In this episode Trent discusses common Catholic phrases we use with Protestants that are inaccurate, unhelpful, or both!
Welcome to The Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey, everyone, welcome to The Council of Trent podcast. I am your host, Catholic Answers’ apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. Today I want to talk about four phrases that Catholics need to drop. Now this is not a judgment on people, saying oh, you’re a bad person if you say these things, because I’ve said these phrases in the past and they still even pop up today sometimes. It’s just kind of a force of habit.
Trent Horn:
But the reason is that I feel like these phrases are either totally inaccurate or wrong, or they can lead people into a direction that allows them to misunderstand the Catholic faith. They’re not as helpful as other phrases, and that’s important. We need to use language in a way to meet people where they’re at, to help them have the best understanding of the Catholic faith. So that’s what I want to talk about today.
Trent Horn:
Before I do that though, just a reminder, if you like what we do at The Council of Trent podcast please consider supporting us at trenthornpodcast.com. You can submit questions for our open mailbag episodes. You get access to my Catechism study series, New Testament study series. You can even get a fancy mug with The Council of Trent logo on it, so definitely check all of that out and more at trenthornpodcast.com.
Trent Horn:
So let us jump into the list of four phrases today. Let’s do it in ascending order. Why not? We’ll start with number four. Number four is Mary had to be immaculately conceived, or here is why Mary had to be, using phrases like had to be immaculately conceived, needed to be immaculately conceived.
Trent Horn:
Every December when this comes around I’ll hear people, often you can hear priests make this argument, that Mary had to be immaculately conceived, and the argument will go like this. Well, Jesus cannot be tainted by sin and so if he was conceived within the womb of a sinner then he would have been tainted by sin, so Mary would have to be free from sin as well in order for Jesus to be conceived within her womb.
Trent Horn:
That’s kind of an argument from necessity that’s made. You can see why people would gravitate towards this argument, because it seems like a really nice ironclad proof for the dogma of the immaculate conception. Or you could say look, it doesn’t matter if you talk about scripture or citing it there. You could just make an argument from logical necessity that if Jesus is free from sin and in order for him to be conceived in the womb of Mary she would have to be free from sin as well. It’s like an argument from necessity.
Trent Horn:
But the problem with this argument is that it doesn’t work for a variety of reasons. Number one, it doesn’t prove that Mary was immaculately conceived from her conception. It doesn’t prove that Mary was preserved from the effects of sin from the moment she was conceived.
Trent Horn:
I think there were even some Protestants during the Reformation who argued that Mary was purified from sin immediately before Jesus was conceived in her womb, so you could say that God allowed Mary to be a sinner and then he perfectly preserved her from sin.
Trent Horn:
If you’re trying to use an argument from necessity, all it would prove would be that Mary was free from sin the moment that she conceived Jesus, not necessarily her whole life and from the moment that she was conceived. So that’s problem number one. It doesn’t get you the entire dogma of the immaculate conception.
Trent Horn:
But problem number two is that it really contradicts God’s omnipotence and it creates a problem of an infinite regress, because if you say Jesus in order to be sinless would had to have been… Mary would have to be sinless as well, but then the problem is if Mary is going to be conceived and she’s sinless then her mother, St. Anne, would have to be sinless as well, and her mother would have to be sinless, and her mother, and you’d have to go all the way back.
Trent Horn:
So you have this infinite regress problem, if Jesus’ sinlessness logically depends on Mary being sinless, then the same thing would apply to Mary, St. Anne to be sinless, every other woman going back to Eve would be sinless, so it just doesn’t work. And as I said, it contradicts God’s omnipotence. You’re saying that God can’t do something, that he can’t retain his sinlessness even being conceived within a sinful woman, and he could do that.
Trent Horn:
God could have become man in a wide variety of ways. He could have just… It’s interesting to think about it. If you wanted parallelism with Jesus being the Adam, Genesis talks about Adam being formed from the dust of the earth. Jesus could have created a body for himself out of dirt, out of clay, and then become man, so he could have done that.
Trent Horn:
He could have even been conceived of a sinful woman. He’s omnipotent. Do you need to tell him that he can’t do that? So rather though than just forming a body ex nihilo, Galatians 4:4, Paul talks about how Christ was born of a woman, born under the law, that it is fitting for Christ to be born of a woman, born under the law, to be born like you and I. That it’s fitting for him to be truly man, that he’s incarnate like the rest of us.
