Having a chat with Austin Suggs from Gospel Simplicity about Catholicism, Orthodoxy and his personal faith journey.

Transcript:

Mike: Go ahead.
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, here to have a cup of Joe with my friend Austin Suggs of Gospel Simplicity. Austin, thank you so much for being with us.
Austin:
It is my pleasure. I just looked at, I don’t know if this is the public title for the conversation, but the one in StreamYard. Your favorite Protestant YouTuber. I’m touched, Joe.
Joe:
Yeah, I will say two things. One, Mike chose the title, but two, I don’t disagree with the title. I think I said something about that on a stream once and he was picking that up. I was like, ah, my favorite Protestant channel. You are
Austin:
Now committed to that quote forever. I’m
Joe:
Going to put it on my own. Apparently so, which I’ve said things I’ve regretted much more.
Austin:
Well, I’m glad to not be the most regretful.
Joe:
It’s a low
Austin:
Part. There we go.
Joe:
So, what we normally do in this channel, we have some coffee and talk about some issue of theology, apologetics, et cetera. So, this morning got my coffee. I don’t know if you’ve got anything on your end, Austin, but I didn’t think to-
Austin:
You didn’t send me the memo. I’ve got one- No, I apologize.
Joe:
I got a second
Austin:
Coffee.
Joe:
It is called Cup of Joe, but I guess it’s not self-explanatory.
Austin:
I didn’t even realize that was the title. I
Joe:
Think I was just
Austin:
Called Thursday live streams. Okay. It’s all ruined from here. Well, alas. I’m just
Joe:
Kidding. I got to work on branding. That’s what I’m learning. But in all seriousness, maybe you can introduce yourself and give us a little bit of your own background.
Austin:
Yeah, for sure. My name’s Austin Suggs, which I find a lot of people don’t know my name, even who have watched my channel for a while. I often get called Justin or just that gospel simplicity guy. But yeah, Austin’s my name if people care to know that or use it. I run the channel gospel simplicity, which I’ve been doing for a while, has recently become my full-time job. I grew up in the evangelical church, eventually got interested in questions of Catholicism and Orthodoxy when I was studying theology during my undergrad at Moody. After my undergrad at Moody, I
Joe:
Went on to do- Sorry, just for people who don’t know, can you explain what Moody is?
Austin:
Moody, yes. The place where Bible is our middle name. Moody Bible Institute is a Bible Institute out of Chicago. And it’s kind of like one of the last holdovers from the era of Bible colleges. A lot of them have either shifted into just Christian universities or have gone out of business. Moody is kind of one of the original ones and that has stuck around. Basically, everybody there out of your 120 credit undergrad degree takes like 90 credits of Bible and theology.
Mike:
Wow.
Austin:
So yeah, it’s a lot. So that’s kind of their whole thing. They’ve got a couple different majors, but they’re all ministry related. And I studied theology there. So they kind of build it as an undergraduate seminary is the kind of type of experience.
Joe:
And I assume Moody’s a las name. Moody Bible is not just a reference to lamentations or something.
Austin:
No, it is not. Yeah. It is Dwight Lyman Moody, the mid 19th century evangelist. It is named after him. So he started
Joe:
Out with that. So you clearly had a passion for God, for scripture, et cetera, to end up at Moody in the first place. I think that’s fair to assume?
Austin:
Yeah, absolutely. So out of high school, I mean, during high school, I had a brick kind of brief deconstruction period, but came back, I think, even more in love with the faith. As I was figuring out, every junior in high school gets asked, “What are you going to do when you grow up?” And like most of them, I had no idea. But at that time I was really interested in studying medicine. I was thinking about doing something like Doctors Without Borders. I’d actually gotten in my senior year to a combined medical program where you have your undergrad and graduate kind of all set up. I had my roommate lined up. I was ready to do that, but I was also interning at my church at the time. And at the end of that internship, they offered me a full-time job and much to the chagrin of my parents who are very committed Christians, but also just American parents.
I decided to take a gap year and defer my enrollment into that program and see if ministry was for me. And during that time, I like to say the church made the mistake of letting me teach in the high school ministry because I absolutely fell in love with it, but I also realized how much I didn’t know. And so that’s why I wanted to go study theology at Moody because I figured that was the place where I could learn as much as I could.
Joe:
Beautiful. Now, how do we get from there to here and what does here look like?
Austin:
Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So my current kind of ecclesial context is that my wife and I worship in an Episcopal church down the road from us, which is kind of like Anglo-Catholic and its liturgy. I’d like to say there’s more Latin in our Episcopal liturgy than there is probably in like 95% of the Catholic churches near us. It’s Latin choral hymns and it’s beautiful and we really enjoy that. But that was kind of a process that we can get into, but was basically an interest in more liturgical expressions of the church. And it was something that we found locally and really enjoyed. But how I got to where I’m with gospel simplicity and interested in all the Catholic Orthodox stuff would be a different question. I don’t know if that’s where you were going or not.
