Joe has a chat with Brayden from The Catechumen and Adrian from Sips with Serra whether Protestants partake in worship. If Protestants separate themselves from the Eucharistic sacrifice, how can they partake in worship?
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I’m here at the Catholic Creators Conference with Adrian from Sips with Serra and Brayden from the Catechumen. And I wanted to pose a question. So my most viewed video as of the time of recording is a video I did called Do Protestants Worship or Do Protestants Worship God. And the video has gotten a lot of pushback, both positive and negative feedback. And so I wanted to talk to two guys who are Protestant converts to Catholicism and kind of nuance the argument and say, what can we make of it and what are some ways to present it charitably and accurately. So first of all, gentlemen, thank you so much for joining. And why don’t we go one at a time and maybe tell us just a brief bit about yourself, your conversion of Catholicism, and then also introduce your channel as well.
Adrian:
Yeah. Hi, I’m Adrian from Sips with Serra. I converted, oh man. Let’s see. I was an evangelical Christian. I reverted to Protestantism in 2018. Stayed there for a couple of years and then realized, oh, the early church doesn’t really believe what we believe about the Eucharist, about baptism and things like that. So looking into early church history made me want to find a church that was more in line with that early church. So that eventually led to me becoming a Lutheran and then eventually a Catholic. And that’s a whole other crazy story we can get into. But yeah.
Brayden:
Hey, I’m Brayden from The Catechumen. Similar story. I feel like a lot of people these days are converting from evangelical kind of non-denominational Baptist dreams, and that’s how I grew up. I was Baptist non-denominational, and it really was encountering the church fathers recognizing, Hey, there’s no Baptists in these writings that I’m looking at. They believed in regenerative baptism and all these things as Adrian mentioned. And I just remember it was that struggle. Can’t we just be Anglican or Lutheran? They kind of look like Catholics, so we don’t have to go all the way. But it eventually led us to even just start looking into Catholic arguments that we hadn’t really considered before because we were taught to think Catholics were just kind of out of their minds and know what they were talking about. Didn’t read the Bible, so definitely turned out to be wrong.
Joe:
Did you make a stopover in high church Protestantism on your journey into the church?
Brayden:
No, we didn’t. We didn’t. And I was actually working as an interim youth pastor at a Baptist church whenever we started inquiring and got married, moved colleges, a whole bunch of changes, and we were just like, you know what? We need to figure this out, go the entire way. And thankfully it didn’t take us too long because I tend to hyper fixate on that sort of stuff. So the only thing I consumed every single day was just that sort of debates, all the things that are freely available online. So that’s part of the reason why I started the YouTube channel is because I feel like we all recognize the importance of having freely available content online to research these kinds of things.
Joe:
So maybe a good opening question on this would just be, did either of you encounter this kind of worship problem objection on your own journeys, or is it something you heard more about once you’d already become Catholic?
Adrian:
For me, it’s something that I didn’t really consider when I was a Protestant. I didn’t really think about what it meant to worship. I thought if I’m singing songs to God, if I’m saying nice things to God, then that is what worship is. But I hadn’t encountered that objection at that time.
Brayden:
So I remember at our non-denominational church, our worship pastor, we had the worship pastor, the lead pastor, all these things made it very clear, it’s not okay, here’s the songs. That’s when we worship. And then there’s the sermon, and then there’s the other things, the worship’s part of the song that was kind of like the ideas like you worship when you sing and then you listen to the lecture. The theology, at least within our perspective was like, okay, you worship God when you sing worship, praise and worship. You worship God when you listen to the sermon, when you read scripture, all these things. And I do remember whenever I was looking into the Catholic faith, there was this worship problem, hold up worship as we, and I know we’re probably going to get into this, but looking throughout scripture whenever there is some sort of act of worship that seemed to involve a sacrifice at least at the pinnacle of it. And so that was something that I started listening to and hearing of, but it didn’t become a super big problem for me like baptism, like the real presence, which I feel like it should have because the real presence of Christ and the Eucharist definitely goes with the sacrifice of the mass. So yeah.
Joe:
Yeah, I think you’ve teed that up very nicely with the sacrificial connection. There’s a great quote I’ve got here. Everett Ferguson, church of Christ Scholar says, sacrifice was the universal language of worship in the ancient world. And I think this is the key to cracking a bit of a mystery in the Bible recently on Catholic answers Live, someone called in and raised something related to worship from a Protestant perspective. I am going off of memory here, so I may not get the conversation exactly right, but I asked him, where do we see worship in the New Testament? He said, what place? And he said, the synagogue. And that’s just wrong. I mean, objectively the synagogue is good, but the synagogue is a place of teaching, like you said, listening to a lecture or a sermon. It’s a place of doing bible study. But the only time we hear even prayer in the synagogue mentioned together, or in Matthew six when Jesus says, don’t pray in the synagogue like the hypocrites do, who to pray in the synagogue and marketplaces.
