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In this episode of Catholic Answers Live, Cy Kellett sits down with Karlo Broussard to explore one of the most honest and difficult questions many Christians face. Karlo unpacks why emotional experience isn&#8217;t the final word on truth, and how the Catholic Church offers something deeper than feeling.
Transcript:
Caller: I have this very close friend who recently found himself at home in an evangelical church. He&#8217;s very intelligent, and we&#8217;ve been having religious conversations. I&#8217;m Catholic, but when I talk Catholic doctrine with him, when I send him resources, he says that he will look because he&#8217;s curious and he wants to know. But even if he believes everything the Catholic Church teaches and some of the things his pastor is preaching are wrong, he won&#8217;t change churches because of that, because where he is right now is why he feels good.
So he says he&#8217;s tried a lot of different churches before, both Catholic and Evangelical, and this is the first one that he likes. And if someday he stops liking it, then he will look for another church. So I guess my question is, how would you normally approach someone like this in order to try to convince them there&#8217;s maybe something more important than just feeling good, namely the truth?
Yeah, yeah, okay. So that&#8217;s how, what I would like your help with.
Karlo: Yeah, so, brother, you actually stole my thunder. I was about to go exactly where you went right at the end there. That it&#8217;s not about what we like or don&#8217;t like, what makes us feel comfortable or not, or gives us emotional highs or not. The real ultimate question is, is this true?
Now, in one sense, your friend can start that inquiry with individual theological teachings and this church and this community and that community and the Catholic Church, or he can start more generally by asking, what is the true church of Jesus Christ? Did Jesus Christ establish a church? And if so, where is that church to this day? Assuming that Jesus promised his church would be with us until the end of the world?
Those are the sorts of questions, Igor, that you can invite your friend to begin entertaining and then walk with him in trying to answer those questions. And of course, we have all of the resources at catholic.com for free online. And then we have our Catholic Answers bookstore at shop.catholic.com that can assist you in walking with your friend and answering these questions.
Did Jesus establish a church? Yeah, he said, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to build my church upon this rock&#8221; in Matthew 16:18. And then you can explain to your friend that we would exegete that text and interpret that rock to be Peter in light of the immediate context and how Jesus gives Peter the keys of the kingdom of heaven, establishing him, as I was talking earlier in the broadcast, as the leader of the Apostolic College and the head and the leader of the church that Jesus is building here on this earth.
And so we see that Jesus establishes a church. He tells us elsewhere that this church will exist until the end of time. He hints at this in Matthew 28, verse 20. St. Paul talks about it in his letter to the Ephesians when he talks about the Church existing from age unto age. And so whatever is part and parcel of the church will always exist until the end of the age.
Peter&#8217;s leadership role is part and parcel of the Church. And so therefore, Peter&#8217;s leadership role will exist until the end of time. And the only way that can be is to have successors to St. Peter and whatever bishop Frick he died in, which is the Bishop of Rome.
And so, given that explanation, Igor, you can see that, hey, at least from a Catholic perspective, the reason why you ought to be Catholic is because Jesus started the Catholic Church. That&#8217;s ultimately the answer that requires justification and defense, a little bit of which I provided already with Matthew 16:18-19.
But that&#8217;s sort of the approach, Igor, that you kind of have to take with somebody like this to try to get them to see that it&#8217;s not about what you like or dislike. Okay, you might not like your family members, but that doesn&#8217;t mean they aren&#8217;t your family members. Right? You know, we can&#8217;t, like, say, &#8220;Oh, well, I&#8217;m no longer a member of the family just because I don&#8217;t like my family members.&#8221;
So it&#8217;s about what is true. And the question is, is the Catholic Church the original church of Jesus? We say yes. So the question is, is that true? And if it is true, well, then your friend ought to become Catholic, assuming that he loves Christ. If he doesn&#8217;t love Jesus, well, then we got to take a step back and start talking about whether we should love Jesus and believe in him.
But assuming that&#8217;s in place, then the ultimate question is, which church did Jesus establish and where is it at today? And if it is the Catholic Church, then out of love for Christ, he ought to be Catholic. What do you think of that, Igor? Was that helpful?
Caller: Yeah, yeah, it was helpful. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Yeah, I think he would normally. That&#8217;s a rational approach, but he would normally just. I think he would normally come back and say something like, &#8220;I&#8217;ve given myself to Christ, and I think that really he really loves me and I love him, and it doesn&#8217;t really matter what church I go to.&#8221;
And I mean, he keeps asking sometimes how that affects his salvation. I&#8217;m trying to be very careful to tread that line, of course, not to say that he&#8217;s damning himself or something like that. But, yeah, I don&#8217;t know.
Karlo: Okay. All right, well, let me share a couple of thoughts. Let me share a couple of thoughts here, Igor, and see if this will be helpful.
So, two things here. Your friend said, &#8220;I&#8217;ve given my life to Christ. He loves me, I love Him. So it doesn&#8217;t matter which church I belong to.&#8221; But wait a minute. If you love Christ, well, wouldn&#8217;t it follow that we should belong to the community that he established, to the church that he established?
And I mean, think about this. If he loves me, well, then wouldn&#8217;t Jesus want me to belong to that church? Because that&#8217;s where I&#8217;m going to experience his love the most. And so it actually is the case that it does matter which church we belong to precisely because we love Christ.
So you might want to gently challenge him on that and try to get him to see that love of Christ is the very motivation for why we should want to belong to the church that Jesus established, whatever church that might be.
Now, the second thing you brought up there at the end, and it slipped my mind. I forgot it. I thought I had it in the bag, but I forgot. Oh, yes, his salvation.
Consider this line of approach, Igor. You can share with him and say, &#8220;Hey, look, friend, yes, it&#8217;s true that it&#8217;s possible that you could be saved outside of the Catholic Church if you&#8217;re not responsible for your ignorance of the Catholic Church and stuff. That&#8217;s possible. But consider this. If the Catholic Church is the church that Jesus gave us, then it would follow from that that all of the gifts that Jesus wills for me to experience and use and have for my salvation are present there.&#8221;
In other words, we have all the apples in the basket, all of the gifts, life and truth that Jesus wills for you individually, for you to be saved and to intensify and live out that saving relationship with living life to the full with great joy. The Catholic Church has those gifts.
And so even though it&#8217;s possible for you to be saved outside the Catholic Church, under certain conditions, you still want to be Catholic to enjoy and experience all of the gifts that Christ wants you to have and that he wants me to have to experience the Christian life in full.
And so the question becomes, do you want to experience the Christian life in full? And assuming we can presume that the answer would be yes because he loves Christ and he said so, well, then you want to belong to the church that can help you fulfill that desire to live the Christian life to the full.
And that&#8217;s, so we would argue, the Catholic Church. If Christ started the Catholic Church, then the Catholic Church would be the answer to that question of providing everything that is needed to live the Christian life to the full.
Igor, thank you so much for your question there. Hopefully, all goes well with your friend. We&#8217;ll be praying for him. Praying for you as well.

If I Feel Closer to God as a Protestant, Why Be Catholic?

Is it necessary to dive into childhood or is it more about exposure?

Can a moms feeling of just being overwhelmed actually be anxiety?

I’m a middle school teacher. What tips do you have for helping my students through anxiety?

I’m so filled with anxiety that I have torn up my skin and have ulcers. I need help in mitigating this experience?

How do you deal with anxiety knowing that you’ll always fall to sin?

Thought my anxiety would go away after being sober for 4.5 years. How do I deal with it now that it hasn’t gone away?

How do you deal with anxieties when you don’t realize you have anxiety until it boils over?

