What's The Point Anyway?

Episode #42 - From Calvinist Pastor to Catholic Theologian: Dr. John Bergsma on the Church, the Kingdom, and the End of the World

• Luke McInnes

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🔥 Show Notes:

In this powerhouse episode of What’s the Point Anyway, host Luke sits down with Dr. John Bergsma—renowned biblical scholar, convert, and senior fellow at the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology—for a theologically rich, deeply personal, and spiritually moving conversation.

🚨 You’ll hear:

  • Dr. Bergsma’s journey from Dutch Calvinist pastor to Catholic theologian
  • Why sola scriptura and sola fide didn’t hold up under biblical scrutiny
  • How Catholicism reveals the Church as the Davidic Kingdom
  • A stunning breakdown of the Eucharist, the priesthood, and biblical continuity
  • What Catholics and (yes) Preterists surprisingly have in common
  • The "already and not yet" of biblical prophecy—and why the Catholic Church is Eden restored
  • How Catholic faith becomes real when suffering hits home

✨ With references to St. Ignatius of Antioch, Isaiah 66, Revelation 22, and Hebrews, Dr. Bergsma provides profound insights that will challenge, deepen, and inspire your view of Scripture, tradition, and the purpose of the Church.

📌 Whether you're a cradle Catholic, curious Protestant, or just spiritually hungry—this is an episode you won’t want to miss.

I highly recommend Dr Bergsma's latest book, Jesus and the Jubilee: The Biblical Roots of the Year of God's Favor which you can purchase here: stpaulcenter.co/Jubilee 

And here is a link to his free digital companion: stpaulcenter.co/jubileecompanion 

You can follow Dr Bergsma and the St Paul Center on Instagram to keep updated with their latest content.

https://www.instagram.com/stpaulcenter

https://www.instagram.com/emmausroadpublishing

https://www.instagram.com/john.s.bergsma

Follow What's The Point Anyway on X and Instagram to keep updated when the latest episodes drop.

Please like, rate, subscribe and share if you enjoyed this episode and think others will get value from listening to it too.

