Latest / The Lila Rose Show / E180: The Most Unlikely Convert w/Dr. Scott Hahn

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E180: The Most Unlikely Convert w/Dr. Scott Hahn · The Lila Rose Show

• 0:00
  By the time I was at 14, I had been busted for breaking and
• 0:04
  entering, shoplifting, sales and possession, burglary, fraud,
• 0:07
  forgery, you know, tearing apart my grandma's rosary beads
• 0:11
  because I just thought these represent the chains of
• 0:13
  superstition and falsehood. And I was teaching the covenant
• 0:16
  and how godfather's a married couple, then a family, then a
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  tribe, then 12 tribes. So I drew this big family
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  pyramid that should ideally be worldwide.
• 0:25
  And one of my sharpest students, Rebecca said, sure looks like
• 0:28
  the Catholic Church to us, you know, And I said, no, this is
• 0:31
  the antidote to Catholicism. You know, what I want non
• 0:34
  Catholics to see is what we agree on is so much greater than
• 0:38
  where we disagree. And when Gabriel was a teenager
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  and I shared this vision of the timeline of the covenants, the
• 0:43
  fulfillment of the old and the new, and told me for the first
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  time, like last year, that was my adult conversion.
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  I looked at that other. I could cry.
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  I saw something on. I don't know where I saw it.
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  Somebody had taken your Bible for decades and gave it back
• 1:01
  recently. Yeah.
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  I don't have it with me. Somebody stole it from the
• 1:08
  parish. I want to say Saint Joseph's in
• 1:13
  Fort Wayne. OK.
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  And I remember because I looked, it was there and then I talked
• 1:19
  to it and then I looked and it was gone.
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  And they said, oh, you just lost them.
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  Like I don't lose that. But I mean, the irony, there's a
• 1:27
  kind of divine humor in this because somebody did take it.
• 1:31
  And so my fellow, my brother Knights who were saying, oh, no,
• 1:33
  you just lost them. Like I'm telling you, I didn't
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  lose it. Somebody took it.
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  They're like, oh, we asked, you know.
• 1:38
  And so it was 4 weeks ago out of the blue, this package and my
• 1:45
  Bible and a note that basically apologizes for taking it, He
• 1:50
  said 20 years ago was like 17 years ago, and it was so.
• 1:55
  Amazing. I had it right after my
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  conversion in 10th grade. And so I went up and bought it
• 2:01
  at the mall and had it all my markings.
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  And you could just see the changes in my markings, you
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  know, as I became Catholic and then it was gone.
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  And I just, I, God gave me a grace of detachment.
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  So I wasn't upset. But I I and I always thought,
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  you know, I'll wait until the ignatious study Bible comes up
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  before I have really my study Bible, you know, and then.
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  Do we have it with us? No.
• 2:23
  OK, OK. But here's the area, because I
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  did take it with me last week to seek in Salt Lake City, and I
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  used it in my admiration. Yeah.
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  And I got here for the priest conference.
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  And I'm like, where's my Bible? And this time I did lose it.
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  Nobody took it. And so it was found.
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  It was in the lost and found. Somebody turned it in.
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  And so one of the four, I know. But I'm after telling these
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  brother Knights, I didn't lose this.
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  I would never lose that. I think our Lord was like,
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  humble yourself. Doctor Scott Hahn, welcome to
• 2:58
  the podcast. It is great to be with you,
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  Lana. What an incredible honor to have
• 3:02
  you out here. It's truly shared.
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  I feel the one I'm, I'm the one who's honored.
• 3:07
  I I am a super fan of yours. Well, if I didn't know me, I
• 3:10
  might be impressed. And so yeah, I'm not a big fan
• 3:14
  of mine anyway. Well, listen, you have helped so
• 3:16
  many people. You have.
• 3:17
  How many books is it now that you've that you've written?
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  Just a little bit north of 50 if you include the children's books
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  fifty that I've done for our 23 grandkids.
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  I was going to brag that I've read most of your books, but
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  let's say I think I've read at least 10, but I have not read.
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  Most of them well on your way. Wow, amazing.
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  And I I just what you've done in my life and because your, I
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  mean, Rome sweet home was the first book of yours that I read.
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  And I think it was, I don't know, 17 years old evangelical
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  trying to figure out how to get more deeply into faith closer to
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  Christ. And then, yeah, so many, so
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  many, so much of your ministry has blessed me personally and so
• 3:56
  many that I know. So thank you for that.
• 3:58
  You're welcome. I feel like I'm having so much
• 4:00
  fun thanking me as like, you know, thanking a kid for opening
• 4:04
  up his candy store. He can't eat at all.
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  You know, I'd just love to share this stuff.
• 4:08
  It's fun. Amazing.
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  OK, well for folks who are getting to know you for the
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  first time, tell me about the the childhood of Doctor Scott
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  Hahn. Yeah, I mean, it was just a sort
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  of typical Pittsburgh area suburban life and a nominal
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  Christian family. I don't want to demean what my
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  parents did because they tried their best.
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  My dad was really an agnostic for much of his adult life,
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  unbeknownst to us. And so by the time I was really
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  twelve, I embraced a lifestyle you'd have to describe as
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  juvenile delinquency. And by the time I was almost 14,
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  I had been busted pretty hard for breaking and entering,
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  shoplifting, sales and possession, burglary, mail
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  fraud, forgery, you know, and that's what they caught me at.
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  And so I I hit hard. And in that, in that moment of
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  grace, our Lord found me right before I was going to be
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  sentenced to Warrendale Detention Center.
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  At 15. At 13 1/2, fourteen.
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  Yeah. And the fellow across the street
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  from me had been sentenced there and it committed suicide like
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  his first 48 hours. And so to me, that was the only
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  thing I could compare to hell. And so I lied my way out of that
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  sentence. But I recognize I can't just
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  keep living lies. And so I I had a crush on a gal.
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  She was going to a retreat, so I decided to go.
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  I never connected with her, but our Lord connected with me big
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  time. And I remember reading The Cost
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  of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, CS Lewis's Mere
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  Christianity, and then getting involved in a Bible study
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  through Young Life. And it was really what God used
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  to kind of pull me out of a life that was really headed down
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  downhill fast. And so I, I, I fell in love with
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  Sacred Scripture through that Bible study.
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  I, I, I began reading a Bible that felt like a dark forest.
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  There were no explanations. And so I just kind of put it
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  aside. And then I had an experience in
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  prayer with the Holy Spirit, but also in conjunction with a study
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  Bible that I had purchased at South Hills Village.
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  I think it was around 1972 or three.
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  And I'd gone up and I found it. I brought it back.
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  And in the footnotes it was answering all kinds of
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  questions, making all kinds of connections, history, geography,
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  but also doctrine and such. And I thought this is this is
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  this is what I need. This is what I've been looking
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  for. So by the time I was finishing
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  up high school 2 1/2, three years later, I, I think I was on
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  my, I'd finished my second round trip through the Bible and it
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  just became something of a passion.
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  And I don't mean to make a long story a little longer, but I
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  played guitar in a band, The Continentals, right after
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  graduating from high school and I was torn between studying
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  theology in college or playing guitar semi professionally and I
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  came out to LA in 75. I played with this band and I
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  met real guitarist. I might have been one of the top
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  three in the Pittsburgh area, but I was in the third
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  percentile in the LA area. And so for three months we did
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  these gigs, 2 months in the states, 30 some States, and then
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  one month in Europe, Belgium, Holland, England and Scotland.
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  A different performance every night.
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  And I got it so entirely out of my system.
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  And my bandmates, my buddies were sleeping on the bus while I
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  was studying John Murray's commentary in the book of
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  Romans, going through about 600 pages, enthralled with not only
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  the scriptures but connecting the old and the new and that
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  sort of thing. And so going to college, I was
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  convinced that I wanted to study scripture theology.
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  And so I did at Grove City for four years.
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  But I also wanted to repay the debt of gratitude to Young Life,
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  to our Lord. And so I worked in Young Life
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  for those four years, kind of reaching the unchurched kids who
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  are a lot like me. So I, I, I reached out a lot to
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  a halfway house where kids who are going to be sentenced to a
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  detention center were on release time for months.
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  And so in that time, I discovered that when you, when
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  you study theology, I also had a double major in philosophy.
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  I added a third major in economics because my dad was
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  paying for the tuition at the time and he wanted something
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  practical. And the, the result was I, I
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  would see my classmates studying and getting good grades.
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  And I was trying to do the same thing, but they weren't doing
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  ministry. And, and So what I discovered
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  that if you're studying scripture, you're studying
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  theology, you're studying our Lord and you're not sharing it.
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  You, you, you get kind of constipated.
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  You all this stuff comes in and nothing productive, you know, So
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  I, I discovered that doing study, serious study and
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  ministry 2025 hours a week. And then I ended up recruiting
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  about 10 or 12 leaders, including my future bride,
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  Kimberly. She was the most dynamic Young
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  Life leader in reaching the women.
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  And we had so much fun. We've just backed into falling
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  in love. But the the experience is such
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  that I always tell my students, if you're studying this stuff in
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  earnest, you've got to find an outlet.
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  You got to share it because you learned it so much better when
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  you have to teach it. You can get straight A's, and I
• 9:39
  got straight A's, but I learned so much more by turning around
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  and trying to communicate this to high school kids like my
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  young Life leader Jack did for me and my buddies back in high
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  school. So that was decisive, getting
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  married after college. Then we went to Gordon Conwell
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  Seminary together. We graduated back in 82, and
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  there were some ominous signs at that point.
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  You know, I graduated the top of my class and I got ordained at
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  Trinity Presbyterian Church. But I discovered the early
• 10:05
  Church fathers. Yeah, exactly.
• 10:08
  Well, I didn't know that, you know.
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• 11:02
  But I discovered the early Church Fathers.
• 11:05
  Yeah, exactly what I didn't know that, you know, there were a
• 11:09
  series of volumes on the Sunday sermons of the Church Fathers.
• 11:12
  And I I, since I was going to be ordained, since I was expected
• 11:16
  to preach 30 to 40 minutes each Sunday, I thought, well, I'll
• 11:21
  bone up on this stuff, you know. And so I did.
• 11:24
  But connected to the Old Testament and the New, it was
• 11:27
  something really cool. I mean, I had professors who did
• 11:30
  that. They were my favorites.
• 11:32
  But typically you had an Old Testament specialist or a New
• 11:35
  Testament specialist or a systematician.
• 11:37
  So, you know, Klein and Nicole and others were good.
• 11:41
  But the early Church Fathers, it was raw.
• 11:43
  It was so much like the road to Emmaus, where your heart's
• 11:47
  burning and you can't wait to get up and share this on Sunday
• 11:49
  morning. But after almost a year, I
• 11:53
  discovered I was reading and studying and praying myself in
• 11:56
  the crisis of faith. And so in less than two years I
• 12:00
  submitted my resignation and I went in search of a church that
• 12:03
  felt like it really was what I was discovering in the early
• 12:07
  Church Fathers and reading how the new is concealed in the old
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  and the old is fulfilled and revealed in the new, like
• 12:15
  Augustine put it. This led me and and I got to
• 12:19
  just press pause for a second Lila and explain that I wasn't
• 12:22
  just not a Catholic. I in high school especially, but
• 12:26
  then just as much or maybe more in college, I was anti Catholic.
• 12:31
  And so, you know, I would target my Catholic friends in high
• 12:34
  school. I would target the Catholic kids
• 12:36
  in the local public high school in in Grove City and I just felt
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  what do you. Mean by target.
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  Well, I looked upon them. I mean, our, our ministry, Young
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  life was to reach the unchurched.
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  And I considered Catholics unchurched.
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  And it wasn't just bigotry, you know, on my part.
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  It was the sense that I had better been instilled in me that
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  if the Eucharist is sacred and profound but bred, then the idea
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  that you're worshipping it. I mean, idolaters and antiquity
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  had, I think, you know, more class than that, worshipping a
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  wafer. And likewise what they were
• 13:15
  doing to the Blessed Virgin Mary struck me as really detracting
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  from what is owed to our Lord alone and the Saints, you know,
• 13:24
  and seven sacraments and all of these things struck me as just
• 13:28
  so much baggage. And, you know, my grandmother
• 13:32
  had been a devout Catholic, very quiet, very, very prayerful.
• 13:36
  But you know, I just, when she died, we missed her.
• 13:40
  You know, I didn't go to the funeral Mass.
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  I couldn't step into that church.
• 13:44
  But I remember because. Of a sense of.
• 13:46
  Yeah, the sacrifice of the Mass is what the reform.
• 13:49
  Seems idolatrous. Yeah, it's idolatry, it's
• 13:51
  sacrilege and all of the rest thinking that they believe and
• 13:54
  they claim that they're recrucifying Jesus, that they're
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  repeating a sacrifice that is once and for all, you know, as
• 14:02
  Hebrews puts it. And of course, years later, I
• 14:05
  realized that is really a caricature.
• 14:07
  It's a sincere but serious distortion.
• 14:11
  You know that what Christ is doing in heaven, according to
• 14:13
  the book of Hebrews, he's a high priest forever.
• 14:16
  And you don't have a high priesthood if you have nothing
• 14:18
  to offer. He's not offering cattle, sheep,
• 14:21
  and goats. He's offering his own glorified
• 14:24
  humanity, his resurrected body, to the Father on our behalf, and
• 14:29
  then giving it to us on the Father's behalf.
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  You can't repeat a sacrifice that is never ending.
• 14:37
  You can't repeat anything that's never ending.
• 14:39
  And his sacrifice, but it took me years of study with the help
• 14:43
  of the old and new, but with the fathers especially.
• 14:46
  And so this crisis of faith led me, you know, back to our
• 14:51
  hometown, our college town, and then eventually to a doctoral
• 14:54
  program at Marquette in 85. And then the next year in 86, I
• 14:59
  started attending daily Mass in a basement Chapel on the
• 15:03
  Marquette campus. And I, it was for me a Eureka
• 15:10
  moment on the one hand, where it's like, you know, I had
• 15:13
  translated the entire apocalypse, all 22 chapters.
• 15:16
  And, you know, I had this experience of frustration back
• 15:20
  in college. And then suddenly at my first
• 15:23
  Mass, I'm hearing the Lamb of God, the glory of the holy,
• 15:26
  holy, holy, all of these things that were there in the Book of
• 15:30
  Revelation. But I never really had that
• 15:35
  experience before. And so by the time the priest
• 15:38
  pronounced the words of consecration, I still wasn't on
• 15:40
  my knees. But it just felt like the last
• 15:43
  doubts were just draining out of my head and my heart.
• 15:45
  I'm like, that's you. That's not bread.
• 15:48
  The church fathers were unanimous about this.
• 15:50
  And now it was a Eureka moment. But it was also a kind of Emmaus
• 15:54
  moment because in the first half of the Mass, the Scriptures were
• 15:59
  read in a coordinated way. Lila, like you could hear the
• 16:03
  promises in the first reading from the old, fulfilled by our
• 16:06
  Lord, what he was teaching in the Gospel.
• 16:09
  And I'm like, wow, the homily was so underwhelming.
