Joe does a debrief with John DeRosa on the debate with James White on the Mass being a propitiatory sacrifice, and the infamous Ignatius statement.

Transcript:

Joe:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and this is going to be a little different of an episode than I normally do. As you may know, I was just down in AR Kansas this past week to debate James White on the sacrifice of the mass. I’m really pleased with how the debate turned out and from the 3000 plus comments that people have posed so far, it seems that many of you were pleased as well. So I’m going to link to it at the end if you haven’t seen it yet. I think many of the Protestants who watched the debate were actually surprised at just how much evidence there is for the Catholic case for the mass, both from the Bible and from honestly a huge number of early Christian sources. Now on that note, I want to give a quick follow up. One of the issues that came up during the debate was this question of whether or not we can trust the writings of St. Ignatius of Ancho from 1 0 7, whether they’re even from Ignatius and even whether Ignatius himself ever existed.

CLIP:

There has been a tremendous amount of scholarly skepticism expressed as to whether Ignatius even existed and which letters are actually, because there’s a Latin and there’s a shorter, and I was not taught that, but I’m sort of catching up with that. I hope Ignatius

Joe:

Moss and people like that are taking

CLIP:

A view, but it’s a fringe view in Scott. I hope it’s becoming the central view.

Joe:

After I recorded this recap episode you’re about to hear, I recorded it on Monday night when I was only 39. I’m 40 now. James came out with a 90 minute response video claiming he’d been misrepresented on whether or not he’d called Ignatius’s existence into question or whether or not he had called Ignatian Mythicism, the central view.

CLIP:

It’s good to be careful, it’s good to revisit what people thought was a consensus, and that’s all I was trying to do in answering the question. But then by misrepresenting me and I challenged him after the debate, I came up to him and said, I really didn’t appreciate the fact that in your closing statement, and he apologized. Now, I’m not sure what he is going to say on the video tomorrow. My strong recommendation to them is don’t do it. This was a contextual comment that got interrupted terms were introduced to it by Meyer. He seemed to misunderstand, and evidently other people have misunderstood as well. And look, I’ll be honest, the whole reason for this is to try to do damage to me and it’s dishonest. It lacks integrity. It lacks scholarship.

Joe:

You’ve got ears. I’m going to let you be the judge of that. I, on the other hand, went on capturing Christianity with an old friend of James White’s, Dr. Steven Boyce. Now Dr. Boise’s PhD is in Canon in text, and his doctoral work is on what’s called Codex H. This is an early collection of early writings that include the letters of Ignatius. Now, I think Dr. Boyz did a great job of setting the record straight on this issue of explaining where the scholarship actually is.

CLIP:

Honestly, I’ve known James White for a few years now, and that one threw me off. I mean, he and I have done programs together. I’ve been on his show and we actually covered a little bit of my dissertation specifically about Clement of Rome, but from that manuscript that has Ignatius, and I was a little bit surprised to hear him say it because I was watching it live and almost dropped my jaw on the floor. I was like, what did he just say? I thought I heard him wrong at first. Then it kind of repeated it, which will show the clip of, and it took everything in me not to message him that night and say, can you please clarify everything that you just said in that debate? Because that doesn’t sound like anything you would’ve ever said. I’ve heard these arguments from atheists. I’ve heard these from ISTs. I’ve never heard that from somebody like you, so it kind of threw me off.

Joe:

So if you’re interested in that topic, I encourage you to go check that out over on capturing Christianity. Otherwise, just know this. Yes, Ignatius did exist. The central view is that he existed. The questions we have about discrepancies in the manuscripts we have of Ignatius, which are the kind of questions we have about a lot of ancient works, these questions don’t call question the existence of the works themselves. Now, I mention all of that now because those two videos, James White’s response and then the caption Christianity one happened after I recorded this recap with John DeRosa. So I was really honored After the debate, several Catholic YouTubers reached out to see if I’d do a recap with them, and I said no to almost all of them. I don’t want this to become that kind of self-referential thing where I’m talking about myself, but I did say yes to John and the reason for it, at least in part is this.

A few years ago when I’d written a book, I was doing the rounds on radio shows and podcasts being interviewed about the book, and a lot of the questions were the same. Why this title? What made you choose to write this book? What do you hope people will take away? And at a certain point you can kind of do the interviews on autopilot, but when I got onto John’s show, classical theism, I remember being struck by how original and how good his questions were. It was obvious to me that he’d taken the time to read and digest a book and had thoughtful and probing questions. So I would say, first of all, you should definitely check classical theism out wherever you get your podcasts. And second, I hope you enjoy this conversation with him.

