In this episode Trent sits down with a previous debate opponent who is now full received into the Catholic church.

Transcription:

Trent:

When I was a Baptist seminarian looking at these different texts, the things I started seeing didn’t look, sound or appear in any way to the Baptist church I belong to.

Stephen:

And so that moved you though from being a Baptist to being an Anglican.

Trent:

Yeah, I think if every Anglican is honest, they have to wrestle with the subject of Rome and the papacy because it’s in your history.

Stephen:

Welcome to the Council of Trent. My guest today is Stephen Boyce. He’s the host of the Facts YouTube channel. Fax is a theological historical podcast, uncovers the foundations of the Christian faith through scripture, early church history and patristic writings. Steven and I had previously clashed over church history and patristics when we debated the doctrine and justification by faith alone, specifically in the early church several years ago. And Steven has undergone his own faith journey from Baptist to Anglican to Catholic now. So it’s a really interesting journey and we’ve crossed paths before and he’s assisted with the channel. We had a great episode teaming up, Catholic Anglican team up on the sacraments, responding to Protestants who deny their seven sacraments. So yeah, I just wanted to have you on today to share a bit about your journey. So Steven, welcome to the Council of Trent.

Trent:

Yeah, so good to be back. Thanks for having me and letting me share a little bit of the story that the Lord has worked us through.

Stephen:

Oh, I’m super excited about that. So let’s jump right into that. In March of 2021, you were on James White’s dividing line and you’re talking about Solafide and First Clement. And at that time, you were a Baptist. So can you tell us a little bit more about your theology, your worldview, where you were at at that point?

Trent:

So that was a major transition in my life because I was just finishing up my PhD work. I had just released my dissertation, which covered a lot of first clement from Codex H. And so James White and I had already become friends. We had done some discussions on the Kama Yohanium and different passages that are textural variations, mostly because of King James onlyism, because as a Baptist, I grew up in the fundamentalist independent King James only group. And so I changed out of that group pretty early on in my college days. And so we crossed paths just on that subject. So we had done previous discussions together and even two on two dialogues. And so once I finished First Clement, particularly the textual analysis from Codex H, along with some of these other books, he’s like, “Well, let’s specifically talk about First Clement, come on my channel.” So we did.

And I was already struggling with things. I didn’t necessarily share those because when I was a Baptist seminarian looking at these different texts, especially the Ignatius letters, although those were in the longer Rescension and the full copy of the Didique, the only complete copy we have in Greek in that manuscript, the things I started seeing didn’t look, sound or appear in any way to the Baptist church I belonged to. I had pastored two Baptist churches. I started as a senior pastor at 21 years old as a youth pastor from 20 to 21, became a senior patch from 21 all the way to 26. And so I’d pastored two churches, independent and Southern Baptist. And so I had already taken steps kind of away from those ideas even as I was studying the early church, but studying the second and third century church, Father, especially the apostolic fathers, I was wrestling daily with this is not the church I belonged to.

What I’m reading doesn’t reflect the church. So he had me on and he wanted to talk about sole fide and some of the different variants in there. And at that point, I was still strongly Protestant in my ideas. I was still strongly Protestant in my concepts, but I did struggle with the idea of Bishoprick, things like Ignatius saying, “Don’t let anything be done without the Bishop.” Things that dealt with real presence in the Eucharist and the defense of it and the language that was used by Ignatius and the Didique. So these things really tore me up and daily haunted me in a good way that I had to constantly go back and say, “Do I reflect this?

Stephen:

” Right. And so that moved you though from being a Baptist to being an Anglican, because when we debated in 2024, it was a two-on-two debate, myself and Jimmy Aiken and your debate partner I think was more of a Baptist.

Trent:

Correct.

Stephen:

But by that point, you were staunchly Anglican and even said in the debate because we were debating the question, “What must I do to be saved?” And the question of submitting to the Bishop of Rome came up, to which I asked you, I mean, do you need to submit to a bishop define common ground? Do you need to be submission to a bishop? And you said, “Well, yes.” And you admitted a lot of Protestants won’t agree with me, but that is really, really important. See,

Trent:

I was in a weird stage in that debate because there was parts of me where I was worried that we would end up agreeing so much and we did. We agreed on a lot. And to me, some of the language we were debating was semantics. And I had become an Anglican at that point and a lot of that was due to Jonathan Sheffield. He and I were doing debates together. He was an Anglican in Texas. And so I fell in love with the English patrimony reading the-

Stephen:

Just a sidebar for our viewers, Jonathan and I have also done a debate. People can check that out on our channel. We had a debate about the Deutertero Canonical books of scripture, but he’s a super nice guy.

