Ask me Anything! (with Reason and Theology)

In this episode Trent gets “grilled” by Michael Lofton, the host of Reason and Theology, on all sorts of questions related to apologetics and theology.

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Welcome to the Council of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic answers.

Trent Horn:

Hey guys, in today’s episode, I want to share with you a recent interview that I did with Michael Lofton at the Reason and Theology Channel. Michael is one of those people that legitimately gives me hope in the church today. Sometimes I’ll complain that there are Catholics who will talk a lot about things that aren’t going well in the church, and there’s a place for that, but I would really love to have more help engaging all the errors, the heresies, the lies about the church you can find just on YouTube alone. Now I’ve been doing rebuttal videos, and I want to do more rebuttal videos here in the near future, but sometimes it just feels overwhelming trying to tackle all of this error out there. That’s why I love that Michael has Reason and Theology. He’ll host dialogues, debates. He does breakdowns of videos dealing with people like John MacArthur or James White. He handles Eastern Orthodoxy very well in a very measured way, so I’m just really glad that Michael’s in the vineyard with me doing apologetics work at Reason and Theology.

Trent Horn:

He’s also been partnering with Catholic Answers lately. I hope that we will do more with him in the future. It’s been great. It was super fun because Michael came out with his family to visit our parish here in Dallas, Texas, St. Basil, the Great, our Byzantine Catholic Parish. Our priest actually goes out to where he lives to do a mission there once a month. Michael and his family came out here. They come out here frequently to worship at St. Basil, the Great, our church, and so it was awesome to be able to have him and his family. They came over for dinner, and he’s just a great guy. We had an awesome interview where he asked me about all kinds of different issues in theology, apologetics, current events. We started right off talking about Nancy Pelosi and communion. We covered a lot of great ground, and he’s just an awesome person to do a back and forth with.

Trent Horn:

I definitely want to do more engagements with him dealing with apologetics, maybe co-rebuttal videos. We did one of an Orthodox priest not too long ago, so you can check that out on my channel. I did that alongside Michael because he really knows Eastern Orthodoxy very well. Yeah, definitely, I hope you enjoy this interview. Be sure to go and check out Michael’s channel at Reason and Theology. Definitely subscribe to him because he’s doing a lot of great work. Without further ado here is my mega interview with Michael Lofton of Reason and Theology.

Michael Lofton:

Let’s dive in. I mean, we have a wide range of topics that I wanted to ask you about. I thought tongue in cheek of naming this interview, Michael Lofton interrogates Trent Horn because I have all kinds of questions.

Trent Horn:

Sure. Let’s do it.

Michael Lofton:

Let’s dive in. Let’s talk about the issue of Nancy Pelosi and her suspension from holy Communion. Of course, Archbishop Salvatore, I guess you call him Salvatore Cordileone.

Trent Horn:

Cordileone.

Michael Lofton:

Cordileone.

Trent Horn:

I made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.

Michael Lofton:

Pretty much. He recently suspended her from holy Communion because of her obstinate position in relation to abortion.

Trent Horn:

Yeah.

Michael Lofton:

It’s totally understandable now. He’s received a lot of pushback for it, but it’s completely understandable that he’s taken that position.

Trent Horn:

Right.

Michael Lofton:

I want to, first of all, get your impression about that, and then I want to ask a question about the death penalty.

Trent Horn:

Yeah. Well, I think it’s good that he’s done that. I mean, I’ve followed this for a while. I’ve read and talked to different Catholics, more liberal Catholics who believe one should not withhold the Eucharist from politicians. Honestly though, Michael, when I’ve asked these more liberal Catholics or left Cats, because that’s my favorite question to ask when they’re in an uproar about this. Can you give me a hypothetical example where you would say because of that politician’s vote, they ought to be withheld Communion, because a politician could commit grave heresy just in his own personal life. He could go start his own church or something, and have nothing to do with his voting record, and still be withheld Communion or something like that. The question I ask is what specific vote would a politician make, and because he casts that vote, Communion should be withheld from him?

Trent Horn:

Honestly, the left Cats I’ve spoken to, the honest ones have said, never. You could never withhold it no matter what they do. I asked Steve Millies, he’s with the Bernardin Center. He calls himself a public theologian. We had a dialogue about Roe V Wade, and he called Roe V Wade a Catholic win. We had a whole dialogue about that. I find his position morally reprehensible. Now we had a civil dialogue about it, and we had a follow up on social media where I even gave him a hypothetical. I said, suppose a Catholic politician voted to make it legal for ranchers along the border to shoot illegal immigrants on site merely for trespassing. They’re allowed to shoot people merely for trespassing on their land because of immigration issues, this or that.

Trent Horn:

I guarantee you a large number of people, Catholics on the left, and bishops and others, would demand that that politician, if he was Catholic, be withheld Communion for an affront, and the dignity of the person, and all of these other things. He actually said, he just put under that, politicians should not be denied Communion. Obviously if you denied it to somebody who threatened to lie, who promoted it, made it legal to kill people merely for trying to go from one country to another, and you withheld Communion there, what about politicians who vote to make it legal to kill a child who’s trying to go from inside the womb to outside the womb? They recognize their position is ultimately, it’s a free for all for their position. Though I’ve heard others who have said this is going to play into following up on the death penalty, asking about that.

Trent Horn:

They’ve said things like, well, we can’t withhold Communion from Biden or Pelosi because there’s nothing they can really do. It’s legal. Roe V Wade’s made it legal. The fact that their pro-choice doesn’t cause abortions, they’re just supporting what already exists. That’s why I’ve dropped the hammer to say, and I said it in my previous podcast when I heard Roe V Wade would be overturned, that if Biden and other Catholic politicians cast a vote to codify Roe V Wade into federal law, I’m sorry, now they have taken an active step to deny the right to life to unborn children. They’re not just merely tolerating what’s already been legal. They’re trying to promote evil at that point. They obviously should be withheld Communion for choosing to do something like that.

Trent Horn:

I guess that’s just my thought right there on Pelosi and Communion. It’s been a long time coming, but now you’ve got the goods. You’ve got her on record and these others people saying, “Yeah, we want to codify Roe V. Wade into federal law and make it impossible to protect the unborn.” All right. You drew the line in the sand. That’s on you.

Michael Lofton:

I don’t know if you saw the comments from Whoopi Goldberg, the eminent theologian.

Trent Horn:

Oh yeah. Future doctor of the church. Of course, when I say this, I mean, righteously I am upset about the lives of children being lost and politicians playing into that, but we always remember that this penalty, it is a medicinal penalty. It’s one for the good of that person’s soul. I very much would like them to repent of the evil they’re supporting for the good of their souls. Not just because of the evil they contribute to, but because they are doing grave harm to their souls and their eternal life. Yeah, Whoopi Goldberg, that’s not your, what did you say, that’s not your job.

Michael Lofton:

Right, which I thought, actually it is.

Trent Horn:

Right.

Michael Lofton:

That’s the very definition.

Trent Horn:

No, I’m not going to listen to someone, I remember when I wrote my pro-life book many years ago, I did a chapter on religious pro-choice people. In there, I quoted Whoopi Goldberg because this is between me and God. God gives us all choices. I’m like, Whoopi, you wouldn’t say that about someone using their God given free will to commit a racist act of violence or anything like that. It’s just abortion. The problem with abortion is that people, most people have an emotional reaction to it and they haven’t really thought the issue through very much. When you force them to think it through, it makes them really get off the fence one way or the other.

Michael Lofton:

Now what some people have said is that the Archbishop is inconsistent because he’s not suspending people from Communion who might be in favor of the death penalty, politicians who are in favor of it. Could you maybe briefly address why you think that might not necessarily be an issue?

Trent Horn:

Yeah. I think that this is an objection that’s off base for several reasons. First, even if he were inconsistent, it wouldn’t mean that he’s wrong about applying those standards to Nancy Pelosi. The fact that someone’s inconsistent, it only shows they’re wrong in one area, not that they’re wrong in another. Everything he’s done there would still be fine. On the baseline though, I feel like this objection’s very disingenuous because I would ask Nancy Pelosi and Biden, “Okay, suppose the bishops did withhold Communion from people who support the death penalty? I want to put that in quotation marks. Would they be okay with their suspension from holy Communion still staying? No, not at all. That would not change their opinion about, they would say they still have the right to receive Communion. It wouldn’t change anything. It’s just a smoke screen when they bring it up.

Trent Horn:

It’s the logical fallacy of Tu Quoque, hopefully I’m pronouncing it right, or you too. Well, I know this is bad that I did, but you also did a bad thing. It doesn’t change that you did a bad thing though. That, I think, is to show that ultimately it’s a smoke screen problematic in that regard. The other issue that I would say is, well, no, what if he’s just applying the standard, like I mentioned earlier, that people will say a Catholic politician who says they support legal abortion, well, they haven’t done anything yet to actively promote the evil of abortion. Even if a politician filled out a questionnaire from 30 years ago saying that he supports the death penalty, the fact of matter is, I can’t remember the last time, at the federal level, politicians voted to support the death penalty. That’s a state issue. The states apply the death penalty in various ways.

Trent Horn:

It was back in 1976 when the Supreme, this is funny actually, when you talk about, the Supreme Court can’t change. I think it changed in like four years. There was one Supreme Court case that prevented the implementation of the death penalty. I want to say it was the Furmin case in 1972. I haven’t done this in a while. I’m rattling around in my head. Correct me in the chat if I’m wrong people. I think it was 1976, Greg versus Georgia, Greg case, where the Supreme Court said the death penalty could now be reimplemented. The thing is, even if the politician has this private opinion, people will say, well, they can’t change anything. It’s not like these politicians, I doubt a politician under the Archbishop has cast a pivotal vote to make the death penalty legal.

Trent Horn:

Here we’re saying, look, abortion could become illegal. You’re casting a vote to keep it legal. What politician has cast a vote to make the death penalty legal or keep it legal? That’s what’s being judged here, not just your personal opinion, but what actions have you done? Your actions have contributed to a grave evil. I don’t think we have a lot of politicians, even if I grant death penalty is a grave evil, which that would be the next step in the argument, so whenever I make these arguments, Michael, it’s always like, okay, let me grant as much of your case as possible. That’s what Aquinas would do. I will grant as much of your case as possible and still show why it doesn’t work. Let’s say it is a grave evil, but they haven’t actively cooperated with it or contributed to it. The best you might say is somebody like Barr, the attorney general, putting forward the federal death penalty. I don’t know what Bishop or Cardinal, what appellate he’s under. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’s under, is Biden under Gregory?

Michael Lofton:

Yeah. I believe he is. Gregory Wilton, right?

Trent Horn:

Yeah. There you might say, well, what did they do about Barr in the death penalty? Well, if he’s under Gregory, if he is, and Cardinal Gregory hasn’t withheld Communion from Biden, and to be consistent, we couldn’t do it to Barr either. There, the consistency is not putting down any suspension equally across the field. I don’t believe Archbishop Cordileone is under that position because I don’t know any politicians under him that would cast a pivotal vote dealing with promoting the grave evil of death penalty, yada yada. Even if we go through this track, I don’t think the argument works.

