In this episode Trent shares some of the advice he gave at a recent Franciscan University of Steubenville Conference
Welcome to the Council of Trend podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey guys, welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answer’s apologist and speaker, Trent Horn.
Trent Horn:
Last summer, I got to give a keynote presentation at the Defending the Faith Conference at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. This is one of my favorite conferences to go and speak at. I love speaking at conferences in general, but I really enjoy speaking at the Defending the Faith Conference because I love all of the other guest speakers that are there. Whenever I show up, it feels like you’re part of the Catholic justice league.
Trent Horn:
You walk down the hall. There’s Patrick Madrid. There’s Scott Hahn, there’s Matt Fradd, and we all get together and do these talks and the attendees are really fired up. It’s just an amazing experience. If you haven’t been, I will be speaking again at next year’s Defending the Faith that will be, should be in July at the Franciscan University of Steubenville in Steubenville, Ohio.
Trent Horn:
So if you have some time, you can look into the website, check it out. I should leave a link to it in the description below, and you can get your tickets for it. It’s a really cool conference. I highly recommend it. So I was asked to give a keynote presentation on how to defend the faith. And I wanted to share with people my Socratic method. How you can defend the faith without having an encyclopedia of Catholic knowledge, that you can start defending the faith right now in this very instant.
Trent Horn:
So today I want to share with you kind of the first half of my talk, which is how to defend the faith using the Socratic method, particular tips and skills to have good conversations and to have effective conversations, once again, even if you don’t have that encyclopedia of Catholic knowledge. Then tomorrow in the follow-up episode, I want to share with you the live Q&A portion from my talk.
Trent Horn:
And this is really cool, because I put the method into practice and I play a game with the attendees where I do kind of a mock dialogue with them. They portray objectors to the Catholic faith and so they will give objections. And part of the game is I’m only allowed to ask them questions. So today I want to cover the method, how we use it to have good conversations. Tomorrow’s episode will be the application. I think you’ll really enjoy it. So definitely check it out and yeah, thank you guys so much for tuning in.
Trent Horn:
So I was asked to come and give a presentation on the beginner’s guide to defending your faith. And I’m super excited by the way, to see so many people here who are interested in apologetics, how many people here know what apologetics is? Do you guys know what… Okay, that’s really good. A lot of parishes it’s usually one person in the back and then later somebody comes up to the table and tells me, “Why are you an a apologist? You shouldn’t apologize for being Catholic.” Always somebody,
Trent Horn:
No, the word apologetics comes from the Greek word apologia which means to give a defense. Usually in a court of law, you give a defense or a reason for what you believe in. I Peter 3:15 says, “Always be ready to give a reason for the hope within, but do so with gentleness and with reverence.” And it’s interesting here being at Franciscan University with Dr. Hahn to see the trajectory of apologetics if you look at it from a historical perspective, because actually you go back to 1920s, 1930s, big heyday of American apologetics. You had the Catholic evidence training outlines. You had Frank Sheed, the Catholic Evidence Guild.
Trent Horn:
They’d have people just go out to Hyde Park, go out to parks and debate people. Then debate, usually it was fellow Protestants, but on Catholic Protestant issues. Then you had the second Vatican council. And after the implementation of the council, apologetics kind of took a nose dive for an unfortunate unintended application of the council saying that, “Well, we should really focus on ecumenism reaching to other religions and not be triumphalist apologists.”
Trent Horn:
And I agree, we shouldn’t be triumphalist in the sense, of look how great I am and how not great you are. Rather, we should see the world as a kind of field hospital to minister to others. And so apologetics kind of faded away a bit until you have in the eighties and nineties, I have a t-shirt I go out and wear to see two kinds of people in the world. It has a drawing of a cassette tape on it. And there is a certain age demographic that does not know what that is. My children don’t know what that is. Even their older peers don’t know. If I was to hand them a cassette tape and a sharpened pencil. They’d have no idea. “What are you talking about? How do these two things go together?”
