James White DEBATE debrief (w/ John DeRosa)

Joe does a debrief with John DeRosa on the debate with James White on the Mass being a propitiatory sacrifice, and the infamous Ignatius statement.

Transcript:

Joe:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and this is going to be a little different of an episode than I normally do. As you may know, I was just down in AR Kansas this past week to debate James White on the sacrifice of the mass. I’m really pleased with how the debate turned out and from the 3000 plus comments that people have posed so far, it seems that many of you were pleased as well. So I’m going to link to it at the end if you haven’t seen it yet. I think many of the Protestants who watched the debate were actually surprised at just how much evidence there is for the Catholic case for the mass, both from the Bible and from honestly a huge number of early Christian sources. Now on that note, I want to give a quick follow up. One of the issues that came up during the debate was this question of whether or not we can trust the writings of St. Ignatius of Ancho from 1 0 7, whether they’re even from Ignatius and even whether Ignatius himself ever existed.

CLIP:

There has been a tremendous amount of scholarly skepticism expressed as to whether Ignatius even existed and which letters are actually, because there’s a Latin and there’s a shorter, and I was not taught that, but I’m sort of catching up with that. I hope Ignatius

Joe:

Moss and people like that are taking

CLIP:

A view, but it’s a fringe view in Scott. I hope it’s becoming the central view.

Joe:

After I recorded this recap episode you’re about to hear, I recorded it on Monday night when I was only 39. I’m 40 now. James came out with a 90 minute response video claiming he’d been misrepresented on whether or not he’d called Ignatius’s existence into question or whether or not he had called Ignatian Mythicism, the central view.

CLIP:

It’s good to be careful, it’s good to revisit what people thought was a consensus, and that’s all I was trying to do in answering the question. But then by misrepresenting me and I challenged him after the debate, I came up to him and said, I really didn’t appreciate the fact that in your closing statement, and he apologized. Now, I’m not sure what he is going to say on the video tomorrow. My strong recommendation to them is don’t do it. This was a contextual comment that got interrupted terms were introduced to it by Meyer. He seemed to misunderstand, and evidently other people have misunderstood as well. And look, I’ll be honest, the whole reason for this is to try to do damage to me and it’s dishonest. It lacks integrity. It lacks scholarship.

Joe:

You’ve got ears. I’m going to let you be the judge of that. I, on the other hand, went on capturing Christianity with an old friend of James White’s, Dr. Steven Boyce. Now Dr. Boise’s PhD is in Canon in text, and his doctoral work is on what’s called Codex H. This is an early collection of early writings that include the letters of Ignatius. Now, I think Dr. Boyz did a great job of setting the record straight on this issue of explaining where the scholarship actually is.

CLIP:

Honestly, I’ve known James White for a few years now, and that one threw me off. I mean, he and I have done programs together. I’ve been on his show and we actually covered a little bit of my dissertation specifically about Clement of Rome, but from that manuscript that has Ignatius, and I was a little bit surprised to hear him say it because I was watching it live and almost dropped my jaw on the floor. I was like, what did he just say? I thought I heard him wrong at first. Then it kind of repeated it, which will show the clip of, and it took everything in me not to message him that night and say, can you please clarify everything that you just said in that debate? Because that doesn’t sound like anything you would’ve ever said. I’ve heard these arguments from atheists. I’ve heard these from ISTs. I’ve never heard that from somebody like you, so it kind of threw me off.

Joe:

So if you’re interested in that topic, I encourage you to go check that out over on capturing Christianity. Otherwise, just know this. Yes, Ignatius did exist. The central view is that he existed. The questions we have about discrepancies in the manuscripts we have of Ignatius, which are the kind of questions we have about a lot of ancient works, these questions don’t call question the existence of the works themselves. Now, I mention all of that now because those two videos, James White’s response and then the caption Christianity one happened after I recorded this recap with John DeRosa. So I was really honored After the debate, several Catholic YouTubers reached out to see if I’d do a recap with them, and I said no to almost all of them. I don’t want this to become that kind of self-referential thing where I’m talking about myself, but I did say yes to John and the reason for it, at least in part is this.

A few years ago when I’d written a book, I was doing the rounds on radio shows and podcasts being interviewed about the book, and a lot of the questions were the same. Why this title? What made you choose to write this book? What do you hope people will take away? And at a certain point you can kind of do the interviews on autopilot, but when I got onto John’s show, classical theism, I remember being struck by how original and how good his questions were. It was obvious to me that he’d taken the time to read and digest a book and had thoughtful and probing questions. So I would say, first of all, you should definitely check classical theism out wherever you get your podcasts. And second, I hope you enjoy this conversation with him.

John:

So recently you had a debate with James White, a reformed Baptist, and the debate question was, is the mass a propitiatory sacrifice? How is that decided and what does propitiatory sacrifice mean?

Joe:

That’s a good question. So the backstory to the debate is basically this. I had been on the YouTube channel answering Adventism, doing a debate on the seventh Day Adventist idea of soul sleep, and it’s hosted by a guy by the name of Miles Christian and Miles is good friends with Jeremiah, nor I believe they’re good friends or at least friends enough that Jeremiah told Miles, who’s looking for somebody to debate James White And Miles suggested me as a Catholic who’d be willing to debate him, and then kind of encouraged me that, Hey, you should go debate James White, and I was happy to do so. The only issue was this was at this point already mid to late January, and it was the last weekend of February, first weekend of March. Originally they were asking, would you like to do two debates? And I was like, there’s no way I can do my normal job and also adequately prepare for two full length debates with James White.

That was his 295th debate. It was my first live debate in kind of a Catholic apologetic setting. I’d done some online debates, more of like this atmosphere where you’ve got in your home environment, you’ve got everything. But here the request was that I come down to Jonesboro, Arkansas to a reformed Baptist church of people who were pretty big fans of James White and very much not. There’s there’s one Catholic church in Jonesboro. And so I was like, all right, well this is going to be, that’s a little bit of a stretch, but I’m still interested. I mean, I want to go and proclaim the gospel wherever I’m invited. And certainly I don’t say yes to every invitation. I don’t mean that, but if there’s a good opportunity to proclaim the gospel, I should take that or I should at least take very seriously. So then we got started talking about possible topics and I threw out was the Old Testament canon closed at the time of Christ and James shot that down.

That one is something he has claimed multiple times that, oh, there was a Bible that everybody just knew in Jesus’ day and there’s a great deal of Jewish scholarship that that is just not true, and I would love to open that up and really delve into those sources. But I mean I’ve done the research on that. He makes claims about that. I don’t know if he’s done any research on it or not. That was thought be an interesting one. He countered with a solo scriptura debate, but he’s done that a million times. I feel like everyone’s heard his arguments in solo scriptura, you accept him or you don’t. That didn’t seem like a good idea for a debate. I wasn’t interested in just doing one more variation on that theme. So then I actually went to my Patreon, shameless joe.com, shameless plug right there and asked patrons, do you think I should debate James White?

And if so, what are some topics that would be fair, appropriately, broad and narrow where it’s not so broad that it’s like an unmanageable research burden? And related to that, the third criterion I was looking for was it wouldn’t take much prep time. You want it to be not so niche that 12 people are interested in the topic, not so broad that you’re all over the place. So it takes a little calibration. And then the last thing was that it had to be a topic that’s important, and so they threw out some ideas. I came up with some ideas and I ended up pitching eight topics to, and it was these eight topics. Number one was Marriott, perpetual virgin. Number two was the Old Testament cannon closed at the time of Jesus. Number three is the Eucharist, really Jesus. Number four is the mass of sacrifice.

You’ll notice in the original form, I don’t actually have the word propitiatory, number five is Christian worship sacrificial. That one turns out I think we just agree on, so that wouldn’t have been a good one. Number six, does water baptism save us since they’re Baptist? Number seven is divorce and remarriage acceptable in cases of adultery? Number eight is the priesthood biblical. And so I shot those ones over and basically said, I feel like I could do these. I don’t know that there’s are a lot of other topics I would be comfortable cramming in the amount of time we have between at this point, it was January 22nd and the debate was March 1st. So five weeks basically, and I’m still doing two podcast episodes a week and I’ve got travel and all this other stuff. I’m like, okay, and I know James is traveling too. It’s not just like I’m thinking of myself selfishly, but I also know it needs to be something he can prepare.

So he countered with is the mass a propitiatory sacrifice? And that makes sense because then certain Protestants are going to say, yes, it’s a sacrifice, but it’s a sacrifice of praise that doesn’t actually seem to be his argument about the Eucharist or about the Lord’s supper. He seems to be saying it’s not sacrificial. There are other ways we offer a sacrifice of praise and we offer bodily sacrifice in the way Romans 12 one talks about. I wondered if he was going to try to hammer that more. What he ended up doing in the course of the debate was anytime you’d quote an early church father talking about the sacrifice of the mass, he would just assert that they didn’t mean they just meant a sacrifice of praise. Even when in some cases they use the phrase propitiatory or when they say it’s a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins, et cetera, where it’s very obviously propitiatory.

