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The Pope on American Politics @BenShapiro @DailyWire

In this episode Trent critically examines the typical Bible verses Protestants offer as proof of the doctrine of sola scriptura.

“Bible Verses that Teach Sola Scriptura”

Does 1 Corinthians really reject philosophy—or is Paul the Apostle targeting a false “wisdom” that opposes the Gospel? In this episode, I unpack Scripture with the help of St. Thomas Aquinas to show how Paul is not rejecting the use of philosophy when it comes to knowing God but rather a human “wisdom” that focuses on the things of this world alone and attempts explain the world without God.
&nbsp;
TRANSCRIPT:
Does the bible reject the use of philosophy? There are some Bible passages that would seem to indicate it does. But, as we’ll see, the operative word there is “seem.”
Hey guys, Welcome back to the channel! So glad to have you with me. If you haven’t done so already, don’t forget to subscribe to the channel and hit that bell notification so you can be notified when new videos are released. Also, I’d like to invite you to consider helping keep this podcast going by financially supporting us on Patreon at doctorkarlo.com with “doctor” spelled out.
So, as I mentioned, the question we’re looking at today is whether using philosophy to talk about God and his revelation goes against the Bible.
There’s one passage that seems to say it does: 1 Corinthians 1:18-25.
There, Paul talks about the message of Christ crucified as God’s wisdom—and he contrasts that with what he calls the “wisdom of the world.”
Here’s what he says:
[PHONE READ]
“For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart.’ Where is the wise man? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? . . . For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified . . . Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God [Christ crucified] is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” (1 Cor. 1:18–25)
Some Christians take Paul to be rejecting human wisdom entirely as a legitimate way to know God. Here’s what the author of Enduring Word Commentary David Guzik has to say about it:
[VIDEO]
[W]hy has God destroyed the wisdom of the wise did you see that in 11:52 verse 21 this is staggering friends for since in the wisdom of God the world 12:01 through wisdom did not know 12:07 God my friends there is a constant tendency to think that the smartest and 12:13 the wisest humans will know the most about God but God cannot be found through 12:22 human wisdom but only through what through the message of the cross the 12:29 pursuit of human wisdom may bring Earthly contentment it may bring Earthly 12:34 happiness though that may be rare I mean I don&#8217;t know many philosophy Majors that I think are really happy 12:41 people my friends this pursuit of of human wisdom it and in it of itself it can 12:48 never bring the true knowledge of the true God
Did you catch that? Guzik thinks Paul is saying that
[VIDEO]
“God cannot be found through 12:22 human wisdom but only through what through the message of the cross. . . this pursuit of of human wisdom it and in it of itself it can 12:48 never bring the true knowledge of the true God”
Is Guzik’s interpretation, right? If so, then philosophy is out the question for explaining and defending the faith. We’d have to leave all that philosophical stuff behind and focus merely on preaching the cross of Christ.
Let’s walk through a few things we can say in response.
First off, from a Catholic perspective this interpretation can’t fly. It goes directly against what Vatican I definitively taught in Dei Filius. Here’s what Canon 1 “On Revelation” says:
[PHONE READ]
If anyone says that the one, true God, our creator and lord, cannot be known with certainty from the things that have been made, by the natural light of human reason: let him be anathema.
Stated positively: God can be known with certainty from the things that have been made, by the natural light of human reason.
So, at least, Catholics must reject Guzik’s interpretation on magisterial grounds.
But not everybody’s Catholic. What should other Bible believing Christians think?
They should be suspect of this interpretation because it runs contrary to what Paul teaches elsewhere. Check out what he says in Romans 1:20:
[PHONE READ]
Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.
That means God can be known through human wisdom—that’s to say, philosophy is a legit tool to know at least some things about God.
Okay, what else can we say in response?
Well, if we take God’s words, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever,” as a blanket rejection of all philosophical reasoning, we end up with some big problems.
For starters, Guzik’s take is actually self-defeating. Why? Because he’s using human wisdom—philosophical reasoning—to make his case!
He’s saying, “Paul teaches that God destroys human wisdom,” and then concludes, “therefore human wisdom can’t help us know God.” To reason from premise to conclusion is nothing less than the use of philosophical reasoning, which is human wisdom.
But here’s the kicker: Guzik is using human wisdom—philosophical reasoning—to arrive at knowledge about God. What’s that knowledge? God can’t be known by human wisdom.
So if Paul really meant we can’t use human wisdom—like philosophical reasoning—to know anything about God, then Guzik wouldn’t even know the truth of his own conclusion that God can’t be known by human wisdom, since the human wisdom of philosophical reasoning was used to know such a conclusion. That’s a classic self-defeating argument.
Another big problem with the idea that Paul is forbidding the use of philosophy to talk about God is that it would mean God is acting foolishly, since he would be acting contrary to His own nature, which can’t be.
Let me break that down.
As human beings, it’s part of our very nature to be rational. We have an intellect, and our intellect naturally reaches out to understand reality. That’s basically what philosophy is: the pursuit of truth, trying to understand the deepest causes of things using our natural reason.
So when we engage in philosophy—especially when we use it to help guide our lives toward God—we’re actually doing something good.
Now, if God, through Paul, were to tell us not to use our reason like that—not to pursue truth through philosophy—He’d be telling us to go against something that’s actually good for us as human beings. That would mean God is asking us to act against our own nature.
But here’s the kicker: If we act against our nature by acting against what’s truly good for us, we’re actually turning away from God, since to act against our own good is to act against the divine will. The order of good built into our human nature is really just an expression of God’s will—because, after all, He’s the one who created our nature in the first place.”
So, if God were to ask us not to use our reason by using philosophy in talking about God, he’d be asking us to turn away from him, which means he’d be asking us not to love Him.
But that can’t be, because that would mean God would be failing to love himself, which is absurd. God by definition is fully actualized in His love because he is pure actuality or existence itself. He cannot do anything but love himself.
So the bottom line is: God isn’t condemning all philosophical reasoning here. That can’t be what Paul means either, since Paul was inspired by the Holy Spirit and wouldn’t be saying something that contradicts what human reason can clearly understand.
So what does God (and Paul) mean when He says,
 “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever”?
Let’s call in some help from St. Thomas Aquinas.
In his commentary on 1 Corinthians, Aquinas points out that God can’t be saying, “I’ll destroy all wisdom.” After all, Sirach 1:1 says,
“all wisdom is from the Lord God.” 
Instead, so Aquinas argues, God is saying He’ll destroy the kind of wisdom “the wise of this world have invented for themselves against the true wisdom of God.”
James 3:15 puts it this way:
“This is not wisdom, descending from above; but earthly, sensual, devilish.”
In other words, God’s going after the kind of distorted thinking that leads people to live only for the things of this world. That’s the kind of “wisdom” the cross overturns.
What Paul’s getting at comes into sharper focus when we look at what seems to be his Old Testament backdrop: Isaiah 29:14. There, God says,
[PHONE READ]
[T]herefore, behold, I will again do marvelous things with this people, wonderful and marvelous; and the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the discernment of their discerning men shall be hidden.” 
What does God mean here? In their Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, Curtis Mitch and Scott Hahn explain:
[PHONE READ] 
Originally this was a warning for the leaders of Israel, whose overconfidence in human understanding was manifest when they paid more attention to politicians than to prophets. The same warning is now posted for the Corinthians, who prize the rational wisdom of men over the revealed wisdom of the gospel (pg. 286). 
&nbsp;
So it’s wisdom opposed to the Gospel, or the desire for human wisdom before God’s wisdom, that Paul is rejecting.
Aquinas continues in his commentary by saying God’s not rejecting prudence altogether either. Instead, He’s targeting worldly prudence—the kind that focuses only on temporary goods and completely ignores the eternal, which is what true prudence deals with. As Paul writes in Romans 8:6,
“The prudence of the flesh is death.”
And here’s where it hits home: When we live just for this world, we start interpreting everything in terms of this world too. We explain the world only through natural causes and push away any thought of God or divine revelation. That’s what Aquinas means when he says,
“[O]n account of the vanity of his heart man wandered from the right path of divine knowledge.”
Fr. Thomas Joseph White, a Dominican priest, explains this beautifully in his 2014 article “St. Thomas Aquinas and the Wisdom of the Cross,” published in the journal Nova Et Vetera. He says that this kind of human confusion—this misery, really—is precisely what the wisdom of God in the crucified Christ comes to heal.
It “opens reason up,” he writes, “to an authentic horizon of intellectual universality.” That’s a fancy way of saying the cross helps us see the big picture.
And in Aquinas’s words,
[PHONE READ]
“God brought believers to a saving knowledge of himself by other things, which are not found in the natures of creatures.”
Translation: God comes to help us out by giving us saving knowledge that’s we can’t have by reason alone—it’s supernatural.
Think of it this way: If a teacher sees their students totally missing the point, what do they do? They switch gears. They try a different example, a new explanation—whatever it takes to help them understand.
God does the same. When He sees that we’re struggling to grasp life’s meaning through the natural order alone—by reason alone, He speaks to us through something that hits at the heart—the cross.
And what’s the cross saying?
Love.
That’s the message. Christ crucified reveals the deep, powerful truth that we’re called to a loving relationship with God the Father, through Jesus, by the Holy Spirit.
Fr. White puts it this way:
[PHONE READ]
The “love of Christ crucified . . . redeems the human mind by introducing it at once to the heights and depths of the mystery of the Trinity.”
So how do we live out this loving relationship with the Trinity?
By imitating Jesus. By living a life of self-giving love, offering ourselves for the good of others—just like He did. By living the sacramental life and living the life of grace.
&nbsp;
So, bottom line: Paul isn’t rejecting philosophy—he’s rejecting the kind of false “wisdom” that pulls us away from God. Real wisdom, the kind rooted in truth, actually leads us closer to Him because it reflects the way He made us. That’s why the Church embraces both faith and reason, not one against the other.
And in the end, the wisdom of the cross doesn’t shut down human reason—it transforms it, heals it, redeems it, elevates and opens it up to see the bigger picture. Which means that when we use philosophy in service of the Gospel, we’re not going against the Bible—we’re actually doing exactly what God designed us to do.
Well, my friends, that’s it for today! If you found this video helpful, make sure to like, subscribe, comment below, and share it with someone who might need to hear this. And for more resources, check out my website at karlobroussard.com.
If you want me to come and speak at your event, visit catholicanswersspeakers.com.
Lastly, I’d love for you to consider supporting me over on Patreon. I can’t continue doing this podcast without your financial support. You can find me over at doctorkarlo.com with “doctor” spelled out.
Thanks for hanging out, and I’ll see you next time!

Does the Bible Reject the Use of Philosophy?

I’m always surprised by the ignorance of most Christians when it comes to <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/who-are-the-jehovahs-witnesses">Jehovah’s Witnesses</a>. For instance, my wife, who is a cradle Catholic, thought they were Protestants like any others, but ones that just happened to go door-to-door in their evangelization work. She was shocked to find out that they don’t believe in <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/in-defense-of-the-trinity">the Trinity</a> or the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/how-do-we-refute-the-soul-sleep-argument">immortality of the soul</a>. And many people I speak to have no idea that Jehovah’s Witnesses practice a form of shunning against former members (called disfellowshipping). “Like the Amish?” they’ll say.
But the ignorance can go both ways. As a teenage Jehovah’s Witness, I’ll never forget the time in high school when I learned from a Baptist girl that she (and her church) believed in the Trinity. “You believe in that three-headed god?” I asked. “I thought only Catholics believed that!”
As a former Witness, I’d like to present a few of the more salient points you should be aware of when encountering a Witness. This will be a sort of “insider’s perspective” on Witness practice and belief, where I highlight some of the things people unfamiliar with the Witnesses miss when <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/evangelizing-jehovahs-witnesses">dialoguing with them</a>. It’s not exhaustive, but it is a place to start.
First of all, “the organization,” as it was colloquially referred to by the membership, is a bureaucratic entity that is constantly changing. For decades, the mainstay of JW life was the reporting of “time,” or the hours spent going door-to-door that every Witness in good standing was expected to complete—typically a minimum of eight hours per month. That requirement was <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/religion/timekeepers-no-rank-file-jehovahs-witnesses-say-goodbye-tracking-prose-rcna126582">done away with</a> recently—an astonishing development, because it was formerly understood to be a <a href="https://watchtowerwayback.org/jw-wb/English/Magazines/The%20Watchtower/1943%20The%20Watchtower.pdf">directive from Christ Himself</a> (203), with the Watchtower’s <a href="https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/201988328#h=5">detailed instructions</a> on how to properly do it being deeply embedded in Witness praxis.
The shunning practice has undergone a pretty significant modification as well. Among other things, Witnesses are now <a href="https://cne.news/article/4220-jehovahs-witnesses-ease-shunning-rules-after-blow-in-oslo-court">permitted to say a greeting</a> to the disfellowshipped person (the exception being those disfellowshipped for apostasy). Finally, one of their lingering failed prophecies has been <a href="https://www.jw.org/en/library/magazines/w20100615/United-in-Love-Annual-Meeting-Report/">further</a> “<a href="https://jwfacts.com/watchtower/generation.php#2010">adjusted</a>”—namely, that “the generation” that witnessed the events of 1914 would not die prior to the start of the Great Tribulation. It’s now been necessary to posit the existence of “overlapping generations” as a suitable interpretation of “this generation” (Matt. 24:34) to avert systemic doctrinal collapse <a href="#_edn1" name="_ednref1">[i]</a>.
Nevertheless, there are a several constants when it comes to Jehovah’s Witnesses. Let’s discuss some common ground we have with Witnesses that you might not be aware of.
What do we have in common with the Witnesses, besides both being lumped into the general category of “<a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/they-told-me-jesus-isnt-god">Christians</a>”? Witnesses are generally considered “conservative,” and so there is a good deal of overlap regarding traditional morals, with the notable exceptions of our stances on remarriage and contraception. But the major (and perhaps surprising) area of convergence is the similar insistence on membership in a visible, earthly organization as being necessary for salvation. For the Witnesses, the Watchtower organization is God’s dispenser of truth on earth. God leads it into all truth through a gradual process of increasing “light” (Prov. 4:18). “Current understandings” that are suspected by a Witness to be wrong are therefore opportunities to suspend judgment and “wait on Jehovah” to correct matters.
It might be necessary to carefully distinguish this from Catholic teaching. Some Witnesses are aware of certain changes in tone in the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council and will attempt to conflate the two phenomena. Catholics believe in one dogmatic gospel, delivered once and for all by Christ Jesus to his apostles. The understanding of this deposit can deepen, and we’re assured of the Holy Spirit’s guidance in this process, but it can never contradict what came before. And on certain prudential matters, the Church can change her stance as the needs of a particular age may require (on questions of social justice and relations with other faiths, for example). In contrast, Witness dogma can openly contradict what came before it, and Witnesses admit as much, based on their belief in progressive revelation. For example, at one time, Witnesses believed that all Christians would go to heaven upon their deaths. Later, in 1935, they received <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Crisis-Conscience-struggle-between-religion/dp/0999499203">clarification</a> from God that only 144,000 would do so, and that the rest would live forever on a paradise earth (16).
Despite these crucial differences in our understanding of how revelation works, Catholics can still praise the Witnesses for seeing the need for a concrete, visible faith community with a clear authority structure. Sadly, though, many ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses have not considered the possibility of entering the Catholic Church precisely because they feel so burned by their experience with religious authority in the Witnesses. Presenting a compelling vision of our historic hierarchical structure and how it corrects the deficiencies in the Witness model is therefore something to approach sensitively when talking with ex-Witnesses.
Remember that if a Witness is willing to talk to you at any length about matters of faith, you’ve already made some progress. Being exposed to something different is all it takes to trigger curiosity many times, so just giving him a glimpse of the beauty and depth of Catholicism can often be the best strategy.

