Featured Guests: Jimmy Akin, Tim Staples, Karlo Broussard, Rose Sweet, Stacy Trasancos, PhD, Jim Blackburn
Featured Questions:
- 01:06 – If Jesus crushed Satan on the cross, why is Satan still alive? – Tim Staples
- 04:00 – How do you explain that praying to the saints is not necromancy? – Karlo Broussard
- 06:52 – What is the best way to approach someone who believes science and faith conflict? – Stacy Trasancos
- 08:16 – Can I receive Communion if I am divorced? – Jim Blackburn
- 10:51 – Can we live morally without religion? – Jimmy Akin
- 14:51 – What’s the best advice for a newlywed couple to avoid divorce? – Stacy Trasancos
- 17:58 – Why pray to the saints when the Bible says God has an unchangeable divine plan? – Karlo Broussard
- 22:42 – How to convert while a minor and with parents objecting? – Tim Staples
Transcript:
Hi, I’m Cy Kellett. Welcome to the G. K. Chesterton Studio here at Catholic Answers where we broadcast the Catholic Answers Live radio program. This is your opportunity to join us in studio, to watch our apologists and guests address listener questions about the Catholic faith. On today’s episode, Catholic Answers apologists Jimmy Akin, Tim Staples and Karlo Broussard.
Also, speaker and author Rose Sweet, Catholic scientist and authors Stacy Trasancos and Catholic apologists Jim Blackburn. You’ll hear them answer tough questions clearly and simply about whether religions is necessary, why Satan is still around, how to stay married, whether science needs Jesus and much more. Enjoy the show.
We go to Cindy in Winter Springs, Florida. Cindy, your question for Tim Staples.
Hello gentlemen. Thank you for taking my call.
Welcome.
My question is if Jesus crushed Satan on the cross, why is he still here?
Yes, very good. You know, Cindy, not long ago we had a Rabbi come out and speak and I invited him to speak to all the apologists here at Catholic Answers and that was a big problem with him and it is for a lot of our Jewish friends today. They look at the text Isaiah chapter two and elsewhere, the texts that talk about the coming of the Messiah, the lion will lie down with the lamb or the wolf with the lamb, actually and so forth. So why is it the Messiah came and we don’t have peace and so forth?
Well, actually, the answer is that in the Old Testament itself, it was predicted, it was prophesied that the Messiah would indeed come but that there would be two comings. You have the one, yes the Messiah comes and establishes peace throughout the world and such like we see in Isaiah 2. But then you also have texts like Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53 and Wisdom chapter two that talk about how the Messiah would come and suffer and die as well. And so what we have, Cindy, are two comings of the Lord. The Lord came historically 2,000 years ago, he crushed the head of Satan on a spiritual level.
But all of what the Messiah came to accomplish was not intended to have been accomplished all at once. That’s how you harmonize both the wolf will lie down with the lamb text as well as the suffering servant text and how the people of God would have to suffer and so forth. So Christ came, He crushed the head of Satan, He purchased for us our salvation but now, we’re living in a time where God offers us the opportunity to freely enter into what Christ did for us 2,000 years ago so that it may be fully effectual in our lives and in the end of time, it will be fully effectual throughout the world.
So that’s the reason. It’s God who wills for us to freely now accept what Jesus did, objectively, crushing the head of Satan on the cross. See, you and I, Cindy, can choose not to accept what Jesus does and so that crushing of the head of Satan will not be applicable in our lives as individuals. We can choose to reject, hence we can choose to be separated from God for all eternity.
Thank you so much, Cindy.
In this next clip, a caller wants to know how to explain to someone that praying to the saints is not necromancy?
Yeah, well, normally, this objection is what is known as the necromancy objection, right? So in the book of Deuteronomy in the Old Testament, I think it’s Deuteronomy chapter 18, God forbids the form of divinisation or excuse me, divination actually where you would approach a medium or a necromancer to conjure up the dead for the sake of obtaining sort of a secret knowledge that goes beyond our natural powers. And God strongly forbids this practice and we see, I think it’s 1 Samuel chapter 28 if I’m not mistaken, Jerry, you might wanna check that out to verify that, but in the Old Testament, we have the witch who conjures up Samuel’s spirit and we see this as an action that’s prohibited, that’s frowned upon.
And so, Cy, the common objection is, well, when we pray to the saints, we’re doing that, we’re guilty of necromancy. Well, here is the key, Jerry, the key is that when we ask the saints to pray for us, we are not guilty of the sin of necromancy because in no way are we one, trying to conjure up their spirit through a medium of some sort and number two, we’re not trying to solicit from them a sort of secret knowledge that goes beyond our natural powers.
