FFAF: My Patrons Ask me Anything!

Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

The Council of Trent would be nothing without our patrons. So today on Free for All Friday, I’m dedicating it to them. Welcome to the show. Mondays and Wednesdays we talk apologetics and theology. Friday we talk about whatever I like, which often is not necessarily related to apologetics or theology. But today it is.

Today’s episode is dedicated to our patrons who make the podcast possible. I recently answered many of their questions on an episode of Catholic Answers Live. Cy Kellett was a wonderful moderator to walk us through all the questions that they had. Once again, I’m really grateful for their support. And if you want to help the podcast to grow and thrive and remain advertising free, then please consider supporting us at trenthornpodcast.com.

Now onto the “Ask Me Anything” questions from the patrons of the Council of Trent podcast. All these questions come from his patron.

This first one comes from a patron who identifies him or herself only by the letters NP, what is the first thing you look for when you hear an argument for the opposing side?

Well, the first thing that I look for is I try to understand what is the conclusion, and then I try to work my way backwards. So when you think about an argument, an argument is just a series of premises that are used to support a conclusion. So if I am in Dallas, then I am in Texas, I am in Dallas, therefore I am in Texas. That’s a simple if then argument. Modus ponens is the technical term for it. Or all men are mortal. Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal.

Now most people, when they give an argument, they don’t lay out the premises in a very distinct order like that. Usually people will speak informally and they’ll present a bunch of words. And so what you try to do when you hear someone, especially in conversation, and if they’re informal about it, you try to identify the key pieces here. What is the conclusion? What is the thing that they’re trying to prove? And then what are the reasons they’re using to prove that conclusion?

So I like to make an analogy that an argument is sort of like a table. So the tabletop would be the conclusion, and the question is what’s holding it up? What are the legs? So to find the conclusion and argument, usually people will say, “therefore,” “it follows,” “so it must be,” okay. So that’s what you’re trying to prove? Okay, then I’ll try to look for the premises. All right, so what is your points that lead to that conclusion? Then once I have that together, I’ll think, okay, what are the reasons given to think the premises are true and that the legs are actually strong, that they’re not just hollowed out legs that can’t do any of the work, or maybe there aren’t any premises. Maybe the conclusion has just been restated. It’s just a kind of an assertion. The tabletops floating in midair. So when I hear an argument, I’ve kind of trained myself and I try to think it through in that way.

NP, thank you very, very much for the question and for supporting Trent Horn’s podcast, which you can find trenthornpodcast.com. By the way, it’s called the Council of Trent, and you can find it over there trenthornpodcast.com, or wherever you get your podcasts. And I don’t really know how that works. They just tell me to say that wherever you get your podcasts, the-

Well, I think you can pick up… You’re right. Podcasts oftentimes I find that they’re on sale at the local grocery store. They keep them behind the counter.

So, you pick one up, if there’s a good one on sale?

You can get a pack of 20 of them for a discount.

All right? All right, I’ll look for those deals. Dylan is also a patron of Trent’s work, and Dylan asks this, what’s the best way to explain why we need the Mary in dogmas and why Mary plays an important role for Catholics?

Yeah, I think what’s always important when we talk about the Blessed Virgin Mary is that Mary always points us back to her son, Jesus Christ. It’s been said before that if you have a bad Maryology, you’ll have a bad Christology. So if you don’t understand Mary’s role in the incarnation and the divine plan of salvation, you’re going to radically misunderstand who Christ is.

And so when we look at the four Marian dogmas, even Protestants, every Protestant should agree with the first dogma. If they don’t, they’re actually in heresy. But most sophisticated Protestant apologists will agree, and that would be that Mary is the mother of God. So why is that important? Well, if you deny Mary’s the mother of God, Theotokos the God bearer, oh, you’re going to be denying that Jesus is God. And if you were an Orthodox Christian, you don’t want to do that. You don’t want to deny that Jesus is God.

Because there are people heretics throughout history who said, “Yeah, Jesus is God. He wasn’t always God. He became God at his baptism.” For example, there were early heretics that held that view. So to affirm, no, no, no, Jesus, the human Jesus is identical to the person God the Son, right? It’s not like we can split them. That’s the best story in heresy. So if you say that God the Son, and the human Jesus are separate beings, well that’s wrong, okay? You have one divine person who has a fully human nature and a fully divine nature. So that’s important to be able to focus on to say, look, throughout Jesus’s entire human life, he’s fully God. So that means Mary is the mother of God from the moment Jesus was conceived in her womb. So very important.

