ChatGPT-4o Tries to Convert Me

Joe Heschmeyer goes toe to toe with Chat-GPT, rebutting the internet’s best large language model’s arguments against Catholicism.

Transcription:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. I want to do something different today and specifically I wanted to try out chat GPT-4o. Now there’s a lot of different ways you can do this and I in particular want to look at arguments against Catholicism. So I have not done this yet. I actually, I’m not sure I’ve ever used chat GPT for, so this is a brand new one. I actually had to pay $20 to get a month subscription just to try this. That is how much I love you, maybe even more than $20. So with no further ado, you can watch it happen. You’ll see me type in, you’ll see first of all how incredibly quickly it produces the answer. And then we can go through and say, how would we reply to these different responses? I have a few tabs ready with some possible bible verses to go to, but to be honest with you, I don’t really know where the rest of this episode is going to go.

So with no further ado, let’s ask chat GPT what are the best arguments against Catholicism? And you can see how incredibly quickly it produces a very systematic response. It says arguments against Catholicism come from a variety of perspective and then it’s looking at theological ones and historical ones. And then I think the third category is going to be ethical or yeah, and then ethical ones looking at social issues. And then I figured we can just go kind of piece by piece through these and give brief counter arguments. Do any of these arguments completely rebut Catholicism or is there something we can say as Catholics in response to what a very sophisticated robot saw as the best arguments? So the first category of arguments are theological arguments. The first thing is the authority of the Pope and it says, critics argue that the concept of papal infallibility and the central authority of the Pope lacks strong biblical support.

They often cite that early Christian communities were more decentralized and then it even offers counter-argument, even though I didn’t ask it to, it’s going to actually do my job for me. Catholics believe that the Pope’s authority is rooted in the apostolic succession from St. Peter who they hold was appointed by Jesus as the leader of his disciples. Great. That’s already a good start. Let’s work with that a little bit. If somebody says, I’m not Catholic because of the authority of the Pope, the first thing I’d say is that is a really good reason not to be Catholic. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that this is the winning argument. I just mean this is a helpful thing if you’re dealing with another Christian, Orthodox, Protestant, anyone who calls themselves Christian and respects the authority of the Bible and respects that Jesus is who he says he is, one of the things that you often encounter is it can be really difficult to get through all of the different issues.

People have all sorts of for why they’re not Catholic. And so it can be overwhelming where they say, okay, I’ve got these 20 different doctrines. I think the Catholic Church might be wrong on, but I haven’t carefully investigated them and I’m open to the Catholic church being right and they’ve given themselves this tremendous research project and if they find that they agree with the Catholic claim on all 20, then they’ll become Catholic. And if they find themselves maybe 15 out of the 20 or something, then they’ll hem and haw and say, well, I don’t really know what to do with this because I don’t fit comfortably in any Protestant denomination, but I also don’t really belong in the Catholic church. The solution here is to say, look at the question of authority. Is the Catholic church who she says she is? And a good way of getting to that is, is the papacy true?

So here’s why. If you were listening to Jesus, you would hear him say all kinds of radical things. Some of them you’d agree with, some of them you’d recognize as these brilliant encapsulations of the Mosaic law and other things would probably be challenging depending on what the background you’d come from, depending on your own biases, your own sin, your own intellectual journey, your own spiritual journey. And the question isn’t, do I agree with everything Jesus says? The question is who is Jesus? And if he is who he says he’s, if he is the son of God, then if I don’t agree with him, I’m in the wrong. So I don’t start with the question of do I agree or disagree? I start with the question of who’s in the position of authority to know who’s right on this? Well, likewise what the church, the Catholic claim is that the church is the body of Christ and has been created not by human agency, but by Jesus’s divine authority.

And then has it been empowered by the Holy Spirit, the spirit of truth to guide the church into all truth. Now if that’s true, then all of those times we might disagree with the church are times we’re just flagging ourselves as being wrong. So the one thing you have to sort out isn’t the 20 point checklist of doctrines you might have questions about. It’s that one question of authority. And so the papacy is a nice concrete way of exploring that question of authority. Another way to put it is like this. If Catholics are right about the papacy, everyone should be Catholic. If we’re wrong about the papacy, no one should be Catholic. And when you do that, now that 20 point list is a one point list and that’s a lot easier to sort through. So I’m glad we’re starting with the authority of the Pope.

Let’s look at a few biblical passages to support the Pope’s authority. Now one thing I do want to say, actually before we get there in the chat GPT description, it says the critics often cite that early Christian communities were more decentralized. I would press on that a little bit because a lot is being made usually if arguments from silence or really incomplete kind of data. Now to be sure in the first century, in the second century when things like communication can take months functionally, everything is just decentralized to a greater degree than it is now that you just can’t have the amount of oversight you would want. Empires are more decentralized. Everything is, that is not really a theological argument. That’s a technological limitation that the Pope can’t meddle in your business or can’t oversee what’s going on depending on whether you view it as a positive or negative because it’s just physically impossible with the technology of the day.

So with that said, I think we actually find a tremendous amount of information of people going to the Church of Rome and speaking of the Church of Rome in elevated terms and talk about the necessity of agreeing with that church. There’s all sorts of stuff there, but because this is I think more of a biblical argument, I’m going to look at just the biblical data. Let’s look at a couple places. Alright, the first one I like to go to is the gospel of Luke. It’s Luke 22, it’s the last Supper. And begin in verse 24, the disciples begin to dispute among themselves about which of them has to be regarded as the greatest. So I mean imagine you’re at the last supper. This is the most important meal in human history and here in the midst of it you have the apostles not able to get out of their own way talking about which one of them is the greatest.

Jesus doesn’t rebuke them for this though It’s good to ask the question about greatness and it’s good to want to be great. And instead what he says to them is that the kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them and those in authority over them are called benefactors but not so with you rather let the greatest among you become as the youngest and the leader is one who serves. So this is the creation of what we might call servant leadership. Then Jesus gives himself as an example of this in verse 27, he says, I’m among you as one who serves. Jesus shows us what servant leadership looks like. And then in the next verse, 28 to 30, he tells the 12 that the father has appointed a kingdom for them and that they’ll sit in thrones judging the 12 tribes of Israel.

