On October 31st Trent was invited to answer questions posed before students at Taylor seminary as part of their Reformation Day activities. He also gives some tips for how you should answer questions posed by your Protestant friends and family.
Welcome to The Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
What do we celebrate on October 31st? I know it was a few weeks ago, but put on your thinking caps to remember. Probably first sprung in your mind, “Oh, Halloween. Take the kids out trick or treating.” If you have your Catholic sensibilities on, it’s, “Oh, it’s All Hallows’ Eve. It’s the night before All Saints’ Day.” And if you’re Protestant, it’s Reformation Day so that you don’t have to do any of the stuff with Halloween that might seem contrary to your moral and religious sensibilities and to celebrate the apocryphal event of when Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the Catholic church in Wittenberg, Germany. Luther didn’t actually nail the Theses on the door, there’s little evidence he did that. But he did promote his Ninety-five Theses areas of disputation that helped to ignite the Protestant reformation. Though honestly, it was really beginning the reformation, the seeds were planted centuries before Luther by a multitude of causes we’ll have to cover in a separate podcast.
But here’s why I bring that up. I was invited on Reformation Day to do a video chat session with the students at Taylor Seminary, which is a Protestant seminary up in Canada. My friend, Randal Rauser, previous guests on the podcast, an evangelical theologian and apologist, invited me. So, I came and he had a series of questions he asked me with the students present, and so, I was able to answer them and it was a nice opportunity to share the Catholic faith with these Protestant seminarians. And I even offered them free copies of my books, The Case for Catholicism and Why We’re Catholic, and some of them ended up reading them. So, I thought it was very successful, wanted to share that Q&A with you so you could pick up a few things from it.
I’d like you to notice as I answer these questions to show the approach that I take. I always try to find, and this will help you with your conversations with Protestant friends, find common ground where you can. So, affirm the good things in Protestantism. You’ll know at one point I said, “Hey, it’s good on you guys that you can make it through 45-minute sermons, no sweat. But if you hear a Catholic priest he does the homily longer than seven minutes, Catholics start to get antsy.” So, mild self-deprecating humor I think is fine you don’t want to overdo it. But you should affirm Protestants start their love for our Lord Jesus Christ, their love of scripture, the knowledge of scripture. Those are all great things to be able to affirm.
And you’ll notice in many of my responses, I turn the conversation back to scripture to try to show the biblical support for our faith. And what I also try to do when subjects come up, let’s say it’s the mass or it’s the papacy, listen to it in these answers, I always try to go back to the broad principles. So, if someone asks about the Pope, asks you about the Pope, I recommend going back to the broader principle of “Who has authority? To whom did Jesus give his authority?” Or if someone asks about the mass, say, “Well, what is the nature of the Eucharist? Did Christ give us his body, blood, soul and divinity, truly and substantially present under the form of bread and wine? Did he really give us his body and blood? Or is it only a symbol?” So, going back to broader principles when people ask questions I think can be helpful and also including a lot of common ground as well.
Finally, this interview is a good way for you to hear how I try to overcome technical difficulties. I think the devil really did not want me to speak to the seminary audience. We were having audio problems at the beginning, trying to get me Skyped in for this and we just couldn’t quite connect. And then throughout the Q&A session, I kept having this distracting echo in my ear buds. I’m listening, I’m trying to hear myself speak and engage. And also I’m using the microphone on my earbuds. And this happens sometimes with me in interviews with radio stations. And sometimes if it’s a live interview, I can’t just stop the interview. I will be giving it and in my own ear I can hear an echo of what I’m saying, and it is incredibly distracting and makes it difficult to give answers.
So, let me give you a taste of what that would feel like. So, imagine you’re trying to give an answer to a question and you just hear your voice echoing lightly behind you like this. It’s enough to drive you crazy. So, it wasn’t that bad in the Q&A session that you’re about to hear but I did have it to some effect. And I think, at one point, I take out the ear bud and I turned it around so I only have the microphone and I can’t hear myself. And I say, “This is kind of driving me batty.” So, I think the devil did not want this to happen but that’s because I think there were a lot of good seeds that were planted. And I hope how I answer the questions in this Q&A will give you a nice framework and example for how to engage similar questions your Protestant friends may ask you.