Trent Horn:

Then finally, there’s the question is the death penalty on par with abortion? I would say that the answer is no. I, myself, am pretty solidly opposed to capital punishment, both for prudential reasons and for principled reasons. As I’ve had in dialogues before, I didn’t have as much of a problem with the revision in the catechism. It seemed to be on the trajectory of a development of doctrine. We had seen John Paul II and Benedict going for some time since the second Vatican council, but even the way that you read it as it stands, the church’s teaching on death penalty is not like it’s teaching on abortion. Teaching on abortion says abortion has been condemned for 2000 years. It’s a direct killing of an innocent person. The catechism uses language that’s prudential, so I think a Catholic politician involved in this could make a case that, well, this is a prudential judgment, and disagreeing with the Pope on the Pope’s prudential judgment is not a grave enough grounds to withhold Communion from someone.

Trent Horn:

Now, I think someone could make that case and be strong because we have a lot of magisterial teaching on not just the gravity of abortion, but the gravity of politicians who legally support it. Look at evangelium vitae. It is very clear talking about that. We simply don’t have, because the revision is so new, we don’t have as much magisterial teaching on the culpability and gravity of politicians voting for or against and what is entailed there. I think someone could make the prudential judgment argument and show this is still very different. Ultimately I’m just going to call their bluff and say, it doesn’t matter because for you guys, even if they did do this, you still wouldn’t wouldn’t care. Let’s just talk about the main issue, whether abortion should be legal or not. Sacrosanctum ConciliumYeah, well said. Let’s shift gears and let’s go to something related to our setting here. We alluded to it earlier. You said that you and your family attend here. What really attracted you to the Byzantine Catholic Church and its liturgy. What really brought you here?

Trent Horn:

You know what’s interesting about this, and I have respect for all different kinds of rights and traditions within the Catholic church. I’ve worshiped in the extraordinary form several times. I’ve been to Maronite, and I’ve been to other rights celebrated in the church. I think the thing I love really about Byzantine is I think it captures the spirit of, I always worry about that spirit of Vatican too, but really what was being taught in the second Vatican council about the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium says that the goal of the reforms of the document on the liturgy was to encourage full, active, conscious participation in the liturgy. I think people can, I really think even people who are very traditional should at least recognize there can be a temptation. I mean, I think there’s lots, in any structure that’s given to us, you can see places where temptation can creep in.

Trent Horn:

Even people who are very, very in favor of the traditional Latin mass, and I think the traditional Latin mass is great. I would hope they could at least acknowledge, there can be a temptation to not actively participate in the liturgy because a lot of it is focused on the silence, which is good, but you can have that temptation there. Now, I think a lot of times you could go too far to try to get people in the Novus Ordo to participate. It’s just so cringey. It’s just like, oh, we made the decision to switch over. We were looking for something reverent, and the mass we went to, I think they brought up all of the boxed goods that were brought into the church for a Thanksgiving food drive or went and placed at the altar. I was just like, oh, I can’t do this anymore. I just can’t.

Trent Horn:

It was funny. We were just looking around and then we knew some friends who had gone to the Byzantine Catholic church in San Diego, Holy Angels. Then we just started attending there. I just fell in love with it. I’ve been familiar with the right. I’d been to it a few times here and there before because you have to take some time to really enter into it. You got to go for a month or two to get a good handle on what it’s like. That’s what I love. What I love about it is that it’s very, sometimes I get cheeky a little bit. Sometimes when I meet people who are a bit super TLM and not very tolerant of other traditions, sometimes they’ll ask me, so do you go to the traditional Latin mass in your home? I was like, they’re kind of judging me. I say, oh, I go to the divine liturgy at the Byzantine Catholic church. I feel like we have this weird standoff. I’m not super TLM, but I’m also worshiping in an ancient tradition.

Trent Horn:

Sometimes if I’m cheeky, only obnoxious, I mean, I love people who go to traditional Latin mass. I love the community. In any community, actually online, I have met, I used to joke about this, a deacon, a Byzantine Catholic deacon who is just the worst. I call these people Byzantine radical traditionalists. I would call them Brad Trads. It’s like, you have Brad Trads.

Michael Lofton:

I’m going to use this for now on.

Trent Horn:

Oh totally. It’s like what happens when an ortho bro becomes Catholic and attends a Byzantine mass and doesn’t shed the attitude. They’re Brad Trads. It’s like an obnoxious Byzantine Catholic who acts so superior to everybody. I’m like, dude, don’t do that. Sometimes if I meet someone who is a Mad Trad, if I was cheeky, I would say, well, I like the Byzantine Catholic church because I just feel like the traditional Latin mass is this newer western innovation bringing in these secular elements into the liturgy like the organ. I mean, I’m not very comfortable with a musical instrument that was created for Roman orgies playing because the organ, when it was introduced in the fourth or fifth century, it was controversial. In the Byzantine church, we still sing, we celebrate the liturgy acapella with no instruments.

Trent Horn:

Now that being said, like I said, I don’t want to pick fights with anybody. If it’s a valid tradition, I love it. Though I think some are more aesthetically pleasing than others. It’s not relative in that regard. I love the divine liturgy. It feels like one continuous prayer. There’s active participation. It’s not like when I go to a Nova Soto and it’s like we always have to have a new hymn or new thing to make it feel fresh. I can sing the same timeless hymns, and I love that the hymns are theologically rich and dense, that when you sing them, that the vocabulary, the language, they’re so rich and dense. It’s great.

Michael Lofton:

When you first attended your first divine liturgy, were you able to follow along with the structure? Did you feel like, okay, I know this liturgy, even though I might not know all the details, I at least know the skeleton, know the structure.

Trent Horn:

It was hard. The very first ones were hard and I was flipping back and forth a lot in the missal trying to like keep track. When you go enough, because it is the same hymns that are sung over and over and over again, you can get it under your fingers in a matter of weeks. That’s something I’ve appreciated with it, and that it’s, at least at the church we attended, it’s sung in the vernacular, but it’s just done in a beautiful way.

Michael Lofton:

Like I said, I told you I’m interrogating you here for a wide range of questions, so here it is again.

Trent Horn:

Of course. Do it.

Michael Lofton:

Let’s talk about your career as an apologist. I’m curious, because I’m not sure the background here, how did you start out as an apologist?

Trent Horn:

Yeah. Well, I got into apologetics because I’m a convert. I went from being a Deist in high school to converting to Catholicism my junior year. High school, I read books, watched debates. I had to do apologetics during my conversion process. Then after converting, I left high school, went to college in Phoenix, Arizona, and I was volunteering with the local youth group at the time to mentor high schoolers when I was in college. One of the things I did was teach them apologetics, so I just kind of continued it. Then I started doing pro-life work, but apologetics was always a hobby I enjoyed. I enjoyed teaching other people how to do it. Then it just really changed. In 2012, when I heard Catholic Answers had an opening, and I had been doing apologetics on my own for some time before that, and then I approached them, and they liked my work, and yeah, I’ve been there for about 10 years now.

Michael Lofton:

I remember them asking something along the lines of who would you like to see as the next apologist? They gave a list of people and they ended up choosing you. I remember that.

Trent Horn:

Oh, wow.

Michael Lofton:

That was pretty much it. When was that again?

Trent Horn:

It was 2012. That was when I came back in there.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah. I joined the church in 2012.

Trent Horn:

Oh wow. Yeah. Awesome.

Michael Lofton:

I was a brand new Catholic.

Trent Horn:

Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Lofton:

What’s your advice to others who want to start out in apologetics or are already in apologetics, but just need advice on how to be a good apologist?

Trent Horn:

Yeah, I think, well I have, my gosh, I have a lot of things that I could say here and I’m always trying to improve and learn myself in avoiding mistakes and things like that. One, I think you have to keep your spirituality at the center. Some of the people that I engage who are the fiercest critics of the church are former apologists, former Christian and former Catholic apologists, people who just went off the deep end. You need to be careful. If you’re going to do apologetics, you got to have a very robust spiritual life and a robust community to keep you on track. Number two, I would say just really know the basics, get them under your fingertips, knowing scripture, knowing the catechism. Four out of five times it’s just knowing what the catechism says to clear up a misconception.

Trent Horn:

Then if you want to go deeper, I would say find people who are the best authors in different fields, read their secondary works, and then see what primary sources they cite and know those, especially church fathers. Probably the most important church fathers are apostolic church fathers, the Ante-Nicene Fathers, understanding them. It’s not that hard to get through that material. The church fathers, I mean the Schaff Collection, it’s like a million words. Read the church fathers. Like, oh, okay. We just start with the apostolic fathers and that’s not hard to do. If you do that over a course of a few months, that will cover you for pivotal 300 years of church history to really answer a lot of objections. Read the good authors out there. Be familiar with the opposing arguments. Honestly, my advice for people who want to get into apologetics, it is very, very difficult to become what I would call a jack of all trades apologist. For example, I would say that Jimmy Akin is like that. I am desperately trying to juggle the bowling pins and do that myself.

Trent Horn:

That’d be something like, I just did a debate on abortion, followed by a debate on the Deuterocanon, followed by a public dialogue on the problem of evil. I’ve done New Testament work, debated mimesis. There’s people who can, I’ve covered a lot of different areas, but even I can feel stretched. I’m relying on other experts to fill me in on things. It can be hard because as you get into an area, you need to be aware of the Dunning Kruger effect, which is the people who are the least knowledgeable about a subject constantly overestimate their knowledge of that area. Basically people who are not smart think they’re smarter than they really are, and people who are genuinely smart underestimate their intelligence. You have people who will speak so confidently on something when they have not actually looked at the nitty gritty to have the nuance.

Trent Horn:

To avoid that, I think if someone wants to get into apologetics, I mean, it’s fine to do general apologetics, collate resources, help people, lead a group at your church. It’s fine to be very, what kind of apologists are we talking about? If you’re doing just ministry at your church to encourage people and teach them, and you’re popularizing what other people have put out there, that’s great. Do that. Some people think an apologist has a YouTube channel, like Reason and Theology, or Council of Trent, and they do debates and do dialogues or write books, and that’s great. Make sure when you do it, you understand all of the different objections and things that are going to come at you. For example, I feel like you’re more well versed in Eastern Orthodoxy than I am. If I was to dabble into that area, I would run things by you and by other people, because I just don’t have the expertise.

Trent Horn:

I’m aware of the limits that I have though. I can answer objections and engage. I’m aware of the limits that are involved. My advice for apologists is to know your limits. If you want to be general all around, I think that’s fine. There’s a lot of work to be that kind of an apologist. I think what we need more in the church is we need Catholics who are willing to, if they love apologetics, become an expert in a specific, helpful area. That way, it’s like you are the guy. Like Suwon Sana is the guy on biblical proof text or the papacy and typology. You’ve got other people. Gary Michuda is the guy on the Deuterocanon. He does other apologist greats as well. If we had more people say, yeah, that guy is just amazing at this subject, then get out, do debates, write books.