I guess let me tweak that slightly. As the father has appointed a kingdom for Christ, he’s appointed the sharing in the royal authority in the kingdom. They don’t get separate kingdoms. Just to make sure we’re clear on that. The point though is that he’s talking about servant leadership and apostolic authority and that the apostles are to have genuine authority. Those in authority over them are called benefactors. So he’s using the model of actual authority and then describing something like this for the apostles themselves. And then in the very next verse in verse 31, he singles out one apostle Simon Peter and he says to him, Simon, Simon, behold Satan demanded to have you and you’ll notice there’s you plural that he might sift you like wheat. So all 12 are going to be under a tremendous spiritual assault as we see during holy week, especially here at the night where Jesus is arrested.

And Jesus’s response isn’t to say, I stopped this from happening because I have divine authority. His response is not to say I prayed to the Father for all 12 of you. He instead says, I’ve prayed for you. Now here it’s really critical and we lose this in the English unless you’re checking the footnotes really carefully. He switches from you plural. So Satan has desired to sift all of you like wheat. And I’ve prayed for you, Simon Peter, that your faith may not fail, but he knows it will fail. Simon will deny him three times. And so when you have turned back again, strengthen your brethren. So that in a nutshell is the entire Catholic case. All of the 12 have servant leadership over the church. One of them, Simon Peter, has servant leadership over the rest of the servant leaders. He’s the servant of the servants of God to use one of the papal titles that’s straight out of the Bible about the role that Simon Peter has.

And if you understand why Jesus does this with Simon Peter, then you understand why we believe this was not just a one-off kind of event that he’s creating an actual structure in the church because of all the times to need a human leader like Simon. The time you would seem to need that the least is while Jesus is physically with them on earth and yet he provides for it there. Alright, so that’s one place I would go. Another place I would go of course is Matthew chapter 16. This is a pretty famous one. Jesus asks that, who do you say that I am question? And Simon answers. He says, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. And Jesus then says to him, blessed are you Simon Bara or Simon’s son of Jonah flesh and blood has not revealed this to you but my father who is in heaven.

And then he changes his name, he says, and I tell you you are Peter, which means rock and on this rock I’ll build my church. And then the R-S-V-C-E here says, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it. The actual languages and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it or the gates of Haiti shall not prevail against it. And there’s a lot of dispute about what does this mean? There’s a clear parallelism between Simon Peter saying, you are Christ’s son of the living God. And then Jesus talking about Simon’s sonship son of Jonah, and then just as he goes from calling Jesus the Christ, Jesus goes from calling Simon the Peter. So there’s a clear kind of parallel kind of going on here which points to this being a special thing that no one else in the Bible has ever called Peter.

Occasionally you’ll find Protestants who say, well Peter just means like little rock, which isn’t really true and therefore everyone who confesses faith in Christ is Peter is Pedros is a rock. No one else besides Peter has ever given that title, which suggests that’s a misreading. But more than that, we can go to the very next verse in verse 19 where Jesus says just to Simon Peter, I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven and whenever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven and whenever you lose on earth shall be loose in heaven. Now this gets right to the heart of why this matters because if the church is to be one, and it’s very clear from scripture that Jesus wants the church to be one, he prays for this in John 17 verse 20 to 23 at the last supper.

He wants his followers to remain one. If we’re going to remain one, we need some kind of centralized authority when disputes arise because if you don’t have that, if you have total decentralization, then everything goes off the rails very quickly. People divide up and you have infighting and then you have nobody to adjudicate when two different groups fall out over the proper interpretation of scripture. That is the history of Protestantism and to a lesser extent, that’s also the history of orthodoxy that you’ll find people disputing what’s the right answer here and they don’t agree on who the judge can be in the case. Now that is not the biblical model and the biblical model. When you have a dispute, you can go to the church. Matthew 18 shows this very clearly, take it to the church and if they won’t listen to the church, treat ’em as you would a Gentile or a tax collector, that suggests that there is a clear, visible, recognizable adjudicative authority that Protestantism doesn’t really have today.

So that’s why you need something like the papacy. Let’s go on and give one more passage, John 21. I actually want to look at the very end of John 20 appears to be the conclusion of the gospel of John. John says, now Jesus did many other things in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book, but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ is son of God and that believing you may have life in his name. And then you can almost add like the end because that is so clearly a conclusion. And yet John continues with what’s pretty clearly an epilogue. Now, I mentioned this because the point of John 20 is to tell us about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. So more broadly, John one to John 20 is looking at the incarnation, life, death and resurrection of Christ.

John 21 is doing something different. It’s an epilogue. And what is this epilogue about? It’s the what happens next. So all of the evangelists are left with this. It’s harder to show this with Mark because there’s a dispute about the ending of Mark’s gospel, but Matthew’s gospel ends with the great commission, okay, Jesus lived, died, rose again went to heaven. Church’s mission is go out and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. So you got a very clear mandate, very clear mission. Luke has an entire sequel to say what happens next called the acts of the apostles about, okay, what is the church’s response? John uses a lot more imagery and language and in doing so, he has presented this resurrection appearance that serves as almost like a parable explaining the journey of the church from now until the eternal shores.

And there’s a lot of clues about that in the passage. The first one being that it is written as an epilogue, the second being that the setup is a group of seven disciples. So John 21 verse two shows there’s seven disciples. This is the number of perfection and completion and it points to the Sabbath rest of God, which is to say eternal rest with God. And of these seven, Simon Peter is clearly the leader. He says, I’m going fishing. The other six say We will go with you. That is not a throwaway detail because the church is used. Matthew 1347 to 50, the church is described as a net containing good and bad fish. We’ll get into all this in a second and in Luke five there’s a miraculous catch of fish where Simon Peter is tasked with three of the other disciples there with catching a tremendous catch of fish.

