No Sanity Required
No Sanity Required is a weekly podcast hosted by Brody Holloway and Snowbird Outfitters. Each week, we engage culture and personal stories with a Gospel-driven perspective. Our mission is to equip the Church to pierce the darkness with the light of Christ by sharing the vision, ideas, and passions God has used to carry us through 26 years of student ministry. Find more content at swoutfitters.com.
No Sanity Required
Why I Left the Catholic Faith
In this episode, Brody talks with John, a young pastor who grew up in a devout Catholic family and later became a Protestant. He shares how his love for Scripture and desire for deeper discipleship led him to question tradition and explore new paths in faith.
John reflects on the strengths and struggles of both Catholic and Protestant traditions, diving into topics like church authority, Bible interpretation, the teachings of Augustine, and the meaning of grace. He offers a unique perspective shaped by both worlds, showing how each tradition has contributed to his understanding of God and the Christian life.
It’s a thoughtful and honest look at how tradition, theology, and personal conviction come together to shape a believer’s spiritual journey—and how Scripture continues to guide and transform lives across denominational lines.
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Welcome to no Sanity Required from the Ministry of Snowbird Wilderness Outfitters. A podcast about the Bible, culture and stories from around the globe.
Speaker 2:All right. So, first off, thanks so much. This was like so last minute. It was the way this conversation came about. We've already, you know, we've already got a format. Um, we've laid out the next few episodes and last night we're sitting around the fire. Um, every night during summer camp we we build that fire and just invite student pastors just for fellowship and community and hear people's stories. And so, john I've just met John. He's a new student pastor, but with a church that's been coming for quite a while and that we have a longstanding relationship with. And we're sitting at the fire and we asked John about his story, like, okay, how'd you get here? Where are you from? And he just told a story. I'd like for you to start off by just sharing your story, because it's fascinating of kind of how you came up, how you came up as far as being in Roman Catholicism and then into how that conversion went down, or your like your, your transformation.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. So I was, uh, born and raised in Atlanta. My family's from New York and kind of all over, but we settled there and um.
Speaker 3:I grew up in a Roman Catholic church. Um, there was a lot of different groups of Roman Catholics. We were Polish, there's a lot of just American, a lot of Hispanic, a lot of African. Usually in the Catholic church is very they're usually very vital Catholic churches in Atlanta and, yeah, my parents were wonderful. They raised me in the faith and communicated the love of God and we would think through the scriptures together and stuff like that. And so a lot of Catholics growing up, and especially ones who have left and you'll find at a Protestant church, will come from Catholic backgrounds. That would be largely nominal and so, you know, they went to Catholic church maybe every once in a while. Their family wasn't super serious about it, but it was something cultural that you do and that is an interesting thing, I think. Coming to Protestantism, you know, one thing that's cool about like rural Baptists is that they do more of this, which is like their faith is also part of their culture. It's not so separable.
Speaker 3:But in Catholic Church that's a big you know it's a big deal. So someone could never go to church. They could largely not like the Catholic Church in many ways and they would still proudly refer to themselves as a Catholic for the most part because it's more who you are than you know necessarily even something you believe you could. I don't know if it'd be like so far as with you know, uh, kind of the jewish faith where it's like you could be an agnostic.
Speaker 2:I don't think you could be an agnostic catholic, but um, but you, uh, I think about there was a lot of buzz around Biden.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, last year. Claim to Catholicism yeah, politicians, mobsters yeah, when you're in the South.
Speaker 2:All the mafia is Catholic.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah, a lot of Catholic politicians, that'll definitely come up. So maybe that's a good example of it. But yeah, I had a great, great family, really consistent church background and yeah, I think I've always wrestled a lot with my faith, even from a young age. My parents, my mom in particular, really wanted me to become a priest, which is funny. She had consecrated me to the ministry in her mind and so. But they from an early age they asked me like hey, do you want to become a priest? And I would say like you know, no, I wanted to get married and I just didn't really have a lot of interest in it.
Speaker 3:But yeah, I did, like asking questions about faith and I thought through those kind of things I would say in middle school a lot of that died down and it became really distant to the faith. And so you know, like in our youth group, to get confirmed to the Catholic church, you have to go, basically just be consistent. You have to go and attend a certain number of like Wednesday night or Sunday night, like youth group kind of things, and you check off, like you know, so they can log your attendance and stuff. And my friends and we would go, uh, you'd have one sacrificial lamb for the week of the five friends and he would go sign in for everyone.
Speaker 3:We would all leave and go to Sonic or something like that, like a freshman classes in college, yes, and so we'd all leave, and so wasn't the greatest, uh, youth student in middle school and and really into high school as well. Um, I, just, the Catholic church I went to was the youth group in particular is a large church but it was very rote, Um, and so like we'd go to youth group and they'd play like a video and it'd be like a moral instruction video, you know, and it looked like one of those old school like, um, sex education videos like where it's like some students recorded it in the nineties you know, from all you can tell and it'd just be like about obeying your parents or something you know, something along those lines, and so it wasn't very engaging.
Speaker 3:And I started going to a different Catholic church ninth or 10th grade because some friends from school invited me and their whole sales pitch and it was as effective was hey, we have better food, and so we had pizza, I think. And there's you know, some moms like would home cook something every week and bring it and stuff like that. So I started going to this new church for the food and so that's not normal. Usually, like a Catholics will all go together as one family. My parents let me go to this other church with a different youth group because they thought it'd be more engaging at that point. So it was.
Speaker 3:It was a very vital religious community as a youth group, like it's very tight knit. We'd go on retreats that looked kind of a lot like you know, in summer camps that look a lot like we do here in some sense. You know, theologically obviously is a lot different, but it's. It's funny being youth pastor now and seeing like the the similarities and like just what camp looks like across. You know denominations and I'm sure you can go to a secular sports camp and get a lot of. There'd be similar elements and then there'd be really different elements.
Speaker 3:Um, but yes, I think somewhere around sophomore junior year I was in this new church and I was really plugging in. I began thinking a lot about faith again and just studying the scriptures and the catechism and stuff like that. The catechism of the Catholic Church is kind of their manual for doctrine. They have a consolidated I don't know when it came about, it's somewhat recent in Catholic history but they have like a formal catechism that has their theological doctrine. But they have like a formal catechism that has their theological doctrine somewhere between like a systematic theology and a biblical theology, and they've coded it all so you can read that and as a kid I would read it a bunch. And.
Speaker 3:I was a little bit of an odd kid for that, I think. But I had a lot of questions really, and so something we talked about last night was what drove my journey out of the Catholic Church and into Protestantism was was two things. The first one was I had a lot of Protestant, you know, non-denominate Baptist friends at the public school I went to. And one thing I didn't say our public school was so large. It was like six or I guess it'd be seven, eight now it was six, eight at the time, and it was so large and it felt very secular. So if you were Christian there, whether you were Catholic or Protestant, you kind of felt some sort of solidarity with each other.
Speaker 3:And so I had friends who we would lead a kind of a club it was like an apologetic club and my Baptist friend, he was the one who really spearheaded that and he agreed to shake hands and we would just not talk about the differences, and so we would both get together and like 50 students or so would come over to his house and his mom would make cookies and stuff and we would talk about the reliability of the scripture and like evidence for the resurrection and stuff like that. So stuff that didn't necessarily probe up against the differences we had, because we just wanted at our school something that was like distinctively Christian at least, and we had a lot of different types of people who would engage in that. But it was really through engaging with him. He was the first Baptist I met who I felt really was like. He was intellectually compelling, and my first experiences with Protestantism were like I went to one of those. It was like a haunted house. I don't know if you've seen this before. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 3:It was like a haunted house, but it was like hell.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And um, that was my, that was my intro into.
Speaker 2:Protestantism. I can't believe you didn't turn and walk away right then.
Speaker 3:I was just kind of there. I was. I was like, oh, this is pretty wild and it was entertaining, honestly, but it was a little bit like man. I was still wrestling through Catholicism at this point, but I was like I don't know who's right, but I don't think it's you guys. And then I yeah.
Speaker 2:I've been to several of those. Yeah, and to my shame, to my utter shame, I worked at one one time.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I was a new Christian, I was in my early 20s. The church we were attended, they were going to do it. They called it uh, I don't even remember now, you know, scare mare, haunted trail, or something anyway, and I had to work at the car crash scene yeah you know where the kid just died?
Speaker 3:in the car crash and yeah yeah, oh, it's so bad it's so bad. It's creative. Like you gotta get props, it can be creative but um, that's funny.