Trent Horn:
But some of you may have remembered during that time you had a little cassette tape called Rome Sweet Home or a Protestant Pastor’s Journey into the Catholic Faith. Some guy named Scott Hahn, Scott Hahn. The Scott Hahn guy sounds really good. And you listen to that or maybe listen to Pat Madrid or the story of Jimmy Akin. And I think that lit a fire in a lot of people to show, “Hey, we’ve got really good reasons. We’ve got really good arguments,” and a wealth and a treasure trove of them.
Trent Horn:
During that time, Karl Keating started Catholic Answers. Well, he didn’t… How he started Catholic Answers was one day he went to church, his Catholic parish, and then he comes outside and the local Baptist church had left flyers on all the cars talking about how wrong Catholics were. So Carl goes home, pulls out his typewriter, writes a reply and puts it on all the cars at their Baptist church.
Trent Horn:
And he didn’t want to get grief. So he rented a mailbox, a post office box, PO box, and he said, “I’m going to call myself, these are, I want to give them answers. These are Catholic Answers.” And then he went back and checked the PO box several weeks later, thinking there’d be nothing. It was full of replies. Some of them angry, but others saying, “We love this. Could you please send us your catalog?” And he replied to them in a very Jesuitical way, “Everything we have is out of print,” and then that’s for that beginning.
Trent Horn:
And then we have Catholic Radio. You can listen and tune in and that’s reached a lot of people. When I do Catholic Radio I’m always amazed when we do shows like, why are you pro-choice? Why are you an atheist? Why are you Protestant? We’ll have full lines of people who are not Catholic, who are listening, who are interested in this.
Trent Horn:
And so in this, and then you have the internet where people are interested in apologetics and gathering together to learn these things and it’s great. But sometimes I worry, we’ve been a victim of our own success and that some people will go listen to Catholic Answers live, they’ll to my colleagues, Tim Staples, who can pull any Bible verse or catechism passage right out of the air. He’s got it all right here. Jimmy Akin, who I think is a robot the church sent from the future to help us. It’s a workable theory. It’s one of many. Or he was just a very studied Catholic in the future cotton time loop, time warp.
Trent Horn:
And you think like, “Oh, I can’t go out and do what they do. I’m not going to go out and talk to people. I don’t want to talk to people if I can’t come up with the answers like they do. I can’t do it. I can’t be an apologist if I can’t do what they do.” Well, maybe you’re not called to sit on Catholic Radio and take whatever phone calls come in. But it’s a lie, a lie from the evil one to say that you are not called to be an apologist. We are all called to be an apologist. An apologist is just someone who gives the reason for the hope within. “Yeah, but I don’t have all those reasons lined up.”
Trent Horn:
What I want to share with you today is, you don’t need that. What I want to share with you is that to be a great defender of the Catholic faith, because sometimes we think, “Oh, just by osmosis, I’ll go to all these conferences and I’ll read all these books,” and we think we’re going to read all these books. And then next to our nightstand, we get this tower of Babel that starts growing of all these books we were planning on reading and we turn the ministry of evangelism into a spectator sport.
Trent Horn:
We’re like the people that enjoy watching the games, but we’re scared to go out on the field because we only want to leave that to the professionals. If only the professionals evangelize, the church will die. It will die. Now you say, “But I don’t have all the skills,” but here’s the great thing. God does not call the equipped, he equips the called.
Trent Horn:
And in particular, I want you to remember this. To be a great Catholic apologist you do not need to have all of the right answers. You just need to have the right questions. To be a great Catholic apologist you do not need all the right answers. You just need the right questions. Sometimes we think you watch Catholic Radio, you listen to talks, you think, “Being an apologist means this guy has his objection and I’ve got my argument, my answer right here. When they say this, you say that.”
Trent Horn:
Well, we can’t prepare for life and that’s not how life really works. And we think, “I got to have the perfect answer for every argument.” But rather one thing we forget to do a lot is to say, “Wait a minute, people appreciate the good news of what we believe. Our faith will not be good news until whatever they currently believe is bad news,” right?
Trent Horn:
If everything’s fine, you’re not interested, I’m not interested in what you have to offer because everything I’ve got is great. I might humor you, listen to you about your Catholic faith, all that stuff. But that’s your thing. My thing is working just fine for me. We can’t make headway until we show people the bad news, that if their worldview is not Catholic, there is going to be something false, inconsistent, and sometimes quite ugly about it. And we have to gently show that to them.