And then Jesus says explicitly to Simon that he’ll make him a fisher of men. So there’s a clear fishing imagery going on there, and this is kind of a recurring image both in the New Testament and in early church art and architecture. If you’ve ever looked at the traditional architecture in a Catholic church, it often looks like an upside down boat the way the ceiling is set up, that’s not an accident. That’s an intentional architectural homage to this theological reality. Okay, so when he says, I’m going fishing, and they say, we will go with you, it’s pointed to this thing that I said a minute ago that the way the church doesn’t have schism is by having this unity around the Pope. But in any case, by mere human effort, central authority isn’t actually enough and so they go out in the boat, but that night they catch nothing in the morning.

Jesus is standing on the beach and they don’t know yet that it’s him. He says, have you caught any fish? They say, no. He says, cast an net on the right side of the boat and you will find some. So they do and they were not able to haul it in, and that’s a significant detail we’ll get back to. Then the beloved disciple John says to Peter, it is the Lord. Simon Peter puts on his clothes and jumps in the sea. I love that detail. The six other disciples then follow behind, but notice they’re dragging the net full of fish for they were not far from the land, but about a hundred yards off. Now that’s obviously a conversion into yards. When they get to the land, they see a charcoal fire. This is another clue, this is a story about Peter’s relationship with Jesus because the only other time a charcoal fire appears anywhere in scripture is where in John’s gospel where Peter denies Jesus three times he’s standing by the charcoal fire. That detail matters, right? Additionally, Jesus is already present with fish. He’s cooking fish on the charcoal fire. This is a good reminder that while we are called to evangelize as the church, Jesus doesn’t actually need us. And the third detail is there’s also bread. This is a eucharistic image. Jesus then says, bring some of the fish that you’ve just caught. So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore full of large fish, 153 of them, and although there were so many, the net was not torn.

The word schism comes from this Greek word for torn here, that there’s no schism in the net. Also the word like schizophrenic, torn mind, that Greek word of tearing, that’s what we’re looking at here. So schism, there’s no schism in the net of the church that remember the other six could not bring that in, but at Christ command, Simon Peter is able to bring the net of the church ashore to the eternal shore to dine with Christ. If it wasn’t clear enough that all of this was deeply petron about Peter’s role in relationship with Christ, you then have at the end of breakfast verse 15 to 17 where Jesus says to Simon Peter, Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these? He says, yes, Lord, you know that I love you. Jesus says, feed my lambs. He asks him again, yes, Lord, you know that I love you, 10 my sheep, and he asks him a third time, do you love me?

Peter’s feelings are hurt this time. I’m sure it recalls the threefold denial. And he says, Lord, you know everything. You know that I love you. Jesus says, feed my sheep. So the entire flock of Christ is entrusted to one man, Simon Peter right there three times. There’s no one else with a similar commissioning anywhere in the New Testament, okay? I know I spent a long time on the issue of the papacy, but that’s because I think it’s the one to make sure you get right. If you’re talking to Protestants, Orthodox, et cetera. If you get that right, then it’s like, okay, well if Jesus really did set up an earthly interpretive authority, the governing authority and authority to help lead the church without going into schism, where if you want to not be amatic, you stay connected to Peter and the net. Okay, great. That settles everything else.

Then if I find that I don’t understand why the Catholic church teaches X, Y, Z, that’s a cause for me to spiritually reflect, maybe do more research, but also be ready to just say maybe they understand this better than I do and it can be a cause for humility. Alright, that’s the first. Let’s go onto the next, the Marion doctrines. I don’t know why I didn’t have these ones ready. I should have known that these ones would come up. Some Protestants and other critics believe that doctrines regarding Mary, such as her immaculate conception and assumption are not explicitly supported by scripture and detract from the centrality of Jesus. Counterargument. Catholics argue these doctrines are supported by sacred tradition and the development of doctrine over centuries. Now, there’s a lot that could be said here. I would say this, the idea that it has to be explicitly supported by scripture is a false framework.

This is assuming the Protestant doctrine of soul of script, Torah, which is itself false. So let’s talk about that just for a moment. In Second Thessalonians chapter two, verse 15, St. Paul tells us Soth then brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions, and parados is the word there. It’s tradition, a thing handed on stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us either by word of mouth or by letter. Now, you might be using a Bible like the NIV, which will, when it talks about tradition in a good way, it’ll change it to teaching which is inaccurate. The word there is not teaching. The word there is tradition, but because these Protestants are anti tradition and they don’t like the idea of sacred tradition, they’ll literally just edit it out of the Bible. That’s bad theology and bad translation. It’s the exact same way when Jesus condemns the traditions of men, that is the parados of men when St.

Paul commends Parados is coming from Jesus in the apostles, same word. So it’s not a question of tradition, good or bad. The question is whose tradition is it? Is it manmade tradition or is it divine tradition? Because if this is something coming from Jesus in the apostles, we should heed it, right? If it’s something coming from rabbinical authority like the Pharisees, we can ignore it, particularly if it gets in the way of the word of God when we need to ignore it. So we’re using the same word both in English and in Greek to refer to two different realities. One of these divinely given teachings that are being passed down and the other of just human customs and teaching authority. So when we Catholics talk about tradition, we usually are talking, it can be confusing. It depends a little on context, but we’re usually talking about sacred tradition, those things that can be traced back to Jesus and the apostles, and that is very clearly biblical.

So the idea that you need explicit biblical teaching for everything is not explicitly taught in the Bible, so it’s self refuting, but in fact is directly contradicted by two Thessalonians two 15, which talks very clearly about the need to hold both to those traditions passed on by letter that is scripture, but also traditions passed on by word of mouth. He doesn’t say just follow traditions by letter and ignore traditions by word of mouth. He says the exact opposite. Now, Protestants are free to say at some point in history, all of the traditions by word of mouth were written down in epistle form or in letter form, and they now are all contained in the New Testament, but that is a made up teaching. Nowhere in scripture does say that that is something Protestants are assuming and it has fit with me, no explicit support from the Bible.