Joe:
Well, all of that is, I think having people have a sense of where you are right now, because I already saw someone asked in the comments, they just didn’t know your own background, where are you? And I think the … I don’t know if you want to pull that up, Mike. There was a question where somebody asked, “Forgive me for not knowing…” Here it is. “Please forgive my ignorance because I don’t know what flavor of Protestant Austin is. Why doesn’t the universal attestation of real presence and church fathers convince him at least to Catholic Eastern Orthodox, maybe Luther?”
Austin:
Yeah. Great
Joe:
Question. Which I think this is already giving a little bit of … Because I think people are wondering, “Oh, okay.” You went from a non-denominational thing, you’ve clearly got some depth. I think people looking at your setup can see icons and you don’t seem like the stereotype of many people might have of a non-denominational person. It seems like you’ve been on some kind of journey.
Austin:
Yeah,
Joe:
That’s
Austin:
Definitely fair.
Joe:
What’s that look like maybe? And I know we’re going to talk about that probably a fair amount, kind of where you are, what your thoughts are, but that seems like maybe a good way to dive into the question from an angle.
Austin:
Sure. So when I was studying at Moody, two professors had a really big impact on me and both of them were Anglican and they didn’t cause me to become Anglican right away, but they got me interested in church history, what we might call the Catholic tradition generally speaking, which caused me to look into the church fathers and these types of things. And it was at that point that I became convinced of the real presence in some sense. I would say from there, how I think about theology today would be like a high church Anglican, but whose biggest theological influences are probably all Catholics for the most part. Most of my theological heroes are the people who were parity, I think would be the plural there in Latin, like the experts at Vatican II. I get in trouble with a lot of Catholics because I feel like I’m a bigger fan of Vatican II than most of the Catholics I know, but people like Henri de Lubak, Hanzers, Van Balthazar, Eves Kangar, John Danielu, these are the kind of people that I spend my free time reading.
So yeah, I would say that might describe my kind of theological trajectory from being really interested in church history, which I still am. And then I’m also really interested in kind of the project of what they call in theology resource mont, which is like-
Joe:
I almost seem like you’re on your own kind of resource month journey of retrieving all this stuff from the tradition.
Austin:
Absolutely. Yeah. I think that would be an accurate description of kind of my theological journey. So yeah.
Joe:
All right. Very beautiful. I’m sure many people are going to wonder why Anglo-Catholic and not Catholic or why Anglo-Catholic, especially if so many of your theological influences are Catholic. I’m sure other people are going to wonder why Anglo-Catholic and not Orthodox. So do you want to take that as one giant question or do you want to maybe break it up? Because I think those would be interesting areas to explore. And I’ll say this, maybe a little bit of unnecessary preamble. Frequently, when I see Protestants openly exploring Catholicism, there can be a little bit of a boom and bust cycle where at first everyone clicks and they’re like, “Oh, we’re super excited.” And then if they don’t immediately say, “And I’m entering RCIA on Thursday,” then people say, “Oh, you were just doing this for the cliques.” And I don’t think that’s true.
I think the risk of alienating people is often much bigger than the traffic. I just think that’s a very cynical kind of take. But I think it’s better for people, because as a Catholic, you look at this and you’re like, “Well, of course, Catholicism’s true.” And it seems so natural. And so how can anyone think otherwise? But obviously that’s not the experience everyone has coming in, including people who might eventually become Catholic. It doesn’t always just seem completely obvious and self-evident. And I think it’s very tricky for all of us to sort of step outside of our own hermeneutic bubbles. I know this as a Catholic, when Protestants are like, “Well, obviously this Bible verse means X because it’s what they’ve always been taught that it meant that I’d say, well, it’s not obvious to me. ” And I think so often the evidence for Catholicism can feel the same way in the opposite direction of, well, clearly this Bible verse points in this Catholic doctrine or clearly the history of this points in this Catholic direction and it can be genuinely mystifying even if you’re trying to be charitable to say, “Well, how is someone reading this same corpus of evidence differently?” Like I said, unnecessarily long preamble, take that wherever you want to go with it.
