Pints With Aquinas - The Biblical Basis for the Priesthood w/ Dr. John Bergsma

Episode Date: June 1, 2021

Did you know Jesus was a priest? How about Adam? If that’s a surprise to you, then pull up a barstool with Scripture scholar Dr. John Bergsma and me for a conversation that will blow your mind. You’ll learn about how the Catholic priesthood goes back to the Old Testament, starting all the way back in the Garden of Eden! We also talk about how Christ acts as a priest during the Last Supper and how each of us shares in Christ’s priesthood today. Grab a drink with us (I’ve got coffee) and let’s dive in!   Download my FREE ebook, "You Can Understand Aquinas," now!   SPONSORS Hallow: http://hallow.app/mattfradd STRIVE: https://www.strive21.com/ Homeschool Connections: https://homeschoolconnections.com/matt/   GIVING Patreon or Directly: https://pintswithaquinas.com/support/  This show (and all the plans we have in store) wouldn't be possible without you. I can't thank those of you who support me enough. Seriously! Thanks for essentially being a co-producer co-producer of the show.   LINKS Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/matt-fradd FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/   SOCIAL Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattfradd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd Gab: https://gab.com/mattfradd Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/pintswithaquinas   MY BOOKS Does God Exist: https://www.amazon.com/Does-God-Exist-Socratic-Dialogue-ebook/dp/B081ZGYJW3/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586377974&sr=8-9 Marian Consecration With Aquinas: https://www.amazon.com/Marian-Consecration-Aquinas-Growing-Closer-ebook/dp/B083XRQMTF/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586379026&sr=8-4 The Porn Myth: https://www.ignatius.com/The-Porn-Myth-P1985.aspx   CONTACT Book me to speak: https://www.mattfradd.com/speakerrequestform

Hello. Yes, Matt Fradd. Hello. Lovely to have you on the show. Yeah, it's great to be here. How long have you taught at Steubenville? I have taught at Steubenville since the fall of 2004. Okay. Yeah. Cool. Two years before I got married. Really? Yeah. That's an amazing coincidence there. 15 years, I guess. I've been 14, 15 years. I shouldn't be guessing that on air. And then when did you convert from Calvinism? From Calvinism, right. Yes, I converted from Calvinism, yes. So that's a whole long story that we could talk about endlessly if we wanted to.

I would like to. The particular date is February 24th, 2001. It was a Saturday vigil before Ash Wednesday, an odd time to become Catholic, but it worked. Yeah. A little bit of celebration

and then Lent. And somehow that's appropriate to the Catholic faith. Like, yeah, now get down to suffering. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, that's when I was received into the church.

I was confirmed on February 24, 2001, along with my lovely wife. Came into the church with me. Praise be to God. No great clash of the titans like Kimberly and Scott Hahn. Nothing like that. We had a much more peaceful journey into the church. nothing like that. We had a much more peaceful journey into the church. But there were years of spiritual preparation that preceded that, that led me to that point, of course.

You were a pastor, correct? I was a pastor, yeah, yeah. A pastor. A pastor. Yeah, that's right. In Western Michigan, it's a pastor. So were you a pastor when you converted, or did you leave a leadership role? So I was an inner city evangelist, essentially, and pastor of a little urban church in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan. downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan. And I did that for four or five years, um, uh, from like 93-ish to, uh, 98-ish, some, something like that. And, um, yeah. And, and, you know, doing Protestant ministry was, um, part of the journey into the Catholic Church

because actually trying to put Protestant principles into action started to reveal to me some of their inadequacy, I might say. So, yeah, that was part of the journey. So you left first and then started doing a deep dive into Catholicism? Or was it while you were a pastor? Yeah. Yeah. So I'm doing pastor work.

I'm doing evangelism. I'm telling people salvation is by faith alone. They're taking that to mean that they can pray to receive Jesus and then continue cohabiting with their boyfriend or, you know, using the substance of their choice, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm coming back to them saying, no, no, it's time to live like a disciple of Jesus. And they're like, well, you told me it was by faith alone that my works didn't count. And I'm like, boy, this just doesn't seem like the way that Jesus evangelized. You know, Jesus comes to people up front and says, you know, foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests. The son of man has nowhere to

lay his head. In other words, you know, it's going to be rough. Buckle up, you know, count the cost. That's how Jesus evangelized. And it really bothered me that we as Protestants didn't evangelize that way. So that started me thinking about whether salvation by faith alone was even a good idea. I started losing my faith in sola scriptura as well, as I observed all these other pastors and evangelists working in the same community, essentially, with importantly different approaches to the Christian life, also based on Scripture. And I thought that they were just unaware of some verses that I knew of,

and so I'd get together with them and share some verses. And to my surprise, they had verses supporting their, to my way of thinking, aberrant views. And so they'd share verses with me, and so it was verses, verses, verses back and forth. Verses, verses, verses. And that's what Sola Scriptura ends up degenerating into verses, verses, verses. And so I started, you know, so I was thinking about that.

And after about four years, it was time to receive full ordination in the group that I was in, kind of like final vows. Yep. I got cold feet and thought I would delay things by going to graduate school. That great straightener out of people's minds, right? Oh, well. Graduate school is always the solution, right? Okay.

It just depends where you go. Yeah. So I ended up at Notre Dame, of all places, by accident, because I took a wrong turn while bringing a youth group back from a mission project in Chicago, and end up in South Bend, Indiana, and literally saw the campus of Notre Dame and thought, oh, maybe I should apply here. And I did, and got into the doctoral program in Scripture there. Interesting. And then, you know, then I met some amazing Catholics. So you got your doctorate as a Protestant? I began it as a Protestant,

but by the time I defended my dissertation, I was a Catholic. Wow, and what was your dissertation on? It was on the year of Jubilee, which is not relevant to anything really. Well, it is, but that's very long. I'm sure it took a lot of time. Yeah. I mean, we could eventually bring the Jubilee around to like, you know, the sacrament of confession and a lot of interesting, powerful things.

But, you know, that topic was not a great love of mine. It was simply a project that my director suggested, and I needed to get done fast because I had four children and a fifth on the way, and I needed to get out of grad school, and so I needed to get that baby finished. But you met some good Catholics. I met good Catholics, amazing Catholics. Converts by chance? Not really. Well, maybe the one in particular who eventually became

my sponsor was, you might call him a revert, I suppose, because he did some time in Calvinism through InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. He left the church for a while, was a Presbyterian for a while, and then came back. That was part of why he fascinated me, because you tasted the lights of Calvinism and then returned to the darkness of this false church and papism. You know, what's wrong with you, dude? Yeah. But he was so full of the Holy Spirit, and he was so smart, and he would run theological circles around me,

even though he was three years younger. And I was just like, what is up with this guy? It guy? Yeah. It was just crazy. And he carried a vial. This is, this is the thing I would, um, so, you know, he, he blew me away. I like to say he had three qualities that I never thought I'd find in the same person. He was highly intelligent, full of the Holy Spirit and Catholic and see how you could be all three without, you know, causing some kind of chemical negative reaction, you know. But he fascinated me. He was like, you know, like a freak of nature or something. So we began to get together to talk theology at the huddle at the University of Notre Dame

over the grad school lunch, which was two Whopper juniors for two bucks is most food you could get for your money. So we'd get our little, you know, our two Whopper Juniors for two bucks was the most food you could get for your money. So we'd get our little, you know, our two Whopper Juniors, and we'd sit there and we'd talk heavy theology. And I would run these arguments against the Catholic faith on him, these arguments that I found so effective with ill-formed, non-practicing Catholics that I met in the inner city doing Protestant evangelism. And to me, that was all that the Catholic Church composed of.

My impression of the church was not based on very favorable examples. But anyway, so I run these polemics, and the dude was unfair to me. He answered from Scripture. That was so unfair. I mean, he's turning tables. I mean, I was the Protestant. He was the Catholic. He was supposed to answer from the popes or something. Or quote church documents. And here he's quoting Scripture. And he carried a little New Testament with him. I usually carry... yeah, I do have one. Yeah, I got one. Yeah, yeah, no, this is it.

Yeah, this is the same edition. Wow. It's broken up into daily readings. And he would carry this around with him. I found out later that he used this for devotional reading. But he would pull out the Bible and he'd go chapter and verse and defend the Blessed Mother from Revelation 12. And I was just blown away, like Catholics carrying Bibles, you know. Yeah.

What is the world coming to? What's happening to the world? So, yeah. What was your most sophisticated objection to him, and how did he respond, if you remember? Yeah, well, it's kind of ingrained in my mind this one day that we were sitting there, and he had just answered two or three of my best objections from Scripture, and I was casting around for something to really knock him out with.

And I was looking around the room, and there was this engraving of the Blessed Mother based on Our Lady of Guadalupe. I realize now, looking back on it, didn't know that at the time. And it said, Our Lady Queen of Heaven, you know, in an inscription around it. And that gave me an idea. So I was like, all right, here's one for you. Show me one place in scripture that gives any evidence that Mary is queen of heaven, which is a blasphemous title, you know, from my perspective. And I thought I had them because, you know, I was very conversant in scripture,

been reading scripture most of my life, you know, and I was just convinced there was not a single passage that gave any credence to the idea that Mary was queen of heaven. So out comes his Bible in Revelation 12. And we got this woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and a crown of 12 stars in her head. So clearly she's in the heavens. She's got a crown, so she's a queen.

So she's a heavenly queen. And then in verse 5, she gives birth to a male child who's destined to rule the nations with a rod of iron, which is an allusion to Psalm 2, 9, the Davidic Messiah, who's clearly Jesus. So you've got a heavenly queen who gives birth to Jesus. How can that not be the Blessed Mother? Why not just respond that

the woman is Israel or the church and the Bible is filled with metaphors? Those are lame responses. I knew they were lame. Why did you know they were lame? Because there's no way you can, you know, the child, okay, the child born there destined to rule the nations with a rod of iron is not merely some kind of figure or icon.

He's Jesus. So if you're going to accept that he is a person, a historical person, Jesus the Messiah. And then the dragon too is personified. It's not a... Right. The dragon is Satan. Merely symbolic.

Okay. Not merely. I mean, yeah. I mean, there's more, you know, and there's the mystical body of Christ and there's mystical bodies. Yeah, you can go into all that, but they're also persons, right? So if you're going to accept that, then how can you rule out, okay? How can you rule out that the mother is also a person?

And I hold to this day that you cannot rule it out. In fact, I think that is the correct answer. She's also symbolic. You know, she's a sign of the church, you know, the true church of all times. You know, there's elements of her dress that bespeak the old covenant people as well as the new covenant people. So I see her as Mary as icon of the people of God, old and new covenant. You know, that would be my fullest description of what the woman is. But I don't see how you can rule out an application to the person. I see.

That's a very interesting point. It's almost like only if you come into the argument intent not to see her as Mary would you be so intent on not seeing her as Mary. Right. But if you don't see the implications of her being queen, maybe like, okay, well, fair enough. The child is Jesus. The dragon is Satan. The woman, sure, is the church, is Israel, and is Mary. Yeah, yeah.

You know, I had grown up listening to Baptists give fanciful interpretations to the book of Revelation all my life, and it always kind of given them a line of credit. You know, it said, oh, maybe, you know, I don't know if I quite buy it, but I'll grant you the argument, you know, kind of thing. And now here this Catholic was giving actually a fairly, you know, clear exegetical argument. You know, you got this woman, she gives birth to clearly the Messiah. There's only one woman in all of Scripture who gives birth to Messiah. How can you rule out the possibility of an application to her?

And I'm like, no, that's a good argument, you know, that you definitely have to be open, that it could apply. You know, I wasn't fully convinced that, you know, it was Mary yet. But I'm like, yeah, you have to be able to entertain that as a possibility. So that was an opening, you know, in my journey. At Notre Dame. Right, at Notre Dame. Our lady. Yeah, absolutely. It was an opening, you know, in my journey. At Notre Dame. Right, at Notre Dame. Our lady.

Yeah, absolutely. It was an opening, and I was like, wow, that's not bad. He did a pretty impressive move there with a passage that... So, I mean, it was a disconcerting event because I'm thinking to myself, gosh, five minutes ago, I was absolutely convinced, could have passed a polygraph that there wasn't a single passage in scripture that gave any credence to the idea that Mary was queen of heaven. Five minutes later, I'm like, maybe there is. That's not a bad argument. And now I'm thinking, what else? What else could I be missing? You know, so I started to open myself up to actually listen and not simply, you know, debate,

but actually listen to what he was saying. And then the relationship got much more serious and, you know, I looked at other scriptures and I'm getting much more open to the Catholic faith. What was the number one objection you had to becoming Catholic at the time? Number one objection. That is a great question. Probably Mary and the papacy. Makes sense.

