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In this episode Trent says that the best way to attract Protestants to Catholicism may not be the best arguments, but another kind of “best.”
Narrator:
Welcome to The Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Counsel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn. Today, I want to talk about “the best way” to share the Catholic faith with our Protestant brothers and sisters. Now, I put the word best in quotation marks for a specific reason, because I’m not talking about the best argument for the Catholic faith. I’m not talking about the best way to answer particular Protestant objections.
Rather, what I want to talk about is a specific approach that I think is very effective at helping Protestants to be genuinely interested in seeking out the Catholic faith and to investigate it because they’re impressed that something that they value, whether it’s the ability to answer atheism or defend mere Christianity, pro-life arguments, defending the unborn, biblical studies, liturgy, music, whatever it may be, maybe they’ll look at a certain field and they’ll say, “Oh wow, Catholics are really good at this. Or someone I really like who does work in this field, they’re Catholic. Oh, I had no idea.”
This was someone you had already looked up to who does a really good job and you think, “Oh wow, they’re Catholic. Well, maybe I’ve never really given Catholicism a good look before. I want to go and check that out now.” That’s what I want to talk about in today’s episode and I’ll give you a few examples of that. But before I give the examples, I want to read to you a passage from C.S. Lewis that I think speaks to this particular kind of approach. He was talking about what he might call the best way for Christians to reach atheists. For Lewis, it wasn’t that every Christian should write a book or engage in Christian apologetics.
Now, we should all be able to do apologetics. 1 Peter 3:15 says, “Always be ready to give a reason for the hope within, but do so with gentleness and reverence.” We should always be able to explain what we believe and why we believe it. But Lewis said that not every Christian needs to write a book on apologetics. In fact, if certain Christians can just focus on writing really good books about science in general, that could even do more for bringing atheists to Christianity than if everybody does apologetics. Let me read the quote for you. God in the Dock is a collection of essays by C.S. Lewis. Let me read that to you.
Here’s what he says. While we are on the subject of science, let me digress for a moment. I believe that any Christian who is qualified to write a good popular book on any science may do much more by that than by any directly apologetic work. The difficulty we are up against is this, we can make people often attend to the Christian point of view for half an hour or so. But the moment they have gone away from our lecture or laid down our article, they’re plunged back into a world where the opposite position is taken for granted. As long as that situation exists, widespread success is simply impossible.
We must attack the enemy’s line of communication. What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects with their Christianity latent. It’s interesting, first before I continue, to see what Lewis is saying here. I think Catholics can understand this. They say, “Oh, okay, maybe we can share a video about the Catholic faith or a Protestant might come and examine that.” But then immediately when you’re done examining Christianity or Catholicism, you just fall back into another worldview that’s very opposed or that’s completely different from what you’re observing, then we have a hard time letting it sink in so to speak.
But if you are an atheist and you see that some of the best scientists that you read are Christians, or maybe if you’re a Protestant and you notice that the best biblical scholars you read or the best praise and worship artists, we’re going to get to that in a second, are Catholic, suddenly it reorients your thinking a little bit about how foundational either Christianity or Catholicism should be to your worldview. Now, let me continue with what he says. You can see this most easily if you look at it the other way round. Our faith is not very likely, and I love this part by the way, our faith is not very likely to be shaken by any book on Hinduism.
But if whenever we read an elementary book on geology, botany, politics or astronomy we found that its implications were Hindu, that would shake us. It is not the books written in direct defense of materialism that make the modern man a materialist. It is the materialistic assumptions in all the other books. I love what Lewis is saying here, is that if you really want people to come to see the Christian faith in a different light, you should see that those who are doing the best work, especially in science for example, that if you see that their Christian faith is fundamental to their belief in an ordered regular universe, that the reason they study science is because they believe God created the universe and that’s why the universe has regularity and order and it can be the subject of scientific inquiry at all, then you start to change.
You can say, “Oh wow!” That’s why I think people like John Lennox, the mathematician at Oxford University, for example… Let me see, who was the guy who wrote… Francis Collins. Francis Collins wrote the book The Language of God. He works for the NIH. He was the first to map the human genome. You see people for whom faith and reason aren’t opposed. I remember going to the south many years ago meeting Protestants who had never actually met a Catholic before. They lived in the rural south. They had never spoken one-on-one with a Catholic.
One of them said to me after we were at dinner and talking for a while, they said, “Wow. It was so interesting to speak to you Catholics because I didn’t know that Catholics love Jesus.” I mean, it’s sad to hear that, but that’s a caricature. Of course, there are caricatures of Protestantism that Catholics can be familiar with if they don’t personally speak to Protestants. That’s why I think it’s great for Catholics and Protestants to sit down and talk to each other. That’s why I’m excited in two months to have my debate with Gavin Ortlund, for example, on Sola scriptura, because I think he’s a very irenic and informed defender of Protestantism.