Overcoming Anxiety

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<h3>Memorial of Saint Catherine of Siena, virgin and doctor of the Church
Lectionary: 557</h3>
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<h4>Reading 1    <a href="http://cms.usccb.org/bible/1john/1:5">1 JN 1:5B-2:2</a></h4>
<div class="poetry">Beloved: 
This is the message that we have heard from Jesus Christ 
and proclaim to you: God is light, 
and in him there is no darkness at all. 
If we say, &#8220;We have fellowship with him,&#8221; 
while we continue to walk in darkness, 
we lie and do not act in truth. 
But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, 
then we have fellowship with one another, 
and the Blood of his Son Jesus cleanses us from all sin. 
If we say, &#8220;We are without sin,&#8221; we deceive ourselves, 
and the truth is not in us. 
If we acknowledge our sins, he is faithful and just 
and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from every wrongdoing. 
If we say, &#8220;We have not sinned,&#8221; we make him a liar, 
and his word is not in us.
My children, I am writing this to you so that you may not commit sin. 
But if anyone does sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, 
Jesus Christ the righteous one. 
He is expiation for our sins, 
and not for our sins only but for those of the whole world.</div>
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<h4>Responsorial Psalm    <a href="http://cms.usccb.org/bible/psalms/103:1">PS 103:1-2, 3-4, 8-9, 13-14, 17-18</a></h4>
<div class="poetry">R.    (1)  O, bless the Lord, my soul! 
Bless the LORD, O my soul; 
and all my being, bless his holy name! 
Bless the LORD, O my soul; 
and forget not all his benefits. 
R.     O, bless the Lord, my soul! 
He pardons all your iniquities, 
he heals all your ills. 
He redeems your life from destruction, 
he crowns you with kindness and compassion. 
R.      O, bless the Lord, my soul! 
Merciful and gracious is the LORD, 
slow to anger and abounding in kindness. 
He will not always chide, 
nor does he keep his wrath forever. 
R.    O, bless the Lord, my soul! 
As a father has compassion on his children, 
so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him, 
For he knows how we are formed; 
he remembers that we are dust. 
R.    O, bless the Lord, my soul! 
But the kindness of the LORD is from eternity 
to eternity toward those who fear him, 
And his justice toward his children&#8217;s children 
among those who keep his covenant. 
R.    O, bless the Lord, my soul!</div>
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<h4>Alleluia    <a href="http://cms.usccb.org/bible/matthew/11:25">SEE MT 11:25</a></h4>
<div class="poetry">R.    Alleluia, alleluia. 
Blessed are you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth; 
you have revealed to little ones the mysteries of the Kingdom. 
R.    Alleluia, alleluia.</div>
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<h4>Gospel    <a href="http://cms.usccb.org/bible/matthew/11:25">MT 11:25-30</a></h4>
<div class="poetry">At that time Jesus responded: 
&#8220;I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, 
for although you have hidden these things 
from the wise and the learned 
you have revealed them to the childlike. 
Yes, Father, such has been your gracious will. 
All things have been handed over to me by my Father. 
No one knows the Son except the Father, 
and no one knows the Father except the Son 
and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.
&#8220;Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, 
and I will give you rest. 
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, 
for I am meek and humble of heart; 
and you will find rest for yourselves. 
For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.&#8221;</div>
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Daily Holy Mass: Wednesday, April 29, 2020

How would you explain to a protestant that the reformation did more harm than good?

How would I reply to a friend who says that a Catholic shouldn’t judge a gay relationship?

Can I receive communion more than once a day?

Our priest seems to rush the Mass. Is it appropriate to approach him and ask him to slow down?

Is it good to assume that the people being addressed in Romans 10 were already baptized with great faith? Thus, faith being what was needed for salvation for them?

My friend favors the spiritual presence view of the eucharist? How do I explain to him that this view is insufficient?

I’m thinking of leaving the Catholic church because they won’t give the precious blood? Why am I being denied a sacrament?

I agree with the limiting of microplastics. We need to do what we can to save God’s planet?

Are the different Churches in the new testaments akin to what today are modern dioceses?

In light of 2 Cor 5:20, what is a good way to evangelize senior citizens whose memory isn’t good?

Ask Me Anything

When we choose our investments for retirement, can a Catholic invest in companies who we know are contributing money to Planned Parenthood?

Since James was writing before the events of Acts 15, did he fully understand the gospel?

How would you talk to someone for the World Mission Society, Church of God?

How do I evangelize my agnostic brother?

Can you recommend a source on the history of communion?

Is it permissible to bless my home with blessed oil?

Why do Catholics keep using the word pray when it comes to communicating with the saints? If they change the wording it may not cause as much confusion?

Do you think an individual blessing given during communion is in violation of Fiducia Supplicans?

Catholic Answers Focus: The Hidden Rebellion

Father James Boric, the rector of America&#8217;s first cathedral, the Basilica of the Assumption in Baltimore, joins us to explain why he chose Eucharistic adoration as a cornerstone of his parish-building efforts. It turns out there is a lot of power in sitting quietly with Jesus.

What Good Does Adoration Do?

My Methodist friend hasn’t been to church in a long time and doesn’t drive. How can I help her keep the Lords Day holy over the phone?

Mark’s gospel was written first and based on Peter’s account. Are the others written based on the account of other apostles?

How do we Catholics formulate our belief on assurance of salvation?

What tips do you have for evangelizing one’s Baptist family?

Does John 13:6-10 teach parental or judicial forgiveness?

Why in the debate with Bart Ehrmann, he had a disagreement about Jesus saying He was divine in the synoptic gospels? Why?

I heard a claim that the Church wanted Luther dead, is this true?

How should we treat the death of the Pope? Can we say he is already in heaven?

How can the historical Adam and Eve fit in with modern evolutionary science?

Was Jesus born in a cave or a house?

Can I go to a Protestant service, if I still go to Mass?

I heard there is a reentering of communion between Rome and Anglicans. Will this be on hold with the passing of Pope Francis?

Can you explain the Orthodox claim that the church was originally beyond just Rome because Peter founded a church in Antioch?

Can Catholics believe in both a historical Adam and Eve and modern evolutionary theory? We explore how Church teaching reconciles faith and science, along with insights on Jesus’ divinity in the Gospels, the death of a pope, and Catholic relations with Protestants and Orthodox Christians.
Join The CA Live Club Newsletter: <a href="https://wvw.catholic.com/radioclub?email">Click Here</a>

How Can Adam and Eve Fit with Modern Evolutionary Science?

There’s a popular myth that Jesus never claimed to be God and wasn’t originally thought of as divine by his followers. For instance, in his book <a href="https://www.bartehrman.com/how-jesus-became-god/">How Jesus Became God</a>, the atheist New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman claims that “Jesus was not originally considered to be God in any sense at all, and . . . he eventually became divine for his followers in some sense before he came to be thought of as equal with God Almighty in an absolute sense.”
Part of his argument is that in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, “Jesus never makes explicit divine claims about himself” and that these divine-sounding claims appear only in the last of the four Gospels, the Gospel of John. And certainly, by the time we get to the Gospel of John, it’s clear that Jesus’ followers consider him divine. John begins his Gospel by declaring Jesus “the Word” and says that “the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1).
One problem with the idea that belief in Jesus’ divinity emerged slowly among Christians is that St. Paul, considered the first to write, clearly believes that Jesus is divine. In his letter to the Philippians, Paul quotes a hymn that says of Jesus that “though he was in the form of God, [he] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” (2:6-7).
Ehrman admits the problem, asking, “Didn’t a ‘low’ Christology” develop into “a ‘high’ Christology over time? And if so, shouldn’t the views of the Synoptic Gospels be ‘higher’ than the views of Paul? But they’re not!” His solution, on the basis of a misreading of Galatians 4:14, is to advance the bizarre argument that, in fact, “Paul understood Christ to be an angel who became a human.”
Such a view seriously misunderstands the Old Testament background to Paul’s theology. In the prophet Isaiah, the God of Israel (YHWH) declares, “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other. By myself I have sworn, from my mouth has gone forth in righteousness a word that shall not return: ‘To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear’” (45:22-23). Yet Paul applies these words to Jesus, saying “that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:10-11). That’s presenting Jesus not simply as an angel, but as the one God.
There’s also the problem of what Jesus claims about himself, even in the Synoptic Gospels. It’s true that Jesus never simply says, “Hello, I’m the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, true God and true man,” and so if that’s what you’re looking for, you won’t find it. But he does say of himself that “something greater than the Temple is here,” and then he calls himself “guiltless,” and then says that “the Son of man is lord of the sabbath” (Matt. 12:6-8; cf. Mark 2:28; Luke 6:5).
To see the gravity of these words, you need to know their Old Testament background. The Temple in Jerusalem was “the most holy temple in all the world” (2 Macc. 5:15), and the Holy of Holies within was “the most holy place” (1 Kings 7:50). Why? Because “the Lord is in his holy temple” (Hab. 2:20). For Jesus to declare himself greater than that is to make what’s clearly a divine claim.
Likewise, the Lord of the Sabbath is God himself. In the Ten Commandments, God declares, “Six days you shall labor, and do all your work; but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God.” This is explicitly a day set aside to the one God who created all things, since “in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it” (Exod. 20:8-11).
It’s worth remembering that Israel had, by this time, a rich tradition of prophets speaking on behalf of God. And none of them spoke like this, presenting himself as greater than the Temple or the Sabbath.
In John’s Gospel, we’re told that “the Jews sought all the more to kill him, because he not only broke the Sabbath but also called God his Father, making himself equal with God” (John 5:18). But John’s just explaining explicitly something we see in the other three Gospels. For instance, in Matthew 7:21-23, Jesus describes himself as the Lord, as the judge of all the world, and as the unique Son of the Father:
<blockquote>Not every one who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?” And then will I declare to them, “I never knew you; depart from me, you evildoers.”</blockquote>
It’s true: he doesn’t explicitly say that in calling God his Father, he’s making himself equal to God. But he doesn’t need to say it. His listeners understand this, and ultimately, they arrest him for blasphemy. It is now time for Jesus to speak plainly. On trial, the high priest demands, “I adjure you by the living God, tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God.” And Jesus replies, “You have said so. But I tell you, hereafter you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming on the clouds of heaven.” The high priest is outraged, tearing his robes, and saying to the others, “He has uttered blasphemy. Why do we still need witnesses? You have now heard his blasphemy” (Matt. 26:63-65).
This is the pivotal moment in all three of the Synoptic Gospels (Mark 14:64; Luke 22:71): that Jesus was turned over to the Romans for execution because he was found guilty of “blasphemy” for presenting himself as the Son of God. And this is presented not as a misunderstanding, but as the scribes and Pharisees having “rejected the purpose of God for themselves” (see Luke 7:30), thereby fulfilling another of Jesus’ grand predictions: that “as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day. But first he must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation” (Luke 17:24-25).
Jesus was killed for making statements about himself that clearly implied that he was not only a divine being of some kind, but the one God of Israel. If you miss this, then you miss the whole point of each of the four Gospels, as well as the message of St. Paul and the other New Testament authors.

