Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

The Council of Trent would be nothing without our patrons. So today on Free for All Friday, I’m dedicating it to them. Welcome to the show. Mondays and Wednesdays we talk apologetics and theology. Friday we talk about whatever I like, which often is not necessarily related to apologetics or theology. But today it is.

Today’s episode is dedicated to our patrons who make the podcast possible. I recently answered many of their questions on an episode of Catholic Answers Live. Cy Kellett was a wonderful moderator to walk us through all the questions that they had. Once again, I’m really grateful for their support. And if you want to help the podcast to grow and thrive and remain advertising free, then please consider supporting us at trenthornpodcast.com.

Now onto the “Ask Me Anything” questions from the patrons of the Council of Trent podcast. All these questions come from his patron.

This first one comes from a patron who identifies him or herself only by the letters NP, what is the first thing you look for when you hear an argument for the opposing side?

Well, the first thing that I look for is I try to understand what is the conclusion, and then I try to work my way backwards. So when you think about an argument, an argument is just a series of premises that are used to support a conclusion. So if I am in Dallas, then I am in Texas, I am in Dallas, therefore I am in Texas. That’s a simple if then argument. Modus ponens is the technical term for it. Or all men are mortal. Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal.

Now most people, when they give an argument, they don’t lay out the premises in a very distinct order like that. Usually people will speak informally and they’ll present a bunch of words. And so what you try to do when you hear someone, especially in conversation, and if they’re informal about it, you try to identify the key pieces here. What is the conclusion? What is the thing that they’re trying to prove? And then what are the reasons they’re using to prove that conclusion?

So I like to make an analogy that an argument is sort of like a table. So the tabletop would be the conclusion, and the question is what’s holding it up? What are the legs? So to find the conclusion and argument, usually people will say, “therefore,” “it follows,” “so it must be,” okay. So that’s what you’re trying to prove? Okay, then I’ll try to look for the premises. All right, so what is your points that lead to that conclusion? Then once I have that together, I’ll think, okay, what are the reasons given to think the premises are true and that the legs are actually strong, that they’re not just hollowed out legs that can’t do any of the work, or maybe there aren’t any premises. Maybe the conclusion has just been restated. It’s just a kind of an assertion. The tabletops floating in midair. So when I hear an argument, I’ve kind of trained myself and I try to think it through in that way.

NP, thank you very, very much for the question and for supporting Trent Horn’s podcast, which you can find trenthornpodcast.com. By the way, it’s called the Council of Trent, and you can find it over there trenthornpodcast.com, or wherever you get your podcasts. And I don’t really know how that works. They just tell me to say that wherever you get your podcasts, the-

Well, I think you can pick up… You’re right. Podcasts oftentimes I find that they’re on sale at the local grocery store. They keep them behind the counter.

So, you pick one up, if there’s a good one on sale?

You can get a pack of 20 of them for a discount.

All right? All right, I’ll look for those deals. Dylan is also a patron of Trent’s work, and Dylan asks this, what’s the best way to explain why we need the Mary in dogmas and why Mary plays an important role for Catholics?

Yeah, I think what’s always important when we talk about the Blessed Virgin Mary is that Mary always points us back to her son, Jesus Christ. It’s been said before that if you have a bad Maryology, you’ll have a bad Christology. So if you don’t understand Mary’s role in the incarnation and the divine plan of salvation, you’re going to radically misunderstand who Christ is.

And so when we look at the four Marian dogmas, even Protestants, every Protestant should agree with the first dogma. If they don’t, they’re actually in heresy. But most sophisticated Protestant apologists will agree, and that would be that Mary is the mother of God. So why is that important? Well, if you deny Mary’s the mother of God, Theotokos the God bearer, oh, you’re going to be denying that Jesus is God. And if you were an Orthodox Christian, you don’t want to do that. You don’t want to deny that Jesus is God.

Because there are people heretics throughout history who said, “Yeah, Jesus is God. He wasn’t always God. He became God at his baptism.” For example, there were early heretics that held that view. So to affirm, no, no, no, Jesus, the human Jesus is identical to the person God the Son, right? It’s not like we can split them. That’s the best story in heresy. So if you say that God the Son, and the human Jesus are separate beings, well that’s wrong, okay? You have one divine person who has a fully human nature and a fully divine nature. So that’s important to be able to focus on to say, look, throughout Jesus’s entire human life, he’s fully God. So that means Mary is the mother of God from the moment Jesus was conceived in her womb. So very important.