• 16:14
  I was half tempted to say, hey, Father, could I just add a thing
• 16:17
  or two about that? Those readings from the early
• 16:20
  church, I didn't do that, of course, but by the time we had
• 16:24
  the words of consecration, it was like the scales were falling
• 16:27
  from my eyes. I felt myself literally hungry
• 16:30
  and thirsting for the body and blood of Christ.
• 16:35
  And so an hour later, everybody was gone except me.
• 16:38
  I'm in the back Pew looking down my Bible, my tablet, my, my
• 16:42
  journal, and wondering, you know, did I go to a basement
• 16:46
  Chapel or did I get whisked up to the heavenly Jerusalem where
• 16:50
  John had these visions? Were the same songs, the same
• 16:53
  prayers and the same sacrifice of the lamb?
• 16:56
  I mean, the technical term for the sacrificial lamb is used 28
• 17:00
  times in 22 chapters in the Apocalypse and nobody could ever
• 17:05
  explain to me why. Is that the principal title?
• 17:08
  Because he's the high priest and he's the lamb offering himself.
• 17:12
  And really it isn't found anywhere else.
• 17:14
  I mean in John 1 you have another term used for behold,
• 17:18
  the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
• 17:20
  But apart from John's gospel, twice in John's Apocalypse, 28
• 17:24
  times. So for the next two weeks, I am
• 17:26
  rereading the Church Fathers, trying to figure out how do they
• 17:29
  interpret the visions of John in the Book of Revelation.
• 17:33
  And really, without exception, you see that when you're reading
• 17:36
  the old and the new together, you know, they're, they're
• 17:40
  distinct, but they're in interpenetrating.
• 17:42
  They're, they're, they're really, you know, inseparable
• 17:46
  and they're mutually illuminating.
• 17:48
  And, you know, by that time I, I realized, you know, you don't
• 17:52
  have to die to go to heaven. All you got to do is go to the
• 17:55
  Eucharistic liturgy and the angels and the Saints that John
• 17:59
  sees. It isn't at the end of time.
• 18:02
  It's the beginning of every week.
• 18:03
  It's what John calls the Lord's Day in Revelation 110.
• 18:07
  And I was off to the races. I began devouring material from
• 18:10
  the ancient church and seeing all of this fulfilled in a way
• 18:14
  that just went beyond my wildest dreams and also my deepest fears
• 18:18
  because I just how am I going to do this?
• 18:20
  I mean, everyone who knows me knows that I am the most
• 18:23
  Calvinistic super lapsarian you. Were Calvinist, that was.
• 18:26
  Your very very. Identification.
• 18:28
  I'm Calvinist. You know, and from college on.
• 18:31
  Point Calvinist. Yeah, or 10, you know, but I
• 18:34
  mean, I, I thought of the soft Calvinist as infralapsarian, you
• 18:39
  know, I was super lapsarian. And I believe that Beza and
• 18:42
  Calvin, all these others were too, you know, and I, I just
• 18:46
  couldn't believe that, you know, it's like Saul, who is targeting
• 18:50
  the Christians, ends up becoming one.
• 18:54
  And and so my friends, my colleagues, my former
• 18:58
  professors, my classmates were just like stunned, but not
• 19:01
  nearly as much as I was. It was like a Horror Story, a
• 19:07
  detective story and a romance wrapped into one, you know.
• 19:11
  But by the time I entered the church at the Easter Vigil in
• 19:13
  86, I was not less evangelical. Now that I've become a Catholic
• 19:18
  in in fact, I, I would say that the evangel, the good news just
• 19:24
  was like on steroids. It the good news got so much
• 19:26
  better. And the the sovereign Lord of
• 19:29
  history. Only a God who is totally
• 19:31
  sovereign can use mortals to transform bread and wine into
• 19:37
  Christ, body and blood, you know.
• 19:39
  And so I had a former professor say you wouldn't be such a
• 19:41
  zealous Catholic if you hadn't been such a staunch Calvinist.
• 19:45
  And like, well, even before Calvin, Agustin was this way as
• 19:48
  well. You know, I didn't mean to
• 19:50
  gramble on and off, that was. Beautiful.
• 19:53
  I mean, there's so much to explore and so much of what
• 19:57
  you've said already, but in a nutshell, your story is
• 20:01
  incredibly that the Providence of God in your story from the
• 20:05
  childhood. To almost in juvenile hall sent
• 20:09
  to, you know, detention or whatever, all the way to, you
• 20:12
  know, now you're Saint Paul's Center professor, obviously
• 20:15
  writing, teaching, serving so many millions of souls.
• 20:19
  It's that that alone, you know, it's a trajectory.
• 20:22
  What, what a what a grace. Yeah, I mean, what a.
• 20:25
  Beautiful story of God's prophets.
• 20:27
  Would have been nominated, you know, to be the least likely to
• 20:30
  convert on the one hand and on the other hand, I, I, I feel as
• 20:34
  though since I came into the church in 86 and Kimberly came
• 20:38
  in in 1990. So four years after you.
• 20:41
  That's right. And there was a lot of tension
• 20:43
  and we thought, you know, I didn't think she would ever
• 20:45
  become a Catholic. And then she did.
• 20:48
  And it really had little to do with me after I figured out I'm
• 20:53
  not the Holy Spirit. I can't barge into the Holy of
• 20:56
  Holies, which is her heart, her conscience.
• 20:59
  Only the Spirit can do that. And then through anti Catholics
• 21:04
  who were friends of hers, she kept finding herself explaining,
• 21:08
  no, that's not what they believe.
• 21:09
  I mean, if you're going to attack it, attack it in truth,
• 21:11
  you know? And so she would go through with
• 21:14
  these anti Catholic friends all of these clarifications.
• 21:18
  And so she began to realize this makes so much more sense than
• 21:21
  she ever thought it could, you know?
• 21:23
  And so she surprised me on Ash Wednesday back in 1990 as we
• 21:27
  were preparing to move to Steubenville, OH, from Joliet.
• 21:32
  She had been driving too stupid to look for housing.
• 21:35
  And she was just asking our Lord what she what do you want me to
• 21:39
  give up this like, chocolate, dessert, whatever, you know?
• 21:42
  And she described to me over the phone that, you know, he just
• 21:46
  said, I want you to give up. This is not about your husband
• 21:49
  anymore. This is me, your father calling
• 21:51
  you into the fullness of the faith.
• 21:54
  And when she told me that I was out in California, my eyes
• 21:57
  weren't dry. I could tell hers weren't
• 21:59
  either. And we thought, well, happy days
• 22:01
  are here again. You know, we've done ministry
• 22:03
  together in college. You know, I've been a pastor and
• 22:06
  she had been a pastor's wife and all of that.
• 22:08
  But we ended up discovering we still clashed.
• 22:10
  We developed so many bad habits. On theological issues.
• 22:15
  Or communications, just raising the kids.
• 22:17
  And, you know, how do we celebrate, you know, Advent now?
• 22:22
  It's not the same as Christmas. And we just had conflicts.
• 22:25
  And so we ended up going to a Catholic counselor, a really
• 22:27
  good one down the street, and he just kind of helped me discover
• 22:31
  that marriages go through seasons of life.
• 22:34
  You have seemingly fallen out of love, though you still love her.
• 22:37
  So renew the wellspring, take her back on dates, you know, you
• 22:41
  know, watch the movie that you watched when you first realized
• 22:44
  you were in love with her. And, and so we fell back into a
• 22:47
  love that was greater than whatever we had fallen out of,
• 22:50
  you know, but you can't raise six kids and not go through the
• 22:54
  ebb and the flow and the seasons of of spring, but also winter.
• 22:59
  But in the process, we discovered a partnership, a
• 23:02
  friendship the likes of which I never knew married couples could
• 23:06
  have. And so I just say, glory to God
• 23:09
  in the highest, You know, not to us, O Lord.
• 23:12
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  subscription, in addition to that, you'll get a free tote bag
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  and everylife.com will donate a box of diapers and wipes to a
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  mother and baby in need. And I'm excited to share
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  everylife.com is now offering training pants for your little
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  training pants pull ups for that little one that is maybe potty
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• 24:48
  There's so many questions I have for you, Doctor Hahn and Scott.
• 24:53
  And you know one thing when you were speaking earlier and I we
• 24:57
  need to do another podcast with Kimberly too, because Kimberly
• 25:00
  is a Spitfire an amazing. In her own right.
• 25:04
  Come back, both of you next time and we'll do, we'll do Kimberly,
• 25:07
  then we'll do together. And Lord hear our prayer.
• 25:11
  But when you're sharing about being this 13 year old kid and
• 25:14
  getting involved in so many tough things.
• 25:17
  And I want to go back here because I just think it's such
• 25:19
  a, it's, it's such a meaningful thing to see what God can do in
• 25:23
  someone's life when they're directed like pointed towards
• 25:26
  purpose. Did you ever have, were there
• 25:28
  any seeds in your childhood, you know, a 13 year old or before
• 25:32
  that? I mean, you're clearly very
• 25:33
  bright. You know, your output is
• 25:35
  incredible. People that know you say the guy
• 25:37
  doesn't stop. I mean, you're always thinking,
• 25:39
  sharing, writing, teaching. Like you just have this
• 25:41
  incredible capacity, not like this intellectual capacity.
• 25:47
  So was that 13 year old kid as a kid, were you reading?
• 25:50
  Were you a voracious reader? Were you always writing?
• 25:53
  Did you? You were just like always on and
• 25:55
  then you just got caught up in bad things.
• 25:56
  Well, how did that? You know, it's sort of like
• 25:59
  asking a centipede how he walks. He doesn't know, you know?
• 26:02
  Yeah. And so I was just what I was.
• 26:04
  And I kind of assumed everybody else was sort of like me, but
• 26:07
  not. But getting into crime, was it
• 26:08
  sort of like the, the interest of like, oh, I can forge a check
• 26:12
  like at 12 years old, I mean, well, I mean.
• 26:14
  Three steps. First of all, I was zealous in
• 26:18
  whatever I did. Yes, clearly.
• 26:20
  So I I read probably close to 100 books about the soccer World
• 26:24
  War, My dad had been in the Pacific theater and the honor
• 26:26
  guard for General Douglas McLaren.
• 26:27
  As a 12 year old. Yeah, really.
• 26:29
  At 10:11 and 12:00, I was reading a lot of books,
• 26:33
  especially aircraft. I built over 100 model
• 26:36
  airplanes, you know, and I so by the time I had a bunch of
• 26:44
  friends and I, the second step was guitar.
• 26:47
  That became what really was like my religion, you know, wanting
• 26:51
  to be a rock star in the early 70s, you know, whether it was
• 26:54
  The Allman Brothers, Jethro Tull or Van Morrison, I just love
• 26:58
  music. And I loved getting better and
• 27:00
  better on the guitar. And so I would work on it even
• 27:02
  in study hall, you know, and that sort of thing.
• 27:05
  And so that became not only an opportunity to get good at
• 27:11
  something, but also an opportunity to do bad.
• 27:13
  And so we were getting high and we were getting drunk and you're
• 27:18
  doing things that are just really stupid and
• 27:20
  self-destructive because you're kind of daring the other guys to
• 27:23
  do it. And so whether it was
• 27:25
  shoplifting, getting caught for that, you know, and then
• 27:28
  breaking into a car, a house, and as I said, mail fraud,
• 27:32
  furniture forgery. And, and it was just, you know,
• 27:34
  for me, it was Divine Mercy that I ended up getting caught at
• 27:38
  almost everything I was doing, whereas my older brother just
• 27:42
  got away. Because you're a really smart
• 27:44
  guy. So that you you were.
• 27:45
  You can't be smart and do that many dumb.
• 27:48
  Things. Without, you know, learning
• 27:50
  these divine lessons the hard way.
• 27:53
  So many times people think that mercy is getting away with
• 27:56
  stuff. While in a certain sense, from
• 27:59
  Romans one, we know that's what wrath is, God gave them up to
• 28:02
  all of these disordered desires. Whereas I discovered mercy by
• 28:06
  getting caught. And there was one Sergeant named
• 28:09
  Truver in the Upper Saint Clair police force who for whatever
• 28:12
  reason just targeted me and made sure I was busted as hard as I
• 28:17
  could be. And he was a Catholic.
• 28:20
  You know, I'm like resenting him.
• 28:21
  Years later, I saw, I ran into him and he said, you know, of
• 28:25
  all of the delinquents you were hanging out with, I thought you
• 28:29
  had signs of hope. And so that's why he busted me
• 28:33
  so much harder. And you know, I, I sometimes
• 28:36
  think that's counterintuitive on the one hand, but that's so
• 28:40
  often the way our Lord works. You know, you, you end up having
• 28:44
  to face the consequences of your sins.
• 28:47
  And then you recognize as I did, this is the third and final
• 28:50
  step, you know, for me in in high school, having a crush on a
• 28:54
  gal, wanting to go on a retreat, but then hearing somebody say on
• 28:59
  Friday night, pointing to a cross, Christ paid a debt he
• 29:03
  didn't owe because you owe a debt you couldn't pay and you
• 29:08
  can't. And I remember thinking, there
• 29:10
  are 200 high school kids in this room.
• 29:12
  But I was feeling like singled out because I knew from my crime
• 29:18
  spree that I owed a debt. I couldn't.
• 29:20
  You know, the irony is that when we went to seminary our first
• 29:23
  year of marriage, I shared with Kimberly what I've been learning
• 29:27
  from Numbers 5 and Leviticus 5 and Zacchaeus and, and other
• 29:31
  people that there's this thing called restitution that I have
• 29:33
  never taken responsibility for. And she said the Lord has never
• 29:38
  outdone in generosity. You know, you cannot study God's
• 29:42
  word and not apply it. And so when we did the math, we
• 29:45
  realized I had to pay over $1000 of restitution.
• 29:49
  So Christmas break, our first year of marriage in between the
• 29:52
  fall and spring semesters, I go to the shopping, I go to the
• 29:56
  mall and I go to these stores. You know, one guy said you're
• 30:00
  going to fill up our accounting more now than when you.
• 30:02
  Had been to as a 12 year old. Yeah, I went back to the stores
• 30:06
  that I had stolen record albums from and and how old were.
• 30:09
  You at this point 30. I was 21-O21, newly married at
• 30:13
  seminary. Wow.
• 30:15
  Yeah. And I think our Lord really
• 30:16
  blessed this, not only because I was convicted to make up for
• 30:20
  what I had stolen, but also because I had married a woman
• 30:24
  who was completely willing to do that, even though we had to
• 30:27
  borrow money from my dad just to drive back after Christmas to go
• 30:31
  back to Gordon Conwell to resume our spring semester.
• 30:35
  And, and she just, she made arts and crafts for all of the
• 30:38
  Christmas gifts for her family and mine.
• 30:41
  And and then suddenly out of the blue, you know, the Lord
• 30:45
  provided for us. In fact, an anonymous donor at
• 30:48
  the time, I didn't know who it was made it possible for her to
• 30:51
  get her master's degree alongside of me.
• 30:54
  And so I I tell the story in a book called Lord Have mercy, the
• 30:59
  Healing Power of Confession, because I discovered that in
• 31:03
  taking responsibility for what you did and by God's grace,
• 31:06
  trying your best to undo it, like Zacchaeus, the tax
• 31:10
  collector paid back fourfold. Well, that's stipulated in the
• 31:14
  book of Exodus, you know, And so I, I realized I, I cannot sin
• 31:19
  against the light safely. And Kimberly had already been
• 31:23
  raised in such a dynamic Christian family or her dad, you
• 31:27
  know, he's 93. He's like one of my best
• 31:30
  friends, my spiritual father. He was the first I ever confided
• 31:35
  in that. I was thinking, I was afraid
• 31:36
  that I might have to become a Catholic.
