Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. and first of all, I want to apologize for my voice. I think I’m losing it, but second, I wanted to approach today the question of how to answer the question around our Catholics, Christian and as a Catholic, obviously I think the answer to that is yes, but I think I can give some basic principles to help both Catholics and Protestants who might be facing this question, either wondering it as a Protestant or being confronted with it as a Catholic. Recently, a Protestant YouTuber by the name of Marlon Wilson, whose show I’ve been on before, asked his overwhelmingly Calvinist, I think audience, if they considered Roman Catholics, Christians. There weren’t a ton of people who replied, but of those who did, fewer than half were willing to say for sure that we were. I asked Marlin his own views and he actually argued Catholics.

Were not Christians. Now, if you’re a Protestant Christian, you’ve probably never been in this situation. I’ve never heard anyone ask our Methodist Christians, even though we might disagree about some important questions unless they genuinely don’t know what a Methodist is. But this happens frequently enough by well-meaning ignorant Protestants that in fact, while I was putting this video together, a patron on my Patreon, shameless joe.com shared that when he told his own mother that he was going to become Catholic, she said just kind of casually that he wouldn’t be a Christian anymore. So today, as I sort of hinted, I want to address two groups of people. Number one, Catholics to know better how to react if you find yourself in this situation of somebody saying this to you, and number two, Protestants honestly, so you don’t embarrass yourself by making these kinds of claims without having a better understanding of what you’re talking about.

And I want to say that in love honestly, before I address three ways I think we should respond to the question. I want to talk about two ways that we shouldn’t, and here I certainly have Catholics in view for like, don’t do this. Don’t get defensive. First of all, because it’s really easy to have a kind of emotional speed bump, understandably, right? It’s a tall order for me to tell you. Don’t get defensive when somebody’s making a very insulting accusation about you being told that you’re not a Christian. As a Christian is about the worst thing somebody could say about you. So just imagine someone making a very insulting declaration about your character and about your person. You’re naturally going to want to defend yourself and you’re probably going to get emotionally fired up and everything else. Again, I understand that. I empathize with that, but I would nevertheless tell you, watch out for that because I don’t think it’s productive.

I would encourage you to remember five things. Number one, remember the other person’s awkwardness. Now put yourself in their shoes because chances are you’ve found yourself having to confront a brother or sister about something. Maybe it’s a sin or maybe it’s just something of a non-moral character. Say for instance, you’ve got friend who just smells really bad and as a friend you got to say something that’s an uncomfortable situation for both of you, right? You didn’t want this, and so the least helpful thing to do in that kind of situation is to get defensive in a way that just increases the awkwardness. Instead, move against that. Try to dispel the awkwardness. Be gracious about it even if you’ve been insulted unjustly. Second, recognize the other person’s good intentions. When Marlon shared his theory about why he didn’t think Catholics were Christians, he was quick to say, I say this with love, and you know what?

I believe him. I think he’s wrong in what are some pretty obvious ways, but I also believe his motives are pure and maybe even holy, and so I don’t want to knock that too much, right? I think he is misguided, not malicious. Now, with all of this, you can imagine another kind of set of examples. Maybe the person isn’t telling you you smell because they’re your friend and they love you. Maybe they’re telling you you smell because they don’t like you and they’re being malicious. I’m not talking about that, right? I’m talking about the person who, whether they’re right or wrong tells you, I think you’re an error. I think you’re in sin. I think you’re not a Christian. I think you smell whatever it is in that situation. Don’t get defensive even if you know they’re wrong, even if you know they’re wrong because you want to respond by recognizing the bravery honestly, that it took them to confront you and the awkwardness that they’ve created for themselves as well as for you and their good intentions for being willing to undergo what they knew would be an unpleasant situation for your good.

That’s something to respect and to honor, and that leads then naturally to that third thing. It’s much easier. Remember this, it’s much easier for them to have just talked about you behind your back on more than one occasion. I had this happen at a Protestant wedding. I had this happen in a Bible study where I was the only Catholic. I’ve encountered situations where Protestants have said stuff about Catholics not being Christians, and then they find out I’m Catholic and then they get really awkward. They didn’t want to say that to a Catholic. They wanted to say it about Catholics. I get that sometimes you have an awkward situation where, I dunno if I can go to this wedding, you want to talk to somebody else is kind of on the same page, but I don’t really have a ton of respect for that, meaning I don’t have a ton of respect for it.

