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Chapter 1: Do Protestants go to hell for not being Catholic?
Do you think that Protestants are going to hell because they're not Catholic? I would say that is parallel to the question, will non-Christians go to hell because they don't believe in Jesus? And the answer is, it depends. You go to heaven if you believe in Jesus. You don't believe in Jesus, you're a six-month-old baby, you go to hell for eternity.
Being honest, as we're talking, I'm like, man, these nuances feel like some sort of mental gymnastics for me.
Every Christian articulation of salvation will have a nuanced explanation that could sound like hoops or a bunch of explanations, like super complicated. But where I land on the Eucharist theology line is, I don't believe it's just a symbol. The early Christians used that language. They said, this is the medicine of immortality. Not that we earn eternal life by receiving the Eucharist.
That death didn't kill Jesus.
Jesus killed death. Am I going to hell because I'm not Catholic? Should I return back to Rome to the church? You know, what are the views of the sacraments, the Eucharist, Catholicism? Is it the true church? These are questions that I've been having and been pondering for a while now.
And so I thought no better way and no better person to sit down with than Catholic apologist Trent Horn to ask these questions. Trent, how are you doing? Bryce, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. Man, thanks for coming on. I got tons of questions for you. I mean, I think the overall main question to kind of get into is, like, why Catholicism?
Out of every tradition, you could say, within Christianity, what about Catholicism kind of draws you to it?
Well, I think the biggest thing that draws me to Catholicism is Jesus's promise that he would establish one church, not two churches, not five churches, not 10 churches, and we got to figure out which one is the best one, but that Jesus would give us one church built on Peter and the other apostles and their successors to guide people into truth.
And so if there is one church Jesus established, I'm going to ask myself, well, where is that church today? And someone might say, well, the church is just the invisible bond between all true Christians. That's the church. But to me, I have a hard time with that because I say, okay, well, can the church help me know what doctrines I'm supposed to believe?
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Chapter 2: What is the Catholic perspective on salvation?
And how old are you now? I am 41. So I think just a few years ago, I have spent more of my life being Catholic than not being Catholic. So I grew up in a pretty... non-religious household, not really non-religious, not church-going.
Chapter 3: How does the Eucharist relate to Catholic beliefs?
So my dad was Jewish, but he hadn't been to temple in a very long time, so nominal. My mom used to be Catholic, and then she left the church. And so we didn't go to church as a family. The most religious upbringing I had was my mom would show me these Hanna-Barbera Bible cartoons. The same people who made the Flintstones and the Jetsons. They're super awesome. They're on YouTube.
Definitely go and check them out. And I liked that, and I liked these stories. But by the time I got to junior high, I asked my mom, like, okay, these are neat stories, but how do you know they really happened? And she couldn't give me a good answer. And other people couldn't give me good answers. And so I became like the pre-internet atheist. I mean, this would have been like 97, 98.
So this is like the Stone Age period for the internet for us. Which, by the way, I feel bad for your generation because like... As an older millennial, when we went on the internet in the late 90s, early 2000s, we felt like explorers in uncharted territory. And it was fun and exciting and scary in parts. But now I feel like when you go on the internet, it's so commercial, algorithm-driven stuff.
Yeah. It's like when I went on the internet when I was your age, we were looking into the internet. But for you guys, the internet's looking into you and us. Yeah. And so it's like you're fighting an algorithm and companies have spent billions of dollars on you and all that. Like to keep you on the screen and things like that. Oh, yeah. It's a drug that manipulates you. Yeah.
So in doing that, so I was going on, this is very early message boards where I was like debating other Christians. And I felt like, okay, to be a Christian, you have to believe the earth is less than 10,000 years old, you know, and evolution never happened. And I was like, well, I don't believe that. I'm in the young astronomers club.
You know, I like doing, I love science when I'm a junior high kid. And so I thought, you know, science is all you need. Religion's a crutch. And then I realized, oh, science tells you the way the world is, not where the whole world came from or why the laws of physics are the same in all times and places. That's pretty wild. Yeah.
That we can trust scientific experiments, that they're not changing. The universe is constant, speaks to design. Or science can't tell you the way things ought to be. You can do an experiment to figure out, okay, here's how the laws of gravity work, but laws of morality are different. You can't ignore the law of gravity. If you fall off a building, you're just going to go.
You can ignore the law of morality that says, don't push this person off. But it's like, okay, normally I can't ignore a law of nature. It just happens to me. But I can ignore the laws of morality. That means they're not purely natural. There's something beyond nature about where morals come from. But at the time, I didn't see this as debating people.