And so again, the snake eats its own tail. Many Protestants have been trained to read two Timothy chapter three to say solos scriptura is true and this is just false. So in context, the part that gets quoted is that all scripture is inspired by God or literally God breathed and profitable for teaching, for a proof, for correction, for training and righteousness that the man of God may be complete equipped for every good work. And so the argument goes, well, if this is what you need to be complete, therefore this is all you need. Now that is logically and grammatically false, and you can see that from looking at the full context. So first, it’s logically and grammatically false because if I say if you want a perfect score, you have to do the quiz. That doesn’t tell you by itself whether the quiz is literally the only thing you need.

Maybe there’s homework and a quiz, but you’re not going to get a perfect score if you don’t do all of it. That would still be true there to say, if you want to be complete, if you want to have a perfect score, if you want perfection completion, you need to do the quiz. So that passage by itself simply does not say whether or not scripture is all you need. It simply says basically that you’re incomplete without scripture. That nowhere suggests the opposite is true, that scripture is it. If I say a peanut butter and jelly sandwich isn’t complete without the jelly, I’m not saying you only need jelly, it just doesn’t fall logically. It’s a very silly argument, but we can see that even clearer when you look at the actual passage beginning with verse 14, because St. Paul is talking to Timothy about the Old Testament and no Christian believes the Old Testament is all we need.

He says, as for you, Timothy, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed. He’s not writing to 21st century Christians about the New Testament. He’s writing at a time the New Testament is not completely written, is mostly unwritten and telling Timothy to remember what you have learned, how from childhood you’ve been acquainted with the sacred writings, what sacred writings was Timothy acquainted with from childhood, the Old Testament, and he says that they’re able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. The whole point of the Old Testament is preparation for belief in Christ. And so don’t forget the Old Testament. It would be insane to take that to say therefore the Old Testament is all I need because the Old Testament can instruct me for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. Therefore, the Old Testament is all I need. So I’d put the matter like this, solo scriptura is not true at the time that St.

Paul is writing, and therefore two Timothy three 14 to 17 can’t be teaching it because it’d be teaching a false doctrine at the time. And so it doesn’t magically become a teaching of solo s script later on because that’s not how the Bible works. It doesn’t. It will leave it out for a while and it’ll ripe it into a different teaching. No, so solo scripture isn’t true. So all of that is a long way of saying that the whole Protestant framework for looking at things like the Marion doctrines, it’s faulty with the immaculate consumption, the conception and the assumption, let’s say a few things about it. One, we can say a lot about Mary as the ark of the new covenant, and the ark is perfect, and the whole point is that the ark is so holy it can’t be touched, and we see this in plain places most clearly somewhere like Second Samuel six say, but compare Second Samuel six with Luke one second Samuel six King David, a Rosen went from the hill country of Judah into Jerusalem, and in Luke one, Mary a Rosen went near Jerusalem to the hill country of Judah, and in two Samuel six because the ark is so holy it can’t be touched, a guy but named Za touches it and dies.

The ark is there in the hill country for three months, and King David plotting to get the ark into the capital city of Jerusalem says, how can the ark of the Lord come to me? In Luke one, Mary goes into the hill country of Judah and her cousin Elizabeth says, how is it that the mother of my Lord should come to me and Sherman’s there for three months? And so there’s a clear parallel which the early Christians recognized the idea of Mary as both New Ark and New Eve are very early kind of recognitions. Well, Eve is a sinless virgin who then says no to God by listening to a fallen angel. Mary is a sinless virgin who says yes to the angel Gabriel. Obviously, look, if this was a full episode, I could go in much deeper on those things, but the point is the biblical depiction shows Mary as virginal.

She asks when the angel Gabriel tells her she’s going to have a child even though she’s already married, that’s a whole other issue. She says, how can this be? Since I know not man. And so Mary is showing that she is this sinless virgin and virginity is an ancient symbol of purity. It’s not the same thing, but it’s an ancient symbol of purity. So the Book of Revelation for instance, talks about the 144,000 as virgins. And so Mary’s Sinlessness is pointed to by her virginity and because both virginity at a bodily level and purity at a spiritual level are about being wholly dedicated, you’re not of split affection. You’re not torn in two directions that you’ve given yourself completely to one other and that’s it. And so that’s what Mary has done. That’s why we talk about the church has virginal as well. The church is also a virgin mother because she’s been betrothed to Christ and Christ alone.

That’s the virginal nature. But holiness is all about being set apart for God. So this is why we can talk about the ark as holy’s set apart for God so holy it can’t be touched. So Mary’s immaculate conception is seen in all of those things. It’s true that there’s a big debate, not about Mary’s sinlessness or purity so much as there is a debate about human embryology, like when does the soul enter the body? Because at that point it was pretty unclear. Now we can see from Luke one that the John the Baptist, the cousin of Jesus leaps for joy in the womb at about one month old, or excuse me, at about six or seven months old. And Jesus himself is seemingly under a month old because Mary has arisen with haste and gone into the hill country. So both of them are pre-born children.

Both of them are clearly alive in the womb. But the question of exactly when the soul entered the body, that was a question that took some hammering out. That’s why you get a delay in the imag conception. What about the assumption if Mary’s the Ark and the Psalms correctly predicting that God will go up with his ark and Mary is his ark, then it seems to be a prediction of the assumption of Mary. Now it’s true. Most of the New Testament, which is written before Mary’s death or the end of her life doesn’t talk about the assumption of Mary, the only text that would seemingly come after that point. We don’t know exactly the dating of the New Testament documents or when Mary dies, but the one text that we would expect to talk about it potentially would be the book of Revelation. And sure enough, in the book of Revelation, we find m enthroned in heaven.