• 31:38
  And he just prayed it for me and supported me.
• 31:41
  But you know, with that kind of upbringing, you realize that God
• 31:46
  had prepared me through this woman to try to be a man of
• 31:49
  integrity by the mercy and the grace of God.
• 31:52
  Praise God. Amen.
• 31:54
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• 32:48
  That's Exodus 90.com/lila. The one of my favorite books
• 32:52
  that you've written is the Lamb Supper, which is the value.
• 32:56
  Am I getting the title? But about the, you know, what
• 33:01
  you were speaking to earlier, the incredible biblical basis
• 33:05
  for the Mass and for the true presence, the real presence, the
• 33:09
  Eucharist. And there's so much to unpack
• 33:13
  here, but I, I want to kind of maybe start with that because
• 33:17
  today in America, most Catholics don't really at least behave
• 33:23
  like it is the real presence. And many don't even believe, I
• 33:27
  think it's a majority of Catholics when they're polled.
• 33:30
  You you probably know these numbers better than I do.
• 33:32
  Around 70% depending on the poll and the formulation of the
• 33:36
  question. But.
• 33:38
  You know, don't believe it. Yeah, they believe it's a sacred
• 33:40
  symbol, you know, But I'm like, that's what I believe when I was
• 33:43
  a Presbyterian pastor. I mean, they're, they're
• 33:45
  basically believing as many Protestants do about, you know,
• 33:49
  because I grew up evangelical, we would receive Holy Holy
• 33:53
  Communion. We didn't call that communion on
• 33:55
  a monthly basis. And it was a piece of bread and
• 33:57
  it was a symbol. Think about Jesus and what he
• 33:59
  did for you. And I always thought it was a
• 34:02
  little odd, you know, but it's OK.
• 34:03
  Well, why would we do it this way?
• 34:05
  OK, fine. It wasn't much.
• 34:06
  It's just because Jesus said this sort of and, and you know,
• 34:09
  the Gospels, but so many American Catholics don't
• 34:13
  understand the Church's own teaching on this.
• 34:17
  And it sounds like you had this kind of providential experience,
• 34:21
  this divine gift that you were given to see and to hear at a
• 34:27
  Mass that this is really Jesus. And you knew it was Jesus
• 34:30
  because, largely Revelation. That's right, the book of the
• 34:34
  book of the Bible. But the old and the new, the
• 34:37
  Passover, which for ancient Israel in the Old Testament was
• 34:42
  like Easter, Christmas and the 4th of July all rolled into one.
• 34:46
  And so Christ's fulfillment of that in the Upper Room on Holy
• 34:50
  Thursday, you know, you had to sacrifice the lamb back then.
• 34:54
  You had to eat the lamb. So the lamb has to be
• 34:57
  sacrificed. But I discovered that for the
• 34:59
  early Church fathers, Jesus had to make provisions for communion
• 35:03
  so that it would be a sacrifice like the Passover, and also a
• 35:07
  sacrificial communion upon the lamb.
• 35:10
  And the more you're steeped in both the old and the new, you
• 35:14
  realize that the new surpasses the old in so many ways, but it
• 35:18
  doesn't subvert it. And so that was for me, you
• 35:23
  know, eye opening. But it was also, you know, it
• 35:27
  was like Emmaus wrote. On the one hand, my heart was
• 35:29
  burning within me as the Scriptures were opened, as you
• 35:32
  hear the law and the prophets fulfilled by Christ's death and
• 35:35
  resurrection. On the other hand, they're at
• 35:38
  the table in Emmaus. The one thing I never heard, I
• 35:41
  heard sermons about the Emmaus wrote and I gave sermons about
• 35:46
  the Emmaus Rd. but I never heard anybody talk about the table in
• 35:50
  the town of Emmaus because that's the climax.
• 35:54
  You know, you'd think after 6 miles or so they'd stop the guy
• 35:57
  and say, wait a second, who else teaches like this?
• 36:01
  You know, pull the hoodie back, you know, or something.
• 36:04
  No, Jesus withheld his identity from Clopas and his companion,
• 36:08
  and then he deliberately discloses himself when he takes,
• 36:10
  He blesses, he breaks, and he gives the bread at the table in
• 36:14
  Emmaus. Their eyes are opened in the
• 36:17
  breaking of the bread. Breaking the bread is the
• 36:20
  expression in the 1st century for what later is called the
• 36:23
  Eucharist or the Mass or the Lord's Supper or whatever else.
• 36:28
  And why does he vanish? Is he playing hide and go seek?
• 36:30
  No, you know, He brought their spiritual vision to the point
• 36:34
  where they would recognize His resurrected body in the breaking
• 36:38
  of the Eucharistic bread. And so it was like an Emmaus
• 36:41
  table experience after experiencing that heartburn as
• 36:46
  your spiritual heartburn, you know, for for a few years.
• 36:50
  And and so this plus the Book of Revelation, just I was being
• 36:55
  driven crazy with curiosity. What if any of this remains in
• 36:58
  the Mass? And in the opening chapter of
• 37:00
  that book, The Lamb Supper, I basically narrate what it was
• 37:05
  that I was not expecting to experience when I went to Mass
• 37:09
  for the first time in a basement Chapel on a weekday around noon.
• 37:13
  And, you know, you, you've mentioned a few of the books
• 37:16
  already. So Rome's Sweet Home we wrote
• 37:19
  way back in 93, so it's more than 30 years old now.
• 37:22
  Yeah. And I think everyone should read
• 37:24
  that. It's in so easy to read.
• 37:26
  It's a love story. It's your.
• 37:27
  Love story? Yeah, falling back in love with
• 37:29
  our Lord, with each other, but going through hard times that we
• 37:33
  wouldn't even wish upon your worst enemy.
• 37:36
  So Rome's sweet Homer journey to Catholicism, and it's in like
• 37:40
  over 30 languages. I mean how?
• 37:42
  Many of how many of those have been sold, do you know?
• 37:44
  I've lost track. I never.
• 37:45
  Really, it must be in the millions.
• 37:46
  It is in the millions. Yeah, it's incredible.
• 37:48
  And then I wrote a book called A Father Who Keeps His promises
• 37:50
  around 98, God's covenant, love and Scripture because the
• 37:54
  covenant, the old and the new as not a contract.
• 37:57
  This is yours and that is mine, but a covenant is a family bunt.
• 38:01
  I am yours and you were mine. Like marriage or adoption.
• 38:04
  That was also another laser beam for me penetrating, you know,
• 38:08
  something. So that when God the Father
• 38:10
  sends the Son, the spirit of sonship is poured out upon us to
• 38:14
  make us the family of God in a way that goes beyond any
• 38:17
  religious rhetoric. There's a reality there that is
• 38:20
  going to be even more real, you know, in 15 billion years.
• 38:25
  And we realize that's the real family, the Trinity.
• 38:29
  And then I wrote the Lamb's Supper, because the that was.
• 38:32
  The third. That was wow.
• 38:33
  I didn't realize that I wanted to give a constructive vision of
• 38:38
  why the covenant, the old and the new, led me to the family of
• 38:42
  God, and not just to the Presbyterian Church in America
• 38:46
  where there are other ones in Canada or you know, but a
• 38:49
  international, truly universal, a Catholic family is what I
• 38:53
  discovered that God was doing as he would make a covenant with
• 38:57
  the first couple, our first parents, renew it with Noah and
• 39:01
  his three sons and their three spouses, and then renew it with
• 39:05
  Abraham by the time God's family become a tribe.
• 39:08
  And then with Moses at Sinai, where you have 12 tribes that
• 39:12
  are still a family, a national family.
• 39:15
  And then you move to the new where you have an international
• 39:19
  family. You have this family that is not
• 39:22
  only human but divine. It transcends Jewish ethnicity
• 39:27
  and what fits that job description, like 1 applicant,
• 39:31
  the Catholic Church, which had, you know, Italian popes.
• 39:34
  Now they had a Polish Pope. You know, back then, he retired
• 39:39
  all of the Polish jokes that we used to tell in junior high and
• 39:42
  Senior High School. And so it was like the Pearl of
• 39:45
  great price discovering this, you know, a treasure hidden in
• 39:47
  the field. So a father keeps his promises,
• 39:51
  but I had to focus on the impediments, the obstacles.
• 39:55
  So my. Faith for evangelicals.
• 39:59
  Well, and I think that's such a unique gift that you have
• 40:03
  brought and give, you've given and shared with so many people
• 40:05
  that you have as a Bible scholar, you know, and an
• 40:09
  evangelical Protestant Bible scholar, Calvinist specifically,
• 40:12
  like you were sharing earlier, you, you've really excavated
• 40:15
  Scripture. And you speak, you speak, you
• 40:18
  can read and write or you understand and can translate
• 40:22
  both the Greek and the Latin. You kind of you, you, you do all
• 40:25
  the things right. And so you can understand both
• 40:29
  the ignorance that even American Catholics have and speak to
• 40:32
  that. But then just as importantly,
• 40:34
  you can look at the objections and the misunderstandings that I
• 40:37
  think a lot of evangelicals and Protestants, I know myself, I
• 40:40
  even had many as a Protestant girl.
• 40:42
  And then you can answer those with a deep understanding
• 40:46
  instead of a, a gesture of, you know, triumphant knowledge.
• 40:49
  I know everything you were once there.
• 40:51
  You understand the objections. And I think a lot of your
• 40:54
  previous books, you know, your your books after those first
• 40:57
  three have done that so powerfully.
• 41:00
  And you're using Holy Scripture as well as tradition, you know,
• 41:02
  the Church fathers and doctors, but you're using Scripture to
• 41:05
  help connect these dots for folks.
• 41:07
  It's interesting to look at your own work through the eyes of
• 41:11
  another. You know, it's like, yeah.
• 41:12
  Oh yeah. OK, that's true too.
• 41:14
  You know, So I mean, for me, the big biggest thing was the Mass.
• 41:19
  If they're wrong on that, they're not like Methodists or
• 41:22
  Lutherans or Baptists or Episcopalians.
• 41:25
  You know, as a Presbyterian, I was pretty dogmatic.
• 41:28
  I was pretty cock sure until I realized I can be wrong, and I
• 41:32
  am. And so.
• 41:34
  Was there something in particular, by the way, that
• 41:36
  really shook you? I mean, you mentioned this
• 41:38
  period of time where you were doubting you had to leave.
• 41:40
  I think you said you left the seminary.
• 41:43
  I left the pre I I left the the pastoral ministry.
• 41:45
  The pastor. Excuse me, the.
• 41:46
  Pastor, I graduated in 82. I mean, top of my Presbyterian,
• 41:50
  Presbyterian and, and Gordon Conwell is sort of like the
• 41:54
  Harvard of evangelical seminaries.
• 41:56
  It's non denominational. So we had a lot of these guys,
• 41:59
  my friends were Baptists or Lutheran's or Episcopalians and
• 42:02
  so on. So we would wrangle in, in
• 42:04
  fraternal ways, you know, but none of us were Catholic and all
• 42:09
  of us revered the Lord's Supper, but none of us worshiped the
• 42:13
  wafer. So if they're wrong, they're not
• 42:16
  like Methodists who are a little off as Armenians.
• 42:20
  They're so way off and about Mary and confession to a priest.
• 42:27
  You know, the idea that there is one church and Christ has
• 42:32
  endowed it with this infallible authority.
• 42:35
  I mean, it's sort of like CS Lewis, you know, Jesus can't be
• 42:39
  a good teacher if he's teaching that he's God.
• 42:41
  He's either the Lord, a liar or a lunatic.
• 42:45
  The Catholic Church can't just be another respectable
• 42:47
  denomination if it's claiming this much divine authority, if
• 42:52
  it alone claims to be able to do the Eucharist to, you know, and
• 42:58
  so it's all kind of all or nothing proposition.
• 43:01
  And for me it was so obviously nothing.
• 43:03
  You know, it just they're wrong and they're way off.
• 43:07
  And that's what I had been taught in high school.
• 43:08
  It was reinforced in college and in my own work in youth
• 43:12
  ministry. I would target the Catholic kids
• 43:14
  to help them see the superstition, to find the
• 43:17
  freedom of the Protestant gospel of Lutheran Calvin, and so to
• 43:22
  discover you can be wrong. And I am.
• 43:26
  And I'm not a little wrong. I'm really wrong, you know, I
• 43:30
  once heard some. So, so just sorry to interrupt
• 43:32
  here, but you left the Presbyterian ministry like being
• 43:35
  a pastor, a Presbyterian pastor, because you were seeing so much
• 43:40
  truth in Catholicism. That was, that was the the
• 43:43
  linchpin. It wasn't so much that there was
• 43:44
  something theologically incorrect in the Protestant
• 43:49
  denomination. Let's say you're in.
• 43:51
  It's more that there's so much missing.
• 43:53
  Right, that's a great question. And it reminds me I'm, I've got
• 43:55
  to fill out a space or two because I was convinced that the
• 43:59
  word of God is just that. And I wanted to submit to the
• 44:03
  Lordship of Jesus Christ and I would go wherever the word of
• 44:06
  God led me. And so reading the early church
• 44:09
  fathers who were really building on what my favorite professors
• 44:14
  were teaching in college and seminary.
• 44:17
  So I was a pastor at Trinity Presbyterian Church and I was
• 44:21
  actually recycling the patristic material that I was discovering
• 44:25
  in the 1st 5 centuries. And they just thought I was the
• 44:28
  cat's pajamas, you know, like, where'd you come up with this
• 44:31
  stuff? You know, I was, I'm not even
• 44:33
  sure I was 20. I was 26 at that point, I guess,
• 44:36
  you know, but I was Scott. Chris Austin Han Yeah, but they
• 44:39
  didn't. They didn't do.
• 44:40
  It was so highly unoriginal. But I didn't quote my sources,
• 44:44
  you know, from the pulpit. Really.
• 44:46
  Well, why would you bother, especially, you know, when
• 44:49
  you're recently, I feel like you were doing.
• 44:50
  Justin Martyr. Like, what were you?
• 44:52
  What were, who was your favorite?
• 44:53
  Did you have an Ignatius? Irenaeus was Ignatius of any as
• 44:57
  well, then Justin Martyr. But I I eventually got around to
• 45:01
  Augustine, I mean San Agustin, and I felt safe because for
• 45:04
  Calvin and Calvinist, Augustine is one of us.
• 45:07
  Going to say he's a safe. He's a safe guy for a lot of.
• 45:10
  Until you read more widely and then you realize that guy
• 45:14
  believes in papal primacy. He believes in eucharistic
• 45:18
  transformation. He says it's not a sin to
• 45:20
  worship the Eucharist. It's a sin not to him.
• 45:23
  Like say what? And then the Saints, the Blessed
• 45:26
  Virgin Mary, This guy is supposed to be the proto
• 45:29
  Calvinist. This guy is like 110% Catholic.
• 45:33
  And I wasn't quite ready to even consider that seriously.