So that then gets to the other half of your question, what does that word propitiatory actually mean? It means a toning or expiatory it also the propitiatory is the mercy seat, the place above the arc of the covenant. So it’s the place in which you are reunited with God and certainly in pagan usage it had a strong sense of divine wrath is being averted from you because angry gods, you’ve now appeased them in some way. So a sacrifice that brings you into right relationship with God would be another way of saying that. Obviously the way a Catholic might think about that, the way a Calvinist might think about that are going to have at least shades of difference maybe. But we both believe that there is a propitiatory nature to what Jesus is doing in his sacrifice. And so the real question could be almost said like this is the mass, the sacrifice of Christ, because that’s what we’re really asking. With all that terminological language, it is atoning, it is ex expiratory, it’s propitiatory. All we’re trying to say is what it is. Jesus accomplishes on the cross in solving the problem of sin in some way is carried on in the mass not as a second sacrifice, but as a new step in the ones for all sacrifice of Christ.

John:

We’re going to get into some of the content of the debate. I have a bunch of points and questions I want to ask you about because it was really, really interesting and I thought you did an excellent job, but just starting with some of a more stage setting questions. You mentioned you had about five weeks to prepare for this. I’m curious, how does Joe Hemi prepare for this debate? What did you actually do in preparation? Especially I know you have some young kids at home too, so it’s not like you could just spend all hours of the night reading and writing and so forth. So what did you do in preparation?

Joe:

Yeah, well, first got the flu, we all got really bad norovirus or something and that put me out of commission. Then moved offices, then flew to California. And so I’m watching this already short amount of time tick down and I’m thinking in my mind, okay, here’s some things I want to maybe say and going through sort of draft opening statements in my head of, oh, this would be a good argument. If you’ve ever done that thing where you’re maybe taking a shower and you’re thinking about an argument you’d like to win, doing a lot of that just throughout the day I’ll be walking and just thinking, okay, this would be a great point to make or maybe I should say this, and 90% of that stuff you never end up saying, which is fine. It helps you kind of think through the issues at hand.

I realized as I was getting into the last week that I was still pretty under prepared. I had not finished writing my opening statement yet. I had been doing research frankly on the side as I’m able to, or maybe if I’m stalled out in one project I’m working on, I would turn to this and just start gathering church fathers that talk about sacrifice or even you can do certain. So if you know how to do site specific searches on Google, you can search by domain. So if you type in site new advent.org/fathers, that is a digital, a very easily accessed and searched digital platform just of the church fathers based on the anti and post Ian fathers collections from Philip Schiff and I don’t remember who else. And so you can do a word search in there that is a really great way to find church fathers who maybe you didn’t realize had spoken on something if you happen to look up the right word. So if you look up the word appreciatory, find them talking about the cross, and you’ll also find them talking about the eucharistic sacrifice, which is great because like okay, very clearly they had this in view, this isn’t a coincidence. So that is a very helpful, I guess starting place. Another good place there is a book by, oh, I’m blanking on the name right now and I apologize. It’s a priest from, I want to say Boston College, I think a Jesuit priest who did a whole book just on the history of sacrifice

In the church fathers. What did they think about sacrifice? You know what, I think I’ve got it right here. Yeah. Father Robert Daley 2009 book sacrifice unveiled the true meaning of Christian sacrifice. And so it’s very much an academic work, but he cites to a bunch of different sources. So what I did there is I used that book as very much a jumping off place. Not every time they talk about sacrifice, are they talking about the Eucharist, but a lot of times they are. And so you can find all these times in the book where it’s like, oh look, he’s already put this together and some of these resources that you won’t find in Shae, they’re much more obscure, for instance. And a number of these I didn’t end up even using, but it was helpful to have these. So he quotes to numerous second century homilies on the theme of the Passover because there is this preaching theme.

Remember in the second century, the one hundreds, you have a lot of Jewish converts to Christianity and Judaism is a much more live reality for Christians in this era. You get much more like Jewish Christian apologetics because a lot of Christians were from Jewish backgrounds, new Jewish people. And so you have Justin Martyr’s dialogue with tfo, all this background to say they talk about the Jewish Passover and the Paca, the sacrifice of Christ is the new Passover, and they make these connections and they talk about what does this sacrifice mean in line of this other one? There’s stuff that maybe later Christians lose some of the Jewish background to the Lord’s Supper to the Eucharist. They’ve got it squarely in view and they’re talking about it. So it’s a great, that kind of resource is fantastic. Other, I mean brand Petrie’s book, the Jesus and the Jewish roots of the Eucharist.

If you want something that’s more kind of on a lay level that explains some of those things, his book is very good. But in terms of just getting, I knew I would need to strongly show, this is not my reading of Hebrews and my reading of the new and the Old Testament against James Whites. This is the consistent reading for 2000 years against James White. And additionally, actually my own book was helpful in this, so I have a book called The Early Church was the Catholic Church, and there’s a section in there on whether the mass is a sacrifice. Now, I am not specifically looking at the propitiatory nature of the sacrifice, but I’ve already done a lot of that research on here’s what Martin Luther and John Calvin said, denying that the mass was a sacrifice at all and here’s a wealth of early Christians before the year 200 that are convinced it is.

And so one of these two doesn’t understand it. And by the way, we’re not just dueling theologians in this case because it’s very clear from both the reformers themselves and from the church fathers that the early Christian worship treated the Eucharist as a sacrifice. So it wasn’t just this crazy theologian out here, it was like every week when Christians would come together to offer the Eucharist, this would be what they would offer. So as I was putting these pieces together, it became clearer what I wanted to do for an opening statement, and I was still stressing out about it until I finally just decided like, okay, I’m going to treat this an episode of my podcast and just write a script and think what would I say in a 15 minute episode? And that’s how long I have for the opening statement. And so I wrote a version that became this week’s Tuesday episode of Shameless Popery, and then I have a tweaked version that’s the opening statement of the talk, and that was just how I was able to finally put something on paper and then of course I reviewed it and all of that.

Then I sent it to Mike Caprice who does AV and all the behind the scenes stuff for turning my me in front of a camera into something that looks a lot better. And he also, he went through and reviewed it and picked out things that seemed too technical or obscure or clunky. I sent it in-house to the other guys at Catholic Answers and Jimmy Aiken had some very helpful feedback including to explain what the word propitiatory means, which I’d forgotten to do in the original draft. And then I sent it to a few friends of mine here in Kansas City and one of them is he’s got a PhD in theology, he’s a convert from Anglicanism. He had really good insights and also said, you’re probably going to hear these objections, so watch out for those.

John:

Who was that? You said that person’s name in the debate so fast and I couldn’t actually catch it. You said you sent it to Jimmy Aiken and Dr. Something.

Joe:

Yes, Dr. Aaron Williams. He was the head of theology at Donnelley College and now is doing a different mission within Donnelley College, which is a pretty cool mission, but that’s a story for another day. And so he’s brilliant, he’s really smart, and so I sent it to four other people and Aaron was really helpful in saying, okay, this part should be clearer, watch out for these kind of responses because for instance, sacrifice of praise versus Atory sacrifice, you should be prepared to explain what this difference is and how we know the Eucharist isn’t just a sacrifice of praise. And so he’s not coming from a reformed Baptist background, but coming from a Protestant background of more of a high church variety, I think it was charismatic and then Anglican. So he’s heard these objections before. He’s probably held these objections. So that was really helpful in kind of crafting that. And then the last thing that was really helpful is Catholic Answers agreed to put me up in a hotel for two nights, so I wasn’t driving in on the same day I was debating, so this meant I was driving down from Kansas City to northeast Arkansas, which is a tick over six hours and the entire way, I’m just listening to James White debates and listening to Catholics like Scott Hahn and Brent Petri talking about these same kind of themes. Sorry, this is a little bit out of order. James White’s prior debate with

John:

Robertson Genis. Which one? On the mass?

Joe:

No, yeah, it was on the mass. Was it Robertson Gen? He

John:

Did two with Syngen on the mass.

Joe:

Yeah, I think he was Robertson Gens. I’m sorry. Yes, he did a great job. But I also got a sense from listening to that, listening to James White’s G three talk. He makes the same arguments over and over again, so I had a good sense of here’s what you can expect, and then Trent said he’s going to ask you who’s the blessed man of Romans four? And then he didn’t really ask me that at the end, but I know he preached on that I think the next day after I left. And so once you do your homework, he has a certain depth he’s willing to kind of go to and then know deeper. So if you understand how to answer those objections, it doesn’t seem like there’s another step he’s willing or able to go. If you know the responses to his first line of argumentation, it doesn’t seem like there’s another line beneath that.