Welcome back to What's the Point Anyway. I'm your host Luke and this is my conversation with Dr. John Bergsmar, one of the world's leading Catholic theologians. Anyone who's followed this podcast for the last six months or so will know that I basically went from being very much an anti-Catholic to becoming a Catholic through the process of interviewing various interesting guests. uh But Dr. Bergsmir was one whose content I was consuming probably more than anyone's over the last three to four months. And when I reached out to him and he was happy to come on the show, I was truly honored. this was a wonderful conversation where I could uh sit down with Dr. Bergsmir, albeit over a video call and a long distance apart. and pick his brain on some of the things that I've really loved listening to him speak about um and learning a lot from him. So hope you enjoy it. And if you do, please do what you can to help the show. If you could share it with a friend, hit like, hit subscribe. um It all goes a long way. Thanks so much and enjoy the show. You've got eight kids, I've got three under five and my boys typically like to wake up at 5.30 so this is normal for me. It actually, it just gives me an opportunity to sit in my room in a little bit of quiet rather than, and let my wife look after them rather than me having to be out there. I used to do that when my kids were younger. I'd got all my writing done between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m. Yeah. So you've got like kids? Eight kids, four married, four at home. Yeah. Youngest is 12, oldest is 31. So, three grandchildren. Nice, how many boys and girls? Five boys, three girls. Yep, yep, good mix. Very blessed. think, uh, I don't know. We've got three under five. think that, I think we may, we may be done, but who knows? We start, we start a little bit later than you. heard, did you have five by the time you're 29? I did, yes. Fifth was on the way when... uh No, wait, take that back now. Let me think here. Our fourth was on the way when we moved to Notre Dame in 1999. And then our fifth came while I was in graduate school in 2002. So I was 31 when our fifth was born. And I've, uh, yes, I've, I've been devouring a whole bunch of your content. Uh, I know quite a bit about your story. It's, was, as I was laying in bed last night, I was thinking about it that, um, I mean, I only became Christian four years ago and I was very much sort of a materialist sort of atheist for all of my twenties and life leading up to that. And I was thinking if you, if you had told me five or 10 years ago that I would be so excited to wake up and do a podcast at 6 AM with one of my favorite theologians in the world. would have told you I was going mad. I would have thought it would have been speaking with a businessman or a sports star that would have made me more excited. Here I am. I've absolutely loved consuming your content. You've been a real blessing to me. So to have you join me today for an hour is a real blessing. Absolutely. I'm very grateful to God to be able to be a part of your journey, even though you're so far away. Well, the blessings of the internet these days. So, mean, was, it was interesting. I reached out to you, I think it must've been probably three months ago. had started this Jubilee year, which is obviously a topic we'll speak about given your background, but I started this Jubilee year, started January as a very anti Catholic, somewhat reformed, but more or less sort of church nomad Protestant. And by the end of January, I. I had a similar conversation to the one you did with your, uh, with your grad school partner where I met a smart spirit filled, knowledgeable in the Bible Catholic, which was a combination I didn't think existed either. the dominoes quickly fell for me. took me, I don't think they fell quite as quickly as, I did with you, but I think I messaged you maybe a month or two after that being like, well. There's a few things that have happened in my studying of the Catholic faith. I've watched some of your content. I'd love to have a conversation. So maybe for the, for the benefit of the audience that, that don't know you and don't know your story. Do you want to talk a little bit about your conversion to Catholicism and how it came about? Was it 20, 30 years ago now? Yeah, absolutely. So we would be talking about 1999 when I moved to Amsterdam and then we actually, my wife and I were confirmed in February 24th of 2001. boy, I've told my conversion story in so many versions and so on. So I'll try to keep it to five minutes here. I was a Protestant pastor, Dutch Calvinist, for those who understand what that would mean, in West Michigan, which is part of the center of Dutch culture in the United States. Most of the Dutch were sent there. So big institutions, Dutch Calvinist institutions in Western Michigan. And I was a pastor for four years, and was really while I was doing my pastoral work. that I began to have a serious move towards the Catholic church, although I didn't realize what was happening. people might be aware that the two biggest pillars of Protestantism are sola scriptura and sola fide, which is to say the Bible alone and faith alone. And when I was actually doing Protestant ministry, those pillars began to crumble. Let's take faith alone, for example. uh One of my evangelism trainers would go out and take me with him to learn how to evangelize. And when people prayed to receive Jesus, he would immediately tell them that no matter what they did in the rest of their life, their salvation was guaranteed because once saved, always saved was one principle. And that's kind of a Calvinist principle in a certain sense. And then salvation is by faith alone. So once you make the act of faith, once saved, always saved. nothing you do will ever endanger your salvation again. That shocked me because that seems contrary to the plain sense of so many different scriptures. And although I always, you know, professed with my lips salvation by faith alone, I had never heard it presented in such a crass way that, you you could go out and shoot people or rob banks, et cetera. And so that really started me on a journey to try to understand that doctrine. And I came to the conclusion. that either salvation by faith alone was just wrong or by the time you adjusted what you actually meant by that, by the time you redefined it to accommodate what the scriptures actually said, you ended up in the Catholic position. So that was a huge watershed for me. When you take the Bible alone and just doing ministry with so many other Protestant churches and Protestant pastors in the same small community, we had at least a half a dozen different Protestant churches in the same neighborhood that really could only have supported maybe one of the healthy church. And yet we are all competing for the same sheep and teaching different doctrines about virtually everything of any importance. um We didn't completely agree about salvation because some of the pastors believed you had to have the right view of the end times. Otherwise you weren't really saved. Others believe that you had to be have some kind of experience of tongue speaking or some kind of experience of the Spirit, otherwise you weren't really saved. Some believe that you had to be baptized in a certain way, otherwise you weren't really saved. And then when we got into things like sexual morality, the Eucharist or the Lord's Supper as we called it, know, who could celebrate it, how often, in what manner, same thing with baptism, who could do it, why did you do it, was it only symbolic, did it actually give you the Holy Spirit? No. I mean, they're primary issues, aren't they? Yeah, these aren't what you might call a diapheral in the Christian traditions, like things of indifference. These are like central issues and we're not in agreement. And I began to despair, especially when I would I would read John 17 where Jesus prays for unity. And then I would look around me, I'm like, we're not unified at all. And Jesus says, I pray that they may be one that the world may know. that you sent me. And so I realized, oh, unity is tied to mission. And if we're fractured, then the world doesn't come to know. But if we're unified, the world will come to know. And I looked at our failures in evangelism and I thought it's because we're not unified. you