Speaker 2:It was a little jarring as an outsider.
Speaker 3:Uh, that's funny yeah, it was that. And then another one was I went to this church some large baptist church in atlanta, I don't know what it was called um. A friend brought me though, and it was a Christmas service and it was on the poison of Islam. I was, as you know, catholics. Even if you're like a conservative Catholic, you can be pretty I don't want to say politically progressive, but like socially a little bit more progressive, and so I. It offended a lot of sentiments of mine. I was just as a young student. I was like, oh gosh, like you know, this is crazy. I joked last night. There's a lot of Baptists who postponed my journey to Protestantism by some significant number of years, at least three.
Speaker 3:But this guy though we would argue and we were good friends and we would talk about all kinds of stuff, his humility was really striking and his knowledge and love for the word was really striking, and we were both, you know, I think, juniors in high school at this point and uh, but yeah, we love this club together and he was, you know, he had, he had a better grasp on the word than I did, um, but I would help him where I could and really so I was. Just I was wrestling through these things and I was meeting up with priests all the time because I really wanted to know. I wanted two things I wanted a better understanding of grace and what it meant to be a Christian, what God's transforming love was supposed to look like in the life of a Christian. And that was not something I was getting a super easy grasp of in the Catholic church. It felt slippery at times and I also wanted to be discipled. I wanted someone to.
Speaker 3:I didn't know what that word meant at the time, but that's what I ended up wanting. I wanted someone to pour into me, to lead me along in the faith, and I kind of got the same answer. You know through and through whether I was talking to a priest at, like, a youth retreat or wherever it was, and he would say hey, dude, you're, you know, 16 years old, you're going to church, you're going to youth group. You can chill out a little bit.
Speaker 3:You can, you know you don't need to just like be so crazy about everything, and I think there was probably even some wisdom in that and I probably, if I was like in Protestant church, I'm sure somebody would have had to chill me out.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, we have those kids, yeah.
Speaker 3:But as I kept meeting with priests and talking with them and stuff, I just wasn't. I wasn't getting what I was looking for. And what led me into Protestantism, finally, was not a theological issue per se, although I was wrestling through those. Really it was this desire to be discipled. And there was a youth pastor that friend we were in that club together. His youth pastor was meeting, was willing to meet up with me and read the Bible, and I remember we got a group of like four or five guys and we would open 1 Peter and every week he would assign a student a verse and he would say I want you to go home, I want you to figure out what this means, I want you to come back and tell us and you'll lead the discussion next week. And, um, that was like my introduction to interpreting the scripture, not just hearing it read, not just hearing it preached, but as a student, having to interpret it for the first time. And it's fine, I've started doing that with our students now and we did first Peter too, just cause it worked out. But, um, that was, that was impactful for me. That was like, okay, I think God wants us doing this. I think he wants us reading his word, learning to interpret it, learning to teach it to one another, to exhort one another, and so it just felt right Again, in the Catholic church, there is teaching, there is reading of the scripture, but and I don't, I can't just like you know, there's a billion Catholics in the world or something like that.
Speaker 3:You can't just universally say this never happened, but in my experience, there's not this drive to raise up the average church member to interpret the Bible, and I've actually talked to Catholic apologists about this, because I thought that was something that they would just admit they fell short in, but it was something that, actually, as I talked to one guy I can't remember who it was I was talking to an apologist, though and he said he said no, he pointed to Ephesians four and he said God gave us apostles, prophets, teachers, and he said that means that the predominant task of interpreting the word is given to those who God calls into the ministry, and laity don't need to really concern themselves as much with the formal interpretation of the word. They really should look to their leaders, and, again, there's some wisdom in that. You don't want an unequipped member taking it upon themselves to have to interpret the whole word of God. They need the assistance of pastors and people who have thought through these things together, and even God's given us the office of elder to really protect the doctrine.
Speaker 3:And you know the elders get together, you know it's so. There's, there's some truth in that, but then there's also there is this thing where it's like the lady are not being equipped to read the word, um the uh, more so than just being taught what it means. And that was something I saw in Protestantism and I knew instinctively, or at least the spirit in me, and I guess I could talk about it in a second. I think I was already a believer at that point. But I knew at that point hey, this is right. Whatever else is right or wrong, I know that we're supposed to be reading the word together and learning to interpret it.
Speaker 3:I, right or wrong, I know that we're supposed to be reading the word together and learning to interpret it. And, um, I guess could I mention how I, I think I came to faith in the Catholic church? Uh, okay, I was at a, uh, a summer camp, a youth summer camp actually and one thing we did at the Catholic church that I went to is you would write these journal entries every year at the end of your week of camp and at you know, for some reason, not when you graduated high school, but before you went into your senior year, they would give you back all the journal entries you know, from whatever it was, middle school up until 10th or 11th grade, and I remember I read them and I had known that God had been stirring something in my heart over the past few months. At this point, but as.
Speaker 3:I sat down and read those that day. I remember distinctly thinking as I read what I'd written in years previous oh, I'm an idolater. I was just looking at what I read and I was like, whatever it is that my heart was after, even if it was good things I was after, the way that I kind of held them was in a way that made those the supreme thing, and God was a way to get after this. You know, whether it was like a health of a family member, whatever it was, the desire, the approval of others, it was within the Catholic Church that I think that I came to faith and really began to have a saving understanding of who Christ is and what he's done for us, and something we also talked about last night that you can run into Catholics who are believers. There's a lot of people who would say that there's no um, you, you can't be a believer in the Catholic church.
Speaker 3:Uh, but the reality is, if we're, if we're told that the word is sharper than any two edged sword and if it's dividing um and if it's effective, if it works on its own, apart from us, apart from our strength, then, if you're sitting under the reading of the word of God, people can come to faith, and people will come to faith even if it's under bad preaching, and this is something that is actually part of our Protestant tradition, more so than most people realize is that, you know, um, this is maybe a little bit of a turn, if that's okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, I'm loving it, I'm I'm having a ball.
Speaker 3:Okay, a little bit of a turn, if that's okay. Yeah, okay, I'm loving it, I'm having a ball. Okay, you know, over the years, when I first started picking up Luther whether that was in undergrad or seminary or whatever it was, you know, the first thing that really usually strikes someone is, oh, this guy really hated the Pope, like, in particular, you know, pope's, the Antichrist, you get all that kind of stuff. And so I thought initially that the Protestant Reformational tradition around what Luther and Zwingli and Calvin thought as they interacted with Catholics was that they were stricter on dogmatically eliminating Catholics from the conversation if it was Christian. That was kind of my initial impression.
Speaker 3:But then really over the years, I've realized the way that Luther talked about the church was that Christ's church is holy, not because of the behavior of the church or even because of the quality of preaching all the time, but because God has made it holy. It's holy because it's his bride. And so what Luther would tell someone? Hey, the Catholic church is still the church, it's still part of the church, and even if its leaders are corrupted by one thing or another, even if it's teaching false doctrine at some point, you know if this, you know for him. Baptists articulate this differently, but you know he would say if the sacraments are being rightly administered and the words being rightly preached, then it's there. This is still Christ's church and he always saw himself as a reformer in the sense of this was the church that he was trying to reform, not the absence of the church.
Speaker 2:Right. In other words, he wasn't looking to start something new, he was looking to reform what was there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and if you asked Luther, are there believers within the Catholic Church still after the Reformation? He would have said absolutely. And I think that the word being objectively effective, apart from the human communicator of that word, would have been very important for him or was very important for him. And so, yeah, I do think I came to faith under the Catholic Church, but it was a stunted growth because there's not this discipleship there, there's not this impetus to teach members, teach believers to read the word and interpret it for themselves, and then, on top of that, there is a lot of communication around works. That also stunt growth, because it's when you see God's grace for you they're able to be transformed. One of the things that you know, I've thought was so great this week, even though we've heard in some teaching, is the the fact that it's a new set of affections. Was it you who gave that in? One of your say.
Speaker 3:Yes, with the middle schooler who, who starts, you know no-transcript.
Speaker 3:He's not going to do it, or he's going to do it begrudgingly, and he's not going to do it right and so, but he's going to be very motivated to do it right the minute that his affections have changed. And the same is true for us. You know, if the Catholic church you need to turn from dead works and worship the Lord in your actions, but you're not really putting forward the love of Christ that drives us to do that, and I think there were some motivations there. But a works-based salvation will not initiate the same change, the same sanctification. Even if the Spirit might be present in someone, that work is slowed by bad teaching, even if the spirit might be present in someone, that work is slowed by bad teaching.