Yeah. A lot of Protestants feel that way. Yeah. The Marian doctrines in particular because they seemed to impugn the soul mediatorship of Christ. because they seemed to impugn the soul mediatorship of Christ, you know, and that idea of participatory mediation was not something that I was familiar with. It makes sense to me now because, yes, Christ is a soul mediator, but he has a mystical body which incorporates all of us, and that's so then we participate, and the Blessed Mother, in a special way,

in a singular way, participates in that. But we all participate. We're all co-redeemers of the small c in that sense because we're part of the mystical body of Christ. And if we take that seriously, if we really are baptized into Christ and united with him in one flesh and one spirit with him, then it makes perfect sense that we would participate with him in his one work of redemption of mankind.

So it makes sense now, but at the time it seemed like, I'm not sure about this. But what blindsided me, Matt, was the Eucharist. I wasn't even thinking about Eucharist, but my friend Michael got me to read the Apostolic Fathers. And I'm reading along in Ignatius of Antioch, this early martyr, and how can you impugn the guy? How can you criticize the guy? He's the pastor of the church at Antioch. He's going to be martyred. He knew the apostle John. He's got impeccable credentials. So, you know, I don't know how you can deny that he's a witness to the authentic faith. And you're reading along about halfway through his writings in his

letter to the Smyrnaeans, he gets to this point and he says, he warns the Christians in Smyrna, stay away from anyone who refuses to confess the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Savior Jesus, which suffered for our sins and which the Father raised for our salvation. And if you look at it carefully, he doesn't say Jesus who suffered and Jesus who was raised, but the flesh of Jesus which suffered and which was raised. So it's very concrete. Yeah. It's very tangible. It's like the flesh of Jesus, which suffered and which was raised. So it's very concrete. Yeah. It's very tangible. It's like the flesh of Jesus.

And you got to, you know, anybody who doesn't confess that it's the flesh, like you got to stay away from them because they're not true Christians. And I'm reading this. And meanwhile, I'm thinking about this doctrinal form that I used to have to sign in order to minister in my old group, where I had to affirm that the mass was a condemnable idolatry because in the mass bread and wine were worshiped as if they were God of course they're only creatures and and so that's idolatry right so so I could think of no clearer

more like explicit denial of the real presence than what I had to sign on to. And here this early martyr pastor of the church, a disciple of the apostle John, who was always my favorite apostle, is saying, anybody who believes like Bergsma, anybody who's like Bergsma, stay away, stay away. Wow wow it's a false teacher and I just was convicted I was like oh oh hurt me you know over a distance of 2,000 years this church father is rebuking me and I just like oh ouch you know and um and that that got me really thinking about the real presence and I'm like wow wow, that's so central to these early Christians. And then I went back into the New Testament and it dawns on me,

oh my gosh, all the passages of the New Testament about the Eucharist, their plain sense, which I'm all about as a conservative Calvinist Protestant, their plain sense is just that it's the body of Jesus. And then I thought, well, oh, maybe Ignatius is a one-off. Maybe he's the only church father that says this. No, no, he's not the only one. Other church fathers say Augustine, who's like the great hero to Calvinists. You know, Calvinists think that Augustine was the proto-Calvin, right? So Augustine says things like, Jesus held his own body in his hands at the Last Supper. He says things like,

it's not a sin to worship the Eucharist. It's a sin not to worship the Eucharist. I'm like, oh, Augustine, my hero, the early Calvin. He says that it's not a sin to worship the Eucharist, that it's a sin not to worship the Eucharist. Like, why was this hidden from me? Like, I read, we read Augustine all the time in my Calvinist formation, you know, at undergraduate and seminary. Never read these parts of Augustine where he talks about the sacraments or the real presence.

Ah, totally blown away. You know, so within a day and a half, Matt, honestly, within a day and a half of reading Ignatius on the real presence and then scurrying around and looking at the New Testament, looking at these other fathers, I'm like, oh, my gosh. If the Eucharist is really Jesus, that makes all these other arguments like exactly how does justification work and exactly what's going on in some of the other sacraments. But if the Eucharist is Jesus, that's just like a brute fact that just outweighs so much of the esoteric things that we argue about in theology. Not that those things are unimportant. Like I'm a professional theologian, and I believe in truth, and I believe that it's important to get things accurate. So not saying that it doesn't matter to nail down all those

other aspects of theology, but just the fact of Jesus being the Eucharist is such a brute fact that it's like a, it's like a, you know, the gravity of a black hole that just, you know, sucks you into it by its very nature so that if that's really Jesus, then I've got to be there. And even if the Catholic church was only right about that, that would still be so important that it'd be seriously have to consider. And so without understanding completely how the papal documents, papal doctrines worked or everything about Mary yet, on the basis of the real presence, I decided, look, I just have to become Catholic to be with Christ in the Eucharist and these other things. I mean, I was putting up in my own group with things I disagreed with, you know. I couldn't think of any theological group that I could be in that, in my opinion,

was perfect. So if I'm going to have to put up with theological discomfort somewhere, at least in the Catholic Church, I can have Jesus in the Eucharist to console me while I put up with things. As it turned out, I later became reconciled with the whole body of Catholic doctrine and found that truth and Christ reside in the same place. But at the time, just for the sake of Jesus and the Eucharist, I wanted to... If I were in your shoes, I would have approached everybody smarter than myself and went, please help me make sense of Ignatius and the early fathers and what Christ says in John 6.

Am I misreading this? Is there a way to get around this? So did you do that? Did you go to people? I did. I did, eventually. I mean, at first I looked at the stuff, and then I thought, okay, this seems to me to be a pretty strong case, but I should test this against those that God has placed in spiritual authority over me. So I went to the elders of my Calvinist parish and I told them, I'm thinking of becoming Catholic, but I'm open to hearing anything you guys have to say. So I talked with my pastor. Yeah. I let the, an elder came over and visited and talked with me, you know, and they didn't have strong objections.

And then I wrote to my former seminary professors and I said, I'm thinking of becoming Catholic. If any of you would like to talk with me, please, by all means, let's converse. And so, you know, we did back and forth via email with a couple of different professors. And, you know, they raised some points and i answered the points and and in the end too they're like they didn't have strong objections i was like what is i wrote to my protestant spiritual director from when i was in college i said is you know this is what i'm thinking of doing if there's anything you want to say he wrote back and said um sounds to me like you're being responsible and thinking this out, you know. So God bless you and your new ecclesiastical home.

So I'm like, okay, Lord, what else am I supposed to do? All those in authority over me are not telling me not to do it. They're not warning me. Have objections to Catholicism from Calvinists become more sophisticated since then? In other words, have you encountered arguments now that would have kept you Calvinist back then if you had heard them? No, absolutely not. I think that actually, ironically, the elders and the pastor at my Calvinist church, as well as my seminary professors, etc., were in fact sophisticated enough that they realized that the usual polemics were rather thin. thin. And they had internal reasons why they themselves did not become Catholic, but they

were not convinced of the typical stuff like, why do you call priests father or, you know, you know, all the, all the, the usual objections that they knew those, those kinds of things were, that they knew those kind of things were, you know, kind of ad hoc proof texting, etc. And they also knew that, you know, the church's official teaching on justification and sanctification was not some kind of crazy position that could not be defended by scripture or from tradition. You know, they respected, you know, they respected Catholic theology. In particular, they respected John Paul II, who was pope at the time. And really, you know, JP II, looking back on it, he really was much respected and loved outside of the Catholic Church by other Christians who just loved Jesus and sensed that this man was authentic. So he did a lot for the credibility of the Catholic Church among Protestants, I would say.

Did you lose a lot of friends or were they pretty much open to you doing this? I lost some friends. I gained others. And your wife was okay? My wife was on her own journey. Yeah, she was on her own journey that had a lot to do with the rosary and the blessed mother and redemptive suffering. So just super quick, we were living in this on-campus married student housing, mostly other Catholic moms. And the Catholic moms would get together to pray the rosary at the student center. And my wife would just go along first for just social reasons. But over time, she learned to pray the rosary.

pray the rosary. And another thing was these young Catholic moms were really quite exemplary. In hindsight, we realized that, you know, this is a special group that was there at that time, but they lived their faith well. And one of the things that my wife noticed is that they refrained from complaining about their husband and their kids, which my wife was used to doing in the circles that she moved in. And so when she would start complaining, they wouldn't complain along. And it was so marked that she pulled one of her friends aside at one point. She's like, you know, why don't people just like vent? Because that was just like natural for women to vent, right? It's like, why don't we? And so her Catholic friends said, well, you know,

these are sufferings that are given to us by Christ as part of our vocation, a part of our growth in holiness. And if we embrace these sufferings with Christ. A.K.A. John Bergsma. Yeah. If you embrace these sufferings with Christ. A.K.A. John Bergsma. Yeah. If you embrace these sufferings, John. Yes, exactly. Yeah.

Embrace your husband as your great cross in your life. Absolutely. Then, you know, then they really lead to salvation. And that was so powerful, Matt, because I know that that almost sounds trite to us as Catholics. You know, we've been Catholic for, you know, 20 years now. And so we often say just offhand, you know, well, offer it up and so on. We take the doctrine of redemptive suffering for granted, but we ought not to because it's so powerful. And when you grow up without it and have never known what to do spiritually with the suffering in your life, and you always just felt like it didn't make sense,

you know, that it's just so powerful. You mean all this pain that I've gone through had a purpose? You know, it wasn't just for nothing. You know, it wasn't just God looking the other way, you know, for nothing. You know, it wasn't just God looking the other way, you know, at a couple of key moments in my life, you know, and that was so powerful for my wife and so moving. And then, you know, the development of a relationship with the Blessed Mother through praying the rosary and so on, that redemptive suffering and the Blessed Mother were powerful existential reasons for my wife to come into the church. So we were on different journeys, but we wound up in the same place at about the same time, thanks be to God. And now you're familiar with James White, no doubt.

Were you familiar with him back then while you were converting? Dimly, yeah. Incidentally, we've invited James White to come on the show to debate Jimmy Akin on numerous occasions. He has still yet to take us up on the offer. So if you're listening, Dr. White, we'd love to have you on the show. But one thing he says that I think is at least a fair point, prima facie, is that Catholics often say, I want to be part of this one church because you look at Protestantism and they're all at each other's throats disagreeing on different doctrines. It's a mess.

It's complete chaos. One thing he does today, and it's difficult to disagree with him right off the bat, is look at your church. You don't have this unified church that you would like to have. Look at the weak leadership we have. Even from the Holy Father, perhaps, at points, or the bishops. Right. How are you dealing with all this right now, and what's your opinion on it? Yeah, well, the disunity that we have in the Catholic Church is nothing compared to the disunity that I experienced in Protestantism. And I know it's a good polemical point to make in the midst of debate, but it really is a far cry. The elements that we have that

unify us as Catholics are so powerful, so existential, and so real. First of all, the sacraments. That's a unifying commonality that all Catholics have in common. Apostolic succession. You just can't get away from the fact that wherever you are in the world, whether you're in Antarctica or Fairbanks or whatever, there is an ordinary who is, you know, appointed for your spiritual welfare. You know, there's a bishop in charge of wherever you are, and he's an apostolic succession. You know, the Holy Father himself, whatever faults any particular Holy Father might have, there's just this reality that he's there. And, you know, he's a brute fact. He's the successor of Peter. And like it or not, he's the sign symbol Peter and, uh, like it or not, he's, he's the sign symbol of, of, uh,

of the unity of the church. And, um, so these, these are so concrete. These are so real in, in the deep meaning of the sense, these, these elements that keep us together that, yeah, it's amazing that, um, that in fact, uh, we have one church given the diversity of behavior and thought and so on, but these powerful realities of the sacraments of apostolic succession, of Petrine succession, do in fact unite us in very real ways and make us into a family. But, you know, families are imperfect. Families have spats, you know. But we stay together because we have these powerful bonds. And in the Catholic Church, they're covenantal bonds, you know.