Jehovah’s Witnesses: An Insider Perspective

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Why CAN'T the Catholic Church ordain WOMEN?

Leviticus 18:22 condemns same-sex activity. But who cares? After all, Leviticus condemns things like eating shrimp. So is there any legitimate reason to accept parts of Leviticus as still binding, while treating other parts as obsolete?

Why Care What Leviticus Says About Homosexuality?

Easter is the most important holiday of the Christian year. It’s more important than any other holy day of obligation; it’s more important than Christmas; it’s even more important than Good Friday (which actually is not a holy day of obligation).
Given how important it is, can we figure out when Easter was—historically?
If you read many contemporary sources, you’ll find two dates commonly proposed for the year in which it occurred: A.D. 30 and A.D. 33.
Can we figure out which one?
We can, and in the process, we’ll also learn the month and the day it occurred on.
But we should be aware of one thing before we begin, which is that there has been <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-day-the-church-altered-time">a change in the calendar</a>. There were many calendars in the ancient world, and in Jesus’ day, the most direct equivalent of ours was the Julian calendar, which was introduced by Julius Caesar in 45 B.C.
The Julian calendar was quite good, but it didn’t estimate the length of the year as precisely as we can today, and so—over a period of centuries—it started getting progressively out of synch with the earth’s physical year.
By 1582, the Julian calendar was ten days out of synch, and so in that year, Pope Gregory XIII jumped it forward by ten days and introduced a modification to help keep it in synch with the physical year, giving us the Gregorian calendar that we use today.
This creates a problem when talking about dates before 1582. What date should we use for an event? Its Julian date or its Gregorian date?
Since historians work with sources written before the modern calendar was introduced, they go ahead and use the Julian date for events before 1582. Otherwise, they’d have to change all the dates in the sources they use to make calculations, which would create a big, confusing mess.
So for the material I’m about to cover, we’ll be using Julian dates, and then I’ll convert to the Gregorian date at the end.
The general timeframe that we’re looking at is the high priesthood of Caiaphas, under whom Jesus was put to death (Matt. 26:3-4, John 11:49-53). He was in office between A.D. 18 and 36.
But we can get more specific than that, because we also know that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate (Matt. 27:24-26, Mark 15:15, Luke 23:24, John 19:15-16), and Pilate served as the Roman governor of Judaea between A.D. 26 and 36.
That narrows it down to about a decade, but Luke contains a clue that narrows it down further. He tells us that John the Baptist began his ministry “in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar” (3:1). This year is best understood as A.D. 29, and all four Gospels reveal that Jesus began his ministry after John the Baptist did, so that makes 29 the earliest year for Jesus to begin his ministry. We’re now looking in the range between 29 and 36.
All four Gospels reveal that Jesus was crucified on a Friday (Matt. 27:62, Mark 15:42, Luke 23:54, John 19:42) in conjunction with the Jewish holiday of Passover (Matt. 26:2, Mark 14:1, Luke 22:1, John 18:39). So in what years between 29 and 36 did Passover fall on a Friday?
Here are the days of the week and dates when Passover fell in this range:
<ul>
<li>Monday, April 18, A.D. 29</li>
<li>Friday, April 7, A.D. 30</li>
<li>Tuesday, March 27, A.D. 31</li>
<li>Monday, April 14, A.D. 32</li>
<li>Friday, April 3, A.D. 33</li>
<li>Wednesday, March 24, A.D. 34</li>
<li>Tuesday, April 12, A.D. 35</li>
<li>Saturday, March 31, A.D. 36</li>
</ul>
There are only two Friday Passovers in this period—the one in A.D. 30 and the one in 33, which is why you hear those two years commonly proposed.
But can we decide between them, and if so, how?
The solution is found in the Gospel of John. If all we had were Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we might suppose that Jesus’ ministry lasted only a year. These Gospels mention only one Passover—the final one where Jesus is crucified—though a careful reading reveals hints of at least one other occurring.
However, John is explicit that at least three Passovers happened during Jesus’ ministry. The first is mentioned in 2:13, the second in 6:4, and the third in 11:55.
Since Passover is an annual feast, that means Jesus’ ministry took a minimum of something over two years to complete, and that rules out A.D. 30.
We can thus be confident that the original Good Friday fell on April 3, A.D. 33, which means that the original Easter took place two days later, on Sunday, April 5.
Now we have the date in question, but it’s still on the Julian calendar. What would it be using our calendar?
When historians apply our calendar to events before the Gregorian calendar was introduced, they refer to it as the “proleptic” Gregorian calendar. (Proleptic is a fancy word that means “anticipated”).
Doing the needed conversion, we find that the Julian date of Good Friday—April 3 of 33—becomes the proleptic Gregorian date of April 1 of 33, and the Julian date of Easter—April 5—becomes the proleptic Gregorian date of April 3.
So the devil may have thought he’d gotten rid of Jesus on our April 1, but when Jesus came back on the 3rd, what an April Fool the devil turned out to be!

The Biggest April Fool of All Time

In this episode Trent sits down atheist Alex O’Connor (aka The Cosmic Skeptic) to discuss the ethics of killing animals and human beings. They discuss issues like factory farming, euthanasia, abortion, and whether only God explains human value.

What can we kill? (with Alex O’Connor)

Christians casually acquainted with Mormonism—more specifically, the form taught by the “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” (LDS)—might assume it to be little more than a quirky member of the broader Christian family. Certainly, the LDS do a great job of crafting this image on their website. If you click their “<a href="https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/comeuntochrist/believe">Our Beliefs</a>” tab, the first thing you’re told is that “all our beliefs center on Jesus Christ,” and you’re invited to “learn more about our Savior Jesus Christ.”
Digging a little deeper, you’ll discover that the gap between Mormon and mainstream Christian belief turns out to be larger than it first appears. For instance, while the LDS speak about “God the Father, his Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit,” <a href="https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/comeuntochrist/article/do-latter-day-saints-believe-in-the-trinity">the fine print</a> is that they “don’t believe in the traditional concept of the Trinity,” believing instead that “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are three separate beings who are one in purpose.” In other words, instead of believing in the Trinity, they believe that these are three separate gods who work together.
This has led to a great deal of confusion among non-Mormons. After <a href="https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20010605_battesimo_mormoni_en.html">the DDF declared in 2001</a> that Mormon baptisms aren’t valid, then-prefect Father (now Cardinal) <a href="https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20010605_battesimo_mormoni-ladaria_en.html">Ladaria explained</a> that there had arisen a “difference of practice, insofar as those who had a certain personal knowledge of the teaching of the Mormons considered their baptism invalid, while the common practice continued of applying the traditional principle of the presumption in favor of the validity of such baptism.” In other words, Catholic priests unused to Mormonism saw that they baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and figured their baptisms were valid (since Trinitarian baptisms <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/in-whose-name-should-we-baptize">are valid</a> even if not performed by a Catholic), whereas Catholic priests who understood Mormonism better insisted on rebaptizing Mormon converts to Catholicism.
As important as the Mormon rejection of the Trinity is, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. <a href="https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/130?lang=eng">Doctrine &amp; Covenants</a> (considered by LDS Mormons to be inspired Scripture) teaches that “the Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s.” This idea dates back to Mormonism’s founder, <a href="https://journalofdiscourses.com/6/1">Joseph Smith, Jr.</a>, who said that whereas “we have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity,” he could “refute that idea.” Instead, he insisted, “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted Man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens.”
Several things follow from this idea. First, the Mormon depiction of “God” is clearly not the immaterial Creator of all space and time. He is, rather, a powerful being from another planet who lived, died, was resurrected (seemingly by his own god!), and is now exalted. He lives with his wife, <a href="https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/mother-in-heaven?lang=eng">Mother in Heaven</a>, who is a goddess, but to whom we’re not allowed to pray. Second, this seems to suggest that the Virgin Birth wasn’t a miraculous overshadowing of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit, but the Father physically impregnating Mary. (This isn’t official church teaching but is a view held by many LDS, and one seemingly consistent with Smith’s view of God.)
Third, this understanding of God actually contradicts earlier Mormon teaching. While Smith claimed in 1844 that God the Father has a body, the 1835 edition of Doctrine &amp; Covenants included a section called “<a href="https://lecturesonfaith.com/5/">Lectures on Faith</a>” that taught that there were only two members of the Godhead (the Father and the Son), and that the Father was a “personage of spirit” and the Son had a body (in their words, “was a personage of tabernacle”). These lectures were cowritten by Smith and unanimously approved in 1835. Yet by 1844, a third person had joined the Godhead—the Holy Spirit—and the Father was suddenly a personage of flesh, not just spirit.
Mormon theology got stranger after Smith died, and he was replaced as prophet by Brigham Young. Young claimed that we ought to worship only one god: Adam. <a href="https://journalofdiscourses.com/1/8">According to Young</a>,
<blockquote>When our father Adam came into the garden of Eden, he came into it with a celestial body, and brought Eve, one of his wives, with him. He helped to make and organize this world. He is Michael, the Archangel, the Ancient of Days! about whom holy men have written and spoken—he is our Father and our God, and the only God with whom we have to do.</blockquote>
This idea, called the Adam-God doctrine, <a href="https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1976/10/our-own-liahona?lang=eng">was later condemned</a> by the LDS Church as “false doctrine,” although Mormons continue to venerate the originator of the heresy, Brigham Young, as a true prophet.
Fascinatingly, Young damned all of those who reject the Adam-God doctrine, insisting that “Jesus, our elder brother, was begotten in the flesh by the same character that was in the garden of Eden, and who is our Father in Heaven. Now, let all who may hear these doctrines, pause before they make light of them, or treat them with indifference, for they will prove their salvation or damnation.”
Where does all of this leave Jesus? As mentioned, the public relations side of the LDS church stresses the centrality of Jesus. This is behind <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/news/2018/08/16/lds-church-wants-everyone/">the Mormon church’s move</a> to get everyone to call it “the LDS Church” and distance itself from the word “Mormon.” But again, if you dig deeper, a different picture emerges. Although the LDS Church’s Newsroom <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUs407sadoY&amp;ab_channel=ChurchNewsroom">creates material</a> suggesting that they worship Jesus Christ, talks given to LDS audiences sound a different note. For instance, the Apostle Bruce R. McConkie <a href="https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/bruce-r-mcconkie/relationship-lord/">spoke</a> to a Mormon audience in 1982 on the doctrines that “must be understood in order to gain eternal life.” First and foremost was the fact that “we worship the Father and him only and no one else.” In McConkie’s words,
<blockquote>we do not worship the Son, and we do not worship the Holy Ghost. I know perfectly well what the scriptures say about worshiping Christ and Jehovah, but they are speaking in an entirely different sense—the sense of standing in awe and being reverentially grateful to him who has redeemed us. Worship in the true and saving sense is reserved for God the first, the Creator.</blockquote>
For these and many other reasons, it’s clear that the Mormon conception of God differs in kind (rather than degree) from what mainstream Christians believe. Rather than simply different beliefs about the same God, these seem to be beliefs about radically different gods. That was certainly the view of <a href="https://journalofdiscourses.com/5/55">Brigham Young, who joked</a> about how “Joseph B. Nobles once told a Methodist priest, after hearing him describe his god, that the god they worshiped was the Mormons’ Devil—a being without a body, whereas our God has a body, parts, and passions.” So this isn’t a subtle theological squabble. It’s a fundamental question about whom we worship.

What Kind of God Is the Mormon God?

In this episode Trent takes a look at how LGBT ideology and its views of sex harm the good of friendship.