‘But Jesus Never Said He Was God’

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DAY 155
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CHALLENGE
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“If John’s Gospel is reliable, why is it different from the others?”
DEFENSE
Every author has his own style, and John was supplementing the other Gospels.
Differences between John and the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) are often exaggerated. They tell the same basic story, referring to many of the same incidents in Jesus’ life (the Baptism by John, early preaching in Galilee, feeding the 5,000, later ministry in Judaea, the triumphal entry, the Last Supper, the Crucifixion and Resurrection).
The differences are principally of two types: (1) matters of style and (2) incidents John mentions that the synoptics omit or vice versa.
In terms of style, John presents Jesus’ teachings in extended speeches rather than pithy sayings. Before tape recorders, long speeches in historical documents involved reconstruction, which the audience knew. The claim was not that a historical speech was a word-for-word transcript, but that it accurately conveyed the thought of the speaker. John was an eyewitness of Jesus’ ministry (21:24) and was thus in a position to accurately express Jesus’ thought in his own literary style (see Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, 1:229).
That John includes incidents the synoptic Gospels omit and vice versa is primarily because he is writing to supplement the synoptics. Early sources indicate he was urged to supplement what they had written (see Eusebius, Church History 6:14:7) and that he initially expressed some reluctance to do so (see Muratorian Canon 9-16). This may ex- plain his statement that, were all of Jesus’ deeds to be recorded, “I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (21:25).”
John expects his readers to know the synoptic tradition. In 3:24 he mentions John the Baptist “had not yet been put in prison”—the imprisonment being mentioned in the synoptics but not elsewhere in John.
Comparing John and Mark reveals John’s outline is structured so its events fit around those recorded in Mark (see Jimmy Akin, “Did John Use Mark as a Template?” online at JimmyAkin.com; Richard Bauckham, “John for Readers of Mark” in The Gospels for All Chris- tians). This reveals John intended to supplement the synoptic tradition.
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Why Is John’s Gospel Different?

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&#8220;Isaiah’s prophecy of Immanuel (Isa. 7:14) doesn’t apply to Jesus. It doesn’t say ‘a virgin shall conceive.’ The Hebrew word ‘almāh doesn’t mean ‘virgin,’ but ‘young woman.’”
DEFENSE
Actually, ‘almāh can mean either.
Its basic meaning is a young woman of marriageable age. In Hebrew society, such women were expected to be and normally were virgins. The term thus was sometimes used to indicate virginity, though not always. After reviewing how the term is used in the Old Testament, John Watts concludes: “It is difficult to find a word in English that is capable of the same range of meaning. ‘Virgin’ is too narrow, while ‘young woman’ is too broad (Word Biblical Commentary, vol. 24: Isaiah 1–33 (rev. ed.), 136).
Translators therefore have to choose how to render it in particular cases. Watts points out (ibid.) that the translators of the Greek Septuagint rendered it parthenos (“virgin”), while other Greek translators used neanis (“young woman”).
We elsewhere discuss the fact that, on the primary, literal level, the Immanuel prophecy was fulfilled in the time of King Ahaz (732–716 B.C.) and that the child was, perhaps, his son Hezekiah (see Day 253). If so, the ’almāh in question would have been Hezekiah’s mother, Abijah (2 Chron. 29:1). Either way, some young woman known to Ahaz conceived the child.
This young woman may still have been a virgin at the time the prophecy was given, in which case the Greek translation parthenos would have applied to her in a precise way. Even if she was not a virgin, prophetic texts operate on more than one level, and this one had a greater fulfillment that occurred long after Ahaz’s time.
When that fulfillment occurred, God chose a woman—Mary— who was not only a virgin but who conceived while remaining a virgin (Matt. 1:18–25; Luke 1:26–35). Also, the child she bore was not simply called “Immanuel” (as Hezekiah may have been called early in life, as a second name; cf. 2 Sam. 12:24–25). Instead, the child was literally “God with us.”
In view of this, the first Christians looked back on Isaiah’s prophecy and naturally saw it fulfilled in Jesus. The connection would have been obvious from the Hebrew text alone, and the fact that, by divine providence, the Septuagint translators had used the term parthenos only underscored the point.
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A Virgin Shall Conceive

Philosopher Edward Feser joins Cy to discuss his new book, By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment. Feser points out that Catholic doctrine has not changed, and argues that there are positive reasons not to abandon the death penalty.

A Catholic Case for Capital Punishment

They drink, they smoke, they make a popular show for Catholic men (<a href="https://thecatholicmanshow.com/">The Catholic Man Show</a>), so we ask Adam and David to justify Catholic teaching on the acceptability of drinking. Wouldn’t God prefer that we all just stay away from the sauce and stick with tea? That depends, it turns out.

Can a Christian Drink?

It doesn’t make sense to me why some people hear God in their prayers and others don’t?

How is it that Protestants seem to experience the fruits of the faith, but without the sacrifices that Catholics do?

As Catholics, we agree that we’ll probably be in Purgatory before going to Heaven. The Bible says that Jesus at the Second Coming will take everyone with him. Does that mean they’ll skip out on Purgatory?

A Protestant friend wonders if we’re defecating or disgracing the Eucharist when we receive it?

I want to know how does Dr. Broussard decides when his interpretation of scripture is a maybe/what if and how does he know when God’s Will is definitive?

Why Don’t You Think Catholicism Makes Sense?

This is Why They Killed Charlie Kirk…

If God Is All-Good, Why Does Evil Exist?

Does “Pointless Evil” Disprove God?

Problem of Evil: Could It Justify the Devil?

&#8220;If God Is All-Good, Why Does Evil Exist?&#8221; This episode delves into the complexities of evil and suffering, addressing questions such as whether &#8220;pointless evil&#8221; disproves God&#8217;s existence and if the problem of evil could justify the presence of the devil. Join us as we explore these challenging topics with clarity and depth.
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If God Is All-Good, Why Does Evil Exist? Evil and Suffering

<div>What is the English translation of "ad deum qui laetificat juventutem meam"?</div><div>The translation of this phrase from Psalm 42 in St. Jerome&#8217;s Vulgate Latin Bible is &#8220;to the God who gives joy to my youth.&#8221; It is now translated in the Neo-vulgate Latin used for liturgical purposes in the ordinary form of the Latin rite as Psalm 43 (using the Hebrew enumeration of the Psalms) and translates &#8220;to the God of the joy of my exaltation.&#8221;
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Translation of the Psalm

Do the members of the trinity share will and intellect and do they share a consciousness?

Is there one center of consciousness for the Trinity?

Why do people bow their heads during the mass when the name of Jesus is said?

Did Jesus withhold divine attributes when he walked the earth?

Where can we point to in the bible that that is evidence that is evidence for Mary being our mother apart from the moment of Jesus on the cross?

Scenario: A tornado is ripping through the neighborhood and there is only room for one person. You and your neighbor do rock paper scissors for the spot. What’s the morality of this?

Why was it necessary for Jesus to Send the Holy Spirit if it seems as though we got everything we need with Jesus and the sacraments?

How do I explain to 3rd, 4th, and 5th grader boys why they don’t wear head coverings in Church in light of 1 Cor. 11:6-7 and Act 18 where Paul shaves his head?

If the constitution is more of a Protestant document, does it conflict with anything in our Catholic faith?

What are your thoughts on the authorship and dating of Genesis?

What is the mechanism of action for the devil’s temptations on the world?

Do you think pointing out human’s infinite value is a good response to the problem of animal suffering?

Doesn’t everyone already have reproductive rights? How do you make clear to people that those words are just a euphemism for killing?

How do indulgences play into our time in purgatory?

How does the teaching of elective suffering benefit us and our participation in Christ’ suffering?

Were some events in the book of Joshua meant to be taken literally?

How do I re-confess my sins that I possibly overestimated?

My 3-year-old is confused when we say Jesus is present at mass, but he doesn’t see a person. How do I explain it to him?

There’s so much confusion on how to receive communion and I don’t want to be culpable when I meet Jesus face to face.

My parents were born pre-Vatican 2 and told me that Luther was one of the most evil men to ever exist. What are your thoughts on that?

What are the daily responsibilities of the camerlengo? How does their role change when the pope dies?

