SPEAKER_02 0:00

Big news! God exists! Christ is Lord that he established the Catholic Church. I'm not kidding. I just converted to Catholicism.

SPEAKER_03 0:12

Once there was a scholar at a prestigious university who went from atheist to agnostic and then became a famous convert to Christianity through the help of his Catholic friend. I'm talking about C.S. Lewis at Oxford through his friend J.R.R. Tolkien in 1931. And I am talking about Joe Schmidt at Princeton through his friend Ethan Mews. I think there are many resonances between Joe and Jack. Lewis was known as Jack to his friends. Those resonances are very encouraging. I also think that there are many ways that Jack would differ from Joe, and raising those questions will be very important. Hello, I'm Glenn from Speak Life. I've spent a lot of time on this video because I think it's vital, whoever you are, to wrestle with what Joe Schmidt has brought to our attention. Whether you're Roman Catholic or Protestant or Orthodox, or if you're interested at all in the God question, this is big. You'll see the areas that I'm going to cover in this video, and there are time codes that you can jump to if that is what you want to do. But watching Joe Schmidt's 25 hours of material that he put out in the week that he declared his conversion has been very interesting to me. It's helped me process a lot of stuff about not only my own faith, but the way that faith happens and the way that faith is communicated. I hope that this will bless you even a fraction as much as it's blessed me to think through these things. And if you are at all interested in the things that we think about in this video, why don't you give the channel a subscribe so that we can keep going in the conversation? Now, who is Joe Schmidt? Well, he grew up Catholic and then he turned to atheist and then back to agnostic. And for the last ten years he's been away from his childhood faith. He never told his devout Catholic parents, which surprised Matt Fred when he said it.

SPEAKER_04 2:00

Do your parents have any idea about what you're going through at this point?

SPEAKER_02 2:03

Or is that too big a question to stop right now? My parents, I told my parents two days ago that I was an atheist and that I was an agnostic, and that I just reverted.

SPEAKER_03 2:16

But through this time, Joe did start an excellent YouTube channel, Majesty of Reason, and he has been known in this space as a very lovely, very fair-minded, very brilliant thinker. And he's been known best as an agnostic, as someone who can give the best versions of everyone's arguments. Well, this same Joe Schmidt was earlier this year convinced by a one-to-punch that he lays out in 25 hours of videos. The first punch is the philosophical arguments that theism is probably true. And the second punch is given much more prominence. There are vindicatory miracles within Roman Catholicism that establish Rome as the true church. Therefore, we must come home to Rome. Here is a pie chart that shows the emphasis of Joe's argumentation. There are theistic arguments that take about seven hours and twenty minutes. He gets to the point of saying theism is probably true. Then he talks about Catholic miracles and he breaks that down into saintly miracles. For instance, Padre Pio, who was an Italian priest and a stigmatic, somebody who bore the wounds of Christ, miraculously so. So says Joe, according to some compelling evidence for him. Then there are healing miracles like the miracle of Kalanda, where a farmer has his leg amputated and then the leg regrows again. And his Marian devotion seems to be at the heart of that miracle. Then there are Marian apparitions, like on top of a Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt, which went on for years and was seen by at least tens of thousands, or like a Marian apparition to some young children in Fatima, Portugal, where subsequently multitudes saw the sun dancing, and there is evidence for that that Joe goes through. Then he talks about Eucharistic miracles, uh, like in the eighth century, there's a case of Lanciano in Italy, where the bread and wine reportedly turned into flesh and blood, which has been preserved as a relic and vindicated as flesh and blood by modern doctors, so says the evidence. And then Joe goes into demonic phenomena, i.e. exorcisms. And at the end of the big miracles video, he turns to miraculous artifacts like the Shroud of Turin, but he's less sure about the Shroud of Turin and those other miraculous artifacts, which is why he leaves it towards the end of this video, and he only spends uh 14 minutes on those miraculous artifacts. Tellingly, this is also the part of the video where he discusses the resurrection of Christ for seven minutes. And it's not the theology of or the proclamation of the risen Christ. It treats scripture as empirical data, just like all the other testimonies that he's been discussing. And in piecing together such data, he concludes that we are empirically justified in believing that a miracle occurred on Easter Sunday. And as he does so, he says that the evidence for the empty tomb is much less impressive than the evidence for the major Catholic miracles. This is something that he and Ethan Muse, his friends, say again and again. The method that Joe Schmidt and Ethan Muse have designed to establish the truth of Roman Catholicism is a method that judges the stigmata of Padre Pio more certain, or at least more directly ascertainable, than the resurrection. Which is why Catholic miracles take up 13 hours of this content and the resurrection takes up seven minutes. Now, Joe also spends a good deal of time answering objections to Catholicism for about five hours. But once again, throughout this section, he reminds the viewer repeatedly that the most decisive answer to any objection is to simply pay attention to the evidence of miracles and then just nap out of it, my friend, submit to Rome.

SPEAKER_02 5:58

In other words, there is an objectively grave obligation that everyone has to submit to Rome. An obligation whose culpable violation damns you if you don't adequately repent. And God has manifestly vindicated the Catholic Church, so you should submit to Rome.

SPEAKER_03 6:11

His reasoning is this: your intellect errs, your intuitions err, your objections to Catholicism have shaky foundations. Whatever objections you have to Roman Catholicism, the miracles vindicate Rome. So submit your intellect, your intuitions, and your objections to Rome. And then finally, Joe in his videos turns to some more personal considerations that were moving him along the way. And I found this to be by far the most relatable and persuasive parts of the 25 hours. In the midst of these personal considerations at the end, we get a beautiful four-minute meditation on the passion of Christ that I found very moving. Here is a brief sense of it.

SPEAKER_02 6:50

When I talked about my psychological barriers in part six, I noted some of the personal and spiritual factors in my conversion, very briefly, but you know, you can see some of my other interviews coming out very soon about those. But like another factor that really influenced me was just like the love of Christ. Christ's two highest commandments were to love God and neighbor. And he claimed that you know these were the foundation for all other precepts. So much of Christ's teachings were dedicated to love. We must love our enemies, pray for those who persecute us, forgive everyone from the heart, see everyone as our neighbor, especially the poor, the downtrodden, the outcast. As Christ says, Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. And Christ's sacrificial life evinced the most profound radical love imaginable. Like I want you right now to imagine Christ getting brutally scourged at the pillar. While in agony, he catches sight of you. Despite his misery, he looks at you with pure, unadulterated love and overflowing mercy. Your heart is suddenly infused with the most profound love you've ever felt. He gives you this grace as a gift while he's being tortured in front of you. You realize that he's going through all of this, every whip, every insult, all the abandonment, every dirt rubbing into the open gash episode, every burning sensation from the spit of onlookers for you because he loves you. Are you not a sinner? Have you not flagrantly violated the moral law? And yet the God of the universe has freely abandoned himself to utter torture for your sake. That is the character of God. That is the definitive divine manifestation. That is the touch point, the centerpiece, that through which everything else makes sense.

SPEAKER_03 9:04

That was a wonderful moment, and I was so glad to hear Joe call Christ and him crucified the divine manifestation. The cross is the centerpiece through which everything else makes sense. God incarnate, crucified for you, is the divine manifestation and the lens through which everything makes sense. Amen and hallelujah. And what did I just watch for the last 25 hours then? I have to say, as someone from a Protestant tradition, I found the whole thing a fascinating, educating, and frustrating watch. It was frustrating, not because Joe is not a terrific communicator or an incredibly amiable companion along the way, he is. It was just that I was thinking the whole time, where is Scripture in this journey? And where is Christ? I mean the incarnate Christ of Scripture, his person and work, his life, death, and resurrection for us. If we count the seven minutes on evidence for the resurrection and the four minutes meditation at the cross, um, that's eleven minutes. That's 0.7% of the 25 hours. In the Creed, which all Christians confess, two-thirds is about the person and work of Christ. It's two-thirds of the Creed. It's less than 1% of Joe Schmidt's 25 hours. And I have to say that for most of those 25 hours, a single thought kept returning to me. Philosophical theism plus Marian apparitions does not equal the gospel. But having said that, I have huge hope for Joe because I take him seriously when he says that the cross is the divine manifestation, that it is the centerpiece through which everything else makes sense. I'm going to appeal to Joe in the name of the Christ who he loves to rethink. Joe, is it possible that you could go back a step or two and take seriously what you've just said in this video? I take very seriously that four-minute meditation. And I think you should take even more seriously your own four-minute meditation, because the Christ of Scripture is God incarnate, crucified for us, and this is the divine manifestation. This is the centerpiece. And I think Joe really does believe that. And I also think that the other 25 hours from Joe undermine what is most true, what is most resonant, what is most persuasive. And it doesn't need to be like that. And I think there is a way whereby Joe can take most seriously what he says is most true. And I think Jack can help Joe. I think Jack can help Joe a heck of a lot. I think Joe can retrace his steps to a decisive crossroad, and he can take a better path than the one he has just embarked on. Joe, if you're listening, I think you are a C.S. Lewis kind of a figure. I think this is very significant. And I think that C.S. Lewis can help you to be more consistent with what you say is the centerpiece. You can be more consistent with the Christ that you love. Are you willing to go with me? And everybody else? Well, okay, let's dive in. So here are some ways that Joe and Jack are very similar. And one very obvious way is the significance of the conversion because both have been converted out of a kind of naturalism that is a barren wasteland. Think of Oxford in the 1920s and 30s. It was ground zero for logical positivism. The logical positivists were a school of philosophers who thought that the only statements that you could call meaningful are statements of empirical or logical fact. And out of that barren and self-contradictory ruin of a philosophy comes C.S. Lewis. And now think of YouTube philosophy in the 21st century and apologetics, and think of the new atheism from which Joe has emerged. He talks of it like this.

SPEAKER_02 13:18

I was just like voraciously consuming debates and content online concerning theism versus atheism and Christianity versus non-Christianity and whatnot, you know. So I was just like watching William Lane Craig debates and watching uh the new atheists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, etc., etc. Right. Those dirty new atheists, right. That was a joke. Okay, calma, calma. After some time, the problems for theism and Christianity just kept mounting and mounting, and eventually I lost my faith. That happened sometime around 10th grade. I came to conclude that atheism is true, so God does not exist. And I also thought that naturalism is true, so you know, at bottom, the world is just fundamentally indifferent. You know, there's no fundamental purpose, there's no fundamental-mindedness. At bottom, as Richard Dawkins says, it's just blind, pitiless indifference. You know, the natural world is all that there is. At the time, I thought that that was just the best explanation of the data. But then, in the summer before senior year, I stumbled across this YouTube channel called World of You Design. And I was just captivated. Like I started watching these videos and I was like, whoa, these are like some new arguments for theism that I've never come across.