How LGBT Ideology Ruins Friendship

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CHALLENGE
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“The idea we’re born again or regenerated in baptism is an invention of men that the early Christians would never have heard of.”
DEFENSE
The writings of the Church Fathers reveal that they believed in baptismal regeneration.
We elsewhere cover the scriptural basis for this teaching (see Day 286), and the writings of the Church Fathers confirm that they believed it too. In fact, despite searching, I have been unable to discover any Fa- ther who denied that Jesus’ statements regarding being “born again” and “born of water and Spirit” (John 3:3, 5) referred to baptism.
For example, around A.D. 151, St. Justin Martyr wrote:
As many as are persuaded and believe that what we teach and say is true, and undertake to be able to live accordingly . . . are brought by us where there is water, and are regenerated in the same way we were ourselves regenerated. For, in the name of God, the Father and Lord of the universe, and of our Savior Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit, they receive the washing with water. For Christ also said, “Unless you be born again, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” [John 3:3] (First Apology 61).
Around A.D. 190, St. Irenaeus of Lyons wrote:
It was not for nothing that Naaman, when suffering from leprosy, was purified upon being baptized [2 Kings 5:14], but as an indication to us. For as we are lepers in sin, we are made clean of our old transgressions by means of the sacred water and the invocation of the Lord; we are spiritually regenerated as newborn babes, even as the Lord has declared: “Except a man be born again through water and the Spirit, he shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” [John 3:5] (Fragment 34).
And around A.D. 203, Tertullian wrote:
The prescript is laid down that “without baptism, salvation is attainable by none”—chiefly on the ground of that declaration of the Lord, who says, “Unless one be born of water, he has not life” (Baptism 12).
These are just three examples among many.
TIP
For more, see Jimmy Akin, The Fathers Know Best, chapter 37.
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Being Born Again in the Church Fathers

The Reason Many Christians Have a “Sex Problem”

Dive into the mystery of the Book of Revelation with Jimmy Akin on this thrilling episode of The Jimmy Akin Podcast! Jimmy begins unraveling the controversy surrounding the Bible’s most enigmatic book, exploring its vivid symbols, dramatic visions, and the debate over its author—John the Apostle or John the Elder? He examines why Revelation was written, its prophetic warnings of persecution, and God’s judgment on the Roman world. Join Jimmy as he decodes this ancient text, challenging popular “end-times” theories in a captivating journey through Scripture’s ultimate prophecy!
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TRANSCRIPT:
Coming Up
The book of Revelation—also known as the Apocalypse of St. John—is the most controversial book of the Bible.
Reading it is a fascinating, mesmerizing experience.
It is filled with dramatic images, compelling symbols, and enduring themes.
But what do we know about who wrote it—and why?
Let’s get into it!
* * *
Howdy, folks!
You can help me keep making this podcast—and you can get early access to new episodes—by going to <a href="https://patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast">Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast</a>
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Introduction
Revelation is so rich and thick with symbols that it can be daunting—and not just for ordinary laypeople. Many ministers hesitate to tackle it.
For example, it was the only book of the New Testament that the Protestant Reformer John Calvin did not write a commentary on.
But countless authors have written commentaries and other books expounding Revelation and what they think it means.
These books contain a bewildering array of different and conflicting interpretations, which contribute to the controversy surrounding it.
In recent years, there has been a flood of books, movies, and videos about Revelation.
Many explore what various “prophecy experts” hold will happen in the near future.
An example is Hal Lindsey’s 1970 book The Late, Great Planet Earth, which sold millions of copies and led to him writing popular follow-up books like The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon, The Terminal Generation, and Planet Earth: The Final Chapter.
In such works Lindsey and other authors taught their readers to expect an imminent “rapture,” where all true Christians would be caught up to be with Jesus in heaven while all hell breaks loose on earth.
And the Rapture is something we can talk about in a future episode.
A set of books that popularized these ideas in fictional format was the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.
Spanning 16 volumes, these novels imagined what the world would be like before, during, and after the rapture and related events.
Despite the fact they were fiction, they claimed to be based on what Revelation predicted for our actual future.
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A Perennial Temptation
It’s a perennial temptation to see the events of Revelation being fulfilled in one’s own day.
For the last two thousand years, many have thought that the world was about to end, and numerous authors have predicted exactly when in their lifetimes it would happen.
What all these efforts have in common is that, so far, all of these predictions have been wrong. They’ve all failed.
Scholars have dubbed the enterprise of interpreting Revelation in terms of current events “Newspaper Exegesis.”
Exegesis is the study of how to interpret a text, and newspaper exegesis involves bending Revelation and other prophetic texts to fit whatever happens to be in the news.
Some Evangelicals even have weekly radio programs and TV shows devoted to looking at current news items and reading them in light of what they take to be Bible prophecy.
But is this the right approach?
Should we really assume that the book of Revelation is talking about events in our near future and that the world is about to end?
The controversy over the book is principally due to the question of how it should be interpreted, and the different principles used to interpret it are responsible for the bewildering variety of theories that people have claimed it supports.
This is the first in a series of occasional episodes where we’ll be looking into the mystery of the book of Revelation.
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What is the book of Revelation?
Revelation is one of the books of the New Testament.
Many assume that it was the last book of the Bible to be written, but this is something we do not know. Other books may have been written later.
One reason people think Revelation was written last is the fact it’s printed in the back of the Bible, making it last in canonical order.
This is because Revelation contains prophecies that describe the end of the world, so it’s logical to place it last in sequence.
But just because it’s last in logical order doesn’t mean that it was written last in chronological order.
The book of Revelation is also unique because, although the Old Testament contains many prophetic books, Revelation is the only one in the New Testament.
The four Gospels and the New Testament letters contain individual prophecies, but only Revelation is devoted entirely to the subject of prophecy.
Revelation also is different from the prophetic books of the Old Testament.
Works like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel contain revelations that the prophets received at various points in their careers, and the books collect these prophecies and weave them together with historical incidents from their lives.
By contrast, Revelation presents its prophetic material as a single, grand vision.
We even know what day of the week the author began receiving it—a Sunday—because he tells us it began when
Revelation 1:10-11, ESV
I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet saying, “Write what you see in a book.”
So on the Lord’s day—or Sunday—John received the vision that he wrote in the book.
It’s possible that he saw the vision all on a single day or that it started on a Sunday but he saw it in parts, and he just doesn’t mention the gaps between individual visions.
One way or the other, he apparently received it all in a short space of time rather than over a lengthy prophetic career.
The book is also different in another way.
While the Old Testament prophetic books are written to a general audience, Revelation is written to a specific one.
In fact, its literary form is that of a letter.
It uses the standard opening for first century letters, which involved a (Sender) to (Receivers) formula.
Thus, after an opening title and exhortation, we read,
Revelation 1:4, ESV
John to the seven churches that are in Asia.
The Asia being referred to here is not the continent of Asia but the ancient Roman province of Asia Minor, which is in the western part of the continent of Asia, in the western part of what is now Turkey.
And we know that there were more than seven churches in Asia Minor at the time, but John is writing to seven of them because seven is a number that symbolizes completeness.
So—in a way—John is writing to all churches.
The book of Revelation is thus, in essence, a gigantic letter communicating the prophetic material the author received.
And, by ancient standards, it was gigantic.
As E. Randolph Richards writes in his book Paul and First Century Letter Writing:
<ol>
<li> Randolph Richards, Paul and First Century Letter Writing</li>
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In the approximately 14,000 private letters from Greco-Roman antiquity, the average length was about 87 words, ranging in length from 18 to 209 words.
By contrast, Revelation is 9,852 words long in Greek, making it more than a hundred times the size of a normal letter!
It’s longer than any other letter of the New Testament, and it’s almost as long as the Gospel of Mark.
John’s readers must have been astonished when they got it!
Now, when inspiring Scripture, God used the knowledge and background of the biblical authors, and it is clear that John had a detailed, intimate knowledge of the Old Testament prophetic books.
Revelation contains more than a hundred references to them.
And now that Jesus had come, the author realized that the whole prophetic enterprise of the Hebrew Bible was coming together and being crowned by his own work.
As scholar Richard Bauckham states in his book The Climax of Prophecy:
Richard Bauckham, The Climax of Prophecy
[John] understood his prophecy to be the climax of the tradition of Old Testament prophecy, because in the revelation made to him by Jesus Christ was disclosed the secret of the divine purpose for the final coming of the kingdom of God.
John thus realized that he was writing a work that summed up and brought to culmination the labors of all the biblical prophets before him.
Revelation is a momentous book!
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Who wrote Revelation?
What do we know about who wrote the book of Revelation?
Well, four times, the book of Revelation identifies its author as “John.”
<ul>
<li>Revelation 1:1</li>
<li>Revelation 1:4</li>
<li>Revelation 1:9</li>
<li>Revelation 22:8</li>
</ul>
But John was an extremely popular name at the time.
In fact, John was the 5th most common name for Jewish men in Palestine in this period.
The fact John does not further identify himself—like calling himself John Mark, John son of Zebedee, or John of Jerusalem—shows that he must have been well-known to his audience.
Revelation 1:9, ESV
I, John, your brother and partner in the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance that are in Jesus, was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.
He only says that he is your brother and partner in the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance that are in Jesus.
The only biographical detail he adds is that, when he saw the vision, he “was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.”
Patmos is a small Greek island in the Aegean Sea. It is only 13 square miles in size.
The fact John says he was on the island because of “the testimony of Jesus” could mean that he was there on an evangelizing mission, but the context of persecution and tribulation has convinced scholars that John was on Patmos as a punishment for his Christian preaching.
This has led some people to claim that Patmos was a penal colony, but the evidence does not support that.
It is more likely that John had been banished or exiled to Patmos from a major city.
Banishment was a common way of dealing with troublesome, upper-class individuals as an alternative to execution or forced labor.
A person in exile would be allowed to live in a remote location—away from where he had been causing trouble.
And this seems to have been why John was on Patmos.
There is also a question of which John wrote Revelation.
Historically, the most popular view is that it was John son of Zebedee, one of the twelve apostles.
This view can be traced to as early as A.D. 155, when it was endorsed in the writings of St. Justin Martyr. In his Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, he stated:
Dialogue with Trypho the Jew 81:4
There was a certain man with us, whose name was John, one of the apostles of Christ, who prophesied, by a revelation that was made to him.
However, there is a dispute about this in the early Church Fathers.
Some say that they do not know who wrote Revelation and doubt its apostolic authorship.
Others suggest that it was written by a figure known as John the Elder or John the Presbyter. Elder and = Presbyter mean the same thing.
According to early sources, John the Elder was not one of the Twelve, but he was an eyewitness of the ministry of Christ.
In later years he—like John son of Zebedee—lived in Ephesus, resulting in two famous Johns having their tombs there (Eusebius, Church History 3:39:4-6).
Some Church Fathers also attribute some of the Johannine books of the New Testament to him.
St. Jerome reports that many held him to be the author of 2 and 3 John (Jerome, Lives of Illustrious Men ch.s 9, 18),
And some in the early Church suggested John the Elder was the John who wrote Revelation (Eusebius, Church History 3:39:6).
This may be supported by the fact that John the apostle was an uneducated, Galilean fisherman from the lower class (Acts 4:13) and not the kind of person who would receive the mild punishment of exile.
It has been argued that John the Elder was a member of the Jerusalem aristocracy.
And the option of exile was often applied to members of the upper class when the death penalty would have been used on members of the lower class who had committed the same crime.
&nbsp;
Why Was Revelation Written?
Whoever wrote the book, the reason why it was written is made clear in its opening verse, which describes it as
Revelation 1:1, ESV
The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things that must soon take place.
The Greek term for Revelation— = Apokalupsis—is the origin of our word “apocalypse.”
That’s why the book is sometimes called The Revelation of John and sometimes = The Apocalypse of John.
Or, more simply, the book of Revelation.
And—by the way—the word is singular, not plural. It’s Revelation, not Revelations. If you say Revelations, plural, you’ll signal that you don’t have any real knowledge of the book since you aren’t getting its name right.
So don’t do that.
In the first century, the word revelation meant “a revealing,” so the book reveals information given by Jesus Christ.
And that information concerns “what must soon take place” from John’s first century perspective.
He was writing to warn his readers of a series of events in the Roman world that would involve the persecution of Christians and God’s judgement on the pagan world order that oppressed them.
So what were these persecutions, and what were the judgments?
Those are things we’ll talk about in an upcoming episode.
* * *
We’re now into our second year of The Jimmy Akin Podcast, and I want to thank all our viewers and listeners for joining us!
If you like this content, you can help me out by liking, commenting, writing a review, sharing the podcast, and subscribing
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Thank you, and I’ll see you next time
God bless you always!

The Book of Revelation

Especially in times of upset within the Church, we might well ask just what the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/holy-ghost">Holy Spirit</a> is doing. Does the Spirit really lead the Church? And if so, why so many problems and confusions? Jimmy Akin responds.