John:

So recently you had a debate with James White, a reformed Baptist, and the debate question was, is the mass a propitiatory sacrifice? How is that decided and what does propitiatory sacrifice mean?

Joe:

That’s a good question. So the backstory to the debate is basically this. I had been on the YouTube channel answering Adventism, doing a debate on the seventh Day Adventist idea of soul sleep, and it’s hosted by a guy by the name of Miles Christian and Miles is good friends with Jeremiah, nor I believe they’re good friends or at least friends enough that Jeremiah told Miles, who’s looking for somebody to debate James White And Miles suggested me as a Catholic who’d be willing to debate him, and then kind of encouraged me that, Hey, you should go debate James White, and I was happy to do so. The only issue was this was at this point already mid to late January, and it was the last weekend of February, first weekend of March. Originally they were asking, would you like to do two debates? And I was like, there’s no way I can do my normal job and also adequately prepare for two full length debates with James White.

That was his 295th debate. It was my first live debate in kind of a Catholic apologetic setting. I’d done some online debates, more of like this atmosphere where you’ve got in your home environment, you’ve got everything. But here the request was that I come down to Jonesboro, Arkansas to a reformed Baptist church of people who were pretty big fans of James White and very much not. There’s there’s one Catholic church in Jonesboro. And so I was like, all right, well this is going to be, that’s a little bit of a stretch, but I’m still interested. I mean, I want to go and proclaim the gospel wherever I’m invited. And certainly I don’t say yes to every invitation. I don’t mean that, but if there’s a good opportunity to proclaim the gospel, I should take that or I should at least take very seriously. So then we got started talking about possible topics and I threw out was the Old Testament canon closed at the time of Christ and James shot that down.

That one is something he has claimed multiple times that, oh, there was a Bible that everybody just knew in Jesus’ day and there’s a great deal of Jewish scholarship that that is just not true, and I would love to open that up and really delve into those sources. But I mean I’ve done the research on that. He makes claims about that. I don’t know if he’s done any research on it or not. That was thought be an interesting one. He countered with a solo scriptura debate, but he’s done that a million times. I feel like everyone’s heard his arguments in solo scriptura, you accept him or you don’t. That didn’t seem like a good idea for a debate. I wasn’t interested in just doing one more variation on that theme. So then I actually went to my Patreon, shameless joe.com, shameless plug right there and asked patrons, do you think I should debate James White?

And if so, what are some topics that would be fair, appropriately, broad and narrow where it’s not so broad that it’s like an unmanageable research burden? And related to that, the third criterion I was looking for was it wouldn’t take much prep time. You want it to be not so niche that 12 people are interested in the topic, not so broad that you’re all over the place. So it takes a little calibration. And then the last thing was that it had to be a topic that’s important, and so they threw out some ideas. I came up with some ideas and I ended up pitching eight topics to, and it was these eight topics. Number one was Marriott, perpetual virgin. Number two was the Old Testament cannon closed at the time of Jesus. Number three is the Eucharist, really Jesus. Number four is the mass of sacrifice.

You’ll notice in the original form, I don’t actually have the word propitiatory, number five is Christian worship sacrificial. That one turns out I think we just agree on, so that wouldn’t have been a good one. Number six, does water baptism save us since they’re Baptist? Number seven is divorce and remarriage acceptable in cases of adultery? Number eight is the priesthood biblical. And so I shot those ones over and basically said, I feel like I could do these. I don’t know that there’s are a lot of other topics I would be comfortable cramming in the amount of time we have between at this point, it was January 22nd and the debate was March 1st. So five weeks basically, and I’m still doing two podcast episodes a week and I’ve got travel and all this other stuff. I’m like, okay, and I know James is traveling too. It’s not just like I’m thinking of myself selfishly, but I also know it needs to be something he can prepare.

