Manage Account

Trent’s obsession with industrial safety videos returns! In this episode Trent talks about delta-P, Caterpillar tractor protocol, and the goriest safety video on YouTube he could barely watch.

Don’t “shake hands with danger”!

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?

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DAY 11
CHALLENGE
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“Science cannot accept the supernatural. The natural world is all there is.”
DEFENSE
At best, this leads to a reductionistic understanding of science. At worst, it reflects intellectual prejudice.
The term “nature” is often used to refer to the visible world we see around us (i.e., the world detectible by the senses and by scientific instruments). The supernatural then would be anything that falls outside of the visible world.
On this understanding, the assertion that science can’t accept the supernatural would mean that science cannot deal with anything outside of the visible world. It would not mean, however, that there is nothing outside the visible world. Just because we can’t detect something with the senses doesn’t mean that it isn’t real. There could be vast realms outside the visible world that would be inaccessible to science on this understanding.
Further, those realms might be capable of interacting with the visible world, which would pose a challenge for science. We might be able to see visible effects of causes in the non-visible world, but science would not be able to explain the effects by their true causes, which it would be forbidden to discuss.
Sometimes people use “nature” to refer to everything that exists. On this understanding, one could assert that nature is all there is, but this also would not mean that the visible world is all that exists. There still could be vast realms not accessible to the senses. They might even interact with the visible world. Using “nature” to refer to everything that exists just reclassifies things that would otherwise be called super- natural as exotic parts of nature.
The claim that the visible world is all that exists is simply an assertion. It is not a scientific claim because it cannot be verified by science. If science, by its nature, is limited to examining the visible universe, then there is no way to perform a set of observations and experiments proving that there are no realms outside the visible universe. The as- sertion that only the visible world is real thus would be a matter of unscientific prejudice against the idea there is anything outside the visible world.
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Science and the Supernatural

Why Fr. Altman is Wrong About Pope Francis

Is 2 Tim 1:12-14 linked to sensus fidelium?

Is the Archangel Gabriel, Mary’s guardian angel?

How should we understand doing works of mercy and how it relates to the final judgment?

I’m reading a book on purgatory and saw the phrase imputed righteousness of Christ. What does that mean?

What are your thoughts on the claim that Jesus was a master hypnotist and trained his apostles?

Am I allowed to genuflect after communion?

Many hear the phrase &#8220;imputed righteousness&#8221; and think it&#8217;s a Catholic belief—but is it? We explain how Catholicism differs from Protestant views on righteousness, justification, and purgatory.
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What Does ‘Imputed Righteousness of Christ’ Mean in Catholic Teaching?

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?