When you talk ill of others behind their back while being too cowardly to confront them head on. Now it’s fine if you’re just saying, help me understand this situation. I’m not speaking about that, but someone who’s convinced Catholics aren’t Christians, and both of the cases I’m thinking about in my own life, that was the case. They weren’t asking. They were declaring, but then they didn’t want to declare it to a Catholic. They wanted to declare it to other Calvinists. But that sort of thing, I think whether you’re Catholic or Protestant, we should recognize is clearly un-Christian. That is not what we’re called to do as Christian. There’s model for how you approach when a brother is airing. There’s a model for how you confront error and all of this and that’s not it. And so when someone comes to you appreciate the fact that they didn’t take the easy road, they did the harder thing of coming to you.

The fourth thing, remember how Jesus responded to insulting and false accusations In John chapter eight, Jesus’ opponents claimed he wasn’t really Jewish. They call him a Samaritan and a demoniac that is at least as insulting as being told that you’re not a Christian, right? If I said, you’re not a Christian and also you’re possessed by the devil, okay, I’ve made that already insulting, accusation even worse. And so Jesus could have easily and even justly responded with outrage, but he doesn’t do that in response to the claim that the king of the Jews isn’t really a Jew. We find him responding with grace and humility, but also defending himself directly, addressing their objection, telling them they’re wrong, but without getting defensive, defending without defensiveness, and that’s the model we should be following here. And fifth and finally, we want to recognize that defensiveness tends to shut a conversation down.

If you seem too sensitive to handle criticism, other people are less likely to criticize you to your face. They’ll continue to think negative things about you. They might even share negative things about you to other people, but they’re not going to confront them to you in a way where you could change or correct the record or have a helpful conversation. And so that kind of defensiveness is really counterproductive for them and for you, because you can’t clarify things. It’s a bad outcome all around, they just come away thinking you’re not a Christian. You come away oblivious to the fact that people are saying that kind of thing about you. That’s a problem. And so in all of this, I’m absolutely assuming the best, I’m assuming the person who tells you, I don’t think Catholics or Christians is acting out of a spirit of Christian charity, albeit misguided.

You will find people who are bitter or defensive or just spiteful or trolling or whatever. I’m not talking about those cases. If you don’t know, if you’re not sure which categories a person’s in you would do well to assume that they’re doing it charitably, assume. In other words, the best motives, and we’re going to get more into this and a little more depth as we go. Okay? So that’s the first thing not to do. Don’t get defensive. Second, and this is maybe more surprising, I would suggest don’t debate the finer points of their theological objection. Now, I realize that probably sounds completely counterintuitive and this, I mean I’m speaking very generally here. I would make exceptions to this. If you’re a trained theologian or debater, apologist, whatever, if you know a particular subject matter really well and somebody confronts you about it, if you’re just finished your dissertation on the topic and somebody spouts off something about how Catholics aren’t Christians because, and then they mention your dissertation topic, fine have at that.

But ordinarily that’s not what’s going on, right? Ordinarily it’s a case where you weren’t expecting to have to defend why you’re a Christian and the person confronting you has a whole set of theological ideas that are wrong or at least wildly different than your own. And there’s a lot of work to do to even come to any kind of common understanding. So oftentimes, and I’ll focus on this throughout this video for what I think are going to be clear reasons, when Protestants claim Catholics aren’t Christians, it is I think more often than not based on the idea that we interpret St. Paul’s epistles to the Romans and to the Galatians in a different way than they do when St. Paul says that we are justified by faith and not by works of the mosaic law. We think that means that we’re justified by faith and not by works of the mosaic law.

They think that means we’re justified by faith alone apart from anything other than faith. Now, quite frankly, you can read either of those in the text, both of those can make sense of Paul’s writings to the Romans orations. We’ll get into more of why that matters, right? And so just to give a couple examples of this kind of coming up, John bi, he is the founder of G three, which is the G three conference is one of the largest evangelical conferences in the us. It draws thousands of people, and so he’s a pretty big deal and he wrote a piece in two 2023 about why he thinks Catholics aren’t Christians, and I’m going to take a closer look at that in a few minutes here, but very much at the heart of it. It’s this idea that we believe in salvation by faith, but not salvation by faith alone.

So he acknowledges we believe in the necessity of faith but not alone. Now, strikingly that word alone famously is not in St. Paul’s letters. The only time you see faith alone as a phrase is in James two where James explicitly says, we’re not justified by faith alone. Fine, we can get into that whole deep dive. I’m actually not going to do that, and for this simple reason, if you try to get into the deep dive about why this distorts St. Paul’s theology, whyt pitch Paul against St. James and so on, there is a time and place for that, a formal debate or another avenue where both of you have had time to research and prepare and all of that, but it’s probably not going to be in the context where you’re being told you’re not a Christian. It is just probably not going to be the time to have the formal debate, but there’s also a more foundational thing that I’m surprised more people don’t talk about, and that’s this the word Catholic.