What about the other dogmas though? So why does the perpetual virginity of Mary matter? Well, why does the fact that Jesus is born of a virgin matter for Protestants? So when people say, why does the perpetual virginity of Mary matter, their question is really why does it matter that Christ had no younger siblings? Well, for the same reason, it matters that Christ had no older siblings that were born of Mary. It’s possible Joseph was a widower who remarried, and so he had children with a previous wife, but Jesus had no older siblings that were born of Mary. Why does this matter? Well, it’s a testament to the fact that Jesus has no earthly father. So the fact that Jesus, because God could have become man, he could have been born of Mary and Mary could have already had children. God could have chosen to do that.

But the fact that things in salvation history might’ve been a little bit different, the prophecy in Isaiah 7:14, but ultimately God could have chosen something different. But the fact that Christ is born of a virgin, the point is that Christ has no earthly father. So the fact that Mary is a perpetual virgin is a testimony of the fact of the importance of who Jesus is primarily, and the fact that his mother, Mary fully gave herself over to God and his divine plan.

And then finally Mary’s immaculate conception and bodily assumption, those dogmas, they’re very fitting and point back to Christ because they show that Mary as the first disciple, she receives the fruits of salvation as kind of an example for all of us. So Mary is really the first person to receive Christian baptism in the sense that Mary was protected from all original sin. She received the grace of Christ from the cross retroactively in her own conception. So she receives this kind of baptismal gift, is kind of the first one to ever do that. So she’s that first model of that and her assumption into heaven is the foretaste of what all Christian disciples will receive by being resurrected or having our bodies resurrected and being able to have that embodied eternal life with Christ.

So I think that when you look at it in that way, it’s very, very helpful. I would definitely recommend my colleague Tim Staples book, Behold Your Mother, if you’re like a fuller explanation of all the dogmas and how they all point us back to Christ.

I don’t know how this one got in here. It’s from Eric, and it doesn’t seem like it’s a Trent Horn patron. It seems like it’s a Jimmy Aiken patron, but maybe Eric supports both. Here’s what he wants to know. What is the Catholic stance on ghost apparitions? Can you be a faithful Catholic and believe in ghosts?

Well, not to offend anyone, but I would go so far as to say you cannot be a faithful Catholic unless you believe in ghosts. Now, I need to be very clear what I mean by that we have to define the term ghosts, because a lot of times we think of ghosts as just being made up creatures in horror films, or part of a folk mythology that might be antithetical to the Catholic faith. But just replace the word ghost in the question that Eric submitted with the word spirit. Because then what happens to his question, what is the Catholic stance on spirit apparitions? Can you be a faithful Catholic and believe in spirits? Well, you must believe in spirits. If you mean souls, the word soul and spirit are often interchangeable. So when we talk about when we die, our soul, or our spirit, if you will, goes either to who has a particular judgment. And so the soul either goes to hell, it goes to purgatory, or it goes immediately to heaven.

So we certainly believe that human spirits exist apart from their bodies, and it is also possible that those spirits can manifest themselves and appear to human beings. So that’s important because the word ghost, and Jimmy has made this point abundantly because his Mysterious World, I mean one of the first things he’s talks about on it is ghost the spirit world. He’s done a lot of great work on that. So go check out Jimmy’s Mysterious World podcast. But the word ghost comes from the German word geist, which means spirit. So we talk about they have words like the German word, poltergeist. I got to throw that more heavy German in when you pronounce-

Give it a full Arnold.

Yeah, what?

Give it a full Arnold. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Today. That’d more of an Austrian accent.

They speak German there.

I’m am a poltergeist, just taking my sauerkraut, get in the chopper. It’s not the Germanic word that I have to say it. Now, that’s very distinct, Arnold. There is no Germanic-

Get in the chopper. Yeah, it’s a very Arnold Schwarzenegger thing to say, get in the chopper.

I want to know what is the German equivalent of “get in the chopper,” but maybe one of our German fans can add that there. So yeah, so that’s why when we have in English translations is English is a Germanic language. A lot of English words do have Greek and Latin roots to them, but they also have a lot of Germanic roots to them. So that’s why you’ll hear some people refer to the Holy Spirit. Other people refer to the Holy Ghost and there’s different reasons people have for their preferences there, but it refers to the same thing, the Holy Spirit, you have something that is immaterial. So when we talk about human spirits or human ghosts, we’re talking about the spirits or souls of the deceased.

And so it is possible for God to allow the spirits that are in heaven to be able to manifest themselves in apparitions, to be able to communicate with those on Earth. Now, we should not try to engage in two-way communication on our own, but God of his own prerogative, he can do that. It’s also possible according to St. Thomas Aquinas, that the souls in purgatory could manifest themselves through spiritual energy or something through the providence of God to make their presence known through some kind of visual stimuli or some kind of movement of tactile kinetic movement of objects or sounds to let people know that they need prayers or something is unfinished in their earthly lives. And I believe Aquinas also talked about how the souls in hell God could allow them to manifest as a way to be kind of like a afterlife, scared, straight program.