How the Holy Spirit Guides the Church

Most Catholics, in preparation for the Sacrament of Confirmation, memorized the “Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit.” I say “memorized” them because I suspect that very few could explain them, and even fewer may have subsequently thought about them as what they received when they were “sealed with the Gift of the Holy Spirit.”
One of those gifts used to be called “the fear of the Lord.” In fact, if you look at the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1831), it’s still called “the fear of the Lord.”
If you deal with the U.S. catechetical establishment, however, you’ll often see that gift renamed as “wonder and awe.” I assume that the editors of these catechisms think they are making that particular gift more intelligible and less frightening to people. I’m not so sure.
What is “fear of the Lord”? Does God want us to be scared of him?
No.
On the other hand, Proverbs (9:10) tells us, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” That means we should explain what both “wisdom” (another gift of the Holy Spirit) and “fear of the Lord” are.
Wisdom from a biblical perspective has nothing to do with book learning. Wisdom is about knowing how to live rightly and well . . . and since we can do neither without living in right relationship to God, wisdom has to be related to God.
The biblical opposite of “wisdom” is “foolishness.” “The fool has said in his heart, “there is no God’” (Ps. 14:1). In short, the fool lives his life as if God did not exist, the wise man as if he does.
God loves us, but God is not just an “<a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/was-jesus-nice">old buddy and pal</a>.” God is God . . . and we are not. So one of the things “fear of the Lord” (and its allied gift, piety) teaches us is to recognize that there is an unbridgeable qualitative difference between Creator and creature, God and me.
In the Old Testament, whenever holy men first encounter God, their reaction is fear. Isaiah, for example (ch. 6), has a vision of God and says, “Woe is me!” Elijah hides his face when he recognizes God’s whisper outside the cave. And when Peter recognizes in his miraculous catch of fish who Jesus is, he tells him, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man.”
That “fear” comes from a recognition of the disparity between the Thrice-Holy God and us. It comes from an awareness that we are sinners. But that is not the “fear of the Lord” as a gift of the Holy Spirit.
Yes, “fear of the Lord” recognizes the dissonant gap between God and me. But it also recognizes two other things: that God loves me, and that he wants to save me.
Fear that drives me from God is not of God. Fear that separates me from God is not from God. Yes, that awareness enters into our relationship with God, but if that is all there is, it is not from him.
The German Lutheran theologian Rudolf Otto spoke of God as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. God is the “great” or “tremendous mystery” in the sense that we are aware of how different and inferior to him we are—not just because we are creatures (God, after all, made us creatures), but because we are sinners (which is our own doing). It is that dissonance that makes us want to flee.
But at the same time, God is the “fascinating mystery,” the mystery that attracts and interests us, that somehow makes us want to stay. Isaiah recognized his sinfulness—but stayed, asking to be converted. Peter recognized his sinfulness—and would sin even more—but stayed, ready to get up when he fell down. God fascinated them. He filled them with “awe and wonder.”
That’s what the gift of “fear of the Lord” or “wonder and awe” is all about. It holds those two poles together: an awareness of how we don’t measure up to God, especially by our own sinful doing, but also how we are attracted to God and want to remain with him. The solution is not flight, but conversion. “Fear of the Lord” (and the accompanying gift of piety) makes us want to change so that we are what God wants us to be.
“Fear,” especially to modern man, can have a paralyzing, even an alienating effect. If that’s what “fear of the Lord” means to people, they’re wrong. God, who repeatedly tells people throughout the Bible, “Be not afraid!”, does not want to drive us from himself.
He wants us to recognize his glory, to experience the awe and wonder of him who loves us in our lowliness. That’s why, perhaps, “awe and wonder” might better capture what this gift is about.
. . . but with one caveat: “Awe and wonder” is about who God is. An “awe and wonder” that downplays the significance of how we do not measure up, of the dissonance between the All-Holy God and us, is distortive. Holding “fear” and “fascination” together is essential, and the bridge is conversion.
Whatever causes us to lose a sense of sin is also not from God. Salvation is not cheap, and we needed and need to be saved. Conversion is an ongoing aspect of the life of the Christian, because “be ye perfect as my heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48) is a mandate for a lifetime, not a one-moment thing. It’s driven not by fear, but by love: Because love is dynamic, there’s no point where “I love you enough.” The drive to change comes precisely from fascination with, awe and wonder at, the beloved.
How much more true is that when the beloved is God?
(With acknowledgment to Fr. David Whitestone for the initial idea for this essay).

What We Mean by ‘Fear of the Lord’

Today there is a lot of public attention around mental illness especially the rise of anxiety and depression among young people. However, it’s not just young people; anxiety rose across all demographic categories since 2008. Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the US affecting 19% of the population. These trends are distressing, but are anxiety and depression something new to the human condition? Certainly not. While we may not have the stats to show the comparison, anxiety, depression – what the medieval thinkers referred to as “sadness of the soul” – has been around since the dawn of humanity. The question before us is: how do we remedy this aspect of the human condition? We will explore certain insights into remedies that St. Thomas Aquinas provides for those of us who struggle with the daily grind of life that causes sorrow sadness.

Remedies Against Sadness of the Soul | Dr. Joe Wurtz

Oneness Pentecostal: Is the Catholic Church the One True Church?

Is There a Hell, and Do Most People Go There?

Why “Bind and Loose” Doesn’t Apply to Everyone

Best Way to Bring Faith to Nonbelievers

Why Jesus Didn’t Let Mary Magdalene Touch Him

Who Was in Heaven When Enoch & Elijah Arrived?

&#8220;Why is the Catholic Church the One True Church?&#8221; This episode dives into the unique claims of the Catholic faith, while also addressing pressing questions like the existence of Hell and the fate of souls, the significance of John 6, and effective ways to share faith with nonbelievers.
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Invite our apologists to speak at your parish! Visit <a href="https://www.catholic.com/speakers">Catholicanswersspeakers.com</a>

Why is the Catholic Church the One True Church, Hell, and Faith?

Did Lions Eat Meat Before the Fall? The Shocking Truth About Adam’s Sin

In this free-for-all-Friday, Trent shares his love of Rocky, his own recent training injury, and ranks the opponents in the Rocky and Creed films.

FFAF: Ranking Rocky (and Creed’s) Opponents

In this “open mailbag episode” Trent answers his patron’s questions about a wide variety of subjects from deep theological questions to controversial issues like Santa or “pineapple on pizza?”.

Antiochian Popes, Santa, Calvinism, and Crucifix Concerns (Open mailbag)

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“The Gospels don’t reliably convey the teachings of Jesus. The evangelists invented material based on their own views and the needs of their communities.”
DEFENSE
The evidence shows the Gospels are reliable.
Perhaps the greatest controversy in the early Church was whether Gentiles had to be circumcized and become Jews to be saved. This controversy is mentioned multiple times in Acts (10:1–11:18, 15:1–31, 21:25), and it dominates Paul’s epistles of Romans and Galatians. If there was ever a controversy to tempt people to make up a saying of Jesus to settle the matter, it would be this. Yet the circumcision controversy isn’t mentioned anywhere in the Gospels. That is a sign the evangelists did not feel free to make up teachings and put them on Jesus’ lips.
This is also indicated by the way Mark handles the related question of whether kosher laws were still binding. In his account of a controversy in Jesus’ day about why the disciples did not ritually wash their hands before eating, we read of Jesus saying: “‘Do you not see that whatever goes into a man from outside cannot defile him, since it enters, not his heart but his stomach, and so passes on?’ (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, ‘What comes out of a man is what defiles a man. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery’” (Mark 7:18–21).
In a traditional Jewish view, unclean hands would defile food and make the eater ceremonially unclean. Jesus indicates this isn’t true, for any dirt contaminating the food would pass out of the body without bringing about true, spiritual uncleanliness. The comment “thus he declared all foods clean” is Mark’s application of Jesus’ teaching to the different question of kosher foods. This shows Mark did not feel free to invent a teaching of Jesus.
A final point is the fact that Paul’s teachings are nowhere quoted in the Gospels. Besides Peter, Paul was the most influential apostle. His letters were among the earliest New Testament writings, and if the evangelists felt free to simply attribute things to Jesus, we would expect some of the things Paul wrote to end up on Jesus’ lips. Yet we don’t, not even in Luke, which was written by one of Paul’s traveling companions.
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The Teachings of Jesus

What is Marian Consecration and how do I go about doing it?