And once again, big thanks to Randal for having me up. And I really would love to come up again. I would fly up there in person. Catholic Answers would gladly fly me up there to engage these seminarians one-on-one in more than in person setting. I didn’t go this year because, well, I got to take the Little Tykes Trick or Treating and they’re still cute in their costumes, their little PJ Mask costumes, they were Super Cat Speed then we saw … I can’t miss that. There are only going to be little for so long. But another time, if I’m not away from the family, I’d love to go up and engage at Taylor or at another Protestant seminary.
If you know someone who is a teacher, a professor at a Protestant seminary or a church that would like to do a similar Q&A format on, “Why Be Catholic?” Or learn about Catholicism, I would be more than happy to go. I think it’d be a great event. If you’re interested in that, visit my website at trenthorn.com. Fill out the contact form there or consider becoming a subscriber at trenthornpodcast.com where you can interact with me in a more direct way on these episodes. So, here is my Q&A session with the Protestant students at Taylor Seminary.
Okay. We made it. So, Trent, I’d like to begin with by answering … Asking you a question to get us to know you a little bit better. How did you become a Catholic? I know it happened in your teen years, as I recall. So, could you share a bit about that?
I may repeat the questions, Randal, to make sure I heard them because the … As I tried to make a joke earlier, the devil attacks Protestants and Catholic technology equally and I think … And he hates all secular printers too, apparently. So, the question was “How did I become a Catholic?”
Okay.
Well, I grew up in a non-religious home. So, my mother used to be Catholic and she left the Catholic faith, and my father is Jewish. But we were raised as very kind of non-religious. We didn’t go to church. The only things we did were we celebrated Christmas and Hanukkah. So, as a kid, I just liked nine days of presence. And that was it for me.
But then when I was in high school, I was not an atheist, but I was a deist. I believed there was a God who was out there, maybe would help me on tests every now and then but that was it. I didn’t believe in Jesus or anything like that. Then I met some Catholic students in a Catholic youth group at my public high school. And I thought they were intelligent and winsome. And so they introduced me to Christian apologetics. And so, when I studied the writings of people like J.P. Moreland or William Lane Craig, Peter Kreeft that helped me to come to see Jesus was not just some kind of first century hippie, which was my previous thought of who he was. So, I became Christian. And that was about sophomore year of high school.
And then I reached a dilemma. I thought, “Well, what church should I be a part of?” I even went down to the bookstore. They used to have these things called bookstores. And I flipped through Leo Rosten’s Almanac of Religions and thought, “Well, what church should I belong to?” And then through my research in history and theology, I came to see the Catholic faith as the fullness of what I wanted to be a part of, the fullness of what God had revealed. And so then when I was a junior in high school, I was baptized, confirmed and received my first Eucharist at the Easter vigil. And then from there, I’ve been studying the faith and happy to educate people on it and engage in dialogue with them about it. That’s something I’m very big about and I try to do frequently on my own podcast, The Counsel of Trent.
Excellent. Thank you. So, let’s maybe begin with some of the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism. A big one is the Pope. And this remains for many Protestants an objection to finding unity with the Catholic church, the obligation to recognize the office of the Pope as the vicar of Christ. So, could you say something about why you believe that all Christians should recognize the Pope? And what you believe his role is within the church?
Sure. So, the question is why should Christians believe in the Pope. Why do we have a Pope? The word “pope” comes from the Latin word, “father.” You know, Papa. If you go to 1st Corinthians 4:15 Saint Paul says, “Though you have had thousands countless guides in Christ, 10,000 guides in Christ, you have not had many fathers for I became your father in Christ Jesus.” And so, the idea is that the Pope is a priest, like any other priest in the Catholic faith, and he is a Bishop like other bishops. And priests and bishops in the Catholic faith hold the sacrament of Holy Orders. And so, they receive the authority that Christ gave to the apostles. To understand the Pope and why Catholics have a Pope, I think we have to have more of a foundation and framework.
If we go back to the New Testament and the history of the early church, we would see, we would ask the question, “Where did Christ invest his authority?” One of the big things that divides Catholics and Protestants are is our ultimate authority scripture? Or is there an authority that helps us to understand what scripture means that Christ instituted to teach us? When we look at scripture, we see that Christ never, prior to his ascension into heaven, never told anyone to write anything down actually. Instead, he says in Luke 10:16 to the apostles, “He who hears you hears me.” Matthew 16:18 to Peter, “Upon this rock, I will build my church.” That he gave authority to the apostles to teach and to preach and guide believers. And we believe that that authority was given to their successors and that authority has never ceased to guide believers.
