How the Reformation led to Secularism - Alan Fimister

0:00 welcome to this episode of intellectual Catholicism today I'm here with Dr Alan femister I'll have him introduce himself but before we do that the topic for today's conversation is how the Reformation unintentionally led to secularism and so it'll be interesting to hear Dr femister's take uh so Professor doctor how are you doing today well thank you very much uh I'll just have you begin by introducing yourself so where you're where you're teaching and uh maybe some of the recent Publications that you have and then if I recall maybe I haven't recalled this properly are you a convert to the faith to Catholicism I I I am a convert I converted from uh atheism when I was 10.

0:46 and was baptized uh at that point so so I have no historic association with protestantism I just want paganisms and uh where do you currently teach and I I am um I am assistant professor of pragmatic Theology and director of the ma in theology at Holy Apostles Collision seminary in Connecticut and in my spare time director of The dialogos Institute um which is a bunch of byzantinophile Thomas hanging out together basically um yes I was previously at Saint John Vianney uh theological ceremony in Denver and then before that at the

1:32 international theological Institute in Austria outside Vienna and then before that Aberdeen University long long ago when you were at a twinkle in your parents eyes um and um yes uh so I'm from England not from the United States but uh I've lived in the United States for the last seven or eight years and I'm very happily married to a wonderful Texan I don't have two two uh three children with both well it sounds like Boris Johnson you've never never say how many children he has yes definitely three well uh Dr femister I I guess um to get into today's conversation oh by the way I should also mention that uh you

2:18 co-authored the book integralism with Father Thomas Korean and we were just talking about how I've had him on twice and so it's nice to see his uh partner in crime so to speak or partner in theology maybe it was a better term uh so Dr femister uh our topic today is how the Reformation led to secularism and I guess to kind of maybe in introducing the subject uh a little bit about my backstory so I was raised as a Baptist Protestant and I later became Catholic when I was in college and I remember it was the second semester of my freshman year that we learned about basically kind of the medieval political and social thought and we were reading Charles Taylor's a secular age and that was the first time in that class that I really was introduced to the thesis that

3:04 the Reformation unintentionally led to secularism and that kind of rocked uh the boat so to speak and it got me thinking and so uh with that out of the way then Dr femister some Protestants will say okay well this is either a class uh Catholic cliche right of course of course Catholics are just going to say the Reformation led to every bad thing in Civilization uh or they'll just laugh it off and say that's impossible that's crazy their farmers were devout religious men who believed in the Supernatural how can you say secularism resulted from them and so I think the first question I want to ask you is what would you say to a Protestant who kind of already feels like dismissing the idea that the Reformation possibly could have led to secularism and is this just an idea

3:50 among Catholic apologists well I mean I must say as I said I'm a convert for prophetism I'll convert from atheists online my parents um uh oh I think I think one of my parents is agnostic the other one is is an atheist um and they they were probably both marxists when I was a child and when I converted um and um so but as a as an English child um it seemed to me staggering I mean obviously I wasn't thinking in terms of categories of secularism things like that but refer to when I was 10 but as an English child it seemed to be staggeringly obvious that protestantism led to secularism it didn't require years of study in order to in order to

4:37 unearth this this incredible Insight um I mean it seemed really clear to me that there was there was this was when I was an atheist it seemed really clear to me that was the church founded by Jesus then there was the fake Church invented by the government that was the the Anglican church and designed to facilitate Henry VII's libido and then there were the ragbag collection of Nutters which were all the other groups I mean that I seem to be sorry I'm just alienated you're in high audience sorry I apologize I'm just describing my my childhood's perceptions um and um yeah I mean I was thought of it was something really obvious to me that all the the old medieval Church buildings were stolen and have been gutted at some point or another and that

5:22 um and that the that you know that it was all just to con for the convenience of energy of course I mean that's a very English perspective anglicanism is not a major force uh in the United States I suppose um uh yes I mean um how to explain why isn't just a cliche um well the the the argument I suppose on reflection uh uh goes something like this which is that um uh Christianity is divine revelation um Catholics and Protestants can agree on that something uh which has been imparted to the human race by God in order to accomplish the salvation of the human race and which uh mankind couldn't