Joe explains how Trent changed his mind on what is the most important aspect of Mary&#8217;s Immaculate Conception and her lifelong sinlessness.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I&#8217;m Joe Hesschmeyer In February, 2024, Mark&#8217;s one of the greatest tragedies to befall mankind. I was wrong about something and worse, Trent Horn was right. Now, for context here, Trent Horn and I and some other people we&#8217;re doing a two day brainstorming retreat, and one of the topics that arose was the idea of Mary&#8217;s Sinlessness and why we believe in that as Catholics and Trent made an argument for Mary&#8217;s Sinlessness that I&#8217;d never heard before and one that I initially dismissed as a stretch, which I&#8217;ve now come to see as profoundly true. Now, before I explain why I want to give at least a quick word of gratitude to all of my supporters, all of our supporters, really over@shamelessjoe.com. Now, we recently got a chance to meet some of you at the Catholic Answers Conference, which was incredibly cool. Now we&#8217;re also working on new show notes or Joe Notes that lay out the sources that I quote from or cite and summarize the main points and episodes you can get access to those as well as exclusive question and answer live streams each week for as little as $5 a month.
And just so you know, your direct support is what keeps this channel sponsor free and the quality high. So we hope to see you over there, shameless joe.com. Okay, now I&#8217;m back to the dark day in question. I should be very clear again, Trent and I didn&#8217;t disagree that Mary was without sin. We agree on that. The question was why? Because if you&#8217;d asked me before, why is Mary without sin, my usual answer would be to look at the way scripture seems to present Mary as the arc of the new covenant through a mode of analysis that we sometimes call Mary and Typology. Let explain what this means. Go back and look at Old Testament passages like Second Samuel chapter six. There we&#8217;re told that David arose and went to move the Ark of the Covenant through Judea to bring it to his new capital Jerusalem.
They&#8217;re traveling with the ark amid the hill country of Judah and David and all the house of Israel were making Mary before the Lord with all their might, but they end up stalled in the hill country of Judea for three months leading David to ask how can the ark of the Lord come to me after three months, they may get back to Jerusalem and David dances before the ark were in a priestly effort. Now, I want to compare that Old Testament event to something that happens in the New Testament, namely St. Luke&#8217;s account of the visitation in Luke one. You&#8217;ll notice it begins by telling us that Mary arose and went and where does she go? Well, she goes to the hill country of Judah, of course, and the unborn John the Baptist, the son of Zacharia. The priest dances in his mother&#8217;s womb in the presence of the unborn Jesus and Mary stays there for three months before returning home.
But while she&#8217;s there, her cousin Elizabeth asks her a question that echoes King David&#8217;s. And why is this granted me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? Now, it seems to me those are not just coincidences. The language is the same, the location is the same, the duration is the same, both involve singing and dancing, and the two questions seem to be obviously connected. But while David asked, but the ark of the Lord, Elizabeth now asks about the mother of my Lord. So it seems to me the best reading of this passage is that Luke is showing us that Mary is the ark of the new covenant, and that makes sense. After all, the original arc was the place of God&#8217;s presence. We&#8217;re told that God is enthroned upon the cherubim in the Ark, and now God has done something greater. He has been made flesh in the womb of Mary.
So it doesn&#8217;t seem coincidental to me that for instance, in Revelation 11 and 12, John says that he sees the Ark of the Covenant in heaven and then immediately begins describing how he sees the mother of Jesus. But if Mary is the new Ark, it makes sense that she&#8217;s completely pure and without sin. After all, the original arc was so holy that when USA touched it, he was struck dead on the spot. That&#8217;s why they get stuck in the hill country of Judea for three months. But the incarnation is greater than the divine presence in the original arc of the covenant. So the sinlessness of Mary seems to make sense, seems to follow. So that approach made sense to me before actually still makes sense to me, and it seems to match up with some of the early Christian descriptions of Mary, for instance, as the New Eve.
But Trent went in an entirely different direction drawing on the work of Dr. Jack Mulder. He argued that the immaculate conception of Mary was actually essential in securing Mary&#8217;s free consent to the incarnation of Jesus. In other words, it was important that Mary be without sin so she could give a free and uncoerced yes to God when the angel Gabriel enunciated to her telling her that she was to be the mother of our Lord. Now, as I say, when Trent originally laid out this argument, I found it unconvincing, but a few things have happened since then that have changed my mind. First was Trent pointed me to the catechism of the Catholic church, which says in paragraph four 90 that in order for Mary to be able to give the freest cent of her faith to the announcement of her vocation, it was necessary that she be wholly born by God&#8217;s grace.
And this idea is linked in the next paragraph to the immaculate conception. Now, that could just mean that it was divine grace that gave Mary the strength to say yes, to say, behold, I&#8217;m the handmade of the Lord. Let it be to me according to your word. But I had to admit that this gave some more weight to Trent&#8217;s argument. Then a few weeks later, a second thing happened. I was involved in an inquiry session for people with questions about the Catholic faith, and a young woman asked me about the immaculate conception. I answered her argument in the way I ordinarily would, and she didn&#8217;t seem convinced. I pause and then say, I recently heard another argument from Mary&#8217;s Sinlessness. I&#8217;ll let you decide for yourself what you think of it. I laid out the argument to her and it was like a complete light bulb moment for her.
She immediately resonated with it and it seemed to convince her, and that was a moment for me. I realized that I hadn&#8217;t been considering Mary&#8217;s situation from a woman&#8217;s perspective at all. After all, think of some of the news stories that came out from things like the Me Too movement. Many of these were cases in which men like Harvey Weinstein or Louis Cck made unwanted sexual advances to women. But the allegations weren&#8217;t usually that the women had said no. The allegations were that the women didn&#8217;t feel free to say no. So they said yes, but they said yes under duress because they were aware of this enormous power imbalance between themselves and these powerful celebrities. So maybe if you want, you can think of it in a different context. You could imagine a stranger pointing a gun at you and asking politely to kindly donate to their personal wellness fund.
In that situation, do you really feel free to say no? Is that charity or a stickup? So imagine that instead of marrying you have the angel Gabriel approaching a sinful woman, someone deeply aware that God could justly damn her at any moment. How free does she feel to object to God&#8217;s plan to bring his son into the world through her maternity? After all, the threat posed by the prospect of eternal damnation is equal to the strongest imaginable threat. That&#8217;s at the heart of Dr. Muller&#8217;s argument. As I understand it, the relationship that obtained between it&#8217;s between Mary as mother of Christ and God&#8217;s role as father to Christ necessitates a consent free from any coercion on the part of Mary and Mary&#8217;s freedom would&#8217;ve been unavoidably compromised by sin. We can think about that in several different ways because first of all, sin including original sin, darkens the soul in such a way that we don&#8217;t want the good things that God wants for us, this is one of the reasons we need divine grace.
Without the aid of grace, we don&#8217;t choose God. As Jesus says in John six, no one can come to me unless the father who sent me draws him. So all of us need divine grace, and that&#8217;s actually true of Mary as well. She&#8217;s full of grace for her to be able to say yes, she had to be holy born by God&#8217;s grace. I mention this because sometimes people object to the immaculate conception thinking that it means Mary didn&#8217;t need a savior, but that&#8217;s not the case. Rather, it&#8217;s a God predestined Mary in this special way to be saved by grace from the first moment of her conception. You can save somebody from a car accident by pulling them from the wreckage, but be better to keep them from crashing in the first place. In both cases, you&#8217;re saving them. In Mary&#8217;s case, God&#8217;s doing the second one.
He&#8217;s saving her before she falls. So Mary&#8217;s still only able to say yes to Gabriel because as Gabriel reminds her, she&#8217;s full of grace. But it&#8217;s important to understand that God&#8217;s grace is not about overpowering our free will. It&#8217;s about liberating our free will from its enslavement to sin. Think about it like this. The person who&#8217;s not addicted to drugs still could do drugs, but they have a much easier time just saying no than a person already addicted. Likewise, the point here isn&#8217;t that Mary couldn&#8217;t sin, it&#8217;s that her will was much freer than our wills not to sin. Because unlike us, she wasn&#8217;t a recovering sin addict. And so if Mary was either without the divine grace to say yes to God&#8217;s will, or on the other hand, without the freedom to say no to the invitation to motherhood like this, then her freedom would be radically curtailed.
But instead, God gives Mary these tremendous gifts of grace, which enable her to give the free ascent of her faith to the words of the angel Gabriel. So approaching Mary&#8217;s consent to the incarnation this way actually led me to the third thing that changed my mind. Isaiah chapter six. In that chapter, the prophet Isaiah has a vision in which he says, I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted up and his train filled the temple. The angels are performed crying out Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory. And you might think for a prophet that seeing God like this would be pretty amazing, but that&#8217;s not Isaiah&#8217;s reaction at all. He panics and he cries out, woe is me for I&#8217;m lost, for I&#8217;m a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips for my eyes have seen the king, the Lord of hosts.
And look, Isaiah is not wrong to react in this way as the book of Revelation shows nothing I pure can stand before God. So the only way Isaiah can withstand God&#8217;s presence is by having his sinfulness purged away. An angel takes a burning coal from the altar and presents it to his lips saying, behold, this has touched your lips. Your guilt is taken away and your sin forgiven. Isaiah&#8217;s reaction is the understandable one, and you can find versions of this throughout the Bible, people responding to the presence of God with a holy terror. But Mary responds with a strange calmness. Consider she&#8217;s just been told not only that she&#8217;s going to look upon the face of God, that he&#8217;s going to make his dwelling within her very body. She&#8217;s not like Isaiah seeing God in his heavenly temple. She&#8217;s going to become his earthly temple, and yet she doesn&#8217;t react like Isaiah does, like any of the others. There&#8217;s no note of panic. There&#8217;s simply this docility, this openness to whatever it is God has in store. Behold, I&#8217;m the handmade of the Lord. Let it be to me, according to your word, Trent and I, we&#8217;ve disagreed on things over the years and I think we&#8217;ve learned a lot from one another. I hope I can say that in this case, I&#8217;m actually really happy to be wrong, and Trent was even gracious enough to share his own thoughts.
&#8220;Trent&#8230;&#8221;:
People often ask me who I think the best Catholic apologist alive is, and I always tell them with some hesitation, Joe sme, not because he&#8217;s smarter than me, though he probably is, but because when he walks into a room, people actually want to listen to him. I walk in and folks are like, oh no, here comes the debate club kid again. Joe walks in and it&#8217;s, wow, is this theology or the cover of gq?
Joe:
Yeah, that was definitely not ai. Now, if you want to find out more of why the yearly Christians thought Mary was the New Eve, I cover that right here for Shameless Popery, I&#8217;m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.
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I Was Wrong (Worse: Trent Horn Was Right…)