Austin:
Yeah. So I’ll break up the Catholic and Orthodox reasons because I think they’re probably different and yeah, it might be helpful to separate those. So I’ll start with the Catholic and I think there’s kind of levels at getting into this as well. So I appreciate you bringing up kind of the boom or bust cycle. I also think as someone who’s a Protestant on the other side, not necessarily the cliques on the YouTube side, but I think there’s also this kind of boom and bust cycle as far as excitement about investigating questions like this and looking into the Catholic church. So maybe I can tell my own story a bit through that lens. I’ll start upfront though. So why am I not Catholic? I think my biggest difficulty with Catholic theology would be in people infallibility specifically, and we could get into why that is and what I mean by that, but I’ll put that up front so people aren’t kind of like waiting for me to explain it.
But then I’d say my experience looking into Catholicism feels kind of like that boom, bust or like hills and valleys type of thing. So when I first got interested in it, I think what evangelicals, especially who come from low church settings, when they start reading the church fathers, there’s this, wow, they look really different than my non-denominational megachurch kind of environment and they look a lot more Catholic and Orthodox than they look Protestant. And I think that is just like by and large a good assessment of the church fathers. They do look more Catholic and Orthodox than they look kind of non-denominational Protestant. And so I think for me, that created this sense of, what am I going to do? I also got kind of thrown into this by making a video about Catholicism that I had like a hundred subscribers at the time and got like 10 views on my videos and then I made something about Catholicism.
All of a sudden I was coming across all these arguments for Catholicism and I went into that like rabbit hole of binge watching like Trent Horn videos. And I don’t think you were making them yet. This was a
Joe:
While ago. Yeah, that was pre this channel. But watching
Austin:
All the debates and I think I had a first sense of, wow, like the arguments for Catholicism seem a lot better than the arguments I have in response. Maybe I should become Catholic right away. And then I think one of the biggest things that put the brakes on for me at that point was taking a class with a Calvin scholar and realizing, oh, wait, what I thought was Protestantism, my kind of mega church context of this looks a lot different than the reformers at the source. And so then it becomes kind of a different level of question, right? So it’s, “Well, is Catholicism right or do I love it? The trail begins.” Yeah, do I have the wrong typist reprotestantism? Yeah. And so I think that made me say like, “Wait, I should really get to know my own tradition because I felt like I was comparing Aquinas to my local pastor and I was realizing that’s probably not quite fair.” And as I was reading kind of the reformation sources, I was like, “Huh, this medieval period had some stuff going on.
These reformers seem to be making some sense, so I’m going to kind of slow it down and try to understand at that level.” And then I think there were certain Catholic apologetic arguments that didn’t quite land for me at that point because they began to be arguing against a form of Protestantism that I no longer thought was the best form of it. And then I think it took some time trying to understand my own tradition, those things. I’d say where I’m at now is a bit different in the way I look at these things, also having changed within Protestant traditions into a more liturgical, more sacramental tradition, where the questions I’m asking now as I spend a lot of time with Vatican II and the people that I like are more somewhat theoretical questions of like, what would be necessary for unity, also questioning not even just that because I think that was early on, but I think my view of what the Catholic church is has changed over time.
Joe:
Can you say more on that? I think that’s a really fascinating-
Austin:
Sure. Yeah.
Joe:
… just kind of thing to drop.
Austin:
Yeah, absolutely. How my view of the Catholic church has changed
Joe:
Over time. Yeah. You’re like, “Well, I didn’t realize before that it’s actually the horror of Babylon, but I assume that’s not it.
Austin:
” No, I might get myself in some trouble here. I don’t know. We’ll see. I mentioned in our video that we did recently that I’ve begun thinking of Catholicism as something akin to a theory of everything. And I think the vision of Vatican two is very compelling in a lot of ways in so far as it seems to be this grand project of synthesis and trying to see the good in literally anything that is good and how that can be kind of brought in to Catholicism, going through a filter and being seen in the light of Christ, all of those things. But that kind of outward look from the Catholic church towards the modern world. I made a video yesterday in which I probably very controversially said Gaudim at Spez might be the best document that Catholic church has ever produced, which might just tell you
Joe:
A little bit-That is very controversial. I will say that. But I think the thing you’re saying about the theory of everything, I want to make sure people are getting it because I think this is brilliant, that the Catholic church is in this position to say we have the fullness of divine revelation, we have this robust belief in the relationship of faith and reason, that scripture and tradition, as well as those things that we can know from sound philosophy and everything else, we can build on all of this and we have this longstanding tradition that we see both supported in scripture itself, as well as from the light of human reason, of believing even in things like the natural virtue of religion, that if you think of the Christian story as God reaching out to man, there is also this movement inspired by the Holy Spirit of man reaching out to God and without the fullness of revelation, that takes all these various forms.