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In honor of All Saints Day, in this episode Trent answers a variety of Protestant objections to the intercession of the saints.
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Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
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Happy All Saints Day, everyone. In today&#8217;s episode, I want to respond to a few objections to seeking the intercession of the saints, or what many people call, praying to the saints. But before I do that, I ask for intercession on your behalf, and as a viewer of this channel, if you could like this episode and subscribe so you don&#8217;t miss our content, I would greatly appreciate it. I would definitely appreciate if you financially supported us at trenthornpodcast.com so we can keep reaching lots of people.
All right, so in today&#8217;s episode, I&#8217;m not going to cover every objection to seeking the intercession of the saints, but there was a recent video put out by a group called Abolitionist Rising that I wanted to take a look at. Basically, the objection is that expecting Mary to be able to pray for millions of people who seek her intercession all around the world at the same time in lots of different languages would basically make Mary omniscient. And so, Catholics would be guilty of idolatry in treating her as being divine.
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No shade on Mary whatsoever, but she&#8217;s not divine. She&#8217;s a human being, and she&#8217;s dead, and she can&#8217;t hear anyone talking to her. On top of that, the reason that we think that it kind of is worshipful to think that Mary hears our prayers is there are back to a billion Catholics. Say there are millions of Catholics right now praying Hail Marys. Are you saying that there&#8217;s a dead woman in heaven who can hear all of those prayers all at once all over the globe? I mean, is she omniscient, and she can process it like she&#8217;s omnipresent, I mean, omniscient, omnipresent, and then she&#8217;s able to sort of hear these and then pass them on to God? Is she all powerful? What is it? It basically seems like you&#8217;re describing God.
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So, the objection is that Mary&#8217;s ability, really all the saints, but especially Mary&#8217;s ability to hear so many prayers all at once would make her omniscient or all knowing, but only God is all knowing. So, Catholics would be guilty of idolatry, treating Mary as being a deity. A fair number of Protestants have made this objection. The televangelist Jimmy Swaggart asks, &#8220;How can finite beings hear the prayers of men who are on this earth? The only way they could hear so many thousands of prayers and discern the heart attitudes of all these people is if they were both omniscient and omnipresent. In other words, each saint would have to be God in order to accomplish this.&#8221; Eric Svendsen, in his book Evangelical Answers, makes a similar objection. &#8220;In order to hear all those prayers at once, she would have to be omniscient, all knowing, an attribute that is the property of God alone.&#8221;
First, even if you use a restricted definition of omniscience, like having all knowledge, Mary would not need to have all knowledge to answer so many prayers. Mary doesn&#8217;t need to know the location of every atom in the observable universe. She doesn&#8217;t need to know the 100 trillion digits of pi that have been calculated so far. Her knowledge would be a tiny fraction of what God knows about the physical universe. Her knowledge would be finite and thus within the realm of what a creature can know.
In response, Svendsen says this, &#8220;One may as well argue that omniscience is not needed, even by God himself, since all things that can be known, no matter how many, are nevertheless limited to a finite number.&#8221; So, Svendsen&#8217;s argument is that if the large amount of knowledge of Mary and the saints in heaven is still finite and so they are not omniscient, then that means God isn&#8217;t omniscient either because his knowledge is finite. But Svendsen&#8217;s wrong.
The traditional definition of omniscience means having unlimited or infinite knowledge. God knows all truths, and there are an infinite number of those when you factor in mathematical truths, propositional truths, and if you hold to this view, counterfactual truths, truths about the worlds God could have made but did not make. In light of that possible knowledge, what people pray for on earth is almost nothing in comparison to God&#8217;s infinite knowledge. So, the saints, the knowledge they have, comes nowhere close to omniscience.
But you might ask, how can Mary and the saints still have so much knowledge? Well, Luke 1:37 says that with God nothing is impossible. As long as something is not a logical or metaphysical contradiction, God can do it. What would stop an omnipotent God from allowing Mary and the saints to have superhuman knowledge of what happens on the earth? To say God could not give them this knowledge would seem to deny God&#8217;s all-powerful nature.
It&#8217;s also possible that the saints only need to know we have an intention to pray for, just as you and I might pray for a special intention, or that time might flow differently for the saints in heaven and be stretched out so they can intercede for all these requests they get in a single moment. But even if we can&#8217;t explain how this is done, there&#8217;s no reason to say that God can&#8217;t do it, and especially to say that God cannot give an ability to his friends, the saints, that is also held by his enemy, the devil.
Here&#8217;s what I mean. Christians generally believe the devil personally tempts each one of them. I Peter 5:8-9 says, &#8220;Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. Resist him firm in your faith, knowing that the same experience of suffering is required of your brotherhood throughout the world.&#8221;
That would mean the devil has the superhuman ability to track billions of human beings and their unique temptations all at the same time. Why would God be unable to give his friends an ability to pray for each person that the devil individually tempts? The fact that the devil is able to afflict so many human beings at once does not prove the devil is divine. In fact, I remember a debate between Patrick Madrid and James White over prayer to the saints, and an audience member asked White how the devil can tempt so many people, if such knowledge would make someone divine.
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This is for Dr. White. If Mary and the other saints supposedly can&#8217;t handle those prayers from us on earth because they&#8217;re not God, how is it then possible for Satan to be tempting all of us as constantly and consistently as he does? Do you believe Satan to be omniscient?
No, it&#8217;s through his demons.
Mr. Madrid, do you have a response?
He asked me to be succinct.
Well, I think that what we just saw here is a clear example of dodging a bullet because that question was right on target. In other words, the devil is a creature. St. Peter tells us in his second epistle that Satan is like a roaring lion prowling around. He doesn&#8217;t say Satan and his crew. Satan, himself, the devil. So, there is a unique and personal quality to the temptation that Satan, the individual being himself, carries out. The questioner was absolutely right. This is something that&#8217;s going on on a global scale, affecting billions of people, and Jim simply just dodged the bullet by saying, &#8220;Oh, well, it&#8217;s his demons doing it.&#8221; Everyone in the room, I think, understands the force of the question, that it&#8217;s a creature performing an unbelievable action that we can&#8217;t understand how it could be done, but the fact is this creature is capable of doing it. The extension of that thought is that the saints in heaven, even more so because they are in Christ and through His grace, are capable of doing astounding things.
Next question.
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So, according to White, the devil doesn&#8217;t really tempt each of us. He&#8217;s just like a CEO that has his employees do it for him. Now, I admit, some CEOs might be a helpful analogy for the devil, but even in this case, the devil would have to have knowledge far beyond what humans know in order to manage such an operation. But the traditional view makes more sense, that the devil has an intimate knowledge of what tempts us, and so he personally seeks each of our downfalls, which is why God has given knowledge and power to various creatures, like our guardian angels or the saints in heaven, to protect and pray for us. I also found this clip of White making the claim that Mary has no idea people are seeking her intercession on earth because that would cause her unbearable sadness that has no place in heaven.
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I can tell you, I&#8217;ve said this to a number of Roman Catholics, and I&#8217;ll say it to you, you need to understand something. Mary does not have a clue that anyone on this planet has ever tried to pray to her because it would break her heart. Once you are at rest in Christ, the tears are wiped away. You&#8217;re not up there in heaven suffering because billions of people are trying to pray to you. She has no idea that it&#8217;s ever happened. God would not make her suffer in that way.
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Of course, this assumes that asking the saints for any help constitutes blasphemy, which just isn&#8217;t true. But let&#8217;s assume that some people do idolize Mary. Saint Epiphanius describes an early heretical sect called the Collyridians. They offered cakes to Mary as sacrificial worship, which is wrong. You can only give that to the trinity. Mary and the saints may be aware of blasphemies people commit, and they pray for them to repent. The Bible even describes saints in heaven being aware of evil on earth, making a request to God about it, and interceding with human prayers.
Revelation 6:9-11 describes it this way, &#8220;John, the evangelist, sees the following in heaven. I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne. They cried out with a loud voice, &#8216;Oh, sovereign Lord, holy and true. How long before thou will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell upon the earth?&#8217; Then they were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer until the number of their fellow servants and their brethren should be complete, who were to be killed as they themselves had been.&#8221;
Notice that the martyrs in heaven are aware of persecution happening on the earth and that they will know this persecution will still happen until a certain number of fellow martyrs have joined them. They also make a request, or a prayer to God, on behalf of those who are being persecuted. Revelation 5:8 describes saints in heaven when it talks about how, &#8220;24 elders fell down before the lamb, each holding a harp and with golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints.&#8221;
Here&#8217;s a clip from the Protestant author, Randy Alcorn, who makes a unique argument for the ability of the saints in heaven to at least know what is happening on the earth. Alcorn believes we should not seek the saint&#8217;s intercession, but he&#8217;s quite optimistic about the saints knowing what is happening on earth and consequently them being able to pray for us as a result.
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You look at Luke chapter 15 where Jesus says there&#8217;s rejoicing in the presence of the angels when a sinner repents. It doesn&#8217;t say the angels rejoice. It could easily say the angels rejoice. It doesn&#8217;t say that. I&#8217;m sure they do rejoice, but it&#8217;s saying there&#8217;s rejoicing in the presence of the angels when a sinner on earth rejoices, I mean, repents. So, how do they know that the sinner on earth has repented? They have to know about it in order to rejoice. Who are those people in the presence of the angels? I think it&#8217;s the people of God. It&#8217;s the part of the body of Christ that&#8217;s already gone home. They maybe prayed for years for that person. They see that that person repented. There&#8217;s rejoicing in the very presence of the angels, where the people of God are, when someone down on earth repents.
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This makes perfect sense of what Jesus says in Luke 15. &#8220;There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous persons who need no repentance.&#8221; And, &#8220;There is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents.&#8221; This could mean the joy is solely among or before the angels, but I see no reason to restrict it to them and not to saints in heaven. In this passage, Jesus is responding to the grumbling of the Pharisees over his outreach to notorious sinners like prostitutes. They would not rejoice over those sinners repenting, but Jesus says that is not what will happen in the kingdom of heaven. If this rejoicing only took place among the angels and not the saints who could still be as heartless as the Pharisees, it would really diminish the force of Jesus&#8217;s argument.
In fact, another passage that provides evidence the saints are aware of what is happening on earth can be found in chapter 11 of the letter to the Hebrews. In this passage, the author describes heroes of Israel&#8217;s past like Abraham and Moses, whose faith allowed them to perform amazing feats for God and his people. Then in Hebrews 12:1, immediately after, the author concludes his description with this appeal. &#8220;Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us.&#8221;
Now, some interpretations reduce the cloud to being stories of faith that are witnesses to us, examples of how to live out a faith-filled life. Other interpretations might say that they are witnesses of God and Christ by their faith, but these interpretations neglect the race imagery the author of Hebrews is using. He depicts living Christians as those who are running a race, an imitation of Jesus who ran it and then sat down in heaven.
The Protestant scholar, William Barclay, says of this passage, &#8220;Christians are like runners in some crowded stadium. As they press on, the crowd looks down, and the crowd looking down are those who have already won the crown.&#8221; But even if the saints know about our struggles, why should we think it&#8217;s okay to ask for their intercession?
First, we should not assume a devotional practice is wrong unless there is an example of it in scripture. The Bible never describes people praying directly to the Holy Spirit, for example. But there&#8217;s nothing wrong with praying, &#8220;Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love.&#8221; To say it&#8217;s wrong, since the Bible does not describe the practice, would impose the un-biblical doctrine of sola scriptura on Christian freedom. But doesn&#8217;t the Bible say we should not talk to the dead? Our old friend, Greg at Bible Flock Box, is a fan of this objection.
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Deuteronomy chapter 18 verse 11 condemns spiritists, mediums, and calling up the dead. This means that Christians shouldn&#8217;t pray to Mary or the saints, like the Catholic Church does, because that&#8217;s a form of spiritism.
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Now, the catechism says, &#8220;All forms of divination are to be rejected, recourse to Satan or demons conjuring up the dead or other practices falsely supposed to unveil the future.&#8221; This would be necromancy, but seeking the intercession of the saints is not necromancy. Asking the saints to pray for us just involves sharing personal requests through prayer. Necromancy involves using magic or occult practices to extract information from the dead. If it were always wrong to talk to the dead, Jesus would be guilty of this sin when he spoke to Moses on the Mount of Transfiguration, since Moses had died centuries earlier.
According to my colleague, Jimmy Aiken, the fact that necromancy was for purposes of gaining information is made clear by the Hebrew terms for medium, spirit inquirer, wizard, a spiritist; and necromancer, an inquirer of the dead. The focus on gaining information is also made clear by the context in Deuteronomy, which specifies that God will send His people prophets instead of allowing them to use mediums, wizards, and necromancers. So, since seeking the intercession of the saints is only one way communication, not two-way, it&#8217;s not the sin of necromancy.
All right, that&#8217;s going to do it for us today. As I said, there are other objections that can be raised. I look forward to engaging those in future episodes. For now, though, you can check out my book, the Case for Catholicism, which has a chapter on the intercession and veneration of the saints. So, thank you guys so much. Thank you for your subscriptions, by the way, which helped to put us over a hundred thousand subscribers. Let&#8217;s just keep reaching more and more people. But yeah, thank you guys so much, and I hope you have a very blessed day.
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Answering Objections to the Intercession of the Saints

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CHALLENGE
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“The concept of revelation is irrational. Why should we believe something just because an alleged prophet says so?”
DEFENSE
The concept of revelation is not irrational. In fact, it’s something we use all the time.
Something is revealed if it is disclosed to us by another rather than be- ing personally verified. Sometimes this is also referred to as accepting a claim “on authority.”
C.S. Lewis writes:
Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place as New York. I have not seen it myself. I could not prove by abstract reasoning that there must be such a place. I believe it because reliable people have told me so. The or- ordinary man believes in the solar system, atoms, evolution, and the circulation of the blood on authority—because the scientists say so.
Every historical statement in the world is believed on authority. None of us has seen the Norman Conquest or the defeat of the [Spanish] Armada. None of us could prove them by pure logic as you prove a thing in mathematics. We believe them simply because people who did see them have left writings that tell us about them: in fact, on authority. A man who jibbed at authority in other things as some people do in religion would have to be content to know nothing all his life” (Mere Christianity, chapter 2).
The concept of revelation is thus rational. The question is how it functions in a religious context.
According to the Judeo-Christian view, God has given revealed information to prophets, who he authorized to communicate it to others. In doing so, he was sensitive to the question of how one would know if a prophet is reliable, and the Bible contains tests by which true prophets can be discerned. These include whether a prophet can produce a miracle to validate the claim that he is in contact with the supernatural (Deut. 18:21–22) and whether his message is consistent with prior divine revelation (Deut. 13:1–4; 1 Cor. 12:3).
From a Christian point of view, the Resurrection of Jesus was a key miracle validating Jesus’ message (Acts 17:31).
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The Concept of Revelation

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“Christians are wrong to celebrate Christmas on December 25. Jesus could not have been born then—it would have been too cold for the shepherds to keep their flocks outdoors (Luke 2:8).”
DEFENSE
There are several problems with this challenge.
First, the Catholic Church celebrates Jesus’ birth on December 25, but this is a matter of custom rather than doctrine. It is not Church teaching that this is when Jesus was born (note that the matter isn’t even mentioned in the Catechism).
Second, although most Christians today celebrate Christ’s birth on December 25, this was not the only date proposed. Around A.D. 194, Clement of Alexandria stated Christ was born November 18. Other early proposals included January 10, April 19 or 20, and May 20 (Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology, 2nd ed., §488, §553). By far the most common proposals, however, were January 6 (ibid., §§554– 61) and December 25 (ibid., §§562–68).
While the last was eventually adopted by the Catholic Church for use in its liturgy, the fact that the Church did not declare alternate proposals heretical shows the matter was not considered essential to the Faith.
Third, the proposals that put Jesus’ birth in the colder part of the year (November 18, December 25, January 6, and January 10) are not ruled out by the fact that there were shepherds keeping watch over their flocks at night.
Ancient Jews did not have large indoor spaces for housing sheep. Flocks were kept outdoors during winter in Judaea, as they are elsewhere in the world today, including in places where snow is common (search for “winter sheep care” on the Internet). Sheep are adapted to life outdoors. That’s why they have wool, which keeps body heat in and moisture out.
Sheep are kept outdoors in winter in Israel today: “William Hendricksen quotes a letter dated Jan. 16, 1967, received from the New Testament scholar Harry Mulder, then teaching in Beirut, in which the latter tells of being in Shepherd Field at Bethlehem on the just- passed Christmas Eve, and says: ‘Right near us a few flocks of sheep were nestled. Even the lambs were not lacking. . . . It is therefore definitely not impossible that the Lord Jesus was born in December’” (ibid., §569).
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Transcript:
Oh, I&#8217;m a Jewish person who has been convinced that Catholic Church is a continuation of the faith of what my people were supposed to do all along. But I do have a question. I watched your video that you did a few months back about the relationship between the Jewish people and the Catholic Church and things like that. And I was wondering, I understand that the Judaism thing that you don&#8217;t have to become Jewish to become Christian or to become a Catholic, but I was wondering what does that mean for Jewish people who are already Jewish and are wanting to join the church? Does that mean that they no longer keep things that they were specifically commanded, via Abraham&#8217;s lineage in terms of circumcision and things like that? I understand that Gentiles don&#8217;t have to abide by those, but Jews who are already Jews, do they continue that as well as everything the church commands?
That&#8217;s a really good question. I say Thomas Aquinas distinguishes between three types of laws when we&#8217;re talking about the Mosaic law. You have some things that are expressions of the moral law. So for instance, thou shall not kill. Those are eternal truths that are recorded. Those of course continue. Second, you have some things that are aspects of the law of the kingdom of Israel. And so you will often see those things not being practiced even by Jews in Jesus&#8217;s day. We don&#8217;t find people, well, say today, you don&#8217;t find people stoning adulteresses because that was a particular law, not an eternal law and is understood in that way by Jews and Gentiles alike.
And laws of that kind are something where they&#8217;re national laws. And so a nation can look to the laws of another nation and forming its own laws, but is not bound by the laws of another nation. But then the third category, which are the kind of thing, circumcision, the kosher laws, those sorts of things. Our understanding as Christians is that these were a way of preparing the Jewish people for the Messiah.
And so once the Messiah is there, they&#8217;ve been fulfilled. They weren&#8217;t bad, they were good, but now they&#8217;ve been fulfilled. And so Jews and Gentiles alike are no longer bound by circumcision and the kosher laws or any of these things because they had an important role in salvation history. They weren&#8217;t a mistake, God clearly intends them. But they were a way of preserving the Jewish people as a distinct people because they were the ones bearing divine revelation and ultimately bringing the Messiah into the world. But it was not meant to be just in perpetuity that you would have to keep kosher and circumcised and everything else. So there are aspects of Jewish culture, which, in the same way that if you&#8217;re Irish or Nigerian or fill in the blank, you may have cultural practices that you wanna preserve and hold on to, which is great. That&#8217;s fine. As long as they&#8217;re not incompatible with Christianity, then by all means preserve the elements of culture. But you&#8217;re not required to keep the Mosaic law. You&#8217;re not required to circumcise.
None of those things are necessary
as members of the new covenant, Jewish or Gentile alike.
Yes, that&#8217;s my question. I mean, I understand the whole,
the whole system is not followed the whole dispensationalist attitude and things like that. And that&#8217;s fine, I understand that. And I also understand the Mosaic law kind of being not superseded but fulfilled. But I saw that considering the one covenant that doesn&#8217;t, that may be slightly different to the Abrahamic one. It&#8217;s different than the covenant with Moses specifically. And I was wondering, you know, that specifically would that pass away as well? And because I do also remember reading that even once after Pentecost, many of the apostles and followers of our Lord, they went back to Temple and not just to the Church but also to workers. Yeah, that&#8217;s right. So I was wondering how that squares.
Yeah, because the things happening in Jewish worship were all good and true.
We would say that they were incomplete in the sense that Christ isn&#8217;t being proclaimed as having come. But if you imagine, you know, if you went into a Jewish temple liturgy, five years before the birth of Jesus, all of the stuff happening there is what God&#8217;s intending to have happen as long as the worship is being done properly.
That&#8217;s not gonna be true of any other group&#8217;s worship.
You know, that wouldn&#8217;t be true of the pagans down the block. And so this is divinely revealed. And so even after the time of Christ, you do have this early Christian practice recorded in the book of Acts where they would go to pray in the temple, which is a place of common prayer, and then they would go to celebrate the breaking of the bread, the early mass, on the next day on Sunday. And so you have this practice of recognizing and preserving all of these things which are good. And so even though the temple&#8217;s not standing, I think you&#8217;ll find something and somewhat consonant with that. So if you&#8217;re familiar with what&#8217;s called the liturgy of the hours, there is in Catholicism morning, midday, evening prayer, night prayer, and then what&#8217;s called the office of readings, which is a spiritual readings. But it&#8217;s very much centered around praying the Psalms at set times. And historically it&#8217;s every three hours, but this is coming straight from Judaism and straight from the way worship and prayer would happen in the temple. And so even though we&#8217;re not in Jerusalem, and even though the temple is not standing, elements of what the apostles would have been praying there at those set hours of the day are being preserved and continue to be prayed by Catholics today. So we want to preserve and embrace that. We don&#8217;t wanna just throw out the Old Testament say, and say, &#8220;Oh, that was then, this is now.&#8221; No, no, it forms a really important part of our worship and our prayer because we have this recognition of it being fulfilled but not superseded.
So in all of those things, all of that is preserved.
Nevertheless, specifically with circumcision, the physical act of circumcision has given way to baptism. And St. Paul makes this comparison pretty explicitly that circumcision was a way of bringing you into the Old Covenant. And the way you&#8217;re brought into the New Covenant is through baptism. And so it serves as a kind of spiritual circumcision.
And I think that way makes sense in terms of even the context of circumcision, like why circumcision existed in the beginning. So if you remember, God&#8217;s promise to Abraham is that he&#8217;ll become the father of many nations. And Abraham&#8217;s getting older and older and doesn&#8217;t have any children. And so finally, he and Sarah conspire to take matters into their own hands because they decide the problem is her because she&#8217;s too old. And so Abraham has a child with Hagar. And so circumcision is in one way sort of a punishment because you&#8217;ll notice it happens right after the incident with Hagar where trying by the deeds of the flesh to achieve the promises of God, God rebukes Abraham and there&#8217;s now a physical reminder of reliance upon God rather than upon one&#8217;s own virility.
And so in that sense, all of that is pointing towards the priority of grace and faith over mere unaided human action. We didn&#8217;t say human action is bad, right? But it&#8217;s going to be the child of promise. It&#8217;s going to be Isaac, not the child of human effort with Ishmael. And in fact, if you go through the Old Testament, you&#8217;ll see the sheer number of times God chooses the child who isn&#8217;t the first born in a radical way. So think about Jacob and Esau, think about Joseph who&#8217;s number 11 of 12, think about David who&#8217;s number seven of seven. And the point there is all of the things we might imagine by just we&#8217;re gonna do things the right way and we&#8217;ve got the law with primogenetry and the first born has a special status. All of that has to give way to this divine action in grace. So God will choose who he chooses in the way that he&#8217;s gonna choose it. And we respond to that. And so if we look at it kind of in that juxtaposition, then hopefully it&#8217;s clear why baptism of bringing the family of God together in the way God wants is going to fulfill what is begun through circumcision.
Hey, thanks for watching. If you liked this Catholic Answer, be sure to like, subscribe and check out our live streams Monday through Friday, 3 to 5 p.m. Pacific, or find the episode after on YouTube, your favorite podcast platform or our Catholic Answers app.