If you remember the program Scared Straight where kids get sent to prison to realize, hey, you don’t want to do this. This would be something where if God would say, “Oh, you’ll get to see, hey, if you don’t change what you’re doing, this is what’s going to happen to you.” We think about in and there are spirits of the damned, I say, why would someone in hell want to do that? Well think about the parable of Lazarus and the rich man. That the rich man didn’t help Lazarus and he goes to hell and he says, “I want to warn my brothers.” Even in that stage, he had a desire to want to warn others of what is happening, even the damned care for other people. So even if they’re opposed to God, they have even the most evil people still have a love for their own family members, for example. So God may say, you know what? All right, if you want to give them a shot, God can use evil even to achieve good ends.

Now, I will say this, in a lot of cases when people think that they have, there is a ghost that is present. It’s best to try to exhaust natural explanations first. In many cases, what we think are, there’s a lot of things that might come up that we think are ghosts that actually have natural explanations. For example, we might think that we see a mysterious figure at night, especially if we’re falling asleep or waking up because our mind might cause distortions or our visual perception of shadows at night.

There’s also things that can happen with sleep paralysis. So there’s something that throughout history and folklore has been called old hag syndrome. People wake up and they think there is a ugly old woman sitting on their chest trying to suffocate them when really that was actually ancient and medieval descriptions of what we now call sleep paralysis. Other things sounds, you might hear that’s houses shifting or settling strange patterns with air vents and ducks could cause what seemed like doors to close or other things like that.

I’m trying to think of other, oh, there’s other things that people will try to do to prove that ghosts exist like Ghost Hunters. I’m not saying that they’re always wrong, but they try to record, they’ll take electronic devices and record little cassette tapes and raise the noise floor to listen to the static white noise and they’ll claim, oh, we recorded in a silent room in your home, and you can hear a voice saying, are you there? Are you there? And it’s very distorted. Well, that could just be things like radio transmissions, cellular phone transmissions, baby monitors that catches these little frequencies, things like that. So it could have a natural explanation, it could have a supernatural issue, it could be an actual apparition of a human spirit, it could be a demonic spirit impersonating someone. That’s why whenever these things happen, it’s important to seek out a spiritual director and to always approach these things with the mind of the church.

Eric, thanks. Thanks very much for that question. Appreciate it. This one comes from David. David wants to know Trent, why is the term Christ frequently used in place of the name Jesus? Is not Christ a title or a role? For example, Messiah rather than a name? Using the term Christ seems to diminish Jesus’s full identity as fully man and fully God.

I would say that it doesn’t do that. And when you look in scripture, while the name of Jesus itself is used singularly in places of glory, like in Philippians two when Paul says that, “The name of Jesus, every knee shall bend,” you’ll see that the name Christ is used much more frequently to refer to Jesus. And so I think that’s important because in the ancient world, the name Jesus was a fairly common name. It wasn’t a super common name, but there are other Jesuses that are mentioned in the New Testament. On occasion you find other references to Jesus like a Jesus Ben Ananias in the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus. So the name was not uncommon, it wasn’t a super common name like Mary. I think maybe one in four women at the time of Christ, I think it might be one in four were named Mary. And you think about it in the New Testament, there’s Marys all over the place trying to keep track of who’s who.

So that was a very, very common name. So that’s why the title can help to elevate who the person is above just the name itself. And it’s important because the title references of course that Jesus is the anointed one. He is in Hebrew, Mashiach, the Messiah, the one who has come to redeem and save God’s people. So I think that that’s helpful and that’s something that we do all the time. When we talk about very important people, we often refer to them by their titles as a kind of placeholder for their name. We often use titles in that respect to give them more respect than to just refer to them by their name because the title is a way to say they as this human being of Christ is a divine person, not just a human being, but they as this human have this other loftier goal that they have carried out.

So for example, we often talk about Buddha, the founder of Buddhism. Buddha itself is not a name, it is a title given to Siddhartha Gautama, which means the enlightened one. Even today when we talk about heads of state, usually we refer to, we use royal titles, we use civic titles, the President, the Prime Minister, more so than their name, especially when we’re speaking well of them. So I think that makes sense that in scripture when we talk about our Lord even there, we’re using another title, Lord, Kurios, that we want to elevate them to say that while we recognize Jesus’s humanity, he was not merely a human prophet. He is the Messiah and not just a human messiah and not just a human lord. He is the Lord of lords. He is the King of kings. And so I think that’s why the title Christ is often used more than just the name Jesus or why they’re often combined to speak of the Lord Jesus Christ or to speak of Christ Jesus.