Trent Horn:
But how do we do that? “Oh, you’re not Catholic? Your worldview is false, inconsistent and ugly. Bet you didn’t know that.” Well people don’t hear that. Instead, we should use an approach made popular 2,500 years ago by a guy named Socrates. Might have heard of him? Socrates. Socrates, if you watched Bill and Ted’s Most Excellent Adventure, which by the way is one of the most sophisticated time travel movies out there. A lot of thought goes into it. “How we going to get them out of jail? We don’t have a key. In the future we’ll go back in time and leave a key here. We did do that. We better not forget to do it. We won’t because we did. Yeah.” I’m telling you, it’s really deep stuff. Whoa.
Trent Horn:
So, Socrates, Socrates. Socrates was described as the gadfly of Athens. He was also someone whose face was just so weird looking it was like a car wreck. You couldn’t take your eyes off of him. But how he really annoyed people was he always asked people questions and people said, “Socrates is the wisest guy out there.” And he said, “I’m not smart. I just know that guy does not know what he’s talking about. And I’m going to ask him a question to show that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
Trent Horn:
You fast forward 500 years later, another very smart guy uses the same method to great effect. His name is Jesus. You go to Mark chapter 11. Jesus is talking to the Pharisees and they go up to Jesus and they try to get him in a trap. They say, “Jesus, we have a question for you.” well, they’re indignant. Actually they go up to him and they say, “Who gave you the authority to teach the authority, to do these things?”
Trent Horn:
Now Jesus could have given a long theological answer or a short one. “My dad, the guy who made everything.” But instead he said to them, and this is the dynamic Trent Horn parallel living message bible translation. “I tell you what guys, I will answer your question if you’re willing to answer one of mine, but you got to answer my question first then I will answer yours. The baptism of John, is it from heaven or from Earth? Answer my question and then I will answer yours.” Mark tells us that the Pharisees got into a huddle and they realize they were in a bit of a jam. If they said it was from heaven, the people are going to say, “Well, why didn’t you endorse, formally endorse John in the ministry he was doing?”
Trent Horn:
The Pharisees had a kind of live and let live relationship with this crazy wild guy out in the desert. If they say, though, “No it’s from Earth,” then the people are going to revolt because even if the Pharisees are a bit hands off, the people know John is the real deal. He’s a prophet. So they do what happens to me a lot on radio when people don’t want to answer one of my questions. “We don’t know.” And then Jesus says, “Then neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things.” And then Mark tells us this interesting detail. And then Jesus reached into his tunic and took out a microphone and he dropped it. It’s in some manuscripts. Codex Bezae. It’s a variant manuscript.
Trent Horn:
So notice just by asking a question, he allowed the Pharisees to reveal their own hypocrisy instead of simply saying the Pharisees are hypocrites, which they were. Instead, saying it, he let them reveal it to themselves. One last example of this method.
Trent Horn:
One time I was snowed in, in Wichita, Kansas when I was a missionary. I just graduated college. Our home base was in Wichita. I was snowed in at a friend’s house. He wasn’t home, no internet, no cable TV. There was a DVD player and in the entertainment cabinet, there was one collection of DVDs, the entire series of Colombo, just Colombo. And I watched Colombo for a week. It gets very repetitive, but I mean it’s interesting stuff. “Ah, see, and I just have one more question. I just have one more question for you.”
Trent Horn:
Colombo’s a really cool show because it’s a crime show, but you know who the killer is right off the bat on Colombo. So where’s the mystery? The mystery is not who is the killer? The mystery is how is Colombo going to catch him? And he always catches him the same way when you watch the entire series in a week. He just relentlessly asked questions and he comes off as this like disheveled, not quite altogether there, guy with his hat and his coat. “I’m sorry, I’m getting ashes everywhere on your nice rug here. Something just been bothering me. Tell me this…” because he doesn’t go in puffing his chest, kind of lures the guy into a false sense of security then asks him questions that become more and more awkward that dissolve the suspect’s alibi.