Trent Horn:

Then we’ve got all the different people together and we can compile those resources. It’s better to be an expert that can refute almost any argument against a certain position then to be barely hanging on to lots of different ones. That just comes back to knowing your limits. I’m sure you’d agree.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah. I mean, you’re effectively saying, look, take one area that you can …

 

Michael Lofton:

You’re effectively saying, “Look, take one area that you can certainly master. But then sure, you can explore some other areas.”

Trent Horn:

That’s one thing you can do if you want to grow as an apologist. Where do I start? I would say, start with a specific issue, learn it really well, then move on to the next one. Just start with a very narrow question. Don’t start with the Bible, because it’s going to take you a while. But you could start with the assumption of Mary, or Mary Theotokos, Mary the mother of God, Theotokos. Start with that dogma. That is a narrow, specific subject and reading the arguments for and against will not take you that long to actually feel very competent defending that position.

Trent Horn:

Then, maybe move on to another Marian dogma or, maybe move on to purgatory and just stay on that subject. Or do the gospels. Do an intensive study of the gospels. The biblical alleged contradictions, the sources behind them, and if you move from source to source… I’m sorry. Move from topic to topic and you get really good at it and then move on to the next one, over the course of several years, you could become a very well-rounded, all around individual on these different subjects.

Trent Horn:

Yeah, prayer at the focus and then just make sure you know your limits and you’re growing in a healthy way.

Michael Lofton:

You mentioned earlier a debate that you had on the Deuterocanon, which I really, really enjoyed.

Trent Horn:

Oh, yeah.

Michael Lofton:

That was last week.

Trent Horn:

Yeah, I think so.

Michael Lofton:

It was with Jonathan Sheffield. In fact, I think I’ve had him on, reason in theology before. Great guy, really charitable. I think that he… both, you and he were very, very charitable in the debate, so I appreciated the tone of it. I’d like-

Trent Horn:

Oh, that’s my other advice for apologist. Don’t be a jackass about things. I’m just, I just got to say like some apologists, it’s like, please stop. We don’t… There are some people out there who identify as apologists across different traditions, including some who identify as Catholics. They’re just so off putting. Even if they’re right, it’s like, can you just turn it down a little? You’re at an 11. I need you down to a four of just the arrogance or it’s like, just stick with the facts. Attack the argument, not the people.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah.

Trent Horn:

Just charity’s so important here.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah. Well said. I think y’all did a really good job at exemplifying how one should conduct themselves-

Trent Horn:

Oh, it was great.

Michael Lofton:

In a debate.

Trent Horn:

Yeah.

Michael Lofton:

It was excellent. Now I do want to get your thoughts on as far as the content of the debate.

Trent Horn:

Oh yeah.

Michael Lofton:

What are some post debate reviews that you could give-

Trent Horn:

Well, yeah. Actually, if people want to go deeper into this, I think it’s called Apocrypha Apocalypse. Gary. I’m sorry if I don’t remember the channel name. I think that’s it.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah.

Trent Horn:

Yeah. Apocrypha Apocalypse. I was on there with Gary and… Who else was there?

Michael Lofton:

Was it William Albright?

Trent Horn:

Yeah. Yeah, Albright was there and then was going to say his name was David. He was an apologist. I think he’s from the Czech Republic or he knows Czech. The three of us were talking and we had went through the debate and talked about it. We covered a lot of great ground going deeper into the subject, talking about especially things like Jewish reception of the canon. How that changed Rabbinic Judaism, and some of the arguments that Jonathan made, and some of the rejoinders that I had.

Trent Horn:

The Deuterocanon is one subject where it can get real nitty gritty in ancient documents.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah.

Trent Horn:

Pseudepigrapha, apocrypha, Talmudic literature, church fathers. It can canvas a wide area, but honestly, for a lot of people, I would just recommend reading Gary Michuta’s book Why Catholic Bibles are Bigger.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah.

Trent Horn:

It does a really great job, especially synthesizing some of the stuff that he has had in previous books, into just one nice format to cover there. I’m definitely grateful for his work, because basically Protestant apologists have assembled what seems like an impressive case against the Deuterocanon. When you read people like William Webster and stuff, and honestly, a lot of that comes from Turiton and George Salmon and Philip Shaff and others.

Trent Horn:

Oh, but what about Josefa said this in Melito’s canon and Syros’ canon and Cardinal Jimenez and Kazakhstan and Jerome and all of this. Look at… You have all this stuff thrown at you. It’s like, “Yeah, I guess Ziro canon was really not received at all.” Then it’s like, “Oh no, wait a minute. This isn’t what it seems to be.” You have conveniently left out all this other evidence of how the Deuterocanon was used in the New Testament, in the post-Apostolic period. But Gary does a great job with that. His book is a must read.

Michael Lofton:

He really does. One thing that I noticed in the debate is that he often assumed that in the First Century, the canon was uniform.

Trent Horn:

Right.

Michael Lofton:

The canon was one where it’s 39 books of the Old Testament.

Trent Horn:

Right.

Michael Lofton:

Where you continue to press him on the point that, but wait, you’re pointing me to post-First Century sources-

Trent Horn:

Right.

Michael Lofton:

That attest to a 39 book canon. Can you maybe elaborate a little further?

Trent Horn:

Yeah. Well, he was just trying to say, look, we should receive the Old Testament that the Jews were given a special authority over the Old Testament. He was grounding that in Romans 3:2, which I would say that verse says nothing about the canon.

Michael Lofton:

Right.

Trent Horn:

Already the argument is a non-starter.

Michael Lofton:

Right.

Trent Horn:

But the idea is that, yes, he’s trying to say, well, look. Look at all of the uniformity that Rabbinic Judaism had with the canon. Doesn’t that show the canon was closed? I would say yes, but you’ve made a further assumption that it was closed before the First Century. I agree there is uniformity in Rabbinic Judaism. But even today, there are Ethiopic Jews who hold to a wider canon.

Trent Horn:

But the question is why was there uniformity among Rabbinic Jews? Really you don’t see… You don’t get that full uniformity until really the early Middle Ages, but why was it there? The assumption Jonathan is making as well, because the canon was closed prior to the time of Christ. I would say, well, all the evidence we have for that is hearsay and revisionist history in the Talmud. When we actually go back to those sources from the time period, that’s not what we see at all.

Trent Horn:

The other point that I made, and I made this point in my breakdown on Apocrypha Apocalypse, is that the issues of canon… It’s like when you hear Protestants who say, “Well, the Jews didn’t have an infallible magisterium and they knew what scripture was. So why do we need an infallible magisterium now to know what scripture is?” My reply to that is you don’t unless you want to treat the canon like Jews did in the First Century or prior to the First Century, which is that…

Trent Horn:

Then what I said on the channel with Gary was, which is a much fuzzier attitude than we have today. One that I don’t think modern Protestants… Modern Protestants would not be comfortable with people saying, “Maybe Hebrews a scripture. Maybe it’s not. This guy doesn’t think it is. That’s understandable.” They would not consider you.

Michael Lofton:

Right.

Trent Horn:

They would be baffled by it. Not okay with this, a very fuzzy approach, but that’s how it was in the First Century. Back… Not just fuzzy on a few books. When you look at different Judaisms and what I pressed Jonathan on was what about the Samaritan Pentateuch? The Essenes having a wider canon, the Sadducees having a shorter canon. That is one that Roger Beckwith has tried to argue. I… It’s funny. I quote Beckwith because James White likes to quote Beckwith in a lot of his stuff on the Deuterocanon. I have his old out of print book on it in my office.

Trent Horn:

But when you read newer Protestant scholars, I was reading Anglican who wrote on the Deuterocanon in 2004. He talks about how Beckwith who says that the New Testament has almost no correspondence to the Deuterocanon. That this is just out of step with scholarship. This Anglican scholar in 2004 was, and the name escapes me at the moment., but it’s in my Case for Catholicism book saying that this paraphrase would be a useful word to use to talk about how the New Testament uses the Deuterocanon.

Trent Horn:

You’ll have people like Beckwith saying, “Oh, well, the Sadducees didn’t really… They accepted a larger canon. We can’t know.” I think some people have tried to argue that because the Sadducees didn’t believe in angels, they… Maybe they didn’t… By that argument, they didn’t believe… Because the argument is the Sadducees didn’t believe in the Resurrection. That’s a good reason to believe they didn’t hold Daniel to be canonical. They didn’t believe in the prophets because where the doctrine of bodily resurrection is very explicit.

Trent Horn:

Others like Beckwith will take the argument and say, “Well, the Sadducees also didn’t believe in angels and angels are in the Torah. So they must have not have believed in the Pentateuch either.” As I cite in my book, Case for Catholicism, it may be the case the Sadducees, they don’t deny angels. They deny the cult of angels.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah.

Trent Horn:

Or that angels could be a source of divine revelation for people. The point is with Jonathan and engaging, I felt like you’ve made this massive assumption of canonical uniformity pre-Second Century Judaism, before the Rabbi Bar Kokhba Revolution. I think the evidence speaks heavily against that. That is not very great for the argument that they’re making, especially then when you add in the New Testament’s reliance on the Septuagint and the Septuagint including the Deuterocanon. It becomes overwhelming to me at that point.

Michael Lofton:

Expanding this conversation about Protestantism-

Trent Horn:

Sure.

Michael Lofton:

A little bit more generally. What would be the main reason why you would not be Protestant? What’s kind of the thing that is just a deal breaker for you with Protestantism?

Trent Horn:

Yeah, and that’s hard. Protestantism is a very large target, so to speak. You have some forms of Protestantism that are much closer to Catholicism than others. A high church Anglicanism is going to be very much closer to Catholicism than a kind of low church Baptist Calvinism, basically. For me, a large portion of Protestantism, it is a deal breaker for me because I consider it to be un-biblical. Even if I grant that the Bible, you have the canon, we have scripture, it’s inspired. Then we just directly know that. There are so many denominations I could not be a part of because I believe their teachings are un-biblical.

Trent Horn:

Calvinism is un-biblical. Denial Baptism Regeneration is un-biblical. I’ve had my dialogue with Gavin Ortlund on that and engaged on that. That’s one reason it’s a deal breaker. I also think sola fide is un-biblical. I think you have to really bend yourself into pretzels to explain the teaching in James Two. The doctrine of merits and reward, even going back to Romans chapter two. That is a problem to me that… For me, there’s I think it contradicts the biblical data is number one. But even there, what I try to do and what I’m trying to encourage people to do when it comes to debating Catholicism and Protestantism, is that it should not be well, if Catholicism can’t prove that it’s true, we should be Protestant.

Trent Horn:

No, instead it’s more… That would be like saying if theism can’t prove that it’s true, we should be atheists. No. Even if you can’t prove God exists, doesn’t mean you should be an atheist who denies the existence of God. You just be agnostic on the question. Much like even if Catholicism cannot be proven to be true, it doesn’t mean therefore Protestantism, which denies, says there is no infallible authority beyond scripture, it still hasn’t proven that claim is true.