know, I could talk a lot about that because I took John 17 to my pastoral supervisor and it was a very interesting conversation, very eye-opening for me and so on. But I want to keep this short. So, It was time for me to be fully ordained, kind of like make final vows. If listeners are Catholic, they might understand that concept and, and like commit to the denomination for the rest of my life. And I wasn't ready to do that because of these doubts I was having. And so I decided to go back to school and get another degree largely as like a way to stall and give myself some time to figure out what I believed in and what group I should associate with. So I got accepted. applied to many different graduate schools. The only Catholic one I applied to was the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. And United States, the most famous Notre Dame in the US, but really from football. anyway, American football, I should qualify that. But I think you got Australian rules football. We've got Australian rules there. I've had a, I've actually, I've had a NFL footballer on the podcast in the past. So we love our NFL football too. Don't worry. Yeah, okay. So yeah, so I got accepted at the University of Notre Dame, went down there, planned to study with some of the Protestants that were on faculty because they had an ecumenical theology faculty. I thought it was a great deal. I was going to study with these Protestants. I was going to get paid by Catholics. I felt like robbing the Egyptians, you know. So I thought this is awesome. But, you know, as you alluded to earlier, I ran into this guy, Michael. When I was down there, he was a couple years ahead of me in the theology program and he was smart and he was full of the Holy Spirit and he was Catholic. And I didn't see how you could get those three qualities in the same person. I assumed that if you're really spirit-filled and you were also intelligent, that you would get out of the Catholic church because it was clearly a false church. So I could understand ignorant people staying Catholic and I could understand indifferent people staying Catholic, but somebody who was passionate about Jesus, and really knowledgeable about theology, I figured, well, they would all leave the Catholic Church. course, doesn't really make sense because looking back in hindsight, there were some stellar figures in my life, like Cardinal John O'Connor, the Archbishop of New York, who was a personal friend of my father's. And he was clearly, you know, passionate about Jesus and a highly intelligent man. So I guess I never really thought about him. I I'm, I mean, I was the same as you. mean, initially I went through the whole end times sort of position where, you know, the Roman Catholic church was the whole Babylon and that, you know, come out from her, my people, I thought was talking about people coming out of the Catholic church. And I thought that it was, you know, it really just, it was a church that, and then I ended up being that it was the church that sort of just ignorant people went in. It's a, it's a really prideful position, isn't it? We're the smart ones and there's just all those, mean billions through history of all these just stupid people that haven't worked out what we have. Right. It is. You know, it reminds me of Richard Dawkins who back in his heyday started a group he called the brights. Yeah. Yeah. They were the enlightened ones. Yeah. And I think certain branches of productism I think can appeal to intellectuals. Calvinism is one of the branches that does. Yeah. And you feel like you're being very academically rigorous and you have a little bit of contempt for Catholics and for other groups, you know, that don't emphasize theological education as much. So there's something to that. But then, you know, like myself, I was born into this community, this Calvary's community, and it was part of my heritage. And, know, let me say this, Luke, like I looked at my denomination as if it was the true church. I truly believe it was the true church. So if you could imagine a person who's like living inside of a box and they get the dimensions of the box and they orient their life so that they're, you know, living straight up according to the four corners of that box, they're totally straight and they've got their directions, you know, but then one day somebody lifts the lid on the box and that the person inside the box gets out and realizes that their box is like this compared to a bigger box that it is inside. that was my experience when I went to Notre Dame and I began to really learn about true Catholicism for the first time. I realized the Catholic church is a much bigger box and it's oriented one way. And my little group is kind of inside that in a sense, but skewed. Okay. My whole group was skewed, but I was living inside that. So I didn't know any better. Yeah. But once I got out and saw the bigger frame of reference, I really, my gosh, you know, I thought it was straight, but really I was 25 degrees to the, you know, Northeast or something. Yeah. And when you get a bigger picture, you know, it comes into focus and that was, that was the shock. Yeah. Which still means that there's still a lot that you believe that is right, but there's just more of a fullness to it outside. Yeah. That's right. There's a lot in common between Calvinism and Catholicism. Yeah. A lot through St. Augustine that both traditions appeal to, but we only read part of Augustine. Yeah. So when you, my guess is you went through a similar process to me with this. My whole process took maybe four months and yours, I remember you saying basically when you became convinced of the Eucharist, it was sort of 36 hours later. People have asked me along the journey and they still ask now, they're like, well, but what about the praying to the saints? What about the veneration of Mary? What about the statues? What about... And there's still to this day so many things within the Catholic faith that I don't yet have understanding of. But I step back in because I was actually confirmed as a teenager, even though was more or less an atheist. at that point, but, but I stepped back in through faith because for me, once a couple of these pillars became clearly true, none of the other stuff could matter. You know, I became, I became convinced of the papacy and like you, I became convinced that. Solar scriptura was wrong and that solar feed day was wrong. For me, it meant that, whether I understand Mary or not is sort of irrelevant to this. Were you, were you the same? Yeah, I was. My close friend, Dr. Scott Hahn, insisted on dotting every I and crossing every E before he was willing to take the plunge. For me, there were a couple things. mean, clearly, scriptura and sola fide, those went out the window before I even thought about becoming Catholic. But then when I saw the testimony of the earliest church fathers to the real presence of the Eucharist, you know, the line that did it for me was the end of chapter six of St. Ignatius of Antioch, his letter to Smyrna, which was written about 106, about 10 years after the death of the apostle John, where he's warning the Smyrnaean Christians. says, stay away from anyone who refuses to confess the Eucharist to be the flesh of our savior, Jesus Christ, which flesh suffered for our sins and which flesh he raised from the dead. I'm giving a kind of a dynamic translation there because there's things in the Greek that have to be made more explicit in the English. But, but yeah, he says that and, and, you know, and I realized, my gosh, you know, if I went back to the early Christians, they wouldn't recognize me as a true Christian because I deny that the Eucharist is the flesh that suffered in the flesh that was raised. And that blew me away. then, and then If you read the new Testament with new eyes and recognize that the plain sense of all the passages that talk about the Eucharist are simply that it's either his flesh, which is sarks in Greek or his body, which is Soma in Greek. and that's like, and, and the, all we can trace this, like all the early Christians just took that in its, in its simple sense, all the way into. the Middle Ages. And so if the scriptures say it in their plain sense, and the fathers and the martyrs and the early Christians, you know, affirmed it in its plain sense, like who the heck