He’s just expecting to catch you off guard with that. So if you do your homework, if you say, okay, here are the questions you’re going to be asked, here are the answers to those questions, that can be really helpful. The last thing that was very helpful on Saturday, I’m kind of pulling all this stuff together and then also going through Dr. Lawrence Feingold’s book, the Eucharist, I believe it’s called Present Sacrifice in Communion, and it’s based on his course notes from seminary, but it is a mistic treatment. It’s not a work of apologetics. He is not trying to convince you, he’s just trying to explain Catholic theology, but he has a very large section in there on the sacrificial nature of the mass and how we can know that, where we find it in the fathers, all of that. So that was also incredibly helpful. It felt like every time I thought I was, I’d read something new and think, oh wow, I’ve got to include this. And then sorry for such long answers here. The last thing I knew I had to get together, well, the last two things. One, I knew I needed to be prepared for certain arguments he was going to make in Hebrews, and so I was thinking about that on the drive down, actually listened to the entirety of Hebrews, just red so I’d have it fresh in mind, but then also getting non-Catholic sources. So I had some Anglican and

John:

Which actually it’s funny you listened to it Red because White has remarked one time in one of his lectures, he actually likes the theory that Paul preached. Hebrews and Luke wrote it down. Obviously there’s a number of different theories that people have for who wrote Hebrews and when and how it came to be, but that’s one of the ideas is that it was originally preached

Joe:

And wrote, written down makes sense in a way. Certainly even the written stuff was meant to be read. Revelation chapter one has a blessing on the person who reads those words and on those who hear them. The idea that everyone needed to have their own Bible is not actually biblical. Ironically, in Luke four, when Jesus goes to the synagogue, he doesn’t have a Bible with him. They hand him a copy of the scroll of Isaiah, and so they don’t even have a Bible there. They have individual scrolls, and it just is like, oh, right before the printing press, individuals didn’t have copies of the Bible. This wasn’t a Catholic conspiracy. The written word was extremely costly to produce because you had to write everything down by hand. So yeah, it was kind of like the original way you would encounter the epistle to the Hebrews, whether it was preached by Paul or not. So yeah, you’re right. There’s something kind of fitting about that.

John:

I just want to flag a couple of things before we get more to the stage setting that were great that you brought up that I just want to point out for myself for the listeners, you are a professional apologist and yet still before walking into a public formal live debate are not just taking this, you’re doing a lot of homework and you’re consulting good sources, and you’re also willing to work with colleagues and get feedback, and I think that is just so fantastic because it’s so easy for people in this online world nowadays to be armchair quarterbacks and say like, oh, I would’ve said this, or This looks so easy. Just say this when they say this. But then when you’re actually up there, it is a whole nother level and you can’t just walk into this without preparation. So I actually appreciate the longer answer there to explain what it takes to be ready for a live formal debate.

Joe:

Yeah, I talked to Trent early on when I joined Catholic Answers and said, how long do you spend preparing for a debate? I don’t remember exactly what he said. I remember being shocked that it took him that much time because it was just like, that sounds like a lot of work, and I think it was one of the reasons I’ve been kind of dragging my feet. I love debating. I was a debater in high school and in college, but I did a lot of extemporaneous debate both as a formal category and also just because I was lazy. And so there would be times where maybe the other person prepared a lot, and I had done some preparation of course, but was maybe just relying on rhetorical skills to get through. But here it’s like you don’t want to do that because if you’re going to mislead someone about the truth of the faith because of your own laziness, that is a culpable error

And you’re on for that. So I wanted to prepare in a way that I could stand by win or lose and say, alright, Lord, I did my best with this, and especially because it was with James White, it was kind of this legendary figure in the world of Catholic Protestant debates, I doubt anyone has done as many debates on Catholic Protestant topics as James White. I mean, it would be a pretty short list if you looked at the whole history of the reformation in terms of who has debated Catholics as many times as he has in a quasi formal setting.

John:

No, absolutely. And he’s a strong debater and he does his homework. He actually did a recent episode of his dividing line where he went over some debate 1 0 1. He always remarks how he was shocked at the number of debates when he would show up, and his opponent had never even listened or read his stuff,

And

He just always made sure never to do that. It sounds like you obviously made sure to be very aware of the arguments that he was going to make. Just two more framing questions I want to ask you before we dig into the content, because now that you’ve done it, how was it different? How was this live formal public debate? How did it differ from some of the online formal discussions that you’ve done? Maybe what was different from what you were expecting or what it was like that made it different from just hopping on a stream and talking to some other Catholics or Protestants about an issue?

Joe:

Yeah, I’m used to sitting in front of a camera and in front of a camera. Even if you’re in front of an audience of thousands, you don’t see that, and so I see you on screen. I have no idea how many people are going to watch this, and that makes for a more intimate, relaxed setting almost by definition. So I tend to be a little more relaxed. I have to remember to not be too relaxed. I’m just totally slouching in my chair or something to still be professional about it in this setting, it was not like that. We’re both dressed up. Where in this space, again, it’s a reformed Baptist church in a reformed baptist town as far as I can tell that, I mean literally I looked up the religious history of Jonesboro. They have this wild, this is a total digression. They’ve got this wild history of a religious war that happened about a hundred years ago where two groups of Baptists got in a war over who should be the elder, and they were shooting on each other. Somebody got murdered, people were going to jail. I think there was a bomb threat. They tried to kill the mayor. It was pretty wild. So I was like, all right, this is a very baptist place. I mean, they weren’t doing any of that. I actually was struck by the incredible hospitality because I’m coming in there not as the hero of the story. I’m coming in as the wrestler who’s coming in to fight your team and the away team at the baseball game.

If you’re a chiefs fan going to an Eagles game, it felt a little bit like that. Okay, I’m coming in with my jersey on, and everybody knows they were so hospitable. They were the epitome of southern hospitality. They modeled good kind of Christian hospitality. They made sure I was taken care of. They brought me water and coffee, asked if I wanted anything to eat. They offered me snacks. They were very kind, made sure I was comfortable and everything else. And so they were very warm and friendly, even though they clearly were not rooting for me to win, which was fine. I didn’t expect them to. A friend of mine from seminary, father Jeff Abert had driven two hours across the state to come to the talk just so I would have at least one Catholic in the room that I knew was there. As it turned out, there were five others I think, but still I was not preaching to the choir and I knew it wasn’t going to be. So the other thing that was going on, and I think if you watch it, you’ll see this, I’m just so hyper. I’m so jacked up on adrenaline and I’m having the time of my life, but I cannot bring myself down, so I’m talking too fast, I’m getting too excited, I’m interrupting when I’m not even meaning to. I kick the, I’m sitting in front of a little desk lamp. I kick the cord and knock the desk lamp twice and have to bend down and plug it back in.

CLIP:

There has been a tremendous amount of skepticism, scholarly skepticism. Okay, let’s make sure we don’t, there we go. The light came back on Lum Chris, there has been,

Joe:

I’m just, I am a live wire for the entirety of the debate and then hours afterwards, I didn’t go to sleep until one 30 afterwards. I mean, it felt amazing. I was having a blast. It felt like I was saying and doing the things I was meant to say and do. But it was also like, yeah, I mean that adrenaline rush, and I think one of the things that made me realize from a pretty young age that I should probably do something in public speaking was the fact that instead of getting super nervous, I would get something much more like that. Oh, I love being, I mean, I get excited. I get animated around people. You could have me at a party. I’m the person who’s having trouble shutting up and listening because I’m like a golden retriever who’s just excited to be there.

John:

Livewire Meyer is what we saw in this debate. No, it’s funny that you say that. I’m glad that you can recognize that yourself as well. I think White made a comment towards the end about he wished there were fewer interruptions and so on. And in other debates, I think actually even a clip in the first mass debate he did with Syn Genis, he had a famous YouTube clip where he cut it and he was like, when your opponent gets nasty because of the way the cross X was going down, this is their first debate in the nineties. They had a more cordial one later they did the mass twice. But my point is I don’t think you were trying at all to be jump all over him or be now. It was just you were excited to give your answers, so you may have had more interruptions than you planned for.

Joe:

Yeah, it’s true. And also I hadn’t really thought, because the other thing that’s going on and that’s maybe not obvious is we are facing a countdown clock. And so whether you’re asking the questions or whether you’re answering the questions, when James is asking questions, he’s making statements throughout,

CLIP:

But we have the qualifications of elders bishops, same office in the New Testament.

Joe:

I don’t think they’re the same office.

CLIP:

Well, Paul uses them interchangeably. So the apostle,

Joe:

This is a problem with using the terminological, like if you take DEOs right for Deacon, it’s never used to describe the first seven deacons in Act Six. And it’s used to describe Jesus. It’s used to describe

CLIP:

Paul,

Joe:

It’s used to describe Phoebe,

CLIP:

But Paul provided the qualifications for elders and deacons. So those are laid out for first Timothy one

Joe:

Tus. You mean the first Timothy, right?

CLIP:

First

Joe:

Timothy and Titus, you can go back and watch and he’s giving a speech while he’s giving a question. He’s saying, oh, well Bishop and Presbyter means the same thing in the Bible. That’s not even a question. He’s just asserting that. And I’m like, well, no, it doesn’t. There’s no question there. And so when he’s just giving claims, I’m wanting to combat those claims rather than letting them just be baked into the question because it’s like, well, you’re asking a question from a false premise, but you’re not asking me that. You’re asserting it and then asking some further question. So on the receiving side, that was the issue there.

John:

And there is a strategy to that too, because if they make multiple claims plus a question and then you have to retrace through all that versus whether you just challenge the claim right away, which I think was your instinct, it’s more in the mind of the audience and fresh in your mind too. Whereas if you have to trace back through several claims plus the question, it can get a little bit tricky of how to dice that. All this stuff shows formal debates are hard. Cross-examination is hard.

Joe:

Yeah, very much. And if you don’t challenge it and you forget to answer part of it, he’s going to say, well, look, he doesn’t even contest Bishops and presbyters are the same thing in the Bible, but not in the Roman Catholic church game set match. And so you have to call those things out when they come up, but do so in a way that you’re not seeming rude. It’s a tough balance to hit. And so the rules at the outset where the questioner controls the time, meaning he is free to cut me off and say, all right, I want to ask the next question. And he does that. There are several times in his cross-ex of me where he cuts my answers short and wants to move on to the next question, and that’s fine. And I do the same thing for him, and I think I did it maybe too aggressively and people accuse me of interrupting him, but it’s like, oh, I’m supposed to, because I would ask him a question and he’d give these meandering answers that didn’t answer the question. There’s a famous one, it’s already become famous, where I asked him about Ignatius and rather than harmonizing the thing he had claimed with the historical evidence, he just sort of calls the historical evidence into doubt. And then let’s time expire because there was 90 seconds left.