SPEAKER_03 14:32

So here is a familiar journey from atheism to agnosticism because theism seems much more credible than he had assumed. And C.S. Lewis went on that kind of journey too. In 1929, reason brought him to theism, and he described himself as the most dejected convert in all Christendom, but it was not yet a conversion to Christ in 1929, and it was a reluctant conversion to theism. Uh, just like Joe's story. He talks about reluctant conversion quite a bit.

SPEAKER_02 15:02

The psychophysical laws are strikingly fine-tuned to enable profound goods. So, like the fine-tuning argument also was one of the dominoes. I had lots of objections to the fine-tuning argument, but they just started falling by the wayside, and I was like, oh no. The fine-tuning argument probably works. And the psychophysical fine-tuning argument probably works. Oh my gosh. Oh no. And I remember I remember going through and I was like, by the end, I was like, oh no.

SPEAKER_01 15:30

Catholicism might be true. That's not good. That's not good.

SPEAKER_03 15:36

That's not good. Uh this video with Matt Fred was initially titled, Oh no, Catholicism might be true. Um, but Joe and Jack made a reluctant step to theism, and then came conversion to Christ. Uh for Lewis, it was in 1931 that everything changed. He had a long conversation into the night with a devout Catholic. You might have heard of him. He is J. R. R. Tolkien. And in a moment, we'll see that Joe had a long late-night conversation with a Catholic that convinced him. Uh, but right here we will see that there are two kinds of conversation that are being had. They are very different conversations, and those conversations have put Joe and Jack on different trajectories. Let's consider C.S. Lewis's trajectory. On the 19th of September 1931, the conversation was about story and the imagination and the heart and desire, and the way that Christ's dying and rising fulfills the hopes and fears of all the years. Lewis had always loved stories, but in his adult life he was swept up in the intellectual tide of rationalism. After describing his love of stories, he says in surprise by joy, such then was the state of my imaginative life. Over against it stood the life of my intellect. The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast. On the one side a many islanded sea of poetry and myth, on the other a glib and shallow rationalism. Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary, nearly all that I believed to be real, I thought grim and meaningless. Here is Lewis, half a century before Ian McGilchrist, who has written very extensively about right and left hemispheres of the brain and the ways that right and left hemispheres pay attention to the world. But this from Lewis is very resonant with McGilchrist's brain hemisphere analysis. It's about how the left hemisphere pays attention to what is narrow and focused and analytic and task-oriented. It isolates things from their context so that they can be identified, grasped, and controlled. The right hemisphere pays attention to what is broad and open and contextual and relational. It attends to the whole situation, which includes what is implicit and ambiguous. Now, before Lewis's conversion, he enjoyed all the imaginative right-brained stuff, but he thought, well, the problem is that isn't actually real. What is real is the rationalism of his Oxford peers. But then came a long conversation with his Catholic friend Tolkien, and they again spoke of the myths that they loved. And Lewis acknowledged that these myths are wonderful, but they are lies even if breathed through silver. Tolkien said, no, they are not lies. Myths are not lies. Lewis is shocked. Remember, logical positivism is the vibe in Oxford. If you're not bringing logical or scientific proof, you're not saying anything meaningful. That's what all the rationalists were saying around him, and that's where all the intellectual excitement and energy is going, and Lewis just has this massive right-brained love for myths, but he's been taught to dismiss that in favor of a left-brained rationalism. Tolkien, this devout Catholic thinker, is saying myths are not lies. And that even the ancient myths of the dying and rising gods, they are not lies. I mean those myths didn't technically happen, but they're not lies. And here's the crucial point. There is a myth that really happened. There is a dying and rising God that has shown up in history. The word became flesh. And actually everything before the incarnation and everything since the incarnation is either an anticipation of or a reverberation from the great miracle. The true story of reality centers on Christ. For Tolkien, the reason why we keep telling such stories is because we are living in such a story and there has been such a hero. He is the center of it all. And when Lewis grabbed hold of that, when he recognized that Christ is the union of the two hemispheres, that he is the myth who became facts, when he grasped hold of that, he went away to read the Gospels or to reread the Gospels. And he realized that these Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, they are both very unlike the ancient myths, but they also are very like the ancient myths. They are unlike those myths because they are written as reportage, you know, the action happens in named places. It's not once upon a time, it's in history. In this sense, the Gospels had not the mythical taste, as he put it in surprised by joy. But in a deeper sense, the Gospels are the great myth. He wrote, If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this. And nothing else in all literature was just like this. Myths were like it in one way, histories were like it in another, but nothing was simply like it, and no person was like the person it depicted. As real, as recognizable through all that depth of time as Plato's Socrates or Boswell's Johnson, ten times more so than Eckerman's Goethe, or Lockhart's Scott. Yet also numinous, lit by a light from beyond the world, a god, but if a god, we are no longer polytheists, then not a god, but God. Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact, the word, flesh, God, man. This is not a religion, nor a philosophy. That's important. This is the transcending of mere philosophy. It is an encounter with something or with someone more fundamental. This is the summing up and actuality of them all. Lewis at this point is all but converted when he glimpses the possibility that left brained and right brained could be united in Christ, the myth become facts, the word become flesh. And then Lewis actually is converted when he encounters that Christ in Scripture. He meets there something. Beyond philosophy someone beyond philosophy who sums up all reality in the deepest story of everything. Christ transcends philosophy. He doesn't oppose it, but he transcends it, summing it up as the person behind it all. This conversation with Tolkien was life-changing. Within nine days, Jack became a Christian. Joe's journey has many similarities and many differences. On the similar side, Joe also had a long conversation with a Catholic friend, Ethan Mews, and that conversation was also about transcending philosophy. You see, Joe had gotten to the point where he has seen the limits of philosophy. He is an exceptional mind, and he has always been phenomenal at finding errors in a Christian's argument, and equally good at pointing out errors in an atheist's argument. Joe can see things a thousand different ways, and he's very aware of the arguments on all sides of everything. He really feels the proliferation of human arguments and intuitions and philosophies. He says this. By contrast, the empirical evidence for miracles is overwhelming. Did you hear the problem and the solution here? The problem is there are limits to philosophy. The solution is the overwhelming empirical evidence for miracles. This is vital for Joe. And it is a decisive difference between Joe and Jack. Jack transcends philosophical uncertainty with a deeper story, the story of Christ. Joe transcends philosophical uncertainty with miracles. Here he is on Matt Frad saying the same.

SPEAKER_02 23:48

Listen, philosophy is difficult. You put a hundred philosophers in a room and you're going to get 307 answers to a philosophical question or puzzle. Because they're applying methods with applying their uh taking their intuitions and trying to get to verdicts, but they just radically go astray all the time. I am a finite, limited, fallible creature. Um God has manifestly vindicated his church, and maybe I don't know exactly how to respond to it, but I submit my intellect and will to what is being manifestly promulgated to me as truth with divine stamp of approval.

SPEAKER_03 24:18

Once again, the problem is that our thinking goes astray. The solution is the overwhelming empirical evidence for certain miracles. I think this comparison between Joe and Jack is very revealing. For Jack, for C.S. Lewis, philosophy is transcended by an overwhelming story, the story of Christ. For Joe, philosophy and its uncertainties is transcended by overwhelming evidence. This is, if you ask me, the decisive difference. The limits of philosophy provide a fork in the road. Which way are we going to turn? Lewis went right towards imagination and the story of Christ, and there he found meaning. Joe Schmidt has gone left down the route of overwhelming empirical evidence, and he's trying to find a kind of certainty. That's the fork in the road. Those are the two paths. Let's now see Joe actually take this step. It's phenomenal. We actually have on camera this massively significant conversion moment for Joe. He'd actually captured his conversation with Ethan Mews late into the night. And we would love to have Lewis and Tolkien's conversation caught on camera. But actually we have Schmidt and Muse on camera, and their conversation is a four-hour discussion of evidence for the miracles that surround Padre Pio, this 20th-century Italian stigmatic, somebody who seems to have the wounds of Christ in himself, and there are some miracles that surround him. And if there is overwhelming evidence for these miracles, then Joe's skeptical philosophy is clearly faulty. If he can be overwhelmed by this evidence, then he can move from the uncertainty of the agnostic to the certainty of submitting his intellect to the Catholic Church. Here's how it happened.

SPEAKER_02 26:09

I also have on footage basically some of the moments during which I became Christian. So let's let's look at some of those. I I there's no chance I'm going, I'm gonna die and then risk seeing Jesus and be like, yeah, I know that you super I know that someone had supernaturally reduplicated your passion wounds. Um Padre Pio. But I didn't believe. You know, like that's not gonna happen.

SPEAKER_00 26:32

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I'm saying it's almost exactly like the world is screaming at you that you suck at philosophy.

SPEAKER_03 26:46

It's like Isaiah, I'm a man of unclean lips.

SPEAKER_02 26:49

Yes. It is almost like that is the case. Or that just we in general, you know, the humans suck at philosophy.

SPEAKER_00 26:55

Um which and so that's what the world is screaming at. Screening. And so maybe if you go with, I'm just gonna listen to God's voice rather than my vain philosophy.

SPEAKER_03 27:07

Hmm. So the miracles are providing certainty.

SPEAKER_02 27:10

Yeah, dude, it's it's crazy. It's crazy, it's crazy providential. I told you this on our last call that like literally before I became inundated with all this like empirical evidence for miracles, like I've I was starting to get into that more skeptical mindset where it's like, oh no, I really don't think I can figure anything out in philosophy. There's so much disagreement, there's so much I uncertainty. It's very highly abstract, there's so many divergent intuitions, like can any of us know any of these substantive philosophical views? And then bam, just like miracle one after another just getting thrown at me, and I'm just like trying to bat them away, but at some point I mean, I don't know, I just don't think he should hold out forever. Yeah, no, dude, I I mean it's gonna sound great, but I like I think I mean I'm gonna have to be Christian. Yeah, I think so for at least the moment's on camera, so I think that's gonna be a change.

SPEAKER_00 27:57

Well, and where does that leave you? With um like, where are the credences at for Catholic versus Orthodox versus Protestant versus liberal Christianity?

SPEAKER_02 28:09

Well, they changed so much. Um this Donnegan thing has also changed it a lot. Um, you know, it's like there is no church as unified as the Catholic Church. Like the unity mark is just insane. Like Catholicism utterly mogs everyone else by like miles. Um like it's not even fair. Uh just reading reading the Donnegan book kind of convinced me of that. And I'm like, seriously.