The term &#8220;social justice&#8221; can make lots of people roll their eyes. But the teachings of Christ have profound social dimensions. So how does a Catholic view of social development differ from the world&#8217;s? We asked Jim Cavnar, cofounder of Cross Catholic Outreach to give us some answers.

Catholic Social Teaching in Action

How do you answer when protestants say that the stone is Christ not Peter?

How do I convincingly argue to my protestant friends why we Catholics confess our sins to priests?

I always said that the Church has too much money and is too rich but always asks for money. How should I respond?

How do I respond a protestant who says “my Jesus is no longer on the cross” in response to my crucifix?

I’m a protestant considering Catholicism. What is the sin of presumption?

How do I respond to my southern Baptist friends who teasingly say that Catholics go to confession just to go sin again?

How do the saints hear our prayers?

I want to share my response when I get asked about my crucifix.

What’s Your Protestant Challenge?

Who is in Communion With the Church?

<div>If the Day of Judgement hasn’t come yet, does that mean that there’s no one in heaven?</div><div>There are two judgments. First is the particular judgment and then, at the end of time, there is the final judgment.
The particular judgment is what happens at a person&#8217;s death. God judges the person, who either enters into eternal life (purgatory and heaven) or hell.
The final judgment occurs at the end of time when all the dead are resurrected. The righteous inherit the new world and the wicked are condemned to hell.
The first is &#8220;private&#8221; and occurs immediately after death. The second is &#8220;public&#8221; and occurs on the Last Day at the resurrection. The judgment does not change, just the manner in which it is revealed.
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Is Anyone in Heaven Before the Day of Judgment?

The Lazy Dogmatism of Sam Harris

Episode 64: Year B &#8211; 6th Sunday of Ordinary Time
In this episode of the Sunday Catholic Word, we focus on several details found in all the readings for this upcoming 6th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B. Unlike what we’ve seen in all the previous episodes of the Sunday Catholic Word, these details aren’t as directly related to apologetical discussions as the details in previous readings. But given that they’re related in some ways, it’s worth mentioning. The relevant topics that we’ll be discussing is the Sacrament of Confession, the New Testament ministerial priesthood, respect for the Church’s disciplinary precepts, a healthy approach to disciplinary laws of the Church and their relationship to love, and the Gospel portrait of Jesus as an exorcist.
Readings: <a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/021124.cfm.">Click Here</a>
Looking for Sunday Catholic Word Merchandise? Look no further! <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/catholic-answers-merchandise/?q=sunday">Click Here</a>
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Confession through a Ministerial Priest

How can Catholics ask Protestants to be in communion with the Pope, when there have been so many schisms?

I don’t understand the teaching of no salvation outside the Catholic Church?

How do I explain Papal Authority? When should we listen to the Pope?

What do Catholics believe are necessary beliefs to be Christian?

I struggle with the teaching of Mary’s Virginity based on Matthew 1:24-25?

Is Catholic doctrine found in the Bible?

I’m confused by the belief in Sacrament of the anointing of the sick? I’ve heard different perspectives on going to Heaven with last rites?

What Catholic Doctrine Troubles You?