The implication being a sort of pride, I wanna know what only God knows and I’m gonna do it apart from God. If God wants to give us knowledge of the future and this sort of secret knowledge, He can do that, He can give us that. But He doesn’t want us trying to do that apart from Him or without Him. And in the church’s understanding of asking the saints to pray for us, in no way are we doing this. We are simply asking fellow members of the mystical body of Christ who are perfected in righteousness as Hebrews 12:22-24 states, the spirits of the just men made perfect. We recognize they are perfected in righteousness and according to James 5:16, the prayer of a righteous man avails much.
So we request their prayers on our behalf to Jesus who is the one mediator between God and men. And we’re not just trying to solicit the secret knowledge. We’re simply asking them for help, as Saint Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12. One member of the body can’t say to another member, I have no need of you. We are requesting their help as perfected members in the mystical body of Christ for our sanctification, for our journey of salvation. And so in no way are we guilty of necromancy.
In this segment, a caller asks, what would be the best way to approach someone who believes science and faith are to conflicting to coexist?
Those people sometimes strike me as not confident in their faith. They seem like they really, really need science to prove their faith for them. And it’s not supposed to be like that. We’re not supposed to use science to prove our faith. It’s like using the mashed potatoes to prove mom exists. We are supposed to start with our faith and then look at science and say, “Thank you God for science.” And so it’s just the wrong way. And what you’ll see a lot of those people do like in the intelligent design community and among young earth creationists, they put themselves in the position of going out there and saying, “Nature did this but God did a miracle here. Nature did this, God did a miracle there.” It’s kind of like a God of the gaps in a way.
And it’s a really dangerous theological position to put yourself in to start saying, “You know when God made miracles and when He didn’t,” just because you’re trying to fit your science with your faith. It’s wrong to do that. And so I would, when I get a chance to sit down and talk with people like that ’cause it takes time, those are the kind of questions I put to them. It’s like who are you to go back and say that you know dark matter as if it were dogma when God worked miracles over the evolution of all time. We’re supposed to be humbler than that, we’re supposed to say this is what we know about science, this is what I pray in the creed and believe in faith. And then understand you’re not gonna know everything in your life.
My question is and I am a divorced man, I was married through the Catholic church and I guess I absented myself from church for a while but I am back, attending mass. And I really wanna take communion but I wanna know, what are the procedures, am I’m committing a sin, I mean, can I not get communion anymore?
Okay, Alex, you said you were married in the Catholic Answers and you’re divorced. Have you entered into another marriage, a subsequent marriage?
No, no. I’m still single.
So, you’re living as a single man now.
Yeah.
Then your divorce of itself is not going to be an obstacle to receiving the sacraments. Now, it could be that your divorce was an occasion of sin for you, I don’t know, you might talk to a spiritual director about that to determine if there’s something there that you need to confess. And certainly, if you’ve been away from the church for a while, you need to talk to a spiritual director and most likely. You need to go to confession. In fact, we are obligated as Catholics to confess our serious and our mortal sins once a year at least at the very minimum.
So if you’ve been away from the church for a while, I would recommend you first step be to make an appointment with your pastor or another priest in your parish, there are others. And to make an appointment to go and sit down and have confession. I recommend when you’ve been away from the church for a while, don’t just go stand in the confession line on a Saturday afternoon and expect to sit down in the confessional and then hit the priest with all of this. I’d recommend that you make an appointment, go in and have confession that way.
And then once the priest has absolved you of your sins, you should be free to then receive the Eucharist and any other sacraments as well as necessary. Sometimes, people will confuse the idea or misunderstand the church’s teaching that if you are divorced and then remarry outside the church and you’re continuing to live in that state, that can be an obstacle to receiving community because you would basically be living in the state of adultery. But that’s not your case. You’re divorced, you’re not living as a married man and so you should be able to return to the sacraments with that spiritual confession.
This is an argument that I’ve heard from atheists and I don’t know really how to respond to it and that is you don’t really need religion in order to be moral because you just have natural law. [inaudible 00:11:03] natural law and reason, that can be enough to kind of figure out what’s right and wrong and so that Christianity or any religious in general is at best superfluous and not really necessary for being moral. So how would you respond to that?
I’d make a couple of responses. The first one is, there is an element of truth here because God’s law is written on the hearts of men, even when they aren’t religious. This is something that Saint Paul talks about. He doesn’t talk specifically about atheists but he acknowledges that even Gentiles who don’t know the God of Israel or the scriptures of Israel, nevertheless, they have consciences and that shows that the law of God is written on their hearts.
And so there is an element of truth here. But, it doesn’t mean religion is superfluous because number one, simply being a good person is not the end all and be all of life. I mean, I don’t want to just be good. I also want to know the truth and if it’s true that God exists, I wanna know that. That is not superfluous. Similarly, if God exists and if an afterlife exists and that’s something I wanna know too, I’m gonna wanna know how to get to heaven in the afterlife, how to arrange the best afterlife for me possible.