Trent Horn:
And so when we speak to others, that’s the tone we need to have. Not I’m here to defeat you. Back in several months ago in Austin, there was a conference for priests, Dr. Hahn was speaking at it and I decided to drove down with my five-year-old, Matthew, our first dad, son alone, overnight trip. Super fun. Stopped at all the fast food places we wanted to stop at. He got to go and meet all the priests, meet Dr. Hahn.
Trent Horn:
And I remember in the hotel room, he’s like, “Can we watch a movie?” I was like, “Yeah, sure. Your mom’s not here. You’re with dad.” And we watched the movies that are on TV and they had Matilda on, based on the Roald Dahl book and there’s the dad and Matilda. He tells Matilda, “I’m big, you’re small. I’m smart, you’re dumb.” And sometimes we have that same kind of attitude when we want to say, “Oh, you believe this about the Bible? Well, I’m right. You are wrong. I’m biblically literate, you’re biblically illiterate.”
Trent Horn:
And Ephesians 4:15 says, “We should always speak the truth in love.” And we should have an attitude where we gently ask questions and with an attitude, not of I’m right, you’re wrong, but I’m trying to figure out the truth. Can you help me to get there with you? I just want to understand you. That the one thing you can do in a conversation, get rid of the goal of I’m going to convert this person. Sorry. You’re not going to do that. You can’t do that. Only the Holy Spirit can do that.
Trent Horn:
But if you start with the goal of, I want to perfectly understand this person and they perfectly understand where I’m coming from anybody can make that goal if you listen and ask questions. Let me give you an example. I was at a Catholic high school giving a pro-life presentation and I could tell there was a girl in the back who was not happy that I was there and she’s folding her arms and sneering. And so at the end, I said, “Does anyone have any questions?” And her hand goes up. And so I call on her and here’s her question.
Trent Horn:
“Mr. Horn, what gives you the right to tell women what they can and can’t do with their bodies? I mean, I don’t like abortion, but I don’t go around shoving my beliefs down people’s throats like you do.” Now when people kind of come at us in attack mode, there’s two extremes. Some of us are velvet glove. We say, “I’m not shoving my beliefs. I just want people to understand. I didn’t mean to offend you.” There’s velvet glove and then there’s iron fist. “I’m not pushing anything on anyone. It’s people like you who push these beliefs on little babies that are the problem.” Velvet glove, iron fists. It’s something in the middle here.
Trent Horn:
So instead I asked her a question. Instead of even giving an answer, what gives you the right to do this? I asked her a question and you can always ask one of two questions when you’re in a conversation with someone. Those are, what do you think, and why do you think that? A lot of times when we just ask those questions, what do you think and why do you think that, we can get the person to see maybe they don’t have a good reason for what they believe. “What do you think?” I asked this young girl. Here’s what she said again. “Mr. Horn, what gives you the right to tell women what they can and can’t do with their bodies? I don’t like abortion, but I don’t go around shoving my beliefs down people’s throats like you do.” What do you think I asked her? I’ll give you a hint. It starts with why.
Trent Horn:
Why not? Well here’s what I asked her. I’ll call her Kelsey. “Kelsey, can I ask you a question? You said you don’t like abortion. Why? Why don’t you like abortion?” She said, “Well, isn’t it obvious?” I said, “Well, pretend I’m like a five year old. I’d never heard of this before. How would you explain it to me?” She said, “Well, it’s taking a life out of the world.” And I said, “Okay. Help me a little bit more. When you say take a life out of the world, what do you mean? If I step on a spider, is that abortion? I took a life out of the world.” She said, “Well, no, obviously it’s taking a human life, but I can’t tell women what they can and can’t do with their bodies.”
Trent Horn:
I said, “Okay, well, Kelsey, help me,” and you see the Colombo here. “Help me to put all this together. It doesn’t quite make sense to me. You’re saying you don’t like abortion because it takes a human life out of the world. By that I think you mean it kills a small human being, but you can’t tell women that they can’t kill small human beings. I don’t see how that connects. Can you help me see maybe what I’m missing?” And then all the other students turn around and look at Kelsey. And she says, “Well, sure, it sounds bad when you put it that way.”I said, “Well, I didn’t put it that way. You did. I’m just trying to see where you’re coming from.”