• 45:37
  I was looking at Orthodoxy, I was looking at Anglicanism, I
• 45:40
  was looking at high church traditions that had the
• 45:43
  Eucharist once a week. You know, our, our services at
• 45:47
  Trinity Presbyterian were pastor centered, sermon centered, you
• 45:52
  know, for 45 minutes and four times a year we had the Lord's
• 45:56
  Supper. I got them to go to once a
• 45:58
  month. I even got them to go at the end
• 46:01
  to once a week. And it was really kind of
• 46:03
  breaking through a lot of bias on their parts toward non
• 46:07
  Presbyterians, you know, But I began to look at Orthodoxy,
• 46:11
  Eastern Orthodoxy. And I, I began to sense though,
• 46:14
  that just as the Presbyterian Church in America is kind of an
• 46:17
  ethnic entity, so is the Greek Orthodox, so is the Russian
• 46:21
  Orthodox. They're all defined by ethnicity
• 46:24
  in a way that the new covenant transcends.
• 46:27
  Was that the biggest reason you think you did not go the
• 46:30
  Orthodoxy route and as opposed to the Roman?
• 46:33
  Catholicism. The sense of ethnic origin.
• 46:37
  Yeah, the idea that you're reducing the faith to an ethnic
• 46:42
  body and tradition. And at the time, I think there
• 46:45
  were at least 12 or 13 Orthodox bodies, Ruthenian and Russian
• 46:49
  and Ukraine, all of that. And so I thought, no, we need
• 46:52
  something transnational, international.
• 46:55
  And when I was teaching, well, I was a pastor, but I was also,
• 46:59
  and I described this in Rome's Sweet home.
• 47:01
  I was teaching in a high school, Fairfax Christian High School,
• 47:04
  and I was teaching the Covenant and how godfather's a married
• 47:08
  couple, then a family, then a tribe, then 12 tribes, you know.
• 47:12
  And so my students, especially the sharp ones, were like, where
• 47:15
  is this leading? It doesn't look like, you know,
• 47:17
  a Presbyterian denomination. So I drew this big family
• 47:21
  pyramid that should ideally be worldwide.
• 47:24
  And one of my sharpest students, Rebecca said, Sure looks like
• 47:26
  the Catholic Church to us, you know?
• 47:29
  And I said no, this is the antidote to Catholicism, you
• 47:31
  know, and. Pope Scott Hahn and they.
• 47:34
  Were like shaking their heads Baptist, you know, and whatever
• 47:37
  else they were. It's ironic because two years
• 47:40
  ago I had the privilege of getting back in touch with
• 47:43
  Rebecca and serving as her sponsor when she came into the
• 47:46
  Catholic Church. And she's on fire now as much as
• 47:50
  ever. And so, you know, what goes
• 47:52
  around comes around, I suppose, in terms of what covenant karma.
• 47:56
  But, you know, so the Lamb Supper for me was a major
• 48:01
  exercise in order to explain to other people how it wasn't
• 48:05
  becoming Catholic by subtracting what I believed as an
• 48:08
  evangelical. It was not only adding things
• 48:11
  that build upon what I'd already believed.
• 48:14
  It seemed to be like you were multiplying the Amazing Grace
• 48:17
  almost exponentially. I think there is a concern
• 48:20
  among, and I have so many very beloved Protestant or
• 48:24
  evangelical, non Catholic Christian friends, allies, you
• 48:28
  know, partners, however we want to say family, even extended
• 48:32
  family. And, you know, I think there's a
• 48:34
  very sincere concern that many have that, you know, all the
• 48:38
  bells and smells of Catholicism, as they might see it or call it
• 48:42
  that they, it just seems like a lot, a lot to have to assent to
• 48:48
  a lot to have to understand, agree to, and they're just like,
• 48:50
  I just want to love the Lord. I just want to love Jesus.
• 48:53
  I want to read the Bible and be inspired, try to be live a moral
• 48:56
  life and then just really focus on evangelizing my friends and
• 48:59
  family and worship the Lord, You know, have my worship music.
• 49:01
  I, and I'm oversimplifying, of course, but there's a, there's a
• 49:04
  simplicity to how they feel their walk should be.
• 49:08
  Not that they're not smart people, but they're concerned
• 49:12
  that getting too caught up in the bells and smells, they may
• 49:15
  miss the forest for the trees. They may miss Jesus for Mary or
• 49:18
  Jesus for his Saints or Jesus for, for whomever.
• 49:21
  And I, I, I think it's a sincere concern, you know, of course I
• 49:25
  know. Been there, done that.
• 49:26
  I mean, I had that in spades. And I I sympathize with people
• 49:30
  who have that. I also sympathize with with
• 49:33
  Catholics who are sort of bewildered.
• 49:35
  Why do they oppose us? Why do they call us a cult?
• 49:38
  Why do they see all of this as superficial?
• 49:40
  I'm like, I can explain why, you know?
• 49:44
  On the other hand, what I want them to see and I want non
• 49:47
  Catholics to see is that what we agree on is so much greater than
• 49:52
  where we disagree. I mean, when you look at the New
• 49:54
  Testament, when you look at the Creed, when you look at the
• 49:56
  miracles, the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, and I could go on
• 49:59
  and on, we share, I would say approximately 85% in common,
• 50:04
  maybe closer to 90%. And so there is the Catholic
• 50:08
  extras, you know, with regard to Mary and the Pope, purgatory,
• 50:11
  the Saints, the angels and the seven sacraments and so on.
• 50:15
  But, you know, once you submit yourself to the Lordship of
• 50:18
  Christ and you surrender to the authority of His Word, you begin
• 50:22
  to sense there's a tension between, you know, being an
• 50:25
  American Christian or American Catholic because though America
• 50:29
  might have been founded by a majority of Christians.
• 50:32
  And I'm grateful for this country I love and I'm.
• 50:35
  Yeah, I'm grateful for it. On the other hand, I also
• 50:38
  recognize that in America, everything is free in a very
• 50:42
  individualistic sense where you get to choose as an individual
• 50:47
  what is your truth. And we might think, well, that's
• 50:49
  postmodern. That's recent, but there's a
• 50:52
  genealogy you can trace back to the beginning where we'll serve
• 50:55
  no sovereign, you know, no monarch like King George, but no
• 50:59
  bishops either, you know, And, and so there is a sense of
• 51:04
  experientialism, individualism, you know, I'm only bound to what
• 51:08
  I have chosen for myself. Whereas the scriptures are
• 51:12
  covenantal. They're familial.
• 51:14
  You didn't vote for your parents.
• 51:16
  You didn't even vote for your siblings.
• 51:18
  You know, I voted for my spouse, but I had no idea what that was
• 51:20
  getting into when I got married 45 years ago, and neither did
• 51:24
  she. And so the reality that America
• 51:27
  presents that it's individualism, it's freedom,
• 51:30
  it's voluntary, only what you choose.
• 51:34
  You know, in the free market, that might be fine to a level,
• 51:37
  you know, to A to a degree. But in real life, life is
• 51:42
  family. And, you know, even though
• 51:44
  adolescents want to break out and call that freedom, you know,
• 51:48
  by the time you grow up and you get married and then suddenly,
• 51:51
  as I like to say, the two become one flesh.
• 51:55
  And by the time Kimberly and I became one flesh, you know, nine
• 51:58
  months later, we had to come up with a name because our first
• 52:02
  born, Michael, was the incarnation of our love, the
• 52:05
  embodiment of our oneness. And we kind of became three in
• 52:09
  one as family, you know, and you, you, you study the Trinity.
• 52:14
  And it's true and it's profound, but it's abstract.
• 52:17
  And then suddenly Father, Son and Holy Spirit, or more than
• 52:21
  just titles that we project onto God to domesticate the deity.
• 52:27
  God is a father, more than I will ever be, and the only
• 52:30
  perfect Father from all eternity.
• 52:32
  The Son isn't younger, he isn't weaker, you know, isn't small.
• 52:35
  He's God from God. And you're like, wait a second.
• 52:39
  These mysteries, these sacred mysteries of our faith point to
• 52:43
  the the autoimacy of family life, family love, family
• 52:47
  communion as being divine in a way that you won't find in
• 52:51
  merely monotheistic religions. And and so for me, you know, I I
• 52:56
  did a book called the Lamb's Supper to explain the Eucharist
• 52:59
  from the Bible, the old and the new.
• 53:01
  I also did a book called Hail Holy Queen, the Mother of God
• 53:04
  and the Word of. Mine.
• 53:05
  It's such, so beautifully done. What a classic hail.
• 53:09
  Really clean mother. Of God, yes.
• 53:11
  You know, tearing apart my grandma's rosary beads.
• 53:13
  I tell the story in the beginning of that book because I
• 53:16
  just thought these represent the chains of superstition and
• 53:19
  falsehood. She had the last laugh.
• 53:22
  How old were you when you did that?
• 53:24
  I'm I'm thinking I was first year in college when my grandma
• 53:28
  died. Young zealot, you.
• 53:30
  Know an evangelical Calvinist, you know, And I loved her and I
• 53:34
  respected her faith, but I just thought this is a symbolic act
• 53:38
  just breaking these Catholic chains because now she must know
• 53:42
  what true freedom is. And you know, I'm convinced that
• 53:46
  she was a virtuous woman, perhaps even holy.
• 53:49
  And but I also am convinced that she is praying for me even now.
• 53:53
  And thanks be to God. So I did lamb supper, then hail
• 53:57
  Holy Queen to explain my belief in Mary.
• 54:00
  That was like 2001. And that's unpacking, again, the
• 54:04
  biblical case for Mary as the Queen of Heaven and Mary as the
• 54:09
  Mother of God, and a lot of revelation in there too, to
• 54:14
  explain Mary and our relationship with Mary.
• 54:17
  I, I do well, I mean, these books have meant so much to me.
• 54:21
  I do want to give up spend a couple minutes on a few of these
• 54:25
  topics that are particularly hotly debated because you're
• 54:31
  Doctor Scott Hahn. We got we got to do the
• 54:33
  apologetics here because you know, one does it better.
• 54:36
  So let's can we pause for a moment before you go to the next
• 54:39
  book on the hail Holy Queen and why the case for praying to
• 54:44
  marry. The objection is, and I, I want
• 54:46
  to go back to the Eucharist too, because I know we didn't fully
• 54:49
  do that one yet. But with Mary, a lot of people
• 54:52
  say, listen, you know, you just go straight to Jesus, first of
• 54:55
  all. And second of all, even if maybe
• 54:57
  Mary can kind of pray for you, sure, that's fine.
• 54:59
  Why? It just seems a little over the
• 55:02
  top. There's too many Marys
• 55:03
  everywhere. The Guadalupe, the, this, the
• 55:05
  that, let's just go back to Jesus and Mary, yes, she was a,
• 55:08
  let's just grant her, she was a very special woman.
• 55:11
  Let's even give her that. But it's a little over the top
• 55:14
  to read so much into Jesus saying, behold your mother to
• 55:18
  Saint John at the foot of the cross, because that's what I
• 55:20
  know Catholics will say. So I'm, I'm kind of doing the
• 55:22
  steelman version of the some, you know, concerns that our
• 55:26
  Protestant brothers and sisters might have.
• 55:28
  Yeah, I mean, first of all, I would say that the only way to
• 55:31
  understand the Blessed Virgin Mary, she doesn't add anything
• 55:35
  to Christ's finished work of redemption.
• 55:37
  She also doesn't subtract anything.
• 55:40
  And the church is emphatic about that and always has been.
• 55:43
  And the reason is simple, because the Blessed Virgin Mary
• 55:47
  is the embodiment of Christ's redemptive work.
• 55:50
  I mean, we all are, you know, But there's a certain sense in
• 55:53
  which, OK, Jesus came to earth, He became a man, He suffered,
• 55:59
  died, and rose. To do what?
• 56:02
  To get more glory for himself. Well, he's divine.
• 56:05
  He's not going to get any more glory by coming down and rising
• 56:08
  again. So why go to all of the trouble
• 56:10
  if isn't to get more glory for himself like I used to believe
• 56:13
  as a Calvin, the Saint Bonaventure said, it's to
• 56:16
  communicate his glory to us. It's to convey to us his own
• 56:19
  grace and to convey it to, as Second Peter 14 says, to make us
• 56:24
  partakers of the divine nature as gift by grace.
• 56:27
  But it's not just grace. You like, you know, I'm going to
• 56:30
  forgive you. So the question that remained
• 56:33
  for me was, well, OK, how much grace, how much glory would God
• 56:37
  be willing to impart? Would he be willing to kind of
• 56:40
  give like 8090, you know, 100% God is love.
• 56:44
  OK, maybe he'd be willing to give all of it, the fullness of
• 56:49
  his grace to us, you know, But when I look in the mirror, I'm
• 56:52
  like, so far, you know, I don't see it.
• 56:54
  And I look around at other people and, you know, we're all
• 56:57
  works in progress. So where is the proof of the
• 57:01
  perfection of Christ's work of redemption?
• 57:03
  Because he didn't need to be redeemed.
• 57:06
  He didn't. He already possessed all of the
• 57:08
  glory. Why do we need proof?
• 57:10
  Well, because I think it shows us that God is not just saying
• 57:14
  hypothetically I'm willing to do it, but actually I'm able to do
• 57:17
  it. You've done it.
• 57:18
  Yeah, look at the Blessed Virgin Mary and you see the masterpiece
• 57:24
  of our Redeemer. You don't see someone who
• 57:27
  competes with him. You see someone who is embodying
• 57:31
  the perfection of his work of redemption in a way that none of
• 57:34
  us would even claim to do. So if you went to an art gallery
• 57:38
  to see an exhibition and the greatest artist was there and he
• 57:42
  had all of these works, you know, on the walls and you go
• 57:44
  down the hall and you look at them, you know, he wouldn't feel
• 57:49
  hurt or threatened or belittled if you stopped and spent more
• 57:54
  time looking at that which practically every artist wants
• 57:58
  to do. And that is a masterpiece.
• 58:01
  I'll do all of these things, you know, because I'm contracted to
• 58:03
  do them. But, you know, you want to save
• 58:05
  your best. And so when you look at the
• 58:08
  Blessed Virgin Mary, you see Exhibit A, the masterpiece of
• 58:13
  our Redeemer and the proof that we might need that you are
• 58:18
  capable of overcoming all of our sins, not only by forgiving us,
• 58:23
  but also by preventing us. And so for me, I had to be
• 58:27
  forgiven a lot of sins. But when Kimberly shares her own
• 58:31
  testimony, being raised in a Christian family, just having so
• 58:35
  much grace, she never had that rebellion, you know?
• 58:39
  And so she basically would say, I am saved by grace every bit as
• 58:43
  much as Scott was. But it was a grace that was
• 58:47
  prevenient. It was a grace that was
• 58:49
  preventative. And so the Blessed Virgin Mary
• 58:52
  is not less redeemed because she didn't sin, she is more
• 58:56
  perfectly redeemed from sin. And this is how the Catholic
• 59:00
  Church is always taught it. But where do you find in the
• 59:03
  Bible? That's what my Baptist
• 59:04
  brother-in-law once put to me. And I said, well, though you
• 59:06
  remember what we heard at seminary because we started
• 59:09
  together, that we're looking for proof text.