am I, you know, 2000 years later to call into question the plain sense of scripture and the belief of the early martyrs? Okay, I just didn't feel. comfortable doing that. And thankfully, due to my Calvinism, I had a big view of God. Like my God can do anything. There's nothing impossible for God. So like if God declares it to be his flesh, know, what he says goes. You know, I don't understand that. You know, it could be a mystery, but certainly whatever God says is true in fact. I didn't really have a trouble believing that God could make it into his flesh. I just wanted to see indication from authoritative sources that that is indeed what God intended. But if the Eucharist to Jesus, that's such a bigger issue than almost all the other things that we quibble about. So I'm like, okay, I just got to become Catholic because most Protestants aren't fully comfortable even in the denominations or the groups that they're in. They usually pick a denomination or a group or a movement. that they're mostly comfortable with, but inevitably there'll be like three or four things that like, I don't know, you I'm a Lutheran, but I'm not so sure about, you know, A, B and C, or I'm a Calvinist, but not sure about that fifth point of tulip or something like that. And so like, you know, that's, that's what was my experience. I had, I had issues with my own denominations teaching. So The way I reasoned is, okay, so I'm not super comfortable with praying to Mary and I'm not super comfortable with statues, but you know what? I'm not super comfortable with a bunch of things in my own group, but at least as a Catholic, I've got Jesus's real presence in the Eucharist. can feel like I'm in continuity with the early Christians and then with the plain sense of scripture. So yeah, it was an obvious one. So yeah, like you, I made the decision to swim the Tiber. without having everything locked down and figured out, it was just clear. I knew enough to say, well, this is no matter how you slice it, this is the better option. Yeah. So what the, the one thing I, when I say struggled with them and it was three or four months, so I really didn't struggle that, that hard with it because I came to that sort of point of submission. But, but there was views that I held that were, I had a really high and strong conviction of that the church didn't teach was harder when the church is claiming to be the one single true church. So. So for me it was, well, hang on, could I, if I'm pretty certain this is correct and the church teaches otherwise, how do I square those two? So was there particular things, you know, obviously being a Calvinist and a pastor, did you have high convictions on other teachings, you know, potentially things like predestination that took you longer to understand in the Catholic context? Yeah, that's a great question. But actually I had become frustrated with Calvinist discussions about predestination and the intramural fights among Calvinists about exactly how to understand it got really ugly. Yeah. And my own Dutch Calvinist community in Michigan had become, you know, sadly fractured, you know, with families splitting up and following different denominations, having denominations break up into two or three based on disagreements over predestination. And to me, I... the discussions were also esoteric. We really didn't have a way to validate the different hypotheses about how ah God elects um and predestines. I also have a strong science background, and one of the things that you learn if you study the philosophy of science is that typically there are multiple hypotheses that will explain the data. And it's oftentimes difficult to choose between competing hypotheses until you get a lot more data, for example. We have a set of data, which is the scriptures. And it seemed to me that multiple hypotheses for God's manner of election could be compatible with what the scriptures actually said. And we didn't really have a way to adjudicate between... these different hypotheses. So I kind of held predestination with a light hand, kind of with an open palm. That was not a big issue. But even in that case, you know, there's variety. People don't realize this, but the Catholic Church doesn't have a strongly defined position on predestination. The church has a kind of a parameters. So for one thing, the church does rule out double predestination, the idea that God intentionally damns. some individuals that actually Augustine late in life in some of his readings actually goes there and adopts that view. the church walked that back and later councils said, no, we don't want to go there. Now, certain forms of Calvinism do affirm that, you know, both election and damnation, kind of a double predestination. So that's ruled out, but the church allows a variety of views. have the... Kind of the stronger Dominican view, which is similar to what Calvinists would call infralapsarianism. It's a view that, you know, God does predestine, but it's more of a positive thing. Like he leaves the damned to their own devices. He doesn't intentionally damn them, but the elect, he sends out his pre-vanient grace upon them. He moves the elect. Yeah. So I've kind of a Dominican view, but then you have a Jesuit view that uses some complicated philosophy to really say that predestination comes down to nothing other than God's foreknowledge of our free choices. So it kind of eviscerates predestination of any kind of force. It's just kind of, again, foreknowledge. That's the Jesuit versus the Dominican view. And both are still around, but Paul V. put the kibosh on arguing about this back in the 17th century, 1600s, because the arguments between the Dominicans and the Jesuits got so violent that it was tearing the church apart. And Paul V, who was pope at the time, told everybody to be quiet and stop arguing about this because it wasn't productive. And he needed the Jesuits and the Dominicans to focus on evangelism of the New World. And this was just not productive. uh I'm just I'm just laughing to myself that the Protestant world needs their own Pope to step up and tell them to stop having all these debates and actually focus on evangelization That's true. Yeah, there's a great article by Stephen Long. I think he later became Catholic, but while he was still a prophet, a prophet, excuse me. Well, Stephen Long was still a Protestant. He wrote a famous article, at least famous in the circles that I move in called, Why Protestants Need a Pope. And that basically like, you know, the Pope unifies all Catholics. And the only thing that unifies all Protestants is that they object to him. Objection to the Pope is the only commonality that all Protestants have. It's actually a fair comment because I'll, I mean, I continue to get in lots of debates with, uh, with my old sort of Protestant friends and get a lot of the same questions. And, one of the, I fire back is show me a single thing that the so-called invisible church has agreed upon in 500 years. And perhaps the only thing you could say is that they all don't like the Pope. That's right. But beyond that, beyond that, can't agree on anything. And so far as I can see, no, no one has explained to me how they could come to an agreement on anything either. Except that they've sort of got to kick it, kick it into the future that somehow there'll be a magical resolution on things that hasn't happened and, they don't know how it would happen. Yeah, and I lived in my world for so long and I really felt the tension that I talk about the church and yet I can't identify the church with anything. all the ecclesiology that is like our theology of the church that we had as Calvinists was all kind of wishful thinking because in practice it was nothing but divisions and fractions and arguing about different doctrines. Yeah. Well, I think it's Westminster Confession of Faith 1.16. says basically that scripture is the sole adjudicator of any disputes, but it's never once worked. Never once. Exactly. I'd love to segue a bit because my journey in, followed, did you meet Sean McMahon last weekend? I think he sung the Jubilee song after your... eh Yes, I did. I did. Yes. Yeah, it was beautiful. Yeah. Sean came on my show sort of early, must've been around March this year where I was starting to sort of ask this Catholic question. And I've sort of followed Sean's path in that we