It means universal. We have the whole and we have the whole with all the pieces working together. And so it always feels confusing and complicated for people who have a simpler heretical system, and I don’t mean that again, pejoratively, I just mean that descriptively because nearly every major Christian heresy works in the same basic way. Number one, there’s a fixation you fixate on a particular part of scripture, whether that’s a particular book or a few books or whether that’s a particular doctrine or theme. That’s number one you take apart, apart from the whole. Number two, you then interpret it in a way contrary to the way it’s been traditionally understood by Christians. So you make the whole thing about the mosaic law or justification by faith alone or predestination or speaking in tongues or fill in the blank. It all works the same way. You interpret it in a way where, oh, you have to speak in tongues to be truly saved.

That sort of thing. What are they doing? They’re taking a theme speaking in tongues, which is in scripture, and then they’re interpreting it in a way that isn’t the traditional understanding of that doctrine. You can do this across the board. Then number three, you then interpret the rest of scripture either through the lens of your fixation or you just kind of ignore the rest of scripture. You talk about justification by faith alone and how all that you need for salvation is faith and just that’s all that matters. And then you get these uncomfortable passages like Jesus’s separation of the sheep and goats where he talks about the judgment of the world and he looks at what people don’t do in terms of their works and he doesn’t even mention faith, and you just kind of gloss over those parts. You just kind of ignore them.

Or you say, well, obviously he’s presupposing faith and this is just the outgrowth of that faith. So even though he doesn’t mention faith, he really meant the sheep of those who have faith and the ghosts are those who don’t. You reinterpret all the passages and these often very counterintuitive ways through the lens of your presuppositions because of your fixation. That’s how almost every heresy works. This is also, by the way, how plenty of other things that aren’t theological work like conspiracy theories. It’s you take a fixation about one thing and you make it kind of a grand idea through which you view the rest of reality. Now, the temptation in these cases is to attack the fixation to say, I’m going to debate you about why your fixation is wrong. No, you shouldn’t read the whole of scripture through law and gospel. No, you shouldn’t read the whole of scripture through dispensational theology.

No, you shouldn’t read the whole of scripture through a restorationists lens. That’s tempting. That is usually folly for a few reasons. The chief reason is because this is their fixation and not yours. They’ve probably read a lot more than you have. It doesn’t mean they’re right, but it does mean it’s going to be much easier for them to surprise you with some chapter and verse you didn’t remember then for you to do the same for them. There are exceptions to this. I’ve encountered times, I had a time where I had a Protestant street preacher tell me, you won’t find anything in the Bible that says baptism saves. And then I had him read one Peter 3 21 with me in his own Bible, and he was flummox for a second, but then he said, well, one Peter wasn’t written to Christians, it was written to Jews.

So even then he found a way to reinterpret it according to his fixation. That sort of thing is why attacking the fixation directly usually doesn’t work. There is a better way. I’m going to address a better way in a moment, but I would just say this in general. So debating someone who is really fixated on sofie, on sofie is usually not the way the ordinary Christian should go about it, but this is true across the board. You’ve got some Protestants believe that we all need to be keeping the Sabbath on Saturday, and I’ll bet they know the verses about the Sabbath more readily than you do. Mormons who are convinced that Amos eight predicts a great apostasy, it doesn’t, but I bet they know Amos eight better than you do. Let’s take opposite examples. You got on the one hand, oneness Pentecostals, they believe Jesus and the Father are just different names or roles for the same divine person, so they don’t believe in one God, three persons, they believe in one God, one person.

Then you have the Jehovah’s Witnesses, almost the opposite, where they believe that Jesus and Father are not the same person, but in fact they’re not even the same being that God the Father is God and Jesus is not God. Now, obviously those two things can’t both be true. Jesus can’t both be the Father and not be God at all, and we would say both of them are actually false. But here’s the thing, I would venture that ordinary Trinitarian, Christians, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox confronted with a one that’s Pentecostal or Jehovah’s witness will find themselves kind of frantic and scrambling because those guys are used to having to defend their non Trinitarian theology way more than most Christians are prepared to defend Trinitarian theology because we’re not constantly attacked on it, right? If you are a non Trinitarian who believes you’re a Christian, you’re used to hearing trinitarians tell you, we don’t even think you’re a Christian because you don’t believe in the Trinity.