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&#8220;Did Mary and Joseph doubt Jesus?&#8221; This question leads to a discussion about their understanding of His identity, especially during the incident at the temple. Other topics include the appropriateness of repeating prayers for healing, navigating faith in the context of divorce, and clarifying the status of the Ethiopian Bible.
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Did Mary and Joseph Doubt Jesus? Prayer, Divorce, and Faith

In this free-for-all-Friday, Trent reflects on amusingly accurate book titles about child development.

FFAF: These Titles Perfectly Explain Every Kid’s Age

In this free-for-all-Friday Trent explores wild theories about lost time and the lost &#8220;Tartarian empire&#8221;.

FFAF: The Tartarian and “Phantom Time” Conspiracies

In this episode Trent sits down with Fr. Gregory Pine to talk about his new book on the one virtue that can help us balance our religious life and help us be less weird.

Can You be too Religious? (with Fr. Pine)

<div>An atheist tells me that the original gospels were never found and they are based on word of mouth accounts.</div><div>First, convey to your atheist friend that original copies of Plato, Aristotle and Homer’s works don’t exist, yet no credible historian questions their historical authenticity, including whether these prominent ancient men wrote their respective works. Similarly, while we don’t have the original copies of the gospels, we do have rather early manuscripts and fragments, and many when compared to the number of other ancient written works.
In addition, St. Matthew and St. John were eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus and St. Mark and St. Luke relied on the reports of eyewitnesses.
For more on the origin and authorship of the four gospels, please see <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/did-matthew-mark-luke-and-john-really-write-the-gospels">this article from our Catholic Answers Magazine</a>, as well as <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/where-are-the-original-scriptures">this excerpt from Father Henry Graham’s book Where We Got The Bible</a>.
In addition, explain to your atheist friend that the Catholic Church does not rely on the Bible alone, given that the Church existed for decades before all of the New Testament books were written and centuries before they were officially compiled into the New Testament canon, not to mention that members of the Church wrote the New Testament books and Church authorities determined that they were indeed inspired by the Holy Spirit and thus worthy of inclusion in the biblical canon.
There’s no doubt that the Catholic Church existed from the time of Jesus, as various historical sources, Christian and non-Christian attest. For more on the bona fides of the Catholic Church, please see our tract <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/pillar-of-fire-pillar-of-truth">Pillar of Fire, Pillar of Truth</a> and also my book <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/what-did-jesus-do-the-biblical-roots-of-the-catholic-church/">What Did Jesus Do?: The Biblical Roots of the Catholic Church</a>.
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No Original Copies of Gospels? And No Eyewitnesses to Jesus’ Life?

In this episode Trent rebuts a documentary produced by the atheist Youtuber skydivephil that tries to refute the kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God. Part one focuses on the philosophical arguments for the beginning of the universe.

REBUTTING An Atheistic Documentary on the Kalam Argument – Part 1

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In this debate Trent faces off against atheist YouTuber “Pinecreek Doug” over the central tenet of the Christian faith: Jesus’ bodily resurrection from the dead.

DEBATE: Did Jesus Rise Bodily From the Dead? (with Pinecreek)

In this special Christmas update Trent shares some &#8220;gifts&#8221; for his viewers and subscribers.
🎄 A Christmas Gift for Everyone: <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/christmas-gift-146430381">A Free Chapter from Hard Sayings</a>
🎄 A Christmas Gift for Patrons: <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/christmas-gift-146430861">A Chapter from My New Book</a>
Transcription:
Merry Christmas, everyone. I&#8217;ve got my ugly Christmas sweater on. I&#8217;ll try to include a closeup here. Yes, these are corgis on my Christmas sweater. So I just want to thank all of you for your support of the Council of Trent. It has helped us to reach millions of viewers every month. And I especially want to thank our patrons at trenthornpodcast.com. Without your financial support, none of this would be possible. And now it&#8217;s time for your gift. In the link below, I have a free chapter of my book, Hard Sayings: A Catholic Approach to Answering Bible Difficulties. This chapter deals with alleged contradictions in the Bible, including those surrounding the stories related to Jesus&#8217;s birth. So the accounts in Matthew and Luke that critics say are contradictory to one another. So if you want a nice apologetic read through on Christmas, then click on the link below in the description.
And for patrons who support our channel, all of you will be getting a free excerpt of my latest book, Salvation is from the Catholic Church, and you can check that out at the link below as well. And if you happen to be an Nth medal subscriber to our channel over at Trenhornpodcast.com, Nth Medal being one of the strongest medals in the DC universe, you&#8217;ll be getting a free signed copy of my new book, Salvationist from the Catholic Church. For more on that, check out the link below. And finally, please pray for our channel that we continue to grow and operate in a corporate God&#8217;s will. Pray for my wife as she continues to heal from her brain surgery. It&#8217;s still a long road ahead for her. And I&#8217;ll say a prayer for you all during this Christmas season as well. So thank you guys so much.
We&#8217;re going to be taking next week off. We&#8217;ll be back in the new year with new episodes, new dialogues, a lot of great things planned. I&#8217;m excited to share that with you. So thank you guys so much. Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.

A Special Christmas Gift for You!

In this free-for-all-Friday Trent reveals why you&#8217;re old box TV in the garage is worth more than it looks.