In this free-for-all-Friday, Trent explains why recycling often causes more harm than good and what we should do instead.
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Transcript:
Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Reduce, reuse, recycle. That was the song we sang as kids, and it&#8217;s a gigantic scam. Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast. I&#8217;m your host, Catholic Answers apologist, Trent Horn. And today we&#8217;re talking about recycling.
Why are we talking about recycling? Particularly in it being kind of a scam and not worthwhile, yet we all still feel guilted into doing it? Well, on Mondays and Wednesdays we talk apologetics and theology on The Counsel of Trent podcast, but on Fridays we talk about whatever I feel like talking about. It can be about anything.
And so today I just want to talk about recycling because it&#8217;s something that almost all of us do, right? I&#8217;m sure you&#8217;ve got your regular trash can the city gave you and you got another can for recycling. In some municipalities, I think they have like three or four different cans you&#8217;re supposed to use to even sort your recycling even more.
I remember when I lived in California, we had one can for trash, one can for recycle, and one can for grass clippings and trees and organic products. But there&#8217;s more and more they want you to have. And we do it. We recycle. But it turns out most of the things we recycle are not actually recyclable. It&#8217;s actually bad for the environment. It doesn&#8217;t really help very much. And yet we still do it. Why do we do that? That&#8217;s what I want to talk about today here on The Counsel of Trent podcast.
All right, so I recycle for purely selfish reasons. All right, so I recycle for purely selfish reasons. I just need to have another can to get rid of my trash. I mean, I suppose I could ask the city to give me another can. I think I bought an extra can actually when I was in California for the trash that we made because in California our trash truck only came once a week, and that was the worst.
Here in Texas in the neighborhood we live in, there are two trash pickup days, which is actually nice. You have a smaller can, but they come twice. I way prefer that to when I lived in San Diego and there was one big can that you used and only one collection day because, oh man, I remember those days sometimes. &#8216;Cause if you missed that day, if you forgot to put the trash out that day, having to wait another week to go and get your trash out, oh, it&#8217;s just awful.
I remember those days. I&#8217;d wake up in the morning and Laura said, &#8220;Oh, did you put the trash out?&#8221; And I hear that lumbering sound of the trash truck going down the street away from my house, and I&#8217;d run out there in my white t-shirt and my boxers pushing the garbage can down the sidewalk like a crazy person, trying to catch up with the garbage truck. &#8220;I&#8217;ve got it, I got it. Please take my trash. Please take my trash.&#8221; So it&#8217;s like, oh, you don&#8217;t want to miss that.
But yeah, so we have the two days of pickup. Now we have the recycling can. We&#8217;ve got the blue recycling can and the regular garbage can. And I use the blue recycle &#8217;cause it&#8217;s like, look, I can&#8217;t fit everything in my regular garbage can. So I think, okay, what do you put in recycle, right? What can you recycle? Aluminum cans. That&#8217;s an easy one. Glass bottles. You don&#8217;t use too many of those. But the one that&#8217;s always kind of iffy is plastic and cardboard. You throw cardboard in there, Amazon boxes. You think, &#8220;Okay, I throw plastic in here. It&#8217;s recyclable, right? If it&#8217;s got the little symbol on it, it&#8217;s something I can recycle.&#8221;
Well, it turns out that recycling plastic is pretty much useless. Only about 10% of plastic that goes into recycling programs is actually recycled. Plastic is something that&#8217;s really, really difficult to recycle. And plastic companies have known about this since the 1960s and &#8217;70s, but they&#8217;re worried about the government passing laws preventing the creation of plastic products as people are worried about plastics ending up in the oceans, plastic waste. So they&#8217;re worried, oh no, people are going to start banning plastic, and they have started to do that in certain places, and I cannot stand it when it is banned.
The biggest one for me are plastic straws. That is literally the last straw for me. Losing plastic straws, I think the reason they did that, there&#8217;s like this fourth grader who tried to do a science project saying there&#8217;s like 50 million, billion plastic straws on the ocean. It turns out that was all incorrect, but people love the news story about this fourth grader who did the plastic straw story, and now all the plastic straws are being, they&#8217;re being phased out, but you actually create more waste with the alternatives and the straws that you do use, the degradable ones, those are just the worst. You start drinking them and then four minutes later it starts dissolving in your mouth. It&#8217;s like, oh, this is terrible. This is really awful.
People are starting to rebel though. I think McDonald&#8217;s recently released a strawless lid and you put your &#8230; Starbucks is doing this as well. You&#8217;ve got your lid that&#8217;s just like a sippy cup for grownups. You don&#8217;t get to have your straw. That&#8217;s not how it works. If I&#8217;m lazy enough to go to McDonald&#8217;s to eat lunch, instead of making myself a real lunch as an adult should have, you think that I care. I want to be as lazy as possible. I do not want to have to raise that cup an extra three or four inches to my mouth and sip it like it&#8217;s my morning coffee. I don&#8217;t want to have to do that. And people are starting to, they&#8217;re really mad about seeing that McDonald&#8217;s introducing it.
But you see this. So the plastic companies are worried that, oh, they&#8217;re going to ban plastics. We got to get people to see plastic is okay. You can buy it because guess what? We can recycle it. So no one&#8217;s going to be worried about throwing it in the trash. You throw it in the recycle. But if you throw it in the recycle, it still ends up in the trash anyways, or it ends up being sold to other countries.
So what happens is a lot of wealthy countries, they don&#8217;t want to recycle the material because it&#8217;s actually expensive. It says here in a report from S&amp;P Global Plats revealed that recycled plastic costs an extra $72 a tonne compared with newly made plastic. Recycle plastic is just bad. It degrades over time. It&#8217;s not as useful. It&#8217;s more expensive. It creates waste.
This is similar with a lot of things that are recycled by the way. Paper, you try to recycle paper, good luck with that. To recycle paper, you have to drain the ink from the paper, which creates this kind of toxic sludge that&#8217;s even worse for the environment when you should just throw the paper away. It&#8217;s biodegradable. It&#8217;s paper. It&#8217;ll degrade. And you can plant more trees. We&#8217;re not running out of trees. In fact, there&#8217;s an incentive here for people to create paper products to plant more trees. So it actually works out well for everybody all around.
One of the other problems is that if you look on plastic products and you try to recycle and throw them away, you&#8217;ll think that they&#8217;re recyclable &#8217;cause it&#8217;ll have the arrow symbol, the three arrows, and a number in it. That&#8217;s actually not the recycling symbol. The guy who created the recycling symbol, that ended up in the public domain years ago.
So now plastic companies will put resin identifiers on their products that have a number inside of it and the recycling arrows. That doesn&#8217;t mean that it&#8217;s recyclable. It just tells people what kind of plastic this is, and it turns out, so it&#8217;s really hard to recycle plastic. There&#8217;s plastics, you have to separate them. Certain colored plastics and types of plastics cannot be recycled together, so they have to be separated. When you try to recycle certain things, you have to clean off the food products from them. It becomes a gigantic mess.
Another thing that happens is plastic bags, they end up grinding and &#8230; Not grinding, but they end up clogging up the gears of these recycling machines, and so they always have to be cleaned and taken out. It&#8217;s just a mess. And you&#8217;ve got seven different types of identifying resin numbers to separate these plastics. It ends up, it&#8217;d probably just be easier to throw them all in a landfill. It&#8217;ll definitely be cheaper.
You have municipalities that are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on plastic to recycle them. They end up not recycling them. If they end up exporting the plastic, a lot of times to recycle the plastic, they&#8217;ll just export it to China or Malaysia saying that, &#8220;Okay, these countries will buy the recycle waste from us. Then they&#8217;ll recycle it. They&#8217;ll do something with it.&#8221; But if they end up not being able to recycle it, they dump it in a big landfill. You&#8217;ve got these mountains of trash in Malaysia that&#8217;s actually from the US that they never ended up recycling and they never ended up disposing of properly by the way, because I&#8217;m going to talk about this right now.
You can dispose of it properly if you don&#8217;t recycle it. But in a lot of these poorer countries, they just dump it in trash mounds rather than proper landfills or it ends up in the ocean. It turns out, by the way, the plastic garbage in the ocean, only like 0.25% of it comes from the United States itself. That actually we would help little sea creatures, help all of them in the ocean, the big garbage patch and all of that. Instead of recycling plastic waste, which ends up having it sent to other countries to be recycled, we just buried it in a landfill here.
But this big campaign to get people to recycle, got people thinking that there is no room. Like, oh, we&#8217;re running out of room. There&#8217;s no landfills here. And we got to recycle because the trash is just going to end up on the ground at the feet of a sad Native American. If you&#8217;re an older viewer, baby boomer, maybe Gen Xer, you might remember that ad from the 1970s with the sad Indian. Let me see if I can find it here and play the clip for you for at least to hear it.
Some people have a deep abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country. And some people don&#8217;t. People start pollution, people can stop it.
So that&#8217;s a classic ad. You&#8217;ve got the sad Native American, a little tear running down his face, looking at the camera solemnly as the trash is at his feet. And look what&#8217;s happening to our beautiful country. We need to recycle instead.
The most hilarious part of that ad, by the way, is that the &#8220;Native American&#8221; in it is an Italian actor. He went by the name Iron Eyes Cody, but his real name is Espera Oscar de Corti. It says here, he was an American actor of Italian descent who portrayed Native Americans in Hollywood films, famously as Chief Iron Eyes and Bob Hope&#8217;s The Paleface in 1948. He also played a Native American shedding a tear about pollution, one of the country&#8217;s most well-known public service announcements from the group Keep America Beautiful.
Living in Hollywood, so Iron Eyes Cody, aka De Corti, who&#8217;s Italian, he began to insist even in his private life that he was Native American, over time claiming membership in several different tribes. In 1996, Cody&#8217;s half sister said that he was of Italian ancestry, but he denied it. After his death, it was revealed that he was of Sicilian parentage and not Native American at all. So I ruined your childhood. How many of those old PSAs were actually completely false? Many of them, I would say, many of them.
Another reason people thought that landfills didn&#8217;t have room in them was that back in 1987, you had that story about the trash barge going up and down the East Coast that nobody would take.
We know is particularly fond of taking out the garbage. How about the prospect of not being able to get rid of it at all?
The barge has quickly become a symbol of this country&#8217;s growing problems with trash.
The nation&#8217;s crisis in disposing of solid waste.
Over half the cities in the US will exhaust their current landfills by 1990.
It&#8217;s like, oh no, we&#8217;ve got no room for trash. Even this barge, it has this trash in it. America has so much trash, you have to put it out of the ocean and nobody&#8217;s willing to take it.
That had nothing to do with space and landfills. It dealt with a rumor that the barge had biohazardous waste on it, which turned out to not be the case.
So the story of that barge owes the Mobro 4000, which sounds like a new vacuum cleaner, the Mobro 4000 owned by Mobro Marine Incorporated in 1986 was hauling a load of trash along the East Coast of North America from New York City to Belize and back until a way was found to dispose of the garbage.
It turned out that New York had reached its particular landfill capacity and they agreed to ship its garbage to Morehead City in North Carolina where it would be converted to methane.
Here&#8217;s the thing, if you have a good landfill and you fill it up properly and seal it, you can actually, new landfill technology, you can protect the groundwater, you can line the landfill, you can fill it with trash. Once it reaches its capacity, then you can pave it over. You can put a park over it. You can actually take the trash that&#8217;s underneath it and the methane gas that seeps from it, you can generate electricity from it through, or you can turn it into methane to use for different products, things like that.
So this barge was sent down to North Carolina, turned into methane, about 3000 tons of it. While it was in transit, a rumor was spread that 16 bundles of trash that contained hospital gowns, syringes, and diapers, there was a contaminant within it. And so it got news attention, and because of this rumor that there was some kind of biohazardous contaminant in the barge, North Carolina refused to accept it. It went to Louisiana. They declined it. Went down to Mexico, Belize. Nobody actually even wanted this thing.
Eventually, the whole drama ended in July. It started in March that the trash was eventually permitted by the federal government to be incinerated in Brooklyn, and the contaminant fears were completely overblown.
It says here that it was cited by environmentalists as emblematic of a solid waste disposal crisis in the US due to a shortage of landfill space. Almost 3000 municipal landfills had closed between 1982 and 1987, triggered national public discussion about waste disposal, and was a factor in increasing recycling rates in the late &#8217;80s and the &#8217;90s.
But here&#8217;s the thing, we have plenty of room for landfills. There are municipal landfills that do fill up. But when a landfill fills up, you just cap it off and then you can get another landfill.
I was reading an article recently about how big of a space you would need for all of the trash that the United States creates in what, like a hundred years or something like that. And the article said The great pyramid in Egypt is 756 feet by 756 feet, 481 feet tall. It&#8217;s a really, really big thing it says, one of the biggest things ever built by man. If you took all the trash that the United States would generate in a hundred years and pile it up in the shape of the great pyramid, it would be about 32 times bigger. The base of this trash pyramid would be 4.5 by 4.5 miles, and the pyramid would rise almost three miles high.
Now, that would be an impressive thing to see a three-mile-high trash pyramid. Now it makes you think, like you think of this three-mile-high trash pyramid. We&#8217;re going to be covered in trash. 4.5 by 4.5 miles. That&#8217;s big. That&#8217;s about what, 18 square miles, something like that.
The continental United States is 3 million square miles in size, and you have parts of the country, like in the middle third of the country like that area in western Texas, Eastern New Mexico, parts of Wyoming, Colorado. If you look on a map, you know what I&#8217;m talking about. This is the dead zone of the country. Something like 2% of the population lives in something that makes up one fifth or one six of the size of the contiguous United States. There is nothing out there.
When I drive with Laura, when we drive to go to New Mexico or Phoenix to see our relatives once we pass Midland, Texas, until you get to El Paso, Texas, there is just nothing. You&#8217;re just driving out there. And I remember, actually, we actually had car trouble and I was worried the battery clamp on our car came off. I didn&#8217;t realize it at the time, but it came off and it was sparking inside of the engine block and my car would flicker on and off. I&#8217;m like, &#8220;What is happening?&#8221;
So we managed to pull off at the one tiny little town in the middle of nowhere there. Thankfully, I was able to figure out is the battery clamp and I got it out. But I always have this fear when I&#8217;m driving through that part of Texas. I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Oh, I don&#8217;t want to break down because there&#8217;s nothing out here.&#8221;
So if we need a place to dispose the trash, instead of recycling it through dubious processes where it ends up in other countries, in bad landfills, or it ends up in the ocean or nothing happens to it, just throw it in a landfill and you can do that in a safe and environmental way. That was it. That was just all my rant on recycling today.
Should you recycle? I&#8217;m not telling you not to recycle. Do whatever you want, but don&#8217;t feel guilted as if you&#8217;re a bad person if you don&#8217;t throw plastic in the recycle bin, because odds are, if you throw it in the trash or the recycle bin, it&#8217;s going to end up in the same place. We just don&#8217;t want to let our lives be ruled by misinformation. All right? So thank you guys very much and I hope you have a very blessed weekend.
If you liked today&#8217;s episode, become a premium subscriber at our Patreon page and get access to member-only content. For more information, visit trenthornpodcast.com.