Speaker 3:So, even though I said the thing I said about there are people coming to faith under the word, you know, regardless of the human interpreter. The role of the pastor is still incredibly significant to communicate the word rightly, because it leads to a the word going out more effectively, and there's probably a lot of people who didn't come to faith because of all the stumbling blocks in that teaching. And then, for those who are really having their heart changed by the lord, that growth is just not being rightly fed at the same time. And so I still do think there's a significant role in the word being taught in a way that's faithful to the text on this kind of thing. So I'm not trying to disparage that in saying that people can come to faith in the Catholic church just through the readings of the old Testament, the new Testament and and seeing the beauty of Christ laid out in God's own word, and so but yeah, man.
Speaker 2:That's a couple, a couple of things that I think made me. That triggered questions for me. One, when okay, when you would go talk to that priest. Okay, first off, I'm assuming a priest is accessible to the laity and outside of confessional, that, depending on the size of the congregation, you have access to the laity and outside of confessional that, depending on the size of the congregation, you have access to the priest. So this is more for people that just don't understand how it works. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You go have a conversation with that priest, the same way as a Baptist person go have a conversation with one of their pastors, and then when you're talking about biblical interpretation, the idea is in the Catholic church, would you say that part of what took the church down the path that she went down which ultimately led up to maybe the Reformation, the Protestant Reformation down, which ultimately led up to maybe the Reformation, the Protestant Reformation, was because of that obstruction to interpretation and particularly with worship services through the Middle Ages being led in Latin, people couldn't understand Latin, and so now, interpretation and translation. There's so much going on where people are left to just trust what the priest is telling them. They cannot check it for themselves, like the bereans, who are more noble than the thessalonians, right, so they can't check the scriptures. It's not even, um, we can interpret it. They don't have a translation in their language. Right?
Speaker 2:That was happening in parts of Europe, germany. That was part of what was going on at Luther's time. So, were there? Is there now that you can speak objectively to this, but with intimate knowledge? Were there?
Speaker 3:was that a big part of the abuses, theologically, that were taking place during that time Was that the priests were saying one thing and the people could not check what the priest was saying, against the scriptures I think so, um and, but I think there were checks and balances there okay, talk about that one thing you know luther even talks about is that he was made some people don't realize this he was made a doctor of the church, and a doctor wasn't like you go get a phd, kind of more, like it is now, although I think they're connected, those two systems in history somewhere. But you know, it means that he had at some point in his journey in the Catholic church been set apart as someone who was supposed to guard the doctrine of the faith. And he would refer back to that constantly when he was being criticized and say, hey, you guys made me a defender of the right teaching of the word within the church. And so he would claim and he actually felt it very important that that was the case. And so again, it wasn't like a pure absence or vacuum of checking the word with what the church is currently practicing.
Speaker 3:Because something people also don't realize or I think more people do now is there were a lot of reformations prior to Luther. They didn't always follow the same pattern and a lot of them were monastic reformations. So usually in the Catholic Church you would see the corruption and then you'd go start a monastery of brothers and you're like we're going to really live out the faith in this kind of sequestered community or a convent with nuns or whatever it was, and so typically reformations were monastic, meaning you know you'd go, you would withdraw to try and live a holier life and you would see your role in the church at that point is not, in the same way, not saying you know the church is terrible or it's whatever they would say. Our role is to withdraw and pray. You know, for those who are outside of this monastery and really devote their lives to holiness and prayer, there was pros and cons and all those.
Speaker 3:I think Christians in general because they have the word have always been reforming, have always been trying to get back to the root of what does the scripture say. Because you can see anytime you're dealing with people, and even the catholic church, they're self-aware of abuses and you know hypocrisy within the kind of ecclesial authority and all those kind of things like they've always been attempting to deal with that in a variety of ways.
Speaker 2:Um, and you know now that you're on this side of the conversation, the baptist world cannot take the moral high ground when it comes to, uh, moral failure abuses. Yeah, I mean oh yeah, no one's been. If you're protestant, you love to talk about the spotlight that's been put on the catholic church. Right, but how about the spotlight that's been put on?
Speaker 2:oh yeah baptist, and you know it's just crazy, it came out. You saw, it came out last week. Yeah, the guy, uh, truett mcconnell, former vp. Did you see this? No, I did not. Okay, this came out. Jb sent me this. Uh, this guy was a vp at truett mcconnell. Truett mcconnell is it's baylor seminary um, it's uh, no, no, truett mcconnell is a uh, bible college. I mean, it's a baptist.
Speaker 2:Oh, I see, four-year university, yep, in georgia that's overseen by the georgia baptist okay and so they have their own board of trustees, but they answer, I think, somehow directly or indirectly to the georgia baptist, I see. So it's a state where what happened was the vice president. It's come out this past week that the vice president has been accused of grooming a girl from the time she came in as a freshman and she's got 350 incriminating emails over a 10-year span. Where she was a brand-new believer, he took her into his home to disciple her he and his family Then he started to isolate her. Then he started to disciple her and then it went from there. Her, then he started to disciple her and then it went from there. So I mean, it's like those stories come out of the baptist church as I uh, ding, ding, ding, as often as they come out of the catholic church.
Speaker 2:We don't have moral high ground there. So one thing I've always I've just personally felt was that I get frustrated when protestants, and particularly baptists, imply that the Catholic church is is broken because of all the abuses. Yeah, and we have. Well, sure there's abuses and sure they need to be accounted for and God will deal with that. But I do think something that was really enlightened and insightful for me last night is I'm I talked about some friends that we have that are devout Catholic and they're they're they're more faithful to their church than probably we are to ours, it feels like a lot of times, and they're very faithful in their marriage and they've been very faithful in the way they've raised their children and the nurture and the admonition of what they believe is the Lord's plan for their kids' lives. And so in that conversation I made the comment it feels like they would believe that they are saved by grace and in faith alone. By grace alone, uh, through christ alone, uh. And you made a comment. You said, well, in grace alone, yes, christ alone yes.
Speaker 2:But they would say faith and works yes, could you elaborate on that a little bit yeah, so um, and I think that's when you said it's kind of Augustinian.
Speaker 3:Yep, yep. So the best of Catholics are Augustinian and um best, being most Orthodox.
Speaker 3:Most, yeah, most faithful to the text. So, uh, augustine was super important for me as a, as a younger Catholic. Um, people would encourage his works to me and, like you know, the confessions and stuff like that, great things, and so, um, that was something I came into the Protestant church with, was something Catholics do really well is the Trinitarian theology. Is is rock solid, even when we've been, we've messed around, you know, sometimes and tried to do weird, you know apply the modalism or modalism apply the Trinity to gender roles too much.
Speaker 3:Again, there are some helpful comparisons there that Paul makes even, but, like you know, when we're doing innovative things that we shouldn't be doing, the Catholic Church has really stood firm on that. And the other thing is, you know, a deep love for the early church. Augustine is so cool to me because of all the early church fathers. They're dealing with these Christological debates. They're dealing with these Christological debates. They're dealing with these debates around the Trinity and they're opposing various views. And the church is really taking that first few hundred years to solidify the doctrine that's already there in the scripture but it needs to be articulated and it needs to be universally practiced and agreed upon so that we can have a consistent witness. And so a lot of the effort of the early church is applied to this Trinitarian doctrine. Then later, these Christological debates.
Speaker 3:And Augustine, I think the reason why he talks about grace so much and I think why he became such an important figure for the whole history of the church. Everyone claims him, everybody wants Augustine to agree with them, and that's a testament to the how prolific he was, but then also how wide reaching his kind of doctrinal statements went. You know that if you're a Methodist, you think you're Augustinian more so than anyone else, if you're Lutheran, if you're Baptist, if you're Catholic. And so one of the reasons why he was able to devote so much attention to grace is, for the first time in the history of the church, a lot of those first debates are being settled, and so he almost has a little bit more time on his plate now to start turning his attention to other things. And something he becomes really enamored with is this question of the relationship between faith and works. He becomes enamored with God's predestining grace in a way that you know, especially later in his life, in a way that other early church fathers will touch upon and they'll preach on it, but it's not their kind of dominating focus. And so Augustine is super important, and the best Catholics are still following him in a lot of those lines, and particularly in.
Speaker 3:You know there's two really important things he wrote on this that I think really clarify his position and why so many people fight over him. It's two they're shorter books. The first one is called on the spirit and the letter. He wrote it around four, 12. And if you read on the spirit and the letter like the first time I read it I thought I was reading a John Piper book. It's ridiculous how similar and I don't you know.