And so, the authority of the apostles is given to the bishops who succeeded them. And the Bishop of Rome holds the authority that Peter held as the leader of the early church, that Peter’s role as the leader of the early church is even something that non-Catholic scholars like J.N.D Kelly readily recognize. To show the idea if God created his kingdom here on earth, a good parallel might be in, we go back to the kingdom of Israel, that there God was the King of Israel but he also had … And you were the King, you were the King of Israel but the King also had a prime minister or a fuzzier.
So, in Isaiah 22:22, Isaiah talks about how the righteous Eliakim would take the role of prime minister from the wicked Shebna. And he uses this phrase, “You will be given the keys to the kingdom. What you open shall not be shut and what you shut shall not be open. I give you these keys.” And Catholics recognize that same language in Matthew 16:18, of that authority being given to Peter. “I give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. What you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven” and so on.
And so, the idea here is that if Christ gives us a church that has a visible hierarchical structure of bishops that retain his authority, like even other earthly organizations, you would see that there’s kind of a structure that leads to a leader at the top, where the buck stops. He’s not some kind of dictatorial tyrant but someone who allows proper leadership to take place. You have a president of a country, a prime minister, a CEO. And so, the role of the Pope is that he is the pastor over Christ’s church that has been visibly established and helps to guide believers into the fullness of the truth that has been revealed.
And so, I mean, there’s more I can go in with that but I think that we as Protestants and Catholics, can see an understanding of what authority is. And if we start with looking at the apostles and whether apostolic authority has continued from the time of the New Testament, that can help understanding the role of bishops and the Pope to make more sense. And I would definitely encourage you to read the writings of Saint Ignatius of Antioch, who wrote in the year 110 A.D., who speaks about following the bishop as Jesus Christ follows the father in this kind of early apostolic authority.
Okay, thank you. Let’s talk specifically about an attribute that’s given within Catholicism to the Pope, and that’s infallibility. So, could you explain a little bit of infallibility and also respond to the objection that the Pope at times has clearly been fallible in his teachings or in his practice, so, we can even think right back to Peter’s tension with Paul that Paul talks about in Galatians 1 and 2, and Paul challenging Peter on eating with the Judaizers and not wanting to eat with the Gentiles, and he calls him out on that. And we can think of many other cases in history, like for example, the Renaissance popes, where you had a particular low point. So, does that not provide evidence against the attribute that the Pope is infallible in his teaching chair?
Okay. So the question is how do we understand papal infallibility? What the doctrine is? And how do we understand that in light of the dispute between Paul and Peter in Galatians chapter two and I think you might’ve mentioned one historical Pope?
I just made reference to the Renaissance popes, Alexander or Julius would be good examples.
Okay, sure, sure. Well let’s run through that. Okay, so infallibility is a charism that prevents one from being in error. And so the charism of infallibility is given to the faithful as a whole. The church calls this the sensus fidelity or sensus fidelium that the faithful as a whole will not reject the gospel, will not fall away from the truth. Also, this is given to the church and the entire body of bishops when they teach in union with the Pope that they will guide the church and not formally bind it to error heresy. And the Pope himself when he speaks in a particular way, when he speaks ex cathedra from the chair is what that means from his authority as the Pope, as the successor of Saint Peter when he speaks in that particular way, under those circumstances, he is protected from formally binding the church to error.
And so that is what the dogma of papal and fallibility is and it’s one that’s often misunderstood. So for example, let me ask you a question. Suppose the Pope were infallible, not just in matters of faith and morals that the church only is fallibility only extends to matters of faith and morals. Suppose the Pope were infallible when it came to calculus and I gave the Pope a calculus exam, what is the minimum number of … And there’s 100 questions. What is the minimum number of questions he could get right? If the Pope is infallible, when it comes to calculus, there’s 100 questions on the exam. What is the minimum number he would get correct?
Well, if he didn’t know the answer, he might not answer any of them, but he would know not to put down an errand answers. Is that what you’re going at?