Trent Horn:
It doesn’t mean though that his mother has to be like every other mother, so it’s not of necessity that Mary was immaculately conceived. We would say that it’s fitting. It’s appropriate that God would preserve and protect his mother from the stain of original sin and just from sin in general, and that Mary, in being the first disciple, the first person to say yes to God to receiving Jesus within her very being, that it’s quite fitting then that she would be the first to receive the fruits of Christ’s sacrifice, namely having them applied to her to protect her from original sin, she was conceived without original sin, and to protect her from ever stumbling into sin in her life.
Trent Horn:
Obviously a lot more we could talk about with the immaculate conception. I’m not going to do a whole defense of the dogma here. I’m just saying that the phrase Mary had to be immaculately conceived, you want to drop that. You don’t want to use an argument from necessity because it simply doesn’t work.
Trent Horn:
All right, number three, pray to the saints. This is a hard one, because I say this a lot too, why do Catholics pray to the saints? Well, we pray to the saints because we seek their intercession. A holy person, their prayers are more powerful than other people. James, Chapter 5 says this. You go to the Book of Job, God tells Job’s friends who are all saying false things about God, “Have Job pray for you, because I will listen to him.” I think that’s in… I want to say it’s like in Job 42.
Trent Horn:
The phrase that I say often, you probably say it often, but it gets really hard when we’re dialoguing with our Protestant friends and you hear the phrase pray to the saints. It sounds like worship the saints, because pray to has… For many people it’s just synonymous with divine worship.
Trent Horn:
People could say, “I only pray to God. Why would I pray to anyone else?” I think… Well, I’ll talk about an alternative phrase here in a second, but I think when this comes up I think it’s important to ask people, “What does prayer mean?”
Trent Horn:
When we have a dispute about whether it’s okay to the saints, we need to make sure that we’re talking to each other and not past one another. So I would ask, “Well, what is prayer?” If prayer by definition is talking to God, making a request or talking to God, then Catholics by definition do not pray to the saints, because if prayer is just talking to God, that’s what it is by definition, whatever we do with the saints is not praying to the saints.
Trent Horn:
Really what prayer is is it’s asking for help, so that’s the older definition of prayer you see in things like old English. You read older English works, you’ll see phrases like, “I pray thee tell me.” Prayer comes from the Latin word precari. It means to make a request or to seek help. Usually in modern language prayer refers to a conversation with a deity, but it doesn’t have to mean that.
Trent Horn:
My friend, Jimmy Akin, actually has written an article about this, talking about the language that the magisterium uses when it talks about the saints. And the magisterium, the teaching office of the church, does not use the phrase praying to the saints. It uses a different phrase.
Trent Horn:
So this is what Jimmy writes. “In the sections of the Catechism of the Catholic Church that an English speaking Catholic would turn to for information about praying to the saints, you don’t find that phrase. Instead you find intercession of the saints. However, intercession refers to what they do for us. What language does the church use for what we do with respect to them? It speaks of the invocation of the saints, where the key Latin verb is invocare, to invoke, call upon, appeal to.”
Trent Horn:
So we invoke or appeal to the saints to intercede or pray for us with God. That’s the language the church actually uses. Praying to the saints is just something we say colloquially in English. Maybe it might be better, and I’m going to try this here on out, I’m going to see how it helps my conversations, but it might be helpful to say instead of we Catholics pray to the saints, we invoke the saints. We call upon the saints. Invoking the intercession of the saints.
Trent Horn:
I know that’s a little bit of a mouthful, but so is transubstantiation, so is consubstantial. We want to make sure that we get things right, so I like invoking the intercession of the saints. It doesn’t get us tied up into prayer and worship and what those different words mean, because we ask the saints to pray for us.
Trent Horn:
I think the language of invoking shows that this is a little bit different that just asking your friend to pray for you. We are invoking the saints, we are asking for God’s almighty power to help us be in communion with the other members of… The communion of the saints, with the other members of the body of Christ who have gone before us in glory, who are in heaven, and we ask them to pray for us. We invoke them. We invoke their intercession.