How (Almost) Everybody Gets this Christian Argument Wrong

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DAY 140
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“Monks and nuns are unbiblical. We don’t see them in Scripture.”
DEFENSE
Yes, we do. In both testaments we see people who take vows to specially consecrate themselves to God.
In the Old Testament, we read about Nazirites. The Hebrew term nazir means “consecrated” or “separated,” and the Nazirites were those consecrated to God by a special vow (Num. 6:2). As a result, they were not to drink wine or use any grape products (6:3–4), they were not to cut their hair but let it grow long (6:5), and they were to abstain from contact with dead bodies, even of their own relatives (6:6–12). There were also ceremonies to be performed upon the completion of the vow, which included cutting the hair (6:13–21). Many Nazirites made temporary vows, but some had perpetual ones. These included Samson and Samuel, who were Nazirites from the womb (Judg. 13:5, 1 Sam. 1:11).
Like modern monks and nuns, Nazirites were vowed to live lives of special consecration to God. The parallel is so clear that in modern (twenty-first century) Hebrew, the word for monk is nazir and the word for nun is nazirah (the feminine form of nazir). Monks and nuns thus are the Christian equivalent of Jewish Nazirites.
In the New Testament, Paul appears to have taken temporary Nazirite vows more than once (Acts 18:18, 21:23–27).
He also describes a first-century order that took a perpetual vow of celibacy: “Let a widow be enrolled if she is not less than sixty years of age, having been the wife of one husband; and she must be well attested for her good deeds, as one who has brought up children, shown hospitality, washed the feet of the saints, relieved the afflicted, and devoted herself to doing good in every way. But refuse to enroll younger widows; for when they grow wanton against Christ they desire to marry, and so they incur condemnation for having violated their first pledge” (1 Tim. 5:9–12). Paul is concerned that younger widows will be tempted to re-marry and thus break the vow of celibacy the order required, bringing judgment upon themselves. He thus says younger widows should re-marry and have children rather than join the order (vv. 14–15).
Both testaments thus affirm the principle of some taking vows of special consecration to God.
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The Consecrated Life

In this episode Trent sits down with an Anglican priest and a Calvinist to discuss his thesis that Protestantism’s use of sola scriptura can’t unite believers around essential doctrines.

DIALOGUE: Can Protestants Agree on Essential Doctrine?

An interview with Leah Libresco, author of Building the Benedict Option: A Guide to Gathering Two or Three Together in His Name, kicks off our series on living the communal aspects of our Catholic Faith.