SPEAKER_00 28:34

Uh so it's clear, I mean, that's clearly true. Yeah, like it's also clearly just a feature of our institutional design compared to everybody else. It's also like the fact that we have the theology of the papacy that we do is the explanation for why we have the unity we do. And it just so happens that the tradition that goes back to throughout the first millennium is exact giving exactly that explanation for the papacy. That it's the principle of unity, you know, and whoever doesn't gather with me scatters, and that's what's happened to everyone else.

SPEAKER_02 29:06

Yeah, they either like ossify in the case of orthodoxy, or they're not.

SPEAKER_00 29:10

Well, they have a ton of internal system too. Like they can't they can't adjudicate any new controversy.

SPEAKER_01 29:16

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:17

They literally can't have pan-orthodox synods because they there's no way to actually um reach a final verdict. Because if you don't agree, there's no one that you recognize as being above you that you have to submit to.

SPEAKER_02 29:27

Yeah. And then Protestantism is a mess, obviously.

SPEAKER_00 29:30

Which is amazing. Yeah, I mean, and it also just comes out of nowhere after 1500 years. It just doesn't even seem particularly similar to anything that happened before.

SPEAKER_02 29:40

After my call with Ethan on Taj Pio, I examined my conscience for like two to three hours and then made like a 45-minute general confession. That was pretty rough. Um, but praise God for his bountiful mercy that I don't deserve. As an interesting aside, I also became vegan the day of my conversion as I refused to contribute to the grotesque mistreatment of factory-farmed animals for trivial benefits to myself. And I want to embody, I often fail in embodying this motto, but I want to embody the motto of St. Dominic Xavio, death rather than sin.

SPEAKER_03 30:06

Do you see there the huge desire for certainty and the huge desire for a kind of unity? Um, philosophy is too uncertain, Protestantism is too messy, Orthodoxy cannot adjudicate any new controversy. There is no one ultimately to submit to in Orthodoxy, not on Earth anyway. Um, but Rome, you can submit to Rome. There is a kind of unity there and authority and certainty. And so, given all his priors, this is the very obvious choice for Joe to go to, uh, given that those are his great concerns. He says he's gonna have to become a Christian, is so called at that moment, is uh captured on camera. Um, but he does not remain in his mere Christianity phase uh for more than a few hours, it seems, uh, on this telling. He examines his conscience for two to three hours and makes a 45-minute confession, reverting to the Catholicism of his upbringing. He has really dived in with both feet. He has gone for the unity, the authority, the certainty. He has gone to Rome, he has gone vegan, and it's death rather than sin. He intends, it seems, to become a saint in the Catholic sense. It's incredibly, if you ask me, left brained. Um, Catholicism is not left brained, not at all necessarily. I mean Tolkien is very Catholic and very right brained. Um so I'm not saying that Catholicism is left brained, not at all. Um, but the pathway that Joe Schmidt has taken and the concerns that he wants to uphold are very left brained, and it has sprung from a certain need for unity and authority and certainty. So Joe submits to Rome, and he insists that all others follow. What would C.S. Lewis think about all this? Well, Lewis gave his life to a kind of mere Christianity, and he'd be very disappointed, I think, that Joe seemed to spend about four hours in mere Christianity, and that the thrust of his evangelism is very much of the submit to Rome kind. We will get into that, but there's something here that Lewis would definitely understand about Joe. Lewis understood why Joe said Protestantism is a mess. In an essay on Christian reunion, Lewis showed incredible awareness of how the two sides of Western Christendom see each other. Speaking to a Catholic audience, he said, To you, the real vice of Protestantism is the formless drift which seems unable to retain the Catholic truths, which loses them one by one and ends in a modernism which cannot be classified as Christian by any tolerable stretch of the word. To us, the terrible thing about Rome is the recklessness, as we hold, with which she has added to the depositum fida, the deposit of faith. The tropical fertility, the proliferation of credenda. Credenda is that which must be believed. For instance, Lewis, elsewhere in this essay and elsewhere in his writings, speaks of the various credenda, the things that must be believed by Roman Catholics, and the ways in which the Catholic Church has added to the Marian dogmas that were agreed by all in the first seven ecumenical councils, but then they added to it the Immaculate Conception, which was made a dogma in 1854, or the Assumption of Mary, which was made a dogma in 1950. By that time, Ludwig Ott, a famous Catholic theologian, counted 255 dogmas. They are infallible teachings of the Church that must be believed by all Catholics. Now, around fifty of those are shared by historic Protestants, and about 200 within the Western Church are unique to Rome. Most of those were developed after the seven ecumenical councils. In the next eight centuries, Rome dogmatized about fifty infallible teachings, among them things like transubstantiation and the seven sacraments and purgatory. These were right at the heart of Reformation debates about whether those things should truly be part of the deposit of faith or whether they have been accretions and whether the truly historic movement and from the reformers' side, they argued that these things were not historic. They were the novelties that we need to get back to if we are to truly privilege the historic church. The reformers, in the name of historic continuity and against the proliferation of credenda, as C.S. Lewis would say, they rejected those dogmas and we had a reformation. We also had a counter reformation in which the Council of Trent on Rome's side dogmatized about a hundred infallible teachings in reaction to the Reformation. So we have more credenda, more things that must be believed. And since the Council of Trent, which concluded in 1563, about a dozen more dogmas have been defined, including the Immaculate Conception of Mary in eighteen fifty four, papal infallibility and papal primacy in eighteen seventy, and the Assumption of Mary in nineteen fifty. Now Protestants look on that and we say look at that tropical fertility. The great majority of Rome's dogmas have come after the seven ecumenical councils. In fact, nearly half their dogmas were laid down simply in the Counter-Reformation, the Council of Trent. But even though the dogmas have piled up, the number of denominations has not. Certainly on the Roman side. There is just Rome. Rome does not multiply denominations, it multiplies dogmas. And it keeps a lot of people together under a lot of heavy dogmatic pronouncements. There is a remarkable authority and unity here. But if you have Roman Catholic eyes and you look across the Western divide to Protestants, what will you see? You'll see a mess, right? Protestants seem completely anti-dogma. You know, it's just me and my Bible, right? And so instead of having a multitude of dogmas, there's a multitude of denominations. And who can adjudicate them? And how will this movement lead to anything other than trading away the church's precious truths one by one until we're left with what? Lewis describes it, well, you, Catholics, see in Protestantism the faith dying out in the desert. We see in Rome the faith smothered in a jungle. Isn't that brilliantly put? I reckon that's C.S. Lewis, he's got a future in writing, don't you think? Mark my words. He's fun to watch that C. S. Lewis. But beautifully put, and what it names is a kind of mutual polarization between Protestants and Catholics. Protestants see Catholics as pursuing unchecked authority and illegitimate demands for unity. And so Protestants move towards liberty, and they risk ever more diversity. Rome then looks on in horror and doubles down authority and unity. And Protestants react even more and they go for liberty and diversity, right? And it's this mutual polarization that can occur. But it doesn't just occur with dogmas, it occurs with miracles too. Check out this fascinating paragraph by Carlos Eyre in his book They Flew. I saw it on X, quoted by Matthew Hartke. The book is about the claims that Catholic saints have levitated. There's evidence that Joe gets into in his videos. But here is where Catholic Protestant disagreements play their part in the conversation. Carlos Eyre writes, with the advent of the Protestant Reformation, which denied not only medieval concepts of sainthood but the metaphysical assumptions that shaped them, miraculous phenomena such as levitation became markers of difference. While Protestants denied that anyone could ever become holy through asceticism, or that mystical ecstasy and miracles such as levitation were possible, Catholics responded by seizing upon whatever Protestants denied, augmenting its value. So as Protestants mocked asceticism, monasticism, mysticism, and belief in miracles, or even worse, ascribed such phenomena to the devil, Catholics focused all the more on such things, not just to deny Protestant claims, but to strengthen traditional faith from within. Consequently, saints proliferated throughout the sixteenth century, especially in those lands that remained resolutely Catholic, such as Italy and Spain, and the magnitude of the outward signs of their holiness increased in inverse proportion to their extinction in Protestant lands. Isn't that fascinating? There is a history to this dialogue that we're all having on YouTube in the year 2026. It's a history that goes back at least half a millennium and more. We have been going back and forth on this. And the back and forth has very often only aggravated the divide. As it has been for dogmas, so it has been with miracles. Think of dogmas. You know, Catholicism has been very fertile, pronouncing its dogmas very often, with its eyes on those Protestants scattered across the desert. And Rome says, we have certainty, we have authority, we have unity, and we are able to vindicate our truthfulness in ways that you Protestants cannot. Now, Protestants look back across the divide and we can affirm that Rome has many, many, many truths and dogmas and beliefs and believers and practices, and we can affirm so many of them. We just reserve the right to say that some of your dogmas are not, in fact, true when judged by scripture, and that none of your dogmas can vindicate that you are the only true church. In exactly the same way, we look at Roman Catholic miracles, and we think many miracles happen in Rome. We just reserve the right to say that some of your miracle claims aren't true, and that none of them, in fact, vindicate you as the one true church. Now, that's just a little historical sidebar. We'll return to that question of uh miracles and Protestant Catholic divides in a second, but let's think about the Joe versus Jack divide that I have identified. Lewis looks to the story of Christ as the great miracle undergirding. Everything that's where he finds meaning, that is the most fundamental thing. Joe Schmidt looks to empirical evidence for miracles as the great vindication. The end result for Lewis is that he finds meaning. The end result for Schmidt is to find certainty. For Schmidt, the empirical trumps the philosophical, your doctrines be damned, look at the evidence. But notice this word of caution from Lewis in his book Miracles. The question whether miracles can occur can never be answered simply by experience. Every event which might claim to be a miracle is in the last resort something presented to our senses, something seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted. And our senses are not infallible. If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been a victim of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say. What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience. It is therefore useless to appeal to experience before we have settled as well as we can the philosophical question. Now obviously Joan knows this to a degree, that's why before he examines miracle evidence, he offers arguments for theism and why theism is probably true. He doesn't think that miracle evidence is enough to batter down the door of dogmatic naturalism. Quite right, it never will. But he seems to think that once he has made theism somewhat plausible, the door is ajar just enough such that the force of these miracles, the Catholic miracles, can impress themselves on a person and command submission to Rome. I suggest that there are many more assumptions at play when we encounter evidence. It's not just a case of whether supernaturalism is possible. You can't really go from a bare theism to Mary appears on top of a Coptic Orthodox Church, therefore I will submit to Rome. That argument requires more steps and more background assumptions, I would say. There is a much greater context that you have to grant to make any of those leaps of faith work. As Lewis said, the question whether miracles occur can never be answered simply by experience. And yet I think the conceit of Joe Schmidt and Ethan Mews is that evidence is going to prove the certainty that they want. And repeatedly, they make a kind of argument that goes, look at the evidence for this 17th-century miracle in which a farmer claims to have his leg amputated and then the leg is regrown, and Marian devotion is somewhere involved in the whole miracles. Joe and Ethan will say you don't need fancy arguments, right? The leg regrew. Face the facts, and then your philosophy can kind of take behindmost. Whatever objections you have to Catholicism can take their cue from what the facts say, and the facts say submit to Rome. It's often put like this.