And Randal gets the gold star. A lot of people when they, a lot of people when they hear that question, they’ll say, “Oh, well if the Pope is infallible, it’s 100 he has to get all of them, right?” No, it’s a negative form of protection. So it doesn’t, infallibility does not mean that the Pope or the church will always have the right answer, it just means they will never formally express the wrong answer. And by formally, I mean making it an act that’s definitive that the church is bound to believe. There have been a few popes in history who expressed private views that were at variance with what the church taught. And there had been a larger number of popes that were just scoundrels. Papal infallibility should not be confused with impeccability. Sorry, just a little bit of feedback here, but I’m all right.
There are or sinlessness. So in fact, even some of the popes were a doozy of sinners, if you will like you couldn’t believe what they did. None of them formally taught heresy for the church to be bound to. So that’s to understand that infallibility is a negative protection that prevents the church and the Pope in particular from formally binding the church into error because Christ promise in Matthew 16:18, “The gates of hell would not prevail against the church.” Another passage that I think points towards this dogma would be in Luke chapter 22. Very interesting, if you look in Luke, Luke 22 verses 24 through 30 there is a dispute about who is the greatest in the kingdom among the apostles, who is going to be the greatest among us, and Jesus never explicitly says that there isn’t a greatest.
Rather, he says, “The greatest among you shall be a servant to the others.” And sends around the fifth century, a title of the Pope has been servant of the servant of Christ. Then when you go in the next passage, to the next section in Luke 22 to Luke 22:31 through 34, Jesus turns to Peter, he says, “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you in the singular you that your faith may not fail.” And when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren. Oh, sorry. In Luke 22:31 it says, “Satan has demanded to have you all.” It’s the plural you. So if I had to give it a dynamic translation, Satan demanded to have y’all that he might sift y’all like wheat, but I have prayed for you, Peter in particular, that your faith may not fail and when you have turned again strengthen your brethren.
So I think we can see here a seed or a glimpse of this understanding of Peter as leader of the church and being endowed with a particular charism to prevent it from being led into error. Now the question is, well, how could that be especially with Peter? When you look in Galatians chapter two when Paul says, “I rebuked Peter to his face because he refused to dine with the Gentiles.” We go to Galatians two I don’t want to talk a ton, Randal. Is this okay if I keep going?
No, that’s fine. Yeah.
Okay, great. This is great of Protestants, as Catholics, when we do homilies, it’s like seven minutes or bust father, but you guys can make it through a 45 minute sermon and that’s awesome. So that’s one of the differences with us. So when you go to Galatians two verse 11, Paul says, “When Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed into his face for before certain men came from James, he ate with Gentiles.” So he would eat with the … There was a controversy about the Judaizers. Do you need to be circumcised? He ate with the Gentiles, but when they came, he drew back and separated himself fearing the circumcision party.
In verse 14, “When I saw they were not straight forward about the truth of the gospel.” Literally the Greek word there is ortho producing. Literally Peter was not walking upright. So that’s why we talk about like orthopedic surgery, the word that Paul uses he wasn’t walking upright, he wasn’t living the faith, what he believed. But when you read a Protestant scholar’s, I think Thomas Schneider, Schreiner, Thomas Schreiner. Schreiner’s commentary on Galatians, he says that Peter and Paul agreed theologically. Peter was just not living up to the teaching with … Peter was cowardly in a moment of weakness, which is not out of character for him.
God has a way of calling people and using them to build up the kingdom in spite of their particular weaknesses. So here Peter was condemned for his behavior, not for his teaching. And in fact you find interesting thing here in this part of Galatians, in Galatians, Paul is affirming his legitimate authority as an apostle and that God revealed the gospel to him. He didn’t just get it second hand from other people. He’s showing he has as much authority as any other apostle. So much so that he can even challenge Peter, and that shows that within the early church, Peter had a particular kind of authority different than the other apostles. We also see this in first Corinthians chapter nine when Paul gives the lists of the apostles and he talks about his right to have a sister wife or traveling companion.
Peter gets singled out there among even before the brothers of the Lord. So I think when we take that together, we see that there’s good evidence that the apostles, their authority continued on with the bishops, those they’re ordained and laid hands on and God provided a charism for them as a whole. And the successor of Peter in particular to not formerly bind the church to heresy, doesn’t mean they’ll always have the right answer. Doesn’t mean they won’t royally mess up sometimes in their own personal lives. But in spite of that, God will continue to guide His church and not allow it to be led into error.