CLIP:

Okay, I’ve only got 90 seconds here. But two things.

Joe:

His claim was that when the early church fathers talk about sacrifice, they only mean a sacrifice of praise when they’re talking about the Eucharist. And we know this because they didn’t believe that this was really the body and blood of Christ. Now, if you read Ignatius, you’ll see he says the exact opposite of both of these things. In his letter to this Meridians chapter seven, he talks about the Eucharist being the flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ, which suffered for us. And then he also refers to the Eucharist as the medicine of immortality in the antidote that prevents us from dying. The hallmark of a propitiatory sacrifice is the forgiveness of sins, the bringing about of atonement. He is ascribing those properties to the Eucharist. That doesn’t sound like a mere sacrifice of praise. If I sing a praise and worship song, I might be offering a sacrifice of praise to the Father.

I don’t claim this is the antidote that prevents me from dying, and it’s a medicine of immortality because that is more than you could biblically say about a sacrifice of praise. And so I ask him about that, and his answer is to say, well, there’s an emerging majority of scholars that question whether the Ignatian epistles were actually written by Ignatius or whether Ignatius even existed. And this became controversial. Someone in the past year, James White has quoted Ignatius without suddenly becoming an Ignatian agnostic. We’ll say he’s quoted Ignatius whenever it suits him as proof look in 1 0 7, 1 0 8, here’s what he was saying. And then he suddenly doesn’t know if Ignatius exists when Ignatius is inconvenient for him. But what people miss in that interaction is he never actually answers the question.

He never actually says, here’s how the Ignatian evidence can be harmonized with my claims about what people like Ignatius believe. He just takes the conversation somewhere else and then it peters out. So you can actually go through and see the number of times I ask what I think are pretty clear questions that could be answered with a yes or no, that instead get a story that doesn’t answer yes or no. And so I was trying to hurry him up so I could get to the point of what I was asking. And again, I think that’s just a hard thing to do without coming off as overly aggressive or rude or anything like that.

And so I’m going to just say hopefully I learned how to navigate that in a way where I can achieve the things I’m trying to achieve in cross-examination without coming off as a jerk. I wasn’t even, to be honest with you, this was not strategic on my end. I was just kind of like, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, but this okay, and I can be a little bit that way in real life if I’m not careful because I often am thinking quicker and talking faster than the people I’m with, and I have to just learn to slow myself down just as, I guess I’d say this was more a human failure than a debate tactic, so hopefully that’s one thing I would do differently doing it over again.

John:

I want to ask you about the format, because this was the first, I think this was one of the first debates I’ve seen where there were opening statements, but then no rebuttal periods and then jumping right into cross-examination and also a lot of cross-examination too. It was pretty lengthy, substantial periods. What did you think about that format and is there anything you’d like to see tweaked for your future public debates or is that one that you’d like to go with?

Joe:

I proposed that one actually, and I knew it was going to be tough. James is a formidable cross examiner, but he also is, it sounds pejorative to say he’s a yarn spinner. He tells a story in his talks and the stories are often filled with facts that are debatable or take longer to debunk than it is to kind of say them. So in his earlier debate with San Genis, he begins by quoting Theodate and he tells this story, oh, is this from a Baptist? Was this from a modern person? No, it’s from the fifth century Christian named Theodate.

CLIP:

Let me begin my time with these words. It is plain to those who have been instructed in divine things that we do not offer any other sacrifice, but we make commemoration of that one saving sacrifice for the Lord himself commanded us saying, do this in remembrance of me and this we do in order that by contemplation we may call to mind the figure of the sufferings which he underwent for us and may stir up our love toward our benefactor and await the fruition of good things to come. Now, who could have made a comment such as this in regards to the Lord’s supper? Was it a Baptist, was it someone in modern times? No, that was a man from the fifth century by the name of Theodate.

Joe:

I went and looked at the source and in context he’s saying something closer to the opposite of what James is saying. Now, I don’t want to accuse him of purposely taking him out of context. I think it’s quite possible he has only seen this line from Theodoric because I haven’t found theist works quoted in English in a full length version, yet I found a longer translated passage and theod, it’s question is basically how do we harmonize the ones for all nature of the sacrifice with the fact that we offer the divine liturgy every day, but white cuts that question out. If you ask that question, then it’s very clear that the utter, it sees that the sacrifice in Hebrews and the sacrifice of the liturgy are the same, and then his question makes sense in light of that, he cuts that question out and it makes it sound like he’s denying that the liturgy is a sacrifice at all.

If you read the prior sentence, he’s asking how we can have this earthly sacrifice while there is one divine eternal sacrifice. And so you’ve got lots of things like that, and so in a speech, he can get through a lot of those things and it’s hard to keep track of them, like you said. It’s not just that it’s fresher on the audience’s mind going through point by point, somebody else’s talk can be very difficult to do and it sucks up a lot of time and a cross examination where you can pause them point by point and say, wait a second, is that true? Then someone who’s prone to maybe being a little looser with some of the disputed facts, they’re not going to get away with that nearly as much because you can pause them every time they start to do that and say, all right, well, is that the case? Is that not? And so you have to deal with that a little bit less. So I think I prefer that format at obviously it’s more nerve wracking on the other end to know I’m going to get cross examined for 30 minutes, two 15 minute chunks. But the other thing that made me like this style, so I got this style from this Adventism debate I’d done before and thought, okay,

I get how that works. The two other things I liked about it, one rebuttals that aren’t the closing statement are a weird kind of beast because you can’t write them out ahead of time. And so they’re often from a speech writing perspective, a little bit of a rhetorical jumble because you’re just sort of like, oh, they say this and I say this, they say this, I say this. And I don’t think that’s a very persuasive form of presentation in either direction. You mean most of the time there are people who can do that very well. I think it’s just a rhetorically weak part of a debate. You can pre-write your opening statement. I had pre-written the last chunk of my closing statement, although I lost it, that you can do a little bit of that where you know how you want to wrap up things, you know how you want to present things in the beginning, and then you can have an conversation that’s a little more rhetorically free flowing. So yeah, I was a fan of that. The other thing I liked about it was it meant I had to do less prep work in terms of speech writing.

And yeah, I think it was cleaner in one sense, I think to do it a different way, I’d want to have to, or I guess I would have to get used to good rebuttals and I haven’t seen a ton of rebuttals. I’ve been really impressed by in general, the one thing we did that I hadn’t planned in the original structure was Jeremiah Noer proposed adding an intermission after the first set of cross-examinations. That was a very smart idea, and it helped both of us kind of get our bearings and figure out where we were going to go next and all that. So yeah, I think on the whole, I liked that structure. I haven’t heard anybody say one way or the other structure wise. I got lots of people who told me that they thought I did well on the opening and the first cross-examination, but that the second set of cross-examinations were too muddled and in the weeds to be super effective for either side. And I think that’s probably true. We were not getting very far with either person’s argument, which maybe that could have been done differently as well.

John:

Well, let’s get into some of the content of the debate because, and of course I want to encourage listeners if they haven’t seen the actual one. This debrief is excellent, keep listening to Joe’s thoughts on it, but go back and watch the original debate because it’s really exciting and a lot of good stuff that you can learn on this topic. But in your opening statement, you presented six different points and perhaps surprisingly, you started with a point made by Luther and Calvin. So what was that point and why was that important that you decided to start your case with that?

Joe:

Yeah, so I started the case by quoting Luther and Calvin talking about how the sacrifice of the mass is universal. And so the way I framed it is like today we can have a debate about whether the mass is a propitiatory sacrifice, but you got into a time machine and you went back to the dawn of the reformation or right before there was no debate, and you don’t have to take my word for that as a Catholic. You can listen to Martin Luther who says there is no opinion more generally held or more firmly believed in the church today than this, that the mass is a good work and a sacrifice. And Luther doesn’t just say that’s the view today. He talks about how even the words in the mass, like the prayers that Christians had been praying throughout the centuries suggest and describe it as a sacrifice.

Similarly, John Calvin claims that the devil somehow not only obscured and perverted, but altogether obliterated and abolished, vanished away and disappeared from the memory of man Christ’s lord’s supper, which is frankly pretty wild claim. Jesus establishes the Lord’s supper and Satan beats him. He doesn’t just replace it or create a rival to it. The rival completely eliminates the Lord’s supper and causes us to ever forget it was anything other than this demonic, counterfeit. That’s his claim about the mass. And so I’m doing that for a couple of reasons. One to show the radical nature of the reformation. Remember, these are people who have their idea of what Christian worship is praise and worship music, and then somebody preaching for 40 minutes. That’s all they’ve known. That’s all. This is what they think Christian worship is supposed to look like. I’m trying to challenge that from the roots by explaining to them how they’re part of this fringe radical movement from the 16th century that just happens to have found a home on the American frontier.