6:08 have known without divine revelation right that's that that is that is essential to the nature of the Gospel it's why it's the gospel it's good news it's good and you couldn't have known it without being told it so it's good news um and um there's no way that and always it's transmitted across time uh in in obviously Catholics say in various ways but among them in a very privileged way and uh for proper Protestants in exclusively uh which they take through scripture um and um and so and then it reaches Us in various ways and a proper processant would say it reaches us through scripture and

6:54 certainly that is one of the most important ways in which it reaches us know your argument there um and uh now the problem is that that how on Earth are you going to understand you know as the Ethiopian Unix says to Philip how are you going to understand uh the information when it reaches you for a start it's written in uh Hebrew American Greek it's not written in in a language that most people in the world understand uh you're going to have to be able to read in the first place you have to understand that language you're gonna have to have a reliable copy of the text um you're gonna have to uh know which which verses and chapters and books are supposed to be in the text and are not supposed to be in the text and you're going to be able to understand it correctly you can't I mean if I try to

7:40 read something would it be impossible because there is nothing but if I try to read something in English written two thousand years ago it would be completely impossible I tried to read something in English written 1500 years ago which I think might also be impossible but let's say 1300 or 400 years ago I I find it impossible uh unless I was a scholar of early English um uh now obviously Greek is a bit more uh there's a bit more continuous than that but still you know major changes huge amounts of nuance cultural residents necessary not to read the text properly now you can say that the obvious answer to that is well it's okay the Holy Spirit guides you right so so you so you don't need all these external AIDS in order to do that right but partly the problem with that is you're gonna have to say that the translators of the NIV or the KJV or whatever were

8:27 also Guided by the Holy Spirit and obviously that can't be part of public Revelation that the NIV translators or the kjo of each translators were Guided by the holy spirit because you're randomly including new inspired prophets necessary to do the translations later in in human history right so but let's just bracket that for a second so you just say okay well somehow I have I happen to be really good at coin a Greek and Biblical Hebrew or I happen to be just have a adequate or perfect translation um and I read the scriptures and and that successfully communicates the content of divine revelation to me but the problem is um how a modern Earth am I going to correctly interpret this text I mean it's notoriously difficult to interpret uh the any text let alone one written so

9:14 long ago everybody disagrees about what Plato means what Cicero means what you know Marx Aurelius Augustine whatever they all mean um how on Earth are we going to uh know that we're correctly interpreting the text so again you can say well the Holy Spirit guides you to correctly interpret it now obviously there's an ostensible implaus ability about that because of the fact that so many different uh people who groups and individuals who profess to believe in terms of scripture are radically disagree about about essential elements of this uh of this Revelation um just say for example you're you're used to be a Baptist right um so so um now a rather important question is whether or not baptism is necessary for

10:01 salvation um uh and whether it's an absolutely binding precept whether or not you need to practice it uh upon infants and so that's pretty pretty important our Lord says at the end of Matthew's gospel go therefore Make Disciples of all Nations teaching them to observe everything I've commanded you baptizing them in the name of the father son the Holy Spirit right so he specifically conjoins the precept of trinitarian baptism to the command given to the apostles and other disciples um to preach the gospel to All Nations and teach them to command everything which to teach them to observe everything which I've commanded you so so his true followers those to whom that command is addressed are expressly in

10:48 told to teach All Nations everything which Jesus commanded so how can our Lord's true followers the set of our Lord's true followers be made up of people who who radically disagree about the necessity of baptism and and accept each other as as authentic followers of Christ so as far as I understand it Baptists accept other Protestants uh including you know observant Presbyterians or whatever um as being Christians right people who teach the the the the the binding character of infant baptism right so so they're recognizing as belonging to the set of True Believers people who disagree with them about what it is

11:34 that our Lord commanded specifically about the thing that he was talking about when he gave that command that doesn't sound to me like that is the set of True Believers that sounds like it's a bunch of other people who happen to have picked up a book belonging to the set of True Believers and misinterpreted it um because they're unable to discharge um the the very command contained in the climax of the first of the gospels which is to to command all the nations to but to observe everything which Jesus has commanded because they don't know for certain what it is Jesus commanded now so you can say okay well anyway the the the invisible set of True Believers perhaps you take a strict view that only three Presbyterians are saved and cancer questions and and the set of True