It's the blood of Jesus. We have the same blood running in our veins. So, yeah, so there's a beauty about Catholicism. It's strong enough to withstand, you know, obviously a lot of damage is done to the church by error and schism. And those things are real. At the same time, there's a strength there that the church is able to withstand this to a much greater degree than other groups that have not been started by Jesus Christ. What's your opinion right now on the German bishops who seem to be giving license to their priests, blessing same-sex unions, etc.? Sometimes it seems like, okay, I get it.

I get that we're a ship and we're going to fight this out together, as it were. I get it. I get that we're a ship and we're going to fight this out together, as it were. But sometimes it seems like the church is being far too lenient and not excommunicating certain individual political figures, say. Right, yeah, yeah. So my opinion is that there should be clarity from the Vatican about that. Yeah, done. And the fact that there's not, it doesn't cause you much consternation?

No, it causes me consternation, but that's not my decision. I haven't been appointed as a successor of Peter. Here's a good question, I think. How does one remain a humble son of the church during a time like this? Because it's difficult. I'm sure it's difficult for you, especially as a theologian. Sure, sure, yeah. Well, you need to have an intense life of prayer. That definitely helps. Spiritual direction, I think, is key. I think we all need

to have a spiritual director, and spiritual direction provides an opportunity to talk these kinds of things out with a spiritually mature Christian, and so I highly recommend that. spiritually mature Christian. And so I highly recommend that. So staying faithful to the sacraments, having a good rigorous plan of prayer for each day, you know, that you have daily habits of prayer, the rosary, meditation on scripture,

mental prayer daily, these kinds of things. And then, you know, a good spiritual lecture. I think that goes a long way to keeping things together in tough times. Very good. Yeah, there's a good kind of opus de until you've been influenced by the good work of opus de. Yes, indeed. God's work. I want to talk a little bit about the priesthood. This seems like an area that hasn't been, I don't know, fully developed, at least in sort of lay apologetic circles, such that many Catholics, if they were put on the spot about the priesthood, may not have a good response. They might have a good response concerning the Eucharist or why baptism regenerates the soul. But if someone would say, like, explain the priesthood for me,

I think many lay Catholics who are well-versed in apologetics wouldn't be great at doing that. Yeah, I agree. I wonder if you can help us with that. Yes. Well, I wrote a book recently, Jesus and the Old Testament Roots of the Priesthood, that tries to do just that. Because a few years ago, during Benedict XVI's tenure, he declared the year of the priest, and that gave occasion for us all to think about the priesthood. gave occasion for us all to think about the priesthood. And I was asked to, you know, give some presentations about the Bible and the priesthood to a local parish, which gave me an opportunity to revisit these issues and think about it. And in working up those talks and

meditating on scripture, it dawned on me that priesthood is actually a very central theme in scripture that begins in Genesis and goes all the way to Revelation, and that there's basically this aboriginal priestly vocation of the human person in each one of us. And then in particular individuals, you know, this responsibility to lead the community of worship and to mediate the grace of God to the rest of the community. And you find that all through scripture and it's just written into human nature. And it's just missed, I think, too often because we're not taught to look for it or what to look for. So indeed, you know, beginning with Adam, you know, Adam's in the Jewish tradition, they're all over the fact that Adam is a priest.

But we miss it as Christian readers because we're reading in translation, etc. But in Genesis 2, 15, it says he's placed by God in the garden to work and to guard it. It doesn't mean anything to us immediately, but work and guard are a word pair in Hebrew that sum up the priestly duties. So you look in the book of Numbers and again and again, it says the priests and the Levites are to work the work and guard the guardianship. And that was two fundamental priestly duties. Working the work meant actually celebrating the liturgy, the sacrificial liturgy, and guarding the guardianship, doing the guard duty of keeping the sanctuary clean.

So those are like, you know, pregnant terms that for the ancient Jewish reader, they're reading along in Genesis 2, they see that, oh, he's to work and to guard, oh, ding. Priestly duty, which implies then that the Garden of Eden is the original sanctuary and that's what you find in like the the the ancient jewish literature like the dead sea scrolls and so on they're all over that there's still like it's a commonplace oh everybody knows that you know uh but but i was never taught you know growing up as a pious little protestant boy

i was never taught that adam had a priestly role or anything like that. But, you know, this is why so often we can learn so much from the Jewish tradition, especially the ancient Jewish tradition and the way that they read the scriptures. There's all sorts of kind of unspoken assumptions that are going on. But, you know, Adam was a priest from the get-go. And you can follow that priesthood all the way through the Old Testament. and you can follow that priesthood all the way through the Old Testament. You see the patriarchs acting as priests for their families, for their clans. And again, what do we mean by that, acting as priests?

Acting as priests, yeah. Well, this priesthood has this, it's a mediatorial role. You're a go-between. You are a go-between between God and a community. And so when you face God, you represent the community. And then you turn around and you face the community, you represent God. It's just like at mass. Our priest, ad orientum, he faces God. Then he turns around and faces us. To us, he's the face of the Father. To the Father, he's the face of the community. And that was from the beginning. And even with Adam, when there's basically no other human beings on earth, but he represents the creation. There's

like this cosmic dimension of priesthood that we, you know, we share with the animals, we share with the minerals, and we take that animal and mineral nature and we present it to God and we elevate the rest of creation to an act of worship. So we participate in the rest of creation and then present worship to God. So even if there were no human beings, we'd still have a priestly role on behalf of the rest of creation. The tree can't praise you, God, but I share something with the tree and I'm going to praise you. Wow. Yeah, yeah. But it's just fundamental. So the book, the book is really about not just holy orders, but a lot of the book is about our priesthood as baptized believers.

Yes. And, and, and most Catholics think that priesthood of all believers is a Protestant idea. It's not. Yes. It's in the church fathers. You know, it's in Peter Chrysologus has this glorious passage where he's commenting on St. Paul and talking about the priesthood of every Christian. And so we need to recover that. Actually, the catechism 900 through 909 has some beautiful statements about how we share in Christ's kingship, and we share in his priesthood, how we share in Christ's kingship, and we share in his priesthood, and we share in his prophethood. And we typically either don't know about that, or if we do know about it, we're like, yeah, yeah, theoretically, whatever.

No, this should be as practical as the morning cup of coffee. be as practical as the morning cup of coffee. Like when we wake up in the morning, we ought to make an act by which we offer our entire day to God as a priestly act. And then that kind of like priestly understanding of what we're about ought to... What do you say in the morning,

if you don't mind me asking? Oh, I use a very traditional one, you know. Oh my Jesus, through the immaculate heart of Mary, I offer to you all the prayers, joys, works, and sufferings of this day for all the intentions of your sacred heart in union with the Holy Sacrifice, the Mass, etc. So you say they're still lying in bed, huh? Yeah. No, typically I get up. I put the legs down.

And then remember. And then do it. Okay. This is beautiful. This would be a beautiful practice for all those watching to begin. But yeah, I mean, that's a very traditional one, but you can use your own words. Yeah. Lord, I give you the day. Yeah, absolutely. But I love what you're saying because I would say that the reason we don't know how to understand and explain the ministerial priesthood is we don't know what priesthood

means. I mean, you've just sat there for five minutes and explained to me that Adam and Noah and Moses were the kind of mediator of their community with God. And you've just, you've blown my mind. So clearly I don't know what a priest is, which is probably why I don't know, you know, what a ministerial priest is. I would love you to spend some more time focusing on maybe just priesthood in general and as the mediator, because this might be old hat to you, but you're blowing my mind. Yeah. Well, you know, priesthood, again, there's two faces of the priesthood. The priest faces God and he represents a community to God. And to God, he is a son. And we see that back in Genesis, you know, Genesis 1, 26, Adam is made in the image and

likeness of God. What does it mean to be made in the image and likeness of God. What does it mean to be made in the image and likeness? Well, Genesis 5.3, when Adam later has a son himself, it says that he begot a son who was in his image and likeness. Aha, light bulb. So this is what image and likeness is about. It's how a son resembles his father. So you take that back to Genesis 1, 26, and you realize, oh, Adam is a son of God, you know, and then the last verse of Luke 3 actually says that explicitly. But so when a priest faces God, God sees him as a son. But when a priest turns around and faces the community, they see the face

of the Father. Why does this sound familiar to us? Because that's the Gospel of John. That's like the Last Supper discourse that we're reading right now, you know, coming up to Pentecost, you know, I am in the Father and the Father is in me and show us the Father. How can you say show us the Father, Philip? You know, do you not yet know me? He who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say show us the Father, Philip? Do you not yet know me? He who has seen me has seen the Father. Jesus is talking, yes, about his sonship, but also about his primordial priesthood.

I'm going to suggest that a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to bend it this way towards you. Absolutely. So that's what's going on there. There's this priestly nature of Christ. And that's why when we get to the end of the Last Supper discourse in John, you get John 17, that great, what's called the high priestly prayer, which we're reading like right on the cusp of Pentecost typically.

And that's a prayer where Jesus basically does the day of atonement liturgy. The day of atonement was the highest holy day of the Jewish calendar where the priest, the high priest, went in, atoned for himself and then for the other priests and then for the whole community of Israel. And if you look at John 17, Jesus goes into the presence of the Father. He prays for himself. He prays for the apostles, which are his fellow priests. And then he prays for all who will believe in the apostles' word, which is the whole church. And so scholars recognize that they're, oh yeah, there's a thing going on here. This is based on, you know, the day of atonement here. So that's why it's called the High Priestly Prayer.

But that's Jesus' priestly nature. That's another thing that we miss, Matt, is we don't see Jesus as a priest. We see him, oh, son of God, teacher, rabbi, these other roles, prophet. But we don't see Jesus as a priest. But he definitely is. And if we know what to look for from a Jewish perspective, we can see it in the Gospels, and it's pretty cool. Now, one objection I hear from Protestants is God ordained priests in the Old Testament, but when Christ died, there was a kind of tearing of the veil so that we no longer need a mediator

between us and God, because Christ is that mediator, and that's why we don't have priests today. Maybe you could articulate that a little stronger before responding to it. Right, right. Yeah, I could see what's meant there, although you have to look at the epistle to the Hebrews, which is written to early Jewish Christians trying to explain to them how it is that Jesus is a priest when he's not from the line of Levi, which the Jews were formed to expect. But if you go back into the Old Testament, you find that the Levitical priesthood, which dominates most of the Old Testament, was a plan B from the beginning because it only arises in response to the golden calf.

Then we institute the tribe of Levi as a priestly tribe. Well, the question is then, well, who was functioning as a priest before the golden calf? Well, it was actually the firstborn sons of the people of Israel. And we miss it, but if you look back in like Exodus 13 and the final plague of the Passover, it says that the Passover will consecrate all the firstborn of the sons of Israel to me. What does it mean to be consecrated to God? Well that's a term associated with ordination. So the firstborn of the people of Israel, the firstborn sons were consecrated through the

Passover to be these ministerial priests, to lead the rest of the priestly people in worship. And that's why in Exodus 24, Moses just sends out, he sent some young men of the people of Israel out to offer sacrifice. And in the Jewish tradition, this is the firstborn sons. So there was this priesthood of the firstborn that preceded the priesthood of the Levites. And when you get into the New Testament, like the epistle to the Hebrews, keeps calling Jesus the firstborn, you know, the firstborn over all creation. This is kind of a natural priesthood that he has that resembles the priesthood that existed before we had that golden calf debacle, you know. So you have to go into that kind of explanation. But as far as, you know, not needing a priesthood

in the new covenant, you know, this idea that, oh, Jesus puts an end to priesthood by, you know, an end to priesthood by, you know, rending the temple veil, etc. I think that is going off on a wrong trail. You need to back up, go back to the beginning of the Gospels, and watch what's going on as you progress through. And if you do that, what you observe is, step by step, Jesus takes responsibilities or prerogatives that used to belong to the Old Testament priesthood, the Levitical priesthood, and bestows them on the apostles. And this is very striking. So, for example, Matthew 12, they're walking through the fields and they're threshing out grain. They get challenged by the Pharisees. Jesus uses two priestly examples to defend this practice. He says, haven't you heard

when David and his men ate the showbread, which was only lawful for priests to do? They basically had a dispensation for a priestly act there. And then don't you know that the priests work in the temple and they're blameless? Now we don't get it as Christian readers, but in Benedict XVI, in his book, Jesus of Nazareth, when he gets to that passage, Matthew 12, and he wants to talk about it and its relevance, he brings in one of the most famous American rabbis ever, Rabbi Jacob Neusner, one of the most prolific rabbi authors of the 20th century in America, and quotes Rabbi Neusner. And when Neusner is, Neusner wrote a little book about the New Testament, by the way, and explaining why he's not personally convinced by Jesus, but reading through the Gospels as a Jew. And Neusner comments on Matthew 12, and he says, well, it's obvious what Jesus is doing. He and the apostles can break the Sabbath because they stand in the place of the priests. He's claiming a priestly status for himself.