Speaker 3:I'm sure now I wouldn't but at first it's shocking how similar it sounds the way that like a modern day reformed Protestant would articulate justification, salvation apart from works, things like that. Because he really wants to stress in that letter how important it is that it's through God's grace only that we come into a saving relationship with him. He said you can't do anything to approach God apart from him, and he's really pressing that home and it's a great discussion. But he writes another letter I can't remember which one is first or second now, but it's called On Faith and Works and he clarifies in that one that he still does believe that works have some justifying element to them. And you know there's a professor I had in seminary who disagreed with me on this point, so I could be wrong.
Speaker 3:He really holds it down. He's Lutheran. He holds it down that Augustine was really functionally in alignment with the reformers, and particularly Luther in particular. I think there's one thing here where Augustine thought that you're saved by God's grace and his grace alone, meaning that whatever you have, whatever merit you have, it is supplied by God's grace. He gives you the faith that you believe in him. That's a gift and we would agree with that. Augustine would also say there is some sense in which God looks on you in the final judgment and will justify you according to your works. But Augustine will say there's still no room for boasting in that, because he gave you those works as a gift. And so it's almost like the water bottle analogy you just used, where God hands you the works and then he justifies you for them.
Speaker 3:This is what Augustine says. So you know now, you know again. Not everyone would agree on.
Speaker 2:Which the water bottle illustration was not about works, it was about salvation.
Speaker 3:But yes, what we would say about faith.
Speaker 3:He would also say about works and so we would articulate that differently. We will, and a lot of this debate, if you really want to get into, like the Catholic Protestant debate around Augustine and why the justification language is so confusing. A lot of it is because in Latin the word I think it's estia, I didn't learn Latin so forgive me for that but the word for justification, in Latin it has two meanings that we would in English use two words to describe one word that they had. And the same is true in Greek when Paul talks about justification or when another New Testament author you know kind of famously James talks about justification, it's not always being used with the same meaning. So in English we will say the word vindicate for the other meaning of justification, meaning if we're in a conversation and I say that you were justified, I could mean that you were made right, but I could also mean that you were shown to have been right. And so if you're having an argument and a third party comes in and justifies you, they didn't by say they give some kind of evidence that shows you were right. They weren't making you correct by justifying you, they were showing you to have been in the right.
Speaker 3:And a lot of the confusion comes because you know the New Testament authors. But then also you know later even Augustine will use the word justification and it's kind of hard to piece out when you're reading him which one he's referring to and what the relationship is. And he's not even as interested as we are later at piecing those two things out. And so you know a famous example of this in scripture. I think it's first Timothy 3.16,. You know it's the mystery. I think it's the mystery of godliness. You know it says that Christ is oh, I'm blanking on what it is, but basically he says at one point in 1 Timothy 3.16 that Christ was vindicated by the Spirit, by the Spirit yep.
Speaker 3:And that word is the same word we'd use for justified. You know when Paul talks about it in Romans. But it's so clear that Paul is not saying that Christ was made righteous by the.
Speaker 3:Spirit that we know, we have to know. He's saying that the Spirit showed Christ to have been righteous, he justified Christ in the sense of showed him to be, just to be, in the right, and so, anyway, there's a lot that goes into that argument. It's really difficult to piece out. Like I remember, later in undergrad I really tried to apply myself to that issue and I was like I'm going to figure it out, I want my hands around it and to be able to grasp it, and it was slippery. It's hard reading Augustine figuring out.
Speaker 2:The bottom line, then is sorry, yeah, the grace alone. No, no, no, no To what you're saying there. If I was going to try to explain that to somebody, I would be safe to say like if I'm speaking to a Protestant who has misconceptions about what Catholics believe, I could say in Augustinian theology or soteriology it's not as simple as saying, oh, they believe in salvation by works. But it's also not okay to say they believe you're justified by faith alone.
Speaker 2:Yes, it's somewhere between that, that we've got to reconcile those two. But people tend to think oh, because I've always heard. Well, Catholics believe you're justified by works. Yep, it's not simple enough to say that.
Speaker 3:It's not so simple, especially not in the Augustinian tradition.
Speaker 3:Right, but because he really would say you are saved by grace alone. And he'll use that term and you know so. The term grace alone appears in Augustine's works. Like you can read it, you will never find the words faith alone, unless he's saying them in a negative context, saying that it's not correct, because he's trying to fight against the same thing James is trying to fight against, which is, you know. He has one example in his On Faith and Works where he says if a man is, you know, living with his concubine, living with the woman, he shouldn't be. That's his own life experience.
Speaker 2:That's what he came out of?
Speaker 3:Yeah, but he says, if that man wants to be baptized right now, he would say I would tell that man go settle that situation and then come back because he wants to really make sure that someone is sure that Christ is not only their savior but also the Lord.
Speaker 2:That's what he's really trying to hold up in that moment, and so he doesn't want evidence that that person has surrendered to the lord and is now walking in obedience to his commands yes, he might.
Speaker 3:He might have some issue. You know, if we were to say, hey, come as you are, he would say, well, I agree with that in a sense. But, like you know, let's make sure that you understand that you can count the cost, that you can really say I understand what it means that if I become a christian, I need to turn away from sin, declare Christ as Lord. It doesn't mean I'll be perfect right now. Augustine didn't think that he was someone who welcomed in the sinner, but also, at the same time, he wanted them to understand that Christ wanted lordship over their life. And so I'm not trying to say that to defend his articulation of that, but it's—.
Speaker 2:Isn't it true? Didn't Jonathan Edwards teach that, yeah, yeah, and practice that in his, in his pastoral so much so that jonathan edwards was frequently accused of sounding catholic.
Speaker 3:Um, and yeah, he's, jonathan edwards, uh, was a a frequent um, what's the word? Plagiarizer of Augustine he loved. You know, if you go read Jonathan Edwards on the Trinity, he just copy and paste Augustine on the Trinity. And Jonathan Edwards loved Augustine and he loved the way that he articulated justification. He had disagreements with it and so Jonathan Edwards is a great example of someone who would fall just over the razor's edge of Augustine being on the one side. And if you really pushed Augustine, he would say yes, you're saved by faith and works. Jonathan Edwards would articulate justification in almost the same way as him, but he would not finally say you are saved by faith and works. He will say you're saved by faith alone. But I think Edwards would find himself very much so in line with Augustine where he would say that and I think this is where that Lutheran professor is correct and this is where I would agree with both of them on this Augustine was trying to get across the same scriptural truths that we were. So while I don't think that he finally would articulate the doctrine the same way because again, I don't want to be in an argument with a Catholic and then be just able to point to it and say, hey, you're just definitively wrong. At this point I do think the spirit of what Augustine was getting at was very similar, if not identical, to what the reformers were trying to get at in Luther and Calvin, and that's why they claim him, that's why we claim Augustine I think legitimately and that's why he's such an important part of this conversation. So I'll just say when you're talking to a Catholic so many of them are Augustinian because they really want to hold up you can find Catholics who are talking about predestination.
Speaker 3:Augustine was specific. Towards the end of his life he really thought a lot about predestination, about predestination, and so there are a lot of Catholics who they get at Paul's real concern in 1 Corinthians 4-7. If everything you've received is a gift, why do you boast as if it's not a gift? And then Paul, all throughout Romans, this real concern of the removal of boasting. That's what Paul's after and I think you can get that in Augustine, even with his articulation of works.
Speaker 3:I would say, hey, it's wrong to say you're justified by faith and works, but the way that Augustine articulates it is still in a way that he preserves the removal of boasting, which I think is where the gospel becomes so clear to us, is when you can look at God and say I've brought nothing to this conversation. I brought nothing to the table here. Whatever I have, for whatever reason, you see me as right in your eyes. It was not because of me, purely because of the work of Christ, and so I think that's something that we would agree on at times again with the best of Roman Catholics.
Speaker 2:When Paul says to the Galatians that meganoito state, may it never be. God forbid that I would boast, except in the cross of Christ Jesus. Yeah, that's, that's helpful. We're talking about Hopefully dispelling some misconceptions that people who got their Catholic theology from watching boondock saints you know. Yeah, like that, this is very insightful and I think, unfortunately, the people tend to stereotype and categorize and pigeonhole someone that doesn't hold their, their belief system or their point of view on something, and so hopefully, this is insightful.