So how do we recognize having the answer key as it were, where the various members of the class of people seeking God throughout the world, what answers are they getting right? And that’s not relativism. It’s actually the opposite of relativism, but it is a robust embrace of Catholicism is something more than just one theory among many that it’s pointing towards, as you say, a theory of everything, like a robust vision of the nature of reality. I guess first of all, is that a fair description of what you mean by a theory of everything? And if so, how does that kind of interact with …
Austin:
Yeah, so I think, and I probably haven’t articulated this that well. That was a really good description of what I mean by theory of everything. I think how that maybe shifts from my previous version was thinking of the Catholic Church as a bit more kind of defensive. And I think one of the struggles I have today is a lot of the people I mentioned as my theological heroes, they were also at one point banned from teaching theology. That’s one of the fascinating stories of Vatican too that some of the leading experts at the council just a few years prior were barred from teaching theology. And so it leaves me in this question today of going back to like, what is the Catholic church? Is it the church that’s barring a lot of my theological heroes from teaching? Is it the one that elevates them to experts at the council?
Is it the syllabus of errors or is it Galdiamet Spez? And I’m not doing this in a polemical sense of trying to say that the Catholic Church completely changed its mind. Again, I think Vatican II is actually great, but I think in the past, I was reading the Catholic Church primarily as Council of Florence, Council of Trent, syllabus of errors, things like this, which are all part of the tradition. And so the questions I often ask myself today is like, I can’t imagine being a Catholic in the 19th century. Then again, I’ve never been in the 19th century. So my opinions today are very 21st century opinions. I think Vatican II was great. I also understand the trad arguments against some of the continuity, which places me in a just very different position of thinking about Catholicism of I find the theory of everything version of Catholicism, like one of the most exciting intellectual projects I could conceive, but is it faithfully Catholic in the full sense?
So again, that’s a very different question than I was asking a few years ago when I was thinking like, “Were the reformers right about X, Y, or Z?” Or even not so much that. At first, it was like Sola Scriptura or Solaphide. Those questions all still matter, but they’re just a bit different than the questions I’m asking today. So that might describe my own journey with the Catholic Church.
Joe:
Yeah, that’s a really fascinating journey because I think you hit the nail on the head right at the very end there, that it’s not just a question of what do I think on this particular doctrine or that particular doctrine, but it’s this much broader vision of what is the Catholic church in relation maybe to reality in relation to truth and how do we make sense of the way this gets lived out? And I mean, if I can maybe just put maybe a gloss on one part that you said, because you’re right, the Nuvo Theology guys, I can’t speak French, the new theology guys from the early 20th century were very controversial, but a lot of the people who were pushing back against him were a certain type of Thomist and the whole timistic project when it began was very controversial for frankly, similar reasons of what do we have to learn from all these Pagans like Aristotle.
And then it became, what do we have to learn from these enlightenment thinkers or what do we have to learn from Vatican II? What do we have to benefit from even finding out what it is that these other religions believe and what we agree with them on? That kind of perennial question of saying, how do we take … Because if someone said tomorrow, I’m on a startup project on exploring the Catholic interface with interfacing Catholic interaction with Buddhism, apparently I’m not going to try to say it interface, Catholic interaction with Buddhism, that could be really good. That could be really synchronistic in a way that is really bad. And without knowing more about the project, it’s hard to know what to make of that, which I think speaks maybe to the discomfort people have had perennially in the church with everyone from St. Thomas Aquinas to Delubach and you see guys who do it really badly.
So I don’t have a good question formulated from that, but I think it sounds like that’s maybe where some of your current exploration is of how do we make sense of this sort of ongoing dialogue even within the church, as well as this ongoing dialogue between the church and the world or between the church and other expressions of Christianity or whatever it is. I can’t even tell if I’m being coherent.
Austin:
Yeah, I think that’s right. I would add a third layer to that.
Joe:
Please.
Austin:
And I think one of the most pressing ones is between the church and itself throughout history. And one of the areas of thought that interests me a lot is just not history as just the data of history at a given time, but looking at trajectories of theological history and like Newman’s Project of Doctrinal Development and how we make sense of that. And also how we make sense of the church in this era versus the church in this era. It’s this kind of the hermeneutic of continuity, of reform, of like, how do we make sense of going from the 19th century to the 20th century when there’s certainly shifts in attitude at the very least?
I used to look at those things as weaknesses for Catholicism because I’d engage more in the, are there contradictions, which is a good question to ask. Absolutely. It’s not unimportant. I think today I’m just also interested in what is going on here because if there is development, and I think development’s a word we can all like here, what does that mean for where the church has been and where it might go in the future? So yeah, I think that the church dialoguing with those outside of it is an interesting thing. The church kind of wrestling with those people within its bounds who are trying to do that is an interesting thing, but it’s not even so much like the interfaith dialogue that I’m in... Read more on Catholic.com