In Revelation 12, the mother of Jesus is crowned with a crown of 12 stars and she appears to be a heavenly queen and she’s given birth to the one destined to rule the nations with the rod of iron, which is one of the Messianic Psalms descriptions of Jesus. So the mother of Jesus has been crowned in heaven, and to get to the fifth glorious mystery like that, you seemingly are passing through the fourth glorious mystery, the assumption of Mary. So it’s clear that two things, one, this is very much consistent with the biblical evidence, but two, we aren’t limited to the biblical evidence. There’s no reason unless one buys into the fiction of soul of scriptura to think this is the only way we can know what happened to Mary or for that matter, what happens to any of the other apostles. If I want to know, did St.

Peter die at Rome? This is hinted at in the New Testament, but it’s a lot clearer when you look at later history which talks about it much more explicitly. Likewise, Mary’s assumption is maybe hinted at and sort of pointed to in the New Testament, but it’s much clearer when you read later testimonies. And one important detail in all of that is that there aren’t any relics of Mary. So there are two different places that claim to be the tomb of Mary, but both tombs are empty quite noticeably. And so this leads to this very strange kind of fact that if you go to Jerusalem, the place that’s believed to be the tomb of Mary, you’ll find Catholics and Orthodox and Muslims there, but not Protestants because Protestants don’t believe in the assumption of Mary like everybody else does. And so all I would say is history is on our side there.

Relics, we know were a huge thing in the early church, both real ones, and there were people who were forgers and basically artists who would pretend something was a relic if people thought Mary was buried somewhere. You can imagine the premium that there would be on getting relics of Mary. The fact that we don’t have those is a pretty convincing argument from absence here. I hope that makes sense that in the same way that one of the ways that we know Jesus didn’t have a wife and kids is people would’ve talked about that the fact that they don’t is a pretty convincing argument that he didn’t have them. Well, likewise the fact that nobody’s claiming to have the body of Mary or nobody’s going around trying to sell relics of Mary or anything like this, even the most disreputable people don’t seem to think that they could even trick you into thinking they have the relics of Mary.

Why is that? Well, because Mary’s assumed into heaven. Then you also have, and this is where the evidence gets a little bit shaky, you have different folk accounts trying to describe the assumption of Mary. Now they’re filling in the details, they’re writing a story there. We don’t trust the details of the story, but the mere fact that they’re kind of doing historical fiction about this points to the fact that people recognize that Mary had been assumed into heaven and there was a popular kind of imagination for wanting to know more about it. Okay, so that’s the second issue, the Marion doctrines,

The

Third sacraments and salvation,

The argument critics argue that the Catholic emphasis on sacraments and works for salvation contradicts the Protestant doctrine of salvation by faith alone ide, okay, that’s fine. I mean if the argument is just Protestants disagree with that because they believe in sofie, we’d just say, yeah, it’s probably not consistent with Sofie or at least depends on the formulation of it. The counterargument Catholics believe that faith and works together play a role in salvation interpreting passages like James 2 24. You see that a person’s considered righteous by what they do and not by faith alone as supportive of their view. I have no idea what translation chat GP TV is using. That’s a curious translation either way. It is striking that the phrase faith alone appears only once in the uncorrupted scriptures. And I say uncorrupted because Martin Luther famously adds the word alone to Romans 3 28 and his German translation of the New Testament, and he acknowledges that he’s added it by his own authority.

If you don’t have Luther’s interpolation, then the phrase faith alone appears exactly one time, and as in James 2 24 where it says explicitly justification is not by faith alone. And so when Protestants say justification is by faith alone, and scripture says justification is not by faith alone. We’re going to go with the scriptures, not with the Protestants, but we can get there another way as well. I’ve done a video on this, but I’ll do just a quick response here. You can ask, can you be saved without charity? So the reason I suggest doing this, by the way, is there’s major disputes about what we mean by faith and by works. So by faith some people mean an intellectual yes to God. You believe these things are true, your theology is sound, and if that’s it, you just have the right ideas and go to heaven.

That has trivialized, all of Christianity. It’s very hard to harmonize that with the idea of anything. The New Testament is teaching. The other version of faith is trust in God. And so the just man walks by faith, and so faith is trusting God. It’s something that you live, and so that kind of faith necessarily involves works, but you see how there’s two very significantly different definitions of faith there and people jump from one to the other or are not clear about which one they mean. Second on works a lot of times when especially St. Paul was talking about works, he means specifically the works of the mosaic law, and he often says, works of the law. His argument is not, do you need to be a good person to be saved? His argument is, do you need to follow the mosaic law because that’s the actual theological dispute that’s at issue.

He’s talking about things like circumcision. He knows gentiles can do good works, but they don’t do are works of the law because they don’t follow the mosaic law. They don’t keep kosher, they don’t circumcise their kids, et cetera, et cetera. So what he means by works and what Protestants later on mean by works are two different things. He’s not usually talking about good dets. He’s usually talking about observance of the mosaic regulations, many of which we would not even call good dets. No one’s going to be like, you’re such a good person, you circumcised your kid. Those are two different things that both have the same name. When we talk about faith and works, one of the ways that the dialogue breaks down is we are just using the same word to mean two different realities. Unless you’re very clear or can see into the mind of the other person, we can talk past each other very easily.

Additionally, we mean different things by justification. Most Protestants believe in justification is a one-time event. Catholics believe justification is a state of being alive in Christ. There’s a moment in which you become alive, you’re born again, but you also have to maintain being alive just like in biological life. And so biological life is an unmerited gift. You did nothing to deserve your conception. You did nothing to deserve your physical birth. You may have come out kicking and screaming even. But now that you’ve been given this gift, you do have a tremendous role to play in maintaining it. So you can’t achieve it on your own, but you are required to maintain it partially on your own. Now it’s only partially on your own. You can do everything right and still die. Likewise, you can do a lot of things wrong and still live by the strange grace of God.