FFAF: Why Your Old TV is a Hidden Treasure

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In this episode Trent responds to Fr. Casey Cole&#8217;s video &#8220;What does the Bible ACTUALLY Say about Homosexuality?&#8221;
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Transcript:
Father Casey Cole just released a video asking the question, &#8220;What does the Bible actually say about homosexuality?&#8221; But instead of giving us solid answers, Father Casey just creates more confusion, and provides ammunition for critics who want to completely reject the Bible&#8217;s teaching on sexuality. I wasn&#8217;t planning to address this topic again, because I just covered it in my last episode on the pro-gay documentary 1946, but I felt it was justified because Father Casey just released this episode on his channel.
Now, to be clear, Father Casey claims to fully support and defend the church&#8217;s teaching on homosexuality, so he&#8217;s not like the outright dissenters that you see in the 1946 documentary. However, many of Father Casey&#8217;s claims about the Bible are the same ones made in that 1946 documentary. In doing this, whether he knows it or not, he&#8217;s undermining the strong teaching on sexuality and scripture, and provides support for those who want to outright dissent against church teaching. So let&#8217;s jump in and see what he gets wrong, but also what Father Casey gets right.
There is no passage that speaks to the concept of homosexuality, per se. There are a few passages that speak of homosexual acts, but often mixed together with other circumstances that make any definitive statement about homosexuality difficult to make, not impossible, and ultimately not ambiguous, but also not as clear as some might make it out to be.
The catechism does make what we would informally call a definitive statement on the matter, when it says, &#8220;Basing itself on sacred scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.&#8221; Saying the Bible doesn&#8217;t speak to the concept of homosexuality is like saying the Bible doesn&#8217;t speak to the concept of alcoholism. True, the Bible does not talk about the genetic, social, and psychological origins of attractions or how often they persist, those are scientific questions. Likewise, the Bible doesn&#8217;t talk about how a predisposition to alcohol abuse can have a genetic and social component, those are also scientific questions. But the Bible is clear that acts of drunkenness and sexual acts outside of marriage, including homosexual acts, are gravely evil. That&#8217;s why St. Paul includes both of these sins in his vice list in 1 Corinthians 6: 9-10. So we don&#8217;t need the Bible to speak about the origins of people&#8217;s desires for sinful acts and the scientific facts around that for the Bible to sufficiently tell us that these acts are indeed sinful.
Take for instance the story of Sodom and Gomorrah found in Genesis 19. For many people, this is the quintessential example of why homosexuality is wrong, and what is most quoted in debates.
Maybe some laypeople do this, but when I debate the Bible&#8217;s teaching on homosexual acts, I don&#8217;t quote this story, because it&#8217;s a story, it&#8217;s not a formal command against homosexual acts that we do find in other parts of the Bible. I agree with Father Casey, this is not the best example for a defender of traditional moral principles to use. Father Casey then gives an overview of the story involving the residents of Sodom trying to rape Lot&#8217;s guests, who are angels disguised as men, which prompts the city&#8217;s destruction. Father Casey then explores what the rest of the Bible says the sin of Sodom exactly was noting that while it references sexual immorality in some verses, none of the verses explicitly say the sin was homosexual acts.
According to the Prophet Ezekiel, the reason Sodom was destroyed had nothing to do with sexual misconduct or faith, but everything to do with greed and injustice. &#8220;Now, look at the guilt of your sister, Sodom. She and her daughters were proud, saded with food, complacent in prosperity. They did not give any help to the poor and needy. Instead, they became arrogant and committed abominations before me. Then, as you have seen, I removed them.&#8221;
The verse actually says in the singular, &#8220;They committed abomination before me.&#8221; The Hebrew word translated abomination is toebah, and the same phrase is used in Leviticus 20:13, where it says, &#8220;If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination.&#8221; As Bible scholar, Robert Gagnon, has noted, &#8220;The two other singular uses of toebah in Ezekiel refer to sexual sin.&#8221; That&#8217;s why ancient and medieval Jewish commenters considered one of Sodom&#8217;s sins to be homosexual practice and not just in hospitality. Father Casey goes on to say that some people may have interpreted the story this way at the time, but this should caution us against using it as a definitive proof. I agree, but it does serve as cumulative evidence for the definitive case that divine revelation shows homosexual acts are sinful.
Father Casey then comments on Romans 1, where it clearly says that it is immoral and unnatural for men to have sexual relations with men, and women to have sexual relations with women. However, he says the passage may not mean what we think it means.
And yet, scholars have noted that it still may not be speaking to homosexuality as we understand it today, but rather to straight married men and women who choose to leave their wives and husbands to lie with each other. Even today, proponents of same-sex unions can agree with Paul that leaving your husband or wife to lie with another probably isn&#8217;t a good thing.
Maybe, where they might say these people are just gay people in denial who should be free to find love wherever they see fit.
The passage is likely about homosexuality, but it could just as easily be read as condemning adultery.
No, it can&#8217;t. If St. Paul was condemning adultery, then he would talk about the most common kind of adultery for straight married people, that is engaging in sexual acts with people of the opposite sex, whether they are married or unmarried themselves. The point of Romans chapter one is that Paul is saying the Gentiles know they have sinned and need redemption in Christ. Even though they never had the Old Testament to teach them, the Gentiles had their consciences and the natural law to guide them, so Paul picks two obvious examples of immorality that a person should know, based on what nature intends and conscience commands, it&#8217;s wrong to give worship meant for God to a mere idol, and it&#8217;s wrong to give sexual acts meant for persons of the other sex to persons of the same sex.
Also, if Father Casey&#8217;s argument is that we can&#8217;t be sure what the Bible teaches because some modern scholars have different views, then we could never be sure of anything the Bible teaches, because you can always find some scholar who says all kinds of crazy things about the Bible. The scholar he&#8217;s probably referring to is John Boswell, a self-identified gay Catholic who gave an academic veneer to this kind of revisionism with books like Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. In that book, he said the following of Romans chapter one, &#8220;The persons Paul condemns are manifestly not homosexual. What he derogates are homosexual acts committed by apparently heterosexual persons.&#8221; This coheres to Father Casey&#8217;s claim that Paul might only be condemning people who are, &#8220;straight,&#8221; quote, unquote, but choose to go against their own nature and have sex with people of the same sex.
This is such a silly argument that even critics who say the Bible is not against homosexual acts, even those revisionist critics reject this theory. Matthew Vines, a self-identified gay man, and author of the book, God and the Gay Christian, says Boswell is wrong because, quote, &#8220;Paul seems to be describing latent desires that were being expressed, not brand new ones. I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s consistent to say that Paul rejected same-sex behavior only when it didn&#8217;t come naturally to the people involved.&#8221; So Father Casey has given us nothing to doubt the traditional understanding of these verses.
The same issue may be at play in passages like 1 Corinthians 6: 9-10, and 1 Timothy 110, in which lists are given for those who will be excluded from the Kingdom of Heaven, and sodomites are listed. At first reading, it would seem pretty clear that the text is referring explicitly to homosexuality, and yet the note from the New American Bible, the translation produced by the Catholic bishops, offers a helpful insight.
The NAB was produced by a few Bible scholars in the middle of the 20th century, and was later approved in the 1980s as the only translation that can be used in Latin rite liturgies. However, that does not mean the bishops wrote or even endorsed the footnotes in this Bible, as we&#8217;ll see.
The Greek word translated as boy prostitutes may refer to catamite, boys or young men who were kept for the purposes of prostitution, a practice not uncommon in the Greco-Roman world. In Greek mythology, this was the function of Ganymede, the cup bearer of the gods, whose Latin name was Catamitus. The term translated sodomites refers to adult males who indulged in homosexual practices with such boys. It&#8217;s possible, even probable, that what&#8217;s being condemned here is not homosexuality as a concept or same-sex unions as we understand them today, but pedophilia, while we can read the word sodomite as its modern equivalent.
I also spoke about this in my review of the 1946 documentary, but this is easily one of the worst explanations of what is being condemned in 1 Corinthians 6: 9-10. I wish Father Casey would slow down and see what he is saying. This passage doesn&#8217;t just condemn sodomites, or in Greek, arsenokoites, man bedders, it condemns malakoi, Greek for softies, which he renders, and the NAB renders, boy prostitutes. These boy prostitutes were young. In Latin, some of them were called puer delicatus, exquisite and dainty boys, about 12 to 13 years old, as depicted on this Roman cup from the first century. This includes Ganymede, who was between the ages of 12 and 16, though some ancient Greeks disputed that Ganymede was a sexual partner of Zeus. Instead, the story of Ganymede being used for sexual favors was probably invented by the cretins to justify their pederastic rape of young boys.
The philosopher Plato wrote the following in his laws, &#8220;When male unites with female for procreation, the pleasure experienced is held to be due to nature, but contrary to nature, when male mates with male, or female with female, and that those first guilty of such enormities were impelled by their slavery to pleasure, and we all accused the Cretans of concocting the story about Ganymede.&#8221; By the way, this shows Paul was correct in Romans chapter one, because at least some of the Gentiles knew homosexual acts were unnatural, even if others engaged in them. It also shows Paul was right in Titus chapter one, the letter he wrote to Titus, who was left on the island of Crete to minister there. Paul writes, &#8220;One of themselves, a prophet of their own said &#8216;Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.&#8217; This testimony is true.&#8221; And no, I&#8217;m not going to address the paradox of a lying Cretans saying, &#8220;All Cretans are liars.&#8221; Have fun with that as you will.
Now, let&#8217;s fast-forward to ancient Rome and Emperor Nero. He had one of these dainty boy slaves, named Sporus, castrated and dressed up to look like his wife after she died in childbirth the year before. Let&#8217;s be clear, these are not boy prostitutes, these are child rape victims. The view Father Casey is suggesting is that St. Paul taught that the men who rape children and the children being raped will both not inherit the Kingdom of God. That&#8217;s horrible. Instead, we should hold the common sense view, that St. Paul was condemning men, arsenokoites, who engage in same sex relations, whether it is raping boys who are not culpable, or engaging in sex acts with other grown men, the malakois, softies, who can be held accountable for their actions, regardless of what some academic biased towards defending homosexuality might write in the NAB.
Father Casey then goes over the passages in Leviticus, and says they aren&#8217;t helpful because&#8230;
Surely there will be some that point out that Christians are no longer bound by the law of Moses, and even though we know that moral truths are part of the eternal law and do not change, some may not be convinced.
Except we can show that these passages about homosexual acts are grouped with other passages that deal with universal moral prohibitions, not just old ritual laws. In Leviticus 18, we see this in the fact that verse 20 condemns adultery, verse 21 condemns child sacrifice, and verse 23, right after the verse condemning homosexual conduct, condemns bestiality. Moreover, Leviticus makes it clear that actions like adultery, bestiality, and same-sex relations were part of the moral law that also applied to non-Jews. Only Jews were expected to follow the dietary laws. God had even judged the other pagan nations for engaging in these defilements, and expelled them from the land for doing so.
Father Casey then offers what he thinks is the best argument from the Bible against homosexual acts.
Which is why I believe there is a far more compelling argument to be made from scripture than the ones usually quoted, and it might serve us well to avoid the above passages and look in a different direction. When asking the question of whether same-sex unions have a place in the church today, it might be helpful to look to scripture to acknowledge that none exists. In the 2000-odd pages of the book, in the hundreds of stories and dozens of relationships, not a single instance can be found of God speaking favorably of, endorsing, consecrating, or acknowledging in a covenant a couple in a same-sex union, and so the strongest argument in understanding the will of God on this subject is not what may or may not be condemned, but in what God institutes and upholds.
The problem with this argument is that a revisionist will simply say, &#8220;I agree, homosexuality is never portrayed positively in scripture because modern, egalitarian, same-sex relationships simply didn&#8217;t exist at that time. The only same-sex relationships at that time involved rape. But now that we have these modern relationships that have come into existence, we can include them alongside heterosexual marriages because the Bible never condemned them.&#8221; In the 1946 documentary I reviewed, a Protestant preacher makes Father Casey&#8217;s argument, and he gets that exact response.
&#8230; example in the Bible that speaks of same sex relations in a positive way. One example.
No.
No, because there are none.
Why? Because it was written in the context of the social-
Well, there are plenty of examples of marriage relationships in the Bible, man and a woman. Paul gives very clear instructions about sexual relationships. In the book of 1 Corinthians chapter seven. He talks about how man and a woman should come together and not deny one another. He gives zero instructions of any other kind of sexual relationship. I would think if I&#8217;m writing a book on sexual relationships, and when you should have them and when you shouldn&#8217;t have them, and something is common in the church, I would include that which was common.
It was not. There was always an age or power differential when there was a same sex relationship.
Emperors were well known for [inaudible 00:14:34].
Always an age and power differential.
Father Casey himself clears the way for this revisionist argument when he says that what we see in modern same-sex relationships was simply unknown during the Greco-Roman period.
The fact of the matter is that homosexuality as it exists today would&#8217;ve been a foreign concept to ancient writers, and so it is unlikely that we are going to find a direct condemnation in the Bible of monogamous same-sex unions debated today. The Bible is an old book. It doesn&#8217;t have a direct teaching for every modern reality.
But this is false, as I demonstrated in my previous episode, since you can read Roman authors, like Juvenal, who made fun of same-sex marriages between adult men, the existence of lesbians in antiquity, which was always among equals, and the writings of Plato, like The Symposium, that describe men who only preferred long-term relationships with other men, and women who preferred the same.
The proper ends of all sexual acts are directed towards the union of the couple and procreation. Acts that are closed to either purpose have never been, nor ever will be, permitted. But this is not the same as homosexuality or same sex attraction in itself. While the Bible may be clear in its condemnation of certain actions, it would be a major mistake to read the Bible as condemning people with same sex attractions, or treating them as unfit for The Kingdom.
Here, I agree with Father Casey. That&#8217;s why I&#8217;m not a fan of the RSV&#8217;s translation of 1 Corinthians 6: 9-10, that says, &#8220;Homosexuals will not inherit the Kingdom of God.&#8221; I&#8217;d prefer it say something like, &#8220;The active and passive participants in homosexual acts,&#8221; or, to put it crudely, &#8220;The top and the bottoms will not inherit The Kingdom.&#8221; It&#8217;s about actions you choose, not orientations or feelings that you have that are beyond your control. Paul was specific in this use because he was not condemning men who penetrate men as being domineering or violent, he was condemning all participants in acts that corrupt the gift of sexuality God gave us, which is why St. Paul also condemns those who commit adultery and fornication. But St. Paul also gives hope to all of us who struggle with sin by writing this, &#8220;And such were some of you, but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the spirit of our God.&#8221;
Thanks for watching today&#8217;s episode. If you want more great content, be sure to check out these other great episodes, and don&#8217;t forget to like and subscribe to help our channel grow. Finally, if you want to help us create more content like this, please support us at <a href="https://www.patreon.com/counseloftrent">trenthornpodcast.com</a>.
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Why Fr. Casey Cole is WRONG about the Bible and Homosexuality

In this episode Trent sits down with Deacon Harold to talk about his upcoming book on Catholic responses to racism, the perils of critical race theory, and what the authentic Catholic response to racism should be.

What’s Wrong With Critical Race Theory? (With Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers)

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DAY 251
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CHALLENGE
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“Belief in mortal sin denies Catholics assurance of salvation, but God wants us to have it: ‘I write this to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life’ (1 John 5:13, emphasis added).”
DEFENSE
We can have assurance of salvation if we fulfill God’s conditions for it, but self-deception and mortal sin are real possibilities.
We must be careful about the term “know.” Knowledge can mean different things. “I know physics,” “I know it’s raining,” “I know John,” and “Adam knew his wife” involve different senses of knowing.
We often say we know something without implying there is no pos- sibility of being wrong. If you ask someone, “Do you know what you had for dinner last night?” he might say, “Yes.” But if you ask, “Do you have an infallible memory so there is absolutely no possibility you are misremembering?” he would likely say, “No.”
Scripture sets forth the conditions for salvation. In fact, 1 John sets out multiple conditions, including keeping the commandments (2:3– 5, 5:1–3) and believing in Jesus and loving one another (3:23–24, 4:20– 21). If we have fulfilled these conditions then, per 1 John 5:13, we may know that we have salvation in the ordinary sense of the term “know,” but that doesn’t mean there is absolutely no possibility of being wrong.
Paul says: “I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted [Greek, dedikaiōmai, “justified”]. It is the Lord who judges me” (1 Cor. 4:4). If even a figure like Paul refused to pronounce definitively on his own spiritual state, so must we.
The possibility of self-deception is real. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9). Thus the New Testament repeatedly warns Christians against self-deception, particularly with regard to sin and its consequences (1 Cor. 6:9– 10, 15:33–34; Gal. 6:7–8; Eph. 5:5–6; James 1:22, 26; 1 John 1:8, 3:6–7).
If we fulfill the conditions Scripture lays out for salvation, then we may be assured of and know that we have salvation. But we cannot claim infallible certitude as if there were no possibility of self-deception.
Further, mortal sin is a real possibility, and John goes on to warn against it right after the verse this challenge is based on (1 John 5:16– 17; cf. Day 302).
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Assurance of Salvation

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DAY 253
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CHALLENGE
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“Matthew misunderstands Isaiah’s prophecy of Immanuel (Isa. 7:14). It doesn’t point to Jesus.”
DEFENSE
Matthew understands the prophecy better than you think.
The biblical authors recognized Scripture as operating on multiple levels. For example, Matthew interprets the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt as a fulfillment of the prophetic statement, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.” In its original context, it is obvious the “son” of God being discussed is Israel: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt, I called my son” (Hos. 11:1).
Matthew understood this. He had read the first half of the verse and knew that, on the primary, literal level, the statement applied to the nation of Israel. But he recognized that on another level it applied to Christ as the divine Son who recapitulates and fulfills the aspirations of Israel.
In the same way, it is obvious in Isaiah that on the primary, literal level the prophecy of Immanuel applied to the time of King Ahaz (732–716 B.C.). At this point, Syria had forged a military alliance with the northern kingdom of Israel that threatened to conquer Jerusalem (Isa. 7:1–2). God sent Isaiah to reassure Ahaz the alliance would not succeed (Isa. 7:3–9) and told him to name a sign that God would give him as proof (Isa. 7:10–11).
Ahaz balked and refused to name a sign (Isa. 7:12), so God declared one: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. . . . For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted” (Isa. 7:14–16).
For this sign to be meaningful to Ahaz, it would have to be fully fulfilled in his own day—indeed, very quickly. It therefore points, on the primary, literal level, to a child conceived at that time (perhaps Ahaz’s son, the future King Hezekiah).
This was as obvious to Matthew as it is to us, but—like the other New Testament authors—he recognized the biblical text as having multiple dimensions, so the prophecy was not only fulfilled in Ahaz’s day but also pointed to Christ as “Immanuel” (Hebrew, “God with us”).
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The Prophecy of Immanuel