both came through this sort of full Preterist world where we believed in fulfilled eschatology. But I don't know how much you've delved into the world of full Preterist, but. Yeah, not directly, but my friend Scott Hahn was moving in full circles in the years prior to coming into the Catholic Church. Yeah, Sean mentioned that to me, which was, which was fascinating. I think he said that he considered them to be radical full Preterist and he's a partial radical full Preterist or something along those lines. but the Preterist it's interesting because the Preterist position is that basically all things found their fulfillments in the first century. But Preterists like Calvinists and there's a lot of Calvinists in the sort of Preterism crowds are highly intellectual. can beat most other Christians using a solar scripture or debate. They know their scriptures as well as anyone. And in many ways they've, you know, I think there's a natural leap from preterism to Catholicism because they see all the problems in Protestantism and they see all the problems in the church. So most of them end up being more or less church nomads, which is what I was. But where, where the idea falls apart is that, and this was the problem for me. I saw everything sort of reaching its fulfillment in the first century. But then if you take a non-Catholic view, you're like, well, now what? And then, and then what happened by the time Clement came along 10 years later, or wrote his letter in sort of the eighties, that the church which reached its glorious fulfillment basically just fell to pieces as and was taken over by false teachers. that, that for me was a real problem. But I still, I still saw, I still saw all this scripture that sort of, that showed fulfillment of things. And then I started watching some of your content and I saw you, I think on the show, on the interview with Matt Fradd, you were talking about like Revelation 22 and how. The Catholic church is the fulfillment of this and the living waters are the Holy spirit and the sacraments are how we have the healing of the nations. And then I saw you on other shows talking about how Eden is restored in the Catholic church. And every time you walk into the Catholic church, you're walking into Eden. these are like, these are, these are the most sort of full preterist ideas I've ever heard from anyone in any denomination. And then yet at the same time, so I'm like, hang on this Berg's my guy who's Who's a Catholic is a, is a full preterist, but then you'll still speak about sort of a future sort of end of the world. And we're what I've come to now and I'm still working my way through it is that. For me, eschatology within the Roman Catholic church takes on a lot richer and deeper understanding than it does anywhere else. And that it's sort of. It moves away from this flat linear understanding of things that you get everywhere else where things are both fulfilled, completed, present now, and yet at the same time future as well. So could you talk through a little bit about your understanding of sort of fulfilled eschatology, how things find their fulfillment in the Catholic Church, but what that means for the now and what it means for the future. Yeah, well, that's a huge question, but I'll tackle a few elements of that. A couple of ideas that have been very helpful for me in resolving most of my bigger issues with eschatology have been, first of all, recognizing that the church is the Davidic kingdom. So, you know, if you understand the Old Testament well, you know that there's this sequence of covenants that build upon one another and become more more unit. say more and more universal, but it has to be qualified a little bit. But, know, you've got the Adamic covenant with a married couple in the garden. get the Noeic covenant with an extended family, Noah and his sons. You get the Abrahamic covenant, which is with Abraham. He's, he's the leader of this huge tribe. You get the Mosaic covenant, which is a covenant with an entire nation. And then you get the Davidic covenant, which is. a covenant between God and really an emperor. know, David, David rolled over, people forget this, but he rolled over not over Israel, not only over all Israel, but over all the surrounding nations as well. And then the oracles promised him and his heirs dominion over the whole earth. You know, he shall reign from sea to sea, from the river to the ends of the earth. The Psalms say these kinds of things. So that Davidic covenant is the climactic covenant of the Old Testament. And then. Jesus comes and I never understood this as a child. You know, I read the Bible from a young age, five or six chapters a day, forced by my mother at first and then doing it on my own as I developed a love for it. But I never understand why did Matthew, Matthew's gospel and then also the early parts of Luke, why did they emphasize the connection of Jesus to David? You know, the Davidic genealogy in Matthew one. And likewise, David is in the genealogy of Luke three, but you know, the, uh, the account of the enunciation, the other, you know, what we call is joyful mysteries, but the other major episodes of the infancy narratives in Luke one and two are shot full of references to Davidic covenant fulfillment. And to my mind, after the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke, Like the kingdom stuff dropped away and the connection with David was no longer important. But what I didn't realize was both of those gospels present Jesus as the son of David and then begin his ministry by him saying, repent for the kingdom of God is at hand. And I didn't realize that there's like an integral relationship between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of David. And if you look in the old Testament twice, The kingdom of David is referred to as the kingdom of the Lord in the books of Chronicles, which are some of the last of the Old Testament books, kind of giving a hermeneutical key to the Old Testament. So, you know, just as it dawned on me that just as Jesus is holy God and holy man, so also his kingdom is fully the kingdom of God and it's fully the kingdom of David, whose son he is. And so it's like the kingdom of God is incarnational and the dimension of the kingdom that is visible in the space time matrix is the church militant. It's the church visible that we see. And this is all starting to make total sense to me. Like, okay, so that's why they start off with all this David stuff because Jesus is reestablishing the kingdom of David. And then you realize that, he chooses 12 officers called apostles, just like Solomon chose 12 officers over the kingdom in first Kings four. Just as Solomon chose a royal steward to rule over the palace and be his number two. So uh Jesus chooses a royal steward in Matthew 16, appointing Peter with the keys of the kingdom, et cetera. Oh, just as the queen mother had a role of intercession, as we see in first Kings chapter two for anybody in the kingdom, so too the mother of Jesus has a role of intercession as we proceed through human history. and all this stuff. is why, Luke, when I was, I thought I knew the Bible well as a child. It just opens up, doesn't it? Right, right. I was watching in black and white and now I'm watching in color. This is amazing. So the church is the kingdom of David. That was a huge element. And then the other thing was the temple as microcosm of the universe. And I've written a lot of different works that have touched on this, but basically all through the scriptures, beginning with Eden, which was the first temple, the earthly temple is always a microcosm of the cosmos, which is a macro temple. This is consistent and like, hardly any Bible scholar would dispute me on this. think pretty much whether you're Catholic, Protestant, mainstream, conservative, whatever, everybody agrees on this. You know, that from Genesis to Revelation 22, the earthly temple is always a micro cosmos and the cosmos is a macro temple. And so there's always this mystical relationship between the two. And so when the temple gets destroyed in the year 70, that is a foretaste of the end of the world when the macro temple, which is the cosmos, will experience the same judgment that Jerusalem did. So that is such a great hermeneutical key. And that suddenly turns on the light about why Jesus's eschatological discourses