Trent Horn:
I think invoking the intercession of the saints just might be a better phrase to use than praying to the saints, that we understand that we have a different relationship with Christians who have died and they’re in heaven praying for us than the relationship that we have with God, for example. That might be helpful to have invoking intercession rather than praying to the saints to distinguish that difference, so something to think about.
Trent Horn:
Number two, saved by faith and works. I cover this a little bit in my rebuttal of American Gospel earlier in the week, so I want to revisit that topic. That’s very common. When Catholics and Protestants talk you’ll hear… Even Catholics will say this. Protestants are saved by faith alone. Catholic are saved by faith and works.
Trent Horn:
But that makes it sound like that the way we come to salvation, the way we go from being in original sin to being an adopted child of God is by faith and work, and it’s like jumbled together, that we both believe, but I also do a bunch of other good deeds to make sure I get into heaven.
Trent Horn:
When people hear saved by faith and works, it is too imprecise. They can think that we have to do good deeds to get into God’s graces, or that even after we’re baptized faith and works means I’ve got to do this certain amount of good works, that I believe I’ve got to do a certain amount of good works, and once I’ve ticked them all off I’ve crossed the threshold. I was good enough to get into heaven.
Trent Horn:
That is not what Catholics believe. As I say in the video, what we believe is that our initial salvation is neither faith nor works. Think about that. Here’s what the Catechism… Sorry, here’s what the Council of Trent, not this podcast, the Tridentine Council from the 16th century… It says, “None of those things that perceive justification, whether faith or works, merit the grace of justification, for if by grace it is not know by works. Otherwise, as the apostle says, ‘Grace is no more grace.'”
Trent Horn:
That’s a phrase actually Mike Winger loves bring up a bunch, “Grace is no more grace. It can’t be works.” Right, for initial salvation. Well, the moment that we go from original sin to being an adopted child of God it’s neither faith nor works, because think about it, most people throughout the history of the church who have done this were babies. They were infants, so they couldn’t have faith or they couldn’t do a work, but they are saved. They’re saved through baptism. They’re saved through just accepting God’s offer of salvation and the means he gives to spiritually renew us through the waters of baptism.
Trent Horn:
That’s why when we say saved by faith and works, it can confuse about initial salvation, which is neither faith nor works. It’s by grace. We just receive it. We accept it, and that’s not a work. Receiving salvation is not a work. Imagine if you got a letter in the mail saying you won the lottery, you win a million dollars. You just have to go downtown and sign a form to receive the money. Would you say that you did a work to get the million dollars?
Trent Horn:
No. I went down there and I signed my name and everything. No, it’s a formality. That’s just you deciding to take the money, because you could just throw the envelope away and say, “No, I don’t want it.” But if you do want it, then you go through a process to accept it, but you did no work to receive it. It was just given to you.
Trent Horn:
That’s why saying that we’re saved by faith and works, it’s a phrase that we shouldn’t use. People say how do Catholics believe that we’re justified? I think here we can say Catholics believe justification is a process. It’s something that we enter into through no merit of our own. Nothing we do can merit the grace of initial justification, but when we do good works and cooperate with God’s grace we do increase the radiance of the justification we initially received in baptism.
Trent Horn:
It’s important here to stress that justification is a process and make a distinction between initial justification in baptism, where works and faith have nothing to do with it, and then our growth and justification during that process of the life that we live in Christ. You want to go more in depth on this subject, I definitely recommend Jimmy Akin’s book, The Drama of Salvation. It goes into this a lot.
Trent Horn:
Oh, and finally we will say, “Oh, I got to do faith and works to be saved.” There’s only one work you have to do to be saved, don’t die in the state of mortal sin. That’s like the easiest way to explain it to people, and I think that it’s helpful, to say, “Look, in baptism we’re saved.” You will go to heaven if you die after you’re baptized. Nothing will keep you from heaven. The only thing that could keep you is if you died in the state of mortal sin. That’s it. There’s one good work that we do.
Trent Horn:
Now there’s other works tied into not committing mortal sins. Don’t commit these grave acts of evil. Don’t neglect to fulfill obligations we have, because the Ten Commandments are thou shall not, like don’t kill, don’t steal, but also thou shall do, honor thy father and thy mother, keep the Sabbath holy, which would include the Sunday obligation to attend Mass.