But it was interesting speaking with them that they had a new light in seeing, “Wow. I had no idea,” just like an atheist say, “I had no idea that there are Christians who fully embrace science and are making scientific breakthroughs and discoveries.” Now, I want to get to a few examples of what I’m talking about. First, I want to share with you a clip from a Protestant YouTuber named Spencer Smith who is warning his fellow Protestants about Matt Maher. If you don’t know Matt Maher is, you probably do know who Matt Maher is. He is a Catholic musician. He actually comes from Phoenix, Arizona, where I used to live, because I remember I converted back in 2002 in the Diocese of Phoenix.
I actually converted under Bishop O’Brien. And then a few months later, he was replaced with Bishop Thomas Olmsted, who’s just recently retired. But I remember that, this was in the early 2000s, that I would go to St. Timothy’s Catholic Church. That’s where Life Teen started. I was just very beginning of my faith. Matt Maher was still doing liturgical music and doing praise and worship at St. Tim’s. He would do praise and worship at local events in the Diocese of Phoenix. I remember in 2008 I took a group of students to World Youth Day in Sydney, Australia and they said, “Oh, let’s go to this Matt Maher concert.”
I said, “We did not fly halfway around the world to go to a concert that we can see back home. No, we’re not going to do that. There’s lots of other activities at World Youth Day.” But since then, Matt Maher’s career has exploded. He’s all over K-Love. You can hear his praise and worship music on lots of Protestant radio and Protestant channels. Smith, this YouTuber, is worried. He’s saying, “Hey, people, this guy’s Catholic. He’s going to lure people into Catholicism.” I’m going to play a clip of that. Before I do, for those of you are watching on YouTube, by the way, I have to note this. When I first knew Matt Maher 20 years ago, he had gray hair, actually. I love now he’s gone full white.
It’s kind of like Matt Maher the Gray is now Matt Maher the White. That’s a Lord of the Ring reference for you all there. I’m not a huge Lord of the Ring person, but I know enough to make my references. Let me play it.
Spencer Smith:
Now, here’s what I want to show you. Now, this is Matt Maher’s own website. He’s very successful at what he does. Got a lot of good media. I love the look at that. It looks cool. But he’s got a lot of things he’s doing. He is a hardcore Roman Catholic. By the way, all you K-Love people need to realize that the Pope has actually infiltrated K-Love and there’s a lot of… Ooh, this is not good. This is not good.
Trent Horn:
Infiltration part two, the Pope is in K-Love Radio.
Spencer Smith:
Please allow me to warn you, Matt Maher is a bridge to Romanism, which is a bridge to hell.
Trent Horn:
I love how dramatic that was. It is a bridge to hell. I’m like, oh, goodness. By hell, of course, I think you mean heaven, the bark of Peter, the arc that’s been given to us to unite us of Jesus Christ, the one holy Catholic and apostolic church. But notice the concern that he has here, that if Matt Maher had just written a book called Why Be Catholic, would it reach a lot of people? It might reach some people. There’s lots of books like that. But in developing himself as being not just a great Catholic musician, but a great praise and worship, a great Christian musician, someone that any Christian can appreciate the sincerity, the quality, that also he’s not…
It’s kind of like with Christian movies, right? Some people will tell me, “You should support this movie because it’s Christian.” No, I’m going to support it because it’s good. If it’s cheesy and bad, I’m not going to support it. That gives Christians the wrong idea that if they make anything and they say it’s Christian or slap corny Christian dialogue on it, Christians will go out and support it. No, we don’t need bad Christian art. We need good Christian art that any rational individual who can recognize the true, the good, and the beautiful can orient themselves towards.
Matt Maher has done a great job in developing himself as a musician and creating wonderful praise and worship that even many Protestants enjoy. So that when they see, “Oh, did you know Matt Maher’s Catholic?” They’re like, “Oh wow, I had no idea.” He’s definitely done way more, and also his songs with Catholic themes help to present the Catholic faith in a beautiful light to people. He’s easily done more to lead people to Catholicism in just being the best musician, best Christian musician, than in being like the best Catholic apologist or something like that. Being the best. The next one I want to talk about is St. Thomas Aquinas, of course.