SPEAKER_00 43:39

There was a leg, there was no leg, there was a leg again. You can't leg, no leg, leg. You're done. So figure out why you were wrong, because you're sort of abstract reasoning. There are a lot of places it could have gone wrong. It's really hard. Lots of smart people have disagreed with you about that, and you've just seen that your worldview is wrong.

SPEAKER_03 43:54

It's leg, no leg, leg, therefore submit to Rome. But this is concealing all All kinds of background assumptions and argumentative leaps. Joe admits as much when he begins answering objections to his miracle evidence. Essentially, he countenances four escape routes that you can take if you hear the evidence of the miracles and you want to resist the inexorable pull to Rome. You can look at the evidence and you can posit earthly explanations. There are psychological and sociological explanations that you could appeal to, and Joe is going to close off that escape route. Secondly, you could think about heavenly explanations that don't vindicate Catholic distinctives. So the miracle happened within a Roman Catholic context, but it has nothing to do with any Roman Catholic distinctives. That's another escape route that you could take, and Joe is going to try and close off that escape route. The third escape route that you could take is that there are heavenly explanations for these miracles, and they do vindicate Catholic distinctives, but I'm not going to become Roman Catholic. I'm going to remain a Protestant or an Orthodox Christian. That's a third escape route that you can take, and Joe is going to try and bar that escape route. And then fourthly, there is a demonic explanation for these miracles, and Joe is going to try and close off the escape route there. And so with no escape, it is inexorable. Down we go to the path that leads only to one place, and that's the papacy, and that's Rome. But already, even before we have looked into the plausibility of these alternative hypotheses, even before we've looked into the plausibility of Joe's responses to those alternative hypotheses, even before we've even done that, it is very obvious that Joe must decisively shut the door on the first escape route, and then the second escape route, and then the third escape route, and then the fourth escape route. It must be a decisive shutting of all four doors, or else the strength of that evidence has dissipated. But what is Joe going to have to do in order to shut each of those four doors? He's going to have to use some of that fallible reasoning. In closing off those escape routes, Joe is not using the miracles themselves. He can't use the empirical evidence to close off the escape routes. The empirical evidence is precisely what is being scrutinized and explained differently. And what's more, and this is even more serious, the purported significance of this miracle evidence is what's being scrutinized, and nothing in the evidence helps Joe or Ethan shut down the escape routes. They're going to have to use their fallible reasoning. They're going to have to bring in background assumptions that are non-obvious and that are not taught by the miracles themselves. So nothing in the evidence itself is going to help Joe or Ethan to weigh the alternative explanations. Nothing's going to help them shut off the alternative escape routes. Nothing that's purely empirical is going to help them decide whether this is a vindicatory miracle attached to certain dogmas and that the significance of this evidence is actually vindicating Catholic distinctives. So Joe and Ethan are going to have to use something other than evidence in order to assess the alternative explanations for the miracles and in order to attach the significance to the miracles that they want to attach. And that's why C.S. Lewis is so helpful here when he says that the question whether miracles occur can never be answered simply by experience, that is true. And the question of whether miracles that vindicate Rome alone occur can never be answered simply by experience. Empirical evidence is not going to give Joe or Ethan the certainty that they crave. The way they are trying to vindicate Roman Catholicism is a splintered staff that is unable to hold their own weight, and it is certainly unable to hold the weight of the many who they are inviting to lean on this unstable support. So what about that first escape route that Joe talks about? If you want an alternative explanation to all this miracle evidence, you could say that there are perfectly earthly, naturalistic explanations to these. And that is obviously true, and it is why within Roman Catholicism there is a rigorous system of actually testing these miracle claims, and they they do want to rule out naturalistic interpretations of all these miracles. Joe is very aware of naturalistic interpretations of miracles that turn out not to be miracles, and so am I, and so is everybody. But I think earthly explanations play a larger role in some of these miracles than Joe is allowing for. Think about the baptismal vows that Christians make as they turn from the world, the flesh, and the devil and submit to Christ. The world, the flesh, and the devil are a fascinating way of understanding the nexus of powers that are at play in this world. Firstly, the world speaks of systems that are bigger than any one individual and that can be captive to ideologies and movements and vibes and a million sociological dynamics that can grip us and that can cause things that are really quite remarkable. The world, in that biblical sense, can really account for a lot of remarkable events in human life. Secondly, the flesh is about our fallen humanity, which again has the ability to produce all kinds of remarkable events in human life. And human psychology, before you've even thought about sociology and the world, and before you've even thought about supernatural powers above, human psychology has a depth to it and a richness to it and a mysteriousness to it that I think can account for all kinds of remarkable events in life. And I don't say that because I'm an atheist or a naturalist. I say that because I'm a Christian. The world and the flesh in a Christian sense is not mere naturalism. I think it is a Christian understanding that humans and human societies and groups and cultures interact in ways that can explain at least some of this miraculous evidence. And I think that the world, the flesh, and the devil can explain much of why we want miracles, why we seek miracles, and why we might put ourselves in positions where miracles become more plausible to us whether or not a miracle from God has occurred. Think of the kind of miracles that people want within the Gospels, for instance. The disciples want to be able to call down fire from heaven on their enemies. They want a spectacular judgment from on high to vindicate them. That very worldly impulse is making them seek for a certain kind of miracle. Or think of the uh people who are gathered around Christ at his crucifixion, and they say, Come down now from the cross, and then we will believe you, which is again motivated by a very fleshly desire. It seems like what the flesh would want, right, to avoid that suffering. Surely Jesus should miraculously escape suffering, and then they would believe in him. But of course, you know, it is as he embraces that suffering that he is indeed saving them and through whom they can believe. And so the flesh is looking for a certain kind of miracle, and the world looks for a kind of miracle. And think of the temptations of Christ, okay, as temptations towards the world, the flesh, and the devil. I mean, think of the worldly temptation, which is to go up on top of the temple and cast yourself down, says the devil. The angels will catch you. He even quotes scripture and says, you know, scripture reveals that the angels will catch you, everybody will see, and therefore they will start to believe in who you are. It's a quite worldly demonstration. It's this spectacular cosmological power, and it is this apparition on top of a holy building in front of a whole bunch of people, which will vindicate who you really are. And Jesus rejects that kind of a miracle. He actually doesn't want to appear on top of a holy building and do this sort of spectacular event for people. Actually, what he wants to do is hurl himself down into the abyss of hell. And even though he has twelve legions of angels to catch him, nevertheless, he will go to the cross for us. He won't do that worldly miracle. And he won't do the turning stones into bread miracle either. Satan says, Well, why don't you turn these stones into bread? You're hungry, your flesh wants something, it craves something. Why don't you use spectacular power to serve yourself? And of course, Jesus, he's not going to do that kind of a miracle that only really would serve himself. He will turn bread into a feast for a multitude, so that he will feed them and not himself. But he won't do that kind of miracle. That's a very fleshly kind of a miracle to even want. To even think that such a miracle has happened might be the outcome of a carnal mind, a fleshly mind. To even want such miracles as appearing on top of a building in spectacular ways, um, that might be the marker of a worldly mind. Jesus rejects those, and then obviously he rejects the final temptation, which is to bow down to Satan. Interestingly, in the bowing down to Satan, there would be a kind of unity that would be brought to the whole world if the Son of God made an alliance with the Prince of Darkness. And if the one who is the light of the world actually made an alliance with the Prince of Darkness, then actually the great divide would be gone. There would be a unity through submission, there would be a certainty throughout all the world, and we never would have to worry about division ever again. Because the Son of God bows to Satan, there would be a kind of unity that was brought. There would be a kind of authority that is honored. And Jesus is like, well, there are some unities you should not go for. There are some divisions that are there for a reason. And Jesus refuses that third miracle. And it just goes to show that the world, the flesh, and the devil are powers that can perform remarkable things in this world and they can shape us to want certain miraculous things in this world. And perhaps we should be more attuned to that. Not because we're atheists and we don't think miracles ever happen, but because we are Christians and we know that the world, the flesh, and the devil are always at play. So I think there are certain earthly explanations to some of the miracle data that Joe Schmidt is bringing. That certainly doesn't account for all of it by no means, but I think it accounts for more than what Joe Schmidt is willing to say. So the world, the flesh, and the devil are all capable of producing very remarkable events in this world. They also shape what we expect to see of remarkable events in this world. And they also shape the way that we respond to remarkable events, whether those remarkable events are from heaven or hell. So because we are now talking about uh explanations from below, uh demonic explanations as well as heavenly explanations, let's now go to uh Joe's fourth escape route that he's trying to close off as we think about these miracles. And then we'll do two and three. But the fourth escape route that Joe countenances is what about the demonic? Are these miracles not from above, but from below? Here's how Joe puts it.

SPEAKER_02 56:08

Let's go on to Protestant demonism. This is what like I think a number of Protestants are gonna want to go in for. Um, so like, since the Protestant accommodationist approaches are hopeless, all Protestants have left is the demonic explanation of Catholic vindictory miracles. I mean, of course, they could try to give like these foiling naturalistic conspiracy theories going through systematically through all the Catholic miracles, just conspiracy after conspiracy, massive coincidence after massive coincidence. But then, of course, like, why on earth do you accept the resurrection? Like, if you if you're willing to put on your atheist skeptic hat, as Ethan said, like, good luck. Good luck, my friend, trying to go out there and put forward a convincing case for the resurrection. Um, so like, really, all that Protestants have left, to be even remotely consistent, is the demonic explanation of Catholic vindicatory miracles.