David, thank you very, very much for the question. It does seem to me that there’s a lot of Christians who think that to be the Messiah means to be God, because that’s how we think of it and they don’t get that the title Messiah, the expectation for the Messiah and the title Messiah does not mean God, it doesn’t mean Son of God.

It also doesn’t mean that there is only one messiah so to speak. It just means anointed one. When you look in the Old Testament, for example, there are many descriptions of anointed ones, kings and prophets, for example, those who God has anointed for a specific purpose. It is the Christian understanding that the fullness of the Messiah is that Yahweh himself has become incarnate and will now bring the fulfillment what all the previous priests and prophets and kings of the old covenant did, in part. Now God in the flesh will bring that to its fulfillment through his ultimate messianic purpose, the redemption of the entire world.

And Trent, this one comes from Ryan.

All right.

Can you answer why you believe reasonable people disagree? It’s hard to imagine why so many smart people debate topics like the ones you address and seemingly few of them budge. This question can easily be asked in other areas like politics and science.

Right, so why do people reasonable people disagree? I guess I would say that they don’t, all the reasonable people have the correct views and everyone else is secretly unreasonable or fake.

That doesn’t seem right.

Or working for the devil himself. No. Yeah, that is, well this actually goes back a little bit to the previous question on the perspicuity of scripture. So you go, I am like 98% confident I’m correct on this. I know the book is called the Obscurity of Scripture. I believe it’s by Casey Chalk because I had him on the show so I better not forget. But Casey’s book, he documents how the doctrine of the perspicuity of scripture, the idea that scripture is clear, actually fosters ill will between Christians because the reformers and their progeny had to explain, okay, well if scripture is clear that the man of God using the ordinary due means of inquiry can attain to understanding these truths that are essential to the faith. And yet when Protestants and other Catholics and Orthodox, we look at the Bible and because what about me? When I read the Bible, it seems very clear to me that solo scriptura is false, that there are enduring apostolic offices, there’s the sacrament of the Eucharist, your salvation can be lost. These things all seem very clear to me.

Well, how do you explain what seems like Christians men of God coming to scripture and reaching so many different conclusions or differences about infant baptism or charismatic gifts? And what Chalk points out in his book is that the early reformers had to say, well there people had diabolical intent or under sway of the devil or under the power of sin, or it’s sinful darkening. And so it leads you to having to have a very negative view of people who disagree about scripture that if you disagree, it can’t be reasonable disagreement because it can’t be scripture’s fault, it must be something bad about us. Rather than saying, “Oh, well maybe just, there are things here in scripture that are not clear.” Like II Peter 3:16 which says, sorry, Peter says, the author of II Peter says, “There are things in Paul’s letters that the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction.” So there are things in them that people who are maybe not as well-formed for example, or well-grounded can misinterpret and then that can lead to their own destruction, which would refer to essential doctrine. Because non-essential things don’t lead to your destruction.

So that makes me think about that a little bit there. Okay, so then why do reasonable people seem to disagree? Well, people have a lot of different reasons for what they believe. So to go through a few of them, sometimes I would say that we make cognitive mistakes. We make mistakes in our inferences. We have an intuition that something seems to be true and it turns out that it’s not true. And we disagree about that sort of basic intuition. We might make a mistake in our reasoning that we are just unable to see, for example. So people can make cognitive errors. Other times people may be very reasonable, but they are primarily driven by an emotional connection to something and they don’t even recognize that it’s the emotional connection that is pulling them in their belief towards this particular proposition. And so they engage in rationalization.

Michael Shermer, who is an editor, he was an editor for Skeptic Magazines, he’s an atheist, but he’s an interesting guy. He wrote a book and one the chapter, he wrote a book, I think one of the chapters in the book was Why Smart People Believe Dumb Things. And he said that smart people are often very good at rationalizing beliefs that they came to for dumb reasons. So it could be the case that people disagree and they seem reasonable because a person got there for an unreasonable reason, but they kind of paint it over with a lot of reasonable gloss to make it seem in that way. And the unreasonable reason could be emotional, it could be sinful, it could be a whole host of reasons, but I’m not saying everybody who disagrees, one of them is just sinful or emotional or something like that. As I said, people just might make cognitive mistakes, for example.