If we were talking about the best here, who is the best Catholic philosopher? St. Thomas Aquinas, hands down, right? This reminds me of a book several years ago that Doug Beaumont put out called Evangelical Exodus. Doug actually was previously a professor at Southern Evangelical Seminary. This was a seminary that was started by the late Norm Geisler, well-known Protestant apologist, has written books critiquing Catholicism. But Norm Geisler, however, has a big appreciation for St. Thomas Aquinas. He encourages the study of Thomism in a Protestant context to develop arguments for Christianity, to have a very rigorous Christian theology.
Beaumont wrote this book, Evangelical Exodus, to talk about how in studying Thomas Aquinas, this is the best systematic defense of the Christian faith, they were noticing every year a few dozen SES grad students, even professors like him, were becoming Catholic as a result. SES was getting this reputation of creating Catholics and other Protestants were becoming alarmed by this. One of them is James White, the reformed at Alpha and Omega Ministries. I want to play a clip here of White, this is from a few months ago, in an interview talking about the study of St. Thomas Aquinas saying how should reform Protestants look at Thomas Aquinas.
White says that Aquinas, of course, has good insights, but he also has a note of caution in lionizing Aquinas in saying if you think he’s the best Christian philosopher and you’re a Protestant, there are consequences that White would not be particularly happy with, might go from that. Let me play a clip here.
James White:
I use SES as an example. They don’t like it. They get very angry about me when I do this.
Trent Horn:
Real quick, SES.
James White:
Southern Evangelical Seminary, founded by Norman Geisler. Thomas Aquinas is the patron saint. I was there once on campus and it was just Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas. That’s what it was about. There’s an entire book out there written by people who were staff members or students of SES that are Roman Catholics today.
Trent Horn:
That’s Evangelical Exodus by Beaumont.
James White:
And they all say the exact same thing, “It was my introduction to Thomas.” Now, I am not saying that if you read Thomas Aquinas, you’re going to become a Roman Catholic the next day. But if you say that Thomas is the end point of a divinely ordained development process and without his metaphysics, you can’t properly understand the doctrine and the Trinity, and then you join that with the fact that all these guys… I posted a picture from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary about a month and a half, two months ago. It was the staff picks in the bookstore, and I think five of the 10 were by Roman Catholics.
They’re all presenting the great tradition interpretation, the metaphysics of the Trinity from Thomas Aquinas and everything else. The reality is, once you start telling people, “Hey, this is absolutely necessary. You’ve got to have this,” then the immediate question comes, “So if on the very doctrine of God Thomas got all this right, then why did Thomas get it wrong on the Pope and the gospel and justification and tradition and everything else?”
Trent Horn:
White raises a valid point here, that if you’re reading Thomas Aquinas and you come to a conclusion, “Wow, I could not imagine understanding God, things like divine simplicity,” saying like, “Wow, this really makes the arguments for God and the understanding of God’s nature makes a whole lot more sense,” this classical theist approach, for example, then of course, that’s not strictly a Catholic idea, though there are Protestants, even in the reformed tradition, there’s kind of a debate among reformed apologists, people like James White and others, over things like the importance of divine simplicity, what do we mean by divine simplicity.
There are classical theists, the people who would believe in things like God is infinite and simple, not composed of parts, even metaphysical parts, that God is timeless, for example, that he’s not temporal, he’s not in time in any way. There are people like that. But I would say the vast majority of Protestant apologists and theologians do not hold the classical theist tradition. I remember actually when I was speaking at Capturing Christianity V2, this was Cameron Bertuzzi’s apologetics conference back in August of 2021. I was debating Ben Watkins on the existence of God. During the Q&A panel afterwards, it was really cool.
I really love doing a Q&A panel with other people who aren’t Catholic apologists because we don’t agree with each other on a lot of things. Somebody asks, “How many of you are classical theists, or how many of you believe that God is timeless, that God exists outside of time?” I think only I and maybe one other Protestant on the panel raised our hands. Most of the other Protestants who were there would not hold to the classical theist tradition. But I met a lot of Protestants at this event who were starting to read my book, The Case for Catholicism, because they really liked my pro-life work.
They were introduced to me not through my Catholic apologetics work, but they liked the arguments that I gave against abortion and they liked the arguments I gave against atheism. They liked that they were unique, that the case that I offered for the existence of God is different from maybe what William Lane Craig would offer. That I’ll use arguments more like Aquinas’ first way. It’s been reworked by Ed Feser as the argument from motion or the Aristotelian proof for God, and having this kind of a different approach, more of a Catholic approach to engaging mere Christian theism. They really liked that.