It’s so foundational precisely for that reason. They often know those verses better. So again, I want to be completely clear. There is a time and place to debate the fixation, and there are people who even off the cuff have the theological, rhetorical, apologetic kind of skills to do that immediately. That is not all of us. And so you have enough self-knowledge to know, am I finding myself being sucked into a debate on a topic I wasn’t prepared for and they were because that’s probably not going to go well, and that doesn’t mean that you don’t believe the right thing you can be right, and that’s still the case. So having said all that, that’s what not to do. You might then wonder, okay, well then what in the world am I supposed to do? So let’s talk about that. Number one, seek to understand why.

Now, I’ll acknowledge this is not as much fun as just immediately bashing people over the head, but this is way more important. It’s way more productive. You’ll never answer their objections to Catholicism and why they think we’re not Christian if you don’t first understand what they even think Catholics believe, and so allow them to present their own view on what Catholics believe. Now, along the way, you should keep two important distinctions in mind. Number one, recognize the difference between saying, I disagree with the Catholic church’s teaching on X and the much bolder claim. Anyone who believes the Catholic church is teaching on X isn’t even a Christian. Now we can maybe understand why someone doesn’t see the wisdom of the church’s teaching on X, Y, Z doctrine, and so people who think Catholics aren’t Christians tend to just want to debate the merits of who’s right on justification, who’s right on the role of tradition or the role of the church or the necessity of baptism or whatever.

But that’s all at that first level. I disagree with the Catholic church on these issues, but if you’re going to say the Catholic church isn’t Christian, you have to say the second thing that anyone who disagrees with my reading of scripture as a Protestant doesn’t even get to count as a Christian. So if you’re going to tell me that I have to not just agree with St. Paul on justification, which I do to the best of my knowledge, I also have to agree with your interpretation of Paul. You got to tell me why. So as a Catholic listening, you want to be listening for two things. Number one, what do they think Catholics believe? And number two, are they giving you reasons why you have to agree with them In order to be Christian? Chances are you’re going to find a very fruitful amount of errors in the first thing to have a fruitful conversation, and we’ll get into what to do next in a second.

But there’s a second important distinction because look, remember if this person isn’t just like a total troll, chances are they’re very uncomfortable with the fact that they’ve sort of said you’re going to hell, right? They’ve just said you’re not a Christian, and so they’re going to want to quickly backtrack and create an escape hatch because it’s pretty clear in Christianity that we’re not to just be judging and condemning other people to hell all the time, and so they’ll say, well, maybe you’re saved in some way, so we want to keep this distinction in mind as well. It’s great that they acknowledge that maybe you’re going to heaven, but that’s not the question. The question here isn’t whether some Catholics are going to heaven or not. It’s great that we can agree on that. The question is whether the Catholic church is Christian. Notice what happens.

First, you’re keeping the topic clear. You’re not wandering off course, but second, it forces a conversation not just about theology, but about what a church even is. And I’ll tell you historically, Protestants are very, very weak on having given much thought to even what it means to be the church or having looked at what scripture says about the idea of the church. So already, just by keeping the question in view, we’re not talking about the individual salvation of an individual believer known only to God. We’re talking about whether the Catholic church is a true church, whether the Catholic church is Christian. Notice the difference there. You’re not going to be able to solve number one, maybe the person has a deathbed conversion. You don’t know. Maybe the person says all the right things, but in their heart they secretly deny God. You don’t know those things, right?

God alone knows those things. That’s not going to be a corrective conversation, but you can have the conversation of where is the church described in the Bible or what does it even mean to be a Christian? Those conversations are objective, they’re external. We can have those kinds of discussions. So then the second thing to do after you listen is to gently correct. Now, I think there’s a few things to bear in mind here. The first is called Lin’s razor never prescribed to malice. What could also be attributed to stupidity? Now, I say this because as soon as this person lays out their case about what Catholics believe and why, overwhelmingly in my experience, it takes very little time for you to start hearing these wild distortions of Catholic theology, these outright errors and falsehoods. I’m going to give some examples in a second here. When that happens, don’t assume they’re being malicious.

Now, I know Hanlon’s Razor says stupidity. It’s sufficient to say ignorance. We don’t even have to assume they’re stupid because even smart people find themselves in situations where they don’t understand what other people believe. It’s hard enough to accurately describe your own beliefs to... Read more on Catholic.com