You’ve got people who have a terrible diet and they smoke every day and they lived to 90 and you’d say, oh, all right, well, there you go. But nevertheless, we’d say you have a role to play in maintaining your life as well as your growth, which is the analogy to sanctification. That’s the difference. So we are using faith works and justification in different ways, so I like to avoid all of that, but it’s asking some simple questions. Number one, can you be saved without love, without loving God, without loving your neighbor? And anyone who has the faintest understanding of Christianity should realize the answer is no. The two great commandments are love God and love neighbor. Moreover, St. Paul very clearly says in one Corinthians that if you have faith in not love, it’s worthless. That’s Paul who allegedly teaches faith alone.

Second, can you love God and not keep his commandments? No. Jesus says, if you love me, you’ll keep my commandments. Third, can you keep commandments without doing good works? No, of course not. Remember how the whole law is summed up in loving God and loving neighbor? If you’re not loving God and loving neighbor, you’re not keeping the commandments of God. And so if someone can say, okay, yes, yes, yes to all of that, we’re really not very far apart about the role of works or good deeds in the salvation process. It’s about living out love. It’s faith, working in love. As St Paul puts it that the kind of faith he’s talking about is not just in adherence to the right kind of belief in doctrines. The devil has a better theology than you probably do. That doesn’t mean he’s saved. James makes this point pretty explicitly in his epistle.

Even the demons believe and they shudder, right? If belief in that sense is what’s necessary, then the devil would be in heaven. And so what’s needed is the faith. That is faith informed by charity, faith informed by love, and that’s what we’re talking about when we talk about faith in works, not about doing something to earn salvation, not about doing something to earn initial justification. We’re talking about the fact that the kind of faith that you need to be saved is a faith that’s animated by charity and works in good deeds. Oh, right. Also the emphasis of sacraments. I know this is really long, so maybe we’ll just do the Protestant objections so far in the sacraments. Let’s say a few things. Number one, I’m going to look just at baptism because there’s a lot in John chapter three, verse five, Jesus tells us how to be born again Christians.

He says, truly, truly I say to you, unless one is born of water in the spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. So being born again or being born from above, the word is from the top, which could mean anew or from above. So it’s got two elements, water and the spirit. And St. Paul is going to draw an analogy in one Corinthians 10 when he looks at the Israelites passing through the waters of the Red Sea that they’re led by the pillar of cloud, which is the Holy Spirit guiding them through the waters. And so it’s water and the spirit that is very clearly a reference to water baptism. And as a Catholic, I’m baffled by the fact that there are people who read this to mean something other than water baptism because it seems like they’re translating it as spirit in the spirit and just missing the necessity of water in Jesus’s own formulation.

And it’s probably not a coincidence that immediately after this we hear about the apostles going out to baptize. Okay? So that’s how you become born again, according to scripture, this is all foretold by the way, in Ezekiel, Ezekiel 36, 25 to 27, God promises I will sprinkle clean water upon you and you shall be clean from all your un cleanliness and from all your idols. I’ll cleanse you a new heart. I will give you in a new spirit, I’ll put within you, I will take out of your flesh, the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh, and I’ll put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. Jesus. Well, God and through Ezekiel is promising several different things. Number one, through this washing with water that’ll sprinkle clean water upon you, several things that will happen.

Number one, you’ll be clean from all your un cleanliness and from all your idols that will cleans you. So it’s the forgiveness of sins and purification. Number two, it’s a regeneration, a new heart I will give you and a new spirit I will put within you. I’ll take out of your flesh, the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. Number three, it’s sanctification. I’ll put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. Oh, I think actually the very next verse there is you’ll be my people and I’ll be your God. I didn’t pull that up. Let me see. Verse 28, yeah, you shall dwell on the land which I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people and I’ll be your God. So the fourth promise is that it is the incorporation into the people of God.

So if Catholics are right about baptism, we should see those four things happening and the New Testament evidence points to all of those four things happening. So go to Acts chapter two, or excuse me, acts 22, where Zane Paul is talking about his own conversion. He has kind of a road to Damascus moment. I do that joke every time, and it’s never funny. He has a literal road to Damascus moment and he struck blind, and then eventually Ananias, a Christian comes and he stands by him and says, brother, Saul receive your sight. And he receives his sight. So there’s this moment of what looks like healing, and you’re just think, okay, great, he’s good. But then Annia says, and now, why do you wait, rise and be baptized and wash away your sins, calling on his name. Now, that’s very clear. Acts 22 verse 16, that baptism involves a forgiveness of sins.

The washing away of sins very much echoes the being frugal clean water upon. You’ll be clean from all your own cleanliness and from all your idols that will cleanse you, the washing away of sin going on there. Now, jump back to Acts two. This is Pentecost. Peter’s just preached the first Pentecost sermon and the people who hear it are cut to the heart and they say, brethren, what shall we do? And Peter says to them, repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. Baptism is one for the forgiveness of your sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, so it’s for the forgiveness of your sins, and he’ll put a new spirit within you, the Holy Spirit to cause you to walk in his decrees. And then he says, save yourself from this crooked generation, verse 40, and then in verse 41.

So those who received his word were baptized and they were added that day, about 3000 souls added to what added to the church. Baptism is the doorway to the church. You become the people of God just as was prophesied in Ezekiel. If that’s not clear enough, a few other passages to consider. One Peter chapter three, Peter is looking at Jesus’s descent into hell and where he preaches to the spirits in prison who formerly did not obey when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah. So you’ve got Noah, you got the ark, you got the flood. One Peter 3 21 says, baptism, which corresponds to this now saves you. So you can’t say salvation is in some way apart from baptism. When scripture says the opposite baptism, which corresponds to what Noah’s Ark, you’ve got wood and water, you’ve got the passing through water being led, you got the dove, even all of this stuff water in the Holy Spirit.