Trent Horn:
But that makes sense. It’s all bound up in the idea that the one work that we do as children to God to merit eternal life is just to not die in the state of mortal sin, not throw away our salvation, and if we do throw it away being reconciled to god and realizing we made a giant mistake and coming back to him.
Trent Horn:
All right, here’s number one, drum roll please. Number one phrase we got to drop. This is one you got to drop because it’s false, or at least it’s not helpful, but it’s false basically, and that would be that there are 33,000 Protestant denominations. This is something you hear from Catholics all the time, saying, “Oh, Protestantism, look at the confusion it’s sown. There are 33,000 Protestant denominations.”
Trent Horn:
This is overblown and exaggerated. This citation comes from the World Christian Encyclopedia by Barrett, Kurian and Johnson. This is from the 2001, Second Edition, is where I found this citation.
Trent Horn:
The problem here is that they define denomination as a particular church group in a specific geographical region. It says, “A denomination is defined in this encyclopedia as an organized aggregate of worship centers or congregations of similar ecclesiastical tradition within a specific country.” So when they talk about these denominations it just doesn’t make sense to say, “Oh, yeah, there’s a huge difference between the Southern Baptist Church of Argentina and the Southern Baptist Church of Uruguay, or northern or southern Minnesota.” Just because it’s a different geographical region doesn’t mean it’s just like a dramatically church, so if you just pick different countries or regions, you’re going to really inflate the number of denominations.
Trent Horn:
Also, this isn’t a good source for Catholics to cite, the World Christian Encyclopedia, because it also says that there are… According to this encyclopedia, it says there are 242 Catholic denominations, whereas we would say no, there are independent churches, churches that exist [foreign language 00:18:45], if you will, the Latin term, that are all still in union with the Pope.
Trent Horn:
You have the Byzantine Catholic Church, for example, you have the different rites, [foreign langauge 00:18:55], and the encyclopedia would count these as different denominations, as if they were completely different churches, when they’re all underneath the Catholic Church. They’re not just separate denominations in the same way that Presbyterians, Methodists and Baptists or others are separate Protestant denominations.
Trent Horn:
So it’s just not a good citation. We don’t need that. It’s inaccurate. People will say to me, “Well, how many denominations are there?” I would just say there’s too many. How many did Jesus want us to have? One. Did Jesus say I will build my churches? Did he talk about that there would be many churches? No. He talked about the church in the singular.
Trent Horn:
In Matthew 18, remember when Jesus talks… Or maybe it’s Matthew 17? It’s Matthew 18, when Jesus talks about what do you do if your brother sins against you? Go to him, bring witnesses, finally he says bring him to your church. No, Jesus doesn’t say bring him to your church. He says, “Bring him to the church.”
Trent Horn:
So that’s what I think we can focus on, is that Jesus wants unity, and very clearly amongst the different Protestant denominations that exist there’s not unity, even on major, major issues, like whether salvation can be lost, whether you should baptize children, how should we understand Christ’s presence in the Eucharist.
Trent Horn:
It’s not like all the denominations disagree only on secondary matters that aren’t that important. They disagree over really important things. Are Catholics Christian, like that’s a huge question, and Protestants disagree on that question about what makes someone a Christian or not.
Trent Horn:
We can talk about the division in the body of Christ that is problematic, stemming from principles from the Reformation, without using citations like the 33,000 denomination figure that are inaccurate. That’ll just bog down the conversation, especially with someone who is smart, who will tell you here’s all the problems with that citation from the World Christian Encyclopedia.
Trent Horn:
I hope that’s helpful for you. Just a reminder, phrases to drop, Mary had to be immaculately conceived. No, it’s fitting but not necessary. Pray to the saints. Let’s try invoking the intercession of the saints or seeking the intercession of the saints instead.
Trent Horn:
Saved by faith and works, that just confuses everybody. Rather justification is a process, or that what we do is intimately bound up with our growth and righteousness before God. And Protestantism has led to 33,000 denominations, just drop that one.
Trent Horn:
All right. Well, thank you guys so much. I hope that this will be helpful for you. I’ll try to follow my own suggestions as best I can. Please continue to pray for me and my family and the podcast and I’ll say a little prayer for you guys when we’re done with this episode. Thank you guys so much, and I hope you have a very blessed day.
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