Trent Horn:

So for me, Catholicism has an authority structure, scripture tradition, magisterium. Protestantism has an authority structure. 66 books inspired, many would say inherent. The Sole infallible rule of faith, and that can be unpacked even more. My question is why should I believe that that is true, that authority structure? Where is the evidence for that? The deal breaker for me is that I can’t get to that. Because for me in my conversion experience, it was, “Hey, there’s a God. I look at the historical evidence. Strict historical. I read the New Testament like it’s just manmade documents. I come to the conclusion that Christ did rise from the dead and he had this earthly ministry.”

Trent Horn:

Now what? It’s like, I followed philosophical evidence there’s a God, historical evidence Christ rose from the dead, and then I’m just supposed to say, “Oh, and now I believe these 66 books are inspired, inherent, sole infallible rule of faith.” Wait, wait, wait. That’s a jump. That’s a huge jump. Why couldn’t I just say, “Well, I believe Jesus rose from the dead, and after that, I’m not sure what I should believe.” Or, “I’m just going to listen to the words of Jesus and consider the rest of the New Testament to be helpful guidance, but that’s it.” Not normatively binding.

Trent Horn:

What would be… What objection could a Protestant make to that? They could say, “Well, but wait. But it’s scripture.” Okay. What does that mean? Where’s the evidence for that? Why should I believe? People will try to patch together things. Because I would say, for example, for Protestants, prove that the gospel of Mark is scripture. Why should I care what is written down in the gospel of Mark? It wasn’t written by an apostle. It’s never… It’s not cited as scripture in the New Testament. Paul does reference Luke as being scripture, but not necessarily the entire gospel of Luke.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah.

Trent Horn:

But Mark is not written by an apostle, not cited as scripture. Why would I accept that? Why would I accept Hebrews? What about Revelation? What about the letters of John? Philemon looks like a personal correspondence. I don’t… What does that have to do with me today?

Michael Lofton:

Yeah.

Trent Horn:

It seems to me, so for me, the deal breaker is just this is your authority structure and I’m… I’ve talked to Protestant apologists. I had a conversation with two Protestants about… And I brought up this question. How do.. They said that they don’t like mere Christian theism apologetics for this reason of doing the whole William Lane Craig arguments for God, then resurrection. Because then how do you get from there to Protestant authority? Because for many of them that I… Protestants I’ve talked to, here’s my problem. They’d say, “Well, I’m a presuppositionalist.” I would just say that we have to start with scripture as our foundation.

Trent Horn:

I would say, and I can’t do that because that involves begging the question. Whether you are a Protestant presuppositionalist, a Catholic presuppositionalist, an Orthodox prepsuppositionalist, not pointing out particular people, but the labels will fall where they will. I find it to be a massive act of circular reasoning that doesn’t become invalid just… That doesn’t become valid just because it’s the one circular reasoning that I need to make the system work.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah.

Trent Horn:

Something doesn’t stop being a logical fallacy just because it’s the one thing you need to make the system work. But in any case, yeah, I think that for me, all of that together, that what makes sense is I can follow natural theology to come to a mere Christian theism. But to get to the idea of having even scripture itself, I feel I have to make a giant leap with Protestantism. But with Catholicism, I can get there historically.

Trent Horn:

Because when I read the Bible, just historically, to figure out what’s the authority supposed to be, I’ll just be frankly honest. When I read that… When I read the New Testament, it shouts at me that the authority for Christians are the apostles.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah.

Trent Horn:

When I read, it’s like what is… If I was to read it, who is my authority? I read the New Testament, the answer that shouts at me are the apostles are your authority.

Michael Lofton:

Sure.

Trent Horn:

Not scripture or a collection of scripture. I’ll admit that it doesn’t shout at me successors of the apostles. But to me, if it shouts the apostles are the authorities, I think the evidence leans further in the direction that the authority is not going to be whatever they wrote down. Because even during the time of inscripturation, we had apostolic writings, but nobody says that these are going to become the rule of faith. Rather, it’s their successors.

Trent Horn:

Then when I get into the apostolic fathers, when I get into the church fathers, this is what’s funny for me, Michael. That some Protestants they’ll say, “Well, look. We don’t see in the apostolic fathers the universal primacy and jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome, so why would we be Catholic?” I would say, “Where do we see a universal jurisdiction and definition of the 66 book canon of scripture? Where do we see the Father saying that this is the sole infallible rule of faith?”

Trent Horn:

You can get a few proof texts from hypolotists or Iranaists that I don’t think prove the point, but you read Ignatius of Antioch. He says, “Follow the Bishop as Jesus Christ follows the Father.”

Michael Lofton:

Right.

Trent Horn:

For me, if they are going to be that skeptical, and I would say there is good evidence from Ignatius from Clement, from Iranaists on the authority of the papacy. But if that isn’t good enough for them of how the papacy is reflected into the other church fathers, so the papacy should not have authority. I believe that that is a killer blow to sola scriptura, to scripture itself, being the sole and fallible rule of faith. We do not see anywhere near those citations for scripture being that sense in the apostolic fathers. Absolutely not.

Michael Lofton:

I imagine this relates then to your deal breaker for Eastern Orthodoxy. If you have one, if there is one particular deal breaker-

Trent Horn:

Yeah.

Michael Lofton:

What would it be?

Trent Horn:

Well, that one, and I’ve told people before. If I wasn’t Catholic, I’d probably be Orthodox. I already have an affinity towards the particular style of worship. I recognize though the grass is not greener on the other side.

Michael Lofton:

Right.

Trent Horn:

There are issues and problems.

Michael Lofton:

Right.

Trent Horn:

But when I look at it, I don’t know if you call it deal breaker or not, but a great amount of concern arises that some people see the papacy as a liability. Where’s the evidence for infallibility, universal jurisdiction, supremacy? I would say, “I see your concerns about liability and evidences, but I see the papacy as a great asset in providing this, the unity in the church that is necessary for the continuity of faith. It’s necessary for conciliarism itself to have valid ecumenical counsels, to have Catholicity.”

Trent Horn:

That you need that to… That you really need this particular lynchpin. That just makes sense looking at the early apostolic church with Peter’s role, and then moving forward in history. That’s what’s problematic for me is the concern that without that lynchpin, you lose that unity. You can only preserve tradition through a kind of inflexibility. It’s like, well, as long as we don’t change anything. It’s like at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Israel. There’s a… It’s controlled by like, I don’t know. The Catholic Church, four Orthodox churches, and one like Easter… Like Syrian Orthodox.

Trent Horn:

They’re all… There’s a big treaty from the 19th century to keep the worship there amongst all the churches and because of that-

Michael Lofton:

Yeah.

Trent Horn:

When they pass the, which is called the Status Quo Treaty, they said nothing can be changed. When they passed the treaty, somebody left that ladder outside.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah.

Trent Horn:

It can’t be moved, and so now, when you go to the… When you look churches… Google church holy stuff, Booker Ladder, and it’s still there. You can’t move it. I think sometimes in Eastern Orthodoxy, it’s like, “Well, we do have this unity. As long as we don’t change anything. We can keep everything unified if we just…”. But I think that becomes difficult to then be a church that can respond to things. How do you respond to in the 20th century, the revolutionary… What’s the… adoption of hormonal contraceptives in the modern world.

Trent Horn:

It’s something the Cappadotian fathers weren’t expecting.

Michael Lofton:

Right.

Trent Horn:

You always had people. Pharmakeian, the Greek, people who were using potions and pessaries and crocodile skin condoms, and things like that. But it wasn’t huge on the radar like just the idea that everyone in the congregation would be taking a certain pill to keep them from being pregnant. What do you do? It seems to me, when I look at the biblical and historical evidence, you have every Christian Church until 1930 opposes contraception.

Trent Horn:

Also, up until the Protestant Reformation, there is very firm on no remarriage after divorce. But then when I read, even reading the additions of the Orthodox church by Kallistos Ware, from 1963 to 1993 to 2008, you start seeing no on contraception.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah.

Trent Horn:

Then it gets more and more… I worry that there is problems in that authority structure as well. Not as grave as Protestantism, which I think can’t even get off the ground. But I believe Eastern Orthodoxy lacks essential elements that would make it more robust that I find in Catholicism.

Michael Lofton:

But you know what somebody is going to say is, “Well, you have problems with your authority today.”

Trent Horn:

Totally.

Michael Lofton:

What do you say in response to that?

Trent Horn:

Well, what I would say is that at the very least. Let’s say you have somebody like Cardinal Marx who goes off the reservation.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah. Right.

Trent Horn:

Teaching on homosexuality has to change. There’s always been… Just because you have the right authority structure doesn’t mean you won’t have schism.

Michael Lofton:

Right.

Trent Horn:

In the First Century, the authority structure was listen to what Jesus is saying. One-12th of the apostles left.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah.

Trent Horn:

The others failed morally, so even if you have the perfect authority structure, you’ll have people in schism. You’ll have people who won’t obey. But I think that there is a difference here in that we can point to someone like Cardinal Marx. At least he would say that the church teaches X. He disagrees with it, and the teaching he wants is not what the church teaches, but he would like it to change.

Trent Horn:

It’s not like he can just say, “Well, the Catholic Church actually teaches this on homosexuality.” He doesn’t have the guts to say something like that because he can’t. He can’t say, “Well, the church actually teaches this is okay.” His thing is the teaching is wrong and needs to change or develop.

Michael Lofton:

Right.

Trent Horn:

Whereas another, you could have people, you have this more in Protestantism, but you could have something similar in Orthodoxy. A dispute over well, what is the sacred tradition on a certain matter? You don’t have the highest court of appeal to resolve the matter about what’s being taught. You’ll always have people who disagree, and you’re right. It’s scandalous. It is scandalous, and it makes me just bury my head a bit.

Trent Horn:

But I would rather… Well, you brought this up as well, when I had an interview with you not too long ago. It was when we were talking, I think, about father, the Orthodox, Josiah Trenham.

Michael Lofton:

Oh yeah. Yeah.

Trent Horn:

That… Let’s say if I was an ancient Pagan and I looked at the Nation of Israel, what a cluster bomb.

Michael Lofton:

Right.

Trent Horn:

What an absolute mess in some circumstances. But it would’ve still been better for me to have belonged to the Nation of Israel than any of its Pagan nations, because of what God gave to his chosen people there.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah. Yeah. Now I want to ask you one more-

Trent Horn:

Sure.

Michael Lofton:

Deal breaker question.

Trent Horn:

All right, all righty.

Michael Lofton:

Promise we’ll move on to something else.

Trent Horn:

That’s fine. This is fun.

Michael Lofton:

I’m curious to know what’s your deal breaker for atheism? What do you think that just makes this a defeater position?

Trent Horn:

You know what’s funny? I’ve been doing eight… One of my first formal debates was on atheism with Dan Barker. I’ve… My first book was on atheism. This was actually the apologetic that got me into Catholic answers because they didn’t have a lot on atheism. I was… I felt Catholics were not getting their game together. It’s like we can’t just be relying on William Lane Craig to do all this stuff people. We should be out there. We should be engaging people.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah.

Trent Horn:

I’m happy to do that, and I want to see more Catholics engaging atheism and doing that. But so, the deal break would be why couldn’t I be an atheist?