Communities of Christians, Part 1

<div>How can we reconcile our view that Scripture is the inerrant word of God when you have verses like Leviticus 20:21 and Deuteronomy 25:5 that seem to contradict each other?</div><div><blockquote>If a man takes his brother’s wife, it is severe defilement and he has disgraced his brother; they shall be childless (Lev. 20:21).
When brothers live together and one of them dies without a son, the widow of the deceased shall not marry anyone outside the family; but her husband’s brother shall come to her, marrying her and performing the duty of a brother-in-law (Deut. 25:5).</blockquote>
On first glance these verses to appear to be a contradiction.  However, reading them together, an equally plausible face-value reading would simply render the second verse an exception to the first verse.
Reading the verse from Leviticus carefully, we see that it is a blanket condemnation of marrying your brother&#8217;s wife regardless of circumstances, whether after a divorce or death.  The verse from Deuteronomy appears to present the one exception to the rule—if the brother died childless—and leaves the condemnation intact in all other situations.
We can see that Deuteronomy is an exception to condemnation in Leviticus because of the emphasis on children in both verses. Leviticus states that the divine punishment for such an action will be infertility. In Deuteronomy, the very reason for marrying the brother&#8217;s widow is to have children with her on behalf of the deceased brother.
The two verses together are not contradictory but rather a simple explanation that a specific action (marrying your brother&#8217;s wife) is forbidden except for one very particular set of circumstances (he dies childless).
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Can Someone Marry His Brother’s Wife or Not?

In this free-for-all Friday, Trent explores the varied roots and offshoots of rock and roll music.
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Transcript:
Welcome to the The Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
&#8220;Everybody&#8217;s talking about the new sound. Funny, but it&#8217;s still rock and roll to me.&#8221; That was Billy Joel. Today, we are talking about musical genres, the history of rock and roll, and it&#8217;s many, many, many permutations into various genres in modern music.
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I am your host, Catholic Answers apologist, Trent Horn. On Mondays and Wednesdays we talk apologetics and theology, but on Friday we talk about whatever I want to talk about. Today I want to talk about a webpage that I found that was really interesting that has cataloged all of the different genres that have branched off from rock and roll music, as well as its precursors. It&#8217;s a really cool webpage. It&#8217;s called 100 Years of Rock in Less Than a Minute.
What makes it really interactive is that it shows a chart showing all of these different genres, how they lead up to rock and roll in the 50s and 60s, and then the genres that play out from that. But you can click on every genre and you hear a little musical sample of the genre, and it has an arrow showing what it came from and the genres that came from it to show the evolution of music. It&#8217;s just a really cool thing to see human creativity, how we build off of the accomplishments and work of others, tweak it and modify it, add our own cultural elements, to present that really unique sound.
Rock and roll has an interesting element to it when it comes to the history of music. There is a video on YouTube called Most Recognizable Song Each Year of the Past 100 Years. There&#8217;s a lot of songs like that that talk about 100 best songs, 100 most popular songs, so they differ a bit, but they get a general sense of the change in music.
When you listen to it, what&#8217;s really fascinating is that when you listen to popular music in the United States, and this is just the United States. Obviously, in England and other places, the music is different. In fact, a lot of our music here in the US came about because of things like the British Invasion. The Beatles come here, the Rolling Stones, British new wave pop, things like that coming to the United States and changing things up. And then we export a lot of our elements of country and other elements of music going around to other places and the creativity continues.
But if you listen to the previous music &#8230; I&#8217;ll play a little bit of this. I&#8217;m really hoping I don&#8217;t get any copyright issues today. I&#8217;m just going to go for it. Let&#8217;s just see what happens. When you listen from 1924 until the early 1950s, the music is just really similar. It&#8217;s all a bunch of crooning, slower jazz ensembles. It has almost a static feel for it for about 30 years. I&#8217;m going to play a few of them. Here&#8217;s Gershwin, 1924, Rhapsody in Blue. Sorry, in the year 1924.
And this is Ben Bernie, 1925. A lot of piano, a lot of rag time. (singing)
That&#8217;s a Tiptoe Through the Tulips. Let&#8217;s see if we have a few other elements here. We&#8217;ve got Duke Wellington, It Don&#8217;t Mean a Thing. (singing)
Ethel Waters, Stormy Weather. It continues on. We&#8217;ve got Bing Crosby. (singing) Then also we get a lot of swing music during this time.
But as you go through the 20s, 30s, and 40s, a lot of jazz, a lot of swing and big band. You go to the early 50s, you still have crooners, like Dean Martin. (singing) 1954, Mr. Sandman. When you think of 1950s music, a lot of times you think of that, like in Back to the Future when he goes back in time to 1955, you hear The Chordettes, Mr. Sandman, which it came out a year earlier.
But then I feel like you have the big change ushering in rock and roll in 1957 with the King, Elvis Presley. That is what changes everything in the US, I would say. (singing) The recent biopic of Elvis, I&#8217;ve seen clips of it, I&#8217;ve heard mixed reviews on it, but it&#8217;s got really good reenactments at least of his early concerts. What made Elvis really successful is that he brought music that had been popular among African-Americans to largely white audiences. There&#8217;s this white southern boy that knows how to shake his hips like nobody&#8217;s business and brings in this new sound for people to hear. You have girls that just start screaming when they see him, how he shakes his hips. But that was a real thing because when you think about rock and roll and the history of it, the precursor to rock and roll tends to be jazz, rhythm and blues, boogie woogie, gospel, as well as some elements of country music.
That was kind of the precursor for that. And Elvis was the one who put a lot of that together and brought these elements in for more of a largely white audience to be able to hear. It was controversial. The phrase rock and roll itself can refer to the fervor in black church and gospel performances, but it was also a slang term to refer to sexual activity. And Elvis, with his hip swinging, really brought a lot of that out.
Going back then to a hundred years of rock visualized, it&#8217;s so interesting. I&#8217;ll play a few of these clips and you see where they all start to come together. To give you an idea of this development of the sound here on the website, and I&#8217;ll play some of it. To see how it grows, you start in the 19th century, early 20th century, which is blues &#8230; just playing the blues guitar. Then that develops more into something like jump blues (singing) and then eventually into rhythm and blues by 1950. That itself is the offspring to rock and roll or doo wop (singing), which itself then turns into more of what you would call beat music of the 60s (singing), and then that develops more into the pop rock of the 70s.
I love this. It&#8217;s a cool website, concerthotels.com, 100 Years of Rock. It&#8217;s all different kinds of genres to see where this comes off and veers off into different directions. Blues, country turns into things like rockabilly and rock in the middle of the 20th century. Rock fragments into all different kinds of rock and sound, which also turns into &#8230; so you have things like blues rock, for example. Which then it is one of the precursors to heavy metal (singing). You get that heavier sound (singing), which then turns into more developed forms of metal music (singing).
I&#8217;ll give you another example. I just think it&#8217;s so neat to see how when you look at a chart like this and you see the genres of music, how there&#8217;s slow incremental changes in the sound. It&#8217;s not these dramatic jumps. It&#8217;s how evolution works, basically. It&#8217;s these small changes over time. We have found the missing links in the evolution of music.
Another one, country and rock really have a lot of kindred elements here, and a lot of that goes back to things like Appalachian folk music (singing). Okay, (singing) so then Appalachian folk would become later in the 1960s folk rock (singing), which then turns more into soft rock (singing) or country rock (singing), in which today in the 90s then turns into more like alternative country (singing). There&#8217;s a lot that you can play with here to see the development of these different genres over time.
That was it. I just wanted to give you a little bit of that. I thought it was really interesting. The other video I&#8217;d recommend is Most Recognizable Song Each Year of the Past 100 Years. As I said, once you get past 1957 with Elvis, it&#8217;s so interesting to see the development of rock into things like the British Invasion, which then turns into more like the 80s bands, hair bands, metal, and then grunge in the early 90s, and then the resurgence of pop in the 2000s. As you get more into the 2015s, later 2010s, early 2020s, we almost have a return. The circle starts to come full turn away from the louder sound of the 80s, for example, or 90s grunge. Remember I said earlier in the 20th century is more individual vocals and solos, crooning, if you will, that kind of makes a return in the 2010s (singing). With things like Adele, for example, in 2015 and other similar genres.
Fascinating stuff. I hope that you enjoyed this. As I said, 100 Years of Rock, visualize, go and check it out, or Most Recognizable Song Each Year of the Past 100 Years. Thank you guys so much, and I hope you have a very blessed weekend.
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FFAF: The Evolution of Rock and Roll