in the synoptic gospels sound like on the one hand, he's describing the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70, but at the same time, it sounds like he's describing the end of the world. Like how can he do the two things at the same time? Well, it's because they're mystically interrelated because the temple is the microcosmos that foreshadows what will happen to the macro temple. And that also makes sense, I think, of Revelation as well. those are two central concepts, Churches, Davidic Kingdom, and temple as microcosmos that just opened my eyes. And that bit about the temple being microcosmos, you see that in the Jewish literature. you see it in Josephus. I think it's implied in the Dead Sea Scrolls. um it's in the early fathers. And so it's kind of ubiquitous. It's not something that we kind of invent retrospectively to kind of explain a lack of fulfillment or something like that. Like, could you affirm a comment where, I mean, I'm still, it's interesting. I'm still trying to work out this idea of first century being the fulfillment of all things and the destruction of the temple and so forth, the establishment of the kingdom. And then that being replayed again at a grander level in the future. But now as a Catholic, unlike as a Protestant. I don't need to be right on it. I can accept, you know, I don't have all the answers on this and maybe, maybe what I thought was wrong and that's okay. I'd rather join a church with unity and submit that maybe I'm not the smartest Christian to have lived in the last 2000 years. Just maybe. But is it reasonable to say with that idea that, that all prophecy has indeed been fulfilled? as opposed to this idea that the second coming is when Jesus comes to fulfill the rest of a bunch of items on his list. Yeah, I think that there's things still to be fulfilled. You know, I think there's rather clear statements about, you know, a universal judgment and worldwide. Every eye, you know, every um tongue shall confess, every knee shall bow, every tongue confess. So yeah, I think that there, it's kind of like, this is true too, in our classes on eschatology at my Calvinist Seminary, we would talk about D-Day and VE Day. By the time D-Day was over, it was clear that the Germans were gonna lose the war. And it was kind of a mopping up operation. You could say that the events between AD 30 and AD 70 were D-Day. It clearly establishes the beachhead of the kingdom of God on earth and it's clear that Satan is never gonna win. But then that has to be mopped up and so the second coming will be kinda like E-Day. oh there's that, then, so I say, yeah, there are prophecies, there's scriptural content that remains to be fulfilled with the Lord's second coming. But I think that uh it's been fulfilled in principle uh already. And you find this not only in eschatology, but in other aspects as well, like soteriology, where oh You know, in a sense, we've all been saved on Good Friday of AD 33 was accomplished in principle. And St. Paul will talk that way in Ephesians. know, Ephesians is such a powerful epistle. People don't sit with it enough to allow what Paul is actually saying there to challenge their ways of thinking. But Paul says that we're seated with Christ in heavenly realms now. know, now we're seated. that. It's really difficult to wrap your mind around around that. and so so Paul is basically saying that it has been accomplished already and it nearly needs to be implemented. It needs to be. It needs to be manifested. What's what's already been accomplished in our lives. So. You know, Jesus did it all on the cross and yet there's a role for us to share in his sufferings. I need to make up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ as Paul famously says elsewhere. So I think in many dimensions of theology, there's this truth that our Lord in his ministry accomplished everything in principle and yet there is still this room for our participation in it for that redemption that he has accomplished to be worked out in our lives. Yeah. So there is, you know, always this already in a not yet. Yeah. mean, where I'm sort of moving towards is a, more of like a both and understanding, which only makes sense if you affirm the Catholic church. I mean, lot of reforms sort of have this sort of constant sort of already, but not yet. But the criticism against them is that everything's not yet. There is no, there is, there is no already. Whereas. Whereas the Catholic church, yeah, as you say, can talk about revelation 22 and the healing of the nations and the living water being a present reality. Like there is the already in all of this. And yeah, I heard you recently talk about Isaiah 66, which I mean, one outside of preterism would say Isaiah 66 is a, is a future sort of eternal state. And a Preterist would argue against it saying, Isaiah 66 talks about the sinners still living in the world and the sinner being accursed. But then you made the point that Isaiah 66 also talks about a priesthood and most Preterists aren't going there. They'll debate the futurist on the sinners still being here in this sort of new heaven and new earth that Isaiah talks about. But what about the priesthood? Right, right. Yeah, I see the end of that chapter, which is kind of epic. It's just like this grand conclusion to what an amazing prophetic book, but it's text these waves of missionary activity of the early church, bringing the Gentiles to the heavenly Zion, which is the church herself, and bringing amongst their numbers all the lost Israelites who had been scattered in... Don't even know that they're Israelites. just become assimilated among the nations, but they come back in the missionary effort of the church. then, and then God chooses from among all these mixed multitude of returned Gentiles and returned Israelites, chooses a new priesthood from among them, which as Heber says, when there's a change in the priesthood, there's a change in the law. You know, this is a new law of a new covenant with a new priesthood and so on. Yeah, it just, I think it works really well. And I think it lies behind Romans 11, 25 and 26, where St. Paul says, let me tell you a mystery. A hardening has come upon part of Israel until the full number of Gentiles come in. And then in Greek, it says, and in this way, all Israel will be saved. So much ink has been spilled. You know, what does that mean? Why? How can Paul say that when all the Gentiles come in, that's the way that Israel will be saved. And I think it's Isaiah 66, that vision there, that what he's talking about is the tribes scattered among the nations, you the 10 tribes, which is most of Israel, you know, scattered and assimilated among the nations. And so when the nations come back, we're going to get Israel too. then of course, you know, for those that the descendants of Judah who retained a special ethnic identity, you know, I'm sure God has a merciful and providential plan for them as well. And already has because Jesus, the blessed mother, the 12 apostles and all the early saints, they're from Jews. They're from tribe of Judah. So they're at the core. In principle, they are the sacrament of Judah that is at the very heart of the church. So yeah, that's how I see some of the fulfillment going on there. about the priesthood. I mean, this is a discussion I've been having this week with, uh, you know, non-Catholic preterists that, you know, they'll point to say revelation one six, uh, whereas, you know, us to be a kingdom priest to his God and father. And also we're all priests in the new covenant. Right. How do you define the distinction between us all being priests and there being a specific priesthood? Yeah, yeah. Well, Catholic theology always distinguishes between the royal priest or the faithful. So every, every baptized person shares with Christ his role as prophet, priest and king. And I belong to a group called Opus Dei that follows the spirituality of a 20th century saint, St. Josemaria Escriva. He was very big on that. And for the Catechism, 900 through 909 talks about this participation in Christ's offices. And does a little bit of development, but to me, this is one of the least developed aspects of Christian theology. I think we should talk a lot more about this and we should do a lot more information on coming to understand how do I share in the royal role of Christ, the