So even there, Jesus isn’t saying synagogue bad, it’s just taken for granted. The synagogue’s not a place of prayer any more than a marketplace is a place of prayer. If you’re trying to do a public prayer there, it’s because you’re trying to be seen by other people. So we want to separate the synagogue from the places of prayer, which are the upper room, the lonely places. Jesus goes off to you pray always. So the place of prayer is sort of everywhere. But then there’s this special thing called worship that as we see from Jesus’s conversation with the Samaritan woman, happens in the temple in Jerusalem. This is John four 20 and 21. And so it’s like, okay, so what is worship and how is it different than prayer? And I think you’ve already started to tee up an answer to that.
Adrian:
Yeah, yeah. No, I don’t have anything to add.
Brayden:
That’s great. No, yeah. And seeing the distinction there, it’s hard to imagine at least coming from a Protestant background, that there would be at least a hard line distinction between the prayer that we would offer to God, and especially if it’s adoration or singing psalms that praise him and things like that. And you think back to, let’s say the liturgical life of a Jew who’s not living in Jerusalem, going to synagogue, they would sing the Psalms, they would do these things. They would even do those things during the Seder meal in their own homes. And it’s hard to imagine, at least coming from the Protestant perspective, and I see why so many people are like, you guys don’t think Protestants worship God because we don’t offer such and such a sacrifice win when looking at those passages saying, look, we praise him. And St. Paul says it’s a sacrifice of praise, right? Singing Psalm, spiritual hymns, things like that. So would, like I said earlier, that would be the pinnacle of what a lot of low church evangelicals would think of when they think of Let’s go worship. Oh, we’re going to go sing a song in church with the congregation.
Joe:
Yeah. I think that’s very well said, and I don’t want to knock that right. I think this is probably one of the first places we want to nuance this
Of saying we don’t want say there’s literally no act of worship because Romans 12, one where St. Paul says to make sacrifices in your body, this is your spiritual worship. I mean, the first thing to notice there when Jesus talks about worshiping and spirit and truth in John four, some people hear that as disembodied, we don’t do anything with our bodies. We don’t need the Eucharist, we don’t need an altar, we don’t need a church. It’s all disembodied to the spirit and truth. Whereas for Paul, spiritual worship is explicitly embodied in Romans 12, but the idea that you can actually worship in the temple of your body in different ways, all the ways you mentioned sacrifices of praise, even the sacrifice of just being inconvenienced for the sake of another if done for the glory of God. So we want to affirm worship in that sense and still say, there’s this thing that seems really central to the Jewish concept of worship that’s very sacrificial. And if we don’t have something like that, we are missing something near the heart of worship. Right.
Adrian:
Yeah,
Brayden:
That makes sense.
Adrian:
Yeah. I mean, as a Protestant, I always felt like there was something more that something was missing in our Sunday services. I felt like, okay, we’re kind of singing songs, we’re hearing maybe even a very good speech, but I feel like there should be something more to this. And so I think that is what I found in the Eucharist, and it just happens that that’s what God had in mind.
Joe:
Yeah, beautiful. I mean, it does strike me as someone who was never a Protestant, that the boundaries between church and not church are a lot fuzzier within Protestantism. If you’re meeting, I’ve seen evangelical churches and strip malls, and if you’re coming together and you’re singing songs together and you’re praying together, you could do that in your car. So what is it that makes this different? And one thing could be the gathering the community, but again, if you’ve got other people in your car,
Brayden:
No, we wouldn’t say that there is a distinction. It’s like you can worship in your car, you can worship with other people, you can worship in your house, you can worship alone if you’re singing the same song, what’s the distinction other than there’s more people gathered around you? And I definitely think that in those circles it’s like, yeah, that is still worship. It’s the same kind of worship, same value of worship as it would be in a
Joe:
Service. It is just striking, comparing that you mentioned the early church earlier, comparing how they spoke about worship, theirs looks much more like the Jewish concept of worship going back to the diday in the first century or Justin martyr or senior anus in the second century. And they regularly will cite to Malachi one where Malachi one God is rebuking the Jewish priest and saying he’s not pleased with the sacrifices they’re offering at the altar, which he calls the table of the Lord, which is important later how St. Paul describes the Eucharist and that that’s going to be something that he sets aside in favor of gathering the Gentiles together. And then says, from the rising of the sun to its setting, a pure sacrifice will be offered to my name. That doesn’t look like they’re just singing songs that looks like there’s some kind of visible objective kind of sacrifice being offered. And St. Paul seems to connect that in one Corinthians 10, he compares the table of the Lord eucharistically to the table of the Lord and the temple and then the table of demons. So one Corinthians 10 has a great passage there, but then the Diday, Justin Martyr and RNA make this connection explicitly. So yeah, it makes sense when you read it kind of through that lens, but it’s fascinating if that’s not the background you’re coming from,
It just seems like there’s something missing there.