So he countered with is the mass a propitiatory sacrifice? And that makes sense because then certain Protestants are going to say, yes, it’s a sacrifice, but it’s a sacrifice of praise that doesn’t actually seem to be his argument about the Eucharist or about the Lord’s supper. He seems to be saying it’s not sacrificial. There are other ways we offer a sacrifice of praise and we offer bodily sacrifice in the way Romans 12 one talks about. I wondered if he was going to try to hammer that more. What he ended up doing in the course of the debate was anytime you’d quote an early church father talking about the sacrifice of the mass, he would just assert that they didn’t mean they just meant a sacrifice of praise. Even when in some cases they use the phrase propitiatory or when they say it’s a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins, et cetera, where it’s very obviously propitiatory.

So that then gets to the other half of your question, what does that word propitiatory actually mean? It means a toning or expiatory it also the propitiatory is the mercy seat, the place above the arc of the covenant. So it’s the place in which you are reunited with God and certainly in pagan usage it had a strong sense of divine wrath is being averted from you because angry gods, you’ve now appeased them in some way. So a sacrifice that brings you into right relationship with God would be another way of saying that. Obviously the way a Catholic might think about that, the way a Calvinist might think about that are going to have at least shades of difference maybe. But we both believe that there is a propitiatory nature to what Jesus is doing in his sacrifice. And so the real question could be almost said like this is the mass, the sacrifice of Christ, because that’s what we’re really asking. With all that terminological language, it is atoning, it is ex expiratory, it’s propitiatory. All we’re trying to say is what it is. Jesus accomplishes on the cross in solving the problem of sin in some way is carried on in the mass not as a second sacrifice, but as a new step in the ones for all sacrifice of Christ.

John:

We’re going to get into some of the content of the debate. I have a bunch of points and questions I want to ask you about because it was really, really interesting and I thought you did an excellent job, but just starting with some of a more stage setting questions. You mentioned you had about five weeks to prepare for this. I’m curious, how does Joe Hemi prepare for this debate? What did you actually do in preparation? Especially I know you have some young kids at home too, so it’s not like you could just spend all hours of the night reading and writing and so forth. So what did you do in preparation?

Joe:

Yeah, well, first got the flu, we all got really bad norovirus or something and that put me out of commission. Then moved offices, then flew to California. And so I’m watching this already short amount of time tick down and I’m thinking in my mind, okay, here’s some things I want to maybe say and going through sort of draft opening statements in my head of, oh, this would be a good argument. If you’ve ever done that thing where you’re maybe taking a shower and you’re thinking about an argument you’d like to win, doing a lot of that just throughout the day I’ll be walking and just thinking, okay, this would be a great point to make or maybe I should say this, and 90% of that stuff you never end up saying, which is fine. It helps you kind of think through the issues at hand.

I realized as I was getting into the last week that I was still pretty under prepared. I had not finished writing my opening statement yet. I had been doing research frankly on the side as I’m able to, or maybe if I’m stalled out in one project I’m working on, I would turn to this and just start gathering church fathers that talk about sacrifice or even you can do certain. So if you know how to do site specific searches on Google, you can search by domain. So if you type in site new advent.org/fathers, that is a digital, a very easily accessed and searched digital platform just of the church fathers based on the anti and post Ian fathers collections from Philip Schiff and I don’t remember who else. And so you can do a word search in there that is a really great way to find church fathers who maybe you didn’t realize had spoken on something if you happen to look up the right word. So if you look up the word appreciatory, find them talking about the cross, and you’ll also find them talking about the eucharistic sacrifice, which is great because like okay, very clearly they had this in view, this isn’t a coincidence. So that is a very helpful, I guess starting place. Another good place there is a book by, oh, I’m blanking on the name right now and I apologize. It’s a priest from, I want to say Boston College, I think a Jesuit priest who did a whole book just on the history of sacrifice

In the church fathers. What did they think about sacrifice? You know what, I think I’ve got it right here. Yeah. Father Robert Daley 2009 book sacrifice unveiled the true meaning of Christian sacrifice. And so it’s very much an academic work, but he cites to a bunch of different sources. So what I did there is I used that book as very much a jumping off place. Not every time they talk about sacrifice, are they talking about the Eucharist, but a lot of times they are. And so you can find all these times in the book where it’s like, oh look, he’s already put this together and some of these resources that you won’t find in Shae, they’re much more obscure, for instance. And a number of these I didn’t end up even using, but it was helpful to have these. So he quotes to numerous second century homilies on the theme of the Passover because there is this preaching theme.

