree it’s possible for the majority of the church at a particular time, at least the institution of the church to be hijacked by this or that heresy.
But
That does not in and of itself warrant scheming. And by the way, the reformers and the Presbyterian Scholastics agree with this. Robert Bailey is one of the four main Scottish Presbyterian authors of the Westminster Confession. So he’s a big deal, and he says that even if your church gets taken over by heretics, that is not a valid reason to schism. He said in one Corinthians, they were blaspheming the Eucharist, and in Galatians they were preaching a false gospel. And his exact words are yet from none of these churches. Did any of the apostles ever separate nor gave they the least warrant to any of their disciples to make a separation from many of them? Samuel Rutherford has a very detailed system for when it’s okay to separate versus when it’s not. And basically it’s if you’re excommunicated, then it’s an existential decision. You have to ask, was that excommunication valid? And in 99 out of a hundred cases it is, but the Protestant belief is that the excommunication of the reformers was not valid.
And
The reason I’m not Catholic, because everyone’s like, oh, if you want to retake the mainline churches, why not retake the Catholic church and make it Protestant? Because I respect the Catholic church. I respect that they have ized Protestant views. I’m not going to try and sneak into the Catholic church and lie about what I believe and try to subvert it. If somehow the Catholic church was able to tolerate Protestant views, I know most of the mainline Protestant churches would be happy to go into full communion with the Catholic church. But I’m sure that you don’t support that happening. I don’t think you want the Catholic Church to just take back what they said about Protestant theology.
Trent:
Well, I think that we can make strides to come together like the joint declaration on justification between Catholics and Lutherans back in the nineties.
RZ:
But
Trent:
I do think for me to define Protestantism, I look at it in a little bit of a different way. I consider it more like, what is your authority? So I would look at, for example, so Catholics have scripture tradition. What is your infallible authority scripture tradition? And the magisterium Orthodox would have infallible scripture and tradition for Protestants. I’m going to bracket it into two. I would say that conservative Protestants would say that Scripture is the only infallible rule of faith for faith in life. And then liberal protestants would say they actually don’t have any infallible rule. They don’t consider scripture infallible. They might consider it authoritative. And then below that would just be like the non-Christians who say, like Muslims, who say, yeah, there’s some things that are true in the New Testament as long as they cohere with the Quran. But you see where I’m doing, where I’m just going up in the authority chain. So with Protestants, there’s the conservative ones who believe in the infallibility of scripture and then the liberal ones who don’t or give lip service to it. I think that’s the big issue there.
RZ:
Right. Are you defining authority as just infallible authorities?
Trent:
I do think that’s a big thing. Yeah. I think that that’s one of the big barriers between Catholics and Protestants is understanding that the magisterium, does it have infallible authority when it defines when the Council of Trent defines certain theological positions on justification as being heretical? Do you have to accept that or not? Because it’s been infallibly defined versus just something we might agree or disagree.
RZ:
So is your method of categorizing different Christian groups, just what they consider to be infallible?
Trent:
That’s not the only method. I think there’s other issues related to church polity. How do they structure their leadership, for example? But I think when I’m looking at what is the big difference between Protestants, Orthodox and Catholic, because you’re saying that Protestants also believe in an institutional church. Catholics have an institutional church. Well, the difference there is which authorities do we consider to be the highest authorities or which things are infallible and can’t be? When you’re talking about evangelicals now, how would you respond to this? Somebody says, look, it’s really good. The Protestant reformers came along because the Catholic church lost its way, and they’re saying, we need to do this theology instead to remedy the ills of the medieval church wherever it may be. But then what if someone says, well, in 300 years later, in the 18 hundreds, we see where the Protestant reformers lost their way and we’re reforming that. So why can’t they follow the same principle, I guess?
RZ:
I mean, they could, but that’s kind of a slippery slope fallacy, because if you say that even if the Protestant reformers disagreed with the evangelicals, their ideas inevitably led to that. The East Orthodox could say, even though the Catholic church doesn’t agree with Protestants, their ideas inevitably led to that. Then the Oriental Orthodox could say, even though the Eastern Orthodox don’t agree with Western ideas, their theology inevitably led to that. The Oriental Orthodox
Trent:
Person. No, I’m not just critiquing them. I’m not saying that the method, I’m not critiquing the method. I’m more trying to figure out what is your reply to them? Because it seems like you would like to stop this doctrinal or institutional shift away. Like say, Hey, let’s stay at the Protestant mainlines and fix it, not go away to something else. When these people are saying, what’s wrong with what we’re doing, we’re just applying the same kind of principle, whereas you want to put the brakes right here and with the mainline churches.
RZ:
Yeah. If you’re wondering, how would I respond to evangelicals, I would use kingdom theology that I’m thinking Evangelicalism is mostly gnostic, not literally, but gnostic in terms of their ideas of what the church is. They believe in mostly just an invisible church. They don’t think the church needs to have a visible, tangible, transformative impact on the world today, and that’s largely influenced by dispensationalism and rapture theology. So I would just argue against them with theology and scripture and saying that Jesus’ main message was not how to go to heaven, but the kingdom of heaven here on
Earth.
I think N Nt Wright, for example, does a great job at that, and he’s my favorite living theologian, and he’s a mainline Protestant, and whenever somebody asks me about kingdom theology or eschatology... Read more on Catholic.com