Can your temperament shape your spiritual life? In this episode we explore how natural disposition, trauma, and personality types affect prayer, change over time, and whether they’re at odds with providence. Also—can you be a composite temperament?
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Are Temperaments Fixed or Fluid? Catholic Answers to Personality Questions

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“Jesus is not God. John 1:1 shouldn’t be translated ‘the Word was God’ but ‘the Word was a god.’”
DEFENSE
What that Gospel says about Jesus makes this translation impossible.
It is true that Greek lacks the indefinite article (“a,” “an”), and so translators must decide whether to add it in English. However, one cannot simply assert that it should be added in a particular case. One needs proof from the context.
Considered apart from its context, the Greek phrase normally trans- lated “the Word was God” (theos ēn ho logos) could be rendered a number of ways. However, the thing that determines which translations are accurate is the context—what else the Gospel of John has to say that has a bearing on the meaning of this phrase. When this is taken into account, it is clear that any translation of John 1:1 that would reduce the Word to the status of a created being, such as a finite “god” inferior to the true God, is inaccurate. The Gospel of John repeatedly emphasizes the full divinity of Christ.
John is explicit about the matter when he states, “This was why the Jews sought all the more to kill him, because he not only broke the sabbath but also called God his Father, making himself equal with God” (John 5:18).
Similarly, when Jesus is asked how he could have seen Abraham, he replies, “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58), using the same Greek phrase for “I am” (egō eimi) used in the Greek Old Testament when God declares his name to Moses and tells him, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I am has sent me to you’” (Exod. 3:14). Jesus’ audi- ence understood that he was claiming to be God, “so they took up stones to throw at him” (John 8:59).
Later Jesus declares, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30).
And after the Resurrection, Thomas declares him to be, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28). This reference is particularly significant, because it serves as the bookend for John 1:1’s statement “the Word was God.” The two declarations frame the Gospel of John’s teaching on Jesus’ divinity.
TIP 
For a technical discussion of the grammar of the Greek phrase translated “the Word was God,” see Daniel Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, 255–70.
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The Word Was God

<div>Why is there going to be a new heaven at the Second Coming, and why do we need a new earth? Shouldn’t we all be in heaven?</div><div>You’re referring to what is presented in Revelation 21:1-5. In short, the phrase “a new heaven and a new earth” refers to what heaven will be like for us as resurrected, glorified human persons. That is, a three-dimensional reality that thus accommodates aspects of our physical earthly experience, though in a glorified manner.
For more on this subject, please watch <a href="https://www.catholic.com/video/why-will-there-be-a-new-earth">this short video presentation</a> by Jimmy Akin.
For further insight on the Church’s teaching, please see <a href="http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p123a12.htm#1042">CCC 1042–1050</a>.
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Why a ‘New Earth’ If We’re All Supposed to Be in Heaven?