Michael Lofton:

Yeah.

Trent Horn:

There’s a lot of issues there. There’s different arguments that I defend, but I am… There’s one particular argument, now I’m thinking of exploring and doing a lot more research on. It came about in my dialogues with Alex O’Connor recently, the past few weeks at the Capturing Christianity exchange in…. Down in Houston. We did that a few weeks ago. Alex is the cosmic skeptic, has this channel. We debated before and we had a few dialogues while I was down there. We were talking about morality and I was really challenging him just on human dignity. Why is it we can fumigate rats, but we don’t treat human infants like pigs, even though pigs are smarter than infants? And other questions related to this.

Trent Horn:

There’s a lot of different things people see as to why. I find the argument from contingency and motion and the kalam. Those are powerful arguments, but one particular feature of the moral argument has stood out for me for a long time. I’m thinking about writing just a whole book on that. It might be my first academic ebook.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah.

Trent Horn:

Oxford University Press, Baker Academic, footnotes big and thick. I’d love… I would love to be able to do that. That might be the one. Maybe you’ll do PhD out of it. I don’t know. But it’s the question of intrinsic human value and human dignity. This has come a lot when I would dialogue on abortion. I would… I am even more confident of the wrongness of abortion than on some aspects of natural theology. Especially when you deal with contingency arguments and things like that for the necessary being, and being very abstract. I am just absolutely convinced that abortion is wrong and infanticide is wrong.

Trent Horn:

Because when I look at all of the data, the only way that I can explain that it is not immoral to fumigate a house full of rats, but it is immoral to fumigate a house full of squatters, even though squatters can be highly annoying.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah.

Trent Horn:

I would not pump Sarin gas in to get rid of them.

Michael Lofton:

Right.

Trent Horn:

But I would do that to rats.

Michael Lofton:

Right.

Trent Horn:

Or snakes or other, even other sentient creatures. Why I treat squatters, newborn infants better than even non-human animals that are cognitively superior? This is the group that are persons that have a right to life, and to me it is… Some people have said to me in my pro-life debates, that’s just because it’s a religious… That’s a religious view saying that human species matters more than others, so your view’s ultimately religious. I thought for a long time that was a weakness of the position. Oh, I’m incorporating metaphysics and theology. I want a strict secular pro-life argument. Now, I don’t really care.

Trent Horn:

I would say, “No. Actually my view, yes, it also entails that human… Members of the human species have value precisely because the ultimate source of value-

Trent Horn:

… have value precisely because the ultimate source of value values them. And it is intrinsic because God who just is goodness itself, bestows this value on us. And it doesn’t mean that it’s extrinsic in some way, much the same way that H2O has certain properties like wetness that deal with a relational aspect between hydrogen and oxygen is an analogy that I might make. Our intrinsic dignity does come from a relational value between us and God.

Trent Horn:

So I think that’s the biggest one for me. I mean, I have the cosmological arguments, all that stuff, but it hits very close to home that I am just so convinced of human dignity. And I don’t believe [inaudible 00:54:47] explain it. It’s just going to be a brute fact that I find highly unsatisfying. That is what gets me. And then also it’s just the best answer. Christian-theism is the best answer to the problem of evil in a practical sense. In that look, things just absolutely suck sometimes. You’re absolutely right. But I am only going to accept a view that everything sucks and it will never be redeemed. I am only going to accept that depressing view if there are overwhelming reasons that it’s true. But there aren’t.

Trent Horn:

Instead, there are good reasons to believe evil will be redeemed. So why wouldn’t I believe in this beautiful truth, if there are at the least, there are good reasons for it? And so, yeah. So I think that’s been a big one for me. And I’m looking forward maybe in a year. I’m I want to write just a general defensive Christian-theism, but I think I’m going to explore the argument from human dignity in a much more detailed way, because there’s lots of people who do different arguments.

Michael Lofton:

Sure.

Trent Horn:

And they get it down to a finely tuned instrument. And I think that’s great. Just like what William Lane Craigwas did with the Kalam argument 50 years ago, in the seventies. He kind of resurrected it. This is something that… because especially for my background doing pro-life work for so long before Catholic apologetics, it really speaks close to me like, wow, I’ve been reading a lot about this, and this has been something I’ve been concerned about for a long time. It kind of go together well. So I think soon I might take a break from the popular level books and that’ll just be the big behemoth, but it’d be fun, so we’ll see.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah. I’ll look forward to that. Now, I wanted to ask about Benevacantism. And for those who might not be familiar with the term, the idea is that Benedict Pope Benedict the 16th is still the Pope. He’s not an [inaudible 00:56:38]. He’s actually still the Pope and Pope Francis is not the Pope. What do you think about this movement? And do you think that this is a dangerous movement?

Trent Horn:

I think that it’s not spiritually healthy. In the same way that people who spend all of their time reading about Catholic gossip or spend all of their time reading about where different clerics or Catholic personalities fall short, it’s not spiritually healthy for you. It’s a kind of spiritual pornography. It is, if you think about it, like why do people look at pornography? Well, because it makes them feel good. It makes them feel like you have this high physically and emotionally from consuming this material. And I would say some of this material can rise to the level of spiritual pornography because you look at it and it gives you a sense of superiority. It gives you a sense of pride. Like I know about all this stuff. And let me tell you about the real thing that’s happened and what’s really bad about it.

Trent Horn:

And so you can become consumed by anger and anger is an addictive feeling. I mean, it’s like salt. It makes things, your natural passions for or against something, it can enlarge it, so to speak. And you get addicted to it, and you want more of it. You can’t stop at one potato chip. And so you get angry and you want to get more angry about stuff. And so, so dangerous. I don’t know if I want to use that term per se, but I think having the view, well, I mean, it can be dangerous because if you don’t believe Pope Francis is really the Pope, then you would disobey any of his magisterial acts, they’d have no authority. And that would place you in disobedience to the Vicar of Christ.

Trent Horn:

Now, I think for most regular people, I wouldn’t say it’s dangerous because they’re not necessarily directly under these magisterial acts. So it’s just more like they believe something really kooky and it’s spiritually unhealthy. But spiritually unhealthy things can become dangerous if you let them metastasize. So that is where… and the thing is, I understand it’s hard for me that some people criticize Benevacantism and try to water down all the concerns. I understand people having concerns, being confused about things that Pope Francis has said. He shoots from the hip in a way that John Paul II and Benedict did not. In ways that disappoint conservatives and liberals. So that has to be taken into account.

Trent Horn:

But yeah, the view itself, I think is spiritually unhealthy. And part of that, of course, it’s always grounded in the view that it’s not true. It’s not correct because if it were correct, it’s like, because some people who make these arguments will say, “Well, this isn’t a crazy view. There have been 30 anti-Popes in church history.” Sure. And I get that. It could be possible that someone who claims to be the Pope is not. But where I find the analogy breaks down is when you go back in church history and you have anti-Popes, there is always somebody else who says that person is not the Pope. I’m the Pope. So there’s not a case where you have in church history that you have someone who is nearly, every person recognizes is the Pope. There is someone else who is an anti-Pope who doesn’t declare for themselves that they’re an anti-Pope.

Trent Horn:

I don’t think there is any, I mean, I haven’t researched it, but I’m willing to bet money on this. There is not, I mean, there could have been someone that people rallied behind and he was reluctant. I don’t know, but I’m almost positive every anti-Pope in history has publicly declared they are the true Pope. So the analogy wildly breaks down in trying to say, because Benedict has not… I think the defenders of Benevacantism, I would ask them, if let’s say I was in a debate and there’s cross examination and this isn’t stuff that I debate. My plate is very full of things to debate. But if I was in cross examination and debate, I would ask, “Has Pope Benedict explicitly said that he is still the Pope? Has he explicitly said this? No.”

Michael Lofton:

No.

Trent Horn:

All they’re saying is that he resigned in an unusual way that would implicitly. But then I could say sense his resignation. He definitely hasn’t explicitly. You can’t even argue he’s implicitly. He calls himself Pope Ameritus. He still wears white. That doesn’t even rise to the level of implicit. So I mean, and I don’t… I’m getting more animated just because it’s fun to be in person with you.

Michael Lofton:

And by the way, I have a coming at this angle, but 2D, two dimensional. It’s interesting seeing you from this perspective, the mic is at an angle. Just like it normally is, but now I’m seeing seen 3D.

Trent Horn:

Oh, totally.

Michael Lofton:

So extra dimension.

Trent Horn:

And whenever I see you, it’s just like when I was with Alex O’Connor and Joe Schmid in Houston a few weeks ago, everybody that I know from YouTube, when I meet them in person, they’re taller in real life. Michael’s taller than I am. Alex O’Connor is like six foot one. Schmid is at least my height, if not taller. I always thought like, when I see them on my phone, I always think they’re like four feet tall. And then meet them in person, I’m like, my Gosh, you’re taller than I am. All right. I think I’m shrinking. I used to be almost six feet tall. Now I’m just like a solid 5’10.

Trent Horn:

But yeah. So, I mean, I don’t want to belittle people. I know some people watching might hold the Benevacantism position or they might be really sympathetic to it. And I just want to say, look, I understand concerns that you have with things that Pope Francis has said and done. But at the same time, our faith calls us to be obedient. If you’re only obedient when you agree, you’re not really practicing the virtue of obedience. Or you’re practicing the virtue of obedience in a default way. You’re not really trying. It’s like when Jesus says, “Love your enemies.” Be loving to people. Well, sure, it’s easy to love people when the only… it’s like what Jesus says in the gospels, right? It’s easy to love people who love you. The real challenge is can you love people who hate you? It’s easy to obey people who give you orders you want to obey. The question is, can you obey people who give you orders you don’t want to obey? And I think that was actually one of the things you wanted to ask me about. I mean, we could even [inaudible 01:03:13] for now.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah. Let’s do that. So there’s a situation where Alcuin Reid, a really well known monk, an author about the liturgy was recently ordained, according to the older form, the extraordinary form-

Trent Horn:

Which is not allowed in the demote appropriate.

Michael Lofton:

Right. Which is no longer allowed. It was done without the permission of his Bishop. So it was done by a different Bishop, an unknown Bishop, a clandestine ordination in a form that’s no longer allowed. So it’s valid, but illicit. Now, my question relates to those who rally behind this ordination and say, I think that this is a good thing. I think that this is good because these people are exercising heroic virtue because they’re preserving the traditions of the church. The church is overstepping its bound by not allowing for these ordinations. So it’s good to now resist the Pope, resist the local Bishop. What do you think about that?

Trent Horn:

It’s a dangerous path. Spiritually unhealthy. Can become dangerous. And I would say that the church does give us venues for healthy descent. It’s not like the Pope and that’s where if we’re engaging people like the Houston Eastern Orthodox, and I understand the concerns sometimes on the other side that, oh, you want me to be Catholic? You want me to essentially submit to a dictator? Is that how you view the Pope as an autocrat? And I can see where people would be very concerned if that’s the model of ecclesial government. I would say that’s not the church model of ecclesiology read Ut unum sint by Pope St. John Paul II. Makes it very clear that Pope is not an autocrat in the way that he engages with others. And so that’s why the church does allow for healthy descent. My friend, Jimmy Akin covers as well in his book, teaching with authority. That there are places where theologians may have a difficult time with some of the magisterium is taught or a discipline that it’s ushered in. And there are venues to challenge it. And you have to do so in a responsible way.