But then I saw these other Protestant philosophers, William Lane Craig was an example, J.P. Moreland, saying, no, you can believe in modern science. And actually, science and philosophy points to God. And history points to the reality Jesus rose from the dead. And I was listening to the atheist rebuttals thinking, oh, wow, these are not very convincing rebuttals. Yeah.
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Chapter 4: What role does baptism play in salvation?
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That's an extra 25 cents back for every gallon on your first tank of gas using promo code Bryce. All right, now back to the episode. Yeah, I think one of the first things I kind of want to address is what many people would know listening, the Apocrypha, right? The seven, I'm going to mispronounce this, deuterocanonical books.
Did I get it? So in the late Middle Ages, there was a convert to Catholicism, Sixtus of Siena, and he came up with a classification system for the books of the Bible called the proto-canon or the 66 books Catholics and Protestants both recognize. Then he used the word apocrypha to refer to those books that claim to be Christian that Protestants and Catholics both reject, like the Book of Enoch.
But between that would be deutero-canonical, so proto-canon, first canon, Deutero-canon would be the second canon. Catholics also recognize these are Scripture, but we recognize that we see that they're Scripture, we see that Protestants don't recognize that.
Modern Jews don't recognize that either, but first century Jews would have recognized that these books were Scripture, because later rabbis in the second century had to issue instructions telling Jewish believers not to consider these books sacred anymore. And some people will say, you know, well, why don't you follow what those rabbis in the second century said?
I'm like, well, because they also said, don't listen to the New Testament. It's like, I'm not going to really do what they say. I'm going to go with the Old Testament that Jesus and the apostles had. And so those books, Judith, Tobit, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Sirach, Wisdom, also includes portions of Daniel and Esther. Yep.
uh were in these greek translations of the old testament and we also see allusions to them in the new testament as well so i would say that there's good evidence that this was the bible of the apostles and their followers and the old testament that was used in the early church
So I guess that's been a difficult thing for me to understand because if you look at the Ethiopian Bible, right? I think it's got like 81 books.
It does have some more books. Yeah.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of baptism for salvation?
You need to do both of these things. But the people who don't get baptized, they're going to be people who don't believe. The people who don't believe, they're not going to be saved.
Well, I feel like if you already clarified it the first time, he should clarify it again, right? Because if it says repent and be baptized, the command is there, go be baptized. So in Mark 16, it's like whoever does not believe and is not baptized will be condemned, but whoever believes will be saved.
Well, if you clarified it on the contrary, shouldn't you clarify it again the first time so that it's clear, right? Because we're talking about the clarification. You made the challenge just in general for the person that says, disprove these five baptisms.
No, what I just said was, where is it that I'm looking for the scriptural data that tells us what is baptism for? So even here in this verse, we could say, well, what does Mark 16, what does it say baptism is for? And the most we could get from it is it has something to do with believing in salvation.
So we could say that at least it's connected to that in some way, but not that it says, well, it's only for showing belief. Or to say that, well, it has no bearing on one's salvation.
Because at the very least, that verse would support a view that goes a step beyond your view, that would say baptism is an ordinance one must receive, and to disobey that ordinance would be so sinful, it would contradict you being saved in the first place.
So if someone... I'm talking Catholic perspective here. No baptism with desire, no baptism of blood. Falls Jesus, goes to Catholic Church, doesn't get baptized.
Do they go to heaven or hell? That's ultimately up to God. When you say, does someone go to heaven or hell, the Catholic Church does not have a reverse canonization process. So we can know that there are people who are holy men and women of God who are in heaven who are praying for us.
I think even Protestants would say, like, I can't imagine a Protestant who would doubt whether the Blessed Virgin Mary is in heaven or Peter or Paul or the other apostles, save for Judas, you know, is in heaven. And we just believe also that because God can continue to do miracles in the church, we say, oh, he can confirm this holy person who died, God is doing miracles on their behalf.
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Chapter 6: How do personal beliefs influence views on salvation?
The question of who goes to heaven or not, that's just a wider sphere of God answering that, that unless I have all the data, I can't make that decision for a person. That's why Jesus says, do not judge by appearances alone. You know, God doesn't judge just on appearances, he also judges the heart. So when Jesus says not to judge, it's like, when we say, oh, that person's, they're going to hell,
It's like, we're not really, we can say that that person's actions are incompatible with a Christian life. But to say, oh, they're going to hell, it's like, well, we don't know what's in their heart.
So we don't, when we can't see all of that and how God judges, you know, how they've responded to his grace in different ways, it's ultimately going to be up to God to determine, okay, is this person seeking after me? And is what's preventing them from coming to me some kind of ignorance they're not at fault for?
Or is what's preventing them from coming to me in ignorance they're sinfully dwelling in because they're scared of, well, what's it going to be like if I take that next step? Sure. So in the hypothetical, it's not enough information. It would have to fall into that.