What about the other dogmas though? So why does the perpetual virginity of Mary matter? Well, why does the fact that Jesus is born of a virgin matter for Protestants? So when people say, why does the perpetual virginity of Mary matter, their question is really why does it matter that Christ had no younger siblings? Well, for the same reason, it matters that Christ had no older siblings that were born of Mary. It’s possible Joseph was a widower who remarried, and so he had children with a previous wife, but Jesus had no older siblings that were born of Mary. Why does this matter? Well, it’s a testament to the fact that Jesus has no earthly father. So the fact that Jesus, because God could have become man, he could have been born of Mary and Mary could have already had children. God could have chosen to do that.

But the fact that things in salvation history might’ve been a little bit different, the prophecy in Isaiah 7:14, but ultimately God could have chosen something different. But the fact that Christ is born of a virgin, the point is that Christ has no earthly father. So the fact that Mary is a perpetual virgin is a testimony of the fact of the importance of who Jesus is primarily, and the fact that his mother, Mary fully gave herself over to God and his divine plan.

And then finally Mary’s immaculate conception and bodily assumption, those dogmas, they’re very fitting and point back to Christ because they show that Mary as the first disciple, she receives the fruits of salvation as kind of an example for all of us. So Mary is really the first person to receive Christian baptism in the sense that Mary was protected from all original sin. She received the grace of Christ from the cross retroactively in her own conception. So she receives this kind of baptismal gift, is kind of the first one to ever do that. So she’s that first model of that and her assumption into heaven is the foretaste of what all Christian disciples will receive by being resurrected or having our bodies resurrected and being able to have that embodied eternal life with Christ.

So I think that when you look at it in that way, it’s very, very helpful. I would definitely recommend my colleague Tim Staples book, Behold Your Mother, if you’re like a fuller explanation of all the dogmas and how they all point us back to Christ.

I don’t know how this one got in here. It’s from Eric, and it doesn’t seem like it’s a Trent Horn patron. It seems like it’s a Jimmy Aiken patron, but maybe Eric supports both. Here’s what he wants to know. What is the Catholic stance on ghost apparitions? Can you be a faithful Catholic and believe in ghosts?

Well, not to offend anyone, but I would go so far as to say you cannot be a faithful Catholic unless you believe in ghosts. Now, I need to be very clear what I mean by that we have to define the term ghosts, because a lot of times we think of ghosts as just being made up creatures in horror films, or part of a folk mythology that might be antithetical to the Catholic faith. But just replace the word ghost in the question that Eric submitted with the word spirit. Because then what happens to his question, what is the Catholic stance on spirit apparitions? Can you be a faithful Catholic and believe in spirits? Well, you must believe in spirits. If you mean souls, the word soul and spirit are often interchangeable. So when we talk about when we die, our soul, or our spirit, if you will, goes either to who has a particular judgment. And so the soul either goes to hell, it goes to purgatory, or it goes immediately to heaven.

So we certainly believe that human spirits exist apart from their bodies, and it is also possible that those spirits can manifest themselves and appear to human beings. So that’s important because the word ghost, and Jimmy has made this point abundantly because his Mysterious World, I mean one of the first things he’s talks about on it is ghost the spirit world. He’s done a lot of great work on that. So go check out Jimmy’s Mysterious World podcast. But the word ghost comes from the German word geist, which means spirit. So we talk about they have words like the German word, poltergeist. I got to throw that more heavy German in when you pronounce-

Give it a full Arnold.

Yeah, what?

Give it a full Arnold. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Today. That’d more of an Austrian accent.

They speak German there.

I’m am a poltergeist, just taking my sauerkraut, get in the chopper. It’s not the Germanic word that I have to say it. Now, that’s very distinct, Arnold. There is no Germanic-

Get in the chopper. Yeah, it’s a very Arnold Schwarzenegger thing to say, get in the chopper.

I want to know what is the German equivalent of “get in the chopper,” but maybe one of our German fans can add that there. So yeah, so that’s why when we have in English translations is English is a Germanic language. A lot of English words do have Greek and Latin roots to them, but they also have a lot of Germanic roots to them. So that’s why you’ll hear some people refer to the Holy Spirit. Other people refer to the Holy Ghost and there’s different reasons people have for their preferences there, but it refers to the same thing, the Holy Spirit, you have something that is immaterial. So when we talk about human spirits or human ghosts, we’re talking about the spirits or souls of the deceased.