Frankly. The other thing I’m trying to do is make sure that we are going to frame this, and I’m very glad I did this because James, throughout the debate suggested often pretty explicitly that you can’t trust Catholics to be able to do history because they have a set of theological priors. Now that is, I think, insulting and silly. I mean, you might as well say, well, you can’t trust the Calvinists. They also have theological P priors. But I’m glad that I had Anglican sources, orthodox sources, and Martin Luther and John Calvin saying the same things I was saying. And so I was prepared for him to come up with some out of context church father quote, and this to be a preemptive way of saying, well, who are you going to trust on this? You’ve got this guy you don’t even know about and you haven’t seen the context, or you’ve got the reformers admitting that the people before them didn’t believe this.

If they did, if there really was an early Christian belief in something like the reformed Baptist liturgy, why would Calvin and Luther shy away from that? I mean, granted, they weren’t reformed Baptists, but you would at least expect if something looked really Protestant in the early church, they would leap on that. But they don’t. They acknowledge early Christianity stands against him. So framing it that way, this is coming from law what’s called a statement against party interest. Normally, you can’t bring a non-sworn statement into court. So if somebody says, I saw Mr. Smith do the crime, or I’m innocent, or something like that, and they’re not under oath, you can’t admit that as testimony. The exception is if it’s self indicting, if somebody says, I killed Mr. Smith, even if they’re not under oath, you can bring that into court because they have no motive to say that except it being true

Speaker 5:

Because

Joe:

It doesn’t help their case. So when Martin Luther and John Calvin are making these claims, the only reason they’re going to say those things is because they’re true, not because it helps their case, because it doesn’t. Showing that you reject everybody on worship doesn’t make you look more credible. And so there’s much more motive for James to put a thumb on the scale and the historical evidence than Martin Luther and John Calvin saying that the evidence is against them. So that’s how I wanted to kind frame it.

John:

You also included in the opening, just kind of moving on to another point, part of your case was scriptural and you had appeal to some passages specifically in Isaiah and Malachi. So what were those two passages and how did they support your case?

Joe:

Yeah, the last chapter of Isaiah, Isaiah 66 is about the Gentiles coming into the people of God, and in verse 20, it says, they shall bring all your brethren from all the nations as an offering to the Lord upon horses and in chariots and so on to the Holy Mountain, Jerusalem. And then it says in verse 21, oh, actually then it says, just as the Israelites bring their serial offering in a clean vessel to the house of the Lord. So it’s a very explicitly offertory image, like a sacrificial looking image. Verse 21, it says in some of them, meaning the Gentiles also I will take for priests and for Levites says the Lord. Now why does that matter? Because a Protestant can say, and I should say here, a Protestant of a certain variety like a reformed Baptist. Other Protestants are going to disagree with this Anglicans, some Lutherans who are fine with the idea of a priesthood, but a Protestant of a low church variety is going to say one or more of three things.

One, there are no priests in the New Testament. Two, the only priest is our high priest, Jesus Christ, or three, all of us are priests by virtue of our baptism or by virtue of our being members of the church, something like that. There’s a priest of all believers. The problem with taking just one or more of those three views is Isaiah 66 doesn’t say, and none of them I will take for priests and for Levites, it doesn’t say one of them I’ll take it doesn’t say all of them. It says some of them, which is the one view that Protestants of this variety refuse to accept it some. And not all Christians have a priestly office that isn’t shared by the rest of the collection of the faithful, and yet there it is plaintiff’s day in Isaiah 66. Then you’ve got Malachi one, which is this critically important, which passage and I go into more depth in the talks and in the debate more broadly, it’s a repudiation of the Jewish priests in the time of Malachi for polluting the altar of the Lord, which the Lord calls the Lord’s table and very explicitly between the beginning and end of verse seven, it refers first as an altar and then it’s the Lord’s table.

So that gives us a context for table of the Lord

Speaker 5:

When

Joe:

We see that Eucharistic context in the New Testament. And then it talks about how instead God is going to replace this corrupted priesthood with the priesthood from the nations, meaning the Gentiles and from the rising of the sun to its setting. You may remember that language from mass, a pure offering will be made to the Lord’s name. Now, the early Christians from as early as the ate in the first century point to the Eucharistic sacrifice as the fulfillment of this. And so this is something I saw some of the debate comments saying, oh, this is about the end times. No one in the early days of Christianity thought this was an end times prophecy. It’s about gathering the nations, which is what Jesus comes to do in the first coming, bringing the Gentiles into the people of God. We see that happening in acts, and so very clearly they understand that what is happening here is the fulfillment of Malachi one. The dedicate talks about it. St. Justin Martyr talks about it. EZ talks about it. All of them quote Malachi one 11 and apply it explicitly to the Eucharistic sacrifice. And so that also tells us it’s not just praise. Something deeper is going on here.

John:

That’s a helpful overview. White did push back on those verses in his second cross examination of you, but I’m going to come back to that in a little bit. I want to ask you a little bit more about some of the opening points before we get to that, but he did have some pushback on those verses eventually getting his opening statement. One of his big arguments in his opening was that the true sacrifice of Christ, according to the book of Hebrews is first it’s once for all, and second, it perfects those for whom it is made. And so he argued the mass can’t be the sacrifice of Christ because it involves the perpetuation or the repetition of a sacrifice, which violates the once for all aspect. And also Catholics can attend mass many, many times in their life and yet still die. Im pure, which violates the perfection aspect. So therefore he says, given that the book of Hebrews declares that the sacrifice of Christ must have those characteristics, the Catholic mass can’t be the sacrifice of Christ. How do you begin to disentangle that? That was definitely one of his main arguments.

Joe:

Yeah, that’s right. So if you actually read Hebrews, you’ll see where this argument badly misunderstands the epistle to the Hebrews. But I guess the way to frame it is to first say, okay, if this is a once for all sacrifice, when does that once for all sacrifice happen? And I tried to press him on this and I don’t want to put words in his mouth because I don’t remember exactly how he sort of answered it, but the standard Protestant answer is that this is all good Friday, that Jesus on the cross is fulfilling the once for all. The problem with that answer is twofold. One is when you people when they were saved, nobody says Good Friday, they point to some moment in their own life in the white sort of an Anabaptist, if he was more reformed. The reformed have a distinction between salvation achieved and salvation applied or redemption achieved and redemption applied.

And so they’re grasping towards this reality that the merits or whatever, however you describe what Christ has done for us on the cross has to then be applied in our life. And here’s why, because if you say I was saved from the moment Jesus died on the cross thousands of years before my birth or almost 2000 years before my birth, then you were never unsaved then you cannot say you’re saved by faith because you were saved apart from faith, apart from anything, you were never unsaved. And so as much as Protestants get upset about the idea that Mary could be saved by grace, you would have to say something like some supernatural grace saved you totally apart from faith or baptism or works or anything at all, where it was just never the case that you were unsaved, you never needed a redeemer during your lifetime or that redeemer had already redeemed you.

So white doesn’t say that and it would be ridiculous too, but that then calls into question, well what do you mean by a once for all sacrifice and something else still has to take place that something else can’t be a second sacrifice, but it’s still part of the application of that sacrifice. And what Judaism offers and Protestantism doesn’t is a framework to make sense of that. So for certain sacrifices, and the most significant of these is the Passover you were required to eat the sacrifice for it to be applied to you. So you know what I’m just going to quote, I didn’t quote this in the talks, but the Jewish encyclopedia has a very helpful article on the Passover sacrifice and it says the Paschal sacrifice belongs to the Shela meme, thus forming one of the sacrifices, Shaim like peace offerings for me, one of the sacrifices in which the meal is the principle part.

So it’s not just an optional part, it is the core of the sacrifice, not just that the animal or the sacrificial victim dies, but that you then eat them. So if you don’t have that, then you have a problem understanding what’s happening in the Passover because in the Passover it isn’t enough that you killed the animal. You then have to apply its blood, you smear the blood on the doorpost and you have to eat its flesh. Now if that’s right, you’re not sacrificing the lamb, that lamb is dead. It doesn’t come back to life and get killed the second time. So it’s not a resacrifice, but it’s a continuation of the sacrifice. You might even say you are presenting the blood of the lamb on the doorposts of the door and you’re becoming in St. Paul’s words in one Corinthians 10 partners in the altar by eating the sacrifice.

And so it is striking that when St. Paul in one Corinthians 10 tries to explain how it is we can become partners with Christ. The question he’s posing in one Corinthians 10, 16 and 17, he points to this that when you eat sacrifices, you become partners in the altar. And so that gives us a framework to make sense of this. If you don’t have this, then it’s true the mass doesn’t make any sense, but neither does salvation more broadly. Neither does any Protestant kind of salvation because you say, I don’t know how to get from what Jesus did to me being saved. So that’s the first part. The second part is within Hebrews itself. So the once for all phrasing happens three times in Hebrews and it assumes that you know your Torah, that especially the book of Leviticus and actually James White, he loves the epistle to the Hebrews and he has said exactly this before that the author of Hebrews assumes Leviticus.

And since many Christians don’t, they don’t know what’s going on. So the once for all language is used first in Hebrews 7 27 about how Christ has no need like those high priests to offer sacrifices daily first for his own sins and then for those of the people, he did this once for all when he offered up himself. So the question we should be asking is when does Jesus offer up himself? Is it when he dies or is it at another point? Because a sacrifice isn’t just a victim dying. If you’ve got a cow and you kill it, that doesn’t automatically make it a sacrifice. There’s an offertory dimension that you have to do in addition to the death of the animal in which you dedicate it to God, you lay down the life of the animal. Where does Jesus do that? Well, explicitly at the last supper that he offers his body and blood.