SPEAKER_03 56:52

There are so many things to say here. One is that Joe thinks that we trust in the resurrection because of empirical evidence, the same kinds of empirical evidence by which we assess Zaitoon and Fatima and the others. But 1 Corinthians chapter 15 says that Christ was raised according to the scriptures. He doesn't deny that there are eyewitnesses, he says there were five hundred of them, but he doesn't, in this creedal formula, say that Christ was raised according to eyewitness testimony, which is really quite credible. He was raised according to the scriptures. If anyone, Protestant or Catholic, is proclaiming the risen Christ to the world as a kind of Zaitoon or a kind of Fatima, please stop it. And there are plenty of Protestant apologists who do this too. So Protestants, please stop it. Don't bring Easter Sunday down to the level of another Zaitoon. And Catholics don't raise Zaitoon up to the level of Easter Sunday. That's one thing. But another thing is that Joe and Ethan and many Roman Catholics have thought hard about the demonic explanations, the potential demonic explanations for the miracles, and they have developed tests to see whether the miracles are from heaven or hell. Here are the four that Joe lists. There is the fruits test, what kind of moral or spiritual fruit has resulted? There is the Deuteronomy 13 test, does the predicted sign come to pass, and is it in the Lord's name? There is the house divided test, is the alleged supernatural activity working against Satan's own interests? And fourthly, there is the Moses and Pharaoh's Magicians test. Can the alleged miracle be distinguished from merely impressive supernatural-looking phenomena? Now the first test that Joe goes into gets things utterly backwards. It's not actually what Matthew 7 is about. Matthew 7 is where Jesus says, by their fruits you will know them. But in Matthew 7, Jesus is asking us to test the teaching of purported leaders by looking at their fruit. And he says, almost in the same breath, that those false teachers will be able to say on the last day that they drove out demons and performed many miracles in the name of Jesus. So Jesus assumes that people with very bad fruit perform very many miracles. That is the underlying assumption of his fruit test in Matthew 7. Just let that sit with you. Ethan Mews and Joe Schmidt's fruit test says believe these miracles because people producing bad fruit would never be able to perform miracles, would they? Would they? And Jesus is saying in this very passage in Matthew 7, he is saying that there are many miracles performed by people with bad fruit. But do not accept someone's teaching because of their miracles. One of the first things that you should learn from Matthew 7, if you're paying attention, is that you should not accept somebody's teaching even if they perform many miracles and drive out many demons. You are to reject their teaching because of their fruit, no matter how many miracles they perform. The miracles do not vindicate their teaching, not at all. So the four tests do not get off to a good start. So there's the fruits test, is the first thing that Joe talks about. The second is the Deuteronomy 13 test, based on Deuteronomy chapter 13, which is an important passage. If a prophet or one who foretells by dreams appears among you and announces to you a sign or wonder, and if the sign or wonder spoken of takes place, and the prophet says, Let us follow other gods, gods you have not known, and let us worship them, you must not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer. The Lord your God is testing you to find out whether you love him with all your heart and with all your soul. So notice the assumption God's people need to be ready with tests for miracles because other gods can easily perform them. And it will be credible for God's people. And once again, the miracle is the thing that might make you trust the teaching. And the Bible says, no, do not trust the teaching on account of the miracle. Assess the teaching first. And again, this turns right side up what Ethan and Joe say should be the test. Ethan and Joe want us to first look at the miracle and then believe the teaching. And actually, both Jesus and Moses are saying to us, you can see a lot of different miracles. It does not vindicate their teaching. You are to assess their teaching via other methods. These two tests do not vindicate vindicatory miracles. These two tests utterly question the very premise of vindicatory miracles. Very bad actors can perform very great deeds, and the miracles are not a divine stamp of approval on their teaching. Their teaching must be assessed on other grounds. Matthew 7 and Deuteronomy 13 are both telling you you are not to infer the truth of teaching simply because a miracle worker does a miraculous deed. The real test in Deuteronomy 13 is whether the trust, the worship, the following of the people of God is being diverted from their laser focus on the Lord alone. The other gods that are surrounding the Israelites in the context of Deuteronomy 13 are polytheists who are very happy to worship one God as the great God and other gods in the pantheon around them. And it is possible that a miracle can be done in the name of another heavenly kind of figure that will divert the people of God from their laser-focused worship on the Lord alone. Now, Joe slightly changes this in his Deuteronomy 13 test to asking the question, is this miracle being done in the name of the Creator God? Now I take it that the Lord, Yahweh, is a much more particular name than merely the Creator God, and that other gods, gods you have not known, speaks of exalted figures that can tempt God's people towards worship. And I would just ask, could Marian devotion ever tilt towards actual worship? I know that the official teaching position of the Roman Catholic Church forbids actual worship of Mary, but is it possible that a grand apparition of the Godbearer herself is there a chance that that could tilt numbers of people towards actual worship in a way that the Roman Catholic Church would disavow? Is that a conceivable possibility? Seems to me a very reasonable supposition that there is a non-zero chance that a spectacular Marian apparition might make some Portuguese farmers or some passers by in Cairo, whether they be Copts or Catholics or Muslims or whoever, it might make people tilt towards whatever Deuteronomy thirteen would define as worship. It's possible, isn't it? And if there's a non-zero chance that a grand apparition of the Mother of God to multitudes could turn people away from worshiping the Lord alone and adding another object of worship to their pantheon of gods, as it were, if that is even a possibility, then all of a sudden the incentive structure changes such that it might not only be God who is interested in performing such a miracle, others might be interested in performing such a miracle for the very reason that Deuteronomy 13 sets out. If it's even possible that mass spectacular visions of Mary will make people want to worship her, if that's even possible, then Deuteronomy 13 points in exactly the opposite direction to what Joe and Ethan need. I'm not even saying that that's what Zaito and Orfatima were. I'm not even saying that at all. I'm just saying that the tests that are being laid out for us are not doing the job that Joe and Ethan need them to do. They need these tests to be able to deliver on the question, is this a miracle from heaven that is vindicating Roman Catholic distinctives with a heavenly stamp of approval? Can we go directly from these miracles to submit to Rome? And I'm just saying, no way. No chance. There are so many breaks in the argument that require so much more than simply the evidence. And so the first two tests that Joe Gives to us, I think, point in the opposite direction to where he needs them to point. I think the third test is uh something that everybody can agree with, Eastern or Western Christian, Protestant or Catholic. It's the house divided test. Is the alleged supernatural activity working against Satan's own interests? So demons are not going to want to drive out other demons. Therefore, says this test, exorcisms are very likely not demonic. Now, I think there are reasons to think that this test is not watertight, but if it is watertight, Joe and Ethan have more problems because historically, one of the biggest arguments that non-Catholics have raised against Rome has been our exorcisms work. Right? It's not just Roman exorcisms that work, our exorcisms work. The Orthodox have been saying this for century after century after century. Orthodox exorcisms work, Anglican exorcisms work, Pentecostal exorcisms work, and each example of those miracles involves denominational distinctives. There are Orthodox liturgies of exorcism. There are Anglican liturgies of exorcism. There are Pentecostal distinctives involved in their exorcisms. Speaking in tongues is chief among them. It is a very distinctively Pentecostal miracle to speak in tongues, and that kind of miracle is associated in all kinds of Pentecostal exorcisms with the miracle of driving out demons. It is not just that God is kind and therefore he gives to sufferers in all kinds of denominations this sense of freedom and liberation. It's not just the kindness of God. There are denominational distinctives that are attached to exorcisms and they happen in all kinds of denominations. And so the fact that other denominations pass this house divided test should give real pause to Joe and Ethan about Roman supremacy. The fourth test is the Moses and Pharaoh's magicians test. Can the alleged miracles be distinguished from merely impressive, supernatural looking phenomena? See the magicians in Pharaoh's court, they did some of the miracles that Moses performed, but Moses' miracles were better. His snakes swallowed up their snakes. Well, I get the need to distinguish miracles, and I think there are differences between miracles from above and from below. But I don't think that Pharaoh's palace provides the paradigm for discernment. At that point, we might be tempted to think that the bigger and brasher the miracle, the more likely it is to be from God. I don't think that is the way that we would think if we paid attention to the temptations of Christ in the wilderness. It's not just I make snakes, you make snakes, but my snakes eat your snakes, so my miracles are better and must be from heaven. It is not that the bigger and brasher miracles must be from heaven, and the less spectacular ones must be from below. Pharaoh's palace does not provide the right paradigm for discernment. C.S. Lewis did things differently. Instead of four tests, he had one. So in Miracles, Lewis says that the fitness and therefore credibility of the particular miracles depends on their relation to the grand miracle. All discussion of them in isolation from it is futile. What is this grand miracle? Well, C.S. Lewis unfolds it in chapter 14 of his book Miracles. The great miracle is Christ. He is the God man. And actually the incarnation is the centerpiece of all reality. The word that became flesh, God who became man, the myth who became fact. He is the one who holds in himself all of reality. He is the great miracle. And not even the fact that he rose from the dead and left behind an empty tomb. That is explained by the fact that he is God incarnate, and of course he would not rot in some Jerusalem tomb. C.S. Lewis puts Jesus at the very center of his account of miracles. And he draws our attention to the kinds of miracles that Jesus does. And they're not the same things that the devil tempted Jesus to do, turn stones into bread, or create spectacular appearances on the roof of a religious building, and then tumble down and wait for the angels to catch him, this celestial bungee jump. Those are not Jesus-y miracles. Calling down fire is not a Jesus-y miracle. Coming down now from the cross is not a Jesus-shaped miracle. The incarnation shows us the great miracle. And he is not simply a miracle worker. He is the miracle. He is God-made man. He is myth-made fact. He is word-made flesh. And then the works that he performs on earth are the works of light shining into darkness. They are the healing of the sick and the raising of the dead and the casting out of unclean spirits and the feeding of the hungry. Okay? Those are Jesus-shaped miracles, not mere spectacle. Not mere spectacle. And we are to test all other miracles against the great miracle. That's what Lewis says. And he gives an idea of how we might go about doing that and why it is that we might consider Christ Himself to be the ultimate miracle. He says, Let us suppose we possess parts of a novel or a symphony. Someone now brings us a newly discovered piece of the manuscript and says, This is the missing part of the work. This is the chapter on which the whole plot of the novel really turned. This is the main theme of the symphony. Our business would be to see whether the new passage, if admitted to the central place, which the discoverer claimed for it, did actually illuminate all the parts we had already seen and pull them together. You see, for Lewis, he does not look at the natural world and think of it as a closed system which sometimes God interrupts from on high. He sees it as a kind of puzzle to be solved. He sees it as a tension with something that is missing right at the heart of things. But when you bring Jesus into the heart of it, when you bring the myth become fact, the word become flesh, God become man, when you bring him into the middle of this, what had been inexplicable suddenly takes on a new meaning and a significance and a fittingness. And so when you look at God incarnate, who becomes God crucified, who becomes God who rises again from the dead, these miracles are not an absurdity to be explained and submitted to. God incarnate raised from the dead is the central truth that solves the absurdity, right? Nature is absurd without the miracle. He doesn't think that nature is self-explanatory and then we need to add on to it these supernatural truths. No, nature is a puzzle. There is left brain and right brain, there is myth and there is fact. There is heaven and earth, there is the transcendent and the imminent, and we don't really know how to relate those things until we say, ah, Christ. And he says the Christian story is precisely the story of one grand miracle. The Christian assertion being that what is beyond all space and time, what is uncreated, eternal, came into nature, into human nature, descended into his own universe and rose again, bringing nature up with him. It is precisely one great miracle. You'll notice here that Lewis is using the language of nature, and he's perfectly comfortable using the language of nature and grace, which again within Catholicism is a massive deal. Thomas Aquinas was all into nature and grace, but I think in the high medieval period, what came to be thought of as nature and grace could at times become a distortion, and it could at times teach that nature is a self-contained system and grace comes from beyond it. Now you'd never get Thomas Aquinas saying something as vulgar as that, but there did become a trajectory and a tendency, I would say, within medieval theology, towards considering nature below and grace above such that we can understand certain things about God through nature, but then other things need to come to us by grace and top us up. And so Aquinas did teach that we can know God through nature, but we can't know the mediator and we can't know the Trinity and those sorts of things. And that requires grace, at which point you have a two-step understanding of the Christian faith. You have nature and then grace. You have philosophical arguments that say there is probably a God, and then you have grace in terms of the supernatural. And I think you therefore get the kind of apologetics that Joe Schmidt has put out into the world, which is largely by nature we can get to some kind of God, and then by supernatural evidence, we can understand something that is really quite different from nature. Now, again, C.S. Lewis believed in nature and grace, but I think he believed in nature and grace in a way that was coordinated by Christ, the word who became flesh. And actually, when we go back before the high medieval period, I think the early church fathers thought of nature and grace in slightly healthier ways. And I think as you travel backwards in time and as you travel east, you start to coordinate nature and grace in ways that are much more Christ-centered, such that Jesus, the word become flesh, is the one who unites what is above and what is below. But therefore, the way that Lewis thinks about miracles, he refuses to see miracles as spooky intrusions from outside of a closed system. We can never think that because the great miracle is our Maker Himself taking flesh and perfecting what God had always wanted for his creation. This is not a foreign power who is ruling over the world. This is the true Lord and Master of this world who walks around planet Earth like he owns the place because he does own the place. And he's not trampling down on nature or exerting some kind of supernatural power play. He is saving his world. He is healing his world. He is redeeming his world. He is raising up his world to what it was always intended to be. That is the great miracle, not spooky things that come in from the outside. And therefore, the test for modern miracles is much less about how spectacular or remarkable or out of the ordinary that something is, but whether it is in line with the healing, redeeming, saving work of Jesus. And don't get me wrong, many Roman Catholic miracles pass that sniff test and pass it with flying colours. But the four tests that Joe Schmidt lays out I don't think are helpful in the end. And I think Lewis shows us a more helpful way. We've thought about the different escape routes that Joe Schmidt is trying to close off from us. We're on the highway from miracles to Rome, and there are four escape routes. And one of them might be, well, there are just earthly explanations for these miracles, and actually there's nothing supernatural to explain at all. Joe must decisively close off that escape route, or none of his project works. We thought about actually the fourth of the escape routes that Joe is wanting to close off from us. Maybe they are demonic, and Joe absolutely must close off that escape route. The second of the escape routes that Joe wants to close off is called Protestant Accommodationist Denial. It's about Protestants who look at Roman Catholic miracles, and they are happy to say that such miracles are from heaven, but they deny that those miracles oblige anybody to take on Roman Catholic theology.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:08