Adrian:
And I wonder if this is probably a tangent, but I wonder if this gets into also how we think of soteriology and penal substitution and things like that. Tell me, because people, man, I watch some Protestants who I love, they’re great and I watch their YouTube channels, but they described that God had to pour out his wrath on Christ on the cross because that was the only way that he could be just and merciful perfectly. And we don’t have to get into the differences that we have with penal substitution and all that, but I wonder if this has something to do with that. Because if worship is us singing songs to God or something, then in what sense are we receiving forgiveness of sins? Whereas in Jewish tradition, they would sacrifice for forgiveness of sins and if we don’t have a sacrifice for forgiveness of sins, and that’s just something that happened in the past and that doesn’t really happen now, the sacrifice happened on the cross and we don’t really have anything to do with that now. I feel like that disconnect kind of contributes to that theology.
Joe:
I have an immediate reaction to that. I don’t know if you wanted to jump in first. Okay.
The thing that I think a lot of people miss is understanding what sacrifice is. Something that it was helpful for me to realize was, oh, in the New Testament, they don’t explain how sacrifice works because everyone reading the New Testament in its original context came from either a Jewish or pagan background that had a very similar conception of sacrifice. So we hear sacrifice and we think of just the killing of an animal or the death of Christ, but that’s not it. That’s not accurate. You kill the Passover lamb on preparation day on the 14th day of the month of Nassan, but that’s not enough. Maybe it sounds bad. It’s not like there’s anything wrong with the blood of the lamb there, but that’s not the end of it. So the example I’d give is let’s say, let’s say you’re a kid in a family, you’re of the age of reason.
Let’s say you’re a 13-year-old kid and your family is poor and does not own the Passover lamb under Jewish law, you could share the Passover with another family. If you couldn’t afford your own lamb, how are you covered by the death of the lamb? Well, you didn’t raise the lamb. You don’t own the lamb, you’re not slaughtering the lamb well, the answer is very explicit. The blood is smeared on the doorpost and then you eat the lamb. Maybe you don’t even smear the blood on the doorpost, but you participate in the sacrifice. He become a partaker by eating. And again, one Corinthians 10, St. Paul explicitly says, this is how we become partakers in the altar in Judaism. And he also describes how the Eucharist as a participation, a partaking in the body and blood of Christ, which means we are receiving Christ’s bodily and blood through eating, which makes total sense from a sacrificial context.
And notice this is not a second sacrifice. This is not sacrificing the lamb. The lamb isn’t double dead, it’s still just as dead as it was. It’s a participation in the sacrifice that’s already in one sense, been accomplished in another sense, still needs to be applied. And so once you get that, then it’s like, okay, this tells me a couple things because the other thing to add is sacrifice requires this other thing in operatory aspect. You couldn’t leave the pen open and one of the lambs gets out and gets run over and then say, ah, that’s the one I sacrificed to God.
That’s not acceptable. That’s actually exactly the kind of thing that Malachi won is condemning of offering bad sacrifices. So the offertory aspect, there’s a laying down of Christ’s life that he does at the last supper when he offers his body and blood and then freely goes to the cross. And what penal substitution seems again, as an outsider to be missing, is Christ is the victim, but it’s not clear that he’s the priest, and Christ is explicitly the priest in John 10. He says, no one takes my life from me. I lay it down freely. And for this reason, the Father loves me, not the father pours out his wrath on me. The Father is pleased with the sacrifice in the sacrificial offerings in Judaism, and even in Paganism, there was no sense of God or the gods being mad at the sacrifice or at the priest. That’s just not how those worked. So yeah, it just seems like with the right sacrificial context, not only does worship come into clear of view, but as you say, soteriology changes pretty dramatically if you have a good Jewish understanding of what the New Testament is talking about, which is just taken for granted within the pages of the New Testament itself.
Brayden:
So it seems like at least under the old covenant sacrifice was something that you were bound to do to make reparation for sin.
Joe:
You’d
Brayden:
Take something of your own, whether that be a lamb or whether that be something as simple as grain. There were grain offerings and things like that and sacrifice it, give it up, and it would have some sort of propitiatory effect. Obviously we know from the new covenant that the blood of lamb and goats don’t take away sin, and that’s why we needed the superior sacrifice of Christ. And we offer up Christ’s sacrifice of the mass every time we go to mass. And so what that seems to indicate to me though is that while the sacrifice of the mass is superior to those old covenant forms of sacrifice, those lesser forms were still worship. They were still sacrifices even down to the grain offering.