Well, we would believe that heaven is perfection, right? So the standard for heaven is perfection. Mm-hmm. And if we say, well, hey, baptism cleanses, according to the Catholic perspective, cleanses people of original sin, and sin keeps people from God, and the person doesn't get baptized, then the Catholic perspective would then conclude that that person wouldn't be in heaven.
If there was nothing else that cleansed the person of sin, either at the moment of death or shortly after. And that, of course, could mean God could be capable of saving that person. And once again, I could turn the same thing around onto you. Not just the Native American example I gave earlier, but let's say a believing couple has a, you know, they have a...
Well, I was going to say one-year-old. Here's the example I'm going to give. What do you think is the youngest a person could give his life to Christ? I don't know. Do you think a five-year-old could give his life to Christ and be saved? Maybe.
Three-year-old? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe three.
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Chapter 7: What role do saints play in Catholic faith?
I think three is getting a little young. I don't know. I don't know the age. I know that according to the Catholic perspective, there's like an age of... Well, we set in canon law different ages to be held accountable.
A lot of Protestants want this. They say, well, the age of accountability is seven. And I'm like, that's not in the Bible. That's something you guys just made up, man. I know you want that, but that's not in the Bible. I'm going to do an episode soon called Things that Protestants Literally Made Up.
I'm like, oh, well, that's actually, it's a common, even many Protestant scholars will say, oh, well, that's not actually in there. So the reason I say that is that there's going to be among very young children, like even like a three-year-old, like I discipline my three-year-old. I'm not severe about it, but he can do wrong. He's not like a six-month-old. But if you can do wrong, that's sin.
Now, it's not major sin. So you can have someone who's really young who could do wrong, but they're not old enough to believe in Jesus. So it's like if they've sinned, even minorly, all it takes is one sin. If you've got a two-year-old, a two-year-old, three-year-old, who can do something, you could say, hey, no, don't do that. You could say, you did a bad thing. That's wrong.
They can sin, even minor, one minor, minor sin, but they're not old enough to believe in Jesus.
is that little two-year-old going to go to hell? But is that two-year-old also old enough to believe in Santa? You know, like we can teach our two-year-olds and three-year-olds, oh, Santa's real on Christmas Eve. He's going to come down, eat a bite of the cookie, drink a glass of milk, leave some presents under the tree.
And you tell a two-year-old that knowledge, Christmas comes, he sees the gifts underneath the tree, the bite taken out of the cookie and the milk gone, and they hold on to that truth.
But would your church baptize a two-year-old? The parents said, yeah, he's saved, he believes in Jesus.
Well, I thought you meant the infant baptism thing.
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Chapter 8: How does the Eucharist connect believers to Christ?
Like, no, my church doesn't infant baptize.
But that's the thing, because what we're saying is if someone can be saved, then they can choose to be baptized, right? Yeah. So then logically, if you're saying that a two-year-old could be saved by believing in Jesus, they could be baptized.
Yeah. Yes. I don't necessarily have a problem with that. I just I get and this is just me being honest and trying to verbally process like I don't have a problem with that. If someone has sincere faith, I think that there's young people that have more sincere faith.
The reason I gave that example is sometimes I'll say, what about a six month old, a newborn baby? And then they die and they never had faith in Jesus. Like, is that baby going to go to heaven? Some Protestants will say, well, they never sinned. But I would say, well, what does that matter? They don't have anything human to earn salvation.
So yeah, like what would be your, like babies who die, they don't have faith in Jesus yet. And you just said earlier, if you don't have faith in Jesus, you can't be saved. Like what happens to them?
Yeah, I mean, that's where like, you know, where you guys would lean on like, you know, catechisms and stuff like that for maybe like certain intricacy things or councils, I would say, well, if someone can't make a conscious decision like a six-month-old baby, then we're trusting, right, that God's going to have a grace on that child.
And I would give the same answer for somebody who, through no fault of their own, doesn't choose baptism or doesn't choose the means for salvation. I think we have some common ground here. What you're saying about that six-month-old is, look, yeah, he doesn't believe in Jesus, but not because he sinned or not because he did anything. He was just literally unable to believe in Jesus.
So God is going to judge him, be merciful to him based on what he did or didn't receive. I would say that also applies to people who never heard the gospel or heard deficient versions of it. Once you open the door in that example,
then it can say, oh, okay, so if there's other things that we need to be saved and we don't have them, the question is, is it through no fault of one's own or because of sinful doubt or sinful ignorance or sinful rebellion or rejection? That's where it'll come up. So the question of the guy who goes to Catholic church is really interested in it, hasn't gotten baptized yet,
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