Also, people have different background knowledge that they bring to a disputed issue that will point them in one direction or another. And although as sinful human beings, our cognitive faculties are weakened, so we’re more likely to make these kinds of mistakes. But I appreciate that Ryan, who submitted the question, pointed out this happens in other areas. People will say, “Oh, well there is no true religion. Look at all these religious people disagreeing with each other.” Well, people disagree about politics, they disagree about the facts of history. They disagree about applied sciences in some cases. But that doesn’t mean that there is no right answer just because people disagree.

The fact of the matter is because we disagree and we seek the truth. That gives some evidence that there is an objective truth that we’re searching over because a lot of times we might disagree about subjective things like what food tastes good, what music is good, what art is superior or inferior, and in some cases we disagree, but we know that the disagreement isn’t that big of a deal. There’s not an objective matter, but the fact that we’re all trying to resolve these issues and we worry about this reasonable disagreement that actually provides evidence for an objective truth that we’re all seeking.

What a great question. Thank you Ryan, very much for that question. Lots of cool questions from Trent patrons, folks who support his work at the Council of Trent, his podcast. And that’s what we’re doing today. We’re taking questions from those patrons and this one comes from Gabriel. Gabriel just wants to know this, can you respond to the atheist unintelligent design argument?q

Right? So this can come in a variety of forms. The idea is that it tries to invert the design argument for God. So the idea is that if we see design in the world, if we see something in the world that has order to it regularity, a particular function that is not just a byproduct of the natural processes in the world, but is evidence of some kind of design of the natural world itself. And that should point us to evidence of a designer of the world and people will point to that in all different elements of the universe, like the big picture elements, like the fundamental constants and conditions of the physical universe, the constants being those letters and the laws of physics or the conditions like the amount of entropy or disorder at the beginning of the universe. Those had to be set just right. It’s called the fine-tuning argument. Other people have argued that things like in biological organisms or in the cell exhibit a kind of intelligent design that evolution could not have produced on its own. And so there must have been an intelligent designer that created this thing.

So some atheists will try to take this argument and invert it and say, “Look, if there are things in the universe that show there is a designer, what about things in the universe that are incompatible with a designer that if there were a perfect designer, why wouldn’t the universe look different than it does?” This unintelligent design shows either there’s an unintelligent designer, so maybe there’s a designer, but he’s not God or there is no design at all actually. An Atheist will pick out a lot of different elements of this. So big picture with fine-tuning, they’ll say, yeah, there are these little dials, the strong nuclear force, the strength of gravity that needs to be set just right.

But look at the design of our universe. It’s 99.999999% empty space that is hostile to life. Doesn’t this show that the universe has no design? Well, no, it doesn’t do that because when we look at the universe, we have to once again look at these big pictures. The question is not there is a designer of the universe because the universe has an optimal amount of life in it. It could certainly have more, but the fact that the universe has life when the odds are fantastically low, it should have life at all. That is the correct answer to the question.

So for example, too, I’ve heard this example given imagine you go to a rundown decrepit cabin and you walk inside and you would assume nobody lives here, but you see on the counter there is a hot cup of tea. Now suddenly you might think, “Oh, there is someone,” there’s evidence now for an inhabiter of this cabin, someone designed this, put it together or is making use of it. So to see that even though there are other elements that might make you count against it, the evidence for it balances that out.

Another thing that people might want to pick would be inferior biological design. Sure the cell is just complicated, has these elements in it, but what about suffering and the animal kingdom? Or what about these parts of the human body that don’t seem to do anything? Vestigial organs, things like that. Why do we even have these things? And here we can say that that doesn’t show there is no designer. It just shows that the designer might allow life to grow through evolution for different reasons, such as by allowing all life to be interconnected, for example. And this also shows up with the fine-tuning argument. An atheist might say, why would God design the universe and have all this empty space and spend billions of years? It’s a waste. It’s inefficient.

Well, I might say that doesn’t prove that God did not design the universe because efficiency is only a virtue for those who have limited time and resources. If you have unlimited time and unlimited resources, you don’t have to be efficient. You can just do whatever you want. Think about it. When we do things, we often take scenic drives, for example, when we have excess time or money. So if we have unlimited money, unlimited time so to speak, then you could have a very grand universe that you’re not trying to make efficient. God is taking a scenic drive. He’s not building a suburban tract home with our universe, so to speak.

I like it. I like it very much. All right, Maurice wants to know this. Trent, I hope you are doing well today. I had a question. I was going over your arguing against abortion course at the School of Apologetics and I was kind of confused about something and wanted to get some clarity in Section Six of the course, Answering Arguments From Hard Cases, when rape is mentioned here, there is a part where the ethical and religious directives for Catholic Healthcare Services speak of being able to defend herself against potential conception from the sexual assault. Is this saying that a sort of contraception can be used to help prevent conception or the fertilization of the egg, and this is referring to after rape, and if so, is this an exception and not a rule? Also, have you found it harder to defend the Catholic Church’s view on contraception after arguing this point?