12:20 Believers um you know uh are are the church only and only those those uh free Presbyterians or whatever are the true church um but the problem is uh why are they reading this book right they need effectively divine revelation in order to read the book right so the only way so humanly it's impossible for them to know what the correct interpretation of the book is it can't be established in the public sphere it can only be established through the action of the Holy Spirit above and beyond the capacity of nature in the uh in the reading activity of each individual believer well in that case what on Earth is the point of the book so we go go through all these centuries transmitting this text laboriously copying out Vellum translating it to various different

13:06 languages Etc and it turns out that in order to read it you need prophetic Revelation in each each particular instance in which you read it which renders the book totally Superfluous it's a kind of revelational occasionalism you might as well have just had the entire Faith infused into your intellect just while you're walking down the street without the necessity for all these reams of paper you know don't people know we're trying to save the planet anyway so so so essentially the public character of Revelation the meaningful transmission of it over time is rendered completely sort of cosmetic by the by the idea of solar scriptura and the problem with that is is that it it renders uh Christianity totally subjective

13:53 so there's no there's no publicly verifiable content there's just there are like you know raptured people who know what the true content is and they know that they know but nobody else knows everyone else is guessing and doesn't have a clue um so so so it destroys the church as an entity now an analogy which I used in a in a little article that I wrote a few months ago was essentially if you said that you were a true American Patriot because you didn't believe in all this nonsense judicial activism the the uh the Supreme Court Justices and and Joe Biden and God knows who else get up to you just believe that every American should hold in his own hand a copy of the US Constitution and

14:39 interpret it according to its simple meaning um uh and that no one should be able to tell you what it means uh still less use any kind of coercion upon you um in order to enforce the correct meaning of the text um uh and that the the Supreme Court and its justices have no more or less authority to interpret the text of the Constitution than anybody else well the result of that would not be a rebirth of The American Nation the result of the the instantaneous dissolution of the United States of America now of course it's quite true that Supreme Court Justices arbitrarily make up the meaning of the U.S Constitution that's very obvious um but um but they're not infallible right so that is a problem you need Supreme World Justice in order to keep the show on the

15:25 road you need Supreme Court Justices if you want the show to be the same show as advertised you're going to have to make the Supreme Court Justices um infallible um uh you know God is going to have to make them infallible now of course he didn't do that because God's not quite so invested in the United States of America as he is in the Catholic Church um but um but but obviously so in order for it to be meaningful to even transmit provide Revelation through scripture across time uh there has there has to be an infallible public tribunal uh which and of course people say I saw some debate the other day I can't believe it was but um someone's saying oh you know the idea of infallibility you know it it means that scripture is secondary to the authority of the church but of course that doesn't make any sense at all if you if if the Supreme Court was

16:12 infallible it wouldn't diminish the authority of the U.S Constitution it would it would render the the authority of the U.S Constitution totally Untouchable because the Supreme Court Justices if they attempted to interpret it contributes its original meaning would all be run over by buses or struck by lightning uh or they'd be given inspiration to ensure they didn't interpret it incorrectly so so the um so the existence of an infallible tribunal to guarantee the correct meaning of the sources of the faith um it doesn't undermine the uh the authority of scripture as the very word of God it's a it's a precondition of of scripture meaningfully being the the uh the very word of God because without that uh it's unable without a miracle on

16:58 each occasion anyone opens a Bible to trans met um The Gospel across the generations and so once this uh doctrine of solar scripture was introduced obviously you immediately got Anarchy just like you would with the private interpretation of the U.S Constitution you uh that would dissolve the U.S so in the same way it dissolved uh the church in all those countries where it successfully took hold um and so protestantism now so what it did that didn't therefore lead to the Triumph of the protestantism it led to the destruction of Christianity so so from from the Reformation onwards for 150 years or so you have a theological and Military Civil War inside

17:46 Christendom uh between those who reject and those who accept this false principle of social scripture and when it becomes clear that uh that it's not going to be expunged that that it's going to become a permanent feature of the international order and the Christian polities are going to have to accept as diplomatic partners and fellow legitimate polities other polities claiming to be Christian who reject the definitive authority of the church's teaching office um that then causes the collapse of Christianity as the standard of public policy and public law in Christian Society and that can be pretty precisely dated right to 1648 uh to the um to the Treaty of West failure which represents