Remember in the second century, the one hundreds, you have a lot of Jewish converts to Christianity and Judaism is a much more live reality for Christians in this era. You get much more like Jewish Christian apologetics because a lot of Christians were from Jewish backgrounds, new Jewish people. And so you have Justin Martyr’s dialogue with tfo, all this background to say they talk about the Jewish Passover and the Paca, the sacrifice of Christ is the new Passover, and they make these connections and they talk about what does this sacrifice mean in line of this other one? There’s stuff that maybe later Christians lose some of the Jewish background to the Lord’s Supper to the Eucharist. They’ve got it squarely in view and they’re talking about it. So it’s a great, that kind of resource is fantastic. Other, I mean brand Petrie’s book, the Jesus and the Jewish roots of the Eucharist.

If you want something that’s more kind of on a lay level that explains some of those things, his book is very good. But in terms of just getting, I knew I would need to strongly show, this is not my reading of Hebrews and my reading of the new and the Old Testament against James Whites. This is the consistent reading for 2000 years against James White. And additionally, actually my own book was helpful in this, so I have a book called The Early Church was the Catholic Church, and there’s a section in there on whether the mass is a sacrifice. Now, I am not specifically looking at the propitiatory nature of the sacrifice, but I’ve already done a lot of that research on here’s what Martin Luther and John Calvin said, denying that the mass was a sacrifice at all and here’s a wealth of early Christians before the year 200 that are convinced it is.

And so one of these two doesn’t understand it. And by the way, we’re not just dueling theologians in this case because it’s very clear from both the reformers themselves and from the church fathers that the early Christian worship treated the Eucharist as a sacrifice. So it wasn’t just this crazy theologian out here, it was like every week when Christians would come together to offer the Eucharist, this would be what they would offer. So as I was putting these pieces together, it became clearer what I wanted to do for an opening statement, and I was still stressing out about it until I finally just decided like, okay, I’m going to treat this an episode of my podcast and just write a script and think what would I say in a 15 minute episode? And that’s how long I have for the opening statement. And so I wrote a version that became this week’s Tuesday episode of Shameless Popery, and then I have a tweaked version that’s the opening statement of the talk, and that was just how I was able to finally put something on paper and then of course I reviewed it and all of that.

Then I sent it to Mike Caprice who does AV and all the behind the scenes stuff for turning my me in front of a camera into something that looks a lot better. And he also, he went through and reviewed it and picked out things that seemed too technical or obscure or clunky. I sent it in-house to the other guys at Catholic Answers and Jimmy Aiken had some very helpful feedback including to explain what the word propitiatory means, which I’d forgotten to do in the original draft. And then I sent it to a few friends of mine here in Kansas City and one of them is he’s got a PhD in theology, he’s a convert from Anglicanism. He had really good insights and also said, you’re probably going to hear these objections, so watch out for those.

John:

Who was that? You said that person’s name in the debate so fast and I couldn’t actually catch it. You said you sent it to Jimmy Aiken and Dr. Something.

Joe:

Yes, Dr. Aaron Williams. He was the head of theology at Donnelley College and now is doing a different mission within Donnelley College, which is a pretty cool mission, but that’s a story for another day. And so he’s brilliant, he’s really smart, and so I sent it to four other people and Aaron was really helpful in saying, okay, this part should be clearer, watch out for these kind of responses because for instance, sacrifice of praise versus Atory sacrifice, you should be prepared to explain what this difference is and how we know the Eucharist isn’t just a sacrifice of praise. And so he’s not coming from a reformed Baptist background, but coming from a Protestant background of more of a high church variety, I think it was charismatic and then Anglican. So he’s heard these objections before. He’s probably held these objections. So that was really helpful in kind of crafting that. And then the last thing that was really helpful is Catholic Answers agreed to put me up in a hotel for two nights, so I wasn’t driving in on the same day I was debating, so this meant I was driving down from Kansas City to northeast Arkansas, which is a tick over six hours and the entire way, I’m just listening to James White debates and listening to Catholics like Scott Hahn and Brent Petri talking about these same kind of themes. Sorry, this is a little bit out of order. James White’s prior debate with

John:

Robertson Genis. Which one? On the mass?

Joe:

No, yeah, it was on the mass. Was it Robertson Gen? He

John:

Did two with Syngen on the mass.

Joe:

Yeah, I think he was Robertson Gens. I’m sorry. Yes, he did a great job. But I also got a sense from listening to that, listening to James White’s G three talk. He makes the same arguments over and over again... Read more on Catholic.com