And so it is possible for God to allow the spirits that are in heaven to be able to manifest themselves in apparitions, to be able to communicate with those on Earth. Now, we should not try to engage in two-way communication on our own, but God of his own prerogative, he can do that. It’s also possible according to St. Thomas Aquinas, that the souls in purgatory could manifest themselves through spiritual energy or something through the providence of God to make their presence known through some kind of visual stimuli or some kind of movement of tactile kinetic movement of objects or sounds to let people know that they need prayers or something is unfinished in their earthly lives. And I believe Aquinas also talked about how the souls in hell God could allow them to manifest as a way to be kind of like a afterlife, scared, straight program.

If you remember the program Scared Straight where kids get sent to prison to realize, hey, you don’t want to do this. This would be something where if God would say, “Oh, you’ll get to see, hey, if you don’t change what you’re doing, this is what’s going to happen to you.” We think about in and there are spirits of the damned, I say, why would someone in hell want to do that? Well think about the parable of Lazarus and the rich man. That the rich man didn’t help Lazarus and he goes to hell and he says, “I want to warn my brothers.” Even in that stage, he had a desire to want to warn others of what is happening, even the damned care for other people. So even if they’re opposed to God, they have even the most evil people still have a love for their own family members, for example. So God may say, you know what? All right, if you want to give them a shot, God can use evil even to achieve good ends.

Now, I will say this, in a lot of cases when people think that they have, there is a ghost that is present. It’s best to try to exhaust natural explanations first. In many cases, what we think are, there’s a lot of things that might come up that we think are ghosts that actually have natural explanations. For example, we might think that we see a mysterious figure at night, especially if we’re falling asleep or waking up because our mind might cause distortions or our visual perception of shadows at night.

There’s also things that can happen with sleep paralysis. So there’s something that throughout history and folklore has been called old hag syndrome. People wake up and they think there is a ugly old woman sitting on their chest trying to suffocate them when really that was actually ancient and medieval descriptions of what we now call sleep paralysis. Other things sounds, you might hear that’s houses shifting or settling strange patterns with air vents and ducks could cause what seemed like doors to close or other things like that.

I’m trying to think of other, oh, there’s other things that people will try to do to prove that ghosts exist like Ghost Hunters. I’m not saying that they’re always wrong, but they try to record, they’ll take electronic devices and record little cassette tapes and raise the noise floor to listen to the static white noise and they’ll claim, oh, we recorded in a silent room in your home, and you can hear a voice saying, are you there? Are you there? And it’s very distorted. Well, that could just be things like radio transmissions, cellular phone transmissions, baby monitors that catches these little frequencies, things like that. So it could have a natural explanation, it could have a supernatural issue, it could be an actual apparition of a human spirit, it could be a demonic spirit impersonating someone. That’s why whenever these things happen, it’s important to seek out a spiritual director and to always approach these things with the mind of the church.

Eric, thanks. Thanks very much for that question. Appreciate it. This one comes from David. David wants to know Trent, why is the term Christ frequently used in place of the name Jesus? Is not Christ a title or a role? For example, Messiah rather than a name? Using the term Christ seems to diminish Jesus’s full identity as fully man and fully God.

I would say that it doesn’t do that. And when you look in scripture, while the name of Jesus itself is used singularly in places of glory, like in Philippians two when Paul says that, “The name of Jesus, every knee shall bend,” you’ll see that the name Christ is used much more frequently to refer to Jesus. And so I think that’s important because in the ancient world, the name Jesus was a fairly common name. It wasn’t a super common name, but there are other Jesuses that are mentioned in the New Testament. On occasion you find other references to Jesus like a Jesus Ben Ananias in the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus. So the name was not uncommon, it wasn’t a super common name like Mary. I think maybe one in four women at the time of Christ, I think it might be one in four were named Mary. And you think about it in the New Testament, there’s Marys all over the place trying to keep track of who’s who.

So that was a very, very common name. So that’s why the title can help to elevate who the person is above just the name itself. And it’s important because the title references of course that Jesus is the anointed one. He is in Hebrew, Mashiach, the Messiah, the one who has come to redeem and save God’s people. So I think that that’s helpful and that’s something that we do all the time. When we talk about very important people, we often refer to them by their titles as a kind of placeholder for their name. We often use titles in that respect to give them more respect than to just refer to them by their name because the title is a way to say they as this human being of Christ is a divine person, not just a human being, but they as this human have this other loftier goal that they have carried out.