18:32 the the failure of the Habsburg Dynasty to uh suppress the reformation and uh this is this the the their enormous efforts uh towards this uh exhausted them and provided the opportunity for France to uh seize control of um of the European balance of power um so that immediately launches the enlightenment which is the if it's user a visceral image if the Reformation is the Facehugger then the enlightenment system is the zoo of wolf bursting out to the stomach the western civilization so you see then you then then have a movement naturally develops to eliminate divine revelation as a source of public policy and public law because it's just

19:19 not function that way anymore um as happens in the United States so supposedly the US is is um is religiously neutral as a polity in order to provide a sort of uh you know to hold the ring for for truth to win out in the battle of the sects but uh of course what what that actually happens is nobody can possibly raise any divinely revealed premise in public discourse and therefore you end up by default with a sort of atheist political culture even though it's designed to allow flourishing of of free market protestantism um but that's that's not what you get in the end um and um so essentially that because all the European policies are founded upon Christianity as their fundamental uh basis that it leads to the violent

20:07 revolutionary overthrow of the the order which emerged from the christianization of the Roman Empire and that's what begins with the Revolutions of the late 18th century but there is a deeper problem which is that it's part of the very logic of theism that God will reveal the proper means to worship him um because if you're a classical theist which obviously you should be because it's necessarily true and demonstrably so then you'll know that God is more unlike than he is like anything we assert about him um and that therefore you can't just make up some form of worship which you think my God might be impressed with you're like I don't know we'll we'll not work on Wednesdays and and smash out the

20:54 brains of a chicken with a brick every three months on a full moon and presumably God will be happy with that you can't you can't do that you can't just make up anything um because in order to make that up you're essentially attributing all sorts of things to God that he's pleased by the Smashing out of chickens brains on full moons every once a quarter um which which you've known which are almost certainly not true and um uh and and so you're essentially creating an idol so you can know my natural reason that God exists that you owe public and private worship to him but what but you can also know by natural reason that you can't know by natural reason what form that public and private worship should take and therefore because you know that God is

21:39 just by natural reason you know that he will uh provide you with the means to discover that or else you have offended him and you need desperately to try and see if there are any means around to propitiate him um so you so you know in advance by natural reason that you should be looking for a divinely revealed religion so if you make the concept of divine revelation absurd which essentially is what prototism does then use you logically make the idea of theism absurd so not only do you end up with a de facto atheist policy but you end up driving everyone into atheism and this kind of connects to a principle that John Henry Newman uh is very much Guided

22:25 by which is uh I think Newman puts it man argues poorly but reasons well which means that we come up with sort of gobbledygook explanations for why we do the things we do which we just do in order to not lose face in an argument in a pub but if you actually work out what we really believe fundamentally you'll then see that our logical there are actions logically follow from them so once you adopt these false positions if you genuinely adopt them you will start following out their logical consequences or at least your grandchildren with whether you like them or not and that's essentially what we've been experiencing over the last 500 years since since um Brother Martin drew the boss off the

23:13 cliff well Dr finister if you don't mind what I'd like to do is kind of go back through some of what you said and kind of parse it out and talk about each component so I think the first thing that you said that really stood out to me was when uh you described how as a child though you were an atheist uh it made total sense to you that the Reformation led to a secular culture and the reason why uh that kind of stood out to me is because in my conversations with other atheists and non-religious individuals they don't think that's controversial they they see the connection and even among academic historians now there might be a dispute on like you know uh all the kind of nitty-gritty how one

23:58 thing led to another thing but that the Reformation led to secularism doesn't seem to be questioned among academic historians the questions are kind of the more precise when did this have you know how did the this piece fit here kind of the nitty-gritty but the general picture doesn't seem to be controversial and so I guess maybe to kind of talk about that a little bit I mean uh kind of going back to that your childhood and even maybe other interactions that you've had with atheists or non-religious people why was it so obvious to you well I mean um I mean it seemed uh was it more of an intuition when you were a child or well I mean obviously you'll I I was I went to a Catholic I