Trent Horn:

It’s like saying that let’s say you live in an area that has a large amount of crime. What do you do about it? And you have politicians and a police force that won’t do anything. Well, you should be vigorous. You shouldn’t give up, but you should go through the appropriate channels. You should only use violent means as a last resort. If you live in a place where the government has become oppressive, where it is committing intrinsically evil acts against innocent people, then it’s time to resist and take arms. But let’s say you just live in a mediocre neighborhood with high crime. Well, campaign and get out the politicians, get in politicians that are tough on crime. You got a bad school board? Vote in a better school board. Mobilize, organize, and go through the appropriate channels to dissent from the crummy situation that you are in. Don’t become a vigilante.

Trent Horn:

So my analogy here would be that if you’re concerned about something going on in the church, go through the appropriate channels, even have healthy dissent to publish in the correct theological journals, to write letters to your Bishop, to ask for support, go through the appropriate channels. In the crime analogy, it would be wrong for you to say, well, the cops aren’t doing their jobs, so I’m going to do it. And I’m going to go out there and I’m going to arrest people and I’m going to make sure the streets are safe. No, you’re just going to make things worse in being a vigilante. Okay, Batman. Maybe Batman could have fixed Gotham City if he invested billions of dollars into appropriate social programs, instead of punching people in the face. I’m just kidding. I love Batman. If I could be Batman, I would, but I’m not. If I was a superhero, I’d probably be the Flash. I’m not dark enough to be Batman. One day I could be Batman.

Michael Lofton:

Is that why you wouldn’t be Batman, because of the voice?

Trent Horn:

I would love to be Batman, but I know I’m not tough enough to be Batman. So that’s why I’d be concerned in this situation with Akin Reed, that it reminds me, it’s almost like a collegial vigilantism. I need to save the church and I can’t go through the appropriate channel. So we’re going to do this clandestine ordination, which is really bad because the entire point of the liturgy around things like the ordinations, around ordinations is to ensure we have things like proper apostolic succession. That’s why the church marriage has always been understood to be a sacrament, but that’s why the church over the centuries became more involved. And especially in the Western church witnessing the sacrament of marriage so that it is not some…

Trent Horn:

Because you could, in theory, if it was understood that the bride and groom are the ones who communicate the sacrament to each other, you could have a valid marriage without the witness of the church. But then when you have a guy who marries a different girl in every village, suddenly, you have all these invalid marriages and these problems. So it’s important to have the church. The church saw was important to have the ecclesial witness involved in all of this.

Trent Horn:

The same with ordinations. If you start having secret ordination, then you’ve got real problems about well, what line of bishops goes back where, and this way, and who has valid orders. You are not in a grave situation. I could understand where if you lived in a feudal Japan or the communist Soviet Union, you have to do things underground. And sometimes you might have to bend the rubrics a little bit in an extraordinary situation. But if it’s just you’re not happy with certain functions from a motu proprio, I think that it will have gone too far.

Trent Horn:

And this goes back to what I said about obedience. That you need to obey even if you… if you only obey when you like it, that’s not really obedience. Now, the difference of course is if your superior orders you to do something evil, you have to disobey.

Michael Lofton:

Sure.

Trent Horn:

And so there, it’s like the level of disagreement. You could have a superior order you to do something evil, whether it’s a parent to a child, Bishop to priest, husband to wife, to do something evil. You have to disobey. If it’s clear and your conscience has compelled you, this is an evil act. Can’t do it. But if they just order you to not do a good thing and where failure to do the good is not gravely evil, depending on who the superior is, they have a lot of latitude. I’ve been in situations where I’ve worked at companies, Catholic companies, where I really wanted to do something. And the present of the company didn’t agree with it. And I had to relent because they are the boss.

Trent Horn:

And so I think that there’s something similar here that if you try to say, well, this is a grave thing that’s being involved. I just don’t see it rising to that level just because they won’t allow a particular right to be celebrated in a particular way, even though their motu proprio has not completely abolished the Latin mass, it has allowed it under various circumstances and forms.

Trent Horn:

I just worry, I guess, to close my thought on this would just be, I understand the concerns, but we should be responsible advocates, not irresponsible vigilantes. So it doesn’t mean you’re a doormat. You can express criticism, disapproval vigorously in the proper channels. Go and do that. But don’t take Canon law into your own hands, Is what I would say.

Michael Lofton:

Well said. Now, I have one more question and by the way, everybody, y’all go ahead and put some questions there in the chat. We’ll take just a few.

Trent Horn:

Sure.

Michael Lofton:

And make sure to put them to that Reason and Theology so I can pick them out from the comments. But one more question for you. So shifting gears one last time to the person of Cameron Bertuzzi from Capturing Christianity, I’ve been very fascinated because he not only puts out just really good content, engaging others atheists and also has great interviews, but also he’s discerning Catholicism.So I’ve been following his story and I know that you’ve also had some interaction with him. In fact, I think you just had a conference with him.

Trent Horn:

I did. So this is funny. Okay. So about… it’s almost a year ago now, last August. Cameron was putting on his first Capturing Christianity conference, CCv1. And he was going to have a debate between Alex O’Connor, the Cosmic Skeptic and another Christian apologist, Braxton Hunter. Both of them were unable to appear at the debate. And so then we got Ben Watkins from Real Atheology and oh, actually Braxton was unable to attend. So Cameron reached out to me and said, “Do you want to come out and do this debate?” I said, “Yeah, that’d be awesome.” Because I had already debated Alex before. Then Alex couldn’t make it because of COVID restrictions. And then we got Ben Watkins to come in, so I filled in.

Trent Horn:

Then he did this Caption Christianity Exchange, like a little mini kind of get together. And I just wanted to go and hang out and just watch and have a fun time. And they were going to have another [inaudible 01:12:30] and that guy’s visa fell through. So Cameron asked me again to hop in at the last minute. And so Alex and I had a big dialogue about evil, divine hiddenness, stuff like that. So I just always end up being the one that fills in there. And then I had an interview with Cameron. We talked about Catholicism a little bit and we talked about the concerns here and there and what I’m really trying to help with Cameron and other Protestants who are seekers. And it is just so funny. I’m sure some people might have watched my interview with Cameron or with Alex, from Gospel Simplicity and say Trent, why don’t you just take their arguments and show where they’re wrong, go through the objections of [inaudible 01:13:06], go one by one and show why they’re wrong.

Trent Horn:

And I can do that. But there’s other people who’ve written, there’s all kinds of stuff they can sift through those objections and people might hear it. And they’ll say, okay, Trent’s smart guy, he said this. But Gavin Ortlund’s a smart guy, and he said that. How do I decide between these two? Going from all of that. More of my goal with Cameron and Alex from Gospel Simplicity and others is I want them to really, really not treat Protestantism as the fallback or the assumption, the safe place to be to investigate Catholicism. And if Catholicism is not true, well, good. I can still be Protestant. I want them to view Protestantism as wait a minute. This is a house of cards. It looks impressive, but there’s nothing that’s really able to hold it up. I’m firmly attached to the candid of scripture that divine revelation ended in the first century, many different kinds of beliefs I’m attached to that cannot be supported through the Protestant model of authority.

Trent Horn:

So that’s why I was telling Cameron and Alex saying, “Look,” Austin Suggs from Gospel Simplicity. “One of my arguments, I’m not arguing that… I’m not even going to try to argue if Catholicism is true. Rather, what I want to push more is the Catholic model of authority has more evidence than the Protestant model of authority. Just that it has more. So if you’re convinced of Protestantism, then you should, then there should be enough to convince you of Catholicism.” I just want them to really… and this is what I said with Alex. My dialogue with him will come out soon. But I said to him like, “It’s really hard sometimes to share the gospel in the modern world because you can’t appreciate the good news of Jesus Christ, unless you are already terrified of the bad news of sin.” That’s the problem we have today.

Trent Horn:

Sin has lost… sin is a four letter word. The only sin is saying that something is a sin. So if people aren’t worried about sin, they’re not worried about what happens to them after they die. Yeah, you can have all your fancy arguments for the faith. But if what I currently believe is not a source of concern, there’s not a motivation to leave it. But it is the same thing with like atheism. I’m not concerned about it. You have your fancy arguments, but I’m not convinced. But then if you start looking back, what I’m believing, I don’t think it’s true. I don’t think it can support. It’s just like with an atheist, I believe in objective morality and my atheism can’t support this. I have to look somewhere else. I want Protestants to say the same thing about authority, about many of their other beliefs. I believe this, but Protestantism can’t sustain it for me. I have to go somewhere else. So I want them to see the… before I can share with them the good news of the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, I need them to see the bad news Protestantism.

Trent Horn:

So that’s what I’ve been kind of focusing on to share with them. I really appreciate Cameron’s open-mindedness. I love the work he does at Capturing Christianity because I’m jealous, honestly. Because I kind of don’t like it when Catholics think their only role is to find Protestants and help them be Catholic. Now, that’s good. We should do that or Orthodox. But at the same time, it’s like, we’re called to preach the gospel. There are so many non-religious people who don’t know Jesus, we should be out there talking to them. And if they have arguments, if they’re atheists and there’s all kinds of atheists YouTubers who are leading people astray, I mean, and that’s fine. They think it’s true. So it makes sense for them to do that. I think they’re wrong. So it makes sense for me to oppose them, but come on, guys.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Trent Horn:

Why aren’t we getting out there and engaging philosophers, other non-Christians? There’s so much of it out there. And so that’s why I feel so happy that Cameron has the best philosophers religion, Christian apologists. And he reaches so many people in that way. And if he became Catholic, if Cameron became Catholic, like my message for Cameron Bertuzzi, I’d say like, “If you become Catholic, what I would say to you is for the next year, don’t talk about Catholicism on Captioning Christianity. Make Catholicism, your faith that you’re trying to grow in, but keep defending the foundational elements of our faith.” Because I would tell him like, if he became Catholic, I would tell Cameron, “Don’t become a Catholic apologist who just shows what’s wrong with Protestantism. We have enough of those. We have a lot of them.”

Trent Horn:

But honestly, it’s not a coincidence. I’ll get asked, can you fill in for this atheist debate? I don’t know a lot of Catholic apologists who could just jump in and do that like they could on Protestant topics. And I think that’s to our shame. Come on people. Now, we have great people. Actually, you know what we do have, honestly? We have a lot of great Catholic philosophers of religion who are just aces on atheism. I’m thinking Ed Facer, David Oderberg, Brian Davies, Rob Koons, Alex Pruce, they’re great. But most of them are, they’re philosophers. They academics. They don’t do the YouTube apologetics like we do. So that’s why we need Catholics to take up the mantle and do that.