FFAF: Why Recycling is a Scam

Some Protestants don’t believe in infant baptism, what does that tell us about their understanding of sin and how does that compare to the Catholic view?

I understand the Catholic teaching on cremated remains is to not separate them. But if that’s the case, why do we have cases where certain saints’ body parts are in different locations? It seems like that contradicts the policy on cremated remains.

How do Catholics understand Purgatory in light of Hebrews 9:27?

How do you determine what a saint is a patron of? Like how does someone become patron saint if pilots when airplanes weren’t even invented yet when they lived?

Can you comment on the different translations of Luke 1:28, why Protestant Bibles say “greetings o favored one” and why Catholic bibles say “hail full of grace”?

What is the Catholic interpretation of 1 John 5:1 with regard to baptismal regeneration? I’m struggling to square “if you believe you’ve been born of God” with having to be baptized.

I practice no meat on Fridays. How do I keep up this practice during times when there are lots of feast days or solemnities on Fridays?

&#8220;Can Protestants understand infant baptism and purgatory?&#8221; This episode explores the nuances of these topics, including what the Protestant view on infant baptism reveals about their understanding of sin, and how Catholics interpret purgatory in light of scripture. Additionally, we delve into the significance of saints&#8217; relics and the complexities of baptismal regeneration.
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Invite our apologists to speak at your parish! Visit <a href="https://www.catholic.com/speakers">Catholicanswersspeakers.com</a>

Can Protestants Understand Infant Baptism and Purgatory?

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CHALLENGE
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“Paul said that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. Therefore, there is no room for purgatory.”
DEFENSE
This challenge is based on a misquotation and several problematic assumptions.
Here is the passage on which the argument is based:
So we are always of good courage; we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight. We are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive good or evil, according to what he has done in the body (2 Cor. 5:6–10).
Paul doesn’t say that being absent from the body is being present with Christ. That’s a misquotation. He says that while we are in the body we are away from the Lord and that we would rather be away from the body and with the Lord, but he doesn’t say that one condition is the other.
Consider: When we are at work we are away from home, and we might wish to be away from work and at home instead. But this does not mean that being away from work is the same thing as being at home. There are many other places one can be. Even going straight home from work doesn’t mean you will be there instantly.
This challenge also has two problematic assumptions: (1) that purgatory takes time (we don’t know that it does; it may happen in a flash), and (2) that it is not something that happens when we encounter Christ. Benedict XVI challenged these ideas in his encyclical Spe Salvi (sections 47–48) and proposed the possibility that purgatory simply is a trans- forming encounter with Christ that can’t be reckoned in earthly time.
Finally, Paul says we strive to please Jesus “for we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ.” Elsewhere he links the judgment of Christ to purgatory (1 Cor. 3:11–15).
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Absent from the Body

There are things I cannot accept about Catholicism. Marriage equality and women priests are the two things that I just cannot get past.

Mark 7:31-37 Where did Jesus spit?

In the US we see a lot of extraordinary ministers of holy communion being used ordinarily. Is that an abuse?

Why isn’t fish considered meat?

Is there any issue for a man taking a female saint name for confirmation?

In what state in the body of the damned?

What is the Church position on organ donation?

Could you clarify when it meant when God said he regretted the creation of Man when speaking to Noah?

&#8220;Why isn&#8217;t fish considered meat?&#8221; This question opens a discussion on dietary laws and traditions within the Church. Other topics include the role of extraordinary ministers of holy communion, the appropriateness of taking a female saint&#8217;s name for confirmation, and the Church&#8217;s stance on organ donation, showcasing a variety of inquiries related to faith and practice.
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Invite our apologists to speak at your parish! Visit <a href="https://www.catholic.com/speakers">Catholicanswersspeakers.com</a>

Why Isn’t Fish Considered Meat? Communion and Saints’ Names

Sue Ellen Browder helped sell the sexual revolution. And she, along with many others, lied to do it. Her book, Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement, names names as it tells the heartbreaking tale.

The Cosmo Girl Never Existed

The Bible in Jesus’ Day: How Different Was It?

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CHALLENGE
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“Scripture indicates that God has predestined certain people to go to heaven (Rom. 8:28–30), so I’m either one of them or I’m not. Either way, I don’t need to do anything with respect to my salvation. I can simply await my fate.”
DEFENSE
This misunderstands the nature of predestination and the role of free will.
First, predestination involves both the end and the means by which the end is accomplished. Heaven may be the end—the destination—but the means of getting there is accepting God’s offer of salvation. God doesn’t predestine people to go to heaven regardless of what they do. Heaven may be where they are going, but God has also ordained that they arrive there because they respond to his grace.
Therefore, if you are predestined to go to heaven, you will respond to God’s grace. At some point before death, you will accept his offer of salvation, and so you cannot just await your fate. Whether you go to heaven or hell is dependent on your response to God’s initiative of grace. Your actions do count.
Second, predestination includes free will. From his vantage point in eternity, outside of time, God is aware of all the free-will decisions that are made by creatures in time. Consequently, he is aware whether you will freely choose to accept or reject his offer of salvation, and he includes this in establishing predestination.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states: “To God, all moments of time are present in their immediacy. When therefore he establishes his eternal plan of ‘predestination,’ he includes in it each person’s free response to his grace” (CCC 600).
Because your free choice determines whether you go to heaven or hell, we can therefore say: “God predestines no one to go to hell; for this, a willful turning away from God (a mortal sin) is necessary, and persistence in it until the end” (CCC 1037).
Predestination thus does not involve a denial of free will. Neither does it provide an excuse to sit back and neglect our salvation. On the contrary, man’s freedom is included within the scope of God’s plan of predestination, and if we wish to be with him in eternity, we must respond to his initiative of grace and accept his offer of salvation.
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Salvation and Predestination

Trent sits down with Cy Kellett and explains why our sinful nature and God’s foreknowledge do not refute the existence of free will.

Does God Make People Sin?

There are stark political divides between the people (including Christians) who care about the environment, and the ones who care about the unborn. But instead of viewing these issues as unrelated (or even as &#8220;opposing&#8221; issues), is there a Christian case to be made for pro-life environmentalism? Here&#8217;s what Pope Benedict XVI had to say.

Pro-Life Environmentalism: The Case for “Human Ecology”

A listener asks us if it is wrong to say bad things about others, especially online, if the bad things are true. Turns out, it is, and theologian Dr. Scott Hefelfinger explains why.

Is it a Sin to Call Someone a Jerk?

I’m Protestant interested in Catholicism. My Methodist church has fallen away from biblical teachings. Why aren’t divorced people allowed in the Church but people who advocate for abortion allowed to receive communion?

I’m going to leave Orthodoxy for either High Church Anglican or Catholicism. What advice do you have for me?

I’ve studied Catholicism as a Protestant for years now. Does the Holy Spirit leave you when you commit a mortal sin and get the Holy Spirit back when you repent?

What’s the true faith and how can you know it’s true?

I grew up protestant and was taught that worshipping idols is wrong. Praying to the dead seems wrong.

I wasn’t raised with religion forced upon me. What is Protestantism?

&#8220;Can Mary be sinless if all have sinned?&#8221; This question opens a discussion on Marian dogmas and their biblical foundations, alongside inquiries about the Catholic Church&#8217;s stance on divorce and communion, and the journey from Orthodoxy to Catholicism.
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Can Mary Be Sinless? – Why Aren’t You Catholic?

How can the Catholic Church teach that the Eucharist is the actual body and blood of Jesus when Jesus refers to his so-called blood as the “fruit of the vine”? And how can the Catholic Church teach that Mary was immaculately conceived when she calls God her “Savior” in Luke 1:47?

Are the Eucharist and the Immaculate Conception Anti-Biblical?

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Looksmaxxing: A New Kind of Sin?

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In a divided world, it’s beautiful that Catholics everywhere still stand and profess one Creed.