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DAY 217
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CHALLENGE
“Luke’s Gospel isn’t reliable. It was written long after the events, and Luke was not an eyewitness.“
DEFENSE
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Luke’s Gospel was written within living memory of the events that it records, and it is based on eyewitness testimony.
We elsewhere discuss the fact that Luke wasn’t an eyewitness (see Day 44). Biographies are commonly written by people who aren’t eyewit- nesses, and Luke was in an especially good position as a biographer because he consulted eyewitnesses (Luke 1:2).
Raymond Brown proposed a late date for Luke and Acts of “85, give or take five to ten years” (An Introduction to the New Testament, 226, 280). If so, Luke would have been written a little more than fifty years after the ministry of Jesus, which was within living memory.
However, Luke was probably written earlier. The key to identifying when is its relationship with the book of Acts. Luke and Acts were written as a two-volume set, the first of which covered Jesus’ life and ministry and the second of which covered the history of the Church up to the time Acts was written.
The fact that they are meant as companion works is indicated by several factors: (1) Acts picks up exactly where Luke leaves off (compare Acts 1:1–2 with Luke 24:44–52). (2) Both are dedicated to the same man—Theophilus—who was apparently Luke’s patron (Luke 1:1–4, Acts 1:1). (3) Acts refers to the Gospel of Luke as “the first book” (Acts 1:1), implying that Acts is the second in the set.
This indicates that Luke was written earlier than Acts, and we have a very good idea of when Acts was written. Luke apparently completed it during the second year of Paul’s first imprisonment in Rome (see Day 79). Most hold that Paul’s imprisonment began in A.D. 60, though a careful reading of the evidence suggests it was in A.D. 58 (see Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology, 2nd ed., and Andrew Steinmann, From Abraham to Paul). Acts would then be written in A.D. 60, and Luke’s Gospel was written before that.
It is probable, given their dedication to the same man and the fact that the end of Luke seems to envision the beginning of Acts, that Luke was written only shortly before Acts, in A.D. 59, less than thirty years after Jesus’ ministry.
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The Date of Luke

In this episode Trent examines a recent video from Fr. Casey Cole and critiques his claims that the Gospels are “theology, not history.”

Responding to Fr. Casey on the Gospel’s Historicity

Can Protestantism be Redeemed? (with Redeemed Zoomer)

In this episode, Jimmy Akin dives deep into Acts 2 to reveal exactly what happened on that wild day—mighty rushing wind, tongues of fire, and disciples suddenly speaking real foreign languages to an international crowd! He settles the glossolalia/xenoglossy debate with clear Scripture, proves it was a miracle of speaking (not hearing) and that the tongues—at least in this instance—were not private prayer languages. He also reveals how Pentecost was far more than a Babel reversal—it was the firstfruits of the greatest harvest in history.
Mind-blowing biblical truth you won’t want to miss!
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TRANSCRIPT: 
This week, we celebrate Pentecost.
The day of Pentecost was a momentous one in the history of Christianity, and some really unusual things happened on it.
So what was Pentecost, and what was the nature of the strange tongues that the disciples spoke in?
Let’s get into it!
* * *
Howdy, folks!
We’re in our second year of the podcast now, and you can help me keep making this podcast for years to come—and get early access to new episodes—by going to <a href="https://patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast">Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast</a>
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What Was Pentecost
Pentecost was an ancient Israelite feast. It’s first mentioned in Exodus 34:22, where we read:
Exodus 34:22
You shall observe the Feast of Weeks, the firstfruits of wheat harvest.
Here Pentecost is called the Feast of Weeks. This is because it occurred seven weeks after Passover. Since there are seven days in each week, those seven weeks would add up to 49 days. 7 x 7 = 49
However, these 49 days were understood as the interval between Passover and Pentecost, so Pentecost is actually the 50th day, and that’s where its name comes from. In Greek, Pentécosté means = Fiftieth.
Thus Leviticus 23 says:
Leviticus 23:15-16
You shall count seven full weeks from the day after the Sabbath, from the day that you brought the sheaf of the wave offering. You shall count fifty days to the day after the seventh Sabbath. Then you shall present a grain offering of new grain to the Lord.
Pentecost and the Feast of Weeks are thus two names for the same celebration.
The other thing to notice is that the Feast of Weeks is described as the firstfruits of the wheat harvest.
Firstfruits were the first and best part of a crop that you harvested. What you did was cut a sheaf of wheat and then take it to the temple to be presented to God as what is known as a wave offering, because the priest waved it in front of God’s presence.
Leviticus 23 states:
Leviticus 23:10-11
When you come into the land that I give you and reap its harvest, you shall bring the sheaf of the firstfruits of your harvest to the priest, and he shall wave the sheaf before the Lord, so that you may be accepted.
This waving of the sheaf symbolized the fact that God is the source of everything we have, including the harvest. By waving the first sheaf of wheat you harvested, the priest symbolically returned the sheaf to God—acknowledging him as the source of the whole harvest.
Since the Feast of Weeks was the firstfruits of the wheat harvest, that made Pentecost a harvest festival. The wheat harvest was coming in, and it was time to celebrate that fact and thank God for giving you the wheat that would sustain you through the coming year.
In later centuries, Pentecost also came to commemorate the renewal of God’s covenant with his people, so—in addition to being a harvest festival—it also came to be a covenant renewal festival.
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Mysterious Events on Pentecost
Luke reports that, on the day of Pentecost in A.D. 33,
Acts 2:2-4
Suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.
This is one of several mentions of speaking in tongues in the Bible.
It’s mentioned several times in Acts, and the major discussion with it outside of Acts is in 1 Corinthians 12-14.
In the nineteenth century, the term Glossolalia was coined to refer to speaking in tongues. In Greek, Glóssa = “Tongue” and Lalia = “Speech,”, so according to its word parts Glossolalia = Speaking in a Tongue.
However, in the twentieth century, this term became involved in a controversy about the nature of the tongues in question.
In the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements, it is sometimes held that “glossolalia” does not involve real human languages but “private prayer languages” that God enables a person to speak.
Consequently, some have begun to refer to miraculously speaking a real, foreign language as Xenolossy. In Greek, Xenos = “Stranger, Foreigner” and Glóssa = “Tongue,” so according to its word parts, Xenoglossy = (Speaking) a Foreign Tongue.
It’s also called Xenolalia, which would mean = Foreign Speaking.
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What Happened on Pentecost?
So what happened on Pentecost itself?
It’s clear that the manifestations the disciples witness are cause by the Holy Spirit, since they began speaking in other tongues “as the Spirit gave them utterance.”
The sound of the mighty, rushing wind signals the arrival of the Holy Spirit.
The Greek word Pneuma also means = Breath, Wind, Spirit, so the sound of the mighty wind symbolizes the arrival of the mighty, Holy Spirit.
The “tongues as of fire” (i.e., individual flames) that rest on each of them signify empowerment to speak in tongues.
Fire is a powerful force—you really don’t want to touch it!—so the tongues or flames of fire symbolize the power to speak in other languages.
It’s providential that both an individual flame and a language can be spoken of as a “tongue.”
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What Kind of Tongues?
But what about the tongues that they began speaking in? What were they?
The normal meaning of “other tongues” would be foreign languages—i.e., ones other than the Aramaic that the disciples would have known from their upbringing.
This is confirmed by the text, which goes on to say,
Acts 2:5-6
Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one was hearing them speak in his own language.
This means that the disciples were not speaking in private prayer languages but real-world languages that the international crowd of Jews already knew.
However, some have proposed that something different was happening. Focusing on the statement that “each one was hearing them speak” in these languages, some have held that this is really a “miracle of hearing” rather than a miracle of speaking.
In other words, the disciples were still speaking in their native Aramaic, but the crowd was hearing them in whatever their own native languages were.
This is a creative idea, but it is poor exegesis.
First, the word “hearing” is consistent with both the idea that the disciples were miraculously speaking foreign languages and with the idea that the crowd was miraculously hearing foreign languages.
Acts 2:8-11
“How is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language? Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians—we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God.”
After all, if one of the disciples was miraculously speaking in Latin, then one of the visitors from Rome would obviously hear him speaking in Latin.
And if the disciples were speaking in Aramaic but these visitors were hearing them in Latin, then—again—they’d hear them speaking in Latin.
So, either way you go, Latin is what they’d hear.
The word “hearing” thus doesn’t prove one interpretation over the other.
We thus need to take a step back and look at how the text conceptualizes the miracle, and here we do get an answer.
Luke explicitly states that the disciples “began to speak in other tongues.”
He also conceptualizes the miracle as taking place on the part of the disciples—not on the part of the crowd.
The miracle is happening as soon as the disciples begin speaking; Luke doesn’t present it as beginning when others start hearing what is said.
The fact that this passage and others in the New Testament refer to the miracle as Speaking in Tongues rather than Hearing in Tongues strongly indicates that it is a miracle of speaking.
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Confirmation from 1 Corinthians
This is also indicated in 1 Corinthians 12.
Paul distinguishes between the gift of speaking in tongues and the gift of interpreting tongues. He says,
1 Corinthians 12:8, 10
For to one is given through the Spirit . . . various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues.
Similarly, he asks,
1 Corinthians 12:30
Do all speak with tongues? Do all interpret?
So speaking with tongues and interpreting tongues are two different gifts.
And in 1 Corinthians 14, Paul makes it absolutely clear that speaking in tongues is not understood by itself. He writes:
1 Corinthians 14:5, 9-11, 13-14, 19
Now I want you all to speak in tongues, but even more to prophesy. The one who prophesies is greater than the one who speaks in tongues, unless someone interprets, so that the church may be built up. . . .
If with your tongue you utter speech that is not intelligible, how will anyone know what is said? For you will be speaking into the air. There are doubtless many different languages in the world, and none is without meaning, but if I do not know the meaning of the language, I will be a foreigner to the speaker and the speaker a foreigner to me. . . .
Therefore, one who speaks in a tongue should pray that he may interpret. For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays but my mind is unfruitful . . .
In church I would rather speak five words with my mind in order to instruct others, than ten thousand words in a tongue.
So—in order for tongues to be understood—it requires someone who has the gift of interpreting tongues, and so this is not a miracle of hearing.
In fact, Paul indicates that without an interpreter, not even the person speaking in tongues mentally knows what he is saying. That’s why he says that in tongues his spirit prays but his mind is unfruitful.
Now, some have argued that the speaking in tongues mentioned in Acts is different than the speaking in tongues mentioned in 1 Corinthians, but this is exegetically unsound.
Luke and Paul were companions, and if they were describing two different phenomena then the two companions would not use the same name for two different things.
We thus have very strong evidence that—on the day of Pentecost—the disciples were miraculously enabled (by those “tongues as of fire”) to speak actual, real world languages that they didn’t know.
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Other Kinds of Tongues?
This does not mean that the Holy Spirit cannot give other, related charismatic gifts.
In 2016, the Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith published a document titled Iuvenescit Ecclesia in which it noted that, although there are several lists of charismatic gifts in the New Testament,
Iuvenescit Ecclesia 6
None of these lists claims to be exhaustive.
And that
Iuvenescit Ecclesia 9
There has never been a shortage of different charisms arising in the temporal course of ecclesial history.
Including the charisms that inspire new movements.
I thus don’t have any problem with the idea of new charismatic gifts being given in new eras. If God wants to do miracles of hearing or give private prayer languages in later Church history, that’s up to him.
I’m not going to tell the Holy Spirit, “Hey, wait a minute! You can’t do that!”
It’s just not what Luke described happening on the day of Pentecost or what Paul described in 1 Corinthians.
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The Christian Meaning of the Feast?
So what is the Christian significance of the day of Pentecost?
You often hear it described as a reversal of what happened at the Tower of Babel. BABEL
Back in Genesis 11, mankind got too big for its britches and started building a tower to the heavens, so God came down and confused the people’s speech, giving rise to all the different languages, which fragmented mankind into different communities.
Now, on Pentecost, God is getting the band back together by miraculously uniting people despite the fact they speak different languages.
This is a possible interpretation, and I don’t have a problem with it. But if you stop there, I think you’re missing something, because you’re not looking at the nature of Pentecost itself.
Remember, it eventually came to represent a covenant renewal celebration. It already had that as one of its meanings around 150 B.C., so it’s possible that early Christians understood the Pentecost of A.D. 33 as a renewal of God’s covenant in the form of the new covenant that Jesus had announced, telling the Twelve:
Luke 22:20
This chalice which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.
However, even more fundamentally, Pentecost was a harvest festival. It was the beginning of the wheat harvest, which was the most important harvest of the year.
And the Pentecost of A.D. 33 was the beginning of the major wave of converts that came into the Christian faith after Jesus’ resurrection.
Jesus had specifically empowered the disciples for purposes of bringing these converts in, telling them:
Acts 1:8
You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.
Then, in fulfillment of this prophecy, the day of Pentecost happens, the disciples preach to an international crowd of visitors, and they literally make thousands of converts. Luke tells us that:
Acts 2:41
Those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls.
I thus regard those three thousand souls as the firstfruits of the great Christian harvest of which we are all a part.
* * *
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Thank you, and I’ll see you next time
God bless you always!

Pentecost Tongues: Real Languages or Private Prayer?

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How Do I Explain the Atrocities of the Middle Ages to Protestants?

As Lent is about to begin Trent addresses arguments that Catholic rituals, as well as holy days like Ash Wednesday, are actually off shoots of paganism that are corrupting Christ’s church.