The second place we see this is in Hebrews nine and it says, when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come then through the greater and more perfect tent not made with hands that is not of this creation, he entered once for all into the holy place, taking not the blood of goats and calves but his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. There’s two things to note there. First, this is explicitly paralleled with Yom Kippur. The first half of Hebrews nine spells that out in great detail and second Christ is taking blood already shed. So the once for all sacrifice here is clearly not just Good Friday.

And then the third place you have the ones for all is Christ appearing at the end of the age. So all that’s to say, and there’s actually places throughout Hebrew seven to nine where it talks about the high priest going into the holy place in Yom Kippur to make the sacrificial presentation, which is part of the sacrifice. And then Christ fulfilling this not on good Friday, but 43 days later when he ascends into heaven. And so that is a pretty significant kind of passage if you are saying all of this happened on Good Friday. Well, you cannot say Christ entered into the holy place in heaven presenting our blood on Good Friday because when he rises from the dead on Easter Sunday, he says he has not yet ascended to the Father. So you can’t claim he was doing this priestly work then. So you have to understand the priestly sacrifice is bigger than just the death of Christ.

So that gives us a framework to say the death of Christ happens once for all. No one else ever needs to die for our sins, but it has to be applied to everyone throughout history. And the Jewish framework tells us how to do that two ways. One, the presentation of the blood, which Christ does in heaven, and two, the eating of the sacrificial offering which happens at the last Supper. And so if we have that framework, then it makes sense to say what the mass is repeating is not preparation day with the killing of the lamb. What it is repeating is the Passover meal at the eating of the already sacrificed lamb to participate in that sacrifice.

John:

I think that’s a really helpful start for answering that first charge about the ones for all nature. Just to follow up on the Oh

Joe:

Yeah, the perfect perfected

John:

Nature. Yeah. So one verse he quoted to Hebrews 10 14 for by a single offering, he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. And his argument usually continues that because Christians on his view are perfected by the righteousness of Christ being applied to them or being imputed to them, that’s how they can have peace with God and know that they are justified. But on the Catholic paradigm, you can go to the mass many, many times in your life and still die. Im pure. So how can we say that the mass is the perfecting sacrifice of Christ?

Joe:

Yeah, there’s really two ways this is, although this appears to be an argument about propitiation in a lot of ways, this is an argument about something more like perseverance of the saints and about imputation versus infusing. So I tried to kind of avoid this because it’s such, it could be a whole other debate if you assume a Calvinist framework where you’re just legally declared righteous and not really made righteous, then you’re like, yeah, over and done with. But even then it’s not perfecting once for all because it still has to be applied in your life. So even if you think it only has to happen once in your life, you still think it has to happen in your life and in the other person’s life and in the other person’s life for every member of the elect at least. So his understanding of what once for all means there doesn’t make sense of the Catholic view, but it also frankly doesn’t make sense of the Calvinist view because again, it isn’t as if on Good Friday all of the elects became perfect legally or actually from that moment forward, that is not actually what Calvinism believes, that it still says people get saved and if people get saved, then the merits of Christ will have to be applied throughout history.

And if the merits of Christ can be applied throughout history, then it’s not once for all in that sense, not in the sense that he understands it to be. So then the question is, okay, so what does it mean? It means like Christ’s sacrifice is able to perfect you. It doesn’t tell us how, but it does tell us who that you don’t need a second sacrifice to be perfect. Catholics and Protestants actually agree on that, that Christ’s sacrifice by itself is capable of perfecting you. The only place we disagree is how that happens. So he presents it as if we think Christ’s sacrifice isn’t good enough and that is flagrantly untrue and I think he knows that’s untrue. Everyone who’s ever been saved on the Catholic account or the Calvinist account has been saved by the blood of Jesus Christ, not anybody else’s blood. And so that is what Hebrews is teaching, that is what we believe in the perfecting language, still the notion that something else is going on because it talks about perfecting those who draw near or for by a single offering. He has perfected for all time those who are sanctified. But then you have this other language about us still being sanctified. So if you just teach, excuse me, just treat sanctification as a one-time past event, you’ve interpreted this in contradiction to the rest of scripture, and again, if you really think it through, you’d have to say, okay, then we were all sanctified from Good Friday and I don’t know a single Protestant who actually believes that to be the case.

John:

I want to move on to a few other points, but this is really, really exciting, Joe, to go through some of this because there’s just a lot of important theology that you covered, and as you realize, although the debate was on one main topic, you end up getting into all these other topics which gets complex and hard to track, but

Joe:

Oh, I’m so sorry. It’s

John:

Super

Joe:

Interesting. I had one thing I forgot.

John:

Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.

Joe:

In the debate and just until now,

John:

Yeah, definitely

Joe:

Hebrews 13. There’s a line I should have mentioned that I think would be good for anyone who gets into these conversations because I’m suggesting I said it pretty clearly earlier that Yom Kippur and the Passover are what to keep in mind. If you want to understand Hebrews well, Hebrews 13 verse 10 says, we have an altar from which those who serve the tent have no right to eat. So it is talking about an altar that we are eating from. That sounds pretty darn eucharistic and it’s explicitly about a Christian altar we’re eating from in contrast to the Jewish one because this is better promises.

John:

Okay, no, thank you for pointing that out. That’s a good verse to highlight. No, that’s a good verse to highlight. Well, let’s go to this priestly idea though, because White did press you that when you think about the New Testament, he was asking does it mention priest? Does it call the apostles priest? Does it discuss the qualifications for a priestly office? Because after all, as white pointed out, the New Testament never uses the Greek word for priest when talking about the apostles and elders, and it never discusses specifically the priestly office as a new covenant phenomenon. And so he really pressed you on this. How do you explain that from the Catholic perspective?

Joe:

Yeah, I think God really prepared me for that question because the morning of the debate somebody said, oh, have you read Charles Gore’s book, the church and the Ministry? It’s got some really relevant stuff that might be helpful for you. And Charles Gore is an Anglican. He was actually the chaplain to Queen Victoria, and he makes this point that 26 of the 27 books of the New Testament don’t refer to Jesus as a priest. And so the question that a curious Protestant should be asking, okay, remember first of all, Hebrews was a disputed book. Not every Christian had Hebrews in their Bible. So for many Christians, their Bible didn’t actually describe Jesus explicitly as a priest, and yet he was, and it’s not as if everybody other than the author of Hebrews was unaware of this, that Jesus is presented as a priest even when he is not named as a priest.

So I call this the terminological argument. You’ll find people say, oh, well, we don’t find that word explicitly in the New Testament, and that is the weakest form of argument. We don’t see the word trinity. It doesn’t, okay, but do you see the reality? And so when you see in the other 26 books, Jesus is presented as a priest, but he’s not called one, but then you might still ask, well, why isn’t he called one? And Charles Gore acknowledges that there’s a really good answer that at the time of the New Testament, the word priest has specific meanings for Jews and for pagans, and it would be misleading and not helpful to call a Christian priest a priest. In that context, he gives a particular example of Acts 4 36 where St. Barnabas an early Christian convert Paul and Barnabas, he’s a Levite, so imagine if you call him a priest, what are you saying there?

It sounds like you’re saying he’s part of the Jewish priesthood if you’re actually saying he’s a Levi and not a priest. You see what I mean? So priest is actually an unhelpful term to use in those particular contexts, and gore even suggests you could imagine a culture in which it would be smart for Christians to call their clergy something other than priest just to avoid scandal and confusion. So instead of being called the chief priest, which he is, St. Peter calls him the chief shepherd and first Peter five and the shepherd in bishop of our souls and first Peter two, and so you’ve got Pastor Shepherd and you’ve got Bishop being used to describe a priestly office. The argument that Catholics, Orthodox Anglicans are going to make is yeah, those other times when you see shepherds and bishops referred to that also means a priestly office, and we don’t use the word priest for that, for the exact same reasons we don’t normally for Jesus. The only exception is Hebrews where you have an entire book explaining in what way Jesus is and is not like the Jewish high priesthood. There’s no risk of confusion there because you’re willing to devote a good chunk of 13 chapters to explaining what you do mean. But a normal writing that doesn’t have that much time to explain is probably better served by just not using that term in that context.

John:

No, that’s a good point. That’s a very good point about the potential for confusion and for scandal. I suppose to buttress the case even more, I’d be curious about when they first started being called priests and

Speaker 5:

Kind

John:

Of tracing some of that history. I’m not sure if you’ve had a chance to look into that, but you make a very good point about that even if they weren’t called priests, if the New Testament is portraying the sacrifice of Christ is sacrificial, if it’s portraying the Eucharistic sacrifice, the fact that they have to eat the lamb, eat Jesus’s body and blood, that there’s an altar you quoted in Hebrews 13, and then we see them kind of carrying on this ministry in a priestly way, even if it doesn’t explicitly call them priests, there can kind of be a cumulative case there. And I meant to grab it off my shelf. I apologize to the listeners that I didn’t. I know in Richard Baum’s, Jesus and the eyewitnesses, he has a quote from, I’m pretty sure it’s second century and I think it’s, it might be through UUs because when you read UUs, the early church historians, he’s quoting all these other people.