• 59:12
  But to take a text out of context, to use it as a proof
• 59:15
  text, is a pretext because you've got to read all of
• 59:19
  Scripture in its context. And that means not looking for
• 59:23
  proof texts in the New Testament for all of our beliefs, but
• 59:26
  studying the old and the new and seeing especially how the new is
• 59:31
  concealed in the promises of the old, and the old is revealed and
• 59:34
  fulfilled by the coming of Christ.
• 59:37
  And So what I found in the early church fathers was not only that
• 59:41
  Jesus is the new Adam, as Paul calls him the last Adam in
• 59:44
  Romans 5 and 1st Corinthians 15. He's also a new Moses, the
• 59:49
  prophet, likened to Moses. He fulfills the Passover in a
• 59:52
  way that goes beyond the book of Exodus.
• 59:55
  He's also the son of David, even more than Solomon.
• 59:57
  He's the Son of God, the anointed One, the king, the king
• 1:00:01
  of kings. And so you have the prefiguring
• 1:00:04
  in creation in Adam. You have the prefiguring of
• 1:00:07
  Jesus in the Exodus through Moses and the Lamb.
• 1:00:10
  You have the prefiguring of Jesus in Solomon and the Kingdom
• 1:00:15
  of David. And the temple and all of the
• 1:00:18
  rest, you know, destroy this temple on the third day, raise
• 1:00:21
  it up. But for the early Church
• 1:00:22
  fathers, it wasn't reduced exclusively to Christ, because
• 1:00:28
  the work of Christ goes beyond himself.
• 1:00:31
  And so you will find by the 2nd and 3rd centuries in the East
• 1:00:36
  and the West, not a debate raging, but a celebration of the
• 1:00:40
  Blessed Virgin Mary as the New Eve.
• 1:00:43
  And why? Because in Genesis 1 and 2
• 1:00:46
  creation, the old covenant is begun with Adam and Eve, but
• 1:00:50
  it's broken. And so when you look at John one
• 1:00:54
  and two, you see in the beginning the same opening line
• 1:00:57
  and John 11 as you find that Genesis 11 and you have in the
• 1:01:01
  beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
• 1:01:04
  was God. And the Word becomes flesh to
• 1:01:06
  dwell among us. And then in verse 29 and verse
• 1:01:09
  35 and in verse 43, the next day, the next day, the next day,
• 1:01:13
  just like back in Genesis 1. And then when you get to the 7th
• 1:01:18
  day in Genesis 2, you have, you know, Adam awakening from the
• 1:01:23
  deep sleep bone of my bone flesh to my flesh.
• 1:01:26
  He shall be called woman. And then you have in John one
• 1:01:29
  and two, you come to the 7th day at the opening of chapter 2 of
• 1:01:33
  John and there's a wedding, a marriage.
• 1:01:36
  We don't know the name of this, you know, the bride or the
• 1:01:39
  groom. The only two characters who are
• 1:01:41
  identified are Jesus and Mary. But he doesn't call her Mary.
• 1:01:44
  He didn't call her mom. He calls her woman, just like
• 1:01:48
  the first Adam does with the first Eve.
• 1:01:50
  And so what's celebrated in the hymns and the prayers of the
• 1:01:53
  early church is what John is showing us with this kind of
• 1:01:57
  prophetic insight that the new covenant brings about a new
• 1:02:01
  creation, a new Adam and a new Eve.
• 1:02:04
  It's just as the first Adam and Eve were created without sin, so
• 1:02:08
  is the new Adam, as they were both tested in a garden.
• 1:02:11
  But they went to the wrong tree, you know, and they end up being
• 1:02:15
  naked and guilty and all. So the new Adam and the new Eve,
• 1:02:21
  he calls her a woman. They end up going to a garden
• 1:02:23
  where he's tested. They go to the right tree.
• 1:02:26
  The tree of life is what they call the crucifix and the
• 1:02:30
  Eucharist is the fruit of the tree of life, the antidote to
• 1:02:33
  mortality. They ate back then.
• 1:02:35
  Their eyes were opened. The only other time that phrase
• 1:02:38
  occurs is their eyes were opened in the breaking of the bread in
• 1:02:41
  Luke 24. And so all of these remarkable
• 1:02:44
  convergences, you, you realize this is not like just clever
• 1:02:49
  interpretation. This is not man made.
• 1:02:52
  You really get a sense that the new is more fully concealed in
• 1:02:56
  the old and the old is more fully revealed.
• 1:02:59
  And so they're celebrating the new Adam, the new covenant, the
• 1:03:02
  new creation, and the new Eve. And eventually they see, OK then
• 1:03:07
  Christ is is basically applying to her what was shared by the
• 1:03:13
  1st Adam and Eve. And it really is something that
• 1:03:17
  is beautiful. It's not strictly logical or
• 1:03:20
  logically necessary, but the early church fathers would argue
• 1:03:23
  from fittingness, how fitting it is for God to fashion a new
• 1:03:27
  covenant, a new creation, a new Adam, and a new Eve that not
• 1:03:31
  only fulfills what had been broken, but surpasses it as
• 1:03:35
  well. So we're not just pressing
• 1:03:37
  reset. We're not just undoing the
• 1:03:39
  damage that they did. We were doing something even
• 1:03:42
  greater through Christ. And you see it embodied in Mary.
• 1:03:46
  You know, and you also mentioned the fact that in the Exodus you
• 1:03:49
  have Moses prefiguring Jesus, but you also have the Ark of the
• 1:03:54
  Covenant. And I don't have the time to get
• 1:03:56
  into it, but when you look at the 1st 2 chapters in Luke's
• 1:03:59
  Gospel, you find that Mary is the Ark of the New covenant.
• 1:04:03
  Just like in the first two chapters of John's Gospel, you
• 1:04:06
  see that the Blessed Virgin is presented as the New Eve in the
• 1:04:09
  New Covenant. And I, I wish I had the time,
• 1:04:14
  you know, I just love. We have so many books to read
• 1:04:16
  and that you've written about this.
• 1:04:18
  I mean, even one of the later ones.
• 1:04:19
  I I was just looking at it the other day.
• 1:04:21
  Forgive me, the title escapes me, but you were you were
• 1:04:23
  writing about this. Oh, yeah, it was.
• 1:04:25
  I think it was some sort of a primer for understanding.
• 1:04:29
  Understanding the scriptures, understanding it's a heist,
• 1:04:31
  Maybe textbook, yeah. I don't know if that was it, but
• 1:04:33
  it but anyways, you were you were writing about this
• 1:04:35
  beautifully. What you have is Mary as Nui,
• 1:04:38
  Mary as the Ark of the New Covenant, and you have in First
• 1:04:41
  Kings one and two and in Matthew 1 and 2, the basis for why the
• 1:04:45
  early church fathers would say, look, when Solomon is crowned
• 1:04:49
  and enthroned and anointed as the king, everybody bows before
• 1:04:52
  him in First Kings 2, except when his mother walks into the
• 1:04:56
  Royal Court, he gets up off the throne, he bows before her to
• 1:05:00
  honor his mother, and then he issues his decree establishing
• 1:05:05
  this institution known as the gebby raw in Hebrew, the Queen
• 1:05:08
  Mother, so that every time a new Davidic king is identified, his
• 1:05:12
  Queen Mother is also the only chapter of the Hebrew Bible that
• 1:05:16
  is originating from a woman is Proverbs 31 from the Queen
• 1:05:21
  Mother of King Lemuel. And so the Blessed Virgin Mary
• 1:05:25
  is presented in a Revelation 11:00 and 12:00 as the New Eve
• 1:05:29
  who overcomes the ancient serpent through the new Adam,
• 1:05:32
  her seed, as God had promised. She's also the Ark of the
• 1:05:35
  Covenant, the Ark of the New Covenant, only in the heavenly
• 1:05:39
  Jerusalem, not the earth leader. And then she's also presented as
• 1:05:42
  the Queen Mother of the Son of David.
• 1:05:44
  It's all. The keys, right?
• 1:05:45
  I mean, that's what's so incredible about Revelation.
• 1:05:47
  It's the keys to unlock. It really is the the
• 1:05:50
  convergence, as you say, of the old and the new.
• 1:05:52
  And so to celebrate the Blessed Virgin Mary by reading Scripture
• 1:05:56
  in this holistic way, according to a living tradition that is
• 1:06:00
  not just like archaic or ancient, but it's alive now in
• 1:06:04
  the 21st century as much as it was back in the 1st.
• 1:06:08
  It's also just even the, the, the project of, of reading the
• 1:06:12
  Bible because it, I think if you read the Bible without being
• 1:06:16
  sort of taught the story, you just read it as, as you find it
• 1:06:21
  and you don't, you're not really taught how to read it.
• 1:06:23
  You just read it as you find it. You can still glean and, and
• 1:06:26
  maybe especially if you're particularly bright, you might
• 1:06:28
  be able to find your way to what we're discussing and understand
• 1:06:32
  this yourself. You know, to some degree, to
• 1:06:35
  some degree, but but This is why, you know, in Jewish
• 1:06:38
  tradition, there's teachers and you, you study your tradition,
• 1:06:43
  you study, you memorize scripture.
• 1:06:44
  A lot of it is the memorization of it and recalling what God has
• 1:06:47
  done for us, recalling our salvation arc in our own, you
• 1:06:50
  know, the tribe of Israel and like fleeing Egypt and, you
• 1:06:53
  know, coming out of Egypt, the whole story of our people.
• 1:06:56
  And that's what we're called to do as Christians, the story of
• 1:06:59
  our people as Christians, a family of God who escaping hell
• 1:07:04
  basically because of Christ. Coming out of a bondage to sin
• 1:07:08
  that's greater than Egyptian slavery.
• 1:07:10
  But it's a story and it's a family.
• 1:07:12
  It's a story of a family escaping hell as escaping
• 1:07:15
  bondage. But the the whole Bible is that
• 1:07:18
  story. But if you don't have the keys
• 1:07:21
  to understand it, or you don't have maybe the tradition or the
• 1:07:23
  teaching to, to, to, to interpret it, it can.
• 1:07:26
  And it can get weird, I think. And, and people can be
• 1:07:30
  scandalized by what they read in the Bible, certainly confused.
• 1:07:33
  Or they might find some good, they, some good parts that
• 1:07:35
  really speak to them and inspire them.
• 1:07:37
  But a lot of it is a bit Gray. It, it doesn't.
• 1:07:40
  And that's why I, I, I'm, I don't know if it was, I'm sure
• 1:07:44
  you've felt this before, but even having read the Bible so
• 1:07:47
  many times as you haven't studied it so extensively, it
• 1:07:50
  still brings new light. I mean.
• 1:07:55
  I, I must give the credit where the credit is due because back
• 1:08:00
  in, I can't remember if it was the end of my 9th grade or the
• 1:08:03
  beginning of my 10th. I think it was 10th grade.
• 1:08:06
  I was really feeling guilty because I would try to read that
• 1:08:08
  black Bible and I'd fall asleep in the evening and I just like,
• 1:08:12
  you know what's wrong with me? I'm just still a Pagan, you
• 1:08:15
  know, and, and a group of people prayed over me, promising all
• 1:08:19
  kinds of things that didn't happen.
• 1:08:21
  So I called my young Life leaders that perhaps I committed
• 1:08:24
  the unpardonable sin. And he met with me and Howard
• 1:08:26
  Johnson to assure me that I hadn't, that if I had, I
• 1:08:29
  wouldn't be worried about, you know, having committed it.
• 1:08:33
  I would have hardened my heart so much.
• 1:08:34
  And so I stayed open. And a few weeks later, something
• 1:08:37
  happened when I was reading the Bible.
• 1:08:39
  And I don't really care to go into a description because I
• 1:08:41
  don't fully understand it, but the Holy Spirit manifested a
• 1:08:46
  grace to me while reading scripture.
• 1:08:49
  It was on a Sunday morning and awkwardly I had just left the
• 1:08:53
  church service in the middle of the sermon because this guy was
• 1:08:57
  was making fun of the virgin birth.
• 1:08:59
  Making fun of all of these ancient beliefs that we need to
• 1:09:03
  abandon. How old were you?
• 1:09:06
  I was barely 14. And.
• 1:09:09
  So I remember just like, what are you doing, you know?
• 1:09:12
  And so I stood up in the middle of the service, and I didn't say
• 1:09:16
  anything, but I looked at him. He looked at me, and I'm like,
• 1:09:18
  like the Three Stooges. I just did, you know?
• 1:09:21
  And I walked out and I walked home and I went upstairs.
• 1:09:25
  And I was so sad, feeling as though this pastor had just been
• 1:09:30
  preaching what felt to me like spiritual poison.
• 1:09:34
  Mocking, mocking. The tradition.
• 1:09:37
  Come on, He was liberating us from all of the superstition
• 1:09:41
  that they could believe in the 1st century, but no longer.
• 1:09:44
  And I, he went through a list of things that touched upon the
• 1:09:47
  miracles, the virgin birth, and, you know, a bodily resurrection.
• 1:09:52
  He was just a good liberal Protestant pastor preaching
• 1:09:55
  liberal Protestantism that I had never really encountered before.
• 1:09:59
  And so I'm reading the Bible, begging God for help.
• 1:10:02
  Something happens, it's mysterious.
• 1:10:05
  But that night I couldn't fall asleep reading the Bible.
• 1:10:08
  I couldn't go to bed. I read it for hours and it was
• 1:10:11
  like fire. It was so exciting, you know,
• 1:10:15
  and I don't want to exaggerate it because, you know, I, I did
• 1:10:18
  close it and I did go to sleep, but the next night and the next.
• 1:10:22
  And in a certain sense, I can say, well, I'm often exhausted
• 1:10:25
  or too, you know, distracted to get God's word loudly heard.
• 1:10:29
  You know, something happened there that made the word of God
• 1:10:33
  come alive. And, you know, on the one hand,
• 1:10:36
  you could say the Bible's a library.
• 1:10:38
  It's written by, you know, lots of different human writers down
• 1:10:41
  through the centuries with lots of different literary genres or
• 1:10:45
  forms. But it's also one book because
• 1:10:48
  the principal author is Saint Augustine would put it is the
• 1:10:51
  Holy Spirit. And so to read it with the
• 1:10:54
  assistance of the Holy Spirit isn't just helpful, it's
• 1:10:57
  indispensable. It's essential.
• 1:11:00
  I learned, I think, without ever having anybody explain that to
• 1:11:04
  me. But This is why giving credit,
• 1:11:06
  where credit is due is to say, apart from that experience of
• 1:11:10
  the Holy Spirit, apart from that grace, apart from the permanence
• 1:11:13
  of a gift, I, I really couldn't take credit for anything except
• 1:11:18
  falling asleep. And I look back on that and I, I
• 1:11:22
  understand because when I went to college, I, I saw my
• 1:11:26
  classmates studying Greek, learning Hebrew and seminary,
• 1:11:30
  you know, in Latin and German and French and the other
• 1:11:32
  languages that I had to learn on my way to the doctorate.
• 1:11:35
  But you know, it, it's sort of like you can professionalize the
• 1:11:38
  passages that you're studying and suddenly they, they become
• 1:11:42
  subject matter, you know, where Christ becomes what a
• 1:11:45
  Christology exam. And I always thought that I
• 1:11:50
  would never fight that temptation.