FFAF: Catholic Apologetics – 1980’s vs. 2020’s

In this episode, Trent unpacks his recent debate with Steve Christie on the Protestant Old Testament canon and the deuterocanonical books of scripture with fellow Catholic apologists Gary Michuta and William Albrecht.

Old Testament Canon Debate De-brief

Discover when Luke and Acts were REALLY written! Jimmy Akin dives into the shocking abrupt ending of Acts—why does it stop right in the middle of Paul’s dramatic Roman trial with no verdict? Using rock-solid evidence (even quoting a famous liberal scholar!), Jimmy argues both books were finished during Paul’s house arrest in Rome: Luke in A.D. 59, Acts in A.D. 60. Mind-blowing early dates that crush late-date myths and supercharge the Gospels’ credibility! Must-listen!
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TRANSCRIPT:
Coming Up
When were the four Gospels written?
Ultimately, from a faith perspective, the precise dates don’t matter.
What matters is that they are divinely inspired and thus authoritative for faith.
However, by showing that the Gospels were written in the first century, within a few decades of Jesus’ life, their credibility is strengthened even from a secular perspective.
Today virtually all scholars—whether skeptical or believing—acknowledge that the Gospels are first century documents.
The real question is how early in the first century they were written.
That’s what we’ll examine in this series of occasional episodes on the podcast.
And today we’re going to be looking at when the Gospel of Luke was written—as well as its companion, the book of Acts
Let’s get into it!
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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 yourself early access to new episodes—by going to <a href="https://patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast">Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast</a>
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The Importance of Acts
More than a century ago, the liberal German scholar Adolf von Harnack published a work titled The Date of the Acts and the Synoptic Gospels in which he considered this question.
In Episode 50 of the podcast, I talked about the conclusions von Harnack came to in his book and how they’re quite similar to mine—even though von Harnack was a theological liberal and I’m not.
I promised that I’d tell you the reasons for the dates that I assign to the Gospels in future episodes, so that’s what we’re going to be doing today—beginning with Luke and Acts.
As you might guess from the title of von Harnack’s book—The Date of Acts and the Synoptic Gospel—he considered the date of Acts first.
The reason is that it’s easier to establish this date and then use it to determine the dates of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) with respect to it.
Acts is important because it’s the sequel to the Gospel of Luke. At the beginning of Acts, Luke writes:
Acts 1:1-2
In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach, until the day when he was taken up.
That’s a description of the Gospel of Luke, which covers the ministry of Jesus and ends with his ascension into heaven.
So Luke was the “the first book” and Acts is now the second book or the sequel to Luke.
Since Luke was written before Acts, the date of Acts determines the latest possible date for Luke.
So . . . when was Acts written?
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Acts’ Sudden Ending
The first twelve chapters of Acts are concerned principally with St. Peter, and from chapter 13 onward, St. Paul becomes the focus of the narrative.
Beginning in chapter 21, Paul makes a fateful trip to Jerusalem, being prophetically warned along the way that if he goes there, he will be arrested.
This indeed happens, and the rest of the book is taken up with the consequences of this event.
Paul spends years in custody, and in chapter 25 a turning point occurs when the new Roman governor, Porcius Festus, arrives.
To avoid having the outcome of his trial affected by the hostile Jewish authorities, Paul invokes his Roman citizenship and the right to have his case tried before Caesar (the Caesar in question being Nero at the time). Festus then replies:
Acts 25:12
You have appealed to Caesar; to Caesar you shall go.
The rest of the book is taken up with the events leading up to Paul’s voyage to Rome and what happened on that trip.
Acts ends in chapter 28 with Paul under house arrest in Rome, awaiting his trial. Luke simply says:
Acts 28:30-31
And he lived there two whole years at his own expense, and welcomed all who came to him, preaching the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ quite openly and unhindered.
The end. That’s it! We get no resolution on what happened when Paul appeared before Nero.
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The Significance of the Ending
Many scholars have argued that the book’s abrupt ending reveals when it was written.
It makes no sense, if Luke knew the outcome of the trial, for him to cut off the narrative at this point.
He has been building toward this climactic event for eight chapters—a quarter of the entire book—and yet he doesn’t tell us what happened!
This is all the more striking, because whatever happened to Paul would have suited Luke’s purposes.
If Paul was acquitted at this trial then Luke could portray Paul and the gospel as gloriously vindicated.
If Paul was imprisoned or martyred then Luke could portray Paul as gloriously and heroically suffering for the gospel, as he has done so often in the book, or even Paul being gloriously martyred for the gospel.
Either an innocent or a guilty verdict would make a very compelling ending.
We learn from later sources that Paul was actually released, and he conducted a further period of ministry, only to be re-arrested and then martyred after Nero found it convenient to blame Christians for the Great Fire of Rome in A.D. 64.
With Paul’s death by beheading likely taking place in A.D. 67.
Yet Luke gives us neither of these endings—either with Paul being declared innocent of the charges against him (which he was), thus vindicating the gospel and the Christian faith . . . or with Paul suffering and possibly dying for the sake of the gospel.
The only reasonable conclusion is that he didn’t do this because he couldn’t: The trial had not yet happened.
Von Harnack comments:
The Date of the Acts and the Synoptic Gospels, pp. 95, 97
Throughout eight whole chapters St. Luke keeps his readers intensely interested in the progress of the trial of St. Paul, simply that he may in the end completely disappoint them—they learn nothing of the final result of the trial! . . .
The more clearly we see that the trial of St. Paul, and above all his appeal to Caesar, is the chief subject of the last quarter of the Acts, the more hopeless does it appear that we can explain why the narrative breaks off as it does, otherwise than by assuming that the trial had actually not yet reached its close. It is no use to struggle against this conclusion. If St. Luke, in the year 80, 90, or 100, wrote thus he was not simply a blundering but an absolutely incomprehensible historian!