Here's what he says Protestant accommodationist denial. This is the first Protestant explanation of the Catholic vindicatory miraculous evidence that we will consider. This hypothesis is very similar to the generic or pluralist theist accommodationism. The basic tenets of Protestant accommodationist denial are that Protestantism is true. The distinctive Catholic doctrines that are being vindicated by the Catholic vindicatory miracles are false, but God is performing those vindicatory miracles because he's accommodating or condescending to particular times and places and belief systems. But this is not a remotely serious explanation of the miracle record. First, it absurdly makes God out to be an active deceiver. The hypothesis literally grants that God is going out of his way to authenticate and promulgate false revelations through manifold miraculous signs. Joe really doesn't think this is plausible. In fact, he thinks it's blasphemous. I mean, like, dude, this hypothesis is blasphemous. You are blaspheming God with this hypothesis. You're making God out to be an active deceiver with this hypothesis, and that's not okay. And then he says Protestant decombinationist denial is like among the most overwhelmingly coat-filled, ad hoc, desperate hypotheses that you're entertaining solely to avoid the most blindingly obvious interpretation of the data. And again, I ask, are you willing to print out on a sheet of paper, articulate this hypothesis, and sign your name at the bottom saying, I, Joe Schmoe, bet the eternal fate of my soul on Protestant decombinationist denial? Are you willing to do that? Are you willing? Do you want to do it right now? Okay, so that's Protestant Decombinationist Denial as a potential explanation of the miracle record.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:45

I think that's hopeless. It is very important for the project of Joe Schmidt and for Ether Muse that miracles are normally vindicatory. And that the environment in which the miracle occurs is being vindicated from on high. There's a divine stamp of approval on the miracle worker and on the doctrines that the miracle worker is teaching. And that is, for Joe Schmidt and for Ether Muse, the normal way to understand miracles. They think it's not the normal way to understand miracles when miracles are happening in other denominational contexts. So they will allow that miracles can sometimes just be the kindness and grace of God to a sick person in orthodoxy or a demon-possessed person within Pentecostalism. It could just be the kindness of God that allows them, no matter their denominational errors, to be healed anyway because God is kind. But normally they say miracles are vindicatory. And they make a lot of Matthew chapter 9, verse 6, where Jesus says to some disbelieving Jews, he says, So that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, he tells the guy, get up, take your mat and walk. He performs the miracle before the eyes of unbelievers in order to vindicate a certain dogma. And the dogma that's being vindicated in Matthew 9, verse 6 is that Jesus as the Son of Man has the authority on earth to forgive sins. So miracles are vindicating dogma here. And I just think that's a really silly view of Matthew 9, verse 6. And it is to strip the person of Jesus out of this gospel event and to make Jesus kind of representative of any miracle worker. And it is to ignore the fact that this heavenly vindication did not change the mind of anybody. It did not change the mind of the disbelieving Pharisees who are around Jesus. But Joe Schmidt and Ethan Muse want to say that pretty much every miracle is like that. Or normally miracles are like that, that they are a stamp of approval from heaven on certain dogmas that are surrounding the miracle. Now, if that were true, you've got to explain why in Matthew 7 Jesus says, no, you should expect many miracles from false teachers. What you should do is test their teaching by other means, not by the means of whether they can perform many miracles, because they can drive out many demons and perform many miracles. Ditto Deuteronomy chapter 13. There are people who can perform many miracles, many powerful miracles, and those miracles are not a stamp of approval on their teaching, the very opposite. We need to hold their teaching to a different kind of standard that is considered completely separately to that miracle worker's ability to do something spooky. Matthew 24, Jesus warns himself, four false messiahs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect. Or look at 2 Corinthians chapter 11 from verse 13, for such people are false apostles, deceitful workers, masquerading as apostles of Christ, and no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising then if his servants also masquerade as servants of righteousness. The supernatural is not by itself any kind of vindicatory stamp of approval on anyone. In Acts chapter 16, there's this interesting example where a woman who is possessed by a python spirit, nevertheless, as she's possessed by this demonic force, she actually is able to vindicate the teaching of Paul. So the demons sometimes do vindicate the truth. I mean, she says in Acts chapter 16 from verse 17, she followed Paul and the rest of us, shouting, These men are servants of the most high God who are telling you the way to be saved. She kept this up for many days. Finally, Paul became so annoyed that he turned around and said to the Spirit, In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you to come out of her. At that moment the Spirit left her. Now, there's all sorts of things going on there, but one thing is sometimes even unclean spirits will say true things and will testify and will give a stamp of approval to God's delegate, as Joe and Ethan would call Paul in this situation. But the strict link between a supernatural event that passes the four tests of Joe and Ethan and vindication of the teaching is just massively complicated and complexified by the data of Scripture. And you know, if God is normally using miracles to vindicate actual teaching, that assumes in us a kind of capability to read the signs and draw the right conclusions, which again, because of the world, the flesh, and the devil, is a very doubtful assumption, I would have thought. I was thinking about this with regards to John 12. In John 12, Jesus prays to heaven. He says, Father, glorify your name. And the voice of God the Father from heaven sounds forth, which is precisely the miracle that so many unbelievers actually ask for. I just need to hear a voice. I remember hearing Douglas Murray say that uh on an unbelievable episode. You know, I would need I would need to hear a voice. And a voice from heaven would vindicate the truth of the matter. It's kind of the ultimate miracle in lots of different ways. And yet, what happens in John 12, verse 28? Jesus praise, Father, glorify your name. Then a voice came from heaven. I have glorified it and will glorify it again. Hallelujah. This vindication of God's divine, delicate Jesus. And so people are going to get the message, right? They're going to understand this vindication. And yet the next verse says, the crowd that was there and heard it said, it had thundered. Others said, an angel had spoken to him. Oh, come on. So some people are going for like a naturalistic phenomenon. Okay, it's just it's just thunder, right? And some people are kind of attributing the voice of God to a different spiritual power. We're not very good at following the signs. And even when Jesus is right there and when God the Father is the one speaking from heaven with an audible voice, we are not very good at receiving this message from heaven. And if it is a divine vindication of some teaching or other, it seems to fail in a lot of cases. So I I would just I would just question the whole premise. Why are we talking about miracles as normally vindicatory? And if you do think that miracles are normally vindicatory, then every single Pentecostal healing service is a vindication of the very distinctive Protestant theology that is 130 years old. Okay? So if Joe and Ethan are willing to say that certain miracles that happen in Portugal or Italy are vindicatory of Roman Catholicism, then what about miracles on Asouza Street, right? In the birthplace of Pentecostalism, because they effort just the very miracle that is speaking in tongues, this this purported miracle that is speaking in tongues, is a very distinctive Protestant Pentecostal phenomenon. It is as quintessentially Pentecostal as transubstantiation is quintessentially Roman Catholic. And if there are miracles associated with transubstantiation, then what about the miracles associated with speaking in tongues? There is that phenomenon itself, and there are also Pentecostal healing services and exorcisms that happen in the context of speaking in tongues. If it's vindicatory for Rome, why is it not vindicatory for Pentecostalism? Surely the sensible thing to do at this point is to say that there are all sorts of remarkable phenomena in the world, and some is from the world and the flesh and the devil, and some is from God, but even the stuff that's from God is not necessarily vindicatory of anything. That is very obviously the presupposition that you should bring to the remarkable phenomena of Zaitun and Fatima and Pentecostal healing services. And so of course there is an escape route from miracles to Rome. You could take the escape route that is marked earthly explanations for some phenomena. You can take the escape route that is called demons for some phenomena. You can also take the escape route that's just God does remarkable, miraculous things because he is kind. You can go off on that route as well. And you can see a miracle in a Roman Catholic setting and not buy into Roman Catholic theology in the same way that I can see a miracle that happens at a faith healer's meeting, where the faith healer is preaching a heretical gospel by either Protestant or Catholic lights and is an utter charlatan, and by his fruits he reveals himself to be a total snake oil salesman. And I can think that perhaps people get healed even at that meeting. Perhaps they even get saved, even through a faulty gospel, a gospel that wouldn't pass the sniff test in Roman Catholicism or in Protestantism. And yet God is kind and he is not vindicating that snake oil salesman if he happens to heal Aunt Betty at the altar call. So I think Protestant accommodationist denial is a perfectly valid escape route that you can take. Next, Joe Schmidt is going to talk about the third escape route for him, which will be the fourth that we have considered. It's called Protestant Accommodationist Acceptance. Here's what he says.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:49