priestly role and the prophetic role, and really help lay faithful to lean into that. So I thought that Catholics denied that. I thought that the priesthood of all believers was a Protestant doctrine. And then I was shocked to find, um you know, Catholic saints like St. Peter Chrysologus, who's a, I think a fifth century church father who writes very fervently about our participation in the priesthood of Christ, that all the baptized participate in the priesthood of Christ, also pointing to Romans 12.1, right? I beseech you therefore brethren by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice. You know, I've done some publication on that and as many will point out, Paul uses priestly and cultic language there in Revelation 12 to talk about the role that the believer has that that living sacrifice is being conformed to Christ's priestly act. Remember that Christ's, the offering that Christ brought was his own body. And so there's a way that the priesthood of the lay faithful is more like that of Christ because he offered himself on the cross. Of course, we could point out that he offered the sacrament in the upper room, which is what the ministerial priest does. But again, Catholic theology always distinguishes between the, the royal priesthood of the lay faithful and then the ministerial priesthood of those who are in holy orders. And, and this distinction is already present in the Old Testament because Exodus 19, five and six, the Lord addresses the gathered people of Israel at the foot of Sinai. And he said, if you keep this, you shall be to me a royal priesthood. um that, you know, that expresses that all the Israelites belong to this like corporate kingship and priesthood of God, which really goes back to Adam because Adam was king and priest in the garden. I've, I've, you know, written on that quite a bit. Um, and so the Adamic status is, is really offered to Israel there at the foot of Sinai. And, but they never fully embrace it, you know, with the golden calf sin and their covenant breaking and the wilderness wandering. And so the people of Israel never quite appropriated this royal priesthood of them, of them together. But then, you know, Peter, St. Peter and first Peter to not speaks to the early church and says, You are a really a royal priesthood, a holy nation, repeating those words at the foot of Zion. I now addressed to the early church saying that it's in the church and those who are baptized and received the Holy Spirit truly embrace this royal priesthood that goes back to Adam. And that is truly the priesthood of the new Adam who is Christ. But even in the old covenant, you had to have those who were set aside for the sacred duties to lead. the liturgy and you know, the final plague, the 10th plague, we don't look at this closely enough, but you know, the angel of death passes over Egypt, strikes down the firstborn of Egypt, but the firstborn of Israel were consecrated, it says. And that is virtually a synonym for ordained Old Testament. So between the last plague and the golden calf, you had the priesthood of the firstborn sons. So the first four and sons who were consecrated through the plagues, we see them in Exodus 24, one through eight, assisting Moses with the sacrifices at the foot of Sinai, but they fail in their duty with the golden calf. And so in the early chapters of the book of Numbers, the Levites are chosen. Well, they're chosen in Exodus 32, but then they're uh in there are installed and ordained in the beginning of Numbers and they count up the firstborn and they count up the Levites and they do a switch-o-change-o and the Levites take over for the firstborn and they do the liturgical duties of the people. So, since the Old Covenant, there was a distinction between kind of this common, this royal priesthood shared by all the people of God, all the people in the covenant community, and then a specific liturgical role. which came to be held by the Levites, but that was a plan B. It belonged to the firstborn sons. Now, when you get into the New Testament, I find this fascinating, Luke, because when you look in Acts, it's clear that the apostles act as priests and kings. And there's some very interesting language using Acts that kind of resonates with Old Testament priesthood and kingship as the apostles kind of rule over the nascent church. But when they appoint successors to be extensions of their authority, either geographically or chronologically, that is to say where they can't be physically or where or beyond their lifetime, they appoint these figures and they don't call their successors hieroi, which would be priests. They call them presbuteroi, old ones or eldest ones. And at first that throws people, they're like, you know, so this isn't a priest, it isn't a priest. No, no, no. It's a restoration of the priesthood of the eldest, of the firstborn, right? These are the presbyteroi. These are the oldest sons. And it doesn't have to do with chronological age. It's a gift of the Holy Spirit to have the gift of being the eldest. So we have this order of firstborn sons who um share in the liturgical role of the of the firstborn with a capital F, but in Hebrews, he's called the prototokos. At the beginning of Hebrews, Jesus is referred to as the firstborn. When the firstborn comes into the world, the prototokos. And then at the end of the Hebrews, it says, we are living in the church of the prototokoi, of the firstborn. You know, I see this as the... The priesthood of the Catholic Church is this recovery of the priesthood of the firstborn in a spiritual sense. And even in the Old Testament, we often see that the actual firstborn doesn't do the duties of the firstborn and has to be replaced by a youngest son or a second son. Now this happens again and again and again. So we see that that firstborn status is really a spiritual gift rather than merely a physical and a chronological thing. Yeah. And I see that as a beautiful kind of, uh, fulfilling a restoration. it's the reason that it's not, I mean, I think for me, once you realize solar scriptura sort of falls apart, it makes sense that, I mean, we don't have a book in the new Testament that's the clear definitive list of church doctrine that everyone follows because it was passed down orally and it was established because the church was established before scripture was. So, you know, otherwise if we were left with solar scriptura, you would think there would be a manual for the priesthood. You know, here's what you follow and this is all you need. Exactly. When I was a Protestant, I was so frustrated because Paul says cryptically in Hebrews, it's like, well, you you're grown. I don't want to go back and read the foundation of laying on of hands and baptism. also like, no, Paul, please go back and lay that foundation. But those were things that were communicated orally and did not need to be written down because they were passed down. Passed down. Yeah. By practice. Yeah. But if you're, if you're a Christian here is denying the importance of that. tradition of that handing on of the most fundamental things, then you look in vain in the New Testament for a manual of church order or. instructions exactly on any of the sacraments or on ordination or whatever and you end up having to kind of reinvent the wheel. uh In a very awkward manner. I mean, I came to a Presbyterian church. It is so awkward when they try to re-institute these things based on solar scriptura. And does that, I guess, that explain why you might not have an explicit reference of these two separate priesthoods, but you have an implicit reference in the specific roles that are given to some of these presbyteroid that are not given to all belayers. So, you know, if you look at the gospel to Jewish eyes, you begin to recognize that Jesus is giving duties to the 12 that really were proper to the priesthood under the old covenant. in, in Matthew 12, you know, he's challenged about the apostles thrashing out grain and our Lord's defense is, don't you know that the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and they're guiltless? And it took a Jewish rabbi to point that out to me. But what that implies is that the 12 have a priestly status. the Dead Sea Scrolls come into play here because in the Dead Sea Scrolls, see that they regarded their whole community as a priesthood of