Trent:

Super easy to deal with. I mean, he and Bart Erman debated on my channel a couple of months ago, and they’re going to be doing it again in March. And he and I still, I mean, to this day, we’re friends. We see things very similar at times, but then we differ on some major points, but he’s a good guy. Easy to disagree with and he’s very charitable in his approach, but he was a big influence on introducing the English patrimony. And I fell in love with the venerable bead and the history of bringing Augustine of Canterbury from Pope Gregory the Great and all the things that had transpired in England at that time, I fell in love with it. And then I read Anssom and I was like, “Wow, this is powerful.” The way that the church had formed and created its unity and worked through major war plagues, problems, and at the end of the day, exalted Christ and sent some of the greatest mission work around the world from there.

I fell in love with that. And so we started, my wife and I were secretly going to like an Anglican mass and just seeing what would happen. And my wife said something. Claire said, “If we’re not going to go at least sit through a mass, we’ll never know. We’ll always be talking about it, but we’ll never be doing anything.” I said, “Why? All right, we’re going to go to a mass.” And so we went to an Anglican mass, our life was absolutely changed because we went back to our Protestant church and we continued to go there and it haunted us because every single service, there was not the taking of the body and blood of Christ. Whereas in the Anglican world, there is. And so it haunted us so much that we left a very healthy church that was a massive church that we were a part of, that I was teaching in.

I had started a class of 10 people that grew to over a hundred people and we were seeing a lot of good things and we literally sat down with our mentors and pastors and said, “We’ve got to go. ” And we left on good terms. We didn’t leave on bad terms and they still to this day have a relationship with us, but we left. We told them we had to leave. Then we got into the Anglican world and that was a little bit more complex, but that was the transition is there was a lot of influence studying the early church, seeing what it meant to have the English patrimony, looking at the idea of liturgy. So we fell in love with all of those concepts, which the Anglican church provided. And then we realized we’re actually more high Anglican, so we like these smells and bells and all those things.

And so we became pretty integrated in the Anglo-Catholic world after about a year of being in Anglicanism.

Stephen:

I’m very surprised though that in studying the history of Christianity in England, you did not become Eastern Orthodox because the Eastern Orthodox online I’ve engaged with have sworn up and down. It was an Orthodox country prior to King Henry III or whatever they have you. So it is always funny how people look at history for sure.

Trent:

The problem with that is that was true of the Celtics and some of those areas in the North. But in the Southern part, especially in the Anglo-Saxon conquerings and the wars that went on, I mean, the peace came through Canterbury by the Pope. And honestly, the only thing that kept me connected to the Western right over, if you would, the Eastern, was Pope Gregory the Great. I fell in love with Pope Gregory the Great. I mean, I sympathize with him on so many things. He was a true leader who cared about people, who cared about unity in the right way, but also was strong in his convictions of doctrine. So the more I read Pope Gregory the Great, the more I fell in love with the Western side of that. And yes, there are Eastern influences even in Anglicanism and there’s liberties and Anglicanism that lean toward it, but our calendar is not based on the Eastern right.

It is based on the Western. And so they could say that, but at the end of the day, the councils that came together after 601 were forming Western churches that were based on communion with.

Stephen:

So I guess this is going to lead to the big question, and then maybe also you can tie into this. I know that there are some people, so you’ve been on James White’s channel before and whenever he hears about somebody becoming Anglican, his bat signal goes … It’s like Def Con, Def Con two, and he gets freaked out about it because he sees a pipeline, like an Anglican to Catholic, Baptist Anglican to Catholic pipeline that really worries him. And there was something along there also that spoke to you. I’m sure the papacy will be a part of it, but it’s interesting you mentioned Pope Gregory the Great was for our listeners who may not be as familiar, he was a Pope at the end of the sixth century, so in the late 500s. And that is really marking a big transition period from when the Catholic church exists in tandem with the Roman Empire to now the Roman Empire has fallen for over a hundred years.

I mean, there’s no exact date, but it’s like for over a hundred years, now Christendom is the only thing that is holding the Western world together and papal authority is very important for that, especially in Western Europe holding all of that together. So yeah, so let’s tie it all together how you want, but now something turns you from Anglicanism towards looking at Catholicism.

Trent:

Yeah. I think if every Anglican is honest, they have to wrestle with the subject of Rome and the papacy because it’s in your history. And when you start studying the English reformation and you start asking the questions and you start looking at what happened with Kramner, or you just take the 1549 prayer book and you compare it to the later prayer books and the changing of certain language, the removal of what became known as more Romish. They love that word in a lot of the early English reformation, the Romish doctrines or Romish practices, you start asking yourself like, “Well, what created this distaste?” Most of it was politically driven more than it was theologically. And this is a huge problem in Anglicanism, and that’s what we didn’t know when we came into the Anglican world. And one of the questions that my wife and I continued to ask ourselves is, “What is an Anglican?” Because if you go to the Anglican communion, they start talking about, “Well, the Sea of Canterbury is no longer in communion with these other seas because of X, Y, Z.” And we all know what happened to the Church of England.