24:44 was a campaigning proselytizing Marxist in a Catholic Primary School to next door to Catholic Primary School and my mother worked for Catholic um fostering organization and uh and the sisters who ran that organization uh sort of thought I was a nice little boy and all got to go to hell so they tried to get me a place in this Catholic Primary School even though I wasn't really entitled to it and so I was exposed to Catholicism uh um at a young age um but I I discussed these great questions uh with my father um and he expanded the kind of marxist position to be not in a kind of you know he was very much just giving me the arguments um but I mean he you know he said basically religion is pie in the sky when you die made up by rich people in

25:29 order to persuade poor people to uh shut up and accept being you know whipped into sowing their fields for them um in the hope of a non-existent post-mortem reward um and um so that's what I used to argue with my schoolmates uh in in in the uh in the playground and um uh so and I had a very proactive Irish Catholic um teacher for a couple of years at primary school she was she was I resented greatly her her pushing Catholicism all the time but it gave me a good knowledge of Catholicism used to say when when Pentecost came around she would always say it was the birthday of the church and uh she would say you know who invented who who founded the Church of England and we'd say Henry VII and

26:15 who founded the West against Wesleyan who founded the Church of Scotland John Knox and who founded the Catholic Church oh Lord Jesus Christ and and so I knew the arguments um and uh you know we used to have there's a nearby Anglican Church um just two streets away from where I live and I mean lived as a child um and you know they would have Guy Fawkes Night bonfires and stuff and I remember discussing with a kid who who uh lived in the orphanage next to the next to my Catholic School disgusting the fact that in fact I we assumed the little kids that the Anglican Church actually built in 1920 something but it looked medieval um and uh we we were discussing the fact that it had been stolen off the Catholics and all about Henry VII and all this kind of stuff so but it did

27:00 seem I wouldn't have necessarily been able to put into words but it seemed you know we I knew there was a United Reformed Church over the hill and there was a church of Scotland uh on the bus who's into town and so so so I knew that you know and people I knew that Christianity had been made to look silly by all these different competing claims and I knew that Catholicism was by far the largest and was the original um organization I mean there's no there's you can argue oh no no really Augustine was a calvinist or whatever but you can't it's obvious that there is an Institutional continuity between uh between the Catholic church in the second century and the Catholic church now I mean I suppose you could try and

27:47 come up with some weird conspiracy theory that aliens came and replaced the apostles or something but I mean in the first century but I mean it's pretty obvious that it's the same organization you could claim that it went off the rails like the like judicial activists U.S Supreme Court Justices but it's clearly the same organization so it seemed obvious to me that the plurality of of purported churches um uh made Christianity look silly right and if it was going to be true um that in Christianity was going to be true then it was going to be Catholicism I thought I can't remember who it was whether it was there was some famous apostate who who carrying atheists something I can't remember it's like James Joyce or or or there's a famous

28:32 lyric anyway I can't remember who it was I think it might have a James Choice actually but but he's supposed to have said someone said to him uh years later why did you become an atheist why didn't you consider becoming a Protestant and he said I lost my faith I didn't lose my reason which I think is it's actually sums up the problem if you see I mean I I can see how someone could convert Christianity um from nothing via an Earnest Protestant preacher who preaches something you know rep vaguely approximating the gospel um uh but I can't really see how somebody who thought about it a lot uh and all the possible candidates could who wasn't

29:18 a believer um could could really come to the conclusion if they remain not a believer that anything other than Catholicism would be the true form of Christianity if Christianity was true um and I and you don't I I've I haven't met many people who were particularly well educated and fell from Catholicism into protestantism they tend to become atheists or Buddhists or something like that because because they can see that it doesn't really make any sense if it is and just another interesting point of connection when I was something of a Baptist catechist or just kind of like a Wednesday night teacher of the Bible I remember there was a I would the the children that I would teach they would

30:03 always ask me isn't there just supposed to be one Church why are there so many and then those children were on to something and I think like even when you were talking about your childhood you were kind of on to something a lot of children kind of saw like if God you know is active in the world and gave us something as precious as the scriptures and the gospels or excuse me the gospel but the gospels as well uh why wouldn't he do anything to secure the unity of that church and then the idea that some Protestants have is oh well you know we we are united on the essentials almost a kind of minimalism where we say okay well you know Paul talked about the resurrection so that's an essential uh and Paul had perhaps a quite literal understanding of the Resurrection in a physical bodily