Von Harnack also points out that Luke repeatedly records prophecies of future events in Acts, yet he makes no mention of Paul’s ultimate fate, which is something he could have related as a prophecy if he was writing after the fact:
The Date of the Acts and the Synoptic Gospels, pp. 97-98
St. Luke allows Agabus to foretell a famine, to foretell St. Paul’s imprisonment in Jerusalem; he suffers St. Paul himself (on the voyage) to foretell, like a fortune-teller, the fate of the ship and all its passengers; he in many chapters of the book deals in all kinds of “spiritual” utterances and prophecies—but not one word is said concerning the final destiny of St. Paul (and of St. Peter)! Is this natural? There are prophecies concerning events of minor importance [in the book], while there is nothing about the greatest event of all!
This further reinforces the conclusion that Acts was written before the trial to which it has been building had finished.
And on this I absolutely agree with von Harnack.
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The Date of Acts
So in what year was Acts written?
Well, when does its narrative break off?
The specific year is disputed by scholars.
The two years Paul spent under house arrest in Rome begin shortly after the arrival of the governor Porcius Festus, who ships Paul off to Rome.
The problem is that we do not know precisely when Festus arrived in Judaea.
This is the key event for determining when Paul’s voyage to Rome began and thus when his two-year period of house arrest began.
Many estimate that Festus arrived in A.D. 59, and so Paul arrived in Rome early in 60, and his house arrest lasted from A.D. 60-62.
However, I have done a (currently unpublished) study of the issue, and I agree with scholars such as Jack Finegan and Andrew Steinmann that Festus arrived in A.D. 57.
That would mean that Paul arrived in Rome in early 58, and his house arrest lasted from A.D. 58-60.
Since Acts ends with the house arrest having lasted “two whole years,” that means Acts was written at the end of those two years.
I thus conclude that Acts was written in A.D. 60.
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The Date of Luke
Since Luke refers to his Gospel as “the first book,” we know that the Gospel of Luke was written before Acts, but how much before?
A careful study of the end of the Gospel suggests it was not long.
This can be seen by comparing its end with the end of one of Luke’s sources—the Gospel of Mark.
The original ending of Mark may or may not have been lost, but it concludes in a way that indicates what would have happened next.
An angel tells the women who have come to Jesus’ tomb:
Mark 16:7 (cf. Mark 14:28)
But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you.
Mark thus envisions a post-Resurrection appearance of Jesus to the disciples in Galilee. This is also what happens in Matthew (See Matt. 28:7, 10, 16-20).
However, Luke omits Mark’s reference to the disciples going to Galilee and focuses instead on post-Resurrection appearances that occurred in Jerusalem and its vicinity (See Luke 24:13-53).
He makes no mention of the disciples going to Galilee. Instead, Luke records Jesus telling the disciples:
Luke 24:46-49
Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you; but stay in the city, until you are clothed with power from on high.
Notice: Repentance is to be preached to all nations “beginning from Jerusalem” and the disciples are to “stay in the city, until you are clothed with power from on high.”
This difference has led some to accuse Luke of contradicting Mark and Matthew, but that’s not true. In reality there is no conflict.
The truth is that Jesus appeared to the disciples both in the vicinity of Jerusalem and in Galilee.
This is something the Gospel of John makes clear, as John reports resurrection appearances both in Jerusalem (See John 20:19-31) and in Galilee (See John 21:1-23).
Luke simply focuses on the first location, while Mark and Matthew focus on the second.
For our purposes, the question is: Why did Luke choose to end his Gospel as he did?
The obvious answer is that he was already planning what he was going to write in Acts.
Thus at the beginning of the Acts, he records Jesus telling the disciples:
Acts 1:8
But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.
This directly echoes the end of Luke’s Gospel, where Jesus says.
Luke 24:49
“And behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.”
The statement in Acts that “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you” refers to the events of Pentecost, and it corresponds to the statement in Luke that the disciples are to “stay in the city, until you are clothed with power from on high.”
Luke 24:46-48
Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.
Similarly, the statement in Acts that “You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth” is the outline of the book of Acts, and it corresponds to the statement in Luke that “repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in [Christ’s] name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.”
Other elements of the end of the Gospel are also recapitulated in Acts, including the Ascension (Luke 24:51// Acts 1:9-11), the disciples returning to Jerusalem (Luke 24:52//Acts 1:12), and their regular worship in the temple (Luke 24:53//Acts 2:46, etc.).
The presence of these elements at the end of Luke, and particularly the way Luke diverges from Mark, indicates that he was already planning what he would write in Acts.
That means that it can’t have been long between when Luke composed his Gospel and when he composed Acts.
If there had been a gap of years between the two, Luke’s ending would not dovetail with the beginning of Acts the way it does.
I therefore estimate that Luke was finished immediately before Acts, likely in A.D. 59, and that Luke used the two-year period of Paul’s house arrest in Rome to finish gathering material for and to compose his two works.
In fact, much of the material found in the first twelve chapters of Acts—which focus on Peter—as well as some of the material unique to Luke’s Gospel, likely came from interviews that Luke conducted with Peter in Rome during this period.
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Conclusion
We thus find there are good reasons for thinking that Luke and Acts were both composed during Paul’s two-year house arrest in Rome, likely with Luke being written in A.D. 59 and Acts being written in A.D. 60.
But what can we say about when the other Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and John—were written?
Stay tuned, and we’ll look at them in future episodes.
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If you like this content, you can help me out by liking, commenting, writing a review, sharing the podcast, and subscribing
If you’re watching on YouTube, be sure and hit the bell notification so that you always get notified when I have a new video
We’re in our second year of the podcast now, and you can help me keep making this podcast for years into the future—and can get yourself early access to new episodes—by going to <a href="https://patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast">Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast</a>
Thank you, and I’ll see you next time
God bless you always!