Trent Horn:
So notice what I’m doing in this conversation. I’m connecting. And all I had to do was ask questions to get her to see what she believes and to see that maybe she hasn’t fully thought it through. This can help in a wide variety of people that you’re talking to. Maybe you’re talking to a friend who’s an atheist who says, “Oh, you went to your Steubenville conference? Well, I’m an atheist. Prove God exists.” “Oh, I went to that great Pat Madrid talk on the existence of God, but suddenly my mind is a blank. He had all that great stuff and it sounded so awesome when I was there. And now it’s just, now all I see is a tumbleweed rolling by.”
Trent Horn:
But instead you can ask questions. “Okay so, well, can I ask you a question though about God? I just want to see what you think about all of that. So do you believe in God?” “No, I don’t believe in God.” “Oh, okay. Do you think there is no God or there could be a God, but maybe there’s no good reason to believe in God?” Nine times out of 10 they’ll say, “Yeah, maybe there could be a God. I’m saying there’s no good reasons to believe in a God.”
Trent Horn:
“Okay. Well, can I ask you another question? You say there are no good reasons. What’s the best reason you looked at? Do people give reasons for God?” “Yeah, of course they do.” “Okay. Well, of the reasons people give, what do you think is the best or maybe the least bad reason and what’s wrong with it?” “I don’t know. They’re all equally bad.” “Well, could you just pick one?” “I don’t know. They’re all, it’s all just nonsense.” “Okay. Well, I kind of find it interesting. If you’re so confident there’s no good reasons why can’t you even share one of those reasons with me?
Trent Horn:
“I’d be happy, could I maybe send you a debate that I watched? You could maybe send him the debate I had with Alex O’Connor on the existence of God, a lovely atheist from Oxford. Very nice chap. I’m going to be debating him again at the end of August. If you want to go to Matt Fradd’s Pints With Aquinas channel he’s sitting over here. You’ll hear from him pretty soon. Or this book maybe, and then maybe you can look at the reasons and come tell me what you think about them?”
Trent Horn:
The Protestant apologist Greg Koukl once said, “When you ask questions, it takes you out of the hot seat and it puts you into the driver seat of the conversation.” Isn’t that right? When someone’s asking you questions, you feel like, oh, you got your grill, the third degree, but when you ask the questions, it guides the conversation where you want it to go. Now you are in the driver’s seat, they’re in the hot seat. Not to grill someone to make them uncomfortable, but I believe when we are in conversations with people, we should provide a comfortable level of discomfort to encourage them to talk. And then once we’ve reached kind of an impasse to say, “Hey, if you ever want to talk about this again, send me an email, give me a call. I’d love to be able to chat about it.”
Trent Horn:
I’ll give you one more example that we can ask questions. What do you think? Why do you think that? Let the person restate their view and then we should try really hard when you’ve done this enough. When you got practice, you can say, “Wait a minute. There’s something they believe that undercuts their belief.” It’s self-refuting. Sometimes it’s easy to pick up on.
Trent Horn:
I was at a talk once and a guy stood up and he said, “The reason you’re wrong is because you think that there’s absolute truth. You think everything’s just black and white, but there is no absolute truth.” If you think about it, do you see an inconsistency there? So then I just asked as charitably as I could, “I just have one question. I don’t mean to be snarky. Are you absolutely sure there is no absolute truth?” And notice because you could do it. You could turn up the snark and it’s not pleasant. “Let me ask you this. Are you absolutely sure there’s no absolute truth?” That’s kind of a jerk thing to do. I mean, it’s entertaining to people. Are you not entertained?
Trent Horn:
But tomorrow my friend, Matt Fradd will give a talk called how to win an argument and lose a soul. And what will God say? Hey, I’m so glad you got to have a nice laugh at that guy’s expense and humiliate him so he never wants to hear about the gospel again. I don’t want God to tell me that. That would put a real crimp in my day to hear God being mad at me. Wouldn’t it for you? We’ll put that as a quote, but to say, in a sense of like Colombo, gentleness. Are you sure? That doesn’t quite make sense to me?