And so other areas of religion, besides morality are not superfluous. Even in the area of morality, religion is not superfluous because one of the things that we find, and this is also true of everybody, regardless of whether they’re religious, is we aren’t always good. And we can and do do evil things. And we’re pretty good at self justification and self deception. And so, consequently, it can help to have a reinforcement of things we already know or should know in the form of God communicating it to us and saying, “Okay, listen, I know it’s tempting at the moment, but really, do not commit adultery or do not kill or do not bear false witness,” or whatever it may be.
Having that stated explicitly makes it harder to rationalize away what your heart might tell you. And so even in morality, the role of religion is not superfluous. Also, I’d make another point which is that if you have an atheist who is acknowledging that right and wrong exist and that good and evil exist, okay, how do you explain that on … I’m assuming you’re talking to a scientific materialist as an atheist, someone who thinks matter is the only thing that there is and science is the way to learn about stuff. Well, okay, one of the things about good and evil is they’re not empirical properties, they’re not sensory, you can’t detect them, either with your senses or with the extension of our senses that we have in laboratories. You can’t see under an electron microscope what a particle of goodness looks like.
And so if you believe in good and evil, that they’re real and everybody has this innate sense they are, then your worldview is incorporating something more than just the empirical, something more than just what we have scientific access to. And that means there’s a whole other realm of reality that we have intuitions about but that we don’t have scientific access to and if you’re willing to acknowledge that that there is this second dimension to the universe, beyond what we can detect with our senses, then you should be open to religion as well which brings us knowledge of that area.
Listener Tracey typed in the following question, Rose, what’s the best advice you can give to a newly married couple to avoid divorce or a place where they feel like they should or could get a divorce.
To avoid divorce or a place where they feel they should-
She wants to know how to stay out of a place where you might end up feeling that way.
Oh, okay. Okay. Make sure your husband does all the dishes, takes out the trash, does dinner and give you foot rubs.
Oh right. You’ve been talking to my wife.
I know. Okay, seriously, that’s a really good question. Here’s what I tell everybody in my retreats and seminars, there is one cause, all symptoms are rooted in one cause of divorce. Do you know what that is, Cy? One thing. What takes down any relationship?
I don’t know. I’m sorry that I’m stuck.
Selfishness. Self-centeredness.
Okay.
Self-centeredness. So if you two can practice and make an examination of conscience and look at the way that you are being selfish in the relationship, you know, he likes the lights on, you like them off, bla bla bla, and you’re always arguing about little things, stop and look at those ways that you are becoming selfish. If you can root those out, you will be building a beautiful marriage based on self-sacrificing love. So get rid of any area where you’re being selfish. I know it’s simple but it works.
The church really has a lot of tools for helping you do that, too.
Yes. Examination of conscience, even a nightly examine, there’s spiritual exercises, the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. Every night, before you go to bed, just take a review of the day and be honest about where you weren’t as loving or kind or maybe you gave a silent treatment to your spouse or you were a little selfish, you ate her leftover lunch that she brought home from PF Chang’s and knew she was gonna get mad. That didn’t happen to me.
I was gonna say, that sounds very specific, Rose.
I’m not bitter about that.
I’m fairly certain that that happened.
But if you do find yourself getting bitter, get to confession because our Lord will meet you there, seriously. I know I do like to joke. This is a serious, painful subject. And sometimes, humor is a little healing. But get rid of any selfishness. It works.
I believe you. I feel like I was very slow at that in my own marriage. I guess, I don’t know, maybe other people are quicker at it. I don’t know. It takes a long time. But i don’t wanna say it in a hopeless way. It took me a long time but it doesn’t mean it would take anybody else a long time.
And you know what? That’s a-
I just had to realize, come on, man.
Well, another thing that I love to talk about is the four temperaments and those of us who are natural extroverts, we move more slowly through life, we process things. I think that’s you. There are other people like me who just rush into things quickly and that could be a strength or a weakness but doesn’t matter. Just do it. Just take a day at a time and ask for the grace not to be selfish. And you would probably end up having a really good marriage. Not perfect, but good.
In this next clip, a caller asks, what’s the point of praying to saints when the Bible tell us God has a divine plan that we can’t change?
Jesse, it all gets down to if God is immutable and He can’t change and His plan can’t change, then why in the heck are we doing anything to try to bring about an effect or change something in the history of the world? I mean, regardless if it’s prayer or whether I’m gonna try to get the job or what? Right? So we have to try and reconcile God’s immutability, the fact that He can’t change and consequently His plan can’t change and our participation in that plan and how does that free will and us bringing about change in this life drive with that immutable plan.