Trent Horn:

But I think Cameron’s open minded. I feel a little bit bad. I think it’s almost unfair for someone like him. When you and I were converted and we had to go online every week on YouTube and tell people about it, it’s hard. What pressure to have people peering like Eagle eye, what are you doing? Commenting on it, critiquing it. So I would just encourage anyone who is discerning what is the true faith, I would want them to have appropriate space and to be able to do that. And we need to give people that, but I really appreciate Cameron’s honesty. And yeah, I pray that he, I pray he becomes Catholic. He listens to what God is calling him to, and I believe it’s to becoming Catholic, but also to many of the other good things that he’s doing with Capturing Christianity and other stuff.

Michael Lofton:

Oh yeah. I hope that if he converts, he just continues to do that.

Trent Horn:

Absolutely. I’d say just keep doing what you’re doing, do Catholic stuff here and there. But he would be someone that I’d say, Hey, we need more Catholics who can defend mere the, I would call not mere Christian-theism, but can defend the foundational elements of our faith. The existence of God, incarnation, Trinity, resurrection. And I want to raise up more people like that. So go to School of Apologetics, schoolofapologetics.com at Catholic Answers. I have a course on atheism there. Jimmy’s got a super great course Beginning Apologetics. So yeah. I would love to raise up more people and all that stuff.

Michael Lofton:

That’s awesome. Now, do you think that he will convert to Catholicism? If you had to roll the dice here?

Trent Horn:

I don’t want to jinx it.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah.

Trent Horn:

I don’t want to jinx it. I think Cameron does not have a problem. I think that if he was not going to convert, it would not be because he’s concerned what people think. I think Cameron’s very intellectually honest. And so I think he’d be willing to take a position even if others disagreed with it, but will he move? Will he? Will Alex Gospel simplicity? Well, only God knows. So I just prefer to give people their space, and mostly, to definitely keep working with them. Especially, if we have a lot of common ground on pro-life, on atheism to always, at least, be able to work together on things.

Michael Lofton:

When I started Reason and Theology, I was still Eastern Orthodox. So when I returned to communion with Rome, I didn’t necessarily do it externally, publicly, I should say rather.

Trent Horn:

Right. Yeah.

Michael Lofton:

I didn’t tell-

Michael Lofton:

… externally. Publicly, I should say rather.

Trent Horn:

Right, yeah.

Michael Lofton:

I didn’t tell people on the air. Then again, my channel is much smaller than his, so I could only imagine how many people are contacting him, emailing him, criticizing him.

Trent Horn:

Sure.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah. I imagine it’s pretty rough. I see a question here from the chat from Sean Matthew that I wanted to grab.

Trent Horn:

All right.

Michael Lofton:

That’s a good question, “Trent, are you part of the material sufficiency gang?”

Trent Horn:

Everyone always asks me about this stuff and it’s really hard. Michael, I just feel so busy. I’ll give you an example. I’m super impressed with the rebuttal content out of reason and theology. I love seeing online… Because I’ll say something like, “I’ve got to rebut that video soon when I get a chance.” And I see you address it. I’m like, “Yes. Clap. Michael’s taking a hack of that.” Because actually for the rest of the month, I probably will get rebuttals back on my channel probably in July because I’m finishing a book now When Protestants Argue Like Atheists. The dialogues and debates though, like I had the Deuterocanon debate with Sheffield, Protestant Dialogues and abortion debate. Three dialogues at Capturing Christianity with Joe Schmidt, Alex O’Connor. So it’s just trying to keep all of that together.

Trent Horn:

There’s so much on the plate that there’s a lot of other writing… There’s a lot of rebuttal videos I want to make, but also there’s a list of disputed questions in Catholic theology that are more open questions that I have not reached a firm conclusion on. And then I would love to say, “Here is my take on this.” On them, all I can say is where I lean. I lean strong, lean slightly… That might be a fun episode. I can do a little bit of it right now. I’m editing an anthology on human embryo adoption. I lean against that, but I’m not completely sold, but I lean against it but I’m editing the anthology. Once it’s done, hopefully I’ll have a firm view. Thomism, Molinism, I lean strong Molinism. It’s just my particular view on that, but I haven’t exhaustively…

Michael Lofton:

Sure.

Trent Horn:

The lying debate, I’m right in the middle, whether lying is always wrong or not. Right in the middle. I have not done anywhere near the research to reach a conclusion on that matter so I’m in the middle.

Trent Horn:

This view, material sufficiency, is the idea that… And it depends how you define the term, right?

Michael Lofton:

Yeah.

Trent Horn:

You can say, like some, I think the idea that what we need to believe to be saved has a lot more evidence for it than all doctrine. Material sufficiency would be the elements of the doctrine are present in scripture even if one cannot recognize them without… They’re only implicit. The analogy is that a Home Depot is materially sufficient to build a home but I cannot build a house if you just give me a Home Depot. I don’t have the skills to do that. It’s not formally sufficient. But if I have the HGTV gang with me, now all this entire system is formally sufficient to build a house.

Trent Horn:

So that’s, when it comes to scripture, the question is, as Catholics we deny that scripture is formally sufficient.

Michael Lofton:

Right.

Trent Horn:

It’s not like that would be like a pile of wood, that it could assemble itself or anybody can take the wood and put it together and make a house. No, scripture is not perspicuous enough in that regard for it alone to be… It doesn’t have, it’s not like scripture says, “These are a list of doctrines you need to believe. These are the essential and non-essential.” It doesn’t do that, but the question then is, is it materially sufficient? Does it have all the doctrines? Either all the doctrines we should believe or just the ones we need to be saved? I could see more evidence for that. They are there even though you might need the church or tradition to understand them.

Trent Horn:

So where do I lean? I don’t know. I think I lean like 52% against material sufficiency, which is not popular among some people. I don’t know, but still I understand there’s a lot to read back and forth on it, so I don’t want to speak presumptively. But I do think that there are a lot of things we believe that are very important doctrines that I don’t think are even implicit in scripture, like the ending of divine revelation in the first century. I don’t even think that’s implicit.

Michael Lofton:

Or the Canon.

Trent Horn:

Or the Canon.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah.

Trent Horn:

I don’t think the Canon… Because what Protestants will say is, “Well, if material sufficiency is true, then the Canon is somewhere there, so we can get the cannon just from scripture alone.” I don’t think so.

Trent Horn:

And also, and I talk about this in my Protestant dialogue that will come up soon here on my channel. So yeah, I would say… This other view, by the way, so is material sufficiency that what is in sacred tradition is also in scripture even if it’s in an implicit form? So these traditions we believe as Catholics are also in scripture, implicitly at least.

Trent Horn:

The other view would be called partim-partim. And this goes back to a draft at the catechism… Sorry, at the Council of Trent on the question of divine revelation, which the original draft used the language that revelation is partly in scripture and partly in tradition. So that’s partim-partim in Latin. The final draft, however, omitted that language. I forget the exact wording. I think it just says that it’s in scripture and tradition.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah.

Trent Horn:

But it doesn’t go beyond that.

Michael Lofton:

Right.

Trent Horn:

Now, where the development… I think the development, though, of the doctrine in Catholic theology, I do think it’s gone pretty heavily towards the material sufficiency view. If you look at Second Vatican Council talking about scripture and tradition flowing from the same divine wellspring, it talks about them being interconnected. It talks about… But even there, it doesn’t fully say the relationship.

Trent Horn:

So, I don’t know, but I have this feeling that… I know some people don’t want partim-partim because it seems embarrassing, like we need these nebulous traditions. I just think that it’s not nebulous. People, they go to the liturgy and they pass it on to their children and it’s not very nitty-gritty details, but basic things like what are the boundaries of our faith canonically, the revelation, even receiving something like the sign of the cross. There’s all the examples Athanasius gives about things we received that are not in the written word.

Trent Horn:

Yeah, I would say there, I know I’m rambling on, but we’ve got time and this is all fun, that I lean slightly towards partim-partim but I have not done the full investigation yet to make a firm… So I have no problem with people that hold a material sufficiency view long as long as it’s properly qualified.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah. It’s an open debate in Catholicism.

Trent Horn:

Yeah.

Michael Lofton:

This is one is from Josh, “Can Eucharistic ministers administer communion on the tongue? And would you recommend that?”

Trent Horn:

Yeah, this is the other thing that I have decided in my role, and it’s kind of funny. Catholic Answers, we have different models of apologies and I’m trying to chart my own course, I think. So I think the model, like from the nineties and early 2000s of a Catholic Answers apologist is, “This guy just knows everything about the Catholic faith and he’s here on Catholic Answers live ready for your questions.” I don’t know why that’s the announcer’s voice, but… And so you call the open forum and there’s people… [Tim Stables 01:28:47] can do that. [Jimmy 01:28:48] [inaudible 01:28:48] can do that.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah, Jimmy.

Trent Horn:

I cannot do that. There’s a lot of liturgical questions, rubric questions, canonical questions that I don’t know the answer to. And I thought, maybe five years ago, I thought maybe I should just devote my time to learning this stuff so I can go to the open forum and any of these random Catholic questions that are asked, I could just answer them. And I’ve decided, Michael, no. I don’t want to do that because I feel this need I want to be able to hold my own in a discussion with grandma, be on atheism. I want to be able to talk with a learned church historian in like Gavin Ortlund. I want to be able to engage Shabir Ali on Islam. On textual criticism, Bart Ehrman. I want to be able to take on the toughest critics of the Catholic faith from multiple angles: atheism, Protestantism, non-Christian religions, moral issues.

Trent Horn:

I want to defend the abortion issue backwards and forward. I’ve tried to read as many pro-choice philosophers as I can. And I decided a few years ago that I will never finish my task of trying to learn the faith well enough to take on these really tough critics, but I can still get pretty far. And so, because of that, I just don’t have the time to invest and in just learning all the ins and outs.

Trent Horn:

So the question there is, I don’t know liturgically what Eucharistic ministers are allowed to do. I will tell you my liturgical preferences. My preference is that somebody with the sacrament of holy orders is the one who gives the Eucharist. Can a deacon do that in the Eastern church? I don’t…

Michael Lofton:

Usually they hold the chalice.

Trent Horn:

They just hold the chalice, I think.

Michael Lofton:

Mm-hmm.

Trent Horn:

There, I think it’s just the priest. But at least in the West, someone with holy orders, whether it’s priest or deacon, that would be my preference. But I’m not going to not go to a Eucharistic minister. I do think, though, honestly, that I get concerned with Eucharistic ministers. It’s like, “Look, you are given a very sacred responsibility here. Please treat it as such. Wear your own civilian vestments, suit and tie, nice dress. At the very least, please make it seem like… I’m not saying, obviously you’re not clergy, but if necessity… And the GSRM allows us, General Structure and Roman Missile, necessity and all that. Please at least just try and let’s just offer that, if that’s what is necessary. Don’t just show up there in your Christmas sweater, passing it out like you’re passing out Ritz crackers or something.”

Michael Lofton:

No Grover t-shirts.

Trent Horn:

No what?

Michael Lofton:

Grover t-shirts.

Trent Horn:

Oh, is that a meme, I bet?