Let's go on to Protestant accommodationist acceptance. So, you know, maybe the solution to all the preceding problems is, you know, just to embrace the Catholic distinctive doctrines instead of rejecting them, but perhaps that's just like totally compatible with remaining Protestant. And that leads us to Protestant accommodationist acceptance, which is the hypothesis that Protestantism is true. The distinctive Catholic doctrines that are being vindicated by the Catholic miracles are actually true. And, you know, they can just be assimilated within a Protestant paradigm. Okay. So the main problem with this hypothesis is that it's false. Let's just systematically walk through all the vindicated doctrines to see how absurd Protestant accommodationist acceptance is.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:27

I mean, what's interesting about this escape route is that it is one that C.S. Lewis at various points could take if he so chose. I'm not saying that this is the escape route that he would always use or ever use, but as a Reformed Catholic Anglican, um, there are many doctrines that C. S. Lewis affirms of Rome, um, some of which I don't affirm, and yet he is a non-Protestant who can affirm all sorts of doctrines that are distinctively owned by Rome, like purgatory, for instance. C. S. Lewis did believe in a form of purgatory, and yet he would never submit to Rome, and he was absolutely adamant that he would never submit to Rome, not because of this or that dogma, but precisely because of the supremacist call to submit to Rome. That is the thing that he resisted more than any dogma. It is the claim to supremacy and infallibility that was the thing he could never swallow. In a letter that he wrote to Bede Griffiths, he said this, and the real reason why I cannot be in communion with you is not my disagreement with this or that Roman doctrine, but that to accept your church means not to accept a given body of doctrine, but to accept in advance any doctrine your church hereafter produces. It is like being asked to agree not only to what a man has said, but to what he is going to say. Isn't that brilliantly said by Lewis as a member of the Church of England? He signs up to the thirty-nine articles, this sort of doctrinal basis of Anglicanism, Article 19, describes what the church truly is, and it is not a definition that depends on being in communion with the Bishop of Rome. It says this the visible church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men in which the pure word of God is preached and the sacraments be duly administered, according to Christ's ordinance, in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same. So church is gathered around word and sacrament. It must be gathered around word and sacrament. You can't just have the idea of the body of Christ. You actually need to break bread with others, but as you are gathered around word and sacrament, you are really engaging in the body of Christ. But don't you need to submit to Rome? Well, Article 19's got you covered. It says, As the Church of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch have erred, so also the Church of Rome hath erred. Not only in their living and manner of ceremonies, but also in matters of faith. So Rome hath erred. Everybody hath erred. We all err. That is the incredibly modest claim of the 39 Articles. But even such a modest claim is contrary to Catholic teaching, which infallibly dogmatized the dogma of the infallibility and authority of the Pope in 1870 at Vatican I. And this is what stuck in C.S. Lewis's craw so much. It wasn't simply that he disagreed with this dogma or that dogma, far more. He disagreed with the right of the Bishop of Rome to be the dogmatizer. And at that point, Jack is at loggerheads with Joe because Joe does believe in the authority and infallibility of the Pope. He says this.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:51

So the church was promised indefectibility. It'll never lose the apostolic faith. It'll never be overcome by error in such a way that she becomes a false church. It won't be the case that the universal church is bound to accept heresy. So she'll faithfully preserve the apostolic deposit until the end of the world. Secondly, the church was promised infallibility. So the church is preserved from definitively teaching error in matters of faith and morals. The church will not bind the universal faithful to a false doctrine as something definitively to be held in faith and morals.

SPEAKER_03 1:35:18

So here are two claims at loggerheads, and the Roman Catholic must survive three challenges to this dogma, it seems to me. Challenge number one, are you really saying that the church has never erred in its teaching on faith and morals? Challenge number two, are you really saying that she never will err? That's the great line from Lewis. When you say submit to Rome, it's like you're saying that we need to trust everything that a man has said and everything he ever will say. So challenge number one, are you really saying that Rome hath never erred? Are you really challenge two, saying that Rome will never err? But then challenge three, even if those two challenges are survived. Challenge three is the most serious. If you are asking us to believe the past and future teaching of Rome, aren't you asking us to put our trust somewhere that belongs only to Christ? Even if you survive challenges one and two, I don't think you can survive challenge three. Joe says, submit to Rome. Jack says it's like being asked to agree not only to what a man has said, but to what he is going to say. Now, Jack can agree to the indefectibility of the Church, a perfectly Protestant doctrine. But what is the Church? Is it what Rome says it is? What is Catholicity? Is it adherence to Rome? Lewis says no. What is most certain is the vast mass of doctrine which I find agreed on by scripture, the fathers, the Middle Ages, modern Roman Catholics, modern Protestants. That is true Catholic doctrine. C.S. Lewis is very into Catholicity, and for that reason he resisted Rome. He didn't write about that very much in his published work because his whole project was mere Christianity. But when anyone privately did a Joe Schmidt to Lewis, he responded like this. Here's how one biographer remembered an encounter. I remember Dr. Harvard saying, Jack, most of your friends seem to be Catholic. Why don't you join us? Aren't you tempted? Lewis replied that the important thing was to make one's submission to a Christian church. Which branch of the Christian church one chose was far less important. And he said he was not tempted to share what he called your heresies. Heresies? What heresies, Jack? Well, here are two the position you give to the Virgin Mary, and the doctrine of papal infallibility. But he refused to discuss them. So Lewis is very committed to church, but very resistant to equating church to Rome. He wanted the world to receive Christ rather than to submit to Rome. And if you say that receiving Christ entails submitting to the one church that he has established, and that that church is and only is the Roman Catholic Church, you are in effect saying that you must submit to Roman Jesus. But there is not a Roman Jesus, and there is not a Protestant Jesus, and there is not an Orthodox Jesus. He is the Christ, the Son of the Living God, He is the God-made man, He is the Word made flesh, He is the myth-made fact. He is the Christ of Scripture. And if we ask him, Are you with us or with our enemies? He replies no. The Christ of Scripture is what we offer, not the Christ of any one denomination. And if we have truly received the biblical Christ, then we are sealed by the Spirit into His body. And for Lewis, the fundamental unity of the Church is not found in a Pope or an institution. It is wrought by the Spirit. I mean, get this brilliant little argument which he wrote in a letter to a Catholic priest. Our Lord prayed that we all might be one as he and his father are one. John 17, verse 21. But he and his father are not one in virtue of both accepting a third monarchical sovereign. Right. That's the most fundamental unity that we share as believers. It is a unity by the Spirit. The Father and Son are one by the Spirit. We are one by the Spirit, and it's not a unity by submission to the Bishop of Rome. A so-called unity that excludes Orthodox and Protestants by definition. Roman unity is the unity of supremacy, hence the call to submit. But the unity Jesus speaks of here is a unity of the Spirit, which is absolutely embodied in a universal family of faith united around word and sacrament. That's what the 39 articles say. That's what Protestants more broadly believe. But our ultimate unity is found in being ruled by the Spirit of Christ through the voice of his spirit breathed authoritative scriptures. Now, breaking bread together is absolutely vital. And where true Christians ought to be breaking bread together and aren't, that is a grievous schism in the body of Christ, but Rome is also involved in that grievous schism. As am I, as are you, if you're in the body of Christ. And it's not obvious that the Pope solves that unity problem is it only helps to see the Pope as the solution to that if you think that only Rome is the true church, because Rome's insistence on being the one true church is itself schismatic, if it in fact is not the one true church. If the Church of Jerusalem and Antioch and Alexandria and Wittenberg and Geneva and Canterbury and wherever, if such churches are true churches, then perhaps the Roman pontiff is the most schismatic. So then if we are not to find unity in the Pope, where are we going to find it? Lewis reminds us that there is a much more Catholic Catholicity than Roman Catholicity. Lewis reminds us where true Catholicity lies. Let's remind ourselves, Lewis said what is most certain is the vast mass of doctrine, which I find agreed on by Scripture, the Fathers of the Middle Ages, modern Roman Catholics, modern Protestants. That is true Catholic doctrine. Mere modernism, I reject it once, and then he goes on and says, The Roman Church, where it differs from this universal tradition, and especially from apostolic Christianity, I reject. Thus their theology about the BVM, the Blessed Virgin Mary, I reject because it seems utterly foreign to the New Testament, where indeed the words blessed is the womb that bore thee, receive a rejoinder pointing in exactly the opposite direction. Remember, Jesus says back to the person, blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and put it into practice, right? Lewis goes on, their papalism seems equally foreign to the attitude of St. Paul towards St. Peter in the Epistles. The doctrine of transubstantiation insists in defining in a way which the New Testament seems to me not to countenance. In a word, the whole setup of modern Romanism seems to me to be as much a provincial or local variation from the central ancient tradition as any particular Protestant sect is. I must therefore reject their claim. Though this does not mean rejecting particular things they say. I know I've quoted that already, but it is such a welcome dose of wisdom, really. And it's just based on, you know, Article 19 of the 39 Articles. You know, Rome hath erred. Same as all of us. We've all erred. It's an extremely modest and demonstrably true conviction, I think, that makes unity with Rome impossible. It's also the Achilles' heel of Roman Catholicism. Actually, yeah, it's not really an Achilles' heel, it's really an Achilles head, isn't it? Um the papal infallibility thing is an Achilles' head. I mean, the the the head of the church on earth here, the Pope, is the embodiment of this weakness, this Achilles heel, this Achilles head. Because the actual claim is that the Bishop of Rome can't err. And the rest of us say, well, says who? And Rome says, Scripture. And none of us buy that. And then Rome tries again and says, Um, I know why you can trust a Pope. History. And then we check and we go, no, don't think so. What other source of authority could there be for saying that the Pope is the infallible head of the Roman Catholic Church on earth? How could Rome vindicate that claim except by themselves being the vindicator? Because they vindicate themselves, right? You know, which if Rome is the one true church, must be the case. Ultimately, it must vindicate itself, or else it acknowledges that it's not the ultimate authority. And maybe it is the ultimate authority and it's doing what it should do. And so it must call the world to submit to its authority. It must be supremacist, it must self-vindicate. If that's the case, then no wonder when we turn to miracles, that's what happens with the miracles too. Of course, Rome says about its miracles what it says about its teaching. It says about its teaching, these are the real dogmas, and they vindicate our existence as the one true church. And they say about their miracles, these are the real miracles, and our miracles vindicate us. Submit. Well, okay, maybe, but I'm already suspicious. I mean, in the first instance, I'm not suspicious of the miracles themselves. I might or might not believe them. I'm suspicious of what they are supposed to mean within the Catholic system. The miracles claims of Rome are just like the magisterial claims of Rome. What we have here are the assertions of Roman supremacy when clearly there are truths and miracles in non-Catholic Christianity. Non-Catholics don't deny that there are truths and miracles in Rome. We just deny that they are uniquely vindicatory of Roman teaching. As Lewis says, in a word, the whole setup of modern Romanism seems to me to be as much a provincial or local variation from the central ancient tradition as any particular Protestant sect is. I must therefore reject their claim, though this does not mean rejecting particular things they say. In exactly the same way, we say we reject Rome's claim to vindication with these miracles, and we can do so without necessarily rejecting the particular miracles. Lewis could easily fit into Joe Schmidt's third category. He could easily take that escape route and many others beside him. He could also take any other of the four escape routes. Any of us can, which means that the certainty which Joe Schmidt is after is not forthcoming. The pathway from miracles to Rome is not an inexorable conveyor belt towards Roman supremacy. And so the certainty that Joe is seeking is just not there. I mean, just think about what must be true if the evidence of an apparition on top of that Coptic church in Cairo, if that evidence is good, imagine all the steps you must take from there all the way to submit to Rome. Like, what kind of certainties do we have to have as we go along the chain? First of all, the evidence for this Marian apparition needs to be excellent. In fact, it needs to be sufficiently excellent so that it constitutes perhaps the clearest route towards spiritual and ecclesial certainty. Thirdly, this particular evidence of a figure on top of the Coptic Orthodox Church is not significantly dented by psychological explanations. Fourthly, that it's not s significantly dented by sociological explanations, that there is no demonic activity here, that it's definitely vindicating dogma, and that we definitely know which dogmas it is vindicating, and that they are Catholic distinctives. I mean, she's on top of a Coptic Orthodox church, so you have to finely tune the vindicatory power of this miracle. It needs to be so strong that of course you are required to believe in certain Marian dogmas, but not so strong that you must actually become Coptic Orthodox. It's a very finely tuned kind of vindicatory power that you've got to have. And the force of this miracle needs to be such that it it obliges belief in the Roman distinctive. And of course, all of this assumes that vindication of dogma is the normal and expected intention of miracles, and that if you survive all these highly plausible alternative solutions, you've still got to think that such evidence overwhelms any other objections you might have to Roman Catholicism. That this evidence counterbalances any countervailing points against the papacy or Rome more generally. You have to believe all of that to think that Zaitoon obliges submission to Rome. I think in fact the chain of reasoning falters at every single point. All of these assumptions are highly questionable. And remember, this is all in the name of giving the spiritual seeker certainty. Joe is leaning on a staff that is splintered and brittle, it cannot bear his weight, and it can surely not bear the weight of the millions who he is now calling to Rome. And what would it look like to pursue mission if this is the way to seek certainty and if this is the way to persuade others? You'd have to reconfigure what the mission of the church really looks like. It's apparently not the gospel that is the power of God for salvation to all who believe, which is what Romans 1, verse 16 says. Apparently the really powerful thing is piling up miracle evidence. But didn't Jesus say in Luke chapter 16, they have Moses and the prophets. Let them listen to them, to Scripture. And if they don't listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not listen even if someone rises from the dead. Joe was offered by Ethan Mews a certain sense of certainty, but that certainty actually crumbles under closer analysis. It's one kind of certainty, one kind of unity, one kind of authority that he is calling us to as we are meant to submit to Rome. But if we were to do that, I think we would lose the kinds of certainty that really matter. Now, right at the end of the 25 hours, Joe called. Calls on Protestants to come home and to send up a flair from wherever wherever we are, where we're lost, and we need to find our true home and our true home in Rome. And so he asks us to send up a prayer and to um to pray uh the rosary, which would involve the Hail Mary, which um C.S. Lewis was kind of against that himself, interestingly. But Joe is asking us to do that because he thinks we are lost and we need to be found. Here's how he puts it.