• 1:11:52
  But of course you do, you know, but the love that is renewed by
• 1:11:57
  the power of the Holy Spirit is that without which you cannot do
• 1:12:01
  this safely. And I saw my, I saw my
• 1:12:04
  classmates losing their faith ever so slowly, ever so
• 1:12:08
  gradually, because you'll get a scholarship, you'll get affirmed
• 1:12:11
  because you're so critically minded.
• 1:12:13
  You're so open to other things, you know, and I just thought
• 1:12:16
  it's not worth it. And you know, I, I think, you
• 1:12:20
  know, if a, if a young man wakes up and realizes I'm attracted to
• 1:12:23
  pretty young ladies, you know, that doesn't mean you ought to
• 1:12:28
  major in gynecology. It means you got to find a
• 1:12:31
  beautiful young lady and marry her and stay in love and be
• 1:12:35
  committed and be open to the fruitfulness of that love.
• 1:12:39
  Where so many people who studied the Bible, like that pastor who
• 1:12:43
  was preaching against, you know, so much of what I was reading,
• 1:12:46
  trying to understand in the New Testament as a new believer, you
• 1:12:49
  know, and they think that they've arrived, that they are
• 1:12:51
  liberated by and you're like, no, no, no, you're you're not
• 1:12:55
  liberated by that. If anything, you're ensnared in
• 1:12:58
  something that is merely human. And I think what you're saying
• 1:13:02
  is so beautiful and it's why anyone who I who you know, calls
• 1:13:06
  for Jesus and wants Jesus. And maybe they don't have, you
• 1:13:10
  know, much formation in Christian theology history, but
• 1:13:15
  they have a Bible and God can speak to them powerfully.
• 1:13:18
  That's right, with just them and their Bible, even if they're not
• 1:13:21
  part of the Catholic tradition yet, they don't have the
• 1:13:23
  fullness. But God can do incredible
• 1:13:25
  things. And that's why I do see.
• 1:13:26
  And we see the Holy Spirit blows where he chooses.
• 1:13:29
  I mean, he goes where he will. And you see all the Holy Spirit,
• 1:13:32
  it seems pretty evident to me. There's the whole, this person,
• 1:13:34
  you know, is on fire with the Holy Spirit.
• 1:13:36
  And maybe they're not Catholic yet, You know, I hope one day.
• 1:13:40
  But God is obviously working through them, and His Word is a
• 1:13:43
  part of this if you don't. Sin against the light of God's
• 1:13:46
  word. You're going to end up getting
• 1:13:48
  more and more of it. And I would say this, that we're
• 1:13:52
  not out to win arguments when we're using the Bible with non
• 1:13:55
  Catholics or even anti Catholics like I used to be.
• 1:13:58
  What we're really out to do is to identify the common ground,
• 1:14:02
  share it, celebrate the fact that we do believe that the
• 1:14:06
  Bible's the word of God, the New Testament and the Creed and all
• 1:14:09
  of these other beliefs that are just beautiful mysteries.
• 1:14:13
  And, you know, standing on that common ground, I think we're out
• 1:14:17
  to really discover more and more of what we share as brothers and
• 1:14:21
  sisters in Christ and not fixate on our differences.
• 1:14:26
  You know, that's what dysfunctional families do.
• 1:14:28
  They obsess over where it is, they disagree.
• 1:14:31
  And that's human nature in its own weakness.
• 1:14:34
  But what the Holy Spirit really wants to do is to continue to
• 1:14:38
  blow in our hearts, in our lives, leading us more and more
• 1:14:41
  into the light of God's Word, the light of his truth.
• 1:14:45
  And what I would say is that even though the Catholic Church
• 1:14:48
  seemed to me to be an absolutely impossible destination, that's
• 1:14:53
  where the Holy Spirit blows, you know.
• 1:14:55
  And I remember running into a classmate from seminary, he came
• 1:14:59
  to hear me give a talk on the Eucharist up in near Cleveland.
• 1:15:02
  And obviously he was an evangelical Protestant, a
• 1:15:05
  Presbyterian pastor, just looking at me with this smug
• 1:15:07
  expression, like, you know, have you lost your mind or just your
• 1:15:10
  faith? And at the end of the talk, he
• 1:15:13
  stayed, I think for a second one we, we ended up chatting and
• 1:15:16
  connecting. And he's like, I thought you
• 1:15:18
  just had gone off the deep end. And so I shared with him and he
• 1:15:23
  was reading and studying Scripture and all of this.
• 1:15:26
  His name is Marcus Grodai and he was a classmate of mine.
• 1:15:30
  And he ended up leaving his Presbyterian ministry like I had
• 1:15:33
  done, moving down to Ohio, Steubenville, OH, right down the
• 1:15:37
  street from we, we, we created this thing called the Coming
• 1:15:40
  Home Network because it was a sense of coming home to the
• 1:15:43
  fullness of God's family. When Jesus said on this rock, I
• 1:15:47
  will build my church, he didn't say, Peter, build me a church.
• 1:15:50
  James and John, you start your denominations and then we'll see
• 1:15:53
  if we can reunite. It's on this rock.
• 1:15:55
  I will build my church and the gates of Hades will not prevail
• 1:15:59
  against it. So we've had over 1200
• 1:16:02
  Protestant pastors, preachers, professors, missionaries come
• 1:16:07
  into the church. And for all of them, it's not
• 1:16:10
  about, you know, we're more grateful.
• 1:16:12
  I'm more grateful today for my evangelical formation in high
• 1:16:17
  school, college and seminary then on the day I was ordained
• 1:16:20
  at Trinity Presbyterian Church. Yeah, you just you, you find the
• 1:16:24
  good news just keeps getting more better and it keeps growing
• 1:16:27
  bigger and better. And, you know, that is the key.
• 1:16:30
  But I think it's also important to recognize that your
• 1:16:33
  individual relationship with Jesus Christ is the heart of it.
• 1:16:38
  But it's never just an individual relationship.
• 1:16:41
  You know, I had an individual relationship with Kimberly when
• 1:16:43
  we were dating, when I was courting her.
• 1:16:46
  But that wasn't the end game. The end game was more like
• 1:16:49
  January 23rd, 79, when I got on my knees and I gave her a ring
• 1:16:53
  and a proposed marriage and we were engaged.
• 1:16:57
  And then even more than that was August 18th of 79 when we got
• 1:17:01
  married. And so in the Catholic
• 1:17:04
  tradition, a personal relationship is a great place to
• 1:17:07
  start. And you have to return to that,
• 1:17:09
  a relationship with Jesus Christ that is alive.
• 1:17:12
  But ultimately in the early church, it was courtship, it was
• 1:17:16
  engagement, then it was marriage, it was evangelizing
• 1:17:21
  and having an initial conversion and discovering this
• 1:17:24
  relationship with Jesus. Then there's a kind of
• 1:17:26
  engagement when you enter the catechumenant.
• 1:17:29
  When I discovered that her family is now going to become
• 1:17:31
  mine and mine is going to become hers.
• 1:17:34
  It's more than an individual relationship.
• 1:17:36
  It really is an extended family that I'm entering.
• 1:17:39
  And then the you move from convert to catechumen to
• 1:17:44
  communicant because now you're invited to communion, just like
• 1:17:47
  we enter into A1 flesh union on our wedding night to celebrate
• 1:17:52
  not a contract, but a covenant. You know, it is something where
• 1:17:56
  you just are so grateful for that relationship with Jesus
• 1:17:58
  Christ, so mindful of people who are married and yet miserable or
• 1:18:03
  alone or alienated. So you have to do what the
• 1:18:06
  Catholic Church calls the New Evangelization.
• 1:18:09
  You have to not only evangelize those who are unconverted, you
• 1:18:12
  have to re evangelize the sacramentalized.
• 1:18:15
  You have to re evangelize the baptized, just like we had to
• 1:18:18
  learn how to fall back in love. So conversion is for me when I
• 1:18:24
  was a Protestant A1 and done thing that happened when I was
• 1:18:27
  about 14. But you become a Catholic and
• 1:18:30
  you realize no conversion is ongoing.
• 1:18:33
  It's lifelong. It's necessarily daily because
• 1:18:36
  Jesus says, you know, if you want to follow me, you must take
• 1:18:39
  up your rosary beads. No, you have to take up your
• 1:18:42
  Bible. You got to take up a cross every
• 1:18:44
  day. And that's never easy.
• 1:18:46
  That doesn't become fun. That's always going to require
• 1:18:49
  the power of the Holy Spirit to renew within our minds, our
• 1:18:53
  hearts, our lives, and our relationships something that is
• 1:18:56
  not merely contractual, it is covenantal.
• 1:18:59
  It's an extended family where Christ wants to not only
• 1:19:02
  introduce you to his Father, but his mother and all of his
• 1:19:07
  younger brothers and sisters that are truly now our siblings,
• 1:19:11
  too, in the family of God. This isn't like puffed up
• 1:19:14
  religious rhetoric. It is like the hardcore reality.
• 1:19:17
  Yeah, the truth. And.
• 1:19:19
  And when you begin to sink your teeth into what you're like, the
• 1:19:23
  good news is on steroids. It's like better than I ever
• 1:19:26
  imagined. Yeah, And the more you even
• 1:19:28
  think about it, the better it. Like the more you talk about,
• 1:19:31
  like even hearing you talk about like, yeah, it's just, it's so
• 1:19:34
  good that this is that heaven can be our home and that there's
• 1:19:37
  this whole family that we get to have eternity with.
• 1:19:40
  I, there's some I've heard I've actually had this even just
• 1:19:43
  recently, you know, again, evangelical friends who say sort
• 1:19:48
  of, I don't know if it was in response to something I might
• 1:19:50
  have said about hoping for heaven or looking forward to,
• 1:19:53
  you know, my hope for heaven be with my family forever with God
• 1:19:56
  or something like this. And there was a sense of almost
• 1:20:02
  sadness from this evangelical friend saying, you mean you
• 1:20:05
  don't, You're not confident you're saved.
• 1:20:08
  And, you know, because a lot of certain strains of
• 1:20:11
  Protestantism, they believe that they're saved when they say the
• 1:20:14
  Jesus prayer. They believe that they've been
• 1:20:16
  born again and then it's done. They can't lose their salvation
• 1:20:19
  because of the power of Christ's sacrifice.
• 1:20:22
  And I said, well, I believe I am because I have trust in God, but
• 1:20:26
  I don't presume that I might not screw up big time where I had
• 1:20:30
  the power to turn away from him because I have free will.
• 1:20:32
  So I'm a daily work, you know, I'm a work in progress on a
• 1:20:36
  daily basis. When, when you have talked to so
• 1:20:39
  many of these former Protestants who've become Catholic, was that
• 1:20:43
  a hard step for many to take because they thought one and
• 1:20:48
  done? I'm saved.
• 1:20:50
  I can't undo my salvation. The the the Catholic.
• 1:20:53
  Church introduces something about faith, that is, it's kind
• 1:20:57
  of confusing faith with hope, because the certainty of faith
• 1:21:01
  shows us that there is a God. And he sent his Son, and he
• 1:21:06
  came, He lived, He died, and he rose, and he promised us the
• 1:21:09
  Holy Spirit, that whosoever shall believe.
• 1:21:12
  And so the certainty of faith has for its object these sacred
• 1:21:16
  mysteries, these truths that are more real than the American
• 1:21:20
  Constitution. Then hope is the assurance of
• 1:21:24
  hope, as you read in Hebrews 6 and elsewhere.
• 1:21:28
  But hope is not something where you boldly claim to possess in
• 1:21:32
  its finality and fullness, what you only have as a final
• 1:21:37
  possession in the end. And so Luther would say, if you
• 1:21:41
  don't know you're saved, you're not if you don't know your
• 1:21:45
  faith, Well, OK. And as a Calvinist, I could kind
• 1:21:48
  of embrace a version of that. But we always had this phrase,
• 1:21:51
  once saved, always saved if you don't fall away.
• 1:21:56
  But I knew so many people. But if you didn't know, the
• 1:21:58
  whole idea was though if you fell away, you were never saved.
• 1:22:01
  That's right. First, John, they were.
• 1:22:02
  They departed from us, but they weren't of us.
• 1:22:05
  They were never actually of us. They were not.
• 1:22:08
  In sheep, sheep's clothing, they weren't really even though maybe
• 1:22:11
  they didn't even know. They weren't really with you.
• 1:22:13
  But if you had asked my friends back then who were Calvinist
• 1:22:16
  like me, once saved, always saved.
• 1:22:18
  Yeah. And so you, you're not going to
• 1:22:21
  fall away. That's right.
• 1:22:22
  And if you do fall away, it proves that you're weren't
• 1:22:26
  really saved in the 1st place. And then they fell away.
• 1:22:29
  I mean, my Young Life leaders I had, yeah, I had people who
• 1:22:33
  evangelized and trained me in college who left they.
• 1:22:36
  Still. Left their marriage, left their,
• 1:22:39
  I mean, renounce things. You think of Joshua Harris, you
• 1:22:41
  know, and what he did not just renouncing the book that he
• 1:22:45
  wrote back in the 90s, you know, about giving up, dating,
• 1:22:48
  kissing, dating goodbye, but now publicly renouncing any form of
• 1:22:53
  historic Christian faith. Deconstructionism.
• 1:22:55
  Yeah. And and to me, OK, once saved,
• 1:22:57
  always saved if you don't fall away, well, these guys would
• 1:23:00
  have passed a passed a polygraph.
• 1:23:02
  That's that. I mean, I think the the thing
• 1:23:04
  and I, I have some empathy for and I know you do too, I'm sure
• 1:23:08
  for Joshua Harris, because I think there was no space to
• 1:23:10
  doubt, right? There was no space to wrestle
• 1:23:14
  because you had to once saved, always saved.
• 1:23:16
  And this is if you dare to doubt or wrestle, maybe you're not
• 1:23:19
  saved and then you're in an existential crisis.
• 1:23:21
  And so there's like a lack of, you know, there's a lack of the,
• 1:23:26
  the place for questions. Right.
• 1:23:27
  If you're claiming too much, you find it easier to lose
• 1:23:30
  practically on everything, you know?
• 1:23:32
  But John Henry Newman, in the process of becoming a Catholic
• 1:23:37
  back in the 1800s, famously said that, you know, 10,000 questions
• 1:23:41
  don't add up to a single doubt in the sense that you're denying
• 1:23:45
  something. It's a quest.
• 1:23:46
  So you're allowed to ask questions.
• 1:23:49
  And I think that's the most important freedom that we have
• 1:23:52
  as children of God. And in the Catholic tradition.
• 1:23:54
  You have this real wrestling with Paul.
• 1:23:57
  You know, I'm reminded of the Christ him in Philippians 2 and
• 1:24:00
  how you know it culminates in therefore, brethren, you know he
• 1:24:05
  says work out your salvation with fear and trembling because
• 1:24:09
  God is at work in you both willing and doing for his good
• 1:24:13
  purpose. And you're like, wait a second,
• 1:24:15
  if Almighty God is willing and working for his good purpose,
• 1:24:19
  what's there to be afraid of? Well, our own freedom and the
• 1:24:23
  misuse of it. So Paul doesn't say because
• 1:24:25
  you're working out your salvation with fear and
• 1:24:27
  trembling, you're basically confirming the fact that you're
• 1:24:30
  doubting God. No, the only way you know that
• 1:24:33
  it's almighty God working in you is precisely because you're
• 1:24:38
  continuing to work out your salvation with fear and
• 1:24:40
  trembling. And you know you wouldn't do
• 1:24:42
  that unless God was working in you.