All right. How about this one, the mass, that’s a big difference between Protestants and Catholics. Well, one common objection from Protestants to the mass is that it is a sacrifice and Christ died once for all. So why do we need another sacrifice in the mass?
What is the mass? And when you look at Protestantism and you look at the different … Basically all Protestants seem to agree that there are at least two sacraments, that there is baptism and there is a Lord’s Supper. So nearly all Protestants agree on that point. And you’ll find even among Protestants, a divergence of views on the role of the Lord’s Supper. There’s a wonderful series by Zondervan called The Counterpoint or Multiple Views Series and they have one on the Eucharist itself to understand what is the … Or the Lord’s Supper to understand what is its role. So for example, if you see among confessional Lutherans, the way that they celebrate the Lord’s Supper and they understand what the Eucharist is under a theology of con substantiation, that Christ is spiritually present in the bread and wine?
It’s them and Anglicans, very close to the Catholic view. And of course the Eastern Orthodox have the same view that we do. Then if you go to other Protestants or you sometimes have more of a symbolic view. That’s actually when it comes to the reformation, that was a big sticking point that divided the reformers. Luther and Ulrich Zwingli were very divided on an understanding of what the Eucharist was. Zwingli took a much more symbolic view of the Eucharist and Luther had a view that was far closer to what the Catholic church taught about it. So what the mass is, the mass is not a re-sacrifice of Christ. It is not, Christ is not crucified again in the mass. What the mass is, is that at the mass, mass comes from a Latin word Misa, which means to send forth, to send out, to be sent forth.
Sorry. The feedback’s playing tricks with my mind here. The mass is not, we’re not recrucifying Christ, we’re not doing that. We’re representing the one sacrifice that Christ made on Calvary in 30 or 33 A.D., depending on how you date it. So the understanding here we have is that there will never be another bloody sacrifice of Christ. However, there can be a continual representation of that sacrifice. In fact, the letter to the Romans, Paul says that, “Christ continually intercedes for us on our behalf before the Father.”
So what happens to the mass is that we take that one sacrifice that occurred at Calvary and through the authority, the sacramental character that has been given to the priest, taken from the apostles, consecrating the bread and wine at mass we are able to receive that sacrifice of Christ’s body and blood, body, blood, soul and divinity in the Eucharist to receive for our spiritual nourishment and to understand the biblical foundation for this, there’s a lot for it.
I think one of the biggest things to understand is that Christ is the Passover lamb. I think that’s very helpful in understanding why Catholics believe in the Eucharist and believe in the mass? When John saw Jesus, he said, “Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” Saint Paul in a second letter to the Corinthians refers to Christ as our passable lamb who is sacrificed like he is the Passover lamb so that we understand that Christ, his sacrifice is essentially the new Passover. It’s not one that has to be repeated every year like the previous Passover, it is one definitive sacrifice so that death may pass over us completely and that if we see that if in the old Passover, a lamb, which was male and without blemish, whose legs couldn’t be broken, had to be killed and also eaten, that the Israelites would eat the lamb and then you did all of that death would pass over their homes.
What Catholics believe is that if Jesus is the lamb of God, that he is sacrificed in the same way that for us to receive eternal life or death to pass over, we have to receive and eat the lamb. And for me what really strikes that from is the testimony Christ himself gave in John chapter six where in John 6:53 through 57 he said, “Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life within you.” And he repeats this emphatically. Christ certainly did use metaphors like I am the vine, I am the door, but here he repeats it viscerally and even chooses to not correct people who say, “This is a hard saying who can accept it?”
And in John 6:66, John notes that there were followers of Christ, there were disciples, people who had followed Christ up to this point who abandoned him over this teaching, and Jesus didn’t correct them. What’s funny for me is when you go back to John chapter four there’s a similar misunderstanding where Jesus speaks metaphorically about food and he’s taken literally, Jesus talks about the food he has to eat and the apostles say, “Hey Jesus, we’re kind of hungry. Where is this food?” And in John four Jesus says, “The food that I have is to do the will of my father.” So it’s funny, in John four there was a misunderstanding about food. Jesus is speaking metaphorically, people thought he was literal, Jesus corrected them.