Michael Lofton:

I think that’s what Taylor Marshall said. He went up for communion and there was a lady who was wearing a Grover. I guess from Sesame.

Trent Horn:

From Sesame Street.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah, t-shirt. And that was his moment where he just said, “I can’t do this anymore.”

Trent Horn:

It’s so hard. With somebody like Taylor Marshall, it’s always, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, wait, wait. Too far, too far.” It’s just, there’s certain people. It’s just funny. You’re like, “Yeah, that’s… Yeah, yeah. Whoa, hold on. Wait, wait, wait, wait a minute. Wait a minute.”

Trent Horn:

But the question of receiving communion on the tongue, I mean, obviously that’s my preference and that’s what we have to do in the divine liturgy, because it’s intinction under two forms. That’s my preference. And I think it’s, but at the end of the day, it’s low on the things that keep me up at night and I’m trying to jostle and handle. But yeah, that is a preference. I would prefer that we do that more. I always want the liturgy more reverent. Is that too much to ask for? I don’t know.

Michael Lofton:

Fair. What about gun control? What is the Catholic position on gun control and ownership? The questioner says, “There seems to be some infighting between non-American and American Catholics.”

Trent Horn:

Oh, that’s interesting. I didn’t know that it was a global thing. I thought it was more like left Caths, conservative Caths here in America. Jimmy Aiken has done an article about this at catholic.com. So people can search Catholic Gun Control or search catholic.com, Gun Control. You’ll find Jimmy’s article. It’s a good summary of that. I’m actually planning to have a dialogue with two Catholics who probably disagree with me on gun control issues. We are going to talk about gun violence and whether it’s a pro-life issue and can Catholics reasonably disagree about this?

Trent Horn:

Normally I don’t get too involved in politics, but I really wanted to talk to someone about this. So I’m in the works now to have two Catholics who probably disagree with me on this issue so we can sit down and talk. But my understanding what the church teaches is that question should be framed as: what does the church teach about a responsible adult owning something like a handgun or even a semiautomatic rifle or a sporting rifle? And they own it for the purpose of lawful activity like hunting, self-defense, target practice.

Trent Horn:

And from my understanding is that there is no papal magisterial teaching on this question. I don’t know of any bishop that has invoked his magisterial office to teach. There are bishops who have offered their personal opinions on the matter, which would be prudential judgments. You could see I’ve seen some more left Caths, I don’t mean the term pejoratively, but I think you’ll know what I’m talking about. More liberal Catholics, liberal politically, and even sometimes theologically, they try to cite things like Evangelion Vitea about trafficking in arms. And I think Pope Francis, after the recent shootings here in the US, has said we must stop the indiscriminate trafficking of arms. And I don’t know what he means by that. Well, what do you, what do you mean by that exactly?

Trent Horn:

We don’t indiscriminately… To buy a gun, you have to prove that you’re an adult for an example. To buy a gun in many places, you have to pass certain background checks. And we also, I don’t believe you should have any arms you want. I don’t believe someone should be allowed to own a… I don’t believe a civilian should be able to own a nuclear weapon. Or even a fully automatic machine gun. But even there, you actually can own a machine gun if you pay like 15,000 and buy one that was built before 1986. But I don’t believe they should be mass produced.

Trent Horn:

But that phrase, when I look at the magisterial teaching, “trafficking in arms” that seems to me in the magisterial documents to talk about the wrongness of supplying weapons to known terrorist organizations. So I think when the Pope and previous popes have talked about the evils of being an arms’ dealer or the indiscriminate trafficking of arms, that’s like Tony Stark in Ironman, right? He’s upset because his weapon systems are in the hands of these terrorists because he wanted to make money and he didn’t have appropriate safeguards about where they’re being sold to.

Trent Horn:

So yeah, the church has had a long tradition about not arming groups that are dedicated to committing violence against innocent people. But the gun violence question in the US is more, “What should law abiding adults, what should they be allowed to do?” And I have not seen anything that has said they should not be allowed to own handguns.

Trent Horn:

There was a policy paper, I think from the US bishops back in like 1975, hoping eventually for the elimination of handguns in society. But I haven’t seen that pressed ever since then. So it’d be a prudential judgment back then. And I haven’t seen them resurrect that proposal since then, because it’s just not going to happen. There are more guns in this country than people. And I have my own thoughts about this, so then that’s the magisterial teaching. I believe it leaves a lot of… This one leaves a lot of leeway. At the bare minimum, it should be illegal to directly shoot an innocent person with the intent of killing them. That should be clear. Everybody agrees on that. So people are like, “Pro-lifers are inconsistent because they’re against gun control.” No, they’re not inconsistent. Pro-lifers believe it should be wrong to directly kill innocent human beings whether they’re on the playground or in the womb.

Trent Horn:

Where people disagree is about, well, what law is appropriate? What is a responsible law to mitigate gun violence and what would be overstepping people’s freedoms? Because if the question is, “Well, we don’t want people to die.” Well, you could just take away all kinds of freedoms. Set the speed limit to 35 miles an hour, don’t let people go anywhere. You could do all kinds of things to save life, but we would live in a totalitarian nightmare if you did that.

Trent Horn:

And I would say also, I would say that there is a right to self-defense. If you live in a world where people have these kinds of weapons to kill and hurt you, then you should be able to respond. It’s just those who advocate for stricter gun control law… Not even gun control. There are people who want all guns confiscated.

Trent Horn:

Of course, obviously, hardcore drugs are illegal and they’re still quite plentiful. So there’s that old saying, “If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.” So this idea from those who on the left, Catholic-left people, left Caths, who say, “Well, we ought to get rid of guns because of all this gun violence.” My next question to them is, “If I don’t have a gun to protect myself, how will I protect my family?” And I’m sure they would say, “Well, you should call the police.” And then I would say to these same liberal Catholics, “Oh? Call the police? A year ago, didn’t you say the police are racist?” And let’s say I’m a person of color and you want to take away my guns because you’re afraid that I’m going to commit an act of violence. So these same liberal Catholics, I say, “How do I protect myself?” “Well, call the police.” “A year ago, didn’t you say the police want to kill people of color and they’re racist and police trample on our rights and police are causing more violence? Didn’t you say you wanted to defund the police?”

Trent Horn:

So my honest question to them is, “Well, wait a minute. How? You want to take away my ability to defend myself. You want to give me an alternative you claim is evil. What’s the solution?” Basically. Rather, I think that we should sit down. Honestly, I do care about gun violence a lot. I do. For example, I think one way to reduce gun violence is to just stop reporting it. It’s not a coincidence. It’s not a coincidence that after a widely reported mass shooting in New York, there’s another one in Texas. Because when people hear about it on the news, there’s a small portion in the society that are mentally unstable and think, “That’s my ticket to people knowing me, finally.” This is well documented in the literature, that mass shootings are contagious. And we live in a 24-hour news cycle, that’s why it’s even worse.

Trent Horn:

So I would say to reduce gun violence, stop reporting it. Social media should just not share the stories. News media shouldn’t cover it. If you do that, then there will be less of it. But what will be funny is I’m sure people would say this. Well, imagine if I said we could reduce gun violence by passing a law saying that social media and news organizations don’t cover mass shootings at all. And they would say, “But that violates the first amendment.” Well, wait a minute. Weren’t you the people that said we should get rid of guns? And you said, “Who needs the second amendment?”

Trent Horn:

So I have my own strong views on this, but I believe that you can be a faithful Catholic and believe in rigorous legislation to prevent gun violence. You can be a faithful Catholic. We can reasonably disagree about that. But what I would say is we should not, either on the right or the left, we should not say, “Okay, this is the prudential judgment everyone is bound to. No, the church… We should be… Obey the church when the church gives us definitive teaching and respect the freedom to disagree on issues where the church has left it an open question. And that applies to a lot of issues.

Michael Lofton:

Last question here, this one is from Josh. He asks, “Is God bound by the sacrament of baptism?”

Trent Horn:

Well, no. Paragraph 1257 of the catechism says he’s not. Is God bound to the sacrament of baptism? If that means that God is inhibited from carrying out His will, because of something related to the sacrament of baptism… Well, no, of course not. That’s why paragraph 1257 of the catechism very clearly it says, “Salvation is bound to the sacraments but God is not bound to the sacraments.”

Trent Horn:

So yeah, from our perspective, this is the ordinary means so we have to obey and baptize. But God, He’s all powerful. He can do whatever he wants. For example, with the crucifixion, God did not have to be crucified for our sins to be atoned. He could have chosen another form of sacrifice. He could have chosen to forgive our sins through a divine decree. There’s lots of… He’s all powerful.

Trent Horn:

The one thing God can’t do is He can’t deny Himself. He can’t do a logical contradiction. He can’t utter a lie, He can’t do things like that, but He’s not bound to the sacrament. So that’s why, for example, if somebody wants to be baptized and they die without being baptized, there’s a strong case for the salvation by baptism of desire. If someone received an invalid baptism and they didn’t know it because the formula was off and nobody caught it at the time, is God really going to damn that person because of something completely outside of their control? I’m not inclined to believe that. So, yeah. I think that should be helpful there.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah, absolutely. Trent, thank you so much for being a good sport and hanging in there with all these different questions that I’ve [inaudible 01:43:08].

Trent Horn:

Dude, we did two hours. I’ve got a bunch of text messages here. Not about what we’re saying, just all the other stuff here. But yeah, this is fun.

Michael Lofton:

This is really fun. I appreciate you coming on the show and doing this. Thank you so much for your time.

Trent Horn:

Absolutely, Michael. Thank you so much.

Michael Lofton:

And also, thank you to Father Elias who hopefully is either watching this right now or will watch it later to give us permission to use the…

Trent Horn:

Oh yeah, this is…

Trent Horn:

What a place to be able to record. This is…

Michael Lofton:

I know, right?

Trent Horn:

Know what my favorite is, actually, when we’re in here? My favorite is to come… We do divine liturgy during the week, usually on a feast day, so usually about one night a week. And a lot of those are only maybe a handful of people sometimes will attend because a lot of people drive an hour to come here.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah.

Trent Horn:

So they’ll drive an hour or two hours just to come to this parish. So it’s just not feasible for them to come on a weeknight.

Michael Lofton:

Sure.

Trent Horn:

To drive an hour or two hours. So I love when I have the intimate… There’s only like seven of us in here.

Michael Lofton:

Yeah.

Trent Horn:

And we’re singing all the prayers. The [Latin 01:44:09]. All of it, it’s… The other reason I love all of this is, and I love the West, but I never was a super Latin guy. So to have stuff Slavic and Greek, that’s kind of my jam. So I really dig it here.

Michael Lofton:

It’s awesome.

Trent Horn:

Yeah.

Michael Lofton:

And I look forward to the divine liturgy tomorrow. So if anybody’s in the Dallas area, y’all swing by. It’s in Irving, Texas. St. Basel the Great, we’d love to have you once again. Thank you so much for coming on, Trent.

Trent Horn:

Thank you.

Michael Lofton:

Everybody, see y’all later. God bless, hit that subscribe button. Also, share this on your social media. Take care.

 

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