And this is not unprecedented because the Dead Sea Scroll community, they also claimed a priestly status. You see this in the Dead Sea Scrolls. So there were like eschatological groups in the time of our Lord that were rising up and saying the priesthood is corrupt and we need a new priesthood and we're it. And that's basically what Jesus is doing. So later in Matthew 16, he gives the power to bind and loose to Peter.

And we look at that like, well, you know, big deal. What does binding and loosing mean? Well, binding and loosing were Jewish terms of our Lord's day that we can find attested in contemporary literature for the authority to interpret God's word. And this was an authority that Moses gave to the Levitical priests back in Deuteronomy 17. In Deuteronomy 17, nobody notices this passage, but there's actually a passage that tells you what to do if you can't interpret God's word. What you're supposed to do is go up to the sanctuary

and the Levitical priests will tell you how to interpret it. And you have to obey them on pain of death. If you don't do what they say, you die, you know, according to Moses. So Moses gave that authority to interpret God's law to the priests. Jesus gives it to Peter, and then two chapters later, also to the apostles as a group, not individually, but as a group. And we could go into how that works out in church government and so on to this very day. But the point is, that was a priestly responsibility that Jesus is there at that point in his ministry bestowing on the apostles. Another priestly duty was offering sacrifice, and he bestows that on them at the Last Supper where he says, do this in remembrance of me. Why is that terminology important?

It's very important because that term remembrance is actually, it's a cultic term. It's a liturgical term. It's anamnesis in the Greek. There was an offering in the temple called the anamnesis offering. In fact, I've argued that the way that Luke phrases it in Luke 22, you could translate that, do this as my memorial offering. Because there was a memorial offering in the temple that was offered on a regular basis, consisted of a grain offering to God that was offered to remind God of the covenant. We would say renew the covenant, but they use that language, that Hebrew idiom of reminding God. So that's why it was the memorial or the remembrance, because you were reminding God of the covenant. We would again say renewing God, knowing that God doesn't forget things, but this form of language.

But do this as my memorial offering. Does it make sense to think of the Eucharist as a grain offering to God that renews or reminds, you know, so to speak, of the covenant? Yeah, that actually sounds kind of like what the Eucharist is, this great offering of the renewal of the covenant, you know? But that's a cultic term, you know, so do this in remembrance of me. He's showing them how to, and he's commissioning them to offer this sacrifice in the new covenant. And it's very striking, man, as I'm sure you know, because you've got all these, you know,

people on the show and all your reading and so on, but the rabbis said that when the Messiah comes, the only sacrifice that will remain will be the sacrifice of thanksgiving, which is what Eucharist means. It's the todah or the sacrificial offering of thanks. And that will continue in the age to come because the Messiah will put an end to sin, but there will always be a responsibility to thank him. And so we'll offer the thank offerings, but we won't need to offer the sin and the guilt offerings anymore. So this is actually in the Talmud. My friend Brant Petrie points it out in some of his books. So Jesus at the Last Supper is showing the apostles how to offer the one sacrifice that's going to remain in the new age.

And then after his resurrection, he comes back and he breathes on them and says to them, receive the Holy Spirit whose sins you forgive or forgiven them, whose sins you retain or retained. This is this power to mediate the forgiveness of sins. Who did that in the Old Testament? You don't find prophets declaring people's sins to be forgiven. You don't see kings proclaim people's sins to be forgiven. You don't see kings proclaiming that sins are forgiven. If you need your sins forgiven, you got to go to a priest. And there was actually a ritual of confession. There was, call it a sacrament of confession

under the old covenant. If you did something wrong, you had to bring the appropriate animal to the priest and you had to confess what you had done. This is in Leviticus 5. And, you know, it says, if a man sins in any of these ways, he must confess. Confess to whom? Well, obviously the priest, because the priest was responsible to make sure that the animal you brought was commensurate to how serious your sin was. So if you've done grand larceny auto and you show up with a couple of pigeons, sorry, not going to cut it. Go back, get a bowl, bring the bowl back.

Okay. So the priest received the confession, made sure that the sacrifice of the offer was appropriate. Then he offered the sacrifice and the scriptures say, then the priest shall offer the sacrifice and his sins will be forgiven. So the priest had that role of mediating the forgiveness of sins. After his resurrection, Jesus gives the Holy Spirit to the apostles to mediate that from that point forward. So now that's again, you know, not only interpreting God's law, offering sacrifice, but now mediating forgiveness of sins.

These are the responsibilities of the priesthood being put on the apostles. And again, if we just had eyes to see. And I think that Jewish readers who know the Jewish tradition well, when they read the Gospels, they see a lot of this stuff. Like Matthew 16. One of the best commentaries on Matthew 16 that I know is in the Jewish Encyclopedia from 1906. It's free online. Go look up the article on binding and loosing on the jewishencyclopedia.com and it's a fantastic explanation what's going on in the gospel that I had never heard before as a Christian. But this is what's

happening. So yeah, so the Apostles are the embryonic stem cells of those in holy orders, so to speak. And the rest of holy orders just grows out of them and this priestly responsibility that Jesus gives them. Suppose we have a Protestant listening right now and they're saying, you're saying that Christ taught the apostles how to offer their sacrifice, but I see no language of sacrifice in the Last Supper narratives. What do you say? No language of sacrifice? It's a Passover, okay?

The Passover was one of the key sacrifices of, you know, of the whole Jewish liturgy. And not only is it a sacrificial occasion, not only is it a sacrificial occasion, not only is it a liturgical occasion, but Jesus is the victim. Jesus is the sacrifice. You know, this is my body. This is my blood. You know, if you have the body and blood of a creature,

that means that that creature has died, okay? So it is a prefigurement of Christ's own death, that his body and blood are separated there. And then he's commissioning, I've already mentioned, do this in remembrance and the cultic nature of that terminology as well. Furthermore, I mean, all the more so when you're reading the Gospels from the perspective of contemporary Jewish documents like the Dead Sea Scrolls, and this is another thing I point out in my book, there were eschatological Jewish groups in the time of our Lord that were gathering together and getting ready for the Messiah,

and they practiced sacred meals. The monastery at the shores of the Dead Sea that left us the Dead Sea Scrolls, they were one such group. You have Jewish monks living a celibate life. Sorry, could you back up just a moment for those who aren't really aware of the Dead Sea Scrolls? They've heard about them. They're not really sure why they're important, how they changed the face of scripture, scholarship. What are they and why are they so important? Yes. The Dead Sea Scrolls are the remains of a monastic library from the time of Jesus. That's it in a nutshell. Not widely known that Jews practice monasticism. Most branches of

Judaism did not. The Pharisees didn't. The Sadducees didn't. But there's this group called the Essenes, about which we know a lot, because Josephus, the historian of this time period, who was himself a Pharisee, and was a contemporary of St. Paul, he wrote these voluminous volumes of history of the time. And he was fascinated by this branch of Judaism called the Essenes, and he tells us a whole ton about them. But one of the things that he says, you know, they lived a celibate life, etc. And when they started in 1946, you know, some Bedouin shepherds discovered some scrolls in a cave down on the shore of the Dead Sea that sparked off a lot of scholarly interest. They went down, start excavating and they find the remains of a monastic structure down there with rooms for all the things that monks do, live, work, eat, pray,

etc. Apparently, the monks slept in these caves, which are cool, overnight for good sleeping. And then when the monks saw the Roman soldiers coming to wipe them out around the year 70, they hid their library in these caves. The monks themselves were killed, but the manuscripts survived. So we have the remnants of what was once a library of a thousand scrolls from the time of Jesus. About a quarter of these scrolls are biblical books. Three quarters are religious writings of everything you could imagine. Lectionaries, liturgies, commentaries on scripture, eschatological prophecies, just, you know, the whole gamut. And it's just a treasure trove because these are documents that are contemporary of Jesus,

not just in the sense that they were written in the time of Jesus, but they were physically copied. We can carbon date these to the first century. And it's just mind-blowing. I mean, I still can't get over it, but we find parallels in language, like odd phrases that St. John uses in his gospel and his epistles that are otherwise unattested in ancient literature. Again, odd phrases that St. Paul uses that are not used by classical authors. But we find these phrases in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and it suddenly dawns on us, my goodness, John and Paul are using the contemporary religious language of their own day. And we've got this library now that attests it, you know, so it gives this sense of authenticity, you know, to the Gospels and the epistles that, yeah, you know, this is, they're part of a lost

world, you know, a lost culture that was destroyed in the year 70, but we can attest it, you know? So yeah, so that's what the Dead Sea Scrolls are. Thank you. Yeah. And how do they strengthen the kind of Catholic argument? So if you're engaging with a Protestant and you're referring to the Dead Sea Scrolls, yeah. They help us to see the priestly significance of Jesus' actions, for example. So the Essenes, for example, would gather at noon every day, and they had a sacred meal of bread and wine. Sounds strangely familiar? This sacred meal was in anticipation of the coming of the Messiah, and they believed that when the Messiah came, they would continue this meal practice, only he would join in with them. And so this meal practice was strictly

regulated. And one of the significant things was you had to have a priest present, and the priest had to reach out and touch the bread and touch the wine first and offer prayer over it before anybody else could eat. You know, so against that background, you go to the gospel accounts at Last Supper and you see Jesus reaching out first and taking the bread and offering thanksgiving and reaching out over the cup and blessing the cup. And you realize from the perspective of Jewish culture of the day, he was acting as a priest. This was a priestly duty at the sacred meal, you know, in anticipation of the day, he was acting as a priest. This was a priestly duty at the sacred

meal, you know, in anticipation of the Messiah. So yeah, it helps us to see, you know, the priestly character of our Lord's words and actions recorded in different places in Scripture. I want to go back a little bit because we've talked about the sacraments, we've talked about priesthood. When you were converting from Protestantism, did you look into Eastern Orthodoxy? I did. And why didn't you become, or why are you not now an Eastern Orthodox Christian? Because Eastern Orthodoxy is broken up into national churches, each of which is autocephalous, meaning they have their own patriarch who has no juridical bonds between him and the other leaders.

So, yes, they can act nice to each other and they can get together and pray with each other. But when push comes to shove, there is no juridical connection between these independent national churches in Eastern Orthodoxy. So they end up being, you know, the Greek church, the Romanian church, the Russian church, etc. And these ethnic divisions are not overcome by the body of Christ. They're not overcome by the church. Now, what I saw in Catholicism was, yes, we do have, you know, we've got a church in America, we've got a church in other countries, etc. And, you know, there's diversity there and diversity is good. But we are united through the figure of the successor of Peter in a very real way. And when push comes to shove, yeah, indeed, there is some serious teeth to the papacy.

And the papacy can both unite and the papacy can discipline and so on. And the papacy can and does hold us together as one really united church and not just, you know, theoretically in some kind of mystical sense or some kind of interior sense we're united. So I looked at Orthodoxy and I thought Orthodoxy is better than Protestantism in as much as it's not as broken up into so many shattered different fragments. Typically, there is, you know, just one national Orthodox church per ethnic group. But the way I see it, the structure of Orthodoxy perpetuates Babel, okay? It perpetuates the plurality of languages that divide human beings. And it's not primarily literal language,

but it's the breakup of the human family into independent groups that cannot work together. And these independent national churches kind of perpetuate that rather than overcoming it by bonds of unity that are stronger, even the national commitment. So it was that universality of the Catholic Church that spoke to me. When I look at Pentecost and I look at the division into different ethnic groups and so on being overcome by the power of the Holy Spirit through Peter's preaching there in Acts 2,

you know, I still see that in the Catholic Church despite our troubles. Good answer. Okay, thanks. If you could teach one class for the rest of your life, what would you teach and why? Salvation history. I would just go from the Bible from Genesis to Revelation and just keep doing that over and over again. Yeah, yeah, Because I just, yeah. It's seeing the story. I mean, I've written big books and I've written small books. But my first book was Bible Basics for Catholics, where I just did stick figures and do a stick figure Adam on a mountain Eden, a little garden, a little tree there, you know, and do Noah and his ark and so on.