When Were Luke and Acts Written?

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“God doesn’t give private revelation or perform any miracles today. These stopped with the first century: ‘As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away’ (1 Cor. 13:8–10).“
DEFENSE
This argument mistakes the time frame Paul is discussing.
He says these will pass away “when the perfect comes.” To claim that happened in the first century, you have to identify what “the perfect” was. Suggestions include the death of the last apostle and the writing of the last book of Scripture.
Paul speaks of “our knowledge” being imperfect, but he is not thinking it will be perfect at the close of the apostolic age or the writ- ing of the last book of Scripture—neither of which he mentions.
He writes: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways” (1 Cor. 13:11). He describes our present knowledge as “child- ish” compared to how we will come to know God. But the Faith had already been “once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3) in Paul’s day, and his knowledge was not childish compared to what was known in A.D. 100, by which time the canon was completed.
He also writes: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood” (1 Cor. 13:12). Paul did not understand the Faith “dimly” compared to how it would be understood a few decades later.
Finally, the one who has fully understood him is God, and thus it is God who he refers to seeing “face to face.” He thus expects perfect knowledge to arrive at the Second Coming, when we will see God (1 John 3:2). That is when these gifts will pass away.
TIP
The standing New Testament instructions on how we are to discern miracles say to take an open-minded but critical approach: “Do not quench the Spirit,” writes St. Paul, “do not despise prophesying, but test everything; hold fast what is good” (1 Thess. 5:19–21).
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The Age of Miracles

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What are the pains of purgatory actually like?

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“If God wants us to know him, and if the Bible is his word, why isn’t it clearer?”
DEFENSE
Several answers may be given.
First, much of the Bible is quite clear, including many of its main teachings (e.g., there is one God, who created the world, and who loves man enough to send his Son to die on a cross so we might be saved from our sins). So is the main sequence of events it narrates. For the most part, it tends to be the subsidiary points that are less clear.
Second, the Bible was written in a certain period of time and in a certain culture. It therefore reflects modes of speech and thought then in use. If we lived back then, it would be clearer to us. But we live in a different time and culture, so it is less clear, and we have to work harder to understand it fully. For God to give us the Bible, he had to pick some time and place to deliver it, so it is only natural people from other eras and lands would need to work harder to understand it than the original audience.
Third, the Bible is a rich work of literature. It works on many levels and rewards its readers by the amount of effort they spend on it, like a great novel. If even ordinary human authors produce works of literature that reward multiple and attentive readings, we would expect the same of God, who is communicating multiple aspects of his infinite mystery within the cramped confines of human language.
Fourth, God appears to want to reward those who are willing to wrestle with the meaning of his word. Thus some parts of the Bible are written in a symbolic manner (e.g., prophecies, parables). These only yield their meaning to those willing to devote the thought needed to understand them. This both intrigues us and rewards those willing to undertake the effort. They end up learning its lessons better than if they had been given a simple, straightforward statement.
Fifth, Scripture isn’t meant to be read alone but in the context of Tradition and the teaching of the Magisterium. Even the simplest person willing to rely on these will learn all he needs to go to heaven.
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Why Isn’t the Bible Clearer?

Some Christians claim the Catholic Church’s seven sacraments aren’t in the Bible at all. How do you respond to that broad objection?

Let’s start at the foundation — where in Scripture do we see the idea that God communicates grace through outward signs?

Baptism is accepted by most Christians, but Catholics see it as more than a symbol. What’s the biblical evidence for baptism actually saving us?

Many people say Confirmation is just a Catholic “add-on.” What are the scriptural roots for a sacrament distinct from baptism?

When it comes to the Eucharist, the biblical debate can get intense. How do you show from Scripture that Jesus meant His words—“This is my body”—literally?

But what about when Jesus says, “Do this in remembrance of me”? Doesn’t that prove that the Eucharist merely a meal in which we recollect on the tings that Jesus did?

Confession to a priest is one of the hardest for non-Catholics to accept. Where does the Bible show that God gave men the authority to forgive sins?

Anointing of the Sick is sometimes seen as “Last Rites” only. How do the Scriptures present this sacrament, and does it match Catholic practice?

Marriage as a sacrament—some say the Bible just sees it as a natural institution. How do you show from Scripture that it’s a channel of grace?

Holy Orders—where in the Bible do we see a distinct, ordained priesthood in the New Covenant?

&#8220;Are Sacraments Biblical?&#8221; This episode tackles the claim that the Catholic Church&#8217;s seven sacraments lack biblical support, addressing foundational questions about God&#8217;s grace through outward signs. Discover the scriptural basis for baptism&#8217;s saving power, the distinct nature of Confirmation, and the authority behind Confession, all rooted in Scripture.
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Proving Every Catholic Sacrament from the Bible – Part 1

Cy Kellett, host of Catholic Answers Live, sits down with Fr. Simon Esshaki to talk about his vocation story, the Middle East, and being a popular priest on TikTok.