So for example, we often talk about Buddha, the founder of Buddhism. Buddha itself is not a name, it is a title given to Siddhartha Gautama, which means the enlightened one. Even today when we talk about heads of state, usually we refer to, we use royal titles, we use civic titles, the President, the Prime Minister, more so than their name, especially when we’re speaking well of them. So I think that makes sense that in scripture when we talk about our Lord even there, we’re using another title, Lord, Kurios, that we want to elevate them to say that while we recognize Jesus’s humanity, he was not merely a human prophet. He is the Messiah and not just a human messiah and not just a human lord. He is the Lord of lords. He is the King of kings. And so I think that’s why the title Christ is often used more than just the name Jesus or why they’re often combined to speak of the Lord Jesus Christ or to speak of Christ Jesus.

David, thank you very, very much for the question. It does seem to me that there’s a lot of Christians who think that to be the Messiah means to be God, because that’s how we think of it and they don’t get that the title Messiah, the expectation for the Messiah and the title Messiah does not mean God, it doesn’t mean Son of God.

It also doesn’t mean that there is only one messiah so to speak. It just means anointed one. When you look in the Old Testament, for example, there are many descriptions of anointed ones, kings and prophets, for example, those who God has anointed for a specific purpose. It is the Christian understanding that the fullness of the Messiah is that Yahweh himself has become incarnate and will now bring the fulfillment what all the previous priests and prophets and kings of the old covenant did, in part. Now God in the flesh will bring that to its fulfillment through his ultimate messianic purpose, the redemption of the entire world.

And Trent, this one comes from Ryan.

All right.

Can you answer why you believe reasonable people disagree? It’s hard to imagine why so many smart people debate topics like the ones you address and seemingly few of them budge. This question can easily be asked in other areas like politics and science.

Right, so why do people reasonable people disagree? I guess I would say that they don’t, all the reasonable people have the correct views and everyone else is secretly unreasonable or fake.

That doesn’t seem right.

Or working for the devil himself. No. Yeah, that is, well this actually goes back a little bit to the previous question on the perspicuity of scripture. So you go, I am like 98% confident I’m correct on this. I know the book is called the Obscurity of Scripture. I believe it’s by Casey Chalk because I had him on the show so I better not forget. But Casey’s book, he documents how the doctrine of the perspicuity of scripture, the idea that scripture is clear, actually fosters ill will between Christians because the reformers and their progeny had to explain, okay, well if scripture is clear that the man of God using the ordinary due means of inquiry can attain to understanding these truths that are essential to the faith. And yet when Protestants and other Catholics and Orthodox, we look at the Bible and because what about me? When I read the Bible, it seems very clear to me that solo scriptura is false, that there are enduring apostolic offices, there’s the sacrament of the Eucharist, your salvation can be lost. These things all seem very clear to me.

Well, how do you explain what seems like Christians men of God coming to scripture and reaching so many different conclusions or differences about infant baptism or charismatic gifts? And what Chalk points out in his book is that the early reformers had to say, well there people had diabolical intent or under sway of the devil or under the power of sin, or it’s sinful darkening. And so it leads you to having to have a very negative view of people who disagree about scripture that if you disagree, it can’t be reasonable disagreement because it can’t be scripture’s fault, it must be something bad about us. Rather than saying, “Oh, well maybe just, there are things here in scripture that are not clear.” Like II Peter 3:16 which says, sorry, Peter says, the author of II Peter says, “There are things in Paul’s letters that the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction.” So there are things in them that people who are maybe not as well-formed for example, or well-grounded can misinterpret and then that can lead to their own destruction, which would refer to essential doctrine. Because non-essential things don’t lead to your destruction.

So that makes me think about that a little bit there. Okay, so then why do reasonable people seem to disagree? Well, people have a lot of different reasons for what they believe. So to go through a few of them, sometimes I would say that we make cognitive mistakes. We make mistakes in our inferences. We have an intuition that something seems to be true and it turns out that it’s not true. And we disagree about that sort of basic intuition. We might make a mistake in our reasoning that we are just unable to see, for example. So people can make cognitive errors. Other times people may be very reasonable, but they are primarily driven by an emotional connection to something and they don’t even recognize that it’s the emotional connection that is pulling them in their belief towards this particular proposition. And so they engage in rationalization.

Michael Shermer, who is an editor, he was an editor for Skeptic Magazines, he’s an atheist, but he’s an interesting guy. He wrote a book and one the chapter, he wrote a book, I think one of the chapters in the book was Why Smart People Believe Dumb Things. And he said that sma... Read more on Catholic.com