Speaker 2:So, okay, let's go back in your personal story. Where was that point? You talked about how it was about a three-year like I think I came to. I think I actually came to true saving faith in the catholic church and that's where the conversion occurred. What was that thing? That? And then I want to segue this into the next question, so I'll give you both questions so that that way, if it all flows, you can just take that. What was it that took you in that sort of that final step into I'm turning from this, from the Catholic Church, I'm embracing Protestantism, and then so what, what was it for you, that that final step? And then what would you say to someone who is okay, let's reverse this a little bit. We talked about this last night. There's a massive shift right now with young people who you're seeing this massive movement toward the Catholic Church. What would you say to someone who's wrestling with that and considering going the opposite direction of? How you went, Make sense yeah it does. Okay.
Speaker 3:I think there were a lot. It's like I said, there are a lot of moments, um, cause I stayed in both churches for a full year. I would go to both. Um, I would go to mass in the evenings. We had a our youth, you know, or the contemporary service they had was in the evenings, kind of our version of that now. But but I stayed in both for a year and I would have like Bible studies with these other Catholic students, I know, and I was evangelizing and there were friends who left the Catholic church with me as a result of that and so you know, I had a friend named Sam and he and I would meet up with students and we would read the Bible and we'd argue about things. And you know, sadly, I've met some of them later and some of them we talked out of Catholicism and never into Protestantism and so they're atheist or agnostic now.
Speaker 3:So it was imperfect and really we were just trying to— we were doubting the kind of Catholic theological system we were in, imperfectly and we were trying to evangelize and share the gospel with others. And there were students who left when I did as well and became protestant not all at the same time. It was like a trickle, but, um, yeah, I think there was that year of overlap where I was really there until it was unhelpful, you know, I think until I, pretty much everyone in the catholic church was like, okay, you know, I, they would have never said to leave. But it was like, okay, you know, I, they would have never said to leave. But it was like I was just kind of openly proselytizing, you know, students also in the youth group, and so I understand, you know the the tension that began to rise in those moments and conversations and stuff and um, I remember our youth were allowed to teach sometimes and so I was. Even, you know, I was giving teaching opportunities and stuff in my youth group and during that year.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I was talking about, you know, grace and faith and all those kind of things. And eventually, you know, one of our youth coordinators was like hey, some parents are like what's going on here? And that's in the same situation with us.
Speaker 3:We would be like that's not good, you know, and so but yeah, there were a lot of, so it wasn't this firm break. I do I do remember the day that I left and did not come back, and I've I've been to Mass with my family in years, following at times and stuff, so but just to kind of ideologically, I knew that I was leaving. I was just sitting on the ground. One day we all sat on the ground. For some reason we didn't have chairs in our youth group. I don't think it was a cultural thing, we just did it, we just did it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, somebody was on the stage and we all just sat on the carpet. But, um, but I just remember sitting there one day and just like I'm not a big audible voice of the lord guy, but I just remember god was like all right, you're out, you're done.
Speaker 3:This is it last day okay and um, I left that day and just didn't come back the next week wow and um, but yeah, I remember it was a distinct, that was a distinct moment, but that was after a year of me being functionally out the door, and that would have been like your senior year in high school. At some point during the senior year.
Speaker 2:And at that point had you decided to go to a Baptist college. No, so I.
Speaker 3:I had intended to go to UGA and um, do like business or law. I had no intention of doing ministry. I knew I liked to teach. I loved thinking about the word, but it wasn't until I started going to the. It was a non-drama, you know, functionally.
Speaker 2:He just smirked because JB is behind this camera and she is a radical. She is a jihadist for the University of Georgia, nice, are you barking over there? Yeah, I knew that just made her day, oh yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I grew up in Gwinnett but I really wanted to go to UGA and that was the plan. And then somebody at our church you know is one of those, like old lady comes up to you and tells you you're going to be a pastor moments. And.
Speaker 3:I was like, oh, I don't really think so, you know. But I talked to a pastor there and you know he's like hey, and he's like hey, I think you should really consider. He's like the church wanted to kind of call me into ministry. I know that looks different for different denominations and I probably wouldn't even think the same way about ordination as that church I first started going to there. But they said, hey, we want you to really consider what going into ministry would look like. And so I was fine going to UGA and getting a business degree and then going to seminary. Afterward I actually thought that was that sounded really smart to me, um, to get that kind of both experiences and tools and whatnot, and but I I really had begun thinking I'd like to become a professor, so that was my desire at the time.
Speaker 3:And there's a lot of guys who go through seminary and they want to be a professor and then they end up not doing it, and I was one of those. But, um, so in undergrad, though, I started meeting up with this old Testament professor. Um, I was friends with his daughter. She went to the same youth group as I was in and the Protestant church and, um, yeah, I was just talking to her one day and she's like, yeah, my dad's an old Testament professor. And I was like, oh, I need to meet your dad. And so, yeah, he was a guy. He was teaching at Candler, which is a Methodist seminary in Atlanta, and he's a fascinating guy. He's a minor prophet scholar and we would just meet up and he would talk to me about the Old Testament and why he thought it was so significant and just insights he'd learned. And I told him. I was like, hey, if I wanted to be a professor, what are the next steps? What should I start this journey? Looking like?
Speaker 3:And you know he said hey, you should really consider getting an undergrad in religion if you're hoping to teach at some point. And looking back, I'm really thankful I did that because I really enjoy. I went to Samford university. He recommended Samford and Barry and I went to both and ended up at Samford. But, um, yeah, but it ended ended up there and it was something we talked about last night. You know the religion department in the undergrad there is split. You know there's some progressive and some conservative professors. But I learned a lot and I had a really good time doing that. But he was the guy who kind of pushed me in that direction. So I found myself after senior year with ruined college plans and so I took a gap year and I worked for that church under a youth pastor the same youth pastor, just kind of followed him around for a year.
Speaker 3:And, um, one thing that was fun is I worked as a lifeguard at a indoor pool all year, so through the winter not a lot of people go to the pool in the winter and so functionally I sat alone in a room for a year. You know, there was old lady classes, you who'd come and do water aerobics and stuff like that, but not a ton of people in there. And I'll say, first year really considering ministry, pursuing ministry, sitting in a room alone for 20 hours a week was almost as impactful as the time working in that church under their leadership.
Speaker 2:It was monastic.
Speaker 3:It was monastic because it gave me as a young man your mind is, I was so foolish and I was still am very talkative, but I was like I was, uh, I was not good at the you know, uh, speaking little and listening much, and so just sitting alone in silence for a while was it was really impactful for me. Um, I was able to like, really devote myself to prayer and I remember so, uh, I just found, like you know, john Piper and um, ask pastor John and that the weekly newsletter he had sent out and so just, you know, I would read that and I would, I'd read before I went to college, I just read whatever people would give me, and so there's a lot of Jonathan Edwards, it was a lot of Augustine and early church fathers.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:Yeah, somebody gave me this like spiral bound, like seven of his books that were kind of put into one volume, and I read through those and, yeah, the, the classics, and I decided to sit in that room alone, cause you can kind of read if no one's in there and so I just read and I prayed and did a lot of pacing and, yeah, that was. That was really impactful for me. I do want to get back to that question you asked, though, about um, the person who's considering becoming Catholic. If you don't mind, there is a large number of people, usually younger and usually conservative people, who are moving towards Catholicism, and even Eastern.
Speaker 3:Orthodoxy now and stuff like that. And a lot of it's through Instagram or YouTube and things like that where people are watching videos or YouTube and things like that where people are watching videos. But a lot of it is also that there's two big things, I think, that have led to that shift. I think the first is that we're in I'm going to use a big word and then I'm going to explain it I think we're in a little bit of an epistemological crisis, you know, in the sense of we're unsure about the foundation, of where truth comes from.
Speaker 3:And so Protestantism, which tells you hey, you need to learn to interpret the word, and it it feels arbitrary to a lot of people that I could have one interpretation and he could have another, she could have another, and so the firmness of the Catholic church, I think, is uniquely appealing in a time like this. I think that you can kind of hit the eject button on the conversation a little bit and say, hey, one true church. It teaches apostolically, authoritatively, and I can yield to that. And again, I think there are biblical impulses there, even if I think they're a little bit misguided. But, yeah, that sprint towards security and firmness where people are not feeling that firmness or that security is a big deal, I think also something particular with Eastern Orthodoxy, but also with Catholicism.
Speaker 3:A lot of young men are just pursuing traditionalism, basically, and I think we are to blame for a lot of that as Protestants. I think that, especially over the past four to eight years, we consider anything sometimes, especially in the Baptist world, I think we've been guilty of. Anything is good if it's conservative and we've really kind of left behind. Is it biblical? And that was a mistake, because Eastern Orthodoxy is more conservative than we are. There's no way to get around that. You know they'll. They'll hang up the image of the you know, I don't know, like a rembrandt painting or like a slaughtered lamb holding a cross, leading an army, or something like that, and you're like heck, yeah, dude that's you know if you're like a you know if you, if you've just been told our, our society is soft and we need to just be conservative at all costs.