They came to me at the conference saying, “I really liked that, and now I’m starting to read your book, The Case for Catholicism. I really like that as well.” I think that this can be a helpful way to reach out to our Protestant brothers and sisters. It’s also a way that I think steps back from an approach that can be called poaching, I guess. Something that I could understand Protestants being annoyed by this because Catholics would be annoyed by it being done in reverse. This is what I mean by poaching, that you allow Protestant apologists to take someone who’s an atheist, for example, and Protestants will do the work.
I’ve seen some Catholics do this and I don’t like it. That allowing Protestants like William Lane Craig and others prove the existence of God, prove that Jesus rose from the dead, prove the deity of Christ, prove the Trinity, do all of that, then the Catholic swoops in and says, “Oh, and by the way, Christ established the Catholic Church.” Now, there’s nothing wrong with if you meet someone who is Protestant and you share with them the truth of the Catholic faith, that is a good thing. What I’m concerned about is a kind of laziness that says, “I don’t have to do all that mere Christian theism stuff. The Protestants have got that covered. I’m just going to focus on learning how to defend Catholic distinctives.”
I don’t think that’s the right approach. I think that we as Catholics should be able to defend every aspect of our faith from the most fundamental, the existence of God, to the secondary and tertiary articles of the faith. And that if we have a poaching attitude, there can be this kind of resentment like, “Oh, Catholics, they just want people to submit to the Pope. They don’t want people to come to know Jesus.” Of course, we do, but that’s a misunderstanding on their part.
But they can’t say that if I can say, “No, I’m going to go to an atheist and say, ‘Here’s why you should believe in God. Here’s why you should believe that Jesus rose from the dead. Here are some of the uniquely Catholic approaches that I might take in explaining the data, for example, on these different questions.'” Think about it, right? If somebody brought you to Jesus, you’re probably going to be more likely to belong to their church than another church. If a Protestant brought you to faith in Jesus Christ, you’re more likely to belong to the church of the person who brought you to God. That’s kind of the same thing for us as Catholics as well, especially more and more as we reach out.
When I said about poaching, right? I mean, if you’re Catholic, you probably might be annoyed about Protestants that all they want to do is help Catholics become Protestant. Now, if they think that’s true, that’s completely understandable. It feels like, I don’t know if I’m explaining myself well here, but we should help everyone come to know the Lord Jesus Christ and the plan of salvation he’s given us. Catholics and Protestants, we agree that part of that is that God exists, that Jesus rose from the dead. We agree about that, and we should both put our energies into reaching out to those who are not religious to help them to see that.
That’s why I love partnering with Cameron Bertuzzi of Capturing Christianity to defend mere Christian theism. I’m really happy that Gavin Ortlund has written a book, Making Sense of God. Making sense of God. Let’s see, did I get it right? Why God Makes Sense in a World That Doesn’t. I’ll even put the book cover up here from Gavin because I botched that one. But I’m glad there are Protestants that do that. I want to work with them to do that.
In doing that though, to bring everything full circle, that as Catholics, I think that if we want to help Protestants to ignite that desire, “Well, I want to really look into Catholicism,” for them to see the best philosophers defending existence of God to say, “Oh, they’re Catholic. Okay, wow, this is really interesting this approach.” It doesn’t have to even just be academic. It can be music. It can be engaging in works of charity, whatever it may be. That as a Catholic, we should focus on being the best at what it is that we hold in common, what Protestants value, the best studies in biblical theology, for example.
When it comes to pro-life, Patrick Madrid has a book called Surprised by Life, and it’s about Protestants who became Catholic because of the pro-life movement. I think there are a lot of Protestants who get really fired up about the pro-life movement and defending the unborn, and they can be disappointed when many other Protestant churches they’ll go to and other Protestants are not interested. They don’t want to pray at the abortion facility. Praying at the abortion facility is what Catholics do. We’re not going to talk about abortion. It’s more of a Catholic issue. Now, there’s many more evangelicals who are supporting the pro-life movement.
Still, it’s a lot of Catholics that are on the ground. I’ve known Protestants that the Catholic pro-lifers are where they found a home because the Catholic pro-lifers were doing pro-life the best in their community. And then that introduced them to wanting to investigate the Catholic faith more. That’s what I’m saying here. At the very least, I think any Protestant watching this, maybe they’ll disagree with my approach. I’m not trying to be duplicitous here. I’m not trying to manipulate or use these things to snag converts.
I think we can all agree that as Christians, we should be really good at defending the existence of God, defending the unborn, worshiping God with music and liturgy that is reverent and sacred. My challenge to Catholics, and myself included, be the best at those things, and then you will see spiritual fruit coming from that. I hope that is helpful for you guys. I just hope you all have a very blessed day.
Narrator:
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