Right, this does come up a lot when people will say, well, the church teaches that contraception is wrong. But then people say, okay, but we now have medicines for example. We have other elements that can prevent conception in the case of someone who’s a victim of sexual assault. So we might be able to track that a woman who’s a victim of sexual assault has not ovulated yet. And so it can take something like Plan B to prevent ovulation, for example. So to prevent that so that the rapist’s sperm never fertilizes one of the rape victim’s eggs or ova. But then people say, well, isn’t that the sin of contraception though? And the answer is no, it’s not. When you look, for example in Humana Vitae, what is being discussed is the use of contraception, for example, in the marital act. So the question is do married couples, do those who engage in the marital act, do they have permission to sterilize that act?

But a rapist and the rape victim, they engage in sexual intercourse, but they’re certainly not engaging in the marital act. What is happening here is sexual intercourse has taken place through an act of violence. And so any response to that would not be the sin of contraception, it would be self-defense. So similar to the defenses that we would give as to why it is okay to take a man’s life in self-defense versus just murdering someone. In both cases you have a dead body, but you have the intentions and circumstances are very different here, much the same. There’s a difference between a married couple that uses contraception because they want to keep God and procreation out of their marital act versus a woman who is trying to prevent the rapist attack from continuing through a part of his body that has no right to be within her body.

So I think that when we look at it that way, it’s very helpful to notice the difference here, that we’re not talking about the sin of contraception, we’re talking about the act of self-defense. And this idea that there’s a difference between the marital act and the sexual act when it is done without consent. We also see an element of this in the church’s code of Canon Law, which is interesting. So in Canon 10:61, it says that it talks about a valid marriage being consummated, right? So you can be validly married, but if you never engage in the marital act, your marriage is actually still dissoluble. Your marriage does not become indissoluble. It’s valid, but it does not become indissoluble until the husband and wife become one flesh in the marital act.

So it says here in Canon 10:61, “A valid marriage between the baptized is called ratum tantum,” throw our Latin in there. “If it has not been consummated. It is called ratum et consummatum if the spouses have performed between themselves,” here’s the key clause here, “in a human fashion, a conjugal act, which is suitable in itself for the procreation of offspring to which marriage is ordered by its nature and by which the spouses become one flesh.” It’s very interesting here that it says, look, your marriage is valid, even if you don’t consummate the marriage, it can be dissolved, but it’s valid. Once you’ve exchanged your vows, it becomes ratum et consummatum, it becomes indissoluble once you’ve engaged in the marital act. But it says here, I love the Church Code of Canon Law because there’s always stuff that’s come up they have to account for. “The spouse is performed between themselves in a human fashion, a conjugal act, which is suitable in itself for the procreation of offspring.”

So you’re engaging in the act order towards that end. And in a human fashion, most commenters would say that refers to it being a consensual act. So you’re not, if you were so drunk, you couldn’t consent, that wouldn’t count. If it’s rape, that wouldn’t count If a husband rapes his wife on their wedding night, that would not count as consummating the marriage. So here, this element of consent involved does change what would normally be the marital act to being some other kind of violent sexual act. And I think that can be applied also in the case of using contraceptives to prevent a rapist’s attack from continuing versus the sin of contraception between a married couple.

Thanks very much for the question, Maurice, and for taking the course over there at the School of Apologetics. You can find it@schoolofapologetics.com if you’d like to take apologetics courses from the folks here at Catholic Answers. Was that too sales mini? Would Laura disapprove of that that-

I think Laura would have just fine with that side. She’s still working on material for Catholic Celebrities Invite You to breakfast Part Four, but we might still have room for you to show up there.

I’m going to have to work on being a Catholic celebrity then. I’m not on the Catholic A list of celebrities there, Trent. But if she’s desperate, all right. Julie wants to know this, trent, Julie, one of your patrons at the Council of Trent. What is a good well-rounded elevator speech for why be Catholic versus other Christian denominations? I’ve been trying to convert my non-denominational brother and sister-in-law, and every time I give them biblical proof or historical proof of their position being different than the early Christians, they don’t seem to care.

Yeah, I think that when this happens, when this happens, we have to understand, it’s kind of like when you evangelize people when it comes to the gospel itself during evangelism, you can say, “Oh, well I’ve shared the faith with them. I’ve shared Jesus Christ.” And a person might say, “Oh, well that’s nice, I guess.” And they’re not really moved by it like, oh well now what’s going on here? And I think that’s why evangelism means good news, right? Euangélion, the good news. But the gospel is really only good news to people if they already understand the bad news. So in one sense, evangelism was easier in the early church because Pagans had a very gloomy outlook on life. Life was hard and the afterlife was even harder. It’s a gloomier place. And salvation in Christ is something that provides hope for many people whose lives were hopeless.