Speaker 3:There's ramifications for that theologically, if it's not word-centered, and so I think that's a big issue. If you're on Instagram Reels and there's a guy with a giant beard and robes and a collar saying that you know, young men need to pull their pants up and stuff like that, you're like that sounds, that sounds. My Protestant church seems a little soft compared to what they're offering, and so I think we've trained people a little bit just to be as hard as they can, and that is a mistake if it's not biblically driven.
Speaker 3:Something I've loved we did a night where we broke off into men and women, and John taught through biblical masculinity and it was in, you know, john taught through, uh, biblical masculinity and it was in a way that I really appreciated. I didn't know what to expect. This is my first year here and I was, like you know, I don't know what he's going to say it can be anything.
Speaker 3:You know the biblical masculinity talk and he really just laid out you know that it being, you know, biblically masculine means following Christ, um, and a lot of the things that make a man biblical or make, and a lot of the things that make a man biblical or make biblical manhood, make biblical womanhood.
Speaker 3:So if you said in point one. You know, men lay down their authority and submit to Christ's authority. Women do as well, and so there's a lot of ways in which clinging to the text, clinging to what the word teaches us, and not just whatever is culturally conservative, is good. I think that's led a lot of people down the route of what's the firmest, strongest thing I can find, and even if it's a human authority, I'll cling to that. But I would hate to be mischaracterized myself, and so I don't want to be mischaracterizing. That's not why all Catholics are.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I think that's insightful and I think that's not why all.
Speaker 2:Catholics are, are, yeah, but I think that's insightful and I think that's helpful and you have a to. I know it's not a unique perspective, but it's fairly unique. It's not. It's not a. There's not a lot of people that have your story and, if anything, people are going in the opposite direction, sure, and I I think, uh, we, what you're describing, we see in so many different ways in our culture right now, whether that is, look at last year's election and how much was talked about young men, young black men, young, you know so many young dudes that were saying we're tired of this, the softness or the progressivism or the gender confusion or the LGBTQ, whatever it is. We want something strong, we want somebody that says the things that resonate with us.
Speaker 2:But then, when you look at the trends in the world of podcasting and social media, it's amazing how much traction you see with podcasts or social media accounts, with guys that are pushing some type of masculinity, whether that's the tape brothers or the, the guy. There's these brothers, one of them's a boxer. Now, forget their names. Um, people would be able, kids would be jake paul. Jake paul, okay, yeah, okay, you know, just weird, like very, um, strange, but like trying to push this sort of secular idea of masculinity. But then you look at, there's this massive ex-military community that are so popular in that world right now and so clearly there's this thing that people are drawn to. Well, the scriptures never stopped teaching that what men are to be and what women are to be, teaching that what, what men are to be and what women are to be, and um, but it makes sense here and you say that people have been informed of their masculinity from the secular world and I think maybe with young we're speaking to young men rather than from the scripture. And so now they're, they're seeing a path to a place where we can kind of get this masculine ideology or identity with a conservative and theological framework, because we've dropped the ball in in protestant circles with that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that makes sense. What about? Um? This is kind of what, what um talk about the apocrypha, because we had, we just we give out at graduation. We give our students that graduate from our student ministry at our church. We give them, uh, uh, a really nice Bible, like an heirloom, quality Bible. Okay, um, goatskin or whatever they choose, a scholar or a or or a Cambridge, but a $300 Bible. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so one of our dudes, the guy you met last night, hank, the former NASCAR driver who told a really funny story about going to the Catholic church and putting the Eucharist in his pocket. That might be fun to talk about. I think people would enjoy that. His son asked for his Bible to include the Apocrypha and I haven't got to talk to him yet. I'm like that's interesting, so talk just briefly, just super brief. What is it? Why is it in the Catholic Bible, not in the Protestant Bible?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so people disagree about this. I remember one of the first things I read as a Protestant was Wayne Groom Systematic Theology, and I remember reading it and being like I don't think this is accurate. At least on that one part where he talks about the canon and how it came together, because the Catholic understanding is different and even in Protestantism there's different understandings and interpretations because, history is complicated, but fundamentally, first of all, what Catholics call that particular portion of the Apocrypha that they have in the Bible is called the Deuterocanon or the Deuterocanonical books.
Speaker 2:Okay, so there's more Apocryphal writings that are not included in that, so any.
Speaker 3:New Testament Apocrypha. We would both consider Apocrypha. Okay. You know Gospel of Thomas. Gospel of Thomas is not in the Catholic Bible. Okay. You know, Gospel of Thomas. Gospel of Thomas is not in the Catholic Bible. Okay, there are a few. I'm a bad former Catholic for not knowing how many. I think it's seven. Is it seven?
Speaker 2:I think that's right. I think it's seven.
Speaker 3:Books that are included in the Catholic Bible, that are not in the Protestant, particularly from the Old Testament that are considered the Deuterocanon. Deuterocanonical books, and even not all of the Old Testament apocryphal books have made it into the Catholic Bible, so it's just these particular ones we're talking about, and so saying Deuterocanon is maybe a little bit of a nod to them, but then it's also a helpful way of articulating what we mean when we say that there's more books in the Catholic Bible, because when you hear the word apocrypha, if someone's like you know the epistle, the epistle of Barnabas, or you know, not all the apocrypha is in the Catholic Bible because the word apocrypha, if something's apocryphal yeah by definition, it's false yep other it's so, it's outside of the canon.
Speaker 2:So if you say something is so, what you're saying is those say that word again, deuter deuterocanonical deuterocanonical, those books will be the ones that are revered or held as sacred writings.
Speaker 3:Yep, and even the word. So when we get the deuteronomy in the bible is the second giving of the law deuterocanonical and so it's the second canon.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah okay, and are all the apocryphal books that are included in that? Are they all from the intertestamental period or no?
Speaker 3:yes, I know the more or less I think yes okay so second temple, judaism period, intertestamental kind of.
Speaker 3:It's more complicated because there's like longer endings to books that we already have and stuff like that, um and so uh, but yes, generally speaking they're going to be later and really how the church historically has understood those books. Meaning, you know, prior to the reformation people were divided. So church fathers even you know augustine tertullian did not agree on uh and they weren't in conversation on this, I don't think. But you know various church fathers will say different things about various Deuterocanonical books. They either thought should or should not be included or how they should be considered as God's word in comparison to other things.
Speaker 3:People weren't sure. So that's the thing I think most people don't realize is that it was an unsettled debate for a long time. I think most people don't realize is that it was an unsettled debate for a long time. They kind of slowly over time became more crystallized, but never so formally as in the reformation that they were in, you know. But how the early church saw them when they did consider them as scripture or Jason to scripture, was that they were Jewish commentary on the old Testament, if you want to think of it that way.
Speaker 2:That's wonderful. That's very insightful Jewish commentary on the Old Testament. If you want to think of it that way. That's wonderful. That's very insightful. Jewish commentary on the Old Testament. Yeah, which is why there are some works there that are continuation of older Jewish works. Okay, that's very insightful.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I think to really understand that conversation someone would need learn more about like the talmud and how jewish commentary and like uh midrash kind of works okay because it's it's not like a, you know, an english commentary where you pick it up and it's it's kind of formal, it's logical, it's following the, the grammar of the text.
Speaker 3:It has all that, but then it also has interpretation and even like allegorical and at times mystical elements, and so dragons yep, dragons, dragons make it in and um which, by the way, I don't think are mystical okay yes, and so you know you can find all these kind of diverse elements in in jewish commentary and stuff like that, and so you know when you're reading the book of, say tobit, that's one of them. You know when you're reading it. It's funny because if you all, if all you knew is that it's a hot hotbed for theological debate and everyone was just arguing whether it's in there or not, if you go read it it's a very tame story. It's just like a guy and my memory from catholic, uh um yeah, how old are you now?
Speaker 2:uh 25 so this was eight years.
Speaker 3:Nine years ago I was probably a middle, you know, I don't remember whether.
Speaker 2:I read Tobit, you've read a few things since then.
Speaker 3:Yes, I may have forgotten some details of.