Just using these simple figures. And in many ways, that's still my favorite book. And profound stuff doesn't have to be confusing. It can be really simple. In fact, the simplest things are the most profound. God is the simplest being. He's also the most profound. Theologians will tell you that. So, yeah, I like keeping it simple and, you know, just communicating the reality of God's love for us and the story of how he has saved us. How have you seen lay Catholics especially grow in their understanding and appreciation of Scripture over the last 20 or so years?

I think there's a lot more study of Scripture, you know, even now than there was 20 years ago. I think that's...it's less surprising for there to be a parish Bible study. And who's responsible for that? Or who, you know... Many different groups, many different groups. But I mean, if there's any one person, Scott Hahn and Scott and Kimberly have done like a monumental job of setting people on fire for Scripture all over. And then folks that they've had contact with and some of the young men that they've mentored who've gone on to start different apostolates. But it's many. It's many people.

And I think, you know, one of the fruits of Vatican II was the richness of the new lectionary with all its reading of Scripture. And it's taken a while for that to sink in, but I think that it's borne good fruit. And I think that people have been meditating on scripture more just by the daily readings, which are exposing us to a much broader spectrum of scripture than we had prior to the council. So people that get Magnificat, they may think, oh, I'm praying the church's liturgy, but they're also doing scripture study, whether they're aware or not, just by meditating on the readings for each day and for each

feast day. And so, you know, it's kind of a groundswell. Then you have all the Protestants that have come into the church, especially Protestant clergy. People like Yus yourself as well. Exactly, who've been drawn in. John Paul II had a very evangelistic effect. His attractiveness made it easier for others to come into the Catholic Church. And so you're getting these, you know, trained Biblicists, you know, Protestant clerics coming in who have all this Bible

knowledge. And then, well, what can I do with it? And the church has found ways. I need a job. Yeah, exactly. The church has found ways to put them to work. You know, I've found a way to put me to work. And it would seem that there's even more respect for Catholic Bible scholars today that maybe there wasn't 40, 50 years ago in the Protestant community. Is that right or no? I think there is. I think that's true. I'm hearing Protestant people referencing Petra and others. Yes, absolutely. I think that is true. You know, it's gone in different waves.

You know, initially back in the 50s, non-Catholic scholars looked down on Catholic scholars because the magisterium put some controls on Catholic biblical scholarship and said there's some parameters beyond which you can't go. you know, the wild kids outside the fence, you know, teasing the goody two shoes kids that had to stay inside the fence because their parents told them to stay there. And the kids inside the fence are like, oh, you know, resenting that because they want to get out with the wild kids, you know. So there was a stage where in the 60s and 70s where Catholic Bible scholars got unleashed, as it were, by the magisterium. And you can go play with the crazy kids down the street. And so they went with the German crazy kids and learned all the German techniques and stuff like that. And there was kind of this crazy period. But I think there's been a sobering...

But what's interesting is I think even Protestants look back in embarrassment for how... At some of that, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Some of the excesses of, you know, some of the excesses of the historical critical method and so on. But I think there's been a sobering and a settling down in more recent years in some parts of the church, at least,

and kind of a more sober assessment. And Pope Benedict is responsible for a large part of this. In 1988, he had a famous lecture where he talked about the state of biblical scholarship. And it was called the Erasmus Lecture, given in New York. And said that the time has come for a sober assessment of what is good and what is bad of contemporary Bible scholarship. And I think there's been some of that going on. And there's been some advances in archaeology and language that really do help us to understand the Bible better. And then there's also been some philosophically and ideologically driven errors in biblical interpretation that I'm hoping that

we are overcoming. Let me put it that way. But yeah, I do think that there's a lot of good things happening in Catholic biblical scholarship, and it's exciting to be part of that. If somebody were to ask you, what's the best translation of the Bible to read as an English person, what would you say? Well, I think that there's some really good options out there right now for Catholics. The English Standard Version, which has been approved by the Bishops of India with some Catholic changes, it's a very nice translation in a lot of different books. and has some nice renderings of some difficult passages. So you can get that through the Augustan

Institute. I think they call it the Augustan Bible. For some years now Ignatius has been making available the RSV Catholic edition, second Catholic edition, and that still is kind of my favorite. It's in the King James tradition, so it's not radically different. Parts of it sound just like Handel's Messiah, so when you get to Isaiah 9, you know, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, you know, it sounds very much like the English tradition, right? So the RSV CE2, it's good, and yet the language is updated, so it's not the these and thous, so you don't stumble over the archaic language, but you stay pretty close to the tradition of English Bible translation with the RSV. So that's the Burgundy edition.

You can tell it from Ignatius Press because it's the burgundy cover RSV that they offer and that's what I usually have my students get so I like those now let me also say the NABRE the New American Bible Revised Edition it's got some really nice features I like it in the Gospel of John and in the Minor Prophets and many different places as well. So it's a nice translation too. And definitely I would hope everybody has a copy of that too on their shelf. Now there are King James only Protestants who think that an English person, maybe everyone, ought only to read the King James Version. There are Catholics who would say you ought only to read the Douay-Rheims version of the Bible.

Why is it you think, do you think we're hearing about this more? And what's your opinion of it? Hearing about the Douay-Rheims more? Yeah, I think I'm encountering more people who are like, if you're not reading the Douay-Rheims, you're not doing it right. Right, yeah. Well, the Douay-Rheims is nice. And my personal devotional New Testament is actually a form of the Douay-Rheims.

This is the old confraternity edition, which is an updating of the Dewey Reams. And I like it very much. And that's what I use for devotional reading. So nothing wrong with the Dewey Reams. The Dewey Reams is an English translation of the Vulgate. So, you know, props to St. Jerome. We all love St. Jerome. We all love St. Jerome. And the Latin Vulgate is still the liturgical translation of the Latin Rite. So it is kind of like our home base as Latin Rite Christians is the Vulgate.

So the Vulgate should carry respect in the Catholic Church, and we should always be aware of how St. Jerome rendered things, and that has become part of our tradition. For example, there's confusion in the Hebrew of Genesis 3.15, right? And St. Jerome took it that she shall crush the head of the serpent. And that's been the inspiration for a lot of our liturgical art. So we should be aware of that. And I think that that regardless of how the Hebrew works out, that's just theologically true. You know, she crushes the head of the serpent, whether by herself or through her son.

Nonetheless, she's ultimately responsible for that. nonetheless, she's ultimately responsible for that. So, you know, the Vulgate's great. I think we should be aware of it. And I think that when we have a translational option, we should move in the direction of how St. Jerome took it, because he's kind of an authoritative representative of the tradition. At the same time, you know, statements from the popes, Divino Afflante Spiritu in 1943, Proventissimus Deus back in 1893 from Leo XIII, as well as Dei Verbum itself from the Vatican Council. as well as Dei Verbum itself from the Vatican Council,

all of those documents encourage us to look at the original language of Scripture. So as good as St. Jerome is, St. Jerome's Latin translation does not outrank Moses' Hebrew or St. Paul's Greek. So there is always value to going back to the Hebrew of Isaiah and the Greek of John or the Greek of Matthew, etc. They're saints too. St. Jerome's not the only saint, you know. So seeing what they wrote in their original language, then of course taking into account how Jerome rendered it into Latin. And then the Dewey Reams is an English version of the Latin. So Dewey Reams is great for devotional reading, but it's not, as it were, like an ultimate authority on Scripture. I think that the authors of Scripture themselves were the ones inspired by the Holy Spirit.

They're saints too. Hebrew is a sacred language. Greek is a sacred language. So learn the Hebrew, learn the Greek. And for our modern translations, you know, the Magisterium has been saying for some time now that our translations should be based on the original language of Scripture. Somebody might say to you, okay, well, I want to read the Bible. I want to want to read the Bible. I keep telling myself I need to, but I just don't find it interesting, and I feel

guilty about that. I don't like feeling guilty, so I just don't read it at all. What encouragement would you have to offer to somebody like that? I'd say I wrote a little book for you. It's called Bible Basics for Catholics. So in all seriousness, I wrote that book to be lighthearted, whimsical, and a completely non-challenging way of getting into Scripture. So if you can do little stick figure doodles, you can learn the storyline of Scripture. Thanks for coming down to my level. And then from there, you know... Who published that? That's Ave Maria Press. Okay.

Yeah. And so seriously, that is a good way to begin. I'll put a link in the description for those who might want to grab that book. Right. And then, Matt, I mean, the point you... Remind me, would you, to put a link? Thank you. Sorry. Yeah. But you make an excellent point, which is that the Bible is a huge book. And usually we're thrown into it without a map. It's like walking into a dense forest and you don't know where you're going. And so we need a mental map to scripture. And the church offers us various mental maps. But my little book, Bible Basics, is one such presentation of the church's

tradition. And it's like a mental roadmap through scripture so you don't lose your way. Is it based on the covenants? Yes. Yeah. So you start... It's basically the seven covenants of salvation history know, Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, the prophets, and Jesus. And then, you know, the book of Revelation and Jesus' return. You know, so those are the key moments. And those were pivotal points of salvation history. And then between those points, things largely follow a pattern. They follow a certain, you know, a certain system or a certain order. You know you know so moses comes sets up a certain system of worship and that stays the same

you know until jesus and then new system so on so that's called an economy uh by the fathers but that's a big word i'm trying to avoid big words but um but yeah you know so so laying that out and then and then if when you learn those covenants then you have a mental map then you jump into scripture and like oh i know where i am in the story i'm not just lost you know this is i'm in the moses period you know where we've got levitical priests you know and then you know but before that when you're with the patriarchs you don't have levitical priests the patriarchs themselves are are father priests for their whole families, a different system of worship and so on. Anyway, so yeah, but we need a mental map, and that helps a lot. And once we got that, then the readings at Mass make a whole lot more sense

when we kind of have an idea of the picture of salvation history. And our own personal reading makes a lot more sense as well. and our own personal reading makes a lot more sense as well. Why would you encourage people to perhaps do what you do and walk around with a copy of the New Testament in their pocket? How's that been a blessing to you? Well, because there's so much bad news in the world. Yes. And over the past couple of years, I've learned to wean myself.

I used to be kind of like a news addict. Oh, who is? I mean, it's so important you're saying this because we walk around with phones in our pockets. Yes. And we willingly seek out an hour of bad news podcasts. Like, look how insane the world is now, you know? Yeah. So that's very good.

Okay. So, yeah, you had to wean yourself off of that. Yeah, yeah. You had to wean yourself off of that. Yeah, yeah, being a news junkie and always reaching in my pocket for my phone to bring it out and check, you know, the latest news. And that got so depressing. And I'm like, this is really not good for my spiritual life. So I went back to this bio, which is about the size of a cell phone, and put that in the pocket. And then when I'm sitting in the supermarket checkout and there's somebody slow in front of me and I've got, you know, a minute and a half of my hand.

When that hand goes inadvertently towards where the phone used to be, I got this and I pull this out and then, oh. I may as well read it. Good news. It's a message from Jesus. You know, I've got mail from God from God. So that kind of thing. So it's been a very conscious effort in all seriousness. It's been a conscious effort on my part to wean myself off of being a news junkie and to be in a good news junkie and trying to in those down times during my day to actually put something good into my mind, you know, so that spiritually and psychologically I can cope with, you know, the new normal.

That is great advice. I think another obstacle that prevents people from picking up the Bible is that they think they ought to feel a certain way when they read it. Certainly not in the supermarket where I've got 20 seconds. I need to be, like, in ecstasy, levitvitating while I have this deep, heartfelt encounter with God's Word. I think that's an obstacle because very often we don't have that experience when we're reading Scripture. We don't. We don't. There aren't, you know, bells and whistles and fireworks going off.

But in time, we get familiar with it just as we become familiar with another person. And so we develop this relationship with Christ through his word. And that becomes rich and that becomes familiar. And so we have to think of it more in terms of like long-term dating or really better courtship marriage, that kind of thing, with Jesus. with Jesus than just like a one-off where like, whoa, you know, angelic voices are going to come up in the background when I crack open my Bible. Okay. So other than carrying around a copy of the New Testament, what would be your favorite daily devotion? I am really attached to my morning spiritual reading. I really like to get up. I'm not really a morning person, but I do wake up in the morning and I look at the clock and I think, if I don't get downstairs quickly, I'm going to miss my spiritual reading. And I don't want to start the day without my

spiritual reading. So I hop out of bed and I get down there and give myself a good half hour. I start the coffee machine. I also like my cup of coffee, you know, a flat white. Yeah, as they say in Australia. As they used to say in Australia. That's how I like my coffee. White. White.