This is a prefigurement of baptism, which now saves you not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a clear conscience through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It baptism saves you not because you needed to physically remove the dirt from your body, but because it is a spiritual purification, it’s an appeal to God for a clear conscience. And strangely, you’ll find people who say, oh, well, all that matters here is that you make the appeal to God for a clear conscience. You don’t need the baptism part, which is not what it says at all. It doesn’t say anything now saves you as long as it involves an appeal to God for a clear conscience. No baptism creates this appeal to God for a clear conscience. That is what it’s doing. It is begging for a regeneration and renewal rebirth, and therefore it’s tied with the forgiveness of sins in the creation of a clean conscience.

This is also prefigured, by the way, a name in Ethereum who goes into the Jordan and when he comes out, his skin is like a newborn baby. He’s been reborn and he wanted something more flashy, but this is what the prophet gives him, and it’s again, very clearly pointing to baptism. Okay, last verse. Titus chapter three, St. Paul talks about how when the goodness and loving kindness of our God and Savior appeared, he saved us not because of deeds done by us in righteousness. So initial justification is not something we can earn or merit, but in virtue of his own mercy by the washing of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit. So according to Paul, God saves us by sheer gratuitous mercy, how by the washing of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit, which he poured out upon us through Jesus Christ, our savior.

What do you think the washing of regeneration is? It is baffling. The sheer number of passages that you have to misinterpret to ignore the fact that baptism does the things God promised it would is startling. Okay, one more. Hebrews 10. I know I said there was going to be enough, but I had one more. I forgot I had in Hebrews 10, you’ve got the famous passage about being able to enter with confidence to the sanctuary and by the blood of Jesus. And we looked at this earlier when we talked about the temple veil two weeks ago, but we’re able to do this since we have a great high priest over the house of God. So he says, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.

So if you thought that was just a spiritual metaphor, Hebrews tend seems to close the door and say, no, there’s this twofold aspect that you’ve been actually washed with pure water, and this is where you’re getting the sprinkled conscience. So all the promises about sprinkling clean water upon you and all of that, this is a twofold reality. There’s a physical washing that corresponds to this spiritual washing, which is to say that baptism is a sign that actually does what it symbolizes. That’s what a sacrament is. So that’s just one of the sacraments. We could obviously do much more on all the other ones, but this is already a pretty long video. Alright, I’m going to run through the other ones just to, I think those ones can be done much more quickly on the historical arguments. You’ve got church scandals. I’ve done an entire video on this.

The history of corruption such as the sale of indulgences, the inquisition and recent sexual abuse scandals undermine the moral authority of the church counterargument, church acknowledges past wrongdoings and taken steps to reform and address these issues, emphasizing that these actions were contrary to its teachings that imagine if you create an anti-fraud society, you just hate fraud, or I don’t know, maybe you’ve got an anti-drug group. You say, oh, people are really addicted to opioids say, and then you find out that some of the members of your group are secretly addicted to opioids or secretly committing fraud that might undermine their moral authority as individuals. And if your group kind of covered it up, it might undermine a certain amount of your moral authority, but the message you’re preaching is still true. So the individual actors involved maybe rotten to the core or may just be sinful humans like you and I, but whatever the case, that isn’t the question.

In other words, Catholics don’t claim the Catholic church is the true church because Catholics are so obviously holy and never make mistakes to be sure the saints are a powerful witness for the church, but that’s not the actual argument. In fact, if you know anything about the Bible, then you know it’s filled with God’s chosen. People constantly sinning and rebelling to give two examples, two, Samuel chapter 12, the prophet Nathan scolds David and he scolds him over the whole affair with best Sheba where he commits adultery and then has Bathsheba’s husband put to death in Nathan’s words, thus says the Lord, the God of Israel. I appointed you king over Israel and I delivered you out of the hand of Saul, and I gave you your master’s house and your master’s wives and your bosom and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah.

And if this were too little, I would add to you is much more why have you despised the word of the Lord to do what is evil in his sight? You have smitten Uriah, the Hittite with the sword and have taken his wife to be your wife and have slain him with the sword of the Ammonites. So what should be coming through very clearly is on the one hand, David is the Lord’s anointed, and on the other hand, David has acted in a morally indefensible manner. Those two things are simultaneously true, and that’s a pretty consistent theme throughout scripture, both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament. To give one more example, Judas in John six, after Jesus’s eucharistic teaching causes many of his own disciples to draw back and leave. Jesus then says to the 12 in verse 67, will you also go away? Simon gives his great answer, Lord, whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life and we believe and have come to know that you were the holy one of God in Jesus and answers in a surprising way. In verse 70, did I not choose you? The 12 and one of you is a devil. This should remind us to avoid two errors. Number one, this person is called by God. Therefore, there without sin, we have to just blindly trust their moral judgment and authority. Now, they might be perfectly wretched.

Number two, this person is obviously a sinner and therefore they’re not called by God. Neither of those things can be sustained in light of the fact that God called Judas very clearly. Did I not choose you? The 12 and one of you as a devil means it is possible both to recognize the authority of Judas and to not believe in his personal holiness. So if you’re making an argument, these Catholics didn’t seem personally holy, even if that argument is true, that should be unsurprising to anyone familiar with the Bible that then lets us avoid some of the ins and outs. So I mean, if I didn’t have to worry about copyright issues, we’d be able to go deeper. On the sale of indulgence thing, you’ll have to wait for that video. I don’t know when, but when that one is released from the YouTube algorithmic prison it’s in, we will go into how a lot of the story you may have heard about the sale of indulgences is actually false.

As for the Inquisition, just to give a little bit of context, look, when you’re talking about scandals, I’ve said this before, you don’t want to minimize and downplay legitimate grievances. People have, by all means, if a Catholic priest hurt you, or if Catholics in the past have done something scandalous, the last thing you need is someone to say, oh, actually it wasn’t quite as bad as it sounded. But if your argument is the Catholic church is uniquely bad in history, or something beyond the ordinary expected level of human sin, well then a little bit of historical context can help. So the historian Henry Cayman, in his book Spanish Inquisition talks about how we have vastly overinflated the number of people who died during the Spanish Inquisition. Now the right number of people seemingly zero. So any number is going to be a problem, but a lot of what we thought were deaths were actually just burnings and effigy. And we now realize that lot of people we thought were martyred, were not martyred. They were symbolically martyred.