Speaker 3:Tobit. So if there's any listeners that are more familiar, forgive me, but from my remembrance it's a guy who is just kind of like pretty negative and I think he's like sitting against a wall and a bird poops in his eye and he goes blind and his wife basically he's just like hey, that's the icing on the cake. My life stinks. And his wife is just kind of coming in and talking about how the Lord is really blessing her and their family and she's trying to get him to see God's grace and goodness towards them and she's like I think some random stranger gave him a goat or something like that. And he's like I think like some random stranger gave him a goat or something like that.
Speaker 3:And he's like lady, you're lying, like no one gave you a goat, you're just talking so I think it's just kind of him being really negative and his wife just experiencing god's goodness, and I think god is just kind of trying to like circumvent his perspective on the world and it's you know, um, so it's not really like you know, because a lot of people know that a lot of the purgatory debate kind of rest or falls on. Um, it's a comment made about, you know, kind of a pretty vague comment made on the afterlife in one of the books, and so, um, the doctrine of purgatory yeah, for listeners is is rooted in those apocryphal writings there's at least one line that catholics don't predominantly draw their interpretation of that from okay, the deuterocanon.
Speaker 3:It's just that one, okay, that one part, um. So really most of it is not. It's like the history of the maccabees and stuff like that and this revolt and so which is so fun?
Speaker 3:yeah, but you, we can read that as a resource, I think, as protestants, and see it as not authoritative scripture but as insightful literature to gain perspective on what that time period looked like in second temple Judaism.
Speaker 3:You know, um, you get like the as uh, um, as draws, I think. I don't remember how to pronounce it, but there's, I remember there's a really cool um. You can read the second temple literature and you get to study what was the Jewish expectation of the Messiah, what did they think God's final solution was going to look like? I can't remember what text it is, but there's one where a Jewish teacher is wrestling and he's like I know that God is all-powerful and that he's just and that his people have always sinned and we have always turned away from the prophets that he sent us, and I know that he's made these promises to us and I just don't know how he's going to kind of fit it all together, and so you get stuff like that in there, you know. So it's like um, he's like how how will God reconcile his, his mercy and his justice? And so, again, you can go in like that's insightful. Yes.
Speaker 3:I don, and so again you can go in like that's insightful.
Speaker 2:I'm not going to treat it as authoritative scripture, but we don't always need to have the attitude that it's like a purely negative thing Because, excuse me, we also don't treat Augustine or Edwards or Piper as authoritative scripture. But we are so edified, exhorted, equipped. There's so much to be learned and I appreciate the opportunity to read that stuff. Um, yeah, I, uh, as a fairly young Christian, I I had a really good time with the Maccabees.
Speaker 3:Sure yeah.
Speaker 2:As a young man a dude and and just I just loved it. It was similar, yeah.
Speaker 3:And so, yeah, it's interesting stuff. One other thing on that is that if you're a big Paul guy if you really like reading about Paul. Studying Paul, studying the Second Temple literature is a really good way to get an insight into what Paul's world looked like. Who was he arguing with when he wrote Romans? What perspectives is he repeating? Is he pushing back against?
Speaker 2:you know, and so particularly uh, the thought on romans.
Speaker 3:7 romans 7? Uh, is that where he quotes or maybe makes an allusion to? No, it's romans 1. He alludes to uh, one of the deuterocanonical books, even I can't remember I should have read up on this before I sat down here.
Speaker 2:Well, that's the fun of this kind of format. This is not interpretation. This is not hermeneutics, this is not exposition, it's just conversation. In Romans 7, when Paul is wrestling with, would the Catholics say that he's speaking pre-conversion? When he talks about a wretched man that I am, they're not going to have one definitive interpretation, okay, so the same as protestants.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're just gonna. You said something last night. There's two things you said last night that I'd like to maybe end on. Okay, one was, um, the comparison of legalism between protestantism, particularly Baptists, and you even talked about how Catholics. It's confusing to them because they're like we can drink wine or we can have alcohol we can smoke, we can you know, whatever.
Speaker 2:And then Baptists are very legalistic, but then accuse the Catholics of being legalistic. I'd like to touch on that. And then, what are some things that would? What do you think are some things that the Protestant church needs to do to sort of pull back a little bit from this? We've had this crazy weird contextualization mindset. We've got to be contemporary. First it was contemporary, then it was like we've got to contextualize to the point that a lot of churches have lost their way. It just looks silly. The worship service is just kind of strange and bizarre.
Speaker 2:And the the I had a guy last week even here say why do we make such a big deal out of the sermon in our churches? And I'm like, uh, you know, wait, are you asking me that? Like that, you mean, why do we make such a big deal out of the exposition of the scripture? Um, so what? What do you think? Um, so kind of two things. Talk about the legalism piece, the difference between the two churches, and accusations that, yeah, this will make or protestants will make, and then what do you think we need to be doing on this side to sort of pull people back?
Speaker 3:okay and this is even a helpful point to say before I reference the works righteousness thing is that if someone is listening to this and think you know, oh, john wants me to become Catholic, he's so favorable towards them. What I really want someone to do is see the Catholic Church and the theology of the Catholic Church for what it is. See it rightly is see it rightly and I want them to disagree with it. I think that you know when that guy gave his interpretation of Ephesians 4 and said that you know laity are to do their thing and that it's really it's left up to the ordained ministers of the church to do all this. That's wrong. You know and.
Speaker 3:I think that there's so much joy in life to be found in really taking the Bible for what it is and really applying the whole of it, the whole counsel of God, to our churches so we can celebrate the good of where the Catholic Church is maybe not as unequivocally evil or terrible as we think, maybe sometimes but also at the same time I want someone to know that.
Speaker 3:You know there's so much freedom in the way that the Reformers have led us to see the Scriptures as the one true authoritative. I do want to talk about one thing here. If you're cool with it, if somebody wants a book that's really good to read, gavin Ortland recently wrote a book called what it Means to Be Protestant, or the Meaning of Protestantism. It's just excellent. Protestant or the meaning of Protestantism, and it's. It's just excellent. It's one of the best books you could read on apologetics, specifically in regard to Catholicism and Protestantism, and he even references there. There's a huge gap in that literature. There's a lot of books being written in the other direction and very few solid quality books that a Catholic would really even have to wrestle with when they read it. I would have been so helped if I had read that when I was younger I was doing, I was having to.
Speaker 3:it felt like go to the ends of the earth trying to figure out on my own kind of you know now that I'm Protestant what does it mean to be Protestant? The same thing you asked there. And I say one funny story from my freshman year of college. I, um, I went to Samford. I had access to a theological library for the first time in my life. I could pretty much find anything there, and if I couldn't find it there, they'd mail it, they'd get it for me. I think I was one of the only students who was going up to the fourth floor and asking them to mail order books from other schools and stuff like that.
Speaker 3:But there was this one book that I read that was really, really helpful for me and it was not written by. I don't know if the author was Christian or not, he was just a secular historian, I think from the University of Michigan. But he wrote this book called Adultery and Divorce in Calvin's Geneva and it was for me. It was a case study, because I wanted to know something that Peter Schaaf not Philip Schaaf calls the problem of Protestantism.
Speaker 3:How is it that I can justifiably believe something, as a Protestant that was not held in the history of the church prior to that. You know that's a big tradition and authority in interpreting the scripture. It's a big deal, you know, to take a step away from everything the church has said prior to you. That's not something we should ever do lightly, and so, as a new Protestant, I wanted a firm grasp on what right do I have to do that interpretatively? And obviously there's a lot of different ways you can go there. But adultery and divorce, specifically the divorce aspect of that book was helpful for me because Catholics do not allow divorce.
Speaker 3:It's not just a, it's not shined favorably upon they don't allow it unless you can prove you get annulment by proving your marriage was not legitimate in the first place, and it's rare to be able to get annulment. But you can't just say my wife cheated on me, I would like a divorce. So the grounds that even maybe scripture gives with Jesus, of sexual morality or even like abuse and abandonment, things like that, there's no conversation around that. So when Calvin gets there, his members in Geneva this is what this book is kind of recounting is how he dealt with this. His members come up to them and say, hey, we're Protestant, we can get divorces now. And he has to say, oh well, I guess. So actually we have to parse this out. And so they don't have a church tradition to look back to at that moment and say what has the church done historically on this? And so what Calvin had to do is he kind of just pieced together what the scriptures say, where the church speaks to it to some extent, and then he was going to Roman law and stuff like that to try and just get some like how do you piece through this? But he was for me it was helpful because I got to watch him do something that was he had no choice.