Yeah. I don't know if I got that valid. It was pretty good. Yeah, okay. Almost an approximation for an American, for a Yankee. Anyway, so I get my coffee. And then, you know, currently I am reading Francis Xavier Wynne Van Thuan, the well-known former Archbishop of Saigon, famous life story.

You know, he was the Archbishop of Saigon when Saigon fell in 1972, was captured by the North Vietnamese communists, put in prison for 13 years, nine of which was in solitary confinement. You know, and during those years, he wrote a lot of spiritual books on little scraps of paper that he would smuggle out of the prison camp. And after he was released, those, you know, scraps and those reflections were collected into various books. So the one that I like very much and I've worked through many times and I'm back to working through it again, it's called Row to Hope. And I like them too because I'm a follower of St. Josemaria Escriva

and their spirituality is so similar. They say such similar things so often. But Cardinal Wynne Van Thuan's personal story, his personal experience at prison is so inspiring. And as I'm reading his words, I'm keeping in mind that he is writing these things in kind of almost the worst situation imaginable. It doesn't get much worse than North Vietnamese prison camp.

And so that always puts my own problems in perspective. I'm like, okay, I'm sitting on my comfy couch. I got my flat water right there, you know. So I need to take to heart what this man is telling me. And so I spent some time reading those and then talking to God about, you know, read for about 15 minutes, then talk with the Lord about what I've just read, you know. And sometimes I resist what I read. Like, I don't, I resist accepting that.

Like, I don't want to be cheerful. You know, I don't want to forgive. You know, and so I'm honest with the Lord. And I say, Lord, you know, why do I resist joy? Why do I resist forgiving others? You know, Lord, show me what's going? Why do I resist forgiving others? Lord, show me what's going on in my heart. So we just have a little conversation with that.

And usually then by the time I start my day, I feel more ready to deal with the challenges of the day because I've had that time with the Lord before. I don't know who said this. I think it was Escriver. You tell me if you've heard it. I think it's excellent wisdom. There are many devotions within the church's treasury. Choose only a few and be faithful to them. Yeah.

And I bring this up because we have many Protestants who listen to this show, and I get emails every week now, I would say. That's not an exaggeration from people who are converting, and they're writing, and they're looking for advice. And one of the things that overwhelms them is the multiplicity of devotions that in different quarters of the church, people seem to be demanding, you ought to be doing this in order to be a good Catholic. But what's your opinion on that quote, whoever said it? Yeah, no. Escrivá definitely says something with the same meaning. I'm not sure if it's the exact same phrase, but he also says that holiness doesn't consist in a

multiplicity of devotions. And Escrivá himself had a plan of life that he recommended for lay people that was relatively simple, that just involved basically seven different practices through the day, many of which are very short, like a three-minute examination of conscience at night or praying the Angelus at noon. So he has, you know, kind of his own model. And Escrivá, at the beginning of his ministry, when he had young men that were following him, began by having them do the liturgy of the hours as lay people, you know, so they're bankers, they were contractors,

and they're also trying to do the liturgy of the hours. And he realized that was just too much. So he scaled back and he found what has been for me and for many others to be like a comfortable balance in terms of one's life of prayer. And so I totally agree with that. You don't want to try to do everything that the church offers, you know, a divine mercy chaplet and a servite rosary and, you know, extra decades of the regular rosary. And then, you know know this devotion to this thing you you can really every scapula there is every color you're gonna need that and the metals right right and uh and then reciting all 150 psalms every day and yeah you can you can give

yourself catholic overload but um i think there's a few essentials uh the rosary has been recommended by so many saints um i think that that's all, that's something that we all can do is a daily rosary. Mental prayer is kind of a non-negotiable. What do I mean by mental prayer? That is like non-vocal, non-memorized conversational prayer. You know, just, it's also called meditation by some saints and so on, but it's just a talking with Jesus in an unstructured way. And I think that some time in mental prayer daily is just necessary for our spiritual life. So things like that, offering our day to God in the morning, that takes very little time and is just kind of basic.

Making that examination of conscience at night, that's not a huge time consumer and is very realistic. So, yeah, you know, choose things that... I had somebody suggest to me, put a crucifix, buy a crucifix if you don't have one, put it by your bed and let your first action of the day be to kiss that crucifix. I like those little concrete actions that add sort of form to your day. Wonderful custom. Yeah. Yeah. I've heard people suggest too, for those that have desk jobs,

putting the crucifix on the desk to remind you that your desk is your cross. That's helpful as well. Don't put it on your spouse. You could, but yeah. Well, why don't we take a three-minute break, and then when we come back, we'll take some questions from those in the live chat. Awesome.

Great. All right. Thank you. Thank you. so © BF-WATCH TV 2021 Thank you. Click subscribe, click that bell button. That way Google has to alert you every time we put out a new video. Thank you. in the live chat right now to send your questions over. I want to say a big thank you to Catholic Homeschool Connections. If you are homeschooling right now and you want to kind of help, you know, your young person love learning, go to homeschoolconnections.com slash Matt, homeschoolconnections.com slash Matt.

They've got excellent classes that you can take lectures on apologetics, for example, by Trent Horn or Tim Staples, other really great Catholics who are teaching classes. We homeschool our eldest son, and it's always good to have good, solid classes that are obviously faithful to the magisterium of the church. It's really affordable as well, I found out. So you can do homeschooling on a budget. So please go check out homeschoolconnections.com slash Matt. There's a link in the description below, homeschoolconnections.com slash Matt, and see if you can use some of this for your child who you might be homeschooling. All right. How are you doing? I'm doing great.

All right. How much coffee do you drink in a day? Too much. Do you?? I'm doing great. All right. How much coffee do you drink in a day? Too much. Do you? It backfires, you know, if you do too much. But it gets less and less effective as the day goes on. It gets more and more. Yeah. All right. Well, we've got a few hundred people who are watching right now,

and they're sending in their questions. So I'll read them to you. And this is more of a lightning round. Okay. So feel free to answer somewhat briefly if you want. Ryan Pope. G'day, Ryan. I know Ryan.

He says, If priests can speak for God, how do we account for Peter in Acts 5 stating to the Sanhedrin, we must obey God rather than men. Was the Jewish authority fallible here? Yes. The Jewish authority at the time of our Lord and the apostles were actually usurpers.

Back in the year 152 BC, the Maccabean king took over the high priesthood and really corrupted the legitimacy of the Jewish priesthood. So that's a theme that you got actually going on in the Gospels. We could talk about it at length, but you said briefly. No, that's okay. This is very interesting. I didn't expect the question to be this profound, to be honest. Sometimes the questions are really boring. Exactly.

Sorry, everyone on YouTube, but it's true. So, I mean, one of the problems that you have when the New Testament opens up is that you have this corruption of the priesthood that has taken place. And that's why you have groups like the Essenes that are trying to recover priesthood. They were loyal to the old line of the high priests that got booted out in the year 152 by the Maccabees. And so you've got questions swirling among Jews of Jesus' day, you know, who is the true priest? Who speaks for God? What is the proper authority? and that's the context in which Jesus arises and says indirectly because he's a wise teacher and so he allows others to put two and two together and figure out what he means but indirectly at first and increasingly more explicitly our Lord claims that authority as a royal and priestly Messiah,

and then he claims to share that authority with those that he has chosen and placed in a special position. So I think that answers the question. So when Peter and the apostles are dragged before the Sanhedrin, you have an interesting situation where you've got the corrupt leadership, the corrupt old leadership of the old Israel versus the new leadership of the new Israel that Christ has formed around himself. And these two leaderships are in conflict. And we find that the Sanhedrin is able to, you know, persecute the apostles but not stop them. And this is the Spirit-empowered leadership of the new community that Christ has formed around himself. Thank you.

Candice Martinez says, How can I bring my Protestant family to see the true Catholic faith as opposed to how it is portrayed in her Christian church as idolatrous? Yes, great question. That's complicated and involves a lot of different factors. I have written about my own journey into the church in a book called Stunned by Scripture. And in that book, you know, I detailed the arguments that I find most convincing that led me to embrace the Catholic Church. And it's not just argument as if it's some kind of head game, but we're talking about realities as well, you know, obviously the sacraments and so on. So I would recommend to, was it Gabriela, did you say? Let's see, Candice.

To Candice, I'm sorry. I'd recommend, you know, Stunned by Scripture, How the Bible Made Me Catholic is the title of the book. And that really has, you know, I put my heart and soul into that and explained how I was drawn in and how I think others outside the Catholic Church can be and would be drawn in through the teaching of Scripture to the Catholic Church. can be and would be drawn in through the teaching of Scripture to the Catholic Church. What do you say, though, if she replies, look, I'd love them to read your book, but there's just no way they're going to read it? Yeah, yeah. What I would say is read it yourself first, and then befriend and love them. And, you know, every opportunity that you have to spend with your non-Catholic friends or your non-Catholic family. Take all those opportunities that you can. You know, obviously, you know, your time is

limited by the things that God gives you, but so far as possible, as it relates to you, lean into those relationships. Take advantage of times together to love on your Christian brothers and sisters that are outside the Catholic Church, cultivate those relationships, and then in the midst of those relationships, opportunities will arise where you can speak heart to heart, not in a polemical situation, not in an argument, but you can really speak heart to heart about Christ and why you are a Catholic Christian. So that's what I recommend. Plus prayer and adopting little sacrifices for those that we would like to see come into the church, making little mortifications through the day with the intention, You know, I'm going to skip sugar in my coffee

for the intention of, you know, this person. Those little mortifications, that's something that I picked up from St. Josemaria Escrivá. I really recommend that. He's got this uncomfortable quote from St. Josemaria. Prayer without mortification is not at all effective, he says. So if we're just asking God for things without, you know, living that life of self-denial that Christ calls us to,

then, you know, we're not in that right kind of relationship that we need to be in for our prayers to be effective. So a little mortification. Don't have to do huge things. Yeah, don't have to. It doesn't require lying on a bed of nails or something ridiculous, but little acts of self-denial does mean a lot to our Lord. I like that because I think sometimes we can see how cowardly we are

and think, gosh, I really couldn't fast. I'm not very good at it. I've tried it. I've failed. So we just dismiss it. But you could begin with not taking that second cup of coffee, not taking that second slice of coffee, not taking that second slice of pizza, et cetera, and just offering that small sacrifice. Michael Sullivan says,

what does it mean for Catholics to share in Christ's priesthood, prophethood, and kingship? Wow, what a great question. So the catechism talks about this in paragraphs 900 through 909. So definitely I would recommend that. And, you know, I can't really do much better than the Catechism. But let's take a step-by-step. Sharing in his priesthood means offering sacrifice, among other things. It means offering sacrifice for the salvation of others. And you say, well, what sacrifice do I offer as a lay Catholic? Well, you offer your body. This

is Romans 12. Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, St. Paul says. What does that mean? Well, it means the substance of our lives. It's like all that we are and do, offering that up. This is the sacrifice that Adam refused to offer. He was supposed to guard the garden and he let that snake in and he didn't fight that snake off. And, you know, people debate this, but I'm of the camp that says it was an act of priestly cowardice on Adam's part that he did not want to risk his life to fight off this serpent. So in our primordial nature, we are called to lay down our lives as a priestly sacrifice. And that's what we do as lay people. This is what Jesus did on the cross. He did what Adam refused to do, offer his body as a sacrifice. So lay it all down. So what does that mean? That means, you know,

what am I called? Am I in finance? Am I a banker? Then I'm offering my banking day to the Lord. That means I'm doing it according to the highest standards of ethics and according to the 10 commandments. That means I'm doing it out of love. That I mean, I'm doing it for the intention of the glory of God, not simply to make myself rich or make other, now I need to make money because that's part of my vocation, but I'm doing it ultimately for the glory of God. So doing it for the right intention, doing it with prayer, doing it, you know, united to Christ. These are all ways of making it a priestly offering. You know, then our kingship, yeah, governing our personal affairs, beginning with ourself, learning to master ourself. This is where most people fail from the get-go. They might become

even president of a country and never learn to master their own unruly passions, okay? Lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, pride of life. People never conquer that, so they're slaves to their own disordered passions, even if they're ruling a country. So we want to become kings of life. People never conquer that. So they're slaves to their own disordered passions, even if they're ruling a country. So we want to become kings of ourselves. That means learning to dominate concupiscence, learning to dominate our disordered passions and have control over them. And then when the Holy Spirit, if we let the Holy Spirit lead and give us mastery over that, then we become king of ourselves. And then we can expand that kingship to our home, you know, to our workplace, etc. So that's the kingship, and the prophethood is proclaiming God's word boldly by deed and by word. You know,

we have a lot of times, you know, this misquote from Saint Francis, you know, preach the gospel always, if necessary, use words. You know, Francis never really said that. He said something like it. But too often that quote is used as an excuse for us not to give verbal witness. The point is well taken about us giving a good example by our actions. But I think that one of the things we as Catholics need to be encouraged to do is actually speak the word of God, because we're often shy and hesitant about that, and we look for excuses to get around that. But we, you know, St. Paul says in Romans, faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God, and how can they hear unless someone is sent? So we need preachers, and we need also to use words and be able to give that good explanation for our faith that Peter talks about as well in his letters.