Stephen:

Well, it’s because of XX. The Sea of Canterbury, it’s now held by a woman as one of the issues.

Trent:

That’s the major one that’s recently come up. But even before that, especially Gafkan and these other groups already said, “We’re not following you anymore You’ve left Orthodoxy.” And so then it’s like, well, see, two thirds of the Anglican communion are conservative and the rest are not. And that would mostly be the non-conservatives would be the Episcopals here in the United States or the Church of England and some places in Australia and New Zealand. But when you look at it from that perspective, just take the conservative branch, they’re not in communion with each other. So when we started moving in our journey, we started talking to the archbishop of say the APA, which is Bishop Chandler Jones, a wonderful man. Most of his family is Roman Catholic, either priests or deacons and things like that, very, very priestly family, but he remained in the Anglo-Catholic world.

And when we started getting integrated in the Anglo-Catholic world, it’s like, well, we accept seven sacraments and you and I did a whole entire discussion on that. And then we also accept icons and veneration because you have the seven ecumenical councils. And they would go so far as to say that 39 articles have lesser authority than what is decided in the seven economical councils. So the 39 articles are not even binding to that group. And then it dawned on me, and this was crazy, Trent, because one of the things that happened is when we were coming over from the ACNA, which is very Protestant, more low church, there are some higher church within the ACNA, but that’s not the-

Stephen:

The Anglican Church of North America.

Trent:

North America, correct.

Stephen:

Yes.

Trent:

And the Kern Archbishop who was just recently resigned, we had lunch with him. We spent a whole day in Charleston with him before he became the Archbishop a couple months before. And I was sitting there listening to him talk about the sacraments and the 39 articles, and he was more of a Pentecostal Anglican faith healing ideas. And then you sit down with Bishop Chandler Jones, and it is very, very high church, very much involved in the sacrament life. And then I asked the question when we were going to come over to Anglo-Catholicism, what does it look like? He said, “Well, you got to understand, we don’t recognize the ordinations and we don’t recognize the confirmations of the Anglican Church of North America.” I was like, “So if a priest converts from the ACNA into the APA, they have to be conditionally reordained.” He said, “That’s correct.” And so we recognize these instantly that these conservative Anglicans that sound conservative in their communion are actually not in communion with each other.

And once we became a part of the APA, we could no longer take communion with ACNA because they, and the APA are under old Catholic and Polish national Catholic orders rejecting the very thing that, say, for example, Pope Leo the 13th condemned in the late 19th century, and that is that the orders of Anglicans are utterly null and void, which that was specifically talking about Edwardian Anglicans, which a lot of the Anglo Catholics are not under Eduardian orders. They’re under Old Catholic and Polish national. And so they reject the orders of many of the other Anglicans around them.

Stephen:

So that’s so interesting because there are many Anglicans who will be put off saying, “As a Catholic, why wouldn’t you recognize that we have holy orders also or feel this is an affront from Catholicism? And yet there are many other Anglicans who wouldn’t recognize each other by the same virtue.”

Trent:

Yes. And that was the problem for us. It’s like, wait, we talk about this Anglican communion and we don’t even see each other’s orders as valid and nobody wants to talk about that, but I did. I wanted to talk about it. And one of the things that I had Steven Alspech from the Catholic Brothers on my channel and there was a time where the ACNA was sending delegates to Rome to talk about communion with Rome and we were discussing, well, what would that look like? It was a big deal at that time. And Steven said something to me in that show. He said, “You need to define in your own mind what an Orthodox Anglican is, and then you need the groups to define what they mean by we’re Orthodox.” Not in the sense of Eastern Orthodox, but just in the sense that-

Stephen:

Lowercase O, “Faithful to the deposit of faith.”

Trent:

And I instantly sat there. It haunted me. In fact, one of the board of directors of our channel, our podcast, because we’re on YouTube and we’re on eight different podcast channels as well. We started as a podcast, moved to YouTube, but I have a board of directors and one of them was an Anglican priest and it haunted him. We actually both converted, we both converted together. He was just confirmed a month ago and he converted as well from an Anglican priest. And that question haunted conversations for the next six months for us. What is an Anglican? And so I went back to where most Anglicans go. So there’s a big debate about where does Anglicanism begin? This is a huge debate. Do they begin with King Henry the eighth, or do they go back to the patrimony, Augustine? And if most Anglicans want to start earlier than the English Reformation, they want to go to 601.