But in John chapter six I would say Jesus is speaking literally about the ability to receive his body and blood. And people walked away because they thought it was overly literal. And Jesus didn’t correct them, which we would expect if he was speaking just metaphorically. And then finally, I would say that when you look at the testimony of the early church, the very first church fathers, Justin Martyr, Ignatius of Antioch, Saint Ignatius of Antioch, spoke about how heretics of his time were those who did not confess that the bread and wine that we eat is the flesh and blood of our savior Jesus Christ.
If you want to do a comparative view of the development of religion in Justin Martyr’s apology, his defense to the faith of the Roman emperor, when you read his first apology, how he describes the liturgy that he celebrated, it is actually the part, it’s the liturgy of the Eucharist is almost point for point, still the same the way the liturgy of the Eucharist is celebrating Catholic masses to this very day. So the way the mass goes is you have the gather, we’ll say the penitential rights, we’ll sing the Gloria, you have the proclaim where you have the readings of usually the Old Testament, the New and a gospel, the break, the liturgy of the Eucharist to break open the Eucharist to say here is Christ sacrifice offered once and for all for us, for us to receive him for the forgiveness of sins and then the send where we are sent forth nourished by Christ body and blood to go and do his will. So that would be the kind of the mass one-on-one. I hope that’s helpful for you.
Yeah, that’s a lot. Thank you. That’s a full meal deal as we would say. Now in terms of salvation, let’s talk a little bit about salvation, we’ve only got around 10 minutes left. So we want to make the most we have of it. I’d like to ask two questions about salvation, the first one, brings us back to Martin Luther. So for Martin Luther, one of the things he really struggled with was assurance of salvation. That he could know that he would be saved and that he would be found righteous. And he ultimately believed that he found that through the meritorious work of Christ that had been credited to him by the mercy of God. The concern of Protestants often is that we think that policies, and you can’t have that kind of assurance of salvation, you don’t know if you’ve done enough, you don’t know if you’ve perhaps committed a mortal sin that may have destroyed and snuffed out the spirit of God within you. So how would you address the question of assurance of salvation?
Okay, it’s a great question. What about the idea of the assurance of salvation? So first I would say that word has many different meanings. If you’d like a longer treatment of this in a debate format I did a debate with the Protestant apologist, James White, or I should say a reformed apologist because he would even disagree with other Protestants in relation to reform theology. On the question of whether you can lose your salvation. And Martin Luther actually did come up in that debate. So some take assurance of salvation to mean there is absolutely nothing you can do to lose your salvation. You could even become an atheistic serial killer and you would still go to heaven. You might lose rewards, but you’ll still go to heaven. That would be people like Robert Wilkins, Charles Stanley, that’s one view.
But I would say the Bible seems very clear. No, you can know us by our fruits, that Christians who do that, they are not Christians in any, or at least they have fallen from grace. And that’s the word that Paul talks about but Luther references this. Another view would be what James White defended the reform view is that you can’t lose your salvation, but if a Christian were to apostatize and engage in grave sin unrepentantly, that would only prove that they were never saved in the first place. And so, and I find that to be much more common view of the assurance of salvation. But the problem I have with that is when you talk about finding assurance of salvation, it doesn’t give you any more assurance because you just switch, if I’m Catholic, I’m worried, “Oh no, did I lose my salvation?”
If you’re worried about being neurotic about whether I’m saved, you switch one worry with another. You switch what if I lose my salvation with neurotically worrying about what if I was never saved in the first place? And so I know a lot of Protestants who have that worldview, who they worry was I really saved or really stick. So I would say both Catholics and Protestants have equal psychological assurance and that we can have moral certainty that we are in a state of grace, that we are not committing a grave or mortal sin. I know Protestants don’t use the term mortal sin, but if you think about a James 3:2, “We all stumble in many ways.” I think we can all agree there are little sins even saved Christians commit. Nobody here is sinless, but there are big giant sins that saved Christians do not commit in a regular unrepentant way or even in a regular way.
And so I think that would show that our salvation is not due to our own works it’s due to our own free cooperation with God’s grace. And we can always choose to not cooperate with that grace and choose to reject it either when it’s first offered or even later on in our spiritual lives. So in my debate with James White, I pointed out that Martin Luther, he believed you could lose your salvation if you renounced your faith. Whereas that’s something that Calvin did not believe. So I would say that just to wrap up quick that salvation it’s a huge topic I recommend my friend Michael Barber’s book, Salvation: What Every Catholic Needs Know that even Protestants would benefit from that. The Catholic view of salvation I could just summarize it very … It’s not that elaborate, you could put it this way. Repent, believe, receive.