Anyway, long story short, the guy’s name is like Polycrates as far as I remember, or poly crease, however you say it, Polycrates, and it’s like a long block quote. Long story short, he describes that the Apostle John wore the breastplate of a priest and he uses the word priest. So if the Apostle John or the elder John was walking around with the breastplate of a priest, that would be another indication that they might’ve been carrying on a priestly office. Though for some reasons, like the ones you mentioned and that Gore argued for, they might’ve just not used that term. But I am curious to kind of go deeper into that history.

Joe:

Yeah, I’d be happy to go as deep as I can go. I’m sure there’s more stuff that I remember now that you mentioned it, the very line you’re talking about, because I’ve mentioned that in another context, I know there’s a few places. One a little bit again in presenting it before you name it, Hebrews five talks about what a priest is. A priest is one who offers sacrifice. In one Corinthians 10, when St. Paul compares his offering of the Eucharist to the Jewish priest and the pagan priest offering sacrifices at the altars, he is presenting himself as acting in a priestly way. He doesn’t name it that, but it is an unavoidable reading because if you read the argument First Corinthians 10, Paul makes this threefold parallel between how do you have communion in the Jewish altar and the pagan altar and in the Christian altar and in each case is by eating the sacrificial offering.

He says all that. And so that assumes priesthood in first Clement, I take the later dating of probably 96, I know other people who are very smart, take 68 like right before the destruction of the temple. Either way, first century in one Clement 40 to 42, it talks about the peculiar services assigned to the high priest, to the priest, to the Levites, to the layman, and then says, let every one of you brethren give thanks to God in his own order, living in all good conscience with becoming gravity, and then says not in every place or the daily sacrifices offered or the peace offerings, the sin offerings, the trespass offerings, but in Jerusalem only. So if you take that literally, this is why some people take that as being from literally before the year 70, whereas the traditional dating is later around 96. I think what he’s doing there is showing that the high priest, priest, deacon layman connection parallels the high priest priest, Levi Layman, because otherwise, why in the world is he telling people how to observe Jewish priestly rituals, whether this is 68 or 96, that’d be very strange advice to give to a bunch of Christians at a time when they’re being expelled from synagogues and there’s a lot of acrimony, but that he seems to be describing admittedly in kind of parallel language, this as a priestly thing.

A few other places, I’ve actually got some in my notes, Saint CPR of Carthage. Now he’s in the two hundreds depending on the book, either letter 62 or 63 says for if Jesus Christ our Lord, and God is himself the chief priest of God, the Father, and has first offered himself a sacrifice to the Father and has commanded this to be done in commemoration of himself, certainly that priest truly discharges the office of Christ who imitates that which Christ did. So he’s talking about how there are priests on earth commissioned to do this in remembrance of Christ. That’s I think pretty unavoidable kind of language right there. Then actually the theodate quote that James White had before has the line then why do priests of the new covenant celebrate the mystical liturgy? So it is explicitly priestly as well. I want to say serial of Jerusalem may be one of the first, but I don’t remember that offhand

John:

And I was just going to add it, and it might make sense that once Christians and Catholic Christianity was more established and more secure, that people understood, okay, this is different from Judaism. This is different from other sorts of paganism. This is different. And then there’s all the different gnostics and so on. It took a little bit of time until those different strands were kind of an orthodoxy was established. Then maybe there became a time when, okay, it’s not going to be scandalous or confusing to now call them priests. And so we’re going to use the word priest, but it refers to our own Christian priests.

Joe:

Exactly, and I mean the thing is if you think this isn’t a priesthood, you seemingly think that they are not offering sacrifice. But well before you get them universally called priests, you see universally the idea that they’re offering sacrifice. And so since what a priest is, is someone who offers sacrifice, I mean it’s like this. If I said that guy has a lot of sheep that he tends, I haven’t used the word shepherd, but you couldn’t say, well, I guess he’s not a shepherd because he didn’t say shepherd. I described what a shepherd is. And so if Hebrews five is right that a priest is one who offers sacrifices, and here these people called to offer a sacrifice, nobody else can offer. That’s a priesthood guys. And so anything else is just quibbling about words.

John:

One of the exciting parts during the debate, and you used the word hyper to describe yourself earlier, but I also want to say just excited but also passionate. It was clear you’re very passionate about these topics. It came out during the cross-examination when you had brought up the point that the mass represents Christ’s sacrifice in an unbloody manner, and in response white asked, well, the bloodless sacrifice is still propitiatory. How can that be in light of the teaching of the book of Hebrews that without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins? And you got very excited. You’re like, that’s a great question. That’s a great question, but I am actually curious. And he’s like, it is a good question. So how do you square that with Catholic theology?

Joe:

Read Hebrews itself where it talks about the work of Christ in presenting the blood when he ascends into heaven. It is an unbloody presentation of a bloody sacrifice. Christ is not bleeding a second time when he goes into heaven, when he enters the holy place and presents the already shed blood, that is the unbloody presentation of a bloody sacrifice. Now, we want to be sure that you understand this is still an unbloody sacrificial offer. Unbloody meaning the blood is not being shed. Again, it’s an offering of blood, but it is not bloody in the sense of causing the outpouring of blood. So when he is presenting, let me just actually pull up the line here in Hebrews if you don’t mind.

Nor is it to offer himself repeatedly as a high priest interest as a holy place yearly with blood, not his own. Now notice the high priest when he is going into the holy place, the holy of Holies with blood on his own, that blood has already been shed when he goes in there. And so Christ in verse 24 of, sorry, Hebrews 9 24, Christ is entered not into a sanctuary made with hands a copy of the true one, but into heaven itself now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. And so James has to say, oh, this intercessory aspect of Christ is one in the same with the propitiation and the sacrificial element. And he says this because you can’t read Hebrews any other way. If this is the fulfillment of Yom Kippur, you can’t say the priest going into the holy of Holies is some separate sacrifice from the killing of the animals that the priest is presenting in the Holy of Holies.

It’s clearly two aspects of one thing. Well here too, the cross and the presentation of the blood are two aspects of one thing. One is extremely bloody Christ dying. One is unbloody the glorified Christ, never more to shed blood presenting the already shed blood. Well, likewise at the mass when the priest is presenting the blood of Christ, Christ is not having to suffer again, which is the whole point that is like Hebrews nine is making that Christ does not have to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world. If Christ had to be killed every time you offered the blood to the Father, you would need a billion good Fridays. And that’s ridiculous. And this is why the one sacrifice of Christ on Calvary, which we continue to go to is better than all of the Jewish sacrifices in the past, which if you had a Jewish sacrifice and then you went out and screwed things up again, you couldn’t be like, well, remember the sacrifice from last week.

Nope, you’re done. You need a new one. You’ve solely that one. Well, you can’t solely the cross of Christ. I mean you can repudiate it. Hebrews actually talks about that as well. You can reject the only sacrifice that can save you or you can accept it, but there’s no other sacrifice that’s going to do it in the mass we are entering into that sacrifice. It’s propitiation not because of the Unbloody presentation, but because we’re presenting in an unbloody manner the saving blood that was shed. The mass only works because of Good Friday, but for Good Friday to apply to us, you still need something like the

Speaker 5:

Mass.

John:

Another point that came up was, and we’ve kind of been alluding to it throughout, and you’ve been talking about the eucharistic nature of the sacrifice was Catholic teaching on transubstantiation. And so I just wanted to ask you again to reiterate this, it’s kind of helpful to clarify some of the distinctions. Does Catholic doctrine of the mass depend on transubstantiation? And if so, wouldn’t the doctrine of the mass have to have developed much later since Aristotle’s categories of substance and accidents weren’t even widely used in the early church?

Joe:

So I want to answer the second of those two questions first because I wanted to go much deeper on this than time permitted. It is a falsehood to say that Stan is an Aristotelian category, and if you know anything about the history of the term Stan, you know this isn’t true. So a little bit of context, the person who popularizes Aristotle in the west is St. Albert the great. He’s not the only, but he is the most influential. He is not the first, but again most influential when he’s 10 Aristotelian, which was still pretty new because it hadn’t been translated. A lot of Aristotle’s work were not translated to the mid 11 hundreds. In 1210, the University of Paris, the premier kind of theological institution in Europe, forbids Aristotle’s works on natural philosophy and their commentaries from even being read under penalty of excommunication. This is a bunch of Augustinians who didn’t like the influence of Aristotle because Augustine was much more like neo neoplatonic.

And so for about 30 years, you don’t have Aristotle bean read at the University of Paris. Five years into that 30 year stretch, you have the fourth laddering council that uses the term transi to describe the bread bean changed by divine power into the body and the wine into the blood. Now, two things to note there. One, it’s not Aristotelian, it’s just saying there’s a change of the substance. Two, it doesn’t say anything about accidents. That term is not found in the fourth laddering council. Now it’s true later authors like St. Thomas Aquinas will use Aristotelian categories and explaining transubstantiation. That’s fine, but you cannot say the fourth laddering council was reliant upon Aristotle at a time when Aristotle was not at all in vogue and was forbidden at the most important prominent university in Europe. The place where Aquinas would later study Aquinas himself wouldn’t be born for another 10 years after the fourth Laddering Council.