SPEAKER_02 1:50:31

Imagine you're stranded and alone in a dense forest. You've gone missing for a week, and you're now out of food, water, and shelter. As it happens, you have a flare gun. It's super easy to use, and it takes almost no energy to deploy. Just as it would be irrational not to shoot the flare gun, it would be irrational for you not to pray. Do it. I dare you. Okay, turning now to people who believe in God but aren't Catholic. To you guys, I challenge you to pray a single decade of the rosary in absolute sincerity every single day without fail. So I'm talking to you, Orthodox, I'm talking to you Protestants, just return to the analogy of the flare gun, right? Uh that same argument applies to you. If Catholicism is true, you have a grave obligation to become Catholic, and the culpable failure to fulfill that obligation is a mortal, damnable sin. The stakes are infinitely high. Death comes like a thief in the night. And the challenge I'm giving you is trivially easy. It takes three to four minutes a day. And God does not spurn prayers for conversion.

SPEAKER_03 1:51:33

Okay, but let's say that I send up the flair, and I need not simply Jesus. I need the one true church which is institutionally defined as that which is in communion with the Bishop of Rome. Okay, let's let's imagine that it is Christ plus that that will save me. Okay, I come over to that position. What kind of certainty will you offer me? Well, Joe has just said right at the end of the 25 hours, here's one of his offers to Protestants. He says, Why wouldn't you come and become Roman?

SPEAKER_02 1:52:07

Because you're also not availing yourself of the full suite of valid sacraments that Christ instituted, which are like, you know, basically like holiness boosts, right? They're like they kind of help you along the path to salvation. So, so I think Catholicism just decision theoretically dominates Protestantism. Whether Catholicism or Protestantism is true, you're better off being Catholic.

SPEAKER_03 1:52:27

So to be Roman Catholic, I get more sacraments, I have more holiness boosts to help me on the road to salvation. Where's the certainty gone now? You see, I have been found by Jesus, who is the word become flesh, who is the myth became fact, who is the God became man. He is the good shepherd who has hoisted me onto his shoulders and he is marching me home. I am saved. And I'm being saved, and I will be saved, but I am saved. And you are asking me to come across to a church that says that that kind of certainty is a sin, it's presumption. And look, I get it. You know, Protestants can sometimes go the other way. You know, for some Protestants, you know, assurance of salvation is a duty. Okay. In Rome, assurance of salvation is a sin. With some forms of Puritanism, assurance of salvation is a duty. But in the New Testament, assurance of salvation is a fact. It's just a fact. And Joe Schmidt is inviting Protestants away from that assurance into far more uncertainty. And I send up the flare, and instead, instead of being hoisted onto the shoulders of my rescuer, I'm offered little holiness boosts. Here, have a wafer, here, have a wafer. Little holiness boosts, right? Little power-ups to help me on the road to salvation, and maybe here's hoping, right? That is to trade the right kind of certainty for the wrong kind of certainty. It is to trade an assurance of salvation in Christ for an institutional certainty, an institutional self-assurance. That is a bad trade. And when you hear Joe Schmidt talk about the lack of assurance on his side of the fence, I don't think it's attractive. Here he is on a live stream talking about hell and how we avoid it.

SPEAKER_02 1:54:22

What matters is that, like, there is such a thing as hell, and we all need to, you know, be as good as we possibly can and love God as much as we possibly can, and pray as much as we possibly can, so that um, you know, we can receive his graces unto salvation.

SPEAKER_03 1:54:37

When Joe says submit to Rome, the invitation is not coming from someone who sounds like they're found. It sounds like the person inviting me reckons that they are still lost, but they've been handed a pack of supplies, and a map, and an exhortation to get out of dodge any way that they can. We have to pray as much as we possibly can to avoid hell. Those do not sound like the words of someone offering rescue. They sound like the words of someone needing rescue. So I hope you don't mind, Joe, but I'll offer the same invitation back your way. And I don't say that you have to submit to the Church of Canterbury or Wittenberg or Geneva. I'm not offering you Anglican Jesus or Lutheran Jesus or Presbyterian Jesus. Jesus alone is sufficient. Jesus alone unites myth and fact and heaven and earth and sinners and God, and he does it infallibly. He is the infallible, indefectible Savior. And deep down you know it, Joe. You know what it is that is the centerpiece that makes sense of everything else. You've already said it. It's Jesus Christ dying for you. I love that. And I love that you love that. And I think you will love even more putting that at the heart of your philosophy, at the heart of your theology, at the heart of your life. And I think currently it is not at the heart of those things. It is displaced off to the side, and I hope you can see why it cannot remain peripheral. It must be central. Joe Schmidt, I think you have been offered a kind of institutional certainty that robs you of saving certainty. But the gospel offers you, well, not left brain certainty that you can grasp. What did C.S. Lewis say? Jesus is not safe, but he is good. He is not a tame lion. But when we put him at the center, everything else falls into place. Remember what Jesus said repeatedly to those who he healed miraculously. He just said, Your faith has saved you. Go in peace. And for all of us, remember that word that Jesus brought to the disciples after they came back, having driven out demons in the name of Christ. They were over the moon about all the miracles that they had performed. What did Jesus say? He said, Don't rejoice that the devil submit to you. Rejoice that your names are written in heaven. That's the real miracle. And it's yours in Christ. What a marathon video that was. If you've stuck with us all the way to the end, my goodness, gold star to you. And uh surely the video deserves a like by now. And uh would you like to share it around the place with somebody who might be blessed by it? And as we offer all the time at Speak Lab, we have a free course called 321. We can get to the heart of this ancient gospel that simply goes back to the creed, the creed affirmed by Protestants and Catholics and Orthodox. It's about the threeness of God, the two-ness of the world, the oneness of you. It's just getting back to utter basics with Christianity and seeing that it really is good news that God is love and you are invited. Why don't you do 3 2 1? It's totally free. But that'll do this for now. We'll see you on the next one.