30:50 sense so we have to accept that that Jesus was um our savior he died on the cross all these things and so maybe to kind of provide some pushback from a Protestant perspective they might say well you know Dr femister we can have just a minimalist Christianity where you know you accept the Trinity okay good you're you know you're a Christian you're part of us and uh you know maybe some other Essentials that we list out kind of a Mere Christianity as C.S Lewis would put it and we can also say that uh I mean and we can say that these Essentials are just so obvious from an honest reading of scripture or from a rigorous you know uh educated you know using the the human intellect we can just see that this is from the text and this is the best exegesis right

31:36 so we unite on that on that minimalism and and so uh that's fine uh what would you say to a Protestant who would propose that as an alternative that okay no it doesn't lead to utter skepticism we just use our best exegesis we pull up our sleeves and we read the scriptures and we come to these men these minimal uh Essentials to the what it means to be a Christian well I mean if there are three problems that really first of all they'd have to exclude the Catholics in the Orthodox from their true Christian set of true Christians because we hold that um baptism is necessary for infants for salvation uh which which um if they're set of true Christians includes Presbyterians and Baptists um they obviously disagree or they don't

32:21 they don't think it's necessary of Salvation in either case and they don't think in the back case the Baptist they don't think it should be conferred so it's if you can hardly agree on Essentials if the salvation of everyone up to seven uh could be completely ruined um by by a major disagreement among this set of all True Believers um then you've got a problem if your set of all True Believers is just the Protestants right so you've left out the Catholics of the Orthodox because clearly you couldn't disagree about something so essential as how to avoid external exclusion from the better division for everybody up at the age of seven um that you've still got the problem that they don't agree on on on something so important as baptism itself I mean if you think about it our Lord says that

33:08 and the angels say uh go to Galilee right after the resurrection it seems that that the apostles you know the other appearances price them arrive in Galilee seem to be uh you know just kind of get to get get them hurry up and go to Galilee right it seems to be that the major event is in Galilee um and we only know of two uh two appearances of Our Lord the resurrection appearances in Galilee one of them is clearly a kind of breakfast with the lads the night before appearance or the morning before um uh um on this let's on the edge of the sea guys so it's clear that the the appearance to the 500 that Saint Paul talks about um and the reason why they're supposed to go to Galilee is the appearance on the mountain when our Lord institutes baptism right so this is absolutely huge

33:55 this is what's being talked about straight away from the moment of the resurrection and and and and the set of True Believers if it includes the Presbyterians and the Baptists apparently don't agree on something so major as as who you're bound to baptize and we're not talking about small the minority of people people who died before the age of seven is the majority of the human race um so that's quite a large group people to not really know what to do with and then we have the third problem which is um is is that our lord said teach them to observe everything which I've commanded to do right so none of them even claim to be able to teach them to observe everything which our Lord has commodity even Within These denominations they don't all agree as to

34:41 the meaning of everything that our Lord commanded so so they so clearly they don't they don't even think that they're the people he was talking to they've excluded themselves from his disciples by by their own logic if they don't if they do not have either if they're not either actively able or in possession of a means whereby they can obviously I mean the magisterium um uh teach All Nations everything which Jesus commanded then they are not who Jesus was talking to when he addressed his disciples on the mountain in Galilee and therefore they are not the church Institute by our Lord Jesus Christ I suppose that a Protestant might say in

35:28 response well look we agree with you that baptism is is an essential Christian practice but the Bible silent on whether or not children can be baptized and so we are free to disagree on that um you know maybe that's how they try to wiggle out of uh or you know address that problem or that question so unbelievably weak I mean you're like so the whole thing is like like we're okay we're here on the mountain now and he's gonna tell us what he was going to tell us here it goes and he's like and work out the details among yourselves that that bit was just like that was just left oh the first one he says I'd work out the details among yourselves um and and again that means they have to exclude the Orthodox and the Catholics from the set of True Believers because because they think that it's not Justin

36:15 it's okay to work out among ourselves the authorized Catholics think that you need this to go to heaven if you have not attained the Age of Reason so um so I mean it's it's it's it's clearly not trivial in fact it covers because most people die before retaining the Age of Reason historically it covers the majority of the human race so so it would be a bit of a major Gap to be just sort of you know um it'd be as if our Lord instituted the Eucharist in exactly exactly as he did as morally necessary salvation actually constituting the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ etc etc and then just let us guess whether which substances it was necessary to cons to use as the elements