So you have to repent of your sins, make a change of life, believe in the gospel, and then receive Christ through the sacraments like baptism to be United to Christ and then to be nourished by him in the Eucharist. Repent, believe, receive and then don’t commit a mortal sin. Don’t throw away your faith, don’t abandon God and cut yourself off from His grace. Now for me as an adult convert, I did it, repent, believe, receive. But the order is not necessarily that way. If you are a Catholic baptized as a baby, you might receive the grace of God in baptism and then later believe in the gospel when you understand it, and then repent of sins when they happen. And then choose to live a spiritual life where you either choose to not commit mortal sin or if you do to seek reconciliation with God through the sacrament He gave us, the sacrament of confession.
Which when we go to John 20:23 Jesus even told the apostles, “Whose sins you forgive are forgiven and whose sins you retain are retained.” So that’s a lot, but I threw a lot out at you, but I tell you what? I would like to do for you guys because you came to this chapel. I gave you an order of sampler platter, I’m willing to give you a free meal coupon. I will send to Randal copies of electronic copies of my book. Why We’re Catholic and The Case for Catholicism. Case for Catholicism is my more in depth book on the subject and I give him permission to send you guys copies of that book, the electronic copies for you to read more at your leisure to see kind of the full case. And then you can always contact me through my website at trenthorn.com and if you have questions about what you’ve read, I usually respond to people through that contact form.
So I’ll send that to Randal and give you some more. But I think it’s great for you obviously as Catholics we don’t celebrate the Reformation. We consider it a wound to Christian unity because Christ desired all of us to be one in John 17 however, I do believe Catholics and Protestants can mutually remember what happened at the reformation and see how both of us can grow in our understandings of one another to eventually gain more and more unity with one another. Especially in a culture that’s becoming more post-Christian. Where we really need to rely on one another to evangelize a fallen world. So I will send that to Randal and I hope that will benefit you.
I’m grateful for that I know everybody here is grateful for that offer as a thank you very much. You’re getting a round of applause right now. Everybody loves free stuff. We only have a few minutes left. I had a lot of questions we’re not going to get to, but let me throw a big one out. What is the biggest problem with the Catholic church today in your view?
What is the biggest problem facing the church today? Well, I mean I would say it’s the biggest problem facing the church. And when we say the church, we can mean how it subsists in the Catholic church. But also Catholics believe that the church Christ established extends beyond the visible hierarchical church to our separated brethren, Eastern Orthodox, Protestants, united in Christian baptism that we recognize what is holy and good in other Protestant denominations. And so the church does extend beyond the visible hierarchy for all of us.
So when I say the problem for the Catholic church is the same thing for the church as a whole, what unites all of us. And that’s going to be sin. I mean that is the root cause and it manifests itself in different ways. So you see in the Catholic church for example, there are various sins of pride, of sexual sin, of sins of thinking that, Oh, instead of coming clean about something and doing the right thing to prevent abuse or error from happening, I’m just kind of going to try to do things the way I think it should be done, and I think it’ll be fine that way instead of living up to God’s standards.
And that’s the same thing that we can see even in many Protestant denominations. You ask yourselves what is the biggest problem affecting church? It’s sin manifesting itself in various distinct ways among its members to cause them to fight with one another, or to fall away from the gospel truth, and to stay away from doing what God wants us to do, which are things like the corporal works of mercy to feed, clothe the naked, the hungry and the spiritual works of mercy to spread the gospel, instruct the ignorant. Then the other things like that. So I would say that when it comes to that, I mean it’s always hard that’s a broad thing, but it manifests itself in various particular ways. And so what all of us should do is to unite ourselves closer to Jesus.
In John 15 Jesus said, “I am the vine, you are the branches apart from me you can do nothing.” The more we get away from that vine, from that deep communion that we have with Christ, I think the more problems arise from that. So as a Catholic, I seek Christ out in daily prayer, praying with my wife, meditating on the mysteries of Christ’s life in the rosary, adoring him in the Eucharist, receiving him in mass. For any of us, it’s easy for Christ to become an abstract idea or wrote symbol, but when we stop having him be the center of our lives, then I think that sin starts to manifest from that.
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