Aaron. gosh, it's either in the Damascus document or the community rule. And yet they have the sons of Zadok, they're kind of the liturgical functionaries, right? They, they had this kind of like corporate priesthood and then a ministerial priesthood in the Essenes, you know, predating our Lord by over a century. So these concepts are available in Judaism. It's not like Jesus is doing something so weird that nobody could have like followed what he's doing, but he's basically claiming for himself and for the 12, a priestly status, similar to what the Essenes claim for themselves. Of course, with important differences as well. Yeah. But you see that there. And then in Matthew 16, he gives the power to bind and loose to Peter. And that wasn't the power to interpret the law, which Moses had given to the Levitical priests, according to Deuteronomy 17. And the Pharisees had usurped in the first century, but Jesus gives it to Peter. And then he shares it with the 12 as a group. In Matthew 18, they're corporately given the powers to bind and loose. So that's again, interpretive authority. And then at the last supper, he gives them the authority to perform the memorial sacrifice of the new covenant. would prefer that we translate the institution narrative as do this as my memorial covenant. I'm Do this as my memorial sacrifice in Luke 22 20, uh, representing the fact that the Greek word there on amnesis was the technical term for the memorial sac in second temple Judaism. Yeah. The time period of our Lord. So it's really a cultic thing. He's showing them that, you know, the Eucharist is going to be the memorial offering of the new covenant. I'm showing you how to do it and how to celebrate it. And you're going to continue to do it. And in John 20, when he gives them the power to forgive sins, what sins you forgive are forgiven them. Who has ever sins you retain or retained. was the priests, according to Leviticus 5, 5 and 6, it was the priests who administered the forgiveness of sins under the Old Covenant. And so now if you're saying that you 12 are going to have that power. So all the important powers of the Old Covenant priesthood are given to the 12. And then when you read the book of Acts, they appoint successors by the laying on of hands. And this is also reflected in the, in the pastoral epistles. While we don't have a manual of church doctrine in the New Testament, when you, when you read through Jewish eyes, you begin to realize, okay, this is, this is starting to come together. And I've said on a number of occasions, the more Jewish we are when we read the Bible, the more Catholic we are on the other end. Yeah, I mean, one of the, one of the big benefits and one thing that Preterists do really well is we hone in on audience relevance and context of texts. You you can't, which the, you know, the modern Protestant church just does a terrible job of reading something. that is, it's, it's a letter that was dropped in my letter box that I'm reading that was written to me today in the 21st century. So, and I think what, what your work has really helped me to see. Is that there's, there's a fulfillment and continuation of the covenants, not a yes, the old was done away with and replaced with the new, but it, it, but it wasn't all thrown out. You know, there, there was the good parts were retained and improved, you know, and we weren't left with this new covenant where there is no authority. There is no structure. There is no ability to actually do anything in the world. We were left with a, with a better covenant that would go and do their things. Yeah. So, you know, super quickly in Pope Benedict the 16th, post-Sinodal apostolic exhortation, Verbum Domine, on the interpretation of the word of God. He points out that when we moved from the old covenant to new covenant, there's always three dynamics at work. There's an element of continuity, like similar areas that we can see from one to the other. There's elements of discontinuity where things are not the same. And then there's an element of what he terms, transcendence and fulfillment. It's like the fulfillment is. elevated, you know, there's an element of which that goes beyond our expectations. And I find that helpful. So I would, would, you know, encourage people that, you know, that whole document is really beautiful. It's, it's dense, takes a long time to work through, but it's a real beautiful statement on, on Catholic interpretation. I have to check that out. mean, that would be something like, yeah, the seventh, the Sabbath rest going from being a literal day to the rest that we received in Christ Jesus as the seventh day. Yeah. Continuity is one day in seven is a day of rest dedicated to worship. The discontinuity is it's not the same day and the fulfillment of transcendence is like it's, the celebration of the resurrection. It's the Easter. It's the day of eternity. know? So yeah, there's it's, it's beautiful. Fantastic. Well, Dr. Bergson, it's been an absolute pleasure and thank you so much for taking the time. I've learned a lot. It's been good to get some uh one-on-one time with you and throw some of these questions that have been bubbling away. Maybe just one final question to finish on or note the topic of the podcast is what's the point anyway. So as someone that has become a Catholic, what does it mean for you in your day-to-day life? What is the point of our existence and how you live out your faith? Well, the point of our existence is, to be ultimately enveloped in the love of God. um To be drawn into the canon of the Holy Trinity, which Pope Leo beautifully pointed out in his short address to the Catholics in Chicago this past weekend. Had a lovely little homily starting from the truth of the Trinity and then building out to talk about how we're called into communion because the Holy Trinity is a community of persons. So. You know, our point in this world is to be brought into communion with other persons, ultimately the divine persons, but that joy that love shared with so many other persons as well, because love is diffusive of itself. Love wants to spread, love wants to include others. That's the nature of God. know, life is beautiful as a Catholic. Everything is meaningful. Stuff rings. Take on new meaning. Faith gives one strength to encounter things that are just very difficult. I'm sorry to get a little emotional, you know, I have a second funeral to us, uh brain cancer that we're really going through a critical time with him. I'm so sorry to hear that. My prayers are with you on that. I just said that I did not. Yeah, but I'll tell you, when we got to the hospital where he's receiving treatment and find that the local diocese has already appointed a chaplain there and there's a priest right there in the hospital, there's a chapel right there and we're receiving the sacraments, we're receiving pastoral counseling and the anointing of the sick and it is such a comfort. I thought to myself the first time that we went there, I thought, it is so good to be a Catholic because if I was a Calvinist, this would not have this kind of support. So yeah, how does the faith impact my daily life? The faith just is my daily life. There is not a single moment of the day that is not directed by the fact that I am a disciple and follower of Jesus Christ within his church, living in obedience to the officers that he appointed over his kingdom. Um, and, trying to grow in holiness that directs my every action, whether I'm washing dishes or writing some book of theology, every act is, dedicated to the glory of God. And, and if when I do it with the attitude, with the right disposition, um, I believe that every one of my acts, whether that's mundane or grand, every, every action is leading me closer into this, this communion with the three persons of self-giving love who is the Holy Trinity, who is God. the only God that is for all people and all people are called into his loving. into that. Well, thank you so much for your time. You're an absolute gentleman, you and your whole family, and in particular, your son, are in my prayers. It's been great to get to know you. Yeah, it was wonderful. It was a pleasure and an honor, Luke, and glad to be with you and hope we can do it again sometime on other topics or even the same topics. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Okay, take care now.