So yeah, the prophethood of Christ, that's speaking God's word to those around us. Thank you. Henry Barr, thanks for being a patron, Henry, says, Dr. Bergsma, thank you for everything you do. You are a big reason that I came into the church this past Easter vigil. Oh, praise God. Amazing. Flattered. came into the church this past Easter vigil. Oh, praise God. Amazing. Flattered.

Joey Povell, thanks for your super chat, says, Would the two of you come to St. Vincent Basilica in La Trobe to attend Brother Cassian's 2 p.m. Solemn High Mass, his first Mass as a priest this Pentecost Sunday, assisted by Francis Boniface Hicks? Oh, wow. And Brother Barnabas. I probably won't, but I will say that Father Boniface Hicks. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. And Brother Barnabas. I probably won't, but I will say that Father Boniface Hicks

is going to be on the show. I think it's either this week or next week. So that's kind of cool. Will you go? I would love to, but we have an ordination the night before and then we're leaving on a family vacation. I'll be there, yeah.

Jeremiah Hahn. I can't wait. Do you know this is going to be my first ordination I've ever been to? Isn't that sad? Oh, I guess so, but it's also neat. It's also cool. Do you know this is going to be my first ordination I've ever been to? Isn't that sad? Oh, I guess so. But it's also neat. It's also cool.

And then I go to Mexico next month for an FSSP ordination. No kidding. Fantastic. So it's going to be, yeah. Praise God for that. I'm really excited. Yeah. I'm sure Scott is very excited.

Yes, indeed. With the whole diocese, I think. Yeah. Well, he's a great guy, too. Yeah. Really just so patient and humble. Yeah. We could tell he had a vocation early on.

Anglican Ascetics, thanks for the super chat, says, what is the basis for denying Anglican orders? Interesting. Now, I'm not an expert on this. I like to say just an unfrozen caveman Bible scholar. So people always want to drag me off into questions of canon law and church history, which I'm not a total expert on. But my understanding is there's a break

in apostolic succession around the time of Queen Elizabeth in that transition between Henry VIII and Elizabeth. So I'm just going to say that. That's my understanding of it. And then other experts... I think also the rite of ordination, the words were changed such that they were

no longer valid. Good, good, good. That answer was quicker than I thought and so I'm still sorry. Man Aguaya says, greetings from the Philippines. How do we relate in love and respect with priests who have been proven to have girlfriends

or love relationships while in the ministry, how to help them? Yes. Okay. So obviously this is a bigger problem than any one of us individually. And the hierarchy needs to deal with that. I'm not sure if the question is, you know, is this something that's going on or is this something that's been revealed and been repented of, but was, you know, a past thing that this priest was involved in at a previous stage. It reminds me, though, of an interesting anecdote, which is I have every reason to believe is true, is true that St. Francis, when he was preaching in Italy, of course, was living in a time of great corruption as well, great corruption of the priesthood in the, I believe that's the 1400s.

Am I getting that right? That's right. So St. Francis was accosted while preaching in a certain village. Oh, no, this would be prior to that, wouldn't it? Let's think, because Aquinas was in the, what, 1200s. That's right. So what, the 12th century, maybe? I'm off.

Just a couple of centuries. Yeah, just a couple of centuries. But anyway, we know who you mean. St. Francis, yeah. No one's going to say, who is this St. Francis who lived in the 14th century? All right, sorry. Anyway, yeah, the Dominicans and Franciscans are live and active in the 1200s.

So we're talking probably 1100s then, right? I think so. I think so, yeah, 12th century. Okay, so St. Francis is accosted in a village, and the question's put to him, And the questions put to him, you know, would you receive the Eucharist from a priest who is living in sin, you know, openly in a relationship? And St. Francis said, I would take the Eucharist and I would kiss the hands that gave it to me, which is hard for us to take even today. You know, you hear that from St. Francis and you think, ah, you know, really?

You got an adulterous priest? Would you kiss the hands? But St. Francis has such a respect for holy orders and he's making a very important point that the validity of the sacraments do not depend on the holiness of the celebrant. Thank God. Yeah, and that's so important because, you know, all celebrants, all ministers of the sacrament are imperfect.

They are all sinful men who need to go to confession. Even, you know, the vast majority of them are not in scandalous sin, but nonetheless sinful. And if it depended on their personal holiness, then we would never have confidence that we were actually receiving grace from the Lord. So in the providence of God, the sacraments communicate God's grace despite the sins of the celebrant. So that's an important thing to remember. And so in this situation of, you know, priests with girlfriends or priests that are sinful, this has been a constant problem. You know, if it's an ongoing issue, the bishop should know, we should inform the bishop, and the bishop should take action. But as far as our relationship go, you know, I grew up in the U.S. Navy. We were talking about

this, Matt, before. Fathers were both in the navies. Although I don't know what he did there, but I have texted my mom. I'll let you know. But in the military, you know, they have a saying that you salute the uniform and not the man. And I think that applies also in the church as well. So the role that that man occupies, even if he is unfaithful, is a role that we honor because it's a role established by Christ, and he's acting in the person of Christ. So for the sake of Christ, we respect his priesthood and the position that he has. And then we pray for him, we pray for his conversion, and we offer sacrifice for him. And we fight the urge to become indignant because I think that one

of the things that Satan does to disrupt our own spiritual life is if he can't lead us into sin personally, if he can't persuade us to be involved in scandalous sin, sometimes Satan can persuade us to lose our spiritual peace and just give in to anger. And so we have a spirituality of anger and indignation where we are pointing to all the problems that other people have and that the church has or the hierarchy has. And that can be a very deadly danger because then what we're not doing is we're not doing an examination of our own conscience. We're examining everybody else's. We're examining everybody else's conscience, right. So it's painful.

It's painful when those that represent God to us do not lead lives worthy of that calling. I've experienced this in my own life and disappointed by various spiritual and natural fathers. And I know it's very painful. But I want to pray for conversion, pray for repentance, and offer, I know it's, it's very painful, but, uh, want to pray for conversion, pray for repentance and offer sacrifices for that man. Yeah. That's a good answer. Uh, Arsenal Tech, thanks for being a patron says, Dr. Bergsma, it's John Boyle. Does that mean anything to you? Yes. Good. Quick question. He says with everything going on in Israel, some have said Jews don't have a right to the Holy Land.

Do they? Or do Christians with the new covenant? Okay. Complicated, complicated question. Do Jews have a right to the Holy Land? Yes. What is going on there? Those, yeah.

I would say that anyone has a, you know, yeah. Anyone has a right in a sense to go to the Holy Land, but does anyone and everyone have a political right to set up their domicile there? Not necessarily. The Jews of the contemporary day, the modern state of Israel, is it in continuity with the ancient kingdom of David? I'm not sure. Do they claim that? We believe that Jesus is the son of David, and therefore he is the heir of the throne of David and the kingdom of Israel. Are we serious about that? Do we really believe that? If that's the case, then Jesus is the political leader of the community of the heritage of Israel. So that puts things in an interesting

perspective. Yeah, with all that's going on in Israel at the moment, I think the main thing that we want to be concerned about is preventing the loss of life. And that's a basic tenet of all three Abrahamic religions. Islam, Judaism, and Christianity put a priority on the salvation of life. And the situation that we have going on there is that innocent lives are being put in danger by the violence. So I think the first step is to restore peace in that situation and then look at the very tangled political situation that's a legacy of a lot of invasions and taking overs, et cetera, throughout history. And that's an omelet that's very difficult to unscramble. And really, I'm not up to unscrambling that omelet. Yeah, yeah.

Okay, thanks. Taylor Barrett, thanks for your super chat, says, regarding Romans Galatians, I don't know what this question means, so you'll have to also tell me what it means. NPP versus Fitzmyer, your take and why? NPP versus Fitzmyer. Make any sense to you?

No, I'm trying to think of uh who npp is so uh i don't know let's move on to another question maybe i'll drag my memory at some point all right let's see here um well pj pierce says john bergsma is one of the best professors at Franciscan University. That's nice. That's very nice of him. I like to hear that. Well, let me ask you this question before I find another one. What do you love most about living here in Steubenville?

What I most love about living in Steubenville? The low cost of living. Yes. low cost of living. Yes. Property, groceries, and everything is probably cheaper here than almost any place else in the civilized world. I tell you that. So I think that's a major plus. Oh, NPP, new perspective on Paul. So new perspective on Paul versus Fitzmyer regarding Romans, Galatians, your take. I'm not an expert enough on Fitzmyer to be able to say on that. I think the new perspective on Paul has some things right. My own take on Paul doesn't line up perfectly with any of the positions that I've read,

because I take a kind of a hardcore Second Temple Jewish approach based on the scrolls. And when I look at Paul, I just see him in light of debates about the ceremonial observance of the law that we find in the scrolls. And I think when St. Paul is talking about works of the law, he's talking about what we later as Christians would describe as the ceremonial law following Augustine and Aquinas. And works of the law does not mean good works. It does not mean, it doesn't even mean the whole law. When you look at 4QMMT, a certain document from the Dead Sea Scrolls, it's the only document outside of Paul that uses that phrase, works of the law. And it's using it in a very specific circumstance where they're talking about very technical things

like handling leather and grain grown by Gentiles and other minutia of the cultic regulations. So I think that Paul's major point in Galatians and Romans is that we're saved by faith in Christ and not by the observance of the ceremonies of Moses. That's the fundamental point. He does do a deep dive into other related questions like whether any law is capable of saving us. And I think in Romans 7, we find out that law in itself is not capable of saving us because we don't need just to know what's right. We need the power to do what's right. That's where the Holy Spirit comes in.

So the solution really in Romans, which you get in Romans 8, the solution to all the conundrum is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit empowers us to fulfill the true purpose of the law. So anyway, that's what I'd say on that. But on questions of Paul, I would defer to Brant Petrie and Michael Barber because that's their area. And I'm just an unfrozen caveman, Old Testament scholar. Now, you addressed this earlier on in the interview, but maybe you want to take another swipe at it. Ryan Pope asks, how did the Dead Sea Scrolls reinforce or how do they reinforce the Catholic faith?

If you think you've already addressed this, we can move on. Yeah, I think the Dead Sea Scrolls do a couple of things for the Catholic faith. First of all, they provide a realistic and illuminating context for reading the Gospels and the Epistles that helps us be very...to be confident about the historicity and the authenticity of those documents because when we read, for example, the Gospel of John against the Dead Sea Scrolls... Is that your phone? What's happening? Yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, sorry about that.

Oh, Scott Hahn. Yeah, sorry. Unimportant. Yeah. No. Anyway, let's Scott Hahn. Yeah, I'm sorry. Unimportant. Yeah. Anyway, let's see here. What was I saying? So when we read the Gospels and Epistles against the Dead Sea Scrolls,

we have a very convincing historical context. It helps us to see that the Epistles and the Gospels were not written a generation or more later, but that they really reflect this living, vivid Second Temple Judaism prior to the destruction of the temple. So that's for one. And secondly, they help us to see the cultic and the priestly and, dare I say, sacramental nature of some streams of Judaism. What you have in the Essenes is basically proto-sacraments. You have a form of baptism. You have a form of Eucharist. You have a form of holy orders that is already being practiced by Jews. And so our Lord

looks less like a bolt out of the blue and more like one who comes to perfect and take the faith of the devout to the next level in the new covenant. For example, when our Lord kind of gets frustrated with Nicodemus in John 3, when Nicodemus can't follow the discussion, when our Lord says, you know, you've got to be born again of water and the Spirit. You know, our temptation is to say, well, Lord, it's completely unrealistic for you to expect Nicodemus to follow your discussion because clearly you're talking about Christian baptism.