So clearly transubstantiation does not come from Aristotle, it does not come from Aquinas, it doesn’t come from Albert. The great Albert. The great is 15 during the fourth lettering council. He’s not this very influential 15-year-old. So that whole thing is a myth that we know is not true. What you need is not the substance accidents distinction. What you need is just the idea of a substance that things have realities. You don’t have to be in Aristotelian to believe that, and we see that all the way back in the nice seeing creed when we say that the son is consubstantial with the father, no one says, oh, well that must be Aristotelian, but trans substantial is using this same formula is consubstantial only. It’s a change rather than a sharing of substances. So it is just a myth, and I wanted to press white on this because a lot of people fall for this and think, oh, well, they couldn’t have believed in transubstantiation because it’s a long word.

Frankly, it’d be like saying, well, the early Christians couldn’t have believed that the son was divine like the father because they didn’t know the word consubstantial. But that’s ridiculous because whether you believe in consubstantiation or not, whether you believe in transubstantiation or not, even if you’re not a philosopher, that substances exist. If I say Jesus turned water into wine, you’ll be like, oh, wow, the reality of that thing changed into the reality of something else. And hey, did Aristotle teach you that no living as a human being in the world taught you about substances? And so all transubstantiation is doing is defining in a more precise way that the reality of bread and wine is what has changed because we want to acknowledge the fact that the appearances stay the same. And so it’s a philosophical way of describing a very basic thing that a child could understand.

I would give this example a child at the parish I used to go to in Virginia described it to my pastor this way. She said, the crucifix looks like Jesus, but isn’t The Eucharist doesn’t look like Jesus, but is that’s all like transubstantiation is just saying something happens. So while it continues to not look like Jesus, it becomes Jesus. That’s all you have to basically affirm other than the bread and wine ceased to exist in some way. That’s what we’re saying. This is not an real tillian thing. That’s the first thing. Second thing, we find them talking about this change well before they have the language of transubstantiation to describe it, and we find propitiatory language applied to it well before the word transubstantiation, like centuries before transubstantiation. And even today the Orthodox who eshoo the language of transubstantiation because it was post schism language and dirty Catholics came up with it, and that’s not exactly what they say, but it’s so in the book, Orthodox dogmatic, the Russian Orthodox theologian, proto Presbyter, Michael Posan, I believe is his name, says that the Eucharist is likewise a propitiatory sacrifice for all members of the church.

And then he quotes our Lord and then he says, from the beginning of Christianity, the bloodless sacrifice was offered for the remembrance of both the living and the dead and for the remission of their sins. This is evident from the text of all the liturgies beginning with the liturgy of the holy Apostle James, and this sacrifice itself is often directly called in these texts, the sacrifice of propitiation that is as clear as you’re going to get in this same work. He talks about how as the Orthodox, they don’t like the term transubstantiation, but they don’t object to it. And it’s like, okay, that’s all you need. You do not need to have the word transubstantiation in your theological backpack to be able to believe A, in transubstantiation and B in the sacrifice of the mass.

John:

Alright, those are some helpful clarifications. I want to circle back to the scripture passages that you defended earlier before we close it out here, because this has been a really fun debrief. But in his second cross examination of you, white did bring up the passages that you quoted and used from Malachi and from Isaiah, and he pointed out that the language surrounding those passages such as grain offerings, offerings of incense and so forth, does not have propitiatory connotations. In other words, offerings of incense and offerings of grain that were done in the old covenant weren’t propitiatory sacrifices. So it’s illegitimate, he said, to appeal to those texts as evidence that they point to a future covenant with sacrifices that are propitiatory. At least that seems to be what he was suggesting in that final cross-examination. It came at you pretty quickly. Do you think his points there undermine your use of those scripture passages?

Joe:

I think in the minds of some people it might have, but the way I answered it then was just to say Old Testament passages, prefiguring New Testament ones, you can have additional things that aren’t found in the original passages when you talk about the prophecies of Christ. They don’t tell us every detail about him. So the fact that the Old Testament passage doesn’t tell us every detail about what it’s prefiguring, nothing is contradicted by seeing, oh, there’s more here than we would’ve gotten from the Old Testament alone. That’s the whole nature of Old Testament passages. But also, again, not just my interpretation, the early Christians read this as meaning their Eucharist, but what I didn’t say then, I wish I had, I thought of it actually tonight at dinner, was that the underlying motif of so much of Hebrews is that Christ isn’t like the Levitical priests, his priestly sacrifices like that of Melek. Well, if you go back to Genesis 14, what does Melek offer bread and wine. Now, even if you miss the obvious Eucharistic prefigurement that is, you would still have to say, oh, how dare you author of Hebrews bread and wine are not propitiatory. And so how can Jesus’s sacrifice be the fulfillment of what Melek is doing on, I mean, James White’s argument could be made against the author of the Hebrews, and if it doesn’t work against Hebrews, then it doesn’t work against Malachi.

John:

I think that’s a good response. And my other curiosity too, and this is where I’m not as familiar with the reformed thinkers, is do they propose that the pure offering in Malachi one 11 is referring to something else other than Christ’s sacrifice? Or do they think it’s referring to Christ’s sacrifice, but just deny that the rising of the sun of the setting has anything to do with its ongoing nature as it’s represented in Catholic theology? I’m not sure if you have any

Joe:

No, that’s a great question. I don’t the answer to that. I have not seen anyone grapple with either Malachi one or how universally it was understood in a eucharistic way

Other than random people commenting on the debate and saying like, oh no, this is an in times prophecy, even though there’s no context of it being an end times prophecy. And not only that, but if you’re suggesting that we’re going to need grain offerings in the end times, what is going on covenantal in your worldview that actually would deny that Christ sacrifice has gotten rid of the Old Testament sacrificial system if we need to bring it back in the end times? So yeah, I don’t know the answer to how someone who’s Protestant. I think you’re right. What you see happening in these debates is often that the Protestant side will say, you can’t perfectly prove that this piece of evidence shows the Catholic case. But then you’re like, well, what else would it be?

When we talk about John six, we didn’t talk about John six in this debate. That was kind of intentional because it’s too big to do well with everything else in John six, if you say, okay, this is a metaphor. The question Catholic should get in the habit of asking is how is that a metaphor? How is na my flesh and drink my blood a metaphor for like, trust me, how does it mean that? Show me how you get from, I don’t believe in this literally. Okay, but your case, in other words, many Protestants have gotten into the habit is kind of an intellectually lazy one of just saying, I don’t accept the Catholic case and not considering does their own case work to the standard that they’re holding the Catholic case to. Like if they say, oh, I don’t see the Catholic view fully represented in the first 200 years, well, do you see the Protestant view in the first 200 years? Or are you just holding a flagrant double standard? And I think if people start to become aware of that in their own minds and they’ll realize how often that’s happening, there’s a lot of burden shifting, a lot of double standards, and it is something that we can easily fall into if we’re not being careful about.

John:

Well, Joe Meyer, this has been a really fun debate debrief. We’re almost at about an hour and a half here, so I just wanted to ask you one last question. Reflecting back, is there anything that you might’ve done differently in this debate? You mentioned a couple along the way, a couple of things you would’ve said, and is there anything else that you wanted to address in this debate? Debrief,

Joe:

I guess I’d say that I can sometimes become too obsessive about trying to get everything perfectly. I’ll have something at 85% and I’ll spend six hours trying to get it to 90%, and at a certain point I have to just say, this is what I’m able to do, Lord, I gave it my best. And I can always look back and say, I wish I’d done that differently. I wish I’d mentioned Hebrews 1310. I wish I’d been calmer at some points. I wish I had made the milk tic connection explicitly. Those are things that would’ve been great in hindsight, but I will stand by this debate. I think there’s a reason Catholics are sharing this debate, and I haven’t seen any Protestants point to this excitedly. I’ve seen several Protestants express their lamentation or suggest that they wish someone else had done the debate. And what’s often, if you watch the debate, Hey, look, every side, you’re going to get a lot of people who just think they’re side one. No matter what,

Catholic, Protestant, there were people, I literally saw a comment who said, no, Catholic can beat a Christian because Catholics have such bad theology. And it was like, okay, you’ve literally prejudged every debate in history. We don’t need to listen to your view on things, but listen for people who say that their side lost again, remember the statement against party interest, and I saw quite a few Protestants say they did not think that they won that debate, and they were ready to just blame that on James White not being prepared or something. But I think the actual issue is that James White is a good debater. He just has nothing to work with here because there’s an avalanche of evidence against his position. So there you have it. Hopefully you enjoyed that. If you want to hear more of John DeRosa, I’d really encourage you to go check out classical theism.

If you want more on the Ignatian question that came up, check out the interview I did with Cameron Bertuzzi and Dr. Boce over in Caping Christianity. I want to once again, thank everyone involved in putting that debate together on pretty short notice. So thank you to Jeremiah Nordie for really being the point man and the host and the ringleader for getting that together in a very short span of time. Thank you to James White for participating in it. I know it doesn’t seem like it went quite the way he wanted it to. He doesn’t like the way maybe the internet received it and didn’t agree with how I understood his statements on Ignatius, but nevertheless, I’m really grateful to have had the opportunity to debate him and look forward to seeing when and if our paths will cross again. And yeah, thank you to just all the folks at 12 five Baptist Church and everyone who was so grateful and generous and hospitable, been coming to the talk and all of that stuff. I’m really indebted. As for you, if this has been something that you’ve benefited from and you want to support it, I’d encourage you to go over to shameless joe.com, my Patreon, and you’ll find plenty of ways to do so and really join into that community. Alright, for Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.