Joe Heschmeyer and Cy Kellett answer a concerned caller.
Transcript:
Caller: I am in ocia and I&#8217;ve been wondering, and I haven&#8217;t asked my priest, and I know I should, but what should I be doing since I&#8217;m not going to confession because I&#8217;m not a Catholic? What&#8217;s kind of the protocol for a candidate who knows he has mortally sinned?
Joe: Yeah. So the first thing you should do is make an act of contrition to God. The Catechism talks about this in paragraph 1452, that there is what&#8217;s sometimes called perfect contrition. What this means is there&#8217;s good and bad reasons, or good and less good reasons why we turn away from sin. Sometimes we stop sinning because we don&#8217;t want to be in trouble or because we don&#8217;t want to go to hell. Those aren&#8217;t bad. I mean, there&#8217;s no real bad reason to stop sinning. I&#8217;m glad that you&#8217;re stopping sinning.
But perfect contrition, like the best reason, is turning away from sin out of a love of God. And so you make an act of contrition. And as the Catechism says very clearly in 1452, an act of perfect contrition, where you turn away from sin and confess your sin to God, cleanses you of venial sin and of mortal sin when it&#8217;s accompanied by an intention to go to confession as soon as possible.
Now, in your case, as soon as possible may be months out, but there&#8217;s still&#8230; That is like just a true&#8230; You know, God can save you and heal you through the sacrament. He can save you in whatever way he wants to save you. And so there cannot be two things present simultaneously in the soul. You can&#8217;t have both mortal sin, which cuts you off from God, and the animating life of divine grace.
And so if you&#8217;re in a state of grace, you&#8217;re not also in a state of mortal sin. So an act of charity, where you turn to God out of love of God, that is a hallmark of divine grace and a way of being assured of not being in mortal sin. Does that make sense?
Caller: Yes, that does make sense. And it may be purely psychological, but every Sunday, like, not every Sunday, but if I know that if I were Catholic, I did something that I would go to confession for, I get the psychological relief after. On Sunday, I go up and get a blessing. I know that&#8217;s purely psychological, but&#8230;
Joe: Well, I mean, it may very well not be that.
Caller: Okay.
Joe: Yeah. So I don&#8217;t know if you&#8217;re familiar with what&#8217;s called an act of spiritual communion. Another thing you can be doing kind of during this time is there are prayers, and there&#8217;s not&#8230; I mean, you can find model ones online. But honestly, any prayer where you kind of entrust yourself to Christ and express your desire to receive him in the Eucharist during that time where you just say, I know I&#8217;m not ready to receive you now, but building up that love of that anticipation is a really good spiritual practice to be in.
Both if you&#8217;re a candidate who can&#8217;t yet receive, or, God forbid, if you find yourself in a state of mortal sin some Sunday and you know you can&#8217;t go up, you can make an act of spiritual communion and say, okay, you know, I know I&#8217;m not ready to receive right now, but I love you and I desire you and I want to receive you sacramentally.
Caller: Yeah, that&#8230; Thank you. That&#8230; That&#8217;s really beautiful.
Joe: Wonderful. Well, if you want to stick around, we&#8217;d be happy to give you a copy of my book on the Eucharist called *The Eucharist is Really Jesus*, and it might have some things at the very back of it. If nothing else, it has a lot of Eucharistic prayers that can be helpful in deepening your love and devotion.
Cy: Hang on the line. Let&#8217;s give&#8230; Matt, can we get that copy back from Thomas the TikTok engine? He left with it, and now I got nothing to send.
Matt, hang on. We&#8217;ll send it to you&#8230;
Resources:
Act of Contrition: <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/how-do-i-make-an-act-of-contrition">https://www.catholic.com/qa/how-do-i-make-an-act-of-contrition</a>
Act of Spiritual Communion: <a href="https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/devotions/act-of-spiritual-communion-339">https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/devotions/act-of-spiritual-communion-339</a>

I’m Not Catholic… But I’m in Mortal Sin. What Can I Do?