But actually, it's not unrealistic for Jesus to expect that Nicodemus follow the discussion because up to a century before our Lord is speaking with Nicodemus, already the Essenes were practicing this eschatological water washing that was associated with their ideas of the Holy Spirit. So these ideas of, you know, this eschatological washing of water to participate in some way with the Holy Spirit, this was already around for up to a century before our Lord comes. And our Lord is trying to get Nicodemus to the next step, to see how it relates to the new covenant. And our Lord's expectations are not unreasonable for somebody who is staying current. But I don't know what, Nicodemus has been

reading comic books or just endless YouTube videos, and he hasn't been following the theological journals or whatever that's going on, even though he ought to, because he's kind of like a theological judge, you know, sitting on the Sanhedrin. And so Nicodemus has been a little negligent and can't follow a decent theological conversation. And the Lord, you know, asks him basically to step up his game. But in light of the scrolls, that whole episode in John 3 looks realistic in the lifetime of Jesus, whereas without the scrolls, you end up thinking, oh, you know, this has to be a made-up story from, you know, a couple generations later or something like that. Okay. Somebody asked a question about why only male priests. So what's your sort of elevator

response to those who say women should be able to be priests in the church? Yeah, I think it's part of a general resistance that we have that manifests itself in many ways of resisting our maleness and femaleness and the idea that we have different roles to play in salvation history and that both ways are important. So throughout the Bible, you asked for the elevator version. Well, that's okay. Yeah, yeah. I mean, real quickly, it's because priests represent God the Father to the people of God.

And as in other sacraments, you have to have the right matter. You know, you have to have bread to be the Eucharist, and you have to have wine, and the symbolism is not inconsequential to the nature of the sacrament. So for the priest who has to represent the fatherhood of God, his masculinity is not His masculinity is not inconsequential to receiving the sacrament. It's part of that, just like we need water and oil and bread and wine for other sacraments. So that would be the real quick thing that I would say. But a longer thing that I would say is throughout the scripture, priesthood is correlated with masculinity, but templehood is correlated with femininity

from the very beginning. So you see that Eve, for example, is literally built out of the rib that's taken from Adam's side. And she's not made, she's not formed, she's not fashioned. None of those words in Hebrew. She is built, bana, in Hebrew. Why is it that she's built rather than asah, which is made, which is what Adam's done and so on, or potteried is another term used for Asbott. Why is she built? Because she is a temple. And there's a correlation, as you see in the Song of Songs, too. The garden and bridal imagery in the Song of Songs, too. There's the garden and bridal imagery in the Song of Songs.

There's parts of the song where bride bleeds into garden and vice versa, and you can't tell where garden stops and bride begins because she's associated with that garden. But that garden that she's associated with in the Song of Songs is the Garden of Eden, and it's a sanctuary. It's a place of worship. So temples are feminine in scripture and templehood is associated with the feminine. And so let's ask ourselves the question,

what's more important, priesthood or templehood? And I would say bad question because you need both for a liturgy. So we need a complementarity between masculinity and femininity for the health of God's people, not a competitive nature. And we should accept and we should rejoice that we have different callings in contributing to the building up of God's body. Priesthood is one of the things that men are called to participate contributing to the building up of God's body. Priesthood is one of the things that men are called to participate in for the building up of Christ's body. But the greatest saint was not a priest. The greatest saint was a mother. And I think that's profound.

I just had a – so this is going to – have you ever seen the Babylon Bee website? Oh, yeah, of course course i get an i get an idea right now they don't even have to pay me here it is uh and i know that there are kind of protestants on a political website but they could have a group of men standing outside of a convent with signs saying let us in i would like that that would be cool just to derail your fantastic intellectual response i thought i'd throw in a reference to the Babylon Bee. Absolutely. Okay. We have a question here. Let's see here. Do you have a death blow argument against set of a cuntism? First of all, for those who aren't aware, set of a cuntism means, and then...

Yeah. Do I have a death blow argument? Nothing other than what Jesus says in Matthew 16, that the gates of Hades shall not prevail against the church. And I would think that if Peter did not have a successor, that that would be kind of a death blow to the continuity of the church. Well, in a way, set of accountism is a death blow to itself, because in a generation or two, there's no church left, and there's no... Right. We really do need Peter, you know? And, right, you know, I wanna tell everybody, in times of church history when there have been bad popes, okay, it's still better to have a bad pope than no pope, okay. Take it from a Protestant. Oh, that's a great quote.

We're going to make that. Take it from a Protestant. It's just like better to have a dad that's imperfect than to not have a dad. And I saw this on a very natural level during doing urban ministry, how I would see that kids that otherwise were economically so similar and living side by side, one house, there is no dad present, other house, there's a dad present. Even when that dad's present was extremely minimal because that dad was a drug addict

and just sat at home and got high all the time, I still saw that the children did better. Fatherhood is so important. And, you know, the Pope is a father, and it is so important to have that spiritual father for the church, even in times when that father is imperfect. So I think city vacantism to me is just a kind of a giving up. And I can understand it because at times in church history, you know, because of imperfections of one pope or another, people in desperation are trying to think of some way out of it. But you know what? Look, have some faith in the Holy Spirit, okay? You know, we're not guaranteed an easy ride, so have some faith, folks. And, you know, it's better to have a dad than not. Well, for our final question, I suppose I'd be remiss if we didn't talk about Aquinas,

given the name of the show. So how did you, perhaps, as a Protestant, begin to learn of Thomas Aquinas, and how has he been a blessing to you as a theologian? You know, that's a great question. That's a wonderful question. I actually got way into Aquinas while I was at Calvin Seminary working on a big paper on the role of the law in the Christian life. And I began to compare what Luther said about the role of the law. And then you may remember that Luther had this assistant, Philip Melanchthon. And Philip Melanchthon wrote a major work called the Loci Communis, or the common places, or the common topics of theology is how we would translate that today. And he did several editions, first in German when he was young, and he was working in the shadow of Luther. And then Luther

dies and Melanchthon becomes a bit of a leader of the Lutheran movement. And he matures as a scholar and he starts writing in Latin. And what I documented was as Philip Melanchthon got older, he got more and more like Thomas Aquinas, and he embraced more and more of Aquinas's understandings of the role of the law in the Christian life and how to understand the Mosaic law, etc. So I demonstrated this, and I ended up with a B on the paper because I think the professor wasn't enthusiastic to be shown that the Lutheran tradition moved more towards Aquinas in the wake of Luther's death. But in that whole process, I started, you know, and I had a Latin background from my

undergraduate. process, I started, you know, and I had a Latin background from my undergraduate. So I started reading Aquinas on the law and then moved on from there to doing a paper for another class on Aquinas' treatment of the old law, which is the longest part of the Summa, is his, you know, explanation for all these, you know, why not to eat fruit bats and other things that Moses says. This is a long explanation for that. So I got into that, wrote a long study of Aquinas on the old law, because I was into the Old Testament. And I found, you know, Aquinas really helpful for that. And then when I later moved down to Notre Dame for my doctoral work, I ran into another scholar, Randy Smith, in fact, who's, I'm not sure where he's teaching now,

but he did his dissertation on Aquinas' treatment of the old law. And I had never run into anybody else in my life that was interested in such an obscure topic. Like, this is crazy. Somebody else is interested in this as well. I've since found others also. But Aquinas, you know, what I love about Aquinas was that he was convinced that the Bible makes sense. And he tackled that hard topic of making sense of some of the laws of Moses that don't immediately seem like, you know, they make a lot of sense. And he wasn't always right, but sometimes he was prescient.

And he anticipated things that we later discovered by archaeology. For example, on the question of why not to boil a kid in its mother's milk, you know, it's kind of a bizarre law. He had an intuition that that was probably a Canaanite magic ritual. And sure enough, later archaeology confirmed that. And we have like these magic rituals on clay tablets that describe the use of that. So he was spot on on that. Other things, maybe not quite, but I think he was moving in the right direction.

And I love that conviction that Aquinas had that God's word does make sense. And his conviction about the truth of God's word, you know, in part of the Tantum Ergo or the Pangea Lingua, you know, he talks about, you know, believing on the basis of hearing, I will believe, right? Nihil hoc veritatis verius. Nothing is more true than the word of truth, he says about scripture. And when we chant that in Latin, you know, like at a Corpus Christi procession or something like that, that really convicts me because he had this truth about the infallibility and the inerrancy of God's word. And I think that's where the heart of the Catholic Bible scholar should be. So the Aquinas on there just convicted that ultimately God's Word is true. Sometimes we don't understand how, but we know that it's true. And so it's discovering the truth of God's Word rather than replacing God's Word with something else that we think is true.

Yeah. And do you often find yourself turning to his commentaries to get a better understanding of something? I don't. Usually in my work, because I'm mostly working in the Old Testament, and a lot of his Old Testament stuff has not been translated. Yeah, and isn't the Aquinas Institute about to translate his commentary on Isaiah? I'm not sure what they're up to, but I know that at the St. Paul Center, there's this whole process underway to get all of his Scripture commentaries

translated into English. I think that's going to be fantastic for the church. Do you yourself use a commentary for the Old Testament? I don't use a lot of commentaries. I go to the original language, I do original language work, and then if I see a problem, you know, then I start consulting. I see. But it's a wild and woolly world out there of commentaries. Do you have one that you might recommend for someone who's

just getting into Scripture? Yes, I do. In terms of commentary series, I highly recommend the Catholic Commentary and Sacred Scripture series that I think it's a Bravo's imprint of Baker Bookhouse. Baker is originally a Protestant publisher but they've gotten into the Catholic world and so far that series has been New Testament only. But you've got Mary Healy, you've got Scott Hahn, you've got Father Pablo Gadenzal writing in there. Great stuff.

Mary Healy on Mark, Father Pablo on Luke. Very, very good. So highly recommend that series. They're branching off into the New Testament. They gave me Deuteronomy, so I'm going to be doing a commentary on Deuteronomy for them. And I'm very excited about that. The Navarre Bible is also a good series out of the University of Navarre, especially in the Gospels and the New Testament.

You know, the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible is coming out with its Old Testament section. The whole Bible is going to be there, and that's like a one-volume commentary on Scripture just in itself. And I know Curtis Mitch has been working on that with Dr. Hahn for 20 years now, and I know they're done with it. And so that's going to be high on my recommendation list when that's available, which should be in a few months. And then before we came on, we went live, you were talking about a video series on the Eucharist, perhaps, that the St. Paul Center is putting out. Yes. Tell us about that. Yes.

So the St. Paul Center has been going visual and doing more with film, knowing that that's one of the ways to reach out to the younger generation. So a lot of Dr. Hahn's work on the way that the scriptures come together through the Eucharist is being put into visual format. So I'd encourage folks to go over to the St. Paul Center website, which you can probably link to us, and check that out to the new stuff that's coming out in video. It's just explosive and it's like Hollywood quality. It's terrific.

Yeah, it's just amazing. And then since you teach at Franciscan University of Steubenville, what would you say to somebody as to why they should consider either coming here for their undergrad or perhaps doing a master's online, I believe you could do it. Yes, absolutely. Franciscan is a, you know, Franciscan catches lightning in a bottle. It's this, you know, magical, it's probably an overused term, but a great combination of a joy in the Holy Spirit that comes from the charismatic tradition of the school with a faithfulness to the church's tradition. And so studying with, you know, there's different pitfalls that we can have. A lot of people that are faithful to the church's tradition get dour and critical and cynical, you know.

get dour and critical and cynical, you know, and then others that are full of joy of the Holy Spirit lose their moorings in good theology, you know, and go off into crazy directions. And so that beautiful... Dynamic orthodoxy. Yes, that beautiful combination that you have at Franciscan where we can have joy and truth together, as they ought to be,

has just been a blessing to me and so many others fantastic well dr. Berg's my thank you so much being on the show this is being terrific you're welcome it's great to be on terrific it was wonderful thank you very much Kanskje vi kan ta en kål? សូវាប់បានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបា Thank you. Bye.