And so if I were to give a little bit of pushback to the due Protestants worship, there does seem to be a theology and the new covenant not only giving a sacrifice of praise, but offer yourselves up as living sacrifices. And it’s almost like, okay, yes, they don’t have the real presence, even if they’re these high liturgical traditions, they don’t offer the Eucharist as a sacrifice, many of them. But even though they don’t do that, they have these lesser forms of sacrifices as baptized Christians being able to offer themselves up to God as true sacrifices, but not the one true superior sacrifice of the new covenant.
Joe:
I think that’s a very helpful distinction that the places you find the clearest acts of Protestant worship are not the places that immediately come to mind when you imagine like a Protestant service necessarily listening to the sermon is the least adjacent to worship biblically, and it’s still good. And don’t get me wrong, the synagogue is good, but the synagogue isn’t the temple and capturing that well, the temple doesn’t go away in the new covenant. And I think that a sacrifice in theology connected to a theology of temple is really important because the New Testament temple is the body of Christ. John two destroys his temple and in three days I’ll rebuild it, he’s talking about his own body, but then by extension, the eucharistic body of Christ, the church’s body of Christ is called the temple. And then your own bodies having been transformed into Christ through baptism in the Eucharist, you become a temple of the Holy Spirit.
You are a temple of God. And when we gather collectively, we gather as temple. And so I think even in terms of the difference between, you were talking about Jewish hymns of old and now there’s a deeper sense in which this actually takes on a greater sacrificial context because your body has been turned into a temple of God and maybe it’s worth defining a temple. It’s a place of divine dwelling and a place of divine sacrifice. If you look at why the temple existed, it was okay, we’ve got the arc of the covenant. We’ve got the place where God is, and we’d like to be able to build something beautiful to honor his presence. And because we know God is there, this is where sacrifice will be offered. Now your body is that place, but so is the church as the body of Christ. And these two are intimately connected.
The church, the body of Christ exists because of the eucharistic body of Christ. In one Corinthians 10, verse 16 or 17, St. Paul says, we become one body because we partake of the one loaf that he makes that connection pretty explicitly. But yeah, so I think that’s a very good nuance where you don’t just want to say, oh, Protestants that were sacrificing never worshiped God, that’s too far. It’s overly simplistic. There is sometimes a failure to understand sacrifice and worship and maybe a failure to distinguish it from prayer or from sermons, but that doesn’t mean it’s not present. It just needs to be kind of teased out, purified, and in some cases, maybe somewhat redirected.
Brayden:
Right, right. Now, would you say that there’s a distinction between a Protestant and a Catholic doing maybe the exact same act of self-giving, whereas the Catholic might unite that to the suffering of Christ and the cross unite that act of service, act of worship, act of suffering and the Protestant might not? Would you say there’s that
Joe:
Much of difference? That’s a great question. I would say Saint Augustine, when he talks about sacrifice, says basically any good thing that you do for the sake of God constitutes a sacrifice. And so the problem is what about people who are doing these good things without a sense of a sacrificial theology behind it? My inclination is to say God is still pleased with that and it constitutes a sacrifice in some sense. But the operatory aspect is properly an important part of this. Imagine if someone in the Old Testament didn’t explicitly offer the sacrifice but was still trying to give it to God. My inclination is to say God understands that they’re still trying to give it to him. So good intentions do go a long way, but I want to caveat that slightly with Leviticus 10. So Leviticus 10, you’ve got Aaron, you’ve got the high priest and his sons Nadab and Ahu decide to worship God in their own way, and they offer unholy fire before the Lord. And explicitly they’re not worshiping a false God. They’re worshiping the true God on their terms, and God sends down fire from heaven and destroys them because if worship you think about the old English worthy ship, it’s giving the honor and praise and sacrifice and offering and all of this that is God’s worth. Well, putting God on my terms is not giving him what he’s worth because he’s worth approaching on his terms rather than ours.
And so similarly in numbers 15, when Cora argues all of us are priests and so therefore we don’t need a priesthood, he creates the first schism and the schism in the ground opens up and he and his followers are swallowed up again. They’re offering sacrifice to God. And so maybe in some sense the question of do Protestants worship is a good one to explore more deeply? What do we mean by worship, but do we worship properly? Is this the kind of worship God wants? And I alluded to the Muslim question earlier. I think many times, particularly Protestants hearing this of saying, we can acknowledge a sense in which Muslims worship the true God. They’re hearing, well, this is therefore just as good as anything else, but our implicit premise is it is not enough to worship God. You have to worship God properly in the way he wants. And if you’re doing it with bad theology and you’re doing it with disordered rights and everything else, that’s not it. And so we... Read more on Catholic.com