Now, Jesse, just to give you a heads up, I wrote an article on this for Catholic Answers blog. It’s entitled Pointless Prayer or Gracious God. And if you go to catholic.com and just put in pointless prayer in the search engine, my article will come up. Now, fundamentally, we can reconcile this, Jesse, by understanding that God’s providence, His providential plan, it involves not only willing certain effects to come about. God not only wills certain things to come about, the effect, but He also wills that those effects would come about through certain causes.
So, God actually, in His providential plan, wills a certain cause and effect pattern. That pattern is an essential part of His divine plan. And sometimes, it is in God’s providential plan that certain effects, a healing you might say or the promotion at a job that somebody needs to support their family or whatever it might be, it may very well be in God’s providential plan that He willed that effect to come about through the causal activity, right, through the causation of my prayer so that when I pray, that effect legitimately comes about through my prayer but within the context of God’s whole providential plan that God willed, this effect come about through my prayers and had I not prayed, that effect would not come out.
From our perspective, these things take place successively. It’s one thing after another, this causal pattern is cause, then effect. But from God’s perspective, that cause and effect reality is present to Him simultaneous, it’s present to Him in an immediate now as the philosophers talk about, in the eternal now.
So, on one hand, we know God’s plan is immutable and it can’t change but at the same time, that plan involves our free cooperation. And we know this biblically speaking, we know it from church teaching because, I mean, Saint Paul commands us and he encourages us, I shouldn’t use the strong word of command but he strongly encourages in 1 Timothy 2:1-4 that Christians ought to pray for one another and all throughout his epistles, he’s constantly saying, we intercede for you, unceasingly, encouraging Christians to pray for one another. Members of the mystical body can affect life and healing in the body.
All of that presupposes that our actions can actually bring about an effect. But, that’s understood as being essential to God’s providential plan as a whole. That God wills that certain effects would come about through certain causes and that healing of my grandmother may be a part of God’s plan to come about through my prayer, consequently, it’s rational for me to offer those prayers to God and in accordance with His plan, if, as Jesus said, if it be Thy will, Father, then my grandmother be healed through my prayer, in this cause effect pattern. Well, then let it be.
But, if it is not God’s will, if God doesn’t will that the effect, the healing of the grandma, would come about through the causality of my prayer, well, then we accept that. We bow in humility, knowing and trusting that it is in God’s infinite wisdom that He didn’t will that effect to come about through this cause and that according to Romans 8, I think it’s either 24, Romans 8:28, perhaps, God wills all things to the good for those who believe in Him.
Thank you for taking my call. My question is, I’m trying to convert but I’m only 15, my parents strongly object to it.
Gotcha.
I was wondering, what would your advice be to allow me to convert and I’ve prayed, not prayed but nothing sort of happened.
Yes, well, Connor, it’s a great question. And welcome, my friend. I don’t know if you know this, Connor, but I am a convert to the Catholic faith, I was actually a minister in an Assembly of God community and I came from a family that was quite anti-Catholic. Let’s just say the Catholic church was not on our top 10 good folks list. All right, look. I’ll say that euphemistically.
And so I faced a lot of pushback. But Connor, in your situation, what I would recommend is you ask your parents. Now, you may be surprised. Now, Connor, have you, by the way, asked your parents if you could?
Yes.
And they said no?
Yes.
Okay. And they said no. Well, Connor, I would encourage you to respect your parents as long as you are living under their household, you know, you asked them and they said no. But Connor, I would respectfully ask them, would it be okay if I went to a Catholic church, went to a Bible study or something or even went to an RCIA because what I found, Connor, is sometimes a parent may be strongly opposed to conversion but okay, if you just wanna learn more about the Catholic faith, okay.
They key is, Connor, to do what you can. Be respectful to your parents but then ask them, “Hey, you know, I would like to at least learn more about the Catholic faith,” and they may be okay with that. If not, we’ve got catholic.com, you can call in our broadcast, we’ve got lots of information for you here. So that once you come of the age of maturity when you turn 18, you’ll be able to do this on your own authority. Then I’d recommend you do it.
I know Connor, some people will say, “Oh, just go ahead and rebel.” Look, God’s grace has led you right to where you are right now. His Grace is with you and as long as you are being good, you’re obeying your parents, you’re doing what is right, God’s grace is right there with you. And my friend, I hope one day you’ll call in, maybe three years from now or so when you’re 18 years old and you can say, “Tim Staples, I am now a full fledged Catholic, praise God.” But until such time, do what you can and be a good example for your parents, let them see that your discovering Catholicism is helping you. You be good, you obey your parents, study where you can, get books, get articles from catholic.com. Read and study, let them see it.
We just said the other day in the gospel on Sunday, Matthew 5:16, let them see your good works and give praise to your Father who is in heaven. That’s gotta be your goal, Connor. You be a good son to your parents and I will guarantee it, one day we’ll see you be a Catholic.
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