In this episode Trent breaks down how some conservatives need to stop treating their favorite politicians and influencers as infallible oracles.
Transcript:
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Trent:
In the 2010s, conservatives rightly mocked what looked like the idolatrous worship of liberal icons like Barack Obama or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but some conservatives have fallen into the same trap of offering idolatrous worship or sycophantic flattery to people like Donald Trump, and in doing so, some of them have abandoned their Christian values in the process. The fact that liberals and conservatives easily fall into self-deceived hero worship shows this isn&#8217;t a partisan problem, it&#8217;s a defect in the human condition. There&#8217;s a natural human tendency to want to trust the leader of the Pac so much that you need to defend him or her from all attacks. If something is wrong with the leader, then maybe everything you believe is wrong. We can&#8217;t have that now, but this can lead to an almost cultish tendency of endowing humans with impossible, infallible abilities, whereas the Simpsons put it
CLIP:
Attention everyone.
Let&#8217;s all give thanks to the leader for this glorious day.
The
Leader is
Good, the leader. The leader is great. We surrender our will as of the
Trent:
State. Now, a leader can have a divine protection of infallibility. In some instances, Protestants agree that when the apostles wrote scripture, the teaching they gave was infallible. It was divinely protected from error. And Catholics believe the successors of the apostles have a similar divine protection from error when they universally and solemnly define a theological issue at an ecumenical council or when the Pope speaks ex cathedra. But the bishops and even the Pope can make mistakes in other contexts. Catholics who refuse to criticize the Pope get called Pope s explainers, but ironically, many of their critics who try to find any reason to criticize the Pope will bend over backwards to explain away the errors and evils of politicians or conservative influencers that they adore, especially people like President Donald Trump. The Psalmist warns us put not your trust in princes in a son of man in whom there is no help. When his breath departs, he returns to his earth on that very day. His plans perish. But instead of trusting the sober advice, you get merchandise that says things like only God and Trump can save our country and golden statues of Trump that would make Baal blush Paula White who now leads the White House faith office once said this,
CLIP:
To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God and I won&#8217;t
Trent:
Do that. Some people are even saying that Trump&#8217;s surviving an assassination plot showed that his presidency was divinely appointed or even had a divine mandate. Acclaim my colleague, Joe Hess Meyer rebuts in the link below, and here are the female hosts of the podcast. Girls Gone Bible praying over Trump and then they say this prayer for Trump,
CLIP:
Your kingdom come Lord, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven in America as it is in heaven in the life of President Donald Trump as it is in heaven.
Trent:
Okay, I get that Maybe they&#8217;re asking God that God&#8217;s will be done everywhere, including in President Trump&#8217;s life, but it&#8217;s still really weird to change the Lord&#8217;s prayer in this way in order to say that also Girls gone Bible, they&#8217;re using the exact same logo style as the pornographic series. Girls Gone Wild. That would be like if I created a podcast called Pray Boy that directly copied the Playboy bunny and last week Donald Trump announced an executive order that would require the domestic policy council to find ways to make in vitro fertilization or IVF more affordable. This relates to a promise he made to expand IVF access in February of last year. During the campaign cycle, I suspect that promise was made after the public backlash to an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that resulted in an IVF facilities closing throughout the state. For more on that, see my episode link below that I released at that time correcting Trump and other conservatives who had incorrect views on IVF.
And if you want a good book on this issue, I recommend Stephanie Gray. Connors conceived by science thinking carefully and compassionately about infertility and IVF. But in the wake of Trump&#8217;s announcement, there was no shortage of Catholics who were defending him in spite of his promotion of grave evils because they were huge, I&#8217;m sorry, huge Trump fans. Frank Pavone, who previously served as an advisor to Trump&#8217;s 2020 campaign, posted this on X after the executive order was announced on IVF. Don&#8217;t overthink what President Trump is doing or why he does not share our moral position. He wants to help families have babies because he believes life is a beautiful blessing. That&#8217;s it. I much prefer that to the Democrat enemies of babies and the family. Give me a break. IVF results in hundreds of thousands of embryonic human beings either being deliberately killed or indefinitely frozen.
I wish we could ban it or at the very least, legally prevent extra embryos from being created. Unfortunately, if we can&#8217;t even get a national 15 week abortion ban passed, we are a long way off from being able to ban IVF. Our best strategy, as I outlined in the previous episode where I criticized Trump when he originally made this promise, is to use legal means to allow people to sue IVF facilities for mismanagement, which would naturally lead to those facilities going out of business. But even if it isn&#8217;t politically feasible to ban IVF, it isn&#8217;t politically necessary to pay for it when only 2% of births rely on this technology. So it&#8217;s fair to condemn what Trump is doing here and use this repeated condemnation to hope that he will change his mind on the matter. Granted, I see Pavones point a little bit in that it&#8217;s easier to get someone like Trump to listen to conservatives on moral issues than to get someone like Kamala Harris who uses tours of abortion facilities as part of her PR campaign, but the refusal to condemn any of Trump&#8217;s actions smacks of something that resembles idolatrous worship, that sees no wrongdoing present or it&#8217;s a sycophantic political strategy that must downplay all wrongdoing to stay in the person&#8217;s good graces, but Christians shouldn&#8217;t kiss up to those in power.
We should speak truth to those in power. In fact, the phrase speak truth to power, though often co-opted by godless liberals has its origin among Christians, specifically the Society of Friends, AKA, the Quakers who used it during the civil rights movement. Of course, liberals do the same annoying thing When my ideological enemy does something bad, I rake them over the coals for it. But if my ideological ally does something bad, I take a gentler approach. For example, another big story recently was that conservative influencer, Ashley Sinclair claims she had given birth to a child whose father is Elon Musk. Musk reportedly has over a dozen children concede with multiple women. And while I appreciate the technological advancements Elon Musk has come up with, he should not be anyone&#8217;s ethical role model, the real problem where other conservative influencers publicly congratulating St. Clair on the birth of her baby.
Now, on the one hand, the conception and birth of a baby is always a good thing. It is God who wills when a baby comes into existence, not us. So even if a child comes to be through an act of fornication, adultery, prostitution or IVF, the child is still made in God&#8217;s image and God chose to bless this mother and the whole world with the birth of this child so we can congratulate the mother and father of this child for the blessing God gave them. St. Augustine put it this way, a harlot&#8217;s committing fornication is her own doing, her having a son is God&#8217;s. All human beings, after all are fashioned by the one creator God, nor is it surprising that God works well even in the sins of men and women. On the other hand, publicly congratulating someone can come off to people as an endorsement of the evil method through which the baby came into existence.
Lily Phillips who had sex with a hundred men and Bonnie Blue who claims to have done that with a thousand men, both of whom I covered in a previous episode, each claim to have become pregnant. Those claims have now been revealed to be hoaxes, but if they were genuine, would those same conservatives congratulate them or to give another example, many of these same influencers refuse to congratulate Dave Rubin for procuring children through IVF to raise with his same sex partner. A point I also made in a previous episode, but some of them did congratulate the pair, which further shows the scandal that is created by such public comments. One of the practical arguments against IVF is that there&#8217;s no principled way to allow IVF to remain just for loving married couples who long to raise children in spite of infertility and not give it to people who are unmarried or in disordered relationships.
If you believe children do not have a right to come into existence through the Marital Act and that they can come into existence through IVF and that children don&#8217;t have a right to remain in their mother&#8217;s bodies through pregnancy, then you have no grounds to object to the following scenario. Imagine a creepy guy decides one day to just order a baby online. He pays tens of thousands of dollars to select the right egg donor. The right sperm donor has it sent to an IVF lab to create embryos and then chooses the right woman to rent out her uterus for the pregnancy. And once the baby is born, the baby shows up at his front door via Amazon two day delivery and there have been cases of creepy unmarried men ordering children through surrogates in ways like this. So it&#8217;s not a fanciful scenario. People have always tried to evil by saying it&#8217;s only going to be limited to a few special cases and nowhere else.
In 1930, the Anglican Church broke with 1900 years of Christian tradition to endorse limited contraception for married couples in the US During the 1960s, many drug stores refused to sell contraception to unmarried people that change when the Supreme Court ruled in Eisenstadt v Bard, that contraception cannot be denied to unmarried people, and the same thing has happened with IVF and the horrors of surrogacy, which is why Christians cannot make it seem like we endorse these evils when our political allies engage in them. Oh, and it&#8217;s not just normie, conservatives idolizing or sucking up to Donald Trump. That&#8217;s the problem. The same thing happens when far right personalities like Candace Owens or Nick Fuentes whose more zealous followers sometimes treat them as infallible. Oracles who always have based takes. I&#8217;ve seen Nick Fuentes as followers bend themselves into pretzels defending his absurd takes like his claim that the pornographic series Game of Thrones is awesome and Lord of the Rings is awful.
CLIP:
Game of Thrones win. I don&#8217;t care if it&#8217;s Reddit, I don&#8217;t care if it&#8217;s a bunch of feminist gay Reddit garbage. It&#8217;s awesome. And Lord of the Rings is gay little hobbits, little disgusting habits with their gross little feet living in their stupid village. Oh hey, well, you&#8217;re about the power of friendship, the
Trent:
Power of friendship and magic. You, I&#8217;m rooting for the Orks. These far right influencers get some things correct, but it becomes an idolatrous delusion when you blindly follow all of their hot takes. For example, I appreciate Candace Owen&#8217;s work exposing Black Lives Matters as well as the bias documentary making a murderer, but I&#8217;ve also condemned the outlandish things that she said like that NASA is full of demon worshipers or that she can&#8217;t confidently say the earth is round.
CLIP:
And listen, I&#8217;m not a flat earth. I&#8217;m not a round earth. Actually, what I am is I am somebody who has left the cult of science.
Trent:
A new one I need to add to the list is Candace Owens claim that dinosaurs are a modern conspiracy designed to destroy our Christian faith, or in her words, dinosaurs are fake and gay. You don&#8217;t believe dinosaurs are real?
CLIP:
This is the funny one. This is one of the ones where I&#8217;m like Gut. I&#8217;m not kidding. This conversation happened and it was so funny. I was just walking with Savannah, my manager
Because
We do these little evening walks and I just looked up to her and I was like, dinosaurs, that seems pretty fake and gay. She&#8217;s like, she&#8217;s Savannah&#8217;s from Tennessee. She&#8217;s like, I&#8217;ve never believed in dinosaurs. Literally, everyone thinks there&#8217;s some conspiracy behind it. I was like, that was how it started. And I was like, what? On earth you are? I&#8217;m like, it&#8217;s funny because people will literally say they don&#8217;t believe in God, but then tell them dinosaurs aren&#8217;t real and they fall apart. I&#8217;m like, okay, so there&#8217;s roaming the planet.
Trent:
These far right influencers also bend the knee to not upset their allies. Like when Candace Owens treated Pornographer and pimp, Andrew Tate with Kid Gloves when interviewing him, and here is Tate admitting to pimping out women for online porn.
CLIP:
I created a system that allowed me to convince girls to do this, allowed me to retain a hundred percent control of their income, allowed me to make sure they were effective. It&#8217;s a super competitive industry. Don&#8217;t think this is easy money. You&#8217;re just going to put a girl on a camera and they&#8217;re going to get rich straight away. No, it&#8217;s very competitive and it&#8217;s very difficult. I learned every tip and trick it takes to make sure a girl gets paid. I know how to make sure the girl can&#8217;t run away. Once you teach a girl how to do this, she&#8217;s the ability to make unlimited money from home. Why would she still give it to you? Why don&#8217;t she just run off and keep it all for herself?
Trent:
Once again? Sometimes they get things right. St. Paul quoted Pagan philosophers, so even those who pedal error can have correct takes. The problem is when people become irrational fans of influencers or politicians who can&#8217;t see when they go wrong or they do see it, but they want to stay in the person&#8217;s good graces and so they do absurd amounts of damage control for that person. However, when I read online comments about myself, I appreciate that many of them go something like this. I don&#8217;t agree with Trent Horn on everything, or I disagree with Trent Horn on a lot, or even Trent Horn has a lot of coal takes, but I still appreciate and have benefited from his work on X, Y, or Z. That&#8217;s a good thing. I don&#8217;t want to be a guru. I don&#8217;t want to be a leader of some movement that has followers.
I just want to present evidence for Jesus Christ and the church he founded and help people find eternal life. That&#8217;s all. If you find what I present to be helpful, then support us@trenthornpodcast.com so we can continue to reach more people. I know people who support us who are not Catholic and aren&#8217;t even Christian, but they really appreciate how we equip people to graciously defend a moral worldview. And it&#8217;s okay if there are personal positions I take that you disagree with or arguments I make that you find unconvincing. I pray you apply the same critical thinking to me and every other online voice or influencer and follow this advice from one Thessalonians 5 21, test everything, retain what is good. Thank you all for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.
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The Problem of Idolatry on the Right

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DAY 243
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CHALLENGE
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“Jesus is a created being. Paul describes him as the ‘firstborn of all creation’ (Col. 1:15).”
DEFENSE
Without knowledge of the relevant context, the phrase “firstborn of all creation” could suggest Jesus was the first created being. However, context makes it clear this isn’t the case.
The term “firstborn” had a special meaning in Jewish society. A first-born male was sacred to God (Exod. 13:1, 11–15) and had special rights (Deut. 21:15–17).
With time, “firstborn” became a title of privilege that didn’t necessarily indicate a literal firstborn male. Thus God says he will make David his firstborn (Ps. 89:20, 27), though David was the last son in his family (1 Sam. 16:10–11). In context, the reference to David as God’s firstborn is clarified as “the highest of the kings of the earth,” indicating a position of preeminence, not of age. Similarly, God describes Israel as his firstborn (Exod. 4:22), though Israel was not chronologically the first nation. God also describes Ephraim as his firstborn (Jer. 31:9), though Ephraim was not the chronologically first tribe.
It is as a title of preeminence that the term “firstborn” is used for Jesus in the first-century hymn to Christ that Paul records in Colos- sians 1:15–20. In the ancient world, hymns were sung to deities, and this hymn puts Christ in that class. He is the firstborn “of” creation in that he is preeminent over creation, the same way David was king “of” Israel—i.e., king over Israel.
That Jesus is not a created being is indicated by what the hymn says next: “For in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things. . . . He is the beginning . . . that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell” (Col. 1:16–19).
If all things were created through Christ, if he existed before all things, then he is not a created being. (Jehovah’s Witnesses put the word “other” between “all” and “things” to avoid the implication Christ isn’t a created being, but that’s not what the Greek says.) Jesus possessed “the fulness of God” and thus had equality with God (John 5:18, Phil. 2:6).
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The Firstborn of All Creation