But a lot of people today are very distracted by consumerism, materialism, modern devices. And so in that respect, even death itself doesn’t seem like bad news if you can just really live it up now. But when people face death, they really do see the bad news. They don’t notice it right away in their own lives. I think then for when we are talking with our Protestant brothers and sisters, we got to really help them see the bad news that “Hey, you don’t have a firm foundation for doctrine.” Sola Scriptura is a made up doctrine. The Bible actually contradicts Protestant teachings on sola fide. It contradicts other Protestants on eternal security or the denial of infant baptism. So I think what’s important when we share the Catholic faith is to not just share the good news of Catholicism, which is helpful, but to point out, hey, here are the pitfalls of Protestantism, the bad news, missing the sacraments like the Eucharist, the real presence of Christ and the Eucharist, and then we’re in a better place to share the good news of our faith with people.

Hello, Trent, please strictly consider the text of Mark’s gospel Chapter 9 verse 1. If Jesus really said the words “attributed to him,” does that mean Jesus’s second coming is a failed prophecy? In other words that it’s safe to say the second coming is a prediction that never came true. Thank you.

Sure. In Mark 9:1, Jesus says, “And he said to them,” this is the crowd coming with his disciples, “Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power.” Now, we have to be careful that when we read scripture, I’ve talked about this before on the podcast, modern Bibles have chapters and verses. These were not the original part of the manuscripts of the Bible. There were no chapters or verses, that was added in the Middle Ages. So that can make us think that the authors were separating ideas, they weren’t actually separating. And so we might think, “Oh, Jesus couldn’t be talking about this. That was last chapter, not this chapter.” No, no, no. It all goes through. Or sometimes when we read, even within a single chapter, there are little headings in the Bible that tell us what is the subject being discussed.

And so we think, oh, it must be about that subject heading when actually it could be a long continued discussion of something going through from 10 or 12 verses earlier. So here, Mark 9:1, there’s often a heading that separates Mark 9:1 from the rest of Mark 9 thinking that they’re not connected, but I believe that they are connected. So some people might think, “Oh, well, if Jesus is talking about his second coming, there’s some people they will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God come with power.” Well, Jesus has not returned yet. Everyone in the first century has died. It’s supposed to be a false prophecy. Well, it may not be talking about the second time Jesus comes his second coming. It’s just talking about the kingdom of God coming with power. And that is something that would still happen for the people of the first century.

So one way that people saw the kingdom of God coming with power was God’s visitation on the city of Jerusalem in its destruction. And that would bring to an end the sacrifices of the temple to really point towards Jesus being the ultimate sacrifice for sin, but also seeing the kingdom of God coming in power. So when people interpret the end of the world and like loose gospel, it’s oftentimes referring to more of the destruction of the temple as happening within the lifetime of Jesus’s followers.

But here, even seeing the kingdom of God come in power. What happens after Mark 9:1? Well, what’s verse two? So Mark verse 1, “I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power.” Verse 2 then says, “And after six days, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John and led them up a high mountain apart by themselves.” So it seems that it’s all connected, that some will see the kingdom of God come, who will they? Well, the inner circle, Peter, James and John on the Mount of Transfiguration, Mount Tabor, they go and they have see it come in power in Jesus’ transfiguration with Moses and Elijah at his side. So I think that when you look at it in that way, there’s no contradiction or problematic element to it.

It is striking that it comes right after it just says, and it’s basically he said this and then he did this.

And then he did that. And Mark often does a, he uses the Greek word kai to he starts a lot of the verses this way as a continuous string of action of what Jesus is doing.

Steve, thanks very much for that question. This one comes from Joe. Hello Trent.

Hello, Joe. Hello, Joe!

Do you have any advice for a beginner Apologist, any advice on how to bring people to Christ through the intellectual side of Christianity and do so with gentleness and respect? I know you do this very well, so I thought it would be worth asking. Thank you for all you do.

Well, thank you Joe, and thank you for supporting us at trenthornpodcast.com and just all of our patrons supporting us. It’s really, really helpful for the beginner apologist. It’s kind of like swimming, stay in the shallow end with your floaty for a bit. While you get used to everything, you don’t want to jump off the high dive right away. You don’t want to go whitewater rafting because you’re still trying to figure everything out. There’s a lot to learn.