Speaker 3:He had to go against what the church had historically been saying because they had been ignoring these passages in the gospels where Jesus speaks to the reality, or Paul speaks to the reality in first Corinthians, and so it's a difficult subject and it was one that you know there was. It was obviously super messy because there are a lot of people who wanted illegitimate divorces and he had to. I think there was like imagine if you had no divorces ever, and then the floodgates are opened and all of these members are coming to you and with different reasons, and one of them saying reasons and one of them saying you know, my wife did this, and then you know another one. You're like, oh wait, that actually might be a legitimate case, and so it's. But that was helpful for me because here's an example of where, as a Protestant, you would have just been forced to go back to the word and think through something the church had not been thinking through.
Speaker 3:Rightly, the difference between what the church had been doing and what Christ has said was so stark that for me, intellectually, it just it demanded action, and that helped me, as a young Protestant, be like okay, there are situations where you just to be faithful to the word, you need to go against the history of the church and you shouldn't do that lightly. But one thing Gavin Ortlund shows in that book is that I was going to say this earlier with the Baptist and the sexual morality and having no moral high ground, we have no theological high ground sometimes we make all kinds of mistakes, having no moral high ground.
Speaker 3:We have no theological high ground. Sometimes we make all kinds of mistakes. Protestants have never claimed they've done everything right or that we're even in the right on everything. What we have claimed is that when we're in the wrong we have the tools to fix it, which is the scriptures. When we read church history we can view it critically and say, hey, was this right or not right? We can view it reverently as well, but we can also view it with a subjected authority with the word being at the highest point.
Speaker 3:The Catholic Church has spoken dogmatically and authoritatively on so many issues that are contradictory. At the end of the day, the Pope not everything the Pope says is infallible, but he can speak from a seat of infallibility at some moments. If you just take those, if you take all the ecumenical councils and all the infallible statements of the Pope and you put them together, you cannot make sense of all those things. There are just contradictions in there and Ortlund kind of recounts those in the book and shows that, oh, he does, he goes there, yeah, yeah yeah, and so you get to see.
Speaker 3:he makes this case in the book and it's true and it's the best case. One is that the real debate is not over various theological issues, it's over authority. Where's our final authority? Scripture alone is the most important. Faith alone is obviously significant for salvation. But just debating about that won't help you figure out whether you need to be Catholic or Protestant.
Speaker 2:Where's the authority? Where's the authority?
Speaker 3:Because if the church can speak authoritatively in addition to Scripture and align your interpretation, that's a big deal. And so I think he kind of rightfully identifies the source of the real heart of the debate and then he shows really through the book, just case studies and examples of where again we're in the wrong. They're in the wrong, all Christians err, and we're going to look back in five years. I'm a young man so I get to look back every month and be like, oh gosh, you know. But the important thing about Protestants is that we have the tools to reform. We have the tools to adjust, to repent.
Speaker 3:We don't have to look back at history in a self-justifying way. We can look back at it and say the Lord's been faithful to us over time. We have not been faithful to him, we have not rightly understood where he's asked us to. We need to align ourselves with the word, and that's what I love about being Baptist in particular. You know, because you know in seminary the seminary I went to a lot of people come Anglican. I was a little bit like been there, done that, and so that wasn't a huge temptation for me.
Speaker 3:But what I love about being Baptist is Baptists are just the blue collar. Not all Baptists are blue collars, like in First Baptist Church.
Speaker 2:I resemble that statement. Thank you very much.
Speaker 3:Yes, just the Baptists are like, always tearing things down in a way that just has always really appealed to me, like no structure. And again we're in like an age where I think a lot of institution building needs to happen until you know, maybe we should even lean a lot on our other denominational brothers at the moment, because we really do have a spiritual gift for just tearing the building down and starting over and, in a way that's been harmful where it's like, led people to really seek a formal liturgy.
Speaker 3:And I think, nine Marks, you have some books up here, I see on the shelf are a great example of and I'm coming from a Nine Marks context of thinking thoughtfully through. What is a church service supposed to look like according to the Word? What does it look like historically? Let's get back to the root of. You know, there was the Acts 2 church, but then also, hey, there's like a lot of resources in the church of what is a coherent church service supposed to look like from the front to the back, not just focusing on the word and everything else, but the sermon is fair game. It shouldn't be that way. Our worship should be conformed to scripture, our singing should be conformed to scripture, and so we need to be more faithful. To answer your other question about thinking reasonably biblically, theologically through what is a church service, not just what is a sermon, um. And. And theologically through what is a church service, not just what is a sermon. Orlin does a great job of that.
Speaker 3:That being said, and all the benefits of nine marks coming and bringing some stability in, I do like that little rebellious element of Baptists are always difficult to manage and chaotic. When you get them together, they're always just. This impulse is to get back to the word, to tear it down and start over again and again. There's a bad in that and there's a good in that, but where the good is is that they're always going back to the scriptures again and again and again. And so, yeah, there's just a beauty in the diversity of the body. I think in that and there's a reason why we need to lean on each other in those things. Because you know one of the big jokes, if you're like on Instagram and you're looking at like Catholic, like meme apologetics against Protestants, it'll be like a picture of you know someone declining from like a rope swing to be you know the pastor declining from like a you know cables to preach the sermon and the fire and the smoke and all that.
Speaker 3:Oh right, cables to preach the sermon and the fire and the smoke and all that, and it'll be like, hey, how's the Reformation going? It'll be like some megachurch wild thing going on. So, yeah, I think the movement towards stability is a good thing. But for someone who's trying to seek stability in liturgy and church history, I think they need to couch that in the fact that Christianity has taken a lot of different expressions and you don't need to be Anglican to find good liturgy Um, you don't need to be Anglican to read church history seriously Um, you definitely don't need to be Catholic to do so. And so I think it's for someone considering that, I would say go read other. Go read Gavin Orland, and and you know, his brothers are Presbyterian and Anglican, his family is all mixed, so he would have a lot of grace and compassion towards different denominational perspectives. But read Baptists who are taking church history seriously, and read.
Speaker 3:You know and this is not a Baptist podcast, I'm just saying that in that moment but, like, read, presbyterian, anglican, whatever you are, there are Protestants doing theology, doing church history, thoughtfully, biblically, probably. Wherever you go, to some extent we need each other as the diversely gifted body to be able to even fill in where each group is weak, and things like that. I think there are weaknesses and strengths to each group and even looking at Catholics, sometimes again, I think there's ways in which they should challenge us to be better, to be more historically oriented, to be more rigorously thoughtful on doctrines. They've always kind of held firm to an orthodoxy like the Trinity, and so I would tell someone like you're not going to find everything you're looking for in hitting the eject button and just saying I'm just going to cling to the church's final authority and the Catholic church yeah, that's good, yeah, that's helpful.
Speaker 2:And even within uh, baptist churches, non-denominational churches, community churches, especially the ones that are, uh, that have that have just blown up into mega churches. You, I think there's going at and and like a multi-site. Sure, there's going to be a reaction to that. I don't want to just be critical all the time of of that, though I don't agree with the multi-site model where the pastor is on a screen or being projected or hologram. That's not. That's why we're we're more we're in the non-marx uh camp. I guess you would say. I hate to create labels, but you know, as far as ecclesiology and and even the way the church functions, but, um, people, people are coming to christ in those churches and there's some good people that I love, good brothers, in those churches. I think there will be a reaction to that yeah that's not going to be.
Speaker 2:I don't think that'll be what's happening a generation from now. I might be completely wrong. I think there's going to be a reaction. What we're seeing in this conversation, with people going in the direction of liturgical traditions or even to the Catholic churches it's a reaction.
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 2:And that's the way history works, yep, and whatever you're talking about, and so we shouldn't be surprised. Ok, I have what. We'll wrap it up, but I have about 10 more questions. So can we do this again? A part two? Sure, yeah, we'll do it. Next time you're here, I'll come your way, ok, and sit down, do it again. I'm really grateful. I mean, this was very spontaneous. We've gone for about an hour and a half and, um, I I've just I'm really appreciative. It's a big deal to me that you would just go. Yeah, we'll do it.
Speaker 2:I mean, I just met you last night yeah, well, thanks for asking me had the conversation you're welcome and uh, yeah, it is going to be super insightful and helpful for our people, and so let's it. I don't know when it'll happen, but but we'll do a part two and I've got. I want to talk about purgatory I want to talk about the communion. I want to talk, you know, and I want to have some fun with it. We'll tell Hank's story.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And so we'll, we'll do it again.
Speaker 4:So, thank you, thank you Appreciate it so much. All right, thanks.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to no Sanity Required. Please take a moment to subscribe and leave a rating. It really helps. Visit us at SWOutfitterscom to see all of our programming and resources and we'll see you next week on no Sanity Required. Thank you.