The problem is if you go to 601, you’re speaking of a different church, a different authority, a different structure. And since the Anglican patrimony is what brought me over anyway, I started to conclude, well, maybe a true Anglican was always meant to be somebody who holds to the English patrimony in English right, but has full communion with the Pope, the way it was instituted to begin with. And so I started searching that out more and saying, “What was Anselm? What were these great kings in the past that we talk about and embellish? What were they? ” They were Catholics. They were English Catholics that loved their English patrimony. They loved the traditions that were distinct in some ways in their liturgy from that which was in the Roman right. But at the end of the day, these things were beautiful things that I had already fallen in love with, but I had not put categories to.

And so I started moving closer and closer to the patrimony and saying, “I believe what a true Anglican is, was an Englishman who is in full communion with the Pope.” And so that was a big deal for a lot of us that were studying this together. So we had a catechism class at our house. My wife and I hosted every other Sunday and the Anglican priest, Pat May, who’s also a co-host of mine, he and I would lead this study with a bunch of Anglicans and we studied the Catholic catechism together and we asked the hard questions. And almost all of us that were in that room have now converted to full communion with Rome.

Stephen:

To be deep in English history is to cease to be an English Protestant, to modify Newman’s quote there. Yeah. I think what you’re pointing out is a serious problem. And we’re going to be having more, I think more and more Anglicans and other high church Protestants from the mainline denominations looking into Catholicism because in spite of efforts from people like Redeem Zoomer and others to reconquista and all these other things, we’re seeing just this serious hemorrhaging. The question you ask, well, what is an Anglican? I was just thinking when you were talking, it’s like Anglicanism is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get. The diversity in theological belief, even you look at the most liberal elements within the Catholic church, it does not compare at all to the most liberal elements of Anglicanism. And my favorite example of that is a gentleman named Michael Corin.

So Michael Corin was a, I think he was a Canadian broadcaster. He wrote a book called Why Catholics are right, but then he changed his mind on homosexual conduct and abortion. And because of that, he’s not a dissenting Catholic anymore. He’s now an Anglican priest, but he’s in a very liberal denomination where he can be pro- homosexual unions, pro- abortion. And I think it’s good to bring up like when someone tries to say, “Oh, that’s all what Anglicanism is. ” No, it’s not, but the majority isn’t, but it’s a very loud plurality. It’s not a tiny sliver either.

Trent:

No, there’s an identity crisis going on in Anglicanism right now. I think everybody, if they’re being honest, they’re asking this question. And I think if they’re being honest, and I know this because I’m friends with so many priests. And by the way, we left on good terms when we were … Most people don’t know this, so I’m just revealing this here, we had been attending a Catholic mass for over a year while also going back and forth with our home parish and the Anglo Catholic mass. Our priests knew what we were doing, our bishop knew what we were doing, we were transparent, we were upfront, and they actually welcomed the exploring and said, “You have to do it’s best for your family and your conscience and we’ll support you either way.” And I didn’t want to burn bridges with the Anglicans because I have so many friends and charitable moments with Anglican priests and parishioners.

I was able to speak at multiple churches in the Anglican world. They saw me as an Anglican apologist and because of that, I have a sensitivity to Anglicanism. So I want to continue dialogue with Anglicans and ask these same questions like, “I know you’re battling this and every single Anglican that’s going through an identity crisis right now, so whether it’s scandals going on in the ACNA or there’s issues with G3 that’s now going to be G2 and they’re not even seeing eye to eye on things there, they’re all asking the question with the word Rome in it. Every one of them is. Whether they want to admit it or not, every discussion behind closed doors involves the Pope and Roman invention. And so this has to be something that Anglicans battle out and I’m willing to continue these friendships and share my 10 cents. They can throw it away.

They can accept it and continue dialogue, but I’m not looking to burn bridges with the Anglicans because they are so close to a lot of things that Catholicism loves very, very close on many of these subjects. And so there’s enough there to be compatible with. It just comes down to a couple of questions that some people have to work through, whether or not they’re going to go into full community or not. And that’s what happened to me and it didn’t happen overnight. It happened over a two-year span.

Stephen:

Well, tell us a little bit about the Ordinariate, which many people refer to as the Anglican Ordinariate, but that’s not the official name. Tell us a little bit more about it and its role in helping you be in full communion with the Catholic Church.

Trent:

Yeah, that’s a great question. And I’ve been surprised at how many Roman Catholics are unfamiliar with the Ordinariate. The official name is the Personal Ordinariate. Bishop Lopez, Steven Lopes would not like the term … He gets squamish when you say Anglican Ordinariate, but that’s the name that’s been given to it because in ... Read more on Catholic.com