There’s a famous example, I believe it was Naomi Wolf who had an entire book that she was doing an interview and then suddenly realized the whole thesis of the book had been ripped out because she had mistaken actual condemnation to death versus these death and effigy. I think in her case it was a British context where she was looking at witchcraft trials, but this was a thing that was done where you were symbolically executed to show the judgment on your sin, but without taking your actual life. And so he’s looking at the different cases in Spain and says, effigies, which were burnt in the place of condemned absentees, may well form part of the total figures for executions given by early chronicler. In reality, the extreme penalty of death for heresy was suffered by a very much smaller number than historians once thought. A recent carefully considered view is that in these years of the high tide of persecution, the tribunal and Saragosa had some 130 executions in person that a Valencia possibly of 225 and then a Barcelona some 34.

So again, that’s not great, that’s not good. But if your argument against Catholicism is that one time in Spain, a few hundred people killed in 2000 year history, it’s actually kind of surprising. You can’t come up with better arguments than that because we don’t claim to be without sin. So all that’s to say the historical evidence is not as bad as people make it out to be. Modern historians actually realize that now, but also that we aren’t claiming a perfect history and that’s not part of the claim. So the historical arguments are weak. Second religious war and persecutions argument here. Historical events like the Crusades and the persecution of heretics and scientists, eeg Galileo obviously was going to be Galileo are used to argue the church has often been on the wrong side of moral and scientific progress. Now that is a loaded can of worms counterargument.

The church argues that these events must be understood within their historical context and that it has also been a significant for good in many areas. So I already talked about persecution of heretics with the inquisition, with the crusades. I think it ignores the fact that the church had actually been pretty okay with the fact that Christians were living under Muslim rule before there was a change in power in the holy land. And suddenly Christians there as well as pilgrim’s going to see the sight of our Lord were being harassed, persecuted, and their lives were being threatened and killed. And so it’s when a hostile power takes over the holy land that then western European powers organized by the Pope fight back to create a place that’s safe for Christians, safe for pilgrims. This turns out to be tremendously bloody, not least of all for the crusaders.

The death counts. There’s a range in terms of the number of crusaders who die, but it’s believed to be anywhere from like 30% of the Crusaders to like 80% of the crusaders on the first crusade. The accounts are sketchy. Now this turns out to be tremendously painful and violent for everyone involved, including for the Christians, but this was done to fight actual Islamic aggression in the holy land. So a little bit of this historical context, this is not about trying to expand a western European empire into the holy land. This is about trying to protect. It was basically, it was viewed certainly as a defensive action, I think not without cause. Nevertheless, it’s one of those things where we can look back and say, is that how we would do it today? The strange irony that you have people like Christopher Hitchens who argued against that and then supported something remarkably similar back in the Iraq war where it was much less clear Islamic aggression leading to a much more imperial looking and expansion sort of war.

So I’d just say to critics, just be consistent about it. If you say it’s never okay to go to war for any cause even defensively, then take that position. I think that position is wrong, but hold that. Or if you have a view that the state can go for lower interests, but Christians can’t fight for higher interests, then stake that out. But I’d like to hear an actual principled position if it’s just like no one in the 11th century believed in enlightened principles of freedom of religion. Okay, well, neither side is going to pass that kind of anachronistic sort of test very well. But I think it would be better to live by the more tolerant European attitudes where you have Muslim and Jewish ghettos for a long time, and depending on the country, there’s wildly different stories there than the increasingly oppressive situation that Christians and Jews found themselves in the holy land on the eve of the crusade.

Nevertheless, I don’t want to give just a carte blanche defense of the crusades. Likewise with the persecution of scientists, Galileo goes too far. He makes a number of incorrect arguments and he tries to argue that his scientific findings, which are partially incorrect, disprove the biblical claims he’s wrong about all that stuff. The church condemns this and he’s condemned two house arrests. This is hardly a horrible persecution. A lot of the Helio centrist ideas of people like Copernicus had been embraced. And so to take a maybe bad church trial that’s badly misunderstood and say this one guy was put on trial, not by the pope, but at a lower level, and that disproves the Catholic church for 2000 years. I mean, name a second scientist who gets persecuted in this way. The fact that it’s always Galileo should tell you something. The fact that there are what 40 craters on the moon named after Jesuit astronomers tells you that the church actually really likes science.

Even the fact that we were involved in these debates at such a level wasn’t just because we were like, we want to preserve Genesis. We’d been doing the cutting edge astronomy in Europe at the time. There’s much more to all of those stories. But all that’s to say we can acknowledge past historical failings. Nothing in the Catholic claim is inconsistent with that. And we can also say many of these past historical failings have been misunderstood and in many cases intentionally exaggerated by people with an ax to grind against the Catholic church. Those two things can both be true. Which one you emphasize as a Christian is going to depend a lot on the context. So, okay, this has now been an hour long video and I’ve only gotten through two thirds of the argument. So for your sake, we will leave the ethical and philosophical arguments maybe for another video if this is something you find interesting.

They’re also distinct enough because the ones so far are mostly the kind of things that a Protestant might say. The ones coming down are things that are getting much more from a secular perspective, like, oh, the church is bad on L-G-B-T-Q issues or abortion. Or you get purely atheist things like, what about the problem of evil? Those are different topics. I think those would be good for another video. So if you want another video in this series, let me know that. If you want more normal videos like I do the rest of the time, let me know that too. My feelings will not be heard either way. I hope this is helpful. I hope that we now see that chat GPT is a very powerful tool that cannot disprove the Catholic church. And I like how clearly it presented the argument in counter argument, but there is more to say in each of those cases. Alright, for Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.