37:00 you know it could be rice cakes it could be bread it could be lamb he's just not going to tell us he's going to leave that for us to work out and if we get the right one then the consecration will happen but if we accidentally use rice cakes or raisin bread instead then the conjugation good luck Lads I mean that's just absurd pictures and kind of branching off of that then because you talked about how um I mean I guess there's this inherent Anarchy within protestantism no matter how soft or I guess well I mean depends on how soft you think it is how hidden it is but I know that other Catholics have complained that there does seem to be this Anarchy within protestantism and so I wanted to go to another point that you made about

37:45 um well I think the the kind of main thrust of the argument was that Sola scriptura with the Anarchy that it introduces cannot sustain a Christian Society and then what happens in the wake of that Christian Society arise of a secular one and so uh maybe to kind of just tease out the details there let me let me know if I got the argument right because it seems to be that you know we have Christianity is a religion of public revelation uh it is what is given to us it's not within our rights so to speak to tell uh to to invent what are the dictates of the Gospel what what the gospel actually contains it's given to us by God and in order for that public Revelation to let's say meaningfully govern God's

38:32 people it needs to be understood uh but in order to be understood we if it's just left to human reason then you get all kinds of let's say plausible counter interpretations and you have everybody kind of disagreeing on even the reformers disagreeing on how to interpret the text and then at that point then it can't meaningfully govern God's people I mean the only way that it could meaningfully govern God's people is if as you put it you know uh given that scripture is this kind of universal inerrant rule of the faith that Christians can you be United under it precisely because it is universal and errant given to us by God we would also need an authority an institution that was also given to us by

39:18 God and has this Universal Authority for all Christians and is protected infallibly or else if it's not infallibly protected you could always just say that's your opinion here's my opinion and I think my opinion is the word of God um and so basically you can't meaningfully govern God's people and then what you have to do then is kind of have this agree to disagree attitude on a lot of kind of big subjects and then you end up not being able to sustain a Christian Society is that the correct understanding of your argument yes absolutely so so you'd have to say that that we're just not going to bring up these questions because nobody they're interminable and nobody agrees about them and it just leads to the meetings ending in chaos so essentially all discussions have to become totally secular and the problem with that is a

40:05 it means Christianity couldn't possibly be true because it'd be absurd for God to reveal his will to the Nations say in linear a right don't you come across it's the language of the ancient Minoans we don't know nobody's been able to translate it so if God had revealed um everything you wish the nation's known a language that no one could translate ever that would be absurd I mean he's omniscient an omnipotent why would he reveal everything's necessary salvation in such a way that no one could know what they are right so so the um so for start it implies that Christianity isn't true um and then uh secondly it because if you don't accept some other rival religion like Islam or whatever uh then

40:53 it's going to imply if you think there is no revealed publicly verifiable revealed Doctrine at all then essentially implies atheism because it implies that God created you because classical theorism implies God created you with an obligation to worship him which requires his assistance in order to fulfill it and he hasn't provided his assistance and that's absurd because he's just so therefore it must mean that he doesn't exist so you end up with State atheism you end up with with the the official philosophy of the neutral State ends up becoming atheism by default and to kind of talk about then about secularism because some people might be saying you're throwing this word around but you haven't defined it yet from what I can understand um I mean there are different ways you

41:39 can Define find the term but from the way that the argument is using it it seems to be a kind of de facto agnosticism or atheism as kind of the uh the the kind of public policy the public way that we reason you know kind of use rawl's term a public reason where you can't use divine revelation as the basis for Public Policy because divine revelation its interpretations too controversial right and then you can't always be quite sure if you got the divine revelation right so you can't have that be public policy um is that kind of what you mean by secularism formal exclusion of divine revelation as a principle of public policy and public law right

42:24 and so yeah and so I mean I guess some people would say uh you know kind of entertaining the objections Dr femister this is crazy because the the Protestants you know the reformers they were also okay with like religion and Christianity being part of the State uh so how can you say that you're are you know that your argument's correct when the Protestants themselves the the early reformers were fine with the Christian Society uh divine revelation being a basis for public policy well but they don't have the as I say man argues badly and reasons well they they don't have um they don't have the logical equipment necessary to sustain that I mean even later somebody as vigorous as Calvin