• 1:24:46
  And so it's a kind of counterintuitive thing.
• 1:24:48
  It's like, well, what's there to be afraid of if God isn't
• 1:24:51
  working? What's the proof that God is at
• 1:24:53
  work? For Paul, it's like two sides of
• 1:24:55
  the same coin. It isn't heads, therefore not
• 1:24:58
  tails. It's God is working.
• 1:25:01
  And the confirmation of this is like what first Peter says.
• 1:25:04
  Be all the more zealous to confirm your call in election
• 1:25:08
  because if you just take it easy and just give up and say I
• 1:25:11
  don't, I'm elected, I'm chosen, I'm saved.
• 1:25:14
  Once saved, always saved. I've got it made in the shade.
• 1:25:17
  You're going to end up proving what first John says.
• 1:25:20
  They departed from us, but they weren't of us because if they
• 1:25:22
  were of us, they would not have departed from us.
• 1:25:25
  So God will preserve us, but only to the extent that that
• 1:25:30
  grace of God keeps us free to work out our salvation.
• 1:25:34
  What do you call that? It's not the same as faith.
• 1:25:37
  It's the virtue of hope. And once you confuse faith with
• 1:25:41
  hope, then the certainty of faith in the truth of the gospel
• 1:25:46
  ends up becoming this confused with the certainty that I am
• 1:25:49
  saved. Do you think that was Luther's
• 1:25:52
  biggest error, fundamentally? I do.
• 1:25:54
  You know, at the Saint Paul Center, we published a book,
• 1:25:59
  Faith in Luther, and it's written by a famous Lutheran
• 1:26:03
  theologian who ended up becoming Catholic because he ended up
• 1:26:06
  discovering that Luther put his faith in his faith more than he
• 1:26:10
  put it in Christ, That if you're not sure you're saved, you're
• 1:26:14
  not saved. And it's like, wait a second,
• 1:26:17
  I'm the arbiter. Of my own faith in.
• 1:26:19
  That, yeah. That's a, it's a, it's AI.
• 1:26:21
  Remember being in college and I had a good Calvinist friend and
• 1:26:25
  then he got really hard into it to the point where he could, he
• 1:26:28
  said he couldn't talk to me anymore because because I was
• 1:26:30
  exploring Catholicism at the time, you're not one of the
• 1:26:33
  elect. And so to talk to me might
• 1:26:35
  endanger. Even though he didn't feel like
• 1:26:37
  he was in danger because he was saved.
• 1:26:39
  It was like the association psychologically was hard.
• 1:26:43
  Right. No, we've all had this, I
• 1:26:45
  suspect. I don't know if I've had it more
• 1:26:47
  or less than others, but I remember the gal I had a crush
• 1:26:50
  on, why I went to that Young life retreat.
• 1:26:52
  You know, she ended up pronouncing the faith completely
• 1:26:54
  in any historical, traditional sense.
• 1:26:57
  And likewise, my, my older brother in Christ ended up going
• 1:27:00
  back to cocaine and he's never looked back.
• 1:27:03
  And over and over again. I I can just name with a, a list
• 1:27:08
  with double digits, you know, of people who have left, you know,
• 1:27:12
  and it's hard. How how would tell talk to me a
• 1:27:15
  little bit more about that. And I do want to get back to
• 1:27:18
  you, Chris and a couple other, you know, key apologetics with
• 1:27:21
  you before we have to before you have to get back to your
• 1:27:25
  conference. But I we've we've talked about
• 1:27:28
  Joshua Harris on the show before.
• 1:27:30
  I knew his younger brothers in homeschool debate growing up,
• 1:27:33
  you know, so it was kind of a close to home thing.
• 1:27:34
  And there were a lot of homeschool friends of mine
• 1:27:37
  growing up who in the Protestant world who defected from their
• 1:27:41
  faith passionately, as you're describing some of the folks in
• 1:27:45
  the Young Life. And they were kind of raised in
• 1:27:48
  a fundamentalist Christianity that became toxic for them.
• 1:27:52
  They felt it was toxic. And then they became, you know,
• 1:27:55
  pretty politically left wing deconstructionist or just
• 1:27:58
  completely, you know, postmodern.
• 1:28:01
  And I'm curious, you know, we're talking about this Luther
• 1:28:05
  mistake of conflating faith with hope and not understanding the
• 1:28:08
  difference and, and, and living out the difference freely, I
• 1:28:12
  think. What would be your your
• 1:28:14
  explanation for the deconstructionist movement?
• 1:28:19
  Well, I think you put your finger on.
• 1:28:21
  It and I'm just kind. Of putting a lot of words in a
• 1:28:25
  kind of rigid fundamentalist tradition where you claim to
• 1:28:28
  have certainty that once you become intellectually honest,
• 1:28:31
  you're like, we were pretending to be certain about things that
• 1:28:35
  we had no certainty of. You know, that is a kind of
• 1:28:38
  like, it's like, you know, you, you can't just crack a window
• 1:28:43
  without and you know, you, you shattering it.
• 1:28:46
  You know, you just can't say, well, we'll create a little hole
• 1:28:48
  in this balloon. It'll pop.
• 1:28:51
  And I find that over the last. Well, I, I entered the church
• 1:28:55
  back in 86, I have found more people who abandoned
• 1:29:01
  fundamentalist, Pentecostal, evangelical, kind of a strict
• 1:29:05
  conservative approach to Christianity, who have found
• 1:29:09
  their harbor by becoming Catholic.
• 1:29:12
  So that it's not my feelings, it's not my emotions, it's not
• 1:29:15
  conjuring up the warm fuzzies like we did at the campfire back
• 1:29:18
  in high school or whatever. It's like the sacraments.
• 1:29:22
  It is the fact that God becomes man and uses matter to help us
• 1:29:27
  when we're drawn away from by physical material pleasures.
• 1:29:31
  Then to suddenly be drawn into a close relationship with God
• 1:29:36
  through bread and wine, through oil, through water, and it just
• 1:29:41
  gives you a sense of peace because you don't have to kind
• 1:29:45
  of deny the creation or the physical or the sexual.
• 1:29:48
  You have to recognize that through the sacraments like
• 1:29:51
  marriage, the sacrament of marriage doesn't make it easy.
• 1:29:54
  It makes it possible to be faithful and if you stumble, to
• 1:29:58
  come back and to recognize that the prodigal son comes back and
• 1:30:04
  the father always welcomes him. And if he left a second time,
• 1:30:07
  the father wouldn't say that's too much.
• 1:30:10
  Now you're on your own for the rest of your life.
• 1:30:12
  You know, God the Father Almighty is a merciful Father
• 1:30:16
  who works in his family to give us a sense of peace that we
• 1:30:20
  don't have to kind of conjure up ourselves that through the cloud
• 1:30:23
  of witnesses that we call the Saints.
• 1:30:26
  You know, they're not a cloud of spectators.
• 1:30:28
  In Hebrews 12, after we've gone through a list of all of these
• 1:30:31
  holy men and women from the Old Testament, they form a cloud of
• 1:30:34
  witnesses. They're bearing witness to us
• 1:30:36
  that we can finish the race. They're better than the best
• 1:30:39
  brothers and sisters we had in our own natural family.
• 1:30:42
  They're not betting on us. They're praying for us.
• 1:30:44
  They're cheering us on. That's what you see in the
• 1:30:46
  evisions of John and the Apocalypse.
• 1:30:48
  The Saints, the martyrs, the angels are the members of the
• 1:30:52
  family of God who are loving us, praying for us.
• 1:30:56
  It isn't as though Christ's intercession isn't enough.
• 1:30:59
  It's that Christ wants to share his intercession.
• 1:31:03
  So that you know, if I were to ask you to pray for me, you
• 1:31:05
  wouldn't say how dare you subvert the sole sufficiency of
• 1:31:09
  Christ's intercession? I mean, wasn't it go tell when
• 1:31:11
  he said go tell the go tell the others, right, Yeah, to Mary
• 1:31:14
  Magdalene. It's like he used Mary Magdalene
• 1:31:17
  and my like you can also pop over there yourself, But and
• 1:31:23
  what is there was there, was it your teaching or someone's
• 1:31:25
  teaching on the way? He said go tell the others that
• 1:31:28
  he was using this intermediate intermediary.
• 1:31:31
  Yeah, it's what a father does with his with his siblings.
• 1:31:34
  It's what a mother does too. You know, I have 6 kids, you
• 1:31:37
  know one of them is Father Jeremiah priest for the diocese
• 1:31:39
  is stupid girl. Thank God for that.
• 1:31:41
  You know 3 now four of them are married.
• 1:31:44
  The the the last one is engaged, you know, but growing up the the
• 1:31:48
  three who were born in the 80s and the three who were born in
• 1:31:50
  the 90s, you know, it was often a kind of Eureka moment for me
• 1:31:56
  where I would see as a father, I could do practically all of the
• 1:32:00
  things that the older siblings would do for their younger
• 1:32:04
  siblings. But why do that?
• 1:32:07
  So all eyes are on me. Everybody's dependent upon me.
• 1:32:11
  You know, in first Corinthians 39, Paul says we are God's Co
• 1:32:14
  workers. Soon Ergoy and the Greek, you
• 1:32:17
  know, it's not because God can't get the job done himself, it's
• 1:32:20
  that the job that God is doing is a fatherly job.
• 1:32:23
  And so raising up his sons and daughters to assist their
• 1:32:28
  younger siblings is not in any way an affront to the Father in
• 1:32:32
  his sufficiency or Christ. It exhibits the work, you know,
• 1:32:36
  Go tell others about the gospel. Why isn't the Holy Spirit
• 1:32:40
  sufficient? Go pray for others.
• 1:32:42
  Isn't Jesus intercession effective?
• 1:32:44
  Yeah, but it's diffused. The good is diffusive of itself.
• 1:32:48
  And so this is not just because I'm such an amazing dad.
• 1:32:51
  I saw that and felt more satisfaction and seeing my kids
• 1:32:56
  living the faith and sharing it with their own siblings.
• 1:32:59
  When the three youngest all got confirmed, unbeknownst to us,
• 1:33:02
  they asked their three older siblings to be their sponsors.
• 1:33:06
  And I was like, now let's I servant the part in peace.
• 1:33:09
  I mean, for me as a dad, it doesn't get any better than
• 1:33:12
  that. And I'm not a better dad than
• 1:33:14
  God the Father. And so the glory of the Father
• 1:33:17
  is seeing what is happening through the Son, by the Spirit,
• 1:33:21
  through the Saints who've gone before us, who are more invested
• 1:33:24
  in our holiness than we are perhaps in our own or our loved
• 1:33:27
  ones. And at that point, you might
• 1:33:29
  say, well, now you're kind of ratcheting up the rhetoric to
• 1:33:32
  11. You know, it's not what's
• 1:33:34
  actually even better than that. You know, I, I, I think that
• 1:33:37
  when we get home and we see the face of God and we look around
• 1:33:41
  and see the face of our own brothers and sisters in Christ,
• 1:33:44
  we realize that I'm not exaggerating how it is that this
• 1:33:48
  is a divine family. I'm understanding it.
• 1:33:51
  It will be so much better and it will last for all eternity.
• 1:33:56
  And so this is what hope is, is not looking in the mirror and
• 1:33:59
  saying, I'm sure I'm saved. I'm sure I'm holy.
• 1:34:04
  Don't, don't say that. You know, it is rather I am sure
• 1:34:07
  that God the Father is capable of completing the work that he's
• 1:34:11
  begun in us through Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit,
• 1:34:14
  but not just me individually, but all of us as brothers and
• 1:34:18
  sisters in Christ. Once you see that covenant is
• 1:34:22
  not a contract, it's much more a contract.
• 1:34:25
  This is yours and that is mine, a covenant.
• 1:34:28
  You make a covenant with somebody like Abraham does with
• 1:34:30
  Abimelech in Genesis 21. You know, they want to avert
• 1:34:34
  hostility, they want to avoid conflict.
• 1:34:37
  So they make a covenant the next day.
• 1:34:39
  They don't call each other neighbors or enemies or
• 1:34:42
  potential opponents. They call each other brothers.
• 1:34:46
  And it's this divine bond because you swear an oath.
• 1:34:50
  You, you know, the Latin word for oath is sacramentum.
• 1:34:53
  The Hebrew word to swear a covenant oath there in Genesis
• 1:34:56
  21 is Shiva. It's bare Shiva where they make
• 1:35:00
  the covenant. It literally is the well of the
• 1:35:02
  seven, the well of the oath. It's not an accident that we
• 1:35:04
  have 7 covenant oaths, 7 sacraments.
• 1:35:08
  There really is a convergence, you know?
• 1:35:10
  And when I learned Hebrew and I discovered this, I'm like, who
• 1:35:13
  to thunk it? What a coincidence.
• 1:35:16
  Not even close. There were 1200 pastors you
• 1:35:20
  mentioned earlier that came into the Catholic Church.
• 1:35:23
  Yeah, 1200 is still growing. Through through your ministry
• 1:35:26
  and. Well, it's it's Marcus's.
• 1:35:28
  I mean we Co founded it way back in the early. 90s One of the
• 1:35:32
  many Scott Hahn ministries. No, no, no, I, I don't want to
• 1:35:36
  in any way distort the truth of this.
• 1:35:38
  I might have been a catalyst for, for Marcus, but I mean, he
• 1:35:42
  and his son, John Mark, the Coming Home Network, it has
• 1:35:45
  helped thousands, not just the pastors, the preachers, the
• 1:35:49
  missionaries, the professors, but I mean, thousands, 10s of
• 1:35:53
  thousands. We're going to be holding
• 1:35:55
  retreat at our own Saint Paul Center next year with all the
• 1:35:58
  clergy converts but we've lost count of all of the others were
• 1:36:02
  anti Catholic who now I. Would argue my dad's one because
• 1:36:05
  he was an elder at our Protestant church, not a pastor,
• 1:36:07
  but an elder. And it was similar to you.
• 1:36:10
  I mean, seeing it didn't hold up to the stress test, the theology
• 1:36:13
  that they were operating under. And you know, the divorce
• 1:36:16
  started being acceptable in some cases, things like this.
• 1:36:20
  And he said this doesn't this doesn't hold.
• 1:36:24
  There's no, there's no theology here that is really going to
• 1:36:28
  hold us up, hold us up because we keep changing it.
• 1:36:30
  We're, you know, we are there. We are our own teaching
• 1:36:32
  authority. Ultimately it was non
• 1:36:34
  denominational. You know, this week, as I think
• 1:36:37
  you know, an organization that Kimberly and I Co founded called
• 1:36:41
  the Saint Paul Center for Biblical Theology, we're hosting
• 1:36:45
  a priest conference about 25 minutes from here up in
• 1:36:50
  Huntington Beach. Yeah.