I would say the most important skill that a Catholic Apologist can have is a well-rounded and solid understanding and knowledge of the Catholic faith. So many objections to the Catholic faith, many lay objections, many popular level objections are rooted in misunderstandings of what the church teaches. So I would say reading a chapter of the New Testament a night and maybe 10 paragraphs of the Catechism. And if you do that in eight or nine months, you’ll go through the whole New Testament, you’ll go through the whole Catechism and right there that’ll give you just a really solid foundation.

Also, there are just basic arguments you can learn that help to reply to people that have just heard slogans against the faith. So a good book, I mean, the two books I’d recommend to get you started would be my book, Why We’re Catholic, because it’s just a nice introductory level to why the reasons behind Catholicism. And my colleague Jimmy Aikens’ book A Daily Defense because in Jimmy’s book he has 365 daily arguments. They each are a page. So you can pick up a lot of arguments that are just brief that will help you in those brief exchanges with people. That’s not enough to go out and do debates or anything like that, but it’s enough for the casual conversations that you’ll have with other people. So that’s what I would recommend reading the Catechism and the New Testament, Why We’re Catholic and Daily Defense are a good start.

And then once you have the basic foundation, just pick a beginning level book on a topic that really interests you, like the resurrection or maybe you’re interested in the Deuterocanonical books of the Bible. And so you pick up why Catholic Bibles are bigger by Gary Chuda available at catholic.com. And you read that and you kind of go topic by topic what interests you most. And then you have conversations with people online or friends and family. And if you get stumped, say, “I’ll go look that up and get back to you.” You go find an answer online and you kind of build your encyclopedic knowledge from there, one entry at a time. And remember, it’s a journey, not a race as you set out to do that.

Joe, thanks. Thanks very, very much. It’s interesting to me that Joe is interested in bringing people to Christ through the intellectual side of Christianity. There does seem to be a basic recognition in that question and a very healthy one that that’s not the only way to bring people to Christ. You have other options available to you. There’s the sharing the charitableness of Christ, the charity of Christ with others. There’s making beautiful art. But I do think that there are more and more people who are understanding that they can use intellectual arguments, explanations to help people come closer to Jesus Christ. So thanks, Joe.

This one comes from Drew. How can we get a secular person to agree that using sex for something other than babies and bonding is a bad thing without appealing to religion? Most secular people I talk to about sexually disordered acts believe that using sex for something other than its natural purpose is morally irrelevant. And I’m not sure how to convince them otherwise without bringing in theology.

Yeah, there’s a good book on this. My wife actually read it a few years ago. I’ve looked at parts of it so I can’t fully endorse everything in it, but a good start might be the book Sex Matters by Mona Charin, How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love and Common Sense. And so I don’t know her background exactly, but she does a good job talking about how those who would advocate for sexual libertinism and free love and all that stuff, things have been quite a mess since then. And to be able to articulate that with bullet points, talk about the harm of no-fault divorce, sexually transmitted diseases, children born out of wedlock, and what is happening in the family structure to be able to have those bullet points to put forward to see how people are worse off because of this, can really shake people in that regard.

So one thing you can do is just focus on the harms that have come from sex being treated so casually and how people look with trepidation on even just modern relationships saying they’re not worth it because of how sex is treated, honestly.

Another point that I would raise and I, when people say, “Oh, well, I don’t see how babies and bonding are important,” to ask them, well, what is sex for? What is this act for? And if you can’t give a reason, then you have a really hard time grounding very common moral intuitions people have about sexuality. For example, even many non-religious people would say that infidelity is gravely wrong, even attempted infidelity or asking your partner about infidelity, for most people at least, would say that’s really an awful thing to do. But if sex has no purpose really, if it’s just recreational, then why would we demand fidelity in that respect in those relationships?

We don’t say with our friends, okay, you’re my only friend, right? We’re best friends. You have no other friends. You and I were just friends with each other that would be manipulative and controlling. We don’t do that with any other relationship. We don’t say, “Okay, oh, you’re my tennis buddy. Hey, you’re not playing tennis to anybody else. How could you betray me? You played tennis with Scott. How could you?” That would be controlling. But with sexuality, we see it ought to be reserved. But why? Well, it only makes sense if it is for bonding a complete gift of self. And if it’s open to making babies, it makes sense. It’s just for two people to unite them together to prevent any other unfortunate family dynamics being created from children out of wedlock or fornication or adultery or anything like that. So I think that when we approach it in that vein, we can help people to see the Catholic view of sexuality, even if they disagree on things like contraception, fine, but your own view doesn’t explain these basic moral intuitions, but ours does. So think about that.

Thank you guys so much for listening today, and I hope you have a very blessed weekend. And once again, if you want to help us grow and maybe take part in a future, ask me anything episode, then be sure to support us at trenthornpodcast.com.

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