43:09 um it's all based on the idea that anyone who's predestined and in uh is in good faith um uh well I mean yes it'll be destined anyway um I will read the scriptures the same way and because that isn't true you're just gonna not find a sustainable number of people to maintain a society or even a Christian denomination over any period of time who are all going to agree uh on the meaning of scripture it's just not going to happen so the result is that both first first the the polities and then even the sects themselves will start to collapse because you just can't sustain the claim that everybody in good faith is reading this text in exactly the same

43:56 way because they're just not um right I mean it would be the equivalent of the analogy you used with the Supreme Court uh if we didn't acknowledge the rule of law and that when the Court gives its ruling that is you know for all intents and purposes although we can we can appeal it so that's a bit of a difference but for all intents and purposes that is the law it is universally binding on all the states of the United States um I can't pretend that that's not the ruling of the court so I I'm about that and that kind of in a sense unites me to the rule of law in in the American society but I guess the The View on protestantism is that if we just have solo scriptura and we don't have a universal Institution then um it really does become or there's nothing stopping it from becoming me and

44:41 my Bible so to speak uh me privately interpreting the Constitution saying this is the law be privately interpreting the Bible and saying this is Christianity right and so that wouldn't be a basis then for sustaining as you said a Christian Society or even just any society it's almost like kind of basic facts about human nature that we would need a uniting universal institution that's divinely endorsed uh in order to unite Christians you have to ex I mean it's quite natural for the state as it were to react by excluding Christianity from public life because Christianity is true then the Christian Revelation would necessarily Trump right uh any Prudential decisions of the temporal order if you say that

45:27 um that the the Christianity trumps any potential decisions of the temple order and it's irreducibly subjective and no one can know what it is then essentially you've given to every single citizen to get out of jail free card um uh which is which is you know indestructible and has to be returned once used so so so you you're then that that's obviously the end of the Civil order there's nothing you can do so in order for the Civil order to protect itself from destruction uh it needs to exclude divine revelation as a principle policy and public law once Divine Revolution no longer has a definitive tribunal to determine what it means right once public Revelation becomes functionally useless in governing God's

46:14 people in a way delicious I think um just to kind of summarize again some of what you've been arguing um it seems like the Reformation as you said created a society in which public Revelation couldn't govern God's people and so it couldn't become the basis for public policy and so we had to kind of develop this sort of Tolerance where we agree to disagree a neutrality within the state towards controversial moral spiritual issues and then you end up getting basically in order to actually sustain a society a kind of secular liberal order um and so that's then how the Reformation created secularism because it created a society that couldn't sustain a Christian worldview

46:59 in fact you even get I think Edward fazer makes this point in Aristotle's Revenge um the early modern philosophy and all the other horrible philosophies that were developed from the early modern philosophy is really developed to avoid the logic of Catholicism is developed not always being pushed back in the directional Catholicism well Dr femister you don't mince your words [Laughter] um so for those who are interested in your work and kind of other Publications that you have where would we be the best resource for us to find that oh well I wrote a splendid book about Robert Schumann the servant of God Roxy I think he's the venerable Robert Schumann now the fact that the European Union which is uh which is quite expensive academic book

47:44 um uh and uh as you mentioned I co-wrote with Father Thomas Queen integralism a manual political philosophy which examines what a Christian polity uh would look like and why it's essentially necessary um to the truth of Christianity itself um and uh in about two weeks time I will be publishing um uh a book about the romanness of the church called the iron scepter the son of man romantic as a note of the church um so um I came up to that to you to rip roaring read it's not just the title that's exciting the whole thing is exciting um so it's all from available from all good bookshops probably or at least Amazon because I remember a while back you did mention that you would

48:30 argue that that the church is Roman or at least the center of it is Roman is not an accident in history or something like that absolutely you don't know it's absolutely essential to to a scripture um the uh the um the inheritance of the fourth monarchy in the Book of Daniel by the Saints of the most high right the mystical body of the son of man um uh is is key to to the whole nature of Salvation history so so the church could not have not been Roman um uh it's uh it was built into divine revelation and to the nature of Salvation history as is extensively argued in my brilliant forthcoming book