Trent Horn:
I was once at Balboa Park in San Diego and we were doing a documentary about people not liking the Catholic church. So we asked people what they disliked about the church the most, a very pleasant afternoon. 90% of the people, it was issues of sexual ethics. 90% of them. One guy said, “I don’t like the Catholic church because it says gay people can’t get married. I think that’s unfair and unjust. And that’s why I don’t like the Catholic church.” Now what do you do?
Trent Horn:
Remember when you ask questions, what do you think and why do you think that it takes you out of the hot seat and puts you into the driver’s seat? So I said to him, I’ll call him Craig. “Craig, can I ask you a question? So you’re mad at the church because it won’t let gay people get married?” “Yeah. That’s right.” “What is marriage? When you use the word marriage, what do you mean by that?” “Well, marriage is when two people get married. Right? It could be a man and woman, two guys, two girls, I don’t care. It’s two people getting married.”
Trent Horn:
“All right. And you think it’s bad the church won’t listen to that?” “Yeah.” So then I thought a little bit more about that and I asked him a question. I said, “Craig, I’ve watched documentaries about a guy who’s legally married to one woman and spiritually married to three other women. All five of them would like to be married.” Now it’s interesting. In the Bible Jesus is very clear a man cannot have two wives if you remember in the scripture where he says that in the gospel of Matthew. He says, “No, man can serve two masters.” I’m just, we’ll just leave it right, let’s leave it right there. So he’s very clear. You can’t have two wives.
Trent Horn:
So I said to him, “Why don’t these five people get married?” He said, “Well that’s not marriage.” Then you have to pull it together. I said, “Well, Craig, help me to understand where you’re coming from. You don’t like the Catholic church because it says that marriage just is a man and a woman. So two men or two women, that’s not what marriage is, so that can’t be a marriage. But you say marriage is two people, so this group of five people can’t get married. When you say this is what marriage is, so this union is not a marriage, aren’t you doing the same thing you don’t like about the church when it says, this is what marriage is, so this union is not a marriage? Aren’t you doing the exact same thing?”
Trent Horn:
And he thought about it for a minute and I kid you not, this is what he said. “I know this is a double standard, but it’s my double standard so it’s okay.” And I said, “Well, here’s my email. If you ever want to talk about it, be happy to do that. Here’s some other resources.” Because here’s the thing, when we talk to people, we can’t expect conversion right on the spot. It takes time. Some of you who are converts or reverts, how long did it take you? Months, years, decades?
Trent Horn:
But the goal is to be able to walk along someone through that process. Our goal is not to win arguments, though that is helpful. Our goal is to really just plant a seed, put a pebble in someone’s shoe so it rattles around in their head, that conversation, that question that Catholic asks them that they’re still bothered by. And that plants the seed.
Trent Horn:
Now a lot of us are scared to be in these conversations. There’s three words we don’t want to utter. I don’t know. We don’t want to look foolish or silly or ignorant. So if you’re in a situation, maybe someone will use this technique on you. What do you think? Why do you think that? And you want to say, “I don’t know, but I don’t want to be in that situation.” Instead you can say, “That’s a really good question and I want to think about it more and I want to go look at other people who’ve done even more work on it so I can get you a really good answer. Could I call you or email you?”
Trent Horn:
That’s really good. I want to think about that more because in our conversations about the most important issues it’s not a race, it’s not a boxing match, it’s a journey. We’re all walking there together and we want to always be able to accommodate people so that we’re not fighting toe to toe, but we’re walking shoulder to shoulder. So what I would like to do now is I would like to have a little fun and a little bit of audience participation.
Trent Horn:
Hey guys, thank you so much for watching. Be sure to tune in tomorrow where you’ll see me apply these principles in live unscripted interactions with the audience members who do a really good job, by the way. Some of them I feel like were actually really, really critical of the faith. I don’t think they were, but they really did a good job in their role plays. That’s what I’ll share with you tomorrow and yeah, I just hope that you have a really blessed day.
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