• 1:36:52
  And it's a total immersion in the Emmaus approach to Scripture
• 1:36:56
  where you discover the inner penetration of the old and the
• 1:36:59
  new, the promises fulfilled not just back in the 1st century,
• 1:37:03
  but still today in the 21st century, by the Spirit, through
• 1:37:07
  the Saints, through the sacraments, as the family of
• 1:37:09
  God. And, you know, the early
• 1:37:12
  Fathers, especially in the 4th century, the Cappadocians.
• 1:37:14
  Basil and Gregory spoke of sober intoxication, this inebriation
• 1:37:20
  that is spiritual and it's the wine of God's Word.
• 1:37:24
  But ultimately it's the bread and wine that is transformed
• 1:37:28
  into the resurrected body and blood of Christ at the table and
• 1:37:31
  Emmaus, but also at the altar where Christ meets us and feeds
• 1:37:36
  us with his own flesh and blood, as he promised back in the Bread
• 1:37:39
  of Life discourse. We started this back in O 6 and
• 1:37:43
  it's almost like the thickest slice of heaven you could find
• 1:37:47
  on this planet where these priests come back again and
• 1:37:50
  again. We have around 200.
• 1:37:52
  We'll do it again in April with an Austin, TX right after Easter
• 1:37:57
  when they're so tired. Then we'll do it again in July.
• 1:38:00
  So we have between 6 and 700 priests coming to these three
• 1:38:04
  annual conferences to say thanks for allowing the Lord to use you
• 1:38:10
  in such wonderful ways as you celebrate the sacraments, as you
• 1:38:14
  give us counsel and confession and so on and so forth.
• 1:38:17
  And I just, I, I want to not only express my gratitude to our
• 1:38:21
  Lord for the privilege of serving these servants of
• 1:38:24
  Christ, but I also wanted to make, make mention of the fact
• 1:38:27
  that this is the first time we've been able to offer to
• 1:38:31
  these priests for a discount the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible.
• 1:38:35
  I'm I've got. It here right?
• 1:38:37
  I mentioned back in 10th grade how when I finally found a study
• 1:38:41
  Bible, the Bible started to come alive with the help of the Holy
• 1:38:44
  Spirit primarily. And so back in December of 97,
• 1:38:49
  the founder of Ignatius Press, Father Fessio, asked if I would
• 1:38:52
  consider being the general editor of a study Bible.
• 1:38:56
  Well, I had just finished my doctorate.
• 1:38:58
  It was getting published by Yale University on the covenant.
• 1:39:01
  And so I thought, you know, if I could help Catholics have an
• 1:39:05
  experience of a study Bible that is so rich in terms of
• 1:39:10
  geography, history, but more than just apologetics, the
• 1:39:14
  interpenetration of the old, the new Mary, the Saints, this, all
• 1:39:18
  of this stuff. So I agree, you know, we would
• 1:39:20
  hire Curtis Mitch to really do a lot of the heavy lifting.
• 1:39:24
  Then we ended up recruiting a number of other practical over a
• 1:39:27
  dozen of our colleagues, and it just came out several weeks ago.
• 1:39:32
  It's been sold out I think 3 or 4 times already.
• 1:39:35
  Yeah, I mean, you can go to Ignatius Press.
• 1:39:39
  You can also go to the Saint Paul Center, and we still have a
• 1:39:42
  few copies left, and you can order them.
• 1:39:45
  But I'll be honest, when I first got this, it was another
• 1:39:49
  experience. Like now let thy servant depart
• 1:39:51
  in peace. This is going to be more of a
• 1:39:54
  legacy for my children, for my 23 grandchildren, and all of the
• 1:39:58
  other brothers and sisters in Christ.
• 1:40:01
  Than all 50 plus books that I've done combined.
• 1:40:04
  You know, I, I really feel as though the teamwork, the, the,
• 1:40:08
  the, the prayer and all of this, you know, yeah, I'm just so
• 1:40:12
  grateful. It's incredible.
• 1:40:13
  I mean, I haven't read the whole thing, obviously, but I've
• 1:40:16
  started, started it and it's absolutely beautifully done.
• 1:40:19
  Yeah. Beginners.
• 1:40:20
  Rich is the. Word.
• 1:40:21
  Pick it up. Intermediate, advanced laity,
• 1:40:24
  clergy. You can get the literary sense,
• 1:40:26
  you can get the historical truth.
• 1:40:28
  You can get this instruction and doctrine, all of the rest, and
• 1:40:31
  I, this is so much more than the sum of its human parts.
• 1:40:35
  I have a team and I'm so proud of them.
• 1:40:38
  But we have a Lord who wants to feed the people he bled and died
• 1:40:43
  for the living bread, the bread of life, more than we want them
• 1:40:48
  to. And it's like that is the single
• 1:40:50
  most liberating truth of it all, that He wants to make us Saints,
• 1:40:55
  Amen. And fill us with the Spirit more
• 1:40:57
  than we want Him to, even more than we ask Him to.
• 1:41:00
  So this has been years in the making then this study Bible or
• 1:41:03
  how long? Would be 6 years.
• 1:41:05
  Yeah, I December of 97th is when I said yes.
• 1:41:07
  OK. That's, that's why I was like, I
• 1:41:09
  was unsure if you were going to say there was an earlier edition
• 1:41:12
  I was unaware of. No.
• 1:41:13
  How? No 20 years in the making this
• 1:41:15
  study Bible. 25. 25. Years.
• 1:41:18
  So you go back to December of 97 where I agreed, though I
• 1:41:21
  wondered how in the water we're going to do it.
• 1:41:23
  Then January of 98 when Curtis Mitch became full time and he
• 1:41:27
  worked for the next 20. You had someone working 25 years
• 1:41:30
  full time on. This Oh yeah.
• 1:41:32
  And then he also shared the laborers.
• 1:41:34
  And so I look at this and it's so much more than what I could
• 1:41:37
  have ever done on my own do. You know how many copies have
• 1:41:39
  been sold. I think it's getting close to
• 1:41:42
  100,000. That's amazing for just a couple
• 1:41:44
  months. I mean, Ignatius Press told us
• 1:41:46
  in a conference call that they've never seen a book sell
• 1:41:50
  like this. And I think they probably had
• 1:41:53
  some questions as to how well a book that big can sell.
• 1:41:56
  And one of them just said this is a literary phenomenon.
• 1:41:59
  Yeah. And it it surpasses my high
• 1:42:02
  hopes, but I don't think it's yet attained what it is our Lord
• 1:42:06
  wants. I don't think so.
• 1:42:08
  I think this is going to be a conversion, you know, Genie, for
• 1:42:13
  a lot of people. You know, there's a podcaster,
• 1:42:15
  I, I forget his name, but he goes JM.
• 1:42:18
  We're in touch, and he's been interviewing Matthew Thomas, one
• 1:42:21
  of the contributors. He's a Protestant not about to
• 1:42:24
  become a Catholic, but he does reviews of all of these study
• 1:42:28
  Bibles because Protestants have nearly 100 of they do.
• 1:42:31
  And he just cannot stop talking about what more he's finding in
• 1:42:36
  this than even the NIV study Bible, the ESV study Bible,
• 1:42:40
  which for us, we're sort of like the gold standard.
• 1:42:44
  Wow. I, I know we've got to let you
• 1:42:46
  get back to your conference shortly, but I have two final
• 1:42:48
  questions for you, Scott. One of them is what would your
• 1:42:53
  advice be to someone who's listening, who is a believer?
• 1:42:57
  They're not Catholic. Maybe they're Catholic, curious,
• 1:42:59
  but they love the Word. They want to study scripture
• 1:43:04
  more, get closer to Jesus, live the faith, share the gospel.
• 1:43:07
  What would your advice be to them?
• 1:43:08
  Well, two thoughts. I mean, the second thought is
• 1:43:11
  you might want to consider getting a copy of Ignatious
• 1:43:14
  Catholic Study by. Good idea.
• 1:43:16
  It's. Bulky.
• 1:43:16
  I would also say as part of the second answer, you know, get a
• 1:43:20
  copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and just, you
• 1:43:24
  know, be open as you read and as you study and as you discover
• 1:43:28
  that everything you believe the Church teaches, but the things
• 1:43:32
  that you deny, the Church can explain in a way through
• 1:43:35
  Scripture that is going to take your breath away.
• 1:43:38
  But the first thing, by far and away the 1st and most primary
• 1:43:41
  thing is prayer to say to our Lord, I will go wherever you
• 1:43:45
  want me to go. I will do whatever you want me
• 1:43:48
  to do. I will give away whatever you
• 1:43:50
  want me to give away. I want to submit to your
• 1:43:52
  Lordship and experience the grace of your love in new and
• 1:43:56
  powerful ways. And even though I'm saying it, I
• 1:43:59
  do mean it. But I want to mean it much more.
• 1:44:02
  I love you, I thank you, I need more of you and I trust you.
• 1:44:07
  Beautiful and probably some of this can apply to my next the
• 1:44:12
  group for my next question, which is younger American
• 1:44:15
  Catholics. I think there is a bit of a
• 1:44:17
  resurgence in this country of people who are curious about
• 1:44:22
  faith who want to become Catholic people becoming
• 1:44:24
  Catholic. The show gets a lot of people
• 1:44:26
  who say I'm I'm a Catholic convert or even listening to the
• 1:44:29
  show and other shows like and reading books.
• 1:44:32
  Like your books, they are now going through ICIA or they're
• 1:44:36
  already Catholic. What's your general advice for
• 1:44:40
  young American Catholics or Catholics in the West?
• 1:44:43
  You know, going back to something that you were saying
• 1:44:45
  at the beginning of our conversation, and that is the
• 1:44:47
  story of our lives. Alistair McIntyre famously said
• 1:44:51
  that we can't figure out why we're here unless we figure out
• 1:44:55
  what story is my life a part of. And, you know, to be a part of
• 1:44:59
  Western civilization, to be a part of America.
• 1:45:02
  I mean, that is a sort of story in itself, but it doesn't, it
• 1:45:07
  doesn't even come close to being adequate or sufficient for the
• 1:45:10
  deepest longings. So to take God at his word, to
• 1:45:14
  submit to the lordship of Christ, and then to discover
• 1:45:18
  that salvation history didn't end in the 1st century.
• 1:45:21
  The living water, that stream is still going on right now.
• 1:45:25
  And to step into it and to discover that, yeah, we're a
• 1:45:28
  part of America, but America is showing all of its weaknesses
• 1:45:32
  these days. You know, we're part of Western
• 1:45:34
  civilization, but that's not the be, you know, the be all and end
• 1:45:38
  all of our existence. What is bearing the image and
• 1:45:42
  likeness of God? Discovering that God is
• 1:45:44
  fathering the human race to be his family, that he's fathering
• 1:45:48
  each and every single one of us to make us shares in Christ by
• 1:45:51
  the power of the Spirit in the communion of Saints.
• 1:45:55
  I only believe in the communion of Saints because I believe in
• 1:45:58
  the Holy Spirit, the communion of Saints, the forgiveness of
• 1:46:01
  sins, the resurrection of the body, because this is what God
• 1:46:04
  is fathering. You discover that story is more
• 1:46:08
  than story. It is history, salvation,
• 1:46:10
  history. It's real, it's true.
• 1:46:13
  You know, this is the fundamental purpose of why we
• 1:46:16
  started the Saint Paul Center. You know, nearly 25 years ago, I
• 1:46:20
  had been sharing with my own kids, the older ones.
• 1:46:23
  And when Gabriel was a teenager and I shared this vision of the
• 1:46:27
  timeline of the covenants, the fulfillment of the old and the
• 1:46:29
  new. You know, we were saying goodbye
• 1:46:32
  to all of the other teenagers who came to my house for the
• 1:46:34
  Bible study. And I didn't know this until
• 1:46:36
  just recently. He said, Dad, I, I just stayed
• 1:46:39
  behind. And I'm just looking at the
• 1:46:40
  Scriptures. I'm looking at that chart that
• 1:46:42
  you gave of salvation history. And I think he was like 14.
• 1:46:47
  And he told me for the first time, like last year, that was
• 1:46:51
  my adult conversion. I looked at that and I could
• 1:46:55
  cry. The idea.
• 1:46:58
  He's like, Dad, this goes beyond my family, my nation.
• 1:47:02
  This is my creator. This is my father.
• 1:47:05
  Even more than you, Dad, you know?
• 1:47:07
  And this was reality. This makes so much sense out of
• 1:47:10
  everything. And it's the only thing that
• 1:47:12
  makes sense out of everything, you know?
• 1:47:14
  And to be able to teach that, to share it, but to be able to
• 1:47:19
  enjoy it, it just doesn't get any better than that.
• 1:47:23
  And so that's what I think young people need.
• 1:47:25
  That's what old people need too. Perhaps every bit as much all.
• 1:47:29
  Right, I know, I said. Just do one last one.
• 1:47:31
  Now I have to ask. I don't want to go.
• 1:47:34
  Back it's lovely it's lovely that that young that you know
• 1:47:37
  that American Catholic who wants to or believer who wants to go
• 1:47:40
  deeper. Your son he was your son.
• 1:47:43
  He had your timeline that you handed him.
• 1:47:45
  I know we're talking about this resource, which is amazing, the
• 1:47:47
  Ignatian Catholic Study, Ignatius Press Catholic Study
• 1:47:50
  Bible. Highly recommend.
• 1:47:53
  Any other, you know, concrete practical advice you have for
• 1:47:57
  that person. They want to be on fire.
• 1:47:59
  They have that stirring in their heart.
• 1:48:01
  I know you said prayer, you mentioned the Bible.
• 1:48:03
  Any other resources you recommend?
• 1:48:05
  Well, yeah, I mean, I would go to saintpaulcenter.com and I'd
• 1:48:08
  also recommend what you recommend, and that is Roam
• 1:48:10
  Sweet Home, where we just tell our story.
• 1:48:12
  It's a great, it's not a debate, it's just our narrative.
• 1:48:15
  Yes, a father who keeps his promises.
• 1:48:17
  Yes, a good one. You know, that one was the one I
• 1:48:20
  was writing and that includes the timeline that I drew.
• 1:48:25
  Gabriel saw and later became a book, a father who keeps his
• 1:48:29
  promises, God's covenant, love and scripture.
• 1:48:30
  And then you might look at my books.
• 1:48:32
  You also, I mean, I have so much respect for Brant Petrie.
• 1:48:37
  His bookcase for Jesus will answer the questions.
• 1:48:41
  Jesus and the Jewish roots of the Eucharist.
• 1:48:44
  Jesus and the Jewish roots of Mary.
• 1:48:46
  He writes so well. He communicates the faith in
• 1:48:49
  such an effective way. I would highly recommend Brent
• 1:48:53
  Petrie's writings as well. Amazing.
• 1:48:55
  Thank you so much, Scott. What a good to have you here.
• 1:48:58
  We have to have you back. Thank you with Kimberly.
• 1:49:00
  With Kimberly, absolutely. What a blessing.
• 1:49:03
  Thank you so much. You're welcome.
• 1:49:04
  Thank you so much for the joy and the privilege of being
• 1:49:07
  together. A huge thank you to our partner.
• 1:49:09
  EWTNEWTN is the largest religious network, reaching
• 1:49:14
  millions of people with the truth of the faith,
• 1:49:17
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